Ken's Blog

Today I gave somebody a book. Not an eBook, or any other sort of virtual thing, but a good old fashioned book, printed on paper, with a binding and a cover and everything.

Except that the book was printed today. I went to the bookstore and ordered a book-on-demand. There was a book printing machine right there in the store (which includes a machine to bind the book), and they printed out exactly one copy for me.

There is nothing radically new about this. Such machines have been around for years. But I confess that I chose this particular book partly because I wanted to give my friend something that was interesting and, in its way, unique — a printing run of one, given the same day it was printed.

When we use computers we are used to things being customized just for us. For example, you and I may visit the same page on the Web, yet our respective browser preferences can give us very different experiences of reading that page. To use the parlance of computers, the contents of the page were created “server-side”, but the graphics that we see to look at that page were created “client-side”.

Here in the physical world, we are used to books being made “server-side”. Somewhere there is a big factory — a book server, if you will — and then a delivery system to bring us the finished object.

But newer technologies are allowing more and more things to be made “client-side”, like that book I just got for my friend. This is also true, for example, of the electric vertical hydroponic farm I discussed the other day.

And self-driving cars (once we get those pesky and dangerous human drivers off the road) will similarly enable a client-side technology. Right now we have a model of “one owner, one car”. But once cars function more like packets in a large packet switching network, it will make far more economic sense for any given car to serve many different people.

Future technologies will allow you to choose the interior and exterior color, lighting, interior airflow, and other options that you prefer. By the time you enter a car, it will feel just like your car. But it will only be “your” car from the moment you get into it until the moment you get out of it.

When the next person enters the same physical vehicle, it will feel to them just like their car. The automotive experience will be created client-side, rather than server-side.

As I mentioned a few months ago, this will eventually happen with hotel rooms as well. I wonder how many other experiences in life that we now think of as being created “server-side” will one day become “client-side”?

If Trump wins, Christie
Becomes Veep (!!!) Let’s cross that bridge
When we come to it.

Several days ago I talked about using solar power in sun-drenched equatorial climates to power LED-lit vertical hydroponic farming in colder climates, possibly even within cities. It seemed like a good way to provide fresh locally grown food in an ecologically sustainable way.

Several readers pointed out the difficulties and inefficiencies of converting energy from the sun to electricity and then transporting that electricity over a very long distance. Perhaps, they said, the accumulated losses would make the system impractical.

Since then I’ve been starting to think about the problem differently. Since there is no requirement that the stored energy get to its destination quickly, perhaps it might make sense to convert the solar energy into some intermediate form that can be transported slowly.

There are so many candidates: Compressed air (constant volume or constant pressure), liquid nitrogen, thermo-chemical, biochemical, and thermo-physical are just some candidates. Whatever the method chosen, a storage mechanism in its low energy state can be charged up at an equatorial solar farm to its high energy state, then slowly piloted by sea to colder climates, where some weeks later its energy is harvested.

This slow cycle changes the nature of the game, since it allows us to consider alternate forms of energy storage that are amenable to being shipped slowly by sea. It will be interesting to see whether some particular form of storage is optimally suited for the task.

Over the years I keep learning of women who say they would never vote for Hillary Clinton, because she didn’t leave her husband when he cheated on her. Let me be clear: They are not, as far as I can tell, speaking to her qualifications, nor to her policy positions. Apparently it’s something more primal than that.

So I ask myself: If a man discovers that his wife has cheated on him, and he wants to keep working on the marriage, should that disqualify him as President of the United States?

What do we think of this man if he decides to take is wife back despite her imperfections? Is that the sort of man we would want to be our Commander in Chief?

I wonder what these women would say in answer to that question.

Today there were several in-depth articles in the New York Times about the first reported death in a Tesla while the car was driving itself. The death occurred on May 1, when a tractor-trailer unexpectedly cut off the vehicle, and the robot autopilot failed to swerve out of the way.

The slant of every article was the same: Because the Tesla’s autopilot failed to save its occupant, maybe self-driving cars are not yet ready for prime time.

What none of the articles failed to acknowledge was that the death was caused not by an errant Tesla autopilot, but by an errant tractor-trailer driver. A human, through faulty decision making, inadvertently killed another human, and the Tesla’s software failed to prevent that death.

Am I the only person who finds this absurd? The killer on our roads isn’t software, it’s human drivers. Automobile accidents are the single largest cause of death in the U.S. after heart failure and cancer. The death toll from people killing and maiming themselves and others while driving their cars vastly exceeds all fatalities and injuries to U.S. citizens from warfare or terrorism.

OK, in this one case out of many the robot did not succeed in stopping someone driving a vehicle from inadvertently killing somebody else. But why blame the software? Clearly the solution is to get all those killer humans out of the driver’s seat.

