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Tuesday, February 20, 2024

Public Art

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For the most part, I find public art generally underwhelming. I like this humanoid figure made out of brick though. Location: Toronto. 


 

Monday, January 22, 2024

Existential Betrayal in the work of Philip Roth

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 This is the first half of an essay on a thematic obsession of Philip Roth's, the late novelist. If you work at a publication interested in seeing a full version (probably would be between 3000 and 4000 words), let me know @ trevor.cunnington@gmail.com

Existential Betrayal in the work of Philip Roth

On September 6, 2012, an open letter appeared in the The New Yorker from Philip Roth to Wikipedia, after Roth failed to get an article about his novel The Human Stain changed. Wikipedia decided Roth was not a credible source on his own novel in some grand gesture to Roland Barthes’ essay “Death of the Author. The correction he so direly wanted to make, which he could have made himself had he registered to Wikipedia, was that the character of Coleman Silk was based not on the writer Anatole Broyard, with whom Roth was acquainted tenuously, but rather on Princeton professor of sociology Melvin Tumin, with whom Roth was close friends. Ironically enough, Roth declares that Wikipedia’s claim that Coleman Silk was based on Broyard was the result of “the babble of literary gossip,” the same social force that dooms Silk in The Human Stain. I bring this quibble up not to vex the already exhausted topic of Barthes’ “Death of the Author” or to rehash the truism that not everything is exactly as it appears especially on the internet, but rather to use it as an example of the central theme of Roth’s work: what I will henceforth call existential betrayal.  

Before I continue, it behooves me to define and clarify a term I invented for the purposes of this essay. First, existential betrayal does not hold court with the philosophical school whose central tenet is existence precedes essence, which is another way of saying things were here long before ideas about those things, which are often considered a primary symptom of consciousness. It has nothing to do with this philosophical debate. I have simply used the adjectival form of existence. How do you betray existence, then? If you live in a democracy and accept democratic principles, you allow a fascist to become president. If you are a successful businessman who has achieved the American Dream, your daughter becomes a terrorist and blows up a post office. If you are a light-skinned African-American, you cut your family out of your life, and you live your life as a white person. Any Philip Roth fan will by now have recognized the central situations of three of his novels: The Plot Against America, American Pastoral, and The Human Stain, respectively.  

Betrayal of the kind that Roth seems perversely interested in has a long literary history. Adam and Eve eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, betraying their creator’s wishes. Cain murders Abel out of envy of the latter’s ability to please God with his meat offerings. Judas, one of Jesus’ beloved disciples, turns him over to the Romans who crucify him. Oedipus kills his father and unknowingly sleeps with his mother, breaking one of the most universal taboos, that of incest. Claudius kills his own brother and marries his wife, Hamlet’s mother. Macbeth kills Duncan after being rewarded for his bravery in battle.  

African Americans on paper were given freedom; in life, they were hardly even given freedom with the introduction of Jim Crow Laws. Special Field Order 15, which offered the newly freed slaves 40 acres of land, and a mule to borrow from the Union army, was quickly overturned by President Andrew Jackson. The freed slaves had been promised the autonomy and independence inherent in land ownership. What they received was a tenuous, and sometimes outright dangerous, freedom from slavery, but not from the lynch mob, not from discriminatory housing and employment policies, not from police brutality. These betrayals, both fictional and real, are all very visceral, and their repercussions are felt to this day  

What, however, distinguishes a garden variety betrayal from an existential betrayal? An existential betrayal is one that violates a human universal. While the latter has been notoriously difficult to pin down, what with the seemingly endless variety of human culture across both time and space, there are still, postmodernists notwithstanding, a handful of human universals. Small group bonding, which we call the family, is a universal. Even feral children have bonded to a small group of a variety of animals: dogs, cats, and monkeys. Betraying this small group, without a doubt, is an existential betrayal, as it undermines all relationships and puts one’s very identity into question. That is what is so devastating in American Pastoral. That the protagonist, Seymour Levov, finds out his wife has been having an affair, that he himself had an affair with a woman who would, unbeknownst to him, eventually hide his daughter after she embarks on a bombing campaign in protest of American involvement in the Vietnam war, and worst of all that his daughter would so violently reject the American Dream that he has lionized and achieved leaves him unable to trust his own instincts and intuitions about people. His world has been annihilated by betrayal.  

