this site is dedicated to the delusions of grandeur inside the warped psyche of a hollow shell of a human being
originally entitled Trimalchio in West Egg
7 stars - there is one habit of highly effective people: a annoyance to inefficiency. In any field, motivated people are those that can't stand how incredibly stupidly others are doing something. Because we are learning machines and if we think everything is good enough there is not motivation to do anything about it. Annoyance to inefficiency is important if only because efficient people have more time to spend actually doing things....
proof of intelligent life - computers can't think and aren't conscious because they can't make false assumptions. They also can't lie. Which as far as I can tell are signs of intelligence. It could be thought of as natural selection of ideas. I don't think the brain has nearly as complex a functioning as people think. It couldn't. There isn't enough DNA to encode complex things. If genetics has taught us anything it should be that simple rules can give rise to complex situations. Human being are dynamic optimization machines. Nothing learns better than us. We are blank slates. Genetics influences us. But come on. We do not react directly based on some inborn link. We still have a bit of that around, but for the most part our minds are separate from our bodies as much as we can get away with (will yourself to produce more Insulin)....
Dell Inspiron Mini 9 (or Dell 910) - is awesome. It cost me under 500. Came with XP. Boots in 40 seconds to google loading from wifi. It has no moving parts (technically electrons are moving, but who care about electrons anyway?). The battery life is good. The small keyboard works after a half hour of getting used to it. I love that little machine. It has no optical drive. But that doesn't matter nowadays. It is my primary computer for school or just hanging around my apartment. I can shake it like a baby and nothing gets damaged. Technology is getting better, but sometimes crazy processors are not the answers. By the way, I can only edit this website from my old laptop, hence the lack of entries (in addition to my heavy academic burden), and the possibility of a second site that I can edit from my dropbox account on any computer. It is strange that every computer I* have every had has been a Dell. This will be the forth in the logic's line. Going from 500 MHz to 2400 to 2400 to 1600 Mhz, we are DEVO...
national debt - who knows what this means? Nobody. But the sign in New York is about to get fixed so that it can display the ten trillions place. The ultimate symbol of the endless stream of failed politicians who always compromised with the future....
SNL isn't funny - no, it is not, nor has it ever been. Most SNL kinda sucks. Same goes for Monty Python. There are a few good sketches that stick with us and the crap gets removed by time. Mark Whalberg complained recently about a sketch about him talking to animals. THE SNL SKETCH ABOUT THE VP DEBATE WAS SPOT ON. Fey as Palin nailed it. Perfect. Even the Biden stuff was good. Palin scares me, not only the prospect of her being the new Dick Cheney or of her actually being the president, my fear is with her being governor of Alaska. Really? A governor? Did a pretty face get her that far? I can respect many conservatives. We have different views of how a collectivist society should be carried out. But I can't respect somebody who thinks she will make a good president. My general rule of thumb for presidents is that you must be smarter than me (you must be this tall to ride this ride). Palin is not smarter than me. Although I'm usually a bit humble on the issue if only because of experimental error, I can't concede that ground. I am honestly jealous of her because I will never be in the position. I think they picked a "her" as the VP candidate because a man with equal disqualifications could be openly called an idiot. Her debate performance left semi-circular indentations on my arm from where I dug my fingernails in while she gave her answers. It was like a regular joe-six-pack was thrown up on stage - after being forced to drink their six-pack, and thus depriving them of the one thing that made them a real person. In the end I just hate the elitism on both sides that says that country folk are idiots and that city dwellers have no souls and may not be humans because they pronounce the "g" at the end of the word they are sayin'. Who are these people that act this way? Oh, wait, they do exist. I agree with David Brooks when he talks in a recent op-ed (link: you go find it, google works) about how conservatism has become synonymous with anti-intellectual. Which is why intellectuals stay away from conservatism even though it has valid points. What we need is bombs that target ideas....
527 + 11 = 538, or sanity - the guy behind this site was on the Colbert Report last week. When I looked at this site and realized what it is, it made me happy about humanity for a brief second. Currently Obama has a 93.8 % chance of winning even has McCain's campaign drifts closer and closer to fighting the campaign that I feel McCain specifically never wanted to fight. I want to read a book about McCain's campaign over the last few months. In Terre Haute we are a bit removed from politics even with the tether of CNN, MSNBC, and FOX "news"....
white light white heat - I have nothing other than a feeling, but here goes. We live in a universe but we are surrounded by an infinite number of universes around us. Why? Because of blackbody radiation, or white noise, which is also white light, kinda. But a white light emitter will repeat itself again after an infinite distance, where there is an almost parallel universe. I am not sure on the details. I also have a suspicious feeling that large massive particles (protons, neutrons, electrons...) are really just really high frequency photons that get trapped into moving slowly due to the effective index of refraction (1 / speed) cause by some self interference (gravity or something). It would at least make every kind of engineering optical engineering and make our world nothing but waves!...
