Anyone who has used a laptop atop a lap is intimately familiar with the heat that a modern CPU can generate. Every watt of that heat is wasted.

Talking with Dave earlier, he mentioned that he had converted one of his PCs to liquid cooling, silencing at least some of the fans that had made the thing sound like a damned airplane. He explained how the cooling system used an aquarium pump to circulate water; I hypothesized that the pump was probably redundant–the CPU itself probably put enough energy into the system for natural convection to circulate the water adequately, as long as there’s a one-way valve in the plumbing somewhere. He was skeptical.

Anyhow, if it hasn’t been done already, it would make a good project for a casemodder. But after thinking about it a bit, I realized this idea had a lot of potential. Take it a step further: rather than using energy to cool the system, actively scavenge the processor’s waste heat. I can imagine a couple ways to do this:

1. Install a water turbine in the radiator. This could drive a generator to produce a little juice, or be mechanically coupled to a fan. This would be quite elegant: the computer would become a homeostatic system that cooled itself down as a natural consequence of heating up.
2. Install a stirling engine in the case. Again, this could be coupled to a fan or a generator.

Imagine the steampunk/geek-cred you’d earn by having a functioning stirling engine installed in your case.

When I got my current computer, a Powermac G4, I started using the mouse that came with it, a featureless polycarbonate ovoid. It’s a beautiful mouse–nice heft, nice materials, nice shape. But a one-button mouse. These days, many mice have four buttons plus a scroll-wheel that can also be clicked, and OS X is built to recognize two buttons plus a clickable scroll-wheel with no extra software required (unless you want to remap the button functions).

Perhaps out of exasperation with my button-deficient mousing lifestyle, my über-geek friend Drew just flat-out gave me a new-in-box Microsoft mouse with two buttons and a clickable scroll-wheel that he happened to have lying around (this isn’t that surprising–as near as I can tell, he’s got 8 computers in varying levels of service). So I plugged it in this morning and have been using it.

My findings: In terms of shape, materials, and build-quality, Apple wins hands-down. As to the extra controls, I’m actually a bit ambivalent. The scroll-wheel is a big advantage, no question. But it clicks along in steps, not smoothly, which is actually jarring when following a screenload of text. The second button is also handy (though not as frequently so), but it forces me to pay more attention to what I’m doing. And despite that, having two extra buttons doesn’t quite feel like enough. With a one-button mouse setup, I use the keyboard more to make up for the mouse’s deficiencies. If I’m going to really use the mouse, I need to be able to use it more. Chorded input would give me 7 possible clicks from three buttons, but I’m not sure if that can be accomplished, and I am loathe to install Microsoft’s bloated (4.9 MB) mouse software to find out. A mouse with more physical buttons would do the trick, though perhaps at the expense of a lot more mistaken clicks. There are other mice out there that offer multiple buttons with better ergonomics, and I might break down and try one out.

A discussion on metafilter led me to a Sony robot demo. It’s quite uncanny to watch the robot, winsomely called Qrio, moving around, righting itself from a fall, or waving hello. As nifty as Sony’s Aibo is, this makes it seem like a Furby by comparison. Or perhaps even a Weeble.

But what’s with Japan’s fascination with robots, especially anthropomorphic ones? One might snarkily cite the fact that the guys designing these robots grew up with Tetsuwan Atom and Japan’s other robot-heroes, but what made those characters so popular in the first place? I don’t know.

Japan’s big electronic companies trot out the problem of the country’s rapidly graying society as something that robots can solve–the idea being that robots will do all the scut work for society, especially looking after incontinent oldsters. This seems like the most complex solution possible in search of a problem. Relaxing immigration policies would be the blindingly obvious solution, except for isolationism in Japan even stronger than most countries.

Beyond that, though, the economics of a robotic workforce make my mind reel. Robots wouldn’t be cheap to purchase or maintain. In a society with a high proportion of old people receiving government assistance, those seniors would probably be hard-pressed to pay for these robots out of their own pockets. So would the government: the tax burden would be falling harder on the dwindling (and perhaps resentful) younger population. And if we assume that there are W_N man-hours of work to be done by society in general per year, with robots doing some amount W_R, and humans doing the rest (W_L) such that 0 < W_R < W_N, then the higher the value of W_R, the lower the government’s tax revenues (I assume robots would not be paying taxes). In short, the government would literally need more warm bodies to tax to pay for all those cold bodies.

In a country with full employment, the economics must be different–but with a large fraction of the population on the dole, the economics get all screwy. Ironic that the root of the word “robot” is in the Czech word for drudge-work.

No doubt many electrons will be spilled as self-appointed geniuses like me pore over Apple’s new announcements. These are interesting, I agree, but I’m going to take a detour and look at Apple’s website.

Apple has long done an admirable job of presenting a clean design on its site. One thing that it always steered clear of is dynamic content. There’d be a little “hot news” animation on the front page, but that was usually it. As of today, though, there are signs of more mouseover fun. The Panther page uses some mouseovers (using old-school HTML+JS instead of way-new CSS effects), and the G5 page likewise uses these on the performance charts (one could easily miss these), and on the navigation bar for the G5 pages.

Shortly before OS X was made public, the Apple site was retooled with an Aqua look for the graphic buttons. It is interesting that it is reversing course to some extent–the buttons have a much less pronounced Aqua look (the Aqua interface itself has been toned down), but on some of the Apple Store pages, some buttons are flat ovals–not at all Aquatic.

Apple seems to be reversing course on Aqua for its software, too: in addition to all the iWhatever programs, Apple will be applying its “metal” theme to the Finder. This strikes me as dumb: the rationale behind the metal theme has always been dubious, the application of that rationale has been spotty, and I never liked the theme in the first place (so I turn it off).

I’m not sure what prompted the changes to make the site a tiny bit more dynamic and less aquatic. The website once was a harbinger of the Aqua interface on the Mac, though, and I wonder if it’ll be again. It would be nifty, from a geeky perspective, if Apple tried using modern CSS layout techniques and valid, clean HTML, but it is still a pleasure to read.

Has anyone out there successfully installed edonkey on OS X? If so, how? I spent way too much time trying to get it to work and failing.

Oh Lazyweb, I invoke thee!

A prototype phone can open a voice-over-IP connection if there’s an open WiFi node available. Very, very interesting. If you had one of these and never left Manhattan, you’d probably never need to subscribe to cellular service.

Bah. I really like Chimera, and I like the name. Apparently they can no longer legally use it.

Mike Pinkerton says he doesn’t want suggestions for other names. Tough. If they can’t use Chimera, I suggest Kimera. Or maybe Ximera, which has a certain OS-X pun quality. But it looks awful on the page. Or maybe they can write it in Greek.

But not Camino.

A discussion over at Macintouch led me to the OS X beta of Ragtime, an integrated app available as a free (but big — 54 MB) download. I’ve downloaded it and will be evaluating it.