Category

Sustainability

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Sustainability
October 31, 2017

Designing a Sustainable Home

Kuwait is an extreme living environment. We live in one of the hottest and driest places on earth yet very few people are designing and building homes that take this reality into consideration. The issue is that the low cost of water and electricity blinds…
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Energy
July 8, 2012

Is It Hot Outside?

It feels so good inside ourselves we don't want to move.* Obesity has been linked by some with the constant use of central air conditioning. I'm not sure i'd go that far, but it does help us maintain a comfortable sedentary existence which is generally…
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Energy
February 12, 2011

Biomimicry

If there was one thing that I would absolutely love to have in Kuwait, it would be the Sahara Forest Project. It is basically a hybrid desalination/greenhouse/concentrated solar plant. It uses concentrated solar energy which reflects sunlight to create heat that boils steam. The steam…
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Energy
January 22, 2011

Kuwait 2030: Solar City

I'm going to start a series of posts called Kuwait 2030 where I will outline  some ideas about where I would like Kuwait to be in twenty years. I'm going to outline each idea and then some realistic steps on how to achieve the goal.…
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Barrak Al-Babtain 11
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Energy
January 18, 2011

A 1000KD Gift is a Terrible Idea

As if to prove my point, this 1000KD 'gift' is a perfect example of short sighted gimmickry. People don't want to think about how it will cause accelerated inflation, how most of the money will be spent outside Kuwait and what it means when Kuwaitis think of this as…
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Barrak Al-Babtain 7
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Energy
December 15, 2010

Solar Serpents

Stuck in traffic during the hot summer months, nothing feels better than the cold air rushing through the air conditioner. We allow the sun to heat our cars and then use a lot of fuel to cool the inside. This seems rather silly when you…
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Energy
May 18, 2010

Bricks from Sand

Ginger Krieg Dosier, a professor at the American University of Sharjah (my alma mater), invented an alternative to the traditional way of making bricks by using low-cost rapid-prototyping machines, sand, bacteria and pee. The process starts with sand, which is then printed with a layer…
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Barrak Al-Babtain 5
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Energy
February 11, 2010

Efficiently Electric

First of all, I don't really care about climate change. I'm not a denier, but I think it's not the best 'call to action'. People generally respond more to financial incentives rather than moral obligations. I believe that if we prioritize efficiency, then everything else…
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Barrak Al-Babtain 6
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ArchitectureEnergy
February 8, 2010

Sun Orientation

When deciding to buy a plot of land or a new house, never forget to bring a compass. You always need to know the orientation of the site to know where the sun would be. The sun predictably rises from the East, arches high across…
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Energy
February 5, 2010

Screaming Solar Panels

Acoustic levitation is a way of using sound waves to move small objects. If you reflect the sound waves and manage to get them working together on all three axes (x,y and z) then you can levitate an object, like in the video above. Scientists…
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