Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

mining sewage for gold

Japanese sewer authorities are now profitably mining sewage for gold.

A sewage treatment facility in central Japan has recorded a higher gold yield from sludge than can be found at some of the world’s best mines. An official in Nagano prefecture, northwest of Tokyo, said the high percentage of gold found at the Suwa facility was probably due to the large number of precision equipment manufacturers in the vicinity that use the yellow metal. The facility recently recorded finding 1,890 grammes of gold per tonne of ash from incinerated sludge.

how to not pay for cable

There are lots of ways to watch TV now without paying for cable. Why include this on a blog about innovation? Well, I’m trying to figure out how Comcast is building a second skyscraper in Philadelphia if consumers really hate paying them for TV so much and there is a ton of disruptive innovation going on that would seemingly threaten their business model. The answer must be that big “cable” companies have a lot more going on besides just charging exorbitant rates for TV. I am a Comcast customer by the way, because they are the best broadband option on my street at the moment, and of course I can’t live without that. They charge a lot for it, but then they throw in basic cable and HBO Go for just a little bit more, so they got me. I’m still actively shopping for other options though so don’t get too complacent, Comcast.

12-fold increase in U.S. solar capacity since 2008

This article is called Nothing Can Stop the US Solar Industry Juggernaut Now. A couple quotes:

The US solar industry has engineered a 1200% increase in utility-scale capacity since 2008, according to a new blog post from the Energy Department. When you factor in the explosive rate of growth in small-scale solar, it’s clear that the current hiccup in the price of oil is not going to stop solar energy from advancing in the US market.

The only question now is how quickly the US solar industry can meet the growth in demand, and for that we turn to a pair of newly announced SunShot programs designed to help the US solar industry churn out — and install — more product than ever before…

If you’re not familiar with the Obama Administration’s 2011 SunShot initiative, that would be a 10-year plan to bring the cost of solar energy down to parity with fossil fuels.

Logically speaking, solar energy just has to be a big part of the sustainability solution. The cynic in me would say if you express an increase from a very small number in percentage terms, it may sound impressive, but it doesn’t mean much. I am a little disappointed if grid parity is really still 10 years out. I really thought we were closer than that. I will believe we are close when I walk out of my house and see it all around me, and/or when my electric bill tells me it is mostly or entirely solar. By the way, my house is in the United States, but I am lucky enough to be on vacation in Southeast Asia at the moment, and I don’t see it here either. What I see here is living standards and health conditions close to what we take for granted in the west (my current mild stomach trouble not withstanding), but it is very clear that relatively cheap, abundant oil, gas, and coal make it possible.

R graph catalog

Here’s a nice catalog of graphs made with R, along with source code for each. Some of the images were broken or missing when I tried it, but hopefully they’ll get that fixed. (By they way, this is my personal experience with interactive “Shiny” apps so far – I love the idea and the look, but there always seems to be something wrong that needs to be fixed, and fixing it takes more time and requires more specialized training than just dealing with plain old code. At first, I thought it might be a productivity enhancer, but instead it’s a drag when your job is not to build cool-looking apps, but to produce useful data analysis results in a reasonable amount of time.)

January 2015 in Review

I’m dropping my “Hope for the Future Index” this year. If anyone out there is particularly attached to it, you can let me know.

Negative trends and predictions:

  • According to Mikhail Gorbachev, “Today’s key global problems – terrorism and extremism, poverty and inequality, climate change, migration, and epidemics – are worsening daily.”
  • Exxon predicts the rate of greenhouse gas emissions will stop growing…by 2030…at a level that will still cause atmospheric concentrations to continue rising. They try to present this as good news, but it is clearly a pathway to collapse if you think about it just a little bit.
  • Johan Rockstrom and company have updated their 2009 planetary boundaries work. The news is not getting any better. 4 of the 9 boundaries are not in the “safe operating space”: climate change, loss of biosphere integrity, land-system change, altered biogeochemical cycles (phosphorus and nitrogen).
  • By several measures, 2014 was the hottest year on record.
  • The Doomsday Clock has moved from 5 minutes to 3 minutes from midnight due to “climate change and efforts to modernize nuclear weapons stockpiles”.

