What's Been and What's Ben

Technology seems to have not changed during my life. It reflects a more gradual nature of time that occurs when you actually live it. I see it like arrive at a mountain to wondering why it doesn’t seem to move while you are standing before it. Shortening from the geological to human time scale gives some credence to the lack of progress. For most of the beginning of the 20th century technology seemed to have moved at a rapid rate of horse and buggy to space shuttle and solar cell. Everything appears to simply improve on existing devices. Perhaps I am overestimating the ability to have a fully new idea while ignoring all the work done previously to create ideas.

I blame the baby boom. A generational bubble got old and got boring. New technologies were sidelined. American history since WWII has been defined by a bunch of people going through the same phases of life simultaneously. The imagination died. It will be up to my Internet-savvy, post 9/11, increasingly egalitarian, and overwhelmingly pro-Obama generation to save the day.

My reference frame was tilted when my teacher asked what computer processors and operating systems we first used. The majority of the class answered Pentium 2 or 3 or 4 and most said windows XP. I remember when windows had a program manager and no start button. I remember a brand new computer that did not have a Pentium processor. When hard disk space was a few MB – not a few TB, an increase by a factor of 1,000,000 in my lifetime. I forget that I did get to experience the whole life of the modern Internet. When google and youtube came around.  The world is united in a massive network that will start featuring alphabets other than just English. ICANN announced they will allow registration of web addresses in foreign languages. They also plan to open up top-level domains for naming. So no “.com”, instead we will in coming years be able to go to “search.google”, although I think they will keep the “http://” which the creator of deeply wishes he had saved billions of man hours and only used one “/” instead of two.

The alarm clock had to have been an incredible invention. I think. What did people do before them? Would you just need to form the habit of waking up at a certain time. Was it more acceptable to be late? I can see the increase in turn-by-turn directions guided by GPS technology as a parallel idea. In a decade, with GPS in even the cheapest phones, would it be just as lame to say that you couldn’t find the place as it is to say now that you slept in?

People thought this a century ago. People thought that because they had good parchment paper, trains, textile mills, and Newton’s gravity that everything was done. Physicists were wrapping things up now that everything was solved. All experiments at the time followed theory flawlessly. Scientists never ask questions that they don’t know the answer to already. It seems that pure science research is ignored for not being profitable enough – no industry partner. Nuclear research only developed because of bomb-making potentials. Laser research is now receiving ridiculous money for weapons systems. If only there was a military application for peace.

KAUST made my life significantly better a few days ago. Before when I had to bicycle to campus (across the street) I had to stop, lift my tire up, get my back tire up, and then proceed. A work crew recently put a little six inch ramp that allows me to continue unabated. It really helped me out when I would rush to class. I have now determined that I can set my alarm to seven minutes before the start of class and make it in the door in time for the start of lecture.

Thousands of miles away the White House seems entangled in a war with Fox “news”. Anybody who is not an idiot knows that both fox news and MSNBC are biased. It is like crossfire, but on a network scale. It gives each side a set of clearly defined talking points. Clearly the idea of a republic (we are not a democracy) is best served with two strongly opposed points of view that have no middle ground. Welcome to the post-partisan and post-racial America. Yeah right. I like to think of it from a physics point of view as a superposition of quantum states where the nation is really two, or three, or more, nations wrapped up in one discrete space.

I am a fan of states’ rights, as I have stated before, because I don’t like that my federal tax dollars go to provide programs that disproportionately help people who oppose them (the South). Obama may be angering liberals by taunting us with closing GitMo and ending don’t ask, don’t tell. I think he is just saving it for the summer before reelection so he can make us feel good again just as the stimulus is really not kicking in fully until the midterms.

If you do not know what a ShakeWeight is, please find a video on youtube, it will brighten up your day.

So this is my solution to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that saves and improves lives. Make it a competition. The regions that behave best gets new roads and a dam. It provides an incentive and focuses on improving the countries. “the surge” was mostly about bribing anyway, so why not provide people with real improvements? The only problem is that it could create a motivation to cause violence in other regions, but you could just have all aid scaled by national violence. It would be like the results-based teacher pay programs. Bullets don’t win hearts and minds except for short-term fear responses. Just redirect funding to public works. Is it a coincidence that the best roads are in the best countries?

There I stood in the National Portrait Gallery looking at the famous portrait of George Washington. I was about to hand in my final papers for KAUST. This February 2008 and I had to make a decision. So I turned to my hero – 90 degrees to the right – where in the entryway to the bathroom stood the painting of Stephen Colbert. He told me it was the right thing to do because there was money in it. I laughed to myself, returned to the hotel to hand the interim president my papers.

