where good ideas come from

The other day I was talking to someone about how the members of an engineering team can be so busy doing their jobs that they have no time to discuss new ideas. That reminded me of Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From. Which is a book by the way, but here is the TED talk version:

The take-home is that you might have a lone genius come up with a brilliant idea every once in awhile, but much more often it is seemingly small ideas being connected to each other that end up turning into a big idea. So everyone, especially engineers, needs to find 15 minutes out of their day to discuss ideas, and leaders need to encourage a work culture where that happens.

I didn’t entirely like being reminded that GPS, which obviously has been a very positive technology for the world, was invented to allow accurate delivery of nuclear weapons. But it’s the truth and there it is.

you’re stupid, Joel Kotkin

Seriously, I take no pleasure in pointing out that Joel Kotkin is stupid. If he ever says something that is not stupid, I will take great pleasure in proclaiming it to the masses. In this article he again claims that only rich, young, childless couples live in cities.

As H.G. Wells predicted well over a century ago, cities now depend in large part on affluent, childless people, living what Wells labeled a life of “luxurious extinction.” Jacobs’s contemporary, the great sociologist Herbert Gans, already identified a vast chasm between suburbanites and those who favor urban core living who he identified as “the rich, the poor, the non-white as well as the unmarried and childless middle class.”

He is sitting in the suburbs making up lies about me. I know this because I am sitting in a single family home in a major U.S. city right now, with my middle class family and a young child. I walk to work and to buy 99% of the things I need. And I have thousands of neighbors doing exactly the same thing and planning to raise our children here. It’s a great lifestyle, but the problem is there are very few neighborhoods in American cities that are as great as mine. And things that are great but in short supply tend to be more expensive than things that are mediocre and in great supply, like the endless suburbs. Joel Kotkin, for whatever weird ideological reason, doesn’t want Americans to have a variety of great neighborhoods to choose from. Don’t listen to him.

August 2015 in Review

Negative stories (-12):

  • About 7-19% of cancers are caused by chemicals in the environment. (-1)
  • Steven Hawking is worried about an artificial intelligence arms race starting “within years, not decades”. (-2)
  • The anti-urban attack continues, based on the false idea that crowded, stressful living conditions are the only type of urban living conditions available, and people are being forced into them against their will. This is naked, obvious propaganda that must be rejected. (-1)
  • The more ignorant our species is, the more confident we tend to feel. (-3)
  • According to Naomi Klein, “Our economic system and our planetary system are now at war.”  In related news, July was the warmest month ever recorded by humans, and carbon dioxide concentrations are the highest seen for millions of years. (-3)
  • The media buzz about a worldwide recession seems to be increasing. (-2)

Positive stories (+12):

  • The suburban vs. urban culture wars continue. Suburban office parks are tanking as young people prefer more urban job settings. Entrepreneurs are working on the problems of being car-less with children. (+1)
  • Steven Hawking has a plan to figure out if there is any intelligent life out there. (+1)
  • There are straightforward, practical ideas for dealing with the issues of loading, deliveries, and temporary contractor parking in dense urban areas. (+1)
  • Economists have concluded that preventing human extinction may be economical after all, because “reducing an infinite loss is infinitely profitable”. Is this kind of thinking really useful? (+0)
  • “gene drive” technology helps make sure that genetically engineered traits are passed along to offspring. (+0)
  • Technology marches on – quantum computing is in early emergence, the “internet of things” is arriving at the “peak of inflated expectations”, big data is crashing into the “trough of disillusionment”, virtual reality is beginning its assent to the “plateau of productivity”, and speech recognition is arriving on the plateau. And super-intelligent rodents may be on the way. (+1)
  • Honeybees may be in trouble, but they are not the only bees. (+0)
  • Robotics may be on the verge of a Cambrian explosion, which will almost certainly be bad for some types of jobs, but will also bring us things like cars that avoid pedestrians and computer chips powered by sweat. I for one am excited to be alive at this moment in history. (+2)
  • Dogs can be trained to smell cancer. (+1)
  •  There’s promise of a vaccine for MERS. (+1)
  • It may be possible to capture atmospheric carbon and turn it into high-strength, valuable carbon fiber. This sounds like a potential game-changer to me, because if carbon fiber were cheap it could be substituted for a lot of heavy, toxic and energy-intensive materials we use now, and open up possibilities for entirely new types of structures and vehicles. (+3)
  • Robot deliveries and reusable containers could be a match. (+1)

