The RoBlog

Today Untitled

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 19 Apr 2016 07:46:00 -0700

I'm trying to get back in the flow of doing some creative writing. Here's my attempt for today.

Freely flowing and uninspired. Heart is eager, head is tired.

Down the spurious mountain, ride, while plains of desert bake inside.

A glow, a flow, a want to know, of ages future, long ago.

The path is wide, the road is coarse, the mountain high, the yelling hoarse.

A bridge, a sky, a feeling strong. The journey short, the path is long.

Inspire, aspire.

Reaching, getting, holding, petting. Son is rising, sun is setting.

And everywhere we look there are flowers.

And everywhere we look there are towers.

And everything we look at is grey because we expect colors.

Unoccupied Self-Driving Cars; Some Thoughts

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 4 Jul 2012 13:00:00 -0700

I wanted to talk a little bit more about the quick comment I made in a previous post entitled "Renting Cars", Comments on FutureShock.

It seems inevitable at this point that we will have some version (or versions) of a car that will drive itself. Google’s had self-driving cars for a while now, and they’re far from the only ones pursuing this. Nevada created a special kind of license plate for self-driving cars, though I believe they still require one or more people to be in the car while it’s driving.

So where does this lead us to in the future?

Obviously it will mean that we can focus on other things besides driving during in-car time (this seems like it can only be a good thing considering how many things compete for our attention already when we’re driving, and if nothing is competing for it, the dangers of getting drowsy).

It seems likely that once we have successful consumer grade self-driving vehicles, it will only be a short step to getting unattended automatic driving approved.

If this is the case, I think there’s a very real question about whether most people will even continue to own cars, but let’s assume for a few moments that they do. What changes?

Your car can drop you off and then go find its own parking spot. I’ve often thought it’d be cool if cars at the mall (say) would self-park, and then work their way to the front-most parking spots as people leave. Of course, if cars were totally automated, this would probably be unnecessary as you’d just let your car know that you need it to pick you up and it would drive itself from whatever parking space it had found.

Your car could seek out a place to recharge (I’m making the assumption here that all self-driving cars would be electric, but while I think it’s likely, there’s no strong reason that it has to be the case). This would be important if not every parking space had recharging capabilities, which we can pretty confidently suppose at least in the short run. If, like my local grocery store, there were a small number of charging stations, then we may still get the situation I imagined above where cars jockey for the available spaces.

Tangenting here in two directions:

What is needed for a self-charging car?

For a self-driving car to recharge while you’re not there it would need a way to automatically connect with the energy grid. Current charging stations require a person do much the same kinds of actions that gas-based refueling requires: lifting hatches, taking a fueling connection off of a fueling station and plugging it in to the car in the right place.

It would seem, then, that the best approach for recharging would be inductive recharging, and that a standard system for doing this should be adopted by car manufacturers and recharging station manufacturers alike sooner rather than later.

Besides the ease created for an automatic car, inductive charging is easier on humans as well as you just pull into the right space and you’re basically done. There’s no reason that we should carry forward the old actions of fueling a car into a new fuel paradigm like electricity.

Of course, what we’ll probably get is cars that have a standard “plug-in” interface so that they can be plugged in pretty much anywhere, which will further encourage plug-in-style recharging stations. Inductive (or similar drive-onto charging) will come around and most cars and stations will eventually accommodate both for maximum flexibility.

What is needed for cars to “jockey for available spaces”?

For self-driving cars to negotiate for limited fueling stations they need something that is almost as exciting as self-driving: car-to-car communication. It’s so interesting, in fact, that I’m going to save it for another post.

Back to the benefits of having your own self-driving car.

You could potentially rent your car out to other people. I can envision a web site where people indicate where they need to go and how long they need to be there and any private car that anticipates being free during that time can fill the need for a fee. While being used, the car would ensure that it could return in time for its owner and refuse to travel (based on changed plans) to locations that would put that at risk (keeping an eye on current traffic, and having a historical traffic patterns both stored locally and available via the Internet).

Obviously, if you were tired, intoxicated, injured, under-age, or otherwise unable to drive, you could still get places in your car.

If you needed something picked up but you couldn't get away to get it, you could send your car (assuming someone would be there to load it in, and assuming that the thing you needed couldn’t be similarly shipped from its origin). This holds for things like packages as well as things like children from school and in-laws from the airport.

Let’s explore the idea of picking up children a little further. Obviously this would only work if the kid was capable of making good decisions (for example, I would totally trust my daughter now that she’s 10, but I don’t think I could when she was 4), or some trustworthy adult was there to make sure the kid was loaded appropriately.

I’d probably want some kind of occupancy sensor that would alert me if there were more or fewer passengers than expected, and probably some on-board camera so that I could look in to make sure everything was alright (onboard cameras would be helpful in the renting situation above as well, since it could take before-and-after photos of your car in case the car gets damaged in some way by the renters).

I can image a line of cars at schools waiting to pick up the appropriate children. Obviously there'd need to be some sort of process that made sure that the right kid got into the right car. This would probably need to be both on the school’s end (right license plate, for example), and on the car’s end (facial recognition of the passengers).

Already we've found some interesting things to do with full automated cars, and I’m sure there is more, but I have some non-automated driving to do, so they, along with why self-driving cars may mean fewer people owning cars (which you can probably already see where that is going), will have to wait for now.

Let me know your thoughts on the future of “car” travel in the meantime.

Grandes Cosas Vienen (A Star Wars/Coldplay Parody)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 3 Jul 2012 13:00:00 -0700

We were listening to Viva La Vida by Coldplay in the car the other day and a Star Wars-related phrase came to me as a substitution for the "I know St. Peter won't call my name."

