I came across the image above, taken by James Follows on June 20, 2008, this morning at theatlantic.com. I have been following the progress of the OMA team’s CCTV tower in Beijing for the last few months as it has been an incredibly interesting project to see come together. I said before that the construction of this tower is at least as interesting as the design itself.
This picture of the CCTV tower blanketed in the thick smog of Beijing is quite a contrast to the other crisp, clear images I have shown here. Sadly, this will be how people experience this structure a good part of the time, at least those times that there is a lack of the strong, but infrequent, northerly wind that can clear the air of the city. In the brief dispatch from James Follows at The Atlantic, he points out that the Olympics are less than two months away. This pollution is creating a serious image problem for the city of Beijing, especially given the enormous emphasis the Chinese government has put on hosting the Olympics this year, and the symbolism of hosting this event to the rest of the world.
I’m guessing that title is misleading to some. No gore here, just cold hard facts for men in the United States. Chances are that if you are an American male, the way in which you will die is listed here. Look at the positive, for most of these you will have a lot of company. It appears to be lonely when dying from a shark attack:
You can click on the image to enlarge and make more readable. I found this graphic at the 2Modern blog.
I don’t think this is an issue for most of the rest of the world, but for the United States this is a serious design challenge. This is mostly due to our long established culture of valuing big and fast when it comes to our personal transportation. In the U.S., we’re just catching wind of small and efficient, and this is being driven by our pocketbooks at the moment, and not necessarily by doing what is right. Whatever works to achieve change…
Being an absolute gearhead has presented some interesting dilemmas for me, personally, as I reconcile this fact with my work in sustainable design. I love cars, but I do not love the current range of high-mileage fuel efficient vehicles currently on offer. Yes, the Tesla is sexy and it is indeed fast. It is also around $100k and only six or so have been made and delivered (far below the pace for the 650 promised this year). More options are going to be available in the near future from a range of manufacturers, and these options will begin to push into performance territory while also delivering on great design.
The VW One-Liter concept pictured above appears to be one of these options, at least from the perspective of design. A concept car from a couple years ago, and not tentatively scheduled for production until 2012, the One-Liter seems to be getting more attention from VW. There are plans to produce limited numbers of this 282 mpg, two seat microcar (around 1000 vehicles) over the next year or so with planning being done around it being a mainstream production model by 2012. I like this car. I like the influences of mid-century automobile and aircraft design that doesn’t feel too retro. I like that you access it via a pop-up cockpit canopy, and that the passenger sits behind the driver. I especially like the interior, which looks purposeful and performance focused:
Engineers at VW made good use of materials like magnesium, titanium and aluminum to greatly reduce the weight of the One-Liter, down to a third the weight of a Toyota Echo. Carbon fiber also figures prominently in the design of the vehicle, and is actually a big reason VW is considering production much sooner for this car. The cost of carbon fiber has dropped dramatically much faster than VW had expected, making the production of the One-Liter much more viable. I want to drive one very badly.
CrunchGear’s Peter Ha spent some quality time with James Dyson at his company laboratories. Dyson talks about design and engineering principles, and the value in personally working his products over. The limitations of the blip.tv player prevented me from embedding my favorite video in the series above, but you can view it here. The video is of Dyson giving an impromptu product test, with mixed results. It is great to see such a design legend come across as totally human, and a little bit fumbly.
“Anyone developing new products and new technology needs one characteristic above all else: hope.”
James Dyson
More video from Ha’s visit here. I will say that the blip.tv video player is a TOTAL pain in the ass.
How many lost opportunities have there been from research projects that seem to have gone wrong, and were subsequently thrown out? Countless. Not so for Swedish chemist Saeid Esmaeilzadeh, who came to Sweden over twenty years ago as an eight year old with his family fleeing from Iran. Esmaeilzadeh’s work is focused on developing new types of glass and ceramics. During this work he accidentally discovered a new kind of ceramic, one that has strength superior to steel, when he inadvertently cooled ceramics he was working with too quickly. It would normally be thought that this compromised the ceramics, and they would be discarded. But Esmaeilzadeh decided to look more closely at his mistake, and in the process he discovered he had created a “Super Glass”. He has started a company to work with Super Glass, called Diamorph, and they are hard at work looking at various commercial applications for this material.
More support for the value in failing forward, taking risks, and looking at accidents. That is where innovation happens. Clearly, you can miss these opportunities if you’re not curious enough to look more closely.
