| I shit you not... |
[Jan. 16th, 2005|02:06 pm] |
lots more than water and waste in these urban-
veins. Coming soon ...electricity & information!
i hope this comes out prose-y or stream of conscio-- 'cause it's a narrative about a thought process. one that i just had a few moments ago once upon a time and want to experiment with the info insta spew... So i'm checking out awesome Cool Hunting, because no matter that JR has been on a bit of a bender about sneakers these days ((lots and lots of sneakers)) there's always something if u poke around ...and he has this striking image (above) from the GCANS Project in Japan, it's a construction project that deals with the massive amounts of rainfall during typhoon season.
looking at the size of these underground systems, i could imagine rivers raging here during any particularly stormy week, and i started to think of Rentricity... how much of the energy could be captured from the sheer force of nature's torrent, but more on that later-- it made me think of writing here, and talking about CityNet (who for some reason are very hard to find). I wondered what ever happened to that company i heard about years ago....
so CityNet is a telecommunications company who basically lay fiber-optics through a city's sewer system right up to your, um, house! if you have a toilet, you can log on. I hadn't heard much of this company after a few years and figured that it may have just been a hoax, cash-grab, or some potty-humour net rumour ...but not being a fan of telephone wires, i did some looking around. There's at least a thousand hits for citynet+sewer and no citynet.com .net .biz .us... (very hard to find) lots of stories from 2001 ...TMI, really. Then i see that oh, they must still be around, they got funding from Bershire, CIBC and Carlyle(!), and i see that a couple of cities have started fibering it up! Which is kinda funny if you think about it, the fibre going up the pipes and up into your plumbing instead of the other way around..
((if you're wondering how i eventually found their website, its thanks to Vivisimo, my favorite clustering search engine)) anyway, They're already in 19 cities in the United States!!! Woah! And here's where it all fits in, CityNet has armies of these cute little robots named SAM:
 the Sewer Access Modules, who troll through the sewers laying down the fiber optics. So that's when i thought about Rentricity again...
See RentriCity is also into sewers. They build mini turbines (well mini compared to Niagara Hydro, 3 Gorges or James Bay: from 20Kwh to 100Kwh) for sewers. These different sizes are for different flows that are in a city (a water treatment type will be much bigger than a water main in the suburbs right), and they, like the fiber optics can be placed anywhere that theres a flow. you can even control them and downshift gears ((...urg... can't... ...resisting mentioning scatalogical spelling error i just corrected)) whenever there's too much water or waste pressure anywhere in the city's liquid circulation system.
so I'm thinking we gotta hook these companies up! once the robots are done laying the fiber optics, how hard is it for them to then istall these turbines? what-- aside from buying shares in both companies-- can we do to get these two companies together? petitions? hire a matchmaker? a reality TV crew? [edoted to ad: OK. Now there's a citynet.com and they sell dial up inet service. But I dunno, I mean, I wish it would happen, but I do have some funny feelings about CN, I mean, why is it that citynet.com where'd you go to sign up for dial up there's no mention of of the tech until you add Zirch(?) in-between the city and the net-- citynet.zurka.com ¿qué? And also, i mean i don't want to sound too paranoid, but look at the investors, now there's some funny bedfellows, makes me wonder if the fiber optics can also read what gets flushed down the toilets, can't be a tough ap, And if so, even if I don't want CNdialup (dialup, heh) does the robot just do people once they subscribe? Or, are are they just laying the fiber out, even to my loo? even if i have no intention of using their service? I mean that would make sense, why send out the robots more than once, just get everything done... doing it on demand would suck for them. But having something that is hooked up from my privy all the way to a company owned in part by Goerge HW Bsuh just creeps me out.] |
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scalarparty's journal
Stirling Engines-- which BTW are some of my favorite engines-- and what was before a waste gas byproduct of anaerobic digestion, and up to now lit on fire in mad-max style flares.. see, stirling engines take heat and turn it into electricity by putting two dissimilar metals next to each other... these things can really kick butt, and the technology is only like a hundred+ years old... not