Geek stuff – Page 70 – a sibilant intake of breath

How good is gas?

Per unit of electricity generated, natural gas is the lowest-carbon fossil fuel. Producing a kilowatt-hour (kWh) of electricity using oil, and especially coal, generates significantly more emissions. While bituminous coal produces about 370g of CO2 per kWh, oil produces about 260g, and natural gas produces about 230g.

A recent MIT report focuses on switching American electricity production to gas, as a way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions:

In the results of a two-year study, released today, the researchers said electric utilities and other sectors of the American economy will use more gas through 2050. Under a scenario that envisions a federal policy aimed at cutting greenhouse gas emissions to 50 percent below 2005 levels by 2050, researchers found a substantial role for natural gas.

“Because national energy use is substantially reduced, the share represented by gas is projected to rise from about 20 percent of the current national total to around 40 percent in 2040,” said the MIT researchers. When used to fire a power plant, gas emits about half of the carbon dioxide emissions as conventional coal plants.

They claim that nuclear power, renewable energy and carbon capture and sequestration are all more expensive than gas, and thus less viable as low-carbon alternatives. They also claim that by 2050, 15% of the U.S. vehicle fleet will be fueled with natural gas.

I have three big objections to all this:

First, an increasing share of natural gas is coming from unconventional sources, using techniques like hydraulic fracturing. This has associated environmental risks, such as the contamination of groundwater.

Secondly, the amount of climate change humanity will cause depends on the total amount of all fossil fuels burned before society becomes carbon neutral. Burning more gas obviously contributes to this cumulative total, changing the atmosphere and climate in ways that will endure for thousands of years. If humanity ever starts to burn the methane embedded in permafrost of methane clathrates, the total quantity of associated emissions could be very worrisome indeed.

Thirdly, building new gas-fired power plants perpetuates fossil fuel dependence. It keeps us wedded to fuels that are inevitably going to become ever more costly and destructive to access, and which can never form the basis for a truly sustainable society.

None of this is to say that gas has no role to play in dealing with climate change. In the short term, substituting gas for coal may be a promising way to reduce emissions during the transitional period before renewables become dominant. In the long run, however, there is no alternative to moving beyond fossil fuels.

Helpfully, the MIT report does not just take energy demand as constant, or ever-increasing. Rather, they model the economic effect of putting a price on greenhouse gas emissions, and find that doing so would keep demand flat in the next few decades. They project that carbon pricing would raise electricity prices by 30% by 2030 and 45% by 2050 – a small price to pay for reducing the extreme risks associated with climate change.

Now on Twitter

In the ongoing quest for eyeballs, there is now a new way to follow updates from a sibilant intake of breath and BuryCoal.com:

http://www.twitter.com/sindark/

http://www.twitter.com/burycoal/

Each will be updated when new content goes onto the site, for the benefit of readers who prefer to keep track of things that way. It won’t necessarily be every post that goes there, but I am hoping it will be a way to spread awareness of some more interesting or important ones.

RSS

By default, WordPress creates Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds that can be checked in an automated way using tools like BlogLines or Google Reader. sindark.com has a feed for posts and another for comments, as does BuryCoal.com (comments).

Facebook

Both sites also have Facebook pages: sindark.com, BuryCoal.com.

Hunting neutrinos with IceCube

The University of Wisconsin is leading a project to embed a massive neutrino detecting telescope in the Antarctic ice sheet, called IceCube. It will use thousands of Digital Optical Modules (DOMs) to look for the characteristic blue flashes which occur when neutrinos collide with ice. Since neutrinos normally zip straight through everything, collecting enough observations to learn about them is challenging and requires specialized detectors.

The project will try to identify point sources of high energy neutrinos, investigate their connection with gamma ray bursts, and may provide experimental data relevant to dark matter or string theory.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

If you are trying to make money from a website, search engine optimization (SEO) is a matter of vital concern. An enormous amount of web traffic arises from somebody, somewhere in the world throwing a search query into Google or Bing or Yahoo (but really Google) and then picking from among the results that appear.

This is perhaps an unprecedented situation in human history, because now website developers have an overwhelming incentive to produce pages that appear high in the rankings of popular search engines, when people put popular queries into them. As a result, these website creators are no longer just producing content designed to appeal to human beings – it also needs to stand out as special to the mathematical algorithms that drive the world’s search engines.

For the most part, I would say this is a bad thing. Algorithms can deal with fantastically more data than a person ever could. Google crawls through an impossible number of blog posts every day. At the same time, people are much more clever when it comes to telling a good site from a bad site. They rely on cues that it is very hard to teach algorithms to respond to.

