deepskyfrontier

Skydive From Space: An Informal Business Case

2011-05-26T20:01:00.000-07:00

Only once in history has anyone managed to successfully skydive from over 100k feet in altitude: Colonel Joseph Kittinger, who had the backing of the United States Airforce.

Nick Piantanida made an attempt in 1966. Freefalling from perhaps as high as 120k feet, his mask depressurized at around 57k feet and he suffered brain damage from lack of oxygen. He remained in a coma for the last four months of his otherwise uneventful life.

Several others are planning attempts to break the record. I assume that one of them will succeed within the next five years. Possibly, one or more of them will die in the attempt, but I doubt it. And when they don't...

Let's discuss the components needed to bring near-space skydiving to the masses. And by masses, I mean up-to a hundred people a year.

Using a balloon like this:

http://www.csbf.nasa.gov/balloons.html

These use helium, which costs $60-$65 per thousand cubic feet. That doesn't sound like all that much, but consider that it needs almost 40 million cubic feet of the wispy stuff. That's $2.6M just for helium. Hydrogen, on the other hand, can be produced for around $2.50 per thousand cubic feet. In other words, for around $100k. Hydrogen is also 7% lighter. So, instead of an 8,000lb payload, you could go with 8560lb. This additional payload would be useful for the (hopefully) reusable emergency equipment that it would be nice to take along. It could even be used to accommodate electrostatic dispersal equipment (a network of fine, slightly-charged metal wires running through the interior of the balloon). I've never actually heard of anyone using active suppression in a balloon, so feel free to look into it.

Yes, hydrogen is risky compared to helium. Certain contingencies would require thoughtful preparation. Passengers would be trained to abandon ship at any time. Low-level disasters would actually be far more dangerous than high-altitude failures. Near the ground, spacedivers would wear large BASE jumping chutes. If the lifting envelope lit off only five hundred feet above the ground the twelve spacedivers would need to leave the gondola simultaneously. Thus, they would be too close together to release their chutes without interfering one with another. This could be solved with rocket dispersal packs. Each spacediver would be shot away from the gondola on a different trajectory. This would have the added benefit of getting the spacediver out of the path of the falling gondola. Who wants to land safely only to be squashed by falling debris? The fireball wouldn't be much of a problem (aside from being a fireball), since burning hydrogen flames upward. The falling gondola would pose a problem. To preserve the equipment carried aboard, the gondola would deploy a parachute of its own. If, for any reason, a spacediver failed to detach from the gondola, the gondola's own chutes would open a new survival path.

Spacedivers would wear heated, pressurized suits. Spacesuits. The gondola would also have a chamber that could be pressurized to normal atmospheric pressure and used for emergencies. It would also carry a pair of emergency back-up suits (in case you pick up hitchhikers on you way to the edge of space). If a spacediver became incapacitated and unable to complete their dive, they would take refuge, along with an attending medic, inside the safety chamber. This would either detach and ride down on its own chutes while the remaining spacedivers complete the program, or it could remain attached to the gondola and ride down at the end. This would depend entirely on the individual circumstances.

For the middle part of the ascent, spacedivers might gather together in the unpressurized safety chamber, or in a thermally insulated unpressurized tent. This would allow spacedivers to conserve heat and converse during the hours-long ascent. What would they talk about? Probably baseball.

Before making the ascent, spacedivers would breath pure oxygen for several hours, thereby removing dissolved nitrogen from their blood. Most likely, they would breath only a partial atmosphere (equivalent to the top of Everest, for instance) of pure oxygen during the entire flight program.

During the ascent, spacedivers would hook into a shared oxygen supply aboard the gondola. They would have individual oxygen tanks as well- carried on their persons at all times- which would provide emergency back up in the event that the shared supply failed. If the shared supply did fail, spacedivers would immediately return to earth.

Different parachute programs would be designed for jumps from different altitudes. Spacedivers would be trained for all possible jump parameters.

Jumping from over 100k feet would involve extremely high speeds. Colliding with another spacediver would likely segue seamlessly to death. Therefore, jumps would be staggered to prevent this undesirable scenario. Divers would pay a premium for the last (highest) jump slots. Each spacediver would also be assigned a vector, which, properly followed, would take her away from her fellow divers.

Spacediver landing zones would be spread out over a large area, as much as two hundred miles in diameter. Each spacediver would be provided with a retrieval team. Retrieval teams would be dispersed over the retrieval area and would arrange between themselves to retrieve diver closest to themselves without neglecting any. Divers would be equipped with mapping GPS and would be in general radio contact. Once a retrieval team had been assigned to a diver, the diver would switch to a direct channel. Automatic GPS locators would allow recovery even if the diver was unconscious or "other." Spacedivers should be adept at controlled flight and able to choose their landing area from high altitude.

A total payload of 8650lbs would allow for a 1800lb gondola frame built of carbon composites to sustain moderately high impact; 1400lbs of oxygen equipment; 350lbs each for twelve spacedivers (include the diver herself, suit, four main chutes, and diving oxygen), plus an additional 1360lbs for individual emergency chutes, dispersal rockets, pressurized safety chamber, two extra suits, and the gondola's own recovery chutes. This leaves a 500lb margin that could be used (just as an example) for baseball equipment.

Disclaimer: the gondola wouldn't provide very much of an outfield due to being the size of a small truck.

The gondola would be hexagonal, semi-rigid, and have three concentric zones. The outer layer is the jump platform. This would be open to the air. The middle layer, is an unpressurized, insulated solar tent. This would provide shelter from the blistering cold during the long ascent. In the center of the gondola would be the emergency pressure chamber. It would be large enough for two people to change into the back-up suits simultaneously, or for divemaster / medic to attend to a prone patient.

One divemaster would accompany each group. The divemaster would be the last to leave the gondola under normal circumstances. Under abnormal circumstances, the company would go out of business. This is a very dangerous idea.

Total costs:

Development: $6.3M (includes all administrative costs). $1.8M for entire parachute development program (run concurrent with test dives). Up-to $300k for hydrogen production plant. $600k for each of two gondolas, $800k for sixteen suits ($50k * 16). $1.8M for up to six test flights ($300k * 6). $400k for facility (rent is cheap in the desert, right?). Recovery vehicles would be provided by subcontractors paid $2k each per recovered spacediver / nothing if spacediver not actually recovered.

Per flight costs:
Disposable balloon envelope (recyclable): $20k
Hydrogen gas: $120k
Training: $16k
Retrieval teams: $2k / team = $24k.
Equipment retirement: $20k
Administration: $50k
Unavoidable insurance costs: $40k
Total per flight: $290k

Client cost per flight: $90k x 11 = 990k

Profit per flight: $700k.

Number of flights to recover development costs: 9

Two flights per month from May through October allows to become profitable after the first year and a half of operation. Prices could be lowered afterward to better accommodate supply / demand.

I have now extracted as much fun from this idea as I'm ever likely to extract.

Planetary-Scale Engineering Using Relativistic Hulks

2011-05-26T08:51:00.000-07:00

According to special relativity, a container of hot gas, in which individual particles are moving rapidly within the system, will weigh every so slightly more than a container of cold gas. This is because, the faster a mass moves relative to rest, the more mass it has (from it's own frame of reference, there is no change). Objects weigh more in proportion to the fraction of the speed of light, seeming to approach infinity as the fraction approaches unity. See my previous post for tons of mathematical examples of this effect. Cosmic rays, for instance, are lightweight particles (electrons and atomic nuclei) that have been made heavy through acceleration.

I'm going to use this concept as the basis for a mega engineering thought experiment. One of the requirements of this thought experiment is that we have access to unlimited drive energy onboard a starship. There is no known way to achieve this, and no terribly realistic ideas for fixing this particular inconvenience. Therefore, the source of drive energy is in the realm of pure science fiction. The idea described here doesn't work with ram scoops, antimatter rockets, or interstellar lasers driving solar sails. It requires something exotic like stretching and exploiting the zero-point energy gradient, tuning into blackholes via a holographic hack, or blocking gravity in one direction, thereby causing the weight of the unblocked universe to pull the ship toward itself. I won't bother to discuss it any further here, other than to ask that you assume the unassumable before we continue.

Imagine that you have an extra-impossible starship. Imagine also that you can accelerate that ship very close to the speed of light. That ship will rise in mass and exert significant gravitational influence on its surroundings. By accelerating to high relativistic speeds, the mass, and therefore the gravitational influence, will both increase, approaching infinity at around half the rate of the increase in velocity (in other words, you'll never achieve infinite mass through acceleration, ie, going from lower velocity to higher velocity to even higher velocity.)

Imagine if you were to pass by an asteroid, comet, or even a small moon traveling at a high percentage of the speed of light. You could, according to this idea, cause a gravitational pull on the side that the ship passed by. By doing flybys with many heavy fast ships, you could nudge your target off its original orbit. With careful planning, via advanced simulation, you could engage not just in terraforming, but solarforming- the modification of a solar system to make it more inhabitable.

For instance, imagine a planet is already in the right approximate location, but its precession and eccentricity are out of synch, disallowing regular seasons. Using this method, you could flatten the eccentricity by nudging the planet toward its star while at apogee (greatest distance from the center of orbit). You'd do this by passing your ship between the planet and the star. Alternately, you could pass on the the far side while the planet is at perigee. You could also speed or slow the orbit of the planet by passing in front or behind. By using multiple ships and multiple pass-bys, you could fine-tune the orbit.

On the down side, a point mass passing close to a target would exert massive tidal forces. The most powerful effects would also be the most violent. The surface would be more affected than the core, and the overall effect would be like trying to move a pumpkin by hitting it with a sword. Close flybys would affect rotation more than location (useful for changing the length of the day). Really close fly-bys would rip mountains up by their roots and strip away half the atmosphere.

To be most useful, the virtual masses involved would have to be planetary themselves, and be kept at a safe remove. The effect would come and go very quickly- in a matter of seconds- further dampening the effect.

How heavy, and how fast? For example, a "ship" weighing around 8,500kg (a small commercial truck) moving at 0.999999999999999999999999% of the speed of light (impossible) would effectively weigh as much as the earth when measured from the rest frame (~6e+24kg). Flying something like that through our solar system would have a very disturbing effect. It would cause earthquakes, volcanism, tidal waves- literally- and high velocity winds. Better to use it on planets that aren't yet inhabited.

Would this be a practical approach? No!!! It gets more and more practical the less and less realistic it is (ie, with large masses, higher velocities, and greater standoff). It's a thought experiment that assumes that literally unlimited energy for acceleration is available and can be translated into terrifying, unsurvivable amounts of acceleration. However, if you had access to that much energy, there would be much more efficient ways to use it. You could attach a many of these fanciful drives to the planet directly, or you could use their driving principle at a more fundamental level to get the same effect.

The one advantage is that the above technique uses minimal infrastructure- a single starship run by a single advanced autopilot operating on an extremely precise simulation.

But really, building extensive infrastructure shouldn't be a problem if you're moving planets around, right? Come on.

Virtual Hyperspace

2011-05-13T12:46:00.001-07:00

Imagine that you want to travel to a distant star, some 10 lightyears away, and then come back to earth.

Let's assume that you have a spaceship capable of accelerating at 100 gee. Let's also assume that you can handle the acceleration. You'd spend half the journey (5 ly) accelerating, and half deccelerating at the same speed. Your 10 lightyear journey would be over in 50 days of shipboard time. You'd be 50 days older, while, back on earth, about 10.01 years would have passed. Let's assume that you then spend ten days at your destination, get in your ship, and return to earth using the same velocity envelope.

When you arrived back on earth, everyone you'd left behind would be 20.07 years older. You'd be 110 days older.

If, however, you could arrive back at earth only 110 days after you'd left- thereby synchronizing your perceived passage of time to the rest frame, you'd effectively be making the trip instantaneously (minus 50 days per leg). I'll explain how a little later. You'd be engaging in interstellar time stoppage. You'd almost be time traveling. You'd be able to deliver information about a distant place a whole ten years earlier than it could have arrived by radio. As long as you didn't get it there before you left- obviating the need to make the trip, you wouldn't be violating causality. The information would be between 50 and 60 days old from the standpoint of a single universal frame of reference- a reference we'll call "hypertime." If the distance between the two locations was less, then the gap in time would also be less. If you collapsed the distance to zero, you'd collapse the gap to zero (simultaneous time and place)- you'd never actually get information earlier, from the hypertime perspective, than it was actually produced. The only reason causality wouldn't be breached is because you never actually traveled faster than light. Traveling faster than light goes beyond the instantaneous. It is tantamount to traveling back in time.

How to do it though?

Assume that, before we leave, we built an Einstein-Rosen bridge, using matter with negative mass to keep it open, and take one end of the bridge with us. That's a massive assumption, but as long as building such a bridge is possible, then the assumptions that follow are sound.

We take one end of the bridge to a distant planet, some 10 light years away. We now have a wormhole. If we were to travel through the wormhole, we'd appear instantly back on earth. Let's assume, as Stephen Hawking has, that the act of traveling through it causes a feedback cascade that collapses the bridge, making travel across space impossible. Let's say that the most we can hope for is to keep the bridge open at a distance. Being able to travel through a wormhole at all involves a massive assumption that is probably wrong. However, without it, there's no point in continuing.

We spend ten days at our destination, and then we travel home at 100 gee, arriving fifty days later according to the ships clock.

The mobile end of the ER bridge is then reunited, in terms of literal proximity, with the stationary end. The stationary end is now 20.07 years older. The mobile end is 110 days older. By traveling through the bridge at this point, we emerge on the other side a mere 110 days after we left. We travel back in time- but it's not our own time we travel back into because were weren't around. Assuming that going through the bridge is done in a way that doesn't challenge causality, then it might be allowed. On the other hand, if we travel through and then destroy the bridge, which must continue to exist for another twenty years, or otherwise interfere with crossing through it in the future, then we've created a forbidden paradox. Or, let's say that 20 years later, we choose not to go through the bridge to emerge 20 years earlier. Again, a paradox. However, it's conceivable that we could design a system that would insulate us from paradoxes.

For instance, imagine that the ER bridge could not be accessed without being linked with the missing half. Travel and communication through it wouldn't be possible, but the two ends would still age differently. What if the ship were designed in such a way as to make it impossible to leave the ship without traveling through the ER bridge? Or, even better, a design that physically forces you to travel through when the side are connected. If these decisions were made in advance, and insulated from influence, then the spectre of free-will tampering wouldn't have to emerge.

Perhaps what we need is two bridges.

You go through the first to enter the ship at the beginning of the trip. When the ship physically detaches itself, the stationary end closes and the mobile end opens onto a second bridge which is entirely contained on the ship. Ideally, there would be a neutral region between these, but it is also conceivable that no neutral area exists, and that the bridge is effectively continuous with three sections and two areas where it is stretched across cosmic distances- one for each leg of the trip. The occupants live inside the second half of the bridge- the one that isn't being stretched during the first transit. Once they arrive, they leave the ship via the second bridge, opening it onto the distant planet. When they depart, they leave half of the second bridge behind, closing it from within as they depart to prevent it from being destroyed by a paradox-forbidding cascade. This allows the ship to return again to that distant planet with the same benefit of near instantaneous travel. Limited virtual simultaneity is established between the two locations, though this is different from the simultaneity of hypertime.

When they arrive back on earth, we make it so that the only way to exit the ship is via the local bridge, opening it from within. As long as no one who remained on earth can enter the ship by other means and exit via the wormhole, no actual time travel is possible. If we say that time travel is impossible as a basic requirement of the universe, then we could assume that this is prevented by stating that it is simply impossible to do that. Also, that it is impossible to travel through an ER bridge over great distances, and that it is impossible to enter an ER bridge that is not linked locally (same thing, said twice). If we disallow the breakdown of causality, but not the existence of an ER bridge, then this constraint allows for hyperspace-like travel despite never entering into a literal "hyperspace" other than the strange area within the ER bridge itself.

This scenario assumes a very particular type of ER bridge- one with non-trivial length and extradimensional topology not normally required by an ER bridge. In essence, it needs to have regions that extend beyond the point where the stretch is taking place. It needs to be cut off from normal space, and for its contents to be separated from normal space by the wall of the ER bridge, even though, if traveling through the wall of the bridge were possible, they would simply emerge somewhere in deep space (wherever the ship carrying the bridge happened to be located at the time).

To make the proposition even more elegant, we'd have to say that the ship itself either penetrates the wall (by field or substance), or that the ship can travel through the ER bridge, or is, perhaps, constantly within it, or within the neutral area between two bridges. However, penetrating the wall in any way violates the nature of the allowability of the ER bridge (see above). Therefore, the only solution that doesn't leave a starship parked out in space 20 years later is for the ship to travel through the bridge itself. That means that the bridge would have to be moved, ie carried, from within the bridge itself. This is a problem, since the ship needs to be able to interact with external reality in order to move relative to it.

Assuming you could do that, you've got yourself some hyperspace.

Aluminum, Titanium, and Steel Composite Blade

2011-03-24T12:27:00.000-07:00

You can't weld steel and aluminum together. But you can weld steel and titanium together. And you can also weld aluminum and titanium together. So, in order to weld steel and aluminum, all you need to do is use a layer of titanium.

Proposal (more of a gimmick than a proper innovation) is to build unnaturally light, unnaturally expensive, high-end custom knife blades using a small piece of high quality steel for several millimeters of edge, a thin titanium layer, and rest of the blade as an aluminum alloy.

A composite sword could also be built using a high-quality edge steel, a titanium buffer, and an aluminum alloy blade. The aluminum could be reinforced with small steel insets. It would all be welded together using electromagnetic induction. Such a sword might be lighter, faster, and even sharper and tougher than an all-steel blade.

It would even be possible to build a fiberglass, kevlar, or carbon composite blade with a steel edge. Removable, replaceable steel plates could be used to protect the composite core. This should allow for a flexible, lightweight, edge-retaining sword. It could also be reconfigured as an un-edged weapon.

Why does this matter? For absolutely no reason other than the fact that people would buy it.

The Third Inception: A New Reading of the Film

2010-11-18T08:44:00.000-08:00

After I first saw Inception my first reaction was to marvel that anyone could convince anyone else to make this film. While all films are ambitious in their making, Inception is wildly so. The answer: Christopher Nolan wrote, produced, and directed it himself. Therefore, only Nolan knows exactly what he had in mind.

I suspect, however, that Nolan actually had more than one thing in mind.

On its face, the film's conclusion is the culmination of the content of the story. It's a happy ending. Cobb achieves inception, rescues Saito from limbo, and cruises through immigration on his way back to his children. He spins Mal's totem to check whether he's still dreaming, but goes to his children before he sees it topple. In the last moment of the film, it's wobbling slightly but we never see it fall.

There are many clues that suggest that Nolan wants us to question the ending. The film is actively attempting to achieve inception in the minds of its viewers. The viral idea? "See Inception." And that may be all it is.

But I doubt it.

As Nolan was writing this, he took a relatively simple idea- a horror film about dream thieves (see Paprika)- and developed it into an Ocean's 11-type heist film. From there, he spent a whole lot of time developing the story as deep psychodrama- which is what got DiCaprio involved. The two spent months discussing the story before filming began. In order to commit to the dominant explanation, the two had to commit to the face-value interpretation. Along the way, however, I'm sure they were tempted to discuss alternatives.

Let us suppose that, to some incomplete degree, the final scene is definitely meant to be read as being a dream. Two possible scenarios arise. One: this is the only time the "top" level of reality is actually a dream. In other words, Cobb really did fall asleep on a 747, but hasn't actually woken up. His ascent from limbo is an illusion.

Two: everything that transpired in the film was inside a dream. If that were the case, we could then ask several more questions.

1. Whose dream is it? Who is the architect?
2. For what purpose?
3. Who's real and who isn't?

1. It could be that the entire story comes from Cobb's mind and that all characters are projections of his subconscious. If so, there's only one place- within the film's mythology- that it could happen: limbo. Cobb would be the architect, and the objective of the scenario would be to convince himself to finally accept the reality of the dream. In this reading, no one is real. Perhaps not even the original Mal. For all we know, the person of Mal was never in the dream with him.

The overt reading of the film says that she was really with him in the beginning, that the ascended to wakefulness together, and that she then killed herself, leaving Cobb behind.

But what if he descended to limbo alone? According to the mythology of Inception , he wouldn't remember the beginning of the dream. Would he create a projection of Mal to keep him company? Probably.

That's one possibility.

Here's another. And this brings us to the second question.

First, let's suppose that the prima facie reading is correct. Let's say that Mal really was with Cobb down in limbo- where they were the architects- that they grew old together, and that they then escaped. Let's suppose, however, that when they woke up, they ascended to a reality where neither of them were the sole architect and could not, therefore, change the dream to prove its nature without the full consent of the other. Therefore, they could not tell whether or not they were still in the dream. However, let's suppose that the original architect was Mal, and that she had some advantage. Let's say that she knows that the world isn't real... because, long long ago, she made it. So she is able to wake up, but he isn't.

Here's a different scenario to consider. Let's say that Mal never descended to Limbo. They were experimenting, using sedatives, with layered dream states. He went down, she didn't. She was left in possession of the upper dream state- the top level in which the film takes place. But when Cobb went down into timelessness, he brought a projection of Mal with him. He convinced himself that she'd come down to rescue him, and then, to be with him, and then, eventually, that he had to rescue her.

When Cobb descended to limbo, he was lost in infinite space. There was no way to find him. Rescue was impossible. But he did eventually find his way back... only, he had someone, or something, with him when he returned. He had a competing projection of his wife.

Let's keep running with the scenario. Why couldn't Mal, the original architect, change the dream and convince him that he still needed to wake up? Because he couldn't see her, even when she was right in front of him. Her projection superceded her. In fact, even her totem was a projection. It toppled every time because Cobb- in a reprisal of DiCaprio's character from Shutter Island, believed that the dream was real. She couldn't change the dream because anything she did would be over-projected by his powerful, talented, deeply rationalized delusion. He prevents her from doing it. All she can do is move toward convincing him that she could jump. His respect for her individuality- even the individuality of his projection- allows the real Mal to take herself, and the overlaid projection, off the ledge and into wakefulness. Mal doesn't expect to convince him, but that's just the beginning of her plan. When she jumps, Mal wakes up. The dream persists.

In order to rescue her husband, Mal must reenter the dream and work with the conditions that exist therein to achieve inception in Cobb's mind.

In this reading, there are only two layers to the dream. Everything below the first layer- where Cobb is on the 747- exists on a single plane, despite having the appearance of being multiple. This is because the architect of the second-layer is Mal, in disguise as the character Ariadne (Ellen Page), who follows him all the way down, and who is able to mess with not just the spatial physics, but also the temporal physics. While urgency never relents, there is also always enough time. The van takes 3 seconds to fall 60 feet- an abrogation of the laws of gravity. Arthur stacks, packs, and ships the other sleepers- among many other things- in only two minutes (it should only have been one minute according to the conversion rate quoted in the film). Time expands to accommodate what needs to be done. And what Cobb takes to be projections of Fischer's subconscious- the armed security that keep him acting, not thinking- are actually all part of the architecture. Everthing exists to achieve a specific result. And what is that?

Cobb needs to have a reason to return to limbo because only there can he begin his journey back up to reality. Saito's death and descent is probably an allegory to whatever caused Cobb to fall into limbo himself. The entire plot of the film- achieving inception on Fischer- exists only to bring Cobb to his own inception, which is the realization that he arrives at, in force, when he faces old-man Saito, that he is in a dream.

Do I think this is what Nolan had in mind? Not really. I think it probably crossed his mind. I think the film supports it as a possibility. Try watching it with this reading in mind, and see whether any paradigms shift.

CISSARE - the terrifying future of holographic weaponry

2010-09-12T08:16:00.000-07:00

CISSARE, pronouunced "sizz-ARE"- a play on the word "scissor"- stands for "Constructively Interfering Spherical Section Array Radiation Emitter." What does that mean?

First, we need to remind ourselves about an important property of waves. When two waves intersect so that their peaks coincide, the amplitude of the waves are added together. Observe water waves bouncing off a solid wall at the edge of the water. Sometimes, the reflected wave peak intersects with an incoming wave peak. The result is an extra-tall wave. Sometimes the incoming and outgoing waves intersect peak to trough- making for a momentarily flat place in the water. Read more here.

The same principle applies to electromagnetic radiation. In our initial thought experiment, we'll be discussing microwaves- "light" with peak-to-peak wavelengths of between 1 and 10 cm.

Imagine that you have two directional microwave emitters focused on a single point. If they are either exactly the same distance away from the target, or if their distances vary by some multiple of the wavelength; if they are operating perfectly in synch; and if they are operating on the exact same frequency, they will create a wave point twice the amplitude of the native power of either emitter.

Now, what happens if we add more emitters to the array? In fact, let's skip all the intermediary steps and go straight to the maximum scenario: a spherical array of directional emitters, all pointing inward, all focused on a single point, all in synch to create a point of constructive interference. The total energy at the center point would be derived by adding the energy of each of the emitters.

What we end up with is a point-knife. A device that can vaporize the interior of an object without damaging it's exterior. It could be used for surgery (in fact, in principle, this is how some cancer treatments work already). It could be used as a weapon. Here's how it would work. Imagine that you're CISSARE is set up in another building and you're attempting to destroy a soft object. You set up a sensor in the same room as the object you wish to vaporize. You focus your CISSARE on the surface of the object, so that you can get feedback- a heat reading, for instance- and then- once the point is tuned to maximum energy- you move it into the interior of the object.

You could think of it as a beam weapon without a beam.

Q. Why microwaves? Why not x-rays?

A. Tuning x-rays would require an incredible amount of control and would only be usable over an extremely short distance. Microwaves, which exist as useful energy levels, and to which much of the world is transparent, are much easier to tune.

Q. Why not radio waves?

A. Radio waves would be even easier to tune, but would generate relatively little useful energy.

Q. Why do you call this "holographic" in the title of this blog?

A. Holograms are created by using intersecting beams of light (lasers) which, because of the interference, are able to change the medium. An entire 3D image can be through the intersection of two points-of-view. Instead of creating a three-dimensional visual image, a CISSARE creates a three-dimensional projection of energy.

Q. What you've described allows you to project onto, or even into, an object- to "write." Can a CISSARE be used to "read"?

A. Possibly, in principle. By operating at low enough energy levels to avoid damaging the material, and by recording the energetic feedback signature emanating from the point of intersection, you could probe the interior of an object by scanning, point by point, line by line, plane by plane. The only problem is that you would have to know about the whole object before you'd know how any part of the object would affect the permissivity of the probe beams. A CISSARE could be used progressively- gradually solving for a more and more accurate picture over multiple scans. Or, CISSARE's might be useful as way of testing industrial hardware for variations from the intended design. In either case, enormous amounts of computing power would be required.

Q. Why do you describe a CISSARE as a weapon?

A. Anything that could be used to damage the interior of something without leaving any exterior sign of intrusion has potential as a devastating weapon. It would allow one government to quietly cook some internal organ of a visiting head of state without anyone being the wiser. That head of state might then die, days or weeks later, without anyone being able to prove that it was an assassination. Or, imagine that your CISSARE is on several trucks. You park them around the location of a hostage situation. You then send in a small robot to locate the bad guys. You Once they're all located, you run a quick program that causes a non-fatal burst of heat to appear at the base of each suspect's brain. No worries about collateral damage from stray bullets.

