Soft Arts

In the summer of 1994 I started a research assistantship at the Aerospace and Energetics Research Lab at the University of Washington. I joined a team working on something that Abe Hertzberg, who was the AERL director at the time, whimsically referred to as the Smogmobile. The car was steam powered, but used boiling nitrogen (highly purified air) instead on water.

Abe was motivated to try this approach because he had realized that battery powered electric cars, which were a popular idea at the time, weren’t going to scale effectively. By the time they were being used in the same numbers that internal combustion engine-powered vehicles were, disposal of the cars’ used lead-acid batteries would pose a formidable environmental problem.

This is certainly not a new conundrum - when the automobile was first introduced to London it was considered to be a source of great relief. The city streets at that time were subjected to an estimated 100 tons of horse manure per day due to the culture’s heavy dependence on horse drawn carriages.

Other problems, such as disposable diapers, have followed a similar pattern.

After years of seeing the same patterns I eventually formulated what I used to call “Pasco’s Law,” and will now formalize as “Pasco’s Law of Universal Adoption*” as I haven’t seen it articulated anywhere else yet:

        Everything has a negative environmental impact when enough people start using it

Looking at it another way, this could in someways be considered as an environmental application of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

As a consequence, when presented with alternative energy ideas, my tendency is to look at the impact of the the approach, no matter how small, and consider the impact of it’s adoption on a global scale. I think that this is the only sensible rubric for picking a new energy source - you have to speculate on the scalability of the solutions in order to make a sensible comparison of them.

That being said, I think that there are some interesting ideas being tossed around and I’m interested in finding out more and being involved in the process of finding out what our future will be.

*If I’m lucky, I’ll have other ones before I retire.

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environment, alternative energy

Note: I originally posted this on my old blog in 2006. Last night I heard this program on NPR, which totally resonates with my own feelings on this matter. Check it out, the first speaker, Joel Hirschhorn is the author of “Sprawl Kills: How Blandburbs. Steal Your Time, Health and Money.” is dead on.

Most of our suburban lifestyle looks fine on the outside, but has all of the grim horror of The Matrix’s real world if you take a closer look.

I’ve become convinced that the suburbs are simply a construct meant to divert most of the income of the citizens of the United States directly into the bank accounts of Fortune 500 companies.

Consider the fact that the houses are built, all at once, by large development firms.

There are no small businesses or shops, only homes built cheaply and arranged like cilia. Try looking at your local suburbs from space in Google Earth*. These neighborhoods, like Governor’s Ranch and Columbine, outside of Denver, Colorado, are like middle income housing versions of the gooey life support pods in The Matrix. They function to hold people in one place and in such a way that their life energy can be harnessed for Big Businesses and that none, absolutely none, of the income of the people that live there gets wasted.

Oil companies profiteer because people need to drive their cars 10 to 20 miles to get to their jobs.

Companies like WalMart, Target, Toy ‘R’ Us, and Barnes & Noble profiteer because the citizens flock to these meccas of commercialism from the outlying burbs like refugees to the compound in The Road Warrior.

If you go out for dinner, make it Chiles or perhaps the Macaroni Grill.

There isn’t any other place for these people to go. And pretty much everything that these people make goes to big companies based somewhere else instead of back into their own local economy.

*If you are interested in seeing what some of these neighborhoods look like from space, download Google Earth (now available for the Mac as well as Windows) and enter

columbine high school, CO, 80123