omenti

that energy thing

Patent reading is something I avoid as recreation.  They're written in a humorless formal style that's perhaps a shade more entertaining than Vogon poetry.   Sometimes you have to go through them trying to sort out the claims and their feasibility.  I generally translate them into images and numbers I can understand in the process of plowing through.  It was during that process that my jaw dropped.  Someone had successfully patented something that was clearly impossible.  It violated the underlying physics - the patent office usually catches these mistakes early on.  Someone had already spent a fair amount of change. At least I could alert my client.

 

The patent was trying to harvest waste energy.  That's all and good - more of it should be done, but it claimed to be more efficient that was possible.  

 

A good deal of engineering is concerned with efficiency.  The story of the steam portion of the Industrial Revolution amounted to increasing the efficiency of extracting energy from fossil fuels.  Steam engines are a case in point.  There was a huge need for them pumping water from mines and the early engines made an impact even though they were extremely expensive to run. James Watt and others came up with clever hacks and improvements continued for over two centuries. (The chart shows how much energy can be extracted from a kilogram of coal.  The highest level corresponds to an efficiency in the mid forty percent region)

 

There are many forms of energy... heat, light, motion, electric, chemical, nuclear, gravitational , and so on. These are usually grouped into two types when considering how work is done:  kinetic and potential.   In general something happens when energy moves from one form to another.   But what is energy?  The dictionary and some high school science texts say it's the capacity to do work.   OK .. so what's work?   Dictionaries often say it's a measure of energy transfer when an object is moved.    Nothing like circular arguments, eh?  During the 19th century the definition was a point of contention in physics, but before going into that consider a roller coaster.

 

Roller coasters are great ways to explain the transfers between kinetic and potential energy.  If there wasn't any friction or wind resistance you could start a car off at the highest peak and it would move around the track coming back to where it started.  Gravitational potential energy would turn into kinetic energy as the car dropped and the kinetic energy would turn back into potential energy as it went uphill.  Of course there is friction from the wheels against the track and air resistance. The wheels, axle bearings and track heat up, pieces vibrate, air swirls and sound is generated.  If you add all of these up you can account for the total energy of the system.  You might even be able to harvest some of these, but in general that's a difficult task.

 

Much has been and is being done on recovering lost energy.  Regenerative braking in electric cars, using waste heat from power plants to heat buildings (combined heat and power), etc.  Unfortunately there are limits to how much can be recovered.  As the waste heat is closer in temperature to its surroundings, the less efficient extraction will be.  This was a fatal error in the patent I looked at.  It assumed air temperature was much colder than it really is. 

 

Back to a definition of energy.  Emmy Noether showed that for every conserved quantity in physics there's a corresponding symmetry and visa versa.     Noether's theorem is central to physics.  It's one of those things that makes you gasp when you first realize how it works.  Among other things it shows time invariant processes are those that conserve energy.  If you fall off a building at noon or two o'clock the result will be the same.  Falling under the influence of gravity doesn't depend on time and energy is conserved. Unfortunately really diving in requires some serious math.   You can get an idea of what's going one from this non-mathematical discussion by a physics grad student.  So if you're curious and remember some high school physics:

 

In the meantime note that we waste an incredible amount of energy.  Not only are we staring down the barrel of global warming, but paying for energy is expensive by itself.  There's a lot of low-hanging fruit out there.  The problem is often getting people to imagine.

 

personal social media usage experimentation

minipost

 

A few years ago I found myself spending far too much time on Twitter .. generally an hour to an hour and a half a day.  Time I didn't have.   For a month I went cold turkey, but was frustrated as there were a few people I only interacted with on Twitter and, following about 50 people in one of my fields was a good way to learn about new discoveries and papers.  I decided to limit my time, aiming for a half hour a day in two or three sessions. One would be devoted to hunting for new papers and the rest of the time would be the water cooler.   It's been mostly successful - I'll admit to hours of serious doom scrolling around the January 2021 coup attempt, but generally I'm under my thirty minute a day limit.  (I also have one day a week when I try to cut Internet access completely).

