It doesn’t seem amazing but you have to remember how much energy it takes to physically shove so much water that it crosses the Pacific ocean at hundreds of miles an hour to create waves in Japan (the wave slows and gets taller as the water comes to shallow water). To get an idea of the energy needed imagine being in the pool and shoving the water as hard as you can to make a wave a few inches tall travel ~20 feet.

Also you can see how a Tsunami isn’t just a big wave it’s a long wave. Watch the water level along the bank and it rises about a foot as the wave passes and stays there as water rushes up the river.

Seems to freak the birds out too.

Talk about amazing prescience to coming events. Yesterday Mosspuppet ranted on the US Patent office’s asinine actions in granting Facebook a patent for “The Feed” and went on to talk about how it’s bad for business when companies make generalized patents to stifle competitor innovation (video below).

Today Apple filed suit with HTC for violating their patents.

If you’ve ever read the stream of patents that Apple constantly files it’s pretty obvious what is going on. Apple is basically working to patent every idea they have, in most cases things that they have never done and never will do. Just whatever random ideas they have that sound like good ideas. While I think putting patents on your creations is a good idea I think it’s a real dick move to patent an idea you never actually created. Then when somebody come a along and makes that idea a reality you shouldn’t be allowed to take them to court for innovating and creating something never existed.

Abstract idea patents in themselves are pretty bad to begin with; if it doesn’t exist you shouldn’t be allowed to patent it. The “we may do it someday.” argument doesn’t work. I dreamed of airplanes that flew into space full of passengers when I was 5; I shouldn’t be allowed to patent the idea so I could sue Virgin Galactic now.

There’s also the idea of putting a patent on something that is s basic many people have the same idea. Here’s some of the Apple ones involved in the HTC issue from the excellent breakdown at Engadget.

- Patent 7,362,331: Patents transition effect of opening or closing a window in a browser when it moves at a non-linear speed. Most modern browsers do this.
- Patent 7,469,381: Patents the effect of scrolling to the end of a list and having it snap back to the end with a little elastic bounce.
- Patent 5,920,726: Patents controlling the power usage of a device component to save battery power. Every hand-held device in the world does this.
- Patent 5,929,852: I believe this patents using an application to access an online database like most iPhones apps, all Google resources, and many desktop apps developed in the 90’s onward.

One famous Apple patent is the idea of “Multi-touch”; interacting with a screen with more than one input is a basic idea and one that existed before Apple popularized it. But Apple has the patent, and now that more devices have it they want their cut of the income others are making with this basic idea.

In fact one commenter on Engadget pointed out that Apple held off suing other companies using multi-touch for years until they had all established it as a common use and made loads of money off it so as to maximize Apple’s gain when they finally lashed out with their lawyer armies.

In the end all I have to say is that I agree with Walt Mosspuppet. It’s stupid to grant these vague patents and detestable for companies to use them as clubs to beat on competitors that are innovating in the market.

Apple isn’t doing this out of fairness, they’re not doing this because they’re losing money, and they’re not doing this to improve the market for their consumers. It is a purely selfish move to solidify their market lead, and leach money from the companies struggling to compete. And the people who suffer most are the consumers, the innovation in technology, and the free market itself.

On electricity bills just compare the user to their neighbors.

A commenter in the post mentioned that showing money saving would be a better incentive but why not show both?

People love to lord over each other how much better they are, or if you’re under-performing they like to know so they can comeback and beat their neighbors. it sounds silly but everybody loves to make a game out of things.

Head over there for the full post and a video of the talk.

The change to HFCS was snuck in a few decades ago because of the US’s massive corn subsidies. It’s cheaper to put corn in drinks than sugar cane or sugar beets.

However with the demand of biofuels going up corn is getting expensive so going back to normal sweeteners is coming back.

Meanwhile sugar byproduct is being used in the bottles to bring down the carbon footprint for making bottles.

Sugar in the bottle but not in the drink. Although hopefully sugar will make its way back into drinks soon.

I was practicing my Japanese (in other words watching imported TV) and they had a program talking about the Zephyr Corporation in Tokyo who produces a residential class windmill. The program NHK J-TECH was typical Japanese daytime TV, a lot of pro-Japan talk about how innovative Japan is and how they’re revolutionizing the world. A lot of it is true but if there’s one thing Japanese media never misses is a chance to pat itself on the back.

On a side note it’s cool to see Pakkun and Makkun switch boke/tsukkomi roles when speaking English. In English Pakkun is no-longer the foolish foreigner and plays the straight man to Makkun’s foolish foreigner.

Japanese media difference aside it’s very true that this company had made some great strides in wind power generation, all in a device small enough that to fit above your average suburban home (43lbs, 6ft rotor). I know that there are companies doing this in America and they may be just as advanced or more but they certainly aren’t getting their name and product out. And that may be a social comment on the fact that our TV media likes to play reality TV, and dramas where imaginary “straw man” terrorists are constantly trying to blow up the oceans! Perhaps if we spent more time extolling our own virtues and the innovation that comes from within the US we would spend less time watching Cables News that constantly tells us everything is falling apart. I’m sure the local Green energy solar and wind powered startups would like the publicity as well.

I just hope the US can get over itself arguing whether global warming is manmade or not, and realize that regardless of what you believe the answer to that is, green technologies are the future world wide and that if we aren’t the ones innovating and producing the future we’re going to end up importing it from the rest of the world at our own expense.

Enough philosophy, down to brass tacks; I want one of these windmills.

Gizmodo recently had a small article about a concept of wind powered street lights that was kind of cool. But we all know that concepts rearely become the glittery futuristic reality they portray. Meanwhile these turbines exist now and have been on sale for a few years. They advertise them in much the same way, either small residential generation or powering isolated or low draw installations like lighting in parking garages or bus and train stops.

They start generating power in as little as 5MPH wind and will continue generating power upto hurricane force winds. Most commercial windmills shut off and stop as wind passes 50MPH; the Airdolphin uses excess power to electromagnetically brake the propeller once it reaches 1000 rpm and if winds continue up to hurricane gales it will slow itself to 600RPM to avoid damage (I thought they could feather the blades but maybe that’s too complex for a small deployment). They said they used to have problems with the sound generated before so they copied the feathers of an owl by putting a small ridged edge to the blade and it lowered the sound produced by the turbine to less than 60dB, or roughly ambient neighborhood levels.

The power generated is 1.1kW at 27MPH wind and peaks at 4kW at 44MPH wind. So the windmill can offload roughly one quarter of the average power draw of a home; I think they said the 1kWh rate stored enough power to use a 47” LCD flat screen for 5 hours. The average price I could find for one was about $6000, which means you won’t be making back your money very quickly with one of these little guys unless you’re in a windy area. So you’ll have to be happy with the fact that you’re spending the same amount of money, getting the same amount of power, but being only three quarters of the burden your neighbors are.

But these aren’t really mass produced yet either so the price may go down as demand increases. They mentioned selling 200 in the last 4 years to 31 different countries, which is output you’d expect from a company that hasn’t really moved from walk to run yet. However if they catch on and price comes down these would be great to add into a smart grid to for a community or town; Zephyr already markets a turbine specifically for plugging into the US smart power grid.. In wind power alone a community could offload 1/4 of its power from the grid, add in solar and smart devices on the grid and the community could cut out another 1/4 to 1/2 of that.

They also have an add-on data display server that tells you the wind conditions in real time, how much power you’re making, and it can be connected over IP to provide an accessible page that can reports this information anywhere on the net.

I have to admit I love this stuff, we may never have a future with flying cars and extremely dangerous houses on thin stilts like in the Jetsons, but we already have the technology for a much more futuristic world, if only we can get momentum going for mass production. And while I don’t think that we’ll ever in our lifetimes get to the point where we can completely eliminate the traditional power plant but with the distributed onsite power of a million wind and solar generators helping out we can significantly reduce our dependence on those plants so that they are small enough to not have the impact they do now.

Checkout the video starring Infrastructurist’s gorgeous editor.

Most of the stimulus money given out to HSR projects were given to projects that are already quite mature and have most of the pre-planning done so there won’t be time to ramp up development and production in country. This of course means we need to bring in foreign countries to get it going and when jobs are hard to find that raises some heckles.

I liked the version that Click and Clack of Car Talk put out about a year ago when the Auto bailouts were being made. GM and other US auto manufacturers should create new daughter companies that build HSR tech. Partner with overseas HSR companies to bring their tech to our factories.

1. US auto factories are being abandoned and auctioned off production equipment and all.
2. There is currently a lack of HSR factories in the US.
3. GM et all are looking to build new transpiration option that will appeal to the consumers now that oil isn’t dirt cheap.

Is it just me or does this seem like a perfect storm of events to create jobs, save failing companies, and improve US travel infrastructure all at the same time?
Although to covert quick enough we may need to buy non-US and used equipment of overseas until we ramp up local knowledge and production.