Being on vacation, I have a little extra time on my hand, so here's a pass at a complete song. It takes a little liberty with meter, and I think could tell a better story, but not bad for under 45 minutes' work, I think.

Grandes Cosas Vienen

(Something Big is Coming)

I want to rule the gal-ax-y
Planets will line up to worship me
Now in the morning I sleep alone
Count the stars that I’m going to own

I’m never going to roll the dice
Feel the fear in my enemy's eyes
Listen as the crowd will sing
"Now the old kings are dead!” Long live me!"

I will master Obi Wan
Clench my fist and he’s gone
Qui-Gonn, Yoda, and Mace Windu,
Will be speckles of dust when I am through

I’ll feel the Emperor’s strength course through me
A bad-ass galactic power I will be
The dark side of the force revealed
A crimson lightsaber I will wield

All this effort is not in vein
Once you start there is never
Never an other course
But that is once I learn the Force

I have studied all of Vader’s ways
Could choke the insolent for days
Being evil to the weak and dumb
People cannot believe what I've become

I say to hell with lifting crates
Bring me heads on silver plates
I may only be thirteen
But who would never want to be king?

I’ll feel the Emperor’s strength course through me
A bad-ass galactic power I will be
The dark side of the force revealed
A crimson lightsaber I will wield

All this effort is not in vain
I know Lord Vader will call my name
I’ll become a Sith of course,
But that is once I learn the Force

I’ll feel the Emperor’s strength course through me
A bad-ass galactic power I will be
The dark side of the force revealed
A crimson lightsaber I will wield

All this effort is not in vain
I know Lord Vader will call my name
I’ll become a Sith of course,
But that is once I learn the Force

Battlecards

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 2 Jul 2012 13:00:00 -0700

Battlecards

A more strategic version of the classic card game War

My daughter and I came up with an improvement on the classic card game War that makes it more of a thinking person’s version of the game, so I thought I’d share it. It may look complicated, but it’s really not once you account for a couple of special cases, and it allows you the opportunity to employ strategy and counter strategy in a way that the classic game doesn’t offer.

It’s not perfect. It needs a faster way of ending the game when it’s clear that you’re going to lose. I’m toying around with periodically removing the lowest remaining card from play (“everyone turn in your 2s), but can’t figure out if that’s unfair in some way, when to start removing them, and how often.

Let me know if you end up playing it, how it goes, and if you have to tweak anything to get it to work (or I forgot to address something or need more examples to help explain things).

Setup

Everyone gets an equal share of the deck, arranged in a single pile face down as in the regular game of War.

Each player takes the top 5 cards off of their pile and looks at them (but doesn't show anyone else).

Regular Game Play

Use your favorite method of choosing someone to go first. I just let my daughter go first, but since she’s beaten me every time we play it may be time to reconsider.

The first person chooses any of the five cards in her hand to lay down, face up. The remaining players decide which of the 5 cards in their hands that they want to play on their turn (we go clockwise, typically).

The person who put down the highest card gets all the face up cards, and puts them in a face-up stack that is separate from their face-down stack.

Everyone draws enough cards from the face-down pile to get back up to 5 cards (this will usually be one card, but may be more if wars were fought).

The person who won the last round then chooses a card from her hand and sets it down face up, starting the next round.

Emptying Your Face-Down Pile

At some point your face-down pile will become empty. When that happens, you can draw no more cards until you've played every card in your hand EVEN THOUGH you probably have cards in a face up pile. This means that, if you don’t get into any wars, you’ll have 5 cards to choose from, then 4, then 3, then 2, and then you’ll have no choice but to play the last card that you are holding.

This is really where the strategy comes in as an attentive opponent can guess at what you might have left and play accordingly. Similarly, you might guess how others will play knowing what you have and try to protect high cards for later use rather than risk being forced into losing one.

Once you have played the last card from your hand, you can turn over your face-up pile (making it the face-down pile), shuffle it, draw the top 5 and continue playing, creating a new face-up pile the next time you win a round.

War

If someone ahead of you in a round puts down a card that you have in your hand, you can choose to put down that card and force a war. Keep in mind that, just like in regular War, if the highest card played in the round is higher than the war cards, that person wins and the war never happens. Because of that, a war can only begin when all players have played their cards for that round.

To play out a war, take the top 3 cards from your face-down pile and place them face down next to your face up card that’s in the war (just like you would in regular War); no peeking! Then the last person to get into the war chooses any card from their hand and places it face up next to their three face-down cards. Each player engaged in the war does the same thing going from the last person to get into the war to the first person who got war forced upon them. The player with the highest face-up card wins everything. Of course, there can be more rounds of war if the highest cards played also match.

No one draws any new cards into their hands while they are at war (unless you are one of the situations listed below). So if you started the round with 5 cards in your hand and played one that got you into a war, you will only have 4 cards to choose from to try and win the war. If you get engaged in a second round of war, then you’ll only have 3 to choose from.

War: Special Cases

If you run out of face-down cards before you’ve played the three face down cards for your war, then the remaining cards come from the cards in your hand. Lucky you, you get to choose which ones they are! If using the cards in your hand would leave you with no cards in your hand, choose the card that you want to put face up, put the other card(s) face down for the war, turn over your face-up pile, shuffle it and pull the cards you need to put face down from the top of the pile (still no peaking!). Once it’s your turn to play the face up card, play the last one in your hand.

If you have no cards in your hand when a war starts (that is, the last card in your hand got you into the war), then you can turn over your face-up pile, shuffle it, draw 5 cards into your hand, and take the next 3 cards off the top of the pile and put them down without looking. Lucky you, you get 5 cards in your hand to choose from! If you’ve already shuffled the face-up pile because you’re in a second round of war, you don’t need to reshuffle them again.

