History repeats itself. Sort of.
Hannibal was arrested in Switzerland for beating up his servants. So Muammar the Carthaginian has decided to dismember the Alps by requesting the elephant called the United Nations to act on it. The elephant refused but subsequently the Swiss (the Alps) apologized when threatened with the weapon of mass withdrawal (4 billion pounds) .
This could have been straight out of the Onion. But is, in fact, real news.
h/t – Wronging Rights
Boston.com has published over 30 such spectacular photographs on Hindu festivals and rituals from different parts of the world. Here.
h/t – Amitava Kumar’s excellent blog
Within probably the worst designed site I have ever encountered, is this gem of a map. Of course Ireland and Great Britain are outside the Schengen zone, but you get the overall drift of how precious it is to be inside the ‘zone’. Right?
Source- http://td-architects.eu/ via the good people at Information is Beautiful
Gizmodo recently reported about 5 patents that Bill Gates has filed. These patents call for a fleet of specially equipped vessels which can redirect any tornado by changing atmospheric pressure conditions, specifically by reducing low pressure zones by churning up cold water from ocean bottoms to the top.
While these patents deal with geo-engineering weather change, I wonder if that is the kind of approach Gates is going to take towards climate change. His concerns seem to be mostly centered around how the people in the poorer countries of the world will deal with climate change. This, from his 2009 speech,
A big challenge in achieving this goal is that climate change will be making weather conditions more extreme—triggering both droughts and floods—in the tropical areas where most of the poor live. The negative effects will fall almost entirely on the poor, even though they did not cause the problem. I hope that the increased public interest in reducing climate change will also increase the political will to provide aid that will help the poor mitigate its negative effects. It is interesting how often the impact of climate change is illustrated by talking about the problems the polar bears will face rather than the much greater number of poor people who will die unless significant investments are made to help them.
Unlike legislation, diplomacy and other government based approaches, being a purer technology play, geo-engineering could be cheaper to achieve. For a super-rich individual like Bill Gates, it might even be affordable. And then, they say that for a person who has a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
For those inclined to probe further, here is a nice Salon article on geo-engineering.
The book we are talking about is Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies.
Homi Bhabha and Sugata Bose go on and on about how Conradian Ghosh’s work is. Then Ghosh comes up and declares how much he hates Conrad and how his work is not at all inspired by him. It is delightfully funny.
Further, he goes on to say how he finds Conrad with his mention of Englishmen with pangs of conscience (Lord Jim) as counter historical
Sugata Bose titters embarassedly. Homi Bhabha growls and does not seem very pleased, may be because of Ghosh’s dig about how post-colonialists have to have the last word.
Ghosh talks about his admiration for the Bengali historical novel – Sunil Gongopadhyay, Saradindu Bandyopadhyay. He especially mentions a book by Saradindu about a boy in Shivaji’s army.
Ghosh’s is delicious. An audience member indicates her unease with the language in the sense that while Hobson-Jobson tells what Indian words found their way into the language of the British Raj, we have no idea about how frequently those words were used or how they were used. Ghosh responds, “Oh I made that up. There is no way of knowing that…Its a novel after all”.
He also makes pertinent points – He talks about the rich maritime history of East Bengal, in particular, and how there is no single literary evidence of this tradition available. And how the African slaves have a narrative because by the second generation they had learnt to read and write while the Indian coolies have no written narrative of their experience – only a diluted oral narrative encountered in snatches of song.
Here is the Sea of Poppies website.
Recent energy finds in India encouraged me to look out further into the issue and do some back of the envelope calculations. As it turns out, the gas discovery in the Godavari basin by Reliance is far more significant than the oil strike by Cairns in Barmer in terms of energy production. Overall, these two finds are likely to nearly double India’s energy production by 2010.
World and India oil and gas numbers were taken from the EIA website. Gas numbers were reduced to barrel of oil equivalents through a rough conversion rate of 1 barrels ~ 6 tcf of gas.
More India energy numbers can be obtained here.
So, a while back, my significant other switched off the lights to initiate Earth Hour at home. Now in that process we got into a little discussion on what the Earth Hour truly accomplishes. And a brief google search revealed a whole host of misleading information confusing electricity consumptions saves with electricity generation.
Hence, this clarification. A decrease in Electricity consumption for an hour does not directly result in a decrease in carbon emissions.
We generate electrical energy by mostly burning hydrocarbons, principally coal. In the process, we end up releasing a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Since we haven’t yet developed the capability to store this electricity effectively for later use, we must consume it or allow the energy to go waste. Since power generators will always generate a base load of electricity, there is no way that switching off your lights will directly impact climate change. Since power generators are unable to predict/react effectively to a dip in demand, switching off your lights is likely to have a much smaller effect on climate change than you would imagine.
What you accomplish though by switching off your lights is send an important signal to governments and organisations worldwide that Climate change is a popular concern. And that their performance in the future might be measured in terms of their ability to deal with this challenge. So, switch off your lights, please.
