I live in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and I absolutely love my neighborhood. I've lived in Brooklyn for about a decade and Greenpoint for about half that, so I'm relatively new to the area. Many greenpoint residents have lived here their whole lives. Some of their families have lived here for generations.

Last night, I had the pleasure to meet some of these residents and hear their stories about how they've been fighting for decades to protect Greenpoint from the impacts of environmental disasters and oil contamination which has plagued the area for over 100 years. It was enlightening. I realized that my understanding of our local history was lacking. I knew that our neighborhood was contaminated from oil spills around the newtown creek area. And I knew that the oil companies responsible had made efforts to clean it up, but the efforts were not adequate. And I knew that my community garden was partly funded by reparations from past disasters. But I was fuzzy on any details beyond that.

So I told my neighbors that I was inspired to learn more, and I promised them I would study up. And I wanted to share some quick notes in case it compels others to learn the story as well.

After a quick search for articles about the greenpoint oil spills, the most detailed and poignant story I found was this story from New York Magazine. The story begins 100 years ago:

In 1919, twenty acres of the Standard Oil refinery, storing 110 million gallons of oil, went up in smoke. The oil that didn’t burn sunk into the ground.

The story continues to highlight dozens of years of negligence with moments like this:

[In 1950], on October 5, a vast underground explosion centered at Huron Street and Manhattan Avenue sent 25 manhole covers shooting into the Greenpoint sky, where they reached elevations as high as three stories. This was the first clue that anything was amiss. An investigation revealed that gasoline was leaking into the neighborhood’s sewer system

And into the late 20th century:

Then, in September 1978, a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter noticed an iridescent glaze spreading out over the narrow waterway. The oil under Greenpoint had reemerged. That sparked the first investigation into how much oil from the refineries had leaked into the ground over the years.

And then on into our current century... The article briefly covers the years around 2005 when residents took bold action to push cleanup efforts forward. Even famed activist Erin Brockovich got involved. In 2006, local activists like Deborah Spiroff led the community in a class-action suit that successfully compelled ExxonMobil to hasten their clean up efforts.

[From 2006:] Residents say they’ve had enough of the pollution, which is hurting their property values, air and health. Soil tests performed by the environmental group Riverkeeper in 2005 found benzene and toluene, which have been associated with cancer.

Yet today, although cleanup efforts have continued slowly, the spilled waste still occupies acres of land just under the ground surface. Here are more quotes from the New York Magazine article (from 2007)

Imagine a viscous tar-colored blob stretching amoebalike through the Earth. It starts where Meeker Avenue hits Newtown Creek, seeping out into the waterway. From there it extends south and steadily deeper under the Brooklyn soil, reaching a depth of about 40 feet.

The subsoil near the water is so saturated with toxins that you can light it on fire.

The thick, dark ooze is a hydrocarbon cocktail: part degraded gasoline, part fuel oil, part naphtha—the chemical from which napalm takes its name. All of it is toxic. Dig seven or eight feet down—the typical depth of a basement—and in some parts you’ll find benzene vapor, a known carcinogen, at concentrations as high as 1,560 parts per million.

Now, before I get accused of only quoting the scary parts, I will mention that at least some experts do not believe that this toxic waste poses an immediate danger to local residents. While the spill has completely ruined our soil and well water, our drinking water is not affected because it is piped in from upstate new york. Here's more good news as explained in the NY Mag article:

The good news is that the toxic goop saturating the sandy soil is at least partly capped by a semi-permeable clay layer, the natural legacy of Brooklyn’s 10,000-year-old geology.

More good news: Williamsburg-Greenpoint area does have an overall lower cancer rate than much of the rest of New York City. However, the story might not be so simple; there is reason to suspect that the toxic material could be causing specific cancers like leukemia and bone cancer in local pockets of the neighborhood - possibly because oil may have risen above the clay in some areas. I'll leave it to the NYmag article to explain further details about that.

All of the above was a very short summary of what I learned in an effort to get to know my local history. I'll leave you with two more links.

• Wikipedia entry about the greenpoint oil spill
• Motherjones.com article about the brooklyn oil spill 100 year timeline

And finally, I'll tell you why I was out last night in the first place, why I met these neighbors who inspired me to do this homework to learn this local history. Last night I was at a community meeting to learn about a new gas pipeline that National Grid is trying to build through our neighborhood. The community members argue that no one wants this project and that it doesn't serve the community – quite the opposite: they say it disrupts their businesses, increases the risk of further environmental disaster, raises their gas bills (customers will see a monthly gas delivery increase equating to 17.78%, or 11.99% of their total bill), and is a step backwards in our fight against climate change.

I have more to learn about this issue, but I certainly agree that this project seems problematic at best. This sentiment was well summarized by Greenpoint resident Kevin LaCherra at a previous community gathering:

“This neighborhood does not want to be held hostage by a public utility company that is supposed to be working for us,” LaCherra said. “We don’t want this pipeline, we want National Grid to invest in renewable energy now. Climate emergency is coming and we don’t have any time to waste.”

Organizations like Sane Energy are helping to raise awareness about this problematic project. I plan to make an effort to keep myself educated about the matter. I will see what I can do to be thoughtful about all sides of the argument while fighting for the health and safety of the community where I live.

Just off the coast of Yorkshire, UK, the world’s largest offshore wind farm just installed 174 turbines totaling 1.22 GW in less than a year. Amazing.

In celebration of this milestone, I wanted to share a video that tells the story of the first offshore wind farm. It was built in Hywind Scotland. The 30 MW pilot park was a great success. It paved the way for the Yorkshire, UK project and many more slated for the near future. This is a truly exciting technology for renewable energy.

