Ocado shuts its website. Let's brainstorm!

So today Ocado shuttered the rest of its website. I've long pondered their impressive operation, so let's do some arbitrary brainstorming based on the sparse information I have.

  Neighbour Groups - Improve route efficiency and customer absence

The idea here is pretty simple - that a group of neighbours voluntarily connect their accounts, and permit the other members to know when their delivery will be. That would then trigger the availability of free delivery into the same slot.

Ocado wins here in two ways: firstly, by the obvious route of increasing the clustering of deliveries such that the cost for the additional deliveries is minimised, permitting faster route completion, lower fuel and staff costs per delivery, or in the oversubscribed corona scenario playing out, to increase the deliveries per shift.

The second way they win is that in the event that a customer in such a group is out, the driver has a list of alternative people to deliver to - either by default or by electing to do so, the customer can permit delivery to another member of the group. This should reduce the time and expense wasted by absences.

A key factor right now that would drive take up by customers would be that they could book these slots if any of their neighbours already had that slot. So joining or spurring a neighbour group would be a way to get a precious de delivery slot otherwise unavailable.

Ocado could also offer a lower minimum spend on these slots, as the operational cost is barely higher than someone editing their order.

Segregate customers into alternating groups to cut load

Suppose we divide customers into red and green. The red customers could order deliveries on red days, and the green customers on green days. The website would also only be available for red customers on red days, and green customers on green days. The split can be easily done based on customer ID.

This should be pretty easy for customers to grasp, and once they have tried to log in on the wrong day, they are unlikely to keep trying on the wrong days. They could even be given the Red Login Page and the Green Login Page on static servers which would inform them it was the wrong day without touching the database.

A further benefit could be derived by optimising the division of customers to group them geographically - this would lower average miles per delivery, and thus increase the number of deliveries per shift. People in a given area would all know which colour applied to them.

The division could be done into more groups, though that would make it harder for customers to know which days were theirs - a 2 day pattern fits 2 weeks.

Essentially the entire operation could in theory be divided this way, including stock allocations and databases, as it would become 2 Ocados.

 Predefine approximate delivery schedule and offer the few slots closest to it

At present when I choose a slot I am offered lots of choice. Normally that would be important to Ocado's competitive offering. But this is a different world. By only offering the few slots which are closest to the planned route, Ocado can really heavily optimise the number of deliveries it can make.

An example plan might be to take all the orders over a given few days, remove duplicate addresses, and work out what route would have roughly minimised the total distance or would have minimised the total delivery time. Or alternatively put in a set of dummy orders which anchor the available schedule and leave the system in a permanent state of filling gaps.

Ocado is now in the driving seat, and the customers are far less fussed about particular slot availability.

This approach also gives Ocado a useful lever to pull- they can increase or decrease the number of slots they offer from this ranked list, so that they can respond to further changes in demand or capacity.

It could also permit longer routes with larger vehicles to mix in with the standard set.

Offer dry deliveries

Ocado cannot rapidly ramp up its delivery force because of the need to refrigerate the load. But many people will just need storecupboard items, so Ocado could offer dry shops which are all non fresh, and could be delivered by a more temporary workforce drafted in for capacity. These vehicles could also be larger and on longer routes, perhaps with an additional delivery person to cut unloading times.

This offering could be entirely parallel with the main Ocado site and network, even using a duplicate website which only shares user authentication with the main site. For Ocado technologies it would be a demonstration of their platform and its capacity to adapt.

Warehouseless logistics

What is a lorry but a warehouse with wheels? Given how briefly some products are stored, it is conceivable that for some consignments it would be possible to transfer goods directly fr the original lorry to the delivery trucks without a warehouse in between. Temporary interchange points could be set up in strategic locations, entirely bypassing the main warehouses. This would work well with the dry delivery idea, and could be rapidly expanded - ultimately this could look like emergency humanitarian aid with only a handful of product lines being distributed.

A pasta, bog roll and soap delivery service would be gold in the south east right now.

Unpackers

A very straightforward way to improve unloading times would be to put an unpacker with each driver. This would improve turnaround at each address. Delivery costs might have to go up as a result, but at present I think that would be accepted by the customer base.

Raise delivery charges

 This is a pretty simple step to address multiple facets. The hope would be that the extra cost would incentivise people to voluntarily reduce their delivery frequency, whilst offering a stronger incentive to take the reduced cost delivery slots which I assume are near existing deliveries. If combined with the unpacker role above, there is a straightforward narrative to give the customers when the change is announced.

In sum:  Ocado is in the position to radically increase capacity by turning down some of the niceties traditionally offered

Ocado, and Ocado Technology, have built a system on some underlying assumptions and requirements about delivery slots and customer expectations, and that has been very successful at producing a logistics system. But now and for the foreseeable future, customers are willing to drop their expectations and accept a compromise, which opens the doors to some pretty huge changes to the operating model which could multiply the number of slots and deliveries per van per shift many times over.

I would probably rank these ideas time wise as: raising delivery charges (immediate), predefined routes (hours-days), segregate customers (days), unpackers (days-weeks), then the rest are weeks to months.

Future Domes

Like a lot of geeks I like to guess at the future and how it will look. So I thought I'd flesh out an idea of how part of society will live, I think: In domes.

As with any good prediction, we'll base this in a series of current trends, and extrapolate a necessary solution which combines them. The trends for today are: growing wealth inequality, deteriorating environment, the rise of antibiotic-resistant pathogens, growing concerns about UV damage and technological development in automation.

If you are rich, and you want to give your children the best possible upbringing, there are a few tradeoffs you cannot currently buy your way out of: proximity to a major city vs quality of environment, freedom to roam outside vs sun damage to skin, availability of services vs exposure risk to pathogens. The rich want to be near the city for its resources, for jobs, for services, but away from it for quality of environment and lifestyle.

One way to deal with that is to buy a big expensive apartment in the city, with staff to provide services. This gives you control over your environment, proximity to everything and so on. But you are a prisoner in a hermetically sealed box, and few such boxes are very big. There is no grass in an apartment, no running except on a nearby running track or a treadmill, no hills to climb or lake to sit beside.

