Are you a two-screener?

Early adopters.

My first hint of this was watching my son watch TV. He is arrayed on the couch in a position that might be described as a half-hearted attempt at a headstand. He's watching TV, doing something with his iPad, and texting friends on his phone.

If he had more hands he'd no doubt be working some other device.

This is what the information technology giant Tata Consultancy Services calls "the second screen" -- some other device in use while you're in front of the TV. Increasingly TV producers are trying to take advantage of this.

Tweeting while watching TV began this convergence once companies realized that people continued to use smartphones even while doing other things. This also involved going to other internet channels like YouTube to continue the experience they had on the first screen – the TV.

Networks such as The Discovery Channel are engaging in conversations with viewers and building a growing network of fans. With its vast assortment of networks, including the Animal Channel, the company manages 70 Facebook fan pages with 40-million fans and 20 Twitter accounts with 2.4 million followers. 

Wow. I thought they just showed films of cute deer eating leaves. Every now and then when I turn on an NCIS rerun to take my nap I see some sort of invitation inviting me to go online for something or other. Why would I do that?

The apps are out there, of course.

Some of the most popular apps include Miso and GetGlue. These sites provide an app that allows you to select the show of your choice and join the conversation with others in your network even if the show is not being aired currently. Both apps can be linked to your Facebook or Twitter community, allowing you the opportunity to interact with others who share a similar interest.

If I knew how to work my smart phone I might try it. Get this:

ABC was one of the first to try out the Second Screen with this experiment on its property My Generation, in 2010. This iPad app creates a seamless, two-screen, interactive television experience by bridging a cable / satellite connection and an iPad, by measuring analog sound waves using the iPad’s microphone. It looks for certain contours in the audio signal so that it knows when to display a particular poll or other item linking up with a precise moment in the show. This can also trigger ads or links on the Second Screen app, where an ad will be displayed on the primary screen first and then reveal more in depth content through the app.

But will it get up and fetch me some ice cream?

Our tinker toy electrical system

Doesn't take much.

James Woolsey, former director of the CIA, reminds us how rickety our electrical grid is.

Some two weeks after Secretary of Defense Leon E. Panetta warned of a potential “cyber-Pearl Harbor” involving a possible attack on the electric grid, Mother Nature took the cue and hit the East Coast with a storm that left millions of us for days without electricity from the grid. 

Some said silent thanks for that old generator they’d thought to stick in the garage. Though it wasn’t a cyberattack, but Mother Nature gave parts of the grid a good lashing anyway. 

On my country road south of Annapolis, two transformers were blown down from their perches on telephone poles, and the leaking oil and surging electricity produced 20-foot flames. In the meantime, our driveway was filled for days with 15 Baltimore Gas and Electric Co. trucks and about 25 electrical workers from Arkansas erecting new poles and replacement transformers. 

And that was just to deal with five days of outage, caused by falling tree branches, for a very small community on one short country road. What would it have taken to deal with damage that was far more extensive across a number of states because it had been planned by a group or nation that wanted, above all, to destroy our society? 

The electric grid is the heart of our ability to function as a society. We have 18 major infrastructures that keep our civilization operating — water, sewage, telecommunications, transportation, etc. All 17 of the others depend in one way or another on electricity. Imagine what it would be like for an electrical outage to last for months or years as a result of a cyber- or terrorist attack instead of merely for days. 

Without electricity, we are not just back in the pre-Web 1970s, we are back in the pre-grid 1870s. Very few of us have enough plow horses or manual water pumps.

As I write some guys are downstairs sanding the family room floor. In preparation I unplugged the computer and peripherals. Then I came upstairs to work. Ah! No wireless! I had to rig everything up in the basement, where for some reason the previous resident installed a phone plug. A minor thing, but a reminder of how much we depend on electrical and other connections.

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