Previously, I wrote about how powerful simulations games are, and the potential that they have for helping us navigate through the stormy waters of the early 21st century. Recently, I was discussing this with a friend of mine, and he suggested that I read Ender’s Game, a science-fiction book by Orson Scott Card.
In the book, humanity is faced with destruction at the hands of an alien invasion for, which takes the form of an intelligent, space-faring insectoid race called the Buggers. Unfortunately for the humans, the Buggers have superior numbers and superior tactics. The only thing that can defeat them is a genius military leader, and the only one available is long dead. For some reason that is never elaborated on in the book, the military leadership has decided to find the best and brightest children in the world, and train them to be military geniuses. (it stands to reason that perhaps a large portion of the adult males were wiped out in the prior invasions, or something like that, but it’s never mentioned.) The children selected have savant-level intelligence, ad the method of training involves two different types of simulation games. Without giving too much away, kids and games save the day.
The basic themes of the book are the intelligence and creativity of children, and the power of games as useful tools. There is a unique aspect to games, which is that you can always count on a select few individuals becoming really really good at each particular one. Also, if you design the game correctly, you can solve almost any poblem. This article outlines how a protein researcher from the University of Washington, David Baker, has discovered the usefulness of games in creating new proteins. Apparently, there are still some things which people are much better at than computers, and designing proteins is one of those.
“Proteins are made up of long strings of amino acids that are folded up into complex three-dimensional tangles with many subregions. The function of a protein is dependent on this three-dimensional structure. One pocket might be ideal for grabbing on to another protein, for example. Other parts of the protein may play a purely supportive, structural role, holding the molecule together. Baker’s new method for creating novel proteins begins with the active sites. Once they’re in place, structural concerns, especially how tightly packed the protein is, determine whether the design is feasible. Figuring out the best way to hold together the active sites is a complicated search problem that requires a lot of processing power. There are a myriad of possibilities, but most won’t work.”
The computer programs take a brute-force approach, trying every possible combination for folding the proteins, and then checking to see if the combination is any good.
“When the computer doesn’t know what the best next step is, it changes the structure randomly. Baker says that he began to wonder whether people working with computers can solve a hard problem that computers can’t solve alone.”
Several people, using Baker’s algorithm, were able to see the steps that the computer needed to take, well before the computer did. Unfortunately, they had no method of providing feedback. Baker teamed up with a game designer, and the result was the game FoldIt, which combines the computer program with human creativity.
“The first several levels of Foldit are designed to teach players what good proteins look like and how to manipulate them using the tools of the game…. For example, it’s good to pack proteins tightly, but not too tightly: electrical charges in different regions of the side chains will repel each other if they’re too close to each other….After improving the designs of a few test proteins, players can advance into competitive play, working in teams or alone.”
Baker proposes that, like Ender’s Game, FoldIt has an interesting added benefit: discovering “protein savants”:
“By making the game available to anyone over the Web, the researchers expect to find people they call protein savants–people who are very good at solving protein structures and who will spend several hours a week playing the game.”
Now, just imagine if your son could find a cure for cancer, while playing Halo 6 with his buddies! Wouldn’t it be cool if your daughter, the smart one, figured out a new way to manage the power grid, saving thousands of megawatts of energy, while playing SimPower, Deluxe Edition, on her PC?
Computer simulations represent some of the most useful tools ever invented, allowing us to experience all manner of complex, dangerous, expensive or long-term situations in short time periods, and letting us try them out over and over and over again without experiencing the potential consequences. The applications range from nuclear weapons testing to pilot training to immersive gaming environments.
I’ve always loved simulation games, ever since I first discovered SimCity on the original Macintosh during the mid-80s. I’ve played every version of SimCity since then, and watched it grow more and more complex and realistic. There’s something very satisfying and innately human about building your own little empire, watching it grow or even destroying it with virtual disasters. The only problem is that, eventually, you get bored with it. There’s no way to “win”. There’s no goal. After a while, you give up and start over again.
