What's Been and What's Ben

I grew up in the dial-up generation. I remember waiting for text to load. I like to think I grew up with the internet. I remember there not being a google to search with. The internet gets a lot of crap about taking up a lot of time. I say good. The outside world is still needed, but this is a magical tool that we just found. We still have not gone all the way down the rabbit hole. Every 1.5 years the computing power per cost of semiconductor doubles. 3 years it quadruples. 64 times in a decade. 32,768 times more powerful in my lifetime. 1,717,869,184 times more powerful by the expected end of my lifetime. What will we do with that? Be capable of running Windows Vista?

In five years you won’t have a cellular phone. It will be an old piece of technology we  lump into those netbook-sized bricks that we (humanity) used back in the 80’s. It will all be over the internet. Text messages will die, or at least become more than 160 characters as it merges with email. You will have a phone, but one that is different. I see email addresses replacing phone numbers in the future. Google Voice is a step in the correct direction. You can call my google number that I got for free that is in my home area code. It redirects it to my phone or any number I specify. I can get my voicemail transcribed. This may seem like Google knowing everything about me, but they really just want to send targeted ads.

Google should buy facebook. The price is supposedly too high to be worth it now, but I see that as inevitable, even though facebook doesn’t want to sell.

I hate scooter kids. They fill the air with the haunting clack not to unlike small trains crossing discontinuities. They do have the advantage of moving slightly faster than walking speed. Just get a bicycle already. I hate the sound they make. It reminds me of the inefficiency they travel with and the difficulty of dealing with a scooter they must contend with in their scooter-based lives. I think they are high school students doing some camp things. I would hate them more for that, but I once did it – without a scooter! What crazy Michelle Bachman suburb do these scooter kids come from?

To all the haters who gave me shit for years. To all of those that try to deny me credit when credit is due. Today is my day.

This morning I passed (by that much) my road test and have earned a class D driver’s license in the State of Minnesota.

My proctor was not guntled and he said at the conclusion of the exam that we had to talk about some things, but I passed. I may have ran into the curb while parking up hill and turned the wheels the wrong way on the hill and gone a bit fast through turns and almost hit a proctor while driving through a crosswalk on my way in. But I passed. I came. I saw. I conquered…at the age on 22.

Palin in gone, but will likely be back. I have a few questions for her if she wants my vote:

Did dinosaurs and people walked around at the same time?

Is Obama a citizen? If not, what should we do about the coup?

Will you stop making stuff up for the sake of our troops?

AT&T sucks: they are blocking the website 4chan.org which hosts picture-based message boards, which is where lolcats started damn it! The series of tubes that is the internet is under siege like in that movie. What was it? Undersiege 3?

Amazon sucks: The portable book made by amazon called the Kindle banned the book 1984 – without giggling or crying. Technically the remotely removed everybody’s copy of 1984 who had bought it and then credited them 10 dollars back. This ensured that I will not buy one of their product. Amazon did buy zappos.com too.

Apple/Foxconn suck: Due to the secrecy involved in ensuring that nobody knows what colors the latest line of iPods are to create false suspense in an idiot user/fan base someone has been physically interrogated and forced into suicide. Foxconn actually makes apple products. Foxconn enforces Apples inexplicably tight security arrangement. A man does steal some iPhones. He is harshly interrogated and kills himself – according to foxconn, the only source of info on this. So to keep secret the minor updates from iPhone 3G to 3GS (a compass and a faster processor) a man was forced into suicide. This info was so available online that I have sources that told me about the processor upgrade. At the end of the day did you think a team of Swiss craftsmen were making your gizmos and gadgets. Apple also doesn’t have blu-ray drives on its computers.

