Mark Gardner

Stuck in the Middle with You

2011-04-08T14:01:00.000-07:00

We all know the stories of Sir Isaac Newton, the father of Classical Mechanics in the 17th century and how he disputed all geocentric(earth as the center of the solar system) views of the universe. Lately I’ve been interested in the writings and teachings of Ray Kurzweil.
Kurzweil has a way of quietly saying things that tend to creep up on you in a haunting manner-- Specifically, his comments on how to think in an exponential manner instead of linearly. Kurzweil repeatedly explains his predictions in graph form with an exponential y axis. He is basically saying we need to think differently.

So, let’s take a look at the height of a typical human… lets say a little less than 2 meters tall. If we double the height and then double again and again for 31 times we get a distance of about 1 billion meters which is roughly the distance past the moon into our solar system. In other words, this doubling will get us to play on the interplanetary level of space in our solar system.

Now, in our thought experiment, lets go in the other direction. Take the height of a human and divide it and then divide again and again for 31 times… This will put us on the edge of the nano world!! One billionth of a meter will allow us to play on the nano scale. So, by looking at the world in an exponential manner we find ourselves half way between nano-space and outer space. Which direction do you think we should explore?
I think economics will answer this question for us. Going to outer space takes time and energy and the further and faster you go, the more time and energy it takes. This constant drag on the economics makes the other direction… the nano-direction-- much more attractive. It takes virtually no time to go to the nano world and the energy to get us there is becoming less and less all the time. Remember, as Richard Feynman says, “There is plenty of room at the bottom.”

Maybe we really are in the middle of the universe after all.
Classical mechanics breaks down in both worlds yielding to a new quantum mechanics world… So is it possible that the days of Newton mathematics are limited and that we are headed for a new nano-world? Could this be the reason we have not contacted any other civilizations in the universe? Maybe all intelligent life discovered the nano-world and essentially disappeared into nano-space. Are we seeing this happen right before our eyes with the brick and mortar book stores closing? All the books ever written will fit on the head of a pin.

American Ingenuity

2010-03-24T07:33:00.000-07:00

Google makes $2 billion per month with their monstrous business. Hardly a day goes by without hearing about some new idea that Google has.

This story however is about a little known private company that was taken over by the US Government and now loses $2 billion each month. Yes, loses $2 billion of your tax dollars each month and we don’t hear about that every day on the news.

This company was created by three men…. William, William and Alex. They had a working idea that could transmit information several times faster than the status quo. They ran this company for about a year before the government decided it was such a great idea that they would take over and do it better. After the government took over, innovation seemed to stop and costs skyrocketed. With government controls and mandates, the government tried to prop up this company to no avail. The name of this company was the Leavenworth & Pike's Peak Express Company.... that's right, The Pony Express.

April 1, 2010 will be the Pony Express' 150th anniversary and in 150 years the government has managed to improve the speed of mail from 10 days to about 5 days. New discoveries have been minimal over this time. In fact, if the post office really knew what their purpose was, they would have created email years ago instead of fighting it. They think their purpose is to keep people employed and stifle competition not transmit information.

This is what bothers me the most about the health care takeover. Compare all the health care industry discoveries and inventions American ingenuity has come up with in the past. Now compare these discoveries to the ones made by countries with socialized medicine.

We have just destroyed the future of health care inventions. We will never know the true cost of this and the future discoveries that will never be.

