I know it is cheaper to print a menu on paper than hand an iPad to a table of hungry people in a restaurant. But if we go past the cost consideration, we just may get a glimpse of the future.

A device as sophisticated as an iPad is not needed for making a menu come to life at our table. All we need is a screen capable of playing HD video. Think of a miniature Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives. Click on an item and see it being prepared in a two-minute segment; in other words, a living menu.

Some sports bars already have a screen at your table. You can watch any game they have. You could also use that screen as a menu and watch any item they make.

This will eventually happen in a lot of places if not already. And it is not a leap to imagine those little screens replacing waiters at many restaurants because it does their job like the little screen at Sheetz. I’m surprised McDonald’s has not just gone past the person at the counter and installed a wall of easy order screens, certainly at the drive thru.

It will be yet another technological advancement that will cost on-the-ground, local, minimum wage American jobs. And that’s the whole idea.

This post is not about video menus at all. It is about building a non-minimum wage economy in this country. We need to use our immense American imaginations to create more than the minimum. We need the maximum.

Why occupy Wall Street in a protest when we can actually own Wall Street with our ideas?

What happens if we create computer programs that learn us instead of us learning them? What if we turn smartphones into the only device we need because the expandability and contextual nature of the little devices learn how to change to meet our needs instead of the other way around? What if we stopped talking about building smarter and more efficient homes, cars and cities and did it, starting tomorrow, right where you live? Why tolerate the massive waste and cost of buildings when WIFI can turn a bass boat into a corner office? Why have a campus when the Internet is a digital Harvard? What if we diffused our constant state of war in the Middle East by ending our pathetic addiction to their petroleum teets?

We call Steve Jobs a genius, but all he did was what we should be doing every day. Do not admire his genius. Admire his balls for creating an entire new economy from nothing but fearless ideas.

To do this, we have to have the balls to rethink education. There is no arguable reason that a student needs four years to go to college, much less the six years many schools are requiring now. High school could be shrunk to 3 years, perhaps two, if we paid teachers like we pay pro baseball players and held them just as accountable for their performance as we do Pro football cornerbacks. Internships could be the new higher education. But someone has to have the balls to do it.

We hear politicians and preachers tell us that God wants us to do this and that as a nation. But the biggest sin America is committing does not involve gay marriage or abortion or legalizing marijuana. Our embarrassing disgrace is the wasting and mismanagement of ideas.

We value rote test scores over ingenuity and originality. No wonder so many “geniuses” dropped out of college to change the world. They have to. Otherwise, they would have had the genius wholeheartedly beaten out of them one credit at a time, and then handed a diploma in exchange for their imagination and guts.

We do not need to take our country back. We need to take it forward. We do not need more minimum-wage jobs. We need more high-wage jobs. Encouraging and investing in big and small ideas are the only ways to make that happen. And corporate fear is the fastest way to help all of us get a minimum-wage job.

So lets go occupy something more important than Wall Street. Let’s go occupy our brains.

Recently, Geoff Stone and I attended the AAAA’s Create Tech conference in NYC to hear from several of the digital and emerging technology leaders in branding. Of course that means people like Scott Prindle and Brian Skahan from CP&B, Trevor O’Brien and Glenn Fellman from McKinney, Andy Hood from AKQA, Stuart Eccles from Made by Many, Gary Koelling of Best Buy, Kati London of Zynga among others.

When JP Rangaswami, Chief Scientist at Salesforce.com walked to the microphone people knew things were going to be a bit different. His presentation reminded me of something I saw at Princeton years ago. Very calm, deeply thoughtful, smarter than me. But Chief Scientist? I pondered this title. JP has been a lot of things in his years on this planet: one of the top CIO’s in the world, an economist, financial journalist, technology concept guru. Of all those roles, he has to like being a Chief Scientist best. I mean, who does not want to be that? It may be a little better than his title in that video up there: Chairman, School of Everything. Both are pretty impressive.

Besides his day job, he writes a blog called “Confused of Calcutta.” While he is from Calcutta, he is most definitely not confused, not at all. His brain does things few Porches will do.

“I believe identity and presence and authentication and permissioning are in some ways the new battlegrounds, where the freedom of information flow will be fought for, and bitterly at that,” he wrote on his blog page.

Before he even spoke, that caught my attention. This has been happening in real time in Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, Syria and other countries. He saw it coming. Not only is he a learner and teacher, he is one hell of an observer.

