My How We Have Changed

June 16. 2008 by Dick.

A friend emailed me this Care 2 Make a Difference presentation. “Gotta love the punchline,” he wrote.

Even if you don’t recognize the voice, the credits show it is Eric Idle singing. Yup, that Eric Idle, of Monty Python fame.

Got me to thinking, that did.

Actually pretty much anything will get me to thinking. A pair of white sox. Cornflakes. A boat wake which is not to be confused with a wake for a boat.

I got to thinking about the media my grandfather grew up with, the media my father grew up with, the media my son grew up with, and the media we are growing now.

My grandfather was born before Mr. Marconi plumbed the airwaves. He heard Edward R. Murrow broadcast the news during World War II and watched Mr. Murrow take down Senator Joseph McCarthy on television. He watched Walter Cronkite tell of men walking on the Moon. He saw the Tiananmen Square Massacre on television and he read my email about it. (As an aside, my great-grandfather was brought to us by a Pony Express rider because the Stork was busy. He lived to see jet aircraft but communications, for him were still by radio, telephone, and mail.)

Making the change from letters and newspapers to radio was life changing in the way the printing press changed lives. Making the change from the instant transmission of radio or television to the instant transmission of email is simply humdrum. I love technology, but email is just a new technology for the same old letters.

See, email is cool, but it’s not revolutionary. After all, email is just a badly spelled letter that gets there really really fast. Think Ben Franklin meets The Flash. Likewise, HDTV is a really neat media but it’s not revolutionary. After all, it’s just movin’ pitchers attached to your radio set.

But the YouTube digital movies and the Flash-based presentations like Mr. Idle’s, that’s a revolution. Thanks to advertising, we are overwhelmed by imagery in color and sound and motion. Like any predator, we need more and more and more color and sound and motion to retain our attention. Movies have color and sound and motion innit.

Oddly, the revolution isn’t the technology this time. The revolution is what we do with the technology that lets us make our own color and sound and motion and deliver it in almost real time to our viewers.

Darn it, now I need to relearn Flash. I’ll try to resist using it on this blog, though.

Posted in Society, Media, Geekery, Random Access | No Comments »

Solar Energy a Tough Sell

June 9. 2008 by Dick.

The Miami Herald thinks solar power is a white elephant.

The old saying is, “If it bleeds, it leads.” I guess there wasn’t enough blood in South Florida yesterday.

Florida Power and Light, the principle utility here, has “scaled back grand plans for solar energy in Florida. Sunshine may be free, but generating energy from it is still a costly proposition,” according to a report by John Dorschner in the Miami Herald.

It surprised me to discover that “Florida gets much less direct sunlight than some other places.” The Herald continued that “What’s more, solar can be considerably more expensive than other forms of energy, experts say.”

For the record, FPL Group has desert solar plants and wind facilities throughout the western states. It is the largest U.S. producer of wind and solar power. FPL serves more than 4.4 million customer accounts across Florida.

“I haven’t seen anything yet that shows solar is right for Florida,” Jay Apt, executive director of the Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center, concluded in the Herald.

Now for the real story.

“Backers of solar power insist that costs would drop quickly over time if solar gets support from utilities and politicians. But those who study energy economics are skeptical.”

I want to know where they found these experts. Consider this:

1959: “Only Jules Verne can get a man to the Moon”
1969: “That’s one small step for man …”

1975: “The American automobile industry can’t possibly double the gas mileage on cars. Double? Are you crazy?”
1985: The Corporate Average Fuel Economy for cars reached 27.5 mpg.

1992: “The sweet spot for desktop computers is $3,000″ (I paid $3,085 1992 dollars for an 80486-based Gateway 2000 in May of that year).
2002: Gateway sold Pentium 4-based desktops with Windows XP for under a grand (and some for half of that now).

2006: Google founder Larry Page and Silicon Valley venture capitalists John Doerr and Vinod Khosla lit a public fire under solar power with a California ballot issue.

Computer chips and solar cells are, at the engineering level, pretty much the same thing.

“A solar cell is just a big specialized chip, so everything we’ve learned about making chips applies,” Paul Saffo, an associate engineering professor at Stanford University and a longtime observer of Silicon Valley said in the International Herald Trib earlier this year.

That tells us we can link Moore’s Law and solar technology. Moore’s law states that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles every two years or so; its corollary is that prices plummet at around the same rate.

In 2006, Solaicx was one of dozens of Silicon Valley firms driving the then-$11 billion worldwide solar energy market. Applied Materials, the world’s largest manufacturer of chip-making equipment, began selling machinery that manufactures solar wafers that same year.

In 2006, SunPower founder Richard Swanson told CNN the solar industry was like the chip industry 30 years before. “It was an extremely fun and dynamic industry,” he said. “But unless you were in it, it was practically invisible until the IBM PC came out in 1981.”

That was a couple of years ago, long enough for the news to reach Florida by now.

So. Mr. Dorschner thinks solar power is a white elephant. I think the Herald and Mr. Dorschner should maybe do a little more research. And maybe, just maybe, they should report what the solar industry is doing that will change the numbers instead of looking to spill enough blood to kill it.

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Filed under Bad Journalism and Far Green Angst.Sources:
http://www.miamiherald.com/457/story/561858.html
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/02/17/technology/PING.php
http://money.cnn.com/2006/10/26/magazines/business2/solar_siliconvalley.biz2/index.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore’s_law

Posted in Newspaper "Science", Business, PC, Media, Dick's Dumps | 5 Comments »

Leftist George McGovern Is Right

May 19. 2008 by Dick.

George McGovern (yes that George McGovern) wrote in the NYTimes, “The competition for the Democratic presidential nomination between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama has been long and intense. The news media have given it round-the-clock coverage, including seemingly round-the-clock debates between the two candidates. The campaign has been good not only for the Democratic Party but also for America. It has made millions of voters excited about selecting our next president.”

Senator McGovern is right.

But he is right in a way that worries me greatly.

I don’t have a great passion for John McCain but I do have a great passion for politics. And I do have a great passion for parity.

Senator McCain has gotten short shrift in the media during the 138 months of the Democratic Party Primary that Senator McGovern lauds. Every network story, every front page article is about the Obama v. Hillary battle. Unless it is about the Hillary-Obama battle. Anyone coming to our shores for the first time would think the presidential election is between the two Democratic candidates and that there is no one else in the race.

The Democrats certainly want it that way.

“Early voting was nearly three times what it has been for previous presidential races,” Kate Snow said on the May 13 edition of World News Tonight as she reported from the West Virginia Primary.

Ms. Snow? It was a party primary. It was not the Presidential election. That happens in November, not May.

I have to wonder if the round-the-clock news media coverage would be so skewed if Mike Huckabee and John McCain were having the same nearly equal battle while an anointed Democratic candidate campaigned less loudly from state to state.

See, I don’t think it would.

I think our media has given up giving the candidates equal time. And that is the worst thing that can happen to this election.

Posted in Politics, Media, Random Access | 1 Comment »