Friday, November 29, 2013
Thursday, November 28, 2013
Another Kurzweil Interview
Nothing really new here, but he's still drawing media buzz:
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/11/ray_kurzweil_s_singularity_what_it_s_like_to_pursue_immortality.html
A side note about the video: The reason why most future fiction about life extension is dystopian is not because it's been out of reach for us, but because of the nature of fiction. Fiction is about conflict, and the easiest way to generate conflict in stories about the future is to make it dystopian. It's something to fight against. The reason we don't see much in the way of utopian futures is because they would be boring stories. Really, the only way to have utopian stories with real conflict and tension is to have the utopian society ultimately be or become dystopian, drop a character from a utopian society into a dystopia, make the utopian society a goal, that sort of thing. Which means that even if/when these technologies arrive, stories about the future will continue to be dystopian.
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/11/ray_kurzweil_s_singularity_what_it_s_like_to_pursue_immortality.html
A side note about the video: The reason why most future fiction about life extension is dystopian is not because it's been out of reach for us, but because of the nature of fiction. Fiction is about conflict, and the easiest way to generate conflict in stories about the future is to make it dystopian. It's something to fight against. The reason we don't see much in the way of utopian futures is because they would be boring stories. Really, the only way to have utopian stories with real conflict and tension is to have the utopian society ultimately be or become dystopian, drop a character from a utopian society into a dystopia, make the utopian society a goal, that sort of thing. Which means that even if/when these technologies arrive, stories about the future will continue to be dystopian.
Alzheimer's May Be Caused By Diabetes
You can't really extend the life of a person if their mind is gone, and one way to avoid losing your mind may be to avoid getting type 2 diabetes:
Go Wilford, go Wilford...
Monday, November 25, 2013
Amazing iPad 3D Scanner
http://www.bitrebels.com/technology/structure-sensor-ipad-3d-scanner/
Combine this with a 3D printer to recreate any object you can walk around. Create virtual environments of any building interior for everything from games to business meetings to real estate tours. Huge potential!
Combine this with a 3D printer to recreate any object you can walk around. Create virtual environments of any building interior for everything from games to business meetings to real estate tours. Huge potential!
Will 2D Tin be the Next Supermaterial?
Might this be a room-temperature superconductor?
https://www6.slac.stanford.edu/news/2013-11-21-tin-super-material-stanene.aspx
https://www6.slac.stanford.edu/news/2013-11-21-tin-super-material-stanene.aspx
Tuesday, November 19, 2013
Monday, November 18, 2013
First Sustainable Single-Atom Bit Created
Only for 10 seconds...but that's still a billion times longer than before:
http://www.kurzweilai.net/scientists-create-single-atom-bit-smallest-memory-in-the-world?utm_source=KurzweilAI+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=8ba5fae05a-UA-946742-1&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_6de721fb33-8ba5fae05a-281903081
http://www.kurzweilai.net/scientists-create-single-atom-bit-smallest-memory-in-the-world?utm_source=KurzweilAI+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=8ba5fae05a-UA-946742-1&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_6de721fb33-8ba5fae05a-281903081
Sunday, November 17, 2013
Google's "Moon Shot" to Defeat Death by Aging
Now this is a good use for a few spare $ billion to play with:
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2152422,00.html
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2152422,00.html
Friday, November 15, 2013
Thursday, November 14, 2013
Watson Doubles in Power and Becomes Available Over the Web!
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/14/technology/ibm-to-announce-more-powerful-watson-via-the-internet.html?ref=science&_r=1&
“The next generation will look back and see 2013 as a year of monumental change,” said Stephen Gold, vice president of the Watson project at IBM. “This is the start of a shift in the way people interact with computers.”
Very exciting!
Wednesday, November 13, 2013
What Solar Power Still Needs
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304520704579129211308141046
I don't think the small projected increase in solar power by 2040 takes into account a tipping point boom, but we'll see.
I don't think the small projected increase in solar power by 2040 takes into account a tipping point boom, but we'll see.
