AquaponicsOS: Coda

Being the last blog post, I would like to delve into a couple of half-baked ideas related to articles that came out in the last week or two. Won't have time to fully develop them but didn't want to stop mentioning them.


From Server Farms to Aquaponic Farms?

The first article, recently published in Wired Magazine is titled "Google Says The Internet Of Things Smarts' Will Save Energy".

What most excites me is how Google has been applying an "Internet Of Things" mentality when it comes to their data centers. That is, they are using data and brains to most efficiently design their cloud data warehouses. Every KWh squeezed by efficiency means better service and it involves from the physical arrangement of CPU's and disk storage, to networking, refrigeration, monitoring, anticipated failures, etc.

Another aspect that I found interesting (and was not considering) is that, while harvesting data might provide energy saving on one end, one should also consider the heat produced precisely by using computing resources. Luckily, I shouldn't worry:

The worry is that powering all this extra hardware will require exponentially larger amounts of electricity—not to mention all the money and space spent on the hardware itself. But Urs Hölzle says this won’t be the problem it may seem. Hölzle is the man who oversees Google’s worldwide network of data centers, and he believes that efficiencies brought by devices such as Internet-connected thermostats, lighting systems, and self-driving cars will balance out the extra power needed to drive our computing centers.

Given this amazing expertise, I was wondering what happens if you start applying the same approach to an Aquaponic Farm rather than a Server Farm. What sort of efficiencies could be squeezed in? At some point, bringing an expert in Data Center design might be a key asset.

The Information Age is Dead, Long Live the Infrastructure Age.

Go to Article

I must confess that being aligned with Tim O'Reilly's vision makes me feel the venture's concept has a lot of potential. People are still "clouded" by social. Social, social, social. It might just be that we hit "peak social" in the sense that people have so much time in their lives. We might just be living in the most cognitive bombarded era of a generation, where billions of dollars are being invested to harvest people's information in order to sell products. Each moment you check your ex's profile, Facebook profits from it (as does Goldman Sachs and many other investors). Big Data is being used to understand human behavior, tweak it, exploit it, squeeze every penny and exceed quarter expectations. Rather than invading people's lives with information and products they don't really need, we might start using Big Data to improve the quality of people's lives. For EVERYONE. The recent move of DJ Patil to the Whitehouse is not to be taken lightly. I think it is the beginning of the deployment of smart government to address the real issues of out time: inequality, poverty, poor education, health, social tissue improvement, corruption, transportation, food, energy, democratic gridlock, economic related stress, etc.

Here is where The Internet of Things comes in. It is about applying the same sort of infrastructure and thinking that was deployed at Google, Facebook, Amazon et al. to address human (and Earth's) needs. It is about maturing as a global civilization and taking responsibility for our actions. It is about growing spiritually as well as materially. It's about empathy towards one another and the only planet we have. It is not about using data against people but for people. It is about building infrastructure that will last for the next generation and help lift people out of poverty. I think it starts by simply walking away of our current paradigm and building an alternative.

Humanity has built cathedrals in Europe's backward and impoverished backyard. Many incredibly smart people have already built the basal stones (Transistors, Solar Cells, GNU/Linux, Blockchain, DNA sequencing, etc) , it would be nice if we can build the new cathedrals of the 21st century and see humanity flourish as never before.