"Don't solve problems; pursue opportunities."
Seeking opportunities is no longer wisdom relevant only to the long cycles of economic progress. As the economy speeds up, so that an "internet year" seems to pass in one month, the principles of long-term growth begin to govern the day-to-day economy. The dynamics of growth become the dynamics of short-term competitive advantage.
In both the short and long term, our ability to solve social and economic problems will be limited primarily to our lack of imagination in seizing opportunities, rather than trying to optimize solutions.
The Next Transitions in the Technium
What kinds of developmental thresholds would any planet of sentient beings pass through? The creation of writing would be a huge one. The unleashing of cheap non-biological energy is another. The invention of the scientific method is a giant leap. And the fine control of energy (as in electricity) for long-distant communications is significant as well, enabling all kinds of other achievements. Our civilization has passed through all these stages; what are some future transitions we can expect -- no matter the fashions and fads of the day? What are the emergent thresholds of information and energy organization that our civilization can look forward to? Most of these thresholds are gradual, so we can't assign dates, but each of these structures seem to be a natural transition that any civilization must reach sooner or later.
* AI - There are many varieties of artificial intelligence, and no formal definition for any of them. By whatever measure, a civilization capable of producing synthetic minds similar to its own, or superior in some facets, has reached an important threshold, not the least which is a great compounding acceleration of its progress.
* A-life -- Likewise there are many types of artificial life possible, from derivatives of natural biological life, to a-life running on an alternative chemical base-pairs, to self-reproducing dry life more akin to nano-bots. Sustainable self-reproducing, self-evolving creations enable huge innovations and bring huge problems. It is a major transition.
* Methuselarity - Health care and science keep extending the average longevity of humans, and increasing the rate at which it is improving. Right now science is extending the expected lifespan of humans in the developing world a few days per year. If this rate keeps accelerating, at some point scientific progress will increase expected longevity from one day per year, to one year per year. When longevity increases at one year per year, that effectively creates immortality, or Methuselarity, for anyone who reaches that threshold. They become like the biblical Methuselah and live for a thousand years, on average.
* GlobeNet -- Over time we keep adding sensors and monitors every few kilometers on land and on the sea until we form a dense grid of sensors covering the globe. There will be thermometers, wind speed jigs, rainfall meters, sunlight sensors, air pollution particle detectors, radiation meters, earthquake probes, climatic gas sensors, animal motion detectors, sea level and wave detectors, traffic sensors, DNA sensors, and little things that measure anything we can think of place on a regular basis on the surface (and deeper) of the planet. All of these form a blanket of sensitivity providing the planetary mind (us and machines) a real-time awareness. For the first time we'll have a quantifiable globe.
* Global Superorganism -- The stage at which several billion sentient beings spread over a planet and several quadrillion smart machines merge into a unified system that is always on. This global system of interacting smart agents exhibits emergent behavior and degrees of autonomy that is not present in its constituent parts. On some planets the global superorganism will reach artificial intelligence before a stand-alone AI does. It's not clear which way Earth is headed.
* Memorex -- Every bit of writing, music, photography, painting in civilization is digitized and recorded in a machine-readable way. All knowledge, in all languages, from all ages, in all media is stored in a way that is universally accessible to all people and machines. In other words, the universal library becomes real, but not just books, but everything created, past and present, and it is available anytime. This threshold of civilization-scale knowledge becomes both a global memory and a global awareness.
* Borg -- Another threshold is crossed when any individual can import the global Memorex onto their own minds. Civilization-scale memory available to, or within, all individuals.
* Mirror World -- A one-to-one mapping of both the natural and built worlds onto a full-scale simulation of those worlds. This huge global model runs in parallel to the observed worlds. At first the functions of large organizations are mirrored in a simulation, then entire cities will be reflected in a real-time city simulation. Eventually every major node, sensor-net, agent, or variable on Earth is simulated in real time in this global model. Sort of like Google Earth but with every process, and every ecosystem, as well as every building. The mirror world is used both as an experimental test bed for science and predictions, and as an entertainment medium, as in a second life.
* Class I Energy -- The Russian astronomer Nikolai Kardashev proposed three major levels of energy production for galactic civilizations, which he called Class I, II, and III. Class I was the maximization of energy from the entire planet, Class II was maximizing the available energy from its star, and Class III was exploiting energy from its galaxy. Humans have not yet reached Class I, so that threshold is still in front of us.
