Clean Energy Week! (or how i learned to stop worrying and love the little picture)

It’s been a week since the election, and I keep thinking about Harry Truman who, upon assuming the Presidency on April 12, 1945, told reporters that he felt “like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen” on him. Truman came into the Presidency after 82 days as VP to Franklin Roosevelt, who hadn’t exactly kept Truman abreast of domestic and foreign affairs. One of the first secrets Truman learned of when he took office was the existence of the Manhattan Project, and one of the first decisions he had to make was whether or not to employ nuclear warfare. Very heavy indeed.

While President-elect Obama doesn’t look as bewildered as Truman reported feeling, I have to imagine that he’s had the same elevated experience of his own gravity. He has the weight of two wars, a ponderously sagging economy, and a potential energy crisis-- not to mention 300 million Americans watching to see what he’ll do.

While energy issues didn’t rank highly at the exit polls (compared especially to the economy), the President-elect’s economic plan appears increasingly to be tied to the promotion of green technology and the creation of green jobs. Obama’s energy platform proposes investing $150 billion in clean energy technology over the next decade to create five million new green collar jobs. And at her post-election press conference last week, Speaker Nancy Pelosi spoke of a stimulus package that would “grow our economy by creating jobs and to do it in a newer, greener way.”

There is some debate about the validity of tying the economy to energy policy. Some, like David Brooks, view the economic crisis as an opportunity to transform the way we supply and manage energy in the U.S.—something he says we could have done in the 1970’s. Critics argue that Obama’s green investment/job creation plan ignores the jobs that would be lost in the fossil fuel industry.

And there are some who scoff at the perceived potential of alternative energies in general, which is something I can't quite understand. Perhaps part of that sentiment stems from a knee-jerk reaction to the fact that environmentalists are often grounded in neither reality nor science, but only politics. I can understand that. I can also understand (and share) a healthy skepticism of anything being touted as the Next Great Thing. On the other hand, it strikes me as dangerously myopic to view energy alternatives in terms of either politics or fads. Some alternative energies are new, but they're here, and people are using them.

But these are big issues. Because I am not required to shoulder the weight of the solar system or the world or the drooping economy or the depleting ice caps (yes, they are. yes, it's us), I'd rather not. I'd rather walk around New York City and check out some of the green building they're doing around here. So for the next week or so, look forward to a feature each day on a building in NYC. I'll focus on a different type of energy (wind, solar, etc.) with each post.

Though I'll start with those tomorrow, I'll leave you with something to wet your recycled, sustainable, Earth-friendly whistle today...it's Big and Green and really Bizarre...

It's a building designed by architect David Foster for Dubai, called Dynamic Tower. Each floor is designed to rotate 360 degrees, and the building will generate all of it's own electricity through inter-floor, horizontal wind turbines and solar panels on the roof of each floor. Weird? Definitely. Possible? Maybe.

NANOBAMA!

John Hart, a Mechanical Engineering Professor at University of Michigan (go blue!) might be making the tiniest art ever.

These mini sculptures are made out of carbon nanotubes, which are spectacular little structures made entirely of carbon, each with a diameter tens of thousands of times smaller than a human hair. Carbon nanotubes are all the rage at the moment because of their unique properties —for instance, they are extremely lightweight but about 100 times stronger than steel, which makes them potentially useful for paper batteries (and theoretically useful in the creation of a space elevator…).

Each of the Obama faces above is composed of about 150 million nanotubes, stacked parallel to each other, for a total width of about .5 millimeters (10 times the diameter of a human hair). The sculptures themselves are so small that they are barely visible to the human eye—it takes an electron microscope to obtain a photograph like the one you see here. I suppose it’s a weird hobby, making art too small to see, but I think I like it.

Check out more nano-art here.

Man, Magician, Machine

There are a lot of reasons to hate getting your hair cut when you’re a kid. Reason #1: sitting still sucks. Reason #2: Sharp scissors + ears = pain. Reason #3: it’s scary going to school with a new look, especially when that look is the result of a tearful afternoon spent with your mother and a pair of scissors, in which mom keeps muttering “oh, now that side’s shorter!” and, at the end of which you are told coaxingly that you look like Ramona Quimby, and “isn’t that fitting?”.

