OK, this is for the technically minded, but it occurs to me that your laptop could be a lot more than just a mobile computing device. It could also be a very large bike computer, or a power and g-force measurement device for your race car. Oh, sure, you knew that already, but I don’t mean by adding extra sensors. No, I mean by using the built-in accelerometer! If you have a decent and recent laptop, one with the shock-sensing hard disk automated shutdown and lock feature (ThinkPads have this, for example), a whole new world of uses opens up. Yes, you need to write some fancy software, but hey, it’s an idea! Cool, or what?  And yes, I got the idea from this ibm.com article on footstep mapping (yes, really!) using the Lenovo ThinkPad. The ThinkPad was an IBM PC until they sold off that business to Lenovo.

(Note that whilst I also work for IBM, this is my opinion only, not necessarily the corporation’s. And I’m not just trying to get more Lenovo sales… because it won’t help me one bit. Rather, it’s just a cool idea.)

Folks, if you were thinking that biofuel was the answer to our substitute-for petroleum, easily-transportable fuel source needs in a post-oil world, you may be surprised to read that the draw-backs outweigh the pluses for ethanol and the like. Now this is no surprise really – if you watched certain West Wing episodes from a couple of years ago it was explained explicitly that converting corn to fuel was a sop to farmers, nothing more, and used more fuel in manufacture than it actually produced. Now when a TV drama already has this sussed, why should we still be surprised? Ahhh, politics and lobbying strikes again! When you add up the costs of clearing land, fertilising and watering the crop, moving and storing the crop after harvest, processing it into fuel… you begin to see that the fuel needed to power the process itself is quite substantial, if not potentially greater than the energy harvest itself. And then you have to transport the final fuel to the petrol stations…

This is well known, but not often discussed or publicised. Yes, biofuels do have a role to play in our energy needs, especially if they are manufactured and distributed locally; but as a long-term replacement they do more harm than good. At least at current efficiency rates and models of distribution, anyway. And the last thing we want is to convert more land from forest to crops, for food or fuel.

Here’s a report on this via Carconnection.com:

n recent months, a number of sources, including the U.K. magazine The Ecologist, have suggested that all of the supplementary (and necessary) processes around biofuels production may actually emit more carbon dioxide than if we were to keep using fossil fuels. Now two studies, published in the journal Science, confirm that. While biofuel crops, such as corn or sugar cane, help absorb CO2, they absorb far less than forests, or even scrubland, according to the study, which uses a worldwide agricultural model to estimate the emissions associated with the change in land use. Bottom line, the study concludes that the use of corn-based ethanol nearly doubles greenhouse-gas emissions over 30 years, while switchgrass — long thought of as an ethanol-producing alternative crop, would increase overall emissions by 50 percent if grown instead of corn on U.S. lands. To cut to the chase, nearly all crop-based biofuels used today end up causing more greenhouse-gas emissions than ‘conventional’ fossil fuels do.

I’m hooked on data – and futurism. (I think there’s a correlation there.) I love trends, even Google trends. And What’s Next is a good, insightful read, as is the allied Top Trends blog.

OK, I love cars and bikes. I love wheels, basically. I love the ability to travel much further, far easier than on foot. (And I love walking, too.) Trouble is, cars take up too much space, spew fumes and their drivers act like it’s a personal affront to slow down and give pedestrians and cyclists a chance. The ‘modern’ world is simply unbalanced in its love of roads, parking and ever-bigger cars and has forgotten that people actually live here, too, and want to (a) breathe (b) not be intimidated by traffic to the extent where simply crossing a road or even walking alongside one is an ordeal. At this point I publish in toto and excellent riposte by Sydney’s Lord Mayor to the numbskulls at the Aussie National Roads and Motorists Association (of which I am a long-standing and increasingly disenchanted member):

