Wednesday, May 20. 2009Bruce Sterling's The Caryatids: A ReviewPity those science fiction writers who adapt too slowly: many labor with tools invented for a 1950s version of the genre that no longer makes sense; they're still dreaming heroic rocketcar dreams when the future is scrambling towards carbon-free distributed car-sharing for Indian slums. Nothing decays faster than an old future, and most writers are lucky to find one unique vision of how things might be, much less find a new one when their first wears out. Bruce Sterling, though, is not most writers. He seems to take joy in churning through not just new scenarios for his ideas, but whole new futures about which to think. It's a pretty wild thing to be on top of your game for 30 years, especially when your game is staying tapped into the zeitgeist. (He is also a good friend of this site, Ally #1 as we call him, having run the Viridian list which was one of the inspirations for our founding, and having written the introduction to our first book.) Of course, Bruce's secret is that, like all good science fiction writers, futurists and strategy gurus, he isn't predicting the future, he's predicting the present. He's using dramatic extrapolations of hidden forces at work today to build a future that magnifies those forces into ideas we can wrestle with. So it should perhaps come as no surprise that Bruce's latest novel The Caryatids pumps some very powerful forces up into cinematic size -- forces that most of us are just still beginning to understand. The basic plot of The Caryatids doesn't twist too much: seven test-tube siblings, born to a renegade Serbian scientist, are scattered to the winds and struggle to find meaning and purpose in a world that, in 2060, has plunged deep into crisis. That crisis is barely kept from becoming an apocalypse by three competing global power blocs -- the networked, emergent Acquis, the wired, best-practicing Dispensation, and the last nation-state, China -- and the sisters line up on opposite sides. Mayhem arrives as expected, including pop-stardom empire-building, Antarctic terraforming, archaeological microbiology, Chinese bubble ecospheres and desert firefights. That's all well and good. But where Bruce shines here is in tapping directly into two of the largest emerging trends on our planet, which remain nonetheless obscure to most people: what we might call the atmospheric singularity and the social singularity. The future here, takes place on a planet that has erupted into ecological chaos (of a sort that might be ripped fresh from the pages of the latest panicked scientific papers on climate, oceans and biodiversity -- the Earth, seen from space, reveals "its tainted skies, its spreading deserts, and its long romantic plumes of burning forests."), among people who have swallowed a whole new generation of social technologies, and grown new cultures to match. As such, one of the most riveting aspects of this terrific story is, oddly enough, the competition between completely different sets of social responses to a global ecological crisis. This is disaster-recovery fiction, and it rocks: "The Acquis were global revolutionaries. They got results in the world. They did some strange things, yes -- but they never stopped trying. ...The wounded island was healing before their eyes. Innovation was coming thick and fast, amazing insights, new services, new techniques. Transformations were bursting from her little island that were fit to transform the world." or "Order, unlike war, required unglamorous skills such as political savvy, business sense, and rugged logistics. Restoring order required a crisp, succinct articulation of the big picture and why one's efforts mattered in that regard. It required a tremendous knowledge of details. It needed the patience to build a long-lasting, big-scale enterprise that would not collpase instantly from guerilla attacks. And it needed a cold-blooded ability to make firm choices among disgusting alternatives." Much of the book is about how people in the worst of situations can connect to something hopeful, something worth striving for, some sort of legacy to give themselves over to. It's a Mother Courage sort of future, but one with technological lightning in its fists and a black sense of humor ("What's small, dark and knocking at the door? ...The future of humanity."). The Caryatids is my favorite of Bruce's novels since Holy Fire, and frankly one of the best science fiction books I've read in years. It's a book redolent with not only the future, but the concerns of a particular kind of future that is very much of interest to those of us engaged with worldchanging work. "Los Angeles was a crowded, polyglot mess of a place, trapped between a killer desert and a rising ocean. The