Positive trends and predictions:

  • Taxi medallions have been called the “best investment in America”, but now ride-sharing services may destroy them. I put this in the positive column because I think the new services are better and this is a good example of creative destruction.
  • Remote controlled, robot-assisted surgery is here.
  • The ongoing tumble in oil prices was of course a big story throughout the month. We won’t really be able to say until we look back years from now whether this was just a short-term fluctuation or the reversal of the decades-long trend toward higher energy prices. My guess is the former.
  • It is starting to seem politically possible for the U.S. to strengthen regulation of risk-taking by huge financial firms.
  • Robots can learn to perform physical tasks by watching videos.
  • Howard T. Odum was a genius who invented a “system language” that, if widely understood and applied, might give humanity the tools to solve its problems. Unfortunately, so far it is not widely understood or applied.
  • There may be a realistic chance for a de-escalation of the Middle East nuclear arms race.

more on the western U.S. drought

I knew about low rainfall and depleted groundwater in California, loss of snowpack in Colorado, and the not-at-all-surprising lack of water in Las Vegas. I didn’t know that Oregon is in the early stages of beginning to feel the drought. From Wired:

Snow-starvation might seem like a PR tactic invented by Oregonians to dissuade out-of-staters keen on moving in, but it’s a real problem. Though known for rain, most of the state relies on snowpack to sate its thirst throughout the year. But Oregon’s last three winters have been too warm, and the much of the expected snow has instead fallen as rain, devastating more than just the state’s ski industry. (To be fair to Oregonians, a busted ski season is a huge bummer.) Without melting snow, the rivers are coming up short, and many farmers are having to rely on groundwater. But even in soggy Oregon, there isn’t always enough to go around.”The way water is portioned out in the American west is that if you got here first you get to use it first,” says Kathie Dello, a climate researcher at Oregon State University. When there’s a shortage, then farmers with so-called “junior rights” get their water use cut off early in the season. This has led some farmers to look south for clues about what their future might be like.

All this comes to a head because Oregon is currently the peak influx of any state in the nation. “The biggest fear of most Oregonians that Californians are going to flood the state,” says Dello. (Not a water-flood; a people-flood.) But the fear of being bred out by Golden State refugees might soon be supplanted by an even worse threat: being invaded by California’s drying climate.

technologies to watch

What are the big technologies to watch going forward? Everybody has an opinion, so here are just a few.

Dominic Barton, global managing director of McKinsey & Company:

Fortunately, today’s private-sector labs are bursting with innovations that could spark major productivity-enhancing technological and operational improvements. Advanced materials like nanolaminates (edible lipids) can, when sprayed on food, provide protection from air or moisture and reduce spoilage. Carbon-fiber composites are making cars and airplanes both more resistant and lighter, reducing their fuel consumption. And the “Internet of things” will rationalize production processes by detecting potential failures early, boost crop yields by measuring the moisture of fields, and dramatically reduce the cost of remotely monitoring patients’ health.

Just a little further out on the productivity frontier are commercially viable self-driving cars and trucks. Likewise, synthetic biology will be possible before too long, with scientists using the huge amount of increasingly available and inexpensive genetic data to design DNA from scratch – a practice that has applications in medicine, agriculture, and even biofuel production.

Wait a second… “nanolaminates (edible lipids) can, when sprayed on food, provide protection from air or moisture and reduce spoilage”…where have we heard something like this before?

Susan Hockfield, President Emerita and Professor of Neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology:

An accelerating convergence of the biological, physical, and engineering sciences promises a stunning array of new technological solutions. Imagine a coal-fueled power plant that emits only water and clean air. Inside the plant, designer yeast cells transform the carbon dioxide released during the coal’s combustion into raw materials for floor tiles and other construction supplies.

Or imagine a simple and inexpensive urine test that can diagnose cancer, eliminating the need for a surgical biopsy. And, when cancer treatment is needed, its toxic punch hits cancer cells selectively, with far fewer damaging side effects.

Or imagine a future with plentiful food and fuel crops. Through improved seed stocks and more efficient water management, we can have crops that require less water, grow at higher density, and thrive in wider temperature ranges. And data-driven agriculture supply chains will move them more effectively to the market. These advances will enable us to feed and provide power – at a lower economic and environmental cost – to the anticipated 2050 population of nine billion people.

