David's Random Ramblings

Patent #2 Granted!

2011-08-12T10:09:00.001-07:00

Apparently we still haven't reached the day when I'll stop posting about the status of patents I'm on.

My second patent (which I'm also first inventor on) was just granted! And the version with pretty pictures. (8/16/2011 link fixed)

Mystery Solved

2011-07-16T08:42:00.000-07:00

Ok, mystery solved. Not so surprisingly it is the family members I've been playing phone tag with since my birthday. Yay now it is time to use my birthday present!

Yoda USB Drive

2011-07-15T23:50:00.000-07:00

Someone was nice enough to buy a Yoda USB drive for me. I like the little Yoda statue so it is sitting on my stereo next to my computer. And according to the box it has a huge amount of memory. It showed up right around my birthday so I'm assuming it is a birthday present.

However, I have no idea who it is from. I'd like to use it, but this is how nuclear reactors get taken down (yeah, I know the US and Israeli governments aren't looking to put a virus on my computer, but I'm still going to avoid plugging in a random USB drive).

So if you bought it for me or know who did, please let me know cause I'd like to say thank you and I'd like to start using it. For now I'll just use it as a figurine, maybe if I don't find out who it is from I'll go to an internet cafe and see if there is anything on there.

Oh, and around the same time I got a DaVinci shirt with the guy playing a guitar. Luckily that one I can just wash and then use, but I'd like to thank whoever got it for me.

Google+

2011-07-07T00:24:00.000-07:00

So far google+ seems a lot like facebook, but with more email. And less people.

I don't really feel like setting up yet another profile and stream of info. And I know no one is forcing me, but I like to keep up with the crowd. It is nice that google tries to be kinda smart about who is in your network and how they are connected to you.

BUT this is GOOGLE, I don't want it to make suggestions about who I know. I want it to scrape the entire series of pipes and tubes for information and media about me and create a profile and on going log of my activities that is a more active and realistic view of me than I could create.

Ok, that would be a little scary, and there should be some controls on it. But google should really take advantage of the fact that they know a whole lot about people when they make a personal info sharing site.

Oh, yeah, that uproar over google buzz, never mind, back to picking out a picture for google's facebook.

Disarming Nuclear Bombs

2011-06-21T23:26:00.000-07:00

Hm, for some reason this post never got published. Made a lot more sense the week I saw three nuclear weapons disarmed on TV, but here it is:

Disarming a nuclear weapon pops up occasionally on TV and in movies (I'm looking at you Chuck, Castle and even SGU). They always make it seem like a super complicated task. I'm not sure that it is all that difficult (this is one of those posts where I'm way outside my realm of knowledge).

What I'm willing to concede:
-Even if you know how to disarm a nuclear bomb it would be crazy scary.
-Conventional bombs may have fake wires and components that will cause the bomb to explode if tampered with and it is possible that a nuclear bomb would also have this.

But:
Nuclear weapons are really hard to make. Getting the material may be the hardest part, but even with the material it is quite a task. My understanding is those scientists at Los Alamos (many of the greatest in American history) were provided the radio active material. Today a semi-trained bomb maker with some parts from radio shack and a lawn store can make a conventional bomb, but only certain governments have made nuclear weapons.

Something that hard to make shouldn't be too hard to stop.

Typically nuclear weapons work by using a conventional explosive to smash two pieces of radio active material together. Dirty bombs work by having a conventional bomb spread radio active material. So the key is just to separate the radioactive part from the conventional weapon.

Yes it is good to stop the conventional weapon as well to avoid any damage and yes the bomb maker might make that tricky, but then the scary part is disarming a bomb, not disarming a NUCLEAR bomb.

Ok, maybe it isn't super easy, but definitely seems more straight forward than whatever they end up doing on TV. Plus while they are screwing around with guessing which wire they could be trying to get the material and conventional bomb as far away from each other as possible.

I took a look on the web to see what others think and here's wired's take.

Patent Granted!

2011-06-14T23:18:00.001-07:00

For those who missed it on the twitter feed, I'm first inventor on a patent that was just granted!

For those who did see it on the twitter feed this link includes the pretty pictures along with the text:
MULTIPLE BATTERY CONFIGURATIONS IN AN IMPLANTABLE MEDICAL DEVICE.

Actually the link above is the application, here's the link to the granted patent.

The Magicians

2011-06-05T22:48:00.000-07:00

I read The Magicians during a pause between installments of the wheel of time. It is a twist on Harry Potter/Narnia. It presents these stories based on what would "really" happen if someone was transported off to a magical land where they learn that they can cast spells.

This book's take is that learning to do magic would be very difficult and tedious, much like studying any other difficult subject and would eventually become a standard task rather than an exciting adventure.

The other big difference starts with the observation that typically the main characters in these stories aren't happy in the real world then find happiness in the magical world. This book claims that if the characters aren't happy people they aren't going to be happy no matter what world they end up in. Part of this is the book shows how relationships with others as well as various mundane aspects of life do much more to influence a person's happiness than the world that surrounds the person.

On one hand it is somewhat humorous and a change of pace to see this take on the genre. However, a book that shows a character being unhappy in a series of settings really isn't much fun. Also as part of the "real" take there isn't a clear goal or direction at any point in the book so I often found myself asking if the story is going anywhere or if I'm just meandering around in this world. There is a somewhat interesting plot line running through the book, but it isn't really revealed till near the end. I also thought that the book made the main points through the story, then made them a bit more obvious, then stated them outright in dialogue. I think it would have had more impact if it stopped when the message was a little more subtle.

I'm tempted to recommend this book to anyone who reads a lot of fantasy as something different to throw into the mix. However, if someone reads a lot of fantasy it is probably because they enjoy those magical worlds and don't want to read a book where those worlds aren't that great.

Banker To The Poor

2011-05-18T23:56:00.000-07:00

I read Banker To The Poor over the last few days. Thanks Mom for lending it to me.

The book is interesting and I think contains some good lessons. However, there are several aspects of it that I take issue with.

First the good stuff:
-It is very impressive to see how the author started from nothing and built this huge organization that does a ton of good.

-I like the focus on serving the absolute poorest people in society. So often there is a focus on helping the middle class. Helping the middle class is nice, but the society's focus should really be on the poor.

-He has a focus on how money tends to get pulled toward the already well off. So it is important to make sure that money intended to help the poor should go directly to the poor.

-There is a decent amount of information about how microfinance works (although this is not a microfinace how to).

-There is some discussion of social entrepreneurship which seems to be picking up significant popularity. And at the end he provides an outline of how socially focused business should be run. Although I do think his suggestion may be a little too utopian.

-In general I liked any portion where he talked about how he built Grameen Bank, but had issues when he made broad comments about the role of government and put down other ways of helping the poor.

Parts I have some issue with (here's me telling a Nobel Prize winner what he got wrong in his book about his career):
-He is very down on the role of government in helping the poor. I can see where he is coming from, but at the same time it was government money and involvement that helped Grameen Bank take off. Sure now that it is able to finance itself it no longer needs government help, but that doesn't mean the government has no role to play in helping the poor or other organizations trying to help the poor.

-Often times he states how little money the loans were that turned people's lives around. But when he converts these numbers to dollars he doesn't relate them to the difference in cost of living. If he was trying to get people from the US to donate money then that's fine to say just $500 will pull this person in Bangladesh out of poverty. But he's not looking for donations, he is talking about a self sustaining bank so I feel like the numbers should be adjust to give a sense of how they big they are to the locals of the country under discussion. There is a portion where he talks about microfinace in the US, but most of the examples are set in Bangladesh.

-He repeatedly makes the case that the poor don't need training, just support (such as credit). He believes that given the opportunity they are entrepreneurs and can figure out how to make money. Clearly this has worked on a large scale for him. But I have to imagine that training has its place. The examples of businesses started for the most part don't sound like something that can expand very much. So it helps pull that person out of poverty, but it probably doesn't provide jobs for the neighbors. But I think that business started by people with more training would have more growth potential. In addition he even has stories of ventures that Grameen Bank started that required getting its staff trained and then training the local workers (such as running the fisheries). So I'll believe that training isn't as important as most people think, but I think he goes too far in putting it down.

-I appreciate that this is his story that he is telling. And he is good at giving credit to people who supported him along the way. But I would have appreciated more context of what else was going on in the world of microfinance over this period (which stretches from the mid 70s to mid 2000s). Did he really come up with the idea and implement it and all other microfinace programs are just based on his work? Or more likely, was there other work in the field and other efforts going on around the same time?

-He talks a little bit about the obstacles along the way, but he focuses heavily on the success. I think it would have been more informative to hear more about the issues he had and how they were over come. In many ways this book felt like a sales pitch.

-Well, it felt like he was giving a sales pitch without having anything to sell. A lot of what I got out of this book is most of what I'd normally try to do to help the poor is no good. And I really didn't see many suggestions on what I should do if I do want to help. Ok, he does suggest starting a company with minimal profit motive, but short of that I sorta feel like he's saying don't bother trying to help. Which doesn't seem right. There must be some middle step.

That's a lot I took issue with but overall I really did like the book and do think the author put some incredible ideas to use to do a huge amount of good.

All I needed was stick figures!

2011-04-07T02:01:00.000-07:00

Remember my Shoulder Tapping post from November? No? Ok, fine, well that's what the link is for.

Apparently all that post needed was some stick figures and I'd have written an xkcd comic! (Remember to place the mouse over the comic for a second to get the final message).

Alright, alright, I see how he expressed what took me several paragraphs of text in a series of simple images and how he added extra humor. But still, I think it is kinda awesome. Now I feel like I should go off on more crazy rants on the off chance that Randal will one day go off on a similar rant.

Oh, shit, the irony of being excited after the fact of seeing similarity between one of my 484 blog pots and one of Randal's 882 xkcd posts is just now hitting me. At least it wasn't this post.

And now I'm kind of disturbed that I sometimes think about situations based on blog posts I wrote three years ago. I'm going to try to get back to that excitement I had at the start of this post or maybe just try to get some sleep.

My App "Made Money"!

2011-03-27T12:27:00.000-07:00

Whoa, apparently back in September Apple deposited just over $20 in my bank account because of ad revenue from my App! I did have to pay $99 for a developer's license so it is quite a way from making a profit (even counting the $20 it has made since then), but at least there's some revenue offsetting the loss!

On one hand I'm impressed by the app development process because as a part time hobbyist I was able to create an app I'm rather happy with and that has been downloaded over a thousand times. On the other hand I just now found the section of iTunes Connect that told me that they paid me back in September. I'm sure if someone was doing this professionally they'd have taken the financial portion of the site more seriously and found that page immediately, but at the same time apple is normally all about making interfaces that anyone can easily understand. My bigger complaint is now that I have the app, every few months I want to make a minor change, but each time I end up spending so long getting the new SDK and figuring out the new setup it uses up all the time I intended to spend on it.

I mentioned the number of downloads, but I don't actually think that's a very interesting metric because someone can download an app and never use it. What I do find interesting is in the last week iAds has registered the following number of requests for ads per country (not sure if requests happen when someone goes to main menu or just on opening) for a total of 402:

Unknown 145
US 66
Korea 30
Japan 24
UK 23
Brazil 14
Netherlands 12
Taiwan 9
Turkey 8
Canada 7
Australia 6
Saudi Arabia 6
Thailand 6
China 5
Finland 5
France 5
Hong Kong 5
Czech Republic 4
Morocco 4
Singapore 3
Austria 2
Spain 2
Denmark 1
Kuwait 1
Mexico 1
New Zealand 1

I think iAds is a cool way to track if anyone is actually opening the app, although it is unfortunate that even though they track requests from countries outside the US, they only serve ads to the US.

Inception 2

2011-03-07T10:09:00.001-08:00

I don't know why I ever wrote posts about movies before seeing what Dana Stevens had to say.

Inception

2011-03-06T16:10:00.000-08:00

I just watched Inception (I know, so last year) and this post will include spoilers.

Maybe I just expected too much from it and maybe I had heard enough little spoilers that it wasn't as surprising as it would have been in the theater. But I wasn't that impressed. I actually hope that there is something I missed that makes it awesome.

-My biggest complaint was that I didn't care about any of the characters. No one had enough of a back story or connections to others to care about them. I don't expect every movie to be Serenity, but even the Matrix with its awkward dialog was able to give viewers a reason to care about nearly every major character. Same with Memento where the main character doesn't even know his own story.

-One of the main attractions was a mind bending journey through levels of dreams. But once they said they can have dreams in dreams, everything past that seemed reasonably straight forward. I thought Memento was awesome so I can be impressed by Nolan's mind bending style. They linearly dropped from one dream level to the next then back up. Did I miss the bendy part? Also when a show/movie ends with someone waking up from one dream to find themselves in another it is cliche. So why is a whole movie about multilevel dreams ground breaking? What would have been awesome is if they split off on different dream paths. Then they could create ways to cut between the different dream worlds, or even create dream circles where they go from one level to the next and end up at the first one. Then they'd have to deal with dropping back out of that circle. And it would be truly difficult to sort out if you'd made your way back out of all the dreams. Ok, I guess it is telling that I'm not impressed by a linked list and I think the movie would be improved by exploring some of the more difficult problems with complicated linked lists. Oh, or what if there are two groups in shared dreams and then they are connected together and the dreams have to some how merge and then people could move between the two group dreams. I was going to say that this could have been a cool dollhouse like TV show, but dollhouse actually touched on quite a bit of this already.

-Along the lines of the previous point another attraction was the mystery ending. But I don't really see the mystery. There was no point I saw where it seemed like he could have gotten stuck in a dream. I figured that the reason we didn't see the top stop spinning is that the main character decided he didn't care, then reading Nolan's quotation in wikipedia it seems he agrees. The only point that made me think it was a dream is that the Grandpa was back in America instead of in Paris, which seemed more like over editing than a hint that he was stuck in a dream world.

-I read something that mentioned that the movie doesn't really get dreams right, but that's ok, because it is almost impossible to create a reasonable movie that accounts for the full weirdness of dreams. But I would have appreciated a little more attention paid to the true weirdness of dreams. And if I spend 50 years in a dream world where I can build whatever I want, there are going to be some way crazier architecture. One of the only movies/tv episodes I've seen that comes anywhere close to getting the strangeness of dreams right is the last episode of season 4 of Buffy and now that I think about it, it is a shared dream between several people and involves multiple levels of dreaming (and it is Whedon so viewers care about the characters). How's that for throwing down the gauntlet, I'm claiming that an episode of Buffy is a better shared multilevel dream story than Inception. Hm, really didn't mean to make this a post about how everything Whedon has ever done is better than this movie.

-They spent some time training the architect. The scenes were cool and the character was important to the story. But I thought they should have showed off those skills she learned during the mission. Show us how the city or hotel folds in on itself. Or have her make some adjustments on the fly. Otherwise those training scenes just seem like a moment to play with visual effects and provide an excuse for involving the character.

-There were some reasonably cool action scenes, but nothing that the Matrix trilogy didn't do better years ago. And in the ice scene it wasn't just that I didn't care about the characters, I could hardly tell who was who.

-Not only didn't I care about the characters, I also didn't care about the mission. They spent a whole sentence establishing why planting the idea would be a good thing, given to us by the guy the main character just tried to steal from.

Ok, now what is it that I'm missing that everyone else liked so much and found so mind bending and discussion inspiring? Is this a Big Lebowski where a second viewing magically transforms the film? Or did other scifi fans have the same, ho hum, reaction that I did? Have years of Philip K Dick inspired stories caused an immunity to the trippiness of dream and reality questioning tales?

Why School Science Experiments Should Be Replaced By Engineering

2011-01-29T11:11:00.000-08:00

Disclaimer: This post is a bunch of stuff I just thought up and is mostly about education. I did ok as a student, but know almost nothing about teaching. So the bullshit meter on this post is higher than usual. And I'm really just writing this as a way to put off doing taxes (as a side note, if Republicans wanted to destroy Democrats they'd move elections to mid April).

The build up to this post is the general concept of evaluating information, especially who to trust (school, scientists, religious leaders, parents, no one decide for self...). I'm going to try to skip past my giant set of rants on this topic, especially since I've touched on it in several posts. But the starting off point is that most of these sources often end up saying just trust me and then can't believe when people put their trust in an alternate source (school and science that includes you).

While school is not a perfect source of information, it is generally better than any of the others and is at least a good starting point. So I'd say that two things schools should aim for are showing why school should mostly (but not absolutely) be trusted and more generally teaching how to evaluate sources of information.

I think that science education is a logical starting point for teaching how to evaluate sources of information and demonstrating the validity of information from school. Especially since it is generally the only subject that has demonstrations of any kind (name another subject in which what is being taught is actually tested in any way, except maybe self consistency in mathematics but that's rather abstract). This means that science experiments are far more important as a piece of education as a whole than they might appear at first.

Problem is, I'd claim, that school science experiments are flawed. Let's say students are doing the time an object falling experiment. The hypothesis is something like "gravity accelerates objects near Earth's surface at approximately 9.81m/s^2" right? Wrong! Everyone knows that's correct and if the experiment proves it wrong the student doesn't get to publish an article in Nature, she/he gets to repeat the experiment again till the "hypothesis" is proved true. That's about as far from science as you can get. The real hypothesis is something along the lines of "what teachers tell me is generally correct and provides information about how the world works", and increasingly has the add on of "science/school is fun".

Well, if that's the hypothesis then doing the object drop experiment is still bad science. Why? Well, let's take another example. Someone on the street says the way to add two numbers is to just add 5 to the first number. Now to prove it try doing 6+5, ok how about 7+5. See the rule works, now trust me. The natural reaction should be, let me come up with a set of numbers to add to test this rule and it would quickly be proven false.