“No one is in the anti-social business. Business is inherently social,” he said, roaming around the podium, punching the clicker toward a screen filled with more information than I could possibly absorb before the next click. He only had about 20 minutes to impart a bit of knowledge to us. He squeezed in about 3 hours worth.

“Markets are nothing but conversations,” he went on to say in his professorial tone. “Technology has allowed us to speed up evolution. Fire and cooking allowed us to have a pre-digestive external stomach – so we could evolve our brains and not just deal with food digestion.”

Mr. Rangaswami tied all of this into a nice technology conclusion, yet a guy across the room sat with his mouth open, trying to take everything in, his neurons visibly crunching the information. Stupidly I realized that I was looking at my own reflection in the window. I quickly recovered and scribbled more notes.

“The new generation is about sharing. They rent information. They don’t own it,” he said. “The fundamental functions of Twitter and Facebook are built on the age-old need for conversation.”

People nodded. He went on to describe a construct for technology’s future involving stages like Meaning, Mining, Mapping, and Making. He talked about being a “Retronaut” and gleaning metadata from Flickr. It was deep stuff. And everyone knew it. I wanted to ask about the Retronaut thing, but I just Googled it later and found “HowToBeARetronaut.com.” Some cool pics there.

When it came time to ask questions, even the smartest people in the room sat in silence. Who was going to be the one to question this guy? No one volunteered. That is what happens when a Chief Scientist/Chairman of the School of Everything talks to a room full of developers and branding people at 8 A.M. on Friday.

Blogging is not dying; it’s just getting tired. Have you noticed this trend? People are rambling and posting stuff from other blogs and repeating themselves. Sometimes they just post pics, and why not? No one reads anymore. Do you want to read three pages or watch a 40 second YouTube video showing a guy with a bottle rocket in his butt? Perhaps the days of blogging are numbered. Then again, if you write a blog, you’re hoping I’m wrong – especially if you get paid to blog (and I don’t).

Some blogs have a tight focus, a concise topic. Many are awesome. Blogs about business or branding or social media or financial advice thrive. Blogs filled with insane rhetoric do really well because they cater to our basest instincts. But do you really have something interesting to say every single day? Probably not. And with Twitter tugging at you using only 140 characters, it becomes easier to just slide over there and toss in a few comments or share a link or pic and get back to your paying life. That said, nothing will make you better at writing and expressing your thoughts than forcing yourself to post a blog regularly, no matter if anyone ever reads it (see video above).

The aggregator blog is extremely popular. You don’t even have to write anything. Just repost other’s posts. These are the blogs that cull cool stuff from all over the Internet and toss it up hourly like magazines at the grocery checkout. I am particularly addicted to these sites.

Unfortunately, I am not smart enough to aggregate or fill a niche with my posts. If you read my blog regularly, you already know that I have no focus whatsoever. I do everything wrong. One day I may attempt some deep insight into branding and the next day tell a story about my cousin being impaled by a 12-point buck. Or I may not even post anything for a week.

This randomness may explain why I’m not Seth Godin. And while I appreciate the kind folks who read my verbiage, I am at a loss as to why. Consultants and Web experts have told me to make my posts about something specific, like branding, since that’s the business I’m in. However, I do branding all day long. Do I want to go home at night and wax on about something covered better or worse in 39,498 other blogs?

See, that’s what happens with blogs; you can do whatever you want. You can entertain people, instruct them or bullshit and lie and skew the truth and tell your side as fact and who’s there to edit you? It’s your opinion, right? It’s your blog. These days whole TV networks are basically televised blogs. Flip over there and see one pissed-off guy grinding the Democrats into meatloaf and then two channels later, some equally pissed-off pundit is ripping Republicans like cheap wallpaper. You can take your pick of “facts.” That’s how blogs work. Grab a hold of the First Amendment and let’s go.

Websites are even better at tossing us the half-baked turkey and calling it grandma’s home cooking. And what website doesn’t have a blog or two or ten. Blogs have become like butts: everyone has one. Sadly, I have two, so I am a chief offender.

