Breakfast craft

Someone should invent a small hot-air balloon that would make your toast and deliver it to your plate in the morning.

Mirror, mirror

Day 294,
originally uploaded by JimmyMac210.

When I heard a while ago that a team of researchers had expanded the genetic code by altering the subcellular machinery used to synthesize proteins I thought this would be big all over the mainstream media. I was wrong, however, and I have heard nary a peep on how this could lead to all sorts of interesting mutant enzymes and bizarre polypeptides by substituting other things in place of the twenty-two amino acids that naturally occur on Earth.

I would like to propose a slightly different hack made possible with the expanded vocabulary: mirror image proteins. We could designate twenty-two of the four base pair sequences with mirror-reversed optical isomers of the standard amino acids, generate the appropriate mRNA sequence to assemble them in exactly the same way as proteins we already know, and have the ribosomes and tRNA machinery start to produce these backward polypeptides. I would guess that these would fold in exactly the same way as the conventional proteins, only reversed, with the left-handed alpha helices and other structural elements matching up just as they should. Going further, we could take the entire genome of an organism and rewrite it using our new four base pair language, provide it with the wrong-handed nutrients needed, and have it generate all the proteins making up that creature but completely reversed. It would take a little bit of work to engineer the mirror cells needed to house this machinery, but given enough time I am sure it could be done. We would start with microbes and work our way up to larger animals and plants once we had everything in place.

In the end, we would have a completely mirror-reversed organism relying on the alternate coding in order to grow and reproduce. If we were to eat that organism, we would not be able to digest it very well at all and so would be inherently low in calories. But just maybe it might taste wonderful.

Entropy - it doesn't just happen

originally uploaded by theimpulsivebuy.

What fools we were in the 1970s when we did not know that we needed a product like this to ensure that our hair looked messy, trusting instead to literal winds of chance, inadvertent bed-head (before that was a scientific term), and desperate self-barbering upon occasion. For if science has taught us anything, it's that one cannot trust nature to revert to disorder when one's (fashion) life might depend on it. I imagine that the Axe people have incorporated nanomachinery into their product to make sure that no two strands parallel one another over a significant distance, and perhaps a dab of adaptive optics to befuddle the hapless viewer's eye to see more of a fractal Medusa's nest than is practically possible to engineer in reality. Back in those days the mathematics of strange attractors was regrettably unavailable to describe the chaotic hair dynamics that is now understood to be essential to sustain modern standards of presentability.

Now we're a two hybrid household

We skipped right over the second generation 'Icon' version of the Prius, now having become early adopters of a 'Classic' 2002 model year and now a new 2010.

Construction kits for big kids

It's a project to develop an open source hardware standard for builders, hobbyists, and anyone else who needs to create structures with lightweight, sturdy, reconfigurable and extensible metal parts. They are now in the process of raising funds through Kickstarter through October 24th. If that goes well, look for the first production runs to be done before the the year is out.
Update: Funded, with plenty of room to spare! I'm happy to be one of the first backers of what should be a fantastic enterprise.
Update to update: Still waiting in 2024.

The world's dullest console game

I have an MP3 player by Nextar like the one in this picture, and I like it because it plays MP3s, it doesn't insist on crippling DRM, it is fairly durable, and didn't cost too much. One place that took some getting used to, however, is the operation of the controls. Here, for instance, is the sequence of button presses you need to do if you are listening to a track you are tired of, want to erase it, and start listening to the next track:

S-L-L-S-S-L-S-L-S-C-R-S-R-C

where S is the button on the side, L and R are the buttons to advance and go back, and C is the button in the center of the ring. (You don't need to touch the up or down buttons or the A-B button.) Typically I need to execute this maneuver one-handed, while driving, not looking at the screen, and I'm getting pretty good at it. Still, it seems like they could have done away with a prompt or four to simplify what should be a rather common operation.

The dog days of summer

This is a picture of my laptop at work when earlier today it suddenly and silently cut to grey.The two areas on either side looking sort of like shark gills were feeling a lot hotter than electronic equipment usually likes to be, and the underside of the laptop, sitting flat on my desk, was just as bad. So I'm guessing that the problem today, and the intermittent problems I have been having (occasionally when connecting to the office remotely, which I really find inconvenient) could be heat related.