But if you took the Mediterranean biome (bio-dome) from the Eden project, and built it within a 30 minute commute of the centre of London or New York, then you would have something. An enclosed environment like that is far easier to regulate than an open area, and less claustrophobic than an apartment. A leafy suburb where the temperature is always between 18 and 23 centigrade, where the sunlight is filtered for unwanted UV and crucially it never rains in the daytime except on a schedule.

In some ways it is an elitist's dream; to be able to exclude anyone outside this expensive set, to have as much control as you want over the miniature world you have built, down to the weather. And I'm not suggesting that it is something that we necessarily want to encourage.

But I think it looks inevitable.

The climate is changing, except in a dome. Sunlight is both enjoyable and dangerous, except in a dome. It simultaneously provides control and security; no drone can fly over your garden in a dome, no pigeon can shit on your doorstep. Your children can be kept much better protected from the pathogens in the air, or on people who frequently fly to remote countries.

Being in a controlled environment permits different styles of living; your dining table can be outside if it never rains or freezes. Your bedroom can have a glass roof for you to look at the stars. Your children can get up by themselves, leave the house without sunscreen to chase each other across the meadow to the breakfast hut. They didn't need shoes, or coats or hats, or even money. And the key benefit to this expensive, expensive paradise? Their city parents can be home for dinner.

In some ways it would be terribly sad for some of the wealthiest to cut themselves off from the rest of the world, for their children to be ignorant of what the rest of the world looks like, smells like. It will make it easier for them to deny the gap in quality of life between themselves and the poorer members of society, to ignore the people on whose services they depend. But this is what the richest have always done, because it is convenient to live like that, and I suspect it is hard not to end up doing that to some degree.

The bio-dome structure makes it possible to construct a space large enough for several families to live in, which is self-supporting and still transparent, where you don't feel like you're inside a building. As a physical barrier it permits control of the very air that circulates and the weather inside. I suspect with some tweaks it would be possible to build a dome that could be enlarged as investment comes in.

So I predict that there will be domes built near cities for the richest to raise their families, that will be disliked by people out of a mixture of resentment and envy. But I also think that unless climate change is reversed, it will be a mode that houses a growing proportion of the population.

I would like one of the penthouses attached to the surface of the bio-dome, where your glass ceiling is the only barrier to the outside world, but where the front door leads into the bottled paradise around you. And I would delight in walking in sandalled feet with my wife along a paved path with pretty, low lights, to the cosy restaurant-theatre among the trees.

Banksy-copter

Quadcopters are here, and they are cheap. Banksy's modus operandi is to spray up a ready-made stencil very quickly, and disappear. That is the key to his success - it has permitted him to evade prosecution, and to make the most of the magic in the appearance of an image on a previously blank wall. So, the combination of the two is obvious: use a quadcopter to stencil the wall. Untraceable, controllable via 3g link with a pre-pay SIM, and capable of painting at scales and heights that would challenge a human. With some clever software, a fleet of quadcopters could be deployed and work in parallel. Of course, the flip side is that the council can spray over the artwork with their own quadcopter, so maybe start coating the artwork in transparent vinyl.

The future of physical retail

Response to Supermarkets Without Cash Registers, Amazon In Strip Malls, the Future of Retail Is Weird, on qz.com.

The article marvels at a few things; removal of cash registers as people scan and buy by phone or NFC wherever they are, big box retailing becoming showrooms for online retailers by accident, retailers selling product lines exclusively to fend off online competition. But most of this is already here, not on its way.

I can already shop at my supermarket using a mobile scanner, although I do have to pay at a cash register. That's a pretty easy jump to make.

Big box retailers already prefer to sell items only available at that chain; laptops are sold with different model numbers and marginally different specifications to make comparison difficult, and generic items are bundled with higher-margin items to permit a profit over the whole sale.

Showrooming, however, might just change things. Suppose a consumer wants to buy a laptop and a manufacturer wants to sell it. In the old system, you went to the shop. Mail-order was possible, but both expensive and uncertain. With amazon et al, neither is the case any more. But at the limit where no-one buys from the shop, why would it still exist? It must make money from the still-present need, of shoppers to actually feel the thing they're buying. Pictures do not do physical objects justice.

So the consumers want a showroom, but they no longer consider the old pact (pay enough to cover those costs) to be worthwhile. Apple has an answer; own the whole snake from production to consumption, and be the exclusive distributor. But only a handful of multi-billion-dollar companies can afford to be both national and have stores, or have enough products to make such a store (I'm thinking of the Apple resellers, or Sony franchisees) worthwhile.

The only other party with an interest in the showroom beside the consumer is the manufacturer. We're limiting ourselves (by the non-multi-billion argument) to manufacturers without the reach or perhaps the breadth of products to have their own stores, like Asus or Logitech, or Black & Decker. I think the answer for them is to subsidize the showroom.

It's possible that dedicated showrooms could pop up, showing a wide range of products and charging the manufacturer or distributor for placement in different areas outright. They could perhaps include a kiosk for buying a product there and then at a premium, but the expected mode would be what people do secretively already; scan the code, compare prices and order online.

I suspect, however, that a less clear-cut bargain is more likely. In the same way that supermarkets charge producers for better product placement (effectively adding shelf rental to the mix), big box retailers would expect ever larger subsidies from the manufacturers, until actual sales were no-longer their primary revenue stream. At this point, if becomes viable to show online store prices right on the shelf; Amazon could do a deal with the retailer for the retailer to do just that, and a smaller chain might show the prices regardless of an affiliation incentive.

The mistake the qz article makes, for me, is to suggest that virtual and physical are comparable, that a virtual shop can replace a physical one. The reverse is true. People that want to see the physical item do not want a virtual substitute; online or off, they want to pick up the book (for now), try on the dress, try clicking the camera shutter. Creating a virtual version of a physical store, with screens instead of shelves, is a hiding to nothing. The only difference between that and shopping online at home is that the product selection is more limited, so perhaps a decision is easier. But even that is easily remedied by a new online store.

