Monthly Archives: January 2008

The $2,500 Car

Take a look at part of the reason that petroleum will never be cheap again:

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This is Tata Motors “Nano” car. It will seat four adults comfortably and will sell for about $2,500 US in India and other developing countries. A version of this cute car might even make it to the US. This is the 21st century’s answer to the VW Bug.

A car this cheap will allow millions in India, China and elsewhere to purchase a car for the first time. As more people demand petroleum the price of that resource will continue to climb – even without the peak oil nightmare.

We as a country have to get serious about flex fuel vehicles, ethanol and biodiesel production, battery R&D, and nuclear power. The quicker we push the alternatives, the less the pain of transition.

Laptop Sound

I got a new laptop a couple of days ago. It’s thinner, lighter, and probably 3X the computer that I was using before.

It’s better in all ways except one. The built-in stereo speakers are not as good. Like my last laptop, the speakers are mounted on the bottom front. But they had to go with smaller speakers to make a thinner laptop.

It’s an understandable compromise. Most consumers – me included – like thinner laptops. And, frankly, I don’t expect Bose quality sound out of my laptop speakers. If I want to listen to music or a podcast I plug into my stereo or put on headphones if its at all possible to do so.

Of course I’m not always sitting next to a stereo. The point of a laptop, afterall, is to be mobile. So, imagine the ultimate mobile laptop for, say, end-of-year 2009.

Closed it’s impossibly thin – maybe a quarter inch thick. You open it up and the upper half is entirely screen. The lower half is keyboard and touchpad – input/output neatly divided.

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It would be considerably thinner than the Toshiba pictured above and the black space around the screen would disappear almost completely. Maybe there would be just a thin black line framing the screen for aesthetic reasons.

That would be a great laptop, but where would you put the speakers?

A failed effort to soften the noise from British military helicopters led to a breakthrough enabling surfaces from mobile telephone screens to car roof liners to be turned into stereo speakers.

The technology was sold to Cambridge-based NXT, which christened it “SurfaceSound” and arranged for it to be crafted into Toyota cars, Gateway computers, Hallmark greeting cards and more.

The screen could be the speakers! Now, just put the webcam behind the screen too so that we can actually look at the person we are video conferencing with.

The Fundamental Building Block

Ladies and Gentleman, I give you the invention that made it all possible. A tremendous technological leap forward in its own right — perhaps one of the clearest points of demarcation between the the technology of the 20th and 21st centuries — this device showcased the kind of fundamental rethinking that we casually refer to as discontinuous change. It was the very epitome of the “paradigm shift” described by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

And yet this invention, as critical a breakthrough as it was, proves to be only a stepping stone, a building block for something even bigger: a major step forward in how we can capture and use solar energy.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. First, let’s have a look at the original, all-important breakthrough technology…

Switchgrass Looks Promising

Not to get a whole thing going again, but one of the arguments offered against flex fuels is that any flex-fuel program requires ethanol and ethanol (if it could ever work at all) is problematic in that its production requires making energy production competitive with food production, which can drive up the price of produce such as corn which is applicable to both.

One solution, as I noted in the comments section of that lengthy discussion, might be to open up other agriculture markets for fuel production, while relegating corn back to what it’s best at — feeding us and our livestock. At the same time, we might look at crops that would give us a bigger bang for our buck in terms of domestic ethanol production. As reader Odograph pointed out, it would be next to impossible for the US to match Brazil’s successful ethanol program, partly because corn just doesn’t crank out energy as efficiently as sugarcane, and partly because we’re such pigs when it comes to energy consumption.

Solutions such as plug-in hybrids might at least cut down our rate of consumption of liquid fuels for powering cars (if not our total energy footprint). I mentioned crops such as sugar beets, fodder beets, and sweet sorghum which yield ethanol at about the same rate as sugar cane. And here’s another possibility, which we discussed briefly on our most recent podcast — switchgrass:

Previous studies on switchgrass plots suggested that ethanol made from the plant would yield anywhere from 343% to 700% of the energy put into growing the crop and processing it into biofuel. But these studies were based on lab-scale plots of about 5 square meters. So 6 years ago, Kenneth Vogel, a geneticist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Lincoln, Nebraska, and colleagues set out to enlist farmers for a much larger evaluation. Farmers planted switchgrass on 10 farms, each of which was between 3 and 9 hectares. They then tracked the inputs they used–diesel for farm equipment and transporting the harvested grasses, for example–as well as the amount of grass they raised over a 5-year period. After crunching the numbers, Vogel and his colleagues found that ethanol produced from switchgrass yields 540% of the energy used to grow, harvest, and process it into ethanol. Equally important, the researchers found that the switchgrass is carbon neutral, as it absorbs essentially the same amount of greenhouse gases while it’s growing as it emits when burned as fuel.