Clover Moore January 11, 2008 “THE NRMA, unsurprisingly, claims that few cyclists use the Epping Road corridor each day. The NRMA, like the big oil companies, has a vested interest to protect, and it is depressing that private car use in Sydney is still rising, with vehicle kilometres travelled increasing at twice the rate of population growth. We are past the day when we have any choice but to pursue alternatives: oil is running out and global warming is increasing at an alarming rate. Our streets are becoming impossibly congested, polluted and unpleasant to use. The health costs, in respiratory disease and obesity, to name but two, are well-documented. Many people choose cars over bikes because they can get directly to any destination. Get on a bike, and you’ll be lucky to find continuous safe passage. Cyclists are expected to levitate through impassable gaps in the network and risk their lives inches from tonnes of speeding metal on car-dominated roads. Despite this, nearly 1.5 million bicycles were sold in Australia last year, 40 per cent more bikes than cars. And this is the eighth year in a row that bikes have outsold cars.

“At last year’s C40 Large Cities conference in New York, I cycled with the mayor of Copenhagen. In the Danish capital 40 per cent of people use bikes to get to work and study. International experience shows that if you provide the facilities, people will use them – but it does not happen overnight. Our top need is for a clean, efficient, sustainable and integrated transport system that includes cycleways and mass transit to move the million-plus people who use the city daily to their destinations. Recent research by the City of Sydney indicates that Sydneysiders would be more likely to cycle if there were dedicated cycle lanes and better awareness by motorists of bicycle safety. Even under the present, less-than-ideal conditions, the Roads and Traffic Authority has reported a 45 per cent increase in bicycle traffic in the CBD in the three years to 2005. The city’s own counts show that about 500 cyclists use Oxford Street each weekday between 7am and 9am – a sixfold increase over the past decade. While there are major recreational cycleways – such as the Sydney Harbour route and the planned Alexandra Canal path – the city’s cycle strategy aims to create an effective and accessible network with major routes less than five minutes’ cycle from every residence. It also includes strategies to increase community awareness about the benefits of cycling, to provide better signage and safer, separated cycle lanes. We are encouraging end-of-trip facilities including the provision of parking, storage, change and shower facilities – which progressive firms like Lend Lease are now providing in their headquarters. On the other side of the harbour, North Sydney Council has its own proposals for getting cyclists safely to the bridge, and local governments across the metropolitan area are looking at ways of creating a cycling network that can get people to work, recreation and educational destinations.

“According to the British urbanist Charles Landry, the average US male devotes more than 1600 hours a year to his car – driving it, sitting in traffic, parking it. Adding in the time spent working to pay for it, for petrol, tolls and other charges, he calculates that same person spends over 18 per cent of his life on his car. Sydney people have surely got better things to do with that 18 per cent of their lives.”

Clover Moore is Lord Mayor of Sydney and the independent state MP for Sydney.

We all die; although some of us are also re-born, perhaps. But what about an artistic, if commercial, concept? Do artistic constructs die? For example can we truly say that the ‘album’ is dead, in the context of popular music? Of course we can say it, but what does it mean? Is it death in terms of sales alone, or can the spirit live on? I have some 300 hundred vinyl albums in my house – have they just gone skywards? Obviously not (but I’ll check). Or is it the vinyl itself that has died? Well they still make ‘em flat and grooved, so they can’t be totally dead. Or is it the format – the loose coupling of a musical story, an artist’s selection of music that expresses a time or a feeling and fits one of several fairly well defined shapes and sizes? Maybe that’s it.

The first part of that ‘format’ definition surely won’t die – capturing the essence of an artist’s creativity at a time or place, or their particular feeling at that point in time will go on and on. We will continue to make and record music that expresses time and place. But the restriction in shape and size of output may indeed alter. There is no need today to restrict ourselves to 20 minutes of reasonable quality audio per side of LP vinyl, for example. Or even to pack 60minutes onto a CD. We can stream MP3s ad infinitum if we want. But is that an album? Or do we have to redefine ‘album’?

