Poken: A paper-free business card, free at GHC!

Wow. I mean, WOW.

I just learned about Poken, thanks to a tweet about it being at GHC this year. Not to sound like an advertisement, but it sounds really awesome! It's a paper-free business card that works with anyone else who also has a poken. You apparently touch the two together and it exchanges your contact information. When you set up your account you can choose what information to share and what social networking sites to include.

This sounds like a great idea for a conference, especially as they are giving them free to students and $15 for non-students. This sounds much better than the CONNECT project in 2008, where we had to find a CONNECT person to connect us. This year we'll be able to connect digitally without having to go somewhere else first! Conference organizers really seemed to have listened to our complaints and found a potentially perfect solution.

I think it's still worth bringing regular business cards though. Not everyone will have a poken, and not everyone will set it up either. But this product could really be revolutionary! It's much harder to lose digital information than a little piece of paper (at least, if it's stored somewhere easy to access and organized). It would be great if eventually everyone just had one and it could completely replace business cards. That could take awhile though. I'd like to say it would be more environmentally friendly, but the environmental cost of manufacturing the things may outweigh the paper savings (especially with recycled paper and properly harvested forests).

Well, I'm looking forward to trying out this new technology at GHC this year, and maybe it'll become mainstream enough that soon I can use it elsewhere too! I can't believe I never heard of it, but then again it looks like it may have only come out about a year ago, so I don't feel too bad. Hopefully I'll have a good experience to report!

New England Heating Oddities

The process of heating your house is definitely different between New England and Virginia. This of course is not too surprising, given the colder climate up here. But what I really find interesting is the varied types of heating. In Virginia, almost everyone I knew either used electric heat or a wood stove. Up here in Massachusetts I've had electric heat, oil heat, and now gas heat.

Supposedly gas heat is really cheap, so I'm a bit excited to see if our energy bills go down now that we aren't on oil heat. Apparently it was very expensive a year or two ago though, so I have to cross my fingers that prices won't go up again. The gas heater is really weird though; there's a heater in our living room that is permanently attached, but still is essentially a piece of furniture on one wall. It's supposed to heat the entire house, but it seems like it will just make the living room too hot to bear, and the rest of the house not hot enough. We also have electric heating in the floors that we can turn on (a separate thermostat for each room!!), which is supposed to supplement the gas heat. It will probably take a few weeks of actual use to really find the right process for making this combination work well without a lot of wasted energy. So far the house seems to keep rather warm (thank you, south facing windows and brick exterior!), so I'm hopeful that we won't need to use as much heat as we needed to keep the old rickety house warm. But the idea of having this big heater running while we're not home is not so appealing.

The other confusing part of the gas heat is that there is no real thermostat on it. we can't, say, set the temperature to "60" and then just let it decide to run. You set it on a scale of "low" to "high" and as far as I can tell it continuously runs at whatever point it's put at. The electric heat has actual thermostats, but would require setting them in every room, and is supposedly more expensive to use than the gas heat. I hope we are able to figure out the right algorithm for making this all work out correctly!

This is all on my mind because tonight is our first night it will be below freezing, so I will probably have to turn the heat on. I'm hoping to figure out a way to just keep it around 60 to 65 though!

Reduce. Reuse. Recycle.

Last week when I put the trash out I was very impressed that our standard sized trash can was only half full, meaning our house of 4 grad students had created half our usual amount of trash! The recycling bin was also not any more overflowing than normal. Today is trash day again, and as of this morning the can was empty! Granted, we have a basically full kitchen trash can, some trash in the bathroom, and some bedroom trash, but that still means we will have a low trash amount again this week. We have reduced!!

Of course, the amount of "stuff" we buy has always been fairly low; grad students only have but so much money to throw around. On the same note, we've always tended to reuse: we have plastic and glass food containers we reuse in the house, we acquire much of our furniture used and give our old furniture to new homes, give clothes and "stuff" to Salvation Army or sell at yard sales, and put old things to new use.

