Month: May 2012

A friend of mine has been working at Twin Creeks Technologies since it was formed, and all he was able to tell me was that they were working a new angle on solar technology. So I’ve been itching to know what they were up to. For several years the Twin Creeks website was just a placeholder, devoid of meaningful information. But at the end of March this year, they finally put their cards on the table. I had expected their trick to be in the physics of the electrical generation. But instead it’s about manufacturing efficiencies, specifically, in their ability to make solar cells that are up to ten times thinner than traditional cells.

The technology is exotic, but their elevator pitch is satisfyingly straightforward. Imagine that you’re a lumberjack trying to cut thin disks of wood from the end of a log. Now let’s say you want to make a lot of very thin slices. As the slices get smaller, you will eventually be grinding up more wood with your chainsaw than you’re keeping in your finished product. How can you pop off a thin slice of wood (i.e. silicon) without throwing away a ration of sawdust?

That’s the picture. Now here’s the secret weapon (fun jargon ahead) … Proton Induced Exfoliation with the Hyperion Ion Beam. They’ve made a knife as thin as a proton, and with it they can slice the silicon neatly 20 microns at a time. Pop! Look at this page for the explanatory video, and just reflect on how insanely complex and expensive this machine must be.

Reading about this technology reminded me of Tom Murphy’s Energy Trap. The energy trap argument goes like this: It will be tempting not to invest in new energy sources as much as we should. These new technologies are expensive and risky, and old fossil power is still pretty cheap. But when old power gets expensive, we won’t have the money we need to invest in new technologies. We’ll be pedaling hard just to keep food on the table and mobs off the street. And that is the nature of a trap. You don’t realize you’re in a trap until you’re in it. And by then you’re in a trap. Or, as the addicts say, when you can stop you don’t want to, and when you want to stop, you can’t.

Which is to say, I’m really glad that there are people willing to invest the big bucks in places like Twin Creeks Technologies. And I wish them luck.

I work with a talented designer named Claudia Wey. My company is lucky enough to benefit every day from her good taste and design skills. Now you too can benefit by following her Design Snapshots blog.

Here is one of her catches: impress.js, a presentation tool. Go here and press the right arrow key to step through the presentation.

It’s a fun example of breaking out of the box of “typical” PowerPoint presentations, but too much of the spinning and vaulting gives me vertigo. The inspiration for impress.js was Prezi, and before that people like Ben Bederson have been working on zoomable UIs for years. I would guess that prezi.com is the closest thing to a true ZUI product that made it into the wild.

Here, watch this one: Meaning in Communication | Understanding Information Architecture (or lack thereof). It’s about information architecture, but the structure of its own information is jello on a roller coaster.

Is it more than a gimmick? What do you think?

I was in college when Halley’s comet came by. In the media, the comet was getting star treatment, but the comet wasn’t following the script. It made a pathetic display, fizzing at a level barely visible to the naked eye. I went to the campus observatory where a astronomy professor gave us binoculars and told us where to look. “That’s it?” said my friend when she finally found the faint greasy smudge with the famous name.

Astronomy is a funny game. It’s a cerebral activity that masquerades as a visual feast. The pictures we see from the Hubble Space Telescope set our expectation for what we will see when we peek into a telescope. But the Hubble Telescope is 350 miles above the atmosphere and it’s got an eyeball seven feet across. Nothing you see in a telescope will remotely resemble what it sees. Buy a telescope and you’ll mostly be looking at greasy smudges or bright points of light that all look more or less the same. This is why most telescopes end up in the basement.

If you can get excited by the science, then it all becomes great fun. My favorite example of astronomy as a head game is the AAVSO. That’s the American Association of Variable Star Observers based near me in Cambridge. Technology has made their job a lot easier, but these people used to stare at the same star for hours on end looking for barely noticeable changes in brightness. Train-spotting suddenly seems thrilling by comparison. But again, the science is quite interesting.

Given all this, I was pleased to see physicist Tom Murphy of the Do the Math blog addressing the issue of SUPER! MOON! DISAPPOINTMENT! The last full moon was one in which a close moon coincided with a slow news day, and so, improbably, the supermoon landed on page one, thereby leading to a sunset chorus of “That’s it?” A slightly large moon is cool, but it’s no great thrill compared to an average moon.

Hype is the enemy of satisfaction. Low expectation is the gateway to bliss.

You know what’s cool? The moon.

When I first read about the Descriptive Camera, I thought, “Smells fishy to me. I’m not falling for that Invisible Camera routine.” The Invisible Camera, you may recall, was an extremely well-made hoax about a “revolutionary” new camera. It was so successful (at least in the spirit of War of the Worlds or the Emperor’s New Clothes) that eventually they had to post a long response to explain why they wanted to trick people. Even when they tried to explain it gently, it seemed like an elaborate cruelty joke. What they said amounted to this: We wanted you to believe so that you could experience a childish sense of wonder and delight. Oh yeah, and when we burst your bubble, you get to experience a childish sense of powerlessness, humiliation, and forlorn aspiration. Ha ha!

Anyway, the Descriptive Camera, as far as I can tell, really exists and really works. Here’s what it does. You push the button and it provides a prose description of whatever is in the field of view. So you might get a snapshot like this:

	-----------------------------------
	| ------------------------------- |
	| |                             | |
	| |   This is a faded picture   | |
	| |      of a dilapidated       | |
	| |         building.           | |
	| |                             | |
	| |                             | |
	| ------------------------------- |
	|                                 |
	|                                 |
	-----------------------------------
 

Is it real? And if so, how can it possibly work? If this was the Flintstones, there would be a little dinosaur in there carving the words onto a stone tablet. The secret is that there is a person inside the camera. The person is provided by Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Nifty solution! But now I want a prose cam that has various Hipstamatic-style filters. Switch it to Thomas Hardy and you might get this:

	-----------------------------------
	| ------------------------------- |
	| |                             | |
	| |   A Saturday afternoon in   | |
        | |   November is approaching   | |
        | |   the time of twilight, and | |
        | |   the vast tract of         | |
        | |   unenclosed wild known as  | |
        | |   Egdon Heath embrowns      | |
        | |   itself moment by moment.  | |
	| |                             | |
	| ------------------------------- |
	|                                 |
	|                                 |
	-----------------------------------
 

And by the way, the Star Chamber was way ahead of the curve on this one. We had a ProseCam TI-2100 installed years ago. I’ll plug it in again so you can take a look at what it sees.