Category Archives: Technology

What the Internet was made for

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(which too often isn’t what it’s used for)Since I first discovered Pauline Evans’ blog, Perennial Student, I’ve come to appreciate her work for a number of things—not least that she has a sharp eye for all sorts of interesting stories that I would otherwise miss. A few days ago, for instance, she pointed me to a real piece of good news in the world of biblical scholarship: the guardians of the Dead Sea Scrolls have launched a five-year multi-million dollar project to put them on the Web. Specifically,

the fragments will be photographed first by a 39-megapixel colour digital camera, then by another digital camera in infra-red light and finally some will be photographed using a sophisticated multi-spectral imaging camera, which can distinguish the ink from the parchment and papyrus on which the scrolls were written.Eventually all the fragments will be available to view online, with transcriptions, translations, scholarly interpretations and bibliographies provided for academic study. “The aim in the end is that you can go online and call up the scrolls with the best possible resolution and all the information that exists about them today,” said Pnina Shor, head of the Artefacts Treatment and Conservation Department at the antiquities authority. “We want to provide opportunities for future research on the scrolls. We feel it’s part of our duty to expose them to the world as a whole.”

This is truly splendid, and should be a huge boon to biblical and historical scholarship—especially as it’s already produced unexpected side benefits:

The new infra-red photography has picked out letters that had not previously been visible to the naked eye. “The ink stays dark and the leather becomes light and suddenly you can see text that you may no have been able to see,” said Tanner. “We have revealed some text that has not been previously seen by scholars.” The detailed colour photographs of papyrus fragments may help to identify pieces that fit together and to identify fragments written by the same scribes. Scholars hope this new information might enable them to piece together more of the fragments and so come closer to putting complete sections of the scrolls together.

A couple facts on offshore drilling

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This is the offshore-drilling map: what Congress has allowed and what it has disallowed. The green areas are legal, the red aren’t, and the yellow aren’t under our jurisdiction. (For the rather lurid “No Zone” thing, blame Idaho Sen. Larry Craig—this was produced by his office.)

This is the map of the mockery that China, Cuba, Canada, and other countries are making of that ban, drilling into the Gulf oil fields from sites as close to 50 miles off the coast of Key West.

At the very least, as we debate expanding offshore drilling, we need to be aware that just because we’ve banned it doesn’t mean it isn’t happening—it just means it’s happening a little further off shore, to the benefit of other countries (some of them our enemies) instead of our own.

Your next car will be powered by termites

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Well, OK, not your next car, and not directly—but I’m willing to bet that’s the way things are heading. I’ve been betting on hydrogen fuel cells as the future of power generation (and not just for your car, either) ever since our time in Vancouver when I first heard the story of the remarkable Dr. Geoffrey Ballard (who died early this month at the age of 76) and the company he founded, Ballard Power Systems. The potential for replacing the internal combustion engine and vast coal plants with a power source that produces nothing but water (which in many parts of the world would qualify as a secondary benefit) is staggeringly wonderful—if we can solve two problems: one, storage of hydrogen, which is of course a highly volatile element; and two, finding a way to produce hydrogen that doesn’t cause its own set of environmental problems (as, for instance, cracking natural gas would).I think we might now have a leading contender for solution #2: termites. In an article in the latest Atlantic titled “Gut Reactions,” Lisa Margonelli reports on recent discoveries about how termites break down plant material into food in their third gut (or, more accurately, about the microbes, many of which exist nowhere else, which do it for them) and the exciting possibilities those discoveries raise. She of course, and quite rightly, takes this in several different directions, but the line that caught me was right in the beginning:

Offer a termite this page, and its microbial helpers will break it down into two liters of hydrogen, enough to drive more than six miles in a fuel-cell car.

I understand that scientists want to take each one of those tens of thousands of microbes and study each one thoroughly—there’s a lot of knowledge there, and a lot of doctoral theses to go with it. Along the way, though, I hope they don’t forget to do the most practical thing: follow ArcTech’s example.