Recycling though has been a more interesting progression for me. When I was a kid I didn't really care much about the environmental impact our actions had. I was brought up to not be wasteful and not throw away anything that could be reused, but it was my younger sister who was adamant about recycling. For instance, she would remind us to recycle our soda can when the thought of throwing it away had only half-formed in our minds. We didn't have house pick up of recyclables in VA (they still don't, at least in the southern half of the state), so bags of recycling would pile up in the basement until it was time to take them to the recycling center. What a hassle! I never really cared all that much about it, and didn't think it would really make a difference. To this day everyone in my immediate family still recycles, but I think sometimes some of them get annoyed with how much effort it takes.

Now that I live in MA, I've become at least as aggressive about recycling as my sister already was about 15 years ago. I understand much better the environmental impact of our waste, and how crucial it is for us to try to do our best. I will buy a different brand of the same product in the stores if the package is made from recycled material or is more easily recycled. I remind housemates when they throw away or are about to throw away something that could easily be tossed into the recycling bin instead. Since we have recycling pick-up with our trash once a week, it is practically hassle free to recycle, which makes it so much easier to actually do it.

The next step is composting, which I find a little bit harder without my own yard. Many of our friends compost, and it really does seem like a crucial way to decrease the amount of stuff sent to landfills. In Springfield, MA they recently instituted an additional bin for food waste that is picked up on the curb with the trash. I'm not sure how well it's working since I don't live there, but it's great that they are trying to take that step.

I really feel like where a person lives and the attitude toward reducing, reusing, and recycling in that area (as well as accessibility of recycling) makes a big difference toward how much that person participates. For me, both taking a resources geology class my last year at Virginia Tech and moving to MA really made the difference.

What do you think influences people on this issue? Do you have any other ways we should be trying to save the environment within the reduce/reuse/recycle strategy?

Wintry Confliction

Right around this time every year I feel very conflicted about both winter and living in Massachusetts. If I was still in Virginia it would not be quite as cold yet, and the leaves would still be on all of the trees. I would have a longer time to wear autumn clothing as well; it's already too cold in the morning and evening to wear only a light jacket. I wouldn't be running the heat all evening and morning in addition to overnight, and the growing season wouldn't be as good as done. When I woke up in the morning the air outside of the covers wouldn't be so cold, so maybe I'd actually be willing to get out of bed.

Despite all of that though I do love winter in MA. I love waking up to a snow covered driveway, and layering on the covers at night. I'm always excited about a good excuse to drink hot drinks, so I consume a large amount of hot tea every day. I love snuggling under the blanket while watching TV in the evenings, and using a warm shower to warm up in the morning. I always wear layers anyway, so soon I can start layering with the sweaters that have been under my bed for about 5 months. I love being bundled to some extent.



I also love playing in the snow, and I love that we can still drive around after and while the snow is falling! Sure, the snow comes more often here than in VA, and we get more of it each time it falls as well, but still the roads are generally clear soon after it stops falling. People are also a lot less idiotic about how they are driving in the snow (for the most part).

Of course, clean roads mean school is never canceled. Usually I'm fine with that, but since I'm taking a 9AM class this semester it means I have to get up extra early when it snows to clean off my car and warm it up! That's of course going to be a problem every morning they don't call for snow and it snows anyway, as well as mornings where they call for snow and it doesn't happen. Either I end up not getting up early even though I need to clean off my car, or getting up early and then not needing to clean off my car! So I hope the snow stays away for most of the semester, because getting to school by 9AM is enough of a challenge for me without that extra 15-30 min of work!

At least in the winter our lab at school is too warm instead too cold; I can take off extra jacket layers instead of wrapping myself in a blanket as I work!

Thus, I have a conundrum. I wish it was warm outside, as it's just barely too cold most of the day for me to really want to sit outside. However, I also wish winter would hurry up and get here so I can wake up to a winter wonderland most mornings! But then again, I don't want to have to spend the time to clean pieces of that wonderland off of my car. Sheesh.

