Ray Woodcock’s Current Thoughts

I’m wondering if they can change air so that it becomes brighter.  I guess it would contain some kind of molecule that would hold or reflect light.

One application:  making the atmosphere brighter, so as (perhaps) to reflect sunlight and reduce global warming.  Another application, especially for a biodegradable, light-sensitive, or timed product:  pump it out in the city so as to reduce the need for streetlights.  Especially if you could make it heavy, so that it would tend to settle in the bottom 10-20 feet of the atmosphere, and not outside of people’s high-rise apartment windows.

It could also be handy in the home, at night, in place of energy-consuming nightlights.  Or maybe they could make light-producing streets and highways, such that natural dust or humidity would pick up the light and, again, reduce the need for streetlights and headlights.  Safer for nighttime bicyclists, too.

I just read part of a debate on intelligent design vs. evolution.  People made good points on both sides.  But I still am not sure why there are two genders.

Someone said there are actually three, but they were counting hermaphrodites.  There is not a distinct third gender which is as different from male and female as those two are from each other.

One participant said that two genders gives you genetic diversity, but with more than two you start to run into costs that make it evolutionarily unprofitable.  In other words, nature designs for efficiency, and superfluous genders would be unnecessary and therefore inefficient.  That seems sensible enough.  But wouldn’t we see some species, somewhere, that are (or were) in the process of working through that?  Some kind of bird that has three or four genders, for instance.

It also seems like you could get even more genetic diversity, and could increase the likelihood of survival of the species, if people were able to reproduce regardless of gender.  Like in the situation where the men of a tribe got wiped out by warfare, or where women just get tired of men, or vice versa — why didn’t the ability evolve to reproduce by sharing earwax or otherwise cross-pollinating?  I guess one answer would be that evolution just hasn’t gotten around to that yet.  And that may be.  But I’d think that the force of life, just busting out all over, would have developed that sort of ability quickly, as a top priority.  Am I correct in thinking that cell self-division is the starting point?

Also, if genetic diversity is the goal, why just one mate?  Why not permit or require three- or four-way cross-pollination?

These sorts of question don’t prove anything, which is fine with me.  I’m not trying to prove anything.  I would just like to understand.

Instead of lotteries that award pure cash to winners (who sometimes blow the money and wind up back where they were), there should be at least the option for a kind of lottery that would put the winner into a certain lifetsyle, guaranteed, for the rest of his/her life.  Or, in case that lifestyle proved tiring, perhaps s/he could have a few options to switch into something else.

So, for example, a winner in the Celebrity Lifestyle Lottery would be given a lovely place to live in a celebrity location (e.g., Malibu, Central Park West, Maui), a celebrity-style chauffeur, annual admission to the Academy Awards, etc., along with a nice weekly allowance.  A winner in the Political Lifestyle Lottery would be introduced to the President and the First Lady, among others, and would be admitted to legislative and judicial hearings and conferences, political TV shows, and so forth.

This sort of thing could probably be provided for relatively low cost.  It would probably be more glamorous, and might also be more humane, in at least some cases, than the present form of lottery.

I have a copy of a book.  I would rather have it in PDF format so I can search it for specific terms and store it electronically.  So I rip it apart and I scan it.  Later, I’m done with it.  I sell or donate it to the Internet Library Circulation Department (ILCD) by sending it by e-mail or on CD.

At this point, my rights in the book cease, just as if I had sold or donated a physical book.  The ILCD could be set up to verify that my copy of the PDF had indeed been equipped with a neutering tag, rendering it unopenable.

The copy at the ILCD would be available to other borrowers, just like a real book.  While it was in use by one borrower, it would not be available to others.  The electronic versino becomes the complete replacement for the physical version.

Thanksgiving can be a mealy-mouthed sort of thing, when people feel a sort of vague gratitude that life is so good, or at least that it’s not as bad as it could be.  One way to focus our gratitude would be to have the Surgeon General deliver an annual message touching upon the various things that can and do go wrong with people.  It could be very entertaining and informative.  And by the time s/he was done speaking, we might be better acquainted with what a miracle our present state of health (perfect or otherwise) is.

