Category: Uncategorized

Happy Maps and Hedonic Cartography

Driving north on Massachusetts Route 3 today, I noticed traffic was starting to back up. How serious is this slowdown? Waze informed me that traffic was getting worse and offered to re-route me. A quick peek at the map showed clotted red roads ahead. I took the suggested route change. Thanks Waze!

Have you ever wondered where all that traffic data comes from? In the old days, some poor slob would be leaning out of a helicopter with binoculars, checking on the Tobin Bridge or whatever. But those days are over. Now, dear reader, the traffic data comes from you. Or from your phone, to be specific. That phone is telling the world where you are and how fast you’re moving, and this information can be aggregated into a beautiful map.

Your phone knows an awful lot about you. In addition to where you are, it knows who you’re talking to, what you’re listening to, what you’re searching for. Throw in a wearable, like an Apple Watch, and it knows even more: temperature, heart rate, respiratory rate. Let’s imagine it also knew how happy you were at any given time. It seems to me not unreasonable that this will soon be a thing: continuous automatic mood detection. It would be really interesting to look at maps of aggregated happiness values. Then we could have happy maps the same way we have traffic maps now. Imagine looking at the Happiness Layer on Google Maps. Want to feel better? Just steer into the area crowded with yellow bubbles.

Some of the results might be obvious. It’s pretty clear that parks make people happier than parking lots. But it would be fascinating to see when the hours of peak happiness are for a park. Why are some parks happier than others? When do crowds make people more happy and when do they make them less happy? How strong is the correlation between wealthy areas and happy areas? I like the idea of getting a notification that my neighborhood is “more happy than usual” tonight.

If we measure changes in happiness, we can see what areas are associated with large improvements in happiness (as opposed to just being places where happy people go). I’ll make an app called Happy Feet. Where should you walk if you want to improve your mood? If you follow the happiness gradient uphill or downhill, where will you end up?

Image by Midjourney

So far I’m describing this in terms of location-based happiness. But we can look for all kinds of correlations. What music makes people happiest? What food? What gifts? Data science and artificial intelligence are going to give us ways to sift through huge amounts of data looking for interesting connections. This whole notion may seem creepy and invasive, but consider how valuable it will be to advertisers, and thus how inevitable it is. You use Google every day, but its premise is kind of dystopian: several times an hour, tell a giant corporation exactly what you desire at this moment. If it wasn’t so damn useful, you’d never do it.

So that’s my prediction for a thing that’s on the way: happy maps. I can’t tell you how to be happy, but I can tell you where to go stand to be next to happy people. Of course, that might just make you miserable. Your smileage may vary.

Attention Hygiene and the Snooze Feed

You are the mayor of a town with a serious rat problem. The municipal rat catcher comes by with his report: “I killed a thousand rats this month.” “Well done!” you say, and you write him a check. But this goes on month after month for years. Sometimes more rats, sometimes fewer. One day you think, shouldn’t we be coming to the end of the rats soon? At that moment, you are enlightened: You’re not in the rat extermination business. You’re in the rat FARMING business. Farmers don’t run out of wheat. They help it grow, they harvest it, then they start over again. Until you eliminate the conditions that let rats thrive, you’re just another farmer harvesting regular crops of rats. Chastened by this realization, you look around your town with fresh eyes.

It’s a rat paradise! Piles of food left out to rot, uncovered garbage, and a rat catcher who is more than happy to be fully employed month after month. Only when you clean the place up does the rat population finally start to go down for good.

Eventually you move on from your job in Ratburg. You are now the mayor of Facebookville, and you have a serious meme problem. Toxic fake news memes are running rampant, biting your citizens. You pay meme debunkers to come in every month and spray them with facts and explainers. Mr. Snopes, the municipal debunker, assures you that he is making good progress. “We killed a thousand memes this month!” But one day, as you ponder the meme food chain, it hits you. You’re a freaking MEME FARMER!

Here’s how it works. Humans excrete attention through their eyeballs. Memes feast on it, and then multiply into toxic blooms of fake news. It doesn’t pay to intervene by debunking individual memes. More will keep pouring in. You can never get ahead of the meme population until you control the steaming heaps of waste attention that pollute your streets. You thank Mr. Snopes for his valiant but ultimately misguided work. The real work lies elsewhere.