I wonder if Blacksburg was ideal as it's not as cold as MA, but you still get snow relatively often. Not to mention the bus system is good enough that I could just take the bus instead of cleaning off my car. Oh well, I gave it up to come to MA!

Environment and GHC Occasionally Collided

On Friday Mary Lou Jepsen spoke about her experiences with the One Laptop per Child and her company Pixel Qi that she started to continue that work. Apparently then have shipped approximately 1 million laptops already. In one African country an 11 year old girl created a laptop hospital to fix the broken laptops for other kids, after figuring out how to fix them herself. The laptops come with 6 extra screws, as Mary had envisioned the laptop to be fixable by the children themselves. I think this anecdote is yet another that supports the idea that girls are just as likely to be interested in computers as boys, as long as you don't tell them they shouldn't be (implicitly or explicitly).

I was also impressed to hear how little power these laptops take, and that they can be charged with a bicycle, cows walking on a treadmill-like device, and other non-traditional energy sources. According to her graphs, if a large number of people began to use these laptops instead of their traditional laptops, we could save a significant amount of energy. The laptops have innovative power saving capabilities, as the screen is exceptional in its low power usage, and the hard drive and processors are turned off whenever they aren't being used even if the computer is still on. Any action by the user essentially turns them back on immediately, so the user doesn't really notice that anything was turned off. How cool is that?! These laptops have so many capabilities that it would be great to have on ALL laptops!

Not only do I love that there is such an innovative laptop, I also love how environmentally friendly the use of it is. I wonder, of course, how environmentally friendly the actual development of the device is compared to other laptops. I hope that one day we can make computing have a much lower environmental impact, and maybe this laptop is a step in the right direction. Any guesses on how long that will take?

On a related note, GHC was overall much more environmentally friendly than usual. Every attendee was given a reusable plastic water bottle and encouraged to use that instead of plastic cups throughout the event. ThoughtWorks gave out organic cotton paper that when planted will bloom flowers, NetApp gave away organic chapstick, the free Microsoft t-shirt was made with organic cotton, and overall a lot less "stuff" was given away. Although it's always fun getting stuff, we really don't need it. There were even bins at the conference center for attendees to place any unwanted free stuff, that would then be donated to local schools. I think it's great that the organizers took the time to try to be more responsible toward the environment, and I hope the trend continues for future conferences.

Tornado in MA??

Although we've had a lot of crazy weather lately, I was definitely not expecting to hear of a tornado warning here in Massachusetts. I actually missed the warning as I was on vacation in Maine (posts about that soon!), but my housemate told me about it when I got back last night. Tornado warning! That is definitely not something I have ever expected to experience anywhere that I've lived, much less here.

Apparently, however, MA ranks number 35 in states for tornado frequency, according to the Disaster Center website. This website also states that MA has an average of 3 tornadoes per year, based on data from 1950-1995. Since this was my first tornado warning since moving here (at least that I'm aware of), I supposed that means many of these tornadoes do not happen in this area (we are in a mountainous region, after all).

Finding the Virginia webpage from the same site, however, shows that it has an average of 6 tornadoes a year and is ranked number 29. I remember one tornado/strong storm from when I was in middle school. The other storms I remember were not quite tornado strength, although we did have to go into the basement for many of them.

Well, I suppose tornadoes are not exactly something I should fret about, considering that I've moved to a state with fewer of them, and I've only really experienced 1 in VA. Still, I hope we don't have any more tornado watches or warnings any time soon, especially since our only real warning system is weather.com.

Thunderstorms -- one of my favorite things

I love thunderstorms, I think they are fun to watch. I've never lived anywhere that had frequent thunderstorms, so they have always been a treat. Ironically, we have had thunderstorms almost every night for the past week. Actually, this entire summer has given us more thunderstorms than I've experienced since moving to MA three years ago. It seems that almost every day the Weather Channel calls for thunderstorms, although they don't always happen.

