Brad Templeton is Chairman Emeritus of the EFF, Singularity University founding computing faculty, software architect and internet entrepreneur, robotic car strategist, futurist lecturer, photographer and Burning Man artist.
This is an "ideas" blog rather than a "cool thing I saw today" blog. Many of the items are not topical. If you like what you read, I recommend you also browse back in the archives, starting with the best of blog section. It also has various "topic" and "tag" sections (see menu on right) and some are sub blogs like Robocars, photography and Going Green. Try my home page for more info and contact data.
To my various Republican and conservative friends, it's time to talk about Donald Trump. In particular it's time for hard thinking on whether, for the sake of the GOP and conservatism, it's past time to cut him loose. Not for any of the arguments made by your leftie friends, but because it's the right thing for you. It's also time to leave the sinking ship.
In the young Olympic event of "speed climbing," Sam Watson (USA) set two new world records, breaking his own previous world record. For that, he got the Bronze medal. The reason he did relates to some concepts I have been mulling over about what makes a good spectator event. The Olympics are the rare time when a whole bunch of sports that are generally relatively obscure become big-audience, big-advertising events. Spectator sports are sports as entertainment, but they are also still athletic.
A few days ago, I wrote about Olympics Streaming and the challenge of quickly navigating around streaming/downloaded sports programs with typical streaming or cloud DVR services.
I tend to make heavy use of "jump" buttons which skip forward or back amounts like 10, 15, 30 or 120 seconds. With a local disk DVR (and some very good streaming ones) this is done with super fast response time and a live preview, so it's easy to move around a program to what you want.
I cut the TV cord many years ago, and watch everything streaming or downloaded. When it comes to sports, though, particularly the Olympics, streaming and Cloud DVR don't remotely cut it, and so I record the over-the-air broadcast to a local disk using open source DVR software, and watch from my local disk, sometimes delayed just a few minutes to an hour from "live."
In election season, we regularly see references in the USA to "The popular vote" as well as nationwide polls comparing presidential candidates. These are self-destructive, and ideally should be curtailed.
A busy pedestrian city core is common in Europe, and the jewel of any city, but US cities rarely make it work. Cars are banned but they also bring in pedestrians
Manhattan's plan to charge up to $15 to drive downtown won't happen, but there are better, more high tech ways to do it.
It's time to radically scale back the postal service, by banning the mailing, on paper, of computer files.
The US Postal Service delivers 44% of the mail in the world. 127B total pieces of mail, plus packages, and 46B pieces of first class mail (down from 103B at the peak) of which 13B are "single piece" first class mail with a stamp. That's a lot of trees and a lot of energy.