Eventually, I got tired of not having a goal in my games, so I progressed to turn-based simulation/strategy games such as Alpha Centauri and Civilization. I love these games, and they can go on for weeks, with more than a few all-nighters, until you finally “win” and launch your Civ into space or some similar thing. Unfortunately, after a while, you begin to feel that the payoff of a short video sequence (especially after you’ve seen it 10 times), doesn’t seem to match up to the hours and hours you spent playing. Once again, the end result is that you have nothing to show for all of your effort.
So, now I’m in business school, working on my MBA in Sustainable Management. While many of my fellow students focus on biofuels or reducing waste, I think about ways that computer technologies can help us solve some of the masisve sustainability problems we’ve created for ourselves. This inevitably leads me to wonder if simulations and games can somehow aid in this effort. It seems to me, that is so many people are willing to spend hours upon hours on their computers playing games, there’s got to be a way that we can harness some of that creative energy, and turn it into something that makes a real difference in the world.
In the 1960s, futurist Buckminster Fuller saw the potential of simulations to help change the world. He envisioned a whole-world simulation, called the World Game, which would attempt to solve problems by taking a “whole-systems” approach and a worldwide scale, instead of the piecemeal method of individual countries and cities acting alone. A key element to this, and the reason that it was called a “game”, was the ability for regular individuals, not just politicians and powerful people, to be able to participate in the process. The Buckminster Fuler Institute describes it this way: “Fuller wanted a tool that would be accessible to everyone, whose findings would be widely disseminated to the masses through a free press, and which would, through this ground-swell of public vetting and acceptance of solutions to society’s problems, ultimately force the political process to move in the direction that the values, imagination and problem solving skills of those playing the democratically open world game dictated.”
Unfortunately, at the time that Fuller proposed the World Game, the technologies which would allow people to receive and manupulate data about the state of the world in real time did not exist. It would have required that players have access to “better data than their politically elected or appointed counterparts.”
Of course, now, with the existence of the Internet, Wikipedia, YouTube, the 24-hour news cycle and powerful video and audio tools in the hands of the masses, we have finally reached a point where a World Game is possible. As a matter of fact, the immense popularity of the virtual world Second Life, where players spend enormous amounts of their free time, is a testament to the power of simulations on the human psyche, and the willingness of people to explore alternate realities. What are the potential problems that could be solved if these games and simulations could bring about positive change in the real world? Are there potential implications for sustainability?
In my next post, I will describe several different simulation games which are actually making positive differences in the real-world, and introduce you to a young woman who is making a career out of it.
The potential market for energy technologies is huge.
New energy technology transitions will take decades to replace existing technologies, not the short adoption timeframes associated with typical Silicon Valley tech companies.
Because of the downturn in the credit and real estate markets, there is a lot of money out there looking for a good place to invest, and cleantech is an obvious place to put this money. The flip side to this is that in down markets, investors traditionally turn to commodities investing, which should place downward pressure on oil prices. Lower oil prices means greater competition and risk for most cleantech companies.
Due to the high competition with oil prices, some VCs are focusing on investing in cleantech which does not have a high correlation to oil prices. The example given was solar power in China, which competes with coal power plants and there for is dependent on the price of coal and not oil.
Cleantech companies compete with long-established energy technologies and therefore face severe price competition. One effect of this is that most cleantech companies are global companies, with manufacturing and distribution on different continents to take advantage of price efficiencies, such as manufacturing in China and distribution in the US.
There has been an increase in the number of quality entrepreneurs starting companies in the cleantech space. These are “2nd-stage” entrepreneus, who had previously worked at leading-edge companies and became aware of the gaps in the market. These entrepreneurs are now attempting to fill these market opportunities.
The best quote of the day came from Steve Bengston of PricewaterhouseCoopers. When asked to define what, exactly is cleantech, he paraphrased Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart quote on pornography by saying that “cleantech is hard to define, but we know it when we see it.”
About solar power:
Solar is still very dependent on subsidies to be competitive.
