Challis Hodge’s UXblog

Still a few days lefty to check out Open House at Art Center College in Pasadena, CA. It’s running through July 1.

Open House: Architecture and Technology for Intelligent Living envisions the house of the future as a place for new spatial experiences, new systems of sustainability and new sensory enhancements. This open-ended exhibition and multi-faceted research initiative, incorporating Art Center research studios, as well as a series of public programs, encourages creative individuals to make a substantial contribution to the dialogue on how we will live in the future.

The traveling exhibition, organized by the Vitra Design Museum and Art Center College of Design, opened August 2006 in Essen, Germany. The exhibit is anchored by 10 commissioned exploring future dwellings.

You might remember that Google announced it’s solar energy project in October of 2006. The project was projected to offset roughly 1/3 of Google’s peak electricity use at their headquarters in Mountain View (Googleplex). That would be the equivalent to the electricity requirements of approximately 1,000 average California homes.

At the time of this posting Google had produced 9,993 kilowatt-hours of electricity from the sun during the previous 24 hours. To date they’ve installed roughly 8,200 panels on 8 buildings and 2 carports. That’s about 90% of their plan.

Makes me think. OK, lets do some quick math.

So, divide the 4,104,900,000,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity we use annually in the U.S. by 365 days and we get 11,246,301,370 kilowatt-hours per day.

Divide 9,993 kilowatt-hours by 10 buildings at Googleplex. That’s roughly 1,000 kilowatt-hours per building. Now, for kicks lets multiply that by the roughly 3,000 Walmart stores and we get 3,000,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity.

Quickly divide the U.S. consumption by the potential electricity generated on top of the Walmart stores and that tells us we only have to repeat the process 3,800 times and we’ve covered the electricity needs in the U.S.

Of course the math here is basically meaningless but for one point. It shows us that alternative solutions are not inconceivable. These are numbers and orders of magnitude we can all grasp and understand.

So my suspicions are confirmed. The government did create Halo as a pre-draft training tool. ;-)

Darpa, the Pentagon’s wide-eyed research arm, is betting big on “metamaterials” — composites that can seemingly-impossible new properties, thanks to their molecular structure. But even for Darpa, and even for metamaterials, this seems like a long shot: a $15 million program to build shoot-through, one-way-invisible, self-healing shields for soldiers in urban battlefields.

Metamaterials are already showing promise, as the building blocks to real-life invisibility cloaks; that’s because the composites let electromagnetic waves flow around them, instead of reflecting ‘em back. Darpa’s “Asymmetric Materials for the Urban Battlespace” program goes way, way beyond mere invisibility, however.

from wired