What's Been and What's Ben

The US educates many foreigners in science and technology. We give them degrees and then often kick them out of the country. Many want to open this up because it prevents the US from being as competitive. Germany kicked out scientists in WWII and never recovered their complete dominance in science. I agree that we should allow people with doctorates stay in the US, but we do get a lot of good work out of them when they are driven into the ground during graduate school and it spreads technology around the world.

I eagerly await word from Boulder, Arizona, and CREOL for PhD programs. Hopefully they mail acceptance/laugh-in-your-face letters to my parents and not my mailbox here. My research for this quarter looks to be making a wiimote that will work off-axis (pointed away from TV) with good accuracy. I eat a good deal of chicken and have been watching Nova.

I want to take you through what I feel are the needs of modern computing. Caveat: I do not have completely typical use. I currently have three laptops and two desktops. Nobody should buy a desktop unless they already have two laptops. This is more for my record keeping:

• Laptops
  • Dell Mini 9, netbook, $350, Intel atom processor, first full laptop with no moving parts (solid-state hard drive and no cooling fan needed)
  • Asus a900, netbook, $180, Intel atom processor, cheap and energy efficient (~10W), refurbished (used)
  • Dell M70, Intel Pentium M processor, big-ass laptop, Rose-Hulman 2005 student laptop, old but with a beatiful 1920×1280 screen
• Desktops
  • Handmade “Bennebulous”, $1000, AMD athlon processor, an old footstool I made into a computer, clear Lexan sides, low power, 1 TB hard drive, rubber caster wheels, blu-ray and floppy disk drive
  • Handmade “Bennaroo”, $350, Intel atom processor, size of a dictionary, clear all-Lexan frame, 320 GB hard drive, external blu-ray, and a cool front display panel that shows date/time, song info, and internet usage

Among the more important things worth mentioning is that both my desktops use a 490nm LED as a power light because it is my favorite color. I import them from Germany after using them at an internship. Disk drives are a thing of the past. Using a CD is like using a floppy disk drive a few years ago. Energy efficiency is important to me for the philosophical reason of helping the environment, but it is practically about noise reduction because hot computers require loud fans that make noise. I built “Bennaroo” because it was cheaper to make and put in my suitcase than ship Bennebulous to Saudi Arabia. I – and a very few others – beat manufacturers to punch on the super-tiny computers. They are down to rhyming thesaurus size devices that can sit on the back of your monitor.

I am very happy keeping things small and portable. This is a reaction to the huge laptop I had to/got to buy as a college freshman in college. Custom building a computer is a wonderful project and requires very basic knowledge of what hooks up to what and mechanical knowledge of building a box that air can flow around (put holes it in). It is wonderful in this age that you can just buy a bunch of stuff off the internet, spread it out on a table, hook connectors together, and it just works. Desktops are pointless for almost everybody. Even with an external monitor, you pay little premium for it in the cost of the monitor and the loss of performance they undergo in making them mobile. This is the past, what about the future?

In the future there will by synergy. Nobody knows what this means. Ipads, god willing, will go quietly into the night. Ipads will fail because there exist natural sizes of things that people like to carry around. Except for women with large purses, most anybody who can carry around an iPad could carry around a slightly larger 10″ laptop.  Pluto will always be a planet, books should always be read on paper, and kids should get off my lawn. Laptops will continue to exist because of the strength of the form factor.

My next step is a more powerful laptop. When I go back to the US of A and the end of the semester/start of the summer, I plan to get an Alienware m11x. It will cost ~$1000. It will provides the horsepower I currently miss from my atom processors. Let me tell you about Atoms.

Intel had two objectives with Atom processors: low-end computer processors for emerging market and something to test new manufacturing techniques on. Atom resulted. It was never meant to be sold to Americans. They wanted to charge the developed world for computing power they often didn’t need. My current conspiracy theory is not intended, but the result of better hardware allowing for lazier software. My classic example is that Microsoft Word takes the same amount of time (if not more) to start now versus a few years ago. These things have only 50,000,000,000 transistors versus the 500,000,000,000 of even modest processors today. So think population of the West Coast of the US versus all of the Americas. They are simple and less prone to failure and thus perfect to move them ahead to the next processing node (Intel is going to 32 from 45 nm). You could fit 1,000 across a strand of hair.

