Marshall Brain's Blog

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With Popcorn, DVD's and TiVo, Moviegoers Are Staying Home

The fun fact is: "DVD sales and rentals alone were about $21 billion, according to the Digital Entertainment Group."

With approximately 100 million households in the U.S., it means that each household is spending about $210 per year on DVDs. Given that the standard "3 DVD" package at NetFlix is $18/month, and $18 * 12 = $216, there seems to be a pretty uncanny correlation. Alternatively, if you spend $4 to rent a DVD, it means that the average household is renting about four DVDs a month. Or the average household is buying about one DVD a month.

DVD sales bring in about twice as much money as movie theaters. According to this article, movie theaters bring in only $9.5 billion per year in ticket sales.

Between DVDs and movie tickets, the average U.S. household is spending about $300 per year on movies.

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This letter, as read on Car Talk, makes me smile.

See also these stories and Makes me smile.

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This is from "Revenge of the beer geeks", NewsObserver.com, by Julie Johnson Bradford:

Here are the facts: In the past five years, beer sales fell from 56 percent to 53 percent of the U.S. alcohol beverage market, while spirits sales rose from 28 percent to 31 percent (according to the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States). That's a 3 percent loss for beer, and a 3 percent gain for spirits. Since this is 3 percent of a $48 billion market, the loss is nothing to sneeze at, but it's hardly fatal. Beer still claims over half the dollars Americans spend on alcohol. And, considering that it is less expensive per drink than spirits or wine, beer is clearly the leading adult beverage choice by a good margin.

If the "alcohol beverage market" is $48 billion, and there are roughly 100 million households in the United States, that means that each household is spending $480/year on alcoholic beverages.

That gets you wondering, "what about other drinks?" According to this article: "the nonalcoholic beverage industry... posts about $100 billion in annual sales." That's about $1,000 per household. Also: "More than 10 billion cases of carbonated soft drinks were sold in 2004, generating $66 billion in revenue. The market has grown more diverse, with juices, bottled water and sports, health and energy drinks grabbing a larger share." Energy drinks (like Red Bull) -- just energy drinks -- makes up about $2 billion of the market. According to this article, Milk accounts for about $11 billion.

So, overall, on alcholic and non-alcoholic beverages, the average household in the U.S. spends about $1,500 per year.

What about gasoline, that other essential-to-life beverage in America? According to this article, "Americans guzzle 65 billion gallons of fuel a year." That's 650 gallons per year per household, which is a little lower than I would have expected. At $2 per gallon, that's $1,300 per year on gasoline per household. So we are spending more per year on beverages than we spend per year on gasoline, on average. That is a pretty interesting statistic.

What it also means is that if you could ride a bike and drink rainwater, your family could save nearly $3,000 per year!

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A friend wrote to me and reminded me of this article: Wired 12.05: The Bluewater Revolution

From the article:

"The buoy is the antenna, eyes, and brain of a sprawling apparatus suspended beneath the surface like a huge aquatic insect, its legs of thick steel chain tethered to the ocean floor. The creature's body is a group of three cages, each resembling a gigantic toy top. Inside the cages are swirling, stupid mobs of fish.

The apparatus, an experiment operated by the University of New Hampshire, makes up the first fish farm ever on the open ocean. But this undertaking is more than the latest step in humankind's long effort to tame the seas. The university's Open Ocean Aquaculture Project may represent the best hope for saving those seas - or at least much of the life within them."

It is a fascinating article because this approach solves so many problems.

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The Mad Genius from the Bottom of the Sea

From the article:

Craven's system exploits the dramatic temperature difference between ocean water below 3,000 feet - perpetually just above freezing - and the much warmer water and air above it. That temperature gap can be harnessed to create a nearly unlimited supply of energy. Although the scientific concepts behind cold-water energy have been around for decades, Craven made them real when he founded the state-funded Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii in 1974 on Keahole Point, near Kona. Under Craven, the lab developed the process of using cold deep-ocean water and hot surface water to produce electricity. By the 1980s the Natural Energy Lab's demonstration plant was generating net power, the world's first through so-called ocean thermal energy conversion.

