Demise of wall clocks

In the foyer where the giant teddy bear with its lifeless gaze is watching crowds below, parents take pictures of their children with cellphones. Travellers from all over the world are buzzing about in the airport. This place feels like an extraterrestrial space station with air conditioners protecting humans from hostile desert weather outside. There is even a small botanic garden inside.

Battered by a fourteen hour flight, standing there before the final leg of our journey, we were happy regardless. We moved to an area where people watched an electronic display of flight schedules. 

I don’t wear a wristwatch. 

My cellphone was still showing Sydney time. I wanted to know what the local time was. 

I looked around, high ceilings, giant columns, gorgeous shop windows, shrines of Italian fashion brands, the giant teddy bear, and the flight schedule display, but no sign of a wall clock anywhere. 

Remembering gorgeous Swiss railway clocks and their imitations, I wonder what happened to them. 

We used to have wall clocks in foyers. They were useful artefacts of the analog age. If your mechanical wristwatch failed or you didn’t own one, you could always count on wall clocks. They were revered, communal objects.

With the rise of cellphones, we forgot wall clocks. 

Apple initially used the Swiss railway clock design without permission in iOS 6. Although the exact details of the licensing agreement are confidential. It was reported that Apple ultimately paid Swiss national rail operator SBB about CHF 20M (about US$ 22.4M as of January 2014) to license the use of the clock design. Apple later removed the design from its operating system with iOS 7 (Source: Wikipedia)

The cellphone clock is useful, precise, and doesn’t require readjusting. But cellphones are multifunctional devices, and displaying time is a demoted function. The clock is permanently present on the home screen and sometimes on the status bar. However availability of local time depends on the Location service that may not be available when you don’t have Internet access. That is often the case in airports.

My eyes scanned the flight display, no trace of the local time. 

Five minutes passed. Next to a label “Local Time” at the bottom of the flight display I saw a tiny digital clock. 

A deep sigh followed. 

Vibe

It is a mistake to undermine specialisation in a team. Everybody has a different vibe that drives best in them. A good leader seeks to exploit vibes that collectively make the harmony in a team.

Minimum Viable Product

M in MVP is the only variable. You may vary M to buy time to market in exchange of nice to haves. But the lure of profit can be blinding as you may find it tempting to touch V which will ruin sacrifices made in M.

Timeful

Managing work schedules is a crucial element of a modern workplace. For most, work days are fragmented in hourly, sometimes half-hourly time slots.

We use tools such as Outlook to book meetings and events. These tools are great, however they have some limitations. They lack intelligence and flexibility to help us fill gaps with sensible choices, and they don’t work well with our private activities outside work.

What if we have a smart app on our phone, that will merge Outlook calendar with our private organiser, and help us forming habits, manage our to do lists, and other events effortlessly, in addition to syncing with work schedules.

I give you Timeful, a smart time management app that does all that.

Timeful has AI (Artificial Intelligence) engine to track your habits. Its brilliance comes from the fact that it learns to work with you and your roughly defined schedules.

Say you want to form a new habit. Lets say you want to do Yoga, 3 times a week, mostly in the evenings, and at noon. Timeful is OK with rough schedules, it understands habit forming is hard, therefore it gives you flexibility to fit them into your existing schedule. When its sees a fit Timeful fills it with an activity you nominated. You either go for it, defer it or move it to another time slot with a simple gesture.

Timeful has a seamless, simple and a very easy to use interface. Adding a new to do item, a new habit, or scheduling an event is a breeze. Moving an item into a different time slot or deferring  is equally easy.

As time slots are fragmented, we ended up having diverse activities in shorter attention spans. This is a fact of 21st  century. Good or bad we have to live with it and we need ways to deal with it. Timeful comes handy with its AI, and friendly manners to help us go through our busy life style. It turns hectic into sensible.

Timeful

REFA

REFA - Reforastation of Australian Continent

The Author: Ergun Çoruh, 10 January 2015

The Problem

We crossed the critical threshold of 350 ppm CO2 concentration in the Earth atmosphere around 1990s. We are now at 400 ppm and it gets worse every year. Beyond this threshold global temperature will continue to grow. Science predicted (1), transforming all of the energy production companies to use zero-emission technologies would not be sufficient to save the planet. We need to discover ways to reduce CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, and return it below 350 ppm, in addition to migrating energy production to zero emission technologies. This may only be possible by sucking CO2 from the atmosphere and storing the carbon away. One of proposed methods is to use re-forestation as a carbon sink.

