Tag: energy

Tech in the 603, The Granite State Hacker

Champions of Disruption

Jim Wilcox (The Granite State Hacker)

I’ve been noticing lately that truely interesting things only happen on the “edge”. Everything is energy, and everything happens at the point where energy flows are disrupted.

If you don’t believe me, just ask Mother Nature. Take solar energy. Powerful energy flows from our sun and saturates our solar system… but all the amazing things happen where that energy flow is disrupted. The Earth disrupts it, and the result, in this case, is merely life as we know it.

It’s so primal that we’ve abstracted the concept of energy flows, and call it (among other things) currency. When we sell a resource (a form of energy, in a sense), we even call that change “liquidation”.

Sure, potential energy has value, but there are no edges in a region of potential energy. Potential energy is usually static, consistent, and only really exciting for what it could do or become, rather than what it currently is.

Likewise, it’s where disruptions occur that there’s business to be done.

According to this article on Information Week, CIO/CTO’s appear to have generally become change-averse order takers. Surveys cited indicate that many shops are not actively engaged in strategy or business process innovation.

Perhaps they’re still feeling whipped by the whole “IT / Business Alignment” malignment. Maybe they’re afraid of having business process innovation through technology innovation come off as an attempt to drive the business. Ultimately, it seems many are going into survival mode, setting opportunity for change asside in favor of simply maintaining the business.

Maybe the real challenge for IT is to help business figure out that innovation is change, and change is where the action is.

In any case, it seems there’s a lot of potential energy building up out there.

The disruptions must come. Will you be a witness, a victim, or a champion of them?

Tech in the 603, The Granite State Hacker

Energy Productization

Jim Wilcox (The Granite State Hacker)

I think the ITER project, a grand-scale fusion project, is interesting. I’m troubled with it for a few reasons, though. I can’t help but think that there’s only a few reasons that we need it, and most of them have to do with power… of a controlling nature.

There’s already a great big huge fusion reactor throwing more energy at us than we can collect, let alone use… every single day… the sun.

Efforts to create fusion reactors here on earth are great for these reasons:
1) Energy for space exploration
2) Productization of energy
3) Weapons innovation

Once we learn how fusion’s done, we can build space craft from it that could potentially get us somewhere in the galaxy. That’s all well and good, but will it happen before we poison our existing biosphere?

Once we have fusion reactors, energy moguls can sell it. Oh, great! Instead of energy productization through oil, we get energy productization through fusion… because we can’t all have one of these great big huge reactors in our basements. At least it’s renewable. If the moguls are benevolent, it might even be cheap.

Finally, once we have fusion reactors like this, we’ll learn new ways to blow ourselves out of our collective misery… so I suppose the first two points are mute once this comes along.