Craig's Blog : Ideas

R is for Rocket

craigg75 — Mon, 29 Aug 2005 17:31:00 GMT

Chris ran across a good article recently on the worth of manned spaceflight. It's preaching to the choir. I've always said the space shuttles have no real purpose since the majority of activities could be robotic. I understand the need to get and keep humans in space since it's really the only way I can forsee the species surviving in any long term way. But why not use humans when they are really needed. Like saving the Hubble telescope as the article talked about. Fixing satellites or building an orbiting space station. Make this space station useful. Design it as a jumping off point for the moon. Build a huge optical telescope on the far side of the moon to search for stars that have "Earths". Do something useful other than watching how a plants grow in microgravity. It just seems like we are just exploring just to be exploring. Because historically those that explored sustained their civilization so we better do some exploring. What?! There doesn't seem to be any purpose behind it, more like empty exploring. Real exploring is running a rover all over Mars or landing a camera on Titan. That shit blows the mind of most people, that is purposeful exploration. Putting people in orbit to perform tired out microgravity experiments seems insane. Hell I hand it to the Russians for trying out space tourism, in a way there is some profit exploration going on. Somebody should hand them a capitalist prize! the irony!! I hope Branson and Burt Rutan can figure out how to get a passenger space plane to be profitable, that would shut down NASA's low orbit efforts. Another thing I've wondered about is why NASA built a spacecraft that was intended to be used for 20+ years. Don't they know technology is always improving and they are wasting money by sticking with obsolete tech? Big goverment agencies and good planning never seem to work right.

Here's an interesting question -- why ensure the survivability of the human species? What do we care when we are dead and gone? What stake do I or anyone have in the species? What if tommorow there's a plague outbreak that spreads like wildfire. Of course I'd want myself and the people close to me to live. But what if that part is removed, if we all get wiped out then what? Poof. The marks we left on the Earth would disappear in a million years through subduction and decay. Do we really matter as a species to anyone but ourselves? We think as individuals but rarely as a community so why concern ourselves with the continued existence of the community? It's very likely that the extinction of intelligent self-aware species happens on a frequent basis in the universe. Self-awareness is often seen as the heart and mind of the universe, giving the universe an ability to look at itself. With every death of that mind there is probably a birth, negating any effect. How unique are we? Is that worth saving? Will anyone miss us?

Voice synthesizer

craigg75 — Tue, 15 Mar 2005 18:36:00 GMT

Here's a million dollar idea that I'll give away for free --

Create a voice synthesizer to convert spoken Indian English accent into an American English accent. People will no longer get that sinking feeling when they call tech support and hear the Bombay sing song English accent. This will really sell if McDonalds goes through with offshoring their drive thru operations.

Simple ideas

craigg75 — Thu, 02 Dec 2004 19:09:00 GMT

Ok here's a couple of ideas that would sell very well and shouldn't really be all that hard to accomplish.

1. Be able to change the snooze time on an alarm clock. How hard can it be to include this? It's all on a chip. My alarm clock has a 7 minute snooze time and therefore have my alarm set to 6:39 am. Seems to be the more standard snooze time is 9 minutes according to this article --
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a991126.html

2. Allow cell phone to have more than 4 rings before an incoming call goes to voice mail. 4 rings is sometimes not long enough when your cell is in a hidden part of the house, frantically search for your cell in your purse, or trying to dig it out of your pocket while driving. I'd even pay extra to have that service. Wake up Cingular/Sprint/T-Mobile!

Neandertal souls?

craigg75 — Wed, 13 Oct 2004 16:10:00 GMT

So I've been reading this book Hominids by Robert Sawyer. As usual he's put together a good story. About a parallel universe in which the Neandertals became the dominant Homo species instead of us. So one them gets transported over to our universe with a wave of the scifi author's magic wand and so ensues the story. The part I just read about was the Neandertal's discovering religion since his universe had no concept of religion. So my question is this -- If we all agree that all life evolved from self-organizing molecules, who was the first human to have a soul? Did the Neandertals (in our universe) have souls? If so why did god allow them to go extinct? So I guess we need to agree on what a soul is. My guess it is something only human beings have apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. So maybe it has something to do with self-awareness, foresight, enlarged cerebral cortex? Or maybe it has a lot to do with our godspot, our ability to perceive a god? I don't see too many dolphins going off to church or praying to the almighty oil tanker. So are souls another made up fairy tale that most religions like to espouse? So what if you were the first caveman to have a soul. You end up in heaven with god and ... well nobody else is there ... yet. Dang all of these clouds and angels, what am I going to do to pass the time? I'd rather be in hell, at least there I'd have something to do..haha. Which reminds me of a joke. Bill Gates dies, goes to heaven and god gives him a choice Heaven or Hell. Even better he says heck you can have a 30 day trial version of each. So Bill checks out Heaven first, seems to be nice and comfortable and well ..a bit boring. So he checks out Hell. Wall to wall babes, a sunny beach, women's sand volleyball, tropical drinks. Great he says, I choose Hell. So god says okay, and sends him to Hell, where he ends up being tortured endlessly by devils and the whole works. So god checks in on the fallen angel and Bill screams “hey this isn't what you showed me!”. God replies “oh hi Bill, sorry but that was the beta version”. Waw waw waaaaaaaw!!!

