Category: crazy ideas

Do they really log *everything* going on in their lives?

Gordon Bell has captured a lifetime’s worth of articles, books, cards, CDs, letters, memos, papers, photos, pictures, presentations, home movies, videotaped lectures, and voice recordings and stored them digitally. Phil Libin does something somewhat similar.

When I read about them, I wonder about the times they do something not accordance with law and norms prevailing around them, such as going to call girls, smoking marijuana, shoplifting, meeting with one’s employer’s competitors, having a luscious phone call with one’s mistress, wanking in public restroom, getting a syphilis treatment, farting, peeping into forbidden windows, eating food forbidden by one’s religion, reading subversive books, etc.

I want to buy your trash!

I am a recycling plant.
I extract energy from your organic trash and use it in my other recycling processes.
I extract pure water from your sewage water.
I separate rare metals from your inorganic solid waste and sell them to manufacturers of goods.
I developed technologies for inexpensive transportation of your wastes into me.
I have advanced technologies for separating out mixtures, so that you will not need to sort your own trash.
I invest a lot into R&D for developing cheaper and better methods of processing your refuse.
I have lobbyists in legislature bodies, who cause the appropriate laws to be passed, so that it is cheaper for you to sell me your refuse for a pittance, than to dispose of it in manner which pollutes the environment.
I hand out research grants to scientists, who research methods for separating radioactive nuclei out of material, with the goal of purifying radioactive wastes.

(Translation from inscriptions on a marble slab, which was found in Antarctica after all ice was dissolved due to global warming, and which is believed to be 65 million years old.)

Verbal abuser of wife and son in Doctor Who’s production team?

The end of the “The Idiot’s Lantern” episode of Doctor Who, which I saw yesterday night in BBC Prime (broadcast as channel 30 in Israeli cable TV), shows Tommy forgiving Eddie, his abusive father, after Eddie was thrown out of home by Rita, his wife and Tommy’s mother.

Since this scene has the psychological effect of weakening the resolve of domestic abuse victims, I wonder whether someone in the Doctor Who production team is himself an abusive husband/father, who did not have an interest in lending moral support to abuse victims, who at last decide to do something about their situation.

The “Intelligent Design” Battle

In USA, there is now a battle between science supporters and “Intelligent Design” supporters over incorporation of “Intelligent Design” in science education standards. See, for example, Creationism in the Classroom: Florida and Texas, Then the Nation.

Due to the fundamental role of evolution in understanding biological processes, may I suggest that venture capitalists, investors and businesses specializing in medical, pharmaceutical and biotech technologies – boycott districts, states and countries, in which the educational establishment promotes “Creationism” and “Intelligent Design” over objections by scientists.

Furthermore, it would be a good idea to move existing factories out of those regions, in which the educational establishment does not meet its duty of educating, in science, future employees for those establishments.

2008 Mar 04 update:   see also Creationist Biologist Says Civil Rights Violated by Employer’s Insistence on Evolution.  This is a case, in which a research establishment, in which evolution plays a fundamental role, was sued by a creationist, who was asked to resign from his job there after revealing his creationist beliefs.

Brainstorming about electric car energy source

As I was reading yet another article about Shai Agassi’s Electric Car project (a Google search turned up several references, such as The Electric Car Acid Test and Israel Is Set to Promote the Use of Electric Cars), I asked myself what if we could design a “liquid battery”.

Such a “liquid battery” would really be a fuel cell. We pump in two liquids (in the following – liquid/chemical A and liquid/chemical B). As the car is being driven, it gets the electrical energy from combining liquid A with liquid B, creating a third liquid (in the following – liquid/chemical AB). Liquid AB would later be withdrawn. In a processing plant, liquid AB would be electrolyzed and separated back into liquid A and liquid B, effectively charging the system with energy.

Such a system already exists, but using hydrogen. Hydrogen is combined with oxygen to yield water. Water is then electrolyzed to recover the hydrogen for another round.

