the root problem

The third semester of pottery

2011-12-07T17:42:00.000-07:00

This semester of independent study in pottery saw the production of far more pieces than in the past, a result of primarily two things: a little bit more practice and a lot more time in the studio. There were also two primary themes I was working with: first, dinnerware, and second, the root problem aka abandonment of intention, retreat of volition, infraconscious expression, or refined doodling, which has been my method of creative expression for some time now. Though the entirety of this method is vastly indescribable (by design), the most common manifestation of it is in the attempt to relinquish as much conscious control over my actions as possible, thus limiting the expression of the ego (which has limited appeal outside my self). An attractive notion then is that instead of expressing myself (again, boring), I become a vehicle for universal expression, or for reality to express itself. One of the most important consequences of this is that, like a mirror, each product tells more about the observer than of its constructor; another is that the constructor is immune from criticism, and likewise, can never rightfully claim much responsibility for what has happened. This notion is much more readily apparent with paintings, since they are expected to be interpreted as depictions, and the interpretations vary (widely) not only with each individual, but in time for them as well. With ceramics the effect is certainly subtler, but it does seem as though the results are sufficiently whimsical to be considered applicable; yet, as always, this reality is up to you and you alone (consensus gathering is explicitly prohibited).

Every piece this semester was made with a mix of reprocessed cone 10 clay, and glaze fired in a reduction atmosphere at approximately cone 10 (depending on placement in the rather large kiln). All dimensions are given in centimeters, measured at the maximum and rounded to the nearest half.

As usual, you'll have to forgive my overexposure (etc.), photographing glossy, colorful pottery is still beyond my point and shoot skills, and larger pictures can be accessed by clicking on the respective image.

Series: the root problem

overflowing cup no. 1

D: 11 cm, H: 8 cm

rutile blue, teadust black, Miami beach, Jed's green

note: very thin copper wire was applied prior to glaze firing; the black pool inside is presumably slag

overflowing cup no. 2

D: 10.5, H: 7

red iron slip, pink underglaze, Coleman's purple, rutile blue, angel eyes, Farrell 2-A

overflowing cup no. 3

D: 11.5, H: 10

royal blue, white and pink underglazes, rutile blue, angel eyes inside/around base, touch of moon touchups

swept bowl

D: 15.5, H: 8.5

spudomene, Jed's green, splotchy lavender

milieu vase

D: 9.5, H: 19

red iron slip, rutile blue, Jed's green, angel eyes inside/around top, Coleman's purple splashed

stacked vase

D: 11.5, H: 9.5

Coleman's purple exterior base coat, touch of moon around top, peacock around middle, purple eggshell matte around bottom; satin sky blue interior base, lipstick purple

note: some combination of glazes resulted in a fantastic iridescent blue/green around the bottom, which naturally can't be expressed adequately with a still photograph

injured bowl

D: 14.5, H: 5.5

red iron slip, rutile blue, non-iron blue celadon, teadust black spot in the center

note: the "crack" is probably better described as a tear, caused by stressing the clay through rapidly increasing the diameter while throwing

tetralobular pot

D: 11, H: 10.5

temmoku, Vegas red

collapsing pitcher

D: 10.5, H: 9.5

peacock, splotchy lavender interior, angel eyes exterior

fruitless bowl

D: 20.5, H: 8.5

graphite, spudomene, beading glaze

notes: this is my submission for the semester project, "fruit-in-a-bowl," and it is also probably the best example of the root problem produced this semester. We were requested to construct at least three pieces of fruit, but in the course of abandoning intention, I also seemed to unintentionally eschew the construction. However, as is often the case with this modus, having regained my self and taken perspective, I believe the situation has been resolved regardless, as I cannot help but see the products of this series as the fruit of my labors, since they are all very sweet indeed.

lesson learned: I was afraid that the gap between the glaze and the kiln shelf might be insufficient to prevent the bowl from attaching itself to the shelf, but the 3-5 mm gap, wide foot, and lightweight walls seemed acceptable and I really wanted to retain the sense of a footless bowl that it might be dually bottomless. As it came to pass, the bowl sagged enough to reach the shelf. Thus, fairly significant sagging is to be expected.

???

H: ? D: ?

????

notes: TBF

Series: dinnerware

plate no. 1

D: 19, H: 2

red iron slip, rutile blue, Miami beach, Farrell 2-A, angel eyes, teadust black swirl

note: from leather hard to glaze fired the diameter shrank about 1 inch (~2.5 cm)!

plate no. 2

D: 24, H: 1.5

Miami beach, Coleman's purple, Farrell 2-A, rutile blue, teadust black

note: the circles were drawn in a layer of slip on the wheel. The specifics of the drawing are an extension from my CS/math background, as this is roughly an algorithm/function I've been fascinated with and have written up a few times; the easiest way to achieve it is with a particular sine wave in polar coordinates. In this case, I just ran my finger from center to edge and back at as constant a rate as I could muster. This same procedure was used on all the plates, but with much less obvious results

plate no. 3

D: 21.5, H: 2

red iron and green slip, rutile blue, non-iron blue celadon, Coleman's purple

plate no. 4

D: 21.5, H: 2

red iron slip, pink underglaze, rutile blue, angel eyes, Jed's green

cup no. 1

D: 8, H: 9

copper chun, rutile blue, transparent and Jed's green over copper wire

cup no. 2

D: 7.5, H: 10

red iron slip, rutile blue brushed on center, Coleman's purple on base, Vegas red around top, lipstick purple inside

note: Vegas red and lipstick purple seem to mix well

cup no. 3

D: 8.5, H: 10.5

angel eyes, splotchy lavender, rutile blue, Jed's green

cup no. 4

D: 6.5, H: 13.5

purple eggshell matte, Jed's green inside, splotchy lavender on base, splashes of angel eyes

tempestuous bowl

D: 18, H: 9

ACMR and Voulkos blue slips, Vegas red around rim, turquoise and satin sky blue stripes, angel eyes, rutile blue

note: this was formed without a rib

Reflections

I am, and will be for the foreseeable future, addicted to rutile blue and angel eyes, though clearly other glaze combinations are proving potential for similar vibrance. I don't see how I could possibly stop performing pottery at this point without some significant anguish and feeling of loss.

the root problem: examples

2011-11-27T01:41:00.001-07:00

This is who I am tonight:

And this is who I was quite a few nights ago:

Single File in Traffic, it's the Law?

2011-08-06T14:32:00.000-06:00

Since rediscovering my passion/obsession with bicycles, I've found myself spending less time working with modern technology (like this blog) and more time working with century old technology. Now it seems that even when I am blogging, it's about bicycles. My most recent post, regarding the ongoing and seemingly ill conceived traffic code advertising campaign, has once again been put on SaltCycle here.

I wonder, is this a post about bicycles, or is it a post about a post about bicycles; is there a difference?

You Ride, We Ride

2011-07-06T20:29:00.000-06:00

Posted over on SaltCycle: "The death sent me reeling, despite her being as distant a stranger could be. Hundreds huddled in Liberty, wondering what to do next; I saw the sign..."

Andrew Bird - Noble Beast - Fitz and the Dizzyspells

2011-05-25T00:41:00.001-06:00

My experience has been that Andrew Bird has an uncommon aptness.

Due to the greed of industry, this music can't be embedded. And yet, somehow it makes sense for it to be ok to link instead: http://youtu.be/4vv2EyQnqG4

I recommend this song as well, from the same album, which comes with a side of manic ruminations!!!!!!!!

A Second Semester of Pottery

2011-04-21T22:57:00.002-06:00

Still glowing from my first experience with pottery, the presented opportunity to undertake another semester in independent study was obviously A Good Idea. While I should have expected as much between abstract algebra and earfingers, my workload prevented me from spending the amount of time in the studio I preferred... unfortunately even less than required. Nonetheless I managed to complete a few items, most of which are designated for giving, and most of those for giving to nonhuman animals. As will soon be apparent, photographing pottery didn't enter my skill set since the previous post, though it is now clear due to the metallic sheen of Dexter's dish that a truly accurate representation would require a visual representation indistinguishable from reality, a conveyance of information probably quite far off even in our astonishingly advanced state of technology; call it surprising that the humble ceramic ware, present for the emergence of human society, might demonstrate the sincere limitations of what is otherwise unquestionably profound machinery.

Title: demitasse
Height: 5.8 cm
Radius: 3 cm
Glazes: rutile blue, teadust black, Miami beach, peacock

Title: Adria's tea mug

Height: 8.3 cm
Radius: 5 cm

Glazes: turqoise, dynamite red, Jed's green

Note: Jed's green ended up mostly orange tinted transparent on all my pieces this semester.

Title: Bugsy's dish

Height: 3 cm

Radius: 7 cm

Glazes: rutile blue, purple eggshell matte, Jed's green

Title: Sadie's dish

Height: 5 cm

Radius: 8.5 cm

Glazes: Coleman's purple, Jed's green, Miami beach

Title: dish for arbitrary small animal

Height: 3.6 cm

Radius: 7 cm

Glazes: rutile blue over transparent

Title: dish for arbitrary medium animal

Height: 4.5 cm

Radius: 10 cm

Glazes: Miami beach, rutile blue, touch of moon, kryptonite

Title: Dexter's dish

Height: 4 cm

Radius: 8 cm

Glazes: ohata kaki, teadust black

Title: Mom's bowl

Height: 7.5 cm

Radius: 9 cm

Glazes: rutile blue over transparent

Title: George Ohr homage

Height: 12 cm

Radius: 5.5 cm

Glazes: purple eggshell matte, Jed's green, lion yellow, ohata kaki

Notes: attempting to reproduce this Ohr piece exposed how amazingly symmetric it was despite appearing disorganized with a casual glance. Also clearly demonstrated was the sincere difficulty of actually making such unusual form.

Title: ironic mug

Height: 10 cm

Radius: 8 cm

Glazes: angel eyes, lipstick purple, Jed's green

In conclusion, if you ever get the chance to do pottery, take it without hesitation.

Earfingers

2011-04-06T03:33:00.001-06:00

The project is coming along, and pandora has guided me to a sound which I will likely use for the demonstration of its capabilities. Specifically starting at 4:10 this sound exhibits a strong periodic structure through a wide spectrum of frequency, which should be clear even with only 8 dimensions of decomposition. My intentionally atypical project proposal can be found here.

TRS-80 - I Am Energy

2011-03-16T00:10:00.000-06:00

Research indicates that high tempo auditory clicks increase the operating frequency of the neurosystem, evidenced by a measurable improvement in reaction time. Along with that fact, this song is awezingly amasome (yes, totally sic).

I've been pushing Pandora to produce a station of really high tempo music along these lines and the results have been rather enjoyable. One theme of mine thought lately has been that we may need to increase the temporal performance of consciousness in order to keep up with technology; it is already becoming clear that the shear breadth of generally useful and potentially necessary information exceeds the capacity for education in the time provided by the typical four year undergraduate track.

Related in only the most nuanced and tenuous way: the bicycle featured on the cover seems to be a 70's Schwinn Collegiate. 1965 to 1975 hosted the most recent bike boom, where sales dramatically increased; as Wikipedia says, "At the height of the boom, in 1972, 1973, and 1974, more bicycles than automobiles were sold in the U.S." That so many were made is one reason the 70's Schwinns are recognizable. Things seem to be shaping up for another bike boom, and for the sake of Life on Earth I hope it's permanent this time.

While Life Proceeds Obliviously Below

2011-03-04T01:43:00.000-07:00

Google has a tendency to do what they say they might, and thus it was with a mixture of surprise and expectation that I noticed the Google Maps aerial view of Salt Lake have been updated to include UAV footage, clearly higher resolution as individual people can be discerned. The colors are also much better. Zoom all the way in on this map to see for yourself.

View Larger Map

Mathematics: Invented or Discovered?

2011-01-29T20:00:00.003-07:00

For my history of math course we were asked to write an essay on the topic "Is math invented or discovered?" This is my response.

The debate regarding the ontology of mathematics is a philosophical quandary that extends deep into our cognitive history, near the emergence of sincere cognizance itself. This fact is hinted at in the division of arguments, in which a significant subset is Platonism. The classic allegory of the cave is often illustrated with a specific chair in the room as an oblique projection of the form that unifies all chairs under the notion of chair-ness, some vague set of qualities that result in an object being classified as a chair. This approach does elicit some glimmer of understanding, but the allegory has a vastly more ornate interpretation with consideration of the forms as abstract mathematics and the shadows as specific instances of those general principles. From this perspective there is some credence in the conjecture that Plato was influenced by the ontology of the Pythagoreans, which held that “Everything is number.” With mathematical forms as eternal and unchanging, a Platonist concludes that mathematics is discovered.

A common reaction to this conclusion is the proposed problem of a priori existence, which cites the contradiction that the nonphysical forms exist without a physical manifestation before attaining representation as chemicals in the brain. If mathematics can only exist as an arrangement of physical objects, and these arrangements can only be produced by consciousness, it is reasonable to conclude that mathematics is invented through intelligent processing of experience.

Despite so much thought on the invention vs. discovery of mathematics, the question is broken--clearly a false dichotomy--which really should have been recognized after all the contradictions started arising. It might be helpful to approach this question with a set theoretic interpretation of language. Let each word be a set comprised of its synonyms, including itself (as a singular element), and its definitions. Considering the word roots A = “invent” and B = “discover,” most modern references will give A intersect B as not null, frequently even giving the subset {invent, discover}. Now the question is if, for the word “mathematics” = M,

(A is a member of M) OR (B is a member of M)

but this is a misrepresentation of the problem since A and B are not mutually exclusive, thus mathematics might be a member of invented, discovered, both, or neither.

Both the failure and success of language are a result of its persistent nebulosity, which enables the vaguely logical cogitation that profoundly influences our consciousness; to this we owe our capacity to experience the wonder of metaphor and the sincere difficulty of attaining certainty. As experienced language users, we know that what constitutes a word is not limited only to definitions and synonyms, that language does not naturally obey logic, which is why non formalized philosophical debate can proceed indefinitely. Accordingly, we can redefine the question and approach from another direction entirely, with definitions that appear mutually exclusive. Consider the two statements that thefreedictionary offers on the page for “discover”:

We discover something that existed but was not yet known.
We invent something that was not in existence.

Note that the second statement implies something, for if something was not in existence, it must not have been known, so

We discover something that existed but was not yet known.
We invent something that was not in existence and was not yet known.

which reduces to

We discover something that existed.
We invent something that was not in existence.

Thus distinguishing between invention and discovery relies entirely on existence; now we must ascertain if there is a difference between existence and non-existence. Consider the following definitions taken from thefreedictionary:

Exist: To have actual being; be real.
Existence: The fact or state of existing; being.
Being: The state or quality of having existence.
Real: being or occurring in fact or actuality; having verifiable existence.
Actuality: The state or fact of being actual; reality. See Synonyms at existence.
Actual: Existing and not merely potential or possible. See Synonyms at real.
Fact: Something demonstrated to exist or known to have existed; believed to be true or real.
True: Consistent with fact or reality; not false or erroneous. See Synonyms at real.

An attempt to simplify the definition of “exist” by replacing words with their definitions results in nonsense along the lines of

Exist: To have the fact of existence; having existence in fact or the fact of having existence; having existence or occurring in fact or the fact of having existence existing; having verifiable existence.

In lieu of a definition that consists of something other than self substantiation, let the definition of existence be the following,

Exist/Existence: true.

where “true” is in accordance with the familiar logic construct. Now we have a definition which is very useful for a formal analysis of the problem. If non-existence is not true, then there is no non-existence and everything exists; if non-existence is true, then non-existence must actually be existence by definition, therefore everything exists and everything, including mathematics, is discovered.

But this answer is contrived and not inviolable, because the resolution of the problem in the system of logical analysis, like all, depends entirely on the definitions. We can reach the opposite conclusion by giving an alternate definition, which would clearly result in mathematics classified as invented:

Existence: the quality gained by something when it is first represented in a human brain.

Thus, in order to answer a question, the terms must be well defined, which is not the case for this ontological debate.

CS Senior Project Proposal: Earfingers

2011-01-19T00:12:00.001-07:00

Within this milieu of stupendously sophisticated technology and virtual reality, humanity has indubitably extended the boundary of what is possible effectively beyond limits set by imaginations all but exceptional. The aim of this project is to tax this overabundance in order to produce a novel tactile human/computer interface with the potential to enable an unprecedented interaction with information, and a chance at evoking a new experience of existence through the manipulation of sensation mechanisms; that is, to possibly feel something that has never been felt before.

There is no question regarding the significance and success of the human brain, exemplified by artifacts such as smartphones that are capable of performing feats essentially indistinguishable from magic. It is remarkable we are able to interpret and utilize information so effectively when the process depends entirely on just five low-resolution information pathways better known as senses. Recognizing the inherent limitations in these senses and manipulating our environment in effort to circumvent them has continually and directly expanded our ability to understand existence---for instance the development of the optical microscope immediately led to the incredibly profound revelation that all life is composed of legions of fundamentally similar cells. Despite over three hundred years of this knowledge in the public domain it remains practically inconceivable, as what we think we know more than anything else, of ourselves and of others, is based only on something vaguely real, each of us being emergent properties of a cloud of many Trillions of individual cells instead of the one continuous thing we imagine. That conscientious enhancement of sensation was necessary, and that we are able to operate oblivious to our true nature as an Astropolis of individuals indicate that our behavior is at least informed by sensation; had the ability to distinguish and accurately record individual cellular behavior been a sixth member of our sensory repertoire, it is certain that biology would be extraordinarily more advanced than at present, and it is likewise certain that both the way we experienced existence and the way we interacted as a society would be fundamentally different. For another example imagine that we had the ability to sense blood flow in another brain (like functional magnetic resonance imaging): instead of having once learned the abstract fact that localized hemodynamic response can indicate something relatively specific like ongoing hunger/hunting drive, we could use our sense and proven intellect to determine that what is apparently a log at the watering hole according to five senses is actually a hungry crocodile with information from the sixth. Clearly then sensation doesn't just inform behavior, but in many important ways defines boundaries for it by serving to enumerate possible outcomes. Unfortunately my project is not to create a portable, affordable FMRI; instead we have gone so far afield to illustrate just how significant sensory experience is. That we have but five information pathways is a fact not readily malleable (until we start mechanically re-engineering the nervous system), and this is a major disappointment in light of the significance of sensation and the potential of supernatural sensation to redefine our experience. The objective of this project is essentially to experiment with several softhacks (no rewiring necessary) on the nervous system based on what is known about how it operates. Instead of trying to stimulate novel neurological information and make it perceptibly informative, I will try to feed known neurological information down pathways intended for other information in hope that the signal will nonetheless be at least partially recognized. In particular, I will be attempting to induce the perception of sound through the tactile and visual senses.

The majority of sound is perceived through a single information pathway into the cerebrum; this in itself is not surprising, but that doesn't necessarily mean this information can't enter through another pathway. It's a well known result of neuroplasticity that any region of the brain not receiving the intended sensory input may be used for the processing of other senses, a phenomenon observed in the utilization of the occipital lobe in the congenitally blind. There's evidence that tactile sensation of vibration excites activity in the auditory cortex of the normal human encephalon. There's another neurological relationship between auditory and tactile information in the functional limitation of operational frequency, in other words, the neurons can only convey an action potential (assumed to operate ultimately as a decision problem) from approximately 20-1000 Hz due to the time it takes to pump ions across the cell membrane to recharge. The optimum response frequency, where the action potential is in synch with the stimulation source, of the Pacinian and Meissner mechanoreceptors corresponds with the frequency at which the large outer surface of the cochlea responds in synchrony---both from about 50 to 200 Hz. The cochlea responds to stimuli up to around 20 KHz by taking advantage of signal aliasing and the tendency for higher frequencies to travel deeper into its coiled structure to discretize the soundwave into what is called a tonotopic mapping. Since the cochlea has about 3600 total receptors, the signal being sent to the brain is more or less a 6 ms frame length frequency decomposition into 3600 dimensions with an indicator function if ignoring amplitude. Theoretically, then, reproducing the neurological signal precisely would require as many tactors. The specific spatial distribution of mechanoreceptors remains to be found, otherwise it's generally figured as more on the fingertips than on the torso.

For my project I intend to create the experimental hardware and software in effort to reproduce sound information through the tactile and visual pathways. The tactile information will be generated by moving magnet voice coil tactors (a portmanteau of tactile and motor), driven by an Arduino receiving FFT results from a PC. I intend to have a minimum of 10 tactors, which is more relevant than the upper boundary of 3600 per hand. Scaling the number of tactors will necessitate efficiently encoding the addresses and data over the serial bus so the Arduino can stay in synch, which can be avoided as the 16 MHz clock of the ATmega328 could signal quite a few receptors at 200 Hz. Then there's the delectable sundry mechanical quandaries, which will need be overcome one way or another. For visual stimulation, I will utilize the common, powerful display technology and seek to create a program that presents a neurologically meaningful visual representation of sound, trying to account for the idiosyncrasies of the visual system such as the relatively small area of high resolution on the retina, saccades, and distribution of rods/cones. Whether this concert of stimulation will have any effect remains to be seen, but even no effect on those born with normal audition nonetheless leaves the possibility of eliciting the perception of sound for the congenitally deaf, and even just the chance of enabling someone to experience music for the first time, the possibility of being able to share the uniquely human celebration that is music is justification enough for my efforts. Because this project is experimental in nature, and, excitingly, the results unknown, I think the single best indication of success will be that the people who evaluate what I have done are impressed by it.

Blonde Redhead - Falling Man

2011-01-08T23:07:00.000-07:00

Blonde Redhead has been having a sincere impact on my life by provoking such a profound sound for somewhere near six years now. Despite so much time, and only because I had intended to post this, I just noticed that the person on the cover is partially uncovered. I'm certain the image was intentionally constructed so the intensity of the face distracted the much subtler salaciousness; I suppose then I must admit that this remarkable band isn't just expanding my mind with sound, but with images as well. The combination of auditory and visual information is apt, as my senior project is an attempt to enable the combination of those two with touch in addition. So far I believe it has been progressing swimmingly, which is good, because my advisers have already expressed their concern that this project is too large. It is almost certain that the results will be blogged, so stay tuned.

A Semester of Pottery

2010-12-03T22:19:00.001-07:00

These are the results of an amazing, adventurous semester of ART 148 - Fundamentals of Pottery. I can't wait to do more! Clearly my photography still needs some work, apologies in advance. (click an image to view a bigger version--bigger not guaranteed to be better).

First Mug

Title: "my new favorite mug"
Clay: Long Beach, cone 10
Glazes: Jed's green inside, purple eggshell matte outside. Transparent over royal blue and cactus green underglazes for the badge.
Character meaning: "tree"
Key facts learned:
1. Throwing pottery is an activity of uncanny delight.
2. What I imagine coming out of the kiln and what actually comes out of the kiln are two very different things.

Second Mug

Title: "catfish mug"
Glaze: Transparent
Key facts learned: Underglazes with similar colors must be layered thick for good contrast; glaze applied too thick leads to crazing.

First Bowl - One Pound

Title: "unbelievabowl"
Clay: Long Beach, cone 10
Glazes: rutile blue inside, angel eyes outside.
Key fact reinforced: the kiln is magical in its ability to defy expectation (true with every piece yet completed).

Second Bowl - Two Pounds

Clay: Long Beach, cone 10
Glazes: Coleman's purple over blue speck
Key fact learned: Remove both lifters at the same time and a clean split will develop with drying.

Third Bowl - Three Pounds

Title: "pretty ugly bowl"
Clay: Long Beach, cone 10
Underglaze and slip: Voulkos blue outside applied with a skunk-hair brush, dysfunctional violet inside.

Glazes: Non-iron blue celadon airbrushed base with rutile blue on the rim and Coleman's purple on the base.

Fourth Bowl - Black and White

Title: "Jupiter bowl"
Glazes: Miami Beach over transparent.
Key facts learned: Vaporized copper can migrate amongst items in the kiln, lending unexpected color, though more exploration is necessary to see if that's what happened this time. The coldest part of the kiln is at the top; temperature and the rate of change thereof contribute significantly to the outcome of a piece. Bubbles can form in the glaze when overheated, and certain things such as oil transferred from fingers can cause the glaze to run away from a spot thus leaving it bare. (yes, this was an educational bowl).

Pitcher

Title: "impractical pitcher"
Clay: Long Beach, cone 10

Glazes: Coleman's purple over angel eyes.

Handbuilt 1 - Leaf Dish

Underglaze: cactus green
Glaze: lion yellow (pictures taken pre-application)
Comment: remains to be fired.

