Energy 2.0

Another post on yet another topic ... this time, energy. There's been a lot of discussion lately about energy policy in the U.S., especially centering around independence from foreign oil. Also, Obama seems to be focusing on spending some federal money on upgrading the national infrastructure and building alternative energy sources. All of these discussions got me thinking about how we currently obtain and use energy, and about how this should, and hopefully will, evolve in the next decade.

Currently, we have a very monolithic approach to energy. By monolithic, I mean that we overwhelmingly use fossil fuels for energy, and we just move the fossil fuels to wherever we need them. The Middle East has a lot of oil, so energy consuming nations like the U.S., India and China spend a lot of money to ship the oil to them.

We even do this within the U.S. The northern plains and Appalachia have a lot of coal, so we haul thousands of tons of it on trains to power plants in more populated areas in the northeast and south. Basically, we just always assume that energy is produced by fossil fuels, so geographic areas which need more energy must import more fossil fuels.

The direction which I think energy production needs to take is to produce much more energy locally by taking advantage of the characteristics of the environment and climate in which the energy is needed. Wind, solar, geothermal, hydro, wave, nuclear, clean coal and oil all can be used in areas in which they make sense, rather than shipping fossil fuels all over the globe.

Let's look at my hometown of Phoenix, AZ. This place has a lot of sunshine. The sun causes higher than average instances of sunburn and skin cancer here, but it can also generate a lot of energy. Why don't we make use of that energy, instead of just letting it fry us? We have a lot of open desert which could be turned into fields of solar panels or reflectors for focusing sunlight on steam pipes for running generators. We have a zillion buildings and parking lots which do nothing with the sunlight that falls on them, except get really hot. How difficult would it be to put solar panels on building roofs or to add covers to parking lots, then put solar panels on top of those? We'd get shade to park our cars in and electricity to use. We could use the energy generated to keep buildings cool, keep the lights on, etc.

We could even go one step further and start using electric cars. While you're at work, you plug your electric car in to the solar array on top of the covered parking. After work, your car is cooler and you don't have to pay for gas.

Some of you are probably saying, "That's great, but what about places that get cloudy all winter?" True, solar probably won't work, but we can use other types of energy generation that do make sense. Most of the Great Plains of America have a lot of wind, so we can build wind farms that can harness the wind for power generation. Some parts of the American West have a lot of geologic activity, so geothermal generation would makes sense. Iceland is already taking advantage of their natural geothermal activity to meet most of the island's power needs.

Even some of the dirtier power generation methods could still be used. Clean coal still produces some emissions, but in areas which have a lot of coal, why not use it to meet energy needs for the next couple of decades? Sure, it would be nice to completely eliminate the use of hydrocarbons and be green, but continuing to use domestic coal and oil would help meet the shorter-term goal of energy independence. Also, if we were using coal and oil closer to their sources, we'd save the energy used to ship them all over the country.

Generating energy from local sources is a big departure from our current model of energy distribution and use. Since I'm a technogeek sort of guy, I call this Energy 2.0. It really requires a different way of thinking about energy and requires a large federal investment in order to build the new infrastructure required to make it work.

First, we need to shore up our electrical grid. It's pretty obvious that it's built on older technology and is starting to show signs of deteriorating. Just doing this will help with the grid's reliability and create a lot of jobs in the short term.

Second, we need to do what Obama has been talking about for a while, and that's build the projects which will generate energy from alternative sources. However, this requires careful planning, so that the right projects are built in the places in which they will be the most beneficial.

Ultimately, this will produce more jobs and put America at the forefront of the Energy 2.0 evolution.

Technogeek talk

I have this totally technogeeky idea running around in my head, so I have to put it somewhere.

A while ago, I read Adam Pash's article at Lifehacker about The Self-Sustaining iPod. Basically, it outlined how to use freely available software to rip CDs to MP3s, load the MP3s to your iPod's library and play music off of your iPod, all without iTunes. The additional benefit of all of the software used was that the programs were standalone apps which could be run off of your iPod when it's plugged in to a Windows system. So, your iPod could be free of iTunes or any other software which needed to be installed on a desktop.

Yes, I realize there's some downsides to this. You wouldn't get new iPod firmware updates, you couldn't buy music via the iTunes store, etc. But, if you didn't care about these things so much (which I don't), you could be unbound from needing to plug your iPod into one particular PC in order to get new music.

