Thought That Came Unbidden

It was 85 degF at 8:30am yesterday morning.

I admit it: it’s too hot even for me.

OK, not true; it’s not that it’s too hot: it’s that we’ve reached the fetid stage of DC’s summer. The air’s not moving; it’s wet; and all the vegetation is rotting from the ground up.

Breathing in the soupy air is a chore. Car exhaust hangs in gray clouds over the streets and coats the inside of your throat and nose every time you take a breath. There’s not much point, really, in drying off after the shower in the morning: unless you’re running from air conditioned space to air conditioned space you will end up soaked by the time you get whereever it is you’re going.

It’s the kind of whether where the only thing the day is fit for between about 10am and about 7pm is lying around in the shade while you fan yourself and take the occasional sip of iced tea.

And who says DC isn’t a Southern town? Yet it is at this time of year that we exhibit our schiophrenia and absolute ability to deny reality in the face of our self-importance: people are still going to work in dress clothes – long pants, long sleeved shirts, grown-up shoes with hard soles and accompanying scratchy socks – in defiance of the fact that their business wardrobes carry with them the very real possibility of heat stroke.

Makes ya wonder, don’t it?

I’m not going to be shy about this: I love my iPod. Some people will tell you that it isn’t possible to love an inanimate object, that you can only love an entity that is capable of feeling and choosing to have warm feelings in return for your affection. While that is a larger question that merits debate, there is no question that my iPod brings me joy.

And while the iPod is a nearly perfect consumer product – the problem of short battery life needs to be rectified – everything has a little room for improvement.

Apple’s iTunes software allows you to make a couple of different kinds of playlists. Since iTunes is, basically, a big database with a pretty interface you have the ability to search in myriad ways to build “smart” playlists. You also have the ability to drag and drop things to build the kind of random playlist us dinosaurs used to refer to as a “mix tape.”

Another nice feature of both iTunes and the iPod is shuffle: it allows you to randomly play anything you’ve digitized, and, on the iPod at least, choose whether that is by song or by album. What is missing though is something I think could handly make the iPod even more useful: being able to shuffle a playlist.

Why not? You can drop a CD into a player with a random button and have it choose tracks off that CD. Why not treat a playlist the same as a CD player would treat a CD?

Random techno thoughts for today.

Overeating – defined as eating even after your brain has gotten the message from your stomach that it is full – is a significant contributing factor to America’s much publicized obesity “epidemic.” My theory is that a lot of people take seconds, or even thirds, because they simply want more of the taste of whatever they are eating in their mouths. Indeed, product developers at food companies talk endlessly about the importance of things like mouth-feel and aroma (smell being about 75% of taste) when it comes to making new products.

So what if we had a way to get the taste of anything we wanted in our mouths without having to ingest a huge number of calories to do it?

No, I’m not talking about the girls from the toothbrush brigade that we all knew in high school. I’m thinking more along the lines of nanotechnology.

Imagine a gum that would “learn” the taste of another food after you removed it from the wrapper and held it in proximity to the original dish for a fixed amount of time. The length of time would need to be long enough that you wouldn’t end up with table cloth flavored gum but short enough that it wasn’t onerous to have gum that tasted of death by chocolate cake. You’d get the taste, enough to satisfy the senses but not all the calories of another helping of cake or beans and rice, or even asparagus (if you so chose).

Things I think about while plowing my way through the decadence of a frozen Mexican dinner.

OK, perhaps that is taking it a bit too far for a species that doesn’t really understand how the basic cell works just yet.

Read more…

I don’t get out much. Well, that’s not strictly true: like many people I’ve transformed into a mouse potato doing my “getting out” via the great “information superhighway,” which in many respects is really more like an information strip-mall filled with bizarro little shops that have merchandise that may or may not be reliable. Because of my age, though, I stand at an interesting vantage point.

I’m old enough to remember when we didn’t have the internet and video game consoles beyond Pong. Yes, indeed, I remember when one of the neighborhood boys got Pong when we were 7 or 8 years-old. All the kids seemed to be fascinated by this blinking thing on the TV. Me, I wanted to go outside and ride my bike.

I am, however, also young enough to have been an “early adopter.”

The internet, really the PC, changed my focus to a degree. I could use this new-fangled big (and they were huge) box to connect to an “online service” and read messages from other people. If you were willing to front the per-minute charges you could even “talk” with other people in real time. Careful, though, ’cause making that switch from 1200 baud to 2400 baud might make the chat too fast for you to follow.

Now we have computers that can “generate reality” for us. Indeed, there are huge parts of our entertainments, movies primarily, that don’t exist outside a RAID array storage farm. Terrabytes have become a commonplace unit of measure of capacity for special effects professionals and computer animators while having nearly conquered the fur problem (see Over The Hedge, Ice Age: The Meltdown, and Shrek 2 among others) they still haven’t figured out how to generate convincing looking human beings.

BBC News reports that Microsoft’s new(ish) operating system is pushing the development of new graphics cards which will have much greater capabilities, incorporating the physics and shadows and subtle cues that human vision takes for granted in the hard world outside the box while at the same time The Washington Post is reporting that attendance at America’s national parks is down.

As much as I love my computer and how it connects me to friends all over the globe, as much as I love information at my fingertips, there’s something sublime and comforting in nature and the way it works without guile or remorse or manipulation through guilt.

I wonder if there’s any air in my bike’s tires?