Below is a mini documentary telling the story of the Hywind project. And below that are screenshots from the video showing some stunning images of the project.

A year ago, I decided to build a dead-simple password manager. I wanted it to be so simple, that non-techies would use it. Yet, it would still be open-source, decentralized, end-to-end-encrypted and other fancy things that only nerds care about, but which are important for everyone.

What is Skipper?

Skipper is a free, secure web service that will remember your passwords for you. You can access Skipper from any browser. No need for any apps or browser extensions.

In the future, you will even be able to text or email Skipper to ask for your passwords, and it will send you a link so you can copy them to your clipboard as needed. Here's a little slideshow that illustrates what I mean.

What does it look like?

We built it! Kind of. It's not designed yet, so it's not pretty, but the tech part works as a proof-of-concept.

It looks something like this. You log in with just a master password....

And then Skipper tells you your passwords. You can add or delete more. That's it!

Why is this special?

Skipper is no ordinary web service. It's highly secure because it is end-to-end-encrypted. This means your passwords are never stored or sent over the internet. No one can hack a cloud database and get your passwords.

But other companies already do this, what's the big deal?

Yes, there are lots of other password keepers that do this already. But are they free, open-source, decentralized, and so easy that my luddite friend Bob would use it? I don't think so.

Bob doesn't want to install a password app let alone pay for it. I can't convince Bob to use some complicated thing he doesn't even want in the first place. But I can convince Bob to use a website that's as simple as keeping his passwords in a word document or physical notepad.

Can I contribute to Skipper's open-source code?

Yes please! The project lives here on Github:

https://github.com/syllable-hq/skipper

How do I try out Skipper?

We have a test server. You can find it through the github project above.

Over the last few months, I fell down a rabbit hole. I became obsessed with an idea called Underground Pumped Hydroelectric Storage.

I started to believe this idea could play a fundamental role in our fight against climate change.

Here is a TLDR report summary that explains why.

I'm not a researcher. I write software for a living. But this idea seemed too important to ignore.

I feared that no one would take me seriously. So I started researching and writing. Things, escalated… And today, I finally finished the first complete draft of an 70 page research paper.

As I started researching, I learned that in the 1980s, the U.S. DOE determined that this idea was "technically feasible and economically viable". But no one ever built it. It seems this was mostly because the return on investment took too many years. Today, it seems we can't afford to not make long-term investments if it will prevent climate change.

I determined that over a period of 40 years, this technology could be 7–30 times cheaper than an equivalent installation of Li-ion batteries.

After further research, I believe even more that this idea could be critically important in our fight against climate change. I think it's important to build it.

The paper is still considered a draft, and I'm looking for some peer review. It is open source and written in LaTeX. The full paper is here on github.

I would sincerely appreciate all advice, corrections, and ideas from the community.

I would also greatly appreciate introductions to partners who could help me conduct further research and testing of this idea. In particular, I would love an intro to Elon Musk or someone at the Boring Company.

Thanks all,

Eric

P.S. This is my blog post that started the rabbit hole.

A Content Management System, or CMS, is software to help manage your website's data. A CMS provides a secure, user friendly interface for editing content like articles, images, or videos.

WordPress is one popular example of a CMS. Since its start in 2003, WordPress has been a pioneer in CMS design, enabling millions to edit their websites without requiring much technical knowledge.

Dozens of great options

Fast forward to today, WordPress is still the world's most popular CMS. But there are hundreds of other options as well, and each solution has its strengths and weaknesses. I hope this guide can help you understand your options and find a solution that is right for your needs.

The CMS family tree: Traditional or Decoupled?

Generally speaking, there are two types of CMS platforms: Traditional or Decoupled. We'll look at both below.

The Traditional CMS (or Integrated CMS)

A traditional CMS like WordPress is also called an Integrated CMS because it integrates two parts of your website together – the back-end and the front-end. The CMS is a tool for both editing content and building your website's front-end code.

An integrated CMS is user-friendly and simple to set up. It often comes with design templates and plugins which offer some flexibility for customizing your website. This can be a great choice if those options cover all of your needs. On the other hand, if you want a fully customized front-end design instead of a template, it might be beneficial to separate or decouple your data from your design. See below.

The Decoupled CMS (or Headless CMS)

In recent years, various decoupled CMS solutions have gained in popularity. A decoupled CMS keeps the back end and front end separate. On the back-end, you can still edit your content in the traditional way, but on the front-end, you can customize anything you want. This solution takes advantage of web services and API’s to deliver content in its raw form to any front-end design you may choose.

These front-end agnostic solutions are called "headless", meaning they only provide the raw data through an API. Headless solutions are lightweight and offer the most control over the front-end design. This separation also provides flexibility to customize designs for many multi-channel platforms like mobile devices, wearables, TV media platforms, or anything else.

The Hybrid CMS

Some decoupled CMS solutions are actually considered a "hybrid", because they provide both a "headless"API as well as some front-end templates that you can optionally use. This can be useful for some use cases.

Pros and cons of Traditional VS Headless CMS platforms

There are lots of great articles out there breaking down the pros and cons of each option. You can refer to those articles for a deep dive. Here's one, and another one.

The importance of being open source

Your next decision is whether or not it is important that your CMS is open source. I recommend trying to stick to open source options if you can. I'll explain why below.

Closed Source

Closed source solutions can be convenient in the near term because they often come with great customer support and easy-to-use features. But in the long term, the fees can be expensive, and you always run the risk that the company behind the proprietary CMS might close down or stop development.

