1. Plastic packaging
2. TVs left on for cats
3. Washing machine loads with one piece of clothing in them
4. Transportation of iceberg lettuce
5. Failing to share our power drills with each other
6. Ski-Doos
7. Packaging and moving bottled water and other water-like beverages around the world
8. Excessive retail air conditioning
9. Empty plastic bottles
10. Keeping office buildings lit all night
11. Keeping soy milk cold in the supermarket
12. Incandescent light bulbs
13. Pop radio
14. Endless summer trust fund jet-setting
15. Really really long limousines
16. Fuel for driving places I could walk or bike to
17. Dry cleaning
18. Clothes to replace clothes thrown away prematurely
19. Production of clothes that are never worn
20. Moving inedible corn around
21. Making inedible corn edible by cows
22. Making antibiotics to keep cows alive while they eat inedible corn instead of grass
23. Printing of credit card bills
24. Plastic picnic utensils
25. Manufacture of second, third, fourth, and fifth vehicles per family
26. Mass mailings
27. Ego SUVs
28. Billboard production and installation
29. Cathode Ray Tubes
30. Heated outdoor malls in cold climates
31. Military-industrial complex
32. The old desktop computer that is now your personal MP3 and printer server in the corner, which you named after some Magic: The Gathering creature back in 1997.
33. Computers used for illegal wiretapping
34. Production and shipment of CDs
35. Electric treadmills
36. Inefficient motor vehicle production
37. State control
38. Hosting resources for www.godhatesfags.com
39. Growth and long-distance shipment of mealy pears
40. Refrigeration of mealy pears before being tossed
41. Gasoline Fights ala Zoolander
42. Everyone’s DVD players, while in “Standby”
43. Manufacture and installation of tree wraps
44. Clothes dryers on sunny days
45. Spam
46. Go Karts
47. The machine that adds red food coloring to “farm fresh” salmon feed
48. Production of non-refillable pens
49. Electric toothbrushes
50. All the bread heel slices that never get eaten
51. Synthetic fertilizer production and distribution
52. Conditioner
53. Gasoline required to move the junk in your trunk everywhere
54. Dreams we can’t remember
55. Sidewalkless cul-de-sac hyperindividualistic everything
56. Leaf blowers
57. Nervous fixing of hair
58. Torture devices
59. Internet censorwalls
60. Those new wipes that they’re trying to replace toilet paper with
61. Compact Discs
62. Doilies
63. Oracle
64. Supermarket rewards cards
65. Teflon pans

Daniel pointed me to current.tv today, which I’d seen a few months ago when Al Gore announced it. Now it’s live. A great concept, well executed. It makes me wonder where the ideal point is on the spectrum between pure, direct democracy and more representational democracy. YouTube is pure, Current TV is just slightly more representational. Reddit is pure (or “self-representational” with collaborative filtering?), Google News is radically representational. The user base toward the pure end is really transparent! YouTube is so clearly focused on teenagers, either because it is marketed to teenagers, or because teenagers are the ones pushing on the edge of video right now, or because it just happened to hit upon something that teenagers had wanted: a place for laughter in dark times. They’re certainly addressing more than one need. Then there is Reddit, with its tech focus. Reddit has grown up around geek culture in a lot of ways, so it’s targeting geeks both implicitly and explicitly (though not as explicitly as, say, Slashdot).

Are better forms of government possibly emerging from all this technology? Imagine a congress consisting of everyone in the country, bills voted on by everyone, with collaborative filtering so you only see bills or parts of bills that matter to you.

This is from a few months back, I just forgot to post it.

I’ve just finished reading Eat Here by Brian Halweil, a manifesto on the benefits of locally grown and processed food. It’s an inspiring book and has gotten me excited about how food gets to the right tables. Our current system seems to trade labor costs for transportation costs: get cheap labor on a huge, highly mechanized farm in Mexico, then pay to move the harvest a few thousand miles. My favorite statistic from the book: with this system, you get about 10% of the calories from eating the food vs. calories required to move the food. In a way, we are just moving lots of water around the world.

On the other side of the spectrum are CSAs, local cooperatives, etc. It’s a good system but it’s very fragmented and doesn’t feel optimal to me. So I want to work on this problem of getting local food to local tables.

Do you think urban gardening, on many small plots across the city, could be scaled up to yield a substantial amount of local produce (enough for a profit), if the logistics were greased with a bit of technology? Peer-to-peer gardening? I’m thinking of a system that connects land owners who have extra yard/roof space—and no desire to garden—with nearby stewards who love to garden but have no land. Stewards ride/walk/run to gardens on sunny days after work, getting exercise and doing what they love in exchange for some produce. Land owners are paid in cash, produce, and/or the beauty of a garden where a pile of dirt once was. Old folks who used to garden, but don’t have the energy for it anymore, might love to see some tomatoes growing in their yard again.

