Notes

I used to love macstories.

It’s edited by a fellow italian who writes excellent english (unlike the rest of us), and it was a place to read reasoned commentaries that I enjoyed.

But lately, like most of the other tech blogs, it has changed to a collection of commentaries on brainless apps, such as: twitter clients, calendar and reminder apps, plain-text editors. I’m the first one to acknowledge the importance of simple apps to make our everyday life easier, and in fact I’ve been using Simplenote and NValt for ages. But come on, do we really need to read and review shitloads of stupid apps to keep track of menial tasks? To write using fucking Helvetica? Yet another app to see what the hell I’m supposed to do today or to share crappily filtered photos?

I love tech bloggers such as Gruber, Brooks, Arment. Even if there really is nothing in common between me and those guys except for a generic interest in technology and nerdism, I still love their passion, the public interactions on twitter and instagram (true, sometimes their shots are not really worth much praise, but praised they are), and in some cases (e.g., Gruber) their writing craft.

But today I was reading a blog post by one of these guys and asked incredously myself: “how does somebody that has a passion for writing, and who’s a native english speaker, make these errors ?”.

In this previous post I linked to an article that upset me.

It tells a story about these incredibly smart kids that waste their time and energy (and considerable amounts of brain, apparently) to build yet another ‘social’ things; Internet services that basically allow the user to shut their minds, do fuck-all (apart from taking a picture maybe), and in return be “famous” (in the Facebook sense).

Is this really the way the Internet is developing? Towards a weapon of brain annihilation?

This is the article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/business/energy-environment/24geotherm.html

And this is one very nice and informed comment from a PhD student that puts things into the right perspective:

1. The major difference between enhanced geothermal and standard oil and gas extraction is the high pressures used to create geothermal reservoirs. Oil and gas are normally extracted from porous sedimentary rocks (10-30% void space), but the heat fluxes required for geothermal are found in volcanic rocks with less than 1% void space. The rock must be fractured to allow water to flow through it, and it is this process that causes earthquakes. The earthquakes can continue for months after the pressure has been released because the Earth is a dynamic place and not all of the stress transfer is instantaneous; in fact, the later-occurring quakes are usually governed by stress changes caused by diffusion (slow filtering through the limited porosity due to pressure gradients) rather than advection (the injection velocity/pressure, which causes the immediate earthquakes.

2. There is no danger of creating “new tectonic plates”; the tectonic plates are on a completely different scale than a single geothermal reservoir (1000s vs 1s of kilometers). The absolute worst case scenario would be changing the stress regime enough to reactivate an existing tectonic-scale fault like the San Andreas/San Jacinto etc., which is very unlikely due to the scale difference.

3. For risk assessment purposes, risk is the product of hazard (the event that might be triggered) and vulnerability. A project like this ends up going forward because when the hazard is large (i.e. it is very likely that you will trigger small earthquakes), the vulnerability is also low since it will only affect a relatively sparsely populated area immediately nearby. Obviously, if you happen to live in that area, that is not a reassuring argument. In the other extreme case, if the vulnerability is high (eg. a Landers earthquake-type rupture across most of SoCal), the hazard is low (the chance of re-activating the San Andreas is slim). In both cases, the product of the two works out to a small number, so the risk is deemed acceptable. The soft underbelly of risk assessment is that seismic hazard is fiendishly difficult to quantify given present methodology and observational capabilities.

4. Regional seismic hazard and geothermal energy will continue to be coupled since the areas with the highest geothermal gradients (rate of temperature increase with depth) tend to be tectonically active (young or recently deformed) crust. However, the potential benefits to figuring out geothermal energy are myriad - clean, reliable, domestic supplies - and I think it’s worth pursuing. An exciting tangential scientific opportunity also exists: if we can figure out the processes that control microseismicity in reservoirs, we will be much closer to predicting and someday mitigating the types of earthquakes that make headlines on a more regular basis.

5. This may come as a surprise, but the largest geothermal producer in the world is the oil giant Chevron; they have several enormous traditional geothermal projects in Indonesia.

[click here for the original comment]

An interesting piece was published a few days ago on the official google blog: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/future-of-search.html

Let me quote two passages:

It would be much nicer if we had a device with great connectivity that could do searches without interruption. One far-fetched idea: how about a wearable device that does searches in the background based on the words it picks up from conversations, and then flashes relevant facts?

So what’s our straightforward definition of the ideal search engine? Your best friend with instant access to all the world’s facts and a photographic memory of everything you’ve seen and know.

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