But there are a variety of more exotic non-conducting liquids out there that make your immersion-cooled system much more interesting. 3M just developed one they’re calling Novec, an inert, colorless liquid which boils at 93F. The downside is that your system needs to be airtight to prevent the vaporized coolant from leaking, and it probably still requires a fan to dissipate the heat completely. But it sure is pretty to watch.

As the cost of these materials drops, I could see this technology moving from ulta-niche to general hobbyist, maybe with the participation of a case manufacturer like Antec. I wouldn’t mind having to top off my bubbling computer once in a while, especially not if it meant I could squeeze a 40% performance boost with the added heat dissipation. For data centers, where the cost of electicity is quickly eclipsing the cost of the hardware itself, and where every watt pumped into the building must be pumped back out by air conditioners, this technology is even more attractive. But without major support by rack-hardware vendors, it’s difficult to imagine it taking off, no matter the cost benefits.

Let’s leave aside, for now, the fact that T-Mobile feels justified in differentiating text-message data from all other types of data, and charging separately for it. Enough has been written about that elsewhere (although I’ll return with my own screed later). I want to concentrate on the bottom weasel-text, reproduced here for the googles of the internet, which as of this writing don’t search inside images for text.

Fee we collect and retain to help cover our costs related to funding and complying with government mandates, programs, and obligations. [Oxford comma mine]

Let’s get something straight: despite the best efforts of Ronald Reagan and his idolaters of the last 30 years, every company must comply with government mandates, programs, and obligations. I’m talking about wasteful and oppressive regulations that cripple our job-creating small businesses, such as:

• Don’t dump carcinogens into rivers (ok, but not too much or we’ll fine you)
• Don’t charge an interest rate above 300%, no matter how dumb your mark (or if you do, at least call it a “payday loan” and make sure they’re a poor racial minority)
• Don’t employ children to mine coal (we know, their small hands can get more places, but people kind of hate child labor)

Every company must find a way to deal with the increased cost of doing business that regulation imposes, which may include passing the bill onto customers in one form or another. But few companies would be so gauche as to bill me a line-item for it. And it really does make my blood boil. In one asterisked footnote, T-Mobile has managed to neatly invoke 30 years of discredited free-market claptrap, that zombie ideology that just won’t die, no matter how many bullets to the head it takes. Their buck-passing reinforces this ideology’s central tenet, that government regulation of any sort is an unnecessary evil that raises prices for customers and fetters business. And of course, as with all invocations of this ideology, the potential benefits of such regulation aren’t mentioned, and certainly not in the same paragraph as the costs.

I don’t exactly envy T-Mobile and the other telcos their fate as the maintainers of expensive data lines with cutthroat operating margins, but that doesn’t excuse this kind of behavior. And in any case, their billing practices makes it hard to sympathize with them. Consider what I paid for voice, text, and data last month:

So for 138.37 MB of data (internet access), I paid $30.00. That comes out to $0.22 / MB. For the voice, assuming the most generous audio codecs in existence, I paid $39.99 for 222.89 MB of voice data, a rate of $0.17 / MB. For texts, I paid $10.00 for 0.015 MB of data (98 messages at 160B each), a rate of $668.73 / MB. It should be noted that since I spend nearly every waking moment in easy reach of a broadband connection and don’t have any friends, I use far less voice and data than most smart-phone owners, so the typical rates for those two types of data would be even lower. In summary, T-Mobile has no problem charging me:

• $0.17 / MB, if it’s a phone call
• $0.22 / MB, if it’s a webpage
• $658.73 / MB, if it’s a text message

Yessiree, nothing illogical or unethical about this pricing scheme, government regulators! Now go pick on the logging industry before we add some more anti-government propaganda to our next billing statement.

For most of a decade I’ve been carrying around a phone that was pretty cool in 2001 and hopelessly outdated by 2003, the Nokia 8390. Just look at this bad mother. It has these sweet white LEDs in its faceplate that light up when you push a button or get a call. Back when nobody had color screens yet, the 8390 was about as sexy as phones got. That changed pretty quickly.

