Disruptive technology

What is disruptive technology?  It is technology that brings in a change to our understanding of what is fundamental to a system.  Computers changed how businesses processed information which meant that whole categories of workers were put out of jobs.  Rooms that used to be filled with accountants were downsized.  Similarly rooms full of draftsmen and architects got pared down, as did rooms of engineers to design everything from squeeze bottles to jet aircraft.  Computers disrupted business in ways large and small, and that intruded on our lives and our lives slowly began to change, as well.  Connecting computers to a network and having them internetworked was meant, way back when, to be a way to have computers split processes amongst them as they were few and expensive and idle time was money lost.  Instead the internetworked systems allowed people to contact each other across all the networks in a way that enabled human intelligence to be shared and increased.  E-mail was the first real disruptive technology of networks, and then, later, would come the ability to browse from site to site with information put up in a flat network system with agreed-upon means to display information.  The Internet with World Wide Web came into being and the compelling way it changed lives was through interaction of people to do many things that they could have never done before.  People who would never dream of publishing anything soon had blogs and realized that there was readership available with people desperate for something interesting to read.  Videos also were shared when bandwidth increased, and that also changed our view of each other and the world.  And commerce moved onto a global stage accessible by anyone with a computer connected to a network, and competition became global at a retail level.

Our world changed.

Yet the seasons still come and go, the Earth orbits the sun and the Moon orbits the Earth.  That world did not change as it is Nature and beyond our reach to change, as its laws are required to allow us to be here.

Today we see the last gasp of governments trying to regain control of people in ways large and small, from the Transnational Left and Right we see the disruption of societies as governments and companies try to liquidate what it means to be a citizen of a Nation.  Across much of Europe the attempt to socialize health care has resulted in the horrors of the British system and people left to die of thirst, to the lax attitude of physicians all taking their holiday on the hottest days of the year so that hospitals cannot treat those with heat stroke, to the much admired German system that can't seem to ask its own people if they actually like having to wander from doctor to doctor to get seen on a timely basis and never have continuity of care from a physician that knows them.  These systems have tremendous overhead and lacks big, small and always at the cost of actual health provisioning in a way people prefer.  Bureaucrats run these systems and they are run for the interest of the governments involved, not the people.  Control over personal health is one of the fastest ways a tyrannical system can find and eliminate opposition as it finds out just who has what, and then figure out how to deny opponents actual health services.  With such a whip the political class finds ways to dole out a bit here and there to get re-elected, all in the knowledge that the people are afraid of government as it has taken over the health care system.

This is an antiquated way of doing things, with large lab systems taking lots of time running costly tests at high overhead with may companies and levels of bureaucracy which now must be sustained by the individuals actually using the system.  Put in a few levels of bureaucracy and the actual cost of provisioning health care goes up, timeliness and quality of care goes down.  Computers have not made inroads to anything but forms processing so that forms get ignored on a more timely basis by bureaucrats playing solitaire on their systems instead of just hanging out at the water cooler instead of doing their jobs.  They do that, too.  Computers increase inefficiency as well as efficiency and provide many ways to goof off that could not have been conceived of just 30 years ago.  Health care has resisted disruption from the inside as the insiders have a vested interest in keeping a high overhead, high cost system going: it provides control and makes money for them, and grants those running it much power over others.

Yet automation and miniaturization are coming to the health care system, but this isn't coming from the decaying inside-out.  No this is coming from the outside, from people who don't much care for the inefficient, high overhead and centralized control realms that are the tyrannical features of government controlled health care.  Disruptive technology threatens the apple cart by putting power back in the hands of individuals who are able to walk away from aspects of the system to save money and empower those doing the liberation.  The place to start isn't with the 3D printing of organs... well, that is a pretty good place, actually, but to disrupt the entire system requires hitting at its underpinnings and that is with blood tests.  The things you have to get done to yield some information about what is going on with your body.  I've had so many of them it isn't funny, and if you have ever seen a nurse walk into a room with a full rack of vials to test your blood then you have some understanding of just how important the tests are.  Due to my health I've had up to 35 taken at a single draw, and there are people who have many more than that taken just to try and identify what is going on in their bodies.

