So I’m waiting for Google to fix it’s maps service so that I can finish my CS project. My partner and his friends are playing games to kill the time and I thought I’d write something to kill the time. Since we all just got back to school after Thanksgiving, I figured that as I’m multi-tasking (as in waiting for my project to start working), I’d write about multi-tasking.

I mentioned a couple of days ago that I read a interesting article about multitasking. It was in The Atlantic, which by the way is one of the greatest magazines I’ve ever read, and it provided a lot of insight to the whole concept of multitasking. It was great because the writer (Istvan Banyai) used a lot of different voices and brought in substantial data from psychology and biology, while also contributing his own personal anecdotes and observations. I also really enjoyed it because you could tell that the writer was fairly young (I expect in late twenties) and, as a result, I related a lot more to his anecdotes making for a better experience.

Biologically, he claims that multitasking actually makes humans less intelligent as it hinders our memory. Multitasking essentially limits how our brains develop (a process which proceeds until twenty-plus years of age) and makes us less capable of remembering things. Personally, I can see this happening to me as I’ll be working on one thing, shift my focus to something else, and then when I go return to the first activity, I’ll have to back track a little bit because I’ve forgotten what exactly I did. Maybe that’s not the same, but he cited some biological data to validate his facts. Banyai argues that we’re actually less efficient when we multitask because we, “chop competing tasks into pieces, set them in different piles, then hunt for the pile we’re interested in, pick up its pieces, review the rules for putting the pieces back together, and then attempt to do so, often quite awkwardly.”

Banyai used an interesting analogy about human brains. We use our brains as we use the most technologically advanced devices. Before the computer age, our brains were seen as beakers of chemicals (i.e. they worked relatively magically), then during the major physics discoveries our brains were very mechanical. Now we compare our brains to CPU’s and think that they should be able to work like CPU’s. Obviously our mental facilities are very different from computers and we shouldn’t think that we can think the same way that computers work.

And obviously multi-tasking can be dangerous. We all know that talking on the phone while driving significantly increases the chance of an accident and there are several other scenarios where this is true.

So am I going to stop? Probably not. I’ve grown up with multi-tasking; I listen to music while doing homework, I work on other assignments while waiting for my code to compile, I talk to my friends in between physics problems, and I’ve done all these things since middle school. It’s in most of our natures to multi-task but I think we should all be aware of it and try to take tasks one at a time.

If you have Atlantic online membership you can read the article here.

Fuel cell technology is still a long ways off. Honda’s fuel cell prototype will set you back over a million dollars - and it certainly doesn’t run like a similarly priced Ferrari.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks regarding fuel cell technology is the production and storage of hydrogen. Most people simply assume that you get hydrogen from water - put some electrodes in water, pass some current and you’ll see the hydrogen bubbling out. But that’s not where we get our hydrogen. Perhaps ironically (from a warming perspective), the hydrogen that is produced usually comes from the combustion of methane (CH4 + O2 –> CO2+2H2). And that’s assuming it’s complete combustion, incomplete combustion releases CO into the environment. Furthermore, consider that a sizable portion of our energy comes from coal plants (see CARMA) and if you have to get a lot of new electricity to produce the heat needed to make millions of tons of hydrogen to run all of our cars - the carbon pollution savings are not as great as you’d hope, if they even exist. (This by the way, is the same downfall as that for corn based ethanol. While the corn itself reduces the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, producing and burning ethanol puts carbon back into the atmosphere.)

But researches at Penn State were able to create hydrogen using bacteria. Essentially they utilized a bacterial fuel cell that performs electrolysis on a sample of organic matter (in the case of the research they used acetic acid). One of the biggest benefits is that with the help of the bacteria you don’t need to supply as much outside energy as you would otherwise, cutting down the amount of work we need to put in to produce hydrogen. And while other lingering technical hurdles are sure to keep fuel cells off of the mass market for quite some time this is definitely a step in the right direction.

Story from Wired

For anyone interested in examining the CO2 output of various power plants across the globe here’s a great site to check out: http://carma.org

Up until recently I think emissions from power plants were really overlooked. Everyone focuses on the effects of oil and the need to switch over to hybrids, plug-ins, and eventually fuel cells but if all the electricity we produce is powered by dirty plants then simply changing our automobile fuel won’t do much.

I for one hope we don’t add any new red dots onto the American map (note the concentration around the Eastern US and China).