Before self-consciousness kicks in, I think Reasons #1 and 2 are enough to instill an early hatred of the barber shop. But this was not so for my siblings and I. When we were little and living in Ann Arbor—before the west coast, before the first grade, before my mother took the shears into her own hands*—we had Fantastic Sam’s. And Fantastic Sam’s meant magic.

The basic idea was this: after the haircut (provided you were good—no crying, no fidgeting), the hairdresser would take a lock of your hair and go behind a curtain, where the hair would magically transform into a toy, which would magically appear at the bottom of the curtain. The trick was nearly flawless and, save for the sharp disappointment brought on by the appearance of a human hand, I was enthralled.

Looking back, I’m not sure if the premise of the trick really included a transformation of hair-to-toy, but that’s the way I liked to think about it. Those were the days, after all, when lost teeth turned into quarters, and magic seemed an appropriate way to account for the private mysteries of the world.

I am reminded of the magic trick at Fantastic Sam’s every time I use a vending machine-- primarily because, in the years that have elapsed since early childhood, I have gained little insight into the workings of technology. I am no longer tempted to use magic to make sense of things, which is perhaps why I have largely stopped trying to make sense of things at all.

But science has a way of calling back our curious natures, however repressed by the constraints of experience. And so, recently, when someone asked how the MetroCard vending machines worked, I set out to find the answer…

We can account for most of the details using EVERY OTHER post I’ve written this week about MetroCards: the cards in the machine come encoded with certain information (serial number, expiration date), and a magnetic read head inside of the vending machine writes the rest of the information to the card when you buy it. If you pay by credit card, the same technology is at work: a magnetic read head reads your card, communicates with your bank electronically, and debits your account for the amount paid. The question that’s left to us, then, is how the machine reads cash and coins.

There are several ways that machines test the validity of cash. First, bills are printed with magnetic ink, and different bills generate different magnetic fields (magnetic read heads again, my friends!). Second, denominations have different fluorescent properties that can be detected using an ultraviolet scanner. Third, each bill is slightly electrically conductive, and its conductivity can be used to identify it. Fourth, and finally, digital cameras can measure the different optical qualities of a bill to determine whether it is counterfeit.

Although there are some fancy ways to read coins, most change is judged based on its physical characteristics alone: diameter, thickness, and the ridges that run along the edge. While this might seem like a security measure just waiting for a bored scam artist, the physical properties are difficult to replicate, and machines are picky—they measure each coin to the thousandth of an inch.

And how does your MetroCard get physically pushed out to you while you stand in front of the machine? Well, for starters, there’s a hairdresser…

*While these are true stories, I think it’s only fair to mention that my mother has given me plenty of good haircuts over the years. In fact, most of the time I got a professional cut, I’d come home and beg her to alter it. Most notably, I came home from Bumble and Bumble a few years ago looking like a Republican, and my mom fixed it. Thanks again, Mom.



The photo at right was taken during the Ann Arbor days. The haircut was courtesy of my older brother Gabe, who I mistakenly and unfortunately believed had my best interest at heart.

Broken Laws, Bent MetroCards

I broke a law on Halloween. (Okay, so it’s conceivable that I broke several laws on Halloween, but I’m talking about something I really shouldn’t, in retrospect, have done.) It was the end of a very long day full of transportation-related debacle that included ten hours on the Fung Wah bus, a flat tire on my bicycle in Cambridge, and an outrageously expensive taxi ride from Cambridge to Boston.

Back in New York, I decided to spring for a cab home to Brooklyn, and was turned away by six consecutive drivers-- some of whom had legitimate excuses, some of whom just didn’t want to cross the bridge.

So I walked to the F train and, descending the stairs, felt the old sense of hurry and rush that everyone always feels when they get underground and hear the train coming and decide to break into a run. Except. The LED display at the turnstile informed me that my MetroCard had insufficient funds. And just as that occurred, a couple of mechanics were opening the gate and entering the station-- and this thing happened that I can’t really explain. I grabbed the door behind them, opened it, and walked through. Then I ran down the stairs and made my train.

