Category Archives: infrastructure

Marabunta!

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My friendly neighborhood spidey-librarian got me a copy of Six Legs Better – a book I’ve been interested in reading since Pluvialis pointed me at Charlotte Sleigh in a comment she made. I’m only 60 or so pages into it, but so far it’s really interesting – an examination of how the study of ants has linked back to larger topics in science and society. A nice middle ground between faux-Kuhnian relativism and ivory tower idealized science (Pluvi – what’s the right word for the latter?):

The scientists and naturalists discussed in this book studied ants for their own sake, and often did so with remarkable passion. They did not merely adopt ants instrumentally as vehicles for social and political agendas. Yet neither could they step outside the cultural frames within which they operated. In each case there was a two-way traffic between science and broader culture, with the culture shaping the questions posed by scientists and the scientific answers in turn directing cultural views, reinforcing or slowly altering conceptions of the natural and its significance for the human condition.*

To go along with the reading, I moved The Naked Jungle to the top of my Netflix queue. I gotta admit – all I remembered of the movie (from a Saturday morning creature feature long ago) were the !attack of the marabunta! scenes – turns out the movie is mostly about Christopher Leiningen’s psycho-sexual confusion regarding his mail-order bride. I can’t decide what the right frame is to put around Chuck Heston’s scenery-chewing – 50’s? Turn of the century? 1954’s idea of 1901? Or how it looks from where I sit right now? I couldn’t for the life of me move out of my right-here-right-now reaction to Leiningen’s problem – in a phrase, what a douchebag. Leiningen freaks when he finds out that his talented, pleasant and very attractive new wife is a widow – yes kids, another man has already had carnival knowledge of her. This is an especially serious issue because Leiningen is a virgin. I guess he has some 1st time performance concerns. Pinhead. I’ve been listening to a lot of Elvis Costello recently – Mystery Dance fits, but I really like these two bits from Two Little Hitlers:

You call selective dating
For some effective mating

…

You say you’ll never know him
He’s an unnatural man
He doesn’t want your pleasure
He wants as no one can
He wants to know the names of
All those he’s better than

But, of course, the ants (standing in for the rainforest/Ma Nature) are held off, and Joanna Leiningen’s bravery wins her husbands heart. Yay!

Went off to the Manchvegas herp show on Saturday to pick up various and sundry food items. Andy the phasmid guy was there and had some young Macleay’s Spectres (Extatosoma tiaratum) – I couldn’t resist. I’ll post some pix when she’s a little bigger. In reading up on their natural history, I was semi-surprised to find a commensal relationship with – you got it – ants:

The outside material of E. tiaratum eggs consists of lipids and other organic compounds that ants identify as food. They carry these eggs to their colony, consume the edible outer portion, and dump the intact eggs into their waste piles.

Newly-hatched E. tiaratum nymphs are ant mimics and resemble the insects in whose nest they are born. Their aposematic pattern — orange head, white collar, the rest black — mimics the ant genus Leptomyrmex and makes them appear toxic. Although most adult stick insects are notoriously slow, these nymphs are speedy, active, and quickly make their way to the trees.*

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Last, but not least, this post over at BLDGBLOG caused me to immediately order Ant Farm: Living Archive 7(yes, I know I’m pushing it, connection-wise). It came in on Saturday – I haven’t had a chance to do more than leaf through it, but chapter/section/part III looks esp good – “Projects for a New Mobility”. Ferrocement! Inflatable structures! Media/culture jamming! Info on a current Ant Farm project here.

Got a message, number 419

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Dear American:I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.I am working with Mr. Phil Gram, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. This transactin is 100% safe.This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.Yours Faithfully Minister of Treasury Paulson *

Via BB

This isn’t intended for me, I don’t think.
It’s a missive from the edge of despair, I mean brink
of total desperation; the communication therein
says her hopes for survival are slim
and she’s writing to the Front, though we’ve yet to meet,
with a confidential matter ‘cause she’s heard I’m discreet.
And the urgency of her request for my aid
is matched by the depth of the trust she displayed.
“Don’t betray me like our oil minister did (staged a coup).
And I’m about to flee Nigeria soon
but I’ll never make it out,” she says, with twenty million
three hundred twenty thousand US dollars that are still in
her possession. She embezzled them, I guess.
Look, I don’t really know her so uh… that’s none of my business.
She’s the LADY MARYAM ABACHA, deposed.
These days, can’t even get her caps-lock key unfroze. *

