You've probably noticed that with many of our portable devices, especially phones and tablets, a large fraction of the size and weight are the battery. Battery technology keeps improving, and costs go down, and there are dreams of fancy new chemistries and even ultracapacitors, but this has become a dominant issue.

Every device seems to have a different battery. Industrial designers work very hard on the design of their devices, and they don't want to be constrained by having to standardize the battery space. In many devices, they are even giving up the replaceable battery in the interests of good design. The existing standard battery sizes, such as the AA, AAA and even the AAAA and other less common sizes are just not suitable for a lot of our devices, and while cylindrical form factors make the most sense for many cell designs they don't fit well in the design of small devices.

So what's holding back a new generation of standardization in batteries? Is it the factors named above, the fact that tech is changing rapidly, or something else?

I would propose a small, thin modular battery that I would call the EStick, for energy stick. The smaller EStick sizes would be thin enough for cell phones. The goal would be to have more than one b-stick, or at least more than one battery in a typical device. Because of the packaging and connections, that would mean a modest reduction in battery capacity -- normally a horrible idea -- but some of the advantages might make it worth it.

Quick swap

There are several reasons to have multiple sticks or batteries in a device. In particular, you want the ability to quickly and easily swap at least one stick while the device is still operating, though it might switch to a lower power mode during the swap. The stick slot would have a spring loaded snap, as is common in many devices like cameras, though there may be desire for a door in addition.

Swapping presents the issue that not all the cells are at the same charge level and voltage. This is generally a bad thing, but modern voltage control electronics has reached the level where this should be possible with smaller and smaller electronics. It is possible with some devices to simply use one stick at a time, as long as that provides enough current. This uses up the battery lifetime faster, and means less capacity, but is simpler.

The quick hot swap offers the potential for indefinite battery life. In particular, it means that very small devices, such as wearable computers (watches, glasses and the like) could run a long time. They might run only 3-4 hours on a single stick, but a user could keep a supply of sticks in a pocket or bag to get arbitrary lifetime. Tiny devices that nobody would ever use because "that would only last 2 hours" could become practical.

While 2 or more sticks would be best for swap, a single stick and an internal battery or capacitor, combined with a sleep mode that can survive for 20-30 seconds without a battery could be OK.

I follow the Hugo awards closely, and 20 years ago published the 1993 Hugo and Nebula Anthology which was probably the largest anthology of currently released fiction ever published at the time.

The Hugo awards are voted by around 1,000 fans who attend the World SF Convention, so they have their biases, but over time almost all the greats have been recognized. In addition, until the year 2000, in the best novel Hugo, considered the most important, the winner was always science fiction, not fantasy even though both and more were eligible. That shifted, and from 2001 to 2012, there have been 6 Fantasy winners, one Alternate History, and 5+1 SF. (2010 featured a tie between bad-science SF in the Windup Girl and genre-bending political science fiction in The City & The City.)

That's not the only change to concern me. A few times my own pick for the best has not even been nominated. While that obviously shows a shift between my taste and the rest of the fans, I think I can point to reasons why it's not just that.

The 2013 nominees I find not particularly inspiring. And to me, that's not a good sign. I believe that the Hugo award winning novel should say to history, "This is an example of the best that our era could produce." If it's not such an example, I think "No Award" should win. (No Award is a candidate on each ballot, but it never comes remotely close to winning, and hasn't ever for novels. In the 70s, it deservedly won a few times for movies. SF movies in the mid and early 70s were largely dreck.)

What is great SF? I've written on it before, but here's an improvement of my definition. Great SF should change how you see the future/science/technology. Indeed, perhaps all great literature should change how you view the thing that is the subject matter of the literature, be it love, suffering, politics or anything else. That's one reason why I have the preference for SF over Fantasy in this award. Fantasy has a much harder time attaining that goal.

I should note that I consider these books below as worth reading. My criticism is around whether they meet the standard for greatness that a Hugo candidate should have.

2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson

This is the best of the bunch, and it does an interesting exploration into the relationship of human and AI, and as in all of Stan's fiction, the environment. His rolling city on Mercury is a wonder. The setup is great but the pace is as glacial as the slowly rolling city and the result is good, but not at the level of greatness I require here.

