My Now Rinky-Dink Laptop

Every now and then something happens to a device that you have and it stops working like it originally did. There are two options: buy a new device, or adapt to the new functionality of your present device. Being a complex adaptive system with meager funds, I naturally choose to adapt. This means that, presently, I have only one place in town to connect to the internet. This would be Fred Meyers. Here is a picture of my set up:

I dropped my laptop a couple months ago on a tile floor from one foot off the ground. It chipped my case. That’s all I thought happened. Then, my built in wireless stopped working two weeks later. I eventually bought a USB adapter and that worked just fine. Just fine until, my USB ports stopped working consistently. I have backed-up everything on my laptop onto (miraculously) an external USB hard drive. It just worked to back up my files. Afterword, I couldn’t access my files on it, unless I took the drive over to my desktop. However, everything is safe and eventually I’ll have funds to buy a new laptop. Perhaps I’ll find that receipt and be able to claim it under the limited warranty since it worked for properly for such a long time after the fact. We’ll see…

Happy 3.14159265358979323846… Day!

Today is PI Day, the unofficial holiday of geeks all around.

Here is an interesting Wikipedia page on PI.

Have a good (PI) day.

If you missed it — it’ll happen again next year.

Democracy and Education (or something like it)

I have been thinking about some democracy centered items over the past few years. About three years ago while I was still in Lincoln, NE. I was working at a place called Taco Inn and reflecting upon my life experience – the only logical thing to do when you have a job that solely utilizes your basal ganglia (essentially the reptilian part of the brain). The first thing that came to mind was about rights vs. duties.

I starting thinking about a phrase that I had heard in pop culture and in dialogs between people: It’s my right! I contemplated how this was used in several circumstances and finally settled that the context always implied a rights versus duties point of view. Let me explain: It seemed as though people would use the reality of having certain inalienable rights and freedoms as an excuse to neglect any duty or obligation that they had. I’m my own person. I can do what I want to. Just do it. This was our right. It seems very adolescent and it seems indicative of our culture.

This began to upset me, because I realized that rights brought along with certain duties. It is your right to take a loan, but it is your duty and obligation to repay it. Otherwise, there are consequences – personal and corporate. Take the sub-prime mortgage crisis for example. Duties and rights – these are the Yin and Yang of freedom. It is your duty to vote on everything you possibly can, otherwise it is you fault that your freedom was taken away from under your nose.

One other thing that I also thought was incredible that has some relation to democracy was that a lot of people in Europe have installed their own network infrastructure. Each person installed it on their property and owned it. No telecommunications company owned it because the people owned it. I have since thought about how awesome it would be if we overthrew all of the telecommunications companies by creating our own small grassroots tel-co movements. Along theses same lines, in Portland, OR; Seattle, WA; and in so many places around the world people are installing their own wireless networks that let people access different things, especially the internet. With how cheap technology is, it would be easy for a group of people to form a Wi-Fi cooperative and provide internet access. Of course they would need to find out how to get access to the internet, either a direct T1, OC-n, or distributed access through local internet providers. Any number of ways would work.

Now what would happen if people started to create their own cell phone networks? Cable networks? What about starting to broadcast in the now up for grabs TV spectrum when TVs go blank in February of 2009. Better jump on that quick before no one can get any bandwidth because Google or Nextel have bought all of it.

This brings me to my thoughts on education. Those ideas wouldn’t fly is because people aren’t taught enough about technology, science, engineering, and mathematics in elementary and middle school. I won’t point fingers here. I’ll say that there isn’t enough money and I don’t think we know the best way to educate students about those subjects. Now, I will put in my two cents worth (or more):

I started a research project and I wrote an eighteen plus page paper (which is going to turn into a book soon if I keep working on it). I have integrated different aspects of different disciplines and, in short, the book is very multifaceted and interdisciplinary. It draws on the ideas of neuroscience, artificial intelligence, artificial life, anthropology, sociology, education, and psychology. I wrote a short paragraph about learning in the earliest societies. It stresses how most learning took place in the field.

There were hunter-gatherers who would need to learn how to survive through experience. By doing so they were also helping the clan. There were also the early agrarian societies. These would learn the same way. They would learn by doing – not just to be doing something, but to help in a meaningful and rewarding way in society. This is how we evolved for many thousands of years. If you happen to be a creationist, there is still the mechanism of micro-evolution that is fully compatible with your world-view. It still allows for the fine tuning of the learning mechanism in our species over time.

We are very maladapted to learning things in the absence of societal reward. This is a profound statement that has prolific consequences for education and democracy. In this paradigm, learning about STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) subjects becomes rewarding (perhaps even financially?) and interesting. Since it immerses them into society, they will learn about all of the societal structures that are in place that they need to know about to bring their ideas to fruition. If they want to start a business, what type of business will it be? Sole proprietorship? Partnership? LLC? LLP? C or S Corporation? A variant of one of the above? Does their state support chartering their choice? Where will they get financing? What is the business plan and exit strategy? Since they are embedded in society, they will succeed or fail. Either way, they will learn and gain experience that will enable more success.