Francis Fukuyama famously declared the end of history after the fall of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991. And yet, things continued to happen, and as if that line of a certain front rippled across the earth, happenings were recorded and passed down. It occurs to me the person to make such a declaration knew about as much about history as a billiard ball knows about beer. In Roth, thankfully, history hasn’t ended for better or for worse. We can still sense class conflict in American Pastoral in the design of Levov’s office: glass walls in the middle of the plant so his line of sight could reach each corner. It was if he had torn a page out of Discipline and Punish, from the panopticon chapter, and spliced it with an earned and nuanced examination of workplace power and the give-take characterizations of elite liberals mixed with the resistant reading practices of the folks who dirtied their hands there. And of course, there is sexual indiscretion on both sides of the marriage equation. Should we wonder that people take their pleasures without much discretion in order to seize a measure of pleasure back from their work-invested lives? 

His daughter, long after the bombing of her local post office, converts to Jainism, a religion characterized by such absolute kindness that you are not permitted to kill anything, including plants. Such an irony in a story about people hurt by such actions and being associated with those actions is not lost, especially since in her vision the reality of her country never lives up to the principles it proclaims to its people and to the world. These principles also get subverted to dramatic effect in The Plot Against America. That the “plot” is “against” America, a stealth Fascist insurgency spearheaded by a hugely popular aviator, a character type redolent of bravery and honour and other such longstanding virtues in our literary canon, is another existential betrayal. Lindbergh and his cronies in the alternate history format rush the presidency, he gets elected on his sheer recognizability, then he bans all other parties and undoes the especially virulent democracy of America in a short span of time. In a time where the American Presidency has been bumrushed by a reality star who is then impeached but he continues wielding near absolute power, such a narrative is certainly queasily familiar. “Never forget” takes on ominous undertones.

Thursday, December 21, 2023

My Year in Reading (Part 2)

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 3. Body as a Home for this Darkness, by Maeve Mckenna (2023). I bought this book directly from Ms. Mckenna, an Irish poet I discovered through the litrag Rattle. This slim collection of poems is more than a sum of its parts, and all the poems cohere in a nice fashion (not that I think that is always necessary or desirable). It is a testament to her late father, and deals primarily in the theme of grief, filtered through vivid memories, recent past experiences of being a caregiver, and present experiences of dealing with the estate. There is beauty here, and wisdom. Occasionally she plays with formatting, but she is at her best when she writes in free verse stanzas, where the suppleness of her joy in language shines. In the poem "The Morning after Reading the Will," she echoes Tolstoy's famous quotation that "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" when she riffs ". . . Every family is fractured by revelations of being itself" (21). The lack of capitalization on "being" suggests that the revelations aren't about existence as such, but about the times that our overly socialized masks drop in moments of stress and tension, our being-together as ourselves without these masks. I was bowled over by the beauty of such passages as "Holy statues suggest forgiveness, a pet/fish ingests faeces, the moon/howls allegations and binmen are out/and ripped, slapping shut overnight lids/their deep throat shoulder blades of inked/tongues speaking fake bruises onto skin." For once, it's a moon reference in a poem that is not eye-rolling, and what a fresh way to describe a man's tattoos! This is a tightly-knit poetry collection that rewards multiple readings. 

4. Brion Gysin: His Name Was Master: Texts and Interviews by Genesis Breyer P-orridge, Peter Christopherson, and Jon Savage (2018).