It’s true. The ice of the North Pole is melting at an exaggerated rate, so much so that we may see the North Pole lose all of its ice in the near future, like this year. While this has been making the rounds in most of the major news outlets as a story, I am somewhat surprised that it is not being reported as a much more serious situation than it seems to be. We are distracted.
Here’s the deal. If this happens, and all Arctic ice is lost, this will be the first time this has occurred in all recorded human history. To be fair, scientists give this a 50/50 chance of happening, but even 50/50 seems to be dangerous odds for something that has not happened in a very, very long time and with as yet unknown implications. If this does happen, it means that you could sail completely across the Arctic and cross the North Pole on the ocean surface, as opposed to having to travel underneath the Arctic ice inside a nuclear powered submarine. This is bad news for the already threatened species of the Arctic. It also means that the nations that border the Arctic will have ready access to exploit the natural resources (oil, minerals, natural gas) that were previously unreachable, and would probably race to do so.
The shrinking Arctic ice is not a new phenomenon, as the sea ice loss has been increasing each year. The thick ice that makes up the Arctic had been built up over many, many years. This ice has been melting, with last year’s melt being especially dramatic, and this year’s already on pace. The problem is that the melted old, thick sea ice is replaced by very thin ice that is built up in only a year. This ice is totally vulnerable, and without the ability to replace the thicker sea ice means that the ice footprint of the Arctic is very precarious. This is attributed to rising ocean temperatures and changing climate patterns.
While reading more about this I came across an EU sponsored program named Damocles that measures the environmental impact on the Arctic. Their site is packed with information and I highly suggest checking it out.
A somewhat comical comparison between the fuel efficiency of a Toyota Prius and BMW’s new M3 sedan. The results are NOT what you might think. I am surrounded by people gushing over the Prius precisely because it is ostensibly so very “economical.” Cue the bucket of cold water.
As evidenced from the graph above (via The Oil Drum), it goes to China. 50% of the cement produced last year was produced and ultimately used by China, which equates to 1.3 gigatons of cement. China only exported 33 million tons of cement out of that 1.3 gigatons. Just as an FYI, a gigaton is one billion tons. India was a distant second at .3 gigatons. With the growth and expansion of the nascent infrastructure that has been underway in China, especially in preparation for the Olympics, this probably is not too surprising, but the enormous gap between China and the entire rest of the world is definitely noteworthy. Additionally, something startling that I learned is that each ton of cement produced also produces a ton of the greenhouse gas CO2. In 2007 cement consumption in China produced 1.3 gigatons of CO2, which I’m guessing is a helluva lot of CO2 to be produced by one industry in one nation.
Putting these numbers into context, and perhaps as an explanation for the relatively small production of cement in the United States, is the reality that we invested in and built up our infrastructure during the 1940’s, 50’s and 60’s. That effort also required massive amounts of cement, tonnages that I am guessing are comparable to China’s recent production totals. With our infrastructure largely in place the requirement for massive quantities of cement in the U.S. just is not there, relative to the demand for cement in support of growth in China. That is, until the escalation in the crumbling of our streets, highways, bridges and interstates begins to necessitate more comprehensive replacement and expansion, something that certainly seems to be gaining more momentum nationwide as our national infrastructure moves into its sixth decade of intense use.
I very highly recommend subscribing to The Oil Drum if you have any interest in energy policy, peak oil, and the social, political, and economic implications of our dependence on foreign oil. The coverage on this blog is comprehensive and the writing is excellent.
The Phoenix Mars mission team released some incredible news on June 20th. The Phoenix Mars explorer, since landing on Mars on May 25th, had definitively established that the white material exposed with its digging tool earlier is in fact frozen water. Phoenix had found water ice just below the Martian regolith. That was a significant part of the mission, and to accomplish it so quickly and efficiently is a big win for NASA, JPL, and the whole mission team. The proof is represented in the image above. If you watch the image you see the white material begin to shrink and disappear. That is called sublimination, which is the transition of an element or compound from solid to gas without the intermediary liquid step. Given the atmospheric conditions on Mars, you are seeing evidence above of the frozen water on mars subliming.
Identifying water ice was the first important step in the mission team’s “follow-the-water” mission framework. Knowing that they are working with water ice now triggers a series of analyses that will help identify the mineral components and chemicals in that water ice, and also look for any organic materials. This investigation will help determine if the conditions just below the Martian surface are conducive to microbial life, and if that life exists or has existed on Mars.
