10.1.2K7: British Library to digitize 100,000 old books

The British Library has announced that they will initiate a program to scan the pages of over 100,000 old books and digitize them for public view, either on the library's web site, or on Microsoft's Live Search Books site (MS is a partner in the program).

The program has a twofold value: One, it will allow anyone to access these works, from wherever they are, and read them as digital files. Since the library is concentrating on public domain works, we can expect that these documents will eventually end up in one or more e-book formats, making them freely available worldwide on various reading platforms.

Two, and possibly most importantly, it will make available works that have been off-limits to the public, because of a combination of their rarity and/or condition. Many books deemed unpopular by their editors did not see more than one printing, and those single copies are few and far between, and often not in the best of condition. Therefore they have been largely unseen by the public since their initial printing. This will give old works a chance to be seen by the public at large, regardless of perceived popularity or saleability in their day. At the very least, it should provide more interesting insights into the history of their day.

This could even lead to a small revolution in rediscovering old literature, and if it is successful, hopefully we would see the same effort taken by other countries with extensive backlogs of rarely-seen books, including the US.

10.4.2K7: 50 years in space spurs thoughts of future in space

As we celebrate 50 years since the appearance of Sputnik, periodicals are running articles asking where our space program is today, and where it is going. There is a lot of talk about the groups working to create space tourism, flying people to orbit for outrageous sums, and bringing them right home, like the most extreme roller coaster ride. Others are debating the role of NASA, and whether it has been more of a help or a hindrance over the past decades. And everyone questions the viability of the Space Transportation System (STS, or Space Shuttle) and whether or not it even makes sense to finish the International Space Station (ISS).

The U.S. space program started its history resembling the nationalistic efforts to "discover" the Americas, then to explore the inner continent, to take a full assessment of the resources available. But after this push to explore the outer reaches of Earth orbit, and to reach as far as the Moon, the similarity ends.

During westward expansion, individuals and commercial interests took advantage of the information learned on the Lewis and Clark expeditions to venture westward, into the veritable wilderness, in order to establish homes, find resources to exploit, build businesses, and (hopefully) make their fortunes. They followed the trails blazed by Lewis and Clark, and made their own, and they were closely followed by those who would go into business supporting the trail-blazers. This drive populated the American west and built the second half of the country. "Go west, young man!" used to be the call urging men to seek their fortunes in the new frontier.

Today, few interests see space as a similar frontier, waiting to be conquered, but that's exactly what it is. NASA has blazed the trail into space, learning how to move about in it, gathering data on its aspects and dangers, and working out methods of survival. These are the essential tools that any man needs to venture out into space, and they can be had by anyone with access to a library or an internet connection. Given enough resources, any man can go into space and come back alive.

And why go? For the same reason men ventured into the west: To find their fortunes. Certainly, the resources are different... instead of seeking gold, pioneers would seek to use undiluted solar energy... instead of staking out land, they would take advantage of near-perfect vacuum and near-zero temperatures. Instead of driving fence-posts, they would use microgravity to their benefit. NASA studies have shown that all of these elements have advantages in manufacturing that are either difficult or impossible to duplicate on the ground. Using these elements to manufacture better products could be the way to win fortunes and dominate markets. Pioneers should be actively planning to go to space and take full advantage of those resources, before their competition does.

However, the government has made little effort to promote public expansion into space, and the public has made little of a clamor for it. But with the embryonic beginnings of "space tourism," we are seeing the first signs of government stepping aside and allowing the commercial interests access into space. Today commercial entities have to ask the government for permission to go into space, just as they used to ask for permission to venture into the west. Someday, permission to go to space will no longer be required, any more than government permission is needed to drive to San Diego.

Commercial interests will eventually realize it is within their best interests to go to space, to learn, to do their own R&D, and to produce products that will be superior to their competition. When they are ready, NASA will stand back and let them go, like the proud father watching his son stride away on his own. At some point, NASA may evolve from space explorer to become an administrator of commercial activities in space, in deed as in name... until the day comes when it becomes superfluous, and is finally abolished.

Fifty years after Apollo, we have finally reached the very beginnings of what was once called the Third Industrial Revolution... the development of space. The opening moves have been glacially slow, but they can be expected to speed up in time, as concepts are proven, and fortunes are made. And once that happens, you won't be able to keep them out of space. It might not be long until we hear the new call of the twenty-first century: "Go up, young man!"

