A phone on your wrist

"Hello. My hand is busy right now."

Several months ago two things happened simultaneously. One, all of the batteries in my watches died. Two, the jeweler where I'd gone for years to have the batteries replaced went out of business.

So for a while I didn't wear a watch, and I realized that I didn't miss it. Everyone carries a cell phone now, and the network-supplied time is presumably more accurate than a watch we set ourselves.

Then I began to image that the watch of the future would be our phones. I just now came across one somewhat bizarre rendering of this idea.

The photo to the right shows Italian designer Federico Ciccarese's concept. He is well known throughout the blogosphere for his Apple product concepts. Now Ciccarese has released a futuristic iPhone concept that takes a very different approach to wearable technology.

I don't know why he thought interlacing it with your fingers was a good idea. Otherwise, why not?

If you can't stand the heat

It's about 137 degrees outside, but who's counting? Wait, I just made that up. It's actually 127. Thank goodness the AC is working. Here's a bit of the history of why that's so.

• In the 2nd century, a Chinese inventor, Ding Huan, devised the rotary fan. As big as six feet across and manually powered, it could cool a whole room. In British India, wealthy homes had a cloth sail called a punkah attached to the ceiling. A servant in another room, the "punkah wallah," would move the fan back and forth by means of a rope and pulleys. These methods, of course, required the poor to get hotter so that the rich might be cooler.

• In 1758, Benjamin Franklin experimented with the rapid evaporation of volatile liquids, such as alcohol and ether, to cool water to a point below freezing. He was able lower the temperature to 7 degrees Fahrenheit from 64. In a letter to a friend, Franklin wrote that the experiment showed that, scaled up, "one may see the possibility of freezing a man to death on a warm summer's day."

• Sixty years later, the great British physicist Michael Faraday demonstrated that one could use mechanical power to compress a volatile substance such as ammonia into a liquid—and then, by allowing it to rapidly evaporate, cool water.

• Soon after, John Gorrie—a young doctor living in Apalachicola, Fla.—had a problem to solve. He knew that patients were more likely to survive an illness in cool weather than in hot. So he rigged up pans full of ice near the ceiling in a hospital room. The ice would cool the air around it and, because cold air is heavier than hot air, would flow downward, over the patient and then out through holes in the room's floor. It was the first effective system of air conditioning.

• But ice was expensive in Apalachicola because it had to be imported by ship from the North, so Gorrie began to experiment with making ice by mechanical means. In 1851, he was granted a patent on a machine that worked on Faraday's principle. He quit medicine to work on perfecting his invention, but when his financial backer died he was unable to carry on and died in poverty in 1855.

Bummer.

• In 1902, Willis Carrier, a young engineer at the Buffalo Forge Company in Buffalo, N.Y., invented the first modern air conditioning, to cool a printing plant. He used a compressor to liquefy ammonia and then evaporated it to cool water. Running the water through coils, he blew air across them, cooling the air and causing it to lose moisture through condensation on the coils. The air was then ducted into the workspace.

• While useful for industrial purposes, Carrier's air-conditioning system was both large and dangerous, as ammonia is very toxic. But by the early 1920s he developed a much more efficient compressor and started using a much safer refrigerant called dielene as the volatile. (DuPont would invent Freon in 1928.)

As with all major inventions, air conditioning has had profound consequences. Washington, D.C., used to be nearly deserted in the summer because of the city's notorious heat and humidity. Today, the government runs year-round. That's not necessarily progress.

Stuff you really need to worry about

Sun suffers globalistical warmening.

The sun is a tempestuous mistress - and her outbursts are becoming more and more violent as the weeks go on.

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory spotted the summer's first 'X' solar flare on Friday -- a huge outburst from the sun right at the top of the scale. 

This came on the back of 12 'M' flares in just six days, with a M6.1 flare knocking out radio signals across the planet on Thursday -- hinting at the destruction the sun could reign on our technology if Earth takes a full blast across its blow.

(The biggest flares are known as 'X-class flares' based on a classification system that divides solar flares according to their strength. The smallest ones are A-class, which are similar to normal background levels, followed by B, C, M and X.)

The sun is now heading into the peak of its 11-year solar flare cycle, with 2013 expected to the tumultuous year. With the increased spread in communications in the last 11 years, a sever solar storm could cause huge issues for the planet.

Radio blackouts occur when the X-rays or extreme UV light from a flare disturb the layer of Earth's atmosphere known as the ionosphere, through which radio waves travel. The constant changes in the ionosphere change the paths of the radio waves as they move, thus degrading the information they carry. This affects both high and low frequency radio waves alike.

Solar activity runs in 11-year cycles, with the current one peaking in 2013, so more violent space weather is on the horizon.

Dr. Matthew Penn, of the National Solar Observatory in Arizona, said recently: "Because the sun is becoming more active, it will have an impact on millions of people. Sunspots can cause the biggest and most damaging space storms that occur. 