Why don't they make big smokestacks for laptops to carry the heat away and put it as far away from the unit as possible? Or put radiators under the keyboard (which has lots of open space) instead of in a thin strip to the side? That way my fingers would be right where they need to be to know that the unit is feeling a little feverish and I should try to slow things down for a bit.

I have the back feet of the laptop propped up slightly to improve the air circulation somewhat, and those vents feel twenty or thirty degrees Celsius cooler presently. Let's see whether this helps, since I think a replacement is not going to be in the cards for now.

Two notices for your consideration

• Some library patrons are just better with their hands than others.


• Informational display seen while shopping for GPS units.

The web of memories

CDC 7600 Core Memory,
originally uploaded by stiefkind.

We still talk about core dumps nowadays, but back when I was in grad school using the Control Data 7600 (and, before it, the 6600), they actually used these hand-woven magnetic core arrays. We would submit our batch jobs to be run on the Cyber, and some time later on we would pick up our lineprinter output (green bar paper fan folded and perforated for tractor feed) set out in cubbyholes between the computer room and the outside. Or we would run a program to show graphical output on a monochrome Tektronix terminal and capture screens to be printed on a thermal printer or onto microfiche. At the time, we didn't even realize how cumbersome it was.

It is almost as if we lived during the time of dinosaurs. Towards the end of my time in grad school the first Macintoshes came out at the student co-op, themselves also museum pieces.

Just slightly more wasteful than a Hummer

Please can we get over our international malaise and concern over the composition of the atmosphere so everyone can fly to work in one of these? The parking lots at the 7-11 will have to be modified to accommodate the airfoils as people stop by to grab a cup of coffee, of course.

Extremely loud and incredibly deep

1180,
originally uploaded by Andrew Lilley.

With the global economic crisis, we must use all our ingenuity to encourage the flow of cash. Thus it makes sense to consider those areas we here in the US are good at (amusement park rides) instead of those we are no longer so good at (building cars people want).

The world's tallest rollercoaster is here in New Jersey. This is a kind of record that isn't terribly hard to imagine being broken, as it just requires a designer willing to build a structure more than 46 storeys in the air and the financial backing to construct it. But has anyone considered going in the other direction and building the world's deepest rollercoaster? There are so many abandoned mine shafts around the country that there must be one which can be rehabilitated and adapted for the purpose. Could one go fifty meters down, a hundred, a few kilometers deep? Also, to most people, even the rational ones, mineshafts are inherently creepy, especially for the significant number of people with claustrophobia. I am confident that engineers could address the issues of tainted air, of rescue shafts, of inundation, and of evil cave trolls so that such a structure could take over the title of MOST DANGEROUS ROLLERCOASTER IN THE WORLD which would be certain to pack them in.

Of course when one considers technical difficulties, it is well to remember that one is comparing things to the difficulty of building a structure 150 meters up, which is no picnic either. At least you wouldn't have to worry about wind load, rain and snow.

I propose that we turn the problem over to the experts: high-school students.

Night and day

I think the idea of a surveillance camera powered by the sun is not a bad one, but I would like to see the cell connected to a deep cycle battery so that after the sun goes down it could still function. Say if one had one posted at the foot of the driveway leading up to your illicit late night Old Maid/cricket fighting gamepit. Maybe an infrared spotlight too off of the same power source, for illumination, and a camouflage blind over the whole thing too.

Rendezvous with mouth

Essential tremor is a condition that can affect the ability to use one's hands in a steady fashion and often causes the person who has it to have problems feeding themselves, drinking, or grooming. Medical researchers are working on treatments involving neural stimulation as well as pharmaceuticals, but there are also technologically assisted methods of helping sufferers deal with the unwanted motion.

A device which fits on the person's body to attenuate the motion caused by essential tremor has been the subject of a Mechanical Engineering thesis. I was thinking, though, of a way to compensate for the tremors by using special utensils which were instrumented to correct for the shake much the same way that high-end digital cameras compensate for shaking, or perhaps like the automatic docking system used on the ESA's unmanned transports to ISS. I imagine a fork, knife, or spoon with 3-axis acceleratometers inside the handle, along with a miniature video camera pointing at the destination (the mouth), with an articulated drive holding the working end of the utensil steady despite hand tremor. Now that they have tiny motors built into mascara applicators, it cannot be too difficult to put one into a piece of flatware.

