July 13, 2009

Sterling at Reboot

Shorter Bruce Sterling: Tyler Durden was right about the things you own.

June 15, 2009

The Planet and Its Hacks

A pro-environment, climate science editorial in the Wall Street Journal? It's probably a shock to them as well, but Jamais Cascio writes this week about the case for geoengineering. He argues that geoengineering--the process of intentionally altering the planet's climate to counteract global warming--is necessary to buy time for long-term adjustment plans, even though it will have unpredictable environmental and political side effects.

Of course, being the Wall Street Journal, the comments are a roiling hotbed of climate denialism. Reactions to Cascio's article include the implication that the WSJ is playing a prank on its readers by making up a San Francisco-based environmental futurist with a French first name, possibly at the behest of (I kid you not) George Soros. There are also gems like "I've spent most of my life on Planet Earth and venture out into the 'environment' almost every day. I have yet to notice any sort of crisis out there." Indeed: such compelling evidence will no doubt be collected in the IPCC's newest report, tentatively titled "My Back Yard: I Ain't Seen Nothin', Ya Crazy Hippies."

The irony of these comments is that they're the reason that geoengineering is even being considered in the first place. As Cascio writes, it has moved from the fringes to the semi-mainstream simply because policy-makers have failed to respond strongly to global warming, even as the problem has worsened (most recently, a study at MIT found that warming could reach double the levels previously thought over the next century). And a significant cause of the sluggishness on the part of governments is the hue and cry from denialists who have fought tooth and nail against climate action.

But perhaps, if nothing else, this is the reason to get geoengineering out into the public debate: it moves the conversation forward. Compared to, say, dumping millions of tons of sulfur into the atmosphere as a cooling mechanism, a carbon cap and trade scheme looks a lot more moderate--and hopefully, a lot more achievable.

February 12, 2009

Happy Birthday, Chuck

[more]

"If I were to given an award for the single best idea anyone has ever had, I'd give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton and Einstein and everyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose within the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law. But it is not just a wonderful scientific idea. It is a dangerous idea."

--Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea

November 24, 2008

Should Be

In the spirit of Bloodrayne, what better way to honor the intellectual brutality of Expelled (or as I like to call it, "Win Ben Stein's Last Shred of Dignity!") than to liveblog the wretched thing. Luckily, since it's streamable from Netflix, no currencies were harmed in the making of this production.