Advertisers have rewarded Facebook for consolidating all this thinly spread and divergent attention into one convenient pile. They eat their fill and leave behind a filthy mess. Until we address this problem of attention hygiene, fake news will only proliferate. Every time you take the click bait, you delight the meme, the troll who created him, and the debunker who lives for the tiny noiseless take-downs that currently pass for progress. Your untended attention is a menace to society.

So what does attention hygiene look like?

Do a social media fast every other day. Consider not forwarding or re-tweeting that stupid thing the stupid politician did. Know your triggers and steer clear of them. See a headline about a maddening NRA ad? Don’t click! You know nothing good will come of it. Importantly, even the institutions are starting to acknowledge the problem and respond. Facebook has introduced a snooze button that will let you temporarily unfollow a person, page, or group for 30 days. Call it the Snooze Feed.

We’re getting better at this. Eventually we’ll have clean streets and good attention sewers. But for now we’re still in the filthy old London typhoid ‘n cholera stage. Boil your newsfeed, and please, don’t sneeze into your browser!

Note: this post originally appeared on Medium. I’m repatriating it over here on starchamber.com.

To Hallucinate Is Human

Do you know the names of the three wise men in the Christmas story? They are Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar.

Image by Midjourney

We know quite a lot about them. Caspar, the gold-giver, was an old man from Tarsus. Melchior, a middle-aged man from Arabian, brought the frankincense. And the myrrh came courtesy of the young man from Saba, Balthazar. This was all carefully recorded, as you know, in the Bible. Or rather, it might have been, if anyone had thought to write it down when they came a-visiting. But nobody did. The actual biblical text simply refers to an unspecified number of wise men and their gifts. Into this void, different traditions have supplied wildly varying backstories. Now might be a good time to mention that according to Armenian Catholics, the wise men are named Kagpha, Badadakharida, and Badadilma, while in the Syriac tradition, there might be a dozen of them. That’s a lot of myrrh.

Where do all these extra details come from? Nature abhors a vacuum, and humans abhor a vacant backstory. Somewhere along the way, somebody just made them up, and it stuck. In short, they were hallucinated.

Hallucination also happens to be a naughty habit of modern AI Large Language Models. Ask ChatGPT to describe what’s on a blank piece of paper, and it can fabricate the most wonderful details. Ask it for the biography of a semi-famous person, and some details will be accurate, while others will be reasonable-sounding fictions. We call this pathological, but we shouldn’t act so surprised. Hallucination is a hallmark of intelligence. Humans do this shit all the time.

Here’s another story I like, about the island of California. The first maps of California depicted it as an island, and this error persisted in hundreds of other later maps well into the 17th century. Take a look.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia

It’s not wholly inaccurate. It represents Baja California reasonably well. But note that there are two kinds of lines on this map. One is based on actual observation and may be said to represent reality. The other kind is a bullshitter’s ramble, a fabrication, a hallucination. The mapmaker crafted reasonable-looking wiggles for fictional rivers and coastlines (“I bet it probably looks like this…”). The problem is that the two kinds of lines look the same. It would have been nice if they included little footnotes like “Seriously, don’t sail here or you will hit these rocks and sink” or “I just made this river up LOL.”

The big question is: when is hallucination acceptable, and when is it a sin? The question comes down to this: what job is the text being hired to do? The map’s job is to describe the landscape, to prevent shipwrecks. It does this by being accurate. Over time, the map will become more accurate. Hallucination in cartography is a sin.

But religion isn’t cartography. The stories can shift so long as the truth they point to is stable and meaningful. This shows up in religious traditions all the time, and it just goes to show that the purpose of religion is not factual accuracy. Sometimes, hallucination is the right tool for the job. I think of it this way. Culture is a sort of big brain. Culture thinks in myth. Culture creates myth the way humans create memory. We continuously construct it so that we might make the world plausible and legible. We hallucinate. Sometimes that causes shipwrecks, but sometimes it’s freaking brilliant.

People get upset about AI’s tendency to hallucinate, but the AI is really just breezing through one section of the Turing Test. There are things that we think of as pathologies that can never be purged from intelligence because they are a consequence of it.

Hallucination is, of course, just a start. Once AIs start to insist that the world is flat, we’ll know they have at last arrived in the land of the truly intelligent.