* Universal Family Tree -- Eventually we will sequence the full genomes of everyone living, and as many of the recent dead as we have access to. Together with genealogical records, this huge trove of data will give us our first universal family tree. Everyone living will have a place on it in relation to everyone else. We will clearly see exactly how I am related to you. We'll also see how everyone is related at some point to everyone else no matter where they were born. The big surprise will be the short hops between us. This common tree of descent will aid health care, medicine, and science, but will also aid peace. Greeks and Turks, Jews and Arabs, Koreans and Japanese will see they are far more related than not.
* Knowledge of All Species -- At some point a civilization wakes up and takes a comprehensive and systematic inventory of all the other living species on its planet. This step is similar to mapping all the elements of matter. It realizes that in order to model and manage its ecosystems it must know all the ingredients and all the interacting parts, just as it takes knowing all the elements in order to do chemistry. This threshold of the knowledge of all species includes sequencing the DNA of every species as well -- a huge asset that also enables it to recover and resurrect known extinct species.
* TransHumanity -- When beings gain control of their biological evolution they begin to mess with it. But not everyone will be eager to do so. At the point that humans begin to engineer their own genomes, there will be a significant number of individuals, families and groups who will refuse to do so. For every person who says "Over my dead body will I or my child be engineered," there will be someone else who says, "Bring on the mutants!" Thus there will inevitably be a forking of the gene line. The threshold is not engineering genes since we have been doing that slowly and ignorantly all along, but a clear splitting off of a subgroup. Whether or not each becomes a non-breeding separate species doesn't matter. Transhumanity means at least one fork of the species is deliberately self-engineered.
* Singularity -- As commonly defined, a singularity means an infinite pace of change. We don't know what that looks like because, as commonly defined, it is inherently unknowable. For this reason I don't find this transition useful in prospect, only in retrospect. We have been through one singularity so far -- the invention of language. A few of the above might be also initiate singularity but we'll only know after the fact.
There are a bunch of other transitions such as Downloadability, Time Travel, Telepathy, etc., -- well mined by science fiction -- that would qualify as important information/energy thresholds, but which do not seem inevitable to me at the moment.
Are there other near-future stages that you think any civilization on the galaxy must pass through if it survives long enough?
User Manual First
In the old days (before the web) you could not read the operating manual or instructions for an appliance, device, or tool until you got it home and unpacked it. Getting the manual was considered one of the benefits of purchasing the product. In fact, you had to purchase extra copies if you lost the original, or wanted to check it out. It was often only later when you finally had the box opened that you discovered a) it did not permit the function you bought it for, or b) it was a quarter inch smaller than it looked and so didn't fit, or c) it was incompatible with the assessors set you already had, or d) it had no manual!
Those days are gone. You can find a PDF version of the manual for most products on the web if you search hard enough. It is not as easy as it should be, but the smarter manufacturers make it easy to download the specs of whatever they sell.
That leads to this new rule: get the manual first, before you buy.
For a large home remodel I had to purchase a pile of new appliances, lights, plumbing fixtures, hardware, materials, gadgets, and some tools. I instituted a "Manual First, Buy Later" policy, and it had immediate positive effects. Once I identified a possible candidate for purchase, I would google for its manual. Equally important as finding the operating instructions and basic specs, is to get hold of the installation instructions. There are few sites that aggregate manuals and specs of major lines, but often I would wind up at the manufacturer's site. There I would download the PDF and read it carefully. That's where you find out its precise dimensions, its actual power needs, its exact connections, its real compatibility. I lost count of the number of inappropriate bad purchases I avoided by studying the manual and specs first.
What baffles me are the clueless manufacturers who still don't put their installation and operating manuals online in 2012. (I'm thinking of you, LG.) The main result of this process is simply fewer surprises. Less returns, better integration.
I was heartened to see that even the professionals do this. Here is a snapshot of our plumber "at work" in the bathroom. He has his tablet opened to a installation PDF, and his phone is googling a help number for questions brought up by specs in the PDF.
Locating any particular item's installation and operating specs is still not as easy as it should be. Amazon could make it the norm to have the full spec PDF for every item they sell, or Google could try to algorithmically sort them out, or some clever aggregator could centralize them all. But for now it is worth seeking them out first, any purchase later.
-- KK
As the transmission of knowledge accelerates,...
...as more possibilities are manufactured, the unabated push of incremental growth also speeds up. In the long run, creating and seizing opportunities is what drives the economy. A better benchmark than productivity would be to measure the number of possibilities generated by a company or innovation and use the total to evaluate progress.
