Outline for Vinay Gupta’s talk The Temporary School of Thought.
This has been on my mind a lot lately since the gas heater in my apartment went out, and the gas company didn’t come look at it for a week. Turns out my building’s manager’s heat went out earlier in the winter and it took a month to fix. My partner and I were blowing fuses nearly daily because of the electric heater we were using.
January 31, 2009 at 5:36 pm
At least 10% of power is lost as heat in transmission lines. If we can come up with cheaper, smaller scales ways to produce power and purify water, we can reduce a great deal of waste by decentralizing these systems. There is a lot of ambient energy in every house (heat loss, water running down drains, etc). We know we can use a lot of the ambient energy if we can just make the equipment cheaply enough.
January 31, 2009 at 6:53 pm
This was an excellent talk. His point about “living on the land” vs “living on the infrastructure” especially. Kate Ascher’s book “The Works” is a very cool and visual intro to city infrastructure — like an old David Maculay book re-imagined by the graphic design team @ Wired.
Here in SPFLD, one of the main themes I hear about from everyone is distrust of the city infrastructure. The reservoir is polluted with feces bugs, the water has arsenic and when the tornado came through in 2006, the city did approximately nothing to help anyone. That woke a lot of folks up here.