 

With that background I was fascinated to come across a report on some real-world experimentation by a group of about sixty college undergrads - a group known for heavy social media use.   Matt Salganik taught Sociology 204: Social Networks at Princeton last Fall.  He posted a report on Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy's Freedom to Tinker blog:  

 

Improving Your Relationship with Social Media May Call for a Targeted Approach

 

From the introduction:

 

What students did:

Our class had about 60 students, from a variety of years and majors, and like most Princeton students, many of them were heavy users of several social media platforms. Each of them designed their own treatment and selected an outcome of interest. For example, some students were interested in improving their sleep and others were interested in wasting less time. In addition to these student-specific outcomes, we also had all students track two common outcomes that have been studied by other researchers: subjective well-being and time use changes.

This process of self-experimentation is a bit different from what social scientists normally do. Typically, researchers standardize the treatment, randomly assign treatments to participants, and collect data so that we can compare across participants and treatment groups. In our class, however, each participant was a researcher and designed a unique treatment for themself. Even though this is not standard for research, self-experimentation can be a good way to learn. The treatments students developed fell into three main groups:

Targeted limitation (about 45%). Students in this group restricted – but did not eliminate – their social media use. For example, students in this group did things like stopping TikTok use after 8pm and avoiding the Instagram feed (but still using Instagram for messaging).

Targeted increase (about 15%). In class, we learned about some research that suggests people who use social media actively—rather than passively scrolling—see an improvement in their well-being. So some students committed to increasing their active engagement with social media. For example, students in this group did things like posting 3 times per day on Instagram or direct-messaging at least 3 friends.

Elimination (about 40%). Students in this group eliminated their social media use altogether on one or more apps. Students who designed these treatments did things like delete Instagram or TikTok from their phone, and some actively replaced their social media use with another activity they valued such as reading the news or spending time with friends.

 

It's worth reading and non-technical.  It also offers some advice and techniques in the assignments section if you want to try learning about  your own usage.  It seems clear that there's a broad spectrum of positive and negative use patterns. 

 

repairability

My Dad was a Ford man.  More specifically the Ford Falcon.  It was a simple compact car with a 170 cubic inch displacement straight six coupled to a three speed manual transmission.  It scored on the high end of the Mobil fuel economy test - about 19 miles per gallon when the average sedan was around 14.   But what he really liked about it was how repairable it was.  Not only was it simple to work on, but most of his friends had cars with the same engine and transmission.  If something needed fixing we could usually do it ourselves using tools borrowed from one of his friends.  For more serious repairs there were specialized tools from Strobel's A to Z Rental, garages or (shudder) the Ford dealer.

 

The simplicity of cars of the day was balanced by crude manufacturing tolerances.  Pistons fit so poorly in the cylinders that the first 500 or 1000 miles were done with great care using an abrasive oil to polish the parts into shape.  It made a big difference in gas mileage and extending the life of the engine past 50,000 miles.  

 

The dual gas crises of the 70s opened the market for better cars that used higher precision design and manufacturing processes.  That and the beginnings of cars that crumpled to absorb energy in crashes made simple repair much more difficult.  The home mechanic had largely vanished by the 80s.

 

Clothing and shoes were expensive back then.  Quality construction and repairability were important considerations while shopping.  Tailors and dress makers were common.  The same was true for appliances.  Vacuum cleaners, toasters and anything electronic could be repaired at home or the local repair shop. 

 

There are exceptions today .. Jheri makes her own clothing or buys high quality pieces with the intention of buying very little as she hopes each piece will last at least a decade.  She's abandoned fashion and has created a style very much her own.  I suspect some of you - Om for example - have a similar philosophy.    But while it can be done in clothing, it's next to impossible when electronics are involved.

 

By the time I was fourteen I had three or four black and white TVs.  None of them worked - watching TV wasn't interesting.  The tubes, capacitors, transformers, switches and so on..  now those were useful!  I designed and built a few radios and a stereo amplifier.   It was straightforward and the experience taught me a lot about electronics.  Now I look in a computer, TV or radio and see only massive integration.  It's still possible to build things, but design is much more difficult. Learning about circuit elements is probably better done with computer simulations.   

