Tattoos for the Cyberpunk Era

Big Brother is watching, so is little brother, hell everyone seems to be watching what other people are doing.  In an era where video surveillance seems all pervasive, and getting worse, inventors all over the world are trying to create ways to confuse and block security cameras from identifying the wearer.  These solutions range from make-up patterns that will confuse facial identification techniques to hats with extremely bright infrared LEDs intended to blind cameras.  Beyond make-up there is the potential to integrate near infra-red ink into tattoo designs.  For the privacy minded, users could embed designs that would change how a camera could perceive their facial features.  These patterns would use varying regions of "light" and "dark" near infrared material, to those around you the patterns would be invisible, but when they looked at your face through a digital camera, the patterns would emerge.  As an alternative to hiding one's identity near infrared tattoos could serve as a means of enforcing personal copyrights, a readily searchable means of ensuring individuals a means of tracking uses of their personal image.  More extreme examples could be QR codes linking to personal pages, databases, the possibilities are almost endless.

A Re-Imagining of Cars in the 21st century

The march towards autonomous cars filling the world's highways over the coming decades currently appears to be more the question of when not if.  As we approach a future where humans are no longer responsible for controlling their vehicle we are provided with an opportunity to reinterpret what a motorized vehicles should look like.
In the mid 1990's General Motors proposed "AUTOnomy" a hydrogen fuel cell powered concept vehicle.  The unique premise of the AUTOnomy is that instead of having the primary engine placed in the front or the back of the vehicle, energy storage and power generation capacity (in the form of hydrogen fuel cells) are placed in a platform that looks akin to a thick skateboard.  This skateboard allowing for designers to create readily changed body designs for passengers to utilize.  The real question is could automotive design go even further?  In a future where the very nature of vehicle ownership is in question why would the markets create only a single platform for passengers and storage capacity to dock?  Instead of one really cool skate board concept that is exclusively built to run on hydrogen fuel cell based power, the automotive industry could push their boundaries of design by embracing containerization.
Shipping containers revolutionized the shipping industry by providing a known target for engineering teams to handle, whether by truck, train, or tug (I am using the word tug to keep the t scheme going), companies know that they will encounter, the shipper doesn't need to worry about the mode of transport so long as it is in the container.  Passenger and luggage capacity in transportation could embrace a similar rational, creating a standardized attachment types and available volumes.  Carriages designed to carry passengers would come in several major sizes, from individual privacy pods, to sports team road trip.  Luggage space would follow similar growth curves.  With each pod sized standardized, a range of autonomous vehicles could be optimized for various parts of a journey, from small urban transports intended for rapid pick up and drop off in a stop and go heavy environment to highway transport trains (akin to the Australian Road trains) moving large numbers of passenger pods along highway routes.  This containerization would also allow for trains and boats, maybe planes, to be integrated into the autonomous transport ecosystem, passengers would punch in their destination and depending on what mode(s) of transport made the most sense for that journey would be offered.
One example would be a cross country road trip, for that I would want to take a scenic route, so my queuing system would offer me rides via various transport platforms and depending on how many back roads I wanted to take I would spend more or less, the more back roads, the more money you spend.
Shipping could also benefit, when autonomous vehicles are less utilized, at night for example, companies could move their inventories more cheaply when more vehicles were available.

10/26/2015 some follow up.  Spectrum had another interesting take on autonomous vehicles earlier this summer where researchers suggest turning autonomous cars into service stations that you use while in transit.  Containerizing vehicle design could compliment this concept rather effectively.

The Gourdinator

Hey you! Yeah you!  Do you have an excess of pumpkins, squash, and other gourds?  Then you need the gourdinator.  The gourdinator turns your pumpkan't into a pumpkan. (there is a reason I should never write dialogue for actual consumer products) Using sophisticated 3-D sensing systems and a multi-axis CNC machine, your gourds will be transformed with designs ranging from a traditional Jack-o-Lanterm to the face of alien creations out of your child's nightmares.

This idea was inspired by various companies that CNC their pumpkins during the Halloween season.

Cleaning Up After Blizzards With the Power of the Sun

During Boston's series of blizzards and snowstorms of the 2014-15 winter season, it was mind blowing seeing how challenging it was for businesses and municipal governments to deal with the shear volume of snow coming down.  The shear volume of snow mitigating approaches inspired one additional potential solution for dealing with snow fall.  

Around the world businesses are starting to add solar canopies to parking lots, providing cooling shade for cars, reduced thermal gain for the local environment (when compared to asphalt), and most importantly renewable energy that can be used at the source.  During the summer months these features are rather impressive, but what if we could add additional functionality for the winter months.  This blog has already done several pieces on adding heat pumps to photo-voltaic arrays as means of producing extra benefit from installed solar capacity, we are going to do that one more time with snow melting technology.  

