David Bennett

Your Toothbrush Will Know How Long You Brushed For

This is about when your toothbrush will know how long you brushed for, and why someone will make that happen.

Something I read last night made me think of the predictions made in a talk I heard. The talk was Design Outside The Box and it was given in 2010 by Carnegie Mellon University Professor, Jesse Schell.

The video of the talk was part of an online course in gamification that I took a couple of years ago.

If you are not familiar with gamification it is a way of encouraging people to a certain kind of behaviour by giving them the satisfaction that is typical in games – including rules, rewards, and competition.

The rewards can be extrinsic, such as money or discounts, or they can be intrinsic, such as medals or badges, or points.

Or they can be self-satisfaction giving, such as the pleasure of doing well in the game or in the activity around which the game is built. Competition can be against others or against oneself by doing better than one’s previous performance.

A child having to spend an hour playing the piano for an hour a day and getting a reward of an ice-cream can turn into a self-rewarding game when the child gets good enough that the experience of playing the piano and getting better at it becomes its own reward.

If the game is good, people will see it as having value and a character of its own and it will grow organically.

Jessie Schell is a great presenter – really exceptional – and if you want to watch the video of him talking about what I am about to describe, then here is the link to Jessie Schell’s talk.

He says (in 2010 when he gave the talk) – Game designers designed for fantasy, but the new movement in games is towards reality.

And we are primed and ready for reality and authenticity – we are cut off from nature and from self sufficiency – we want to get to anything that is real. We will take somewhat real or nearly real if it is presented as being more real. Put grass and a tree on a wrapper and say it’s natural, and we’ll take it: We are that desperate.

Sensors are what will bring the real world into games and games into the real world. And the key will be price and disposable technology.

Your toothpaste tube will contain a sensor with wifi connection that will detect how many times you squeezed it. Your toothbrush will know how long you brushed for and it will give you bonus points for brushing for the full recommended three minutes. And the points will get you discounts on your dental plan.

And the toothpaste company has provided you with an incentive to use more toothpaste.

Your bus card will know when you took the bus instead of the car and it will reward the help you give to the environment which will earn you points in the community leader board and lower your local taxes.

And your shoes will know when you walk to work and when you walk fast and that will give you points and if you walk every day for a week you will get bonus points and more discounts off your health plan.

Your cereal packet will have an interactive game on it and you will be able to play with your Facebook friends. And all the while you will be staring at the cereal packet and you will buy that cereal the next time because it has the game and because you started at the box for so long.

That was 2010, and on Google News this evening I read that

Insurance company Aetna today announced a major health initiative centered on the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch, which will see Aetna subsidizing the cost of the Apple Watch for both large employers and individual customers.

Well, that’s the commercial side of the equation. On the community side, Glasgow city council has been struggling for a while with how best arrange cycle paths through the city. Traffic is heavy, and the city was not built for cycling.

They realised it would be handy if they knew where cyclists actually cycled. And it turned out that that information was easy to get. Cyclists use apps that track their routes and their performance. So Glasgow negotiated a deal to get the anonymised information to help them plan their cycle paths.

Simple.

The Awful Story Of Fracking

This is a precis of a talk about fracking given by a Dr. Ingraffea, who is a professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cornell University in the US and an expert in fracking.

Here is the link to his bio at Cornell.

His Talk:
Deep fracking is done by drilling long laterals holes at great depth. The technology is fifteen years old and it is still being developed.

The sheer length of the piping necessitates that water is injected at very high pressure. Water resists being pumped, so chemicals (eight million gallons of chemicals in the case of some wells) are added to make the water flow more easily – this mix is the so-called slickwater.

Once the hole is drilled a cement case is built around it. The cement case around the piping prevents methane from escaping into the the surrounding rock and travelling wherever it will, rather than being extracted via the piping.

The cement is pumped in as a liquid, and if it doesn’t make good contact with the surrounding rock, then methane will escape.