The Virginia-based company ArcTech trained termites to eat coal, and then rummaged through their guts to find the microorganisms best at turning coal into methane. It cultured those microorganisms and now feeds them coal; the company plans to use the methane they produce to make electricity, and is already selling the by-products, including one used by farmers as a soil additive. ArcTech says this method eliminates virtually all greenhouse-gas emissions from coal-based electricity production.

Let’s go and do likewise to provide fuel for our fuel cells, and maybe sooner than you think, you’ll be able to look down at your brand new car and think, “This is powered by termites.”

Local firm does good

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in more ways than one. Rabb/Kinetico Water Systems is a company based here in Warsaw that makes non-electrical home water systems (that, as I understand it, is where “Kinetico” comes in) that use far less salt than your typical electrical water softener; that also means, as I understand it, a lot less water wastage with their systems. They do good work with a good product; they also do good work in other ways, as Don Clemens, the company’s president, is one of the founders and leaders of Men Following Christ, a local Christian ministry. They’re admirable folks, and it’s good to see them getting a little attention beyond our community here: the Times-Union, our local paper, reported last week that PBS and Hugh Downs had filmed a segment on Rabb/Kinetico for the network’s “National Environmental Report.” I don’t know when that will be airing, but I hope to catch it (maybe it will be on the PBS website).

Considering the president’s legacy

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At this point, it’s a virtual certainty that George W. Bush will leave the presidency with a very low public approval rating. Though I’m sure that hurts, I believe he’s wise enough not to take that too seriously. The president who would govern well does so not for the opinion polls but for history (which is why the Founders hoped for citizen politicians rather than the professional political class we ended up with), and sometimes that leads to the choice between the popular course and the best course. Say what you will about the President, he’s never hesitated to be unpopular if he thinks it’s the right thing to do (though he’s often hesitated to defend himself effectively for doing so); in that respect, he’s a lot like another man who left the office wildly unpopular—Harry S Truman. Like President Truman, though not to the same extent, I believe President G. W. Bush will fare much better in the judgment of history than in the judgment of journalism.One reason for this is that Iraq is turning out well. As I noted a while ago, it’s the only real bright spot in this administration’s foreign policy, and even this only comes after several badly-handled years—one of the ironies of the Bush 43 administration is that it owes this victory in large part to John McCain—but when it’s all said and done, unless Barack Obama wins and manages to throw it all away, the last several years will have seen Iraq transformed from a nation suffering to enrich a bloody, terrorist-funding tyrant to a stable democracy and a potentially invaluable ally in the Middle East. That’s an ally we’ll need badly when the inevitable collapse of the Saudi ruling family finally comes. Unless you have an a priori commitment to pacifism—a commitment I respect, when it’s truly principled, but do not share—that’s clearly a good thing.I suspect, though, that history’s judgment of President G. W. Bush will rest equally heavily on two things not much considered now: the two great domestic political failures of his administration. The first is the attempt to reform Social Security—this, not the Iraq War, was the political disaster that wrecked so much of his second term. Our struggles in Iraq certainly didn’t help, but they only carried the force they did because the President had spent so much of his political capital on this issue. Put me down as one who thinks Social Security is doomed, and that this administration’s initiative, politically stupid as it was, was nevertheless noble (in a Quixotic sort of way) and very important. Twenty or thirty years from now, I suspect the narrative on this one will be “man of foresight brought down by the forces of reaction.”The second is the failure to pass a comprehensive energy policy. As Investor’s Business Daily notes,

When the Democrats took control of Congress in 2007, and oil was $50 a barrel and corn $2 a bushel, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid promised an energy plan. We’re still waiting for it. Today, crude oil is $134 and corn is $6.50.It’s pretty clear who’s to blame: Congress. In fact, House and Senate Democrats have obstructed any progress in America’s fight to regain some semblance of energy independence.