Extra-curricular 1 - Food Dish

Title: "dish for pickles the cat"
Clay: Long Beach, cone 10
Glazes: rutile blue undercoat, teadust black inside, Coleman's purple outside.

Extra-curricular 2 - Tea Mug

Title: "Tildy mug"
Clay: Long Beach, cone 10
Underglaze: pink around rim, handle, foot and symbol.
Glazes: Coleman's purple inside, angel eyes over rutile blue on the symbol side, with Farrell 2-A on the handle side.

A Cautionary Tale in Two Movements

2010-11-27T20:14:00.000-07:00

1. The For-Profit Prison

2. Secretive Lawmaking(ACTA) and the Public Panopticon

Reality made Virtual

2010-11-15T22:33:00.000-07:00

In case you hadn't heard, Microsoft recently released a new accessory for their game console called the Kinect. Without going into much detail, the Kinect is packed with some advanced electronic sensors. Some people are unwilling simply to take what has been offered them as it is--these are true, free individuals, actively exercising volition; call them hackers. Within days of being released, the Kinect was unleashed, hacked to fill a bounty. Here we are, 11 days later, and one hacker has built on top of the work of other similarly intrepid minds something profound; as seen on hackaday, it is reality made virtual:

Swirls and Spirals in GIMP

2010-11-11T23:04:00.000-07:00

This blog has most of its traffic coming from image searches. There also happens to be few images that turn up of plain spirals when googling such a thing. So, in a shameless bid to drive more traffic, I'm going to do a short lesson on making spirals in GIMP, complete with images that are free to reuse for non-commercial purposes. There are a number of different ways to do different spirals, this is just one way that works.

1. To create a basic two tone spiral, begin by dividing the canvas in the colors desired; note it doesn't really matter how you divide the canvas, so I'm going with the second (or third) most obvious way.

2. If you want to swirl around a very specific point, such as the center of the image, it will help to paint a smallish, visible dot at this point (using guides and the snap-to-guide option might help). If you get the right size dot and do enough swirling, you don't even need to do any touch up as the dot gets swirled into the infinite beyond.

3. Be sure to select all, then use the IWarp filter (filters>distorts>IWarp), with the deform mode as either swirl CCW or swirl CW. Instead of clicking and dragging as suggested, just click repeatedly on the same spot. I prefer to do less clicking, so I set the deform amount to the maximum; you will have to experiment with the deform radius to get the result you desire. The result will look something like this:

4. If you'd rather not have a square border around the roundness, use the ellipse select, invert selection, and delete/fill/whatev. You have a true circle when the sizes in the ellipse select tool options are equal. Note that blogger is replacing transparency with black. Result:

The following process for a spiral with more than two tones can also be used for two tone, in fact if you want to end up with a circular boundary this way is probably easier.

1.Start by dividing the image into your colors.

2. Next, use filters>distorts>polar coordinates to come up with exactly the multicolored circle you need. While doing so you can abandon any preconceptions about the separation between mathematics and art, as this filter is using the Pythagorean theorem and inverse sine function (aka arcsin) to convert the image from the rectangular Cartesian coordinate system to the circular system of polar coordinates. In rectangular coordinates, a position is denoted by horizontal and vertical displacements from the center (aka origin); in polar coordinates a position is denoted by its distance from the origin and amount of rotation away from whatever is considered 0 degrees/radians. If you didn't know about all this polar coordinate business, consider how much more useful GIMP is going to be now that you do, and how generally richer life will be from now on.

3. The same as step 3 above, filters>distorts>IWarp, swirl, and click away. There will be a tiny bit of deviation from perfectly circular, this can be helped either by fine tuning the IWarp settings, by using step 4 above, or by just getting over it/seeking profession help in overcoming OCD.

America the Gullible

2010-10-14T20:35:00.005-06:00

In the style of Harper's Index, if with so much less elegance...

Number of deaths in the USA due to fundamentalist Islamic terrorists in 9/2001: 2,996

Estimated number of those that were US citizens: 2,669

Number of deaths in the USA due to traffic accidents in the same month: 3,303

Number of deaths in the USA due to fundamentalist Islamic terrorists between 9/12/2001 and 12/31/2008: 0

Number of deaths in the USA due to traffic accidents in approximately the same period: 303,841

Total approved, as of 12/2009, for the three military operations initiated to combat terrorism in response to 9/11 (excluding funds for CIA, FBI, TSA, Homeland Security, etc.): $1,086,000,000,000

Estimated budget for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration over the same period: $6,520,000,000

The NHTSAs budget, expressed as a percent of the amount allocated for these military operations: 00.

Estimate, in 2008, for the final total cost of the Iraq war alone: $3,000,000,000,000

Amount allocated to the military per terrorism related US citizen death in the USA since 9/11/2001: $406,893,967.78

Amount allocated to the NHTSA per traffic related death: $21,458.59

Amount allocated to the military per terrorism related US citizen death in the USA since 9/12/2001: Undefined

Percentage of causes of death in the USA that kill more people than terrorism: 100

Percentage of causes of death in the USA that receive more public money for prevention than terrorism: 0

Percent change in gross federal debt between 2001 and 2010: 232.97

Percentage of gross federal debt in 2001 that would have been eliminated by 1.086 trillion dollars: 18.8

Amount each US household would receive given 1.086 trillion dollars evenly distributed: $9443.48

Rank of defense, excluding expenditure on active military operations, among all categories of federal spending: 1

Percentage of federal spending in 2009 that went to defense: 23

Percentage of federal income in the same year that came from individual income tax: 43

Percentage that came from social security/social insurance tax: 42

Percentage that came from corporate income tax: 7

Sources:
http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_September_11_attacks
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHTSA
Global Terrorism Database, with specific query used
The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11, by the Congressional Research Service (pdf)
The three trillion dollar war
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_public_debt
Projections of the Number of Households and Families in the United States: 1995 to 2010, from the US department of Commerce (pdf)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget

Artificial Intelligence

2010-10-10T00:21:00.000-06:00

Maybe I've said it before, but the idea that any intelligence can somehow be artificial feels misleading. If you separate the element of humanity from intelligence, it is easy to see that all intelligences are real, not artificial. On the other hand, the concept of artificial doesn't make any sense to me to begin with. Regardless, consider the mechanical structure of the mammalian nervous network: it is indeed a network of trillions of cells, little nodes, communication points. When you touch something, a change in net potential electrical charge of ions over neural cell membranes travels from your fingertips through nerves (made of neurons) to your brain. When it enters your brain, it traverses a number of distinct pathways en route to the mammalian cerebral cortex, which is a recent development in Life; mammals specifically have this part of the central nervous system, whereas lizards and other less evolved creatures do not. This construct of many individual nodes networked into some meta entity with whatever emergent properties is not a unique one though. Perhaps the greatest example I can think of other than the brain is this thing called the internet--it too is composed of many networked nodes, and in several senses of the word. For one, the internet works thanks to a tremendous amount of electronic switching nodes, which are in many ways similar to the neurons of our own brains. Alternatively, perhaps people are nodes in this "higher" mind called the Internet, each mind some small part of a more complicated implementation of consciousness. It is difficult to say with any certainty if the systems of switches and wires performing our rote requests is experiencing some kind of consciousness--after all, how could we tell? We can't even measure or readily define our own conscious experience, how are we to begin to hope to communicate with this higher mind!? Even then, it is certain that the construction of this higher mind is very different from the mammalian brain, and doesn't this seem to strongly suggest that its experience or manifestation of consciousness would likewise be very different? I'm reminded of higher dimensions: when you think about one, two, or three dimensions, things make a reasonable amount of sense. But when you get into higher dimensions, even just four, things cease to make hardly any sense at all. So imagine it from a different perspective, one conscious dimension lower than the one we're used to: if you were a cell, one among trillions, could you even begin to imagine the everyday human experience? And yet cells are stupendously sophisticated machines, sophisticated enough to prevent us from answering many questions about human health, answers they have to reveal.

It goes without saying that the value of science is very real, which is another way of saying that our intuition frequently misleads us--if thinking alone were enough we'd have faster than light zero-energy transportation and the galaxy would be colonized by now because the easiest way to do those things would be obvious, as obvious as the Earth revolving around the Sun nearer the edge of the Milky Way galaxy among hundreds of billions of others. Once it is seen that our rough draft perception of things is generally wrong, the confidence in human intelligence erodes, and I think makes a stronger case for "intelligence" being something not anthropospecific.

Note it is institutionally correct to capitalize Internet; it is a proper noun. Even if all this somewhat ambiguous babbling about higher minds is patently false, there's no loss in the magnitude of the Internet. For certain it has become something fairly hard to define on all levels, and regardless a boon to our lifestyle to an inconceivable degree. Imagine, if some great mind were born a few decades ago just a bit too lazy, they might never flourish for lack of access to information. Now however, an inconceivable amount of information is literally available at our fingertips (I was just getting a refresher on the mesencephalon, and earlier I was playing with Wolfram Alpha which can show you how to solve even ambiguous equations like 2x3 - 6.543x = x2, among many other things). If there were any aspiring minds starved of information before, there are definitely a lot fewer now.

Car Replacement Summarized

2010-09-13T08:53:00.002-06:00

Since I dropped a link in the latest Gizmag post, I'm expecting an influx of international visitors.... welcome to my blog! I didn't want to put a bunch of links in my comment, so instead I'm going to weave them all together in this summary post.

When we consider what makes a vehicle energy efficient, two things are more important than anything else: weight and aerodynamics--the lower the weight and wind resistance, the lower the energy required to move. Consider the ratio of cargo weight to carrier weight (in kg): for me and the average sedan, that's about 72.6/1360.8 or 0.053; for me and my electric bicycle, 72.6/18.1 or 4.0; me and a racing bicycle, 72.6/6.8 or 10.7. It is clear that the bicycle represents one of the lightest forms of transportation, and it is thus also one of the most efficient. I am convinced that bicycles can save the world--the outline of my argument in support of this is found in my post titled A Radical Proposal (for any literature fans, yes this is a play on A Modest Proposal).

But the bicycle alone may not be enough, maybe in a sincerely fitness oriented culture, but that kind of mentality takes a long time to develop... technology develops much faster. For instance, the road I live on has a hill with a grade around 10%. In days past I was fit enough to ride my bicycle up worse, but in the time I've lived here I don't recall ever being able to make it up without feeling like I was about to keel over dead. Quite recently I added an electric motor to my bicycle, and despite more than doubling the weight I can haul up that hill in nearly my tallest gear, without even standing up--I've done this almost every day since I got the kit. Also, my legs look better than they have since shortly after I finished my trans-America tour; just because there's a motor doesn't mean I'm not doing any work! I'm going to do a very rigorous overview of electric bicycles at some point in the future, but until then this will have to suffice.

As I mentioned, weight is only part of the battle; the more significant part is wind resistance. The only way to significantly change the aerodynamics of a bicycle is to add a fairing, which generally necessitates the use of a recumbent tricycle. This vehicle is called a velomobile, which is discussed in my post Rise of the Velomobile.

The last part of the puzzle that I mentioned in my Gizmag comment is autonomous navigation and solar roadways. Autonomy is more a necessity for the very heavy and fast every day car, but the benefits of such a system would still be reaped by this ultralight human/electric hybrid. The concept of autonomous transportation and a few different perspectives on energy are covered in depth in the post Intelligent Transportation Systems. The danger caused directly by cars is covered in several posts, notably How Dangerous is the Road?, which also links to information about the very promising solar panel roadway. Solar roadways and roadway to vehicle power transmission are important because they enable significant weight reduction by reducing battery capacity requirements, which leads to further weight reduction by allowing for the use of a smaller motor.

There is still much to be covered (for instance, the average US citizen spends 17% of their income on car related expenses), but not enough time to cover it right now.

Thanks for visiting, please enjoy

The Universe is Impossible: A Proof

2010-09-12T19:36:00.000-06:00

A set is a group of things, ex: {dog, food}
A subset is a set that has only things also in the super set, examples: {dog}, {food}, {dog, food}
A power set is the set of all subsets, ex: {(dog), (food), (dog, food)}.

It follows that the number of things of things in a subset is less than or equal to its parent set, which is in turn less than the number in its power set.

...prepare for mindlblowing...

Suppose there is a set of all things called the universe, then any set must be a subset of the universe. But this implies that the power set is a subset of the universe, which is a logical contradiction since the power set is larger than the universe. Thus, the universe doesn't exist.

Reconsider Healthcare

2010-09-11T19:30:00.001-06:00

While on my bicycle ride across the country, I picked up a book by Patrick Lynch called Omega. This book was remarkably well written, and communicated in the clearest possible way the danger of antibiotic abuse. Using antibiotic measures can result in microorganisms developing genetic resistance, potentially making them more menacing. In fact there are known strains of such dangerous organisms, like MRSA aka Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, which is named for the fact that it is resistant to antibiotics. MRSA is found most frequently in hospitals and other medical care facilities, perhaps not coincidentally the places where the most extreme antibiotic measures are undertaken. There is no question regarding the effectiveness and necessity of a sterile environment for medical practice, but it seems very clear that the tradition of doing so in one large building is not the best way to achieve said sterile environment, and thus not the best way to conduct medical procedure. There is further evidence in the grim fact that babies born by Cesarean section are more likely to have their skin be populated by the hospital flora in the absence of vaginal flora, which in many cases means MRSA and other scary bugs; MRSA is known to live on human skin and in the nose without necessarily infecting the carrier. If you are sensitive to graphic medical imagery, I'd recommend not looking at pictures of the effects of MRSA.

The really unfortunate thing is that C-sections are still increasingly popular in the USAs medical-industrial complex despite growing activism (documentary: The Business of Being Born, available on Netflix), whereas the rest of the world has continued the ancient tradition of home birth with a midwife.

The most obvious solution is that healthcare be undertaken in a physically distributed fashion by way of house calls. What else might help?

The Invisible Hand

2010-09-06T23:59:00.000-06:00

One of the problems with free market economics is that the logical consequences depend on the distributions of supply and demand operating with the assumption of perfect information availability. The thought was that in the marketplace the true value of a good would be reached based on customers purchasing the fairest available price amongst various vendors. There are various unacceptable assumptions here and it is easy to think of situations that break that economy; perhaps the most obvious is the monopoly, but there's all the related phenomena: vertical and horizontal integration, price fixing and collusion, all the emergence of market forces no longer subject to the invisible hand. These emergent forces are to be abhorred because, as it turns out, corporate greed or the pursuit of profit at any cost turns out to be an unfun way to traverse time and transcend our animalistic consciousnesses. In my humble opinion, the purpose of industry should be to expand the sentience and influence of life in all forms; all of us brothers and sisters, how much would we gain if we learned to overcome our trivial squabbles and join together to explore the universe? I can not even imagine the wealth that might be had by all of us if our daily lives were dedicated to the betterment of life on earth instead of increasing the numbers on a bank slip.

But I digress.

The notion of perfect information distribution is these days more conceivable than ever before, but at the same time the actual effectiveness of information dispersal is far less than ideal. For instance, I had reasoned for some time that the sundry AC/DC adapters loathingly known as wall warts should be very low cost, and that the many different device side plugs and form factors were facades constructed to trick people into thinking the differences actually mattered. This artificial sophistication can be very profitable--given the customer assuming that only the OEM wall wart will work, Accme Laptops can charge a minor fortune for a replacement. Arguably worse is when Accme introduces the proprietary copyright protected uPlug, which can be purchased from Accme alone.

I had for some time been unable to find this mythical PSU, so it was with pleasure that I finally found a versatile and cheap DC power supply in a small store known as ledshoppe.com linked through Adafruit Industries. I am impressed by Adafruit, because instead of trying to sell me individually packaged LEDs for hyperinflated prices (that also just happen to be on sale for a short time only), they simply pointed me to a good direct source for LEDs and a handful of other cool items. I feel as though more than just myself will benefit from this openness, for reasons that will almost certainly be documented here shortly.

Tacit assumptions

2010-08-29T05:12:00.000-06:00

How much of the strife that arises in our daily lives is attributable to the assumption that we understand what we are experiencing? How much can a person recognize their own assumptions? How much do we assume?

Probably just about everything.

This isn't necessarily an insurmountable flaw, given the remarkable success of humanity, but at the same time I doubt anybody is unwilling to abandon whatever flaws they can. Recognizing assumptions is very difficult because they are by nature not questioned. Take for example the thought experiment that led Einstein to his celebrated theories; it isn't extremely technical, but rather something that had just never been considered. Mr. X explains better than I ever could, so, from episode 8 of Cosmos (feat. a song familiar to this blog already, coincidentally) (also on Netflix on demand):

The next part is equally engaging and descriptive, visualizing the surprising effects of traveling at C, the speed of light.

What's in a Thing?

2010-08-26T23:08:00.002-06:00

The process of philosophy is unfortunately often an exercise in mincing words across numerous tangents while the original topic fades into oblivion; this is not surprising, as definitions tend to be important in the process of understanding. However there is a systemic fault in relying on words to define our experience, namely, that words are objectively meaningless. In order to define a word words must be used, and these words have definitions themselves; the image then is of a cloud, a highly connected network that has no foundation--it depends entirely on itself for structure, like Boyle's self flowing flask:

Suppose that a Thing starts as not understood but can become understood, and that each Thing has a definition, which is a specific collection of Things. In order to understand a Thing you must understand at least one of the Things in its definition; if a Thing has no Things in its definition, it is not understood (naturally). Do you see the problem? With this arrangement of rules understanding seems entirely impossible because each definition invariably leads to more definitions. But all is not lost.

Suppose that there is a property called self evident, which is the very special occurrence of a Thing that is in its own definition; a self evident Thing is understood by default. With the inclusion of self evidence defined Things become understandable.

What is an example of a self evident Thing? Pick a number, any number!

Foundationalist philosophers seem like proto-mathematicians--a consequence of not recognizing that self evidence doesn't need to be proven, as it is enough to simply assume for the sake of argument. In an axiomatic system, the axioms are always assumed to be true. This is not done in order to answer the questions that the axiom might pose ("do parallel lines ever cross?"), but in order to derive many more interesting implications. The geometry that most people are familiar with is Euclidean geometry, and every single fact in Euclidean geometry can be proven to be a consequence of five axioms:

Two different points can be connected by one and only one line.
A line segment can be extended to produce an infinitely long line.
A circle can be described with a point and a radius.
All right angles are equal to one another.
The parallel postulate: If a line segment intersects two lines forming interior angles that sums less than two right angles, then the two lines will intersect on that side of the segment.

From this simple set of rules, an obscene amount of useful consequences have been derived. In order for an axiom to be such, it mustn't be false according to any of its axiomatic peers, but there is nothing about these axioms that make them universal and inviolable outside their own system. The truth is that there's nobody more critical than a mathematician, and as a critic it is expected for them to raise objection: "Regarding axiom 5, what if two parallel infinite lines eventually cross?" or "What if all the conditions of axiom 5 are met but the lines still don't cross?" What this represents is not idle trolling, but rigorous curiosity. The objection is actually a new postulation that can be tested, and if ever a contradiction arises as a consequence of the postulation, the whole axiom can be rejected. In fact somebody raised this very objection, and after much time and effort no contradiction was found; instead, an entirely new branch of mathematics had been formulated. This non-Euclidean geometry would have no known real world application for more than 60 years, until it became the mathematics necessary to describe Einstein's theory of general relativity. Similar to mathematics, science is the process of discovering physical, measurable Things that are self evident--physical laws--that will not only explain all previous observations but also expose physically meaningful logical consequences.

The applicability of mathematics to reality is regarded as a great mystery. However, in terms of the rules above the applicability of mathematics to reality makes sense; indeed, how else might we know the universe? If there were no people around, it would be clear that reality isn't expressed in words. What we have come to know is that our experience of reality is the reception and translation of numbers and mathematical structure. When I suggest the color yellow, the thought of yellow occurs, maybe yellowish things: sunflowers, dandelions, etc, but yellow isn't defined by yellow things. What we've named yellow is actually photons oscillating with a wavelength around 570 nanometers--colors are by definition numerical, despite our experience of them as a visual cognitive phenomenon.

The case of colors is particularly interesting, because without the use of science to establish a self evident, or experimentally verifiable, numerical fact (wavelength) it is impossible to define color. There is an idea called qualia, which refers to some kind of purely subjective experience; for instance, even though most people will call a primary color by the same name, there is no guarantee that we experience the same thing. In other words, I might experience roses as what you see for the blue wavelength, but since Roses Are Red and everything I see that's called red is the same color as roses, my blue is your red. We will still agree on what items are red and what aren't, despite the fact that my subjective experience is not what you'd describe as red based on your subjective experience of light. Consider the following questions: What does pain feel like? What does a violin sound like? What does sweetness taste like? Qualia can be regarded as a word for the confusion and difficulty that comes with trying to answer these questions, particularly evident if these questions come from someone that doesn't possess the sense in concern, and thus can't gain understanding on the basis of related sensations. Qualia is still fiercely debated, and I'm not much surprised; behind every big debate there is a very ill posed question, but this doesn't imply that our experience is unquantifiable.

Consider the humble computer desktop: without a monitor, the modern desktop is apparently nothing more than a metal box that uses a lot energy in the form of electricity to warm the air. Without special tools, the only indication of activity is a light that's on when the machine is blowing out warm air, and a light that blinks at apparently random intervals when the first light is on. If this headless desktop were an alien instrument, deciphering its function would be extremely difficult. Even looking deep into the hottest part of the machine there would be perplexity abound, and a robust overwhelming with the realization that each of the over 2 billion elements might change state more than a billion times every second. Measuring the states of all of these elements at every step would be difficult given that each feature is smaller than the shortest wavelength of visible light. Even if that problem was solved, making sense of 1 second worth of data would require analyzing around 2*10^18 binary elements, which would require over 227,373 terabytes, or 222 petabytes. Even Then, the bits zooming around a CPU and patterns of gates give essentially no indication of what a computer is used for. Binary is just another way of representing quantity or number; we use decimal, which is base 10, which is kind of like saying we represent numbers with 10 different inherently meaningless symbols: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9. Binary is base 2, the only symbols are 0 and 1, but those symbols are equally sufficient to represent integer quantities. Thus, were you to look at the innermost workings of a CPU, what you'd see is voltages passing through a grid, sometimes changing and sometimes not. The problem is that seeing these voltages as decimal numbers wouldn't bring a modicum of sense to the madness. Even deciphering the relatively simple outbound digital video signal would be an uncanny feat; it would require a leap of imagination something like listening to Morse code and thinking that what you were hearing was actually triplets of values for a large array of photon emitters, plus whatever communication is part of the digital video standard. Some standards require two way connections, which means that before you could even draw the principal signal you'd have to have a precisely correct conversation with the machine that you're trying to figure out in the first place.

Consider the humble human being... I bet you see where this is going. Without motor function, the modern human is apparently nothing more than an elongated tube that uses water and a lot of energy in the form of food to warm the air and make fertilizer. Without special tools, the only indication of activity is from autonomic nervous function. If this were an alien instrument, deciphering its function would be extremely difficult. Even looking deep into the hottest part of the machine there would be perplexity abound, and a robust overwhelming with the realization that each of up to 100 billion elements might change state as many as 100 times every second. Assuming only full action potentials matter, and that this results in a binary signal, making sense of 1 second worth of data would require analyzing around 10^13 binary elements, which would require over 1 terabyte to store. Even Then, the bits zooming around a brain and patterns of neurons give essentially no indication of what a brain is used for. Were you to look at the innermost workings of a brain, what you'd see is voltages passing through a grid, sometimes changing and sometimes not. The problem is that seeing these voltages as decimal numbers wouldn't bring a modicum of sense to the madness. Even deciphering the relatively simple outbound analog audio signal would be an uncanny feat; it would require a leap of imagination something like looking at a continuous squiggly wave and thinking that what you were seeing was actually combinations of patterns for an abstract representation of physical phenomenon, plus whatever communication is part of the social standard. Some standards require two way connections, which means that before you could even draw the principal signal you'd have to have a precisely correct conversation with the machine that you're trying to figure out in the first place.