Fast-forward to 2010 to find me carrying the same model. Not the same phone — I’ve gone through three identical ones in all, including one that spent 15 minutes at the bottom of Lake Sutherland and recovered. My coworkers universally have iPhones or Blackberries, and my friends, even the luddites, have color screens and cameras on their phones. I’ll admit to the occasional pang of jealousy at those luminous devices, but mostly I was immune to phone envy.

Ironically, what spurred my decision to move into the 21st century of mobile communication is that AT&T became so overwhelmed with the volume of data traffic generated by iPhone customers that they couldn’t even bother to reliably make my simple non-smart phone ring when I got a call. So I caved and, for better or worse, joined the ranks of people who can dick around on the internet in public whenever they want. I chose this sexy beast to the right here over the iPhone, mostly because I want to write applications for it without having to buy a $2000 laptop. Overall it’s probably not as polished as the iPhone, but it has more functionality (at least until the 4G) and will let me put my own software on it without jumping through a bunch of quasi-criminal hoops.

I’m still just scratching the surface of its functionality beyond making phone calls and web browsing, but I’ve already started using it as a camera and a GPS. This weekend I used it to trace Roark, Adam and me as we wended our way up a ridge line outside Leavenworth. I might even buy an armband and take it running, just like those people I used to mock mercilessly once they had jogged out of earshot.

I hate to say this, but Twitter is probably next. Sorry, everybody.

The ones Obama just approved to be built are the standard water-cooled, fast-breeder Uranium-238 reactors that we all know and love, not the above hotness. But with Nobel Laureate Steven Chu as the head of the Department of Energy, I can’t write off an idea this good out of hand.

They’re calling it the “holy grail” of green energy: inexpensive, clean, and no emissions. Halfway through the video, they finally cease the hype and take the wind out of our sails by explaining how it actually works.  It’s not the holy grail.

It’s a fuel cell. The main advantage it has over other fuel cells is that it can use natural gas, not hydrogen gas. That’s basically it.

So why do I have to piss in everyone’s cheerios? Why shouldn’t we be excited for it? Let’s start by reviewing why anyone cared about hydrogen fuel cells.

A hydrogen fuel cell is a device that takes hydrogen and oxygen gas and combines them to make water and electricity. Water vapor is the only byproduct of this reaction — it really is almost 100% clean, producing no net greenhouse gases. So what’s the problem? The problem, basically, is that hydrogen gas isn’t naturally occurring in large quantities. To get it, we have to make it (normally with water electrolysis), and it costs energy to make. What this means is that hydrogen fuel cells aren’t an energy source; they’re a means of transforming fuel (hydrogen gas) into energy (electricity). The big problem is that this fuel is really, incredibly difficult to store and transport because of its quirky tendency to explode in a massive fireball.

So if it’s that difficult to store this form of energy that you use electricity to make in the first place, why not just store the electricity in big batteries? Yes, why indeed.

This brings us back to the Bloom Box. Its fuel is natural gas, which, as the name implies, is naturally occurring. More importantly, most homes in this country already have it piped in. What the inventor claims is basically accurate: you’ll be able to attach one of these babies to your gas main and have it generate all your house’s electricity. Your gas bill will go up, of course, but your electricity bill goes away entirely.

Only problem is, we’re running out of natural gas. It’s a fossil fuel.

Besides which, whether you burn it to power a gas turbine (which is how we make much of our electricity today), or you pass it through a fuel cell, you’re still adding CO2 to the atmosphere. They make big talk about using carbon-neutral gases like landfill gas, but these can by their very nature only ever make up a minute portion of our energy consumption.

This is as good a time as any to point out that “60 Minutes” correspondent Lesley Stahl, when being told that the Bloom Box can run on any gas fuel, asks “solar?” The inventor says “yes,” but I think he’s just responding to the level of his audience.

The good news is that this technology probably will replace a lot of our electrical generation, and since it’s more efficient that means less greenhouse gases. Google is saying it’s about a 2:1 ratio, compared with burning the same methane to power a turbine. For really heavy electrical users, such as data centers, this represents a huge economic win, at least as long as natural gas stays cheap. But if a bunch more people are all of a sudden using more of a finite resource, what does that imply about its price trend?