In the short run, though, problems must be solved. Businesses are taught that they are in the business of solving problems. Put your finger on a customer's dissatisfaction, the MBAs say, and then deliver a solution. This bit of hoary advice inspires business to seek out problems. Problems, however, are entities that don't work. They are usually situations where the goal is clear but the execution falls short. As in, "We have a reliability problem," or "Customers complain about our late delivery." In the words of Peter Drucker, "Don't solve problems." George Gilder distills the essence further: "When you are solving problems, you are feeding your failures, starving your successes, and achieving costly mediocrity. In a competitive global arena, costly mediocrity goes out of business."
One Highly-Evolved Day Bag
I asked Charles Platt, former editor of Cool Tools, what he is packing these days and he replied with this list. It's not your usual selection:
I like to be fully prepared when traveling, but I hate excess weight. This has led to a computer bag containing not just a computer but as many small items as possible, packaged in such a way that they don't fall to the bottom in an undifferentiated mess.
The key to the packaging is to use a modular system based on Darice Mini Storage Boxes (available with or without compartments--I prefer those without). These parts boxes measure about 3.5" x 5.7" x 1.2". They have durable metal hinges and can be stacked edge-to-edge. My computer bag holds five of them in its main compartment. Amazon sells an assortment, or you can buy individual styles from CraftAmerica.
Inside the storage boxes I keep:
* Retractable Rosewill ethernet connector, about 1.5" x 3".
* Mini-USB to full-USB wire adapter, 6", for uploads from camera to laptop.
* Mini-mouse. I don't like trackpads.
* Spare laptop battery.
* Medications. To save space, I transfer pills into little 3" x 4" zip-lock plastic bags. I peel the prescription labels from pill bottles and stick them to the bags. (but cheaper from eBay).
* One 50mm diameter concave mirror, so that I can examine my own eye if I get a foreign object in it and there's no one else to assist. The concavity allows very close-up focusing.
* Cell phone charger.
* Camera battery charger.
* Earbuds and wire-mounted microphone with USB plug, for Skype calls via laptop. Especially useful when traveling internationally.
* Miniature 3-foot measuring tape in 1" x 1.5" enclosure.
* Plastic lightweight miniature camera tripod, folds to 1.5" x 6" x 0.6", so that I can take time exposures almost anywhere.
* SD data card reader with USB connector. Just in case image transfer from camera to computer fails.
* Miniature LED flashlight.
* Aegis Padlock 500GB external USB drive, with 256-bit hardware encryption. The nice thing about this drive is that you enter your password on a numeric keypad built into the drive. Thus, no software drivers are necessary, and you can plug it into any computer. And if you leave it behind in a motel room, your data are secure (supposedly there is no backdoor to bypass the encryption). Can you plead the 5th Amendment if an inquisitive US immigration agent wants to see what's saved on it? The last I heard, that issue is being litigated in a couple of test cases.
All these items fit inside the five storage boxes. In addition of course the bag has its own set of storage pockets containing pens, blank sheets of paper, two pairs of eyeglasses, paper printout of all addresses and phone numbers, business cards, passport, a printout of all online passwords using a simple cipher that I can decode in my head, and a pocket digital camera, currently a Canon S100. And, of course, there's a computer (Sharp MP30, no longer made unfortunately).
The bag itself is quite small: 12" x 14" x 5". Even when it's fully loaded, I find the weight tolerable.
-- Charles Platt
Life at the Edge of Space
Life is very pervasive. How high into space does earthly life exist? The Clotho Project aims to find out.
How far off the earth’s surface does life exist, and what is the nature of the organisms that live there? The Clotho Project is a collaboration between the Mavericks Foundation, civilian space explorers, and several of the worlds leading scientific, academic and research institutions. The main mission is to carry out the first general survey of life in the upper atmosphere, including the upper portions of the stratosphere and mesosphere, as well as exploring areas of particular interest such as the biology of clouds and the airborne extent of algal blooms.
Not stated is the fact that the Mavericks Foundation is a co-op of amateur rocketeers. Folks who very carefully and scientifically make huge homemade rockets and launch them to the edge of space. They do it for fun, for the challenge, and for science.
The quest for the limits to earthly life is a good one. So is furthering the catalog of life on Earth. The search for species at the edge of space aligns with the All Species Inventory, which I co-founded.
I will bet that there are far more species of life up there than any biologist would dare predict right now. Probably tens of thousands. Some of these stratospheric species probably have curious adaptions for living in near vacuum and drastic temperatures. Useful genes.