Reasons why it might not make good contact are

    • The cement went in too dry
    • The cement wasn’t pushed down properly
    • Not enough cement was pumped in to reach above existing shallow shale deposits
    The centralisers that makes sure cement is put all around the pipe are not placed correctly or at all.

If centralisers – a series of ‘o’ rings that are placed over the pipes – are not placed correctly, then the pipe will not be central in the bore hole and there will not be any cement where it is needed to keep the methane from escaping into the surrounding rock.

The failure rate for inland fracking wells of this type, which are just a few years old – as determined by Schlumberger in one review and by Watson and Bauhu in another – is more than 6%.

The experience from offshore wells is that wells of all kinds have an increased failure rate as they get older – up to 60% for thirty-year-old wells.

The chemicals pumped in to make slickwater include hydrochoric acid,acetic acide, sodium chloride, polyacrylamide, ethylene glycol, borates, carbonates, glutaraldehyde, guar gum, citric acid, isopropanol, and ethylene glycol.

The Wikipedia page on polyacrylamide says:

Concerns have been raised that polyacrylamide used in agriculture may contaminate food with the nerve toxin acrylamide. While polyacrylamide itself is relatively non-toxic, it is known that commercially available polyacrylamide contains minute residual amounts of acrylamide remaining from its production, usually less than 0.05% w/w.

CSS If You Change WordPress Themes

What happens to your custom CSS and CSS revisions if you change WordPress themes? Normally it gets lost.

But not with Jetpack. I have the Jetpack plugin installed but with very few options activated. One option I have activated and which I like is Custom CSS.

Yes, there are other CSS plugins in the WordPress repository, and I’ve used them.

And of course one can always use a child theme.

In fact I am using a child theme of this WordPress theme here at the moment, but I still change CSS with the Jetpack plugin.

One of the advantages of using Jetpack to change CSS is if you mess around changing from one theme to another as much as I do.

The reason is that the Jetpack CSS Revisions module shows previous versions of your custom CSS. Each time you click Save Stylesheet a revision is saved.

That means that if you add some CSS, change themes, and then want to revert back to your old theme, then you can find the custom CSS you added previously and revert to it.

That’s because Jetpack stores the last 25 CSS revisions made to any theme on your blog.

It’s very handy to be able to click on the CSS revisions and look back at the recent changes and revert to an earlier version if you need to, and I use it quite a lot.

Update Feb 2017

In the latest version of WordPress there is now an option to add CSS via the customiser.

Still David

The 2014 film Still Alice follows the descent of Alice, suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.

She is, of all things, a linguistics professor at a prestigious American University, and when the film starts she is starting to go downhill. She is only 50 years old.

Alice has early-onset familial Alzheimer’s. The ‘familial’ factor means it is hereditary. And as we learn in the film, one of Alice’s daughters tests positive for the gene.

So in addition to the descent of Alice, there is a long-term ‘death’ sentence hanging over the head of the daughter.

And Alice’s husband has to deal with this tangled situation.

As the film progresses, Alice becomes more incapable. She becomes incapable of even carrying out the plan to kill herself that she formulated earlier.

She promised herself she would kill herself when things got really bad.

She got the pills ready, but now she can’t recall what she was supposed to do.

By the end of the film, she can’t speak and she can’t do very much at all.

Vegetables

Today I chopped a parsnip and put it into some soup. I used our little Kenwood thingy to chop the parsnip up very small, and when I served up the soup my wife Tamara asked me whether it was rice that was in the soup.

I told her it was a vegetable and she asked me what it was. I couldn’t remember the name and I had to reach inside the fridge and hold up a parsnip so she could see it. She said ‘parsnip’.

For a few seconds I felt as though I was hearing the word parsnip for the first time. Not only did I not know it was a parsnip, I was learning parsnip anew.

Then after rolling the word around in my mind, I got back into the swing of things. And the parsnip went back to being a parsnip.

But for those few seconds I had an intimation of what it must be like to be Still Alice, but slipping away.