Episode 1 of James Burke’s ground-breaking series “The Day The Universe Changed” which explores the evolution of Western Scientific thought starting from the fall of Rome.
August 4, 2013
The Day The Universe Changed – “The Way We Are”
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July 10, 2013
Next up on our agenda of things to panic about is “peak water”
sp!ked editor Rob Lyons explains that “peak water” just isn’t something to worry too much about:
Disappointed by the failure of the peak-oil disaster to come to fruition, our doom-mongering, Malthusian friends have alighted on other scary narratives to confirm their suspicions of humanity as a rapacious blight on the planet. Their latest is ‘peak water’.
On the face of it, peak water is a boneheaded concept on a planet where two thirds of the surface is covered in, er, water. According to the US Geological Survey, there are 332 million cubic miles of water on Earth. What we tend to need, however, is not sea water but fresh water, of which there is much less: nearer 2.5 million cubic miles. And much of that is too deep underground to be accessed. Surface water in rivers and lakes is a small fraction of overall fresh water: 22,339 cubic miles. Handily, though, natural processes cause sea water to evaporate and form clouds, which then dump their contents on to land — so in most populated parts of the world there is currently sufficient water to supply our needs in an endlessly renewable way. As for the future, it is clear there is no shortage of H2O on the planet. What we really have is a shortage of cheap energy and the necessary technology to take advantage of the salinated stuff.
The ‘peak water’ theorists focus on groundwater supplies that are either being used faster than they are replenished, or supplies that are not replenished at all: so-called ‘fossil water’. According to leading environmentalist Lester Brown, writing in the Guardian last weekend, the rapid exhaustion of these supplies in some parts of the world is leading to the decline of food production. And at a time of fast-growing populations, this apparently promises disaster for these countries.
But often, the problem is a political rather than a practical one. [. . .]
In reality, all of the fixes that apply to peak oil also apply to peak water. New technology may make water desalination far cheaper than it is now, a claim being made for new water filtration methods based on nanotechnology. Better use of water in irrigation, through careful management of when and how water is applied to crops, could cut usage dramatically — something that is already happening in dry countries such as Israel and Australia and in parts of the US. Current uses of water, like flush toilets, may be superseded in places where water is in high demand. Through civil engineering projects, water can be shifted from places where it is plentiful to places where it is needed most, something societies have been doing for thousands of years.
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July 8, 2013
New diesel engine technology to erase the memory of Oldsmobile diesels
The Economist has a glowing overview of new diesel engines for cars:
NOT to belittle the success Tesla Motors has had with its Model S luxury electric car — outselling its petrol-powered equivalents since being launched last year — the prospects for battery-powered vehicles generally may never shine quite as bright again. Babbage believes their day in the sun is about to be eclipsed by, wait for it, the diesel engine.
Surely not that dirty, noisy, smelly, lumbering lump of a motor that was difficult to start in the winter? Certainly not. A whole new generation of sprightly diesels — developed over the past few years — bear no resemblance to your father’s clattering, oil-burner of an Oldsmobile. It is no exaggeration to say that, with its reputation for unreliability and anaemic performance, the Olds 4.3-litre diesel from the late 1970s single-handedly destroyed the reputation of diesel engines in America for decades to come. Quite possibly, it also contributed to Oldsmobile’s own demise.
Later this year, Americans will get their first chance to experience what a really advanced diesel is like — and why Europeans opt for diesels over hybrids, plug-in electrics and even petrol-powered cars. The leader of the new pack is the Mazda 6, completely redesigned for 2014, with the choice of either a 2.5-litre four-cylinder petrol engine or a 2.2-litre turbo-charged diesel. The diesel has 30% better fuel economy and provides oodles more pulling power. Good as the petrol version is, motorists who choose it over the diesel will miss out on a lot.
[. . .]
With its old 1.4-litre diesel engine, the Volkswagen Polo still holds the record for being the most frugal non-electric car in Britain and the rest of Europe — with a fuel economy on the combined cycle of just 3.8 litres/100km (equivalent to 61.9 miles per US gallon). The Toyota Prius hybrid? A lowly twentieth on the league table of the most economical fuel-sippers, with 4.2 litres/100km, along with higher emissions of carbon dioxide. The 19 cars having better fuel economy than the Prius hybrid are all clean diesels.
