Working on infrastructure. Seriously putting some dents in my head, looking at the systems around me right now keeping me cosy, wondering how on earth it all works. Fundamental realization – most infrastructure was designed by and for cold countries. With tons of consistent solar energy you can do a whole new class of things [...]
Energy in Nature and Society is a systematic and exhaustive analysis of all the major energy sources, storages, flows, and conversions that have shaped the evolution of the biosphere and civilization. Vaclav Smil uses fundamental unifying metrics (most notably for power density and energy intensity) to provide an integrated framework for analyzing all segments of [...]
Energy is about to become absurdly cheap at least during daylight hours in sunny areas of the planet. http://nanosolar.com is retailing panels (maybe a gigawatt a year) for $1 per watt. Their production cost is 30 cents per watt of panel capacity. Konarka claims 10 cents per watt production costs (confirmed here) and are expecting [...]
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/22/dining/22local.html?em&ex=1216958400&en=7df5348a50e688b3&ei=5087%0A Guy comes round to your house, grows your vegetables, and gives them to you. There’s a name for this, and I’m trying to remember it…
There’s just no way around it – patent is broken. I’m writing up a set of docs right now, and it’s clear that trying to tease apart what might have been patented before by other people, what’s common knowledge, and what’s potentially material for a patent pool is just impossible. It’s a question that, in [...]
from http://twitpic.com/54k4 (twitter from Golden Phoenix) Smari said, on sight, “Hahahahaha New Headquarters?”
I can’t put it into words, but something happened today, stepped over some kind of threshold, hit critical mass. Now it goes boom, this thing we’ve been building – a perspective, a view on life, a housing technology, a science of infrastructure… a plan to fix the world, which is not broken. If you never [...]
As I look at all these rocket scientists struggling to navigate the horrific waters of patent law and worst practices, I’m wondering… why has the Sacred Oath gone out of fashion? Like, really, what this comes down to is three principles which really ought to be sworn in blood by anybody doing this kind of [...]
Dr. Horrible is a really, really perfectly nerdy web TV show by the brains behind Buffy and Firefly/Serenity. For reasons that I’m foolishly going to try to explain, it hit me like a bag of hammers. Here’s Dr. Horrible’s problem. He wants the world to be a better place, and he’s willing to kill people [...]
“you will live and die on this farm, and you will never go hungry. but your kids are going to the stars.”