Timecode	Comments
0:00	We begin, incredibly enough, with a string quartet covering Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower." I hope it's not Apocalyptica doing the cover. I used to be ironically amused by those guys.
0:01	The credits are all integrated into footage of what looks like concentration camps or prisons being constructed. This is already less subtle than Uwe Boll, which is quite a feat.
0:03	The opening scene is almost like a spoof of An Inconvenient Truth: Ben Stein backstage, emerging to deliver a lecture on Intelligent Design, intercut with footage of prominent scientists (Hey! PZ Myers!) dismissing ID. Stein immediately compares ID to freedom and Margin Luther King Jr. I think the scientists are ahead, particularly since the introduction for the speech (however quickly cut away) is known meth-abusing hypocrite Ted Haggard.
0:06	Expelled introduces us to Dr. Richard Sternberg, who says he wrote a paper that mentioned ID, and he was immediately called a terrorist. I am conditioned by the campaign season to immediately think of William Ayers.
0:09	Hey, they're ragging on George Mason University, my alma mater! It's pretty funny to accuse GMU of being a crazy left-wing witch-hunt, since the university is one of the biggest proponents of radical libertarian and supply-side economics in the world, to the point where it has been called by some "The Chicago of Virginia." But then, clearly a firm grasp of reality is not going to be a feature of the next hour.
0:12	During its footage of academics claiming to have been fired for whispering the words "intelligent design" while alone in their office, the editors continue to intercut "humorous" black and white file footage. One of these is from a Planet of the Apes movie, which seems a little funny in a movie about how God shaped evolution. Why did He kill off people in favor of those damned, dirty apes? Inquiring minds want to know.
0:15	To protect the creationist academics still somehow employed, they do that back-lit silhouette schtick. Whenever people do this, I always think of old Frosted Flakes commercials, which is a source of some amusement.
0:17	Unsurprisingly, even when severely edited, the actual scientists being interviewed seem quite a bit more serious than Ben Stein.
0:18	You know, guys, it's probably not helping your case to play "Spirit in the Sky" over a montage of Stein's man-in-the-street act.
0:21	Or "Personal Jesus" during a visit to Biola University, formerly named "Bible College."
0:22	"Evolution is a funny word," says the ID professor. "It can mean many things." Yes, indeed. If only we had a real definition for scientific words, instead of just a vague hand-waving motion.
0:25	The idea so far is that Ben Stein pretends to be cynical about what he encounters, only to be convinced by them after a few minutes of dialog. But it's funny that his objections still seem valid after that conversation--they're never actually refuted, just dismissed via non sequitor. As rhetorical devices go, it's not knocking me out.
0:29	Dr. Berlinksi asks whether Darwinism is even clear enough to be examined. After all, he says, it's just biology, which is less accurate than physics, which is less accurate than math! And who likes math, right? Case closed!
0:32	More ironic archive footage. Seriously getting old.
0:34	Dr. Wells insists that micro-evolution is valid, but Darwin overstepped his bounds when he talked about the "origin of species." What actually caused the origin of life? Is it God? The suspense is killing me. Incidentally, I should probably start putting the "Dr." in quotes for these quacks.
0:36	It's the argument from complexity! No mention is made of the enormous scale of time and space involved in evolution. After all, you can't do cute cartoons comparing evolution to slot machines if you want to actually get into the statistics.
0:38	Stein plays word-association with ID advocates: if Darwin thought a cell was a Buick/mud hut/cell, now it's like a Galaxy/Saturn 5/whole world. How this relates to evolution, I'm not really sure. Are they trying to disprove cells? I hear Darwin used pen and paper instead of a computer, so does math no longer exist? So much for "Dr." Berlinski's academic snobbery. Word association is a fun game to play, though. You can do it at home: if Darwin thought the cell was X, we now know that it's actually more like Y (my answers: quiche/nuclear winter).
0:40	Here's the infamous graphic that the film-makers cribbed from Harvard. It's very pretty, albeit completely random. A description, by the way, that's not far from the whole move. It's like Michael Moore filtered through Family Guy.
0:43	In the same sentence, they just implied that science is a multi-billion dollar business, then called evolutionary biologists "good comrades." I kid you not.
0:49	And now we blame the media. A clip of a news anchor pointing out, correctly, that there's not a single peer-reviewed paper supporting ID. Unless you already hate the media, this doesn't strike me as a very telling point. A couple of journalists claim that since writing about the topic, their articles have been closely scrutinized. And people say the Internet is killing newspapers.
0:53	You have to wonder, if ID isn't actually creationism, why its advocates seem so repulsed by Inherit the Wind.
0:58	The film digresses into a discussion of atheist and religious scientists. This is transparently beside the point.
1:01	Will Provine of Cornell gives us a "disturbing" view of Darwinism. What is it? Well, he'd never heard of evolution growing up in Tennessee, and when he begin learning biology in college, he challenged the professor. Yet, unable to find any flaw in the science, he began to doubt the existence of God. Provine has a tumor, and insists that he doesn't hold any regrets about being an atheist in this particular foxhole. Instead, he wants to die cleanly instead of suffering. To be honest, it's kind of moving, but not the way Stein probably wants. Again, if your initial thesis is that ID isn't creationism, it's probably not too smart to claim that atheism is the worst possible outcome of evolutionary science.
1:04	PZ Myers says, quite genially, that he'd like religion to be "something fun that people get together and do on the weekends." I understand why that's supposed to be terrifying, but it still just seems kind of comical instead.
1:05	GODWIN'S LAW VIOLATION. By all rights, I can stop typing now and no-one will hold it against me.
1:11	"I wanted to explore this connection further, so I met with the author of 'From Darwin to Hitler.'" I'm beginning to suspect that this is really an elaborate joke, particularly when said author directly compares Planned Parenthood to eugenics.
1:11, cont'd.	My Internet connection is actively trying to stop me from watching this movie. Even Comcast hates Expelled.
1:14	Can Evil sometimes be rationalized as science? Stein asks. "I know Darwinism doesn't automatically equate to Nazism," he notes, letting it go without said that he's implied exactly that (and sometimes explicitly stated it) for the past 20 minutes.
1:19	For six minutes, Stein just tours Darwin's home and tries to look profound. It comes off more as sleepy.
1:21	Note should be taken: the cinematography of this is honestly not bad. It's derivative, schlocky, and intellectually shoddy, but it's not cheap-looking. EDIT: Someone really should have told Stein not to cut his hair halfway through, though, because it's a jarring continuity error.
1:25	In his attempt to confront authority, Stein is the world's worst Michael Moore impersonator. His idea of subversion is to gently interview a few spokespeople, and then throw up his hands and go back to his pet experts. Come on, man! At least march around in a mitochondria costume or something!
1:27	The clips of Dawkins being prepared for an interview, obviously by the film's own staff, is kind of an odd rhetorical trick. Are we supposed to believe that he's some kind of prima donna? Stein then asks him to put a number on the likelihood of God existing, and then attacks him for not having an exact figure. Begging the question doesn't begin to describe this.
1:31	Dawkins explains that even if mankind was created by a higher intelligence, something would have to have created that power. This is paraphrased as "Dawkins is okay with some forms of ID, just not the religious ones." No, not really.
1:33	Back to the lecture hall. I wonder if we'll get another shot of Pastor Ted? Nope. But there is a comparison between ID and the fall of the Berlin Wall, complete with copious file footage. Also, a shot of Ronald Reagan. Stein recieves a standing ovation from his staged auditorium of listeners.
1:36	The film closes with Stein asking if anyone will remain fighting for ID if individuals don't stand up for it. "Anyone? Anyone?" It's kind of sad to be reminded that the man's entire career is basically one long Ferris Bueller joke.