 

The right to repair movement has grown in recent years.  I welcome  it for some products, but given the tight integration of hardware and software  I worry it may not be as generally attractive as proponents claim.  

 

Smartphones are a case in point. Apple is infamous for discouraging third party repair.  You can order a kit from Ifixit to replace a screen, battery and some other parts.  It can work well if you have a bit of experience and Ifitit is upfront with the degree of difficultly. You lack the tools and technique to take apart, replace and reassemble the device to design specifications.  

 

My personal results are mixed.  I easily replaced the battery (twice!) on my first day iPod 1.  The battery and screen on my out of warranty iPhone 5 was a different matter.   After five hours of frustration I was left with an operating phone, but the case was fitting tightly and whatever waterproofness was gone.   The misaligned case also interfered with the physical buttons on the side.  I did get another year and a half from the phone though.   It could be worse.  I know someone who replaced the battery on an Android phone with an inexpensive battery from Amazon.  The phone got very hot during charging and caught on fire when he took it apart to pull the battery out.  It filled his place with acrid smoke, but fortunately only destroyed the phone and wastebasket

 

Apple is afraid of regulation so they offer repair kits for some of their devices.   The Verge documented a batterh replacement.  You get a huge repair kit with a large hold on your credit card until Apple gets the kit back.  The process probably works well if you're skilled at working with small electronic devices, but this isn't for everyone. Given the cost of shipping I suspect Apple's losing money, but they're also trying to make a point of what it takes to do a high quality repair.  Of course a third party repair shop could buy the tools and perform quality repairs and I suspect that will happen.  Lower quality shops abound, but your phone or laptop may be a bit wonky afterwards.

 

We need to understand what's repairable, what's sort of repairable, and what's not.  Easy to repair smartphones have been offered but they're generally expensive and lacking in features.  I suspect smartphones, laptops and smartwatches are probably moving to a subscription model anyway.  Clothing and some appliances could made for longer lifetimes and repairability.  Then again convincing consumers and companies to move away from a consumption model is a huge, but very important, challenge. 

 

I've mentioned clothing, but should follow-up with other product areas where design for long life, repairability and upgrading is important. It's generally expensive, but in the long run can have advantages.  You may live in an example.

 

 

digging in a bit deeper

He would see something familiar in a cloud, the habit of a tree,  or a splatter of mud and use it as inspiration for one of his stories.  Lloyd loved stories.  Growing up, his would make up new stories to tell each other twice a month and, as an adult, he continued the tradition with his own family and the neighborhood kids.  I was one one of those kids. 

 

One night both of our families were camped near Two Medicine Lake on a spectacularly clear and dark June night.  The mountains cut pitch black outlines into the starry sky with new stars bursting into view as the Earth rotated. So many stars were visible it was difficult to find some of the constellations so Lloyd made up some of his own and started into his storytelling.  But two constellations survived - the Big and Little Dippers.  They were so well known to everyone that it was difficult seeing something else.   My contribution to the evening was pointing out some dark patches in the Milky Way. Like the mountains that seemed to be eating the sky and one looked like a galloping horse - enough to launch Lloyd on one of his ten minute excursions into fantasy.

 

Pareidolia is something familiar in otherwise unrelated objects.  It's seeing the face on the Moon or a bunny rabbit in a cloud.  It's a type of apophenia - our tendency to look for patterns in information.  Sometimes the patterns are there, often they're not.  The trick is to take a critical empirical look at the underlying information.  Exactly what is it? How was it measured and what steps were used to interpret it?  (this is where machine learning can fail  .. it's not just bad data sets).

 

Let's go back to the constellations - Ursa Major, the Big Dipper, in particular. Early on we learn that, with the help of culture, we're just finding familiar patterns as we connect the dots.  Stars are usually at different distances and brightnesses.  We're giving up the third dimension.  Nothing to see here .. or is there?