There is a very good chance that drilling will begin in the coastal waters of the United States, and perhaps also places like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. This brings the possibility of environmental disasters due to accidents and spills much closer to home. There are arguments for and against doing this, and one of the more interesting arguments for allowing the drilling is that the United States has been outsourcing its environmental disasters for too long, and that the drilling off our coasts is inevitable. We have the technology and care for the environment to drill in a way that will minimize environmental impact and address accidents in a fast and efficient manner. I do not really agree with this logic, but knowing that the drilling is going to happen it is good to have technology on our side.
Enter the OSP robot, a concept by product designer Ji-hoon Kim, which is a modular, easily transportable, solar powered, oil spill containment solution. Once deployed the robots autonomously contain the spill with an inflatable barrier quickly minimizing the impact of the oil spill and supporting the successful cleanup and management of the accident by the cleanup teams. Response to a spill with these robots is swift, as they can be quickly deployed from special dispensers on board helicopters or boats:
This is one of many oil spill containment tools that should be investigated, and it would be good to not wait until we are drilling off the coast of the United States to do so. An environmental disaster in Africa or Asia from an oil spill has reverberations throughout the global environment, and establishing and mandating a response protocol would be a very, very good thing.
Yesterday marked the 25th anniversary of NASA astronaut and physicist Sally Ride’s first trip into orbit aboard the Space Shuttle, making her the first American woman into space. It was on June 18th, 1983 that Ride and her five crew members rode the Space Shuttle Challenger into Earth orbit. In so doing she became an important role model for all of us, but especially for young girls with a passion for science and adventure. I remember reading about that shuttle mission in the newspaper and thinking that she was just about the coolest person on the planet.
“All adventures, especially into new territory, are scary.”
Sally Ride - Retired U.S. Astronaut
Prior to becoming an astronaut, Ride was a nationally ranked tennis player. When asked about her professional tennis career she quipped:
“I was always very interested in science, and I knew that for me, science was a better long-term career than tennis.”
She was preceded into space as one of the first women by Soviet Kosmonauts Valentina Tereschkova in 1963 and Svetlana Savitskaya in 1982. After inspiring an entire generation of women, she retired from NASA in 1987 and entered academia.
Our little family is definitely feeling the pinch of higher gas prices, to the tune of a couple hundred dollars a month more than we were paying about a year ago. Yet, my wife and I are ok with this and are adjusting our lifestyle and schedule to allow us to drive less. We know that these high gas prices may be what it takes to change not only the habits of Americans as individuals, but of society at large. The net of that will be a very good thing. So we are beginning to drive much less, and be much more thoughtful in our destinations. We are clearly not alone.
A Department of Transportation study (via nextautos) has revealed that in April of this year Americans drove 1.4 billion fewer miles on highways than they did in April of 2007, a 1.8% reduction. So far for 2008 Americans have driven 20 billion fewer miles than they did in 2007. What is interesting, though, is that while those numbers may sound large they are not yet a significant percentage reduction over 2007, though the April numbers continue a six month trend in declining miles travelled. I would anticipate that miles driven will continue to decline and while 1.8% may not seem like a large decline it is my guess that this is a trend that will continue for some time to come. If the high gas prices last as long as many are saying they will, those declines in driving may become permanent lifestyle changes.
As construction crews rush to complete the CCTV tower in Beijing the systems for using the building’s surface as a broadcast medium are beginning to be tested. It was intended from the beginning with the original concept presented by OMA that the skin of the tower would be active and dynamic. This video gives us an idea of what that will be like.
Fun for me on this Father’s Day where I was told to do whatever I wanted this afternoon. I did the right thing and began using the Impact Calculator from Edward Gomez and Jon Yardley to create simulated asteroid impacts and measure the resulting destruction. The image above is the crater created by an asteroid made of iron and measuring 15,000 meters wide which impacted at 27 degrees in excess of 60km/second. That crater is over 1700 meters deep (that is the Empire State Building sitting in the center to provide some perspective).
I came across the Impact Calculator at OrbitingFrog.
The Cassini robot explorer, written about here before, will hit the four year mark on June 30th in the relentless pursuit of its prime mission to explore Saturn and its many moons. After June 30th Cassini is operating in bonus territory, as it was not expected that the probe would last this long or work this well. They call this additional time the “extended mission”. Obviously, everyone is ecstatic as the Cassini mission has been profoundly successful in sending us back invaluable information and images of Saturn (like the one above of Saturn’s rings), as well as the moons Titan, Enceladus, Dione, Tethys, Phoebe and Iapetus. In many ways the discoveries regarding Saturn’s moons has largely overshadowed the many, many findings with regards to Saturn itself.
