Women and the World’s Future
By Frank | June 9, 2009
I have 2 daughters - Rose and Alana - and both of them are now out and working after having complete college and masters degrees. Both are doing well. And one reason this is so is that they live in an unprecedented time for women and freedom. Throughout human history there have been very few times when women have shared equal rights with men. And most of those times have ended badly when a neighboring civilization with male dominance has ended up crushing the more gentle and civilized group where equality existed.
Riane Eisler in her masterwork - The Chalice and the Blade - details one of the earliest of such civilizations - the Minoan culture which existed in the eastern Mediterannian, on Crete about 1700 BCE. It was a culture that produced probably the finest art and architecture of its time. Minoan culture embraced equality of men and women, women had positions of power, participated in sport. But the culture died out at the hands of stronger willed male dominated cultures eventually.
And this seems to me to be the central question going forward. Our future is not about Muslim vs Christian, not about east vs west, it is about whether we are once again going to leave behind the gains we have achieved in the overall equality of people.
We know today that cultures and civilizations that value both women and men, and allow a partnership model for working together, that it is these groups that have the highest standards of living, that make the most rapid progress technically, environmentally, overall.
If you ask a young US woman how much she values the progress that has been made over the last 50 years for women. You will get an ear full. But if you ask how much she is willing to sacrifice to hold on to these gains, then the answer becomes mixed. Is this because the gains came to easily? Or is it because the gains are thought to be impossible to erase? One need only look to other cultures where we are in conflicts to see that this is not the case.
There are cultures who teach that women are chattel, not to be held in the same distinction as men, to be mutilated away from their full sexual potential, to be managed and kept ignorant in terms of education.
So my question is - how willing are we to really fight over these principles? What level of sacrifice will we endure? Can both men and women be convinced to sacrifice for these clearly very valuable gains? If not, what does that say about us all?
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Energy Efficiency by Walking Around (EEbWA)
By Frank | May 31, 2009
Lately as I have been traveling I have been stunned by how often people fail to take the most simple of energy efficiency steps. Here are a few vignettes.
- When I am in Indianapolis, I often eat at MLC cafeterias with my Dad and brother Paul. They offer home cooking in a simple and low cost format. The restaurant has about 200 - 65 Watt incandescent light bulbs in teh ceiling. These bulbs y my estimation are probably on at least from 9 am to 10 pm, maybe longer. And if the restaurant is open 360 days per year then these bulbs alone consume 360 days x 13 hours/day x 200 bulbs x 65 watts/1000 watts/KW = 60,840 KW-hrs per year. But wait, the restaurant probably has to air condition about 8 months per year and so this figure really is about 3x that because the bulbs add substantially to the heat load of the building. So let’s say they cost about more like 200,000 KW-hrs per year. At $0.12 per KW-hr, this costs the restaurant $24,000 per year per restaurant. If the restaurant switched to an equivalent CF style (one that is in a down or spot light configuration) the power would drop to 20 watts per bulb but the heat load would also drop so the total power used per year would be less more than 90% or more like 20,000 KW-hrs per year. Moreover the CF bulbs would likely last 4x longer so you would save not only on power but on service and materials as well. I wrote the company but received no reply.
- In a similar situation, the condominium complex where my Dad lives also found that they had about the same number of bulbs inside to make hallways and open spaces safe and well lit and they replaced all bulbs with CF and the savings was $1,500 per month. It cost $6000 to make the switch so payback was in just 4 months! And because they have a small staff the fact that the bulb changes are now so much further apart really helps them out too.
- The Tiburon Peninsula Club, which has both swimming pools and tennis courts renovated their club extensively about 1-2 years ago. They have a waiting list of over 2 years for people wanting to join. The new pool facilities resulted in 3 separate large pools each about 25 meters long; all pools are open year round. Tiburon is one of the better places for solar energy in the USA - Tiburon receives about 80% of the solar power of even the best deserts in the USA. Solar heating of swimming pools is very mature technology at this point. But did a club that has a waiting list and and only wealthy members use solar heating for any of the pools … NOPE. they went with natural gas fired heaters for all of their pools? How can we go forward if this type of thinking pervades even the people who can afford to be leaders and who would actually see a payback of probably less than 3-4 years. I wonder just how many tons of CO2 per year are produced just to heat those pools??
