It’s the 21st Century, Stupid!

But of course he didn’t mean to. Some people cite The Law of Unintended Consequences like it’s always a bad thing. But it isn’t. Often discoveries derive from the most unexpected backgrounds and the results of one innovation can lead to another and another in the most marvelous ways. Check out the shows Connections, Connections², Connections³ or The Day the Universe Changed all hosted by James Burke. Or maybe you could find the books. What does any of this have to do with Gary Gygax? Just read this piece in the New York Times by Adam Rogers, a senior editor at Wired.

Some people never understood anything about the appeal of D&D. But while I was never heavily into playing I did play a few times and understand the appeal. Consider what happened one time when playing with a friend who was running an “introductory” dungeon for some people who had never played the game or only played once or twice before. I was playing the character of a sorcerer and our group had been tossed into a dungeon. Our first task in this adventure was of course to escape our prison. Being a very low level sorcerer I had very few spells in my arsenal and none of them were very powerful. But I decided to give something a try anyway and cast that old standby, the magic missile, at a bar of our jail. The dungeonmaster rolled the dice to see what would happen, blinked at the results and said in a surprised voice “It worked. The bar has broken apart and you can escape between the remaining ones.”. It was an unexpected action that forced the DM to adapt in an instant to an entirely new set of circumstances and change his plans accordingly and granted the group an unexpected advantage. That sort of thing and the getting together of friends with a common interest is one of the appeals of what Gary Gygax helped create and that he still enjoyed, hosting D&D sessions at his home as recently as January. He wasn’t a saint, more of a curmudgeon in some ways from what I hear, but at a minimum even if you don’t buy some of what Rogers wrote, he co-created a game system that still entertains millions to this day along with its progeny.

Snow day today, so to speak. Sipping coffee and reading the February issue of Popular Science. It has lots of stuff about airline fuel consumption and the search for more fuel efficiency and alternative fuels that would work for aircraft, an entirely different proposition than fuel for cars. One thing that struck me is a sidebar about the Boeing X-48B blended wing aircraft design that can be 23% more fuel efficient and why it won’t ever be a commercial passenger liner. Simply put, no one wants to fly in a passenger plane that doesn’t have windows in the passenger compartment and readily available emergency exits. Sort of reasonable. So current plans call for only military versions of the plane. But then I wondered just how many planes UPS, FedEx and other dedicated air freight carriers use. Aren’t there enough of them to form a fairly hefty niche by themselves? And if you’re building the craft for the military you should have the capability in place to build a civilian version even if it’s not going to the passenger carriers, shouldn’t you?

Yesterday I was helping someone shop for a laptop and researching two different models. One of them was the Dell XPS M1330. It had two technologies that made for a lighter laptop with excellent performance. One was available at only a moderate price premium and the other really kicked up the price. The first of these was a display that is backlit by LCDs instead of a fluorescent bulb. It works well and provides for a thinner, lighter screen. The other is a SSD, a Solid State Disk. With current technology these drives are outrageously expensive and don’t provide as much storage as current disk technology. In the Dell a 64 GB drive added $900 onto the price when replacing the default 120 GB drive.

What’s interesting is that I just found a small article in PC World about a new storage technology called PMC, for programmable metallization cell. Looking online I found this slightly larger article on Wired. Basically this method of storage uses a new technology called nano-ionics to build a microscopic copper bridge between electrodes on demand. If a bridge exists it represents a one, no bridge represents a zero. The difference in capacity is mind-boggling, with a terabyte of memory in a thumb-drive like the one in my pocket easily doable. One of the researchers involved in the project said that the storage based on this technique should cost one-tenth the price of current flash drive and be one thousand times as energy efficient as current flash memory. So if this technology is applied to the kind of SSD in the M1330 it would be entirely likely that an amazingly fast SSD with storage in terabytes should be cheaper than current notebook hard drives. Very impressive. Imagine the speed of this storage for a media server. Or picture the giant libraries of film that can be stored much more readily in massive on-demand movie libraries. Me, I look forward to a really economical way to quit messing with tapes for backup since I just don’t trust them. And the first products are expected to show up in about 18 months. Tick. Tick. Tick.

I found references recently to an extremely useful little tool called CPU-Z from CPUID. It’s small, fast, extremely useful and you don’t even have to install the program. Just tell it to run and it will tell you about your motherboard, memory, cpu and BIOS. The utility itself is free. There’s even an SDK for developers who are interested in incorporating the engine into their own software. There’s also an even more in-depth utility called PC Wizard as well as some other things. If you ever need some of this information or are just curious you ought to check it out.