NPR beats up Twitter Bird

2009-03-17T06:34:00.000-07:00

I was listening to my morning podcast of NPR when I was shocked at what the reporter said. He commented that Twitter reminded him of Ancient Greece… the way people talk in the market place.. I was thinking…. Wow! This sounds like something I would have written about in my theory of news and communication as it goes through 1st Wave (Agricultural era), 2nd Wave (Industrial era) and now the 3rd Wave.
I was glued to my ear buds as none other than Daniel Schorr of NPR pounded the little Twitter bird like it was his biggest enemy. Dan Schorr by the way was on Nixon's enemy list. He knows well the art of “not letting a good crisis go to waste.” It was noted in the report that he got his start during The Great Depression reporting on suicides of people jumping out of their windows… He was 12 years old when he phoned in his first death..and no he wasn’t alive during the Ancient Greek days.
Schorr was asked about the Twitterers during Obama’s speech. His comment was that these people using Twitter during the speech felt trapped and wanted out! He went on to suggest Twitter usurps the editor!! Well... yeah… it's supposed to. He said when you have all kinds of unqualified people sending information anonymously, you don’t know who to believe. You need the structure of verified news before it reaches your little ears.
My opinion is you learn who and who not to listen to in the 3rd Wave, even if their name is Twitter_girl. The decision is yours not the editor’s.
I could hear the anger in Dan Schorr’s voice as he was witnessing the power of being an editor slip away. This is why I listen to NPR. What a great time to be alive!

China’s secret weapon:

2009-03-14T08:19:00.000-07:00

Three years ago China quietly released their secret weapon on the world. Until this point this "secret weapon" was only used internally with the Chinese people. When it proved to be so valuable the communist government could not resist offering it to the world.
China is not the only country that uses this. Hong Kong has used it for years and so do Indonesia, Singapore, Sri Lanka and The Philippines. So… apparently, this is not as secret as we think. In fact if you go to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in France you will find all the details on which countries have it and which ones don’t.
The United States does NOT have it.
No, we don’t have this economic weapon even though it could transform our economy. If Obama knew about it, he could become a hero overnight. The economy would turn on a dime and capital would come rocketing back to the United States.
For now, however we will just have to hope for change while other countries use this to their advantage.
Until the Capital Gains Tax in the United States goes to zero like it is in China and many other countries, I will continue to keep my money in Singapore.

“Bullet in the Head” Train

2009-03-09T07:17:00.000-07:00

So.... the "stimulus" plan has a train… No, we aren’t talking about the $3 million rip-off in the Simpson show “The Springfield’s Monorail”. This is a real train costing $8 billion with a B… this is $8,000 million.
Lets put some numbers to this and I will be conservative. The interest on the $8,000 million dollars will be about $320 million per year at 4%. According to the Manual of Travel Agency Practice, a train this size in Europe (500 miles) cost $3,000 million per year to maintain in 2003 dollars. Utility costs of 17 cents per person mile (England’s cost is 17 pence) I’ll be conservative and convert 1 pound to 1 dollar…. Who knows the real cost of utilities in the future. This is $85 per trip per person utility surcharge.
Large bullet trains can carry more than 1500 passengers… this Vegas run will probably be several small trains carrying 500 or so passengers. I’m just guessing on this one but it makes sense because you will probably need a train in backup and maybe 3 trains on the road… this implies a two way track.
So, let’s say the train is packed full 365 x 24 (which is never going to happen but let’s be conservative in our estimate). If a train leaves the city of Los Angeles every 2 hours… this is 2 million passengers per year each way.
Discounting the fact that it will probably be over budget by the time it’s finished and the fact that it will probably be run into the ground like Amtrak or the Post Office… The cost per person if we pack the train to its gills will be $1,660 + 85 fuel charge per trip!!
So, let me get this straight… Harry Reid (US Majority leader Senator of Nevada) has teamed up with Nancy Pelosi of California to propose a desert transportation boondoggle that in its best days will cost a whopping 10 TIMES the cost of flying between these two cities…. And that’s not event touching the principle costs. The train will never be paid off.
As Al Bundy once said… This will send us rocketing to the poor house. But wait… won’t this stimulate the economy. Why YES.. it will stimulate the economy of Japan or France because that’s the only place in the world that will make these bullet trains. Isn’t it ironic that the path Reid has laid out takes these unsuspecting customers from the “City of Angels” to “Sin City” and we and our grandkids and our great grandkids are happy to pay for it.
Can’t we just be conservative?

