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space age

By anders pearson 04 Jul 2001

i went out to a party in Astoria (that’s in Queens for the non-new yorkers) where the street names are designed to cause confusion (all within a quarter mile of each other are 24th ave, 24th st, 24th rd, and 24th Drv. and the streets go from 21st to 18th in a single block. made trying to find the corner of 19th st and 24th ave fun.)

on the way home, i got to ride on one of the brand new subway cars. i was very impressed. the MTA has finally started to catch up with the rest of the world. aside from being a little cleaner (give it a few weeks and that will change), it looks pretty much like the older cars. but they’ve made a few usability enhancements that were long overdue. on the front of the train, the line number was big and neon so you can see it clearly from farther down the tunnel. inside, there were several LED displays by the ceiling that showed the current and next stop. mostly though, i was impressed with the big display on the wall showing the entire line as a series of labelled lights that would turn off when the train had passed that stop. it allows you to tell at a glance where you are and how many stops you have till you arrive at your destination. the text was large and easy to read from pretty much anywhere in the train (no more stooping and squinting to find yourself on the wall maps that other trains have) and showed what transfers were available at each stop. i’d seen this system before on the subways in Hong Kong and i remember being impressed at how easily i had been able to navigate them my first time. for people who live in new york and know the lines, these are probably pretty minor improvements but they should definately help out people new to the city or who have just never been on a particular line before (i’ve lived in nyc for two years now and there are still plenty of places i haven’t been).

i also noticed that the intercom messages at each stop (you know, “this is the bronx bound number 2 express train. next stop 72nd street. please stand clear of the closing doors.”) had been pre-recorded. it always amazed me that some poor schmucks had the job of mumbling out the same damn thing at every stop for 40 hours a week (usually so quickly and muffled that you couldn’t understand what they were saying anyway) and i’d never heard of them going insane and commiting mass-murder after a week on the job.

volumetrics

By anders pearson 03 Jul 2001

this article about diets, calories, and food volume and weight caught my attention not because i particularly care about dietary issues (i’m substantially underweight), but because of something i once read in Nikola Tesla’s autobiography.

the article mentions that the volume and weight of food that people eat in a given day stays much more constant than other factors such as the amount of calories, and so the way to reduce your calorie intake without being hungry is to not reduce the amount of food you eat, just to reduce the calorie/volume ratio of the food (by eating things like fruits and vegetables that are primarily water).

i found this interesting because one of Tesla’s little idiosyncracies (the man was seriously obsessive-compulsive) was that he absolutely refused to eat anything without first calculating it’s volume in cubic centimeters to several significant digits. perhaps he was just way ahead of the curve on this volumetrics thing. wouldn’t be the first time.

herding appliances

By anders pearson 21 Jun 2001

i’m thinking that home theatre and stereo systems could stand to have a few improvements.

whenever i go home i have to watch in pain as my dad tries to remember how to get the DVD player working. First, you have to switch the TV to channel 3, turn on the VCR and put it on channel ‘AUX’, turn on the receiver and switch it to ‘DVD/MD’, then turn on the DVD player, put in a disk and press ‘play’. this involves switching remotes 3 or 4 times and usually includes lots of swearing. my dad’s a smart guy, so the problem’s definately not that he isn’t bright enough to use consumer electronics; he’s certainly not alone. the whole process is just more than anyone should really have to go through to watch a movie. and if just playing a movie is that difficult, hooking up the whole system is damn near impossible.

here’s what i’m thinking:

first of all, we need all appliances to be bluetooth enabled (maybe not specifically bluetooth, but some similar kind of relatively universal wireless standard with a range of a 10 meters or so and enough bandwidth to carry an HDTV signal or two). no more wires to connect. second, the appliances should be aware of each other. the receiver would detect eg, that there’s a CD player, a VCR and a DVD player in the room with it. similarly, you could have a bluetooth remote that just detects whatever appliances are in the room and changes its interface to match them. having the appliances be wireless would also allow for more flexability. currently, a receiver can only handle and switch between so many input signals because there’s only so much room for connectors on the back of it. with a wireless interface, there’s no arbitrary limit to how many different appliances it could switch between.

this would allow for some further simplifications to the user interface. most people only do a few different things with an entertainment center and the system could predict the best behavior 90% of the time. if someone hits play on the DVD player, it probably means that they want to watch a movie, so the TV and reciever should select the DVD player as their input signal. there really shouldn’t be much more to it than that.

the whole idea of devices being aware of each other on the network is nothing real new. Sun’s been rambling on about this kind of thing for years pushing JINI. i’m just kind of surprised and frustrated that we haven’t seen any real results yet. it seems like anyone who could actually make an entertainment system easy to set up and easy to use for the non-technophile consumer could make a lot of money.

what do you do? "oh, i'm on vacation..."

By anders pearson 25 May 2001

i haven’t been posting much lately because i’ve been rather busy. had finals week, then my Columbia graduation and moving my stuff to my new apartment (with omar).

from there, tuck, jp, and i went down to deleware for shu and liz’s wedding. it rocked. the three of us were “thugs”; our job was to stand around in suits and dark sunglasses and intimidate people (plus handle any bodies that may need to be disposed of). nice ceremony on the beach. the weather cooperated. no fatalities. jp showed tuck and i how to eat crab.

now i’m hanging out at bates with kamden, lani, and assorted other miscreants that i haven’t seen in a while waiting to graduate from here too. got kam and lani to watch eraserhead with me the other night for their first time. mwahaha..

saw Shrek the other day. it was funny. saw Pearl Harbor today. it sucked. i was going to give it one star for killing ben affleck, but then it turned out he wasn’t dead so i can only give it half a star. sorry if i just ruined the surprise for anyone. you weren’t missing anything.

i’ll be back in nyc on june 6th to start my “new” job.

until then i have some serious slacking off to do.