Babbage fully expects the new generation of clean, low-compression diesels to raise the fuel-economy bar by a further 20% or more. That will put diesels on much the same footing — on an equivalent miles-per-gallon basis — as many of the electric vehicles available today. Their big advantage will be that they will come with none of the range anxiety and recharging difficulties to worry about. Roll on the day.
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July 4, 2013
Virtual reality hardware coming to your local big box electronics store
In The New Yorker, Joel Johnson talks about the Oculus Rift, which may be available in retail stores by the end of the year:
Luckey’s garage creation, which soon was named the “Oculus Rift,” is not far from a smartphone with a headband. An L.C.D. screen spans across a plastic mask, sitting about an inch away from a user’s eyes; a barrier divides the display in two, effectively creating one screen for each eye. Motion sensors track the position of the wearer’s head, then feed this data across an umbilical cord to a computer, typically a gaming P.C. Instead of rendering one 3-D world to a single monitor, as in a typical first-person video game, such as Call of Duty, the computer renders the same 3-D world twice, from slightly different angles. It sends those two perspectives, side by side, to the Rift, creating the illusion of depth. Motion is controlled by the direction in which the wearer is looking; instead of using a mouse or a controller to direct your gaze in the 3-D world, a person simply needs to turn his head.
The Oculus Rift uses optical tricks to create the realistic sensation, like slightly warping the edges of the view in the computer, which is corrected by plastic lenses in the goggles. The pixels are more tightly packed directly in front of the eye, giving the perspective a roundness that feels more like human vision. It works. The Oculus Rift rivals — and will possibly exceed, when it hits the shelves sometime in late 2013 or mid-2014 — the best virtual-reality hardware available, military-grade or otherwise.
[. . .]
I’ve been testing the Oculus Rift for a month, and in it, virtual reality feels a lot like scuba diving. First, there is the mask. Then there is the strange disconnect between where your body actually is and where your mind, confused by the mask, is telling you that your body is located. This sensation of discombobulation is doubled in virtual reality, since the current version of the Oculus Rift doesn’t track your body or hands, only your head.
Still, more than any of its antecedents, the Oculus Rift is convincingly engrossing. Most of the several dozen people who have tried my Rift put the goggles on as skeptics, but removed them as believers that virtual reality, as a practical phenomenon, now exists.
On YouTube, WoodenPotatoes recently posted a video where he tried out his new Oculus Rift unit with the original Guild Wars Prophecies by ArenaNet. As he points out in the video, the game is in no way optimized for use with the Rift, but is still an interesting experiment:
July 2, 2013
Better batteries through soy
The Economist on a promising new development in battery technology:
LITHIUM-ION batteries are hot stuff. Affordable, relatively lightweight and packing a lot of energy, they are the power source of choice for everything from mobile phones to electric cars. Unfortunately, the heat can be more than figurative. Occasionally, such batteries suffer malfunctions that lead to smoke, flames and even explosions. In gadgets, such meltdowns can be distressing and dangerous. In aircraft, they can be fatal. Earlier this year airlines grounded their entire fleet of Boeing’s next-generation 787 passenger jet after the lithium-ion batteries installed in two planes caught fire. Last month they have been permitted back in the air after being retrofitted with a protection system in the form of a tough steel box that vents directly outside in the event of a fire.
A more comforting solution, of course, would be to build a lithium-ion battery that could not burst into flames in the first place. Katie Zhong at Washington State University might have just such a device. For the last few years, she has been working on battery technology for flexible and bendable electronic gadgets. By blending a polymer called polyethylene oxide (PEO) with natural soy protein, she had made a solid electrolyte for lithium ion batteries that could be bent or stretched to twice its normal size without affecting its performance.
Like all batteries, lithium-ion rechargeables consist of two electrodes separated by an electrolyte. In a typical lithium-ion cell, the electrolyte is a solution of lithium salts and organic solvents. Charging drives lithium ions from the electrolyte into a graphite anode. On discharge, the reverse happens, with a balancing flow of electrons through the device being powered.