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Switchgrass looks promising, but it’s no panacea. As a natural part of the North American prairie ecosystem, this plant has been touted by some as a crop that could solve all our energy needs with minimal fertilizer, herbicides, or other inputs. But the research says not so fast:

A final significant finding, Vogel says, is that yields on farms using fertilizer and other inputs, such as herbicides and diesel fuel for farm machinery, were as much as six times higher than yields on farms that used little or no fertilizer, herbicides, or other inputs to grow a mixture of native prairie grasses. That result contrasts sharply with a controversial study published just over a year ago in Science that suggested that a mixture of prairie grasses farmed with little fertilizer or other inputs would produce a higher net energy yield than ethanol produced from corn (Science, 8 December 2006, p. 1598). Instead, the current study–published online today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences–shows that switchgrass farmed using conventional agricultural practices on less-than-prime cropland yields only slightly less ethanol per hectare on average than corn. “The bottom line is that low-input systems are not economically viable,” Vogel says.

Switchgrass may be part of the overall solution, but it’s going to take some real effort to make it work.

FastForward Radio

Sunday night Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon welcomed sci-fi author Tobias Buckell back to FastForward Radio.

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They visited with Tobias about the process of creating plausible and entertaining futures.

Click “Continue Reading” for listening options and the show notes:

Adding Hours to the Day?

Next time Stephen packs up his family for one of those all-nighter cross-country excursions, maybe he will benefit from this development:

As the line between science fiction and reality becomes increasingly blurry, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has always led the pack in terms of cool, weird, wacky and frightening innovations. This time Darpa-funded scientists have found a drug that eliminates sleepiness with a nasal spray of a key brain hormone. The spray has worked well in lab experiments, with no apparent side effects. The hope is that the hormone will serve as a promising sleep-replacement drug in humans.

The spray contains a naturally occurring brain hormone called orexin A. In tests, monkeys suffering from sleep deprivation were treated with the substance and were subsequently able to perform like well-rested monkeys on cognitive tests. Darpa is no doubt interested in the spray for it’s promise of keeping soldiers awake and alert during battle, but for those suffering from narcolepsy, the discovery may offers a potential treatment. Even those with less severe sleep disorders may be interested. According to the National Sleep Foundation, than 70 percent of Americans get less than the generally recommended eight hours of sleep per night and consequently suffer some type of sleep-deprivation symptoms.

I, for one, have about a six-cup daily coffee habit that I would like to shake. I would go cold turkey, but I don’t think I could take three weeks or so of being (alternately) comatose and psychotic. Maybe this stuff could help?

As there are no side-effects (yet identified), I wonder what possibilities there are for long-term use? You want to talk about kicking the habit — could those who are so inclined kick the sleep “habit” once and for all? One could potentially add north of 25% productive (or fun) time to one’s day. Second career, night school, hobbies — the possibilities are intriguing.

If this stuff were to become readily available, I can see it being widely used. But given the option, would people give up sleep altogether?

Would you?

Cosmological Good News / Bad News

I know. You’re supposed to start these things with the bad news so as to make the good news seem better, but believe me, it’s just more fun to approach this one the other way around.

So with that in mind…

The good news: You know that whole mysterious thing about how the most distant parts of the universe are accelerating? Remember how it threw so much scientific thinking into disarray? Remember all the problems and confusion it caused? Well, the good news is that maybe the outer edges of the universe aren’t really accelerating at all. Some clever scientists have come up with an alternative explanation.

Which leads us to…

The bad news: So, okay, their alternate explanation is that time itself may be slowing down. At first, time slowing down doesn’t seem to be that big a deal. But it’s one of those things that sort of catches up with you eventually. Still, it probably isn’t something that we need to get all that worked up about:

In some number of billions of years, time would cease to be time altogether – and everything will stop.

“Then everything will be frozen, like a snapshot of one instant, forever,” Prof Senovilla tells New Scientist magazine. “Our planet will be long gone by then.”

So to recap: the good news is that maybe the universe isn’t weird in a way that we thought, and the bad news is that maybe it’s weird in a completely different way that will eventually be the end of everything. But the other good news is that this will only be a problem for those of us planning to live many billions of years. And since most of us planning to do that a also plan to end up functioning in a different substrate — probably silicon, for starters — we can look forward to much faster mental function, which will give us a bit of a subjective offset where time coming to an end is concerned.