But that’s been the pattern. This administration started trying seven years ago to implement the kind of energy plan the Reid-Pelosi leadership said they would deliver; it didn’t happen, in large part, because of Rep. Pelosi and Sen. Reid. If it had, we wouldn’t be looking at $4-a-gallon gasoline, and our economy would be in much better shape; we’d also have critically important work underway to modernize and revamp our national electrical grid, and programs in place alongside them to shift our electrical production away from fossil fuels and toward other energy sources. The Democrats in Congress killed it, and so we are where we are today. Again, I suspect the future will blame the President much less than does the present.As a side note on energy: nuclear power plants have worked well for decades in Western Europe without any significant problems, while ongoing improvements in drilling technology mean we can open up massive new oil reserves—in ANWR, the continental shelf, the Green River Basin, and the Bakken Formation—with minimal consequences. I agree that both these things need to be approached with strong concern for environmental preservation—but they can be. I believe we need to set aside the hysteria and the absolutist positions and try to come up with workable compromises.HT (for the IBD editorial): Carlos Echevarria

Offshore drilling, pro and con

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Pauline at Perennial Student has a post up about offshore drilling (which is just as much about the different ways the story can be spun by the media, depending on whom you read and what their agenda is); she has some good links and even better commentary. I particularly appreciated the introduction to SOS California, a group working to find ways to capture/recover oil that naturally seeps into the ocean—thereby both providing energy and reducing pollution. I’d never heard of them before, but may their tribe increase.

Best-laid plans

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So, the problem with the modem is fixed, but now the router no longer works properly, and I haven’t had the time yet to call tech support and get it set back up correctly . . . as such, it might be a few days yet before this blog returns to normally-scheduled programming.

The idiosyncrasies of technology

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Well, with considerable help from our ISP, we’ve found out why our connection’s been wonky: apparently our modem has been hoarding IP addresses. It’s supposed to grab an available one when the computer comes on and needs one, then release it when there’s no longer a computer actively connected to it; but it hasn’t been doing that. Instead, it’s been grabbing them and keeping them—it’s currently up to four IP addresses, which has been creating a major traffic jam for our computers. The tech said he’d never seen anything like it; they’re having to bump this one up to the big technical guns to get it unsnarled. If all goes well, though, this should be fixed sometime within the next 24 hours, and the connection working properly again. That will be nice.

Cognitive surplus, Web 2.0, and the transformation of media

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Clay Shirky, author of the recent book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, has a fascinating piece up on his blog called “Gin, Television, and Social Surplus.” An edited transcript of a talk he gave at the Web 2.0 conference, it’s the most remarkable analysis of societal transformations I think I’ve ever run across. He begins with the insight of a British historian

that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. . . .And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. . . . It wasn’t until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.

The key insight here is that major societal shifts, if they happen quickly, require some sort of lubricant to get people over the hump until they can adjust to the change of circumstances. (When that lubricant is missing, we get relapses; the case of the USSR after the fall of the Communist Party might be taken as an example.) And for us?

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened—rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before—free time.And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV. . . .And it’s only now, as we’re waking up from that collective bender, that we’re starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We’re seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody’s basement.

He overstates the degree to which that free time went into TV; a lot of that time went into volunteer service organizations as well, especially among homemaking women. Still, the broader point holds, and I think his analysis of the current situation does as well. The shift we’re beginning to see, as he presents it, is this:

Media in the 20th century was run as a single race—consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you’ll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it’s three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share. And what’s astonished people who were committed to the structure of the previous society, prior to trying to take this [cognitive] surplus and do something interesting, is that they’re discovering that when you offer people the opportunity to produce and to share, they’ll take you up on that offer.

Media as triathlon—as an interactive activity rather than merely a consumptive activity. I think he’s on to something here. For example, how many people these days get their news surfing the Web, following links, blogging, commenting on blogs, and the like, not simply absorbing the news but participating (even if only on the fringes) in a conversation about the news? And perhaps most crucially, how many of our children are growing up with this as part of their mental framework?

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?” And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won’t have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing. It’s also become my motto, when people ask me what we’re doing—and when I say “we” I mean the larger society trying to figure out how to deploy this cognitive surplus, but I also mean we, especially, the people in this room, the people who are working hammer and tongs at figuring out the next good idea. From now on, that’s what I’m going to tell them: We’re looking for the mouse. We’re going to look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a canned experience, and ask ourselves, “If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen?” And I’m betting the answer is yes.

It’s a brilliant article, and I think offers a critical insight into what’s happening in Western culture, and what’s likely to happen next. I recommend you read the whole thing.HT: Heather McDougal