Dilbert.com Blog

Ultimate Kitchen

Mon, 20 May 2013 01:00:01 CDT

Imagine if most of your kitchen surfaces were covered with thin panel TV technology. The front door of your refrigerator would be a TV. Each cabinet door would be a TV. The microwave door would be a TV.

This idea would be impractical with current technology. But I imagine we aren't far from having some sort of bendable screen material we can glue to any surface. It might be something like this.

Let's say the kitchen knows who you are by the phone in your pocket that is communicating via Bluetooth. Imagine that you walk into the kitchen and all the TVs come alive. Perhaps the starting channel is nothing but scenery. Or perhaps each member of the family has a default channel that comes up when they are the only ones in the kitchen. If you have a home security system, perhaps it shows all of your camera views.

You can control everything in the kitchen by hand signals. Point to one monitor and "toss" a TV show to it. Pull up a recipe on another screen, a shopping list on another, and the family calendar on the fourth.

You'd have speakers in the ceiling, of course, so if you play music videos the kitchen will become a concert hall. If a Skype call comes in, it pops up on screen and the music cuts off automatically. Emails and texts would pop up on separate screens. Just face the screen to which you plan to respond and use voice commands.

Now mom or dad can prepare dinner while catching up on some TV shows, answering texts and emails, and organizing the family schedule.

I can also see the kitchen screens being synchronized to dinner plans. When it is time for something to go into the microwave, for example, the screen on the microwave door would turn into a picture of that item. When it's time to chop some vegetables, a screen would show you the size of the cubes you want. I can imagine every step of the menu being visual and interactive. No more reading wordy recipes. Just watch the pictures and follow along.

The kitchen might need some sort of sound-proof doors to keep the rest of the house quiet while the kitchen is rocking.

Making a shopping list would be as simple as speaking the items you want. A picture of the item would pop up on screen for confirmation. When you're happy with your list, just send it to the cloud and your groceries will be delivered to your door.

When you need to check on the kids doing homework just make a video call from the kitchen. By then all homework will be done on a tablet or device with a camera. If your kid takes longer than five seconds to answer the call, he wasn't doing homework.

When it is time for dinner, call up a map that shows the location of all family members by their phones. You can see your spouse is only halfway home on the commute and your kid is still at soccer practice, so you time dinner accordingly. (Here I'm assuming privacy is a relic of the past.)

When it's time to eat, tell the kitchen to automatically text each family member and show any replies on the screen.

You should also have cameras on the stove top so you can walk away and still keep an eye on whatever is boiling via your smartphone. Better yet, the smartkitchen should keep an eye on boiling pots on its own and adjust the heat as needed.

The kitchen is already the fun place to be in the house. But we're nowhere near the limit of how cool the kitchen can become. And I didn't even mention robots.

Larry Page's Voice Update

Wed, 15 May 2013 01:00:01 CDT

A number of you forwarded links to a story in which Larry Page describes for the first time his voice problems.

In prior posts I had guessed his voice problem was caused by spasmodic dysphonia, a condition I once had. Evidently I was wrong. (For the first time.) But what Page does have is similar in a few ways.

With spasmadic dysphonia, the vocal chords clench shut involuntarily. Page seems to have the opposite, in that his vocal cords are partly paralyzed. There is a version of spasmodic dysphonia in which the vocal cords open involuntarily, and that might sound very similar to how his voice sounds -- breathy and weak. What makes Page's situation different, and also indicates to me that the problem isn't spasmodic dysphonia, is that his two vocal cords went bad in different years. I've never heard of that.

Interstingly, my voice problem was fixed by a surgery that clipped my existing nerve connection from brain to vocal cords and spliced in a new route. Page's problem also seems to involve nerve damage from brain to vocal cords. So his voice problem and my ex-problem are entirely different, but it wouldn't surprise me if the solution was similar: Nerve rewiring by surgery.

Interestingly, Page's voice problem was triggered the same way spasmodic dysphonia gets triggered, by a common cold or respiratory illness that causes laryngitis and simply never improves. I'm surprised there are two conditions with that same trigger.

Anyway, if Larry hasn't yet spoken to Dr. Gerald Berke at UCLA, he hasn't finished investigating his options. I'd be happy to make an introduction.

Common Sense and Complexity

Tue, 14 May 2013 01:00:01 CDT

Sequestration refers to the automatic spending cuts that the government of the United States passed into law in 2011, and which went into effect March 1^st of this year. The original idea was that the impending meat cleaver approach to the budget would force a contentious Congress to reach agreement on smarter and more targeted cuts for the good of the country. Common sense might tell you that making intelligent budget cuts would be better than reductions across the board. Most people held that view.

But my common sense argues the opposite. I say dumb cuts are every bit as good as intelligent cuts, at least for cuts of the size we are discussing. I'll explain.

For starters, consider how often common sense is wrong. My most-used example is that common sense tells you that investing in individual superstar stocks would give you a better return than buying the market average. But we know from studies that buying individual stocks is a sucker's game unless you have insider or special knowledge. Common sense often steers you toward calamity.

The thing we call common sense is in reality some mixture of bias, fear, self-interest, ignorance, misjudgment, emotion, and about a dozen other psychological malfunctions. Common sense only operates well in simple situations, and the budget of the United States is far from simple.

When the sequestration was originally contemplated, the hope was that by 2012 Congress could get past partisan politics and agree on intelligent, common sense cuts. The flaw in that plan is that intelligence and common sense aren't real things when it comes to the budget. If you fired everyone in Congress today and replaced them with new folks, you would end up right back where we are. In the context of massive complexity, common sense and intelligence are nothing more than the soothing sensations our brains provide so we'll feel less frustrated and confused. Our tiny brains prefer simple statements such as:

Cut that defense budget!

Stop giving those freeloaders my money!

Yay for solar power!

I have a bit of insight about across-the-board budget cuts because I was a budget manager for a bank and then a phone company during a portion of my corporate career. My job was to present management with enough information for them to make "intelligent" budget decisions. Management would look at my information, assume it was nothing but a compilation of lies from department heads, and proclaim a 10% budget cut across all departments.

And oh how the department heads squawked about the irrational budget process. But they made the cuts, after much complaining, and life went on. As the budget guy, I got to see how many doom and gloom stories transpired because of the "dumb" cuts. Answer: none. I never saw a real business problem that could be traced back to the budget cuts. People simply adapted to the new constraints.