However the point I wanted to add was that this is proof of why the US needs to focus on green technologies now. No matter what you believe in global warming the world is going to demand windmills and solar panels in the future. If America doesn’t position itself now as the leader of this tech we will find ourselves buying it from European and Asian companies down the line.

Treehugger had a great post talking about how the green movement often parallels extremist religion in getting its message out. It’s a really interesting take and I agree totally that perhaps the reason that people believing in Global Warming has dropped below 50% is because the people pushing green ideas and conservation do sound like they’re trying to push their cult like beliefs on you.

“You shouldn’t eat that, it’s meat not kosher.”
“Mother Earth God suffered for your sins!”
“Aren’t you ashamed you’re destroying the planet going to hell?”
“Your wasteful consumerismsins will send us all to hell!”

I have to admit, listening to a lot of people who share the same beliefs as me proselytize about how we need to “protect mother earth” is such a turn off I want to join everybody else in denouncing them. One of my favorite bands even has a song about being sick of being preached to by celebrities.

I see this rejection of the green movement all over Utah, ironic since Mormon missionaries are experts at trying to force their beliefs on others. MANY people I know want to destroy the Earth faster just to spite people who preach a green lifestyle. And they’re dismissed because greens think that they must just be a “lunatic fringe.” But I agree with the green movement and at times even I want to spit in the face of people telling me how to think and what to do. Obviously there is a problem in how the message is getting out, not in how poorly people are receiving it.

I think I have a unique line on how to improve the message. Like I said I agree with most all of what the green moment preaches; however my appeal to it is my desire for efficiency in how we collectively impact the world as an organism. I want the same end result as the green movement of zero impact, but I reject the pushy messages same as red America.

Let’s face it Americans don’t like being told what to do. The first problem is saying, “You need to stop wasting resources.” Second problem is we don’t like being forced into having sympathy, “You need to quit using paper bags because logging is destroying the North Western Tree Rat’s ecosystem.”

Most Americans respond with, “I don’t care.” and the worst respond with, “Fine, I hope they die, and I hope they burn in hell!” The solution is to hit people in a softspot that even the most hardened beer swilling, rifle-hunting, red state American feels it; in the wallet.

I’ve always believed that the way to create converts to a green lifestyle is the same way Christmas was stolen from Christianity… Capitalism.*

Me:Us: “You should get a more fuel efficient car. Using less gas means you buy less gas, and that’s more money in your pocket.”
“Turn down your thermostat in winter. Your gas bill will be much smaller.”
“Use CF bulbs and turn them off when not in use. Using less electricity means you pay the electric company less.”

Them: “Doesn’t all that stuff cut down on pollution and lower humanities’ carbon footprint.”

Us: “I think so. But do you really care so long as you have more money for yourself? Think of the lower pollution as icing on the cake.”

Watch people flock to the green movement and an efficient earth friendly lifestyle after that.

*Capitalism is really just another religion, the ATM is the altar and I’ve seen many people pray before it to, “Please have money!”

Question to the religious: How many times have you visited the ATM and now many time have you gone to church in a week?
How much of your day do you dedicate to making money?
How many times have you decided to keep money for yourself when you saw situations where others needed it more?

Of course the comments are a thinly veiled threat at China and their firewall blocking anything that paints the country in a negative light. China has already reacted, probably because of the stir Google caused earlier, by denouncing Clinton’s statements as damaging to bilateral ties between the country calling it “information imperialism”.

Boy, talk about the pot calling the kettle black.

Ma defended China’s policies promoting the Web, saying the nation boasted more than 380 million users, 3.6 million Web sites, and 180 million blogs.
“The Chinese Internet is open and China is the country witnessing the most active development of the Internet,” Ma said, adding that China regulated the Web according to law and in keeping with its “national conditions and cultural traditions.”

The mind boggles. Somebody needs to tell them that the number of people using the internet has absolutely no bearing on how much freedom those people have.

It’s amazing that China has effectively been able to rewrite their own history through information control. Most Chinese don’t know the significance of Tiananmen Square, the protests there, or the massacres that occurred in the area in 1989. I remember watching a show where they interviewed students at the China University of Political Science and Law, where the protesters originated from, and showed them the iconic picture of the man standing in front of the tanks the day after the massacres asking them if they recognized it.

None recognized it, and only few knew that it was tied to an important event in China’s history. Most thought it looked like a parade, exhibition, or some celebration.

To think that even with the masses of information the internet makes possible, the Chinese state has been able to keep its citizens from learning recent history. The anonymous man who is seen as a hero for freedom and peace through the world is unknown in his own county.

The second thing that amazes me from a technology standpoint is how much power google has now where their actions and simple refusal to continue to bow to the government of China can put the Chinese and American Governments so much on edge that simple discussions on the freedom of the internet by the US can be damaging to bilateral ties.

Clinton is right, the internet is a new world where people can freely come together. The power of the recent events with China is proof that freedoms in the real world need to be carried over to the virtual world.

The story follows John Hantz and his idea that piques my interest in two different ways.

In fact, Hantz’s operation will bear little resemblance to a traditional farm. Mike Score, who recently left Michigan State’s agricultural extension program to join Hantz Farms as president, has written a business plan that calls for the deployment of the latest in farm technology, from compost-heated greenhouses to hydroponic (water only, no soil) and aeroponic (air only) growing systems designed to maximize productivity in cramped settings.

Did somebody say Hydroponic?
“Ah, now the ball’s in Farnsworth’s court!”

Even before reading this I was thinking of urban hydroponic farms. Here in SLC there is a huge parking lot taking up a full city block that is never used by more than 5-6 cars. They had to tear down a bunch of longstanding and popular bars, venues, and hangouts plus demolishing a hotel to turn it into an unused parking lot that spends all day doing nothing but heating up under the summer sun. With a moderate initial investment the same area could likely feed hundreds with fresh local produce using no more water than what we get in natural rainfall.

There is another quote in the article I’d like to point out:

This is possibly not as crazy as it sounds. Granted, the notion of devoting valuable city land to agriculture would be unfathomable in New York, London, or Tokyo. But Detroit is a special case.

Unfathomable my ass, I actually just watched a TV program from Japan that was touting urban farming in Tokyo as a modern way of making use of land in a country that has little land to spare. They referred to it more as a food factory where everything was grown under lights inside a building that for all intents and purposes from the outside looked like a 4 story factory. The idea of greenhouses in Detroit actually makes more sense, no electricity issues with lighting unless you want to extend the growing season even more than the greenhouses provide.

Detroit makes more sense for urban hydroponics, more land is going to waste and the city is desperate finding ways to make it more productive. Ideally it would be more profitable to fill the land with high density office space; but when what you have is blight, upgrading to clean farming is still a much better option.

However Hantz is a little misguided.

Hantz thinks farming could do his city a lot of good: restore big chunks of tax-delinquent, resource-draining urban blight to pastoral productivity; provide decent jobs with benefits; supply local markets and restaurants with fresh produce; attract tourists from all over the world; and — most important of all — stimulate development around the edges as the local land market tilts from stultifying abundance to something more like scarcity and investors move in.

I agree with everything there but the tourist attraction, this is a farm not Disneyland. Don’t factor tourist income into this investment in any way. But all the other benefits are spot on. Hydroponics requires an initial upfront investment which Hantz is apparently willing to pay in cash. Then it’s just a matter of monitoring the crops, harvesting, and shipping to where they’re needed. The system is incredibly low maintenance, and the land can be tied up in a productive way until the city starts growing again.

There is a second reason this article is interesting to me.

Houses in Detroit are selling for an average of $15,000.

That sounds like a buying opportunity, and in fact Detroit looks pretty good right now to a young artist or entrepreneur who can’t afford anyplace else — but not yet to an investor.

Damn straight $15,000 looks pretty good right now. I was looking at getting a condo downtown here and they wanted $250,000 for a loft! A quarter of a million dollars and you don’t even get a separate bedroom!

Hey, Mr. Hantz! You need a guy to help with your farms? I’ll start tomorrow and using the “first time home buyer” clause of the 401k I can even afford a home TODAY!
I mean Holy Cow, I can’t believe that I could be owning a car and home free and clear right now along with a steady job. All I need is enough money to buy food and utilities, anything else is icing on the cake.

The economy and the world itself are in a serious state of flux right now. That means this is the perfect time to change the status quo when it comes to our infrastructure. There is a possibility for failure but this is also the time when you can get in on the ground floor. And when it comes to investing and development there are two constants.
1. People need food to eat.
2. People need a place to live.

The situation in Detroit create a lack easily accessable #1 and an over abundance (read: cheap) of #2.

While hiking the local mountains a few years ago I looked out into the valley of warehouses and through that all those bright reflective roofs would look better and probably make the building cooler if they had greenery on them.

They I thought it would be even better if they had solar panels the powered the building and sold excess to the surrounding residents. The added benefit would be a cooler building since the entire roof is now shaded so the power draw of running AC during a hot summer afternoon is reduced as well.

