190 on chevettes and trying

"Alexa, play Lucifer."

We got a Fire Stick for the TV, and now it has voice control, and it's awesome. A few years ago I saw a gap in what I called "voice OS" and now it's here and pretty great. (And in this instance, unlike my phone, it's activated by a button.)

So, what OS is next?

I'm sure there are a bunch of possibilities, but the one that leaps out at me is gesture control. Google already has patents out.

Gesture control will be useful in all kinds of circumstances, from snapping to shut down your music to simply moving your hand to scroll... But the biggest one might be VR and AR control.

Despite hopes by Facebook, my gut is telling me most VR will be done on phones, for cheap. Why? Because people already have phones, and they are basically the same hardware as VR goggles, minus something to attach to your head. So the real question becomes, how do you fit a better VR experience onto your phone? And with current options being limited to one button and some motion control, the answer is, with some sort of better controls. You want to be able to touch and lift objects in VR. Boom, gesture control.

This will start with some sort of joystick. It already has, with Samsung's Gear VR.

And while we're on the subject of design, let me hit on a classic Blake rant. Prepare yourself for my "V8 theory of design" lecture.

In the V8 theory, you have America in one corner, with a few people and a lot of resources. (How we got there is another story for another time.) In the other corner, you have the rest of the world, with a lot of people and not so many resources.

In America, we created the V8. (That's a car motor with 8 cylinders. I guess if I need to tell you that, I should just say, it's a big motor that burns a lot of gas.) The V8 is a great motor. Given enough gas and oil and spare parts, a V8 can last a long time.

But the rest of the world didn't have as much gas and oil and spare parts as America, so they had to get creative. As a result, they opted to build smaller, more efficient motors, like sixteen valve four cylinders, and diesels.

In America, we called these "rice burners."

Now, as the world has run short on resources, the V8 has run into issues. For a while, the US response was to try to make smaller motors. Hence, the Chevy Chevette.

When I was a kid, it was an obvious stinker. It was clutzy and bulbous compared to the Japanese cars it was imitating.

Now, forty years later, I can see the designers were really trying. I mean, it does look more like a Japanese econobox than an American muscle car. But I remember how I felt when I was younger, and I'm pretty sure that the driving experience would be weird as hell, then and now.

(I have a memory of driving an 80s Chevy economy car, a Cavalier, on the freeway and being absolutely terrified. The steering wheel was so tiny, and seemed only remotely attached to the wheels.)

America's solution to the V8 dilemma has been, well, not great. When we ran out of easy oil in the 1970s, at first we drove 55 in throttled down muscle cars, and the four cylinder made major inroads. Then we started resource wars, attempting to get more oil, and the V8 was back. Then we started fracking, and now Japan is designing V8s for the American market, and Ford only makes trucks.

Meanwhile, Tesla has become the most valuable vehicle manufacturer in the country.

Ok, enough high-minded thinking about how we solve problems, let's get back into the trenches of pandemic-propaganda-politics. There's no time to plan for the future, we must panic today!

Or maybe we won't be able to get away from all those V8s after all.

It is not a coincidence that the regressive wing of American life is parading around with "neo-confederate" flags in pickup trucks, and on Harleys. (The two wheeled equivalent of a V8 is an 1800cc twin.)

But there's more to America than they show on the nightly news.

Quiet, peaceful types don't get a lot of attention, but we get a lot done, and we think a lot.

Like about the rolling stop.

Which is now legal in TWO states! (Washington and Idaho.)

But practiced basically everywhere.

Because stopping-and-going on a bicycle isn't just a pain in the ass, it's more dangerous.

And speaking of more dangerous...

It's tough to watch the economic devastation, but it's nice to feel safer, and history tells us we will recover faster for all of our precautions.

(It would seem that the editors forgot there are cities in other countries while writing this story.)

Bill Gates didn't forget, though.

And he wants to set the story straight about how effective the "travel ban" was. Remember those jammed airports when dear leader shut down travel from Europe?

Speaking of Europe, the virus is making a comeback.

But, seriously, why does SF have a lower death rate?

Anecdotally, we were first hit by a stronger strain of the virus than NYC. It was more deadly, but didn't spread as easy.

But we also did take the threat seriously. Those four or five days in March really seemed to matter.

And we've been testing and tracing.

But maybe not exactly the right people in the right places.

Of 500k tests we've conducted, 10k have come back positive. At the city's largest test sites, that has been a 1-2% positive test rate.

But in the hardest hit areas, we're seeing upwards of 9%.

So, like many parts of our response, we're still a little stuck back in March. At this point, we know where the disease is. So why are we throwing resources at where it's not?