On Demand Street Lights

Have you ever flown over a city at night and seen the road lined with streetlights snaking across the landscape. To some people, the sight is beautiful. To others it is both light pollution and a colossal waste of energy.

My idea for the future involves on-demand street lights. With advances in LED (light-emitting diode) lighting, the street lamps could glow with a minimal amount of light to provide a bit of safety, and when a car or a pedestrian approaches, it turns itself on, for only as long as the car or pedestrian needs it. Then it goes back into its quiescent state.

This makes a lot more sense than burning kilowatts and generating photons for no one to see. Who do we think we are -- the universe? The only trouble is that we don't have the vast amounts of energy that the universe has at its disposal. We do need street lamps to light up our life, but only while life is under them.

Digital Data DNA

We are generating data at an incredible rate. With the help of Moore's Law which states that the amount of transistors (hence) memory on a chip doubling every two years, we now take pictures, record and twitter every moment of our lives. All of this digital data has to be stored. Up until now it hasn't been a problem.

However, the most stuff that we as humans are generating is data and the curve is not linear but exponential. This means that the amount of yearly data is not a straight line but a power curve. If we generate 2 exabytes a year, then the next year it is 4 and the next year is 16 exabytes. We must find new ways to manage this data.

Mother Nature has given us a template in DNA. DNA contains enough encoded information to make a human being, and it is tiny and found in every cell. We must find a way to encode data in a manner similar to the way DNA encodes information. Right now, data is a single dimension. If we can dimensionalize data, we can store a lot more data in a much smaller space. It will be much more efficient than the data compression that we do now.

So all of you inventors out there, get your thinking caps on. If you find a way to make Digital Data DNA, you will be richer than Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Carlos Slim and the top 5 worlds richest billionaires all combined.

Future of People

When the internet first appeared, I was naive enough to think that if everyone had an internet connection, and it would engender dialog and we would be on the way to peace in this brave new world.

I was wrong. The internet is being used as a weapon by groups of people who want to obliterate other groups of people. The ethic-less Chinese are using it to try and gain world dominance. The Muslim extremists use it to communicate messages to synchronize their mayhem and destruction in the West. The Tea Baggers use it to spread their right-wing intolerance As a matter of fact, even Colonel Sanders and KFC are coming out with a Tea Party Bucket. It consists entirely of right wings and a**holes.

With the ninth anniversary of September 11th come and gone over the weekend, I was struck with several cogent thoughts about the future of people. We will always have the hierarchy of people. The bottom of the hierarchy is populated with most of the people who will never escape the lower socio-economic, cultural and intellectual level. The people least qualified to have children have the most. It is very Darwinian. The best of Mother Natures vast genetic experiments, like the cream, rises out of the morass to the top.

As long as there is a large pool of people at the bottom (and many of them have votes), then politicians will stoop to the lowest common denominator to harvest those votes. And as one American commentator put it, to get rid of hate in the world, we have to shoot all the grandmothers. Children learn hate on their grandmothers knee. So we will always have hate.

The Arabs will hate the Jews. The Muslims will hate the Christians. The right wing Republicans will hate their black president, gays, immigrants, Hispanics, and anyone not like them. Everyone will hate New Jersey.

The only way to break this mold is through the scary principle of eugenics. People will have to have a licence to have babies. They will be genetically matched and screened to eliminate genetically passed diseases, including stupidity.

The two questions that jump out are (1) Do we want this kind of world and (2) will it ever happen? I believe that the answer to both is "No". It would be like herding cats. The people that disagreed with it, would bear arms against those who wanted such a system. There would be more murder and mayhem then we have now.

I guess that the only hope for peace on earth, is the large asteroid that is heading directly for Earth. When it impacts, after the dust settles, there will be peace for another 65 million years.

Personal Satellites

In the future, what do you get a millionaire who has everything -- easy, his own personal satellite. Why would someone want their own personal satellite? For one thing, it has the bandwidth to enable a person to live in two places anywhere on the planet.

If one has a house in Europe totally wired with cameras and screens, and another one in North America, with a 24 hour per day video and audio uplink, it would be like having that person in the house, even though he is a continent away.

There are other uses. One has the bandwidth to work at home and do things like trade stock or other occupations where one's presence is normally required.