Bitcoin is having its first "15 minutes" with the recent bubble and crash, but Bitcoin is pretty hard to understand, so I've produced this analogy to give people a deeper understanding of what's going on.

It begins with a group of folks who take a different view on several attributes of conventional "fiat" money. It's not backed by any physical commodity, just faith in the government and central bank which issues it. In fact, it's really backed by the fact that other people believe it's valuable, and you can trade reliably with them using it. You can't go to the US treasury with your dollars and get very much directly, though you must pay your US tax bill with them. If a "fiat" currency faces trouble, you are depending on the strength of the backing government to do "stuff" to prevent that collapse. Central banks in turn get a lot of control over the currency, and in particular they can print more of it any time they think the market will stomach such printing -- and sometimes even when it can't -- and they can regulate commerce and invade privacy on large transactions. Their ability to set interest rates and print more money is both a bug (that has sometimes caused horrible inflation) and a feature, as that inflation can be brought under control and deflation can be prevented.

The creators of Bitcoin wanted to build a system without many of these flaws of fiat money, without central control, without anybody who could control the currency or print it as they wish. They wanted an anonymous, privacy protecting currency. In addition, they knew an open digital currency would be very efficient, with transactions costing effectively nothing -- which is a pretty big deal when you see Visa and Mastercard able to sustain taking 2% of transactions, and banks taking a smaller but still real cut.

With those goals in mind, they considered the fact that even the fiat currencies largely have value because everybody agrees they have value, and the value of the government backing is at the very least, debatable. They suggested that one might make a currency whose only value came from that group consensus and its useful technical features. That's still a very debatable topic, but for now there are enough people willing to support it that the experiment is underway. Most are aware there is considerable risk.

Update: I've grown less fond of this analogy and am working up a superior one, closer to the reality but still easy to understand.

Wordcoin

Bitcoins -- the digital money that has value only because enough people agree it does -- are themselves just very large special numbers. To explain this I am going to lay out an imperfect analogy using words and describe "wordcoin" as it might exist in the pre-computer era. The goal is to help the less technical understand some of the mechanisms of a digital crypto-based currency, and thus be better able to join the debate about them.

Last night I gave a short talk at the 3rd "Personal Clouds" meeting in San Francisco, The term "personal clouds" is a bit vague at present, but in part it describes what I had proposed in 2008 as the "data deposit box" -- a means to acheive the various benefits of corporate-hosted cloud applications in computing space owned and controlled by the user. Other people are interpreting the phrase "personal clouds" to mean mechanisms for the user to host, control or monetize their own data, to control their relationships with vendors and others who will use that data, or in the simplest form, some people are using it to refer to personal resources hosted in the cloud, such as cloud disk drive services like Dropbox.

I continue to focus on the vision of providing the advantages of cloud applications closer to the user, bringing the code to the data (as was the case in the PC era) rather than bringing the data to the code (as is now the norm in cloud applications.)

Consider the many advantages of cloud applications for the developer:

• You write and maintain your code on machines you build, configure and maintain.
  • That means none of the immense support headaches of trying to write software to run on mulitple OSs, with many versions and thousands of variations. (Instead you do have to deal with all the browsers but that's easier.)
  • It also means you control the uptime and speed
  • Users are never running old versions of your code and facing upgrade problems
  • You can debug, monitor, log and fix all problems with access to the real data
• You can sell the product as a service, either getting continuing revenue or advertising revenue
• You can remove features, shut down products
• You can control how people use the product and even what steps they may take to modify it or add plug-ins or 3rd party mods
• You can combine data from many users to make compelling applications, particuarly in the social space
• You can track many aspects of single and multiple user behaviour to customize services and optimize advertising, learning as you go

Some of those are disadvantages for the user of course, who has given up control. And there is one big disadvantage for the provider, namely they have to pay for all the computing resources, and that doesn't scale -- 10x users can mean paying 10x as much for computing, especially if the cloud apps run on top of a lower level cloud cluster which is sold by the minute.

But users see advantages too: