DragonCon starts next week!

Once again, I've been invited to speak in both the Space and Science tracks (which are over in the Hilton, across the street from the truly crazy stuff). I have three presentations:

What the Heck Happened to Our Space Program?
Friday, 11:30 am
Weren't we supposed to be orbiting Jupiter by 2010? Some history of NASA's highlights and lowlights, and why the proposed cancellation of the Constellation Project is good for sci-fi geeks who actually want to see exploration of space.

Hydrogen Cars, Ethanol, Wind Farms, and other Silly Ideas
Friday, 4:00 pm
A discussion of alternative energy sources, their uses (or misuses), their limitations, and what to do about America's addiction to fossil fuels.

Rise of the New Space Startups (with Michael Mealling)
Saturday, 11:30 am
President Obama's new space policy effectively removes NASA from near Earth manned space flights & expects commercial space groups to fill the void. Can they do it?

Tear yourself away from the comic books and lightsabers, and come hang out with the real geeks of DragonCon!

PDFs of all three presentations will eventually be available here.

It's easy to despair of the language problem. And, indeed, I didn't find anything that would help me with reading the pictogram language. But I found a way to cheat in trying to converse with people.

I downloaded a bunch of utilities for my iPhone. Two stand out as being actually useful: iTranslate and Eng-Chi Lite. iTranslate is essentially a front end to Google Translate, and Google is pretty good at translating simple sentence... if you have an internet connection, and if Google isn't blocked. Both can be problematic in the People's Republic but, as that gets solved, something like iTranslate is a thing of beauty. You type in the English sentence, press a button, and the sentence gets displayed in Chinese, with another button to speak it aloud. It's not Spock's universal translator, but it's very very good.

When offline, try Eng-Chi Lite. It stores its whole database internally, so it doesn't need an Internet connection (after the first run where it does a database update, so run it first on Wi-Fi!). It walks you through a more simplistic sentence-building exercise, so there's not a lot of flexibility, but if you want to say "I want a cup of tea with sugar", this will get it done.

Technology

So the iPhone came in very useful. I could make 3G connections from Korea and Hong Kong, so I was optimistic about China. (I'd bought the buy-before-you-leave 100 MB international data package from AT&T, and it turned out I overbought... I burned just under 50 MB of cellular data in ten days.)

Mixed results. I could occasionally get a 3G signal in Chengsha, but mostly it told me "The Internet connection is not active." When I disabled 3G, I consistently got a low-speed interface that was good enough for Google Maps and other light duty (like iTranslate). I never got 3G in the more remote areas, but almost always had a strong low-speed signal.

Again, in Korea (at least in the airport) and in Hong Kong, fast free Wi-Fi appears to be a civil right. I never had a problem getting a signal, including on trains and ferries.

China isn't there yet. Only one hotel (the utterly gorgeous Samantha Resort and Spa in Zhang Jiajie) had Wi-Fi. Everyplace else had wired Ethernet in the rooms at respectable speeds (although speedtest.net was blocked) and, in three of the four hotels, I had zero trouble plugging in my laptop and roaring away. In the fourth, it blocked HTTPS connections, which made it impossible to access Webmail and to upload photographs to SmugMug.

VPNs solve this problem. The Georgia Tech VPN didn't work, for some reason, but PublicVPN.com worked perfectly. The only challenge was bootstrapping my way to a working account without a secure connection on this end. The answer was to set up the account from the China end (HTTP only), then have a trusted confederate back home (my wife) log into that account and pay, since she already knew our PayPal password. Once I had PublicVPN installed, it worked great for that hotel, even for the iPhone. $7/month; recommended.

iPad

The device that got short shrift this time around was my iPad. I used it to watch one movie on the flight over. And I typed a few trip notes into it, but found myself typing mnenomic notes into SimpleNotes on the iPhone just due to convenience. (That's where most of the snippets for these blog posts started.) I never expected to get a 3G signal on the iPad, and I didn't. I could piggyback off the laptop's Ethernet connection by setting up AirPort Sharing, so I did that sometimes. But to make that work, by definition, I had a working Internet-connected laptop running, so the use case for the iPad was less compelling.