The owners of these fancy birds in the sky will teach their children this new nursery rhyme:

Star light, star bright

First star I see tonight

I wish I may, I wish I might.

I want to see my satellite.

Self-Sanitizing Underwear

It won't be long now until you start to see underwear with self-sanitizing strips. Gone will be the days of musty smells emanating from the groin area after exercise or just during a hot day. Strips of sanitizing and deodorizing agents will be sewn into the undershorts that will keep them fresh and clean all day.

Sold under the trade name of Ever-Fresh, or Jockey Juice, or Wundie Undie, these things will smell fresh as a rose under any circumstances.

This is an item that doesn't require the development of any new technology, so we are waiting for an enterprising entrepreneur to rush this one to the patent office.

The best benefit to society of these new jockeys, is that you won't have to enjoy the farts of people in close proximity to you.

Nanotechnology Teeth Hygiene

Nanotechnology is the science of small stuff. It encompasses small machines, robots and even small particles. Right now, nano particles are put into cosmetics, and they change colour depending on what wavelengths of light hit them. Nano particles are used in many industrial applications as well.

We will see nanotechnology move into tooth care. Instead of brushing, we will insert an appliance into our mouth and the nano machines and cleaning nano particles take over and they will be much more efficient than regular toothbrushes. Cavities will no longer exist.

With a toothbrush of the future based on nanotechnology, there will be no excuse for the British to have bad teeth.

Multi-functional Plants

Plants are an integral part of living for human beings. They provide food, raw materials, shade and even aesthetics -- with flowers decorating a home or playing a part in a wedding or a funeral.

With the ease of genetically modified plants, we will begin to see plants created that are multi-functional. For example, when the DNA is infused with the glow-in-the-dark DNA from some ocean creatures, your hallway plant will be a night light. And you will be able to throw out your Glade Plug-ins to keep your air fresh. A plant that is engineered to do so, will not require electricity -- just light and a bit of watering occasionally.

I predict that some plants with wide tropical leaves will be engineered to absorb sound in places like shopping malls and public areas. Plants will be enhanced to filter out and clean air. They already provide oxygen and eat carbon dioxide.

Our future will incorporate plants into our bio-system which will perform better than their mechanical or electrical counterparts. So while we await these miracle plants, lettuce rest -- I feel beet.

Got Milk -- Cowless Milk?

The chief driving factor of progress is corporate profits. Of these days, someone will figure out that the lactose intolerant are a huge niche market segment, and we will have the invention of artificial milk.

Artificial or cowless milk will have a much larger consumer base than the lactose intolerant. Folks who follow the organic way, can finally buy milk where it has no chemicals, pesticides, growth hormones, drugs or any other additives in it. In essence, artificial milk will be as pure as mother's milk, provided that the mother is not a crack addict or taking any kind of drugs at all.

The other advantages of cowless milk is that it is not handled anywhere near manure so it cannot be contaminated with e coli. It will not spoil on the way to the dairy from the farm, and it will not take as much energy to produce. You will not need the tractors to make the hay and corn to feed the cows. In addition, there will be less greenhouse gases from the artificial process.

The big question is, will it taste the same? Does the milk process from animals actually contribute to the taste that we all know and love along with dipped Oreo cookies? If not, then no one is going to cry over this spilled milk.

www.GrowMeAKidney.Com

In a previous entry on growing meat in a lab, I mentioned the concept of tissue culture in an artificial medium. Today' concept takes it just a little further. In the future, instead of relying on people who kick the bucket for transplantable organs, we can grow one artificially in a chamber, just for the person who needs it. You don't need to go through the fuss and bother of waiting for someone to die, or suffering the trauma of knowing that someone else's guts are inside of you.

Scientists have already grown an artificial ear on a mouse. However, we will develop the protocols to grow complex organs like a kidney, in a laboratory chamber, totally without the mouse.

One of the benefits is that the starter tissue could come from the person needing the organ. Thus once the organ was grown, there would be no chance of rejection (except when the person dates).

Judging by the spam that I get, I'm willing to bet that the first artificial organ grown for transplant, will be the male sex organ. Some men with esteem issues will pay anything for a large one.

