Brad Ideas

Robocars & More

Voice over IP, a field I've been working in, has been generating some recent excitement. And that's appropriate.

However a lot of the talk is about something I consider the wrong direction. I call it PoIP, for PSTN over IP or worse, POTS over IP. (POTS, in turn, stands for Plain old Telephone Service.)

Online discussion and collaboration tools are old now, dating back almost 40 years to PLATO, 30 years for mailing lists, 25 years for BBSs and USENET. Yet somehow I don't feel we've got it right yet, and in fact may be going in some wrong directions.

I beleive there are two central dichotomies that make the problem hard to solve.

The first is the distinction between "serial" material which is meant to be read as a stream (though perhaps referenced later) and "browsable" information meant to be read in a somewhat more random order.

In the 80s, as VCRs were becoming popular, I saw an interesting product that acted as a commercial eliminator for those who wanted to tape classic, black and white movies that were often on late at night.

The product simply detected when the signal went colour, and would trigger the pause button on your VCR. (In early VCRs this was not even infrared.) The commercials were colour, the movie was B&W and so you got a commercial free movie recorded.

It would be nice to see (perhaps it already exists) an ethernet card for a PC that also looked, in hardware, like all the other standard PC hardware. In particular like a basic standard SVGA video card, like a soundblaster, like a keyboard and like a mouse.

But in fact, all writes to these devices would be sent out over the ethernet. Writes to the video memory, sounds send to the sound card and so on.

People who speculate about the growth of cultures have wondered if our moon (which is unusually large compared to the host planet, at least based on the limited set of planets we can see) played a big role in our societies. Did it make us more aware of the sky than people who evolved on a moonless world would be, or a world with a small moon? Did the tides have an unusual affect on us beyond ordinary solar tides?

A couple of years ago, a series of digital picture frame products appeared. Some took memory cards. One plugged into a modem so grandma could get new grandchild pictures each day without doing things. But they were all super low resolution and high priced.

Panels have come down a lot recently. I see wall mount 1280x1024 panels getting to about $350, wall mountable (though you need power.) That's a resolution I could handle.

There's lots of privately owned parking out there, even around airports, but nor market for it. What about a web market?

Imagine, if you owned a parking space, you could file it in a database. People going somewhere hard or expensive to park would go to the web before the trip, enter the address, and get offered a spot near their target with a rate. This could also include commercial lots with spare space. If not at the web, you could call from your registered cell phone for a small extra fee while driving to your destination.

One of my interests is "new democracy" -- concepts of governance that could only exist due to the revelution in the technologies of organization that computers have brought. (I feel that one way to view the purpose of government is as a technology of organization.)

We all love our Tivo or other PVRs (though my mother just got the Scientific Atlanta 8000HD which does HDTV but otherwise has a terrible UI. It's hard to imagine this was designed after people saw the Tivo or Replay.)

After you use your PVR, you get a large library. Deliberately recorded programs, or in the case of the Tivo "suggestion" mode, programs recorded at random that are similar to shows you have asked to record.

Emory University scientists, taking one species of vole that is one of the extremely rare animals to be actually monogamous, found a gene to boost the effect of Vasopressin, one of the love hormones. Inserting this gene into other voles made them more socially monogamous.

I had heard of this before, and there has been science fiction about couples taking love drugs, but this story made me wonder about how people might try to alter the concept of marriage.

A dot-zom is a dot-com that's walking dead, still coasting on investor money, but no future in sight. The stage before a dot-gone.

Here's my most disturbing idea yet. There are drugs which erase memory (or rather block the formation of memories while they are used.) It seems disturbingly probable to me that these might be being used for torture. Espcially considering the light of new memos giving the US the green light for torture.

Declan recently wrote an article about abolishing the FCC and selling off spectrum to private owners. It's an old idea, in fact too old, it was out of date even when the book he cites was published.

I took a trip to Toronto in part to see the very rare transit of Venus over the face of the Sun. I was lucky enough to get some great photos.

See my gallery of Venus Transit 2004 photos with notes.

Seeing the essay by James Lovelock, environmentalist pioneer and originator of the "Gaia hypothesis" that we must move to nuclear power to avoid greenhouse gas emissions, I thought the sentiment might be summed up as follows:

"Glow" is the new green.

Everybody loves their webcams (though the surveillance aspects of some are to be worried about.)

What about a way to make them cheap and easy to put in cool places. Combine a webcam with a solar panel, 802.11 link and small bettery. The webcam charges the battery off the panel, and when there is enough charge to take a picture, it takes one and spits it out the wireless link. You don't need much of a battery or much of a solar panel, because the amount of power simply controls how often it can take a picture.

Later I will blog my observations on an attempt to do a 2 week working trip to Toronto, but before I do let me throw out and idea to make technomadism easier.

A network of condos, of similar value (with some exceptions) in the most interesting cities of the world. The condos would be "standardized" to include the following:

I'm not the only one to have thought of this, but as yet no real work has been done. How about a hybrid car powered with a Stirling Engine? (Not spelled Sterling, btw.)

The Stirling is more efficient than the internal combustion or diesel engine, and it's also a lot quieter. Sounds great, but it's not good for cars because it can't rev up quickly and it takes about 5 minutes to get the engine hot enough to run well. We want our cars to start the minute we put the key in.

I am on the road in Toronto, so not a lot of blogging, but let me point to an idea that should spread. The Toronto Globe and Mail has a regular feature called Reality Check, where they take claims by politicians and officials, especially ones in negative ads, and research them.