Technologists these days have been hard at work building 3D visual overlays, augmenting how you see the world. As it were, fanboys and fangirls have been hard at work telling us about our future in homemade videos; but, as technology advances, the real world will only get more real.

For the luddites and techies among my readership, please find the following video below and watch it as a point of discussion.

For the same reasons humanoid robots never seem to make the shelves of Walmart, this future vision (double-meaning intended) will never happen for the mass market—it’s too costly.

Let’s start with the cost of providing vision modification technology, enumerating by scenario:

Case 1: Camera Hacks. Some iPhone apps, like the Yelp application, have basic augmented reality features that overlay information over a video panel of whatever it is you’re looking at. The hardware cost is low, but the fact remains your augmented vision requires that you hold a piece of technology out in front of you like a goober. Offloading vision augmentation into a handheld device is clumsy and usually inconvenient; it’s a neat trick, but not much more.

Case 2: Super Glasses. Science fiction (e.g. Snow Crash, Accelerando, Caprica, Iron Man) often feature HUD-enhanced glasses that identify other people, overlay environmental information, or display text or video messages from others. Yet, fiction forgets that mobile embedded devices have (and will continue to have) issues trading off performance for reliable power. Modifying a scene in believable real-time 3D is difficult enough for an array of 3D rendering machines at Pixar, much less a pair of Ray Bans. The power and heat requirements would simply be too taxing to prove usable, and vision-augmenting would be limited to short bursts, not useful for regular wear.

Not to mention, glasses move around on faces throughout the day. The display would have to constantly correct for the minor, but highly sensitive differences as the glasses move around ever so slightly on the wearer’s moving head. And, like watching Avatar in 3D, you’ll develop a slight headache unless the optics are almost near perfect and consistent.

If—big if—you manage to mitigate these issues, how much is it going to cost you?

Case 3: Tiny Projectors. Imagine a micro-projector outfitted somewhere on where an image can be projected on your retina, fooling your eye into seeing things that aren’t actually there. Can’t imagine it? Neither can I—mostly for the reasons mentioned in Case 2.

Case 4: Optical Nerve Hacks. Imagine a device that could intercept the signal relayed from the retina to the optic nerve as it his the vision cells on the neocortex and offloads visual rendering and modification to a nearby machine, you still have to deal with the matter of bandwidth in rendering an enhanced vision for your neocortex so that it can make sense of it. But, if that technology were possible, why would you waste time, effort, and cost on only making things look more real or understandable. Why not make things simply more real or understandable at the fundamental level of understanding?…

…which brings us to

My Hunch: As technology moves forward, there’s little doubt that we’ll eventually find a way to make visual image enhancement commonplace. (Naysayers: thirty years ago, what if I told you that people would, en masse, elect to have lasers reshape their corneas, circumventing the need for glasses?)

If we’re at the point, as in Case 4, that we would elect to enhance vision directly to the neocortex, why not enhance the neocortex itself?

Strange as it may sound, the neurons in the neocortex that handle and make sense of your taste, your touch, your smell, and your sight, are identical. Instead, depending on what input they’re connected to, the neurons arrange themselves and adapt themselves to make sense of the signals coming into them.

Neurons are pretty neat in this respect. Watch how sensors on the tongue can help the blind to see.

Imagine, if you could, connecting a sensor to a portion of your neocortex (presumptively an area that was of very little use to you) and training your brain to make sense of that information coming in. What if it were a digital source, like the entire contents of Wikipedia?

As of January 2010, Wikipedia, including all of its images and all of its text, totals 2.8 Terabytes, or 2867 Gigabytes. If memory density increases 20% a year (as it has been) for the next 21 years, you’ll be able to fit Wikipedia into memory the size of the fingernail on your pinky. You could certainly fit a pinky nail underneath your skull.

So, if you could implant information directly on your brain and your neocortex could make sense of it, why would you need augmented reality? Your brain would do the work automatically. Say for instance that you, in 2010, wanted to look up “portmanteau”, you’d have to pick up a dictionary or type that word into the Internet, read the definition, understand the definition, and then apply it contextually. With a chip on your neocortex, you’d just know it. You would know it just like you can read this sentence without thinking too much about the character-by-character construction of its words. You would just know.