So doing a proscribed experiment doesn't go very far in answering the true hypothesis. The students need to design their own experiments. But the answer to any experiment most students would do is already well known and they'd still be expected to get the correct answer. It is a step in the right direction, but I'd claim that far better would be to ask a student to design something using the knowledge they've been given. When a student is able to use their knowledge to create something that works that is a powerful moment. It shows the knowledge they have works even when tested in the way the student chooses. It means that the student isn't just repeating whatever they do till they get a right answer. And I'd claim it is more fun (although that may just be my opinion).

Now there is a huge issue with building something. It very often won't work. If the project stops there then science is disproved, school is bullshit and it is time to start reading websites about how the moon landing was faked. However, if the student has to figure out why it didn't work and then redesign based on that info then the student is testing whatever science comes up rather than whatever was being taught that week. This becomes a much better test of the reliability of information taught in school. Additionally, many people don't consider science sufficiently "magical", and I think that finding unexpected issues and their causes can help demonstrate how mysterious and "magical" science can be.

Not to mention that if the design is sufficiently interesting the hypothesis can be adjusted to "what teachers tell me is generally correct and provides USEFUL information about how the world works".

In addition to increasing trust in school, now the student knows that some sources provide information that can be used in interactions with the world. Which means that other information sources can be tested for the same ability. Thus, giving the student a tool for evaluating sources of information in general.

Alright, I'll admit the argument doesn't hold together perfectly (not to mention being built on complete ignorance about teaching), but there it is. I guess I should also admit that it isn't surprising that I think the key to making people smarter (aka thinking more like me) is to get them to do more of what I do.

Oh no, Radiation, Ahhhhhh!

2010-12-16T23:08:00.000-08:00

I tried so hard to make this post short and simple and failed so badly, if you want you can just head to this wikipedia article on ionizing radiation or the epa's page on the topic and get a more coherent version of this post. Otherwise you can continue reading why the person who makes his money designing circuits that put radiation in the air thinks that radiation from electronics is safe.

Unfortunately very few people really know physics and very few people really know biology and especially since they are on somewhat opposite ends of the science spectrum an extremely small number of people really know both. This leads to a lot of confusion over how radiation impacts people.

I definitely can't claim to really know biology, but I do know some physics especially when it comes to a certain range of the electromagnetic spectrum. So I'm going to try to spread a bit of knowledge about the subject.

First of all, radiation sounds scary right? Well some of it is. If someone says there's a big source of alpha radiation near by then run. But when I tell you that in order to read this post you have to bombard your eyes with radiation and that each particle of that radiation is far more energetic than those created in a microwave, you should stay calm cause I'm talking about visible light.

Next an attempt to quickly explain what radiation is: radiation is a very general term describing particles or waves traveling through a medium. Unfortunately some radiation is described as waves while other radiation is described as particles and sometimes people go back and forth. Explaining that takes some mind bending quantum mechanics, but we can skip over that. Most of the time when radiation is discussed it's either alpha/beta radiation which is typically viewed as particles. In general big doses of alpha/beta radiation come from radioactive elements and can be scary stuff. The other type is electromagnetic radiation which is typically described as a wave. All electromagnetic radiation is the same thing, just with different frequencies. It's a bit easier to think of it as a particle in which case frequency describes how much energy each particle has and power describes how many of those particles are flying around. The span of frequencies is essentially infinite, but the range people typically encounter is about 10^6 Hz (AM radio) to 10^19 Hz (gamma rays - hopefully you don't encounter these too often). This chart from wikipedia nicely shows the spectrum. Notice that 10^6 to 10^19 is a crazy huge range - gamma radiation's frequency is 10 trillion times greater than the frequency of AM radio.

So what makes some radiation scary and some radiation completely safe? Well to answer that we have to know what it can do to a person. Alpha/beta/gamma radiation can do some really nasty stuff that can kill fairly quickly as well as cause cancer - I don't know much about what it is doing when it kills quickly - probably just messing up a bunch of molecules by knocking out electrons. The main fear of radiation is that it causes cancer. It can also heat the inside of the body.

Well what about cancer? Radiation causes cancer by knocking electrons out of molecules in DNA. Once an electron is knocked out it can change the chemical properties and change what the DNA encodes. Then a bunch of biology can happen and end up causing cancer. In order to knock out an electron the radiation particle hitting the electron must have enough energy to knock it out. The key here is that the individual particle must have enough energy. No matter how many times someone lightly pokes you, you'll never break a bone. So if the particles are low energy/low frequency it doesn't matter what the power is. If the particles do have enough energy then the power, and exposure time, do matter because the more particles hitting you the more likely one will hit an electron and cause all the steps required to cause cancer. This is the difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation and is the key concept in knowing how dangerous radiation is.

So what radiation is ionizing? Ultraviolet light and higher frequencies, so around 10^16 Hz and above. Cellphones, portable phones, wifi, baby monitors, and bluetooth all use frequencies around 10^8 to 10^10 Hz, one millionth the frequency of ionizing radiation. Most other electronic communication standards use lower frequencies cause generating higher frequencies is really hard. Note that visible light is between any radiation generated by electronics and the frequency of ionizing energy.

Ok, so all these electronics devices don't use ionizing radiation, but microwaves don't use ionizing radiation (2.4*10^9 Hz) and everyone knows that if they stick their head in a microwave bad stuff happens. True, this gets us to the third issue with radiation which is that it can heat parts of your body. Microwaves are the prime example of this since they are designed specifically to heat water, 2.4 GHz is the resonate frequency of water. The human body works really hard to keep its innards within a very specific range of temperatures and outside of that stuff starts to breakdown and cause problems. WiFi uses the same frequency as microwaves and cell phones are sorta close. So it seems reasonable that they could cause heating which would then cause issues. Except they don't put out nearly enough power. Try reheating leftovers by putting your cell phone next to them. A common response is even if the power is small, people spend a lot of time with cell phones next to their heads. True, but again the human body works really hard to keep its insides at the right temperature, so it's not going to have any problem adjusting to some tiny bit of power. Consider that the human body can handle it being 100 degrees outside or 0 degrees outside and still stay 98.6 degrees. Compared to that getting rid of the tiny bit of heat from cell phone radiation is nothing - heck getting rid of the heat from the hot phone touching your head is probably the bigger issue. Microwaves generate about 700 watts of radiation, cell phones max out around 2 watts.

Yeah you say all that, but what about those big studies that show that cellphones cause bad stuff? For that I refer you to my post about shoulder tapping.

A few bonus items:
-People who live near cell phone towers are actually exposed to less cell phone radiation. Most of the exposure is from their phone, which doesn't need to transmit as much power if it is close to a tower.
-If you notice that your ear feels kinda warm and weird after a long phone call on a cell phone, it isn't cause of the radiation, it's cause you were holding a hot, hard object against your ear for a long time. Normal phones have a more comfortable shape and don't get as hot.

If you're still worried about cell phone radiation:
-When you're talking the phone has to transmit a bunch of data so it is almost constantly sending out radiation. When you aren't talking it's just checking in with the tower every once in a while so the amount of radiation exposure is far lower.
-Radiation falls off with distance squared so moving the phone just a little further from your head significantly cuts down on the radiation, plus your ear will appreciate not being pressed against a hot object.
-Bluetooth only needs to cover from your ear to your phone, vs a phone that has to talk to a tower. So bluetooth head sets do transmit significantly less radiation.
-WiFi is actually the one that is the right frequency to heat water. But its range (and transmit power) is much less than a cell phone and people generally don't hold their computer or access point to their head. Sleeping near an access point isn't a big deal because there typically isn't a lot of traffic on your wireless network while you're asleep.
-It might seem that something like streaming a movie would cause more radiation from your phone/laptop because more data is moving over the wireless connection. But when downloading data the only transmitting the device needs to do is send acknowledgements that it's getting the data. That's more transmitting than when the device is doing nothing, but far less than if you're sending a movie to someone.
-Frequency, power and duration are all key to understanding the impacts of radiation so watch carefully what terms are being used when reading about the topic.

Wikileaks

2010-12-15T21:53:00.000-08:00

I probably shouldn't apologize every time I write a post that ends up too long, so this is me trying not to apologize even though I am sorry.

What I find so interesting about all the recent activity surrounding wikileaks is how it combines many of the social concepts associated with the internet.

One of the big memes when the intertubes first popped up and still one of the semi-utopian ideals of the internet is anonymity, summed up by the phrase on the internet nobody knows you're a dog. This sense of privacy has quickly eroded, but the internet is still a great way to get to interact with the world without anyone knowing who you are (if that no longer seems true, go check out TOR).

Another big meme which started long before the series of pipes and tubes was made, but was truly able to take off because of the internet is information wants to be free.

These two concepts are often promoted by the same people and organizations (such as The EFF, Richard Stallman, and to a much lesser degree myself). While it may be possible to mesh the two concepts into a consistent framework by drawing some lines, there's clearly some conflict between wanting transparency and privacy.

To me these have coexisted as two of the pillars of the social movement around the internet and the wikileaks events so nicely brings them out and especially their conflicts. Such as a secret organization, where one of the key enabling factors is their ability to give information sources complete anonymity, whose stated goal is increased transparency. Then a group that actually calls itself anonymous supports the group dedicated to transparency by disabling websites while ignoring the fact that shutting down websites is the opposite of promoting free speech.

This whole post so far is essentially a long drawn out version of this xkcd comic.

In addition to those two long standing concepts, a more recent idea comes into the picture. While net neutrality is typically discussed in relation to making sure ISPs treat everyone equally, the concept can also apply to webhosts refusing to host certain content. And even more disturbing, credit cards and paypal saying who you can and cannot pay using their services based on disapproving of what the organization says.

Another concept which I think is related to the idea that no one knows you're a dog is the idea that information should be put forward and evaluated on its own merits. I've mentioned this idea and its relationship to wikileaks before. This is one of the few concepts I'm mentioning that I am very wary of since I think that information without context can be misleading which is where experts can help clarify what the information actually means.

When the leaked documents first came out there was some commentary about it prompting security improvements. It is reasonably likely that wikileaks improved national security, because if they got the info then it seems reasonably likely that other nations and enemies of the state were already able to get it. But when wikileaks got the info the government found out so it is able to address the security weakness. There are a lot of existing computer security concepts related to this situation that I unfortunately don't know well enough to talk about (I know that usually doesn't stop me).

One thing I wonder is how the debate would change if instead of partially scrubbing the data, wikileaks was more like wikipedia and allowed the raw posted data to go up on the site. On one hand it seems much worse since potentially life threatening info could get out, but on the other hand it would make the poster responsible rather than the data hosting organization. Much like youtube isn't responsible if someone posts daily show episodes since they don't do anything to screen the posted content. Well ok, in the case of youtube they take down the offending material when contacted which of course wikileaks wouldn't do. Although by removing some of the data wikileaks is choosing what information to host and what information not to host much like what amazon did when they stopped hosting wikileaks. Holly crap, I'm now arguing that Assange isn't sufficiently dedicated to transparency, time to move along.

Anyway, kinda cool to see all those major concepts interacting over the course of a single news story, although it does make it really hard to come up with an opinion. But, I really think the reason this has become such a big story is that unlike the previous leak, no one knows who leaked the info. So everyone, including the government, is trying to place the blame somewhere. When the source of the leak is known it is so straight forward that the person who stole the info is guilty and having found the person to blame we can all just move along. But without that clear answer we get stuck in this area where all these normally great principals don't quite fit together.

David's Second Rule for Debugging

2010-12-14T22:55:00.000-08:00

Way back when I came up with David's Rule for Debugging, then read a book about debugging with a more comprehensive set of rules. Since then I've added a new rule to my list. The exact rule is still a bit of a work in progress, and it has some similarity to "get a fresh view", but I think has some unique aspects. So here it goes.

In its most extreme form the rule is:

If you feel nauseous or about to cry, let other people help you.

I tried writing this post in a general way using third person but it was making it very tough to write so I'll just go with first person.

When I'm facing a problem, typically at first I'll want to think about it and look at it either on my own or as part of a small group. Later I might get around to "get a fresh perspective", but first I'll want a chance to get an understanding of the situation. This is especially true for high pressure/high excitement situations, which is unfortunate since that's when lots of people want to come by and get involved or give some advice. My general response is to try to gently push them away so I can get my chance to think/work (they typically don't leave, but I try).

However, there is a special case when the event is so high pressure and the results are so bad and make so little sense that the pressure gets to me and I start to feel nauseous. My gut reaction as the stress steps up is to push people away harder so I can dedicate my diminishing focus on the problem. But once nausea has kicked in there really isn't any focus or wits left to dedicate to the problem. That's when the rule kicks into effect, since I'm no longer of any use the best thing I can do is back away. Even if the people stopping by are normally less qualified to work on the problem, at this point random people off the street would have better luck solving it, so let them have at it. This also allows me to regain composure by stepping back rather than focusing in.

Luckily, I've only been in this situation once in recent memory and one of the people who stopped by was the exact right person to solve the problem. Unfortunately, I hadn't come up with this rule yet so I resisted help for longer than I should have, but eventually just had to back away. Also luckily, the person who solved the problem did it impressively quickly and once that was taken care of everything worked really well.

Can't say I'm looking forward to getting to use this rule, but at least if it happens I'll be prepared, well if I have enough wits left to use it - maybe the rule should be adjusted to: ...BEFORE you feel nauseous...

To Engineer Is Human

2010-12-09T21:56:00.000-08:00

I finished up To Engineer Is Human a few weeks ago, but have been considering how to blog about it in the back of my head. It is a book from 1982 that is supposed to be about engineering in generally, but is almost entirely focused on structural engineering (and at the very end has a short chapter about using computer aided design). While it does have some general engineering lessons, it really isn't very relevant to pretty much anyone I know reading this blog. So while I'm tempted to dig into a bunch of examples in the book I'm going to try to just skim some highlights.

First off is he mentions The Deacon's Masterpiece which is one of the few engineering poems I've ever read. The poem itself is rather long, but the idea is that someone decides that for any wagon there's always one thing that breaks first. So he's going to design each piece of the wagon so it won't be the first to go. And the thing works great for years and years and eventually every part fails at once and the whole thing falls apart. It's pointing out that in any design, no matter how good there has to always be a weak point.

One of the main themes of the book is that the reliability of structures kind of goes in cycles. Once a type of bridge has been design properly with a certain set of materials so it doesn't fall one of a few things happen:
1. The same design is used in a different set of conditions and fails. Then the engineers figure out what is required for that set of conditions.
2. Lessons of the past are forgotten and repeated. Once the new bridge fails the lessons are remembered and the next set of bridges are good again.
3. Since the current bridges are good it is time for progress and new designs or new materials or the same idea but with less safety margin are used. Then if there are failures the issues are worked out and then some better reliable bridges are built.

Along similar lines he suggests that every design is a hypothesis. The hypothesis is the design will work without failure. When the hypothesis fails it can be very unfortunate, but it is also the most informative. When the structure doesn't fail it doesn't say much because who knows what slight change in conditions would cause it to fail.

The two themes above suggest the problem with using structural engineering to draw general lessons for all engineering. In many areas of engineering failure is not as catastrophic and as long as failure rates are within acceptable limits meeting performance requirements can be far more important.

A lot of the book is going through various structural failures and talking about why they happened. One of particular interest to me is the Kansas City Hyatt Walkway Failure. Less than a month after I was born the Kansas City Hyatt was hosting a large party, which some of my family members almost attended, and the walkways over the lobby where the party was held collapsed and killed 114 people. Some of the initial thoughts were that the walkways simply weren't designed for people dancing on them. What actually happened is that the original design used beams that stretched from the ceiling and each beam supported multiple levels of walkways. But getting bolts to the middle of a long beam was practically very difficult so someone modified the design to have one beam from ceiling to the top level and then another beam from the top walkway to the bottom walkway. The problem is that now the bolt holding the top walk way had to support the weight of two levels instead of just one. Besides the personal relevance of the story I think this is interesting because it is tempting to blame whoever made the change at the last minute. But it is also the fault of the original designer for creating a design that couldn't actually be built or as someone else put it:

A detail that begs a change cannot be completely without blame when the change is made.

Few other random items:
-Kind of cool to see a book from 1982 mention a congressman working on improving safety regulations and it's Al Gore.
-Excalibur and other sword myths have a lot to do with engineering (why when a bunch of swords are built one is especially reliable). So is Icarus (wings melting as he tried to fly to the sun) - this one is really about a good design being used improperly (for the SGU fans - get it, the Icarus planet, get it? - oh and for the SG1/SGA fans, Daedalus is the guy that built the wings). And the liberty bell is an engineering failure.
-In this book written in 1982:

Computer models that predict the behavior of the economy have come increasingly to be relied upon to justify major economic decisions, and yet these models are not necessarily any more infallible than the ones that predict the fatigue life of a bus frame.

-This one is actually an important lesson in many aspects of life - random failures can be mitigated by having two of something, but to backup against systematic failure the backup must be of a different design (a friend has a story about a bunch of people backpacking who all brought water pumps so they'd be ok if a few broke, but then the temperature dropped and all of the pumps froze - luckily some of them had iodine tablets).

Oh crap, so much for not writing too much. Sorry.

Shoulder Tapping

2010-11-29T19:47:00.001-08:00

Let's say that for some reason Justin Bieber picks up the habit of tapping people on the shoulder. Then, of course, in a few days every kid in America is tapping everyone they see on the shoulder. The next logical step is some parents get concerned about the health effects of shoulder tapping and make sure that scientists studying shoulder tapping get funded.

Let's say that 200 studies are started. Each study picks a different health effect that seems like it could be connected (impact on bone structure, passing of germs, social anxiety...) and checks if it is correlated with shoulder tapping. These are real scientists who know what they are doing so they properly account for external factors and other correlations and thanks to all the funding are able to get such a large sample size that each study has a confidence level of 99%.