Interestingly, once the need to make money selling physical boxes is gone, many other possibilities open up. Showrooms would be competing for their ability to show off the product and assist purchasing (wherever from), not their ability to suck you in and leave via the cash register. If it were me, I would set up a smaller shop in a mall with gadgets in, sell the shelf space and learn how to use all the gadgets. I would put Which and online reviews of items right with the item, provide live updating displays of prices from various retailers, and fill the shop floor with helpful staff.

If that sounds much like an Apple store, that's because it has many of the same goals; to provide the physical aspect of the purchase experience, to show off the product more than make the sale, and it too would be paid for by the manufacturer rather than the till sales. Crucially, though, it wouldn't be Apple. The customer would get the best prices for the products, which themselves would be competing in the marketplace. This is the Apple experience, but for the mass rather than the luxury market (Apple doesn't want you if you have less money).

Some other things would inevitably be borrowed from Apple; the genius bar is the flipside of the physical sales world, the ability to point at a broken screen and ask what it will cost to fix, rather than filing some form or a call centre call. The support side is a significant cost to the manufacturer, so there is a good incentive there for the showroom to offer such services at the cost of the manufacturer rather than the customer. And all the good things follow from such alignment of need and cost; a shop could demand much lower incentives from manufacturers with easily replaced parts, and charge much more for send-off-to-this-address setups. There could be a clean room upstairs, where you can actually watch your product being fixed.

I've concentrated really on big box electronics retail, but these are all generic observations, which would be true for clothes or any other sector. Clothing is way ahead here; department stores already provide a set of concessions which are presumably rented to individual retailers. The staff are general rather than manufacturer-specific, as is the sales and return setup. So if we look in that direction, we might expect to see concessions in our showroom.

There is opportunity for the forces of evil to corrupt the vision, however. With control over their concessions the manufacturers would opt to limit the set of retailers whose prices are displayed, and remove unfriendly reviews. And with the manufacturers firmly in the seat of funding, they would call the tune. To me, this is counterproductive; if you want to make a store, make a store. If you want an arena in which the customer feels confident to make the best decision and neither ripped off nor hoodwinked, then you have to actually behave that way.

An anecdote from the world of surprising retail innovation is relevant here: on a recent holiday to a coastal town, there turned out to be a shop whose owner simply rented shelf space to local craftspeople. In much the same abstract way as the concessions, they offered a unified service to the customer but neither set the prices nor chose the goods. Inevitably, the shopkeeper is able to provide crucial feedback to the craftspeople about what kinds of goods sold well, offer critical analysis of works in progress and so on; they are the whole interface between the customer and the manufacturer but as a service to both rather than the customer of either.

Argos offers a physical version of the virtual store; you can ask to look at any item before buying it, and the choice of a vast range over a vast showroom makes it a reliable source for convenience shopping. Suppose we do the same here; make part of the shop a warehouse of a few items of each product. Sell the shelf space to the manufacturers again. But next, permit the items in stock to be sold by any retailer involved. If Amazon are a partner, you're buying that camera from Amazon, and you execute the sale and any later claim through them. In effect the product sale is a transferrable contract which is sold to whichever retailer buys it for the highest price, and the customer gets the product there and then.

The future of retailing may well be very different, and how we choose to pay or from whom we purchase are the least of the changes.

Free samples

Seth compares free sample consumers at a farmer's market to those of digital media; the first are characterised as vultures, eating into the traders' margins, while online the samples cost the provider nothing. I think he's basically right. I also think the careless consumers of free samples could be better managed with some psychology: put the samples nearer the traders and further away from the punters. It requires more boldness to pick up a sample from right in front of the vendor than to take a couple from an unobserved plate. There's some psychology to be mixed into the digital free sample as well. Every piece of digital media should have its origin printed through it like a stick of rock; in the filename, in the audio track, in the image. Never leave someone searching for the source of a file. My divergence from Seth in general is that I think content will be freely and widely distributed in the future; not because it's pirated, but because it's given away. And not just samples; free stuff won't just be a taster for the paid stuff, because there's no sensible way to make digital media into a commodity that you buy. In this future, the storefront doesn't exist. You hear a great new piece of music because a friend shares it with you, or your content aggregators suggest it. You go to the source of it to get some more, which is also free. And you add the creator of it to the list of people you thank with money. No storefront, because the product sells itself. No artificial scarcity of 'tasters', or 'free samples'. Free will be implicit, because everything is 'free' at the point of consumption. Samples could perhaps be the paid addon; the extra detail that only remixers and fans want. When the tail is so long, only a tiny minority can be 'sold' with specific marketing, salesmen, etc. The vast majority will have to sell itself.

Just wrote an auto-memoizer for single-valued functions as an answer to a StackOverflow question:

function memoize(func, max) {
    max = max || 5000;
    return (function() {
        var cache = {};
        var remaining = max;
        function fn(n) {
            return (cache[n] || (remaining-- >0 ? (cache[n]=func(n)) : func(n)));
        }
        return fn;
    }());
}

function fact(n) {
    return n<2 ? 1: n*fact(n-1);
}

var memfact = memoize(fact,170);

Based on an implementation of factorial function by user xPheRe:

var factorial = (function() {
    var cache = {},
        fn = function(n) {
            if (n === 0) {
                return 1;
            } else if (cache[n]) {
                return cache[n];
            }
            return cache[n] = n * fn(n -1);
        };
    return fn;
}());

Things I like:

• It memoizes anything
• The cache limit prevents stupid things like memoizing where there are floats
• It's faster than the if/else original

I could add in a trigger which replaced the function with a straight call after too many misses, so that even wrongly-memoized functions weren't slowed down after a number of calls.

Rituals, expectations, culture

On reading Ken's post on rituals:

I've been thinking about this recently. I think a culture defines a set of public and private expectations of its members. People that do not conform to these expectations are cold-shouldered. We usually call it being rude, or antisocial. In one society, one finishes everything on the plate to show it was good. In another, we leave a little to show we the host was generous. There is probably a historic reason for each, and doing the wrong one will make us seem rude.

