I spend an inordinate amount of time logging into things. I spend extra time forgetting passwords and then logging into various email accounts to recover passwords. It’s so obviously stupid that it will obviously be evolved out of in a generation. But how? What replaces the login? What I’m thinking is smell. I think the computer should smell me, know who I am and let me do my stuff. That is, rather than fingerprinting or whatever, to use a wireless seemingly invisible odortype. I think that’s what the cat does and he’s not insanely smart. Should be possible.

I have always thought that the best architecture is the closest to seeming natural. The ancient Anuradhapura tanks compared to the Dehiwala flyover, for example. This takes it to another level of awesome, however. Scientists in Taiwan have made trees that glow. It’s a stretch, but they could theoretically light streets at night. “By implanting the nanoparticles into Bacopa caroliniana plants, Su was able to induce the chlorophyll in the leaves to produce a red emission… ‘The bio-LED could be used to make roadside trees luminescent at night. This will save energy and absorb CO2 as the bio-LED luminescence will cause the chloroplast to conduct photosynthesis,’ says Su” (Chemistry World). This would be the coolest ever. Nature has, admittedly, been trying to kill us for millions of years, but the pendulum is slowly swinging towards a comfortable harmony with it. Via inhabitat.com.

I’m under the overpass. There’s a motorbike carrying two people and a huge box. Behind that there’s a van carrying one person and nothing. I wonder. Traffic is bad and the more roads you build, the more traffic you get. At some point, somethings got to give. I wonder if there are other ways of thinking about the problem. I’ve often wondered, what if you made cars that were thinner, four people in a row. But that would be odd. What if you made cars that were modular, take one pod out for one person, four for the whole family. Also odd. At this point, also, the investment in current technology means you’d have to clamber down this evolutionary peak to find another one, something that rarely happens. Then I wondered, what if you kept the same technology and just switched road traffic like internet traffic, in packets.

In 2015 Google debuted Intelligent Ants (IA). IA were a set of biologically engineered ants which, following Google’s mantra of ‘Don’t Be Evil’, were finally helpful around the house. Par example: After eating some sausages I left the plate on the counter. In the morning it was swept clean. From there it goes direct into the low-power dishwasher, giving it a perfunctory soap and rinse. I think the sausage ends up in the compost, any errant plastic ends up in the sort, and the ants take 2% for themselves. It’s like AdSense for ants. AntSense. The ants are bred in some intense phenomenal breeding camp in Africa and they arrive here in a gradually edible tin. They eat it across the middle passage and if you just leave it out the thing disappears in a week. Just in time I suppose. You empty them out, they’re African so local ants stay clear, and then they go to work.

There’s an ongoing discussion about what future generations will condemn us for, like we condemn the past for slavery, sexism and racism. Kwame Anthony Appiah says they will judge (Americans) for their prison system, industrialized meat, treatment of the elderly and the environment. Ross Douthat (the NYTimes token Republican) calls this provocation and says future generations will judge us for abortion. It’s an interesting question, though these are somewhat Americentric answers. In the Global South people still practice sexism, racism and even slavery. In predicting the future, Will Wilkinson (the Economist) is probably right to say “we will tend to mount our personal hobby-horses and congratulate ourselves for getting on the right side of history before the right side of history was cool”. But, to mount that hobby horse, I have my own opinion as to what history will condemn us for.

What if your computer knew what you were talking about before you said it? If I’m talking to a friend and they ask for a contact number, what if my smartphone displayed that contact before I even took it out of my pocket? What if a wall screen pulled up relevant info on Shiva during a coffeehouse debate? What if, instead of prepared PowerPoint, a computer displayed relevant images to what the speaker was saying, in real-time? Basically, that would be nice. I was watching The Guild online and I think you can tell from TV how technology should be. And, more likely than not, how it should be is how it will be. In that the Indian is discussing a chat and when he opens his laptop the text of the chat is right there. In reality you’d need to wait 15 seconds for the laptop to wake up, put in the dongle, wait 20 seconds for Internet, wait for the web browser, wait for Gmail, search your chats, etc. By that point the information is conversationally impotent. In the future, however, it won’t be.

Clay Shirky has an interesting article on why complex business models collapse rather than gingerly scale down. Like Sri Pada, it is easier to climb up than climb down. In evolution there is the idea of peaks and valleys in a fitness landscape. That is, one can climb a particular peak and follow that to its logical conclusion. There may, however, be other options in the landscape. Instead of legs we could have evolved some flying apparatus, for example. But it’s too damn late now. If all the land disappeared we wouldn’t have time to climb down from our local peak and climb another one. Plus there is no particular evolutionary mechanism for getting less adaptive, even temporarily. Often you just die.

THIS IS FICTION. Skype Sex was the only thing holding our relationship together. Sadly, it was also tearing us apart. You know how it is, you meet a nice girl from the same gene pool, now expatriated within an inch of its life. And she’s in London. Then you move to London, and she’s in Singapore. It’s like transmetropolitan whack-a-mole, with your dick. That is, of course, until they figured out how to put your dick in the computer, so problem solved. Almost.

They (those magical scientists) have measured quantum effects on a large object. That is, they’ve gotten a small paddle to both vibrate and not vibrate. This is interesting in that quantum physics is weird, but I really dug this quote: “if trillions of atoms can be put into a quantum state, why don’t we see double-decker buses simultaneously stopping and going? Cleland says he believes size does matter: the larger an object, the easier it is for outside forces to disrupt its quantum state. “The environment is this huge, complex thing,” says Cleland. “It’s that interaction with this incredibly complex system that makes the quantum coherence vanish.” It is as if reality really is a consensual hallucination.

I had to go to the loo and I found The Art Of Travel by Alain De Botton, it has worked out quite serendipitously. The first chapter is called ‘On Anticipation’. He quotes an old Dutchman saying ‘I must have been suffering from some mental aberration to have rejected the visions of my obedient imagination and to have believed like any old ninny that it was necessary, interesting and useful to travel abroad.’ So he unpacked his bags and stayed home.