Monday, November 11, 2013
Solar Power Successes in Europe
Solar Power Begins to Shine as Environmental Benefits Pay Off
By DIANA S. POWERS
PARIS — Amid polemics over rising electricity prices in Europe and the level of green energy subsidies in various countries, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that the growth in clean-energy generation is a huge success story.
Solar photovoltaic generation, known as PV, like wind power before it, is coming into the mainstream — at great environmental benefit.
Based on comparative life-cycle analyses of power sources, “PV electricity contributes 96 percent to 98 percent less greenhouse gases than electricity generated from 100 percent coal and 92 percent to 96 percent less greenhouse gases than the European electricity mix,” said Carol Olson, a researcher at the Energy Research Center of the Netherlands.
Photovoltaic generation offers several additional environmental advantages, Ms. Olson said in an interview.
“Compared with electricity from coal, PV electricity over its lifetime uses 86 to 89 percent less water, occupies or transforms over 80 percent less land, presents approximately 95 percent lower toxicity to humans, contributes 92 to 97 percent less to acid rain, and 97 to 98 percent less to marine eutrophication,” she said. Eutrophication is the discharge of excess nutrients that causes algal blooms.
Toward the end of last year, installed global photovoltaic generating capacity passed the milestone of 100 gigawatts — enough to meet the energy needs of 30 million households and save more than 53 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually, according to a recent report by the European Photovoltaic Industry Association, E.P.I.A., a solar power industry lobby group.
“Right now, today, the world has installed 130 gigawatts of PV, up from 1.4 gigawatts in 2000,” Wolfgang Palz, a former manager of the European Commission’s development program for renewable energies, told a conference organized by France’s National Center for Scientific Research, CNRS, in Paris last month.
Europe alone now has 80 gigawatts of installed photovoltaic capacity, of which 35 gigawatts is in Germany, the European Union leader, providing about 7 percent of the country’s electricity, he said.
Some regions of Germany are even further ahead: “If you buy an Audi today, manufactured in Bavaria, 10 percent of the electricity used to produce it is PV,” Mr. Palz said in an interview.
With large-volume installation, economies of scale have substantially reduced unit costs.
According to a report by the E.P.I.A., the European solar industry’s lobby group, photovoltaic costs have dropped 22 percent with every doubling of production capacity.
Going back 10 to 15 years, “we had to fight to find some crazy people who would install solar panels for $70 per watt on the rooftop,” said Eicke Weber, director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems, in Freiburg, Germany.
“We had to find some market support systems for the first thousand-roof program,” Mr. Weber said. “That became the 100,000-roof program — and then the million-roof program.”
Now, “the number that should be broadcast is that, in Germany now, we are able to put PV systems on the rooftop for one euro per watt,” or $1.34, “with the back-up system, with the inverter, and with the cost of installation,” Mr. Weber said. An inverter is a device that converts the direct current electricity produced by solar generation into alternating current that can be fed into the electrical grid.
“In other countries, in the United States, it’s about a factor of two to three more expensive,” he added.
The rapid expansion of renewable energy generation in Europe has been driven by policy, and specifically by the provision of relatively high guaranteed prices for renewable energy sold into the transmission grid — known as feed-in tariffs.
Ahead of the 2009 United Nations climate change conference in Copenhagen, the European Union adopted a set of targets committing it to a 20 percent reduction in its greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels; an increase in the renewables’ share of E.U. energy consumption to 20 percent; and a 20 percent improvement in energy efficiency — all by 2020.
Since then, feed-in tariffs have been one of the main drivers of cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. The other has been reduced industrial activity resulting from economic recession. Between them, they appear to have been remarkably effective.
In Germany, Spain, Italy and France, for example, renewable energy investment boomed after the introduction of feed-in tariffs, though it has since slowed abruptly as governments have backed off to avoid a glut in supply.
According to the European Environment Agency, Europe had already achieved an emissions reduction of 18 percent by last year, putting it on course to overshoot the 2020 target, even if the E.U. economy recovers by then.
According to the E.P.I.A., the photovoltaic industry lobby group, 10 of the 27 E.U. member states had already achieved their 2020 photovoltaic targets by 2012, and most of the others were close.
