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Archive for the ‘Rewire’ Category

Gambling on Space

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010

Last week Obama introduced the new United States budget– which notably kills the American space program. There is one way the zombie that is NASA can return from the dead: a lottery.

NASA has been in the sick ward for some time. Few come to visit these days. The Shuttle is a flying Betamax of technolgy. NASA has been reduced to finding parts on eBay.

Perhaps the only thing George W Bush did I concur with was give NASA a reboot. The proposed Constellation Program was Apollo on steroids. After all, we have computers, CAD, and iPods so let’s use that awesome technology to go to the moon. Using proven rocket technolgy from the design of Saturn V and Soyuz rockets, the Ares would take us back to the moon.

It might have, but now the money and interest is gone. This has been the problem with manned spaceflight since it’s inception: money and interest.

The money is obviously an issue in the credit crunch economy. Interest also as many see other things to worry about. Interest, in the traditional knee jerk short sighted reaction.

Consider Sputnik in 1952: at that time there was no MLB Network, Internet, or cell phones. Sputnik had no clear benefit, no practical outcome. Soviet scientists were not sitting around saying “let’s put ball in space then it go beep beep. After, we will sell– how can you say– sports network to yankee blue jean American to watch on TV.” Nope, just a ball in space that went beep beep. Heck, most people didn’t even have a TV. Yet Sputnik’s development was absolutely critical in the world we live in today.

All that anyone could promise at best was the ball went beep beep and didn’t explode. That’s it. Today satelite technology is an invaluable part of our way of life but then it was simply ball that go beep beep.

Today where fortune and success come and go by the second space is a hard sell. The average person cannot afford a trip in space.

There’s a way to make money off space: get the real average Joe and make people excited about space again. The answer is a lottery.

At $100,000 Virgin Galactic isn’t cheap but it is cheap for space travel. If 100,000 people bought a $1 ticket (better odds than most lotteries) that would break even. Chances are though mote would buy– and outer space would start making money and interest.

This is the kind of viral and word-of-mouth advertising marketing types have wet dreams about. Even a few minutes in space is a lifetime experience and at $1 the price is right. Anousheh Ansari spent time in space and left feeling depressed– as if she had seen a fantastic world just out of arms length. As a result she created the X-Prize, offering a prize for affordable space travel; which in turn led to Virgin Galactic. Imagine when not just some guy on TV but your neighbor, your friend, or you journey into space. What we could accomplish with renewed money and interest in space is unimaginable. It’s unimaginable because right now we can’t get there, yet.

With a lottery, we could.

Tags: Futurism, NASA, space, technology
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Rewire: The Library as Cloud Storage

Monday, January 18th, 2010

Libraries are storage repositories for books, but just certain books, not your books. No, you have to store those yourself.  Most of the time, those books are speed bumps or structural elements because most of the time you aren’t reading them.  While a well-stocked bookcase or two can be good for showing off to friends and potential mates when you have them round the place, there’s something to be said for not having a half ton of dead tree hanging about the place, taking up valuable space that could be used for holding broken electronics or a knife throwing range.  See where I’m going with this yet?

Two things about me: I’ve got no money and I live in what would be considered a treehouse if it was in a tree, rather than over a store that sells do-rags and tire chains. Thus I think a lot about making use of the limited space I’ve got and keeping myself stimulated without laying out a lot of cash.  Add that to my nerdish tendencies and it’s a no brainer that I have a pretty steady relationship with the local library.

I took a big box of books down there yesterday to donate after cleaning out the apartment. (My New Year’s resolution had something to do with house guests not getting tetanus)  They thanked me, dropped in a coat closet and would presumably be storing them until they can be bought at some semi-annual sale by other people who will also use them to clutter up their apartments.

So I got thinking: what if we applied out internet age expectations of resource sharing to Dead Tree Media?  What would that look like?

Now a library is an old, old approach to a problem that doesn’t really exist anymore: books being rare, expensive and the only way to reliably preserve and transmit the written word.  True, it can still expensive to build up a book collection of one’s own, especially if the knowledge you’re after is something that might be captured within the textbook/university publishing ghetto where the writing is dry and the prices are high.

These days, libraries are struggling.  Cities everywhere are deeply in debt and over budget so they’re slashing funding to everything they can.  At the same time, the gushing info pipe that the internet provides has made the modest offerings of the local public library seem less important to those well-off enough to afford their own computer and net access.

So how can we rewire libraries to increase their relevance?

Well, one suggestion would be to have them work more like cloud storage, crossed with a little bit of file sharing. (yeah buzzwords!) Dig: Libraries could take a patron’s books, either assuming full ownership or holding them for a mutually agreed upon term.  Then, the patron would be able to get them back at any time, provided no other library patron has checked them out.  Donating patrons would have priority on retrieving any books they donated (i.e.: could skip ahead of the line if an item was heavily reserved) and donated books would be stored in their donor’s home branch, keeping them nearby most of the time.  The donor gets imperfect access to his books but for most books, who needs them right at hand 24/7?  I could certainly wait a week if I ever got the yen to read Glamorama for the third time.

Downsides would include the additional cost for libraries to absorb many many more books.  This could be partially offset by requiring patrons to pay a fee upfront for storage of their books within the system. I’d gladly pay 10-15 cents a book to have it nearby but out of my apartment.  These payments could also be credited in-kind to a patron’s account to reduce their overdue charges or pay off future fines.

Another downside would be a significant hit to sales for book publishers.  If libraries were suddenly flush with free books, they wouldn’t have to spend as much.  Likewise, such a system could encourage less people to actually buy popular books if they knew that it was sitting there for free at their local library.

All in all, not perfect but worth a shot.  Thoughts?  How would you rewire your public library?

Tags: books, cloud, dead tree media, library, reading, Rewire, storage
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DIY Fix for Global Warming?

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009

Russ George: The Man to Save the World?

“Give me half a tanker of iron and I will give you an ice age.” — Russ George

Russ George in the volume 18 issue of Make magazine says he has a solution for global warming. His plan sounds like a deus ex machina solution for our global warming problems: get some iron (0.5 micron hematite), drop it in the ocean, spread at the right times and places, plankton eats iron, plankton grows, and global warming and dying fish go bye-bye. He has also written a Google Knol article (yes, someone uses Google Knol) on the subject as well.

His company, Plantoks Science bills themselves as a “privately held ecorestoration and ocean  biotechnology company” though this sounds like “MacGyver style fix to global warming.”

Science to the rescue or psuedo-science fraud?
(more…)

Tags: environment, iron, michael chrichton, plankton, psuedoscience, russ george, science
Posted in Rewire, Tin Foil Hats | 1 Comment »

Rewire: The Postal Service

Friday, June 19th, 2009

Alright, I confess: I still write and send actual, physical letters to people.  People I know even.  For non-special occasions, not even as a ritual or an outdated formality.  I’m a sucker for physical objects, what can I say.

As often as I think that I’m the last non-corporate entity who still uses the post office, there’s still that enormous line at every sad outpost of the U.S. Mail.  Weird.  Who are these people?

Before this devolves into a pointless antiquarian rant, let me get to the meat: there’s an article brewing that I want to get a conversation going about before it starts.

Topic: how would you go about making the postal service relevant?

Included in this would be the issues of improving the user experience, competing with email for ease of use, making all those hackneyed storefronts do something and running it all without just digging a big hole to throw money in.

Somewhat harder than all that would be: how can we revive the culture of sending each other tangible objects?  How does one create a market for the delivery of things?

Go nuts in the comments.  Let’s get talking.

Tags: culture, mail, marketing, objects, physical culture, postal service, Rewire, things
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