Shale Oil: The Latest Insights

I recently attended a meeting on Shale Oil organized by Allen & Overy and their Future Energy Strategies Group in London on 16 October. The summary I wrote with key take-away points is now available at The Oil Drum. 

Thoughts on a Sustainable Human Ecosystem

Here's a post I wrote last year around this time, which still shapes most of my thinking (and activities today), originally posted at The Oil Drum. 

It is clear there are limits to the pollution a given ecosystem can absorb, the level of resources that can be depleted, and debt that can be incurred. Despite concerns of many about these limits we are far from tackling any of these problems on a meaningful scale. The question is why this is the case and if we (the Human Race) have the knowledge and capability to live within such limits on Planet Earth?

Book Review: On Intelligence

On Intelligence - Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee

What’s it about: A book from a man who wants to build intelligent machines.  Jeff Hawkins, a computer programmer by background, formed a number of ideas about intelligence from a considerable amount of do it yourself reading. His interest culminated into a neuroscience research center, the Redwood Neuroscience Institute (RNI) in 2002, still alive today. Soon after he founded the company Numenta which is working on Grok – one of the first computer programs geared towards data analysis and automatic model construction to make predictions. This is the core move towards what Jeff sees as the key ingredient of intelligence à the prediction of what will happen in the world around us.

CleanTech Company Listing

Today, I made an inventory of the top 100 startup companies in CleanTech, according to Cleantech Group LLC who publish an update on the world of CleanTech every year. The spreadsheet is accessible via Google Drive. Other lists on the list for an inventory - to be done at some point in future - include Sustainia100  and the Artemistop 50