Ceaseless Student

You have pics. you know you want everyone to see them. You know you want them to show up on PlanetOlin… it’s a bit pathetic that 2 years has gotten us 613 photos. And by us I mostly mean Tostie14 who has 422 of those pics. All the other members combined don’t match him. So let’s fix this:

To start putting pics in a nice shareable public place you need a few things:

-Get a flickr account
-Add me (bdieseldorff) as a contact
-Upload some pics (I suggest using flock for this)
(Here you might have to wait for me to invite you to the group)
-Go to the ‘Organize’ tab
-Drag all the photos you want to give to the pool into the workspace
-Click the send to group button
-Click the Olin group

Yay!

If you’ve got Q’s comment or e-mail me for some A’s.

The website for Sitemeter is slow. Wow. It is seriously slow. Well. I have the code installed, but I have a stupid picture I want gone. Soooo slow. I’ll continue writing this when the stupid page can be made to load stuff…

OK. I’m actually giving up for today. I should drill my speedreading.

One thing I did notice: Google analytics reports stuff the day after it happens. This is boring Google! I like to be able to randomly refresh and be like “w00t! two more!” Huge props to StatCounter for having this covered. FeedBurner seems to do things in batches, but I haven’t really figured out what’s going on there. This is somewhat of a tangent but in FeedBurner’s rss metrics, they have this thing called reach that’s really hot. It accounts for aggregators and stuff instead of just counting them as one subscriber - my numbers look much shinier with planet Olin added in.

Peace out.

I’ve heard that Google analytics is the best thing out there. Then again, I had trouble installing it and I’ve heard reports that it misses test visitors and stuff…

I’ve been using Statcounter. Sadly, this reputedly solid tracker gives me substantially different results from the Feedburner’s reputedly solid tracking. What’s up with that?

So I’ve decided to load my site up with stuff and see what they all say. This might hurt the load speed a bit - I apologize in advance. What do you use? Put in a little blurb in the comments and I’ll add it the arsenal aimed at my traffic.

I’ll start by reviewing the installation process for the three I’m using as of this moment:

Statcounter - Fantastic. Personalized instructions depending on what you’re using. In blogger they just have you add one html element to your layout. So easy.

FeedBurner - Solid. It tells you where you have to go and what you have to do there.

Google Analytics - says something along the lines of “add it to your template above the tag. I’m fairly sure that this isn’t where you want it; that just goes at the bottom of the blog instead of each post. I followed the instructions for FeedBurner’s placement in the template instead and Google says Analytics is properly installed on my site. This is ridiculous. Google owns Blogger. I can’t believe they enjoy shooting themselves in the foot so much.

Update: Actually, the FeedBurner instructions don’t really work. Google’s instructions do end up working but I’m still giving them badness points for being big losers. They install just like stat counter - an html element in the template.

Please pass on any tools you use for traffic analysis to make this a broader test!

So I watched a clip about money that seriously attacked our current system and decided that it should be torn to shreds so here goes.

A bit more than halfway in they ask four questions that I’ll go ahead and answer:

1 - Why do governments choose to borrow money from private banks at interest when gov’t could create all the interest-free money it needs, itself?

Ok. Imagine the government just spawning more money whenever it needed it. If the total value in a system is unchanged and more money is introduced, all the money will be worth less. In the extreme, governments using arbitrarily created money lead to hyperinflation and disastrous consequences.

So why doesn’t this happen with money that private banks create? Private banks create money when an individual makes a contract to repay it and collateral exists. The money does have real-world value - the property that would be foreclosed.

2 - Why create money as debt? Why not create money that circulates permanently?

This kind of money system would work.

But it would work more slowly. The ability to get a loan lets people gain more leverage and be able to accomplish more with the same original amount. Using a dynamic system instead of a system of permanent circulation allows greater value to be created from the same initial monetary investment.

