Thomas the Think Engine

My suburb is dotted with flexicars.

Pay a once-off 30 dollar joining fee, a 70 dollar annual insurance fee, and an hourly rate between 9 and 15 bucks, and you get a car.  Petrol and insurance included.  When you book online you get a code that pops the car doors open.  The keys are on the console.

In Melbourne they are very much an inner city thing.  The northenmost is in Brunswick  the southernmost is in St Kilda.  It’s only in these burbs that the economics of parking are so bad that sharing a car with someone else could make sense.
Continue reading Flexicar

When I went to Russia, I bought a Vladimir Putin T-Shirt.   It says bce putem.  it means ‘going the right way’ and it’s a gentle pun on his name.  That was 2003.  Now I keep it in a drawer with my Hitler and Idi Amin tshirts.  It’s hard to get a really good macchiato in the bohemian inner north when you’re wearing a genocidal dictator around. Continue reading Vlad the bastard

Cars are too big.  Traffic would be better if cars were smaller, like bikes.  We can easily reduce the length of cars.  People like to be high up, as SUVs have shown.  Put the engine under the cabin and do away with the bonnet.

Cars don’t need the engine hanging out the front there mainly as a crumple zone.  Why carry round a crumple zone you’re not using? People also like to be safe, which is where this plan gets it’s incredible voodoo mojo from.  instead of having an engine as your crumple zone, you have airbags. On the outside.

They’d have little sensors that would pop them if they saw a solid object approaching at high speed.  I guess a technical problem arises here:  The power of the airbag that can absorb a cars collision is enough to splatter a pedestrian.  Smaller lighter airbags would have to be deployed for a pedestrian collision.

If this sounds pie in the sky, think about the incredible amounts of coin that are spent on road safety.  And a quick google reveals that while I came up with this idea independently, so did Toyota.  They’ve got a pedestrian saving device complete with radar and infra-red sensors under development in Japan as we speak.  Mercedes has also installed an external airbag under the car, to add to braking power.

There’s a big push to include new pedestrian safety standards in Europe’s car crash ratings, which could make this a reality by 2012 !

Libertarians are guys who live on farms.  They buy a bulldozer to dig a dam, and run a pump from the dam, so they can put out a fire, because you can’t rely on the state to save you if your house is on fire.  They have a weapons cache in every room, because you can’t rely on the state to save you if your house is invaded.   Chances are they cheat on their taxes and grow a little weed in their basement, because the state’s rules are a ridiculous, nannying infringement on man’s inherent freedom.

Continue reading Freedom, civilisation and consumption

Two nights ago, a black cat crossed my path. Unlucky?

Yes for him. I was on my bike at the time, and another cat chased him out of some bushes at high speed. He crashed into my foot, my pedal and my back wheel. I jammed on the brakes as he sprinted off up the road on 3 legs. I went after him, going ‘puss puss puss’. When I found him he seemed shaken but was too proud to accept my ministrations.

Then yesterday, I was having lunch, and the restaurant had the character fu for good fortune stuck on the wall.

It’s one of those rare characters where the components actually mean something. The thing on the left is a person. One the right there is a horizontal line above a box, above a box with a cross in it. These are the characters for the number one, a mouth, and a field. So the character describes fortune as a person who has a field and only one mouth to feed. Continue reading feeling lucky, punk?

Remember the y2k bug?  Every time we think we can predict the future, we should look back on the y2k bug. For every good thing we predict that hasn’t come true (cure for cancer, no child living in poverty, flying cars) there’s bad things that haven’t come true either (armageddon via nuclear war, swine flu pandemics, a Super Mario Bros: The Movie sequel). Continue reading Feeling peaky about the future?

Occupying a sunny promontory between the sea of social science and the rugged mountains of ‘real engineering’, sit urban design and traffic engineering.  They recline on a piece of public furniture, watching the pedestrian, the driver, the public transporter, and even the bench-sitter interacting with the public space.

Occasionally Psychology will pop by and trade a few insights for a long-neck of homebrew and half a round of brie.  Sometimes they get their supercomputers out of the picnic basket and do some modelling.  Sometimes they may get on the phone with architects trying to design a public space people will actually use.

Continue reading How we drive

The game Modern Warfare 2 is set for release tomorrow.

To many people, this is monumentally irrelevant.

But they misunderstand the zeitgeist. Modern Warfare 2 is likely to gross $338 million on its first day of release, and be the highest selling game ever. By comparison, the highest rating movie of last year, the Dark Knight, took $150 million in its opening weekend. In Britain, annual computer game revenue is four times that of box office revenue, and more than music and dvd sales.

Continue reading Modern Warfare 2: glorifying violence?

The folowing is satire, and will not make sense unless you have read this disturbing, ridiculous, selfish, dangerous and infuriating article by Miranda Devine, entitled Roads are for cars, not lycra louts .

—
Whoever made up the Fairfax motto To Err is Devine has a lot to answer for. It’s a big fat lie. SMH is built for people with conscience and reading comprehension. Pretending otherwise is unfair to columnists and readers alike. Continue reading To Err is Devine

There are people with brains, and there are people with time on their hands.  Sometimes these are the same people.  People like you.  Sure you read the paper and listen to the radio, and watch Two and a Half Men (how funny is the little kid!?) But you also deploy your surplus cognition actively: You edit Wikipedia, comment on blogs, write blogs, make Youtube videos, and play games.

Clay’s point is this: For too long, mainstream media has been on stage, delivering its monologue. People are rolling their eyes. We’re starting to heckle. The show’s not even over and half the crowd has headed to the after-party. Continue reading Clay Shirky’s “cognitive surplus”

I have advocated building a big mirror in the Australian outback, to reflect a whole lot of sunlight back into space and counter the effects of global warming. My preferred construction technique was a nuclear blast that would melt the sand to glass.  Happily, this would also create a nuclear winter that could be the extra surge we need in the race to cool the planet.

I was drunk at the time.

Continue reading Stay cool.

Think about head hair. Everyone says it exists to keep our heads warm.

But as skin colour has adapted to the sun, head hair remains, from the Inuits to the Arabs to the Melanesians.  Why?

Maybe head hair actually has a ‘helmet effect’ where it deflects/absorbs hits to the head. It would be evolutionarily adaptive. if you look at hair, it covers the area of the brain neatly (except the forehead). Continue reading Helmet Hair Hypothesis

There’s a push to add an intelligence/aptitude test to the mix for university admissions.  It’s an indirect and stupid way to solve the problem of the homogeneity of  university intakes.

http://www.theage.com.au/national/push-to-make-uni-entrance-fair-for-all-20091017-h26o.html Continue reading ENTER > IQ ?

For too long this blog has blundered around in theoretical la-la land.  It’s time to get practical.  Should you run if it starts raining?

Continue reading should i run through the rain?