- At a high end day spa in Napa, we found that most of the lighting was done using more artistic fixtures and lighting bulbs that were not commonly found in CF type lights. All of the lighting was incandescent. But was that really the only solution? This spa was fully owned and operated by women. They did not like at all having to get out tall ladders to replace bulbs that were burning out several per week. The solution eventually will be to switch them over to LED based lighting. In this case the lifetime of the bulbs will be 50,000 to 100,000 hours so they will last MUCH longer than what is there now and as this technology matures it will provide the same lighting levels but at only 20% of the costs.
So I am asking each of you. Try walking around and see who is trying to be conscious of their energy usage. You can see it pretty quickly. If you find someone shop, restaurant or business that seems to be really doing well, ask how far they have tried to go green. And then let me know.
I am working with churches in Indiana, California and hopefully other places too to start a grass roots movement to get those in our midst who have not really risen to the challenge. What will it take for us to start saving in ways that actually fully pay for themselves even at today’s low energy prices? Let’s find out!
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Bumping into Limits
By Frank | April 21, 2009
Perhaps many of you reading this watched the CBS 60 minutes show last Sunday on cold fusion power and its renewed potential. If not, you can view it here. I must admit I am still pretty strongly among the unbelievers.
One reason I am still not convinced is that any fusion reaction leaves different chemical elements than what it starts with. So if you have D2O and you process it through cold fusion then you must get some form of helimu (He). Why they did not look for the helium in addition to the excess heat is surprising.
But for the sake of this essay, let’s suppose that they have found the key. Then like they state in the 60 Minutes piece, it is a very big deal. Because it represents a rather limitless source of power that is both clean and plentiful and potentially very cheap. Wow.
Such a discovery has very deep importance to steps that we are taking as a world now. The mutiple threats of global warming, CO2 build up, rapidly declining amounts of fossile fuels, rapidly developing new large population nations. All of these could be solved by this single discovery.
One problem that this presents is that we are investing in some very long term strong alternatives to carbon based power - wind, solar, geothermal - to name a few. And also we are investing in changing the energy usage equation by increasing efficiency of everything from motors to lighting. Those investments could be curtailed if we have this different future. Do we want that?
What has me reflecting is the idea that with this “flick of the technology magic wand” we eliminate the problems to all visible extent. But most likely not for very long. The fact is we are now living at a time when human interaction with the earth happens on a global scale. We light it all up, we have explored nearly all of its surface and waters, we routinely do terraforming projects that are visible from space.
So if we are able to use technology to once again remove a limitation we face, won’t there be more. And aren’t they likely to come up pretty quickly? If we were to record moments in time when humanity faced limits that required care on our part for survival we would see, I suspect, that these are occuring with ever greater frequency and with shorter time spans between them.
For example, there were -
- a crisis of food and pollution that came around the time of the industrial revolution. The one was solved by better farming technology. As we also built factories so we could all have better underwear, towels and such, we ended up polluting the cities of that time so bad that people were sickened from the dirt in the air and water (let’s date this one at 1850)
- a crisis relating to the scale of war that occurred in the 2nd World War from both the atomic bomb but also the ability to deliver mechanized killing anywhere in the world through the use of airplanes and rockets. (date - 1945)
- a crisis relating to feeding the world’s rising population occurred again in the 1950-1960s but was solved through better chemicals, better genetic strains of crops and better. (date - 1965)
- combination of oil, climate change, loss of biodiversity (already discussed) (date - 200x)
So my question is if we pull this one out, do we really solve anything unless we deal with the long term fact that humans are dominating the planet. Is this fact something we can deal with and pull back from, live in harmony with the rest of life and the planet’s resources?