The key is that a culture needs to be largely predictable for it to function. I need to be able to expect to go to dinner without taking a plate, or to know to take my plate. The more uncertain the behaviour of everyone else, the more precautions and preparations I have to make.

In a village, social cohesion is important, and there are not that many people, so I can and should greet everyone I pass. But in a city, I cannot afford to greet everyone I pass, and the culture must permit this. So we have cities where no-one makes eye contact, despite inhabiting each other's personal space.

A different slant, however, is provided by the religious or moral code. Often, particularly for the believers, these are not merely rituals but ways to honour their diety; the ritual represents their own hierarchy. She chose to observe her ritual instead of socialising, which some will respect and others will see as an affront.

The future: megacity margin-dwelling artistry

Malthus saw two equations: the exponential increase in population resulting from the individual action to have more than 2 children per couple, and the sub-exponential rise in resources with which to house, clothe and feed these people. He could see that the first will continue until something limits it, either continuously (for much of human history you needed n children to have 2 survive) or in mass events (war, disease, famine).

Over the last 60 years, the West has suffered no war on its soil, no famine it couldn't buy its way out of, no disease it couldn't contain. It has assisted similar evasion of Malthus in the rest of the world, and the world population has responded by exploding.

We are faced, today, by a series of Malthusian equations, regarding the future of civilisation:

1. Outside a few countries in the West (notably Germany, France) the population is continuing to rise. In developing countries it is continuing to rise exponentially as the traditional expectation of large families is not met by the same threat of disease and famine it had been for so long. Until people get used to choosing to have smaller families and a better quality of life, this will continue at a breathtaking pace.
2. There has been a migration from the country to the city for a century or more. As the city offers more modern lifestyles and has lower incidence of famine and disease, the population growth of existing city dwellers is also increasing. This means that the future will be increasingly lived in cities, to the exclusion of all else. Over time, life has been less about the land and more about people; technology, education, consumption.
3. People are living longer. Not only does this contribute to the rising population, but it also makes more demands on their ability to save for their old age. 
4. Technology is systematically removing the human component of necessary production. Food, clothes, transport are all global goods, produced wherever is cheapest. But the competitor with no bottom line, no minimum wage, is the machine. Even Chinese and Indian labour will be more expensive than the machine eventually. This means that increasingly people's jobs depend on the unnecessary; on books and holidays and music. We have a fear of recession precisely because in a recession people stop spending and the economy depends on their spending, their consumption.

As population increases beyond our means to produce more, there will inevitably be a food crisis. It may be slow in coming, with people learning to live on less as they see the prices rise, or it may be fast, initiated by a widespread bad harvest in a particular year. If it is the former, and we are ready, we may survive the beginning of it. If it is the latter, there will be famine. There are many ways we can ease the crisis in the near-term; vegetarianism, GM crops, desert irrigation, food supplements. If the crisis is slow, we will use all of these and others, albeit only when finances dictate we must.

With technology reducing the dependence of farming and production on people, and the population rising, an ever-diminishing number of people are needed for production. Since the capacity to farm is limited by the amount of available land, rather than our ability to farm it, the exponentially-rising population cannot result in an exponentially-rising number of farmers.

This means that with a diminishing amount of food available, and an ever-decreasing proportion of the population in necessary work, the rest of us will need something to do. A population needs entertainment, society, events, and so on. This is the expanding industry of the future; art. The creation and sharing of meaningful artefacts of culture, things that bind a group together - film, music, news. All the material things that have possessed the world of the present and the past; farming, manufacture, the management of scarce resources, will be history. The scarcity may be so severe that we cease trying to manage it.

If people are doing unnecessary work which largely benefits only themselves and their group, where will they get the money to buy food? I think the only answer is that the government or some other overarching corporation will give it out. State benefits will be the norm, not the exception, and they will be meagre by today's standards. Imagine that instead of handing out money for food, the city government provided it free. It will have already become the government's job to find enough food for everyone; we already see countries like China buying up land in Africa for food - eventually this is their primary remit. Money and capitalism will still exist, but they will be largely irrelevant to the mass; after all, you don't need money for food.

So we see enormous populations in cities living on low margins; minimising their consumption, minimising their need for scarce resources. Over a few generations of any lifestyle, a group absorbs the techniques and goals of living it into their very psyche; we see it in the philosophy of martial arts, in the way people feel that there is a natural order, their order. We see free speech and democracy as right, as good. But they are constructs we created to handle threats to our existence in the past - tyrants, dictators, corruption. I think we will see a commitment to living on narrow margins enter the collective psyche. People will not be fat even though food is free in this future, because of the social stigma associated with such excessive consumption. You may think that the rational actor will win, that people will overeat anyway. But the rational actor would steal, corrupt and connive in today's world with its low policing and yet people don't because we consider it beneath ourselves to do so. Plus, the food won't be so fattening.

The final piece in the jigsaw is perhaps the most unbelievable, if you have managed to stifle your disbelief so far. In a world where art is the way of life, and money merely a choice between living in one area with its balance of comfort and food and another area, people will not pay each other for things, they will give. Once the meaningless necessities are dealt with - purchasing food, clothing and so on - what is left is the meaningful. Gifts are the ultimate currency of meaning, and one people are only too ready to employ (why else do gift vouchers exist?). In a world of scarcity, to save up your resource, your time, and produce an artefact which you give to another is a supreme sacrifice, and thus a meaningful gift.

Your great-grandchild won't buy a ring for his spouse, he will craft one, and after a special dinner at the local eatery where he called in his favours with the owner to get the tastiest morsels, they will go home to their 2 room apartment and think about when in their life they will have their one child, proud to be living the right way. What will they think of you?

Scrobble my mood

I'm back on Last.fm after a long stint on Spotify. I have paid for the premium services of both in the past, but both are disappointing in one area: knowing what to play next. Spotify makes you choose your own tracks (the Radio functionality is useless), which is simple but very limited. I barely discover new music on Spotify, it's usually just from searching for things I've heard elsewhere. Occasionally I will discover something new by listening to compilation albums which contain tracks I've searched for, but that's about the limit of it.

