For over 30 years, the chicken tikka masala pie at Zante Pizza & Indian Cuisine in San Francisco, California, has blurred the line of whose cuisine is it anyway, with a new breed of pizza entrepreneurs like Hapa Pizza in Beaverton, Oregon, and Anzalone Pizza in Boise, Idaho, using their Asian culinary heritages to present Vietnamese pho and Thai panang curry on pizza.
While pizza continues to morph and bend beyond pizza itself, lending its essence to pizza-flavored snacks (see: Combos, Cheez-Its, Goldfish Crackers, and Pretz), its crux is that pizza adapts to where it is—from Tokyo-style marinara to São Paulo’s move away from their staid white-tablecloth, fork-and-knife, pizza-for-dinner-only status. Or the offerings of Old Forge, Pennsylvania’s self-proclaimed “pizza capital of the world,” where, in a town of 9,000 people, rectangular pan pizzas are not called pies but “trays,” and there are no slices, just cuts.
I have said a few times that the arguments around renewable fuels – solar and wind in particular – have hijacked the Sustainability conversation. Lots of good has been delivered around Circular Economy thinking. The US EPA defines a circular economy as one which “reduces material use, redesigns materials to be less resource intensive, and recaptures “waste” as a resource to manufacture new materials and products.”
So, it was a fascinating journey in the last month talking to entrepreneurs, literally around the world, who are putting their heads down and showcasing plenty of success stories. My conversations with each are linked below.
Ashley Etling of Limeloop talked about her reusable, smart packaging to help in today’s exploding eCommerce deliveries
Giacomo Franchini of Italy based SupplHi presented on sustainability, sourcing and other elements of complex industrial B2B supply chains they support
Carlos Oliveira of Chile based Algramo presented a different way to package and consume CPG products resulting in reduced plastic pollution, bite size economics and other benefits.
Wilhelm Myrer of Norway based Empower talked about his blockchain tech to provide traceability and accountability for the circular economy. Norway, btw, is leading the world in circular economy thinking. 97% of their plastic bottles are recycled. Most other countries are barely at 10%. That is as impressive as the country's dominant performance in the recent Winter Olympics.
Matthew Wright of Specright presented on the huge payback from precise specifications in products, formulas and packaging
These conversations were facilitated by Kange Kaneene of SAP.iO Foundries. Her group represents SAP’s startup programs, including accelerators, that enable startups that can deliver value to SAP customers. Impressive in 4 years they have helped over 370 startups across 10 locations. All these startups were part of their Sustainability cohort. My conversation with her is here
Like I said – inspiring. Small firms, Big dreams, Tangible results that are helping the world.
With the energy crisis caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, SciTech Daily has a nice article on the global liquefied natural gas (LNG) market. The US, Qatar and Australia are some of the biggest exporters. China and Japan are two of the biggest importers with Germany ramping up its own imports
"LNG is made by cooling natural gas to minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 162 degrees Celsius), which reduces its volume by a factor of more than 600. Natural gas is piped to a port, processed in a liquefaction plant, and then loaded into specialized insulated, temperature-controlled tankers for shipment by sea.
To receive LNG, an offloading port must have a regasification plant that converts the LNG back to a gaseous form so it can be sent by pipeline to end users. Both liquefaction plants and regasification plants cost billions of dollars and take multiple years to build."
Hydrogen has a diverse range of applications and can be deployed in a wide range of industries.
“It’s a very powerful molecule,” DellaVigna said. “We can use it for heavy transport, we can use it for heating, and we can use it for heavy industry.”
The key, he argued, was to “produce it without CO2 emissions. And that’s why we talk about green, we talk about blue hydrogen.”
Described by the International Energy Agency as a “a versatile energy carrier,” hydrogen can be produced in a number of ways. One method includes using electrolysis, with an electric current splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen.
If the electricity used in this process comes from a renewable source such as wind or solar then some call it green or renewable hydrogen.
Blue hydrogen refers to hydrogen produced using natural gas — a fossil fuel — with the CO2 emissions generated during the process captured and stored.