From Instapundit I read, today, about a woman who, at age 19, started a company after dropping out of Stanford University and used her tuition money to put into the company (Article at Wired).  She is afraid of needles and thought that there must be a better way to do blood testing.  Now at 30, Elizabeth Holmes' company, Theranos, is featuring a 30 test service at Walgreens in Palo Alto, CA.  The blood sample is a miniscule amount that fits into a half inch collection vial.  Results for their tests are in 4 hours.  The company posts the costs of its tests on its website and they are a fraction of the cost of going to a traditional lab.  Their goal is to run thousands of tests via a single sample, and to have that sample available so that if a doctor wants secondary tests done on it they can be performed without the need for a re-draw.

Do they test for bacteria and viruses? Yes.  Instead of culturing blood, and risking contamination, they do a DNA screening to see if known viruses or bacteria are present and at what levels.  That is days of specialized culturing thrown out the door and the most definitive way to find a pathogen, via its DNA, put in its place. At some point my guess is that they will be able to give you your entire genome so that physicians can quickly see what medical conditions you might be susceptible to via your genetic profile.  The cost of a full genomic work up has been dropping drastically, and making it an everyday test done in hours, not days, would begin to change the course of medicine as diseases can be cross-referenced with genetic background and statistical results derived from it.

Even with Moore's Law slowing due to the fact that physics at the atomic level limits the size of processors, the ability to multiply what a processor does increases computing power per die for production.  Once some of this technology goes off patent, or once competition with alternative and faster ways gets into play, the cost of the tests will go down, the rate to get results will speed up and the size of the sample will decrease.  Give it two cycles of Moore's Law and the microengineering to get a 'lab on a chip' and you will begin to see the first generation of full spectrum blood sampling devices as something that becomes available in nearly every store.  Put in a few more cycles of Moore's Law and that then becomes a device you buy to add to your cellphone.  Cross that with the X-Prize for a non-invasive tricorder and you have Dr. McCoy's minimal test tricorder.

Time for something like this to get off the drawing board?  Less than a decade.

What is the basis for Larry Niven's device in the Known Space stories called an Autodoc (a capsule you rest in that does full medical procedures from a simple blood test and manicure to setting bones and treating cancer, or replacing organs or limbs)?  A full spectrum blood test.  As results are processed faster and cross-indexed with diseases, pathogens, and genetic background plus having a 360 degree body scan to see what is wrong with you, then the basis for the Autodoc appears.  The blood test is key as it is the basis of so much of modern medicine that it isn't funny.  As of today the first piece of the Autodoc is being worked on, although not as an Autodoc but as a way to get small blood samples to yield up information that used to take racks of vials to get.

This sort of technology is no longer a question of 'if' but of 'when' and 'how soon will it get here'.

Our health care system is on the verge of disappearing as we know it, with its high overhead bureaucracy, within 20 years.  Possibly within 10.

What will you do when you are given the freedom of having all of that medical knowledge on the cheap about yourself and then able to have a doctor step you through the beginning of understanding just what is in your body and how you can deal with it effectively?  Why would you want 'insurance' when you are in control of your medical life in an absolute way that is at once low cost and easy to do?  The power to control you begins to evaporate with low cost, effective blood testing that breaks the old system at its foundations.  How long will it take to do simple genomic cross-indexing of inherited conditions?  I'm guessing less than a decade, but certainly in that 20 year time horizon.

And what happens when governments try to take this away from stores, doctors and you?

That is an obvious power grab directly against you, the individual, to put a bureaucrat in control of your life and death.  Yet it will be cheap and easy to snub these control monsters.  Will you dare to be free of them?

This is just one disruptive technology.  Others are here and just being perfected.  Still more are coming from the horizon at a high rate of speed.  If you want to know why those wishing to dissolve your personality, your bonds to your country and your fellow citizens, are so desperate it is this: the future is arriving far faster than it can ever be controlled.  Governments are ill suited to coping and understanding what this means.  Individuals, however, are very able to do so as they do not have the burdens of collective stupidity and bureaucracy to hamper them.  And those who will benefit most are the poor, who do not need this controlled for them to get a good price as it already comes with a low price tag.  What happens when the poor are set free of the clutches of those wishing to control them?  Will they quake in fear of freedom or just shake their head at those who seek control and let them know that their day is over?

Change is here, but it isn't the one that the controllers hoped for.  Quite the opposite as this kind of change is their deadly enemy.

Welcome to the future.

I embrace it with open arms while those who seek control yell in fear of it.

Oh, happy day.

First you get chronic illnesses...

...and then you get sick.

