Coal Gasification

First, here's the 4 minute video on coal gasification. It's not quite layman's terms but it's not too bad.

There's been a lot of really boring nerdy talk about turning coal into natural gas (methane). The beauty of this is that coal is a really dirty fuel source; it gives off mercury, CO2, sulfur (sulfur dioxide), etc., but natural gas on the other hand burns so cleanly that we can use it in our homes. The US is "the Saudi Arabia of coal" according to that companies spokesman. His other claims include:

• 80% of the energy in the coal is passed on in the form of natural gas.
• It's cheaper to gasify coal than it is to acquire natural gas conventionally.
• All pollutants (mercury, sulfur, etc.) are sequestored.

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"We are cooling. We are not warming. The warming you see out there, the supposed warming, and I am using my finger quotation marks here, is part of the cooling process. Greenland, which is now covered in ice, it was once called Greenland for a reason, right? Iceland, which is now green." - Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele

Hilarious and kind of scary... Here's why they're actually named as such.

This image has nothing to do with anything, I just like it. This is the view off my rooftop.

Madoff Explained Sesame Street Style

Links

Happy Pi Day! It's also Albert Einstein's birthday.

In one of the sections of his book The Tipping Point Malcom Gladwell shows how suicide can be "contagious." When one person does it it in a sense gives others a sort of permission to do it themselves. There are apparently even fads... the detergent method.

This is interesting as hell. Some scientists found that they could make nickel particles self assemble in water by inducing small amounts of electric current... and then they moved around like a snake... and avoided objects as if they could think. Of course it's a bit early to draw specific conclusions as to how this may have affected the origins of life but it certainly is an interesting avenue to pursue.

Jim Cramer, of CNBC's Mad Money, takes a beating via John Stewart. Full episode here, starts around 5:30. I just feel kind of bad for Cramer in this... he just gets eaten alive.

Making Jobs Obsolete

This is going to be one of those posts that I trudge through unable to explain many of my thoughts. I don't think I have a single friend that agrees with me on this subject. The subject is of course getting rid of unneeded professions from the labor force. That is, putting people out of work! Go to hell Logan. This seems to upset almost everyone I've ever brought it up with. I think technically it would be somewhat akin to structural unemployment.

This is the article that got me thinking about this. It talks about how a large group/organization of graphic designers is upset because companies are more and more holding design competitions for logos; that is, crowdsourcing. The result is one winner who makes very little, and everyone else gets nothing. The professional graphic designers are upset because this cuts into their work and what they can charge for work. Dear graphic designers, these competitions are not evil. They merely make the market more efficient by bringing together people with needs (companies who need logos) and designers willing to give it to them. All participants are willing and if the professionals design is really so much better then they will continue to have a niche somewhere in the marketplace.

There is often this (misguided) feeling in society that putting someone out of work because their job is no longer relevant is a terrible thing. I'm not talking about cyclical unemployment. That is, unemployment that fluctuates according to the business cycle. That should be avoidable, at least theoretically, and it has been to some degree for the last 25-30 years... let's not get into why that is. What I'm talking about is jobs that no longer need to exist. The example I always give is that of a blacksmith. Back in the day that was a highly regarded job, now they barely exist. Why? Because it is more efficient to let a machine do that work. In the short term sure that person is out of work and they need to change careers, but in the long run that person can become more useful to society by doing something else. I'm not discounting the pain that this brings on the individual. I'm merely saying that the pain imposed on the individual is less than the "pain" felt by society for allowing that person to keep their obsolete job. Milton Friedman, who right now is taking a beating (which I think is somewhat unfair in that his ideas are actually quite liberal), used the famous example of loom operators in India (near the beginning, interesting read too).

I have mixed feelings on unions. I like that they raise wages for me. Although overall I think the practice of it is a form of collusion which is illegal. That and it artificially limits the number of people who can get jobs. A union's best quality is that they act as a collection of trade professionals who train apprentices. They essentially act as a trade school. This alone may justify their existence. One of the problems I see with unions is that they sometimes employ construction techniques that purposely take more time and are not necessarily better. As an example, in Chicago you have to use conduit (conduit can have some advantages but it also adds enormously to the cost) around all electrical wire instead of romex, and copper tubing (which goes bad over time and is expensive) must be used for water over pex, a plastic form of piping that never goes bad. Both of the unused examples are employed in the South where unions are more or less nonexistent.

