Posts Tagged ‘sustainability’
“The only advantage of not being too good a housekeeper is that your guests are so pleased to feel how very much better they are”*…
Roomba is on the rise, but is the humble carpet sweeper poised for a rebound? Edward Tenner considers…
Every so often technology critics charge that despite the exponential growth of computer power, the postwar dreams of automated living have been stalled. It is true that jetpacks are unlikely to go mainstream, and that fully autonomous vehicles are more distant than they appear, at least on local roads. And the new materials that promised what the historian of technology Jeffrey L. Meikle has called
“damp-cloth utopianism”—the vision of a future household where plastic-covered furnishings would allow carefree cleaning—have created dystopia in the world’s oceans.Yet a more innocent dream, the household robot, has come far closer to reality: not, it is true, the anthropomorphic mechanical butler of science-fiction films, but a humbler machine that is still
impressive, the autonomous robotic vacuum cleaner. Consider, for example, the Roomba®. Twenty years after introducing the first model, the manufacturer, iRobot, sold itself to Amazon in August 2022 for
approximately $1.7 billion in cash. Since 2013, a unit has been part of the permanent collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.As the museum site notes, the first models found their way by bumping into furniture, walls, and other obstacles. They could not be programmed to stay out of areas of the home; an infrared-emitting
accessory was needed to create a “virtual wall.” Like smartphones, introduced a few years later, Roombas have acquired new features steadily with a new generation on average every year. (They have also inspired a range of products from rival manufacturers.) Over 35 million units have been sold. According to Fortune Business Insights Inc., the worldwide market was nearly $10 billion in 2020 and is estimated to increase from almost $12 billion in 2021 to $50.65 billion in 2028.…
Adam Smith might applaud the Roomba as a triumph of the liberal world order he had endorsed. Thanks to the global market- place for design ideas, chips, and mechanical parts, he might remark,
a division of labor—Roomba is designed mainly in the United States by an international team and manufactured in China and Malaysia—has benefited consumers worldwide. Smith would nonetheless
disapprove of the economic nationalism of both the United States and China that has made managing high-technology manufacturing chains so challenging.Yet Smith might also make a different kind of observation, high-lighting the technology’s limits rather than its capabilities…
Yet Smith might also make a different kind of observation, high-lighting the technology’s limits rather than its capabilities… Could household automation be not only irrelevant to fundamental human welfare, but harmful? As an omnivorous reader, Smith would no doubt discover in our medical literature the well-established dangers of sedentary living (he loved “long solitary walks by the Sea side”) and the virtues of getting up regularly to perform minor chores, such as turning lights on and off, adjusting the thermostat, and vacuuming the room, the same sorts of fidgeting that the Roomba and the entire Internet of Things are hailed as replacing. In fact the very speed of improvement of robotic vacuums may be a hazard in itself, as obsolescent models add to the accumulation of used batteries and environmentally hazardous electronic waste.
As the sustainability movement grows, there are signs of a revival of the humble carpet sweeper, invented in 1876, as sold by legacy brands like Fuller Brush and Bissell. They offer recycled plastic parts, independence of the electric grid, and freedom from worry about hackers downloading users’ home layouts from the robots’ increasingly sophisticated cloud storage…
Via the estimable Alan Jacobs and his wonderful Snakes and Ladders: “Adam Smith and the Roomba®” from @edward_tenner.
(Image above: source)
* Eleanor Roosevelt
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As we get next to godliness, we might spare a thought for Waldo Semon; he died on this date in 1999. An inventor with over 100 patents, he is best known as the creator of “plasticized PVC” (or vinyl). The the world’s third most used plastic, vinyl is employed in imitation leather, garden hose, shower curtains, and coatings– but most frequently of all, in flooring tiles.
For his accomplishments, Semon was inducted into the Invention Hall of Fame in 1995 at the age of 97.