10.6.2K7: Music Industry vs Thomas—Thomas loses

For years, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has been pursuing people accused of illegally sharing music files on peer-to-peer networks, in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA). The usual result would be the accused settling out of court, and paying $2-3000 to the RIAA.

With one exception: Jammie Thomas, accused of illegally sharing up to 1,720 songs on Kazaa, decided to take the record companies to court for the first time. The trial ended on Thursday, and there should be no surprise that the RIAA won the case.

The surprises come in the details: To begin with, although Thomas was accused of sharing over 1700 songs, the trial focused on only 22 specific songs. When the trial began, the jury was instructed that they were to rule on whether Thomas was guilty of disseminating files that were not hers to disseminate. But the RIAA decided that this was not good enough, and conferred with the judge after the day's adjournment. The next morning, the judge altered his instructions to the jury to rule on whether Thomas had merely made the files available, not on whether any of them had actually been disseminated.

This made the jury's decision a no-brainer, because they had already decided on another issue: Is proof required that Thomas actually did the file-sharing, as opposed to (for instance) some anonymous person who entered her house and did it? The jury had eventually concluded that it was her computer, using her internet account, in her house... and that made her, as the homeowner, ultimately responsible.

So the jury found her guilty on making 22 songs available on the file-sharing network, in violation of copyright laws. Again, no surprise there, and anyone would be hard-pressed to deny the decision. But when it came to the punishment, the jury ruled that Thomas should pay $222,000 in damages to the RIAA. The consensus is that Thomas' life is now officially ruined by the verdict, and the mortgage-sized fine.

Although you want a fine to be large enough to be a deterrent, I personally think complete financial ruination is going too far, especially since there'd been no physical harm done, and absolutely no evidence of financial harm to the plaintiffs (the trial was set up to remove the need for the record companies to put a dollar figure on their losses).

Fine her $2,000, or even $20,000, I can see that... it'll suck for her, but she can still have a life, and pay her debt within 5 years. If she'd physically stolen 1,720 records, the jail time she'd get wouldn't equal 30 years... and even if she'd destroyed every record, the dollar figure loss wouldn't equal $220,000.

The decision just seems too off-kilter to me. Feels like a witch-hunt trial (something 16th century men would pull on 16th century women who wouldn't have sex with them, or who wouldn't keep secret that they did) (also something jealous 16th century women pulled on other 16th century women who messed with their 16th century men)... the punishment doesn't fit the crime.

However, the example has now been made, the precedent has been set, and I predict parents are going ballistic over what might be on their kid's computers. I foresee American parents storming into their kids' rooms and saying, "I'm not going to lose my house over whatever you've got in there! I want to see all your files, and I want every file-sharing program off your computer, right now!"

Which is, of course, what the RIAA wanted all along. Congratulations.

10.19.2K7: Pour-it-yourself solar panels?

Yes, if you can believe a California company called Innovalight. They are developing a liquid of nanoparticles in a solvent, that can be poured onto a substrate. Once the solvent is removed, the particles align uniformly and dry into a surface that functions as a solar cell. The poured cell has efficiencies akin to crystalline solar cells, but will reportedly cost much less to produce. Innovalight believes it can cut solar cell production costs by 50% or more.

Innovalight will hopefully be one of many companies that will find less expensive ways to produce solar panels. Though solar cells are one of the most promising power generation technologies around in this global-warming-concerned era, being essentially quiet, clean, safe and non-polluting, their cost is still far too high for most consumers to be able to afford in useful quantities (in America, enough solar cells to provide all the power needs of a particularly frugal house can roughly equal or exceed the cost of the house itself). Other major companies, like Honda, are working on ways to improve the basic design of conventional solar cells, and apply mass-production economies to bring costs down. And other companies are searching for innovative replacements for elements like silicon, also in hopes of bringing costs down.

It won't be anytime soon that we can expect "cheap" solar cells to appear at Home Depot. But hopefully, by the time that our reliance on foreign oil is finally becoming untenable, we will be able to begin converting ourselves to solar alternatives and carrying on.

10.22.2K7: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch?!?

Trash washed up on Kamilo Beach by the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, 2006

When I recently saw these words, part of me hoped that it was just someone's attempt at being funny... but most of me had a sinking feeling that I was about to learn about another one of the many man-made disasters visited upon our planet by our own carelessness.

