Jason’s Fresh Produce

You have to appreciate Nintendo’s attempt to inject exercise into gaming with the wii, wii sports, wii fit, etc, but really, they’re coming at it from the wrong angle–exercise equipment is expensive, electronics are cheap. So we should be injecting games into exercise (and don’t tell me sports already do that–sports are hard).

Surely a game as simple as dual-n back (which is actually an IQ-boosting exercise, not a game) could be EASILY ported onto such a system, maybe even with its current software!

Let’s work the same problem Nintendo is working from the other end. One glorious day, when we meet in the middle, geeks will rule the world!

If you’ve ever tried to get an iPhone or a Wii, you’ve experienced the frustration of persistent scarcity. And maybe you’ve looked at eBay and found the item you want… for double the price. Or maybe you’ve finally broken down and paid your $500… only to see the item drop to $400 the following week.

All of these things can potentially hurt customer loyalty, and seem inefficient to me. Instead, let’s do the following:

The company should release a pricing scheme that looks like this:

Week 1  … 1000 units …. $1000/each

week 2… 1000 units … $950/each

.

.

week x …1000 units …  eventually stabilized price

This way, the early adopters and the technophiles can run out and pay a little tax for the luxury of being the first to own. Anyone who thinks the price is too high can simply wait. And they know exactly how long they have to wait before they think the price is fair. If the initial price is high enough, no one will have to suffer through long lines and long product searches.

The other advantages is that the company maximizes profit. They organically and dynamically find the value point for each consumer. This means that instead of Joe-eBay making extra money, the company (and therefore the shareholders) are gaining the benefit of the popularity.

In addition, no one should feel cheated by price changes, because the whole schedule is freely available.

The attempt to reify intelligence–measure it and assign it a single number–has been a goal of scientists for a long time. “The Mismeasure of Man” is a good book written in response to “The Bell Curve” about this topic.

Today I thought up a 3-dimensional description of intelligence that is slightly more useful than the 1-d version. Each axis is rated on a scale of 0-9, and the resulting 3 digit number describes the “3dIQ”

Axis 1: How quickly does the subject learn? What is their rate of knowledge increase?

Axis 2: How much can the subject learn? What is their maximum attainment?

Axis 3: What is the breadth of the subject’s knowledge?

So, by this scale, I might rate myself: 867

I learn more quickly than the average joe, which allows me to come off as smart, but really, my mastery of a subject doesn’t increase much past my initial bout of learning. Since I learn quickly, I look at a lot of different fields, and hence my breadth is above average.

Ideally I guess you’d have independent axes, but I suspect there’s a correlation between how quickly someone learns and what their breadth of knowledge is.

Any comments or self-evaluations?

The “deletionists” are wikipedia zealots who want to “legitimize” wikipedia by including only “notable” articles. Obviously, it’s a tough criterion when it’s being defined by hundreds or thousands of disparate people. However, I have a solution for wikipedia.

Let anyone write anything.

Obviously, if you let this go unchecked, wikipedia could turn into junk overnight. So you add a second bit.

Have “verified” and “unverified” entries. Verified entries appear above unverified entries in search results, and have a tag that notes they are verified. You can even include a flag if you only want to search verified entries. If you link to an unverified entry, the link shows up in a different color or style to let you know it’s questionable.
This is no extra work, because people are already reading (and deleting) entries they don’t like. This is having your cake and eating it, too. You have everything entered, and you have the good stuff noted as good stuff. This is uniformly better than the current process of having everything entered, and then half of it being deleted as “not good enough.” Let the end user make the decision, and inform their decision-making process.

I have 3 new ideas this week, all of which are similar. I’d love to create a webpage with at least one of them.

1) “Elevator pitch.” This is a website where you can post your entrepreneurial ideas. Posts come in, real time. You can tag them for organization. A couple lines will display on the main page, and you can link to a longer pitch. There will be forums to help people hone their pitches.

2) SciCloud. Collation of abstracts from scientific journals. Tagging and word clouding helps you figure out what’s hot in the science world. Rate of change of keyword frequency lets you determine what’s growing and what’s slowing.

3) Song scanner. Just like the “scan” function on your radio, this plays 3-5 second snippets of songs to your computer. If you like a snippet, click on a link to iTunes or Napster or whatever.

I was reading an article this morning that opined: “women talk too much.” It cited the statistic that men speak about 2000 words in the average day, and women something like 7000.

I tried to estimate how many words I speak per day–probably something like 5-10k–but I realized that one could invent a device that counted words. My wife (appropriately) came up with the clever name of “wordometer.”

How does it work? Our proprietary software integrates with your bluetooth headset and simply measures the time of your speaking. It then uses either a look-up table or some sort of word recognition program to estimate/guess your speaking rate. Rate x time  =words per day.

This is information you probably need even less than the number of steps you walk in a day. But for those of us who are obsessively narcassistic autodataphiles, it would be cool

I watched a special on lock picking the other day, and while I was turning my combination bike lock this morning, I had an idea.

I call it “The Baffler.”

It’s a simple mechanical spring device that is triggered by the first tumbler falling into place. This spring is geared to take a set amount of time (say, 5 seconds) before it kicks the tumbler out and spins the lock. Effectively, if you don’t do the combination quickly enough, you get booted.

Since lock picking takes time, I believe this would be an effective way to stymie both combination lock and key lock picking. For a keyed lock, the baffle time could be nearly instantaneous, since a key effectively hits all tumblers at once.

If this kid can build a damn windmill in the middle of Malawi with scraps, I oughta be able to put something together in the US.

(sorta reminds me of the line from Iron Man: “Tony Stark built this in a CAVE with SCRAPS!”

“Sorry, I’m no Tony Stark”)

I use google reader to aggregate the dozen or so rss feeds I subscribe to. Often when scrolling through slashdot, reddit, techdirt, and the like, I find the same link repeated over and over. It would be fun if google reader could automatically detect that link similarity and tell me which site posted a particular link first. It would also be interesting if google reader could notify me with a flag that the following post contains links I’ve already clicked on. Then on busier days I could skip by all the repeats.

In the wayback time, scientists had to create punch cards to talk to computers. These cards would be physically spelled out machine code fed into a reader that would perform operations. Thankfully, we left behind this archaic system many decades ago.

I’m trying to bring it back.

But in a totally new way. I’m imagining a barcode or a tiny RFID chip embedded in something the size of a business card. You could make printable programs, and then have a piece of hardware on your computer, like a barcode reader or chip scanner, that would perform the actions read off the card.

For example, I hand you my new business card. It has an embedded script that tells your computer to go to the website www.LinkedIn.com and add Jason as a contact. When you get home, you wave the card in front of the reader and the script executes. Then you just sit back and wait to click “ok.”

Really, this is no different than handing someone a disk. It’s just smaller, sturdier, and more customizable graphically. It’s only intended to transfer really tiny bits of code, like a website or a simple set of instructions. Sure, I could just type in a webpage, but am I going to do that?

This may be totally useless, but I feel like there’s something here. I welcome comments on this idea.