It is through this paradigm that they will dream and bring that dream into existence. They will learn higher level cognitive skills than they will if we just focus on the basics. I should stress that would “just” in the previous sentence. The basics will be there and they will be drilled over the basics. However, the reason will be the same about for any concert performer or athlete to practice and drill basics: it improves your capabilities and chances for successfully implementing your dream.

This paradigm also brings duties and rights to the forefront. It is your duty to learn this to earn your right to bring your dream into reality. If anyone argues, “We have that in the current system, it is one’s duty to graduate and earn your right to do what you want to. What makes this any different?” One major reason: this paradigm is more relevant, it makes sense to the innate learning mechanism. Students will see the reason for learning and perfecting the practice of the individual steps required to reach their goal.

I hope that this doesn’t seem like a Utopian dream. I know the nature of people and this vision only optimizes one aspect of a societal structure. It does not change people. It only uses our brain in a way more suitable to how it evolved.

I got a new job!

I am very happy today. I had an interview at 10:00am. I found out that I got the job at 3:22pm. I will be working at a place called Community Services Consortium. I will still be working as a taxi driver for two more weeks, but I start working at CSC tomorrow at 8:00am. I will finally have a normal work schedule with weekends off. Plus, I’ll make more money.

The best and coolest part about this job is that I will be working with youth to help them find jobs, get education, and get remedial education. I will have great fun in this job. I also believe I will do great things. Hopefully things just as great as Alexander Graham Bell. Speaking of him, it’s his birthday today.

Nature Inspired Technology

My post on the nanotube radio reminded me of a thought I had a few days before I saw that radio. That thought was: RFID, especially the passive variety, is a cool step forward to creating highly energy efficient technology. In that case the RFID tags are small, compact, and are powered by their antenna. They pick up the signal from the reader and that signal creates a current across the antenna and the circuits ground. This can be used to both power an IC and as the communications channel. This was awesome news to me when I first heard it because that means that the only power footprint for the system is the main transceiver that reads the RFID tags. This can also be applied to other electronic devices that don’t need to communicate via radio waves. Anything that doesn’t need much power can be powered by the radio waves in the air. All that is needed is an appropriate antenna, a rectifier, and a smoothing capacitor. This would create a fairly small amount of current that might be able to power some very energy efficient electronics.

If we look at biology, we can see that biological systems are very sensitive and receptive to electromagnetic fields that can take some real work, on our part, to detect. The brain actually harnesses its own EEG to coordinate the firing of fairly distant brain regions, as researchers at MIT have shown. It would be awesome if we could build technology that operated using EMF levels similar to those found in biological systems, mostly because they would use very little energy. The possible side-effect is that we could discover that low energy devices open new possibilities for design, like opening up the possibility of creating designs that synchronize different parts like the brain does.

There will be definite design challenges that will be inherent in very low energy devices because of the sensitivity. The major benefit of electronics as we now know it is the robustness and well defined behavior they exhibit. This could all vanish in low energy devices. The electronics might get down to the point where we might be working with single electrons that exhibit quantum behavior. Of course, nature got around this by using an incredible synthesis of electro-mechano-chemistry. Perhaps we might do the same thing. Except we would need to figure out how to make it work faster than chemistry normally works. I suppose we could go the massively parallel route to achieve the likeness of lots of speed with relatively slow parts.

Besides all of this, wouldn’t it be great if instead of charging your electronic devices, you had to feed them?

“Excuse me while I go feed my computer.”

“Okay, I’m back”

In other news (okay, this is from my birthday two years ago), researchers at MIT have developed a way to power devices with non-radiating waves. Go here to find out more. It is really cool because this would not create any interference with any device unless it happens to have a specific resonance that tunes in the wireless energy source. Pretty cool.

Breakfast and Nanotubes

Ah! There’s nothing quite like cooking stir fry for breakfast at 3:20 am. Then eating it. Then biking to get to work by 5:00 am. This happens to be a semi-delectable sweet and sour variety concocted in semi-awake-ness. As I scarf it down remember this article that my friend emailed to me. It is from MIT Technology Review

It is an all-in-one nanotube radio. And the original paper on it can be found here. How it works is really incredible. The nanotube acts like a tuning fork and a piano string at the same time. It is like a tuning fork because it has an intrinsic frequency the it vibrates at. It is like a piano string because the amount of voltage applied to it acts to tune it like tightening a piano or guitar string. Increase the voltage and you increase the frequency that it vibrates at. Now the strange yet cool thing about this is that the tube does not act like an antenna. It is the electrons that collect at the free end of the tube that act as the antenna. They will start to induce motion in the tube in response to any electromagnetic fields. The tube naturally filters out any other frequencies since it naturally damps any motion induced by the electrons at any frequency besides what it is tuned to. There is a cathode a little over a micron away from the end of the 500 nm tube which picks up the electrons ejected during the tube’s movement. This is actually the demodulated signal — meaning that it is an audio signal and not a radio signal.