By the same token, when you looked at someone, you would just know their name. Or, when you looked at the Eiffel Tower, you would know when it was built, who designed it, who installed the elevators, and it’s mass in kilograms (or pounds) as easily as you see that it’s colored dark brown.

With deep vision into everything you were looking at, why in the world would you need something as crude as a live-drawn diagram to tell you how to make a pot of tea?

You wouldn’t— it’s too costly. And, as discussed above, you would just know the motions and the recipe by heart.

By the time technology capable of feeding modifications to your vision arrives, we should be able to augment your neocortex. This can, in turn, create real knowledge inside your head based on linked data pools. It’d be the end of visual infographics and the start of just data.

Linking data in your head, live, is cheaper, faster, more reliable, no matter how you slice it. And, until we can connect to the data inside your head, always-on Augmented Reality is too expensive—socially, technologically, economically—to become a reality.

Humanity’s problem-solving process is demonstrably flawed. When we attempt to solve problems, our first instinct is correct conundrums with fixes. However, fixes tend to ignore the causes and roots of problems. In this manner we treat symptoms, not problems.

I am not talking in abstract: people’s flawed approach to problem-solving shows up everywhere in modern life, ranging from mandatory drug cocktails to automobile design.

Example 1: Drugging the Youth

In recent years there’s been a marked increase of diagnosed personality disorders among students. Students with short attention spans are labeled ADD; those with gobs more energy, ADHD. In response, we medicate—sometimes without option—to “fix” chemically-imbalanced kids.

It’s an easy solution: medicate kids and they’ll behave “normally”. As a society, this is how we addressing the ADHD “problem”. But, we’re actually just treating a symptom.

Consider why a kid might score as ADHD: their energy levels might be out of whack due to a high-sugar and largely high-fructose corn syrup diet, or their physical inactivity might be leading to heightened stress levels, leading to social anxiety and poor behavior. Or, their environment at home might not be ideal.

…or, he might just be an 8-year old who’s extremely curious about the world and explores it on a bike and by poking inquisitively at the dirt. Maybe our idea of normal “order” as it relates to Attention Deficit Disorder is flawed, or that we’re doing things to our kids that cause ADD. Instead of examining this, we seek to medicate. We treat the symptom.

Without looking at the secondary effects of medicating kids (or looking in the mirror, for that matter) let’s look at another example where we treat the symptom instead of the problem—and what probably most people don’t think about as a problem at all.

Example 2: Starting and Stopping Cars

First, let’s reframe a car trip as a set of problems:

As designed, cars transport a certain number of people from one point to another. Since you can’t just put people in a box and expect magic to take you there, there are a number of problems that need solving:

1. The car won’t move! The problem: it needs to go.
2. The car is now moving! The problem: it needs to stop.

This is how we fix these problems:

1. The car won’t move! Let’s spend energy: The engine will get it to move!
2. The car is now moving! Let’s spend energy: The brakes will get it to stop!

In both instances, we treat each part of the process as a problem needing a unique solution. But, what if we were to reframe it? Let’s think of braking a “un-going”:

1. The car won’t move! Let’s spend energy: The engine will get it to move.
2. The car’s is now moving! Let’s give the energy back to the engine and we’ll stop!

You’ve heard this called regenerative braking. While the technology is primitive, the concept is not. Ideally, the transaction cost of moving a person from point A to point B should only require energy to overcome wind resistance and friction. (And even there—futurists will tell you—there’s room for improvement.) We, however, currently spend energy at every step of the process: we treat each stage as a discrete problem to solve, not a discrete problem to undo.

In our minds, starting and stopping are both problems. But, opposed to identifying and treating them like opposing problems where one is the solution to the other, we treat them individually like symptoms. Where the cost could have been simply the cost of initiating and managing the start, stop, and travel friction, our universal solution is pricey and costly at every stage.