Education is in chains. Hopefully, by 2100, it will be freed.

People love to learn. Not everyone, not every subject, and not always. But in general, if people are given an opportunity to learn something, and if they see it as useful or interesting, and believe that they can indeed learn it, they will.

That does not necessarily apply when other factors intervene. Teenagers, for instance, have a lot to sort out. They are not the best candidates for education — certainly not for education of a coercive nature, which is how too many of them experience it at present.

Education has become more free with the advent of the Internet.  It is now possible to find someone, somewhere, who has already looked into many of the puzzlers that two-year-olds (and older) pose to their parents.  But much still remains to be done.

It is still very much the case that exceedingly knowledgeable people are encouraged to share their thoughts only through professional journals that publish only a fraction of what there is to be known and shared on any given subject, and that they tend to do so in terms that only an educated elite can understand.  We are far from a situation in which people who need to know can learn directly and efficiently from people who know.  This can change, very much for the better, by 2100.

I just tried doing a quick Google search for this, but I don’t want to invest a lot of time in a stray thought, so just let me ask:  do you suppose animals race across the road, right in front of cars, because they know that birds of prey will not dare to dash down and snatch them when a vehicle is so near?

Plainly, this would not apply to deer and other large animals.  It also would not explain every confused gopher or indecisive squirrel who is fated to become part of the pavement.  But it would be interesting to know whether any kinds of small animals do use the onrushing automobile as a shield.

Right now, if you want to use dual monitors, you have to buy two monitors. This may seem logical. But an even more logical thing would be that, if you want to use dual monitors, you buy a dual monitor.

When you must buy two monitors, you must plug dual cables into dual outlets. You must also wrestle with dual positioning. With one piece of hardware that was designed from the beginning to serve as a dual monitor, this would not be necessary.

One stand is capable of holding two monitors. Moreover, it is capable of holding them so closely together that the user’s dual-screen experience could be an almost seamless one.

A single stand, holding dual monitors, could also hold them in assorted landscape and portrait orientations. That way, a user could arrange his/her desktop to open some programs (e.g., the Internet browser) in landscape mode, with a wide view — on, say, the left-hand monitor — while holding other programs (e.g., the word processor) in portrait mode, on the right-hand monitor.

A single dual monitor could also be much easier to move. The two monitors could fit together, face to face, providing very good protection; and with a base intelligently designed to pop off, the monitors and stand could slide into a box not much bigger than a single-monitor box.

After writing the foregoing words, I became aware of DoubleSight’s dual LCDs. At present, they do not have all of the features described above. But they have some of them, so they illustrate the point.

I know of a simple way to sell a lot more computers in the U.S.:  dual computing.

Sometimes your computer is not available and working properly.  Its hardware is malfunctioning, or its software is screwed up, or it is preoccupied with video rendering or some other processor-intensive task, or it is going through some kind of diagnostic process.  Or maybe it is working fine, but for some reason it is not able to install and run a piece of hardware — VoIP, say, or some video device.  Or you want to test a piece of hardware while maintaining your connection with the Internet, or while continuing to write up the test process or do some other work at the same time.  Or it needs to be rebooted so that some software can install.  Or maybe it needs to boot into a different operating system.  Or maybe you wish that it *could* boot into some other operating system — Linux, say, or Mac.

For various reasons, it can be handy to have a second computer.  This can be done:  just buy or build a second computer.  That means a whole separate bulky, space-consuming case, and all the ingredients that go into it.  You’ve got extra electricity consumption, extra heat production, and extra noise.  Then, if you want to run both computers from a single monitor, keyboard, and mouse, you have to learn about KVM switches, ghosting, and other problems and fixes.

After losing a large amount of time to some hardware issues last year, I decided to go ahead with the process of setting up two computers.  It has been worthwhile.  I would think, though, that it would be possible to make dual computing more of a common thing — to design a case, say, that would work with two motherboards, or a motherboard that would not only support two computers but that would also be able to combine the forces of those computers for especially demanding applications.  Hard drives could be internal or external; basically, all of the things that a person wants with two computers could be incorporated into one redesigned computer case — permitting, say, removal of a nonworking motherboard (or its processor-supporting daughterboard) from one side of the case while the other side was still powered up.