 

For years I considered the constellations to be nothing more than useful human constructions for finding one's way around the sky.  Ursa Major turns out to be special when you dig a bit deeper.  If you ignore Alkaid, the end of the handle, and Dubhe, the furthest point on the bucket, the remaining stars are all just a bit more than 80 light-years from Earth.   They also have the same proper motion - they're moving in the same direction at about the same speed.  Use a telescope and look at the distance and proper motion of dimmer stars you find over fifty that make up a physical cluster.  Spectroscopically they're very similar.  It looks like they were formed from the same dense cloud of gas about a half billion years ago - just after the Cambrian explosion on Earth.  With the exception of Alkaid and Dubhe they've moved in a slowly expanding formation and will continue along their way for some time 

 

And for years I thought the grouping must be nothing more than a human construct. A more critical look exposes a richer story.

 

 

 

 

communicating scale

Moonrise Kingdom by the wonderfully clever Wes Anderson is up there in my top ten list of films.  Anderson's films have strong visual and musical themes in addition to the storytelling.  A major theme by Alexandre Desplat repeats a few times.   Near the end of the film, in a homage to Benjamin Britten's The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, it's narrated by a child.  Individual instruments are identified and the listener gets a sense of textures and scale they build in combination. (go to part 7 at around 13 minutes .. the YT version of The Heroic Weather Conditions of the Universe  is low quality.  Try it on a high quality streaming service.  I recommend Apple's  .. if you subscribe.  I configure for lossless. )

So where am I going with this?  

 

It turns out we're bad - make that really bad - at recognizing the number of objects visually.  Most of us can tell the different between six and seven randomly arranged objects instantly, but it quickly falls apart at larger numbers.  We end up relying on other proxies, but it's difficult to get a gut feeling.  For example - the Sun's diameter is about 107 times that of the Earth. I sense that as really big, but I need to see a visual model to grasp it.  And how do you communicate something like the diversity of an ecosystem to the non-technical voting public?  Can you make an emotional connection?

 

Listening to CBC's wonderful weekly science program Quirks and Quarks came an answer that made me think of the music in Moonrise Kingdom.  Listen to the A scientist recreates avian soundscapes so we can hear what we're missing segment in the 21st of May edition. 

 

at the frontier of computational photography

A few of you are interested in computer-enhanced imaging.  The most exotic work often takes place in fundamental science where specialized instruments and techniques have to be built because nothing exists. I'd argue that particle physics and gravity wave telescope are part of computational photography, but some people demand something that registers as an image in our brain.  

 

If that's the case I'd claim the Event Horizon Telescope is one of the most exotic computational cameras in existence. It's approximately big - the diameter of the "lens" is about the size of the Earth.  Last week the EHT collaboration announced results of imaging Sagittarius A - the supermassive blackhole at the center of our own galaxy.  A few years ago the results of a much larger black hole in M87 were announced. The observation run was about a week with equal time look at the M87 BH and Sgr A* It turns out the computational techniques needed to sort out Sgr A* are were much more demanding and a few more years were required. 

 

I've talked about the EHT with some of you and written a bit, but it demands using hands, a blackboard and visual props.  Rather than link a potentially confusing explanation, I'll link to Derek Muller's piece (Veritasium - he's a fantastic science explainer). He also offers a quick visual explanation of what you're looking at.  You can't do this with just words and it's dangerously easy to get into deep water and get the audience lost.

 

 

Last month a week long observation at shorter wavelengths and a few extra telescopes was made.  Hopefully we'll see results sooner as techniques have been established.

 

ted lasso?

a minipost

I was listening to a panel discussion of elite sports psychologists, sports scientists, and a sports anthropologist when a question was posed:

 

Could a Ted Lasso exist?

 

If you haven't seen the show, Lasso is an American college football coach who is suddenly hired to coach an English Premier League team.  He had success in his D-II school, but it was clear he was hired to fail.  It turns out he didn't.

 

There was some laughter among audience members, but the panel members took it seriously.  It could work.  You'd need someone who was an incredible learner with success leading a team  of some kind.  Someone great at listening, observing and thinking.  They've need a Beard - a character who happens to be a serious soccer expert (among other things), but would never cut it as a coach.   Creating a bond with the players, listening to them, and be willing to experiment is key.  You'd also need management willing to put up with the time required to create a success.

