How Virtual Reality Has Changed the English Language and the Way Humans Communicate
Introduction
Is it noise or content?
One of the wonderful consequences of spending far too much time ‘blogging’ is the connections that I have made over the last 27 months. I have come across a wonderful range of interesting writers and learnt so much more from those links. However, that’s not all, by a long chalk. A number of you have offered to contribute an essay to Learning from Dogs. (And if you are reading this and would like to offer a guest post then ‘fill your boots!‘ )
So it was that a few weeks ago I received an email from Alexa Russell. She offered me a guest post that I found very interesting, leading to it being published today.
I asked Alexa to write a little about herself, to which she replied, “I am a freelance writer who likes to write about technology, education and the changing nature of society. I am currently considering graduate school but fear being scared off by mounting costs and diminishing returns.”
So onto the post, which Alexa explains is about the ways in which virtual reality and digital devices change how we humans communicate and use the English language. Alexa is the author of several resources on studying English and the value in earning anEnglish PhD. Here she asks what Learning from Dogs has previously wondered — do we need to understand language in order to get the message?
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How Virtual Reality Has Changed the English Language and the Way Humans Communicate
Technology has changed the way we communicate in some obvious (and occasionally obnoxious) ways. Grammar, punctuation, and even a more general respect for lexical rules have diminished in favor of speed and facility in text messages, which are now the most common communicative tool. Probably more periods have been omitted in the last two days than in the hundreds of years since the Gutenberg Bible. None will be omitted here, but maybe they should be.
As social networks expand, making an acquaintance at a coffee shop can easily translate to a lifetime connection – thanks to Facebook. And finally, there is a way to sever contact without engaging in direct conflict – defriending. The funniest thing about defriending is that it is usually considered as an unimpeachable revocation, as starkly offensive as a breakup – when in fact the message has not even crossed the digital threshold to the real world.
As virtual reality and networks progress, so too do our attempts to understand exactly what has happened and may happen to our grip on physical reality. There are a myriad of movies that attempt to explore the subject: The Matrix, Inception, and Avatar, to name a few of the most popular. In The Matrix, Neo discovers that he can will himself to do anything, move with almost infinite speed, gain superman strength, as long as he can carry that belief to his avatar in The Matrix. In Avatar, the protagonist cannot walk in real life but is then given a taller, stronger, more agile host to control. Inception tests the boundaries of the physical, as well as the emotional, as the virtual realities of the “hacked” mind have real impact on his or her emotional truth.
The conclusions that all of these movies come to is the same, albeit shocking fact: virtual reality has real-world effects. Neo can die if he believes he has died. Love can transfer from the blue, tall, strong, avatar to the avatar’s handicapped controller. Inception controls the outlook and actions of an individual well beyond the confines of the dreamworld. It can even come to define the rest of the dreamer’s life.
Virtual reality allows us to shed our physical shells and our weak points. There is nothing holding us back from becoming what or who we want to be. The zits and potbellies of real life give way to what is being communicated. Equally, as in the Matrix, World of Warcraft and even in NASA’s new medical diagnosis virtual reality for astronauts, skills can be learned more quickly than ever will be possible in real life. The NASA device gives astronauts an instant how-to guide, which will enable them to collect data and provide diagnoses as if they had years of medical school under their belts.
So, it really shouldn’t be all that surprising that grammar, punctuation, and spelling have lost a lot of their importance. When people communicate through a virtual medium, they can forget things like academic training and rules of grammar. The value of training and rules is diminishing. It is the essence of the message, not its style, that matters. The biggest question, however is, can you understand the essence?
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You can understand why it was such a pleasure to receive Alexa’s essay! And the question left in the air, so to speak, in her closing sentence, is one of huge import. As we add to, or is it replace, our tradition of the ‘spoken’ word with this new-world of staccato speak, what’s happening to the essence of the message!
I do hope that Alexa will grace these pages again.
The official video about Miniatur Wunderland Hamburg, the largest model railway in the world, and one of the most successful tourist attractions in Germany. On the 1.300 m² large layout, far more than a thousand trains, aircrafts, cars and ships move about. A wonder of the world in miniature. Please, find more information here.
A lifting of the importance of integrity is the key to our survival.
Let me start by reflecting on the difference between ‘truth’ and ‘integrity’.
Here’s one of the definitions of Truth: conformity with fact or reality; verity: the truth of a statement.
Here’s one of the definitions of Integrity: adherence to moral and ethical principles; soundness of moral character; honesty.
So while in yesterday’s article, I frequently referred to the word ‘truth‘, determining the ‘fact or reality‘ of a wide range of issues associated with anthropogenic climate change is not always straightforward. Many of us probably have a strong intuition of the ’cause and effect’ of man’s footprint on this planet but a strong intuition is not the same as truth.
Then let’s turn to the notion of integrity. This is a much bigger issue, to my mind, the appalling lack of integrity! Illustrated by one simple example. How many leading politicians from any number of countries have demonstrated soundness of moral character; honesty with regard to the changing climate, even offering something as simple as “I don’t know!”
There’s a saying that pilots use, “If there’s any doubt, there’s no doubt!” Come on, politicians and leaders, at the very least there is doubt!
OK, let me move on!
If integrity is partly defined as honesty, then while it’s easy to take a pot-shot at the world’s politicians maybe we need to look closer at home; ourselves. Are we as honest with our own self as we now need to be?
Here’s an example that supports that question.
A few days ago there was a report on the website The Daily Impact about the crash of US fisheries. Let me show you how that report opens,
Report: US Fisheries Crashing
We live in a country in which every household has two TV sets, most of them receiving hundreds of channels, and two cell phones, many of them “smart.” One of every two households has a computer connected to the Internet. This country is currently in the middle of a hotly contested presidential election. And yet among the things that have almost completely escaped public attention is this: last week the US government declared fisheries disasters on four coasts.