How does this really change anything?
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Myth and Transformation
By Frank | April 10, 2009
I have been asking myself the question - “How are we supposed to live in this age of carbon limits and energy sustainability?” And it seems to me that we cannot accept or require that each person live under some intricately defined limits and rules but rather perhaps we can live in fairness to one another if we could agree to live sustainably by some broad but quantifiable definition. (Others have asked this question - Peter Singer wrote a book with this title but it was more focused on how we treat living animals than energy)
By systainable, I mean that for our energy lives perhaps we all agree by 2020 or some date that we live where we produce as much energy as we use. It may be that such a goal can only be achieved by some fraction of society by that time. Perhaps some progressive phase in of this objective such as the wealthiest 10% of the country must achieve this by 2020 and then the top 25% by 2030, the top 50% by 2040 and so forth.
But key to this is how we begin to make the transition.
I have been reading a terrific book entitled - “The Constant Fire” by Adam Frank. Adam Frank is a PhD astrophyscist by training (something we share in common) but this book is highly approachable. In it he carefully lays out how we have put science up on a very high pedastle but in fact it is only the latest (and quite long running) of man made mental constructs that allow us to better understand our universe.
In the past we had the world held up by a turtle or a very strong man and a charriot pulling the various elements in the solar system about in the sky. Science allows us to make more numerous and more accurate predictions than these previous systems. But it is hubrious for us to think that our science of today has the last word.
The title of this essay - “Myth and Transformation” relates to the need for us to transform across all of the human family. We cannot continue to keep buring fossile fuel, polluting the planet, using limited resources. As a species we have come to dominate the planet in a way never before achieved. if you look at Earth from space, you know that human beings dominate the planet.
In visible light you see our cities lighting up the night. In radio light you can listen to radio, watch TV and listen in on internet traffic over various frequencies. The planet is changing visibly in terms of the geography as well. The northern polar ice cap is disappearing and that has not happened in a very long time. Large ice areas in the antartica are also diminishing. Overall our global temperature is changing and this can be determined from space using yet another frequencey of light. (Note - radio, visible light, heat or infrared light are all forms of light and obey the same scientific laws)
The evidence is quite strong that if we do not change our directions we will change our climate and biosphere in ways that could damage our planet’s ability to support complex life like human beings.
Ok, Ok, Frank. But Myth …
It turns out that as we can see Science as our most modern and pervasive myth, we can perhaps be humble enough to use other lessons from human history and our myths in the past. Myths have been a fundamental way we have been able to make changes.
In early human history boys as they transition to manhood and participated in the hunt (which was dangerous generally) were inducted into this activity through stories and myths. They might be taken into caves and shown paintings of the hunt and the harm that can come during such times. The myths of the hunt were its heroics, triumphs and so forth and by the telling courage was given to the boy about to become a man.
Arthur Schlesinger Jr puts it this way in “The Cycles of American History” - “Science and technology revolutionize our lives but memory, tradition and myth frame our response”.
Technology can help us know of the need to change our interaction with our natural world. Science can make models and projections of what will happen if we do not change. But still we will not change based on these “fact based models” alone. We need our myths and traditions (probably including our religious traditions) to help lead the transformation.
More on this in the next essay
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At the Bottom?
By Frank | March 12, 2009
As I write this, we are still in the turmoil of the largest financial crisis since the great depression of 1929-39. The stock market has lost more than 50% of its peak value and many companies are on the verge of bankruptcy.
Yet somehow I sense things are turning around. There are too many people pressing for improved lives around the world - especially in India and China where 30%+ of the world’s population live - to allow the rest of us to slide down the hill too long.
For Finisar, the company I founded some 20 years ago, in their recent conference call they noted that they expected this quarter to be the last negative growth one and for there to things to improve from this point. They even noted that orders in February and early March are higher than their forecast they presented that day. This is an unusual statement for Steve Workman and Jerry Rawls who, like me, are conservative mid-western folks to their cores.