Certainly, the world is much better off as the result of the existence of powerful search engines. That said, I hope that SEO proves to be a dying industry in the long term, as search engines begin to more closely approximate the behaviours and reactions of real human beings. When that happens, web designers and content producers may start optimizing their work for its human consumers, rather than for the robots that are often the intermediary between humans with a desire for certain kinds of information and the humans who can actually provide it.

(Full disclosure: This site does earn money from advertising, but so far that has very much been a matter of paying the cost of web hosting. In terms of income per hour of work, I would be enormously better off working any minimum wage job.)

Blogging out loud

I have attended and enjoyed a couple of Blog Out Loud Ottawa events, at which local bloggers read one selected post in front of an audience. This year, I decided to give it a try. The event is on July 7th, at 7:00pm at Irene’s Pub on Bank Street, just north of Landsdowne Park.

My contribution will certainly be outside the norm, as most people read posts that are narrative accounts of their own personal experiences. I will almost certainly select one of my posts on climate change.

The post is meant to be from between June 2009 and June 2010, but the selection is otherwise up to me. I want to choose something that is informative and accessible, even for people without much knowledge about climate change, politics, or environmental issues.

Suggestions?

The problem with 3D everything

The 3D craze in all forms of entertainment has spread to the extent that the swag bags for journalists at Toronto’s G8/G20 summit include an iPhone cover designed to let you view 3D media. 3D is all the rage for movies and games, as consumers flock to something novel and seemingly high-tech and entertainment companies sense an excuse to boost ticket prices and (for now) offer something that pirated media does not.

I have one big problem with all of this: while it is easy enough to exploit binocular vision to produce the illusion of three dimensions on a flat screen, doing so doesn’t really take into account how people see. The effect works because of how our brain interprets parallax – the situation in which the perspective on a scene differs slightly when the viewpoint used changes. This is a problem for many point-and-shoot cameras, with viewfinders offset from the lens; you can compose a photo nicely as viewed through the former, only to discover that it doesn’t look so great when viewed through the latter. It also applies to the different perspectives offered by your two eyes. Your brain uses the differences between the two views as one source of information about how far away things are, feeding into our overall awareness about the three-dimensionality of the world.

Parallax is one important way in which our brains make sense of a three-dimensional world. Others include geometric cues, like how parallel lines seem to converge as they approach the horizon. Exploiting these sorts of cues allows artists to make works that seem to have depth. It is also one way in which optical illusions can be created. It is one reason why the very cool hollow face illusion works. Indeed, that particular illusion only works when seen without the benefit of binocular vision, which allows our brains to figure out that we are in danger of being tricked by geometry.

The trouble with 3D is what happens when our eyes go beyond perceiving a scene and into responding to it: specifically, by refocusing. When we see a rhino charging at us, the muscles around our eyes change the shape of our lenses so as to keep the beast in focus. Our eyes also turn inward, toward our noses. Unfortunately, when we are just looking at a false 3D image of a rhino, the re-focusing is not necessary. After all, we are still really looking at the same flat screen. This may explain why watching 3D movies is nauseating for some people; more worrisomely, it could cause people to learn to see in unnatural ways, in a manner that extends beyond the movie theatre experience.

This is not a problem that can be overcome, so long as our chosen mode of producing faux-three-dimensional images relies upon information displayed on flat panels. How important it ultimately will be, I can’t really comment on. Still, it is worth knowing that the exciting 3D experience consumers are being promised is premised on a limited understanding of how people really see moving images.

HDstarcraft and HuskyStarcraft – viral marketing?

Blizzard’s Starcraft must surely be one of the most enduring computer games of all time. It came out when I was in high school, but is still actively played by a large number of people, especially in South Korea. There are even professional matches and tournaments.

Now, Blizzard is in the middle of a long beta release of Starcraft II. I think the key purpose is to balance the three races, so that good players will be approximately equally likely to use all three. The balancing is subtle and detailed: involving everything from the cost and time required for weapons upgrades to the potentially useful hexagonal grid projected by Protoss pylons, which could aid accurate placement of buildings.

Throughout the beta, there have been two internet personalities releasing high-resolution narrated replays of high level matches: HDstarcraft and HuskyStarcraft. They had one sponsored tournament, but generally don’t seem to advertise for anybody. That, combined with the relative professionalism of their operation and the sheer amount of time they are putting into it makes me wonder if they might be part of a viral marketing campaign run by Blizzard, designed to build anticipation for the forthcoming game.

