Energy and Environment

Lots of discussion lately on energy. Many of you know that I investigated a solar panel installation for our house and decided to go forward with a 38 panel setup from Direct Energy. Unfortunately, our transformer is not capable of supporting another solar installation and our project is on hold.

If you are curious, here is some of the information I gathered in making my decision.

Going solar will save us up to $150 per month for 10 years then up to $350 per month after that. Not too shabby. There is the added bonus of supporting the emerging residential solar energy market which seems like a fine idea.

Beyond helping me by reducing my electric bill, why go with solar power? The problem we face with energy production is the tragedy of the commons. See the wikipedia definition and this dated yet relevant article here. The second article makes many interesting and controversial points. I found the comments about pollution relevant to contemporary concerns.

So if we all agree that the environment is changing in a way that humans will not like and we all agree that our current energy production infrastructure is a contributor we can influence, then the rest of this discussion will make sense. If we don't all agree with these two assertions, the rest of this discussion will be entertaining at best.

Given my current understanding of the environmental concerns, there are three things humans must do.

1) reduce green house gas production - carbon is the dominant contributor
2) invest in green house gas free energy infrastructure - several options exist here
3) research green house gas reduction - required to remove existing surplus

A few controversial proposals exist. None of these are free and none of these will show substantial impact in less than a few decades. Here are my favorites - they seem most likely to have positive impact.

1) augment new power installations with wind and solar

This will reduce the growth of green house gas production but not reduce the surplus.

2) explore alternate energy sources with no green house production

Combined with wind and solar, alternate energy sources will further limit new emissions. Nuclear from TerraPower is one option. Compact Fusion from Lockheed Martin is another option. There are several others.

3) research algae, iron fertilization, and other carbon sink strategies

There are many companies exploring this space. These may not be the best strategies but research here will inform alternate areas to explore.

It is not clear how we can make the green house gas problem go away. It is clear that taking some action will produce data we can use to inform our next action.

Music, Pictures, and Documents

Music life was simpler in 1985. All my music was on 43 cassette tapes that i kept in my car. Computer life was simpler too. All my documents were stored on floppy disks that I carried with me.

Now we have cloud based storage with many options. Some storage systems are easier for Mac users, others easier for Windows users, others are easier for use in a web browser or on a Chrome book. The number of options is staggering.

Over the past few months I've been exploring options for storing music, pictures, and documents in the cloud. It turns out my needs are not as simple as I hoped. There are several options for cloud storage but none of them are both simple and free. To minimize my exploration costs, I focused on the free options first. These are Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, and Apple's iCloud.

Cutting to the chase, I've landed on Apple's iTunes Match for music, iCloud for photos, MicroSoft's OneDrive for documents, and Google Photos for redundant photo storage.

Effectively I have five groups of data to manage.

1. Music
2. Photos
3. Personal documents
4. Work documents
5. iPhone backups

We have been a Mac for 10 years now. Windows dominated until the hard drive in our windows box died. Then we bought a Mac Mini and reused the existing screen, keyboard, and mouse. For fun, I purchased a Windows laptop last January but found it was too much overhead to relearn things I was comfortable with on Mac and I sent it back to the store. Now we have many Apple devices - phones, tablets, laptops, and a desktop. The Mac mini has been mothballed - let me know if you want it.

With the Mac as our primary computer, exploring Apple options seemed like a good place to start. Until last year, Apple's storage options were too pricy so we chose a local hard disk backup instead of cloud based backup. Now we can get 200GB of storage from Apple for about $36/year - all my photos fit there so we are good.

The music problem has been solved with iTunes match for quite a while. The new Apple Music option may get me to review this decision but I'm in no hurry - iTunes match works fine and it allows me to hear our music from all our devices. It also allows us to keep two local physical copies of every song in case of disk failure.

The photo storage problem was initially solved by a big internal hard disk and a big external hard disk for backups. This has been good. The downside is that we generally needed to manually backup phone data and pictures to the desktop computer. The backups became cumbersome. 

Enter iCloud Photo Library. 

With iCloud Photo Library. enabled, all our devices backup new photos to the cloud. We configured the desktop computer to download full resolution copies of all photos and the laptops only keep low resolution versions. Now with iCloud backup, we can see all our photos from any web browser on any device.