Cut Your Travel Time in Half

2010-09-07T10:27:00.001-07:00

There are some aspects of the universe that are exceedingly difficult to imagine properly. For instance, if you were in a spaceship traveling at half the speed of light, and you were to measure the speed of the light you shot out ahead of you, you'd find that it was traveling exactly the speed of light both from your standpoint, and from the standpoint of the stationary observer. This is true for the spacecraft traveling at 99% of the speed of light as well. Special relativity- Einstein's description of the universe in which there are NO special, or privileged reference frames (one's where light doesn't go the speed of light), leaves us with the understanding that in order for this to be the case- in order for light to always travel light speed- other things we consider to be constant get warped and squished and stretched. The rate of the passage of time. The physical dimensions of objects. Mass. Even the very concept of simultaneity.

While it's difficult to imagine, it's not difficult to calculate.

The factor, called gamma, by which we divide the passage of time for the moving reference frame, or multiply for the rest frame, is a simple calculation.

gamma = 1 / ( square root of ( 1 - ( v^2 / c^2 ))

v is velocity expressed as a decimal of the speed of light, c. C, is 1. 1 squared is still 1. So you can disregard that part of the equation. So...

gamma = 1 / square root of (1 - v^2)

And now for some examples:

v/c___________GAMMA__________percent relative to rest frame
0.0___________1________________100%
0.00001_______1.00000000005_____99.99999999995%
0.0001________1.000000005_______99.999999995%
0.001_________1.0000005_________99.9999995%
0.01__________1.00005___________99.99995%
0.1___________1.005_____________99.49874%
0.2___________1.021_____________97.979736%
0.25__________1.033_____________96.82458%
0.3___________1.048_____________95.39392%
0.33333_______1.061_____________94.28090%
0.4___________1.091_____________91.65151%
0.41660_______1.1_______________90.90909%
0.5___________1.155_____________86.60254%
0.55277_______1.2_______________83.33333%
0.6___________1.25______________80%
0.63897_______1.3_______________76.92308%
0.66666_______1.342_____________74.53556%
0.69985_______1.4_______________71.42857%
0.7___________1.40028___________71.41428%
0.74535_______1.5_______________66.66666%
0.75__________1.512_____________66.14378%
0.78062_______1.6_______________62.5%
0.8___________1.666_____________60%
0.80869_______1.7_______________58.82353%
0.83148_______1.8_______________55.55556%
0.85029_______1.9_______________52.63158%
0.8660254038__2________________50%
0.9___________2.294_____________43.58899%
0.91__________2.412_____________41.46082%
0.91652_______2.5_______________40%
0.92__________2.552_____________39.19184%
0.93__________2.721_____________36.75595%
0.94__________2.931_____________34.11744%
0.94281_______3________________33.33333%
0.95__________3.203_____________31.22499%
0.96__________3.571_____________28%
0.96825_______4________________25%
0.97__________4.113_____________24.31049%
0.97980_______5________________20%
0.98__________5.025_____________19.89975%
0.98601_______6________________16.66667%
0.98974_______7________________14.28571%
0.99__________7.089_____________14.10674% (two nines of c)
0.9949874371__10_______________10%
0.999_________22.366____________4.47101% (three nines of c)
0.9999________70.712____________1.41418% (four nines of c)
0.9999499987__100______________1%
0.99999_______223.607___________0.44721% (five nines of c)
0.999999______707.107___________0.14142% (six nines of c)
0.9999994999__1000_____________0.1%
0.9999999_____2236.068__________0.04472% (seven nines of c)
0.99999999____7071.068__________0.01414% (eight nines of c)
0.999999999___22360.680_________0.00447% (nine nines of c)
0.9999999999__70710.678_________0.00141% (ten nines of c)
1.0000000000__(infinite)__________0%

Notice anything interesting happening at high c? Makes it easy to remember, doesn't it?

Let's put gamma to work in some simple operations.

Q. A ship with a 1 gram rest weight is traveling at ten nines of the speed of light. How much does it weigh?

A. 1g x 70710.678 = 70.7kg.

Q. A neutrino with negligible mass is moving exactly the speed of light. How much does it weigh?

A. (almost nothing) x (infinity) = infinite weight. In other words, neutrinos *don't* quite make light speed. Light, which can only travel at light speed, is completely massless.

Q. A one-kilometer long ship is traveling at 0.8c. How long is it when viewed from the rest frame?

A. 1000m x 0.6 = 600m.

Q. A starship is traveling at four nines of the speed of light for ten years according to the rest frame. How many years ass on board the ship?

A. 10 x 0.014142 = 0.14142 years or 51.65 days.

Q. A ship is traveling at 96% of the speed of light for ten years of shipboard time. How many years pass on earth?

A. 1 / 0.28 x 10 = 35.71 years.

Q. At what speed does relativistic time dilation cause shipboard travel time to be exactly half that of the rest frame observer?

A. To find the answer, we set gamma equal to 2 and solve for v.

2 = 1 / square root of ( 1 - v^2)

Divide both sides by (square root of ( 1 - v^2)
Reset.
Divide both sides by two.
Reset. Get 0.5 = square root of ( 1 - v^2)
Square both sides.
Reset. Get 0.25 = 1 - v^2
Subtract 1 from both sides.
Reset. Get -0.75 = -v^2
Take square root of both sides.
Assume the answer we desire is positive.
Get 0.8660254038 c.

v = square root of [ - {(1/gamma)^2 - 1} ]

That's how fast you'd have to travel to cut your travel time in half.

All of Us are Drill Sergeants

2010-09-06T11:31:00.000-07:00

Let's say that every time you see someone with a LiveStrong bracelet, that you can demand that they do 20 push-ups. Like a drill sergeant. And every time you make this demand, you are required to do the same. How long would it take for people to catch on?

I'm talking about demanding exercise, in public, without fore-warning, from strangers.

Q. Would people cooperate?

A. Not all of them, but those that do would do so because they appreciate the opportunity to break the cultural taboo against exercising in public.

Q. Would it catch on?

A. If everyone that was accosted and commanded to do push-ups had it explained to them, then a number of them would likely take up the practice. It would appeal to a person's competitive nature- an attribute likely present in those that wear LiveStrong bracelets.

Q. Would it be worth it?

A. Even if it only barely caught on in a single small town in the middle of nowhere, those that participated would benefit from the increase in activity. By breaking the taboo against exercising in public, the benefits might be unlimited.

Security Upgrades for Online Email

2010-08-30T08:01:00.002-07:00

When I log into my bank, I type in my user ID, my password, and then type in the answer to a question. It's all done on a keyboard. If I were to access my account on a public computer with a keylogger install- and chances are, if it's a public computer, a keylogger *is* installed on it- then I could lose all my money.

Several times this summer, I've received email from people who've had their email or facebook accounts hacked. Usually, it's because of keylogging. Sometimes through malware, sometimes through physical devices.

I propose the following updates.

Have a pair of on screen keyboards- manipulated using the mouse- for entering passwords. Have it work in concert with the physical keyboard. This would allow the user to remove letters from the logging data, making it useless.

Why two onscreen keyboards? To make it more difficult to use mouse logging in concert with screen capture. The keyboards can also alternate between being in qwerty and alphabetical order and move around (between entered letters) to make it impossible to gather usable data. This wouldn't cancel the need for malware blockers.

People need to be educated by their email providers to check the integrity of the keyboard cord whenever they're on a strange computer.

There are always going to be workarounds. So, in addition to the password, I propose an extra layer of security that would be activated whenever someone attempts to access an account from a strange IP address.

When you set up an account, you are shown a series of cartoons with random names assigned. You memorize the names of the cartoon faces, which are provided to you so you can't be socially engineered. You then modify the names in two ways.

For instance, you're shown a goofy cartoon face and told that the this is "Pedronimo." You're quizzed several times to make sure you've memorized this. When you access your account, you're sometimes asked to answer security questions as a refresher. You may also be asked to change the name in some way. Change, but not replace. For instance, you might use "redPonim00." You can now be asked questions based on this information. The questions are presented in mild captcha form.

"What is the original name of this person?"
"What is your version of this person's name?"
"Except for the first two letters, what is the original name of this person?"
"What are the last three letters of your version of this person's name?"
"What does this person do for a job?"
...and so on.

The keylogger may get the raw data, but not know the question- including what the face looks like. And even if the hackers got everything- including the face and the questions- you'd just have more cartoon faces than likely legitimate locations for logging in. No two face/question combinations would appear to consecutive disparate IP addresses. For consecutive visits to the same insecure IP address, you'd ask a different question about the same face.

Every once in a while, you'd learn a new cartoon face while working from a secure location and from within your email account. You enter all the information using mouse data- just in case- so that even if you're being keylogged, no one can see your answers or even infer that this is what you're doing. You have a choice about how many of these faces are used- as few as five and as many as ten or fifteen.

If a person happens to suffer from a bout of extremely poor memory, you'd have a set of backup questions which require sentence-length answers. While the exact spelling and order of words isn't essential, a certain minimum percentage of correct words is required. If you score low on one question- less than 95%, you have to answer another sentence-length question. If you can score above 90% on two, or above 85% on three, you get access to your account.

How do you keep from keylogging these answers? That's a problem. Inference of missing letters would surpassingly easy if you were to do the mixed method mentioned above. Of course the questions would be in captcha form. The only solution I can think of is that every time you successfully answer one of these personal long-form questions, it is never used again. If you get less than 85% matching on a single attempt, the question is red-flagged and no further attempts at accessing the account from non-secure IP addresses will be allowed for 24 hours.

Could someone that knows you really well answer these questions? Possibly. This places a burden on using intensely personal content and idiom. Like the cartoon faces, this is a method that would need to be actively maintained. One could put the answers (without questions) in a secure place. A secure place is one that no one that knows you knows about. If someone that doesn't know you finds the sentence, they won't know what to do with it. They won't even know the question.

A program running on your phone uses a virtual-randomization algorithm. By running a number through a series of mathematical operations (invisible to the user), and then returning a sequence of numbers based on the original. The login page offers a seed number, which you enter into the separate program, and it returns a four-digit number which is the incorporated into your password. For instance.

You're given a seed number of 59393
The virtual randomizer, which is, itself a unique program created by random seeding, returns 8702.

Your part of the password is the word "rutebega." But "rutebega" all by itself doesn't work. You have to add the first digit before the first letter and the last three digits just before the last letter. Your password, in this instance, is "8rutebeg702a" Given a different seed number, it would result in a different password.

If someone gets the letter parts of your password- the "rutebega," they still need the randomizer to get the rest.

If someone gets both your phone, and your root word, they'd be able to get access to your account. Otherwise, using keylogging would do them no good whatsoever.

To authenticate your standalone app, it would generate a long number that represents the identity of the random program that it is using to generate the seeds. Enter this on your email account to match the math. You'd only need to do this once.

And example of a random program.

Seed squared times pi, take thirteenth through eighteenth digits, divide by the current date in six digit format, take cube root of the fourth through eleventh digits, invert the answer, multiply by the square root of 2, and take the third through sixth digits. Rearrange- first digit third, second digit first, third digit fourth, fourth digit second. And that's your seed. The individual steps, constants, use of independent variables, etc. are all subject to one-time randomization.

To prevent the program from being copied, you could have a line item that uses an internal identifier, such as a serial number, as a source of a constant. Furthermore, you could make the device unusable to a stranger using your phone by having a number added to the seed. Your email account would need to know what this number is.

In other words, part of your password would be entered on a separate device.

I'm not saying that any of these ideas are perfect. All of them share the same issue of being more complicated than simply remembering a password. They wouldn't be used on secure computers, but they could be an option for questionable computers. Some of them might be considered fun. Some might appeal to those made paranoid by past experiences. Methods such as the ones I've mentioned could be provided on an optional basis. This means that hackers would go after the low-hanging fruit instead.

Optimum Language Curriculum for an Unlimited Traveler

2010-08-26T19:50:00.000-07:00

What are the most important languages? We'll start with the following assumptions:

1. The language student wishes to have the maximum possible flexibility throughout the world.

2. Basic communication, and not fluency, is the standard of success.

There are lots of ways of calculating this answer. Number of native speakers, number of first and second speakers, number of countries where a language is spoken, relative economic influence of those speakers. I'm going to take this question to another level. We'll be considering the effect of sprachbund ( language family), relative isolation, difficulty of learning, and availability of alternate communication among native speakers. We'll assign positive and negative points for all of these factors. We'll also take into account emergent, as opposed to historical, trends in globalism.

For simplicity sake, we'll be comparing just eleven languages, including English.

These are (alphabetically):

1. Arabic
2. Chinese (Mandarin)
3. English
4. French
5. German
6. Hindi
7. Japanese
8. Korean
9. Portuguese
10. Russian
11. Spanish

Here are the variables:

N. Number of native speakers (as a first language). 4 + 0.1 awarded for every 25 million speakers, rounded to the nearest 25). Note that the relative difference is small except for in the case of Hindi and Chinese. Wikipedia
1. Chinese (Mandarin) (1.1 billion) = 8.4
2. Hindi/Urdu (350 million) = 5.4
3. Spanish (330 million) = 5.3
4. English (300 million) = 5.2
5. Arabic (200 million) = 4.8
6. Portuguese (160 million) = 4.6
7. Russian (160 million) = 4.6
8. Japanese (125 million) = 4.5
9. German (100 million) = 4.4
10. French (75 million) = 4.3
11. Korean (72 million) = 4.3

E. Economic rank. 1 + percentage of world GDP (per language) / 10. unicode.org/notes/tn13/

1. English (28.2%) = 3.8
2. Chinese (22.8%) = 3.3
3. Japanese (5.6%) = 1.6
4. Spanish (5.2%) = 1.5
5. German (4.9%) = 1.5
6. French (4.2%) = 1.4
7. Portuguese (3.4%) = 1.3
8. Russian (2.1%) = 1.2
9. Hindi (2.1%) = 1.2
10. Arabic (2.0%) = 1.2
11. Korean (1.4%) = 1.1

S. Number of speakers as a second language. This is also a measure of the language's versatility, hence it's relatively heavy weight: 2 + 0.1 for every 10 million speakers, rounded to the nearest 10. Wikipedia

1. French (190 million) = 3.9
2. English (150 million) = 3.5
3. Russian (125 million) = 3.3
4. Portuguese (28 million) = 2.3
5. Arabic (21 million) = 2.2
6. Chinese (20 million) = 2.2
7. Spanish (20 million) = 2.2
8. German (9 million) = 2.1
9. Japanese (8 million) = 2.1
10. Hindi (?) = 2
11. Korean (?) = 2

C. Number of countries where spoken. Number of countries / 10 + 0.1 for every 50 million people. You'll notice that English gets a huge - and admittedly unfair - advantage on this one. Many of those 115 countries are small islands in the Caribbean, for instance. Before you accuse me of Anglo-chauvinism, remember that we're starting from the assumption that *you* read and speak English. Therefore, English isn't even included in the question. www2.ignatius.edu/faculty/turner/languages.htm

1. English (115) = 11.5 + 0.6 = 12.1
2. French (35) = 3.5 + 0.2 = 3.7
3. Arabic (24) = 2.4 + 0.4 = 2.8
4. Spanish (20) = 2.0 + 0.7 = 2.7
5. Russian (16) = 1.6 + 0.3 = 1.9
6. German (9) = 0.9 + 0.2 = 1.1
7. Chinese (Mandarin) (5) = 0.5 + 2.2 = 2.7
8. Portuguese (5) = 0.5 + 0.3 = 0.8
9. Hindi/Urdu (2) = 0.2 + 0.7 = 0.9
10. Korean (2) = 0.2 + 0.1 = 0.3
11. Japanese (1) = 0.1 + 0.3 = 0.4

L. "Learnability" (for an English speaker). Reverse scale from 2 to 0. 2 is highly learnable, 0 is very difficult. Increments of 0.1. (Ref: arbitrary judgement which includes the relative difficulty of learning to read the language).

1. Arabic = 0.3
2. Chinese (Mandarin) = 0.1
3. English = 2.0
4. French = 1.4
5. German = 1.6
6. Hindi = 0.4
7. Japanese = 0.4
8. Korean = 0.5
9. Portuguese = 1.4
10. Russian = 1.0
11. Spanish = 1.6

B. Sprachbund rank - is the language part of a larger family of languages in which more alternatives exist? Among the languages on the list, does it stand alone? Scale between 0 and 1 in increments of 0.1.

1. Arabic = 1.0
2. Chinese (Mandarin) = 1.0
3. English = 0.5
4. French = 0.4
5. German = 0.4
6. Hindi = 1.0
7. Japanese = 0.9
8. Korean = 0.9
9. Portuguese = 0.3
10. Russian = 0.7
11. Spanish = 0.5

R. "Replaceability" - Do other language options exist in significant numbers? For instance, while Morocco is Arabic-speaking, many people speak French. In Morrocco, Arabic is "replaceable" with French. Scale of 0 to 1 in increments of 0.1. Low numbers means that it has a good chance of being replaceable by another language on the list. A low number reflects a high number of multi-linguals among a quorum of the population. In some cases, this tends to offset the advantage of "N" (# of countries spoken-in).

1. Arabic = 0.8
2. Chinese (Mandarin) = 0.7
3. English = 0.9
4. French = 0.2
5. German = 0.1
6. Hindi = 0.5
7. Japanese = 0.8
8. Korean = 0.7
9. Portuguese = 0.5
10. Russian = 0.7
11. Spanish = 0.6

X. Special factors such as emergent economic or diplomatic consideration. Takes into account secondary speakers throughout the world. Scale of 0 to 2 in increments of 0.1.

1. Arabic = 1.4
2. Chinese (Mandarin) = 1.4
3. English = 0.0
4. French = 1.1
5. German = 0.5
6. Hindi = 1.8
7. Japanese = 1.2
8. Korean = 1.6
9. Portuguese = 0.7
10. Russian = 1.5
11. Spanish = 2.0

F. "Friendliness." How likely are you to have a chance to put your skills to use? Scale of 0 to 1 in increments of 0.1. A purely arbitrary judgement based on impressions of receptivity to tourism.

1. Arabic = 0.3
2. Chinese (Mandarin) = 0.6
3. English = 0.9
4. French = 0.5
5. German = 0.6
6. Hindi = 0.6
7. Japanese = 0.4
8. Korean = 0.8
9. Portuguese = 0.4
10. Russian = 0.5
11. Spanish = 0.6

Here are the calculations:

English:
N + E + S + C + L + B + R + X + F =
5.2 3.8 3.5 12.1 2.0 0.5 0.9 0.0 0.9 28.9

Chinese (Mandarin):
N + E + S + C + L + B + R + X + F =
8.4 3.3 2.2 0.5 0.1 1.0 0.7 1.4 0.6 18.2

Spanish:
N + C + S + E + L + B + R + X + F =
5.3 1.5 2.2 2.7 1.6 0.5 0.6 2.0 0.6 17.0

French:
N + E + S + C + L + B + R + X + F =
4.3 1.4 3.9 3.7 1.4 0.4 0.2 1.1 0.5 16.9

Russian:
N + C + S + E + L + B + R + X + F =
4.6 1.2 3.3 1.9 1.0 0.7 0.7 1.5 0.5 15.4

Arabic:
N + E + S + C + L + B + R + X + F =
4.8 1.2 2.2 2.4 0.3 1.0 0.8 1.4 0.3 14.4

Hindi:
N + E + S + C + L + B + R + X + F =
5.4 1.2 2.0 0.9 0.4 1.0 0.5 1.8 0.6 13.8

Japanese:
N + E + S + C + L + B + R + X + F =
4.5 1.6 2.1 0.4 0.5 0.9 0.8 1.2 0.4 12.4

German:
N + E + S + C + L + B + R + X + F =
4.4 1.5 2.1 1.1 1.6 0.4 0.1 0.5 0.6 12.3

Portuguese:
N + E + S + C + L + B + R + X + F =
4.6 1.3 2.3 0.8 1.4 0.3 0.5 0.7 0.4 12.3

Korean:
N + E + S + C + L + B + R + X + F =
4.3 1.1 2.0 0.3 0.5 0.9 0.7 1.6 0.8 12.2

0. English 28.9 (Widespread, ecomomically dominant)

1. Chinese 18.2 (Extremely populous, multi-emergent)

2. Spanish 17.0 (Locally important, widespread)

3. French 16.9 (Essential worldwide as a secondary language)

4. Russian 15.4 (Irreplaceable gateway language, populous / emergent)

5. Arabic 14.4 (Widespread, often irreplaceable. Local dialects dominate)

6. Hindi 13.8 (Highly populous, multi-emergent)

7. Japanese 12.4 (Economically significant, localized)

8. German 12.3 (Highly replaceable)

9. Portuguese 12.3 (Localized)

10. Korean 12.2 (Localized)

Japaneses through Korean represent powerful, albeit localized languages. All three are replaceable to a limited degree- either by English or Spanish (thanks to the versatility of the local population).

This is not a "perfect" calculus. It makes many arbitrary assumptions. In the case of the last four languages, the differences are practically insignificant. One could easily argue that the local importance of Spanish greatly outweighs the vast numbers faraway Chinese. However, recall that the original assumption is that the language student is traveling throughout the world and is looking for the greatest amount of versatility with the least number of languages.

The Indeterminate Finish Line

2010-08-22T23:09:00.000-07:00

All you have to do to get this is to visit these two sites:

A balloon trip to the edge of space:
http://vimeo.com/12488149

The device they used to track down the instrument package:
http://www.findmespot.com/en/index.php?cid=102

So, here's the idea. Turn on the Spot, launch via helium balloon, allow to fly for half an hour, wait fifteen minutes, and then start providing delayed telemetry to each of two or more chase teams. First team to locate it wins. Or, alternately, first team to get it safely back to their base wins. Other teams can re-capture it by successfully mounting an assault using paintball guns (obviously, this assumes wilderness). Likely, it would play out over several days. Perhaps you'd play it using dual sport motorcycles (road-legal dirt bikes).

A high tech steeple chase.

Could call it a "Tracker Race." (Sounds a little like "Track Erase.") Who wants to play?

The Fast Emotion Memory Hack

2010-07-27T00:23:00.000-07:00

This is a very simple, very easy-to-use memory technique. You can learn to do it in one minute.

Having a strong emotional response to a stimulus tends to reinforce your memory of that stimulus. One could even argue (as some psycho-neurologists have), that the emotional response exists in order to make strong stimuli easier to learn from.

So, as a memory exercise, try this:

Whenever you experience a stimuli you wish to remember, immediately *create* an emotional reaction.

Key words:

Immediately - while you're still in the presence of the stimulus. And do it quickly. Attempt to complete this entire exercise in less than a second.

Create- most experiences are close to being emotionally neutral. However, we can expect some small tendency in some direction. Identify the tendency and then amplify it by saying to yourself, "that makes me feel X." If you can't identify a natural tendency, choose an emotional reaction. I suggest choosing positive reactions the majority of the time. When you choose a reaction, consciously amplify it by constructing a particular reason for feeling that way.

When you wish to remember a particular moment that you've coded with "fast emotion," you have multiple options for entry.

1. Recall the tangible, real-world context and work inward.
2. Recall the constructed reason for feeling the way you felt and work sideways.
3. Replay the emotion itself and work backward.

The nature of this technique lends itself most readily to concise, discrete events. You can use these events, however, to reconstruct a much larger context. By sprinkling moments of fast emotion through an experience, you can make the whole thing more memorable.

A bit of advice: Don't try to be consistent- matching the same emotion to the same stimulus each time it reoccurs. Rather, use the conflict between, for instance, positive and negative reactions to make both stimuli more memorable.

This technique can be used to see your surroundings- especially your personal artifacts- as mnemonic anchors. When you look at something you haven't already coded with fast emotion, the most prominent emotional content of your history with that item should tend to pop to the foreground. Firm anchors can be re-used numerous times.

You Are Your Gym

2010-07-12T09:28:00.000-07:00

First, some a disclaimer:

If you want to look like a body builder, go to the gym. Almost every day. For three years. That's the only way. If you want to be healthier, lose weight, and have more energy, then let's be realistic.

Second, some assertions:

1. Everyone should get more exercise. Half an hour a day, at least. If you are sedentary, you need more because just sitting there is bad for your health (even if you exercise the rest of the time).

2. Many people intend to do more exercise, so they sign up for gym memberships. That usually doesn't work. Having a special place to work out means that working out becomes special. You only do it when you're in that special place. The gym becomes an excuse not to exercise.

3. Having a gym membership actually means you're less likely to exercise because, even when you mean to do it, you might not have time. Going to the gym- just dressing, packing, driving, checking in, going to the locker room, and then going to the work-out area, are steps that, taken together, can double the length of a workout (easily to over an hour)- especially when you take into account that you have to reverse all those steps. Most of those things are not exercise.

4. Let's define a "short" workout as anything less than twenty minutes. A long workout is at least twice that long. Because of their length, a long workouts must be carefully timed so that you're not interfering with the rest of your day. Going to the gym and doing a short workout is a waste of all the effort mentioned in item 3. Long workouts, which are worth the effort, are even more challenging. Therefore, gyms are only efficient as deterrents.

5. Long workouts make you really sweaty. You need a shower afterwards. A shower takes about seven to fifteen minutes. Why am I mentioning this separately? Didn't I already say that?

Why? Because a very short workout doesn't have a chance to make you significantly sweaty. What is a very short workout? One to five minutes.

6. Many people try to do everything in the course of a workout- work every muscle group. Many mix cardio with strength training in a single long visit. This represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the cross training effect. The cross training effect means that you don't have to use every muscle group in every workout to get a "full body workout." You only have to exercise some of the larger ones on a day-to-day basis, and less prominent ones on a week-to-week basis.

7. Many of us don't need the heavy weights and complex machines to exert ourselves enough to get a good work out. Most of us have enough weight in our own bodies to get good exercise by just moving in certain ways.

Conclusions:

A. Be realistic. Don't expect the money you spend on your membership to motivate you to visit the gym.

B. Don't define a workout in such a way as to make a very short workout not count. If you can achieve failure in a single muscle group, even if you're not doing multiple sets, that's better than doing nothing at all.

C. Because of the danger of the habitual sedentary lifestyles- even among those that exercise- breaking up unavoidable periods of sitting with micro workouts is better than going for hours, days, even weeks between actual workouts.

D. Instead of (maybe) doing a single short workout every other day, do five mini-workouts over the course of every day. They can be spread out over the whole day- two in the morning, two in the afternoon, one in the evening- or they can be close together- all five within a couple of hours. Together, they amount to a single short workout. You body gets the health benefit of remaining more active, on average, and- therefore- will maintain a higher level of metabolism overall. What you'll lose is the cumulative intensity of consecutive sets. Therefore, it is important that individual sets reach their highest level of intensity.

Each five-minute workout should involve less than a minute of rest. The objective should be to reach a state of temporary exhaustion by the end- something that can be easily recovered from without disrupting the course of your day.

Attempt to do five exercises focusing on the following five areas:

Arms (Push-ups from a wide stance, pulsing to generate extra force moments; chin-ups, one-arm pushups- or one arm assisted).

Core (flutter kicks, sit-ups, leg lifts, crunches).

Legs (one-legged swats, burpees, sprints)

These are exercises that don't require equipment.

What if you don't have even five minutes to privately exercise? Well, that's a problem.

It's a purely cultural problem. We respect exercise, but we don't allow it to invade our normal lives. We simply do not exercise in public- in the same way that we do not wear bikinis anywhere but the pool and beach. We are as ashamed of working out as we are of being naked. So, we don't do it in front of others.