Last.fm, by contrast, makes it almost impossible not to discover new stuff unless you only listen to your Library or Loved Tracks all the time. But the piece of functionality that should do exactly what I want (click-free music that I want to listen to for hours) is the Recommended Radio, and it's not great. Which is surprising, because it knows everything I have listened to for the last few years, as I've scrobbled even my Spotify listening.

So what's the problem? Inappropriate tracks. I don't mean offensive, I mean not matching my mood. Some artist radio stations are good matches for my mood and don't end up playing me rubbish; Rob Dougan is one, but mostly because it plays me lots of Rob Dougan, who is just excellent, particularly at work.

My mood is very variable, and the music has to fit it or I'll just switch it off. At the same time, I usually want the music to just play without me needing to babysit it. On Spotify, I tend to play specific playlists built up over weeks or months of selections and deletions. On Last, playlists are nearly pointless (you can't just play a playlist until it has a very large number of tracks in it, so you never actually build them up), so I end up playing tag or artist radio.

I've never worked out, however, whether playing the Uptempo tag radio will be the same for me as for someone else - does it take my tastes into account?

Idea: Do mood-matching to link my scrobbles
If I listen to a load of tracks in one go, and I skip some of them before they scrobble, then I'm probably in a particular mood, especially if some of those I skip are loved tracks; it's not that I don't like the track, I just don't want to listen to it now. Thus, we have more meta about this collection of tracks; they are probably mood-related. So instead of making me work out playlists for myself, or cast myself to the winds of tag or artist radio, Last could do mood-specific recommendation.

The power of the Web 2+ world is to do algorithmic cleverness in order to deliver some very human requirement automatically. Google goes beyond mere links now, and personalises searches, fixing spelling mistakes and suggesting maps. Social networks have to handle my social segregation between close friends, acquaintances, family and work, without telling work I'm pregnant, or the matriarchy about my relationship status before I'm ready. Thus Last has done well to facilitate self-measurement (scrobbling), but they have some way to go to give me a set-and-forget radio station that works for me.

So for now, I stick to pop artist radio... the mainstream is at least inoffensive to the ear for the most part, and fairly peppy.

Re: The Great Apple Apartheid

My response to Alan, who wrote about Apple ignoring the needs of the poor or ill-connected when needing a fast internet connection for a software update to get iTunes functioning on his new machine.

---

The demographic that can afford to buy Apple products is the demographic that has a fast internet connection. Apple does not target the poor, at all. Have you ever seen an Apple product priced to compete with cheap products? The only one I can think of is the shuffle, which is a lead-in for getting people to spend money on iTunes.

Alan, you speak of poverty, but people in actual poverty do not buy Apple products. They do not fit; you need to buy the product, and then pay for all the expensive stuff that goes with it – the fast internet connection, the expensive upgrades, the pay-for iTunes downloads. If you live on $100 a month, when are you going to buy into that kind of expenditure? Even the western poor on state benefits are likely to struggle. No, you buy a cheap PC, second or third hand, ideally with some linux flavour on it which will cost nothing to update bar the net connection, and which permits you to share music for free. Illegally if necessary. If I have a choice between a 5-year old run-of-the-mill car or a 12 year old Merc, I would be foolish to buy the Merc because it will cost far more to fix, far more to fuel etc. Particularly if no-one else around me owns a Merc.

Apple do not target the poor, because they are poor. They do not have the money that Apple wants, nor do they have the cachet that Apple makes use of. Its products are aspirational, status items. I suspect that any community whose internet connection is slow and/or expensive will share music via mp3s on usb sticks, not by paying a track at a time on iTunes. Just like we used to, when we had slow and expensive connections.

Apple is an immediate choice in your world, so your problem is the fragility of it. In the world of the poor, Apple is Prada, Gucci, Alienware, Steinway. Hey, Prada have a fashion event on, and the dress code is strings of pearls.

Flow

I had flow again, just for a few seconds, improvising on the violin.

Felt like a kind of bliss/fire up my spine.

Re: A tale told by an idiot

In response to A tale told by an idiot on Ken's blog, in which he bemoans the reality-denying conspiracy theory of the film Anonymous about Shakespeare's works being written by someone else.

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To reuse the bard’s form: “A tale told by an idiot is still a tale”

Films are about meaning and narrative, and are in fact usually a way for people to ascribe meaning and overarching narrative to a world full of random chance and no objective meaning. So film is actually about the meta, the meaning, not reality. Just like sci-fi is about humanity, not about science.

So, just as scientists have to do when watching most disaster movies, you must realise that we must leave disbelief at the doors of the theatre. Leave reality behind, and enter fairyland, enter the magical world where everything has a reason.

It probably will do well at the box office, because it has a strong enough premise for you to rail against. Most people won’t really care whether that premise is objectively true or not, because they already have too much objective reality to deal with. All they want is a story. That’s why films do well about dinosaurs roaming the earth, or aliens, or supernatural things.

There is usually a loose connection to reality in order to set the scene, to begin from a common narrative understanding; that there is a bard, that he is famous for writing some of the greatest works in literature. From there, the tale can construct its own world. Ignore the assertions of the nutters, and immerse yourself in the story.

Launderati - smarter, cheaper, more usable laundromat

John emerged from the cardio room at the gym before work. Under the neon Launderati sign in the lobby, with the cold light of morning glancing through the window at an ATM in front of him, he waved his card and entered a PIN, pressing 'Cubicle'. "Cubicle D" appeared on the screen, and to his left a glass door slid open, waiting. Inside, finding the right door, he pushed it open to reveal a spartan changing room and shower, clad in a pale cream, awash with fluorescent lighting. His mid-grey suit, quiet determination on a hangar, hung in an alcove, freshly pressed. Once showered, suited and booted, he stuffed his clammy gym clothes in a chute in the wall and heard them thud somewhere by his knees. On the screen beside the chute, he pressed the 'Gym kit' preset, and exhaled the last of the energetic workout. He walked back down the corridor, chest out, chin up, ready to work.