If I had thought about the lack of Wi-Fi, I could have brought an Airport Express Wi-Fi base station. In theory, plugging that into the hotel room Ethernet cable would have given me everything I needed to use the iPad over Wi-Fi. In theory. I'm not sure how well it would have worked at the fourth hotel, where I needed to set up a VPN. It should have worked. But I'm glad I had my laptop.

Laptop

I got heavy use out of my laptop on this trip... which is ironic, since it's the first trip on which I've even taken my laptop since the day the iPad was released. Advantages:

1. Wired Ethernet jack; see above.
2. iPhoto, so I could download, edit, and cull photos for publication every evening at http ://photos.stephenandcissa.com/Travel/China2010.
3. SmugMug plugin for iPhoto, so the publication was painless.
4. Photoshop CS3, so I could assemble some Photomerge panoramas and upload them to SmugMug as well.
5. Full email client to stay on top of stuff at the office.
6. Web browser, Twitter, etc.
7. DVD burner to back up copies of photos from camera SD card.
8. Skype videocalls back home

I could actually have done most of that except videocalling from my iPad (AutoStitch makes good panoramas) with the addition of an Airport Express. No way to burn a DVD, but JungleDisk would have let me upload a backup copy into the cloud, which is just as good. And it would have been nice to not lug the weight of the laptop with its various cables and connectors. (I found three different styles of 220V connectors in four cities, plus the standard 110V plug on Korean Air.)

But, you know, having the laptop meant one less set of things to worry about in a very foreign environment. If I had to have left one of my devices behind on this trip, it would have been the iPad. It surprises me to say that, and it probably won't be true next time I take a trip like this. But there it is.

Kindle

And, of course, I had the standalone Kindle, which is just a joy for long trips like this. Basically weightless; with wireless turned off, the battery has lasted two weeks without charging; I think I have over 100 books installed. For just reading in decent light, it's better than the iPad.

Camera

I've been lusting after Micro Four-Thirds cameras for a while, but I wound up surprising myself by not buying a new camera for this trip. I continue to have good luck with my Canon A720is (successor to the A710is I used on my South Africa trip), and my conclusions haven't changed from this post from two years ago.

1) The best camera is the one you have with you. Which is why some of my travelogue photos are from the iPhone 4, which finally has an acceptably sharp camera. But, in general, it's important to have a camera that fits in your pocket. I covet a Canon 5D Mark II, but it's not going to fit into my pocket.

2) The A720is has a good set of manual controls, so when I want to control aperture or timing or focus or all three, I can do it. If I'm in a hurry, I can just leave it in Program mode and use it as a point-and-shoot.

3) It lives on AA batteries. I can't emphasize how important this is. But if you have a camera that eats something else, I don't have to explain it to you.

Canon probably has a newer stronger faster replacement for the A720 out there. I'll probably buy it someday. But this is a great travel camera.

View: The China Posts

Then I read the orgy of criticism that washed over the blogosphere last night about all the device's perceived failings and, on mature and considered reflection...

I still want one.

(Maybe two, so I don't have to fight with my wife over it.)

What really strikes me about the iPad is how "Apple" it is... in the sense of Apple's product introduction strategy for the last several years. Define a minimum feature set to delight a particular constituency, sweat all the details to serve their immediate needs, ruthlessly leave out features near and dear to the twitterati, and leave plenty of room for upgrades later.

(I mean, look at your iPhone. Do you remember how many limitations the very first iPhone had, less than three years ago? Heck, I didn't buy one until the App Store came online... do you remember that wasn't until a year after launch? And global search and cut-and-paste, to name just two features I use daily, didn't arrive until version 3.0 of the OS.)

This is iPad 1.0. We'll see a lot of changes over the next couple of years. (And, yeah, I'll feel like a chump for being an early adopter, but c'est la vie.)

That being said, my thoughts on a few specific perceived deficiencies:

1. No stylus. I predicted this last week. Give him credit for consistency... Steve Jobs has clearly decided that multi-touch and on-screen keyboards are the future, and he's sticking to his guns. I happen to disagree, and wish there had been a stylus option, but he's the CEO, not me. I'm going to optimistically treat this as a third-party opportunity, and wait for someone to bundle a capacitive stylus with an app similar to OneNote.