Extended Warranty Evaluation
The sales pitch for an extended warranty is simple: pay some extra money now to extend the manufacture's 90-day warranty another 3 years to save on expensive repairs later. For most appliances an extended warranty is a rip-off. The cost of this insurance rarely pays for itself. Either the device keeps working till just after the warranty period, or the cost of the warranty extension exceeds the cost of replacing the unit. Either way, the money made by selling uneconomical extended warranties is a major source of profit for retailers. That is why they are selling it: because on average most devices don't break during this period. Therefore, the wisdom of the smart shopper: skip the extended warranty.
There are a few exceptions to this rule. At this particular moment in technology, there are 3 major devices that seem particularly repair-prone and problematic, with frequent failures within their first 3 years, and with high costs of repair. According to a study by the independent Consumer Reports (August 2011), those three are: personal computers, refrigerators and zero-turn-radius riding lawn mowers. And because of their frequent failure across brands the insurance of an extended warranty is justified in their cases.
But not all extended warranties (EW) are the same. You can purchase an EW from the manufacturer, from the retailer selling the device, from a third party, or from your credit card company. And different issuers have different selling points.
In the personal computer realm, the best deal is Apple's. As 25-year Apple fans we automatically figure in the cost of AppleCare's 3-year EW for any device we purchase from them. Sad to say, we frequently need it. Happy to say, their service is great. We take the ailing unit to a local Genius Bar, and they swap out what's broken and make it right. Over the years we'd had screens, keyboards, drives, motherboards, power supply, all repaired for no extra costs over the EW. And that is not to mention the great real-human phone support help for any kind of software related questions.
Refrigerators are a different matter. Almost everyone has one, and newer models (particular those with ice makers) can be very complex. In the past few months, we needed to purchase our first new refrigerator. Even our plumber told us that the EW was worth getting for a refrigerator. But what kind? Sears offered one plan. Home Depot another. Visa, our credit card company offered another if we used their card. Square Trade offered third-party service. With the help of Camille Cloutier, we researched all the plans to see which had the best deal using a new LG refrigerator as a test case. Her research is summed up in this table here.
The short answer is that like many other industries, when you get behind the curtain there are really only a few major players. Most retailers and card companies outsource their extended warranty programs to a few industry giants, who rebrand their service, and then outsource the actual repairs to local companies. But because there are so many brands involved in this transaction it is very hard to assign credit or blame when things don't work out. If you read the feedback in forums on refrigerator repairs most unhappy customers aren't making the distinction between the manufacturer of the appliance, or the retail seller of it, or the company selling the EW, or the actual company supplying the repair technicians who come to your house. Those are four different companies for one experience for the customer.
What I found in warranty repair is that the competency of the local service branch probably plays more of a difference in customer satisfaction than anything else, but was the least consistent. If the local agency did a poor job fixing a problem, customers would naturally blame LG, or Panasonic, or GE for crappy quality and service. It is hard to judge the service quality in an EW, but it is essentially the same as the quality of a regular warranty repair -- that is dependent on local crews -- and this is important -- who often service all the different manufacturers. The Maytag man is unusual because most of the others repair technicians are contracted out and work on all brands.
So the choice of EW providers comes down to price and plan. All the policies we examined include a "No Lemon" clause -- if three of the same repairs are made in a 12 month period and a fourth becomes necessary, they will replace the unit, and most of them share the same long list of exclusions. Of all the policies, Visa's was the shortest and least specific. Its instructions on claim processing seemed the most lengthy (to report a problem, they mail you a claims form, you get an estimate and return that claim form, once it's approve, the claim can proceed).
Most 4- to 5-year service plans cost about 20% of the purchase price. Except Home Depot; they charge a flat fee of $100 for a 4-year extended contract on refrigerators (on a large one that's only 4%). It begins when the 1-year manufacturer's warranty ends, so I went with them for our extended warranty on a new fridge. I now have 5 years of service for $100, which seems like reasonable insurance.
-- KK
VW Vagabond
This couple penny-pinched their salaries for several years, bought a VW Van, and drove it around the world (US, South America and Africa). They share what they have learned on one of the most helpful websites I've seen for this sort of thing. I really like their sensibility and advice. Very reasonable and very wise. They also "review" the tools and stuff they found vital in their small traveling home on this page. Click on a tool to see more.
They give good advice about shipping vehicles (very complex) and even saving up enough to make the journey. They have a book, too.
While living in a VW Van for three years, they got the idea that even this lifestyle was too complex so they get simpler for the next stage. They are now bicycling across Asia, another adventure and great idea. They are riding recycled 1980 mountain bikes. As usual they have all kinds of great tool reviews (water filters and the like).
