The Passive Aggressive House

Modern home building designs are beginning to focus on ways to make homes as energy efficient as possible, from better insulation, to thermal pumps, low flow toilets, solar generators.  These innovations are doing wonders to reduce humanity's impact on the environment, yet they could go further.  Humans are the weak link in home designs, with this realization Smart Home Innovation and Technology Tomorrow and Yesterday (SHITTaY) has come out with a complete product portfolio for creating the very first passive aggressive house.  The passive aggressive house is a wondrous convergence of machine learning, smart sensors, and proprietary technologies, working together to guide residents to a more sustainable life-style.  Each door and window has a sensor noting when the door was opened and the ability to ask itself "did someone really need to leave me open for that long? (I mean they're wasting all of this power trying to heat the outside)"  if the answer is that the door or window should have been closed sooner, the passive aggressive house will politely leave a sticky note on the offending door the next day, reminding the user how much energy they wasted.  Light-bulbs have similar concerns, should they have been run as long as they were, could the user have gone to a brighter spot in the house? if power was wasted users will get a snarky text, several hours or days after the offending action, asking the home owner to be smarter about when they use a light.

The wonders and innovation of SHITTaY don't stop with energy management, the passive aggressive house is deeply concerned about your health.  Networking with smart health and activity monitors, the passive aggressive house knows how much exercise you have done in the past 24 hours and will comment on your snack selections accordingly.  Did you miss your step goal for the day? Not a problem the passive aggressive house will leave judgy messages on your refrigerator's smart display custom tailored to your snack selection.  And if the house feels you really should eat a healthier snack it will push your chocolate eclairs to the very back of the fridge and let them rot there.

Developers at SHITTaY are working tirelessly to provide more natural language interface with the passive aggressive house.  Currently the system is limited to text based interaction, but in the near future the company hopes to integrate actual spoken interface, with voice options including, Fran Drescher from the Nanny, Gilbert Godfrey, your annoying ex, and if research goes well a modulated version of the user's voice from when they were going through puberty and having their voice crack.

The tomorrow's of tomorrow are that much more exciting thank's to the research from the SHITTaY team.

Happy April 1st everyone.

Distributed Servers of Tomorrow*

One of the major challenges facing modern internet infrastructure is the energy required to actively cool the laundry list of thermally inefficient micro-processors.  The majority of server farms are so concerned with keeping their infrastructure cool without spending too much money on cooling.  A solution that industry analysts  have been investigating in and investing in, has been air cooled servers, where the server is more directly cooled by the ambient environment, as opposed to having an intermediary air conditioning system.  These air cooled servers have come in a variety of shapes and sizes, and I would like to suggest one more,
Street Lights (I'm not kidding)
Streets lights have the potential to serve as a fantastic platform for distributed computing infrastructure, they are ubiquitous in the world's communities, there is a decent amount of un/under-used surface area for mounting, and as lighting infrastructure moves towards LEDs there is already an inbuilt AC/DC converter.  At the current time the idea is relatively vague, I readily acknowledge that, as the characteristic constraints are hard to pin down.  Ideally these smarter street lights would be connected to a robust internet infrastructure at the local level.  Similar to how server farms have fungible racks of individual server elements, easily added or swapped by a technician.  As Moore's law has begun to slow, at least when it comes to density increases of transistors (I honestly haven't kept good track on actual cost per transistor) this infrastructure can be built up for more long term planning

Potential markets include, municipal governments trying to provide their own localized equivalent to larger online cloud services, local ISPs minimizing their concentration of servers, cable companies/Netflix and other video on demand service providers where last mile delivery concerns are legitimate, and honestly who knows who else.
*(this is a quick and dirty post for the moment, I will do follow up later, my schedule has gotten rather crazy, but I really like this idea March 22, 2016)

A follow up post will have notes on a starting template for a streetlight system intended to promote a hybrid of air cooled servers, battery storage infrastructure to keep things going, and for snowier climbs who knows maybe a heat pump to melt snow around the server.