This is truly local food: The bulk of the urban harvest goes out to farmer’s markets and restaurants, if that’s the easiest route to the table. This is probably the hardest problem: knowing when things are ripe, and gathering and selling them quickly. The problem is made harder if the gardens are biodynamic, because you can’t just say "go pick all cabbage plots." How would crop distribution across gardens allow you to minimize the number of gardens visited in a given week? Gardens with a few vegetables that ripen around the same time vs. 12 that ripen over different times might be easier to manage.

I think the stewards and landowners could coordinate some things online, but getting soil and seed, and doing the prep work each season and for each new garden would take a lot of time and up-front capital. Each garden would have to be pretty standardized—which is why I like the Square Foot Gardening approach: it has high yield, it doesn’t depend on existing soil quality (BYO soil), it requires fewer tools, and it’s modular and scalable across many different garden sizes.

Crop loss via theft, drought, and negligence would have to be absorbed somehow. Supermarkets get by with 5% shrinkage so this isn’t a huge concern when the garden network is big.

Other concerns: liability and accessibility for rooftops, raccoons and other collateral nuisances, having "steward capacity" for coverage while other stewards are on vacation, how to process excess yield—ideally, a local canning facility. OK, this is a huge project and one could spend a lifetime on it.

Your thoughts?

I was registering a domain yesterday and I decided to have a look at register.com’s Service Agreement. Halfway down the page I found this:

You acknowledge and agree that Register.com may suspend, cancel, transfer or modify your use of the Services at any time, for any reason, in Register.com’s sole discretion and without notice to you.

So, they can just take your domain name from you at anytime. Your whole business is in their hands. Doesn’t this seem a bit intrusive?

I went to Network Solutions and read theirs as well. They don’t have such a clause, as far as I could tell. They give themselves a 30 day period after you register a domain, during which they can cancel it. And they list a handful of legitimate reasons for service termination after 30 days. Needless to say I ended up with Network Solutions.

But it got me thinking. Someone needs to take the lead of Creative Commons and create human-readable summaries of service agreements, so people can readily asses the legal burden of a service agreement. I think clear summaries, highlighting differences between competitors, could really help hold these companies accountable for heavily lopsided service agreements.

I would not typically post an ad on my blog, but this one is absolutely spell-binding.

It plays in iTunes/Quicktime.

I think we’re seeing a resurgence of grassroots culture and crafty local commerce among popular/youth culture. Witness: Stitch ‘n Bitch and the new knitting kids, Whole Foods Market’s big boom, due at least partly to a broad interest in locally made, handmade, artisan foods. How do you account for the recent popularity of geeks, who, if I do say so myself, are often the craftiest among us? What about the do-it-yourself reporting of Indymedia? Or Readymade? Or make-your-own-encyclopedia, design-your-own-coffee-mug, etc.

Is a new barter culture emerging around all this, as well? Witness Bazaar Bizarre, formerly known as the punk rock craft fair.

Is this globalization backlash? Or is it more social: are we trying to connect with each other again amid all the imported goods?

Is it merely the next level of American individuality?

Everyone says we are overworked, but maybe they’re wrong; maybe we do have more free time, and we’re not using it to play video games, not all of it anyway. Maybe we’re finally seeing that time-saving technology advances have led us to a place where we can all persue the hobbies we desire? You may not want to work in a knitting factory, but a little knitting on the side would hit the spot.

What a luxury.

www.1000journals.com

Someone had the idea last night to create a new political party: the sex party. Use sex to make local, state, federal, and international disputes dissolve in a sea of passion. So many coutries are already in bed with each other in the metaphorical sense, why not take it all the way?

Gives new meaning to International Relations.

Other party ideas that came up:
the sports party (everything can be resolved— with a series of soccer games)
the gambling party (let a coin toss decide our nation’s most controversial issues)

Getting photographs out of the more tumultuous parts of this world has always been a challenge. Steve McCurry tells stories of sewing film canisters into his clothing in preparation for the Afghanistan border crossing. Beyond that, equipment theft, weather, and of course warfare can all keep the film from ever returning (not to mention the photographer).

How about an SLR camera with a digital sat phone back? All images are sent out through the phone as they’re taken. No film, nothing to hide… just this little camera with a big-ass phone attached to it.

On my half-time restricted budget, I’m not going to buy a lot of books. So I visited the main branch of the Somerville Public Library today and it gave me an idea for an open source movement.

The movement is called “Open Source Design”, and here’s how it works. Open Source Design sets out standards for design among public buildings and small businesses. It is free and can be adopted in part or whole.