Finisar’s sense of the bottom certainly is based on the fact that the Internet is still growing. Thing about it for a minute. How much video did you watch using Internet transmission technology 2 years ago? How much do you watch today? Against that time frame it is easy for many people to see that today they watch quite abit and just a couple of years ago it was practically zero. Video places extreme bandwidth needs on the Internet.
Back in 2005, I published a series of articles on the Finisar web site which showed that our sales of optical transceivers were experiencing a growth rate of 10x every 4-5 years. I measured this growth rate in “megabits per second shipped per month per person on earth” or Mb/s /mo /poe. Sometime in 2005 we were at approximately a unit of 1 on this scale. This meant that Finisar shipped enough 2 Gb/s and other optical transceivers that every person on earth was given another 1 million bits of data per second or bandwidth say in June and then another one in July and August and …
But I also showed that this figure had been growing for us and predicted that it woudl grow by 10x by about 2008/9 and also that this growth would be driven by video on demand over the Internet. And as VoD has happened, so has the prediction of 10x increased bandwidth shipped by Finisar to its customers. So it all continues.
And now there are parts of the internet that are clogged up and the way to fix this is to add more Bandwidth! So we will have to have increased sales to large customers like Cisco and Brocade to have the Internet be able to sustain its growth.
But what about other industries.? it seems to me that those who have strong fundamental support for their futures will thrive. These certainly include new infrastructure for the USA, solar panels, energy efficiency products like new lightbulbs and such. But luxury items that really have no part in the rapidly evolving future - Hummers, private planes, wildly speculative investments - those will likely be mainly relegated to the past.
If I am right, then this will be a real first for the USA as well for some time. We are not driving the world but the world is helping us. I hope we can be open enough to see this.
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Outliers
By Frank | February 10, 2009
As related last time, I have been reading more lately. And the best book has been “Outliers”. It is the number 1 bestseller on the New York Times non-fiction list.
The book studies many types of “outliers”. The first group are individuals like Bill Gates. And the book makes the point that these people are not so extraordinary as they are people who were in the right places for extended periods of time. Gates was introduced to computer programming in Junior High School and was able to get individual access to computers in the late 1960s when this was virtually impossible. So when the Altair came along he and Paul Allen (his friend) were perhaps some of the only young people with sufficient experience to write a computer language for this new “personal computer”.
Over and over you find this same pattern in what appear to be brilliant people. Let me cite 2 more “outliers” and their books for you to verify.
One is “The Snowball” which is the biography of Warren Buffett. The most interesting part of this read are the stories of his paper route when he was in Washington DC where he earned more as a teenager than his teachers in school did! He started early, and dug in deeply to learn about how to efficiently earn money. He was an outlier from the beginning.
But even more interesting is “Born Standing Up” which is the autobiography of Steve Martin. He begins his 20 year journey to big time fame as a comedian by working in the parking lot at Knott’s Berry Farm (a Disneyland like place). Over time he advances to the magic shop and then to doing small performances, etc. But key again is that fame took 20 years and there were many times that the outcome was in doubt.
The book outliers makes this point. It takes about 10,000 hours of focused effort in one direction to really be an expert.
My experience bears this out. I worked in fiber optics at Bell Labs in the early 1980s and worked in the area of passive optical components. And then in 1984, I started my first company and it failed with in one year. From there I went to another company and did a different part of fiber optics (systems and electronics). Finisar was founded in 1988 and again I was able to continue as an individual contributor or small group leader for another nearly 10 years. Over this time I learned about lasers, photodiodes, integrated circuits, manufacturing, quality and so forth from the ground up.
Honestly it took me much longer than 10,000 hours to achieve what success that eventually came. But I felt a kinship with Steve Martin, Warren Buffett and even Bill Gates. Our paths were long and not elegant all of the time. Filled with passion and often more than a fair amount of luck.
