Nuit Blanche: disruptive technology

Anne Fouillet, Grégoire Rey, Eric Jougla, Philippe Frayssinet, Pierre Bessemoulin and Denis Hémon just released a paper on the correlation between weather temperature and mortality rate. This is in part due to the 2003 abnormal death rate sustained in France during a heat wave that killed upward 18,000 people above what would have been expected. In recent memory, there were 4 other hot weather incident in France: summer 1975, 1976, 1983 and 2003. The figures shown below are from the paper and they tell a story:

When I saw these graphs, I could not but notice the following, there seems to be a resonance when the maximum temperature goes above 35 C (35 degree Celsius = 95 degree Fahrenheit). The average body temperature is 37 degree Celsius (or 98.6 degree Fahrenheit), skin temperature is an average of 34 C and we also know that water is very anomalous, and in particular that the specific heat capacity (CP) has a minimum at 36°C.

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One can always imagine the following, between 34C and 37 C, the body (made of 90 % water) starts taking in heat from the surrounding (mainly from radiation) and it does so more quickly at around 36 C. Since, we are only accustomed to heat warming the body slowly at lower temperature (higher Cp at T less than 30 C), there is a compounding effect taking place above 34 C that yields catastrophes on populations not accustomed to these heat fluxes. One also wonder, if a lower-tech version of DARPA cooling glove would not be an efficient tool in these situations (besides drinking and air conditioning).

[1] A predictive model relating daily fluctuations in summer temperatures and mortality rates.

Sunday, August 26, 2007

Hard Problems: Walking Dinosaurs wearing make-ups while sleeping.

I am always a little astonished by some things that I do not see implemented because they are too hard. Yet, I don't even see them being even attempted in the first place even though there is a very large market for each of those. Here they are:

How come we don't have Jurassic Park with walking dinosaurs ? everytime there is an animotronics coming in town, you have lines of kids waiting to see those things even if the time spent waiting will be longer than the time spent watching them and yet we still don't have walking dinosaurs (except when a human is inside). How come ? (my interest here lie in muscle, autonomous ). It looks as though we have only been able to devise their gait recently. Some people are already making a business case that building them will get people to come.
Knowing that some women spent as much as two hours every day to do their make-ups, how come there is not a Make-up robot for women ? ( autonomous ). This is all the more interesting that much technology goes into changing the face/shape of women in magazines. How come there isn't a similar technology to evaluate if the make-up is good enough ? Think Snow White mirror.
People spend an average of 8 hours sleeping yet there is no real good technology to improve sleep. How come there isn't an autonomous pillow that shapes itself around one's head over the course of the sleep. Or since a 32 GB SD card can allow people to record entire sleeping patterns for over 8 hour. What is the software that will allow to check if the pattern is a good one or a detrimental one ?