Cool

Extreme Sports, Baby Cribs and Pipes

In the future we will have new extreme sports.  We are already sort of seeing it with that person that did a jump from close to outer space.  We will start to have ziplines that you can ride from the moon to the earth.  We will surf/swim on the lakes of lava on the sun!  We will skate on astroids.  We could build ice-rinks or glass/transparent swimming pools that float through space!  I am sure there are things that we haven’t even invented yet or dreamt up that will cause us to create new and insanely awesome sports.

On a much more mundane note, we should have a computational geometry person and a mechanical engineer redesign portable baby cribs.  Their current design is terribly difficult to setup and take down.  It should be as easy as pressing a single button or even no buttons!  There shouldn’t be these set of buttons that need to be pressed in order for the thing to be taken down.  It is terribly difficult for all of the buttons to be pressed correctly for everything to work.

What about pipes that don’t clog and if they do there would be this thing inside the pipe that could chop and push the stuff through.  No chemicals needed.  Or if you want chemicals it would be cool if the pressure on the sides of the pipe due to the clog would release a chemical that would dissolve the clog.  The chemicals would be based on some algae that could live on the pipe.  So, you wouldn’t need to dump drano or stuff down the pipe.  Also, this make me think that the pipes in your house could be modeled after the human digestive system.

Autonomous Smart Faucets

So, i want to make a device that will turn on and off the bathroom sink for me…

Basically I’m too lazy to turn off the sink while i’m brushing my teeth. So,
I want to connect a RP to a Kinect/leapmotion to a couple motors that can move the knobs.

Then it would be cool to train it… Like to know i want cold water when i’m brushing my teeth i want hot water when washing my hands i want cold water when i’m filling by water bottle when to turn off the faucet etc.  Might be able to integrate HiTAB somehow so that the end user can develop new behaviors like hot and cold…  Essentially come up with different applications that I haven’t thought of yet.  It could also estimate water usage and sync with your phone to let you know that your children have brushed their teeth etc.

This would save soo much water too.  Therefore, it would be cost effective…  Really I could sell this and if you have a somewhat large family then you would see the savings…

Price Surging and Bounty Hunting

So, it seems like uber might have a bounty type pricing model.  They have this system of price surging.  This we also found doesn’t work for adjusting the bounty.  I thought that maybe it would provide a method to get agents to go after the right tasks, it doesn’t.  However, it does give me hope that maybe my bounty stuff will be useful in something like taxis.

I found this article here.

Power grid for shipping containers

Shocks in shipping containers that would charge batteries that would allow for gps tracking of all of the containers.  Also, when stacked they could essentially distribute the electricity.  Harvesting the energy from the force of tons of pressure would be interesting.  Also, they could be very safe batteries!! You could use Lightsail storage.  Then it would be also be eco-friendly as well.  This would be pretty cool.

The gps would then allow for more effiecient logistics which would make the cost of new containers non-existent.  At first not every container would even need to have the system installed.

Main concern is the weight of the lightsail system may be prohibitive…  Also, if you want GPS units that always are on and not intermitant when ever you have the juice, we might need a better storage system…

Scratch that, right on their website the system claims to be able to be placed in a shipping container form.  This makes me think that if you buy a few of these to generate the electricity for the rest of the system and then use relays to distribute the electricity when stacked then it would be perfect.  Then each container would only require a simple battery that has properties that would make it work in such a system for a very long time with being able to charge and discharge at will.  The great part is that the compression of the air will be done by moving the containers.

Computational Sciences and Informatics

Another PhD in Computational Sciences and Informatics.  I wonder if I could pick one of these up then after I get my PhD in CS and have a job.  They have a quantum information science area and I have always been interested in being able to program and think about problems with quantum computers.  Especially with application to AI.

Might want to work here: http://www.nas.nasa.gov/quantum/index.html (NASA’s QuAIL Quantum AI Lab!).

Travel and Architecture

  1. There should be an app that will tell you your personal expected travel time at any user given day and time not just the current conditions and average driving time given speed limits etc.  It could be based off of your past history of driving.  So, basically it would need to be a phone app that could record things like acceleration and time to arrival vs the expected average time of arrival.  History of traffic from google (those yellow, green, red lines), speed limits, weather history and weather predictions.  All of this can easily directly affect the travel times of people.  This could be used when you are in a new city that you haven’t driven in before.  They might be able to recommend easier routes.  I have found that TomTom has a terrible web app that claims to do some of what I outlined above, but their user interface is the worst.  Also, Google shows the typical traffic at a particular day and time, but doesn’t give you the option to get directions based off of that information.
  2. Now a variation of this idea I think is probably on my blog already but I again experienced the need for it.  Builders create blueprints which they take to their clients for review.  This is a long and iterative process due to miscommunication between the client and the builder.  Automating this process and obtaining the specs from a client to create a structure seems similar in principle to that of building a piece of software.  Which we are taught, as computer scientist, is a difficult venture that requires a lot of time talking with the client to obtain the specs and their ideas.  Unlike with software I think a lot of the issues with architecture version of the problem could be automated and prototyped in front of the client.  Leading to a faster return time and thus greater revenue from happy customers.  I found this journal, Automation in Construction, it looks like they have been exploring this problem (http://www.journals.elsevier.com/automation-in-construction/).

I’d like to see both of these applications created.  I might in the future discuss in more detail how I would go about implementing them.

Botball 2015

I’m going to be a mentor again for Botball.  This time I’m partnering with David, Kevin and Stephen and we are mentors for the middle school that David helped at last year.  So, hopefully that means we will have more success than I had last year with Kramer middle school.  This weekend is the intro/get everyone up to speed days and hopefully we can make use of the fact that the middle school participated last year to our advantage.

JUnit and TestNG

I just got finished some code refactoring and a major rearchitecturing of bounties to be more ammenable to unit tests.  Which I, for lack of time, unfortunately didn’t do.  But, now that I have a bit of time and its for a class I’m going to start adding them.

Junit has always been my goto unit testing framework.  It was the one I was taught.   However, I just found a new unit testing framework called TestNG.  According to this article TestNG has more features than Junit!  That link also goes through and compares and gives examples how its used.

So, I’m going to try it out.  See how I like it.