Even in the dead of winter solar panels will be warmed by the sunlight striking their surface, making the solar panel warmer than the ambient environment.  This extra thermal energy has the potential to be used to melt fallen snow.  Using a network of heat pumps and piping engineers could readily produce a solar canopy system that concentrate thermal energy from location to location, working for maximum efficacy of the available energy.  Immediately after the snow has stopped falling the system would first work to start exposing the solar panels, this part would likely need at least some degree of human interference to initiate the process.  As the panels are wiped off the electrical and thermal energy are used to aid in cleaning more and more panels until the majority are exposed.  After the panels have been exposed, a human operator or autonomous control system would start designating regions where the systems thermal energy would cause the greatest benefit.  As the snow is melted it can be dumped into the local drainage infrastructure. 

While the overall labor benefits are moderate, the added functionality could be the deciding factor for facility operators making the decision as to adding solar parking lots.

AIRSHIPS I Want Them NOW

The idea of people moving from city to city floating safely in lighter than air vehicles has been around for decades, look at old concept drawings of the Empire State Building and you will see mock ups of airships docking at the top of the tower.  An awesome concept, alas, that darn Hindenburg just had to explode and destroy people's sense of safety associated with traveling by lighter than air vessels.  Now almost 80 years after the Hindeburg disaster lighter than air vehicles are starting to have a renaissance, with companies like Aeroscraft and Skylifter, are working to develop their own unique technological solutions.  While these new solutions are cool, we need something crazier, a component that would allow us to really push the boundaries of what we can design, we need a lighter than air solid.  Imagine a material so light that when you let go of it at sea level, it starts to float away, and unlike helium balloons from a birthday party, this material will never lose its buoyancy.  While there are, probably, many potential ways to create a lighter than air material, one solution could potentially involve a sheet of graphene wrapped around a volume of molecular hydrogen held at atmospheric pressure.  The graphene exterior would keep the hydrogen for years without letting any gas escape, the hydrogen would provide a counter pressure to the outside environment, ensuring that the "balloon" did not require some kind of internal mechanical support.

If lighter than air solid could be made, the applications are legion.  Initially only the military and high cost research organizations would be likely to to afford this technology.  For the military, drone reconnaissance systems that would never need to land.  After disasters other models could provide communication relay services and remote sensing, aiding in finding the missing.  As the cost for a kilogram of lighter than this lighter than air solid went down the use cases would grow. hybrid lift air ships could be developed, the traditional cigar shapes with wings would slowly disappear.  When costs became lower still, new renewable energy solutions become possible, similar to the Altaeros flying wind-turbine design, we could build floating solar and wind arrays, generating power almost continuously.  These energy platforms would serve forward operating bases, research stations, and disaster recovery.   What would be more exciting is what technology like this would mean for space exploration on planets like Venus, there are already proposals to create research stations for humans that would float in the Venusion atmosphere, with lighter than air solids, we could potentially build massive structures of permanent habitation, harvesting useful chemicals from the thick Venusion atmosphere.  Eventually the wealthy would start building floating sky yachts, not nearly as fast their private jets, but far more luxurious.  Further into the future, floating gardens, gently scrubbing out surplus carbon dioxide and other pollutants from the atmosphere.

There are probably other applications, the real question would be, how much does it cost for a given amount of lift.  The Earth's atmosphere has a density of about 1.2 kg/m^3, that means if you wanted to lift 1 kg into the air and the lighter than air material had a density of 1 kg/m^3, you would need roughly 6 cubic meters of lifting material.  The lighter the solid the less volume you would need to displace.  I am betting that the most representative unit of measure would be $/kg of lift.  Comparing this number against alternatives is a more complex life time cost calculation, that I cannot realistically approximate at this time.

I hope you enjoyed the article.  Please feel free to comment, ask questions provide feedback.

Sustainable Water Towers

Water Towers are an impressive feet of engineering, allowing municipalities and buildings to maintain relatively constant water pressure throughout the day.  Awesome concept, what I wonder is why aren't these water towers doing more, there is plenty of available surface area that the water tower provides for green energy production.  Additionally the tower's height already provides much of the altitude gain that a wind turbine would need to ensure maximum energy production.  For municipal applications I could see concerns about liability or aesthetics, but for smaller use cases a water tower working in tandem with renewable energy sources would make a huge difference.

Imagine a traditional water tower 30-45 feet tall, providing water pressure for an off-grid house.  Rain water is collected in lower tanks, and when the home's energy production exceeds use, water is pumped up to be stored for later use. 