 

2. No camera. I have to admit, this one surprised me. I was really expecting a front-facing camera for video iChat. I can think of a couple of reasons why it didn't happen. The prosaic one would be that AT&T told Jobs that their wireless network would keel over and die if millions of people started using videoconferencing in 2Q10... but, if that were the case, it could have been limited to Wi-Fi only.

   I'm going to take a more Jobsian view. Whatever device you have with a front-facing camera—be it a MacBook, or one of the Nokias, or an Android device—you never quite make eye contact with the other party. And this is the sort of detail that drives Jobs mad.

   Check out this Apple patent. Conventional wisdom is that the iPad will get a video camera in a future hardware iteration. I'm claiming otherwise. I now believe that you won't see a version of iPad with a separate front-facing camera... we'll have to wait until the technology matures enough that you can look straight into the screen.

   At which point, we won't be able to imagine doing it any other way. Very Apple.

 

3. Connectivity. I think Apple did exactly the right thing by offering a Wi-Fi only version and a 3G-plus-WiFi version... and the price points aren't bad. People in the U.S. can complain about being limited to the AT&T network all they want, but we have no idea how much money AT&T put on the table to maintain exclusivity!

   For me, since I already have an iPhone with 3G, I'm hoping for some sort of tethering between them. If not... I think you could make a compelling argument for buying the WiFi-only version and a Verizon MiFi. I think that's what I'm going to do.

 

4. Charging. Sigh. This was just wishful thinking on my part. I thoroughly understand Apple's need to control the proprietary 30-pin dock for synching and docking and hardware accessories. But I was hoping that they'd have put in a mini-USB jack with only the power pins connected... so, if you're out somewhere and your battery is dying, you can use a standard charger to get some juice. Mini-USB chargers and cables are ubiquitous, because they're used in Blackberrys, and cameras, and Bluetooth headsets, and even my Harmony remote control. This would have been nice, but I didn't really expect it.

 

5. Micro-SIM. This was my only real "WTF" moment of the announcement. So you create an unlocked 3G device, which will clearly ship globally sometime this year, and instead of the bog-standard SIM card that's been around since rocks were soft, you go with some funky new "standard" that no one else has adopted yet? You can't tell me there's not room for a standard SIM card in a device this size! I don't get it. Apple is all about driving adoption of next-generation standards—from 3.5 inch floppy drives to FireWire to USB—but this just strikes me as dumb. Somebody please explain?

 

Anyhow, those are some of my initial reactions to the criticism. (Which I think will eventually look a lot like "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.")

I already read a lot of books on my iPhone, and this will clearly be a better solution for that... meaning I was right not to jump into the Kindle/Nook fray.

A lot of my evening Internet consumption will fit nicely on my iPad, and I can always walk across the room to my laptop if I need to compose an email of more than a couple of lines.

I'm actively looking forward to walking into presentations with this and a VGA cable (although someone sorely needs to make a thinner VGA cable, or it will be bulkier than the iPad!).

I'm not going to give up my laptop or my iPhone, but I think there's room in between. In two months, we'll see if anyone agrees with me.

Of course, this being Apple, nay-sayers abound. They seem to come from two different directions.

1. Since tablet computers have been around forever and have been resounding market failures, why should this one be different?

   (Disclaimer: I invested in a company that made software for Tablet PCs in the late 1990s. It was a technological triumph but, as alluded to above, it was a resounding market failure.)
   

2. Apple already has a tablet computer—it's called an iPhone/iPod touch—and it already has a small portable full-featured computer—it's called a MacBook. So where is there room for a "middle product" without cannibalizing existing sales?

 

Lots of good points being made in those links. But I can answer Joe Wilcox's challenge: "What would you use an Apple tablet, or any other, for...that you can't do on an iPhone or laptop?"

For me, it's easy: Take notes in meetings.

Dilbertian arguments about meeting productivity aside, I live in meetings... sometimes eight or ten in a day. Sometimes one-on-one, sometimes around a table with a dozen other people. But there are two things I can't do in those meetings:

1. Unfold a laptop, no matter how small or sexy. Because once you have a laptop on the table, you have literally erected a wall between you and whoever you're meeting with.
2. Hold up my iPhone and focus on typing in that teeny-tiny screen. (Holding the iPhone down in my lap and not-so-discreetly reading email is a faux pas, but happens anyhow. But scrolling and reading doesn't take the same level of focus as typing.)

