Supertiny Power Plants

What an amazing concept.

How Everyday Behaviors Can Produce Clean Energy: How to generate energy from sidewalks, roads, railways-- and every breath you take.


These are the kind of ideas that make my brain just light up with joy: that's kind of like alternative energy sourcing in it's own right...

A Lesson from Goldilocks

To perform well in American academic settings, children learn a number of little tricks with the intent of making the most of an inherently limited base of knowledge. Test-taking strategy 101 obliges he or she who is being tested to answer first the questions to which the answers are known, and then go back and work through those that are more difficult.

This works fairly well for the standardized tests that mark a child's progress through the primary and secondary school system, and, I would even venture to say, most of the tests anyone encounters in the course of a college education.

It occurred to me yesterday, though, that many of us grow into adults and try to apply a similar strategy to daily living. This is not to say that there is no wisdom in this approach, as there most certainly is insofar as it keeps one from becoming paralyzed, caught in consternation, confounded by one of the particularly puzzling challenges of modern life while the ceaseless race - to what?!?!- continues, less one fool stuck on question number three.

But I also see a problem that inevitably arises when one persists in such a manner. The easy questions are in endless supply. Coffee or tea? SUV or compact? Red or Blue? White or wheat, shoes or sandals, East coast or West? Sure, we can make them difficult, and lord knows, we do. Why?

When we are busy with the easy questions, we have a good excuse for leaving the difficult ones unanswered. It is our own personal form of jingling the keys in our pockets, a determined attempt to keep everyone, even ourselves, convinced that we're busy. 'Sorry, soul,' we tell ourselves, 'I am busy looking for crackers without trans-fats and checking my stock quotes and fantasy baseball team. Who I am, what I want, your siren song, will have to wait until tomorrow.' Then tomorrow comes and- surprise!- we end up mired in a flood of all new and equally pressing easy questions, and the difficult ones can once again be justifiably left unresolved. It's not like- heaven forbid- we weren't doing anything. It's not like we were holding still, thinking, reflecting, growing into ourselves. We were doing things! If you don't believe us, just look at our lists with all their pretty little check marks.

People, and for that matter, a culture- which, let it be known, I do not exempt myself from- that does this for a long enough time will inevitably be left with quite a collection of big, difficult questions accompanied by equally big, empty spaces where the answers ought to be, and all the easy answers in the world won't fill in those spaces.

What we forget is that not all of the questions are equal in value. In a culture that values productivity and efficiency above all else, the ability to assign value to anything based upon quality is often lost in the pursuit of increasing quantity. Quality and quantity are similar goals in that they both require time and energy. More importantly, however, they are opposite, synergistic, yin and yang. A successful culture, or a successful life, requires a balance of the two. In Japan, there is a traditional way of growing fruit where all but one developing fruit are cut from a branch. Obviously, this results in a much diminished quantity of fruit, but the quality of that fruit is unsurpassed. When a farmer focuses on getting as many apples as he can from each tree, the number of fruits harvested is of course increased, but the quality of each fruit suffers. Ever had a bad apple? No number of those could take the place of one perfectly crisp one. That said, it is of course an equal but opposite travesty if so few apples are harvested that no one gets to taste one at all. It would seem to me that we ought to strive for a middle ground. Not too many apples, not too few. Like Goldilocks, we need to find the porridge that is juuuuuuust right.

Coming up with a million easy answers is useless if the questions are worthless. In order to produce anything worthwhile, be it fruit or an original idea, an innovative thought, we have got to slow down enough to recognize the worth of the questions to which we apply our time and energy.

Steady as we go.

Running in Circles

I am twenty five. My life is still very much in flux. As evidence, here is a true story in which I just starred: Upon opening our little post office box this morning, crossing my fingers, as usual, hoping that some exciting and lovely surprise might reveal itself as I shuffle through the bills and catalogs, I found instead a notice informing my husband that the annual fee for rental of said post office box was due.