Then a journalist or study of studies scientist comes along and asks every scientist what they found. Turns out that with 99% confidence shoulder tapping causes peripheral vision loss.

There's no theory why shoulder tapping causes peripheral vision loss, but if there's a study showing a chance it is true then best to try to kill the new trend right?

Well, actually, even if there is no correlation between shoulder tapping and any of the studied health effects, the odds that 1 or more studies out of 200 would show a correlation with 99% confidence is 87%. (1-0.99^200). It is actually rather likely that there would be a false positive (even with only 69 studies there's a 50% chance of false positive, and with only 10 studies there's a 10% chance of false positive, much smaller, but still 10x worse than the quoted 99% confidence level).

While the individual studies were done with proper statistics the news story/study of studies was actually done with very poor statistics. Now if a scientist read the news article and then repeated the study of peripheral vision loss and again found a correlation with 99% confidence that would be worth reporting. Of course there would still be some question as to causation, but at least it would be true that there is very likely a correlation.

Wheel of Time 4-7

2010-11-14T21:00:00.000-08:00

I figured there's no point in putting up a post for each Wheel of Time book. But I just hit the half way point by finishing book 7. Since I'm in the weird position of being 5,926 pages into the series and thus would have to write a whole book just to summarize and yet only half way in so not even sure where the whole thing is going I won't say much other than good stuff so far.

Actually I take back the summary thing - several young adults plucked out of a small town are exposed to the larger world and meet a variety of other people while on their mission to fight evil using their newly found magic and special powers. I could totally be an author, all Robert Jordan did was fill in some details.

More TV

2010-11-07T20:59:00.000-08:00

Better Off Ted: Apparently there were two unaired episodes of Better Off Ted at the end of season 2. They are on netflix streaming, but their order is flipped - what netflix calls episode 12 (swag the dog) is clearly supposed to be the last (13th) episode of the season.

I'm still amazed how badly they messed up the promoting of that show. I know I had no interest in watching the show after seeing the ads since they completely failed to play up the arrested development style humor or the pointed comments about corporations that so well match the post 2008 national attitude. I bet that if they had just used the Veridian ads as the better off ted ads the show would still be on the air. Oh well...

TV

2010-11-03T22:12:00.000-07:00

First Chuck: Chuck producers, the woman we've all be waiting to see isn't Chuck's mom, it's Summer Glau. And here's how her episode should go. First a mysterious, large box should show up at castle. There should be some commotion over opening it then Chuck should kick it open and Summer should jump out naked (in a surprisingly non-sexual way). Then there should be a mission where Summer has to act as a ballerina and shows off some dance moves. Something strange should happen during the mission causing her to beat up Casey in a series of very fluid motions. Afterwards Morgan should laugh about Casey being beat up by a 90 pound girl. After that Summer should act more cold and distant and take on a stiffer fighting style where she acts almost like she is indestructible. During that time she should run into Chuck's mom and make a comment about how Chuck's mom looks different than she remembers. To make sure the joke lands, Chuck's mom should make a comment about expecting a body builder instead of a little girl. During one of these fights something should land on Summer's arm forcing her to wear a cast. Then she should meet up with Morgan and flirt with him in a weird, nerdy way. While Morgan is busy flirting with Summer, there should be an important phone call to the Buy More and Lester should cover for Morgan by doing a dead on impression of him. Throughout the episode Summer should make slightly off comments. The episode should be written and directed by Joss Whedon. It would also be nice if they could fit in some references to some of Summer's previous roles.

Second SGU: Anyone else think that while a few SGU episodes are about progressing the plot (mostly stacked at the start and end of a season) and a decent number are about building the characters (all thousand of them), that they set aside several of the mid season episodes to be more about how the story is told? I do think it is cool that they play with the format a bit. But in some of those episodes every character acts exactly as you'd expect and so does nothing to build the characters and the plots are so obvious you know the ending 15 minutes in. Which I guess is fine if it is all about how the story is told rather than the story itself, but does seem like making those stories a bit stronger would do a lot to improve the episode. I also don't think they have fully adapted to the idea that the crew is isolated so making it look like someone (especially someone we've seen more than once or twice) is going to die is extra unbelievable.

Third Caprica: I'm so disappointed Caprica is being canceled. Partially because I like the show, but even more so because I feel like I put in a season of watching them build up the world in order to get the payoff in later seasons and now it turns out those seasons won't be made.

Travel Costs

2010-11-03T00:30:00.000-07:00

I've found that when I'm looking at ticket prices to travel somewhere I tend to evaluate the cost of the ticket based on factors such as the cost of other modes of transportation, ticket prices at other times of the year, ticket prices to other destinations... But rarely try to evaluate how much the trip is actually worth to me.

Say that it costs $1000 to fly home for thanksgiving. Sounds outrageous since say it is usually $400 around thanksgiving time and $250 other times of the year. But what if you are asked what is it worth to you to get home for thanksgiving? Or why does spending $1000 to go to Egypt seem reasonable, but $2000 seem unreasonable? Do I actually know the value I would get from a trip to Egypt to within $1000? Is the purchase of travel tickets purely based on a game of trying not to be the chump?

Priceline sort of gets at this, although it always shows you the normal prices before you have to name your own. I bet if it didn't do that it would be incredibly difficult to decide what to pay and in the end the decision would probably mostly rely on a guess of what prices should be.

Maybe that's more universal than just airline flights, but I do think that when I buy items there's typically a question of how much is this worth to me, rather than just, how's this compare in price to similar (but not equivalent) items. (The "not equivalent" is important, because unlike say a different smart phone, I can't buy last year's ticket home instead of this year's and a ticket to someone else's home wouldn't make sense, but still factors into the acceptable price calculation).

Facebook Venn Diagram

2010-10-19T02:11:00.001-07:00

Since I can't seem to sleep I was flipping through facebook. As I was looking at the page of a good friend I noticed that we have few friends in common both as an absolute number and as a percentage of his total friends. So I started looking through other friends and noticed the same pattern with almost everyone. Good friends, family, distant friends, people from high school whose names I forgot. In almost all cases mutual friends were very roughly around 1% to 20% of total friends.

There is another good friend in college where it came in at 1/3 which is more in line with what I would suspect.

I'm not complaining or worried about not knowing enough of my friend's friends or think any of this means anything. But especially the minimal correlation with how well I knew the person struck me as odd.

Anyway, enough of the meaningless observations, time for bed.

It's All About Jobs

2010-10-13T22:05:00.000-07:00

There's a meme floating around that this election is all about jobs and that the top item for voters is jobs.

First off, I'm sorry for for everyone who has lost their job in the economic downturn and in general for the unemployed. I in no way want to imply that I don't think it is important to increase the number of available jobs. Also this discussion could easily be seen as influenced by politics, but I'm really just trying to understand the above statement.

The question is if jobs is the top issue on the minds of voters and if so why?

The unemployment rate is about 10% (which is big). But that's only 10% of people who are looking for a job who don't have one, there are a lot of people who have just given up on looking given the poor economy. Not sure what that number is, but I'm thinking it is reasonably to bump the unemployment rate up to 15% to include those who have stopped looking.

So of the people who want a job 15% don't have one. As a matter of economics and ethics that's very bad, but is a small portion of the voters. Let's assume that everyone who doesn't want a job is dependent on someone in the general population of workers (both employed and unemployed) then 15% of the overall population would be unemployed or depend on someone unemployed. I think that's probably an overestimate (we're talking potential voters so kids under 18 don't count), but let's go with it. We've still got 85% of the population to explain.

Let's for the moment assume that voters represent the population as a whole. Obviously untrue, but I don't think adjusting this assumption would help answer the question (we'd have to consider all the retired people who consistently vote).

There is a decent portion of the population that is underemployed because of a lack of jobs at their skill level. Let's say this equals our adjusted unemployment number, of all my guesses I have the least idea about this one. So now we've accounted for 30% of the voters.

There are only a few other groups I can think of:
1. People who are employed at the right level, but feel they'd be making more money or would like to make a job shift if there were more jobs. Not sure, but doesn't seem this would make jobs their top issue. At this point it seems something like healthcare would be just as important (in either political direction).
2. People who know unemployed people and are sympathetic or even don't know any and are super-sympathetic. Maybe I'm being too jaded, but again doesn't seem like enough to push it to the top of the list.
3. I thought I had another group, but the Dogfish Head 90 Minute Imperial IPA I just drank is starting to kick in.

Maybe some portion of the above groups (including the one I forgot) makes jobs their top issue. Let's say a whole 20% of the population (which would require a fairly large portion of the above groups since they are only a portion of the total population) defies my jaded world view, that only bring us to 50% of voters. That's a lot but only on the edge of majority. I guess that if the rest of the issues have to split the other 50% then jobs would be the top issue. But not in the supermajority way that I think the meme represents.

This leaves me with only a few possibilities:
1. It's not true. Jobs aren't actually the top issue for voters.
2. The above analysis is correct (or close enough) and while jobs is bigger than any other issue, it isn't actually the top issue for more than half the voters.
3. I vastly misestimated the above numbers and/or left out some significant group that cares about jobs.
4. Jobs is the top issue of super-vocal voters, not voters as a whole.
5. Some group or groups have put the idea of jobs into the heads of voters who otherwise would have other top issues.
6. I'm just missing something completely. This seems very likely.

Again, I'm really asking. I'm not trying to make a point, I just don't understand, most likely due to a lack of knowledge. Although, now that I wrote all this out I'm thinking that something along the lines of #2 is correct, but this post took some time to write and I don't feel like deleting it.

Midas Touch

2010-09-30T23:13:00.000-07:00

At a super bowl party last year I had a bottle of Midas Touch and was impressed. Since then I've had it a couple times and thought it was good, but had no idea that when the bottle says Handcrafted Ancient Ale it's serious:

Midas Touch Golden Elixir, currently marketed as Midas Touch, was first marketed in June 2001. The recipe for this beverage is based on the chemical analysis of residues found in clay vessels believed to date back to the 8th century BC. Originally discovered in Gordium, Turkey during a 1957 dig by archaeologist Rodney Young, the content of these vessels was left unknown for 40 years. In 1997, molecular archeologist Dr. Patrick McGovern received a phone call from a former student of his informing him of a residue on clay jars from the tomb of King Midas. Dr. McGovern quickly did chemical analysis finding all aspects of the drink except for the spicing agent but made an assumption of saffron due to regional availability.

Now I really want to try Chateau Jiahu.

Ok, end beer commercial. Why am I drinking Midas Touch on a Thursday night? Because I'm celebrating that the project I've been working on at work for the last year is finally coming together!

Shop Class As Soulcraft

2010-09-25T23:06:00.000-07:00

Today I finished Shop Class As Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into The Value Of Work by Matthew B. Crawford.

The book makes the argument that separating knowledge from being able to work with the physical world is bad for workers in many ways. It is push back on the knowledge economy. The story is based on his own experience working as a motorcycle repairman after getting his PhD and working some office jobs.

If the subject makes you think of Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance, there are a few shared ideas, but this book isn't insane.

I have mix feelings about this book.

First some good:

Sections of the book are clear articulations of thoughts that have guided my career and education. If anyone wants to understand why I chose electrical engineering over computer science and engineering over other fields, this book would be a good place to start - the core idea being working within the constraints of the physical world and seeing ones efforts cause something to actually work both theoretically and practically. Even though he does makes some comments about repair being superior to design (I think most of those comments are based on ignoring several aspects of design).

He even made some comments on creativity that very nearly matched my own.

Some ok:

He makes some good points about the modern office. Especially about how when people work in teams on poorly defined tasks it is difficult to evaluate the success of both the group and individual, vs in repair where either the repairman gets the motorcycle to work or doesn't. And how this puts managers in a strange position. Also how the knowledge of success vs failure is key to satisfaction in work. He also gets into how demoralizing it can be when the goal is something monetarily based, such as number of pages written, instead of working towards quality.

He also discusses how advertising and marketing reveals people's desires to build and repair their own stuff. He discusses marketing campaigns such as the Scion where they have people purchase options to make them feel like they are working on their car, when they are really just buying more stuff.

Some bad:

He takes most of his points to extremes - such as I toned the comments about the office way down.

My biggest issue with the book is that he encourages people to consider vocational school over college, especially since for some people they can make more money if they are willing to accept blue collar jobs. First, I question if that's true, much of the recent discussion of the labor market I've seen is about how recently those with college degrees are pulling even further ahead of those without. Second, even if it was, there are other reasons to go to college, such as just being an education person. Also this is one of the most "academic" books (outside of science and textbooks) that I've ever read which seems somewhat ironic given its subject matter. It's also a bit odd that a book suggesting going to votech made me feel like I should have taken a philosophy class before reading it.

The author doesn't bother at all with balance. He's all about getting away from specialization of labor as well as other aspects of corporations, but doesn't address what would happen if there was actually a major shift back to engineers doing their own building and writing their own user manuals. It never comes up that products would be significantly more expensive and the economy would tank. Not to mention that he does not suggest how reasonably complex projects would be designed or built. A good example of the lack of balance is when I made comments about creativity on this blog several people made good counterpoints and that's my personal blog - this book did nothing to address that there is more than one side to it.

Finally the size:

I really like the size of the book - it isn't a little pocket book, but still fits in a pocket so as I read through the wheel of time at home, I've been reading this book while doing laundry and hanging out on castro st. All books should be this size and if they need to be longer they can be split into multiple volumes. Also makes me wish there was a mini-kindle that bends a little.

Time Travel

2010-09-16T23:42:00.000-07:00

There's a particular view of time travel that seems to be preferred by tv and movies. This view is that someone can travel back in time and change something which alters the future. Let's say the character lives till 2010 then travels back to 1980 and changes stuff then travels back to 2010. In the show his time line is continuous from 1980 to 2010 then jumps to 1980 then jumps to 2010. The "first" time he is in 2010 in the past there is only one of him in 1980, the time traveling him hasn't visited that time. The "second" time he's in 2010 in the new history of the world there were two of him in 1980, one the normal and one the time traveler.

Ok, before we go further we have to allow physics to be broken in order to time travel, and even bigger we have to allow causality to be broken. It is difficult to proceed with a logical argument once we're allowing causality to be broken, but logic minus causality is one more thing we'll have to allow for this post to proceed.

It's always seemed to me that if someone time travels from 2010 to 1980, then in 1980 there are two of him and all of the resulting consequences, no matter if it is the "first" time he gets to 2010 or the "second" time, since there aren't two 1980s. (Sometimes shows touch on the idea of switching to a different universe when the time traveling occurs - that would solve the problem, but then the person is both time and universe traveling, not just time traveling*). So that's not a new idea. But what finally occurred to me is why the two different 1980s view of time travel is so natural for TV - you are following the character who time travels and time is progressing based on his view of time so it is possible to see each moment in time more than once as soon as he starts time traveling. Even in a story with many characters, the story will take the view point of only the time traveler for that part of the story. (Heros may be an exception to that rule, but Heroes' time travel rules were really wacky, remember the crazy mesh of strings they called a timeline?)

If a TV show had to draw a time line (based on the reference of a third party - or a non-time traveling character) they would be hard pressed to make it work with this view of time travel. It would be equally difficult to make this work if they also showed events from the perspective of a non-time traveling character. Especially since the time traveler's friend's memory contains one set of events during the "first" 2010 and a different set of events during the "second" 2010.

So I blame the linearity of story telling and the tendency to perceive the story through the view point of a single character for this persistent view of time travel.

Although since we've dropped causality maybe I blame this persistent view of time travel for the linearity of story telling.

(*The universe hopping version of time travel is also somewhat less satisfying since if the character goes back in time to save someone they're not actually saving the person in the original universe, but rather just choosing to live in a universe in which the person survives - that seems to make the story much more shallow. Although I guess if they're not sure how time travel works they could still be well intentioned...)

Two Ideas

2010-09-16T23:01:00.001-07:00

Here are two ideas:

1. Trilingual travel books. Lots of people both in and out of the US speak the language of their home country and English as a second language. When they visit a foreign country it is likely they will speak English there since they will find more English speakers than speakers of their primary language. So it is useful for their tour book to have English names and descriptions. However, even if the person is very fluent in English it is likely that there will be many places in the foreign country they learned about growing up in their primary language and don't know the English for it. In addition to sites, this would likely be true for foods and other aspects of travel. So it is useful for the tour book to also include names in the reader's primary language. And of course any good tour book will include the names in the language of the destination country.

This isn't just a crazy theory - a coworker borrowed a tour book and mentioned how he had a tough time find what he's looking for because he only knows the Chinese name (and his English is approaching native speaker). When I suggested a tour book in Chinese he pointed out that he'd be speaking English in the country so a Chinese tour book wouldn't do it either.

I think the major obstacle is a company that has all the content would have to do this or give someone permission to use their content. Also tough would be that this would require the creation of a huge number of books - perhaps it is an idea better suited to a website that allows the user to pick a destination country and all the languages they want the information in - or maybe ebooks are the answer.

2. Certified store for Android apps. Any app going into the Apple app store has to be approved by apple which is both the store's biggest advantage and biggest disadvantage. My understanding is basically anything can go up on the Android store. Seems like an opportunity for someone trusted to check Android apps for security issues (and if trying to mimic apple - occasionally dismiss apps for no reason) and then put them up for sale in a special store. I was thinking that the developers might have to send them the source code, but iOS developers don't send the code to Apple so it should be possible to do the security checks with binaries only.

Semi-related idea - why isn't there an app store equivalent for desktop/laptop computers?

Creativity

2010-08-31T23:57:00.000-07:00

I'm going to talk about myself for a bit, since that's what I get to observe, but I'm trying to get to a broader point not just spout off about myself.

