Department of Good Ideas

Alternatively - Does your dog think you are a dog?

A man watering his yard asked the boy taking his dog for a walk “Cute pup, what’s his name?”   The boy replied “I dont really know but we call him Rover.”

Dogs don’t have self-perception like we ugly-bags-of-mostly-water, when they are 2-6 months old they appear to classify things.   Companion, threat, food.   Sheep can be companion or food depending on how you raise your pet carnivore.   If you go the companion route, they are loyal and protective.

Do they consider us dogs?   I don’t think they consider us Gods like White Fang.    We are companions to them, we protect them, we are loyal to them.  I think, yes, we are dogs to our dogs.

More insights on our broken world.

I have 4 years of college math under my belt.  3 years of biology, physics, chemistry, psychology, anthropology, and much more.   I’ve been studying Kung Fu for 3 years with paid instruction 2 days a week. Private tennis lessons.  Swim team training.
But what about these seemingly important topics:

• How to be married:  0 hours
• How to raise children: 0 hours

The average 16 year old soccer player has had 1500 hours of coached soccer practice, but only 50 hours of driving experience is require to get a driver’s license!

I love cars and my kids.    Here’s something disturbing to think about from Autoweek.  In the last 4.5 years we have been fighting in Iraq, the US military has had 3,600 casualties.   In that same time 26,000 kids between 15-19 have died on US highways.   When a 15-17 year old is involved in a fatal accident, only 1/3 of the victims are the teenage driver themselves.  4 out of 5 of these fatalities were people over 21.   In other words, teenagers are killing other people much faster than themselves.

Is US safety policy failing?  Seems so.  Depending on the measure, US road safety ranks as low as 46th in the world.  We are a culture centered on autos - we drive more and farther than most international counterparts but we are also myopic in trying to fix everything with more tech.   Did you know that while our high school drivers ed teacher did it for side money - in many countries certified professionals are used.   In the US, there is no required behind the wheel experience or demonstration to get a license.  In other countries testing is grueling and training can take years.

What should we do?  In this big world of compromised and slow moving government actions, we must do it ourselves.  1. Parents, make sure you kids have 100 hours of behind the wheel experience with YOU before they go off on their first rally (or pizza run).  2. Take your kids out on the extremes - skid pads, heavy rain, slides in ice and snow, emergency braking.   Do it often enough that it’s in their muscle memory.  3. Require your kids to be certified in first aid and emergency response.   If they crash, are in a crash or see a crash - make sure they know exactly what to do.

A teenager is killed in a car crash ever 64.5 minutes, injured every 55 seconds.

Teenagers hold 7% of drivers licenses but make up 20% of all reported accidents.

More and more my friends ask whether they should go Mac for their home computer. They ask me because I’ve used PCs forever, have a extensive background in computer security, and have been using a Mac Powerbook for 18 months for work.

I wonder why the surge in Mac interest. Seems many of my friends are just fed up with the running battle on viruses and spyware, plus needing to reboot Windows. My view today is that PC hardware is so fast that people don’t out grow their PC hardware as often as days of yore (2004). In fact, it seems ludicrous to me to think of upgrading to Vista on your current hardware. Just wait until your reg file is so foul that rebooting takes 5 minutes - that means its time for a clean start. Toss the box (recycle please) and get a new one - Windows du jour comes with. But then - maybe you don’t need Windows at all - time to rethink?

The agonies of the Mac: Few games (except Desktop Tower Defense!!), MS Office is pretty crappy on the Mac, their expensive. Compatibility with the world is hit and miss - if it works it’s smooooth, if it doesn’t then its hard to figure out what to do. Mac’s have many eccentric behaviors - is this endearing or annoying?

The agonies of the PC: It’s made by Bill Gates. It’s a cesspool of viruses, spyware and needless hassles. You can’t trust it. It gets slower every day.

If you’re a gamer, you just can’t go Mac. Otherwise, if it’s your home computer and your a) sick of the horrors of Windows security, b) don’t want to give more money to Bill Gates, c) want something cool, fresh and neat - then pop for a Mac. It’ll put some spring back in your step.

I’m a tool user, not a programmer. I always find tools just miss the mark on what I need, so I’m soliciting your help.

Do you want the world to be a better place? Do you want to see progress move forward in great leaping strides? Me too.

I have a family legacy to live up to. It’s self-inflicted now but in the last century members of my family have changed to world in ways we still talk about (yes, even you). I’d like to do the same.

So here is my simple plan. Let’s apply the wisdom of communities to establish and fund some goals that inventors, scientists and artists can reach for and in the process change the world. Think of the X prizes.