If you don’t have enough cards to do a war (that is, you on the brink of losing), then pick one card to use as your face-up card, and put whatever cards you have left face down for your war cards. If you only have one card, then you don’t need to put down any face down cards; you’ll win or lose based on the one card that you have left!

If the card that got you into the war was your very last card (sad face), then that is the card that you will fight with. If anyone else’s card beats the card that you went to war with, they get it all. If the highest card played by anyone else is still a tie, then you keep playing with that card until you’ve won or lost (they will need to keep putting down cards in regular war style as long as THEY still have cards). (I can imagine a tie here where, say, two people have played their last cards and they are the same, and higher than any other players’ cards. It’s bound to be a rare condition, but a crafty player could force it. In this case, I’d suggest that the winning players take their own cards back, take the remaining cards that other players might have contributed along the way and turn them face-down. Shuffle them and deal them to the winners evenly. If there are any extra cards that would prevent an even distribution, they go to the first player to force the war. Let me know if this ever happens to you.)

The Joker Variant

This is the version that we are currently playing. It’s totally optional and probably only worth adding once you've mastered the main game. It adds another small bit of strategy that can be fun.

Add in the Jokers to the deck before shuffling and dealing. Jokers take on the value of the last card that WON a round. So if there are two people playing, and a 9 beat a 3 in the previous round, the value of any Joker is now a 9. It remains a 9 until a different value wins a round. During this time, it’s treated as any other 9. This means that if you have a Joker and no other high cards, you can suddenly get a high card. If someone wins a round with an Ace, for example, your Joker is now an ace. As soon as someone wins a round with a lower card (say, a 4), though, your Joker loses its value (from an Ace to a 4).

During a war, a Joker keeps the value of the card that won the last round the entire time. If the card that won the last round was a 6, and the current round ends up in a war starting with aces, for example, Jokers are worth 6 the whole time, not an ace since no one has won this round yet. If a war over aces is won by a 4, then the next round the Joker becomes a 4, not an ace (since the 4 is what won the round).

The Road to Inspiration

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 1 Jul 2012 13:03:00 -0700

I’m currently on vacation in the wilds of Northeast of Canada, by which I currently mean Prince Edward Island, which is not all that wild at all.

If you know me at all (and no doubt you don’t), you’ll know that I’m not short on ideas, but am quite short on…what…motivation?...energy?....stick-to-it-iveness? Let’s just say the “doing”.

I have now two book series that I’d like to write, any number of articles about what the future has in store for us and how to learn from past predictions, ideas for new things, ideas for improving old things, ideas for websites that should be profitable if I could only get around to them, ideas that would take hundreds of millions of dollars to implement, thoughts about all kinds of philosophy, humorous observations of all kinds, a presentation or two for the local Quantified Self meetup that I’d like to give, and the occasional food/movie criticism.

As you can guess, not much is happening on any of these fronts as of yet, but on this trip I’ve run into two, what you may call “propellants”.

First, we visited the Alexander Graham Bell museum in Nova Scotia. It was my wife’s idea to go there and, I have to say, I was pretty indifferent. I came away pretty inspired. Mr. Bell, most well known for his invention of the telephone, was hugely prolific as near as I can tell. Also, as near as I can tell, he considered himself an amateur at most everything. I don’t know why Thomas Edison, who was no doubt triply productive, doesn’t inspire me to the same depths. I imagine Edison as the head of a large enterprise and Bell as working with a small number of passionate people. I imagine the truth to be more complex than this.

I tried to find something suitable from the gift shop to capture the inspiration that I felt, but the best I could come up with was a bookmark (my daughter, on the other hand, came away with a complete ink and pen set like they used in the days before ball points). It’s not enough, but I’ll put it on my desk when I get home as a reminder that the race goes to the runner, not the one who could imagine how to run faster.

The second propellant was the discovery that a neighbor died just as we set out on our adventure. He was 57, and I don’t know what happened, but he left behind two kids, a wife, and an apparently non-trivial legacy. A reminder that, as yet, time is ticking for all of us, and once the sponge between our ears is no longer wet, everything in it dries up and blows away, so at the very least, write things down.

So that’s what I’m doing. Hopefully this means more entries about things and progress towards the increasingly large list of things I’d like to even get started on.

If you’d like to help me out on this, feel free to give me a nudge virtually or in person. The more propellants we all have, I guess, the better.

The Emergence of Elephants

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 30 Jun 2012 12:24:00 -0700

So, I was curious about how one might get from the laws of physics (and probably some kind of starting conditions) to, say, an elephant.

The reason for this was a couple-fold.

First, I didn’t know if it was possible. Given what I know about the state of knowledge, it didn’t seem likely, but given that I’m always surprised at what I don’t know, I thought I’d take a look.

Second, if you COULD get from physics to an elephant (not contemplating, for the moment, getting to a specific elephant), then it might have something to say about the concept of determinism; a topic that my friend Justin and I are continually exploring by way of good-natured arguments where I try to determine (heh, pun) what the consequences of a fully determined universe might be on an individual person, and he steadfastly believes in magic.

Third, it would tighten another discussion that Justin and I are always revisiting, which is whether, in an infinite universe (whatever specific kind of infinite that you happen to prefer), there is a version of you that has made better choices. Justin thinks there is, and that makes him feel great by association with his more successful self. I think that any universe that had so specific a lead up to get exactly you to be born may be required to be the same from there on out. Much of this discussion is on the nature of randomness and whether there are really new universes splitting off around every decision that you COULD make (I believe that there may be splitting universes on a quantum level, but once you get to the macroscopic level of people, all bets are off).

