How life was meant to be...or was it?

I was looking today at Gen 2 on www.youversion.com (which is fantastic and any internet involved Christian MUST check it out) and I found just the title of someone's post on the chapter and it was titled "How life was meant to be." And I was suddenly surprised to hear something in me yell "No!"

"Alright then," I said to myself "what is it supposed to be like?"

"It's supposed to be like Jesus..."

"And...?"

"The new heavens and the new earth. It is supposed to be like that and not like what it was. We as people of God are not to push back towards the Garden. Life is not meant to be a return to the Garden, and any attempt to get back there will be met with a flaming sword. We are to look forward to life with Christ, not backward to the grave. The way we have heaven now is not to fix the broken world, but to walk ever closer to our savior. Adam and Eve did not have it great because they got to walk around naked eating fruit, but because they walked close to Christ every day and every hour.

"And God when he came back and established his kingdom did indeed heal the sick and the blind and the lame, but he did not restore the garden. What he did in his death and resurrection was unite us to himself so that now we can walk closer to him more than it was to bring back the perfect balance of nature and all else. His restoring was a taste of what is come not what was before. The curtain was torn in two, and now we can walk with our Lord every day and every hour. We even have his spirit to guide and comfort us. This is what we are to revel in and seek after.

"But how much of every day am I trying to restore the garden? How much am I trying to make things 'the way they were meant to be'? Instead my efforts should be focused squarely on Christ and the way things will be in the future."

"Ah," I said to myself, "that makes more sense. Let's press on then. And do try to be more eloquent when you decide to interrupt."

And he came into the world scandolously

You know I never really sat down and thought about it, but the virgin birth was quite scandalous. I'm pretty sure that I have heard this before, but it jumped out at me again today. Our savior looked to all around as if he had been conceived out of wedlock. Kinda crazy right? I mean everyone could do that math. You were born 3 months after your parents got married.

Joseph and Mary both had their reputations stained by this essentially branded as fornicators. Here is the kicker, they would also look bad in front of the Church today. For Christ they suffered ignominy at the hands of other religious people. So in following Christ, they looked bad to the morally upstanding of their day, even those who were following the law.

I guess that just goes to remind me not to judge, and to realize that following Christ might sometimes make me do things that look bad to the rest of the world -- even the Christian world.

Is Bloom Energy just hype?

Bloom Energy came out last Sunday with a spiffy name, and a bunch of promises, but it seems to me their numbers aren't quite stacking up. Their promise of "payback" seems completely made out of thin air.

First lets look at the natural gas aspect of this. The Bloom Device uses about 2/3 of an MMBtu per hour to produce 100 kw of electricity. If you are a utility that is buying huge quantities, that's only 2 cents per kwh. For industrial you will be closer to 3 cents per kwh, but for residential customers, it will be about 7 cents per kilowatt hour at today's prices. Just that last number pretty much kills the idea of ever getting a Bloom into your house. Unless you are in California (or Texas because Texas' electricity comes mostly from natural gas) your utility cost will be cheaper than owning one of these boxes.

Second, lets look at the payback. I don't understand how the device can pay for itself in so little time. Assuming that the Bloom is free to run, and you are in California, and you are paying residential prices for electricity, it will take about 7 years to pay back. However, when you throw in the cost of running the Bloom, it jumps out to 9 years. Throw in cheaper cost of electricity to large consumers you are looking at 12 years. Take it Alabama where electricity is only 8 cents to large customers and it won't pay back for over 40 years.

Nuclear power plants cost only about $4000 per kilowatt and take 8-10 years to pay back and have less expensive fuel costs than natural gas by an order of magnitude. Natural gas is under $500 per kilowatt installed and also has a lengthy payback. But Bloom has a $7000 per installed kilowatt and claims that it can payback in just a few years...no way.

The only way this would work is if there were massive government incentives. Even with a 5 year payback, you would need over $500,000 in government incentives in the first few years. I could see some of that happening in California, but not anywhere else. In order to get that type of money, you would have to convince people that this is the next super-green technology. They have done this but convincing does not make you right.

Bloom isn't even that green. It's twice as efficient as Natural gas combined cycle turbines so it makes half as much CO2. That does mean it's about 3 times better than coal, but pretty much everything else out there (solar, wind, nuclear, hydro) is going to be about 100-1000 times less CO2. So it produces 30-300 times as much CO2 as other renewables. This should not qualify for ANY sort of tax break.

Second, lets talk about stability of natural gas prices. And now lets look at this graph.



That doesn't look very stable to me. It looks like gasoline prices doesn't it? Are those stable? No. And what if the whole country went to natural gas? Could we even supply it? Probably not. Those are not stable prices and they never will be because natural gas wells produce most of their gas in the first couple years then taper off. Therefore natural gas has boom and bust cycles. That's how T. Boone Pickens got rich and poor several times over. He tried to guess the cycles. We are in a cheap phase so it's a great time to push natural gas technology. Wait 5 years and it will be out of vogue again.

I really don't know what Bloom has been thinking, but my guess is that it has been thought up by a close conversation between marketers and scientists without a business mind in the middle to check their numbers.

What's with our current obsession with origin stories?

