Ceaseless Student

The saga of Japan 2 continues - I left you all with burnt bread and near-futile dish washing.

What I did not tell you was my sad discovery. Later that night I found out that duct-taping down the cook button was stupider than I thought. It not only burnt my bread - it had apparently killed my rice cooker. I was devastated. Rice is hugely important to my way of life during the school year. I couldn’t possibly live without this rice cooker (despite having a 5 cup, 3 cup and another 10 cup rice cooker close at hand). If I couldn’t raise it to life I’d be down thirty bucks or so and it would be sad.

So I took the natural course of action. I played Smash in the hopes that it’d fix itself by morning. Well. No luck. This is what I get from getting used to PICs and Windows. Anyhow, I figured I’d try to fix it. I got to learn how the rice cooker works (there’s a physical button [top left] that’s released either as water evaporates into steam and the whole thing gets lighter or simply as a function of time). So I figured there was probably a mechanical trip that would go off if someone were to do something stupid like, say, duct tape down the power button. I found nothing off the sort. I managed to make a hack that let me turn the rice cooker on in ‘keep warm’ mode. Not exactly what I needed…

Eventually I found a fuse that my rice cooker had deviously been hiding from me under a sleeve thing. What a jerk. Anyhow, the problem was dealt with and the rice cooker was tried. “Arise cooker arise!” Great success! Now I could try it again…

PS- boriswitchdoctor.com feel more comfortable with rice cooker. - If you don’t get it go watch some ATHF

PS 2.0- betcha you didn’t see the ‘circuits’ label coming in this bread-related storyline

I saw this sign in New Hampshire and was really impressed:

Ten points to NH for metric system use. Sadly, I only found three signs like this…

I really think this is how the US should be addressing the issue of SI ignorance. If they were simply to use both systems on new signs, we’d get huge benefits in the long-run at an extremely low price. I’d imagine that a kid seeing a sign like this every day for 5 years would have about as much trouble telling you what a mile was in kilometers as you’d have telling me how many inches are in a foot. The just go together so much that it becomes more than even just connectedness - it becomes identity.

By now, it’s common knowledge that Dell is offering a computer preloaded with Ubuntu (an easier-to-use-than -most Linux distro). This was huge for Linux users everywhere - it means that people who aren’t huge nerds are starting to use it.

The Linux community’s growth among non-geeks now has something else to look forward to. It appears that Walmart’s super-economy (sub $300) line of desktops may offer a Linux version as soon as this year.

And it looks like we might soon see other big PC makers preloading Ubuntu. At Ubuntu Live, Shuttleworth told his audience that they would indeed be seeing “more top-tier PC manufacturers offering Ubuntu pre-installed.” Looks like Ubuntu is really pushing for the mainstream.

Insane. I can actually imagine seeing Ubuntu be a serious player in the field. ie We could have Ubuntu pop out of the ‘Linux’ category that we now have when talking about operating systems: Windows, MacOS, Linux, other. That’d be neat.

What I’d really like to see for the masses (and maybe even us geeks) is a cheap Linux box that’s ready to run headless and interface with Macs and Windows PCs. I think a cheap Linux box, some clever software and a huge hard drive would be an extremely marketable product. It could actually make backing up computers happen in normal households. I wonder if I’m seeing too much potential in this - the status quo is quite a force to be reckoned with…

I was just talking to my brother and he told me a story that I really liked. So I’ll share it with you all as best as I can remember it:

So there’s this hedge fund manager who is really successful. He makes somewhat over a billion dollars a year. Literally. Over a billion a year.

Anyhow, he’s talking to John Grisham - for those of you who aren’t familiar with him, he’s an extremely successful, well-known and respected writer.

So they’re talking and at some point the hedge fund manager says “Y’know John, last year I made more money than you’ve made on all the books you’ve ever published in your entire life. In one year John.”

Since this was factually true, John Grisham agreed. “Yeah. That’s true. You did make that much, but there’s something I have that you will never have.”

Manager-“Oh yeah? What’s that John?”

JG-“Enough.”

Just in case there are any normal/reasonable/sane people reading, I’ll give a little bit of background.

There are now many games online that involve spending huge amounts of time acquiring experience (which makes your character better) or items (which also make your character better, but are fungible in game). Lately, an interesting practice of selling accounts has begun to take place. It really makes a lot of sense when you think about it - people are buying something of value that they can’t get any other way that doesn’t take an absurd amount of time. But here’s where it gets gross.

A couple of weeks ago a curious incident took place. A leading player of Gunbound was kidnapped and had his life threatened in an attempt to obtain his account’s password. Incredible. Evidently, one of the four kidnappers’ girlfriends met up with this gamer online (on Google’s social networking website Orkut). They set up a date at a mall, but when the dude showed up, he got a guy with a gun instead of a hot girl.

That sucks right? It gets better/worse. He refused to give them his account’s password despite the fact that they held a gun to his head for five hours. Yes. Five hours. Insane. They eventually just gave up and were caught later. This dude is such a dumb ass. But I guess he won or something…

Unbelievable you say? I agree. So I checked the source and it seems to be all good. That’s so gross.