What the bleep do we know?

craigg75 — Wed, 29 Sep 2004 17:53:00 GMT

So Gregg and I finally got around to seeing the movie What the Bleep Do We Know? I give it a 6 out of 10. It's sort of reminded me of some of the jazzed up specials on Nova or Discovery channel when they try to explain something in science that's esoteric. Throw in a little animation and cool special effects and suddenly you have a pretty cool show about quantum mechanics. Not that there is anything wrong with that but it's like only looking at the cool graphic on the physics book cover and going wow look at that, now I understand it. Really the joy is delving into the book and learning it. But quantum physics, consciousness, nature of reality, mysticism is so ripe for special effects and sheeple. The first third of the film dealt with quantum superposition. The second part had an awesome animation sequence to describe how we are basically slaves to the chemicals. A pumping hypothalmus, blobs of cells with neural receptors and emotions and rock music. The last part went off the deep end and added the mystics in with the mix. bah. The movie was about a woman dealing with her disgruntled life with cutaways of interviews with scientists and mystics. So in the end once we've figured out quantum physics, the chemical nature of emotions and all of it's possibilities it's only a short leap to mysticism and the magic wands of how we can change our environment. Mostly the power of positive thinking. It was fun ride though, a worthy bit torrent download if it ever gets out there.

Gregg found this interesting site detailing the movie's subject matter -- Forums

Life in America

craigg75 — Fri, 09 Jan 2004 20:15:00 GMT

So if I wore a button that said "I am a suspected terrorist" how long would it take for me to end up in jail? The truth is we are all suspected terrorists in the eyes of our goverment, no one is innocent. The danger is that we are falling into a 'lusion that it's ok to give up our civil rights such as free expression and privacy to our goverment in the name of “fighting the good fight“. We refuse to use our minds to think through what sets of rules the goverment is feeding us. In the end most of us are sheep and are more than willing to accept brainwashing. Perhaps there are better ways of fighting terrorism other than bullets and strip searches. I read this quote today, seems to express my views on the state of America --

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, (which is) always followed by a dictatorship."

"The average age of the world's greatest civilization has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through this sequence. From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance, from abundance to complacency; from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back into bondage."

So can we stop this seemingly eventual decay that has been playing out for centuries? Perhaps we can. It seems the civilized world suffered through hard times under the fist of kings and god-head rulers for most of it's existence, with the faint glimmerings of the spark of liberty shining every so often -- keeping the fires burning in the hearts of all humans. It does seem that once a new continent (North America) opened up the freedom seekers took flight to it and got rid of the yoke of intolerance. Is this what is needed today? Are we too crowded on Earth to allow social and political experiments to prosper, to rid ourselves of the established ruling order? It seems to me that's the case. Dare I say we as citizens of the rich countries push our goverments (we the people?) to explore the neighboring planets and other places (space stations) that can harbor life? To allow new cultures, societies, ways of thinking a chance to survive and see if it's worthwhile. Maybe space is the final frontier -- the final hope for humankind to finally escape the cogs of history.

Lottery idea

craigg75 — Sun, 21 Dec 2003 16:36:00 GMT

I have an idea to make the lotteries more popular, as if they aren't popular enough. Why not limit the winnings to say $10 million per winner. That should be plenty to live life work free and yet very comfortable. For instance the lottery right now is somewhere around $120 million. Lets say only one person matches all the right numbers. They get the first $10m. The next person with the closest numbers gets the next $10m and so on. In the case of tie breakers, the person closest geographically to the spot where the original winner's ticket was sold wins. In the case of that tiebreaker, the person with the oldest date on their ticket wins. Anyway I think it would get more people to play, especially for the people who say “it's one in a million odds, no way”. If there were 12 guaranteed winners some may change their minds. Still it's a 12 in a million shot I know, but still it's sounds better. We all know how people are intimidated and fooled with numbers... That's another blog topic altogether.