CBS makes a point in its report to reiterate how dumb the whole “solar panel” idea is, contrasting acres of rooftop panels with a couple modest Bloom Boxes the size of fridges. It really underscores the fact that, in the public energy debate, the one thing people do not understand about energy is the only thing science knows about it for certain: it cannot be created or destroyed. The Bloom Box sounds like our savior if you don’t understand this basic fact; likewise, solar seems like a pipe dream. Problem is: all the energy this planet now has or will have in the future came from one of three sources.

1. The sun
2. Geothermal (caused mostly by gravity, we think)
3. Nuclear decay

That’s it. Notice what’s not included on this list: natural gas. It’s just a form of stored energy caused by a few billion years of organic life, fueled by the sun, dying and being cooked for millions of years underground. It’s going to run out.

What’s not going to run out is the sun, which we can convert to electricity directly using the technology they pooh-pooh as quaint. The chart above shows the size of solar installations necessary to replace the world’s energy use, including all fossil fuels, using 8% efficient photovoltaics. If we can get the efficiency up to 30%, which current trends suggest is feasible, those circles shrink by 75%. They’re still massive, but they’re ultimately the only feasible way we know of to provide civilization’s power requirements in the longer term. And of course, we could start building them now, with immediate payoff.

So now I’m confused — should we be excited about this new technology or not? Of course we should, yes. It’s much more efficient, which is pretty green, even if it still produces greenhouse gases. Maybe more importantly, it takes pressure off our stressed-to-capacity electrical grid, which we haven’t seen fit to invest in since Eisenhower. All those electric cars people are going to be driving need to get their electricity from somewhere, and if they can get it from natural gas and bypass the grid, there will probably be fewer resulting blackouts.

At least until we run out of natural gas.

Publishers, you are so unbelievably idiotic it makes my blood boil. The music industry just went through this. Were you not watching the news? We’ll pay for your product, but only at a price we don’t perceive to be highway robbery. Remember the $18 album? How can you believe the $15 ebook can make it?

Ebook prices need to come down to new paperback prices, in the $5-$8 range, or lower. At paperback prices, the convenience of electronic text makes sense, and probably makes up for the biggest drawback for most people. I’m talking about DRM, the software that controls under which circumstances you can enjoy your new ebook. Specifically, it disallows loaning or reselling the book and reading it on other devices. This is true for all three major reading devices on the market.

New releases are bad enough, but for old books the prices are actually insulting. Consider The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick. I can buy a new softcover copy for $10.82, or, by getting a digital version that I cannot share or resell (and that may no longer be mine if I have to replace my reading device), I save a whopping $0.83. That’s the discount — over a new copy. You can pick up a used one for around $6, online and in Half Price books.

Let’s be clear what we’re talking about here. This book is 46 years old. The author is long dead. It’s widely available in both used bookstores and libraries. For that matter, a simpleton could find it on bit torrent and transfer it to their device through USB. Quality control is generally poor — publishers clearly don’t even bother to hire proofreaders to spot obvious errors when transferring to an electronic format. I’m really, really getting tired of finding more errors in paid content than in books I pirate. In the case of the book above, they’ve even given the middle finger to the blind and disabled the text-to-speech option because they claim that the Kindle’s robotic voice constitutes an audio performance, which is separately licensed.

And they want twice as much as a paperback for it — a paperback that I can loan to a friend when I’m done reading it.

This is not how you endear yourself to customers; it’s how you show them your contempt. It’s how you show them just how incredibly out of touch with everyday values and beliefs you are. It’s how you drive them away into the waiting arms of whatever Napster-like community springs up once readers are ubiquitous.

Publishers, you have the power to keep yourselves relevant, but you have to accept what the music industry took a decade of kicks to the groin to understand: you aren’t nearly as important as you used to be. The internet is orders of magnitude better at the distribution part of your job than you can ever be. You may think that customers were paying for some intangible intellectual property all along when they picked up the latest Dan Brown at Barnes and Noble, but you’re kidding yourself. They were paying you for a physical object made from a bunch of dead trees. That’s all. Now there’s a better version of that artifact, and we don’t need you to put it on a truck and drive it to our big-box outlets anymore. You’ve been out-technologied, and there’s no return to a world where you present business model makes any sense.