Jim “Mr. Happy” Kunstler:

Last week’s ripe moment turned out to be the Thursday night Washington photo op when Treasury Secretary Paulson and Fed Chief Bernanke emerged from a huddle with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and just about every other legislative eminentissimo in an attempt to reassure the nation that its financial system had not turned into something like unto a truckload of stinking dead carp. I don’t know about you, but I got two distinct vibes from the faces in that particular tableau: 1.) abject fear, and 2.) a total lack of conviction that they knew what they were doing.
The product of that huddle was a cockamamie scheme for the US treasury to absorb all the losses from a twenty-year binge in which Wall Street created and retailed the most complex set of swindles ever seen on this planet Earth. The background music to the tableau was the whoosh of a several trillion dollars exiting the US financial system never to be seen again.
The next day (Friday) many particulars of that scheme began to emerge — such as the complete lack of oversight and review mechanisms for Treasury’s new power to monetize private business failures and frauds — and the stock market soared in response. Other new features of the reformed capital landscape also resolved later that day, like a new experiment aimed at eliminating the short sale as a way of guaranteeing that henceforth market bets could only be placed on the upside of the table. It will be interesting to see how that reform works out in the days ahead.
Over the weekend, all these various playerz retreated into their gilded bunkers to negotiate the details, and by Sunday night, among other things, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley — the two remaining investment giants left standing — announced that they would metamorphose into regular banks in order to qualify for additional truckloads of government loans in exchange for any leftover fraudulant securities still lurking in their vaults. Another new provision had the Treasury rescuing swindled foreign companies, too — in effect, saving the world, which seemed at least, how you say, pretty ambitious.

And, lest I be accused of quoting exclusively from one side of the spectrum – and I’d remind folks that what with the current Republican administration having nationalized AIG, one may want to be careful about slinging ‘socialist’ as an insult – one from Daniel Larison at The American Conservative (AmConMag = paleocon in most taxonomies – it labors under the twin disadvantages of consistency and truthfulness):

During the months before the invasion of Iraq, I often heard or read the claim that we had to defer to the government, because they “knew more” than the rest of us, which meant that if they claimed a dire threat was on the horizon there really was a dire threat on the horizon.  As it turned out, they knew scarcely more than the average well-informed citizen, and much of what they thought they knew was wrong.  There was a broad, international consensus of supposed experts that did not doubt the severity of what turned out to be a non-existent threat, and this consensus held despite an acknowledged lack of reliable information.  Indeed, the consensus thrived on the impossibility of proving a negative.  Except for a relative handful of dissenters, who were either ignored or dismissed as cranks, the people in the relevant policy community acquiesced or kept quiet, and the average citizen looked at the near-unanimity of supposed experts acknowledging the severity of the threat and took it far more seriously than he would have ever done otherwise.  Instead of asking who benefited from building up the threat, people were cowed into taking the threat for granted and accepting more or less unquestioningly government proposals for addressing it.  To be part of the mainstream conversation, one had to admit first of all that the threat was real and serious, at which point the debate was really already over.

This strangely misplaced confidence in government expertise seems to have returned.  This time people seem to be inclined to defer to government claims because the situation really is quite serious and the problem at hand is fairly complex, which makes it much easier to confess a lack of expertise, yield to expert opinion and say, “Well, we have to trust the government–the alternative is unthinkable!”  If the last few years have shown anything, I would have thought they would have taught us to recognize this sort of browbeating as a means to shut down critical thought and skepticism.  The people who sold a war of choice as a war of necessity are now telling us that yet another emergency measure is absolutely necessary, which makes me think that it is distinctly possible that it is not.  The language of necessity in turn feeds the public’s fear that things must be so bad that they should not question the principle behind the emergency measure.  They can, as half-hearted critics of the invasion did, quibble about means and process, and at this point that is all we are seeing from most members of Congress, but they are not supposed to doubt the necessity of acting and acting now.