Author’s Note

The author sees himself as an amateur futurist, he is not an expert in any of the fields that might be relevant for this concept. He likes daydreaming, stirring ideas, asking odd questions, and getting people solve problems rather than himself solving them. Thankfully he does not claim he is right all the time. In fact most often than not he wishes to be wrong to learn the truth. It is evolving ideas, human creativity and learning excite him most. Hence the author’s elaboration of the idea shall be limited by his imagination, and he happily accepts it.

The Idea

This paper discusses the possibility of re-forestation in the Australian continent as a carbon sink to reduce C02 concentration in the atmosphere.

This idea needs calculations and a goal on how much sinking effect should be aimed. My wild question is, with deployment strategy that spans 50 years, can this solution alone reduce the CO2 concentration by 10 ppm by the year 2150? We can play with numbers, but my gut feeling is, this solution alone may not be enough to go below 350 ppm. We would need more disruptive technologies, and other ideas to contribute to the global aim of going below 350 ppm. In other words we don’t have a magic bullet, we probably shouldn’t seek one.

Australia is a vast continent (7,686,850 km2) with unique geography, climate, and ecology.  It has low population density of 3 people per square kilometre. Its desert areas constitute 35% of total land area. That is a lot of empty area, with enormous potential to help us solve the climate problem.

The idea involves several components:

• Research
  — Identify potential areas of reforestation. Not all areas would be suitable.
  — Observe water from space and identify reservoirs.
  — Analyse and aggregate geographic, ecological and climate data including sporadic bushfire patterns.
  — Analyse and re-assess the project’s goal.
• Technology
  — Invent re-use a plant type, use genetic engineering as required.
  — The plant should not have detrimental impact on continental flora and fauna.
  — The plant should grow slowly (1–3 years), should have high longevity, its dead-form should have properties for becoming a versatile re-cycle material.
  — The plant should be durable against bushfires.
  — Plantations should be controllable, i.e. the plant should not be a macro “weed”.
  — The plant in its dead form should have economic and scalable properties, such as elasticity, strength and weight that would allow it to be harvested and easily transported to become raw material for 3D printers, structures or buildings.
  — A plant that can replace plastic in many areas would be the holly-grail technology.
  — Desirable: A plant with reflective leaves can produce green energy. This is a crazy idea we can at least talk about.
• Deployment
  — Survey vast areas using spontenous wi-fi technology and drones before, during and after deployment. Spontenous wi-fi using multi-hop routing would allow drone squadrons to travel and cover vast areas of land in close proximity for surveying and controlling things like water dispatching and distribution. Also make drones to use solar energy. Deploy and distribute solar energy sub-stations for drones to land and re-charge their batteries.
  — Use self assembled 3D printing to assemble small water pipes. They will weave themselves like spider webs, they will form large lattices. Harness water reservoirs identified during initial survey or even use seawater as water source.
• Economy
  — Get Energy Companies to invest initially 10% of their time on this, make them shareholders. The raw output (the plant’s trunk), the technologies invented and its side industries will be their return on investment, through direct ownership or partnership. There is no reason for Energy Companies not to diversify their portfolio with high tech innovations such as spontenous drone squadrons, self assembling pipes and so on. In the end They may start calling themselves as “Carbon Sink” companies as well as Energy Producers.

References

What It Would Really Take to Reverse Climate Change

That little box

Our brain’s wiring is changing.

I am a programmer.

Early in my career back in mid-eighties nineties when we were confronted by a problem and needed information, we had no option but seek documentation, read lengthy manuals, and sometimes pay truckloads of cash to ‘consultants’.

When we needed to learn a new programming language or grasp a new technology such as a new API or operating system we had no option but to read thick manuals and sometimes attend courses.

Our brain pretty much operated on its own with input mostly taken from static material. This was after all how our brain was wired through education systems of pre-Internet era.

We were used to the idea that our consciousness is unique and isolated. It seemed the best way our mind’s clockwork could operate was when we were in complete solitude provided that we had every material we need in front of us.

Nowadays I hardly open a book for solving problems. In the past few years I learned three computing languages (out of seven) through Google.

At work every other second my mind reaches out and extends its memory through that little box, Google search.

That little box almost became a cyber-extension of my brain. It seems all I need is a well functioning short-memory from my biological end and whatever my frontal lobe is capable of.