Squarespace is one example of a closed-source, integrated CMS. It is a fantastic option if you need to get a simple website up and running quickly. But it would probably not be a good choice if your goal was to support long-term growth for a more complex website.

Open Source

If a CMS is open-source, it means that the code is published for anyone to audit and build on. Open source projects benefit from transparency and collaboration. Anyone can report bugs or build plugins to support an open-source project. And open-source projects avoid the risk that a private company could shut down your website.

Open Source, and self-hosted.

For companies that want to fully own their data and manage things themselves, a self-hosted, open-source solution is the way to go. There are lots of great projects for both integrated solutions and headless solutions. These projects are well supported providing guides and helper tools to make installation a breeze.

Open Source, but still fully-hosted.

Some people may want to use an open-source solution but they don't want to deal with hosting the website themselves. Many CMS projects like WordPress still offer hosting services for those who would rather not host their own website. This can give the best of both worlds offering convenience along with all the benefits of an open source ecosystem.

Some top CMS choices in 2019

At Syllable, we use a variety of CMS options to suit the needs of various projects. I'll summarize a few of our favorite choices below.

Ghost

Ghost is an open source CMS used primarily for blogs. Built on Node.js, it feels modern and fast. Using Ghost, it is relatively easy to design a fully customized, CMS-powered blog. Syllable has used Ghost on a few projects including our own blog.

Strapi and Directus

Strapi and Directus are two of the most popular options for open source headless CMS platforms. I need to spend a little more time with these tools, but they both look fantastic. I have been eager for the opportunity to use them on more projects where they would be a strong fit.

Contentful and ButterCMS

Contentful and ButterCMS are great products, but they're not open source. I have used tools like these in the past, but I am trying to move towards open source alternatives whenever possible.

WordPress

WordPress is still the world's leading CMS, and with good reason. As mentioned above, it is open source and boasts a strong developer community. It is commonly used as an integrated CMS, though it is possible to use WordPress as a headless CMS to support a custom front-end. WordPress is written in PHP which could be a pro or a con depending on your developer team's preferences and skill sets.

Squarespace

As a closed-source, integrated CMS, Squarespace is not right for many projects. But it has its place. It does work really well for some early-stage companies who need a great-looking website in a hurry and don't have the budget for something more custom.

Shopify

Shopify is perhaps the best CMS option if you're building an e-commerce website. Similar to squarespace, Shopify is closed-source and expensive. But the cost can be well worth it since they radically simplify how much time it takes to develop a consumer shopping experience. Shopify is an integrated CMS, so you cannot 100% customize the front-end design. However, they have built great tools to get pretty close to full-customization. You can actually write some custom front-end code, but it has to be run on their closed-source system.

Further reading

There are lots of other CMS reviews out there if you'd like to read some more. Headlesscms.org is a great resource for comparing headlessCMS options. AlternativeTo is another great resource.

Conclusion

Choosing the right CMS is not hard once you understand your options and your project's needs. Syllable is always happy to chat if we can help you decide.

Can Syllable help build your next project? Give us a shout!

This post is part two in a series. Part one explains how energy storage plays a critical role in fighting climate change. As I explain, it turns out that replacing fossil fuel with green energy solutions is not possible without also rapidly expanding our stored energy capacity.

Our cheapest, most efficient technology for storing energy is called pumped hydro storage. A pumped storage battery is just a pump sitting below a dam. The pump spends energy pumping water uphill, and then the dam recaptures that potential energy with turbines.

When we run the numbers, the conclusion seems clear, even if surprising. It seems necessary and urgent to find some way of pumping enormous volumes of water up and down some giant elevations.

Below is a quick recap of this vexing energy storage problem. And then I’ll explain why I think the ocean can help us solve it.

Our energy grid has a spending problem.

Our energy grid is very bad at saving the energy it produces. Global storage capacity is less than 2% of our total energy production [c2es.org].

This is a huge problem. Because in order to avoid “substantial damages to the economy, environment, and human health over the coming decades” we will likely need an energy storage capacity of 100% or more (see part one). The scale of this expansion is so daunting that we don’t even have a plan yet for achieving it.

A piggy bank for our grid

Our grid would actually be much safer and more efficient if we had the capacity to store energy for a proverbial rainy day. But we simply have nowhere to put it. There are no batteries large enough to hold the world’s energy. Electrochemical battery storage is too expensive. Our best tool for energy storage is in fact simple gravity and water; pumped hydro solutions comprise 94% of the world’s stored energy.

For those keeping score, you’ll note that without pumped storage, we would only store about 1/1,000ᵗʰ of our grid’s energy. (6% of 2%).

Considering the facts above, it feels clear to me that we must build dozens or even hundreds of times the amount of energy storage we have today. And the most viable solution seems to be pumping enormous volumes of water up and down a giant hill.

It seems obvious where to get vast quantity of water: the ocean. The hard question is, where to get a giant hill? I propose that instead of looking up, we look down.

Can the ocean store the world's energy?

We know that the ocean can generate power through wave and tidal energy. But can it also give us a battery to store energy?

Here’s a quick refresher about how gravitational potential energy works. It's simple. The amount of energy you can store using just water and gravity is:

Energy Storage = volume of water × pumped height difference.

Creating a giant battery is simple in theory. As described above, you just need to drop a lot of water through a turbine, lift it back up, and repeat. The earth is already a giant dam for the ocean. So what if we built a huge reservoir deep below the ocean surface?

I see two options:

Concept 1: Sink giant tanks to the bottom of the ocean.