city of Los Angeles had blown more climate-wrecking fumes out of its tailpipes than most nations. If there were any justice in the global mayhem of Extinction 6.0, Los Angeles should have been the first place to die: the first city in the world to drown, convulse, starve, riot, black out, and burn right to the ground. Yet there was no justice in the climate crisis. Not one bit of justice. The climate crisis was not concerned with justice: it was about poverty, stench, hunger, floods, fires, thirst, plague and riots. So, although Los Angeles did burn in many places -- Los Angeles had always burned, in many places -- Los Angeles grew much faster than it burned. If this tormented world had a world capital, this was it." Catastrophe is not the end. Unless you are a monster, the future we've inherited will break your heart. But broken hearts can be mended; life goes on, and when it does, a fierce beauty is sometimes born. The world, when all is said, is always remade by broken people who refuse hopelessness, who refuse to be overcome with sorrow, who refuse to pass on that which broke them. As we come to grips with the awful fact that we are already committing ourselves to centuries of crisis, loss and burning, we can hew close to the knowledge that while disaster is our inheritance, transcendence can yet still be our legacy. We are all Caryatids now, and we can all dare to hope for the best. Via WorldChanging
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Culture & society, Sustainability
at
10:25
Defined tags for this entry: books, culture & society, fiction, science & technology, sustainability, thinkers
Wednesday, May 13. 2009GREEN meets BIG: Proposals for Iconic SustainabilityDynamic Architecture's Dynamic Tower, Dubai Rad Nature's Sunshine Tower, Los Angeles There is no question that iconic design plays a significant role in the architecture discipline these days. Countless cities around the world are amassing billions of dollars for the design and construction of buildings that function first and foremost as representations of high-profile, sought-after identities. For the most part, these iconic buildings disregard energy issues, because they affect the bottom-line. Contrary to this convention, however, a number architecture firms are now incorporating energy issues into the design of iconic structures. This means for example that the energy used to run the building is carbon-neutral with the help of so-called carbon credits, or that movement sensors are installed to automatically turn of lights. Even names like Hadid and Van Berkel are being associated with sustainable design (see our previous post by Chu-ism). These examples are somewhat limited, but in a couple of cases the influence of energy has engendered unique, never-before-seen architecture. For the least likely of cities, Dubai and Los Angeles, Dynamic Architecture and Rad Nature Architecture Office have proposed buildings that are both iconic shapes and high-tech power plants.
Dynamic Architecture, headed by an elderly Israeli architect, is finalizing building permits for its Dynamic Tower in Dubai, UAE. Like other Dubai towers, its shape shouts for attention. The tower is made up of prefabricated floors that spin around a central utilities core, making the effect of a spiraling, glistening form. The firm argues that nearly every aspect of the structure is groundbreaking (see for yourself), from the prefabrication to the level of luxury. Let's delve closer into the energy aspects of the tower.
Wind turbines and solar panels are tucked between and above each floor, respectively. The idea is that as the floors rotate, some portion of the solar panels are constantly in direct sunlight. However, one sees that there is only significant sunlight exposure when all the floors are misaligned (see far right on top image). Even in this arrangement, the shadows from upper floors will surely reduce the actual radiation received.
It is planned that a giant wind turbine is sandwiched between each pair of floors, but they are actually absent from the building renderings. As an intermittent source of power, it seems counterproductive to gather kinetic energy from wind only to use that energy to make the building appear to move in the wind. The Dynamic Tower is spinning in circles: green does not meet big.
Rad Nature Architecture Office, founded in New York by Dong Ping Wong, a former architect at REX, proposes that architecture and energy must be considered together. A number of the office's projects stem from the design process that REX is known for: bold and clear diagrams that explain exciting building forms. In Rad Nature's case, these diagrams depict the energy consequences of careful spatial compositions, rather than arranging program blocks.