Margaret and I drove from Las Vegas, NV to Joshua Tree National Park in CA recently. Saw an amazing variety of solar farms in the desert landscape.
Off US-95, south of Boulder City we saw miles and miles of solar panels. They included the Copper Mountain Solar Facility, a 802 megawatt solar photovoltaic power plant (see some of the panels in video below). It is next to the 64 MW Nevada Solar, the 150 MW Boulder Solar, and the 300 MW Techren Solar projects.
This complex adds up to half of the generating capacity at the nearby Hoover Dam, which has powered Las Vegas’s bright lights for decades.
The nearby thousand acre Townsite Solar + Storage uses a Tesla Megapack whose capacity is rated at 360,000kWh.
Off I-15, near the CA/NV border, we saw Ivanpah which uses mirrors to focus the power of the sun on solar receivers atop power towers. The video below describes the design and some of the problems the site has encountered
Impressive what you can do with cheap land and free sunshine.
A pop-up store at a mall caught my eye. They had a whole variety of electric tricycles for personal and business use. The salesperson rattled off a bunch of attractive features
Classified like an eBike – ride in bike lanes, on sidewalks, residential streets and bike trails
30-50 mile battery range from a single charge
18-28 mph speed
No gas, license, registration, insurance required for models with a top speed of 20mph
Minimal to no maintenance
Storage compartment and baskets for bags and light gear
No pedaling required
The personal and business use cases are limitless and they cost way less than BEVs to buy and operate. Many of them look like an Italian designer rethought the tuk tuk you see on Asian roads.
The Driven says there are already 1.5 million electric trikes on Indian roads and another 1.35 million in China. As we rethink our carbon footprints and lifestyles, I have a feeling we will see more of them on Western roads
In 2015, McKinsey acquired QuantumBlack, a London-based data analytics and AI specialist which had established its reputation working with F1 teams. “The New Zealand team wanted an AI that could do dynamic manoeuvres in highly variable environments, but didn’t think this was possible,” says QuantumBlack’s Nic Hohn. “Reinforcement learning really works when you’ve tried everything else.”
The McKinsey team worked with the New Zealand team for ten months during 2019 and 2020. The bots got so good that the human sailors would watch the simulations and pick up tips. “The bot was actually doing things that felt counterintuitive to the sailors,” says Jacomo Corbo, QuantumBlack’s co-founder and chief scientist, “but they’d try them out on the water and they’d actually work.”
While we were at Joshua Tree National Park in California last weekend, Margaret and I went to the monthly Dark Sky Program at the nearby Sky's The Limit (STL) Observatory and Nature Center in Twenty Nine Palms
We had a bit of cloud cover that evening but Ann Congdon, President of STL, kindly shared with me couple of photos of spectacular skies other guests have captured above their dome.
Nonetheless, it was a thrill to get a tour of the skies by Allen Schiano, who has a doctorate in Astronomy and Astrophysics and teaches at Irvine Valley College in Irvine. He previously worked at UC Irvine as a Director of Instructional and Research Computing. He was on stage with John Hill who is the Technical Director at the Large Binocular Telescope operated by the Steward Observatory of U of Arizona.
With their laser pointer as guide, us amateurs got to see
Sirius, the brightest star in the sky
The three stars in a straight line in Orion’s Belt
The Big Dipper and the North Star
The open star cluster, Pleiades, also known as The Seven Sisters
They answered a bunch of questions including how the recently launched James Webb Space telescope will be able to look farther back in time than previous telescopes using infrared light and will allow scientists to look through dust to see stars forming inside.
But the highlight was an experiment they ran as the clouds cleared. Allen describes it:
“It's a long story but the video at the end is worth the time it takes to read what it's all about.
My buddies John Hill and John Hoey and I had a crazy idea to try to see something with a 14 inch telescope that had only been seen with telescopes larger that twice that size. And we didn't use the method usually employed - a spinning disk in the focal plane - since it requires more equipment and expertise than most people could achieve. That was our goal- something simple others with amateur telescopes could do.
