Saturday, December 20, 2008

The exponential rate of technological growth

Sometimes its easy to miss the degree to which our cultural and technological environment is changing when we are participating in it on a day to day basis. I recently ran across a video from NOAA that brings the degree of some of these changes home.

This is a video of all air traffic around the world in a 24 hour period. Really makes an impression.

A friend of mine had an interesting comment about it: "There is an odd thought I sometimes have that some of our problems are due to our evolutionary and cultural heritage in small groups and villages, and a simple inability to comprehend the scale and simultaneity of the modern world. we can intellectually manipulate information on large scale issues, but we don't really comprend things at a gut level. little videos like this seem to make the scale more real, at least for me."

All i can say is that it makes the scale of human endeavor a little more real for me as well.

Thursday, December 18, 2008

The curious foci of modern news media

I find it quite interesting to track the kinds of news stories that get national media coverage in the United States against those that get only limited coverage. As far as i can tell, most news coverage consists of truly trivial stories that have little or no bearing on the big picture. How we live, what we understand about the earth and the universe around us, why things are happening in the way that they are. None of these questions seem to be addressed, almost ever.

So a story about how there are two large holes in the Earths magnetic field shows up well below the fold, while stories about assorted minutia accrue top billing. And folks wonder why the world works the way it does ....

Why can't the media exercise some discretion in regard to the stories they promote? Isn't there some measure of abstract importance that could be applied?

Ah well, I suppose the game changes but the story remains the same. C'est la vie.

Thursday, December 4, 2008

Ongoing Revolutions in High Density Hydroponics

Traditional hydroponic gardening techniques have always been a bit ahead of their time, and generally only competitive with traditional farming for 'high value' crops. The vertical hydroponics movement is beginning to change that relationship by making it easier to grow traditional food crops at high densities in urban areas close to where the crops are sold and consumed. 'Vertical' refers to a class of hydroponic technologies that can be stacked - yielding much higher crop density than traditional greenhousing or hydroponic methods. I have recently been looking at hydroponic technologies suitable for vertical applications, and have found that cylindrical rotating methods appear to have some fairly significant advantages over traditional hydroponics.

Basically, rotational hydroponic methods consist of a cylinder containing rows of a suitable growth medium, a central lighting fixture, a water reservoir, and a chain drive system that rotates the cylinder at very low speed so each row of plants is dipped into the water reservoir a couple of times per day.

The advantages are simple - these rotational units can be stacked vertically, all plants are essentially equidistant from the light source, and rotational growing generates much larger and healthier plants than non-rotational methods. Combined with LED based lighting operating at only those frequencies at which plants absorb light energy, operating costs can be significantly reduced when compared with traditional hydroponic techniques.

One such system is sold by Omega Garden - although construction of something similar from readily available materials should not be a great challenge for anyone mechanically inclined. An international patent is pending on this technology.

The question is, why arent there more of these systems out there, what problems are associated with setting up small urban production facilities to generate various food crops or high value spice and oil crops, and what can be done to improve this technology even further?

After all, local food crops make a great deal of sense - especially when considering the continuing increases in transportation costs. Grow food near where it will be consumed, and I predict that developing technologies to make this feasible in urban areas will be an ongoing area of research over the next 20 years.