It’s up to the city (or business) to deal with the specifics of implementation, but Open Source Design should be versatile enough to handle most situations.

It may provide:

• Guidelines for usability in public buildings. The guidelines should address common usability issues in libraries, schools, city and town halls, the parking office, the DMV, and so on. Ultimately, they provide clear, consistent, usable design across city government buildings, documents, and web sites. The challenge of this project is that it’s both technical and design-related. And cities have no money… which leads me to:
  
• Low- or no-cost solutions for usability: signage, informational sheets (sheets for rules, recycling guidelines, public contracts (think Creative Commons)
  
• An archive of successful building designs to draw from.
  

This is perhaps similar to the Chinese Restaurant Kit. That’s my name for the standardized kit of signs and menus used by many take-out Chinese restaurants. These restaurants are not part of the same chain, but they have purchased the same menu system, the same photograph of General Tso’s Chicken, and so on.

The double-edged sword here is that design and open source are in conflict. Design is best when overseen by one person (“the visionary”), in my opinion. Have we figured out how to facilitate the design process over the Internet? Most open source software demonstrates that we haven’t. If we can’t design open source interfaces as well as Apple, why bother having a branch of open source for “design”?

But there are a few open source projects that have good interfaces. I think you’d find that the interface, or the entire project, was primarily created by one or two people. Other projects with decent interfaces will either copy a commercially available option (eg. OpenOffice.org), or they have a well-defined standard to go by (eg. Mozilla— “to start, it should look and feel like IE”). I want to look into this in more detail: What other OSS projects have excellent interfaces, and why?

Of course, you could also do Open Source Design for profit, or as a public outreach branch of a profitable design firm.

I talked to a few people about this gaming table so far.. and it has spiraled out of control. In a good way.

A highlight of my trip to Europe in 2000 was a meal I had with a complete stranger in Paris. I wandered into a restaurant alone, and I asked the hostess the only French phrase I knew. The answer was no, so I stood there for a minute. Tried to gesture at a menu. Someone came up to me and said something, so I asked if he spoke English. And indeed he did. He asked if I’d like to have dinner with him, and I said sure. I realized that this was a custom that simply doesn’t exist in America. We had a great meal and I thought, why don’t they do this stateside?

So American café culture could be friendlier. And short of changing the culture, maybe this digital gaming table could add much needed glue.

Anyway, my cousin Ethan had a number of valuable suggestions. The most important: start with the need to be addressed by the users. Of course, this is the bedrock of usability. So, from the point of view of the users, this table could:

• act as an ice breaker in a cafe (there’s always someone you’d like to meet, isn’t there?), then give people who just met something to do together so they can cultivate their relationship a little.
  
• give bored people something to do while they sip their coffee
  
• provide entertainment for passive observers of the game in progress
  
• give people a place to go when they want to play a game

And of course, all of these points help the sale of coffee. Bring people in and keep them around longer.

Anyway, I’ve always liked looking at what the user will experience. It’s also interesting to see what happens when you put something out there. Inevitably, people will not use it exactly as you expect, but their usage patterns will always hint at what might be needed.

The community part is the most promising, in my mind, and it’s also closer to chess and scrabble than to Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4. I thought of the Au Bon Pain in Harvard Square, with its famous chess boards. There’s always a bustle of community activity around those tables, and that’s a good sign. So going along those lines of community games, Ethan and I did a couple minutes of brainstorming. I told him about Audiopad’s interface, and he talked about an exhibition at the SFMOMA that was similar. Radio/magnetic pucks that relayed location information and therefore acted as controls for the interface, combined with an LCD projector aimed at the table from above.

We also talked about having a large central screen, viewable by all participants, which showed progress of the current game(s). The simplest form would show scores and some other interesting bits to draw people in, but I think it gets more exciting if you see the central screen as a key element in the game itself. For example, Bingo or Keno, where you have your own card and you watch the screen for results. OK, those aren’t games, but you get the idea. Take that notion and add the digital gaming table to it, so now you have the micro-game and the macro-game. The four people at my table can help build scrabble words together and place them on the big board.

When I told this all to Todd tonight, he said “I’d love to play Risk like that: Germany and its resources are on my table, and the big board shows the whole world.” The micro-macro possibilities here are v. cool. So I think the big board should be a big part of this project.

Speaking with Daniel last night about video games. He enjoyed this article in the Sunday Times about Atari, its new leadership and funding, and the future of video games.

They say the future is bright for video games. I thought so back when I was 8 years old, playing Buck Rogers on my grandfather’s ColecoVision system. And I felt it again when I first played SSX 3 for The Playstation 2 last week.

