The Adventures of Flyshack +1: 2009

Friday, April 24, 2009

Breakthrough Engineering

Wouldn't "Breakthrough Engineering" be a great name for an engineering consulting firm?

The idea would be: get a bunch of really smart engineers together who would work on technologies that are "10 years away" and try to overcome the barriers keeping them from being scaled up.

Take superconductors, for example. If we had a national grid made out of superconductors, we'd have a much better grid. In fact, if we don't one day have such a high volume grid, we probably will start experiencing lots of problems pretty soon. More blackouts, expensive electricity.. you get the picture.

Same thing goes for ultracapacitors. If they existed, oh man. Electric cars would be the norm, and they would be cheap, too. The world would be a better place for sure.

Now why, do you ask, would it be better to have a firm full of engineers working on these problems? After all, aren't there already companies trying to do this? Aren't the people who know these technologies the ones best suited to think of solutions?

I'd say: not necessarily. In the same way that management consultants are able to often see how to run a business better than people who may have been running that business their entire lives, a team of exceptionally smart engineers might be able to see solutions that the people who have been scratching their heads for years did not.

Also, from a practicality standpoint, no technology company can afford to hire a think tank full of engineers. Each has its own team, but they have to also hire technicians, accountants, lawyers... what if they could just outsource the brains of the operation to a group of really smart people whose sole job it is to be the brains?

I wonder if this exists already, I just don't know about it.

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

IKEA

I really like this song. It's called IKEA by Jonathan Coulton.

I've never heard of Jonathan Coulton before, but this song keeps coming up on Pandora, and I love it. The tune is good, the lyrics are funny and about something other than love or angst. They are about IKEA.

Pandora probably chose this song because I told her I liked TMBG. But although I like TMBG, this is different in a way. The humor is more overt, and the tongue-in-cheek comes in one layer. TMBG takes some getting used to; this doesn't.

I think

I've discovered a quick little trick that automatically makes my writing better.

Any time I catch myself writing the words "I think", I just delete them. I learned this trick in high school, when we were instructed to never write "I think", especially in an argumentative essay. You don't write it because it's implicit that this is what you think.

Nothing profound here. Just a handy little rule of thumb.

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Bad Sign

There's a cool website called Midomi, where you can hum a tune and see what songs have that tune.

I tried it out on a tune that I wrote recently. I find it catchy and I like it a lot. The good news is that it doesn't appear to be a rip off of anything else, so I can go forward with it. The bad news is that the music it apparently sounds the most like is Hillary Duff and Hanna Montana.

That gets to me.

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

The ABCs Of My Internet (Courtesy of Google Chrome)

For those of you who still use IE or Firefox: When one types into Google Chrome's search bar, the browser automatically tries to help you find what you are looking for, based on your browsing history. Even a single letter will prompt a suggestion.

Here is what Google Chrome suggests for me, letter by letter.

A is for amazon

B is for better place

C is for chicago climate index

D is for diigo

E is for ebay

F is for fdu (unclear why...)

G is for google (duh)

H is for hulu

I is for google images

J is for janglo

K is for keytar inc