My current 'object of desire' is the absolutely gorgeous Fisker Karma. Built by Fisker Coachbuild, and powered by a powerplant from Quantum Technologies, the Karma is an eco-geek's dream machine. It is a plug-in-hybrid, which operates exclusively off of it's batteries, with a gasoline engine to power the electric plant in the event that the driven range exceeds 50 miles between charges. If your commute is less than 25 miles in each direction, the gasoline engine never kicks on, and you end up with an effective 100MPG. When you have returned home (or if you have an AC outlet at work), you plug it in and charge the batteries and you are ready to roll after work or the next morning.
The clever folks at Fisker Auto also have the option of a solar array on the roof of the car to keep the cabin (and batteries) cool during idle periods, thereby boosting the batteries' efficiency. Rumor has it that there is also a garage-roof-solar-panel option with the car as well, to allow it to charge using solar while parked. Of course, if you drive home from work in the evening, that doesnt give you much time to harness the sun to charge the battery unless you have some sort of fuel-cell that stored it up all day.
In my case, with two young children, it is the perfect pairing of exotic sportscar (it goes 0-60MPH in 5.8 seconds) and family sedan. Granted, the estimated retail price is somewhere north of $80,000, so it is unlikely that my smarter-and-better-half will green-light the pre-order in these harsh macro-economic times.
Never one to be deterred, I set about trying to justify the value to myself (in preparation for the harder sell to my wife), and was surprised to discover some nasty facts about electric power in the United States that caused me to think twice about a plug-in hybrid.
I'm going to lay out some data that I uncovered, and hope that some astute readers can point out the holes in my concerns, or new data, so I can justify this after-all:
/Rant
On the short flight today I finally took the time to read the much-referenced National Geographic article on Swarm Behavior, which (uncharacteristically for N.G.) manages to intermingle stigmergy with Wikipedia.
I am going to don my best Asbestos suit for this one and go out on a thin flammable limb in saying that:
"SWARM BEHAVIOR AND THE WISDOM OF CROWDS ARE COMPLETELY DIFFERENT"
If you are reading this, the odds are strongly in favor of your ancestors having descended from primates of some species, which means that we have our own pecking order on how we figure out who is giving orders and who is taking them. Who gets to mate with that pretty female over there? Easy, the big silverback.....and woe betide the little ape who tries to bypass the pecking order.
I'm currently sitting in a frequent traveler lounge in Chicago O'Hare international airport. In fact, I've been sitting in these lounges for so much of my life that I should be able to claim this as residence on my taxes. It USED to be that you could walk into these lounges and the pecking order was clear.....the silverback CEO in the pinstripe, his #2 in the blue blazer and gray trousers, the #3 in the taupe suit with spiffy tie. Then, about 15 years ago, a new species was introduced into the pecking order....the guy in the jeans with the $500 pen and leather journal. He disturbed the explicit status regime because no one could place him in the pecking order.
Vignette- In 1996, I moved from Southern California to Northern California. In SoCal, if you walked in to a fine mens clothier, you had better look the part already or no sales rep was going to take the time to come and speak with you. I once waited 30 minutes for a sales rep to approach me at Fashion Island in Newport Beach because I had stopped on a whim while wearing jeans. When I moved to NoCal, I strolled into Stanford shopping center in Palo Alto to pick up some new corporate armor and was pounced on by sales reps repeatedly, also while wearing jeans. Why? Because in Silicon Valley, that unshaven guy in jeans may be the recent community college dropout, or the recent dot-com multi-millionaire retiree. It's better to err on the side of not ignoring him.
So what does this have to do with Swarm Intelligence, you may be asking yourself? Exactly nothing. That's my point. We have a complex, hard-wired program of non-verbal cues and social behavior that underlie the structure of human interaction. We don't sniff each other's privates to say hello, follow pheromone trails, or dance a jig to signify when we've found a new hive for the family unit. We do unconsciously move (or not) when walking straight at other primates, we do defer to the silverback in the room and adjust the tone of the conversation when he/she enters, we do follow a complex program of picking the EXACTLY RIGHT urinal when confronted with a busy public restroom.
I agree with half of the article's argument that pervasive network connectivity and web 2.0 technologies allows us to engage in a public dialog and discourse on a scale unprecedented in human history. This will be the killer application of the information superhighway that we all painstakingly built in the last two decades, just as the secondary commerce that arose from the highway systems worldwide was the real societal benefit, and not the highways themselves.
I disagree that this has anything to do with swarm behavior. We may be clever primates and build tools and bots to leverage swarm behavior to forward our primate ends, but we can't deprogram millions of years of evolution and hard wiring and begin to act like networked honeybees, pigeons, or ants.
/Rant off
After two days at the ARCS workshop at the Santa Fe Institute, as well as two more days at the annual Business Network meeting, my 'buffer is full', as we say in the computer business. It was an excellent combination of specific/deep (ARCS) and broad (BusNet) meetings.
All in all, my favorite presentations were those of Norman Johnson of LANL, and Martin Nowak of Harvard. Dr. Johnson's presentation was entitled "Pandemics: The Emerging Threat, Biodefense & Biosecurity- Global View", and walked through the history of prior pandemics, the societal conditions that existed at those times, with the contrasting societal conditions now and the impact of a comparable pandemic. It was a very effective and chilling augur of the coming pandemic(s).
Dr. Nowak of Harvard had an equally excellent presentation on cooperation. He went through his slides quickly, walking through the five distinct modes of cooperation and the prisoner's dilemma. He covered more material in his brief presentation than I have absorbed in >10 books on the subject. If he had been a professor of mine in my undergraduate years, I would have quickly shifted my focus from business and computer science to evolutionary dynamics.
Hopefully, the Santa Fe Institute team will post the slides from the BusNet meeting soon, so I can update this post with links to those presentations.
I also was able to wrap up my last two days in Santa Fe with back-to-back morning runs, including a new personal record for the mile (10.06) as well as prolonged distance without stopping (about two miles). I am glad, as I sit in the Frankfurt Airport, that I ran those days, as international travel provides a good opportunity for those tired muscles to heal up in preparation for some good runs in Nice and London this week.
Going to head for my gate now, where it appears that the European air-travelers are equally unthrilled with the liquid/gel regulations that are causing travel delays worldwide. More from the Cote d'Azur.
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