This book I bought from the publisher Trapart Books because I am a big fan of William Burroughs, and in a book of interviews with him called The Job, he said he derived the technique of cut-ups he used in composition for his Nova Trilogy (of which The Soft Machine is a favourite of mine) from Brion Gysin. I had no idea, however, that I was in for a rollicking account of the social world of some of the twentieth century's most important artists. Brion's life was truly astonishing and worthy of an epic biopic. He knew everyone, from the original group of Surrealist painters and writers in Paris in the 1920s, through the Beat writers, through the personnel of the Rolling Stones and Beatles, to legendary Joujouka musicians, to even Yves St. Laurent and the power behind the throne of the Church of Scientology. He himself was primarily known as a painter, although he seems somewhat of a polymath. He wrote a book called The History of Slavery in Canada, as well as books about the "Beat Hotel" in Paris, and a novel or two. His views on the cut-up are the most fascinating, but he swears his most important contribution to the world was the Dreammachine. He claims that if he had managed to find a way to mass-produce it, it would have become the non-drug alternative to heightened states of consciousness in the 1960s. From his descriptions, it sounds like it's a more elaborate version of closing your eyes and staring at a strobe light, which renders beautiful patterns and arabesques on your eyelids. He calls it an "art-object" although clearly it is somewhat of an invention as well. Someone who experienced it said that it rendered the art museum superfluous because it inspired such beautiful visions. I also quite enjoyed his description of experiences of running a restaurant in Morocco. It was refreshing to encounter his prescient anti-transphobia, but his gay misogyny was a bit disheartening. We can't all be perfect, I suppose. What an astonishing life and work! 

5. Second Nature by John Schertzer (2023). To be honest, I'm still wading through this chunky book of poems. It's very dense, but the quality is extraordinarily high. As it somewhat loosely clusters groups of poems under headings such as "An Economy Can Remember Us," "Drop Scenes," "Convenience Struggles," and "Plan for a Broken Bowl" (which I hope is a reference to Henry James' masterpiece of frustrated love The Golden Bowl), it is not as tightly knit as the aforementioned collection. However, after reading the first twenty or so poems, I have a feeling this is going to become a favourite poetry book of mine. I am in no hurry to finish it, as I love to relish poetry slowly. He clearly writes in a lineage I myself write in: heavily influenced by avant-garde schools of poetry such as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, and the Black Mountain and New York schools of modern poetry. I love the two-faced "Seventeen," which originally presents itself as a group of 17 seemingly unrelated poetic declarations, such as "A trash receptacle in a labyrinth," "Questions answering themselves silently," and "Oblique circles of days matching the moon." Each declaration is numbered. If you read the poem again, however, and mentally delete the numbers, a certain flow emerges between the declarations, and motifs of circularity emerge and serve to unify the poem. If you're looking for straight-forward lyric or narrative poetry, this is not going to be your cup of tea. This is cerebral stuff, folks, which is why I'm going to take my time with this one.

Friday, December 15, 2023

My year in Reading

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I read a bit more this year than in the last five years, which I very much intended. It was since I downloaded Instagram, whose reels section copies the wildly popular short form video format of TikTok, that my reading decreased. A friend and I often gripe about the effects of these genres of content on the human attention span. The consensual position in my Communication and Culture program was that the perspective of technological determinism; the idea that new technology shapes human consciousness and social change more than, say, social relations; hews too closely to behaviourist psychological perspectives (the work of B.F. Skinner and Pavlov among others) to give us the best tools to examine communication systems. 

Technological determinism is a short hand criticism of some of the most important Communication theorists such as Marshal McLuhan and Harold Innis, who tracked changes in human politics or relations and sourced these changes in technological changes of communications systems. Innis believed some forms of communication had a time-bias (i.e. writing on stone tablets), while others had a space-bias (i.e. writing on papyrus, which is easier to transport, but does not endure as long through time). He thought that  political changes were inherently related to changes in the dominant communication method. McLuhan believed technologies were extensions of our own bodies. The wheel is an extension of our feet, the camera is an extension of our eye, etc. He believed new technologies were subconsciously changing our behavior and habits. The idea that social media are curtailing our attention spans is certainly in line with McLuhan's thought. 