This is pure speculation on my part but if it is true, it is a clever move on Blizzard’s part. The number of people watching each screencast has been rising steadily, and is now consistently over 100,000. The people watching may end up as some of the most active members of the eventual Starcraft II community, after commercial release. Even if Blizzard has nothing to do with these replays, I think undertaking such an extensive beta release (with more than 13 patches already) shows a good amount of respect for their customers, for whom the issue of balance will eventually be very important.

[Update: 14 December 2010] I no longer think it is at all likely that HD and Husky are part of a viral marketing campaign. Still, it would have been a pretty good idea on the part of Blizzard. I have definitely enjoyed their videos, and they contributed to my desire to buy and play Starcraft II.

Hardtack colony

One of the most common objections I see to the idea that the world needs to move to renewable forms of energy is that renewables just aren’t up to the task. Critics point out how renewables only produce about 2% of our electricity (and less of our total energy use, once you consider things like transport) and how wind, sun, tides, and so on are all variable.

This morning, I dreamed up a metaphor that might serve as a quick partial response:

Imagine a colony founded in a previously uninhabited area, far from the mother country, and with no prospect of future resupply. It is founded with a large stock of non-perishable food: hardtack, flour, lard, biscuits, etc. Good stuff. They also have seeds and the land around them. Imagine now that they are at a juncture in time where 98% of their food comes from the rations they brought along with them. They would not be saying: “Look what wonderful, everlasting sources of sustenance this hardtack is! It is all we will ever need!” Rather, they would be intensely concerned that they were only producing 2% of the food they need for any given year, while drawing down their one-off stock, which would be better saved for emergencies.

Obviously, the colonists need to learn to farm and garden. They also need to learn to cope with seasonal variability. Since the most ancient civilizations, we have had to deal with the fact that food is more abundant at some times than at others. Unlike some mammals that balance it out by storing and drawing down fat (think of whales and penguins that go without eating for months at a time), we use external food storage systems and techniques, from granaries to salting and canning.

Unfortunately, electricity is not so easily stored as food. Nevertheless, we have many options for energy storage. We can balance renewable production between energy sources (wind, solar, geothermal, etc) and between regions. We can store energy in pumped hydroelectric storage and multi-reservoir tidal systems. We can use electric vehicles as a storage and load balancing system, and work to improve batteries, flywheels, and capacitors.

Of course, the metaphor emits much that is relevant to our situation. Fossil fuels are different from stored rations in important ways. For one, we don’t know just how much we have. More importantly, using them causes severe harm – both in terms of toxic pollution and in terms of climate change. Finally, the metaphor takes our energy needs as essentially fixed. When it comes to our society, we could do many of the same things we do now, while using a lot less raw energy.

Those issues aside, I think the metaphor has promise as a quick response to the ‘renewables will never be up to it’ argument. In the long run, we really don’t have a choice.

Broken clavicle x-rays

Here are some photos I snapped of the x-rays taken at the Ottawa General Hospital, at various points after my cycling accident:

May 30th – a couple of hours after the accident

T+4 days

T+19 days

In three weeks, I will get another x-ray. I have been warned that I will need to avoid any intense physical activity for a further three months after that, meaning I will miss most of the summer cycling season.

[Update: 9 July 2010] Here is an x-ray from today, showing a bit more of the affected area. The biggest difference from the T+19 shot is the round area of bone forming underneath the fracture area. The doctor told me another should form later underneath that sharp protrusion:

T+40 days

[Update: 13 August 2010] Today, the doctor said they might eventually need to operate, to remove that sharp spike of bone. I am supposed to go back in three months for another x-ray.

T+75 days

[Update: 24 November 2010] I told the doctor about how my shoulder has been aching a fair bit, since it started getting cold. He set me up with an appointment for some physiotherapy.

T+178 days

[Update: 2 March 2011] This will be the final x-ray in this series, as the doctor is now satisfied that things are healing properly. He told me the bone will still be remodelling itself for at least a year.

T+275 days

ArtBank

This evening, I visited ArtBank – an institution of the Canada Council for the Arts that has been buying Canadian artworks since the 1970s and then renting them to government offices and private organizations.

The art is rented at 10% of its appraised price, for each year. The minimum term is two years, and the minimum annual expenditure per renting organization is $2,000. The price per work is capped at $3,600, meaning that some of the most valuable pieces are quite a deal to rent. For government offices, the necessary insurance is already in place. Private organizations need to provide written documentation of adequate insurance.

The collection includes 18,000 paintings, prints, photographs and sculptures by over 2500 artists. Sizes range from modest to gigantic. All told, it seems like a rather good resource. It’s certainly a place worth visiting, if the opportunity arises.