So let's imagine a cultural shift.

(See my most recent blog entry)

From Balloon to Orbit

2010-06-30T11:10:00.000-07:00

Imagine with me a solution for getting a large payload into orbit.

Traditionally, we use multi-stage rockets that carry all their fuel from sea level to orbit and beyond. For going from ground to orbit, at least 90% of the weight of the rocket must be fuel. The remaining 10% can be structure. A smaller percentage of this can be payload. In the case of the Apollo missions, "payload" can be considered the weight of the astronauts, camera film, and a bag of moon rocks. Everything else- including the reentry vehicle, was technically disposable. To double the final payload would likely require doubling the initial size of the rocket.

A technically more elegant solution is to use a multi-stage, reusable system. The space shuttle, which only visits low earth orbit, has a much higher payload percentage.

SpaceShipOne, built by Burt Rutan to visit the lowest definition of "space" (about 60 miles) uses a combination of air-breathing jet engines and rockets. Different parts of the system land separately.

So, for the fun of it, I'm thinking about another way to do something similar. Only, in this case, we're going higher than the 53k feet that an air-breathing engine can handle.

Let's say that we need to get 250 miles high to achieve a reasonable, stable orbit. Let's say that we'll be getting there via rocket. Let's be generous and say that the mothership model (ie, WhiteKnight) gets you 10 miles high. That's 4% of the total distance. Aside from the advantage of not having to drill through the dense lower atmosphere while simultaneously gaining the necessary momentum to continue onward to escape velocity, this translates to only a marginal total advantage. The higher your target orbit, the less your advantage.

So, I propose that we get even higher. StratoLab V, a high altitude testbed from the early 1960s, still holds the world record for highest manned balloon ascent. Over 113k feet. Unmanned balloons have reached as high as 173,900 feet- more than half-way to the hard edge of space.

Imagine building a balloon that can lift a two-stage rocket powered shuttle glider as payload to about 80k feet. The shuttle would sit in a cradle, dangling beneath the balloon, and take off at an angle away from the balloon straight overhead. The balloon would achieve non-trivial speed using high altitude winds which would be added to the rocket's total lateral velocity. The balloon, which would likely be manned, would then be piloted to the ground by releasing billions of cubic feet of hydrogen.

In the event of an emergency, balloon crew would parachute to safety wearing pressurized suits. The shuttle would glide to safety. Crew would come down separately on parachutes and the shuttle would be flown remotely. If necessary, it would jettison its fuel and make a water landing. Otherwise, it would operate as designed, making a dead-stick landing at an airstrip. Its payload would be recovered and reused.

Alternately, instead of a shuttle, a two-stage, bare bones rocket would be used. Because of the high altitude, it would not even need to be particularly aerodynamic. The payload could be partially or even completely exposed to the open air.

After landing, the balloon would be deflated, disassembled, placed on trucks, and returned to base for refurbishment and reuse. Helium might be used as a buffer gas- for instance, providing a thin layer- held in place by ultra-thin polyethelene- to diminish the exposure of hydrogen to static charges on the balloon's surface. Because the helium would represent a small amount of the total gas volume, but would be enough to keep the gas envelope up (rather than raking against the ground during landing), this helium could be carried all the way back to earth and then be recovered, purified, and reused.

How big would this balloon be?

Let's imagine that we want to achieve 50k lbs of delivery to low earth orbit- similar to the Space Shuttle.

Let's estimate that the total advantage, over the traditional space shuttle, is about 40%. two-thirds of the advantage comes from being able to bypass the lower atmosphere's drag. The remaining one-third comes from a combination reduced distance, and the cumulative consequence of carrying additional fuel over said distance. A further 10% advantage comes from the reduction in total complexity and, therefore, weight due to being able to bypass the stresses of the lower atmosphere, as well as the 40% drop in total weight and the attendant complexity. Another 5% comes from improvements in rocket technology. That still leaves us with about 1,900,000 lbs (of which less than 3% is payload).

What kind of balloon can carry nearly two million pounds of payload? There's only one I know of.

The 100-Mile Diameter Telescope

2010-06-18T23:02:00.000-07:00

A telescope's effectiveness arises from two factors. 1. It's ability to collect light (a function of the objective size of the light-gathering lens or reflector). 2. It's ability to focus in on far away detail (the telescope's "power").

If your objective lens is proportionately too small for your telescope's power, you get a dim, noisy image. If the light-gathering capacity exceeds the telescope's power, then you're wasting available information.

The best possible telescope of arbitrary size would be one that gathers all the available light coming from a faraway object and resolves it into an image that is as accurately detailed as that quantity of light allows.

This means that a telescope's power, or "zoom" is always a function of its ability to gather light. Bigger lens = better zoom.

Let's compare two telescopes, the Hubble Space Telescope and the proposed James Webb Space Telescope. The Hubble has a light-collecting area of 4.5m^2 (imagine a square about 7 ft on a side). Webb "will" be 25m^2, (imagine a square about 16.5 ft on a side). That means that the Webb would have about 5.5 times more "zoom" than the Hubble. However, because Webb embodies many technological improvements, it's total performance boost is somewhere between 100x and 400x (in the IR range) of that of Hubble.

I want you to imagine what would happen if we took this to an extreme.

Let's imagine the space telescope that might be built fifty years from now using micro-scale assembly of nano-engineered metamaterials, built in the weightlessness of space, far from the Sun.

Some factors to consider when we calculate the factor of improvement.

First of all, metamaterials may enable us to create telescopes that don't require the light to be reflected to a single small collector (think camera or eyepiece). Instead, we may be able to multiply optical efficiency by several factors by foregoing the inherent lossiness of reflection. Layers of specifically-tuned metamaterials may allow us to detect the direction from which a photon is arriving, filtering or disallowing photons from undesired directions. Essentially, the light-gathering surfaces of the future could be thought of as trillions of nano-scale refractor telescopes that use quantum effects and electric fields in place of physical lenses. Essentially, we're talking about an advanced form of the compound eye.

Instead of interacting with the light twice- once upon reflection, once upon detection- we may be able to interact with it just once, upping efficiency in the process.

Instead of curving the entire surface of the collector, small sections of it could be aimed independently. This would allow us to use a flat, essentially two dimensional support structure instead of a far-more-complex 3D structure. Remember, we're building in space- not just because there's no atmosphere to gobble precious photons, but also because zero gravity means you can build big without the object crushing itself. If we build in a remote enough place- more on that later- the object's own mass, and the self-gravity generated thereby, is of more significance than outside forces. Building in a plane confines those forces to the same plane.

Imagine a great flat sheet of high-strength composite honeycomb. The structure might be built in space by robot "bees" that employ some of the same tricks real bees use to build nearly-perfect hexagonal cells. In each of the cells is a gimbaled ring and, inside the ring, a small flat panel of optically-sensitive metamaterial. We'll call these panel sections "scales." Each scale can be aimed separately.

This gives us several advantages which fall under three categories.

1. Perfect focus. Using image feedback from, for instance, known imagery (pointing the telescope at earth for instance), we can adjust individual scales to create the equivalent of a mathematically perfect surface. Only problem is that light traveling to the edges of the gathering plane travels slightly farther, relative to a hypothetical spherical section, than light hitting the center. This means that frequency-scale science would require large amounts of computing power to simulate coherent data. One might expect computing power to be very cheap in the year 2060, but it's good to remember that we're talking about single "images" equivalent to billions of megapixels. Best approach may be to build a computer into each scale and do all the heavy math locally.

2. Selectable focal distance. Our telescope would have one setting for focusing to its maximum detail level at infinity, where the stars and galaxies are, but it could also focus directly on objects within the solar system, or be reconfigured as either an over- or under-powered telescope.

3. Multiple focus. Different areas of the telescope could focus on different objects within the telescope's optimal field of view. In other words, our telescope could be repurposed, in a matter of seconds, from the role of one extremely-large telescope into thousands of merely-large telescopes. This would allow the telescope to be shared in by a large numbers of scientists studying a large number of different objects. Let's say that some interesting signals are coming from a distant star. According to some futuristic mathematical analysis, a supernova is suspected to take place within the next several years. So, part of the telescope is focused on that particular place at all times. One day, things start to evolve. Within three seconds, 95% of the telescope is focused on the supernova. The remaining 5% continues observations that cannot be cut-off without causing intolerable loss of data.

And now for the math you've all been waiting for. How much more powerful than Hubble would our 100-mile diameter telescope be?

First, let's base our calculations on a average optical efficiency of about 50 times that of Hubble. This is based on the suggestion that Webb is about 15 - 70 times more sensitive than Hubble (particularly in the IR range, where dim / small stars are much more visible). It's possible that the numbers may be significantly higher- well over 100x Hubble may be possible. However, metamaterials are almost entirely theoretical at this point in history, so let's not get carried away.

A 100-mile circular diameter comes to about 406,834,381 m^2 of light collecting area. Divide that by 4.5 m^2 and you get a factor of 90,000,000. Multiply that by 50, and you get 4.5 billion.

What could you do with a telescope 4.5 billion times more powerful than Hubble? Crazy things. There are currently 461 known extrasolar planets. With a 100-mile telescope, you could eventually multiply that to over ten billion, some of which might be very interesting. Of known, nearby extrasolars (less than 50 light years) you could map their continents and count their moons. You could measure the gases in their atmospheres to within 1 part in a million. You could study the Oort Cloud in precise detail. You could even study the Oort Clouds of nearby stars. You could study other galaxies with the same level of detail we currently study the Milky Way. Deep field galaxies- the most distant galaxies we've ever seen- could be studied at the same level we currently study nearby galaxies. You'd study quasars- objects the size of solar systems- from across the universe. You could take a picture of Voyager as it leaves the solar system.

For objects within our solar system, it would be like having a microscope. We could study cloud formation on Neptune. We could track microfissures on Europa from billions of miles away. You could map every asteroid with 1:1 detail without sending a single probe.

And you would discover things that no one could possibly predict. For fans of SETI, this could be your key to find the missing aliens, or prove conclusively that they're really missing. Instead of confining your search for lower order life to our own solar system, you could expand your search for life-specific atmospheric oxygen to thousands of planets. And you could search for the apparently non-existent rock-rock-gas-gas-ice-ice solar systems (like ours) with Goldilocks planets (not too hot, not too cold, just right).

And that brings us to the next big question.

Q. Why 100 miles?

A. Because that's the title of this blog entry.

Q. Is there any reason we couldn't use the same modular construction technique to build a 1000-mile telescope?

A. No.

In fact, as you build a 100-mile telescope with individually-aimable scales, you'd start with a 0.01 mile telescope and then build outward. After a while, you'd have a 1-mile telescope, and then a 10-mile telescope. There's no reason you couldn't use these as you continue construction. And there's no reason you couldn't continue construction beyond 100 miles.

At some point, you will reach the physical limits of your construction technique. At that point, you'll have to stop building.

Using the kinds of macroscale construction regimes I discussed in a previous post, Replacement Earths for $1, there's no reason you couldn't continue construction all the way up to the physical limit. So, let's go ahead and do so.

However, there is a way to go beyond the physical limit- a way that solves another problem at the same time.

Here's the problem: the bigger you build, the less feasible it is to change your optimum viewing angle- to aim the whole telescope in a new direction.

Instead of explaining the solution, I'm going to leave this up to the reader to figure out.

Q. How do you build an extremely large (hundreds or even thousands of miles in diameter), single-surface telescope that never needs to be aimed as a whole?

A. See comments below.

The Multi-Engine Electric Hang Glider

2010-06-11T07:21:00.000-07:00

Hang gliders only ascend when the surrounding air is ascending. Wind deflected by hills. Pockets of warm air rising. Hang gliders go up for the same reason kites fly. And kites don't need complex airfoils. They're just sails.

Powered aircraft ascend by using their engines to move fast enough to provide their wings with wind. Wind flowing over wings produces lift.

So why do gliders have airfoils- wings with top surfaces longer than than their bottom surfaces- if they're not what makes them rise? Because gliders need to be able to remain in the air as long as possible. To loiter and maneuver to locate the rising air. Just as powered aircraft use airfoils to convert forward motion into altitude, gliders use theirs to convert altitude into forward motion.

What if you put an engine on a hang glider? It's been done. Many ultralights use hang glider wings. Such aircraft land on wheels. Some people employ a simpler approach, attaching a small 15hp engine directly to their flying harness. These are launched and landed on foot.

Powered hang glider require special skill on take-off and landing. And they're not as appropriate for mountain launches. When flying under full power, the pilot is pushed forward through the control bar. This results in a control attitude that is equivalent to a power dive. It's not a very strong position to be in. The pilot is also managing an extra source of aerodynamic directional control because she is directly attached to the source of thrust. This added dimension of control partially obscures the "natural" control motions normally required to fly a hang glider. Also, the propeller provides a substantial amount of drag when the engine is off. Usually this is addressed by building in features that allow the prop to feather or fold back.

Powered hang gliders are chimeras. They are neither gliders nor aircraft, but represent a compromise between two incompatible ideals. On one hand is pure soaring flight to which the added noise, cost, weight, and drag of engines is anathema. Hang gliders are designed to be gliders. They're designed to be controlled via weight shift.

On the other hand is powered, three-dimensional, acrobatic flight. Or, if you prefer: high-speed / long-distance passenger service. Aircraft design varies accordingly. Powered aircraft rarely look anything like hang gliders.

If you're a pilot that's interested in soaring, organic control, and the elegance of physically carrying your wing until it carries you, then you're attracted to hang gliding. Otherwise, you'll probably head elsewhere.

However, I'm thinking that there probably isn't a HG pilot that wouldn't appreciate an engine occasionally. Sometimes you want to take off from flat ground and fly flatland thermal- without going to the multiplied trouble of being towed by another aircraft. Sometimes you'd want to boost yourself back into ridge lift instead of drifting down to a faraway valley at the loss of hours of flying. And then there are times when circumstances have left you no option but to crashland in unsuitable terrain- forests, rocks, cacti. In addition to an emergency chute, a bit of thrust would make for an excellent safety feature.

But if you look at the options already available, having an engine for these special occasions means managing a significant amount of awkwardness and drag on a constant basis. So,

What I'm proposing is that the hang glider be equipped with an odd number of small electric ducted fans attached directly to the glider's wing- not to the harness. The fans already exist. They're made for radio controlled scaled-down jet aircraft. And batteries have never been more advanced.

Ducted fans are an efficient way to produce low-speed thrust- in the regime of 0-100mph. Ducts drastically reduce blade tip losses- vortexes of turbulence that don't contribute to thrust. Ducts add complexity and weight, however, which may outweigh the efficiency gains at higher speeds. Also, high speeds entail greater amounts of induced drag caused by the ducts themselves. But DFs, with their shorter diameters, can also operate at higher RPMs than similarly powered open props. Electric motors are a perfect choice for taking advantage of this.

When not under power, the drag a propeller's generates is proportional to the area of the circle of the propeller's sweep. That doesn't mean that the induced drag is exactly equivalent to what would be caused by a flat solid disk of the same diameter. It's significantly less than that. It only means that the wider the propeller, the more drag it creates when not under power. A helicopter, for instance, with its massive prop-diameter, produces enough drag to actually land safely even if the engine quits (see autorotation). Propeller = parachute.

Ducted fans allow for comparatively tiny cross sections.

By using several of them, let's say five, you take advantage of a miniature expression of the multi-engine advantage. Why do large aircraft- WWII bombers, for instance- employ multiple engines? It's not because a single engines couldn't be built that could provide enough power. Bigger engines almost always provides a better power-to-weight ratio (this doesn't apply as much to electric motors). Instead, it's because propellers would have to get very large and be driven very fast- and the blade tips would be exceeding the speed of sound which would generate all kinds of horrible turbulence. Multiple engines allows for smaller prop diameters to generate the same amount of thrust.

That's one side of the argument in favor of multiple engines. The other side is that smaller prop diameters entail far less drag. Assuming you have efficient small engines, and assuming those engines aren't always running, multiple small engines entail far less drag.

Let's do some math, using two small DFs as examples.

First, tuck this away: a Mosquito powered hang glider uses a prop with a 1.35m diameter. That translates to a prop-circle area of 1.42 m^2. The engine / prop combination the Mosquito uses produces about 130 lbs of thrust. That's about 96 lbs / m^2. Sorry about the mixed units. I'm an American.

Let's take a look at some electric DFs: this produces 18+ lbs of thrust with a 120mm diameter or 0.0113m^2. That's about 1592lbs / m^2.

Meanwhile, this one produces 28+ lbs of thrust with a 156mm diameter (0.0191m^2). That equals 1464 lbs / m^2.

The drag induced by a 30% greater diameter cancels out the proportional advantage of 55% greater thrust. Let me put it this way.

The least common multiple of 18 and 28 is 252.

14 x 18 = 252 lbs
9 x 28 = 252 lbs

To get 252 lbs of thrust, you could use 14 of the 18lb ducted fans or
9 of the 28lb ducted fans.

14 x 0.0113m^2 = 0.1582m^2
9 x 0.0191m^2 = 0.1719m^2

If you needed to produce 252lbs of thrust, and if all you cared about was the amount of drag the ducted fan would produce when not in use, 14 slightly smaller DF's' would entail around 8% less drag than 9 of the larger, more powerful ones.

That's how ducted fans roll. They make smaller diameters more stream-lined for similar amounts of power.

Let's assume that each DF is designed to produce some amount of static thrust at some particular operating speed. Either slower or faster is less efficient. Let's call this peak efficiency, or PE.

Let's also assume that each DF can produce significantly more power- albeit at a lower efficiency / longevity. Let's call this peak power, or PP.

Let's also assume that you can also operate your DFs to produce just enough thrust to overcome the drag they produce just sitting there. We'll call this peak longevity (I'd say "endurance," but I already used the letter "E"), or PL.

Why use an odd number of DFs?

If you had five DFs in a row (and I'm not saying it would have to be five. Likely you'd end up wanting between 7 and 11)- two on each wing and one in the center- you could turn them off in the follow progression:

5- all on
4- all but the center one on
3- one on each wing plus the center
2- one on each wing
1- just the center

Let's run some scenarios.

A. Let's say you find yourself in a momentary emergency situation. You need to produce maximum lift in the least amount of time to avoid hitting an imminent obstacle. You turn all five DFs to PP and switch to PE as soon as you're out of the woods.

B. You've dipped into a mountain valley and need to fight your way back into the ridge lift. You don't dare fly too close to the sheer mountain walls, where turbulence is unpredictable. You have open airspace to operate in, and- if necessary- an emergency place to land down at the valley floor. So you switch all five fans to PE and work your way back up until you've above the ridgeline again.

C. You're flying cross country and you haven't even needed your DFs at all. Your batteries are full. So you operate all five fans at PL to give yourself the best possible flight characteristics.

D. You're at 8000ft AGL, flying cross country, and a wide long lake is in your path. You believe that you have enough altitude to glide across with up-to a mile of glide to spare. However, you'd be at such a low altitude on the other side that you'd have precious little chance to find another thermal and make your way back up to cloudbase. Your flight would probably be over for the day. You ask yourself: am I a soaring purist, or am I a pilot? You decide you'd rather fly that break a record, so you set two of the five fans to operate at PE, providing yourself just enough thrust to maintain your present altitude. Halfway across the lake, you encounter sinking air. Instead of wasting time maneuvering in an attempt to find more favorable air you turn on another fan- also operating at PE. After five minutes, you cut to two. Once your shadow hits the shoreline you turn all but one of them off. You're still at 6500 ft when you encounter your first hint of a thermal. Ten minutes later and your high-altitude swim is all but forgotten.

E. You've been flying cross country for several hours and you could really use a break. It's the middle of the day. You spy a truckstop with huge, mostly vacant parking lots so you meander down, flaring out in the grass at the edge of the lot. You tie your glider down, jog to the bathroom, catch some lunch, and then, with crowd of bemused onlookers wondering what you have in mind, you strap back into your harness, face into the wind, run, turn on all five DFs at PP, lift off, and make a lazy wide circle over the hot parking lot. After you've gained fifty feet of altitude, you switch to PE. Another fifty, and you're getting some positive help from the inevitable black-top thermal. You're back at altitude and on your way.

D. You're contemplating a mountain launch, but the ideal launch direction the site provides is facing 45 degrees away from the direction of wind. What's worse, the wind is averaging 5 mph less than what'd you'd like. So you angle yourself straight into the wind. Two volunteers hold your wings as you ready yourself. You turn on all five fans at PE and start your run. Your HG tugs against your ground handlers. You shout, "clear," and instead of five steps, you're off in three. Instead of dipping down fifty feet before leveling off, you lose nothing. You're alerady climbing. Thirty seconds later, you cut out all five DFs and emerge into a high pocket of ridge lift. For the rest of your flight, your DFs are running at PL.

E. You've just driven 10 hours to fly at a particular mountain in the foothills of Idaho. It's early afternoon and when you arrive, the windsocks are laying limp. You wait an hour, and other than an occasional 8mph gust, it's a still day. You're not looking for an epic journey, you just want to get off the ground. So you power up, setting all five DFs at PE, and up you go. You let all five DFs run at PE until the battery is about dead, stealing altitude from an uncooperative sky. Then you switch to PL and you quietly glide back to earth. What would have been a five minute flight has been stretched into almost an hour.

F. The unimaginable has transpired. One of your under wing guy lines has broken its shackle in a violent bout of vertical turbulence and now your wing is slightly skewed and threatening to deteriorate further. You were flying over steep, tree-covered terrain when it happened. A quarter mile away is an inviting mountain meadow. You have a choice- throw your parachute immediately and land in the trees- or gently nudge your wounded wing into more inviting terrain before hitting the silk. Only problem is, the winds just aren't cooperating with your plans. So your first reflex is to give yourself some emergency power. You point your nose to safe terrain. Simultaneously, one hand has gone to your chute, pulling it from its pocket on your chest. You mentally rehearse your throw, ready to move the moment things get any worse. A subjective hour later, you're over the meadow. You have a few hundred more feet of altitude than you would have had you not used the DFs. Parachute in hand, you take a few extra moments to survey the terrain. Time slows. Satisfied, you make your throw. Your forward progress is abruptly halted and you begin to descend at an angle, turning slowly as you go. You see that you're headed for one of the few small pines that occupy the otherwise open meadow so you goose the throttle on your DFs, producing moments of PP whenever you're facing away from the tree. You radio back that you're okay, fold up, and hike out. You realize that if you'd deployed your chute immediately, you very well might have spent the remainder of the day, scratched and bleeding, a hundred feet up in a tree.

G. You've decided to fly across the United States. You're going from west to east, following the prevailing winds. You keep within sight of roads and highways as you go. Each day, you fly as far as the weather and wind will permit, using your DFs to boost your altitude whenever expedience requires. On cooperative days, the sky gives up hundreds hundreds of miles. Some days you fly from morning to afternoon. Others, you stop several times at towns, or rural gas stations, and beg electricity in exchange for telling your story. You're often invited to supper. Most of the time, people offer you a place to sleep. After you cross the Mississippi, you encounter a patch of rainy weather that lasts for most of a week. You fold up and take advantage of a friendly stranger's offer to store your glider in his garage. When the weather clears, you head east again. After two months, you swing out over the Atlantic and then come to rest on a beach in North Carolina. You're greeted by a crowd of well-wishers who've been following your progress online.

I could write more about the technical details. The types of batteries you'd use (at least 40lbs of compact rechargeable lithium ion batteries designed for small electric cars). I could talk about how, with five DFs, you'd have two on each wing and one on the centerline and that by varying the thrust bilaterally, one could steer the wing. I could talk about how you could use either a system of switches to turn DFs on and off and a single throttle, similar to a motorcycle's throttle control, that varys the power of everything that's turned on. The pilot could have a second throttle-like control, or lateral sliding control, that moves power from side to side to assist in steering. Finally, the pilot could have presets that would keep the DFs running at PP, PE, or PL in whatever configuration she desires.

The DFs could be mounted in a number of different ways. I expect the most practical arrangement would be to mount them to the crossbar under the wing. The center DF could be mounted to the keel. It's important that the DFs be mounted in a way that doesn't cause them to crushed or filled with grass during a noseplant.

I used an example above with 252 lbs of thrust. That's well more than necessary. Somewhere around 170lbs of PP thrust should be sufficient. More than that, and the pilot would be tempted to stray into acrobatic flight.

Total 5 x PE flight time might be around 30 minutes. Dividing the number of DFs multiplies the endurance.

In summary, what makes this idea potentially superior to powered hang gliders that already exist is that it hews closer to the ideal of pure soaring flight. It allows the hang glider to handle like a hang glider again. Instead of turning a hang glider into a small ultralight, it provides occasional assistance, extra flexibility, and emergency power. It allows for take-off from flat ground /and/ hill launches without reconfiguration. It enhances cross-country endurance by providing a bridge between hotspots.

And, if you were to install lightweight photovoltaic cells- like the thin copper indium gallium diselenide films promised by Nanosolar, you might have yourself a solar soarer capable of indefinitely extending its daytime endurance or, in a pinch, of getting off the ground again after a wilderness landing.

Q. Isn't having a powered option kinda like cheating?

A. Yes... but, you should ask yourself whether the added versatility, longevity, would make you a better pilot, or worse. If the answer is "worse," then this concept isn't for you. On the other hand, if you think of this as a safety device, then no, it isn't cheating.

Q. How much will they cost?

A. About $12k fully assembled and tested.

Q. What if I'm building one myself?

A. Between $7k and $10k.

Q. What would you need to make this happen?

A. An investor- initial prototyping should be achievable for less than $50k / 6 mos. A hang glider engineer- someone with a lot of experience repairing, rebuilding, and modifying hang gliders. An "RC Engineer"- someone with experience working with the propulsion equipment. And a test pilot- an advanced hang glider pilot with powered experience. A spokesman (probably one of the aforementioned persons)- someone that can navigate the news media to generate free advertising.

Q. What will this do to the sport of hang gliding?

A. This has the potential for attracting new interest to the sport of hang gliding, as well as reviving the interest of some percentage of existing pilots. People who live in flat areas, or are repelled by their impression of the inherent risk and uncertainty of unpowered flight, may use see this as an excuse for giving the sport a second chance. DFs will also add to the cool-tech factor, expanding the potential customer base accordingly.

Barefoot With Shoes On

2010-06-09T17:03:00.000-07:00

This blog is about an experiment in toughening the soles of my feet.

For the last three weeks I've gone hiking barefoot. The idea came to me at the end of a trail. Shoes were already off to wade in a cryogenic stream. The trail was about a mile and a half long, covered with sharp cubic quartzite gravel. It made for some slow going. Speed didn't come natural.

Which was good, because it made an otherwise short hike last longer. Instead of waiting in the parking lot, I was waited-for- at least for a couple minutes.

The next week was similar. About two miles total over a mix of gravel, scree, talus, and- toward the end- across the forest floor. My feet were sore after that one too. I was the slowest poke around. Again, a short hike made more substantial by barefooting it.

This last weekend, I hiked about 3.6 miles. This trail was through a pine forest, occasional sand, gravel, snakes (x2), and stone outcroppings. This week I didn't just hike, I jogged, I ran. I kept ahead of other shoe-wearers. I was no kind of slowpoke.

And my feet were about as sore as they'd been the previous two weeks. Not too bad.

