Video Game Consulting

I did some consulting for a web game for the Discovery Channel's Building the Future documentary. You can play it on the web.

Lisa's Inventions for the Future

When I was in sixth grade, I entered a national poster contest for envisioning the future. My parents had plans to move us from Wisconsin to Phoenix, so I drew a picture of air-conditioned and heated clothing. 1500 kids entered. The top three won money and ten runners-up won T-shirts. I won a T-shirt. It wasn't air-conditioned.

So when a Washington Post columnist wanted submissions for ideas about the future, I did what anyone with a Ph.D. in engineering would do. I sent him a paper I published.

The idea was a driverless mini-taxi. When someone wants to use the mini-taxi, she calls for it by dialing on a cell phone. A GPS knows where the cell phone is and where all the idle mini-taxis are waiting, so the GPS sends location data to computers to dispatch the closest available mini-taxi to the person. She swipes a credit card to pay the fare and types the address of the destination. Then the taxi’s computing power calculates the route and joins the other taxis to form a train, joining and leaving train groups as it turns onto each road-like structure along the route. When the mini-taxi arrives at its destination, the person gets out and the mini-taxi becomes available to transport other people or goods to their destination.

I don't think Big Auto or Big Oil will let this happen in the U.S. It would likely have to be some type of electric rail system so users wouldn't have to be responsible for filling gas tanks. But I wouldn't be surprised if this came to Europe. Maybe even China or Japan.

The winner of the contest got a free lunch. Runners-up got their name and invention in the Post. No air-conditioned mini-taxi. Not even a plain T-shirt.

Every day is a slow news day in Reedsville

FAA Freddi: Funniest Fed

The Society of Women Engineers is excited that Freddi Vernell, an engineer at the FAA, was selected as Funniest Fed. We’d like to thank the Sunday Source for printing her picture, showing their readers that the face of engineering isn't always a boring old white guy.

Freddi Vernell (photo by Michael Woodward)

Our Little Lives

My husband and I just got back home from the annual Virginia Section Institute of Transportation Engineers conference in Virginia Beach. I love walking along the beach, collecting cool rocks and seashells. - Pause for laughter while Randy makes fun of me for carrying thirteen pounds of rocks home in my luggage when we went to San Diego in March.

It amazes me how some of the shells arrive on shore glued together in groups by some type of calcium carbonate mixture. Nature’s concrete. How many more shell sculptures are out there in the vastness of the ocean?

Incase the ocean wasn’t vast enough, at the conference banquet we were encouraged to ponder the vastness of space. Our guest speaker was Donner Grigsby, a NASA engineer. He emphasized the point of how small the earth is, in comparison to the Milky Way suns NASA has studied.

The most interesting topic Grigsby discussed was that the moon contains enough of a helium 3 isotope to power the earth for the next trillion years. At 1/20th of the current cost of energy. And if China gets there first, they won’t let anyone else have a part of the moon.

Sounds like something NASA made up to justify its budget.

Even if it is true, I would think there would be serious consequences that nobody has thought of yet. Like with carbon dioxide, the gas mammals exhale. I would have never expected carbon dioxide to be a problem. But now scientists call it a Greenhouse Gas, blaming it for global warming. Perhaps we should cut down on the exploding population of a certain species of mammals. Doing so would probably reduce energy consumption also.

If we do harvest helium from the moon, I speculate that too many of these helium atoms will pervade the earth’s atmosphere. Then we’ll all sound like Minnie Mouse every time we breathe. The Disney Corporation must be behind this whole moon helium thing.

Unfortunately, Big Government, Big Business, and even Big Religion won't admit what Big Science has known for years. The universe doesn’t revolve around them.