What were we trying to do, you say? We wanted to see the Crab Nebula pulsar 'pulse' on its close to 30 Hz frequency by taking 30 second images at the scope. Those could easily be shown to people watching with current amateur level equipment.
We rigged my Celestron C14HD SCT telescope with 'woofer' speakers and pumped nearly 30 Hz signals into speakers we had taped to its side (Data from the Jodrell Bank, UK ephemeris of the Crab were used to calculate the exact frequency which is critical). We aimed the scope at the Crab Nebula, specifically at the pulsar in the nebula which is the remnants of the star that exploded in a supernova which people saw on Earth in 1054 AD. The neutron star is 1.4 times the mass of the Sun and is about 10 km in diameter. It spins at a dizzying 30 times per second. Like a lighthouse, with every rotation it sweeps a beam of light past us. We see it as a 30 Hz pulse. That's too fast to detect visually for most people.
This video consists of four frames captured while aimed at the pulsar and with the speakers vibrating the scope just below 30Hz. You can see the stars bouncing around while the pulsar remains stationary. The pulsar does bounce around in the same direction as the stars since the location of the pulse is defined by the exact timing of each frame which we did not control.
As far as we know, this is a brand new technique for capturing the pulses of the pulsar and requires only a modest investment in equipment that almost any amateur astronomer could afford.
Instead of seeing it blink on and off this video captures its image as it vibrates 30 times per second. All the stars and background bounce back and forth as does the pulsar. But the pulsar is only lit for a brief moment every 1/30 of a second so it seems to stand still.
The images aren't perfect. This was our first attempt. But this definitely proves this concept works. And that is totally cool!
Tech Specs: Celestron C14HD at f11/Mallincam DS10cTEC camera/30 sec exposures at gain=110/160 and bin=1/image processing by GIMP (cropping, rotation), Topaz Labs DeNoise AI (noise reduction), and PixInsight (animation)
In preparation for the trip, Margaret had tried out several monocular lenses to attach to her iPhone. Assembly turned out to be a bridge too far in the dark. So it is a bit embarrassing to see how deftly Allen assembles his 250 lb. telescope.
Talking about the dark, Margaret did bring along a tactical flashlight with red/green/blue lights. We used the red light to walk around and not spoil the viewing for others. Red light has a wavelength of around 650 nm. That can be detected by cone cells, but not rod cells in our eyes. Cone cells dark adapt much quicker than rod cells.
BTW, even a day trip to STL is worthwhile. It has an Orrery – walkable model of the solar system at 20 billion-to-1 scale, trails with desert flora and a variety of sculptures. It is off the grid thanks to eight solar panels plus a bank of reclaimed batteries donated by the USMC which has a large base in town. This system provides the power for computers, projectors, a weather station, and more.
Investments in the sector slowed somewhat before 2020 as other renewable sources such as wind and solar PV gained momentum, a situation exacerbated by delays to several major hydropower projects and some regions’ lack of policy changes, which also stunted growth. The industry is, however, experiencing a renaissance as countries are increasingly motivated to find suitable renewable options to decarbonize their energy supply.
“Hydropower is the backbone of low-carbon electricity generation and has been rising since the 1970s. Over the last two decades, the installed global capacity of hydropower has grown from 680 GW in 2000 to nearly 1,200 GW in 2021, a surge of more than 75%,” says Rystad Energy analyst Karan Satwani.
Hurd, a falconer, and Cheddar, a juvenile Harris’s hawk, are contractors hired by Tampa International Airport to visit a few times a month and deal with unwanted guests.
It’s a 3,000-year-old, human-devised method for fighting a 100-year-old, human-made problem.
Airfield operations compliance manager Brett Bell is the guy driving the truck.
Planes take off and land at Tampa International Airport each day carrying thousands of passengers blissfully unaware of what’s happening in the giant, grassy fields below. Bell and his small team are the specks down there, looking out for the even-smaller specks — herons, egrets, turkey vultures, pigeons, gulls and so on — threatening to damage or bring down airplanes.
Recent Comments