Obtaining Unobtainium

Two items of news have surfaced recently…One through the TED Conference, and one through 60 Minutes.

via the amazing TED Talks: Bill Gates on energy: Innovating to zero!

A molecule of uranium has a million times more energy than a molecule of coal.” Instead of burning the 1% of uranium-235 found in natural uranium, this reactor burns the other 99%, called uranium-238. You can use all the leftover waste from today’s reactors as fuel. “In terms of fuel this really solves the problem.” He showed a photo of depleted waste uranium in steel cylinders at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Kentucky — the waste at this plant could supply the US energy needs for 200 years (woah!), and filtering seawater for uranium could supply energy for much longer than that.

And on 60 Minutes: The Bloom Box

The Bloom box is a new kind of fuel cell that produces electricity by combining oxygen in the air with any fuel source, such as natural gas, bio-gas, and solar energy. Sridhar said the chemical reaction is efficient and clean, creating energy without burning or combustion. He said that two Bloom boxes – each the size of a grapefruit – could wirelessly power a US home, fully replacing the power grid; one box could power a European home, and two or three Asian homes could share a single box.

Aside from the sheer far-feched coolness that both of these represent, and the social/political/cultural ramifications that could begin to be discussed, both of these made me recall a passage of C.S. Lewis’s in The Abolition of Man:

There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the “wisdom” of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique…

The way I read the selection is that the path of earlier age wisdom was to attempt to live in conformity with the unyielding reality. Modernity, or applied science, has approached reality as a malleable natural world – something we can shape to fit our desires. Our current mindset seems to be generally focused on a search for new power sources, and in the case of the Bloom Box we are truly creating power out of thin air. Now I realize I’m stretching by trying to connect these three things in my mind, but in very general ways C.S. Lewis’s passage is a reminder of the possible split between a mindset of efficient creation of power (using science to coax and mine every last bit of energy from our finite resources in our search for more than we have) versus using science to help us in our efficient use of power (an example would be the extended battery life in our phones due to more efficient software programming/resource allocation).

In the topic of a more sustainable future, I would have to say that I might fall more in the camp of the ‘earlier ages:’ we have a depleting amount of unobtainium, do more with less of it. I feel that the greatest success is going to occur when our advances in efficient creation of power is met with a broader cultural shift in thought away from consuming to conserving.

Resolutions

Twenty Ten. A new year, with new resolutions and new things that we must do. And one of the greatest mysteries we face is “What will I do next?”

Easy things like talking, wandering around or eating is about as equally mysterious as the hard stuff like thinking, creating and career planning. Trying to figure out the mystery only leads one to making weird faces, and its become apparent to me over these last couple of years that I’m pretty poor at planning. I find that its easier on my face if I don’t focus to stringently on it.

For a while, I had had side projects that kept me pretty busy, but a long break over the holidays and the subsequent work load back at the office has proven to me that I need to be spending more time away from the screen, and also more time away from “work” and all that’s related to it.

After a few years of living here in New York, I’ve come to respect it and know it as more than those initial feelings of it being a place of thrilling experiences. There are so many amazing things happening here, all the time, that most of one’s anxiety in the city comes from the over whelming feeling of being in a perpetual state of missed opportunities. And, it takes alot of work to get by here. You need patience, humility and empathy for your neighbor, and yourself. And you have to create time for friendships and hobbies to avoid falling into a work-only lifestyle.

But too often today, I find it easy to forget to stop and breathe. Work late, multiple meetings for multiple projects that become double booked and all of a sudden you are over-organized. It becomes all too easy to forget the simple acts that have been redefined as indulgences.

They should be part of our natural routine.

So, maybe that’s the resolution for 2010. What I’ll do next is focus more on the simple acts.

Fitting My Current Mood Perfectly

Dreams

And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

If you travelled back in time to 1963 and told everyone that in 2009 the President of the United States is a black man, perhaps only Martin Luther King Jr. would have believed you.

Nomenclature, Semantics, Etc