In terms of energy output, it seems our cars were primarily designed to expend energy, and secondarily to transport us from one place to another.* Inasmuch, when we “fix” problems by treating its symptoms, we generate new problems to fix. Over time, these problems layer over each other into never-ending abstraction.

Feedback loops

Unfortunately, we’re addicting to solving problems, not undoing them. Our economy is fundamentally based on solving problems and pain points, and common perception is that it’s cheaper to address problems by patchwork than to rethink how problems arose in the first place and undoing the situation.

And, unfortunately, it is. Treating problems symptomatically is easier. It’s easier to describe and easier to act upon and easier to think about with a divide-and-conquer methodology. There are fewer moving parts in each part of the problem, and any externalities created through “solving” the problem are somebody else’s problem, or a problem we can put off until later.

Ultimately, we create more work for ourselves—problems beget more problems, and these ill-conceived “solutions” don’t adequately address underlying problems, if at all. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry once noted, “Perfection is attained, not when there is nothing more add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

Let’s stop fixing problems and start removing them.

–

*On that note, hasn’t anyone else found it weird that we take up half of our available roadway in New York City for the storage of empty cars?

Despite private e-mail and private delivery services, The Postal Service remains top courier. However, as electronic correspondence increasingly cuts postage revenue and smarter private distribution centers enable Fedex and others to compete on cost and services, USPS needs to adopt modern messaging paradigms if it wants to protect its business viability.

I urge John E. Potter (current Postmaster General) to realize that USPS is in a unique position to do things that no one else can, and can accomplish them thusly: sell electronic post office boxes that take regular mail.

USPS e-mail: a certified, electronic, and virtual mailbox run by USPS which can get away with doing things that neither e-mail providers nor private companies can directly compete with:

1. Charge for Message Delivery. Credit card companies and healthcare companies, for example, need to notify you by mail of any changes to your service offering or plan. An official address that officially (as in governmentally-official) ties citizens to a mailbox. These companies are used to paying for this type of correspondence.
2. Charge Different Rates Depending on Message Type. Credit Card offers: $1.00 a message. Not-for-profits: $0.01 a message. Et cetera.
3. Strong-arm Government Agencies to Adopt Electronic Messaging Capabilities. Offer free message delivery for all government agencies, the cost reduction in the first year’s postage alone would likely pay for the entire implementation.
4. Automatically discard Junk Mail. I’d pay $20/year for that.
5. Automatic Package Redirection. Order something delivered to your e-USPS address and packages are automatically routed to the nearest facility for delivery, no matter where you move.
6. Official Mail Segregation. Identify and differentiate government/very important mail from everything else at delivery.
7. Certified Delivery. It can never get lost in the mail… and they can charge for delivery/opening confirmation. And you know it got to the right person.
8. Physical Address Privacy. I know where Elvis lives.

I’d also love it if they adopted a scanned-mail service offering similar to Earth Class Mail, so my experience with my mail is the same regardless of how the initial sender sent it. Backwards compatible mail.

I’m sure you can think of what else could be accomplished with this setup.

Inasmuch, USPS’s unique features make this proposal particularly compelling. Firstly, they are one of the few agencies explicitly authorized by The US Constitution—the country’s politics (likely) won’t let it fail. Secondly, the government and agencies rely solely on USPS to correspond with its citizens—and the government’s co-dependence on it (likely) won’t let it fail, either. Therefore, it’s permanent and environmentally-friendly, to boot.

Unless USPS can’t find a way to stop borrowing from The Treasury to pay budget deficits, we’re going to have another persistent taxpayer liability on our collective hands. Ultimately, USPS needs to take a fresh look at how it can play within modern communications paradigms.

This is my suggestion.

When I first watched the video of 2010 Olympic Luger Noder Kumaritashvili’s accident, I was struck—not by the gruesome or graphic nature of the clip—but by its familiarity. Like many gamers, I’ve seen this sort of thing before. Countless times:

Life doesn’t have a reset button. But, when videographers and reporters depict events in a similar fashion—showing only the incident and none of the aftermath—the mind tends to catalog the event in abstraction. Without the sense of finality or consequence, significance is lost.