Concept 2: Dig deep into coastal bedrock. Then dig sideways to create flood tunnels.

Concept 1: Submarine tanks on the ocean floor

What if we build giant submarine water tanks and sink them to the bottom of the ocean? During the day, we could use solar and wind power to empty them. Then at night when our solar power blinks out, we let the ocean refill our tanks at high pressure which spins turbines which powers NYC all night.

How big would these water tanks have to be? I did some quick back-of-the-napkin calculations to find out. In order to supply New York City with power all night long, it seems we would need about:

5 submarine tanks, one mile deep on the ocean floor. Each about 13 meters in diameter and one mile long. It might cost about $0.2 billion.

My next question was, where would we even put these tanks? Where is the ocean floor a mile deep? Well, there just so happens to be an underwater canyon 100 miles off the shore of New York. It’s called the Hudson Canyon and it’s over one mile deep. It was carved by the hudson river, not unlike how the Colorado River carved the Grand Canyon.

Here's a video to give a rough impression.

If you still think this sounds crazy, maybe it will help to see some precedent. Here are some existing projects working on a similar technology. The Fraunhofer Institute in Germany has already demonstrated a seabed-based pumped-storage structure.

German engineer Rainer Schramm says a system like this can have a round-trip efficiency of around 80%. This is on par with dam pumped storage.

Of course, there are also numerous obstacles to face with a design like this. One huge problem with building in the Hudson Canyon is that you'd have to build in international waters. That alone could sink the project's potential. But before we get anchored down by such pesky realities, let's move on to Concept 2 which I believe will prove to be the winning option anyway.

But first a budgetary reality check.

Reality Check: Death, Taxes, and Climate Change

Big numbers can be hard to wrap your head around. A quarter billion dollars? Just to store energy? Just for New York City? You might read these figures and conclude it's all just too expensive. Well, maybe there's a cheaper option. But what if there isn't? And what if it's simply more expensive to do nothing?

It's all relative.

$0.2 billion might sound like a lot of money, but it is still cheaper than using electric batteries to build an equivalent system. My back-of-the-napkin calculations say it would cost 10 times as much to accomplish the same job with tesla power walls. And, importantly, tesla power walls have a life expectancy of only 10 years. Our water tank system on the other hand might last decades with relatively little maintenance.

It's critical to acknowledge that we must pay for climate change if we don't build a solution. A US government report estimated that American taxpayers have already lost $350 billion over the last decade, or $35 billion a year [finance.yahoo.com]. And we don't know how fast that number will grow in the coming decades if we do nothing.

Okay, enough doom and gloom. Let's renew some hope with Concept 2, which I think could be even better than Concept 1.

Concept 2: Sea water pumped deep underground

What if we dig a hole deep into coastal bedrock, and then dug miles of horizontal tunnels deep underground, and then flood those tunnels with sea water?

Just like Concept 1, we would use solar and wind power to empty them during the day. And then at night, we could flood them to spin turbines which would power NYC. Here's a rough video sketch to give an impression.

Again, these are just very rough guesses. But back-of-the-napkin, if we used a digging technology similar to the tesla boring machine, we could supply NYC all night long for about $1 billion.

Yes $1 billion is a lot of money. But it's still cheaper than chemical batteries. And the storage gain per cost is still in the ballpark as existing projects like the $3 billion retrofit of the hoover dam mentioned in my previous blog post.

Still think it can't be done?

In case you're wondering if it's crazy to dig tunnels a mile deep, the best reassurance I have for you is that Elon Musk thinks it's quite feasible.

Also, it's worth noting that 10,000 feet is nearly twice as deep as the one mile I'm using. I used one mile because it was a conservative round number. And it matched the depth of Concept 1. But if we dug two miles down instead of one, it would nearly double our capacity and therefore halve our cost to $0.5 billion.

I think it's interesting that Musk mentions 10,000 feet as a viable tunneling depth even while disclaimering that he wouldn't recommend it for traffic tunnels. Of course this makes sense, because you gain nothing by digging traffic tunnels deeper than you need to. So is it curious that Musk mentioned the number at all? Probably not. It's probably just an interesting fact from their research. But, maybe this depth is also important to Musk and his team; maybe they have already dreamed up this same idea, and maybe they are actively working on underground pumped storage designs. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised. And I hope they are. If this concept proves as compelling as it seems, then for the sake of the whole planet, we need to think big and move fast. And I can't think of anyone better than Mr. Musk to lead such an effort.

Climate Change Reversal is our generation’s Moonshot

Every year it becomes more obvious: Climate change reversal is our generation’s moonshot mission, and failure is not an option. So let’s buckle up, think big, and get to work. I'm sure that my napkin-calculations have errors. (Please send feedback!) And it might turn out that these ideas are not viable after all. But regardless, I hope these posts were informative and interesting. And I hope they inspire others to keep thinking of big crazy ideas that just might work. Because they might be our only hope.

Thanks for reading. Any corrections are always appreciated. I will try to update any errors and keep archives of the original versions.

Out of the Boulder Dam come a few dozen rods of copper — long, long, long rods of copper perhaps the thickness of your wrist that go for hundreds of miles in all directions.
...
until finally the river is spread throughout the whole city—turning motors, making heat, making light, working gadgetry. The miracle of hot lights from cold water over 600 miles away—all done with specially arranged pieces of copper and iron.
...
Stop the big wheel, and all the wheels stop; the lights go out. They really are connected.