The concept of a static money supply is silly. Suppose a static money supply. Assuming that humanity is productive (which is, I hope, a fair assumption), the value of money would be forced to increase. With a static money supply, money represents a fraction of the world’s value; in other words, increases in global value would lead to runaway deflation. If humanity is productive and deflation is steady, the best way to amass value would be to simply sit on your money. Deflation would pretty much serve as an interest payment - talk about the rich getting richer.

The whole concept that our system is broken because it is independent of permanent money is flawed. It’s true that it relies on debt; our system relies on a constant flow of paying loans and getting new loans. This common event, called equilibrium, is ubiquitous. It’s found in everywhere in nature and it also dominates the structures of man. Supply and demand; debt and money. Everything balances.

3 - How can a money system dependent on perpetually accelerating growth be used to build a sustainable economy?

This part is, in my opinion, the only fair concern in the film. If humanity as a whole ceases to create value at an exponential rate everything will break. We must continue to create value faster than we create debt - and we have been.

To be sustainable we don’t need to be using up less than or equal to the amount of resources that are produced in a specific period of time. We can afford to use some non-renewable resources because we are counting on becoming independent of them before we run out of them. As long as this is true, it is irrelevant that we may have used up of our non-renewable resources if they are no longer needed. In short, we are betting on technology. The bet seems OK to me though; technology also advances exponentially.

As a short response to this question, I will use my favorite quote from the clip itself:

One thing to realize … is that, like a child’s game of musical chairs, as long as the music is playing, there are no loser.

Simple. If we can continue to play the game (create value), our system will run smoothly.

4 - What specifically needs to be changed to allow the creation of a sustainable economy?

Things could certainly be improved by change, but it the monetary system itself is not inherently broken.

This post is getting really long so I will satisfy this question by saying that my previous arguments make the question invalid in the spirit that it was originally presented. If I were to write about my none-too-solidified opinions on our government and economics, this rant would become a paper that I don’t have the inclination to write at the moment.

———————-
These are just a couple of moments in the movie that made me angry that I couldn’t work into the post well:

• Money earned from lending money is not the act of a parasite or a thief. Money is gained by creating value - the use of fungible money is hugely valuable. Lenders do not leech from the system; they make it more efficient.

• I think the worst one IMO was at 23:08. The clip says that individuals have more money to spend when they’ve paid off their debts - this is false. If I take out a loan, I’ll have more fungible money available. It’s the same on an individual and national scale.

———————-

Please feel free to correct whatever I messed up and contribute opinions. …I know this blog is read by at least one econ major.

Matlab

you are quite effective
I feed you raw data
you return what I ask
you question nothing

you are a worthy adversary
matrix operations
make you run so much faster
linear programming is for losers

you are a workhorse without equal
when the going gets tough
the tough crunch the living hell
out of relevant numbers

So remember how I said I’d gotten 208 unique visitors to date on Tuesday? It’s more than 275 now. Blue is the unique visitor count. Check it out for the entirety of this blog’s existence:

I use StatCounter. It’s free, easy to use (add an html element to your blog) and has decent visuals. How accurate is it? I don’t know. I recently started using FeedBurner (when Google bought FB and it became easy to use with blogger) which can do some site statistics too. Hopefully comparing them will be interesting.
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Last night at around 01:00 I was doing some reading drills and had a monstrous headache. I thought “Maybe I should do an extra nap tomorrow…” At the end of the day though, I think it was a blood sugar thing. I ate some pie and felt much better and much more awake.
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Evidently the Stop & Shop on 9 is open 24 hours. I’m also told it’s closed Sunday. But seriously. 24 hours? Around here? Hooray places that are open after 20:00!
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As part of a NASA project, I’m using a PIC as a prototype circuit. I got to be all nostalgic and literally run through a good portion of the labs we did for POE. Awesome. For my money, the hardest thing to do with a PIC is get your computer to believe it’s actually plugged in.

So. I was reading a post on the Dilbert Blog. Here’s a little taste:

What if the government could give something of value to the rich in return for paying higher taxes? It would have to be something that didn’t cost the government or its citizens any real money. How about extra rights?