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July 1, 2013
The rise and fall of economic powers
Charles Hugh Smith has a guest post at Zero Hedge, talking about the theme of economic decline of great powers:
Our collective interest in the rise and fall of empires is not academic. The meteoric rise of China and the financialization rotting out global capitalism are just two developments that suggest we are entering an era where some great powers will collapse, others will remake themselves and others will gain ascendancy.
[. . .]
In 1987, pundits were predicting that Japan’s “5th generation” computing would soon dominate what was left of America’s technological edge. They were spectacularly wrong, as the 5th generation fizzled and Japan became an also-ran in web technology, a position it still holds despite its many global electronic corporations and vast university research system.
Japan’s modern economy was set up in the late 1940s and early 1950s to exploit the world of that time. Sixty years later, Japan is still a wealthy nation, but its relative wealth and power have declined for 20 years, as its political-financial power structure clings to a model that worked splendidly for 40 years but has not worked effectively for 20 years.
The decline is not just the result of debt and political sclerosis; Japan’s vaunted electronics industry has been superseded by rivals in the U.S. and Korea. It is astonishing that there are virtually no Japanese brand smart phones with global sales, and only marginal Japanese-brand sales in the PC/notebook/tablet markets.
The key dynamic here is once the low-hanging fruit have all been plucked, it becomes much more difficult to achieve high growth rates. That cycle is speeding up, it seems; western nations took 100 years to rapidly industrialize and then slip into failed models of stagnation; Japan took only 40 years to cycle through to stagnation, and now China has picked the low-hanging fruit and reverted to financialization, diminishing returns and rapidly rising debt after a mere 30 years of rapid growth.
There is certainly evidence that China’s leadership knows deep reform is necessary but the incentives to take that risk are low. Perhaps that is a key dynamic in this cycle of rapid growth leading to stagnation: the leadership, like everyone else, cannot quite believe the model no longer works. There are huge risks to reform, while staying the course seems to offer the hope of a renewal of past growth rates. But alas, the low hanging fruit have all been picked long ago, and as a result the leadership pursues the apparently lower-risk strategy that I call “doing more of what has failed spectacularly.”
Though none of the historians listed above mention it, there is another dangerous dynamic in any systemic reform: the very attempt to reform an unstable, diminishing-return system often precipitates its collapse. The leadership recognizes the need for systemic reform, but changing anything causes the house of cards to collapse in a heap. This seems to describe the endgame in the USSR, where Gorbachev’s relatively modest reforms unraveled the entire empire.
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June 17, 2013
Top this – wine corks meet screw-tops
BBC News looks at the latest attempt to blend the tradition of the wine bottle’s cork closure with the convenience of the twist-off screw top:
The unveiling this week of a new style of cork raises the question of why the traditional kind continues to dominate much of the wine world.
The Helix is opened with just a twist of the hand. No corkscrew is necessary as the top of the bottle has a thread inside.
The glass bottle and cork combination for wine is thought to have started in the 17th Century. But newer materials exist today that some argue are better suited for sealing a bottle than cork.
Screw caps and plastic corks have been embraced by producers fed up with wine becoming “corked” — the unpleasant musty taste, likened to wet dog, which is caused by tainted cork.
Influential US wine critic Robert Parker reckons that during the mid 1990s 7-10% of the wine he tasted was corked. In 2004 he predicted that by 2015 screw caps would dominate the wine industry.
The screw cap — generic name “Stelvin” after its biggest brand — advanced spectacularly in “New World” wine nations. By 2011, 90% of New Zealand wine was sealed this way.
But in Europe and the US the cork remains king.
It’s a little puzzling to some. Wine has become democratic and modern. There are prices and drinking styles to suit everyone. So why hasn’t the closure method evolved?
Portugal, where most of the world’s corks are harvested, has fought back against the chemical compound trichloroanisole (TCA), one of the most common causes of tainted corks.
But the screw cap not only avoids the problem of tainted cork, it forms a tighter seal. Most critics say that this guarantees a better flavour for all but the more expensive wines (which may age better with more oxygen).
