Monday, May 18, 2015

Green New York


buildings could be repurposed to include vertical farms, with internal greenhouses, exterior scaffolding for hardier plants, and terraces for free-range animals. Rooftops could be covered with growing space, and solar panels could help offset the costs of keeping greenhouses warm year-round. If all of New York’s food were grown within its political limits, the city’s traffic would flow through an ocean of green. ....... discovered, unfortunately, that it would take some thirty nuclear power plants to provide enough heat and light for all those urban farms. (You need a lot of agriculture to feed eight and a half million people.) ...... how thirty per cent of New York’s consumables might be produced within a hundred-mile radius of the city ...... “Trees sequester carbon, they provide ventilation, they give shade,” he said. “We could easily lower the summer temperatures here by five degrees with more trees.”......... people fare much better, emotionally and cognitively, in greener environments than in purely urban landscapes. ....... In New York City, developments such as the High Line, the greening of Broadway, and Citi Bike are extensions of Mumford’s vision. ........ green-roofed buildings connected by tree-lined walkways.
A better idea than 30 nuclear power plants would be a city that is in tune with the Caribbean islands. Let them grow the food. It is only hours away. They do solar. Not solar heaters. Simply solar: direct Sun. More trees in the city, on the other hand, are a great idea.

The Brain

Singularity is NOT near! Stop complaining about overpopulation. Why try to mimic brains when there are so many brains out there, undernourished, underutilized?
Your brain has roughly 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion neural connections, or synapses. An iPhone 6’s A8 chip has 2 billion transistors. (Though, let’s be clear, a transistor is not anywhere near the complexity of a single synapse in the brain.) .... The highest bandwidth neural interface ever placed into a human brain, on the other hand, had just 256 electrodes. Most don’t even have that. ..... The second barrier to brain interfaces is that getting even 256 channels in generally requires invasive brain surgery, with its costs, healing time, and the very real risk that something will go wrong. .............. the former editor of the journal Neuron has pointed out that carbon nanotubes are so slender that a bundle of a million of them could be inserted into the blood stream and steered into the brain, giving us a nearly 10,000-fold increase in neural bandwidth, without any brain surgery at all.