November 18, 2008

A Golden Eternal Bore

Man, I really want to be the kind of person who enjoyed reading Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach. It's been recommended by some really smart people, and Hofstadter himself seems like a very smart, agreeable person. The thing won a Pulitzer, for pity's sake. I should be eating it up. I feel bad about hating it. But I can't help it.

GEB claims, in an introduction that is both wry and impossibly self-congratulatory, to be a "fugue" tying together music, art, and math in an examination of how the mind works, and how AI could be designed. Hofstadter writes that he felt the need to add an introduction explaining the book's purpose because so many people had gotten it wrong. Someone with less investment in the topic should have maybe taken that as a hint. He also says that the book originally started as a pamphlet and simply grew and grew over the years--well, so does cancer. Thing is, these two problems are related: if people have trouble understanding that your 800+ page book isn't really about math and Bach, maybe you should consider editing out the two-thirds of it that are a crash-course in number theory.

Yeah, I'm a little bitter about it. Like I said, I feel bad--like I'm not living up to my potential by raving about the book. But fundamentally, this is a work for people who find themselves fascinated by the question "is math true?" And like many pragmatists, I think that question's basically a waste of time: better to ask "does math work? Yes? Okay then." Throwing a bunch of Zen into the mix does not help me take it seriously.

And the dialogs--sweet mother of mercy, the dialogs. For those who've never picked up a copy, Hofstadter precedes each explanatory chapter with a short, "witty" conversation, usually between Achilles and the Tortoise (it's an extended riff on a piece by Lewis Carroll). These are exactly as dreadful as they sound: careening wildly between pedantic and a math geek's idea of whimsical, their only saving grace is that they still look modest compared to Ray Kurzweil's ego-boosting appropriation of secretly-transhumanist historical figures (that said, what doesn't?).

