a life at KAUST (King Abdullah University of Science and Technology) in Saudi Arabia
I think we need a bigger stimulus package. Why? Because I don’t know of single example of a country that did too much to save their economy. I think Obama is planning a reconciliation budget (50 not 60 percent required in senate) that will do many of the things he wants to do. Might as well do it early while he has high approval.
Al Franken needs to get in there!
I realized recently that the only thing that can make you think better is to think about how you think. This can lead to an infinitely cascaded set of reasoning that usually ends up with me contemplating if all this proton/neutron/electron stuff that I supposedly made of is real or not. Lost (brief mention) has the example where Sawyer confronted Jack about how he lead only by quick reactions rather than thinking things out.
Currently I am just clocking the hours until spring break when me and the lovely Morgan will go to visit Minneapolis for spring break. My current thinking is to fly up and then bus back because we don’t know when we exactly will want to leave. Larry, who graduated fall quarter, asshole, will be back in Terre Haute for the last weekend of break so we might go back early to see him and find out how West Virginia is going. Hopefully it will be warm there by then. It was snowing here in Terre Haute on Sunday morning. A bit late in the season and doubly annoying since it meant a cold ride in this morning. I had to wear long pants – a personal defeat.
Recently I switched over to non-graphing calculators. I now use a HP 35s – modeled after the original pocket calculator, the HP 35. It does a few more things! I uses RPN (Reverse Polish Notation) which in addition to being a good way to make a joke about Polish is also a cool way to do calculations that doesn’t require parentheses. I haven’t needed to graph anything in a while on the calculator level since I just use Maple 12 (classic, not the java-based garbage) for all of that. It has nice buttons that click when I press them and looks stylin’ as far as calculators go.
LOST has been really good lately and I like where it is going. House, 30 Rock, the Office, and the Daily Show/the Colbert Report have all been good lately. I have been watching the Flight of the Concords lately too and it is hilarious. I want to live in New Zealand now. Well, visit the old Lord of the Rings set and dance around in a tunic and cape. NZ has about 4 million people at a density of around that of South Dakota. They are very green (first non-nulcear) and have a similar standard of living as here.
I feel a sense of pride that I went into engineering over finance as if for me it was ever considered. Obama reinforced that and made me think of Wall Streeters as hollow men. We should invest a lot of money into sciengineering because we have never caused a recession – although we have gotten us out of a few. 1.2 million for investigating reducing cow smell is important to people who live around cows (good god fearing folks) and sh0ws me how out of touch Washington and Media people can be on issues that are real. We should not hyper-tax bonuses as much as the Robin Hood in me would like to do so. Obama knows it too or he would be on board because he knows as a former constitutional law professor that it sets a dangerous precedent. What we should do is prosecute those we can and to establish laws so we can punish people who pull these stunts in the future. Regulation of our functionality is important and one of the fundamental traits of living things.
I have not personally implemented Keynesian economics to my life. I go through strong booms and busts when it comes to adopting music. The cycle goes like this.
Recently this has lead me down the path of the Killers, Dredg, Ash, Helio Sequence (again), the Fugees, the Decemberists, TV on the Radio, Wilco, Robert Plant (Raising Sand), and Bruce Springsteen. Also a rise in Andrew Bird came after hearing Dosh live last December – even though the evening was clouded by the death of his best friend. Life from death; there is a metaphor in there for English majors.
I have two ideas for good stories. One is a movie called Math Model and the other is an episode of House.
Math Model – The movie opens at a fashion show. Why? TnA. Two wallsteet business men are there with arms full of hot chicks living it up watching the fashion show of a company they decided to buy. They manage a company that uses math models to predict the stock market. Cut after the credits to the relatively boring life of Victor. He is an mathematician that has come up with the best way of predicting the stock market using large supercomputers. He worked at NASA doing good work until the economy and an incident at work forced him to take a walk down to Wall Street. He lives in a crappy apartment and sees the horrible things that are happening around his studio apartment in Brooklyn because of the collapsing economy. His life takes a change when his neighbor and best friend kills himself after loosing everything including his former job at a hedge fund (he received no retention bonus). He goes rogue with hatred of the company that is considering downsizing things. Instead he decides to take something back from the company after he himself is fired. He hacks into a NASA computer with the help of an old colleague and creates an new math model that predicts how his old company would buy/sell stocks and ends up driving them bankrupt by counter-abusing the abusive method the company uses to manipulate the stock market. It ends with a shootout on the roof of skyscraper where another fashion show is going on. In the end the company goes bankrupt, Victor gives the money to his neighbors, but dies in the process. All who tried to manipulate the market (including Victor) end up punished (catharsis) and the money returns to the people of his apartment building.