“Got a big dream, from a small town”*…
Take one isolated, High Desert town (John Day, Oregon), add an abused river, a dying timber industry, and a hotter, drier climate. Then mix in a local leader’s grand, out-of-the-box ideas about rural sustainability. What do you get?
One day in October of 2021, a handful of city leaders in John Day, a small town in rural Oregon, gathered to watch a crane operator set a new bridge. Fashioned from a repurposed railroad car, the bridge spans the John Day River, just blocks from downtown.
Not much else was there that day, aside from some heavy equipment, a freshly poured sidewalk, and piles of concrete and crushed mining tailings. But to the small group that came to watch, the bridge forged connections both physical and symbolic. It was a small piece of a grand vision called the John Day Innovation Gateway—an uncommonly ambitious, multimillion dollar blueprint for a town of just 1,750 residents.
The plan, several years in the making, aimed to restore the river, revive the town’s riverfront, and rebuild the local economy. In doing so, town leaders hoped, the Innovation Gateway would propel John Day into the 21st century with a resilient infrastructure that anticipates the massive changes and challenges brought by climate disruption.
For John Day and many other communities in the western U.S., those challenges include hotter, dryer summers, more intense heatwaves, and dwindling snowpacks, so crucial for water supplies during dry months. These trends are already worsening. In fact, a recent study found that the West’s 22-year “megadrought” is making the region drier than it has been in the last 1,200 years.
To prepare itself for this future, the city of John Day has acquired $26 million (and counting) for its various projects—a staggering amount for a town so small it doesn’t even have a traffic signal. A local newspaper article from 2019 listed no less than 23 projects in various stages, from sidewalk and trail upgrades to plans for a new riverfront hotel and conference center.
All of this activity has excited hope among many John Day residents. Others, however, have been alarmed at the scale of the changes afoot, and the way they’ve been handled. And, as projects have moved from the drawing board to groundbreaking, the protests are growing louder…
Trying to reconcile process with action, the present wrestles with the future; in the middle it all, a determined small town City Manager: “The West’s Rural Visionary,” by Juliet Grable (@JulietGrable) in the always-illuminating @CraftsmanshipQ.
* Lil Wayne
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As we face the future, we might send foresightful birthday greetings to Vilhelm Bjerknes; he was born on this date in 1862. A physicist turned meteorolgist, he helped found the modern practice of weather forecasting. He formulated the primitive equations that are still in use in numerical weather prediction and climate modeling, and he developed the so-called Bergen School of Meteorology, which was successful in advancing weather prediction and meteorology in the early 20th century.
While you were sleeping…
The Rip van Winkle of the insect world, the “periodical cicada,” is awakening across the East Coast of North America after a 17 year hiatus. Since 1996, these “Brood Two” cicadas have lived as nymphs two feet underground, sustaining themselves on liquid they suck from tree roots. While biologists don’t know exactly how the cicadas set and keep their rigid schedule, they do know that these occasional visitors will crawl up to the surface, molt, swarm (sounding rather like a chorus of jackhammers), mate, lay eggs, and die– all within a month… at which point the cycle begins again.
One month isn’t a lot of time, and the cicadas will be busy… still, they’re bound to discover that, while they were sleeping these past 17 years, entomologists have made some pretty impressive advances. From figuring out how insects fly to discovering an entire new order of insect, check out “Leaproaches, Mutant Butterflies and Other Insect News That the 17-Year Cicadas Missed.”
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As we remind ourselves that it could be worse, it could be locusts, we might send sustainable birthday greetings to Rachel Louise Carson; she was born on this date in 1907. Trained as a marine biologist, she began her career at the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries. She turned to nature writing in 1950– and won the National Book Award for her first full-length effort, The Sea Around Us. Her next two books, also on the ocean and the life within it, were also best-sellers.
In the late 1950, she became concerned with threats to the environment, especially the advent of synthetic pesticides. The result was Silent Spring (1962)– a book that brought environmental awareness to an unprecedented number of Americans (even as it elicited vicious counter-attacks from the chemical industry) and spurred a grass-roots movement that led to the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency.
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