This recently got me thinking ... why can't someone build a music player which incorporates these ideas from the ground up? It wouldn't be difficult to build a music management app into the flash memory of a music player. Set it up to autoplay when the player is plugged in and build in all of the usual music management functions: rip CDs, manage podcasts, edit tags on music files, etc. But, instead of having to sync music from the desktop to the player, it can just work on the music files on the player. Seriously, this saves that whole synchronization step anyway.

At this point, Mac and Linux users are screaming, "What about our OSes, you Windows-centric hack?" Yeah, that's important, and it wouldn't be particularly difficult to build Mac and Linux versions of a music management app and include all of them in the player. Observe YamiPod: versions for all three major OSes and can be run standalone from an iPod.

Now, let's go one step further. If a smart company builds this music player and they publish the structure of the music library on the player or if they publish APIs for managing the library, third parties (read "open source developers") could build apps which interact with the music library. This could allow users to swap out the default music management app and install the open source app of their choice.

This is very much like the Google model of innovation ... create a platform and a way to interact with it, then let the vast community of developers innovate all kinds of things. Look at Google Maps. Google provides the platform (map data, satellite photos, street view photos) and APIs for web developers to use for interacting with the data and for embedding maps in their pages. The page known as Google Maps is just one app built on top of their mapping platform.

In the same way, this music player could be the platform (the physical hardware which plays the music) and the APIs for interacting with it. The music management app which is bundled with the player would be just one app on top of the platform, but developers could build many more.

Maybe Google will actually be the company to do this ... I think I get credit for being the first blog to discuss rumors of the secret Gplayer.

Maybe they'll build a player on top of Android. That doesn't sound like a too-far-out idea. And while I'm on the topic of Android, I wouldn't be totally surprised to see a developer somewhere create an app like this which can run on an Android phone and manage music on a microSD card in the phone.

Moving past racism

Time for a short retrospective thought on the presidential election.

We elected an African-American to the highest office. It doesn't mean that racism is gone from America, nor mean that he won the election because of some sort of national feeling of Affirmative Action. Barack Obama won because we felt that he was the candidate who could lead this nation in the direction we want it to go.

So now, we can say that we, as a nation, have finally achieved a small part of Dr. King's dream. We looked at the candidates and we judged them not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

Republican party making a right turn?

I was reading this article from Paul Krugman of the New York Times. It makes a logical argument as to how the Republican party may move even farther right after this election. What worries me more than a Republican party which is borderline crazy-right is a Democratic party which has the White House and both houses of Congress.

No matter how good their rhetoric or how noble their intentions, the temptation to use and abuse power will prove to be too much for Washington Democrats. Maybe Obama wouldn't pursue the expansion and use of presidential powers anywhere near as much as Bush, but a House and Senate full of a Democratic majority will do something(s) stupid sooner or later. Especially with the federal government having an ownership stake in a good portion of the financial industry of this country, I'd really like a balance of power in charge of that.

A government like ours works best when the party in charge has a loyal opposition to contend with. Having one ideology in charge without a counterbalance to force compromise causes the government to swing too far left or right. The first six years of the Bush administration showed us what can happen with the Republicans in charge. I don't want to see what happens after six years with Democrats running roughshod over the Republicans and the rest of America.

Thoughts on the long campaign

I was thinking about what a pain the ass our presidential campaigns have become. It takes 21 months for us to figure out who we want as our next president? Really?

It seems ridiculous that anyone should have to campaign that long to convince us that he or she should be president. It wastes a huge amount of time and money to run a primary and a general election campaign for that long. It drives most Americans crazy to have to hear about the election for that long. Personally, it makes me tired by this point ... I just want the election over with.

I thought that instead of reforming campaign finance laws, we should just institute a legally mandated campaign time frame, like some other countries have. Say, six weeks for the primary and six weeks for the general election. Any campaign-like activities outside of that time frame gets you fined, tossed in jail or both.

But, I just had a contrary thought. Maybe it's good that it takes this much time to choose our president. Not only do we get a lot of time to become familiar with a candidate's positions and policies, but we get a lot of time to see what they really are like. A 21-month campaign is probably the most difficult experience in American politics, outside of actually being president for four years. If we're choosing someone to lead our nation, I want to see how they can handle the pressure for month after month of hard campaigning.

Not only do candidates have to travel across the nation over and over again, gaining the trust and confidence of the electorate, they have to make a million different decisions as to how to manage their campaigns, what strategies to pursue and how to pursue them, and how to raise the money to pay for all of it. I think this really tests the leadership abilities of a candidate and gives us an excellent view into how they will lead in office.

Maybe the long election cycle isn't such a bad thing after all.