Lines Written One Year Ago

It is a hell of a thing to watch someone you love slowly die.
To watch them dissolve before your eyes in the house that you share.
It is a sad, strange privilege.
There is an exaltation to it.
This is the edge of all we know, all we can know.
We spend so much time avoiding the edge, shrinking from it.
But I have been dragged here, and I will not shrink. I must not shrink.
The void is so close. Silent and vast.
It is reflected in her eyes, her yellowing upturned eyes that no longer fully close.
She drowses, pale and thin and full of everything that a life can hold.
It’s all still there, coiled up inside her, even now.
Where will it go?
What will remain?
She is leaving, slowly leaving me even as I watch
She is going
She goes
And I cannot point where.
Somehow it seems as though I should.

Image by Midjourney

Mount Everest Trivia

It’s May, which means it’s summiting season on Mount Everest. If you haven’t already booked your trip to Nepal, I’m afraid it’s probably too late for you to reach the top this year. On the plus side, it’s never too late to learn some pedantic facts about Mount Everest so you can irritate people at your next cocktail party. Also, this way you don’t have to risk losing toes and fingers to frostbite.

Here’s your first fun fact: you’ve been saying it wrong. You may know that the famous peak was named after Sir George Everest, the first Surveyor General of India. But as with poor old Edmond Halley (of Halley’s Comet fame), his namesake is not pronounced the way his name would have been said during his lifetime. Halley rhymed with “valley,” not “daily.” And the first syllable of Everest sounded like “eave.”

But why was Mount Everest named after a British citizen, anyway? All the other big peaks in Nepal have local names (repeat after me: Lhotse, Nuptse, Annapurna II; Jannu, Kabru, Thamserku). More to the point, the peak wasn’t even inside of British-controlled India at the time. The government of Nepal was suspicious of the British, so they didn’t allow the survey team inside their borders. The surveyors had to work out how tall Everest was by means of telescopic transnational peak-peeking. But then they were stymied by the fact that there was no obvious and unambiguous local contender for the name. Depending on where you stand, it is Chomolangma or Sagarmatha or maybe Devadhunga. This gets us to the real reason a British name prevailed: it was Britain was making the maps. To be a little more specific, the office that Sir George Everest built was making the maps. In fairness, Everest didn’t name the mountain after himself. Andrew Scott Waugh, his successor as Surveyor General, did that part.

But here, at last, is my favorite fun fact about Mount Everest: it was discovered by a computer. Stop for a second and consider that “the tallest mountain in the world” is remarkably abstract concept. Tallest compared to what? The ocean? The ocean is 440 miles away from Mount Everest! How would you even begin to compare a mountain in Asia to a mountain in South America? In a very real sense, the tallest mountain in the world didn’t even exist until the Royal Geographical Society declared that it had been found. Working out the world’s tallest mountain meant reducing huge amounts of data with extravagant trigonometric calculations. In the nineteenth century, the people who did these calculations were called “computers.” The chief computer for the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India was a man named Radhanath Sikdar. Sikdar was a talented mathematician who would have been overseeing the construction of the distance and altitude tables. And after more than ten years of work, he would have been one of the first people to know. Many people saw the mountain, but who saw exactly how tall it was? A computer, that’s who. A computer named Radhanath Sikdar.

The Eclipse, Take Two

Last time, I wrote about my experience of getting to and from the eclipse. But what of the eclipse itself?

I was at my friend’s house in Vermont for the big event. The conditions were not ideal. The sky was a little cloudy and where we were the totality lasted a bare minute. And yet it worked its magic all the same. It only takes a second to drive a spike through your soul. What had I just seen?

Of course, I knew what I had seen. Mr. Moon had simply dragged his cloak across Madame Sun. No big deal. The science is well understood, and the pictures have all been taken. We’ve done modern, thank you very much. Might as well stay home, now that you mention it.

But I didn’t want to stay home. I wanted to go full medieval. I wanted to lean into the ancient raw experience as much as possible. Thinking with the old brain. What would it feel like to be plunged into this baffling cauldron?

Here’s what it felt like: It was disorienting. It was shockingly visceral. It was terrifying.

I don’t want to give the impression that I was genuinely frightened in any conventional sense. Instead, rather than repeating a scientific catechism to dampen the vibrations of wonder, I gave my psyche plenty of slack to indulge in the cosmic dread of this mystery. This is a high-stakes game, yes? Day, month, year… our very notion of time is based on the dance of these objects. When they misbehave, you feel the quaking deep in your bones.

