dessalles

Just got back from Norwell, Massachusetts, where I spent the first half of this week on business, as it were. Norwell is just south of Boston in case you’re wondering. Norwell is also just south of the only city whose nearness to my person exhibits direct correlation to my irritability. So I was in no way looking forward to spending any time in Boston’s sprawl; and the crappy hotel, watery hotel coffee and spine-bending hotel pillows in no way enriched my visit. The train ride there and back was nice though - lots of leg room, food car and all. We need more trains. There’s still something very space-agey about traveling overland at high speeds while standing - sitting is for stillness, not moving about.

The hotel in Norwell did have one thing going for it…

Apologies for the blurry cameraphone pics, but your eyes don’t deceive you my friend. That is, in fact, a pizza vending machine. And for three dollars you don’t end up with a frozen pizza, but a “Hot, Brown and Crisp” one. I suppose the interaction design insight is to note the “How It Works” sign and the screen that gives those accustomed to instant vending something to stare for a couple minutes.

I could get into a discussion about seamfulness vs seamlessness, or something of the sort, but to be honest, I haven’t the energy. Maybe some other time. The pizza was neither crispy nor brown, by the way.

Matt Webb, whose questions I seem to like responding to, asks:

Satellites are very tall towers used for telecommunications. Are there any other profitable uses of space, or is that it?

Reading Nicholas Carr’s recent article for the FT, I’m now fairly certain the answer to Matt’s question is data centers - solar-powered, orbital data centers. The technology to beam the data back down to surface is already floating up there. No reason to waste football-fields worth of precious land to store all this crap; most of it’s spam and pornography anyway. And I’m sure our atmosphere is better off without all the heat these data centers produce. Everybody wins.

Watched the MythBusters fly a plane off a moving tarp last night. Sort of underwhelming. I’m always surprised with what an awful job people do of explaining this problem. There are two approaches I usually take when trying to convince a non-believer. The first requires some rephrasing:

Imagine a plane coming in for a landing on a conveyor belt running at the same speed as the plane but in the opposite direction. And instead of cutting off the plane’s propellers when the wheels touch down, the pilot maintains the plane’s speed. Would the conveyor belt stop the plane?

My other explanation takes a reductionist approach:

Rather than worry about whether or not the plane takes off, think about whether the plane would move forward. And rather than worry about whether the plane would move forward, think about how the plane would move backwards if the propellers were off. Would the plane travel backwards at the same speed as the conveyor belt ? Or would the wheels start to spin out underneath it?

One of the two usually works. Oh, and go Giants.