House, M.D. – My episode of house is about a med student who know of House and has an embarrassing condition like an STD he got in Guam or something. He/She gets himself admitted to House’s hospital under false pretenses without divulging that he is a med student. He presents with symptoms of a different disease that has the same treatment – which he fails to get. House eventually figures it out by some cool psychological trick with giving him drugs that a med student would know would kill him. The patient confesses and treatment of the real disease starts. It fails, the med student was wrong. The student is saved in the end by House connecting some minor details together after trying treatment for Wagners, Cushings, and cancer like a normal House episode. House sees his younger self in the patient, warns him, and then goes on like usual – like House episodes usually do. There needs to be a song at X:52 like in normal episodes as I have noticed that while watching House that there is always a song at this point. Look at the clock next House episode when the song comes on, the minute hand will point a little past the 10.
Squirrels hate people. North America was once covered in a forest. Sure there are the “great plains” that mighty buffalo once roamed. Science has indicated that Native Americans effectively cultivated the North American “plains” to heard buffalo. Either way, squirrels once were able to go from Florida to Maine without touching the ground. Humans burst onto the scene with a speed only outdone by infectious viruses and bacteria.
North America lacks large animals. It didn’t before, but we (humanity) killed them off. The same thing happened Australia and any other place that humans suddenly came into contact with large animals that when push met shove we lived and they did not. It is tragic from a conservation stance, but evolutionarily they were just one of many to fall from out hand that now ranks amongst asteroids in effectiveness at erasing species from the book of life.
What does this mean? Animals need to get used to us. Even with our climate changing tendencies, I doubt even a nuclear winter would wipe us out. We are not going away. The question for the other species on Earth is if they want to cooperate (get out of the way) or die? In Africa and Eurasia many large land mammals exist that we were able to domesticate. Animals in the Americas need to understand that even though we are more eco-friendly we still kill things that pose a threat. We should change our ways considering the wealth of biological knowledge that exists out there that we have no knowledge of yet – and may never.
What should we do? We should stop acting like we can pour toxins back into our environment without consequences. We should stop wasting paper so we don’t need to clear-cut forests. We should invest into science and engineering, even though we use a lot of paper, albeit green!
Last night was two good interviews: Stewart with Springsteen and Leno with Obama. I kinda like Bruce Springsteen after I gave him a chance after Stewart gave an emotional interview with him. Leno gave Obama a half-hour interview. It was great. The Special Olympics thing was funny and true. It wasn’t the best thing to say for a president, but if special needs people were better at sports they would be in the regular Olympics. Yes, he was saying effectively that he is retarded at bowling. Come on people.
Obama did talk down to me, the viewer. But idiots watch TV.
I am impressed with Leno’s professionalism. Not just for this interview, but in general when interviewing a clearly boring person. I hope at 10pm he will have more of a variety show. That will be the end of television as we know it. It is the harbinger for change – the sign that broadcast television has faded. I was always a Letterman fan, but he seems kinda disgruntled at times. Leno seems like more of a nice guy, but he panders, although he has fun with it. Conan might be too counter-culture to be embraced at the Tonight Show. I think that is why Letterman didn’t get it over Leno when Carson left.
Leno beats Letterman in the ratings consistently, but Letterman has more valueable watchers. I should watch more Charlie Rose.
Currently I am sitting at a computer in an otherwise empty public computer lab in the upstairs of the Library here at Rose-Hulman. To my side is a floor to ceiling window less than a foot wide. Ramzi often jokes (but kinda serious) that were (when) zombies invade this would be the place to fight them off from. I agree. But my concern is the current population of undead that lay at my feet. A population of 11 living and 24 dead ladybugs and it bothers me.
Although they fall below my threshold of a central nervous system, I still feel for their plight. They attempt in vain to escape this fortress through a transparent barrier that tortures them with the prospect of a sunny day on the other side. The stronger ones make it to the top while intermittently attempting flight as the weaker fall down among the remains of what is probably their brothers and sisters.
Without a sufficient nervous system they try the same procedure over and over. Doomed to repeat for their Hundred Hours of Solitude. I lack an proper reason for how they got into this place. One just fell over while walking on the window sill. Another fell over while walking high up on the glass. They make a light clicking noise when they fall from a height and immediately start to walk towards the light. Plants have the same instinct called phototropism – a tendency to grow towards light.
Feelers around their mouth search frantically in front of them for an end to the invisible wall while their six legs inch them forward away from death and towards the light. They lack the proper pigment of a ladybug and seem reflect a rusty orange. I could make an elaborate metaphor about how both me and the ladybugs are sitting by the window because of the light. Both of us are technically dying with our DNA slowly wearing away. But today is too nice of a day for a gloomy metaphor and I can see a ladybug on the other side of the glass….
