NimbleSource Blog

Chemists at University of California Berkeley have identified quantum processes that could be the foundation for super efficient bio-quantum photo cells.

This is big news because up until this point physicists believed that quantum effects were only relevant at the sub atomic-scale. For those of you without pocket protectors, this means that things are pretty strange inside atoms, with particles not really here or there but defined by their probability that they will be here or there (see Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle). Furthermore, particles can have a strange kinship with one another called entanglement in which they are directly linked in real-time across space.

According to physics up to this point, in the macro world (anything larger than an atom), things exist in only one place and time and communications have a speed limit of the speed of light, so no entanglement allowed. The prevailing wisdom was that the size and chaos of the macro world masked the quantum behaviors of the sub-atomic world (see decoherence).

The new research from UC Berkeley blows the lid off of that thinking. They have observed entanglement in bacteria that engage in photosynthesis. Bacteria might not seem large but they’re huge on the atomic scale. The observed entanglement only lasts for picosecond timescales, but that’s enough to cause a chemical reaction and to measure it using standard spectroscopy.

This basic research and the finding that quantum states can exist in macro systems without decoherence can be used directly to build bio-quantum photo cells that use natural processes to create energy at nearly 100% efficiency, obsolescing the problematic photovoltaic cells that are now state-of-the art.

Further study of the mechanics of photosynthesis combined with these findings could result in the creation of trees that produced gasoline from sunlight and the CO2 in the air. As a thought exercise, a gasoline tree with an effective area of 100 m2 would produce about 3 gallons per hour of direct sunlight.

The findings also have wide-ranging implications for research on batteries, drugs and life sciences, and even the nature of consciousness and thought. The latter essentially inexplicable using conventional physics and theoretically quite compatible with quantum processes.

I haven’t blogged in a while because we have been busy launching Tweetiator and a few projects we’ve been working on feverishly that I can’t share with you yet.

I’m breaking my silence because I’ve been watching with some interest the flap around the GOP’s new website which is being ridiculed. Some of this criticism is well deserved, typos are unacceptable in our modern world and the little Michael Steele is silly.

However, I wanted to highlight something different about the site which can serve as a case study and cautionary tale for us all: the message and content don’t align.

The message attempts to be hip and cool and forward looking: Michael Steele’s blog was originally called “What up?” (I’m not making this up); and there’s nice use of dynamic design throughout (I really like the sparkly little Flash flag in the “Heroes” section). The problem is the content focuses on the past, it looks backward in time.

GOP Heroes

Look at the “Heroes” section under the “Learn” tab, black and white photos of people who met their makers years and even centuries ago. No current Republican heroes? Come on. I may have some political differences with these folks but they can’t come up with anyone from the era of color photography?

Look at the Accomplishment section. It starts in 1860 and has nothing more current than 2004. Nothing accomplished in the last five years? This content tells the story that the GOP’s best days are behind it. Once again, content clashes with intended message. And that’s something we all have to watch out for on our websites.

We’re signaling our visitors that something is amiss when our words tell a story that is not backed up, or even contradicts our content. In practical terms this means, don’t have a “partners” page if you can only list your bank and insurance company as partners, don’t have a “Management” page if you’re just a bunch of contractors (not that there’s anything wrong with this arrangement), and don’t say “we’re the market leader in…” if you don’t have a set of customer logos or endorsements you can present.

It’s better to have a small website that aligns message and content, then attempt to flesh out a more ambitious story with an absence of, or contradictory, content.

Recent data suggests that it’s not the lending that is the weak link in the chain of economic recovery, it’s the borrowing. According to the Fed, during the first quarter of 2009, private borrowing by households declined by 1.1 percent and by nonfinancial businesses by 0.3 percent. Net borrowing was down $151.8 billion for households and $28.3 billion for businesses. Dubbed the paradox of thrift, this otherwise responsible behavior is shrinking the economy.

Richard C. Koo, the chief economist of the Tokyo-based consulting firm Nomura Research Institute, in a new book, The Holy Grail of Macro-Economics: Lessons from Japan’s Great Recession argues that the Great Depression of the 1930s, proposes that Japan’s 15-year recession beginning in the 1990s, and our current downturn are examples of “balance-sheet recessions.”

During balance-sheet recessions, individuals don’t spend, and businesses are more worried about paying down their debts than maximizing their profits. So individuals save money and businesses stop borrowing it even when interest rates, which normally spur such activity, approach zero. And this is pretty much what happened in the 1930s and more recently in Japan, and what’s happening today.

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to drive my business partner’s Tesla Roadster. For those of you not familiar, the Tesla is an all-electric sports car that utilizes a revolutionary new battery and drive train system. Here in Washington where 100% of our electricity comes from renewable sources, the Tesla has no carbon footprint.

Ron in the Tesla Roadster

Now, I’m not a car person but spending a day in a Tesla was an amazing experience. Amazing on two levels, the first is as a piece of automotive engineering: it is absolutely a rush to drive, 0-60 MPH in 3.9 seconds is as close an experience to taking off in an airplane as you can get without having to go through TSA security screening, Maybe even more breath taking is 70-100 MPH in the blink of an eye (not that I am confessing to having violated any traffic laws).

