Thoughts from the intersection of science, business, society and culture.
Posts tagged ‘Science’
Grow-A-Brain has posted an awesome time-lapse video of slime molds and mushrooms growing. Advertant readers will have noted my fascination with the mycological recently, so it’s not surprising that I found this particularly interesting.
I just read this piece by Alex Steffen on the WorldChanging blog and highly recommend it. The key quote from the piece, in my opinion, is this one:
[I]f we’re going to avert ecological destruction, we need to to not only do things differently, we need to do different things.
What he’s saying here is something that I’ve pointed out to my colleagues in the innovation community: sustainability is not about making things with less stuff, or that last longer, or that aren’t toxic, or even that can be infinitely cradle-to-cradle recycled. Sustainability requires us to invent things that make it possible to live more sustainably. If the things, the stuff, that we have and use make it easier to live sustainable lives than to not do so, then we will live sustainably.
Its not an easy problem to solve, for the same reason that truly groundbreaking innovation is not easy. It is pretty straightforward to imagine a novel solution for a market that already exists. It is much harder to invent a new market. I think that the kinds of products that will help people live sustainably are products for a market that doesn’t exist yet. Our business strategists don’t know how to value them, so our market analysts can’t compute a return on investment, so no investment is made. And truthfully, our scientists and engineers don’t always have the global perspective necessary to understand what types of solutions are necessary.
The point of Steffen’s article was to underline the importance of community in making these changes in our systems. I think that it is also important to understand the systems themselves. As we grow in our understanding the network of interactions and dependencies in our economy and our society, this understanding will allow us to break out of unsustainable patterns and replace them with ones that are equally understood, but are sustainable to the best of our knowledge. And because we’ll be building from a base of understanding, we’ll be able to look at them in a rational fashion 40 years from now when we understand the ways in which the new patterns are not sustainable.
It may be that at first, these more-sustainable patterns will be obvious. Things that folks like Steffen have been telling us for years, like community gardening, reducing sprawl, and increasing bike transport. But as with everything else, the low-hanging fruits will be quickly exhausted. At that point, progress will only be made by deeper understanding. It will be interesting to see how the tools for gaining that understanding develop.
I recently read Ian Ayres’ excellent book, Super Crunchers. For folks who read and enjoyed Freakonomics, this book is a must-read, covering more cases where clever statistical analyses have uncovered interesting and useful results. The goal in writing the book, according to Ayres, was to encourage people to learn to think statistically. On the other side of the link is a discussion of some errors in experimental design, why their treatment in Ayres’ book frustrates me and why the average person should care.
Continue reading ‘Review and commentary on “Super Crunchers” by Ian Ayres’ »
I posted an article earlier critiquing the media reaction to the recent reports on biofuels and land use management. Worldchanging has just posted a similar, fairly in-depth, critique as well. Their analysis goes more in depth into the specifics of each report, so I highly recommend it. What they do point out is that the Science articles are nuanced and that it was clear that the media in general either missed the nuance or ignored it.
No one grandstands quite like Craig Venter. Whether its leading a team racing the government to the first human genome sequenced, succeeding, or admitting that his team beat the government by sequencing his own genome, this guy has style like few others in science. And while physicists at least have the reputation of having large egos installed as part of their graduate training, Venter’s ego is apparently physicist-sized, at least according to Wired and Forbes.
That being said, there is something phenomenally inspiring about the folks who have no shame about tackling the really big problems. This is a constructive sort of hubris, the kind that Larry Wall correctly identified as a virtue. Venter’s glorious hubris was on display this week at the TED conference, where he announced that he was working on a project to engineer a bacteria that turns carbon dioxide into methane and octane and that he expects results within 18 months on these fourth generation fuels.
Technorati Tags: biofuel, green, worldchanging