As someone on the chat says, Richard Alley is “brilliant and twitchy.” More kindly, he’s an animated speaker. He shows photos of his ice-drilling expedition to Greenland. Is there global warming? Yes. He runs through the evidence. The biggest cause is fossil guels: The typical US driver buys 100 pounds of gasoline per week. We’re burning fossil fuels a million times faster than nature created them. Global warming is a natural trend but we’re making it much worse.

Most of the effects of global warming are negative for humans, he says. Some high-latitude economies will do better. But, it could dry up the grain-belt, kill off a whole bunch of species, raise sea-level and spread tropical diseases. [Ok, overall, I’m against global warming.]

It’s hard to make it better but easy to make it worse.

He hypothesizes that the climate moves by staggering up and down. He shows a chart that shows that in the Ice Age, the temperature staggered but the CO2 level changed rather smoothly. Possible conclusion: Now that CO2 is rising again, we should perhaps expect big swings in temperature.

He shows satellite photos of the ice sheets in Antarctica. They’re melting. These are just small ones. But it’s possible the large ones will melt. Goodbye Florida.

We can do things about this. We can put CO2 into the ground, we can conserve, we can use solar. It might take 1% of the world’s economy ($250B/year) to clean this up. Someone could make a ton of money doing this. , he says. [Yet another good presentation. And, great Tufte-esque display of numeric info, as someone on the chat pointed out.]

1 Comment »

Tom Daniel‘s talks’s title is “Bugs, Brains and Borgs: Reverse Engineering Moving Systems. It’s a great presentation, but too rich to encapsulate via love-blogging.

He shows how complex and messy systems are. E.g., he shows footage of a hawk moth that hovers and sucks nectar from flowers at night and the flowers are moving. That’s a lot of data to process. He shows a single cell in a moth brain that’s excited if the visual field moves to the right and not if the world moves the left. [He credits the grad students who did the research — always nice to hear.] The neuron responds more slowly than the wings — it takes a couple of wing beats for the neuron to react. The neuron projects into the motor output region. Antenna strain sensors respond to changes in position faster than the visual systems do; that’s how the moth knows its pitch and yaw. Another neuron responds to the neurons that sense these changes. This leads to the third thoracic ganglion that flexes the abdomen and slows the wing beat, controlling the flight.

He ends by talking about the fairy fly, the smallest flying insect. Its brain is so tiny that it’s hard to understand how the neurons operate. He suggests studying it as a way to get new concepts in computing (with a nod to Janine Benyus).

This and Benyus’ sessions are the prototypes of a PopTech presentation. Fascinating.

Be the first to comment »

Janine Benyus talks about biomimicry: the conscious imitation of nature’s genius.

She’s going to give us “12 big ideas from biology” about how life sustains life. I’m sure not to get them all.

1. self-assembly
2. chemistry in water
3. solar transformations
4. the power of shape – from efficient fans to color without pigments to cldean without detergents
5. materials as systems
6. natural selection as an innovation engine
7. material recycling
8. ecosystems that greow folds – seware plants that mimic marshes
9. energy-savvy movement and transport
10.
11. sensing and responding – locusts don’t collide
12. life creates conditions conducive to life

Great information. So many amazing examples, which I have not captured. (Sorry!)

[It just isn’t right that we’re halfway through PopTech before we’ve heard from a woman. It’s worse than that. It’s shameful.]

Here’s an article on self-cleaning cars that uses the same technique as the lotus flower: Shape instead of detergents. (Found by Wayne Pethrick, posted on the PopTech chat.)

2 Comments »

Ian Kahn just gave me a Laptop Desk from LapWorks. It’s a plastic platform that unfolds on your lap to support your laptop and provide a mousing platform. You can also fold it and use it on a desk to tilt your laptop forward to a comfortable typing angle. Simple idea and it’s making blogging from the Camden Opera House much more comfortable. Tthanks, Ian!

2 Comments »

28 bloggers, 11 pizzas…

3 Comments »

Since the theme of the morning is “Happiness,” I ask: I like happiness as much as the next person, but in the Bill Joy sense — a little act can destroy all life — aren’t we doomed.

ze Frank: I’ll handle this one. I’ve done a lot of research on happiness in single-cell animals. And, in that sense, no, we’re not doomed.

Q: What about these emalis I’m getting from Nigeria?

ze Frank: They’re all real. What you have to do is haggle with them.

Q: In taking the two kids out of Bhutan for the tour with the giant book ultimately make them less happy?

Michael Hawley: Not in these two cases. One wants to be a spiritual leader in Bhutan and the other wants to become a doctor.

Q: I hear Bhutan has a high tax for visiting.

Hawley: Yes. But there’s only one flight in a day. Only 6,000 people a year get to see it. It’s not a place where you rent a Hertz and bomb around.

Q: You haven’t stressed enough that we need to engage in order to change the world.

Alex Steffen: Yes, there’s lots of work to do. And thank goodness, President Bush has been a uniter … against his policies.

Be the first to comment »

Too funny. Punctuation as vengeance. How to write spam. How to dance properly. How to make a dancing puppet. When office supplies attack. Toilet-paper fashion. Haikus for a newly-neutered dogs. Too funny.

Be the first to comment »

The impossibly talented Michael Hawley talks about Bhutan. He shows pictures of kids and says “These kids are from one of the poorest countries on the planet but there’s a sense of health and wholeness about them.” Remarkable photos. (Michael is affiliated with FriendlyPlanet.org)

He talks about how he came to produce The World’s Largest Book, a collection of photos of Bhutan. [It’s on Amazon.]

Great works, in both senses.

Be the first to comment »

Alex Steffen from Worldchanging.com says that we’re doomed — too many people, etc. — but that there is in fact another world already here. He points to Jim Moore’s Second Super Power, Howard Dean, Linus Torvalds, wikipedia, Creative Commons, and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Lula is rengotiating the relationship between the developed and underdeveloped worlds, Alex says. Brazil is giving broadband to poor areas and seeing rapid economic improvement. He also points to the Internet Bookmobile, a merry-go-round that pumps water as kids play, a rollable water jug, and a flower that has bee nengineered to detect land mines. Then there’s the pond scum that emits hydrogen.

[Very upbeat talk. But we’re all doomed.]

3 Comments »

Phillip Longman says: Unless the secular socities find a way to reproduce themselves, the future belongs to fundamentalists…that is, a new dark ages.” (He’s at the New America Foundation.) More exactly: Fallling birthrates will bring a breakdown of modern welfare states, and the inability of secular societies ro reproduce themselves will lead to the rise of fundamentalist states.

He goes through the numbers. I, of course, I can’t evaluate them because, well, they’re numbers. “Does the future belong to those who believe a higher power command them to procreate? On the surface, the answer seems to be yes.” One conclusion: The future of America, demographically speaking, belongs to the Mormons, he suggests.

[My favorite slide title from this presentation: “An Aging Population Death Spiral” Quite the light-hearted talk! ; ) ]

2 Comments »