Here’s an idea if you want to inspire the generation that voted for you:
Let’s go to Mars.
Category: Science
Don’t forget
We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
Wireless Internet everywhere, not
Another reason why the web fan babies are not getting it is the current price that the vast majority of people today pay for mobile Internet. This is the story of a Belgian who went on vacation for three days in Spain. He bought himself a mobile data formula and I guess he hoped that it wouldn’t be very expensive.
A few weeks after he came home he received an invoice of 18888 euros. The price per megabyte was 10 euros.
This poor guy was lucky because Proximus (the phone network company) settled the invoice for 1400 euros. For 1400 euros it would still have been cheaper to take a plane to Belgium, check your mail at home, and take a plane back to Spain. For 18888 euros … I don’t think it’s possible to schedule as much flights in three days as you could buy with 18888 euros.
I remember I told a few people at GUADEC that it would be cheaper for me to fly home every day to check my mail, than it would be to do this over GPRS in Istanbul. This story seems to verify that.
These are the prices for mobile Internet access in 2008, the year when all the web 2.0 babies started crying that all of the mobile applications should become AJAX websites.
Again the point that I’m trying to make is that instead of completely changing the strategy of products like GNOME Mobile towards webberty web stuff, maybe intelligent people should consider that maybe, just maybe, we just don’t have the wireless connections for that yet. In reality, you see, we don’t have that at all at this moment.
I’m not convinced that within the next decade we will have anything that comes close to reliable wireless Internet connections at the same coverage as GSM. Which still wouldn’t be sufficient. I mean, the connectivity of GSM is really bad if you take into account how often you don’t have a good signal.
The reason is simple: the economic model of a free wireless Internet for everybody everywhere on the entire planet, is probably just not profitable. The research to achieve this without needing a few thousand nuclear power plants and without having to hire thousands of people for maintenance of the wireless routers worldwide, is just not happening.
The political power that you’d get out of having control over this giant wireless network can much more easy be achieved by simply owning all news papers, television networks, schools, etc. What that means is that politicians wont do it either.
Mint crystals in Istanbul
I finally found what I was looking for at the Istanbul Spice Bazaar (Misir Çarsisi): mint crystals.
For the Nokians and other Finnish sauna freaks reading this, this is the stuff that you want to mix with a little bit of water (else your sauna is way to dry, of course) and then put the mixture on the hot stones. Crystalised mint is a very pure form of mint. Mint in a sauna gives a very cold and cool feeling on your body. Meanwhile your sauna is obviously very hot. You basically think that it’s cold, yet it’s very hot.
Well, with crystlized mint you maximize this. Eucalyptus is nothing compared to mint crystals. Chinese mint comes close, though. But not quite.
The aftermath is that you probably don’t want to jump in ice water after your sauna anymore. Not before adapting to normal temperatures for ten minutes. You wouldn’t be the first who passes out. I mean, your body is in a very confused state: it behaves as if it’s cold, but it sweats as if it’s very hot. The one thing you don’t want to do is to make it very cold suddenly. Unless you are a big dangerous looking Finnish dude, maybe.
I mean, I’m not underestimating the Finnish sauna people. I’ve been to a public one in Helsinki. Woah.
Anyway. The store can send the crystals to your home with DHL, the owner told me.
If any of the Nokians or other Finnish sauna pussies want to know what a real sauna experience is, you can mail them at ucuzcular@gmail.com, and try it.
God save the Queen
People living somewhere on the British Islands.
This is a device that produces static electricity
You plug a power plug in a power socket
I have marked on this image of the power plug where the static electricity gets delivered into the power socket
Let me clarify my point:
- Washing machines produce static electricity
- Walls and sockets don’t produce static electricity
Let me add another point that I’m trying to make here
- The dangerous looking pin in European sockets is not dangerous at all
Also note that the Germans and the Dutch use sockets that don’t have the dangerous looking pin. Both types of sockets and both types of plugs are compatible with each other. European continental standardisation is very useful sometimes.
Let’s take a look at the European plug and the location where it delivers the static electricity to the wall socket.
Let’s now compare that with an actual photo of a British Island’s (Irish guys use it too) plug.
My adult male finger (I have very thick fingers compared to Tinne’s skinny fingers and Tinne has thick fingers compared to a small child’s fingers) fitted in the space. It was possible for me to fully touch the static electricity pin. The device was powered on so the two pins for delivering the actual electricity where completely connected.
Now let’s see some actual photos of the European plug in action. Decide for yourself.
The solution is to convert those crazy English, Irish, Northern Irish, Scotts and Welshman (boy, I do hope I didn’t forget anybody) to the European system :-)
Mindstorm … s
You buy a bunch of Lego Mindstorms bricks and you start building a robot to remotely control your mobile devices.
Well, that’s the official explanation.
