My App "Made Money"!

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

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

Inception

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

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!

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.