Rambles at starchamber.com

Clean energy is going to save us. Oh no, wait! Clean energy is going down the tubes. Maybe nuclear energy ia the next big thing after all. Oh, right, except for the earthquake that vaporized all political support for nuclear power. But maybe thorium fission is the magic we’ve been looking for. Or maybe not.

I tell you, these hype cycles are exhausting. It’s enough to make you pretend you don’t care and hope for the best.

When sorting out the hope from the hype, I like to find technically trained people with clear voices, people like Rob Carlson and Tom Murphy. Carlson is on the leading edge of biotechnology and has some encouraging things to say. I enjoyed this piece on The new biofactories. Biotech is promising because it’s granular, scalable, and distributed. Granular, in that it can work in sizes from the humble test tube to a 1000 liter stainless steel brewing tank. So you don’t need a hundred billion dollars just to see if it will work (cough, fusion!). And biotech is scalable in the sense that if it works, you make a lot of product. The fact that it can be distributed means you can make stuff close to where you use it. So not only can you avoid going to the most dangerous part of the world for what you need, you also get to avoid the long trip home from Godforsakenville.

Clearly it would be foolish to say that biotechnology is going to solve our problems, energy-related or otherwise, but it’s coming faster than you think. Read Carlson’s essay and see if you can picture his image of cowborgs mildly sucking on sewage as we milk them for butanol.

Who knows where it’s all headed, but that’s the hype that I’m buying this week.

Drew Berry is an animator, and what he animates is something that can’t be seen. He takes the latest research on molecular biology and turns it into movies about how life works. His protagonists, the molecules that constitute our cells, are smaller than the wavelength of the light we use to see. But in a broader and more figurative sense, scientific advances are shining a bright light on vast previously unknown landscapes of biology, and the view is absolutely breathtaking. So while we cannot see the molecules drive us, we do know what they look like.

I’ve collected and admired Berry’s videos for some time, so I was delighted to come across a TED talk in which he discusses and showcases his work. I was surprised to learn that he was originally inspired by none other than David Goodsell, the other guru of biological visualization, and another hero of mine. What’s great about these guys is that they keep up with the science so you know what you’re getting is not a watered-down version. Everybody knows the basics of DNA, but Berry is going to show you the weird whiplash mechanics required to replicate the strand of DNA that’s moving in the “wrong” direction (3:50 in the video below). Every biology student has seen the blobby diagrams that correspond to the phases of mitosis, but Berry is going to show you the teeming construction site view of the microtubule scaffolding that attaches to the chromosomes. Watch those dyneins and kinesins zipping up and down the microtubules like trams in a train yard (8:20 in the video). Finally, you may have some understanding of the life cycle of malaria, but Berry will bring it to life in disturbing detail. Watch as the nasty little parasite smashes the window on a red blood cell, crawls inside, and turns it into a clotted crawling nest of writhing plasmodium babies (12:40 in the video).

I’ll close with Berry’s own words. This is from an article describing his MacArthur Grant award.

My approach is the opposite tack to simplifying the science. Rather than dumbing it down, I set out to show the audience exactly what the scientists are talking about. By building accurate visualisations founded on real scientific data, the animations come alive of their own accord, engage the audience, and go a long way towards explaining what the science is about. The science is rich, detailed and fascinating, and if you can watch it in action you will intuitively get to know how it works.

UPDATE: I just noticed that Apple is featuring Berry’s animations prominently in their recent iBooks textbooks announcement.

Kickstarter precipitates novelty and weirdness from the web.

Kickstarter is a site that helps people who need a little capital to reach out to the world and ask for it. It’s a clever idea, but they’ve executed on it so well that it has become a remarkably successful platform for launching small companies. By asking people to support ideas that haven’t been funded yet (like windowfarms or hamburger wrapping paper), Kickstarter builds “pre-communities” for their products. This helps in multiple ways: builders get money, early customers, and word-of-mouth marketers. Consider the alternative. You beg a bank for some money, then make a product, and only then try to market and sell it. It’s all the wrong way around. The bank wants its money back before you even start to attract enough customers.

Kickstarter thus has an alchemical effect, reducing the energy required to start selling niche products, which means products get nichier and weirder. They did a nice review of 2011 featuring some of their favorite videos. If you’re wondering why I keep using the word weird, take a look at the Freaker. They’re not all weird, but this one is. In a good way.

Play this game: you are a banker. Zach walks into your office and asks you for $48,500 to support his great new idea, the Freaker. Do you give it to him? In a bland and demanding world, Kickstarter is your friend. Gold is everywhere if we can be bothered to see it.

How is it you can drink saliva all day long and never run out of the stuff?

