New Daedalus

It's been a sparse week, but I am working on some talks, and doing a lot of work at my day job on BIM as a service model. There is something quite powerfull in this realm that I have not been able to define yet - not even enough to write about.

BIM as a service framework. BIM in the clouds. Transactional BIM running through service markets. Open Geospatial COnsortium (OGC) tagged Demand/Response in localize energy day trading.

It is snowing here in Carolina, but I will be up early to put my daughter on a plane to NYC. North Carolina does not handle ice well. I am expecting a complete mess on the way to the airport tomorrow morning.

A few hours later, I get on the plane to the city myself, to speak at AHR in the Javits center. As the biggest trde show for AirConditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration, there is alwauys a cluster of meetings and events nearby.

January 21, 2008 B2G (Building two Grid) summit - "New Business Models in Service Oriented Energy Management"

January 22, 2008 Global Warming and GridWise 10:30 at the Javits Convention Center

January 23, 2008 Preparing Buildings for a Sustainable World 1:30 PM Javits Convention Center

In between, I will try to squeeze in some time at the Commercial Building Initiative (CBI) to see the latest efforts to meet the 2030 challenge of zero net energy buildings. 

Come by and see me if you're in town.

I live in an shuttered mill town; the mill closed nearly 40 years ago. Many of the places my children explored while growing up were forbidden relics. They would creep up the rotting stairs of the county’s first cinema, no bigger than many home theatres, to view the still-open projectionist’s log. They would hunt snakes and crawfish under the old general store. They even made excursions into the old mill itself, until it burned sown in a succession of surprisingly large fires. Those fires were probably the dire consequence f misguided environmental policy—of which I may write on another day.

There is another old relic at the heart of town, one that the state and its rational engineers tried to destroy: the old bridge. The old bridge was built in the 20’s, when Bynum was the end of the paved road. A cement roadbed still extrudes from the north end of the bridge up to the second general store where it ends in blacktop.

When 15-501 was paved, it swerved to miss the town, crossing the Haw River just upstream. Some old timers claim they avoided the town so folks could drive from Chapel Hill to Pittsboro without being shot at. That was a lucky break, because it preserved a quiet community and the one lane bridge crossing the river by the old mill.

When the State was planning to make 15-501 a divided highway, they first scheduled the old bridge for destruction. Tear it down, make it bigger, and folks can drive through the town during the highway construction. This, of course, would years later still encourage impatient folk to speed through town to get past a slow school bus on the highway. The free-ranging flash crowds of dogs that characterize Bynum would have been quickly culled. So the unincorporated town protested, eventually successfully

In a fit of petulance, the State next announced that they would tear the old bridge town, cutting the town in two. Not up to standards. One lane bridges are outmoded—you might have to wait on one end for the other driver to cross. Finally, after more protest, the State relented, but still insisted on blocking each end to prevent traffic crossing.

In central Carolina, there is a tradition of placing jack-o-lanterns on country bridges at Halloween. Higher speeds on newer roads have made that dangerous. New designs offer no ledge to place the pumpkins on. But the old Bynum Bridge, with its squared off concrete sides, can still hold and display the giant squash. Now blocked off, a virtual 1/8^th of a mile walking plaza, the old bridge has become Pumpkin Display Gallery for the whole county.

Last night there must have been 80 or so carved vegetables. A few were traditional, albeit better than I ever manage. Others offered radical designs, or were carved with linoleum cutters, and awls, and who knows what to produce translucent cave drawings, and demonologies, and even nature scenes. Some were influenced by Bosch, or Durer, or the rock painting of the Anastasi, or the folk art of the Mexican Day of the Dead. There was even a small can of pumpkin pie filling with a votive candle in front.

Later in the evening, two nameless individuals began drumming at the end of the bridge. There were wearing costumes with a line of glow-sticks sewn down each limb, making a read stick figure, and a blue stick figure that danced, and drummed, in the dark. When their performance was over, they vanished into the dark. Their performance made a fine end to the evening.

It was a triumph of local good will and creativity over the single purpose engineering of the Department of Transportation. Halloween evening was just one other experience of what makes Bynum a special place to live and raise a family.

It’s been raining for days, a beautiful finish to a long dry spell in the Carolina’s. Durham was down to 60 days of water, and so was considering restricting lawn watering. The homeowners associations in town were warning members to keep their yards up. Even three days of on-to-two inches a day won’t make up for a long drought. Today, at last, it stopped soaking into the parched ground and began running off.

