Category Archives: Energy

Energy, Security

Water-bottles as light source

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There seems to be some kind of buzz around a story on water-bottles as a light source. The past couple days it’s been mentioned numerous times. The story I heard first was from Brazil. This video was posted May, 2008:

Then in 2009 or 2010 I heard about it in Africa. Apparently the new story is from Indonesia, in an advertisement.

It’s a great story of finding efficiencies on several levels. It reminds me of the large tubes of water in some high-end solar homes that connect to the roof and not only light a room but heat it as well. They are more than just sun tunnels but actual vertical columns of water that run floor to ceiling in a room and radiate energy. Of course I can’t find any images of one right now…need some buzz to get them to appear again. Maybe the water-bottles will help.

Energy, History, Security

LSE Report on Cycling Benefits

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As I mentioned a few months ago, I attended the London School of Economics in the early 1990s and commuted every day by bicycle from outside of Greenwich to the Strand, about 10 miles each way.

No matter rain or shine, light or dark, I was pushing the pedals like a Victorian only 100 years late to the party. It was great fun although I was almost always the only cyclist on the road. In fact, come to think of it, I never saw another cyclist on the road back then, not even as I flew along with traffic above the banks of the Thames.

Crossing Tower Bridge in the rain at night on smooth metal grates in-between thundering lorries and at their speed is just one of the risks I learned to manage with skill and experience.

However, after six months I had to cut back and eventually stop riding due to the effects of harsh pollution on my lungs. The unregulated diesel fumes and particulates caused permanent damage and created the feeling of almost constant illness — a risk for which I tried but was unable to find any workaround. My GP literally told me to stop riding so far and so often because the London air was poisonous.

It is therefore amusing to me to read the brand new LSE report on the benefits of cycling that claims it can reduce illness.

Dr Alexander Grous of LSE’s Department of Management calculated a “Gross Cycling Product” by taking into account factors such as bicycle manufacturing, cycle and accessory retail and cycle related employment
[…]

  • Cycling to work is associated with less all-cause sickness absence. Mean absenteeism in cyclists is significantly lower than in non-cyclists with a significant relationship between frequent cycling and absenteeism, with regular cyclists taking 7.4 sick days per annum, compared to 8.7 sick days for non-cyclists
  • Frequent cyclists save the economy £128 million in absenteeism per year, projected to save a further £1.6 billion in absenteeism over the next 10 years
  • Compared with the rest of Europe, the UK has the highest number of sick days taken each year, with 225 million days estimated to have been taken in 2010 at a cost of £17 billion. This equates to around £600 per employee per annum, and an average of 7.7 days per person

I get the impression the report writers are not long-term cyclists as they leave out numerous other benefits. They definitely don’t read this blog. Even worse than the omission of the effects of pollution on cyclists is the omission of cycling benefits as a zero-emission transportation option. They also omit the benefits of social networking, as I’ve written about before in regard to an English propaganda movie. And the report omits the resilience of cyclists to natural disasters, as documented after the Japanese Tsunami; bicycles work without fuel supplies, fair roads, electric grids…they are the most effective form of transportation for national security and resilience to infrastructure failure.

It’s great to see cycling catch on in England but perhaps the greatest point of all is that England was full of cyclists after WWII for the reasons I mention above. Their decision to follow the US model of the automobile was a huge mistake if you run the numbers.

Thus, I find the LSE report a great start but embarrassingly weak analysis. Can they really directly attribute better health to cycling or is it just a correlation related to an overall lifestyle or even culture (e.g people who buy bikes already are healthy)? I would have added a long list of direct health and security benefits to the LSE report from cycling (e.g. zero emissions) to the gross product as well as call out the massive losses and costs since the decline of the last English cycling boom in the 1940s. Finally, I might even have tried to explain why cycling fell out of style.

Energy, History, Sailing, Security

Do we know how to make software?

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Jeremiah asked and I did my best to answer without getting wrapped around the axle because he bragged to me about buying a big American car during the fuel price rise.

Here is my response:

Well, maybe you knew I couldn’t resist commenting on your automobile engine analogy. I’m still laughing from the time last year you told me ‘when gas prices went up, prices on Suburbans went way down, so I bought one to drive my five miles to work’. Clearly we still don’t see eye-to-eye on managing risk.

You say “the United States ruled the automotive industry; an industry we created from a machine we invented”. For brevity sake I’ll concede the industry was largely built by the US (not created) but I can’t let you assert that the machine was invented in the US. The engines of steam, electric, internal combustion, diesel; all were invented outside the US in the 1800s. I mean by comparison the US at that time was stuck in a rut over whether slavery was a viable engine to power its industrial production!

Yeah, ok, I know Ford gets lots of credit for ramping up his assembly line and blowing a whistle at his workers, but even that was an application of British automation developed and built 100 years earlier to support the quality and speed necessary for their military during the Napoleonic wars. Imagine watching a steam engine-driven system in 1808 that produced over 100 thousand blocks (pulleys) for the Navy. The Block Mills of Portsmouth proved that with an assembly line and machines just 10 men were made able to work as quickly as 100.

