Longshot City

All right all right.  I hereby declare that I’m getting excited about this “Sleepbox” idea, and more importantly about where it can lead.

You get the idea.

It’s related to Tumbleweed Tiny Houses (which is a running real-deal business, by the way, so props there), only Sleepboxes are much smaller and mass-produced because they’re small enough to transport on trucks and trains.  They’re also more affordable than “houses” because–and this is key–they don’t get rained or snowed on.

OK.  Now.  Notice, if you please, how many of us (well, many of us without children, sigh) are approaching “traveler” status every day.  There’s a growing demographic who own:

• A $2000 Apple laptop
• four changes of clothes
• a bicycle/Vespa

…and access all of their…

• books
• music
• movies
• correspondence
• …and even a portion of their social life via Facebook/G+

…through said $2000 Apple laptop.

OK.

Therefore, my mind is racing toward applying this business model in a more permanent direction:

I see a “marina” of these pre-fabbed baby housing units–most of them obviously imported from China–tastefully arranged over a defunct Suburban parking lot.  Interspersed are some nice ceramic planters with trees, flowers and such.

Parking and storage lockers off to the side, bus/train connections nearby.

In the center are (aggressively-cleaned) facilities for:

• laundry
• bathrooms
• coffee/hanging out
• milk and bananas
• toothpaste and razor blades
• playground

Over the top a geodesic dome roof, steel-frame with clear plastic panels, to keep rain and snow off.

Instant affordable housing, boom boom boom, set up in a month or two, just like that.

Also notice what other business aspects are facilitated by the “Marina” model.  For example: Heterogeneity of design and ownership.  Each individual unit could be owned by any of…

• Its occupant
• A private owner collecting rent
• A bank
• An investment corporation
• A government

Physically, they can vary by…

• source (China, Chicago or Milan)
• design (Kmart, Ikea or custom)
• footprint (kid, adult or couple)

Finally, note that these assets can be picked up and moved to somewhere else, in search of a better deal for their owners, occupants, or both.

All of these cacaphonous factors can help these places fly together quickly.

Of course, someone could instead borrow golden ingots from the Chinese Communist Party and cut them into super-thin slides to build big monotonous blocks of half-million-dollar condos… but who cares?  And besides, for how much longer will such big loans be available from anyone at all?

Hm!

Addendum 1: Trailer parks match this business model quite closely, actually, and I feel rather dumb for not noticing that earlier.  Not exactly the same, but close.

I want a DSLR or point-and-shoot digital camera that automatically, via wifi, uploads every picture it takes to some password-protected web photo database, broken down like by day.

Dangit, doesn’t this exist? ‘The heck!

Your comments and criticism, please:

My new apartment is swell, but my shower is awful.  (And no, I didn’t think to check it before signing the lease.)  Sometimes the water isn’t warm enough and the pressure is so low that it comes out in a trickle.  I can pee more gallons per minute than this shower puts out.  The water doesn’t actually project from the shower head, but runs down it, like a rock getting rained on.

I dig and dig around for a product that does the following, but am surprised to find that it doesn’t appear to exist.

Let’s call it “Mister Shower”.  Mister Shower does the following:

• Sits on the floor, next to the toilet (or wherever)
• T’s off the hot or cold water supply in front of the sink or toilet, using a kit of plumbing adapter-thingies
• Takes in water at a relative trickle at whatever pressure is available
• Heats that water to temperature X, which is set with a dial
• Has a fitting for a flexible shower head hose
• Includes a battery-powered RF dial-thingie pump control that you stick to the wall in the shower stall

So it buffers up water and heat at a precise temperature, and then serves it out in quick blasts.  Whammo.

Finer points:

• Just 2 amps of power is plenty to heat 10 gallons from cold to hot in 12 hours
• Just 100 watts of pumping power is plenty to do 2.5 gallons/minute @ 50psi
• The tank is ambient-pressure, like a toilet tank, so it doesn’t need to be a pressure vessel

Note what it does NOT do:

• Hot/cold water mixing — You set the water temperature and walk away

And that’s it.

Maybe there’s another product “Mister Bathroom” that also has a second output for a sink tap.

Anyway, I’m suddenly enamored with this idea, because it’s exactly what I, a mere plumbing mortal, could buy online, take out of the box, and hook up to solve this shower situation.

What I don’t know is how many other people would care.

Well?  Brilliant or stupid?

Dear Homies, sometimes you just gotta be excitable and shout-out for the heck of it:

I present to you “Foodtubes” (link1 link2).  The idea has legs, for anyone who figures out How to Actually Do It.

Over time, perhaps just this one block of efficiency alone could keep our economy from tanking.  This is why I care.

Aside: And why do enthusiastic engineers have to have such absolute-complete-utter-shit copy-and-paste-only communication skills?  I mean really, it’s embarrassing.

The idea is an “internet of stuff”: a network of plastic pipelines where little capsules boogie around like trained rats, point to point.  Amazon Fresh and UPS boxes full of eBay trinkets are a dead giveaway, for example.

The contents aren’t even packed in cardboard boxes.  Not even that.  Just plastic bags, plunked into the capsules.  No muss no fuss.  Even if it’s ripe tomatoes, they’ll come in capsules with built-in air-inflated packaging, suspended bruise-free like little princesses.  Wha-bam.