I would go so far as to say that sometimes the best way to improve a department function is to cut its budget. Constraints generate creativity. People will only try hard to improve if it is necessary. A fully-funded budget removes that creative energy.

Consider this highly simplified example. Let's say a government-funded medical procedure costs $1,000 per patient, but the budget cuts make it impossible to spend that much for the coming year. Once the constraints are in place, you might see more effort in searching for cheaper solutions across the globe. Before the cuts, there was no reason to even look for a cheaper solution. Now folks might do research and discover that India has a procedure that costs $100 and produces the same result. Or you might do a study that results in a better understanding of which patients will respond to the treatment, so you can skip the people who wouldn't have been helped. For the best results in the long term, you need a healthy balance of both funding and constraints.

The best way to ruin a good program is to overfund it until everyone involved gets fat and lazy. One could argue that the best way to improve a program - once it has reached a massive national scale - is to cut its budget and force some creative energy into the system.

So while most of the country was worrying that the dumb budget cuts of the sequestration would lead to doom, I was thinking it was a brilliant work-around to a failed Congress. The dumb budget cuts would be no worse than intelligent cuts, and we'd gain some degree of predictability about the fiscal future. The economy loves predictability.

This is another situation in which the Adams Law of Slow-Moving Disasters comes into play. The law states that any looming disaster that the general public recognizes years in advance will be solved. For example, if today the government proclaimed that Social Security would go away in the year 2040, the country would adapt. And the solution would likely have many advantages over Social Security in the long run. For example, perhaps it would trigger a massive wave of home upgrades as people add in-law apartments to their existing homes. The economy would boom, grandma would be close to the grandkids, and you could easily feed her with the money you saved by not paying Social Security every month. When she dies, you have an extra space to rent.

Don't get too caught up in my examples. I'm just making the case that budget constraints fuel creativity. And that trade-off is sufficiently unpredictable that common sense simply can't tell you whether to cut a particular large program or not.

So how do you make budget decisions in the face of massive unpredictability? That's simple: You pick the path that is cheapest. And that is roughly what the sequestration did.

Solving Three Problems at Once

Mon, 13 May 2013 01:00:01 CDT

Problem 1: Grandparents enjoy watching movies, but they don't enjoy the hassle of going to the movie theater.

Problem 2: Grandparents want to see more of their families.

Problem 3: You feel obligated to visit your parents/grandparents but it can be mind-numbingly boring. And you don't want to sit in the living room for hours listening to medical complaints.

Solution: Suppose the AARP (a seniors organization) worked out a deal with the major film studios to allow seniors to stream new movies to their homes on the same day the films are released to studios. And let's say the price is high, perhaps $100 for a two-day streaming rental.

Now you have a situation in which the grandkids might want to visit the grandparents just to see the new movie that is out. That's doubly true if the grandparents have a huge screen TV.

A typical grandparent would have twenty-or-so family members and friends who might be interested in a new movie. That brings the cost down to $5 per viewer if everyone wants to pitch in. Or grandpa could pick up the entire tab to sweeten the deal.

Professional movie theaters would still have a huge quality advantage over home theaters, especially for 3D. And some people simply prefer doing things with crowds because it makes the event more exciting. So theaters should continue to do fine. My guess is that the revenue stream from grandparents would more than compensate for lost theater attendance. And the grandparents would be happy to see more of the grandkids.

It would be easy enough to test this plan in a limited market. Pick one theater and draw a circle around it on the map. Market this new streaming service for seniors within the circle and see how the theater performs compared to its peers.

You'd have cheaters of course. Young people might add grandma's name to their house deeds just to be able to watch new movies at home. But I think the cheating could be in the 10% range.

Would this idea work?

InterFACE

Thu, 09 May 2013 01:00:01 CDT

I want a computer interface that is built around the idea of actual faces on every file and file folder.

It occurred to me the other day that everything I do has some sort of human associated with it. Some stuff might be for my editor, other stuff for my startup partners, and so on. Everything I do is ultimately for the benefit of at least one human, even if the human is me.

Humans are wired to spot faces quickly. If you open a folder with fifty faces, you can spot the one you are looking for in a second. With our current computer interfaces I have to read all of the file names, or sort by date of creation. It's doable, but not natural.

The most natural way to sort files in a folder is by "target person," as in who will be the audience or beneficiary of the file. The second filter would be by date last opened. So if I want to find the document my lawyer sent my last month, I pick his face from the crowd on my desktop, click on it, and view the documents in the order they were last accessed.

This sort of idea wasn't practical before Facebook, LinkedIN, and smartphones with cameras. In the past, you wouldn't have access to photos of people to create your filing system. Now you can find a picture of most folks with a Google search, or a Facebook or LinkedIN search. And your family and friends are probably on your smartphone already.

I don't know about you, but I often lose files on my computer because I can't remember the file name or the folder I put stuff in. If the application I used to create it has opened too many "recent" files, I have trouble finding my target file that way either. My hypothesis is that humans are so wired for social living that we would remember what "face" we filed something under more easily than we would remember a file name or folder.

In some cases you might need to use fictional faces. Let's say you pick Shrek as the face for your "miscellaneous" files. Even though the association of Shrek with random files makes no logical sense, I think you would still easily remember what face goes with which files, much the same way you can tell me what kind of car each of your friends drive. We easily remember what objects are associated with different personalities.

Taking it one step further, I imagine my desktop looking like a model of the solar system, except instead of planets you would see floating faces representing various files and folders. Let's say there are a dozen-or-so face-planets around a sun, and the sun represents you. You can rotate the face-planets around the sun by swiping your screen in any direction. As the face-planets rotate, the ones in the back come to the front and vice versa. You might arrange your personal face-planet solar system by time of day, so the work-related files are nearest you in their natural orbit during the day. At night, from home, on a different computer, you see the same face-planet solar system but by the time you get home, your personal files (face-planets) are nearest you.

The idea is that you would sit down, think of the file you need, immediately associate it with a face, and know instinctively where the planet would be in your interface. Swipe once and it starts spinning until you tap to stop it. Then tap the face-planet to open.

I got this idea from my dog, Snickers. She has herding genes and we can see that she keeps a mental model of who is in which rooms of our house at all times. There's a lot of coming and going with a busy family, but by her actions we can tell she knows where everyone is at all times. If two people leave by car, but one returns, she always looks for the second person. She is hardwired to think of her world in terms of the humans in it and where they are. I think you and I do the same thing.