But I was just a poor college student and didn’t have the money to invest in a project like that. Solar pays off over long periods of time which means alot of upfront money is needed for a long payout.

Luckily it looks like some other people had the same idea and have a bit more resources to make it a reality.

Anyway despite the potential for learning Biosphere 2 was a mis-management boondoggle brought down by the ego of the humans in and running it as much as anything else. Thus it ultimately failed as an experiment. Now it sits derelict waiting to be turned into suburban sprawl.

Check out the Pics and writeup here.

Before I dive into this (I’m lucky today is a slow day) I want to clear up some minor misconceptions:

1. AT&T is NOT talking about removing physical wiring and running everything over wireless or cell networks!!!! (!!Very important misconception!!)
2. This will have no impact on your DSL or cable internet. It is merely moving analog circuit switched POTS lines to the same technology that the internet runs on.
3. POTS is technically already mostly digital from end to end. Only the final mile is converted back to analog. But it’s in a (nearly) lossless conversion and still circuit based, not packetized.

Now some quick definitions:

POTS – Plain old telephone system. Using switched circuits it creates a single end to end connection between two points (usually phones).
PSTN – Public Switched Telephone network. The network that runs the POTS.
LEC – Local Exchange Carrier. Basically your local phone company.
“Final Mile” – This refers to the connection from your neighborhood switch to your individual home. Once you leave the final mile you’re into the LEC’s network of phone connections.
Backbone – The main connections that connect all the neighborhood switches together and link all the LECs themselves together. AT&T and the few other long distance carriers control most of the backbone connections between regional LECs.
VOIP – Voice traffic that is divided into packets and transmitted in the same manner as internet data.

So where are we at?

Basically AT&T is tired of maintaining the POTS network. POTS requires an end to end connection between the two communicating points. In the past human operators connected the physical wires based off the circuit a person was calling (people over 50-60 years old might remember phone numbers that were like “KL425”). Later automatic physical switches made connections based off numeric a phone number. Most recently digital switches use computers to redirect calls based off the number. But even though it’s digitally switched the effect is still creating a single, 64kbps of data sized, end to end circuit.

This is what AT&T wants to change.

Now in the era of internet we don’t use a fixed circuit, the data stream is chopped into packets, each is individually addressed, and then sent on their way. The stream often follows the same path but doesn’t need to. It can arrive through different paths across the backbone, be put back in order and re-assembled at the other end. Any lost packets can just be resent.

Voice can be compressed and sent along the same as internet data in a VOIP connection, but some of the above situations can break VOIP. VOIP is a streaming technology, if a VOIP packet is lost that part of the conversation is lost, unlike loading a webpage you can’t wait for the data to be resent. The VOIP traffic is also compressed, depending how much it’s compressed the quality can drop significantly as parts of the voice stream are eliminated. G.711 basically just digitizes the stream and does almost no compression so the stream is 64kbps. G.723.1 can compress that down as far as 6kbps but call quality loss can be noticeable.

Now some reasons for AT&T’s desire to eliminate POTS become clear.

First is the fact that even through IP and circuit switched voice can run on the same equipment and same cables, they are two completely separate and incompatible networks. They need to go through special converters called DSP’s to be made digital and packetized (or un-packetized), and special systems need to be programmed to re-address for the new network. It’s much easier to consolidate everything into one system to maintain and monitor and adjust.

Second, compression make better use of the backbone bandwidth; instead of using up 64kbps of a fiber line per call you can get away with 16kbps or as little as 6kbps. That means for every one circuit switched call taking up fiber bandwidth you can fit 4 VOIP calls.

But there are some problems too.

Voice can be packetized into an IP network with no problem but it needs high priority to maintain the voice stream since voice needs to be a consistent stream and voice packets can’t arrive out of order or late. Too many dropped packets cause the voice call to stutter, and too much compression distorts the sound (usually sounds “tinny”). VOIP calls have a margin for error of about 200ms before the connection will likely drop.

That old POTS line has also been backwards compatible with equipment made as far back as the 1940s. If you get a simple old phone from before 1990 you’ll probably notice it doesn’t have a power cord. The power was actually provided at the phone company and backed up using massive banks of batteries in its basement. That means in a power outage most old POTS lines and phones will still work, great for emergencies and natural disasters.

Some things require high quality audio for communications, notably modems and fax machines. That squealing sound you hear when a fax or modem connects is 1s and 0s converted into an analog sound and blazing out a thousands of bits per second, usually 56 thousand per second to be exact . When VOIP compresses with the idea that it’s compressing voice data and will eliminate the sounds it doesn’t think the human ear can hear, unfortuenately modems use a much broader frequency range for data. Plus modems and faxes don’t know what to do when a stream of data arrives late or doesn’t arrive at all. A lost VOIP packet can screw up the data stream and cause the modem to disconnect.

So when AT&T talks about eliminating the POTS line we’re talking about some major changes. Not just changing how voice crosses the backbone, or how AT&T does business with other LECs but eliminating modems, faxes, and all those non-VOIP phones.

I know many people won’t mourn any of the above but let me fill you in on some of what I do for a living (for AT&T no less).

I setup and upgrade business class internet connections into AT&T EVPN MPLS cloud. Don’t worry about all the acronyms, simply put we provide connections between the multiple sites of a business. If you work at branch store or office and connect to a corporate site then we connect you together over AT&T’s backbone. Once up and running we literally are the “internet cloud” and transparent to the users. A customer doesn’t see any of our massive network, just a direct line to all their other company sites and connection out to the internet.

My job specifically is configuring the AT&T equipment on the customer site. I don’t physically go there and install it, there’s a separate onsite tech who puts it in and turns it on then my team connects in and configures the equipment.

The problem is that since the equipment isn’t setup just plugging it in and turning it on won’t connect, you need another way in that isn’t dependent on that data connection working. So by using a POTS line and a modem you can connect into a router as if you were physically there. No matter what is wrong (other than the power out) you can get access through the modem from anywhere in the world just by dialing the number (and going through massive passwords and encryption).

In fact the modem is integral to the reliable up-time for the router and is required by AT&T to have in addition to the data line itself. If any emergency or outage happens to the onsite router for the customer; first it should be able to reload and fix itself, but if for some reason it’s erased itself AT&T will see it disconnect, will connect through the modem, reload the configuration, and be back online in minutes. Without the modem we’d need a tech to go onsite, directly connect and fix the issue. Factoring in time to call for a network down, schedule a tech, travel out to the site, and fix the issue, you can be looking at anywhere from 4 hours to 48 hours of down time.

When dealing with government entities and Fortune 500 companies the difference between 10 minutes and half day downtime can millions of dollars in lost production and sales. The difference is having a modem onsite so a tech here in Utah can fix the site remotely.

So it’s pretty ironic that AT&T itself is calling for land line elimination when my AT&T department requires them for service. Obviously a situation of a company being so big the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.

The switch from POTS to IP is inevitable

I do think that some day the circuit switched and packet switched networks will be merged. But a lot will need to happen to make that possible:

Everybody needs to replace their phones with VOIP phones, or providers need to put massive conversion facilities in the final mile.
Providers need to find out how to provide local 911 and emergency service when power goes out and the infrastructure is damaged.
Modems and faxes need to be replaced with a similar reliable technology that is compatible with VOIP compressions and missed packets.

Basically what AT&T wants isn’t impossible and it is inevitable. But the switchover would make the Analog to DTV switchover look like nothing. It’s one thing when you’re changing over something recreational like watching TV. POTS landline elimination is a deeply ingrained infrastructure technology that will be a pain to switch over. It’s like saying that we’re not going to use asphalt on our roads anymore, all asphalt roads would need to be changed over to concrete because new cars don’t work on them.

But the technology is there, and once a few issues are resolved it’s much better to make the switch instead of clinging to old technology.

Next best thing is that if an area is gong to be developed that we do it in a way that has as little environmental impact possible. In fact I see that as the new great development challenge for humanity. We’ve proven that we can forcibly carve out our comfort zone by making Nature bow to our demands. Now we need to find a way to create the same comfort zone we currently have in the developed world but do it in a way that has virtually no impact on nature.

Now a lot of people say that no impact means that we should all live in huts made out mud, clay, and cow pies. That we should only eat food grown, cultivated, and picked by hand. And that anything that uses any carbon or energy be eliminated. Ok, maybe that’s the extreme “straw-man” viewpoint but a lot of people lean that way in their arguments, and they piss me off because their unrealistic goals and self righteous attitudes create a backlash where people go out of their way to waste resources more. Seriously, I met a guy who doesn’t just want to leave an environmental imprint and carbon footprint, he wants to leave a “Carbon Crater, just to piss [environmentalists] off” as he puts it. This is the group of people who put “People Eating Tasty Animals” stickers on their bumpers and get outraged when the hear that some person doesn’t believe in eating meat.