— Excerpted from Richard Feynman’s lectures on physics

Meet our power grid

Here’s an interesting thing you might not have realized about the electricity coming out of your wall sockets: Nearly all of it was produced just an instant ago by some power plant many miles away. The energy powering your lights and appliances is not requested, packaged up, and delivered in some orderly fashion; it’s slurped up by your wall socket at nearly the speed of light. Meanwhile, a factory must immediately dump exactly the same amount of power into the grid to replenish it. The grid acts like one big closed system with very little wiggle room. So factories must constantly spin up one moment and shut down the next to meet everyone’s shifting demands.

If this system seems a bit frantic and helter-skelter, it’s because it is. Generating power in real-time without much buffer is risky and expensive; too much power will damage equipment, and too little power will cause blackouts. So why have we not improved this? Because it’s very hard to build a battery large enough to support the whole grid.

This blog post and its follow up post are about building a battery big enough to support green energy. But first, it's important to understand why stored energy is so critical.

Earth, we have a problem.

First, some bad news.

Climate change is on track to cause “substantial damages to the economy, environment, and human health over the coming decades.” And our current efforts to mitigate climate change “do not yet approach the scale considered necessary to avoid [those damages]”. (National Climate Assessment Report)

Did you catch that phrase: “do not yet approach the scale”? That translates to, “we’re not even close”. Do we need to spend 10 times or 100 times more money on this? Do we need radical new solutions? The truth is, we don’t fully know yet. And probably yes to all the above.

We will pay for this disaster. So let’s invest in preventative solutions which will be healthier and cheaper in the long run.

So, what’s the good news?

Here’s the good news. Many state governments like New York have already passed ambitions legislation to work towards this goal. New York, which already generates nearly 23% of their power from renewable sources, has set the following targets for 2030: (https://rev.ny.gov/)

• 40% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.
• 50% of electricity must come from renewable sources by 2030.

A battery big enough for a whole country.

Currently, global storage capacity is less than 2% of our total energy production [c2es.org]. The United States is just above the world average at 2.5%. We’ve actually fallen behind other world leaders. In Europe, energy storage capacity is about 10%. In Japan, about 15%. (energy storage factsheet)

Building more energy storage is a very hard problem, but it’s necessary. It’s an important step for making our power grid more secure, and as I’ll explain below, it’s a hard requirement for eliminating our dependency on oil. To understand why, we need to look at a little graph in the shape of a duck.

This little duck is a big headache.

Solar power looks to be our most promising solution to switch from oil-dependence to green energy. The cost of solar is dropping rapidly and is on track to be cheaper than coal by 2020.

But the obvious problem with solar is that the sun doesn’t shine at night, and it doesn’t even shine consistently during cloudy days. This causes wild energy fluctuations in the grid, which happen to look like a cute duck, but which cause a very ugly headache for our power grid. Here’s a video explainer.

As shown in the video, energy storage is a critical missing piece of our power grid. Our grid currently relies on fossil fuel “peaker plants” which accommodate the ever-changing electricity demand by spinning up and shutting down. When a whole city turns on their AC units, the peaker plants jump into high gear. These peaker plants are inefficient, dirty, and expensive. And this problem will only get worse as we add more solar power to the grid. That’s why we can’t just add more solar to meet our green energy goals; we also need to increase energy storage.

Defeating the Duck: With a grid-sized Battery

How big would a battery have to be to store the whole grid? Bigger than we know how to build.

When you think of energy storage, you probably think of electrochemical cell batteries — like the ones in your flashlight, or phone, or electric car. But those kinds of batteries are still far too expensive to hold the energy of a whole live power grid.

It’s only in the last few years that batteries like the tesla power wall could start to compete economically with peaker plants, which are expensive to operate, partly because they must sit idle for much of their lifetime. Could tesla batteries affordably back up the whole grid running just solar and wind? Not at today’s prices. An electrochemical battery storage system big enough for the U.S. to go just 80% renewable would cost more than $2.5 trillion. And the lifespan of such batteries is only about 10 years. Ouch. It gets worse. Between 80% and 100% renewable energy, the cost goes up exponentially. At 100% wind and solar, you would need more than a month’s worth of storage to avoid blackouts.

So if batteries can’t scale, what alternatives do we have? Well, there are lots of ideas: Compressed air energy storage, Molten Salt Thermal Storage, Non-lithium batteries, Thermal storage, Flywheels… Unfortunately, despite many interesting examples of these technologies, none have been demonstrated to work on a large scale.

But! There is one technology that far exceeds the others. It’s the oldest, simplest, technology of them all, and it makes up about 94% of our current grid energy storage. What is it? Pumped Hydroelectric Storage. AKA, moving water up and down a hill.

Energy Storage Simple Recipe: Gravity & Water

I was pretty surprised to learn that 94% of the world’s energy storage came from pumped storage. As it turns out, simply pumping water up a hill and then running it back through a hydroelectric dam is really freakin efficient. The full-cycle efficiency is roughly 70–90%. That kind of efficiency is hard to beat, especially if you already have a hydroelectric dam you can hook it up to.

It's an old technology, and it's still compelling today. Indeed, the increased demand for energy storage is already sparking new, ambitions pumped storage projects. Take for example the Hoover Dam – the very same renamed Boulder Dam poeticized by Feynman. The Hoover Dam is slated to undergo a $3 billion retrofit to add pumped-storage technology.

Pumped Storage: Into the Future

Let’s recap.

• To avoid substantial damages to the economy, environment, and human health, we must increase our efforts exponentially.
• We must double our sources of renewable energy by 2030, and then double them again soon after that.
• As we increase our renewable energy sources, our cost of energy storage and transmission grows exponentially with current wind and solar solutions.