With the advent of low priced iCloud storage, iCloud Photo Library is a clear win. The price is low, the integration is tight, the mental overhead is minimal.

Google photos is a good system for backup from the phone. It is not fully compatible with iPhoto cloud library though and it causes the phone to run out of storage. My solution is to use the Google photos app for viewing photos and the Google Photos Mac application to upload the whole library to the cloud. I chose free unlimited storage which provides lower resolution pictures. One nice thing about Google Photos is the Assistant. Google periodically trolls through my photo library and creates collages or movies or stories then alerts me they are ready for viewing. Each alert is a quick walk down memory lane and quite fun.

But what about those documents? I've tried several options here.

1. DropBox
2. Google drive
3. iCloud drive
4. OneDrive

Though DropBox was our initial leader, it never got a strong presence. Google drive was good but initially I needed to manually copy files through the web browser - this was too cumbersome. iCloud drive felt like an island for a long time so it never got a fair shot. I settled on OneDrive for Office integration and the perception of integration with Sharepoint. I say perception because the integration is loose at best.

OneDrive for business has a similar interaction model to OneDrive - though the current Mac client is broken. The interaction model is to specify a folder on you local disk that OneDrive synchronizes to the cloud. This makes it very easy to do work off-line and synchronize later. Now I have a consistent model for working with personal and work documents. 

As an added bonus, our iPhones automatically back up to iCloud drive. This means that whenever  we update iOS or get a new phone, our settings and apps pickup right where we left off. Nice.

So music life was simpler in 1985. Documents and pictures were simpler too. But instead of loitering in 30 year old technology, I'm riding the wave and trying new things. Sometimes I wish technology would stop changing so quickly, it takes a lot of energy to keep up.

Christopher Columbus

Here's a controversial topic. My friend asked me why we celebrate Columbus day. I did not know so I did some research. In summary, it seems Columbus is shrouded in controversy. The controversy splits along these lines:

• If we as a nation want to celebrate exploration and exploitation of new things, Columbus is a great person to celebrate. 
• If we as a nation would rather celebrate humane progress towards agreed upon goals, we should celebrate something else.

Here are some things I found.

Enjoy!

Why celebrate Columbus? 

• After he found the Bahamas, other people followed his path
• Arguably this is the "event" that triggered western movement
• You could argue that someone else around the same time could have had the same impact, but there are no other historical figures mentioned in the articles I read.
• Followers of previous explorers stopped following before 1400
• Many vikings including Leif Ericson came over before 1400 but their cities died off and the next migration was not until 1721 - see this on Greenland

Why not celebrate Columbus?

• He killed many people to serve his needs - now considered genocide
• He started the slave trade - a substantial blemish on north american history

Why not celebrate Leif Ericson instead of Columbus? 

• Marketting - not enough people made a fuss about the Viking discoveries, many people made a fuss about the Italian discoveries
• Columbus' lasts through today - Ericson's impact ended in the early 1400s

Wikipedia says this:

Though Columbus may not have been the first European explorer to reach the Americas (having probably been preceded by the Norse expedition led by Leif Ericson in the 11th century^[3][4]), his voyages led to the first lasting European contact with the Americas, inaugurating a period of European exploration, conquest, and colonization that lasted for several centuries. These voyages had, therefore, an enormous impact in the historical development of the modern Western world. Columbus spearheaded the transatlantic slave trade and has been accused by several historians of initiating thegenocide of the Hispaniola natives. Columbus himself saw his accomplishments primarily in the light ofspreading the Christian religion.^[5]

See this

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/10/151011-columbus-day-leif-erikson-italian-americans-holiday-history/

And this

Even though Columbus was completely ignorant of the new continent he had encountered, his voyage changed the course of human history - fast. Within two years, the Pope had divided the so-called 'uncivilized world' between Portugal and Spain in a deal known as the Treaty of Tordesillas. The islands Columbus explored became known for all posterity as the West Indies, and the native inhabitants of the entire hemisphere became collectively known as Indians. Columbus was followed by wave upon wave of European explorers and conquerors motivated by God, gold, and glory.

Stolen from here:

http://study.com/academy/lesson/effects-of-european-colonization-christopher-columbus-and-native-americans.html