Jonoabroad

A place to leave my rants and ramblings.

Touch screens - the beginning of the end for the mouse.

I hope the iPad is the beginning of touch screen integration into all apple products. MacBooks and iMacs would be wonderful with an entire touch screen. No longer this disconnect between the pointing device and the thing you want to interact with, want to move a window, drag it, want to resize a window pinch it.

It could be the beginning of the end for the mouse. Not for everyone, specialist, such as graphic designers and possibly programmers would probably still need a mouse, if they don't like or know keyboard short cuts.

Here is hoping my next laptop is a MacBookPro with the optional touch screen interface.

Google needs to get into farming

Anna and I were watching Michael Pollan's talk on fora.tv ( http://fora.tv/2009/05/05/Michael_Pollan_Deep_Agriculture#fullprogram ), HT @jjprojects. He was talking about what is wrong with the American food system and what can be done to fix it - moving away from mono-cultures and feed lots to reduce the amount of oil needed to produce food; move away from spending 10 Calories of energy to produce 1 calorie of food. Also by moving to a diverse crop less pesticide and fertiliser is needed. Finally grow locally, so the produce isn't being shipped across America or the world.

The solution seemed to be that we need more diverse farmers, with a preference for farmers owning the farm rather than large corporates.  It occurred to me if you want to be able to trace your Broccoli or Steak from paddock to plate, google is your best bet. They already look after our search, mail and in the US at least are starting to look after our Health records, Internet connection and power generation. 

So, why not our food system. 

They could track from seed to plate,  gathering a wealth of information to help grown better crops in the future. Not by dumping large amount of chemicals on them, but by working out what plants grow together well.  Nature is already far better at this than us, but it doesn't mean we can't find improvements to suit our needs.

Also if google are running farms across america it can better cope with the ebb and flow of demand, instead of shipping steak from California to New York ship it from New England. It will arrive quicker and in a better state. 

The problem with electric cars

They don't go far enough and then you need to charge them for eight hours. The answer is apparently better batteries and while the performance of batteries will improve, I don't see them getting to the point where one could reasonably drive from Sydney to Melbourne in a day nor Sydney to the Gold Coast any time soon.

One way to get round this would be to treat cars more like laptops; you don't use your laptop on the battery for 3 hours then sit round for 2 waiting for it to charge. You keep it plugged in when you can and only use the battery when you need to.  If you inverted this idea and ran on battery around town, short trips and used power on longer trips - on the freeway / motorway. Then one could cover long distances with an electric car.  

I'm not of course suggesting we whip and buy 1000Km flex and hang it from the back of the car, rather use some kind of induction in the road to get power into the car. Pretty much turning the motorways into huge Scalextric tracks. Some kind of induction system would allow the batteries to charge while also providing power to move the car. 

It is probably not viable as the cost to build the infrastructure is most likely prohibitive and possibly having a big enough induction coil that close to people may not be healthy. Well, as healthy as the current western diet. 

Another alternative would be to treat the batteries like BBQ gas bottles and rather than refilling them yourself you swap them when empty. Service stations would then turn into large charge lots. It might be more efficient to direct power to service stations than homes and businesses for charging? 

My final thought was Hydrogen / electric hybrid. The Hydrogen could either charge the batteries or be the primary power source,