Why did I do it, knowing that the NYPD arrests thousands of people a year for the crime? I’d like to say I was acting on instinct. I’d like to say it was the same thing that happened to Wesley Autrey last New Year’s, when he jumped onto the tracks in front of a speeding train and lay down on top of a stranger, saving his life.

I guess mine was just a less heroic instinct.

The MTA loses millions of dollars annually to fare evasion (16 million as of 2005). Mostly, people hop turnstiles, but there are also plenty of cheap scams involving unlimited MetroCards or station agents. When MetroCards were first introduced and the technology was lousier, it was easier to fool the system, and tech-geeks (and anyone who learned from them) were getting free rides all over the city.

My personal favorite of these early scams is the bent MetroCard. The idea was to take an empty card and bend it in the place on the magnetic stripe where fare deduction is encoded. This worked because, when you swipe a MetroCard, the data is read and rewritten by a series of magnetic “read heads” that perform different jobs. Magnetic read heads are these little pea-sized machines that convert the magnetic information on your card into electrical signals, and vice-versa. In fact, this technology works just like tape and video players, except that instead of the tape moving from spool to spool across the read head, your hand moves the magnetic stripe along as you swipe. This read head is a version of a simple electromagnet:

When you pass your card through the machine, an electrical pulse travels through the coiled wire and creates a magnetic field in the iron core. When the magnetic field reaches the gap in the core, a fringe pattern is created in order to bridge the gap. This fringe pattern interacts with the magnetic stripe on your card to write new information on it. The opposite process also occurs to read your card—the microscopic magnets on the stripe create a magnetic field in the iron core, which travels to the wire and sends electrical signals back through the wire.

The whole process, with different read heads performing different jobs, takes only about one-tenth of a second.

In 2005, the MTA changed the read-head technology and drove the card-bending trick into extinction. The change involved making the technology more sensitive, thus promoting MetroCard swiping to a low-level art form involving, if not beauty, a delicate combination of grace and speed.

The Transit Trail: Using MetroCards to Solve Crime (and why we know where you are right now…)

Since the MTA completed its transition from token to MetroCard in 1997, the electronic fare cards have been used on many occasions to help solve criminal cases. In 2001, a transit worker named Christopher Stewart was accused of stabbing an ex-girlfriend to death in Staten Island. His alibi placed him on a ferry to Manhattan, but the trail left by his MetroCard told a different story—he’d swiped it on a bus near the scene of the murder twelve minutes after the crime took place. The new evidence won the case for the prosecution, and Stewart was convicted of second-degree murder.

MetroCards have been used to exonerate as well as condemn. In 1998, for example, a Brooklyn high-school student filed a federal civil rights case after being arrested for allegedly hopping a turnstile. The student had been on his way to the library to work on a school project, and ended up spending nineteen hours in custody instead. Two years after the incident, electronic records from the MTA showed that the kid had, in fact, swiped his card right before being picked up by the cops.

So, how is it possible to trace one MetroCard out of five million? The third track (see Monday's Post) on a MetroCard is encoded with a unique serial number when the card is manufactured. When a MetroCard is swiped at a station or on a bus, the data on the card is both read and rewritten by a magnetic read/write head (see tomorrow’s post), and all data from the transaction is conveyed to the Automatic Fare Collection Database—a central computer database where all electronic transit histories are stored.

What does this mean for you, assuming you aren’t a public-transit-reliant criminal? If you buy your MetroCards in cash, your transit history trail can be traced only for as far back as the card in your wallet goes. If, on the other hand, you use a credit or debit card each time you purchase a new transit ticket, the Automatic Fare Collection Database knows who you are and where you’ve been going since you first stepped through a turnstile.

A Naked Card and an Old Subway Car

I stumbled upon this article on the web last night called “The MTA Exposed!” It was written by a self-described “hobbyist” who has apparently committed himself to decoding the MetroCard and, though it is still a “work-in-progress,” writing his own (free) electronic ticket. Despite the exciting title, the author’s investigative efforts hadn’t uncovered anything particularly incriminating about the MTA, though he was able to glean an impressive amount of information about MetroCard code using just some receipts and an old tape recorder.