"During the next two years, we are expecting the number of sunspots visible on the sun to reach a maximum. We know that sunspots are the source of a lot of space weather and solar storms, so we expect a larger number of solar storms here at the Earth."

The biggest impact will be the difficulty in spreading hysteria about globalistical warmening.

This is creepy, but you're creepier

Creepy.

One day, people won’t have to type queries into a box to search for information. It’ll be delivered to them, via their various screens, based on where they are, who is nearby and what they might like and need to know.

Google gave a glimpse of that future this week at its developer conference in a feature called Google Now, which will act as a kind of automated personal assistant on Android smartphones. The service, which will roll out as part of the next update to Google’s mobile operating system, will do things like remind an Android owner of a lunch date — but also who it is with, how to get there and when to leave, based on current traffic congestion. And based on your past Google searches, it will keep you up to date on flight information and sports scores. 

It’s easy to see how this kind of service could be helpful. It’s also really easy to see how it could be creepy. What’s harder, however, is to see the line between the two, and to know where (and when) Google might cross it.

The features that Google Now offers are mostly already available in some form or another, through third-party mobile apps and services.

But it gets weird when Google starts to extend its reach into that territory, because Google already knows so much about us — things like who we e-mail and talk to the most, along with what we search for. When those smaller bits of data begin to get linked together in a more meaningful way, that knowledge can take on a larger, different context. 

A standalone app that pings you to let you know when friends are nearby might feel like a friendly little helper. Google doing it might feel like a menacing stalker. In addition, a service like Google Now may also cause people to realize exactly how much data and information Google actually has about their routines and daily lives. And that might cause some people to be very, very uncomfortable, regardless of how useful the service is.

I'll tell you what's creepy: this guy who follows me around telling me when my next appointment is. I think it's my dentist.

(Thanks, Bruce)

I got a charge out of this

Charging iPads.

The annual cost of charging your iPad tablet -- based on fully charging it every other day -- is $1.36, according to a study by the Electric Power Research Institute,

"The analysis shows that each model of the iPad consumes less than 12 kWh of electricity over the course of a year, based on a full charge every other day," EPRI said. "By comparison, a plasma 42" television consumes 358 kWh of electricity a year.

Apple said 67 million of the devices have been purchased worldwide, the power institute said. EPRI calculations found that the average energy used by all iPads in the market is approximately 590 gigawatt hours.

"In a scenario where the number of iPads tripled over the next two years, the energy required would be nearly equivalent to two 250-megawatt (MW) power plants operating at a 50 percent utilization rate. A quadrupling of sales in two years would require energy generated by three 250-MW power plants," the power institute said.

"These results raise important questions about how the shifting reliance from desktop to laptop to mobile devices will change energy use and electricity requirements for the information age," EPRI Vice President Mark McGranaghan said. "At less than a penny per charge these findings bring new meaning to the adage, 'A penny for your thoughts.' "

I'm guessing that some intern in the public relations office came up with that and is real proud of himself.

Something new to worry about online

Be careful what you click on when searching the Web; the international cybercrime community is coming for you.

That's the message from Internet security firm Blue Coat, which earlier this year found that poisoned search engine results remain the number one malware threat on the Web, accounting for a full 40 percent of all cyberattacks in 2011.

The popular bait-and-switch tactic is nearly four times more likely to snag unsuspecting users than the once common email-based approach, which now only accounts for 11 percent of attacks. Social networking rounds out the top three threats with 6.5 percent. The Blue Coat report was based on an analysis of the Web traffic of more than 75 million users. 

"Searching is at least as dangerous as going into your email in-box and clicking on things," Chris Larsen, Blue Coat's chief malware expert, recently told USA Today.

The scam works like this:

The bad guys set up themed "bait sites" using terms that are likely to show up in search engine results, as a way to trick users into visiting their sites. When the unsuspecting user clicks on a poisoned result in their search engine, thinking they are going to a legitimate site related to their search, they are served a site designed by the phishers to gather their financial information or get them to download a piece of malware or otherwise fall victim to whatever scam they are running. In many cases, users don't even know they have been victimized until it's too late.

What you can do.

• Scan the site description — Google and Bing display two lines of "flavor text" alongside their text search results, which can provide clues to the site's provenance. "Look for disjointed, random text, like it was mashed up by a computer (because it was)."
• Check out the domain name — "Is it one you've heard of? Does it seem to have something to do with the topic you were searching for?"
• Preview before clicking — "Google now has a 'preview' feature, where text-search results have a little button to the right. If you hover your mouse on it, it will display an image of the page. This lets you see if the page 'looks legit.'"
• Know your top level domains (TLDs) — "There are a lot of two-letter TLDs assigned to specific countries: .RU = Russia, .IN = India, etc. If you're searching for a U.S. culture topic, like Halloween costume ideas, or Thanksgiving recipes, or Christmas decorations and your search returns results on .RU or .IN, etc, ask yourself if it's likely that a site hosted there would really have good content about your search topic."
• Use protection — It's always important to protect your computer with antivirus and antimalware software, which will block many of the malicious infrastructures that run search engine poisoning attacks.