 

The anthropologist noted some of these qualities are missing in NFL, NBA, MBA, and NHL coaching.  Coaches tend to be extremely confident of themselves and there is pressure to win.  Team culture can suffer and creativity is low compared with some other types of teams.  He pointed out some women's teams - particularly soccer and indoor volleyball -  are extremely innovative with positive team cultures well beyond any men's pro team he's seen. 

 

There was general agreement among those in the panel.  Coaching has a way to go in the big pro leagues, but the types of coaches selected are an issue.  A great women's soccer or indoor volleyball coach (several were mentioned) could be a Ted Lasso if they had a Beard at their side and the time to create change.   As an example a women's volleyball coach was mentioned.  Something of a household name in sports, he's as passionate figuring out how to coach a team of pre-teens as he is his countries national team.  He's experimenting and learning and might make a discovery with some twelve year old kids that works with his olympians.

 

It's culture all the way down at the top.  Maybe some of these multimillion dollar coaches aren't worth it, but it's unlikely the culture that selects them will change. 

 

It's an interesting game to think about the question in teams outside of sports.  

 

who are you going to call?

Drop two pieces of bread into the toaster and push the lever down.  You go about your business getting the rest of breakfast ready and then, after a few minutes, two pieces of toast pop up.  Have you ever thought about what's going on?

 

We usually think about the toaster receiving the bread and giving it back to us after a few minutes - electric heating somehow.  Someone from a few thousand years ago might wonder where the bread came from and what kind of magic transformed it into something similar but different after a few minutes.  He might wonder if the lever was some kind of prayer or incantation.  We can examine the process at a variety of levels and can find considerable depth.  We know the cord is plugged into a socket which has a path though a series of transformers and wires that usually lead to a generator that is turned by spinning a turbine with falling water or steam superheated by nuclear fission or the burning of fossil fuels.  When the switch goes on the load on the generators increases by a bit more than we're using.  The steps required advances small and large over the decades in science and technology.   For example getting the of generation and transmission of electricity to work efficiently depends on an understanding of Maxwell's equations and a fair amount of math.  

 

We don't think about these things because we trust them. There's a solid bedrock of reliable knowledge in much of our technology even though we're not one hundred percent sure of the science.  Our trust in science is nearly universal even though some of us chose to deny certain aspects.  Global warming deniers and flat earthers have no problem using the Internet - computer mediated communication built on silicon based semiconductor technology, fiber optics and much more.   Their mistrust is often based on something in their personal value system that to first order may seem orthogonal to the scientific arguments.

 

Not many people have a good handle on how science is done and how it progresses.  Many of us had to memorize the steps in "the scientific process" in elementary school, but it turns out it's messy and there's no formal process.  In college you may have come across Karl Popper's notion of falsifiability and Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm shifts. Both of these models have been shown to be wrong.  The view among many scientists and philosophers of science is science is more or less makeshift, but produces reliable knowledge and tends towards self-correction and reliable knowledge over time.

 

A few years ago a few lectures by Naomi Oreskes at Princeton gave me the basis of something I'm more comfortable with even though it's not complete. She argues reliable knowledge is based on five factors:  method, evidence,  consensus, values and humility.  I won't go into these as each is a deep subject, suffice it to say that the last three are deeply social - something many "hard" scientists tend to have a difficult time admitting.  Science is deeply collaborative and these social aspects often determine what is worked on as well as how it, and the people who did it, are perceived. 

 

Although most people trust much of science, personal and group values can get in the way of trusting certain aspects as well as certain scientists.  We've witnessed this up close with the pandemic, global warming and evolution.  I worry that many scientists have made a mistake by hiding their values (that's changing with some of us) as well as separating science and technology.  The separation of science and technology was value based and began to become dominant after WWII. Somehow science was to be the pure pursuit of nature even though it's linked to technology at the hip.  Often technologists are well versed in the science underlying their work and some venture into applied science.  Scientists, particularly experimentalists, are by necessity amateur technologists.  I've done some technology and have a bit of a feel for it, but I'm certainly not skilled - I do much better on the science side.  I'm in as much awe of great technologists as I am of great scientists. 

