[onoway]

There was a news item today that an oil eating bacteria has unexpectedly shown up in the Gulf and presumably is happilly chomping away on the 23 miles or whatever of drifting semidispersed oil that is left of the BP blowout. This seems to be mixed good and bad news..good for obvious reasons and bad in that now oil companies will feel more relaxed about having another blowout or spill ...it is interesting (depressing) to wonder just how bad such a thing would have to be before governments (including the Canadian govt) decided that drilling in vulnerable areas should be disallowed.

[y66]

Another item of possible interest in todays news:

Quote

Jason Pontin, the editor in chief of Technology Review, recently spoke with Bill Gates about everything from software entrepreneurship to promoting polio vaccination in northern Nigeria. But the heart of the conversation, published today on the magazine’s Web site, was about how to make non-polluting energy technologies so cheap that coal reverts to being the shiny black rock it was before the industrial revolution.

... more

Perhaps this comment was motivated by earlier comments on this thread:

Quote

On the other hand, the way capitalism works is that it systematically underfunds innovation, because the innovators can’t reap the full benefits. But there’s actually a net benefit to society being more R&D-oriented. And that’s why in health research, governments do fund R&D.

[y66]

Cap-and-Trade is Dead; Long Live Cap-and-Trade

Good analysis by Nate Silver. I see his blog moved to a new location yesterday.

[hrothgar]

A (potentially) interesting aside which I discovered this week:

One of the things that I was working on last year was applying various statistics and optimization techniques to embedded designs.

Let's assume that you're building an embedded controller that is governing how an engine runs. You need to change the behaviour of the engine based on a large set of (correlated) dependent variables.

Here's the catch... Your embedded controller is limited, both in terms of RAM and processing power. Even though you might have 50 different independent variables, you can only afford enough memory to use 12 of them and you'd really like to shrink this down to 8 or 9. In a similar vein, you could try to deal with the multicollinearity by running a PCA on your data, however, if you do this, you're going to burn a lot of processing power.

One of our customers really liked some of the techniques that we came up with and is deploying improved algorithms in some of their new products. They were able to use them to make very significant reductions in the amount of CO2 that was being emitted by some big, dirty engines.

Always nice when some of the stuff that you work on has a practical impact...

[PassedOut]

hrothgar, on Aug 26 2010, 07:44 AM, said:

One of our customers really liked some of the techniques that we came up with and is deploying improved algorithms in some of their new products. They were able to use them to make very significant reductions in the amount of CO2 that was being emitted by some big, dirty engines.

Always nice when some of the stuff that you work on has a practical impact...

Nice combination: interesting work with a positive effect on the world. Life at its best. Thanks for mentioning it.

[pooltuna]

onoway, on Aug 25 2010, 12:59 PM, said:

There was a news item today that an oil eating bacteria has unexpectedly shown up in the Gulf and presumably is happilly chomping away on the 23 miles or whatever of drifting semidispersed oil that is left of the BP blowout. This seems to be mixed good and bad news..good for obvious reasons and bad in that now oil companies will feel more relaxed about having another blowout or spill ...it is interesting (depressing) to wonder just how bad such a thing would have to be before governments (including the Canadian govt) decided that drilling in vulnerable areas should be disallowed.

you neglected to mention the bacteria are there because the gulf bottom leaks the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez spill every year.