Eliminating Man Boobs

Now that Viagra has taken care of the first major problem that a man faces when aging, the second one will become a goldmine for whoever solves it with pharmaceuticals. I am talking about the scourge of man boobs.

In the Seinfeld show, Cosmo Kraemer invents a bra for men that he calls the bro. This invention would be obviated by a new spray invention that shrinks man boobs. As men age and put on weight, they start to get breasts and unless you are prepared to spend every other waking hour in the gym, they are difficult to get rid of. The answer is a spray just like Oil of Olay.

Women have their wrinkle cream. We men will have our man boob spray. There is only one caution. If you carry it on your person in public, you may be charged with assault with a deadly weapon. After all, this is a boob eliminator and there are a lot of boobs out there.

The Modern Shoe

The modern shoe really isn't modern. Sure we have Air Jordan, and the latest Nike Shoe incarnations made with space age material and such. We also have the weight loss shoes, and a different shoe for every sport. But when you come to think of it, the shoe in its overall form hasn't changed that much.

The shoemakers of old took a pencil and a piece of paper, traced your foot, and made an enclosure for it. This enclosure has been enhanced with wheels, springs, air bags, flashing lights, rockers and what not, but mechanical function has not changed.

There are twenty muscles and twenty-eight bones in the human foot. The shoe of the future will be designed to react according with the entire set. There will be micro-machines embedded to relieve stress on the downstep, and recover energy on the upstep. The recovered energy could power the microprocessors inside the shoe running the show. In other words, the shoe will become as dynamic as the foot inside of it. Gone are the days when unyielding shoes will cause blisters.

There is only one problem that will arise with the modern shoe. Muslim extremist will find it easier to wire bombs into them, or make them better weapons for throwing at American presidents. Perhaps they will be made to go in planes in bare feet. It will go with their Stone Age views on religion.

The Smart Diaper

Last night I was having a discussion with a friend about whether we would choose to become a parent again. Parenting is hard work and it never ends. It goes on for years. Of one thing that you can be certain, is that technology will help.

One of the things that I foresee, is the smart diaper or diagnostic diaper. We have at-home diagnostics in many things. Women pee on a stick to see if the rabbit dies and they are pregnant. Diabetics test their own blood at home. It makes sense for a company like Pampers to gain the market edge by creating a diagnostic diaper.

The smart diaper would analyse the things that it has readily available. These would be pee, poop and temperature. Not only would the diaper notify you when it needs changing, it will also give you a running analysis of the contents of the diaper.

The biggest invention in diaper technology that I am waiting for, is an odor neutralizer. Now that would be a huge boon to mankind.

Grow Your Own Meat -- Lab Meat

Back in the 1980's a popular kitchen appliance was a home yogurt maker. They were blue plastic things with an array of cups that you plugged into the wall and it rotted the milk to make yogurt. Your can buy these machines used at yard sales for a dollar or less.

In our brave new future, the home yogurt maker will be replaced with the home meat maker. That's right. We will have meat grown in a laboratory environment. Lab meat. It will save all the muss and fuss of having a real animal with its pooping, mooing, smells and unsanitary space. Instead of filet mignon, we will have filet au flask. Instead of pig-in-a-poke, we will have pig-in-a-petri dish.

Growing meat in a lab is especially efficient. You don't have to waste energy and food to grow the bits that we can't use like hooves and udders and horns and lips and such. We get the prime cuts from flask to grill.

PETA, the animal activists have offered a $1,000,000 dollar reward to the first person that comes us with a viable process to grow meat in the lab. I think that I will raid the kitchen for equipment and go out and try to find a cow somewhere.

Get Water

We as humans are composed mostly of water and we need it to survive. More importantly, we need it to live. We wash our hair, brush our teeth, cook our noodles, boil our cabbage and do many many things with water without even thinking about it. That is about to change.

Already a good part of the world faces water issues. Here in the tropics, water on this island comes from a hellishly expensive reverse osmosis system that uses a lot of energy, or it is barged in from natural lenses of fresh water from another island. This is unsustainable, especially with the population growth of people migrating to the capital city to look for jobs and improve their way of life.

So how are we going to resolve this water issue? Simple. Using technology. The way that the astronauts do. The only answer is to recycle water.

