Assuming, of course, that you can make an axial motor which fits his idea, at the price he's quoting, there are still a couple problems with this.

Vehicles have sprung weight and unsprung weight. Sprung weight is weight which is insulated from the road by the springs and other suspension elements. Your engine and vehicle body are part of the sprung weight. Your wheels and brakes are part of the unsprung weight (no springs isolating them from the road).

For a smooth ride, you want your ratio of sprung : unsprung to be as high as possible. That way, the weight of the vehicle keeps the wheels stuck to the road and the wheels bouncing up and down on the road transmit less motion through the suspension to the body. Adding a motor to each hub is going to boost the unsprung weight, meaning you vehicle will have a rougher ride. That's problem #1.

You want as few moving parts, as possible, as part of the unsprung weight because they take a genuine beating driving over the road. Putting the motors in the unsprung weight means the motors will take a beating, which means they're going to have a shorter lifespan than you might hope. That's problem #2.

If you could remove a vehicle's differential and replace that with one containing one or more electric motors, such that the motors are part of the sprung weight, that would help to fix both issues. That, however, would add considerably to the weight and price tag, especially when you consider most front-wheel-drive vehicles already have a very crowded engine bay.

I admire his thought about retrofitting existing vehicles and turning them into Plug-In Hybrid Vehicles (PHEVs). I agree that, if 90+% of your daily driving could be done on electricity, you would seriously diminish the amount of fossil fuels needed. I agree that, if you are only adding 20 miles or so of range, you don't need such a large battery. I agree that retrofitting an existing vehicle into a PHEV, without spending 5 figures doing it, could go a LONG way toward diminishing fuel usage (mod your existing vehicle, rather than acquiring a completely different one). I agree with his motivations, and I've pondered what he suggests, some time ago. Unfortunately, I just don't see such an easy way to reach the goal.

I'd be happy with a plug-in hybrid but precious few of them are on the US market.

What I'd rather see is a trailer with a gasoline engine and a generator, such that I could use a lower-range EV around town but still hook up a trailer (rented, not owned) when I needed to do a road trip which was well beyond the range of my batteries.

And me without mod points today. Mod this up!

At a prior gig, I introduced the IT manager to a wiki. It was free software which ran on a Windows server (they were an MS shop). At first, he didn't see the value in it. I started putting stuff in there. He'd come ask me something. Have you checked the wiki? Uhh ... oh ... yeah ... there's that info. He quickly saw the value in it and started using it as well.

Fast forward a few months. We hired some more IT folks. We quickly discovered what was poorly- and well-organized. It became a rite of passage for new folks to hit the wiki to find stuff and, if something wasn't there, someone with more experience would help them write it up. New folks quickly came to see the value in it and contribute to it. Stuff got doc'ed, widely, and well-used.

Fast forward a few years. I'm at a new gig. I'm trying to learn my way around the infrastructure and the coding standards. Oh, go ask so-and-so about that. Are there no docs? Nah, just go ask that super-busy person who is juggling the jobs of three people.

We had a wiki (mediawiki, no less) but it wasn't getting used. I used it. I wrote stuff up. More new hires, interns, etc. They're being told "oh, check his wiki page; he's got a ton of stuff linked from there." They start doing the same. It's become a running joke. Can anyone tell me how to do such-and-such? Yeah, I have a page about that; try not to act surprised. After about a month, they're not surprised; they're laughing along with everyone else.

If only one person in the organization knows how to do that task, that task has Bus Factor = 1 (only one person needs to get hit by a bus, or otherwise rendered unavailable, before your organization suffers). A good wiki, where it's easy to write clear docs, and search them 'cuz plain text, can quickly take any task to Bus Factor = infinite. If you want your organization to thrive, you need the Bus Factor as high as possible on everything.

Anytime I have to wrestle with how to do something, I doc it on the wiki. If I need to do it again, next week, I might remember how to do it. After a couple months, it's good thing I doc'ed it. Eagleson's Law says that any code you wrote, but haven't touched for at least 6 months, might as well be written by someone else. It's been flushed from your short-term memory. If you have a mortgage and car payments, cut that number in half. If you have a significant other, cut it in half. For each kid, cut it in half. Pretty soon, you're lucky if you can keep stuff in short-term memory for a week at a time. Spending 5 minutes putting it on a wiki page, which you can find when you need it, will save you a lot of "wrestling."