Like the obedient and upstanding citizen I am, I promptly traversed my way over to the counter, where there was no line (this made up for the lack of exciting and lovely surprises!) and told Pam, our ever jovial and sweetly matter of fact mail woman that I'd like to pay the renewal fee. She gave me a simple option, but it threw me for a loop. “For six months or twelve?” Without thinking, I told her I'd just go ahead and pay for the whole twelve, but no sooner had the words left my mouth than I second guessed myself. Twelve months! A lot could happen in twelve months. How could I say we'd be in the same place, using the same post office box?!? Now, I have no ostensible reason to believe we will be relocating in the next twelve months, but in all honesty, the possiblity seems as likely to me as not. I don't really have a reason to think we won't move. It all depends, I start thinking, and I realize that just the night before I'd sagely advised a friend trying to make decisions about his career and lifestyle that the right decisions for him would depend on how life unfolded. My use of the adverb 'sagely' is half self mockery, as it suddenly occurs to me what a passive, reactive way it would be to live completely dependent on the unfolding of life; but equally important, it is half self-respecting, as I think it is at least as important to respect the world's plans, even as you make and execute your own. That's what makes the game fun, after all, isn't it? Challenging, yes, but fun too- there's a reason Smooth Sailing Interstate Highway never sold the way Chutes and Ladders did.

And that, ladies and gentleman, in a nutshell, is my mind: Just like that, because of a bill from the post office, I found myself moved by the very concept of possibility. In many ways, I believe it is one's approach to possibility that separates childhood from adulthood, and my own approach to possiblity that is my greatest strength and weakness. Ah, the possibilities!

“Wait!”I interrupted Pam's ringing up of my bill, a little too desperately. “The childishness with which my life is still in flux is far too great for me to commit to twelve months of being in the same place!”

Yes, I feel a little sheepsih admitting, I did actually say that, verbatim. Pam looked at me strangely, and suddenly I felt a little strange. “I'll just do the six months for now,” I told her, and then hastily added, in the style of explanantion, both reasonable and minimally informative, that I have discovered to be most socially acceptable,“we're thinking of buying a place in the next year.” This satisfied her, and I went on my way, my strangeness once again safely tucked inside that cloak of nonchalant urbanity I find myself, to my consternation, donning more and more often.

As another poignant example, just this morning, on my way to this coffee shop to sit and write, I told an acquaintance on the phone I would be busy writing for the next couple of hours. When she asked me about it, I told her I was 'doing a little bit of freelance work.' It's just a little simpler, I rationalized, than explaining that I am in fact spending precious time just sitting here writing for some purpose unbeknownst to me beyond the fact that I can't divorce myself from this part of my identity that is a 'writer,' whether or not I actually make an attempt to have readers. Is that even possible? It's sort of like a chef pouring his heart and soul into elaborate and delectable meals, but not serving them to anyone, or a painter who stores his masterpieces in a closet jammed between a set of ski gear used once two decades ago and a cardboard box filled with old receipts. It's possible, I suppose, but mostly, it's just stupid. The two are not mutually exclusive.

But I am afraid. Not so much of rejection or failure, but of rejection or failure officially rendering time and energy wasted.

I am, by nature, interested. In everything. In college, I became aware of the astounding frequency with which the words, “That's interesting” crossed my lips and consequently convinced myself I needed to find a new adjective, until I realized that the reason I said it so often was because it was actually true. I do find myself constantly interested. If I had been born ten years later, I almost surely would have been one of the eight million children now prescribed Ritalin for my attention deficit disorder. I sometimes find myself absorbed in things like the slightly irregular shape and texture of a viridian leaf, and the unique pattern of the arc it semi-circumscribes in the gentle but insistent breeze that warns of a coming summer storm. Honest.

A mind that works this way does not always have an easy time of it in a society wherein the standard pace of functioning requires daily consumption of caffeine. (Caffeine is after all, pharamacologically similar to a mild dose of Ritalin.) I think it is also true, though not necessary, that individuals with minds that tend to zero in on experiential details with more voracity than usual are more likely to feel a little lost or overwhelmed by the rapidity with which the world changes, particularly if one's world exists within a society that worships at the altars of efficiency and productivity. Somewhere around late teenage-hood I began to connect my feelings of lostness and overwhelmedness to my strange way of seeing, and by the time I was 18 and a half, beginning my second year of college in the great city of Los Angeles after a year spent experiencing and experimenting a bit, I was pretty damned sure I better do what I could to cure myself while I still had the chance. Basically, I had a flash of foresight wherein a glimpse of my potential future self as an ever volatile, unpredictable and above all, strange, writer scared the living daylights out of me, and I chickened out. The first week of sophmore year, I dropped all the English classes I had enrolled in and switched to PreMed.

And here I am, six and a half years later, sitting at Starbucks biting my nails and pecking away on my MacBook with tears in my eyes thinking how futile the effort to escape oneself is.