Dr. Dobb's Journal February 2002
"I'm just rotating my intellectual tires in a vain attempt to start a new tread."
—Charles I. Weiman, Chuck Waggin's Movable Feast of Waggery
I want to say something about identity theft, but this Ginger, or IT, or Segway Human Transporter thing has to be dealt with first. As a card-carrying wag, if I don't make some waggish joke about Dean Kamen's telepathic scooter, I'll feel that I've let the side down. So let's just get that out of the way first.
This year will see a revolution in wheeled transportation. That should do for waggishness, but just to be sure, let me elaborate. By now everyone in the world knows that the much-heralded invention by legendary inventor Dean Kamen is a battery-powered, gyroscopically balanced scooter that is controlled by semiunconscious shifts of weight, and that is virtually impossible to tip over. "When you walk, you're really in...a controlled fall," Kamen says. "You off-balance yourself, putting one foot in front of the other and falling onto them over and over again." With Segway, he says, it's gyros instead of your inner ear, motors for muscles, wheels instead of feet, but otherwise, it's the same thing.
In other words, operating Kamen's device is as easy as falling off a log. If Kamen is right about the ease of use of his scooter, it is a remarkable achievement. But it seems to me that it's also a clever insight that could be applied to all user-interface design. When people walk, they don't think about it much, but if it's brought to their attention, they recognize that they are, in fact, walking, and that this is a skill, albeit a minor one, and that it is a skill that they have mastered. They don't for a minute think of what they are doing as falling and catching themselves. Falling and catching yourself is not the EXPERIENCE of walking.
So: Walking is unconscious. It's perceived to be a skill. It's a source of mild self satisfaction. And it is, in truth, a natural reflex action in response to a confronted difficulty. Can we implement this as a computer user interface? It sounds perfect.
I guess first we would have to implement gravity. Then maybe everything else would fall into place.
Moving right along...
The FBI has called identity theft the fastest growing category of white-collar crime in the USA. I think they said that before the Enron scandal broke, but I'm not sure. Anyway, I'd like to focus the Bureau's attention on some ID theft cases that are being overlooked.
How about all those cases where some individual registers his last name as an Internet domain, as I have registered swaine.com, only his name is something like McDonalds or Sears. And then the multinational corporation of the same name, having stupidly failed to register the domain itself, suddenly wakes up and takes the individual to court. And the court rules that the corporation has more right to the domain name than the individual does, and forces the individual to give up his domain. How about those cases of identity theft, FBI?
Also, since the advent of the Web I've been a lot more aware of some of the other Michael Swaines out there. I don't know if this constitutes identity theft, but I'd like the Bureau to keep an eye on these suspicious characters. That China expert at the Rand Corporation in particular. My real worry is that I could get confused with him during some Sino-American crisis. Being mistaken for a real-life Jack Ryan has never been a fantasy of mine.
On the other hand, there's that artist named Michael Swaine who has developed an interesting technique of hand-painting photographs. Since there are intellectual property rights issues with using other peoples' photographs, he queried me before painting my web site photo for his online portfolio (apparently realizing that there was at least one, if not two, levels of identity theft possible), and when I granted him the right to use my photo, he granted me the right to use his derivative work, his painting of me. Now I have this nice digital painting of myself, suitable for hanging over the virtual mantle. I guess this could be considered the upside of identity theft — er, identity sharing.
Michael Swaine
editor-at-large
mike@swaine.com