Reflect on that paragraph. Surely it’s a reflection about the lack of integrity, of honesty, about our society?
The report ends thus,
The disaster declaration covering all these dire situations makes them eligible for Congressional aid, along with drought-stricken farmers in the Midwest and Southwest, flooded-out homeowners in New Orleans and along the Gulf, the fire-ravaged states of the far West, and the derecho-pounded Northeast. Congress will no doubt be delighted by the opportunity to help.
We eat nearly five billion pounds of seafood every year — about 16 pounds for each of us — and 85 per cent of it is imported (according to NOAA). Yet in the wake of this grim assessment of a large proportion of the domestic industry, and the questions it raises about the future sources of seafood, there is no discussion of “fisheries independence” or “peak fish” in politics or the media. Only in such outposts as this website and Mother Jones will the dire warning from the Commerce Department be reported as what it is — a dire warning.
Then there was a recent article on the Australian Permaculture news website about the US food and dairy industry. Here’s how that opened,
Americans’ right to access fresh, healthy foods of their choice is under attack. Farmageddon tells the story of small, family farms that were providing safe, healthy foods to their communities and were forced to stop, sometimes through violent action, by agents of misguided government bureaucracies, and seeks to figure out why.
Filmmaker Kristin Canty’s quest to find healthy food for her four children turned into an educational journey to discover why access to these foods was being threatened. What she found were policies that favor agribusiness and factory farms over small family-operated farms selling fresh foods to their communities. Instead of focusing on the source of food safety problems — most often the industrial food chain — policymakers and regulators implement and enforce solutions that target and often drive out of business small farms that have proven themselves more than capable of producing safe, healthy food, but buckle under the crushing weight of government regulations and excessive enforcement actions.
I’m not going to insert that YouTube video into this post but you can link to both the full article and the film here. For anyone interested in the fate of the family farm in the USA, the film is a ‘must see’! Once again, the theme of integrity, of adherence to moral and ethical principles; honesty, comes to mind!
How I do want to close this rather personal reflection on present times (some may call it an indulgent reflection!) is by including a video from this seasons TED Talks. It was brought to my attention by Christine over at her excellent blog 350 or bust. The video is about resolving conflict,
William Ury, author of “Getting to Yes,” offers an elegant, simple (but not easy) way to create agreement in even the most difficult situations — from family conflict to, perhaps, the Middle East.
The reason why this seems like a very appropriate way to close this is because the way things are going at the moment, avoiding conflict could become rather important, rather soon!
Science may just be starting to make some sense of this cruelest of diseases.
It used be to the dreaded ‘C’ word; cancer. But now that ‘C’ word has a companion, the dreaded ‘A’ word. The incidence of Alzheimer’s disease seems to be on a terrible rise. Indeed, my wife, Jean, lost her late husband to Alzheimer’s disease. My half-sister back in England is now very ill with the disease. Just chatting to some people here in Payson a few days ago revealed many who had friends or relations suffering.
So a recent item first seen on the website of The Permaculture Research Institute of Australia really jumped off the ‘page’! It was an article by George Monbiot entitled The Mind Thieves. I dropped Mr. Monbiot a quick email requesting permission to republish the article and very promptly received a positive answer. Thank you, Sir.
So before moving to the article, first a little background on George M. From his website, one quickly reads,
George Monbiot
I had an unhappy time at university, and I now regret having gone to Oxford, even though the zoology course I took – taught, among others, by Richard Dawkins, Bill Hamilton and John Krebs – was excellent. The culture did not suit me, and when I tried to join in I fell flat on my face, sometimes in a drunken stupor. I enjoyed the holidays more: I worked on farms and as a waterkeeper on the River Kennet. I spent much of the last two years planning my escape. There was only one job I wanted, and it did not yet exist: to make investigative environmental programmes for the BBC.
I’m not going to copy the full ‘About George‘ description but do urge you to pop across to here and read it yourself; George has had, trust me, a fascinating life journey that I suspect is far from over. This is how that About description closes,
Here are some of the things I love: my family and friends, salt marshes, arguments, chalk streams, Russian literature, kayaking among dolphins, diversity of all kinds, rockpools, heritage apples, woods, fishing, swimming in the sea, gazpacho, sprinting up the pitch in ultimate frisbee, ponds and ditches, growing vegetables, insects, pruning, forgotten corners, fossils, goldfinches, etymology, Bill Hicks, ruins, Shakespeare, landscape history, palaeoecology and Father Ted.
Here are some of the things I try to fight: undemocratic power, corruption, deception of the public, environmental destruction, injustice, inequality and the misallocation of resources, waste, denial, the libertarianism which grants freedom to the powerful at the expense of the powerless, undisclosed interests, complacency.
Here is what I fear: other people’s cowardice.
I still see my life as a slightly unhinged adventure whose perpetuation is something of a mystery. I have no idea where it will take me, and no ambitions other than to keep doing what I do. So far it’s been gripping.
The article was first published in the British Guardian newspaper (there’s an online link to it here) as the article mentions below. But I am republishing, in full thanks to George, the copy that appeared on George’s website on the 10th September last, including the references.
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The Mind Thieves
September 10th, 2012
The evidence linking Alzheimer’s disease to the food industry is strong and growing.
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian, 11th September 2012
When you raise the subject of over-eating and obesity, you often see people at their worst. The comment threads discussing these issues reveal a legion of bullies, who appear to delight in other people’s problems.
