This past weekend, at a flea market, I came across a Kodak Instamatic 800 manufactured in 1964. From the aspect of design and material culture, I rather liked the aesthetic packaging that the camera came in. There was something very classic, very tasteful and not at all kitschy about it. So, I thought I would post scans here. The Instamatic was a huge product for Kodak during the 1960s. They sold over 50 million of them, and it was arguably The Camera that popularized amateur photography as a fixture of healthy, modern middle class life.
Thinking about the manufactured objects of life more generally, Edward Burtynsky [a photographer I posted about earlier] is working with the Long Now Foundation to put together an exhibit of contemporary material culture. Not so much the stuff one would find in the design section of a contemporary art musuem, but surely some of that, but more so the sorts of things that one would expect to find doing an archeological dig of mid-century America. Burtynsky gives a 5 minute presentation on it with many a slide.
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J. Craig Venter is a highly prominent synthetic biologist and entrepreneur whose research into the human genome and cellular biology has placed him as one of the main public faces of this rapidly unfolding field.
I just recently came upon www.fora.tv which, for any of those who do not know it, really promises to tickle the fancy, and to kill the time. It seems that they have done a very good job positioning themselves as a major repository of lectures and intellectual discussions by forging content relationships with universities, think tanks, public forums and cultural institutions.
That said, I found Fora by way of this presentation (see below) given by Craig Venter about the recent history and future trends of synthetic biology. For those who may have missed it, we are rapidly approaching the moment when, entirely novel forms of life can be designed on a computer and brought to life through a combination of DNA sequencers and other laboratory techniques. This has doubtlessly started to cause much in the way of both ethical concern and concern for the possibility of garage biohackers designing all sorts of killer bugs.
The exciting part was we took this piece of DNA and inserted into the bacteria E. coli and what had happened was E. coli recognized this as a piece of software and started making viral particles. And true to form in nature when the viral particles were released from the cell. They turned around and killed the bacteria that had made it. So, this is a process that we see all the time in nature. I was just speaking to oil executives and I said they clearly understood that process. But this was pretty exciting: just taking a piece of DNA and having it activated, making viral particles. So we view this as the software actually building its own hardware. This is an important concept as we’re trying to go forward in this field, that even most people that are working in this area have not truly grasped the implications of this, that we don’t have to design life from scratch. We just have to design the software appropriately. [link to the presentation video - many of the latter chapters are of particular interest]
This was really such a startling picture to come across. The F-117 Nighthawk was certainly for me, and I think at least for many boys growing up around the collapse of the Soviet Union, the quintisential icon of the infinite possibility of American military technology. It was The Stealth Fighter, invisible, invincible, built of a super high tech material that would absorb radar and make the whole plane look no bigger than a sparrow upon an enemy’s screen. It was super top secret, and even knowing about it gave one the sense of some how being included in all of that intrigue and magic. But, if WE know about THIS, can you just imagine all the things they are not telling us? They must even more fantastic things, maybe even X-Files and secret UFO technology. They did, after all, develop and test it at Area 51.
But now here it is. Torn apart by an ordinary Caterpillar excavator, reduced to a formless tangle of industrial material, like one saw in the pictures dispatched from New Orleans, or South Ossetia. Giving up the ghost, the spell is broke, the charm is flown. There was so much promise in you, oh Nighthawk. Yours was a special place, a harbinger from the coast, signaling the floods would soon recede and Eden would be reclaimed. But as they have stripped you of your feathers, we too must go naked for a season.
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It was not until the fantastic rise in energy prices of the last several years (remember: a decade ago a barrel of crude was less than $15) that companies that do oil exploration and production (E&P) began a serious consideration of extracting the very low grade bitumen (essentially the most expensive part of a barrel of oil to refine, and directly the stuff that holds the stones together in asphalt). When prices looked as if they were heading straight for $100, and even more so when it looked like they were heading straight for $200, companies began investing heavily in the Canadian province of Alberta, which is estimated to hold 1.7 trillion barrels of oil, according to government sources. However, the recent turn around in the direction of oil prices, combined with the banking crisis which is (1) making it difficult to put together financing for exploration projects and (2) creating concerns that the slowing economy will push oil below $70, the price that determines profitability for these projects, has cast the future in doubt. All of that said, the physical process by which oil is extracted from the ground is quite interesting and something that is as mysterious as the magic smoke inside an ipod to most people. So for your edification, take a look at the diagram below:
The above image, taken from an investor presentation given by Petrobank, an E&P company working in Alberta, shows the basic anatomy of a well site.
- The vertical well sections are drilled about 1.5km on average, although they could get as deep as 3-4km
- Once the drill reaches the oil sand deposits, the direction will be changed so that the well will continue horizontally. This is done because the seam containing the oil sand is relatively shallow and the more surface the well can make contact with, the more production that will follow.
- Once the actual hole of the well is drilled, it is shored up with a high pressure casing that maintains the structural stability of the well.
- Following this, the casing is fractured in many places using explosives. This has the double effect of loosening up the surrounding sand formations, allowing the oil to flow more easily, as well as providing more entry points for oil to flow into the casing.
- On the surface, the pump jack helps create the pressure required to extract the heavy bitumen from the ground