I would imagine that each house would have a water recycler just like a furnace. All of the drains lead to the recycler. When you boil your noodles, and dump the water down to the recycler, it comes back pure and clean without the salt. When you have a pee, it comes out a pure drinking water. The astronauts now drink the water from their pee after it has been purified.

It will even go further than that. There will be machines to take the humidity out of the air and turn it into drinking water. Water will be caught and recycled from clothes dryers. Water will become so valuable, that it will be worthwhile to process it from wherever we find it. This will be good news for the Scotsman who will go green by drinking his Scotch straight, instead of adding water to it.

Genetically Modified Pets

As we humans, and particularly scientists get more comfortable with this DNA thing and genetically modifying plants, our attention will turn to the family pet. After all, it isn't such a big ethical disaster if a DNA experiment turns out horribly wrong whilst working on the family cat.

Take the family cat. It needs vast improvement. It now longer needs to hunt, so the claws can go. I'm willing to bet that a scratchless cat is worth a few million to its inventor. Then you turn your attention to flea resistance. Fleas bite and eat the cat's blood. The future cat would have genetically modified bloody that is stinky to fleas and they would find it repulsive. The cat would no longer have fleas. Just have lots of Febreeze around if the cat cuts itself, but it is a small price to pay to get rid of pestilence.

The next step is to prevent shedding. Cat hairs will be genetically modified to wither and crumble into dust from the top down. Instead of cat hair clinging to everything, a quick pass with the Swiffer gets the floor clean.

And finally, we will cure the "aloofness" gene in cats and transplant the dog "friendly" gene. The cat will be waiting at the door, ready to greet you as you come home from work. It will jump up on you, but it won't scratch or shed. It will be the perfect pet. It will supplant the dog as man's best friend. That would be a dog-gone shame.

The New Music -- Non Auditory

I had arrived in Nassau last night and after a long day of airports, I turned on the TV to watch the Discovery Channel. A professor from Laurentian University was demonstrating temporal lobe brain stimulation on one of his students. His contention was that we have a "God" spot in our brain. This area of our brain produces the numinous feelings of mysticism when we enter a church or pray. He wanted to demonstrate that it was a local brain effect by using an electromagnet taped to a helmet. This helmet was put onto the test subject in a darkened room. The test subject was wired to an EEG to monitor her brainwaves.

When the electromagnetic brain stimulation was started the girl started seeing images and entities and feeling numinous. This got me to thinking. In our future, our music and iPods have the potential of being the non-auditory kind. In other words, music of the future won't enter our brains through our ears, but rather directly into our brains by stimulating the right part with electro-magnetism.

This stimulation could be of two kinds. The first would be stimulation of memory to re-play songs that we have already heard. This would be like have a personal iPod with no actual musical storage equipment other than your brain.

The second kind of "new" music would be to stimulate the brain to produce pleasant harmonious music within itself, of the kind that you like. It would be a brain synthesizer and a heck of a new musical instruments.

I took violin lessons for five years, and judging by the amount of practice, I think if my violin music cortex were stimulated, you might get about 5 minutes worth of music.

The Translator Couch

When I traveled all through Siberia and Russia in 1992, I managed to pick up a novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatski. It was sort of a science fiction book called "Monday Begins on Saturday". It was an amazing piece of literature.

In the novel, the characters create all sorts of innovative things at a scientific institute in the old Soviet Union. One of their inventions was a translator couch. Two people who spoke different languages could sit on the couch and have a conversation could understand each other. The primary character of the story fell asleep on the couch, and he heard hundreds of voices that awoke him when the couch began to translate his dreams into almost every known language.

The book was written close to thirty years ago, and when I read it, it seemed like it was a droll piece of humour. I was wrong. The Strugatski brothers (who are twins and both astrophysicists) were predicting the future. Our furniture in the future will not be there just to support our bodies and stuff to keep them off the floor. It will be multi-functional, multi-purpose and intelligent furniture.

The furniture will recognize who is sitting in the chair, by weight and bio-metrics, and depending on the time and day of the week, will turn on the entertainment, or dim the lights or whatever. The thing to watch for, is when the wife programs the Lazy Boy to kick the husband out of it to do chores. That is when the future won't be fun any more.