Blogs are not dying; just the opposite. Everything is like a blog these days. There are no facts, just opinions and spin. Screw Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow, most journalists are really commentators, leaning the news one way or the other based on who’s cutting the check. Politicians’s blogs blow smoke so far up our asses our hair smells like beef jerky for a week. Company CEO’s lie so easily in their blogs it’s as if their bonus is connected to the amount of BS they can manufacture. Those mortgage companies forging signatures on foreclosure papers? That’s no different than a blogger making up stuff that seems like truth to people who aren’t paying attention. Blogging is the ultimate ode to “here’s my story and I’m sticking to it.” That’s kind of fun of it. After all, who doesn’t love a good lie, even if it is presented as the God’s honest truth?

So when you see Seth Godin saying something extremely smart in his blog – and he does every day – remember, there’s always some guy who wishes he was Seth Godin. But he’s not.

I got a Droid last April. It was great for a while. The iPhone’s dirty sister, I called it at the time, since it would do things an iPhone would not do. That was then.

For the last five months I have been spending a lot of time watching the little battery image on my Droid drain like a green Gatorade bottle with a hole in it. The charge lasted for three hours max. Then the smartphone became dumber than my cousin Roy watching Jeopardy. During this meltdown, the phone would get so hot you could warm your hands on it. In January, with temps in the teens, I put it in my pants to keep my ass from freezing – so it did provide that benefit. It concerned me, however, when my right ear began to glow red after using it. I have heard stories of smartphones blowing up, prompting a dream one night that mine went off in a meeting and splattered my last 15,000 thoughts all over the room.

Functions got slower and slower. If I wanted to know something, it was faster for me to call someone with an iPhone than to start the arduous process of cranking up an app on my Droid. If you have experienced the four-phased rigmarole involved in using the phone on this machine, you know that is not a quick operation either. Of course, if I wanted to really live on the edge and check the weather, it would likely change by the time the app opened. And even then, it might give you the weather for Guatemala. Pretty much anything I wanted to do, from taking a pic to checking the news, choked the thing to death, causing a restart. Basically every app slowed to a crawl or just did not work at all.

I put up with all of this because I have been swamped and the basic phone call and email program worked, albeit like syrup in Canada in December. With my schedule, there was just no time to go stand in line at the Verizon store. Last week, I was standing in line.

On Wednesday, the email functions disappeared completely. I get a lot of emails, too, probably 200 a day. While the quiet was nice, my inbox was stacking up deeper than PBR cans behind a frat house. And I am paying good money for a phone that is supposed to run like a striped-assed ape according to the glowing, red-eyed commercials.

The nose-ringed Verizon sales person examined the ailing lump carefully. By the way, you want that kid with the piercings and tats because they know what the hell is going on with stuff like this. And if you want fast service at a Verizon store, be there when the doors open at 9 A.M. sharp and be ready to elbow the old people out of the way.

Anyway, the girl played with my Droid for a while and gave me the news: “I put in a new battery, but the email is just gone. I’m going to have to wipe it. You good with that?”

Wipe it? I know that is not good. I think the bad guys tried to do that to Batman’s brain when I was a kid.

She went on to explain that a battery only lasts about a year (although my contract lasts far longer) and it was normal for it to die. I said that my battery was dying months earlier. She shrugged as if to admit that nothing is perfect in smartphone world. My one hot ear proves that.

“Okay, wipe it,” I said, wondering just what would happen after that.

“I can save your contacts on the SD card and reload them when the wipe is over. But some things will be lost.”

I nodded stupidly. “Some things,” I pondered. I imagined those things would be the things I wanted to keep.

She did her thing, wiped it, got my emails working again and handed it back. All-in-all, it was pretty painless, until I left and drove to a gas station down the road and decided to check my contacts.

Upon clicking the button, 510 names appeared – Jimmy the Hound, Chauncy the Cat, Harry Big Dog Mumford, Earl the Weezil, it went on and on. I wondered who these people were. Whose contact list had she saved? Then it hit me. This was my dog, Rudy’s, Twitter follower list. Hundreds of dogs, cats, ferrets, horses, birds and people pretending to be all of them. Of the 510, only 10 were from my 50+ contacts. Yes, nothing is perfect in smartphone world.

As I was clicking and clicking and deleting, the old, familiar, robotic “Droid” wailed from the phone indicating a message. I checked it. Hoover the Pig was “having a wonderful day!” Thoughts of bacon roamed in my lobes as I deleted Hoover.