And that’s the way it is….

2009-03-08T17:59:00.000-07:00

In 1988 I toured a USA Today printing plant in Dallas. This was before the Internet… I remember being amazed at what I saw. I could have been walking through a manufacturing plant that made widgets for whatever… In this case the product being produced was a folded up newspaper ready for a truck to deliver the morning news throughout north Texas. There were no reporters to be seen, no man behind a glass cage barking orders out to tattered reporters. I probably saw no more than 5 people running the whole operations. USA Today had figured out how to deliver the news out of Washington DC via phone line and the only thing in Dallas was the printing press.
A year later the movie “Back to the Future” had a reference of the paper in the year 2025 or something like that. The whole world knew that USA Today knew how to handle the future. This is when I noticed the beginning of the end for traditional papers.
Fast forward a few years and you will realize that this oracle of the future news only had one brilliant idea. That was to take out the delivery of papers and print them locally. Thinking in a straight line, they began to grow worldwide… using the same business model only over a different area. Looking back now it’s easy to see… they got it partially right but they didn’t understand that they really were a manufacturing plant and they needed more than one brilliant idea to move into the future. The company was so focused on efficiency that they neglected the small part of the company that was actually discovering and writing news…. In 2004 there was a scandal that forced a front-page apology for “manufacturing” the news. They had cut their process to the bone and almost lost their product.
This year we have seen a rash of papers failing because they don’t understand that most of a paper’s business is an industrial business. It’s a business process of cutting down trees, making paper, hauling the raw product and then printing little words on the product and then gassing up trucks to deliver the paper. All this just in time to be usurped by some news event that happened at 6:00 in the morning a full 6 hours after the paper went to press. I get more new news out of my free twitter account than I do from a 6 hour old USA Today paper.
This, however is not why papers are failing… this is why they have been hurting for the last decade. The final blow came in a more subtle form…a method that has been lurking for decades in human civilization. A method of learning and communicating brought forward from the agricultural era and suppressed by the printing presses of the 15th century. Before the news was printed and read to a medieval person, he would walk into a crowded market and be bombarded with information throughout the day. He knew instinctively that it was up to him alone to decide what he heard during the day was true news or gossip. He alone decided what type of information he wanted and who he wanted to talk to. This agricultural era concept has been lost on the lives of industrial people.
In 1982 John Naisbitt coined the term Mass Customization. Ever since I read his book “Megatrends”, I have been waiting for customization on a massive scale and frankly I am pleased to see it. What amazes me the most however is the wrath of the people fighting it and rejecting it. This week I read an article in which the author stated: “It wouldn't be so scary if online local news could fill the void (of mainstream media), but that isn't happening.” This is just one example of how the ones in “newspaper power” are resisting as their empire slips away. I am enjoying watching this tremendously. This person just doesn’t get it at all…. The hundreds of ways to communicate now, not only fill the void but it’s like pouring water into a bucket of rocks… it simply fills every void imaginable. My question to you is: Can we humans rise to the occasion and accept this responsibility, burden, joy and power of deciding within our own skull what is right and what is wrong or will we opt for the easy and learned method of finding someone who says “And that’s the way it is…”

3rd Wave is here...

2009-03-07T06:52:00.000-08:00

I started this blog so I don't have to send emails describing the latest in Real News to my friends..... Many people are tired of the MainStream Media. They (MSM) only cover a small fraction of whats really going on in the world. Most of us have been conditioned to expect honest reporting ... remember Cronkite "that's the way it is" ? Well... we are in a new world now! Bombarded by rumors and information from all sides, YOU have to be the one deciding if what you hear really is the way things are.

Before the printing press was invented and mass media began to grow... INDIVIDUALS decided which rumors to believe and which to ignore.. This caused virtue and integrity to be valuable. We have come full circle in some ways to that point again. There is so much information out there ... its up to YOU to decide what is right and wrong.