Cat+Fish

A few days ago, I was watching a cooking show; they were making catfish.

"After you've cleaned the catfish, gotten all the bones out, coat it with the breading."

I looked at the filets: all the same size, color, and shape with no rough edges. Those filets weren't cleaned by human hands.

The host leaned in conspiratorially. "Do you know why they call them 'catfish'? Because the fish have whiskers like a cat!" He pantomimed in excitement.

I was shocked. I was incredulous. Could it be, I wondered, that there are people in this world who eat catfish-the-meat and have no idea what catfish-the-animal looks like?

Then I thought about how likely I would be to distinguish a beef cow from a dairy cow by sight alone.

I was chagrined.

Little Red Riding Hood

Check out this fantastic animated retelling of Little Red Riding Hood. Don't worry; it only takes a couple of minutes.

Culture Wars

Forget the pro-life vs. pro-choice divide or the so-called Christian vs. Muslim "Clash of Civilizations." This video is of the original culture war.

TiVoing Dinner

The miracle of photosynthesis, the plant-and-animal cycle, is a closed cycle. You have opened it -- and your lifeblood runs downhill....

- Robert Heinlein

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

I'm in the middle of reading Michael Pollan's excellent book, The Omnivore's Dilemma. If you're a public radio junkie like me, you've probably heard more than one interview with him. The relevance of the subject matter -- how all of us in the United States manage to feed ourselves -- and the engaging and lucid way he makes his points make him one of my favorite guests to listen to.

I read some interesting things this morning:

The fertility of the earth is limited in large part by the amount of fixed nitrogen in the soil -- that is, the amount of nitrogen that has been converted from its inert form in the atmosphere into more reactive forms that are useful for life. Only a few organisms are able to fix nitrogen: so-called "nitrogen-fixing" bacteria (clever name) that live among the roots of some plants, such as legumes. The amount of nitrogen these bacteria can fix, by limiting the number of plants that can grow on a given plot of land, essentially limits the size of the entire biosphere that subsists on that land.

This is a problem for a species, like ours, with unlimited ambition and for a society, like ours, that would rather have its people compete in industries other than farming, so we have improved upon nature with chemistry. The Haber-Bosch process, developed in the early 20th century for the dual purposes of farming and chemical warfare, fixes nitrogen chemically using fossil fuels -- in particular natural gas -- as inputs. The resulting chemical fertilizers allow farmland to support many times the number of plants that its native fertility could support. How well this process works is testified to by the fact that most of the nitrogen in your body and mine was fixed, not by soil bacteria, but by the Haber-Bosch process. Indeed, somewhere between 30% and 40% of the human beings alive today would not be but for our ability to increase fertility in this way.

(An interesting and sad corollary: farmland that used to produce corn before the era of chemical fertilizers has, with their aid, increased its yield tenfold. However, where it used to produce two calories of food for each calorie invested in it, it now requires more than a calorie of fossil fuel to produce a single calorie of food. We are breathing methane, drinking oil, and eating coal, my friends.)

...which set my gears spinning:

Of course we have not actually increased the fertility of our land at all -- not any more than a TiVo increases the number of shows on television. We have simply time-shifted forward the nutrition our food crops require by millions of years. As fossil fertilizers become less available and more expensive, we are liable to discover that we need a good deal more farmland and a good deal more farmers -- and that there are too many of us by half.

All of this exposes a rather large but apparently thus-far-unnoticed problem with the fossil fuel industry -- indeed, with almost all extractive industries. They are based on an economically unsound practice: liquidating capital and calling it income. If I possess a stockpile of gold bars, each worth $100, and sell one of those bars to you for $100, only a fool would claim that I have made myself $100 richer. But if I own $100 worth of oil under the ground, and I pump it up and sell it to you for $100, I will immediately be acclaimed as a baron of the most profitable business ever.

I may have shared this analogy before, but here goes:

Suppose I have before me a basin of water. This water is replenished at a rate of one tall refreshing glass every day. At the same time, I dip my glass into this basin every day and take out one glass to drink. But now I get to thinking (never a good idea), and I approach several of my friends. "If you will invest your money with me," I say, "I will be able to buy a second glass, and will be able to dip twice as much water, which I will share with you." They do, I do, and we all enjoy the extra water very much. But of course there's no more water than there ever was; we're just depleting our stockpile twice as fast as it's being replenished. We might get away with this for a while, but eventually we will learn the hard way that, as Heinlein also wrote, There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.

Everything's amazing, nobody's happy

An important reminder: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoGYx35ypus

Zoom Zoom

Every time a GM executive shows up anywhere these days (say, at a pawn shop or a Congressional hearing), it seems he shows up in a Chevy Volt, the plug-in hybrid concept car expected to be released into production some time next year. The electric car will save our wallets with cheaper refueling and our planet with lower emissions.

I don't know how much lower the total carbon footprint of an electric car will be than that of a conventional gasoline-powered car, and I don't know how much cheaper refueling will be. True, it's cheaper to generate power on a large scale than a small one, but there are losses in transmission and in the battery, and manufacturing that battery has a hefty carbon footprint itself before it even gets into your car.

But there's another reason why we should all look forward to the day when we will have batteries in our cars: innovation.

The future will be an energy polyculture. We will generate power not only from traditional sources but also from a variety of new renewable sources. We will expand wind and solar production; we will leverage a variety of biofuels. We will use natural gas in new places. Some may even turn to hydrogen power (although there are significant problems with hydrogen as a fuel source). The question is, how do we get all of this energy into our vehicles?

