How to Power Modern Economies: Read Your Meter

Read you meter at home. This fun-filled advice was given by Sir David MacKay in a wonderful TEDx talk about how we heat our homes, get to work, run our computers, and how it all scales across countries and continents. The idea is really about how we run our lives while also trying to pass on a livable planet to our grand-children without the politically correct “greenwash” and self-righteous “claptraps”. Read your meter, do some algebra, and embrace the adventure to explore your home, your life, and the energy it all takes. If you read this far, watch the movie

David MacKay taught physics and information theory at the University of Cambridge in England. I learnt of him via Ruth Mottram in one of her many tweets. Dr. Mottram studies climate impacts of Greenland glaciers and works at the Danish Meteorological Institute. The tweet made me buy the book “Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithm’s” that David MacKay wrote a few years back. It arrived today.

What piqued my interest was the advanced math that goes into designing networks that send and transform information such telephone calls via wireless, computer networks, and how to deal with imperfect channels of communication. My marriage comes to mind, too, because what I say is not always what I mean which is not always what my wife hears and vice versa, but I digress. Imperfect communication channels are one challenge we will face in an experiment to explore acoustic underwater data transmissions that hopefully will take place next year out of Thule Air Force Base, Greenland. Water and ice are imperfect communication channels that we need to use wisely to make our whispers carry far. Try to talk to a person across a busy street in Manhattan with all its hustle and bustle; you need to find something smarter and more effective than just simple shouting.

David MacKay wrote a second book that is close to his TEDx talk and is called “Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air.” Experimenting at home like any good physicist does, he discovers that “… the more often I read my meter, the less gas I use!”

There is so much more to this man, his work, and ideas as a physicist with a keen interest in the big picture without skipping the details. Sadly, he died yesterday of cancer too early only 48 years of age.