It's pretty obvious right now that we have a huge obsession with origin stories. Batman, Superman, Spiderman, even Star Wars, have recently put forth stories about their origins, and for the most part, they have been quite successful. It isn't limited to movies and super-heroes either (though it does show up there the most). The "phenomenon" which was and I guess still is LOST is fundamentally an origin story. Even the recent Battle Star Galactica which completely ran out of steam at the end, has begun anew in a prequel. Even the Lord of the Rings is going to be doing a a backstory sometime soon (based on the book which started it all.)

The strange part of it for me, is that even though this seems like and feels like a fad to me, I love it. These coming of age stories which are so popular now, they pull on my heart and my emotions much more than the older stories which have clearly defined good guys and bad guys. So somehow they really affect me why is it? Right now I have couple of theories.

First and most obviously, a dynamic character who represents myself is much more interesting than someone who has already achieved the top. This generation is acutely aware of our limitations in a way that I think many before us were not. In some way we have lost hope of progress, of ultimately achieving greatness. But these stories are hopeful in a true sense of the word hope. We know the ending, we know it will all turn out more awesome than any of these characters could ever expect. I want that for myself, and it thrills me to see it.

What else drives this desire to understand the past of characters? It's the very thing that is making me think about this post. A desire to understand and to know so that I can progress. Right now as a society based on science, if we know the rules and the intial conditions we can predict and control the outcome and even understand our presence. We have learned the majority of the rules, now we just need to know the beginnings. Then we can understand where we are today, get a real grasp on what is going on and repeat the success of our heroes.

Finally, I just think that it might be our hearts crying out for history. We live in a time where so much information is about the here and now, with an eye towards the future. Money, fame, riches are all about predicting the next big trend. If you can do that, the world is yours to play with. In this flood of analysis of information about the present (go look at twitter, facebook, buzz, or pretty much any other site) the information will all be about the present. It used to be most books that you could get your hands on were written in the past. But today everything is online, and it's all about today. I see so little history online that I think there is a gaping hole in my understanding of the world. We need our history, and we know it even if we don't know it.

So why the prequel then? We need hope, understanding, and history. And that is all part of the prequel.

Apple's tablet to come

I am hardly known as someone who likes apple products, but with all the excitement that has been going on recently, I HAVE to speculate about what Apple is up to right now with their "Tablet."

There has been lots of speculation about this being some sort of beefed up iPod Touch with a bit more of a computer behind it. That it might even run the same OS as the iPhone. But this is really quite unlikely. I think it is entirely possible that iPhone apps will be compatible with this device through an iPhone emulator of some type, but I do not think it's primary purpose is to become some sort of larger iPhone.

I think that this device has much, much broader aims. In fact they are so broad and far flung that it may become the next must have device even though it will cost 3X what an iPod Touch costs today. Apple is gunning for every ounce of your multimedia life. They want everything from the Sopranos to Better Homes and Gardens to Youtube, and they may well have the hardware an operating system to do it.

First and most obviously, it will be a device which can surf the web with the best of them. Some tweaked version of Safari which renders pages quickly, perfectly, and sizes them for the device. It will support flash video and include as much hardware acceleration as possible. It should be joy to use the web on as this is a must for any piece of electronics, over $200 today. But more than that, it will introduce RSS to the masses. It will have a feed style listing available that will simplify even further the reading and finding of online material. Also it will create a great system of ranking webpages by popularity and reviews. Essentially, it will become what google has not. Google has a very machine learning approach to the web. Apple's will be very personal and will have similar impact as other social networking sites.

Second, is it will finally monetize the internet. The internet is super convenient way of getting information, but is still a challenge for some and is dominated by advertizing. By simplifying and speeding up the web, they will allow people to charge a very, very small amount (think $1-$5 per year) to be able to read a blog newspaper or magazine in order to read full pages without any adds popups or having to click on multiple pages to get to full articles. Expect all your magazines, blogs, newspapers and everything to come to this device within two years.

Third it will do video, and it will do it with your TV. This seems kinda obvious to me. Apple TV tried to do this and failed to generate any sort of foothold. Apple has learned it's lesson though. Everything from this device will be available to stream at a moment's notice, and it will be in high definition. It's all about convenience for this part, and I expect there will be some wireless streaming here or possibly a dock which will connect via HDMI to a majority of modern TV's.

People will be able for the first time to subscribe to individual shows for a fraction of what they are paying now for cable. Think $10 for a season or about $0.25 an hour. If you watch 5 hours of TV per day, then it will cost about $45 a month to get that level of TV which most people are paying about $100 a month for right now. You will subscribe to your shows you want to watch and see them commercial free whenever you want.

This will spawn the new Video store that will go alongside iTunes and the App Store.

It will do movies like this too. Watch out Netflix!

Fourth, it will do music. Again, the dock will be key, but I expect the music listening prowess of the iPod will be present on this device as well as the ability to connect to existing apple docking devices.

All of that in sleek 10 inch touch screen package that you can easily take on the road (possibly with a slide in keyboard to turn it into a laptop for real road warriors) and I think they will sell like nobody's business. Apple may become part of my house this year...

So I will finally start blogging again!

Alright, so I have been not doing anything here forever. This is the year that changes.

I will share thoughts, words, ideas, predictions, observations and maybe even some predictions (actually this will start with a prediction).

So here goes!