On the other side, all the fall flowers that were not blooming because of the drought rushed to get a full season’s reproduction in. I woke up with puffy eyes and a swollen throat—I certainly didn’t feel like writing.

Flowers weren’t the only thing that was behind. Eight months of drought meant the gutters had not been rinsed out once. So today they were clogged up. The water sucking into the ground left the well murky.

But I don’t care. It’s wet again. The sound of water on the roof was odd, at first, something unremembered. But it came back. And with it came sound sleep. Even the dogs were quieter. The deer who have been coming out of the woods searching for watered shrubs stayed at home. That nagging worry about whether the well would make is relieved. I slept well.

And I plan to do it again.

Combining Sugar Protectionism with Corn subsidy created a product searching for a use. Corn syrup came out of nowhere to replace sucrose in thousands of products. Because it is metabolized differently than sucrose, its pervasive use is suspected by many to be a contributor to the diabetes epidemic.

Now this subsidized corn syrup is being priced out of the market amid huge distortions in productions of all crops, as farmers switch crops to take advantage of the subsidized corn bubble. Maybe it is time we just fixed the mess by ending sugar tariffs. Whatever benefits those domestic sugar producers were supposed to get from protectionism was lost when it priced corn syrup into the market in direct competition.

This would aid Caribbean and Central American foreign policy, reduce foreign aid requirements, and improve health (as producers switched away from corn syrup). It would also, of course, free up the crops dedicated to corn syrup for corn ethanol – without requiring subsidies. This might even change the economics of corn ethanol to make sense.

It still wouldn’t make Corn Ethanol useful as a Carbon / Fossil Fuel / Energy Independence policy. Corn production would still use a more fossil fuel than the energy produced. Ethanol would still generate more carbon dioxide per mile than the octane it replaces.

All of this leaves out the truly horrific effects of the spiral of corn and sugar subsidies.

Farmers across the country have switched crops to catch the corn subsidy wave. While the bad effects of Corn Ethanol policy on Mexican tortilla are prices are well known, the external costs of crop substitutions are less publicized. Among the crops that farmers have shifted from are Barley and Hops. There are now spot shortages in both of these markets

Barley and Hops. That’s right, the ingredients of Beer. Small brewers, especially microbreweries are expected to raise their prices across the board this winter to cover the increased costs for these basic supplies.

Bad economics and market interference are an American tradition. But they have gone too far when they mess with the price of beer.

I’ve been thinking for a while that most Artificial intelligence attempts get one big wrong. They design single purpose systems that do one thing well, but do not have other aspects to their behavior. Neuroscientists often do the same thing, carefully noodling out the mechanisms and structures that support a single purpose.

Neuroscience is often advanced by war, and by people who suffer some sort of brain injury. This may take out an entire cognitive function, but the personality, and consciousness, while deformed, remains. So when is it that a system exhibits intelligent behavior. It may not be when enough low level programs are written, but rather when enough service oriented systems are amalgamated.

Recently I have been reading some background economic theory from Lynne Kiesling ( www.knowledgeproblem.com ). In her introduction, she leads the reader through the definition of a standard markets as complex adaptive systems. Complex adaptive systems have large numbers of diverse agents that interact. Each agent reacts to the actions of the other agents and to changes in environment. Agents are autonomous, using distributed control and decentralized decision making, Eventually, the dominant interaction becomes the agents interacting with the system environment that was itself created by the agents’ own independent decision making.

The market pattern results in emergent self organization, in which a large scale pattern emerges out of the smaller decisions and interactions. The emergent pattern is not imposed top-down, but rather arises decentralized agents interacting within bounds of distributed control (or self control if you will).

Another characteristic of such markets is resilience in the face of change, what the economists call adaptive capacity. This is of course a key element of intelligence.

For an old brain chemistry dude, this description of complex adaptive systems sounds a whole lot more like the proper model for intelligence and consciousness than do many of the reductive neuroscience models, let alone the AI approach. It clearly is closely aligned with the principles and language of embryology. Any number of gee-whiz articles since the sequencing of the human genome have explained that “it is really not a blue-print, but an organizing principle”. Emergent self organization is a pretty good description of how the body organizes itself, actually.

We’ve been talking about using building system-based agents as players in emerging energy markets. But now I’m wondering. Are we defining an ecosystem of agents that will be self-organizing, irrespective of the economics? Is it mandatory that we have a multiplicity of agents, to offer us resilience rather than stampedes during a crisis? Should we think of building services and efficient energy use as the tropisms these agents follow?

What if we’ve finally found the path to Artificial Intelligence…