I do data science now

A decade ago this site was really active.

Then I got a job, learnt to program, and had a bunch of other life stuff.

_{A giant tumbleweed slowly moving through a carpark with trees and cars}

That’s likely not something you really care about, and it’s not actually something I’m interested in writing about much on here. What I do want to do though is put a breadcrumb up here because for some mad reason this site has had consistently been found by readers that entier time, and I want to point them towards things I care about now.

If you’re here because of Biomythology: Eastgate-gate 1 (or How the Eastgate Centre, Harare, is not like a termite mound) or The 5 Great Biomimicry Applications Series – Plants 4 or Biomimicry Template: Prarie Dog Burrow Ventilation then great. Those will stay exactly where they are and I hope you get what you were google searching for. These articles have consistently been seeing 1000s of individual readers a year, which makes me really happy.

Maybe you came from BakeFoldPrint. You didn’t? Well go have a look, Patrick is a really great friend and doing far more interesting science blogs than I am right now.

Since the original articles came out I wrote this in The Guardian about slime mould mapping, and last month it was syndicated for the 3rd time in a decade (thanks PAT Adaptive Tests!). If you for some reason need to reference how a slime that looks like dog vomit could have remade the US highway system, you can syndicate it too!

This is obviously self-promotion, but technically The Guardian didn’t pay me to tell you this, and it’s my site.

Dave

All of these thoughts reminded me of 2 things:

• Biomimicry is still something that people do
• I’m still doing things that some of those same people might care about

So here are the things I’m working on that are more up to date.

I have this personal profile website which is less active blog wise, but way better to contact me through, and occasionally gets interesting things put on it. These are mostly programming related things, but theres lots of programming that can be done to improve sustainability, environmentalisim and energy efficiency, so maybe you’ll find something you like there to?

p.s. even when I was doing the Biomimicron I was learning little bits of programming. Some of it even leaked out in articles like this one on Aaron Swartz.

I do business now

I started a company at the beginning of the year.

By providing instant machine learning for the most pressing energy management problems, ENGI.AI accelerates the transition to more efficient, decarbonised buildings.

Engi.AI

Between the last articles on this site and now I did a lot of work in the energy and utilities industry. I’m now using that foundation to try and accelerate the energy revolution with data science. If this sounds like something valuable then great! I think so too! Engi.AI is open for signups and I’m happy to connect on LinkedIn if that’s your bag. Just make sure you send a nice message in the invite in case I think you’re trying to sell me ‘consultancy’ by accident.

I do large language models now

Yeh, so does everyone Dave, I hear you cry.

True, but not everyone builds a software solution that brings a business critical data classification process up from 40% accuracy with a bunch of manual steps to 90% using best in class foundational models in seconds. I can’t share much more (it was an AI for Good challenge with an NDA), but if you’re involved in using the AI revolution to save the world, I’m right there with you. My code tends to live around here. Not that code though. NDA remember?

_{An emergency vehicle on a desert road. The land infront of the vehicle is on fire. Tumbleweed spiral in a small tornado.}

If none of these things seem relevant to you, no problem. As I’m looking back over some of the stuff I put here I’m surprised by some of the things that are here that I had totally forgetten, and seem so irrelevant now. Why a British 20 something wanted Barrack Obama to win the 2012 American Presidential Election seems so inconsequential.

Donald Trump looks like a cat that caught a mouse and is now batting it around with its paws until it dies. Romney is the mouse. pic.twitter.com/fSuxKbR7d8

— Taegan Goddard (@politicalwire) November 30, 2016

_{10 years ago I was worried about the guy on the right…}

In the same time span Enter Shikari have moved from Arguing with Thermometers to An Elegy for Extinction, and MayBeSheWill have developed from Singing the Word Hope in Four Part Harmony to adding Greta as featured vocals on Zara so I guess we’re all getting older.

The Biomimicron isn’t going to be updated again any time soon. For the 409 subscribers that will get an email notification from beyond the grave; Don’t panic, this isn’t becoming a mailing list for my other projects, and for ‘Jane’ who signed up in September 2022, sorry this is the first ping you’re getting. Maybe the second might come through some time in 2033.

