Monthly Archives: August 2017

Aug 11

I love the idea of vertical forests (and vertical farms).

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I love the idea of vertical forests (and vertical farms). My short story “Vegetation” is the only place I’ve explored it so far, but I plan to return to the idea.

Originally shared by Greg Batmarx

Air pollution is the single biggest environmental health risk the world faces today, with outdoor pollution linked to 3 million deaths every year.

It’s no wonder designers and engineers are racing to come up with all kinds of air-purifying solutions, from smog-sucking towers and bikes to moss-covered walls. But one of the most impressive ideas so far can be found in Milan, Italy, the design capital of the world and one of the most polluted cities in Europe.

The brainchild of Italian architect *Stefano Boeri, Bosco Verticale (meaning “Vertical Forest”) is the concept of residential high-rises packed with greenery, which can help cities build for density while improving air quality.

The first “vertical forests” were realized in 2014 in the Porta Nuova Isola area of Milan, where two towers, with over 100 apartments between them, together host nearly 500 medium and large trees, 300 small trees, 5,000 shrubs, and 11,000 plants.

The science is simple: trees are the cheapest and most efficient way to absorb carbon dioxide. The 20,000 trees and plants across this pair of towers can transform approximately 44,000 pounds of carbon dioxide into oxygen each year.

Trees, a perennial gift from nature, can also keep temperatures cool indoors and filter out fine dust particles and noise pollution from traffic below.

The logistics of making it all happen, however, were a lot more complex. The process began with bringing together experts in structural engineering and botany to answer all the essential questions.

For example: how can a tree resist extremely windy conditions at 400 feet in the air? Engineers then had to devise a way to secure the roots of the plants in their containers while making sure they could be properly watered and fertilized.

Laura Gatti an architectural botanist on the project, also conducted a three-year study about local plants to determine which species would survive the conditions of the towers. And, of course, even after they’ve been planted, the trees need regular maintenance.

That’s done by a team of aerial arborists, who, like the familiar skyscraper window washers, make their way up and down the buildings, inspecting and grooming the vegetation.

As cities continue to grapple with air pollution, housing shortages, and climate change, these vertical forests could very well be the residential typology we need for the future. And you can certainly expect to see more of them.

I really hope many other architects, many other urban planners, many politicians will be in condition to replicate and improve what we have done Boeri tells us.

His firm itself is currently working on new vertical forests across Europe and in China, including an ambitious “Forest City” in the city of Nanjing.

Meanwhile, similar projects are being proposed and developed all the time, from a spiraling high-rise in Taiwan that is expected to contain 23,000 trees when complete to new tree-tower variations in Toronto and Bogota, to name a few.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/9/16112758/milan-vertical-forest-stefano-boeri-video

Aug 11

Manufacturing productivity, measured as value added per worker, has increased immensely in recent years thanks to a…

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Manufacturing productivity, measured as value added per worker, has increased immensely in recent years thanks to a number of key technologies all improving at once. This article explains how.

Not in the article: This is good news primarily for the people who own the means of production, since they have positioned themselves to keep the benefits of the increased productivity largely to themselves. Ironically, they defend this by claiming to be “job creators”.

It does mean that manufactured goods are rapidly dropping in price, though. Which is a mixed blessing; lots more stuff isn’t necessarily a good thing, but some of it is genuinely useful.

It reminds me of The Economy of Machinery and Manufactures by Charles Babbage (the Difference Engine guy), which is a book I recommend reading if you’re interested in industrialism. Writing in the 1830s, he demonstrated with tables of figures how rapidly the price of manufactured goods had dropped recently, and provided an insightful analysis into why that was. It’s on Project Gutenburg.

Originally shared by Singularity Hub

Exponential technologies have helped manufacturing productivity double over construction productivity.

http://suhub.co/2vVsKTb

Aug 10

Via Deborah Teramis Christian.

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Via Deborah Teramis Christian.

Originally shared by Kam-Yung Soh

Nice work. “When 16-year-old Kavya Kopparapu wasn’t attending conferences, giving speeches, presiding over her school’s bioinformatics society, organizing a research symposium, playing piano, and running a non-profit, she worried about what to do with all her free time.

[…]

Of 415 million diabetics worldwide, one-third will develop retinopathy. Fifty percent will be undiagnosed. Of patients with severe forms, half will go blind in five years. Most will be poor.

“The lack of diagnosis is the biggest challenge,” Kopparapu says. “In India, there are programs that send doctors into villages and slums, but there are a lot of patients and only so many ophthalmologists.” What if there were a cheap, easy way for local clinicians to find new cases and refer them to a hospital?

That was the genesis of Eyeagnosis, a smartphone app plus 3D-printed lens that seeks to change the diagnostic procedure from a 2-hour exam requiring a multi-thousand-dollar retinal imager to a quick photo snap with a phone.