More Dams?

Is building more Dams the solution? It’s part of the solution. But building new dams comes with it’s own controvieries. Once a dam is built, it’s a wonderful source of green energy. But the construction of new dams is expensive, and it can damage local ecosystems. Most importantly, we simply might not have enough suitable dam locations to meet our future energy storage demands. So if not Dams, what?

What if we Dammed the Ocean?

I was pretty shocked to learn just how much energy storage we will need to support green energy. Seeing as pumped storage is our cheapest, most efficient way to store energy, it seems prudent, if not necessary, to rapidly expand our capacity. So how can we pump enormous volumes of water up and down a giant hill? It seems obvious where to get vast quantities of water: the ocean. But the hard question remains: where to get a giant hill?

I have a possible answer which I would like to share. Please read about these design concepts in my follow up blog post: Can we create the world's largest battery deep below the sea?

Around the world, thousands of projects that you’ve never heard of are racing to build the foundation of a technological revolution. These projects share a common provenance; they are all born out of an idea invented in 2009 by a peer-to-peer digital currency called bitcoin. Bitcoin’s big idea is a bit technical, but here’s a description: Bitcoin invented a decentralized network of untrusted computers that can self-regulate its own ledger of transactions using nothing but cryptography. Or, said without the jargon, bitcoin proved that a [bunch of computers] who [don’t trust each other] can [resolve all arguments] about [who owns what] using [just math]. This is a big deal, because it proves that the internet can trade value all by itself. It proves that the internet technically doesn’t need banks, corporations, lawyers, auditors, or governments. That’s right, bitcoin discovered a new superpower for the internet.

Fast forward to today. In this blog post, I want to highlight some emerging projects that demonstrate some amazing future potential. But because this technology is a bit new and complicated, we’re going to take a couple small steps along the way to get some context and learn some basic concepts.

A movement’s rapid growth

Most people have still never heard of cryptocurrencies or blockchains. But that could change fast as news spreads at an accelerating rate. Here is the latest google trends report for “cryptocurrency”.

2017 has brought incredible growth to the cryptocurrency market. The overall market has grown from about $18 billion in January to about $400 billion at the time of writing. And it looks like growth may only accelerate this month as news reports discuss futures market trading for bitcoin.

The money is dizzying. Without a strong understanding of the technology, it’s tempting to dismiss the whole thing as a delusional fraud, as some people have. But before we jump to any conclusions, let’s cover some basics.

Understanding the jargon

Here are some short definitions.

Decentralized Network: A Decentralized Network is a peer-to-peer network in which the information is saturated into the consuming machines rather than being stored in one centralized server. Think napster, or bittorrent. The internet itself was built on this model, and some of its original creators want to see the internet return to these decentralized roots.

Blockchain: A Blockchain is a distributed ledger of transactions that uses cryptography to prove its validity.

Cryptocurrency: Money on a blockchain. Bitcoin is the most famous example.

If you want to dive deeper, there are some great visualizations of these concepts by ozy.com. Of course, even with a basic understanding of this technology, the rapid growth and evolution is still baffling. So whenever I feel overwhelmed by it all, I find myself searching for some historical perspective. And the best place to find that, of course, is retro youtube videos.

Historical comparison to the early Internet

Today’s blockchain hype feels eerily familiar if you think back to the early dot com days of The Internet. To jog our memory, let’s look at some youtube classics from the 90’s. Check out this news report from 1993. Or this AOL infomercial from 1995. Or this documentary about the browser wars of the late 90s. It’s fascinating to remember how revolutionary the internet was at the time and to remember how rapidly it changed our culture.

Today, the internet is practically absorbed into our everyday lives. But in the early 90s, people were struggling to understand this new intangible force. And in the late 90s, the booming wealth of dot com corporations was met with a clash of exuberance and skepticism. With this historical context, it’s easier to find a familiar drama in today’s news about blockchain and cryptocurrencies. We start to realize that something important is happening. We realize that even though we might be in a bubble, it’s clear that this new idea is here to stay. Like the internet, this new wave of technologies will survive bubbles and live on to change our lives. This sentiment is nicely captured in this recent interview with Albert Wenger (Union Square Ventures).

What an emerging revolution looks like today

Now that we have some grounding, here’s the fun part. Let’s look at why this trend could actually be the biggest technological shift since the 90s internet boom. As evidence, here are some amazing projects being built today. I, for one, believe these are prototypes of a revolution in the making.

Bitcoin — just the beginning

First, let’s start with bitcoin. Bitcoin is like “digital gold”. Bitcoin was the start of it all. But it won’t necessarily be the future. It’s a beautiful technology, but it’s young and it needs to solve a lot of problems to survive its rapid growth. For example, it uses too much energy, its transactions are too expensive, and the bitcoin community is not always aligned, which leads to destabilizing network forks. These are problems that the whole industry is working hard to solve. Whether or not bitcoin will be the platform to solve them is yet to be seen. But fear not, if bitcoin falls behind, there are many hungry competitors waiting to take up the charge.

Alt-currencies

There are many alternative cryptocurrencies besides bitcoin. They each have their own strengths. Here are a few of my favorites:

Litecoin: The “silver to bitcoin’s gold”. It’s faster and cheaper. And it has strong leadership which will help it evolve.

Vertcoin: Similar to litecoin, but with additional features that help it remain decentralized and community oriented.

