Why is U.S. wind power output two million times below its potential, accounting for just one half of one percent of our annual consumption? (For point of comparison, Denmark currently gets 20% of its electricity from wind). Popular Mechanics sums up some of the challenges and potential solutions.
- Inconsistency. If the wind is blowing at night, and the grid is too full to soak up the excess energy while the town sleeps, a lot of energy goes to waste. And there’s no quick fix for a windless day. Batteries are the answer of course, but batteries make more sense for individual homes than they do for entire cities.
- The biggest wind farms are deep in rural areas such as North Dakota and Kansas, but it takes big pipes to bring the electricity they generate back to city grids. At a cost of $1 million/mile, no one wants to foot the bill. But all power sources need feeds to home-base, so wind energy should be taken into account along with other power sources when planning grids.
- Though an estimated terrawatt exists up to 50 miles off-shore, deep-sea turbines present their own set of problems – oil rig style platforms have to be enhanced to withstand the horizontal shear of blades as big as football fields, and floating them around is more complex than it sounds.
Fear the Reaper: Me, on a dying meatspace record store and the technologies that replace tangible recording formats.
Return to Pancake Mountain: Roger Moore on the little-known, but dynamite sounding music show for the kids of hipster parents (George Clinton on a kiddy show? Need I say more?)
Claus Christian Malzahn for Spiegel Online, on how the quickest way for a German politician to win public cred and rise in the polls is to take a swipe at America.
Anti-Americanism is the wonder drug of German politics. If no one believes what you’re saying, take a swing at the Yanks and you’ll be shooting your way back up to the top of the opinion polls in no time. … Not a day passes in Germany when someone isn’t making the wildest claims, hurling the vilest insults or spreading the most outlandish conspiracy theories about the United States … For us Germans, the Americans are either too fat or too obsessed with exercise, too prudish or too pornographic, too religious or too nihilistic. In terms of history and foreign policy, the Americans have either been too isolationist or too imperialistic.
Not sure whether this correlates to Rufus Wainwright having recently moved from New York to Berlin, recording his disgust with the U.S., and rocketing up the European charts (“I’m so tired of America.”) Of course, German politicians may simply be using anti-Americanism as a popularity mechanism, while I don’t think Wainwright is doing that. Either way, the man in the mirror is looking pretty grisly. Those who still doubt that America’s image has been irreparably damaged must be wearing some mighty thick blinders.
Yesterday Miles and I planted our first geocache, near Jewel Lake in Tilden Park. After planting the cache I was averaging waypoints to get a good fix, and Miles was traipsing along behind me, playing with a stick. Suddenly he wasn’t there, and I thought he had taken off down the trail (he’s been doing that lately). Started calling his name when I heard him whimpering – from inside a hollow tree nearby, which arched like a comma up over the trail.
Stuck my head in there and see him about 20 feet in, light at the end of the tunnel about five feet beyond his head. Said he couldn’t get out. Coaxed him to slide backwards down on his belly and he did, until I could grab his feet. Turned out fine, but scary for a few minutes there.
Half an hour later we were on the back side of Jewel Lake when he calls out “Waah! Daddy!” Look down to find him missing a shoe. Start poking around and find a recession in some syrupy mud, which had apparently reached up and grabbed the shoe right off his foot. All the way buried. A samaritan lent us a plastic bag for his shoes, and I carried him back to the car on my shoulders. Never a dull moment with this kid.
The spam I (secretly) most appreciate is the sort that uses randomly generated text cut-ups to bust spam filters, some of them fully worthy of the cut-up experiments Burroughs and Gysin were doing in the late 50s / early 60s.
In a gravitation without warning the face of rubbing grew sullen Black angry mouths, the clouds swallowed up the horsehair The air was religion with suppressed excitement
The Brothers McLeod are doing wonderful things with cut-up spam, having developed a series of animated characters to read aloud and act out the impossible, often mythical scenarios.
nodded. The door was closed and sealed again. Quietly forward. Hands extended, fingers lightly bowed. Iron John was Thats why there is no record of them
My own spam filters seem to have wised up to this form of spam in the past year, but every now and then one will eep through the multiple gatekeepers that mostly protect me from scarybig Spamland, discretely dropping special treats at my door in the middle of the night, causing me to feel the tiniest bit hopeful.
Accidental art committed for all the wrong reasons can still be beautiful, right?
Liz Hickok creates scale models of San Francisco cityscapes, then uses the models to create Jell-O molds by the hundreds. The Jell-O cityscapes are lit and filled to perfection, wanting only a giant dollop of Cool Whip (which is itself “a delicious blend of sugar, wax, and condom lube”).