"The potential of OTEC is great," says Joseph Huang, a senior scientist for the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration and an expert on the process. "The oceans are the biggest solar collector on Earth, and there's enough energy in them to supply a thousand times the world's needs. If you want to depend on nature, the oceans are the only energy source big enough to tap."

"Enough energy to supply a thousand times the world's needs" sounds like a lot of energy. It also sounds like the end of the fossil fuel economy.

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Little medic has a nose for illness

Here my dog has been sniffing fire hydrants for the last 10 years, and now we come to find out she could have been detecting cancer. From the article:

Ginger correctly selected the cup from a patient with prostate cancer, dismissing specimens from healthy volunteers.

Gordon reached into a pocket for her reward: a piece of chicken.

Ginger didn't always pick the right cup, but the little dog got it right more than half the time on her first pass. On average, she has sustained that accuracy rate during 250 training sessions, Gordon said.

Under way for more than a year, Gordon's Find "Fred" project – his euphemism for a cancer patient – has evolved into a Scripps-approved clinical trial to see if dogs can be trained to detect early signs of human cancer through odor signatures of the disease.

Of course , if there are cancer-caused chemicals in the urine that can change its smell, those same chemicals can be detected in many other ways.

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Child Population Dwindles in San Francisco

The article contains this fun fact:

"Family housing in the city [San Francisco] is especially scarce and expensive. A two-bedroom, 1,000-square-foot starter home is considered a bargain at $760,000."

That is $760 a square foot, and it is a "bargain". My house in Cary, NC cost $90 per square foot, and that is considered "fairly normal". That's a pretty big difference.

What does a square foot of house cost where you live?

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Virgin at 18? Here's a Big Payoff!

From the article:

The data showed that both the male and female high school students who remained virgins at least until age 18 enjoyed huge advantages as adults, compared to those who had had sex in high school:
1. They completed an average of one year more of higher education.
   
2. Their incomes were 20 percent higher.
   
3. They had about half the risk of divorce.

The interesting question that the article leaves unanswered is, "why?" Is it because virgins spend more time studying than fooling around, so they get better grades, so they do better? Is it because virgins tend to take less risks (the assumption being that sexual activity is "risky" behavior), and this more conservative approach tends to make them more successful? What is causing the difference?

See also: The Teenager's Guide and Stiletto Heels.

From Can hybrids save US from foreign oil?:

Of course, a sudden switch [to hybrid cars] is virtually impossible, since there are roughly 235 million cars and light trucks on the road in the US today. Less than one-tenth of 1 percent of those - some 200,000 - are hybrids. So the speed of the conversion will determine how much imported oil the nation might save.

There are 300 million or so people in the U.S., and 60 million or so of them are school-age kids. So, approximately, every single adult in America owns a car. One out of every 1,000 of those adults owns a hybrid vehicle right now.

Totally unrelated but also interesting is this tidbit from Factory egg production:

There are approximately 300 million egg laying hens in the U.S.

What this means is that there is one laying hen for every single person in the United States. Somewhere in the U.S., there is a laying hen that, essentially, has your name on it. You eat all the eggs that your hen produces.

Slides from the Google factory tour

Ten Things I Didn't Know About Google

Google's architecture

Do you Google?

Top 100 April Fool's Day Hoaxes Of All Time

Today's post at SadTech talks about Cars and driving, and offers some interesting replacement options:









Click here for details

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If you watched the Google Factory Tour yesterday, you know that Google hinted at and then announced its version of a personalized homepage:

http://www.google.com/ig

What I am wondering is this: Can Google create a personalized page for WebMasters as well?

Here's the problem, and this problem happens both on big sites like HowStuffWorks as well as small sites. When you publish an article on your web site, you have no way to notify Google's spider that the article is available. So, on a big site like HowStuffWorks, it generally takes two or three days for the spider to come by and find the new article. On smaller sites it may be a week or more.

With a WebMaster interface, you would have two possible buttons. One would say, "Goggle, please spider this individual page". The other would say, "Google, please spider my entire site." When you push the button, the Google spider immediately crawls the page or the site and then the Google index updates immediately to show the changes.