Yesterday I was started by the KAUST communications director – who looks like the guy with glasses from the TV show Heroes. He had some reporters with the New York Times with him. It felt a little restraining to have him standing behind me. I was glad to have a news agency doing something other than recycling KAUST press releases. That interview in tandem with watching four hours of Ken Burn’s National Park documentary last night has made me feel in the reflective mood.

Engineers are naturally pessimistic. We are trained to find flaws in plans or else space shuttles blow up, pencil tips break, and bridges fall down. I was reminded of this every day last summer when I would bicycle over the Mississippi River from my apartment on the U of M campus to see the mangled remains of the 35W bridge laid out on a field below the banks. I realized When I applied for KAUST that I would probably not have the same experience at another university. Only through luck was my sub-field of solid-state optics (crystals like LEDs and laser pointers) added to the curriculum a few months ago. My purpose in coming to KAUST was partially just to make sure incompetent people didn’t cause it to come tumbling down. If things fall apart, the administration is at fault for believing they know about academic matters better than the faculty they hired. Our text books sit in customs houses for weeks when I would have hoped that the Saudi government would allow them fast passage through.

Unfortunately, because the labs I would like work in will not be up until 2011, I must look elsewhere. Instead of taking a leisurely (research intensive) two year track for a masters or staying on for a PhD, I will go back to America. My mother will sleep better at least. I must admit that I never intended to have KAUST be my terminal degree. I see it as a spicy foreign delicacy in the sandwich of my life. This weekend I need to decide because of the time sensitive nature of these decisions where I want to go afterward. My choices are industry, PhD, and Park Ranger. My current thinking is to try for Berkeley, University of Minnesota, University of Colorado: Boulder, and maybe Northwestern.

I am happy. My academic problems are just a thorn in my paw. The people here are awesome. Most meals take at least an hour – if not several.

This is the view from my balcony.

My view of KAUST is optimistic, but for other people than me. The lab I want to work in won’t be up until 2011, so I am getting a one year masters and finding a PhD elsewhere. It is better than my friend who had the rug pulled out from under him when they took him out of the PhD program he had signed up for and instead put him on a master’s track. Previously this skilled research scientist was going to be here doing research, now he will be taking the path I am. The entire department sided with him, but the bumbling administration decided that they should not live up to what they promised him – what he left his previous graduate program to do. The labs will be great once things are setup and the invisible hand of Saudi Aramco steps back. They are having separation issues with this magical baby they have produced in a few short years.

On the media side of things, another friend, Nathan, had his blog copied and translated verbatim by a Saudi paper from the Western province about the student elections. He was in a meeting that I randomly got to sit in on yesterday with the Consulate and State Department. KAUST lawyers are helping him correct this crime.

I never really experience much culture shock. I watch TV. It was surprising to me when I found myself in a conversation that the absurdity didn’t hit me until I took a break to use the bathroom to realized I was trying to prove that the Holocaust actually happened and wasn’t part of a giant conspiracy.

I think of my life here as a series of pleasant evenings. The urban camping of our housing situation is starting to even out – although the thousands of dollars of students’ property that was destroyed is still up in the air. My biggest problem is how they treat the faculty here. My friend who had the entire department fighting for him was overturned by a strange administration that has no transparency.

Last night I watched the first two segments of Ken Burns documentary The National Parks: America’s Greatest Idea and want to salute John Muir (pictured below). I admire him because he told President Theodore Roosevelt that he was full of himself on a private camping trip in Yosemite National Park and founded the Sierra Club. Ken Burns invented dramatically panning over pictures for documentaries. I am currently sitting cross-legged in the library reading a book on psycholinguistics while sipping on a juice box.

So why do I fell superior to those snow-owl-loving hybrid-driving gluten-free sourdough individuals of San Francisco? Hetch Hetchy is why. It is a valley in Yosemite National Park that is now under water to provide non-bottled water to San Francisco. President Wilson had the dam built because he is an idiot and his shit is all messed up. The water has unusually high levels of smug and hypocrisy. They don’t really need to use it, they are just lazy.
The documentary is amazing and makes me want to become a park ranger. I looked into it and found out I need a degree in forestry/conservation or a related field to get a job. I might just become a mountain-man anyway.