Finally, there is something intriguing about thinking of science longitudinally across all sciences at once. It seems like there are some interesting opportunities to speculate that the laws of physics basically make the universe a giant information processing machine (an example I’ve heard in the now distant past), which would have effects across all sciences at once, rather than in each domain specifically.

What DO physics, cosmology, chemistry, biology, psychology, and sociology have as common organizing principles. What ways of looking at these can we come up with that shed new light on everything all at once?

It would seem like the concept of emergence would be at play here in more than a “emergence happens” sort of way. And I’m sure complexity theory has something to say here, though I find the Wikipedia article on this fairly impenetrable.

(As an aside, am I the only one who finds Wikipedia is fairly impenetrable as soon as you get outside of topics that most people know something about? There seems to be a cliff in any topic where it goes from being accessible to the lay person like me, to where you need to be a specialist in that particular field in order to know anything about it. For a while I saw “Simple English” alternatives on a sparse few of these kinds of articles, but not in quite some time.)

Of course, I believe that this area is being actively pursued by probably thousands of people all over the world, so I thought I’d Google the unlikely phrase “can physics predict an elephant”.

The top result that I got was entitled “Can physics predict a giraffe” on a blog called Cosmic Hoizons. Close enough.

That post is, itself, a comment on a post “Why biology and chemistry is not physics” at The Curious Wavefunction.

It is there that I’m working my way through the interesting (and, so far, civil) discussion in the comments.

I realize this isn’t a very satisfying place to end a blog post, but I assume that the result of finishing the comments will be more questions than answers, and so this post is a reflection of that. Learning is a journey, not a destination, so consider this a vacation update. Which, not coincidentally, it is, in fact.

"Renting Cars", Comments on Future Shock

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 16:20:00 -0700

Future Shock is a book written by Alvin Toffler, and published in 1970. I'm reading through it and commenting as I go. Feel free to follow (and comment) along!

On p65, Toffler mentions the then burgeoning rental car market as another indicator of our growing transient relationship with "things". It would be interesting to see what he would think now of the "flex" cars available in most metro areas that allow you to pick them up when and where you need them, and more or less abandon them when you are done.

Even better, the likely coming wave of self-driving cars that come to you when you need them, take you to where you want to go, and then drive off to service someone else.

"Length of Car Ownership", Comments on Future Shock

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 15:24:00 -0700

Future Shock is a book written by Alvin Toffler, and published in 1970. I'm reading through it and commenting as I go. Feel free to follow (and comment) along!

On p64 Toffler mentions "..the fact that the average car owner in the United States keeps his automobile only three and a half years."

I did some quick searching to see where that figure was today. According to data compiled by global market intelligence firm R.L. Polk & Co, that number is up from the 42 months quoted by toffler to 57 months now, though back in 2002 it was as low as 38 months.

They believe that both the current economic situation and better build quality are driving the shift to longer ownership.

"Rental Housing Starts", Comments on Future Shock

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 13:09:00 -0700

Future Shock is a book written by Alvin Toffler, and published in 1970. I'm reading through it and commenting as I go. Feel free to follow (and comment) along!

On p63, Toffler mentions that in 1961, rental units as a percentage of all housing starts had reached 24%, and by 1969 they had exceeded the number of regular housing starts.

Since I'm the curious type, I set out to see what the rate was these days. I'm not sure if this is the same data that Toffler was referring to, but the Commerce Department lists new housing starts for the last year, broken down by single units, 2-4 attached units, and 5+ units. These all may be non-rental properties, but if singles indicates owned, and 2+ indicates rentals (as opposed to, say, townhouses), then the average over the last year has been about 34.5%.

Here's a graphic:

"Modular Architecure", Comments on Future Shock

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 12:42:00 -0700

Future Shock is a book written by Alvin Toffler, and published in 1970. I'm reading through it and commenting as I go. Feel free to follow (and comment) along!

On p63, Toffler uses modular “snap in” architecture as examples of how man’s relationship with “things” is becoming ever more transient.

“…they all conspire toward the same psychological end: the ephemeralization of man’s links with the things that surround him.”

Could the fact that we haven’t moved, in the intervening 40 years, to large-scale transient architecture suggest that our desire for a less ephemeral surrounding outweighs our need for the convenience that a constantly changing environment would bring? Or was he just too optimistic on how soon it would be until this kind of building was easy enough to implement broadly? Or has, maybe, this already happened, and I’ve just missed it?

Starting Future Shock

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 29 May 2012 17:29:00 -0700

Inspired by having finished (at long last) Arthur C. Clarke's Profiles of the Future, I decided to pull another book out of my futures-of-the-past library: Future Shock, by Alvin Toffler, written in 1970.

I’ve been avoiding reading this book for quite some time (although it should be said that I’ve not read ANY book in quite some time) primarily because it seemed to fall into my least favorite of three broad categories of predicting the future. As I see it, those categories are:
• Theories and How-Tos about predicting the future
• Predictions of the SOCIAL future
• Predictions of the TECHNOLOGICAL future

Future Shock seemed to fall into the category of social future predictions.

Social futurism is much less interesting to me as it tends to be based on how we SHOULD behave and why they way that we DO behave will lead us to overpopulation, mass starvation, environmental collapse, and the like; all this from a heavily moralistic point of view.

It’s not that these aren’t valid, or even interesting problems, and I can easily imagine modern books on these topics being a fascinating read. It is a peculiarity of what I like to read (books more than 20 years old that attempt to predict the future) that means that most books that I’d pick up about social future predictions are typically written in the 1960’s or ‘70’s, and are very preachy and/or impenetrable.