I am lucky in that the number of upper respiratory tract infections that I get have dropped from their extreme high in my teen years (anywhere from 3 to 5 per year with some of them lasting nearly a month) to merely 1 or 2 a year.  No matter how well I take care of myself, I still get the bugs... but taking good care of my diabetes allows me to track when something is trying to get a jumping off point and deal with it.  I may get a 3 day stint of relatively high readings and then my body will have gotten rid of the germ and I'm right as rain.

Still, once or twice a year I get something that isn't so easy to shake and I have one of those now.  I would well and truly not have survived my teen years without modern medicine circa post-1940.  One or two sulfa drugs I can stand but they never dealt with the infections I've gotten in the upper respiratory tract.  That is the ears, sinus, throat and, when things get really bad, the upper parts of the lungs although that hasn't happened since I was 16.

I can't really do much of anything safely with tools of any sort, although that doesn't mean I can't find things to do or things find their way to me.

My lady's laptop, a Dell Inspiron 1721 bought a few months after mine, decided that its problems with the battery system (that is it hasn't been recharging them properly) now needed to have a hard disc problem.  As I had been looking a bit deeper at the recharge problem and realized that it wasn't the batteries or the software, that meant that it was the hardware which is on the main board of the system.  Here is what I do when I see a major problem on the motherboard of a system that is over 5 years old: I get a replacement and build a new system.  I can't do that with a laptop and had to buy a replacement and decided on one of the HP Pavilion line of computers... refurbished, natch.

The Inspiron finally coughed up a major problem on the hard drive and it took half an hour just to boot enough of a system to see the drive errors that filled the error log.  Since I had already gotten the major apps installed on the HP, plus removed a bit of the built-in cruft (although I never got to removing all the games and other junk that came with it, but it sits quiescent, unused and, therefore, relatively safe) put in my favored AV (Avast!) and the Comodo free firewall, it was ready for use.  The first order of business was to take a look at the drive from the Inspiron on another computer, which would require that I get the actual hardware to do that, a USB to SATA/IDE drive connector.  Since I was doing that at NewEgg I also got a new drive for the system and scared up some freeware to copy a drive image if I could find it.  Those both arrived just as I was starting to get sick...fun, fun, fun!

A day after it arrived I put the old drive onto a system and did a basic scan, which didn't show much.  Then I took an image of the drive, and put an image of that on the new drive.  That drive wouldn't boot.  Thus I had to scare up a Live CD to see what was going on and that finally revealed that the drive wasn't being properly recognized by the system.  I put on an MBR and still, no dice.  Pull the new drive with image and then put a really nasty chkdsk /f on it.  An hour later... it was bad news for the old drive image.  The second chkdsk /f only took about 10 minutes revealing no other problems.  For S&G's I put it in the system and no boot, of course.  Two directories held massive amounts of recovered files, all unusable.  Thus it was time to pull out the old install DVD and get to work...

The new drive is functional and happy, the old image is mostly awful and unrecoverable, and yesterday I spent most of the day hunting down drivers, apps, and generally getting enough on the Inspiron to get it past the bootable stage and close to useful.  I slapped an AV on it and still have to put on another firewall, and then have to do a final clean-up, defrag and general getting it back into functional order and examine any NEW errors coming up.  Both of the Dell laptops are the same vintage and I'm guessing some minor thing like, oh, a cosmic ray toasted out part of the old hard drive on the machine I was working on.  A thorough low-level disc scan and sector map should figure that out and would make the difference between having a drive that had some minor but critical event and one that is wholly unreliable.  Since there are no cables I can easily get at involved, if its the cables then I'm to stripping the system apart and if I have to do that I will see if I can scare up a new motherboard from that old line of Inspirons.  Basically, by the time you put in the cost and effort to get an old machine up and running, you are at the cost of a low-end refurbished machine that will do more.

Until the economy truly tanks when we are seen as an unreliable spendthrift.

All bets are off, then.

I can do a lot more than just woodworking... a bit of firearms work... geology...

Actually it seems as if my interest in a lot of subjects has some dividend to it.

Another project I'm taking up... where do I get these ideas, anyways?... is an adsorption cooling system/refrigerator.

Basically most refrigerators around your house run on electricity and have a compressor involved.  Those running on propane or other fuels have a burner to heat up a liquid to its vapor point and then evaporating coils to get the vapor to phase change back to a liquid (thus cooling what it is in contact with) and then a final condensation set of coils to make sure the liquid gets back safe and sound to the heater.  You can make that into a solar system, and efficiencies vary.  These ones with minimal to no compressors are absorption systems.