I mention the hobbyist and his website because I found, at the bottom of the page, the above photograph. Here you can actually see the data tracks on the MetroCard, thanks to some magnetic developer fluid (the fluid makes data recorded on tape or other magnetic material visible to the naked eye). The top strip contains tracks one and two, where information about your card's expiration date, remaining fare, etc. is stored. The bottom strip is track three, and is encoded with the card's serial number.

In other news, I visited the Transit Museum today in my own investigative effort, and recommend a field trip if you are in the area. There are a lot of very cool artifacts, including a display of old turnstiles going back all the way to the original, pre-automated ticket-chopper machine used when the subway first opened in 1904. At one point, before World War II, the turnstiles were wooden, which suggested to me a time (probably fictional) when things were more beautiful and more natural, and made with more care than they are now. I hate feeling nostalgic for times I never experienced—whenever it happens, I try to walk around imagining the present through the soft-focus, simplifying lens of time. I imagine someone standing in the Transit Museum fifty years from now, marveling at the old stainless steel turnstile, wishing she could have lived in a time when commonplace things were made out of natural materials rather than thick antibacterial plastic. And it works, kind of.

The Transit Museum is located in an old subway station, and you can go down to the tracks and walk through some of the antique cars. On a day like today, there isn’t much traffic through there, and the old upholstered seats in car R10 are a good place to sit and think.

This Magnetic Moment: An Introduction to the MetroCard

If you live in New York City, you are familiar with the MetroCard: it is your key to the city’s public transportation system, your eighty-dollar-a-month unlimited pass or dwindling pay-per-ride card or fleeting single fare. It is the thing you take for granted until you find yourself without it in a station with no agent and a broken vending machine, standing sadly by the turnstile as a stream of people swipe their cards and pass through the gate and board the train without giving you so much as a sympathetic smile. It is the thing you take for granted knowing how to use until you are caught behind a group of tourists who approach the turnstile uncertainly in front of you, as one would approach a large and unfriendly and perhaps rabid dog. You watch as, after some discussion and a few false starts, they drag their collective card slowly through the machine, failing to notice the screen reading “please swipe your card again at this turnstile” until after they’ve given the unyielding iron bar a few sincere pushes. Meanwhile, you hear your train come, and you hear it go, but the good part inside of you swallows your fury and provides the tourists with a friendly tutorial on the speed with which a MetroCard should be swiped.

But as common as the MetroCard is to us, and as familiar the anecdotes, few of us have any idea how the thing actually works. Because I didn't know either when a friend asked me a few weeks ago, I began researching it. And because I had so much fun learning about it, I'm going to devote a few blog entries to the workings of the MetroCard, our key to the city...

The technology on the card itself—the magnetic stripe—is actually fairly uncomplicated. Magnetic stripes are made out of thousands of tiny particles of iron oxide, each about 20 millionths of an inch long. Because iron oxide is a magnetic material, all of these little particles are oriented in one of two directions-- you can think of them like arrows pointing north or south. When the card is blank, all of these little magnetic particles are oriented in the same direction, and by switching some of the particles around, the stripe becomes “encoded.” Just like binary code (0’s and 1’s) can be interpreted as characters and words and whole computer applications, the magnetic orientation of these particles can be read as information regarding your card’s serial number, balance, expiration, and so on.

The magnetic stripe on a MetroCard contains information in exactly the same format as virtually all other cards with magnetic stripes. Though you can’t see it, the stripe carries three different “tracks,” each with a different type of data. Track one on a driver’s license holds information about your name and address, along with the location the card was issued. On a MetroCard, tracks one and two hold information about the card type, expiration date, times used and remaining card value, while track three is encoded with a unique serial number. One inch of one of these tracks holds 210 bits of data, which translates to about 70 characters. Each time you swipe, your card is both read and rewritten to reflect your new balance. And how does that work? I'll tell you later this week.

(I created the handy drawing above using Microsoft Paint, an application that I don't believe has been updated with a new version since I was in elementary school. Speaking of simple technology...)