Based on the book cover summary, this is what I thought I was in for when I finally decided that it was too well known a book to ignore.

I’m happy to say that, SO FAR, I’ve been pleasantly surprised. I’ll let you know if that changes over time, but here are a couple of things that I thought were interesting:
• Introduction (p5): “Writers have had a harder and harder time keeping up with reality. We have not yet learned to conceive, research, write and publish in “real time.”” Perhaps this is now a skill that modern writers may more readily possess?
• I forget where this was and how specifically he addressed it and how much I just wandered into it myself, but it seems that we should probably get good at making broad predictions as a way to help improve how we get to more specific predictions. The pace of any technology or field of study does seem to begin with a coarse understanding and get finer as we learn more. I suppose there’s no reason that making predictions of the future shouldn’t go through this same series of refinements except that it is so much more fun to come up with (and read about) very specific predictions.

Profiles of the Future: The Rest

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 29 May 2012 17:23:00 -0700

I started reading Arthur C. Clarke's Profiles of the Future way back in 2003. I've finally gotten around to finishing it, and wanted to add in some comments to those I originally wrote on earlier chapters. So, here we go!

P 198
While he’s not making a prediction here, the following comment is amusing for probably self-evident reasons:
“We seldom encounter really impressive feats of memory these days, because there is little need for them in our world of books and documents.”
I wonder if he ever reflected on this in the Google era.

On the same page, and of interest for similar reasons:
“When we discover how the brain manages to filter and store the blizzard of impressions pouring into it during every second of our lives, we may gain conscious or artificial control of memory. It would no longer be an inefficient, hit-and-miss process; if you wanted to reread a page of a newspaper you had seen at a certain moment thirty years ago, you could do just that, bu stimulation of the proper brain cells.”
While it wouldn’t discount Mr. Clarke’s points about the vividness and completeness of recall that could be accomplished this way, I’ll be curious to see if the Tivo-ing of our lives through external monitoring (always on cameras, microphones, etc) will provide much the same experience (with handy multi-faceted search interface!) sooner than the level of vivid recall that he imagines. Of course if you could turn on perfect recall 10 years after perfect life Tivo-ing, then you still have the added advantage (on top of the deep immersion) of being able to go back to a time before technology was recording you. Nonetheless, we could have a lighter version of what Mr. Clarke imagines long before we get the full experience.

P 200
“Yet the mechanical educator – or some technique which performs similar functions – is such an urgent need that civilization cannot continue for many more decades without it. The knowledge in the world is doubling every ten years – and the rate itself increasing. Already, twenty years of schooling are insufficient; soon we will have died of old age before we have learned how to live, and our entire culture will have collapsed owing to its incomprehensible complexity.”

P 200 – 201
“It has already been demonstrated that the behavior of animals – and men – can be profoundly modified if minute electrical impulses are fed into certain regions of the cerebral cortex…Electronic possession of human robots controlled from a central broadcasting station is something that even George Orwell never thought of; but it may be technically possible long before 1984”

P 203
“The pilot of an aircraft, fathering data from his scores of dials and gauges…identifies himself with his vehicle, intellectually and perhaps even emotionally. One day, through telemetering devices, we may be able to do the same with any animal.”
It’s interesting that he doesn’t take the opportunity to apply the telemetering devices to the airplane itself as we have started doing in the last decade. Of course he may address this later (or did earlier, since it’s been a while since I’ve read the earlier part of the book), but it just struck me how directly he could have gotten there in this passage (despite that what he’s really talking about is connecting to the experiences of other animals directly in our brains).

Age-Dependent Age Units

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 4 Apr 2009 12:55:00 -0700

I occasionally think about how the speed of time passing is dependent on the age you are. The basic premise is that the older that you are, the smaller a percentage of your life any increment of time is.

With this in mind, and the fact that my daughter firmly corrected me for saying that that she was six ("six AND A HALF"), today's shower thought was about when we should switch what units we refer to people's age as.

This addresses the question of when you switch from days to weeks when talking about a baby's age, and extends it on to old age (where I take a bit of a back-track; see below).

What I've done is assumed that age 30 (years) is about when years start going by really fast, used the percentage of your life a year is at that point (about 3%) and used that fraction as the point that we should change age units starting with minutes after birth. I adjusted things slightly to better fit with units of time that we frequently use (rather than, say, 3 minute increments I went to 5).

So here we go:

At birth, count age by minutes (i.e. "she is 14 minutes old")
At 30 minutes old, count age in 5 minute increments (i.e. "he is 55 minutes old")
At 150 minutes old, count in 10 minute increments
At 5 hours old, count in half hours
At 15 hours, count in whole hours
At 30 hours, count in 2 hour increments
At 2 days, count in quarter day increments
At 7.5 days, switch to half days
At 15 days, switch to full days
At 30 days, switch to 2 day increments
At 8 weeks, switch to 1 week increments
At 6 months, switch to quarter months (i.e. "she is 7 and a quarter months")
At 7.5 months, switch to half-months (i.e. "he is 13 and a half months")
At 15 months, switch to full months
At 2.5 years, switch to quarter years (i.e. "she is 6 and three quarters years")
At 7.5 years, switch to half years
At 15, switch to full years

Now check this out:

At 30 years, switch to 2 year increments (i.e. you will never be 37, you'll go straight from your 36th birthday to your 38th 2 years later)
At 60, switch to 5 years.

After a while individual years become important again (as a sign of achievement), so I'm suggesting:

At 90, switch back to 2 year increments
At 100, switch back to 1

And there you have it.