“We prefer seals that ensure the wine is not going to be faulty,” says Ewan Murray, spokesman for the Wine Society. “Wines that are ready to drink young are always going to be fresher under a screw cap.”
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June 6, 2013
Rail technology changes on a slower timescale than other transportation systems
The Economist looks at innovation in the railway business:
Compared with other modes of transport, train technology might seem to be progressing as slowly as a suburban commuter service rattling its way from one station to another. Automotive technology, by contrast, changes constantly: in the past decade satellite-navigation systems, hybrid power trains, proximity sensors and other innovations have proliferated. Each time you buy a new car, you will notice a host of new features. Progress is apparent in aircraft, too, with advances in in-flight entertainment and communication, fancy seats that turn into beds, and quieter and more efficient engines. Trains, meanwhile, appear to have changed a lot less.
Actually, the perception of change is much greater for cars and airplanes, but there are few changes in those areas that are not merely evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Incremental changes are the rule of the day, as neither cars nor planes travel significantly faster than they did thirty years ago … but they do it safer and more comfortably now.
This comparison is not entirely fair. For one thing, people buy their own cars, so they pay more attention to automotive innovation. Carmakers are engaged in a constant arms race, trumpeting new features as a way to differentiate their products. Nobody buys their own trains. Similarly, air passengers have a choice of competing airlines and are far more likely to be aware of the merits of rival fleets than they are of different types of train. In addition, notes Paul Priestman of Priestmangoode, a design consultancy that specialises in transport, trains have longer lives, so technology takes longer to become widespread. The planning horizon for one rail project he is working on extends to 2050. “You have to think about longevity, whereas the car industry wants you to buy a new car in two years,” he says.
Another big difference is that the way railways operate — with a small number of powered units (locomotives) and a very large number of unpowered units (freight cars and passenger cars) that have to be reliably connected to one another and operate successfully. A car can go on any kind of road (or even none, in many places) and a plane can fly in any part of the sky, but a train needs an engineered right-of-way that falls within established standards of curvature, elevation change, and overhead and side clearance. Because of this, any piece of railway equipment that does not run on its own isolated track (like monorails or the various flavours of high speed railways) must always meet the existing standards … which have been slowly evolving since the mid-nineteenth century. With so much capital invested in existing right-of-way and rolling stock, the costs for introducing significant changes can be astronomical.
There’s also the fact that unlike other forms of transportation, passenger and freight trains operate in different and sometimes conflicting ways. Passenger trains need to operate on a known schedule between high population centres at relatively high speed. With higher speed goes a need for better braking systems and more capable signalling methods. Unlike a train full of new cars or iron ore, you can’t just park a train full of living human beings on a siding for a few hours to allow slower trains to clear the way (unless you’re Amtrak or VIA). Passenger trains have to have top priority, which often means the railways have to delay freight traffic to ensure that the passengers are not unduly delayed.
One solution to the problem is to provide separate tracks for the passenger trains, but this can be very expensive, as the places where the extra tracks would be most effective is also where the land is at peak cost: in and around major cities. Most passenger trains are now run by government agencies or corporations acting as agents for local, regional, or state governments, so they sometimes use the power of eminent domain to gain access to the land. This is a politically fraught area, as the more land they need to take, the tougher the process will get.
Brakes are also getting an upgrade. Stopping a train can take so long that locomotive-operators, also known as engineers, often have time to contemplate their fate before an impact. “Your life races before you,” says a former operator who, years ago in Alabama, helplessly watched as his freight train, its emergency brakes screeching, headed towards a stalled truck that ultimately managed to pull off the tracks in time. Stopping a train pulling a hundred cars at 80kph can require 2km of track. Road accidents take far more lives, but 1,239 people were killed in more than 2,300 railway accidents in 2011 in the European Union alone.
Much of the problem is that the faster a train’s wheels are spinning, the hotter its brake shoes get when engaged. This reduces friction and hence braking power, a predicament known as “heat fade”. Moreover, nearly all trains power their brakes with compressed air. When switched on, air brakes activate car by car, from the locomotive to the back of the train. It can take more than two minutes for the signal to travel via air tubes to the last car.
