I was all scheduled to give a talk at tomorrow’s Minnebar 16 entitled “Silico-Paleontology: Using graph databases to analyze evolved programs”. Than, last night, my left knee cap decided to slide off to places it didn’t belong, and I ended up in the ER where I received a very stylish knee brace/immobilizer. I’m fine, and will be hopefully be back to normal in a week, but for now the idea of driving the 3ish hours each way to the Cities, the walking and standing and walking, etc., etc., isn’t really an option. So I’ll be missing a meetup with Morris folks tonight and one of my favorite tech events tomorrow.
Even more annoying, I’d finally gotten around to scheduling a talk, and now that’s not happening either. I’ve thought pretty seriously about giving some sort of talk since I attended my first Minnebar in 2013, but the timing has always gotten in the way. Usually these things are in April, when the semester/school year is getting quite chaotic, and the best of intentions run up against the realities of the job, and the talk always losing.
This year, though, Minnebar is in the first week of June! So there was really no reason not to submit a talk, and I did. Several people had expressed interest on the website, and I was really looking forward to sharing some of the research work I’ve done with UMN Morris students over the years, meeting some new folks, etc., etc., etc.
My knee, however, had other thoughts.
And so when I would planning to be arriving in the Cities and checking into a hotel, I’m sitting here with my leg propped up babbling on the Internet. Sighz.
If there’s time maybe I’ll write up a short version of the talk here, and if folks would be interested in more we can go from there.
We just installed a new Nest thermostat and are giddy with anticipation!
Nest thermostat by James Britton from Flickr
The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed. – William Gibson
The thermostat we had when we got up this morning knew the temperature in the house (or at least in the living room downstairs) and because it was “programmable” it had some inkling of what we wanted the temperature to be. On the other hand it had no idea what the weather was like or was expected to be. It didn’t have a clue that a big winter storm was headed our way until the wind had already stripped away whatever heat was stored up in the walls.
It didn’t know if we were actually home or away, so we always had to remember to fiddle with the settings before we went away at Xmas.
It didn’t have any idea how long it would take our 100+ year old hot water radiator heating system to get up to speed or expend its heat. This meant that it often overshot, especially on cold mornings leading to sunny mild days.
It’s communication skills also left something to be desired, being limited to a small, unlit LCD display and four buttons. We keep a flashlight on a table under it specifically because it’s such a pain to to see, even in daylight, and we keep the instruction manual close to hand because the strange button combinations needed to alter the programming make emacs key combinations look positively intuitive.
And we had to be right in front of it to interact with it. If we left for vacation and forgot to put it on hold, well that was just too bad. And there was no way to tell it that we were an hour or two from arrival and it would be really swell if it could start warming the house up for us so we’d come home to something more welcoming than a furnished meat locker.
This afternoon, though, all that changed as we installed our new Nest thermostat.
We now have a thermostats that’s on the Internet. It knows where we live and knows that the sun went down a few minutes. It can access weather forecasts, so it knows how much the temperature is likely to drop tonight. And we can talk to it from anywhere we’re on-line. I can’t see it from where I’m sitting, but via this laptop I know that it reads the current temperature in the living room as 72F. And I can change its settings from this computer. Or my iPod touch. Or a computer at my parents’ house in Arkansas. We can provide an ETA and desired temperature from the road on the way home from a vacation, and the Nest can combine what it knows of our house, our heating system, the weather, and our request to figure out how to make it all happen.
WeatherGrrrl and I were giddy as school kids after we installed it and set up the accounts. We’d connect to it in different ways and alter the settings, and then look at the Nest and watch it respond almost instantly, and watch the displays on other computers update in real time. We giggled like we’d fallen into some strange episode of the Jetsons or Star Trek. And the crazy thing is that it hasn’t actually done anything yet, as the temperature’s still warm enough that we don’t actually want the heat to be on. Yet we sat there dreaming up scenarios and possibilities enabled by this splendid little device, and smiled and laughed and enjoyed ourselves immensely.
While we have no actual experience to report, I can say that the packaging was wonderfully elegant (very Apple-esque), installing it was no problem even for a unhandy person such as me, the set up was easy, and connecting on-line was a breeze. Now we wait while it learns things like how to recognize whether we’re home or now and, when the weather gets cold enough that we need heat, what our heating preferences are and how our aged house and radiator system respond to its commands. Here’s hoping it lives up to half of its potential!
On a related note, way back in grad school (late 80’s?) I had to good fortune to take a seminar from John McCarthy, pioneer of artificial intelligence as a field (and coiner of the term) and the man that developed the Lisp programming language. One of the most memorable moments was a lengthy discussion of whether a thermostat was intelligent; McCarthy argued that it was, much to the consternation of many of the grad students in the room. Without cracking the lid too far on that can of worms for the moment, it’s certainly clear that our Nest thermostat is a whole heck of a lot “smarter” than the programmable jobby we took down today, which was in turn muchly “smarter” than the old analog spring thermostat that was on the wall when we moved in.
Me thinks we just installed a bit of the future, and it’s whole tons of fun!