So my daughter will be, no doubt, happy to know that she is 6 and three-quarters, my wife that she will be 36 for an additional year, and my parents that they are 60.

No need to thank me. Your eye-rolling will be quite enough.

Group Story Telling on Twitter (Concept)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 1 Dec 2008 07:46:00 -0800

Here's an idea I had yesterday about using Twitter as a mass-story-making system. I've been enthralled with story telling through Twitter since nearly its inception (when I tried to get some people to do an arc of Lost during its off season, which each person tweeting from a character account).

Usually my interest is in the blurry line between reality and fiction that you can play with. This idea, however, is more about how to create a story as a group.

Feel free to steal this as I'm unlikely to build it. Let me know if you do.

So here's the idea, as a series of 140 characters or less.

TwitStory
Core
The parameters of a story are set up and made publicly available.
Interested participants follow the TwitStory account on Twitter.
The first line of the story is sent through the account.
Participants have a period of time to respond with an @ message to that account.
The reply message should extend the story.
One response is selected from all received during the timeframe.
The selected response is published through the TwitStory account, and the cycle begins again.

Options
For story parameters:
"Christmas" in 84 cycles (a short story over a week (12 updates a day for 7 days))
"Liberation" in novel length (an interesting experiment in long-form cohesiveness)
"He said, she said" (story telling using only inter-character dialog)

For selecting the next line:
The first @ reply received becomes the next line. Fastest wins, but this can be gamed and may not lead to the best storyline.
Prospective respondents have some period of time (5-10 minutes) at which point people can vote on which of the received lines should be the next one.

For voting:
Everyone can vote (can potentially be gamed by having friends vote for you).
Lines are occasionally chosen at random. Everyone who has been chosen with a line gets to vote. Decreases fraud, may decrease interest.

For publishing:
Publish new lines once an hour from 8am Pacific to 8pm Pacific. Allows people to continue with their life. Hits most active time periods.

Extensions
Every line that comes in becomes its own branch of the story. While not updated through the TwitStory account, they can be updated online.

Fairy Story for an Older Audience

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 22:06:00 -0700

Here's the same story as in my last post (well, the beginning anyways), only written for a much older audience. Not sure if it succeeds any better than the children's version.

---------

It's a little known fact that, upon the final hour before your death, all of the colors of the world become slowly more saturated, and all the sounds more distict and resonant, until, the moment before your death, you may become overwhelmed by them.
It is a little known fact not because it is not common, but because we don't want to see it, the way we don't want to see a vagrant, or a mugging. Few of us are brave enough to wonder at it unless our death catches us wholly unawares. And those that do? Well their time for pondering is limited, now isn't it?
I say these things not because they were apparent to me, at least not the first time, but because I came to see - see in that same way - in time.
It is a myth that rats are dirty in and of themselves. They have ever been associated with disease and evil. Such is their lot in this world. That is, to be misunderstood, not, in fact, to be bad.
The rats have had their own evil incarnate as long as their collective memories can dwell backwards: fleas. It is the flea who is the spawn of the underworld, spreading plagues amongst the innocent and unknowning. It is from the fleas that the rats are given their burden. Ever to be chased. Ever to be reviled. Ever to be destroyed.
Somewhere, just now, a group of small baby rats are being born. Somewhere dark, somewhere warm, and somewhere safe. For a time they will play and nip and run and, once they have weaned, shall assume their role here. To be chased, to be reviled, and even to be destroyed, all while doing their service, and trying to protect.
The rat is not alone in its dual role of vilification and protection. The crow too carries this burden. But, unlike the rat, who accepts his burden with resigned acquiescense, the crow accepts it under great protest. For the crow is endowed with wings that allow it to sit within view while it scolds (ever scolding), and flit away once its dissatisfaction is satisfactorily delivered.
Unlike the rat, whose early days are marked with a joviality soon to be forsaken, the crow is trained early from the start. A crow is delivered the accepted propaganda from the moment its egg is laid. Once hatched, it knows its mission. Once fledged, it undertakes it. Again to be reviled. Again to be disdained. Again to protect.
The squirrel, the final player in this, our opening volley, plays a different role altogether from the rat and the crow. Encased in disarming cuteness, moving with apparent impish glee (and the analogy here is more than skin deep), the squirrel sits on the same frontline in our story as the crow and the rat, but on the opposite side. For the squirrel, you see, is the scout. Able to get close without raising alarm, they watch us, passing their information through complicated networks masked in chasing games and nut hoarding. "To whom?" you may ask. That we shall soon enough see, but the "whom" in this tale is certainly no friend to you or me.
You may have deduced that the story that I am about to tell you has cast the role of evil to the cute and good to the loathesome, but rest assured that this is not so in every case. You may wonder about your playful dog, or skulking cat. Whose side are they on? You can take an easy breath on this count as the animals whom we have domesticated (and they who have domesticated us) are with us (by and large). They sit on neither the side of the rat nor the side of the flea. They sit, as helpless as we do, in the middle, as largely unwitting pawns in the grander game of the squirrels and the crows and theirs.
Let us begin this story proper by introducing a character through whose eyes you will better see the world in which we now find ourselves. As a brief background, suffice it to say that there are special places in this world where the overworld and the underworld meet. By "special" I do not mean to imply that such places are few (as they are not), but that they have an indefinable quality about them that you can feel when you are there, but don't know is missing when you are not.
You may be surprised when I say that this is our world. Or, rather, your world. The very one in which you live now. Such special places are confined to no one corner of the Earth; they exist where ever there are men. The particular one that I will take you to is not special in and of itself save that it is here that we have someone to meet.
She sits on a concrete step, with her legs dangling over the edge reaching nearly half the distance to the tread below. She sings softly to herself, but only because she presumes herself to be alone (she is far too young and inexperienced to see us quite yet). The late spring sun has proven too attractive to resist, so she suns herself here. If you did not know better, you would think that she was waiting for her long absent love to return and sweep her up in his arms; she has that air about her. But she is too young even for that fantasy. What she is expecting is us, though she does not know it. And as we get close enough to make out the curly brown hair hanging like lazy vines down her face, and note the artful orange stroke applied to the length of her otherwise simple white dress, we can also see that she is now positively buzzing with excitement.
But it's about now that you really fixate on the things that are off about this description (perhaps you already were). The scale is off; she is very small relative to the 13 steps running down to the sidewalk. Perhaps you initially thought she was some sort of animal given how this story began, but the mention of curls and a dress, though not entirely unlikely in a story like this, has lead you to think this is more of a person that we are looking at. It is at this point that you might realize that the use of the word "buzzing" in the previous paragraph was somewhat more than just a metaphor (I like to think I'm clever like that, occasionally). It is when she pauses, apparently straining to hear some hint of us (though who we are she has quite no idea), every fiber of her silent, that you can see her wings. For this girl I have chosen to show to you is a fairy, and, so that you will not think of her as an abstract being to whom you cannot relate, I will tell you that her name is Amelia, and she is just on the cusp of turning 5.
Now I realize that you may have had no idea that this would be a tale about faries, much less with a main character so very young, but I do implore you to hang about for just a bit longer. Perhaps it would help that I remind you that this is no fairy tale of yore in some place long shrouded in the mists of time. Amelia lives on Flanders Street, in the Laurelhurst Neighborhood of the city of Portland, Oregon, on the western edge of the United States, and the vehicles that are driving by decidedly horseless.