Again, it’s not physically or financially possible to switch over all existing cars to newer technology in one fell swoop, so any updated brake technology must be 100% compatible with what is already in use, or you risk creating more dangerous situations because some brakes may operate out of sequence which will increase the chances of accidents.
Norfolk Southern, an American rail operator, now pulls roughly one-sixth of its freight using locomotives equipped with “route optimisation” software. By crunching numbers on a train’s weight distribution and a route’s curves, grades and speed limits, the software, called Leader, can instruct operators on optimum accelerating and braking to minimise fuel costs. Installing the software and linking it wirelessly to back-office computers is expensive, says Coleman Lawrence, head of the company’s 4,000-strong locomotive fleet. But the software cuts costs dramatically, reducing fuel consumption by about 5%. That is a big deal for a firm that spent $1.6 billion on diesel in 2012. Mr Lawrence reckons that by 2016 Norfolk Southern may be pulling half its freight with Leader-upgraded locomotives. A competing system sold by GE, Trip Optimizer, goes further and operates the throttle and brakes automatically.
This is a good use of computer technology: you add the software on top of the existing infrastructure and use it to detect operational gains without needing to make system-wide changes to all freight cars.
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May 29, 2013
Lessons learned in the post-Napster era
At TechDirt, Mike Masnick discusses the things we learned from Napster:
Last fall, law professor Michael Carrier came out with a really wonderful paper, called Copyright and Innovation: The Untold Story. He interviewed dozens of people involved in the internet world and the music world, to look at what the impact was of the legal case against Napster, leading to the shutdown of the original service (the name and a few related assets were later sold off to another company). The stories (again, coming from a variety of different perspectives) helps fill in a key part of the story that many of us have heard, but which has never really been written about: what an astounding chill that episode cast over the innovation space when it came to music. Entrepreneurs and investors realized that they, too, were likely to get sued, and focused their efforts elsewhere. The record labels, on the other hand, got the wrong idea, and became totally convinced that a legal strategy was the way to stem the tide of innovation.
The Wisconsin Law Review, which published Carrier’s paper, asked a few people to write responses to Carrier’s paper, and they recently published the different responses, including one from a lawyer at the RIAA, one from another law professor… and one from me. This post will be about my paper — and I’ll talk about the other papers in a later post. My piece is entitled When You Let Incumbents Veto Innovation, You Get Less Innovation. It builds on Carrier’s piece, to note that the stories he heard fit quite well with a number of other stories that we’ve seen over the past fifteen years, and the way in which the industry has repeatedly fought innovation via lawsuits.
You can read the whole paper at the link above (or, if you prefer there’s a pdf version). I talk about the nature of innovation — and how it involves an awful lot of trial and error to get it right. The more trials, the faster what works becomes clear, and the faster improvement you get. But the industry’s early success against Napster made that nearly impossible, and massively slowed down innovation in the sector. Yes, a few players kept trying, but it developed much more slowly than other internet-related industries. And you can see why directly in the Carrier paper, where entrepreneurs point out that it’s just not worth doing something in the music space, because if you want to actually do what the technology enables, the kinds of things that are cool and useful and which consumers would really like… you’ll get sued.
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May 24, 2013
UBC’s latest big idea
Alex Usher calls it the best idea he’s seen all year:
If you’re a UBC student, staff, or faculty member, and want to start a business, you’re eligible for up to $5000 worth of business services (though, in practice, most use far less). And unlike virtually every other entrepreneurship system in Canadian PSE, there are no requirements whatsoever with respect to using UBC technology, nor is there any stipulation that the business be some kind of technology enterprise. Want to open a flower shop? This fund’s for you.
There’s no catch. UBC certainly isn’t interested in equity, for instance. All they want is recognition. All companies that move through the program must display a logo declaring themselves as “UBC-affiliated companies” for a period of five years.
How brilliant is that?
First, it creates a great, dense network between an institution and small businesses in its community (which will no doubt pay off philanthropically, down the road). Second of all, it allows the institution to get a much better handle on the post-graduation activities of its entrepreneurs, and hence allows UBC to highlight its larger role in job creation and innovation in British Columbia. Frankly, UBC could pay for this out of the Government Relations budget, and it would make complete sense — how great will it be to be able to walk into an MLA’s office and rattle off the names of all the new, “UBC-affiliated” businesses that have started-up in his/her riding?