Floor Coverings Coming

You won't recognize conventional floors of the future. We are already starting to get a glimpse of what can be done. The first intimation of the future of flooring came in the movie Saturday Night Fever, where John Travolta strutted his stuff on a dynamic disco floor that was out of this world. Lights flashed and patterns changed on the floor and we were all dazzled.

Take a look at the left hide side of the above picture. It is of the carpeting of a ballroom floor in a hotel in Texas. The carpet is patterned to create an optical illusion to make it look like there are waves in the floor. Apparently, it is quite the sensation to dance on.

The changes to flooring will be dramatic. With the touch a button, patterns will change, colour will change, and even texture will change. It will go from a soft carpet to a surface on which you can putt a golf ball. You can even program it, so that if you bring a woman to your apartment for a dinner date, the floor gets softer as the evening progresses.

The flooring of the future will also change our behaviour. For example if you dial in a shag rug, when you are lying drunk on the floor, you can hold on to something. You got to marvel at modern progress.

Piezo Electricity -- Power From the Roads

The first time that I heard of piezoelectricity was when my brother did a science project on it many years ago. Piezoelectricity converts mechanical action like pressure into electricity. If you have ever used a built in sparker to light a gas barbecue, you have used piezoelectricity.

Essentially, a piezoelectric transducer is made by cementing thin sheets of crystal like quartz between thin metal plates. The metal plates are hooked up to electrodes to capture the electricity given off when the transducer is subjected to any kind of mechanical force or stress. These transducers were used in sonar, in microphones and in all sorts of applications including ultrasound.

They also could be used to generate electricity on our roadways. With the amount of heavy trucks rolling down the highway, piezoelectric transducers could be embedded in the pavement surfaces and every passing vehicle would generate electricity by it weight rolling over the transducers. This is an ideas whose time has come.

Young people get a real charge out of driving. It's an electric feeling. We should be collecting and monetizing that electricity.

Rugby Metrics -- The Time Has Come -- The Future of Rugby

It's not often that I post about my own putative contributions to futurism, and my endeavours, but this time I will. This is about creating new knowledge about the sport of rugby using advanced technology and mathematics.

Moneyball. It all began when Michael Lewis, a statistics nerd and financial journalist, met up with Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A’s baseball club, and Bill James, the team statistician. Beane had been given the task of turning the club around and making it competitive. He was disadvantaged in many ways but his primary disadvantage was a lack of money. In professional sports, money fuels the competitiveness of a team by providing the

means to bid and compete for top players coming into the game or for those coming up for free agency. Beane ran a team with total salaries of approximately $40 million while teams like the New York Yankees spent $125 million per annum on salaries alone. Unable to compete in such a disadvantaged revenue situation, Beane, with the help of Lewis and James, decided to try another approach.

The trio postulated that the collective wisdom of game insiders (including players, managers, coaches, scouts, and the front office) was subjective and often flawed. This body of information had been used to develop baseball statistics and the trio considered the content of the statistics and the methodology of determining them to be relics of a 19th century view of the game. So, Lewis, Beane, and James decided to radically dispense with subjectivity in favour

of objectivity, and in doing so, spawned the concept of Sabermetrics.

Sabermetrics is now a feature of every professional team in North America. Sabermetrics involves taking all of the statistics in the sport and using data mining and statistical analysis, one determines the exact factors in a winning team.

For example, conventional wisdom said that a young pitcher with a blistering fastball was the key to winning baseball games. As it turns out, any pitcher with a higher than average number of ground-outs is worth more than a 100 mph fastball pitcher who throws a lot of home runs.

Advanced statistical analysis and information theory allows one to determine what is really a significant statistic for success. It is about time that this happened for the sport of rugby, and I am the person doing it.

I was in discussion with one of the owners of a premiership rugby team in the UK, and both of us agreed that the sport of rugby was ready to "tip" worldwide. We used the word tip in the sense of Malcolm Gladwell's "Tipping Point" where rugby would become the rage, in vogue and very popular. Rugby metrics will contribute to that tipping point. That and the fact that in civilised society, the last venue for warfare and blood and guts, is on the rugby field.