Bible 2.0 - this counter-productive novelty internet website is great for time, but not for definite space. It is right-handed brain, not left-handed. Right people think better in logical temporal (time) while left people think better in terms of fixed but more widely interrelated things. What I need is WikiBen for a set group of my ideas, ideals, and ideology. There are not broad stokes of Ben here, just sampled points. Today could have sucked for me (it did) or it could have rocked (it did) or both (it did). I have way too much to do now. But maybe in the Spring or over some break I will just break everything down and create a unified vision of myself. Why can't we just give peace a chance?...
spinning persistence of vision display system - my senior design project is going to be a spinning persistence of vision display system where basically a row of LED lights will be spun around really fast and turned on and off at the right time so that they form an image. It is awesome and the really cool stuff is all still to come. I am a bit nervous about the project because I am the "expert" on the technology. But I have several clever failback schemes that I will not get into detail with here....
way to go, idiots - way to go America. I am glad to already be in grad school. You people did one of the following to potentially ruin all of our futures: 1) you gave out a loan people who clearly had no way of paying 2) you took a loan that you didn't use basic math to figure out you couldn't pay 3) you stood by and watched it happen 4) you encouraged it happening 5) you failed to warn people. Everybody did one of the following. I will not claim to have seen this coming. I always though the idea of a credit nation was stupid because you are literally living on borrowed time. Greenspan in retrospect sold our future and then left so he wouldn't have to clean up the pieces. Meanwhile the stock market seems to be holding us all hostage by bouncing dramatically (1 point on the DJIA is about a quarter of a billion dollars)....
16 GB = 30 $, solid-state - what? I remember Freshmen year when conventional hard drives dropped below a dollar per gigabyte. Soon having multiple discs spin really really fast and having magnetic fields stored on them and read using head that hover less than a hair above the surface will be as ridiculous sounding as having little cylindrical chambers where small amounts of fossilized extinct animals are burned in order to turn an axel that powers wheels. I bought a 16 GB SCHC card on newegg for 30 dollars. There is something wrong here. Or just very right!...
on tour - oh, I will probably be in Minneapolis starting Wednesday morning and going through early sunday/late saturday night. Part of me is also debating this a bit, but I need to get a driver's license. I have yet to purchase my tickets but my goal is to leave on Tuesday at noon. Oh, and I will be away in Saudi Arabia for the second week in January....
other nations means humanity - when newscasters say that Obama is more popular to the other nations of the world they should say humanity. The majority of humanity wants Obama elected. Most people think that's a good idea. It is not a statement about just those few other folks who have not yet tried to scale the fence. It is saying the other 95% of humanity generally thinks what we are doing is bad. Now I must admit that most people are idiots. Americans are idiots because they don't have to care, as clearly we still continue existing without having to care, as clearly nobody has cared for quite a while, if they ever did! Other people lack an education or an ability to have time to care about the grander problems....
crash, baby, crash - the Dow is down 457.98 points now, or 4.11%. I try not to think of this as 4% of the US economy vanishing. But we are still above 10,000 on the DJIA! Either the market isn't going to crash, people are bad investors, or the stock market is being kept from crashing. What is going on? Perhaps everybody else is as clueless as me. I want a crash. I want to see it all burn. Artificially inflating the economy will not help....
a French/English/German salute - English is a German language. French is where most of the worlds come from. But the 100 most used words are German and 83% of the top 1000 are German too. Germans dominate. If you know the obscure reference that is the subheading of this paragraph then good for you. I always liked the Jabberwocky, which is a word recognized by spellcheck despite being inherently not a word....
debaters of the masses - the debate was okay. It showed how little difference there is between how they would handle the economy. Like the president gets full control of the American economic engine. The president can't save us. They don't set the DJIA. That doesn't bother me as much as national defense issues, where somehow people think that were a weak liberal elected, then our soldiers would suddenly be incapable of firing accurately....
in case you missed it - my computer case is coming together, just not right now. I keep changing it around. My most recent realization is that any of my current strategies will yield a functional case. At the current moment the problem is that the next phase will render my desktop useless until I finish my case because the motherboard tray in case 2.0 is the tray from case 1.0 cut out by my trusty jigsaw. I plan on Dremeling out the lexan as I already have the main pieces cut and drilled. I could jig-saw those cuts, but it could not be as accurate or detailed. My sweet new laptop gets in tomorrow....
genetic algorithm optimization - I need to write a computer program that does curve fitting. Every one of my weekly labs could use it and I have the ability. We are build using genetic algorithms. Everything we do is optimized by the survival merit function. The reason we don't have the vision of an eagle or the memory of an elephant is that we don't actually want it. This is all in cave-man terms because that is when evolution stopped....
yoga, yogurt, and gaining weight - I have been trying for two weeks to gain weight. I have been eating fatty foods. It doesn't work. Nothing changes. I have tried exercise, yoga, and diet modification. Exercise puts on muscle mass, but greatly reduces my fat. When I worked out daily (thanksgiving to my bicycle accident, give or take) I lost almost all of my fat. I somehow lost inches off my waist. Yoga doesn't fly. I though I was having digestive problems, but I tried the yogurt that helps you poop for two weeks and nothing changed. I guess I should feel lucky. My last plan is sour cream, which I can eat a pound of in a sitting with potato chips....
mini - the mini has arrived..............
equatorial does not mean equal - an initial problem with my solar powered flashlight that I though up (engineers often think in terms of problems) was that at higher latitudes the amount of sunlight every day changes (in winter we have a few less hours of sun than in the summer). Then I remembered that poor people do not live at high latitudes. Well, not "I need a solar flashlight" poor. Poor people aggregate where living conditions are easier (all things follow the path of least resistance). The sun does not shine equally....
the war at home - yesterday I cycled to Walmart. I got some stuff for my computer case (which is coming along!). I also purchased an LED 40 watt equivalent light bulb (standard socket) and DIY (Do It Yourself) lamp repair kit that was basically the thing you screw the bulb into with the standard push rod fixture that they just goes to a cord with a plug in. Minimalistic. I made a really cool lamp then for under ten dollars of supplies that will run on 3 watts (nothing) that fits in with my room lighting theme. Diffuse lighting is a key to happiness. You should never actually see a light source. Tomorrow I will post a nice drawing or something about the actually building of it because it is all so simple. It uses: a lightbulb, a lamp assembly (with cord), 13 feet of heavy wire (or a few coat hangers), a foot of duct tape (redundant), and an old t-shirt as the shade (diffuser or Lambertianizer)....
