Longshot City

I’d like to have an iPhone and an iTouch that are “married” and work together in a certain way:

They look alike and work alike, but only the iPhone is the real thing.  The iTouch is just a “dumb terminal” and doesn’t “know” or “do” anything on its own.  In electronics parlance, the iPhone the “master” and the iTouch is the “slave”, communicating with the iPhone over Bluetooth such that:

• Its screen looks exactly like the iPhone’s screen
• Pushing its button also pushes the iPhone’s button
• Touching its screen also touches the iPhone’s screen
• Talking into its microphone also talks into the iPhone’s microphone
• Its speaker plays what’s coming out of the iPhone’s speaker

So it’s a glorified clone, really.  This way I could take notes, look things up, etc., while talking to someone on my iPhone.  I probably wouldn’t even need to know which is which.

(As for which microphone to listen to on a phone call, it would probably just go with whichever device I pushed “answer” on.)

I know that Steve Wozniak has two iPhones, so that he can do nearly exactly this, but of course it means two different AT&T accounts and having to somehow sync them all the time.  ‘Which isn’t horrible, but it’s not super-slick like this could be.

…

(Come to think of it, this would be much more doable on Android.)

Because clothes shopping sucks.  It really does.

Behold: Trunk Club

You (and The Mrs.) talk to homegirl over the telephone/Skype/email.  A big box of clothes arrives.  You keep (and therefore purchase) the pieces you want and return the rest with the pre-paid Fedex sticker.

Booya.  All it takes is money.

Shipping containers are quite the impressive invention.  Read the book and see what I mean.  They let us pick up 40-ton objects and put them down nearly anywhere on the earth, which such ease that Alexander the Great’s head would explode with envy.

And they look so simple, too.   What’s left?  How could someone possibly improve on the system in any way?

Well to start, feast your eyes on the CakeBoxx container design (website, video) that has no doors at all, but rather has/is a giant lid that fits over a base. 

Advantages include:

• Killer-strong/more-stackable, because it’s metal all around (no doors)
• Easier to inspect, because you can see everything, from all sides, right away
• More secure, because A) it takes a lot more equipment just to get into one, and B) it’s more difficult to replace the serial-numbered tags/seals/thingies that hold the lid down (as opposed to simply cutting the hinges off a regular container and then replacing them, with the lock still on no less!)

Wow.  ‘Wish I’d thought of that one.  Maybe next time I will.

Next, I must admit that I found very impressive the Hammar 195S (video) automated container trailer for semi trucks.  It loads and inloads itself, picking the continer up and putting it back down again, without needing someone else to show up with a crane at either end.

What next, I ask you?!

—————-

(I, for one, am holding out for something like the Hammar trailer, but more articulated and complex, so that I can build container-frame baby houses that can then be set atop concrete pillars on hillsides, without having to excavate much at all.)

(And/or actually straddling two-lane streets.)

(Etc.)

A few years ago, on a whim, I picked up a copy of Sex, Time and Power at the used bookstore (I think mainly because it had a naked lady on the cover, which of course is perfect ;)).

I took it home, shelved it, and never touched it again.  Last weekend, though, I moved to my awesome new apartment (well, as awesome as it can be when full of cardboard boxes), and while unpacking I of course had to pick it up again and remember that I had it.

This time I opened it up.  It’s rocking my world.  I won’t finish unpacking for a while.

Imagine hybridizing Wild at Heart with Double Your Dating and then running it through the scientific analytical wringer.  It’s written by an MD who’s also an (avid amateur) anthropologist.  He’s the same fellow as who wrote The Goddess Versus the Alphabet, which explores the phenomenon of ancient cultures tending to have stopped worshiping goddesses around the same time when they discovered writing.

It all started when he was in medical school and essentially asked:

“What the heck is up with this monthly menstrual bleeding business?

Not one other species does it, so why would homo sapiens [or “gyna sapiens”] evolve to start doing it?  Blood is “expensive” because it requires animal iron to replace, as our guts are nearly unable to get iron from plants.  That and predators can smell blood from a mile away.

So how exactly is this advantageous?”

It snowballs from there.  The book is two inches thick, and I’m only a quarter-inch into it, so I can only review its “build-up”, not its conclusions.

One of its angles is to contemplate the fact that human females are the first in natural history to understand that sex leads to pregnancy, which also just so happens to be far more dangerous and deadly for them than for any other species.  It has to do with the fact that human babies, evolutionarily speaking, “want” the biggest brains and heads that they can possibly get, which unfortunately also causes them to more severely wound their mothers during delivery, sometimes fatally.

Big-headed babies, even those that occasionally killed their mothers, were still an evolutionarily-advantageous “good deal” for the species in the aggregate.  Things got way more complicated, though, when women’s brains were also big enough to consciously connect the dots: sex -> pregnancy -> possible injury or death.

Even salamanders understand that death bad, so what’s a species to do when each of its females has a damned good reason to avoid reproducing?

