Category: Uncategorized

Tourist bids goodbye to NYC

The time has come for me to leave New York City. After almost 2 whole days here on business, it just feels right.

It’s hard to pinpoint when New York officially was over for me. Was it this morning in my hotel room, when I got the check-in e-mail from Delta? Or 5 minutes later, when I took a taxi to the airport?

I can still recall the moment it all began like it was yesterday, because it was yesterday. I landed at J.F.K. on a misty Friday afternoon, to attend a conference on plastic utensils. I had finally realized my childhood dream of moving to the concrete jungle, where dreams are manufactured.

Reminds me of the many visitors who confuse Manhattan with NYC, and proclaim that they could never live here based on their extensive times square experience.

Chips and cells

The ability to build a system that combines the power of solid-state electronics with the capabilities of biological components has great promise. “You need a bomb-sniffing dog now, but if you can take just the part of the dog that is useful — the molecules that are doing the sensing — we wouldn’t need the whole animal”. The technology could also provide a power source for implanted electronic devices in ATP-rich environments such as inside living cells.

Hoverboard Genesis

Because the Chinese manufacturing industry is so centralized, anything new spreads like crazy through the supply chain. One manufacturer creates a product; another reverse-engineers it and makes it too. And that next company can make it cheaper and faster, because it has no R&D costs.

China coal plants

China would try to cut pollution from coal-fired power plants by 60% by 2020, reducing CO2 emissions by 180M metric tons

this is about 2% of world emissions
2020-01-04:

China is set to add new coal-fired power plants equivalent to the EU’s entire capacity, as the world’s biggest energy consumer ignores global pressure to rein in CO2 emissions in its bid to boost a slowing economy. While the rest of the world has been largely reducing coal-powered capacity over the past 2 years, China is building so much coal power that it more than offsets the decline elsewhere