Plus, we can’t rule out subjective immortality kicking in there somewhere down the line. Could happen. We just need to get it started at some point before that final tick of the Big Ticking Clock.

Oh, well. Nothing like a deadline to inspire productivity, I suppose.

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Zubrin on the Glenn and Helen Show

Robert Zubrin is featured on the most recent Glenn and Helen Show, talking about his book, Energy Victory — which is apprently doing quite well. (He was also a guest on FastForward Radio not long ago.) Now Glenn reports that a member of John McCain’s campaign staff has contacted him to point out how Senator McCain is all about Flex Fuels.

Here’s hoping that some (or all) of the other candidates chime in. Before Christmas, I started a list of people who I think need to read Zubrin’s book. Let’s add all the candidates’ names to that list. A sane energy policy could be closer then we think!


No Regrets for Time Travelers

One of the themes of the Speculist that I have neglected over the past couple of years is the idea of Practical Time Travel — the notion that we are moving through time not in the reversed or accelerated way described in science fiction stories, but rather forward one day at a time through myriad possibilities to a future that is, to the extent that we can make it so, one of our own design.

Some balk at the idea of describing this as “time travel” at all, but that is exactly what it is. I would make an analogy to space travel. In one sense, we are all space travelers, completing a trip around the sun each year. And that’s just the beginning: the sun doesn’t stand still, and the galaxy itself is hurtling through deep space away from all the other galaxies. We are all astronauts — moving through local, interstellar, and even intergalactic space.

Still, it doesn’t seem remarkable, or even particularly interesting, to move through space this way, seeing as we all do it…all the time. And yet, when someone moves a much smaller distance through space — say into earth orbit or to the moon — that is remarkable. Why?

Well, it’s remarkable because the astronaut broke out of the normal pattern of space travel that we’re all engaged in (and don’t think about) and chose his or her own destination. Time travel works the same way. When we stop plodding along helplessly towards “the future” (as relentless as, and in fact parallel with, our annual journey through space around the sun) and start working on arriving at a future of our own choosing, then we become time travelers. A year from now, it will be 2009 for everybody, but the question is which 2009 you will be living in? The one that just shows up? Or the one that you chose as your own destination?

Via InstaPundit, Gil at Virtual Memories writes a very moving coming-of-age/beginning-of-the-year piece in which he quotes the philosopher Hegel:

A will which resolves on nothing is not an actual will; the characterless man can never resolve on anything. The reason for such indecision may also lie in an over-refined sensibility which knows that, in determining something, it enters the realm of finitude, imposing a limit on itself and relinquishing infinity; yet it does not wish to renounce the totality to which it intends. Such a disposition is dead, even if its aspiration is to be beautiful. “Whoever aspires to great things,” says Goethe, “must be able to limit himself.” Only by making resolutions can the human being enter actuality, however painful the process may be; for inertia would rather not emerge from that inward brooding in which it reserves a universal possibility for itself. But possibility is not yet actuality. The will which is sure of itself does not therefore lose itself in what it determines.

In choosing a destination, we also choose the destinations that we won’t be arriving at. When I decided to write this blog post, I chose not to write any of the other thousands of posts I could have been working on right now. Our task, this year and every year, is to choose a few good outcomes that we want to work towards — or rather one good destination at which we would like to arrive — and start working towards it.

Glenn also linked an interesting NY Times piece with some ponderings on the subject of regret as it relates to these kinds of choices. The following passage in particular caught my attention:

Over the past decade and a half, psychologists have studied how regrets — large and small, recent and distant — affect people’s mental well-being. They have shown, convincingly though not surprisingly, that ruminating on paths not taken is an emotionally corrosive exercise. The common wisdom about regret — that what hurts the most is not what you did but what you didn’t do — also appears to be true, at least in the long run.

So if you want to avoid regret, don’t worry about everything you missed out on. Be a time traveler. Choose a destination for yourself and start towards it. It seems that what people regret is knowing that there was a future out there they could have worked towards, but didn’t. Kind of like an astronaut who thought maybe he could have made it to the moon, but never gave it a shot.

But even worse than that would be an astronaut who could never decide if he wanted to go the moon, to Mars, or to Venus…and so never went anywhere.

Pack your bags, time travelers. All your yesterdays are behind you. All your tomorrows lie ahead. Choose a good one, and don’t stop until you get there.