Technology

 by Brendon J. Wilson

Fix Me!

As a kid, I delighted in “fixing” my parent’s watches, radios, and various household electronics, gleefully unscrewing the backs, bottoms and sides of anything that dared to attempt to hide its inner secrets from my prying eyes. Most of the time, these efforts turned into frantic cover-up operations, the evidence destroyed, and innocent eyes turned to their highest “gee, I haven’t seen that for a long time, guess you lost it” setting.

Obviously, these efforts weren’t true attempts at repair. However, it does illustrate a difference between then and now. It used to be that if a device you owned broke down, you could open it up, swirl a screwdriver around inside, close it, and have a better than zero chance that the device would start working again. Like my childhood experiments, whether you actually fixed it through the exercise of skill or chance remained another matter entirely.

Try fixing anything you buy today. Hell, try even getting it opened.

Go to any pawn shop in your city and you’re guaranteed to find a camera from the depths of photographic history that’s at least 70 years old and, surprisingly, still accepts standard 35mm film. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t. But, chances are, you can fix the camera yourself with a little care, a search on the Internet and a set of jeweler’s screwdrivers. Try to do the same thing with your 3.1 megapixel digital camera when a stray cosmic or gamma ray wanders into the camera’s CPU and fries a connection that’s thinner than the hairs on a human hair’s head.

Gazing into my crystal bowl of alphabet soup, I can foresee your camera’s future: do the letters S, O, and L mean anything to you?

When my parent’s bought our first computer, an Apple II clone called the Franklin Ace 1000, it came with schematics. Actual schematics. If anything went wrong, you at least had the option of sauntering down to RadioShack, grabbing some spare components, and spending the evening burning yourself with a soldering iron while attempting to cram a capacitor into a space marked C12 on the motherboard. Fast forward to now, where companies like Sony make crappy products and won’t even give you the schematics.

The hermetic sealing of devices we bought and we own by their manufacturers is a cunning strategy by corporations to leverage “Consumer Lock-In” (uh-oh, there’s another one of those business terms). Essentially, you no longer own the products they buy, they own you. The most chilling example in the news lately has been the use of proprietary computer systems in cars. Independent mechanics are being squeezed out by car manufacturers, who refuse to release the specifications for these systems. If you want to diagnose a GM car, you have to buy the GM diagnostic tools. Ditto Ford.

Are we putting ourselves at risk through this intellectual property hoarding? We should probably look to history to see what can happen. Proprietary file formats, hardware, software, and interfaces are all reducing the economies of scale and scope, dividing up our technological and cultural heritage. One has to wonder sometimes if the Amish might have the right idea.

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 by Brendon J. Wilson

Recycle Grandpa

Though I like the software industry, I’ve gotten the feeling that much of the industry isn’t producing anything especially useful. Don’t get me wrong, there are some promising areas, such as data mining, that will improve society by allowing us to maximize our utilization of existing resources and turn raw information in actual knowledge. However, the use of software and computer technology in general has been disappointing and spiraled into a new arms race: my PDA is bigger/better/etc. than yours! Gadget-envy is killing this planet.

I’ve been wracking my brain of late to think of new, simpler, ways to make society more efficient and to reduce waste. I have a personal pet theory, which I’ll narcissistically dub “Brendon’s Theorem of Resource Extraction”:

We (society) have already extracted all of the natural resources from the Earth that are necessary to sustain us indefinitely.

Think about that: we’ve already dug up all the ore, chopped down all the trees, killed all the fish, et cetera, that we will ever need to continue our way of life. The problem is we extract resources, use the resources to build goods, and then throw the resources away once we’re “done” with them! Consider your typical piece of consumer electronics: we expend enormous energy and time on extracting, separating, refining and distilling precious metals and petrochemicals required for these products, only to discard all of that effort wholesale once the next generation toy comes out. All of that effort is lost. If only we could capture that waste!

Even in death, we’re wasteful! Remember when you were a kid, when science teachers would try to put the composition of the human body in perspective by relating the values to something you could understand? They’d tell you things like how many nails you could make out of the iron in your body, how many pieces of chalk out of the calcium, and how many bars of soap. A bit gruesome perhaps, but in retrospect it does beg a certain question: why, exactly, do we bury or burn our dead when they’re such useful sources of resources?

Now, I’m not suggesting something along the lines of Soylent Green, turning our dead into a tasty edible treat, but something more practical. A person spends a lifetime, distilling raw materials, purifying them; why waste that effort? Heck, if we can’t recycle our own bodies, a fairly simple bag of organic compounds and water, how can we expect to recycle anything else we produce?

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