Cars on the market today are inextricably tied to their primary fuel source. The power train is driven directly by the gas engine, and the battery is too small to do much more than run the radio without constant recharging from that engine. Now suppose we wanted to encourage competition between different fuel technologies to drive down prices and increase efficiency. If we built the cars of the future the way we've built cars thus far, we'd need engines running on each of these fuels powerful enough to move your Suburban but safe enough to sit a couple of feet away from your body while your car is racing down the freeway at 70 mph inches from other vehicles. Then we'd need parallel world-wide distribution systems for all of these fuels. Supposing that competition was very great: multiply the number of engine designs in the world today by 5, and divide the sales volume of any one of them by 5.

I think it's safe to say that the expense of such an endeavor would prove prohibitive. The situation today is instructive: engines exist that can run on biodiesel and/or ethanol in addition to gasoline, but most cars don't have such engines, because they're more expensive to develop. Although much of the distribution infrastructure can be shared with gasoline, E85 and biodiesel refueling stations are few and far between. Imagine the situation when we try to add more unusual fuels to the mix, like natural gas or hydrogen.

There's a saying in software design that any problem can be solved by adding a layer of abstraction. That's what we need here: a secondary power source  on which to run all our cars that can be replenished by multiple means. This secondary power source should be readily available, and a distribution system should exist already or be relatively easy to develop. And while this new system is developing, it should be possible to continue using the system we have today with little or not disruption -- which brings us back to "replenished by multiple means."

Electricity, stored in and delivered by a battery, is this secondary power source. We have a power grid already, and it can be fed from multiple fuel sources. When grid power isn't available, a vehicle can generate its own power from one or more fuels it carries with it -- for now, gasoline. But changing the type of this fuel no longer requires redesigning the whole car, because this fuel doesn't have to power the car; it only has to power a generator attached to the car's battery.

It's a simple principle: reduce diversity where it adds less value in order to expand diversity where it brings more value.

A case study for the nerds among you:

There were many kinds of communication networks: packet-switched vs. circuit switched, wired vs. wireless, token ring vs. CSMA/CD, switched fabric, and many others. Once upon a time, each of these networks required custom hardware and custom software in order to use them. Connecting one network to another was therefore very difficult, because chances are that network worked differently than yours.

Then came IP, the Internet Protocol. IP was simple enough to run on top of all of the other packet-switching technologies, and therefore any system that spoke IP could talk to any other (at some level, anyway), even if they were connected to different physical networks.

Today, there is as much diversity in networking hardware as ever, and software has never been more inter-connected -- and all of this technology speaks IP. At last, even our telephones and televisions are becoming merely applications running on this common data fabric. Why should your house be wired with one kind of network to transmit your voice, a second to transmit your favorite programs, and a third to handle your digital files? Rip it all out; let there be only one network, and let it transmit only IP.

Two hundred years after the invention of the electric light and the internal combustion engine, we still power our light bulbs and our cars differently. But what IP has done for information delivery, the electric power train will do for power delivery. Why do I have to go down the street to get fuel for my car when I have power available for my TV and refrigerator in own home?

Social Networking, Part 2: Case in Point

No sooner did I write that previous post about Google and social networking than the news about Grand Central broke.

More Nouns, Please

I started playing with the new version of iPhoto last night. The new Faces and Places features are totally addictive. For those who don't know, they allow you to tell iPhoto who's in your pictures and where those pictures were taken. Then you can navigate all of your albums based on those cross-cutting pieces of information; I can look at all of the photos that include a particular friend of mine, for example, or all of the photos taken at Stanford University. And here's the really cool part: iPhoto can recognize the faces in your photos, so once I identify someone in one picture, it can show me other pictures that might also contain that person and allow me to confirm or reject those matches.

In general, the recognition is pretty good. I enjoyed seeing how often it mistook members of the same families for one another -- even when people were only related by marriage (maybe we copy each others' facial expressions over time). Of course, it's not perfect: iPhoto thought that the reflective flank of a mechanical bull contained a face -- the Virgin Mary, perhaps? -- and it suggested that the hind end of a millipede looked like my uncle Donny. But in most cases, there were many more correct matches than incorrect, and it let me correct the incorrect ones.

It all just leaves me hungry for more. My computer's desktop is very good at organizing things: files and folders. But why have we been stuck there for 20 years? Why are people and places trapped in the ghettos of individual applications? Sure, Apple Address Book and Microsoft Outlook provide programming interfaces to allow other applications to access the contact information they store. But that doesn't change the fact that the information lives in those applications. I can't browse that information from my desktop alongside my files, and I can't click on a name in iPhoto to see all of the documents created by that person, all the emails I've exchanged with him, or the next event on my calendar that includes her. I can't even navigate between iPhoto, Address Book, and iCal, even though all of those applications are from the same vendor.

Innovation, please!

Social Networking, the Next Generation

I've been playing with some more Google applications recently, and in switching between them and my home on FaceBook, it strikes me that while Google also seems to be building out a platform that could be considered "social networking," they're doing it in a very different way.

Social networking sites like FaceBook, MySpace, Friendster, and the like are really just lists of lists: these people are my friends, these people aren't my friends, these are the things I like, etc. Google's platform (if it's not too early to use that word) is about what its users are actually reading (Reader), thinking about (Blogger), talking about (GMail and GoogleTalk), and doing (YouTube).

Sure, you can make a list of your favorite web sites on FaceBook, but that list is totally decoupled from what you're actually reading. Google Reader, by contrast, serves a useful purpose as a standalone applications -- it aggregates RSS feeds, for those who haven't tried it -- but it also ties into other Google services. You can, for example, flag the articles you found most interesting, and make them show up in a pane on your blog. (I've got one of those myself; check out the new sidebar. Haven't figured out how to make it look decent yet, unfortunately.)

All of which leads me to something I'm really curious about: which side will Twitter come down on, and why hasn't anyone bought them yet?