Minimum Viable Planet
November 24, 2015 11:25 AM Subscribe
The inconveniences of daily life are not the significant problems.Bret Victor: What can a technologist do about climate change?
The world that scrolls past you on Twitter is not the real world.
You cannot calibrate your sense of what’s valuable and necessary to the current fashions in your field.
Bret Victor is awesome.
posted by slater at 12:12 PM on November 24, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by slater at 12:12 PM on November 24, 2015 [2 favorites]
Worth reading. I'm trying to do something slightly less ambitious for my thesis and it's frustrating that he just keeps raising the bar.
posted by ethansr at 12:17 PM on November 24, 2015
posted by ethansr at 12:17 PM on November 24, 2015
This is great. So much to keep thinking about, so many links to explore.
posted by Maecenas at 1:55 PM on November 24, 2015
posted by Maecenas at 1:55 PM on November 24, 2015
This passage gives some estimates of what the proposal would actually do. But there’s something more going on. Some numbers above are in green. Drag green numbers with your mouse to adjust them...HOLY MFGHWAOALXM—
Some numbers above are in blue. Click a blue number to reveal how it was calculated... Notice how the model’s assumptions are clearly visible, and can even be adjusted by the reader.WHAT! This is awesome.
This technique needs to be propagated and used. In fact, I wonder if I have any projects where I could implement something similar...
posted by daveliepmann at 2:07 PM on November 24, 2015
...and of course he introduces the library for it in the next section.
posted by daveliepmann at 2:14 PM on November 24, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by daveliepmann at 2:14 PM on November 24, 2015 [1 favorite]
I see he's using his own library tangle.js, but is he using any graphing library/framework?
posted by hermanubis at 2:45 PM on November 24, 2015
posted by hermanubis at 2:45 PM on November 24, 2015
QFT:
posted by mhum at 3:34 PM on November 24, 2015 [7 favorites]
Worrying about sentient AI as the ice caps melt is like standing on the tracks as the train rushes in, worrying about being hit by lightningA quality burn.
posted by mhum at 3:34 PM on November 24, 2015 [7 favorites]
His section on wind power technologies is deep in unproven prototype technology and handwavey woo. Fringe technology won't save us.
posted by scruss at 3:38 PM on November 24, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by scruss at 3:38 PM on November 24, 2015 [1 favorite]
Wind power is now the cheapest electricity to produce in the UK
Wind power was so plentiful in Texas that producers sold it at a negative price.
posted by gwint at 8:19 PM on November 24, 2015 [1 favorite]
Wind power was so plentiful in Texas that producers sold it at a negative price.
posted by gwint at 8:19 PM on November 24, 2015 [1 favorite]
I love this post. As a software engineer one of my constant complaints has been that having, essentially, my fingers on history's most impressive lever (by which I mean a fairly comprehensive and esoteric understanding of how to translate a raw idea into billions of complex operations at essentially no cost), I find myself often at a loss of how to use my superpowers for real human good. This is something of a signpost indicating what that sort of action might look like.
posted by axiom at 11:55 PM on November 24, 2015
posted by axiom at 11:55 PM on November 24, 2015
axiom, that reminds me of a NYT article about the current industry/tech-culture focus on empty-calorie projects. I think this is the one:
Why do these smart, quantitatively trained engineers, who could help cure cancer or fix healthcare.gov, want to work for a sexting app?...
What logic, if any, pertains to where the money flows? [There is a] vague sense of a frenzied bubble of app-making and an even vaguer dread that what we are making might not be that meaningful.posted by daveliepmann at 12:46 AM on November 25, 2015
"There are many fights more important than the fight over how the internet is regulated. ...
Except for one thing: the internet is how every one of these fights will be won or lost. Without a free, fair and open internet, proponents of urgent struggles for justice will be outmaneuvered and outpaced by their political opponents, by the power-brokers and reactionaries of the status quo.