Some clues:

To start, human females also happen to have the strongest ability to willfully say “no” to sex, even when fertile.  They also have more-than-typical interest in sex when they’re not fertile.  And finally, they’re the first to not even know when they’re fertile in the first place.

Etc, etc.  The rabbit hole just keeps on going.

The Grand Unifying Theory that explains it all comes later, or at least I sure hope it does.  For now, all I have is this excellent meta-argument that an extremely important (perhaps the defining) evolutionary crisis for our species was endured and solved solely on the female side of the family.  Us menfolk have been reacting to it even since.

Perfect timing.

First, there’s International Women’s Day a week or so ago.

Men…

• are most of the prison population
• are most of the homeless population
• commit suicide more
• die on the job more
• get overwhelmingly killed more in wars that women also vote for, yet are never drafted (by law or by poverty) to fight
• have less access to higher education
• die younger (unlike in 1920 when life expectancies were the same)
• have less average net worth
• sometimes get a bad hand and have to pay child support to women who elect to no-fault divorce them and use the legal system to deprive them of child custody and visitation

One of the Women’s Day demonstrators had a sign that read “How long until women have equality?” and I’ve rarely been so angry.  I was a Good Boy, though, and didn’t say anything (“man fail!”).

Then, I recently finished listening to a (3-hour!) interview of Warren Farrel, author of The Myth of Male Power.  He was once on the board for the National Organization for Women, but got kicked out when he started turning the same how-is-a-group-used-by-the-culture analysis on men’s lives as well as women’s.

Then, I re-read Is There Anything Good about Men, another take on essentially the same subject.  One of its key points is that men are every (remaining) culture’s biggest winners and biggest losers, and it elaborates on why that is, especially from the perspective of evolutionary theory.

Essentially: To grow a population, a group needs all the women it can, but only a few men.  Therefore there’s always a “penile surplus” of men who, as the economics shake out, are ready for starting companies, fighting wars, curing diseases, starting movements, and all kinds of ambitious and risky stuff that usually ends in anonymity and oblivion, but Mad Success (riches, women and offspring) for those who succeed.  It’s those men that we’re descended from.

Roughly 80% of all the women who have ever lived have reproduced.  Only 40% of all men have.  Most men in world history have died childless and presumably single.

…

And then, I noticed that I just love the movie preview for Fast Five, about a group of crooks (eight men and one woman) who get together in Brazil to pull a heist and steal $100M from a police station.

• Men doing incredibly risky stuff for a shot at incredible rewards
• Men brutalizing each other in the competition for said resources
• (The portrayal of) young women holding themselves out as prizes to the victor, uninterested in who in particular that victor ends up being

“Chances are we’re going to end up in jail or buried in a ditch somewhere…  but not today!” –Vin Diesel

Man.  How sucker can I be?  How far does the rabbit hole go, exactly?

All right all right I give!

For one, he’s smart and hardworking.

And second, he’s really sweet to little kids.

So cut the grumpiness and give it up!

Here’s something I’m having a great time with and recommend to everybody:

http://stereopsis.com/flux/

The theory is that we’re only “designed” to see blue-color light during the day, before sunset, because the sun is the only source of blue light in nature, as opposed to sunsets, campfires, etc.  Also, according to The Scientists, blue is the last color that animals evolved the ability to see, and also the hardest to focus on.  FYI, red was the first color that animals evolved the ability to see beyond black-and-white because that’s the color of blood, ripe berries and whatnot.  Doggies are still like this.

Anyway, the problem is that computers don’t know what time it is and keep blasting out the blue light well into the night.  This makes it hard to sleep because your eyes are telling your brain/hormones that it’s still noon.

(Note how ambient-lit devices like Amazon Kindles dodge this problem because they don’t put out any light of their own.)

This utility fixes that.  It knows where you are geographically, and you tell it what kind of lighting you have inside your place.  It then fiddles with your colors to make the screen “match up”.  So for me, with tungsten lights at home, past sunset the screen looks yellowish/reddish, making it surprisingly easy to look at.

I, for one, dig it like crazy, because it makes it much easier to go to sleep after looking at the MacBook at night.  In two or three years I expect all iPhones, iPads and Macs to do this natively.

(Act like you know.)

The “RSA” is the Royal Society for (the Encouragement of) the Arts, and the “RSA Animate” series are these 10-minute hand-drawn YouTube animations about some very important academic work going on, in the past but also right now.  Thanks to our Limey counterparts for bankrolling them.

Start with The Empathic Civilization, and the rest are all linked-to from there.

It’s 11pm and I just can’t stop watching these.

This probably sounds horrible of me, but I have this “problem”:

I got this bitchin’ new Crock Pot that will let me actually prepare actual decent food for me and 1-4 other people.

But, it is the acquisition of these people that makes this complicated.

That is, I have a list of friends who I appreciate and admire who I’d like to invite to evening X, but I’m not actually very picky about WHICH 1-4 of them show up.

Ergo, I’d appreciate some sort of service or convention/method for how one invites N people to something, and takes the first M to respond and commit.

Eh?