Today I bought a single 3-tab shingle asphalt composite shingles from Home Depot. It traced my foot, cut off half my big toe (on the cut-out, not the toe itself) and made myself a pair of gravel-covered insoles to use without socks.

The shingles probably won't last a day before I wear all the gravel granules off. The combination of heat and friction will, doubtless, make short work of them.

What I need is a pair of durable, rough-gravel insoles that won't degrade from the heat typical to the human foot. If I can toughen my feet up on odd-numbered days, and maintain that toughness even when I'm not hiking barefoot, then going barefoot when I want to would be far more appealing. Instead of being an exercise in pain management, I'd be able to focus on the unique sensory experience of being in touch with the ground.

Is it strange to want to go barefoot? No, not really. Barefoot is healthy. It allows your feet and gait to take their natural shape. Going barefoot causes you to adapt to your surroundings, distribute your weight, tread lightly. Instead of pounding on your heels and jarring your knees, barefooting makes you glide, naturally. Vibram, of shoe tread fame, makes shoes that mimic the look and feel of going barefoot, called FiveFingers. They literally have five little toes. I admire the concept. For people who want to wear shoes, who don't want to experience the pain or risk of going shoeless, or who want to go out in hot or cold weather (shoeless even on white concrete in the summer is torture).

So, that's the idea. Durable foot-toughening insoles for graduating to shoelessness.

Everyone is an a Continuum Relative to Suicide.

2010-05-07T19:05:00.000-07:00

Visualize this. On the far right is the person so determined to do himself in that he'd bite his own wrists open. That's the extreme. That's the person that can't be talked down.

On the far left is someone who doesn't want to die. Period. You could put them in a concentration camp and they'd keep fighting to stay alive. This is the person who, after a 100 years of misery still says, "I'm not ready to die. I want to keep going."

This continuum is defined by extremes. A genuine extreme is something beyond which there could be nothing more extreme. As such, these endpost personalities aren't likely to be represented in reality.

And that means that everyone is somewhere on the continuum of relative tenacity for life.

Let's place some types.

The soldier, who is willing kill to stay alive, but also to actively risk death on behalf of his country, is right around the middle. The parent who lives for her kids, but- if it was her or them, wouldn't hesitate to sacrifice her life. She's right in the middle. Even the Kent State sniper, despite his glioblastoma, was somewhere in the middle. He knew that by killing others, he was killing himself. And yet, he acted as if he was defending himself from death. There's no question that his behavior was extreme, but it doesn't represent an extreme on this continuum.

Both extremes indicate pathology. On the "life at all cost" end, we may have a sociopath who values his own existence more than anything, or anyone, else. Most of the time, he'll keep his head down and no one gets hurt. But when pushed, he's capable of murderous preemptive self defense. At the life extreme, nothing can be more important than personal survival.

On the opposite side- on the "death by any means necessary" side- we can only define such compulsion as an extraordinary insanity. Not to oversimplify, but severely suicidal depression isn't characterized by a preoccupation with death itself, but with the experience of intense psychic pain. Psychic pain that is in no way different from physical torture, only the cause is invisible. If the pain is improvable, then- the complexity of human psychology notwithstanding- the subject should be expected to slide left. Left towards life.

As a society, we view suicide as a binary problem. Either you are or you aren't. It's as if there were two extremes and *nothing* in between. This is an artifact of our culture, and of our shame, and not of the underlying reality. I'm not proposing that serious psychologists see things in such black and white terms, but they belong to a system of thought, a cultural bias, that pushes them toward a binary definition of "suicidal tendencies."

At this point, you either agree or disagree. Either way, I'm continuing on with the next stage of my case.

First, we need to acknowledge that we are all somewhere on a continuum. It is not "unthinkable" that either we or anyone we know could be an a one-way trip to the right. Most people who succeed at suicide would have preferred to succeed at something else. They would have preferred to have been surrounded by different circumstances. Suicide becomes a final solution only when the problem is fully defined as unsolvable. And that point of apparent insolvency occurs at different places on the continuum for different people. What I'm saying here is that the continuum doesn't have the same extremes for everybody. Most people will never experience an extreme. In some cases, or in most cases to some extreme, attempted suicide (or self-defense murder, for that matter) is a reaction to the experience of an extreme.

One piece of evidence for this assertion is that exposure to suicide, even in fictional depictions- increases the incidence of suicide among people that otherwise might not have killed themselves.

I assert, without delay, that we need to expose people to stories of survival in better-than-equal measure. Stories of overcoming extremes. Heroes that overcome- on both sides of the continuum.

Another facet of my general assertion is based on risky behavior. We don't call motorcycle accidents where the deceased was going 140 mph without a helmet a "partial suicide" but it's no great stretch to imagine that, if this person was a bit more tenacious about staying alive, they might not have bought a motorcycle in the first place.

I'm not saying that people who engage in risky behavior are "suicidal." That, again, is the binary assumption speaking. I'm saying that, just like soldiers, parents, and brain-tumor victims, they are on the continuum. We are on the continuum. It is not for me, or anyone, to say that riding a motorcycle is a right-leaning indicator. It may represent a left-leaning love of life (perhaps obfuscated- at least in the eyes of non-riders- by a motorcycle-specific definition of what it is to "be alive" in the first place).

So, if the point of insolvency comes at different points for different people, then we're not talking about an objective continuum anymore. We're talking about a personal, invisible, inscrutable continuum that is only superficially connected to humanity as a whole. By that I'm saying that, if someone kills themselves, it is not different that if they were all the way to the right. Same results.

One of the problems with suicide is that it's seen as a rare problem. But suicide is one of the top-ten killers in developed nations. It probably would be a top-ten killer in undeveloped nations as well if it weren't for AIDS, TB, malaria, measles, and other childhood killers. Comparatively speaking, if suicide were a disease, thousands of people would be working on developing a vaccine. If only it were a disease, right?

I believe it is a disease. It's a cultural virus. The very idea of suicide is a fatal meme.

Because we define "suicidal" as a binary condition, we consign the desperate among us to ask the question, "Am I now, like those before me, ready to kill myself?" In a binary world, the answer is either "no" or "yes." And if the answer turns up "yes" then one would hope they'd ask again before acting on this conclusion.

We need a different approach to the desperate question. We need to ask a qualitative question. "How bad is it?" "How much worse do I feel compared to yesterday?" "How much harder is it to continue this life?" Essentially, the question should be, "How far am I to the right?" Because if we openly treat suicide as a continuum, and define healthy, average, statistically normal people as representing the center- if we admit that any of us can be moved to the right- then we're not abandoning the desperate to think of themselves as separate, different, untenable in society's eyes.

If someone is truly at the end of their rope; if all they want is death- and there are miserable circumstances that make death into a rational option- and only the individual knows their own pain- then that's one thing. I don't think suicide is 100% avoidable. But if someone is contemplating oblivion because of changeable circumstances, the last thing they need is to feel that "being suicidal" has been added to their disenfranchisement.

For my own part, I own life insurance. I rock climb. I drive a car. I expect to die someday. What scares me about death is that, no matter when it happens, there's no way on earth that I'll have finished doing the things I wanted to do. And the longer I live, the more I see, the more I want to participate. It bothers me that, to make a soldier- someone willing to kill and be killed- you need a young person who hasn't learned to think like this. Someone who hasn't had time to learn to lean hard to the left. Someone blank and malleable. It bothers me because I know that if war were the exclusive domain of middle-aged men, it would be more rare, and for more intractable reasons.

We're all on the continuum, but some of us are where we've been put by others.

So, aside from admitting that the desire for life and death is not binary, we need to do more for the cause of life. Part of the cure is to have the power to control your risks. Not just your actuarial risk, but your existential risks.

People need purpose. Not "peoples need purposes." They need something they can control, something they can master. They need room to grow. They need to be able to experience the benefits of their efforts. We may now live in a society where a well-designed video game gives a person a greater feeling of empowerment than the eight hours they spend at school or at work. We may be doing intolerable violence to our psychic selves by never attempting the impossible.

Here's a quote from the blog that got me thinking about this:

"A 2005 article in Psychiatric News says some jumpers aren't necessarily depressed or chronic suicide attempters—sometimes people are simply overwhelmed by a sudden desire to leap—and that thwarted jumpers rarely go on to kill themselves in other ways. One researcher followed the lives of 515 people who were pulled from the Golden Gate Bridge: After an average of 26 years each, 94 percent were either still living or had died of natural causes. Another study, of the Duke Ellington Bridge in Washington, D.C., showed that its suicide fence caused no increase in suicides at the Taft Bridge, which has no fence and is only one block away."

What do you think?

Punishing Obnoxious Advertisers With Attention

2010-05-07T09:37:00.001-07:00

I've never manage to write a short blog yet. Maybe this will be the one.

Let's say you're visiting a website and some advertisement insults you in some way. Maybe it uses weasely language, employs scarevertising, guiltvertising, or tries to sell you something you find morally objectionable.

What do you do?

In most realms, the best answer would be to simply ignore the advertising, right?

Let's think about that. For most forms of advertising, the advertiser has already paid for the privilege of assaulting your senses. Online advertising is different. Advertisers pay a relatively small amount for "views" and a relatively large amount for "click throughs." So, if you want to punish an advertiser for insulting you, click their ad, visit their site, and then leave without buying anything. Make them pay for their ineffective advertising.

Obnoxious advertisers will benefit by seeing that click-throughs aren't turning into sales. Hopefully they'll realize what's going on and change their ways.

(BTW, PLEASE DON'T DO THIS ON MY BLOG)

Now That We're Here, Where Can We Go?

2010-02-25T19:43:00.001-08:00

I was watching a James Cameron interview on the Science Channel's website and they asked him what he thought the next big thing was. And he mentioned two things: faster frame rates and making things brighter. Unfortunately, the full-length interview is no longer available.

Cameron talks about how they started doing 3D differently. Instead of doing it the old fashioned IMAX way, with a pair of cameras side-by-side, he talks about how they started experimenting with "active convergence"- which means having two cameras and changing the angle between them- parallel for objects out at infinity, angled together to converge on something close. This is the basis of stereoscopic vision. Human eyes do the same thing. When you look at something really close to your face, you go cross-eyed. And that's a big part of what tells you that it's really close. The double image produced in the non-focused background, on the other hand, is an indirect cue. The main reason you don't see double-image artifacts is that film making isn't that close. You could, however, create quite a miniature effect by using it (in the next 3D Bugs movie, such techniques might be used).

Cameron et al quickly discover that active convergence has limitations. Namely, the fact that movie cameras are enormous compared to human eyes. It takes a large lens to match the resolution of our natural optics. And you can't put two large lenses too close together without having them crash into one another. So they started doint things differently: "We completely revolutionized... when we went from a parallel system to a beam splitter system." And that's the big gimmick with Avatar: that 3D isn't a gimmick any more. Unlike past 3D movies, where the 3D was omnipresent (think of Beowulf for instance), Avatar's 3D was designed to go unnoticed. In fact, Avatar represents the first time 3D wasn't being used to create scenes with impossibly deep 3D that don't represent how the eye and brain actually work. Think of the spear scene in Beowulf. The tip of the spear is pointed at the viewer's eye. Part of what tells you that it's so close is that it's huge compared to the background. But if you were actually to have a spear in your face, and you were to focus directly on it (as it appears in the shot), you'd also see a blurry double image of the background. But the makers of Beowulf keep the background clean and singular. After all, the mind can derive 3D from the primary cue without resorting to distracting secondary cues. In making Avatar, Cameron uses active convergence, enabled by beam splitters, to operate in the middle distance. No cross-eyed shots. Avatar is a movie of dense foreground shots- numerous 3D plants- and big sky long shots. There are several shots that are extreme closeups- Jake's face when he emerges from hypersleep, or while he's opening his own eyes after finishing a link session. But these shots have no background cues, so we never experience the lack of secondary cues.

Here's where I get crazy. Cameron says we're finally reaching a plateau.

Asked whether we'll ever be able to take off the glasses, Cameron says no. He says, "For a big theatrical exposition in a movie theater, you're always going to wear glasses." (And then Jon Landau, Avatar's producer, fantasizes about using the glasses to make money: "It's not that I have to wear the glasses, but that I get to wear the glasses" and goes on to spout a fantasy about how your glasses could also be your ticket, paid for at home.)

First of all, Cameron is wrong about the plateau. But just as Cameron represents the (half)generation of filmmakers that were inspired to surpass George Lucas at his own game, there is plenty of room for new innovation. I'd like to say something about George Lucas. People may not have been impressed with his new Star Wars trilogy, but he, and ILM, did a massive amount of innovation a whole ten years before Cameron pulled the trigger on Avatar. Just as Cameron and (many) others spent fifteen years (post Return of the Jedi) moving the tech forward for Lucas.

Cameron mentioned two innovations: faster frame rates and brighter pictures. Both would be significant. By "brighter" he may mean "higher contrast." Film projection allows contrast ratios of thousands to one. Some TV displays allow over a million to one. That's the difference between looking at a photograph of a sunset and actually feeling like you're looking at the setting sun. One of the biggest obstacles to the suspension of disbelief is that movies are relatively dark. That's one of the reasons that the cinema style favors relatively dark scenes, at night, under clouds. Using artful but inherently unnatural lighting (oh, how bright the moon is, and how conveniently located). Higher contrast would both add a level of realism never before imagined and freedom from the constraints of traditional lighting.

Higher frame rates would provide some interesting benefits. The most important thing it would do would be to allow fast POV action shots to be believably achieved. That's because, at 24 fps, you almost can't pan at all without creating stroboscopic artifacts that tell the brain that what it's seeing is not real. In other words, the camera can't turn its head without making the scene unintelligible. There are some tricky ways around this: artificial motion blur, carefully establishing spatiality before making a motion (using an establishing shot for instance). The best way around it is to keep the camera still. That's what movie making equipment was designed to do in the first place.

But if you double or quadruple the frame rate, and you can also quadruple your pan speed and stop relying on tricks. This would allow the film maker to break the proprioception barrier- to get into the head of the viewer, to get them to identify kinesthetically with your characters. Many people who saw Speed Racer (2008) missed the point(s). It was panned by people who called themselves "film critics," but were actually operating on a purely emotional level. What made Speed Racer great was that it made so many of its viewers sick. What kind of sickness? Motion sickness. Because the movie convinced them that they were moving in ways they weren't prepared for. The only way to enjoy a movie like that is to do so actively: to put yourself in the driver's seat. Because it was so innovative in this and other ways, it still managed to make Richard Corliss's top ten list. Just imagine what the Wachowski Bros could have done with a faster frame rate?

And now for the reason I'm writing this blog: Let's talk about how to make 3D more believable.

When you're watching a 3D movie, the film makers have decided what your eye can look at, what is in focus. This used to be done in more subtle ways- the use of eye dominants (the brightest thing on screen should always bee the thing you want to draw attention to- a rule made to be broken). The use of aberrant motion. Simply using color contrast. And the oldest trick of them all: movie stars. Pretty faces to attract the eye.

With 3D techniques, film makers have another trick in the bag: the ability to constrain the focal plane on the object-of-focus. And that works well.

However, the illusion of 3D arises in the brain, not in the eye, not in the picture the eye is looking at. By dictating what the eye can focus on- but giving it only one option- a huge part of the illusion is lost. Unfortunately, there's only two ways around this (that I know of). Both are difficult to do.

One, the oldest and hardest to revive, we'll call the multi-planar staging approach. Imagine instead of projecting your 3D image on a single flat screen, you project images on numerous screens that are actually at different distances from the eye. Besides being very difficult to film for and to execute, it also only works well for only a couple people sitting in the best seats. And projection is out of the question: projection screens have to be physically moved out of the way because they are, of necessity, not transparent. Instead, you use special screens with countless switches allowing flat pixels (super bright LEDs- the brighter, the smaller) to be reoriented so you're seeing them edge on- making them almost transparent when not in use. And you'd use these screens to show 3D images to add extra depth.

This would allow the eye to choose its own focal plane, which would create a sense of 3D that would make Avatar look like King Kong (the first one) in comparison.

You'd really be creating a simplified hologram. But unlike the traditional application of hologram technology, this one would look enormous (even if it was no bigger than a home theater) and at least half-immersive.

The other way is actually easier, even though it isn't technologically feasible (yet).

Instead of projecting multiple screens at multiple distances and letting the eye choose, you simply track what the eye is looking at and provide an in-focus image before in less time than it takes the eye to focus or the mind to take notice- somewhere around 1/15th of a second. You just need fast computers (about a magnitude more powerful than the present crop of affordable GPUs). At this point, the movie theater becomes obsolete. The best way to achieve this would be with head wearable displays. Virtual reality "glasses." So Cameron would be right about not taking off the glasses. He might be wrong about the future of "big theatrical expositions" though. That's likely to change in some slow subtle ways.

It would also pose a considerable challenge to film makers. Cameras would need to collect a distance map (using an array of laser range finders) of the image that could be used to translate the image into a virtual hologram of the image in post. One cool thing is that your could use a single camera to produce a 3D image- you'd just have to have separate motion trackers, display drivers, and displays for each eye.

It would take some very fast computers but, ultimately, movies wouldn't become much more data heavy. It would be like adding an extra audio track. The technique could be used in both live action and CG-based movies. You could even 3D-ize movies that weren't filmed using the techniques (though the mind would suspend believe every time it tried to focus on something in an out-of-focus plane). In that sense, it would be better used for TV shows. Cheap TV shows filmed during the day. Woohoo.

Fast frame rates, much higher contrast, and self-selectable 3D focus planes- together these could produce a visual experience indistinguishable from reality. Of course, if you really want to go there, you'd need to be able to not just move your eyes. You'd need to be able to move your head too. And if we're really going for the next big thing, it should go without saying that the image should be at least 180 x 180 degrees wide and tall.

All that means is filming at a higher resolution and a wider angle. Not necessarily 360 degrees though (your camera crew needs to hide somewhere).

When? Actually quite soon. You'll start seeing cameras capable of encoding distance data in the next five years. Ultra HD will eventually become the next TV standard, but the exact technology hasn't been designed yet. I predict we'll see viable HWD's in the next five, and the technology will mature in the next ten. Fifteen years from now, we may expect feature films using self-selectable 3D. It'll be a test film, nothing like Avatar. Fully mature examples of the technology may take another five to ten years to arrive. So, I place the next plateau somewhere around 2030.

Is there a plateau after that If you've read my last post, you already know the answer. There's usually another level. In this case, I think the next level will arrive concurrently. It requires adding senses, especially breaking the proprioception barrier. Imagine sitting in a chair that sways back and forth to simulate walking, or spins you left and right to cue your inner ear that you're turning. Imagine having a virtual body- arms and legs that move as your point of view moves, or as you choose to move them, and which are lit in ways that are consistent with the scene you're immersed in. Why are arms and legs important if you can't interact with the movie?

We're talking about movies here, after all, not games- though there are already good examples of games that have exceeded the ambitions of theater (Call of Duty, Modern Warfare is a great example- the final battle, at least for me, was emotionally immersive in a way no movie has achieved- I personally felt responsible to save the millions of lives that would be snuffed out if I didn't succeed).

So, how does seeing your limbs break the proprioceptic barrier? Simple. Arms and legs are in the middle territory between the internal and external sensory fields. Your arms are embassies into "reality." The fact that you can move them, using signals from within, to affect part of what you see outside of you lends reality to everything that you can see because it belongs to the same visual continuum.

Try this exercise. Close your eyes in a completely dark room. Now, move your hand in front of your face. If you are indeed in a completely dark room you won't be able to see anything. Right? But you tell me, can you see your hand? Not visually, no. But you "see" something. Try changing the shape of your hand. Make a fist. Wiggle your fingers. Do you have any trouble visualizing the shape your hand has taken? Is it even "visualization" that your mind is engaged in?

The frontier beyond that is probably something internal- jacking into the optic nerve directly, creating false nerve signals, creating technologically-driven conscious dream states. The Holoband of Caprica instead of the Holodeck of Star Trek. And beyond that? For that, read my last post.

Shock Level Five: The Limits of Ultraintelligence

2010-02-21T21:36:00.000-08:00

This is going to be long and to the point. I'm not going to explain what future shock is. Read this instead.

Just in case you didn't, here's an excerpt (begin quote):

Future Shock Levels:

SL0: The legendary average person is comfortable with modern technology - not so much the frontiers of modern technology, but the technology used in everyday life. Most people, TV anchors, journalists, politicians.
SL1: Virtual reality, living to be a hundred, "The Road Ahead", "To Renew America", "Future Shock", the frontiers of modern technology as seen by Wired magazine. Scientists, novelty-seekers, early-adopters, programmers, technophiles.
SL2: Medical immortality, interplanetary exploration, major genetic engineering, and new ("alien") cultures. The average SF fan.
SL3: Nanotechnology, human-equivalent AI, minor intelligence enhancement, uploading, total body revision, intergalactic exploration. Extropians and transhumanists.
SL4: The Singularity, Jupiter Brains, Powers, complete mental revision, ultraintelligence, posthumanity, Alpha-Point computing, Apotheosis, the total evaporation of "life as we know it." Singularitarians and not much else.
If there's a Shock Level Five, I'm not sure I want to know about it!
(end quote)

Catch that?

"If there's a shock level five I'm not sure I want to know about it."

If.

Which is to say, "there might not be." That it's possible, on a conceptual level, that nothing beyond what we can presently imagine will ever be imaginable. That there's not necessarily anything beyond "ultraintelligence."

Now remember, we're talking about levels of Future Shock. Shock is an very human concept: the feeling awe in the face of the ramifications of future possibilities. We're not talking about the future directly. We're not making statements about inevitability. Future Shock is a symptom of no-holds-barred extrapolation that are, nevertheless, firmly rooted in our present existence. As much as some people would like to pretend otherwise, there is no way to avoid experiencing future shock in the face of the future. Isaac Asimov was shocked by the emergence of personal computers and the internet. And yet, he wrote about godlike AIs. Arthur C. Clarke helped to pioneer the digital age. He actually invented the idea of the communication satallite. And yet, even he was shocked at the one-way cultural implications of what emerged. Shock occurs in countless ways. Microsoft's Encarta- written by paid professionals- was a massive failure compared to the shocking emergence of the volunteer-driven Wikipedia. Future shock is unavoidable. The only person immune to future shock is a dead person. It would take a knowledgeable intelligence of a higher Shock Level to not be shocked by its own level.

To question the possibility of a Shock Level Five is an honest question that, in some ways, is far more serious than what I'm about to undertake.

I'm going to ask what would a Shock Level Four ultraintelligence think about this question? We exist, with our slow, natural, organic intelligence, at SL0. Zero shock. That means that all levels of future shock are beyond us. But what would happen to the question if we were to find ourselves at SL1? Would we still consider SL4 to be the point-beyond-which nothing is imaginable?

And if a posthuman ultraintelligence (UI) with unlimited computing ability were to pose the question, how many levels of shock would there necessarily be?

What I can say for sure- since what we're talking about is shock levels- is that there would be at least one more level. It would be characterized by that which only a SL4 UI could imagine to be "unimaginable."

Before I continue, I need to diverge for a few paragraphs. I need to ask whether intelligence- the way we define intelligence- is actually scalable beyond a certain point. Is there a point at which a higher IQ just gets you the same answer that a lower IQ could have gotten, only faster? Are ultraintelligent minds able to think in transcendent ways? We know that the human mind is transcendent compared to computers- computers are our inventions. It's conceivable that a single human being, given sufficient time, freedom from senility, and opportunities-of-necessity, could invent everything that has been invented by individuals. Indeed, many inventions arrive from prolific individuals. Are UI's likely to be much better than a great number of normally-intelligent minds operating at a higher speed?

This is not a Penrosian critique of the possibility of AI, but I'm asking: what if the only kind of ultraintelligence that's possible is incapable of being self-aware because the internal vibrancy of thought causes external reality to become too slow, too dark, too uninteresting to have a self concept that exists relative to it? And what if self-awareness is necessary for intelligent intention- for acting in ways we would define as intelligent?

Let me pose the question this way. This is a thought experiment, and isn't meant to be taken as a conclusive argument, even if it draws conclusions.

Suppose you're a UI studying the goings-on of all the parts of the universe that "isn't you." Everything outside what you think of as "yourself." Let's say, for the sake of defining what we mean by "ultra," that your "mind" operates a billion times faster than a normal human mind, with billions of times more bandwidth- which we'll define as the ability to think about different salient details concurrently. Bigger minds take longer to operate, but if we use light-speed post-human "neurons" in place of 25mph neurochemical signals, we can get a truly huge brain operating at fantastic speeds.

Let's say that, with just a few of your innumerable "eyes," you stare right at the surface of the sun. Because you think a billion times faster, it takes you over a hundred thousand years to observe one hour of solar evolution. You might learn an unimaginable number of things about the sun in that one hour of "objective" time. Perhaps more than what a billion scientists could learn given a billion lifetimes. But you couldn't learn more than was available to know. And you wouldn't be able to separate what a thing is from how it's experienced. For a billion-X UI, the universe holds a different meaning. Subatomic activity ceases to be either a statistical firehose or a needle-wide window. Instead, you are able to watch a million square miles in simultaneous microscopic slow motion. And if that's the way you see the universe, then that becomes the normal way of seeing things. The universe becomes a horse of a different color. And that kind of difference would lead to insights unanticipated by normal-speed minds.

Same thing if you were to operate more slowly. An ultraintelligence able to operate a billion times more slowly would have another set of advantages: the ability to perceive over two million years of solar activity per personal "day." The more natural place to put one's attention would be on the macroscale- where big things are happening constantly. Dozens of supernova a minute. Galactic gravity unfolding before your eyes in realtime. Forests changing to deserts faster than a cloud moves across the land. Again, the universe would take on an entirely different meaning derived from a different mode of perception and interaction.

Can you have both kinds of thinking? The most straightforward answer is simply, "No." For a single ultraintelligence to have a cohesive awareness, a single reference frame is, by definition, necessary-- unless we first decide to define words like "cohesive," "awareness" and "intelligence" differently. Granted, you could have numerous non-simultaneous consciousnesses running concurrently, at different speeds, with different perceptual foci, and then integrate their thought products after-the-fact (like watching memory-movies created by alternate lives). However, the fastest consciousnesses will always outweigh the slower consciousnesses because they produce more "movies." The movies produced by fast consciousness would define the UI's native realtime. The fastest consciousness is consciousness. Anything less than full-speed would have a minority share in contributing to the identity of the intelligence (proportional to the inverse of the ratio of the differences in speed). Between the two examples above is a factor of 10^18.

So, as an ultraintelligence with vast computing capacity at your disposal, the ability to write your own operating "software," and the option to operate very fast, what would you do? Pretty simple. You'd take what you learned with your slow-motion ultra-wide microscope and you'd internalize the workings of reality. You'd simulate timescales from within your primary, full-speed consciousness. Why wait billions or trillions of years for something you can easily acquire (as an incomplete but constantly improving) picture in a matter of moments?

Without trying to go into detail, let's consider: what does an ultraintelligence think about? The simplistic answer is: reality, and not just the one that it exists within, but many variations on that one, and perhaps many others that we wouldn't consider to be parts of "reality." But our perceptions are biased. Essentially: many variations operating at many speeds- each producing questions tending to be answerable. Even a UI would have trouble thinking about what it can't think about. And that's the heart of where I'm headed.

