Wow, that week just whizzed on by. How come the older I get, the shorter periods of time seem subjectively when I look back from the present, yet they seem as long as ever while I’m experiencing them?

Beats me, but I bet the answer has something to do with compression. As we get older and add more and more stuff to our mental hard drive, we are forced to compress our memories, and so the “space” between them becomes smaller, and that produces the illusion that times grow shorter all the time.

But then again, what do I know? On with the science!

Where To Get Your Greens

This is one of those ideas that blows your mind, because it is brilliant and totally obvious in retrospect and just makes so much sense.

Why not put hydroponic farms atop supermarkets?

I mean, d’oh! Why not grow the food on the roof? Talk about fresh, local produce! It’s so local, it only moved a hundred feet!

Heck, grab a ladder, you can “pick” it yourself.

I really like this Paul Lightfood guy. He is a man after my own heart, because he has a deep and abiding passion for efficiency, and so do I. I loathe waste. I hate it on a nearly cellular level. To me, efficiency is like a god. It’s how we get the most out of what we have. How we get the most human happiness from the limited amount of source material that we have.

And what could be more important than that?

I also think that people in efficient systems are happier. People in efficient systems can relax and concentrate on their job and not worry about the system, because efficient systems are trustworthy. You never feel like your effort or your contribution is wasted. It all fits into the overall purpose and it does so in a way that makes you feel like everything you do counts.

And you know what, Paul is right. Food is not grown primarily for flavour. It’s grown to stand up to shipping first, and to look good second, and to be cheap third. Flavour is maybe fourth, or in a tie for fourth with nutrition maybe.

Think of what you could do if you were growing the food right where it was being sold. We could all have the European Old World model, where the food you buy is so fresh, it was alive the morning you ate it.

It’s just so damned brilliant.

A Warm Little Robot

This little project really caught my eye, mostly because I see it as having enormous potential that maybe the inventors don’t see themselves.

It’s all about a little black box on wheels.

Inside this black box, at the heart of its operation, is a phase-change heat storage system that lets the little black box store heat and then radiate later.

Pretty cool, huh? But wait, there is so much more.

Because also inside this little black box is an infrared sensor and some smart programming to allow this little black box to use its wheels and go around looking for heat to absorb.

So imagine this little black box scooting about looking for heat to absorb, maybe soaking up some warmth from the back of your refrigerator, or that one lamp that still has the old fashioned hot light bulbs in it, or even curling up in the sunshine like a cat.

And it does this all day…. then when you get home, it finds you, and shares all the warmth it has gathered for you!

I tell ya, if you can take that and make it look cute, preferably with some kind of cute fuzzy animal motif, it would make the emotional connections people make with their Roombas look like a passing infatuation. Imagine an adorable robot animal that wants to make you warm, and spends all day looking for warmth to share with you!

I want one right now, honestly.

The Craziest F**ing Thing….

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you about the craziest fucking thing I have seen lately.

This mad genius, Garnet Hertz, took an original Outrun full cabinet (if you played the game in the standup version, you were robbed) and modified it by mating it with a golf cart and turned it into a driving game you can drive.

What’s more, he also caught some major augmented reality vibes and made it so, via two cameras and some pretty nifty code, the road ahead of you is turned into Outrun graphics right there on the video game’s screen. You can truly drive the world as if you were playing Outrun!

Now, I have never liked driving games. They bore me and I am not that good at them. I really don’t feel motivated to win races. I want to save the world, not win some stupid rally.

But I tried the full Outrun back in the day, and it impressed even me with how visceral the experience was and how much that drew me into the game. I actually played the game more than a few times, which for me is very unusual, especially for a racing game without missile launchers.

(What can I say, I am better at combat that speed. )

So Outrun was already cool in my books…. but to take the gamer’s dream of taking the thing on the road and make it real is just beyond amazing.

I am sincere when I say I find this sort of thing beautiful. To me, making this thing is the epitome of art, because it’s a crazy idea turned into magnificent reality, a dream come true of epic proportions.

Now I am trying to think of what old arcade game I would like to see realized like this. A lot of the games I loved involved martial arts, and those are already more or less real.

I mean, nobody can really throw a hadoken, but still.

I sure as hell wouldn’t want to see real world Gauntlet. Too disturbing. And a lot of those old games, in the pre-genre days, were really messed up. Burger Time? Make Traxx? No thank you!

I give up. My games are all too disturbing to realize.

Although if someone figures out the hadoken thing, tell me, I want one.