I feel like there's a "traditional" image of the path to creativity. A bunch of somewhat wacky looking people tossing a ball around while brainstorming in an office shaped like a castle or sitting in a hot springs on some company retreat (ok, maybe that's several images all jammed together). And part of the image is that those people are part of some cross disciplinary team or each has some broad range of work and life experiences. Think of the creativity posters with pictures of an old Einstein with crazy hair.

I've filled several invention disclosures at work. Some of which are working through the process to become patents. I'll admit that while each to the best of my knowledge is an original and useful idea, none of them is going to transform an industry or anything close to that. But I like to think that to have an original useful idea in a field that has been around a while and has a decent amount of competition takes some creativity.

I was thinking about what lead up to each of these inventions. Since I've never been to a meeting where a ball was tossed around and definitely never been to a company retreat with hot springs none of those were involved in the process. In fact the common theme in each case is either independently or in collaboration with one or two other coworkers I was digging deeply into the details of some aspect of a circuit I was working on. And in each case as I reached a certain level of discovery and understanding the new idea just flowed. And it was a single clear idea, not a giant list of brainstormed ideas. Each of these situations seemed almost the exact opposite of the "traditional" image of creativity.

Going back to Einstein for a moment. The old man with crazy hair really didn't do much. It was when he was a clean cut, suit wearing, patent clerk that he came up with mind blowing advances in physics. I will admit that I don't know a ton about Einstein, but my understanding is that most of his advancements came from thought experiments on his own, not brainstorming or even collaboration.

For my own example I wonder if while I'm being creative, maybe I'm not hitting a higher level of creativity that the "traditional" example would help me achieve. The higher level could be just how new the idea is, or could be the difference between creativity on the level of circuit details vs large system changes. However, that doesn't hold together when the Einstein example is considered.

I guess the answer is probably just that creativity is a large, poorly defined concept so different types of creativity require different approaches. And different people get to creativity by different means. In addition, crazy looking Einstein makes a better poster and a multidisciplinary teams going rafting makes a better story than an engineer focusing on a computer screen late at night. So those are the images of creativity that are spread.

Was that obvious? Is there something I missed? Am I over valuing engineering creativity - is a pixar writer so much more creative than a chip designer that the comparison doesn't even make sense? Does a pixar writer actually follow the "traditional" path or is that just a false image? Is "traditional" path really more about how to get a team to collaborate than how to maximize individual creativity?

Most of my random ramblings are just that. But in this case I'm actually reevaluating which assignments at work I want based on this idea. The "traditional" image of creativity that I have says bounce from area to area picking up broad knowledge to allow cross-pollination of ideas. But now I'm thinking that while breadth shouldn't be ignored, my own path to creativity is to go further in depth.

RFCALC

2010-08-07T15:22:00.000-07:00

My previous post about iphone programming included some complaining about the development environment. Well I'll admit I had the expectation that I should be able to just sit down, crank out some code, and submit it (as if I was using a program instead of creating one). I realize that was expecting a bit much. Once I bothered watching a few lectures of the Stanford iPhone programming class, looking at some more example code and finding apple's class definitions I realized that apple actually makes iPhone programming very easy. And once I got into it I realized that a lot of it, especially graphics, is much easier than I anticipated.

Version 3.0 (I'm being a little generous with version numbers, but at least I started with version 1) is submitted for review now and should be on the store soon. When I first started the app several coworkers suggested I make a smith chart tool and I said that the graphics would be too much of a pain. So I'm fairly excited that version 3.0 has a smith chart tool. And, maybe it is just because I made it, but I think it is in some ways better than the smith chart tool I have on my computer at work.

I decided to try adding iAds to the app (that was added in version 2.0). So far there are just two ads that run and I'm not really making money off it. But it was kind of cool to have the first app I've seen that uses iAds. And what I like about it is I get to see how many requests for ads occur so I get some sense of if the app is just being downloaded or if people are actually running it. Based on that the number of people using it must be much smaller than the number downloading it, but there's still a decent number of people using it and in surprisingly large number of countries.

Of course now that I'm getting (somewhat) used to objective-c and have some code built up I'm running out of ideas for what to do with it next.

I've been thinking a bit about why I've been enjoying iPhone programming so much. I think part of it is that I like engineering and design and while work sometimes fulfills that role, work projects can have very long stretches between successes. On the other hand, programming, well maybe just hobbyist level programming, allows me to make something and see it work over the course of a few hours to a few days. Far faster than even hobbyist level electronics design.

This is biggest program I've worked on in quite a while, most of my coding since graduation has been limited to single page perl scripts. So it has been cool to come up with the higher level structures (even though I'm sure it is pretty basic even compared to school projects). In particular it is great when all of the underlying objects have been built up so that a few lines of code can add a ton of functionality.

Wikipedia and knowledge

2010-07-31T23:23:00.000-07:00

This interview with one of the founders of wikipedia is in general somewhat interesting. But what really caught me was what he had to say about how experts are viewed:

Why did you feel so strongly about involving experts?

Because of the complete disregard for expert opinion among a group of amateurs working on a subject, and in particular because of their tendency to openly express contempt for experts. There was this attitude that experts should be disqualified [from participating] by the very fact that they had published on the subject—that because they had published, they were therefore biased. That frustrated me very much, to see that happening over and over again: experts essentially being driven away by people who didn't have any respect for those who make it their lives' work to know things.

Where do you think that contempt for expertise comes from? It's seems odd to be committed to a project that's all about sharing knowledge, yet dismiss those who've worked so hard to acquire it.

There's a whole worldview that's shared by many programmers—although not all of them, of course—and by many young intellectuals that I characterize as "epistemic egalitarianism." They're greatly offended by the idea that anyone might be regarded as more reliable on a given topic than everyone else. They feel that for everything to be as fair as possible and equal as possible, the only thing that ought to matter is the content [of a claim] itself, not its source.

I thought that fit in very well with all the discussion of wikileaks and the idea of getting information with no knowledge of the source. See the great New Yorker Piece about wikileaks and the slate article claiming transparency means revealing sources. While I somewhat agree that getting a bunch of data without knowing the source is questionable, I do think wikileaks is a very cool idea (although it would say more about the site if the dominate story didn't always become the site rather than the info it is disclosing).

Hm, I feel like there's some clever conclusion to be reached, but I don't feel like thinking that hard right now. But I do think that it is common for people to look at a subjects like economics, global politics, climate change, and health/medicine and try to evaluate the facts for themselves while dismissing the opinions of experts, and on the other side blindly trusting experts without doing any of their own checking (as a person I include myself in this).

For example, recently people are rather unhappy with economic experts, but listening to amateur economists explain why they know better than the expert consensus, possibly based on some document that sounded like fact to them, gets rather absurd.

My iPhone App

2010-06-19T12:07:00.001-07:00

My iPhone App was just accepted by Apple and is now in the App Store! The app's name is rfcalc (radio frequency calculator).

It still needs a lot of work, in fact there's a mistake in it that even shows up in the screen shot. But I'm excited that it got it to the point of being accepted so now I can build on it.

The app is aimed at RF electrical engineers, which is a fairly small target audience, but it also means that as far as I can tell there aren't other apps that do the same thing. The idea is to have a whole list of calculators for common calculations done by RF engineers. Right now there's just one that goes between impedance as a complex number and the equivalent series and parallel components. Fairly simple, but I've actually already used it a few times at work.

Saeed was nice enough to write some code that I used as a guide to get me going and most of the code for the interface is just a few pieces of example code I found online and hacked together. One of the most interesting moments was when I first used the app on my phone instead of the iPhone simulator on the computer and realized that I kept trying to scroll the window even though I knew I didn't include scrolling. I guess that'll be the first item for version 0.2.

It is also interesting to see the difference between how apple treats developers and users. Considering that most apple programs are installed by dragging a file to a folder, I was very surprised that it took me hours just to figure out how to get all the certificates set up so that I could submit the app to the store. On one hand I did ignore their extensive set of tutorials, but on the other hand since when do apple products require a manual for basic use. That's just one example of everything I found more difficult than expected along the way; although, I did go from never having seen object-c to submitting my app to the store in about a week so maybe I shouldn't complain. But I will complain about the iPhone keyboard - they have several keyboards that can be used in an app, but don't seem to want developers to modify them. A custom keyboard would do a lot to improve the interface of this app.

Oh, and this all means that I did pay the developer fee so if any of you develops a free app and wants to put it on the store without paying the fee let me know.

Email is working again

2010-05-27T01:29:00.000-07:00

Normal email address is working again. Let's all forget about the mailmight address before someone gets out the broken abstraction barrier stamp.

email

2010-05-26T19:54:00.000-07:00

Something screwy is going on with my email today - I'm working on it. If you are getting email bounces use my mailmight address or give me a call or...

Ebooks

2010-04-11T16:18:00.000-07:00

It's general assumed that books are better than tv/movies, especially since it sounds so superior to say so. Although of course tv/movies have some advantages, other than just being easier to consume.

One of which is it is way easier to remember who characters are. Look at a show like heroes which has a large collection of characters who come and go over the course of years. Yet even if a viewer can't remember all the details of the character, when the viewer sees the character's face they'll generally remember who the character is. Compare that with a long book or series of books. There are plenty of books that can be read over a much shorter period of time and yet give the reader trouble remember which minor character is which.

I think this is a simple matter of people being better at remembering faces than names (especially when authors (I'm looking at you Robert Jordan) pick unpronounceable names, or in the case of say lord of the rings when two characters have very similar names).

I think this is one area where ebooks could improve upon normal books (heresy, I know). The obvious approach is to make character names links that take you to a page describing who they are. But much better would be to give faces to each character and display them, maybe on the opposing page if the ebook has two screens, or even over the name or something along those lines (I'm thinking more along the lines of an ipad display than a kindle display). I know part of the point of books is to let the imagination fill things in, but the face doesn't have to be a photo, it could be a sufficiently generic drawing (similar to what often appears on a book cover) that it would help the memory, but not limit the imagination. Heck for LoTR just a red eye over Sauron and a white cloak over Saruman would be super helpful. Ok, the white cloak would get confusing when Gandalf takes over as the white wizard, but you get the idea.

And about half of Snow Crash could have "more sumerian mythology, just move along" written across it. Ok, maybe that one is taking it too far.

On what I initial thought was an unrelated comment, but now realize is actually rather related. I tried reading a comic book on my phone (dr horrible) and comics seem like the perfect format for reading on a phone. For those times when you want to read, rather than watch video, but don't want to strain your eyes reading on a phone, comics get across the info and have some reading, but small amounts of large text are no problem to read on a small backlit screen.

Oh, just noticed that the first part of this post is describing comic books. So I guess the conclusion is that we should give up books for reading comics on our phones... Not really where I intended to go with this.

The Dragon Reborn

2010-04-11T16:11:00.000-07:00

I recently finished The Dragon Reborn which is part of the wheel of time series. It now strikes me that the title is a bit odd, since this book is almost entirely about everyone but the dragon. Weird, anyway, good book although I'd claim not as good as the previous two.

Moving

2010-04-11T15:54:00.001-07:00

Holly crap I'm moving again! Yet again solidifying AEPi as my most stable home since middle school.

I started writing up my giant rant about the insanity of how Avalon at Creekside sets their prices (take the average of some nicer apartment buildings, see how over priced the apartment is then divide that by 4, why 4, cause that's the formula - that's the super short version) but decided I'd spare you. I had discussed the idea of "the worst they can do is say no" with a friend recently. But this experience taught me the worst they can do is give such an insane explanation and pitifully small offer ($9 off) that you get mad and end up leaving.

Anyway I found a place about 5 minutes away that's cheaper and bigger and has an AC and is more recently renovated. So I'm excited about that, but not so excited about putting all my stuff in boxes again.

Life

2010-04-11T15:20:00.000-07:00

Wow, it's been a while since I posted about my life. I feel like I've noticed a general drop in blog use. I wonder if that's a change in the situation or the observer. I also wonder if twitter really is just enough that it removes people's need to write full blog posts.

Anyway, since the summer I've been working on a chip at work that had/has a very tight schedule and the part with the most focus is the part I am working on. Unfortunately I've discovered that the harder I work the more mindless downtime (aka TV) I require so when I'm low on time I often end up killing the bit I have with TV. Luckily some of my friends in the area are also into watching tv and playing games so I can actually combine that recovery time with being social which is awesome.

That long stretch of work was split up by several intense spouts of having fun. I visited home for Thanksgiving. I visited Santa Barbara where I hung out with my Uncle and his family which was a nice get away as always. Over winter break I went skiing at Sunday River with college friends. The skiing and seeing friends was a great time. It was also nice because I went from a nervous skiing n00b to, well still a beginner, but comfortable getting out there and enjoying it. Finished up that trip with my first Russian New Years and attempt at cross country skiing. I think I'd need to try cross country again before claiming that I really get it.

There was a one day trip to Tahoe for skiing in there. Good time, but I had my first encounter with moguls and wore myself out since I had no idea what to do. Also took a bit of a hard fall. I thought I was going through a connector between trails I had done before so built up some speed before getting to it. Upon entering it and realizing it was so narrow I couldn't slow down I realized I hadn't seen this bit of trail before and had to fall into a pile of snow. That's the only time I've left blood on the snow (just a bit of nose bleed, nothing serious).

March was a lull at work which worked out well since a lot happened that month. My parents came to visit and we headed down to carmel for an extended weekend. It was great to see my parents and hang out in a nice area. Kayaking in Monterey Bay was very cool. The next weekend was my brother's bachelor party. We met up in Denver and headed to the mountains for two solid days of skiing. Then Sunday night hit the town. The next weekend some college friends visited and it was great to see them.

Most recently I'm getting ready to change apartments. This seems like a good point to switch to a new post.

That was a big span of time, so I left out seeing someone or some major event - sorry.

The Great Hunt

2010-02-21T21:55:00.000-08:00

Having finished The Great Hunt, I now have a mere 12 books left in The Wheel of Time Series. Well this book did answer my questions from The Eye Of The World.

This one seemed a bit less LOTR like. Some similarity to Dune - the power that is primarily used by women, but on rare occasion can be used by men. It might turn out to be something different, but the whole connection to the multiverse through the stone tablets seems overdone (although this book does predate Stargate and Anathem so guess I can't blame it), and there do seem to be clues that something else is going on.

Anyway, good stuff.

A Walk In The Woods

2010-02-20T23:19:00.000-08:00

I read A Walk In The Woods over winter break, but since I haven't felt like writing I'm just now posting about it.

It's a fairly funny story of a guy who decides to hike the appalachian trail. The author, Bill Bryson, was unprepared for the challenge and his hiking buddy was hilariously unprepared. So it is an interesting view of hiking and America through the eyes of someone who doesn't have backpacking experience. He did do some interesting research and include it in the book - such as he's very down on the national forest/parks services.

Overall if you're into hiking/backpacking it's a funny read.

Quick Avatar/Dollhouse

2010-01-31T12:58:00.000-08:00

I've been meaning to blog about actual life events, like thanksgiving and skiing and new years and... but just haven't been in the writing mood lately.

But two quick items:

(Minor Avatar spoiler): When Jake is getting onto the back of the giant dragon thing, hiss thought is that it is the biggest thing in the sky and doesn't get attacked so it probably doesn't bother looking up. I really think that I've heard almost the exact same thing before, but can't seem to remember from where. Does anyone know what I'm thinking of?

(Minor Dollhouse spoiler): I'm 95% certain that the company I work for made an appearance in the last episode of Dollhouse. When Victor hands Tommy a piece of circuit board to burn, the main chip on that board has a big M on it, I'm pretty sure it's the logo of the company I work for (pausing on hulu is a bit too fuzzy for 100% certainty). My guess is that it was from a hard drive they had broken apart.

Motion Sensors

2010-01-09T11:51:00.000-08:00

Remember that Better Off Ted episode where the company decides to control the whole building with motion sensors, but it turns out the sensors only see white people? Yeah, way to go hp.

I'm Telling You This Because I Want To Talk

2009-12-21T00:05:00.000-08:00

Have you ever noticed that thing where when there is a group of people and a portion of the group is listening to one person while others are listening to another then all the attention shifts away from one of the speakers the audience-less speaker will just kind of stall while looking around for anyone to continue telling the story to, even if the new audience has no overlap with the old one. And there's that awkward bit of eye contact language as the story teller tries to drag people in and audience members try to avoid glances or get sucked in.

I find the whole eye contact communication fairly funny. But what I find especially amazing is how little it matters who gets sucked in to hear the rest of the story. If someone starts talking you can give the person the benefit of the doubt that she/he thinks there is information the audience would appreciate knowing (or would find amusing or...). Then when the audience is lost if the person only started again upon regaining the attention of the original audience it would be one thing. But as far as I can tell it rarely matters who gets sucked in by the eye contact game. Which I think eliminates pretty much any possibility other than the story teller is talking purely for his/her own sake. Not that this is such a terrible thing - telling others a story can be very therapeutic. But the instances of this scenario really make it seem like a huge portion of communication must be more for the sake of the speaker than listener. Yeah I know I'm far from the first person to come to this conclusion. And yes as I started writing this post I did realize the irony of writing about people who talk for their own sake without caring who is listening on my blog.

Dollhouse

2009-12-20T23:56:00.000-08:00

Semi-spoiler alert.

So my understanding was that Whedon had a 5 season plan for dollhouse. They made it 1.5 seasons in before Fox decided to cancel the show. That left 9 hours of dollhouse. I really think they are covering the whole 5 year plan which means each episode is about 0.4 seasons and it does feel like each episode is covering a half season story arc. As the guy in the attic said - that's ahead of all projected schedules. I'm getting extra mad at fox because the last few episodes haven't been as enjoyable since the plot is so rushed, but they do seem like they would be awesome multi-episode plots. But with the speed they are going through the story I'm barely caught up with the idea that Echo has gone from slave to super hero. At least we got to see Victor being Topher.

