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[Mar. 7th, 2006|10:56 am] |
[очень]Вольный перевод третьего тура конкурса хайку.
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вишни в цвету -
вот-вот их пожрёт
Токийский смог
cherry blossoms -
about to be devoured
by city smog
* imho, the original is exquisitely boring. only the japanese still know how to achieve this quality in art. |
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[Mar. 7th, 2006|07:57 pm] |
Today I listened to a podcast of the Churchill Club's 8th annual Top Ten Tech Trends Debate, where most famous valley VCs were making bold predictions of future technologies. http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=2455
They discussed many interesting topics, but what struck me the most was an observation by John Doerr of how bad we are at storing electricity. He mentioned this particular problem in passing, as one of other important "green" revolution themes, such as non-silicon solar energy production, distribution infrastructure, and etc., but I felt as if my brain was jolted by a major thoughtquake. Why? Because state of storage is an extremely important indicator of system transition to a different level of maturity. And, on a more human level, it is the best means we've got for controlling our own space and time.
If you read "Guns, Germs, and Steel", you probably remember that the major advantage Indo-European people had over all other races was their ability to grow and store vast amounts of food - dry wheat. That allowed them not only survive periodic famines, but also trade with their neighbors, develop transportation system, gain access to new knowledge, which increased enormously the rate of society growth.
Just think about the fact that today less than five percent of population in post-industrial countries are capable of feeding the rest of the world. It would be impossible, if people didn't invent efficient techniques for storing perishable foodstuff: from basic breakfast cereals to delicious ice cream deserts.
Now think about knowledge. Before people invented writing, i.e. a way to store thoughts and speech, they had no good way of "inheriting" ideas. Everything had to be either reinvented from scratch or passed orally to family or tribe. Dead sage meant lost experience. Sending a message meant sending a messenger - a very space-time-food consuming exercise. Printing, audio/video recording, computer memory allowed human society to move to incredible levels of information storage and sharing. Our collective mind learned to span thousands of years and thousands of miles. This has been called "the Death of Distance." The Death of free Time is considered to be almost a side effect.
Energy, though, proved to be tricky to store. For a while we were stuck on mules, sails, and slaves. The Dutch, for example, learned to store wind by building dikes and pumping water uphill using their famous windmills. Ingenuity in energy use and storage, coupled with a strategic trade location, enabled this small nation to survive and prosper.
Then came steam, then internal combustion engine, and all the energy that mother nature stored as coal and oil was made usable for people. Mining, transporting, storing, and burning fossil fuels had become a human obsession. Electricity didn't change the situation that much, because beyond a fairly weak chemical battery technology, a scalable electricity storage solution has not been found yet. We still produce and waste a lot more energy than we consume. Compared to information technologies, our ability to manage energy time-space is somewhere before invention of the printing press.
I hope that this new power storage stuff will be really cool: like a solar roof-battery, or a portable black hole, or maybe a good old garbage converter. In any case, the change in ways we create and use technology is going to be enormous. Most importantly, life in California will become even better. Because we've already got tons of great quality pure sunshine energy, which we are going to sell to the rest of the world at a very high premium. The same way the French sell us their bottled water today. |
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