More to the point you say “The trend is that we (in the U.S.) invent something new, create an industry around it.” That seems to skip right past the fact that most industries in the US were started by European immigrants based on European ideas in place for many years before the US copied them. From Budweiser to Champagne, Cheddar Cheese to Chandeliers, what the US has really done well is bring down the price of goods and make them more accessible. In fact, that was an obsessive element to the Nixon administration that success would be determined entirely by the availability of goods. A steak on every table. And it’s true our shelves were stocked our pantries full while others in the world were still paying more for fewer goods, but somewhere in that heady explosion of prosperity out of the 1900s the US lost its sight of quality as a measure of success in “efficiency”.

You bought that Suburban, you said, because you perceived value, right? Did you feel like you were buying innovation? Quality? Maybe a trip to a car show to look at the latest models (all outside the US now) will change your perspective:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/automobiles/as-frankfurt-show-opens-industrys-balance-shifts.html

“If it seems as though German manufacturers are on the leading edge of new, gas-free urban transportation solutions, it is due in no small part to the European Union’s strict pollution controls. ‘Today, all the innovation in the auto industry is coming from the German manufacturers…A little from Japan. None from the U.S.’”

NONE from the US. Our amazing ideas of “efficiency” apparently were not so.

I mean a four-door all-wheel-drive station wagon made by Volvo is expected to be available next year that delivers better horsepower than a Ferrari 308 and a Camaro Z28, yet will also provide 100 mpg. That should have been an American made vehicle. No reason that it could not have been built and sold here. We have the weather, the open roads, the crap to haul around. Oh, no reason except people were for some reason still buying Suburbans. You know I could go on about this forever and someday I MAY convert you to a highly resilient low-risk source of energy for transportation, even if I have to do it on the mat…but I’ll try to get back to the point of your post.

I think your definition of software may be too narrow. You say “software must be built by highly skilled people, whose skills are not trained up quickly or easily.” But isn’t that the very opposite of what is causing so many problems in code? Code is being written by many more people less trained and using toolkits. It is based on a massive rise in the amount of shared/borrowed/stolen code available. I see this most in recent cases of malware mutations — so many more people developing (or at least modifying) more code more rapidly than ever. The mobile app stores are another example. Anyone with a cheap personal computer and a few online tutorials now is in place to build and release software to hundreds of millions of users. Compare that to the training, samples and platforms of twenty years ago. Software is just flying off the wires now and it’s going to get even faster as more remote areas are connected.

You say “those who profit by the billions from creating software, like Microsoft, Oracle, and Adobe seem unable to ship multi-million line software projects on a deadline”. You’re looking at the wrong sources of innovation. That’s like criticizing the British Navy for deploying ships late (a critique as old as the British Navy — special note to the Falklands War deployment, which led to the development of ITIL). While the Navy isn’t going away and will continue to find ways to automate production, they are solving massively complex problems. The future of software build efficiency is less about the big guys just like ship building an ocean-going vessel for the masses is at a much smaller scale today. The lessons learned from the big expensive mistakes are applied faster, better and at smaller scales of automation.

So, I’d be one to argue yes, we know how not only to make software but hundreds of millions of people know how to save time by learning from the innovation of others — sharing knowledge and tools to reduce build times. I’d be happy to go more into the myths of commodity and innovation. I also would like to clarify trends and real numbers but I’ll leave those for another day (e.g. Today’s fastest growing telecom company? Skype is barely over 500 mil while India mobile is soon expected to have 1.2 billion subscribers). Alas, it’s time now to go make some more fuel for my engine.

Update: My comment has not yet been approved, so I’m glad I made a copy here just in case. I also have to point out there is some sweet irony; a post about efficiency and automation is taking a long time to approve a comment. Maybe it’s a manual process. :)

Energy, Security

Warning Labels for Coal Power Plants

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Illustration by Tom Toles.

Warning Labels for Coal

He forgot serious illness such as cancer, birth defects…

…huge rates of coal consumption were a factor behind an increase in cancer and birth defects as well as non-specific and chronic nervous, immune and respiratory illnesses.

Coal-fired power plants contribute three quarters of China’s total electricity needs, but also around 70 percent of energy sector air pollution.

The government has been studying how to reduce its toxic effects, but “clean coal” remains a misnomer, said the group’s China campaign manager, Yang Ailun.

“There are many coal power plants saying they are now ‘clean’ but there are a lot of misunderstandings — coal creates pollution and clean coal is impossible,” she said.

Studies of the effect of coal used in homes have a similar warning:

[Kirk Smith, a professor of global environmental health at the University of California, Berkeley] said the results of the study do provide further evidence that coal causes significant health problems and should be replaced by other fuel sources. “Coal can’t be burned cleanly…it should be banned from all household use,” he told Reuters Health.