I recall reading the "Mother Earth News Handbook of Homemade Power" back in the 1970s. They had an extensive interview with an Indian guy named Ram Bux Singh, talking about "gobar gas," which was an Indian colloquial term for methane.

It also featured an in-depth article from an originally-British guy who ran a major pig farm in South Africa for 70 years, turning the manure into methane and running a modified diesel engine on it. You can read the interview here for more info.

Not only did his investment in the methane production equipment pay itself off (in the late 1950s) in the course of about six years, it also helped with another major problem found on pig farms: flies. Fly eggs in the manure went into the methane digesters and ... that was the end of them. The fly problem basically disappeared and the pigs were healthier as a result.

We're already in a state where we get called into a meeting and ... that could've been handled with an email. Trying to add email to zoom isn't going to help matters. It's bad enough that stuff sent through the existing chat channel, in a Zoo meeting, disappears when the meeting ends. We've stopped using that and stuck with our existing chat client to keep that from happening.

What Zoom DOES need to add is a list of my most recent meetings. 95+% of my meetings are with the same handful of people, with the same meeting room info as last time. Show me a list of who all I've had a Zoom meeting with recently, and what meeting room info was used for them, and let me select from that list to enter a meeting. THAT would be useful and it involves info which Zoom already has.

First off, the Senate vote was a stunt by Marco Rubio. Afterwards, when reporters asked various Senators why they voted for it, they were all "wait, WHAT did I vote for?" There's a variety of procedural stuff that no one really pays attention to and votes in favor (breaking for lunch, breaking for the day, etc.). Rubio managed to get that thrown into one of those periods.

Second, we did try the year-round DST thing back in the 1970s. Kids waiting for their schoolbuses, in the dark, were getting hit by motorists before the sun came up. It wasn't "kids walking to school," as some have stated; they were waiting for this buses. And while it's much less likely kids would be walking to school, these days, it's every bit as likely that they'd be waiting for buses. That killed our experiment with year-around DST. Biden was a Senator back then, voting in favor of it and then, after seeing the results, voting to rescind it.

Ergo, if it had passed the House and Senate, he would most likely have vetoed it. Because he's been around long enough to remember what happened LAST TIME we went there.

It's been my experience, traveling someplace where a different language was the dominant one, QR codes on menus can be a pain or a blessing.

What I'd like to see is a paper menu with a QR code next to each dish which, instead of linking you to a website, shows you the text describing that menu option in another language. For example, if I'm traveling in Puerto Rico, where everyone speaks Spanish, a Spanish-language menu could have QR codes which give me an English translation on each dish. That would help me improve my Spanish skills, as I could compare what's on the menu to the translation, even if I have to use my phone to decode the QR code and see the translation.

Yes, QR codes are typically used to provide you with an easily-decoded URL. They don't HAVE to be used that way.

I could also envision an AR app which looked at the Spanish-language menu and overlaid the Spanish descriptions with the English translations from the QR codes. That could end up being a "killer app" which drove greater adoption of AR.

When we visited Iceland, some years ago, they had a lot of English-speaking tourists (USA and Britain) but they also had a lot of French-, German- and Chinese-speaking tourists. All Icelanders have to learn multiple languages in school (there's about 360k people who speak their language, world-wide; they all learn Icelandic, English and at least one other language). That comes in handy when dealing with tourists, but few of them had the option to learn Chinese so such tourists had a particularly hard time; the Icelander is usually speaking English as a second language and the Chinese tourist is usually speaking English, or trying to, as a second language. The people we talked to mentioned having a very difficult time accommodating Chinese-speaking tourists. If they could pull out a menu or something with QR codes which Chinese-speakers could decode (no WiFi, no website needed), that could've helped. Maybe the menu has multiple QR codes for each menu item, with flags indicating which QR code provides which language's translation.

