Roger O’Neill video takes a look at the Crave Brothers use of methane – from their cow poop – to power the farm and 120 neighboring homes. The farm includes a cheese factory.
Category: Technology
“Google’s Addiction to Cheap Electricity”
“Don’t be evil”, the motto of Google, is tailored to the popular image of the company–and the information economy itself–as a clean, green twenty-first century antidote to the toxic excesses of the past century’s industries. The firm’s plan to develop a gigawatt of new renewable energy recently caused a blip in its stock price and was greeted by the press as a curious act of benevolence. But the move is part of a campaign to compensate for the company’s own excesses, which can be observed on the bansk of the Columbia River, where Google and its rivals are raising server farms to tap into some of the cheapest electricity in North America. The blueprints depicting Google’s data center at The Dalles, Oregon are proof that the Web is no ethereal store of ideas, shimmering over our heads like the aurora borealis. It is a new heavy industry, an energy glutton that is only growing hungrier.
I wonder how the economics and energy consumption details compare between growing web applications and legacy paper based products?
Fixing US broadband: $100 billion for fiber to every home
The US is in desperate need of 100Mbps “big broadband.” That’s the conclusion of a new report from EDUCAUSE (PDF), a group that represents IT managers at over 2,200 colleges and universities. But these 100Mbps connections are coming slowly; in the meantime, countries like Japan already have them. To avoid falling further behind, the report calls for a national broadband policy to be passed this year, one that includes $100 billion for a fiber-to-the-home infrastructure that will connect every household and business in the country.
The report opens by citing the familiar, dreary facts: US broadband might now be widely available, but it’s slow and relatively expensive. Between 1999 and 2006, the US fell from third place to 20th in the International Telecommunications Union’s broadband usage measurements. When it comes to average connection speeds, the US isn’t beaten just by Japan but also by France, Korea, Sweden, New Zealand, Italy, Finland, Portugal, Australia, Norway, Luxembourg, the United Kingdom, and Germany. And it’s not about population size or density, either; Finland, Sweden, and Canada beat us on most broadband metrics despite having lower population density. Finally, we’re getting beat on price, coming in 18th worldwide when it comes to cost per megabyte.
Technology’s Unintended Consequences
As GPS transceivers become common accessories in cars, the benefits have been manifold. Millions of us have been relieved of the nuisance of getting lost or, even worse, the shame of having to ask a passerby for directions.
But, as with all popular technologies, those dashboard maps are having some unintended consequences. In many cases, the shortest route between two points turns out to run through once-quiet neighborhoods and formerly out-of-the-way hamlets.
Scores of villages have been overrun by cars and lorries whose drivers robotically follow the instructions dispensed by their satellite navigation systems. The International Herald Tribune reports that the parish council of Barrow Gurney has even requested, fruitlessly, that the town be erased from the maps used by the makers of navigation devices.
A research group in the Netherlands last month issued a study documenting the phenomenon and the resulting risk of accidents. It went so far as to say that GPS systems can turn drivers into “kid killers.”
Carr makes an excellent point. One has to add some common sense to navigation systems. I used a TomTom in Europe last year. I found it very helpful – mostly, however, when we decided to wander around. The navigation system would then provide a route back to the hotel (which I had added as a predefined point prior to our departure).
33 Things That Make Us Crazy
Wired on air travel, and 32 other modern annoyance:
Ticket Counter: Expensive? If anything, flying doesn’t cost enough: The average domestic fare in spring 2007 was $326. That’s $50 less than a decade ago, after adjusting for inflation. During the same period, fuel costs nearly tripled. To stay in business, major carriers have aped the strategies of budget operators like Southwest. Largely gone are the free meals, blankets, and pillows. The savings have been passed along as lower ticket prices — at the price of your comfort.
SpaceShipTwo
Virgin Galactic has unveiled a SpaceShipTwo (SS2) design, created by Scaled Composites, that harks back to the NASA/USAF Boeing X-20 Dyna-Soar glider of the 1960s, while Scaled’s carrier aircraft, White Knight II (WK2) has been given a twin-fuselage configuration.