So let’s be realistic, the world will never give up all the progress made in the last 2000 years and go back to living off berries in lean-tos in the forest. That’s why I’m always excited to see projects like this one by resort architects ReardonSmith, that creates a 200 room hotel under a golf club in Surrey UK.

I’ve always liked the architecture of building underground. There are a lot of benefits to ecology and efficiency in building underground. The ground is warmer than air in winter and colder than air in summer, not to mention an amazing insulator to ambient heat and sound, It’s like having a house that is in constant 48 degree weather, just add a little heat as necessary. The obvious glaring issue is getting natural light in but that is usually solved by building the structure in a circle around a well that lets light in (think Luke Skywalker’s home in Star Wars). There are all kinds of cool articles about this stuff online, including a soldier in Afghanistan inspired to come home and build a green house with reinforced HESCO earthen barriers surrounding the structure to reduce the stress of dirt leaning against the walls.

But I’m getting off topic. As cool as it seems to finally see people designing our living environment to better sync with nature rather than fight it this new resort is catching flak from some of the least likely sources. You’d think treehuggers and eco friendly people would be onboard, but the problem is that the resort will be in a London’s “Green Belt” an area around the city zoned to keep urban sprawl contained and to provide a green buffer to help keep the environment air clear and fresh for the nearby city.

This brings us back to the issue I began with. Some people can get a little extreme in their environmentalism. If this was a golf resort going into a protected Wilderness area I’d understand but this is the area surrounding the densest urban area in the UK. I hate to be the realist but that land is going to be touched by the hand of man eventually; if only every city were to build their sprawl in such an eco friendly way we’d be a lot better off by now.

I think this is a situation where people should meet half way. I bet a lot of people in the “Carbon Crater” camp would be quite impressed to see how nice it is when development works with the environment instead of against it, enough that we might bring more of them over to our cause. And certainly more than if we just tell them “No! The line in the sand has been drawn and progress and development stops here!”

Maybe in the future we can all live in some prettier, eco friendly cities. We may never be able to erase our impact to the point where our homes are indistinguishable from the wilderness but we have the technology now to at least work with the environment from hear on out.

Via treehugger, via inhabitat.

Abercrombie and Fitch ads always bothered me. It’s not just the fact that all the guys are half naked, it just seems ironic using unclothed people to sell clothes.

If you’re out and about shopping on the last Saturday before Christmas and happen pass an A&F store, look at the pictures in the windows and notice that the guys never wear the clothes. In some cases it’s actually hard to find where the clothes being advertised are at. Sometimes draped over a shoulder, other times out of focus in the background.

A few years ago there was a Frontline episode about advertising to the modern generation. It mentioned that direct advertising no longer works in America, if you tell people to “Buy Mountain Dew! It’s great!” people will be more likely to avoid it. Instead to advertise now you do it subconsciously. Show four extreme snowboarders doing all the wild tricks in stunts that you wish you could do. And hey! They’re drinking Mtn.Dew, maybe if you drink it you’ll be more like them.

It seems silly but it works even when you know about it and try to avoid it. About the same time Mtn.Dew started their new “Do the DEW!” advertising I started drinking it more. I don’t know why and to this day I can’t be 100% sure if it was just that I liked it more, or I was brainwashed to like it more. If you drink Mtn.Dew think back to when you started drinking it a lot, was it round about the late 90’s 1997-2000? Maybe they got you too.

Anyway it’s obvious that A&F’s message is: buy our shirts, throw them on a chair in the background, you’ll get a ripped 6-pack, and hot girls in t-shirts and bikini bottoms will glance over your shoulder running their hands over your chest while you stare off into the distance in that “Confused Jock” sort of way. It’s either that or they have found a way to ship free soft core porn to girls through the mail and call it a “catalog”.

All of this is interesting to me because A&F just opened their first Japan store and it’s not doing so well. Apparently half naked guys without shirts isn’t the best way to sell overpriced shirts there. It’s interesting that the now annoying sales technique used buy brands such as A&F and Hollister aren’t as successful over there.

I think A&F just needs to find a way to bend this into some kind of fetish café for females. You know that’d make money there.

Update: Danny Choo went there and posted about it too. I think it’s funny that he’s confused as to why the guys are naked. He even mentioned mentioned getting gassed from too much perfume, just like Maddox’s post about Hollister. Yes Danny, all “trendy” US clothes shops suck that bad.

Also he mentions and even has some pics of the outside of the store where the windows are boarded up so you can’t see the clothes for sale without going in. It goes along with what I was saying, what’s the point of advertising if you hide your clothes from sight?

Personally if the business isn’t going to take the effort to advertise their product I’m not going to go out of my way to check them out.

I like my women mysterious, but not my retailers.

Give it your address, draw out your roof or backward solar array (or place wind turbines) and it will calculate your output for your area, quantify that in dollars and figure out the cost minus incentives for the setup. Then combine the two to figure out how long it will take to pay itself off.

For my home, covering the garage in solar arrays will generate $500 in electricity a year, and after factoring in incentives will cost about $15,000. This mean it will have paid for itself in nearly 25 years.

However I don’t know if that factors in the added the value the PV array gives to the house (I doubt it does).

While in Japan I was amazed at how quick and efficient the Target=blank>bullet train (Shinkansen) system was. Of course having a rail pass that gave me the ability to get a ticket and go at anytime without worry of the price was a big plus but the ability to be anywhere I wanted in the country within just a couple hours was liberating. On a whim I went to a concert in Osaka during my Tokyo stay; it didn’t require much rescheduling since I could walk into station and be 515km away in less than 3 hours.

For more local comparisons that is the equivalent of traveling from here in Salt Lake City, to Las Vegas (580km) in about 3 hours.

By car that same trip takes 6-7 hours if you go legally, 5 if you go at 120mph (through mountains and winter snow). I flew to Las Vegas from SLC and factoring in typical airport delays along with flight time it also took 3 hours so really the time by train or air is the same between here and there.

SLC to Los Angeles is about double the distance. My cousins are in LA and when we visited them we’d drive 12 hours down there; basically leaving in the morning and arriving that night. Via bullet train we could eat an early breakfast in SLC, and be having lunch in LA, then be back to SLC in time for dinner.

Plus travel by bullet train is more comfortable since you get decent leg room and much more visually stimulating since you can actually see things as you pass rather than just the tops of clouds. But the main thing that caught my eye was an advertisement for the new N700 trains. Bullet trains are electric and the N700 uses 15% the amount of fossil fuels (or carbon output, my Japanese is limited) for the same Tokyo to Osaka trip.

That’s not 15% LESS, it’s 15% OF or in other words 85% reduction. In today’s “Green” world that is a nearly unobtainable goal in carbon reduction. And the trade off isn’t bad at all, a slightly slower transport but a much more enjoyable transport as well. The 15% carbon is still coming from something but since the trains are electric it’s entirely possible to use alternative electricity sources and lower that number further. After all its alt easier to squeeze the most efficient energy out of hydrocarbons at a plant rather than in an internal combustion engine in the train.

The only problem I can see is there are less populated cities across the west. The Tokaido line from Tokyo to Osaka passes through other huge cities such as Yokohama, Nagoya, and Kyoto. With a comparable distance Salt Lake to Las Vegas line the biggest cites passed would be Provo, and St. George. Obviously long distance commuter traffic will be much less, but of course running less trains isn’t hard at all. The planes only travel one or twice a day, with 15% energy reduction running three trains a day would still be more efficient per day. Plus as with Japan you can also run freight trains on the tracks in between bullet trains, although I’d hope that the US would change it’s rail policy and give passengers priority over freight.

Running from SLC to Denver could be complicated (but doable) by the Rocky Mountains but SLC to Vegas would be cake. Run it down past Provo, you could even run it on piers along the edge of Utah lake to keep from running through residential neighborhoods. Past Nephi run it out to Delta, besides connecting the most remote large city in the state it’s also the site of the power plant that powers much of the west from Salt Lake to Los Angeles and a perfect place to tap power for the electric bullet train. Then head south through Cedar City, St. George, and finally the straightaway to Las Vegas. Most land is relatively flat scrubland, and there are plenty of open places for wind farms to supplement the juice powering the rail line.

Another line heading west could pass Wendover, head to Reno then punch through the Sierra Nevada into Sacramento before ending in San Francisco.

I really hope that the future sees high speed mass transit lines tying the western cities a little closer together. Besides being a greener way to travel they could revitalize trade between western metropolises and boost usually remote cities the same way key refueling points on the transcontinental railroad did a century ago.

If there was any one thing I learned through my years in college chemistry and physics classes is that science is incredibly complex. The the level we work with it we’re getting the most boiled down simplified interpretations. For the scientists doing research there is so much data that you have to be a lifelong researcher to truly understand a concept. certainly more than you can learn by watching a 10 minute talking head segment on Fox News or reading an article in the newspaper.