If you're using your phone to decode the QR codes, and actually READING the output, instead of surfing the net based on QR code URLs, it's less likely that you'll get sidetracked into checking email, etc.

I rocked one for multiple years. When it finally died a few months ago, I had a funeral.

I had a Pebble 2 HR. And yes, the HR means it had heart rate monitoring.

The step counter wasn't bad. It was off by < 10% compared to some of the other things I've used. The heart rate monitoring wasn't bad; within about 5% of a chest-strap-mounted heart rate sensor. The sleep tracking was quite good.

It had a smart alarm. I could give it a 30-minute window in the morning and it would wake me up, as early as possible within that window, when I was in a light-sleep state. Trying to wake up, when in a deep-sleep state, leaves me groggy as hell; I never woke up groggy with this. I could make any alarm a smart alarm, including different times for different days of the week (getting up for work on weekdays vs getting up Sunday morning for church vs no alarm on Saturday morning). I could set / disable / alter these alarms on the watch itself, instead of needing to use the app. If I was off work tomorrow, I could disable the wake-up alarms for the next morning on the watch itself.

If you were willing to leave the Bluetooth on all the time (which ran the battery down), you could use it to:

• control music, playing on your phone
• see who was calling
• see incoming text messages
• send one of a handful of canned responses

etc. If I left the BT off most of the time, I could go 7 - 10 days on a charge. If I left it on all the time, two days tops.

The app synced with Google Calendar, such that appointments with notifications on them would trigger the vibration alarm on the Pebble. I could be eating lunch and ... oh, crap, I forgot about that meeting. I was rarely ever late for an appointment or meeting because the watch didn't have to be actively synced with my phone, at the moment, to know about appointments. It would hold a couple days' worth of appointments; I made a point to sync it every day or so, such that it stayed up-to-date on what was upcoming and sync'ed my sleep tracking and step count off to the app.

When my phone would no longer work with it (updated to newer version of Android), I had it sync with my tablet (still running an older version of Android). Sounds like the new app would let me use it with my newer phone, if I still had a Pebble.

If I woke up late at night and needed to navigate to the bathroom, I could tap the watch and it would illuminate just enough that my adjusted-to-the-dark eyes could see obstacles and I wouldn't bump into stuff. It was pretty faint; I could do this without waking up my beloved.

There were a variety of watch faces to choose from; I settled on one with large digits that was very easy to read at a glance. There were also other apps you could load. I kept a countdown timer app. I'd put laundry in the dryer, start a countdown timer, put laundry in the washer, start a countdown timer, put something in the oven, start a countdown timer, etc. and it would silently notify me when each of these expired. I couldn't begin to count how many loads of laundry I dealt with, how many loaves of bread I proofed and baked, over the years, with this thing silently letting me know when to get up and deal with something.

There's no way for a smartphone to do sleep tracking or smart alarm things; only something wearable is going to know what sleep state you're in. A smartphone can do everything else, assuming you carry it all the time.

Still looking for a smartwatch which can duplicate ALL of that. I'm wearing a cheaper device from Withings, at the moment; it tracks sleep and step count and can have one smart alarm per week (it wakes me up for work, on weekdays), but that's it. When I find something which can do the smart alarms, hold multiple days' of appointments and run various apps, without needing to be BT tethered all the time and without needing to be charged every day, I'll probably plunk for it. That seems to be a pretty tall order; I was very spoiled by my Pebble. It's gotten really hard to find Pebble 2 HRs out there; they don't last forever and they're in very high demand, so anyone parting with one either has serious issues with it OR wants a small fortune for it.

Originally, for the USA, DC had the most deaths per capita because population density; there is no rural territory in DC.

Then New York took the top spot 'cuz population density (the NYC metro got hit pretty hard, which extends beyond just NY; CT and RI had pretty high numbers, too).

Then New Jersey took the top spot. It has the highest average population density of any US state.

Then vaccines came out and Blue States jumped on 'em. New Jersey is now bumped down to like #8 or #9 with Red States taking the top spots because their populations are less likely to get the vaccines.

Alaska and Hawaii both have very low population density, and low deaths per capita, but they vote differently. If you think about it, you would expect high-population-density to correlate with deaths per capita.