I’ve already written about taking a deep breath and counting to ten – what about the current situation requires us to act NOW NOW NOW NOW? Weren’t we being assured a week or two ago that everything was under control – by the very same people who are now predicting total world economic collapse? Were they lying then? Lying now? Incorrect then/now/both? Why do they need all the money up front?

falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

On a somewhat lighter note, I fully support this suggestion made by Tanta over at CR:

What I really really like is the idea of subjecting CEOs to the same petty humiliation everyone else gets treated to. I suggest that for every separate asset these CEOs sell to the government, they be required to write a Hardship Letter over a 1010 warning (that’s a reference to the statute forbidding lying in order to get a loan) explaining why they acquired or originated this asset to begin with, what’s really wrong with it in detail, what they have learned from this experience, and what steps they are taking to make sure it never happens again. Furthermore, the Treasury Department will empanel a committee of the oldest, most traditional, and bitterest mortgage loan underwriters–preferably those downsized to make way for automated underwriting systems–to review these letters and opine on their acceptability.

And on a much, much lighter note, if you are not aware of all Internet traditions and thus don’t get the reference in the picture above, hie thee over to Failblog, instanter.

Now – I hope – back to dogs, bugs, birds, etc. On deck – ants! Zombie bears (and how do walruses relate?)!

More fun with signs.

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Make your own gas station sign here – via Bruce Sterling, who also gives us a link to an article in the Australian:

There is instead a new reality: the greatest transfer of income in human history, away from energy importers such as the US to energy exporters; the rise of a new breed of wealthy autocracies that cripple US hopes of dominating the global system; and demands on the US to make fresh compromises in a world where power is rapidly being diversified.

Despite cyclical fluctuations, world oil and energy prices will stay high, driven by long-run changes in supply and demand. This provokes a global wealth redistribution without precedent to oil exporters, mainly in the Middle East and Russia, that marches in tandem with China’s export-driven current account surplus.

Jott

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A little more about Jott, to follow up on the brief post below… Jott is, at core, a speech-to-text application. It’s the input and output options that make it – IMHO – very cool. The primary input feeder is a phone – dial Jott, tell it where you want the message to go and start talking. When you’re done, pause – Jott will say “Got it” and queue up the message to be processed into text and sent. Output options include:

  • Send an email message to yourself. This was what got me interested in Jott in the first place. I find myself having ideas or thinking of some little thing I really ought to do only to have the thought go on sabbatical (if it’s something I need to do, it usually returns as I’m trying to go to sleep – if it’s a good idea, it may never come back). Now I can make a quick phone call and jott myself a note.
  • Send an email and a text message to someone else. I used this today – sent a message to someone: “Call me once you’ve started your day.”
  • Send an update to Twitter. Very handy for those of us without qwerty keypads on our phones – at least that subset who are pathetic at numpad texting (I’m a member).
  • Add an item to a list. Jott accounts are provisioned with a To Do List already included  – I’ve added a list for blog post topics. Grocery lists, people to murther, the possibilities are endless.
  • Post to your blog. Moblog mastery!

For the coolest, most mind bending, creatively playful use of Jott ever, click here. It’s a two species blog post – bravo RKO’C!

Doomed

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I was running errands this morning; listened to an interesting edition of The Exchange – NHPR’s morning call in program. Today’s topic was “Economic Turbulence in the Friendly Skies!” – a survey of the (sorry) state of the US domestic air carriers. If you’re interested, you can listen at the link above or download an mp3 here. The talk about the new baggage fees (we get to pay for the privilege of having the carrier lose our luggage and/or have sticky fingered TSA employees help themselves) motivated me to call in – I expressed my disappointment with the current state of the skies and ranted a bit about my efforts to fly as little as possible (it was a little better than yelling, “You kids! Get off my lawn!”, but not by much).

After thinking about it a bit, I find it difficult to imagine how the airlines are going to dig out of the hole they find themselves in. Let’s take some of the points made on the show and see what they indicate.

Fuel costs. I just don’t see fuel costs dropping significantly in the medium to long term. High prices will drive down consumption and cause (I hope) some innovation – it’s clear that we need to stop being such hydrocarbon junkies – but the world will continue to bid up the price of oil as living standards rise. Falling living standards – a crash or a long period of stagflation – is another possibility, but that bring it’s own set of issues – economic disaster is a possibility, but difficult to predict. The airlines are going to have to deal with $170/barrel (their cost) fuel – praying for an improbability (cheap oil) is not a business plan.