Children's Fairy Story

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 21:54:00 -0700

Wow, after reading this for the first time in a while, I realize that it needs a lot of work yet. But since it probably won't get it, here it is for you! It was written to be read to children of about 3-4 years old. It was intended to be a simple first meeting story, with the word choice being slightly challenging.

-------

In the twilight of a summer night, in the neighborhood of Laurelhurst, on a street called Hazelfern Place, a boy named Jack played in theback yard of the red house where he lived.
The sun had just climbed down from the sky, and the full moon was peeking up over the horizon, when he heard a familiar sound.
A brown squirrel was racing, as it often did, down the fence that connected the back yards of all of the houses.
Its claws were scraping loudly on the wood of the fence and it shouted happy squirrel talk as it ran.
Chasing the squirrel was something Jack hadn't seen before. A glowing, yellow . . . something.
The squirrel ran across the back fence of Jack's house so fast that he could only see a blur of brown as it passed.
The yellow something went by just as fast, but as he watched it disappear down the fence, Jack thought he saw what looked likepeople arms, and people legs, and wings that didn't look people-like at all.
And now that he was looking at the something, he heard a new sound too. The something was laughing.
"Cool," said Jack softly at the fading glow.
An excited look appeared on his face and he shouted "Again! Again! Again!" jumping up and down with each word.
The sounds of chattering squirrel, scraping claws, and the laughing something got quieter and quieter until Jack almost couldn't hear them any more.
And then the sounds started getting louder, and louder still until he could finally see the pair running down the fence towards his yard.
When they crossed into his yard, Jack waved his arms, jumped up into the air, and yelled, "HEY!".
Surprised at the unexpected sound, the squirrel stopped its chattering, ran to the nearest overhanging tree limb, and disappeared up it.
The yellow glowing something suddenly became a dark blue something and fell off the fence into a fern in Jack's yard.
Jack ran over to where the something fell, and even though it was getting dark out, and even though the something was glowing only alittle bit, he could see it . . . and it looked like a very small, scared, crying girl.
"Are you okay?" asked Jack. "Did you get a owy?"
The little girl only sniffled, her glow growing darker yet.
Jack's face lit up with a smile. "You want to see what I can do?" He asked. And before the little girl could answer Jack jumped straight up into the air, and landed crouching with his arms out to either side.
The small girl, who Jack could see a little bit better now, was staring at him with her mouth hanging open. She seemed to be waiting for something.
Maybe she was waiting to see Jack do something else.
"Watch this one!" yelled Jack, taking a long run and then leaping into the air again, tucking his legs under him before landing with hisarms and legs extended like a big X.
The little girl's glow changed from blue to green at the same time a smile burst on to her face.
"How about THIS one!" Jack shouted, now smiling himself. He ran up the two stairs to the deck, turned around and jumped off of it with his arms pointing straight ahead. He tried to land on just one foot, but fell over and rolled a couple of times.
The little girl began laughing, her color turning bright yellow again. "That was funny," she said in a tiny voice.
Jack smiled the smile that he smiled when he got ice cream. "You want to try?"
The little girl, still giggling a little, nodded and stood up.
The wings that Jack had seen before unfolded themselves from behind her, and Jack could see that the glow that followed her everywhere was coming from them.
She flapped her wings quickly, and then faster and faster until at last she leaped into the air.
For a few seconds she hung in the air, her wings flapping furiously, before she finally fell back to the ground panting.
"I'm not big enough to fly yet, but soon I'm going to fly up so high I'll touch the sky," she puffed.
"I'm Jack," said Jack, still grinning.
When the little girl with the big wings didn't say anything back, he asked "Are you a butterfly?"
"I'm not a butterfly. I'm Amelia!" said Amelia proudly.
Her face suddenly went still and she looked scared again.
"Oh no!" she said, "It's dark. I have to go home now!"
She turned around part running, part flying towards the back fence where Jack had first seen her.
She bounded up the fence and stopped at the top, looking back at Jack.
"You want to come over and play later 'melia?" asked Jack.
"Ok Jack," she said, and waved and turned to run back across the fence that connected all of the houses.
"Bye 'melia!" he yelled after her, watching her glow disappear down the fence.
Jack watched until he couldn't see her any more, and then started running and jumping as high as he could.
He flapped his arms as fast as he could, but landed on the ground just like always.
He tried again and again until he couldn't run any more.
"Maybe I'm not big enough to fly yet either,' he said, and then went up the deck steps, and inside to have some dinner.