Jon Stewart holds a special place in my heart. I have been watching The Daily Show and The Colbert Report since high school. It has been a religion for me since at least 2003, six years now, or since we invaded Iraq. For a good chunk of my conscious life I have been watching these men educate, entertain, and engage me in the issues of the day. I transitioned from broadcast over to basic cable; away from Letterman and Conan. Conan doesn’t take over until June 1st, which surprised me. They came along for the ride with my rising interest in politics. I can not imagine what I would be without them.
Stewart recently had on Jim Cramer, the host of Mad Moneyon CNBC. It was one of the best interviews ever on his show. It bumped off all but three minutes of comedy. Stewart was well prepared. Cramer is a reasonable guy and should not have been the face of this. It is only because Cramer defended his network when others did not that he became the focus of the artillery bombardment.
The basic problem Stewart has is this… Business news is not realistic because there are two stock markets in one. The first one has your money for retirement and the other is the domain of Wall Street traders who manipulate the market to make money from no work. Now, from a principle of conservation, the money must come from somewhere. Because of the lack of proper regulation these traders took from the rest of us and accumulated large sums of money that had no meaning. But nobody on the news talks about the real trading that is going on.
I can understand the arguement that these traders help even out the system and provide liquidity. The problem is that hedge funds and other organizations are not faceless investors in a massive sea that unaffected by them but actively changing the market. Overstock.com was almost forced out of business because purposeful manipulation to do short selling drove their stock down to near collapse.
What did Stewart do and why is it important? He brought enough attention to it that people on my level (rather imformed) know about it. A larger influence comes from the media ripple that was sent out. The Thursday interview caused it to be brought up on all the Sunday morning talk shows. People in the media watch Stewart/Colbert because what they do is media criticism. If there was a show about working at a widget plant then widget plant workers would watch a show about that.
What does it mean in a broader sense? We have entered an age where it is now dangerous (and at worse criminal) to believe everything you hear. It was before, but now we can pay attention to the problem. Every news source has a bias that changes. Some reporters are lazy and go to press conferences, rephrase what was said, and then we read it. That is not news, but propaganda dispersion. We have so much news in the digital age, but the quality hasn’t improved with it!
I propose that we pay more attention to the news, find different sources, and remember that all information has a bias.
Q-switching for plants – some lasers do this thing where they only are on for a short pulse every very small time interval in order to take full advantage of the gain medium (stuff that does the lasing) and I think plants could do the same thing. This summer I want to try growing lots of some random generic plant under lights that pulse not only the proper color of light (by LEDS) for the pigments (gain medium) and at the proper frequency. I will use a small variety of color (knowledge exists) and a wide variety of frequencies, duty cycle (how short of a pulse), and general growing conditions.
Coherence-based radio amplification/security – if you send out light (not radio waves) with similar wavelengths (colors) they will spatially beat together at set spatial/temporal intervals. Waves are waves, so what if we transmit radio with a bunch of very close frequencies to reduce the total power required and reducing the area that signal is transmitted to? So only certain magic spots could pick up the signal. Think of having really bad radio station reception, but your choice of a very large number of stations to pick up on. It could change what frequency you are operating on as you move around by transitioning to better frequencies or something. I never plan on implementing this. It would be a more secure signal since you would be broadcasting to a limited area and would be jumping around while moving.
Why, Robots – I think bioengineering will replace the need for mechanical robots. Living things are efficient and do most things other than discrete math (hyper-deterministic stuff) better. I think zombie monkeys that do our laundry and grow flower bouquets on their backs will be in the future. Also we need some kind of plant that is a solar cell – producing electrical energy instead of growing or at least putting their energy into something we can chemically extract better, like gasoline berries. On second thought, lets have mechanical robots too! In the future (very distant) we will have a renewable world because everything will be alive, self-repairing, and designed to bend to our will to become cars, houses, food, clothing, and newspapers. Things need these properties to be stuff in = stuff out compliant.
Ramzi got back from UC: Boulder and it sounds great. I want to go there for a PhD now! I think MEMS based optical computing would be a good set of skills for the future. Me and Ramzi see ourselves as the equivalent of 1930’s era electrical engineers. I kinda hate “god’s country” out there, but they have a sweet program and a nice little mountain town. It could be a cool place to go after KAUST since I have a feeling I will keep getting an education until they stop paying me to do it. Arizona has a technically better optics program, but is boring stuff and in a boring place. Boulder doesn’t do lens design because really, only like ten people need to do that.