 

So in this year 2010, when we're supposed to be orbiting Jupiter, I'm still taking notes with a pen in a Moleskine notebook. Then I ignore them.

What I want to be able to do is take notes on an electronic device that automatically syncs them with something in the cloud (PBworks, or a Google doc, or something). Then when I get back to my desk, I can edit those notes, forward them to co-workers, add tasks to a timeline, or generally do anything productive with them without trying to read my own handwriting and re-type the contents. And I want to do it with Apple's signature UX and polished UI.

Oddly enough, I used to use a device that gave a vision of how this could be possible... and Apple manufactured it in 1993. It was the Newton.



I won't go into my impassioned defense of the Newton here—once your product has been skewered by Doonesbury, it's pretty much all over. And, really, the product didn't hit its stride until the release of the Newton 2100, only months before Steve Jobs returned to Apple and killed the project because of its guilt-by-association with John Sculley. (The 2100 had an 8x faster CPU, which finally let the handwriting-recognition algorithms keep up.) But I could do something with my Newton 2100 that I couldn't do with a whole series of Graffiti-based Palm PDAs, or a Fujitsu Stylistic tablet, or my iPhone: I could take notes in meetings.

Real-time, as fast as I could write, in outlines that I could rearrange and organize and search while still in the meeting. Because Internet connectivity was still primitive, and wireless basically nonexistent, I had to dock the Newton with my desktop and transfer the notes over a cable... but the core note-taking functionality was there. Transmitting the bits differently would have been a trivial improvement, had the product survived.

And because the Newton stayed horizontal on the tabletop or tilted in my left hand, I could maintain easy eye contact with other people in the room, glancing down at the screen precisely as I do with my Moleskine notebook... a completely different interaction than occasionally peering at them over the lid of a laptop computer.

Apple still doesn't make anything that can do this. Neither does anyone else.

And I fear that, after January 26th, Apple still won't make anything that can do this. Because all of the sexy applications—watching movies, and editing photos, and reading graphically-rich ebooks—can be done with what Steve Jobs calls "the best pointing device in the world... our fingers."

You can't take notes that way. Even with some sort of exotic haptic feedback, typing on a tablet means focusing on the tabletop, not whoever you're meeting with. And fingerpainting lettershape is technically impressive, but slow, slow, slow... requiring you to move the whole hand, not just twitch the point of a pen. And although I know someone who can type 80 words per minute on his Twiddler handheld input device, I suspect the very steep learning curve will keep it out of the mainstream (therefore, out of Apple's product line).

Rapid eyes-up input requires a stylus... either with sophisticated handwriting recognition or with something like Graffiti. And with all the exotic possibilities being hyped for the Apple tablet, no one is mentioning a stylus.

Because Steve Jobs hates the stylus, because it reminds him of the Newton.

Which means we still won't be able to exploit what should the the killer app of a thin, powerful, touch-screen device, nearly two decades after the Newton was released.

Which is a damned shame.

This is too long to tweet...

At Hartsfield-Jackson Airport in Atlanta, Boingo contracts with the airport for Wi-Fi carriage. That means they don't control their own infrastructure.

I run JungleDisk on my Mac, which continually backs up selected directories to Amazon S3. I highly recommend their service. But, if it detects an Internet connection, it will silently start chewing up bandwidth to back up the files that have recently changed. So I connected successfully using my Boingo password, started to check my mail, got a few messages, then BOOM. Blacklisted.

ATL-WIFI has a policy that if you exceed secret bandwidth caps or exceed a secret number of TCP connections in a certain period, they declare you to be infected with malware, and they shut you down cold. No suggestions for remedy, no recourse, just "contact your administrator." The only person in authority near me is the bartender in the Concourse B Crown Room, and she's not exactly a networking ninja.

You can see the total and complete error message at the top of this post. There's not even a freaking phone number to call!

Luckily, I have my iPhone, so I found Boingo's phone number that way. Called them, spoke to a friendly but clueless tech support agent, waited on hold for twenty minutes waiting for Tier 2 support, who finally gave a phone number to call in Atlanta. Called that number, it was wrong... but they, at least, knew the right number.

Called there, got a very friendly tech named Marcus who cleared me off the blacklist in thirty seconds.