I highly recommend the book Outliers …
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Hanging Out at the Library
By Frank | January 30, 2009
I have labeled 2009 as my “year of learning”.
Each year between Christmas and New Years, I try to revise my “life plan” and take stock of how things are. This year it was particularly interesting because of the massive shift of both economics, politics and many personal elements in my life. So to have learning be a more focused element of the next year seemed timely.
I have always been an indiscriminate reader but now this habit has been shifted into overdrive. If for some reason you would like to see what I am reading, one good way is to find my LinkedIn page. If you scroll down there is a section where the books are shown complete with some comments. I hope others share reading lists with me. Recently my daughter, Alana shared a very literary list with me and I dug into those but some were challenging!
But the real point of this essay is that all of this reading has reintroduced me to my local libraries. For several years now, I have been pretty addicted to just dropping onto Amazon and clicking my way to a larger library. But I find that about 50% of the books I think I will like end up being dropped by 20% through the book. And they are not ones I want to take up shelf space long term.
Today’s libraries have collaborative relationships with others in their counties or even wider areas. So you almost always find that they have the book. You can have it for 2-3 weeks for free and no shelf space is taken up. Of the last 10 books, I really liked “Outliers” and bought a copy (Amazon again) but the others did not get across the new and higher threshold.
So try going back to your local library. See get a card and see what they can get for you. Find out how to use them from your home by reserving books on line. I even found that they keep some books now in soft copy form so that you can read them instantly from home. This was especially for computer language books.
Try it. And let me know what you find.
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Veni, Vidi, Cleani
By Frank | January 17, 2009
I received emails from various parts of the Obama campaign and transition team (one was from Michelle Obama … did we all get personal emails?? Ha.) asking each of us to particpate in a day of national service as a prelude to the new presidency. Barak Obama and his family will be doing this in Washington DC. I suspect there may be easy clean up there.
Anyway to geel involved, my neighbor, Barry Wilson, and I went out to do our part. As you know I live on the San Francisco Bay and I like to Kayak. So we took my 2 person Kayak (Barry has a pair of one person Kayaks) and some buckets and some trash sacks and so forth and went for a paddle.
Now we know of an island that is near to land in the northern part of Richardson Bay, a small bay part of the larger SF Bay. And so we went to the island that was accessible but where humans typically do not go and began our clean up! Here is a map of the broad area around where I live -
Now at this scale our particular island is not so visible so here it is on a magnified scale -
(these are clipped from Google Maps)
Now on our island we found perhaps 5 dozen tennis balls all pretty much bald from long term outdoor exposure, some glass bottles, a very old plastic toilet seat, and various other stuff. Enough for 2 bags and that was all the Kayak would hold since it had to carry us back too.
What article is complete without a photo of the intrepid explorers and their treasure (or trash in this case). So here is Barry and I posing with our trash sacks -
The point of this post is to say to all that you can do this in the next few days and be a part of the transformation that is coming. Even if we just start by making all around us a little bit better. That is a very good start!
Topics: Essays, Green Perspectives, Personal Stories | 1 Comment »
How to be President (in the future)
By Frank | December 25, 2008
I was particularly struck by this picture and its message -
And it made me think about the previous qualifications we have sought in our presidents and how that might change in the future.
In the past we have selected presidents who -
- served in the US military (Bush 2, Bush 1, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon, Kennedy)
- were often governors of states - Carter, Clinton, Bush 2, Reagan but not senators
But Obama breaks those rules and especially about military service. He learned how to get people organized by being a community organizer. In the USA military you learn how to organize people to fight in small units. Generally our presidents have not been senior military leaders now for more than 50 years (Eisenhower was the last).
But it is precisely that quality, the ability to work with large groups of people, coalitions of people with generally different personal interests that probably makes a good president today. We are a very pluralistic society and the idea that a small town mayor/governor from one of our least populated states would be a good consensus builder for our nation is absurd. A community organizer from Chicago (even without being Senator) probably has a better chance of understanding how to be a good president.