Most of the panelists felt that the unsubsidized cost of solar is still too high to be competitive with existing energy sources, and is still a factor of 2 or 3 away at the retail level. The consensus was that the retail price for solar needs to come down to at least 30 cents/KWh to be competitive. On a wholesale level (large power plants), solar is even farther away, where it needs to be around 5 cents/KWh to compete with fossil fuels.
The solar business model is still based on an assumed theoretical declining cost curve. While this cost curve remains to be proven out, most people believe that it is accurate.
There are some locations where solar is already competitive, due to very high energy costs or favorable conditions.
When asked about solar’s dependency on scarce raw materials (i.e., silicon) one panelist said that third-generation solar tech is focusing on becoming less resource-dependent. He also stated that a large portion of the cost of solar panels was in the aluminum and glass components.
About storage technology:
While energy storage technology is potentially a very important component in the adoption of new energy generation technologies, the cost is still much too high to justify implementation.
Even if energy storage technology becomes price-competitive, it is not clear who will pay the cost to implement it. Will is be the energy generators, the suppliers or the consumers?
About alternative fuels:
Alternative fuels are “sexy”. They are easily understood by the public, because of their day-to-day experiences fueling their vehicles, etc.
Alternative fuel investing is extremely risky, but also has extremely high rewards. The VCs who are investing in alternative fuels see it as a necessary component of their portfolios, albeit a small one for now.
The biological and chemical expertise necessary to implement alternative fuel technologies is extreme.
There is an opportunity in techologies which can convert e-waste plastics into biofuels. This is viable technology which can also greatly reduce waste.
About pollution and recycling technology:
Current efforts are focusing on mercury, sulfur and nitrogen waste reduction.
Silicon Valley is not currently investing very heavily on these types of technolgies. Sillicon Valley VCs focus more on products than services, because products are easier to scale up to profitability levels that VCs are interested in. Pollution and waste reduction technologies are viewed as mostly services, which are harder to scale up.
Most of the panelists cited the need for an appropriate regulatory framework in order for these types of services to be feasile. There is some debate on whether regulation should lead the way or wait for technologies to prove themselves before regulating them. Countries like Germany are taking the leading approach, while the US is mostly taking the lagging approach.
All in all, the news was very positive. It seems like cleantech is not being affected by the downturn in the economy. Om the contrary, it appears to be benefitting from high oil prices and a dearth of good investment opportunites.
This table is a perfect example of how to use examples of nature to make something which is both simple and complex at the same time, and inherently beautiful. While it may seem complex at first, it uses a fractal-based design to implement its complexity. Fractals are basically simple pattern which are repeated on increasingly smaller scales. Most natural and biological structures are based on fractal designs. They are also used to build the landscapes in video games without a lot of overhead.
There is something about the design, being so much like nature, that is inherently pleasing and soothing, while still retaining the order and utility of a manufactured product. Combine this with some earth-friendly source material, and you have the basic model for very sustainable distributed manufacturing.
Next, we’ve got something on the other end of the spectrum: a truly man-made design. This small solar collector design has components which can be printed out via a 3D printer. This came via the RepRap blog, so I think the intention was to be able to print these via RepRap’s low-cost printers. I believe that only the plastic support parts are currently able to be manufactured via a 3D printer, but it is easy to see where this is heading, and the implications. (besides, we are not that far away from 3D printers being able to print their own circuitry and metals)
Imagine, for a second, that a working model of this could be printed by anyone, including poor 3rd-world peoples, for only the cost of the raw materials, plastic, metal and glass. That could mean cheap, clean energy for everyone.
This last one is just for fun, but it shows how for advanced 3D-prototyping has come. This model of Disney’s Cinderella Castle was printed with a very expensive high-end rapid prototyping machine:
This research paper from the Institute for the Future discusses information overload and the future of various technologies to overcome it. It is a really interesting read.
My favorite part is where they discuss the social web, especially social bookmarking services like del.icio.us. I love del.icio.us, and I use it quite a bit. The problem, for me, is that I haven’t yet figured out a way to discover those perfect gems of the internet which are ripe for blogging. What I need to find are relevant stories, research, ideas, products which are just coming onto the scene, and before the mainstream blogs pick up on them.