I am always acutely aware of the location of my loved ones, although obviously I am sometimes wrong. They have a tendency to move without telling me. But I automatically keep a mental map, accurate or not, of the physical location of everyone I care about. I think that natural brain wiring can be used to keep track of files too. That's all I'm saying.

Crime and Privacy

Mon, 06 May 2013 01:00:01 CDT

In 1997 I predicted in my book The Dilbert Future that someday all crimes would be solvable. My thinking was that video surveillance and other technology, such as electronic noses, would make it nearly impossible to get away with anything illegal.

There will always be crimes of passion, and there will always be insane criminals, and criminals who didn't get the memo that crime doesn't pay. And a few geniuses will always find a way to stay ahead of technology. Crime itself will never go to zero, but I'm going to double down on my prediction that technology will someday make it nearly impossible to get away with crime.

The Boston bombers were spotted on several security videos. That probably marked the point at which the public came to understand how ubiquitous video recording is. But you probably thought that sort of video surveillance is common only in cities.

Last year some presumed identity thieves went through the garbage cans on the streets in my quiet suburban neighborhood at about 3 AM. A least two neighbors produced home security video of the perps, taken from multiple angles facing the street. At some point, every home that has a security system will have video as a component. Law enforcement will know who comes and goes through nearly every front door.

Now we learn that the government might be recording every phone call, email, and text of every American citizen. At the moment, that information is used to fight terrorism. But one assumes law enforcement will someday use it more generally if they aren't already.

In twenty years, the government will always know where your car is, the same way they can track your phone. Taxis will someday only take credit cards. Busses and trains will require you to swipe an ID, and so on. If you travel, the government will know where you went and how you got there.

Or suppose someday there are enough people wearing Google Glass that nearly every crime is recorded in real time by observers and loaded to the cloud automatically. I could imagine future versions of Glass keeping a one week running record of everything you see, just in case you ever want to play it back.

Eventually, physical cash will go away, and with it the easy means for criminals to profit. Once all money is digital, how do you buy illegal services? If you're following the Bitcoin story, you know that Bitcoin technology has potential for illegal transactions, but for that reason I see the government finding a way to clamp down on it.

I can also imagine big improvements in the area of personal identification. Imagine, for example, having a smartphone, an iWatch, and a smart car. When you go to the store, the cashier will someday automatically know that you, your car, your watch, and your phone are all in the same place. That is nearly a 100% identity check. When you approach the cash register, I can imagine your phone automatically identifying itself and pulling up your photo on the register. In the future, when we are part cyborg, we won't be using driver licenses for ID; we will use our proximity to our personalized hardware. (Someone already has that patent. I checked.)

In the near future, certainly in your lifetime, law enforcement will know every front door you entered and exited, where your car has been, where your phone has been, everything you've said by phone, text, or email, and everything you have purchased. You ain't getting away with shit.

Another interesting phenomenon is that the Facebook generation has an entirely different view of privacy. When I was a kid, I could count on my classmates to keep their mouths shut if they saw me breaking a rule. Today, keeping your mouth shut isn't even a thing. It went away when privacy did. In today's world, if a high school kid does anything inappropriate in front of witnesses you can count on it reaching multiple parents in about a day. The filters are off.

On the plus side, I also predicted that a lack of privacy would lead to fewer activities being against the law. The only reason law enforcement can afford to act against drug users, or prostitution, or gambling, for example, is because only 1% of those crimes are detectable. If police could magically know every time someone violated a drug or prostitution law, the volume would be so high they would end up ignoring the entire class of crimes for purely practical reasons. And that's where we're heading.

Ironically, the more the government clamps down on individual privacy, the more freedom the residents will have. When the government can detect every sort of crime, it will be forced by public opinion and by resource constraints to legalize anything it can detect but can't stop.

Porn has already moved into the mainstream. More states are making gay marriage legal. Weed is being legalized in various states. Promiscuity has entered the mainstream. And prostitutes with websites no longer try to hide their "escort" business.

I'm reminded of a banking saying: "If you borrow $100,000 from the bank, the bank owns you. But if you borrow $10 billion, you own the bank." There's a similar thing happening with privacy and your government. If you give up a little bit of privacy, the government owns you. But if you give up most of your privacy, the government loses its power over you.

Consider the effort to control legal handguns in the United States. Common thinking on this topic is that the more the government knows about your guns, the greater the risk to liberty. But my thinking is that gun sales will go through the roof if the government ever succeeds in tracking them. You don't want to be on a list that says your house has the least firepower on your block.

I know from past posts on this topic that I'll get a lot of down votes because you hate any thought of the government reducing your privacy. Let's agree that we all have the same gut feeling that privacy is a good thing and we want to keep it. All I'm putting forward today is the idea that the less privacy you have, the more freedom you will have at the same time.

Consider the gay rights movement. The genius of the gay rights pioneers is that they increased their freedom by voluntarily reducing their privacy. By coming out in large enough numbers, gays took from the government the ability to vilify gay sex acts and gays in general. There were simply too many gay citizens to ignore or to jail. Society necessarily started to adapt, and continues to evolve.

In general, whenever privacy is lost in a democracy, it creates an opportunity for freedom to increase. The mechanism looks like this:

1.      A loss of privacy reveals how many people are involved in a particular activity and gives the public a chance to get used to it. (gays, weed, porn, etc.).

2.      Law enforcement has no practical way to handle all of the "criminals" who are now exposed. And even trying would look like a bad use of resources.

3.      Laws evolve to reflect what is practical. Formerly illegal activities become legal or tolerated because there is no practical alternative.

In the long run, privacy is toast. But what you will get in return is more personal freedom and less crime. That's a trade that almost no one would voluntarily make, but I think the net will be good.

[Update: Based on your comments, I should clarify that losing privacy in a dictatorship is always bad (Germany registering guns). But in a democracy it works opposite because public opinion matters. Great Britain, for example, has strict gun laws and a relatively low risk of initiating the next Holocaust. -- Scott]

Perfect Moment

Wed, 01 May 2013 01:00:01 CDT

In the late afternoon, after I've exercised and showered, I brew a steaming cup of coffee in the kitchen and walk upstairs to my office to finish drawing some comics that I sketched earlier. It is mindless work, but sometimes my brain and my body are in exactly the right mood for mindless.

