Tuesday, April 19, 2016

Spoiler Mode for Youtube

There should be a way for smart content, video, blog posts etc..., so that you can live as spoiler free a life as possible, ideally content with spoilers could be flagged for a given subject matter, and users could choose to select which spoilers they would like to avoid.  Worried about how the Real Housewives keeps getting spoiled, well now you won't have to worry about your internet stumbling leading to spoilers.  Until your DVR is caught up, you won't see anything about later episodes.  Ideally this platform would integrate your viewing platforms, allowing for maximum convenience on avoiding spoilers.

Monday, April 11, 2016

The Next Generation of Electric Submarines

(please note this post is a shameless plug piece for my job application at OpenWater Power)
Military submarines are the silent hunters of modern warfare, for nations like the United States, Great Britain, and Russia, these vessels are frequently nuclear powered, allowing for vessels to go years without needing to surface (if the vessels did not have pesky humans requiring fresh food).  Other countries have less sci-fi sounding diesel electric submarines, where the vessels will surface as needed to bring in air to allow the diesel generators to recharge the vessels on board batteries.  Newer vessels are even looking towards hydrogen fuel cells, I would like to suggest an alternative, a vessel that possesses "hot swappable" power packs composed of Aluminum water fuel cells.
Aluminum water fuel cells have an incredible ability to store energy, over 2.00* kWh/liter, all without requiring air to be added to the system for power production.  Navies of the future could design vehicles that exclusively use these swappable fuel cell systems to power the vehicles energy needs.  By eliminating the requirement of a mechanical generator and the associated acoustic dampening vessels could be made smaller, contributing to the difficulty of being detected.  Depending on the design strategy of the organization creating these new fuel cell based submarines, the swappable elements could also include replacement air supplies, food stuffs and other materials for long term operations.

For navies working to extend their reach more covertly the swappable fuel cells could be hidden inside of shipping containers and said containers could "accidentally" be lost at sea for ships to pick up reserve power, the logistics would be complicated but not beyond the abilities of a mid-sized blue water navy.

Ok back to class work, the StartUp Institute is kicking my butt and I need to keep up with the torrent of projects and homework.  I will try to make some sketches during my lunch break, although it wouldn't be that crazy for the swappable fuel cells to go into bays similar to the ICBM launch tubes found on Ohio class submarines.

*A previous version of this post listed the energy density as 200 kWh/liter, not the official 2.00 kWh/liter, I apologize for the confusion, I did not read the specification as closely as I should have.

Friday, April 8, 2016

Depressing Foods of the Future

Articles discussing how species of bacteria have adapted to metabolize varying types of plastic.  One can imagine a sci-fi writer having the most impoverished part of a planets population eating foodstuffs derived from the bacteria that have consumed waste plastic.

*Yeah I know this post was short, I may write a short scene later, but I wanted to get better about posting, sometimes length will take a hit, which may or may not be a bad thing, you decide

Tuesday, April 5, 2016

Getting My Game On

I'm growing up, I admit it, I no longer burn through a twelve pack of mountain dew in one night, my obligations are more than summer job and gaming with buddies, I'm growing up, why is it so hard for me to play with grown ups?  I want a service, ideally one that knows all of the various games and platforms I own and enjoy and when I have time to play with people online, and my friends are busy, I want a platform that lets me be a casual player with other casual players.

This idealized app would allow you to link your steam, xbox live, etc... accounts into a single shareable tool, where you can conveniently broadcast to the world that you're down for playing with someone online.  When I start my time slot for gaming, I would press the broadcast button, letting other people with my game list know that I am playing game X.  If someone else joins my game, we can have a trial period of working together in the game, after the time has elapsed you can let them know if you are going to keep playing or not.

A challenging social tool is noting whether people enjoyed playing together and whether or not they want to play together again.  As time goes on the system would  learn what gaming personas you enjoy playing with most and try to best match players.

Imagine a world where when you want to decompress after a long week you aren't duking it out against squeaky 12 year olds or aspiring pro players who can't understand that people have lives outside of a game.  That world is possible.