When alcoholism and drug addiction are discussed, the tone tends to be sympathetic. When obesity is discussed, the conversation is dominated by mockery and blame, though the evidence suggests that it can be driven by similar forms of addiction(1,2,3,4). I suspect that much of this mockery is a coded form of snobbery: the strong association between poor diets and poverty allows people to use this issue as a cipher for something else they want to say, which is less socially acceptable.
But this problem belongs to all of us. Even if you can detach yourself from the suffering caused by diseases arising from bad diets, you will carry the cost, as a growing proportion of the health budget will be used to address them. The cost – measured in both human suffering and money – could be far greater than we imagined. A large body of evidence now suggests that Alzheimer’s is primarily a metabolic disease. Some scientists have gone so far as to rename it. They call it diabetes type 3.
New Scientist carried this story on its cover last week(5): since then I’ve been sitting in the library trying to discover whether it stands up. I’ve now read dozens of papers on the subject, testing my cognitive powers to the limit as I’ve tried to get to grips with brain chemistry. While the story is by no means complete, the evidence so far is compelling.
Around 35 million people suffer from Alzheimer’s disease worldwide(6); current projections, based on the rate at which the population ages, suggest that this will rise to 100 million by 2050(7). But if, as many scientists now believe, it is caused largely by the brain’s impaired response to insulin, the numbers could rise much further. In the US, the percentage of the population with diabetes type 2, which is strongly linked to obesity, has almost trebled in 30 years(8). If Alzheimer’s, or “diabetes type 3”, goes the same way, the potential for human suffering is incalculable.
Insulin is the hormone which prompts the liver, muscles and fat to absorb sugar from the blood. Diabetes 2 is caused by excessive blood glucose, resulting either from a deficiency of insulin produced by the pancreas, or resistance to its signals by the organs which would usually take up the glucose.
The association between Alzheimer’s and diabetes 2 is long-established: type 2 sufferers are two to three times more likely to be struck by this dementia than the general population(9). There are also associations between Alzheimer’s and obesity(10) and Alzheimer’s and metabolic syndrome (a complex of diet-related pathologies)(11).
Researchers first proposed that Alzheimer’s was another form of diabetes in 2005. The authors of the original paper investigated the brains of 54 corpses, 28 of which belonged to people who had died of the disease(12). They found that the levels of both insulin and insulin-like growth factors in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients were sharply reduced by comparison to those in the brains of people who had died of other causes. Levels were lowest in the parts of the brain most affected by the disease.
Their work led them to conclude that insulin and insulin-like growth factor are produced not only in the pancreas but also in the brain. Insulin in the brain has a host of functions: as well as glucose metabolism, it helps to regulate the transmission of signals from one nerve cell to another, and affects their growth, plasticity and survival(13,14).
Experiments conducted since then appear to support the link between diet and dementia(15,16,17,18), and researchers have begun to propose potential mechanisms. In common with all brain chemistry, these tend to be fantastically complex, involving, among other impacts, inflammation, stress caused by oxidation, the accumulation of one kind of brain protein and the transformation of another(19,20,21,22). I would need the next six pages of this paper even to begin to explain them, and would doubtless get it wrong (if you’re interested, please follow the links on my website).
Plenty of research still needs to be done. But if the current indications are correct, Alzheimer’s disease could be another catastrophic impact of the junk food industry, and the worst discovered so far. Our governments, as they are in the face of all our major crises, appear to be incapable of responding.
In this country as in many others, the government’s answer to the multiple disasters caused by the consumption of too much sugar and fat is to call on both companies and consumers to regulate themselves. Before he was replaced by someone even worse, the former health secretary, Andrew Lansley, handed much of the responsibility for improving the nation’s diet to food and drinks companies: a strategy that would work only if they volunteered to abandon much of their business(23,24).
A scarcely-regulated food industry can engineer its products – loading them with fat, salt, sugar and high fructose corn syrup – to bypass the neurological signals which would otherwise prompt people to stop eating(25). It can bombard both adults and children with advertising. It can (as we discovered yesterday) use the freedoms granted to academy schools to sell the chocolate, sweets and fizzy drinks now banned from sale in maintained schools(26). It can kill the only effective system (the traffic light label) for informing people how much fat, sugar and salt their food contains. Then it can turn to the government and blame consumers for eating the products it sells. This is class war: a war against the poor fought by the executive class in government and industry.
We cannot yet state unequivocally that poor diet is a leading cause of Alzheimer’s disease, though we can say that the evidence is strong and growing. But if ever there was a case for the precautionary principle, here it is. It’s not as if we lose anything by eating less rubbish. Averting a possible epidemic of this devastating disease means taking on the bullies: those who mock people for their pathologies and those who spread the pathologies by peddling a lethal diet.
References:
1. Caroline Davis et al, 2011. Evidence that ‘food addiction’ is a valid phenotype of obesity. Appetite Vol. 57, pp711–717. doi:10.1016/j.appet.2011.08.017
2. Paul J. Kenny, November 2011. Common cellular and molecular mechanisms in obesity and drug addiction. Nature Neuroscience, Vol. 12, pp 638-651. doi:10.1038/nrn3105
3. Joseph Frascella et al, 2010. Shared brain vulnerabilities open the way for nonsubstance addictions: Carving addiction
at a new joint? Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 1187, pp294–315. doi: 10.1111/j.1749-6632.2009.05420.x
4. Ashley N. Gearhardt et al, 2010. Can food be addictive? Public health and policy implications. Addiction, 106, 1208–1212. ad. d_3301 1208..1212 doi:10.1111/j.1360-0443.2010.03301.x