Utah is an anomaly partly for the reason you stated: they may vote red but the main influence in that area is not the population but the religion. They are also low population density.

If your definition is "whatever Zuck / Meta says," no. We don't need that. Zuck wants a playground where people will focus all their attention, as long as possible, so he can influence what you see and how you spend your money. He wants to make Fecebook more immersive. Again, we don't need that.

I'm a coder by day. If I had something which could use 3D rendering to show how the code I'm developing interacts with other code and other systems, that would be helpful. Having 3D for depth could really add to the amount of detail I can perceive and process, something which a 4K display (my current main screen) has difficulty with. I have a pretty good FoV with my 4K but there's only so much detail I can perceive on a 2D screen. "The Lawnmower Man" was fiction but I frequently find myself wishing I had an immersive, 3D environment like what was envisioned in there, not because it would give me superpowers (duh, no) but because of the visualized data in which I could immerse myself, such that my pattern-matching mind would have more data to parse. Visualization software would need to evolve but it's not going to evolve that direction until good, immersive 3D (which doesn't make you nauseous) is available at reasonable price. And it will be "read-only" until such time as someone can come up with a good, useful, systematized way of manipulating stuff in that 3D space. You need to be able to manipulate your position, your gaze, your zoom level and be able to move / manipulate objects "in world."

If I could use some kind of robot for telepresence, such that I could, say, tour the Parthenon in Greece without needing to get in an airplane and go there, and be able to perceive it all in 3D, as well as being able to steer the robot around (instead of just zooming in / out on some bubble-shaped image), that would be cool. At that point, you're not just talking about using a VR headset; you're talking a full 3D environment where you can remote-drive something to change the physical vantage point. That was part of the Metaverse, at least WRT the "Snow Crash" implementation. To make that happen, you'd need a way of

• turning multi-vantage-point imaging (on the telepresence robot) into a 3D model
• transferring that model from point A (the Parthenon) to point B (my system)
• getting said model into my head through my headset
• providing consistent controls for driving, gazing, zooming, etc.

You'd need a consistent methodology for all of this. The systematization of all of this would be a sort of 3D "operating system," on which a wide variety of applications could be built. That OS could, realistically, be known as a Metaverse. Just as a web browser systematizes the WWW (rendering stuff in consistent fashion, providing a recognizable set of controls and input mechanisms, etc.), a Metaverse could systematize all of this other stuff that we aren't really doing (yet).

Until such time as it is systematized, different apps will have very different abilities, different ways of manipulating stuff, etc. The WWW wasn't the first hyperlinked system (see Englebart's Online System - NLS - and Nelson's Project Xanadu). But it systematized things and opened it up for the world to play with. In that regard, HTTPD, HTML, etc. provide the OS upon which so much of our modern life is built, known colloquially as the WWW.

If I had a PHEV which could go, say, 50 miles on a charge, it would need considerably less battery than a full EV. I don't typically drive 50 miles in a week (my wife and I both WFH) so I wouldn't need to charge every night.

It also means the only time I'd need to buy fuel for it is when I do a significant road trip. Those happen a few times / year. I wouldn't need to worry about whether or not there's a charging station, is it functional, or is it full; I could pump a few gallons into the tank and get on down the road. That infrastructure is already built out. I'm just making considerably less use of it.

For 90+% of all my driving, I'd be doing it on electricity; I'd be within 50 miles, round trip, from my home and I can charge up at home. I care, considerably less at that point, about the public availability of chargers and charging networks.

When I lived in a rural area, a PHEV with 100 miles range would do 90+% of all annual driving on electricity.

We need to burn less gasoline; no argument. But there's a point of diminishing returns. If I can spend a little more money and eliminate 90+% of my gasoline usage (only needing gasoline for significant road trips), that's much more economically viable than shelling out 2 - 3x as much money for a vehicle which eliminates 100% of gasoline usage.

There need to be PHEVs with varying amounts of range, such as 50 miles, 75 miles and 100 miles range. Longer range = more $; that's understandable. So far, I'm having a hard time finding any with > 30 miles range. That would eliminate > 50% of my gasoline usage but I'd like to eliminate more.

