Last week has been a blast. We’re visiting family as part of this world trip and have nestled ourselves in the ‘burbs of Denver, Colorado. I’ve never really spent extended periods of time in American suburbia, so my understanding of it has always been a bit superficial. The biggest highlight was…wait for it…SNOW! The kiddo doesn’t really remember her first snow (that was in London when she was barely a year old) so this was a big deal! She spent the whole day transfixed by it and experimenting with it. In service of art-as-a-habit-and-not-just-hobby I tried to capture the moment:
Onwards to this week’s finds that focus on Denver, suburbia and middle-America:
- BLUCIFER? Denver is a fascinating place. And it becomes apparent the second you land in its airport. There’s 32-feet tall blue, demon-eyed horse statue has terrified travelers, and rightly so - it was fatal to its creator. It’s just one of many, many, many things that have fueled conspiracy theorists - from supposed proof of flat-earth-theory to illuminati HQ to gargoyles and aliens. The airport is great, and all this lore is more about who we are as humans and the stories we love retelling.
- FIGHT FIRES Colorado has recently faced devastating wildfires. There is a dire need for better technology to deal with this. A former special effects coordinator has caught the attention of fire officials in Colorado by introducing a tool used to create weather on movie sets to fight fires. It sort of creates a wet micro-climate that punches through the fire. So cool!
- QUANTUM HUB We spent a day in Boulder - a city not too far from Denver - great hikes, great vibe. But what the laid-back veneer hides is some serious advanced computing happening there. Boulder was recently coined a “Tech Hub for Quantum” by the US govt. The Tech Hub designation could spur more public and private funding and help commercialize the technology and expand the workforce beyond researchers with Ph.D.s. The hope of quantum is to help humans find solutions to the most challenging problems on Earth that are taking today’s computers too long to solve. Climate change is a popular one.
- TRANSIT WOES The amount of public transport we’ve used in the past week is exactly zero. And that’s not by choice. There’s a deeply messed up relationship between housing, transport, economic activity and the American dream. In the middle of the 20th century, the US government made a decision that would transform American cities: It built a huge system of interstate highways, many of which went right through the downtowns of its biggest cities. This sealed the country's fate as a car culture, and today we're seeing the results. In most cities, it's extremely difficult to get around without a car, in part due to public transit systems built to serve an outdated commute.
- METHANE
PROBLEMSOLUTION This is a very cool local story from Colorado that has lessons for us living in any part of the world. A Colorado scientist realized methane mitigation didn’t need to rely on any future scientific leaps. It simply required an economically feasible reason to burn the methane into carbon dioxide — a far weaker greenhouse gas. He captures methane from abandoned coal mines and either uses them as fuel or diverts them into carbon credits. Simple solutions.