5. Bijal Trivedi, 1st September 2012. Eat Your Way to Dementia. New Scientist.
6. Sónia C. Correia et al, 2011. Insulin-resistant brain state: The culprit in sporadic Alzheimer’s disease? Ageing Research Reviews Vol. 10, 264–273. doi:10.1016/j.arr.2011.01.001
7. Fabio Copped`e et al, 2012. Nutrition and Dementia. Current Gerontology and Geriatrics Research, Vol. 2012, pp1-3. doi:10.1155/2012/926082
8. See the graph in Bijal Trivedi, 1st September 2012. Eat Your Way to Dementia. New Scientist.
9. Johanna Zemva and Markus Schubert, September 2011. Central Insulin and Insulin-Like Growth Factor-1 Signaling – Implications for Diabetes Associated Dementia. Current Diabetes Reviews, Vol.7, No.5, pp356-366. doi.org/10.2174/157339911797415594
10. Eg Weili Xu et al, 2011. Midlife overweight and obesity increase late life dementia risk: a population-based twin study. Neurology, Vol. 76, no. 18, pp.1568–1574.
11. M. Vanhanen et al, 2006. Association of metabolic syndrome with Alzheimer disease: A population-based study. Neurology, vol. 67, pp.843–847.
12. Eric Steen et al, 2005. Impaired insulin and insulin-like growth factor expression and signaling mechanisms in Alzheimer’s disease – is this type 3 diabetes?. Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, Vol. 7, pp.63–80.
13. Konrad Talbot et al, 2012. Demonstrated brain insulin resistance in Alzheimer’s disease patients is associated with IGF-1 resistance, IRS-1 dysregulation, and cognitive decline. The Journal of Clinical Investigation, Vol.122, No.4, pp.1316–1338. doi:10.1172/JCI59903.
14. Naoki Yamamoto et al, 2012. Brain insulin resistance accelerates Aβ fibrillogenesis by inducing GM1 ganglioside clustering in the presynaptic membranes. Journal of Neurochemistry, Vol. 121, 619–628. doi: 10.1111/j.1471-4159.2012.07668.x
15. Eg:
Wei-Qin Zhao and Matthew Townsend, 2009. Insulin resistance and amyloidogenesis as common molecular foundation for type 2 diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease.
Biochimica et Biophysica Acta, Vol.1792, pp.482–496. doi.org/10.1016/j.bbadis.2008.10.014,
16. Sónia C. Correia et al, 2011. Insulin-resistant brain state: The culprit in sporadic Alzheimer’s disease? Ageing Research Reviews Vol. 10, 264–273. doi:10.1016/j.arr.2011.01.001
17. T. Ohara et al, 2011. Glucose tolerance status and risk of dementia in the community, the Hisayama study. Neurology, Vol. 77, pp.1126–1134.
18. Karen Neumann et al, 2008. Insulin resistance and Alzheimer’s disease: molecular links & clinical implications. Current Alzheimer Research, Vol.5, no.5, pp438–447.
19. Eg: Lap Ho et al, 2012. Insulin Receptor Expression and Activity in the Brains of Nondiabetic Sporadic Alzheimer’s Disease Cases. International Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, Volume 2012. doi:10.1155/2012/321280
20. Suzanne M. de la Monte, 2012. Contributions of Brain Insulin Resistance and Deficiency in Amyloid-Related Neurodegeneration in Alzheimer’s Disease. Drugs, Vol. 72, no.1, pp. 49-66. doi: 10.2165/11597760
21. Ying Liu et al, 2011. Deficient brain insulin signalling pathway in Alzheimer’s disease and diabetes. Journal of Pathology, Vol. 225, pp.54–62. doi: 0.1002/path.2912
22. Konrad Talbot et al, 2012. Demonstrated brain insulin resistance in Alzheimer’s disease patients is associated with IGF-1 resistance, IRS-1 dysregulation, and cognitive decline. The Journal of Clinical Investigation, Vol.122, No.4, pp.1316–1338. doi:10.1172/JCI59903.
Don’t know about you but the above is a fine example of investigative reporting. It deserves the widest circulation because if it is proved that there is a link between diet and Alzheimer’s disease then, once again, it shows how taking personal responsibility for our health has huge implications for us, our families and for society at large.
OK, that sub-heading must seem a tad bizarre! Let me explain. On Tuesday, Jean had an important visit to make down in Mesa, AZ on the outskirts of Phoenix. The first 65 miles, give or take, from Payson to Mesa are down along Highway 87.
At 11.20 we started on our return from Mesa planning on being early back home, say by 1pm at the latest. But 31 miles up the Northbound carriageway of Highway 87, we came to a halt. The road was closed due to an accident with a tanker. As our local newspaper, the Payson Roundup, put it,
The driver of the truck was taken by ambulance to a Scottsdale hospital with non life-threatening injuries. DPS has not ruled out speed as the cause of the crash. Photo by Andy Towle.
Due to a hazardous spill, Highway 87 was closed most of Tuesday, but reopened Wednesday morning after overnight clean up efforts, according to the Arizona Department of Public Safety.
Officials initially thought the roadway could be closed as many as two days due to the amount of oil spewed across both sides of the highway.
The highway closed down after a semi truck carrying oil used for paving rolled Tuesday afternoon near milepost 228, at the bottom of Slate Creek.
That resulted in us having to take a 170 mile detour and not arriving back until 4.30pm!
So what’s that got to do with the post for today? Simply that the implications of Tuesday spilled, like the tanker’s oil cargo, across into Wednesday and the long, thoughtful post I had in my mind to write got put on hold. Thus in its place is this republication of a recent release by Stanford School of Engineering at Stanford University. Apologies for another republished item but the article is relevant and interesting.