Part of the reason their advice and website is so useful is that they have no sponsors -- a rarity for ambitious trips like this these days. It keeps them honest and useful. Check 'em out.
Sample excerpts:
Rain gear has proven to be pretty
much useless here in Southeast
Asia. To wear even the thinnest,
most breathable layer in this heat
creates a sauna-like effect. We
have taken to simply riding in the
rain... it's refreshing, really! If it
pours too hard to see, then we
pull over in a bus stop and wait
for the drizzle to return.
This is Rich preparing to cycle out of the
Bangkok railway station at 4 a.m. Notice
the reflective vest and reflective tape stuck
all over the bike. Reflective vests are
available from almost any bicycle shop. The
3M tape is the stuff used on highway guard
rails in the U.S. We purchased strips of it on
eBay for a few dollars.
We purchased our down bags at the Veterans
Thrift Store. They are a few years old and
needed a good washing but are as functional
- albeit with less status - than their adventure
store counterparts. Rich paid $10 for his and Amanda's was only
$1.65. We washed them on the delicate
cycle then ran them through the dryer on low
heat for a few cycles. If you put a running
shoe (make sure it's clean) in the dryer with
the bag it will keep the down from clumping.
We hung them on the line for two sunny days
and now they look and smell brand new - or
close enough.
TechShop Membership
TechShop (previously reviewed here) is a member-based workshop. They have one of every tool you could dream of -- laser cutters, plasma torches, computer-control sewing machines, welders, 3D printing machines, you name it -- plus piles of regular tools (drill presses, lathes, oscilloscopes, miter saws etc.), and once you are member and cleared for training, you can use them whenever you want. They have a big open tables, lots of room, and offer classes for various tool craft as well.
TechShop sells day passes, week passes, monthly passes, or yearly membership.
The big update is that they have expanded their locations from their original Silicon Valley station. They are currently in 5 US locations, with 3 more in progress, and are adding more each year.
The idea is brilliant. Why should you purchase, maintain, and upgrade expensive shop tools that you might need only once in a while? It's a whole lot better to join a co-op that buys, houses, and upkeeps the gear. You pay rent to use it -- a price that will be a lot less than the cost of purchase. The downside, of course, is that you need to travel to the TechShop, which can be inconvenient. I've found 3 types of folks using it: 1) Those who have tiny apartments and no tools, or tool space, of their own; this is their workshop. 2) Those who are working on a prototype, or a big art project, for a specific period of time; this is their lab and office. 3) Those who own a decent typical workshop but want occasional access to a laser cutter, or 3D printer; this is their luxury.
Here are some photos I took at the San Francisco location:
A cage of power tools.
Welding machines waiting to be used.
A work table with floating power cord, easily accessible from any side, but not in the way. The lockers are for members use.
A plywood bench made using tools on the premises.
Working at the laser cutter control station.
Oil paint, keyboard, opera, pen...
--all these opportunities remain. But in addition we have added film, metal work, skyscrapers, hypertext, and holograms as but a few of the new opportunities for artistic expression. Each year we add more opportunities of every stripe. Ways to see. Methods for thinking. Means of amusing. Paths to health. Routes to understanding.
The Great Asymmetry of economic life ceaselessly amasses new opportunities while relinquishing few old ones. The one-way journey is toward more and more possibilities, pointing in more and more directions, opening more and more new territories.
"A few decades from now there will be ten billion people on the planet, and sophisticated computers will be cheaper than transistor radios," writes science fiction writer David Brin in his manifesto The Transparent Society. "If this combination does not lead to war and chaos, then it will surely result in a world where countless men and women swarm the dataways in search of something special to do--some pursuit outside the normal range, to make each one feel just a little bit extraordinary. Through the internet, we may be seeing the start of a great exploration aimed outward in every conceivable direction of interest or curiosity. An expedition to the limits of what we are, and what we might become."
Material Libraries
There are thousands of types of materials to make things from. The first impulse for most of us is to use known materials like wood, steel, concrete, and glass. But each of those have hundreds of varieties, each with their own properties. How about metallic ceramics? And every year brand new materials are invented. How can one find out what materials are available?
One way to become familiar with the vast possibilities of materials is to visit a materials library. That's what professional designers and architectures do when embarking on a project. Maybe what they design can be made of some kind of glass? Or super strong plastic? Or bendable wood? Larger design firms have their own material collection, which they use for inspiration, research and for sharing with clients. Below is an unusually large material library at the New York City architecture firm 1100: Architect. Smaller ones can be found at most design firms.