You could embrace this fact: streamline your business, reducing it to editorial, talent-finding, and marketing and get rid of that entire third of your company that the internet made obsolete. It’s not all bad — you don’t have to take a large capital risk to put a book in front of consumers before knowing how it sells, because the per-unit production price of the artifact is measured in tenths of a penny. If you accept which way the wind is blowing and act on it, you might still have a place as editor and tastemaker for the literary world — just not as its distributor.

Or, you can keep asking outrageous prices for something you’re not, in any real sense, actually selling me. Your call.

And for the record, anyone who thinks that the iPad will make a large dent in the eReader marker is an illiterate yokel. People have been able to download and read books on laptops and netbooks for a decade, and yet they haven’t. Why is that, I wonder? Do you think it has anything to do with the discomfort of reading on a back-lit LCD screen?

To be fair to nerds (important goal to me), Apple is talking about this thing like it’s Jesus*. This is what they’re actually saying on their main product page (linked above):

Our most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary device at an unbelievable price.

They call it both magic and revolutionary. That takes balls.

Nerds gotta hate on new name-brand technology, I guess, but a lot of them really don’t get it. As is their wont, they tend to evaluate this kind of proposition with their brains instead of their guts. Their technical arguments, especially about the limits of such a “walled garden” approach to software that it’s now clear Apple is embracing, are basically sound. But they lack all perspective. We’re going to look back in 10 years and talk about how revolutionary this device really was.

What makes me so sure about this? For one thing, there’s the popularity of the iPhone. Everyone who loves their iPhone immediately gets the iPad on a visceral level, because it’s basically just a huge one that can’t make phone calls.

A lot of them will buy it, and then their friends will see it and wonder why they’re sitting on their couches making awkward little swipes at a mouse surface just so they can manipulate a little image of an arrow slowly, slowly up to a link — when all they’re trying to do is read webcomics. The truth is, one application at a time with a focus on the web is more than enough for a lot of people, and those people are being handed an interface that, although limited, is much easier to use and understand than a keyboard and mouse, for about the cost of a cheap (non-netbook) laptop.

Seriously, no perspective. This is what nerds were saying about the iPod when it was released in 2001:

No F-ing Way

All that hype for an MP3 player? Break-thru digital device? The Reality Distiortion Field™ is starting to warp Steve’s mind if he thinks for one second that this thing is gonna take off.

What else happened? Oh yeah, John Stewart interviewed the author of a new book about how America exports its cultural and medical attitudes about mental illness, especially depression. It sounds pretty fascinating, and also kind of sad.

*If Jesus were software, He would probably make your computer much nicer for a while, then quit working abruptly for 3 days, then suddenly return to operation and give all your other software a chance to install itself permanently. Then, about 2000 years later, He would make it impossible to reform American health care.

Like bacteria, the organism infects other cells through osmosis, then mutates and reproduces agamogenetically.

Agamogenetically is a real word, not a made-up sci fi word, so they’re in the clear there. But if there’s one thing I learned in high school biology, it’s the definition of osmosis: the diffusion of water across a semi-permeable membrane. It is certainly not a means for anything to infect anything else… unless by infect, you mean hydrate. Bacteria don’t “infect other cells” this way because they’re not water molecules. Also, because bacteria don’t “infect” other cells, seeing as they are single cells themselves. Cells are into some kinky shit, but they don’t enter one another.

It’s kind of funny: I’ve come to accept and expect a sub-7th-grade understanding of science from our news media, but for some reason, I feel like the nerds at EA should know better. If nothing else, this kind of glaring error in a “scientific” document achieves the opposite of immersion in a medium that’s striving for it.

This talk is to a technical audience (an engineering class), so if you get lost just pretend he’s saying “magic.” The quick takeaway: his company has developed a more efficient way to stream HD video, which allows them to run games on big honking servers in a data center somewhere, while you just need a tiny (maybe free) device in your living room that never, ever needs upgrading. Instead of you upgrading to a new console every 5 years, they upgrade to the latest and greatest hardware behind the scenes every six months. In the video game industry, this is the biggest paradigm shift since the NES proved that home consoles could be profitable in the USA.

