Category: Ideas

My Super Amazing Ideas

Suddenly I See by KT Tunstall
[audio:http://karneyli.com/KTTunstall/09-Suddenly%20I%20See.mp3]

So occasionally I’ll come up with these ideas that I wish were implemented in real life. The only problem is that I’m too lazy to do it. So here we go, free ideas:

Cell phones should have away messages. Push a button, record a 10 second message (“I’m at the gym”), and that will be the default voicemail until you turn it off or change it again. I figured this was a pretty obvious idea, but after running it by a few people, I guess it isn’t as obvious as I had thought.

#2
This is an idea that I started thinking about more and more as debate over Net Neutrality heated up. It is a little out there, but stay with me. I would like to see someone build a browser network that would sit on top of the existing internet. That is to say, A browser that in addition to viewing normal webpages, could also view pages located on someone’s computer (another user of this browser). “Well,” you say, “that’s just stupid – you’re just adding a worthless layer to the internet! That is exactly what the internet is.” The thing that makes this idea unique is that this browser uses bittorrent’s protocol to serve up files and information. So instead of a website having limited bandwidth, a site’s bandwidth is only limited by it’s popularity. Of course, it would still need a server (or just a computer) somewhere to serve up the original files. But as more people view that site, they can take the burden off the original machine. So I suppose this is really more of a P2P app that serves webpages, instead of a browser. Although I want to keep the idea of a browser, because it should not feel any different than using a browser. If a standard website is called (from the normal internet) this should still be able to fetch it.
(I concede that this is not perfect, and there would be some problems with server-side scripts and/or databases. I have a few ideas about how to fix that, but I’ll leave it to a smarter person than I to solve)

I don’t think either of these ideas are original, and I’m sure someone out there has thought them before, but they are currently not implemented, and extremely feasible. Take these ideas and run. I don’t want credit, I just want to use them.

In Praise of Idleness

All hail BoingBoing for bringing these links to the light of day.

First, In Praise of Idleness, which is an excellent, if a bit lengthy, essay defending doing nothing. I may reread this article for the rest of the week so I can be sure to absorb everything he has said.

Second, a more recent article which looks into what people who hang around towns during work hours are actually doing. I really wish I could just camp out on a city block for 24 hours, and see how the world around me changes. I may do just that in the future. You can thank this article for that notion.

Lastly, an episode of This American Life which also explores the Secret Life of Daytime. The episode is an hour long, but all five acts are extremely interesting, and very worth listening to. If you find yourself short on time, just listen to act one, but do yourself a favor and make time for the rest of the show later.

While all of those links are in my linkroll, they were so incredibly cool and interesting that I thought they deserved special mention. It is rare that so many good things appear on the internet at once. So it shouldn’t surprise you that I have one more link to share.

Bonus, from Neatorama (which for those of you who don’t know, is like BoingBoing in its subject matter, but has a different, and in my opinion more appealing, way of presenting it). The Strangest Disaster of the 20th Century. This doesn’t have anything to do with the aforementioned links, but is a damn good read.

That last story is from one of Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader series, which are amazing. This story is proof. If you need more, I have several editions in my bathroom, which I’ll would gladly share. If you want them.

Water Fountain

People Watching by Keller Williams
[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/kw2007-04-14.flac16_avantoneCK-1cards/kw2007-04-14d1t02_64kb.mp3]

I’m sitting in the library tonight, and I’m writing my paper. I’m using a computer in a well traveled part of the library so there are plenty of distractions. I’ve got to keep my subconscious occupied, or else it’ll distract me even more than those folks who are around me.

Anyway, in this lounge, there are two water fountains, right next to each other. One has a button to press and turn it on, and the other is sensitive to a person moving in front of it. Neither works very well. The sensor on the second fountain is a little flaky, so even if you stand in front of it, it may not turn on. You can even put your hand right over the sensor, and the fountain won’t budge. The first fountain has a sticky button, so even though it will turn on, it is difficult to turn it off.

After someone’s attempt to get a drink from the sensor fountain failed, they moved on to the button fountain, because they were in such a rush. So they got their drink, and started to move away, and noticed that the water was still running even thought they were not pushing the button. They glanced back and gave it a second to understand this, and kept walking.

The button fountain stayed on for ten more minutes, and nearly one hundred people walked by it. Every single person noticed it, but no one tried to understand or fix it. Some made little jokes to their friends, “Its a ghost.” Other people actually went up to get a drink from the sensor fountain. (this just confuses me…the other fountain was already on! why not just drink from it?) Despite the fact that the sensor fountain was right next to the button fountain, they didn’t bother playing with the button fountain or try and turn it off. So for ten minutes this went on, while the three of us sitting in the lounge looked on in amusement. Finally, one of the other two people in this lounge decided to leave, and on their way out, turned off the fountain.

Continue reading “Water Fountain”

Personal Responsibility

Walletsworth by Umphrey’s McGee
[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/um2007-04-11.flac/UM2007-04-11Set2T03_64kb.mp3]

So its Spring Weekend again here at UConn, which always confuses me. I don’t understand it. At all. Thousands upon thousands of college students from all over arrive to talk, get drunk, and stand around. And maybe pass out.

It could be the whole being on your own, independent for the first time thing that fuels this, but it still confuses me. At its highest point, there were probably ten thousand students in a single location, most of them drunk, some of them high (why must spring weekend correspond with 4/20?). Many, many, many people were falling down or passing out. I suppose they still don’t know their limit, which is funny, because they do this every weekend, you think they would have figured it out by now. Despite that, the majority that were still standing were doing so…but nothing else. There is no real reason to go to this place, except to be in the company of others who are just as drunk. There isn’t any music, there isn’t any dancing, there isn’t much of anything except for standing around and drinking and smoking.
I just can’t understand it.

