BOMBS, BOOBS & BURGERS

I went down to Washington D.C. to interview Vint Cerf a few weeks ago and he laid an interesting surprise on me: space communications technology may soon be coming to Android cellphones. Cerf, a Google vice-president and one of the founding fathers of the internet, is currently helping NASA test a delay-tolerant network (DTN) that will greatly improve the efficiency of space-to-Earth communications. (It's part of the fabled "Intergalactic Internet.")


Space-to-Earth communications are currently reliant on complicated schedules - satellites, shuttles and other sensors can only relay information back to the ground during specific connection windows, when they are passing over antennae nodes on the ground. The new DTN will make it possible for satellites and the rest to use a sort of store-and-forward system, where they'll bypass the need to make a direct connection with the ground. Instead, it'll work kind of like a BlackBerry - if you type out an e-mail but don't have cell coverage, the device will store it until it establishes a connection, then send it.

U.S. military tests of a ground-based version of DTN have gone "fantastically well," Cerf said, so we could easily see the technology applied to cellphones running Google's Android operating system to deliver "content-directed routing." Example: one Android phone downloads some map data, then radiates it out to other nearby phones, thus saving those other users having to download the info themselves from the cell network. Cerf said the application could be particularly useful in health care, to establish Star Trek-like tricorders. "We're not very far away from stuff like that," he said. "I don't think it's going to take till 2400."

Further to the post on robots the other day, the fast-food industry is also making use of them. Pittsburgh-based HyperActive Technologies has been rolling out its "Bob" robots to several fast-food restaurants, including U.S. chicken chain Zaxby's, to help speed up drive-through orders. Again, HyperActive's robot bears little resemblance to the humanoid machines being built in Japan and is instead designed purely to boost productivity.


"Bob" is actually a sensor network that detects cars coming into the restaurant's parking lot. It then instructs staff inside on what food to prepare based on statistical likelihood - i.e. if 20% of customers order a cheeseburger and 10 cars enter the property, chances are good that at least two cheeseburgers will be ordered.

I interviewed HyperActive founder R. Craig Coulter last year and he had some interesting thoughts on fast food. He said that despite being one of the first to automate with machines back in the fifties, the industry has actually been slow in adopting robotic technology. I guess teenagers have proven to be sufficient.

For net neutrality aficionados, I'm on CBC Radio's Spark program today (Wednesday) at 11:30 a.m. talking about the current CRTC proceedings on the subject. Not much to do with the topic of this blog, but Spark host Nora Young does give my book a nice shout-out toward the end of the program, which you can also catch as a podcast. And besides, net neutrality is a hugely important issue - if certain internet service providers get their way, perhaps some day we won't be able to view blogs with the word "boobs" in their titles.

Wouldn't you know it, though - I just happen to be on Spark's episode number 69. (Cue Beavis & Butthead laughter.)

It'll be April soon, which we all know means one thing: it's the return of the RoboBusiness conference! Oh yeah - for all of you out there that are nuts about robots, this one's for you: two days of full-out, hot robot-on-robot action!

But seriously folks... the RoboBusiness conference's name pretty much says what it's all about: the business of robots. I was at last year's conference in Pittsburgh and learned quite a bit, including the big difference between Japanese and American robot research. The Japanese are the ones who often capture all the headlines with their violin-playing, bicycle-riding machines. Americans, however, are a lot more pragmatic about their robots, preferring them to do simple but necessary tasks, like weld cars together.

This year's show is in Boston and I'll most likely be going. In the meantime, check out a pair of interviews I did from last year's show. One is with Kevin Fahey, the program executive officer for U.S. Ground Combat Systems, and Col. James Braden, project manager of the Robotic Systems Joint Project Office, who are basically in charge of procuring robots for the U.S. Army. Fahey and Braden talk about how replacing human soldiers with robots is a good thing. The other interview is with Colin Angus, the CEO of iRobot, which not only makes bomb-sniffing robots for use by troops in Iraq, but also those handy robot vacuum cleaners. Angle discusses his company straddling the military and consumer markets

After getting back from this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, I got the usual question from friends: "What was the coolest thing you did or saw?" This year, the answer was decidedly different. It wasn't a neat gadget (although the Palm Pre was very cool), and it wasn't a sci-fi experience (like riding in a robot car). It was a dinner with porn stars.


Since the Adult Entertainment Expo runs concurrently with CES each year (and definitely not by coincidence), I got invited to a media dinner with the folks from Digital Playground. Like a true nerd, though, I put research over simple male-ness and spent most of my time talking to the people who actually run the company rather than the porn stars - although in my defense, most of them were seated at another table and kept pretty much to themselves.

I did manage to have a decent conversation with Stoya, the company's newest contract star. I had never seen her work before and was struck by how "normal" she looked - no bleach blond hair, no implants, no excessive makeup or jewelry. We chatted about my book, her name (it's her Serbian grandmother's), the fact that she was up for the Best New Starlet AVN award (she ended up winning - congrats!) and of course, the weather in Toronto.