To be launched on a Lockheed Martin Titan III rocket, Dyna-Soar was for hypersonic flight research but the programme was cancelled before the first vehicle was completed. Some of its subsystems were used in later X-15 flight research and Dyna-Soar became a testbed for advanced technologies that contributed to projects, including the Space Shuttle.
GPS Liability?
In early January accident, a California computer technician turned his rental car onto some train tracks in New York per the directions of his sat nav system. The car became stuck and he had to abandon it before an oncoming train hit it. There were no injuries, but there were significant delays in travel. “The rental car driver was issued a summons and is being held liable for the damage to the train and track.”
That leads a real live lawyer, Eric J. Sinrod, writing at c|net to examine the potential of a driver to point to the GPS manufacturer as being at fault. The article points out:
An Interface of One’s Own
Microsoft Word. Light of my mind, fire of my frustration. My sin, my soul. Mi-cro-soft-word. The mouth contorts with anti-poetry. My. Crow. Soft. Word.
Oh, Word. For 20 years, you have supported and tyrannized me. You have given me a skimpy Etch A Sketch on which to compose, a cramped spot on the sentence-assembly line — and then harangued me with orders to save or reformat as you stall and splutter and assert points of ludicrous corporate chauvinism (“Invalid product key”! “Unrecognized database format”!).
And just when I need to be alone with my thoughts and my Mac, you detain me by emphasizing my utter dependence on you, melodramatically “recovering” documents lost in your recreational crashes.
After lo this lifetime of servitude, I intend to break free. I seek a writing program that understands me. Goodbye to Word’s prim rulers, its officious yardsticks, its self-serious formatting toolbar with cryptic abbreviations (ComicSansMS?) and trinkety icons. Goodbye to glitches, bipolar paragraph breaks and 400 options for making overly colorful charts.
Top Tech Predictions For 2008
Yesterday I attended the Third Annual SNS New York Dinner, a gathering of tech professionals and investors at the famous Waldorf=Astoria Hotel hosted by futurist Mark Anderson. As usual, Anderson stirred controversy with a big dose of his high-powered brain candy.
Anderson opened the evening with a set of interlocking observations about the current global landscape. First, Anderson said that the world will face two crises as it transitions into the new year. The first is a climate crisis and the second a financial liquidity crisis.
“We must now agree that the climate crisis is true. We are past the time for debate. But now we need a rapid response,” he said. “What if the global climate crisis is non-linear? There are no straight lines in nature,” he said. Anderson agreed with Albert Gore’s recent remarks that humanity is at war with the planet, but he reminded SNS attendees, as he did at the last two dinners, that there is lots of money to be made by figuring out to end humanity’s war against nature.
Anderson predicted that the West’s good will with China would come to an end in 2008, in no small part due to China’s role as a massive polluter (which the world will notice at the 2008 Olympics) but also because China has taken its current role in the global economy as far as it can. Soon China will have to grow up and evolve.
High oil prices, which Anderson has spotlighted at the last two SNS dinners, will continue to climb. “$70 a barrel for oil is the new floor,” he said. “We’ll see another run to $100 a barrel by December 31 next year, or shortly afterwards.”
Finding the Right Digital Photo Frame
As digital cameras proliferate, consumers want to make use of all of those pictures they’re taking. Many of them wind up buried on computer hard drives. But it’s getting easier to take those photos and display them on a digital photo frame in the living room.
These photo frames look just like any other picture frame from a distance. But they are, in fact, small liquid crystal displays that can change the photos on display every few seconds. For romantics and technology Luddites, that is a kind of blasphemy, a reflection of a fickle age where not even a still image can remain constant.
But who says you have to look at the same pictures of your relatives on the mantel for all eternity? Sometimes, change is good. That’s why digital photo frames were the No. 2 consumer technology gift on Black Friday, just behind navigation devices, according to market researcher NPD Group. Sales were up 171 percent compared with a year ago.
Picking a good digital photo frame is a matter of looking at the display and checking out its quality. If it looks good, that’s a clue.