Sorry to put the image of spit-drinking in your mind, but you’re doing it right now, am I right? And the more you think about it, the more you do it. Before today is over, you’ll have swallowed more than one vice-president of the stuff. Here’s how I figure it: a healthy human (that’s you) consumes something like a liter of spit per day. That would fill up a typical pitcher, and John Nance Garner, who was vice president under Franklin Roosevelt, once remarked that his job was “not worth a pitcher of warm spit.” So the vice-president, as a unit of saliva volume, is therefore less than your daily output. This reminds me of the names of champagne bottle sizes. The larger sizes are named after rulers of Israel and Babylon. So a double magnum, or three liters of champagne, is known as a Jeroboam (the first king of northern Israel). By extension we might measure salivary volume in terms various legislative occupations. How much is a Speaker of spit? Or a House Minority Whip of spit?

But I digress.

My point is that your body is a collection of remarkably dynamic processes that give the illusion of stasis. And the thing that got me started on this line of thought was this sentence:

In order to provide energy to sustain our lives, every day, each one us produces a quantity of ATP by this mechanism that is approximately equal to our body weights.

Yikes! That’s an astonishing amount of flux for one single molecule. Do you want to see how (most of) this ATP is made? Look at this.

The quote and the image come to us courtesy of the Mitochondrial Biology Unit at Cambridge University. We’ve known for a long time where the ATP was being synthesized. But now we know the shape of all the insane molecules that do that work. The ATP mill you’re looking at here isn’t something exotic. Your body has enough of them to pump out a pound of ATP every ten minutes or so, one molecule at a time. And that is a spitload of ATP.

As I noted last week, Vladimir Putin is having his share of troubles these days. Now we hear that Kim Jong-Il has moved beyond earthly troubles. As to whether he’s still got problems wherever he is now, I can’t be sure. But I do suspect that the blog Kim Jong-Il Looking At Things is unlikely to be updated anytime soon. At least not with new material.

Old Kim never tried to pose in the heroic mode of Putin, but he sure looks at a lot of interesting stuff. He comes across as the more honest of the two. I suspect Putin doesn’t actually spend all his time wrestling with tigers. But I can believe that Kim Jong-Il really did spend a lot of time, you know, looking at stuff. Stuff like soft drinks and chickens. Here he’s totally cracking up the umbrella guy. And here’s a great shot of him in a Supervillain Lairmobile. Next stop, secret volcano laser control room! Or hell, whichever comes first.

Buckaroo Banzai was a physicist, rock star, neurosurgeon, rogue inventor, and presidential advisor. He was also fictitious. A little bit closer to home, Jesse Ventura was a Navy SEAL, professional wrestler, and 38th governor of Minnesota. He even had a political action figure.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, as we all know, was a governor who played action heroes on the big screen, but when it comes to mixing high-octane politics with super-hero hijinks, it’s hard to beat Vladimir Putin.

Putin may be having his political troubles these days, but no autocrat since Benito Mussolini has been quite so handy with a photo-op. Please take the time to flip through these pictures from The Atlantic of Vladimir Putin, Action Man. Which is the best image? Shooting a crossbow at a whale? Driving a tank? Playing the concert piano? So many to choose from! Which one do you like?

After a peek in the medicine cabinet, what could be more appealing to a home voyeur than a good judgmental crawl of thy neighbor’s bookshelf? It used to be that the proprietor’s record collection afforded a similar opportunity, but of course music has long since disappeared into the aether. We can no longer admire a battered old Dylan album or turn our noses up at a Flock of Seagulls LP. But for now, books still exist as three-dimensional artifacts.

Recently I came across a tweet that made me realize that bookshelf voyeurism extends across the centuries too:

Decided to put Myles Standish’s library into @LibraryThing this p.m.

LibraryThing is an excellent service that helps you keep track of your books. You can, by extension, keep track of other people’s books too, so they introduced Legacy Libraries. Want to know what Thomas Jefferson had piled next to his bed? Look no farther. That’s how it came about that the library of Mayflower magnate Myles Standish began to appear on LibaryThing. It’s fun to browse through it, and let me tell you, they knew a thing or two about making book titles back then. For instance, consider The historie of the most renowned and victorious Princesse Elizabeth, late queen of England. Contayning all the important and remarkeable passages of state both at home and abroad, during her long and prosperous raigne. Composed by way of annals. Neuer heretofore so faithfully and fully published in English. Neuer? That striketh me as vnlikely. But vvho am I to jvdge?

If you have your own books catalogued on LibraryThing (mine are here), then they’ll compare your libraries. Imagine my surprise to find out that Myles and I had two books in common. One was The eight bookes of Caius Iulius Caesar: conteyning his martiall exployts in the realme of Gallia and the countries bordering vpon the same (I may have read a slightly different edition). And the other wasn’t Ye Bridges of Madison Covnty: being chiefly a Meditation on Unnaturall Loue and the Corn of Iowa.