The internet isn’t the most important fight we have; but it’s the most foundational"
posted by jeffburdges at 5:03 AM on November 25, 2015
Except for one thing: the internet is how every one of these fights will be won or lost. Without a free, fair and open internet, proponents of urgent struggles for justice will be outmaneuvered and outpaced by their political opponents, by the power-brokers and reactionaries of the status quo.
The internet isn’t the most important fight we have; but it’s the most foundational"
posted by jeffburdges at 5:03 AM on November 25, 2015
Sexting apps are easy. Even the math their "data scientists" use is easy, as ad placement is a forgiving problem. It's much harder to optimize the placement of wind turbines using say the Navier-Stokes equation.
posted by jeffburdges at 5:47 AM on November 25, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by jeffburdges at 5:47 AM on November 25, 2015 [1 favorite]
> It's much harder to optimize the placement of wind turbines using say the Navier-Stokes equation.
I wish that were the only constraint. Where I mostly work, environmental and permitting constraints will typically mean that you can put turbines on less than 5% of the land that you option.
gwint, I've been doing wind power commercially since 1993. I know that wind power a) works, and b) is cheap. The designs considered in the article, however, have been perpetual pie-in-the-sky ideas pretty much since I was a student.
posted by scruss at 10:00 AM on November 25, 2015
I wish that were the only constraint. Where I mostly work, environmental and permitting constraints will typically mean that you can put turbines on less than 5% of the land that you option.
gwint, I've been doing wind power commercially since 1993. I know that wind power a) works, and b) is cheap. The designs considered in the article, however, have been perpetual pie-in-the-sky ideas pretty much since I was a student.
posted by scruss at 10:00 AM on November 25, 2015
Scruss, I think he's not saying "yes these are great ideas that will be adopted" as much as "there can be innovation on current tech without having to invent new energy tech from the ground up." Whether these particular things are innovations or practical is separate, the idea is to get technologists to focus on more realistic goals. Of course, actually being in the industry for a while would greatly help come up with more practical ideas.
I'm glad to see so much discussion of this, finally. The cost effectiveness of renewables is making it awfully hard to say no to them these days, even for the anti-renewable ideologues.
Storage storage storage will be the issue. Getting people into electric cars will help bootstrap grid storage, as lion car batteries can see many more years of home use after there lost their peak capacity. The secondary market on batteries is going to be quite interesting. And we need to start mining much much more lithium identifying more reserves, as well as pushing along flow battery tech and maturing that industry.
And we most definitely need to start pricing carbon at its true cost. It should cost $0.26/kWh for carbon based electricity, instead of $0.11, merely to account for known externalities. At that price, it's more expensive than solar/wind+storage per kWh, even in the less than ideal locations for solar!
When the economics and the environmental factors are positives, it's time to stop subsidizing the carbon sources and actual make them pay for their externalities rather than letting them freeload on our health and our children's futures.
posted by Llama-Lime at 6:18 PM on November 25, 2015 [3 favorites]
I'm glad to see so much discussion of this, finally. The cost effectiveness of renewables is making it awfully hard to say no to them these days, even for the anti-renewable ideologues.
Storage storage storage will be the issue. Getting people into electric cars will help bootstrap grid storage, as lion car batteries can see many more years of home use after there lost their peak capacity. The secondary market on batteries is going to be quite interesting. And we need to start mining much much more lithium identifying more reserves, as well as pushing along flow battery tech and maturing that industry.
And we most definitely need to start pricing carbon at its true cost. It should cost $0.26/kWh for carbon based electricity, instead of $0.11, merely to account for known externalities. At that price, it's more expensive than solar/wind+storage per kWh, even in the less than ideal locations for solar!
When the economics and the environmental factors are positives, it's time to stop subsidizing the carbon sources and actual make them pay for their externalities rather than letting them freeload on our health and our children's futures.
posted by Llama-Lime at 6:18 PM on November 25, 2015 [3 favorites]
« Older The three witnesses to Lord Vader's skiing mishap... | "Looking forward, the models see red" Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by brainimplant at 12:06 PM on November 24, 2015 [7 favorites]