graphic artistry - I dare you to compare the graphic arts that the two campaigns have. Obama is somewhere between apple, dell, and the future (2008 had Al Gore won in 2000). McCain is a throwback to an old era. It is folksy vs. modern. Obama is so Web 2.0 in appearance while McCain feels like the ad-supported free tripod pages I used to make back in the day. I like the campaign buttons that McCain has. I am thinking of getting some. Today I also received a MoveOn.Org shirt that I ordered a while back with a Raster image of Obama. It is American Apparel (the new liberalized gap) so the quality is nice. This is so a culture/generation/sex/race/religion/everything-but-policy war. 100 million will vote for McCain and 100 million will vote for Obama. The question is what do the rest (100 million) do? Most of those won't vote. I would call them idiots. But 100 million are voting for McCain. Both sides get ads targeted at what they want to see. The two sides don't share information as much. They get their news from different sources. So both think they are right (or left) and the other is wrong (or right). MSNBC is obviously liberal now. Fox "news" is clearly conservative. Just look at how they frame the debate in how their questions are worded....
my home and native land - Minnesota is as close as you can get to Canada without getting your eyes wet. Recently I was power-surfing the internet and started getting into the Canadian election. It is a crazy process. Enough said. Google it!...
blast away - here are yet more stories recently dumped out of the crumb tray from the intertubes:
the Senate Agrees On One Thing: MORE LASERS - Washington Post - we do need more laser weapons of every kind. If only because it will be badass and heavily symbolic to start fighting the next war, the one with lasers.
How AIG Fell Apart - Reuters - read this to find out why you should be scared of the economy. Basically AIG was one of the few giant financial companies that didn't have insurance on its bonds, so it was stuck paying both for its own defaulting bonds, but also other financial companies' bonds that AIG insured (which are now defaulting). The fear is banks will stop lending to banks, the market will loose liquidity, and they will then fail one by one in a every bank for itself version of Thunderdome.
Teen Rail Enthusiasts Grieve - LA times - this story gets me down to realize what a shallow, shallow entity the media is.
What if Marx and Mao were right? - the National - an interesting to say the least story from the UAE!
America's nasty presidential election - the Economist - McCain is in fact fighting a dirty campaign, it will backfire, hopefully.
"the secret life of Lisa Simpson" - was the season 8 finale and it was the last good episode of the Simpsons. What makes good television: zero or constant plot evolution. The Simpsons was good because Bart and Lisa never aged. Maggie is the same age I am for god's sake! It started to go downhill in with the next season and "The City of New York vs. Homer Simpson". Now I know and am reciting now in my head the entire script, every joke of this episode. But it was the beginning of the end. I have also heard the Season 11 finale ("Behind the Laughter") as being the end of the funny train. Maude Flanders died in season 11 by the way. It is like Lost, which I think received horrible review of its second season I feel party because at the end of Season 1 they...well, things (plural) blow up, to not ruin it. The individual plot can change, but people like fixed characters that they can force the logic of their actions through. Homer must be illogical, Bart must make trouble without remorse, Lisa must be a tortured genius, Maggie must be innocent but still know more than anyone things, and Marge must be there to keep it all together. Once Bart started to see the errors of this way and Lisa started acting irrationally irrational things fell apart. The Simpsons was about irreverence to social norms. They were the anti-hero American family. Television does best with either no change (fixed characters, a SITCOM) or with constant change (soap operas). So boo change, at least in the imaginary world of television....
the fight against evil - there are no Evil people. Maybe a few crazies. But I don't think anybody sits down and reasons out doing evil. Acting evil usually just means pure self-interest. People do evil things for personal gain (selfishness), a warped sense of justice (victimization), an existential need (survival), or because they are crazy. Selfishness has coincidentally been selected to naturally reside in us. We need bibles to try to unlearn that. Some evil are done by people who feel wronged by the system (all of us) and need to take stuff back from it (the rest of us). An increasingly increasing amount of evil is done out of an existential need for survival. Is it wrong to steal a loaf of bread? Evolutionary yes, but only on an immediate level. But most of us will look the other way. Can you ever blame some organism for fighting for its own survival? Would you expect anything less? Would you do any differently? Would any of this evolution stuff work without such survival? Then there are always crazy people, who sometimes do good, if only on accident....
too coincidental to be coincidental - irony is too often confused by people with something that is actually coincidental. I can play in my mind how the entire thing fell apart. A bunch of generation X-ers got horrible eductions by Reagan and now ironic ironically doesn't mean ironic anymore, which actually isn't ironic, although it kind of is. I don't care. I use irony like I am not saying something that is contradictory to fact. It is just such a cool and ironic thing to do....
| FALL | WINTER | SPRING |
| OE 416 - Optical Eng. Design II | OE 417 - Optical Engineering Design III | PH 325 - Advanced Physics Lab |
| OE 480 - Lens Design & Aberrations | OE 485 - Electro-Optics | PH 410 - Introduction to MEMS |
| OE 495 - Optical Metrology | PH 401 - Quantum Physics | RH xxx - literature-based rhetoric class |
| OE 592 - Fourier Optics | CHEM 201 - Engineering Chemistry I | CHEM 202 - Engineering Chemistry II |
this should provide me with just enough to graduate with with an OE major, Physics minor, a Literature and Language (English) minor, and a Semiconductor Materials and Devices certificate. MEMS stands for MicroElectroMechanical System, which is making little mechanical things powered on electricity smaller than the width of these characters. None of this matters. It is a moot point. I am in grad school. I just need to have fun while running out the clock. Which I guess in some broader philosophical sense is all anybody ever is doing. That is too bleak. Technically if I wanted to listen to the sound of settling I would C'est la vie....