I don’t know alot; but I do know enough that two sentences taken out of context in 13 years worth of email chains isn’t enough to form any kind of opinion, especially without doing to research to at least try to put those sentences into context.

One thing that bugs me that I’ve heard alot in conservative Utah now that it’s winter is the comment that alludes to snowing as proof that global warming doesn’t exist. Even if you deny global warming, do yourself a favor and don’t assume global global temperature and local air temperature are the same. If makes you look like an idiot and negates you as a person with an informed opinion. Do some research and find real evidence global warming is flase (climate scientists would probably pay you if you found valid evidence!)

How about the buffet owners? If they still have so much food left over after you and your partner ate your fill they have to throw it out were they slighted by his high consumption?

The big question being is did he “hog” all the food? Personally I’m kind of an efficiency junkie so my answer is no, he got what he needed without negatively impacting anybody else. The only loss here was the providers overabundance of food, perhaps an overcalculation on their part but this way all their customers were happy.

You may be wondering what this has to do with technology but Benoît Felten has pointed out the same thing, except in the definition of a”bandwidth hog” on the internet. ISPs are claiming that bandwidth hogs take more than their fair share of bandwidth at the expense of others, this way people who use too much can be charged more. But if you pay for all you can eat and the provider has bandwidth to spare are you a hog or just making use of excess bandwidth?

Benoît is challenging the ISPs to prove that bandwidth hogs are a problem. (follow up here).

I can’t directly answer Benoît’s challenge but as I work for an ISP, in the cloud, where all the backend bandwidth lies and I can tell you with some hands on experience that at least on our network bandwidth hogs are not a problem and doesn’t create noticeable impact on the network users.

But before shouting the inevitable “Aaah HA!” to ISPs for lying to us for their own profit, bandwidth hogs DO impact the network at peak times, just not noticeably or in the way we would expect. You see we create complex Cost of Service rules across all the routers in the cloud that guarantees our customers have X amount of bandwidth minimum based off what they pay, and then Y amount of excess bandwidth if its available. This creates more of a flow change during peak times rather than a roadblock. Most people think of network congestion the same way they do a traffic jam. If one big semi is taking up most of the road the smaller cars get crowded behind it and soon you’re 20 minutes late to work because traffic came to a halt.

Network congestion doesn’t work like that.

When traffic starts to fill up the available bandwidth (traffic lanes in the above analogy) traffic doesn’t bunch up behind the heavy data streams (semis) instead the bandwidth is narrowed down. So the cars don’t bunch up behind the semi, the semi is made skinnier and longer taking up less bandwidth but over a longer period of time. In this way if somebody is streaming a hulu video and using up all the bandwidth, your mission critical email won’t be blocked all traffic will just be stretched out a bit and the email will take a bit longer to send. However considering that web traffic and emails are fractions of a fraction the size of a high def web stream even a doubling of the time taken to send it will be virtually un-noticeable. We’re talking about 60ms to load to 120ms to load.

The bigger the file transfer the more noticeable the change, so the only people who will have a noticeable impact on performance are those people who are hogging the most bandwidth.

And in real life production it’s amazing watching the latency change as we grant that guaranteed amount of bandwidth instead of just having a company use the excess bandwidth. At first a new router is just using the excess bandwidth on the cloud which may be very minimal at peak times. As soon as they’re Cost of Service and Committed Information Rates are integrated into the bandwidth there is a very noticeable change is transfer speeds.

The amount of bandwidth being on the cloud used is usually quite high simply because people are using up the excess (thus less lines are “dark” or under utilized) so sites that don’t have their guaranteed COS values set have a hard time competing with sites that have guaranteed speeds+the excess. Thus a site with no COS may get 40% of their max circuit speeds, once they’re integrated with everybody else that usually bounces up above 90%. It’s only the rare time that EVERYBODY maxes out their connections and speeds drop across the board to the guaranteed speeds (usually around 75% of the circuit capability).

Another good comparison is the planned state of the “smart” electric grid which is basically going to work as out internet does now. By monitoring data flow all across the net high congestion times can be rate limited a few percentage points to smooth out the bursts of data. There is an impact to users but the less data needed the less noticeable the impact, a page that takes 1 second to download will still seem about the same if it takes 1.2 seconds to download.

So bandwidth hogs do exist and at the same time their use a a term by the ISPs are a concoction to get more money.

Businesses have been living under this model for decades, and users have been to but it’s only recently we’re regularly using enough bandwidth that we’re starting to notice our impact. In the future we will probably see terms such as “Guaranteed Class of Service” and “Committed Information Rates” show up more in consumer internet plans, although I hope they use terminology that it’s easier for consumers to understand. But it’s best now if you start to erase from your mind the idea that you purchased a 5mbps connection cable and that you’re guaranteed to be able to use that at full throttle all the time.

At the same time be aware that data plans that are tiered by total bandwidth used is just a marketing way that companies can dig more out of heavy users. The solution that I hope we see in the future is simply the way corporate connections go, and that is that you pay for a line capable of X bandwidth, with a guarantee of Y bandwidth.

via ars

Reel Big Fish – Sell Out (Official Music Video)

Want to know why I feel no guilt watching big labels bleed a slow death, read this great article from an un-recouped band trying to find out how much money they’re making.
It’s a bit long for a “quick” read but it’s great, and as you’re reading keep in mind this is one of the numerous “little guys” once embraced by the corporation that is now discarded by the wayside. And one of the few who has the abilities to see just how bad their getting screwed.

As I asked more questions (Why do we get paid 50% of the income from all the tracks on one album, but only 35.7143% of the income from all the tracks on another? Why did 29 plays of a track on the late, lamented MusicMatch earn a total of 63 cents when 1,016 plays of the exact same track on MySpace earned only 23 cents?) he eventually got to the heart of the matter: “We don’t normally do this for unrecouped bands,” he said. “But, I was told you’d asked.

Time Warner is the 4th largest media conglomerate. They aren’t a mom and pops startup business in danger of dying so that they have to cut costs to stay afloat. Just a few of TW’s lucrative holdings:
New Line Cinema (Makers of Lord of the Rings Trilogy)
Time Inc.
HBO
Turner Broadcasting System
Warner Bros. Entertainment (All Harry Potters, Batmans, and Supermans)
Cartoon Network
Adult Swim
CNN (The “Not Fox or that crappy MSNBC” one)
DC Comics (And all the comic book movie moneys they bring)

My point is a company this big an powerful has the ability to do basic accounting of where their money is coming and going; something they are all too quick to point out to say that illegal downloads of music and movies is apparently killing them.

Making money is making money, it doesn’t matter if you’re up $20,000, or in the hole $300,000 income is just as important. The fact that record labels dismiss the income (debt reduction) owed on artists that are un-recouped is just bad as if they cut a recouped band out of a $10,000 royalty check. The artists aren’t suffering because of downloads like the labels say, they’re suffering because the labels are lying to them and cutting them out of the income they are entitled to.

Alternatively we have proof here that the big labels aren’t losing hardly any money on digital downloads at all. If 1,016 plays of a track on MySpace is only worth 23 cents, why are illegal downloaders being fined $80,000 for downloading a digital copy off the internet?

Either way you slice it the conglomerate labels are lying and exploiting their artists and customers.

Via Giz

The gains in the last week have been almost too rapid that I think we’ll still see days below 8500 in the future. But like I said this is far better than I think anybody could have hoped for at the beginning of this year. Unfortunately the real world we live in feels the fallout longer than the market so even if we jump to 10,000 by Christmas (could you imagine!!) then it will still take a year or so for the real world to stabilize under the highs of Wall Street.

It’s funny that I hear people now saying that with the market at 9000 already that it’s proof that the stimulus bills were unneeded. Um… I think the reason it’s this high already is BECAUSE OF the stimulus bills; this is exactly what they were supposed to do, they just did it better and faster than we thought they would.

That was me in July. Today the DOW broke 10,000 (hasn’t closed yet so I don’t know if it will last the day). All I can say is that from a financial perspective I’m loving it. In May I calculated that if the DOW had stopped at 8000 my 401k would have generally fully recovered in August of this year, every point beyond has just been multiplying my gains.

I never though we’d recover to 10k within the year, let alone by October. Now if we could just get businesses to calm down and start hiring again we’ll be good.

Technically the market hasn’t really done anything ground breaking today, 10000 is an arbitrary number, the real big events occurred in March and July, and today is no different than the last couple months of growth. The point is that it’s a generally steady rise upward to this point which is good.

On the otherhand if you’ve been planning on investing to take advantage of the low market the door is closing; it can’t go up forever and the real time to jump onboard was the first half of this year. Still it’s good to invest over long periods anyway; so there’s no reason to wait before re-investing in the market (my co-workers think this is crazy and that Obamma is going to destroy the market and the country in the next year or so, but I work in the reddest area of the reddest state). If you haven’t felt confident about the market in over a year now is the time to get your feet wet again.

This is all very reassuring news that the economy has more bright days ahead of it than dark.