Aside from the technology involved in making this radio, it is the simplest radio ever. Right now it is really sensitive to temperatures, and the reception could be improved by operating it at lower temperatures or operating several tubes together. I also think that there are other distortions to the signal besides just the temperature interference. I think that other radio signals that operate at frequencies that are partials of the main resonant frequency of the tube and tuning would still induce enough motion to distort the signal. So it has it’s imperfections, but it will get better — just like my cooking gets better when I’m fully awake.

Out of Chaos: Order

Many creation myths contain an element that chaos reigned before order emerged. There’s the Enuma Elish, Genesis, and Ovid’s Metamorphosis. They all imply that there was some sort of chaos until a god (ruler) commands or acts to create order by establishing laws. In Genesis the words used are tohu (toe-who) and bohu (bough-who), which mean unformed and unfilled more or less. They imply a certain amount of disorder. God is introduced using the word elohim, which is normally translated as God. However, this word is definitely broader than that. In few places, and there might only be two, it is used to designate the word rulers or kings.

If you dig deeper in your Biblia Hebraica Stutgarttensia (that’s the gold standard used for researching the old testament; it contains all the known variant readings in their original language), you will find more textual evidence pointing towards the meaning of elohim being rulers. Genesis 6 talks about the sons of God (benai ha’elohim) and the daughters of man (benot ha’adam). This passage has been misunderstood to say that angels were having sexual relations with human women. However taking the meaning of elohim to be rulers, we can safely say that this passage means the rulers were hogging all the women (just in a very different tone). This makes much more sense. It also means that Genesis 1 describes the rulers establishing boundaries, creating names, and decreeing order upon the chaos.

I think the fact that well developed societies had this type of creation myth tells us something about ourselves. Once a society has built a hedge against the randomness of life, they feel as though they have established order. As the generations progress, they begin to feel as though everything is orderly and that order should be demanded of everything. However, there is now a glaring crack growing, bifurcating the facade of that security. In quantum mechanics everything is a probability, nothing is certain until it is measured. Einstein spoke against this negative feature of the quantum by saying, “God is not a pair of dice.” normally translated, “God does not play dice.” Everything is based on randomness. This is a stochastic universe.

Mathematics is begining to tell us the same thing: Everything is based on randomness. The sequence of the prime numbers is random. Algorithmic information theory tells us that the closer to random something is the more dense the information content. A truly random number sequence cannot be compressed. This means that randomness is pure information.

It is the nature of order to emerge from chaos, because chaos represents dense information. Nature’s order comes from a careful balancing act of the creation of information, increasing entropy, and nature’s self organization. Nature, being a complex adaptive system, must let information occupy the most stable state it can form. Randomness is the engine that drives creation (in the present tense). It is probably even the explanation for the arrow of time (Too many people are going to laugh at that and so much more because I’m serious). All this leads me to believe that order is an emergent property of randomness.

To Stroke My Muse

Fluid thought that spills
out of my head running, flowing across the page.
Drunken thought that stumbles
around the wide open, unrestrained page space.
Intoxicating thought pungently, provokingly wafting through pages of books
propelled by pens and quills of previous writers
who let their thoughts distill into writing,
which created the reservoir for the cascades of water-falling thought and philosophy and science to come; making this world run its course and the people the way they are.
This is the essence of what drives culture,
economies, societies,
and whatever people do and make.
This affecting force that moves each one of us is this intoxicating essence,
this ethereal fluid, this wine of fermented ideas that propels us just as it has
propelled other societies and the creation of other societies.
We each drink of the scotch of ideas everyday, even the
vodka of passion that fills our life.
What can I say about this society driving under the influence
of freedom and independence?
It is just a recent example
describing the power of thought to inspire
the intoxicating idea of revolution and revolt, the seed of
this nation which impregnated the colonies giving birth to what you see here:
a world super power that polices the nations; a nation both reviled and respected by
others. A fulfillment of prophecy? Each person has the power of thought, but each must run their thought though the grape press so that others may drink of its influential nature. Each must do the work to effect others. We are powerful beings who have amazing potentials that have not been realized. Who will wield the wondrous wooing work of the thought? Who will shape the world through their mind? Who will start the work of gleaning the grapes from their fruitful mind and begin to intoxicate the world with the power of their visionary vineyard?
To this day, the voices of the past still move the world. Paths that have been pioneered a long time ago are now paved roads and common to all. Will you rise to the calling of the thought, of the intoxicating vision in your head? Will you start out the new trail no one else dared to trod, while having others follow you into this new frontier? Will you pave the next widely passed over passage?

A lone
pawn
stands
up to the
challenge.

Now who would come and follow this one? Who will dare to add momentum to this cause? Who will dare drink until surrendered to the drunkenness of the though? Who will drink until its influence is all that drives you down its path?

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You can read this the way it is supposed to be read by download this PDF: Fluid Thought