The challenge is to find chemicals (which can be liquid, gas or solid powder) A, B and AB with the following properties:

  1. They store energy when separated rather than combined, so that no single chemical will be able to release energy uncontrollably i.e. explode. So, for example, ATP (used as energy storage medium by biological processes) would be out.
  2. No one of them can release energy by combining with oxygen or nitrogen. This would eliminate the big safety risk of hydrogen.
  3. Chemicals A and B can be combined in a fuel cell to efficiently release energy in the form of electricity.
  4. Chemical AB can be efficiently separated into chemicals A and B in a power plant.
  5. High energy storage density, relative to current technologies.

Socialism vs. capitalism and the question of neutering stray cats

Few days ago I saw few hungry cats while touring Jaffa. Some people in my group had compassion for them, bought food and fed the cats. It was mentioned that street cats should be neutered, so that they’ll not have kittens who are going to lead a life of hunger and misery.

I would like to consider the issue from another point of view.

Suppose YOU are offered the choice of:

  • Being taken care of, being well fed – but you must accept being sterilized. Then you would not have progeny. There would be no future for you.
  • Being left to fend for yourself, to succeed or fail on your merits, and then you’ll be spared sterilization. Then you would have a chance for a future.

Which of those alternatives would you choose?

No matter which alternative will you choose, several people would make the opposite choice.

The problem is that before we neuter cats, we are unable to ask them what is their preference, so we do not ask them. We patronize over them and assume that we know that it is better for them to have cozy present but no chance for a future.

Or else, we allow them to have litters of kittens, most of whom would die of hunger and diseases – just for the chance that some of them will be successful in the unfriendly world, into which they are born.

This reminds me of the ideological conflict between socialism and capitalism, which existed until the 1980’s, when people hit upon the present way of combining the safety net style of socialism with exploratory capitalism.

Previously, it was believed that it is possible to have only either regime which takes care of its people but offers them no future, no reason to have a gleam in their eyes – or regime, in which people do not take care of each other, in which people indulge in cutthroat competition, in which there are several losers and few winners – but people can hope for glorious future.

The human solution does not work for cats, because humans have access to fertility control technology and can reversibly control their fertility. In the case of cats, we make the decision for them. And usually we make the decision according to our squeamishness of letting kittens die if they lose in the competition over the cruel world’s resources, so we neuter the cats.

Force fields seen as critical to advancement of human civilization

Existing discussion about total energy consumption by civilizations (such as the one summarized in Kardashev scale) neglects the accident and terror factor.

Disasters (both natural and man-made) are usually associated with uncontrolled release of energy. When a civilization deals with little energy, the scope of man-made disasters is limited. However, when a civilization has a higher Kardashev scale rating, it deals with a lot of energy. Then uncontrolled energy releases can wreak a lot of havoc. Example: meltdowns in nuclear reactors.

Traditionally, the way to mitigate against man-made disasters was to live away from dangerous locations. Dangerous locations are locations, in which a lot of energy is manipulated. However, once a civilization advances to type I or even type II, then it will be at its disposal enough energy to wreck an entire planet. Humans would have to live in far away space stations, and in those space stations use much less energy than is available to their civilization.

Therefore, development of force fields able to contain such explosions is critical to humanity survival as it strives to become a type I civilization. This is important not only because of the risk of accidents, but also because of terror acts.

Neo-marxist solution to the modern day customer service woes

A series of blog articles about the bad customer service of HOT (the Israeli provider of cable TV, which provides also Internet and alternative telephony services) appearing in Dakar’s blog (the links are: http://www.dakars.info/general/hot-rumbling/ http://www.dakars.info/general/hot-the-story-continues-1/ http://www.dakars.info/general/hot-the-story-continues-2/ http://www.dakars.info/general/hot-the-story-continues-2-2/ – all in Hebrew) prompted me to think the general issue through. The problem is specific neither to HOT nor to Israel.

Essentially, what happens is that companies provide excellent service until the moment you sign over the dotted line. Once you are committeed to pay the monthly payments, they neglect to do proper installation, activation or maintenance/upgrades. When you want to disconnect from the service, they make you jump through hoops in their customer retention department.