What an adsorption system does, in contrast, is uses a medium to temporarily bind the vaporizing medium to the surface of it as a liquid.  That surface, when heated, breaks the weak surface attraction bonds and creates a vapor that then goes away from the region being heated.  Cooler areas will draw off heat to start and then, since the liquid is barely in a vapor state, the vapor condenses and removes heat from the area.  Since it is a phase change it takes more heat away than it puts in, thus chilling the area down.  This is a chiller, not a real refrigerator, but gets to much of the same ends.  The physics is pretty old, going back to Van der Walls force and the equations that govern this attraction between gases and liquids when they are in relation to surfaces.  It was not applied to chillers until... I think it was 2003 or 04 by Toshiba.  Amazing how 19th century physics can still be used today, isn't it?

Doing a bit of reading up on the subject the main elements for a solar chiller consist of a liquid that easily turns into vapor at a relatively low temp, an adsorption media that can attract a lot of molecules to its surface, a heating chamber with the materials in it, and a cooling area.  That is it, no pump.  Nature does the work both at the chiller area and, when the sun goes down, the liquid and vapor go back to the cooling region with the adsorption material due to the attractive force it has on its surface.

That's the theory, at least.

So what are the actual materials?

Methanol and activated carbon.

Methanol you can get from various sources, but you want it anhydrous.  Anyone doing biodiesel can point you to suppliers.

And activated carbon?  Used for filtering fish tanks.  Get it in the spherical, low dust version as you don't want carbon dust clogging the thing up over the years.  Some fine screening might be a good plus for the system.

I've ordered the basics for a rig to test it out:

- A length of 2" black pipe, 24" long with couplers and bushings to get the ends down to 1/2".

- Copper pipe in 1/4" for the chilling/condensing region

- Copper pipe in 3/8" for the heating to chilling region, thus giving the vapor a slightly easier path up to the 3/8" to 1/4" reducer

- Brass pipe fittings to mate all this up, I have teflon pipe tape

- Plastic boxes used for scrapbook making, which I will fill with brine and use bulkhead 1/4" connectors for, and this will be the chilling region... I may need to put a minor coating of something on the copper pipe, like shellac, say... dunno

Still to be made are a simple stand to hold the rig in place, and a couple of cardboard boxes so I can test the thing out.

For a simple test the black pipe gets mounted on black painted wood, perhaps in an open box configuration to help concentrate the heat, the copper runs up the sides to a platform with a brine filled box, and the 1/4" pipe has some gentle bends coming out of them (and some tighter ones inside the brine containers) to serve as condensers and a simple bend pipe trap to allow liquid to serve as a barrier to any back pressure coming from the heating area so the flow goes in one direction.

I am not expecting more than a few degrees difference between the box with brine and pipe and the box that will just have a brine container without pipe.  A couple of sunny and dry days will help this out no end once it is built.  If I can get any results then I will have the known factors for materials, sizing, volume and so on to allow for scaling up of things.  I'm figuring more heating chambers in a flat box with glazed glass over it, and a top and bottom vent to allow hot air to move slowly out of the system will be a final design goal.

That and an old refrigerator I can strip out and put in some better insulation to help things along.

In theory this all works, although size and scaling is unknown.

Getting to the practice part is the hard part... but even a small chilling box that keeps a constant temp for medications and other such items would be great to have.  Plus it is no maintenance once it is put together with a sturdy frame and always works so long as there is any sunshine at all.  Weatherizing it may take a bit, but that is another bridge to blow up when I come to it.

Just because I'm sick doesn't mean I'm out of it.

Operations just shift venues for awhile.

Some thoughts on computers

I've been into computers since the card era.  Not the smartcard, RF card or adapter card era, but that era which featured paper cards with data grids on them that were either punched or had a reader that would accept pencil filled in rectangles... that you filled in with a pencil.  My first computer interface was a paper-fed terminal.  My first computer language that I learned the basics of in 7th grade was APL.  Yes, I've been around to see a few things change, and gone are the days when the teacher said that you only got so many sheets of paper to do your work per month... and then my dad would bring in boxes of used terminal paper from his workplace as they only used the lined and colored back part of the sheets.  Amazingly at the end of the month I was the only one still using the terminals.