Sure enough, this bad-science-fiction-movie-sounding entity is a very real phenomenon—actually two phenomena—floating out in the Pacific Ocean right now. In a nutshell, plastic garbage has been dumped into the Pacific, by the ton, in Japan and the United States, over the past 50 years. This garbage is being picked up by ocean currents called the Pacific Gyre, which rotate throughout the northern Pacific in multiple vortices. One of these vortices is a position northeast of Hawaii, and as the garbage has followed the currents, much of it has come to rest in the vertex, where it continues to go nowhere fast. Scientists estimate that this mass of garbage is now larger than the state of Texas.

Worst of all, this garbage isn't just floating harmlessly on the top of the water. Much of it is under the water, as deep as thirty feet below the surface, and its presence is harming fish, sea-birds and other organisms that are either being poisoned in attempting to eat the plastic, or are being entangled within it and suffocating or starving. Because it is so spread out, attempts to simply "scoop it up" would be fruitless. The trash contains measurable amounts of DDT and PCBs. And, when the vortex passes close to a land mass, like Hawaii or Midway Island, the trash is washed ashore to create a monstrous, hellish pile of dangerous, poisonous debris.

From the Institute for Figuring:

"Scientists who study the problem say there is no solution except to cut down on our use of plastic. Now. Of the 15 billion pounds of plastic the US produces each year just 1 billion is recycled. [Greenpeace] Though many plastics can be recycled in principle, in practice sorting it into separate categories is too labor intensive to be viable. Moreover, many complex products like cell phones and computers have so many different plastic components that sorting out the various types would be prohibitively expensive. Since the 1950’s plastic usage has increased tenfold every decade so that in 2001 the average American used 223 pounds of plastic. By the end of the decade it is estimated that our average yearly use will be 326 pounds. [Los Angeles Times] Every hour Americans use and discard 2.5 million plastic bottles, totaling 22 billion a year."

10.26.2K7: Efficient cars on today's technology

Detroit would have America believe that it's tough to get better economy out of automobiles. They would have us believe that only hydrogen can save us now. GM engineers believe, and tell their students and new employees, that doubling fuel efficiency and getting more horsepower is patently impossible.

Johnathan Goodwin, a seventh-grade dropout, is blowing a nice, fat raspberry their way. He has figured out how to take existing cars and boost their fuel economy, and horsepower, with mostly off-the-shelf equipment. In fact, he maintains that most of that off-the-shelf equipment he uses is right out of GM cars.

In his latest project, he has taken a Hummer and is working to make it an electric hybrid. Taking a page that's been read before (a car running on a jet turbine, storage batteries and an electric drive motor was covered in a Popular Science article in the 1970s), he plans to replace its engine with a turbine originally designed for the military, which can run on almost any kind of fuel, including cooking grease and used motor oil. The turbine will charge "supercapacitor" batteries, which can take, hold, and deliver a larger charge much faster than any other traditional battery type. Those batteries will directly power electric motors to the wheels. He expects his hybrid Hummer to get 600 horsepower, double its current level, and get 60MPG. He's already accomplished efficiencies like this with other cars, one of which has been featured on MTV's Pimp My Ride.

General Motors engineers have looked at Goodwin's designs, and told him, "They told us that this was impossible." And this is, to me, not surprising at all. GM has clearly given up on innovation. GM does not want to spend money on R&D, seeing it as impractical and unprofitable. Their efforts to build hydrogen cars are so much smoke and mirrors, designed to placate the politicians and the media, while they stall on hybrid and electric cars that could have been on the road decades ago. They have not lifted a finger to innovation for decades. In fact, they have developed an internal mentality that actively discourages it.

However, when innovation strikes... you can bet they'll be first in line to buy it. GM has expressed plenty of interest in other companies' efforts at improving the automobile, especially Honda and Toyota, the first companies to get hybrids on the road (GM's first hybrid SUVs are based on Toyota designs). Their new motto is: "Let someone else do the hard work—we'll option it later." IBM has recently taken the same tack, allowing other companies to spend big money on R&D, then licensing the product and making a killing in the marketplace.

Goodwin is making the connections that car makers need to see, such as replacing banks of old-fashioned batteries for supercapacitors, the next generation of electric storage (developed in 1957... the next generation, ultracapacitors, are even more efficient), and removing the combustion engine from drive-train duty altogether. His vehicle designs could potentially save the US enough oil to essentially give up on foreign oil imports, not to mention improving our air quality and saving us money. And Goodwin's work is beginning to attract a lot of attention, especially from companies like GM, and from individuals who don't want to wait another decade for GM to do what Goodwin can do right now.

He's not alone. Garage inventors nationwide are innovating right along with Goodwin, and together, they will be the ones responsible for creating the cars of the future.

But it will probably be GM that you'll buy them from.