Is it possible to quantify the chemical senses of smell and taste? There are multiple ways on multiple scales, the most obvious: scents and flavors are particular molecules which are specific arrangements of atoms. Every atom is defined by quantities (mass, charge, etc), and the specific spatial arrangement of atoms that defines a molecule can also described mathematically... so even chemical sensation is merely an interpretation of numerical and mathematical structure. It may seem as though the mathematical definition of chocolate cake wouldn't make for much of a treat, but I'm suggesting that the mathematical definition is in fact the tasty part; there is no such thing as chocolate cake, only a variety of mathematical structures that are referred to as chocolate cake. If someone were to condense the sophisticated structure of chocolate cake down to a few succinct mathematical theorems written on a page, you wouldn't call the page chocolate cake, you'd call it a recipe; the recipe is a way to translate and understand chocolate cake, but without the quantization of the cake in some form, memorized, written, or otherwise recorded, there would be no cake. This comes across as very absurd, but consider the fact that there is no such Thing as chocolate cake; because "chocolate cake" can be interpreted as an exceedingly large range of Things, there is no objectively consistent Thing that is chocolate cake. This is different from self evident Things, which are objectively consistent; light with a wavelength of 570 nm will be light with a wavelength of 570 nm, even if you name it chocolate cake. Without a numerical level of specificity there is little assurance that everybody can and will interpret correctly.

We may never know...

Take the example of the aged philosophical question: "what is the meaning of life?" Perhaps the reason it has gone unanswered for so long is because it's an ill defined question--perhaps the question doesn't even make sense! Just because it is frequently repeated doesn't mean it is well defined. Do any of these similar sentences make sense?

What is the meaning of rock?
What is the meaning of light?
What is the color of life?
What is the interpretation of life?
What is the sound of a vacuum?

On an almost entirely unrelated note, I was pleased to find that Google had the wisdom to include the ability to search for images free for re-use, which made it very easy to produce the above image without fear of accidentally stealing the intellectual property of some profitably litigious organization. Lately I've seen this practice of open and alternative licensing (Creative Commons, GNU General Public License, etc.) referred to as copyleft. What that means I amn't certain, but regardless this free functionality provided by Google offers me a modicum of comfort given that the FBI is apparently more concerned with copyright violation than identity theft and missing persons, as noted on /. recently. As usual the law is really too complicated for "free for re-use" to make much sense; for example the fair use doctrine, which may or may not save one's ass in court if it comes to that.

silly cyclists sick music

2010-08-24T22:47:00.000-06:00

The compression of this data and the characteristic effects of lossy transcoding actually enhance the aesthetics of this particular audio signal, imo. Recommended signal transduction via nothing less than 5" stereo drivers capable of 50 watts RMS (roughly). It's White Rhino by Trans Am:

Spectrogram of a Swept Triangular Wave

2010-08-16T02:29:00.000-06:00

I was going about in my typical atypical way and by chance did discover a very attractive fractal that is the frequency spectrogram of a swept triangular wave. I made this quick and dirty animation of a ping-pong zoom of it:

This was done with Audacity, GIMP, and NCH Tone Generator, all of which are free--my thanks to everybody who ever contributed code to any, it should be known that my thanks is an exponential function, for anybody who may have contributed to more than one. Also, thanks to anybody who understands any of what I write.

It should be noted that a number of other interesting fractals can be generated, depending on the wave type and the sweep.

Rise of the Velomobile

2010-08-15T02:58:00.001-06:00

The velomobile will be the next great technology to reach ubiquity.

(Assuming that everybody behaves in a perfectly rational manner, which is not a safe assumption, unfortunately)

Near the beginning of August the web was abuzz with news that obesity incidence in the US has continued to increase; more recently, it was suggested that obese people visit general practitioners more frequently than smokers and generally unfit folks. Obesity is bad, this is not news--with the distributed costs of public health care, obesity is even worse. Another bit that isn't news is that a moderate, sudden, and sustained escalation of petroleum prices, perhaps as a consequence of finite/dwindling supply, would likely lead to cataclysmic economic destabilization because of our profound reliance upon it--a point practically self evident in the most rudimentary economic perspective. Of course for whatever reason many more people have petroleum centric anxiety manifested as fear of global warming, for which the more dire consequences won't happen until a fair while after we've already run out of gas if we keep increasing our consumption.

But for a culture in which the automobile was supplanted by the velomobile, these problems amongst many others would be made irrelevant.

What is a velomobile? It's a pedalcar, resembling a grown-up soapbox racer with bicycle pedals. This is a velomobile:

The typical modern velomobile is little more than tricycle recumbent with a fairing, but these two things together make for something of an advanced vehicle. Here's what it looks like in the cockpit of a good DIY velomobile that was constructed for under $1500 (full flickr here):

Recumbents are increasingly popular as they can provide more comfort than the usual bicycle and also utilize the mechanical advantage from having lower back support while pedaling. The fairing adds the benefit of aerodynamics, a good thing as air is the principle force that slows a cyclist. But the fairing does more than that: by enclosing the tricycle, it is suddenly a vehicle equipped to ride in inclement weather; perhaps even more important, what was a bike now strikes the casual bystander as a car. Unfortunately the fairing adds weight... and with intuition it becomes clear that with the minor addition of a small electric motor, this vehicle is the most sensible form of transportation ever devised.

On flat terrain with no wind, an average person can sustain 25 MPH in a velomobile without much difficulty. With an electric motor I'd expect one would be able to sustain 25 MPH while going up a decent hill.

There are many exciting things about velomobiles--by my figuring they potentially represent the cheapest, safest, cleanest, healthiest, and most sustainable form of transportation ever conceived--but the most exciting thing about it all is that like bicycles there's already an international legal precedent for their use on public infrastructure. In the US a velomobile is classified as a moped, as long as it has pedals and doesn't exceed 20 MPH (varies by state). Because of this a velomobile can be piloted on public roads with all the rights of a cyclist, which tend to be more generous than the rights of motorists, no registration or insurance necessary. Newer velomobile designs incorporate headlamps, turn signals, and brake lights; with an electric motor you could drive with city traffic as though you were one of the internal combustion monstrosities. The biggest problem with velomobiles is that they haven't caught on yet, and as part of that, nobody has been able to produce one on a large scale for a price within reason.

This is an incredible custom velomobile, replete with water-filled airbag suspension (full flickr here):

This velomobile is somewhat commercially available, total price >$6000 (retail site here, worklog here):

With the widespread adoption of velomobiles our country could reap the benefits of increased general health with vastly reduced vehicle related expenditure, and thus an increase in overall prosperity. Perhaps even more important, we'd reduce our exposure to calamity by decreasing our extreme dependence on a steady (and foreign) supply of petroleum at a steady (and low, and further subsidized) price. Not that I think adoption should be limited to US.

Predictive prose

2010-07-24T01:36:00.000-06:00

One of the great things about a software keyboard (and open software) is that a different keyboard can be had with no more than a download. What is even more interesting is that by digitizing the keyboard, it can easily function in ways that were previously impossible. Recently I downloaded the beta for SwiftKey, an android software keyboard that aims to improve with a feature whose removal I've long bemoaned: predictive text. The short story is that I'm (naturally) very interested in the behavior of this software, and simultaneously impressed and disappointed at its performance. Quickly it became clear to me that I was witnessing artificial intelligence/machine learning, and aloof with a sense of uninhibited exploration I sought to set free the voice inside the machine. With minimal input, I guided the software in constructing sentences, in the process revealing patterns that were part of prior training. This is what my keyboard had to say:

My plan relied on Sunday morning, so if we could find a little bit more time to get a chance to win. I am feeling very well presented and I will be in a few weeks. Hey, you're sure that you are interested in joining us? I think we should be able to make a difference. I am going to have the capability to be a great deal of More information on this one. I am a beautiful place on the web, and I will have a great time. Hey everyone, I have a good idea to advertise. Good luck with the word of mouth upon discovery of the many authors, and thats what you think about this product. Good morning!! Good morning 2,I. Good luck with the latest version of the week. Good luck with your own virus checking software. Good luck with the new year. Good morning, but it feels like a plan to use the search page, or if you want me to come over? Just wondering if you have to get the most popular videos. Is it possible to get a bit of funding for balsa wood and aluminum foil balloon attached to the following models of common knowledge and experience of the day off, but it feels like a good idea to me. We will be able to make it go faster before it finishes and then we can get some work done. I think, and I am. I am feeling very tempted by electric bike kits. I am going to be a good idea to advertise your company slogan. I am a beautiful person. I am a man who has been a bit of a question about the whole thing was that the top prediction for the letter i when following for is instance ; most other times the recommendation is simply " I. I am a bit of a question about the whole thing was that the top prediction for the letter i when following for is instance ; most other times the recommendation is simply " I. Hey, your skate is still on the web, go to the list. I am feeling very tempted by electric bike kits. Hey guys. Hey everyone else. Hey everyone, I am a beautiful person. Hey everyone, I think I have to retake calculus 2,just. Hey, you're way amazing and the rest of the many advantages of open software, new research has revealed that the top prediction for the letter i when following for is instance ; most other times the recommendation is simply " I. Thanks for the next few weeks. Thanks, but I think I'll be back for more information about yourself and your function in the morning, and thanks for the next few weeks.

Matter and Electromagnetism

2010-07-06T00:14:00.000-06:00

With precisely 20 minutes of focus anybody can come to know a very significant portion of the foundation of our physical reality.

Motorsport: Rally

2010-07-03T01:49:00.000-06:00

Despite my fervent conviction that cars should not be used as they are, I'm actually something of a sucker for motorsports. In particular, it is with ceaseless amazement that I witness rallying. As far as forms of vehicle races go, few are in the same league as rally racing; certainly none require traversing such a diversity of surfaces, including none at all.

The World Rally Championship (WRC) is the best known international rally series. This video clearly shows that being a rally driver requires equal portions of insanity and talent, and, in the case of the co-driver, the ability to maintain literacy while under extreme duress. Coincidentally, the song played for most of the video is one that has also been showing up in my Pandora.

Regarding Grammar Nazis

2010-06-25T03:23:00.000-06:00

i gotta wunda yzit dey tinkin wedadumwuns wen ryting disway canb far moar efishunt and expresiv. peepol who thro a fit abowt sumdin liek da cowrecked form uv ther mussb dadumwuns cuz da meenins clear frum contxt... uddawyz ther, ther, an ther woodall sownd diffrnt to. point izat if i sed ther sittin ova ther on ther lawn, yad no wat i meen, so ynot makit da same for rytin.

There are occasions that call for communicative and thus linguistic precision, which demand the correct use of words, syntax, grammar and so forth. However the notion that any non quantitative language can be used with maximum communicative efficacy is foolish. For instance, a studied linguistic prodigy could write a whole story with what was intended to be communicated hidden (but nonetheless objectively discernible) in the etymology of choice words while maintaining a coherent facade--in other words steganography by etymology. Similarly a word might be used such that several of its meanings yield sensible interpretations. The mere fact that many words have multiple distinct meanings is enough to indicate that absolute precision in communication by this language is unlikely. Despite this lack of objective precision, communication is surprisingly robust; people often use words thinking they mean something other than what they actually mean, yet the intended meaning comes across (more often than not, in my experience). The modern paragon of this situation is the phrase "beg the question," commonly used as though it means "causes the question to arise." This usage is unequivocally false: the phrase comes from formal logic as the fallacy of assuming what is to be proven, first defined by Aristotle ~350 BCE.

It's not just the uneducated masses who abuse conventions, a good number of celebrated authors have as well: Emily Dickinson's work is superficially characterized by a distinct misuse thereof, Jose Saramago won the Nobel Prize for literature for a book that abandoned all rules regarding punctuation of speech, and for his best known work "A Clockwork Orange" Anthony Burgess successfully discarded much tradition in favor of a largely fabricated and evocative lexicon. Even authors for whom the principle intent is not to explicitly subvert tradition will occasionally see fit a bit of unrestrained expression. Intentional subversion of convention is not necessarily better than the accidental, as the important consideration is efficacy of communication; if technically incorrect writing communicates more effectively than the cowrecked alternative it must be qualitatively superior. Objectively the rules of writing should only matter as much as they aid in communication since it is the primary objective. This is a good thing, as the rules of writing are so complicated that even professional authors require editors to point out all the errors. If technical proficiency is more important than communication then language kinda loses its point, amirite?

Clearly there are cases in which abandoning standards is more effective or desirable than abiding by canonical stricture, thus rendering the concern at hand nebulous. Are we simply to assume that people who replace 'because' with 'cuz' are idiots, or is it possible that certain other people are inflexible pedants unable to realize that 'cuz' is an efficient, effective and unambiguous replacement of 'because'? The truth is that language is evolving, as it has from inception, the only difference being that presently it is happening fast enough for crotchety pedagogues to notice and complain. If it weren't for such odd sociological pressures I think this evolution might happen much faster, at the very least cuz it does (with intriguing results) when distinct languages intersect.

Some portion of people who started reading this won't make it to this point cuz of my possibly disconcerting choice of ostentatious diction (further rent til but a tortuous enigma did remain :P), which is too bad because they don't get to see this part where I expose my erudite articulation to be a Planck thick veneer over an idiocy so profound it is capable of using cuz and emoticons, and in, liek, a run on sentence. Another portion will get here having not fully understood what I've intended to communicate. Notice that for both of these cases it isn't my failure to comply that causes a communication breakdown but my technically acceptable overzealous use of multisyllabic words that might appear on the GRE.

To me the emergence of glyphic phenomena such as lol, \o/, :/, :|, :), :D and :P indicate a previously irrelevant deficiency in the ability of our communication medium and language to express ourselves sufficiently; in other words it's really hard to convey any emotion in the terse typed (not even handwritten!) form which has recently rapidly grown to unprecedented ubiquity. To not recognize the validity of these modern phenomena even in traditional print just seems stodgily conservative. Similarly if my use of unconventional symbolic representation lowered a persons judgment of my already limited intellect, I'm afraid I may no longer consider their ability to judge sound.

I cannahelp but tink dat deybdadumwuns tinkin as dey do dat da comma is anemor dan vizul garbish.

Garrett Lisi: Unification Theorist

2010-06-16T18:26:00.000-06:00

Garrett Lisi is a particle/theoretic physicist who has come up with a very intriguing theory, one that mathematically unifies the quantum and relativistic branches of physics. The theory is fascinating and attractive, despite being essentially beyond comprehension. I had read about his theory at some point a while back and found it of general interest and know I've brought it up in discussion many times. Those times though my recollection was poor and didn't communicate the very important bit that is the author's name, but now I don't think I'll forget.

Unification is of course the holy grail of modern physics, an achievement similar in magnitude to curing cancer. A great thing about Lisi's theory is that it makes predictions which should be answered when the LHC makes it to full power. I have mentioned already that the theory is naturally appealing, and I wasn't lying: his paper is the most downloaded of all on arXiv.org, which is probably the largest online collection of pre-print scientific articles.

At the 2008 TED Lisi gave a presentation, his attempt at a lay explanation of the theory. You might want to take a moment to breathe deep and clear your mind before you watch...

A Million in a Briefcase

2010-06-12T14:53:00.000-06:00

A million dollars in a briefcase is almost the ultimate cliche, and accordingly diverse in its performances. Cliche is usually regarded as derogatory, but I must disagree--after all, where would we be without a million dollars in a briefcase? It is certainly cliche, but not in the sense that it is indicative of an absence of creativity; the briefcase by itself is totally ambiguous, lacking narrative, but it has strong potential to characterize any scene that it is placed in. In this sense the briefcase is more a character than a simple plot refrain.

For the other half of the brain: have you ever wondered if a million dollars would actually fit in a briefcase? These things are easy enough to figure out these days. The dimensions of US currency (from here) are about 6.1 x 2.6 x 0.0043 inches, and a common briefcase size is 18 x 13 x 5 which is enough space to hold around 17,450 bills. If each of those were hundreds, that would be $1,745,000. In fact a slim 3-inch briefcase can hold a million dollars. If someone really wished to avoid being cliche they could take the money in pennies, though it would be a poor choice; a hundred million pennies weighs just over 550,000 lbs, and all of them stacked would make a tower almost 79 miles tall.

Google Shenanigans

2010-05-22T01:01:00.000-06:00

Google has been all over the news today for making their homepage logo into a playable Pac Man game. Something I find interesting is that while none of the news I saw mentioned it, Google is also running a round of voting for the selection of drawings submitted by primary school children to be used for the logo at a later date. The contest is called Doodle 4 Google and is run in partnership with Smithsonian. The drawings are a handful selected from over 33,000 entries under the theme "If I could do anything, I would...," each with a short statement. I found the remaining candidates interesting despite what seems to be an obvious presence of bias in the selection process prior--I would love to believe that around 40% of US children have the restoration and preservation of Earth as top priority, but I have a feeling that on the whole entries might have been more along the lines of the finalist who answers with "...go to Japan," but with less deft artistry.

It seems that most of the time I see Google in the news it is over some imagined privacy theft, as though Google is secretly plotting to shame everyone on Earth at the same time by revealing our most incriminating queries (or what have you). Clearly in this case they are harvesting the unbounded imagination of our children... who knows what nefarious deed Google might conspire based on the suggestion to build subsidized housing for the homeless on the moon. And not only that, but Google with their unquenchable lust for data couldn't help but steal our opinions on this information too, as if their stated plot to give away 3 laptops, 80 netbooks, $15,000 scholarship, and a $25,000 computer lab grant weren't nefarious enough.

Actually I am somewhat disappointed by those figures, they seem a bit paltry (relative to Google); $15k wouldn't even pay for a degree at an in-state public university. Voting takes place here and is only open 5/18-5/25.

Mandelbrot Composition

2010-05-19T01:53:00.001-06:00

Some more results of exploring reflection and the Mandelbrot set:

Iteration

2010-05-13T13:28:00.001-06:00

I've added threaded scene capture to my ray tracer so that I can make animations. Combine this with a map of the Mandelbrot set, and you can do things like this:

This animation also uses the reflection model of the ray tracer to complicate things a bit near the end, as you may have noticed.

One of the first animations I got out plays like a short film:

This result was accidental, I had meant to iterate by floating point values but was casting to integers at the wrong place; as it turns out, some interesting things happen around integral values.

If that's a short film, this might be a summary of that film:

note that I practically always display the set with a basis orientation contrary to convention--this is mainly because the blobs lend themselves more readily to anthropomorphizing than the alternate, and are thus naturally more aesthetic.

The following shows the set lights off and lights on:

In fact, the only difference between the two (IIRC) is that for the second I added an additional light to the ray tracer.

Deepwater Horizon

2010-05-08T20:13:00.000-06:00

The recent explosion of Deepwater Horizon and subsequent venting of crude oil has garnered a lot of coverage lately, and rightly so. However, there's an interesting perspective to this story that I think has been overlooked.

Consider that the estimated minimum leakage rate is 5,000 barrels of crude oil every day (according to Reuters). Is this a lot? The daily consumption of petroleum in the US is somewhere around 19,500,000 (2008 data, from EIA); 5,000 barrels is 0.00026% of our daily consumption of refined petroleum.

There's a really important point in this: a sleight 5,000 barrels of crude oil per day seeping into the ocean is enough to do quite a bit of damage. With that in mind, doesn't it seem reasonable that the gases seeping into the air from burning 19,500,000 barrels every single day would probably have some consequences?

If only all consequences were as obvious as tar covered wildlife washing onto our doorsteps. There was a time, not long ago, that we could get away with pretending that the Earth was an infallible provider of infinite resources. That time has now passed, and the oblivious industrious bustle of humanity elicits tacit threats of autocataclysmic destabilization, by endeavors of awe-some magnitude undertaken at unprecedented pace with slightest regard for the fragile ecosystem from which we emerged. I'm immensely saddened to see the failure to prioritize the maintenance of viability for life on Earth, particularly when it is overlooked for something as senseless as one more quarter of profitability. If only corporations were most interested in ensuring the future of life, if only...

*update*
New estimates place the rate of flow around 200,000 barrels a day. Even though that's a mind boggling amount of oil, it's still only 1% of the daily US consumption--and worldwide consumption is a fair bit more than that.

The Secret to Weight Loss

2010-04-21T00:12:00.000-06:00

This is a "common misconceptions" post that I've been meaning to do for a long time, and thanks to a recent article in The New York Times I finally have a good reason. More on that later.

Everybody knows weight loss is a big deal, the fact is obvious from the astounding range of products/services with weighty promises (lose 30 pounds in 30 days!!!); the advertisements assault us constantly, from every possible angle. Given that the majority of US Americans are considered overweight in a culture with highest regards only for the exact opposite build, it's really no surprise that weight loss is big business. The real surprise is just how successful such ventures are when practically all of them make explicitly outrageous claims and just as many (if not more) are wholly ineffective. The truth is that with few exceptions commercial weight loss products are simply fraudulent--they are designed to take your money, not to help you lose weight.

I know the secret to losing weight, and I'm willing to share it... for free! It is very simple, and not simple in the subtly very complicated way, just simple. Ready?

How to lose weight: Eat less.

It's a matter of physics. Imagine an extreme case where a person doesn't eat or drink anything; by the very laws of nature and obvious from elementary intuition, it is impossible for that person to gain weight. This would be just like setting a scale in a sealed room: it would be very silly to think that the scale might at any point suddenly measure any more weight than it has all along. Humans are magnificently, extraordinarily, incomprehensibly complex systems, but that doesn't exempt us from the laws of physics. Unless more stuff is added to a body, that body will either maintain or lose weight. In case it isn't obvious, let me remind you that abstaining from all consumption for longer than a little while is a bad idea--remember, the rule is to eat less, not to eat nothing.

Let's explore the physics in slightly more detail. The main reason we eat is to supply our body with energy; our bodies need fuel to keep the magic alive, just like a car needs gas to move. Clearly it would be a bad setup if the energy we consume couldn't be stored, like a car without a gas tank we wouldn't get very far. There are a variety of ways the human body can store energy, but the presently relevant one is best known as fat. Call me crazy, but next time you see that extra bit of flab, try being grateful--if it weren't for that "unsightly" bit of excess, a few missed meals would result in death. I don't know about you, but I'd rather have a less than optimal social image than be dead.

So fat is stored energy, but what's this energy? Is there any way to quantify it so that its consumption might be regulated? In fact, yes, there is! The energy in food is also known as Calories, which is actually a kilocalorie or 1,000 calories. A calorie is a unit of energy, just like an hour is a unit of time. If you eat 2,000 Calories in a day and only use half of them, the rest will be stored, with some portion of them being stored as fat, it's as simple as that! If you are gaining weight and it's not because you're building muscle mass, you are eating more energy than you're using. Here's the Eureka moment!

How to lose weight (revised): Eat fewer calories than you use.

But wait, what about fatty foods, exercise, and metabolism, don't these play a major role in weight loss? Lets look at each of them.

Fatty Foods
One of the strongest diet related misconceptions around is that eating foods with excess fat, saturated, unsaturated, or otherwise will lead to increased body fat. This isn't true, food fat doesn't automatically turn into body fat. Perhaps this misconception arose because lipid nutrients and adipose tissue are both known colloquially as fat, but the notion that consumed lipids will transform into adipose tissue is as silly as the notion that eating brain will make a person smarter. Anybody can eat pure fat every day and lose weight, because the amount of fat in a food doesn't matter for weight management, what matters is the amount of Calories in the food and how much food (ergo how many Calories) is consumed. It's true that fat, with 9 Calories per gram, has a higher energy density than protein and carbohydrates, which have 4 Calories per gram, but for the purposes of weight loss this is moot--all Calories in a food, regardless of the source, are accounted for by the "Calories" figure on every nutritional label. Predictably there's a fair degree of complexity in how effectively food energy is captured, but the given number of Calories represents the maximum; if you closely regulate energy intake, you will realize there are no magical foods that cause body fat. Often, however, energy intake is far from regulated, far even from monitored, and it is very easy to underestimate how many Calories are eaten in a day. One case deserves special mention: high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), the modern sweetener du jour, has been shown in a recent Princeton study to lead to more weight gain in mice than equal amounts of cane sugar. The theory I've heard is that HFCS is far more easily digested than cane sugar, and since digestion requires energy, HFCS results in more energy than an equal amount of sugar.

Exercise
When people think weight loss, they usually think exercise. It's always a point of contention when I say it, but exercise does very little to hasten weight loss. The reason is that the body burns a lot of energy no matter what its doing; for most people exercise causes only a marginal increase in energy consumption from the already high baseline. Remember the NYTimes article I mentioned? Here's a quote from it:

“In general, exercise by itself is pretty useless for weight loss,” says Eric Ravussin, a professor at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La., and an expert on weight loss.

The exception here is athletes, whom require many more calories than everybody else. This is because athletes have bodies that are especially efficient in utilizing energy--in other words, they have a higher basal metabolic rate. For those of us who aren't professionally physically fit, the connection between exercise and weight loss isn't anywhere near as clear cut. For more information on this topic I recommend reading the aforementioned NYTimes article: "Weighing the Evidence on Exercise." Beyond weight loss, keep in mind that frequent aerobic exercise is universally acknowledged as a critical component in the maintenance of cardiovascular health.

