My friend Sondre is dreaming of automating his house. Having his basement filled with racks of servers and having sensors all over the place. He wants voice recognition to help him turn the lights on and off and control his music. His music will follow him from room to room by routing it to that room's set of integrated sound system, and doors will open as he approaches.

That's kinda cool. But really, if I was to spend a lot of money automating my house I'd want it to help me with the stuff I don't mind doing myself. I just don't think its too much hassle opening the door when leaving the room, or turning the lights on. And I actually enjoy putting on music manually. But if I could have my house clean itself, though, that would be another thing alltogether. Now we're talking actual value.

If it would constantly keep the toilets shining and pleasantly fragrant, the floors swept and toys out of harms way, keep stains off my rug, ants out of my kitchen, the waste basket empty, the lawn mowed, the fridge emptied of dated goods, the car washed, my bills paid, my inbox free from spam, and dinner ready on time. Then I'd start doing the mortgage-math.

"Computer! Lights on!", my ass.

"Bjorn, your car is washed now. Would you like it waxed as well?" - That's more like it!

"it's really good for my sanity to have some moments of solitude and be working on my own little projects. But now the problem is I'm getting isolated from what's going on in the rest of the house. I'm all alone on a different floor, sometimes with headphones on, and the door closed to keep the heat in"

"After a while we started adding more advanced math operators. These are SQR (square), SQRT (square root), POW (power), and MOD (modulo). It was at this point we started losing players. Remember that the rule of whole numbers still apply, so SQRT(8) is not allowed."

"It can appear at the most inappropriate times. Like when you are really into a good flow - your mind is working at a racing speed, juggling huge amounts of information in short term memory at once. Local variables, program states, architecture, threads, locks, possible race conditions. Your whole problem domain is in your head. You'd just hate to lose that focus now, and spend the next fifteen minutes just regaining the overview."

"The usual scientific focus on this phenomenon revolves only around the impact it has on travelling at light speed. But there are so many other activities that are far more compelling to do in such a "time-pocket". Just realize that you get to spend all the time you want without actually spending any time at all."

"We are used to counting with our fingers. We have been doing this from we first learned to count. This is quite useful in many circumstances, but the number of fingers are quite limited - 10 fingers in total per person. What if you want to count beyond 10? Do you start using toes? Or another person's fingers?"