“From amazing to plumbing”

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Russell Beattie:

“This morning on #mobitopia we were talking about our WiFi day and I said, “I can’t think of anything to write about WiFi.” Then I started thinking and realized that it’s been a “just” a year using the technology and it’s gone from being Cool, New and Amazing, to just Plumbing I use without thinking about it. I’m actually writing this in the living room connected to the router in the bedroom via WiFi. I hadn’t noticed until I started writing this piece.

That in itself is probably the most amazing part of WiFi now. “

I like the title. “From amazing to plumbing” is probably the dream goal for a lot of conscientious experience designers, but a nightmare of commoditisation for any company.

Unless of course they can be confident in the value of great design to create positive lock-in; come up with amazing, delightful plumbing, cf. Apple.

» Russell Beattie: From Amazing to Plumbing: A year of WiFi

How old the future is

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aerogel-handful-bg.jpg

I was obsessed with AeroGel back in the summer. A succinct and surprising summary of it in The Guardian today [my emboldening]:

“One of the most beautiful of modern inventions is aerogel. This eerie stuff is a jelly made with air instead of water. A sheet of it can support 4,000 times its own weight. It is one of the great insulators, as well as a great soundproofer. It is uncannily light. It looks like frozen smoke. And pretty much its only use so far is aboard a spacecraft called Stardust, which is preparing to sail through the tail of a comet and catch its dust with a trap made of the stuff. Aerogel sounds like the last word in materials science, but in reality it has been around since 1933.“

The article itself is focussed on LED technology, which is cool… but not as cool as AeroGel. For instance, here’s some AeroGel art by April Debra Tsui.

“The nature of monkey was… IRREPRESSIBLE!!!”

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New(-to-me) blog on mind and idea stuff found via Seb’s Open Research, which I gravitated towards purely because of the nostalgia-value of the URL, but stayed for stuff like this:

“Modern preconceptions have it that simply by applying our brains and concentrating hard enough on a problem (e.g. a crossword clue), we should be able to see the solution. This is the “Hare brain” approach.

The book says that there are two types of solution moments. Yes, one is when we sit down and just think hard. But there is another solution moment which comes seemingly out of nowhere, when we’ve been staring out the window, or having a shower, going for a walk. This is the tortoise mind approach. This is a result of a) having done the hare brain thinking in the first place and b) just relaxing your frontal lobes, and letting the rest of your brain “background render” the solution.

» Monkeymagic: December 2003 Archives

Hippocrates and Asimov

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Made aware of our Roomba’s military parentage on the weekend, I took a little look around iRobot‘s site. Amongst the slightly-sinister-but-undeniably-cool fishbots, and swarm-deploying mothershipbots I found the Bloodhound.

When Bloodhound arrives at the wounded soldier, it will notify the medic, and the medic will examine the casualty using the robot’s sensors. Bloodhound’s diagnostic sensors include video cameras, an electronic stethoscope, and two-way audio to communicate with a conscious casualty.

After determining the extent of the casualty’s injuries, the medic will be able to treat those injuries using Bloodhound’s medical payloads. Potential payloads include devices to stop bleeding (inflatable bandages, fibrin bandages, liquid fibrin sealants, Factor VII), intramuscular auto-injectors (which can deliver morphine, adrenaline, and nerve agent antidotes), and advanced diagnostic devices. Using these payloads, the medic will be able to stabilize the casualty’s condition until a medic can arrive or the casualty can be evacuated.

Bloodhound is part of a Robotic Rescue Team being developed at iRobot. Other members of this team will include robots for evacuating casualties and robots for shielding casualties from hostile fire.

The bloodhound is semi-autonomous, so a human medic makes the choices for it. However, it is not an enormous leap to think of autonomous battlefield medibots. Would their dispassionate graphite and metal swarms shield and treat the enemy without discrimination?

Would their manufacturer feel obligated to encode in them not only Asimov’s Laws but supplement them with the Hippocratic Oath?