Anyway, Daniel was speaking of ethics in video games, about how it’s all shooting things and blowing things up, and that maybe it’s time for some reform here. I don’t have children, so I don’t give a fuck, but lets presume that there is some sort of moral or ethical issue here, and the violence must end, and maybe we should be teaching something other than hand-eye coördination and how to obliterate the enemy.

Keeping that in mind, take a look at the typical video game system and its controller. The basic controller affords movement with the joystick (of your piece, or you, or your ship) and a few other actions (blow things up, accelerate, punch stuff, etc). It’s an elegant interface, but I think it limits the kinds of video games created.

My friends who play online RPG/strategy games (like Ultima Online) strongly prefer the keyboard and mouse over any other game controller because there’s a vast number of commands and modes in RPG games. So I think the gaming industry needs to augment the current platform with something that goes a little beyond the simple controller plus buttons we’ve used since the 80s. It’s time for a new interface.

Lets step back and look at the whole system, not just the controller, in an effort to get away from the status quo. One problem with current-day video game systems is that they make no attempt to bring players into eye contact with each other. In a 3 player video game, everyone stares at the screen and shoots wildly. If it’s a collaborative game, there may be some conversation about strategy, but otherwise it’s pretty much devoid of direct personal interaction.

I’d like to create a video game that isn’t time-limited and that involves eye direct contact between players. Something more like Chess or Scrabble—the kind of game you’d be comfortable playing with friends in a coffee shop.

Enter the digital gaming table. The initial model would have two “controllers” and a built-in flat panel (the table top). The controllers might have their own display (for Scrabble, card games, etc). I envision an interface that is solely about direct manipulation, so probably a touch screen or two is involved. Slide your finger across the table to move something, etc.

What I’d like to do next is start building a table and devloping game ideas simultaneously. I think the table should have a general enough interface to allow for a number of traditional board/card games (1-4 players), so development can work in parallel.

Do you have any ideas about the interface? That’s the biggest challenge, I think. Here are the requiprements:
- allow for games where each player has a private “hand.”
- facilitate direct manipulation of “pieces” if possible.
- keep the table surface flat, so it’s usable for reading the newspaper and drinking coffee, but keep the interface easy to get to when it’s needed.
- avoid cords if possible
- the touch screen either needs to be REALLY sturdy or kept away from the table top.
- is it possible to make a glass top table with a touch screen somehow built into the glass?
- the game board itself -could- be displayed via an LCD projector directly above the table.
- inspiration might come from Audiopad, though I don’t like little radio sensors that can get lost/stolen/eaten/broken.

There will be more to come on this topic…

Here are some of the freshest ideas I’ve had. Just need somewhere to put them for now, so why not here:

Connect a computer up to a digital projector, and place it in parallel with a standard movie projector in a theater. The computer displays only a little sliver of something, set just above or below the movie projector’s image on the screen. What would it display?

- “pop-up video”-style trivia.
- synchronized subtitled director’s commentary
- real-time text messages sent in by the audience
- current sports scores, during sports season
- breaking news, as needed (“WE GOT HIM”?)

OK, all my ideas for the content are kind of whacky, but I think this has potential if one were to mull on it further. What I like about it is that every viewing of the movie could be different. No two audiences will have the same experience. I also like the idea of some form of audience participation, turning a movie into a performance.

A photo of storefronts without signs (photoshopped out), preferably a strip mall
juxtapozed with photo of beautiful old retail architecture (see harvard design school book)

Japanese Vacation Photos of America— coffee-table type book. Japanese people are renowed for the quantity of vacation photographs they take. Aren’t you interested in their perspective? I’d go to Japan for research, visit families who have travelled to America. Most pictures would probably be of American landmarks, some with other Japanese people around, the Japanese tour bus, etc.

Celebrity Water Heaters— and other domestic photos. Touring the basements of the stars.

Architecture by Non-Architects— a review of functionally excellent buildings designed by non-architects. I only know of a couple examples off-hand (Tor House, Boston Athanaeum’s facade (?), etc), but this would be a lot of fun to research.

Now that the ski season is going, I see a growing need for WiFi access points out there in the wilderness, or at least at the base lodge. I was yearning for this last year when I broke my wrist and sat in the lodge all day with my laptop. I’d love a little timed-use internet access with my hot cocoa in the lodge. This is especialy true for places like Smuggs, who already have a huge hotel at the bottom of the mountain.

Victoria’s Secret meets Virgin Megastore as a sex shop— tall ceilings, open plan, escalators, plasma TVs, big wall-sized color posters, nice light, high end adult products, nice packaging, friendly service. Right on Newbury St. / 5 Av / Michigan Ave / Rodeo Dr.