I came up with that headline, and I think it should be name of the program that the US creates to get this happening (and the name of the first city). The article focuses on water conservation but I just think it would be a great way to make human habitation in the extreme locals that make up a major portion of the earth the most efficient and enjoyable it can be.

I love stuff like this. Back in the 1950’s and 60’s America dreamed that by the new millennium this type of future would exist. Then our generation dropped the ball and focused on more glut, less tech. A few people have kept alive the dream but that’s all anybody thinks of it anymore… a dream.

We have the technology to make stuff like this happen, the benefits and utility savings of a city built like this are well understood. I know first hand how hydroponic farming can maximize food output with restricted space and resources. The issue of equipment micromanaging a micro climate like this may have been a stumbling block in the past, but the computers of today would make it a piece of cake. Paolo Soleri and people who have followed his footsteps have explored Arcology concepts that maximize the efficient use of area while maximizing the feel of open space.

Seriously, we should jump on this now while it’s easy. If movies have taught me anything it’s that we need to build futuristic worlds now so when the world is packed with our fast reproducing moron offspring, they’ll have a world that can sustain them.

Idiocracy – Opening Sequence – Free videos are just a click away

Hat tip Gizmodo. And it’s more Logan’s Run than Dune.

Today the head of the FCC announced that they’re moving to guaranty the internet stays free and competitive from now on. FCC Chairman wants network neutrality, wired and wireless
To do this it will require laws that guarantee certain freedoms for people on the internet. These laws may restrict the way businesses take advantage of consumersdo business; in much the same way labor laws took away a businesses right to employ 8 year-olds for 60 hour work weeks.

The idea of a law against business has got Republican attention and now Republicans are moving to block the new FCC online freedom initiative by removing all the funding for it to be implemented. In their own words:

“In this struggling economy, any industry that is able to thrive should be allowed to do so without meddlesome government interference that could stifle innovation,” Ensign said in a statement. “We must avoid burdensome government regulations that micromanage private businesses or that limit the ability of companies to provide what their customers want. The Internet has flourished in large part because of a lack of government interference; I see no need to change that now.”

These are the businesses that “thrive” by charging you $100 a month for phone service that doesn’t work. By charging you more per kilobyte for an SMS than it costs NASA to communicate with the Hubble space telescope. By promising to “innovate” and upgrade your service over a decade but instead charging you more per month for the same service.

This is an example of jackass Republicans letting partisan bickering block good legislation all without them knowing what or why they’re blocking it. These FCC initiatives don’t “limit the ability of companies to provide what their customers want.” They stop companies from blocking what customers want. It keeps the internet free so that huge corporations don’t stifle the innovation that created the internet in the first place.

Because if laws that guarantee freedom stifle businesses, then those businesses are doing something they shouldn’t.

The new FCC network Neutrality regulation is a regulation the same way the First Amendment is a regulation. Guaranteeing people have freedom to do what they want may mean we have to force business NOT to restrict our freedom. The government is just passing legislation so that our modern Corporatocracy doesn’t become a “Big Brother” influence that defines how and when we communicate over the internet.

To put it in perspective, if free speech was billed by corporations when the founding fathers came up with the Bill of Rights these morons would be fighting it saying that government regulation will kill all the businesses that make money enforcing silence among the populace.

Bottom line:
Today the FCC made the first announcement that it’s going to keep the internet free (communication-wise, not $$$), competitive, and non-discriminatory.
Republicans are moving to stop this, and in the process rejecting everything they claim defines their party.

By giving monopoly businesses power rather than the consumer they are creating an environment that:
1. Squashes free communication
2. Closes the free market
3, Blocks access to today’s modern communication utility
4. And restricts the innovation that has allowed to internet to redefine communications in our time.

It may sound like I’m blowing this out of proportion but all of the above have already happened at least once as the big communication providers have tried to “cross the line” to turn a profit. I hope to hell that the republicans are only doing this as a knee-jerk “fight the democrats” reaction and not because they truly believe that corporate America should have to power to define and limit how American citizens freely communicate online.

Update: It was. Yay for internet, boo for the USA’s failing government.

The news via Ars is that “Japanese RIAA wants server-side music DRM for mobile phones.”
So anytime you listen to music on your phone it checks online with a central repository to see if you have the rights to play the song.

It’s mind blowing on so many levels.

First is the gall of any organization to try to pull this. Second is the massive amount of backend resources to log everybody’s DRM rights. And third the huge potential for failure rendering everybody’s legally purchased music worthless. Even though it’s not addressed I’m going to assume they’re smart enough to ignore tracks ripped from legally purchased CD and played on mobile phones. Otherwise multiply the audaciousness of the above list tenfold.

But what really interests me is how this speaks of the differences between culture in Japan and the US.

That there is even a possibility for RIAJ to suggest this speaks volumes about Japanese culture and the adage “The nail that sticks up is the first to be hammered down.” RIAA in the US would love this kind of thing but they know that the public would eviscerate them the moment they even hint at it as a possibility. In Japan I still don’t think they’ll allow it but nationally people are submissive enough towards authority that it actually makes it on the table. “If it’s the law follow it and change it through low pressure means, don’t make waves.”

Next is the incredibly lax copyright respect given to western music on TV and Japanese media. Watch Japanese TV for 20 minutes and you’ll hear a few music clips from western music; watch another 20 minutes and you’ll hear clips played by bands that most definitely did not give permission for the show to play their music. In the US copyright lawyers start circling the waters if you play as small as a three cord riff from a popular song (which speaks volumes of US propensity to litigate). However I think there may be a copyright law that says that you can sample on TV so long as it’s less than 30 seconds, or maybe that only applies to covering another artist’s works. Either way a lot of indie bands get a lot of uncompensated play in Japan.

Another oddity is the fact that piracy in Japan is so much less of a problem than it is in the US. While it’s not non-existent, Japanese people are generally much less inclined to illegally download music. Which is amazing considering how overpriced the music is brand new: $10 for singles, $20 for albums, $30-40 for limited edition albums!
Possibly tempering this is the fact that Japanese youth are less PC oriented and more Mobile Phone savvy. That keeps the act of running torrent servers more in the realm of the tech geeks rather than the everyday Japanese youth. So why in the world would the RIAJ think of such a restrictive process for controlling music?

But the real mind boggler is the fact that even though few people pirate music, when it does happen it’s quite blatant. In Japan they have DVD rental shops just like in the US, but in Japan they also have CDs for rent at the shops. It’s a prime place to get exposure for all the latest releases and will always have new hits the day they drop.

Ok that’s no so shocking but the kicker is that in additional to all your DVD and CD renting needs, the shops also sell all the blank CD, DVD, and MiniDisc’s that you need.

Put two and two together. It’s like one stop shopping for the CD ripping pirate. The icing on the cake is that they have hourly rentals, just enough time to go home, rip, and come back. I took a picture when I was there to prove it because I just couldn’t believe the audacity.

(Sorry the picture is a bit clandestine, I thought I might get in trouble for taking it).

For more check out this interesting article about why RIAJ looks the other way over CD Rental ripping.

So why, with all things considered, is RIAJ thinking of such a draconian scheme as locking down all digital music copies on Mobile Phones?

Already a lot of my conservative friends are pointing out that this proves “New Oil” will always be available and thus the world will never run out (we’ve had this argument before). So here’s some basics I picked up in college geology to put oil in perspective and hopefully open a few eyes.

The problem is that it takes very specific circumstances for oil to be created and trapped where it can wait to be discovered by us.

Issue 1 – Time

It takes time to create oil; coal, it’s called a “Fossil Fuel” for a reason. Oil is basically prehistoric algae, trapped under sediments, and heated to become oil or natural gas (plant and animal material generally turns to coal). Most oil is generally understood to have been algae that was buried between 200 and 400 million years ago. The problem is 2/3 the earth’s surface is 300 million years old or younger, most is less than 100 million years old.

Source: National Geophysical Data Center

The ocean floor is a constantly shifting mass of dense rock that comes up in the ocean rifts, and spreads across the ocean before plunging back under the continents. Average time spent crossing is about 150 million years. So even if algae is quickly deposited in the center of the ocean, buried under sediment (see next problem), and heated at the right temperature, it’s barely becoming oil when it’s plunged back under the continental shelves.

So oil will only exist in places where geology is relatively slow and the rocks are old; like on continents, continental shelves, or pockets of the ocean that aren’t actively being sucked under the continents (like the gulf of Mexico). Most of the ocean floor doesn’t have a possibility of oil even if we could reach it.

The algae needs to be trapped in an anaerobic environment so that decomposition won’t occur; then buried under sediment until the pressure and heat can convert it to oil. This doesn’t always happen; in fact if our current natural world is any guide, it’s kind of rare. Not to mention that when it does happen it still takes time for enough sediment to pile on top till the algae is deep enough the pressure and heat can convert it. So again, even though it takes about 10 million years to naturally convert, the time to be buried, heated, and converted takes 200-400 million years.