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WIND COULD MEET WORLD’S TOTAL POWER DEMAND – AND THEN SOME – BY 2030
Wind turbines near Livermore, CA.
HIGH RESOLUTION MODELS
In their study, Jacobson and Archer adapted the three-dimensional, atmosphere-ocean-land computer model known as GATOR-GCMOM to calculate the theoretical maximum wind power potential on the planet taking into account wind reduction by turbines. Their model assumed wind turbines could be installed anywhere and everywhere, without regard to societal, environmental, climatic or economic considerations.
The new paper contradicts two earlier studies that said wind potential falls far short of the aggressive goal because each turbine steals too much wind energy from other turbines, and that turbines introduce harmful climate consequences that would negate some of the positive aspects of renewable wind energy.
The new model provides a more sophisticated look than previously possible by separating winds in the atmosphere into hypothetical boxes stacked atop and beside one another. Each box has its own wind speed and weather. In their model, Jacobson and Archer exposed individual turbines to winds from several boxes at once, a degree of resolution earlier global models did not match.
“Modeling the climate consequences of wind turbines is complex science,” said Jacobson. “This software allows that level of detail for the first time.”
With a single model, the researchers were able to calculate the exposure of each wind turbine in the model to winds that vary in space and time. Additionally, the model extracts the correct amount of energy from the wind that gets claimed by the turbines, reducing the wind speed accordingly while conserving energy. It then calculates the effect of these wind speed changes on global temperatures, moisture, clouds and climate.
POTENTIAL APLENTY
Among the most promising things the researchers learned is that there is a lot of potential in the wind—hundreds of terawatts. At some point, however, the return on building new turbines plateaus, reaching a level in which no additional energy can be extracted even with the installation of more turbines.
“Each turbine reduces the amount of energy available for others,” Archer said. The reduction, however, becomes significant only when large numbers of turbines are installed, many more than would ever be needed.
“And that’s the point that was very important for us to find,” Archer said.
The researchers have dubbed this point the saturation wind power potential. The saturation potential, they say, is more than 250 terawatts if we could place an army of 100-meter-tall wind turbines across the entire land and water of planet Earth. Alternatively, if we place them only on land (minus Antarctica) and along the coastal ocean there is still some 80 terawatts available—about seven times the total power demand of all civilization. Hypothetical turbines operating in the jet streams six miles up in the atmosphere could extract as much as an additional 380 terawatts.
“We’re not saying, ‘Put turbines everywhere,’ but we have shown that there is no fundamental barrier to obtaining half or even several times the world’s all-purpose power from wind by 2030. The potential is there, if we can build enough turbines,” said Jacobson.
Mark Z. Jacobson, professor of civil and environmental engineering. Photo: Linda Cicero / Stanford News Service
HOW MANY TURBINES?
Knowing that the potential exists, the researchers turned their attention to how many turbines would be needed to meet half the world’s power demand—about 5.75 terawatts—in a 2030 clean-energy economy. To get there, they explored various scenarios of what they call the fixed wind power potential—the maximum power that can be extracted using a specific number of wind turbines.
Archer and Jacobson showed that four million 5-megawatt turbines operating at a height of 100 meters could supply as much 7.5 terawatts of power—well more than half the world’s all-purpose power demand—without significant negative affect on the climate.
“We have a long way to go. Today, we have installed a little over one percent of the wind power needed,” said Jacobson.
In terms of surface area, Jacobson and Archer would site half the four million turbines over water. The remaining two million would require a little more than one-half of one percent of the Earth’s land surface—about half the area of the State of Alaska. However, virtually none of this area would be used solely for wind, but could serve dual purposes as open space, farmland, ranchland, or wildlife preserve.
Rather than put all the turbines in a single location, Archer and Jacobson say it is best and most efficient to spread out wind farms in high-wind sites across the globe—the Gobi Desert, the American plains and the Sahara for example.
“The careful siting of wind farms will minimize costs and the overall impacts of a global wind infrastructure on the environment,” said Jacobson. “Regardless, as these results suggest, the saturation of wind power availability will not limit a clean-energy economy.”
Funding sources include National Science Foundation, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and National Aeronautics and Space Administration high-end computing.
Andrew Myers is associate director of communications for the Stanford University School of Engineering.
Monday, September 10, 2012
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Let me close by pointing you to Mark Jacobson’s website.
An afterthought about the adventurous spirit of man.
While the focus on the manned exploration of space has declined significantly since those days of the Apollo missions, the spirit to explore has not diminished. This was underlined in spades by a recent post from the British blog Earth & Solar System that I have been subscribing to since a few weeks ago.
This blog reflects the research interests of the Isotope Cosmochemistry and Geochemistry Group at the University of Manchester. In our laboratories we study samples from comets, interstellar dust, interplanetary dust, Mars, the moon and asteroids to understand how the Earth and the Solar System were formed, how they evolved and became what we see today. We study the Earth and its chemistry to understand how it works, its mantle, crust, oceans and how we change it. We want to share and discuss what we find with everyone.
The blog is for sharing science and what we and other research groups discover as we do science in real time. Discussion, questioning and enquiry are good, but politics, and opinion that can’t be backed up by published scientific work are strictly off-limits and will be removed.
Yet another example of why integrity is the only way forward.
Anyway, the recent post that was published came into my ‘in-box’ on Monday and I wanted to share it with you. Primarily because the mainstream media have moved on and there is little ‘news’ about NASA’s Curiosity rover. That’s why this post is so fascinating and it’s reproduced on Learning from Dogs with the permission of Ashley King, the author.