I can foresee one issue with the invention, however: would it be dishwasher-safe? Perhaps if the water-sensitive part were detachable from the spoon/knife/fork part in a way similar to the interchangeable heads on an electric toothbrush, one could get around this too.

Total Metabolic Information

TMI Cooling Towers,
originally uploaded by scenesandcinema.

Some might be of the opinion that this product goes too far (careful if you are at work), but it might just be that it doesn't go too far enough. How about an upgrade where your internal body temperature is put up to Twitter so all your contacts know exactly how you're doing minute to minute? It's just a matter of integrating a cellphone application keying off of the Bluetooth connection, child's play really.

A no-brainer.

Stay out

Archaeologists reveal signs that the builders of Stonehenge fenced the common people out.

I am eager to find out exactly how this worked. To get in to see what was going on, could a person go to a 3000 BC ticket counter (bearing a kid goat, perhaps)? Or was there a stone-axe wielding bouncer at the main entrance with a list? If one of the masses caught a glimpse of the Megalithic structure, could he or she sell the story to the mass media in order to satisfy the popular curiosity? Or would that be suicidal?

In a more practical sense, it raises the question as to whether the ancient palisade structure ought to be recreated. It could be done privately, supported by advertising space, thus leaving the great stones untouched by commerce.

More crane fun

Here is a list of some other things that a household bridge crane could bring within reach of the ordinary kook like me.

• A visual artist could use it to paint canvases many meters across in the paint-drip style of Jackson Pollock, ones too wide to reach across normally without having to step onto them. You could either come up with some arrangement with paint pots and servo motors mounted on the hoist, or else a harness to lift the artist up to apply the paint by hand.
• Along the same lines, the kids could put on a production of Peter Pan. Test those wires before flying too high, though.
• It seems to that the main room cleaning chore remaining once you have a robotic vacuum cleaner is the need to shift the furniture both to spare the carpeting from getting those pits where the legs dig in and to give the robot a chance to hit those areas underneath. A judicious application of hoisting points on your sofa, coffee table, TV, etc., would allow you to whisk them away (perhaps just as the Roomba is heading in their direction) and to redo the room layout every single time a cleaning pass is done.
• You could have one of the world's largest games of pick up sticks using a pile of aluminum trusses.
• At the end of a dinner party, tie all the corners of the tablecloth to the hook and lift the mess out of the way in one dramatic gesture. Or if your gearing is up to it, tie only the corners at one end of the cloth and execute the classic tablecloth trick.

Really, it's surprising that more people aren't already clamoring for the personal bridge crane already.

Memory aid 2008

quipu,
originally uploaded by mobebu.

The Incans invented a method of keeping accounts using the number and placement of knots on a bundle of cords called a quipu. It provided the user a flexible and durable way of keeping a tally of one's flocks, crops, or houses.

Design notes

We were talking at work today in the context of telephone tech support and I came up with the idea of a best practices document entitled The Seven Words You Can't Use in a User Interface. I was thinking of a scenario where the support person would have to tell the user "Now click on the button whose name begins with C. No, the other one."

Not those Seven Words.

Well, maybe.

A post for the informed customer

When considering a major purchase such as a router, it is important to consider the pluses and minuses of the different offerings. So as a public service, here's a rundown of two major manufacturers' offerings.

Cisco ASE 1000 series	Festool OF 1010, OF 1400, OF 2200, MFK700
Processing power in 1U format	Dust collection
High availability	Depth adjustment
Scalable service intelligence	Guide rail compatibility
Granular real-time policy and traffic management	Tool-less changes
Quantum Flow Processor	Ratcheting collet
Scalable and flexible packet processing	MMC electronics
Unified firewall	Engineering & Design

I was a little disappointed that neither vendor addressed the really important questions posed by average consumers: Does it come in teal or in burgundy? What kinds of questions will you get from TSA when you try to bring on onto an airplane? Which one would reach the ground first when dropped from a second-storey window?

Compare and Contrast III

Ding dong merrily on high.

This post has been removed due to bitrot of all of its content over the years. Sorry!