Al Gore and the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 this morning.

From the Nobel Foundation’s statement:

By awarding the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 to the IPCC and Al Gore, the Norwegian Nobel Committee is seeking to contribute to a sharper focus on the processes and decisions that appear to be necessary to protect the world’s future climate, and thereby to reduce the threat to the security of mankind. Action is necessary now, before climate change moves beyond man’s control.

And the response from the Gores:

I am deeply honored to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. This award is even more meaningful because I have the honor of sharing it with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – the world’s pre-eminent scientific body devoted to improving our understanding of the climate crisis – a group whose members have worked tirelessly and selflessly for many years. We face a true planetary emergency. The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity. It is also our greatest opportunity to lift global consciousness to a higher level.

My wife, Tipper, and I will donate 100 percent of the proceeds of the award to the Alliance for Climate Protection, a bipartisan non-profit organization that is devoted to changing public opinion in the U.S. and around the world about the urgency of solving the climate crisis.

Well, after a tremendous year of accomplishments and honors (an Emmy for Current TV, an Oscar for Inconvenient Truth, the Live Earth global concert over the summer), this is the final benchmark for Gore; if he doesn’t run for president in 2008 now, then he definitely ain’t runnin’ …

Yet another sad episode in the United States’ continued slow motion self-lobotomization:  

From 2002 until this year, NASA’s mission statement, prominently featured in its budget and planning documents, read: “To understand and protect our home planet; to explore the universe and search for life; to inspire the next generation of explorers … as only NASA can.”

In early February, the statement was quietly altered, with the phrase “to understand and protect our home planet” deleted. In this year’s budget and planning documents, the agency’s mission is “to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research.”

David E. Steitz, a spokesman for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, said the aim was to square the statement with President Bush’s goal of pursuing human spaceflight to the Moon and Mars.

The full article, from the New York Times, is here.

On the sustainable energy front, two new technologies to be tweaked by …

Brown energy is the polite term being bandied about to describe new methods of capturing the methane gas (a chief component of natural gas, as well as a principle greenhouse gas, more potent in its heat-capturing effects than carbon dioxide) generated by cattle. Polite because it euphemizes the process of collecting gas from thousands of cows and pigs farting and shitting their way to their own annihilation.

But its scatological characteristics aside, it’s impossible not to recognize a certain elegance to the operation, both ecologically: 

… More utilities are thinking of buying the gas outright. Pacific Gas and Electric has agreed to transport gas from a big digester that Microgy, a digester manufacturer, is building in California. Right now Microgy plans to sell the gas on the open market, but Robert Howard, vice president for gas transmission and distribution, said P.G.& E. may buy some gas itself. “This technology provides pipeline-quality gas and reduces carbon emissions, so of course we’re in favor it,” he said.

The environmental boons are many. According to Agstar, digesters are already keeping 66,000 tons of methane from escaping each year into the atmosphere, while generating enough energy to power more than 20,000 homes.

and economically:

The potential market is huge. Agstar officials say that at least 70,000 dairy and swine farms are big enough to support a commercial digester and could collectively provide enough energy to power more than 560,000 homes, while keeping more than 1.4 million tons of methane out of the atmosphere.

“The business model of producing energy along with food will transform the economics of rural America,” said Michael T. Eckhart, president of the American Council on Renewable Energy, based in Washington.

Indeed, anaerobic digestion yields not just methane, but leftover liquids that farmers can use or sell as fertilizer, waste heat that can heat their homes and barns, and fibrous solids that make excellent bedding for cows. Farmers also save the costs of controlling odors and treating waste. “Two years ago I couldn’t even convince farmers that digesters work,” said Melissa Dvorak, marketing manager for GHD, a company based in Chilton, Wis., that sells digesters. “Now, all they ask is what the payback will be.”

The full article is in the NYTimes, via Treehugger.