Protecting jobs by passing on the cost to consumers doesn't really help anyone. It hurts demand for the product and doesn't allow as many people to consume the good. If putting in pex saves installation time, is cheaper, and requires less maintenance then wouldn't using it over copper pipe allow plumbers to service more homes thus lowering the cost of plumbing... allowing more people to have it? The point is that people should be put to use in an area where their work is of better use to the collective good. Essentially, in this example technology has made it possible for one person to do the work of many, but for various reasons we hold back this technology to keep people employed. The result is expensive plumbing. Plumbing shouldn't be a luxury. It improves people's health and makes needless labor unnecessary. The problem is what to do with those unemployed plumbers. Ideally they would get retrained at another career. Possibly even something similar, but reality isn't always that nice.

Now my mixed feelings. As I talked about a while ago things change faster now (it's near the end of the post), so its not crazy to think that people's jobs could become obsolete just a few years after starting them. The Department of Labor doesn't really know (boring) how often people switch careers. They do however know that they tend to change jobs about ten times between the ages of 18-38. The point is that I'm not sure where all this is going. It could be the case that someone spends more money on their education than they could possibly make by working in that field while it exists. In the plumbers example it could also be the case that twice as many plumbers exist but they take half as many hours; essentially a reduction in work and pay. That's all good and fine, but then you have to compete with "hungry" people who are willing to work 60 hour weeks.

I found this passage by Andre Gorz in the Wikipedia article on structural unemployment, "The connection between more and better has been broken; our needs for many products and services are already more than adequately met, and many of our as-yet- unsatisfied needs will be met not by producing more, but by producing differently, producing other things, or even producing less. This is especially true as regards our needs for air, water, space, silence, beauty, time and human contact..."

Now, how to employ that in the free market... (hint: you have to change the lifestyle, opinion, and general habits and thoughts of the "average" person)

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"Socialism is no more an evil word than Christianity. Socialism no more prescribed Joseph Stalin and his secret police and shuttered churches than Christianity prescribed the Spanish Inquisition. Christianity and socialism alike, in fact, prescribe a society dedicated to the proposition that all men, women, and children are created equal and shall not starve." - Kurt Vonnegut

Today I'm making a collaborative art print with my friend Justin. Pictures to follow.

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"Cultivate poetry like sage, like a garden herb. Do not trouble yourself to get new things, wether clothes or friends. That is dissipation. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. If I were confined to a corner of a garret all my days, like a spider, the world would be just as large to me while I had my thoughts." - Henry Thoreau, journal entry age 33

This is the front of my families warehouse. When I was a little kid it seemed huge and dark and was full of wonderous machines whos purpose was a mystery to me. Now it seems small. It's a place where I go to work, to find useful purposes for the unuseful.

The Future of Cameras

"The best camera is the camera you have with you." - Ansel Adams, The Camera I (great book by the way)

This is a concept I came up with a while ago and it's not really all that crazy original. Although I haven't heard anyone else mention it. Cameras will eventually be insanely tiny, or rather camera phones will dominate the market at be of better quality than any professional camera that currently exists.

There are two main components to a camera; the lens and the image sensor (film). Film is analog, essentially it has infinite depth and is only limitation in enlargement are the instruments used to do so. In order to duplicate film digitally and enlarge (print bigger) it without any perceptible loss in quality you need a 10-15 megapixel sensor. I find that 3-6 MP is adequate for the vast majority of people/occasions. My camera phone is a little over 3 MP and I know some exist that are 5+. Over time sensors will become more and more powerful all the while becoming cheaper. Lenses are a slightly different story. High quality lenses are expensive and in my opinion the most important part of the camera. As image sensors (CCD's) get smaller the lens required becomes smaller. That's why your pocket camera has a tiny lens and my medium format camera's lens is bigger than your entire camera. Phone cameras use a tiny image sensor, so the lenses can be very small. In fact there has been some research done on lenses that utilize a bead of water for the lens and focus (change the shape of the droplet) by passing small electric currents through the water droplet. Crazy stuff. Lenses will become of higher quality and cheaper as image sensors get smaller and as they are further mass produced. Even Zeiss, one of the finest lens makers in the world, has made some lenses for Sony phones. Zeiss makes lenses for the legendary camera manufacturer Hasselblad. They aren't cheap.