Later that day amongst the bustle of the early evening, he returned to pick up some laundry from the day before, and noticed the french neon 'r' of Launderati flickering intermittently, oblivious to the crossing paths of the pedestrians beneath it. His thoughts of the turmoil of the day, the confrontation in the side-office, were jarred by the whir of the opening panel revealing his shirts and a bag of socks all shrinkwrapped in a thin layer of shiny green plastic, with Launderati scrawled across the front. After the day he'd had, he headed home to change to meet the guys at the bar. A good day, but definitely one to talk about, drink in hand.

---

What if laundry was done by machine, from start to finish? If opting for a cooler wash, washing in bulk, unattended, could lower the cost of a laundromat to below that of owning a washing machine? Using electronic tags on laundry bags with washing info would permit garments to be washed appropriately, and enable people to use a laundromat for all their washing. As in the narrative, the laundromat could be integrated into a gym or an apartment building. I did toy with the old idea of the washing appearing in his apartment automatically, through subsurface tubes. Ah, sci-fi is always within a moment's dream.

The realistic part is having a shop-sized machine receiving, sorting and washing garments automatically. Heat-exchangers and reprocessing units could make the energy and water use far more efficient than a home machine, a growing priority in the future. Pricing would no longer be per garment, but paid for monthly on a plan much like a mobile phone. Part of the purpose of the narrative was to emphasize that this would cease to be anything surprising or even special, just a necessary part of low-margin city-living.

[Idea] Lightbox Photo Mall Concession

As you walk through the mall one day with your family, having finally got them all out the house, you see a room-sized white cube in one of the concession positions. On it, written in huge letters:

"Your family photo now! Before they start arguing..."

Or some better marketing message. Essentially this is a mobile photo studio, with a rapid turnaround service; you take 10 shots, have the customer pick any two they like and give them a small print set (a 6x4 and two wallet sized), a copy of the files on memory stick (in multiple resolutions) and send them any prints they order by post.

Charge a fixed fee for the process, or (more daring) a fixed fee per image they want to keep - we're talking £5 per image, and keep the premium on the prints low. That way if they don't like the images, all everyone has wasted is time, and the photographer's only incentive is to take good photos.

The key to this is rapid turnaround and volume of customers. Normal portrait photographers will charge £100+ for 'creative fees' or just provide a package of prints. That cuts out the majority of families, who can't or won't pay that much for a luxury item. It is also increasingly old-fashioned in a world of digital photos and electronic sharing. By bringing the mobile studio to wherever people are already dressed to go out and families are all in one place - the mall, the cinema foyer, the school concert - you enable on-the-spot service. 90% of getting a good family photo is getting everyone there at the same time, having a decent backdrop, and getting them to smile. Most people have endless photos of part of the family as someone has to hold the camera, against distracting backdrops, where one or other member is blinking.

The team to do this would be a photographer (or two, and have them compete!), a salesperson and an assistant when busy. The customer flow is salesperson to bring them in, assistant to fix their hair or provide entertainment, photographer handles the photographing with the assistant getting people's attention (think babies). Salesperson can then do the finish up with the image selection, prints and so on. All images get uploaded to a central site for safety, reprints, etc.

3 people for an hour could cost £120, suggesting a rate of 6 groups per hour with an average spend of £20. Anything above that in spend or speed is profit.
 This has to be a highly positive business, so give some portion of profit to a children's charity.

Wouldn't it be worth a few quid for a decent family photo? And no hassle getting them there?

Optional paying is giving, so let me give right.

Digital artwork is easily pirated, paying is optional.

Optional payment is a gift, a reciprocation, a thanks, honouring its creator.

We give to reciprocate, so why give most of the price to intermediaries? 

I have come to realise that the above are all unavoidable statements, in order of descending certainty.

In a traditional thing-based society, we can use physical force to make sure people pay for what they take. This is necessary both because taking means the original owner no longer has it (copying is manufacture), and because resource is limited. But in a digital world, I can give you a song and keep it as well. It is also near-impossible to enforce (literatally, force) laws controlling sharing and copying of digital media.

The response of traditional media and the status-quo has been to attempt to enforce thing-world control of digital artefacts; creating rights management software to prevent you distributing your music by making it more like a physical thing; traceable, hard to copy, sending the police to find you if you disobey. Understandable, but a losing battle. Computers change often making any such systems obsolete quickly (Why can't I play my albums any more? I paid for them!) and widely evaded, because imperfections are quickly exploited and the exploits easily distributed. The internet is made to distribute data quickly and freely, so all control systems are fighting the basic nature of the system.

The result has been a two-layer system: On one it is easy and free to get digital artefacts without paying for them; until iTunes and Spotify, it was actually easier to pirate music than to go and buy it. Cheaper, faster and better = revolution. On the other it is easy and reasonably cheap in moderate quantities to buy or license music. Most people, particularly the teenagers who will drive the future culture, therefore have a choice whether or not to pay.

It is not quite as simple as clicking Pay or Free download; for the older generations (twenties and up) there is a significant social distinction between pirating and buying, and the legal difference means Spotify is limited to legally licensed music. So the two layers are quite separate, meaning each group tends to employ only one or other system in the main; some groups download everything, some buy everything. The difference is predictably related to disposable income as well as socially-enforced stigma.

It is, however, already a reasonably free choice for most people whether to accept a minor amount of guilt and download something to try it out, or to stump up for it. The barrier is far lower on renting sites like Spotify, but it still exists. I can opt to look for an illegal electronic version of a new book or buy the hardback; buying the artefact is seen as a way of supporting the author, in the same way that ticket and merchandise sales are seen as a way of supporting a team.

So people are already used to making a morally-guided choice based on personal expression about where their money goes; we have been taught by consumerism "You are what you buy". If you doubt that for a moment, consider whether any advert for a premium brand focuses on the product or the viewer's self-perception. You pay a bit more because you're worth it.

If I buy a hardback book, I know that most of the money is going to the printer, the publisher, the retailer. But some of it will go to the author (once past their advance). We accept this bargain; this is the author-sanctioned mechanism for both thanking the author and obtaining a physical artefact of self-identity; "Thank you Jo Rowling, my copy of The Half-Blood Prince will take pride of place on my bookshelf. I am a Potter fan."