I grab a protein bar from the stash in my desk, put my coffee next to my Wacom Cintiq 24HD, sit down in my ergonomically-correct chair and put my feet up on the hassock under my desk.

My trusty dog, Snickers, follows me into my office and finds her napping place. She likes to be where the action is, and I'm the only show in the house.

The protein bar flavor goes extraordinarily well with coffee. I take a sip of coffee, one bite of the protein bar, then another sip. It is taste perfection.

I pull the Cintiq - a computer monitor on which I draw - toward me and position it for work. I have a television strategically positioned in the corner where I can see it easily while drawing. I find a great movie that just came out and order it with the On Demand function. I grab my drawing stylus, open a file, and start drawing.

I have a strange relationship with drawing. As a child it was a compulsion, closer to OCD than art. I drew on everything, all the time. As an adult, I see drawing as work, and it usually feels that way, especially in the morning. But today I have arranged my environment so perfectly that drawing is automatic, effortless, and childlike.

The movie serves two purposes. It distracts me from an otherwise mundane task that will last a few hours. But it also causes me to take frequent breaks to see what is happening in each scene before looking away to draw. I need the breaks to keep from overworking my hand.

I'm the sort of person who needs to feel productive. When I'm drawing, I know I'm doing something useful that has a specific value. It is meaningful work and it nourishes something deep inside me. Work isn't what I do; it's who I am. When I work, I exist in a way that makes sense to me.

I also remember what it took to get to this place. I think of all the days in my youth when I worked on my uncle's dairy farm doing back-breaking labor under the boiling sun. I think of all the mornings I got up before dawn so I could shovel snow or mow lawns to earn money for college. I think of the four jobs I held during college. I think of the three years I worked my day job while going to school at night to get my MBA. I think of the six years I worked full-time at Pacific Bell while creating Dilbert morning, nights, and weekends. I think of the ten years I worked without taking a day off.

And as I listen to the sweet snoring of my loving dog, I realize that all of my hard work paid off.

I take another sip of coffee, another bite of my protein bar, and draw. It is a perfect moment.

Robot Killer App

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 01:00:01 CDT

In an earlier post I asked which topics you prefer me to blog about. I was surprised that the topic of robots wasn’t popular. I say that because interest in anything is usually based on how much we expect it to influence our own lives. And I can’t imagine anything that will change all of our lives as much as the coming Robot Age. We are the last generation that will remember life before robots. In about five years, shit is gonna get real.

So how will the first big push into residential robotics happen? If you break your daily chores into categories, which of those categories do you see as the first killer apps for robots?

We already have robots that vacuum carpets. But armless robots that scoot along the carpet don’t impress me. I’m wondering when I’ll buy the first robot that can move through my home, manipulate things with its arms, and communicate by voice.

The other day, I was clearing the dinner table and putting dishes in the dishwasher. It occurred to me that technology has already reached the point at which a robot could clean your kitchen and dining table after a meal. A robot could collect plates, scrape the debris into the trash, and load a dishwasher. If you saw the Youtube video of a robot doing ironing, or pouring a glass of water, you know why I think the technology is already here.

I could also imagine a robot walking the family dog when everyone else is working or in school. You’d need the robot to train the dog with treats, just as a human would. But that seems doable. And the robot would need to have a DVR function in the cloud to record whatever is happening and discourage pranksters and dog thieves. Perhaps you, as the dog owner, could watch the entire walk on your smartphone or computer at work. You could even talk to passersby through the robot, just so they know they are being watched and video-recorded.

I also have a vision of a Transformers-like robot designed specifically for childcare. At night it turns into a bassinet with video feeds to the parents. If the baby cries, the parents can have the robot bring the baby to their room, or try to soothe it by rocking. When it’s time for a walk, the bassinet becomes a self-moving baby carriage. For meals, the robot morphs into a high stool. If the smoke detectors in the house go off, the robot carries the baby to safety automatically. And I would think it could sniff out a diaper problem and alert parents. A robot won’t replace adults for childcare anytime soon, but I can see childcare getting a lot easier with a robot helper. In time, the robot can even teach the kid language skills.

I think it will be a while before robots can cook gourmet meals or clean your bathroom just right. But I’ll bet we’ll have commercial robots that can clear a dinner table, take the dishes to the dishwasher, do laundry, and help with childcare in five years. And I think the price tag will be around $5,000, with a monthly maintenance plan of $100.

The first company that cracks the residential robot market has a good chance of becoming the most important company on earth. The robot revolution will make the industrial revolution look like practice swings.

By the way, if there are any college robotics majors looking for a fun project, I have one for you. I need a small robot that can find and pick up tennis balls from anywhere on the court and throw them in a hopper (a basket) on its back.

When a human takes a tennis lesson, or uses a ball machine to practice, the unpleasant part of the process is picking up the two hundred balls that are left all over the court. A tennis teacher could save ten minutes of tedium from every hour-long lesson.

I would think the technology for a tennis ball robot is already here. Let me know if someone already built one.

Spy in your Office

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 01:00:01 CDT

Does Skype have an auto-answer feature that only activates for certain users calling in?

I couldn't find it, but I assume it either exists or will soon. With that feature I could dip in and out of meetings all over the world just to gather fodder for Dilbert. Just plug in my Skype user ID and leave Skype open.

I imagine Dogbert as my image for the account. You'd be sitting at a meeting with your laptop or smartphone on, Skype open, and suddenly Dogbert would call in and automatically connect. My video would be off. All you need to do is let me listen in.

The downside is that you could get fired for exposing confidential company information. But think of how cool your story would be. Totally worth it.

Over the course of my cartooning career, the comment I hear most often from readers is "You must have a spy in my office." I always wished that were true. And now it seems technology has made that an actual option.

... time passes...

Okay, I decided to go ahead and set up a Skype ID called Dogbertiswatching. Add that to your contact list and Skype me if you're in a particularly ridiculous meeting. I'll usually be looking for comic fodder between 6:30 AM and 8:30 AM Pacific Time. But please don't expect me to be chatty because I'll be working. I'll just send a "hi" message and listen in.

And start lining up your next job now. You might need it.

