Okay, so the above image is a little ridiculous if you think about it. That is a DJI Phantom quad-copter "carrying" or perhaps birthing an Amazon Echo smart speaker. While the form factor I have featured would never make it past R&D, I hope that it demonstrates the concept. For my purposes it will work just fine.
This post technically started when I first picked up the Golden Compass, by  Philip Pullman years ago. While the focus of his work was more or less to show that you can have The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe style fantasy without all that God allusion, I tend to read things for myself and draw my own conclusions. Sorry Phil, I enjoyed your works but remain convinced of the existence of a personal and loving God. The reason I bring this up in relation to the above picture though is because of a very neat concept that Mr. Pullman introduced in his novels: the daemons​. Today, we are hunting for daemons!

In the Golden Compass, the visible, physical manifestation of your soul is known as a daemon, and it can interact not just with you, but with those around you. As children, with lots of potential paths in their lives, the daemons change shape and form, often to fill an emotional or physical need of the moment. There is typically a preferred shape though, and as one gets older the daemon sort of "hardens" into a permanent shape. I liken this to the idea of people getting set in their ways (though I would argue that you're never too old to change). This is not a post about the soul (which would be a neat musing) but rather about the form factor that some of these daemons take: floating or flying over your shoulder.
I believe (or at least dream) that in the very near future we will see the combination of an Alexa style (or Google Home, or Apple Siri, or etc.) internet connected assistant embedded on a very small, ultra-lightweight, portable flying robot. There are some technological hurdles that come to mind almost immediately and I would like to briefly bring up what I think are the challenges (and the existing solutions) to some of these problems. Keep in mind that while I may think something is easy, I do not actually have the knowledge base, training, nor skills to solve these problems...just the imagination and hope that they can be solved.
For our silicon daemon to be effective, it needs to be able to last at least a full day. Battery technology is always improving, but we haven't seen the leaps one would hope for since Li-ion was invented. I am always reading about MIT or Rochester or some other higher learning institute coming up with demonstrable leaps in battery technology...but then never see any products incorporating those leaps. I have hope, but no evidence, that this will be solved soon. Anyway...the battery would need to drive a multi-rotored aircraft for at least 4-6 hours. Yes this is less than a day, assuming, when you're not moving, it could rest on your shoulder or a nearby surface would allow for efficient use of limited battery life. While it is resting though, the brain would still be keeping track of: voice commands issued, where you are in the world, where it is in the world, connectivity to the world, etc. Basically I picture a battery running a flying computer...where the computer stays on, and the flying can happen at any time if necessary. We aren't there yet, but I think it can happen. Oh...and the battery needs to be small.
The next piece I think we need is a very small form factor. This is probably the easiest piece to solve because ultra tiny quad-copters already exist. You can purchase pretty inexpensive quad-copters on Amazon that are smaller than 3 inches across. That's amazing. These are currently remote controlled, but...
A.I. way-finding and obstacle avoidance need to be integrated. The daemon should know where you are (either by sight or perhaps by something you wear) and be able to follow you at a predetermined distance, but also avoid obstacles such as ceilings, doorways, other daemons, etc. It needs to be able to do this naturally, without interference from you unless you tell it to go somewhere. Currently there are some great strides in automatic obstacle avoidance technologies for drones. Many of those systems, however, require fairly massive amounts of computing power. This needs to be miniaturized. The iPhone/iPad are good indications that humans are good at bringing large amounts of power into small packages.
Noise. Currently, these little buggers are noisy when they are flying. This is actually a pretty serious problem, as there are some solid physical reasons for the noise and it will be difficult to reduce the noise of a tiny flying daemon drone over your shoulder. It would be nice if you didn't have to sacrifice the hearing on one side of your head for the convenience of a flying companion. I'm really not sure how to begin solving this one, since all of my ideas either require making it bigger or adding physical limitations that make it less efficient to fly. This one is a puzzler.
Speaking of companion, it should have personality. I like Siri's quips, Alexa's speech patterns, and Google's information (privacy costs aside for now). But what I really love and think would add an enormous amount to this idea is personality. There are a lot of people working on this problem right now. My favourite so far is Jibo, (update: Cozmo has a ton of personality without speech). He's cute, his mannerisms are natural and intuitive, and his personality (while artificial and pre-set) is adorable and helpful. There is a lot of potential for natural language response/understanding and for interaction in a more "human" way with technology.

