Amazon Frustration-Free Packaging

The AFFP is a brilliant idea for Amazon, first it saves on packaging costs since the manufacture eats the cost of the box and item packaging. Amazon can just slap a shipping label on the OEM packaging and ship it, they don’t have to pay someone to put bubble wrap, etc. Second it means Amazon can sell the same stuff as regular stores but they aren’t visually the same. So people can’t buy an item they need right now at a higher priced regular store, then order it from Amazon and return the cheaper but not instant item to the store. Conversely, people can’t buy something from Amazon, then find the item on sale locally buy it and return the item to Amazon. Custom packaging is win, win win for Amazon. (It might also help the environment; I doubt very much that was the original idea.) The down side is that the AFFP boxes have the same level of attractiveness as IKEA packaging. This is in some ways ok, because you don’t walk down the aisles at Amazon, with brightly colored packaging enticing you to purchase things.

However, if you look at the example on the AFFP webpage, you can see that as a gift, the Amazon packing doesn’t really make the Pirate Ship look all that fun.

Christmas morning in the not to distant future after the colorful wrapping is torn off “Gee dad, you got me an IKEA lamp. Waaaah!!!” If Amazon remembered that children can’t always read and picture would have shown the IKEA lamp is actually a Nintendo DS, this awkward disappointment could have been avoided.

Bayesian stats, Machine Learning, and internet match making

If anyone out there is interested in going forward with it, I have an excellent idea for taking on E-Harmony. E-Harmony uses manifold compression algorithms to match people across 29 dimensions. They ignore a great deal of information, and don’t take into account any Bayesian Stats, Machine Learning. Sorry for being vague, but if you interested it is actually a well fleshed out idea. I have nothing against E-Harmony, so if someone at E-H reads this I and willing to help improve your algorithms..,

Light interference

This is a question as opposed to a posting. When light destructively interferes what happens to the energy of the photons? I assume it is converted to heat? All the books gush about how the double slit experiments prove the particle and the wave, no one talks about once the wave is destroyed what happens to the energy of the particle.

Observing beyond 4 dimensions

As with all my posts that involve theoretical physics this one comes from a point where I was so exhausted that my mind was beyond organized linear thought and opened up to the possibilities of the universe. (Lest you scoff at my method, take a moment and use your rational mind and try imagining a 7 dimensional sphere. I have very high spacial perception and with a lucid mind it’s extremely hard, and makes my head hurt. Conversely, try to talk to someone who at any point of the day or night can conceive of such high dimensional objects, and see how lucid and linear they are in a sustained conversation.)

Moving on, scientists theorize that there are far more than the 4 observable dimensions. I will not go into how many, etc, but the reason that we can not perceive them is they are “currently believed” to be too small for us to interact with. However, I realized that the effect observed in the Casimir and Polder experiments might be explained by more than 4 dimensions. Since the space between the plates in the experiment is very, very small, it might be possible that it is reducing the effective size of the fourth dimensional world to a point where the interaction of the other dimensions can be seen.
It would be interesting to put a point source of light between the plates and see what happens. (Co60 as a point source could be very interesting.) Similarly shining hard UV or X-ray laser light between the plates is likely to produce some interesting effects.
This effect has potential to improve the storage of data in a non-magnetic manner. Since the head of a hard drive moves at a distant where if it were not for the magnetic fields the Casimir effect would have significant strength.

Also there is the possibly of designing new kinds of shielding for high energy photons, using nanomaterials.