Entries this day: Good_ideas Swimming

Good ideas

2:27pm JST Saturday 4 December 2004

Andrew, who works two booths from me at Gaba, loaned me Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, as detailed a description of the universe as laymen would likely willingly read, written in laymens' terms.

The book talks of great men and great failures and great discoveries. Since I'd like to make such a great contribution to the world, I've decided to write a little ditty about some of the great ideas I've had, to encourage more ideas to come.

in order of recall:

1. A system to keep from wasting things. I have a stack of rubberbands here that I don't need. I'm moving and will throw them away, or give them to the first person who comes by and says, "hey man, can I have those rubberbands?"

   For economical reasons, items that are more valuable more frequently would be more worthy of advertising, but wouldn't it be cool to reduce the advertising price to near zero? (the internet does that) If we can reduce to transportation price to zero, then we have a winner.

   Fred recently told me about an email list in Austin (freecycle), which is exactly my idea, but in a local area. Dammit! That was the key that I didn't think of, by localizing the advertising, the transportation is effectively reduced to zero.

   close.

2. chatbotchats.com, where, like hotornot.com, things are observed and rated. I bought the domain, but it's hosted by a crappy slow ISP which took forever to set it up properly, and even then they don't have unix' screen command available. So I lost interest in the project.

   Oh, it was supposed to allow people to upload funny conversations they've had with chat-bots, the most famous of which is probably SmarterChild. I surmised there will be more chatbots coming from different companies with different agendas and styles of speech. It could be fun to read the hilarious results.

   Domain for sale: chatbotchats.com $100. The idea that goes with it: $10,000.

3. An optical mouse with a trackball on top for scrolling.

4. A way to connect people with different skillsets to people with projects that need certain skillsets. monster.com: good job.

5. how about a book on world economies? I might call it _The value of the dollar and how it got to be that way_

   Or _The value of money and how it got to be that way_

I have recently decided that my big thing should be something that computers cannot conceivably do in our lifetime. (*) Or getting computers to do something that computers cannot conceivably do. Like experiencing emotions or astral projection; something decidedly real but not physical.

(*) not things like realtime translation, realtime movie generation, nanobiotics, or manual labor.

- - - -

Oh - these are the answers I give to what I would do if I had 10 million dollars, and 100 zillion jillion gilligan frillion kershmillion dollars, respectively:

6. Hire a hoard of genealogists to carefully document my family tree as far back as possible while being pretty darn certain of accuracy.

   With equal accuracy, trace the descendants of all those people until we get to those who are living today.

   Send all of these people a letter explaining how they are related to me, a $10,000 credit card and directions to the BIGGEST FAMILY REUNION EVER.

   The hope is that lots of people who hate each other will find out that they are cousins and quit fighting.

7. Build a house on the moon with an indoor swimming pool.

   Dive in and watch the splash 1/6 the speed as on earth. Awesome.

- - - -

Other interesting thoughts:

I predicted that bills (cashmoney) would be individually tagged before I read about it online.

More interestingly (to me), I predicted that there would be a lawsuit involving cameras in rented residences. The owner will say s/he has a right to monitor the health of the house, and the resident will say s/he has a right to privacy. This lawsuit occurred not quite like I expected: a car rental company used GPS to determine that the driver had been speeding. They charged him and he sued them. Or something. Same idea though: ownership vs privacy.

- - - -

I have thought for a while that I want to keep expanding my skillsets. It started with learning to ride a unicycle. Then studying Spanish, ASL, and French (though I didn't get very far with those). Now learning Japanese (I'm better with that).

Next? Dunno. Maybe study the science of sleep.

No, really.

Swimming

8:11pm JST Saturday 4 December 2004

I thought it was 500 yen for the first hour and 200 yen per 30 minutes thereafter. Then I thought it was 500 yen to go in and 200 yen for every 30 minutes in the pool. But then Hitomi informed me we had been there for 2.4 hours, not 1.4

Definitely big fun going to the indoor pool with Hitomi. They have a water slide (only 1 person at a time, though) and a flowing looped pool and several heated pools, two different saunas (50 and 60 degrees C) a mist room, which I had never previously experienced, and other things that were cool but forgotten.

In the looped pool, I worked hard to successfully sit up on my floats that I wrapped my legs around. The trick was to use nothing but water for leverage, and not let go of the floats with my legs. I had the Winnie The Pooh pool ball (that I bought when Jen and Dan and I went to the outdoor pool at Miyorenji during the summer (thank you, Shoko for showing us the pool!!)) and pushed it down in the water in an attempt to push myself up. I was able to do it while facing up a couple of times, but not consistently. It was too difficult for me to accurate (and forcefully enough) push backwards enough to get the ball underneath my back.. But I found that I could push the ball down like an overzealous outrigger and push myself face down, then easily push the ball down below me (in front of me) and push myself up that way. After a few tries I could do that manuever easily.

It was a bit of a trick to get four paddleboards under me so I could float effortlessly on my back. I was able to do it, but I lost control of the Winnie the Pool Ball in the process.

When we arrived in the area with the waterslide, we wanted to do that first, but there were so few people in the pool area as a whole that the slide was off (no water gooshing down) so they had to be summoned to turn it on. They wouldn't let us go down with the ball, so I threw it over the ledge to the slide-dumping pool before we went down. Hitomi slid first and I had to wait forever before it was deemed safe for me to go down. They should have a waiver for big kids so we have the run of the place.

When I tried to breathe underwater using air expelled from my trunks as nourishing oxygen, I was yelled at by one of the pool staff. (Don't put your head underwater.) Bah; c'mon; just because there's no one else here doesn't mean you need to pick on me!

When Hitomi and I got into the pool without using the stairs, we were summarily yelled at; [excuse me; please use the stairs!] Ah geez; we'll be fine. We're not babies.

We relaxed for a while on some massaging jet chair type things; Hitomi sitting back on me but bouyed by the fluids below. (air and water; get my mind out of the gutter!) I enjoyed relaxing in that space.

I also enjoyed walking on the rocky bottom pool (heated), but not the chilled rocky bottom pool. Um.. oh the funniest thing I did was make ghetto goggles using Winnie the Pool Ball: with most of the air evacuated, I mashed it against my face to keep water from getting on my eyes. But, just as bad or worse, the ball itself wanted to touch my eyes. Just before I perfected a technique (or rather came across a solution) the guy was like, [wah wah wah don't put your head underwater...] Egad! I got ghetto goggles, G! Chill out!

The mist room approximated my perfect environment. Warm and soaking sopping wet. It was a bit too wet to comfortably lie face up on the bench in there, so I partially deflated Winnie the Pool Ball to cover my face so I could bask in the warm splashiness.