I started Venus Labs http://venuslabs.org/ to research and promote exactly this idea! Join us and we can live in stratospheric penthouses on Venus, rather than basement tunnels on Mars...
A lot of science fiction postulates worlds full of designed creatures - Oryx and Crake, The Windup Girl, etc. Your efforts to revive extinct species could be seen as a stepping stone to that kind of technology. Are you intrigued by the possibilities? What kind of creature would you design?
Adafruit has been doing a lot of interesting stuff around wearable electronics recently, having hired Becky Stern. Do you have a vision for where you want to go with that stuff, how much of your own time is spent on wearables now?
Metrix Createspace is just one example of a hackerspace. There are lots more all across the world. To see if there is one in your area, check the hackerspaces.org list. I've been a member at both noisebridge (in San Francisco) and hacklab.to (in Toronto), and it's been a wonderful experience.
I know that you did a lot of travel when you were younger (e.g. backpacking in Asia for years). How important was that for your status as a "Renaissance man"? Would you still recommended extensive travel to young people, or has globalization changed the opportunities?
Some friends and I are the creator of the North Paw compass anklet. You can check out our website at sensebridge, or read all of our hack notes on the noisebridge wiki: compass vibro anket. You can purchase North Paw kits from us for $95, and then you don't have to take Quinn's word for what it's like to wear one:-)
"Name an industry that can produce 1 million new, high-paying jobs over the next three years", challenges BusinessWeek. The obvious answer is Greentech. We need to scale wind and solar power production rapidly, for a whole host of reasons. Currently installed base took decades, and is still only 1% of the electric grid, so clearly there is lots of room to expand... and that's not even counting such opportunities as electric cars.
There is a group of people meeting on Sundays at Noisebridge in San Francisco, to work on devices like this compass belt, check us out here:
https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Cyborg_Group
Tesla got screwed over by Henry Fisker, and now they are trying to get some compensation (presumably after Fisker refused to settle outside of court). I wrote that this negativity would happen on the day the lawsuit went public, and I truly hope it doesn't hurt the nacient EV industry.
I am especially hopeful that the Automotive X Prize will drive this industry forward - and on that count, don't you think it's interesting that Tesla is an official contestant, but Fisker is NOT? See X Prize Cars for more information.
you've probably noticed already, but these are not practical vehicles. We're talking about single-person, prone-position, ground-hugging, 10-20 MPH vehicles. Of course you can get 2000+ MPG with those conditions!
The Progressive Automotive X Prize is about practical vehicles getting 100 MPG (or equivalent). Now that's a race whose outcome is interesting! Check out some of the X Prize Cars which have already been designed.
I've been chronicling the Automotive X Prize for months over at X Prize Cars. At X Prize Cars you can read about the various teams, Compare many of them side-by-side, and follow the news. The most impressive are of course the Tesla, Aptera, and the FuelVapor Technologies, which is actually on exhibit here at the New York Auto Show. But many other teams have cool cars as well - and it's still early, the official entry process is due to be announced today!
Also, if you're curious about the rules, I have a handy AXP rules summary page.
The ZAP Alias is going to be one of the first new cars to sport the old "Detroit Electric" brand. It's a three-wheel sports car EV. ZAP may enter it in the Automotive X Prize! For more information, check out the xprize cars page ZAP Alias
They are an official competitor. But do they actually get anywhere close to 100 MPGe? Especially during their fuel burning phase, which will necessary during the race? Nobody can tell because they haven't released enough information.
For more information check out the X Prize Cars page:
http://xprizecars.com/2007/12/mdi-inc-and-zero-pollution-mot.php
I've had enough of all the hydrogen hype, slashdot should run more stories on the Autmotive X Prize. For which hydrogen is not an acceptable fuel. Check out the X Prize Cars - and we're still 2 years from the race yet!
I've got a new website up profiling some of the Automotive X Prize (AXP) cars - I intend for it to be a kind of one-stop information clearing house on the X AXP. The Aptera-typ1 is one of the cars I feature already. Check it out at:
I got to play with an XO laptop yesterday at the Maker Faire. It is not a gadget - it is a computer built for a child (small keyboard) with little prior experience with IT (simple GUI, etc). I wrote up a review (with pictures) on my blog.
Writer works OK for me - it's a little slow, and sometimes image formatting differs from Word, but in general it works.
Calc on the other hand is absolutely impossible to use for my job. Anything more than a few hundred rows of data and it becomes literally seconds to do anything, like scroll. I typically work with thousands of rows of data (once per second baby) and tens of thousands isn't unusual. Excel handles this fine. And others have already mentioned how poor the charting is. Finally, The Save and autosave are horrendously slow, which is especially bad for the autosave - it will literally interrupt your work, and you've have to sit there for 20+ seconds while it "saves"...
So, the main reason I don't use Open Office at work is it can't handle the bulk of my work, which is large data set in a spread sheet.