The second level, and the one most likely to change our lives and the trajectory or our planet, is as an ambassadorial tool for the possibilities of all-electric vehicles. This is a head-turner of a car that makes being green alluring. Causing the reduction of one’s personal footprints on this planet to be object of mainstream envy is better marketing than any guilt-inducing documentary. It’s a visual thing, worth a thousand words and triggering strong emotions.

Tesla recently was given a grant of nearly half a billion dollars to complete development of their family sedan. The planned initial price point and specifications put green luxury and performance in the realm of the possible for many families. Other manufacturers will make surely lower cost all-electric vehicles and, with any luck, obsolesce our dependence on carbon fuels and the dictators and bigots who sell them to us.

This is a significant new report from NOAA. The gist of it is that climate change is happening right now, right here, and it’s trending worse. According to this report, if we continue on our current path the United States is likely to warm an additional 7°F to 11.5°F by 2090.

One of the things the report does that is very thought-provoking is the regional breakdown of impacts:

-parts of the Southwest, South Florida, and South Texas could see more than 180 days per year with temperatures over 90°F
-significant strain on the agriculturally critical water resources of California and the West.
-sea level rise of 3 to 4 feet potentially will submerge a lot of Seattle’s SODO district, the Florida Keys, Everglades National Park, parts of San Francisco, the Gulf Coast, etc.

I know that there are some who believe that this is one more chicken little document from a government agency to be ignored, but please don’t.

So this post has nothing to do with business, and only tangentially with the environment. Via Cliff Mass’ always informative weather blog I found this beautiful time lapse HD video of mountain-induced convection storms. Cliff explains that when slopes are heated, upslope flow occurs on both sides of the mountain and the upward currents join together at the crest with the strong upward motion resulting in convection and storms. In addition you can see the tide moving in and out. None of these events are unusual, but viewed this way they are all mesmerizing. You can download more videos here.

Economist David Rosenberg of Gluskin Sheff is renowned for the insights delivered in his daily reports. In today’s he focuses on the trend toward part-timeization in the work force. That is, more people are working fewer hours (or getting paid for fewer). His interest is in the deflationary impact this has as a consequence of household income reduction. It piqued my interest as well because it shows a growing market for web services ranging from time management to billing to calendaring. Doing more with less and managing a fractionalized schedule will require a new set of skills and tools to master this challenging situation. I think it will become structural as households become accustomed to one or more part-time workers and employers find that they can attract talent with part time positions.

It is now conventional wisdom that global imbalances in savings rates have contributed substantially to the credit bubble. Americans were able to dig themselves into debt with very low interest rates because of the 50% savings rate of countries like China (the largest holder of US Treasury debt).

How can the Chinese afford to save so much. A paper by Shang-Jin Wei of Columbia University and Xiaobo Zhang of IFPRI, attributes this to China’s one-child policy, which created an imbalance of 120 boys per 100 girls. This means that there were 40 million men in 2005 who the math kept out of the marriage market.

The causation isn’t so clear. Are Chinese men saving more to make themselves more desirable mates? Are kids so expensive that they eat up savings? All that’s clear is that the researchers found that in China between 1978-2006, local savings rates where systematically and positively correlated with local gender ratios.

Google’s just published study of search utilization compares iPhone, regular mobile, and computer search. The most surprising result is that iPhone searchers have a greater diversity of search strings than computer users. Google attributes this to the bar-bet phenomenon (e.g., “I’ll bet you a beer that Kurdistan’s GDP is larger than Ukraine’s”).

What may also be at work here is a phenomenon in which people are actually querying things they do not understand while they go about their day, perhaps even while speaking with another person or reading something. I’m not sure whether this is disconcerting (that we are going from a world of people who know things to a world of people who can find things) or liberating (knowledge is freed from the bounds of academia and diffuses as needed). I guess I’ll have to Google that one.

The Congressional Budget Office published a compelling, albeit US centric, report on the challenges ahead. Even though you’ll need to translate this from wonkese to English, it makes the following important point:

“Those insights have spurred some researchers who are particularly worried about low-probability but high impact outcomes to call for limiting long-term warming to no more than 3°F to 5°F with a high degree of certainty. However, since about 1.4°F of warming has already occurred, and past emissions have made a substantial amount of further warming inevitable, limiting long-term warming to such levels with a substantial degree of certainty would probably require very dramatic and potentially very expensive curtailment of expected future emissions. There is a large difference in costs between a policy that leaves a 50 percent risk of warming exceeding 5°F and a policy that virtually eliminates that risk. In moving along the continuum of risk from the former to the latter, each increment of risk reduction is likely to come at an increasing price.”

This is all important to the cost/benefit analysis of how we get out of the mess we’ve gotten ourselves into, what costs we are willing to expend, and the risk we are willing to take to national and global stability.