Simulation suggests Musk's Hyperloop "quite viable"

Ashlee Vance, writing for Businessweek:

Ansys, the maker of very high-end simulation software used to design planes, trains, automobiles and all manner of other things, has fed the Hyperloop specifications into a computer and come away impressed.

“I don’t immediately see any red flags,” says Sandeep Sovani, the director of land transportation strategy at Ansys. “I think it is quite viable.”

The biggest problems with hyperloop aren’t engineering related, they’re the same thing that trouble other large transit projects—soaring budgets, NIMBYs, and politics. A lot of things are technically possible, just not practical (in the broad sense of the word).

Germany's energy transition at critical stage

Melissa Eddy and Stanley Reed, reporting for the New York Times:

“We are now coming to a critical stage, and all the politicians are aware of this,” said Udo Niehage, Siemens’s point person for the transition. “The costs are becoming high, maybe too high, and you have to look at the consequences for the competitiveness of our industry in Germany.”

Rivaling the costs are the logistical challenges of eventually shifting 80 percent of energy consumption to renewable sources, something that has never been tried on such a grand scale.

One of the first obstacles encountered involves the vagaries of electrical power generation that is dependent on sources as inconsistent and unpredictable as the wind and the sun.

Mentioned in this article—though perhaps not emphasized as much as it should be—is Germany’s knee-jerk reaction following Fukushima to shut down their nuclear power plants by 2022. If there’s one source of predictable, carbon-free energy that can be built anywhere, it’s nuclear, but they’ve taken that off the table and so rely on dirty coal plants to make up the difference. As a result, their emissions are higher now, not lower.

Cars by the minute

PSM reader Paul Beard alerted me to this newish short-term car rental service, car2go, which charges by the minute. It’s not substantially different from other short-term rental services like ZipCar, but experimentation here is a good thing.

(I have a hard time calling these “car sharing” services because fundamentally they’re businesses, not co-ops.)

How Gothic Architecture Took Over the American College Campus

Robinson Meyer, writing for The Atlantic:

American schools didn’t always look this way. A little more than a century ago, there was no cachet in being an “old college,” and there was little cachet, too, in having the old architecture to match it. But a combination of forces—some cultural, some economic—transformed the appearance of American institutions, and made the modern-day college campus take its contemporary appearance and mythology.

The Search for a Better Delivery Truck System for Old, Narrow European Streets

Feargus O’Sullivan, writing for the Atlantic Cities:

To clear streets of peak-hour trucks and make delivery swifter, City Move has developed a new container system that blends design features from both container shipping and post office boxes. They call this system, successfully piloted in Lyon last year, the Bentobox, presumably because its different compartments resemble a Japanese lunchbox. The Bentobox is effectively a large cart into which any number of different-sized storage containers can be slotted. A set of these boxes can be wheeled easily up a ramp into a truck, speeding up loading times.

The boxes are then shipped to small downtown storage facilities, where customers can pick up their goods when it suits them, opening their allotted container with a password, pre-delivered by SMS, that is entered at a touchscreen docking station.

Coca Cola, USDA sign watershed restoration pact

Canny timing on the part of Coca Cola, which signed the agreement last Friday. The premise is pretty straightforward—the soft drink company needs lots of clean water to sell as water and sugared up water, and one of the cheapest ways to do that is to restore vegetation in watersheds. By 2020, the company claims they’ll “replenish” as much water as they use. (In quotes because how that’s defined will likely be a subject to interpretation—see carbon offsets for an example.)

Wetlands are your best neighbor in a flood

If you want proof of the utility of wetlands in a flood, look no further than Longmont, Colorado. The massive flooding there has washed out roads, flooded basements, and made lakes out of farm fields. I was watching footage from a helicopter survey of the flooding when I noticed the scene above. The dry-looking green section to the right of the homes is a wetland, they told me. The homes next to it, while a bit higher in elevation, look to be doing just fine.

Meteorology and geography collide in Colorado flooding

Monte Morin, writing for the LA Times:

Though about a decade of drought has diminished vegetation that might otherwise work to slow rain runoff, urban development has also created areas where rainfall moves rapidly across populated areas.

“Of course, over the years, Boulder has grown and grown and like most cities, the more it grows, the worse the runoff gets,” Patzert said. “That’s because there’s more parking lots, more driveways, more roads, etc.”