 

A final point.  Who should you trust to do science?  If the light in your house keep going out when you plug the toaster in, it probably makes sense to call a licensed electrician.  When a pipe in your house bursts spewing out gallons per minute, you call a licensed plumber and not an electrician or dentist. A trip to the dentist and not the Ghostbusters is in order when you hit a cherry pit in a piece of pie and a tooth falls out.  And when you're thinking of the long term - say your children's lives - listening to experts on global warming makes sense while listening to Mobil-Exxon or the Farmer's Almanac doesn't.  In each of these areas there are mostly good players and a few bad ones. You find the good ones from the consensus of their community. 

 

a thread of ev history

There's a nice vantage point in  Point Loma in San Diego with a monument to Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo.  In 1542 he made the first contact with the indigenous people of the area.  Not much happened, but sailing Northwards a few days later he noted smoke hanging over what is now Los Angeles.  Enough that he called one of the bays  Baya de los Fumos - Bay of the Smokes.

 

It's not clear what caused the smoke.  The Los Angeles region hosts three types of temperature inversions, each capable of trapping air masses close to the ground allowing smoke to build.  The region may have had one of the highest population density in North America in the 16th century, so it's possible the smoke was from thousands of fires - the region certainly held smoke in later centuries.  It's also possible there were large fires in the hillsides fanned by Santa Anna winds.

 

Before WWII Los Angeles, apart from areas around chemical plants, had fairly clear air most of the time.   That all changed after the war and by the fifties a thick brownish much often dropped visibility to a few blocks.  The brown smog was different from either smoke produced by wood fueled fires or the smogs coal burning was know for.

 

While the LA area was a natural environment for temperature inversions, it also hosted centers of intellectual curiosity.  A few years after the war Los Angeles decided to tackle the problem and created the first air pollution district in the country.  Arie Jan Haagen-Smit of Caltech managed to figure out what it was by 1950.  Sorting out how it was produced took a few more years.   He was able to show eighty percent came from  the automobile.

 

Caltech became a breading ground for ideas to deal with automotive smog.  By the mid 1960s Haagen-Smit and others were thinking about modern incarnations of electric cars. Wally Rippel was a student fascinated by the idea of electrifying transportation. His aha moment came when he showed electrifying the automotive fleet would only require a twenty percent increase in electricity generation.  (the number today is considerably less than ten percent). Wanting to move things along Rippel did what any Caltech student would do.  He challenged MIT to a race.

 

The Caltech team added over a ton of lead acid batteries to an old VW van for the Pasadena → Cambridge trip, while MIT converted a Corvair for their trip to Pasadena. MIT finished about a day and a half faster, but they broke down several times requiring towing more than once. The van, on the other hand, just motored through without incident and were declared winners.  

 

The 70s saw further development at several engineering schools. Recognizing batteries were heavy,  Caltech worked on early hybrid cars that would drive short distances on power from smaller battery packs before starting up a gasoline engine.  Along the way they develope regenerative braking to boost efficiency.  The first energy crises hammered home the idea that efficiency was important.  A Scientific American article appeared in 1973 telling the story of efficiency and declaring a person on a bicycle one of the most efficient forms of transportation in nature .. Steve Jobs later riffed on that calling personal computers bicycles for the mind.  An electric bike would be about twice as efficient as a human powered bike.  That led to work on motors and controllers. Unfortunately the American book disappeared and plans for a safe cycling infrastructure died.  Electric bikes would have to wait a few decades.

 

 

 

In the 80s Rippel was working with Paul MacCready's AeroVironment, something of a Caltech spinoff, on a specialized, almost anything goes, solar powered car for the five day World Solar Challenge race in Australia.  GM footed the bill for Sunraycer team and the car buried the competition.  GM engineering worked with them and the collaboration continued.  Learnings from the solar races went into new motor and controller designs as well as a recognition that aerodynamics were very important gave people the feeling something practical could be done.  Enthusiasm within GM's engineering community talked the company into building the EV1 - the first production modern electric car .  GM corporate didn't know what to do with it.. much has been written on how and why the project was killed after three years of production and extremely enthusiastic customers. Other than its batteries, the EV1 was more sophisticated than current electric cars.