Seems to me that an album is a package of sorts. It must have a theme and a defined size. Photo albums continue to be like that, even in a digital world – they are defined in some way. Otherwise they are just unsorted collections. This is after all our model for musical albums. And just because we can stream data ‘forever’ doesn’t mean we should discard the album as a concept. Or the concept album for that matter. So I think it still exists, but exists in a world where it faces a challenge: do artists want to retain and work within this album format, rather like poets may want to write in sonnet form? Or do they prefer to live with and embrace digital streaming and the endless track-mashing that comes from single-track online sales?

What prompted this rave was this CNET article. The point is that online sales of single tracks takes control away from the artist and gives it to the consumer. All of the artistic pretension in the world can’t overcome the buyer’s urge to buy and listen to only the music they like. But how different is this from the recent past, where we may have bought an album but only played the singles; or simply bought the singles. We’ve always listened to what we liked. Except now we can make these choices even easier and even burn our own CDs in the shape we prefer, if we want. More to ponder in our changing world I guess.

OK, you didn’t ask, but here I go. Some thoughts and questions to consider for today.

1. Why is it that the bicycle industry can make frames that are compatible with the drivetrains of at least 3 major manufacturers and the componentry of just about everyone? Doesn’t that (otherwise very sensible) component commonality impinge upon product differentiation?
2. Why is it that automotive companies can barely get it together to share wheels and tyres and sundry hidden mechanicals and electricals? Sure they have tried to share platforms and engines, and there are plenty of exceptions, but generally they keep reinventing the wheel; or in this case the complete drivetrain and monocoque shell. Does this more complete individualism grant some competitive advantage or are they simply blind to the savings that they could make for themselves, their customers and the world?
3. Why is it that the PC industry is split so unevenly between the bespoke “locked-up” designs like Apple’s and the open, modular and shared componentry that the “IBM-compatible” (or perhaps ‘Intel/Microsoft architecture-compatible’) makers comply with? What can we take away from the far greater market penetration of the latter approach? Or the higher prices and possibly ‘cooler’ designs from the low-volume makers?
4. What is the best approach for the world (including our living environment as well as our economic one)? To evolve shared componentry in all cases and thereby reduce overlap and waste; or to instead foster maximum competitive differentiation with bespoke, individualised design? Or to balance the 2 approaches? Or to find a 3rd way?
5. If there is ‘a better way’, should governments mandate it? Car safety legislation would be one example when government has enforced a common standard of safer design, however I have the sneaking suspicion that there are better, lighter, cheaper safety systems than the amazingly contrived explosive ‘airbag’ system that car companies have foist upon us. Airbags are of course less intrusive than helmets, harnesses and the like – but are they ‘better’? Is this an example where the compromise reached favours maximising car sales over implementing good sense? Or do the practical problems of getting people to wear harnesses and helmets outweigh the benefits?

These are the questions on my mind right now. More later, I’m sure…

It seems that we can’t let go of labels. As I have noted before we continually stretch the labelling logic with increasingly weak definitions for Baby Boomers, Gens X and Y and of course the weakest link of all, Gen Next. And we can’t leave the Web alone either, with Webs 1, 2 and now 3. But can you tell the difference? Does it matter? Do we agree on the definitions? No, no and no! But Forbes mag has taken a stab at it.

Well things do change, don’t they? When I started my working life in the mid-’70s modems were quite literally huge boxes offering staggering throughput around 1200 bits/second. Let me think that through for a moment. These were big boxes commonly mounted on walls in banks which tied distant computer terminals to mainframes via telephone lines, so that transactions could be completed “instantly” and printed in passbooks. At 1200 bits per second. Hmmm. Amazing anything got transmitted at all. Fast forward to 1985 and I was connecting at just 300bits/second but using a modem a bit smaller than a shoebox, or about 10% of the size of the first modem I ever worked with. By 1987 I was hooking up to bulletin boards using plug-in PC cards at 1200 bits/second, and a year later at 2400 bps. And shortly thereafter 9600bps. Things were certainly zooming along. But I got bored and drifted away.