I think a solid counter argument to the utility of a personal daemon is that a wearable can do all of what you're asking it to do (besides fly somewhere else to get you coffee or a picture) already. The big difference for me is that I'm a pet owner and love the companionship that comes from that activity. Technology is not supposed to be sterile or just functional but should actually cause you joy. Having a daemon as your personal companion that you can converse with, play games with, and go through life with is a pretty neat concept and I hope my dream becomes a reality someday.

Also, I'm not saying that you should have a "demon" as your companion...that would be less than joyful and requiring of a neck brace due to spinning. Note the spelling.

I loved seeing the movie interstellar. It was gorgeous, well acted, bleak, and at the same time vastly hopeful about our ability to overcome obstacles. I felt the movie did a neat job sidestepping the human impact on the Earth's climate (probably to bring a wider audience), and instead focused on a somewhat realistic doomsday-style virus or affliction that attacked plants. The dark-humourist in me laughed about corn being the last of the crops we could grow. Out of all the mega food crops we grow now, it is perhaps the least nutritional to humans. It has other uses, true, and I'm getting off topic.

So in that movie, humans are forced to start thinking about an exit strategy from Earth because they (we) have no food. The main character, played by Matthew McConaughey, straps himself into a rocket, blasts off to space with his crew, and then couples their flight vehicle with a travel vehicle and blasts off (again) for an outer solar system wormhole. All of this is very cool, but what the spaceship does while in flight reminded me of this idea we used to beat up a little bit in my introductory astronomy and physics classes: spin the station.
Many times in sci-fi, the author or creator will have some vague, physics-defying technology that generates a directed gravitational field for shipboard survival and comfort. With that technology out of the way, we are free to explore the stars in our own time, not worrying about the horrible effects of bone loss and reduced heart strength. Application of sci-fi style space travel therefore encounters a problem at the start: we don't have any clue how to start generating gravitational fields other than good old fashioned "add mass to it" methods. Mass, as it turns out, is quite effective at keeping a gravitational field, as it is a property of mass itself. Another problem: unfortunately, of the four base forces we can observe in the universe (there are probably at least 5, but we can't even detect the fifth one yet), gravity is 10^-38 as strong as the nuclear strong force (the thing that holds protons together in a nucleus). What that means for our "add mass to it" method is it requires a lot of mass to get comfortable gravity, say about the amount found on Earth (go figure). That is too much to make a space ship out of (unless you think Earth is a spaceship, then congratulations astronaught, you have arrived). There is a way to get around this, and it requires us to think of gravity from a slightly different frame of reference.