Kopparapu and her team—including her 15-year-old brother, Neeyanth, and her high school classmate Justin Zhang—trained an artificial intelligence system to recognize signs of diabetic retinopathy in photos of eyes and offer a preliminary diagnosis. She presented the system at the O’Reilly Artificial Intelligence conference, in New York City, last month.

“The device is ideal for making screening much more efficient and available to a broader population,” says J. Fielding Hejtmancik, an expert in visual diseases at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Other research groups, including Google and Peek Vision, have recently announced similar systems, but Hejtmancik is impressed with the students’ ingenuity. “These kids have put things together in a very nice way that’s a bit cheaper and simpler than most [systems designed by researchers]—who, by the way, all have advanced degrees!”

[…]

Hejtmancik, the NIH expert, notes that there’s a long road to clinical adoption. “What she’s going to need is a lot of clinical data showing that [Eyeagnosis] is reliable under a variety of situations: in eye hospitals, in the countryside, in clinics out in the boonies of India,” he says.

Still, Hejtmancik thinks the system has real commercial potential. The only problem, he says, is that it’s so cheap that big companies might not see the potential for a profit margin. But that affordability “is exactly what you want in medical care, in my opinion,” he says.”

Harish Pillay Jyoti Q Dahiya

http://spectrum.ieee.org/the-human-os/biomedical/diagnostics/teenage-whiz-kid-invents-an-ai-system-to-diagnose-her-grandfathers-eye-disease
Aug 06

Via Yonatan Zunger.

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Via Yonatan Zunger.

Originally shared by Robert Hansen

An example of a successful informal incubator:

As an appellate court judge, Dad had X clerk slots to fill. And, of course, every student at every Tier-1 law school applied. Federal appellate clerkships are prestigious and can result in large bonuses to initial salary once a clerk matriculates. Dad often said that if all he wanted were Harvard Law grads with 4.0s, LSATs of 172 or above, and a Polish last name, he could do it just from the applications in his inbox.

He didn’t, of course. Instead at the beginning of each law school year he’d call up professors at Tier-2 law schools, at historically black colleges, and he’d ask them: “Do you have any third-years who are once-in-a-career students who haven’t had the one break they need and are running out of time to get it?” Sometimes — usually — they’d say no. No harm, no foul: talk to you next year.

But sometimes — rarely — they’d say yes. At which point Dad would write this student a personal note telling them their professor recommended them highly, and encouraging them to spend this next year doing something that really knocked it out of the park, something to tell him about in their application for a federal clerkship.

And the thing is, if you specifically ask for “students who just haven’t had the one break they need,” that is a wholly race, sexuality, gender, and creed-blind criteria which will nevertheless disproportionately benefit minority candidates. It’s a meritocratic program that at no point involves the word ‘diversity’ — and yet, it resulted in a remarkably diverse workplace filled with whipsmart lawyers from a broad variety of experiences, all of whom were fanatically loyal to Dad for being the guy who took a chance on them.

Pretty good program, I think.

Aug 06

Basically this. I’m not even an engineer, and I know this.

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Basically this. I’m not even an engineer, and I know this.

Originally shared by Yonatan Zunger

A Googler wrote an (internal, since leaked) manifesto about gender and engineering a few days ago. If you haven’t read it, I will say that you are not missing much. But if you’ve heard about this and are wondering what my response was, I just posted it publicly.

The intro of this also hints at some bigger news which I’ll get into later. 🙂

https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/so-about-this-googlers-manifesto-1e3773ed1788
Aug 04

I usually only post my five-star reviews here, and this is a four-star.

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I usually only post my five-star reviews here, and this is a four-star. But it would be a five-star if I liked the genre, and making me like a book this much when I don’t like the kind of book it is – that’s an achievement.

If you, unlike me, enjoy dystopian, this is a well-crafted, clever story with a compelling protagonist.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2082387965

Aug 04

Besides being involved in a Batman movie that was actually good, Lego are taking pretty serious steps to be…

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Besides being involved in a Batman movie that was actually good, Lego are taking pretty serious steps to be environmentally responsible.

Originally shared by Greg Batmarx

In March, the Lego Group unveiled the world’s tallest Lego wind turbine to celebrate having met its 100% renewable-energy target three years ahead of schedule.

The 30-ft-tall wind turbine built from 146,000 Lego bricks pays tribute to the Burbo Bank Extension offshore wind farm near Liverpool, UK, one of Lego’s investments in wind energy totaling $940 million since 2012.

Companies often meet (or even beat) ambitious renewable energy targets by investing in clean electricity, such as wind power, to offset traditional electricity consumption.