The Faustian Ticket Bargain. American casual fliers have gotten used to  crazy-cheap air fare. Folks expect to be able to fly just about anywhere in the US for a few hundred dollars. David Field called these folks ‘low yield’ passengers – I’m reminded of the old joke about selling below cost – how does one make up the difference? Volume! Can some of the incremental stuff (baggage charges, etc.) extract enough money to make low-yield passengers worthwhile?

Business Travelers.  The holy grail of the airline business. Some business travel is unavoidable, but as costs go up businesspeople will travel less (duh!). Conventional wisdom seems to be that companies love sending people on the road. That may be true (not sure at all) for sales/marketing types – the marketroids may be the airlines core constituency. For non wining-and-dining applications information is relatively cheap to move when compared with kilos of mass. Already, folks are meeting in virtual environments – expect more/better.

The thing airlines offer is speed. Speed comes at a price – airplanes are inefficient. In the short to medium term, fuel efficiency is going to be more and more important (I’ll bet you can get a hell of a deal on an SUV at any dealership in the US right now). What the airline industry will look like in 5 years is anybody’s guess, but I’ll bet it’ll be smaller and tickets will cost a lot more. Whether customer service remains as awful – I’m a pessimist at heart…

Arcologies, Urbmon 116 and protocols

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Summary – folks who are designing super-mega-structures are missing the boat. Designing interfaces/protocols to allow pieces of very large structures to link to each other is, as far as I’m concerned, much cooler.

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I’ve long been a fan of very large structures – I discovered Paolo Soleri and arcologies via the Whole Earth Catalog many years ago and was fascinated by the scale and organic beauty of many of his designs. Sci fi – generation ships/space habitats and Robert Silverberg’s dystopian The World Inside – helped fan the flames. I’ve been thinking big again – the past couple days have been one of those ‘the internet is telling you something’ experiences.

It (re)started two days ago when Bruce Sterling put up a link to an Inhabitat post: MILE HIGH ULTIMA TOWER: Vertical eco city works like a tree. What struck me – not for the first time – is how static this thing would be. It’s supposed to hold a million people – we’re talking all of Detroit or Birmingham or Adelaide. None of those cities is finished, in the sense that a building can be said to be finished – they’re churning, tearing up/down, growing/shrinking – there’s no point at which the prime contractor turns the keys over to the developer. Does it make sense to think that a million person structure would be a scaled up Petronas Towers?

While I was visiting Inhabitat, I indulged my curiosity a bit – I searched for ‘shipping containers’ – I keep thinking about putting some containers together as (hopefully) very low cost shelter out in the hinterlands someplace (maybe something Bruce Goff-esque – Bavinger or Bob Barns, using containers, phone poles and cable – yes, I’m a hack and a nut). Sniffing around led me to Lot-ek (warning – they’ll resize windows on you and the site is set up in a way that makes linking to specific pages impossible – I recommend you just take a peek at the screen cap below). They’ve not only designed small container based houses; they’ve also put together plans for larger structures.

Lot-ek Train Station

Shipping containers are well defined – sizes, how they fit together – but as far as componentry in a larger structure is concerned, the definition is pretty shallow – no power, water, or other services in or out.

Geoff Manaugh’s (BLDGBLOG) Flickrstream supplied the final thread (he put up this post as I wrote the last para). The idea of floating cities has been, well, floating around for a while – the ultimate pirate utopia. Governance issues aside, seems to me that this could be a fruitful area for work on interface specifications. Just as the internet doesn’t care if you are sitting in front of a Mac, or are telneted into an IBM z-series or are using WebTV (does that still exist?) as long as you comply with relevant RFCs, so too Floatopia-land shouldn’t care what your bobbing pleasure palace looks like as long as it connects to the rest of the structure in a specific way, it’s sized in multiples of X by Y by Z, complies with stability standard 1.1.1, etc. The marine environment is pretty unforgiving – marine architecture isn’t a specific field for nothin’ – but the safety and survivability problems need to be addressed regardless. RFC 1149 meets The Raft from Stephenson’s Snow Crash – let’s float!

More Nokia fun (elsewhere)

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Some people (me) post GPS data from lame little trips on Rte. 128. Others – see here – post data on bar-hopping. In this case, the bars are floating on the igarapé do Tarumã Açu (a tributary of the Rio Negro), just west of Manaus. I’ve got radio towers and he has peacock bass – don’t know about you, but I’d rather be there.

