What's Been and What's Ben

Why do we punish people more for premeditated crime? Doesn’t somebody end up dead/injured?

Why do we punish people more for hate crimes? Doesn’t somebody end up dead/injured?

How is true mental belief provable? Is there justice beyond proving the binary state of intent?

Doesn’t it protect those capable of defending themselves rather than those who are innocent?

When we put corporations on legal parity with people we yield to constructs of the human mind that which should be reserved for conscious, mortal, and discrete beings. When we vote for civil rights and fail, we ceed to the forces of pure populism. People are people and other things are not. Consciousness is so particular and unique, it must be our main threshold for defining who mean by “we”.

I don’t remember “states’ rights” and elections on civil rights being an okay moral position. If that were true, interracial marriage would still be illegal in parts of the south. At the heart of the issue is specific religious dogma forcing a limitation of contract law. Bestiality is not part of the same slippery slope because animals can’t sign contracts. The 1960′s didn’t represent a full racial integration because it was really just the manifestation of a nation understanding that all people are people of the same species.

Statistics will save us! If you are opposed to same-sex marriage you will likely die soon and be replaced by a younger person who won’t have to live a life of sexual repression that cause them lash out at the group they secretly wish to belong.

Religious fanaticism is evil; it’s unrequited dedication and frustration leads to aggression. So wars fester and towers fall. It provides authority to impose your views on others. It erodes free speech when Muslim extremists force cartoons of Muhammad out of newspapers in distant lands.

As Hubert H. Humphrey said, “people are people.”

GNU is not the ultimate statement on freedom, it comes with the sacrifice of rights because you can’t alter it and then commercialize it without publishing the code under the license. It forces people into your ideological thinking.

Evolution optimizes heavily for small brain size (weight/power) in flying animals who can thus not fully appreciate the wind in their hair.

If it wasn’t for all these trees, I could finally find that damn forest.

The University of Minnesota’s new football stadium will have beer for sale on all levels (Star Tribune).

If you flew over a body of salt water or took a similarly long plane trip, all the recycling for the last year didn’t matter, nor the tree planted in your honor. Flying around the world for KAUST basically doubled the environmental impact of my life. I find it morally hilarious that people will give you a dirty look for not walking to the other side of a park to recycle some bleached paper covered in heavy-metal inks while everybody at the airport abstracts it away thinking their reason is special like the Croatian at the just reopened after a blitzblizzard Frankfurt airport on December 22, 2009 who insisted that the person behind the counter didn’t understand that he needed to get home for Christmas – like the rest of us happened to be travelling for a December 24th business meeting that could easily be moved a few days. I’m sure future generations will think of us like slaveowners, but ones who really needed the extra work out of our environment.

Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson on funding NASA.

MIT published research finding of 230% efficient LEDs at 135° C at 30 pW input power with 69 pW. Thanks to the Stefan–Boltzmann law that means 1500  W/m^2 just from blackbody thermal emissions. Assume they were using a package the size of 1 cubic mm, so you could have a wall of them packed next to each other to produce 39 μW/m^2 in “gain” along with 1500 W/m^2 of loss. They made a crappy laser (sub-unity gain (a great band name)) that in no way violates thermodynamics.

Oh, and that neutrino stuff seems to be about a bad fiber optic cable.

My third hand-made (assembled) desktop is roughly ten times as powerful in all major specs relative to my Rose-Hulman engineering behemoth from 2005 – keeping up with Moore’s Law. I went AMD because if I went Intel I’d be kicking myself in a few months when Ivy Bridge and it’s “3D” (2.5 at best) 22 nm transistors come out. SSDs are a critical part to any new computer and are the single best upgrade to get a few more miles out of an older computer. The computer will also integrate my new Dell U2412M 1920×1200 IPS monitor and some old drives I’ve had laying around: 1x Blu-Ray Drive, 1x Blu-Ray/HD-DVD DVD-writer Drive, 2x 1TB HDD, 2x 2TB HDD. They provide 6TB of storage and the ability to watch multiple blu-ray disks (like Lord of The Rings extended edition) back-to-back without load interruption. I use a microsoft natural elite keyboard that has slight ergonomics and excellent keystroke action and a logitech MX500 mouse from 2002. I’ve resurrected my old desktop-in-a-desktop background that I need to keep doing.

A main things I invested in was a good power supply and power efficient components. I use a line-regulator that corrects the incoming wall voltage, provides surge protection, and maintains power during quick interruptions for my desktop, monitors, and speakers – isolating the system electrically. My secondary monitor is my older 1920×1080 panel that I mounted upright. I also got an energy monitor that has a wired display for your desk. It runs about 130W for the computer, 30W for primary monitor, 24W for secondary, and <10W for those awesome $100 Bose stereo speakers I got back at Rose and often forced me into back rooms at the Jeddah airport because of magnetic distortion. The monitors have output efficiency of 11.4 lm/W for a white background. I keep a string of Christmas lights on the back of the primary monitor to provide counter-lighting to reduce eye strain.

Assembling a computer yourself is rather easy. Arstechnica and anandtech put out a few system guides a year that you can follow. The decision process goes: Intel of AMD processor (go Intel), motherboard maker for CPU socket type (go ASUS), memory maker and type (probably 240-pin DDR3, go corsair), graphics card based on motherboard socket (probably PCIe2.0×16, go ATI unless you have an opinion, in which case go nVidia), power supply based on graphics card need (don’t cut corners, efficiency doesn’t mean low noise), get a case that can fit your motherboard, get BD/DVD/CD and hard drives (go SSD at least a 60GB drive for your OS),  and an operating system (Windows 7 64-bit OEM/system-builders edition). As long as you match CPU-socket types you can probably just pick the top-rated among the top-selling product on newegg.com for each category in your price range.

 Cable management is crazy difficult, even in spacious cases. I download the latest BIOS/drivers instead of using install CDs and put it on a USB drive that I tape inside the case for future incidents. Remember that you can always google stuff or rip off system builds from newegg comments. Mineral oil immersion is so tempting, but seems frivolous. Main conclusions:

• Solid-state drives (SSD) are the best investment per dollar
• Upright secondary monitors are awesome
• Don’t buy thinking your upgrade your system, it is the end of the line because interfaces change too quickly. Only a good power supply is forever.
• Don’t put video over VGA.
• Unless you are far from wifi, use a $10-20 USB “nano”-adapter.
• Have a n-only network if you can as g-wireless requests time by broadcasting noise from n’s perspective, reducing speed and increasing latency.
• I can always overclock %10 and be safe because I used a good power supply and motherboard.