Following the work of Cassini has been like following your favorite band on tour. Nearly every month the mission team has reported more incredible findings or provided another series of stunning images. This page from the mission website catalogs dozens of events and accomplishments. This year alone Cassini has scheduled over a dozen different flybys to allow the use of the craft’s Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS), Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph (UIS), Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer (INMS), and Radio Science Subsystem. Cassini is packed with gear, and it is not only amazing that it all is still working as planned, but that it made it there in the first place. Congratulations to the Cassini-Huygens mission team on the four year anniversary.
I came across this video this morning and it got my attention. Video is coming on strong as an interaction media, and we are only at the very, very beginning of how we will be able to interact with video. The direct manipulation of video as a way to navigate opens up a whole host of possibilities.
I posted about the Mazda Furai concept, pictured above, back in January with regards to how it manifests Mazda’s Nagare, or “flow”, design language. Last week I came across a ton of content at the Car Design Blog with regards to Mazda design and what Nagare means to the organization. Mazda views Nagare as the physical manifestation of their brand and brand heritage, and has put tremendous emphasis on Nagare as the foundation of a future looking design language for the company. Of particular note are the descriptions of Mazda’s design process and the admission by Mazda’s global head of design, Laurens van den Acker, that to realize Nagare they had to break the golden rule of design, which is to simplify:
“Everybody will tell you to remove lines until you have no more left to remove. We are adding lines, which is kind of counter intuitive, but if we do it well it looks natural and creates beauty.”
Laurens van den Acker, General Manager Mazda Design
NASA engineers have been busy testing robotic mobility prototypes for potential use on future missions to the moon and Mars. The engineers, in full astronaut gear, have been putting the machines through their paces on terrain at Moses Lake, Washington that approximates the mobility challenges of navigating the surface regolith of the moon.
The robotic prototypes tested include the twelve wheeled robotic transport pictured above, as well as a six-legged all-terrain vehicle that can carry large payloads, an autonomous drilling rover and a mapping robot. There is an incredibly large and well-shot image gallery of the testing, and the various robotic vehicles, here that is worth viewing. The public was invited to observe, which is further proof of the efforts that NASA is undertaking to engage the public and enlist their enthusiasm. NASA’s relatively recent adoption of social media as a way to create dialog with the public is an additional indicator of a changed view of the role of the public in space exploration.
Here in the United States we are definitely feeling the pain of higher gas prices, but that pain is only a result of our expectations being unreasonably set by unrealistically suppressed gas prices for… well, forever. The graph above compares the gas prices of several nations over the last year. The average price in the United States for a gallon of gasoline would be the bluish line at the bottom, the one far below the cluster of lines.
This perspective brought to you by our friends at Telstar Logistics.
Chris Bangle is the sometimes controversial head of the global BMW Design Group, and he has worked tirelessly to move automobile design at BMW to a place where it can respond to both the demand for innovation and the needs of the user. He has put together a dream team of designers, engineers, and thinkers who challenge every convention of what an automobile is and how we use it. The most recent work from this team is the GINA Light Visionary Model pictured above. At the most base level, this dramatically effects the look of automobile design. At it’s most complex, it completely changes our relationship to this mode of transportation and brings out a level of emotion that I, personally, have not experienced in a very, very long time. I encourage you to watch this video presentation of the concept if you have any interest in the future of automobile design:
As far as I am concerned, GINA nails it by creating a seamless connection between form and function, by challenging every convention of automobile design, and by FINALLY bringing materials innovation to a point of influence that is beyond the shallowness of style. It is:
“Context over dogma.”
Chris Bangle - Head of BMW Design Group
Much more on this at Winding Road, perhaps the best automotive blog I have yet experienced.
Click on the image above to enlarge the graph to make it more readable. It paints a picture that is probably not that surprising, but definitely attention grabbing. The United States faces a very different reality in the world today than it did toward the end of the 1990’s. Today we face a diverse spectrum of new players who are incredibly competitive, players who are in some cases much more disciplined, ambitious, and intensely focused on innovation. The elephant in the room is China which, again, is no surprise. China has been nothing but resurgent over the last decade and nothing tells that story as well as the graph above. China’s rise over the other 33 nations in the survey demonstrates a much changed world economic landscape in technology. Note also the ascendancy of Mexico, South Korea, India, Singapore, and Taiwan. We all owe Thomas L. Friedman of the NYT’s a small bit of deference on this matter.