Gravity is a force (duh). We feel the effects of gravity in different ways depending upon our circumstances, but in general our feet take the brunt of the opposing force of the ground acting on our bodies, while gravity pushes on our heads (okay, on all of us and it doesn't push, but just picture it okay?). This concept is key though. We feel "gravity" because the ground pushes on our feet upwards. That can seem counterintuitive, but read Newton's Three Laws of Motion and you'll get there.
Armed with the knowledge that my feet are gravity detectors and that they can't think for themselves, I am confident that I can trick them to think that there is "gravity" in situations where our mind would understand that this is less than true. Well, still true, but "free fall reference frame" introduces another page of explanation so just go with it. I just have to push up on my feet, preferably at a steady acceleration, and my feet will report to my brain that we are experiencing gravity. Picture an elevator: going down makes the elevator floor accelerate downward, reducing the force it is applying to your feet, and they report you have less gravity (again, because they are dumb). The opposite is true when you go up. Silly feet.
I keep talking about acceleration though, when this is about gravity or even about a better space station. We're getting there. When I said gravity is a force, I wasn't kidding. On Earth and in many places humans can explore, Newtonian physics dominates, and so his equations work for describing things like forces. Newton's equation for force is F=ma where F is force (gravity), m is mass (you, earth, elevator, etc.) and a is acceleration of that mass. On Earth, we have the force of gravity competing with the force the ground exhibits on your feet. They generally balance out so you don't fall to the middle of Earth or fly out into space. When you jump from a perfectly good airplane for no reason, you don't have the ground pushing against you, just the air. So the air slows you down because it is putting a force on you, but gravity is winning and down you go. The ground will balance that when you get there. Hopefully you brought a parachute. In space, when you jump out of a perfectly good airplane, you suffocate, but before that happens, you experience weightlessness (or less/no gravity - stupid feet). This is because gravity is pulling you toward the center of the earth (that's what gravity do), but you keep missing the ground because you are going sideways, or what we commonly call orbiting.
I'm going way wide on this, so let's get back to simulating gravity.
So since we want to trick our feet into thinking there is gravity, we need to push on them with something (artificial ground) while our heads are accelerating "downward". If we had an infinite amount of fuel and nothing to run into, we could just build a platform to stand on, and then accelerate it in one direction forever. Problem solved. New problem: we don't have infinite fuel, we need supplies, and orbits make it really hard to travel in straight lines...ever. So another way to make something feel like it is accelerating downward is to spin it. Down becomes away from the center, and the hull of a ship acts as the ground pushing against your feet. "Aha!" you might exclaim aloud, he's talking about centrifugal force, and my response is, "No I'm not!" The force being applied in a centrifuge is centripetal force, and that is what I'm talking about. You might ask yourself, "what's the difference" to which I would point you to a Wikipedia article and move on. Once your done there, we'll continue...
Okay, so spinning a hollow object that you can stand in sounds like the right idea. We run into some issues when we realize that size matters and the distance you are from the spinning object determines how much force you feel. To understand this idea, think about a wheel on a bicycle. If you spin that wheel so that the rim goes by the same point, say your finger, every second, you may notice something further down on one of the spokes, closer to the hub: it also goes by the same point every second. But the point on the rim needs to travel further than the point on the spoke. If time is equal, but distance is different, then velocity must be different (D=rt is the common equation in grade school. It's simple but it works for this demonstration). Now picture your head vs your feet. If you stand in our spinning spaceship, your body is like a spoke on the wheel, where your feet touch the rim and your head is closer to the middle. That means your feet are traveling faster than your head, and because your spinning, the velocity turns (pun intended) into acceleration. Remember above when we talked about acceleration on a mass being a force? Well this is why your feet would feel more "gravity" than your head by a percentage related to how far away you are from the center of the spinning spaceship. This is not difficult physics, I promise, but it is probably getting hard to hold in your head. I encourage you to draw some pictures, or better yet, get some string and start trying this out. For our purposes here, I'll tell you the conclusion: the farther you are from the center of rotation, the smaller the % difference in force between your head and your feet. Another upside is that you don't have to spin as fast to get the same force (this is useful when trying to reduce the Coriolis effect. That almost inspired another long explanation of misunderstood but commonly cited physics terms...but just google it instead). So how big of a spacecraft are we talking about?
A spacecraft would need to be approximately 448 meters in diameter to allow for a roughly 30 second "orbital" period and 1g of gravitational force. That's huge. Putting this in perspective, the International Space Station (ISS) is about the size of an American football field or 109 meters from end to end. That is pretty big, and it has taken us many years to put that thing together...and it doesn't spin. Now imagine the engineering marvel that is a spinning spaceship, or even cooler the parts of a spinning spaceship and how they interact/seal against the non-spinning parts. The engineering challenge starts to balloon when you attempt to solve this problem in one sitting, in one head. Thankfully, humanity has a lot of heads, and while time may be short according to some, it is still time and we do still have it.
I've written a lot, so I want to stop here. I might pick this topic up again in the future. Perhaps explore some real-life plans to make artificial "gravity" a reality. For now, I am bursting with other ideas and so need a break...