From time-sharing on a mainframe to my first almost PC to the first PC and then through the 386/485/Pentium eras all the way to today's quad core, LED display monsters with terabytes of drive space and gigabytes of memory, I have been around the block a bit on computers.  I am not, of necessity, retro on my computer use but it is purpose driven.  Purpose driven use concentrates on certain aspects of computing, such as document creation or gaming.  Back in the day it was document creation that drove the early days of computing for office use, and the gamers had to adjust to the advances that getting simple work done on a computer drove as it was the marketplace.  That changed just around 2000 and now the gamers and, increasingly, entertainment use of computers drives displays, memory and storage.  This means that usability has gotten much, much, much better from the paper terminal days and the systems are pretty 'user friendly' and have been for awhile.  Yet, because I have limited uses for computers, mostly in the document creation and research areas, that means that a stock, out of the box computer or Operating System comes with all of the fun, glitzy, entertainment stuff turned on.

Growing up through the era of the early PC and early Internet means that there are some credos and maxims that exist for computers that haven't changed much, although a few have changed greatly.  I'll go over a few of those as a personal look at computers, overall.

The first great maxim of computers from the mid-1980's to just a bit after 2000 has been: the computer you want always costs $2,500.  Add in an extra $500-$1,000 if it was a laptop.  For a few short years between 2001 and 2005 that dropped to $1,500 and it was in this era that the gamers finally took the lead at high end computing and office document generation dropped off the screen.  For general office work without glitzy presentations, you can get a computer at $300 that will do absolutely everything one of its mid-1990's predecessors did and much, much more.  The only thing that would be the same with this $300 Nettop or sub-notebook is the screen size, but the resolution today is much higher and the color rendition much, much better... do note you would be dropping from a 14" CRT monitor to a 10-12" LED display in that transition.

The second great maxim of computers that still holds (and may for about 5 more years) is a simple one.  The greatest resource of your computer is the screen real estate space and this dates to the Windows Icon Mouse Point concept of interface.  Your screen real estate (even in 3D) is limited and, therefore, it is the most precious commodity of a computer since it is the one that allows you to interface with it to know just what it is you are doing.  There have been a number of proposed solutions to this, but they all involve creative ways to compress or otherwise shift the use of the screen real estate while presenting more on it.  Getting a larger screen is the first and best way to increase computer functionality for a desktop machine, and while it is a pricey option, there is nothing as valuable as an extra 4 square inches of screen real estate space.  This is mandatory because of the 1960's WIMP paradigm and will not change until the interface space expands beyond the screen and nothing delivers information in such dense amounts as visual interfaces.

From Jerry Pournelle, the man doing stupid things with computers so you don't have to, comes a few key and essential concepts of computer troubleshooting.  The main one is: if it isn't the cables its the memory, and if it isn't the memory its the cables.  Most computer problems can be solved by taking out and reseating the memory and the cables of a system.  If you need to ensure good electrical contacts, use Stabilant 22A and an eyedropper bottle I got in the early '90s is still going strong today.  Unfortunately for sealed devices or those where your ability to actually get to anything beyond the memory is limited, like laptops, nettops, etc. you either have to have the basic confidence to strip something down and get it back into original condition or send it to a shop... or buy a new one.  When I was more actively building computers this set of advice meant that I could easily find the problems on a system and then ID it.  Early on I had problems with cables, and not just the low-end cheap stuff, either... and that was in the early '90s.  By the end of the '90s I had a few bad memory sticks that showed up during the era of the memory wars for pricing.  Since then has been relatively trouble-free computing, but the few problems I have had are right back at cables and memory.

Another Pournelle rule is that cruft builds up in the computer's disk system over time.  'Cruft' is left over parts of programs, bits that didn't uninstall or install properly, left over pointers in the registry that didn't go away properly, old drivers that interfere with new equipment, and the general slow scattering of data on a hard drive as bits and pieces of programs get fragmented due to poor disk maintenance on the part of the OS.  Every OS ever created has that problem, just that some have it to a lesser degree than others.  A system that slows down over time is due to cruft, and the cure is to either get a cleaning utility that will remove old parts of programs and clean up registry entries and then do a boot disk fragmentation on it, or get a back-up copy of your disk contents, wipe the disk and re-image the hard drive.  There are a plethora of things between those, including getting a new hard drive and ghosting the old one over to the new one with an optimization routine.  Depending on what you use your computer for cruft can start showing up in a few days (if you install and uninstall lots of software) or years.