The graph is the result of a study conducted bi-annually by the Georgia Institute of Technology that measures the technology standing of 33 countries based upon four key technology focused factors:
National orientation toward technological competitiveness
Socioeconomic infrastructure
Technological infrastructure
Productive capacity
From the intro to the Georgia Tech report on the study findings:
“…China may soon rival the United States as the principal driver of the world’s economy – a position the U.S. has held since the end of World War II. If that happens, it will mark the first time in nearly a century that two nations have competed for leadership as equals”
Over the past two years astronomers at NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office have observed over one hundred explosions on the moon’s surface. These explosions are the results of impacts by meteoroids and have measured as powerful as a few hundred pounds of TNT. It is no surprise that the moon suffers impacts, look at the image of the moon’s surface above. What is interesting is the observable frequency of these impacts in the last 24 months, which is quite a bit more intense than astronomers were expecting. This is an important phenomena for NASA to observe and understand as we get closer to the reality of a new effort to send astronauts to the moon and eventually set up a permanent lunar base. Essentially, there is no place on the moon that is impact free, nor is there a time that is less intense for impacts than others. The image below depicts the locations of the recorded impacts since initiation of the program:
The frequency and explosive power of these impacts pose a number of challenges to lunar astronauts, not so much from the risk of a direct hit but more from the risk of a secondary hit by one of the millions of particles that the explosions create and that shoot out from the impact area like bullets. A piece of debris 1 millimeter in diameter could penetrate an astronauts suit and damage equipment.
The first impact was recorded very shortly after the initiation of the moon impact observation program and recorded the strike of a meteoroid about the size of a baseball. Most of these impacts are the result of small meteoroids, some little bigger than a small rock or pebble, but they are traveling in excess of 30,000mph and hit the moon with incredibly violent force. A meteoroid the size of a pebble can create a crater several feet across.
Discussions around the demise of print continue to intensify. Just last week I posted some of my thoughts on this matter, motivated to do so by the confluence of increased speculation as to the future of printed media. Then, yesterday, BAM! Steve Ballmer of Microsoft, in an interview in the Washington Post, speaks his mind on the issue when asked for his outlook on the future of media:
“In the next 10 years, the whole world of media, communications and advertising are going to be turned upside down — my opinion.
Here are the premises I have. Number one, there will be no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form.”
Steve Ballmer of Microsoft
Video of the Ballmer interview:
I am not one to follow closely the predictions and strategies of Ballmer, or Microsoft, but this statement made my jaw drop. Fact: Microsoft is a force in the future of whatever media becomes. Fact: Microsoft devotes tremendous resources out of its tremendous resources to guide this future in a way that benefits Microsoft. Fact: Steve Ballmer is closer to this issue, in many ways, than the rest of us as he is leading Microsoft’s strategy with regards to media. Does his opinion have merit? Most definitely. He even points out that it might be eight years or it might be 15 years, the timing doesn’t really matter as the reality is that the result is inevitable.
Then, this morning via Twitter I come across a new post at FastCompany that approaches the issue from a slightly different angle, that the demise in print media is also being driven by huge changes happening in journalism. Newsrooms are shrinking, news media subscriptions are collapsing, and increasingly reporters are getting their information and tips from public web forums. That would make the big news media companies middle men for the news, with the end result being that the public gets this and prefers going direct to the source. Leaders at media institutions like the New York Times are in total confusion as to what is happening and what will happen next, and the New York Times has actually been a vanguard in pursuing the online media channel. Ten years ago the public needed the resources provided by the Newsweeks, NYT’s, and the myriad other special interest publications. The printed manifestation of this resource was the only interaction option. Following the change in that interaction, from the reliance on the printed piece to the irrefutable dominance of the online channel, is an exercise in realizing how traditional media outlets have been inept at surveying strategic risk and changing with the times.
This image is the result of the Mars Phoenix mission team instructing the robotic arm camera to look under the vehicle. What you are looking at is the surface of Mars, and it shows that the Martian soil has been displaced by the landing thrusters on Phoenix to expose what is most probably ice. The simple action of Phoenix landing on Mars has potentially exposed polar ice directly under the vehicle, ice that was covered by a very loose and thin layer of soil.
There is a rumor that when the mission leaders saw this image the first words uttered were “Holy cow!”
Pretty incredible video of work in robotic prosthetics being done by Dean Kamen and his team. Knowing that prosthetic limbs have not really progressed much, technologically, in the last fifty years it is stunning to see the leaps that Kamen’s team has made. The initial prototype of the robotic arm was completed in one year at the behest of the Department of Defense searching for a solution to soldiers who had suffered the loss of their arms.