The media at large has focused on the co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz, and his medical history, motive, and the airline's culpability in their pilot's actions. Keeping in mind that this is an opinion piece, I feel that many of these questions, and their answers, are important. They have the potential to lead us to a more secure future. To some this is necessary, to others the very thought of being more secure means their privacy is less so. To most it is inevitable. That debate, and similar ones around the web and the world are just beginning to heat up, and you might catch me writing about them periodically but not today.
Today, as I ate breakfast and watched the news, a little ticker on the bottom of the screen mentioned that just about everywhere, rules/regulations/laws were being quickly enacted to prevent any person from being left alone in a cockpit mid-flight. Some flights are long, and may require a bathroom break. It doesn't take a genius to extrapolate that a flight attendant will need to step into the cockpit if a pilot needs to have a break (and yes, they should be allowed to have breaks. It's not an easy job, and you want someone fresh and composed when the routine fails to be so routine). The other option is requiring three pilots. When planes were bigger, people were smaller, and cockpits were less automated, it was standard industry practice to have a pilot, co-pilot, and flight officer/engineer all manning the cockpit. The flight officer's job was to not only provide critical backup, but to manage communications, flight plans, weather reports, and other tasks more administrative in nature but still necessary.
With the trend to move toward a more automated flight experience, many of the flight officer's tasks became more efficiently handled by a computer or more robust ground communication suites. The transition from three people into a cockpit to two happened relatively quickly, and now you really only see three people in the cockpit on transoceanic flights over eight hours because that is the flight time limit of a pilot with two pilots on board. So what do we do with these leaner cockpits? I'm honestly not sure, and I think at least putting another set of eyes in the cockpit is at the least a good idea. The unfortunate truth is that if someone in the position of trust of a pilot wants to bring a plane down they have pretty good odds of making it happen.
Okay, so no matter what we do, there will be bad eggs or misunderstood people put in positions they should not be in, that can cause great harm to people beyond themselves. It is a small mercy, but if 9/11 taught us a simple lesson, it is that God's law of physics rules the roost on this planet, and so putting that plane down in the mountains limited the catastrophe's scope. How do we do a better job of identifying high risk people in high risk scenarios to avoid these terrible events in general? We need data!
There are some proposals floating around the FAA's of the world stating that we should have cameras on airplanes. I don't want to wade into the public vs private debate today. Let's just say that I'm surprised it isn't something that already exists, especially in the cockpit. So here is an expansion on that nugget I saw in the news. If you are in a position of authority on this issue and you happen to be lost in my small corner of the internet, then feel free to take these proposals all the way to the top. It would be nice to be cited, but I doubt I'm the first to think of this and I don't need the attention - I just like to know if things I say or do have impact. So here is what I think (took us a while to get here, sorry):

1. All interior spaces (and some exterior) on all flights should be video and audio recorded. Storage is cheap, non-volatile, and getting cheaper and more robust with each passing second. I can think of very few barriers to entry of putting simple, webcam style cameras in every space of a plane that a human can go, and just recording it passively. There would be limits to how long footage should be kept. Say, 3 or 4 days worth of storage before it overwrites previous recordings. Cameras are cheap, and work well, power is not an issue on a plane, and you wouldn't even need the footage unless there was an issue you needed to review or investigate.
2. That brings us to lock in. There needs to be a way to lock in footage in the event of an accident. You don't want the freak situation of the onboard computer still functioning and recording days after the crash because rescue/recovery personnel couldn't get to it in time. I expect the cameras to be destroyed, I expect the computer to be a wreck, and for there to be fire everywhere. But if a car knows when it has been in an accident and can call for help, then a similar solution can key a hard record function that prevents overwrites. If it wants to keep recording while it is in the mountains waiting for recovery, then fine, but do not allow it to overwrite the event that led it to the ground.
3. Since we are talking about the destruction of most of the systems, let's look at one of the toughest things people have ever made: the black box. When there aren't tragedies to make us remember the human cost, the black box becomes a ubiquitous term meaning indestructible. It is not in fact indestructible but boy do we try to make it that way. So where do you think that we should store the A/V data being collected on flights? That's right - in the black box. 2 TB of data can be store on something the size of a thick postage stamp (not commercially available yet). You have to give the data the best shot of getting out to be analyzed. That's how we improve: review of data and iteration. So we need the data - make it survive as best you can.
4. Offloading the data. Planes need fuel. They typically need passengers or cargo (yes this should be implemented on all commercial flights, not just passenger). Those exchanges take place in airports or facilities designed to pass things to and from the plane. How hard is it to plug in an ethernet cable or some other cable suite to the underside of a plane and in a matter of minutes (or more likely seconds) offload all the flight recorder data? This has many advantages and a couple I can rattle off include:

• Pilot performance review: couple this with the medical tests, the aptitude tests, and you start to build a pretty good idea about the character of a pilot in all situations they encounter. This could be used for reviews, prosecution, defense, training opportunities - you name it.
• Because storage is cheap, you can store an entire airline's A/V data in perpetuity if you want or you can put decadenal* limits on the storage. Whatever, I'm not that picky. You can't create enough data that will outpace our ability to store it in this fashion.

Okay this is longer than I intended it to be, but I figured I should write this down before I forget about it. I have many other things I planned to do today, and I should get a move on. Thanks for reading and please forgive the simple spelling and grammar mistakes I may have made. It has been years since I was a writer competitively, and I feel super rusty.