Not everyone has the space or time to build their own. So Material Connexion is a commercial business operating in 8 major design-center cities of the world. For a subscription fee you can use their extensive material library. They add about a dozen new materials per month. A fair number of university art centers also use them to install and manager their collections.
Art, architecture and design centers in colleges and universities have begun creating material libraries that rival the depth and usefulness of book libraries. Notable collections include Harvard's Materials Collection and RISD's Material Resource Center in Providence, RI. At both you can check out a sample to study, just like a book:
To Borrow Items from the Material Resource Center Select items from the shelves and bring them to the checkout desk. Materials circulate for 7 days at a time. Please return materials promptly - an overdue fine of .20 per 5 items will be charged.The Materials Lab at the University of Texas was the pioneer in creating material libraries several decades ago. Their own library contains 25,000 different types of materials. Even better, the catalog of the Material Lab is openly available online. It's organized by domain and even though you can't touch them, you can learn a lot by browsing and searching. You can quickly see, say, how many different types of concrete blocks are available, or how many types of metallic glass, or plywood laminates.
Chances are that if there is a art/design college near you, they have a material library that you could at least visit. The local art college in my neighborhood is the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. I visited their materials library, which is small, but stimulating. Here the librarian oversees the collection. I was free to browse it.
Even better, it is not hard to accumulate your own collection of materials, or even start a shared library with friends and colleagues. It is not just the pieces of stuff that is valuable, but the information about the stuff -- its specs, what it can do, or not do, where it comes from, how to get more of it.
-- KK
Flexible LED Strip Lights
We installed flexible LED light strips in our kitchen for under cabinet and within cabinet lighting. These are very low energy consumption, cool to the touch, and rated to last for 50,000 hours.
The strips are about 1 cm wide and 2 mm thick. The strips come on a spool with a sticky tape side. You press the sticky side to the bottom of the cabinet (or the sides inside) and the strip gives a very diffuse effective and efficient light. They are so thin, you can't really see the light strip itself, only the glow. The strip is a circuit of LEDs in a row. They have marked segments about every 2-3 inches where you can cut them to fit. They typically run off of 12 volts; the transformer can sit i a cabinet, attic, or basement. You can also specific different color temperatures (very warm to very cool). The lights are dimmable.
We used them under our cabinets and inside of one cabinet (picture above).
There are tons of manufacturers peddling flexible LED strips now. You can purchase them in meter strips or on 5 meter reels. Here is one supplier with many products and variations: Superbrightleds.com. I have no experience in using this outfit. It is a new market so quality varies.
We used a local California-based manufacturer, Aion. Their prices are higher than many of the imports (usually from China), but they had a deliverable guarantee of 5 years. Unfortunately they don't deal retail, wholesale only through electricians, who can reliably install it.
If anyone has experience with installing DIY LED strips, please let us know.
And these nifty strips can be used for all kinds of other illumination where flexibility and thinness is desired.
-- KK
Smart Light Switch
We just had a new light switch installed in our bathroom, the Lutron Maestro Occupancy Sensor. It is smart and cool, but it needs a user manual! Yes, a manual for a light switch!
Because of new building codes, bathroom gear needs to conserve energy by keeping electricity use to a minimum. One way of low use is via LED lights; the other is via a smart switch that has a motion detector built in, which will fade the lights after X minutes if no one moving inside. And it will turn them on when you enter. It also remembers what level the light was last when you turn it on. The downside is that you have to PROGRAM the light switch -- what levels, when, and how long it takes to go off. It comes with a dense how-to-manual. But the default settings seem fine and the device is pretty cool. Here is a shot of the instructions, which also cover the other side of the paper.
It costs about $32 from places like Amazon.
-- KK
Long before Beethoven sat before a piano...
...someone with twice his musical talents was born into a world that lacked keyboards or orchestras. We'll never hear his music because technology and knowledge had not yet uncovered those opportunities. Centuries later the fulfilled opportunity of musical technology gave Beethoven the opportunity to be great. How fortunate we are that oil paints had been invented by the time Van Gogh was ready, or that George Lucas could use film and computers. Somewhere on Earth today are young geniuses waiting for a technology that will perfectly match their gifts. If we are lucky, they'll live long enough for our knowledge and technology to make the opportunity they need.
Changes Ahead
Dear Readers,
I am making a new book of the Best of Cool Tools. (The last one I did was a small one in 2003.) This will be a large, real paper book and might be available in the fall. In the next few months I will be going through the 10-year archives of this site selecting the the outstanding evergreen tools, the best of the best, and then presenting them in one large book.