The past week has seen NASAs Curiosity rover return more amazing images of the Gale crater, fire up its DAN and SAM instruments, and take its first steps towards Mt. Sharp.
Mastcam view south-west from the Bradbury landing site. The foreground is boulder-strewn and contains the edge of an impact crater. The layered rocks in the background form the base of Mt. Sharp (NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS).
The new images, captured using the 100mm telephoto lens of the Mastcam, provide a glimpse of the geological treats that await scientists at the base of Mt. Sharp. Of particular interest has been the identification of an unconformity, where two rocks in contact but of different ages indicate a break in the geological record. Satellite data suggests that the rocks lying below the unconformity contain hydrous minerals whilst those above are “dry”. It appears these rock units formed under very different environmental conditions.
Unconformity (marked by white dots) at Mt. Sharp (NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS).
Next, Curiosity had another driving lesson, this time positioning itself over one of the scour marks created during landing. This allowed the rover to continue testing the ChemCam and turn on the Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons (DAN) instrument, which will be used to search for water below the Martian surface. The Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument, comprising of a mass spectrometer, gas chromatograph and tunable laser spectrometer, was also gently woken up. SAM can measure the abundance of C compounds, H, N and O, elements associated with life, in atmospheric and powdered rock samples. A quick test of some Earth air trapped in the instrument since launch confirmed that it is working well and should soon be ready for Martian samples.
Curiosity has now completed four drives and is heading for Mt. Sharp. However, the first target is Glenelg, a rock outcrop 400m to the east of the Bradbury landing site, where it’s hoped Curiosity will start using its drill. Although the journey will take several weeks, Glenelg contains at least three different rock types that will help scientists piece together the geological history of Gale crater.
Leaving the Bradbury landing site. This Navcam image shows the tracks left in the Martian soil by Curiosity (NASA/JPL-Caltech).
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Makes a nice change to forget about the goings-on here on Planet Earth!
Richard and I go back too many years! He has been a dear friend despite the obvious hurdle that when we first met, he declared that he was a typewriter salesman for Olivetti in the UK with me admitting that I was a typewriter salesman for IBM UK! Here’s the story.
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WHAT WENT WRONG IN EUROPE – SIMPLY EXPLAINED!
Not Helga’s Bar!!
Helga is the proprietor of a bar. She realizes that virtually all of her customers are unemployed alcoholics and, as such, can no longer afford to patronize her bar. To solve this problem she comes up with a new marketing plan that allows her customers to drink now, but pay later.
Helga keeps track of the drinks consumed on a ledger (thereby granting the customers’ loans).
Word gets around about Helga’s “drink now, pay later” marketing strategy and, as a result, increasing numbers of customers flood into Helga’s bar. Soon she has the largest sales volume for any bar in town.
By providing her customers freedom from immediate payment demands, Helga gets no resistance when, at regular intervals, she substantially increases her prices for wine and beer – the most consumed beverages.
Consequently, Helga’s gross sales volumes and paper profits increase massively. A young and dynamic vice-president at the local bank recognises that these customer debts constitute valuable future assets and increases Helga’s borrowing limit. He sees no reason for any undue concern, since he has the debts of the unemployed alcoholics as collateral.
He is rewarded with a six figure bonus.
At the bank’s corporate headquarters, expert traders figure a way to make huge commissions, and transform these customer loans into DRINKBONDS. These “securities” are then bundled and traded on international securities markets.
Naive investors don’t really understand that the securities being sold to them as “AA Secured Bonds” are really debts of unemployed alcoholics. Nevertheless, the bond prices continue to climb and the securities soon become the hottest-selling items for some of the nation’s leading brokerage houses.
The traders all receive six figure bonuses.
One day, even though the bond prices are still climbing, a risk manager at the original local bank decides that the time has come to demand payment on the debts incurred by the drinkers at Helga’s bar. He so informs Helga. Helga then demands payment from her alcoholic patrons but, being unemployed alcoholics, they cannot pay back their drinking debts. Since Helga cannot fulfil her loan obligations she is forced into bankruptcy. The bar closes and Helga’s 11 employees lose their jobs.
Overnight, DRINKBOND prices drop by 90%. The collapsed bond asset value destroys the bank’s liquidity and prevents it from issuing new loans, thus freezing credit and economic activity in the community.
The suppliers of Helga’s bar had granted her generous payment extensions and had invested their firms’ pension funds in the BOND securities. They find they are now faced with having to write off her bad debt and with losing over 90% of the presumed value of the bonds. Her wine supplier also claims bankruptcy, closing the doors on a family business that had endured for three generations; her beer supplier is taken over by a competitor, who immediately closes the local plant and lays off 150 workers.
Fortunately though, the bank, the brokerage houses and their respective executives are saved and bailed out by a multibillion dollar no-strings attached cash infusion from the government.
They all receive a six figure bonus.
The funds required for this bailout are obtained by new taxes levied on employed, middle-class, non-drinkers who’ve never been in Helga’s bar……………………….!
A wonderful investment in studying America’s ecology is just starting.
I am indebted to The Economist for including in their issue of the 25th August a story about NEON, something I had previously not heard about.
It was then an easy step to locate the main website for the National Ecological Observatory Network, or NEON. (Just an aside that I can’t resist – NEON is such a fabulous acronym that one wonders how much push and shove there was to come up with the full name that also fitted the word ‘NEON’! Sorry, it’s just me!)
Anyway, back to the plot. The following video gives a very good idea of the projects aims. When I watched it, I found it inspiring because it seemed a solid example of how the nation, that is the USA, is starting to recognise that evolving to a new, sustainable way of life has to be built on good science. NEON strikes me as excellent science. You watch the video and see if you come to the same conclusion.
