First I’ll start with an update about how the Stemsational fared on Quirky: it didn’t. I’m not even entirely sure they looked at it as they claim to do. I got a form fill letter stating “Sorry _______, but Quirky decided not to go with the _________. But you should keep trying!” I guess the key to getting stuff developed is to get people who have already bought stuff on the site to vote for you. That’s the only thing that carries any significance; which I’m not too stunned to hear, they are after all, a business.
So, the Stemsational has been pushed back onto my plate, where I will push it to the side like so many over cooked peas, only to have one roll back into the middle of my dinner every once and a while, forcing me to reconsider before eventually deciding to corral it back with it’s unfortunate brothers. So goes the life of an inventor. Or at least, that’s what I’ll tell myself since I neither know any other inventors nor have actually invented anything myself. But if there was ever a notion to spur oneself on, it’s romance.
The other big development that has happened since I last wrote is that I’m now working on Google’s Self-Driving Car project! Which, I might have to kill myself when my contract is up, because I don’t know if I can go back to the mundanity of everyday life after having worked such a sexy job. It certainly is going to be hard to top. Maybe underwater welding? I don’t know.
Anyhow, I get to fly future cars all over Mountain View all week long. And when you’re in a car for eight hours a day, you start to realize there are some serious design flaws. My biggest pet peeve is currently right around when the evening commute starts to pick up speed, (if you’ll permit me), is the same time when I need to start using the visor to block out the sun. When you’re winding your way around a place you find yourself furiously flipping the visor this way and that to make sure you’re blocking out the sun. It especially becomes fun when the sun sinks below the level the visor is able to help out with, but has not yet set below the horizon. Sometimes it’s a good thing the car drives itself….
What would be a huge help is if the window worked the way transition lenses in glasses do, and become darker exactly where the sun was. It would have to be smart of course, because the whole window going dark if the sun was shining head on would not really be an improvement. The car would somehow need to track the position of the sun and correspond that position with where the driver’s head was, and then create a circle big enough to only obscure the sun and then follow it around has the car pivoted.
A tall order, I know, but Sergei was throwing billions of dollars at a glass project no one wanted. What if he could pivot it to a product everyone can appreciate? Plus, I think the general populous will be relieved to know that one of Google[x] core products will no longer be attempting to turn people into cyborgs. When the robot revolution comes, it will be on four wheels. Let’s just hope they’ll be considerate enough not to blind us.