My thought process is no longer driven by a static, hardwired and error-prone organic memory which is subject to birth, physical and age related weakness, but by a more dynamic, accurate, ageless and colossal machinery.

That little box makes me smarter, I make better judgements, I think faster, and I can reliably test my assumptions at a much faster rate. Despite my age my productivity at work increased in several orders of magnitude.

I am no longer Homo Sapiens. I am remade as Cyber Sapiens.

These are exciting times for our generation. We are lucky enough to witness the best of both worlds and we are representing a generation at the dawn of post-Internet human brain evolution.

Paper

In my article Mixed Feelings I wrote about inevitable decline of printed books. Sadly everyday I see evidence of my prophecy being verified.

Angus & Robertson and Borders bookstores are closing down.

We are loosing forever that romance, that warm feeling of visiting a nearby bookstore and simply browsing books for pleasure.

In middle ages for a decent copy of a book or a manuscript an average urban wage earner had to pay at least a quarter of his annual income. For peasants buying or even seeing or touching a book was an impossible dream.

Within a millennium the cost diminished by a factor of 1000.

For many hundreds of years despite endless catastrophes, fires, burnings, wear and tear, paper continued to carry the knowledge of humanity which is estimated to be around 10 EB (1 exa-byte is 10 to the power of 18).

And now like LP records we are beginning to see books thrown into the corners of moldy second hand bookshops.

On the upside e-books will easily be accessible and transportable. E-book will continue to carry the flag it took over from its overweight but humble cousin.

I still think socialising is a big part of book reading experience.

Perhaps it is time to design new bookstores (e-book stations) with Wi-Fi access, comfy chairs, coffee and cookies, smooth background music.

Patrons sit down, relax, chat, review, download and buy e-books in special discounted prices.

On the walls of the e-book station images of authors shifting, instants from their life are projected, Tolstoy in his farm, Hemingway in Africa.

In that corner a famous author is digitally signing his newest e-book which is automatically downloaded and overlaid in e-books of his audience.

References:

Mixed Feelings

The price of a book in middle ages

Ultimate bit

How many bits of digital storage capacity humanity has right now in hard disks?

"How many computers?" I asked Wolfram Alpha search engine.

The answer came back as:

Estimated number of personal computers worldwide:

over 1 billion

Then I had to make a bold part guess of average storage per computer. Big fat machines that belong to governments and fortune 100 companies will have substantial capacity per computer. But there must still be many old machines around with small capacity as well. I estimated that 64 GB per machine would be too conservative as it was the benchmark 4-5 years ago. I thought 100GB would be a good figure.

So the number of bits came out as:

1 billion X 100 GB = 100 EB (exabytes) = 8 X 10²⁰ bits

That is

800,000,000,000,000,000,000 bits

This number would be equal to eight times estimated information content of all human knowledge (10EB).

This means we have a growing memory surplus that we could meaningfully fill, also we still have no operational or economical capacity to store everything we know on hard disks.

I am not ignoring the fact that gene technology trends will require huge amount of storage to keep gigantic databases of gene sequences required by genetically modified food, bio-fuel research and so forth. But I still think it will lag behind available storage capacity as the global consumer market will always put huge pressure on reducing storage cost. Also the main problems in gene research seems to be indexing and CPU cycles rather than storage capacity.

So I estimate available storage will always be 10 times of human knowledge and at least 100 times of used storage.

Where is the most vulnerable of those useable bits that when flipped would cause the maximum catastrophic impact on humanity I wonder?

One nasty bit that its redundancy is incidentally non-existent.

Like all physical systems hard disks do fail. When hard disk fails software almost always fails.

On ageing nuclear missile sites?

On ageing GPS satellites?

One freak magnetic storm in space?

Where?

It would take just one bit to flip forever from 1 to 0 or from 0 to 1 out of 8,00,000,000,000,000,000,000.

I would like to buy a new notebook computer nowadays. I think I am going to pick a machine with a solid state drive (SSD).

Spellchecker

It is true that your word-processor's spellchecker does not and cannot improve your English as you'll never learn if you don't make and not humiliated by your mistakes.

But at the same time new technology gives courage to write. Ordinary people would have terrified if they were stuck with an old typewriter.

What technology did remarkably well was to empower people and encourage them to focus on the content and expression by relieving them from checking ruthless grammar and spelling errors (not completely but nearly). And I think this is a good thing. Technology democratised writing.