Friday I enjoyed a thunderstorm from the covered balcony of a restaurant, Saturday a thunderstorm ruined the outdoor plans for my party, and Tuesday it canceled our playoff softball game against the #1 seed. It looks as though storms will also cancel volleyball practice today (we play outside), and quite possibly the re-scheduled softball game tomorrow.

The heavy rain we received last night actually flooded our department's first floor! The atrium, the conference rooms, and classrooms all had an inch or two of water in them. There is a single lab on the first floor, but they were far enough away from the water entry-point that they were spared. However, we are expected an afternoon and evening full of rain again today, so they may not be OK this time! It's rather scary to think that your research or electronics could be ruined due to rain in an area that is not prone to floods.

Hopefully I can continue to enjoy thunderstorms this summer without it causing too much damage. I don't know if it's global warming or some other phenomena that's screwing with our weather, but for the moment I mostly enjoy it. If we're lucky no more problems will come from it all.

Powerful and Energy Efficient go Hand in Hand

There is apparently a list called "Green500" that ranks supercomputers based on their energy efficiency, as I read about in this article: The Green500 List: Good things come in threes. According to the article, the world's current fasted super computer named Roadrunner is also the third most energy efficient!

It's really great to see that we are making progressing in decreasing the energy consumption of computing. These energy savings are apparently due at least in some part to IBM's BladeCenter QS22.

Hopefully technology can continue to become more environmentally friendly, but this success seems like a great step in the right direction.

Early bird catches the worm

This morning was not exactly my favorite of mornings. I returned last night from the last of the 3 weddings of early summer, then had the alarm set for 6AM to take Tim to the bus stop for a ride to Boston for a conference this week. Mother Nature, however, decided that 6:00 was much too late for waking up, and thus sent a very loud thunderstorm from 5:00 - 5:45. Needless to say, not much sleeping happened after 5:00.

When we left the house a bit before 7, we noticed that there were a bunch of little white worms that looked like larvae climbing up the stairs to our door. I wish I had taken a picture, but we were in too much of a rush to think about it. It was a bit freaky though; they were climbing vertically up the stairs, the railing, and were even ringing the top of the trash can. It looked like they were mounting war against us!

When I returned a bit after 7, I expected to see them covering the front door as well. However, I instead saw a robin standing on our trash can, and then leaping on to the railing when I parked. There were no worms in sight except for the one in its beak. After I registered what had just happened, the robin flew away.

Thank you, early bird.

Global Climate Crisis

I saw Al Gore give a talk at Google on Friday, April 7th, and even got to shake his hand afterwards. It was a great talk about the state of the climate changes and global warming. I was incredibly impressed with the fact that his talk concentrated on the facts, and was not political. There were of course political jokes here and there, and slight pokes at the current administration, but I do not feel that they detracted from the point he was trying to get across. The Q&A session afterwards had more of a political agenda due to the questions that were asked, but overall I think it was very well done.

Below is a summary of what he talked about, including quick facts. All of this information will be in the movie coming out this year entitled An Inconvenient Truth, which I recommend seeing and plan to see myself.

• He calls it the "climate crisis" because "global warming" doesn't truly encompass the issues, and makes it sound less like a local problem
  
• The word "crisis" is written as a combination of 2 characters in Chinese, one for "danger" and one for "opportunity" -- this tidbit of information is a good summary of the talk
  
• There are a lot of global places that are showing signs of global warming: Mt. Kilamanjaro is out of glaciers, and Glacier National Park is out of glaciers, for 2 examples.
  
• You can compare the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere by checking the amount in glaciers (they save the gas in pockets of air) and comparing it to numbers taken over the past 40-some years. The amount of CO2 has never gone over 300 ppmv (parts per million), but is now at 400 ppmv. 45 more years of following the same increase trend as the past 40 (there was a graph) would be catastrophic due to the large amout that would then be in the air. We are talking exponential growth here.
  