PLUR

Cover Photo by Donald Giannatti on Unsplash

Fracking in the UK causes earthquakes, pollutes water and will INCREASE carbon emisions and energy prices

Scientists for Global Responsibility (SGR), a multi-disciplinary watchdog  organisation, have released their report on fracking and shale gas extraction in the UK. The document, compiled by scientists, engineers, architects and technologists, provides the most up-to-date analysis of the possible impacts of shale gas fracking in the UK.

In addition to concerns about unstable geology, water and air pollution the report also criticises the assertions of industry and government that fracking will increase jobs, decrease energy bills, and provide a ‘low carbon’ transition fuel.

AMAZING NEW SKYSCRAPER HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH SQUID! Bio-mythology, the sequel.

This story about the ‘Squid-inspired’ skyscraper has been in the news recently (well, the biomimetic news). “It’s a skyscraper, but its’s a squid too!”, “It won the architizer A+ competition”, “Biomimicry #YOLO” but please, can we just… not?

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Seven FREAKIN’ Days to make Solar FREAKIN’ Roadways a Tron like FREAKIN’ reality

Solar FREAKIN’ Roadways.

Roads, that are solar panels. They are photo-voltaic panels that turn your morning commute into the closest you’ll ever get to a Tron Light-Cycle Race.

Downtown Sandpoint by Sam Cornett

“That’s just a pic with Photoshop editing. Stop wasting my time with artists renditions” you say. Maybe you’re an important business man with a place to be. Or just an insufferable dick.

They exist.

Fo’ realsies.

Nepenthes Bottle Greenhouse

I love plants. Both as inspiration for biomimicry and in their own right. Sometimes though, I hate them. Really hate them.

While it is a simple process (usually) to grow a cactus in a pot, or put an orchid on a coffee table, some things hate being inside, and pine away for the outdoors. They leaf drop and crisp up and are generally whiny, thankless room-mates.

Solid foundation – This trees roots have grown into an I-beam

Biomimicry is the process of learning from nature, but what about nature evolving something we already knew?

‘The base of large trees inspired the buttresses of large buildings and cathedrals’, is a familiar, though as far as I can tell anecdotal, idea. It’s easy to see the parallels though. A large sweeping structure, supporting a tall, vertical object. When researchers began to look a little deeper though, other similarities between trees and buildings were discovered.

10k views! Level Up! – New Website Unlocked

10,000 views. Note bad for a blog run out of my bedroom.

I actually hit 10,000 views at the end of May, which was the same time you last heard from me on this site. That’s because I was busy getting this ready:

http://www.biomimicron.com, It’s a thing now.

High Fri-delity – Top 5 biomimetic robots

Biomimicry has been at the heart of robotics before the term ‘biomimicry’ was even coined. An ‘Android’ is a mechanical device made to resemble, and function like, a human. The term has been a sci-fi staple for decades, though its first appearance was in 1727.

Of course now the concept is so widely accepted that Michael bay has just started his second Transformers trilogy, and farmers in China are leaving the fields  because it’s more profitable to make giant robot sculptures out of old tractors.

The field of biomimetic animal robots is in many ways even more developed than that of  humans, and progressing all the time. While I’m continually thrilled by all this design and technology, as a generation raised on The Borg and Terminator films, I can never fully relax when researching this topic. Remember, we’re only ever one AI paradox away from the Matrix.

Clam-punching shrimp focus of new biomimicry research

The mantis shrimp,  Odontodactylus scyllarus, is a large predatory shrimp that smashes its prey to pieces. Camouflage isn’t really a strong point though.

credit Alexander Vasenin [cc]

This colorful crustacean uses its ‘dactyl club’ to break open clam shells. Probably because they don’t spot it coming. Seeing as the US army have become interested in recent biomimetic research on the material of clam shells for use as body armor, that’s a hell of a punch.

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I’ve been a Wierd Al fan all my life. Ever since I learnt The Saga Begins and Amish Paradise word for word and was therefore never able to remember a single line from the originals.

Now that Wierd Al is releasing his 14th, and possibly final, full album he has published a song a day in the lead up to it’s release. My favorite is definitely the Robin Thicke parody ‘Word Crimes’ (or should that be #wordcrimes? (which would be ironic (yes, this is a nested bracket (yes, that is also ironic)))).

UPDATE: Wierd Al just released Mandatory Fun,  and immediately hit the top of the charts with 104,000 sales in the US. I suspect he’ll use his new-found riches to finally move to Alberquerque.