Back at it

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 21:36:00 -0700

Hi.

Yeah, so this is a little awkward. I realize that we haven't spoken in a couple of years, but I wanted you to know it was mostly me, not you. I got distracted for a while, and, as happens with me, I ended up flirting with other interests. I hope you will understand.

In any case, I'm back (for a bit anyway).

I wrote up a couple of posts criticizing work that other people had done, and thought it might be time to toss some more of my own stuff out there for the same treatment.

The next two articles are stories that I've written (in the first case) or started two write (in the second).

Here's some context:
The first story is one I wrote as a colaborative effort with some friends. We were playing with the idea of creating an illustrated children's book. That didn't end up panning out so I share the last draft that I can find with you. I have some wonderful editting comments from one of the friends, but I can't find a draft that incorporates them, so you're stuck with a rawer form until I can find them, or become unlazy enough to fix it again. This book was to be part of an ambitious series of books, movies, and more, designed to grow up with the children. The stories would get more complicated and sophisticated as both the children in the stories and the children reading them grew up. There was a plot big enough to sustain this epic adventure, with the opportunity for many side trips along the way.

When the book stalled, I toyed around taking the same story to a much older audience with a more distinct writing style. That's the fragment you get in the second story.

I have a couple of other stories that I've started over the last few years that I'll share from time to time.

Since they're all in very raw places, and I'm more of a starter than a finisher, I submit them to you to do with as you will. I expect most people will ignore them, but perhaps someone would be interested in correcting, elaborating, rebutting, or prodding me into working on one that particularly interests them.

Thanks for visiting, regardless. Let's not spend so much time in silence again, shall we?

FutureGrinder: Participatory Panopticon with Jamais Cascio

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 17:56:00 -0800

Conversation with Jamais (35MB, 49mins)

Jamais Cascio, co-founder and Senior Contributing Editor of WorldChanging.com gave a presentation at the Accelerating Change 2005 converence where he described his idea of a "Participatory Panopticon" - a society where everyone is constantly recording their experiences because so doing helps make their life easier.

As I've been interested in that idea myself for quite some time (and was, in fact, recording constantly at the conference), I was immediately intrigued. I was not disappointed. I found myself nodding heavily in agreement with his thoughts.

After his presentation, I asked him if he'd be willing to talk a bit more about the world of always on recording, and this conversation was the result.

The RobCast: Roadtrains with Bruce McHenry

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 21:36:00 -0800

Interview with Bruce (53MB, 58mins)

I met Bruce McHenry at the Accelerating Change 2005 conference where we got to talking about the future of transportation. As it happens, he is a transportation consultant helping to bring about (among other things) "roadtrains", which are collections of physically coupled cars travelling together to make better use of both the road and fuel.

I thought it would be fun to record a conversation with him, and he agreed. After many months of schedule jockeying, we finally were able to connect. Our conversation not only covered the direction Bruce thinks we should take passenger transportation on the roads, but touched on collaboration systems and mental illness.

You can find Bruce on the web at DiscussIt.org.

I'd love to hear any comments on the discussion if you care to leave them.

NTalk 3: The Introduction

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 6 Jan 2006 07:24:00 -0800

An introduction

Accelerating change and system complexity as a braking factor

Magic and the man from 3000 years ago

The N-Type brain

Modern tribes

Left brain versus right brain and personality type

NTalk 2: Internet TV, Africa

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 3 Dec 2005 15:12:00 -0800

NTalk is an occasional conversation by and for (but not necessarily about) Meyers-Briggs Intuitive (or "N") personality types between Rob (INTP) and Kevin (ENTP) and any other N types we can sucker in.

In this installment we talk about where TV is going and what relationship the Internet has to it, and how Africa may be an economic force of power faster than you might think.

NTalk 1: Zero, Election Systems

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 21 Nov 2005 07:05:00 -0800

NTalk is an occasional conversation by and for (but not necessarily about) Meyers-Briggs Intuitive (or "N") personality types between Rob (INTP) and Kevin (ENTP) and any other N types we can sucker in.

In this installment we talk about the fabulous-ness of zero, and a couple of different ways of holding political elections that might do a better job of representing the will of the people.

Kurzweil and Transportation

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 30 Sep 2005 07:24:00 -0700

If Kurzweil's general observations - that "progress" is made on an exponential curve - hold for transportation, would that imply that systems like PRT, or fleeting, or other systems that would increase the average throughput of daily transportation systems, must come into play soon?

It would be interesting to see a plot of the average trip to work time as far back as it could be traced. In the US, at least, I wouldn't be surprised if the time had been getting longer throughout most of the last century. My guess is, however, that the average throughput (people per second?) of a particular segment of land transportation infrastructure has probably gone up. This may indicate that you have to choose your metrics wisely if you're trying to get one of Kurzweil's curves.

Bumpersticker Wisdom, Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 1 Aug 2005 10:15:00 -0700

Transform the Ubiquitous

Bumpersticker Wisdom, Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 22 Jul 2005 06:53:00 -0700

Create the Dominant Paradigm