As with any new technology, there will be winners and losers. A brief list of each:

Winners:

• Hardware manufacturers. Intel and nVidia are going to clean up as high-end compute and graphics hardware turns into a co-op business.  Instead of relying on bleeding-edge early adopters to buy their newest cards and chips, they’ll be able to count on millions of rank-and-file consumers paying for access to a timeshare of the same.  Even better, a consumer PC gets upgraded once every 3 years, but servers in the data centers will get new hardware on a continual, rolling basis.
• Developers and publishers. No license fee to the creator of the platform (Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo).  No need to port games to multiple platforms.  No piracy cutting into the bottom line.  Instant, globally applied patches.  No up-front investment when printing and shipping discs.  Indie developers in particular stand to make a killing compared to older distribution methods.
• OnLive and shareholders. They’ve got proprietary technology that is going to make it very difficult for another upstart to attempt anything similar. That’s on top of their 3-year lead time. Expect for them to own this market for the next decade.

Losers:

• Retailers.  Retail stores are going to be cut out of the market completely.  Online stores like Amazon are going to fare no better than brick-and-mortar shops — the business of selling physical disks is simply going to evaporate.  Used stores, needless to say, are likewise out of luck.  If you haven’t started shorting GameStop stock, start now.
• Game pirates.  Unlike with DRM for movies and music, which is laughably easy to circumvent, there is simply no way to steal games from OnLive short of stealing someone else’s account information.
• Innovative controllers. Nintendo has largely succeeded in the hardware wars because of its innovative control schemes for the Wii and the DS.  Before that, it invented the analog stick.  Before that, it invented the directional pad.  With the advent of on-demand gaming, controls will be standardized and more or less frozen, possibly with the exception of special-purpose controllers for blockbuster games like Guitar Hero.

Gaming has already surpassed Hollywood as America’s most profitable form of entertainment, and as movie executives finally pull their heads out of their asses and realize that preventing piracy is impossible we’ll start to see those massive resources shifted to where they can get the best return. This doesn’t mean the death of big-budget blockbusters in the near term — but it does mean that games will routinely get the level of financial commitment thrown at Avatar and other mega-blockbusters. Game execs currently wring their hands over a budget of $15 million. That’s going to change.

For $60 you get two devices, various chargers, and 25 cartridges.  To re-up, I’ll be ponying out $1 per cartridge, which they dubiously claim is equivalent to 15 cigarettes.  More on that later.

The device’s function is simple: most of the length is a Lion battery, and when you puff, it feeds power to the pretty blue LED on the end, as well as to a heating element (vaporizer), which atomizes the nicotine solution in the replaceable cartridge.  You inhale the vapor, and it dissipates almost immediately when you exhale.  Watch this kid do it:

The day I received mine in the mail I chain-smoked them at my desk at work, eventually getting what was obviously in retrospect a mild case of nicotine poisoning. It felt great at the time. They’ve since mostly gotten use in social settings for their novelty value. The verdict is that it tastes and feels more like smoking hookah than a cigarette. Everyone’s favorite flavor is menthol.

So: should you buy one of these things? If you enjoy smoking and won’t miss $60, then probably. If you’re looking for a supplemental smoking device that you can use anywhere (for now), or for a novelty item to spark conversations at parties, look no further.

If, however, you’re a current smoker lured by the advertised 80% reduction in cost over traditional burning-plant-matter cigarettes, you should rethink your plan. I don’t know how they formulate their 15-cigarette equivalence (maybe on nicotine content, maybe it’s pure marketing BS), but in my experience each cartridge is closer to three or four tobacco cigarettes. This means that each virtual cigarette is about 25 cents apiece ($1 per cartridge), which is slightly cheaper than a pack in Seattle, a lot cheaper than a pack in NYC, and more expensive than most of the country. Besides the relative parity in cost, the smoking experience provided by the vapor just doesn’t cut it if you’re really craving a smoke. The pleasant but painful “throat hit” of cigarettes is faithfully replicated, but something is missing. It’s just not the same.

And as a final warning: just because you’re technically not breaking any laws with your e-cigarette doesn’t mean that people won’t look at you funny or ask you to “put it out.” This hasn’t happened to me yet, but I’m aware of the possibility. Also, “I’m not technically smoking in bed” is not guaranteed to placate your girlfriend.