Treehugger has a great article today about 70s space station designs, with images:
Clearly these designers knew something that we seem to have forgotten: If you want to build a sustainable community you need lots of trees. Cylinders, Bernal Spheres, Toroidal Colonies, all full of trees.
It’s a rainy Thursday here in San Francisco and I’ve found myself with a day off. I packed up a laptop and headed out to meet a friend; we were going to sit at the cafe down the street from his house and write, taking advantage of the wireless Internet access. We ended up making some sort of eggs and potatoes dish, then he had a phone meeting with a client, so I headed out on my own.
I went for walk and decided it would be easier to stay over on this side of town then head back home, since I’d be ending up back this way tonight.
Once the rain became heavy enough to stop me from traveling on foot I caught a J-Church and headed out to City College. I haven’t been to the library there in awhile, but I figured they’d have Internet access and I’d be able to spend a few hours writing and reading the news.
But they don’t. When I asked at the information desk a very pleasant reference librarian told me even if I could sign up for access it takes a few days and I’d have to register my computer. Yikes. I found it odd that the public community college wouldn’t offer access, but what do I know?
I jumped on a K-Ingleside train from City College and hopped off at West Portal. The West Portal branch of the San Francisco Public Library is rigght across the street from the station and I figured it was worth a try. I came in and asked at the front desk if there was wireless Internet access. Another pleasant librarian looked up and smiled and said, “of course, just open up your computer and you should be able to connect.”
So here I am. Hooray for the San Francisco Public Library. It does make me wonder if we’re ever going to get the city-wide wi-fi that they tried to get going some years back.
Now if I could find a power outlet…
A startup called Solyndra has developed cylindrical solar panels that are easier to install and take up less space than traditional panels and can absorb solar energy from any direction, according to the San Francisco Chronicle:
Solyndra’s tubes, made at the company’s Fremont factory, don’t need to be tilted to face the sun the way traditional solar cells do. They work just as well lying flat, making them ideal for the wide-open roofs of office buildings, warehouses and big-box retail stores.
And because Solyndra’s racks leave an inch of space between each tube, they don’t catch the wind very easily and don’t need to be bolted to the roof, cutting installation time and cost.
Yet another example of a clever solution to a problem (that’s kind of the running theme for this blog, of course). While the technical achievement of collecting solar energy from any direction is impressive, being able to install the panels easily — according to Solyndra they don’t need to be bolted down — is really exciting.
If adding solar panels becomes as easy as setting down a freestanding rack, homeowners and renters alike could put panels on roofs, on patios, in yards and anywhere else exposed to sunlight. Maybe solar panels could become as common as satellite dishes on buildings today, especially if a standardized way to plug them into the grid is developed and could be installed easily in an hour or two.
I’m a huge fan of car sharing. You join the car share service and that gives you access to cars all over the city. You just book one of the cars on the web site — even just a few minutes before you need it — and then you can pick it up, using a card key to unlock it. You pay by the hour (or by the day) and gas and insurance are both included.
For city dwellers like me car sharing saves a ton of money and aggravation (it’s awesome not owning a car!), we have access to a car when we need one and using a car becomes a fixed and predictable expense.
The large commercial car sharing company in cities across the US is Zipcar; an architecture company has created a design for what they call a “Zipcar dispenser.” It’s basically a giant Pez dispenser-like rack system that allows car share cars to be stored vertically in dense urban areas and popped out like pieces of candy when they’re needed.
Check out the picture here, and the Moskow Linn Architects site for more pictures and information.
Image: Moskow Linns Architects
Today’s opening on the new California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park was a madhouse. The ceremonies were set to start at 8:30am; we arrived a little after 9am (after picking up some very tasty scones from Arizmendi) and expected there would be a line. What we were unprepared for was the line stretching well away from the Academy down JFK Drive, past the Conservatory of Flowers and then wrapping back around down Middle Drive East.