***

Crowd power is an equally interesting (and less messy) attempt at siphoning energy from the otherwise irreversible slide towards entropy. The imaginative idea is based on tapping into the restless, unceasing energy of the city itself; footfalls, vehicle vibrations, the general ambience of a busy day. Unlike Brown Power, this is still in the prototype phase, but it has received a lot of financial investment already. What they have so far:

[Project engineers] Bates and Price are now in the process of developing a joint partnership to make the idea a reality. The architectural team is working with university research groups to finish two vibration-harvesting prototypes by December. The first is a staircase that will contain hydraulic or piezoelectric technology in the risers. The technology will pick up kinetic energy from commuter footfalls and convert it into an electrical current.

Climbing stairs requires more force, which means there’s more energy to be tapped. Engineering experts from the University of Hull hope to develop a system that will convert at least 50% of the six to eight watts each person typically generates while walking. The current will be stored in a battery, which can be used to provide energy for lighting or electronic devices. The second prototype is a wireless lighting system that will use tiny generators with components designed to resonate at the same frequency as surrounding vibrations. The resonance will either move a magnet relative to a coil or put stress on a crystalline structure inside a generator to produce a current. Light-emitting diodes connected to such vibration harvesters could illuminate the underside of arches.

Full article is here. Also via Treehugger.

 

 

Like a great many people have done recently, I saw An Inconvenient Truth tonight and was shattered.

In it slow methodical science takes unusually persuasive and passionate form. It is truth-telling at its noblest and most highly effective. The enormous, planetary threat that Al Gore has been flogging since his college and congressional days (the latter of which was a 17-year tenure he began at age 27) go beyond the politicization that the right has tactically and instinctively — and predictably — resorted to in attacking the film; rather, global warming is, as Gore himself says, not a political issue, but an urgently moral one. That so many people have been packing seats to see it, and that the Republican counterargument is sounding more and more shrill and insane to more and more people by the minute signals, perhaps, that a tipping point in our collective consciousness has finally been reached. Whether or not we can make it past the next century still remains to be seen. If we don’t, will it perhaps be because we’ve reached the Rapture after all? A fossil-fuel-depleted, water-logged, carbon-soaked one albeit? Now that we seem to have eeked past 6/6/06, all bets are off …

I’ve said it before, but just to reiterate … Gore in 2008! We need you ever so desperately now … 

On a lighter, but nevertheless related tip, check out this ingenious and entertaining (and alas, depressing) animation called A Bad Case of the Humans …

When I came across this link to the NASA site that contains an archive of 70s space colony paintings (via Core77) the other day, I practically lost my shit. From the fourth through sixth grades, I devoured this stuff. These very images appeared in the junky, yellowing old issues of Popular Science that dad kept around in the basement. I remember poring over these reverently. [I also remember how in the back of these mags were ads for space mural wallpapers -- which I desperately wanted to get for my bedroom -- and the mail-order listings of Chesley Bonestell (who was the space-age equivalent of the anodyne Norman Rockwell or Maxfield Parrish) prints, and, oh yes, DiY Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome housing kits you could build for your own backyard. Yes, Popular Science in those days was certifiable sci-fi porn for me ...]

I don’t know if anyone in the 70s truly ever thought that these kinds of space colonies were possible, but the intricacy and care with which these images were rendered were persuasive enough for my 10-year-old eyes. Even more so, it was the audacity of the idea itself – curvature of the world made visible! rivers going uphill! groovy bachelor pads on the Riviera — in space! (I can only imagine William Gibson had come across these same images and later incorporated them into his conception of the decadent and malignant Straylight, in Neuromancer) – that pushed these images into the realm of alluring tangibility. They struck chords too deep to be ratiocinated and doubted.

I mean, what kid who grew up with Star Wars in the Reaganite 80s didn’t look up towards space with a sense of hope and wonderment?

***

It would strike me much later, in 12th grade english class in high school, that the image that came to my mind as we read Samuel Coleridge’s trippy Kubla Khan was the very image of these verdant, paradisical space stations — aka, pleasure domes. (’toroids’ or ‘donuts,’ really, if you must insist)

From the first stanza (more of the poem can be found here):

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree :
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
        Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round :
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree ;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

Two pieces in today’s Times …

This discusses the green building movement in New York, and features SOM’s recently completed 7 World Trade Center, and Sir Norman Foster’s Hearst Building. When they say ‘green,’ they mean it in more senses than one:

Of course, it isn’t just environmental consciousness that is motivating developers. Because green buildings use from 30 to 70 percent less energy, they can be run for less money — but leased for more, because companies want healthy offices, which several studies have shown lead to increased productivity.