Those sensitive to violence will have more trouble letting go of what they just saw: for them, the image shocks them and significance isn’t as likely lost. But, for others used to violence and realistic depictions of violence, it’s more likely to be stored as another datapoint for how a human body can crumble at speed.

In discussing this with my friend, Ben Edwards, he remarked how age groups have responded with stark contrast: on average, people tend to be increasingly upset in correlation with age. And it makes sense: the younger you are, the greater chance you’ve been exposed to abstracted violence. The older you are, the greater chance you’ve either experienced real violence or none at all.

I’m not claiming that familiarity with violence is the problem here; but, rather, in presenting violence in the same cut-away shot as a video game does reduces its meaning and impact. And, while I understand that the “money shot” is in those critical albeit violent moments, the media should take note to craft a story that does not shy away from the aftermath of the incident. The Huffington Post has an appropriate feature.

How we remember what we’ve seen is more important than what we’ve seen. And, in order to distinguish real events from virtual events, we need to be mindful: how we frame violence changes the way it’s absorbed. A viewer need not have to review or watch the aftermath of a violent event. But, it’s important that we frame the violence appropriately so we can make sense of it, remembering that the victim often doesn’t get a reset button. Or, if you’re not going to frame it properly, don’t show it at all.

Walt Disney, Albert Einstein, Ben Franklin, and other pioneers all had measurable impact in our world. Their contributions continue to resonate through time; but, if we had the power to bring them back, I’m skeptical that their intellectual currency kept pace with inflation—perhaps they work best in our memory.

Let’s draw an example:

It’s often said by baseball pundits that Babe Ruth, arguably the best player of all time, couldn’t hold a candle to modern major leaguers. They argue that these days, it’s hard to fathom him edging-out stars who’ve been trained in highly-competitive talent development leagues since diapers.

If Babe Ruth—The Great Bambino—were to miraculously return to baseball, we’d be risking what he means to baseball, possibly tainting what he is to so many people. (Just ask any three-year-old who the best baseball player of all time is.)

In this way, Babe’s most useful as an ideal, not as a player.

Reanimating the thinkers and doers first mentioned in this entry could have a similar effect: it’s not that restoring Albert Einstein wouldn’t be beneficial to science and mankind; it’s that in all likelihood, he’s no smarter or able than modern scientists who have followed in his footsteps.

A living Einstein couldn’t possibly create the edifice as a dead one could; much less could he meet demand for his time. Likely, his active involvement in the scientific community would be lackluster compared with the great expectations for him; and, likely, he’d on-par with the rest of the active community.

Like Babe, Einstein’s most useful as an ideal, not as a player. To further the risk, if Einstein proved not to be a modern-day Einstein, his reanimation could detract from his story.

Perhaps this is true for living legends as well.

–

Though, as an afterthought, a postmortem comeback to the top would be an impressive feat, one that would create a new benchmark for legend; but, we do need to recognize the possible (and likely) deleterious effects associated with returning the idea of a specific person—an idealistic person—into human form. Having it be a net benefit would be a long-shot, one pragmatism should prohibit in almost all circumstances.

It’s probably been a while since you’ve used a word processor as your primary vehicle to process words. More likely, you’re using a webmail client, IM chat, or an e-mail client where the formatting’s fixed and the written word rules. I challenge you: change your font—see what happens.

Interestingly, the font face influences you more in the composition phase than it influences the reader when reading. Consider:

To me, all of these sentences have the near-equivalent emotional impact.

I’ll admit: the aforementioned examples are a bit contrived. But, for me, I find that if I compose in a particular font modify margin width and line height, your writing will tailor itself to the message’s function.