It's not a "search engine" per-say but a lot of your talk of "automated meritocracy" sounds exactly like what StumbleUpon does in order to recommend content to users. People vote on a page, those votes are passed through an automated collaborative filtering system, and then the page is shown to more users who are predicted to like it, rinse lather and repeat. Good content rises to the top of the recommendation queue, so that new users (or people who just joined a category) are shown the things which the vast majority of people liked, in order to build up a rating history to personalize that person's recommendations.
And I remain unconvinced that they are going to actually achieve what they claim. And even if they did, we don't have the 10,000amp service at my house necessary to actually charge them at speed. And we haven't heard anything about "leakage" (or "self-discharge") rates.
It's all vapor ware until they show us a functioning prototype instead of just bragging about materials purity...
Running a few quick calculations shows that power is not likely the cause of the delay between firings. If you have 10kW to power your system, you can fire a 64MJ blast every 1.78 hours. If you have 100kW, time to fire is only 10.7 minutes. Obviously for the smaller railguns the power requirements are even less. I'm no expert on how much power is actually available on those big boats, but somehow I doubt that 100kW is out of reach.
I believe that the time to fire is more likely dominated by the maintenance issues - making sure that the rails are perfectly straight, the warhead is correctly placed, etc. If you're off by even a little bit that sucker could destroy the railgun on the way out, costing you millions and making it inoperative until you're back home.
I've been saying as much for years - in fact here is a blog post from June 2005 where I say that both would be DOA, expect for the fact that the PS3 gives Blue-ray a little bit of hope.
The reason I've been saying this? The same reason why DVD-A and SACD never took off: there simply isn't enough difference if all you're doing is stepping up the quality, to make consumers see the point of upgrading. So they won't bother - an upgrade like this is a big deal (rebuying your entire collection, new TV, new players, etc.) so there has to be compelling reasons like there were for the switch from VHS to DVD (new slimmer form factor, ability to play again and again without degradation, looks much nicer, and only lastly higher quality). I'm just not seeing these reasons for HD-DVD or Blue-ray, and I think the vast majority of people are with me.
The real successor, like the article says, is digital downloads: no physical object at all. That's an upgrade that consumers will love, once the bandwidth is available.
Slashdot Mirror
I started Venus Labs http://venuslabs.org/ to research and promote exactly this idea! Join us and we can live in stratospheric penthouses on Venus, rather than basement tunnels on Mars...
A lot of science fiction postulates worlds full of designed creatures - Oryx and Crake, The Windup Girl, etc. Your efforts to revive extinct species could be seen as a stepping stone to that kind of technology. Are you intrigued by the possibilities? What kind of creature would you design?
Adafruit has been doing a lot of interesting stuff around wearable electronics recently, having hired Becky Stern. Do you have a vision for where you want to go with that stuff, how much of your own time is spent on wearables now?
I recently attended the Montreal Mini Maker Faire, had a total blast, you can read about it on my blog: http://www.digitalcrusader.ca/2012/08/montreal-mini-maker-faire.html
Metrix Createspace is just one example of a hackerspace. There are lots more all across the world. To see if there is one in your area, check the hackerspaces.org list. I've been a member at both noisebridge (in San Francisco) and hacklab.to (in Toronto), and it's been a wonderful experience.
I know that you did a lot of travel when you were younger (e.g. backpacking in Asia for years). How important was that for your status as a "Renaissance man"? Would you still recommended extensive travel to young people, or has globalization changed the opportunities?
Some friends and I are the creator of the North Paw compass anklet. You can check out our website at sensebridge, or read all of our hack notes on the noisebridge wiki: compass vibro anket. You can purchase North Paw kits from us for $95, and then you don't have to take Quinn's word for what it's like to wear one :-)
"Name an industry that can produce 1 million new, high-paying jobs over the next three years", challenges BusinessWeek. The obvious answer is Greentech. We need to scale wind and solar power production rapidly, for a whole host of reasons. Currently installed base took decades, and is still only 1% of the electric grid, so clearly there is lots of room to expand... and that's not even counting such opportunities as electric cars.
There is a group of people meeting on Sundays at Noisebridge in San Francisco, to work on devices like this compass belt, check us out here: https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Cyborg_Group
If you'd like more info on the Automotive X Prize, check out these:
Table comparing 15 competitors side-by-side
Summary of the (draft) rules
Podcast focusing on interviews with the teams
Tesla got screwed over by Henry Fisker, and now they are trying to get some compensation (presumably after Fisker refused to settle outside of court). I wrote that this negativity would happen on the day the lawsuit went public, and I truly hope it doesn't hurt the nacient EV industry.
I am especially hopeful that the Automotive X Prize will drive this industry forward - and on that count, don't you think it's interesting that Tesla is an official contestant, but Fisker is NOT? See X Prize Cars for more information.
you've probably noticed already, but these are not practical vehicles. We're talking about single-person, prone-position, ground-hugging, 10-20 MPH vehicles. Of course you can get 2000+ MPG with those conditions! The Progressive Automotive X Prize is about practical vehicles getting 100 MPG (or equivalent). Now that's a race whose outcome is interesting! Check out some of the X Prize Cars which have already been designed.