The actual explanation is that this is what happens when you are 26 years of age, your girlfriend tells you you are almost 30 and that when you are 30 it’s the end of your youth (although, people of that age usually tell me this ain’t true), you are a nerd of the type software developer (and quite addicted to this too), you have your own business and therefore your accountant asks to make some expenses (like .. buying a Mindstorms robot! No?).
I acknowledge it’s probably just an early midlife crisis. Boys want to make things, fiddle with stuff, put things together. Whereas girls, girls just wanna have fun. I’m totally guilty of being a boy. I know. (although, I’m sure a lot of girls enjoy making things too — before I get killed by a group of feminists –).
Now that the model itself is finished, I clearly see what I am becoming: an old lonely dude who plays with trains, electricity stuff and mostly breaks things just to put them back together. I’ll probably die getting electrocuted while trying to take apart a by that time old holographic 3D gesture recognizing display, as I’m trying to figure out whether some evil corporation is spying on its customers by using such electronic devices.
But, isn’t that cute? No? I mean, Tinne, seriously, now I must be ‘like’ a younger dude, no? I have been playing with toys for kids aged 11 to 16 (that’s what the Lego box’s age indicator says, so it must be true). Anyway, the only way that it can get worse now, is if I’ll start writing software for this Lego model. I’ll have a camera view on my screen where I can mouse-over so that the robot will follow my mouse pointer. With a library like GStreamer I can let that camera image go efficiently over a distance. Sending some commands over a socket ain’t very hard.
About the bot itself: it has three axis. One (the X one) uses normal wheels, two others (Y and Z) are built on top of the chassis. All axis are controlled by Mindstorms motors. The Mindstorms computer thing is integrated in the model, there’s a touch sensor on one of the axis (the Z one). I don’t yet have this software, that’s the next thing I’ll (try to) finish. I’ve spend ~ 450 euros on this thing (the normal Mindstorms package didn’t have enough bricks, but the programmable thing, the sensors and the motors are ~ 300 euros).
But hey, 450 euros for something that you could give to a little fellow as soon as you are done playing with it? That’s not much for multi functional and multi age toys! I mean, if I get bored of this thing, I can make another robot with it. If you have a son (or a technical minded daughter), you can let him (or her) play with the Lego bricks while watching his (her) brains grow! You can’t convince me that today’s computer games are better for training a kid’s brain than Lego.
After the kid is finished building the bot, you can make the software for it. Hah! Perfect father – son (or daughter) relationship. You actually help him make his toys, and you enjoy doing that! And … he’ll get interested in software development, join one of the many free software communities, he’ll find a job in IT as programmer, etc etc.
Lego rocks!
In support for Kathy Sierra
Although Kathy‘s message is to be passionate and although I can (try to) imagine how ill people like psychopaths can easily translate her call for being passionate into an act of making what they see as a funny picture, but what normal people see as a death threat: I don’t believe this was Kathy’s intention and hers isn’t to be blamed for this.
Rather the fact that biology needs discrepancies to detect faulty designs within our genes. Differently put, the people who did these dead threats are simply tryouts or rather errors of nature. They are an error because it’s in the interest of our society to neither encourage nor have asocials.
A lot human-like societies (like baboons) would have responded to this asocial by things like not offering the specimen access to females. So, the nature of other species shows that the best technique is to ignore these people, to try to make sure that they don’t have access to females (or males, if the guilty are females) and by forcing them out of the group, etc etc. Right? Let us let nature do its work: ignore them, deny them access to females and let their erroneous genes get extinct.
Kathy’s attempt of teaching us, software developers & co., about how to be passionate people and all that, has been in my opinion exceptionally good. I hope Kathy understands that by stopping her work on this, she would let them win the battle. I’m sure that this is just a pause for Kathy though.
In our society we need more passionate people Kathy. Through your work you created a lot such people. We need passionate people to be successful. You have been teaching us, passionates, how to be successful.
It was your book on design patterns too that made me want to do the project that I am doing right now. Your work is precious and important.
Kathy, I hope you won’t stop. But do pause if that is what you need.
The universe spontaneously …
Stephen Hawking tells us the universe spontaneously popped into existence from nothing. I don’t believe this. I believe the universe is. Full stop. It’s us, beings, who are limited by time.
Clearly, things do happen in that universe. Maybe a big bang did happen? I even believe that if it isn’t limited by time, the same things will have happened and will keep happening over and over again. Maybe is time an event like any other within that model?
The thing that really bugs me is the why; but I stopped questioning myself “what started it”. I think it never started, I think it is. To have a moment of starting, you need to be limited by time. Like how human beings, animals, planets and stars are limited by time.
Religious people will probably now think: it’s God who started all this. To which I would answer something about turtles all the way down (it doesn’t answer the question, it just moves it).