Photo credit: CNET Reviews

The sky opens the morning to a ceiling of porcelain blue above the pines and rusted leaves. A man in a bright orange cap and vest leans across a rail from a hunting stand letting the 20-gauge shotgun settle on a deer 50 yards across the woods. Crosshairs on the scope drift just behind the large animal’s shoulder, hovering around the ribs. A slow squeeze of the trigger rocks the weapon back into the man’s body as the sound of gunpowder peels through the dawn. It is a perfect hit, through the lungs, a quick kill. The deer bolts across a clearing and out of sight, unharmed.

How can that be?

This is the American Whitetail Authority Pro Series hunting competition (http://www.awapro.com), the only competition that rewards skill instead of bloodshed, not that hunters are against killing a deer. They enjoy it. In most states, however, they can legally only bag one a year. With new digital scope technology, the equipment records 10 seconds of crisp video around the shot, allowing Pro Series judges to determine everything from the accuracy of your shot to the age of the deer, to how big the rack is and any other circumstances that affect the skill involved.

It is the most advanced development in hunting since arrows. Competitors have no limit on the number of deer because they are only simulating a kill using the software in the Eclan Digital Hunter scope. It’s a real deer in a real world environment without the dying. The AWA Pro Series is akin to the catch-and-release tournaments of Bassmaster. And Bassmaster has turned fishing into something almost as popular as NASCAR with millions of fans and national sponsors like Toyota and Nitro Performance Boats dominating race-like uniforms coated with logos. Some say the last thing we need is another logo-infested sport. Others see the bright orange side: all skill, no kill.

If you are one of the best of the best in the AWA Pro Series, you hunt the deer, you take your shot, the deer lives to run another day. Right now, it’s just an amateur competition, but with an upcoming show on the Outdoor Channel in 2011, how long do you think it will take for the prize money to follow? Not long.

The idea has already changed the sport in ways that some hunters will not like. And that’s a good thing. It rewards a quick, clean kill instead of a sloppy wounding, which happens all to often. And that was the aim of Greg Koch, founder of the Pro Series tournaments. The best of four qualifiers will compete at the AWA World Championship is this month in Mississippi.

If you don’t like guns or hunting, even this advancement will not likely make you happy. But if you are a deer, you are flashing a high-def smile in the crosshairs of a digital scope somewhere out there.

And all the boards did shrink;

Water, water, everywhere,

Nor any drop to drink.

When English poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote The Rime of the Ancient Mariner around 1797, he understood the concept of thirst. Soon, we may understand it better than we want to.

Over 70 percent of the earth is covered by water, of which 98 percent is in the oceans, making it undrinkable because of the saline. Until technology advances, the amount of energy needed to turn salt water from the ocean into drinking water is far too great. Only about 2 percent of the planet’s water is fresh and 1.6 percent of that is frozen in the polar ice caps. Rivers and lakes account for only about .036 percent of the potable water and aquifers contain .36 percent. That leaves the rest of the water in the air as clouds or in us, as we are 65 percent water.

Aquifers are in trouble and water shortages are already common in many countries. The earth moves water around naturally through evaporation and rain. We move the rest of it just to stay alive. Industry swallows water as if the supply is limitless. Agriculture sucks up massive quantities of water from one place and redistributes it to another place in the form of vegetables, meat, fruits, etc. Humans guzzle water worse than cars guzzle gas. We don’t just drink it; we flush it – over and over, without regard to the resources needed to filter that waste. Sanitation is a large part of the 400 billion gallons we use every day.

Since the oceans are undrinkable and we’ve polluted most of the rivers and lakes by various definitions, the small amount of water available for human consumption is small and has to be treated to decrease toxic pathogens. Disease from tainted water is one of the world’s leading causes of death. In the natural cycles of our biosphere, when we pollute one water source, it affects another source. Eventually, our water pollution goes into the 65 percent of water that is in us. Add naturally occurring droughts to the mix and the potential for disaster rises considerably.

I’m typing constantly and rolling my mouse all over the desktop for hours at a time. That’s a lot of energy being wasted when it could be captured and used to recharge longer life batteries. Friction energy seems to me to be the next great energy source. But I don’t hear much talk about it. If we could just get a grip on the friction energy between men and women or Democrats and Republicans, we could put Eveready out of business (not that I have a grudge against that particular brand of battery). The friction from half of all sour office relationships would power every device in the building with enough left over to run your car for several miles and keep your battery-sucking smartphone constantly loaded with juice.

Think about it: how much of your day do you spend with a mouse in your hand? I Googled it. The average seems to be between 6 and 8 hours a day. Imagine harnessing that much fric…wait, I just got a warning that my mouse battery is low. Got to go find some batteries. Catch you later.

