A Solution to Spray Paint Vandalism

I was reading about the new nanotechnology based Lithium-Titanite battery that will be used in the Lightning GT electric supercar when it occurred to me that future technology could be used to solve an age old problem: street vandalism.

The answer would be to simply manufacture nano identification particles and salt paint with them. These nanoparticles would be ID-linked to the spray paint, marker, or any product capable of being used to perform paint-based vandalism.

Of course, for that to be effective, laws would have to be passed so that everyone who purchases those products would have to be ID'ed and recorded in a database. But that's no biggie; we're already something similar for those people who purchase drugs containing Ephedrine.

The key idea here is to make it more cost-effective for the police to scan the nanoparticles at a scene of vandalism and track down the perpetrators. But by merely deploying this technology and ID'ing people, that alone should serve as a pretty strong deterrent.

The Electric Car Revolution Is Coming

Right now, it is impeccably difficult to purchase a vehicle that doesn't fund terrorism in the due course of its operation. The reason is that virtually all the vehicles of today operate off either gasoline or diesel -- a nonrenewable commodity that is largely controlled by OPEC.

Aside from funding terrorism, there are also several other negatives to gasoline that make it a poor fuel source for powering personal locomotion. From an environmental standpoint, gasoline combustion is clearly bad as it exacerbates global warming. But, more importantly, it is the performance/efficiency characteristics of internal combustion engines that makes it an undesirable fuel.

It is very difficult for gasoline engines to accelerate quickly without resorting to tricks like supercharging, turbocharging, or increasing the number of cylinders/capacity. These "augmentations" allow the vehicle to develop more power, but rob efficiency in the process. You just can't beat the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Engines based on combustion will never be able to deliver high power and efficiency at the same time. A new technology is needed to deliver both; and that technology is the purely electric powertrain.

To replace gasoline engines, this new technology must both be monstrously powerful while being very efficient. The market as a whole is not going to adopt highly efficient but slow, clumsy vehicles because a vehicle is not just an instrument that takes one from A to B; a vehicle is a symbol that allows man to express himself; the vehicle is the a manifestation of art in modern technological societies.

The electric car is clearly able to deliver on this. For example, we have the 2010 Tesla Roadster Sport, a supercar that goes from 0 to 60mph in 3.7 seconds (range 244mi, top speed 125mph). By contrast, the gasoline powered 2010 Lamborghini Gallardo LP560-4 supercar also does 0-60mph in 3.7 seconds, but it's fuel efficiency is 16 mpg combined. So, if we go with $3.50/gal, it costs $5.47 to drive 25 miles in the Lamborghini. For the Tesla Roadster, it costs anywhere from $0.25 to $0.75 to drive 25 miles depending on whether you charge it in the day or at night.

In addition, electric powertrains deliver constant torque by nature and are far superior to gasoline engines in that regard because they begin transferring energy to the wheels the moment you floor the accelerator. With gasoline engines, there is a perceptible delay in power transmission as the gears downshift and the engine revs up.

Tesla Model S

Now all that's left is for the technology to mature and have the cost trickle down to all market segments. Right now there are 3 main market segments, all of which definitely need more automakers jumping into (counting pure-electric cars coming to the US only):

Entry / Mass-Market (~$30,000):

• Nissan Leaf (~2010)
• Tesla BlueStar (~2016)

Luxury/Performance Sedans ($50,000 - $80,000):

• Tesla Model S (~2010)
  

Supercars:

• Tesla Roadster Sport (~$130,000)

That is a very nice early market outlook for electric vehicles, with Tesla leading the way with their production supercar. In order for electric vehicles to become viable, they have to appeal to all market segments and offer lots of consumer choice.

Very soon enough, we'll all be able to purchase electric cars that outperform their gasoline counterparts. It's a great relief that finally, we'll be able to drive around efficiently, powerfully, and do so without giving a dime to terrorism. Ain't technological advancement awesome?

Tesla Motors Seattle Showroom Open House

Got to ride in the Tesla Roadster Sport today at Tesla Motors' Seattle Showroom opening...

Needless to say, that is an extremely fast car. The Tesla Roadster Sport goes from 0 to 60mph in 3.7 seconds. It's one thing to see those numbers on a spec sheet, and a completely different thing to experience it for yourself. When he floored the accelerator I could instantly feel the Roadster racing forward at an incredible pace. There was no shifting lag or wait time caused by turbochargers revving up to speed because the car is fully electric and has no gears.