Just after the beginning of the Internet era came ads.  Lots and lots of ads.  Mostly the 1-cent per click-through type that then dropped to tenths or hundredths or thousandths of a cent per click-through.  In the beginning there wasn't much to deal with, but as advertising for revenue increased the need for weeding out ads arose.  Why?  Simple: you own your computer, your screen and your screen real estate is the most precious part of your computer and if you don't want something on it then there must be a way to make it GO AWAY.  The Firefox browser has all sorts of nice add-ons for that, like AdBlock Pro and NoScript plus a few others to get rid of the tracking leeches and so forth that try to infest your browser. Users of MSIE have only recently gotten a semi-useful pop-up blocker that Firefox has had for some time, and unless you are using Avant as your MSIE shell, then you don't get much beyond that for blocking ads.  The alternative is to block the stuff before it gets to your browser via Privoxy, which has a plethora of geeky hand coding capabilities and a few free action scripts that you can modify to start getting rid of entire sub-domains of advertisements so you never, ever see them and they never, ever get to your hard drive.  For me Avant through Privoxy tends to be my main browser, but I use Firefox for a lot of work, and then things like Opera and Google Chrome to see if I can't get around user-hostile sites that don't like being weeded badly on the ad-side of things.  Basically, I don't see many ads... and when I do it is because I have temporarily gone to a direct connection or otherwise shut off the blocking capability so I can get to other content.  The moment I have the content (the wanted part) the rest goes back into place.

As I'm no longer in the gaming world of things (the rise of the FPS and the decline of my health basically leave me out of gaming now) I am not into the spinning, twirling and always there aspects of the modern OS that have started to become standard features.  Basically my computer screen real estate is devoted to simple document creation and, therefore, I don't want many features to clutter it up.  Thus there are no widgets or small apps infesting my screen real estate.  There are no transparencies enabled for the 'ooooo! neat!' of getting blurred material from around material I need to concentrate on.  I do not mind simple warnings from the status bar, and the clock there in simple text is useful.  The taskbar is small and permanent, I don't need it sliding around and out of the way or doing other fun things.  In fact I turn off anything that tries to fade in menus or otherwise do neat animations with them as when I want a menu I want it now, not in 3 seconds and when I get what I want it is to go away now, not in 3 seconds. 

As I can get around my hard drive pretty easily I have two directories I added after reading an article in PC Magazine back in the 1980's.  One is download and the other is TEMP.  When I download things I don't want an OS created place that you can't easily get to because they have decided to hide it on you, but one directly off the main drive (or data drive if I have one) called download.  Similarly if I need to expand or unzip material, or work on items they get a sub-directory in TEMP.  Over 95% of all my user generated material resides in TEMP.  And if I have to back up anything then that directory gets a priority as it is, by and large, data that I've created.  A final directory I have started to create is Programs Contained which are programs that do not get registered in the registry, run as standalones, and really should have a nice place to be contained so I can find them.  The first time I get one of those, I create Programs Contained to hold them.

I have witnessed people with their computing screen real estate taken up by documents.  Sometimes there are so many of them that it is hard to figure out where the important system level icons are.  There is a way to clean that up and it is by use of a desktop folder.  The best way is to store those documents in TEMP, of course, so they NEVER appear on the screen interface which needs to be clean so as to make it easy to use and not prone to click errors.  Simple desktop folders and saving to them would solve most of the problems, as would creating such folders and dragging and dropping the icons into them: problem solved.  But having a simple TEMP directory means you don't even have the folders to clutter your computing desktop.  And since so many documents seem to come from one or two applications, opening the application will be something that will have to be done and then finding the document you want from its place on the TEMP directory is an easier task... made easier by applications that keep a Most Recently Used list of the last 5 or 10 items you have most recently generated.  Mankind invented folders and filing cabinets for a reason, and even though I enjoy a physically messy desk, my computer desktop can be kept neat via a bit of forethought that I never have to think about again.