The Automotive Age lingered until about 2040 in America, and even longer in other poor countries. Historians generally agree that the era drew to a close, in the U.S., after the passage of the Rail Transportation Affordability Act (RTAA) of 2037. Until then, annual mass transit passes had been relatively unaffordable, to the point that considerable numbers of ordinary people still had to rely on old individual means of transportation (IMOT) devices.

The RTAA was quite unusual for its time. It was, in essence, a throwback to 20th century concepts of federal government expenditure, of a type that international creditors had largely forced the U.S. to abandon after its “secret” insolvency of 2017. Specifically, federal funding for citizens’ purchases of mass transit passes was facilitated, through the Act, on the basis of an open-ended governmental commitment to make up the difference between what people could afford to pay and current market prices for transit passes.

Creditors allowed Congress to proceed with the Act primarily because, by 2037, the productive capacity of the United States had become competitively undervalued. Continued progress in neural implants, combined with recent liberalization in restrictive freedom-based jurisprudence, held the promise that Americans would soon be offering considerably enhanced productive cognitive and emotive resources to employers. At the same time, further developments in longevity and old-age productivity had justified two substantial increases in individuals’ permanent indebtedness ceilings within the past three years – in 2034 and again in 2036. It appeared, in short, that creditors’ fiscal leap of faith, grounded in solid anticipation of improved returns per person, would ultimately prove justified. Increased access to elevated rail transportation, it was believed, would enable American workers to provide sharply improved levels of profitability for their owners’ benefit.

The RTAA thus fostered a decisive resolution of the long competition between elevated rail transportation providers and IMOT manufacturers. Basically, by 2037, the war was over. IMOTs had been increasingly untenable since the Pavement Desuetude movement of the early 2020s. When the RTAA became law, it was quite clear that the nation and the world would not generally be going back to the land-intensive, agribusiness-disruptive, difficult-to-maintain world of pavement-based IMOT transit. Many vehicle-width roads and bridges, which IMOTs had required since the dawn of the Automotive Age, had already fallen into disrepair when the Desuetude movement began. Motorized IMOTs also suffered the drawbacks of having always been quite dangerous, and of relying upon varying forms of fuels that had become unaffordable, irregularly available, and/or environmentally unacceptable.

Yet several factors delayed the end of the Automotive Age. First, a sharp public and legislative reaction against oversized vehicles, beginning about 2010, set the stage for many years of small-IMOT transit, during which the rising costs of raw materials needed for vehicle construction were partially offset by the smaller quantities of such materials needed per vehicle, as well as by savings in fuel and road construction and maintenance expenses. Possession of an oversized (one-ton or larger) vehicle was not criminalized in most states until about 2021, and of course it was never criminalized for commercial vehicles; but by then numerous judicial decisions had upheld state laws imposing strict civil liability for operation of personal oversized vehicles in vehicular accidents. Because the nation held a substantial inventory of smaller vehicles in 2020, for which their owners had incurred considerable debts and which were then starting to be seen as unsalable, the transition to rail travel was slower than the proponents of rail had hoped. Only as those vehicles and their roads began to fall apart did elevated rail emerge as the unavoidable successor.

It also took many years for the elevated rail network and related features (e.g., various forms of people-movers and automated delivery systems) to develop, following the completion of America’s first citywide prototype in Minneapolis in 2019. It would be another 12 years before national transit passes would finally provide the primary means of transportation for the majority of Americans.

Automobiles and roads, as they had been known in the 20th century, had changed almost beyond recognition by 2030. The change was less dramatic but still profound for trucks, tractors, and other forms of service and commercial vehicles. Even as late as 2040, there were still a few pockets of industry and personal use in which non-rail transportation predominated. For the generation reaching adulthood in 2020 and thereafter, however, automobiles seemed increasingly irrelevant and impractical. There really was never any question that that generation’s children would rely upon rail transit. It may have been this attitudinal change, more even than the several practical considerations just discussed, that spelled the ultimate end of the Automotive Age in the United States.