While at the time I agreed with the consensus of my program, which was a curious one considering the above theorists worked in or were from Toronto, where my program was located, I can't help feeling different now. McLuhan came from a background in literature, and while he did design some experiments to prove his ideas, these experiments were fundamentally flawed in terms of validity and reliability. That itself, however, does not make him wrong. How else can one explain suddenly feeling unable to watch longer movies, or finish novels? How else can one explain the disparity between my memory of classrooms I learned in, and the classrooms of today, where students seem unable to listen or pay attention to anything without the quick edits and overly caffeinated delivery styles of social media influencers and their content? 

While this is a lengthy digression, I see it as necessary to introduce my sum up of my reading experience. I consciously read more this year to try to reclaim my attention span. I picked longer books. I will pick my five favourite books from my reading this year to discuss, in no particular order.

1.  The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, by Carson McCullers. This is one of the classics of the Southern Gothic Fiction genre, one of my favourites. I don't know why, but the self-reflection of white authors in an area whose economy was entirely predicated on mass slavery just 175 years ago I find particularly compelling. I consider Faulkner, who also writes in this genre, the best novelist of all time for the simple reason he has written the most undisputed masterpieces (even if he himself considered one of them -- The Sound and The Fury -- a failure). I started reading this book in 2021, but I lost its thread and dropped it despite admiring the way it wove together the lives of five vividly drawn characters. The intersection of race and class in the novel is endlessly fascinating. Two of the characters, a Black doctor deeply respected by his community, and a poor white drifter, both harbour communist sympathies. The Black doctor and his son both suffer physical violence at the hands of law enforcement in the racist south. The centre of the novel is a deaf-mute, so this book was ahead of its time in terms of representing the disabled community. The four other characters each meet with this deaf mute to bare their souls, while he is mostly preoccupied with the loss of his gay lover and fellow deaf-mute to a family-led coerced commitment in an asylum over 200 miles away from him. 

The other two main characters are Mick, a 13 year old girl (by the end of the book, she is at least 15), the daughter of a poor family forced to rent rooms to survive, one of which the deaf mute character, ironically named John Singer, occupies after his lover is committed. She dreams of composing music, but ends up relinquishing her dream at the end because of life's harsh realities. Finally, there is Biff, a restaurant owner whose gender identity seems somewhat fluid, whose wife dies of an illness. He/they (applying such pronouns to a character in a book published in 1940 seems anachronistic, but trust me, he's that) is the only one who realizes the extent to which the others are projecting their own dreams, hopes, fears, and desires onto John Singer, and the lack of reciprocity of understanding between Singer and the others. Despite being sympathetic in this regard, he struggles internally with a blatantly inappropriate romantic interest in Mick, who goes from tomboy to young lady during the course of the book. This is one of the qualities that make for the most compelling fiction: a very sympathetic character with a very terrible, unsympathetic secret. Fortunately, he never acts on it, and he lets it pass, as it eventually does. 

John Singer is the only white man that Dr. Copeland can stomach, and one of the sources of tension in the book is how Jake Blount, the poor communist drifter, and Dr. Copeland never get to join forces to potentially collaborate to achieve their goals. When they finally meet, they have an all night tete a tete that culminates in a terrible quarrel over the role of the "race question" in the context of communist agitation. Soon after that, Jake ends up, through no fault of his own, in a race riot. He finds himself in the confusion on top of a dead black boy, one that Dr. Copeland grudgingly gave a scholarship-type award for best essay on how to uplift Black people in America. The newspapers blame the melee on "labor agitation" rather than the toxic race relations that are the residue of mass-slavery. That's his sign to leave town. Overall, it is a somewhat gloomy novel, but it has a very moving climax and denouement that rewards the reader who sticks with it. The characterization is superb. 

2. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Doestoyevsky. After reading The Double and Notes From Underground, the former of which reminded me slightly of William Godwin's Caleb Williams, and which feels like a nightmare, I had Doestoyevsky pegged as abnormal psychology, the novels. That is, his work seems obsessed with neurotic or psychotic characters. Crime and Punishment is not so different in this respect. However, whereas I had the urge to reduce his work to a one-trick pony kind of evaluation, I cannot claim otherwise than that this novel is a masterpiece. 

The main character is Raskolnikov, a desperately poor student who kills a pawn broker, robs her, but refuses to dispose of the booty to his advantage. The psychological dance between him and the police, with whom he has regular contact after the murder, is masterful. One of the great things about this novel is the ambiguity of his motivation. We are given different possibilities, such as he robbed her in order to start his path into greatness, to become a Napoleon type figure, or that her social function as a parasite of the poor must be eliminated. However, a relative of the pawnbroker, one towards which he bears no ill-will finds him over the pawnbroker's dead body with a bloody axe in his hand. He kills her too. He expresses remorse over this murder, but never over the pawnbroker's murder. 

*Spoiler Alert*

On the cusp of getting away with his crime finally and completely, he suddenly turns himself into the police and confesses his crime, inspired by the saintly figure of Sophia, a woman so destitute she turns to prostitution to support her family. All of a sudden this lengthy narrative turns into a Jesus allegory. He accepts his punishment, and starts a relationship with the Mary Magdalene figure of Sophia, who moves to the town in Siberia, where he serves his sentence of hard labor. The boldness and audacity of turning the story of a murder into a Jesus allegory is certainly admirable, as usually such allegories are heavy-handed and saccharine. 

Stay tuned for the next three books in my next post, before the New Year!


Saturday, November 11, 2023

Artificial Intelligence Tribulations

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I remain concerned about the impact of Artificial Intelligence on human knowledge, understanding, and cognition. Recently, I got a positive response to a story I submitted to a publication, with a request for a rewrite, one of the grounds of which included that I began the story in media res, in the middle of the thing. To them, it was too abrupt. I started with a bit of dialogue between a customer service representative and a customer. They wanted some contextualization of the main character's (the customer service representative) goals and motivations. 

While the editor made some great suggestions about how to improve my story, I disagree on this particular point. I am a strong believer in the in media res technique to invite the reader to imagine the moments before and after the story, to involve them more. The clear cut beginning/middle/end school of fiction tends to dictate the world of the story, rather than invite the reader into it. These discussions are very closely connected to the distinction between story and plot, or in the words of narrative theorists such as Victor Shlovsky and Vladimir Propp, syuzhet and fabula. The syuzhet, or plot, is how the story appears on the page. It is not necessarily in chronological order; it does not necessarily have a clear cut beginning, middle, or end. There may be flashbacks, representations of simultaneity, flash forwards, etc. On the other hand, the fabula is the story in the reader's mind. It represents the reconstruction of the plot in chronological sequence. 

Since I read narrative theory almost twenty years ago, in my defense of the beginning of the story, I wanted to refer to the distinction between syuzhet and fabula. As my memory can sometimes invert terms, I looked up the terms on Microsoft Bing's AI platform and came up with the following result: 

The text on the left and right contradict each other; the text on the right is simply wrong. Fabula is not the "thematic content of a narrative." Syuzhet refers to the plot on the page, not the "chronological sequence of events." Suppose I was a narrative theory novice. If I saw these contradicting accounts and chose the version on the right, I would be deeply misled, and potentially spread this falsehood further than just the encounter between this text and myself. The account on the left, which is the one most eyes not of the Arabic or Jewish world would encounter first, as Hebrew and Arabic are read right to left, is luckily accurate and correct. (This is not to say that bilingual Hebrew and Arabic readers would necessarily do that, but the potential for the assimilation of inaccurate information is higher for them). Therefore, the results of this search reveal the potential for the spread of misinformation is high with the use of this AI platform.

Sunday, November 05, 2023

I'm not here.

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Socially incentivized mediocrity.

The stories that aren't yours to tell (all of them).

