The Cloud beckons

No doubt, the cloud is now Prime Time, particularly when the Autodesk //Lab environment offers a plethora of cool (& free) tools to solve complex real world problems using the compute power of the cloud to do the job. Check this bad boy out, you will not be disappointed. :)

A July Morning

A sunny July morning is magical if one looks at the little things that make summer special. A very short clip showing why nature never disappoints.  

When doing this, I thought the players in this video have been doing this kind of work for nearly 140 million years, a timeframe approximately 250 times longer then the existence of us homo sapiens, something to consider as we continue to to pollute the home on which all life depends.

Sex as we know it...

The Red Queen responds: "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place"

This quote drives the Red Queen Hypothesis whereby coevolution in the form of parasites versus their pray may have brought about sex...


It seems we may have parasites to thank for the existence of sex as we know it. Indiana University biologists have found that, although sexual reproduction between two individuals is costly from an evolutionary perspective, it is favored over self-fertilization in the presence of coevolving parasites. Sex allows parents to produce offspring that are more resistant to the parasites, while self-fertilization dooms populations to extinction at the hands of their biological enemies.


The July 8 report in Science, "Running with the Red Queen: Host-Parasite Coevolution Selects for Biparental Sex," affirms the Red Queen hypothesis, an evolutionary theory who's name comes from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland text: "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place." The idea is that sexual reproduction via cross-fertilization keeps host populations one evolutionary step ahead of the parasites, which are coevolving to infect them. It is within this coevolutionary context that both hosts and parasites are running (evolving) as fast as they can just to stay in the same place.

"But I don't want to go among mad people," said Alice. "Oh, you can't help that," said the cat. "We're all mad here." - Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

Before Man

In the excellent New Scientist article, Vital giants: Why living seas need whales, researcher Steve Nicol eloquently explains why man must change current strategies in managing the ocean's resources before it's too late.

"They do so in at least three ways. The first is simply by mixing up ocean waters, which can return some nutrients to the waters above the thermocline. 


The second way in which animals can boost ocean productivity is by nutrient scavenging - feeding at depth and bringing nutrients back to the sunlit zone. Sperm whales, for instance, feed on squid and fish at great depths, and defecate at the surface. Models suggest that this recycling of deep material may well be significant for essential elements such as iron.


The third way in which animals may boost ocean productivity is by recycling nutrients within the sunlit zone. 


Whales produce buoyant plumes of faecal material that functions as liquid manure. Recent measurements of the iron content of the faeces of baleen whales by my team show that concentrations in whale faeces are at least 10 million times the background level in seawater. 

When factored in with the finding of animal populations in Korea's DMZ being much greater then when man was around makes one wonder what the world was like before us, when life operated at levels unable to be comprehended today, where original temperate forests routinely had trees 150' and higher as the norm and vast herds of buffalo and flocks of Morning Doves, among numerous other herding species, roamed the earth in numbers too vast to even contemplate.

"The de facto wildlife preserve encompasses 390 square miles of diverse terrain virtually untouched by human development for 55 years. Now, as this accidental Eden faces major development pressures, a growing contingent is pushing for its establishment as a transboundary nature park – which could also be a step toward peace between the two Koreas.


“This strip of land contains almost every type of ecosystem you can imagine,” says Alan Weisman, author of “The World Without Us.” “It has inadvertently become one of the most important wildlife conservation sites in the world.”

Makes one think doesn't it?

Agent Smith: I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague and we are the cure. 

The Future of Money... with caveats

As per mashable.com's informative article concerning mobile payment, PayPal may be right regarding the possible demise of the wallet in terms of how we pay for our stuff by 2014 if the article rings true regarding tech, smart-phones and the inevitable fact dollars are now bits able to be decimated to all parties equipped with the right hardware and connects to the web. Caveat: With digital currency, anonymity is but a fiction unlike the physical entity of cash.


PayPal seems to think so. The payments giant boldly predicts that the wallet will be dead by 2015. It’s putting its money where its mouth is: It recently acquired mobile payments provider Zong for $240 million.


PayPal isn’t the only one getting into the game though. Google recently launched Google Wallet, the search giant’s mobile payment system, and Visa recently made a strategic investment in Square, the mobile payments platform now worth more than $1.4 billion.

When reading this article, one player not mentioned is bitcoin, the possible disrupter of all things financial due to the fact there is no trusted 3rd party and it's already working on the net, able to be accessed on all platforms without problems using the free BC plugin. With bitcoin in play, the future of money gets really interesting if you know what I mean. To see BRTs take on BC, click here.