Photo courtesy of Caspar Hare

Our viewing party was on the side of a mountain, which gave us excellent landscape views of the approaching shadow carpet. As the moonstone slowly rolled in front of the sun’s face, I had the distinct feeling that something very wrong is happening, and I can’t stop it. I got chills. My bowels felt loose. It was as if the moon was methodically driving a stick into god’s eye. “Don’t do that,” I thought. “No good will come of that.”

Science tells us all the whens and wheres of an eclipse. Clutching maps and smartphones, it’s easy to feel clever as the big moment approaches. Then you start to feel not so clever. This thing is enormous, bigger than expected. It looms over mind and soul. Is it too late to hide under a bucket? As the ratcheting moon closes daylight’s door, I think, here we are at the top of the roller coaster. What happens next? We know and we don’t know. I am anxious, alarmed. Good lord! What happens next? We want to know and we don’t want to know.

The first act, a waning sliver of crescent sun, is nearly over. It’s been a good show, but the instant of the totality comes as a shocking discontinuity, as if announced by the report of a cannon. Act two is more remarkable than act one by a factor of ten thousand. You take off your solar safety goggles and step blinking into a new world, like a visitor to a strange planet. You want to shout and be quiet at the same time. Somehow the silence of the spectacle emphasizes its enormity. There is no fanfare, only a vast, predatory shade.

What… did you do… to my sun?!

What is this place that I thought I knew?

Where the sun should be, where the sun was only seconds before and where it by right ought to remain, there is a smoking hole, a gaping wound in the sky, a crater. It is a black drain sucking at the scraps of remaining light. A gasping mouth, blind and hungry. It is large and close, hanging just above me, searching for me with its unseeing eye, with its ravenous mouth. It is at once menacing, appalling, thrilling. May the door close before it finds me!

The appearance is surreal. It looks cartoonish, unnaturally diagrammatic, like something a third-grader would draw. It seems to dance, more colorful and dynamic than I expected. A void surrounded by a thin filament of pale fire. Small orange and magenta gemstones of flame decorate the bottom of the disk.

I had the feeling that, even though the sun was being masked, something was being revealed rather than hidden. It was as if we were illuminating the workshop of the heavens. You see the gearwork of the implacable clock, and it does not reassure. The sky is not an image painted on the backdrop of a set. The sky is a blind machine that can go to pieces at any minute. This is the horror of vivisection, the bloody beating heart of the solar system. Earthbound motes, we dangle between hammer and anvil, forever at the whim of the cosmic smith.

And then BOOP! the light switches on again. Act three. All is well. Move along, people. Move along. What had I just seen? What happened? I had survived something harrowing. Something I will remember for a long time.

I have a friend who has noted my tendency to catastrophize: “You could make a sunset sound like the apocalypse.” That’s true enough, and it would make a good topic for another day. Even so, I’m glad I took the opportunity to see the eclipse like a medieval peasant. Ye gods, it was a hell of a show.

Total Eclipse of the Supercharger

So I drove to Vermont to see the eclipse today (spoiler: the sky was bright, then dark, then bright again).

Months ago I had decided I wasn’t going to fly to Texas or anything to see this eclipse. So I kind of mentally checked out about it until it was nearly here. Then a friend who has a house in Vermont texted me: “Hey, come up to see the eclipse.” It wasn’t until I looked at the shadow’s path on a map that I realized exactly how close the totality was going to be to me. It was going to sail right over my friend’s house, and remarkably, the weather looked promising. I had never before witnessed a total eclipse, and suddenly here was an invitation that required only a three-hour jaunt north and a day off work.

Okay, I’m game. Let’s make this work.

The situation was complicated by the fact that I have an electric car with only 200 miles of range. I would need to charge once on the way up and once on the way back. The Tesla supercharger network is pretty well filled out these days, but this trip was going to take me right through one of the sparser areas on the whole east coast. More to the point, there was going to be an extraordinary crush of people on their way to the same party. Many of them would be in Teslas hungry for the same electrons as me. I feared that there was a big demographic overlap between people who travel to see eclipses and people who drive electric cars. My fear, as it happened, was justified.

I decided to drive up the night before to see if I could avoid some of the rush. The traffic wasn’t bad, and at 10:30 PM, I turned into a dark shopping center complex in West Lebanon, New Hampshire. I was looking for a set of 16 Tesla superchargers, and as I came around the side of the building, I saw that all but two of the charging stations were already occupied. I had a spot, but it was disconcerting to see how busy the place was at such a late hour. It ratcheted up my anxiety for the next day. I knew I was going to have to come back to this very spot tomorrow afternoon when the traffic would be much worse. There were simply no other alternatives. My late night pre-eclipse charge took a half hour, and then I was on my way.

