Sunday, at least in my part of the country, was a gloomy day of bitter cold, rain, and gray skies. As a result, I stayed indoors and read a fair share of blogs. Here are a few gems I uncovered:
- The Japanese space agency, in partnership with Mitsubishi, launched a ridiculously cool satellite. This is an amazing step forward in terms of connectivity, and I’m excited to see how this seemingly cheap (given the scale?) project pans out:
“[The satelite] will bring high-speed internet access to Japan and neighboring countries. The $342 million project [...] is expected to culminate in a terrestrially accessible internet connection reaching speeds of 1.2Gbps, dwarfing current [DSL] connections that typically allow data transfer to occur at [or] below 8 Mbps.”
- In about three months, domestic airlines will use 100% electronic tickets. That doesn’t mean a complete end to paper during the course of your travels, but it does complete the seemingly obvious transition to computer-based records in place of paper tickets. Oh, by the way: it will save the airlines over $3 billion a year.
- A Spanish firm will soon begin construction on the largest solar power plant in the world near Phoenix, Arizona. Initial estimates price the power (enough to serve 70,000 homes) at 20 cents per kWh, or twice the price of coal-fired plants. But, as the article points out, that cost disadvantage could disappear if the US moved toward a cap-and-trade or carbon tax system.
- Recent major events in my life (ahem#getting engaged#ahem), made me think about this piece dissecting colleges and universities’ outdated means of connecting with young alumni for contributions:
[Alumni magazines are increasingly irrelevant to recent grads]. “Why wait four months for ‘class notes’ when you could simply check Facebook to see what a friend is up to?” Further, while many colleges have online giving programs, many also still communicate with alumni as if writing a check is the normal way to give. “It likely shocks most development officers as to the percentage of young alumni who don’t write checks, or own stamps.”
- I watched an embarrassing number of episodes of Dirty Jobs on the Discovery Channel today. They ran an all day marathon, and it couldn’t have come at a better time. You see, I used to look down my nose at Dirty Jobs as sort of a one-trick-pony: “I get it…he gets dirty doing disgusting things.” But the combination of host Mike Rowe’s quick wit and this Fast Company profile describing his motivations for the show and evolving view of work turned me into a fan. The profile is a great read.
That should get your week started. Hope it’s a good one.
I spent the beginning of last week at a great conference on North Carolina’s Energy Future. While in future posts I want to offer specific reflections based on individual speakers, let me first quickly highlight a few clean tech and energy policy ideas from various sources that I found particularly compelling:
- “Feebates” — the idea is simple: tax owners of high-emissions/low-mileage vehicles and transfer money from those fees (in the form of a tax rebate) to owners of low-emissions/high-mileage vehicles. An easy, straightforward incentive that pays for itself.
- Composite Cars –many Americans have a tremendously dangerous misconception that heavier cars are safer. In reality, heavier cars yield deadlier accidents. An alternative to bulky steel frames are carbon composite shells that can be manufactured 10-100 times stronger than steel. The great part? They weigh just a fraction of a similar sized steel frame. This is crucially important considering the energy wasted by conventional (heavy) cars, SUVs, and trucks. As a Rocky Mountain Institute Report points out:
“The contemporary automobile, after a century of engineering, is embarrassingly inefficient: Of the energy in the fuel it consumes, at least 80 percent is lost, mainly in the engine’s heat and exhaust, so that at most only 20 percent is actually used to turn the wheels. Of the resulting [20%] force, 95 percent moves the car, while only 5 percent moves the driver, in proportion to their respective weights.”
- Smart Power Grids –power distribution systems with at least three key features: (1) a two-way flow of electricity, allowing micro-level power generation systems (solar panels on houses, to use an obvious example) to feed excess energy back into the grid; (2) energy storage capacity that’s dispersed over a given area to optimize power flow (minimize the distance electricity travels) and (3) a decentralized power-generation system that makes micro power plants like wind turbines and solar cells more cost effective by drawing all energy produced by those sources into a common pool and sharing the power-generating burden across a variety of sources. I’ll be the first to admit that I have a lot to learn about Smart Grids, but these types of major infrastructure overhauls will eventually be necessary as we transition to new energy technologies. I’ve heard of at least one company working on this technology, though I know there are many more.
Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user EdTarwinski.
We’re not sure what this means (though if the editors of SMITH magazine are reading this, we’d still love those Planet Earth DVDs…), but Jarred’s entry in TreeHugger/SMITH Magazine’s six-word essay contest on “The Green Life” is currently featured prominently on the contest’s site. In case you missed these in the comments of my previous post:
Jarred: Kermit’s Right, Being Green Ain’t Easy.
Taylor: Don’t act in isolation; isolate inaction.
While it’s too late to enter the contest, I wanted to highlight this topic again because apparently six-word writing is all the rage. Rachel enlightened us in the comments of my previous post:
“Someone once bet that Hemingway that he couldn’t tell a story using only six words. And he came up with the following: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Is it a story? No. Is it compelling as hell? Yeeeeeah.”
Just today I saw that the Freakonomics blog is hosting its own “six-word motto for the U.S.” contest. My favorites so far are:
Our Worst Critics Prefer to Stay
AND
Just Like Canada, With Better Bacon
Is a new art form emerging, or are our attention spans so limited that we can’t handle longer prose…..
Timothy Egan of the New York Times tackles the statement Steve Jobs made last month about the decline of reading. I covered Jobs’ quote here, and a lively debate ensued in the comments. It’s been our most popular post by far, probably because what El Jobso said is pretty controversial.
You should definitely read his whole piece, but here are some of Egan’s money quotes:
Reading is something else, an engagement of the imagination with life experience. It’s fad-resistant, precisely because human beings are hard-wired for story, and intrinsically curious. Reading is not about product.
Next year, business may be down, and several publishers may merge, and certainly more of the poor, beloved independent bookstores will cling to life support. Steve Jobs will stroll into a room filled with breathless acolytes and pull a must-have trick from his bag. We’ll oohh and ahhhh about it, then go back to lives where a good book still holds more power than anything with a screen. Power to transport the reader to another world. Power to get inside somebody’s else mind, to live their story, to be moved.
Last year, a survey for the Associated Press found that a much smaller number — 27 percent — had not read a book lately, which means nearly three-in-four have read a book. [...] The more compelling statistic was rarely mentioned in news accounts of the A.P. story: the survey found that another 27 percent of Americans had read 15 or more books a year. That report documents a national celebration.
Courtesy of my office mate, Craig, here is a new challenge for you. Leave your guesses in the comments!
[Update: Pwned.]