It is stupid to send a person to a planet. I still want to do it because it is important for the long-term survival of the species. I want us to actually go places because that is what Christopher Columbus was doing. Science-wise we should be sending bigger and better probes up. We can make stuff way smaller and better. I want to know if there is or was life on Mars. Send something to determine that. Not something guaranteed to find an unclear result. I think sending a bunch of smaller probes in a larger package of unmanned vehicles could be cool and make the mission less about a single discrete success/failure boundary. It could also allow smaller probes to have more local communication with nearby larger land devices or satellites. Just have a bunch of probes aimed at proving or disproving in different ways if life was there or not. If anything else, we would at least learn about the environment in the most similar place we have found to our own planet.

I am watching a NASA old timer talk about the Apollo program. The 27th of January 1967 is when three astronauts died on the launch pad in a fire in the rich oxygen atmosphere. The door wouldn’t open. It did start the a major redesign. Without this process we would not have landed on the moon. Without the deaths of three Americans we would not have realized what we did wrong. It kept a whisper in the back on the mind of every engineer on that project. Those young engineers didn’t know what they were doing. They had no formal training in rocketry. The techn0logy did not exist. The engineers were afraid because any of them that actually comprehended what they were doing knew they were in over their head.

When Kennedy asked for something to show up the Russians, NASA said they could go around the moon in 10 years. He asked if they could land. Two weeks later they said they could. In less than ten years we landed on the moon. There were no plans. At first most doubted that we could rendezvous two crafts in space while orbiting the moon. They did this all under the pressure of the media and with the fate of the cold warm looming in the backgrounds.

Going to Mars will be hard. Space travel is no different that explorers of the world when we thought we may run into the edge and fall off only to find that it is round and infinite – not to unlike space. Magellan never got all the way around the world, but his ship did.

KAUST: King Abdullah University of Science and Technology

11/09/07  I applied for the scholarship.

01/11/08  I had an interview in Washington, D.C.

02/24/08  I signed up after seeing the Colbert portrait

08/22/08  I went to DC for creativity training

01/04/09  I went to KSA (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia) and the KAUST kampus

07/12/09  I went to Mexico City for pre-departure orientation

08/20/09  Leave for KAUST???

09/05/09  Classes Start

09/23/09  The man behind the curtain shows up

~12/25/10 I get my masters in Electrical Engineering: Solid State Devices / Optics

KAUST is an awesome experience that will be extremely unique. The first years of an organization are supposedly the best time to be part of it. It is great and I am excited to be part of it. Yada yada yada. Here are some things you won’t find on the website. You may see it as a bit negative, but you get the sunshine from them.

As a KAUST scholar you will receive living money that will come at completely random times. It is not a steady flow for reasons that I can only attribute to IIE. IIE is the face that you will see as they recruit, evaluate, and prepare you for KAUST. The scholarship is wonderful – it payed for half of my undergraduate degree. They owed me over 10,000 at one point and I received no money until I think April. This likely has been worked out. While going to KAUST you will get $20,000 a year. What that means is vague. I assume it will be in monthly installments that usually take place at a certain time of the month. We got checks for the first year and then it became direct deposit. I got $1,213 a month all-year for living expenses, 2 x $500 a year for books, and $2,500 once for a laptop while an undergrad in addition to all my school tuition.

At all of these events you will be put up in a wonderful hotel that costs hundreds of dollars night and then grilled over a few dollars of cab receipts. At the good events they just hand you an envelope of cash. They will not pay for liquor at meals, but will take you out to eat. It is like the movie Jurassic Park as they have spared no expense.

There is a game of telephone that goes on when you ask a question. Hyperbolically, your question goes to somebody at IIE, who filters it and sends it to their boss, who then tattoos the message on a dolphin, the dolphin swims across the Atlantic, through the Mediterranean, and down to Jeddah, where it is translated several times, filtered up the chain of command until somebody just gives an answer, and the process is reversed. The circle of life. This frustration will likely work its ways out as the campus is built and the school actually exists. Contact us KAUSTers if you have questions. KAUST is at the time not a place for detail-obsessed people.