For general writing, I use Helvetica Neue (Light) size 12, set to 6.5 inches of writable horizontal space (1 inch margins on an standard 8.5 x 11). For news and newsletter-style stories, I’ll break the page into two columns and my sentences become 30% shorter, my paragraphs drop to a sentence or three, and I’ll get to the point within the first vertical inch. For book and paper-writing that demands a bit more clarification (but not necessarily ‘clarity’), nothing has yet beaten Cochin (or Sylfaen, for those on a Windows box).

Succinctly, your language accommodates the area you have to work with. So form your working area accordingly.

(It’s true for me, at least.)

The Robin Hood you’re familiar with stole from the rich to give to the poor. But really, it sets the wrong precedent: the poor become accustomed to rescue, and the rich become irritated with a maverick whose sole mission is to bridge the wealth gap while waiting for an absent and benevolent king.

Machiavellian economics aside, this is just stupid.

The peasants have more ability than they realize, and in many cases it takes a Robin Hood-type character to shift the paradigm. But, Robin Hood himself falls short of becoming a real hero in failing to bridge the real communication and economic gap. Hood and his band of merry men do little in their activities other than to apply band-aids and irritate the wound, providing little more than hope and brief relief to a struggling population while fostering resentment in another.

What they’re missing is empowerment.

Recently, new not-for-profits (and not-just-for-profits) have begun to address these problems both domestically and abroad. These organizations don’t support impoverished people and groups with handouts, but rather makes strides to shift the paradigm and teach people how to help themselves.

Two favorites are Kiva and the Acumen Fund, both of which take capital and invest it in populations that most financial institutions won’t touch due to perceived risk. The results of their efforts have been staggering and encouraging, and I urge you to learn more about what they’re doing.

There’s also Robin Hood Foundation, which takes aims at causes of poverty, but their branding choice does what they do a little bit of disservice: you don’t want to be Robin Hood. But if not him, who?

What we really need is a new character; or, perhaps, a new character metaphor. Robin Hood just isn’t sufficient or sustainable, nor can this type of change be appropriately epitomized by just one man or woman.

I’m open to suggestions.

Amazon: Twitter for Dummies
Kindle edition: Twitter for Dummies

It’s also available at Barnes and Noble for the retail price of $21.99 +tax.

Congrats to my co-authors, Laura Fitton and Leslie Poston and everyone else who contributed to our efforts.

In essence, the brain is a pattern machine. Thoughts and ideas are stored in neurons in the cerebral cortex as a nest of patterns, patterns established on physical limitations (the body) and on the environment. Emotion, circumstance, and social interaction help dictate the patterns the brain understands and values—and only that follows.

I’m not meaning to say we don’t think. (Or, at least I think we think.) What we call thought is (I think) our brains’ attempt to pattern-match our lifetimes’ worth of experiences onto whatever problem, circumstance, or question confronts us. Racking our own brains, we turn to research and randomness.

By way of example, recall Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the scene where primates discovered tool use by bludgeoning skulls with a loose femur. The act of banging was behavioral, its proximity to skulls coincidental, and thus its use random. Skulls, the primates knew, once belonged to live animals, and thus they concluded: the femur could be used against other primates. A novel idea, translated from random happenstance.

Similarly, the major leaps of man are random acts of pattern discovery: patterns observed, learned, and translated into other situations. In this sense, original thought is nothing more than discovery and translational application.

This is also not to say humans are incapable of complex thought, quantum leaps, or extraordinary thinking—I’m only suggesting that those leaps and complexities are based on a systems that we know or that we happened upon: our imaginations are limited to our experiences and the patterns we innately understand on circumstance of being human.

Consciousness is our gift. Pure creation is not. (Insert your preferred dogmatic implications here.)

Which, if I’m right, is rather frustrating… if I’m right, I never really came up with this idea—it just happened upon me.