Congress finally passed a compromise bill affecting auto mileage standards. Notice the finally part of that. Also notice that it was passed in spite of the automobile companies continued resistance. When you see the ads they run pretending to give a damn about the environment and mileage remember that. Also, when they say that it just isn’t technically feasible keep this guy in mind. It’s true that his full blown rebuilds aren’t economically feasible for anyone but the wealthy and that their cost would never be recovered in fuel savings. But it is also true that it puts the lie to the claims that there is no technology that exists to reduce mileage as drastically as we really need.

 Then there’s the research at MIT that would produce an engine that while more expensive than current ones would be much less expensive than hybrids. What I wondered about when reading this was whether in their savings calculations they accounted for the reduced weight of the smaller engine and reduction in supports needed for it in determining what it would do for gas mileage.

When it comes to innovations that would allow even further divergence from the old gas engine standard there’s the in-wheel motor that has different companies creating their own versions of it including Bridgestone, Mitsubishi and PML.

There’s lots of tech out there to do what Detroit is saying can’t be done. They apparently just don’t want to put forth the effort. There might be what they view as good reasons for doing it given their current financial problems but looking solely at the short term will do nothing to help guarantee their long term existence. Now in my opinion if there was a technology that was proven to produce major fuel efficiency improvements and they just couldn’t feasibly afford to retrofit their factories to produce it I wouldn’t have a problem with the government subsidizing that retrofit so long as the accounting was transparent. It would just do too much good for our country to not do so.

An article on CNet news, a place that specializes in tech news, is about one of the green industries that people wouldn’t normally think about, chemistry. Yes, there is a new version of the industry that has done so much damage to the environment and it is serious about improving things. Sometimes it’s a question of new compounds that aren’t toxic and easily degradeable. In other cases ways are found to do things that don’t use chemicals at all.

The basis of this blog is in part the idea that things change and in many cases we’re better off adapting than trying to remain stuck in the past. Or to put it in another way if you base your plans and beliefs on the way things were instead of the way things are, odds are the plans aren’t going to work out very well.

But some things really shouldn’t go away completely and instead should at least exist even if some change is necessary. A new show on PBS, Wired Science, did a segment entitled Dangerous Science about how the ability for youngsters and adult amateurs to do hands on science is almost extinct. There’s no longer any such thing as a real chemistry set, many chemicals and materials that amateur scientists and tinkerers need will set off alarms in Homeland Security and even school labs are hesitant to let their students do real hands-on experiments that some timid administrators apparently feel might get them sued if anything goes wrong. Haven’t these people ever heard of a release form?

But if you’re one of those who occasionally feel the stirrings of a desire to find out things for yourself there does exist at least one resource, United Nuclear. Believe me, you owe it to yourself to at least browse around their site.

That is the title of a show on PBS I had DVRed and watched this afternoon. It is Timothy Ferris’s ode to amateur astonomers and it is a wonderful show. One part of it was about the Bisque brothers, who founded a company called Software Bisque that produces astronomy software and equipment for the enthusiast. What they did in the show that I thought was so great was to set up for relatively little cost a good small scale setup that mirrors something I knew was either already out there or could be done. This was set up at a location that had electricity and a web connection in a good viewing location with minimal light pollution. Using the internet connection and a good amateur scope with special remote contol capability and a good CCD camera you have a telescope that can be used for good viewing from anywhere on the planet. I’ve always thought this would be a great thing to have. But what it would be really good for is if you could have a network of them accessible on a rental basis to people who were interested and most especially to schools. If you want to captivate the imaginations of young people nothing does it so well for so many as the kind of images you see from space. Look at how much of the public is captivated by the images from the Hubble telescope. Can you imagine the reaction of kids who could see fabulous images from space that they can have a part in creating?

This leads me to something I’ve been wondering about for a while. What kind of small telescope could be built that would survive in space? Could you build a cluster of them? and then give remote control through a center here on Earth that would distribute this control and the images to schools? How much would it cost and how many could we build to make it as widely available as possible? Think of the possibilities.

…bad reporting on science or technology always annoys me. I hadn’t even heard of this article because I don’t have HD-Net, Dan Rather’s new employer. But a blogger on Wired examines a piece that he did on the new Boeing 787 Dreamliner. The article even has a stinker of a title, Plastic Planes. To use the word plastic to describe carbon fiber composites is inaccurate, to say the least. While there might be questions about these materials they have in fact been used in military aircraft and one has to wonder about claims that the stresses on a military aircraft are so radically different than a commercial craft that it raises significant safety questions.

Does anyone else remember reading articles about how the internet was going to save rural communities because anyone could live anywhere if their job could be done remotely? And that companies could locate there because they would still have modern communications? PC World has an article entitled Rural U.S.: Doomed to Dial-Up? that shows the weakness in that belief. Basically the telecom companies have no interest in serving rural areas and small towns because the profit margin they require in today’s business environment just isn’t there. And with the continuing decrease in rural population in many areas it’s only going to get worse.