Sustainability

Hi!

I have written about Sustainability before, on this blog. And it is a thin red line along the blog in its entirety. Hippie make-love-not-war kind of thing that so many people think is cute and corky. But I am not against war at all.

I advocate war for Sustainability.

In the Orwellian universe they use traditional, everlasting war to sustain the high product flow, by destroying goods in the war. The war is the consumer.

In our universe, the high rate of production is sustained also by destruction. 99 % of goods that are sold in the US, are wasted within 6 months. That's the nature of the goods, by design, because it makes economic sense to mass produce and ensure a steady flow of goods, by designing them to fail or fall out of fashion in a statistically predictiably way.

For some reason I like to save and squeeze out the most of things. I tend to prefer that over overindulgance, although I'm by no means living spartan.

What's great and fascinating to me as an engineer is nature allows you to create systems that are quasi-eternal. When looking at this on the extreme, we should be able to build things that repair themselves like living things, even huge buildings and process plants, performing their function of designed intent, and self-maintenance, solely driven by the sun, our energy source. Energy drives the repair job, as the mechanics of the system direct energy in that way intelligently, by design, or by progressive evolution of the system on its own, finding the optimal solution if given the conditions to do so. I could get a bit carried away on this field.

Let me just point you to a provocative (you're expected to object and discuss) video called the Story of Stuff, watch it here:
http://www.storyofstuff.com

Simon

walking music

Listen to this mp3 I made.


Outside my flat, there are several construction workers, hammering and listening to radio. You cannot hear the radio in my recording, but I imagine the music they're listening to going from their radio to my flat. Then eventually, the music enters your own little space, whereever you are :)

The song is Lars Winnerbäck - Ett sällsynt exemplar,
from his new album Tänk om jag ångrar mig och sen ångrar mig igen

Enjooyyyy :))

Scroll

Many of us, definitely me, really hate Microsoft Word for various reasons. One of them being the sense of lack of control. Often I get the impression that Word is telling ME what I should write, or sometimes it like an unruly kitten and doesn't listen or learn anything I tell it to do. One space here, fifteen spaces there. A shifting line, a new page, picture moved to the footer.

In many cases, I DO want Word to know things for me. Like, what the number of that figure should be, or, what the margins should be et cetera. LaTeX and LyX mostly solves this for me. LyX is nice to work in because it NEVER fucks up.

But this post isn't about Word or LaTeX. It's about document format. I think it's weird that we are still sending A4 papers, electronically, between computers. Sure, we are printing these papers very often, but we really shouldn't. At work, I find that some documents, reports or papers are nice to have physically, but there are so many documents I quickly read through, without needing to print.

I want to throw away A4.

What if page-by-page wasn't the standard of electronic documents? What if we found a format that would make use of the computer monitor in a way that A4 never could?

I don't think the computer is baked to zip through page by page. The problem with the computer interface and the document, is that it's lacking a physical connection. Yes, reading on LCD screens is not as comfortable as paper or electronic ink, but it is also not comfortable or natural to blink from one page to another page. The brain is struggling with discontinuous information and desperately seeking a coherent visual history when trying to read a Word or PDF document.

I think it's time to ditch the spatial separation of physical pages from electronic documents. Let's have ONE page. Let's have ONE SCROLL, with a finite but scalable height, and infinite length.

Despite years of effort, attempts to build an electronic intelligence that can mimic the awesome power of a brain have seen little success. And that might be simply because we were lacking the crucial electronic components - memristors.

So now we've found them, might a new era in artificial intelligence be at hand? The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency certainly thinks so.

Read the quoted article on New Scientist!

Wolfram Alpha

This is something I heard about a month ago or something, but now finally sat down and read what it was actually about. A new tool is evolving and launching on the net soon, by the makers of Mathematica (Wolfram).

It's called Wolfram Alpha and it's a self-proclaimed "computational knowledge engine". What does THAT mean? Well, imagine going to Alpha just like you would go to Google, to find some information. Unlike google, you're not necessarily interested in websites, you search for direct answers. One example?

Type "1.234345634" into Alpha and hit Enter. What kind of result would you expect? A website? That would be pretty useless, unless it is a number with a "famous" meaning. No, Alpha, would in this case completely invert the number, and give you functions and formulas that would generate that number.

Ok, that sounds like something Mathematica could do, cool, but not that interesting for everyone. More examples on Alpha input terms and their possible results:

Other diverse and noteworthy examples include "president of argentina in 1943," which resulted in Ramon S. Castillo; "tide NYC 11/6/2020" which displayed a graph of the tide in New York City that day; "15 flips 10 heads" which generated probability and distribution charts of such an event; "ISS" which displayed a map of the location of the International Space Station in real time; "1.343495843" which computed the possible formulas that give you that particular number; "a__n__g" which gave words that could fill in the blanks of a crossword puzzle (amending and atoning); "earthquakes" which generated a global map highlighting earthquake locations in the past 24 hours; "2 cups oj 1 slice cheddar cheese," which computed a synthesized nutrition label of the snack including vitamins and minerals; and "running 4 mph 30 minutes age 40 male 5'8" 160 lbs" which presented charts of calories, fat burned, heart rate, and race prediction times for different distances.

--physorg article www.physorg.com/news161024785.htm

Alpha is not open for use yet, and you shouldn't even expect it to do anything useful for you when it does arrive. Alpha is a research project, but what's cool is that this project will probably attract and focus the collective effort of creating... creating what?


INFORMATION LIKE YOU'VE NEVER SEEN BEFORE.

This is the revolution the internet is ripe for. The evolution of the computer and the internet now soon, finally, will interpret, understand and present everything you desire to know.

a normal distribution of apples and pears

It's O-Kay to go "WTF!?" by now.
Creative Commons license by Simon Simonsen!

Life creates conditions conducive to life

Life creates conditions conducive to life. It builds soil, it cleans air, it cleans water.

Janine Benyus

This amazing TED Talk with Janine Benyus shows us how nature still teaches us groundbreaking ideas, how to create high-tech materials and products which nature has evolved for æons. I am a wastewater engineer myself, so it kindof got to me :)