Net net, this took twenty minutes of my time, occupied four call-center agents, and certainly blew whatever profit margin Boingo thought they were going to make on me this month. (And toss into that, the first Boingo agent admitted that they get "many calls a day" from people having this exact same problem in ATL, and you wonder why they don't cut a better deal or build their own infrastructure).

What's a better solution to this problem? How about a friendlier error message? Explain that innocent programs like iTunes or even Web sites like YouTube can trigger automatic protections. Suggest avoiding those, then give the customer a button to clear the blacklist. Put a CAPTCHA — or Pramana software — in there to thwart bots. Voilà! I go from twenty minutes of frustration to twenty seconds of "Yeah, that makes sense."

And, oh yeah, put a phone number on there to contact someone if the button doesn't work.

When AT&T makes tethering on my iPhone legal, I will take great pleasure in cancelling the $10/month I spend for Boingo. Until then: the secret phone number of Hartsfield-Jackson ATL-WIFI tech support is (877) 452-9434. Ask for Marcus.

For a month or so now, I've been enjoying my newest toy. It's a Wentz electric bike... which is a bicycle with a built-in motor assist.

I need to get more exercise. I know that. And two years ago, I moved to a house about a mile from the office, so it seems logical that I should ride my bicycle. And, sometimes, I did. But I would normally find an excuse not to.

Then I started looking at electric bicycles. They come in all levels and price ranges, including some that will run all day completely without pedalling. That's not what I needed. I just wanted a little bit of extra "oomph" so that I could get up and down the local hills without too much sweat.

(To the exercise purists: yes, sweat is good. But not when wearing a business suit and headed for a day of meetings, okay? Let's be practical here.)

I live at the top of a hill with a 6% grade, and I have to coast down it then climb another 6% grade to get across Peachtree Street. (Ever looked at Downtown/Midtown Atlanta from the air? Peachtree runs right along the ridgetop.) So, yes, getting to and from the office is "uphill both ways."

I asked at my local bicycle shop; they don't carry electrics, but they knew someone who did. Ken Altshuler runs Electric Bike South, which has the Georgia/Florida distributorship for Wentz electric bikes. And he lives one neighborhood over in Virginia-Highlands. Right now, he's selling them mail-order and out of his garage.

My wife and I went over for a test drive, and I was immediately hooked.

It's not like a motorcycle (or even a moped). You still have to pedal, except on dead-level ground (and there's not much of that in Atlanta). But as soon as you pedal a revolution or two—or twist the throttle grip—the rear-wheel motor kicks in and helps. It's hard to describe... but it makes that 6% grade feel like a 3% grade. Result: less stress, less strain, less sweat.

And there's another benefit that I haven't seen written up anywhere. Something you would never notice in a car, but definitely notice on a bike, is how many of the roads in Atlanta are seriously crowned (bumped up in the middle) to improve drainage to the edges. If you're stopped for a red light (yes, I stop for red lights on a bike, unlike many of the damfools around me), then you're pedalling from a dead stop up a slope from zero speed... and, if you forgot to downshift before stopping, you're in the wrong gear. You wobble. Wobbling is unsafe.

With the e-bike, you just twist the throttle as you step off, and the motor gives you a bit of forward momentum until your pedalling catches up. I think that's safer than a regular bike.

There are purists who hate electric bikes. Lots of reasons: they're heavy. They're complicated. They have fenders. They're "cheating."

Yep. All those things are true.

But, to me, results matter. And my Trek commuter bike was gathering cobwebs. I've ridden my Wentz e-bike to work every non-rainy day since I bought it.

Commuting

This model of Wentz bike comes with a rear carrier. I wanted a basket. Instead of buying an expensive bicycle basket, I went to Home Depot. $17 for a ClosetMaid wire basket, a dozen cable ties, and voilà! A sturdy rear basket able to carry my twenty-pound oversized briefcase. A couple of bungee cords, and it's suitable for grocery shopping as well.

Range on the standard lithium battery is more than adequate for errands in Midtown Atlanta. The Web site claims twenty miles between charges; I know that I can make three round trips to the office (six miles) before the five-segment gauge drops to only having four segments lit.