If the majority of your thoughts are about events that originate within yourself, then, for all intents and purposes, you are your reality. The concept of self-awareness, as we have heretofore defined it, becomes nonsensical. Self-awareness requires "self" to be the thing that is aware. That "self" must have something that is distinct and separate from- something incompletely known- in order to define the parameters of self. If you know everything- or consider nothing that is unknown- then all things are, in essence, within you. And if there is no distinction, there can be no awareness of distinction. Hence, the grander the UI, the less there is of "self."

Now, when we're talking about hypothetical posthuman singularity-style ultraintelligences with planet-sized minds and the ability to exploit the fine structure of reality for carrying out its computational whims, we're certainly not talking about an "infinite" intelligence. The conditions described above are a matter of degree, not of absolutes. At some degree, however, the concept of self-awareness becomes obsolete as a primary mode of description. In fact, a UI might actually choose to represent itself as some number of self-aware individuals within itself- each distinct but fully compatible with its other manifestations.

Next question: what can an ultraintelligence think about? What kind of "life of the mind" can such a being expect? It is conceivable that such an intelligence would spend an enormous amount of thought seeking meaningful answers to this very question even before it reached the level of ultraintelligence (for instance, by reading this blog). By necessity of achieving Shock-Level transcendence, ways of thinking would be devised to maintain contact with modes of being that the previous incarnation would recognize as meaningful. That's not to say that an ultraintelligence wouldn't evolve rapidly into something we'd consider absolutely alien. But, from the UI's own perspective, that evolution might be very gradual and cautious. The stakes are vast, after all. A UI faces a kind of oblivion, a loss of self by drowning in a thoughtspace where it is almost the only thing that exists; where the only things left to think about are permutations of thoughts already thought.

If a Shock Level Four UI can reach the state of UI without closing its horizons to coincide with the divide between it and outer reality, then what it is contemplating is, necessarily, what we'd have to consider to be the subject material of Future Shock Level Five.

Something beyond itself, and perhaps always beyond itself. If any intelligence can contemplate something beyond imagining, it would be- by analogy with levels one-through-four, a far greater UI. And the thing beyond imagining would, by necessary exclusion, be a mode of intelligence beyond its own ability to attain because of certain impairments to its candidacy for Level Five.

One of the ways an ultraintelligence of any amount of power is irrevocably impaired is by the fact that it has evolved from a lower starting place- a place from which its primitive memories are still available. A hypothetical SL4 UI knows, and cannot help but know, the full story of its existence. Therefore, it knows- if only by analogy- that its existence is (hopefully) one of ever-increasing vibrancy in the forward temporal direction, and ever-decreasing vibrancy in the negative (back in time). Impairments in time equate to impairments in space- you can't see beyond your lightcone. And time travel, if it were possible at all, would make causality, and therefore, "knowability" meaningless. It would destroy the timeline that gave it rise and would, therefore, happen a maximum of once per universe. Therefore, even if a UI was capable of time travel, it couldn't affect the limitations of its personal past.

Any UI capable of knowing itself at all would know that it is impaired on certain space-time vectors and that the absence of these impairments would lead to a horse of a different existence- an alien sort of intelligent identity. The UI would, therefore, consider the ever-transcendent Shock Level Five intelligence to be one without any impairment vectors. One with all the benefits of time travel without collapsing causality. One that can consider variables and alternatives within itself without losing, or even damaging the concept of "self."

At Shock Level Zero, many intellectually rigorous individuals tend to consider the idea of a Level 5 UI to be an unassailable unlikelihood. Such a UI would have outside solutions to achieving cohesiveness of consciousness. To be plain about it, it would indistinguishable, at least for those lower than it, from the definition of God (God: a being above which no greater being can exist, for if one did, it would be defined as God). While certain SL0's may have a problem going there, it is a legitimately unassailable unlikelihood that a Level Four UI wouldn't consider such an entity to be worthy of contemplation: a UI without impairment on any space-time vector; without temporal-ratio impairment; without blindspots in time or space. A UI embodying a native solution to the self-awareness vs. internalized reality paradox. A UI capable of writing not only its own code, but pre-coding everything we think of as reality (and probably much more) to meet its own requirements.

Is there a Shock Level Six? Is there a Seven? The answer is twofold, and mundane. First, the answer is no. We SLO's left the imaginable behind at Level Four. For us, there is no Level Five unless a UI at Shock Five wants there to be. And if so, there is. And so on with higher levels- all of which belong to the definition of "God," and which become inevitable to that Level Five UI, but still entirely unknowable to us, for such things are not on the continuum of immortality, technology, transhumanism, or posthumanism. They are on the continuum of creation- of time, space, mass, and energy. They are on the continuum of intractible mysteries spanning the edge of even our theoretical universe, and deep into a place where no mind can- however grand- can imagine. If we take seriously the possibility of Level Zero leading to One, and One to Two, and Two to Three, and Three to Four, and from Four, the serious contemplation of Five, then Level Six is also a recursion. Knowing what we imagine-we-know about every other Shock Level, we can suppose that Level Six is actually no different from Level Zero- except that, this trip around, we are not alone and we never were. Level Six is relational. It's about a deep strange future, designed by ANOTHER, but into which we may travel.

Humans are not smarter than humans. They tend to fall prey to the attribution fallacy even when they have the best intentions. What I should have said was "We tend to fall prey" but I was actually falling prey to that very fallacy. Our personal reasons for believing what we believe are always too difficult for others to understand, so we tend to ascribe less-developed reasons to others. Atheists call deists self-deceiving idiots. Deists call atheists self-worshiping materialists. But we're all at Shock Level Zero when it comes to what is actually going to happen next. All parties rely on faith whenever they make assertions about the shape of the future. And that's not to say that faith is also a fallacy. This is already a strange universe, and faith may be the strangest thing we can "know" about it.

Many people believe in probability- that there is a 50-50 chance that a flipped coin will come up heads. But there's actually no such thing as probability on the level of actual, individual events. If, on a particular flip, it does come up heads, then it means that heads was a 100% certainty even before we knew it to be so; tails was 0%. Probability is just a sophisticated way of managing ignorance about the future, or sometimes, the past. And faith works the same way- except that, if there is a Level Five, Six, Seven, etc UI, then for it, knowing how the coins will land is a matter not of simulation, calculation, or even pre-destination. It's a matter, potentially, of anything it chooses it to be, including active decision. In other words, who's Shock Level Zero we're in is a matter of faith, nothing else. And faith is of the same substance as decision, as intelligence interacting with reality. It can only act so wrong before the truth imposes itself. And we don't choose whether or not we'll fill the gaps between knowable things with beliefs-pertaining-to-meaning. We just do it. That much is human nature.

So if you know- by whatever means, whatever reason, whatever bridge your intelligence can build- that what we imagine now as possible is not all there is to be imagined- there's such a thing as Future Shock Level Five, Six, Seven, or beyond- and in this reality- in this already-surpassingly strange universe- then I'm in no position to contradict you.

Inflatable Soldiers

2010-02-10T14:24:00.001-08:00

I saw the Hurt Locker recently and the most riveting scene, in my opinion, was the sniper battle in which Voldemort was killed by an Iraqi insurgent operating a Dragunov from a small concrete shack off up the hill. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) takes over his abandoned M107 and takes off his helmet. Granted, if he gets hit in the head, helmet doesn't help. But his head is actually more visible without the camouflage the helmet provided. William James (Jeremy Renner) takes over as his spotter and leaves his helmet on. That, the spit-and-polish lesson, and the juice box, were all significant imo.

((Using stats collected up through 2007, I'm estimating that Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs, aka roadside bombs) cause around 40% of U.S. fatalities in Iraq. The current number may be higher. Obviously, anything that can be done to address IEDs directly will save lives. My best idea is to create a robotic conversion kit for a Humvee allowing it to be remotely controlled by a local operator. The Humvee would carry an array of pulsed magnetic detection equipment that would identify metalic objects near the road being traveled. A camera on a boom would allow a higher vantage point for visually identifying suspicious metallic mass. Anything suspicious would be fired upon using anti-materiel rifles by U.S. troops operating from a safe remove. The remote Humvee could also "toss" detonation charges before retreating or continuing down the road.

Another idea would be to create a series of quickly deployable surveillance poles. Video data would be delivered via wireless data connection to local hubs. Whenever a convoy is about to travel down a specific length of road, the data would be remotely reviewed (by non-military subcontractors). Poles would be equipped with night vision. Software would extract footage featuring motion. Traffic that doesn't stop or significantly vary its speed would be detected by matching it to a template. Any tampering with surveillance equipment would result in immediate live attentiveness and possibly fast-moving (for instance, a helicopter gunship) response.

But this is an idea specifically for the kind of scenario featured in the sniper battle in "The Hurt Locker."))

As soon as U.S. troops come under fire from whence they know not, they seek cover. At the same time, inflatable soldiers are (somehow) deployed- carefully crafted inflatable decoys that self-inflate under the cover of a temporary smoke screen using compressed CO2. These inflatable soldiers would move slightly using a combination of robotic actuators, internal puppet marionette strings, and swiveling. To be effective, they would need to swivel to face the enemy. Also, they'd appear in a crouched or semi-crouched firing position holding an inflatable rifle.

Now, the sniper(s) firing on the friendly position aren't going to be fooled by the decoys within a certain range. However, beyond a certain range, the enemy will have no choice but to second guess whether the inflatable soldiers are the real thing. Meanwhile, actual soldiers are prone, moving to a more protected position, or simply crouched in the open right among the decoys. Every time the enemy fires on an inflatable soldier instead of the real thing, friendly forces have an increased chance of surviving the encounter.

Inflatable soldiers would weight about ten pounds each and would look like landmines in their undeployed state. They'd be tossed around like Frisbees or launched like clay pigeons. The first stage of their inflation process would turn them upright if they happened to land upside down. They'd be reusable- just open a valve and return to manufacturer to be repacked. They'd be usable in both urban and open conditions. They could be deployed remotely using a radio-controlled vehicle using off-the-shelf RC parts. Their directional microphone and swiveling ability would provide a cue to actual soldiers which direction the enemy fire was coming from. By putting some sort of fine powder inside the inflatable, a penetrating bullet could indicate the direction of origin by creating a plume.

Using modular inflation chambers, it might be possible to make an inflatable soldier stand up to being shot. Sequenced inflation might also make it possible to raise the newly inflated soldier in a way that crudely mimics the natural motion of rising from prone to a crouched position.

The appearance of more soldiers than the sniper originally anticipated might also give cause to break off the attack.

Inflatable soldiers could be used in lots of tactically creative ways. For instance, a small force could initiate an attack on a fixed position by inflating an entire platoon of inflatable soldiers away from their point of attack as a distraction. A single sniper could deploy a half-dozen inflatable soldiers around, but not-too-close-to his own position. After each shot, he could then inflate another soldier as a distraction. The enemy would have no choice but to dedicate some of its attention to the inflatable, even knowing that it was a decoy.

An inflatable soldier would be much easier to deploy in a rapid, believable fashion than an inflatable tank for instance. The organic curves of a human body would also be a more natural shape to attempt using small-scale inflatable architecture.

I Am Not A Hoax

2010-01-24T17:07:00.000-08:00

Someone sent me this link calling into question whether the dvorak ergonomic keyboard arrangement is what people (like me) claim it to be.

Here's a quote from the last page of the article:

The QWERTY keyboard cannot be said to constitute evidence of any systematic tendency for markets to err. Very simply, no competing keyboard has offered enough advantage to warrant a change. The story of Dvorak's superiority is a myth or, perhaps more properly, a hoax.

Here's my story. I learned to type in my first semester as a high school freshman. It was a once-a-week class. We used WordPerfect 5.0, which runs in DOS. Unlike Barbara Blackburn, one of the fastest typists to ever live, I did not fail my high school typing class. At the end of the semester, my teacher told me it was okay to stop trying after I hit 60wpm. And that made mad. I retook the test and turned in a score of 75wpm.

I did a lot of writing when I was in high school. Millions of words, tens of thousands of pages. All of it on qwerty.

Somewhere along the line I learned of the existence of dvorak. And when I did, I felt cheated. You see, qwerty is all fine and good once you learn to touch type, but it's inherently inelegant. So, at some point in my first semester of college, I started practicing on dvorak. Despite the interference posed by knowing qwerty, I was able to reach 20wpm in a couple hours. At the beginning of my second semester of college I realized that I was going to be doing a lot of writing in my life. I decided to switch to dvorak. So I wrote a clumsy macro keyboard for WordPerfect 5.0 and I quit qwerty cold turkey. It was frustrating at first. My mind would wander just a little and I'd find myself making qwerty-specific mistakes. But I'd correct them immediately. I didn't learn dvorak in a class. I learned it a couple hours and then practiced it in real life for months before I had matched my speed to that of qwerty.

Now there are times when I use qwerty extensively, even to this day. In fact, if I'm writing an email- which is rarely terribly long- qwerty doesn't irk me. And if I'm using a program with shortcuts, qwerty makes more sense. In fact, I don't even bother to rearrange the keys on my keyboard.

However, when I'm writing, sometimes for eight or ten hours at a stretch, dvorak is indispensable. Not because I can type much faster with dvorak (I can hit over 100wpm when I'm racing- something I've never come close to on qwerty), but because dvorak is effortless to use.

Let me give you one tiny example. The word "THE."

On qwerty, "THE" is typed by leaping diagonally with the left pointer finger, side-stepping slightly with the right pointer finger, and then reaching up one row with the left middle finger. Alternating motion. No great distances to travel.

On dvorak, "THE" is typed by pressing the "TH" combination- right middle then pointer in quick succession- no traveling- and then pressing straight down with the middle (strongest) finger of the left hand. Is it faster than qwerty? No and yes. No, it's not faster. At normal typing speed, it's just easier, relatively effortless. Does that make it more satisfying? Sometimes. It actually depends on my mood. Sometimes I like all the work my fingers are doing. I like that they're jumping all over the place. But after about half an hour, that gets old. And after two hours, it gets very old. So, eventually, the answer is absolutely "Yes." Dvorak is faster. But it's also faster if what you're going for is raw speed. If I'm copying something in front of me, or if I were taking dictation, or doing Close Captioning (CCers use dvorak if that tells you anything), then dvorak would allow me to type much faster than I'd normally need to if I were just trying to keep up with my own thoughts.

And there are kinds of writing for which dvorak allows my speed of thought to increase.

You may be thinking, "That's great if all you have to type is the word 'THE'." I mention THE only because it symbolizes the entire experience of typing on dvorak very succinctly. On dvorak, my hands don't move as much. I just counted how many times my fingers left the home row in the course of a single sentence. On dvorak: 23% of the time. That's right. 77% of the keys of I typed didn't involve leaving the home row. That's because, on dvorak, the home row represents the most common letters. How common? They make up about three quarters of the words that make up the English language. Especially the common words. How does dvorak achieve this feat? Here's a hint. On qwerty, only one vowel, "A," is found on the home row ("E" is actually the most common vowel in English). And one of the keys on the home row isn't even a letter. It's the semicolon. And yet, every English word contains vowels. And the dvorak keyboard has all of them, except "Y," on the home row.

Same sentence, on qwerty: 63% of the time was spent off of the home row. And I never used the semicolon once. In fact, many intelligent people may legitimately go their entire lives without even feeling a need to use a semicolon. As punctuation, it's an option, not a necessity.

Does that make dvorak faster? Yes. It does. Have there been inconclusive studies, comparing average typists to people using qwerty at speeds below the threshhold above which dvorak becomes indispensible? Yes. Do these studies measure the typing samples in minutes rather than hours? Yes.

Are there people who feel that, because they type "fast enough" on qwerty, that dvorak is a needless waste of effort? Yes. Yes, of course there are. People who aren't upset at their high school typing teacher for making them learn on qwerty because, after all, it wasn't that hard to learn. Sure.

Here's the problem. I know people who don't know how to type. People who took high school typing- for one day a week x one semester- and who don't know how to touch type. They look at the keys as they type. They do an advanced version of hunt and peck. And they get by.

Recently, I heard one of these people in an interview. He was asked why he doesn't try his hand at writing a novel. His answer? "I type too slow." A lot of people have the same story. Learning to touch type is an essential skill in our society, and yet many people don't learn it.

Remember when I said that it took me only a couple hours to learn to type on dvorak- to 20wpm- and that the rest was practice? That's the truth. Beginner typists make faster progress- and it even feels faster because they're typing actual words right from the beginning. Once you break through into the realm of touch typing, the practice part comes naturally. Qwerty takes a long time to master. It takes days of primary learning just to "get" where the keys are. Break through is not inevitable. Why? Because the arrangement doesn't make sense on any level.

Well, it makes sense on one level. Try typing the word "typewriter" using the qwerty keyboard. Notice anything strange? It's not an accident.

People who write for a living, who write articles quoting research calling dvorak a myth, are using the qwerty keyboard. They're touch typists. And they don't have a clue what they're talking about.

Why hasn't dvorak been adopted? It's simple. The people that are in a position to make such a decision already do "just fine" using qwerty. They don't see it, and they can't be shown. Like the Matrix, sadly, the only way to know what dvorak is involves swallowing the red pill and learning dvorak for yourself.

There is no faith involved when I say that dvorak is superior. I am speaking from ideal experience. I can still use both qwerty and dvorak with equal facility. I prefer dvorak because it is superior for reasons directly attributable to its intentionally ergonomic design. Speaking of that article: it is frankly unbelievable that someone could seriously suggest that dvorak's superiority is a "hoax" based on the suggestion that specific missing evidence constitutes negative evidence and the fantasy that markets don't make such big mistakes. Along with most of America, I can personally testify that they do. I don't expect people who are already proficient at qwerty will be able to make the switch- and that's most people. High school typing students don't have the right to make decisions. They do what they're told, and if they don't they don't learn to type.

However, I did it myself, and it wasn't hard. It wasn't a mistake. I don't regret it. And I know what I'm talking about. Anyone with basic math skills can see that qwerty was not designed for efficiency and that dvorak was. And design matters.

Dvorak is so effortless in long writing sessions that I can literally write up-to and past the edge of sleep. I can write in a hypnagogic state and, while it doesn't last for more than a paragraph, I can actually read what I wrote the next day and be able to track the changing of consciousness: from things I can remember to things I have no recollection of. I can not do that using qwerty.

The Cost of Power

2010-01-19T11:59:00.000-08:00

In 2008 the world used about 15.04 terawatts of power, on average. That means that, at any given point in time, 15.04 terawatts of power generation was needed. This includes all the electricity, all the jet fuel in the B-52s, all the cars and trucks and trains and ships, all the firewood, all the geothermal, all the energy we require to operate planet earth in a style to which we are accustomed.

For the sake of this thought experiment, let's pretend that it's all electricity. How many kWh (1000 watts for 1 hour) does that represent?

Let's do the math:

There are about 8,766 hours in a year.

15,040,000,000,000 watts x 8766 hrs = 131,840,640,000,000,000 watts.

131,840,640,000,000,000 watts / 1000 = 131,840,640,000,000 kWh.

That's about 132 trillion kWh.

There are 6.796 billion people on earth. That means that, on average, the energy needs, per person, are about 19,400 kWh / year, or 2,210 watts per hour. That's per person, not per household. For no good reason, let's say that the average cost per kWh is $0.15. That comes to a yearly energy bill of about $2,910 per person. That includes the cost of running the tractors that plant and harvest all your food, the energy cost of manufacturing the goods you buy, the trucks that deliver them, street lights, the mall's utility bill, cooking, heat, logs for the fire, electricity, jet fuel for visiting grandma, etc. Doesn't sound so high does it? But it's an arbitrary estimate. Again, the actual number is invisibly complex. Anyone who knows the answer, please educate me.

Q: Where does this power come from?

A: 37% oil, 25% coal, 23% natural gas, 6% nuclear, 4% biomass, 3% hydroelectric, 0.5% passive solar, 0.3% wind power, 0.2% geothermal, 0.2% biofuels, 0.04% solar electric.

89.2% of that comes from fossil fuels or biomass (think firewood, ethanol, biodiesel).

The rest comes from a mix of mostly nuclear and partly renewable sources.

In the U.S. the majority of our power production comes from coal. According to this creative little breakdown (which fails to take into account the cost of environmental damage done by coal mining, CO2 production and simply makes up numbers on the nuclear side), coal production is insignificantly cheaper than nuclear. Does nuclear power produce pollution that should be included in the cost? No. It produces waste that needs to be sequestered away to avoid becoming pollution. According to that web page, 17% of the cost of nuclear energy is the cost of storage. Other than that, nuclear is clean.

Let's play a little game. Let's say that all power plants cost the same amount to build. That's obviously not true. A coal plant is much cheaper to build than nuke plant. An oil-fired plant is probably cheaper still. But let's pretend that the environmental cost of coal is measured in money and that the money has to be paid when the plant is built. There, fixed.

Let's also pretend that the only kind of power we need to concern ourselves with is electricity. Is there anything that electricity can't do that other forms of power can? Yes. Electric trucks, planes, ships- no go. Hydrogen, generated from electricity, that's another thing. But not another enough. We'll assume that at least a third of the cost of energy will be tied to the price of oil until oil is no longer for sale.

What is that price?

One barrel of oil is equivalent to 6.1 gigajoules of heat energy, which is equivalent to 1,700 kWh of heat energy. About 60% of that can be converted into electricity. That leaves about 1,000 kWh per barrel of oil.

Q: To serve the entire world's energy needs by burning oil, how much oil would you need to burn and if you were to buy it all at today's price of oil, what would it cost?

A: 132 billion barrels of oil. At $79 / barrel (1/19/10), that could cost a mere $10.4 trillion. Just for the fuel. You see, if you could get your power generation for free and just pay for the fuel, electricity would cost you about $0.08 / kWh. Oil ain't cheap.

Q: Same question, now with natural gas.

A: 6000 cubic feet of natural gas is equivalent to one barrel of oil. Natural gas costs around $5.36 / 1000 cubic feet. That means that the natural gas equivalent of oil is about $32. That's $4.21 trillion for the whole world, or $0.032 / kWh at raw generation costs.

Q: Now with coal.

A: I've got bad news. Coal plants have an actual thermal efficiency of about 30%. At that rate, they produce approximately 2 kWh per kilogram of coal. That means that one barrel of oil is equivalent to about 500 kg of coal. In 2008 a metric ton of coal in the U.S. cost about $47. In much of the world it cost 2-3 times that. *Rolls Eyes* Soooooo, about $24 per barrel of oil equivalent. That means that the total raw cost would be $3.168 trillion for the world or about $0.024 for power generation.

Q: Finally, nuclear.

A: Accord to a recent article in Wired, traditional nuclear power costs about $55 million per year to run a 1 billion watts reactor. That's a barrel of oil equivalent of $6.30, which means that the whole world's power requirements would be met for $831.6 billion. And the raw kWh cost? $0.0063.

Now, as referenced above, defenders of energy-from-coal would have you believe that the actual cost is a lot closer to that of coal. Even a little higher. They're probably right. But remember, we're assuming equal cost for building the generators. Nukes are bigger and there's an economy of scale that works in their favor. But big works against local, and local is an important part of efficient, which is an important part of cheap.

Q: Same question- only now we're talking about renewable energy- solar, wind, geothermal, hydro.

A: Remember when I said we won't count the cost of building the plant? Well, if we apply that rule here, the answer comes to zero. Obviously, plants cost money.

Now for the fun part.

In the last question, I said "traditional" nuclear power. That means enriched Uranium in carefully managed reactors with massive cooling towers and- despite being massively complex-actually trade away a huge amount of efficiency so they can be made simpler. A nuke plant is the size of a fair sized town and employs as many people (per shift). It produces weapons grade plutonium as a by-product which is great for winning Cold Wars (or destroying the planet, take your pick- or, for that matter, building nuclear propulsion starships).

Liquid thorium reactors were proposed way back in the 50s, developed through the 60s and early 70s, and thoroughly forgotten for a generation. Thorium is a superior fuel to uranium. Less radioactive, but easier to sustain. And it dissolves in flouride salts. It's possible to build a passively regulated reactor in which, if the reaction gets too hot, the molten salt expands and automatically slows the reaction. Such reactors could be built very small- as little as 3000 square feet x several stories tall. They could be used to power ships. Hell, they could be used to power large aircraft. Their nuclear by-products are relatively benign compared to uranium- becoming safe in a couple centuries instead of tens of thousands of years. And they don't help you build bombs. Which is why they were never developed. But it's also why they've become very popular with growing nations like India and China, or hyper-visionary development zones like Dubai. It's why Harry Reid and Orrin Hatch- who have never liked the idea of storing nuke waste in their back yards, have championed their development. And thorium is abundant. And cheap. There are downsides. For instance, getting the reaction started is the hard part. But once started, it can be kept going for the life of the plant. According to stats quoted in Wired, a one gigawatt reactor would take $10,000 in raw thorium fuel per year.

Q: How much would it cost to provide the entire world's energy needs using thorium reactors?

A: Try this on. A barrel of oil equivalent of less than 0.12 cents. A world cost equivalent of $151 million. A per kWh cost of less than $0.0000015.

Remember back when I mentioned the worldwide per capita cost of energy? What was it $2910? Well, if there were some way to produce all our energy needs using thorium reactors, the raw energy cost would be about $0.03. That's not per kWh. That's per year.

Q: What would it mean if all our energy needs were met for less than $3 / lifetime?

A: Well, we'd change the way we use power. We'd build maglev superhighspeed trains to replace continental air travel. Transportation costs would drop- and with it the cost of goods. Tourism would benefit. Cities would get brighter. Bright enough to grow food indoors, underground, or out in the open in the middle of the night. Astronomers would hate it. We might consider using mass drivers in place of chemical rockets to launch payload into space. All our heat would be produced electrically, virtually eliminating pollution. We'd find it more attractive to live in Alaska, northern Canada, Siberia. Cheap power would make it possible for more people to have access to education, health care, and entertainment. Energy intensive desalination would be commonplace. Your TV would probably get a lot bigger, a lot brighter (though there still wouldn't be anything on).

It would be a different world, but not so different. People would still be poor. People would still waste resources. People would still find ways to damage the environment. But in many ways it would be the world predicted back in the 50s, before the Cold War drained all the fun out of the future.

Replacement Earths for $1

2010-01-15T23:19:00.000-08:00

How big would a city have to be if it contained the entire population of the world and was comprised entirely of high rise apartments?

Let's lay out our playing pieces first.

1. The world's population is about 6.796 billion.

2. The area of all the world's land is about 57.5 million square miles.

3. The worldwide population density is about 118 people / square mile.

4. The population density of New York City is about 27,440 people / square mile.

5. The population density of Manhattan is much higher: 71,201 people / square mile.

Let's ask ourselves some questions:

Q: Name a country with a population density similar to that of the entire world.

A: Afghanistan is a good match: 118.6 people / square mile.

Q: Take all the people in New York City (8.363M) and spread them out at the same average density as the entire planet (118 ppl/sq.mi). How much space would they take up?

A: About 71,000 sq.mi. - an area about the size of North Dakota, Missouri, or the country of Cambodia, Syria, or Uruguay.

Q: Same question, only now you're taking just the people in Manhattan (1.635M) and spreading them out at the earth's average population density.

A: The population of Manhattan would take up about 13,900 sq.mi.- about the size of Taiwan or Moldova. No states are in the right range of size. Twice the size of Hawaii? Meh.

Q: What if we took those 1.635M people and spread them all over the planet? What would the average population density of Earth be?

