WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton
This week's Winding Down concentrates on energy, global warming, and the like. You can find most of in the 'Homework' section. Having so much on this one topic wasn't intentional, it's just that the last month has seen quite a few reports on these sorts of thing, so I thought I'd round them up for you all...
But first, here are the shorts!
Shorts:
Last week I mentioned QR codes and some of their uses, but since then it's been pointed out to me that they can also be used with mobile phones as shopping coupons. And already you can use them as electronic theater tickets in some of London's west end theaters. You can even use them at some of those bastions of junk security, airports, to check in. And the great thing about them, compared to near field communications (that's the contactless chips you use to wave your passport or credit card over a reader), is that they can't be read remotely, unlike the latest generation of credit cards!
http://www.channel4.com/news/fraud-fears-grow-over-contactless-bank-card-technology
I covered the US$35 Raspberry Pi computer a few issues back. I'm happy to tell you that the first production versions have finally shipped, and it seems to be moving into regular production. For me the only question is, how long can I wait off getting one for...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/16/raspberry_pi/
Homework:
The last month hasn't been kind to the global warming gravy train. First of all the highly respected conservationist Peter Kareiva, chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy, the world's biggest environmental group, launched a stinging attack on the old hippie idea that nature is 'feminine', and that it's 'fragile'.
"The trouble for conservation is that the data simply do not support the idea of a fragile nature at risk of collapse," he writes. "Ecologists now know that the disappearance of one species does not necessarily lead to the extinction of any others, much less all others in the same ecosystem. In many circumstances, the demise of formerly abundant species can be inconsequential to ecosystem function."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/04/kareiva_new_environmentalism_essay
Next came the news that the well documented medieval warm period, dismissed by pro-global warming climate scientists as a local, Europe only, phenomena, was in fact a global event. This was proved by the fact that a record of the warm period has now been traced in the Antarctic ice record. So all the attempts to ignore the warm period when drawing graphs, look like coming to naught. For the record, the temperatures during the warm period (about 900AD to around 1250AD) were as hot as any recorded in industrial times.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/23/warm_period_little_ice_age_global/
But that wasn't all, for there came the revelation that, completely unexpectedly - at least on the part of our warming scientists - the increase in temperatures between 1980 and 2000, left US ecosystems unaffected. The monitoring set up by the US government is showing that the sort of runaway positive feedback on which so many of the global warming 'catastrophes' are based is not happening.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/10/streams_unaffected_by_global_warming/
Then there's the glaciers. I mentioned in an earlier edition the Argentinian glacier, a poster child for the speed of its shrinking in the face of higher temperatures. That one turned out to be enterprising locals carving chunks of ice off it to use in cocktails in big city night clubs! But what about the Himalayas? The glaciers there were supposed to be vanishing in a twinkle of the eye, according to the last big global warming report. Intensive studies by space born instruments, the first on board a space shuttle in 2008, and the second on a French satellite in 2008, have now been collated. The result? There is definitely more ice in the glaciers now than there was earlier.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/16/himalayan_karakoram_glaciers_gaining_ice/
OK. But what about the polar ice caps, I hear you ask? Well we already knew that the Antarctic ice is undergoing a process of net gain. It's losing ice off one side (the left hand side on my map), and putting it on, on the other. Our climate warming friends, it seems, were only measuring one side, and you can guess which side that was. But that's old hat. How about the North Pole then? Well it does seem to be shrinking, no doubt about that. However, it's worth remembering that having two icecaps is actually quite unusual in Earth's history. For most of that time it only had one or the other pole icebound. Having said that, though, one of the predictions of the climate Cassandras was the idea that there would be dramatic reductions in the amount of ice floating in the Bering Sea. It currently seems to be at an all time record high!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/11/bering_sea_ice_cover/
And finally, just to pile on the woe, over on this side of the pond, the UK government has indicated that it is planning to remove the subsidies for wind power, without which windfarms are completely unviable!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/16/wind_power_rip/
That's all pretty gloomy if you truly believe that humans are responsible for warming up the Earth. Me, I'm not convinced that we are not just going through the changes the Earth's climate goes through at intervals. I'm prepared to be convinced, but I want to see hard data, and I also want details of the computer software that produced the predictions of human generated climate change. I'm old enough to remember that when I was a teenager, all the climate scientists were talking about an imminent return of the ice age!
