What's Been and What's Ben

One last video on DNA self-assembly that will blow your mind. My prediction is that this will be the new technology in 2030. I view us as being in the first of three stages of technology growth. The first stage is learning from basic principles to make things like cars, cell phones, and lasers. The second stage is really a transition where exploits in complexity can lead us to things like the self assembly in this video, but we are just patching the inherit complexity we got along with our existence. The third stage is engineering the complexity to grow cell phones. In this stage we choose where each atom goes and what it does.

I must suggest the blog about okcupid statistics, an online dating site started by some harvard math guys. It has some good statistical information that is wicked interesting. Some of the results are a bit controversial (race analysis, rape fantasies by state, and the value of life by state)

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

At KAUST we just finished WEP (Winter Enrichment Period, or Why Even Participate) and today is the first day of the spring semester. WEP was a four week period meant to have us explore other fields of knowledge. I took a class on marine science because it was one of three classes I could get credit for. I had to write a technology review called “sediment traps: a bucket in the ocean” which is about sediment traps – buckets placed in the ocean to collect floating bits of sediment. They have some technology dealing with funnels, honeycomb baffling, and other things that escape me at the moment. It was painful to write and due the day after the superbowl – which aired at 2 am here. I spent a fair amount of time on AcademicEarth.org. They aggregate good lectures on various things. I found a good lecture on relativity with simple math (got square root?) as seen below:

There is an evil book out there called the Four Hour Workweek or something stupid like that. I shall forgo googling the exact name because this book is pure evil. It was brought to my attention through several conversations with potential lotophagi. The basic idea of the book is that you should create a life where you do four hours of work a week and spend the rest of the time on a beach. This is a dangerous idea based on resting on your intellectual property by draining just enough of your energy to survive. It sounds so tempting. But be afraid, it is the call of sirens trying to run your ship ashore with their seductive songs.

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.”

Cliches are awesome. I hate to beat a dead horse, but they just help us understand things. Yes, they often take up more than their fair share of space. But would you really want to live in a world where there were not certain arrangements of words that provided a meaning that connected it to all the other times it was used. Do they not arise naturally? Misuse of cliches is a bigger problem in my mind. Definitions can blur. But what about the children? Cliches tell a story. Use the word “mull” without following it with “over” for a challenge. Also I refuse to put the accent mark on the word cliche. It is no more a special word than hubris.

I am sure you all know about the major address going on today. Not the state of the union from POTUS. This is from god or Steve Jobs as some call him. Apple just announced the iPad. It is a giant Ipod touch. Little has been so hyped since the segway came along to replace that messy walking thing. This sums it up: gizmodo’s 8 things that suck about the iPad.

It seems really cool and I will likely buy one or something like it. I am different from many other Apple users: I have no brand loyalty to Apple. I use apple for what I find useful. KAUST gave me an iPod touch as a signing bonus two years ago. I gave that one to my sister when I left for The Kingdom. I got a bigger one in Dubai because it was cheap and I find them to be an awesome tool. They make better hardware for some things than any other company. Nothing special. Steve Jobs is not actually god. He is a harsh task-master that has given Apple engineers a higher suicide rate than MIT.

I like the cheap 3G plan of $15 a month for 250GM a month or $30 a month for unlimited access from the Ipad. It uses an Apple A4 processor (a ARM processor with integrated GPU). The keyboard thing seems cool. $500 dollars as a base price for 16GB of storage. $100 extra for 32GB and $200 extra for 64GB. $130 extra for 3G. No camera.

Apple does some things I don’t like. They are into an ultra-proprietary format that only works with iTunes. I find it troubling that people worship the false god of a computer company that makes a good 30% margin on everything they sell. They also aim for the lowest common denominator with a user interface that I do at least appreciate I will still be able to use after having a few strokes.

The iPod is a nice palm pilot. It is nothing new. I had one in high school that would play music from an SD card and I could play games, read books (I read the 9/11 report on it), organize my life, and use it as a flashlight. My palm pilot even used a processor from the same line, ARM. It had the same general user interface with pages of lists of icons with applications (called apps in street lingo). The iPad beat Google Chrome OS to the punch.

250,000,000 iPods sold to date with 6,799,082,702 people alive.

Of course I will not go into the even worse working conditions experienced in the Chinese Foxconn Corp. factories to keep this product secret for months so that the spectacle would be grander and Steve Jobs would feel like a real man.

Everything for me now is a countdown to an ambiguous time when I hear back from Boulder. I don’t care about financial aid. The motto around here is “follow the drinking gourd” for a few of us. I am going to give my all to these last few months at KAUST and then move on, hopefully, to the University of Colorado at Boulder.
I was told during a lecture that the blind spot we all have in our eye is not due to the optic nerve, but from light interference. If you have a degree in optics I am sorry for the mental pain you are feeling now. It is like Lewis Black’s famous non sequitur, “it it wasn’t for my horse, I wouldn’t have spent that year in college.”

The murder rate – and to a lesser extent the violent crime rate – in the United States went down in 2009. This makes no sense because during a recession one long-held fact was that crime went up. Instead it went down. Is this Obama-related? What else has changed?

Question 1: Did Noah literally gather two of every species on the planet, put then in a boat, and survive a flood all within a human lifetime? (this includes rare butterflies from the Amazon that surely could not survive a flood)

Question 2: If you heard God (a burning bush, booming voice from the sky, etc.) telling you that it was God’s will to kill every member of your family, would you do it?

If you answered no, they you do not really believe in God.

Some people think wearing your swimsuit is considered naked. I belong to the camp that believes wearing only socks is a tricky gray area. Naked to me means nothing.