But now I'm just being mean. I don't like GEB, but I think it needs to be put in context. Mentally, it gets shelved next to the Illuminatus trilogy or Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance--books written by well-meaning hippies trying to locate Big Ideas for the general public through their own personal eccentricities. I even understand the urge--isn't that what many bloggers sometimes find themselves trying to be? I know I do. But on a blog, I think it's possible to forgive the occassional lapse into feigned profundity (sorry, readers!). It's a bit harder to swallow when it's a $20 tome that's as thick as the Arlington phone book.

September 25, 2008

End of Line

Of all the futurism scenarios, the one I like best is the "linear future" idea. You don't hear much about it, comparatively, because it's not as sexy as tech utopianism (we'll all have robot iPods!) and the singularity (we'll all be robot iPods!), but I think it leaves us better off in a quieter, less robotic way.

The idea of the linear future is briefly touched upon in a talk Charlie Stross gave to a tech consulting group, which he later posted up as "Shaping the Future." In that speech, he purposefully ignores a whole host of futurisms, like bioengineering or nanotech (the latter of which, of course, has so far been almost all smoke and mirrors), in order to talk about how we percieve technological progress:

Around 1950, everyone tended to look at what the future held in terms of improvements in transportation speed.

But as we know now, that wasn't where the big improvements were going to come from. The automation of information systems just weren't on the map, other than in the crudest sense - punched card sorting and collating machines and desktop calculators.

We can plot a graph of computing power against time that, prior to 1900, looks remarkably similar to the graph of maximum speed against time. Basically it's a flat line from prehistory up to the invention, in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, of the first mechanical calculating machines. It gradually rises as mechanical calculators become more sophisticated, then in the late 1930s and 1940s it starts to rise steeply. From 1960 onwards, with the transition to solid state digital electronics, it's been necessary to switch to a logarithmic scale to even keep sight of this graph.

It's worth noting that the complexity of the problems we can solve with computers has not risen as rapidly as their performance would suggest to a naive bystander. This is largely because interesting problems tend to be complex, and computational complexity rarely scales linearly with the number of inputs; we haven't seen the same breakthroughs in the theory of algorithmics that we've seen in the engineering practicalities of building incrementally faster machines.

...

The cultural picture in computing today therefore looks much as it did in transportation technology in the 1930s - everything tomorrow is going to be wildly faster than it is today, let alone yesterday. And this progress has been running for long enough that it's seeped into the public consciousness. In the 1920s, boys often wanted to grow up to be steam locomotive engineers; politicians and publicists in the 1930s talked about "air-mindedness" as the key to future prosperity. In the 1990s it was software engineers and in the current decade it's the politics of internet governance.

All of this is irrelevant. Because computers and microprocessors aren't the future. They're yesterday's future, and tomorrow will be about something else.

Now, Stross is ambivalent about that future. He mentions the idea of the "end of progress," which he credits to Canadian writer Karl Schroeder. The end of progress is the idea that we'll one day answer all the big questions of science, and the rest will be either details or physically impossible to test. It's the anti-Singularity. On the other hand, Stross calls bioengineering the big elephant in the room, and clearly has high hopes for it as a revolutionary technology.

And he might be right about the latter. Still, I find it interesting that in the same discussion where he points out that the Singularity is not necessarily some sort of total paradigm shift, he still insists that we'll find it difficult to grasp the future. Stross is a science fiction writer and so he's got some investment in being able to pitch exciting, disorienting new worlds. But is the future really a dividing line that you can't understand until it's been crossed? I have my doubts.

The classic example of future shock is a medieval peasant confronted with an advanced artifact like an airplane or a computer. And we laugh at the idea of some filthy ape pawing at the controls, driving the plane off a cliff or cowering in fear when Youtube plays the Dramatic Chipmunk. This is, I'd submit, at best smug, and at worst bizarrely classist. It assumes that we are much smarter and more adaptable than our forebears, even though relatively few of us modern sophisticates can actually fly a plane or program a computer.

Being chauvinistic about our current moment in time is kind of comforting to us. It's the kind of rationalizing you do when you've got buyer's remorse over a slightly-underwhelming purchase, because you don't want to admit that it hasn't made you a better person. "2008 is awesome," you say weakly. "You primitive screwheads from 2006 couldn't even imagine how great we are in 2008. Don't even try!" And in turn, the same way that we lust after shiny products, we shop frantically for the biggest, best futures. "The Singularity is going to be awesome," we yell. "I mean, it's so good, you can't even imagine what it's like until you've got it. I can't wait!"