What happens with social bookmarking is that you get one of two things: a small number of web pages which are bookmarked by a lot of people, a “popularity contest”, or a large number of web pages which are just coming onto the scene, some of these are interesting, but most of them “noise”. How do I raise the signal-to-noise ratio?
I have been using a “river-of-news” system for a while, where I subscribe to a large number of blogs, and quickly scan the titles for things that look interesting. Then I “star” them in Google Reader for later review. This is a good system, but very time-consuming. It is a constant process of finding new feeds and then getting rid of feeds that don’t provide any value.
Part of the problem can be solved by finding good, cutting-edge bloggers and bookmakers, who can act as a filter. These are few and far between, but when you find them, they are gold.
Another method it to use various automated filtering programs, like FeedHub. FeedHub works by taking your feeds and filtering them based on “memes”, which are basically subject keywords that appear in the various articles You then get a new “washed” feed that you can subscribe to in your reader. You can also set volume limitations.
One drawback of this system is that you have to be careful not to limit yourself to subjects which are your “favorites”. What happens is that as you customize and narrow down your feeds to the ones you like, your view can also become very narrow, and you will miss opportunities coming from unexpected areas.
I continue to see more examples of the “cognitive surplus” combined with DIY culture. While more people are spending less and less time with passive pursuits, such as watching television, many of those same people are putting that time and energy into creative pursuits. Some of these pursuits, such as making videos to post on YouTube are purely for entertainment purposes, but, increasingly, cheap technology is allowing for “hobbies” which would traditionally fall under the rubric of science or manufacturing..
Today, we find biologist and blogger Attila Csordás writing about cheap technology allowing individuals to perform laboratory-quality biology experiments at home, referred to as “BioDIY”. Home labs can be had for as little as $2,000. Csordás gives an example of a “man who amplified his daughter’s DNA at home to help doctors figure out her genetic disorder.” He even suggests that it may be possible to isolate embryonic stem cells at home(!).
This development strikes me as both amazing and totally logical. It only makes sense that if computers can get cheaper and faster, other technologies will do the same. As I’ve written previously about similar achievements in 3-D printing, bringing technologies like these to individuals will spark a revolution in almost all areas of manufacturing and science.
I’m a huge fan of the blog Lifehacker, and have discovered a lot of web and productivity tools by reading it. yesterday’s article on the Firefox-based web browser Flock, Flock 1.2 Bakes Social Networking into Everyday Browsing, led me to give Flock a try. At first, I was skeptical about adding another web browser to the mix, but, after trying it out, it seems like a godsend for bloggers and social media addicts.
Flock is basically Firefox, but with a bunch of social-networking and blogging integration built right in. It includes tools to integrate Facebook, Digg, Twitter, Flickr, Gmail, YouTube, Picasa, Blogger, WordPress del.icio.us, along with a several others. It’s a little busy, with buttons and sidebars for almost everything, but once you get used to it you realize that everything is organized very well. It’s sort of like a dashboard for social media. If you are someone who likes to work with multiple browser windows open, then this might work well for you, because it keeps a lot of stuff condensed into one place. I usually have one browser window that has Gmail and Google reader tabbed in it, and I will probably use Flock for that now, while still using Firefox for everything else.
Let’s take a look at some of the interesting features for bloggers:
Blog Editor: Flock has a built-in blog editor, that can hook in to most blog software, including self-hosted blogs. It works both online and off line, which means that you don’t have to be connected to the web to edit your posts. Flock’s editor has all the basics, similar to most text editors, and includes html editing, linking and media embedding.
Where this editor really shines is in it’s ability to automatically embed media, such as photos and video, simply by dragging them from the browser window into the post you are editing. It’s that simple. From my experience with the WordPress.com blog editor, video embedding is particularly difficult, so this alone will make my life much easier.