The Eye of the World

2009-12-20T23:23:00.000-08:00

Lending someone a book you think they'll like seems like it would be nice, except it is a bit less clear when it is first book in the third longest novel series (in latin or cyrillic characters). Wow, just looked up #1 on the list - that is a giant ball of silliness.

There is a definite sense in the book of struggling against an overwhelming enemy who can be set back but never really defeated. I think Robert Jordan helps bring this out by giving the reader an overwhelming number of pages to read. No matter how much I read in a day it barely dented the book, and finishing the book is barely denting the series.

I actually really liked The Eye of the World and appreciate Julie lending it to me. This book is very lord of the rings, although based on the ending I expect it to start diverging in the next book. And I think the actual writing style is somewhat different (well the most obvious is there aren't many songs and poems in this one).

One of my few criticisms of LOTR is that Tolkien made Gandalf so powerful that he then had to handicap him by giving him orders to not intervene too much. I still think Gandalf is awesome, but I do think that in The Eye of the World the power of the characters is a bit more balanced so no one is artificially holding back (well, later books might correct that). Although I am left wondering if those three characters are so important why is there only one Aes Sedai with them? What are the others up to that's so important? I imagine this will be answered later so if you know the answers to these questions don't tell me.

The Office and Counterpoint

2009-11-19T23:47:00.000-08:00

I think that what The Office has been doing recently is kind of interesting. The show started off with the typical office humor point of view where there's a normal person or two, the boss is incompetent and each coworker has their own bit of insanity. Pretty much the Dilbert formula. I'm not saying there wasn't anything original about The Office (well, ok there was nothing original about the American version), but the perspective was pretty standard. Over the past couple of seasons as Jim has taken on more responsibilities we've seen hints about the transition to come. And now that Jim is a co-manager they've really flipped the situation around. We learn that while Michael is a weirdo and somewhat incompetent, some of the insanity is on purpose and Jim who is expected to know better is actually needing direction from Michael.

Nothing that extraordinary, but if office fans are the Dilbert crowd who go through their day convinced they know better than their boss then the show is in some way now making fun of their fans (or at least correcting them). Seems like a bit of a strange move. Luckily Michael still comes off insane so it is not a complete reversal of views.

This sentence is acting as a transition between topics.

When news and talk shows have Jenny McCarthy on to talk about vaccines I scream "WTF IS GOING ON? WHO'S BEEN HANDING OUT THE STUPID PILLS?". Oh, that's not where I was going with that. Let's try again. When news and talk shows have Jenny McCarthy on to talk about vaccines it might seem appropriate to have another guest who is a vaccine specialist at the CDC or some university explain why vaccines are actually good and talk about the extensive studies that show they don't cause autism.

However, that's not the counterpoint that should follow her appearance. The guest after Jenny McCarthy should be a vaccine specialist at the CDC or some university and should be wearing a sport coat with chalk dust on it over a t-shirt with Maxwell's equations, too loose pants and pure white tennis shoes, also acceptable is a free t-shirt from a career fair plus jeans that were purchased in the early 80s and birkenstocks with white socks, bonus points for taped glasses and extra bonus points for soldered glasses. The scientist should be there to provide a counterpoint to Jenny McCarthy's choice of outfit.

If McCarthy cries foul because she went to the "university of google", the scientist can explain that he went to the university library and read all the books on fashion he could find, most of which happen to be from previous centuries, but hey he read a bunch of stuff so he's just as qualified to discuss fashion as she is to discuss vaccines.

The weird thing is I don't even watch the shows that have McCarthy on, but it generates so much buzz that I hear about it on NPR and news websites. Hm, I just admitted that I'm complaining about interviews I've never even seen. Well I guess I should go ahead and dedicate this post to everyone attending the "university of google" where poorly informed rants like this post count as reading assignments. Remember that anytime a claim from this blog is cited it can be proceed by, "My source, who has a graduate degree from MIT, says...".

Mind Reading Showers

2009-11-19T01:36:00.001-08:00

First off for all the Stars Wars fans there's this.

Ok, now for the overly thought out terrible idea.

I want a hat that I wear when I take a shower that reads my EEG. Over time I would train it to learn when I'm feeling too hot and too cold. Once it has caught on to what pattern indicates my feeling about temperature it could take over control of the shower temperature. If you think having an EEG learn when I feel hot vs cold is the most impractical part of this idea, I think you'd be surprised - this is when a link to an article about one of those devices that let people move a mouse cursor with their mind would be helpful, but it's too late at night to bother. Might be able to make the problem easier by also looking at something like rates of nerves firing on the skin, especially for an early indicator if the temperature is too high or low. Of course the feedback system would have to be carefully designed so that it wouldn't make changes too rapidly or overshoot the goal by too much, but that's not terribly difficult (basically just need to make it an over-damped system or critically damped if a little overshoot is acceptable).

This might sound super lazy and it is, but I am annoyed when I have to keep adjusting the knob up and down to maintain what feels like a comfortable temperature. There should also be a shutoff button that both electronically and mechanically shuts off water to the shower in case the system went haywire and cranked up the temperature. If the EEG was connected to the shower by wires that would get in the way, but all of this could be done wirelessly, especially if the hat did some of the data processing. Hm, I guess the hat would get in the way of washing my hair, but do you really have to wash hair since after a while you cut it off and grow new hair anyway? Well, I guess clean hair is nice so instead of a hat for EEG the shower could be built inside a fMRI. I'd have to keep perfectly still, but if I'm spending a million dollars on a shower I could probably have it wash me without it needing me to move.

Somewhat more seriously I'm surprised that I've never seen a digitally controlled shower. I wouldn't expect it most places, but maybe fancy hotels - well maybe fancier hotels than I go to.

802.11 Wireless Networks

2009-11-12T23:30:00.000-08:00

About a year and a half ago I bought 802.11 Wireless Networks The Definitive Guide and I've been slowly making my way through it since then. I finally finished.

I got a lot out of reading the book since it answered a lot of my questions about how the circuits I design at work are used, what is going on around them, and why certain features are required. But for anyone else I think you either know you want to read a book about WiFi or you don't. Although if I was going to get a book about WiFi I would look for something more recent, especially since 802.11n was still poorly defined when the book came out in 2005.

I'm trying to think of any interesting details to share. But a lot of the user stuff really only applies to large networks, not setting up a single access point in a home.

Holy Water

2009-11-11T23:33:00.000-08:00

I'm going to a baptism on Saturday. I'm kind of worried. Is this one of those events with holy water? If I get some holy water splashed on me how badly will it burn? Would it be wrong to bring a plastic tarp like the first few rows at a Gallagher show? I think my only hope is if god made a coding error and wrote holy water burns if Jew XOR atheist instead of Jew OR atheist.

Stuff and Things

2009-11-11T22:57:00.001-08:00

2nd patent application has been submitted. But because of how it was filed it won't show up on the uspto site till it is approved.

Dollhouse has been canceled :'(. I guess not showing any episodes during sweeps was a bit of a sign (not to mention airing it on Friday night). At least we get a few more episodes. It's kind of odd that I'm more upset about them canceling firefly even though I didn't even know the show existed when they canceled it.

Day man
Fighter of the Night man
Champion of the sun
You’re a master of karate and friendship…for everyone
Day man, day man
Uhh ahhahh
Fighter of the Night man
Uhh ahhahh
Champion of the sun
Uhh ahhahh
Master of karate and friendship…for everyone
Day man, day man
Uhh ahhahh
Fighter of the Night man
Champion of the sun

That one is for the It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia fans. It's strange, when I watch that show I alternate between not laughing, but thinking, oh that's a funny concept and laughing like crazy. Actually I think it is just a matter of how much Charlie ranting time the episode has. I also think it shares the aqua teen hunger force effect - the later at night it is the funnier the show is. (Hm, that paragraph isn't a strong endorsement for the show, but I actually think it is really funny).

On Castle Mal squared off against the bad guy from the second to last episode of firefly. It was way better when it happened in firefly.

I do actually have more going on in my life right now than TV, really, there's other stuff and even things.

RSS Ads

2009-11-11T00:27:00.000-08:00

There's a blog on EDN I occasionally read (unfortunately it's way too focused on digital). As with all blogs that I read I follow the RSS feed. I was just fooled into clicking on an ad because the blog's RSS feed incorporated links to ads as if they were links to posts (ok, I wasn't paying much attention because all the ads start with "Sponsored Link"). Not sure how common that is, but it is the first time I've seen it. Putting ads as posts in an RSS feed - LAME.

Hm, I guess the only thing lamer than that is a link that goes to a blog post that talks about ads in RSS feeds and even worse then tries to make it ok by using a self-referential joke...

Row 14

2009-11-11T00:08:00.000-08:00

All life on Earth, including humans, is carbon based.

Carbon is in the 14th row of the periodic table of elements and thus has 4 valence bonds (it's outer ring of electrons has 4 spots filled and the other 4 spots open).

Semiconductors are typically made out of silicon which is also in the 14th row and thus has similar chemical properties to carbon. Other semiconductor materials such as gallium arsenide and indium phosphide are made up of elements in other rows that combine to act like row 14 elements (the two examples are combinations of rows 13 and 15). Sometimes germanium is added to silicon which works out since germanium is also in row 14. There are plenty of other crazy combinations of elements used in semiconductors, but those are the major ones used for integrated circuits.

So both life and semiconductors are based on row 14 elements and thus are both based on similar chemistry. Kinda cool.

Yes, I realize that lots of people have proposed the idea that we could find silicon based life on other planets, although that usually refers to finding something animal like, just based on silicon chains rather than carbon chains. What struck me was the similarity between semiconductors and humans. But that's about as far as I've gotten with that thought.

Repeated Dilemmas

2009-11-07T01:15:00.000-08:00

On TV there's a reasonably common scenario in which a decision has to be made about trading off risk to an individual vs a group (in fact if you leave on the Syfy channel you'll probably see this multiple times a day). Often there will be two characters who disagree, the one who takes up the "greater good" argument is typically a scientist or other logic driven character and the one who pushes "leave no man behind" or "this is the morally correct way to go" or "how could we live with ourselves" is typically a member of the military or some other hero type character. The scientist argument can sometimes be a mask for "do whatever is least risky for me" which is typically the jerk scientist, but I'll ignore this side of the argument for this post.

I imagine that just about everyone sides with the character who supports saving the individual and so do I (I always side with Helo and almost never side with Baltar).

First I'd like to defend the scientist a little. While I overall disagree, I will say that often "leave no man behind" will pose significant risk to the entire group, and if TV shows didn't care about keeping main characters or audiences then we'd probably see a more balanced set of outcomes which may call the hero choice into question. I think that more movies like The Watchmen would do a lot of good for all other stories since the audience would believe something bad could actually happen (of course that thought is part of the justification for Wash's death so maybe I'll take that back).

However, I would claim that simplistic logic leads to the "greater good" argument and that the scientist character should be far too smart for it. The major downfall of the greater good argument is that on these shows it is almost never a one time event that is being dealt with. But rather something that happens about once a week (ok in the course of the show it may be less often, but is still a repeating occurrence). So they are not in a single game, but a repeated game. (If you're getting bored, just think prisoner's dilemma vs repeated prisoner's dilemma and you've basically got my point).

Yes, in a truly isolated incident maybe it does make sense to loosen your morals for a moment and let one guy die to save the group. However, if this decision is going to be faced repeatedly there are several consequences. For one thing the person out doing something dangerous is probably the person who would do other dangerous things in the future. If an important marine/viper pilot/away team member dies every time there is a threat to the group they're going to have a shortage of these important people. In addition after this happens once or twice that could do some serious damage to moral and reduce the risks team members are willing to take on. Both of these concerns are especially significant if they are a group on say one or more space ships and have no connection with other humans or there are no other humans. Also in situations involving the military it is always going to be a repeated dilemma since at some point the military will face another dangerous situation and its policies and reputation from past decisions will matter.

I think that this logic is somewhat built into human emotions and societal norms/morality. This is why the hero type will know the right answer from a gut feel or moral standpoint. However, writers seem to think that the scientist is applying logic to only the single situation. Seems like they think the scientist showed up for the psychology or economics lecture where the prisoners dilemma was covered, but skipped the next week when the repeated version was discussed.

I think I just took down Spock using logic! Which makes me wonder if Spock and Kurk had the opposite positions would the situation also be reversed in all the scifi shows since then.

Driver's Test and Probability

2009-11-07T00:40:00.001-08:00

Today at lunch a coworker mentioned this story about a woman who took 950 tries to pass the written part of the driver's test and started asking about the probability of passing by guessing each answer.

Our guess is that the test contains 20 questions and that each one has 4 or 5 choices. Let's go with 4 choices for now. The article says she only needed 60% to pass. Well, to figure out the chances of getting 12 or more right by chance just sum the probability of getting 12 to 20 right answers. For a set number of right answers n the probability is (1/4)^n*(3/4)^(20-n)*(20 choose n) since you need n right answers, 20-n wrong answers and you have to account for all the ways of arranging them (they aren't unique so it is choose rather than permutations). So then the probability of getting 12 or more right in one sitting is sum (1/4)^(n)*(3/4)^(20-n)*(20 choose n) from 12 to 20 = 0.000935392 or 1 in 1069. Not very likely that someone would pass by blind guessing once.

However, what are the odds of passing at least once in 950 tries? This could be solved in basically the same way as the last question, but there is a faster way. This is the same as asking what is 1 minus the chances of failing 950 times which is simply 1-(1-0.000935392)^950 = 0.588949 which is approximately 59%. So even if she was purely blind guessing she was actually slightly unlucky it took that many tries to pass.

However, if there were actually 5 choices per question then she actually only had a 9% chance of passing in 950 tries. If that was the case she was lucky, but still not terribly far from the realm of blind guessing.

Remember how excited I was about wolfram alpha? This may be the first time I've used it since a few weeks after posting about it. I guess a combo of google calculator and matlab tend to keep me satisfied. Actually wolfram alpha is in a weird in between spot. It is not as immediately available as google calculator due to the firefox search box. On the other side it doesn't allow for scripting (at least it is not immediately obvious to me how to do it) or even have an obvious way to feed one answer into the next calculation so it's not that great for anything serious. I guess it fills in when I need to do some math at home.

The Future of VOIP

2009-10-27T00:02:00.000-07:00

Sending voice over the internet is a bit tricky since what you care about is latency (how long from the time a sound is made to when the other person hears it) rather than throughput (how much data you can send over an extended period of time). The internet is largely designed for throughput so people go off and do all sorts of fancy things to improve latency for VOIP (voice over internet protocol).

So if the computer could see a little into the future (like the elevators in hitchhikers guide to the galaxy, or Daniel in the Avatar episode of stargate), over the course of the conversation it would be sending the same amount of data in the same time, but it could deal with short delays. Of course the universe has decided to be causal which ruins so many time travel stories. But the world is increasingly pointing out that human speech really is quite predictable. Type into an iphone and it becomes clear that after just a few letters it often knows what you are going to say. Even more disturbing is the google search box in safari and firefox that will complete what you thought was such a unique search phrase.

So VOIP could see into the future. Obviously it would sometimes be wrong and often would just have a list of possibilities, but it could send across a list of several possibilities (make use of the excess throughput) and then once it knows for sure, just send a short message saying which one it turned out to be. And in the cases where it was wrong then it just sends the voice data as usual. (Has some similarity to pipelining in processors.) You might point out that it doesn't just need to know what word to send, but needs to actually send the sound of your voice, but that just means it has to train over the course of several conversations.

If I was Scott Adams 100 people would now tell me about how this is already being done and another 100 would tell me why it is a stupid idea. Being me, the comment box will sit empty while my friends question if they can delete this RSS feed.

Lithium

2009-10-26T23:13:00.001-07:00

Today foreignpolicy.com had a slide show about where lithium comes from. It's not really a sad story since Bolivia is actually trying to make sure it gets some money out of the deal as opposed to what has happened with previous natural resources.

But something about it really struck me. I guess it is just that lithium batteries is this growing high tech area so it seems so odd to know that it comes from people digging evaporation ponds and moving around old plastic tubs by hand. I imagine that a lot of what we take for granted comes from similar sources. But the change from an image of middle class people sitting in front of computers in cubicles or taking measurements in electronics labs to the woman holding a plastic tub was a bit jarring this morning.

Oh well, I'm sure in a day or two I'll have reverted back to my previous set of mental images.

A Sad Realization

2009-10-24T22:44:00.000-07:00

As I've gone from a kid who is good with computers to MIT student to MIT grad working in electronics, I've kind of felt like eventually I should hit a point where tech support people treat me like slightly less of an idiot.

My current job is designing part of commercial WiFi chips. A few days ago I was calling AT&T because I occasionally lose internet access for short periods. The tech support person decided it was a WiFi problem. I tried to explain that it doesn't make sense since it is not that I get an error from the browser but an error page sent by the router which is delivered over WiFi. That got me nowhere. (No, I didn't mention what I do for work, I didn't want to be that guy).

The individual incident is a pretty mild tale of dealing with tech support (it is not like I was trying to explain the difference between 1 cent and 0.01 cents). But it has forced me to realize that I will never be qualified enough to convince a tech support person to trust me over where their script has led them.

Cornel West

2009-10-24T17:44:00.000-07:00

Does Cornel West have graduate students? Is his office the collection of coolest people in the world or is it just a typically group of divinity and African American studies graduate students? In group meetings does every statement need to be phrased as prose? Instead of accompanying him on trips to conferences did they go to the set of The Matrix with him? Are any of his graduate students conservatives?

Health Insurance

2009-10-24T15:51:00.000-07:00

While I have some reasonably strong opinions about health care reform, I'm kind of bored of the whole thing so this post isn't about pushing my opinion.