MBTA map redesigns

The transit system here in the Boston area is a mishmash of systems built over nearly 200 years. It’s complex and oftentimes confusing to navigate, so the MBTA is seeking help in redesigning its map. They’re down to six finalists, the winner of which may be used as the new map (the MBTA isn’t making any promises, apparently). Andy Woodruff critiques the final six over at Bostonography.

Can ‘Hot or Not’ Help Us Design Better Cities?

Liz Stinson, writing for Wired:

Social scientists have long suspected that a neighborhood’s aesthetic value might be a good gauge of its safety and vitality, but the proof was slippery. After all, it’s not easy to quantify an emotional response to a graffiti tag. But two years ago, that’s exactly what a group of researchers from MIT’s media lab did.

The team built Place Pulse, an online tool that enabled them to gather empirical data on how a city’s architecture, design and general aesthetic affect its social and economic outcomes. Place Pulse is basically a website that encourages visitors to rank two side-by-side images of cities on the basis of their appearance. Using randomly chosen Google Street View images from Boston, New York City, and Linz and Salzburg in Austria, the site asked questions like: Which place looks safer or which place looks more upper-class?

I can see this being useful, but I can also see it reinforcing long-held notions that may need to be revised.

Yellow warblers protect Costa Rica's coffee crop

Traci Watson, writing for Nature:

A study found that insectivorous birds cut infestations by the beetle Hypothenemus hampei by about half, saving a medium-sized coffee farm up to US$9,400 over a year’s harvest — roughly equal to Costa Rica’s average per-capita income. The results, published in Ecology Letters, not only offer hope to farmers battling the beetle, but also provide an incentive to protect wildlife habitat: the more forest grew on and near a coffee farm, the more birds the farm had, and the lower its infestation rates were.

How Green Is a Tesla?

Will Oremus, writing for Mother Jones:

How green is it, really?

The quick answer: If current trends hold, it could be pretty darn green in the long run. But as of today, the calculation isn’t as straightforward as you might think.

As is often the case, geography matters.

Melting to Keep Cool

Phil McKenna, writing for NOVA Next:

The incredible energy density of [phase-change materials] is a result of something known as the heat of fusion. In the case of melting ice, thermal energy is required to break hydrogen bonds between individual molecules. When water freezes, thermal energy is released as new bonds form.

And:

In recent years, research on PCMs has moved beyond water and ice to a vast number of new materials with a wide array of melting temperatures and applications. Some of the new materials will help keep us cool, while others will store energy at temperatures so high they would make us melt. Collectively, they will help us use existing energy supplies more efficiently, which may ultimately keep the entire planet from overheating.

A small experiment with solar

Brendon Slotterback tries solar as an alternative to fossil-fuel powered backup generators:

As far as a back-up power source, this set up would power my refrigerator for about 12 hours, and our 8.8 cubic foot chest freezer for about 24 hours.

Swapping corn for rice

Yale e360:

Four years ago, the Chinese government began paying farmers to grow corn instead, which requires less water and leads to less fertilizer and sediment runoff than rice farming. Now, water quality tests show that fertilizer runoff declined sharply, the researchers found, and the amount of reservoir water available to Beijing and surrounding areas has increased.

Odd idea of the day

BBC Future:

Have you ever been stuck on a pavement between slow pedestrians who stop you getting past. Those slow coaches waste our time and reduce productivity, and they drive me mad. The solution? Pavements should be sectioned into three lanes: slow, middle and fast – just like motorways.

Population and job growth

Binyamin Appelbaum, writing for the New York Times:

The share of American adults with jobs fell slightly to 58.6 percent in August as population growth outpaced job growth.

Christopher Mims suggests this could be “what the robot economy looks like“. He might be right.

Appelbaum again:

Why are more Americans choosing not to work?

If Mims is right, “choose” is the wrong word to use here.

'Green' sprawl is still sprawl

Kaid Benfield:

Even the greenest development in the wrong location will create more environmental problems than it will solve.  Of course, that doesn’t stop developers’ and architects’ green puffery.  Heck, they may even be well-intentioned, trying to do the greenest internal design on a site whose non-green location cannot be overcome.  But trying to green a project doesn’t make wishes come true.