Faster delivery service #
For many years now I've pondered what's next in delivery services. In 1973, FedEx gave us overnight delivery. With faster delivery you not only make more shipments of the same type of items you had been shipping (“depth”), you also ship things you would have never shipped before (“width”). Instead of trying to capture more of the pie, FedEx expanded the pie, both width and depth, made lots of money, and made their customers happy.
The next step for delivery services is to again dramatically improve delivery times. There are lots of times I'd like to buy something online, but the delivery time is too long, so I end up going to a store. For example, when I went on a cruise to Alaska, I wanted to buy a digital camera. We were leaving for the cruise the next day, so I didn't want to order online. If delivery were faster, I would've ordered online. This is what I call “depth” expansion of the business—more deliveries of the type of items people ship anyway.
There are some items that I would not consider ordering online from a faraway place. The main example is prepared food. If I want a pizza, I will order from a local store but not from Amazon.com, because pizza delivery via FedEx is too slow. If delivery took an hour instead of a day, people would be willing to ship meals. I could order a Philly cheese steak sandwich from .. Philadelphia. This is what I call “width” expansion of the business—delivery of items that people would have never shipped with a slower delivery system.
To get faster delivery, we need something that goes much faster than trucks. To get my sandwich from Philadelphia to California in one hour will require something travelling 3000 miles per hour. Unfortunately this is faster than the speed of sound. Supersonic travel is expensive and complicated. If we can lower the air pressure, we can reduce the air resistance and lower the cost of moving a shipment. (Surprisingly, air pressure does not affect the speed of sound.) Thus, the solution is to use evacuated (near-vacuum) tubes.
A network of evacuated tubes running throughout the country would allow fast delivery of small packages. These tubes would be connected together at hubs, which would function somewhat like Internet routers. The RFID tags in each package would be used by the hub to route it to the best tube. As with the Internet, the package hubs could adapt to route around congestion. However, unlike Internet packets, we don't want to lose packages.
The cost of building evacuated tubes to every household is incredibly high. Initially, the deliveries would be made to central locations in each community, perhaps post offices. Either the post office can then deliver packages to your home/office, or you can go there to pick it up. The next stage would likely be to build tubes to higher density locations like office buildings, skyscrapers, and apartment complexes. Lower density locations like single family homes would most likely be the last to receive delivery tubes. In older locations where new infrastructure is not being upgraded, tubes might be attached to the inside top of sewage tunnels.
I think getting sandwiches from Philadelphia to California is unlikely to be practical. However, having a sandwich delivered from across town in a matter of minutes could become commonplace. If you want a book, Amazon could print it at a local printer and then have that book delivered to you within minutes. EBay sellers could send their small goods through this network. If shipping on EBay became fast and convenient, we might see everyone participate. It could be the P2P of physical goods.
The initial cost of such a system is very high. The value of a delivery system is that you can ship anywhere. It does little good to have tubes running to only a few cities, although it might be feasible to use existing delivery services in conjunction with the tube system. Once the system is built, he marginal cost is lower than with FedEx, because the entire system can be automated. In addition, the demand will be much higher than the current demand for shipping services. I think eventually this system would be very profitable.
Go ahead and laugh at this idea. They laughed at the idea of overnight delivery too.
Update: [2012-09-01] Someone else had the idea of delivering package through the sewage tunnels.
Update: [2014-03-30] Amazon.com has announced that they're going to offer faster delivery with flying robotic drones!
Update: [2023-12-20] Pipe Dream Labs is using small robots inside underground pipes to deliver goods and meals!
Labels: future
Trusting software too much #
Google shows 41 search results for "Koki Anna". Why? Because a certain word processor flags U.N. Secretary General's name, Kofi Annan, as a misspelling, then suggests Koki Anna as a correction. So you end up seeing documents that have the wrong spelling of his name, including a page on the U.N.'s own web site. How embarassing!
I have mixed feelings about this. Part of me is old-fashioned and thinks everyone should learn spelling, grammar, arithmetic, etc. But part of me thinks as human beings get augmented with computers (including PDAs and cell phones), we shouldn't bother learning mechanical tasks like arithmetic and spelling. Computers are better at following rules. Human brains are better at breaking rules. Memorization is a very inefficient use of our brains. We should spend our brainpower on creativity, learning patterns, and designing things. Until that day comes, however, we should all learn how to spell.
Less right clicks, use the Away Page! #
It sounds like there's an auto-update to the AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) client that advertises their new “Away Page” feature. The advertisement (in the AIM client) says “Less right clicks, use the Away Page!” However, it's spooky, and it looks like a virus. As far as I can tell, it's not, but I'm not finding much information on the web about it.
I'm glad I don't use the regular AIM client. (I use Gaim, which is available for Windows and Linux.)
Update: my gaim isn't working for me anymore. I wonder if it's related to the “Less right clicks” thing. I spent an hour trying to figure it out, then gave up and switched to Google Talk. The buddies I care most about have switched too.
Labels: howto
Decouple nutrition and taste #
When choosing what to eat, there are usually tradeoffs between taste and nutrition.
Good nutrition: water, beans, fresh fruits, whole grain foods.
Bad nutrition: soda, beef, cheese, salt, chocolate.
Why do I have to make those choice? Why can't I have nutritious chocolate? The problem is that after many millions of years of evolution, primates prefer food that lets them fatten themselves up, because they're more likely to survive through famines. And evolution only weeds out bad habits that kill you when you're young. So we ended up liking foods that will kill us in the long run. But this is a solvable problem.
I'm starting to notice more things in the world where there are two options, and both of them are unpleasant (e.g., either you have heart disease or you give up fatty foods). In cars, either you give up gas mileage or you give up horsepower. For energy, you either give up comfort (air conditioning, etc.) or you hurt the environment. With programming, you either have slow reusable code or you have fast messy code. For cameras, you have high resolution still pictures or low resolution movies. I don't want to make the tradeoff anymore. I want the best of both.
With food, let's decouple nutrition and taste. The simplest (but perhaps ugly) way to do this would be to divert food after it has hit the mouth (where it contributes to taste) but before it hits the stomach (where it contributes to nutrition). We could then feed supplements into your stomach.
Since the supplements are much smaller than real food and they don't need as much digestion, we can downsize the stomach and intestines and maybe some other organs. You could use that space to keep all the diverted food. You could use any additional for storage, like Bender on Futurama.
Every once in a while you'd have to remove the supplement cartridge and plug in a new one. Unfortunately Lexmark will use DRM to prevent you from refilling your nutritional supplement cartridge.
That way I could eat all the unhealthy food I want and it won't impact my health. No tradeoffs, other than the Lexmark issue. Don't settle for less.
Labels: future
Car shades are a pain #
Car sun shades are very useful. You can put them up when you leave your car to keep the sun out. This keeps your car cooler, reduces the amount of gas you use slightly (because you don't need to run your air conditioner so much to undo the heating), and helps protect your seats and dashboard.
The problem is that they are manually operated. The popular silver shades are unrolled and placed in the windshield. There are also black perforated shades that can be pulled out. They're manually operated because it's too expensive for third parties to automate this stuff into every type of car.
Carmakers should automate sun shades. When the car is off, you should be able push a button to have a sunshade come up. For the windshield it could be set up just like the windshield wiper—an arm comes up and spreads out a folding shade. For the side windows it could be like the power windows—a reflective cover comes up from the door. Someday we'll use windows that can become opaque. Right now it's too expensive, but maybe in five years it will be reasonable.
If we had automated sun shades, far more people would use them.
Update: [2006-07-30] These car shades are a step in the right direction.
Labels: future