And it's built like a tank (and nearly as heavy), so potholes and rain grates and other urban hazards aren't a concern. The style is called "step through," which means it doesn't have a top tube as in the traditional diamond-frame bike. To anyone raised in this country in the last fifty years, that means "girl's bike." That bothered me for about five minutes, until I realized how much easier it is to mount and dismount. (Especially after I added my monster rear basket! Flinging my right leg over that would probably dislocate my left knee!)

Basically: the diamond-frame you are used to is lighter and more efficient. The step-through design requires a massively heavy front frame piece to keep the whole bike from flexing. This is solved by adding metal. So you need more weight of bicycle to carry the same weight of passenger. I'm not going to go racing, or pedal across the country, so I don't care. Oh, and while we're adding metal, there's a chain guard to keep my pants leg out of the front sprocket. And there's a sturdy motorcycle-style kickstand that holds the bike vertical, so you're not leaning it over when parking. Think Gelandewagen, not Ferrari.

It comes with a headlight and taillight (both LED-based) that run off the main battery. If I did a lot of night riding, I'd probably investigate something brighter with a more consistent illumination pattern, but this is fine for what I do. The wiring connections from the factory are lousy: friction-fit connectors that easily jostle loose. But a few minutes with a soldering iron and some heat-shrink tubing fixed that. And all the running gear parts (except the hub motor) are standard enough that your bicycle shop won't be scared to service it.

Travelling

This is a big, heavy bicycle (63 pounds, including removable battery). I could probably get one onto an SUV roof rack, but it wouldn't be fun. And two of them would probably exceed your roof's weight limit, anyhow. The front wheel requires tools to remove, so you can't do the quick-release thing to stuff it in the back of your car. Basically, if you're going to take it somewhere else, you need to have a minivan/SUV/pickup big enough to swallow it whole, or a trailer-hitch carrier. (Or you buy the Wentz folding model instead, which fits in the trunk of most cars.)

That being said... we were up in the Nantahala National Forest a couple of weekends ago, and I really wished we had had a way to bring my electric bike!

If you're interested in trying one out for yourself, email Ken and tell him I sent you. And remember to wear your helmet!

One of the reasons I love what I do... getting to hang out with cool guys like Blair McIntyre!

Jeff Foxworthy said once, "If the directions to your place include the phrase 'Turn off the paved road,' you might be a redneck."

I'm not sure if American Maglev would appreciate the comparison, but it's apt. A little ways off Thornton Road in Powder Springs, about twenty miles west of Atlanta, down an unpaved road, is a glimpse of the future. I got a chance to visit them yesterday.

"Magnetic levitation" is one of those delightful polysyllabic phrases. It's routinely invoked in science fiction books and films to connote swoopy futuristic trains hurtling across the landscape at hundreds of miles per hour.

But in the pine woods of this Atlanta suburb, Tony Morris (a Georgia Tech graduate) and his team have built a reasonably-swoopy train car and a third of a mile of elevated trackway. A lot of money has been spent here... nearly $50 million over the life of the company. The latest investors are from Dubai.

And the darned thing works.

Maglevs are cool for lots of reasons. By floating the car over the rail, you eliminate friction. No wheels, no bearings. By inducing eddy currents in the track, the car becomes part of a linear induction motor that's as long as the track. No rotary motors, no gearing, nothing to lubricate. By using electricity as your motive power, you have no local emissions... and if those electrons are coming from nuclear or solar or hydro plants, no emissions at all. And there's not even much noise to complain about.

In science fiction, maglevs require superconducting magnets. Superconductors come in two flavors: high-temperature and low-temperature. "High" temperature is a relative term — these are cooled by liquid nitrogen at minus-320°F, so they're still awfully cold to you and me. But liquid nitrogen is cheap... about the same cost per liter as beer. Unfortunately, high-temp superconductors are pretty lousy from an engineering viewpoint. Hard to work with, brittle, low current densities — not a good answer.

Low-temperature superconductors are cooled by liquid helium. Liquid helium costs more per liter than Glenmorangie. And it boils off and has to be replaced constantly. And keeping anything cooled to minus-452°F means massive engineering challenges. So maglevs based on low-temperature superconductors are horrendously expensive.

American Maglev has declared "a plague on both your houses" and isn't using superconductors at all. Just honking big electromagnets (like the ones in your radio speakers, but bigger) with a sophisticated sensor and control system. This system monitors the gap between the magnets and the rail thousands of times per second, adjusting the electromagnet drive current as necessary to maintain a constant 3/8-inch separation.