No classes before 9 am! The course catalog was NOT made by professors at KAUST, but by foreign universities that were asked what we should offer. It is being reworked constantly. They don’t know what will be taught in the spring or during winter enrichment. Winter enrichment is a few week period of mini-classes to be taken outside your typical area in things like Arabic language/culture, dive training special topics, guest lecturers, and random things.

Not everything is free at KAUST. The golf course, marina, dining hall, and other things cost money. How much? Hahaha! Like they tell me. I hope I have enough cash on hand when I land to eat until they get me on the new stipend.

KAUST.edu.sa is not a great website for real info on KAUST. Look around and you can find construction pictures from april – not January like on the official website.

Oh, and funnest of all is the campus itself. Last time I saw it in person it was a small skeleton with hundred of cranes. Supposedly it will be done for us to move in. I have heard a number of different things about it being built by the start of class. They do cite that core facilities will be open, but what is core? I have heard construction experts say they will be giving us tents (a joke) and that everything is going smoothly. I have no real info. I saw some pictures in Mexico city last weekend of KAUST 6 weeks ago of at least one finished apartment which they refuse to send me. I have always taken the lack of new pictures on the official website as a bad harbinger, but I have hope.

I leave in less than a month and yet don’t know my flight itinerary, how I will move my stuff, or what day I will leave.

We need to go to Mars. Going to the Moon was awesome. Jump ahead 40 years and we just repaired the toilet on the ISS (International Space Station). I know that more data can be gathered by sending probes. But that is not what this is about. Or maybe it really is. We have lost scope. We (USA) don’t dream the way we used to dream. We do things we know will work so that our narrow research on photo-chemistry of comet tails instead of asking bigger questions. Perhaps we know enough about our immediate surroundings that we don’t wonder big questions – or are afraid that our current thinking will be challenged.

I know we can dream. It is natural to fall into a Garrison Keilor mentality that believes that individuals don’t matter much and can’t change anything. We got air conditioning and cable while nobody else in the world seemed to have come up with a better idea so we lived lives of complacency. People tend to value themselves relative to their neighbors and nobody else lives in ways that really impresses us. Bold measures requires a need to do so. It took $4/gallon gas to scare Americans into fuel-efficient cars that we could have made a few decades ago.

Mars will provide us a war we can win. It will bring us new technology and ensure that we lead the next 40 years of science. Keep in mind that American science sucked until we got us a bunch of German scientist. Wernher von Braun gave us modern rocketry after giving it to Germany. Going to Mars will reinvigorate our tech sector and drive forward the next generation of engineers and scientists to give us something tangible that everybody is cheering for. The average age of NASA engineers was 28 when Apollo 11 splashed down – now it is 47. To reference the movie Primer, you know what they do with engineers when they turn 40?

Here are some interesting facts that I have been told by King Abdullah University of Science and Techn0logy (KAUST) officials. I ship out august 16 – 20th-ish. I don’t yet have my visa, plane tickets, or know how to get stuff over there. I realized at my recent Mexico City pre-departure event that I had a bit more to go on than the people who just got in versus my year and a half (1st cycle/iPod scholars).

• public school in KSA (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia)
• 75% of student body is non-Saudi
• 300 students in first class
• 2000 students total at maturity
• 80 faculty
• no religious police on campus
• internet filter, but not KSA internet filter
• 222 Teraflop supercomputer
• Maps lack Persian Gulf and Israel
• individual student apartments: fully furnished (towels and silverware), nice TV w/ satellite, washer/dryer, full kitchen, 1 or 1.5 bathrooms, queen size bed, den, and air-conditioning of course!
• no religious police on campus without president’s okay
• full medical (and dental) coverage by US and British doctors
• No formal language training in Arabic except in January, so far
• K-12 schooling done with IB (international baccalaureate) programme
• Dress code for class: business casual light
• speedos: speedon’t
• ladies: one-piece or conservative two-piece
• go to a private club for skimpier outfits (not official advise)
• marine scienes students go to WHOI for a while until their stuff is built
• 50 – 60, 000 construction workers working on site