Waiting for the iWatch

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 01:00:01 CDT

Few experts seem to think Apple has another megahit product ahead of them. But I think the iWatch might be bigger than anyone imagines. You should keep in mind that I'm the oracle who predicted that no one would want an iPad. I repeated that prediction with the oversized phones from Samsung - the so-called phablets - and those are flying off the shelf too. So we know I suck at predicting consumer demand for gadgets. And while you might think I would be too embarrassed to make another prediction about consumer electronics, apparently I don't feel shame like normal people.

So let's get to it.

I've been holding off on buying a normal watch for the past several months because I'm fairly certain I'll get an iWatch if it ever hits the market. And when it does, ordinary watches will start to look the way flip-phones looked six months after the iPhone was announced. You're probably thinking an iWatch would be too geeky for any fashion-conscious consumer. But I think your old-timey standard watch will look like a butter churn in a few months. Fashion will require you to get an iWatch.

I see the iWatch as the next phase in our evolution to full cyborg status. I want my Google glasses, iWatch, smartphone, and anything else you want to attach to my body. Frankly, I'm tired of being nothing but a skin-bag full of decaying organs. I want to be the machine I was always meant to be. That prospect excites me.

But what excites me most about the iWatch is all the potential apps. Let's assume that the iWatch will be connected to your phone by Bluetooth. And let's assume the watch can measure movement. If you wave your arm in a figure eight, the phone senses it.

I'm also assuming the watch has a camera or two. I'd like one camera on the underside facing forward and one on the top facing forward, sort of where a wind-up stem would be on a standard watch. If you want to take a picture, just point your arm toward the scene and snap your fingers to operate the camera.

You'd also be able to control your environment with hand motions, like an orchestra conductor. Control the lights by pointing your arm toward the fixture and giving, let's say, the thumbs-up motion.

Likewise you can control everything from the television to video games to your heating and cooling just by hand motions, as if using magic. You would walk through your home like a wizard, with all of your electronics responding to your arm motions.

Your hand would also act like a computer mouse. Just move your fingers over the desktop to move the cursor on screen.

To make a phone call, just put your hand in the "call me" position as if holding a fake phone to your ear.

If you walk too far from your smartphone, the watch gives you a quiet alarm. That way you never leave without your phone.

If you want to wake up without bothering your spouse, the watch could have an alarm vibrator built in.

If you can't find your phone in the house, the watch would sense its direction and show an arrow on screen. Just follow the arrow to your phone's general direction. Ask the iWatch to find your phone and it sends a signal to the phone to make a continuous beep until found.

The watch could have sensors on the underside to monitor blood sugar, heart rate, and oxygen levels.

When I'm working in the kitchen, I often want to see an incoming message but I don't want to dry my hands. The iWatch would let me see messages even with wet hands.

When I want to add something to my to-do list, I can use my smartphone, but I generally don't because that means fishing it out of my pocket, and frankly that takes longer than I can hold most thoughts. But I would speak a to-do note into my iWatch just because it would be so accessible.

Imagine an app that lets you find compatible mates in public places. You fill out a dating questionnaire and your watch glows a certain color when someone compatible and available is in your public space. There are already a number of apps like that for your phone. The watch would add a level of fun because your friends could see your watch glowing too and be part of the fun.

Your watch could act like an emergency backup battery for your phone. Just plug a power cord between phone and iWatch and keep texting.

I would say my family misses 75% of all incoming phone calls even when our phones are nearby because they tend to be on vibrate. I even miss calls when my phone is in my pocket. The iWatch would be a huge improvement in not missing calls. I would buy the iWatch for that one feature.

Okay, that's my wish list. What apps would you want in an iWatch?

Ordinary Super Powers

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 01:00:01 CDT

I define an ordinary super power as any useful ability that very few humans possess. For example, having a spectacular voice that commands attention is like a super power. So is being ridiculously attractive, insanely smart, highly energetic, artistic, and so on.

I don't have any of those super powers. I'm an example of someone who has good but not great skills that work well together. I write okay, have a good sense of humor, draw better than the average person, and understand enough about the business world to pull it all together in the form of comics. No super powers needed.

But I often wonder what it would be like to have one or more of the ordinary super powers. And I also wonder which one I would choose if I had my pick. Knowing my shallowness, I would probably choose to be ridiculously attractive. But if I were to be more rational about it, and choose an ordinary super power with the greatest career utility, what would it be?

Realistically, attractiveness probably trumps most other super powers. So much so that in my opinion the men-versus-women way of seeing the world will soon morph into a political model in which attractive people of every gender and ethnicity are seen as advantaged while unattractive people are struggling. Gender and ethnicity will seem trivial compared to attractiveness. We're about halfway there.

This is a long way of getting to my point, and yes, I have one. I would nominate for my preferred ordinary super power the ability to not feel embarrassment.

My observation is that people such as Richard Branson or Elvis, or just about anyone famous, has willingly taken on a career that promises a lot of raised eyebrows, shaming, humiliation, and ego attacks. Some people shrug off that sort of stuff. They have that ordinary super power. And it makes success more likely because they get to compete against a smaller field.

My hypothesis is that people who display a lack of embarrassment are seen by others as natural leaders. I suppose a lack of embarrassment looks like a form of bravery, and we're wired to respond to it. When someone gives a speech to thousands, and shows no signs of nervousness, their confidence affects us. We assume good things about a person who is so cool under pressure. And when someone does something monumentally embarrassing, and shrugs it off with a smirk and a twinkle in the eye, we are in awe.

The good news is that one can learn to control embarrassment. You simply need to experience it so many times that you get used to it. In my case, my natural personality is shy, and as a kid I embarrassed easily. But I've learned through practice to power through most of my embarrassments. And that's a good thing because embarrassment is a routine part of my job.

Take this blog. What I enjoy most about it is that there is no editor between you and me. The downside is that you see my spelling errors, grammar mistakes, and dumbass ideas in their raw form. I barely go a day without embarrassing myself in public. But at this point in my life, blog-related embarrassments don't feel any more psychologically painful than looking in the mirror and seeing that I need a haircut. It's just stuff.

I'm not totally immune to embarrassment, but I'm working toward it. Of all the ordinary super powers, enduring embarrassment is the one that an ordinary person can most easily develop. I will never have a radio-quality voice, or suddenly become tall and attractive. But I can learn to endure embarrassment, and that has a tremendous economic value.

Imagine being able to talk to anyone, and ask for any favor or resource, without fear of rejection or embarrassment. 99% of people you talk to could give you the stink-eye and you'd still become a billionaire because of the few that cooperated.