I bring her up because it turns out Stoya is a bit of a nerd - she likes her gadgets and yes, she's even on Twitter. G4 has a video up of her reviewing a user-created application for the Xbox 360 that turns the console's controller into a massager. Her bottom line: "If Steve Jobs made it, I would use it somewhere that's not my back."

We're into the plus-double-digits in temperature here in Toronto, so it looks like spring is finally on its way, thank the stars. I shouldn't complain too much, however, as I spent a sizeable part of the winter down in sunny California doing research. One of the places I visited was the University of Southern California, where much of the work in digital imaging was done in the seventies. The Signal and Image Processing Institute is responsible for laying much of the groundwork that went into the JPEG format, which is now the ubiquitous picture standard across the web and many digital devices. Sandy Sawchuk, one of the professors who was there in SIPI's early days, showed me this non-descript classroom/lab on campus. "We should have a plaque on the door that says, 'This is where the JPEG was born,'" he told me.


The really interesting part of this story is that the most important picture in the history of the internet, a cropped centerfold from Playboy, was also scanned in this room. The photo was one of the first images scanned and transmitted across the U.S. military's ARPAnet, the precursor to the internet, and then became the de facto standard for image processors everywhere.

I was browsing around YouTube the other day and found this hilarious video. It's an extraordinary invention from a South Korean fast-food chicken chain that combines food and drink packaging into one. The "Col-Pop" is basically a large soft drink cup with a plastic basket on top that holds a bunch of chicken "pops." Assuming the contraption's two compartments are insulated from each other, so that one stays cold while the other stays hot, this thing probably has tons of potential. It wouldn't surprise me to see North American food processors and fast-food chains jump all over this. After all, KFC did give us those great bowls a.k.a. "failure piles" (warning: bad language).

The British Ministry of Defence has announced its future plans, and man do they include a lot of technology. Like the U.S. military, Britain is going to invest significantly in unmanned vehicles, as well as lighter and more mobile tanks and soldier gear. My colleagues over at the CBC have put together a short photo gallery on the topic.

The news follows last year's announcement that the Brits are working on an invisible tank, which uses cameras and projectors to display the surrounding landscape on the actual vehicle. Britain plans to have the tank rolled out by 2012. Japanese researchers are also working on invisibility - here's a short YouTube video of their work in action:

An acquaintance passed on a link to a fascinating story yesterday about a study that looks at U.S. online porn consumption. The study, done by the Harvard Business School, found that not only is consumption generally the same across the country, if anything, conservative states are actually more into the porn than their liberal counterparts. Utah, land of Mormons and no drinking, was the biggest consumer with 5.47 content subscriptions per 1000 broadband connections. Moreover:

Eight of the top 10 pornography consuming states gave their electoral votes to John McCain in last year's presidential election – Florida and Hawaii were the exceptions. While six out of the lowest 10 favoured Barack Obama.

The study was done by looking at credit card data from a major unnamed adult entertainment company. Given the nature of the findings, my money is on Hustler - you just know that's the sort of irony/hypocrisy that Larry Flynt lives for.

Check out this interview I did with adult star Jesse Jane at the Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas back in January, where we talked tech. You can read the text transcript over on the CBC website but this audio slideshow is way better as it gives a better sense of her personality, plus there's a bunch of hot PG-rated photos (all courtesy of Digital Playground). The interview is split into two for length purposes.

Here's an audio slideshow excerpt of one of the book's shorter chapters, "Barbie's Worst Enemy."

Hi everybody, welcome to my new blog, the official online presence of my upcoming book, Bombs, Boobs & Burgers: How the Technologies of War, Sex and Food Transformed Our World. I'll be using this blog to provide a behind-the-scenes look at how the book is coming together so I'll be posting interviews, excerpts, photos, stories and whatever else I come across in the course of research. I'll also be posting links to all the war, sex and food technology news out there, so if any of those topics floats your boat, be sure to check back here regularly.

So what is the book about? Well, the subtitle pretty much tells it all. A surprising amount of every-day stuff comes from those three industries: war, sex and food. The amount of technology that comes directly from military research - from jet engines to digital computers to the internet - is simply astounding. The sex industry, meanwhile, generally hasn't directly invented the stuff it uses but its role as an early adopter of technologies has been no less influential. Without porn, we may never have had video cameras, VCRs or video streaming. As for the food processing and fast food industries, when you consider that even bananas have banana flavour injected into them to make them taste more like bananas... well, needless to say, there's a ton of technology going into food that we don't even notice.

What's the link between the three? There are perceptions out there that war, porn and food processing are bad. The inevitable result of war is death, and there's little disagreement that that's not a good thing. When it comes to pornography, some argue that it chips away at society's morals. Food processing and fast food, meanwhile, often get blamed for poor health and rising obesity levels. While all of this may or not be true, the three industries do also contribute to a bright side, which is the bettering of our world through their technological offshoots. Bombs, Boobs & Burgers is all about weighing those derivatives against the downsides and, hopefully, coming to some sort of conclusion (and nope, I haven't done so yet!). I hope you check out the book when it's released in Spring 2010!