This op-ed by Jamie Lincoln Kitman of Automobile Magazine applies some lucidity to the hype surrounding hybrid cars:

Several bills floating around Congress, for instance, have proposed tax incentives to buyers of hybrid cars, irrespective of their gas mileage. Thus, under one failed but sure to resurface formulation, the suburbanite who buys a hypothetical hybrid Dodge Durango that gets 14 miles per gallon instead of 12 thanks to its second, electric power source would be entitled to a huge tax incentive, while the buyer of a conventional, gasoline-powered Honda Civic that delivers 40 miles per gallon on the open road gets none.

And under some imaginable patchwork of state and local ordinances, the Durango buyer might get a special parking space at the train station and the right to use a high occupancy vehicle lane, despite appalling fuel economy and a car full of empty seats, while the Honda driver will have to walk to the train from a distant parking lot after braving the worst of morning rush hour traffic on the highway just like everybody else.

*** 

Holy hyperlinking! While we are discussing the Times, I was pleasantly surprised when I saved the above article and received this smart, Amazon-style followup — a long-overdue feature, for sure:

 

These brilliant spots, edited back to back, are for a Japanese kids’ tv show called ‘Pitagora Switch.’ A Japanese colleague and I deduced the ‘Pitagora’ to mean ‘Pythagoras’ (of a^2 + b^2 = c^2 fame), the ’switch’ part, dunno. I am also assuming the tv show is a kind of science program, and that these bumpers are unique, weekly show openers. I don’t know if that’s true, but it is lovely to think so — we need more ways to make engineering sexier to the kids, because we’ll need more world-saving geeks in the future, and fewer fucking American idols.

[cheers, Theo]

It’s spotty like swiss cheese, but delicious nonetheless: 

‘Remember the whiny, insecure kid in nursery school, the one who always thought everyone was out to get him, and was always running to the teacher with complaints? Chances are he grew up to be a conservative.

At least, he did if he was one of 95 kids from the Berkeley area that social scientists have been tracking for the last 20 years. The confident, resilient, self-reliant kids mostly grew up to be liberals.’

[thanks Meredith]

 

A family of five siblings in remote Turkey appear to move around quadrupedally, i.e., on all fours. Anthropologists and psychologists are on the case.

Link to the BBC article here, but a fuller explanation of the remarkable phenomenon is found on the BBC television special. Link to the torrent here.

[Thanks Jeffrey]

 

Spore is the upcoming ‘god’ game designed by Will Wright (of Sims fame), and ‘god’ — as in oh my fucking * — is right; its procedural gaming engine takes emergent AI to another level. As this paradigm-busting demo video (of Wright’s presentation of the game at the recent Game Developer’s Conference) progresses, the edges of gameplay leap continuously outwards, past every conceivable boundary of expectation. To be released sometime this fall, Spore displays a complexity and plasticity beyond pretty much anything you thought possible for a computer game today.

The tingling you are feeling is the Shock of the New …

 

Elizabeth Kolbert wrote a terrific — and thoroughly depressing — piece in last week’s New Yorker called ‘Watermark’ regarding the deterioration of the southern Gulf Coast. You need the dead-trees version of the magazine to read the article, but a Q&A with the author Elizabeth Kolbert can be found on-line (Kolbert’s upcoming book, Field Notes From a Catastrophe, will no doubt contain a longer verion of the piece as well).

As with many of Kolbert’s articles on the environment, ‘Watermark’ begins with a scientific overview. In this case she describes the shifting, precarious geological characteristics of the Louisiana coast, which artificial interventions — such as the existence of New Orleans itself – throw out of balance. Combined with the trend of increasingly powerful hurricanes (which a positive feedback cycle of global warming reinforces and accelerates) gouging the coastline each season, the forecast for the Gulf Coast is grim. 