As I've been listening to the debates about health insurance one aspect strikes me as odd. Part of health insurance really is insurance. You pay a regular set amount and in exchange the company will pay on the unlikely chance that you have a problem that costs a large amount of money. The insurance company has low risk because they pool a large number of uncorrelated risks and you pay them more than your expected costs because they take on your risk.

But there is another aspect to health insurance. In addition to paying for unexpected events they also pay for regular check ups and other expected expenses. It's like if your car insurance paid for oil changes. Some of those expected expenses like regular check ups aren't even so expensive that you need insurance against them. There are other events that may not be 100% expected, but are sufficiently likely you don't need to average with other people. Such as going to the doctor for a cold or flu or other minor issues. It will vary some year to year, but the variation is probably small enough you don't really need to insure against it. Maybe the insurance would be if the number of visits were to exceed some large number.

There's also pre-existing conditions and prescriptions. If someone has been prescribed a medicine they're going to take for the rest of their life then the next year when they renew their insurance, they're not really insuring against needing the prescription. They know they're going to need it, it is not about paying to share their risk with others.

I'm absolutely not saying that these items that aren't really insurance should not be covered. I'm just saying that it seems like what we buy is more like a monthly subscription fee rather than insurance. It may just be a change in phrasing, but it could help reshape how the problem is viewed. Such as if you consider them insurance companies then it is kind of weird for them to insure against a condition someone already has. But if you consider it paying a monthly subscription fee, then as long as the person (or their employer or the government or...) is paying for their plan then they should get treatment. And I think it is easier to make the argument that everyone should be allowed to pay for health care through a monthly subscription fee regardless of existing conditions. It could also be a way of by-passing insurance companies by allowing medical groups to directly offer these plans.

Stargate

2009-10-15T21:54:00.000-07:00

A while ago I was asking about scifi with multiple governments. Martian Time-Slip had elements of what I was thinking of, but that was just part of the background.

But there's one scifi story that seems to exactly fit what I was talking about, well except now it is syfy, but I won't hold that against it. And the winner is: Stargate SG-1. While the stargate program is really run by the US government at various points they cover interactions between earth governments, alien governments, different branches of the us government and combinations of each.

I'm sure that everyone is excited that the search no one but me cares about has ended! And yes I did just link to my own blog twice in a single post.

Dollhouse

2009-10-11T21:55:00.000-07:00

At some point early in season 1 I came up with a metaphor for dollhouse and in celebration of the start of season 2 I'll share it with all of you (aren't you lucky... or something).

The actives are people who normally are completely blank, live in a really nice place where people take care of them. They spend their downtime exercising and caring for their looks. Many of their assignments involve sex and/or violence. -Actors and actresses.

Tofer is the one who designs personalities for the actives (and he's the funny one). He likes his job for when he gets to do good, but often his boss has him do work he isn't proud of. -Joss Whedon.

Adelle is the boss telling Tofer what to do and picks assignments based on what will make money. She takes better care of the active that she slept with. -Network executive. (Hm, I used to like Adelle, but now I'm mad at her for canceling firefly.)

Handlers look after actives. They go on assignments to watch over them and make sure everything is going ok for them. -Agents/managers.

Paul Ballard is tortured by always making the correct moral choice. -Helo.

Dr Saunders is a doctor. -Doctors (ok, I don't have one for her, especially now that we know more about her)

If I wanted to stretch this way too far I could stick in something about Echo's awareness being related to Eliza becoming a producer in addition to actress.

Traffic

2009-10-11T20:44:00.000-07:00

Just before heading off to Boston I finished up Traffic, Why We Drive The Way We Do. It's strange because I normally remember why I pick out books to read, but I can't remember why I picked this one. The author is a writer for slate so that could have had something to do with it.

In my own words I would say the main point of the book is - you suck at driving and you suck so bad you don't even realize how bad you suck. The book actually covers a number of topic related to driving. Some of it is about the psychology of how drivers interact with each other and with pedestrians, traffic planning, safe driving, estimating risk, local driving habits...

On the one hand I thought the book is interesting because it does explain a lot about driving and traffic, which considering I spend a decent amount of time in a car it is cool to know. On the other hand most of it is just telling you what the problem is, not what you can actually do about it. And on the weird mutant third hand, it is a book about traffic and driving so it can only be so exciting.

A few interesting things I picked up from it:
-Dialing a cell phone seems way more dangerous than talking on a cell phone. And for a set time it is more dangerous. In fact talking on a cell phone almost imperceptibly increases the second to second risk while driving. But when you integrate the increased risk of talking on the phone over a half hour conversation it adds up to be significant and far more than the moment it takes to dial.
-One of the best ways to be safer on the road is to have a passenger (except if you're a teenage boy and the passengers are teenage boys). Both because you'll drive safer for the other person and because it is the rare time when you actually have feedback about your driving and a second set of eyes. The you suck so bad at driving you don't even know it has a lot to do with the fact you almost never get feedback about your driving.
-The book talks about numerous safety measures and traffic designs tried by traffic engineers and they all seem to come down to two things, the main one is getting people to slow down and pay attention. One village in Denmark (or one of those northern european countries) has a city with zero traffic signs. They never have accidents because they make the roads seem dangerous and integrated with pedestrians (narrow roads near pedestrians and lots of round abouts) so people slow down and pay attention. Actually the idea that what seems dangerous is actually often safer because it gets the drivers to slow down and pay attention is a common theme in the book.
-There were some interesting descriptions of how traffic jams travel as waves which is why when you see a slow down it seems to be at a completely random spot and time.
-He also discusses issues with traffic reduction schemes. One interesting part was about people often wish they'd just open another lane on a busy road. But adding extra lanes almost never helps because more people will use that road (you might think that would clear up other roads, but a lot of it is added traffic that wouldn't exist otherwise). He talked about evidence that it is only a matter of a day or two before people will re-route to use the added space.

While the book is really about driving it does have some interesting insight into other topics like psychology and risk assessment.

One odd thing about the book is it is 402 pages long. But if you don't count the acknowledgments and footnotes it is 286 pages. So it is much shorter than it first appears.

Wedding Weekend

2009-10-11T19:11:00.000-07:00

Last Tuesday night I headed off to Boston. Thanks to Jeremy and Emily for the ride to the airport. Wednesday was pretty low key, but I got to see Mike, Laura, Max and Alex for the first time in quite a while.

While I was in Boston I stayed at Alice's place (thanks Max and Alice). Short tangent: I was reading this daily beast article where they rank the smartest cities in America. Boston came in number 3 and one of the comments about the city is "When you go into somebody’s office or you go into their home, one of the things you case out is their bookshelf" and the room I stayed in contains a bookshelf I am declaring the winner.

Thursday I was still adjusting to the time zone and got up rather late. After some lunch at the miracle of science and an unfruitful search for a glass for Mike to step on we headed out for the bachelor party. First stop was india quality. I'm so glad that in college we picked a restaurant that's actually really good so we can now do the combo of nostalgia and good food (nud pob and burrito max were good and all, but even if one of those was the Sunday post clean up place I couldn't see either being the aepi alumni meet up spot). (Yes I just explained that I'm glad that we liked a place I like).

After IQ we headed to Fenway where we watched the Red Sox beat the Indians. Well really we watched the backs of the Sox beat the backs of the Indians, but at least we were close to the field. Then off to Jillian's for some pool playing.

Friday after I took a little nostalgia walk through MIT while reading the Tech, Jeremy, Emily and I made our way down to the cape (and found a good glass for stepping on). We hung out at Laura's place and did the rehearsal. Afterwards we headed to a nice restaurant and had the rehearsal dinner where I won the over-under bet on the number of toasts (total coincidence the toast I made gave me the win - yeah, coincidence that's the ticket). (I also won the over - under for the wedding night, not that I'm competitive or anything).

Up to this point both in Boston and on the cape the weather had been really nice. So the day of the wedding it starts raining. A school bus picked us all up and drove us around for the wedding pictures. There was a spot on the beach with a covered area so we took pictures there for a while. Then the rain stopped for a bit so we headed out to the beach for some pictures. When we got back a group of us were given the assignment to greet people arriving and the assignment to empty beer cans to string to the back of the bus. This turned out to be an interesting combination.

The wedding itself was very nice. The party afterwards was a great time. Some good Russian food and a handle of vodka on every table makes for a good time. I think that was the first time I took part in the chair raising for the horah. I was quite surprised both how easy it was at first and how hard it was by the end of the song.

The next morning after the group breakfast Max and Alice gave me a ride back to the city where I took a little walk through the Commons and headed to China Town for lunch before heading off to the airport. Thanks Julie and Saeed for the ride back from the airport.

Overall a very good time! Congratulations Mike and Laura!

Whitney

2009-09-22T22:38:00.000-07:00

Thursday night after work Jeremy and I hit the road and headed to Mt Whitney. We got in late, set up a tent at 10,000 ft and got a few hours of sleep to start the acclimation to altitude. The next morning we got up and headed to the ranger station. Normally to hike up the Whitney trail you have a put in a request in February. But by 11 am enough people had canceled that we were able to get two permits.

Soon after getting our permits and bear boxes and wag bags (oh, there are some smelly stories to be told about the wag bags, but I'll skip those on the blog). We started off at Whitney portal at about 8,300 ft and hiked our way up to our first camp site at 10,000 ft. The walk up was tiring, but I assumed it was the minimal sleep the previous night. That night I had to force myself to finish my dinner - if you know me, that should strike you as a very strange statement. The next day I really struggled to make it up to the next campsite at 12,000 feet. At times I had to stop and lean against the mountain because I was feeling light headed. Once we got to camp I started feeling nauseated. So I rested for the rest of the day. The next day I took things slow getting up and packed up while Jeremy headed up to the summit. The whole walk up and time at camp I wasn't feeling great physically and was in a terrible mood.

Once I got packed up I started heading down the mountain. Around 9,500 feet I was getting low on water so I found a place to rest while I waited for Jeremy. Jeremy flew down the mountain so I was only resting for about an hour. By time he got there I was breathing well, had my appetite back and most surprisingly was in a pretty good mood. Since after 3 days I wasn't able to acclimate to 12,000 feet I think I'll be setting my sights on lower altitude adventures. While it is possible that if I wanted to I could push through the physical effects, the bad mood kind of ruins the point.

On one hand that was a bit of a downer, but on the other hand I wanted to know how I would do at altitude and now I know.

Santa Barbara

2009-09-14T22:53:00.000-07:00

Over labor day weekend I headed down to Santa Barbara (well Jeremy and Emily provided the ride - thanks!). It was great to see my little cousins and catch up with my Uncle and Aunt (thanks for having me over and feeding me!).

We went swimming and got to the beach. It isn't the first time I got to the beach this year, but the first time I did beach stuff. Zach and Zoe were nice enough to let me use a boogie board and Zach showed me how to use it. After that a few times I actually caught a wave and it was awesome! I was also there for Zach's early birthday party. We also spent some good time chillin on the couch and played some board games. Zach and Zoe seem great and are getting tall.

And I was able to catch up on the Jonas Brothers and Hannah Montana.

Overall an awesome labor day weekend.

Blog notification on twitter

2009-09-02T22:54:00.000-07:00

Just set up on twitterfeed so if it works it will send a message on twitter when there's a new blog post. Not sure how well it will work. Let me know if you follow me on twitter and it gets annoying. For those following on RSS there won't be any change.

The Problem With GPS

2009-09-01T00:51:00.000-07:00

GPS is awesome for all sorts of reasons. Having it for driving directions is great. And as more devices have GPS included in them there will be an increasing number of cool ways to use it.

So what's wrong with it?

Well, since it is so awesome people will work hard to make it even better, but it reduces the motivation for finding other methods of determining location. Which isn't a big deal if you have GPS satellites orbiting the planet you are on. But what happens when we start moving to other planets? Are we going to have to put a series of satellites around every planet we inhabit? Sure there will be other issues to be dealt with, like terraforming the planet and getting people there in a reasonable amount of time. And yeah humans explored basically all of Earth without GPS. But still, wouldn't it be nice if once we set up on a planet we immediately had precision location information?

That's the problem with GPS (inspired by watching way too much Stargate SG-1).

Really once we hit a certain point of technological progress shouldn't we start back over as cavemen in order to increase the motivation for technological innovation?

Hm, that phrase about necessity is the mother of invention is actually really wrong. I think that if you look at recent history the amount of need has decreased sharply while the rate of invention has increased rather rapidly. Everyone moving back into caves would instantly create massive need and yet severely slow down innovation. Plato, I'm calling shenanigans!

Charge it! (aka Mt Whitney)

2009-08-28T23:32:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend I headed down to Mt Whitney with Jeremy and Emily. It was a mere 7 drive each way. Jeremy and I both wanted to try out hiking at elevation (the peak of Mt Whitney is the highest place in the continental US) and get the full story on getting permits for multiday trips up Whitney (yes I've heard of the series of pipes and tubes, but the Whitney permit site is pretty bad).

So we headed out early Saturday. Got into the area and got some info at the ranger station, made our way to our campsite, set up and then headed to Whitney Portal. Hiked for 3 hours then headed back to camp while it was still light and not raining too badly. I definitely felt the altitude (we were at about 9,000 ft at that point), but I was hiking really fast. I strongly felt my heart beat in my head and started to get a bit of a headache (even though I was drinking a ton of water). As soon as we started heading down hill everything cleared up.

That night it rained fairly hard so we did a simple dinner then hung out in my tent before heading to bed. Again my fancy new tent kept me and my stuff nice and dry.

The next day we did another 3 hour hike. The altitude had far less impact that day (got to about 9,500 feet). I wasn't hiking as fast although we did take a more challenging trail (some scrambling up and down rocks).

For lunch after the hike we went to a pizza place in Lone Pine (the town next to Whitney) and the two guys at the table next to us started talking to us about hiking/climbing. They used the term "charge it" more than once per sentence to describe anything from hiking to climbing to driving. When we asked about what is labeled a challenging climb, their opinion was "if you've ever climbed before, then you'll be fine, just charge it".

Hiking around Mt Whitney was cool especially since it looks more "mountain like" than the hills along coastal California. There is a valley lined on either side by mountains which was nice to look down at from Mt Whitney.

One thing I didn't expect is in that valley is where one of the Japanese internment camps was located. There was a small museum although we weren't there for long so we didn't visit. But it was a reminder of how little is taught about that event in school. I was also surprised how small the museum looked.

The Crippled Angel

2009-08-28T22:35:00.000-07:00

Last week I finished The Crippled Angel the last book in The Crucible Series which includes The Wounded Hawk and The Nameless Day.

Semi-spoilers ahead.

I really enjoyed the series. It takes place around 1380. Although based on a quick look through wikipedia I think that some the "real" parts of the story are a bit off and shifted in time. Since I don't know anything about the time period I don't actually know, but it seems like she makes it feel like you are in the 1370s.

The part that makes it far more interesting is the religion/magic mix which gets more and more hilariously anti-religion. She does a good job of changing things up through out the story. Which is extra nice since so many fantasy stories take the LOTR approach - Froto you have to destroy the ring then a whole bunch of pages later he destroys the ring. Actually there is some similarity to part of LOTR - Froto finds out he is going to take away the power of the Elf queen and that Elven town would be destroyed. This series kind of takes that idea and runs with it. Plus add in some Harry Potter where the main character is interlinked with the bad guy (except by then who's bad and good has gotten mixed around). I'm trying to be somewhat vague because of the number of twists.

Overall good stuff - I'd recommend it to any fantasy fans out there. I would say that the series really reads as a single book so approach it that way. The first one is good, but is really the background and build up. The action, humor and more interesting stuff (such as explanations for what the heck is going on) is really in the next two books.

One thing I did pick up from this book is being king really wasn't such a great deal in a feudal society. I'd really rather be king at a later point when kings had more direct control rather than just trying to get the support of the lords who have the real military power and money. In general I always figured I'd rather be the King's cousin than the King - nice life style without all the responsibility and people trying to kill you. But in a feudal society that just meant being a lord so there was still responsibility and assassination attempts. So the take away is if you are going to become European royalty at some point in history think more 1600s than 1300s.

Is XKCD right?

2009-08-24T23:01:00.000-07:00

I've got some longer posts coming, but I should be off to bed. So I'll just take a moment to ask if this xkcd comic is right?

Not sure if it captures everything, but sure seems awfully close.

Mountain Rescue Doctor

2009-08-20T21:50:00.000-07:00

I was at the library looking through some books to see what they had to say about altitude sickness and noticed the book Mountain Rescue Doctor. The author Christopher Van Tilburg is an emergency room doctor who is part of a volunteer mountain search and rescue team called the Crag Rats in Hood River Oregon.

Each chapter is the story of a rescue (and/or search). In addition to each rescue story he goes into discussions of other topics like the risk reward trade off of outdoor activities (and how having a family changes that), his background, tips for survival, and so on.

There are search and rescue teams that run in with a litter (stretcher) and carry the person out. The group this book is about take care of the situations where they need to set up ropes and climb to get to the person.

The individual stories are fairly good. Even though he describes a variety of situations, it does get a little repetitive to read about, but not too bad. I liked getting a sense for the search and rescue side of rescues. I was actually surprised by how willing they were to send out rescue missions. I was also surprised that in most states, unless you do something especially negligent the state actually pays for the rescue mission and that large parts of rescue missions are done by unpaid volunteer groups. One amusing item is that while everyone says you should have basic survival stuff (like a map, compass, whistle...), in a large portion of the rescues the most helpful item was a cell phone (well, sufficient food, water and shelter were also fairly key). In one of the stories of an extended search they even had the cell phone company triangulate the position of the climbers.