So I put the following unscientific question to you:

1. Rank your fear of embarrassment from 1-10 with 10 being highest.

2. Rank your career success (age adjusted) from 1-10 with 10 being highest.

I think there will be a correlation. That's my hypothesis.

Our Moon Shot

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 01:00:01 CDT

You often hear that the United States no longer has big goals, the way it did when President Kennedy challenged the country to put a man on the moon. And by big goals, I mean something that costs an enormous amount of money, focuses the entire country on the objective, takes years to accomplish, and delivers more in the way of psychological and technological benefits than it gets from actually accomplishing the goal. Walking on the moon was trivial compared to the emotional and psychological boost it provided, and the technology developed along the way.

I think we already had this generation's equivalent of a moon landing, except it involved landing helicopters in Pakistan. And instead of astronauts sticking a flag in the moon, Seal Team 6 stuck a bullet in Osama Bin Laden's skull.

Killing Bin Laden cost the United States, oh, let's say ten trillion dollars, if you include everything from the opportunity costs, to the interest expense, to the Iraq war, to homeland security, and of course the war in Afghanistan. And by the time we got Bin Laden, the objective itself was trivial compared to the effort. But man, did it feel good.

In the long run, the technology developed to fight terrorism will probably be as important to the world as the technology developed getting to the moon. And like the moon race, we didn't choose the objective so much as it was chosen for us by international forces. The race to the moon was a message to the Soviet Union. The bullet in Bin Laden head was a message to anyone who thought attacking the mainland United States was a good idea.

Countries are like people in the sense that they develop personalities. Countries are the sum of their parts plus the sum of their histories. When a country does something notable, good or bad, that becomes its personality for a century. And getting the personality right has a huge economic value.

For example, Cyprus will probably have a century-long reputation as the unemployed uncle who rifled through your underwear drawer looking for your hidden sock full of money so he could buy beer. Russia is a well-dressed mobster. Canada is the guy who mows his lawn and then mows yours too because he was "...already out there, eh?"

The personality of the United States changes periodically. Sometimes we're generous and inspiring. Other times we're total dicks. It's a complicated country. But no one thing defines the personality of the United States more than our willingness to spend ten trillion dollars - and kill anyone who gets in the way - just to put a bullet in one asshole's skull. That gives me neither pride nor embarrassment; it's just a statement of fact.

This brings me to North Korea. I don't know enough about complicated international affairs to have informed opinions, so I'll put this in the form of a question from a citizen: Why isn't North Korea China's problem?

The old United States, with its old personality, probably needed a strong military presence in the area to keep things from getting out of hand. And of course we wanted to be there for our allies.

But today the United States has a different personality, and that provides different options. Today we could pack up all of our stuff, slap China on the back and say, "It's all yours, buddy. Call if you need anything. Glad to help." And we'd totally mean it.

The best part of our new personality is that Kim Jong-un understands that if someday he lobs a missile at the mainland United States, we'll spend ten years and another ten trillion dollars to put a bullet in his head. We'll even shoot his kids on the way up the stairs. And realistically, if North Korea did attack the United States, China would either step out of the way or do some regime-changing themselves in North Korea, as a favor to their biggest customer.

My observation over a lifetime is that when it comes to a fight, the craziest person has a huge advantage because he's not worried about his own losses. When Kim Jong-un's father was running North Korea, he had the craziness advantage. Today I'm not buying their act. From my dim vantage point, it looks like acting crazy instead of the real thing. If they want to see the real thing, all they need to do is send a rocket a little too far toward California.

Boston

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 01:00:01 CDT

Words unnecessary.

http://www.businessinsider.com/muse-singer-plays-national-anthem-for-boston-2013-4

Fact Checking: Adams Law of Slow-Moving Disasters

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 01:00:01 CDT

I was watching Real Time with Bill Maher the other day. He had a professor on the show who said climate change can be fixed by making well-understood adjustments to how farmers raise cattle plus some other fairly ordinary changes. Apparently this is all explained in a documentary called Carbon Nation.

I'm skeptical of any claim so big and contrarian, but it does fit with The Adams Law of Slow-Moving Disasters. Simply stated, my observation is that whenever humanity can see a slow-moving disaster coming, we find a way to avoid it. Let's run through some examples:

Thomas Malthus famously predicted that the world would run out of food as the population grew. Instead, humans improved their farming technology.

When I was a kid, it was generally assumed that the world would be destroyed by a global nuclear war. The world has been close to nuclear disaster a few times, but so far we've avoided all-out nuclear war.

The world was supposed to run out of oil by now, but instead we keep finding new ways to extract it from the ground. The United States has unexpectedly become a net provider of energy.

The debt problem in the United States was supposed to destroy the economy. Instead, the deficit is shrinking, the stock market is surging, and the price of gold is plummeting.

Social security was supposed to go broke. It might have some dents and scratches, but it looks as if it will be fine.

Offshoring was supposed to suck the last bit of manufacturing DNA out of the United States. Instead, robotics and other market forces have caused the trend to reverse.

Illegal immigrants from Mexico were supposed to overrun the United States with crime, steal American jobs and burden the social systems. Instead, the economy of Mexico started improving and immigration reversed.

When I was a kid, it looked as if the country was heading for an eventual race war. Today that seems impossible unless angry white guys start shooting.

In the seventies it looked as if crime was going to keep increasing forever until the suburbs were overrun by street gangs. Instead, violent crime has steadily decreased.

On a smaller scale, the BP oil spill in the Gulf was supposed to destroy the Gulf ecosystem for the rest of our lives. And while the lasting damage was plenty bad, experts were generally surprised that it wasn't far worse.

The Y2K problem was supposed to break computers and plunge the planet into an agrarian society. Instead, programmers invented shortcuts for finding and fixing the bugs with time to spare.

In California, predicted ongoing droughts were supposed decimate the state. Instead, it rained.

Can anyone give me an example of a potential global disaster that the general public saw coming, with at least a ten year warning, and it actually happened as predicted?

Pick a Topic

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 01:00:01 CDT

I blog on a variety of topics. I'm wondering which ones interest you the most.