Posts lately have been all things solar system, and that is because there is so much going on right now with regards to robotic exploration of Jupiter, Saturn, Mars and the their various moons. It is an exciting time to be a space exploration geek. I just came across the above image taken by the ESA’s Venus Express explorer of a vortex occurring in the southern polar region of the planet. This image was captured by Express back in 2006. I also found an excellent image montage of Express approaching Venus that shows some detail in the cloud covering that surrounds Venus.
Venus Express is essentially a reconfiguration of the ESA’s Mars Express explorer technology and left for Venus back in 2005. The goals for Venus Express are to explore the atmospheric composition and circulation on Earth’s closest neighbor, as well as how the atmosphere interacts with the planet’s surface. Venus is definitely inhospitable, with an atmosphere mostly comprised of noxious gasses and an incredibly hot surface temperature. Surprisingly, given the close proximity of Venus, we still know very, very little about the planet. Venus Express is helping to change this.
The Phoenix robotic explorer has been on Mars now for about 27 hours after an incredibly successful entry, descent and landing. It has been very busy. Incredible images are already streaming to Earth, and those of us geeked out by things of this nature are absolutely riveted. I was excited to discover how many people I know were following @MarsPhoenix on Twitter.
Many images are coming back, and most right now are of the explorer itself and the immediate vicinity as the mission managers check systems and get their bearings. The above image of one of the craft’s landing pads is one of my favorites because that image is of the pad of a man-made robotic explorer sitting on the surface of Mars millions of miles away from Earth, and it was taken in the last 24 hours. Astounding. Even more astounding is this video composite of the Martian surface, terrain and horizon taken by Phoenix today.
We are at just under four hours before Phoenix lands on the surface of Mars. I am checking periodically at the Phoenix mission control website in anticipation of this event. Martian weather is clear and the landing later today is green for go. I suspect there are a lot of very excited and anxious people at JPL right now.
The above animation is of weather on Mars around its north pole from 5/16 through 5/22. The small cigar shaped outline in the upper left quadrant is the planned landing zone.
The graph above and the recent editorial by Thomas Friedman intersect with some grim realities. The steadily rising price of oil has created petro-authoritarian states that no longer see the United States as a nexus of power in the world. In fact, they actively work to counter American interests globally, and do so fairly effectively right now. Huge amounts of money is flowing into states like Venezuela, Russia and Iran, and power and influence follow money. Energy and security expert Gal Luft testified to Congress last week and pointed out that as oil approaches $200 a barrel, OPEC will have amassed the wealth to:
“…potentially buy Bank of America in one month worth of production, Apple computers in a week and General Motors in just three days.”
Gal Luft
In his editorial, Thomas Friedman points out that the really startling issue here is that despite the confluence of so many negative catalysts around oil for our nation, and catalysts that will have long term socio-economic implications for us as individuals AND globally as a nation, we still do not have an effective energy policy in place that moves us past this desperate reliance on oil. What is it going to take?
It’s not just a big day for race fans, its a big day for science and space enthusiasts. In August of last year the Mars Phoenix Explorer left Earth to start its journey to Mars. Its mission is to arrive safely, land on the Martian North Pole, and dig into the soil there begin looking for the building blocks of life. It arrives today at around 4:45PM PDT. Arriving is the hardest part, as now the explorer has to successfully enter the Martian atmosphere (at 12,000mph) using parachutes to slow the rapid descent from 900mph to 250mph, and then fire landing rockets to prevent it from slamming into the Martian surface (see the video above). Its a complex landing, and the mission control team probably hasn’t been sleeping much these last few days, as the last five years of their work culminates today in about seven minutes of anxiety. That’s okay, though, as they have a number of ways they can distract themselves while keeping us updated on the the mission’s progress. For instance, you can follow the Phoenix mission on Twitter and get frequent updates and mission facts. The mission team also has a blog that is full of information and that will be used to post what the mission team is thinking and what Phoenix sees and discovers, as well as an information rich mission website.
So, the entire Phoenix mission is going to be captured for us via an array of online tools. This is incredibly exciting, and it serves to connect us to the exploration and science that NASA leads in a way that is not only meaningful, but also basically real time.
The headline quote is a favorite line from Steve McQueen’s character in the movie Le Mans. It sums up well my current state of mind.