Issue 2 – Escaping the ground on it’s own.

Once the algae becomes oil it has another problem, if the rock above is porous the oil will seep up to the surface. Remember oil is lighter than water and rock, as water seeps down cracks in the ground it displaces oil and forces it to the surface. Once up it is broken down in a natural reaction by heat and organisms at the surface.

In southern Utah as a kid I remember coming across crack in the rock that had tar squeezing out from in between. This is deep in nationally protected areas, miles away from any roads. At first I wondered why people sealed a crack in the desert with tar, then I realized it must be natural tar, now I know it’s natural petroleum products seeping to the surface and breaking down in the heat.

So for oil to survive it needs to be trapped into a reservoir capped with non-porous rock until somebody drills through the rock and it can squirt up the well.

Issue 3- Oil quality

Sounds funny but not all petroleum is created equal. Saudi Crude Oil is of such a high quality it’s almost already refined and ready for use. Other forms of petroleum can be so poor that at room temperature it solidifies to a waxy texture or in a state that additional energy needs to be added to extract it from the Kerogen and get a small amount of crude oil with a large amount of waste product. And all oil may be mixed with a contaminant like sand they need to be separated from before refinement. So even if you find a deposit of oil shale or oil sands that have oil in them, the cost of extraction is often prohibitively expensive. Back in the 1980 oil companies actually abandoned oil production through oil shale because it wasn’t economically feasible. The fact they’re returning to the oil shale now gives an idea how desperate they are for new oil sources.

This is all very relevant because the energy cost to create 1 Killowatt hour of electricity through renewable methods like solar energy is eight times that of producing the same amount with oil. Currently most people consider that to be excessively high but oil extraction from oil shale or oil sands can be 10-30 times more expensive than regular oil extraction from wells. So when compared to oil from oil shale, The total price per kilowatt including manufacturing and production, solar power production will actually become the economical alternative.

And all of this of course also ignores the ecological factors that the machinery excavating oil shale burns about the same amount diesel that they get from oil they extract, a 3 to 1 ratio of water and additional chemicals to oil is needed for each barrel of crude produced, and a lot of chemical waste is produced during extraction.

Issue 4 – Finding places that haven’t already been found

Knowing what we know above you can predict where oil will be; certain conditions can be met so by looking at the geology of an area you can tell if it’s old enough to have oil, if it’s been heated enough to convert fossils to oil, and if the rock is too porous to keep the oil from escaping.

Seems easy enough but you have to remember that you’re competing with the world’s massive oil companies and their billions upon billions of dollars in resources who have spent the last 100 years scouring the earth to find potential oil reserves. The report that oil is at peak production now and will begin to run out around 2070 has been verified by Chevron, Exxon and other oil companies themselves. They’re not just guessing or making estimates, they know because they’ve been mapping and test drilling every continent on Earth for the next big find and they know that they’re running out of places to look. BP didn’t spend millions to drill a well in the Gulf of Mexico because they wanted a challenge; they did it because it’s one of the few untapped places left that has a possibility for finding oil.

Conclusion

Oil really is in decline. When the worlds oil conglomerates start freaking out that we’re running out of oil you know there is trouble. When you see oil companies like BP and Exxon begin diverting massive amounts of their revenue to renewable forms of energy production don’t fool yourself that they’re doing it to make everybody feel warm and fuzzy about saving the earth. They’re doing it to save themselves. It’s their job to know where oil is and if they can see it’s running out the only smart thing to do is to diversify into what energy production methods they think will take its place.

And even though the earth will always have a pocket of oil here or a reserve of waxy bitumen petroleum there, if it’s not economically feasible to extract and convert it it might as well be useless sludge. As demand rises, and resources fall the crossing point where oil is a feasible source of energy will be passed and all the currently “expensive” forms of renewable energy production will become the “cheap” forms of energy production.

The writing is on the wall and the people who will be best prepared for the changeover will be those who get in on the ground floor now.

Governor Schwarzenegger (no that’s not the problem, well hiring actors to be politicians is generally as bad idea, but nvm) has the brilliant idea of having everyday people twitter their ideas to fix the state.

Schwarzenegger has just launched a new Twitter-based site for California, MyIdea4CA.com.

That’s right, solve the states multiple issues in 140 characters or less with the same ease of calling somebody a “fascist Nazi” on a chat room or message board flame war.

If you want a quick idea how this will play out you can goto Yahoo.answers or 4Chan and ask people “How to I get this Girl to notice me?” Between the massive amount of messages saying you’re ugly and you should kill yourself there may be some actual suggestions that generally don’t help. And you learn your lesson that the first thing you should do to get a girl to notice you is to ignore all advice people give online.

So now we have the same thing coming from our government (yours actually, Caariifonia), except the ideas have to be in 140 characters or less.

Back in the day if you really wanted to make suggestions to your community and government leaders you went to a town hall meeting and waited your turn at a podium to speak directly to their faces.

But state and federal leaders were generally too busy to hear your ideas because they were on fundraising trips with wealthy donors for their re-election in 3 years. So you wrote a letter, mailed it in, and in 2 months received a canned response written by an intern on why they were going to ignore everything you said (they literally only read what the initial subject is, then send a response).

Recently email has allowed these multipage ideas of why their continued refusal to support telecommunication infrastructure improvements is allowing service providers to jack prices up in the name of “limited assets” to be sent instantaneously. And they don’t have to hire an intern to even read the first of the letter. Canned responses ignoring you can be constructed by a computer parsing the email for a few keywords.

Now we can just setup a live stream for people to shout into that will go directly into the trash without any other overhead. Maybe the Governator can point to the fact that the site has 300,000 followers, or that 1.5 million “suggestions” have been made and ignored. You know it’s just going to become a stream of pointless and ignored comments by people with no really interest in actually taking the effort to fix things.

This is all business as usual in the governments continued ignorance of how such rapidly changing technologies can be put to use benefiting the state and nation.

My favorite part however is the 140 character limit to the whole thing. Can you solve state and federal budget problems in 140 characters? How about dealing with failing healthcare, massive deficit issues, education reform, choking pollution, loss of natural resources, and lack of a comprehensive energy solution plan?

I’ve tried and every time I come up with the same answer for all:

“Stop Sucking and Do Something Useful like we hired you to; instead of wasting our time with pointless ideas you read in an article in Technology Monthly!”

Hang on-
154 Characters.
Fuck, it’s not even enough to tell them what a massive fail this is.

I’ve talked to a lot of people who “just don’t get it” when it comes to astronomy. When you stand alone looking up into the night sky and people ask you what you see, if you reply “the stars” they just shrug and walk away like there’s nothing amazing in that statement.

It’s the problem of taking something common for granted. Often people don’t even notice seeing the moon in the sky because it’s always there. You don’t get it until you stand there looking at it and you realize it’s real; not a CGI movie effect, not an image printed on paper or beamed onto a TV, it’s a huge actual physical object hanging above your head the same way bricks don’t. If you had a rope big enough you could throw a lasso around it and pull it down to you, just like George Bailey (and cause a cataclysmic impact that would destroy the Earth in the process).

It’s always awe-inspiring when you’re looking at the sky and your perspective begins to change from looking UP at a 2 dimensional speckled ceiling, to looking OUT into a vast field of objects more massive than anything in our solar system.
It helps to lay on your back with your head north and your feet south so that your sense of up and down matches with traditional models of the solar system orbiting the sun horizontally rather than vertically. Then you’re not looking up at the stars, you’re slapped to the side of a tiny spinning ball of rock, hurtling through space, surrounded by titanic spheres of exploding energy, clustered around an immense black hole that will eventually swallow everything you see.

If all that wasn’t enough this video shows us that the number of galaxies just like this outnumber all those stars you see in the sky.

Via Gizmodo.

some investments I’m very happy that the Dow broke 9000 today. It’s an arbitrary number but it’s one I set as a goal in my mind back in February. I was thinking that if the Dow gets to 8000 by summer and 9000 by Christmas we’d be well on our way to recovery. Getting here this fast is a good sign that this won’t be the next Great Depression that so many people said it would be 8 months ago.

The gains in the last week have been almost too rapid that I think we’ll still see days below 8500 in the future. But like I said this is far better than I think anybody could have hoped for at the beginning of this year. Unfortunately the real world we live in feels the fallout longer than the market so even if we jump to 10,000 by Christmas (could you imagine!!) then it will still take a year or so for the real world to stabilize under the highs of Wall Street.

It’s funny that I hear people now saying that with the market at 9000 already that it’s proof that the stimulus bills were unneeded. Um… I think the reason it’s this high already is BECAUSE OF the stimulus bills; this is exactly what they were supposed to do, they just did it better and faster than we thought they would.

Personally I think Obama’s “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009” was much better than Bush’s “T.A.R.P.” handout to the banks; but I think the rapid recovery of the last 6 months proves that not only have they worked, they worked better than the most optimistic of us expected.