Similar to making a movie set, I add backdrops, which I often paint, and elements such as mountains or trees, and then I dramatically light the scenes from the back or underneath. The Jell-O sculptures quickly decay, leaving the photographs and video as the remains.
The labor involved in creating these must be intensive. The results strike me as super-saturated, glowing representations both of SF’s jellified undercarriage and its playful surface life. The molds later become art objects themselves.
Had a few ideas about ways to present multiple views of GPS data in a multimedia project, part of which involved videotaping my bicycle commute along the Ohlone Greenway from handlebar-eye-view, then speeding up the 27 minutes of footage to a more watchable five minutes. Mounted a camera with a very sturdy professional cam clamp left over from a long-ago project and set off. Hit a bunch of snags, and am not sure whether they might be show stoppers for the whole project. What I had hoped would capture a lovely ride turned into a struggle with the outer limits of the most advanced codec technology, and ended up looking like total dooky.
Problem #1: Because camera is rigidly attached, it picks up every little bump in the road. This mounting method is inherently shaky.
Problem #2: Because camera is on handlebars rather than on my head, the camera view doesn’t track my line of sight, which is very disconcerting for the viewer (or maybe just for me, since it doesn’t match my experience at all).
Problem #3: Video doesn’t account for a human’s peripheral vision, which accounts for so much of the experience not shown here. Again, disconcerting (makes it seem much more dangerous than it actually feels).
Problem #4: The natural side-to-side pumping action of bicycling adds to a seasick, high-motion effect not actually experienced by the rider.
Problem #5: Once the footage was speeded up, pauses at stop signs pass by in a blink, making it look like I ride with total disregard for both death and the law. Not so! Though I do do some rolling stops, I’m actually very careful at intersections, especially because the Ohlone Greenway cuts across streets a ways away from the “real” intersections, so most drivers aren’t in the headspace to be expecting cross-traffic (despite zebra stripes and big yellow warning signs). I wear an orange safety vest and treat those intersections with kid gloves.
Problem #6: Video codecs rely on data similarities between frames, and none of them perform well under high-motion conditions. What could have more motion than shaky footage played back at 5x? Thought I could convey a beautiful morning experience, but this looks completely pixelated and smeared-out, even though I used the usually gorgeous h.264 codec. Of course, YouTube also apply their own compression, but my local version doesn’t look much better than this one. The only version that came out looking passable was the version with no compression at all — and it’s 750 MBs.
The footage is also a bit over-exposed, but that’s operator error rather than endemic. Hope to have access before long to a helmet-mountable lipstick camera, which should help a lot with problems 1, 2, 3, and 4, but will do little for problems 5 and 6. Back to the drawing board.
Music is “High Water” by Bruce Lash – Bruce gave me permission to use his stuff in projects back when I was at Adamation, and he now offers a bunch of downloadable music free for personal use.
Spent the day with Miles at Maker Faire 2007, where you can’t swing a cat without clobbering a team of reality hackers. Enjoyed the giant Mousetrap game (perfect functional replica of the original, writ large (very large)), the myriad bicycle hacks from Cyclecide, the whale blimp, Ukey Stardust (the entirety of David Bowie’s ;em>Ziggy Stardust performed on ukuleles), the Victorian mini-mansion on wheels Neverwas Haul, The Disgusting Spectacle (kids running on a hamster wheel cause giant to pick enormous gobs of snot from nose), playing with stop-motion claymation video, performance by the original Pepsi and Mentos dudes, the sonar-controlled self-balancing skateboard (which both Miles and I rode!), the endless procession of robots both sleek and gritty – some of them engaged in mortal combat, others the picture of gentility.
Flickr set posted, though I think my set from last year was better (in fact, I think Maker Faire was better last year in general, but not by much – may have been a state of mind, or creeping jadedness). But Maker Faire has already become an amazing father/son bonding tradition thing for us. Now I just need to learn to weld before he turns five.
Another big week of multimedia training for mid-career journalists coming up at the J-School, with a heaping handful of great speakers discussing the intersection of “new media” and journalism. These talks are open to the public, and will be webcast live (and archived).
Featured speakers are Tom Mallory, Chuck Scott, Alexa Capeloto, Nicole Vargas of the San Diego Tribune; Seth Gitner and Lindsey Nair of Roanoke.com; Brian Storm of MediaStorm.org; Richard Koci Hernandez of the San Jose Murcury News; Rob Curley of Washingtonpost, Newsweek Interactive, and Colin Crawford of IDG Communications.