The team's mantra is "smart vehicle, stupid track." This makes a lot of sense. The track is elevated (keeping it out of the path of kids, cows, or cars) and consists of two load-bearing steel rails, two more steel rails to carry the electric current, and a series of flat aluminum plates down the middle. It's supported by pre-cast concrete towers every 88 feet... meaning that building a track means digging sixty deep holes per mile and snapping pieces together, rather than the laborious bulldozer, grading, filling, and paving process needed for traditional light rail (trolleys) or heavy rail (MARTA or Amtrak).

Levitating the car only requires 40 kilowatts (50 horsepower) of power; about the same as two dozen hair-dryers. Making it go sucks more current, but you get some of it back when slowing down (by charging on-board batteries). Overall, the company claims to be able to transport passengers and freight for approximately 1/3 the power of steel wheels on steel rails.

Inside, the car feels like a five-fourths-scale model of a MARTA car. It's about two feet wider inside and a bit taller, which makes it feel much more spacious. There's plenty of room for various seating arrangements, or even carving it into compartments if required. The current car would seat 100, or allow 200 to stand at American densities, or allow over 300 to stand at Tokyo density.

There's no driver; everything is computer-controlled. For long-haul routes, the company expects there to be an attendant of some sort in each car to make passengers feel more comfortable (and probably to sell snacks and Cokes). For urban routes, we'll probably be on our own — just like the underground trains at Hartsfield.

I've written elsewhere about the advantages of private vehicles over mass transit. But, if we're going to have mass transit, can't it at least be good mass transit?

MARTA claims that it can build new heavy rail for $200 million per mile. They're probably wrong; the Los Angeles Red Line cost an eye-popping $700 million per mile in current dollars. (For the math-impaired, that's over $11,000 per inch.)

American Maglev claims they can build their system for $20 million per mile. Even if they're optimistic, that's startlingly less than heavy rail. It's even less than light rail... and, because American Maglev's vehicles travel on an elevated track, they don't have to be hardened against collisions with cars and trucks like trolleys... which means the swoopy levitating vehicle will actually be cheaper than old-fashioned electric streetcars.

Smart software means that, instead of an eight-car MARTA train controlled by a trained operator, you can have a bunch of single cars running more frequently. I don't know about you, but the statistical indeterminacy of how long I'll have to wait for a MARTA train is one factor in why I don't use transit much. If I knew there'd be another car along every two minutes, I wouldn't care so much.

American Maglev's test track in Powder Springs is their third generation of technology, but they intentionally kept a low profile until late last year. Now that they have working hardware, they're hosting frequent delegations of potential customers from around the world. They're bound to win one or more of the projects they have bid on, from Los Angeles to Asia. Personally, I think it'd be great if they convinced the Atlanta Beltline folks to go with maglev!

I visited yesterday as part of a delegation from Georgia Tech. I appreciate the time that Tony and his team took to demonstrate the system and answer our questions. We had a great time, and I'm thrilled to see this unexpected new player in Atlanta's high-tech community.

Here's the situation. I have about three cubic meters of obsolete computers, peripherals, and other electronic crap sitting in storage. A couple of ancient Macs (including a pair of PowerBook 2400c "netbooks"). Miscellaneous printers and scanners. Disk drives. A fax machine. At least one stereo system. A handful of Handspring/Palm Treos. Probably a dozen wireless phones. Other stuff. And cables. Bozhe moi, the cables. I could tie down King Kong with the cables. Mostly pre-USB... Apple ADB, and power cables, and SCSI cables as thick as your thumb.
 
Most of this stuff worked when I put it into storage a couple of years ago. (A couple of the Treos have display problems.) It offends my soul to just take it all into an electronics recycling place. But I certainly don't have time to do anything else with it.
 
So... I need an archaeologist to (1) take it all away, (2) sort through it and figure out what's what, and (3) post it all on eBay. You keep half of the net proceeds after shipping; I get half.
 
This would be a great task for a slightly-geeky high school student wanting some cash... or for anyone in the tech business between jobs right now. It'd be nice if you knew something about Macs in the 1990s to make the writeups easier, but if you don't, Google knows everything.
 
Any interest? Email me.