In light of all that, he's not wrong. If we can make 6 PHEVs with 50 miles range, or a single EV with 300 miles range ... the former is going to make a bigger dent in gasoline consumption than the latter.

I drive a Camry Hybrid, which gets 40+ MPG in town. I'd love a way to upgrade that silly thing into a PHEV but that just ain't happenin'. I don't have enough $$$ burning a hole in my pocket to plunk for a Tesla.

As I understand it it, the screen is unrolling from one (maybe both?) sides of the frame as they stretch the frame.

So, the roll-up screens, as seen in "Red Planet," are finally becoming reality? I'd be ok with something like those. Retract it into a couple cylinders for storage / carry, unroll when needed. Bonus points if they can build in the tricorder functionality that can show you broken ribs, looking through a space suit and skin.

In "The Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer," the author talks about creating code by plugging numbers into boxes. You're plugging in numbers for lower- and upper-bounds of ranges, with various things happening based on whether metrics are in this range or that range. This worked well for creating a certain amount of automation, usually for unit testing.

Does this constitute programming? If so, it's definitely a low- / no-code environment.

Does creating a spreadsheet constitute programming?

A spreadsheet may be an interpreter, and it may be rather slow, but yes, this is programming. Especially when you have formulae which implement if / then / else logic; now you're getting into Turing-complete functionality. If you keep the spreadsheet from griping about circular references, you can implement all manner of programmer-adjacent functionality.

Do you need a degree in IT or Computer Science to do that? I know plenty of people who have no formal training in programming getting the hang of this and getting it working, able to implement some significant logic.

Back before I got my degree, I was doing temp work in various offices. I was using Lotus 1-2-3, which actually had a very easy-to-use macro recording function. I blew away a lot of people with how I could record a macro which did something, then record a second macro which used the first, then record a third macro which used the second. I would end up executing one macro and it would sit there and crunch numbers for multiple hours at a time (I had one macro which ran for over 3 hours; it was an older, very-slow machine; the company for which I was temp-ing was expecting someone was going to have to babysit the machine for a couple days and I did it all in one afternoon). I had some high-school training in programming (Applesoft BASIC, for the most part) so I had SOME programming training and experience, but nowhere near a degree.

Was that programming? Yes. Was I writing code? Not really; knowing how to tell the app to record a sequence of keystrokes ... that's easily a low- / no-code environment. Even if it's not the type of environment the article's author is thinking of.

It likely will not REPLACE traditional coding altogether but it will enable companies to implement more and more automation without needing so many traditional coders. If future apps make it easy for a "real developer" to develop to add-ons which end users can automate ... look out world. You won't need AI to do the coding stuff for you.

Artificial Intelligence is no match for natural stupidity. It's also no match for human intuition. Companies would be much better off trying to leverage the latter.

There was a book with that title.

An excellent book, I should add. At least one of the chapters, talking about how large telegraph offices were setup, sounds an awful lot like the architecture of a modern router.

The reality is that a variety of communications techs came about in conjunction with the telegraph. Pneumatic tubes were originally developed because getting data a short distance from the one location to another was too slow via Morse Code (or any of its predecessors). Paris had a system where you could put messages in boxes on trams and have them delivered elsewhere in the city within a matter of hours. It was possible to get messages back-and-forth across Paris, using this tram-based system, doing two round-trips in a single day (not impressive by electronic standards but EXTREMELY impressive when you compare to modern postal systems).

Just as the Internet unified a variety of different technologies, telegraph offices of a prior century tended to be hubs unifying a variety of different comms techs.

To one of your points: the workers find they don't add enough value.

That's the crux of the whole argument, yes? If a union adds value (gets you better conditions, more money, etc.) workers will want it. If it doesn't (caving to the employers' demands, taking too much in union dues) they won't.

This is an opportunity for unions to make a comeback. Too many people have been screwed over by employers for too long. But unions need to actually provide some value. Too many of them quickly became mini-corporations in their own right, enriching their own C-suite at everyone's expense. They will need to do better than that, if they are to actually make progress.