But maybe we are not as incomprehensible to previous eras as we think we are. I often feel that if you could actually bring a 16th century peasant into modern times, explain things carefully, and set them loose, they'd have a Facebook account and a Gmail address within the month. Within two, they'd be complaining about the iPhone App Store restrictions. Don't get me wrong--information technology and the cloud have been transformative technologies that have changed how we structure our society and our culture. But they are not, in and of themselves, mind-bogglingly hard to understand. If nothing else, this should be obvious from the metaphors we use to describe them: libraries, icons, highways, forums, etc.

The past is just a foreign country, and we are Ugly Americans. When it comes to the future, we simply switch roles and are filled with envy for the land of opportunity across the ocean of time.

So let's say we put aside our prejudices and our rationalizations, and we assume that the future--while possibly structured culturally with larger or smaller degrees of openness--is going to be technologically about the same (i.e., it will at least be recognizable). The implications of this futurism are, to me, a lot more interesting than ones that have nanotech teleporters and warp drives, because they are implications we can more directly act on today. Anticipation of a future where there are magic fuel sources and unforeseen computational trends, for example, has been highly detrimental to taking action on climate change. We don't need to worry about the consequences of our technology, the argument goes, because we will invent something to solve those problems before they kill us. This theory is silent on what those technologies are or what they will do, because in a paradigm-based view of the future, it's conceptually impossible to predict them until they get here. Needless to say, such an approach is unhelpful.

We don't need a futurism model that both promises the world and denies that we can see a pathway there. We need a model that recognizes that the problems we face today aren't going to vanish tomorrow in a blaze of digital deus ex machina. So that's why I like this idea that technology ten or a hundred years from now will be largely the same as it is today, with a few tweaks. Far from being depressing, it gives us hope and direction: how do we make this the best possible present, and thus the best possible future? Imagine that your cell phone and your computer will be slightly more powerful, but will never be substantially different or able to solve radically different problems. If they won't be improved beyond a certain set of features, why not concentrate on their sustainability or their equality of distribution, both of which could stand to see some serious improvement?

I think we are starting to see aspects of linear future thinking emerge. Sites like Etsy and Make represent a growing craft/DIY movement based around improving and adapting what you've already got, instead of racing to invent something new. The One Laptop Per Child program may be a grave misstep educationally, but some of the ideas behind its technological innovation--a laptop that's durable, easily servicable, and less ecologically hazardous--are similar. All of these are a practical, hacky kind of futurism. They say "I'm not waiting around for the future. I already live there, and I always have."

August 15, 2008

Programmer Math

There's a line in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon where one of the main characters, a mathematician and programmer, is asked if he is good with numbers. "I'm good with math," he replies. "Mathematicians stay away from actual, specific numbers as much as possible. We like to talk about numbers without actually exposing ourselves to them."

To most people, math and numbers are the same thing, which is unfortunate. Certain personality types respond well to numbers--one of my ex-girlfriends, a CPA, derived a kind of warm satisfaction from seeing columns upon columns of financial figures--but for the rest of us they are at best an eye-crossing source of confusion, and at worst a harbinger of bad news: taxes, checkbook balances, bills, etc.

Perhaps I'm an outlier (Cue cries of "freak!"), but I'm finding that while I personally don't care for numbers, I really enjoy math. I've learned (or re-learned) more math in the last two months of coding than I picked up through all of college (granted, I majored in the softer bits of Communication, and had taken all of the math courses available at my high school). This late education has actually been a lot of fun.