And when it comes to being environmentally friendly the Roadster does it all at an equivalent of 120 miles to the gallon. Being fully electric that means you charge it on electricity generated from renewable sources and not release anymore carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But most importantly, fully electric vehicles like the Roadster means that you are no longer forced to support terrorism at the pump.

I don't see that big of a difference between the 10mpg Hummer H2 and the 50mpg Prius; you're still go to go fill it up at the pump. As long the pump is being used, terrorism will continue to have a source of funding and global temperatures will continue to rise. With temperatures soaring up into the 90s next week in Seattle, it definitely feels guilty to be filling up at gas stations. But, of course, the Prius is a good "bridge technology" that will take us from gasoline powered cars to pure electric cars.

More importantly though, the Tesla Roadster and upcoming Tesla Model S prove that electric cars outperform their gasoline powered counterparts. I personally wouldn't purchase an environmentally friendly vehicle if it entailed getting a slower car. For electric cars to win, they have to show that they are better when it comes to performance -- and indeed they have. A gearless pure-electric powertrain means that you get acceleration on demand, right away, at any speed. That alone makes it vastly superior to gasoline powered engines because there is no lag time to wait for turbochargers to spin up or engine components to get up to speed before you get your promised torque.

AmazonFresh is a win.

Yep. I did all my grocery shopping yesterday on the Intertubes while doing serious multitasking between Chinese homework and a ton of other stuff. I never even left my comfortable IKEA armchair.

And, this morning when I woke up, all my groceries and stuff magically appeared on my doorstep. That's right! Intertube Magic! No prizes for guessing where I'm going to do all my grocery shopping in future. AmazonFresh delivers. In fact, they deliver so fast that you can shop today and have your stuff by 6am tomorrow morning.

AmazonFresh seriously makes grocery shopping fun. You don't need to drive to the grocery store, look for parking, walk to the store, traverse every single aisle to find your stuff, queue up to pay, take all your stuff out of the cart to be scanned, walk back to your car, load up your car, drive home, and unload your car. You get the point.

Manual grocery shopping is tedious, tiring, and ultimately, untechnological. The modern man shouldn't have to go to the grocery store; the grocery store ought to come to him. With any luck AmazonFresh will turn out to be a commercial success. The service is currently in "beta" for selected neighborhoods around the Seattle area.

What strikes me about AmazonFresh is their environmentally friendly techniques. All their totes (see image above) and internal temperature-control packaging/gels are recollected and reused. Ice cream was among one of the refrigerated items I bought; it arrived hard as a rock (dry ice win). Also, the fact that I don't have to take my 17.5mpg vehicle out to get groceries does wonders to the environment too.

It's cool to be green these days.

(On a side note: The above image was taken with the iPhone 3GS's new 3 megapixel camera. The quality is stunning.)

The Dawn of a New Technological Era

The great technological revolution has begun. The modern man has now reached a stage in his evolution that empowers him to use his technology to conquer his environment. No more is the modern man shackled to the whims of Mother Nature. The modern man's destiny is getting less and less controlled by the laws of nature; the modern man's technology has effectively allowed him to rewrite the laws of nature as he sees fit. This is the dawn of the information-on-demand era.

To put this into perspective, consider the following scenario: You are somewhere far away from campus and the weather is scorching hot. You need to return to campus. Now, the options are bleak for the man untouched by the information-on-demand revolution: he is forced (by nature) to walk back to campus in the scorching heat, or, he is required to carry an array of local bus schedules with him and has to further look them up in order to compute a dignified route back to campus.

Something about those scenarios should strike the modern man as insulting. The idea that the modern man has to walk any further than the distance from his house to his car must certainly come off as an assault on his technological dignity (after all, he should have been able to use his technology to ameliorate a humiliating walk in the scorching sun).

Likewise, the alternative of having to fumble over a bagload of bus schedules in order to successfully avoid such a humiliating walk must also come off as equally insulting. Why should the modern man have to bother himself with laborious calculations in order to live the technological life? Shouldn't his technology be already able to achieve this feat? Is it possible for the modern man to avoid the humiliating walk, and at the same time not carry around those schedules or perform tedious calculations?