Basically my prediction is that camera phones will one day dominate the camera market and their quality will be extremely high. How soon? Camera phones will eclipse point and shoot pocket cameras in just a few years. In the mean time here are some moments when I wanted a real camera but was at least lucky enough to have my somewhat-impressive-for-a-camera-phone 3 MP G1 camera phone.

Evan inside a steam pit we just designed/built in Joliet, IL.

Susie holding a Remington 700 rifle... don't ever expect to see that again.

Thanksgiving '08

The burners of an atmospheric scotch marine boiler. Oh, the irony (I'm Scotch).

A store in Lakeview in Chicago... 3300 N Sheffield-ish.

36"-10" Ridgid pipe wrenches. I find them to be one of the most elegant designs ever conceived.

Evan preping a boiler door for insulation.

Parking Meter FAIL, Round 2

I first blogged about this here. What's really funny is that at the end of that article I say that we have to stop spending so much (so that we don't have to do things like sell off parking meters to private companies in order to pay our debts... it makes Chicago seem like a drug addict), but of course now the name of the game is for government to spend as much as possible. Oh how so much can change in not quite three months!

Chicago finally raised the rates of meters in my area and increased the hours in which you have to feed them. This picture is a broken meter, broken because it's so full of quarters it can't accept any more. I did a quick survey on my 2 block walk. Two meters were still functioning out of about 30.


Okay, now the fun part. HAHAHAHA!

"A tax is only as good as your ability to collect it." - I thought that was Benjamin Franklin, but I couldn't source it.

So here's what happened. The meters in my area went from $1 an hour to $2 an hour. In addition to that the east west streets used to stop charging at 6 PM, now it's 9 PM. Also, Sundays and holidays are no longer free days. It went from $1 an hour for 60 hours a week to $2 an hour 91 hours a week on the side streets. That's an increase of roughly 300%... how does that break down in quarters? From a max of 240 to a max of 728... I know, it's terribly complex. It's so complex that The Man forgot to triple the size of the workforce that collects the quarters from the meters. I wonder if they've figured this out yet? In the mean time raising parking rates has led to free parking.

Here's a few other interesting things I've noticed. The meters for the most part still stay full all the time. I thought doubling the rates would have more of an impact but it really hasn't. Parking spots are only marginally easier to find now. I wouldn't have guessed demand was so inelastic (the change in demand was not equal to the change in price, signaling that there are few substitute goods). The amount of cars circling for parking has definitely been reduced. The streets around my area are less busy now; not that I have numbers to back that up but it's noticeable. All in all I think it's an improvement, but I'm still upset that the city sold the rights to it's meters. It could have all been done better.

What the Hell is Happening?

... With the economy of course. I'm pretty convinced no one really knows (go to that link, it's short). That's why I haven't been posting about it. Just to scare you though here's a sobering video.

Here's a link explaining this video, but first skip to 2:10 and watch this:



"Somebody threw us into the middle of the Atlantic Ocean without a life raft and we're trying to determine what's the closest shore and whether there's any chance in the world to swim that far. We. Don't. Know." - Rep. (D-PA) Kanjorski

Here's a good look at predicting financial collapse based on trading of the S&P in the futures market.

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"If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something." - Kurt Vonnegut from A Man Without a Country

These are two 8x10 gelatin-silver prints I just made of the Art Institute's south garden last winter. It's quite possibly my favorite garden in the city.

Musings

I'll be back to blogging a bit more now that I finished applying to grad. school. I kept tweaking out over little details in my portfolio. I think next time I'll just go to a real printer and pay up instead of visiting Kinkos... they really don't know how to utilize their expensive machines there. I read over my professional statement for the 569th time and found that I forgot to include an "of" in a sentence, so now I feel mentally disabled. Oh, well. I wish I could have an interview with the admissions people. There's a lot that just doesn't come across in an application. Although the portfolio was a great help.

On the up side that's over for this year, and I solved a Rubik's cube in 4:15.

Here's what I ended up including in my portfolio. It's the directory or whatever:


Man, after reading that again I realized that I have a really hard time removing the informal voice out of my writing style. I'd be worried about putting my info out there but I doubt too many identity thieves are trolling my blog, and if they are; hey, thanks for stopping by! Don't forget to tell your friends!