There is a new Big Thing coming. I’m not talking about the election, but a deep secular cycle in technology that has enormous implications for our economy. The pessimists are wrong about the end of innovation, and growth, just as they have been serially wrong for as long as there’s been techno-pessimists and intellectual Malthusians. But the…
This past Sunday, investigative journalists at The New York Times created something of a furor in the dweeb-o-sphere with a lengthy article titled Power, Pollution and the Internet: The Cloud Factories. “A yearlong examination by The New York Times has revealed that [the] foundation of the information industry is sharply at odds with its image…
“As the use of the Internet continues to grow and massive computing facilities are demanding that performance keep doubling, devoting corresponding increases in the nation’s electrical energy capacity to computing may become too expensive.” [National Academy of Sciences] A central tenet of nearly all Internet energy forecasts is that there will continue to be improvements…
Around the world when countries make major oil and gas discoveries there follows if not celebrating in the streets, high fives in the halls of governments. It’s no surprise. The world runs on hydrocarbons, and will for a long time. If you find ‘em, you can cut your import deficits. And if you have enough,…
“Welcome to EARTH — a highly ambitious [European Union] … project, investigating the energy efficiency of mobile communication systems." … Mobile telecommunication networks are increasingly contributing to global energy consumption. So, does efficiency, less energy per unit of traffic, cut demand?
Summer’s not over until September 21st. There’s still time for productive summer reading. Here’s three new books, each with deep relevance to issues of our times.