But if I pay for a copy of an ebook, there is no printer, no retailer. If I already like the author, they have no need for a publicist in this transaction. It's me thanking the author and their editors. Why should iTunes or Amazon take a cut?

The (small) cut should go only to whoever creates the system permitting me to thank the artist at my discretion, which somehow lets me build my identity by the same token.

This kind of giving is expressive, social and efficient by minimising middle-men. Just what the internet is for.

The Yearning Weight Of Achieving

Compressed, but not crushed, I bear it.

Looking up from my trudging steps, I warily peer about
seeking a path.

I am in the dried ridges of a tractor's track,
compounded by many traversals.
Ahead, the paths diverge in the caked mud;
to the left, to the right, straight ahead.
All lead to more fields, more grass, more brush,
and I cannot see beyond the hill they lead over.

But I am not weary, I am hunted. Life chases me,
and decisions elude me.
I make foolish mistakes, and am humbled daily
by my own failures to live up to anything at all.

Sometimes, I am reduced to a crawl, to dragging forward
my tiredness.

What lies over the hill, past the ridge?
Is the landscape there as empty as this one,
the earth as bare?

Why am I so hunted by opportunity,
so lost amongst the available options?
And why so terrified of the choices I can make,
the decisions that make themselves
in indecision.

A generalist, I could do anything,
when ability was my only guide.
Now, chance has dealt me some distance
in a few directions.
I am walking several paths, pulled one way by day
and another in the shades of dusk and dawn.

Still the creative push inside me demands more
but is that merely the remnant of a constructed identity
based on what seemed to make me different?
Am I not merely the upside of my disability?

Most people are happy, it seems, not to change the world.
Somehow they can live with affecting only themselves,
their family.
But that sounds like arrogance on my part,
that merely being locally worthy is beneath me.

But it is not driven by elitism but by hope,
that against the futility I can improve the world.
Still that goal is worthless if nothing comes of it. Less than
that in fact, it is harmful if the demand paralyses me
and slows my progress in any direction.

So, a hierarchy, then. First I will provide for my family,
but in this time, in this society, that is straightforward.
Second, then, to use whatever I have, whatever I am
to assist those who do not benefit from my opportunities.

This feels like fear and like guilt. Who am I,
that I should be educated and supported and loved
having done nothing?
And why should others be downtrodden and thwarted
having done everything?

I benefit from the actions of the good - but is it the actions
of the many, or of few? Is the bulk of our progress
down an aggregation of many small goods, or of standing
on the shoulders of giants?
I am no giant,
and nor do I really believe a giant is of his own making.
I am one,
but I am possessed of some theories.

If I am right, I am poised to do much good.
If I am wrong, I can only make myself a fool,
another little man with little ideas
that nevertheless grip his little mind
with their dull charm.

Beneath the roaring skies of all these philosophies
tugged by many winds
pressed by the weight of expectation
(or so I feel it)
sometimes giving up life itself attracts.

Yet it is always followed by the simple thought of humility:
I am able, so I must be able to do some small good.

--

I am shortsighted, and I imagine simple things.
At time, I can screen out distracting detail
and see a truth beyond it.
Othertimes, I can screen out important detail
and see a folly of my own construction.
Convinced by a weasel in the clouds.

Hunted, stressed and fearful,
not useful things to be.
I also feel somehow stupid for feeling them,
get real, princess with a pea.

Confession, then, before absolution.
I start things but do not finish them;
journeying from fever to distraction,
from single-mindedness to
a kind of depressed defeat
at the smallest tangle.

This in particular perplexes me,
why I am so easily defeated by the difficult
by the confusing. Am I so wed to simplicity?
I read that it is fear, but that seems far off -
what could I be afeared of?
Of failure?
Of the unknown?

It feels more like boredom, but it has the ring of helplessness.
A futility with a kind of sadness; clearly I expect to be competent
and find myself wanting. I am no magician,
no sage.
Am I afraid to discover I am not even that clever?

Others are so methodical; they see through the maze,
through the morass. They seem fearless, confident
that the answer can be found,
that the answer can be found soon,
that they will not be swallowed by the task,
left struggling in the belly of the beast.

I suspect this is why I enjoy creativity;
it rewards whatever you do, and often the urge
is enough to produce.
In that sense it is easy, or at least easy for me.
It does not have a pass or fail,
judgement is not passed in the act even if it is later.

To create anew is to conquer the blank,
to defeat the nothingness.
True, that is sometimes a worthy opponent,
but it is nowhere near as hard as
the unyeilding mass of thorns,
the forest of tentacles.
At least to me.

Perhaps this is a skill I can learn,
a role I can become,
an identity I may grow to fulfill,
something not an accident of birth,
but an achievement, a triumph.

I may not get there,
but I will try,
and I will begin,
now.

Share taxis in the smartphone age

Millions of people drive from A to B every morning and then back again. Between these, their car sits empty and unused. Most people drive alone, an entire car to transport one person. This is the kind of waste that the internet and smartphones are destined to deal with - dynamic, information driven problems with real monetary effect.

So I gleefully imagined a system somewhere between a bus and a taxi; a driver picking up passengers and dropping them off, but not at predefined times and places, rather as driven by demand. No more empty buses trundling to their next vacant rendez-vous.

But most things I think up either exist or have been imagined before. So I looked for it. And in developing countries, where the costs of transport are proportionately higher and time is proportionately cheaper, there are Sharing Taxis. Or Collective Taxis. Often these will wait to fill up and then set off; the trade-off is a significantly longer expected wait for the reduction in price. I had heard of this mode of transport before, where the bus drivers will wait for a morning until they are full.

Some services act more like unscheduled buses - they are official services which travel between specific places. London apparently has some of this, although the page on the Transport for London website doesn't specify any actual information. There are also a number of community bus schemes and dial-a-ride services, largely targeted at those not covered by normal public transport; the elderly, the rurally dispersed, the disabled.

I think the time has come for a more dynamic system. One where a professional can request a service from their smartphone, indicating whether they have additional baggage or passengers, and the taxi companies can bid to take the custom. They give a price and an arrival time, and are penalised for every minute later they are. The users of the service rate their trip; largely this is a feedback mechanism for when the taxi is late, unhelpful etc.