There’s also a comprehensive introduction to the project from which I will republish this,
In an era of dramatic changes in land use and other human activities, we must understand how the biosphere – the living part of earth – is changing in response to human activities. Humans depend on a diverse set of biosphere services and products, including air, water, food, fiber, and fuel. Enhancements or disruptions of these services could alter the quality of human life in many parts of the world.
To help us understand how we can maintain our quality of life on this planet, we must develop a more holistic understanding of how biosphere services and products are interlinked with human impacts. This cannot be investigated using disconnected studies on individual sites or over short periods of observation. Further, existing monitoring programs that collect data to meet natural resource management objectives are not designed to address climate change and other new, complex environmental challenges.
NEON, the first continental-scale ecological observatory, will provide comprehensive data that will allow scientists to address these issues.
Later on there’s more detail, as follows,
NEON has partitioned the U. S. into 20 eco-climatic domains, each of which represents different regions of vegetation, landforms, climate, and ecosystem performance. In those domains, NEON will collect site-based data about climate and atmosphere, soils and streams and ponds, and a variety of organisms. Additionally, NEON will provide a wealth of regional and national-scale data from airborne observationsand geographical data collected by Federal agencies and processed by NEON to be accessible and useful to the ecological research community. NEON will also manage a long-term multi-site stream experiment and provide a platform for future observations and experiments proposed by the scientific community.
The data collected and generated across NEON’s network – all day, every day, over a period of 30 years — will be synthesized into information products that can be used to describe changes in the nation’s ecosystem through space and time. It will be readily available in many formats to scientists, educators, students, decision makers and the general public.
For some reason I couldn’t find on the NEON website the informative map that was included in The Economist so I grabbed that one, and offer it below:
These eco-climatic domains are fully described here on the NEON website.
The benefits of this fabulous project are described thus, “The data NEON collects and provides will focus on how land use change, climate change and invasive species affect the structure and function of our ecosystems. Obtaining this kind of data over a long-term period is crucial to improving ecological forecast models. The Observatory will enable a virtual network of researchers and environmental managers to collaborate, coordinate research, and address ecological challenges at regional, national and continental scales by providing comparable information across sites and regions.”
As they say in business, if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it! So reading in the above the sentence, ‘Obtaining this kind of data over a long-term period is crucial to improving ecological forecast models.‘ is cheering to the soul.
The United States quite rightly gets a huge bashing over it CO2 emissions but to condemn the USA for that and not to applaud this sort of wonderful research is utterly unjustified. As I have hinted before, America has, more than any other country in the world, the energy to make things better over the coming years.
As Professor Sir Robert Watson highlighted here recently said, ‘… deep cuts in CO2 emissions are possible using innovative technologies without harming economic recovery.’
The mistake we all make is to look behind us and think the future will be the same.
Let me start with something that is not really news. Not news in the sense that it has been very widely reported. I’m speaking of the probability, the high probability, that this year’s summer ice area in the Arctic will be a record low, with all the implications that this carries. Let me refer to a recent BBC news item that included a stunningly powerful chart.
Scientists at the US National Snow and Ice Data Center said data showed that the sea ice extent was tracking below the previous record low, set in 2007.
Latest figures show that on 13 August ice extent was 483,000 sq km (186,000 sq miles) below the previous record low for the same date five years ago.
The ice is expected to continue melting until mid- to late September.
“A new daily record… would be likely by the end of August,” the centre’s lead scientist, Ted Scambos, told Reuters.
“Chances are it will cross the previous record while we are still in ice retreat.”
The US National Snow and Ice Data Center may be found here.
So to the piece that generated the title of this post, the future of the car.
On the 17th August, I wrote an article highlighting the fact that the U.S. leads the world in cutting CO2 emissions. That was endorsed by an item published on the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) website, that said,
U.S. carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions resulting from energy use during the first quarter of 2012 were the lowest in two decades for any January-March period. Normally, CO2 emissions during the year are highest in the first quarter because of strong demand for heat produced by fossil fuels. However, CO2 emissions during January-March 2012 were low due to a combination of three factors:
A mild winter that reduced household heating demand and therefore energy use
A decline in coal-fired electricity generation, due largely to historically low natural gas prices
Reduced gasoline demand
It was the last item that caught my eye. Because it resonated with an article on Chris Martensen’s Peak Prosperity blog just over a week ago. That article, written by Gregor Macdonald, was called The Demise of the Car.
About a third of the way into the article, Gregor writes,
But it’s not just India that has incorrectly invested in automobile transport. The other giant of Asia, China, has also placed large resources into auto-highway infrastructure.
It appears that at least a decade ago, the developing world made the same assumption about future oil prices as was made in Western countries. The now infamous 1999 Economist cover, Drowning in Oil, reflected the pervasive, status-quo view that the global adoption of the car could continue indefinitely. A decade later, however, we find that after oil’s extraordinary price revolution, the global automobile industry is now starved for growth.
Then a little further down in this interesting article there is this,
More broadly, however, global governments are captured by sunk-cost decision making as the past 60-70 years of highway infrastructure investment is now a legacy just too painful to leave behind. Interestingly, whether citizens and governments want to face this reality or not, features of the oil economy are already going away as infrastructure is increasingly stranded. Moreover, there are cultural shifts now coming into play as young people are no longer buying cars – in the first instance because they can’t afford them, and in the second instance because it’s increasingly no longer necessary to own a car to be part of one’s group. See this piece from Atlantic Cities:
Youth culture was once car culture. Teens cruised their Thunderbirds to the local drive-in, Springsteen fantasized about racing down Thunder Road, and Ferris Bueller staged a jailbreak from the ‘burbs in a red Ferrari. Cars were Friday night. Cars were Hollywood. Yet these days, they can’t even compete with an iPhone – or so car makers, and the people who analyze them for a living, seem to fear. As Bloomberg reported this morning, many in the auto industry “are concerned that financially pressed young people who connect online instead of in person could hold down peak demand by 2 million units each year.” In other words, Generation Y may be happy to give up their wheels as long as they have the web. And in the long term, that could mean Americans will buy just 15 million cars and trucks each year, instead of around 17 million.
