May, 2013 (after MakerFaire and Hardware Innovation Workshop)
Entry 1 of ??? : MatterNet
You're can read this web page because information can get from A to B on the 'net. Your computer threw a request out into the ether, asking for this page. That request got tossed from router to router, 'til it got to SG's computer. That computer wrote the reply and threw it back onto the 'net, where, hop by hop, it got back to your computer.
What if you could do the same thing with physical stuff?
That's the idea behind MatterNet.
You build a small quadcopter. You build it with a standard-sized cargo box on the bottom. People come up to a kiosk, and they put their package into the box. If it fits, and weighs under two kilos, they get charged and the package is on its way. The quadcopter flies the package to its destination. If the destination is more than ten kilometers away, the copter lands at kiosks along the way to swap out its battery pack. It picks its route from kiosk to kiosk the same way information is routed from hop to hop around the 'net.
The service is in very early stage testing in Africa already. Their cost to deliver a 2 kilo package 10 km is 24 cents, which leaves them lots of room for profit and expansion. It's also a wide enough range to cover most big cities in a single hop. The current test version has no automated kiosks; it's dudes by tiny helopads swapping the batteries and packages by hand.
The big obstacle to this one, aside from the usual engineering challenges with anything this ambitious, is regulatory. The developed nations have outlawed robotic fliers in their cities already. That's one reason to start in Africa: they're allowed to. Second, it's direly needed there. Mud roads wash out in 85% of the continent, for at least part of the year. You need to get medicine to someone 10 km away, and it's a hard problem.
So when will we see it in the developed world? I imagine after enough Peace Corps workers come back from Africa to NYC saying, "They have flying robots that deliver everything there, why don't we?"
This game has been a darling of the Indie video game scene since it won its first avalanche of awards 4 years ago... and then the developer kept on polishing it. It hit Steam a couple weeks back, and word is that it lives up to (very high) expectations.
Monaco is a quick-to-learn game about cat-burglary and teamwork. The players cooperate to steal as much as they can from puzzle-like levels, each with many possible solutions. Each team member has their own bonus skill to contribute. The Lookout who knows where guards are even when they're out of sight. The Mole, who can dig through walls.
Who'll join me for a game?
Fact #1:
Cards Against Humanity is a game that makes people say things like, "What ended my last relationship? Lance Armstrong's missing testicle." There have been, like, 85,000 copies of it printed so far.
Fact #2:
Between the 6th and 8th century, there were approximately 65,000 books made in all of Europe. I don't mean 65,000 original books were written. No, I mean 65,000 books total, copies included.
Conclusion:
There have been more copies of Cards Against Humanity made in the last 2 years than all the books in all of Europe for three hundred years.
Sources:
How many books were made in the Dark Ages?
How many copies of Cards Against Humanity have been made?
Oh, wait, you actually followed those links? Right then, time to explain myself. I may have played a bit fast and loose with the facts.
When I said there have been 85,000 copies of Cards Against Humanity printed, I should have really said, "There were 85,000 copies of the Cards Against Humanity holiday bonus pack, the one that they barely advertised and then did as a one-time-deal, printed." How many copies of Cards Against Humanity have really been made? I dunno. Someodd tens of millions. So really, it's something more like, "There were more copies of a game featuring Lance Armstrong's absent genital made in the first week of February than all books in all of Europe for 300 years."
Now, go forth and use this knowledge only for good, never evil.
How much is 1 trillion dollars? It's as if everything in all of Singapore, every piece of art, every person's home, every car, every diaper, every stitch of clothing, everything that belonged to the entire nation of Singapore - a prosperous island to be sure... as if all that faded away, leaving just the people standing on a barren desert. And then, not 20 minutes later, it all came back.
It got me thinking back then. Indulge me; I'm going to quote a nearly three-year-old blog post verbatim:
San Francisco is sailing by outside the train's walls, and the woman next to me is explaining about Mexico City. How from the air it just goes on in all directions, with no end by the horizon. How the trains are packed full, and men wearing backpacks with speakers in all directions will board, blast the train with a quick snatch of music, try to sell a CD, then head to the next car. I think this is what we expected from our cyberpunk future, only in Japanese.
I've been buying up boxes of Netrunner on eBay, a cyberpunk game that died in '99, to share amongst my friends. The cards are littered slang from 2020, a future where millions logged onto The Net every day. Where a deranged AI could crash the stock market. Where the 'eurobuck' was stronger than the dollar, and governments took their marching orders from corporations.
Funny how that future never happened.
When Mike Pondsmith wrote CyberPunk 2020, it was 1988.
The treaty creating the Euro was signed in 1995. The first ones entered circulation in 1999. The Euro overtook the dollar in 2002 and has been higher valued ever since.
ArpaNet came online in 1969, connecting 3 computers. By 1988, a wider 'net of civilian computers had grown up around it, and people were calling that "The Internet". If you worked outside academia, you wouldn't hear about it for a few years more. By the middle '90s, most Americans had heard of the Internet, and might even have seen it through AOL.