 

Rippel and a few others from the EV1 experience founded AC Propulsion, building a demonstrator called the tzero.  More a proof of concept, it was sportscar designed to impress wealthy tech types defeating a stream of Ferraris and Porsches along the way. Martin Eberhard tried to convince them to take it to production, but the jump in scale was too much for them.  Instead he co-founded a company called Tesla well before Musk entered the scene.

 

Electric car history has many threads.  I'm familiar with this as I heard bits and pieces in school and through people I know.   The deeper story requires many more angles, but it's sticking how much can take place with just a few people.

 

I'm a believer in efficiency and infrastructure.  Moving towards safe active transport (walking, cycling and e-bikes) offers a much greater improvement over conventional electric cars.  (long story, willing to argue) 

 

A bit of early history. International Rectifier funded a solar car project in 1960.  Silicon solar cells were still very new and exotic.  IR provided solar cells to the space program, but wanted to grow a commercial market.  Doing the math they realized powering a home would be incredibly expensive, but a short range vehicle for city use might be practical earlier.  To make a statement they sent a solar panel to Charles Escoffery who converted a 1912 Baker Electric.  The world's first useable solar car.

Finally the clean air work starting at Caltech lead to catalytic convertors, reformulated gasoline and any number of environment regulation that have saved many lives.  That work was an innovation. 

 

three dog nights and a changing world

My father never had the thermostat above 60°F and 55° was a more common setting,. At night it would be dropped to 50°.  The house was well insulated and the furnace didn't come on that often if it was above freezing.  During colder weather we spent most of our time in an insulated room in the basement.  We had a lot of sweaters, thick socks, and scarves.

 

Great Falls, Montana lies just East of the Rocky Mountains.  It can be much colder than its latitude suggests as cold arctic air can plunge Southward unimpeded along the Eastern slope of the Rockies.  Global warming has changed the climate a bit, but thirty years ago -40° (F or C) would happen every few years and long spells with high temperatures staying below 0°F are not uncommon these days.   It also happens to be very windy. The residents are became very good at adapting to the climate. 

 

Our house was small so I slept in a small travel trailer most of the time during my high school years. The only real insulation in the Winter was snow..  There were a lot of blankets, a down sleeping bag, a beagle and two silky terriers.  The dogs would make their own beds down to about 40°.  Below that they'd join me in the sleeping bag.   The only down side from these three dog nights was when the beagle had gas.  The sleeping arrangement was always toasty.

 

Another bit of information comes from David MacKay.  Staring in the mid 1960s someone at Cambridge interested in residential heat transport in homes put recording thermometers in a number of homes in town as well as a few other locations around England. The standard Winter daytime temperature was remarkably consistent - about 55° through the 70s.  By 2000 it had crept to 62°. Lower readings than Americans expect, but the Brits may dress more practically.    It would be interesting looking at the insulation value of standard wardrobes over time.  I suspect the emergence of low cost clothing is partly to blame.

 

Over-reliance on Russian natural gas is presenting an enormous problem in some European counties. Short term solutions other than conservation are non-existent, but conservation holds a lot of promise.  Heat people rather than spaces.  A few days ago Jheri wrote noting she's working on warm Winter clothing lines for German and Nordic markets on speculation that natural gas will be rationed for a few years.   The savings projections I've seen involve thermostat settings of 16°C (61°F) .. I know from experience you can go much lower and be perfectly comfortable.  (That said I don't know how some of the high school girls survived with miniskirts back in the day.)

 

In the medium term there are a number of things that can be done, but I struggle coming up with anything at the home level approaching the impact of serious conservation.  The same goes for petroleum usage. Infrastructure changes to encourage cycling can have a non-trivial impact.  Fortunately a few locations (Denmark and the Netherlands)  have made, or are making (Paris), great headway. 

 

The medium and long term will be dominated by power generation and distribution, but progress can and should be made with "smart" heating and cooling along with smart fabrics.   There's much to say about those areas, but for later.

 

Who knows.. maybe tech can be more meaningful than social media and blockchains..  

 

Who knows.