At that sort of connection speed the world was really just sending text and numbers. For that it was fast enough. But it was very much a call-pause-respond sort of thing, especially over any distance. It wasn’t replacing face-to-face meetings or threatening to send couriers and the post office to the wall. But it was magical, and we could all see the future possibilities. And in 1990 I saw the Internet for the first time and thought, yes please. Suddenly we had a real world-wide platform to play on and email (with attachments) was workable. But it was still a geeky thing. But by 1994 it was in the daily news, big-time, and the world was shifting under our feet. I can remember my stunned amazement when the world of geeky text and numbers transformed itself into the World Wide Web of graphics, colour and motion. And I jumped back into the world of modems.

So in fast succession we went from 9,600bits/second to 56,000bits/second, yet we wanted more. Now I sit here at home connecting at 7,616,000bits/second and I still want more! And of course we will get more. And with every increase in speed comes an increase in quantity and a change in nature. Things become do-able. Video gets better and better. VoIP becomes clearer. Instant Messaging becomes more instant. Graphics get bigger and better (or worse!). And we inch a bit closer to true virtual reality.

Which is where I start thinking about work, life and friendship. We are quite accidentally teaching our kids how to submerge themselves in a virtual world, where even the nature of friendship is changing. You can see and feel the generational gap. Kids just do it, they connect by phone, face, IM, SMS, chatrooms or Web2.0 – whatever it takes. Old fogeys like me embrace it, sure, after all we are here too – but we also remember the ‘good old days’ of actually having to meet people, to see our teammates and friends face-to-face and to engage in different, human ways. We remember the old ways of facial expressions, of hand gestures, of shared jokes and raised eyebrows. But kids these days use avatars and emoticons as much as expression and eyebrows. Sure, not everyone is ‘into’ it, just as not everyone does everything in life exactly the same. But you can see the shifts happening.

Some of this is good. Working from home can be isolating or it can save petrol. It’s up to us to make it work, to identify when we need to do better. I can easily fall into a lament about the passing of the good old days, when teams were groups of people in one physical location, not avatars roaming around a virtual world. But as bandwidth increases and applications get better at being virtual I can see a day when it all becomes seamless. A day when being virtual is just as engaging as being real. Now it could sound scary, but it could just be what we need to do to survive and prosper. Sitting on our hands crying about change won’t bring our past back to life. It’s time to move on and make the future work for us.

Lots of recent words on the young these days ditching the technologies of the elderly.

Thus we have PCs displaced by super-powered mobile phones and email ditched in favour of instant messaging. Well I reckon it’s not quite like that at all. Sure, hand-held devices are becoming more powerful and can do more, but they can’t do everything. I don’t want to use Photoshop on a hand held, for example. Or Office, for that matter. Maybe I’ll do a draft, or a sketch on a handheld but I’ll do the real work on the PC. If youngsters are ditching PCs it’s because they don’t need to do the heavy lifting that a PC can do. They are satisfied with faster, lower quality and less functionality. And that’s sweet. Most of us only use a fraction of what a PC and its typical applications can do – maybe only 10-20%, if that – so it’s only natural that we’ll adjust our tools to suit our real work and home needs. In that way I think handheld devices will continue to erode some of the PC market, and convergence of features will continue to shift people to new devices with new multi-functional capabilities.

So PCs are indeed going to have to evolve, and even then will lose more market share. They’ll shrink in size but retain that heavy-lifting grunt-ability we need to do full-size jobs. Equally, however, the miniature-sized devices will continue to grow their abilities upwards and become much more like miniature, portable computers. Sounds like they’ll collide in the middle. So what’s really happening here?