Learn more.

Let's talk. Not.

People just aren't talking anymore. I let Google pick up my voice mail, and it tries to transcribe it, with about a 50 percent success rate. That's enough to let me know what's up. So I have fewer buttons to push -- and fewer people to talk to.

People are switching from voicing to texting in such numbers that wireless carriers are considering switching to unlimited plans to keep revenue up. 

They have reason to worry: the average length of a local call has fallen more than 50% over the last decade to around 1.8 minutes, according CTIA, The Wireless Association. The only time certain people bring the phone to their ear may be to avoid talking to those around them, studies show. Some 13% of people in a Pew Research Center survey said they actually pretend to be on their phones in order to avoid “unwanted personal interactions.” 

Instead, adults have joined the ranks of teenagers and now let their thumbs do the talking. 

One-in-three Americans said they’d rather text than call, according to a 2011 study by Pew Research Center. In fact, the survey found that Americans send an average of 41 texts a day – with those aged 19-25 sending an average of 110 texts a day. Wolfgang Luckmann, a Yulee, Fla.-based acupuncturist, treats patients with “thenar tendinitis,” an inflammation of tissues in the thumb mainly due to incessant texting: “In the old days, people had neck spasms from talking on the phone. Now, they’re getting this.”

People used to deliver good news by phone. These days, they’re just as likely to brag about their kids in a Facebook status update. Why? It reaches more people and it’s less time-consuming. 

Mostly, however, why should you want to listen to them pretend to care?

Look under the cushion

Say cheese

You look marvelous, darling!

Here's what Facebook and similar sites want from you: pictures.

In the online arms race between Apple, Facebook, Google, and others, control of the world’s snapshots is seen as vital – and lucrative, Quentin Fottrell writes. 

Pinterest, an online scrapbook that lets users share and comment on their favorite images, had over 20 million users in April, up from one million in July 2011. The startup just raised $100 million. Facebook, meanwhile, added to its image arsenal Monday, snapping up the London-based photo-sharing service Lightbox for an undisclosed fee. Apple too is upgrading its iCloud online service to include new photo-sharing features.

“Photos are the real currency for social networks,” says social psychologist Matt Wallaert. “We want to know, ‘What does she look like now? Who did she marry? How great is her life?’ They are much more revealing than reading a status update.” 

People share over 200 million photos on Facebook every day, or six billion per month. Larry Rosen, author of iDisorder: Understanding Our Obsession with Technology and Overcoming Its Hold on Us, says it makes people feel like trendsetters, photo-journalists and celebrities. “We’re presenting ourselves as stars,” he says. “That’s why fan magazines and reality shows are so compelling. This is the online equivalent.”

But there are other reasons.

• Like bank accounts, photos are “sticky.” Whether they’re Facebook pictures of your Aunt Ida eating an ice-cream in Yellowstone Park or a random picture on Pinterest of patriotic candy, it’s difficult to move months or years of digital memories to a rival site. “The time and effort required to move those photos to some other type of digital storage is significant,” says Michelle Barnhart, assistant professor of marketing at Oregon State University College of Business. 
• Aside from the images themselves, the location data and other personal information embedded in the files may also be lucrative to advertisers.
• Endless photo posting by friends also keeps people trawling through albums and clicking, enabling sites to charge more to advertisers and generate revenue. 

And you thought it was just one big friendly place.

Neat hair and confident voices

Paul Graham is an essayist, programmer, and investor on who should run a startup:

"Sometimes the VCs want to install a new CEO of their own choosing. Usually the claim is that you need someone mature and experienced, with a business background. Maybe in some cases this is true. And yet Bill Gates was young and inexperienced and had no business background, and he seems to have done ok. Steve Jobs got booted out of his own company by someone mature and experienced, with a business background, who then proceeded to ruin the company. So I think people who are mature and experienced, with a business background, may be overrated. We used to call these guys "newscasters," because they had neat hair and spoke in deep, confident voices, and generally didn't know much more than they read on the teleprompter.

"If you work your way down the Forbes 400 making an x next to the name of each person with an MBA, you'll learn something important about business school. After Warren Buffett, you don't hit another MBA till number 22, Phil Knight, the CEO of Nike. There are only 5 MBAs in the top 50. What you notice in the Forbes 400 are a lot of people with technical backgrounds. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Jeff Bezos, Gordon Moore. The rulers of the technology business tend to come from technology, not business. So if you want to invest two years in something that will help you succeed in business, the evidence suggests you'd do better to learn how to hack than get an MBA."