I have been receiving a Wired magazine subscription for some time now. I have been somewhat disappointed with myself in, not sitting down to read it more often and taking advantage of my subscription.
Over break, I read a couple articles, one was about Crowd Farming and another was about Land Grabbing the Arctic. The land grab article starts out like this:
In 2005, the Canadian military launched Exercise Frozen Beaver. Eleven soldiers flew in helicopters to Hans Island, a hunk of rock off the coast of Greenland that’s long been claimed by both Denmark and Canada. When they landed on the half-square-mile outcropping, the troops planted a Canadian flag, ripping down the Danish colors that had been flying there since 1984. Once they got home they mailed the confiscated flag to the Danish ambassador in Ottawa.
Long before my time, countries and empires rolled across the lands, claiming their stakes. Now with global warming, evidently everyone wants a piece of the semi-frozen pie up north. The ice is melting fast, something like 386,000 sq. miles melted this year. That’s a lot, what’s more interesting though, the Northwest Passage ACTUALLY exists now. Oil now fuels the competition between the countries hoping to stake their claim.
Artur Chilingarov, a Russian Scientist, has helped Russia lay claim the ocean floor below the North Pole.
Among the most recent — and weirdest — incidents: Russian scientist Artur Chilingarov used a small submersible to plant a Russian flag encased in a titanium capsule on the Arctic seafloor some 13,000 feet under the North Pole. “If someone doesn’t like this, let them go down themselves,” he said. “The Arctic has always been Russian.” In fact, all five nations with Arctic borders — Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia, and the US — have engaged in at least some saber rattling over the frozen territory.
Read the rest of the article here. This fight is going into space next. Da Moon.
My second order of business, Crowd Farming. As described by Wired, Crowd Farming is:
Crowd Farming
v. Generating energy from the movement of hordes in football stadiums and train stations by installing weight-responsive dynamos under the floors. A subway system could be partially powered by the foot traffic of approximately 25,000 people — though not until the first crowd farm is actually built.
The creators are two students from MIT, Thaddeus Jusczyk and James Graham. While this is still prototype and it doesn’t look to provide huge amounts of power, as the technology blossoms it seems as if it can only get better. After reading this article from MIT News, it is a little more apparent that there is a lot altruism and brilliance behind this project.
Reading about dynamo, or movement creating energy, I started to think about converting sound into energy. But, after several stops on pages discussing resonance conversion to energy. It appears to be futile. Due to the enormously small amount of energy generated, the Sound Wave Harvesting (you like that? All M.E.) is not cost effective.
Too bad, it would have been nice to deploy in factories and cafeterias. Hopefully this was enlightening.
2 Comments
January 2, 2008 at 7:34 pm
Two things one pertaining to the article one not:
1) I feel the same as you about “sound wave harvesting” and I thought it would be a potentially good way to power a cell phone if you could have some sort of way to convert your energy from your conversation into the battery life.
2) On the comment you left on my “Best of…” list, gimme some movies and books man for sure. I want to start reading again once I pass all of my exams for work which should be in a month or so. And I know movies was lacking but I obviously missed a lot according to you.
January 4, 2008 at 2:54 am
Denmark is too peaceful these days. They should get out there and show Canada whats what.