when shock turns into numbness - me and Ramzi were discussing how we never really do derivates anymore. But we do. We do a lot. I deal with several integrals a day as far as calculus is concerned. We just don't think about it anymore. I think in our (PHOE) department we deal with math more than most majors. I had to do a quintuple (5) integral for some crazy Fourier optics stuff. I came to Rose over three years ago, 1/7th of my life, a roll of the die. None of us seniors fully comprehend it. It hardly feels like we are done or that any time has really passed....
how 'bout some credit now, credit is due, for the damage that's been done - we broke it and nobody wants to fix it. Iraq and Afghanistan. Two failing battlefronts. I see a pattern. Pathological behavior. Good intentions mixed with long-term ambitions. Acting out in a rage justified by our sense of victimization. Some people just want to watch the world burn. Where now? All we have is a choice between change and more of the same. Either one will bring the same endgame. Neither one will some how get us out of this funk that we are in. Perhaps the answers is to improve our image at home. But pride will keep us from ever admitting defeat. That is Bush's problem. It is why people hate him. This war is going horribly and everybody knows it, but we still put up a facade. We are untouchable toxic waste to the rest of the world. We are a beautiful disease that the rest of the world both fears and idolizes. Almost everybody wants to reap the benefits of this globalized world, but want to have everything and maintain things like folksy cultural identity and whimsy. Underneath money is eroding away ourselves. The huge financial burden placed on society because of our actions and lifestyles is not maintainable or sustainable by us. The stock market very well should crash a bit. It needs to return to normal and get its head out of the clouds. I just hope some day we can get some straight-talk so we can find out what actually happened and what will come to be....
the mind is a patchwork quilt - there is not enough time for me to appreciate the smaller things in life. I don't really have time to read, write (as much as I'd like), or learn or sleep! Writing this is one of the few things I have that I can spend some "me" time on. Mostly because I am stuck in my office (first PSR (private study room) in library) for a few hours a day. I've been trying to eat a grapefruit a day to maintain some semblance of routine or stability. I have returned mostly to my old work-out routine. I don't like to admit it, but I am dependent on other people. In the sense that I started to go crazy living alone this summer. There is hope. This could be the first picture ever of a planet in another solar system orbiting another sun....
the search for things missing: seti and yeti alike - I hope we evolve beyond radio communication. When we first started radio transmissions they were full band (every frequency) static bursts of Morse code. When we discovered frequency transmission we outlawed all full-band (static) transmitters. I hope we get one more step. I hope this because we haven't heard any other civilizations. This means either that they aren't out there, don't have radio equipment yet, or have evolved beyond (or without) radio. Without having heard from anybody, the only hope is that radio communication is a fad in the relative scale of time that unfolds. It means that even if somebody was close by, they would only receive stray waves for the amount of time they transmit (a century for us so far versus a few billion years of planetary existence, 100 vs. 1,000,000,000). The sphere of radio waves that have traveled out could become a thin shell in time if we get rid or radio or if we die out....
competing alleles - I used to think that bioengineering was a crazy idea until I realized that it is just another way for genes to compete. It will happen in my intended lifespan. Would it be that bad. Image you are born into such a world. Wouldn't you want to run faster, think harder, and be free of genetic disease? Would you really want your parents to go granola and have you naturally?Would you feel accomplished if you had such innate advantages? These questions aren't answered in my bible (Richard Dawkin's the Selfish Gene). We know the real date is 20 of March 1393....
5126 years - on December 21st or 23rd in 2012 the world will reset according to the Mayan calendar. Maybe we are on a time loop. It would be hilarious and scary if in mid-2012 we figure out that things are set in motion to return to the world of 3118 BC and there is nothing we can do about it. It would make the pyramids all the more impressive....
my Sharona - (youtube) the Knack is a youtube video pulled from the TV show Dilbert and it is about engineers. Hilarious....
projected images of the future - currently I feel like I am on the path to work in semiconductors. Either through ICs, processors, detectors, laser/LEDs, or collectors like solar cells. That is actually rather cool. The real decision comes down to commercial vs. academic. Do I want to make money or win prizes. There is a fundamental question of human motives that this comes down to. According to Fountainhead, ego is the fountainhead of man's creativity. I do best when I feel under moderate competition with no consequences for failure. I don't like being told what to do or feel forced. My idea is to boil perspiration and inspiration down to a comparison between fear and hope. Both are motivating factors to people. Fear tends towards conservatism because things that have worked have kept you alive while hope tends to be more about free-ballin' it....
anti-reflective coating - today I again tried to propose the group's mission statement (this time for Optical Design) be: to ensure that good wins over evil. It is funny and is universally true - I would hope - for most people. The problem is that "good" and "evil" are too vague and have different meanings to different people. Opposing sides in war always think the other side is evil. Just like sports teams will often pray to the same god before a game. It is like...I don't like to single out member of the three idiot frats (I make generalizations because they auto-arrange themselves by degree of popped collar)...but this just bothers me...there was this fiji in the commons today that was talking about the subway scrabble game and seriously thought if only somebody would give him one letter he would win several thousand dollars, as if that is all it took to win that contest. But I digress. People tend to put themselves into groups because it allows for a you vs. them mentality. Knowledge is an important thing because lack of it can be confusing....