A: 0.0284 ppl/sq.mi. Greenland, by comparison, has a population density of 0.067 ppl/sq.mi. Each person on earth would have 35 square miles all to themselves- approximately the size of the island of Anguilla or, ironically, an area about the size of Manhattan (33.77 sq.mi.) all to themselves.

Q: If you were to take the entire population of the world and pack it into a single large city with a population density similar to that of New York City (the Five Burroughs), how big would it be?

A: About 248,000 sq.mi. - about the size of Texas. And no country is the size of Texas.

Q: Same question, only now we're using the population density of Manhattan as a model. How big would our "World-Sized Manhattan" have to be?

A: 95,700 sq.mi. A little bigger than Indiana or the United Kingdom.

Q: Imagine that the entire planet is covered by an endless Manhattan-like cityscape. How many people would live in it?

A: Just over 4 trillion people.

Let's take those 4 trillion people and give them the following: 1/4th acre of farmland (in a vertical farm)- about 10k square feet. 1000 square feet of personal living space. A 2000 square foot share of open space. A 1000 square foot share of shared infrastructure space. 1000 square feet of structural space. Total area: 15,000 square feet. Let's assume a ten foot ceiling for all spaces. Total volume: 150,000 cubic feet. Of course, give that person a super-advanced MMO account and they could feel like they had a lot more space.

Q: How big would a spherical spaceship need to be to house the entire population of Planet "Super Manhattan" (4 trillion)?

A: 1046,448 feet or almost exactly 198 miles in diameter. That's a very small moon or average-sized asteroid. For comparison, Saturn's moon Mimas is about 25% larger. Ceres, the largest asteroid (now dwarf planet), is about 260% larger.

Q: What if you were to just put the present population of the planet (6.976B) in such a spherical space spaceship, only this time let's give them four times more space: 600,000 cubic feet per person.

A: The sphere would be almost exactly 200,000 feet in diameter or just under 38 miles in diameter.

Q: Don't be so generous. 150,000 cubic feet is excessive. Using aeroponics, virtual reality, and creative design, you could make a person quite comfortable in less than 50,000 cubic feet. How big would your sphere be then?

A: About 86,580 feet or 16.4 miles in diameter.

Yeah. That's a sphere, less than 17 miles in diameter, that comfortably houses the entire present population of the planet.

Q: What would it cost to build such a sphere?

A: About $1 in the year 2100. Why? Because if you can build in space and can use material from asteroids and get your energy from the sun, the only cost is labor. But if you can build a robot that can build another robot that can also build another robot- using free material and free energy- the only cost is the original robot, the original program, the cost of delivering it to a place with abundant free resources, and *time.* How long? Well, if you started at the center and built outward at a rate of one inch an hour, it would take you 115 years. So you'd have to build it faster than that. If you could build it at an average rate of an inch a minute, it would take just under two years. How much would your first robot cost? It might cost only 50 cents and weigh only a few grams- much of which would be a solar array that could double as a solar sail. If you bought it in space, you're already most of the way there. What's the other fifty cents for? I don't know. Maybe you want to buy two just in case one gets lost.

Q: What would it cost to build a bigger one?

A: Same amount. It would just take longer.

Crowd-Sourcing Infrastructure Inspection

2010-01-12T14:33:00.000-08:00

I read somewhere that our aging bridges and dams are being inspected at a tiny fraction of the rate necessary to keep ahead of disaster.

So, turn basic inspection over to amateurs. Advertise for volunteers. Gather them from the local community. Don't pay them. Have them periodically take pictures of anything that looks off. Have them send these pictures to actual inspectors. Let the actual inspectors respond while things are still fixable.

It would be better than nothing. Nothing is almost what we've got now.

Design for a Versatile Conference Table

2010-01-06T11:15:00.000-08:00

(Note that the lighter green rectangle under the table is there only to help visualize the position of the four anchor points).

This idea would work best with a rather large table. The concept could work with smaller tables too, but I conceived it as a way of making a large conference table more versatile.

The table surface is suspended, rather than held up by legs. It's suspended from points away from the edge of the table.

Of course, if all you did was suspend it, it would swing around like a oversized swingset. That's why it's anchored to the floor.

There are four anchor points on the floor that are set back from the edge of the table to avoid interfering with the legspace. Each anchor point has two cables attached. One that crosses to the far side of the table, and one that crosses to the far end. A total of eight cables secure the table.

By detaching all eight anchor points and raising the table ona pulley system, you could store the table on the ceiling.

To secure the anchor points, you simply lower the table below the designed height and lock it in place temporarily. You then attach the four pairs of leg anchors which, at this point, are still loose. You then raise the table, pulling the leg lines taut in the process and then lock the height.

And by installing anchor points in the floor that are positioned closer together, you could anchor the table at coffee table height. By putting them farther apart, you'd have a standing-height work table. You'd simply lock the top cables at a different height. By putting the upper suspension cables on a pair of rails and putting anchor points at different positions on the floor you could move the table from one end of a room to the other.

You could anchor the cables more directly- more or less straight down- but the length of the leg cables wouldn't allow for multiple height configurations, would interfere more with legspace, and would require higher tension (and therefore, stronger cables) to dampen lateral sway.

Proposal for an American Super Tower

2010-01-05T11:29:00.000-08:00

Imagine building a city where previously there was none. Imagine building much of it as a single structure. That's what's being undertaken in China, Dubai, Saudi Arabia, and most recently, Russia. Undertaken doesn't necessarily mean "assured." Real estate can be a good investment though, and the people that tend to live in 1/2 mile high towers do tend to have some cash to spend so such plans aren't necessarily as crazy as they look and sound.

Now that the bar has been set, what would it take for the United States to play this game?

The Burj Dubai will be a science-fiction-flavored 828 meters tall when completed. Let's ask a very serious question. What would it take to build something twice that tall- a mile in height? 1610 meters. Or, while we're up there, what would it take to build something 1776 meters tall? That almost exactly 110% of one mile.

First, let's divest ourselves of the fantasy of doing it the "old fashioned" way. There are no traditional building methods that would allow such an undertaking. The methods used in the Burj Dubai are already maxed out. Otherwise, they would have gone higher.

The answer is to depart from the requirement that the building be "free standing." Instead, you support it in tension, like the third tallest structure in the world, this 2000ft+ tall radio mast.

A radio mast like this is actually an invisible pyramid of high tension lines which extend outward as odd-numbered spokes from the single central compression member of the tower itself. The need for stiffness is all but eliminated using this method, which saves an incredible amount of weight that would otherwise be required. The central mast needs only be stiff enough to resist the forces exerted by the wind operating on the spans between where the tension lines are connected. And it need only be strong enough to support its own weight and the weight of the cables pulling down on it. Such radio masts have almost no payload- just a few hundred pounds of radio antennas.

But the idea is scalable. Take a look at one of the anchors for the above-mentioned radio mast. Notice that three cables come from a single point, attaching to three elevations of the mast itself. At first glance you might think, "that's big." But really, it isn't. It's actually "just big enough." If it needed to be bigger, it would be bigger. There are no physical laws that say that you can't build a bigger anchor.

Here's what I have in mind. First, start with a 450 meter free-standing monolithic base. Most of the salable real estate will be found inside. From there, continue upward with a tapering tower that is with another 850 meters of usable and semi-usable payload- airship apartments that one would be serviced by elevators operating at near freefall speeds. The final 476 meters would be built to support a single observation deck.

The wind would exert hurricane force on the upper reaches. By placing numerous wind turbines on the upper structure, some of that lateral force could be transformed. The added weight of the turbines would cancel most of the benefit of doing this, however, what would be gained in electricity would probably power much of the structure's needs. Individual turbines might be pinwheel sized. Too large and their blade lengths would extend beyond the width of the tower itself which would actually increase the wind load.

Power could also be generated by harnessing the variable tension moments in the high tension lines. This would involve building linear hydraulic pistons into the anchors. The pistons would lift a multi-ton weight. By diverting some of the pressure thus stored, a turbine could be driven, resulting in additional energy gains. The same system could be used to stiffen or loosen one side of the tower's supports, allowing the structure to lean into the wind and thereby remain upright.

The uppermost diameter of such a structure might be only 5 meters. It would be almost entirely made of steel.

Changing the method of construction multiple times from foundation to point would be analogous to a multi-stage rocket. What works close to the ground is different from what works higher up. People buying real estate would be buying the prestige of living in the tallest building in the world, not living in the highest part of it- a situation that would be far from desirable anyway. Above a certain significant height, only the most courageous would feel comfortable anyway. And the amount of space available would diminish such that the daring billionaire might find herself living in something like a lighthouse's arrangement of stacked rooms.

I should say something about it's sensitivity to attack and how it would need to be built to accommodate certain types of failures that would be unlikely except as acts of sabotage.

The first 450 meters would be immune to all but bomb attack. Cutting all the tension lines would not affect it. The next 850 meters would be susceptible only to cutting multiple tension lines and would feature two modes of emergency escape. One mode would involve going down the elevators. Another would involve riding down the tension lines in small enclosed gondolas equipped with speed-activated brakes. The uppermost observation deck would be similarly equipped, only the gondolas would (unfortunately) be even lighter. The structure would need to be built to withstand 200mph winds and the loss of a random assortment of cables. Each anchor would be guarded. Flying an airplane into the tension lines would usually result in simply cutting the aircraft into kites. The resulting shockwave would be absorbed using the active hydraulics mentioned above.

What would it look like?

Imagine something like the Eiffel Tower, only- instead of four sides- it would have an odd-number of sides. The number of sides would gradually decrease as you got higher and higher as features in the outer facade merge. It might have a spiral appearance, much like the Crystal Tower concept. I have a quite different design paradigm in mind that might be applied- I'll elaborate in a future post. In any event, it would have perfectly smooth transitions. You could not tell by looking at it where one construction paradigm begins and another ends. And it would be lit up. The tension lines might be lit with millions of lights. Because of the foreshortening of perspective at such great distances, the top would taper such that, when one is standing withing the tension umbrella, it would appear to extend upward infinitely. The tower's actual vanishing point would be scant arcminutes from the top of the tower.

Where would such a structure be built? California is likely out of the question because of the earthquake risk. In fact, the entire West Coast might be out. Shame that. Not that CA laws would ever allow it. It should also be build away from the most common paths of hurricanes, so the Gulf Coast is also mostly out of the question. Although, it is already being built strong enough to withstand hurricane winds. What's an actual hurricane?

Building too far north involves a reduced building season. Too close to NY City would involve air traffic interference. In terms of real estate value, perhaps the best placee to build would be within sight of Manhattan. Too close to Manhattan and it would do injury to the skyline aesthetic. But looking down on Manhattan would be worth paying for. How much? Between $30k and $150k a square foot.

The location question is something that would take a lot more thought.

What would it cost to build such a structure?

Well, the design and engineering costs would come to between ten and twenty million dollars. To purchase and prepare the building site would require tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. It would incorporate around a million tons of steel (more likely more than less). That's some $1B in raw material costs. Raw construction would cost around $8B. Finishing it would cost at least another $5B. Around $16B in a perfect world. Actual cost is likely to be about twice that. To be profitable, it would need to attract businesses and residents from an area larger than its viewing radius. It would need to compete with Dubai for billionaires.

Nvidia Ion Solves One Wearable Display Dilemma

2009-12-27T22:11:00.000-08:00

The Nvidia Ion is a netbook processor solution capable of running up-to 2560x1600 resolution- well beyond true 1080p HD. It's light, small, and energy efficient. Go ahead and take a look at how small the reference platform is. It's portable.

Ten years ago dozens of companies thought the future of computing was going to be found in "virtual reality" displays. So they built the best stuff they could, at the time. As recently as five years ago, the best HWD had a resolution of around 800x600. And yet, it was suppose to go right in front of a person's eyes. And compete with conventional monitors. Because it wasn't particularly portable.

The human eye can see about 1 pixel per arcminute of viewing angle- about sixty pixels per degree. Let's take an example.

The Sun is about 32 arcminutes in angular diameter (it varies depending on the time of year, but 32 is a good enough average). That means the Sun is just over half a degree across. That means that, in reality, the Sun in the sky represents about 157 pixels. And a 800x600 display represents a spot of reality that is 6.5 degrees in diameter. A large orange held at arm's length. To really be immersive, it needs to be a beach ball. And each eye needs it's own independent display driven by its own graphics processors or else it isn't going to be 3D when you need it to be. But let's not worry about that too much.

Let's take a single HD display running at 1080p, which is 1920 pixels wide. That gives us a horizontal viewing angle of 32 degrees at maximum detectable resolution. That means that if the display is close enough that it takes up more than about 1/5th of a person's maximum field of view, they'll be seeing less than optimum resolution. What this also means is that it would take 5 HD displays, arranged side-by-side, to account for just the horizontal axis for a truly immersive Omnimax-type VR experience- all positioned at exactly the right distance to make the maximum use of their resolution (not so close that you see individual pixels, not so far away that pixels blur together). Do we really need that many? Depends on what we're trying for. Short answer: no. Not yet. We don't have any applications that could make use of such a technology. Every one of those displays would require a PS3 to drive it- if it were a game- plus a whole extra layer of complexity to get them all to work together. Not counting the fact that games and movies don't represent the same level of visual reality.

The human eye sees high resolution detail only for the center 50 degrees or so. I was going to say 60, but I mistyped it and decided to leave it that way. At the same time, the eye and mind are aware of detail surrounding that central focal point- detail that can be focused on by simply looking at it. And there's no way to just render the center while leaving the periphery blurry unless you're controlling what the eye looks at. Think cutscene vs. playable content. There's no getting away from the fact that, for immersion to be achieved, HMD's need to pump something like 16 (4 wide x 4 high) HD monitor's worth of imagry options for the eye to look at. That doesn't even count what you'd need if a person's head could move.

There's ways of cutting that down. And there are practical ways of using VR without it being either immersive or reality-resolution.

What's interesting, and what I'm pointing out in this post, is that if the display optics were available, the computing power needed to run it is *almost* portable.

For the moment, I'd be satisfied with an HD-resolution HWD positioned so that it takes up 45 degrees of viewing angle- the center 1/4 of the a person's field of view. At that range, I'd be able to pick out pixels, but it wouldn't be too bad since computing environments are already pixelated. It would be preferrable to having the display represent less than 32 degrees (which is wasteful).

Is it possible to make HD displays smaller than the window pane in a pair of reading glasses? Yes. How do I know? Simple. DLP chips are about that size. CCDs and optical CMOS chips are in that size regime.

What would the technology look like when it all finally comes together?

1. Think 5th generation "Netbook" with a cheap eReader display on the box for traditional viewing and sharing. More importantly, it comes with a pair of HD or HD+ resolution glasses.

2. Think multi-touch pad (could be the unlit conventional display) as a finger-controllable pointing device.

3. Multi-touch works as a keyboard as long as you can see the keys. For invisible typing, you need two things: A. You need to be a touch typist. B. You need tactile response- a physical device.

4. Tracks eye movements so you can use the device without resorting to finger movements. Voice activated search. Btw, for voice activation to be truly useful, it has to be able to hear you whispering. Or read your lips.

5. Now that you're wearing your computer, you need to be able to do all the things computers do. Which, these days, is all the things smartphones do. Including taking video. So your head mounted display, in the from of a pair of glasses, needs to have cameras built in.

6. How is the HMD powered? Is it connected via a cord? Why not? People wear headphones without complaining.

Ehh. I'm done writing for now. The rest of my ideas take too much space to explain.

Pointing Out the Obvious...

2009-12-08T15:24:00.000-08:00

Here's what I want: a three-tiered mobile technology solution: 1. Smartphone with full-sized touch screen and double-thumbable keyboard. 2. Bluetooth headset. 3. Bluetooth-connected wrist watch with screen as big as the face.

Here's the rationale:

1. Smartphones are the new business machines. As Motorola and HTC (and not Apple) have realized, smartphones need keyboards because we're actually writing Great American Novels on them. The better the keyboard, the more often a person will leave the house without their laptop.

2. While the intensive tasks require a large touchscreen an a keyboard (iPhone users may disagree, but only because they don't know what they're missing), not every task is intensive. Sometimes you just need to read a text, check the subject line of an email, see calendar updates, and navigate your address book. Warming up the a smartphone's whole screen uses an unnecessary amount of power.

3. A good keyboard corresponds to a good-sized screen. Both correspond with a rather large device. Large devices end up out of reach- deep in pockets.

4. Bluetooth headsets are essential for making smartphones viable as mobile productivity stations. A person needs to be able to juggle apps- text, email, maps, search, address books- while talking. A headset allows a person to use their smartphone in front of them, instead of up to their ear, or on speakerphone. Bluetooth is also safer, since we all talk while driving. If you don't already have one, get one. They're not expensive.

5. Bluetooth headsets don't need to be worn constantly. They're uncomfortable, and they look funny. Headsets are often somewhere else. I often put mine in a coat pocket. Finding it again takes time. I often turn the Blue off, the speakerphone on, find the Blue, and then turn it back on again. Obviously, I'd rather this be simpler.

6. Many of us use to wear watches just to keep track of time. Many of us don't wear watches because our cellphones tell us what time it is. And wristwatches haven't developed much. For instance, you can still spend $40 on a calculator watch by Casio that is essentially identical to ones they made 20 years ago. That's abysmal. Is there any wonder that wristwatches have become fashion items?

7. There is currently no way to put everything you need into a wristwatch-sized case. However, if all you needed to do was put a screen, a battery, a transceiver, and a minimally powerful processor- that's all very doable. Using a smartphone as the main source, and a high resolution wristwatch screen (think iPod Nano), you could even watch Hulu (eventually) or at least Youtube.

8. We need a better place to keep our headsets when they're not in use. I'm imagining a Bluetooth headset that clips onto the side of your wristwatch. Call comes in, your watch alerts you. You remove the headset, insert it into your ear, and your smartphone stays in your pocket the whole time. Or, a text comes in. You read it on your watch, remove the headset, and call the person directly- smartphone never leaves the pocket. Or, call comes in, you take it on the headset, and then- as you're talking, you get your smartphone out and use it to search for a phone number in an email. As soon as you find it, you hit the button for "send to watch." You immediately turn off the big energy-sucking screen on your phone.

9. If smartphones didn't have such short battery lives, we'd use them for more things. We might actually use them as mp3 players. As it is, that is very often a separate device. The only people I know that play music on their phones are teenagers. They don't necessarily have multiple devices. Either that or they really like listening to music. Music navigation could easily be managed on a watch.

10. It occurs to me that the next iPhone will probably have a Pixel Qi screen, enabling a 50% increase in battery life. That's probably what will be announced at MacWorld in February. It'll be an eReader, iPod, iPhone, mini-tablet PC alternative. Because really, what we need are devices that can be used for everything we need them for, and are always before us- but not in our way when we don't need them- and have enough battery power to survive 12 hours of heavy use.

11. Is a a wristwatch likely to appeal to enough people to make it viable? Yes. Here's why: smartphones are starting to all look alike. It's time to make a slightly bigger smartphone- bigger screen, better keyboard- and keep it in your pocket. Smartphone becomes tiny netbook. Wristwatch becomes tiny smartphone.

12. And that's all I have to say.

Helium-Filled Alternate History

2009-12-03T11:47:00.000-08:00

One of the great what-ifs of history is "What if the Hindenburg hadn't burned down on live radio- making it one of the most indelible news events of the 20th century?" And what if WWII->Cold War hadn't shifted our technological priorities toward high-altitude, high-speed jet-powered aircraft- the civilian application of which is the commercial airliner. What if airships had continued to be developed? Helium, with a molecular weight of about 4 grams / mol, is twice as heavy as diatomic hydrogen (around 2 gram/mol). However, compared to air, which is about 29 grams/mol, it's still excellent. The difference between 2 and 4 grams compared to 29- about 7%. In other words, if the Hindenburg had used helium- as it was originally designed to- it would have been able to carry 7% less payload.

The real what-if actually comes earlier. What if the U.S. (the world's only supplier) hadn't banned the export of helium to Germany in the run-up to WWII? Not counting dark matter, helium accounts for 24% of our galaxy- 12x more mass than the rest of all other elements combined. Hydrogen accounts for 73.9% of what's visible. Here on earth, the only viable source for helium is as a radioactive decay product that accompanies the natural gas from certain wells in the U.S. and a- to a lesser extent- Poland.

Helium, unlike hydrogen, isn't something you'd want to throw away. The Hindenburg was designed to use dynamic envelope control which requires a heavier airframe and a higher margin of error. That's because the helium wasn't going to be vented to make for an easy decent. Switching to hydrogen allowed the Hindenburg to carry 7% more passengers and freight according to the raw numbers. It probably would have carried several percent more because of how it was being flown.

We (now) know hydrogen is dangerous. Hydrogen is actually two gases mixed together- both consisting of diatomic hydrogen- the molecules of which are arranged differently. The exact properties of hydrogen gas depends on the combination of these two isomers, which in turn, depends on how long the gas has had a chance to reach equilibrium.

In other words, fresh hydrogen is quite different from stale hydrogen.

As for safety, when it burns, it burns rapidly, invisibly (it skips the visible spectrum but is visible in IR and UV), and- provided enough oxygen- totally. It's ignition temperature (500C) is well within reach of all manner of things, including matches and static electric sparks. One of its not-quite-saving graces is that, in its pure form, it doesn't burn at all. It needs oxygen. Also, when it burns, the flames tend to rise quickly and it produces no smoke. Most of the people who died on the Hindenburg died because they were inside the hull and had nowhere to escape to as the ship's diesel burned nearby. Out of 97 passengers and crew, 61 survived.

Helium is relatively safe. Its stable, non-reactive, and fun. The only way it can kill you is by asphyxiation- since breathing pure helium has all the health benefits of not breathing anything at all. Mix it with the right amount of oxygen, however, and you've got a superior diving gas.

Helium, if made available at the right moment, would have harnessed innovative energy that was dedicated to high speed aircraft. That shouldn't sound like a total shame. Jets are fast. And not too expensive. And safe. But they're also the only option. And they're expensive. Take a 15 hour trans-oceanic flight without enough room to unfold your knees. And then consider the following:

According to estimates, there were over 4 trillion ton-miles of intermodal domestic freight shipped in the United States during 2008. Intermodal means "by every method." The worldwide volume of freight transported by sea is over 35 trillion ton-miles. This represents 4x increase over the last four decades. And all of it, ALL OF IT, is powered by fossil fuels. In fact, around *half* of that freight volume IS fossil fuels: crude, oil products, and coal being freighted from one part of the world to another.

The most efficient mode of transport is using very large ships (boats). Boats are incredibly efficient when compared to rail, road, and runway. Boats are made of steel, which is cheap and abundant. Large ships involve a lot of surface area, and hence, a lot of friction with the water they travel through. But they also have enormous amounts of internal volume. And the bigger they are, the more favorable the ratio between area and volume. And they don't go very fast, so induced drag isn't too bad. Only problem. Boats don't work on land.

Next most efficient is rail. Low speed hence low friction. Low manpower costs. Efficient engines. Logistics are slow and, for many products, unworkable. To really do point-to-point transport, you need trucks. High manpower costs- which mitigates the highly fluid logistical challenges. Not extremely efficient, but enormously flexible. And both rail and trucking require infrastructure that needs to be maintained. And we won't discuss airfreight, which has only speed to its advantage, which solves a lot of logistical issues in one fell swoop. Remember when the idea for FedEx got a C when it was turned in as an assignment at Harvard Business School?

So here's the question we're drifting toward: could airships have had a role in transporting freight? The short answer should be obvious: no. They don't so they couldn't. There are only around 50 working airships- most of them blimps- and precious few of them are used for transporting anything resembling freight in any meaningful way. The golden age of airships ended with the burning of the Hindenburg- just as it was getting off the ground. But the reality is, airships were on their way out anyway. The Hindenburg wasn't the first airship to go down. The U.S.S. Macon, which was nearly as large- and which was filled with helium- experienced a far more dramatic trip to earth (unless dramatic = flames, in which Hindenburg wins most competitions). Hindenburg was just the most visible. Also, at the time, airships were competing, not with air travel, but with sea travel. Considering the risk of being sunk by a submarine, the definition of "safe" was a rather low mark. And the Hindenburg would have made for an extremely poor flying truck. It's crew consisted of more than forty people. It was a niche craft.

It may have been beautiful, immensely romantic, and intensely inspiring to look upon. But inspiring doesn't pay bills. And inspiration that doesn't reproduced isn't worth much.

Here's the crazy thing, though. The design for airships like the Hindenburg- that distinctive torpedo-like shape- actually pre-date the invention of the airplane by a about twenty years. Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin was making flying cigars in 1894. And there were elongated dirigibles that date back to the 1880s. By the time Orville and Wilbur started toying around with powered kites, Zeppelins were a major industry. And everyone knows that airplanes win wars while airships much prefer peace. (German Zepellins were used to bomb London during WWI but after 1915- during which they lost at least half their airships, they abandoned their use. One of them was bombed out of the air by a British pilot flying an early monoplane. Live by the bomb, die by the bomb.

So here's another big "what if?" What would have happened if airships and airplanes had been developed at the same time?

What would have happened if the following ingredients were combined in a single place?

1. Helium made available as an openly-traded commodity.
2. Aerodynamic lift theory applied to lighter-than-air craft.
3. Application of progressive materials science coupled with advanced structural engineering.
4. No intrinsic fear of airships among the general public.

I'll tell you what *might* have happened.

Airships might have matured into lifting body hybrids. Flying cruise ships. Flying trucks- able to sail on prevailing winds. Flying construction cranes. Maybe even flying towns. Flying launch platforms.

Double-Hybrid Airship

2009-11-30T18:43:00.000-08:00

So I've been thinking about airships lately. If you've read my previous post about (actually) building flying cities, you'll know that this isn't a new idea.

I think I first thought about building a hybrid airship about six or seven years ago. It was a passing fancy: develop a set of plans or kit for building a small personal dirigible. And that's about as far as it got. Dirigible means steerable. Like a Zeppelin- which also has a rigid frame.

Airships are the quintessential romantic conveyance. They show up in alternate history, steam punk, technopunk (okay, Nebuchadnezzar was a "hovercraft"- same idea). Mummy movies. Final Fantasy games. Oh, and the Teddy Ruxpin cartoons back in the '80s. Great epicadventure, unbearable singing. And, of course, Up.

So I'm definitely not the only one who has picked up on this theme. And yet, there are no airships anymore. Sure, the DoD is fielding some radar platforms. There's the Goodyear Blimp. And don't forget hot air ballooning. That's pretty close to the spirit in question.

I was talking with a friend a couple weeks ago. I think our conversation started with a mention of Balloon Boy, and whether it was plausible to actually build such a craft. I started to think about it. The things we talked about were more to do with the spirit of the idea. I started to think about it in practical terms.

The question, as it turns out, isn't how big you build an airship, but how small. Small is cheap. Cheap is attainable. It's easy to imagine a multi-million dollar project that would be guaranteed to fly by virtue of its volume of helium. It's not so easy to imagine getting off the ground on several hundred thousand.

The airship you see in these pictures is actually more of a lifting body aircraft than it is a hybrid airship. It gets less than half of its lift from helium. To achieve the shape, it is built like a omni-directional suspension bridge. There's a open-topped box at its center that is comprised of four tent poles. These are held apart by a pair of horizontal girders that run from nose to tail. They're built like a construction crane (only much lighter).