It could begin with manual bidding and selection of services - opting for sooner and more expensive if preferred. I suspect the ultimate aim would be for taxi companies to automatically bid for each journey using live pricing systems taking in traffic data, etc. The user could subscribe to a monthly contract much like a mobile phone, which gave them a certain amount of usage. Thus the price matching would happen between the demand and supply sides.

Ultimately a market in such things, particularly one including forwards or future contracts, would allow a taxi company to buy a minibus and finance the purchase by selling a number of journeys in the near future; demand-led investment. It would also create a market for forward-looking traffic data.

The basic mechanism, however, is just that a user can request a taxi and permit sharing part or all of the journey, with a central system to connect the supply and demand sides of this; the drivers and passengers. With that in place, many daily journeys would be much cheaper, which itself enables a huge swing towards on-demand transport services (taxis).

To bring it back to the current demand-responsive transport, they could hook into such a system as providers if they already run services, or as customers if they are consumers - residents associations, charities etc. It should make both sides of that equation more economically viable as there would be both more available supply and more available demand. How? By reducing inefficiency.

Stab vest ideas

Electrified

A layer of conductive fibres beneath a few layers of insulating material, acting as a switch - if the fibres in one direction (say, horizontal) are broken, the circuit switches on, and the unbroken fibres in the opposite direction (vertical) conduct the charge from the capacitor through the knife and the attacker, down to the ground.

Active Material

A series of pockets interwound with tensile strands, such that when a fibre is severed, it contracts at high speed and somehow deflects the path of the blade to the side. With enough layers like this it could create a shear force that deflects the attack and pushes the victim sideward in the same action. The key is the energy stored in the material, which is not there in a standard multilayer plus metal plate vest.

Variable speed buffer playback idea for delay-free high quality audio conferencing

Reading an article on VoIP audio quality, it seems that one can increase the quality of VoIP audio by increasing buffering, essentially giving the connection more time to deliver the packets correctly. The tradeoff is that it adds a delay, somewhat like talking to someone in a far-flung country, or via satellite. In the article, the author contends that delays are tolerable but low audio quality is not.

People converse in a fairly simple fashion: A talks, then B talks, then A talks. We do not all talk at once, so synchronisation of speed between A and B is not important.

The idea, then, is that we work out when B starts talking, and send a burst of packets with low latency. The receiver then starts playing these immediately (no delay) but plays the buffer at a lower speed (pitch-adjusted) until it has built up a reasonable buffer. Thus there is a delay between the B talking and A hearing it (ignoring the transmission time), but not an audible silent delay between B starting to talk and A hearing it.

It is the usual game of introducing complexity to handle to competing goals. Is the complexity worth it?

Make your happiness work for you

Endorphins, serotonin and their friends are the happy chemicals in your brain. When you have tasty food, they are released. When you get attention that you desire, they are released. They are mechanism by which a naughty child learns to be naughty to get attention - she gets a happy rush when she gets attention, and if her parents give her that attention when she's naughty and ignore her when she's good, she has been trained to be naughty. Why?

Because we are all addicted to happy chemicals

It's the only good addiction, and it's the root of all those psychological addictions (not the chemical ones). You have somehow learnt that there is only one thing that will give you that happy rush right now, so that's what you indulge in, even if you know at the back of your mind that it's not right.

Hedonism

So are we all hedonists, just doing whatever makes us happy? To a degree, yes. Many hedonists are just doing whatever makes them happy. There is a kind of logic that if you are doing something that makes you happy but which is damaging your future (like spending all your money), then you will be storing up unhappiness, so you try to fit your hedonism into a longer-term picture.

But you can train yourself (or be trained) to seek some future goal which will make you happy, or to change your values so that your happiness depends on something else. So I can pin my happiness on academic achievement, so I work to do what it takes to get that goal, in order to get that happiness waiting for me. This is what hedonism lacks - the willingness to change what makes you happy. For hedonists, happiness is the goal itself.

For me, that's a problem. Chasing happiness itself means that if I find a way to get a steady drip of happy chemicals then I should take it. So if I was offered a lifetime on a cocaine and morphine drip, then I should take it. Happy ever after, right? No, I want more from life than just some happy chemicals. I want to make a difference, I want my genes and memes to survive, to live on, to improve the human race and its future. Maybe that's some successful memes showing through, enslaving me to their goals, maybe it's just common sense not to want to end up as a body in a hospital bed with an ecstatic smile.

Choosing a new goal

So an ecstatic smile is not a good enough goal. What is? I'm a husband and father, so I want the best for my family. I want to support them, house them and feed them. I also want to inspire my children to live joyful lives. I want to make a difference to the world, not just live a quiet life in the corner.

So if those are my goals, I need to pin my happiness on them, so that I learn to derive happiness from the steps I make in that direction, in pursuit of those goals.

I could do with losing a bit of weight, being a bit more focused at work and at home, having more of a plan. So I'm defining some medium term goals, setting aside reasonable amounts of time for them, planning to succeed. I lose focus when I can't see my efforts leading to some worthwhile goal, so I'm weaving these goals into a longer term achievement.

Change

Often people fail with long term goals because circumstances change. Aiming for that job or that dream may make sense now, but not work out when you get there. So the goals have to be largely about how you are improving yourself and your circumstances, not about achieving specific targets that may move. Fortune favours the prepared, so aim to be prepared.

Jobs, companies, houses, all pass in the night. Getting attached to any single one is easy, because of all the improvements to your life you imagine will result. But the key is to notice what they mean to you, what you yearn for. Sometimes it's recognition, self-worth, belonging; if you realise it's one of these then they are better (and more cheaply) worked on by addressing the real issue rather than seeking the answer in purchases or jobs, which won't actually resolve an underlying emotional problem.

Coda

So this is me working out what I actually want to achieve, what will make me a happy man in the long run, and trying to avoid the pitfalls of vainly seeking fulfilment in jobs and purchases, taking an active approach to getting to where I want to be.