The answer, in 2009, is, yes, and the solution is the iPhone 3GS. That entire stack of bus schedules can be replaced with something better -- far better. That something is the Internet. Throw in GPS, a directional compass, and the armada of features that Google Maps provides and you've got yourself a mobile navigation system that allows the modern man to shield himself from yet another insult that Mother Nature tries to inflict upon him. No manual calculations required -- just select the place you want to go to and the technology figures it all out.

But this is just the beginning. Such a level of "life simplification" would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. It is incredible to observe how much technology has advanced within a span of just a few years. Who knows what the next few years will have in store for the modern man.

Hmm?

I can has cheezburger?

WANT

Saw it on sale at Kinokuniya. Really surprised it would be carried that!

Paper is Dead: Bring on the Cloud Computing Revolution

I just coredumped my home. That's right: I literally threw out everything I didn't need and couldn't eBay. Now all the stuff that remains is what I might need (very conservative definition of "might need") and stuff I plan to eBay soon. What surprised me was what I threw out this time and the reasons for throwing them out:

• All my photographic negatives, associated photo CDs, and a bunch of paper photographs. (Reason: They were all already digitized and stored on my computers and the Cloud)
• Every single old homework, along with exams I didn't want to keep. (Reason: Never even looked at them for over a year)
• A few outdated books with no resale value. (Books are so last year. Anything worth reading these days is indexed and stored on the Cloud, where it can be easily searched for.)
• A bunch of other assorted garbage no one in the 21st century uses anymore.

That's right. So much of my stuff has been digitized that is no longer make sense to keep vulnerable physical copies around. But the most important reason for not keeping physical copies around is because it requires a lot of physical effort to search for something.

No one has the time anymore to comb through a library of books to find something. What's worse still is that these books tend to get outdated extremely quickly. Technological progress is happening so fast that any book over a few years old is no longer relevant enough to be worth reading. Newspapers are dead as well. The modern man wants his information immediately, up-to-date, and in such a way that it is easy to catalogue, organize and search. This is an area that upcoming eInk readers are bound to find their place (especially once color eInk screens come of age). There are huge secondary benefits as well, namely that you don't need to cut down any trees to produce PDFs.

In addition to all that, the cloud computing revolution also makes the modern man less vulnerable to catastrophes such as fire. House burns down? No problem: everything's safe on the cloud. Just cash out your insurance check, buy a new house and computer, and you're back in business. You just can't go wrong with the cloud.

Most proper clouds are extremely resistant to failure as well. Plus, you already have a local copy of your data on your computer. So, even in the super-ultra-unbelievably-unlikely event that the cloud crashes, you're still got your data stored locally anyway. I'm still experimenting with clouds and waiting for the ultimate cloud-to-end-all-clouds, the Google Drive, to be launched.

The revolution has begun.

Safari 4.0 Multithreading Win

Mmm.. Love those threads. Safari 4.0 is seriously fast.

Words. The leadup to the 322 final...

Right. I've got two finals this week. CSE 322 (Automata) and CSE 341 (Noobified Languages). The CSE 322 final is about 2 and half hours away so right now I'm just doing nothing in the leadup to that. My philosophy is that I should have already figured everything out by the last day of class, and hence the time between the last day of class and the final ought to be spent doing practice problems and developing exam strategies.

The idea is that you get as much sleep as possible before in the leadup to a final, enter the exam with a clear mind, then use that built-up energy to burn right through it in a 1.83 hour blaze. Studying right before a final, or, worse, "burning the midnight oil", depletes energy from this "1.83 hour cache" which impairs performance.

The CSE 322 final probably won't be as bad because I suspect it would be more a test of knowledge than a test of speed. The same, however, cannot be said of the CSE 341 (Noobified Languages) final this coming Wednesday. I'm anticipating an ultra-mega test of speed unlike anything I've witnessed before (remember the CSE 321 final). You basically learn 3 "programming" languages in the following order of execution speed in CSE 341 (they are taught in the following order as well):

• Slow (ML)
  
• Slower (Scheme)
  
• Slowest (Ruby)
  

I'm so glad I'm done with these playground languages and my senior year will mark the beginning of the real stuff (CPU Organization & Assembly, Operating Systems, Networks, Security, etc).