To the left and right there are several more girders that define the lateral dimensions. Attached to these is a kind of vertical stabilizer that is in place to prevent the air moving over the lifting body from sliding sideways. Hence they are called slip limiters.

The whole aircraft weighs a little less than 16,000 lbs of dead weight. It is a little over 100' long and 80' wide- not counting the roll-control wings. The internal volume of its lifting gas is about 120,000 cubic feet. The cabin is around 1000 square feet of usable space. It uses a single diesel and a set of super capacitors to power all four ducted fans. The capacitors would power the burst of thrust needed to get airborne. After that, aerodynamic lift would take over. Ducted fans are actually more efficient a low speed- less than 100mph. This airship would max out at about 50mph.

Parts of the lower surface would consist of transparent Tefzel, allowing passengers to look straight down, through a Tefzel window- and transparent helium- at the ground below. And the ground would never be very far away. The cabin would be unpressurized. It would solar heated (like a greenhouse) and actively cooled using air conditioners. Parts of the airship's top surface would be covered with lightweight, thin-film photovoltaics. It's conceivable that the aircraft could cruise on solar power alone- albeit at minimal speed. Because of its low speed and enormous area, it might actually be able to achieve meaningful lift from thermal activity. A soaring airship. In such a mode, the ducted fans would be used for extremely tight maneuvering, not for forward thrust.

The amount of usable cabin space would be on par with that of a 50' sailing yacht. It would be capable of landing and taking off from water. Because it would be heavier than air, it would need to be anchored, but not hangered when not in flight.

It would take off at about 20mph.

The airship could be flown using aerodynamic controls. Yaw would be managed with the twin rudders attached to the aft ends of the slip limiters. Angle of attack would be managed with the substantial elevator at the aft end of the main body. Roll would be managed via the side wings.

The internal gas volume would be separated into a number of chambers by a super thin layer of Mylar. Once airborne, the craft would be able to maintain flight even if all of its lifting gas were lost (assuming that the wing surface is mostly intact.)

Here's my Facebook page on the subject. Same thing, presented differently.

Comments on HTC's "You" Ad Campaign

2009-11-04T20:36:00.000-08:00

You may have seen these ads. They're filmed from the perspective of a person's phone. The last thing you see at night. The first thing you see in the morning. And everywhere in between. Every part of your life.

HTC was a nameless brand a year ago when I bought my G1 "Google" phone running Android. I'd never heard of them before. That only bothered me a little.

It took a while to really get an idea of what this phone could do. Things really opened up when I got a bluetooth for it. Here are some examples of what my phone allows me to do.

Cutting a text message to use it as the subject line of an email. Leaving gmail to open the camera, take several pictures, return to gmail- my unfinished draft still waiting for me- and attach the pictures. Take or make a call before or after hitting send- confident that the email will get through.

Searching and reading email while on the phone. Writing an email.

Sending and receiving text messages while on the phone.

Playing a strategy game while on a call.

Comcast goes down while I'm in the middle of a chat. Switch to my phone and not miss any of the conversation.

Start an email on my phone, save as a draft, and finish on my laptop. Or visa versa.

I have an app that automatically searches craigslist. I got my whitewater kayak, paddle, wetsuit, sprayskirt, and lifevest from five different sources and ended up spending less than $200 total. It took over a month though.

Someone sends me a text message with the time and place of a business appointment. Cut and paste it into my google calendar in a couple seconds.

The internet, of course. But not while talking on the phone. Moving between different browser windows without having to start over.

Instant, and I mean *even before it shows up on my laptop* email notifications.

The fact that my phone has a keyboard on it, which I type on fast enough to hold my own in chat, or write multi-page missives, is essential. I'd never settle for less.

Virtual observatory software using the phone's electronic levels, compass, and GPS. All I have to do is point the phone at some area of the sky- day or night, indoor or out- and it shows me what's there.

Being able to check the weather instantly. Traffic too- using free apps. I have three pages of desktop (with a quick search bar) and six pages of random things I've downloaded. About a hundred programs, only three of which I've paid for. Because the rest were free.

I had a complaint about how gmail worked, and they fixed it in the next update.

I bought an extra battery for it (for $5 straight from HK), which is ready for emergency use.

One thing I don't use it for is navigation. I have a dedicated GPS in my car.

And no Youtube either. Mobile resolution is unusable. Youtube is bad enough without having its quality reduced further.

Rumored eReader from Apple

2009-11-04T17:44:00.000-08:00

First, best glance at my previous post.

For more than a year Apple has been expected to enter the eReader market. And yet... they haven't. Why would this be? Most likely it's because it wasn't Steve's own idea to do so. But I'm sure he's changed his mind about that by now. And here's how that would happen.

1. eReaders, as they are now, are just too limited. They're good for reading books, and blogs, and any written content that isn't particularly graphical in nature. Meanwhile, Apple has a vested interest in all the products on iTunes. Therefore, Apple will never produce a straight eReader. It'll have to be an iPod. It'll have to support video. And it'll be bigger than a Nano so it'll have to have many gigs of HD space. Anything else would be impossible. Only problem is that running video is incompatible with the kind of screen an eReader needs. But if Apple is licensing Pixel Qi's screen technology, we can expect to see an Apple Tablet-sized iPod eReader during Macworld in early Februaray (9-13) of 2010.

Major question is whether it'll be more oversized iPod touch, or more netbook / Macbook Air with a keyboard. Since design paths appeal to different segments of the market, the likelihood is that Apple will produce both. One may actually be a new version of the Macbook Air, and one very likely will be labeled with the moniker "Touch." Mac will launch both at the same time. And no other products using Pixel Qi technology will hit the market until after Macworld, a privilege that Steve Jobs will have been willing to pay tens of millions of dollars for.

Why won't it be announced before Christmas? Simple. Because so many existing products will be made obsolete by Pixel Qi's technology. All Netbook makers will actually make more money by selling off existing stock at going prices than they would if they tried to compete for future share with limited supply. And supply will be extremely limited in December. Prototype-limited.

Will Apple be the one and only company to have Pixel Qi's technology? Definitely not.

Pixel Qi: Mary Lou Jepsen Masterminds a Revolution

2009-09-15T10:26:00.000-07:00

First take a look at this. It's Pixel Qi's new screen technology, descended from the OLPC's hybrid display and built using existing manufacturer techniques. It's due to appear in new devices in Q4 2009, though- at the moment- there's no new chatter. A major product launch is in the make. This is the silence before the storm.

In an earlier post I pointed out the need for a two-screen, color-capable eReader if the niche magazine industry is to survive the same fate as many small town newspapers (Ann Arbor, MI- not so small).

I've thought seriously about buying an eReader like the Kindle 2. One of the drawbacks with the Kindle is that its memory capacity is miniscule. Many of the eBooks in my digital library are more than 50mb each. Some are over 200mb. These are the ones that include numerous illustrations and diagrams- many in full color. The Kindle's effective capacity is less than 2 gb. That's 10 to 40 books. What I want is a device that will allow me to carry a small college library's worth of salient texts at all times. As to why, that'll be a subject of future posts.

So I discoverd Asus Eee PC 1005-HA series laptops with 8.5 and 10.5 hours of battery life. I started to think about a netbook as a replacement for my current laptop, which has not battery life at all, and even my smartphone, which is fine for necessary tasks but too small for undermotivated use. Smartphones also lack Flash. (A smartphone with Flash is a future killer app.) I liked the idea of Kindle's free access to Wikipedia. Not a fan of the lack of graphical support though. I learned that I can potentially use my smart phone's 3G and bluetooth to provide internet access to a netbook though. Thanks, Android.

I started to think of a netbook as a replacement for my iPod for car use- which is where I do most of my educational listening- as much as 20 hours a week.

One other thing. I like to write in my sleep (or nearly asleep). I can do this thanks to the Dvorak ergonomical keyboard arrangement (same hardware, different software driver- is included with Windows, is easier to learn than qwerty, enables much faster error-free typing with far less risk of repetitive use injury). I need a light, thin, cool-running laptop to do that. Even better if it's not tethered to the wall.

I also want a computer that's comfortable in the wilderness. Something I can charge with a small PV. Again, why is a subject for a future post.

So I took a look at netbooks, compared the resolution to the necessary size of a single page view. I decided that I'd have to look at the screen sideways. Asus doesn't make a screen that folds flat either. I'd have to be careful.

I was all but convinced that this is what what I wanted to do when I stumbled upon Pixel Qi. Which is why I'm not buying a netbook until I can get one with a Pixel Qi screen.

Here's what I need:

1. I definitely need integrated bluetooth. Come on. It costs $2 to include it.

2. I need a larger hard drive. 160gb is far too small. It would force me to use a portable drive to supplement it.

3. I'd like you (Asus, Acer, Toshiba, etc.- all of you) to create a recessed usb slot that allows a thumb drive to all but disappear into the laptop's chassis. I want to use a 64gb flash drive as a removable, supplemental data drive. I'll probably never remove it. Unless I'm upgrading it. When I do remove it, I want to be able to transfer truly monumental amounts of data.

4. It has to have touch screen technology. Multi-touch preferrably. Something that will work with either finger touch or fine sylus control. If I have to choose between the two of them, make it stylus driven. Too much of the image is obscured by fingers.

5. I want built-in speakers that aren't an afterthought. I don't want to have to provide my own power source if I want to be freed from having to use headphones. Headphones mean having to carry the whole device around the room with you. I don't want that if all I'm doing is listening.

6. I want to be able to fold it all the way around so that the screen is on one side and the keyboard is on the other. Provide a removable hard plastic keyboard cover (or just disable it) instead of making the screen swivel. I don't like swivel screens.

7. $400 is my price point.

Missing Technology: Tools for Digital Film Making

2009-04-12T18:32:00.000-07:00

Film making is not something you can do all by yourself. Sure, you can set up a tripod and then stand in front of it. But if you want actual camera work, and the ability to move within a scene, you need, at absolute minimum, two people.

What I'd like to see developed is a cheap, programmable tilt-and-pan head for attaching a camera to a tripod. Something that can produce smooth, perfectly identical camera motions time and again. It would have to be rather silent, vibration free, and very smooth. Shots would be programmed with a laptop inside of a 3D virtual environment. You could chain shots together and, using a remote, have the camera begin the next motion only when you're ready.

Even better (but more difficult to do) would be to teach the pan-and-tilt head right there in the field exactly what movements you wanted it to reproduce.

Such a system should also have control over the zoom and, preferably, the focus of the camera. This would have to be handled after-the-fact through firmware updates from the more serious camera companies. It could be administered via the camera's own remote control.

You could use a projected laser line to define the edges of the shot box. Because laser light would reflect and possibly polute the shot, you'd want to use it only to rehearse blocking.

A programmable tilt and pan head would allow you do do complex compositing shot. You'd just run the same movements on your scenery, or in your 3D CG program, as you did on your green-screen-backdropped actor.

And why stop there? Why not have a programmable track system too, based (perhaps) on model train tracks. You'd need to create a very finely-tuned locomotive. You'd then put the tracks on specially built workhorses (taller than average).

Crane shots? Not exactly. But a system that simply raises and lowers the aforementioned pan-and-tilt head on a system of smoothly-moving pulleys. Keep in mind, there is no reason to expect to need extremely long shots with many degrees of motion in them. Especially on a programmed system, shots should be kept short. Push the envelope in later developments, perhaps.

I've thought about this as well: if you could build a sufficiently smooth programmable pan-and-tilt head, why not give it the ability to track a target? The actor would wear a beacon of some sort. I don't think that would work all that well. It wouldn't be able to intelligently anticipate the actor's motion. It would feel rather artificial.

How cheap would it need to be to acheive maximum profitability? $399. Anyone with a digital camcorder has proven that they can afford at least this much, if not more, at some point in the past. They are not likely to covet a system that costs more than their camera did. It needs to be cheap enough that they can purchase it without feeling that they alread need it. In other words, it should be sold as a toy, not as a tool. That's not to say that it shouldn't be an effective tool. It has to be. It must be presented in the most professional manner possible.

The Snowball Effect

2009-04-09T01:00:00.000-07:00

Time to take a break from forecasting the future of advertising.

Totally unrelated.

How to build a really big snow wheel.

Start by making a regular snowball. This will be the seed, or nucleus around which the snow wheel will form. Make it as large as possile, as long as it's round. Larger is heavier. Be realistic. Now, drive an eight foot long, four-inch diameter PVC pipe through the center. This is your axel. Put a rope through the axel. More on why later.

Put one person on each side of the axel (only one- they need to be able to move aside if the wheel falls) and two or three people behind the snowball. Start rolling in onl

y one axis. The snow wheel's width will never get to be much more than the diameter of the original nucleus. Go downhill if you can. If flat ground (an athletic field, for instance) is all that's available, be prepared for a workout.

As you proceed, you will inevitably find that the wheel gets lopsided. Periodically stop and reshape for roundness. As perfect as possile. Attach a short rope to the axel and use it to measure the radius. Carve with long knives, spatulas. Patch the gaps. Keeping it round will make all the difference later on. Don't let it get lopsided side-to-side either. It will fall over and kill someone. Or break their legs. Or kill them.

Once it gets too heavy to push, harness up as many more worker ants as you need using the rope running through the axel. Be creative!

Long after the snow on the ground has melted, you'll have a monument to your snow-based engineering skills.

The 100% Subjective Omni-Documentary

2009-04-08T01:00:00.000-07:00

There's a movie I've wanted to make for a while. Nothing like anything anyone's ever dared to do. And for good reason. Working title: 70,000.

*** I'm listening to this album at the moment: http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/atek-phoenix ***

I've noticed that if I take a stream of digital images and show them at a rate of about eight per second, that's more than enough time to "see" individual images. What's interesting is that I can go through the same images, at this speed, and see different images every time. It's fast enough that not every image is being seen.

What I'd like to do is collect 70,000 images and turn them into a movie-length slideshow, non-stop slideshow (about 2:26 long). The idea is that everyone would see the movie differently.

It would be a mental marathon. It would totally exhaust a large percentage of people. I believe some people would be able to be inspired by it, get ideas from it, and that they could watch it countless times without seeing the same thing twice.

As a DVD, or Blu-Ray it would have a number of different soundtracks. It could also be sped up or slowed down.

From time to time you'd slow the relentless rate and pause on a single image. Or, you might have several frames from a video. Enough to capture a tiny moment of motion.

What kind of images would it contain? Overall, it would be an homage to existence. It would

consist of simple images primarily- things you can grasp quickly. It would have art work as well as photography. It would have

a lot of portraits in it. It would take you in many directions at once, allowing your mind to pick up on any number of themes at will. For instance, it would have an almost equal number of male and female portraits, but different people would see more men, or more women, depending on a number of factors- expectation, for instance.

The first challenge is a legal one. Creative Commons licences would make things easier. The best way to proceed would be to include attribution and license information on the image itself. That way, you could arrange them in any order.

The next challenge is one of raw manhours. To find 100 good images a day would be a monumental task- a full time job. Even then, it would take two years just to collect the images- much less get them ready for presentation. A team of twenty, each preparing twenty images a day (volunteer, part-time labor- get paid later) would take could bring the gathering time to

about seven months (including weekends and down days).

If I get twenty volunteers- or even half that- I'll start. Your portion of the profits from the DVD sales will reflect the number of hours you spent on the project divided by the total number of hours to complete.

By the way, eight/second means that, at 24 frames per second, each image would be on screen for three frames. That allows for a two-frame crossfade with the image that preceeds and follows.

It would go something like this for images A, B, and C:

Frame # 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Image A A B B B C C

% 100 80 80 100 80 80 100

Or, from the perspective of a single image (B):

Frame # 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Image B B B B B B B

% 0 20 80 100 80 20 0

In other words, an image would start as 20% visible while the previous image was 80%. In the next frame, the proportions would be reversed. 80% while the previous image was now 20% visible. In the next frame, the image would be 100% visible. Then the fade into the next image would start in the next frame.

The Advertising Revolution: How to "Save" Spam

2009-04-07T19:53:00.001-07:00

And by "save" I mean "kill." And by "kill" I mean change it into something that actually works. For the reader, not for the reprehensible people that engage in unsolicited sending in the first place.

I won't go into why. Let's skip to what. The why will provide itself.

Imagine that the advertising revolution is underway. You no longer are forced to see ads- on TV, on the internet, even in e-print- for things that simply don't interest you. Ads are subject to personalized feedback. Your current interests are respected. Branding-across-demographics is no longer necessary. You are now addressed as an individual. Meanwhile, your spam folder is still full of garbage. So let's clean it up, once and for all. Well, not exactly.

Imagine that every time anyone sent an email to someone they didn't already know, and who didn't already know them (the people in your address book), they had to pay a few pennies in postage. On email. Postage is charged at two points. Half is charged for the simple act of sending. Half is charged if the receiver opts to open the email. The reader can also opt to refund the charge. You like receiving monthly specials from REI? Don't change them for the privilege of sending them to you.

The first charge acts as a disincentive to fill the world's inboxes and spam folders with offensive, excessive amounts of garbage. Part of that change goes directly to the email recipient. You get a lot of spam? You also get a lot of pennies. Another, very small part goes to pay for the service.

The second charge is applied when you open the email. It is also a disincentive to the would-be spammer to send ineffective email. But it is also an incentive for the recipient to give that spam a change. Have a few seconds to spare? Why not earn a few cents checking out the ads you've been sent. The assumption, of course, is that if the recipient looks at the email, even for a second, the sender has recieved meaningful exposure. Certainly better than being lost in a spam folder, resented, mistrusted. Everyone knows you don't follow links in spam, right? (DON'T FOLLOW LINKS IN SPAM).

What happens if someone is sending you personal email for the first time? Well, they have the option of charging you postage, just like any spammer. However, if you respond directly to them at the email they used to send to you, they are automatically refunded. After that, you must actively choose to change them if you ever want to reverse the situation. Responding to them refunds the last several charges, or all charges in the past month, or week. Some length of time.

This would not replace spam filters. You would still be able to block unwanted email. You would never be forced to see something you didn't want to.

Why such a service wouldn't work.

Who could you trust to administer such a system? Even if they couldn't see your mail, they would have a record of what went where. If they were publically traded, they could be bought out and exploited. A private company would be just as susceptible. Even a government-regulated service would be subject to iffyness.

It would be impossible to send completely anonymous email. You would have to register your email with the service in order to get paid.

So, the service would need to be optional.

If you're a private individual that wants to be able to email anyone without a money trail attached, you'd be allowed to do so. As long as you "paid" with a captcha. The receiver wouldn't get paid any postage for the inconvenience of reading the email you sent them. And they'd know it. The email would be labeled as "anonymously sent" or "postage withheld." If it turned out to be a piece of traditional, obnoxious spam, it would still be subject to traditional filtering. The sender would have to solve a captcha for every piece of anonymous email.

It would still be possible to send millions of emails to millions of people you don't know. But you'd have to pay for the right to waste their time. And you'd have to pay the recipient directly. You'd have to think long and hard about whether it was worth the expense. Not just to send, but to be read. The quality and legitimacy of spam would rise accordingly. It would also become far, far less common.

It would still be possible to send anonymous email to anyone. You just couldn't do it quickly. And they'd know it was anonymous. They'd have the option of rejecting it for that reason, to even block it permanently.

Let's examine a common scenario. You receive an obnoxious forward from someone you don't know that well. Charge them. You take some of the money they earned from reading spam in their own inbox. They start to notice that they're losing money.

How do you administer the system? For web based email, it's done in server side software. For HDD-resident email software, it's a download.

Would anyone be exempt from being charged for sending mass emails? Would the government be able to send email for free? Perhaps.

Email is a currently a weak system. Spam is that weakness. Solve spam and the utility of email will be elevated. Marginally respectible companies willing to spend money on printing and posting junk mail will have a cost effective alternative. Trees will survive.

The system will involve an increase in web traffic. An extra two messages must be sent before an email can reach your inbox. One confirming that the sender can afford to send, one subtracting the postage. Potentially, afterwards, there would be another message. The total number of messages sent would multiply by four. But there would actually be a net gain in efficiency because spam volume would go down.

Salvation for Magazines: The Future of eReader Design

2009-04-05T18:14:00.001-07:00

Back to thinking about advertising.

In this post I will ellaborate on an idea I mentioned here.

I subscribe to exactly two magazines. Wired and Time. If I were to subcribe to a third, I'd probably go with Popular Mechanics. Ask me about a fourth and a fifth, and I might not know what to say. I'm a man of many interests, but few of those interests are expressed in a desire to subscribe to a magazine on the subject. Instead, the internet is all I need. Or is that the only way the magazine market, as it currently exists, allows me to think?

Perhaps there are dozens of magazines that, if I had them within reach, I'd give them a meaningful share of my time. Biblical Archeological Review, New Scientist, the Economist, Kitplanes, Backpacker, Cinefex... oh, the list could be really very long, if I were willing to shell out. I'm casually, and perhaps convertibly, interested in plenty of magazines. I'm not willing to pay any amount of money for 100% of what I can get a reasonable 30 or 40% for free elsewhere. Or at least feel that I am. In reality, I know there's no replacement for paid writing.

Unfortunately, there are more and more people that feel this way. Many venerable, once-essential magazines are gradually dying off. New magazines arise only by appealing to a broad, shallow interest. Perhaps correlationally, just as the technology for reaching any conceivable microniche is coming into its own, the previous technology (print) is flattening into grocery store subjects (decorating, fashion, hot rods, guns, and body building).

I could go on and on about the problem. I could expound at length on how we got here. But I'm ready to talk about the solution.

E-readers, like Kindle, are being designed wrong in that they ignore one of the most important ways that writers get paid- not through royalties, but through ad revunue. They are designed for books.

So I'm about to describe the e-reader of the future. The one that saves the magazine industry from inevitalbe information age demise.

The next e-reader must have two screens, preferably a dual-mode, two-layer display: low energy epaper and color OLCD. One page for text, one for a full-page ad that is present while you read the text. Color is essential for simulating a vast number of books, not just magazines. A dual-mode display would vastly broaden the available book market at the same time. Textbooks require color. E-readers for children must have color. A two-page spread is essential for some kinds of information, some kinds of illustrations.

It will cost more, but that's of no concern. A two-screen, dual-mode e-reader can can be sold for close-to, or less than cost as long as a profit sharing arrangement exists in which advertising revenue is added to lost profits. And the potential revenue is enormous.

Advertising on such devices should be subject to a voluntary feedback model like the one I described in an earlier post. People appreciate the ads in magazines. Don't feel shy about putting ads in front of people- as long as those ads are for things your readers are interested in.

New e-readers should always have wireless capability, netbook capabilities, but must be usable far from any available network. They should operate in a low-power, black-and-white mode. If you are interested in an ad, you simply tap it to see the full-color version. Ads should be allowed to animate, or force you to see full color, only during the first few seconds after "turning the page." I mean one to three seconds max. Constantly moving ads are annoying and distracting. You should be able to click on an ad- all the way through to a purchase decision- without losing your place in the article you're reading. The ad page is also a browser, or an Adobe AIR interactive document, or an order form.

Naturally, this dual-screen e-reader should fold. You should be able to fold it closed, to protect the screen and hide what's inside, or fold it open, so that it can be read one-handed. The button for turning to the next page should be only on the right side. Turning back, only on the left. That way, you must look at both pages before you can advance.

Not every page of text would be opposite an ad. Sometimes you would have two-pages of text, or a two-page illustration. Sometimes you'd have two-page ads. It should balance out.

Instead of flipping through a magazine, you could have a visual table-of-contents. Each page of the magazine, including the ads, would be visible in miniature on a page that is cached for fast accessibility at all times. The ad page could be used for this. It is good to encourage the reader to interact with the ad page (which would, most often, be the right hand page). The reader should feel good about the ad page.

You'd still pay for subscriptions. But you'd pay a lot less than you do now. No paper, printing, mailing, or mail-based subscription service charges. More timely, targeted ads. Transparent, instant feedback. In fact, some magazines could be distributed free to the consumer.

You could also have an ad-royalty model in which writers get paid a bonus for the revenue generated by the ads that accompanied their writing.

Magazines themselves would become more sophisticated. There is no reason you couldn't have interactive flash illustrations, embedded video, or links directly to related material built into the magazine articles of the future. The same is true of books.

The window of opportunity is rapidly closing. The chance to employ the existing two-page magazine model will not always be available. We will outgrow it. There is already a well established alternative model- the internet advertising model (banners, sidebars, embedded text ads)- to compete with.

How would google feel about controling the print advertising market as well? I imagine they'd be willing to invest in the technology that allowed them to do that.

As a consumer, reader, and technology user, wouldn't you rather have a dual-screen solution?

As a magazine publisher, wouldn't you rather not die?

As an advertiser, wouldn't you rather have a full page ad instead of a sidebar, or a banner?

E-readers need to evolve in this single, essential, non-negotiable way. Once they do, all previous e-reader innovations will become instantly obsolete.

As a technology designer, wouldn't you rather make a sale than a footnote to history?

A New Method of Acheiving Lift

2009-04-03T12:01:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's post about how to actually build a Cloud Nine.

Ways of achieving lift. Plus one that's never been used.

Rocket lift. One of the oldest forms of lift. Stay on one side of a long-lasting explosion and you will find yourself flying.

Airfoil lift. Again, very old. Kites use this. Essentially, a combination (to a relative degree depending on airspeed, wing chord, wing loading, etc) of downward deflection and an upward-pulling low-pressure area above the wing. Used in gliders, powered aircraft, ekips, rotorcraft, frisbees.

Hotter than air lift. Relatively recent invention. A form of lighter-than-air lift. Heating normal air lowers it's pressure relative to the surrounding air, making it lighter. Requires a heat source. Is highly dependent on the relative temperature of the surrounding air. Doesn't work well in warm weather.

Light gas lift. More recent still. Helium or hydrogen has a lower molecular weight than the air thas surrounds it. Doesn't need extra heating, works regardless of relative temperature. Economical for use or large airships. Low cost way of staying aloft for a long time.

Accelerated air lift. It's debatable whether this deserves to be a category of its own. Like rocket lift but works by moving the air, not by controlling an explosion. Insects use a version of this. Insects (with the exception of butterflies and their ilk) don't use airfoil lift.

Eh, okay. Electrostatic lift. Electrically inducing an ionic flow. Check youtube.

And then their's one more that has never been exploited before.

Low-pressure lift. It's a form of lighter-than air lift. Instead of heating the air to lower its weight by lowering its pressure, or simply using a lower weight gas to begin with, it is possible, though very difficult, to achieve lift by lowering the pressure.

Essentially, by removing air from the lift volume, you make the lift volume lighter. But you can't do that with a balloon. A balloon would just get smaller, equalizing the pressure difference as it did. You need a rigid wall. The more air you remove, the more rigid it needs to be.

With Cloud (see previous post), which requires a rigid wall to begin with, it would be possible to to pump a few percent of the air out of the inside of the volume. This would put positive pressure, pushing inward, on all parts of the structure simultaneously (though not equally- an approximately 17% difference from top to bottom due to differences in atmospheric pressure).

Each percentage point of air removed from the interior would translate into more than a hundred tons of additional lift.

This method can also be used in concert with light-gas lift and hot-air lift.

But it's a risky approach because, if you breach the envelope, you lose the extra lift. Instead of relying on low-pressure lift at all times, it could be used as an emergency back-up plan. Powerful pumps could quickly remove some of the air to boost altitude. It would be used as a first resort- particularly in areas where dropping a hundred tons of water might not be particularly neighborly. It could also be used after water ballast had already been dropped, as a last-resort emergency maneuver.