The Sunshine Tower is a solar power-generating skyscraper. It is an optimistically perverse interpretation of the building type, which is everything but energy-efficient. Rather than raising it's profile vertically, the housing tower is segmented into smaller towers that lean on each other, multiplying the surface exposure for photovoltaics. With PV panels oriented in every direction (even north?), it may be possible to generate enough electricity for the entire tower or even a surplus: green meets big.
The Sunshine Tower prompts us ask more of icons and architecture in general. If even a skyscraper can be energy-productive why can't every other building?
For those interested in low-energy high-rises, I recommend checking out the following, albeit less radical, architecture firms:
And for some less practical ideas:
Upcoming topics: The architectural program and urban waste
----- Via Jargon, etc. Personal comment:
Intéressant de voir que le développement durable engendrera également la recherche de formes nouvelles et "marquantes", dans une sorte de longue tradition architecturale. Tuesday, May 12. 2009Energy and the InternetThere's been a lot of debate lately about the growing amount of energy needed to power the Internet, and we wanted to weigh in on the discussion. A few months ago, I first blogged about the about amount of energy used in one Google search. Our engineers crunched the numbers and found that an average query uses about 1 kJ of energy and emits about 0.2 grams of carbon dioxide. But those raw numbers don't really put the environmental impact of searching the Internet into perspective. To add some context, below is data about the C02 impact of some everyday activities and items compared to Google searching:
We work hard to provide our users with the fastest products using the least amount of energy. We have a team of dedicated engineers focused on designing and building the most efficient data centers in the world. In fact, through efficiency innovations, we have managed to cut energy usage in our data centers by over 50 percent, so we're using less than half the energy to run our data centers as the industry average. This efficiency means that in the time it takes to do a Google search, your own personal computer will likely use more energy than we will use to answer your query. And the energy used by computers is growing; people are more plugged-in today than ever before in history. There are more than one billion PCs and laptops currently in use, and that number is expected to grow to four billion by 2020. We've got cell phones, PDAs, iPods, and GPS devices — not to mention the data centers that store all of our digital information "in the cloud." The electricity needed to run all of our computers, gadgets, and gizmos is growing and now accounts for half of all ICT emissions. (ICT stands for "information and communications technology.") Although the amount of energy used to power ICT is growing, it's important to measure all of the ways information technology helps us save energy too. A study by The Climate Group, in fact, shows that ICT emissions pay for themselves (PDF) (and then some) by enabling significant reductions in emissions by other sectors of the economy. After all, it's much more efficient to move electrons than to move atoms. "Virtual" tools like email, video-conferencing, and search engines replace more carbon-intensive activities like snail mail, business travel, and driving. We can still make progress at improving computing efficiency across the industry, however, and Google is committed to doing so. In 2007 we co-founded the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, a non-profit organization committed to reducing global CO2 emissions from the operation of computers by 54 million tons a year by 2010. Check out their website for more information on how you can reduce the environmental impact of your own computer use. Posted by Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Operations ----- Related Links:Personal comment:
Des données comparatives par rapport à la polémique qui était née autour de la consommation énergétique d'une recherche sur Google. Friday, May 08. 2009Biofuels vs. Biomass ElectricityFindings show that turning biomass into electricity is more beneficial than turning it into transportation fuels.