The new high-end LED/LCD, 3D HDTV’s are ruining my old school eyes, but not in a painful way. It is delightfully devious retina ruination, an eye-opening bite of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, like in Genesis. Instead of a snake, however, you are tempted by a remote – four of them, actually. A machine like the Samsung 55-incher is a peek behind the wizard’s curtain, a look up a tragically famous celebrity’s dress. I was blind, but now I see, and what I’m seeing has caused me to question everything I knew about visual entertainment.

When a movie like Public Enemies pours across the screen in such clarity that your nose bleeds from the sharpness, you know you have stepped into the next La-Z-Boy existence, a reality where the old concepts of film and grain and light are altered forever.

Coppola’s re-mastered Godfather films on Blu-ray take on a clarity, lushness and thickness last seen by Gordon Willis (Coppola’s DP) in a dark screening room as he squeezed the film fresh out of the canister. It looks like a completely different movie.

Wrap 7 Klipsch theater speakers tied to a 3-D Onkyo 7.2 channel network receiver around your head and that anger you felt earlier in the day at the office melts into a little puddle under your chair. I am sitting here now, barely able to type these words, as the Corleone Family does their dirty business in the most beautiful images I have ever seen, and I have seen this movie at least a hundred times. Toto, we are definitely not in Kansas anymore. I have no idea where the hell we are, but I like it.

If you’re calculating what such a system will cost, just think about college football in 3-D. Just let that settle in for a few seconds before reading the next sentence. Think about Drew Brees throwing a tight spiral right through your living room, knocking over your beer and peanuts. There is Kobe draining a 3 in 3D from the top of the arc. Unspeakable imagery flows into my face from the screen and unexplainable sounds sneak into my ears from the speakers. It gets better – three years, no interest.  A few clicks on my Droid calculator assures me the whole set up costs less than eating fast food for lunch every day. So you get a great TV and feel better while watching it.

There is one drawback: the 3D glasses.

They work like a jacked-up border collie on a sheep farm, but I wear regular glasses all the time, so the idea of wearing two pairs of glasses is not exactly appealing, especially since the glasses I wear every day already help me to see life in 3D. With the digital glasses, I feel like LeVar Burton’s character, Geordi La Forge, on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Perhaps they will eventually have a 3D helmet where the entire visual/sound experience happens right around our heads.

I can see it now. We are all sitting around with our heads encased in brain cancer-causing 3D entertainment. I can’t wait.

Digitally, we will never die. We will just enter another database, easily found by anyone who remembers just a little info about us. It may not take that much. Our clicks live forever like old episodes of “I Love Lucy” floating through space to far away planets on sound waves broadcast in black and white over fifty years ago.

Into this metric world comes Bynamite, a small start-up that wants to help us regain some control of our digital selves. The app monitors information that Web marketers are collecting about us. It is less about online privacy than online transparency. According to the New York Times the founders say Bynamite “is mainly a ‘mirror,’ showing users how the commercial Internet sees them.”

In the same Sunday NYTimes Book Review, Gary Shteyngart writes about disconnecting from our iDevice/ARoid world and seeing what is around us in the real world. His observation that once engaged on a smartphone, everything disappears except the little arrow and the tiny screen, is far too familiar for most of us. We are drowning in Droids and buried in Blackberrys. This week, Apple’s Steve Jobs delivered a fix for the new iPhone so it works no matter where you hold it. The announcement made me a bit sad.
There are times when I’d like to hold my digital device in a way that doesn’t let it take the reality of my existence from me, meaning that I don’t hold it, it holds me.

I am disturbed to admit that I have become a traitor to my own humanity, constantly fondling a small re-charable square that blinds me from all that surrounds me. My kids sleep with their devices. People die texting or surfing or thumbing the ubiquitous screens. Every time I want to –

“Droid!”

Sorry, I got to get that. Catch you later.

At an average of $10 per book downloaded, that’s $35,000. I’m pausing to wrap my head around that number.

(pause)

So it is possible to be carrying $35 grand worth of reading material in a 1/3 of an inch-thick digital device that snags books anytime from anywhere in the world. Just don’t drop it in the toilet.

If you extrapolate this math farther, reading an average of 12 books a year, that’s 2,916.6 years, or roughly 902 more years ago than when Jesus walked the earth. So yeah, that should be enough reading material.