It’s hilarious that they illustrate these things coming out of a regular grocery store.  Idiots!  They’d come from an Amazon Fresh warehouse with no windows and inconvenient parking in a crummy neighborhood.  This would be a stick of dynamite to bricks and mortar, and you know this.

Does UPS even need sorting facilities if every parcel is point-to-point?  Exactly.

And for Next Day Air, do the little buggies roll RIGHT up into carbon fiber tubes in the freighter jets like Pringles into a can?  Yes they do.  And disgorge at full speed out the back at the end of the runway after landing?  Exactly.

And likewise into/out of specially-engineered tube-containers dockside for two-dollar UPS Ground to China?  You guessed it.

What’s also brilliant, but also easy to miss, is that it doesn’t carry people, so there’s no one to kill when engineers/programmers mess up, and no one to worry about “The Terrorists” screwing around.

They’re idiots for saying the capsules should be six feet long and three feet wide.  Make it more like a Howitzer shell or A-Fresh box and I’ll believe it.  99% of what I buy can fit into that form factor with a little creativity.  (Could Ikea sell a sofa or coffee table that packs into boxes that big, Your Parents Put it Together?  You bet your butt.)

Also, if they’re nice and small, then no one worries about human trafficking.  That and they’re easy to single-file through automated bomb scanners.  Exactly.

The keys to this will be figuring out:

• The actual pipe, motor and switching technology, like down to the last detail  (Plastic pipe?  Really?  It won’t wear out?)
• How to lay all those damned pipes, like for real (Mad-crazy automation & brilliant interfacing with municipal authorities)
• Whatever mobile networking it takes to let multiple people/groups share a terminal (Your sandwich will arrive in 18 seconds, 17, 16, 15…)
• The micro-UPS business model that “splits out” a terminal to everyone on a city block?
• (Getting it into China without being ripped off.)  (Or rather, accepting getting ripped off and making the best of it.)

And finally, consider that this is an obvious real estate play, which is where the REAL money is, just like with trains 150 and cars 60 years ago:  Apartment buildings and other facilities can be built around this that are on real estate that was OTHERWISE cheap, because it was inaccessible transport-wise.  Work “local”/from-home and you’re set.

And then you can get really crazy, like imagining tanks of clean/waste-water coming and going this way, or compacted slugs of trash or sewage, or whatever, and you can build cities absolutely anywhere.

Interesting.  So I’m using this to imagine a world where smaller-than-a-breadbox stuff flows ultra-freely, easier than today, but bigger things and human bodies are LOCAL.  Hm.  I’ll buy it.

Let the scheming begin!

Act like you know.

(Damn I’m hot today.)

Here’s a Google Maps feature that would be really neat.   It works like this:

1. I put down a pin at some geographic location.
2. I select a time of day (9am, 6pm, etc.)
3. I select a number of minutes (5, 15, 45, etc.)
4. I select a means of transport (car, bicylce, walking, walking+bus/train, etc).

Google Maps then shades in, on the map, everywhere I can travel to at that time of day, within that number of minutes, by that means of transport.

This would be super-great for people moving closer to their new jobs, and would thus nicely tie into Adsense revenue for mortgages, moving companies, etc.

The shapes surely change with the time of day, but I wonder how much.  During rush hour the freeways are slow so the shape is more “blobby”, going out in all directions along side streets.  Late at night, though, freeways are super-fast so the shape “spikes out” along them.  That’s only a guess, though.  I’d love to know how much it really does change, and I bet Google has most of the data already, in some form.

And then how about doing it not by a quantity of minutes, but instead by some general-purpose metric of hassle and frustration (walking/cycling being minuses, and sitting in trafic being plusses, etc).

I should really present some kind of graphical for-example to better convey just what the heck I’m talking about, but here goes anyway.  Furthermore, it’s surely telling that I’m not generating that for-example graphic, because I’m at my day job and have to make this quick.  In fact, that’s actually the whole point of this posting, come to think of it.

I type out technical sentences all day, all the time:

This does it this way, but this other thing is similar but it also does this other thing.  On the other hand, if you use this one instead, it’s like this instead of like that, but the same in these other ways.

Sheesh!

In “one-dimensional” English, these sorts of explanations get long and complicated.  I often worry, surely with some good reason, that people who don’t speak English natively just can’t understand them, no matter how hard I try.

So if I’m always writing on a computer and then hitting “send” or Control-P for print, it gets me to thinking…

…

…that there’s a new graphical “super-grammar” waiting to happen here.

Some way, eventually standardized in a few Control-_’s in Gmail, of structuring these sorts of statements in a more obvious way, surely involving lists, tables, font sizes or even colors.

I’m reminding myself of the “truth tables” that we did in electronics class, which let us state what-if outputs for every possible combination of inputs.

And I say grammar to imply a standard, that you can grade fifth graders for doing correctly or incorrectly, that takes the “graphic designer” style stuff out of it.  Like, pre-sets that are the best practices for how present-day graphic designers (or “information designers,” as Tufte would say) convey these sorts of complex if-then’s and for-each types of relationships, but right there in Gmail or whatever.

What we’re all working with today, like:

• Sentences
• Capitalization
• Paragraphs
• Punctuation
• …and all of that…

… are all throw-backs to the first printing presses 500 years ago(!), which of course could only do left-to-right rows (aka “lines”) of various type blocks, one per symbol.

We can do so much more than that now.  Mind you, bullet-points are a great start, but we can do better.

Hm.