Another part of the WebMaster control panel would show a complete list of all of the files from your site in the Google index. You can sort of get this now using the "site:" option, but it does not seem to be entirely accurate and it is not a compact list.

Another really nice feature for WebMasters might be this: The WebMaster types in a URL, and Google shows 10 or 20 keywords in the Google index where the page ranks highly.

Here's a feature that Google could implement with a little extra work. Google could, fairly easily, instrument its search result pages so that, when anyone clicks on a search result, Google counts the click. Then Google could create a page that indicates exactly which keywords on Google sent your site traffic, and how much traffic was sent. The one minor problem with this idea is that it would provide SEOs with even more data that they would then use to further optimize (corrupt) the Google index. On the other hand, if Google offered a WebMaster interface, it might be easier to detect SEO tampering.

The overall thrust of the idea is this: Give WebMasters some tools so they can interact directly with Google's spider and index. This would make Google's index more complete and more up-to-date.

If you have other ideas (or if you see flaws in these ideas), please add them to the comments.

For more information on Web sites, see WebKEW.

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The idea is to create shoes that prevent a couch potato lifestyle:

Shoe kick-starts active lifestyle

From the article:

The shoe - dubbed Square-eyes - has a unique insole that records the amount of exercise a child does and converts it into television watching time. One button on the shoe - the brainchild of a student at west London's Brunel University - records the number of steps taken by the child over the day. Another transmits this information to a base station connected to the TV.

Another idea would be a second box that locks the refrigerator and pantry using the same techniques.

There is a "Google factory tour" going on today, starting at 1:00 PM ET, 10:00 AM PT. You can access the video feed here:

http://www.google.com/press/factorytour.html

Here are the slides from the talk

Here it is -- a six-pack of interesting stories on the Web. Each one of these stories is amazing in some way, and each one has a technological twist that makes it even more unexpected:

1. The tale of the radioactive boy scout -- the kid gets points for amazing creativity. But then he probably loses them again for not having so much common sense.
   
   
2. Surviving Partial Ejection from A-6 Aircraft -- Truly a harrowing, white-knuckle experience with a relatively happy ending.
   
   
3. Just a drop in the bucket -- how "a little bit each day" can really add up.
   
   
4. Gliding into infamy -- the amazing story of the Gimli Glider. See also this tv news story.
   
   
5. The Story of Oak Island -- The world's most amazing treasure hunt.
   
   
6. An Unbelievable Man-Made Disaster That Almost Could Not Be Undone -- Shows you how to create your own personal Grand Canyon (not valid in all states, some restrictions apply).

See also Makes me smile.

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Google Sightseeing - UFO

A strange and unexpected object shows up in Google's aerial photo libray. Click the link to see the photo.

The Google Sightseeing site is pretty cool in general.

See also: Expert Says East Texas Is Hotbed For UFO Sightings, Has Video To Prove It

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Welcome to Fundable

The idea is to give groups of people an organized way to buy something together. This graphic summarizes the idea very nicely (click for full view):



It is not a perfect idea, or a perfect implementation, but it is still interesting to think about.

There are some good ideas in here:

A Faster, Better Behaved Windows XP

One day, you would hope, this is all automatic.

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Super Water Kills Bugs Dead

From the article:

A California company has figured out how to use two simple materials -- water and salt -- to create a solution that wipes out single-celled organisms, and which appears to speed healing of burns, wounds and diabetic ulcers.

One question -- will it cost $2 a gallon, or $200?

With Episode 3 about to come out, I decided to re-watch the existing library of Star Wars films to get myself "Mentally Prepared." I was absolutely amazed at the number of anachronisms in the original Star Wars movie, and wrote them up in Watching Star Wars 28 years later.



I am not talking about the obvious things like "space ships make no noise in a vacuum." People have been talking about stuff like that for decades. What I am talking about are things that would be absolutely impossible in a society this advanced -- things that will be impossible even in our own society in just 20 or 30 years. Things like human soldiers wearing cotton cargo pants with matching shirts into battle, or the fact that the princess has to insert physical media into R2-D2:



Click here to read the article.