Wearing out the welcome of everyone. 

Testing the patience of the impatient. 

We represent no one but ourselves; you can't fool me. 

Blood is thicker than water, but soil is thicker still, thicker than thieves. 

At least water gets around. I'm stuck here. 

Wealth is an illusion. When everything costs money, it becomes the arbiter of freedom, not equal treatment under the law.  

These illusions have bars realer than steel. 

The night is on fire. 




 

Friday, September 29, 2023

Artificial Intelligence Disruptions: GhatGPT 4 and Intellectual Property

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Artificial Intelligence Disruptions: ChatGPT 4 and Intellectual Property




Keeping IP Lawyers in Business

If you have not heard or read some of the buzz about the AI revolution, you either live under a rock or you are off the grid. In the realm of artificial intelligence, the biggest disruption of the last year has occurred with the introduction of large generative language models such as ChatGPT.

ChatGPT’s viral spread from its introduction on November 30, 2022, has already upended business and educational activities. It reached 100 million users faster than any other online application or social media before it. One of the areas feeling its reverberations is the section of law that deals with intellectual property (IP).


 

Three ChatGPT 4 Hiccoughs

Three issues that the newest iteration of ChatGPT (4) have brought to the fore are the way it infringes on third-party IP, the difficulty it creates of determining authorship and ownership, and the way it interferes with tracing IP and holding people accountable for infringements (www.bing.com).

Human creators object to how generative learning models such ChatGPT 4 can scrape the entire internet and subsequently reproduce their text, images, or sound without consent, credit, or compensation. For instance, there is one case of ChatGPT reproducing exactly a song lyric from Taylor Swift in a prompt to write a song. It also has the potential to reveal trade secrets of businesses whose IP consists of patents. These are clear violations of IP laws.

Furthermore, with regards to the content produced by ChatGPT 4: who owns it? Does the person who wrote the prompt own it, or do the developers of ChatGPT 4 own it? Finally, because it trains itself on the entirety of the internet, without people having the option to opt out, it is very difficult to trace when and where it reproduces material directly, thereby violating copyright laws.


 

Citations

 
Hearn, A. (2023, March 15). What is GPT-4 and how does it differ from ChatGPT?
Www.Theguardian.com. Retrieved August 12, 2023, from
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/mar/15/what-is-gpt-4-and-how-
does-it-differ-from-chatgpt
Kelly, S. M. (2023, March 16). 5 jaw-dropping things GPT-4 can do that ChatGPT
couldn’t. Www.cnn.com. Retrieved August 12, 2023, from
https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/16/tech/gpt-4-use-cases/index.html
www.bing.com (2023, August 11). Three issues with ChatGPT and Intellectual
property. Retrieved August 12, 2023, from
https://www.bing.com/search?q=Three+issues+with+ChatGPT+and+Intellectual+
property&qs=n&form=QBRE&sp=-
1&ghc=2&lq=0&pq=three+issues+with+chatgpt+and+intellectual+property&sc=1
0-
51&sk=&cvid=60C6123DE397406F9F041BFE33290ADE&ghsh=0&ghacc=0&ghpl=

Tuesday, September 19, 2023

The Best Home Automation Systems 2023

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 The Best Smart Home Automation Systems 2023

Unsure you’ve locked your door when you leave your home? There’s an app for that! Home automation systems have changed our relationship with our places of residence, giving us more control over when and where we activate home appliances such as HVAC systems, locks, security systems, and lights (Ashraf et. al., 2020). Amazon Echo, Google Nest, and Apple HomeKit are three of the best rated and most popular home automation systems

Amazon Echo

Using voice-command interface Alexa, Amazon Echo comes with a camera for increased home security. You can view your front porch via an app on your phone. It features better sound quality than competitor Google Nest. The Echo is compatible with a nice range of devices.

Google Nest

Google Nest runs on Google Assistant, and unlike Amazon Echo, it has a sleep sensor that can track your sleeping patterns to maximize your health. Google features better display quality than the Echo. It works with cloud computing, so it relies on Google’s servers. It is more compatible with devices with android operating systems.

