Reveal the Infrastructure

September 10, 2019 by kris de decker Filed Under: Quotes

Designer Gauthier Roussilhe:

“People seem to be living in a techno-fantasy dream. Mostly because they don’t understand the infrastructure on which it is relying. Eventually, the physical world with its energy limits and planetary boundaries will catch up with these dreams. I’ve been dedicating a lot of time in conferences and workshops explaining to people why autonomous cars will not be possible. Once you open the black box and reveal the infrastructure, people understand what is behind their dreams. You can break the spell, even in the French start-up scene.”

Read more: Can you design a website on a (very) limited energy budget? An interview with Gauthier Roussilhe, We Make Money Not Art.

Web Bloat Score Calculator

September 9, 2019 by kris de decker Filed Under: Internet

Most people are probably aware that image files, as a rule, are bigger than plain text files. Yet, as the Web Bloat Calculator website explains, one of the weird things about the way websites have evolved is that their text is frequently so overloaded with superfluous (hidden) coding that they actually consume more energy than they would if the pages were presented solely in image form (ie, if a screenshot was taken of the webpage, and that was what was displayed when people looked up the webpage, rather than the original text). Such code bloat tends to build up in layers over the years and can lead to frenetic, and almost completely meaningless, exchanges of information between servers and browsers.

Web Bloat Score Calculator. Quoted from: Our Lighter Website, feasta.

EcoSanitation: Trading “Flush and Forget” for “Cycle and Sow”

September 5, 2019 by kris de decker Filed Under: Humanure

“Flush and forget” or “drop and store” are some of the most common strategies for human waste “treatment” around the globe. These approaches can be seen in massive sewer systems that exhaust effluence away from communities, septic systems that hide and diffuse material locally, and common pit latrines that simply hide and cover the waste. These methods do not treat the waste so much as bury it or move it to another place in the world where it may become someone else’s problem. In doing so, households and communities are missing an incredible opportunity to turn waste into nutrients that can improve public health and reduce hunger.

EcoSanitation is a closed-loop concept of sewage treatment that employs the planet’s natural hydrological cycle to close the gap between sanitation and agriculture. The hydrological cycle, a term we use to illustrate the paths of water between atmosphere, earth and oceans, includes the essential process of evapotranspiration. Evapotranspiration is the sum of water transfer to the atmosphere due to evaporation (from soil) and transpiration (from the metabolic processes of plants). This naturally occurring phenomenon, which separates water vapor from organic material, can be harnessed to safely process the nutrients of human waste while supporting the growth of edible fruits and vegetables.

Read more: EcoSanitation: Trading “Flush and Forget” for “Cycle and Sow” @ Engineering for Change.

Scientific Authority and Media Visibility of Climate Change Scientists and Contrarians

September 4, 2019 by kris de decker Filed Under: Media

“We juxtapose 386 prominent contrarians with 386 expert scientists by tracking their digital footprints across ∼200,000 research publications and ∼100,000 English-language digital and print media articles on climate change. Projecting these individuals across the same backdrop facilitates quantifying disparities in media visibility and scientific authority, and identifying organization patterns within their association networks.”

“Here we show via direct comparison that contrarians are featured in 49% more media articles than scientists. Yet when comparing visibility in mainstream media sources only, we observe just a 1% excess visibility, which objectively demonstrates the crowding out of professional mainstream sources by the proliferation of new media sources, many of which contribute to the production and consumption of climate change disinformation at scale.”

Source: Petersen, Alexander Michael, Emmanuel M. Vincent, and Anthony LeRoy Westerling. “Discrepancy in scientific authority and media visibility of climate change scientists and contrarians.” Nature communications 10.1 (2019): 1-14. Thanks to Julie Molinié.

Making a Cooling Chamber for Tomatoes

September 3, 2019 by kris de decker Filed Under: DIY, Random, Refrigeration

When you pick your tomatoes, if you want to keep them longer, you have to find a way of reducing the temperature. As availability of electricity at village level can be a problem, ways have to be found to lower the temperature of this fragile crop. Some farmers at Dambatta in Kano State, Nigeria have used local mud bricks to make a very effective cooling chamber. Watch the video at AccessAgriculture. Via Practical Action.

Tech Talks

September 3, 2019 by kris de decker Filed Under: Talks, Technology

Last week, I spoke at The Conference in Malmö, Sweden, where I saw quite some interesting tech talks. The super-efficient Swedes have already uploaded them, so I present you some of my favorites:

Next week, I’m doing a talk in Paris. Knowing the French a bit, these videos will never be uploaded, so be there.