Scott Adams's Blog, page 375

Cashless World

Cash will eventually go away. So will checks. Someday all you will need is a retina scan and a password, or an embedded chip, or something along those lines. Imagine a world where all transactions are digital. I'm not sure we know what's ahead.

For starters, you wouldn't have to prepare your taxes. All of your transactions would be reported to the IRS as they happened. Perhaps you'd have a separate password for business-related transactions to keep things straight.

I wonder how much of the b...

House Ideas That Worked

We've lived in our new home for several months now, and I'm ready to render my verdict on what design elements worked.

Sound Baffle

My home office is designed with a sound baffle. It's a 10-foot diagonal hallway between my office door and the main office space. It's a kill zone for sound waves, and it works like a charm. The house has no carpets, so sound carries, but none of it makes it to my desk. The master bedroom has the same feature.

Home Theater Location

We put our home theater in the sa...

Exobrain

I'm fascinated by the phenomenon of manipulating our environment to extend our brains. I suppose it all started with early humans carving on cave walls as a way to store historical data. Now we have ebooks, computers, and cell phones to store our memories. And we have schools to program our brains. But it goes much deeper than that. Even a house is a device for storing data. Specifically, a house stores data on how it was built. A skilled builder can study a house and build another just lik...

Withdumb

Definition of Withdumb: A quality you possess if you hold a popular and unfounded point of view.

Withdumb is different from herd instinct. A person who possesses withdumb could achieve the condition with no help from the group whatsoever. For example, if you were the only person in Mongolia who believed in astrology, you would have withdumb, but it wouldn't be because your herd influenced you.

It's easier to cling to an irrational opinion if you know that somewhere in the world there are lots...

Swimming Pool Units

In response to my previous post about storing energy, several of you mentioned pumping water to a mountain lake during the day and generating power at night as the water flows back down. Evidently that is already working in a number of places. The obvious limitation is that most people don't live near an uninhabited mountain valley that can be turned into a lake.

The question of the day for you engineers is this: How many swimming pools worth of water traveling downhill would it take to power...

Unreliable Energy

Experts like to tell us that solar and wind power can never be our main sources of energy because they are "unreliable." Solar doesn't help you at night, and wind power is useless on still days. That problem could be solved if large scale batteries were inexpensive. My question is this: What is so expensive about making batteries.

Consider our existing battery technologies. Do most of the costs of existing batteries come from the raw materials in them? Is making batteries an especially difficu...

Charged with Salt and Batteries

Q. What is the new definition of "Taliban"?

A. Anyone who lives above a lithium deposit

On Monday we learned something that the Pentagon has known for years: Afghanistan is sitting on a trillion dollars worth of valuable minerals.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/wor...

I have literally never seen a news story more interesting than this one. I barely know where to begin. For starters, why were Americans looking for mineral resources in Afghanistan in 2007? I try so ...

Most Widely Read Ebook in the World

What is the most widely read ebook in the world? Interestingly, no one knows the answer to that question. You can find best seller lists for ebooks, which are generally limited to one distributor's numbers for a limited time window. The best seller lists ignore all of the illegal ebook downloads, the free ebooks, the books from the past, and the books from distributors that don't report their numbers. In other words, no one has any way to determine which ebook has been the most widely read in...

Programming the Moist Robot

The brain makes associations automatically. That's why aversion therapy works. For example, if you want someone to avoid watermelon, inject a foul smelling chemical into a number of slices and have your subject bite into the slices repeatedly. In time, if your subject is willing to continue the experiment, he will develop a strong aversion to watermelon, and you will have successfully programmed him to avoid that particular food in the future.

Associations don't have to be negative. People w...

Adams Complexity Threshold

The Adams Complexity Threshold is the point at which something is so complicated it no longer works.

The Gulp oil spill is probably a case of complexity reaching the threshold. It was literally impossible for anyone to know if the oil rig was safe or not. The engineering was too complex. I'm sure management thought it was safe, or hoped it was safe, or hallucinated that it was safe. It wasn't possible to know for sure.

Maybe someday we'll learn there was one person who skipped a safety step, ...