Dash: Dash is quickly developing into a more user-friendly product than bitcoin. And it’s no accident; this evolution is aided by mechanisms built into the Dash network which reward collaboration. The network incentivises the community to contribute to development and growth. (Related topic below: see Aragon and “unstoppable organizations”)

Smart contract platforms

Blockchain is not just for money. With a little extra code, a monetary transaction can be extended into a smart contract with arbitrary business logic. These contracts can rely on code and cryptography to prove that agreements are valid and enforced. These smart contracts can enable something called a Decentralized Application, or dapp for short.

Ethereum: Ethereum is the leading smart contract network. It enables many other projects to outsource their smart contract infrastructure the same way that a company can outsource their server infrastructure to cloud services.

Projects that run on smart contracts

Now, finally, we’ve gone far enough down the rabbit hole to understand how blockchains enable smart contracts, which enable projects that can change the world. (Note: This is a little simplified. A blockchain is actually just one model for building a decentralized network. But that’s a story for another time.)

Supply chain monitoring: Modum uses IoT sensors on a blockchain to ensure supply chain integrity for sensitive shipments. It could be especially useful for use cases like shipping medicine across international borders. By monitoring data like gps location and temperature, and by putting this data onto a blockchain, Modum creates a secure, tamper proof network that everyone can trust. This new kind of “trustless” data network has the potential to, in their words, “significantly reduce the 3 billion USD spent annually on logistics services within the industry.”

Medical records: Bowhead Health is one of the blockchain companies trying to fix the broken system that handles our medical records. Although their flagship product is actually a fancy pill-dispenser, I’m most excited about their long term plans to secure our medical records. Today, copies of your medical records are stored by hundreds of separate companies’ databases. These companies are each vulnerable to hackers. Your hacked medical records are 10x more valuable than your hacked credit card information. All of this is a recipe for disaster as we’ve seen through a constant stream of hacking. Does blockchain technology have a solution? Companies like bowhead want to get rid of these many, insecure copies of our healthcare data and instead encrypt them onto a decentralized network. This could put your own private information back into your control. You could update it and share it instantly to whomever you want whenever you wanted. Improving our medical records is just one of many problems that blockchain can address in healthcare. Oh, and by the way, the U.S. healthcare industry is worth more than $3 trillion.

Decentralized power grid: Grid+ Based in Brooklyn, this new kind of smart meter and blockchain energy market could help reshape our power grid. It’s a little complicated to explain, but this new technology will help decentralize our power grid into microgrids which will make it cheaper and more resilient to blackouts. The Grid+ payment network will incentivize more local solar power as microtransactions make it possible to arbitrage and ameliorate the wild fluctuations in supply and demand which hamper today’s grid and threaten blackouts. Exergy is another ambitious decentralized power grid company. They are launching their token soon and I’m very excited to see their progress.

And many more use cases than we can imagine…

There are so many other potential blockchain applications, and each one is exciting in its own right. Here are a few more of my favorite projects. Keep in mind that this is a somewhat arbitrary list, and many of these projects share a market with equally strong competitors.

Sia: A decentralized cloud backend. File storage distributed in the “fog”

Basic Attention Token: Online advertisements that gives users more control.

Substratum: A real life attempt at building Pied Piper’s new decentralized internet.

Althea: Blockchain powered wifi mesh network. It’s hard to believe, but I think this technology will reduce home internet prices to almost nothing.

Aragon: A platform to enable decentralized, “unstoppable” organizations. Consider how wikipedia crowdsources content and moderation. Start with that, and then incentivise the whole thing with microtransactions, and then add other functionality like voting, task delegation, and every aspect of running an organization. That’s what Aragon is working on.

Numeraire: A meta-hedge fund running on crowd wisdom and AI. (Yeah, it’s crazy, but if it works, the financial world will lose their minds.)

Monaco / OmiseGo / etc: Free, instant payments. Think venmo + a credit card + free, instant, international transfers.

Foldingcoin: Earn cash while mining cures for disease! A bitcoin-like network that converts wasted mathematical work into useful calculations that help find cures for diseases like cancer.

Steemit: Social network on the blockchain

Props Project: Video streaming on the blockchain

Opus / Voise / etc: Music streaming on the blockchain

Welcome to the rabbit hole

Want more? Here’s the complete list of the cryptocurrency market.

Disclaimer: The author is an active investor in many of these projects. This is not investment advice. Watch out for falling objects. Don’t pet wild jaguars. Keep calm and hodl on.

I’m very excited about a side project that I’ve been working on for the last couple months in my spare time. It’s called Dear Nation. When it launches soon, it will be a living archive of the letters we write to our nation’s leaders.

The project was inspired by a podcast episode about how President Obama used to read 10 letters every day that he was in the White House. He said this about his practice.

“These letters, I think, do more to keep me in touch with what’s going on around the country than just about anything else.” — President Obama

When President Obama’s presidency came to an end, I was sad to see such a wonderful practice fall by the wayside. So I’m building Dear Nation to try to keep it alive.

Whether you want to write to former President Obama or to some other inspiring leader, Dear Nation gives you a platform to post that letter with hope that it just might get delivered. Your letter just might land on that desk and influence some big decision. It just might land on the front page of a newspaper. Or it just might inspire some stranger with a story just like yours who felt like no one was listening until they read your letter.

The Dear Nation website is currently under construction with an “alpha” label on it. Feel free to take a sneak-peek. But please excuse any missing functionality for now. I’ll make a more formal announcement soon when the site is actually complete and ready to go.

https://www.dearnation.org/

This article was originally posted on Syllable.Productions earlier this year. Update: I participated in a workshop at Google to further explore this idea. I’ll post an update soon.

Sonorous is a proposed navigation tool for the visually impaired. It enables someone without sight to visualize their surroundings through sound.