Parahawking is the most manly activity ever created. You hold two giant hawks – one in each hand – and use them to read thermals and go paragliding around mountains. Sure you could use thermal sensors or some more practical method. But it is a combination of falconry and paragliding. Tip of the hat to whoever invented this. {original article}

My plan is to graduate KAUST inside of one academic year (as in next May). After that I need to do something. If I want to apply to a PhD program then I must take the GREs, and deadlines are very close. They are like SAT/ACT tests for graduate school. I thought I had dodged them, but should have taken them when everybody else was. I am thinking about trying to get a job. Prospects in the US are scary, and I may be tempted by Saudi Aramco money. I don’t really know what I want to go into. I have narrowed it down a bit. My currently path suggests something to do with crystals: optoelectronics (LEDs, laser pointers, and optical computing) or MEMS (very tiny things that move). Both have their advantages. My past as an optical engineer makes me lean towards optoelectronics, but I see MEMS as being potentially more interesting because it is a newer and more applied technology (physical, like lego bricks). MEMS devices are the things that tell the angle of tilt in your iPhone and Wii controller. They also deploy your airbag and make the image in many digital projectors. I am taking an approach of just doing both and possibly just doing optical-MEMS, which is a field, they even have a research group at the U of M.

My current research is in the future feasibility (all on paper, no lab yet) of making a very small fiber-optic camera for looking inside of tissue using dense-wavelength multiplexing developed by the telecommunication (100% of internet use does this) and some harsh chromatic dispersion to sort out these colors into a grid that uses confocal principles to regather the light and produce a 2-D image through a single-mode fiber with some random optics attached at the end. It could greatly improve the doctor’s ability to look inside of patients. It was proven to work conceptually at UCLA recently.

I am thinking of trying to get into making good animations of semiconductor manufacturing processes for educational purposes, since many of my classes would greatly benefit from these aides.

I spent the last month stranded out on the Island, but am back in my old apartment – the fifth closest to campus. My walk has been shorted from twenty minutes to seven. Everything works. No more mold. I get to take a shower instead of sponge bath things! My apartment overlooks the town square. This square has transformed a great deal recently. It is now full of cars (the alarms go off from time to time) that are being sold. The square is full of restaurants like Burger King, Baskin Robins, Tamimi (safeway), quiznos, a shwarma place, an Arab place, an Indian place, a coffee shop, and a Pizza Hut rip off. Pizza Hut here incidentally is a fancy chain of sit down restaurants that you go to. Quiznos uses American cheese on sandwiches that taste better without and only puts on lettuce half the time. Baskin Robins is probably as common as McDonalds and Burger King combined in the Middle East. Shwarma is a delicious fresh-grilled chicken wrap with french fries inside made from chicken breasts constantly rotating in from of a fire with the cooked outside being cut off as it chars. Food, as you may be able to tell, it a big part of life here as there is not that much to do but eagerly await the showing of The Pink Panther 2 in a few days. Now we must eat in a cafeteria…well, we do, because it is free. The dining facilities here are too expensive for students. So I will be making my own meals when the cafeteria goes away at the end of the month. It will be nice now that I am back at my apartment. I am currently tearing up aluminum foil and sowing them up on string like popcorn for Christmas trees. I place these strands (one so far) in my window; illuminated by my LED accent lights that constantly pass through the colors. As the air conditioner blows air over my windows (bad thermal design?) it causes them to move around.

It was over 40 C here the other day when the high in Minneapolis was 40 F. I listen to the MPR (Minnesota Public Radio) ipod touch app to expose myself to some new music. The nights are cooler. The women on campus continue to live in the hotel on campus.

This is good television

• Drama: House (FOX), Lie to Me (FOX), Mad Men (AMC), LOST (ABC)
• Comedy: The Office (NBC), 30 Rock (NBC), It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia (FX), Curb Your Enthusiasm (HBO), Flight of the Conchords (HBO)
• News: The Daily Show (Comedy Central), The Colbert Report (Comedy Central), Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO), Fareed Zakaria GPS (CNN), Charlie Rose (PBS)

I fully agree with Conan O’Brien that we are in a golden age of great television. Being an aficionado on television from the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s thanks to growing up on TV land and nick at night I can tell you that this is the best time for television in a long time. Most good shows are from four to five years ago, but new stuff like Mad Men and Lie to Me are giving the future more and more hope. I credit the end of the laugh track and a move towards realism as being a large part of this.

As for music, I have recently been entertained by Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeroes, Phoenix, The Left Banke, and Girl Talk.