Roundtuit

I don’t know about you, but after I’m done doing what nature intended (not the fun thing, but the other, disgusting thing), I want all involved items (parts of my body and appliances) completely clean. I’m a bit anal about it (har har).

So, why don’t toilets take care of this for me? How hard can it be: you look, if anything’s floating, or otherwise disturbing the water’s clarity, just keep on flushing. If the toilet did this for me, it’d be oh so much quicker to continue with my day.

I imagine a visual sensor and some very simple pattern recognition ought to do the business.

Since saving water is an important environmental, I think there should be a regular flush setting. Or maybe three settings:
“number one only” (small flush), “nice number two” (regular flush), and “Mommy, I’m scared of the nasty thing, make it go bye-bye”.

I live to share ideas like these.

I use travel search engines all the time. Like most busy business travelers, I haven’t used a travel agent in years. And with tools like meet-0-matic, I can even solve the hardest part of the problem: finding a time that works for the concerned parties.

Finding the place is another matter. But I work in lots of situations that involve people from several cities, often several countries. So here’s a do-hickey that would really help, and I think would really be an added-value for one of that major travel engines.

I’d like to be able to get all the involved parties to register with a site, specifying their home city and perhaps a few preferences. Then, when a subset of the users need to meet, they go to the site, and register a meeting request. And the site finds a location for the meeting that optimizes the preferences (convenience, expense, nearby fun, etc.).

It’d be good for long distance relationships too (something I have far too much experience with).

How cool would that be? Clearly, it’s just an optimization problem, and a fairly complex one, given the nonlinearities in the expense of transportation, and the discrete availabilites of resources. But nothing that would be beyond the capacity of a good genetic algorithm, or similar.

Hope someone gets a roundtuit.

I’ll never be rich enough to get this roundtuit. But if I were theme-park-owner rich, I’d make a Transformers roller coaster.

Think about it. You stand in line to get in a hot Shelby Mustang. You whiz around a race track, then transform into a fighter plane for a quick dogfight, maybe a speed boat for some splash filled chase action. And, finally, whirrrr-buzzzz you’re at at the heart of a mighty robot, for some fisticuffs with a Decepticon. I see a downtown setting, with mirror glass covered buildings so you can watch yourself Transform.

Right before you get off, I figure you’d want a victory dance.

UPDATE: The technical detail on this, as I see it, is that it has two tracks, one for each foot, running in parallel, but with twists here and there, and perhaps with some track switches in the line. The cart that holds the passengers is on an articulated frame, connected to the two feet, which enables the “Transforming”. Since their are already coasters with a wide variety of connections-to-track, the added degrees of freedom the double track and articulation would add seem natural. This is the real “meat” of this roundtuit. The Transformer angle is just exciting window dressing.

With today’s announcement of a live action movie of our Transforming Robotic Brethren, somebody will take up this roundtuit. Oh yes, they will.

Contributed by Rob Smith

UPDATE: Put this robocoaster on tracks, and you’re getting close.

I wake up in the morning, and short of brushing shaving and cleaning my self, I require Outlook to tell me what to do. My to do list (with its friends coffee and wireless) runs my life. And lately, it’s been out of control. As a consultant, academic, business person, and wannabe writer, my to do list is insane.

I sort by priority (only 3 values in Outlook, dammit), as well as start date and due date. And I have about 50 categories of to do items. This morning I realized that I’d really like another way of looking at my to-dos.

What I’d like is to be able to translate priority into Payoff (subjective, in terms of the things I want out of my life) and dates into Pressure (subjective, in terms of how obligated I feel to meet a due date). Then, I’d like to be able to look at the to-dos in a Pareto optimal sorta way.

A Pareto graph is like one of those “value versus horsepower” graphs you see for laptops in PC Mag reviews. By looking at where each laptop appears in this 2-D space, you can narrow your selections to those on the “Pareto front”: the layer of laptops furthest out from the graph’s origin.

Another example of a Pareto front (this one in the minimizing direction, so that close to the origin is “better”) is in the environmental impacts/costs space:

If I could place my to-do items in the subjective, 2-D, Payoff and Pressure domain, I’d just pick off the Pareto front, and work on those items first.
And I could then better welcome my computer overlord every morning.