Metabolism
One of my pet-peeves, if you can call it that, is when people disseminate false information. We live in an age when almost the full knowledge of Earth is accessible on demand, so the reasoning goes that it's time we stop defaulting to wild speculation and just google it. Of course I have nothing wrong with wild speculation, my displeasure arises when the speculation is presented as fact. I'm bringing this up because it's relevant to the topic at hand, metabolism. Everybody has heard the word, it's used all the time, especially in regard to weight management, but what does it mean? What is metabolism? For all the mention it gets, I'd think everyone would be familiar with what exactly was being referred to. If you visit the Wikipedia page for metabolism, you might find that the subject is rather complicated; the summary refers to cellular respiration, metabolic pathways, and the carboxylic acids that are part of the citric acid cycle. That doesn't sound like weight loss! Metabolism is something of a shotgun term that refers to the chemistry of life. The basal metabolic rate is a bit more specific, as it refers to the amount of energy an organism expends while at rest and in a post-absorptive state. Since basal metabolic rate is roughly energy expenditure, it must be able to indicate how many Calories are needed to manage weight, and indeed it does. Interestingly enough, metabolic rate is strongly correlated with lean muscle mass and the same figure has been arrived at for all people: 16 Calories per pound of lean mass per day. This means an estimate for how many Calories you need each day can be found by multiplying your lean mass by 16. This also indicates what has been shown in other studies as well: the best known way to increase the basal metabolic rate is by increasing lean muscle mass.

Just one final note: losing more than a pound or two a week is neither healthy nor permanent.

Nexus One, an Android

2010-04-18T13:28:00.000-06:00

I've had an iPhone since shortly after they were first released, nearly three years now. For the most part, I've enjoyed it. These days, particularly when it comes to electronic devices, three years is a really long time; as such, it's almost difficult to recall why the iPhone had the hype it had. One thing to recall is that the app store, which is now probably the most attractive and well known feature of the phone, didn't exist when the phone first came out. The reason the iPhone was viewed as revolutionary (and that it was) was because it was the first cell phone to give what could be called functional access to the Internet, where most all websites were available to a mobile phone without any modifications. Clearly the Internet has revolutionized society; the movement from being available only on home computers to being available almost anywhere with cell reception is undoubtedly a movement that has been similarly transformative.

The availability of the whole content of the Internet, many Terabytes of information, on a diminutive device feeling like a polished stone, is practically inconceivable to me. But the notion is one conceived many times over in the science fiction canon. The most obvious example I know of is the device which shares the name of the book in which it resides: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In his remarkable series Cosmos, Carl Sagan repeatedly fantasizes about perusing the fundamentally similar, fictional Encyclopaedia Galactica, a compendium of all the knowledge gathered throughout the existence of an intergalactic species. Both of these bits of media originate around 1978, a time in which something like the iPhone and the Internet must have been considered far out by any reasoning; it is apparent that at least two foraward thinking people saw such a device as a product of civilizations living on a galactic scale.

From 1978 the iPhone must have been a long way away, considering the primitive original Apple Macintosh didn't even hit the market until January of 1984, though development started in 1979. The Macintosh had an 8 MHz processor, 128 KB of RAM, and a 9" 512x342 monochrome display. Fast forward 23.5 years, and though our progress in intergalactic exploration hadn't much changed from naught, our computers had made unexpected advances! The original iPhone runs at 412 MHz, 128 MB of RAM, and a 3.5" 320x480 18-bit color display--it's roughly 52 times faster, has 1,000 times more memory, and a far superior display. It fits in a pocket and can run all day without needing a charge, it can replace books, newspapers, televisions, and the list goes on beyond any reasonable expectations.

Three years later, the revolution of Internet on a phone has taken place, and giant leap taken all that remains is incremental improvements: the Nexus One. This past December there was a buzz about the web as rumors of a Google phone spread. The buzz persisted for a little while and then mysteriously subsisted. The Google phone arrived almost as if it were secret all along, almost as if it remained a secret--from what I've read, the sales of the device aren't remotely as impressive as those for the iPhone. But for what it lacks in popular perception, it makes up for in spec: 1 GHz processor, 512 MB RAM, 3.7" 800x480 display, or about twice an iPhone. Having just recently mentioned that GHz isn't a very important measure, I'd be foolish to regard that as a concrete measure of performance; it isn't, but the Nexus One noticeably outperforms the iPhone in every respect. Interestingly enough, the Nexus One matches or exceeds the recently released iPad in almost every spec except for screen resolution--it's truly a remarkable device.

One of the things about today's cell phones, also called smart phones or super phones, is that they're actually powerful little computers masquerading as phones. The iPhone does a very good job at hiding the power under it's hood, and this is very much one of the reasons I chose to go with a Nexus One over another iPhone; the Nexus One has only a thin veil to hide the fact that it's a computer running a version of Linux. In order to write an application for the iPhone, one needs to pay Apple about $100 to apply for the opportunity. If they choose to accept you, there are a number of steps to follow, including authorizing a particular device, associating it with a particular machine, writing particular code, and accepting a very hefty agreement which includes conditions such as not displaying your device in public and the right of Apple to take ownership of your code without notification or recompense. The $100 only covers one year--every year requires another $100 to continue participation. I did go through this process at some point, but I didn't get as far as getting code onto a device before my membership expired; after that, I gave up. The Nexus One is a different story: anyone can write anything and put it on their phone at any time, for free. The first day I had my new phone I had a custom application uploaded to it. The second day I gained root access, installed a custom bootloader and a modified version of the Android operating system known as CyanogenMod; in other words, I now own my phone.

The subject of science fiction is relevant for one last note: the name Nexus One comes from the most advanced android in a story called "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" better known as "Blade Runner," by Philip K. Dick.

Nothing says "I'm a geek and I know what I'm doing" like a command line:

One thing that really stands out about the Nexus One versus the iPhone is the much higher resolution display (click to see a version large enough to tell the difference, also note that some aliasing in the form of red, blue, and green banding may appear depending on your monitor):

Here's a side by side comparison:

There are still a few things I like about one more than the other, but the power of the Nexus One is that I can change nearly everything as I see fit--the same most certainly cannot be said for the iPhone.

Music for a Season

2010-04-12T09:50:00.000-06:00

I can't speak for the daylight hours immediately passed thanks to a fittingly peculiar sleep cycle (which I happen to appreciate despite, or perhaps for its general incongruity), but early this morning I emerged from in-doors to find the weather teetering upon perfection. It was the type of occasion that calls for the composition of a remarkably accessible, evocative, and timeless piece of music; fortunately for me, given my lack of musical training and the otherwise moderate difficulty of composing such a sound, someone has already taken and decidedly owned the feat. Thus it is with endless gratitude to, and for the inspiration of, Antonio Vivaldi, paragon of baroque classical composition, that I present music fit for this season, the 3rd movement of Spring, from The Four Seasons:

SparkFun SEN09423 integration issues

2010-04-07T15:28:00.002-06:00

Anyone seeking to use SparkFun's SEN09423 breakout board for the LPY530AL as a position sensor should be advised that the two 4.7 µF capacitors (C1 and C2 on the schematic) used for the high pass filter need to be removed and the contacts bridged. This image shows which tiny bits are of concern, however note that it seems the resistors indicated therein do not need to be removed. This information comes thanks to a few people who know what they're doing (which excludes myself), as discussed on the SparkFun forums here and here. From what I gather this may be an issue with numerous (all?) SparkFun breakouts including ST rate gyros, the two threads alone implicate boards containing LPR530AL or LPY530AL, including the IMU 6DOF Razor. This is a particularly odd case because Inertial Measurement Units are mostly used for dead-reckoning, and the inclusion of these caps will effectively frustrate anyone with such an intent. As far as removing them, good luck! Here's my own picture of how gigantic these caps are:

I found the best luck (given a fine tip soldering iron) with adding a little solder to one side so that solder wick can get most of it. Then just heat up the other side and push gently. The first one I removed took the contact pad with it, if that happens to you you may or may not be high and dry. I managed to salvage the situation by drawing between the appropriate areas with a pencil. In case you weren't aware, graphite is conductive--clearly this is a handy bit of information on occasion.

For a slightly more general audience, here's some interesting information. The capacitors pictured are about 0.065 inches wide, or 1.66 mm; the skinny dimension of the penny pictured is about 1.52 mm. I said these capacitors are gigantic, and relatively speaking this is true! Relative to molecules, light rays, and subatomic particles sure, but also relative to the vast majority of capacitors out there. We will get to how in a minute, but first a brief overview. The electronic components most of us are used to seeing are the ones attached to those (usually) green boards also known as circuit boards, like this one:

These days most circuit boards we encounter are printed circuit boards or PCBs, called such because the production process resembles printing to varying degrees. The principle elements of a PCB are, put simply, fiberglass, copper or other conductive metal, and solder mask. The fiberglass makes up the board-ness, the copper is akin to wiring for conducting electricity amongst the components, and the solder mask, the colored part, is a coating that solder doesn't stick to, in place so that connections aren't made accidentally by wandering solder. Not too long ago, I thought the PCB was made of silicon; after all, electronics are associated with silicon, and from a naive perspective the shiny green board looks like something that might be called silicon. But if that's not it, where's the silicon? In an IC of course! These days most all the action of an electronic device happens in an Integrated Circuit, which looks something like this:

Inside that chunk of plastic there's a wafer of silicon, which could contain anywhere from hundreds to Billions of electronic components. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a window that showed the silicon? Like this one?

Instead of discrete components like the capacitors I shared above, these components are formed by spraying (very precisely) successive layers of various chemicals in a process called photolithography, resulting in something like a miniature PCB. The CPU is the biggest, most complicated IC in the box that is your computer (unless you have a very fancy video card), and because of this it looks different than all the others. For one, you can't even see it, it's hidden underneath a big heatsink, which is there to help get rid of all the electricity that turns into heat in the CPU (the process is conceptually similar to heat generated from friction). CPUs generate so much heat that one would burn itself to a crisp almost instantly without a heatsink. But even if you remove the heatsink (after you've turned off the computer), modern processors have another metal plate which hides another sealed package that finally contains the silicon. Here we're finally at the land of magic: as of now, April 2010, Intel has a 32 nm manufacturing process, which means that the typical component width is less than 32 nm. This also means that the 1.66 mm wide capacitor above is about 52,000 times wider than a single component on a 2010 Intel CPU, or, relatively gigantic. Granted, most things we know are relatively gigantic compared to 32 nm, particularly since that's quite a bit smaller than the shortest wavelength of visible light--violet, at 400 nm. Reality check: we're making electrical components so small that a ray of light can't even hit them, so small that even the most powerful microscope couldn't see them, way smaller than the average bacteria. Really!? Apparently that's not enough, industry projections have us with 11 nm chips in 2022, which would make each component about the same width as 55 carbon atoms. Interestingly, the first time a single carbon atom was photographed (after a manner) was 9/2009. Of course, there are certain problems that what we know as computers, that is Turing class machines, can't solve--certain problems that could be described in a hundred or so lines of computer code that would take a computer the size of the universe longer than the universe is supposed to exist to solve. Not content to take limitations as they're handed to us, work is well under way to develop a different class of computer: the quantum computer. Quantum computers are very different in that they can take very specific problems, like the one I just mentioned, and solve them instantly. I don't know enough about quantum computation to judge if they'll ever reach the ubiquity our Turing machines have, but I can say one thing for certain: there's not much certainty in the future! Intel will probably plug ahead and reach 11 nm in 2022, but the real question is will that even be relevant? I'm willing to bet not, it almost seems like sitting in 2002 and projecting that by 2012 our CPUs will run at 11 GHz; as it turns out, GHz aren't all that important. Take a top of the line 3.8 GHz Pentium 4 from 2004 and I assure you a 1.8 GHz chip from today will outperform it. Maybe the state of the art in 2022 will be a 100 MHz chip with a million cores--only time will tell.

Computer Graphics

2010-03-25T09:26:00.000-06:00

As part of my course on computer graphics this semester the class has been writing a ray tracer. The details of ray tracing aren't really worth going into, instead I'd rather share a picture (more technically a rendering) that is the result of my work.

If you are particularly learned, you'll recognize this figure as the Mandelbrot set. In case you didn't recognize it, at least you will in the future! This version in particular is really an abuse of the ray tracing engine we've developed; typically other much more efficient means are used to generate an image. However in using the ray tracer I'm able to generate images that simply couldn't be done with the more traditional methods. For instance, this rendering uses a reflection model to add an additional layer of the delicious recursiveness that characterizes fractals. Though you could do the same given the more traditional code, simply having the code alone versus a ready-made rendering program allows me to color the actual Mandelbrot set, which is almost always left black:

For the sake of completeness, here's a more traditional ray traced image that specifically includes a good variety of capabilities a ray tracing engine made in a single undergraduate semester has:

As you can tell, my cylinder code still has some issues that need to be resolved.

By the Numbers

2010-03-23T15:26:00.000-06:00

I presume most people recognize that there is a vague connection between statistics and probability, but, having taken a course in probability theory, I'd be willing to bet the farm that very few people realize the full breadth of intimacy between the two. This is true in particular because despite having studied both, I'd count myself as one amongst the naive. From the outset probability is simply difficult, and often counter-intuitive. Not only does probability proceed in ways contrary to our intuition, it does so in such an amazingly tricky way! Maybe it is a function of how easy it starts out: given a typical six sided die, most everyone knows that the chance of guessing which number comes up is one in six. Easy enough, you pick one side out of a total 6, so the probability is 1/6. The common understanding of probability stops there, for the simple reason that any situation even marginally more complicated than that becomes remarkably more logically and mathematically sophisticated. Suppose I'm flipping a coin and you're guessing the results. For some reason you're having terrible luck and you've guessed wrong 10 times in a row, what's the probability that you guess the next flip wrong as well? Think about it for a minute and when you've logically arrived at what must certainly be the answer, highlight the following space for the answer: 1/2

Next, try to logically deduce the probability of guessing incorrectly for 10 coin flips in a row. Answer: 1/1024

It only gets so much worse from there, to the extent that I'm really not confident I could present the correct answers myself! Even admitting that I can't help but try for one more. Assume that 4 out of 5 people prefer Crelm toothpaste. What's the probability that from a selection of 5 people 4 of them prefer Crelm? Answer (I think): 256/625

The important notion here is that a probability says something both nebulous and concrete about reality. If a truly random die is thrown 6 million times, in all likelihood each number will have come up about 1 million times. If 4 out of 5 people really do prefer Crelm, then the chance that a randomly selected person prefers Crelm is 4/5 or 80%. As much as we all like to think that the statistics don't apply to us (because we're special), if the statistics are accurate there's no way to escape them. Most of the time this is a banal statement, as when referring to whether or not you prefer Crelm--either way it's not exactly a big deal. But then... there are the other statistics. "Around 50% of US marriages end in divorce" can be a pretty hard pill to swallow for a couple walking down the aisle. I have reason to believe the number of couples who'd figure they end up on the successful half of that statistic while exchanging vows is much higher than 50%--clearly if they thought it wasn't going to last they'd probably not be entering the commitment in the first place. Similarly, doubting the success of the marriage from the outset probably isn't going to increase the chance of a favorable outcome. What's left is an awkward position, objectively maybe the best one can think is that at least the odds aren't as bad as they could be, better than any casino game. However marriage is a particularly special case for a number of reasons, the primary one being the shift in locus of control which is applicable to all interpersonal relationships; though a bit less severe, anyone who's been dismayed by the lack of a second date (etc.) knows the score. To be fair the actual divorce rate changes based on many factors, where 50% is just the overall rate. The lowest divorce rates are found in each of the following categories: first marriage, atheist or agnostic, age 30 or older, residing in the Northeast and no cohabitation prior to marriage.

Uncontrollable statistics naturally lead to other more personally manageable probabilities. For instance, 28% of car accidents in the US happen while at least one of the drivers is using a cell phone. This is the part where I reiterate: we love to think we're special and that the statistics don't apply to us, but it just doesn't work that way. We are all special, I'm fully on board with that, but that doesn't grant any of us statistical immunity. Using a cell phone while driving (even with a hands-free headset) substantially increases the chance that you will be in a car accident, which could result in your death, or, arguably worse, the death of another/others with the accrual of manslaughter charges and the lifelong burden of knowing that you've killed someone. It's very simple: while the car is in gear, your phone doesn't exist. There are absolutely no excuses.

Technology II: State of an Art

2010-03-19T13:36:00.000-06:00

For today's exercise, please read the following passage and give the question at the end a sincere and thoughtful rumination. Once you feel you've thoughtfully ruminated enough, watch the video.

Imagine a modern machine, one that could be called a robot, that consists of a three fingered hand mounted at the end of an arm with a range of motion similar to our own and a single camera. Given the present state of technology, which any sensible person would describe as "quite advanced," what might this arm to be capable of?

It is astounding, yes, no less should have been expected, but there is something a bit backwards about it. Traditionally machines are constructed and used because they can do some certain task vastly better than we are able to. Naturally the machine's form and means of manipulation don't resemble ours in the slightest, otherwise we'd probably not have needed it in the first place. A good number of years ago, enchanted by the ideas of Isaac Asimov, I had a strong interest in androids--humanoid robots. But even before I knew the beginning of the true technical challenges behind building an android I realized something: a person desiring to make a passable humanoid machine would save themselves a lot of effort and greatly increase their probability of success by doing so the old fashioned way, that is by seeking a viable mating partner and letting nature run its course. At the time the thought was conceived mostly as a joke, and though it's still humorous, it's also quite sensible--practically speaking I think we have more than enough roughly human shaped objects with adequately human like capabilities. Nonetheless it is almost certain that many will continue attempts to build an android, and it's far from difficult to imagine that one day a result could be described as nothing other than successful. However one thing will remain true even then, even when androids exceed our capabilities: the human form can't do everything. No matter how dexterous or sophisticated, our fat fingered mechanical offspring won't be able to manipulate the atoms of a molecule unaided; even less technical, these two handed automatons will have just as much trouble as we doing the work of three hands. This will be a small victory for three handed people as they will get to remain not yet obsolete longer than the rest of us, at least for the few moments it takes to add one more hand to the robot. All silliness aside (well ok just most of it), there's clearly a huge number of tasks which won't benefit from the superhuman but still human capacity of these imaginary androids unaugmented. This represents a significant relief since we aren't stuck waiting for these super androids to come along (which nonetheless probably isn't too far off, though given the rate of technological progress, relatively probably quite a ways off). In summary, I've basically stated in a very roundabout way that we are free to continue to augment our own similarly limited mechanics the same as we have since the invention of the first tool; we can use our already inconceivably sophisticated body of technology to extend and enhance our capabilities. Case and point, the da Vinci surgical robot. Surgeons are essentially required to have superior motor control as even the slightest irregular movement could result in a fatality. However, no matter how talented the person holding the knife with intent to open you up, there is a fundamental biological limitation to the amount of accuracy they are capable of. Rather than just hoping their home life isn't distracting them and that their cup of coffee wasn't abnormally strong that morning, the da Vinci confers peace of mind with a laundry list of features specifically designed to maximize precision by counteracting the inherent imprecision of human hands. There are over 700 worldwide, and though it is only approved for a limited number of procedures, the number is expected to continue increasing as rapidly as it has been. While it's already on it's second version, I think it's a safe bet that further enhancements will be rapidly forthcoming. Of course, the proof is in the numbers, and the numbers are unambiguous--given the choice between traditional and robot assisted surgery, choose the latter! Here's a video of it peeling a grape on live television:

In conclusion, I'm compelled to once again say the same thing I've said previously: over the past few decades in particular we've been developing foundational technologies. Because each of these have such vast potential for application, the first and most obvious few applications took hold and found success. Being as we are focused on a multitude of things wholly different from the vastness of yet unrealized and incredible possibilities that these technologies enable, it is natural to unconsciously assume that what we see is more or less the extent of what technology can offer, but this tacit assumption is, in my opinion, absolute rubbish. In particular the most overlooked and underutilized technology is cheap and powerful microprocessors; everyone knows that desktop processors keep getting more powerful without getting more expensive, but the bit of interest is that the processors of yesteryear continue to get smaller and cheaper. This fact in itself isn't unacknowledged, actually there's a well known meme that suggests a common calculator found in a high school today has more processing power than the space shuttle that delivered the Apollo astronauts to the moon and back. The overlooked bit is that that little processor can do an awful lot more than help with algebra homework. Like what? Well, I have a video demonstration of one such device, but before you watch it consider that the processor in the device shown is essentially as powerful as a 1986 state of the art desktop that cost $6500 (the Compaq Deskpro 386), can be had for around $3, and is smaller than a dime. The whole device could probably be made wholesale for under $10.

Electronic Music

2010-03-11T07:56:00.000-07:00

Vitalic is a musician that constructs and delivers frequent variations in air pressure in a manner with a rather more contemporary lineage than what I've shared prior.

Ramachandran on the encephalon

2010-03-04T23:28:00.000-07:00

Vilayanur Ramachandran is a neurologist. What's more is that he has a very keen insight, and a particularly effective ability to communicate. Given that the nervous system (including the brain) is naturally and rapidly a profound topic of consideration, such a person as Ramachandran could really make 20 minutes intriguing. Well it was 23 actually, but I'm willing to wager nobody in the room wanted him to stop.

Observations

2010-02-14T02:29:00.000-07:00

First, one of the most notable characteristics of life is activity in the 4th dimension. Observe:

Another interesting fact is that computers also exhibit activity in the 4th dimension:

and

Almost entirely unrelated to the entries prior, here is a coffee cup as a measure of progress towards some certain success, followed by a painting and a portrait:

Technology

2010-02-13T23:34:00.000-07:00

I've heard that some people think technology isn't really progressing at an amazing rate. I think they're crazy. I don't think I've shared this yet, it's an example of the state of technology:

Frankly, I think we have so much technology at our fingertips that we have hardly even begun to scratch the surface of what it's capable of. On top of that, better technology is hitting the scene faster than anyone can keep up with. I certainly think that we are in a technological singularity, and that Kurzweil's condition (strong artificial intelligence) is satisfied by our own intelligence as augmented by the Internet. It's a subtle, almost secret form of artificial intelligence that, from what I gather, no one has yet realized the significance of. With the power of the Internet, a person, so willing, may learn practically anything, and at record speed--no digging through card catalogs or driving to the library necessary. Suppose you want to learn engineering but can't afford school? No problem, one of the best engineering schools in the country, MIT, has put all course materials for the first four introductory engineering courses online (lectures, notes, assignments, labs, etc) for free, available to anyone with an Internet connection. You'd probably want more than an introduction, so it's a good thing they've made freely available most of their curriculum, including that from other programs. You don't get any certificate, but does that really matter? I'm certain that a degree is worthless in lieu of an education, and that an education is no less valid if it isn't certified. This isn't a new fact, it's just easier to get an uncertified education now than it has been in the past. Take Dean Kamen, the man behind this amazing prosthetic arm and many other similarly astounding creations--he didn't earn even an undergraduate degree, though he now has around 7 honorary doctorates. The real point is that now other potential Kamens are easily able to obtain the resources necessary for their talent to reach fruition. An important addition is that I think most people have more potential than is generally realized; if this is true, than we should expect a significant increase in technological progression. The question I'll leave for you to answer then is this: have we seen a significant increase in technological progression since the Internet became widely available?

Arbitrary archetypical emotion

2010-02-09T22:25:00.000-07:00

Describing an emotion such as disappointment is an undertaking well served by describing situations which would cause this emotion, that is by conveying an archetypal scenario. Thus what follows.

My math professor had mentioned multiple times in class that an upcoming assignment could be done by way of spreadsheets or with a computer program. Given that I'm supposed to be a computer programmer, I figured that despite the bit of extra work involved I was either obliged or compelled to write the computer program. Hoping to not be merely a person who could write a computer program but instead perhaps someone who could (possibly, maybe) be described as having a talent for writing these programs, I spent some time and effort more than reason would suggest to construct a beautiful program, replete with color graphs and readable formatting. I went to some length to make it work with just a single double click, dissatisfied with the alternative prospect of explaining to my instructor how to enter a command into the shell, much less how to add java to the PATH. I added an equation parser so that input like sin(e^(ln(y-sqrt(x-y)))) could be interpreted correctly, a scrollable output window for tables of values, and 2 windows for 12 full graphs, labeled unambiguously with their associated equations. I even tested it on three different platforms to make certain it would Just Work (note it won't run on OSX because it doesn't have the latest JVM, Doesn't Just Work). So it was with pride and satisfaction that I sent it off along with the source code, wondering, wishing I could see the reaction.