You might think I rigged that to come out even, but I didn’t.

pneumatic chutes

They have pneumatic chutes on Roosevelt Island, in New York City’s East River. I think this technology has promise, especially in a high-density urban future. A long time ago, we decided we wanted our sewage out of site in tubes underground, but for some reason we are still trucking garbage around on the surface. Theoretically, you could have one tube system to collect all the organic waste (human waste, kitchen waste, yard waste) and take it to a central point for aerobic composting or anaerobic digestion, yielding useful products like energy (electricity, heat, natural gas) and fertilizer. Mixing high-carbon sewage and yard waste with high-nitrogen kitchen waste can also create a more balanced waste stream for digestion. Using suction instead of gravity to transport sewage opens up a new world of no- or low-water transport of waste, which is simply the direction we have to be headed in many warming, drying, and densely populated parts of the world. And sucking stuff through a tube has to be cleaner, safer, and quieter than a fleet of diesel-powered trucks.

Taking this even further, if you generate methane gas you could feed it into a fuel cell, creating electricity and clean water, and potentially sequestering carbon although I don’t fully understand where the technology is at the moment. But this seems to me like a very nice water-energy-waste system that could work at a building, institutional, or neighborhood scale, not exactly a closed loop but much more efficient than the production-use-disposal system we have now.

the Environmental Kuznets Curve

Here’s a journal article with some discussion of the Environmental Kuznets Curve, which is the idea that a developing country’s environment will slowly degrade, then improve again. Having breathed and drank in a variety of countries, it is pretty clear to me that the concept applies to air and water pollution, but not to overall ecological footprint, wildlife habitat, or long-term stability of our atmosphere and oceans. I suspect that this is because air and water pollution are things people can understand – they affect health, safety, and property values in pretty obvious ways. Over time, economic development starts giving people some money, education, and leisure time, and they become more politically active, generating pressure to clean up the immediate human environment. But people don’t understand or don’t care about the long-term ecological issues as much, so the political pressure does not develop.

The main purpose of this paper is to present a theoretical model incorporating the concept of circular economic activities. We construct a circular economy model with two types of economic resources, namely, a polluting input and a recyclable input. Overall, our results indicate that the factors affecting economic growth include the marginal product of the recyclable input, the recycling ratio, the cost of using the environmentally polluting input and the level of pollution arising from the employment of the polluting input. Our analysis also shows that, contrary to the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC), environmental quality cannot be maintained or improved via economic growth. Instead, the improvement in environmental quality, as measured by a reduction in pollution, can only be achieved by an increase in the environmental self-renewal rate or the recycling ratio.

Edible Infrastructures

Just an interesting site I came across in random web surfing. If you really had a clean slate and could turn a computer loose to design an efficient city for you, it might look something like this.

Edible Infrastructures is an investigation into a mode of urbanism which considers food as an integral part of a city’s metabolic infrastructure. Working with algorithms as design tools, we explore the generative potential of such a system to create an urban ecology that: provides for its residents via local, multi-scalar, distributed food production, reconnects the traditional waste-nutrient cycle, and de-couple food costs from fossil fuels by limiting transport from source to table.

Our research is conducted through the building up of a sequence of algorithms, beginning with a Settlement Simulation, which couples consumers to productive surface area within a cellular automata type computational model. Through topological analysis and interpretation of the simulation output, we explore the hierarchical components for a new Productive City, including: the structure and programming of the urban circulatory network, an emergent urban morphology based around productive urban blocks, and opportunities for new architectural typologies.

The resulting prototypical Productive City questions the underlying mechanisms that shape modern urban space and demonstrates the architectural potential of mathematical modelling and simulation in addressing complex urban spatial and programmatic challenges.

 

machines of loving grace

Fresh Air has an interview with John Markoff, author of Machines of Loving Grace.

Markoff, the author of the new book Machines of Loving Grace, points out that artificial intelligence plays a role in many of our lives — sometimes without our even realizing it. “I have a car that I bought this year … that is able to recognize both pedestrians and bicyclists, and if I don’t stop, it will,” he says. “That’s a very inexpensive add-on that you can get for almost any car on the market now.”

