Samizdata

I have been somewhat quiet of late as I am on the road again, going from job to job to keep cash flowing sufficiently to keep me alive until my aerospace startup can keep me busy and paid full time. In the last 30 days I have worked jobs in Manhattan and north of DC; at the moment I have one day of business in Pittsburgh and am staying with the other half of “Browning and Amon” (or vice-versa), a duet from my younger days as a fixture in the Pittsburgh music scene.

Mark Browning, besides being a fellow singer-songwriter and guitarist who shared many years and several bands with me, is also a Pittsburgh zoo-keeper and has used his knowledge of birds and his fertile imagination to invent a product for a market most of us would never have imagined existed: housing for Barn Owls.

An Owl ponders the possibilities of Mark and dinner.
Photo: Courtesy of Mark Browning

Sound strange? You might think so and you would be wrong. Barn Owls, beside being large, gorgeous and fascinating predators also happen to be exceedingly effective controllers of small mammals. Since I long ago shared a flat with Mark and assorted birds and vipers, I realized immediately how useful it might be having some living about your farm field. What I did not realize was just how big the potential market is. To be truthful I still do not know how gargantuan it may be, but it is simply huge. There is hardly a farm in the Anglosphere world (and perhaps later elsewhere) that would not profit from the free service provided by these birds.

His boxes are selling like hotcakes in the California wine country. Sales are accelerating rapidly. Barn Owls love his nesting boxes and growers are packing them into their fields as closely as the Barn Owls will go along with. I would say there is every chance Mark will make his million from warm blooded flying predators long before I make mine off rapidly flying objects of the manmade kind.

Mark with his box and the Pittsburgh skyline behind him.
Photo: Courtesy of Mark Browning

You may wonder what is so special about these things. I cannot give out details I have been told over a few beers (well, not just a few. A lot actually) until his patent is through, but it comes down to a design which lasts and is naturally cooling. It gives barn owls a cool nesting place even if there is direct sunlight. If one happens to be flying around in the neighborhood it will make a beeline for one of these boxes because large enough hollow trees are rare and their old wooden barn homes are rapidly disappearing.

A proud homeowner surveys his cool new pad.
Photo: Courtesy of Mark Bornwing

I would not be at all surprised to turn on Autumn Watch in a year or two and see Bill and Kate talking with Mark about the increase in owl population these boxes have brought about.

I am sure our own Editor Perry deHavilland will also appreciate this advance in Barn Owl housing…

Perry with his familiar, Cadaemus, during his Hogwarts days.

If you are interested you can find out more from The Barn Owl Box Company web site.

Lawrence Berkeley Labs has a movie here that shows Carbon atoms in live action movement in a sheet of graphene. That is the stuff you make when you drag your pencil across a sheet of paper and it may be one of the more important materials of the 21st Century.

We are approaching the days of magic, the long ago predicted days when computing and electronics technology ceases to be visible and vanishes ‘into the walls’. One of the key solutions required for that disappearance is in the process of being solved.

If you are going to have an ‘intelligent environment’ around you, the computing elements involved must not only be small but they must have a source of energy. If we are truly talking about ubiquitous computing, there will be thousands of nodes in a home, millions in a neighborhood, billions in a town or city. You cannot feasibly wire them to external power and you can also not have thousands of folk running about changing a billion batteries every week or two.

That is where environmental energy scavenging comes in and it is not a future technology. It is here and several different types are purchase-able off the shelf from AdaptivEnergy, Texas Instruments and others. The systems work by picking up small amounts of energy from vibration, tiny amounts of ambient light, temperature differences and even the broadcasts from the local TV station.

Some applications are already in use for sensors in factory environments but the threshold is nigh where applications will move into businesses and homes. Tiny gadgets that you install and then forget about because they just keep doing their job for year after year with no maintenance, no battery changes, no replacements and no attention. They will effectively become invisible adjuncts to daily life.

According to Sir Arthur C. Clarke, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. We are just about to cross that threshold.