I’m working on converting Mr. Lawrence’s track data to something that’ll show a path in Google Earth – so far, I’ve gotten waypoints and that may be where it ends – we’ll see.

Exchange and the web

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As I’ve mentioned previously, I’ve been doing a bit of thinking about how technology – in particular, networking – has been changing ‘stuff’ and how we acquire same. First, a couple caveats. This applies only to parts of the world wealthy enough to allow big pieces of their population to stop worrying about starving or dying of malaria/diarrhea/etc. – too often, these sorts of posts ignore the fact that there are a huge number of people who don’t worry about Mac vs. PC; they’re worrying about bad water vs. civil conflict. Also, I’m going to make a few plain ol’ assertions. I’m hoping they will be uncontroversial, but if not feel free to ket me know why you think I’m off base.

First assertion – the networked world gives us more information than we could have dreamed of, say, fifteen years ago. The span is both wide and deep – especially interesting for my purposes, has been the explosion of how-to info: Make:, Instructables and various subject specific forums.

Second assertion – the networked world reduces friction when trying to exchange things – eBay, Etsy, Lulu and (importantly) all the places folks gather to collaborate (think SourceForge, for example) and swap ideas.

…And an observation. It seems that as the world becomes more info -dense (I was going to say richer – in the $$ sense – but I’m not sure that’s the case), people’s appetite for uniqueness explodes. The crap we surround ourselves with has always had, as part of it’s purpose, a role in identifying us – we signal things to the world about our identity through our clothes, cars, etc. (but not our books, dammit). There’s a lot of give and take here – people want to show they are part of a big (mainstream culture) tribe, thus NASCAR stickers/clothing/etc. while drilling down into sub-tribes (Calvin pissing on a Ford, Calvin pissing on #24). Some people may drill down until they are a tribe of one – others start there – using their own taste as a guide (for better or worse).

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In the great internet tradition of 4-panes, I back-of-the-enveloped the diagram above; I think it plays well with unfounded speculation about modes of exchange. Before I talk about some of the panes, another assertion: markets are one way of allocating resources and exchanging stuff. They are not the only way (think reciprocity, barter, command economies, etc.) and may or may not be appropriate for every circumstance (see the use of magic market pixie dust in CPA Iraq).

Quadrant 4 – physical commodity items – was where the vast majority of post Industrial Revolution, pre 1945 activity took place and it still, I think, conditions how we think of exchange. This is the part of life where neoclassical economics got it’s start and still retains a lot of power (other things being equal). One note on the Scion xB – I moved it (right) away from the pure physical zone because there is significant software in automobiles today and included an arrow attempting to show a trend towards customization – modding xBs is part of Toyota’s marketing appeal/effort.

Looking at quadrant 2 as it edges to the upper right, it seems to me that more abstract and unique stuff lives in the world of gift exchange. As an abstract becomes less unique (drops down) , markets get involved – with differing degrees of success. The key issue, I think, is that in a society with ubiquitous digital technology, copying abstract stuff is not just trivial – it’s how things work. Extracting money from certain instances of copying (yes when I copy from the iTunes store, no when I sync my iPod, no when the song is copied from the drive to the DSP) is, empirically, problematic. Quadrant 3 is the world of the RIAA (suing our customers for a brighter tomorrow!) , the MPAA and others who are trying to maintain an analog (LPs, film) hold on a world where the copying djin has been released.

Quadrant 1 is the world of the hardware hacker, the maker, the english wheel and the torch. It’s the next big area of change IMHO (I think the revolution is well underway already – but there’s much more to come). As the xB shows, it’s where a lot of people want to do business. To be successful in this space, connection to the designer/maker, uniqueness and elegance are key. There are livings to be made here by people who are good at what they do. Simply having an idea and milking it won’t do though – the design/idea behind a physical object will be increasingly digitized and in a world of fabbers, a knockoff is just a 3D scan away. We may end up in a world of feedstocks, commodities (including unique/custom items knocked off in a fabber, based on a common software template), and craft – craft items being those things with a tie back to a human being that you as a consumer have developed some kind of real relationship with.