A road on which all vehicles were robot driven would be a completely cooperative road. No humans with bad judgement would be cutting off and killing other humans, no drivers would be trying to guess what’s on the mind of other drivers. It would all be a single coordinated packet-switching network, with every vehicle knowing, at all times, the exact location and intended movement of every other vehicle.

So why is this story not being reported for what it really is? Suppose after the horrific shooting in Orlando, the news media had focused entirely on the failure of bullet proof vests to save every victim.

I can envision hand-wringing editorials declaring that bullet proof vests are not yet ready for prime time, and criticizing the makers of bullet proof vests for not taking responsibility for the lives of the murdered people their vests had failed to save.

Wouldn’t that be a completely idiotic view of the situation?

Late last night, on my way home from the lab, I decided to pick up a few groceries at my favorite corner market, and I got a little carried away. By the time I arrived at the checkout counter, I had a basket full of things to buy.

At the checkout counter I saw a disheveled and very lost looking man, clearly homeless. Sitting on the counter before him was a packaged snack and a can of beer. He just stood there stoically, as though waiting patiently for his turn to be served.

The proprietor, ignoring the homeless man entirely, asked me if I was ready to be served. I thought to myself that this homeless guy’s life is clearly hard enough, so maybe I could help a little.

“He has a lot fewer items than I do,” I told the proprietor. “I can go after him.”

Just then a young man, maybe twenty years old, stepped in front of me and put two items down on the counter for purchase.

Now that seemed just plain rude. “OK,” I siged, trying to stay civil, “I guess I will go after everybody else.”

The young man looked at me sheepishly, then gestured toward the homeless man. “I’m paying for him.”

And so he was. I felt very embarrassed, but I guess I learned one good lesson from this awkward episode:

When you find yourself feeling all puffed up and proud after being kind to a stranger, just remember that there are people in this world who are kinder than you are. I think that’s a good thing.

I read an article today about people running hydroponic farms in small spaces, the kind of spaces you might find in a crowded city. The key is to use LED lights and make the farms highly vertical, so you get a lot of plant growth in a relatively small footprint.

The LEDs are only 50% efficient in their use of electricity — the other half turns into heat. So in some ways it’s a bit energy wasteful, and the electrical bill is usually quite steep.

But it occurred to me that if we look at this from a more global perspective, it might make sense to link solar power in one part of the world to electric hydroponic farming in another part of the world. Why not harvest solar energy in equatorial deserts, where it can be done efficiently, and then pipe the resulting electricity away from the equator?

You could then have electric hydroponic farms in more frigid climates. The people in those climates would then be able to get freshly grown food, right from their own neighborhood.

Also, 50% of the piped electrical power that dissipates into heat could also be harvested. In particular, it could be used to heat peoples’ homes.

Wouldn’t this solve two problems at once?

when we’re at our best
we are too busy to ask
am i at my best?

After a few days reflection, I find myself changing my mind about the larger implications of Brexit. At first I had thought it boded ill for our own nation. After all, if Great Britain can manage to vote itself down from a major world power to a shrunken frightened little child, then the same could happen here.

But now that the charlatans behind that bizarre maneuver have had a chance to show their true colors, I am heartened. The mythical three hundred and fifty million pounds paid weekly to the E.U. has vanished in a puff of rhetorical smoke, just as the promised greater investment in British healthcare was revealed to be nothing but empty talk.

After the sad spectacle of Brexit, I had worried that people in the U.S. might also be taken in by a narcissistic no-nothing opportunist who doesn’t know the first thing about how government actually works. But now I realize that we have the example of Brexit to show just how embarrassing it is for a country to be taken in by nonsense talk from fools and knaves.

The U.S. now has a clear working example of what happens when racist isolationist opportunists steal the microphone. At the end of the day, we Americans tend to be a fairly pragmatic people, with a strong instinct for self-preservation.

Which is why I’m newly hopeful that we on this side of the Atlantic will not follow Great Britain down the rabbit hole of small minded and racist fear mongering. Because that’s how a great nation destroys itself.

I am typing this while sitting on a panel about visualization. The first of five panelists is currently speaking, and I will be the last of five.

As it happens, we are a very diverse crew, with very different backgrounds and areas of expertise. Between us we cover government, science, education, and virtual reality. And I think that’s a good thing.

There is an argument to be made for organizing panels around some evocative starting word (in this case “visualization”) and finding the most diverse group of people you can find to speak to that topic. For one thing, this structure will discourage any individual speaker from approaching their subject in any way that is too narrow or focused on fellow experts.

But more than that, it is a great way to engage an audience, to discover and perhaps to create surprising connections between fields. In short, when choosing panelists for a panel discussion, there is something to be said for going broad.

And, of course, choosing a good starting word.