As I read it I’m like “Man. That’s brilliant.” It’s an interesting question because it probably hurts the rich more than it helps them; nonetheless, separating them into a higher class of citizen would probably not go over so well with the less rational minds in the nation.

In fact, it would probably also not go well with the more strongly opinionated somewhat idealistic minds either. That’s a common type of person at Olin. Then again, we also have people on the other extreme who would see this, not as unfair, but as obvious and right.

So I’m not sure who my audience is exactly, but I’m hoping for enough strongly opinionated people for a comments fight like Scott Adams always gets:

Go!

I’m actually doing better than I would’ve expected. I’m generally untired (except of course now that I’m writing about it my body is whining). My proof that I’m doing OK is that I had originally planned on taking 2 or 3 naps but have voluntarily only taken 1 each of the last few days.

I tend to be most off my game for about 20 minutes after my lunch-time nap and when 1AMish rolls around. That being said, there’s some circumstantial evidence that I’m not actually that much worse off at 1AMish - I seem to do just as well with the whole speed reading bit.

On a related note, I think I’ll be adding an energy drinky thing to my diet every day. Apart from having enough calories to satisfy that extra bit of hungriness brought about by my quirky sleeping, it also has more vitamins than you can reasonably shake a stick at. Once I drink it daily I’m pretty sure I’ll be invincible. That is how vitamins work, right?

I called my mom in Peru with Skype. Skype has such a reasonable rate for Peru $.03/minute. So hot. Here’s the sad thing, I had to call her on a cell phone; $.30/minute. Oh well.

So I was going through Lifehacker and I happened upon a little blurb about Flock. Flock describes itself as a social browser. Aight, I thought.

I downloaded it, started it and found that it had a lot of shiny stuff and then Firefox as a browser. As it turns out, that’s pretty much exactly what’s up. Flock is a Mozilla based browser. The stuff it offers is a huge emphasis on rss feeds, blogging, uploading pics etc.

The blogging interface is really not worth it. I guess I could hit either of my blogs from a single place, but it opens in a new window so it might be a longcut for me (I keep both blogs open in tabs all the time). It does have a neat right click menu with a “blog this” option. This would be great if I had a quicker blog like that; however, there are Firefox extensions that do this (eg JustBlogIt).

So that was lame. Then it has this media stream thing going up top, which displays your flickr stream or equivalent from some other site. Pretty cool, but eats screen real estate. So I tried the upload functionality. This was wonderful. It was magnificent. It gave me so much control for so little effort. Oh fantastic. Auto resize (important due to the limited monthly bandwidth thing), easy naming. Really great stuff.

In short: lame browser; great flickr uploader.

When I logged into Flickr (for the first time in a long, long time. I found a message telling me that I was now one of the Olin flickr groups admins. OK. So I posted an effortless 27 pics and then added them to the Olin group (yay Flock). Here’s the pathetically lame part. This makes me the second biggest contributor (48 pics). It’s really easy guys.

Upon a teacher’s suggestion, I downloaded vvvv to help with some image processing I needed to do. It’s a visual programming language that’s pretty awesome at a/v stuff. I’m just going to toss in some pics instead of ranting for too long… I should note that it’s kind of an annoying program and that most of my, uhmm, code(?) is just variations on code that others put online.

This program is hot. The parts of the image that look a bit messed up are because the camera is out of focus and has been substantially tampered with physically. Now this isn’t actually what I need I think, but it’s close. I need to differentiate color not brightness. This might be easier in the YUV colorspace instead of RGB… I need to look at if vvvv has support for such a transform and I need to look at the code of the effect node. The effect node is the one that has a bunch of inputs in the bottom left. It’s the one that sets the brightness threshold and outputs the appropriate color. It’s evidently the only node that you can easily get to the source for (a .fx file).

Sweet.

In case anyone wants to replicate this: I used this main patch, this effect file and this effect patch. I’m pretty sure that the second patch is a demo you don’t actually need, but I didn’t want to check and I wanted it available if it was needed.