Organic Insulation

Ecovative Design was the most interesting presentation at the RPI-hosted Tech Valley Business Plan competition this past May. Many in the audience thought founders Eben Bayer and Gavin McIntyre should have won, but nonetheless they are gathering lots of interest from within RPI's Incubator Center and are another great innovation to come out Burt Swersey's Innovator's Studio class in the product, design, and innovation (PDI) curriculum at Rensselaer.

Their Greensulate product will compete against polystyrene sheets (the pink stuff you often see on the outside of new construction homes). It requires no light, heat, or petroleum products, but it does require a volume of space and time to grow. The R value of the insulation is 3 per inch - comparable to blown insulation or polystyrene, but unlike polystyrene, it doesn't burn and generate toxic gas, so it is a firewall too.

Check out Eben Bayer and Gavin McIntyr giving a presentation.

Slideshow of trip to Russia

I am working on a video of our trip to Russia last June. So I decided to see how Blogger does with the conversion. The audio comes through well, but the frame size is reduced. But not bad really.

Hawai'i

We had a great time in Hawaii - a week on Maui and a week on the Big Island of Hawaii. On Maui we spent a few days in Hana, including some great snorkeling. The islands had been blasted with a major storm so the waterfalls were all flowing. The sunrise from the top of Haleakala was not spectacular on the day we were there, but other sunrises more than compensated. The hiking on Haleakala however was beautiful in a volcanic sort of way.

On Hawaii we went on a tour of the original 88 inch observatory on top of Mauna Kea; unfortunately we didn't get into the Keck observatories which are the twin ball shaped ones in this photo and are the world's largest optical observatories. We also had an amazing time swimming with dolphins along the coast north of Kona. If you go to Hawaii, it is an amazing experience.

Free Rice - Where is the curve headed?

If you like exponential curves you may be interested to check out Free Rice . It is a test of your vocabulary and will contribute rice to the World Food Program thanks to some very low impact advertising.

I heard about it on November 13th from Anuj Goel (check out his blog) who recently created a platform for collaborative groups to trade services, products and event details. VERY useful for everything from clubs, church groups and small business customer service groups to in-house corporate bulletin boards.

The growth curve on Free Rice has been interesting to watch. On November 13th it had been active for a little over five weeks. The peak usage was November 20th. A few days ago they doubled the number of free grains of rice per correct word - maybe to move the curve up since it has essentially flat-lined for the last two weeks.

Planners vs Seekers

I started this post long before it was ultimately posted. I had just started reading William Easterly's book The White Man's Burden which was recommended by Nidhi Tandon, a colleague from the board at Ontario Nature.

I haven't finished the book yet, but I decided it was time to post this and get a full summary out later. The book begins by presenting two different styles used in what might be called international development. The planners have been those promoting the idea that "we" in the developed world know what is wrong with the less developed countries and can tell them how to fix things using various forms of carrots and sticks. Essentially a top-down design strategy. The seekers fall at the other end, essentially a bottom-up method.

I suspect both are needed for genuine progressive results.

Necessary Journeys - Finding Farley

I know people who have gone for multi-month road trips or walked the Appalachian Trail and even some very long canoe trips. Cool. Exciting. And clearly well beyond my travel vitae. But I am in awe of that elite group who qualify to be what I would call Great Modern-day Explorers - GMEs.

At the very top of the GME pile is the Gluttons For Punishment category presently dominated by Colin Angus and Julie Wafaei. Colin did the first human-powered circumnavigation of the world. We heard some of their stories last year when they spoke at the University of Waterloo. Somehow they were able to spend five months together rowing across the Atlantic and still get married. Their videos and books will amaze you.

My other favourite adventurers are Karsten Heuer & Leanne Allison. They are just finishing a cross-Canada adventure journey - Finding Farley . Leanne won several awards for the brilliant video Being Caribou - imagine walking across the tundra in Yukon and Alaska following a caribou herd, without having a dozen porters or helicopters dashing ahead to tell you where the herd went while you were asleep. Karsten wrote a book of the same name as well as Walking the Big Wild which describes his Yellowstone to Yukon walk (virtually no trail by the way). Y2Y is an important conservation project worth supporting.

GPS, synthetic fiber clothing and airplanes have fundamentally changed the challenges of undertaking adventurous journeys. These folks have redefined adventure and exploration. Someday I hope to accomplish a fraction of one of their journeys.

Ecological overshoot

"Ecologists are intimately familiar with the overshoot-and-collapse phenomenon. One of their favorite examples began in 1944, when the Coast Guard introduced 29 reindeer on remote St. Matthew Island in the Bering Sea to serve as the backup food source for the 19 men operating a station there. After World War II ended a year later, the base was closed and the men left the island. When U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist David Kline visited St. Matthew in 1957, he discovered a thriving population of 1,350 reindeer feeding on the thick mat of lichen that covered the 332-square-kilometer (128-square-mile) island. In the absence of any predators, the population was exploding. By 1963, it had reached 6,000. He returned to St. Matthew in 1966 and discovered an island strewn with reindeer skeletons and not much lichen. Only 42 of the reindeer survived: 41 females and 1 not entirely healthy male. There were no fawns. By 1980 or so, the remaining reindeer had died off."

From Lester R. Brown's Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble

Easy energy savings

A KW Record article today provides some interesting details about ervenue from our local curb-side recycling:
• Aluminum: $2,176 per tonne sold to Anheuser-Busch
• Glass: $20 per tonne, processing in Guelph.
• Steel cans: $171 per tonne most goes to Hamilton.
• Newsprint $96 per tonne, sold in Ontario
• Mixed paper: $47 per tonne
• Corrugated cardboard: $93 per tonne
• Boxboard (cereal boxes): $57 per tonne
• Plastic bags: $139 / tonne
• Plastic #1: $365 per tonne
• Plastic #2: $634 / tonne
• Plastic #s 3-7: $16 / tonne, mostly shipped to China.

Paradoxical humanitarianism

There is an interesting article in the September 2007 issue of Wired about humanitarianism and how people donate their money.

A group of people were shown a picture of a little girl who is starving and asked how much they would donate. A different group were shown the same little girl as well as one other little girl in the same dire situation. Same scenario, but people gave less. Not just less per child. Less. In a similar experiment it was a group of eight children dying vs one. The eight received on average 50 percent less.

Clive Thompson is the author.
_______________________
Sent from my BlackBerry

Paper battery

Researchers at Rensselaer have developed a new energy storage device that is 90% cellulose making it flexible and infused with aligned carbon nanotubes which act as electrodes.