• The actual temperature of the ocean is higher than predicted by an actual computer monitor taking only natural causes in to account. A computer model that predicted the increase based on human interference from 30 years ago has accurately predicted the temperature up until now. That model shows it to continue to increase at a rate that will probably kill off most of the sea life in our lifetimes.
  
• In March 2004, Brazil had the first typhoon in South America; a very big sign of changing global climates and ocean temperature.
  
• We are having more flooding and more drought: the heavy rains cause flooding, but due to the rains all coming down at once the aquifers do not have time to refill, causing drought in the non-rain time.
  
• Glaciers:
  
  • We have lost 40% of the thickness of hte arctic glaciers
    
  • There is currently a higher temperature increase at the north pole than at the equator. If these glaciers melt, the ocean will be warmed a great deal because these glaciers currently reflect a majority of sunshine in the winter months. If this warming occurs, the therma-haline pump between Canada and Europe could stop working, which currently helps control the ocean temperature and warms Europe. Europe could be thrust in to an ice age if this happens, with high consequences to the rest of the planet as well.
    
  • Larsen Ice Shelf in Antartica disappeared. It is just completely gone, this huge piece of ice. The small melting areas tunneled to the bottom of the glacier, heating the water and causing the land based ice to fall.
    
  • Land based ice melting causes the ocean height to rise, because that water was not part of the ocean previously. Water based ice melting does not cause the ocean height to rise, because it was part of the ocean to begin with.
    
  • Greenland melting (which it has already begun to do visibly) will raise sea levels worldwide by 20 feet, as all of those glaciers are currently land based. Currently 50 cubed miles are lost a year from the Greenland glacier. If this melting is not stopped, all of the Netherlands (not to mention most of Florida and many other regions) will be entirely under water in our lifetime.
    
• Due to this warming, there is less frost on the ground during winter, and therefore invasive speacies come sooner. This is causing devastation to whole forests and other natural habitats.
  
• Coral has died in the Caribbean because of warming ocean temperatures.
  
• There will be more infectious diseases and mosquitos due to this warming, as they will be able to survive easier.
  

The year to fear is 2050...yes, if things keep going as they are, we will have a flooded and possibly uninhabitable planet by that time.

If you take nothing out of these bullet points, there are 2 things I want you to remember. First, 53% of the news puts global warming in doubt, whereas 0% of actual scientists doubt it. Big oil companies and others are literally paying people to act as specialists and claim that global warming is fake. Two, we are basically the one big country that has not ratified the Kyoto Protocol, and it cannot succeed without us because we output much more CO2 than the other countries, even per person. The rest of the world understands the problem, and wants to fix it but for some reason we are too worried about what it will do to the economy. But by not following the Kyoto Protocol and decreasing our emissions, we are losing some of our economy. For instance, our car makers are suffering right now; if they made more fuel efficient cars they could sell them to other countries, but right now they can't because their cars are not up to the standards required!

There's no reason not to try to fix our mistakes and save the Earth. Otherwise, our children might be the last generation before we plunge back to the dark ages or become extinct. It really is that imminent, and something really does need to be done about it.

If you are unsure of terms or why I think something matters, just ask. I did a semester project on global warming when I was an undergraduate, I took a geology class where we discussed much of this, and I have a full year of college level chemistry behind me. I could write a post on each of those bullet points I think, but I will refrain from doing so for now. However, it really is a very important topic, and we really need to take care of our planet because IT'S THE ONLY ONE WE HAVE!

Please see his movie or research more on this topic (preferably not in the american news, as there are many lies there) if you are not already familiar with the key points. If we do what we are capable of doing with the technology we have now, we actually CAN get our CO2 levels down to that of 1970! It's only a matter of trying and making the government know that it should be a priority! Because really, what's the point of fighting terrorism and finding cures to diseases if we aren't even going to have a planet in 50 years?