Media Support: To go along with the blog editor, Flock allows you easy access to your photo and video streams. Once you set up your Flickr, YouTube or other media accounts, you are able to view streams in a “filmstrip” that appears above the web page in your browser tab. From there, you can easily drag and drop stuff into blog posts. Flock also has buttons which allow you to email photos and videos directly from the filmstrip, and this goes directly to your Gmail account if you have one.What’s really neat here is that you can also subscribe to other people’s media streams, and view them in the filmstrip. This means that pictures posted anywhere from Facebook to Flickr are only a few clicks away.
Photo Uploader: Flock includes a photo uploader, which can load up to 1,000 photos at a time, to any of your sign-up services. Once again, you can do all of this without having to leave the comfort of your browser.
Digg: Having access to Digg, especially to submit new posts, is another time saver. Flickr also allows you to view a stream of your submitted posts in the filmstrip, and you can see how many diggs each has.
del.icio.us: delicio.us integration sounded, at first, like the perfect thing to have, but I’m not completely happy with the way it was implemented. Clicking the favorites button allows you to add web pages to both your favorites and to your del.icio.us account. The problem is that you have to go into the sidebar separately to add tags, which is a huge disadvantage. I still like the del.icio.us bookmarks Firefox extension better. The extension allows you to tag immediately and has many more features, including being able to turn favorite tags into toolbars, a feature I use quite a bit. I’m sticking with the extension for now.
All in all, Flock seems to be a great browser. I’m probably going to continue to use it for my main blog editor and social media browser, while using Firefox to do the regular browsing.
There has recently been a confluence of extremely interesting news floating about in the past week, leading to some really mind-blowing conclusions:
• Scientist and inventor Ray Kurzweil has been everywhere in the past few weeks, speaking about how the exponential compounding of information will lead to an explosion of new technologies, covering all spectrums from medicine to computing, and it’s going to happen much sooner than most people think. What he is saying is very profound when you combine it with the next two bits…
• The Institute for the Future recently released a report suggesting that DIY culture, along with the decreasing costs of production and increasing access to information will lead to a revolution in the way products are produced and delivered. The “Maker Map“, as it is called, outlines the major factors which will influence how products are made in the future.
• The RepRap project announced that on May 29th, 2008, their Universal Constructor machine successfully produced a copy of itself, thus achieving the project’s main goal: the world’s first self-replicating machine!
When I wrote a few weeks back about the potential of rapid prototyping technology to change the way products are produced, and, subsequently, to potentially be a major step towards a truly sustainable world, I had no idea how far along this technology had progressed. In a way, this is exactly the sort of thing that Ray Kurzweil has been speaking about: we are quickly entering an age of sudden and incredible change. More to come very shortly…
Del.icio.us is a wonderful way to share your favorite websites with others, and to see what others are linking to.
Here are a few ideas that you can use to make it more powerful:
1.The Firefox del.icio.us plug-in: This is my favorite thing ever. 2 little buttons at the top of your browser allow you to tag links to your del.icio.us account and give you access to view and search your existing links.
There are so many cool ways to use this, but my favorite is creating custom toolbars of favorite tags. Basically, when you make a tag a “favorite” tag, you can select it as a toolbar in your browser. I have separate tags for “presidio” (school stuff), “bills” (all my financial websites), “radio” (internet streaming audio), and “blog” (blogging tools and ideas). You have no idea how much time this saves me, especially the presidio one and the bills one.
The best thing is having access to all of your bookmarks from any web browser, either through the plugin, or through the del.icio.us website.
2. Receive updates automatically: Combine del.icio.us with an rss newsfeed reader, and you can get newly-tagged links right in your reader.
In del.icio.us, your subscriptions and the feeds from people in your network all have the orange “rss” button on the bottom of their respective pages. If you click on that button, or copy and paste its link into your feed reader, you will automatically get updates to whatever tag that page was referring to. You can use this method to get updates from individual people in your network, or individual tags, or you can subscribe to the combined feeds and receive them all together.