if you hit a dog long enough, he will think he did something wrong - frustration leads to aggression. Your computer doesn't work. You hit it. To...ummm...shake the electrons loose, of course. Adaptive (biological) systems can respond to negative reinforcement. It is why there is such a divide between dog and cat people. When I grew up I was the go-to watch-your-pet kid on my block when people went on vacations. I know the difference between dogs and cats. Dogs are trained with negative reinforcement (fear) and cats are trained with positive reinforcement (love). If you hit a cat, the cat will walk away, and not take that crap. If you hit a dog, it will take it because it is dependant on people. Dogs are innately social animals. Cats are innately independent. Neither one is permanent. This relationship follows (as best social statistics can) political affiliation. Strangely, cat people are better at dealing with larger social environments. While republicans prefer living far away from their neighbors. I wonder which one causes which. If anti-social people live in red terrain or if blue people tend to congregate. This is the problem. Divide we don't stand. Especially on such trivial issues. This election is turning into a culture war. That divides blue, cat, city, educated, social, peace, organic, hope, and love away from red, dog, country, religious, independent, strong, enhanced, steadfast, and prudent. I tried to put those with as little bias as possible. None of this is important now, nor has it ever been! They are stupid wedge issues that the right thinks up to divide things up because nobody wants to hear the real reasons they are evil....
and here's to you Mrs. Rand - I believe that strict conservatism represents the most efficient way to run things. But I don't ever want to live in that world. I doubt that I will ever need the social welfare system that I want to protect me from a disaster that will never happen. It is also illogical and extraordinarily pious to think that everybody will be able to live for 70+ years without needing some kind of help. What I am trying to say, is that my first real job will probably be in the six-figures range (who's illogical now?), but I still want to give half of that over to the government. I will take every deduction they give me. Paying taxes is worth it. My public K-12 education was clearly better than most (public or private) at my school (90% of the already extraordinary (literal sense) engineers at my school). It cost about a quarter million dollars. I feel that until I pay that back, I have no right to complain. Without it I wouldn't even know how to complain about it. Why live in a thunderdome when you don't have to?...
false hope -the failure of false hope is dangerous because it is negative reinforcement for hoping and impedes hope in the future....
the District doesn't sleep tonight - when I was in DC I sleep for less than five hours all weekend. I slept a bit on the plane back. But I don't need a lot of sleep. My internal testing has yielded a result of ten days that I can go on minimal sleep (3-4 hours) before light begins to show at the cracks. The last time I had to push this envelope for school was back in high school for my extended essay, which sucked. I psychologically broke down. But like a phoenix, I rose from the ashes a stronger person....
Doddin' the Issue - in this cafe off Dupont circle in DC I ran into some people that gave me hope in the failure of it (hope is only necessary when there is none). They asked me what I liked to do in DC for fun. I told them I was just a visitor there. We started up a conversation on M&Ms that wandered a ton. Eventually I ran through my list of people I wanted to be president (democrats of course): Kucinich, Gravel, Biden, Dodd, Clinton, and Obama. Then I told them that in the end it was Sen. Chris Dodd that I liked the best. As it turned out, they were campaign staffers for Dodd's campaign. They lost hard. I got the card of a guy who was his senior political advisor. That made my day. Of all the shots in the dark, to have run into a group of Dodders was awesome....
ego trippin' at the gates of hell - so it was about 5:30ish in the morning as the five of us KAUSTers walked in front of the White House. We decided that the funniest picture would be us acting like we would jump the fence of the white house. The capital police actually helped us take the pictures at first. Then the secret service came over their walkies. Things got a bit real. We left. We had to meet at 8am for a meeting anyways. I love night walks around DC. There are more visible Hobos now than in January....
a never ending series of black holes - so this is my creation story, it goes back before the big bang. Essentially the big bang was the formation of a black hole, which we now live in. This means that it is ultimately our fate to create black holes (new universes) that are habitable to life, that is how it works. That is how certain physical constants that are needed to be within a certain range for stable atomic structures to form happen to work out. We are the descendant of black holes that either by chance formed universes with the proper ratios or were properly seeded to have the right stuff. This does not answer what started all of that off. Does it matter? The unfortunate thing is that black holes (at least in our universe) die eventually of thermal emissions (they are not black) that have to happen because of fancy science. Perhaps that returns us to some vast sea of relative thermal equilibrium that collects and collapses into black holes (new universes) every so often. I like to think of the magic of the universe that starts from a singularity (a point, a black hole) and moves towards equally distributed equilibrium. The two situations are Fourier transforms of each other, translating from the spatial to the frequency domain. Which only encourages my theory that "reality" is really just a vast mostly uniform sea and that we are manifestations of the residual waves bouncing around in this sea. Perhaps we just oscillate between the two forms when a singularity degrades by entropy into a uniform sea which in the other sense of space is a singularity that degrades into uniformity which starts the cycle all over again. A constant feedback loop....
dependant by design - we are designed by evolution to be weak. Pound for pound we are the weakest creature of earth that eats meat. Even most herbivores our size can beat us in a fight. We have to talons. Nothing inborn to fight with. It takes a decade before we can defend ourselves in any practical definition of the word. We play the long game. We need to be weak. We can't have giant claws to slash at eachother with. We couldn't form societies if we were those people. Evolution made us weak because physical strength was never needed. Sure it could help to run faster than fifteen miles an hour in full sprint. But we needed to be sedentary to build a society. The thing mother nature provided was a way to evolve into a civilization....
big picture - I have developed a few large long-term lifetime goals that I accept before even mentioning them as being probably beyond my means. I want to create a small private engineering school in Minnesota because for all the state's education system there is not a major engineering institution. In other words, it would have been nice, in general, if I didn't have to go out of state for a good engineering education. Another goal is what charities should be doing in Africa because it is a sustainable gift: infrastructure. Africa needs roads - not medicine. Medicine is a short-term solution that directly eases the conscience. It only provides more people to overcrowd an ecosystem not able to support everybody. Africa needs roads and to a lesser extent schools. Roads don't save anybody directly. People will probably be killed walking on them by bandits. But the trade will save lives....
a boy named Jeeves - what is in a name? More than sentimental poetry would tell us. Does naming your kid Jeeves sign him up to be a servant for life? Am I a Ben? What about you?...
the futures market - playing the stock market is playing other people, not actually how well the companies are doing....
