the reporter's notebook of Christopher Mims
Web Security Tool Copies Apps’ Moves
Technology Review
Imagine a sci-fi future in which a clone of you is modified so that its free will is limited to acts that are morally sound. Now your behavior and thought patterns are compared to it in real time, and if you ever do anything the clone wouldn’t, the thought police swoop in and shut you down. That’s sort of what Microsoft’s new web security invention does, except for web apps.
Hurricane Forcing: Can Tropical Cyclones Be Stopped?
Scientific American
The oceanographers I interviewed for this piece were not kind to v1.0 of the Salter Sink as proposed in Salter’s first paper on the subject. They did want to see more research on it, however. I’m beginning to think that Intellectual Ventures’ policy of revealing its new inventions before papers on them have wound their way through peer review is a mistake.
image cc Paul Stevenson
You may have heard that, raised properly, grass-fed beef doesn’t hurt the climate. That’s a convenient lie: a recent lifecycle analysis of the carbon impact of grass-fed beef revealed that cows who are pastured for their entire lives emit 50% more greenhouse gasses than their less well treated colleagues trapped in Concentrated Animal Feed Operations.
Read the rest of this entry »
image cc James Jordan
It turns out that removing CO2 from the smokestack of a coal fired power plant and then burying it under ground in a process called Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) is the most costly, least efficient way to interdict carbon before it hits the atmosphere.
Read the rest of this entry »
(Don’t know why I didn’t post this a year ago, when I wrote it, but better late than never. Seems newly relevant in light of the launch of Futurity.org, which, you guessed it, is just more regurgitated press releases.)
Did you know that the most-visited source of science news on the internet, Science Daily, is basically 100% unedited press releases?
Read the rest of this entry »
Albedo Yachts and Marine Clouds: A Cure for Climate Change?
Scientific American
There has been a lot written about Marine Cloud Brightening, which in geoengineering circles is sort of like the Pepsi to the Coca Cola that is the attempt to cool the earth with what’s essentially an artificial volcanic eruption.
Here’s the thing that always got me: would the seemingly fantastical ships required to realize Marine Cloud Brightening even work? It seemed like the most interesting angle to pursue when my editor at Scientific American, Dave Biello, got interested in commissioning a piece on the scheme. So even though the headline at SciAm doesn’t indicate it, this is really a deep dive into the engineering side of this particular geoengineering scheme.
The Era of Nanoparticle Drugs Begins With Erection Cream
Discover
The interestingness of nanoparticles as a drug delivery mechanism is hard to over-state. They can encapsulate anything in these miniscule plastic balloons.
The world uses 85 million barrels a day.
At 42 gallons to the barrel, that’s three billion, five hundred and seventy million gallons of oil (3,570,000,000).
Niagara falls has a flow rate of 150,000 U.S. gallons per second.
3,570,000,000 of oil / 150,000 gallons per second = 23,800 seconds of flow equivalent.
In other words, if by some horrific means you were able to replace the flow over niagara falls with nothing but oil for 6.6 hours a day, that’s how much oil the 6 billion inhabitants of the earth burn every single day of every year, and have been for more or less the past ten years.
A More Secure, Trustworthy Cloud
Technology Review
What didn’t make it into this piece: the overall trend that servers, having been virtualized, are now so easy to set up within someone else’s cloud infrastructure that they are now within reach of anyone, anywhere, for any purpose.
Those who remember what it was like when only a few people knew how to build web pages, who also now marvel at the ease with which blogs and Facebook profiles can be deployed and edited, will understand the analogy:
Some day soon, slick interfaces for putting your own cheap, temporary, ridiculously powerful computing and storage resources to productive use will make you wonder how you ever got along without them. Off-site drives like DropBox and JungleDisk are but a first step.
Clips