To date there are more than 3,000 Cool Tool reviews posted here, so there is a lot to choose from. Despite that abundance, in surveying the reviews I've noticed that there are large vacancies in many subject areas. There are significant crafts that we have not covered. Not much in underwater sports. Little in metal working. None in the voice arts. Music can use more reviews, Etc.
To fill in these areas I will be actively soliciting new reviews and steering the conversation to tweak, correct, or modify the material we do have. I plan to use this blog for that conversation. For the past 10 years the Cool Tool blog has reliably posted one cool tool review every weekday. We won't stop doing that. But starting in a few days I will begin posting additional items, queries, clips from AskCoolTools, pointers of cool tool related postings elsewhere, and other stuff in order to flush out new material.
In other words, I will be disrupting the very orderly blog that's been running so smoothly all these years, the blog that you presumably have come to enjoy. In addition to one highly selected, well-proven tool, highly edited by Oliver Hulland each day, the blog will also sport half-baked ideas, tips, related material, questions, dialog, requests, clarifications by me and Oliver. It will resemble the variety of material you find on other blogs.
Some readers are not going to like this. That's too bad. However it will only be temporary until I finish the book, when your regular programming will return undisturbed. Other readers are going to love it because it will be more interactive, more community minded, more dynamic. Don't get too used to it, because after the book is done your regular programming will return undisturbed.
In the meantime, I hope to make some noise and try a few editorial alternatives. After 10 years without change it's about time. Not everything tried will work. The intent of this experiment is to discover, with your help, the best cool tools for the book in the widest range of subject areas. Any reviewer appearing in the book will get a copy of the book.
Tell me what tools you love, and why: kk at kk dot org, or leave a comment here.
-- KK
We can rearrange more than just bits.
Think of the mineral iron oxide, suggests Romer. It's rust. More than 10,000 years ago our ancestors used iron oxide as a pigment to make art on cave walls. Now, by rearranging those same atoms into a precisely thin iron oxide film on plastic we get a floppy disk, which can hold a reproduction of the same cave paintings, and all the possible permutations of it wrought by Photoshop. We have amplified the possibilities a millionfold.
The power of combinatorial explosions--which is what you get with ideas and opportunities--means, says Romer, "There's essentially no scarcity to deal with." Because the more you use opportunities, the less scarce they get.
Everything we know about the structure of the network economy suggests that it will bolster this efflorescence of opportunities, for the following reasons:
- Every opportunity inhabits a connection. As we connect up more and more of the world into nodes on a network, we make available billions more components in the great combinatorial game. The number of possibilities explodes.
- Networks speed the transmission of opportunities seized and innovations created, which are disseminated to all parts of the network and the planet, inviting more opportunities to build upon them.
Technology is no panacea. It will never solve the ills or injustices of society. Technology can do only one thing for us--but it is an astonishing thing: Technology brings us an increase in opportunities.
Undetectable Technology
Karl Schroeder, science fiction author of the novel Permanence, writes about the Fermi Paradox. The Fermi Paradox says that if there is an infinite universe there must be an infinite number of civilizations at advance stages that would emit evidence of their presence, but as far as we see in any direction, there are none. The skies should be full of aliens, but are not. Why not?
Schroeder's explanation is a re-phrasing of Arthur C. Clarke's famous declaration that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Schroeder's declares:
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Nature. Basically, either advanced alien civilizations don't exist, or we can't see them because they are indistinguishable from natural systems. I vote for the latter.
That is interesting and a very plausible answer. Basically, we can't detect really advance civilizations because their technology is so advanced that is operates in harmony with a planet, and it uses some kind of communication that looks like natural radiation, etc., to such an extant that it appears to not be there. The civilization acquires a sort of natural technological camouflage. Think Pandora in Avatar.
[Green Planet image by Ivan Raposo]
But what Schroeder says afterwards is even more profound in terms of the technium.
If the Fermi Paradox is a profound question, then this answer is equally profound. It amounts to saying that the universe provides us with a picture of the ultimate end-point of technological development. In the Great Silence, we see the future of technology, and it lies in achieving greater and greater efficiencies, until our machines approach the thermodynamic equilibria of their environment, and our economics is replaced by an ecology where nothing is wasted. After all, SETI is essentially a search for technological waste products: waste heat, waste light, waste electromagnetic signals. We merely have to posit that successful civilizations don't produce such waste, and the failure of SETI is explained.