By Tyler Hamilton
There's also the potential, according to the study, of capturing and storing the carbon dioxide emissions from power plants that use switchgrass, wood chips, and other biomass materials as fuel--an option that doesn't exist for burning ethanol. Biomass, even though it releases CO2 when burned, overall produces less carbon dioxide than do fossil fuels because plants grown to replenish the resource are assumed to reabsorb those emissions. Capture those combustion emissions instead and sequester them underground, and it would "result in a carbon-negative energy source that removes CO2 from the atmosphere," according to the study. The researchers based their findings on scenarios developed under the Biofuel Analysis Meta-Model (EBAMM) created at the University of California, Berkeley. The analysis covered a range of harvested crops, including corn and switchgrass, and a number of different energy-conversion technologies. Data collected were applied to electric and combustion-engine versions of four vehicle types--small car, midsize car, small SUV, and large SUV--and their operating efficiencies during city and highway driving. The study accounted for the energy required to convert the biomass into ethanol and electricity, as well as for the energy intensiveness of manufacturing and disposing of each vehicle type. Bioelectricity far outperformed ethanol under most scenarios, although the two did achieve similar distances when the electric vehicles--specifically the small car and large SUV--weren't designed for efficient highway driving. The potential is even greater for the bioelectricity option because under the EBAMM model, "we did not account for heat as a [usable] by-product, which would make the electricity pathway even more advantageous," says Elliott Campbell, lead author on the study and an assistant professor at the Sierra Nevada Research Institute, part of the University of California, Merced. Mark Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, conducted a similar but much broader study released in December that focused more on the environmental effects of various energy options. He doesn't support using biomass for either electricity generation or ethanol production but says that he isn't surprised to find that the ethanol option performed worst. Burning biomass, says Jacobson, "is not necessarily an efficient way of generating electricity, but it's more efficient than making biofuel." It just makes sense, he adds: "Electric vehicles are four to five times more efficient than combustion vehicles." But Vincent Chornet, president of Montreal-based cellulosic ethanol producer Enerkem, says that it would be a mistake to pick winners: there's room for both options. In places where the infrastructure isn't capable of supporting the mass charging of electric cars, next-generation biofuels are the only other option, he says. Adding biofuels also offers a solution for air travel and heavy transportation that electricity and the current state of battery technology can't address. Copyright Technology Review 2009.
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Posted by Patrick Keller
in Sustainability
at
09:56
Defined tags for this entry: energy, sustainability
Real-Time Online Energy Usage Dashboards
While the PowerMeter project is still in "private beta", other online energy dashboards can already be admired. . The Energy Detective project merged the actual energy output of an everyday family with a Google Visualization API Timeline visualization, which itself is based on a Twitter-based feed from the smart metering device. Remarkable events or peaks are regularly annotated, and one can easily make out when typical household activities have taken place. . The flashy Radisson Hotel Building Dashboard seems to offer near real-time statistics about water, electricity and natural gas usage, and the weather. As a hotel, it should really try to consider offering some real data behind those ambivalent "Please use our towels multiple times, for the sake of nature" signs. Other recent websites focus on using group pressure and social encouragement by publishing one's efforts in more sustainable living within the framework of an online social network. - Make Me Sustainable allows users to calculate and reduce their carbon footprint, which is then represented as a simple history bar graph or translated in the metaphor of "trees saved" or "cars taken off the road". - Carbon Rally focuses on reducing one's carbon footprint impact by proposing group challenges, and aggregating the efforts of all its members on a large CO2 Impact Map. Finally, the Carbon Monitoring for Action portal is a massive database containing information on the carbon emissions of over 50,000 power plants and 4,000 power companies worldwide, visualized on a world map. By providing complete information for both "clean" and "dirty" power producers, CARMA hopes to influence the opinions and decisions from consumers to policy makers. ----- Personal comment: Quelques ressource en ligne pour essayer de réduire son impact "carbonique" ou simplement des interfaces qui vont dans le sens d'un monitoring personnel et quotidien de son empreinte. Intéressant que Google s'y mette également. A suivre mais il faudrait également engager de lourdes rénovations au niveau du parc immobilier pour rendre tout ceci "intelligent" ou tout au moins "pilotable".
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fabric | rblgThis blog is the survey website of fabric | ch - studio for architecture, interaction and research. We curate and reblog articles, researches, writings, exhibitions and projects that we notice and find interesting during our everyday practice and readings. Most articles concern the intertwined fields of architecture, territory, art, interaction design, thinking and science. From time to time, we also publish documentation about our own work and research, immersed among these related resources and inspirations. This website is used by fabric | ch as archive, references and resources. It is shared with all those interested in the same topics as we are, in the hope that they will also find valuable references and content in it.
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