Here are a few math functions that I've either picked up, picked up again, or had to explain to coworkers who have forgotten even more of their algebra classes than I had:

• Modulo: You already know what modulo is, although you may not know that you know. Everybody learns it in elementary school. The modulo is better known as the remainder, or the amount left over after performing division. Apparently, it gets its new name from modular arithmetic, a system developed by Carl Gauss in the early 1800s, where numbers loop back around to zero when they pass a certain value. Which, if you think about it, is basically what the remainder does: it resets to zero each time division results in a whole number. Since programmers tend to care more about referencing 19th century research papers than being accessible, we're stuck calling it "modulo" instead of "remainder." I remember hating remainders in elementary school, because a remainder meant you weren't done with the problem--we had to keep dividing them into smaller and smaller decimal places. But remainders are actually really useful in their own right, because they let you cycle through a set of numbers using only addition and subtraction.
• Absolute values: I was really surprised when one of our graphic artists didn't remember absolute value--the distance of any given number from zero. Obviously, for positive numbers, the value and the absolute value are the same. But for negative numbers, the absolute value removes the sign. This is surprisingly handy. I've been using it to test whether or not a given arithmetic operation changes the sign between the input and output, for a hobby project.
• Sigma notation: Man, this is a scary one. I avoided learning about sigma notation for years, but it's actually not that frightening in reality. Sigma notation is just a shorthand for adding an arbitrary number of equations over a range of values. The value below the "broken E" is where your variable starts. The value above is when you stop. And the equation to the right is what you do over and over again, adding each result to all the previous results, until you hit the stop condition. I'm mostly excited about it because I can finally express my multiple-monitor-productivity equation: I figure that I'm 1/n times more productive for each additional monitor. So my second monitor makes me 50% more productive (1/1 + 1/2), while a third takes me up to 183% of normal productivity (1/1 + 1/2 + 1/3). Finally, I can adequately express this for n number of monitors! ("Freak!")
• Sine and cosine: These are, I think, always explained very badly in geometry classes, at least for the applications in which I've used them 99% of the time. Sine and cosine are just the y and x values of a point on a circle for x number of radians. Getting into the proof and the explanation of how they work requires a lot of triangles, but you don't actually need to know that part to use them. So basically, yeah: y and x values on a circle. Can't draw a circle--or in my case, animate pictures going around in a circle--without these guys.

I know, this all sounds really dorky. But what I'm enjoying about all this math is that it's almost like a puzzle to solve: I've got x input, and need to end up with y output. How do I get one to become the other? All the different mathematical principles and operations are like boxes that I can hook together, like the modulation matrix of a synthesizer, until they spit out what I want. By focusing more on the operation and less on the numbers, I'm having a lot more fun than I thought I would.

July 16, 2008

Greenpunk

There are really few USB devices that are more fun to plug in and start pounding on than the Korg PadKontrol. It's a big square grid of rubber pads that light up when you hit them, providing both tactile and visual sensations. Even if it weren't also a versatile MIDI controller, the PadKontrol would still be good for a few moments of pointless glee. It's enough to make a person wonder why using a computer can't always be that enjoyable.

Synth makers, particularly the high-end ones, know that the physical feel and feedback of an interface is important. That's why most of them come with lots of knobs and buttons. Even on my Micron, which is mostly metal and has only four knobs and a pitch wheel, those elements are made out of easily-grabbable materials that are fun to play with. Companies like Nord and Moog have made their reputations with lots of responsive controls and classy wooden cases. They do this because they know that musicians incorporate the physical feel of an instrument into the experience--those sensations and limitations are part of what makes us love the act of playing music, even when it's on a keyboard.

It's less common, I think, to find a computer or consumer electronics manufacturer doing the same kind of thing. Apple's current designs, which tend to set the trends, are almost all smooth metal or plastic lozenges--some like them, I find them chilly. I love my Thinkpad's carbon-fiber finish and excellent keyboard, but its design alternates between Japanese bento box (lid closed) and Soviet tank (lid open). Cell phones have trended toward increasingly less tactile response, with slick metal/plastic cases and shallow buttons or flat touchscreens. Everything seems to be headed away from softer, natural materials and real physical character.

I think clearly there's a desire for that kind of character--the fashion of steampunk gadgetry indicates as much. I'm sympathethic to this quote from steampunk designer Alan Rorie at Make:

I would spend weeks and months working on my thesis and the result would be some bit of data that only existed on the computer and in the mind of my peers. I realized that I needed to create real objects, things and stuff that existed in the world.