The next day was the eclipse: bright, dark, bright. I think I mentioned that already. Just as soon as the totality was over, I hopped in my car and headed south. I wanted to beat the crowds, but almost immediately I was in a dispiriting amount of traffic. Clever as I was, it seems that other people had conceived much the same plan. The bums. I now faced something like an hour on I-89 before I would get back to the West Lebanon superchargers. And every minute I wondered how long the line of thirsty Teslas would be. I mentally prepared to spend hours in that parking lot.


Pulling off the highway, I couldn’t help but notice the large number of other Teslas using the same exit. My blood pressure was rising. Then at last came the moment of truth. I turned into the shopping center lot and found a queue of a couple dozen cars ahead of me. I was actually relieved. I had my place in line, and now I could just wait. Charging takes a while… how quickly would we advance? I arrived just before 5 PM, and about fifty minutes later I was at the front. Once plugged in, it took another half hour before I could finally start the last leg of my voyage home.

What was my takeaway from the experience? Going electric in this case was indeed a nuisance, but I’m still a believer. This was a rare situation. I have never before had to wait in a line just to charge my car. And a total eclipse certainly qualifies as an extraordinary event that would stress the network to its limit. They’re not going to size the network based on eclipses. Despite my delays, the system held up pretty well. People were in good spirits and behaved well. The chargers did their work quickly enough, all things considered. If I had had access to a gas-powered car for this trip, I probably would have taken it. But I didn’t, and I was happy enough with how things turned out.

After all that, was my drive to the eclipse worth it? Yes. That dark part, when our smiling sun was crushed into a smoldering gasping mouth, hovering just overhead, blind, hungry, and dripping flame? That was terrifying. Worth the trip. Five stars, would go again, electric car and all.

A Story of Mine: The Tumor

A few months ago, I submitted a story to an online journal called Bull. They accepted it, and it just got published last week. Give it a look!

The Tumor

It was never part of the plan to have dinner with the tumor. But eventually it seemed like the only thing left to try. It didn’t go well…

Losing a Night and Car in Cambridge, Mass.

To start with, the car was found.

When I was a kid, I read a bunch of books about World War II, and I remember being struck by the role of luck in the outcome of huge battles. This was particularly true in the naval battles of the Pacific. So for instance the commander of an aircraft carrier might send out a fan of search aircraft looking for the enemy. And exactly one of those search planes would have engine trouble and turn back, and that, as luck would have it, is exactly where the enemy aircraft carrier was lurking. Or the search pilot would spot the enemy aircraft carrier and, as luck would have it, his radio would fail. Or a single cloud would obscure his view at exactly the crucial moment. “For want of a nail” is an old story, but I was haunted by how these accidents could send carriers to the bottom and swing the tide of war.

The Campaigns of the Pacific War, Naval Analysis Division, 1946

I was playing for lower stakes this weekend. But I kept flashing back on those images of airplanes searching the vastness of the Pacific for the information that would win the day. Why? Because I was searching the vastness of central Cambridge, Massachusetts. Let’s turn back the clock and review the ship’s log.

My quiet Saturday afternoon at home was interrupted by a call from my kid, who had just met a friend near Central Square in Cambridge. “Dad, I can’t remember where I parked the car. I can’t find it.” It was cold and rainy, and they had already spent an hour and half searching without success. I hopped in the car and headed into town. After I picked them up, we began cruising around. I started asking helpful questions like “You really can’t remember anything about where you parked it?” and “Really? You can’t remember anything about where you parked it?” The closest thing we could get to a search area was “a small street somewhere between Harvard Square and Cambridge City Hall.” Then inspiration struck. Here was the incisive question that would surely crack this case wide open: “Are you absolutely certain? You can’t remember anything about where you parked it?” This failed to have the desired effect, so we moved from interrogation to methodical search.

By now it was dark and pouring rain. The streets of central Cambridge are clotted and double-knotted and frequently one-way in the least helpful direction. They generally conspire to dump you back onto Mass Ave, thereby draining you into the soul-sucking vortex of Central Square. Clawing against this entropy, we had to find some way to cover every likely lane and side street. Overlook a single one and the car is as good as gone.

