The n-Category Café

As a related comment, aside from all the “deep” mathematical work on environmental issues, one area that hasn’t received as much attention as it deserves is the contextual numerical assessment of energy issues. By this I mean that it’s easy for enivronmental discussions to throw up isolated numbers that we don’t have an overall context for (eg, a nuclear power plant can produce 600MW: even though you may know technically what that means, relating it to other energy technologies and energy usage isn’t something we’re practiced at). Professor David McKay at Cambridge has produced a book (with a freedownload website for the book “Without hot air”, although you can also purchase conventionally published copies from bookstores/online) which attempts to put some order of magnitude estimates on both energy “generation” and energy usage in the UK, scaling things down to the per individual case so that it’s easier to see the effect of various items on both sides of the “balance sheet”. (Despite being able to pick the best brains in the top universities, McKay’s original research is in coding/machine learning and he’s not an specialist on any of the individual topics, so individual calculations may well be wrong. What’s brilliant is that he’s put the whole thing on a “whole system” numerical basis so that you can see what it might mean on the whole balance if, say, wind-power generation capacity was underestimated by a factor of five. Unfortunately critics seem to pick on individual calculations which may be inaccurate without taking the larger point of looking at the whole system numerically.)

I thought this was worthy of mentioning because it’s definitely not sexy mathematics, but it is an important contribution, and hopefully a lasting one, to the methodology of analysing enivronmental, and I applaud McKay for having the character to plug away at non-deep stuff to produce this.

Unless you get the Los Angeles Time in Singapore, you may have missed this.

You can thank Arthur Rosenfeld for energy savings

“… In 1954, Rosenfeld took a position at UC Berkeley at what was to become the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, joining Luis Alvarez in the development of hydrogen bubble chambers for detecting subatomic particles. ‘Fermi wrote me a wonderful recommendation as his “second-most promising graduate student,” ’ Rosenfeld said. He recalled that Fermi, who would die soon after, ‘coyly declined to identify his first.’”

“Fifteen years later, Alvarez, backed by a team of scientists that included Rosenfeld, won the Nobel Prize for physics. But climbing to the heights of quantum physics research was not to be Rosenfeld’s destiny.”

“The turning point came on a cool Friday night in November 1973 during the second Arab oil embargo. Television screens beamed images of frustrated Americans in gigantic cars queuing up for fuel. Pained to see his nation humbled by its spendthrift habits, Rosenfeld looked around his own building. Most of his colleagues had departed hours before, not bothering to turn off the lights. Rosenfeld went from office to office flipping switches. His life’s mission suddenly clicked. ‘The cheapest energy is what you don’t use’ became Rosenfeld’s guiding mantra from that night on. ‘It would be more profitable to attack our own wasteful energy use than to attack OPEC.’”

“He set out on a mission to engineer U.S. appliances and buildings to use less energy. It wouldn’t be easy. Pressure was mounting to build massive nuclear facilities to meet California’s growing needs. Manufacturers and builders would undoubtedly balk at tough efficiency standards. The key, Rosenfeld concluded, lay in government policy that could force these changes….”