Category: technology

Driverless cars! Imagine being able to get in the car going to work, travel, whatever, and be able to do something else along the way? Yes, I know that some people already do this on a bus or train, but those don’t go directly to your house and then precisely to your end destination. A car that drives itself will start at your house and take you wherever you want. If I want to go see my dad, I could hop in the car and catch a nap along the three hour ride. Or surf the web, or watch a video, etc. Because computers have much better reaction times than humans, it will be possible to have many more cars on the road at once and traffic will be much more efficient. The vast majority of accidents occur due to driver error, automated cars will be able to eliminate a lot of those problems.

The technology is already here and is being used. There are a few problems though. First, computerized directions have to get much better before I will trust it. How many times have we been steered wrong by GPS directions? A bigger issue is liability. I am perfectly willing to believe that most accidents are caused by human error and that almost all of those could be avoided by automated cars either through avoiding dangerous driving and/or much better reactions. There will still be accidents though, who will be liable when something happens? While the frequency of accidents may go down, the more litigious of us out there may see bigger targets when something goes wrong. Will the manufacturers be willing to take on that kind of risk? How will the laws have to be rewritten to accommodate driverless cars?

Man, overnight trips would be so much easier and nicer like this. Imagine the boosts to autonomy people with disabilities could have! Blind people wouldn’t have to be reliant on public transport or friends and family. Speaking of public transport, can you imagine how that would change with this type of technology? The possibilities boggle the mind… Please oh please let this start coming soon!

Another bit of technology that is super exciting is the possibility of using light as a means of transmitting data. Radio waves are handy, but the spectrum is crowded and congestion is getting worse. Some very clever people have come up with a way of modulating visible light so that it can be used for all sorts of networking purposes. Here’s the basic idea…. If you replace regular light bulbs and fluorescents with LED lamps, you can switch the light on and off millions of times a second. That’s far faster than the human eye and brain can cope with so it would look like continuos light to us. That switching on and off would create ones and zeros, and then BAM! we have digital communication. Potentially any and all light sources could be transformed into networking spots. All of the lights in your house, all street lamps, headlights and tail lights (see the driverless cars above), absolutely any place that is illuminated could take advantage of this. Check out this talk that explains it:

There are still a lot of questions surrounding this. How do you turn it into a two way communication, what about the backhaul issues, how would you wire your house/office for this etc. The good news is that this technology is all sorted out. There are no technical limitations in the way of this being used. People are talking about a 2012 introduction of this sort of technology. Here’s another great thing, even if we discount the awesomeness of this wireless technology, can you imagine the efficiency gains if a significant number of lightbulbs are switched over the LEDs? There are all sorts of amazing possibilities with this, and who knows what other sorts of uses will be thought of once essentially free, high speed connections are available in many places.

The future is looking good, and close!

I was at dinner the other night with some family members and the topic of Trukee California came up (don’t ask). Both my brother and I had been there but there was some question about where it was and some of the details about it. We both got out our phones to look it up, but we did it in very different ways.

I started to type it into a Google search, like I always do. Nathan simply picked up his phone and said “Trukee California” into it and got the search result. It occurred to me that I don’t actually use my phone for much and when I do, I essentially use it like a small computer. I could have search by voice on mine (it’s offered by Google) but it never occurred to me to do something like that. I might own the technology, but I’m not really fully invested in the capabilities of my mobile devices. Nathan’s life has revolved around his phone for years. I get the distinct impression that he could live without a computer just fine, but if his phone went missing he’d be lost. It would be the opposite for me.

I’d like to get more into my mobile devices, but I’m not sure how I’m going to do it. Maybe with just enough time It’ll become second nature to me. Maybe I just need to get out more and spend some time away form the computer…

Can you believe it? It’s been twenty years since the web rolled out. I was surfing the internet before there was a graphical interface, and I went to BBSs before that. Everything was done by command line and it was exhilarating to be able to find info from all around the world. Gopher servers and WAIS were fascinating to me. Spent a lot of time on USENET, remember that? Didn’t think so…

A couple of years after I was out of college, I was over at a friend’s house and saw my first actual web site. It was a search portal called Web Crawler. I later found Lycos. I was hooked all over again. All own this was done over dial up of course, so sites were pretty rudimentary. There are still a few relics live on the web from that time period. Check out the Southeastern Conference on Linguistics page from 1997.

It should load pretty fast since there really isn’t much to it. Can you believe how that looks? That was pretty common. Text, some colors, hey it was all new and we lapped it up! We’ve come a long way in 20 years, let’s see what the next 20 bring us!

Just downloaded Galaga for the iPad. For those of you not familiar with 80’s arcade games, Galaga was probably the pinnacle of the space invaders type games. Space invaders is a classic of course, it was the first arcade game to start a craze, the likes of which weren’t seen again until Pacman came along. Japan actually suffered a shortage of 25 yen pieces because of the game. But by the time the 80’s rolled around, Space Invaders was pretty dated. I only ever saw 2 or 3 of those games in the wild, they were old by the time I got to the arcades. Galaga was a lot more colorful, and added in some new action with swooping aliens, and tractor beams that could capture your ship. With careful shooting, you could get it back and then shoot with two ships at the same time.