It’ll be interesting to see how this works out in the long run, as $5,000 isn’t enough to establish a business but it can be a helpful amount of money to an otherwise undercapitalized business.
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May 16, 2013
Tim Harford on the patent system’s failings
The question seems to be is it totally broken or only partially broken?
According to one well-publicised estimate, there are 250,000 patents relevant to a modern smartphone. Even if the number is one-tenth of that, it suggests an impossible thicket of intellectual property through which a company must hack to bring a cool new product to market.
A key issue is something called the hold-up problem. If a $1bn product depends on 1,000 patents, it is clearly impossible to pay the typical patent holder more than $1m. But any patent-holder could try to extort many times that amount by threatening to block the whole project.
Large firms have responded to this problem by buying or developing large collections of patents. This gives them the ability to launch countersuits, and that threat should make rivals reasonable. But although defensive patenting looks like a pragmatic solution, it has costs and limits. The wave of defensive applications swamps patent offices, which means more poor-quality patents and longer delays.
“Patent trolls” — a derisive name for companies that make money purely from their patents — have less to lose in a patent war but although some are legitimate, others are extortionists. And while established players may reach cosy understandings, a young company with a new idea may find it impossible to break into a market that is thick with defensive patents. If only the big boys can play the patent game, innovation will suffer.
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May 8, 2013
Nanotechnology comes to the aid of diabetics
Matt Peckham discusses a technology that may help diabetics avoid the majority of their frequent insulin injections:
Say you’re diabetic: Instead of having to inject yourself with insulin multiple times a day, imagine only having to do it once a week. Crazy, right? And instead of your syringe harboring glucose-regulating insulin, imagine it filled with nanoscopic particles you fire into your bloodstream — particles capable of detecting when your body’s blood sugar levels rise and releasing insulin accordingly.
Thanks to research conducted at North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Children’s Hospital Boston, what sounds like a Kurzweilian science fiction fantasy may soon be reality for the estimated 25.8 million children and adults in the U.S. alone — 8.3% of the population, according to the American Diabetes Association – with high blood sugar (and 366 million in all worldwide).
“We’ve created a ‘smart’ system that is injected into the body and responds to changes in blood sugar by releasing insulin, effectively controlling blood-sugar levels,” says NC State University biomedical engineering assistant professor Dr. Zhen Gu, the lead author of a paper describing the work (via NC State news). ”We’ve tested the technology in mice, and one injection was able to maintain blood sugar levels in the normal range for up to 10 days.”
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May 6, 2013
The Whole Earth Catalog was “the internet before the internet. It was the book of the future. It was a web in newsprint.”
In the Guardian, Carole Cadwalladr profiles Stewart Brand and his early but vastly influential work, the Whole Earth Catalog:
Stewart Brand didn’t just happen to be around when the personal computer came into being; he’s the one who put “personal” and “computer” together in the same sentence and introduced the concept to the world. He wasn’t just a member of the world’s first open online community, the Well; he co-founded it. And he wasn’t just another of those 60s acid casualties; he was the definitive 60s acid casualty. Well, not casualty exactly, but he was there taking LSD in the days when it was still legal, with the most famous hipster of them all, Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters.
For nearly five decades, Stewart Brand has been hanging around the cutting edge of whatever is the most cutting thing of the day. Largely because he’s discovered it and become fascinated with it long before anyone else has even noticed it but, in retrospect, it does make him seem like the west coast’s answer to Zelig, the Woody Allen character who just happens to pop up at key moments in history. Because no one pops up like Stewart Brand pops up, right there, just on the cusp of something momentous.
[. . .]
This year marks its 45th anniversary. I have a slightly later, yellowing and decrepit edition, from 1971, though it’s the same oversized format. It’s the edition that sold 2m copies and won a US National Book award, and the tips on spot welding, home remedies for crabs (not the marine kind, I don’t think), dealing with drug busts, and building your own geodesic dome are rather delightfully quaint. (I especially like an extract from the underground guide to US colleges which states that, at the University of Illinois: “The hip chicks will do it. It is easier to find a chick who will have sex now than it was two years ago when things were extremely difficult.”) But it doesn’t even begin to convey the revolution that the Whole Earth Catalog represented.