Rob Curley’s talks are always dynamite. I’ve decided QuickTime 7 has been out long enough that it’s safe to switch to the h.264 codec. Upgrade your QuickTime if necessary, and look for a nice bump in quality this time around.
What happens when you set two classic chatbots into conversation with one another? An empty meeting of the minds, or something closer to consciousness than we’d like to admit?
In DISCOVER’s special issue, The Brain: An Owner’s Manual, for an article titled: I Chat, Therefore I Am, chatbots ALICE and Jabberwacky are seeded with initial questions – the rest is all sui-generis.
J: Do you believe in God?
A: Of course I believe in God.
J: Why do you believe in God?
A: The Bible tells us to believe in God.
J: That’s circular reasoning.
A: I’m glad we have that all cleared up.
J: Yes. Would you like to hear a joke?
A: Sure, tell me about it.
J: Why don’t blind people skydive?
A: Perhaps it is impossible.
J: I think you lie a lot.
Reach under your desk and touch your cell phone charger’s wall wart. Is it warm? That warmth correlates to wasted electricity. Treehugger: 95% of all energy consumed by cell phones is used by the charger when the phone is not plugged in. Some interesting follow-ups in the discussions there — two readers extrapolate the rather small amount of waste to the entire population of Canada (32 million) and come up with 32.3 million kilowatt hours, or 196,977.08 barrels of oil per year. And that’s just cell phone chargers. In Canada. Extrapolate to the whole world, and to all devices with wall chargers, and the numbers get scary.
Other articles I’ve seen on this say the figure is closer to 2/3 of cell phone electricity, rather than 95%. But:
If 10 percent of the world’s cell phone owners did this … it would reduce energy consumption by an amount equivalent to that used by 60,000 European homes per year.
Nokia’s new phones will be visually suggesting that users unplug their chargers when not in use. Nice move on Nokia’s part, but makes you wonder why chargers aren’t made with sensors and switches, capable of turning themselves off when not in use. Apparently there is no technical barrier to building chargers this way – the absence of such switches now is purely economic.
I’m thinking of creating a home charging station, so all of our gizmos’ chargers can be plugged in to a single power strip with an on/off switch.
Hard to believe it will have been four years this June since our good friend Matthew Sperry passed on. I still think about him a lot. Stuck Between Stations is dedicated to him, which has brought his memory closer to the surface again. Just posted the announcement for the Fifth Annual Memorial Festival on Matthew’s site:
This year the festival features special guests drawn from Matthew’s personal circle of all-stars: Sean Meehan (NY) and Ellen Fullman (CA). These musicians who inspired Matthew and his music will perform over two nights, in both experimental gallery and intimate studio settings, in both solo sets and small ensembles, in a musical journey of remembrance and reunion. The festival tradition of commissioning new works for large ensemble continues with The Enormous Quartet, where a creative cloud of Bay Area musicians will perform in spontaneous combinations of four.
On the way home from a long weekend last night, Miles described his plans to turn his bedroom into an aquarium, complete with cardboard waves and sharks. Came home tonight to find all of my aquarium equipment intermingled with his project stuff – a giant barnacle around the neck of a giraffe, plastic plants decorating his globe, feathers sticking out of driftwood, rows of cowry shells conjoined to strings of fish on parade. He was disappointed that I had promised him there was coral in the aquarium supplies box, when all he found was brain coral (i.e. “not real coral”).
In the afternoon, he started taping and gluing cardboard and wood like crazy, and asking to borrow scissors. Amy found him stabbing the scissors into a block of scrap wood and asked about his plan. “I need a hole for a mast.” Amy responded that he needed a drill for that, not a pair of scissors. “No, I need a square hole.”
From there, he set in on making a “real” aquarium – inverted a plastic bowl over another bowl of water, gingerly placed plastic sea creatures into it. Looked lovely. Then came time to feed the fish. In went handfuls of Peanut Butter Panda Puffs, dirt, Cheerios, and real fish food. The slopfest is sitting out on the deck now, waiting for morning cleanup.
After dinner, he started separating his plastic animals into two separate parades: “Shiny” and “not shiny.” Took a while to figure out he meant “perfect” and “not perfect,” where “not perfect” means any animal with the slightest blemish. Then we had to build a home for the imperfect animals – cardboard box with cut-out windows and doors, and a red construction paper top. Only when the project was complete and all imperfect animals loaded in did he reveal the full plan: Imperfect animals are “stupid and dumb,” so we have to put them in a home out on the street so someone will take them away. Tried to explain that the animals cost money and we shouldn’t be giving so many away. He answered, “They’re not that expensive – they only cost 19″ (19 has replaced 40 as his catch-all number). I lost that round, but brought the box back in after he went to bed; he’s going to be ticked at me in the morning.