A day later, I received the response. It was a request, for me to bring in a paper copy of my results; my professor, for whatever reason, didn't want to run my program.

That vignette could be used to describe disappointment, but with a catch: it would best illustrate the emotion only if the emotion was stated beforehand. If I had said that I was about to describe anger, frustration, or even success and satisfaction, would the story have illustrated the emotion any less? It is easy to see that a person could be angry in such a situation, frustrated too. But I could have just as easily felt flattered, were I to think that I had created a program so sophisticated it was to be handled with caution. If any of these clearly distinct emotions could have occurred, then circumstantial emotion is itself in some ways ambiguous (I hope that's not news). The ambiguity of emotion is something easily used to our advantage; it's a fact that when you feel positive emotions, you feel better, you're physically healthier. That being the case, why not exploit the ambiguity of emotion? In writing that program I learned a lot, I improved my life regardless of who sees or approves of it. I could feel disappointed, or I could feel a strong sense of self satisfaction in my accomplishment. Given those options the choice isn't very difficult! The power is in the fact that there is a choice, that you have a say in how you feel. You can spend all your time looking for reasons to be sad or you can spend all your time looking for reasons to be happy--either way you shouldn't be surprised by the results.

One down

2010-02-06T16:17:00.000-07:00

One assignment done, 6 or 7 to go. Ok, just an excuse to share some Rachels - Last Things Last.

Technically the piano is a percussion instrument, but I don't think that's why I like it so much. I like harpsichords a lot as well, which utilize plucking instead of striking to elicit those wonderful resonant frequencies. The logical conclusion then is that I like instruments roughly shaped like pianos. On a related note, Wikipedia says "The word piano is a shortened form of the word pianoforte, which is derived from the original Italian name for the instrument, clavicembalo [or gravicembalo] col piano e forte (literally harpsichord with soft and loud)."

Demonstration of feasibility

2010-02-06T00:46:00.000-07:00

I'm a bit too busy to give the normal glyphic flood, but as proof following my plea for autonomous vehicles this demanded mention. The Center for Automotive Research at Stanford (CARS) is planning to send an autonomous Audi up Pikes Peak at race speeds. Pikes Peak is a mountain road used as a rally stage, with surfaces varying from packed dirt to loose gravel. Actually an autonomous car has finished the course previously, but "only" at an average 25 mph. There is some reason to suspect the Stanford team will succeed in their intent, as they won DARPAs Grand Challenge and took 2nd place in their Urban Challenge; the car can at least drive 120 mph across the salt flats. I cannot wait to hear the results!

Light and reflections

2010-01-23T06:04:00.000-07:00

I was randomly trying to get a good photo of my iris when I noticed something interesting. One of my attempted variations was bouncing the flash off a nearby wall while looking at said wall.

It's not a good photo of the iris at all, but something interesting was going on in my pupil...

It almost looks like an image...

Hm, that looks familiar.

It's a horizontally mirrored image of the wall I was using to reflect my flash. Neat.

Max Richter

2010-01-20T15:55:00.000-07:00

Max Richter is a contemporary classically trained composer and musician. By my judgment he is absolutely a musical prodigy, certainly amongst the most gifted musical artists of this time. His pieces can often be characterized as avant-garde as he blends modern and classical elements, breaking conventions to enable the forging of some extraordinary, transcendental aural experience. Interestingly his Wikipedia page mentions him "commissioning and performing works by Arvo Pärt, Brian Eno, Philip Glass, Julia Wolfe and Steve Reich" early in his career, which happen to be a few of my favorite artists. Predictably enough, his music has had a rather profound impact on my life several times over several albums. Nonetheless, I know enough to understand music is as subjective as it gets, to the extent that the reactions of others can be rather hard to predict. Well, there's only one way to find out; here's some evidence for my conjecture:

The thing is, like many great musicians, he doesn't just write songs, he writes albums. Thus, as great as this song is alone on this page, it is but a mere shadow of itself when played as part of the whole. I recommend purchasing all his albums, if only to ensure he's funded and motivated to continue producing lots of music for as long as possible.

2 photos and a fabrication

2010-01-16T12:55:00.000-07:00

Time keeps on slippin'

2010-01-16T12:43:00.000-07:00

I like to think about really mind bending things, but even more than that I like to think about real mind bending things. For instance, I'm not sure I'll ever be comfortable in my understanding of the fact that the further we look into space the further back into time we look. This is a legitimately crazy thing--it means that given a powerful enough telescope we could watch the creation of our own universe. As impossible as that sounds, it's more or less correct; in fact, we have telescopes powerful enough to look inconceivably deep into spacetime, and we have actually captured the direct aftermath of the birth of our universe. This aftermath is known as the cosmic microwave background radiation, and its discovery earned a Nobel prize. No matter which way we look, the furthest we can see is the CMBR, it surrounds us. This is interesting because the best theory of the origins of the universe, the Big Bang theory, posits that the universe started in an extremely dense bit of space, expanding from there. But how much sense does it make that no matter which way we look we end up looking at that little bit of space? In one sense, the CMBR is a sphere that surrounds the universe. In another sense the universe surrounds it, as the universe grew from it. Either way it doesn't make any sense.

Not everything that throws us for a loop needs to be on a universal scale. Recently I read an article from NewScientist titled "Timewarp: How your brain creates the fourth dimension," which I found to be nothing short of profound. As you might gather from the admittedly bad title, the article is about our perception of time, which is something I had (surprisingly) never really considered before. Early on there is a sentence that nonchalantly flicks off a few words; "Time... is much weirder than we think it is."

Invitingly audacious, isn't it?

The whole article is well worth it, as it shows some ingenious experimental methodology and keen insight regarding something as potentially slippery as temporal perception. One thing that stood out was research apparently showing that a click track at 5 clicks per second (300 beats/minute) for 10 seconds improved performance in basic arithmetic, memorizing words or hitting a specific key on a computer keyboard by 10 to 20%.

There has been research done that shows binaural beats at certain frequencies can entrain certain brainwave frequencies, and it has been suggested that this phenomenon could possibly be used to enhance the performance of the brain. I wonder if binaural beats are somehow related to rapid beats... I know that because of the time delay with binaural beats it sounds as though there are twice as many beats as usual. Anyway, it will be interesting to see where all that research goes.

Intelligent Transportation Systems

2010-01-13T11:22:00.000-07:00

In 2004 it took an estimated 6400 megajoules to build a typical computer, including 17" CRT. This works out to 1778 kilowatt/hours, or about the average consumption of a house in the US for two months. Based on the 2009 US average industrial rate of $0.07 per kwh, assuming that only electricity was used and at 100% efficiency, $124.46 of the cost of the computer went to energy alone. I reckon this would represent somewhere around 10% of the total cost.

A gallon of gasoline has about 1.3x10^8 joules or 138 mj, meaning the computer would require about 46.4 gallons of gasoline to build. Using a rough average of the current prices, $2.70, this means about $125 worth of gasoline. Note that 1 gallon of gasoline has about 36.6 kwh.

Alternatively, the current average residential rate for electricity is $0.12 per kwh, meaning the cost to build the computer would be $213.36. Notice that a mere change of 5 cents to the cost of a kwh nearly doubles the end cost of the energy, which would most likely be reflected in the purchase price. It's important to recognize that energy and the cost thereof, from, gasoline, electricity, or beyond, is extant in all facets of our modern lives. In other words, if the price of gasoline goes up, the price of everything goes up. Of course most of our electricity is generated from coal and natural gas, so the price of gasoline doesn't seem directly related to building a computer. Unfortunately that's rather short sighted, as gasoline is required in order to move the computer parts to and fro, not to mention to transport the coal to the power plant to begin with.

Clearly if the cost of both gasoline and electricity were to rise by a nickel, we should naturally expect everything we buy to become quite a bit more expensive. It isn't difficult to see that this in turn would most likely have dire economic consequences. This is why there's so much buzz about energy, it should be obvious that the extreme consequences of demand outstripping energy supply readily justify extreme evasive efforts.

Imagine it was discovered that a meteor sufficient to absolutely obliterate Earth was headed straight towards us with a 100% probability of collision. Our dependence on gasoline is kind of like that. Buying a Prius would be like building a large bomb shelter: it would show that you probably realize there's some kind of problem, but that you nonetheless have absolutely no understanding of its magnitude. Do you know how much energy it takes to turn bits of iron buried in the Earth into a shiny new Prius? According to an average figure per car, not the Prius specifically, given by Toyota, around 22,519 kwh or 22.5 megawatt/hours , the rough equivalent of 615 gallons of gas. This means that driving a Prius 31,000 miles uses about the same amount of energy as building the thing to begin with! 22.5 mwh would power the average house for over 2 years, it's quite a lot of energy.

One implication is that by buying a used car instead of a Prius you are preventing the use of the equivalent 615 gallons of gas--buying a used 15 mpg beast and driving it 9,000 miles uses less gas than a new Prius with 0 miles on it, making the beast more sustainable and conscientious up to that point. I realize I always pick on the Prius but I don't mean to be too disheartening, the Prius is one of the better options available, even if I think it's not as extreme as it should be. Anybody who buys a new Prius with legitimate environmental concern is now obligated to drive that car into the ground.

New cars aside, one Mythbusters experiment showed a 39% increase in fuel efficiency from drafting a big rig--driving 10 feet behind it. Assuming every car could always draft in such a manner and increase efficiency by 39%, well then the yearly consumption of gas would decrease by a monumental 39%. That's a big assumption, but there's one way it could be realized, and that's with autopilot.

We can't all draft all the time because it is very dangerous to drive at almost any speed 10 feet behind anything, and the reason is simply biological: it takes a measurable and substantive amount of time for information to traverse the nervous system, this phenomenon is commonly referred to as reaction time. When you see brake lights, the light must activate an action potential in your retina, which travels into the brain. Once processed, another signal is sent down the looong path (compared to microscopic neural cells, inconceivably long) to your foot, telling it to press the brake pedal. If a truck moving 60 mph slams on the brakes with you at 10 ft behind, that reaction time is simply way too slow and it's game over. On the other hand, with autopilot brake lights aren't even necessary, the computer in each vehicle would be in constant communication with the cars in front and behind; the vehicles could be 10 ft apart, 2 ft apart, even physically connected like a train without any problem. I imagine the optimum arrangement would be a physical connection for a number of reasons. Of course, if all drivers were computers, the brakes themselves would hardly be needed, especially on the freeway. If you know the status of every car around you, about their planned movements, power characteristics and beyond, less wasteful air friction could be used to decelerate as appropriate, perhaps to allow a car to enter the train, which is itself a task much easier for computers than humans.

It isn't hard to envision that traffic lights would disappear with irrelevance as well, indeed I doubt it would make much sense to sit at an intersection when precise control and rapid, traffic-omniscient computer communications would allow cars of all headings to pass through synchronously. Sure, it will take a while to get used to constantly missing that other car by inches, but abandoning the familiar start/stop/wait process will give tremendous fuel savings, as it is the most inefficient part of driving and why the distinction between city mpg and highway mpg exists. Accordingly, the pace of society will see a new and considerable boost as not only the time between locations diminishes, but we are also free to spend that time doing something other than driving. Not only will we get places fast, ambulances, police, and fire trucks will be able to reach their destinations in the maximum possible time. If that weren't enough, we should expect that we are all a noticeably wealthier as our expenditure on gas shrinks, car insurance disappears, and as mentioned above practically everything drops in price along with energy cost. It's such a win for everyone it feels like cheating, but all of that is just the start.

The first thing people say when they hear of computers or robots driving cars is "but that sounds So dangerous, it would never be safe enough, I would never trust it!" Well, the bleakness of reality readily illustrates the absurdity of such a thought. Think of it this way: the autopilot system could have 5 million accidents a year and that would still be a huge improvement over humans driving cars! There were around 6.4 million car accidents in 2005. 100 people could die every single day in a computer driven car and it would still be safer, because 115 people are dying every day in the current system. One hundred and fifteen people sure seems like a lot, doesn't it? Well, consider that 3,303 people died in car accidents in the month of September, 2001. That month is and always will be bitterly remembered solely for the terrorist attacks that fell the Twin Towers, acts that meant the death of 2,819 people. There is no doubt that 9/11 was a tragedy, but so was 3,303 car accidents. Death by car accident and terrorist attack are fundamentally similar in that the victims of either are generally no less expecting nor deserving the outcome--incidence is practically random. Just because the first figure elicits strong memories and the next is unfamiliar doesn't make the prior any more tragic! Personally I'm inclined to think that every person is more or less equally valuable (namely, invaluable) and thus that each person's death is equally tragic. That being the case, the 2,819 terrorism related deaths on 9/11 are quantitatively about 85.347% as tragic as those due to car accidents in that same month. Alternatively, if we were to assume that only the death of a relative or dear friend qualified as measurably tragic then the majority of people would see that 2,819 random strangers and 3,303 random strangers are pretty close to each other, and we might expect to estimate their relative tragedy as similarly near. Objectivity aside, you would have to be colder than cold to somehow consider 3,303 lives lost any less tragic than 2,819 lives lost regardless of the details, these are all people that could have been you or I, yearning to be alive just like you and I: husbands, daughters, mothers, brothers... neighbors, friends and mentors; they were real people!

So it's established, there were two significant tragedies in the US in September, 2001, now what? Perspective: the 3,303 fatal car crashes in September was actually fewer than that for the two months post and prior, which makes 5 tragic months in a row. If you figure that anything over 2,000 deaths is sufficient to be labeled tragic, every single month in 2001 was a tragedy considering car accidents alone... 37,862 people died. Every single year from 1994 to 2008 has been a tragic year, with an average 37,500 fatal car accidents per year. 1994 is the earliest data I have, but I'm willing to bet the numbers don't improve much by going back further. Over the 14 years that span 1994 and 2008 562,712 people died in car accidents. If instead of happening over 14 years it happened in one day, that day would be about 199.6 times as tragic as 9/11, like the events of 9/11 replayed 199.6 times in one day. 562,712 is 2.5 times the total number of people that died from the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Know that those weren't the most devastating though--strategic firebombing of Japanese cities killed around 500,000 people, inconceivable yet still fewer.

Cars driven by people are as deadly, if not more, than world wars.

Then how dangerous would it be? Because an intelligent transportation system would need to be implemented everywhere all at once and thus a massive project, breadth and depth of testing at all stages is a certainty. To start, there has been decades of dedicated research on this specific issue, and the state of affairs is amazing (see DARPA's grand and urban challenges). Given the talent inevitably attracted to exceptional challenges (such as top engineers to NASA), a category for which this certainly qualifies, I presume each issue arising throughout development would be deftly handled. Finally, I would expect that some qualified organization would be intimately involved, dictating the requirements and governing the development to ensure safety and reliability, much as the FAA does with all things aerial. An autopilot system made properly as thus, I predict less than a hundred accidents per year from the very start, probably no deaths. With such a system the probability of dying in a car accident would go from frighteningly high to somewhere less than being struck by lightning. The current estimated yearly cost of car accidents is over $230 billion dollars, so... cha-ching! There's an extra $229.98 billion dollars floating around. Nonetheless we would expect the system to improve over time, transforming cars from most dangerous to safest form of transport.

Optimally the typical commuter car should be prepare for transition by being made small and ultra-light, with aerodynamics engineered in terms of chains of cars. The majority of cars should seat one passenger since most often a car carries only one person and any empty seats means wasted energy. With standardized interfacing and characteristics, other vehicle forms would fulfill the need for cargo haulers, high capacity vehicles, and so forth. Ideally vehicles would be public property, eliminating the need for a family to have multiple vehicles for commuting and family outings, but realistically this is the US and people want to own the things they use. Regardless, thanks to the reduced complexity and altogether more efficient vehicle design coupled with energy efficiency savings, a family could afford to own a number of vehicles which nonetheless add up to a fraction of the energy and materials cost of the present steel monstrosities, maybe able even to be stored in the same amount of space. Alternatively a sufficiently large platform could allow for modular passenger compartments; though the platform size would be less than optimum for single passengers, needing only one drivetrain would decrease materials consumption. The subsequent implication is that modular drivetrains could be used instead of modular passenger compartments.

The aforementioned efforts combined would make for an increase in efficiency so marvelous that domestic oil production would actually be sufficient for the first time since the 70's, when it peaked. Since we're making a whole new concept of car, it would make sense to complete the metamorphosis: ditch internal combustion for electrical, pave the road with solar cells, and oil becomes practically irrelevant for the first time since the second industrial revolution. Rather than carry around the really heavy main batteries, leave them stationary and build contact strips in the road so that cars can zip around like full scale slot cars. The relatively lightweight backup batteries would still be carried so that in the case of main power failure the vehicle could still maneuver and communicate safely. With the sum of these modifications, we should expect our busiest roads to give the impression of losing much of the normal traffic--in reality, the same road may have even more traffic, only seeming less because more cars fit in less space for less time. Each intersection would know about every car planning to traverse it from the earliest possible moment, and would assign each car a set of parameters with which it is to use for traversal, including possible alternate plans. Each car would then communicate with every other car assigned to the intersection around the same time to verify that everything works out, a sanity check independent of the intersection. For example, two chains of several cars each plan to travel east and north through the same intersection at the same time. The intersection may dictate that both chains enter the intersection moving 80 mph, the first at 5:00:00 and the other at 5:04:00. The chains verify together and find that they will pass within 6 inches of each other, but that this is an acceptable margin given the wind conditions and other factors. The plan is confirmed with the intersection and each car passes through, deviating a few hundredths of an inch from their predictions--these deviations would then be incorporated back into the prediction model which is distributed across the whole network. Suppose four very long chains travelling in every direction are approaching the same intersection. This time the intersection would probably dictate that the lead cars split and accelerate through such that at any moment there are 4, possibly 8 cars in the intersection, each one missing the other by a hair. Eventually it is expected that the traffic network will maximize efficiency of the whole system in unexpected ways. Maybe previously busy intersections will be used as though there were no crossing, or all but a handful of wide, long, straight thoroughfares will fall into relative disuse.

I am a driving enthusiast, I really love driving. Many days it seems my highest aspiration is to do laps around Laguna Seca in some kind of ultra performance four wheeled vehicle. But despite my pleasure in driving there is no way that I can call the present system workable. It's extremely dangerous, terribly slow, woefully inefficient, and absurdly expensive. The truth is that we have the technology to automate the roads, people have been working on it for decades and the resulting systems have proven reliable even in novel situations many humans might otherwise fail. It might not be perfect, but it's much better, and as I've shown we're so terrifically awful at driving that that's not saying much. The transition is ready to happen, and when it finally does our world will simply become safer, faster, better, and wealthier. The only downside is that it can't be done over night.

Once we finish automating our roads, what's the next revolutionary development? A space elevator. More on that some time.

some sources:

"Energy Intensity of Computer Manufacturing" by Eric Williams, United Nations University
http://www.scribd.com/doc/4183/Energy-Intensity-of-Computer-Manufacturing
"How much does electricity cost? What is a kilowatt-hour?"
http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/cost.html
"How much electricity do computers use?"
http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/computers.html
Energy Content of Fuels (in Joules), other useful tables
http://physics.syr.edu/courses/modules/ENERGY/ENERGY_POLICY/tables.html
"Weekly U.S. Retail Gasoline Prices, Regular Grade"
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oil_gas/petroleum/data_publications/wrgp/mogas_home_page.html
"Average Retail Price of Electricity to Ultimate Customers by End-Use Sector, by State"
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/table5_6_a.html
"Energy to build a car?"
http://www.cleanmpg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=18240
"Most and Least Fuel Efficient Cars "
http://www.fueleconomy.gov/FEG/bestworst.shtml
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's Fatality Analysis Reporting System
http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx
Wikipedia - "Intelligent Transportation System"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_transportation_system
U.S. Dept. of Transportation - "Intelligent Transportation Systems Benefits and Costs, 2003 Update"
http://ntl.bts.gov/lib/jpodocs/repts_te/13772.html#4.0

Photos

2009-12-30T04:10:00.000-07:00

A bend

2009-12-02T20:27:00.001-07:00

Release 3 wouldn't be much of a follow up without a few milestones, and milestones (of a sort) I did make. This time the stretch became a bend, which doesn't make sense but for the fact that thereafter follows the break--fortunately I anticipate it to be more of the winter kind than the psychotic kind. The 17 straight hours of desk work seemed pretty significant at the time, but today upon leaving my obligations (met and otherwise) at the classroom door, I realized that 17 hours was a number unwittingly exceeded. Admittedly, it took a while to push aside enough fuzz to narrow down two sides of time, longer still to then find the difference within that silly base-twelve chronological institution. Fancy dictum and questionable conflations aside, this time I worked for around 21 hours straight. The distinction though is probably less than significant, since the prior 17 was constrained by having such a late start--this time I only managed to begin my Olympic marathon of stationary feats a few hours earlier. For the better too, as there was much to be done! It started rough, as my digital tablet suddenly refused to comply with my digital scribing needs. Its absence might have meant more time available, not lost to enjoying or perfecting my production, but that was time lost nonetheless trying to get it to work as it has and should (by all reasonable expectations), and this was time lost without the end result of a better picture, mind. Eventually reason won over and I resigned myself to the mouse for my work. While we're here, let me opine that the mouse was a brilliant introduction to the world of computers 25 years ago--today it's just a sad and unavoidable display of our deficiency in interacting with computers. Even worse, people with money to move markets have been convinced of the absurd notion that touch interfaces are superior. That's the point where I might have written "but I digress," but didn't; to clarify, I did digress, briefly (and continue to do so), but did not make the matter explicit in the sentence prior--I was saving it for this sentence. Moving on, I decided to embrace the uniformity of which electronic mice conduce by creating a virtual milieu of very uniform structures for my next game. For this strange place I envisioned a purple sky and square hills covered in blue grass, but attempts at both proved unsatisfactory. Instead I went for square hills covered in arbitrary textures. The result certainly was strange.
With my patience presently waning just as it was then, I moved on to a mildly meaningful but voluminous task (thusly giving a questionable but satisfying notion of productivity) partially akin to sorting books for my groups' body of computer code. It was with irony then that I moved on to some real work of debugging, for which several hours of careful reading gave in return very little productivity. At some point near there others in my group awoke (as normal people are expected to do) and began to make their own contributions to our code, starting with the goal of the illusion of a completed project, with any progress thereafter for good measure. As the only person able to produce visual elements (or the only person foolish enough to readily volunteer), I then spent most of my time drawing (or mousing) graphics. Of course we had way too much to do, and even in a rush I have a hard time producing insufficient material (unless that's my intent from the start, but lack of time isn't sufficient to incite acceptable intent for whatever reason), so I spent a lot of time thinking that I should really just leave it, whatever it was, how it was, but that it really needed to be fixed and so on. Perhaps the highlight of the bend was another event which surpassed its image in the stretch: once again, I managed to do quite an amazing thing in the final moments of the ordeal--I made an entire game, from drawing to coding, in about a half hour. In the stretch it was much the same in an hour, but for whatever reason so much more thrilling. If anything, back then my modifications to the code were rapid foolish dashes of adventure into the unknown, whereas now my understanding of the code was such that my programming amounted to copypasta with a few lines changed to get new images. Nonetheless the result was a game that functioned to some degree (don't try anything other than moving left and right), but it met the final requirements we naively set for ourselves long ago of having 6 total games. In reality there were two types games with slight variations between them but otherwise obviously the same. Though our result was a little rough, it could be cleaned up in a day or two, so it wasn't that bad. While only having two gameplay mechanics is less entertaining in the long run, I think it was sufficient for our purposes.

Could be a good deal...

2009-11-24T03:39:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I got an email regarding the Department of Energy computational science graduate fellowship. Normally I'd probably ignore such an email, but for whatever reason I took a gander. Inside I found some words (as one might expect), but these were the ones in particular that caught my eye:

Benefits of the Fellowship:

$32,400 yearly stipend
Payment of all tuition and fees
Workstation purchase assistance
Yearly conferences
$1,000 yearly academic allowance
12-week research practicum
Renewable up to four years

Sounds pretty decent I thought, but what's the catch? This kind of dough doesn't usually come without some strings (or steel cables) attached, so what is it, a lifetime of indentured servitude? Well the conferences are required, but they're all expenses paid on top of extra stipend for attendance, so it's more like a mandatory paid vacation. Same for the research practicum, in which you are required to use massive DoE supercomputers for whatever you want. Notice that when they say "workstation purchase assistance," they mean that they will only match the money you put up for whatever high performance computer you want. In addition, whatever school you attend has to agree to not have you working as a TA or research assistant for more than one semester. Finally, the only non-academic requirement is that you agree to consider job offers from the DoE or contractors.