The book did drive home the need to make sure rangers know your plan in as much detail as possible. Even knowing stuff like what gear you have and your experience level can help guide their search (more important when doing technical climbing than hiking). Also making sure you have enough equipment to deal with unexpected situations and how helpful it can be to have a partner with you. He also pushed that if you get in trouble you should stop and take a moment to evaluate your situation rather than just pushing on. He also discussed how important it is to get medical attention quickly for serious injuries and that the first hour is especially critical (this is where cell phones become really helpful - normally someone would have to hike out to get to a phone, add in a gps device and the search can be way faster).

Semi-related, after reading the book I bought a gps app for my phone that gives me the raw gps data since knowing the closest address isn't terribly helpful in the woods. I find it kind of strange that the standard map program won't just tell you the raw coordinates.

Lassen Volcanic Park

2009-08-13T21:44:00.000-07:00

Two weekends ago (weekend of August 1st) I headed out to Lassen Volcanic Park with 4 other fellow backpackers. Unfortunately I don't have the pictures yet, but I'll post a link once those go up.

Friday night we drove up and camped near the cars. Used my fancy new tent for the first time (well other than in my living room) - thanks mom and dad. Next morning we got up and headed to the start of the trail. Then wasted an hour figuring out that we had to head back to the camp ground to get a permit. Was a waste of time, but I did get to drive around the hills with the top down in the mustang, so not all bad. Then we headed out. Did about 8 miles getting into camp. Was a nice walk, a bit of elevation gain/loss but not too much and walked by a few lakes. While the elevation gain/loss wasn't much, everything started out at about 6,000 feet so we had to breathe a bit harder than usual. Once we got to camp (this was a camp where you want place so "getting to camp" was picking a place along the lake to plop down) we put up a line between trees to hang our food (keeps it away from bears and keeps the smell above bear nose level). During this exercise we learned that when I sit on Jeremy's lap I still can't reach any higher than the one female backpacker in the group. Then after I made some overly harsh comment about the idea of finishing the day after only 8 miles, 4 of us headed out to see the lava bed and climb the cinder cone:

View Larger Map

The person we got the permit from told us it would be about a two hour walk from the lake to the top of the cinder cone and back. Well it took about two hours from the lake to the base of the cinder cone and we weren't cruising, but we weren't that slow. Especially since we didn't take backpacks, just some water. Well it was a very cool view from the base of the cinder cone - we looked down at "painted dunes". Basically rocks that were a few different colors, it was other worldly looking. One of us decided to turn back at that point since it was just starting to get dark. The trail was very clear so we weren't super worried about someone going off on their own. Then the three of us started walking up and noticed the mass of clouds in the distance and the thunder and lightening. We stopped to discuss and decided that rather than spending a bunch of time discussing we should just walk up. Several minutes later I took another look at the clouds and the ground we were on (basically a giant pile of ash) and envisioned racing down a pile of wet ash while it rained on us. So I suggested we turn back and the other two readily agreed. Once we got to the bottom the clouds had moved in right over the top of the cone - those clouds moved super fast. So then we embarked on what was probably the most intense hour and a half of walking of my life. Only got rained on a little. The main motivation was we hadn't set up tents or had dinner.

After that walk we got back, set up tents as fast as possible. Got rained on a little in spurts, but nothing bad. Got the food down, cooked, ate, got the food back up (this time super fast) and got in tents just as it started to pour. Luckily the tent kept me and my stuff completely dry.

Next day we got up, played around in the lake a bit. Had breakfast and headed out. This time we were taking an 11 mile path back to camp. Not too strenuous, but we did have a 5 hour ride ahead of us so we wanted to move at a decent pace. At one point Jeremy and I were a bit ahead of the others and took a wrong turn. Then decided that would be a good place to wait for the others. Waited a really long time then Jeremy realized our mistake. Not that we had to catch up with the others, but seemed like a good thing to do so we got moving. All day I had felt a bit tired and my feet and knees ached. Once we kicked up the speed all my pain and tiredness faded away and I was feeling great. Caught up with the others, walked with them for a bit, but then decided to kick the speed up again.

Early in the drive back stopped at applebees (by far the best choice in the town we stopped in) and ate a hamburger with a side of buffalo wings. And then drove till 3 am. The next day at work around 4 pm I literally had to concentrate on keeping my eyes open.

Transmitting Silence

2009-08-09T00:50:00.001-07:00

This is probably a no one but me cares post (or may be an everyone already knows, but I'm guessing more of the former).

It just occurred to me that when you tune your radio to your favorite FM station and instead of hearing music and/or talk you hear silence it is not that they're not transmitting. If they weren't transmitting then you'd hear static like when you tune to an empty station, as your radio tries to pick up any little signal out on the air (or even the internal electrical noise of the stereo). But rather you are getting silence which for FM means that the radio is picking up one dominant signal, but the frequency of that signal is not changing (or changing too quickly - the key is none of the change is in the 20 Hz to 20 kHz range). So it is not that the station's transmitter is broken or turned off, it must be an earlier stage that isn't working.

The Wounded Hawk

2009-08-08T22:40:00.000-07:00

Finished up The Wounded Hawk a couple days ago. This is the second book in the same series as The Nameless Day.

Still going to wait to finish the whole series before saying much. But this book definitely kicks up the action and the heresy a notch.

Thanks again to Julie for letting me borrow the series.

Three Cups Of Tea

2009-08-05T23:44:00.000-07:00

While I was in Tahoe I read most of Three Cups Of Tea and then finished it up a bit after getting back. My Mom introduced me to the book and let me borrow it. The book is about Greg Mortenson who has spent about 16 years building schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The book starts out talking about his attempt to climb K2 and some of his life story. I really enjoyed reading about his attempt at K2. The life story stuff is good build up to understand where he is coming from, but not the most interesting part. Then when it really gets into his work building schools in Pakistan it is very cool. It has a great message about the power of small contributions to education. Also some cultural info and a look into the life of the mountain villages. There is a bit of back and forth over if people who live in small mountain villages have a simpler better life or if living in tough conditions with minimal money isn't so great. I actually almost wonder if that's some natural back and forth or perhaps the voices of the two different authors coming through. And there's some good adventure. Just getting from place to place is a bit of an adventure, but the peak is when he gets captured and held for 8 days with minimal explanation.

This is far from the main point of the book, but often times when I hear about adventurous travel or outdoor adventures I think, oh that would be so cool to do (even if it is far beyond what I'd really do). But this book showed me someone who takes risks beyond what I have any interest in taking. So that was kind of cool to bound my interest in adventure by reading the book. (Note, just because that is an upper bound doesn't mean something far less adventurous would not also be an upper bound).

Not that I've read a lot of biographies, but I think this may be the first that was about someone who is still alive. It doesn't make a big difference, but it is a bit different. I found myself sometimes questioning how well he remembered all the details and feelings, but I think that was one of those MST3000 "It's just a show, I really should just relax" moments. And I do get the sense that the main author did a lot of interviewing and fact checking on all the important stuff.

Unlike a lot of what I read which tends to have a more focused audience, I'd really recommend this book to basically anyone.

Ted and Bruno

2009-07-17T00:01:00.000-07:00

First of all - I've been slow to recommend Better Off Ted because in some surface way it seems like it's not a great show. Maybe one of the ads just hit me wrong. Although I think there's more - one example is there are times when characters are supposed to be really mad, but they still seem like they are smiling. But the show is awesome! I'm laughing the whole time and they do a great job ripping into the questionable morals of corporations. And it has a bit of an Arrested Development feel (more than just because Portia is in the show).

Bruno SPOILERS coming up.

I saw Bruno recently. I was laughing the whole time. I can't recommend it since there may be stuff you just don't want to see. I've only heard/read a few reviews, but I really think they are missing something. Obviously a big part of it is that Bruno is an outdated gay stereotype and a certain portion of the movie is about how people react to him. That seems to grab most of the attention. Although I think the movie dedicates just as much if not more time to making fun of the search for celebrity.

What reviewers seem to miss is how self-referential the movie is. Fairly early on Bruno shows a TV pilot he made to a test audience. The test audience absolutely hates the pilot and can't imagine anyone watching it. First of all - when you watch the movie you see the pilot. Second it is a rough approximation of the rest of the movie (think Terrance and Philip in South Park). So right up front you're watching people tell you how bad the movie you are watching is. Later on one of the strongest comments on society is when Bruno asks parents what they would be willing to let their kids do in order to be included in a photo shoot. He then proceeds to do similar things with a baby. So now he's also making fun of the parents that let him use their baby in the movie. Now given those two scenes think about the fact that to make a movie that makes fun of what people will do to be famous Cohen goes off and does very crazy, dangerous, and disgusting stuff.

I'll admit I have a tendency to reach too far on these things, but I really think that buried in there is Cohen making fun of himself.

Ok, even if you don't buy all that, you have to admit that the wrestling scene and the scene with Paula Abdul were hilarious.

Hm - seems I posted a bit too soon. Dana Stevens's review makes a similar point.

Tahoe

2009-07-13T22:10:00.001-07:00

The week leading up to the 4th of July my parents, brother and I headed out to Tahoe. My family was nice enough to work around the shutdown week at the company I work for and to head somewhere in driving distance for me. We stayed at a huge house with a great view of the lake in south lake Tahoe just on the Nevada side.

The trip could be described as short hike + work out video, 8 mile bike ride, longer hike, drive around the lake, 20 mile bike ride, kayaking. In addition to the outdoor activities we (well, mostly the other three) spent some time cooking up healthy meals. And generally hanging out as a family. Oh, and can't forget Tiger Wood's golf on the Wii and especially can't forget the frisbee golf section of the game since that was the one part I dominated - my dad clearly had the lead on the normal golf part. The last night we watched the fireworks over the lake from the house. There was a show across the lake we could see clearly and there was a closer one partially blocked by the hill. Oddly the partial blocking of the hill created a cool effect and made the fireworks a bit more interesting.

The second hike was at Emerald Bay which is a bit hilly and next to a little bay (weird to think of a lake having a bay) with an island in the middle. So great place to hike. Oh and I'm purposefully just telling my stories from the trip since I'm publishing this online. The 8 mile bike ride was a fun ride through a historical area. The 20 mile ride was a bit taxing, I'm going to blame a piece of that on the altitude. We rode from North Lake Tahoe to Squaw Valley where we biked around for a bit and got some food then biked back. It was a good ride. The only downside was it was the 3rd so Tahoe had filled up and pedestrians had taken over portions of the bike path. Up by Squaw was great since almost no one else was on the paths. On the 4th we headed to a cove near the house. They only had tandem kayaks left so Eric and I shared one. After we had covered the whole area where we were supposed to go we headed off for a ways. Apparently my estimating the time based on the position of the sun skills need some work since what I thought was about 1 hour turned out to be 2. Oddly the only muscle soreness I felt was some shoulder pain, but the next day my whole back let me know what it thought about those 2 hours. While we were at the cove we watched all the college students roll in and fill up the beach in preparation for the fireworks.

One final thought. It may be tempting to think - oh a biggest loser exercise tape - I should be able to do what a bunch of overweight people can do. However, there are several flaws to that thought. First, this is post competition so they're no longer overweight. Not only are they not overweight, they've been doing so much exercise they were able to lose a ton of weight so they're actually in great shape and very strong. On top of that, they are mostly the ones who did well so they are indirectly selected for a willingness to exercise really hard.

The Nameless Day

2009-06-25T20:38:00.000-07:00

Julie let me borrow The Crucible Series by Sara Douglass. I read the first book The Nameless Day. I liked the book and I'm enjoying the story. But at this point there's a lot that still isn't clear so I'm going to hold off on writing more till I finish the series (I think it would be like talking about The Fellowship of the Ring before reading the other two, except in this case it is not even clear that Frodo should destroy the ring). I will say she does a good job of putting you in the world (Europe in the 1300s), and does a good job with the main character's transition. And unlike some authors who write long books with lots of characters (Neal I'm looking at you) she's nice enough to sometimes remind you who they are and what happened that you should remember.

Project #2 Part 3

2009-06-13T11:02:00.000-07:00

I've been very slowly building a boost converter as part of the grand plan for the iphone charger. A boost converter takes power from one source and then outputs power. What makes it special is the voltage it provides is higher than the input voltage. It does this by storing energy from the source in an inductor and then disconnects the inductor from the source and dumps the power onto a capacitor. The output draws power from the capacitor.

While 4 batteries in series works as a perfectly good charger for the iphone (I actually used it on the lost coast trip). It doesn't fit into the desired case, is hard to charge from USB and can be higher than 5V, which is fine for the iphone but technically above specifications.

The Maxim MAX1703 does the whole job of boost converting with just a few external components. And should be able to handle more current than needed.

I spent some time thinking about how to position the big components which I'm kind of happy with. However, when I went to actually connect things I just started putting things in one by one without a grand plan (obviously I had a schematic of what connections to make, just not where to physically put the wires). I think the technical term for the soldering style I ended up using is: crap. I was going to say rat's nest, but that actually is a technical term. Thanks in part to the poor style at first I had missed a couple connections when I hooked up the battery and the chip got very hot. Not sure if I did damage or not. Once I got that corrected the output was 4.6 V (within spec of 4.5 to 5.5). But when I connected a 10 ohm resistor the voltage dropped to 3.8 V (so it was only able to source 380 mA instead of 500 mA).

When I connected my ipod mini it charged for a moment than stopped. The ipod mini only requires 200 mA. So this is really a story of failure :(. I have more of all the components so I may try the same thing again and see if better wiring and not cooking the chip will work better.

I also learned the limits of 90 second epoxy. Its strong, but some inadvertent lever action can overcome it. Also, when the two sides mix it gets a little hot - not a big deal unless you don't know that and get some on your fingers and wonder what on Earth is happening to you.

I'm also going back and forth on if this is really the right approach or if it makes more sense to just find a nice case for the 4 series battery option.

One of the Series of Pipes is for Jose Cuervo

2009-06-11T21:51:00.000-07:00

Used the series of pipes and tubes to do a cross country video chat shot with Laura and Jeremy. I know the technology has been around for a while, but was still a first for me.

I'm really looking forward to seeing Mike and Laura when they come out to the Bay Area in July! And it is great that they found such cheap flights. Coming out for the weekend is definitely worth the cost of those tickets.

I realized that I only posted about Dollhouse once, early on in the season. Before every episode I declared that this would be the one where it gets awesome so I was very disappointed when we got to episode 5 and it was still just ok. But then episode 6 happened and awesomeness occurred and continued through episode 12 (10's main story has a cool concept, but isn't as awesome, but the side story totally makes up for it). If you're dedicated I'd say watch the whole way through (don't be scared off by episode 3). If you're willing to watch a few episodes I'd say watch episode 1 to get introduced to the characters and idea then start at 6 and go up from there till you're hooked. If you're a Firefly/Buffy/Angel/BSG/Matrix fan you should be able to identify 5 actors by the end of the season. And you'll want to be caught up with season 1 so you're ready for when River shows up in season 2.

Weekend

2009-06-08T22:59:00.000-07:00

Julie and Saeed fed me dinner Friday night - thank you! Also got in some good castle crushers and bomber man time.

Saturday afternoon I headed to a party with Jeremy and Emaily. I only knew a few people, but it was a fun crowd. After hanging out there for a few hours Julie and Saeed picked me up (thanks again) and drove me to Dublin where we had dinner with Ben who was in town and Adam (from aepi) and his wife who apparently live about 10 miles from me. It was great to see all of them. Then headed back to the party for a bit before heading home.

Sunday I killed a lot of the day watching TV, but eventually got off my butt and headed to Planet Granite to go climbing with Jeremy and Nina. I passed my belay test so I won't have to deal with that next time I go. I had a few moments where I thought I had suddenly gotten a lot better and a few other moments where I failed on stuff I expected to be able to do.

Overall great weekend.

Maker Faire

2009-06-01T22:43:00.000-07:00

On Sunday I headed to the Maker Faire with Saeed. Thanks to Andy for the free tickets!

Probably the coolest thing there for anyone who played Mouse Trap as a kid was the life size, fully functional version (unfortunately these are iphone pictures so they don't do a good job capturing everything):

Also very cool was seeing the mentos and diet coke guys do their 100 bottle show which was fairly similar to the YouTube video (I know it's so 2002, but how often do you get to see it in person?):

What I think makes this giant hydraulic arm super cool is that someone puts their hand in a glove like thing and the big hand mimics what their hand is doing:

There was some more serious and focused stuff like people who will turn a Prius into a plug in hybrid. And there were some people selling tools and services to DIY types. And some smaller projects, many of which had a bit more focus. And then of course there's stuff like a spinning ball of fire:

And this thing (extra creepy if you saw Terminator the day before), can't see it in the picture, but the video is the people looking at it and is all ascii characters:

And of course some people doing their Steampunk thing.

Overall very cool. I'll definitely try to go again in the future.

Spice

2009-05-30T01:59:00.001-07:00

I had the spiciest meal of my life today! This beat the Sichuan style meal I had in Beijing and the time I had a Thai restaurant not hold back. I went to smoke eaters with some coworkers today. The restaurant serves buffalo wings with 7 levels of spice. Most of us find their highest level quite spicy, but still easily edible. The restaurant also has the hell fire challenge where they make extra spicy wings and you have to eat 12 in 10 minutes with no drink or napkins. None of us wanted to do that, but we wanted to try the higher level of spice and figured we'd have a few of those and the rest of the meal would be level 7 wings. The hell fire challenge wings were covered in a thick brown sauce which was basically habanero paste. The others had less than one wing, I had two. After that the level 7 wings tasted mild.

What I learned: If you start to hiccup on your first bite of spicy food then stop. If you continue and a few tears run down your face then stop. If you still continue and for a moment your mouth seems to cool down, don't think that means you can handle more. Even if there's some guy at the next table actually doing the challenge and looking like it doesn't even phase him, still stop.

