LOL, I know my engineering stuff pops up in technical searches and are very popular posts, but then it seems many all over the world take an interest in my adventures and come back in growing numbers. Thanks for visiting my little corner of the net! Remember to think critically these days.
As energy becomes the obvious critical path in our world's economics, food production, and general survivability if you like, growth models like GDP and other growth fictions will necessarily fall away and we will have to address conservation of existing resources and alternative energy like hydrogen with alternative hydrogen carriers other than carbon. Like nitrogen for example. The time is late.
Truly alternative and renewable energetic chemistry requires an intelligent comprehension of energy balances that are sane and rational. Consuming millions of barrels of oil to mine millions of tons of lithium to manufacture batteries that then drain the existing energy feedstocks even more is not a sane or rational solution. Not to mention the knock on effects of electrification to charge and recharge these devices by way of a power grid infrastructure that requires re-engineering, will consume concomitant copper and critical minerals to manufacture magnets (for electric motors) - more energy in than what we will get out. Never mind the carbon hocus-pocus side show. We have an enormous problem that cooperation and rational policy is badly needed to bring the intellectual resources together to resolve. The world's historical habit of colonialism and projection of bully politics that empires traditionally attempt to enforce simply will not work, because they do not provide a solution - only a painful downward spiral towards a cold dark place. We need a solution and we together can create many. First through conservation, and then through innovation. This problem will prove to be a great inflection point in our development as a global community. Get it right and imagine how good this can be for all of us. Get this wrong and imagine how painful this will be for all of us. What I'm trying to say is, this is a global energy crises, if we can solve it, we can strive to be energy independent, what a gift for our children.
I agree with Alister that rapid decentralization and experimental development of a myriad of regionally supportable methods look to me to be the ultimate sustainable solution. This however requires a seismic shift in how we understand personal wealth creation, projection of influence and power, national political power projection and wasteful dedication of resources that do not solve this problem, the ideas of commerce and our quality of life. This effort will require a giant leap in compassion and trust (trust and truth telling seem to be at an all time low at the moment) which allows sharing resources rather than the private hoarding, legalistic games aimed at wealth generation such as pattenting ideas - they just bar access to innovation which has been the hallmark of economic wealth aggregation. The usual solutions invoked to acquire somebody else's resources won't work either - not a solution. The historical reactions to resource scarcity will only squander the time we have to soft land the world's population and reorient our thoughts around sustainable living in a very different future. Can we evolve, or will we revert to sticks and stones?
This is not the Franconia in Germany, but a little town in Minnesota with a weird art colony that I think is pretty cool. The exhibited sculptures are of the most strange and imaginative kind...
"Johnny Appleseed" Mark di Suvero (born in Shanghai) an abstract sculptor built this in France, spent some time in Millenium Park and finally landed here. It recalls the forms of industrial machinery used to build it. Yep.
The Grief Truck, by Brett Douglas Hunter. Discard your grief and "Big Mama" will help you cart it off to somewhere...
The Compact, by Eliza Evans. Cast concrete forms relates the "compression"of individual agency over millennia. Surveilled, digitized, measured and archived...
If birds lived like humans in high rise buildings... Birds choose not to live this way and there are none nesting in this multi-story, multi nest contraption.
Not sure what this is about, looks to be an evolution from wood hulls to fiberglass - sort of a boaters technology timeline...
The augmented ear by Jordan Olsen. "The world has greater definition than we can possibly know..." I agree!
Not holding up to the elements too well...
What are you inspired to think about?
I can plainly see this is a pine cone!
No idea... bird?
I happened upon this sculpture park maybe ten years ago. On a whim I drove through this part of the country the other day and decided to see what's new. There is a bunch of crazy cool stuff here!