So do you continue to man the guns? And if so, for how long? The most heartbreaking passage in the article is the one in which the cold, scientific conclusion — that post-Katrina reconstruction of New Orleans and beyond will be an expensive exercise in futility – is pitted against the fierceness and passion of New Orleans residents, still fighting bureaucracy and political inertia to repair their lives and their beloved city.

 

I spent my Friday off roaming the streets of the city and the hallways of the Met and the Museum of Natural History.

The Met is currently showcasing a collection of Robert Rauschenberg’s ‘Combines,’ the name for his mixed media, half-painted, half-sculptural works. I was already enamored with Rauschenberg’s messy, layered, collage sensibility (I throw Tapies, DeKoonig, and Basquiat into this camp as well, but Rauschenberg was probably there first), but to see physical objects — furniture, window frames, clothing, ladders, electrical fixtures, and stuffed animals, including an alpaca goat with a tire hooped around it! — extend out of the picture frame into your physical viewing space was very satisfying in a real, visceral way.

There is also something satisfying by their utter lack of pretension, too. If Marcel Duchamp’s dull, ordinary, mass-produced ‘found objects’ were meant to puncture the sanctimony of High Art, they still did so by taking on themselves the articulation of that polemic — the urinal, the bicycle wheel, the wine rack, provide a semiotic purpose, and are therefore still slaves to a concept; they are still ideas. Rauschenberg’s found objects, on the other hand, are much humbler. They are comfortable amidst the paint smudges and their own ugly, scattered imperfections. They lack any sense of self-consciousness, they don’t raise their voices …

In a distant room in the museum, much smaller in size and more compact in presentation, was a small exhibit of Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava’s sculptural and architectural projects, its emphasis on the relationship between the two.

Ok, I begrudge Calatrava (trained as both an architect and an engineer) the precision and elegance of his sculptures; every piece is a system of tension (wires) and mass / compression (solid material, usually ebony or bronze) held static in an equipoise of competing forces. His buildings and his bridges also share that kind of structural rigor, and they too are beautiful to behold. But when extrapolated to the scale of architectural, the beauty of Calatrava’s formalism turns tyrannical. We can all tiptoe around his sculptures and admire them at a distance in the controlled space of a museum (no cameras please!), but architecture is a larger, more complex, messier, interactive affair — it contains a vitality and dynamism that fights against Calatrava’s rigidity. This conflict is especially apparent given the fact that several of his recent commissions seem to be massive transportation hubs (including the World Trade Center Transportation Hub under construction in Lower Manhattan), whose urbanity and bustle seem completely at odds with their stately, quasi-religious designs. Now if he were designing cathedrals or libraries or something of the like, then perhaps I would be onboard …

I can no longer remember which professor/architect said this at one of our undergraduate studio reviews, but the critique, over a student’s spartan, hyper-symmetrical, super-minimalist, ultimately prison-like design, went something like, ‘Now tell me. What about the Coke machine? If you have to put one in here, and you will, where would you put it? Where can you put it?’

The final, and as it turned out, the longest, leg of my day was across the park at the Museum of Natural History, which was mounting an exhibit on Charles Darwin, founder of Evolution. I went primarily as a show of support and solidarity for fellow reason-based, humanist souls, in light of the shitstorm brewing these days over the teaching of Intelligent Design in American public schools. My $20 was meant mainly to say, ‘Thank you for putting on this show at this particular point in time, and fighting the good fight against the forces of ignorance,’ but it ended up paying for much more than mere lip-service.

The show is incredibly well-executed. The displays (which contain a lot of text — those who don’t like to stand and read be warned) are arranged chronologically, with a strong sense of pacing and narrative. The story begins with Darwin’s curious, insect-collecting boyhood, and progresses through his college days; his 5 years traveling the world and collecting exotic specimens (and eating them! ha!) aboard the HMS Beagle; his return to London and his subsequent entry into its scientific intelligentsia; his move, with his new family, to his manor in the English countryside, where the germination and methodical development of his Evolutionary theory began in earnest; and up through, finally, the publication of The Origin of Species, and the subsequent storm of controversy that it generated — and eventually triumped over. As any well told story does, it envelopes you so completely. And it is also successful because it not only presents the scientific history intelligently and rigorously, but situates the ideas in the rich, emotional life of Darwin the man.