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Irena (age 5) asked me about bed bugs this week. One of her friends had said, "don't let the bed bugs bite!" Since Irena is paranoid about bugs, the idea of a "bed bug" was a big concern to her. I told her that I had never been bitten by, or even seen, a bed bug in my entire life. I didn't believe that she had anything to worry about.

But it made me think. I'm under the impression that bed bugs were once a common problem, but that they were eradicated along with smallpox and the dodo sometime in the last century. I thought I would look them up just to be sure, and came across this surprising news story:

Bed bugs threaten to put bite on U.S. hotel industry

From the article:

In 2003, a Mexican businessmen sued the Helmsley Park Lane Hotel in New York after he and a companion allegedly suffered numerous bedbug bites to their torsos, arms and necks while staying at the property, which overlooks Central Park.

Apparently bed bugs are experiencing a surprising resurgence.

The story has a nice photo of a bed bug -- my first sighting. And the whole thing is kind of creepy, given that I stay in hotels all the time. Just when you though it was safe to fall asleep...

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Centrifugal weapon could deliver stealth firepower

It is a completely new way of thinking about a gun. Instead of shooting the bullets using an explosion, the bullets are slung out of the barrel by spinning them rapidly and using their centrifugal force.

What is so interesting about this idea is that guns have existed for hundreds of years, and centrifugal force has existed since the invention of the wheel, but no one thought to put them together until now. A classic, "Why didn't I think of that?" moment.

See also the Gauss gun.

The White House and Capitol in Washington DC were evacuated today because a small Cessna 150 airplane strayed into restricted airspace:

Errant Flight Prompts Capitol Evacuations

In this case it appears to have been a complete accident -- the pilot was a student.

Within 10 years or so, airplanes will start being equipped with a rudimentary form of consciousness that makes this sort of accident, as well as intentional attacks, impossible. The book Manna, chapter 3, describes the progression.

The system will work like this. Airplanes can already detect their exact location using GPS systems. These GPS systems will be married to very detailed digital maps of the ground and the airspace over the ground. The maps will tell the airplane where every single building and structure is on the ground, and mark all areas of restricted airspace. So if a pilot steers a plane toward a building or a restricted area, a "conscious" plane will refuse to fly there. It will be, quite literally, impossible for a conscious plane to fly into a building -- the plane will "know" that flying into a building is "wrong." If all the engines fail, a conscious plane will know what is on the ground in the vicinity and do its best to crash into an unpopulated area.

As this happens, of course, planes are able to fly themselves. Pilots go extinct, and airplanes become completely automatic. Human pilots are eliminated from the cockpit because they cannot be trusted. See Manna and Robotic Nation for details.

One of the things we do with the kids every so often is to go to the dollar store. We give them each a dollar and let them pick whatever.

It is very interesting to watch the decision process. You learn something about each of the kids by seeing what they are looking at. There's also the part where they have to narrow the decison from two or three items down to one. There can be a certain amount of creativity -- for example, David once went to the kitchen section (unexpected...) and picked out a big spoon because he wanted it for the sandbox.

And then there is the fact that it brings so much pleasure for them. I have not figured this out yet -- what is it about buying something that is so exciting, so pleasing? Why does it make kids (adults too for that matter) so happy? No other animal "buys" things, and humans have not had places to buy things until very recently, so it is unlikely that there is a part of the brain "wired" for buying. Does it tap into some primitive circuit that, long ago, was used to help us gather food in the wild?

Anyway... Not so long ago Wal-Mart must have looked at dollar stores, seen how popular they are and opened what we call the "junk aisle". A lot of the stuff in the junk aisle is 88 cents, but things in this aisle can range as high as three bucks.

We were at Wal-Mart today so we went to the junk aisle and let the kids pick something out. Ian picked out a dinosaur. Johnny found a little plastic gum ball machine. David got a big rubber spider. And Irena, who always takes the longest, bought a package of long balloons with a hand pump to pump them up.

What this meant is that, when we got home, Dad got to learn how to make balloon animals. I've never created a balloon animal in my life, nor cared to, but now balloon animals are in demand.