For many of us, toilet paper is a singular in purpose, tasked to clean up modest unpleasantries. Though, over the past few months, I have since discovered some interesting—if not unorthodox—uses for this oft-neglected paper product. Turns out it’s more versatile and inexpensive than many its alternatives. To wit:

1. Whiteboard eraser 

Toilet paper is far superior to whiteboard erasers:

1. Toilet paper is a joy to hold. Erasers are not. The soft, round form-factor of a roll trumps its plastic counterparts in feel hands down: it’s soft and plushy, accommodates the shape of your hand, and no matter how hard you press it against the whiteboard to rub out stubborn dry-erase marks, it never makes that scratching sound that plagues traditional plastic erasers when pushed to the limit. In addition, ANY surface of the toilet paper is a working edge, whereas the plastic competitor can only erase effectively in one orientation.
2. Toilet paper is typically taller, and thus requires fewer strokes. When you’re working in the fast-paced world of whiteboard-enhanced office environments, seconds count. With TP, you’re cleaner… faster.
3. Toilet paper is far more precise. For small erasures, squares of toilet paper can be manipulated into arbitrarily-small pieces. With plastic erasers, you’re forced to use a corner—and, since companies manufacture them cheaply as possible, they often skimp on the often mission-critical corner erasing material.
4. Toilet paper cleans with consistent quality. When you’re done erasing with toilet paper, you can remove the dirty layer, instantly yielding a clean eraser—every time. Over time, plastic erasers build up stores of dry-erase material and lose their effectiveness.
5. Toilet paper is easily replaceable and accessible, available at any local bathroom or water closet. Plastic erasers need be scrounged for, often lurking in the bowels of office supply closets, or purchased from shelves at the rear of local office supply stores. (To boot, in rural environments, the cost of procurement can be costly due to transportation expenses.)
6. Toilet paper is affordable. High-quality, recyclable toilet paper runs $1.14 a roll when purchased in bulk. Mediocre  whiteboard erasers cost $2.04 in bulk, nearly twice as expensive. Further, my preliminary tests demonstrate that a roll of toilet paper will last longer than one plastic eraser. So, in costs per whiteboards (CPW), toilet paper is far greater than the 2:1 unit cost ratio suggests; In reality, I it’s closer to 3:1.
7. Toilet paper is environmentally friendly and dissolves in water and are recyclable. Plastic erasers, particularly those made from PVC, are more difficult and costly to recycle.

Lastly, by using TP as whiteboard erasers in an office environment, you’re showing your commitment to a cleaner, healthier environment, and publicly displaying your operational pragmatism in employing a cheaper solution than the norm. 

2. Vibration silencer

Office machines, particularly those with fans, tend to develop rattles over time. 

For example, in the NOM offices, we have a standing-unit air conditioner than is dead silent; though, from time-to-time, one of the plastic exterior panels comes a tad loose, creating a rattling sound that is nothing short of infuriating. Though easily rectified with a sharp tap to the side of the unit, many times I’d rather not leave my desk. In these cases, I throw a roll of toilet paper at the problem and the issue is immediately resolved.

To my chagrin, I can think of no other instance where I can utter those words mean them completely, wholly and literally.

3. Coffee/Tea Coasters

Despite the best efforts of our favorite baristas and container designers, sometimes coffee cups and tea cups cannot contain the sweet, sweet warmth of our favorite beverage. If a coaster is unavailable, a square of toilet paper suffices just fine. I recommend 2-ply as it tends to be more absorbent than its single-sheet counterparts.

4. Mini-spills

In the same vein, office spills tend to be small misplaced splashes, and not floods of biblical proportion. Toilet paper is much more environmentally friendly than paper towels given that each tear uses a smaller piece of paper and that the sheets are smaller to begin with. In the case of larger spills, an entire roll can be used if need be, whereas a full roll of paper towels would be more costly and take up more room on a desk.

 
5. Pencil and Sharp-Object Holder

While pencil cups are preferred, a roll of unused TP can be used as a paper cup: just place the pens and pencils inside of the spindle with the flat side perpendicular to the table. If you run out of room, you can easily shove the sharp ends directly in-between the unused, rolled-up sheets. This is particularly useful for exacto blades missing their plastic caps.

As you might have guessed, toilet paper is quickly becoming my new favorite desk accessory. This list is merely the beginning of the uses I have discovered—I will undoubtably find more.