Note: Bitcoin took a quasi hacking hit but it will survive as the tech itself is sound.
"A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing." - Albert Camus

Finally

For years, BRT has stated that when efficient solar can be put into a cheap and elegant form factor able to be applied in endless ways, (roofs, windows etc., etc.) the tech will finally take off. Well, it seems the form factor issue has finally been resolved.

"A scientific advance in renewable energy which promises a revolution in the ease and cost of using solar cells, has been announced today. A new study shows that even when using very simple and inexpensive manufacturing methods - where flexible layers of material are deposited over large areas like cling-film - efficient solar cell structures can be made."

When combined with artificial photosynthesis being developed by MIT, Cal Tech and numerous others, the path to a viable sustainable future becomes possible.

Tech finds a way.

Questions, Questions :)

Any questions? :)  Happy 4th everyone.

Glimpses into a garden

The symbiotic relationship of insects to flowers cannot be overstated. This short clip is but a brief snapshot of this most fascinating world. Enjoy

Juice

Tech finds a way. Packing the Ions presages a new way to store energy and release it in ways thought to be impossible until now...

Gogotsi's team discovered you can increase the energy stored in a carbon supercapacitor dramatically by shrinking pores in the material to a seemingly impossible size—seemingly impossible because the pores were smaller than the solvent-covered electric charge-carriers that were supposed to fit within them. The team published its findings in the journal Science.


The mystery was not simply academic. Capacitors are an important technology that provides energy by holding an electrical charge. They have several advantages over traditional batteries—charging and discharging nearly instantaneously and recharging over and over again, almost indefinitely, without wearing out—but they also have drawbacks—most importantly, they hold far less energy.


An electric double-layer capacitor, or supercapacitor, represents an advance on the technology that allows for far greater energy density. While in traditional capacitors two metallic plates are separated by a nonconducting material known as a dielectric, in a supercapacitor an electrolyte is able to form an electric double layer with electrode materials that have very high surface areas.


As such, supercapacitors are able to achieve the same effect within a single material, as properties of the material divide it into separate layers with a very thin, nonconducting boundary. Because they can both forgo a bulky dielectric layer and make use of the carbon's nanoscale pores, supercapacitors are able to store far more energy than their traditional counterparts in a given volume. This technology could help increase the value of energy sources that are clean, but sporadic, meting out stored energy during downtimes such as night for a solar cell or calm days for a wind turbine.

In effect..."It uses graphene on a substrate and a polymer-gel electrolyte," Sumpter explained, "so that you produce a device that is fully transparent and flexible. You can wrap it around your finger, but it's still an energy storage device. So we've gone all the way from modeling electrons to making a functional device that you can hold in your hand."


Localized fabbing and energy production via flexible high efficiency/cheap solar combined with artificial photosynthesis (and storing this energy using this kind of tech) is key to moving civilization into a sustainable economy environment because the status quo is no longer viable even though the powers at be are trying keep the old bus going while the tires begin to fall off and the engine ceases to run. To see why staying the course is crazy, check out the world's debt and the state of the crumbling Eurozone to see, in part, why.


“Our senses enable us to perceive only a minute portion of the outside world.” - Nikola Tesla

On Foot

This evocative image Walking on 125th Street, created by Nicola Villa, brings to mind just how far out of touch we are when it comes to distance, something not even considered when driving to a store 6 miles away, something that would take  Josey Wales an hour  to cover (Clint's a biggie with me) as the average speed of a walking horse over distance is about  6 miles per hour thus confining Josey to a very small territory in which to mete out justice to the bad guys. (At a gallop, The Pony Express averaged nine mph over 25 mile stages.) If Josey lost his horse and was on foot, his "average walking speed is about 5 kilometres per hour (km/h), or about 3.1 miles per hour (mph)."

I write this after reading a long tract from Cluborlov, an excellent site created by an Russian engineer who, as Kurt Vonnegut would say, knows of such things regarding economic collapse, sailing and the dire consequences of running out of energy, something our society is reluctantly beginning to face as we move further into the 21st century. While I don't wholly agree with Orlov on his take regarding a dark future for civilization, (Tech has a way of changing things thank god) I greatly respect it as his argument is persuasive and nuanced, characteristics all to rare in this age of packaged information designed to entertain and divert in order to keep real news at bay while we watch American Idol and wait, with baited breath, to see if  NFL football will come to pass, two "important" events that have absolutely no impact on one's life save that of our being entertained while conveniently ignoring issues that do impact our lives, i.e.,  climate change, energy depletion  & fiscal/governmental meltdown.

"A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things." - Herman Melville