As far as I'm concerned, this whole program is the best idea anyone has ever had! The thought of being paid to go to grad school makes me very, very happy. I managed to find the applicant statistics for last year and it turns out that about 1/20 people who applied got in. Assuming equal probability those odds aren't bad at all, however that's probably not a fair assumption to make; with benefits like these, it's easy to be motivated to do better in school so that my probability of selection might improve, hence the current time and my working on homework (well, ok, blogging, but motivated or not everyone needs a break now and again). I'm actually fairly confident in my grad school prospects, mainly because of my undergraduate research. This is my second semester of such, and apparently my research advisor likes me enough to propose advising me next semester as well despite him being on sabbatical (so that we'll be prepared to "hit the ground running in the summer"). I can't express how grateful I am to have found such a good fit and generally exceptional person to work with... though that statement does do a pretty good job of at least indicating the magnitude of my gratitude. As it stands, it seems that I will be graduating with 6 semesters of research experience, which, combined with being the student administrator for the CS department's linux server and a double major, ought to more than make up for some of my less than optimal grades. Nonetheless, better grades certainly aren't going to hurt, so back to the books!

HD isn't always HD

2009-11-20T12:45:00.000-07:00

For years now HD has been a magic word, and for just as long I've found humor in its use, when not shaking my head at the naievete involved. Everybody knows that you have two options with HD, 720 or 1080. Clearly 1080 is the better option, because it's a bigger number... right? Well, yes and no. These numbers represent the vertical resolution or number of rows of pixels from top to bottom of the screen. Of course vertical resolution is only half the picture, for whatever reason the horizontal resolution is implicit: 720 has a full resolution of 1280x720, 1080 has 1920x1080. In terms of resolution, yes, 1080 is better, but this is a really restricted and possibly misleading analysis. In terms of actual clarity, a vastly more important measure is PPI (pixels per inch). Imagine for instance that the big man on the block has a 60" 1080 HD lcd screen, in his own little world he is really special for having such a ginormous TV with such crystal clarity. But in reality, his neighbor's 20" 1080 HD lcd screen looks much clearer, and the reason is simple: both TVs have the exact same number of pixels, which means that to fill the extra space the 60" has pixels that are 3 times as big (with 9 times the area), making them much easier to distinguish from the same distance, making the contrasting areas of the image look blocky and jagged. To further illustrate, imagine another neighbor has a sad little 5" 1080 HD lcd screen--in truth, he is the one to envy! The clarity of such a screen would be astounding, with 440.6 pixels per inch it could draw letters and numbers 1/100th of an inch tall, just about twice the width (diameter) of an average human hair. On the other hand, Mr. big man only has 36.7 ppi, the smallest letter his TV could draw would be 1/7th of an inch tall, close to the width (diameter) of a pencil eraser!

The reason I say HD isn't HD is that as a computer user, I'm accustomed to HHD (higher than high-def)--you probably are too, you just weren't aware of it. Suppose we ignore all this (very relevant) pixel density stuff and focus solely on resolution; the average computer monitor has been capable of resolution better than 720 for a long time. 1280x1024 is the most common computer resolution, and it has 142% the resolution of 720. It is only 63% of 1080, but 1280x1024 is rapidly going out the window--in fact, you can now get a new 22" lcd computer monitor with greater than 1080 HD resolution for $200. The discovery of this recently surprised me, that seems like a great bargain. I'm a big fan of 30" 2560x1600 monitors, but unfortunately they are tremendously expensive, so in my idle pondering and interest in value metrics I ended up deriving the very simple math to get the numbers above and a few more that relate to 30" monitors. In short, a 2048x1152 screen has only 57.6% the resolution of a 30", but can be bought for 15-20% of the price. Likewise, if you really want to match the 30" experience, a 24" 2048x1152 monitor will have the same PPI... but any smaller size with the same resolution will also have a smoother image (or higher definition) than the 30". With this perspective it's no longer a great bargain, but an amazing deal.

need... more... ram... MORE RAM!

2009-11-18T17:10:00.000-07:00

Depending on who you're talking to and how much they like to debate semantics, data mining and machine learning are essentially the same thing. The important point is that incredible amounts of data are needed in order to mine golden nuggets of useful information. The Netflix dataset used for the Netflix Prize, for instance, is well over 4GB; to make matters worse, unless one writes a lot of skillfully efficient code, putting this into a data structure takes quite a bit more space. On top of that, raw data isn't very useful unless you have room to fit whatever models you're trying to construct in addition. Despite my relatively short presence and shorter sentience on this Earth, I remember a time when 4GB was a huge capacity for a hard disk. Of course, these days 4GB will fit on the increasingly outdated optical DVD format... 4GB can even fit on a plastic sliver of flash memory, less substantial than a humble dime. In a time of terabyte hard drives costing less than a trip to the grocery store, 4GB seems laughably diminutive. However, there's a significant issue here! Most people know that a computer has several types of memory: RAM and a hard drive (there are more, to be covered momentarily). Why are there two types of memory, why not just use a hard drive? The answer is simple, getting data from a hard drive takes 100,000 times longer than from ram! While a specially built computer could run with only a hard drive, it would be so unbelievably slow that nobody in their right mind would ever use it. For a good number of tasks, like listening to music and looking at pictures, a hard drive works just fine. The reason is that these things are just read--once they've been read and used, say the sound the data represents has been sent to the speakers, the data can be thrown away. However, the more important, invisible bits of data that allow a computer to run are most often handled very differently: once read and processed, the results are stored so that they might be used later. Imagine, for instance, that you have a counter (which are extremely common in computers and programming) that counts the numbers of mouse clicks. If the processer were to take the stored counter, add one, and throw the result away, then the next time the processor read the counter it would get the number that the counter started at. If you have a program that displays some message when you click 10 times, the message will never get displayed. Obviously, in order for your program to work, the cpu must be able to remember how many clicks have happened, so it must read and write. For this simple example, the time it takes to read/write from a hard drive is ok--even the fastest human clicker is inconceivably slow compared to the inner workings of a computer. However, if this count is something that is read/written millions of times a second, the time it takes to access the hard drive will be an incredible bottleneck. In fact, this kind of situation is extremely common in computers (hard drives are the biggest bottleneck in a computer), hence why we have ram; computers simply need a place that can be accessed very quickly in order to work fast enough for us not to prefer watching grass grow. For a bit of extra credit, let me point out that as far as the cpu is concerned, even ram is dreadfully slow. See why after the jump.
Lets consider a 3 gigahertz processor. 3 GHz means that the processor runs through 3 Billion cycles per second. One cycle doesn't represent one calculation, in fact the relationship is so complicated that even I'm not very interested in the details, so lets assume that it takes 3 cycles to complete one calculation (technically I mean instruction, but for our purposes calculation will suffice). This means that the processor can only do a Billion calculations every second, pretty slow eh? Now talking about a billionth of a second can get tiring, but fortunately there's a shortcut: a billionth of a second is also known as a nanosecond (ns), so our cpu can do one calculation per nanosecond. Accessing ram takes about 60 ns, but what does this mean? Lets suppose our computer is busy for one whole second with a simple task: read a value from ram (60 ns), add one to it (1 ns), write the result back to ram (60 ns), and repeat. This task will happen about 8,264,462 times (1s/121ns), and for about 99% of that 1 second the cpu will be twiddling its digits, doing nothing, waiting for the ram. Clearly having a computer waiting 99% of the time is a tremendous waste! This is why there is another, even faster type of ram built right onto the cpu chip (actually several types, known as L1, L2, and sometimes L3), amongst a number of other technical and generally uninteresting efficiency boosts. We might be inclined to think it obvious that all our ram simply be L1, which would be a great idea if it weren't for the fact that L1 is at least 10,000 times more expensive than hard drive space.

Moving on, my very long winded and educational prelude is meant to suggest that moving the Netflix data back and forth between a hard disk is not an option--even very efficient algorithms could take decades to complete! Recently my personal adventures in machine learning (my academic adventures take place on a box that is adequately equipped... for now. For some things there will never be enough ram) have become bounded by my "limited" amount of ram, and as such I've been looking into some beefier hardware.

I've spent some time pricing out various configurations and comparing options (fortunately looking is free). Not surprisingly, building my own saves substantially and gives a lot more flexibility. Currently the most sensible route is buying a server board because that will allow me to upgrade in the future; the board I have in mind can hold two processors, but only needs one to run, which is key. By only buying one cpu, I can maximize the ram for that chip, leaving the option to double the power of the computer down the road when/if prices drop. Interestingly, as part of my research I checked how the prices of my current computer have changed (something I've done every so often since the purchase), and the results have some surprises. For one, almost everything I bought has been discontinued, except for (unsurprisingly) the case, keyboard, fans, and (surprisingly) the ram. The price of my ram has fluctuated over time, sometimes more expensive and sometimes less; currently it's 13% cheaper, indicating that I managed to purchase it near its cheapest, but also that there is a lower limit for the price of some things. This has an interesting implication, which is that the price of the proposed components might not drop, but it's a moot point: except for the very low risk of a substantial increase in price, there is only the chance of it staying the same or dropping, both indicating that waiting is a good strategy. I mention this because my second most attractive option (especially in the Tim the tool man Taylor way, 16 cores... *grunt grunt*) is a 4 processor board using last generation tech which required fairly close analysis for comparison. The advantage is that it has more power and a higher maximum capacity for ram, at a presently lower cost--the cpus cost half as much and the ram is slightly cheaper. However, the disadvantages are that the prices most likely won't drop much, the time components for upgrades will be available is probably rather short, and practically speaking more cpus means less ram per cpu which I gather would have an undesirable performance impact (task distribution amongst different cpus, even between different cores on the same cpu, is presently one of the most pressing challenges in computer science).

As it stands, the system I've imagined has an Intel Xeon E5520 (Nehalem) quad core and 36 GB of triple channel DDR3 1066 ram (9x4GB FB-DIMMs) on a dual socket Tyan motherboard with a maximum of 144GB of ram for the glorious day when 8GB DIMMs cost a fraction of their current >$1000 price. The price I've projected includes an average figuring (since I spent enough time comparing the important bits to not want to conclusively examine the boring bits) for the cost of a 1000+ watt non-redundant power supply, E-ATX case, and single hard drive. And the total is....... $2500, which, if you ask me, is surprisingly agreeable for the power and upgradeability of the included hardware. The cost of ram is about 43% of this total! For comparison, a Dell PowerEdge T710 workstation similarly equipped but with only 32GB of ram costs about $3000, but comes with support (pssh, tech support is for noobs) and a warranty (just like individually purchased components), which comes with restrictions (you mean I can't crack open my box? Yeah right, get lost) and the capability of Dell to void it, leaving you high and dry (Boooo, Hissss!). Alternatively, a new, student-discounted MacPro with 2 cpus, required to reach the maximum amount of ram--32GB purchased after market for savings--costs $4230, with no further ram capacity upgrades possible.

The end of scrubbing tubs

2009-11-05T16:25:00.001-07:00

As a college aged male bachelor, I know a thing or two about bathrooms that have gone uncleaned for longer than many people might think possible. To make matters worse, I use a humble castile soap that produces scum with unabashed vigor. Last week, by the combined effort of many unknowable forces, I decided to clean the bathroom, and in the process made a fantastic, incredible, revolutionary discovery (this time not involving micro fiber cloths)! I started with the typical futile effort, spraying everything with potent cleaning chemicals and scrubbing, scrubbing, scrubbing with a typical plastic bristle brush. Before long it was clear that all my effort was adding up to nothing. I decided to pull out the big guns, and began to seek a green scouring pad. I found one, and thumbed it as I saw in the same drawer a box of those new-fangled magic "eraser sponges," also known as melamine foam, I had picked up on a whim at the dollar store. Feeling my sense of adventure kick in (and not knowing what else I might ever use them for), I decided to grab a magic sponge and give it a try. The results were unbelievable. The soap scum literally rolled off every surface after just a pass or three; I had the whole shower cleaned and sparkling in under 5 minutes! Never before in my life has a shower taken less than an hour, at least, to clean, and thus my excitement for this finding. From now on I needn't fear nor need to clear a day so that I can clean the shower; maybe, just maybe, it'll get cleaned more often now... no commitment there though. I checked the box of the eraser sponge afterward, and it does actually suggest using it for cleaning the shower, which means someone, somewhere out there actually knew about this beforehand. This is hard to believe, I would have figured the news would spread like word of a Gmail outage (wildfire in this age is the new grass growing, amirite?). I don't know if they've advertised these for this purpose since my exposure to commercials is essentially nonexistent, but I'm led to believe that even if they did it would pass unnoticed and the reason is simple: from memory, bathroom cleaning products are depicted in an ineffective way. I remember them showing what looked like an evenly disgusting tile wall, oddly aesthetic in the precision of its filth, which becomes pristine after just one pass of a sponge. Yeah, sure, everyone believes that. Even with the magic sponge there's some work involved, but I think 30 seconds of someone cleaning a real bathroom in real time with real results would be an amazing commercial. It'd say "Hey, look, this actually works. We're not trying to trick you using magical cartoon scrubbing bubbles." But then again, this is marketing we're talking about, which leads to a strong movie recommendation: How to get Ahead in Advertising.

More than you ever wanted to know about soap after the jump!

As a quick aside (Ed: not quick), I happily use Dr. Bronner's bar soap. For one, I like the feel of castile soap; others say it feels "slimy." I'm not sure I agree, but I don't think that's a bad descriptor for a sensation when the unsanitary connotations are removed from the word. I think it might feel more oily, like the wet version of velvety. I also love the scents the soap comes in: peppermint, lavender, eucalyptus, citrus, etc.

Perhaps my favorite feature of Dr. Bronner's is the elegance of the ingredients list:
water, saponified organic coconut, organic palm and organic olive oils (w/retained glycerin), organic hemp oil, organic jojoba oil, essential oils, citric acid, vitamin.

Simply enough, I don't see anything on there that I might object to rubbing all over my body on a daily basis.

On the other hand, there's the ingredients in Dove bar soap:
sodium cocoyl isethionate, stearic acid, coconut acid, sodium tallowate, water, sodium isethionate, sodium stearate, cocamidopropyl betaine, sodium cocoate or palm kernelate, fragrance, sodium chloride, tetrasodium EDTA, trisodium etidronate, BHT, titanium dioxide and sodium dodecyl benzene sulfonate.

Hm... if I were to come across a large barrel marked BHT, or sodium cocoyl isethionate (SCI), I doubt my first thought would be 'hey, I should rub this on my skin!' To be fair, Dove (owned by the ginormous multinational Unilever) might just be using scientific names for similar ingredients--that's no problem, scientific precision is a Good Thing, not a reason to blindly assume danger and run in fear. Were scientific precision the case at hand, in the age of the Internet, it would be easy to resolve, and so I did in some minor way. SCI is a detergent or anionic surfactant, which means that it reduces the surface tension of water. It turns out that it is a very specific chemical compound derived from coconut oil, which is partially more reassuring than the big scientific name. Coconut acid refers to a mixture of the fatty acids (fatty acids are often oils) that appear in coconut oil, and it's a fair bet that cocamidopropyl betaine and sodium cocoate have something to do with coconuts too. Intuitively I'd still prefer the whole oil than some specific derivative of that oil, but intuition isn't exactly the most intelligent creature (otherwise airplanes and computers would have been common sense a long time ago). What about BHT? Also known as butylated hydroxytoluene, it's a "lipophilic (fat-soluble) organic compound that is primarily used as an antioxidant food additive [...] as well as in cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, jet fuels, rubber, petroleum products, electrical transformer oil, and embalming fluid." In this particular instance, it is most likely used as an analogue of Vitamin E to reduce the oxidation of unsaturated oils by atmospheric oxygen--in other words, it's a preservative. Once again, BHT is like Vitamin E, but not Vitamin E, and once again from the naive common sense perspective, I'd rather just have Vitamin E. I haven't looked at any of the other ingredients, but from painting I know that titanium dioxide is used as a white pigment, and whether or not it seems to be benign I'd rather just have off color soap! Dr. Bronners uses some fair trade ingredients as well as orgranic ingredients; whether either of these mean anything is probably closer to subjective at this point in time.

A stretch

2009-11-04T22:01:00.000-07:00

I am now full and well wholly exhausted. Today saw Release 2 for software engineering; yesterday saw the most recent time I got out of bed. Far from complaint, there's something about staying awake for 36 hours or more that strongly appeals to me. I enjoy the feeling near the end of it, a sort of lightness of being. I enjoy the solitude of the earliest morning/latest night, that short period in which this little city is blanketed by an expansive silence--and Oh, those precious moments you can hear the sound of snow falling, a performance so minuscule that only amongst the stillest movements can an audience find itself. Further, with some associative tendrils linking them all, there is special joy in getting into bed after having not gotten into bed for some atypical stretch. It is almost as if as time goes on, the general average distribution contracts to a focal point of particular lucidity, a larger than normal indefinite fog lying within the perimeter that typically defines the periphery, and which invokes some new order of perception in many ways desirable but at least for its provocation of unique insight.

I Really enjoy the amazing amount I can accomplish over that time... I have some sense stronger than naught that I'm not really able to hit my stride until 12 or more hours after awakening. Actually, I recall clearly that despite finally managing to awaken early enough for class yesterday, I was in a Franciscan class mental fog nearly all day--it wasn't until around 11 PM that the urgency of the upcoming deadline and hopeless mounds of work (even worse, the mounds hadn't yet been assembled, by then there was merely a postulation that some mother-lode waited for a few rocks to be overturned) translated into some motivation to begin working on it. To be certain the thought of a good chance to pace my new furniture played some part, but before long, with some pride of performance and an awkwardly intangible form of irony, the chair disappeared and I became absolutely consumed with work. I worked for 17 hours, from 11 PM to 5:30 PM, and the only thing that stopped me then was the necessity of attending class; despite the fact, I was 15 minutes late for my inability to find a timely conclusion. I wish I could explain exactly why this was the case, but I'm afraid it's the type of situation that even another knowledgeable programmer would have a difficult time understanding. In sufficient, through the final pressing hour I managed to do what I would have previously considered impossible from a number of perspectives. That is to say I experienced some minor miracle nonetheless greater than maintaining consciousness through somnolence by programming a computer to move monkeys and boxes about a screen with bounded futility.

Actually, it was a lot of fun. Throughout the hours I happily dabbled slightly deeper into otherwise foreign but interest arts: graphical design, audio production, not to mention the manufacture of code that has a functional, visual interface.

Herman Miller Embody - first reactions

2009-11-03T16:13:00.000-07:00

I think talking about "my chair" is banal and way too close to boastful, the egotism inherent therein being a personality characteristic I try particularly hard to avoid (synonyms of boastful read like a list of things I doubt many people aim for as a characterization: arrogant, conceited, pompous, pretentious, etc). With that in mind, I think "the chair" in general is fascinating, and am grateful that I have the opportunity to experience it in real life; though I was hesitant to write this up, perhaps my thoughts will lend insight to someone else.

With all that said, I have to admit, few things will sound more pretentious than what I'm about to say anyway.

First, the Embody has an arresting aesthetic, its form is absolutely captivating; it is actually inspiring to look at. I don't mean inspiring in the generic, feel-good way, I mean when I look at it there is a surge of creative, unique thoughts and a sense that the majority of objects we encounter each day are needlessly bland, expressionless, devoid of notability--altogether invisible and uninspiring. You might look at a picture of the Embody and think 'I don't get it, looks like a moderately interesting chair,' and with that I'd agree, a picture of the Embody displays a moderately interesting chair. However, as I've mentioned before, the 2 dimensional projection of a 3 dimensional image loses and incredible amount of information; the chair IRL is a whole different story.

Of course, function is a critical element of design... personally, I think form is just the whipped cream topping of any design. To be sure, a desk isn't much of a desk if you can't use it as a working surface, no matter how beautiful it is--Michelangelo's David is not a desk. On the other hand, as long as you can use it is a working surface, no matter how nauseatingly ugly it is, it'll work as a desk. Thus, it is a good thing that the Embody has function covered. But there are levels of functionality, and true to the reason I chose this particular chair, it seems to have function covered to an exceptional degree; not only can you sit in it, sitting in it is a pleasure. I haven't had the chance to sit in it for one of my 12-hour-straight coding jams yet, and that's the true test, so the full extent of its functionality remains to be seen. As it is though, it's a pleasure to sit in, it feels something like sitting on a bed. This isn't altogether surprising, as the seat has a system of suspension much like a mattress. This is a wonderful idea, and one that really surprises me for its obviousness, yet lack of presence in every other office chair I know of. The back also has an interesting suspension system, one with less give.

One thing that I love most about the Embody is that despite looking and sounding very complicated, despite a long design process with many prototypes, it is actually surprisingly simple, especially the suspension systems. The composition, strength, elasticity, and formation of the various plastics used is probably fairly involved, but in the end, the shape and intersection of all of them is very natural and efficient. Certainly this was a design objective (easier said than done), but the result is powerful; the Embody looks like an exoskeleton, an extension of the body, and what could be better than a solution provided by nature?

I don't think it's the be-all, end-all of office furniture, but then again I have a strong bias against conclusive permanence, so no chair will ever fulfill that criteria (except possibly an infinitely adjustable "indefinite chair" formed in real time by nanobots). In case you couldn't tell, so far I love it. The only shortcoming I've thought of, an insignificant and unimportant one, is that it doesn't have a headrest. There's no obvious reason why they might choose to omit such a thing, but I'm certain that it wasn't a simple fact of oversight--clearly there was no oversight involved in the design of this chair. The only reason I can think of is that they figured the inclusion of a headrest would provoke a change in the implied posture which would possibly have a detrimental impact on ergonomic functionality. Well, I'm sure there is a reason, I'd like to know what it is. My only other complaint is that it took a long 8 weeks to get here.

A Pictorial Vindication

2009-11-01T16:29:00.000-07:00

I have received word that, given the existence of infinite permutations of parallel universes, some people have been considering my recent furniture upgrade as unnecessary. However, in light of what I'm about to show you, I believe any transdimensional rumors will be sufficiently concluded as having no factual foundation. I present my current chair (with bonus Pickles action):

If one happened to feel gifted with a finely tuned, elite aesthetic sense, and that by seeing this image this sense has been dismantled and disfigured, transformed irreperably into an unidentifiable blop of goo, allow me to comfort them; had their sense been incapable of handling this fundamentally evocative display of Form, it wasn't worth a tarnished penny anyway and nothing of value was lost. I suppose they wouldn't see the profound symbolism in the bits of open cell gray foam that with clinging tenacity remain on the rough plane of misshapen splinter spitting plywood, refugees of a forceful division of useless padding from malformed foundation. Nor would they see, I imagine, the ongoing dialog between the thoughtlessly intrusive, precariously balanced seat, mismatched and standing as a contradiction to the firm stability of the back, which with a posture slightly less than vertical seems to mourn the loss of its intended counterpart. Of course it all goes so much deeper, more than I could fit into any number of blog posts.

I will surrender, yes, that I assembled this marvel in a fit of vanity, that I ought to have focused from the start on a more balanced, less perfect design. However, I assure you that the striking, fluid beauty of this piece is complemented by an enhanced functionality; namely, this artifactual collage doesn't make the lower half of my body go numb as its unglorified predecessor did. Frankly, I do admit some amount of guilt for purchasing a replacement for a chair that is otherwise the paragon of design, but I think that it is better served encased in glass as an enduring testament of what can be accomplished with concerted effort and a healthy dose of luck.

In case it sounds as though I've gone completely bonkers, the truth is yes, I have--but only temporarily. Such is the result of staying up all night doing probability homework.

Software Engineering

2009-10-23T04:24:00.000-06:00

For my Software Engineering course we are spending the whole semester developing educational software as small groups. Each group was given the choice between math or spelling oriented software for 1st to 2nd graders. Our group chose math, since it is inherently easier to deal with numbers than words in programs. The course calls for 3 releases, or waypoints at which we demonstrate our software and, since they are in place of what would typically be exams, our software is supposed to meet criteria we determined for ourselves at the beginning of the semester. Thus far there has been one release, and two of the three groups had very visually limited programs, instead focusing on the backend. My group, however, was the complete opposite. This was not a mistake, either. If you know me well enough (or have read enough of my blog), you'll know that I am very critical when it comes to design, and this project is no exception. Initially I was hesitant to work in a group, as I've never handled group dynamic as well as I should, and indeed at the start of the semester it seemed as though the influence of the group was resulting in nothing short of chaos. However, when it came down to assigning the tasks, I ended up with about 90% or more of the work. While that meant a lot of chairtime, it also meant that I got to design the foundation of the project without any interference, so I decided to take it as a positive thing.