This just came up in the App Store recently, and it was FREE!!! No more quarters, and lots more smiles. They have several versions available to purchase, but I’m sticking with the classic one for now. Lots of fun…

TV still looks great on my iMac, but I’ve noticed something that is giving me second thoughts. It looks as though certain channels are not available through the firewire port. I had always watched sports on CSN, WGN, NHL network, or the MLB network with no problems. I tried watching ESPN the other night and had no luck. The same goes for BBC America (which isn’t available in HD for some reason on FIOS). I can get around the ESPN thing by watching the streaming content on ESPN3 online. The quality isn’t nearly as good, but it is there. The only way around the BBC America thing is to wait until the next day and watch the show after I download it from iTunes. The show is always much better without the commercials, but it’s a bummer having to wait the extra day. Still, I’m not going to buy a TV just for one and a half channels. I should be fine with what I’ve got.

Have you noticed over the past several years that it’s harder to get your laundry as clean as it used to be? I know I have. Recently, I had a problem with my towels. No matter how I washed them I couldn’t get rid of the moldy smell that is so common to basement dwellers. I stumbled across an article, on an economics blog of all places, that shed some light on why it is harder to clean stuff. I’ve noticed more and more laundry detergents are claiming to be phosphate free. I never thought about it much, but it turns out that’s why it’s tougher to get stuff clean.

It’s my understanding that phosphates act as the scrubbers in detergent. More and more places are passing laws against having them in detergents, so they must be really bad for the environment, right? Actually, it’s the opposite problem, phosphates are too good for the environment. They make excellent fertilizer, things grow like gangbusters with the stuff. The problem is that if you put too much of it into streams, ponds, etc, the algae can go berserk and end up killing the fish. So various states have started to pass laws banning them from household products. As is so often the case, it isn’t really clear that phosphates from detergents are to blame for the increased algae growth. Agricultural use is much more intensive, and there’s always the possibility of the phosphates occurring naturally. If you’re on a sewer system, phosphates should be filtered out in any case. The days of raw sewage being dumped into waterways is over. In the meantime, we have trouble getting things clean.

Even though it is difficult to buy detergent with phosphates in it, it is really easy to add it manually. I picked up a box of Trisodium Phosphate under the Savogran brand at Home Depot. It’s in the painting supplies department. Usually TSP is used as a heavy duty cleaner for paint prep. A dilute bleach/TSP combo is supposed to do wonders as a general cleaning solution. I bought the small box for 4 or 5 bucks, it should last quite a while. After looking around, it seems as though all you need is a half teaspoon per wash load. That’s all I used and my towels are actually clean! Yay for not having smelly towels!

If you’re still worried about the environmental impact, think about this.. TSP is also used as a food additive. It is far safer than anything else I found in the paint department, that’s for sure. It’s big impact is that it makes things grow too well. Personally, I’m not convinced that it’s any more dangerous than any other type of detergent. Even if you are worried, using it once in a while is certainly no worse than most other household chemicals. I say, let there be clean clothes and dishes!

I saw something the other day that made my head spin. It could change the way computers are made and how we think about them. I’ve talked about the new Thunderbolt port before, it’s the super high sped connection that is currently on the new Apple computers. It uses the same protocol, and the same speed, as the devices inside the computer. This means that we could potentially add things to our computer on the outside and have the same effect as changing the inside.

Some of you are probably saying, “Who cares?” but with just a little imagination things can get crazy. First off, we’ve been able to add things to tower computers for a long time. Just open it up, add or replace a card and voila! new performance. Laptops are far and away more popular than desktops at this point, and they are not nearly as easy to upgrade, till now… Check out the Sonnet Echo Express , it’s a little ways down the page. What is it? It is an external enclosure for PCIe cards. Those are the same ones you put into a tower, but now you can attach one to a laptop using a Thunderbolt port. Imagine having a mild mannered, energy sipping laptop on the go, and a graphic powerhouse laptop when you were at home… Just attach a new video card at home and BOOM! Going forward, there will be little reason to stick to the same form factor. As long as the box you have it in has a thunderbolt port, it will work…

But it can get so much more weird/cool… Why do we need a laptop? Why not a tablet, or a phone? Do we just need a small box to put our CPUs in? Remember, Thunderbolt is capable of carrying all current protocols that are now used over varying cables. It could replace ethernet (for networking), USB, Firewire, ESATA, and the various video cables like DVI and HDMI. Because Thunderbolt devices can be daisy chained, you could potentially hook your tablet to a single cable and have it hooked to massive storage, input devices like trackpads and keyboards, a huge display, a camera, whatever. Right now, Thunderbolt is using a copper cable that is good for 10GBs in two directions, but it has a shortish maximum length. There are already plans for optical versions that could stretch for many hundreds of feet and vastly increased bandwidth/speed.

That adds a whole other dimension to the possibilities. All of the things that make up what we call a computer could be distributed around a house or business. Want to network a video processor? No problem. Want to change CPUs? No biggie, just unhook it from the cable and pop a new one on. The possibilities are endless. Modular, easily networkable computer systems with crazy fast performance are within our grasp. Add fiber optic internet and we are talking serious stuff.

Future tech? I don’t think so. The computer I’m supposed to get tomorrow has two Thunderbolt ports on it, that means I could use up to 12 Thunderbolt devices. The device from Sonnet is supposed to be here this summer, Intel already has fiber versions working in the lab, and I have fiber optic internet going right up to the house. Of course, that fiber is converted to copper to bet into the hose, but I can’t imagine it would be too difficult to eliminate that step. Like I said, things are moving quickly, let’s see what the next couple of years hold.