I've been chronicling the Automotive X Prize for months over at X Prize Cars. At X Prize Cars you can read about the various teams, Compare many of them side-by-side, and follow the news. The most impressive are of course the Tesla, Aptera, and the FuelVapor Technologies, which is actually on exhibit here at the New York Auto Show. But many other teams have cool cars as well - and it's still early, the official entry process is due to be announced today! Also, if you're curious about the rules, I have a handy AXP rules summary page.
The ZAP Alias is going to be one of the first new cars to sport the old "Detroit Electric" brand. It's a three-wheel sports car EV. ZAP may enter it in the Automotive X Prize! For more information, check out the xprize cars page ZAP Alias
They are an official competitor. But do they actually get anywhere close to 100 MPGe? Especially during their fuel burning phase, which will necessary during the race? Nobody can tell because they haven't released enough information. For more information check out the X Prize Cars page: http://xprizecars.com/2007/12/mdi-inc-and-zero-pollution-mot.php
I've had enough of all the hydrogen hype, slashdot should run more stories on the Autmotive X Prize. For which hydrogen is not an acceptable fuel. Check out the X Prize Cars - and we're still 2 years from the race yet!
I've got a new website up profiling some of the Automotive X Prize (AXP) cars - I intend for it to be a kind of one-stop information clearing house on the X AXP. The Aptera-typ1 is one of the cars I feature already. Check it out at:
http://xprizecars.com/
Over at my blog I go into some detail... I wish they had thought about the prize more, they left so much on the table! http://digitalcrusader.ca/archives/2007/09/lunar_xprize_mo.html
http://wiki.millenniumcampaign.org/olpc/concepts Share your game concept for the XO machine - there are some fairly interesting ones up already.
I got to play with an XO laptop yesterday at the Maker Faire. It is not a gadget - it is a computer built for a child (small keyboard) with little prior experience with IT (simple GUI, etc). I wrote up a review (with pictures) on my blog.
Writer works OK for me - it's a little slow, and sometimes image formatting differs from Word, but in general it works.
Calc on the other hand is absolutely impossible to use for my job. Anything more than a few hundred rows of data and it becomes literally seconds to do anything, like scroll. I typically work with thousands of rows of data (once per second baby) and tens of thousands isn't unusual. Excel handles this fine. And others have already mentioned how poor the charting is. Finally, The Save and autosave are horrendously slow, which is especially bad for the autosave - it will literally interrupt your work, and you've have to sit there for 20+ seconds while it "saves"...
So, the main reason I don't use Open Office at work is it can't handle the bulk of my work, which is large data set in a spread sheet.
It's not a "search engine" per-say but a lot of your talk of "automated meritocracy" sounds exactly like what StumbleUpon does in order to recommend content to users. People vote on a page, those votes are passed through an automated collaborative filtering system, and then the page is shown to more users who are predicted to like it, rinse lather and repeat. Good content rises to the top of the recommendation queue, so that new users (or people who just joined a category) are shown the things which the vast majority of people liked, in order to build up a rating history to personalize that person's recommendations.
I've blogged about this EESTOR stuff twice already:
s torage_r.html a pacitor.html
http://digitalcrusader.ca/archives/2006/09/power_
http://digitalcrusader.ca/archives/2007/01/ultrac
And I remain unconvinced that they are going to actually achieve what they claim. And even if they did, we don't have the 10,000amp service at my house necessary to actually charge them at speed. And we haven't heard anything about "leakage" (or "self-discharge") rates.
It's all vapor ware until they show us a functioning prototype instead of just bragging about materials purity...
Running a few quick calculations shows that power is not likely the cause of the delay between firings. If you have 10kW to power your system, you can fire a 64MJ blast every 1.78 hours. If you have 100kW, time to fire is only 10.7 minutes. Obviously for the smaller railguns the power requirements are even less. I'm no expert on how much power is actually available on those big boats, but somehow I doubt that 100kW is out of reach.
I believe that the time to fire is more likely dominated by the maintenance issues - making sure that the rails are perfectly straight, the warhead is correctly placed, etc. If you're off by even a little bit that sucker could destroy the railgun on the way out, costing you millions and making it inoperative until you're back home.
I've been saying as much for years - in fact here is a blog post from June 2005 where I say that both would be DOA, expect for the fact that the PS3 gives Blue-ray a little bit of hope.
The reason I've been saying this? The same reason why DVD-A and SACD never took off: there simply isn't enough difference if all you're doing is stepping up the quality, to make consumers see the point of upgrading. So they won't bother - an upgrade like this is a big deal (rebuying your entire collection, new TV, new players, etc.) so there has to be compelling reasons like there were for the switch from VHS to DVD (new slimmer form factor, ability to play again and again without degradation, looks much nicer, and only lastly higher quality). I'm just not seeing these reasons for HD-DVD or Blue-ray, and I think the vast majority of people are with me.
The real successor, like the article says, is digital downloads: no physical object at all. That's an upgrade that consumers will love, once the bandwidth is available.