I've felt the same way for a long time, which is why I didn't aim to become a programmer out of college--my experiences with it seemed unsatisfyingly intangible. But the more I look at these homemade victoriana, with its focus on brass and steel, the more I think it's a shame, frankly, that this particular fad has seized the imaginations of crafty techies. I'm not a back-to-nature kind of guy, but it seems like a more interesting set of challenges and materials would be to create sustainable electronics from renewable resources: wood, bamboo, glass, and light metals. Call it "greenpunk," if you will.

Some manufacturers have started putting these kinds of techniques to work. Fujitsu recently showed a concept for a wood-shelled laptop that incorporates its own carrying case into the frame. Nokia, meanwhile, has continued its green agenda with its own concept: a phone called the Remade constructed almost entirely from recycled materials. These are a start, and they are hopefully part of a trend toward more environmentally-friendly engineering, but they are focused primarily on making the same designs from new materials.

More interesting things--things which are identifiably "greenpunk" just as valves and rods are signifiers of steampunk--will happen when those materials begin serve as inspiration, and manufacturers begin to build with these kinds of aesthetics in mind, creating devices that are enjoyable to touch and use as much as they are currently fun to watch and interact with. Perhaps the best illustration of this goal is an excerpt from Idoru, by the always prescient William Gibson:

"I like your computer," she said. "It looks like it was made by Indians or something."

Chia looked down at her Sandbenders. Turned off the red switch. "Coral," she said. "These are turquoise. The ones that look like ivory are the inside of a kind of nut. Renewable."

"The rest is silver?"

"Aluminum," Chia said. "They melt old cans they dig up on the beach, cast it in sand molds. These panels are micarta. That's linen with this resin in it."

[...]

"It started with a woman who was an interface designer," Chia said, glad to change the subject. "Her husband was a jeweller, and he'd died of that nerve-attenuation thing, before they saw how to fix it. But he'd been a big green, too, and he hated the way consumer electronics were made, a couple of little chips and boards inside these plastic shells. The shells were just point-of-purchase eye-candy, he said, made to wind up in the landfill if nobody recycled it, and usually nobody did. So, before he got sick, he used to tear up her hardware, the designer's, and put the real parts into cases he'd make in his shop. Say he'd make a solid bronze case for a minidisk unit, ebony inlays, carve the control surfaces out of fossil ivory, turquoise, rock crystal. It weighed more, sure, but it turned out a lot of people liked that, like they had their music or their memory, whatever, in something that felt like it was there... And people liked touching all that stuff: metal, a smooth stone..."

July 1, 2008

Cultured

Shorter Conservapedia: We don't really understand this whole "evidence" thing.

June 30, 2008

The Mail Must Get Through

Via a discussion by Ezra Klein, Cogitamus figures out the comparison in cost between Netflix by mail and by broadband. Hint: It's still cheaper to send DVDs by mail than it is to download them. It's not that Netflix's Watch Instantly service is a bad idea (when Comcast lets it through, I quite like it), but it's not obviously less expensive than the physical alternative.

Nor is it necessarily that much more environmentally friendly, which is another counterintuitive result. I got curious about this recently--after getting the Kindle, I was surprised to see that I was still often ordering physical boxes from Amazon, either for books that aren't available digitally or other items like games and music. But from what I've been able to find googling around*, the carbon impact from shopping online (or shipping products a la Netflix) may be less severe than traditional shopping models. And the reason is simply that those deliveries are often folded in with mail trucks that will run anyway, or UPS trucks that take trips along planned routes.

The packaging, on the other hand, is not nearly so harmless. Online shopping obviously leaves behind a trail of cardboard boxes and plastic wrapping. Amazon at least uses relatively little packaging, probably in an attempt to save weight. But this can always get better, and those materials can often be recycled.

* Google is, as always, not a substitute for someone who actually knows what they are talking about. But hopefully I'm smart enough to filter out the wackos.

Future - Present - Past