Once Burbo Bank began producing electricity in May, the total output of clean energy from Lego’s investments was enough to offset the power used by the company’s factories, offices, and stores worldwide.

Many big brands have set renewable-energy targets to help reduce their carbon dioxide footprints, but a recently published study concludes offsetting carbon emissions by investing in renewable energy isn’t enough to save the planet.

We’ll also need to actually reduce carbon emissions.

In 2015, Lego set another target: replacing 20 types of conventional plastics used in making its bricks with sustainable materials by 2030 to help curb the company’s total carbon dioxide emissions.

The Denmark-based toy maker invested $155 million into a Sustainable Materials Center, where materials specialists are exploring alternatives to plastics made from fossil fuels.

Lego attributes just 10% of the carbon dioxide emitted during the lifecycle of Lego bricks to the company’s own factories, offices, and stores.

The other 90% comes from sources outside its direct control, such as product transport and distribution, and from the making of the tiny plastic chunks it sources from materials suppliers to build its bricks.

In fact, about 4% of the annual consumption of petroleum worldwide is used to make plastic, and another 4% is used to power plastics-manufacturing processes, according to a 2015 study by the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington, DC-based environmental research group.

One solution is bioplastics, which are derived from plants, other biodegradable materials, or both. Bioplastics currently represent just about 1% of plastics produced, but their market is growing at more than 20% a year.

Maximilian Lackner an author on climate-change mitigation and university lecturer on materials science in Vienna, says the trend can be explained by increased consumer awareness of the environmental costs of conventional plastics.

In addition, he notes, recent product innovations have helped bioplastics begin to shed their image as smelly, poor-performing alternatives to conventional plastics. Companies that voluntarily comply with standards such as Europe’s EN13432, designed to measure factors like compostability, for example—gain credibility in the eyes of their consumers.

Conventional plastics have been historically cheaper, but the cost of bioplastics has come down enough to lure some big brands.

Coca-Cola, for example, has distributed 35 billion plant-based bottles in 40 countries, eliminating an estimated 315,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions. The beverage company’s ultimate goal is to find a 100% sustainable, responsibly sourced material for its bottles that is fully recyclable.

Lego wants the same from any sustainable alternative to the 20 conventional plastics now used in their products. Substitute materials also must be as durable as current plastics used, such as the incredibly tough, oil-based ABS (acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene), and as perfectly interlocking and backwards compatible as every Lego brick made since 1958.

Tim Brooks vice president of environmental responsibility for the Lego Group, oversees the work of the Sustainable Materials Center’s 70 experts whose challenging job includes meeting the company’s exacting standards for product safety, quality, and durability.

Every potential bioplastic is tested for strength, stiffness, dimensional stability, and impact strength, measured by whether an element could break or splinter during play.

I’m about to pass on the Lego bricks I played with as a child and the bricks my dad passed down to me to my son says Brooks. We know Lego bricks are often passed down through generations, making it so important that the sustainable materials chosen for our products be extremely durable.

Every Lego element demands something different from a sustainable material.

Bricks require tough materials like ABS; axles and gear wheels need strong materials with low friction; small connectors require strong material that is also stiff; and tires should be soft.

We want any bio-based material to be capable of being precisely molded, or to mold to just a few microns says Brooks, and we want it to be shiny.

Brooks pointed to a side-by-side comparison of two green Lego bricks: one a sample made of wheat sugar and the other a traditional plastic.

The test brick’s color was dull and flat compared with the shiny, bright-green traditional brick.

Despite the challenges, Brooks is confident the company will identify bio-based materials it can make work for their products, and knows it’s something Lego needs to do to be successful in the age of climate change.

Brooks says We know that making bricks has an impact on the planet, and we want it to be a positive one.

Lackner says Lego’s commitment is huge.

If more large companies would commit to sourcing sustainable plastics, it could significantly limit the extensive environmental damage that comes from burning fossil fuels to produce 300 million tons of plastics worldwide every year.

The big players can change the game says Lackner.

https://qz.com/1038739/lego-wants-to-solve-the-worlds-plastics-pollution-problem-but-first-it-needs-to-find-a-biomaterial-that-can-survive-generations-of-play/
Aug 02

now that’s geoengineering: There is a proposal to use about 9% of the oceans surface for massive kelp farms.

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Originally shared by Gregor J. Rothfuss

now that’s geoengineering: There is a proposal to use about 9% of the oceans surface for massive kelp farms. The Ocean surface area is about 36 billion hectares. This would offset all CO2 production and provide 0.5 kg of fish and sea vegetables per person per day for 10 billion people as an “incidental” by-product. Nine per cent of the world’s oceans would be equivalent to about four and a half times the area of Australia.

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/07/so-long-global-warming-and-thanks-for-all-of-the-fish.html