If future car sales in the US will be limited by the loss of 2 million purchases just from young people alone, then the US can hardly expect to return to even 15 million car and truck sales per year. US sales have only recovered to 14 million. (And that looks very much like the peak for the reflationary 2009-2012 period)
Indeed, the migration from suburbs back to the cities, the resurrection of rail, and the fact that oil will never be cheap again puts economies – and culture – on a newly defined path to other forms of transport and other ways of working.
It’s a long and interesting article that demonstrates an old truth, no better put than in this quotation reputed to have been said by John F. Kennedy,
Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.
A closer look at the excellent work undertaken by Dr. Krista Varady.
Back on the 16th I wrote a post that was a follow-up to the previous day’s post about living a long life. My follow-up was called, hardly surprisingly, Postscript to Long Life post.
In that follow-up post, I wrote this,
Over on the Healthy Fellow blogsite, there’s an interview with Dr. Varady. The web link of that interview is here and crossing over and reading the full interview is much recommended. Here’s a taste, pardon the pun, of that interview:
JP: Can you help explain the distinctions between alternate day fasting and caloric restriction?
Dr. Varady: Caloric restriction is basically daily calorie restriction where an individual would restrict themselves by about 15% to 40% of their energy needs daily. So basically every single day you’re undergoing the same amount of restriction, whereas alternate day fasting involves a fast day wherein the individual would only eat 25% of their energy needs. So about 500 calories or so and that’s alternated with something called a “feed day” where the individual would eat ad libitum – so as much as they want. However in our studies we show that people end up losing weight because they can’t fully make up for the lack of food on the fast day on the feed day.
I’ve been in touch with JP wondering if I might have permission to republish the full interview. Unfortunately that wasn’t possible. However JP did say that republishing a couple of paragraphs would be fine and I’m going to be cheeky in adding a couple to the one I already published above!
Anyway, before inserting those paragraphs, let me set the scene. A very quick web search comes across the fact that Dr. Varady is an Assistant Professor at the UIC College of Applied Health Sciences. Her research work is described thus,
Research Interests
Dr. Varady, PhD
My research investigates the ability of novel dietary restriction strategies to facilitate weight loss and decrease cardiovascular risk in obese subjects. The most common dietary restriction protocol implemented is daily calorie restriction (CR), which involves reducing energy intake by 15 to 40% of needs daily. Another dietary restriction regimen employed, although far less commonly, is alternate day fasting (ADF). ADF regimens include a “feed day” where food is consumed ad-libitum over 24-h, alternated with a “fast day”, where food intake is partially or completely reduced for 24-h. ADF regimens were created to increase adherence to dietary restriction protocols since these regimens only require energy restriction every other day, rather than every day, as with CR. Recent findings from our lab demonstrate that ADF is an effective means of facilitating weight loss and improving several indicators of cardiovascular disease risk in overweight and obese subjects. Our findings also show that changes in adipose tissue physiology during weight loss may mediate these improvements in vascular health.
Current research activities
Developing novel diet and exercise regimens to facilitate weight loss and decrease cardiovascular disease risk in humans; Examining the intermediate role of adipose tissue in mediating the cardio-protective effects of diet and exercise; Investigating the behavioral factors that influence adherence to dietary restriction strategies.
So this is one lady that ought to understand the effects of what we shovel down our mouths. OK, on to that interview. From Part One, I selected this exchange,
JP: How long does it generally take for people to adapt to this new way of eating?
Dr. Varady: A lot of the subjects were saying that for the first two weeks it was pretty tough to basically change from a 3 meal a day eating pattern to just eating 1 meal a day and then 3 slightly bigger meals the next day. But they said that about after two weeks they totally got used to it and weren’t that hungry on the fast day anymore. They could undergo these really long periods of fasting without really feeling deprived. The other interesting thing that they were telling us was with regard to the feed day. The people didn’t binge. They only ate about 100% to 110% of their calorie needs.
Then from the second part of the interview, JP underlines an important point, “The truth of the matter is that research into ADF is still in its infancy and Dr. Varady is the first person to admit it. ” I then went on to select this exchange between JP and Dr. Varady,
JP: It seems as though ADF provides a very broad array of health benefits. Do you have a theory about why this is possible?
Dr. Varady: In the human data the main thing you see is weight loss. Even if it’s done in normal weight people. The minute you start losing weight you all of a sudden see an improvement in the majority of these factors. A lot of the effects of alternate day fasting are mediated through weight loss. Losing weight is so tightly correlated with your blood pressure, your cholesterol levels and heart rate, etc.
Fasting May Reduce Age-Related Disease Risk Factors
So this is not something of trivial interest, it’s serious research that could have a remarkable effect on the huge problems of obesity and poor diet that affect millions. Do yourself a favour and read the interview now. Part One and Part Two.
Finally, in that post on the 16th, I owned up to having got my weight down to 161.6 lbs (73.30 kgs). Now here we are having completed my third week of 5:2 fasting and last Saturday morning my weight was 159.0 lbs (72.12 kgs). The routine is very comfortable and as Dr. Varady mentioned, there is no sense of wanting to binge after the two days of fasting.
Learning from Dogs 