1.      Future (robots, technology, healthcare, etc.)

2.      New business ideas (apps, inventions, services)

3.      Management bullshit

4.      Success tricks and tips

5.      Personal health

6.      Psychology (hypnosis, cognitive bias, illusions, affirmations)

7.      Politics

8.      World events

9.      The startup I'm working on

10. Humor (silly stories usually about my life)

11. Metaphysics (hologram reality, religion, meaning of life)

I ask because I usually hear "stop doing that" more than I hear "do more of that" so I have an imbalanced idea of what people prefer.

Turning Point

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 01:00:01 CDT

The other day I was practicing my two-handed backhand against a tennis ball machine. I've played tennis since I was a kid, but I started out with a one-handed backhand and it takes some work to switch. I set the ball machine to a narrow-random mode for some variety and started hitting.

Just so you can imagine the scene as I saw it, the ball machine has a black plastic exterior and it's about four-feet tall. It swivels left-right at its midsection. On the random setting it seems as if it's just messing with you. There is some variability in timing between balls because of the nature of the mechanical feeder on the top. When you add that to the programmed left-right randomness it gives the impression of being playful, just yanking you around for fun.

So there I am, hitting ball after ball, just me and the machine. No other human was anywhere near. I was having a great time, working up a sweat, improving my skills. . .

And then it occurred to me.

I . . . have a . . . robot friend.

The ball machine isn't intelligent in a classic sense. It was merely random. But humans are fairly random too, or so they seem, because we can't predict exactly what one might do next in any given situation. I don't even know what sentence I will type next. It's not random, but it seems that way because it is so unpredictable.

You all know my view that humans are simply moist robots, so for me, the difference between this tennis robot and a human was freakishly small. I was even responding to the robot in an emotional way. I felt a bit of a connection. Humans bond through shared activities and I was feeling it.

I imagine you're all dismissing this as a stretch. We're surrounded by machines that aren't entirely predictable and they don't feel alive. I'm typing this at my computer that surprised me half-a-dozen times already this morning. But my computer doesn't feel alive to me. Nor does my toaster, no matter how surprised I am its results. Those machines don't feel like the future. They are mere tools. The ball machine on the other hand registers in my lizard brain as a primitive form of life, in part because of its physical dimensions, and partly because of its relentless randomness. It makes humans seem a bit less special.

I saw a clip from TED (can't find it now) in which a guy tosses tennis balls at a toy helicopter that has a tennis racket strapped to it. The toy adjusts its position autonomously and returns the ball to the human, over and over. At this point in history the only thing that prevents me from having a full three-set tennis match with an anthropomorphic robot is the expense. The technology has arrived.

My prediction is that within the next five years each of you will have your own Holy $#!t moment with a robot that registers as freakishly intelligent. It's a cool feeling. It feels like the future.

Or have you already had the experience? Let me know in the comments.

Hey, I'm an Expert!

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 01:00:01 CDT

The Wall Street Journal asked my opinion on a few investment issues. I was happy to oblige.

On managed mutual funds

On Warren Buffett's Investment Strategy

Sorry about my lack of blogging this past week. The startup I'm working on is busily getting the beta ready to share with those of you who were nice enough to volunteer for an early peek at it. More on that later.

Knowledge is Health

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 01:00:01 CDT

Update: Link fixed

Did you know that 50% of second opinions from doctors contradict first opinions? And did you know that 80% of the findings in medical literature are wrong?

I'm fascinated by a new company called Metamed that offers to be your personal medical researcher. For a fee of $200 per researcher per hour, with a $5K minimum, you can make sure the full force of science is on your side. Metamed analyzes the medical literature and tells you which study results about your condition are reliable and which are not. They assess the value of various diagnostic tests, and create a map of all possible medical correlations. It's the sort of thing your doctor would love to do for you if he had the resources.

Metamed's service is pricey, but the cost will probably come down as the process gets more automated. And objectively speaking, the service is already a bargain if your alternative is death by ignorance.

I saw in the news recently that the rate of growth for healthcare costs in the United States was slowing and no one is entirely sure why. I assume there are a number of reasons for the unexpected change, but my hypothesis is that the Internet is already unlocking the power of healthcare information for consumers. Personally, my healthcare process looks like this now:

Observe symptoms
Search Internet for diagnosis and treatment.
If I'm not confident in what I find on the Internet, I email my doctor in the Kaiser Permanente system to describe my symptoms. Kaiser encourages email.
My doctor often replies in an hour with a prescription that has already been sent to my nearest pharmacy, some self-care instructions, or a request to come in for tests.
If I need to book an appointment, Kaiser's website does an automated interview to advise me whether I should treat the problem myself or schedule a doctor.

For the bigger problems, you want as much expert brainpower on your side as you can get. That's what Metamed provides. It makes me wonder how much healthcare costs can drop if we get better at picking the right treatment the first time. My gut feel is that 20% of healthcare costs are directly attributable to ignorance.

My healthcare provider, Kaiser Permanente, operates for the benefit of the members, so they are super-aggressive about preventative healthcare. I would think preventative medicine can take another 20% off of healthcare costs in the long run. And preventative medicine is mostly about getting the right information to the right people.

The Adams Law of Slow-Moving Disasters observes that whenever a massive threat to humanity can be identified far in advance, we always find a way to sidestep it. At the moment it seems that healthcare costs will grow to the sky and bankrupt us, especially as the population of oldsters increases. But I think better information might someday cut healthcare costs by as much as 50%. That better information will come from a variety of sources. Metamed is part of that solution, as is Google, as is Kaiser's extraordinarily effective use of the Internet. And we're nearing a point at which your smartphone will test you for all sorts of problems.

I can also imagine a time in which Google Glasses ^TM will observe all of your food choices during the day and keep a running record of your nutrition. When you stray from a healthy diet, your glasses might start suggesting a salad. When you don't exercise all day, the glasses might suggest using the stairs instead of the elevator. For all practical purposes, a human with Google Glasses and a smartphone is already a cyborg. And your future cyborg half will do a better job of keeping your organic parts functioning than you are doing on your own.

In the long, long run your healthcare provider will fix both your organic parts and your cyborg parts because it will all be part of the same system. You'll go to the doctor complaining of a headache and he'll update your smartphone software to track your daily habits and look for what triggers the headaches.

Anyway, my point is that better information will solve the problem of increasing medical costs. It's already happening.

Disclosure: I don't have a financial interest in Metamed, nor do I have any firsthand knowledge of their service. The Chairmam of Metamed is Jaan Tallin, one of the founding engineers of Skype, and one of the more important futurists of our time. I know Jaan because of our mutual interest in the so-called singularity.