However, I am in favor of cleaning up our messes, which was why I was interested in another couple of items that came to my attention recently. The first was a piece in Scientific American about a paper from economist Bard Harstad at Northwestern University. Harstad has been looking all the different strategies for reducing carbon emissions, such as carbon taxes and emission caps. He suggests we are looking at things from the wrong end. Instead governments and NGOs should be spending their cash buying up the extraction rights to fossil fuels such as coal, and then refuse to extract it. Nice idea, but, wearing my political analyst's hat I can see a number of problems - not least of which is the possibility of government action to start using the stuff when an election comes up. Especially one at which the issues of fuel prices are at the top of the agenda.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=new-emissions-curbing-
strategy-buy-coal-lock-up-supply&WT.mc_id=SA_CAT_SP_20120416
Gizmag has a piece for those of you who live in hotter climes. It's about AORA's Tulip solar power system. Using 52 mirrors and a 115 ft high bulb shaped tower, hence its name, it generates around 100 kilowatts. Uniquely it uses heated air, rather then the more conventional molten salts. Sound to me like it has some potential.
http://www.gizmag.com/aora-tulip-solar-power-plant/22067/
Finally, in this section I'd like to tell you about a scheme to use the geothermal heat in Iceland to generate clean electricity for export to the likes of the UK and Europe. All the good signs are there. Iceland is desperate to find new exports after the hammering it took in the recent slump, and the price of electricity has risen to levels where the electricity can be generated and distributed profitably. Definitely a win-win situation!
http://news.sky.com/home/uk-news/article/16207200
Geek Stuff:
There's a new movie just out called 'Marley' about the life and music of Bob Marley. I haven't seen it yet, but judging from the write ups it might well be worth taking a look at if it comes to cinema near you.
http://www.bobmarley.com/marley_the_movie.php
Got a few of those dot com boom dollars left in your wallet? Then take a look at 'The Banner Saga'. You may well want to invest the odd greenback in this attempt to provide something different in computer games. Well somewhat different, it's still a role-playing game at the end of the day. The difference seems to be in the very tasty artwork and the and DRM free PC and Mac versions. It also seems to have very open play about it (think Morrowind, but without the rain).
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/stoic/the-banner-saga?ref=thanks
Now here is a brilliant idea for filling potholes (and, boy does our road need one). If you've ever used corn starch in cooking you will have found that it is a non-Newtonian fluid. Nothing to do with gravity or F=MA. No, it refers to the way in which it oozes like a liquid, but suddenly seems to become a solid when something hard hits it. So, the inventors though, why not stick some of this stuff (or something like it) into a plastic bag, stick the bag in a pothole, and then put a bit of sticky fabric over it to hold it down?
Sheer brilliance - I love it!
http://www.gizmag.com/non-newtonian-fluid-pothole-bags/22153/
Scanner: Other stories
Hotel lobby hosts the world's largest cylindrical aquarium
http://dvice.com/archives/2012/04/hotel-lobby-hos.php
Nokia loses $1.7bn in Q1, sales chief falls overboard
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/19/nokia_earnings_ouch/
Secret computer code threatens science
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=secret-computer-code-threatens-science&WT.mc_id=SA_CAT_SP_20120416
Physicist uses math to beat traffic ticket
http://www.physicscentral.com/buzz/blog/index.cfm?postid=4656335810518469535
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers Andrew, Barb, Fi, and to Slashdot's daily newsletter for drawing my attention to material used in this issue.
Please send suggestions for stories to alan@ibgames.com and include the words Winding Down in the subject line, unless you want your deathless prose gobbled up by my voracious Spamato spam filter...
Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
22 April 2012
Alan Lenton is an on-line games designer, programmer and sociologist, the order of which depends on what he is currently working on! His web site is at http://www.ibgames.net/alan.
Past issues of Winding Down can be found at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html.
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