To put some of this in context, let me cite the example of a webcomic artist that I’m sorta familiar with. rtevens writes diesel sweeties. The core of his vast empire is a gift – he makes the 1s and 0s that comprise a strip available w/o charge to anyone who wants to look. He sells ad space on the site – converting eyeballs/clicks into revenue. He sells t-shirts – physical instantiation of POV and in-jokes from the strip – both niche-y and tribal (also socks). I’m sure he’d be unhappy is someone knocked his shirts off, but he churns them – some drop into the void; others are created. He’s definitely working in the top half of the chart – using (2) and (3) to drive each other. Not surprisingly, he’s got a very active web presence – encouraging that feeling of connection with the artist/maker.

So there it is. For non-commodity items: connection, uniqueness, gifts, standing against the fact that anything can be copied. For commodity items, the desire to move above the horizontal line – to differentiate. I’m sure there’s a lot to disagree with above – feel free – just an interim stab at figuring out the lay of the land; one that’s particularly important to me since both my chillun are artist/designer/craftsperson types.

Nokia N810 nav functions

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The N810 I recently purchased has a built in GPS receiver. I had a drive to do this morning and figured I’d put it to the route-finding test. There was very little route to find – directions were about as easy as can be imagined – a perfect first outing. Call me conservative, but I prefer to shake things down before I’m in desperate need of them (when possible). There are two options, as far as I can tell, on the N810:

  • Wayfinder comes preloaded on the N810 with a big caveat – to get route finding, you need to spend $$ to upgrade to the ‘full’ version. At this point it looks like a 36 month subscription is about $140 – too rich for my blood.
  • Maemo Mappper is a free open source app that’s a one-click install, To get voice directions you also need to install flite, so maybe I should characterize it as a two-clicker.

I spent 10 minutes or so yesterday with Maemo Mapper – figuring out how to ask for directions, download maps along the route, etc. First thing this morning, I fired up Mapper and set out. A note on the N810’s GPS performance – every review you read says the same thing – it takes forever for the receiver to find satellites. True fact. I think my ancient Garmin 12XL comes up faster. However, once it’s up the N810 does a great job staying connected. I drove with the little beastie on the passenger seat (the Garmin would have lost signal for sure) and it knew where I was throughout the trip. No tunnels – it would be interesting to see how quickly it re-composed itself once above ground again – but as I said, baby steps. The voice directions were just fine; standard syntho-voice, something I prefer – don’t startle me with a “who the heck is in the car?” moment. All in all, a positive experience – encouraging for the first time out.

Mapper generates a track as you move – I saved the ‘going away’ track and loaded it to my server. Right-click here, choose save link as and it’ll load into Google Earth like a charm. Some pics from the ride:

Local point of interest

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Navigator/radio operator’s station

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Got the radio on

I’m like the roadrunner

Alright

I’m in love with modern moonlight

128 when it’s dark outside

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(I’ll bet a million bucks Steve knows exactly where these antennae are.)

Trash to gas to steam to electricity and heat

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A recent BLDBLOG post gave me the motivation I needed to do some photography and (brief) posting that has been on my ‘ought to get to that at some point’ list for six months. Last fall I noticed a lot of digging and pipe laying near home and on my drive to work. I was curious, but didn’t figure out what was going on until a story on the radio clued me in. The University of New Hampshire and Waste Management are collaborating on a project: EcoLine.

In 2008, UNH will become the first university in the U.S. to use landfill gas as its primary energy source. In partnership with Waste Management of New Hampshire, Inc., UNH launched EcoLine, a landfill gas project that will pipe enriched and purified gas from Waste Management’s landfill in Rochester to the Durham campus. The renewable, carbon-neutral landfill gas, from Waste Management’s Turnkey Recycling and Environmental Enterprise (TREE) facility in Rochester, NH, will replace commercial natural gas as the primary fuel in UNH’s cogeneration plant in January 2009, enabling UNH to receive 80-85% of its energy from a renewable source and sell additional power produced to the grid by mid-2009. Construction began in 2007 on thelandfill gas processing plant in Rochester that will purify the gas and on the 12.7 mile underground pipeline taht [sic – glad I’m not the only one taht does taht] will transport the gas from the plant to the university’s Durham campus.

I took some pictures this morning between deluges as I ran some errands – slide show is below. UNH’s cogen plant’s website is here. In a laudable bit of transparency (way to go!) they allow you to log in to a guest account on their monitoring system – the diagrams in the slideshow are screencaps of the monitor that I grabbed. If you’re really curious – I’ve mapped the pictures on Flickr – you can click through to see where this is happening.


Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.