The first AI stock trader came online in the late '80s. It was wired to the NASDAQ by a spliced feed, and when the officials discovered it a few years later, they demanded that its parent company disconnect it and trade through a screen and keyboard the same as everyone else. The corporation complied by rigging a camera to the computer to read the screen and a machine to type on the keys, and kept the AI directly connected, with no human in the loop. The NASDAQ officials left in a huff, but never tried to shut it down again. The generations of AI traders that followed this one, now called "HFTs" (High Frequency Traders) tripped the flash crash when they fell into a logic trap their programmers didn't foresee.
Blade Runner was set in 2019.
Ghost in the Shell set its future in 2029.
We don't have offworld colonies. Brain to computer interfaces are still reserved for a handful of medical cases whose brains we were poking things into anyway, for other reasons. I don't see any replicants on the horizon.
But in so many other ways, we're right on schedule for the cyberpunk future we were promised in the 80's.
I mix mine strong, and one big bowl of the stuff is my breakfast of choice on recent days that I have writing to do. It puts me in a brainstorming and creating mood like nothing else. Could be it's the energy in it: Enough calories to serve as a meal replacement, with complete proteins in the mix too. It could be the drug-like effects: cocoa is loaded not only with sugar, but also with caffeine, theobromine, psychoactive amines, and who knows what else. The Aztecs and Mayans called chocolate "the food of the gods" and built their empires on it. No wonder why.
My breakfast recipe looks like this:
Cocoa and Mocha: Are you a fan? What's your favorite recipe?
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Dan McDonley, with his Boosted Board prototype - one of only five, for now.
The Boosted Board is an electric skateboard that can push the rider 6 miles at 18 MPH under its own power. Why is that a big deal?
Do you remember when there was a news buzz about "Ginger" several years ago, a new product that was going to change the way cities were made? It turned out to be the Segway. It could go a few miles on a charge, running near bicycle speeds, and go everywhere a person goes. Well, that cuts out most of the need for a car for your daily commute, for many people who live in big cities. Then it turned out to be too big and too dorky and too expensive. No one wanted one, The Segway was a flop.
The Boosted Board does almost everything the Segway does*, but it's cheap**, it's hot looking, and you can throw it over your shoulder when you're done riding it to work, plug it in by your desk, and it'll be recharged to get you home.
So that's awesome.
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*: Almost everything a segway does? Well, it won't go up stairs, and the range is shorter.
**: How cheap is cheap? The first ones went for $1,300, and I expect they'll get cheaper as more are made.
- Signed up for Mandarin Chinese classes.
- Started studying the construction of CNC devices. (i.e. robot tools that take a picture or a 3D model in, and carve or burn that shape out for you.)
- Still working on the new boardgame design; started on a second one in parallel.
Tonight: Went to a salon put on by the Health Extension Community. The first speaker was a guy who built a stem cell lab in his garage from lab equipment bought cheap from bankrupt startups, and funded by reselling the high tech tools they didn't need themselves but that they got offered during those shopping/vulturing trips. The second speaker was a professor who studies the population of stem cells in the brain, and how they're influenced by the FOXO gene, which has been tied to longevity.
The free discussion after the talks was better yet. I volunteered to donate skin to a longevity study. (They needed volunteers of Askenazi ancestry. That's dad's side of the family.) I'd love to contribute to a study on aging: That's a scar I'd bear proudly.
After that I ended up in a conversation with one of the heads of the Space Sciences Institute. Nerd fanboy moment: That's organization was headed by Freeman Dyson up until a few years back. I said I was working on a space colonization themed game, and if it got good enough to be worth showing off, I wanted introductions to scientists to fact-check my work. She was enthusiastic right back at me.
In short, it was awesome.
Just that I was up again until far too close to dawn. writing some gent' in Japan ideas about how to tweak his board game.* Excellent to be so inspired you'd rather not sleep. Less excellent the next day when it's time to get to work, and you barely slept.
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*: i.e. "Here's how to keep your theme and keep it fun, while ditching all the parts of the game you don't need, so you can sell it for 20 bucks instead of 40 bucks."
Today's test: Reposado Tequilas.
5 test subjects drank a 1/3 shot of tequila, straight, from each of 4 samples:
- Zapopan
- Cazadores
- Milagro
- Trader Joe's "Distinqt"
The tests were double blinded: Neither subject nor administrator knew what was being consumed*. The subjects ranked the 4 samples, and those rankings were processed via Condorcet voting.
1st place: Cazadores
2nd place: Trader Joe's "Distinqt"
3rd place: Milagro
4th place: Zapopan
The results were unambiguous: 4 out of 5 reviewers immediately gave the Zapopan their bottom ranking. 3 out of 5 gave Cazadores their top rank, so it won not only by Condorcet compromise-finding, but through simple majority as well.
*:Granted, the Milagro was a silver thrown in with 3 reposados, so you could hold it up to the light and see.