A good keyboard is hard to find.  I use an old clicky style that should survive through Armageddon and still work on my main machine.  For other machines... there are keyboards that aren't bad on laptops... and there are keyboards that aren't all that good, either.  If I could get a custom clicky keyboard for laptops, I would, but I can't so I'm stuck with what the designers have put on those types of machines.  I can use a mouse, touchpad, arrow keys, joystick or trackball.  I prefer a trackball since it doesn't require much motion nor actual desk space.  Mushpads...errr... touchpads aren't bad but, like some keyboards, they aren't all that good, either.  If you get the idea I have a very modern monitor, old fashioned keyboard and out of step pointing device for my main desktop computer... you are absolutely correct.

If you get the idea that I don't have much on my desktop, you are right.  In general there are a few items of necessity that end up on the desktop and they include: My Computer or just a C: drive shortcut, browser icons, one spreadsheet I use constantly, a writer application, one calculator that can do a few math shortcuts, an alarm app, and a folder of Utilities.  Bluetooth puts a couple of shortcuts I can't move on the desktop, as well, so they stay there by default.  I used to use the Quick Launch area of the task bar a bit, but have found that it is more a short-short menu of items I use a bit less often.   That's it.  The rest is a pleasant blue with high contrast to it and the smallest icons I can use for the screen resolution.  The status bar is the equivalent of the computer items of interest and letting me know that the network is connected, battery or UPS system is OK, and a very few other things to let me know things are working well.  There are a total of 12 items there and if I got rid of the Bluetooth I could move that down to 10 items.

What I know is sacrilege to many is that I also don't listen to music much any more so there are no music apps, no background music and the speaker is muted at all times.  Anything that must get through from the OS can go through speaker for beeps, very simple. 

I also don't watch much video and it is usually short items from blog presentations and if I want it I will click on it.  And if it auto-runs, well, the speaker is muted... its almost like there was a plan, there.  I do have the free software tools to do all sorts of video but they sit on my main computer mostly unused with just enough skill to do some transcoding if I need to.

I don't need a weather app as I have this thing called a 'window' that I can look outside and see what is happening.  If I want more weather related information I can go to a website.  I don't need an app to tell me it is daytime or raining, I have that capability built into this thing called a 'house'.

I also have zero RSS feeds coming in.  Yes, zero.  None.  No one is saying anything important enough to cause me to want to subscribe to them and I don't need an app on my desktop for it.

I am also on zero social media sites.  Yes, zero.  Since I have no wall to deliver messages on, I don't have that to worry about.  No Facebook, no LinkedIn and no Twitter.  If you see someone using a hashtag related to me, its not me.  I do have a cellphone, I turned it on and made one call that was free to make sure it works.  I turned it off after that.  I turn it on periodically to check its charge.  It will probably go in my medical bugout bag.

In no way am I a Luddite, and I love computers and the capability they have with them.  They are, as with any firearm or any of the woodworking equipment I own, useful tools.  A well maintained computer should last you five years before something critical goes on it.  Often it will last much longer, but the Mean Time Between Failure has you on the decreasing half of continued function that is now below 50%.  Just like you can still find Edison bulbs from the 1900's dimly glowing here and there, the majority of them didn't make it this far and out of the thousands, tens of thousands, perhaps million or two of them produced you now have a few left and their MTBF still holds.  Like any tool it is best when it is suited to your purpose and requirements and does what you want it to do... not what some marketer decided would be a neat thing to put on your desktop.

Robots for the future of farming

Major h/t to Instapundit linking to this Wired article on automated harvesting done by robots. This was also seen in an earlier Modern Marvels on the History Channel, which caused me to ask, at the time: If robotic 'beta versions' are being tested *now* then how long until production versions come around?

That centered on the multi-spectral sensors on gripping hands to judge fruit quality and send tactile feedback for picking of same. Since such sensors, which would include chemical sensors, do not rely on sunlight (looking more to IR and other non-visible spectra) and using chemical sensors to determine fruit quality and ripeness, one is soon in the position of picking delicate fruit (peaches, pears, apples, etc.) without the need for hand harvesting while keeping quality high. So to get an idea of jobs that humans will not need to do, by and large, lets start hitting that sector of the economy and find out just how much longer there will be jobs that *people* will need to do in the agricultural sector of the US.

To get started lets head over to the UK for a look at a back-breaking job if ever there was one: picking cauliflower. The Pera company points to its first pre-production model of an automated cauliflower harvester, that should be coming to market in the next few years.

Well, no one said these things would be a joy to look at! Still, this is a finicky vegetable that does require good handling and picking, and getting *that* into the automated realm is a huge plus to eliminating back breaking work in the world.