A more complicated use solution would integrate a range of technologies, solar panels, wind-turbines, and that really cool transparent blackbody material.  The solar panels would be on the side of the tower, the rational for the solar panels being on the side of the tower are two fold, the added height reduces the potential for the panels falling into shadows, and the mass of water behind the solar panels would minimize overall thermal fluctuation.  On the backside of the tower would be a passive radiator solution, intended to avoid direct exposure to sunlight, hopefully maximizing the passive cooling ability.  On top of the tower would be the wind turbine(s), while this does add another element that requires maintenance, the increased reliability of power production for an offgrid solution should make it appealing.

10/11/2015 (I'm taking a break from finishing this article as it is 1 AM and I should try getting some sleep

Sci-Fi Spaceship Idea

This has no bearing on reality, and the idea is relatively vague, oh and it is dependent on a really crappy understanding of Schrodinger's Cat.  Sci-Fi writers feel free to use.

The Starship Gumdrop was on the run, speed had kept the crew alive for the last five days.  The Gumdrop had stumbled into an Inguat military convoy.  Reactors had been pushed to the limit and could give no more.  The captain had no choice but to activate the Cat.  No one outside a research lab had ever been able to understand how the hell the Cat did what it did, but it was amazing.  Within seconds the interior of the ship would become completely indeterminate with respect to the outside world.  Every element of the ships interior was both everywhere and somewhere.  Now, when the Inguats finally got within firing distance it would be almost impossible for critical interior systems to be targeted in the first volley.  The Cat was far from perfect, once the interior of the ship had been impacted the defense was gone, the quantum uncertainty found inside the ship would collapse and the crew would be vulnerable again.  Even if it only meant surviving one volley after shield failure, the Cat was better than nothing.



This idea was partially inspired by this Scientific American article involving the impact of gravity on macro-scopic instances of Schrodingers Cat.


A crazier version could involve multiple vessels somehow sharing the same interior at the same time, as the ships are destroyed only the remaining vessels continue to hold the shared mass until only one vessel remains.  This provides the crew safety within a larger swarm.  I hope you guys enjoyed the idea.

The Internet of Things and the Sharing Economy: How this author is a buzzwords addict

So the title is a little excessive on buzzwords I totally acknowledge that, but I am trying to be better about semi-regular posts, so it was bound to happen

As planet Earth's population continues to grow we as a global civilization must work to find ways to improve the standards of living for all while reducing the environmental impact of providing said improvements.  In theory the concept of the sharing economy has the potential to empower communities find the greatest benefit from a given object, be it an umbrella, an electric screw driver, bicycles,  etc..., currently apps and services do a reasonable job of providing access to whatever rent-able device you need, but what these services don't do is provide object owners with a clear way of knowing how much potential benefit they could get from renting out their underused vacuum cleaner.  As the internet of things slowly matures, packages with sensors and computers are getting smaller and smaller, eventually these devices will become small enough and cheap enough that almost every expensive item in a home could have the ability to tell their owner, where they are and what they are up to.  With this information over time a user could determine that they in fact do not use their vacuum every day of the week, and in fact most weeks they only use it during one particular day.  Armed with this information people can now make the decision to put their vacuum on VacuuShr and make money from their device.

Realistically people are unlikely to want to share everything, but as rapid distribution services become more effective and people have hard data to help them avoid owning things that make more sense as a rental.  By being able to accurately gauge where inventory is everyone can more effectively manage our civilizations limited resources.

One potential business model could be something to this effect, home tools as a subscription, instead of owning complex hardware, you have a local subscription service that works in tandem with either a drone delivery platform or a car delivery system.  Users request whatever they need, delivery systems rapidly bring your order to your front door, and when you are done someone comes by to pick it all up.  The extra benefit of having everything having an inbuilt IoT controller is that the user's home system can help them find that object when they need to return it.

Another perk is knowing what you should just get rid of.  Some day in the future every mid-ticket purchase and above could have an embedded IoT sensor that measures a devices use and location, if you haven't used something in a pre-specified period of time your house asks you if it should post your old treadmill on Ebay for you.

This idea was inspired by a TED talk whose title I am unsure of at this time(10/7/2015), the book Makers by Cory Doctorow, and the article I linked above about shareable umbrellas.

Hey Someone Did a Thing I Said #3

In my post "Cooling with Hot Water Heaters"  I suggested that it might be a reasonable suggestion to integrate solar hot water heaters and solar panels into a single solution for home energy production (well that and the idea of producing colder mass during the night).  It turns out that a team of researchers in the UK have actually developed a hybrid solar thermal collector and PV array for rooftops.  This is very exciting and I hope that solutions like this do produce a cost effective solution.

On a similar vein I hope that they look into the more convoluted suggestion I had in which the water heating system is used as a refrigeration aid at night.  While this only makes sense for grid connected facilities in hot climates, the ability to cost effectively produce large quantities of both hot and cold materials does wonders for a structures ability to reliably maintain a comfortable climate without straining the grid too much.