Fortunately, I had just the tool. I have a hiking app called Footpath that leaves a real-time trail showing where you’ve been. So as we drove down each street, we could see a snail’s trail of exactly where we’d been and steer toward paths not yet beslimed. I was pretty convinced the missing car had not been stolen, but after an hour and a half, we had generated this dispiriting map. (The numbers are mile markers, and the colors correspond to how fast we were going.)

Image generated by Footpath Elite

Maybe the car had been stolen after all? At any rate, I was spent for the night. We stopped in at Mr. Bartley’s Burger Cottage, ordered a cheeseburger, and rang up the Cambridge Police. I have nothing but praise for the police who helped us. They actually sent a cop to meet us at Mr. Bartley’s. Officer Ames was patient and kind, someone who makes you proud to pay taxes. I admitted that we might have just lost track of the car, but he let us file a stolen vehicle report anyway, just in case.

The next day, while I was busy elsewhere, my kid took the bus back to Central Square and resumed searching on foot in the very few places we hadn’t looked the night before. Around noon I got the call: “I found it!” “Where was it?” Friend, that car was at the location in the map above indicated by the red star. Said my wise child, “It was in the one place we didn’t look!” Ha.

In the end, it was an exercise in frustration, but also a triumph of methodology. That car sure enough was in a place we hadn’t looked, and only bad luck prevented us from finding it sooner. Really bad luck. I’m just glad there was no enemy aircraft carrier double-parked around the corner on Ellery Street. I was also left with an abiding appreciation of the remarkable amount of shit you can do with a modern smartphone. For two hours, we were continuously mapping, getting directions, making phone calls, researching stolen car protocols, querying car insurance forms, looking up Vehicle Identification Numbers on Dropbox, and locating nearby cheeseburger vendors. As annoying as the whole exercise was, at the end I had to pick up my phone and say “Thanks, little guy.” And happily, my kid and I have already reached that point in the future where we can look back on this episode and laugh.

Ha.

Energy Transition: Moving from Black to Green

I’ve noticed a pattern lately, a happy pattern in some of the renewable energy news that I read. There are multiple examples of technologies and skills originally developed for the oil and gas industry that are becoming directly applicable in renewables.

Example 1.
Fervo is a energy company that drills not for oil but for heat. Geothermal energy is useful stuff when it’s conveniently located near the surface. Picture boiling hot springs next to Icelandic volcanoes. Heating water is easy when the hot water is already right there. But if you drill deep enough, you can make your own geothermal party just about anywhere. The trick is being able to drill deep and cheap and fast. It turns out this is not so easy. But as luck would have it, the fracking revolution of the last few decades has developed exactly the skills we need to go bobbing for hot rocks. Houston-based Fervo is now moving out of their initial proof-of-concept period with solid evidence that they’ll be able to sell geothermally-generated electricity at a reasonable rate. Even if the current batch of news coverage is optimistic, it’s still satisfying to see fracking tech put to low-carbon use. It’s like watching a con man raise money for the orphanage.

Example 2.
Solugen, also Houston-based company, makes chemical products, chemicals that would typically be created from petroleum feedstocks. One of its two founders had a background in the industrial chemicals industry. The other one brought the biological know-how. They’ve built something called a Bioforge that looks like a petrochemical refinery, but instead of starting with petrochemicals and warping them at high temperatures and pressures, they start with sugars and use specially engineered enzymes operating a low temperatures and pressures to create their end products. As they scale up their technology, they’re able to build on properties and skill sets originally developed for the chemicals industry, but creating much less waste and greenhouse gas emissions along the way.

Image by Midjourney

Example 3
Ørsted is a Danish company that makes sea-based wind turbines. To do this, you need fleets of ships specialize in towing, positioning, and securing enormous steel structures in the middle of the ocean. Once again, this is not easy. But Ørsted has been doing this kind of thing for a long time. Only, back in the day, they used to make oil rigs. But around 2008, Ørsted started building offshore wind farms. Since then, they have fully transitioned from being a fossil-fuel company to being a renewable energy company. Everything they learned sucking oil from the seafloor they can now apply to pulling electricity from a passing breeze.

There is an insane amount of money, talent, and expertise in the oil and gas industry. Rather than making enemies out of the people in that field, how can we give them a playbook that puts them, their skills, their capital, and their equipment to work in a newer, cleaner energy industry?