Well PCs aren’t dying, they are evolving, just as the hand-helds are, too. These new converged devices – cell phones with CPU, memory and camera, for example – will grow into still more capable hand-held PC modules that will plug seamlessly into full-size keyboards, scanners and monitors when you need to use Office or Photoshop or whatever. When we need that still-more-big-iron-grunt, extra memory or some specific applications we can download it all off the web and “the grid” and simply leverage the scale of the Internet to boost the performance of our modular mini-PC. In this way the PC-in-a-big-box will have morphed into a more portable device; just be careful not to lose it somewhere on a train or a taxi, OK?

Does that mean it died? Or is it more like dinosaurs evolving into birds?

As for email, well IM is just like email but quicker, looser, more free and easy. It’s part of a continuum between casual and formal communication.  I expect to see the divisions and distinctions blur over time so IM simply becomes email when needed, or an email simply becomes an IM. It all depends on the application – if your email application only does email then that’s what you are stuck with… but if it can morph into IM on a whim, so will you. Again, does that mean email is dead? Nope, it just evolved again.

Here’s an InfoWorld piece on this subject.

I’ve always thought it would be helpful if plants could be identified by their DNA in some simple way, like the DNA expressing itself as an easy-to-read label for example. Now that may well be possible, but it may not be desirable. Along similar lines comes this idea from some Japanaes researchers, expanded upon by the NYT: an interesting use of available biological storage, eh?
“Take, for example, an insect from the order blattodea that has 4,500 species in six families, known as the cockroach. A group of Japanese scientists led by Masaru Tomita of Keio University recently used a bacterium’s genome to write four copies of Albert Einstein’s E=mc2 and “1905″ into its DNA. That work has now led to a proposal to create a time capsule by encoding a year’s worth of the New York Times magazine into the DNA of a cockroach. You see, all species have something referred to as junk DNA and, as an example, the human genome has a total of 2.9 billion letters or about 750 megabytes of data, of which only 22,000 letters or genes are used to make us what we are. So there is plenty of capacity, but what makes the cockroach special, is its proven ability to survive almost any conceivable scenario, making it the ultimate information-storage device, devoid of the harshness of evolution and time.” There’s a lot more on this subject here.

You may have noticed the recent DARPA-organised robotic car competition. If you didn’t you can read about it here in a Forbes article. It’s certainly impressive and looked like a lot of fun. Aside from enhancing research into practical robotics, competitions between robotic cars completing ‘races’ in urban environments is an interesting look into a Sci-fi future of immense wonder. There must be a business model here for someone.

Just imagine: robotic sports, anyone? Google-search your way to an urban pleasure robot for hire, perhaps? Replace human-driven taxis with robots and cut down on those inane cab-driver conversations? (Unless the robots get speech chips as well of course.) Or robotic buses that eliminate the end-of-shift grumpy-driver syndrome? Or more seriously, competent robotic day-surgery in remote locations without the need for expensive, highly-trained human surgeons “on-site”. It’s potentially a mix of good and bad, isn’t it? More programmers and robotics experts, fewer jobs for real people.

Now I’m not a Luddite, but I do wonder about whether we think these things through. Like Einstein wondering whether his work opened to door to nuclear war.

And sure enough these harmless-looking robot games have a military goal as well, with lives saved if you can send more robots into battle instead of warm bodies. The downside to robotic wars, however, are grim. Without the appropriate programming robots will not show human mercy or simple judgment, and may indeed be programmed to be exactly that – inhumane killing machines. And war with ‘thinking’ machines instead of people at risk may lower the barriers to war itself. So we get more war with fewer consequences – well, if you are on the winning side, anyway.

Meanwhile Google’s ‘first privately-owned car on the moon’ competition is a bit wacky – and certainly way-out – but hints at where we may be going next in our personal transport. Despite the fun of it all it’s possible that our obsession with cars will end on Earth when we run out of accessible, cheap resources; equally it’s hard to see how lunar exploration and exploitation will solve our immediate problems. But that’s humanity – pressing on, pushing the boundaries and fixing up the broken stuff later.