The Monty Hall Problem and Schrodinger's Cat

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 01:00:01 CDT

The famous Monty Hall problem in the field of statistics goes like this: Monty Hall is a game show host. You are given a choice of three doors. One has a car behind it, the other two have goats. If you pick the door with the car, you win it. Your odds are 1-in-3.

So you pick a door, but before it opens, Monty opens one of the other two doors to reveal a goat. He asks if you want to switch from the door you initially picked to the other closed door. Your brain says the odds are the same for any closed door, so you stay. But in fact, the odds are twice as good if you switch doors.

You can see the math of it here. But if you are normal, you'll never reconcile in your mind how one closed door could have better odds than the other. If there are two closed doors remaining, how can the odds be anything but 50-50?

This reminds me of the Schrodinger's Cat thought experiment in which a cat in a sealed box (presumably with air holes) exists in a state of being simultaneously alive and dead depending on the results of a randomized event happening inside the box. How can a cat be alive and dead at the same time? Math says it can happen, my brain says no.

The pattern recognition part of my brain is connecting the Monty Hall problem with the Shrodinger's Cat thought experiment because both situations feel like proof that our brains are not equipped to understand reality at its most basic level.

Most of us accept the idea that math is a better indicator of truth than our buggy personal perceptions. Math doesn't lie, but our brains are huge scam artists. The Monty Hall problem and Schrodinger's Cat are examples in which our perceptions of reality and the math of reality disagree in a big way. It makes me wonder how much of the rest of my so-called reality disagrees with math without me knowing.

If I were programming a computer simulation full of artificial humans who believe they are real, I would need to take some shortcuts in creating their context and history. It would be nearly impossible to invent consistent histories for seven billion people spanning back to the primordial ooze. A far smarter approach would be to craft the history as you go, based on the present, in whatever minimum way is necessary to make all histories consistent.

For example, let's say you learn that you are the grand winner of a lottery. At the moment you realize you are the big winner, history becomes limited to only the possibilities that got you to that winning moment. Before you learned you were a winner, the reality at the lottery headquarters was only a smear of possibilities - like Shrodinger's Cat - where you were both a winner and a loser, just like everyone else. As soon as you learn you won, your history and everyone else's harden to conform to it. No one else can perceive that they won the grand prize in that particular lottery.

If I were the programmer of this simulation that you call your reality, I would make the history dependent on the present just to streamline my work. All I need from my fake history is that it is consistent with all the other fake histories so there is no "tell" left by the programmer.

I realize the simpler explanation for my confusion about Monty Hall and Schrodinger's cat is "Math be hard." But I like the psychological freedom of feeling as though I am the author of my own history and not its bitch.

Here's the cool part: I get to keep my interpretation of reality - in which my history is a manufactured illusion - until something in my present experience is inconsistent with that view.

Recently I heard of two senior citizens with mild dementia who became friendly at a senior care facility. Their fragile minds concocted an elaborate history of being childhood acquaintances that had found each other through fate. No one tries to dissuade them of this illusion because it works for them. They successfully rewrote their histories without any repercussions.

I wonder how often the rest of us rewrite our histories. Our only limitations are that our new histories have to be consistent with whatever scraps of history have already hardened.

The Perfect Room

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 01:00:01 CDT

When my wife and I designed our home we got one of the rooms exactly right. The living room area has an L-shaped couch that opens to a fireplace on one wall and the TV on the other. It's far better than the common practice of an ugly rectangular TV over a rectangular fireplace. Our windows are on both sides of the fireplace so there is no glare on the TV. And there are walkways on all sides of the couch so the living room eliminates the need for a hallway to connect rooms downstairs. Best of all, when we are facing the TV, Shelly can be nearer the fireplace, and that works for both of us.

That's just an example of a perfect room setup. Obviously your ideal room setup would be different if you don't have a fireplace or a TV. But it made me wonder if there is such a thing as an ideal room design for every given set of functionality and budget. Is there, for example, a perfect kitchen layout that has everything figured out? A perfect bedroom?

You often see rooms that can't be furnished properly because furniture placement was an afterthought. The design of a room should start with the perfect arrangement of furniture and fixtures. I would think that for every budget and set of preferences there are a few furniture arrangements that stand out as the best. How hard would it be to catalog those best arrangements?

I imagine a time when a user can design a home simple by checking boxes on a long digital form. Questions for a living room might include:

1.      Do you want a TV in this room?
2.      Do you want a cozy reading chair?
3.      Do you want a fireplace?
4.      Etc.

Once the user selects all of his preferences for each room, he clicks a "shuffle" button and it spits out a house layout complete with external windows, doors, hallways, stairs, and engineering support structures. All of that stuff is fairly rules-based. If you don't like the first design, click the shuffle button again. In every case, the rooms will have exactly the features you specified but arranged differently. And of course you can walk through your model in 3D mode.

You would also have to answer some questions about the orientation of the home on the lot, such as the location of neighbors, the street, and the sun. Just check the boxes that apply and hit the shuffle button.

I can imagine that each time you select or deselect a feature it automatically adjusts the total cost of building and maintaining the home. When you have the design you like, at the price you can afford, you click a button to send the whole thing out to bid for contractors. I can also imagine that clicking the "build" button sends the materials and cutting instructions to manufacturers and lumberyards that prepare all the building materials and deliver them to the site, appropriately labeled for the builder.

I would think the cost of the house would fall dramatically with this model, in part because you could shuffle rooms until you got the lowest cost that meets your needs. When an architect designs your home, you get perhaps two or three different looks from which to choose, and no idea which one is more expensive. Room placement makes a big difference in costs for several reasons:

1.      Rooms that need plumbing should be near each other to reduce costs.
2.      Orientation to the sun makes a huge difference in heating/cooling/insulation.
3.      Some designs require fewer hallways, which saves space.
4.      Some designs require more support structures, doors, windows, etc.
5.      Some designs have ductwork issues.

Those are just some obvious examples of potential savings. You'd also cut your architect expense by 80%. And you'd save on labor and materials because the building materials would be measured and cut at the factory, including everything from lumber to floor tiles to carpet.

My observation is that the building industry is slow to innovate and fairly disorganized. Builders, architects, and materials companies are all their own little silos. So my guess is that the "shuffle design" program will originate in some sort of online game environment before it gets ported to the real world.