Billy - if you listened to some of the 24-hour news cycle leading up to Bill Clinton speaking at the DNC you probably thought he was going to fling some poop at Obama. What did people expect of him? All I know is that he is the master of playing the expectations game. Bill was not going to threaten being tagged with losing Obama the election. I think that his gradual endorsement was meant to mirror most peoples' uneasiness about electing somebody with so little experience....
soda pop - (source) I have seen and probably posted this map before. It is a map of who calls pop (/soda/coke) what. I hadn't noticed it before. But people who refer to pop as coke live in general below the Mason-Dixon line. Meaning if your state used to be cool with slavery, you call it coke. Soda-land is California, New England, St. Louis, and Milwaukee. The heartland, where real Americans come from, is solid blue pop-land. National regionalisms (spell check is okay with that word?) are interesting. Ever since fully experiencing the lower Midwest I now resent being grouped in with them. I am strictly an upper-Midwestern. We have lake superior and everything. It really is about Lutherans. I technically am one....
Every Man a King, But None Wear a Crown - this was Huey Long's ethical slogan. I wrote my IB extended essay on him. But I want to talk about Martin Luther ( - King). Martin Luther was a bad ass because he essentially said ""not so fast" to catholicism. He started the whole Protestant reform thing. He ironically invented the Martin Luther invented the Christmas tree. So I assume that all people who put one up are spitting on their pope. Popes are so lame because they deify a person. Back to the Christmas tree thing. It is ironic that a holiday that is now about material excess (stores playing our religion against our pocket books) that got its modern start from a man who said you can't buy your way into heaven. Martin Luther didn't like that catholics give money to the church in exchange for being granted access to heaven (and she's buying a stairway to hea-ven). He nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the Church (Holy Roman Empire) saying that god did not accept Visa....
real god/imaginary god/complex god - what if god gave us free will because he is not immortal? what if our reality is just based on the collective beliefs of other people? When I was in third grade I wondered if I was just a dream that the sun had and if everything was just some collective dream of something I now realize is just a self-perpetuating nuclear reaction. It was like the matrix, but more spiritual, which is code for I don't believe in Churches....
balance - society has to balance some things. We can't let poor people out on their own and just free-ball it. We can't fully subsidize them of the incentive-based society we live in falls apart (that is what capitalism is). What do we do with fat kids? Do we commend their courage to eat a lot? Do we insult them? Do we tell them that they have free will? Do we ignore them and hope the problem of childhood obesity?...
Life in the fast lane - I should have signed up for fast track calculus. I didn't learn anything new in Calc 2 or 3 (got out of 1 at least). I have realized that like half of my friends at Rose were fast-trackers. You could chalk it up to by elitism that really comes down to me not liking to deal with stupid people. Perhaps it is because growing up with the four cousins (myself included) I never had to deal with idiots because for all of our childish (we were children) insults we were actually all a few standard deviations ahead of the curve. I have no need to justify myself to others. Actually I do. Just not to everybody. I like the line from the excellent film High Fidelity which you should watch if you haven't, the line is about a woman, but it applies to people in general, I will paraphrase it from my perspective, it's not that I don't care about my appearance or the image I project, I just that I'm not affected by it....
successful people - I have noticed that "successful" people (broad definition) have a few traits in common: a distaste for inefficiency, an ability to solve problems with duct/k tape, and a fundamental ability to care for the word around them. This could be broken down to having the will and ability (grace) to do something, or the systemic properties and initial conditions. Most of what determines ones rationality is the extra-curricular schooling. I've realized that comprehension is actually the most difficult thing to do....
morality - Modern conservatives believe in free-market capitalism and that god created the world five thousand years ago. These ideas do not gel, they are not gellin. One half believe in evolution and the other half acts like in can't exist - even as an intentional part of god's plan ( a plan that includes 9/11). Why does nobody blame The Baby Jesus for 9/11?....
clash of cultures - I hold two fundamental beliefs: digital photography is inherently better than chemical film and that vinyl records are the supreme format of music. In my mind this seems like common sense. These two ideas seem to clash with me favoring and denying the benefits of modern technology. Here is my favorite example: tube amplifiers. Back in the day before the semiconductor transistor revolution we had vacuum tube amplifiers. Now old radios still have these tubes - something highly praised by audiophiles for it sound production qualities. Now this makes no sense at all technologically! These tubes should be surpassed by modern semiconductors. The answer comes from a question of standards. Old audiophiles honed their hearing by learning from old audiophiles who learned hearing on old vacuum-tube-based amplifiers. Vacuum tubes are technically inferior to transistors. But their flaw is a very pronounced favoring of noise at the 3rd harmonic frequency instead of the typical 2nd harmonic (higher order harmonics are dampened by important laws named after important people). So people's sensibilities are skewed by important effects of psychology. So back to me and music versus me and light. I would like to reduce it down to psychological triage where something that I need to be qualified at in some semblance of a professional manner (optics) I favor fact while something that I think of as a diversion (music) I favor folksy and old-time-iness; a monument to my nostalgia for an era of music long dead....