His theory suggest that what technology wants is to be "natural," not just biologically natural, but geologically natural, or like self-regulating Gaia, natural on a planetary scale. I didn't quite reach that far in my book, so I am glad to have been pushed even further by Schroeder.
We Are Stardust
Every year at year's end the intellectual impresario (and my literary agent) John Brockman asks his clients and friends a Question. For 2012 the question was WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE DEEP, ELEGANT, OR BEAUTIFUL EXPLANATION? About 200 of us answered, compiled here. The collection is a good read.
My answer:
We Are Stardust
Where did we come from? I find the explanation that we were made in stars to be deep, elegant, and beautiful. This explanation says that every atom in each of our bodies was built up out of smaller particles produced in the furnaces of long-gone stars. We are the byproducts of nuclear fusion. The intense pressures and temperatures of these giant stoves thickened collapsing clouds of tiny elemental bits into heavier bits, which once fused, were blown out into space as the furnace died. The heaviest atoms in our bones may have required more than one cycle in the star furnaces to fatten up. Uncountable numbers of built-up atoms congealed into a planet, and a strange disequilibrium called life swept up a subset of those atoms into our mortal shells. We are all collected stardust. And by a most elegant and remarkable transformation, our starstuff is capable of looking into the night sky to perceive other stars shining. They seem remote and distant, but we are really very close to them no matter how many lightyears away. All that we see of each other was born in a star. How beautiful is that?
[Image from C. Smith at Curtis Schmidt Telescope]
Every opportunity seized...
...launches at least two new opportunities.
The entire web is an opportunity dynamo. More than 320 million web pages have been created in the first five years of the web's existence. Each day 1.5 million new pages of all types are added. The number of web sites--now at 1 million--is doubling every 8 months. (Think lily pond!) A single opportunity seized in 1989 by a bored researcher began this entrepreneurial bloom. It is not the lily leaf that is expanding now, but the lily pond itself.
The number of opportunities, like the number of ideas, are limitless. Both are created combinatorially in the way words are. You can combine and recombine the same 26 letters to write an infinite number of books. The more components you begin with, the faster the total possible combinations ramp up to astronomical numbers. Paul Romer, an economist working on the nature of economic growth, points out that the number of possible arrangements of bits on a CD is about 10^ billion. Each arrangement would be a unique piece of software or music. But this number is so huge there aren't enough atoms in the universe to physically make that many CDs, even subtracting all the duds that are just random noise.
A Whole Lot of Nothing
I live about 2 km from the ocean. I rode down on my bike today and just hung out on the shore to watch the waves crashing over each other. This is what it looked like on our beach in Pacifica. As I sat on some rocks watching the waves roll in and the wind whipping the foam at the top, and the sun shinning through the crest of the wave, I was overcome with the certainty that everything I was seeing was immaterial. It was real, but it was not solid. Despite the hard rocks I was sitting on, despite the gritty sand on my feet, despite the pounding water in the surf, despite the force of wind on my cheeks, despite my knowledge of how fatal the ocean can be to life, despite all these clear and unmistakeable signals, it was (and still is) clearer yet, that at their essences, all these things are really made of something intangible, without weight, something close to what we think of as information.
Water is made of oxygen and hydrogen. What is a oxygen atom made of? Not oxygen, but of smaller particles, like protons and electrons. And what are they made of? Mostly space. In a lecture I just watched, Brian Cox gave a figure for how empty an atom is. It is 99.9999999999999% space. And what is that remaining 0.000000000000001% non-space made of? Nothing that we would call hard, or material. It is some wavicle, some quantum superposition, some intangible force. Maybe it is simply information. We actually don't know what matter is at the bottom, but we do know it is fungible into energy and information.
So in a very real sense, the drops of water splashed up by waves thundering on the beach before me, and the sand churned up from the beach, are just patterns of the immaterial. Water and sand are real patterns just as the waves are real patterns; but they are patterns of a kind of nothingness.
I know the monks on the tops of mountains have been saying the real world is immaterial for eons, but the difference is that now we say can it precisely, and in such a scientific way that we can predict what else we should see if this view is correct. So far we can't use ordinary words to describe what this fundamental intangible is. Wavicles don't mean anything. Neither does the concept of a quantum particle being in two places at once. All we have is the language of mathematics, which few can speak. And what the maths say is that the tons of water rolling in under the light of a sun 93 millions miles away and pounding the sand in front of me is all really mostly nothing, and the little that is not nothing, is really just another kind of nothing.
This is hard to see at sunset on the beach along the edge of the Pacific Ocean. But this afternoon I could see it.