Additional Note 10/29/2015  This is an example of pumped thermal systems that could really compliment traditional PV

Bringing Crude to the Stars?

A laundry list of proposals for the mining of the moon highlight the lack of available hydrogen in lunar regolith necessary to make viable quantities of water.  General suggestions include shipping up literal tanks of hydrogen to the surface of the moon, so that the contents can be mixed with oxygen to produce water, other proposals suggest simply using the leftovers from lunar landings as a seed material.  Focusing on only hydrogen stems from the fact that lunar dirt already has a rather high percentage of oxygen fully present, if chemically combined, with minerals found on the surface.  From previous research it seems likely that refining said oxygen is a relatively solvable problem, getting the hydrogen necessary to make drinkable water a slightly harder problem.  While I applaud the suggestion of recycling the leftover fuel found on a mission, I ask, what about the tank?  Now as I am not a material science guy (I really don't know what material properties are possible with the suggestion I am about to put forth) I wonder, can we develop a material, maybe a plastic, that can be used as structural elements for a spacecraft, that at the end of the life of the vessel, the materials can be reduced down, and the hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen (you know the life elements) so that we can start the process of seeding a celestial body.  Imagine after every probe is sent to another body, future explorers can know that there will be a few more kilograms of chemicals essential to life available as a resource for the continuation of their mission.

This idea has been rattling in my head for a while, the biggest inspiration for posting this morning is I started reading Neal Stevenson's Seveneves, I haven't gotten too far, but so far I am loving it.

Follow Up 10/6/15  I remembered recently that NASA and private industry have looked into using rubber like materials for space exploration since the 60s.  Starting with Goodyear and more recently Bigelow Aerospace.  Additionally Kevlar has a decent amount of both hydrogen and carbon, although something that has less oxygen in the chemical make up would be nice as the oxygen is not what is lacking in lunar soil.

Follow Up 10/10/15 I just finished Seveneves, I highly recommend it.  While not as much of a mind-f*** as Anathem, it was in intriguing concept on how humanity could push itself when faced with a nigh unimaginable series of disasters.  Also I forgot to note with saying that Kevlar could be a good material for a design emphasizing multiple use cases over the material's life span, first as hardware then as feedstock, that the ISS is actually partially made out of Kevlar.  Here's hoping we can figure out a strong recyclable material that can aid in long term exploration and colonization.

The All Autonomous Universal Urinal System (Or Robotic Bathrroms where you need them)

One of the many challenges of visiting the fair city of Boston is a lack of public toilets.  This can also be true for major festivals or outdoor sporting events, getting the toilets to the people. Proper sanitation is critical to the operation of modern society, but it is one of those background issues that plays number 2 to many other infrastructure needs that seem more immediate.  This changes as soon as you get below critical toilet in a given area, if an event or space does not have enough places to go the bathroom for a set number of people, things will get gross.  Currently traditional port-a-potties provide a means to supply a space with sufficient bathroom facilities, this is great for events where you have relatively static needs on facilities, but what if the need for restrooms is dynamic?  For that I suggest developing the "All Autonomous Universal Urination Solution"  (I'm not married to the name) an autonomous vehicle designed to bring the bathroom to where its needed and bring itself in for maintenance at the end of its work day.  Imagine a series of autonomous platforms that drive around a city, following population flows, when a shopping district is filled with busy shoppers, the toilets are there, when the evening transitions from clothes buying to getting slizzerd (sp?) the toilets move to the locations of the bars.  These autonomous robots ensure that people have a safe and sanitary space to do their business.  This combined with their ability to follow the needs of users means that we have less infrastructure needlessly built up in an area.  Even better these mobile bathrooms could be designed to dock with autonomous vehicles, now your road trip car doesn't need a bathroom and you don't have to wait for a rest stop to take care of business.  The fuel savings of not having to stop should make this idea a valid contribution to the travel scene of autonomous vehicles (no it wouldn't but I am trying to play up the design firms vibe of an over promised solution)  These autonomous bathrooms could range in size from single person portable bathrooms to fully furnished restrooms moving from site to site.

Now how would we pay for this system?  Civil authorities would be unlikely to put up the cash, for this I keep it simple.  Pay-per-poo, each person will be required to pay to access the unit.  Additionally to ensure maximum use of the toilets, there would be the 2A2U app, which would allow users to find an available toilet, check wait times, and pre-pay for the usage.  If the system finds that more people in an area are looking for toilets, the units would move to accommodate.

The TL:DR version port-a-potties designed to be moved by some kind of autonomous mover system, designed to work with smart software to ensure that they are utilized as much as possible.