The events of this weekend are such as to make my wife feel like a single mother. That is because for those of us that favor motorsports, this weekend is it. There are races, and then there are RACES… and this weekend is definitely all about those. Yesterday kicked it off with the start of the Nurburgring 24 Hours, which runs through Sunday and is raced on one of the most complex and exciting racetracks in the world, one that I’ve been fortunate enough to lap many, many times. Today is the start of the Isle of Man TT Motorcycle Races, the coolest, most challenging, and dangerous series of motorcycle races which run through June 6th. Tomorrow is huge, with the Formula One Monaco GP run at the racecourse in Monte Carlo, definitely a favorite race. Check out this racecourse narrative from the BMW-Sauber F1 team to get a sense for how challenging Monte Carlo really is:
Tomorrow is also the day for the venerable Indy 500, raced at the “Brickyard” in Indianapolis. Honestly, this is a weekend that makes me seriously reconsider not owning a television. I must strategically plan the entire long weekend with opportunities to intersect with places I might be able to catch the races on television. In between those happy accidents, I’ll be watching the live feeds from a series of about twenty websites.
The convergence of seemingly random events (the Print is Dead blog, this t-shirt, Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernhoff, and this presentation by Lynne d Johnson) has put the “Print is Dead” mantra in front of me several times in the last week. Oddly coincidental or representative of a growing sentiment, you decide. Obviously, print is still very much alive, but how we use print has changed, is changing, and will continue to change. Dramatically. The reality is that for some, print is in fact very dead. For others it is dying, and for a shrinking portion of the population… print is all there is. Print isn’t dead, but it is pretty ill and the prognosis is not good. You would be hard pressed to argue otherwise, that print is alive and well, as there is so much happening that clearly supports the hard reality that the ways in which we interact with information has quickly tilted to the digital.
Our mobile technology increasingly breaks down the usability barriers between where we are and the content we want. This is not just about convenience, either, it is very much about connectivity and the ease with which we can leverage diffuse networks to find what we want. How can the printed page compete with that? Print publishers are struggling with this reality, and working hard to figure out how to transition their content assets in a meaningful way to the array of digital channels before them. Some have pioneered great strategies for this, and benefit from not just increased audiences, but from the concept of content adoption. That’s what we do on the web, we adopt content and send it around. We point people to it. We fold it into how we navigate information, and personalize its place in our information networks. This is incredibly useful, and is the reason why I no longer subscribe to a physical newspaper and only a few printed magazines (that I subscribe to because I like them and there is not yet an online channel for that content). I don’t even hit most newspaper and periodical websites anymore as the content I want finds me through a myriad of personal technologies that do all of the work of searching for me. Popular and free technologies like RSS and Twitter. I have always been a reader, but I have never read as much as I have the last few years and I would say that close to 90% of what I read is online. Garrick Van Buren wrote a somewhat related post about this a few weeks back, and in that post he passed on a line that is unforgettable to me from an article in the New York Times:
For some, that is an incredibly inflammatory statement. As inflammatory as saying that the workplace of the future is not about real estate, which it’s not. That is because the workplace that many of us already operate in is boundless, and is defined by where we are at any given moment. The workplace of now is our home, hotel room, car, airport lounge, coffee shop… wherever we are. The workplace of now is not a desk, chair and filing cabinet. It is our laptop, mobile phone, and other tools that support us in our tasks wherever we are. This is not a new development, but one that has been in motion, and gaining momentum, for over a decade. There are individuals in the workforce now who have never worked another way. This change has been driven by innovations in the ways in which we communicate, in connectivity, and in how we do business. The “virtuality” of business is not something that can be overstated, really, as so many tasks that required meeting in person twenty years ago are now completed without the involved parties ever needing to occupy the same geographical location, or ever actually talk to each other. That certainly devalues the importance of an office with regards to the effectiveness of business process. Or does it?
There is pressure on the office to change in ways that support this boundless workplace. The reality is that the office is not going away, and it shouldn’t as there are many circumstances where we need to work together in the same place, but how we use the physical space of an office environment is changing and evolving rapidly. As such, the ways that our organizations think about the office needs to change and begin leveraging notions of flexibility, adaptability, and customization to task. The physical office is an important node in our network for bringing us together for interactions that cannot be bested virtually, but this is very different than the typical archetype on which most offices have been built, which is the idea of warehousing workers to make operational control more efficient. Our work is increasingly defying the effectiveness of this archetype, and as a result we are experiencing productivity levels in the United States that are staggering. Organizations are learning that we can share a “mission and vision” without actually having to be in the same place at the same time. Some companies are way ahead in their thinking with regards to the boundless workplace, others are stubborn in the face of this change. The reality, though, is that there are many, many factors driving everyone to begin working in this manner and at some point the entire traditional 1950’s corporate office metaphor is going to collapse and be called out as an obstacle to effectiveness, productivity, and employee health and wellness.