The rebuke of Creationism (and its insidious proxy, Intelligent Design) comes at the very end, but the argument is made persuasively, not angrily. Which meant the show has a good political sense, too, by making politics invisible. This is was perhaps the only museum exhibition I’ve ever left with the urge to applaud outloud.

Now my question is: could anybody over at the Discovery Institute mount something as smart and coherent as this without some kind of divine intervention?

 

This was one of the most powerful snowstorms to hit NYC in recorded history, with 20 inches of accumulation. At one point it was snowing at a rate of 3 inches per hour! As you can see above, even now about 24 hours into it, the world is still a swirling white blur outside our window …

Some additional pictures under the ‘nyc blizzard’ tag in flickr.

[addendum: This turned out to be one for the record books! Central Park recorded 26.9" of snow -- a record for snowfall here! It beat the 1947 record of 26.4". The storm was so fierce, 'thundersnow' was reported in the early hours of Sunday. Thundersnow!]

I became a fan of Malcolm Gladwell late in the game, in January 2004, after he wrote an extraordinary article in the New Yorker which took apart commonly-held (and thereby dangerous) perceptions about the safety of SUVs. I’ve followed his articles since, as well as read (like everybody else) The Tipping Point (although out of laziness more than anything else I have not yet read Blink), and his m.o. has since become discernible; he begins with a seemingly intuitive, common-sensical viewpoint — big, bulky cars are safer to be in; pit bulls are violent and dangerous and should be banned – and then, over the course of the article, through some alchemic, almost ineffable process, he arrives at the exact opposite conclusion. 

A deceptively neutral writing style is a big part of it. He takes a strong position in every piece he writes, but there’s no heated rhetoric, no too-clever conceits, no literary fireworks, no emotional manipulation – his arguments are issued in an orderly, logical, irresistible cascade, the language cool and precise. They move past all standard bullshit detection defenses and nestle in your mindspace until some cleverer argument or better science can come along and dislodge them, because party lines and kneejerk cynicism and angry outrage just don’t suffice as persuasive counterarguments here.  Truly, reading Gladwell is like butter …

Last week’s New Yorker contains a piece he wrote about pit bulls, and how their (unfair) persecution problematizes the practice of profiling (Gladwell is against it).

And speaking of profiles, there is one about Gladwell in the last New York Times Book Review.

 

As an admitted time-piece fetishist, I truly dug this ‘fuzzy’ time-telling device. How dope is this:

‘This is the way they work. The first watch, called “AboutTime”, gives you an approximation of the time. “Going on quarter past one”, “almost six”, “a bit past three”, etc. Perfect if you want to take life a little more easy.

Then, there’s the “Timeline” watch, in which you’re only shown the hour, and not the minutes. Then, the numeral will slowly make it’s way from the bottom the the watch’s face, to the top. The minutes are thus expressed as a proportion of the distance traveled. In other words, if the number 2 is halfway up, you know it’s 2:30.’

[from The Talus Watch via OhGizmo]

 

And on the flipside, a decidedly non-fuzzy, mechanical wonder (and only 220,000 bones, too):

‘This really spectacular architecture seems to be absolutely original. The mechanical design of the Cabestan, including its tourbillon, is totally transversal. The indications (hour, minute, seconds, and power reserve) appear on the cylinders located at the four “corners” of the watch.

Starting from the lower left, we find the barrel, which transmits its driving power to the movement by the intermediary of a chain. This chain is connected to a second cylinder, at the upper left, made up of one part of a fusee (placed horizontally as opposed to the traditional fusees that are always vertical), and the other of the cylindrical power reserve indicator (a total of 72 hours).

Still on the upper end, but this time on the right, we find two cylinders next to each other, providing the perfectly readable hours and minutes. In the lower right hand corner, we can see the tourbillon, which is also placed vertically and is directly linked to another cylinder, which quite logically gives the seconds indication, as the tourbillon makes one rotation per minute.