Palin the wordsmith

This blog post makes a very interesting point about Palin's way with words. I hadn't thought about the exact details of how Palin has been attacking Obama, but this post makes it much more clear how her campaign rallies have generated several stories of racist comments.

Obviously, Palin does not stand for uniting this country and leading it in an honorable way, and I don't think McCain does either.

Volunteer mercenaries?

Does it help McCain's campaign to pay Obama supporters to campaign for him? I think not. This article from The Times in London details the differences between the Obama campaign and McCain campaign.

I know that Obama has less experience on the national and international stage than McCain. But looking at the organization which Obama has built for his campaign gives me great hope that he can run the government in much the same way. That's about 180 degress apart from the cluelessness we have now and that's what we need for the next four years.

Religion gone wrong

This video from YouTube is just plain scary.

I was reading this article from Politico.com and I realized that it's scary how easily money can be turned into political influence. Are Americans that gullible, that we'll just believe the ads we see the most? Apparently, we are.

Putting a finger on what's unsettling about Palin

This article from the Wall Street Journal really puts a finger on what's unsettling about Palin. It also gets to the heart of what's wrong with politics in America today. Thanks to the Bush administration, much of the Republican party wants to look at America as slices, constituencies with common attributes, rather than looking at the whole. Granted, different constituencies will always be used as campaign tactics, but can government afford to work like that? I don't think so.

The system of government in this country is designed to work around consensus and compromise. At the end of the day, all the different slices of America need to work together more than they work to defeat each other. The kind of fractured, partisan politics which have been the hallmark of the Bush administration need to end, one way or another.

Are you anti-American?

Wow, this is political craziness reaching it's extreme, and it's not even in the presidential race! Apparently, Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota wants the media (presumably the liberal elitist media) to do an expose regarding which members of Congress are pro-American and which are anti-American. Really. Read the article here.

Is this what we need in a time of turmoil and crises? Modern-day McCarthyism? I think not.

However, the fact that her opponent in the race for her House seat has received nearly half million dollars in donations from pissed-off Americans (or maybe they're anti-Americans) makes this absolutely hilarious. Bachmann has managed to shoot herself in the foot AFTER inserting it firmly between her tonsils.

Where is this election headed?

The Chicago Tribune endorsed Barack Obama today. The networks are concerned they may have a boring election night. On Twitter, fakejohnmccain and FakeSarahPalin are providing as much campaign hilarity as Tina Fey on SNL. Where is this thing headed?

Is America just tired of pretending that an angry maverick and an uninformed hockey mom actually constitute a viable ticket? Will this election come down to a final week of fading numbers for McCain, requiring he and Palin to run around the country, bravely proclaiming that "you can still make a vote for real change" while knowing that it just ain't gonna happen?

I'd be happy to see the tide finally turn one way or the other. I'd prefer towards Obama, but really, I just don't want to see two weeks of tight polls and ever meaner and shriller campaigning. It's been over a year and a half, people. I'm tired of hearing the talk. Let's just get this over with and move on past the W Era.

Intelligence is elitist, dontcha know?

This article from Salon makes good points. When did being intelligent become "elitist" and something to be made fun of, while general cluelessness and lack of curiosity about the world become "populist"?

I want smart, intelligent people with ideas in charge of this country. I want people with a sense of the world that extends beyond the borders of the USA. I want people with college degrees. I want well-rounded individuals who can think critically about the validity of policy proposals.

McCain has said that he's a better choice for president because he has experience and there's no on-the-job training for the presidency. That's just bull$#!%. No one is totally prepared for the presidency, but a person can be prepared to use their brains.

Geolocation evolution

I think geolocation is going to be the next big evolution on the Internet:
http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/10/introducing-geode/

With iPhones and other new mobile devices building in GPS, and now larger devices like laptops getting easier to geolocate, will sites like MySpace and Facebook start giving users the ability to attach location information to their posts? drop.io already has a drop location feature which allows drops to be assigned a location, so that they are only visible by devices which are close to that location. Features like that seem to tie in nicely with functionality like Geode.

Of course, this opens up a whole bunch of new privacy concerns. But, netizens these days seem comfortable publicly posting just about everything, so adding location into the mix may not really upset many people.

Political satire

Yup, I was right! Political satire does make the campaign season more bearable. Check out this story from NPR.

Economic depression

Time magazine declared that this isn't Depression 2.0. Of course it isn't. It's Depression Vista, Media Center Edition.