Here’s hoping that in the next 6 months Wall Street will stabilize into a realistic 10,000 and companies can rebuild their foundations so we can avoid scares like this in the future (although I believe the market is driven on fear more than anything else but that’s a whole different discussion and I’m running already long).

And I promise this is the last of the financial posts.

Many people say that Japanese are superior at building new technology because of the Wii, PS3, Plasma HDTV’s etc. I think the real proof is that they have hand driers that work in less than 15 minutes, and the handrail on the escalators go the SAME SPEED as the escalator steps (those yellow textured tiles on sidewalks for blind people deserve an honorable mention too).

Via Engadget.

Satoda Mai and the FUJIWARA duo are the only people I’m rooting for here; and seriously what’s up with the Animals? They always have interesting missions, but this is just weird.

Half the fun of this show is watching TARANTO run thorough places I visited when I was in Japan. Although I remember Ameyoko being shoulder to shoulder with people buying produce and meat. I always wonder how they get famous places like that so empty, the bit at the end of the show mentions the cooperation with the local police for safety and permission to shoot but I think they’re shooting in the early morning since Tokyo buisness doesn’t seem to “wake up” until about 9am. That also explains why most of the people in the background are delivery men, and a few early birds in suits aren’t showing up until the end of the show.

We all know that China is the most populous country in the world and India is nipping at its heels. But not many people know that third place is our own United States of America. That’s right, the bronze medal in the "Holy Fuck that’s alot of people!" category is the USA.

As big as this nation is its not immediately apparent but when you think about it it makes perfect sense. A majority of Americans believe its their religious duty to populate the earth, and they’re succeeding quite well. Here in Utah 10-12 member families is common.

This is one of the many reasons why our housing is being crammed into smaller and smaller quarters. Much like Japan we’re bumping up against a resource ceiling that keeps us packed into cities. Although ours has less to do with physical space as it does with fresh water abundance/distribution and driving distances/time between locations. When I see the cramped expensive living conditions in Japan I wince; but we’re not really that far off.

Anyway, as kid I always looked forward to moving into a house surrounded by a yard so large it would seem like a home in a forest in the mountains. It seems that a large yard surrounding a small home is a thing of the past.

Update: Other reasons for homes separated by 3ft:
-Realtor Greed. Why sell one home in an acre when you can sell 8?
-Pride. My house is bigger than yours (even if there no room to walk in between them).
-Gluttony. How many of us have full rooms full of stuff we will never use before we die?
-Extravagance. I need 3 more garages for the Hummer, Escalade, and Jet-Skis

It makes me pine for the simple, isolated life Dick Proenneke (from "Alone in the Wilderness") lived with for the last 30 years of his life.

Well for the 30th anniversary of the original Gundam they have built a 1/1 replica model of the RX-78 in Odaiba Tokyo (I’ve been there!). Simply put, it’s epic!

It also moves, with steam and sound effects!

If you’re not fammiliar with the Gundam series I suggest you pickup Gundam SEED
and Gundam Seed Destiny. Both top quality It’s up till August.

From Pink tentacle via Danny Choo

So why has nobody gotten those Dyson Airblade Hand Driers? I know there was an issue when Dyson claimed to have “invented” the air blade drier, even though it was the only type of hand drier in Japan for the past few decades. But so what if hijacked the machine; just forget the patent, license the machine from whatever Japanese company makes them and start selling them in the US, you’ll make millions. Instead we’re still stuck with the crappy Dayton hand driers that have been the same useless thing for the past 50 years.

That reminds me I need to get a “Press button, Get bacon” T-Shirt.

But they’re wrong, there is a logic gap between walking out of Albertsons with an unpaid bag of potato chips and somebody downloading a song for free off the internet.

First I’m going to skip the fact that technically we can record music off broadcast radio and still get it without paying ( the only reason internet recording gets prosecuted is it’s easier to track).
No the difference here is that just because somebody downloaded a song illigally DOES NOT mean that they would have bought it if it’s wasn’t available for free. This is a very important fact so I’m going to state it again:
Mike “The Bruiser” Simmons who normally listens to Pantera downloads Britney Spears’ album “Blackout”; if the internet didn’t exist he wouldn’t have normally brought this album. He was just curious about it since his niece was always raving about Britney. RIAA did not lose any money when he downloaded this album because the downloaded album was not downloaded in place of a potentially purchased album.

Many people, including the movie and music industry, think that this is just the excuse downloaders make to justify their theft. Well guess what the facts say?
On average Downloaders make MORE legitimate purchases than others.

However I didn’t need a study to tell me tell me this, I’m one of the downloaders that seems much of my money flow out of my pocket to music purchases. I’m the Mike Simmons from above (that’s not really my name, I made it up). I admit it, I download music, alot of it. But in the number of CDs I buy I also out purchase everybody I know by 5-10 times. I budget $60 a month in CD purchases and thanks to wise spending that equates to 8-10 new CDs a month. And I can’t count the number of times that something I downloaded on a whim became a favorite of mine and led to another 2-6 Cd purchases.

Yet from the RIAA perspective I’m stealing from them; but again for every $10 the average person spends in music I spend $100. In fact I just realized I didn’t figure in concert attendance, to tack on another $60 a month plus $40 a month to the venue’s bar in alcohol purchases. If you had a customer that was spending $120 a month compared to others who spend $10 would you take them to court and turn them into your enemy, or try to find a way to appeal to them through the downloads and try to turn them onto to more music they might like and spend money on?

I’ve left off the whole mess of the fact that somebody who likes why they hear after downloading begins to tell others what music they like through “Word of Mouth” marketing; the holy grail of all marketing.

BTW: Blackout was actually pretty good, forget what you think about Britney Spears and give it a chance.

Pics of my current CD collection:

I finally ran out of shelves.

And now I’m out of CD tupperware. I’m going to have to get a 300-600 unit stand-up CD rack.


tags: RIAA, MPAA, Downloading, Fans

One word. Convenience.

I’ve harped on it before but mankind leans towards laziness when fat and content. And America which has been rich and powerful for most of the last 100 years has developed one of the laziest cultures. Now that’s not to say we wont do things; we just tend not to go out of our way to do something extra if we can’t see an immediate self serving benefit.

Back to the subject of recycling. Most Americans would be willing to recycle in our everyday lives if its convenient to us. Businesses and community/state/federal can take advantage of this by making recycling easy. At home this is simply done by providing curbside garbage AND recycling programs. Provide a recycling can and bi-weekly pickup and watch people learn to sort their garbage for recycling on their own. We have it here in SLC and it’s great, people sort their own garbage as much as possible and out dupms don’t grow as fast.

Now businesses and city planners need to get involved next to cleanup the other 50% of our garbage, all that from, parks, public areas, businesses, fast food and restaurants. Compare the garbages in US fast food joints (above) with the ones in Japan (below). It may seem daunting at first, especialy when you don’t read the language but images if it were all in english telling you where to put what. And anybody who has worked in food services immediately sees how magnificent a special drain for all foodstuffs and liquids to keep it out of the garbage. It’s practically an American teenage rite of passage to get a first job at a fast food restaurant; and we all remember taking out the trash, heaving it into the dumpster while vile trash liquids spilled down our silly uniforms. Those teenagers and those of us who remember that look at Japanese trash cans and think, “Why didn’t we think of that 30 years ago?”

Quick description from left to right:
Combustibles (paper), Non-combustibles (plastics), above: a drain for the liquids and ice, and finally a bin for recyclable plastics like water bottles etc.

I’m willing to sort plastics and combustibles at a can if I’m just provided the opportunity and convenience. Over there almost every garbage can was at least divided into combustibles and non-combustibles; and next to every vending machine (and there are alot!) they have a special garbage can for your empty plastic bottles. Imagine that!
Coke, Pepsi, and every other drink vendor should be all over this. Not only does it give them a ready source of plastic to remake into new bottles; but what is the first thing that somebody thinks as they throw away their empty bottle?

“You know what I could use? ANOTHER DRINK!”

So how comes it’s been decades and we still haven’t figured out to do these simple win-win strategies over here?

I’m glad to finally be seeing some technological innovation to make mass transit here in SLC a usable reality. For something to catch on with the masses it needs to be easy, or people need to have some desperation in needing to use it. For most of us using mass transit is usually forced upon us by rising gas prices; but UTA can also entice us into using their service by making it easier to use. Not having to lookup ticket/fare prices or use annoying ticket machines helps. Obviously convenience is another major factor, but Trax runs every 15 minutes unlike the buses so its not as big of a deal.

Having and RFID "tap-on, tap-off" pay pass is brilliant, and takes one of the pains out of mass transit on UTA. Salt Lake City’s transit system may be ages behind Tokyo and Osaka’s but were making steps towards being a more mature city. Now if they can just solve the problem of getting the buses to run on time


Go there now.