Apple HomeKit

Apple, uses Siri as its voice interface. In contrast to Google Nest, Apple HomeKit works on local Wi-Fi networks. It features better data protection, privacy, and security than Echo or Nest. People also report it is faster and more reliable than other top home automation products. However, it requires an Apple device as its hub, and therefore suffers from less compatibility.


Benefits of Smart Home Technology

With one of these systems, you achieve peace of mind from enhanced security, you can save money on energy, and reduce the carbon imprint of your home. Finally, a home automation system can enhance the convenience of your life in the home, with voice commands for lighting, climate, and entertainment.

Citations

Ashraf, I., Umer, M., Majeed, R., Mehmood, A., Aslam, W., Yasir, M. N., & Choi, G. S. (2020, September 22). Home automation using general purpose household electric appliances with Raspberry Pi and commercial smartphone. Www.Plos.org. Retrieved August 14, 2023, from https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0238480

Palaniappan, S., Hariharan, N., Kesh, N. T., Vidhyalakshimi , S., & Angel, D. S. (2015). Home Automation Systems - A Study. International Journal of Computer Applications, 116(11), 11-18.

Tuesday, September 12, 2023

Why Solar Energy is Taking Over: The Best Solar Water Heaters

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The climate crisis burdens the minds of many. If you wonder how to help, consider that 14% of residential electricity we use to heat water, which also accounts for 7-20% of households’ energy usage (Bongungu et. al., 2022). Solar energy is one solution for our carbon-intensive economy, and for a few thousand dollars, the best solar water heaters can reduce our energy usage significantly.  

 

This benefits not just the planet, but your pocketbook as well in the form of smaller electricity bills. Let’s compare the three best solar water heating systems.  

 

The Sunbank 40-Gallon Solar Water Heater 

Sunbank designed this system to serve a household of 1-3 people, and it comes with peace of mind: a ten-year warranty. Furthermore, Sunbank is a certified brand eligible for a 30% Federal Tax Credit in the US. 

It features top-shelf efficiency, capturing 92-96% of the sun’s rays. Like a regular water heater, it uses municipal or well pressure to move water in and out of it.  

The only disadvantages of this model are the fragility of its glass vacuum tubes and potential incompatibility with local water distribution systems. This system has no moving parts and is very easy to maintain. You can purchase one directly from the company for $2,499, and you can even pay in installments. 

 

The Misol Solar Water Collector 

 

Like the Sunbank system, Misol makes this solar water heater with vacuum tubes painted black for maximum heat absorption and optimal thermal efficiency. It uses solar radiation to heat water directly, which runs inside copper pipes in the tubes, rather than generating electricity to heat water.  

One downside is it requires assembly, but the materials are very durable and survive the elements well. While this model costs less than the Sunbank system, it requires a pump to move water through it. It costs from $300-800; you can get a pump for $50, but you save a lot on installation costs.  

 

SunRain Solar Flat Plate Collector 

Rather than working with vacuum tubes, this product uses a flat plate of specially treated, tempered glass to warm the water moving through it. This collector comes in various sizes to accommodate the size of your family.   

 

Like Sunbank, this model is certified, and thus eligible for rebates or tax credits, depending on your locale. Depending on the tank size, this product costs $1000-3000

  

Citations 

Bongongu, J. L., Francisco, P. W., Gloss, S. L., & Stillwell, A. S. (2022). Estimating residential hot water consumption from smart electricity meter data. Environmental Research Infrastructure and Sustainability, 2(4), 1-31. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/362852449_Estimating_residential_hot_water_consumption_from_smart_electricity_meter_data 

Odogwu, C., & Blok, A. (2023, June 2). Solar Water Heaters: Everything You Need to Know. CNET. Retrieved August 17, 2023, from https://www.cnet.com/home/energy-and-utilities/solar-water-heaters-everything-you-need-to-know/