60 Minutes recently ran a piece on Bloom Boxes. They are heralded as a device that can replace the electrical grid. Do not get excited. These fuel cell devices are nothing special. I do not trust the man in charge of the company one single bit. This, to a more muted sense, is the general reaction of engineers.

“You can even use solar” was his answer when the interviewer asked if you could use solar energy to fuel a bloom box. No. You can not. Solar energy is light falling on us after travelling millions of miles from the sun’s perpetual nuclear furnace. I will bet every dollar I have in the bank against a penny that you can’t use solar. He was placating the interviewer. Fuel cells convert fossil fuels into electricity using a more controlled combustion that happens inside stacks of catalysts instead of a typical less controlled explosion in your car/lawnmower/etc. So this man’s vision of the future is that everybody will be “off the grid” because they will have a generator in their back yard. We still need fuel that will still release chemicals into the air.

Hydrogen power is a myth created by vested petrochemical interests. Yes water comes out, but we have no source of hydrogen. Roughly half of the atoms in your body are hydrogen, but those are tied up in water. Water (H – O – H) is like rust for hydrogen. To get them out of water would use, at best, slightly more energy than you get from recombining hydrogen with oxygen. To boil it all down: the Hindenburg was filled with hydrogen, do you want to drive that around and deal with auto accidents.

What he is doing is not revolutionary. His little bullshit song and dance about nicely colored green and black wafers annoys me to no end. It reminds me of why people are supposed to get degrees from schools before they talk about technical matters with authority. Bloom energy is the name of the company that I can at least know will likely be bankrupt in a few years. The man in charge has an okay vision and a great ego about his work. I ran some back of the envelop calculations and it would be cheaper to just go to home depot, buy a generator, and use that instead of the upfront costs of a Bloom Box. The final nail in the coffin: these things do nothing to help global warming except offer a slightly more efficient generator than you would get for your remote cabin or work site.

P.S. The implementation of hydrogen fuel technologies has never been about the engine, but about the fuel itself. You could modify your engine to run on hydrogen fuel relatively easily (<$100). The problem is where does hydrogen come from? There is no free lunch. The best we have are all nuclear solutions from either sunlight, fission (Thorium), and fusion (see future?).

Beware of false prophets.

Modern tea party = hippies who would rather people keep to themselves

All non-moral victories are mere coincidences of nature.

modern tea party = anarchists, discuss

Why is free-market capitalism so closely tied with republican lawmakers that don’t believe in evolution? Slate had a good parable about how changing time cause changing perception. Parable-enthusiasts and parable-aficionado should enjoy this story about what I consider the the heart of darkness of life: you can do everything right and still win or more simply put, life is not fair. Physics is fair. It is completely unbiased against all forms of race, religious belief, and other such factors. We are comprised on a crazy number of physical events. Life is not fair because there are so many of these tiny events that we can’t possibly know about them – much less compute what to do with that information. What does discussion of physics and metaphysics mean for macroeconomics? Almost nothing except that even with a system of cogs and widgets doing exactly what they are meant to do, the outcome is not certain. All I know is that I am a genius because I started that last sentence without knowing a place to land and it came out all profound.

…those who don’t believe in evolution are doomed to repeat it…

I came up with an intelligence test which I call the Frevert Intelligence Test (FIT) because I don’t think any of the 500 Freverts have come up with one. This test is based not on asking if you know something, but demonstrating what you can do with what you know. There is no correct answer. It is a form of a personality test, but I came up with it when I was thinking of a good way to prevent hiring an incompetent idiot. It heavily favors creative people.

The test is simply two dots on a sheet of paper with a short instruction at the top:
“Connect the dots without taking your writing implement off the table. You have twenty minutes and can’t leave early.”

Perhaps applicants will connect the dots and sit there for twenty minutes, make a drawing, fold in the corner so your pen can move there to then move to a new location (see video for explanation), fold the paper in half (connecting the two dots without ink), and connecting the dots and walking out.

You can download a PDF of the Frevert Intelligence Test.