Anywise, there were lots of police and EMTs around to keep things in order and keep people from dying. And I’m usually all for that. This is one time where I can’t say I feel that way. I can’t help but think that all of this takes away from personal responsibility. It isn’t like the EMTs are saving people from a natural disaster, they’re saving them from something they did to themselves. There is something tremendously wrong with this.

I do understand that it isn’t meant to be enjoyable if you’re sober. Don’t bother correcting me on that. Maybe its something I would need to be drunk to understand. But that would bring me down a long road which leads very far away from this train of thought. I’ll touch on that someday though.

Also, a sidenote: as someone who doesn’t drink or smoke, I think events like this are an excellent example of why pot should be legal. The folks who were drunk were vomiting or pissing on themselves or in the woods. The folks who were high were not. Can someone explain to me why one is legal but not the other?

As I walked back to my dorm, I heard a helicopter in the sky above me, and thought that was strange, because usually helicopters don’t pass overhead at one in the morning. So I thought it was likely a news chopper, because it was very likely that the crowd could be seen from very high up. And when I look up, I see the flashing lights of LifeStar, the helicopter that airlifts people to hospitals because they’re so bad off that an ambulance would be too slow. That means someone drank enough so that they were nearly dead, or someone got into a drunken brawl, and was near dead. Either way, this was a situation they voluntarily put themselves in. I have zero pity. None.
However, as much as I’d like to say, “don’t bother keeping EMTs on call, let those students on the ground be an example to others” I know that college students aren’t smart enough to get the message.

How can the sight of ten thousand people having the time of their lives be so depressing?

Definition of Numbers

Big Mon by the String Cheese Incident
[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/sci2007-03-27.Schoeps/SCI2007-03-27.Schoeps_d2t01_64kb.mp3]

First off, happy Friday the 13th. Seems like an appropriate day to talk about the meaning of numbers. This is a subject so simple, it doesn’t seem to be worth the time thinking about. If I have one of something, and I get one more of something, I now have two of something. Easy, right?

What if someone viewed the concept of ‘one’ as something other than what is the generally accepted definiton? How would that change the way they went about their life?

After watching the first part of The Trap, whose argument is based almost entirely on the certainty of numbers, I got to thinking: We take numbers entirely for granted, even though they mean different things to different people. An easy example is the number 13, which is a famously unlucky number to some. This definition has nothing to do with its quantitative definition, and fundamentally changes the meaning of this number.

I don’t have anything but questions in the post, but as I spend more time thinking about it, I hope I’ll be able to post some answers.

The Trap

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

This is the first of three BBC programs called The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom.
I just finished watching this, and it is pretty good. Many observations and a lot of history and explaination of Game Theory, so if that interests you this is certainly worth your time. The program is an hour long, and if you don’t feel like staring at your screen for that long, pretend its a radio show, because there isn’t anything shown that you wouldn’t gain from listening. I’ll post more in the series as I get around to watching them.
That’s all for today, more musings tomorrow.

Creativity and Ignorance

The American Dream by Particle
[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/particle2006-02-10.akg460.flac16/particle2007-02-10set1t02_64kb.mp3]

In one of my lectures today, I was vaguely paying attention when either my professor or a fellow student said something which intrigued me. So I started down this thought process which vaguely makes sense, and keep going. The further I went, the more interesting and entertaining it was to think of these things. The only problem is, I had no where to write anything down, so I scribbled

creativity = ignance (not a spelling error)

on my hand. I’ll try to remember and convey these wonderful things I thought, but I make no gaurentees, and it is far more likely that I will finish this with a different conclusion than the one I reached earlier.
Moving on.

I think the idea started from my musings on jargon (which I also have scribbled on my hand). I was thinking about how certain groups use jargon to limit the information which others can gain from their thoughts, either written or spoken. I understand that the primary use of jargon is a straightforward one: an attempt to define a concept otherwise undefined in the English language. But the fact that those outside of a certain circle are ignorant of the meaning of these words, is always used for advantage.

A great contemporary example is computer jargon. These concepts are fairly simple to understand, but they’re hidden behind foreign words, which scare people who don’t know their meaning. They’re too intimidated to try and determine these things for themselves, so they turn to someone inside the circle, who understands the jargon. This is why hiring a guy to fix your computer costs so damn much. He has information which you don’t possess, and he knows it. He also knows that you have no alternative. I’m the computer guy, by the way, so I know all about exploiting people’s ignorance on the topic. It is a lot of fun, and profitable, but in the end I am gaining from what I withhold from people. I could answer questions or fix problems and explain what went wrong and how they can prevent it in plain english, but then why would I been needed?

So these were my musings on ignoranceand jargon and the like when something was said in class which made me connect ignorance and creativity. At first, I was thinking about how something otherwise ignorant, when seen in a certain light could be seen as creative. I thought about how creative people may put themselves in a childlike amazement of the world around them in order to create things. I thought about how their wonder and awe transfered to the observer through their work, and the observer would be reminded of their own childlike wonder and awe.

Then I realized that it wasn’t the creator who was ignorant, it was the observer. The creator had done something to make the observer think in a way they hadn’t expected to. This defience of expectations is what makes something creative, or not. So the observer isn’t just reminded of their own childlike wonder and awe, they actually are awed.

Just a bit more food for thought.