The project was inspired by folks like Daniel Kish who are skilled at tongue-click echolocation. Watching these experts navigate their environment through sound have given me hope that technology-assisted echolocation that could offer another tool to improve accessibility for visually impaired folks.

HOW IT WORKS

Sonorous works by combining three super-cool technologies.

1. A mobile device called Tango, made by Google, maps the space around you locating objects and surfaces. It’s kind of like the technology used by self-driving cars.
2. Next, augmented reality software interprets the map to identify real objects in the room — like doors and obstacles. Then it creates virtual sound beacons to represent the objects.
3. Lastly, a 3D audio technology called binaural audio ties it all together. This audio processor is what creates the convincing illusion that the virtual sound beacons are attached to objects around you. It’s seriously cool. Try the 3D audio demo app below!

DEMO OF THE TANGO INTEGRATION: VIDEOS

When you walk around in the room (in real life), the Tango device synchronizes your real location with your location in a virtual model. In the demo, red and green dots represent virtual audio sources. The augmented reality app plays 3D audio in your headphones which makes the virtual dots sound like they are sitting right on the furniture in real life.

Please keep in mind, this is just a proof of concept. It doesn’t reflect the future product design.

DEMO OF 3D AUDIO WAYFINDING: A MAC APP

1. Download and unzip the 3D Audio Demo. (no Tango device needed) (edit 2022: hmm, it looks like the 3D audio isn't working anymore. I'll try to make another  app build.)
2. Run the application:

• Unfortunately, you can’t simply open it, because I am an “unidentified developer”.
• Instead, control-click (right click) on the application file.
• Then select the “Open” option at the top of the menu.
• It will still display a warning dialog, but now the dialog has an “Open” button. Click it.

Now play it! (Please excuse the annoying steps.)

This article was originally posted on Syllable.Productions earlier this year.

Build Squad is a proposed Project Network. It’s like a “LinkedIn for Projects”. Just like LinkedIn shows how professionals are connected, the Build Squad network shows how projects are connected. Why is this great? Because it creates a new way for organizations to hire a team of professionals perfectly fit for their project.

Yes! Let me explain. Today, if an organization needs to outsource a project, they might hire one or two freelancers, or they might hire recruiters to help build a small freelance team. But if they need a larger team, they will need to hire an agency — a more expensive option. The Project Network offers a high-quality, more affordable option: it enables them to request a ‘squad’ of high-caliber professionals. The network will vet and curate the best draft picks. The professionals will also self-select the highest quality teams by requesting the top talent that they prefer to work with.

Okay, help me picture how this actually works?

Okay. Imagine a network like LinkedIn. In this network, each node is a professional, and each connection is a personal relationship. Like this (below).

Build Squad has a similar network structure. But instead of connecting personal relationships, it connects projects; each node is a project and each connection expresses a similarity between projects. Project similarities include things like: sharing the same creators, or requiring similar skill sets, or requiring a similar budget or quality. The brainstorm sketch below tries to illustrate how these similarities can be used to calculate “degrees of separation” between teams. In theory, this can power an algorithm to curate ideal teams for a company looking to build their next project.

Just like Linkedin, this network could create a broad map of similar projects by allowing for 2nd and 3rd degree connections.

Need a team that can build you an art gallery website similar to the MOMA’s? Maybe the network can find you perfect match like the one shown below.

An example ideal team:

• A team lead: An industry leader, all-star portfolio. Valid LLC and vetted.
• 4 freelancers under that lead with these promising stats:
• — 1/4 have worked with the team lead before
• — 1/4 actually worked on the MOMA website
• — 3/4 are 2nd degree or 1st degree colleagues of each other
• — They have a combined 15 years working in tech
• — They have a combined 8 years working with museums
• — They have a combined 20 years working with top-tier companies.
• All freelancers are available, valid LLCs, and within budget.

This article was originally posted on Syllable.Productions earlier this year.

Wireless lighting is starting to go mainstream. Products like the Philips Hue light bulb are making it easy (if not cheap) for folks to control their home lighting through a smartphone.

But smartphones will never replace the humble light switch. I don’t want to fumble for my phone to turn on the lights; especially, for example, when I get up in middle of the night for a glass of water. I want my home to feel cozy. I want the interface to my home to feel direct and familiar; a switch lets me ask my home for light with a chummy high-five.

You can already get wireless light switches on the market today. But I don’t love the options like this and this. They’re either very expensive or they feel cheap and plasticky. So I want to make a simple, beautiful one. It will be inspired by the beautiful hardware of vintage stereo equipment. It will be flat so you can mount it anywhere. It will use the classic interface of a toggleable radial dial which can be toggled on or off and also rotated for dimming.

Hi. We’re the Raptorsaurs. We’re a community of freelancers and creatives.

Raptorwhonow?

When my friends and I left our day jobs to freelance, we missed the daily camaraderie of our office communities. We missed the water cooler chatter and happy-hours. We missed the slack chats. We missed the knowledge sharing, business tips, and invitations to meetups.

Okay, the truth is, we were suffering withdrawal from puppy gifs and dumb memes.

So a community was born. And it was named Raptorsaur; no one remembers why, but we think it’s funny.

Who are we?

We’re freelancers, designers, software developers, user experi…entiators? (UX/CX), artists, entrepreneurs,,,, You know, folks who get excited about making stuff.

Slack Chat

We have a slack group! We’re very inclusive. We think you’ll fit right in if you’re:

• passionate
• sincere
• weird
• and/or just certain that the raptorsaur is your spirit animal

• Slack
• Startup