This completely original mechanical movement, with manual winding, a fusee and a tourbillon, integrates six ball bearings into its operation. It is also water-resistant to 30 metres. The entire movement is visible from above and from the side, under a double sapphire crystal (”Trimaran” model) with three recessed and curved sides, taking the form of a “hood”, all in a very sturdy design.’

[from Europa Star via BoingBoing]

The politicization of science under the Bush Administration continues, carried out via the insidious silencing of dissenting (indeed, empirical, science-based) views. A 40-year veteran of NASA and an expert on climate science there, Dr. James E. Hansen, has come forth claiming that his increasingly vocal warnings about the dangers of global warming — a message he has been hewing since 1988 — are being muzzled by his politically-minded bosses.

The article gives wiggle room the Bush-appointed PR-flack for NASA (some toolbox named George Deutsch), saying that without a hard record a lot of the accusations are of a he-said/she-said variety, but really now. None of this should come as a revelation. After years of this kind of intimidation, at the NIH, at the EPA, at State, at Defense, within Congress, even within the so-called independent media — why would the suppression of ‘off-message’ information by the Whitehouse be seen anymore as anything but S.O.P.?

‘… Dr. Hansen said that nothing in 30 years equaled the push made since early December to keep him from publicly discussing what he says are clear-cut dangers from further delay in curbing carbon dioxide.

In several interviews with The New York Times in recent days, Dr. Hansen said it would be irresponsible not to speak out, particularly because NASA’s mission statement includes the phrase “to understand and protect our home planet.”

He said he was particularly incensed that the directives affecting his statements had come through informal telephone conversations and not through formal channels, leaving no significant trails of documents.’

…

‘The fresh efforts to quiet him, Dr. Hansen said, began in a series of calls after a lecture he gave on Dec. 6 at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. In the talk, he said that significant emission cuts could be achieved with existing technologies, particularly in the case of motor vehicles, and that without leadership by the United States, climate change would eventually leave the earth “a different planet.” The administration’s policy is to use voluntary measures to slow, but not reverse, the growth of emissions.

After that speech and the release of data by Dr. Hansen on Dec. 15 showing that 2005 was probably the warmest year in at least a century, officials at the headquarters of the space agency repeatedly phoned public affairs officers, who relayed the warning to Dr. Hansen that there would be “dire consequences” if such statements continued, those officers and Dr. Hansen said in interviews.

Among the restrictions, according to Dr. Hansen and an internal draft memorandum he provided to The Times, was that his supervisors could stand in for him in any news media interviews.’

Full article here.

Perhaps it is a passing interest on my part, but I’ve become increasingly interested in analog imaging techniques as an antidote to working as a designer almost exclusively in digital media. I’ve become fairly convinced that there is very little you can’t do anymore on a computer, or attempt to do — even a bad composite job or uncanny CG still very explicitly communicates the intention even if the technical execution, to our well-evolved and very shrewd animal eyes, strikes an off-note.

One of the most ‘liberating’ — and therefore one of the most immediately suspicious — aspects of CG is certainly the camera’s limitless freedom of motion, which grants the eye god-like ability to move in impossible ways and perceive impossible things; Matrix-style bullet-time being perhaps the most memorable and egregious recent example. So what joy it was then to come across some DiY camera hackery that make some pretty dope images, that don’t require that deus ex machina (and my daily butter, god bless) otherwise known as Photoshop.

Theo mentioned to me the other day some people who created a scanner camera; they stripped out a camera, attached an off-the-shelf scanner to it, and were able to focus the lense image directly onto a scanner bed. While not a totally analog process, I think the wild, analog spirit still permeates it; at any rate, the results are pretty fascinating.

I also came across this, a site of do-it-yourself photography hacks. I am probably too big of a damn wuss to tweak my cameras and lenses in such a way, but certainly the diy ring flash and macro light box look like worthy endeavors–and there is, certainly, no ‘global illumination’ filter in Photoshop to cop out with right now! (though that too is no doubt just a matter of time …)