With many European consumers squeezed between stagnant or falling incomes and soaring power bills, and governments desperately trying to cut back on public sector spending liabilities, green feed-in tariffs have come under increasingly sharp attack in the past year.
Power utilities have blamed them for rising electricity bills while traditional oil, gas and even nuclear generators have accused them of skewing the competitive playing field — a complaint that ignores the fiscal, regulatory and contractual advantages that they themselves have negotiated with various governments over the years.
Last month, for example, the British government agreed to a 35-year guaranteed price for power from a new nuclear plant to be operated by the French utility EDF. The price set, almost double Britain’s current wholesale electricity price, was effectively a feed-in tariff under another name, supporters of renewable energy say.
“Claiming that a guaranteed feed-in tariff for photovoltaic has to be stopped because it does not fit anymore in the new world is, of course, pure hypocrisy,” said Claude Turmes, a member of the European Parliament from Luxembourg. Mr. Turmes said that President François Hollande of France had backed EDF in its negotiations for a feed-in premium to build the British reactors, even while government policy was shifting away from feed-in tariffs for renewables.
Although cost of living concerns have increasingly been raised by critics seeking to roll back green energy incentives, Ms. Olson, of the Netherlands energy research center, said a cost-benefit analysis of German feed-in tariffs in 2011 made by the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, had found that the benefits outweighed the costs paid by electricity users.
“The €10.9 billion surcharge from the feed-in tariff was in large part compensated by savings on fossil fuel imports of €7.1 billion,” she said. “The presence of renewable energy in the electricity market also brings down the cost of peak electricity by about €4.6 billion. These two factors alone offset the costs, even without calculating in the health and environmental benefits or the jobs created.”
Cutting back on support for green energy now, in response to a short-term oversupply, could seriously damage future investment prospects, clean energy advocates and some financial analysts say.
“Photovoltaic has attracted the largest share of renewable energy investment for the past three years,” said Arnulf Jäger-Waldau, a senior scientist in the renewable energy unit of the European Commission’s joint research center, in an interview. “In 2012, worldwide it attracted $137.7 billion, or €105.9 billion, in new investments.”
“When politicians put in high feed-in tariffs and then abolish them, they create too much uncertainty for the market to grow well. It is better to enact a more modest feed-in tariff directly coupled to the actual cost of developments and maintain it over many years,” he said.
By 2015, present overcapacity on the market should be absorbed, Winfried Hoffmann, president of the European photovoltaic industry lobby group, said in an interview. “Two years from now, we will see a new wave of cost-effective production units,” he said. By then the period of consolidation will be over.
“Many companies will not survive, but some will. If we do not do our homework and prepare the ground today for this next wave and this growing market, then the window of opportunity will be closed,” he said.
Michael Eckhart, global head of environmental finance and sustainability at Citigroup, warned that policy shifts risked undermining investor confidence.
“Don’t let the public policies lag,” he said, “because once we leave, we’re not coming back.”
Solar Market Forecast
Saturday, November 9, 2013
Tuesday, November 5, 2013
Robots Can Now Learn By Demonstration
This seems like a terrific way to train robots to be useful about the home:
http://www.kurzweilai.net/attention-kmart-shoppers-theres-a-robot-checker-open-in-aisle-six?utm_source=KurzweilAI+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=89522e6000-UA-946742-1&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_6de721fb33-89522e6000-281903081
http://www.kurzweilai.net/attention-kmart-shoppers-theres-a-robot-checker-open-in-aisle-six?utm_source=KurzweilAI+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=89522e6000-UA-946742-1&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_6de721fb33-89522e6000-281903081
22% of Stars May Host Earth-Like Planets
Earth-like as in similar size and similar orbit. Other restrictions may apply. But that means BILLIONS of planets in our galaxy alone may hold life:
http://www.universetoday.com/106121/22-of-sun-like-stars-have-earth-sized-planets-in-the-habitable-zone/
http://www.universetoday.com/106121/22-of-sun-like-stars-have-earth-sized-planets-in-the-habitable-zone/
Monday, November 4, 2013
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