SNL ... making the 2008 election more palatable, one skit at a time

I saw Saturday Night Live's opening skit from this weekend. I think we should give Tiny Fey and the SNL writers some kind of award. Without their brilliant parodies, this election would suck a lot more.t

No turning, just more of the same

Last night's debate didn't turn out to be a real turning point. Like the previous presidential debate, I don't think this one swayed an undecided voters. Here's my talking points from last night:

• Palin: she crammed well for the exam, but still isn't really qualified for president, or VP for that matter. She should read the Constitution and figure out what the job of VP actually entails
• Biden: studied hard as well, and didn't come across as a hot-air-spewing politician or an @$$hole
• Palin (and McCain): quit with the "maverick" crap. I'm tired of hearing them refer to themselves and each other as mavericks. That just seems lame and egotistical. It's only cool to call yourself maverick if you're Tom Cruise in Top Gun. Granted, McCain was a pilot and womanizer back in his younger days, but just resist the urge to say it, John and Sarah.
• Biden: good job acknowledging that you started out on blue-collar Main Street, but that you're doing better than most financially now. We all know that none of the candidates really live on Main St. anymore, so thanks for not pretending that you do. On a side note, the only one of the four of them that really hasn't lived where most of us do is McCain. Obama, Biden and Palin have all had experience with living day-to-day as much of America does. Other than his time as a POW, McCain has lived in the Navy or married to money, so I'm fairly certain he has no idea what it's like to try to make ends meet.
  

I realized that I kinda don't like the idea of putting a "Washington outsider" in the presidency or vice-presidency. It sounds good, but really, that just means they're lacking a huge amount of knowledge about how to get things done in Washington. Would the average manager who's trying to fill an open position hire an applicant specifically because they're lacking in expertise which is critical to doing the job?

Yeah, sure, being an outsider means they're not "corrupted" by all the favor-trading and lobbying in DC, but come on! They're all politicians ... it's not like they're saints.

The turning point of the election?

It's less than an hour until the vice presidential debate. I'm fairly certain this will be the most-watched VP debate ever. It certainly will be more interesting and entertaining than Edwards vs. Cheney in 2004. The real question is not whether Palin will completely bomb or not ... the question is how her performance will affect McCain's campaign. If she seems totally clueless, she may get still get a lot of sympathy from the soccer moms of America. If she comes off as knowledgeable, will she look like just another rhetoric-spewing pol and lose some of her Washington-outsider-maverick shine?

Either way, at least she's better to look at than Dick Cheney and his creepy smile/grimace!

Financial doom

Holy cow! Check out this article from a story on NPR: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95099470&ft=1&f=94427042. This is a pretty good explanation of what happened a couple of weeks ago to precipitate the crisis America's economy has fallen into.

I had no idea how close we really came to a total financial collapse. I hope that the whole economy wouldn't have shut down, but at the very least, we would have had a terrible situation to work through and no amount of government bailout would have been able to fix the problem.

It's interesting to see how lax regulation and enforcement in one area of the financial system of this country led to a huge ripple effect which has severely weakened America as a whole. I think it really highlights the need for government to find a balance between too much regulation and too little.

With too much regulation, the economy pretty much turns into communism, with prices and other rules of commerce set by a central authority. With too little, the free market becomes a constant sequence of bubbles and busts, as greed and profits drive inflation in prices to ridiculous levels, followed by huge corrections.

The role of government should be to allow the free market to function, but to slow down unchecked speculation and prevent huge rises and drops in prices. Boom and bust cycles are normal, but very large ones threaten the safety of the system as a whole, as we have seen in the past few weeks.

Basically, governmental regulation should act as an impartial referee, enforcing common sense on the market when greed drives individuals to act in a manner which emphasises short term gains far more than long term well-being. Greed is good, but unchecked greed is not.

The blog beginning ... bloginning?

Where to start .... how about ranting about politics? I'm not in a ranting mood, so I'll just discuss last night's presidential debate.

It seemed to be slightly less tame than previous election's debates. I was happy to see the candidates able to directly debate each other, rather than just spewing their standard responses on each question. I think this favored Obama, as I'm pretty sure McCain's ability to think on his feet is not quite so sharp.

It felt like McCain was trying hard to make sure he covered all of his talking points ... he has a lot of experience, he doesn't agree with everything Bush did, he loves Reagan, Obama just doesn't understand. I think that Obama was trying to ensure he got his message across as well, but I think he made a better connection with the audience.

Overall, I think people in each party's base will feel like the debate affirmed their opinions, but I don't think many undecided voters will make up their minds as a result of this debate. So on it goes...

I'm looking forward to the VP debate ... I'm fairly certain Biden can kick Palin's ass in his sleep, especially on foreign policy.