In the subscriptions section of your account, simply click the edit link to search and add tags to your subscriptions. In the network section, you can add your friends’ account names. In both cases, any time a new link is added to that friend’s account or to that tag, it will show up in your feed.
As a side note, I personally enjoy using Google Reader for this, because I can access it from anywhere, it is fast, and I like the way it works.
OK, I guess that’s all for this time…hope you find this useful.
This week, during our class discussion of prototypes, the text barely touched on the subject of “rapid prototyping”, another name for 3D printing. I am fascinated by the implications that this technology has for manufacturing and for sustainability. As a matter of fact, the confluence of several different ideas and technologies are making it possible to reverse the trend of mass-production and mass consumption and turn it on its head, where soon we will be able to make what we need, only when we need it, and exactly to our specifications. Forget mass customization: think Star Trek.
For those of you who have seen the famous science fiction series, you may remember the “replicator” technology that allows the crew to create almost any object that they need, seemingly out of thin air. 3D printing technology, or “rapid prototyping”, is based on a similar idea, allowing users to “print” three-dimensional objects utilizing ink-jet printer and similar technologies.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, and engineering professor by the name of Herbert Voelcker developed the mathematical and theoretical basis for describing three-dimensional objects in a way that could be utilized by computers to control machine tools to produce those objects. In 1987, another researcher by the name of Carl Deckard built upon Voelcker’s work when he realized that products could be built-up, layer by layer, instead of machining away the excess from a block of raw materials. With the advent of modern ink-jet technologies, this layer-by-layer approach allows for a making a mind-boggling number of things.
There are many different methods that can be employed. For example, if you wanted to make a simple, solid shape, such as a intricately-detailed chocolate or a replica of a famous sculpture, you simply create a 3D model, using CAD or other type of design software, and the 3D printer will spread out the appropriate material, layer-by-layer. This method is used very often to make soft prototypes.
The possibilities start to become endless. You are also not limited to using just one material. In the same way that a color inkjet printer has multiple colored inks, a 3D printer can print multiple different materials. Using this method, medical researchers are currently working on ways to “print” tissue and organs, cell by cell.
The sustainability crowd has been focusing on how we can “dematerialize” products, reducing raw material usage and transportation costs. Readers of Treehugger.com will surely be familiar with the many articles dedicated to designs which are made for downloading and building at home. Usually, these designs employ a cut-and-build method, where one piece of plywood or cardboard or similar material is cut into pieces that are then joined to form the object.
But what if the customer could simply “print-out” the product at home, in one piece, instead of assembling it? If this is combined with dematerialization in the design of the product, then it is easy to see how these efficiencies will begin to build upon each other to create an exponential reduction in the energy and materials used, and wastes generated, over traditional manufacturing and transportation processes.
Several trends are combining to make this a reality in the near future.
“Scanning or faxing paper is so 1970. Now you can get an affordable Nextengine 3D scanner ($2,495, just a little more than I paid for my first fax machine). It is another step on the road to dematerialized production, where designs are transported over the internet and printed out where needed. 3D Kinko’s are opening where you can go to get your object printed out.”
Although that article does go on to say that 3D printers are still quite expensive, this article explains how Roboticist Hod Lipson has a build-it-yourself design for a 3D printer which costs only $2,300 to build! A third article also speaks about the coming desktop revolution in fabrication.
I will conclude with this quote from Dr. Linson, which pretty much sums it up: “The only way to make something cheaply today is to have it mass-produced. For example, you wear the same shoes as everyone else. If you had a fabber, you could custom-make shoes that perfectly fit your feet. Three-dimensional printing will help us move away from the mass consumption that is so deeply ingrained in our culture”
Computer simulations represent some of the most useful tools ever invented, allowing us to experience all manner of complex, dangerous, expensive or long-term situations in short time periods, and letting us try them out over and over and over again without experiencing the potential consequences. The applications range from nuclear weapons testing to pilot training to immersive gaming environments.
I’m a huge fan of the blog Lifehacker, and have discovered a lot of web and productivity tools by reading it. yesterday’s article on the Firefox-based web browser Flock, 