Guy Ryder, Director-General of the International Labor Organization:

In the midst of a major employment crisis, technology continues to reduce the labor needed for mass production, while the automation of routine legal and accounting tasks is hollowing out that sector of the job market as well. The science of robotics is revolutionizing manufacturing; every year, an additional 200,000 industrial robots come into use. In 2015, the total is expected to reach 1.5 million. Adapting the labor market to a world of increasingly automated workplaces will be one of the defining challenges of our era.

Finally, the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks report 2015:

The pace of technological change is faster than ever. Disciplines such as synthetic biology and artificial intelligence are creating new fundamental capabilities, which offer tremendous potential for solving the world’s most pressing problems. At the same time, they present hard-to-foresee risks. Oversight mechanisms need to more effectively balance likely benefits and commercial demands with a deeper consideration of ethical questions and medium to long-term risks – ranging from economic to environmental and societal.

robot library of the future

This is an interesting article by Philadelphia Inquirer critic Inga Saffron about the new library at Temple University, which is going to use robots to retrieve books. This allows the books to be stored in a very small space, and the rest of the building to be used for technology, meeting rooms, collaborative work spaces, and social spaces. This is based on warehouse technology used by Amazon and others, and has already been implemented at the North Carolina State University library.

Joe Lucia, Temple’s dean of libraries, believes these buildings are the most inclusive spaces at a university and serve as an “academic Switzerland.” An engineering student may never wander into the humanities building, he explained, but all students need to consult a library’s holdings. The library’s location on the new central quad will cement its place as Temple’s community center. Besides the glass reading room, the building will be packed with study rooms, seminar rooms, digital work spaces, as well as a ground floor café-and-study area that will be open 24 hours.

The wealth of work spaces is made possible by the automated book-retrieval system. The new library will be about 200,000 square feet, roughly the same as the existing Paley Library, built in 1966 by Nolen-Swinburne. (It will probably be retrofitted for classrooms.) But because the automated system allows the new library to store books in tightly packed trays, storage will take up just 10,000 square feet. The ratio is almost the reverse at Paley, which has open stacks. Because the books will be protected in their own concrete room, the new library can have many more windows. It is sad that the one place where windows are scarce is on the side facing Liacouras walk. Long blank walls could be off-putting on such a pedestrian stretch, and Temple officials say they are exploring some design changes.

One of the good things about the automatic book-retrieving system is that it’s already been tested at Snohetta projects such as the Hunt Library at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. The system delivers the books within five minutes, and it’s become such an attraction that students are known to take selfies with the robot.

This also makes me think about the future of urban retail. Who will need big box stores with shelves packed full of duplicate items? Instead you can have showrooms with just one of each item, or even holograms, for people who want an up-close look at an item they have already seen on the internet at home. The actual items to be purchased can be stored very compactly in the back, basement, or second floor of the store, and retrieved in minutes by a robot. For that matter, why would you want to carry a bulky item home if it can be delivered to your door within a few hours. In that case, it doesn’t matter if the warehouse is down the street, on the edge of town, or out by the airport or rail station or factory that actually makes the items. Each retailer doesn’t need to operate its own warehouse and delivery system. If 3D-printing technology really comes into its own, this system would get even more interesting.

The Sixth Extinction

Here’s a half hour Fresh Air interview with Elizabeth Kolbert, who wrote the book The Sixth Extinction. Her descriptions of ocean acidification and amphibian extinction are particularly eye-opening. The whole thing is worth a listen (better to listen than try to read this transcript), but I especially liked this exchange:

GROSS: So this is going to sound like a horrible question, but, you know, I don’t get to see barrier reefs. I don’t get to see coral. I live in the city. What impact does it have on my life if coral reefs can’t grow anymore and if they start declining because of the acidification of the oceans?

KOLBERT: Well, I guess I’d give you two answers. The first answer is, you know, we are effectively undoing, you know, the beauty and the variety and the richness of the world, which has taken tens of millions of years to reach this point. We’re sort of unraveling that. And if that is something that you just say, well, I don’t care about, then I guess I’d say, well, what do you care about?

(LAUGHTER)

KOLBERT: But on another, on a more, you know, personal sort of like, OK, I want to know how – you know, what’s it mean to me, I guess my answer would be we’re not sure. You know, no one’s – we haven’t done this before. You don’t get to sort of see this experiment run over and over again. So we’re doing, it’s often said, a massive experiment on the planet, and we really don’t know what the end point’s going to be.