• 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.

“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.

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

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.

On a lighter side, Zach Galifianakis’s internet talk show Between Two Ferns is hilarious. The natalie Portman one is best. Unfortunately, the KAUST firewall blocks this site. Below are some things worth watching

Malcolm Gladwell explains pasta sauce. As a side note, ketchup is one of the few foods that has no better variant than the normal Heinz. There is no premium stuff. What a product.

George gets real at his last press conference. This is pure entertainment. I miss W.

Dennis Kucinich at the 2008 DNC telling America to WAKE UP. My favorite part is the arm gesture he gives when he is done and steps away from the podium. He ran for president to find a wife like Mr. James on Newsradio.

Prank Calls on CSPAN

If you want to work four hours a week you hate your job. Good job. Since this book is targeted at professionals (scientists, engineers, etc.) the idea is that you go through all this training to find a trick to exploit in society to perpetuate your existence with no further work. Good job, Genius. By taking this path you have really just come to the conclusion that the metaphorical boat you spent so much time building should be sold for scrap. I love to do whatever it is that I do. To use a cliche, love what you do and you will never work a day in your life.

It is a waste of intelligence to work only four hours a week. It is just as morally irritating for a smart person to abuse their gift by thinking only as little as possible as it is for physically strong to make millions playing a sports game for a few hours a week or physically attractive people to make millions being a model. To me it is just as annoying. I see it more as a concession made out of the fear that if you try, you will never reach your vision of your full potential made all the worse by the fact that your intelligence indicates that it was a fully conscious decision. Too many smart people do not try because they fear defeat and thus skim through life without dipping down into the waters that can unleash their full potential (I’m extending the metaphor). It is an evolutionary safe bet that will ensure a life of relative mediocrity.

Endorsing the Four Hour workweek is sociopathic behavior. Everybody can’t do it. Why are you so special? It is the superman theory with clear sign of delusions of grandeur. It is legal but morally it is theft. Even if your cold heart bleeds no blood for the society that allowed you to act in such a manner, at least understand that personally it is giving up. In the words of philosophers Rob and Big, “DO WORK.”