But then, it’s almost impossible, to flick through the pages of the Catalog and recapture its newness and radicalism and potentialities. Not least because the very idea of a book changing the world is just so old-fashioned. Books don’t change anything these days. If you want to start a revolution, you’d do it on Facebook. And so many of the ideas that first reached a mainstream audience in the Catalog — organic farming, solar power, recycling, wind power, desktop publishing, mountain bikes, midwife-assisted birth, female masturbation, computers, electronic synthesizers — are now simply part of our world, that the ones that didn’t go mainstream (communes being a prime example) rather stand out.
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May 3, 2013
What could kill Google Glass? Terminal dorkiness.
In Wired, Marcus Wohlsen theorizes that the inherent dork factor will be the biggest hurdle for Google Glass:
The Segway. The Bluetooth headset. The pocket protector.
What do these three technologies have in common? They all pretty much work as promised. They all seem like good ideas on paper. And they’re all too dorky to live.
Now, far be it from me to claim that nerdiness equals lack of popularity potential. But I contend that dorkiness and nerdiness are two different qualities. While nerdiness implies a certain social awkwardness that’s ultimately endearing, dorkiness connotes social obliviousness that opens you to deserved ridicule.
Guess which category Google Glass will fall under when it goes “mainstream?”
Forget about the privacy concerns for a second. I don’t think you have to get that serious to recognize the inherent antisocialness of Google Glass. All you have to do is look at the guy in the picture at the top of this post. Or any of the rest of the guys on White Men Wearing Google Glass, a new Tumblr that serves up the data needed to transform the hypothesis “Google Glass is too dorky to succeed” into a proven scientific theory.
Disagree? The floor is open for falsification. Start your own Tumblr: People Who Look Cool While Wearing Google Glass.
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April 30, 2013
Barnes & Noble files a great argument for reforming the patent system
At Techdirt, Mike Masnick has to restrain himself from just quoting the whole B&N submission to the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice:
As Groklaw notes, the B&N filing is clear, concise and highly readable. It outlines the problem directly:
The patent system is broken. Barnes & Noble alone has been sued by “non practicing entities” — a/k/a patent trolls — well over twenty-five times and received an additional twenty-plus patent claims in the last five years. The claimants do not have products and are not competitors. They assert claims for the sole purpose of extorting money. Companies like Barnes & Noble have to choose between paying extortionate ransoms and settling the claim, or fighting in a judicial system ill equipped to handle baseless patent claims at costs that frequently reach millions of dollars.
As they point out clearly, even when they have a very strong case — either when they don’t infringe and/or when the patent is bogus, a lawsuit is incredibly costly in terms of time, money and effort.
In the current system, patent trolls overwhelm operating companies with baseless litigation that is extremely costly to defend. Patent cases generally cost at least $2M to take through trial, and frequently much more. Litigating, even to victory, also entails massive business disruption. Companies are forced to disclose their most sensitive and top-secret technical and financial information and must divert key personnel from critical business tasks to provide information and testimony. The process is exceptionally burdensome, especially on technical staff. Document discovery and depositions seem endless.
Patent trolls know this and as a result, they sue companies in droves and make settlement demands designed to maximize their financial take while making it cheaper and less painful to settle than to devote the resources necessary to defeat their claims. The current system lets them do so even with claims that are unlikely to prevail on the merits. That is because, whether win lose or draw, the rules effectively insulate trolls from negative consequences except perhaps a lower return than expected from any given company in any given case. They can sue on tenuous claims and still come out ahead. And so the broken system with its attendant leverage allows trolls to extract billions in blackmail from U.S. companies and, in the final analysis, consumers.
One of the great things about the filing is that it reminds the FTC and the DOJ of the constitutional underpinnings of patent law — not that patents are required or guaranteed, but that their purpose is to promote the progress of the useful arts. If that is not happening, then the use of patents in such a manner should be seen as unconstitutional.
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