Understanding is the Essence of Intelligence

Within 10 years, Repower America with 100% renewable energies while creating new stable, local, American jobs:


And for those who think this is impossible, check out this article of an American town producing more electricity than it consumes today:
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/04/home-residential-wind-power-rock-port-missouri.php

A few words worth a thousand pictures, or when art meets sustainability:


When helping educating a girl in the developing world, each dollar spent yields the highest return in the long term: she will marry later, will have fewer children but with higher education. Women reinvest 90% of their income in their families compared to less than 50% for men.

For more information, visit the Girl Effect Website or their You Tube Channel.

We need to add Carbon Capture to the list of false solutions promoted by polluters for the sake of short term profits.

Carbon Capture-ready is nothing more than an excuse for the oil and coal industries to continue to pollute forever.

Carbon Capture facts:

• Not available before 2020 at best, 2030 more likely
• Removes only 65 to 79 percents of CO2
• Reduces power plants efficiency
• Increases the cost of power plants by 30 to 50 percents

True renewable energy power plants are less expensive and the technologies are available today, we don't need to wait until 2020 or 2030.

Detroit may finally have learned a lesson from the success of Toyota Hybrid Vehicles. After the Chevrolet Volt last week, Chrysler announced this morning three new Electric Vehicle to hit showrooms in 2010.

Last week I was also discussing with Jean-Hugues, the design of electric Trial Motorbikes which requires high torque at low (zero) RPM and would therefore be a perfect match for and electric engine. Here are a few ideas that came to my mind:
- Replace Shock Absorbers by Electric Linear Motors much like those found in loudspeakers drivers for jumps and shock-absorption-energy reuse. Jumps / shock-absorption could be controlled by the release of the no-longer necessary clutch handle, a button, or biker-pumping.
- Wheel-embedded electric engines for forward propulsion and electromagnetic braking / energy reuse.
- Ultra-capacitors for instant delivery of enormous power for jumps and store of energy from braking and shock-absorption.
- The smallest Li-Ion battery (to reduce weight) good enough for the duration of a competition. The battery should be easily replaced (with only a theft-prevention lock).
- No transmission, no gear box.

Jean-Hugues proposed to make it Hybrid with a low-power gas-powered generator but I believe this would be heavier than the batteries required for the short duration of typical modern competitions of less than 10 miles. The generator if optional could be used for road-use or longer competitions.

Working at software and internet companies over the last 23 years, I found out that engineers (including myself) often print dozens and sometimes hundreds of pages of code. One of the problems is the inadequate availability of printers, ink, paper, and the time wasted waiting for hundreds of pages to be printed. Looking for productivity improvement and at the request of engineers, the usual response from management is to add more and faster laser printers, sitting right on top of a cabinet full of always-available paper, and everybody is happy - except nature of course, because nature is too shy to speak-up when these decisions are made. At these companies, nobody ever questioned the necessity for printing as printing invariably provides a sense of something being done.

After about ten years of this emotionally-rewarding behavior, I started to realize how devastating this was to mother nature and gradually stopped to print any single line of code, ever. The net result is that my productivity increased because I found much better ways to address the problems that printing was supposed to solve in the first place, with the added benefit of no longer having to sort through allergenic dusty piles of ancient* literature.

However, setting the example never had any impact I could perceive on my co-workers and the printers never had the time to cool down keeping them always ready to spit the next job - the technical term used since the early days of computer printing to designate the bundled destruction of an pile of chemically whitened sheets of precious wood engineered by billions of years of evolution to regulate the earth climate and host millions of now endangered species.

It's almost like productivity could be measured by the amount of destruction that companies' trashcans can collect.

So one day I decided to set a radical measure for my team. I setup a single low-speed inkjet printer for the entire team, attached to my computer. I told my team members that every time they would need to print something they would just need to ask me and that I would always grant them the authorization to print if they wanted to. In fact they did not really need to ask me because my printer was just there on the network.

From then on, each time engineers wanted to print something, I asked them to consider if they really needed to print, made them think for how long the print would be useful, if they really needed to print that many files or even if it was necessary to print entire files, and most importantly if there would be other alternatives to solve the problem printing was supposed to address. All these questions delayed the printing but we always had a rewarding social interaction activating just a few of our surplus of neurones to question what had never been questioned before.

One might think this would be a complete waste of time and productivity for my team and myself considering the amount of paper a team of engineers can process per day. But actually this little conversation usually enabled me to help them solve their problem without printing a single line.

The problem often was a bug somewhere throughout 10000+ lines of code that they were afraid they would not find without setting down in front of some amount of measurable quantity of matter. But an engineer will seldom find a bug this way, because a software bug is not a paper-bound creature, a software bug is ... a software bug, duh! Finding a software bug requires to develop software debugging skills and associated tools.

Surprisingly, even to myself, the net result was again an increase in productivity, not just for myself but for the entire team this time. Gradually printing almost stopped entirely in my team as engineers had learn the skills to fix bugs without printing. That's better software with smaller carbon footprint.

The same can be done for meetings. How many times do we attend these 10+ people meetings where a stack of ten documents is printed for each attendee. There's always some attendee that is missing his stack or a document delaying the start of the meeting. Many people can't follow accurately the speaker and never know where to look in the stack. At the end of the meeting user-friendly trashcans are filled with 90% of this one-hour outburst of dementia resulting from the presumed rational and pragmatic business kingdom.

In the 21st century one might think that there might be more efficient ways to conduct meetings and there are: laptops, video-projectors, web-browsers, plus neurons.

I don't really like the PDF format, other than for brochures and printed journals, because this is a format meant for printing, this is a pure web 1.0 format, a format transposed to the web from the Gutenberg era. It is very inefficient to collaboratively follow on a display screen. If we use electronic devices for collaborative work we need content tailored to the electronic devices we use, not to printers, because there are no such thing as lap-printers that we carry along with 500 sheets paper reams.

I have two kids at the same school and I invariably receive twice the same letters although I asked several times to receive all communications exclusively via email. Schools often print on enormous amounts of paper for tests, homework, etc... Online tools are now available to make this a thing of the past while allowing more efficient assessments and reporting.

When writing a long document, or even a book, do we really need to print intermediate versions? If this is to review them while going to bed, think about other ways to use this time for other nature-inspired purposes. The review can wait tomorrow morning. If this is for other uses, keep thinking.

The bottom line is to start questioning printing wisdom and look for 21st centuries tools to address our 21st century's needs. Eventually I have found that for myself the only time I ever need to print is when required by some outdated administration or legislation remnant of the previous centuries.

* by internet standards.

Tags: Sustainable Development, Printing, PDF, Software Development.

This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution license, .... and with the additional restriction that this article cannot be printed.

After destroying the rain forest for harvesting so called bio-fuels crops and raising the cost of food for the poorest, Brazil now plans to drill oil 6000 meters under the surface of the ocean.



It's funny to read that Brazil is also looking for ways to rip the benefits of the oil found thanks to investments it did not want to commit. Get investors on board, then rip them, but only if it works.

But the funniest is that they believe (or pretend) they could use the new wealth for social purposes.

Since when does oil enable higher education?

Oil sure brings greed, pollutions, and death.

Higher education comes from people not oil or destructive behaviors.

Humanity does not learn from past mistakes.

See also:
The Biofuel Scam.