Articles - Food for Thought
Topics - In the Works ... [edit]
Self Driving/Autotomous Cars
2015-06 rickatech
Mars
2017-03 rickatech
Habital planets need a radiation shields, and enough gravity to build up an atmosphere.
E-Fuels
2015-05 rickatech
Increasingly affordable renewable energy (solar, wind, geothermal, ...)
and increasingly affordable peak demand shifting batteries are providing increasing incentives
for developing new chemistries for sustainable production of high quality synthetic fuels.
Open Source and the iPad
2010-07 rickatech
What Apple has achieved is to break through _part_ of the strangle hold the mobile carriers have on the wireless market, and effectively destroy propietary content formats that enforce freedom constraining digital rights management on content. Anyone can get the free tools Apple provides and develop an iPhone/iPod application. Publishing is easy if you steer clear of smut in your application, and Apple doesn't care if your application source code is free.
Expect you could find some sort of hack to replace Apple's IOS with some Linux kernel, but if the carriers won't recognize your signals after doing so what's the point. Same thing with Android, which is essentially just as tightly control by Google as IOS is by Apple.
Lastly, iPad and its smaller ancestor iPod Touch in many ways show that we still don't know how to let people use wireless devices effectively ... the user interface and core applications are still in wild flux, yet both of these devices easily do end runs around the wireless carriers by using uncontrolled WiFi where possible to connect to the big pond. Linux WILL NEVER surpase the UI wonk's at Apple and other commercial companies, and open source WILL NEVER directly bust open the locks wireless carriers and Hollywood have on access and content like a company like Apple can with its iTunes store.
When content and bandwidth are free, then the highly efficient open source model will assert itself properly in the wireless space. Until then open source will steadily increase its dominance on the backend side of the Internet, but it will continue to need Apple to 'make money' by destroying the profit motive of closed wireless networks and content providers.
Gift Based Gender Role Reversal
Imagine a prize/goal seeking party game that forces men
to behave as women and visa versa.
Insects/Birds Organically Deposit Building Materials Where Needed
- Buddhism, Just another 12 step program?
Recently I've been attending some Buddhist prayer
meetings with a friend and our kids. It then struck
me that thousands of years ago Buddhists essentially pioneered
the twelve step program. I mean come on,
The Four Noble Truths + The Eightfold Path, that's twelve baby.
eerie coincidence? I think not.
- Methane Capture
2009-01 rickatech
Excess methane in the atmosphere, even more than CO2, is said to
contribute significantly to global warming. However methane is directly
combustable whereas CO2 is not. A radical approach to reduce global
warming then would be to build wind powered methane capture
devices and just burn the captured methane to produce energy. Its
a win win - removes methane from the atmosphere and produces
green energy at the same time.
Flying Car
- "What the world needs now, is a new kind of
transport, cause the old kind just bores me to death."
- sing to melody of Teen Angst by Cracker.
Space Travel
Reactionless thrusters are real?
- Its the weather, stupid
What makes certain parts of the planet attract business and talent.
- Storage Locker Farm Dilemma: plague of the Biosphere or prelude
to the affordable housing of tomorrow?
Elsewhere:
Space Travel
For deep space travel to be practical for humans, new propulsion systems that
transcend traditional chemical reaction thrusters are needed.
Deep Space Expansion
Perhaps the recent difficulties
of the scientific community to easily determine the age of the
universe are due to a still to be discovered phenomenon by which
electro-magnetic and gravitation energy degrade into new pockets of
space between the stars. This making all attempts at justifying
the Big Bang by a guess of the age of the Universe totally irrelevant
since the very nature of energy may be causing new space to be
created.
Planetary Core Waste Disposal
2015-09 updated, rickatech
Musing about how most toxic and difficult
to recycle materials might be broken down by the Earth's hot magma.
Urban Biosphere - Integrating biosphere use for urban,
park, and wildlife
20xx-xx rickatech
Development is necessary for modern civilization. However alleged development that
blithely ignores well established environmental norms typically is regressive:
alienates people from the environment, forces unnecessarily high amounts of mechanization
where previously simple behaviors not only we're adequate, but enriched communities,
and unduly displaces wildlife and habitat for sterile concrete jungle prison fenced
hellscapes.
- Coffee 21st Century Style
- California Neighbor Estrangement
Why are Californians such unfriendly neighbors?
Because the beautiful weather naturally incites people to
have affairs? By keeping your relations with neighbors cool,
you are compensating for the hormone encouragement of the
really nice weather, which allows you to keep your atomic
family intact.
Do Greece, Italy, and Spain have similar neighbor relations?
- Genius in the Wings - how when new technology transitions into
cheap media and distribution technology, new geniuses and forms emerge that
would otherwise have gone unnoticed and undeveloped.
- Attack Iraq?
Would it be better just to take a chunk of Iraq and call it a UN
protectorate. Then tell Iraq that anymore severe UN violations
and we will expand the protectorate. Sort of like we just broke your
left arm. Do it again and we break your right arm.
- Space Shuttle Columbia
Space needs a face for our attempt to do the almost impossible.
|