We had decided when we saw the line going around the first corner that we’d just come back another time to see the inside of the museum (a luxury of being a local). As we walked along, our attention turned to the line itself — the number of people waiting and how long people would be willing to wait to get in.
I stopped and talked to one of the academy volunteers. She said she had stopped counting after the first 2,000 people and they could only accommodate 4,000 people at a time. That wasn’t even halfway to the end of the line. I asked some people in line how long they would wait. The first folks I talked to seemed mildly shocked when I told them how many people were in front of them, but a group I spoke to waiting even farther back said they’d stick it out for four or five hours. I wouldn’t (and didn’t!) but was impressed with their dedication.
It was nice to see so many people in interested in a science museum!
We ended up walking back to the main concourse and checking out some of the booths and the bands playing in front of the Academy. One in particular, Junkestra, was really fun. They’re a group of symphony musicians who play on a bunch of instruments that they had built out of garbage! The music, played on trashcans, with old hoses, on plastic pipes, on water bottles, with a saw and with other weird objects, was very good!
There was more information on the Academy of Sciences itself, including the solar panels and the living roof — the roof of the building features gently undulating curves covered with soil and living plants.
I was disappointed that so many people drove there instead of using public transit — the park was full of idled cars and the surrounding Inner Sunset neighborhood was choked up all afternoon and into the evening, which delayed the public transit, of course.
When we got back I mapped out the line and found that it was about an eighth of a mile long when were arrived around 9am and a little over a mile long when we walked back past around 11am.
The US Green Building Council offers a free PDF download of their “REGREEN Residential Remodeling Guidelines” at their Green Home Guide site.
From the introduction:
Green remodeling is the design and construction of projects that reduce the environmental impacts of remodeling, including energy, water, and materials consumption; waste generation; and harmful emissions, both indoors and out.
It’s 180 pages of information, photos, how-to guidelines, case studies and strategies, including sections for each room in a house and chapters on home performance, major additions, gut rehabs and deep energy retrofits.
More about the USGBC:
The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) is a nonprofit composed of leaders from every sector of the building industry working to promote buildings that are environmentally responsible, profitable and healthy places to live and work. Our more than 15,000 member organizations and our network of 75 regional chapters are united to advance our mission of transforming the building industry to sustainability.
I’m always amazed at the little niches people carve out for themselves in the tech world. I came across backupcentral.com today, a site and blog run by Curtis Preston; he’s the author of O’Reilly’s Backup and Recovery and Using SANs and NAS books (his original title, Unix Backup & Recovery has been replaced by the aforementioned title).
This guy lives and breathes backups! And I think that’s not a bad thing at all. His writing is interesting and has a nice tone. I found myself getting engrossed in his “Mr. Backup” blog with entries like “Agentless Backup: Not evil after all” and “Dedupe, Immutability & Non-repudiation” (dedupe products are pretty interesting in and of themselves, but that’s another topic).
I consistently get a few calls a year from friends who ask something like, “so what can I do to get my stuff back since my hard drive died?” And I always know the answer to my first question, “do you have any backups?” The part that makes it even worse is after they say they don’t, I ask if they have an external USB hard drive and they usually do, they just didn’t rig it up to back up their data automatically.
Since USB drives are so cheap and easy to use, it’s a no-brainer to task them with regular backups. On the Mac there’s Time Machine, a pretty cool system that automatically creates versioned (ie different time-point) backups with a really easy to use interface. Most of the drives themselves come with some sort of Windows software to do the same thing, though it may not be as elegant.
On my Mac I run a shell script from a cron job that rsyncs everything over each night. If the prospect of losing my data files wasn’t enough simply because they’re, well, my data files, having the music files I’ve purchased online means I have files with actual known monetary value.
Once in awhile I do hoark some file and it’s great to be able to pull it right off the USB drive. In fact, now that I think about it, I had a hard drive die last year. Replacing it and reinstalling the system didn’t entail any data loss at all. Very handy. And instead of being a traumatic memory of losing all my stuff, I didn’t even remember right away that it happened.