« PREVIOUS ENTRY
RSVP — the game
NEXT ENTRY »
Ferrofluid is freaking me out

One of the most interesting aspects of corporate history is the development of interoffice communication. After the skyscraper was invented in the early 20th century, large companies began to occupy increasingly spread-out places. That meant they had to rely on increasingly complex ways to move messages around — including pneumatic-tube systems, speaker-tube grids, and wax-cylinder recorders.
And now … blimps. A researcher at Hewlett Packard has developed the first ever intraoffice blimp: A tiny dirigible that ferries messages from one cubicle to another. You can watch a video of the blimp’s maiden voyage here, and there’s also a Q&A with the inventor, who notes some of the environmental problems of blimpmail:
I think the noise of the blimp’s fans was more of a problem than the color. I imagine that people will not like the airspace above their cubicles filling with buzzing objects, but I’m sure there are ways to design these systems responsibly. Perhaps they have to fly at least at a certain height, or only during certain times. And if it’s a useful service, I think people will get used to it.
Me, I’m kind of charmed by the idea; there’s something almost Blade Runneresque about the idea of massive objects floating around inside my office.
Joking aside, the inventor here actually made one interesting breakthrough. He quickly realized that any guidance-control system would be too heavy for the blimp to lift, so he made the blimp “dumb”. The control systems are in the room around it: A set of video cameras tracks the movement, calculates the vectors in which the blimp needs to fire its engines to reach its destination, and squirts the commands over to the balloon. This system means you could conceivably roll out a pretty big fleet of blimps pretty quickly, since it would only take one “brain” to route them all.
The inventor notes that when his blimp project was mentioned on Slashdot last month, he was beseiged with resumes from geeks who wanted to apply for jobs on Hewlett Packard’s “blimp team.” Heh.
I'm Clive Thompson, a writer on science, technology, and culture. This blog collects bits of offbeat research I'm running into, and musings thereon.
Currently, I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired magazine. I also write for Fast Company and Wired magazine's web site, among other places. Email or AOL IM me (pomeranian99) to say hi or send in something strange!
A long German word for “noticing when ads are being customized based on your surfing history”
“El Ajedrecista” — an analog chess-playing computer from 1912
“How did you find my site?” and Vannevar Bush’s memex
» visit the Collision Detection archives
May 20, 2011 » 02:28 PM
From Christopher Kennedy’s very droll book “Neitzsche’s Horse”.
July 28, 2010 » 07:35 AM
“Wr” - S
July 06, 2010 » 10:05 AM
My Xbox broke, and I was trying to Google some possible technical solutions, when I noticed that Google appears to be encouraging me to make a typo. I suppose it’s possible that Google’s algorithms know that typing “wont” instead of “won’t” would produce better results.
June 29, 2010 » 05:00 PM
On the other hand, when I tried the test for multitasking, I was pretty abysmal. I performed worse than people who identify themselves as heavy multitaskers, and those who identify as low multitaskers.
June 29, 2010 » 04:58 PM
I finally got around to trying out the interactive “test your distractability and multitasking” page at the New York Times, which they put up alongside their story earlier this month about how computer distractions are eroding our lives.
According to the test, I guess I have good focus — I’m not very distractable!
» see all of my photos on Flickr
ECHO
Erik Weissengruber
Vespaboy
Terri Senft
Tom Igoe
El Rey Del Art
Morgan Noel
Maura Johnston
Cori Eckert
Heather Gold
Andrew Hearst
Chris Allbritton
Bret Dawson
Michele Tepper
Sharyn November
Gail Jaitin
Barnaby Marshall
Frankly, I'd Rather Not
The Shifted Librarian
Ryan Bigge
Nick Denton
Howard Sherman's Nuggets
Serial Deviant
Ellen McDermott
Jeff Liu
Marc Kelsey
Chris Shieh
Iron Monkey
Diversions
Rob Toole
Donut Rock City
Ross Judson
Idle Words
J-Walk Blog
The Antic Muse
Tribblescape
Little Things
Jeff Heer
Abstract Dynamics
Snark Market
Plastic Bag
Sensory Impact
Incoming Signals
MemeFirst
MemoryCard
Majikthise
Ludonauts
Boing Boing
Slashdot
Atrios
Smart Mobs
Plastic
Ludology.org
The Feature
Gizmodo
game girl
Mindjack
Techdirt Wireless News
Corante Gaming blog
Corante Social Software blog
ECHO
SciTech Daily
Arts and Letters Daily
Textually.org
BlogPulse
Robots.net
Alan Reiter's Wireless Data Weblog
Brad DeLong
Viral Marketing Blog
Gameblogs
Slashdot Games