I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.

- John F. Kennedy

I believe that this nation should commit itself ot achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of reducing our petroleum and coal consumption in half and returning the Earth safely to our children. No single science and technology project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-term preservation of Earth, and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.

- tell me which president will say this

1. Motorola Droid on Verizon
2. HTC Nexus One on T-Mobile

I’ve been thinking about the relative advantages and disadvantages of the two phones, and it’s a close call.

The Droid has a few advantages. The physical keyboard is very welcome, but I find myself using the virtual keyboards more and more, and I also find myself using voice input more often. Voice input used to be pretty miserable, but lately I have noticed a dramatic improvement in the precision. The resolution is slightly higher on the Droid screen, but it’s not a huge difference (480×854 vs 480×800). Both screens are stunningly good, particularly compared to the iPhone, which has a pretty mediocre screen. The speaker on the Droid is dramatically better, though some people might find it weird that I sometimes listen to podcasts through the speaker instead of using headphones. Sometimes I put it on speakerphone and set it on the table – the sound is very good through the speaker on the Droid.

The Nexus One has a few advantages as well. It’s thinner and lighter than the droid. It has rounded corners that make it pleasant to hold. The processor seems slightly faster, though this may be the software release that they are running. It lacks the physical keyboard, but I don’t seem to miss it as much as I thought I would. It is supposed to eventually get a car dock and a home dock, but I haven’t seen them yet. The home dock is apparently $45, which I concluded was too expensive. The trackball is very nice, and I use it all the time – in fact the droid sometimes feels clumsy to use because of the lack of a trackball.

The big difference for me has been the networks. I have been finding the T-Mobile network to be pretty marginal, but I’m not sure if it is a physical problem of the Nexus or a software problem in Android or simply that the network is lacking. Note that I haven’t made any attempt to measure network coverage over a large area, and you should be very careful of people saying one network is better or worse than the other. People tend to use their phones in a very few areas and draw conclusions about coverage over the entire USA, which is clearly misguided. All of the mobile networks have strong areas and weak areas. The verizon network won’t work at all in most parts of the world. I find that 95% of my phone usage is at home, a work, and in a hotel. In all of these places I usually have Wifi, so the mobile network is largely irrelevant there. With all these disclaimers, I am uncomfortable saying that the Verizon network is better than the T-Mobile network. When I travel to Europe, the Verizon Droid will be incapable of making or receiving phone calls, so it will stay home.

So which one would I recommend? The Droid, by a slight margin. On the other hand, my employer is paying for the data plan, and the answer might change if I was paying for the data plan, because frankly I doubt that I would buy a data plan – I’d buy an unlocked Nexus and use APNDroid to turn off cellular data access.

Would I recommend them instead of the iPhone? The iPhone is clearly a good phone, but I haven’t had a chance to use one at great length. I sincerely despise iTunes, which is one reason why I could never tolerate an iPhone. I find a lot of the value from a smart phone in the applications, and I find nothing lacking in the Android applications. People talk about having 100,000 applications on the iPhone but only 20,000 on Android, but that seems like a completely ridiculous comparison. It only matters if the 20 applications that you really want are available on the phone you want. If you are already an iPhone user, then you have already had your head bent to the Apple way of doing things, so it’s unlikely that you will be happy on an Android phone. I’ve observed a discussion among iPhone users who complain about differences, but almost all of the complaints are that things are done differently, rather than things can’t be done. The two phones offer very similar feature sets, but you should never expect things to be exactly identical.

I wonder what phones will look like two years from now!

• The personal computer
• Graphical user interfaces (mouse and windowing)
• The Internet
• The World Wide Web
• Laptops (they started out as computers called “luggables”)
• 802.11 wireless networking

Each of these brought tremendous change to the ways that we think about computing. One of the reasons why I started working on Android is because I see mobile computing as being as big a paradigm shift as any of the previous ones. We have a ways to go in this, held back in large part because of the cellular providers, who still have their heads wedged where the sun does not shine. It’s still going to be a huge change on how we interact with computers.

The other big thing that happened 40 years ago this week is that I met my wife while playing volleyball. Sometimes it takes a while to recognize how important something is in your life.

It’s things like this that should inspire kids to venture forth in science. We still have a lot to learn!

One great advantage of open access publishing is the lack of backlog – journal articles could become available on the web the moment they are accepted, there would be no practical limit on the number of papers accepted. When the flow of high quality articles gets too high, you publish more papers. When the flow of sufficient quality papers dries up, you publish fewer papers. There would also be no practical limit on the size of articles. Moreover, it would make it easy to maintain links to backing evidence for scientific literature, including demos, data, code to process the data, designs of experimental apparatus, etc. This would enhance overall quality, by removing the artificial constraints of page limits and focusing exclusively on quality.

There are numerous advantages, and as far as I can tell, few disadvantages. The only significant barrier is lack of vision.

1. A Tango
2. A RAV 4 EV
3. Larry’s Tesla (the silver one)
4. Sergey’s Tesla (the red one)
5. A gemcar

I can’t wait to park my Aptera in one of these spaces…

Sometimes it’s difficult to predict what the future has in store. I’ve said several times that I came of age in the information age, and our kids will come of age in the biological revolution. So far all I have discovered is that I have a slightly elevated likelihood of some kinds of cancer, I’m lactose intolerant (duh), and I have a few favorable characteristics in my genetic makeup. I hope that at some point in the future, we’ll see a net benefit to society.

I’ve always wondered how long it will be before we have pure electric vehicles, since the trend seems to make these quite feasible now. I’ve been tempted to put a deposit down on a Tesla, but the cost is simply too high for me to tolerate, and it’s not really a good replacement for the Boxster since it has too little trunk space. As an alternative, I decided to bite the bullet and put a deposit down on an Aptera. This won’t replace the Boxster, but it might replace the Prius. Someone has to lead, and I’ve always had a fondness for cutting edge cars.