Until the demonstrations for the first release came, I honestly hadn't even considered the difference between focusing on back and front end, but in retrospect I think that's because all the back end in the world isn't going to make a first grader want to play your game! Minutes prior to our group's presentation, I jotted down a few ideas about my design objectives. What I came up with was that calling what we were making a game failed to represent the magnitude of our undertaking; what we were doing (in theory) was taking part in the earliest exposure and formation of the foundation of childrens' experience with mathematics. Framed in this way it is easy to see that our software being designed as best as possible is critical. What we want to do is create substantive, positive, memorable experiences involving math, in such a way that in the future these children might not run in fear from math (as many of us do now) but instead view it as an exciting and fun thing. Thus my aim in constructing the front end was to craft sensational experiences... I got a few laughs when I said that, but my guess is because people misunderstood: by sensational, I mean of the senses. Given that we are limited to merely 2 of 5 senses, it is extremely important to emphasize those senses, yet being mindful so that the experience doesn't get so chaotic that it is overwhelming and stressful as this would subvert our purpose.

I was part of one of the very first generations to have computers available in elementary school; Jordan and I were remeniscing the other day about playing those green screen computers with the floppy disks that were actually floppy in elementary school. Thus, my design objectives drew heavily on my own vivid memories of using computers to play games in school. For instance, the music in SimCity 2000, first experienced at school simply had a profound effect on my entire life. I still remember receiving SimCity from my grandparents as a Christmas gift some time shortly thereafter; obviously it was cause for substantial excitement given the detail that I can remember this event despite it having happened more than half-my-life ago. Accordingly I made certain to pick suitable music (light ambient) and sound effects... and ours was the only group to have any sound at all. Can you imagine, completely ignoring half of the senses you're given to captivate first graders?? Anyway, there's no good way to put our game online yet (there might be nearer the end of the project), so here are some screenshots:

Not only did I handle designing the game mechanic, choosing the music, and actually programming the game, but I also did all the art. With the exception of the menu screen image (from wikicommons) and a few standard fonts, I drew everything, even the animated monkey. I probably don't have a future in professional graphic design, sure, but I'm quite proud of what I've done--particularly given that I did essentially everything.

The reason I'm bringing up my homework is that release 2 is coming up quickly, we basically only get 2 weeks to put it together, and I set the bar high enough for the first release that I've got a lot of work to do! Fortunately the work was divided up a bit better this time, so I'm mostly in charge of the graphics. Nonetheless it's 3:45 AM and I'd been drawing for about 12 hours straight so it was time for a break. Yes, I'm really wishing my chair was here... and now you can see where all my complaining about design and chairs came from; you try sitting in the same thoughtlessly designed chair for 12 hours and see if you don't get a little grumpy! I think that waiting for this chair has probably been the most painful anticipation I've experienced, literally and figuratively.

Moving on, I wanted to mention that I've been spending so much time in GIMP (the GNU Image Manipulation Program, GNU stands for GNU's Not Unix), that I've actually been getting much better images out of it. I've learned a few basic techniques from some well written GIMP tutorials that have made a huge difference. While I haven't used anything from it for my own purposes, the results in this tutorial on drawing your very own planet starting with just a blank canvas are stunning, especially since the process isn't very complicated. I've also learned how to use a few of the tools better and found some other less than obvious features that have helped me get some results I'm very happy with:

There's always room for improvement, but I'm excited to see how it all comes together!

Economic Doom & Gloom?

2009-10-20T19:06:00.000-06:00

I've decided that if I've put the time and effort into writing something moderately interesting, I may as well post it here. Recently I received an email from an acquaintance that suggested with urgency and confidence that because of the current debt financed federal deficit and the associated cost of interest the US economy will probably collapse within the next decade. What a terrifying prospect! For my own peace of mind and some hope of bringing another perspective to the grim proposal, I decided to do my own analysis.

First, a few items of business. I'm not an economist by a long shot. The extent of my economic training is an elective course titled Economics as a Social Science, in which I got a C. Next, as clarification, the federal deficit and the federal debt are two distinct things: the deficit refers to the difference between expected yearly income and expenditure in the government budget, which is usually what's in the news and also is typically "in the red," otherwise we'd know it better as the federal surplus. The federal debt, on the other hand, is the total accumulated debt, which has been in the red for the majority of the history of the US. According to the US Debt Clock, our national debt is currently very near 13 trillion dollars. This is an unintelligibly large number, obviously, but it's all relative. One of the more useful perspectives of this otherwise ambiguously huge figure is as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

Find the relevant bit of the email and my response after the jump...

First, the part of the email I responded to:

"The 2009 Federal deficit is $1.42 trillion. The average interest rate of 3.2% on this new debt is an $45.4 billion. This means that we need to cut spending or increase taxes to fund this new debt. More likely the interest payments will be added to next years deficit.Most of the Federal debt is funded with short term bonds. During the Carter administration government bonds paid an interest rate of 15%. At this rate the annual interest payment on the 2009 deficit would be $213 billion (payments on the debt would be impossible)."

...And here's my response. Please note that there was no intention of offense in my response, just a different perspective:

The federal debt as a percent of GDP is at the higher end of the range throughout the history of the US, but it's not at its highest. We don't necessarily need to raise taxes or cut spending, the GDP of the country could rise enough for the increase in existing taxes to cover the new debt. I would like to think that involved in the calculus for the feasibility of increased debt financed expenditure was an involved probabilistic estimation of the impact the spending would have on GDP. My knowledge regarding the fiscal management of the largest economy in the world is at a bare minimum, but from information like that here and here and a little bit of logic I don't see a reason to to start panicking just yet. I have sort of a half joke/half serious idea that the good portion of the federal budget that goes to the military is in part a measure to dissuade any country from getting too pushy about debt collection. More importantly though, the world economy is so tied up in the performance of our own that essentially nobody can pull the trigger on our debt without shooting themselves in the process. Certainly there are things that could potentially bring the whole of human society on earth as we know it to its knees, rapid onset of peak oil prices for one, but I think that in comparison public debt practically isn't a threat to economic functionality. If the influence of the dollar continues to weaken in countries worldwide, I imagine the importance of managing public debt would grow inversely proportionate, but approximately 50% of our debt is held by the 2nd (China) and 3rd (Japan) largest economies making such a prospect a distant one, particularly given that these 3 economies comprise about 38% of the world GDP. Other than the possibility of a slow decline, a naive examination seems to indicate that the forced collapse of the US economy by debt collection demands would most likely collapse the financiers themselves. In effect, the most involved countries can't even refuse to lend us more since doing so would be an exceptional risk to their own interests; indeed I doubt that any country would fare well after the collapse of the US economy and the vanishing of ~20.7% of world GDP with it. Just the same, I intuit that the worlds largest economies would prefer not to lose that kind of position, thus being less likely to ignore the substantial risk the instability of our economy would present than to take the much smaller risk of helping to stabilize. Logically then it seems to follow that until financing us becomes riskier than the collapse of our economy, they will continue to finance us. Furthermore it seems to me as though at least these two countries are so involved that an adequately massive shift in risk is highly improbable. Mutually assured destruction is a precarious line to walk, but it works pretty well.

While I wouldn't say I trust economists nor the folks at the treasury (the assumption of competence is a dangerous one), I must say that they probably have a much better understanding of the situation than I ever will. At the very least, it doesn't seem to me that behaving as though economic collapse is imminent will do much at all to prevent it from happening--the monetary system is, after all, a faith based system, and I have my doubts that any other way could possibly enable the incomprehensible rate of technological growth we've seen over the past millennium. I see the economy as a force of nature: maybe it will set humans back a hundred years some day, but I'm led to believe that an event like that is as timely and predictable as a major pandemic, meteor impact, gamma ray burst hitting Earth from a distant supernova, or the spontaneous generation of life successful enough to persist for 3.7 billion years. I suppose that if you're confident enough in your analysis of the future you shouldn't be too worried, given that you ought to be able to make a few choice investments (be it guns, food storage, foreign currency, etc.) that will see you come through the other side as fantastically wealthy. That makes me think, if the willingness of one to risk to their resources isn't a test of confidence, I don't know what is. Personally, the only thing I'm willing to bet the farm on at this point is that everything will continue to be crazy and unpredictable for better or worse, though lately I've been inclined to optimism, economics be damned.

Pumpkin Carving!

2009-10-20T03:02:00.000-06:00

It's that time of year again, when a good number of North Americans prepare for all sorts of bizarre and hilariously entertaining rituals surrounding the end of October. The extent of my Halloween celebration usually matches that for all other holidays, as in not doing anything, but I have a soft spot for carving pumpkins. For reasons unknown to me, pumpkins seem to be my optimal artistic medium. Honestly I'd prefer it be a more lucrative medium, but I suppose I'll take what I can get. Despite the joy carving pumpkins brings me, lately I've been forgetting to do it... I can actually say for certain that since 2005 I've carved two pumpkins, and the only reason I remember that is because both of them were memorable. Ok, actually now I'm remembering that technically that's not true, because I carved two in 2005, but both of them were virtually identical. The concept I went for with those two was some mix of Golem and an angler fish. I wasn't completely thrilled with the outcome (thought it could've been much better), but it nonetheless won a fairly informal competition on campus in addition to making it into the yearly selection (for 2006, inexplicably) on ExtremePumpkins.com, probably one of very few sites dedicated to pumpkin carving. Honestly there are people out there who are much better than I at carving pumpkins, but that's ok with me--I do it because I enjoy it. I don't care if the result is the best or worst pumpkin ever. Enough talk, here's some walk:

Moving on, my latest pumpkin was done last year, and I'm a bit more pleased with how it turned out. One of the things I had in mind was the effect it would have glowing, which came out just as I had hoped.

I confess, in order to get it to light up like that I had to use more than a tealight, but getting the walls thin enough for the tiny bit of light a tealight puts out to show through would have compromised the structural integrity. Also, I'd like to point out that while it wouldn't fool even a bad neuroanatomist, I did do my best to represent the major sulci (fissures). A true representation was out of the question, as a simple matter of time! There are way too many sulci in the brain, at least enough in my own to convince me that there are better ways to while away a few hours. Perhaps if I had used a dremel or other power tool, but this was done entirely with good old manual knives. It's not looking like I'm going to have a stab (pun!) at a pumpkin this year, but who knows, maybe some time will present itself.

Reproducing Foods

2009-10-17T22:08:00.000-06:00

Every so often I find some irresistably scrumptious item available exclusively at some restaurant nearby. Recently this happened with the "mocha blender" at Einstein Bros. Bagels and I found myself more or less addicted. Such a habit can become expensive quickly, so I sought to reproduce it at home. The last time this happened was with a smoothie from Jamba Juice, which was easy to reproduce almost exactly given that they put all the ingredients together right in front of you. However, this was going to be a bit of a challenge, because the ingredients as put together in view consisted of ice, Hershey's chocolate syrup, and some liquid poured from a generic carton. My less than trained gustatory instinct pointed to most of the desirability being from the texture, unusually velvety for a smoothie--closer to a milkshake, which it definitely isn't. The obvious next step was to seek nutritional information, which I found after a quick google. Unfortunately, due to poor pdf formatting, some portion of the ingredients for the liquid of interest, "cappucinno base," were cut off, but my suspicions were nonetheless confirmed as there were several thickening agents visible: carageenan, guar gum, and locust bean gum. The use of whey protein probably also plays an important part in the final experience, otherwise it seems to be sweeteners, stabilizers, and the ubiquitous, impossibly ambiguous "natural flavors." As far as these flavors go, I don't think they have much if anything to do with espresso.

Given that I don't have easy access to any of these commercial thickeners, I had to improvise with powdered sugar for its corn starch content. Here's what I've come up with so far, texture-wise it seems pretty close:

8-10 oz. whole milk
Equal part or more ice (a lot).
Espresso to taste
Hershey's chocolate syrup to taste (probably about 2 Tbsp)
1/2 scoop whey protein
2 Tbsp powdered sugar
1 Tbsp granular sugar

This is the result of only my second attempt, so there's probably improvements that can be made. I think the most promising avenue is the addition of some salt to drop the freezing point of the mixture. The flavor is still way off, but the only thing I can think to make it closer is just removing the espresso altogether.

Thoughts regarding the poor sense of probability

2009-10-15T20:47:00.000-06:00

As a homework assigment for my probability class, we were asked to respond with our thoughts concerning the following TED talk.

In the interest of availability, persistence, and my efforts not going to waste (on the off chance someone reads my blog at some point), I've reproduced my responses after the jump with minor edits so they might make sense outside of the discussion amongst classmates.

#1: Assumption of Competence

I singled out the notion of obliviously assuming that a person knows what they're talking about. Perhaps the draw is for the evocative and profoundly unfortunate nature of the case in hand, or maybe it is the pervasiveness of this classic human error; as with most things, it's probably some combination of the two. We all know what is said about hindsight, and in this case it becomes clear that the physician shouldn't have been trusted to handle with adequate deftness a topic decidedly outside of his domain. However, hindsight abandoned, I'm led to ponder in how many future occasions will we and everyone around us continue to make the same error? There is no question in my mind that the false assumption of authority is indeed common and often remains unnoticed. For instance, I'll pick on network news (as it deserves so much picking upon): everyone sufficiently knowledgeable about a scientific field knows that anything communicated to the "lay press" will get blown out of proportion, misconstrued, and eventually presented as something completely different and altogether false. Just the same, news networks actually hire people (generally more attractive than average, trained in the ways of entertainment but otherwise intellectually incompetent--aka actors) to appear and speak as though they have some kind of authority regarding the matter at hand. These are the so-called talking heads, and their inane, unfounded blather is broadcast worldwide to some large quantity of folks who eagerly take it as fact. Perhaps that wouldn't be so bad, presuming that the extraordinarily attractive hosts we call journalists do actually serve with some journalistic capacity... but then that's just the problem, isn't it? Are these people actually journalists? I submit my opinion, fully lacking in any authority, that Rupert Murdoch is well aware of the human tendency of lavishly and sloppily assuming authority, and that he takes full advantage of this. Of course, if you conclude that I have no idea what I'm talking about, I'd happily agree and instead point you to someone who probably does, like Noam Chomsky. Unfortunately his having spent several decades in aim to dismantle the widespread callous distribution of misinformation has had apparently little impact, given the rise of network news over the same period. And perhaps it's not so difficult to come up with a reason why; how do you know Noam Chomsky knows what he's talking about? In other words, is it ever possible to acknowledge authority, or is it always some degree of assumption?
Just one more thing to consider: we've encountered a number of problems so far concerning various tests and their accuracy, even the video brings up such a scenario. Here's the question: given that a test is stated by its manufacturers to be 95% accurate, what reason do you have to believe that their stated accuracy is itself accurate?

#2: The Effect of Presentation

Woe is me for having watched the video last Friday, only to forget to respond until a day too late... so it goes. One thought that this video has provoked is the effect that presentation has on our reaction. While we have seen this effect in our own class, as with the exaggerated forms of situations my professor has presented, this notion is far more widespread than just a tool for understanding probability. In the video there is expressed the idea that the physician probably wouldn't be trusted to build a bridge; likewise, I submit that a construction worker wouldn't be trusted to accurately calculate probability and statistics, even if he were to take the stand in court as an expert. Thus I presume that the expert status in court is less than sufficient to lead to a misappropriated sense of capability; what makes this situation liable to happen is beyond my own capability to adequately describe, but is fortunately also beside the point I wish to make. What I mean to elucidate is a more simplistic notion of presentation having a large impact on our interpretation, one well enough acknowledged to play a substantial part in the field of marketing. The best way I can think of explaining this is by way of example, just the same or very similar as the exaggerated versions of problems presented in class: A recent homework problem presents a strategy for winning roulette. After finding the various probabilities, we see that there is actually a pretty good chance of leaving the wheel ahead, and are thus led to believe that this is a good strategy. Then, finding the average outcome, we see that despite the good probability, over time we will nonetheless lose more than we gain. This is an odd circumstance, but it can be understood rephrased as a new, slightly different and exaggerated version: suppose there is a game where I generate a random number from 1 to 100, and you try to guess that number. If you don't guess the number, you win $1. At this point, the game is looking pretty good! Continuing, if you do guess the correct number, you lose $1,000,000. Now I doubt I'm ever going to convince anyone to play my game. However, if I were to push the numbers closer together, what I end up with is the roulette problem, and people lining up to have their money taken away. Clearly this technique of pushing the numbers closer together will only work on people marginally more sophisticated than naught in their knowledge of probability. Similarly, I highly doubt that casinos like roulette; if experience is any indication, there is a much more effective trick regarding presentation which separates people from their money much faster, that is the chance at a jackpot for some small amount. From the perspective of human nature, disregarding probability, the idea of paying $1 dollar and getting several million dollars in return is a decidedly attractive deal, and thus the ever effective lottery. Casinos largely take a slightly different, presumably more effective, approach with the slot machine: a quarter is much cheaper than a dollar, and thus easier to convince people to spend. Combine that with a fast pace and instant gratification, and those quarters add up fast! The extent of effort a casino goes to in order to facilitate conspicuous spending is undoubtedly profound (and from the bit that I know, also quite interesting), but casinos are far (far, Far) from the only businesses out there leveraging the odd circumstances which reduce our capacity to spend discriminately. In another TED video (yes, TED is awesome, I've watched most of them), the presenter discusses a certain marketing technique which goes as follows.

Buy our newspaper! There are 3 options:

Get the print edition for $74.99
Get the online edition for $69.99
Get BOTH for just $89.99!

It turns out that the majority of people go for both because it's such a bargain, even though very few had even considered a digital newspaper beforehand and very few will even use it afterwards! This kind of trick is all over the place: you can get a medium soda for $2.30, the large for $2.50, or the XX-Large for just $2.60, nevermind that over two bucks for a soda is a scam or that XX-Large sodas should come with a note from the Attorney General. Maybe the case is that you can get the XYZ Blando widget for $50 or the Deluxury Black Edition with n additional useless-but-seemingly-essential features for just $75. I'm reminded of another (perhaps same, bad memory) TED talk which had an impact, where the presenter pleaded that we stop calling people consumers--at the very least call them customers, we're not all just pigs at the trough (yet). Ever since then I've been offended by the term consumer, and doesn't that seem like the appropriate response? I know I hope to be considered as more than just some mindless hoarding machine, and I definitely hope everyone else feels the same! Whatever the case may be, I encourage everybody to train their mind in the ways of marketing defense, lest we all fall from humanity and instead become consumer-zombies.

Nissan Succumbs to Logic

2009-10-10T18:05:00.000-06:00

Making the rounds on the web is a new Nissan Land Glider concept vehicle. My opinion is that this represents the first indication of a correct step towards a sustainable near-range vehicular platform from a major automobile manufacturer. Included with all the sites discussing it are a few pictures and the following video (which has a very interesting choice of music with what I'm quite certain is the avant-ambient work of Steve Roach):

Get more after the jump!

As I have alluded to previously, perhaps the main problem with the vehicles being presented as an indication of a sustainable future is the fact that they don't represent sustainable design. In other words, the Prius is not the vehicle of the future, the Prius is the same vehicle that's been around for the past century... with the addition of a second motor. There are lots of reasons being thrown around for we need a new kind of car, but simply enough the reason is because we're using too much gas, it's a simple logical proposition:

A. Cars use a lot of gas.
B. There is only so much gas.

Therefore, if we want to keep using cars, cars need to use less gas.

The argument can go into exhausting depth, but for simplicity lets just assume the conclusion that we want to use less gas. What is the easiest way to have a car that uses less gas? Clearly we should look at where the energy from gas goes when driving a car. Modern gas powered drivetrains get about 12 to 17% of the total energy in gas to the wheels, the rest is lost in heat, noise, friction, etc. before it even gets there. This seems like the obvious place to start the improvement, but it turns out that engineers have been trying to do this for decades--MIT has an internal combustion laboratory (side note: Click and Clack graduated from MIT), and if decades of work from people like MIT engineers hasn't made loads of progress, I think it's safe to say that there's probably not going to be any breakthrough in this area in the future. So, lets say 15% of the energy in gas is actually moving the car; now, the actual amount (instead of percentage) of energy used is dependent on the weight (actually mass) being moved. The 3rd generation Prius weighs 2,900 lbs and for the sake of round numbers we'll say the driver weighs 200 lbs, which means that of a total 3,100 lbs the driver is about 6.5%. Thus a (admittedly rough) estimate of the amount of energy from gasoline a Prius uses to move the driver is, drum roll... 0.97%. Perhaps you will think that this is an unfair analysis, that my numbers are all wrong. I don't mind, in fact, I encourage you to! I would love for somebody to put in the time to do a much better analysis and let me know the results. However, whether or not my exact numbers are correct is irrelevant. The point is that the energy used by a vehicle is a simple matter of how much it weighs, and hows this for shedding light on the situation: the new 4th generation Prius is 142 lbs heavier at 3,042 lbs, and I don't think that includes the added weight of the asinine solar panel. Thus, I submit that Toyota's efforts in sustainability are in gentle terms misleading and in less forgiving terms fraudulent. I will concede that the Prius is making advancements in drivetrain efficiency, but the essence of my pointed charge is that they aren't doing as much as could be done because efficiency gains from drivetrain improvements pale in comparison to simple weight reduction and increasing aerodynamics.

I'm going to get to the new Nissan momentarily, but lets revisit the numbers for a moment. Lets suppose that we did the same rough analysis on a much lighter vehicle that weighs 1,600 lbs (like the Smart Fortwo). Now, of the total 1,800 lbs, the driver is 11%, which means that 1.6% of the energy from gasoline is moving the driver. 1.6% still feels like an astonishingly small amount, but this number represents a vast improvement over the heavier vehicle. Enter the Nissan Land Glider concept: it's small, and it's probably aerodynamic. Given the seating arrangement, one behind the other, it's very skinny--only 3.6 feet wide. Imagine for a moment dividing every lane in half... talk about traffic improvements! A road with two lanes for travel and room for parking on both sides could host 6 lanes of travel and still have room for parking. Along with the typically limited information released with the concept is mention of crash-avoidance technology, which is another reason I consider this car a correct step towards a platform for the future. Indeed I really can't condone the idea of ultralight compact cars being driven by people, particularly those skinny enough to roll easily; the Land Glider handles this possibility with weight distribution, meaning it actually leans into turns. As all car afficionados of time past, I disdain the fact that this most likely will never see production, but nonetheless I am pleased to know that at least one major manufacturer is thinking clear and rationally about the future of transportation.

Telescopes in Space

2009-10-08T02:15:00.000-06:00

At first the idea of a telescope floating around in space is absurd, but any marginally knowledgeable astronomer can profess that it's a fantastic idea. Astronomy at the most fundamental level is the study of space, everything and anything that's not Earth, and it's one of the oldest realms of intrigue known to humankind; it was popular long before the scientific method wandered onto the scene, despite being very much a scientific pursuit. On one hand, that space is an old interest isn't surprising--anyone that has turned their sight to the sky on a clear, dark night knows exactly why. A gaze into what might as well be the infinite unknown, the act itself as simple as a glance at our own hands, has a way of inspiring speechless profundity in even the most uninterested amongst us. On the other hand our primal fascination with space is surprising for its distance, simply far removed from our experience and altogether relatively bland to the naked eye for its expansive empty darkness excepting the occasional tiny point of light. I find it interesting that this practical void drew fascination more readily than the exceptionally vibrant and astonishing diversity of phenomenon on Earth which we can easily approach and examine. I suppose it's another case of obscene acclimation leading to an almost humorous misplacement of gratitude (or the frog in slowly heated water, though I'm not a fan of the literal part of the notion when put that way). Nonetheless, space is a fascinating place, especially when explored with our modern technologically augmented senses, the subject of this post.