Looking ahead, Markoff predicts further advances in driverless-car technology. He also foresees a generation of computer chips that don’t require batteries; instead, they would run on sunlight or vibration or sweat.

“In the next five years … this [computer chip] technology will fan out all around us and create applications we can’t even think about today,” he says. “They’ll be used for robotic sensors. They’ll be made to make robots more mobile. And they’ll be used to do a million other things we can’t even conceive of, and it will continue to transform our society.”

warmest month ever

Eric Holthaus continues his entertaining, slightly sensationalist climate change coverage in Slate:

All this warmth on land is being driven by record-setting heat across large sectionsof the world’s oceans. The NOAA report notes that the warmest 10 months of ocean temperatures on record have occurred in the last 16 months. This is mostly due to a near-record strength El Niño, but the current state of the global oceans has little historical precedent. Since it takes several months for the oceanic warmth of an El Niño to fully reach the atmosphere, 2016 will likely be warmer—perhaps much warmer—than 2015. And that poses grave implications for the world’s ecosystems as well as humans.

We’ve recently entered a new point in the Earth’s climate history. According toreconstructions using tree rings, corals, and ice cores, global temperatures are currently approaching—if not already past—the maximum temperatures commonly observed over the past 11,000 years (i.e., the time period in which humans developed agriculture), and flirting with levels not seen in more than 100,000 years.

But this is the scary part: The current level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is higher than at any point since humans first evolved millions of years ago. Since carbon dioxide emissions lead to warming, the fact that emissions are increasing means there’s much more warming yet to come. What’s more, carbon dioxide levels are increasing really quickly. The rate of change is faster than at any point in Earth’s entire 4.5 billion year history, likely 10 times faster than during Earth’s worst mass extinction—the “Great Dying”—in which more than 90 percent of ocean species perished. Our planet has simply never undergone the kind of stress we’re currently putting on it. That stunning rate of change is one reason why surprising studies like the recent worse-than-the-worst-case-scenario study on sea level rise don’t seem so far fetched.

Drive – Daniel H. Pink

From Amazon:

the secret to high performance and satisfaction in today’s world is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.

Drawing on four decades of scientific research on human motivation, Pink exposes the mismatch between what science knows and what business does—and how that affects every aspect of our lives. He demonstrates that while the old-fashioned carrot-and-stick approach worked successfully in the 20th century, it’s precisely the wrong way to motivate people for today’s challenges. In Drive, he reveals the three elements of true motivation:

*Autonomy—the desire to direct our own lives
*Mastery—the urge to get better and better at something that matters
*Purpose—the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves

This strikes me as almost exactly right. To enjoy my job, I need to be intellectually challenged and improving my skills every day (although those are two slightly different things, both important but for me the first is more important), and I need to feel that my job has some larger social and environmental mission. And even when I have those two things, there are days when I resent the feeling that my time does not belong to me. I think there is one more thing that matters, which is generally positive interaction with other human beings. The wrong people can make an otherwise good job bad. And forming bonds with other people can help people perform terrible jobs, just ask any soldier in the trenches.

fear the walking dead

AMC is producing a (predictably pro-weapon) prequel show called Fear the Walking Dead. An excerpt is provided by Fresh Air:

KIM DICKENS: (As Madison) So why the knife? Hey – I could expel you just for crossing the threshold with that thing.

LINCOLN A. CASTELLANOS: (As Tobias) No. Please. We’re safer in numbers.

DICKENS: (As Madison) Safer from what? Tobias, please, don’t screw yourself like this. You’ve been working your ass off. You’re on track to go to college.

CASTELLANOS: (As Tobias) Yeah. No one’s going to college. No one’s doing anything they think they are.

DICKENS: (As Madison) What? What are you talking about?

CASTELLANOS: (As Tobias) Can I get my knife back, please?

DICKENS: (As Madison) No, you can’t get your knife back.

CASTELLANOS: (As Tobias) They say it’s not connected. They say that, but I don’t believe them. It is – from reports in five states. They don’t know if it’s a virus or a microbe. They don’t know, but it’s spreading.

Ah, fun stuff.