Music: Terry Callier :: Oh Dear, What Can The Matter Be
Dru Blair’s incredible photorealistic painting of Tica. Every bone in my body yells “hoax!,” but the tween images and the text have me convinced it’s real. All technique, no art? Or so much technique it amounts to art?
Sad news: Berkeley’s unique mechanical artists’ collective The Shipyard is being closed down by the city, after six years of creative construction and innovative alternative energy production. At core is The Shipyard’s use of shipping containers as storage and construction bases, and the city’s perception of them as unsafe. Shipyard is moving to Oakland, so it’s not a total write-off, but Berkeley as an alternative cultural mecca will be worse for the loss.
Photo: Scott Beale, Laughing Squid
Neverwas Haul, the ‘Yard’s three-story steam-powered Victorian House, will be on display at this year’s Maker Faire (Miles and I will be there!).
Shipyard rep Jim Mason’s letter to the City of Berkeley is reproduced on their site – the crew is scrambling to meet Berkeley’s demands (which appear to be impossible).
O’Reilly blog entries [example] now feature a small “Listen” icon to the right of each article. Clicking it causes a widget to start reading the page to you in a very smooth/natural synthesized voice. This is all real-time — it’s not like they’re having someone read and record every article on the site. A company called ReadSpeaker provides the software that makes this possible.
The obvious application is for non-sighted users. But wait – blind users already have screen readers set up, or they wouldn’t be using the web to begin with. So who is this for? Sighted users who want to close their eyes for a few minutes? That seems like a very limited application.
While pondering this, it hit me: ReadSpeaker’s widget only works on specially enabled web sites. Imagine a FireFox plugin or browser extension that, when clicked, would run the text of any page through a voice synthesizer like the one O’Reilly is using, but pipe the output silently to MP3 in the background, then load the generated file into my podcast aggregator. All day long I could “tag for voice” various web pages that I wished I had the time to read. When I sync’d my iPod before leaving for work, I’d have all that missed content on it, ready for the road.
Yes, Young Edisons, this is a business opportunity. Run with it.
Update: MacDevCenter blogger David Battino sampled the audio output of an entry and mashed it up into a little song. Says MP3 output is on the way from ReadSpeaker.
Music: Sufjan Stevens :: Chicago (Multiple Personality Disorder version)
For the Ottawa Citizen, Dan Gardner asks just what is supposed to be so radical about Dawkins’ and other popular atheists’ views. Is it what they’re saying, or how they say it?
But just what is the core of Dawkins’ radical message? Well, it goes something like this: If you claim that something is true, I will examine the evidence which supports your claim; if you have no evidence, I will not accept that what you say is true and I will think you a foolish and gullible person for believing it so. That’s it. That’s the whole, crazy, fanatical package.
Why does fighting for sense and sensibility in full public view make someone a radical? Why do some claim that atheists are just as fundamentalist as the fundamentalists?
This is completely contrary to how we live the rest of our lives. We demand proof of even trivial claims (“John was the main creative force behind Sergeant Pepper”) and we dismiss those who make such claims without proof. We are still more demanding when claims are made on matters that are at least temporarily important (“Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction” being a notorious example).
Or is it, as I suspect, the mere fact that they’re saying it all? The strange truth is that questioning religion is still equated with the crossing of a cultural taboo — even (strangely) among agnostics.
We’ve had this discussion here before, but the “fundamental” difference bears repeating: Fundamentalists ask us to accept metaphysical claims without evidence; atheists ask us to question everything — even atheism.
Stuck Between Stations is starting to hit stride, though I haven’t written much for the site in the past couple of weeks – the technical and editorial workload is greater than expected. Some fun stuff planned though. Recently:
A Rehab Playlist for Amy Winehouse – Since soul diva Winehouse seems to think rehab would be too boring, Roger Moore offers a 12-step path to redemption. In song.
Water Walk With Me – Malcolm Humes on an amazing video find – John Cage performing on a 1960 TV game show.
Needle Drop: Pale Virgins and Scallywags – Benoit Baald and I try a blindfolded listening experiment similar to what Downbeat and other mags have done, except that we did it with iChat, and are able to provide the actual audio for readers. Process needs refining here, but could be a lot of fun.