natural versus unnatural - I have come to realize what may be apparent to everybody, but I didn't get it at the time. The difference between the natural and unnatural world comes down in our minds to intention. Natural things are unintended while unnatural things are mean to be (think contrived and forced) and thus our natural resentment for artificiality. Perhaps it also has to do with time. The sight of farm fields seems kind of natural despite it being anything but. We assume too much that a natural life is any healthier for us. We used to eat lead and not have medicine. Populations explode because the survival rate is so high. Cities are just like ant hills....
synthesis - to clarify, I don't think that digital photographers are better than film photographers. I am saying that digital photographers can be better. A computer is an amazing tool - far better than a darkroom. We just don't have enough good digital photographers. Developers would be a more accurate term - since all the work is done in post-production. It will be exciting in a few years when ridiculously good digital cameras start coming out. To the point where more megapixels will finally be too much....
selection, naturally - it is very interesting the way modern lens design is done. The way things roll is that a computer finds solutions for lens arrangements/curvatures using evolution. It picks a random population, tests them, evaluate winners from losers, and selecting them for future generations. It is nothing but natural selection where dozens of factors are balanced by evaluation in real-world conditions. They don't compete with the other directly. But nobody wants a defensive lens arrangement. It is just interesting to me that of all the ways that could have been developed, that this is the best way we have found to do things, the way we started with (in the positive sense) - the old-fashioned way....
unnatureality - Fourier Optics has the coolest labs at Rose. I will post pictures next week. I saw the diffraction pattern caused by my hair magnified up on the wall with my hair being an inch across. It showed how light doesn't just get blocked or not by objects but is actually a wave that can interfere with itself. It looked like somebody dropped a giant hair folical into a lake and then suddenly froze the waves only in red light. It is too magical to describe with words - what are english majors thinking....
gEvolution - it environments of great plenty, simple organisms thrive, it is not until resources become scare that complex and specialized organisms like us arise. Google is going to take over the (computer) world. Their new internet browser "Chrome" is awesome. I haven't yet dropped the fox. I have been with firefox since it was phoenix (2002). It is the next piece in what I now realize google is doing. Google is getting all of the pieces together of its probably linux-based operating system. It will tie together all of google's components. I am all onboard. Being taken over is inevitable (like suffering!), so it may as well be by a company like google. They are making sure that they have all the components together before they go public because it needs a tipping point and not a slow march like Linux. One day it will just be there. We will try it. We will choose a different company to control things behind the scene....
god speed - cnn - Stephen Colbert's DNA is going to be shot into outerspace in case we kill ourselves and need to be brought back by cloning Stephen Colbert and having him mate with himself to recreate humanity (aka Stephen Colbert...diluted)....
good speed? - nytimes - good call. It should be entrapment. On a serious note, if we drove "reasonable" cars we wouldn't be in a gas crisis, albeit far less kick ass. I think we are all willing to shed blood on a foreign battlefield to go faster in our cars, seriously, as almost everybody speeds, which is a redundantly obvious safety hazard. So it is something we are willing to risk life and limb for. You can't take the bow off Pandora's box and expect people not to peek behind the lid. Not only why do almost all cars go almost double what they legally can ever do (yes, I know, in public, but I don't own a race track), but why do we want that? Are we so tricked by advertisers telling us we needs 500 HP to drive down to Walmart? What are we compensating for? Why do we think the drug of retail will make it feel better? It didn't fix 9/11 or win us the war in Iraq. Back to cars. They create the poison in the air. I have a plan for energy that calls for nuclear power and electric cars. boom. Energy crisis solved for a few hundred years. Nuclear waste is not that bad. It is all around us. There was more radioactivity in the granite of the walls of situation room where the Three-Mile Island crisis was handled than anywhere around the actual plant. Oh, those nice granite counters (that go well with sub zero fridges and viking stoves) has tons of radiation in them, some have even been found to keep meals warm!...
good seed - our nuclear power plants are feed on back stock. They are old technology (no new since 3-mile). So now we have a bunch of wasteful reactors that are dangerous. New reactors use thorium mostly - not uranium. They consumer their own waste and don't generate the huge quantities of spent fuel. We need to build more plants. I understand NIMBY (not in my backyard). But we all have to encounter some risk. Americans feel too entitled to their wealth, prosperity, and lack of burden. We are not going to get the cheap energy we have. The oil market is suppose to have either already peaked, is peaking, or will peak soon (most estimates put it at 10-30 years). This is the time when standard market principles (this is a rather defined product) says that price will be at a minimum. From now the price will go up as we pass the half-way point of consumable oil. From here on out it will be harder to find and gather, but not to sell. Oil sucks. It will be cool one day if I have to struggle to some youngin' what a combustion engine is - I would probably start laughing. It is very Paleolithic - literally. Actually oil is a geological phenomenon - not biological. So there is this block of metal with pistons inside that turn a cylinder with little controlled explosions a hundred times a second....