Each day I find that I am amazed at the Internet anew -- the ease with which you can find information still blows me away. You type "balloon animals" into a search engine and up pops this page:

Free balloon animal instructions

Five minutes later I had made my first balloon dog. Let me just say that, if you have small kids, you can have a whole lot of fun for $2 by buying the Wal-Mart "balloons and pump" package in the junk aisle. It provided a couple of hours of entertainment at least.

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No training wheels needed

The idea is to replace the training wheels on kids' bikes with a rear wheel that can transform from two wheels to one. From the article:

Called SHIFT, it slowly transforms from a tricycle to bicycle configuration as the rider pedals faster, then returns to trike formation as the rider slows down.

What is so interesting about this idea to me is that I have four kids. Therefore, I have lots of little bikes with training wheels on them. Training wheels appeared to me to be the "normal" and "only" solution. My brain never considered the possibility of something better. And then a solution pops up that is so elegant -- I love when that happens. This is such an elegant solution to the problem that it elicits a laugh of surprise.

There is an eye-opening post on the coming of the Robotic Wal-Mart in the robotic news this morning. Interesting that it is 5/5/05.

Since I wrote the article How to make a million dollars I have received quite a bit of email. One of the most common questions goes something like this: "I would really like to start a business, but I do not have any good ideas. Where can I find some good business ideas to get my imagination started?"

The simplest thing to do is this: go to a good bookstore or a library or amazon and look for books/magazines containing business ideas. A good bookstore will have 10 "entrepreneur" type magazines on the shelf, and a dozen books full of "home business ideas", "small business ideas" and so on. Look also for magazines dealing with franchising opportunities. Scan through books and magazines like these for ideas. That will get you started.

You can do the same on the web. There are hundreds of web sites that discuss business ideas. Go to Google and type in something like "small business ideas" or "franchising ideas" or "getting started in small business" and see what you discover.

If you have an office of the Small Business Administration in your area, they may have a library. Stop by and talk to them. They also have a web site.

I started this recently:

Making money on the Web

The idea is to help people get their web ideas off the ground. It is an ongoing project. It will help you to get some ideas for web sites.

Look in your area and see if there is an entrepreneurial organization. Where I live (Raleigh, NC) it is called the CED (The Council for Entrepreneurial Development - http://www.cednc.org/). They have meetings, tours, seminars, classes, etc. You can often get ideas by talking to other people who are starting their own businesses. Go to the meetings and start talking to other entrepreneurs. If you have no idea what to say to people, try this, "What kind of business have you started?" Ask other entrepreneurs where they got their ideas, how they got their businesses started, what roadblocks they faced, how they overcame them, and so on.

In other words: Cast a wide net and see what you catch...

Here is another common question: When can I possibly have time to start a business? This is the important thing to keep in mind:

If you have a job, you spend less than a third of your life at work.

During every week of your life there are seven days. In those seven days there are 168 hours. Let's say you spend 50 hours a week at work. That leaves 118 hours outside of work for you to do anything you like. Choose to use those hours to work on business ideas.

Simply carve out a 20-hour slice per week -- 20 hours is only about one-sixth of your available free time. You will be AMAZED at what you can accomplish in 20 hours a week if you focus your attention on your business.

This quote from the Yarn Harlot is so appropriate:

"I neglect housework rather fiercely," she says. "That helps, it frees up a lot of time. I'm going to clean up when the kids leave."

You can read her whole story in the YarnHarlot case study. Realign your priorities, in other words.

Larry Page Graduation Speech

From the page:

Larry Page, Google co-founder, spoke at the College of Engineering graduation, and his speech was definitely the highlight of the weekend (plus, I got to shake his hand and accept his congratulations!). Being the geek that I am, I made sure to record his speech with my Windows Mobile phone. I would definitely suggest listening to what he had to say to our graduating class. It was truly inspiring.

This is interesting at so many different levels. The speech itself is interesting. The fact that you can record the whole speech on a mobile phone is interesting. The fact that the recording can be broadcast to the entire world essentially for free is interesting.

What it means, essentially, is that anything you say can be captured and broadcast to the entire world in short order. It is both amazing and terrifying.

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Teens adrift at sea rescued after 6 days