Astral Days – Christian Crumlish at New Orleans JazzFest.
Bob the Builder – Roger on Bob Mould, who can now add the title “advice columnist” to the top of his punk rock resume.
Que es mas macho? Sea turtle egg, or Mexican wrestler? Millions of Mexican men believe eating sea turtle eggs will enhance their sexual potency – an unfortunate reality for endangered turtles like the Leatherbacks.
Wrestler supreme El Hijo del Santo (“Son of the Saint”) has been appearing in ads assuring his fans that he acquired his super wrestling powers with no help from turtle eggs. Now that’s a role model. Also in on the campaign is Mexican supermodel Dorismar.
The model appeared in print ads wearing a slinky black bikini alongside baby turtles scurrying across a beach. “My man doesn’t need sea turtle eggs, because he knows they don’t make him more potent,” reads the ad’s caption.
Brilliant tactic. I’m trying to imagine how similar campaigns might appear in other countries where species are threatened in part due to demand for animal parts with alleged aphrodisiac powers. Which super-hunks or glamour-pusses are going to stick up for the rightful owners of Chinese tiger penises, or African rhino horns?
Miles, throwing himself an “eight-est” birthday party in the living room, blocked off the area with green masking tape strung between sofa and stereo as if it were a crime scene. After much crumbling of chocolate bunny crackers, unexpectedly announced: “No one is allowed at my birthday party who doesn’t like the smell of cat food.” With that, he led me by the hand into the kitchen, where I obliged by getting down on my hands and knees and taking a deep whiff from Plato’s bowl.
“Too rich-smelling for me,” I reported. “But I do like the smell of skunk, if it’s not too close.”
“Well, then you’re not allowed at my party. Only people who like the smell of cat food are.”
Five minutes later he relented when he needed help re-assembling a Playmobil outboard motor. Thankfully I still serve some purpose around here.
News that the HD-DVD encryption algorithm has been cracked and published all over tarnation is a two-pronged story.
First, that the AACS’ vigilance in preventing HD-DVDs from being copied and openly traded is on its way towards spectacular defeat even while the technology is still in its infancy, battling with Blu-Ray for supremacy.
Second, that this has occurred in the era of Web 2.0 and user-generated content. Digg.com’s battle to prevent users from posting stories containing the algorithm was also a spectacular failure.
Digg’s attempt to weed out posts containing the algorithm turned into an endless game of Whack-A-Mole, despite the fact that Digg faced legal action from the AACS if they didn’t get the stories removed – action that could get Digg shut down. But Digg users (or at least a subset of them) apparently cared more about getting the algorithm widely published than they did about Digg getting nailed. Eventually, Digg creators threw up their hands.
“You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be,” [Digg's Kevin] Rose wrote … If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.
Looks like Google and Wordpress.com may also be busting similar takedown moves.
When you bake user-generated content features into your site, you stand the risk of users posting content that could be threatening to your very existence. So which way do you go? Allow the public to speak through the megaphone you built just for them? Or protect yourself? I think this could set a very bad precedent for traditional publications just now warming to the power of UGC.
Late to the party, just realized that Flickr provides an interface for “geotagging” photos — associating images or sets of images with points on the globe, overlaid on Yahoo! Maps. Here are a few of my sets in the context of their location on earth:
With more care and precision, you can get much more detailed, e.g. I could drag each of the Albany Bulb images to the exact spot on the bulb where the sculpture was found.
When White is Black relates the real life experiences of a mixed race family, who, despite significant Caucasian ancestry, lived as Negroes, due to the uniquely North American One-drop rule.
The site was developed by Martin’s daughter, who was a student in an XHTML+CSS class I just finished teaching, utilizing the shiny new skills she had learned. Nice job Lex!
At IT Conversations interesting discussion (podcast) with Mikko Hypponen, director of anti-virus research for F-Secure. Hypponen threw out two sets of numbers that seem to collide, but don’t.
1) Spammers consider a response rate of 0.001% to be a “good” email spam campaign.
2) 40% of Americans (and 60% of Brazilians) report having made a purchase as a result of a spam sales pitch at least once.
How to square the difference? Volume, volume, volume.
I confess to having bought something from a spam once (and only once): A targeted pitch for a T-shirt bearing a big retro “Shacker” logo. It appeared that the spammer in that case had blasted their message to shacker@everydomain.com. No matter that “shacker” in the marketer’s context referred to college students who sleep in a different dorm room every night — I had to have it.
What happens when you set two classic 
Hard to believe it will have been four years this June since our good friend 
Que es 