Once you add to that some experience in a state legislature and then in the USA Senate you see a person who understand people and then understands how to make effective laws and how to get them passed through our legislative processes.
Get prepared to be flung into the future!
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Trust, but Verify!
By Frank | December 15, 2008
The quote that makes up the recognized title of this essay comes from Ronald Reagan. Here is the entire quote -
I think I could sum up my position on this with the recitation of a brief Russian proverb “Doveryai no Proveryai.” It means trust but verify. -President Ronald Reagan in the “New York Times”, Dec. 4, 1987
Well i have been chronicaling the bring up of my “green” home in Tiburon. But perhaps it has not been said clearly enough that the entire project would have failed pretty much if I had not taken the step to take data and then verify the data against what were the system specifications of the claims for each of the products. So before the home settles down to long term stable operation let me tell you about a few of these and then make some comments.
- Solar photovoltaic panels were installed on our roof in 2 separate installations because the home has a separate address for a rental unit. This qualified us for 2 separate rebates. The larger set ended up having a intermittently faulty inverter that had to be replaced. Without monitoring with a resolution of 5 minutes per data point we would not have been able to spot the problem that ended up causing us to lose perhaps 25% of our total output.
- The solar panels that were installed second (for the rental apartment) have an unexpected shading that occurs in the afternoon only in the time period from Novermber 1 to February 1. This also removes about 25% of the output of these panels and can be improved by a simple tree trimming.
- Our solar hot water system has a faulty controller that does not restart upon a power failure and hos other features that if used in “normal” ways will crash due to software bugs. i am working with the vendor to have this fixed still.
- We decided to take out the older natural gas fired furnaces and to put in heat pumps (but with natural gas backup) into the home because we anticipated being able to generate sufficient electricity to be able to use our solar energy excess in the summer to power the home heating in the winter. This looks like it is going to work out fine but our heat pumps appear to be performing way below expectations. So we are having them tested to see if they are performing to their specifications. This is a most difficult task to get done as no contractor likes to be seen as doing incomplete or work in error and there are no independent verifications services I have found. Ouch. Something in the home where its performance cannot be verified is a open door to sub optimal performance.
- Our hot water system in the home was designed with a recirculating loop so that when we turned on a faucet or shower it would deliver hot water to the user in a few seconds. It worked very well but the original design had the recirculating pump on 24 hours a day. Even if you turn it off at night and perhaps when you are at work it will double or triple your overall hot water energy use (gas in this case). So we had to design an alternative. What we eventually settled upon was a switch in every bathroom where a person, with a simple touch, can turn on the recirculating pump for a total of 3 minutes after which it automatically turns off. Ergonomically this is a bit of a nuisance because you need to wait typically 1-2 minutes before the hot water arrives at your location. But generally this wastes little water and little natural gas. So it is optimal except for the human waiting which can be often planned (when you wish to shower touch the hot water prep button and then go and undress, get new clothes, etc and when you are ready for the shower it is prepared for you as well!)
- The hot water system works (as was described earlier) by the sun working to raise the water temperature of a storage tank as much as possible during the day. And then the water is pulled from this tank as various users call for it. This hot water tank has the water temperature further raised if needed by a pair of tankless water heaters that are fired by natural gas. One additional problem we identified was that the storage tank has heat leaks so that if the sun raises the tank to 100F one day but we shower the next morning the tank has often dropped down by almost 20F to around 80F when we call for the water. if we can find and plug these heat leaks through better insulation and more careful handling of the water then this can improve substantially.
In each of the above cases, I envision a future where our President Obama and the new congress, who are eager to begin to address climate change, encourage us all to make changes similar to what I have done in Tiburon.
But …
With out verifying what we have install to be working properly and working well over the long term we will not really reap the fruits of what we will labor for and spend precious capital.
Trust but Verify. I am sure the old sage would say the same thing in this new context today.
Topics: Essays, Green Perspectives, Personal Stories, StartUp Ideas | 4 Comments »
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