As it turns out, Earth is a lousy place from which to explore everything that's not Earth. The telescope, primary instrument of astronomers, is often incapacitated by the humble cloud, and it is increasingly difficult to find a spot where light pollution (that light from the ground which obfuscates the much fainter light from billions of miles away) isn't a problem. But even on the highest, most remote mountain on the clearest night, a telescope on Earth is substantially limited by a variety of factors, and thus the idea for a telescope in space. Space telescopes were proposed by at least the 1920's; the first (Hubble) was funded in the '70s but took about twenty years to get into space, in 1990. Of course, 20 years from paper to space is ok by me, given that it's a hulking monstrosity, nearly 25,000 lbs of technical wizardry. It may have launched as early as 1986 if it weren't for the Challenger disaster, which put Hubble in cold storage but to the tune of $6 million a month, not your everyday storage unit. Nonetheless, the time investment seems to have paid off, as the Hubble is very near entering its 20th year of functionality.

Despite the near 20 years of development, shortly after launch the images Hubble was transmitting indicated a serious issue, with quality far less than expected to the extent that it performed similarly to ground telescopes. Before long it was discovered that the main mirror was shaped incorrectly. Telescopes depend almost wholly upon the precise shape of the main mirror, and the precision of the Hubble's is astounding--it was perhaps the most precisely manufactured mirror ever made, with a deviation from the intended curve never more than 10 nanometers. In other words, the shape was at most off by a length about 40 times shorter than the shortest wavelength of visible light (the color violet, at 400 nm). To give you some kind of perspective, nothing skinnier than about 400 nm can be seen with our eyes, no matter how powerful a microscope you can find: the problem is that for something under 400 nm, visible light can't hit it, which means it can't bounce back and into our eyes. So given a mirror so amazingly precise, how could it possibly have been so bad? Well, the mirror was very precisely manufactured to the wrong shape!

Here's a question: how do you fix a ~7ft diameter mirror that took 5 years to manufacture, stuck in the middle of a technological marvel which is hurtling through space at 17,000 mph?? There were two backup mirrors made, but replacement wasn't an option. Fortunately, the Hubble had a strength, a unique design choice: it was built so that it could be serviced by astronauts. After extensive analysis of the problem, a surprising solution was conceived--new sensor instruments, something like the chip in any digital camera, would be specifically designed to be flawed in a way that would be the anti-flaw of the mirror, thus cancelling out the effects! It reminds me very much of doing the same thing to both sides of an equation in math; you can do whatever you want, as long as you do it to both sides (note that this isn't always true). This story is one that I find informative and inspiring, I hope you can find similar value in it. I also recommend taking a look at the Hubble Space Telescope page on wikipedia, as there's a lot more generally interesting stuff to know. Surprisingly, the Hubble is just one of around 100 space observatories past, present, and future. ~45 of them have been terminated, ~15 are planned for the future, and this year alone stands to see the launch of 8 new observatories!

Chairs and Design

2009-09-26T18:17:00.000-06:00

As a computer "power user" aka computer geek, I spend somewhere near 95% of my time at home (and awake) sitting at my desk. For a few years I had a pretty good chair that was snagged for free from an unused office. However, with the extreme use it received, it gradually and literally fell to pieces. Though I did my best to keep it in functioning order, which near the end of its life involved keeping it together with rope, it finally gave up the ghost when bolts irreparably sheared and welds failed. I moved to a backup chair that was primarily used by Pickles (who wasn't so happy about me stealing her chair), but as time has progressed the chair has proven wholly unfit for sitting, often feeling more like a torture device than furniture.

For one reason or another, functionality and office chairs are in most cases two unrelated concepts; I have been looking for a new chair for years but never found anything close to adequate. As far as I can tell, the design of office chairs starts and stops at the notion that there is some sort of surface with dimensions such that any person so inclined could do something resembling "sitting," with the result that any rudimentary design meeting this limited criterion can pass as a chair. Any person who sits as much as I do can profess that much more is involved in what can qualify as a chair... anything less is simply a surface which can be sat upon (regardless of if sitting upon it is a good idea). Considering the depraved state of computer furniture thusly described, for the longest time my intention was to design and construct my own chair, just as I did my desk. However, before long I realized that the manufacture of a chair was a problem much less feasible for an individual in comparison to that of a desk, and resigned to waiting for a better solution to present itself, which worked until my marginally adequate chair decommissioned itself.

With every passing moment in my backup chair it became clearer that the need for a new chair was desperate; it is never a good sign when your legs fall asleep sitting in a normal position, nor when they go numb while one's butt just constantly hurts. At such a point even an end table starts to seem like a superior alternative. Fortunately my waiting appeared to pay off, as a solution presented itself: the Herman Miller Embody, fairly recently introduced as successor to the famed and prestigious aeron (which was nonetheless eliminated from consideration in my previous seating quest). At first glance the price completely banished any desire of purchasing it--as with all Herman Miller furniture, it cost somewhere near an arm + half a leg. Nonetheless, moments passing in a chair unfit for sitting humans (despite being suitable for cats) had me realizing with increasing urgency that an arm and half a leg was cheaper than everything waist down. Still hesitant, a bit more research proved it to be a viable choice: a 12 year warranty(!!), reports of it being the most comfortable chair ever sat in, and finally, a site that for one reason or another had $300 in options available for free. And thus, it was settled.

I really hate spending money (which is not to say I don't enjoy the results!) and so this was a difficult thing to do. However, there are a few notions that even a frugal person need keep in mind. First and foremost is the idea that often despite a high entry price, the purchase in question can prove to be a far better value over time. Of course this takes research, because there are an incredible amount of nauseatingly overpriced products, especially relative to quality. In this case the 12 year warranty easily dispelled all fears of poor quality. Second, particular emphasis must be placed in purchasing products which will receive substantial use; only the most foolish professional house-framing carpenter would buy a hammer out of the dollar bin! To me as a programmer, a chair is just like a hammer, it's a tool necessary for getting work done with maximal efficiency, which in turn maximizes value. With only these two things in mind, the purchase is easily justifiable, but there is another critical point which seals the deal: health. Just as a poorly designed pneumatic nailing gun can be the death of a carpenter, a poorly designed chair can quickly harm the health of someone who sits for extended periods--this is why wheelchair cushions are very specialized, and why bedridden folks must be treated with care (otherwise they will get bed sores).

In my experience, when all the research is done and the intended purchase thought out well enough, even a frugal person can spend a chunk of change without feeling purchase remorse. Indeed, I have never felt an ounce of regret after buying the pricier items I own; when I do feel regret after a purchase, it is always for the cheaper items that I failed to adequately contemplate. Anyway, enough blabbing, eye candy after the jump (yes, there's more).

A while ago I saw what is supposedly a self-adjusting concept chair from Herman Miller ...and that's about the extent of the available information. Nonetheless, the one and only image appealed to me and approached the extent I thought a functional design should require. Note that in this stance, the positioning of the wheels will result in a quasi-stationary platform, an interesting design choice.

In accordance with my personality, I also imagined discarding the traditional and aged desk/chair paradigm, trying to envision anew the working space relative to the modern perspective. This seemed reasonable, at least better than assuming that what has been done would be the best way to continue doing given a few minor upgrades. The result was something along the lines of the following (though of course I'd aim a tad higher aesthetically), which is simply called Workstation, from GRAViTONUS :

I'm obliged (given that I think this is an embarrassingly poor design) to emphasize that my idea was substantially different from this, but the basic forms are related in that both conceptualize a computer workspace that you get into. Frankly I don't think the Workstation would be good for anything, the crippling feature being the keyboard placement under the monitor. My own resolution to this problem was to abandon the keyboard entirely, opting instead for predictive text from 10 or 12 keys positioned at the hands. I actually discovered a week ago that I certainly wasn't the first person to have this idea for text input--around 1990, Steve Roberts (the newest entry on my short list of most-awesomest people ever) did essentially the same thing so that he could type while riding/living as a nomad on his amazing bicycle. Anyway, moving on, despite possibilities in mind for resolving functional flaws in such a design, I put the idea in long term storage for possible consideration later on. From this attempt I learned one thing above all else: good design is really difficult! The interesting (and frustrating) reality, however, is that so many entities manage to get along quite well simply by pushing through crap design with a clever presentation. Case 1:

If this looks to you like some moderately interesting plastic patio furniture that might be found at Target, I don't blame you. However, this is actually an example of modern high-design available for the low, low price of $217. Though it may look and feel like plastic, don't be fooled: it's actually "injection-molded fiberglass-reinforced polyamide," aka plastic with fiberglass in it. To me, the worst part is the explicit and misleading conflation of form and function evident in the product description: "This new stackable chair has a structure that is the result of an evolution, more than of a design process. It represents a new vision of form, generated by digital data, resulting in a chair to be used every day, slender, lively and healthy. The liquid, organic nature of its form combines the beauty of the human anatomy with the most advanced process of industrialisation of 21st-century polymers." I have also heard the designer (Ross Lovegrove) portray the perforated back as a functional element in that it allows for ventilation. I'll admit it has form, whatever that means, but the suggestion that this has anything resembling function is laughable. Case 2:

This is Kong, from Philippe Starck. I don't know about you, but I'd prefer to stand. For this case I'm not even very willing to admit it has form, much less function. Available now for only $2395 (get arms too for just $300 extra).

Enter good design:

Enough said.

Project 10^100

2009-09-25T19:38:00.000-06:00

About a year ago Google started up Project 10^100 which invited people to submit ideas they thought would change the world. The intention was that a few of the best ideas would be put up for a vote, where one or several winning ideas may or may not be put into motion through funding and initial management by Google. Note, I used the ambiguous qualifier to reflect the verbiage of the site, which says "Your vote for one of these ideas will help our advisory board choose up to 5 projects to fund," thus somewhat resembling the electoral college in terms of feel good vote theater. Snark aside, I genuinely support the idea of this project regardless of the chosen process.

Moving on, the window for submissions closed quickly as over 150,000 entries flooded the digital suggestion box, and now, having supposedly read through every one, the voting has opened. The project somewhat defies our typical expectations in that it's not really about ego, that is, there is no winning person or prizes for winning people; the notion is that what really matters are the ideas, and that the people behind the ideas should be perfectly satisfied that their world-changing idea is getting attention. Likewise, judging a winning person would probably be very challenging, as there is little doubt in my mind that the ideas up for voting were put forward more or less with a consensus amongst many submissions. Humility therefore firmly established, it appears that the idea I (and certainly many others) submitted has made it into those selected for voting.

Here's an excerpt from my submission:

Unfortunately the sister project of Wikipedia, Wikiversity, has had a difficult time getting off the ground. This is attributable to several factors, most significantly the lack of contribution which itself is likely resultant from the expertise required in the knowledge of the topics as well as in the arrangement of the information in a manner conducive to learning. Thus in the spirit of Knol, portions are written by community members to be periodically approved by volunteers who are acknowledged experts in the field. International schools from elementary forward would be able to use crowd crafted expert approved materials for free, as well as individuals desiring to educate themselves in any topic. It may even be possible to establish an accredited university online using performance tests based on these materials, providing a degree for the bare minimum cost. Education is generally presumed to be a profoundly positive thing, thus indirectly the issues resolved by universally available education are multitudinous. More directly however the result of education in an individual's life are tools for empowerment and progress, which itself may eventually benefit all mankind were they to become the next Gandhi or Gödel.

From the idea titled "Make educational content available online for free," there are shown suggestions that contributed to the idea:

1. Collaborate with top schools around the world to make their lectures freely accessible online
2. Create an online educational platform that provides free training and education as part of a worldwide, officially accepted degree
3. Provide free online lectures and textbooks for every subject and grade level
4. Facilitate information exchange among students around the world, including cross-country "study groups" on specific topics

Honestly I think that all of this is inevitable, and in fact much of it has already happened. Years ago MIT kick-started what would become the OpenCourseWare consortium by making available course materials for free, and since then a large number of other institutions have joined. Though limited to post secondary materials, I'm certain it will expand soon. Point 4 is pretty well taken care of with various message boards and forums online, I often find help through questions already asked and answered on these sites with a quick search. Point 2 is the most technically challenging one, and that is only because accreditation is done through outdated organizations operating in their own interests. My opinion on this matter is something like the inverse of point 2--rather than seeking accreditation, seek to dismantle the accreditation organizations. It seems to me rather clear that the qualifications and abilities of an individual cannot even begin to be known simply because they have a degree from an accredited institution. Nonetheless, I doubt accreditation is going away, and I have heard of some organizations working towards minimum cost accredited degrees. On that note I ought to mention that affordable education is available--the tuition for foreigners at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) is a couple hundred US dollars, which despite being an incredible bargain is still more than native Mexicans who pay less than a hundred dollars. For anyone who might find themselves prejudiced against Mexico for whatever reason, I ought to also mention that UNAM is a world class university that has produced a number of Nobel laureates, participates in cutting edge research, and is one of the largest universities in the world, with satellite campuses all over the world and nearly 306,000 students.

Of course all the criticism I have offered is quite ironic given that I apparently contributed to the idea... but I suppose all I can say is that a lot has changed in the past year, especially my own thought patterns. Fortunately the collective conscious has my folly covered in this situation, as there were enough people thinking then as I am now to have also gotten a spot titled "Drive innovation in public transportation." Intriguingly, a number of the "suggestions" for this spot match very closely with what I would have said myself (emphasizing ultralight vehicles, preferably power-assisted pedal bicycles, minimizing injury and maximizing efficiency via autonomous transports). This makes me think one thing more than any other: what are the people that suggested those things a year ago thinking about now?? Apparently I am a year behind others in getting to the thoughts I'm having now, it'd be really nice and interesting to be able to jump ahead another year's worth of thinking!

Anyway, I highly recommend taking a look at the ideas. There are a total of 16 big ideas representing a good cut of what the collective mind is thinking for the future, some of which at the very least will probably pique your interest, or maybe even move you to action.

Old cars are not safer!

2009-09-23T15:50:00.000-06:00

Here's another common misconception ready to be exposed: old cars aren't safer. By older cars it is typically meant late 60's and prior, and the thought goes that because they are heavier, they are safer. This is absolutely false, weight doesn't matter in vehicle safety; what really matters is the ability of the frame to absorb impact while maintaining structural integrity of the passenger space. The safety of a vehicle accident is very simple physics: by spreading an impact over time and distance the force of impact is also minimized. This matches our intuitive understanding, just imagine dropping an egg from 10 feet. If the egg hits concrete, it breaks--it goes from speed to stopped instantaneously. If the egg hits 5 feet of padding, it will be fine--it will slowly go from speed to stopped over time and distance, as the padding absorbs energy from the moving egg. The "padding" in a car accident is mainly of one form, the crumpling of steel. Of course this is all moot if the passenger cabin is compromised, as our soft, fragile bodies are no match for hard things moving at high speeds, and that's the rub; no matter how much energy is absorbed, if the engine block ends up in the driver's seat or the vehicle explodes, there is little hope of walking away from the accident. Excluding air bags, seat belts, and other obvious safety features, modern cars still have the advantage because they are designed to crumple up to the cabin, which is in turn designed to be as rigid as possible. As far as I know, older cars weren't designed with any energy absorption in consideration, and thus a double edged sword: if the car doesn't crumple at all, no energy is absorbed and it is like an egg hitting concrete; if the car does crumple, it will most likely continue to crumple well past the engine bay and into the cabin, rendering all energy absorption for naught. And now, for the demonstration:

The cars collided each moving at around 40 mph. As is usual for the Internet, a number of people (I think it's safe to assume they are classic car enthusiasts) have stepped forward challenging the veracity of the video, suggesting that the chosen car was not representative. As in any scientific pursuit, contentions are often valid and desired, and the responsible scientist will acknowledge, explore, and respond to any valid concerns. I found this on Consumerist, where amongst the comments arose criticism (from user Nighthawke) as follows: the appearance of reddish dust that may indicate the presence of structure-compromising rust; the lack of seat belts used in the test vehicle (which were available as a dealer option); The expense of an unsafe frame for the aesthetics of the curved front pillar specific to Bell-Airs; Finally, the frontal offset test is unfair because the skinny engine didn't have the opportunity to absorb energy.

The responses are easy, as only the first point is really valid. The IIHS, which conducted the test, assured that the "rust" was just accumulated dirt and the car appeared structurally sound. For the final 3: the optional seat belts were lap belts only, and almost certainly wouldn't have made a modicum of difference; perhaps the Bell-Air has uncommonly poor structural integrity (I'm not sure, but I know of other classic cars with the same pillar shape), but the whole point is to show that collision safety design has improved tremendously and no other modern American car has performed anywhere near as bad as this Bell-Air; Last but not least, life isn't fair and the frontal offset test is one of a scant few standard tests that all cars undergo. Likewise, it's an important test for how common this type of accident is; James Dean died in a frontal offset collision. Frontal offsets have a particular propensity to cause extensive damage--the energy of the collision is focused on a smaller portion of the vehicle, thus causing more damage. In fact, in terms of energy absorption, a direct, in-line/"head to head" collision is safer! Clearly our intuition begins to fail us at this point, our instinct even more so; two people destined for a head on collision will swerve, unfortunately magnifying the danger of the impact be reducing the surface area of the collision. Nonetheless, this idea of applying a force over increased surface area is one that is often understood (or at least utilized) by people using snowshoes. This same principle is what allows people to lay on a bed of nails.

At least we have some kind of standards! Check out other poorly fairing vehicles here and here. In closing, I want to point out that heavy modern cars aren't safer either--in fact many large vehicles (trucks, SUVs) fare worse in passenger protection than smaller vehicles for a few fairly obvious reasons. Also, it's a matter of perspective: presume large vehicles are safer for the occupants, what about the people in any smaller car that may be hit? You'll probably walk away from your Suburban with a few scratches, but how will you feel about having possibly killed several or all of the people in that Yaris? The truth is, large vehicles aren't safer, they're more dangerous for everyone. The only reason huge cars can be viewed as safe is because there are other huge cars out there, and that's just an unsustainable and foolish perspective--keep it going and before long we're all driving monster trucks. Unfortunately even that won't help just as our huge SUVs haven't helped because more and more people will be getting injured in single-vehicle rollovers.

Certainly cars have gotten a lot safer, but as long as they are being driven by people, they will never be safe enough.

Information, a perspective

2009-09-19T16:28:00.000-06:00

Fair warning: I'm about to talk about math. However, I don't think you need to know or even like math to enjoy this. Suppose I were to tell you that the following images were both of the same thing. Would you believe me?

Unless you know multivariable functions or are pretty slick, you probably think I'm crazy. However, I can assure you that these are simply two different perspectives of the exact same shape; the only thing that has changed from one to the next is the place from which you are looking at it. If you're a skeptic (and I hope you are), you still don't believe me. Fair enough, but look at the animation after the jump and you don't have to believe me--you will see it with your own eyes.

this is a large .gif, it takes a minute to load, and can probably be seen in full resolution if you click on it.

For the sufficiently curious, the graph is of the function

f(x,y)=

Pretty awesome, right!? This is a very interesting consequence of trying to put a 3 dimensional object onto a 2 dimensional space. In other words, this is a 2d projection of a 3d object. It makes an awful lot of intuitive sense that by trying to represent a 3d object in a 2d space that information will be lost--in other words, if anyone tries to draw a bog-standard sphere on a piece of paper (that is no shading, no contour lines, just an outline), all their mathematician friends will laugh at them for drawing a circle! In fact, you can't draw a sphere on a flat piece of paper because it lacks any indication that it ought to be jumping off the page. What is very interesting about this idea is that the addition of information can really help in tricking the human brain into thinking that the object does have some depth. In the above images we have the additional information of color gradients, a contour grid, and in the animation, changing perspective. Had I not included these things, it would have been very difficult to communicate what I'm talking about; the images would just look like a chaotic mess.

I think it is interesting to note that despite the added information, there are still a number of times that the shape doesn't make very much sense at all, and there are a number of other shapes I could use that would be even more confusing. Indeed, even the way in which you rotate the object is a form of information--had I been able to figure out how to rotate the object around only one axis, it would probably make less sense than the second image alone! In terms of being a confused human being, there does seem to be an easy explanation of what confuses us and why : were the image of a textured, roughly round object rotating around one axis (instead of something like the above), most people would be able to easily interpret its nature. The reason is simple--our lifetime experience is riddled with roughly round, textured objects, and certainly not many objects shaped like that.

I think this concept of additional information has some very interesting and underutilized ramifications, Especially in this modern digital era. For instance, perhaps you have heard of a phenomenon called synesthesia. Synesthetes have a peculiar sensory experience, the most common being the sensation of colors in combination with symbols. In other words, a person with color/grapheme synesthesia will see a letter as being colored, and always having the same color (when not adjacent to other letters, more on this in the "good resource" below). This sounds pretty novel, but is it useful? How about, hm... Absolutely! It only takes one example to prove it. This kind of perception has the added advantage of being able to recognize words and phrases just be seeing a sequence of colors, no reading necessary for a general conception of what the word might be. This type of cross-information processing is something most people already do unknowingly by guessing a word from its general shape or first and last letters. There is a further advantage of having letters associated with colors: memory. By having an additional layer of information, there is an additional path for that information to be recalled; it isn't too difficult to imagine that if angry words were on average more red than other words, we would quickly associate red with anger on a very visceral level, more than just the abstract idea we already have that red can conceptually indicate anger. If you'd like to read more about what it is like to be a synesthete, here is a good resource. I don't necessarily think that that person's experience is optimal for added information, but it makes me think what I feel is an obvious thought: we live in a time where the majority of letters and numbers can actually and easily be colored... when it confers such obvious advantages, why aren't we doing it!? This likewise leads me to another obvious conclusion: the extent to which we are under-utilizing the technology at hand is profound. When one considers (as I often do) that the extent to which we are utilizing technology is profound, well, there is only one conclusion left: we live in an inconceivably amazing time!

IQ Scores: Junk

2009-09-12T13:38:00.000-06:00

Intelligence is a thing that is very difficult to define, if it's even possible to begin with. Historically something called an IQ test is considered the way to quantify or put to some kind of standard scale. In fact there are may different IQ tests with a fairly substantial deviation in approach. I think that IQ tests might be one area where we see how tradition is not adequate to justify continued use. Interestingly, there are ways to quantitatively explore an abstract idea such as IQ scores, and that is through associated statistics. For instance, wouldn't it be interesting to consider IQ score as it correlates to salary? It is at least interesting enough for someone to have done the data collection from the same people nearly every year since 1979 (the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, funded by the Bureau of Labor Statistic, information found here)... and the results? Smart most definitely does not mean rich! In fact, people with high IQ scores exhibit higher than average rates of fiscal stupidity. With this in mind, IQ scores can be thought of as failing to consider a rather essential and applied form of intelligence for proper functioning in this modern era--personal finance. Ultimately an IQ score can only tell somebody how well they are at taking IQ tests.

There are certainly many instances in which IQ tests fail to adequately describe something easily considered intelligence. The most common example is the phenomenon of savant syndrome, where the affected people have such unique and powerful capabilities that they almost seem intellectually super-human; recalling the phone number and address of any random person they've read in a phone book, instantly performing arithmetic operations on large numbers, and on and on. One of the most famous savants, local to SLC, Kim Peek, was the basis for the character in the film Rain Man; Kim is able to read books at a rate of ~10 seconds per page, even faster accounting for his ability to read in parallel, two pages at a time--one for each eye. If that weren't convincing enough, he can recall each of ~12,000 books he has read, and his amazing abilities extend beyond reading/recollection. Despite all this, Kim has an IQ of 73. Clearly IQ fails to capture something that would most certainly be called intelligence. Further, I think this failure is much more ubiquitous than the special case of savants; from personal experience I can say with certainty that I've met many, many people who would appear unexceptional to an IQ test but whom I can attest have a special (and meaningful) type of intelligence.

It might seem that I'm battling IQ like a spurned testee--indeed we would expect a person who considers themselves intelligent to express their dissatisfaction with their score. Thus it may be moderately surprising that I'm battling IQ despite having gotten a favorable score, though the reason is simple: I don't think IQ scores do any good for anyone. In fact, I think it very well may be to everyone's detriment to put any reliance on such an ambiguous and not altogether indicative thing such as an IQ score. It's a sword that cuts all ways too; it would be erroneous to think that because one has a higher than average score they are somehow superior or more likely to be successful in life... if anything, a person who finds themselves to have a high IQ should recognize a statistical disadvantage and start paying closer attention to their finances! Likewise, people with very average scores shouldn't feel limited--plenty of people with average IQs have been billionaires, CEOs, athletes, world-renowned musicians, and presidents.

In short, don't let anyone tell you what you are and aren't capable of. We are all amazing, and when it comes to nearly 7 billion unique people, there is little hope of a meaningful, broad quantification, and a great chance of spectacular, rare, and unforeseen abilities to arise.