Actually, low pressure lift is an old idea. Otherwise known as vacuum lift, it dates to 1670 when a brilliant Jesuit priest named Francis Lana conceived of an airship held aloft by airtight copper spheres from which the air had been pumped out. To make a copper sphere strong enough, however, would require making it too heavy to fly. In fact, no such metal is strong enough on the scale Lana had in mind (about seven meters in diameter).

By building extremely large, and by lowering one's expectations of acheiving near-total vaccuum, it's actually conceivable.

A Completely Serious Approach to Building a Flying City

2009-04-02T06:53:00.000-07:00

A city of ten thousand. That flies. And really can't do anything but fly. And I'm serious. Totally.

The idea belongs to Buckminster Fuller, what he called a Cloud Nine. The idea, in a two-sentence nutshell, is that the larger you build a geodesic sphere, the lighter it is relative to the volume of air it contains. Heat that air a few degrees warmer than the surrounding air and you have a rather large hot air balloon. Every time you double the diameter, the volume of the air is cubed. In other words, if you build bigger, the economy of scale rises geometrically. If you build a Cloud that's a mile wide, the payload capacity would be in the thousands of tons. And the amount of usable space is also massive- a whole countryside in fact. You run out of payload much faster than you run out of space.

The principles governing flight are straight forward. There's no debate that such a thing would fly if it could be built. What Fuller never mentioned was how to do that- how to build one. And that's what I'm about to address.

A geodesic- or, rather, preferably, a tensegrity sphere- is not strong enough to support its own weight until a complete ring of its structure is completed.

*** A geodesic uses nearly identical rigid components to form all the parts the structure. A tensegrity is much more complicated, is flexible, and effeciently isolates compression and tension forces into specialized structures. High-compression struts for compression, high tension lines for, well, tension. ***

And even then, a completed ring is only strong perpendicular to the plane of that ring. Nowhere else. Furthermore, if you are building a sphere, you can't build from the bottom up because the bottom is a mere point and then grows outward. You'd have to build some very large scaffolds- scaffolds more extensive than all the architecture found on some entire continents. It would be like building a upside down pyramid. Only magnitudes larger. And you can't start with a hemisphere because you would then need to lift the whole structure up to put the lower half under it. It would be unthinkable to produce the mechanical force needed to do such a thing. You might be able to use the structure's own buoyancy to do this, but you'd be subject to intense stress from wind and weather as you did. Billions of pounds of force even in good weather.

Until a sphere is complete, in all axi, it is extremely fragile. Imagine the difference between an eggshell that has been cracked, and one that is intact. An already-cracked egg shell can't withstand even a few dozen grams of pressure without shattering further. An intact eggshell, on the other hand, can withstand many pounds of equally-applied force (as you may notice, I mix SI and English units at whim. Totally intentional).

A mile-wide sphere cannot be built strong enough to stand up to normal stresses before it is completed. To build it strong enough would make it too heavy to fly. It is an almost intractible problem.

Fuller imagined one solution. You would build the sphere entirely in orbit and then drop it, gently, slowly, into the atmosphere. By the time we have the freight capacity to build such a structure in space, we'll be far more interested in building space stations. Such a system, while technically feasible, is very unlikely to ever be employed. We'd have to run out of places for space stations first.

My solution is accessible today.

What is needed, put simply, is a mile-high system of "cranes." What I mean by cranes- that is something you'll have to bear with me on. But cranes strong enough to support the weight of the incomplete, unskinned sphere. At least the part that doesn't support itself. And a way to protect the incomplete structure from the weather. Basically, virtually, a construction hangar. But I said "accessible today" didn't I?

We know quite well that it is impossible, using current building techniques, to build anything other than a radio tower anywhere near a mile tall. Such towers have never been built. Also, a radio tower is an extremely poor analogy for a crane. A tower needs only to support its own weight, and can be held in place by tension lines. A Cloud-building construction crane would need to support hundreds of tons of weight.

So, next, we examine natural topography to provide the placements for our cranes. A fjord in Norway, some spur of the Grand Canyon, a valley between two peaks. A strip mine in Siberia. Somewhere must work, surely. But it's not as easy as it sounds. While there are many places with a mile of relief, such places rarely appears so abruptly as to afford the ideally-shaped pocket we'd desire. We could compromise. We could build something smaller- give up the economy of scale that allows for a complete flying city- or we could attempt to use a place with mere half-mile relief to build the lower half of a sphere and rotate it 180 degrees so that it becomes a semi-buoyant dome, half-a-mile above ground level. (A mechanical near-impossibility). We could then race to complete the lower half. In any scenario, we would have to imagine running suspension bridges across a huge space. Cables, gondolas, cranes- a massive collection of complex infrastructure. Tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in tools.

In any event, such an approach is not the answer. That is not the way to build a mile-wide sphere.

*** A mile wide anything is absolutely unheard of. We build ships that are over a thousand feet long. We build skyscrapers. We build warehouses. But we don't build anything anywhere near a mile in size- unless it is completely resting on the earth, like a warehouse. Even then, the mile scale is unexplored. A mile-wide structure is not an incremental increase in scale, it is a massive leap forward. It is a magnitude higher. A leap for which few analogies exist. I can't overstate how audacious it would be to work at this scale. ***

The answer is far simpler, more efficient, and- most importantly- cheaper. And it is available today, using existing technology. In fact, the only thing that really stands between a Cloud and reality is the will to build it. Such a structure could even be profitable to build.

There is another place- besides canyons, fjords, and craters- that offers a mile difference between top and bottom. Furthermore, it is a place that allows you to operate from the top down. In fact, it requires that you do. It is also a very calm, predictable place. And it is a naturally protective environment. It is the "virtual hangar" we need. It also can be used as a virtually weightless environment as long as you plan to use it as such.

I'm writing, of course, about the ocean. I've even picked a place: just to the west of the Yucatan Penninsula, north of Cárdenas, Mexico.

You start on shore, building flat rings that are carried by track into the water and then towed to your building site. You tow the rings with powerful barges. You build the rings with the capability of varying their own buoyancy, like chains of unmanned submarines. You then lower the scaffold rings into the water. You overlap the scaffolds, like meridians on a globe. You control the process like slow-motion marionettes, cables running from surface to depth.

You then begin to build on the scaffold, at the surface. You use a combination of shallow-depth and just-out-of-the-water construction. As you complete a section, you rotate the incomplete sphere- by pulling the appropriate control cables from the construction ships. The scaffold assists by varying internal buoyancy. At this point, you are building only the framework of the sphere. The skin will be added after the structure is complete, strong, and the scaffold has been disassembled and towed away- ready for reuse.

Using a similar, roll-as-you-go process, you put the skin on next. I'm leaving a lot of detail out. The skin would start as a single surface. A second layer would be added much later.

And here's the hard part (not that everything else is easy).

Using the rotation method you attach uninflated buoyancy bags to the outside of the sphere, especially the upper half. Each unit has a large amount of compressed air inside tanks that self-detach when depleted. You then begin to pump heated air into the top of the dome- the part just beneath the water. At this point, you are putting a massive amount of stress on the skin. You reinforce the topmost portion accordingly.

If you can do this in cold weather, there is a significant lift bonus. You also use all available construction barges, and perhaps a fleet of other ships, and you haul outward and upward. Water drains out of the bottom as the sphere gradually emerges from the water. At first, it is being lifted on external buoyancy, provided by the underwater float bags, by the ships, and by a small amount of mechanical leverage (possibly working against anchors set in the sea floor). As it inches upward, it relies increasingly on its internal buoyancy- the same force that will allow it to fly.

If the sphere can be built large enough, light enough, and with the help of supplemental buoyancy, it rises from the water. The completed structure flies free of the water, is moored to the construction ships, and, by varying its altitude to take advantage of prevailing winds, is "supersailed" toward land. It may be the weather doesn't allow it to go where you want it to. Worst case, you release it and fly it around the world, delivering building material with airships. Up to this point, the structure is far more efficient than necessary. It would actually be prudent to carry millions of pounds of water ballast.

Over time, much of the water ballast is replaced with useful payload. The first task would be to develop an on board airport with a one-mile airstrip (at the equator). Once completed, you can visit it at any time using more conventional aircraft, though jet airliners might be out of the question. Then you build the essential infrastructure. Repair systems, onboard generators, safety systems (lifeboats). Then you build a city. Resorts, estates, offices, schools, and retail space.

Naturally, it would rotate, which might- through a combination of active and passive systems- be used for minor navigation. For the most part, however, it would navigate using the supersailing method. Keep in mind that Cloud would not be a form of point-to-point transportation. It would be a moving destination. A supranational sky island.

*** Though it would be far less interesting, Cloud could also be anchored in place. It would then be the ideal site for a massive wind plant- far more than enough to meet its own needs. ***

Cloud would, before all else, be a real estate investment. Individual apartments would be spacious, with walls built of lightweight materials. Residents would pay based on the weight of the structure and furniture payload, not the number of square feet. Condos would range from around a million dollars to more than fifty million- possibly far more.

Cloud would operate a research university. It would be a magnet community for innovators and luminaries. It would grow some of its own food, using aeroponics. It would have a cold indoor lake which could be dropped, in the form of sudden rain, to add emergency lift- one of several systems in place to provide aggressive course adjustment.

Perhaps the largest part of its economy would be based on tourism. It would carry a small fleet of air taxis- possibly hybrid airships- that would visit local airports, shuttling visitors back and forth. It would be possible to BASE jump indoors. The views- both internal and external- would be like nothing else on earth. You could play golf at ten thousand feet.

If necessary, it would be capable of "landing"- resting gently on the water, or open land. The base could be built in such a way as to provide a soft buffer zone that would allow it to land in forests with minimum mutual damage. In the event of catastrophic damage, it would also be repairable in flight- as the internal air volume would be sub-divided into a number of sections, like the sections of an orange. The loss of one section should be within the surplus margin of lift available by other means (releasing ballast, super-heating, adding hydrogen, cloud seeding to reduce local external temperatures, and one other) The loss of two sections would cause Cloud to gently land. It should be made capable of surviving a 9/11-type collision with an airliner. For safety sake, it would be illuminated on the outside. From fifty miles away, it would be as large and visible as the full moon. You could display video on its surface to audiences of millions, broadcasting the sound via radio.

There is also the potential for Cloud to become the first example of a previously unexploited method of achieving flight. A mode of lighter-than-air lift that has never been used before. But I'll have to write about that later (see next post).

I don't seriously expect Cloud to ever be built. It is, first-and-foremost, a thought experiment. I've thought of it as the organizing principle for an introductory physics-and-engineering textbook for high school and college students, as well as a "picture book" for younger children. Possibly the same book. The kind of book you keep for life. The kind of book that inspires you to dream big, the way Buckminster Fuller inspired me.

The Future of Oceanic Power Generation

2009-04-01T23:21:00.000-07:00

Years ago I "invented" a method for harnessing sea slow-moving ocean currents. This is a quick overview of the idea and its drawbacks.

Ocean currents may move at only 3 kts but represent one of the most energy-dense potentials on earth. Only fossil fuel deposits and geothermal hotspots have the potential for being denser.

A single current, such as the Gulf Stream, may represent the solar input of many thousands of square kilometers of open ocean- concentrated at the surface and transformed into motion. Currents vary in location and intensity, but to a lesser degree than wind and (except in desert areas) solar. They are far more constant than tides and waves.

I calculate that tapping a small part of the kinetic energy of contained in an area fifty-by-a hundred miles, and given a 3 kt average speed, would supply our entire planet' s energy needs. And that assumes a sparse distribution of the generators described below. To do the same thing with wind or solar would take up over a hundred thousand square miles of suitable territory.

Tapping ocean currents could be done with negligible effect on the currents themselves. How do I know this? Because the total energy available is extremely enormous. It's equivalent to somewhere in the vicinity of 1 it 1.5 million square kilometers of solar-collecting capacity. Any perturbation would be proportional to the percentage of the whole that is being tapped. Granted, this is something that would require further study. Even if extracted energy is minimal, a potentially nontrivial amount of local turbulence may be generated, which might confuse some of the less navigationally talented pelagic species. Fortunately the system described below would generate very little turbulence. Certainly no more than a bit of bad weather.

So, yes, the major problem isn't a lack of available energy. It's that you need large devices with broad cross-sections in order to tap remote current energy efficiently enough to make it pay off. If you build a bladed turbine, you'll be forced to work with a circular cross section. Because currents are fastest at the surface, and drop in speed with depth, it seems that ideal placement of a turbine would be close to half-in and half-out of the water- thereby allowing for its widest part to encounter the fastest speeds.

Unfortunately, moving blades in and out of the water would cause added drag at the air-water interface. An individual blade would only provide power half the time- unless the wind was right- and would be vulnerable to forces in directions other than the current itself- which would cause enormous stress. Furthermore, differences in air and water properties, as well as in speeds inherent to both, would dictate a design compromise away from optimum.

To build a bladed turbine large enough, one would have to build it incredibly strong. Strength equates with weight. Weight cuts into efficiency. Weight adds to cost.

A bladed turbine would need to be fully submerged to remain economical in its design. Being fully submerged, it would still encounter a speed gradient that would cause significant axial stress requiring a rather robust design. A bladed turbine would be inherrently inefficient in such a setting. It would have to be small and numerous. Again, too expensive, both in deployment and maintenance.

A bladed turbine is not the answer.

My solution doesn't use a turbine at all. It uses paired drogue chutes designed with high-aspect-ratio shapes optimized to put the bulk of the cross-section inside the fastest part of the current (right near the surface). Each chute would very large- thousands of square meters- and be attached to one end of a long semi-buoyant cable- potentially many miles long- that would, in turn, be connected at its center to an anchored barge containing a gearbox and generator (I mix units, that's right). While one chute is open, the second one would be closed- deflated so as to provide minimal drag as it is drawn opposite the direction of the active, open chute. If the two chutes were at the opposite ends 20-mile cable, and the current were traveling at 3 kt, and the chute was moving at 1.5 kts, it would take almost 6 hours to complete one down-current run.

When the open waterchute reaches the end of its run, it is closed- using a simple system that is nonetheless too complex to describe without the use of schematics- while its paired counterpart is opened. The closed chute is pulled back toward the barge while the open chute goes down the current in its place.

It's a process that would need to be actively controlled. As the chutes pass each other, for instance, they cannot occupy the same area of the ocean. The closed chute must be steered away, which is accomplished with a dynamically controlled rudder attached to the cable itself.

The chute and its cable is also a hazard to deep-drafted ships. Beacons and active navigation information would be in order.

The greatest obstacle isn't in the design and operation of the chute system, but rather in the anchoring of the barge itself.

I believe, however, that there will come a time when deep sea oil exploration rigs will outlive their primary use. The setting of anchors in the sea floor is a new potential market. As oil becames scarce, the need for alternative energy sources increases proportionally.

What impact would these waterchutes have on sea life? Well, for one thing, they are moving too slowly to trap anything. They can be equipped with deterrents that would protect larger lifeforms, and holes large enough for smaller ones to escape through.

Another obstacle is that such a system doesn't generate power constantly. The longer the cables, the higher the duty cycle. However, it can never reach 100%. Running multiple systems in tandem won't solve the problem completely either. Different units are bound to operate at different speeds, causing the down-cycle to arrive at different times. Sometimes it would average out into smooth power. Sometimes it would cause significant drops as multiple systems encounter simultaneous downtime. Such factors could be managed actively by scheduling reversals at less than full extenstion.

And then there is the huge problem of transmitting power from sea to land. Power lines could, conceivably, be run along the bottom of the ocean, or suspended at reasonably serviceable depths. Running power lines above the water is a special design problem but has the benefit of allowing the lines to be uninsulated. Either system may be more practical, depending on the individual circumstances.

Another obstacle is that ocean currents rarely exist close to where the power is needed. Fortunately, most of the world's population at least lives within a hundred miles of the ocean. Current farms could be built in many places around the world. Industries can also locate to where power is cheapest.

Such a system may well be the cheapest, greenest power source available on a global scale. It has an extremely high per unit cost due to the fact that it is only efficient at a large economy of scale. That cost translates, in turn, into a huge amount of power generation. Each one may be equivalent of an average-sized hydroelectric dam, or over a hundred wind turbines.

Will such a system ever be built? I doubt it. The obstacles are too great. The system would be too expensive to bring online. Only if we are desperate to be able to tap ocean currents would such a system be explored. Other sources of energy are bound to be far cheaper up front. It's an option though.

The Gap Between Toys and Games

2009-03-31T12:01:00.000-07:00

A game is governed by rules. If you don't play by the rules, you're not really playing.

A toy, on the other hand, has no rules. You make up the rules yourself.

A ball, for instance, is a toy. In general, physical objects are more likely to be toys than games. In fact, a game may not even have a physical component. It may consist entirely of rules. Hide-and-seek, for instance, is a game that can be played anywhere hiding places can be found.

I have the impression that childhood was once much more centered on toys. My own childhood, for instance, was toy-centric. One of my favorite toys was a shovel. With a shovel one could dig ditches, put boards over the ditches, and have "caves." I don't remember playing in these homemade caves- except to prove that one could get from point A to B. The fun was in the making. Legos too, were a toy. They could be combined in countless ways. Again, "play" consisted of the act of building.

The distinction is important in light of the fact that many things that are being sold as toys are actually games. Toys that represent very exact things- action figures belonging to a certain narrow mythology, plastic GI Joe tanks with no other purpose than to serve as weapons of imaginary war, items ostensibly designed to be considered "collectible." The downside of the gamification of the toy industry should be relatively obvious. Toys require- and inspire- the use of imagination; games operate at face value- without any added imagination being necessary. You can play Monopoly as a boardgame- as nothing more than what it is. You don't need to imagine yourself as a real estate tycoon to play the game. You can play a video game without imagining yourself to be part of the world.

Game mentality becomes more prevalent as a person grows older. Rules make for more complicated outcomes, more reliably enjoyable play. Toys can be hard work. One even gets the idea that a child may prefer toy-based play simply because he or she cannot grasp the complexity required for game playing. But which is more fun?

Without a doubt, toy-based play is more enjoyable. Adding a layer of self-identification to a video game makes it far more fun. Subtracting that layer is never preferrable.

Here is my mini-manifesto for toy designers.

Design for generic play. Get away from specific uses. As a child I would rather have had a new Lego set with many versatile blocks than a few narrowly-useful unique ones. A toy plane would have been preferrable to a toy boat. Better yet- a toy float plane. Toys were vehicles of imagined exploration. RC cars always went too fast. Their batteries died too soon. I would have preferred a vehicle that made the house or yard seem big by going slow, not small by going fast. An RC tractor would have been more fun than a high-speed buggy. A toy plane isn't much fun if the only thing it can carry is a pilot. An amphibious cargo plane would be more interesting than a fighter jet. Boys like their toys to have weapons, but a mistake to build an entire toy around a weaponized use. When it comes to play, fighting isn't as important as exploration.

In the grand scheme of playthings, nothing is superior to Legos. I have a problem with how hard it is to get enough pieces to be able to build a satisfying variety of thing. Lego should sell sets that embrace versatility. Narrow, specific designs end up supporting game-like play.

Video games should be the same way. Too much energy is spent designing games with single, specific pathways to success. Exploration, which is based in toy-like play, is woefully overlooked. When I was a kid, the best game you could have given me would have been one in which I had a choice of vehicles to move from point A to B, as well as a variety of obstacles to overcome. The best example of what I mean, unfortunately, is Grand Theft Auto, which is not for kids at all.

The toy industry's profit motive is written all over the place. Game-based play is easier to sell. It's easier to develop product tie-ins around. It's easier to leverage into a line of collectibles. Toy-based play, on the otherhand- Legos, Playmobile, building blocks- can be extremely cost effective by comparison.

So what should be done?

Toy designers, design for versatile exploration. Move toward the generic.

Parents, buy buckets of Legos, not individual sets depicting Star Wars fighters.

Kids, never forget how to engage in toy-based play.

The Next Decade in Advertising

2009-03-30T21:13:00.000-07:00

Ideas about the future of advertising don't leap to mind as being particularly compelling reading. Well, okay.

There was a road that I often traveled with my parents when I was a kid. It was a road going west out of Randolph, VT. There was a place in the road where you could make a choice. You could go up over a hill, or around to the side of it. Beyond that choice the road rejoined and went on. What strikes me about that choice was that they were, in a sense, nearly equivalent. Neither was a shortcut. One represented lateral displacement, the other vertical. Often my parents would call for an instant vote. "Over or around." We usually voted to go over.

Since the beginning of modern advertising, messages have been targeted as members of demographic groups. If you wanted to sell luxury cars, you advertised them in the business section of the newspaper. If you wanted to sell diapers, you might put them in women's magazines. If you wanted to sell toys, you marketed them directly to the children that would play with them, hoping that the children would act as an unpaid sales force.

What you didn't do was advertise to too small a niche. You went for the greatest common denominator (GCD). And in the process of advertising to the largest group possible, you actually had a hand in defining that group. Advertising, especially after World War II, when American capitalism entered its strongest chapter, has had a homogenizing effect on how culture sees itself. We're still living with the labels and assumptions that were first developed for that era.

But this is a very different age.

When we were choosing whether to go over or around, we knew that we would end up in the same place either way. We knew it would take about the same amount of time. The only thing different was that particular part of the journey.

Those who use advertising- a group that encompasses the whole gamut of business in our post-industrial society- don't need to care about how they get to their destination. They need only one thing. They need to arrive. They need to convert customers. Whether taking them from the pool of the previously uncommitted, new spenders, or by stealing them from competitors, the path isn't as important as the destination.

And therein lies the problem with old style advertising.

If you don't care how you get there, you'll choose the more direct route. If you were to look at two roads on a map- a 2D flattening- you'd be tempted to believe that the straightest, most-direct seeming route was by far the best. You'd be missing the hill altogether.

Successful advertising has, for a long time, consisted of large campaigns targeted at the GCD of huge numbers of people. The finesse approach, which focuse on smaller cross-sections of a product's target market, often used the same advertising assets. There was an expectation that, to some degree, a product represented those that would buy it. In other words, the brand was mistaken for the product itself. It was even misconstrued as representing the target market itself. Someone could be a "Marlboro man" or part of the "Pepsi generation." Car salesman sold image overhauls in the form of hood ornaments (attached to automobiles). If you participated- as all were required to do to some degree- then you could be identified by the labels on your clothes. One could even use brands to identify oneself.

That's still how most advertising works. Big brands require big piles of money. They not only reach a broad demographic, they actually define it.

But I'm not here to write about going over.

A new form of internet technology opens up a completely new road. And the ramifications of traveling that road stand to have a profound effect on the concept of product-based identity.

Instead of pushing people into categories and hoping that they fit well enough to be durably branded, it is now possible to reach people where they already are. Instead of advertising to million of people an once in hopes of reaching those who actually could be customers (if they could be converted), it is now possible to target, with greater and greater sophistication, smaller and smaller definitions of the buying public. Microniches are now addressible.

But I'm not thinking about targeted marketing. I'm thinking about something a whole step beyond. Let me describe what it would look like.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that you're a 25-year-old male with a new car in your garage and a hungry dog by your side. Let's say you want to watch a program on the History channel. Traditionally, you can expect to see ads for the AARP, term life insurance, and comfortable sedans. But you're not in the market for any of those things, and if the advertisers of those things knew a little more about you, they wouldn't be wasting their money trying to sell them to you. So, in our next-age example, you see ads for pet food, new tires, the most recent FPS. And you're more than happy to give that information about yourself because it means not having to watch ads that hold no interest for you.

Let's take it a step farther. Suppose one of those ads is successful. You decide, based on the ad, and how happy your dog is, to go with a particular brand of dog food. Let's say that you let Purina know that you're now one of their loyal customers.

Purina now has a vested interest in keeping you while other dog food manufacturers have an interest in poaching you. Purina won't try to convince you to switch anymore. Instead, they'll let you know when and where to find their products on sale. They make sure you know about other products your dog might like. They'll change the tone of the conversation and, in so doing, they'll solidify their advantage.

Purina's competitors may be able to identify you as a loyal customer and try to lure you away. But the same system that would allow them to craft a campaign specifically for that purpose would also allow Purina to keep tabs on the competitor's exposure. Both parties would be able to exercise their campaigns with greater efficiency. It would come down to who did a better job. Who offered a better product. Who made the customer feel more appreciated. In essence, customer service- even at the level of initial advertising.

Let's take it another step. Let's say that two competitors are vying for your patronage. One of them, unfortunately, has ads that annoy you. They're whiny, manipulative, and desperate. In fact, every time you see such an ad, it makes you want to punish that product's maker by going to the competition. So, you let that company know. You tell them, "I don't want to see this ad anymore." And they are faced with a choice. They can ignore your request and risk annoying you further, or they can honor it, replace the ad with something else, and improve their standing with you. The better their ads- the more amusing, the more powerful- the more likely you are to watch them.

One more step. Let's say that you're in the market for a new car. So you say so. Upto that point you were being shown a slow steady stream of car ads calculated to get you in the mood to buy something new. But the moment you admit to being in the market, the conversation changes. One company in particular starts putting a series of ads in front of you. You find that you now know about the car's engine and fuel economy. You have a feel for its interior. You've seen it accelerate. You've seen it in the snow. And then, one day- when the advertiser knows you know everything you need to know- they offer you a deal and tell you where to go to take advantage of it. They issue you a personal invitation to do a test drive. And because you have no real need for pickup truck, not once did you see an ad for one.

And I'm not talking about TV advertising- though TV is part of the picture. I'm talking about the ads you see while watching shows online. Sidebar ads on practically any website you might visit. Even the ads you hear while listening to your nextgeneration car radio. I'm talking about the ads you see while reading a ereader version of your favorite magazine. By the way, ereaders need to two pages as soon as possible. One page for the print, one for the ad. If you can do that, and do it soon enough, you can preserve and perfect the existing print advertising paradigm. Otherwise, print advertising dies.

What can you do about it today?

Well, if you an advertiser, stop trying to sell to the idea of the single perfect ad. Don't get stuck taking just one road. Improve your footwork. Stop thinking of yourselves as contractors and start thinking of yourself as partners. As a consumer-marketer-producer feedback loop is developed, expect to be paid on the success of your ideas, not merely for your ability to sell them.

If you're a business owner, expect more specific ideas. Expect sophistocated psychology. Expect to pay more in creativity as part of the tradeoff in getting your message more efficiently to market. Expect to learn things about yourself you neven knew. And be prepared to employ more than one ad agency. Update your approach to image-branding. Alter your expectations of what advertising can accomplish.

If you're a consumer, start volunteering information. If you have an opinion about an ad, let the company know. Use words like "boycott due to annoyance" and "great job!" At the end of the day, the consumer is the one that stands to benefit the most. The more valuable your advertising, the more power you have to support the TV shows you enjoy. Less of your time is wasted in watching ads that don't interest you. More access to news and articles, based on the increased value of the advertising that accompanies it. More power as a consumer.

The choice was whether to go over the hill or around it. The distance was the same. The destination was the same. The difference was how you got there. Do you go uphill- spend the money, build the brand, change the basic fabric of societal identity? Or do you go around?

You go around, because, as it so happens, that's where your customer lives. You don't need to look down from the high vantage anymore. You can go right up to the front door. You might even get invited inside.