Joseph Conrad did not plead clemency when the British government sentenced Roger Casement to be executed. Fervent supporter though Conrad was of his adopted nationality, this decision could not have been straightforward. For while “Into the heart of darkness” is perhaps the best known novel revealing the madness of King Leopold’s functionaries in the Congo territory, it was Casement’s report that provided the factual core to the unrestrained barbarism that was being practiced in the heart of the Congo. In 1903, as the British Consul in Boma, Casement had been commissioned to investigate the atrocities in the Congo Free State. He delivered a detailed eyewitness report called the Casement Report which finally led to the reorganization of the Free Congo State – Leopald’s fiefdom into the parliament governed Belgian Congo. Casement’s execution though happened as he sought freedom for his own nation – the Irish Cause.
Much like Tilak’s “Swaraj is our birthright” speech, he said in 1916 as he was on trial on charges of wartime treason, “Self-government is our right, a thing born in us at birth; a thing no more doled out to us or withheld from us by another people than the right to life itself – than the right to feel the sun or smell the flowers, or to love our kind….”. As Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold’s Ghost mentions, Casement’s views on liberty were not just limited to his own people but applied to all peoples.
Nehru, for one, was inspired enough to write of his speech in these terms, “It seemed to point out exactly how a subject nation should feel”. But perhaps Nehru drew more than this notion of self rule from this Irish rebel. After all, Nehru’s foreign policy actions included the stitching together of newly independent states into the Non-aligned Movement, a movement that has been strongly democratic in character. His efforts to guide these nations are further chronicled in the African National Congress website here.
Bob Metcalfe, Polaris Venture Partners looks to be a very charming speaker as he stitches together the notions of the internet industry and how that may be transposed into energy.
He quotes George Santayana “People who dont learn from history are condemned to repeat it”. And then memorably,” “History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren’t there.”
Funny.
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I stand corrected. Bob Metcalfe looks to be is a very charming speaker.
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Oh wow, he is the Metcalfe of Metcalfe’s law. Fellow students at Nicco Melle’s class take note! Also, he supports nuclear power- rare in the green world but very necessary!
Overall, he predicts that the new energy will have storage – and plentiful amounts of cheap and clean energy.
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Sun Microsystems has started an open platform around energy called openeco. Is this the Java experiment all over again? Will Sun be able to maintain control? and be the community to share energy consumption information? I think people need to check the website out!
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Rob Bernard, chief environmental strategist, speaks against sector – based approaches to managing resources. How do we deal with the different dimensions and the networked effect of the various challenges we face.
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The Better Place representative speaks in visionary terms about how battery replacement infrastructure for electric cars is the way to the future. No mention is made of the low power intensity associated with batteries ie your car will never accelerate as fast as it does with gasoline.
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The Google Open Social seems a very interesting thing. But will this displace facebook?
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And now the Venture Capital Forum
Government focus is on companies which can start producing returns in a hurry – willing to open factories etc.
Navin- subsidies are good – icing on the cake but the real economic proposition is what venture capitalists look at. Steve however feels that Government is very important in the energy industry- for example mandates, CAFE standards for the car industry.
What companies will you stay out of?
Navin- Solar(maybe late stage) Biofuels, transportation to stay out of.
Erik – feels that solar is one of those industries which will be serially disrupted. Hence not go for incremental improvement.
Steve- still open to biofuels. no high capital intensive. no long payback periods.
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Ok my computer is dying – enough blogging for now. Thank you all.
In an old post, I had mused on the spikiness of the world. So when I began reading Chris Anderson’s long tail, the thought that the wired world may have an influence on the real world struck me.
First, what does Richard Florida’s article, the one I had spoken about a year back say? It works as a rebuttal of sorts to Thomas Friedman’s “The World is Flat” thesis. It says that inspite of all the claims of the levelling effects of technology, the economic geography of the world is very spiky. Most populations live in cities. Most innovation occurs in cities of the United States, Western Europe and Japan. Scientific citations, too are limited to the cities of the developed world, primarily, the United States. The author attributes this un-uniform distribution to the absence or presence of infrastructure. High population densities require a certain amount of hard, physical infrastructure – utilities primarily.. For these high population densities to produce things of value to humankind, there is required the presence of a soft layer of financiers, scientists and entrepreneurs – something for which a world class set of universities are called for.
Now what does the interconnected, webbed world do? It does, as Chris Anderson puts it, remove the ‘tyranny of physical space’. Thus, information dissemination is no longer limited by the physical device, be it a book or a tape. Neither is it limited by the material constraints imposed by the geography of the consumer. This means that suddenly the economics of producing , marketing and consuming have started to be favorable at smaller scales. Chris uses the example of Amazon and the fact that more than half of its book sales come from books which are not in the top 130,000 book titles, to illustrate this paradigm change. Pictorially, this is depicted as a world full of foot-hills – a long tail.
The manner in which the online world transforms plausibly do to this spiky world of demographics, innovation and research? For one, geography matters less in the quest for information based services. Thus the gigantic populations in the cities of asia, can have much easier access to the knowledge locked up in the West. Even within, more directed services catering to “foot-hills” and not gigantic spikes might be possible. Thus, even a group of people with less buying power might be catered to, because the cost of catering to them has been dramatically decreased.
Its just that the web of communications has to reach the developing world. And it has to reach in a fashion that data volume no longer remains a constraint. All that remains then is the capital investment. And maybe then, we might see the foothills of innovation being created in soft infrastructure deprived parts of the world.