PHOTOGRAPHIA - HERE IT IS! This the place where I will upload all my wonderful pictures, past and present.
the sound of music - people like music because they like birds because they are canaries in the coal mine, but on the surface. No birds meant no life as birds live everywhere people do. So cave-people (us without suits and dresses) should have been pacified by bird calls. We like order and rhythm because it means the birds are healthy enough to consistently repeat the same tune. All the better if sounds go together. In the rainforest and potentially other places (this is from Planet Earth) animals will time their songs into an orchestra, if only to prevent them from stepping on eachothers' notes....
folksy - Palin is too folksy. I don't want a common everyday person to be president. I should at least hope they are smarter than me. I get so angry with new reporters talking about her story is about how anybody can become VP. Really? I hope this is liberal media bias. The media isn't biased; it isn't ideological for the most part. The media is heartless and will go after whoever they can. Republicans are just idiots, so they get picked on. That the majority (at least 75%-ish) of reporters are left-leaning. But do we really want Yukon Sarah? When I thought about her being the VP pick I realize that the McCain campaign is running scared. But he does operate best as an underdog. I greatly appreciate him for going through torture for the good of the nation, but I will not let him do an unrelated job because of it, especially one he himself should find so important. In the end with Palin, I hope sexist republicans stay home....
imitate and water down - the media has two problems dilution of talent and the AP. It is pointless to read the average newspaper now because every non-local story is just an AP wire or a recycled transmission. There is too much media and not enough people good people in the business. I am sure that even FOX news is a good 5% great journalists. The problem is that 95% of them surf the net and read up on Brittany Spears. The other problem with too much news is that on a slow day CNN needs something to play. So follow a slowly unfolding scandal that can have a good live feed and some guests for Larry King. It is a crime of necessity. Information is power, but only if it is new, relevant, and well covered....
SAT prep - Hope is to Obama as Fear is to McCain. Most of the actually zingers the candidates exchanged in their national conventions were implications by logic. For example: vote for Dewey Stong: he won't put poison in the well. The logic of politics deals with perception, not reality. Most people don't trouble themselves for that. I can think of any number of ways to divide the parties: young/old, 1950's/1960's, averting pain/seeking pleasure, hope/fear, modern/classical, future/past, potential/strength, and democrat/republican. The conventions say it all. The democrats (who hate country) play country to appeal to the segment that choose a candidate based on musical tastes (Obama likes all music) while the republicans play rock. Both are not realistic to their image or likely as pleasant to the people who like listening in - but it could be a deciding influence to some. That is why it is done. There is a room of people who debate this for hours. The goal is two pronged at a convention: get supporters excited about your campaign and get people to vote for you. You use special language (like Bush talking to evangelicals in 2000) like "culture of life" instead of "pro-life" or other terms. Both sides do it. I love political rhetoric because understanding it allows you to actually know what is going on. Of course Tim Pawlenty is just fine with Palin getting VP. But really he can see his chances at the oval office disappear. It is like Billary at DNC. What did people expect them to do? Who actually though they would try to undermine or even half-ass their endorsements of Obama? They would never be the ones tagged with losing Obama the election. I put it at a 67.3% chance of Obama winning. Minnesota is now safely in his column....
Cabin Pressure - Here are some fun facts about Minneapolis/St. Paul that I read in a travel's magazine while flyin' out of DC:
St. Paul has the most Victorian mansions on earth, with over 5 miles of them of Summit Avenue alone.
Minneapolis has a downtown the sizes of: Dallas, Denver, Houston, Indianapolis, and Sacramento COMBINED!
Minnesota has the most golfers and volunteer hours per capita....
Greyhound Sleep - let me start off by saying this is an oxymoron, or at least some kind of mutual exclusive paradox. You can not sleep on a Greyhound. Greyhound sleep is the state that your body puts your mind into when it needs to technically at least look like it is sleeping. You will never feel rested afterwards. It will never last long enough to get into the valuable REM sleep cycling thingy to do any good. It is a trick you pull on yourself - like chewing gum when you are hungry. You can never even hope for just one good nap because if you do, you will miss your stop. Then there is the perpetual fear that people are going to take your stuff. Couple this with the awkwardness of sharing a row for a solid day with another person and chaos overtakes you. Irritability will make you think that you are locked in an epic battle for mere inches of legroom. Planes are comfortable. Now at least. On a greyhound there are no rules. But back to sleep. If you can sleep on a greyhound, good job. I wear headphones all the time. Think of the ten hours between Minneapolis and Chicago (7 by car, by the by) as an opportunity to listen to the complete discography of a few artists. My trips take between 16.5 to 25 hours depending on how the trade winds (bus schedules) blow (line up). Chicago is the worst place to wait. It is noisy and busy at all hours. If I were a hobo I would etch the relevant "bad sleep here" sign into the tile. Indy is peaceful, but probably a little more dangerous outside. Then you wake up, don't see your bag immediately, panic, and then notice you knocked it onto the floor.
ARCHIVE 2: 6 november 2005 - 30 december 2005
ARCHIVE 3: 28 december 2005 - 12 february 2006
ARCHIVE 4: saturday 11 february 2006 - monday 6 march 2006
ARCHIVE 5: sunday 5 march 2006 - sunday 2 april 2006
ARCHIVE 6: sunday 2 april 2006 - sunday 30 april 2006
ARCHIVE 7: monday 1 may 2006 - wednesday 31 may 2006
ARCHIVE 8: friday 2 june 2006 - thursday 8 june 2006
ARCHIVE 9: monday 9 october 2006 - tuesday 2 january 2007
ARCHIVE 10: tuesday 3 april 2007 - sunday 24 june 2007
ARCHIVE 11: sunday 15 july 2007 - wednesday 28 november 2007
ARCHIVE 12: sunday 2 december 2007 - saturday 29 december 2007
ARCHIVE 13: tuesday 1 january 2008 - friday 22 feburary 2008
ARCHIVE 14:monday 25 february 2008 - wednesday 30 april 2008
ARCHIVE 15:thursday 1 may 2008 - wednesday 25 june 2008
ARCHIVE 16:thursday 26 june 2008 - thursday 14 august 2008
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