Not to be outdone, Giulio Reina's work at the University of Salento's Department of Innovative Engineering (on leave this year to Tokyo's Space Robotics Laboratory) points to a paper for robotic harvesting of raddicchio. While a pretty sturdy plant, it does need some specialized handling and the paper goes through the parameters of vision, examination and picking of it via an automated process. Who knows, the price of the stuff might come down a bit!

The University of Western Australia has been developing a sheep shearing robot, of all things!



And after seeing the Dirty Jobs episode of shaving alpaca, I can understand *why* someone would want to automate this for sheep... and if you can do this in a production line environment then the Shear Magic is the robot for your sheeply needs.



Yes, many jobs to go by the wayside in the sheep business with this, plus a reduced risk of getting things like anthrax. Apparently that is something that Australians would prefer that NO ONE gets from doing that job.

The TimesOnline (UK) reported in 2005 on the automated cow milking machine, so that one can have no fuss nor muss when having to get that task done day in and day out. There appear to be lots of jobs that folks in the UK and Australia just don't want to do!

Well, far be it from the US to lag behind, and Carnegie Mellon University has been at the forefront of automated harvesting of crops in an unattended fashion. Yes, set the harvester to go, day or night, and off it goes into the field to harvest the crops. To step just a second to another dirty job, how would you like something to help automate the fun job of paint removal?


M3500 Ultra Strip

Brought to you by the researchers at CMU! For those of you who don't think paint stripping is the best of all possible jobs on the planet.

CMU is famous for having been awarded a contract for the Unmanned Ground Combat Vehicle after the last DARPA Grand Challenge.



Apparently getting ammunition, supplies and such to soldiers on roads that are in or near hostile territory or frequented by IEDs is something that soldiers do, but would prefer to have robots do for them. And with this add-on package, called the UPI, the vehicle will perform even better against unknown parts of terrain or sudden problems.

But back to those *other* jobs Americans don't want to do!

How about lawn mowing for large areas? Yes the little home robot mowers are fine for the family yards, but, for things like golf courses... well... you need something a bit better. And that is what CMU is partnering with Toro on!



Ah, why should someone need to do *that* job, if a robot can do it for you? On the larger scale, for fields and orchards and such, there is the automated water sprayer system, also from CMU and partnering with John Deere.



Why should anyone have to just drive around and around hauling a spray system? Sounds very robotic so let a robot do it! One can get a full run-down of the CMU program here in their Projects vs Capabilities page.

The University of Kentucky with BAE systems has been working very hard at automating the tobacco harvest, as seen at their page on same. Their paper on mechanizing the harvest is here. Who would have guessed that Americans would prefer to have machines pick tobacco? The UK/BAE work is also looking into precision agriculture for forecasting, watering and soil analysis. Getting good and solid info on soil type, moisture content, plant nutrient needs and such is critical to doing robotics and better farm management, so that higher yields and lower utilization of pesticides and fertilizer allow for precision application *just* in the amounts needed and only where it is needed.

In 2001 Loyola College spun of its World Technology Evaluation Center into a corporation, WTEC, and it held a robotics conference in 2006 (full page here), looking across a broad array of uses of robotics across industries and environments. That conference looked at the wide array of types of robotics currently in use, in design and proposed, from such things as the Sony Aibo and Roomba to proposed environmental research vehicles to find the precursors to off-shore algal plumes that endanger fisheries. Yes, getting that data is, apparently, a job that is better suited to a robot than a scientist.

What all of this is leading to, of course, is RoboFarm. The first test of the automated farm is being done in Monterey County, to work with things like lettuce, strawberries and other farm produce that currently needs a lot of hard work to get picked. This is the first real integration of all the technology from soup to nuts, from GPS analyzed fields via automated systems to automated planting, watering, fertilizing, harvesting and packaging. The elimination of humans in the farm to make it more efficient. There will *always* be a place for human experience and the ability to integrate non-linear systems, of which farming is a prime one, but the removal of drudgery and labor intensive tasks that are limited to the fallible human for judgement and time on the job, means that better crops, more crops and cheaper crops will result due to lowered overhead and consumable expenditures via better crop management.

Within 10 years the first real hard changes will be towards eliminating humans completely from the mundane tasks of farming. And that will shift the areas of expertise to those areas that machines just don't do such a good job.

I am sure that we will become so lazy as to no longer wish to procreate.

Don't worry, there will be robots to help there, too.