Hundred years ago, this kind of problems did not exist due to the following reasons:

  • Very few deals involved post-sale customer service. You simply bought something, forked over the money and went home whistling merrily.
  • Service-oriented businesses catered to the Rich and Influential. They were not price-conscious. So companies were not under price competitive pressure to cut back in service quality.
  • Managers were not subjected to the kind of pressure today’s managers are subjected to by investors, who expect steady growth in earnings each quarter.

On the other hand, hundred years ago employees suffered from horrible working conditions. This problem was ameliorated through the marxist approaches of laborers’ committees, labor unions, and employee part-ownership in the business. Those solutions were enforced by strikes and other means.

Let’s try to carry further the analogy between capitalist-laborer gap of hundred years ago and today’s provider-consumer gap.

One of the problems is that the service providers answer to their stock owners, who are typically pension funds – rather than their own customers. So their management is supposed to serve the owners’ interest by squeezing as much profits as possible – rather than by provision of great service to owners who are also customers. Therefore, one solution is for customers to own a part of the business and have enough influence in its board to get it to have the proper trade-off between service quality and stock dividends.

Other possible approaches:

  • Customer representative committees, with which the companies have to negotiate acceptable service quality levels. Class action lawsuits, which already exist today, are a step in this direction.
  • Customer boycotts – are analogous to laborer strikes.

One more aspect is that hundred years ago, companies formed cartels, which monopolized their respective industries. The monopolies typically fixed prices. Those practices were largely stopped thanks to legislation, which regulates and prohibits anti-competitive behavior. Customers were (and still are today) price-sensitive, so there was a lot of political support for this kind of regulation.

However, this kind of regulation does not seem to extend to service levels. So consumers are often faced by having to deal with one of few companies, which provide essentially the same product/service, and at very similar prices – AND with similarly horrible levels of service.

There may be a market failure lurking in this, because customers typically shop by prices alone. They would know and value the quality of customer service only if anything goes wrong – not the thought one entertains when ordering the product/service. If a company offers different levels of service at different prices, most of the customers would buy the lowest level of service and then demand the highest level of service… Maybe customer representative committees can help with this, by helping to adjust the expectations of both producer and customer from each other.

Crazy speculation about herbs with medically relevant chemicals

In nature, there are various herbs and plants, which manufacture chemicals with theraupatic properties for humans and animals.

Did those plants evolve this ability to manufacture chemicals by themselves? Or were they artificially bred (or even genetically engineered) to do so by a long-lost civilization, which may have existed thousands of years ago?

This question suggests that a research be made about the metabolic pathways, which are used to create those chemicals. Two questions are of inerest:

  1. Do the metabolic pathways need the involvement of special genes?  If yes, it is a hint about artificial genetic engineering.
  2. Do the chemicals have other uses in the plant’s lifecycle?  If yes, then the metabolic pathways could have been created by evolution.

(No, creationism is not a valid answer.)

Difference between music (or books) and video

Peter Fader, a marketing professor in Wharton, was interviewed few months ago about the Radiohead’s release of their album online (Radiohead’s Free-for-all: Performance Art or New Business Model?, registration required).

He got it wrong when comparing movie DVDs to music CDs.

When you view a movie, you want to view it on a big screen with speakers, in a comfortable surrounding, and with popcorn or sunflower seeds on hand. Thus, viewing a movie is not an activity to be performed at any random place and time. You have at most few venues in which you would view a movie. Therefore, it is feasible to force you to use a memento, (such as a VCR cassette or a movie DVD) having a volume and a weight, to view a movie.

On the other hand, music is consumed in iPODs and MP3 players and everywhere. So ideally, you want to have it as a weightless bitstream. Therefore, any attempt to lock music down to a CD album would be counterproductive. Similarly – for books. While books require one’s undivided attention, one wants to read them at idle moments everywhere. Therefore they had better be available as weightless bitstreams in e-book readers, as well.