That’s the point of the headline for this post. The office today is in so many ways defined by the furniture that fills it. This doesn’t really work anymore, and the office we increasingly require is one that supports business process, and that meets the requirements of being an effective node, one of many, for the ways in which we do business. There will be furniture in this office, it just won’t be defined by it.
Takashi Murakami is a master of the mashup, smashup, and mixing of ideas. A genius in the finding of inspiration. Murakami’s superflat is the liberation of the intrinsic value from his efforts. It is turning art into commerce in a way that Warhol probably envisioned, but did not have the chance to manifest.
A friend shared The Alternative Productivity Manifesto with me. We’ve discussed the workplace of the future and productivity issues previously, especially as these relate to the tension between controlling your time, how you use it, and the pressures exerted by a production focused mindset in so many businesses. The Alternative Productivity Manifesto is an excellent response to the present realities of the 40 hour work week, a productivity system visited upon us in the 1940’s and not revisited since. This despite the doubling in worker productivity over the last sixty years. We’re twice as productive, yet real wages are going down as compared to a historical average. We’re twice as productive, but there is ubiquitous pressure to put in more time, not less, and to sacrifice more to productivity. When did productivity become equated with quantity of time? Why does the worker not also benefit from their own efficiency and productivity? This disconnection is partly driven by our own ignorance of and inability to exert influence over the value systems within corporations, and partly by the enormous industry that has grown to help organizations squeeze every ounce of productivity out of their workforce. Productivity is big business, and big businesses invest big money with consultants that help them optimize and maximize the people that make up these companies. Not only that, but there is an enormous productivity industry focused on individuals promising enlightenment through productivity. This, of course, is achieved through the reading of endlessly published productivity books, blogs and through the purchase of innovative new productivity products. We struggle with ourselves.
In response The Growing Life has put forth The Alternative Productivity Manifesto to provide some perspective, and perhaps challenge the status quo. Here are just a few tenets from the manifesto that resonated with me:
If your productivity increases, but your pay stays the same, then you’re effectively taking a pay cut (same goes if you begin working longer hours for the same pay).
Productivity should be designed around our lives, not the other way around.
I came across the graphic below this morning and found it really interesting, and startlingly revealing of the fragility of freshwater on the planet. It was put together by UNESCO’s World Water Assessment Program, a program that monitors freshwater issues to properly inform decision making and ensure a comprehensive understanding of the status of our planet’s most valuable natural resource. WWAP puts out a report, the World Wide Development Report, that comprehensively reviews the state of freshwater on the planet. This relates to an earlier post here, What is Important, to Scale, that used a compelling image to represent the proportion of air and water to our planet. The graphic below supports the tenuous nature of freshwater on our planet:
Let’s summarize:
Of the total water on the planet, only 2.5% is freshwater
Of that 2.5%, almost 69% is in glaciers
About 30% is groundwater
Only 0.4% is surface and atmospheric freshwater
Of that 0.4%, 67.4% is freshwater lakes
12.2% is made up of soil moisture
9.5% is in the atmosphere
And just over 10% is in wetlands, rivers and plants and animals
It is interesting to realize how overwhelmingly abundant freshwater is in certain areas of the world, so much so as to be taken for granted, while in contrast how overwhelmingly scarce it is in others. The net is that there is just not that much freshwater on the planet.
If you use Twitter, how many times have people asked you about it and what it does… and you totally butchered the answer? Probably at least a few. Struggle no more, as the video above is one of many from the cool cats at Common Craft. I have used their descriptive presentations more than a few times lately, and quite effectively. That’s because they are masters at taking something like RSS, and explaining it in simple, straight forward, and understandable terms. They are excellent story tellers and utilize paper models in a very simple and unobtrusive manner to support the information they are communicating. It works really, really well. Earlier today I used their RSS in Plain English to help a person who is internet challenged understand the benefits of that technology, and how it can impact their business. They got it.
The image above is via the Galileo explorer and depicts the volcanic moon Io previously discussed, with its neighboring moon Amalthea. Amalthea is small, and has been misshapen by the incredible volatility of existing in close proximity to Io and Jupiter. It’s a tough neighborhood. As Io is swept by Jupiter’s electromagnetic field huge amounts of material are scoured off of Io and spiraled towards Jupiter. At times Amalthea orbit takes it directly into the path of this material, and the total intensity of the power generated, and it is thought that this has created its intense reddish color and elongated shape.</