I’m comforted by the fact that even after books disappear as things you can hold, I’ll still be able to admire your bookshelf virtually on LibraryThing.

The rain forest is shrinking.

Right, you knew that. But did you know this? Google Earth lets you research the topic on your own. Like Superman, you can spin the globe forward and backward in time to see what the yesterworld looked like.

I zoomed in on a region around Ariquemes in Rondônia, Brazil. Once there, I used the “time slider” to change the year in which the pictures were acquired. For this particular part of the world, Google has satellite imagery reaching back to 1975, at which time Ariquemes scarcely existed, and none of the nearby forest had been cleared. Paging forward in time, I saw this.

[This is an animated GIF image with four frames. If you want to see it animate again, click on it or reload the page.]

The forest, there she goes, eh? I resisted the urge to play sad music in the background.

But something big is happening in Brazil right now. Despite our economic troubles up north, Brazil is in the middle of a tremendous boom. That’s more bad news for the forest, right? Not at all. It’s the best possible news. Because what’s happening is people are leaving the impoverished countryside and heading to the city. In many places, subsistence farms are being abandoned.

So there’s this interesting question: if left alone, can the rain forest repair itself? For a long time, we had a ready answer: no. The rain forest is a fiddly machine perched atop poor soil. Smash that machine and you’ve got a parched wasteland that will never bloom again. This is a good story if you like sad-face dystopias, but when you gather real data, a different story emerges. The forest wants to come back if we can just leave it alone (or perhaps help it a little). Here are two encouraging articles.

• Tropical Comeback: Can New Growth Save the Amazon Rainforest? (Spiegel Online)
• How long does it take a rainforest to regenerate? (New Scientist)

Some people see a moral hazard in calling out good news like this. Does being hopeful mean we are perforce denying the severity of the problem? That we are abetting the enemies of the earth? The answer must be an emphatic no. The point is not that the situation is good, but that it is not hopeless. Ignoring the problems of deforestation and global warming is harmful, but giving up in despair is worse.

It doesn’t help anyone to make a scary story scarier than it is.

What do borders look like? We know that they are lines on maps and checkpoints on roads and sometimes walls and fences. But can they be seen from the sky? In The Sword in the Stone, T.H. White tells the story of young Arthur and his mentor Merlin flying as birds across the countryside. Arthur comes to the realization that there are no borders at all, that they are social constructs, illusory excuses for warmongering.

Borders are indeed hard to see from on high, but what do they sound like? The Strange Maps blog is featuring a marvelous language map created by Eric Fischer with help from Mike McCandless. It’s based on the languages that people are using when they tweet and the result will make your eyes bulge. Here’s a big version, and here’s a HUGE version.

So many stories here: you can see the French and Dutch oceans splashing together in mid-Belgium. Portugal and Spain are more clearly differentiated than I would have expected, and what’s that country on the Mediterranean coast of Spain? Why that’s no country, that’s the Catalan-speaking region of Spain centered on Barcelona. Francophone Corsica, birthplace of Napoleon, is a stone’s throw from Italian Sardinia. The Greek and Turkish sides of Cyprus are obvious. And wowie-zowie, the division between North and South Korea is even more stark than the Earth at Night photo.

Cruise around that big old map. There’s hours of fun in there.

I once saw a documentary about skyscrapers where the architect says, “It’s not that hard to make a 100 story building. You just need to make a one story building 1500 feet up in the air, and the rest is easy.”

Sometimes it’s easy to miss where the real work is.

Makani Power is a windmill company that builds only the business end of the windmill. The rest of it, overpaid and redundant, gets chucked. Think about it this way. A windmill (or turbine) is a great big propeller blade that’s being pushed by the wind. You want to build an efficient wind turbine, here’s what you need to do: Make it big (large diameter blade) and stick it in the wind (duh). Now look at the problem we’ve got. The best winds are way up high, and large diameter blades are heavy. So you’ve got to build a massive tower to carry the load of a giant spinning blade.

But wait: we went to all that trouble to put the spinning tips of the turbine far apart and up in the wind. Can’t we just leave out everything else? Then we would only need a tiny fraction of the materials to achieve the same result.

THAT is the thing that Makani Power did. They made the spinning tip of a turbine and almost nothing else. More kite than windmill, it’s actually a tethered airplane with reverse motors. By “reverse motors” I mean they look like regular airplane propellers, but they generate power instead of using it up. Clever, eh?

A clever concept is a small part of the battle. That and a ton of engineering might just add up to something useful. They seem to be making good progress, and I wish them luck.

Here’s how it’s supposed to work commercially, and here’s what it looks like now.