Here is what we need. A community idea submission site to suggest and vote for huge reaching goals. With the communities best of the best ideas, we let the world donate prize money. Establishing the committee to measure and vote for the ideas will be a dream job.

C’mon Andreeson and Jobs, this has your name all over it. Give a brother a little code and let’s go!

I’ve been working real hard on Faith.   My Christian friends want me to have it and, admittedly, I don’t want to spend an eternity in hell.  But the engineer in me finds this leap of faith hard to swallow without proof - then I read this.

The Ancestor Simulation Argument. If you believe that computer technology will continue to race forward - and you believe that the world will not unanimously agree that people should not be simulated - then in all likelihood we are sims right now.

I mean really, this makes great sense in a disturbing way. Of course computers are going to move way forward, we just got started! Look on the research horizon - Moore’s law, quantum computing, wetware - add the beginnings of decent AI, virtual worlds. Mix well, add a few breakthroughs then cook with some PhD students. Voila! A simulation of people living in a world, interacting, discovering, evolving, dying. What self-respecting researcher would not be running simulations to figure out how our genes evolved, psyche, religious belief, nature/nuture, fight or flight? You name it - thousands of simulations will be cranking away.

So what’s the chance that we aren’t one of those? The only possibility is that we are the pioneering version of humanity - not the thousands of simulations running behind it.

Of course, the world could decide to ban such a thing - it’s inhumane to harass sims after all.  Yeah, right.

Ok - so who is going to hack this thread of life and override the Abort button?

An interesting idea came to my attention from a recent read by James Rollins, Black Order .  Schroedinger’s famous cat theory says that in quantum terms, the cat is neither alive or dead until the box is opened.   Until that time, the cat is both dead and alive.  The theory goes that the mere act of observation causes a ‘decision’ to be made.   Thus quantum particles are in both states until measured.

DNA is built of molecules.  Molecules of atoms.  Atoms of quantum particles.   So could DNA changes be ‘decided’ based on the act of observation?  Could leaps forward in evolution be caused by not by statistically random deviations and slow survival of the fittest pruning but by an “observer” that causes better ‘decisions’ to occur.   Could life itself be an “observation” machine that causes better than random ‘decisions’?  Could life get better and better at ‘deciding’ which evolutionary leaps because it’s better and better and making good quantum ‘observations’?

Could God be the hand that made all life as the Bible asserts?   Did God just “make it so” (in six days)?  Did God also leave all the evolutionary breadcrumbs to deceive us and lead us astray (or what that El Diablo)?

Maybe God had his hand in making the “better-than-random quantum evolution machine”.   Just give this little machine a shove, let stew a  few million years and see what you get in the Petri dish.

I’m carrying a Treo 650 today.   It’s a klunky device but takes a pretty good beating.   I’m hard on phones and have had many.  I guess I’m clumsy.   Some of my more entertaining accidents:  I had a little Sony Ericson in my shirt pocket but when I went to put water in my dogs bowl it slipped out - splash!  No problem, dried it off and couldn’t tell any damage.   Apparently slobber proof (you should know my dog!)

6 months later I was driving with the phone in my fingers while my arm rested on the center arm rest.   I hit a bump and the phone slipped - ohhh, the full mug of hot coffee was there to catch it.  Splash - full submersion.   This was a little harder to recover.   I removed the phone from the hot coffee pretty quick (I told you it was HOT coffee).  When I got home I pulled it apart and dried it.  The most notable damage was the screen - it was fully black.   The phone still operated, however, and with speed dials I could limp through the day.   Oddly, within about a week the screen started to clear and after a few weeks it was pretty much back to normal.   I have no explanation for why LCD would do this.

And my motivation for this post.  On the train this morning I was taking off my jacket, the Treo, apparently feeling suicidal, leaped from my pocket and bounced down 8 steps to the bottom floor of the car.   Crash! Bam! Boom! Everyone heard it and grimaced.   But on recovery of all the parts, and reassembly, it seems just fine.

My Treo must know I’m coveting the new wi-fi Blackberry coming out on T-Mobile in September.   Phones always break right before they are replaced.   Just like cars it seems.

Got a Wii this weekend for my son.   This is a remarkable device.   I expected reasonable accuracy with the controller but was very surprised with it’s accuracy.   I haven’t figured out exactly all its degrees of freedom but certainly it has Yaw, Pitch and Roll, nearly laser pointer accuracy when pointing at the screen, and apparently an accelerometer to detect rate of change in position.   Very clever engineering with simple set up and low cost.

Wired had a great article about blending the virtual controller of a Wii with Second Life.   Fascinating idea.  Stay tuned for idea on what might be done with this convergence.

http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/news/2007/07/wiimote