Wow, I ended up with a lot of time to play sudoku on my iphone (how's that for a euphamism?). Well I found my spice limit, and have no need to repeat that experience.

Luckily my stomach calmed just in time for Julie and Saeed to feed me dinner. Thank you Julie and Saeed!

Google Wave

2009-05-30T01:50:00.000-07:00

Someone is starting a rumor that google wave is a firefly reference. Which I'm believing because they use Shiny! in a message and the error message really is "Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal".

KC and Naples Part 2

2009-05-28T22:03:00.000-07:00

It's been pointed out that I kind of sped through the posts on KC and Naples. Didn't mean anything by it. I think I just had the backpacking trip on my mind and rushed through the others. Here's attempt #2.

In KC we went on a great bike ride. I was very happy that the bike seat hurt my butt a lot less than it had in the past. A lot of the time in KC was spent talking to my family which was great, but makes for some boring blogging. For my Grandma's 75th birthday we had dinner at my parent's house. For mother's day we headed to the plaza for brunch and then did a short walk to Starbucks where we discussed Bringing Down the House and gambling strategies, which is a bit odd since I don't think anyone in my family goes to a casino with more than $100. While it was nice to meet my friends' babies, I'm not really at a point where babies hold a lot of appeal (all me, nothing to do with their babies). I did head out to a bar with Ben to play pool which was great, especially since I was playing fairly well. It really highlights how much moving I've done that it wasn't just that I didn't know if I had told people about where I live now, but wasn't sure if they knew about the move before that.

I headed to Naples on a Saturday and got there Saturday night. My flight happened to show up at almost the exact same time at the gate directly next to Steve's flight. We grabbed a surprisingly cheap rental car (thanks to whoever it was that set us up with that) and headed to the Inn on Fifth which is a cute hotel on a cute street in Naples. Downtown Naples actually felt a lot like Santa Barbara, except the people were older. We met up with what we decided were for the most part the male college friends on the bride's side, which oddly includes Laura. Had some good sushi then bought some booze at CVS and headed to the hot tub at the hotel - again brought back some memories of SoCal life. Next morning we headed to the wedding. It was a tad hot outside, but there was ice water that was very helpful. It was cool to be one of the friends and know most of the people in the wedding party. And the bride looked so happy - awwww. There was quite the MIT crowd so I spent a lot of the wedding party catching up with them. A crowd also headed outside for a bit to marvel at Florida's sudden down pours. After the wedding a few of us met up at the bar next to the hotel. Then off to the out of towner dinner. I spent a lot of this time describing to Laura the "plans" for Mike's bachelor party. The dinner was nice especially because the bride and groom had more time to talk. Next morning some of us met up with the bride and groom at the bar next to the hotel for breakfast. Then off to some thai food, Edison house, and airport.

MIT crowd at the wedding:

Lost Coast

2009-05-27T21:51:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I headed to the Lost Coast with a portion of the usual hiking crowd. We drove up on Friday night. Put down some tarps on the beach and slept in our sleeping bags looking up at the stars. Saturday morning we drove to the start of the trail. We did the 24 miles from Mattole to Blacksands Beach over the course of Saturday, Sunday and Monday. Hiking 24 miles with basically no elevation over 3 days was sounding pretty easy so we had planned out some extra hikes we could do. Well, we didn't have to hike on the sand for very long to realize this wasn't the cake walk we expected. Then we hit the segments where the sand was replaced by piles of rocks and we started wishing for the sand. The creek crossings threw in another bit of unexpected challenge, especially with backpacks and heavy wind - I wish I had spent more time practicing balancing on the Wii Fit. While the creeks weren't that deep, none of us wanted to hike with wet feet. The trip did have some time pressure because there were sections that became impassible during high tide. The added challenge was cool, but my knees did not appreciate the constant tilt of the path due to walking in one direction next to the ocean, they weren't too thrilled about me slipping in one of the creeks either.

It was a cool adventure. We were next to the ocean the whole time and got fairly close to some seals and birds. Also there was a bunch of drift wood and people had built some amazing shelters out of them (according to the ranger a lot of the building was done by boy scouts), unfortunately they were all claimed by time we got to them. Another cool thing is this area is owned by the bureau of land management. Unlike most parks where you can't have fires and have to register for labeled campsites, the BLM is fine with fires and you just camp anywhere on the trail you feel like (although there are some obvious spots where people tend to cluster). So we did get to make use of some of the drift wood and had fires going Saturday and Sunday nights. An added bit of adventure is there are some bears in the area so we had to keep all the food in hard plastic bear boxes and place them a good distance from camp. That way even if the bears find the food all they can do is knock the boxes around. Unfortunately we didn't get to see any bears, fortunately we didn't have any bear encounters and the boxes didn't get moved at night.

The driving itself was a bit of an adventure, especially between the ends of the trail. Luckily only the other car took the dirt road with small creeks running through it. I'm pretty sure if a prius was bottoming out, the mustang would have just been stuck. It was also quite a shock to see the 101 become a 35 mph main street through small towns.

Jeremy was the offical photographer of the trip and all his pictures along with captions are up here.

I think the full set of pictures is worth checking out, but here's a smaller selection:

Naples

2009-05-27T21:42:00.001-07:00

Two weekends ago I headed to Naples for Julie and Saeed's wedding (congratulations!). The wedding was very nice. It was great to see some of my MIT friends. Somehow I went the whole time without getting to the beach. But I did get to see Edison's Fort Myers home.

KC

2009-05-27T21:37:00.000-07:00

Three weekends ago I headed to KC. It was great to see the family. Got in some biking and Wii fitness. Also got to be there for mother's day and my grandma's birthday (well at least close). Also got to meet my KC friends' many children.

Slumdog Millionaire and the Supreme Court

2009-05-26T23:19:00.000-07:00

First - I finally saw Slumdog Millionaire. Did anyone else feel like they were watching a Forrest Gump remake? I liked the film (but I also liked Forest Gump), but for most of the movie I really had this sense that I've seen this before and then it finally hit me.

Second - It felt to me like there were a lot of supreme court nominations recently (3 in the last 4 years). If you want actual information you could look here or you could keep reading my speculation based on no research. The last nomination prior to 2005 was in 1994. So if you are around my age then it's likely the first time you paid attention to nominations wasn't till 2005 and even if it wasn't, your experience is an 11 year stretch without any. Based on that experience you might expect nominations to be very rare.

But (based on guessing) no one gets on the supreme court before the age of 40 and most probably finish up by 80. So a justice keeps the job at most 40 years and if there are 9 of them you'd expect a nomination around every 4 years and probably more often since 40 years is the upper end. So the last 4 years have seen a fairly reasonable rate, it's the 11 years prior to that were odd and screwed up my sense of the supreme court justice turn over rate.

Thanks Steve for the correction.

Wolframalpha

2009-05-22T08:57:00.000-07:00

If you haven't seen wolframalpha yet, it's worth checking out. Some people are trying to play it up as a competitor with google. If that's how you view it you'll be very disappointed. If you take a look at their sample searches there's some cool stuff there. But what they don't seem to play up is that you now basically have free access to mathmatica (one line at a time).

So try stuff like
10*x^3+0.5*x^2+x+100=0
or simplify (x^2 + 4*x + 3)
or d(e^(x^x))/dx
or 4 * (boltzmann's constant) * (300 K) * (100 ohms). Yes, google calculator will do the last one, but it doesn't change the units to (nV^2)/Hz like wolframalpha does.

Epistemology

2009-05-21T23:00:00.000-07:00

I'm having a reasonably packed May, but I'll get to that in another post. But while waiting for my flight back to CA I finished up Epistemology by Richard Feldman. The book is, not too surprisingly, about Epistemology, aka Theory of Knowledge. Reading Anathem got me interesting in checking out certain areas in philosophy. In particular the parts discussing if pure mathematical concepts live in a universe of their own and then filter down to our own, and if so does our universe filter down to other universes. Also if I stayed in high school in Paris I would have taken a theory of knowledge class for the IB and I always kinda wondered what it was about.

Well Epistemology was nothing like the stuff in Anathem. On one hand I liked finding out what theory of knowledge is all about, on the other hand as someone who took mostly science and engineering classes in college it's really weird to see a subject that has been studied for thousands of years and yet has no definitive answers.

So quick(ish) summary. The traditional analysis of knowledge is that the requirements to know something are: 1. it is true 2. you believe it (not in a blind faith way, but a generally think it is true way) 3. you are justified in believing it 4. the justification for the belief does not essentially depend on any falsehood (the last one is just to deal with certain weird cases). There are a lot of ways to describe what it takes for a belief to be justified. The main one the author backs is you know what you think you see and what you think you remember and from those essential facts you can build up beliefs. Others involve things like you're justified if the belief fits into your whole system of beliefs or if you are able to track as something goes between true and false. But he shows why those others really have problems.

Then he goes into skepticism which is asking if there's much you can really be justified in believing. Gets into a lot of the how do you know you aren't a brain in a vat with a computer making you think things are happening to you. And almost all knowledge is built on induction, but just because something has always worked a certain way in the past do you really know it will do it the same way in the future. The main response is even if you aren't absolutely certain it will happen the same way you are justified in thinking it will. So if you distinguish knowledge from absolute certainty then it still works. There are a number of other skeptical arguments and not all of them have been dismissed by the traditional analysis of knowledge.

He talks about science and epistemology. One part is scientific studies show that humans very often get some basic logic and probability questions wrong which along similar lines to skepticism makes you ask if there's much that people are really justified in believing. The author's arguments against this seemed the weakest of any in the book. He also discusses if epistemology should take a more scientific approach. He argues it doesn't really need to which also comes off a bit weak (maybe I'm showing a bit of a bias).

I sort of expected the book to be a bit more concrete about how you evaluate when you know something and distinguish what knowledge is justified and what isn't. I guess it does exactly that, except more philosophically (not surprisingly) than I expected.

Not sure that I'd recommend the book unless you've been wondering what theory of knowledge is about for over 10 years or if your name is Angie.

CA special election

2009-05-20T09:19:00.000-07:00

Here's the results of the California special election. All the budget measures failed. The one thing to pass was limiting raises for the legislature during bad budget years.

I was able to vote the exact opposite of the rest of CA. On one hand I feel like a contrarian, but on the other hand I was the one voting how the legislature asked me to. Maybe I'm the only sucker.

Maybe this is what I should have patented...

2009-05-04T23:26:00.000-07:00

What happens when a need for variety meets the kitchen of a single male who eats 2 to 3 meals a day at work?

Wait for it.

Wait for it.

Vindaloo oatmeal.

Awesomeness!

Take oatmeal with a normal amount of sugar and add a generous amount of vindaloo then stir. From the moment I had the idea of spicy oatmeal I was scared. Up till that first bite when I realized that a new snack had been born!

Patent Application

2009-05-02T17:45:00.000-07:00

My first patent application was published on Feb 5!

I wouldn't expect anyone here to read it, because either you're not a patent lawyer or you are a patent lawyer, but have no interest in reconfiguring batteries for medical devices. But there are a few pretty pictures if you follow the link.

Implantable defibrillators are kind of weird to design because most of the time they are super low power, but every once in a while they need to be really high power. Typically for the low power stuff you want a low voltage battery and for the high power stuff you want a high voltage battery (that statement sounds more obvious than it actually is, but I will spare you from that tangent). The battery voltage used is usually a compromise between the two. Marcus and I came up with the idea of reconfiguring multiple batteries using switches so you could have high voltage when you need it and low voltage when you don't. The patent also expands on that idea in a few ways.

Well hopefully some time in the next 5 years or so we'll find out if it actually gets accepted (oh patent office, why do you take 5 years to read an application?).

Oh - and this is post #400!

Martian Time-Slip

2009-04-30T21:41:00.000-07:00

I actually got a response to my search for scifi with multiple governments. Of course the one response I got was from the one time I asked someone in person, hm. Anyway, while it wasn't exactly what I was thinking of, Martian Time-Slip by Philip K. Dick does fit the criteria.

The book is actually mostly about mental illness and crazy shifting through time stuff (as you might guess from the title). While the story does have some good what is reality stuff, a lot of it seems out dated. The book involves some mix of what was accepted views of schizophrenia and autism and Dick's crazy ideas about them. But not knowing what the state of psychology was in the 60s it's hard to tell where that line is.

I'd read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep or Ubik before I'd read Martian Time-Slip. Both of those seem less dated.

Swine flu

2009-04-30T16:31:00.000-07:00

To minimize the spread of swine flu we are supposed to be more cleanly and find a greeting that doesn't involve touching other people's hands. Also wearing a face mask is becoming more socially acceptable.

Can we also get the cool phones, fast trains and sumo wresteling?

Big Basin

2009-04-28T23:25:00.000-07:00

Went backpacking in Big Basin State Park with Jeremy and Greg over the weekend. We did 10 miles to get to the camp site which included walking past 3 water falls. And stopped for a bit after lunch to watch two newts mate. Once we set up camp we did the two mile walk to the beach. It was very windy so we just watched the wind surfers for a bit and then walked back. Next day we did the 10 mile hike back to the park entrance. The first part of the trip back had a sign that said: Warning, very step, recommended only for horses. I was weirdly energized during that part of the hike which worked out nicely. The rest of the way back was a nice and reasonably level walk. Greg noticed a fire in the distance and Jeremy called it in. Turned out a community center in the middle of the woods had an illegal fire going. Not sure if we stopped the forest from burning down or just caused a non-profit to get fined.

Good times followed by pie at Marie Callenders.

Some pictures here and more here.

Life

2009-04-20T23:06:00.000-07:00

Two weekends ago:

Thursday night I went with Emily, Jeremy, and some of their friends to Yuri's Night at the California Academy of Sciences. We didn't do much related to Yuri's Night, other than look at the wacky San Franciscans dress "science-y". Mostly we walked around the museum which was cool since I hadn't been before. They recreated a tropical rainforest inside and after you climb your way to the top of the rain forest you take an elevator down to the aquarium under the rain forest. There's also a whole area decided to environmentalism and a planetarium. Unfortunately all the planetarium shows were sold out by time we got there. Anyone thinking of going should consider watching for Thursday night events - it is cheaper and you avoid all the little kids.

Friday night I went to Julie and Saeed's place where they fed me dinner and I met some of Julie's law school friends. I feel like I should say something really nice since I know Julie will read this. I did have a good time. For once I did well on the x-box movie trivia game since there were a bunch of Serenity questions.

Saturday I went to work for a few hours. Then I headed to San Francisco for the traditional 4th night seder at a coworker's house, where he made sure we had our traditional 8 (not a typo) glasses of wine. He also served the traditional smoked brisket - good stuff. I stayed the night at another coworker's place and then hung out in SF for a bit the next day.

The next week:

Work.

Last weekend:

Saturday I worked most of the day.

Sunday I worked for a bit then had a monster energy drink at lunch. Then I worked really fast for most of the rest of the day. Then I got home and did a bunch of house work. Then I paced back and forth while watching TV.

By avoiding getting a goodnight's sleep I watched True Blood and the first several episodes of How I Met Your Mother. True Bood is really good. Not The Wire good, but still makes me wonder why non-HBO shows exist (well, then I remember not everyone likes to see all a vampire's blood come out its mouth as its body collapses). Although I did feel a little bit like they spelled out "this is a metaphor for discrimination" a little more than required. I liked How I Met Your Mother although wasn't super impressed. My biggest complaint is what's with the laugh track? Didn't we all get past that? It feels like a trip back to the mid 90s. I almost don't want to laugh when it comes on cause who are they to tell me what to find funny.

The Perfect Villain

2009-04-15T00:03:00.000-07:00

I bought The Perfect Villain: John McCain and the Demonization of the Lobbyist Jack Abramoff by Gary S. Chafetz a while ago because a friend knows the author. I finally got around to reading it. It would have made a lot more sense to read it before the election, but at that point I didn't need any extra reasons to dislike McCain.

The book describes some of Abramoff's life and work as a lobbyist. The point of the book is to try to show that while he may not have been a great guy and may have cross a few lines, he was no where near the villain that McCain and the Washington Post made him out to be. And that McCain and the Post bent the truth and hid evidence to make Abramoff look worse. My spidey sense was kicking in as I read the book. Partially I'm just wary of any book that comes out against a presidential candidate not long before an election. And the other part is it suggests the truth is rather different from my impression of what is generally accepted (which doesn't mean it is wrong, but requires more supporting evidence). Neither of these is enough to make me think it is false, just enough to make me not sure. Normally with stuff like that I can look it up online and reasonably quickly get at least some sense about it. But I'm coming up with very little on this book. It almost seems like no one read it or no one cares. If anyone knows anything about it or can find any better info I'd appreciate it.

Anyway, even if you ignore the claims about McCain and the Washington Post it still has some interesting info since it details several examples of how lobbyists work. One good example was an Indian tribe that funneled money through charities Abramoff had some control over to a christian right leader so he could lead an anti-gambling movement in a neighboring state to prevent other tribes from starting casinos and creating competition. All of the stories also seemed to involve getting his clients to make large donations to key lawmakers' favorite charities and setting up fact finding missions for senators that happen to involve trips to famous golf courses.

If Chafetz is right about the whole thing then it's that much more to dislike about McCain. But I'm not sure I'd feel that different about Abramoff. Partially because he was doing a lot of questionable stuff. But even more than that, because he plead guilty so I don't feel any conflict about the possibility that he was wrongly convicted since he didn't go to trial.

Day Hike

2009-04-07T22:21:00.000-07:00

On Sunday I went out to Henry Coe for some hiking with Jeremy and Emily. We were going for 10.3 miles, but I think it ended up closer to 11 with a little side trip we ended up taking. Good time, although now the legs are in some serious pain.