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.

This is interesting… I can’t seem to title this post… I’ll see if it works from a different browser after saving a draft…

Anyhow. Today was pretty sweet. Some of us were laser-cutting parts that we need for NASA out of thin plastic film for quite a long time. The way the machine works is rather neat; it just burns whatever lines you give it. One sets the speed it goes at and the power it uses. That’s it. Then the laser goes along burning what you told it to burn and the ventilations system attempts to pump out all of the toxic fumes you generate. It doesn’t fully succeed, but I’m going to go ahead and imagine that the smell would’ve been far worse if it weren’t for the ventilation system.

So anyhow, one of the sheets of plastic we were cutting was really thin. I mean we had one that was five thousandths of an inch thick; that was the fattest one. The small one was to thousandths of an inch thick. We set power and speed lower for the thin piece of Kapton and then we started up the laser. It went along the bottom edge of the shape we were cutting and then promptly proceeded to miss the Kapton entirely.

This wasn’t the laser’s fault; it was positioning itself perfectly. The issue at hand was that the piece of plastic was really thin. Thin enough, in fact, to get sucked into the ventilation system. We had to shut everything down.

Eventually, everything was fixed and the now-wrinkled piece of Kapton was recovered from the ventilation system. Hooray!

…Something’s being silly. I can’t seem to get into my account from Opera. It wasnts me to switch my blogger account to a Google account. Oh yeah. It’s always been a Google account. wtf.

OK. I got in. (I needed to tack on the @gmail.com). When I look at my post in Opera I can access the test box for the title, but I can’t touch the bod. Also what I’d already written disappears. How odd. My hand is force. I will use the scourge of worlds: IE.

AH good. IE can’t access the text box for the title either. Whatever. This shall henceforth be known as “The Post With No Name.”

Man. You know what’s frustrating?

It’s frustrating to want to talk to someone who doesn’t speak your language.

You know what’s possibly even more frustrating?

When they do speak your language except they’re at this language immersion camp and they can’t speak anything but some foreign language.

You know what might be even more frustrating than that?

Having taken enough of the aforementioned foreign language (albeit a long time ago) to try to talk anyways. Talk? Not really. Listen? Sometimes I can understand some things. Ish.

Most frustrating telephone conversation ever.
*exhales*
I needed to get that out. Thanks for feeling obliged to read b/c it’s showing up in your rss reader or Planet Olin or something.

I promise a more upbeat post tomorrow. In fact, I’m pretty sure I know the topic. It should be fun!

These things are sweet. Like, really sweet. The idea is that you write a program and the FPGA implements it in hardware (it makes a digital circuit with a portion of its hundreds of thousands of gates).

The parts I like are the cost and how much they jam on the board. All the stuff on the board can be used as either inputs or outputs (depending on what they are); also there’s some mode-controlling stuff on the board, but let’s ignore that for now.

I’ll describe one that’s just shy of $100. It has 8 LEDs, 8 switches, 4 push-buttons on the board itself. Then it has an additional 60 I/O ports that can be used for whatever. Some of these (24) are split off into groups of 6 pins that you can plug something called a Pmod into. These are extensions that they’ve already made for you such as video I/O or audio I/O or motor control etc. Oh yeah. It also has a 4 digit seven-segment display. This lets you make the simple squarish looking digital clock type numbers. And there’s a slot for a 1/8 VGA LCD screen. Sexy.

Anyhow. I keep on coming up with reasons to buy one that aren’t good enough to get me to do it. Case in point: for about $200 I can make a TV card for my monitor. I mean. OK, I could play Smash on my monitor. Or I could get a $50 TV card. But the FPGA can also do other stuff. But for $200 I could buy a new TV. *sigh* I need better arguments for myself. If anyone can come up with a compelling reason for me to get an FPGA other than their shininess, that’d be awesome.

I’m pretty sure this device has made me the happiest and most victorious-feeling for the most mundane tasks. For example, I felt accomplished after following a step-by-step screencast to make the FPGA count in binary and display the 8 MSB in LED form. And now, I’m failing to use the seven-segment display to make it count with numbers. Actually, I think I’ve gotten it to do it, but too fast for my eyes to resolve… I’ll work on that.

So there’s this cool thing called the Peltier effect. Basically, you line up n and p doped semiconductor in such a way that when you run current along the underside of the semiconductor all of the holes and electrons travel down. These electrons and semiconductors actually carry some heat so you can cool one side of the device while warming the other; the current will be directly proportional to the temperature difference. If you then hook up a heat sink and a fan to the heated side, you have a sweet cooler. I’m making one for beverages. It should be cool. I recommend wikipedia’s article on this for anyone interested. There’s also an inverse effect that uses a temperature differential to generate electricity; evidently there are even some watches that power off of the temperature differential that your body heat makes. Neat.

I just got myself an 80 watt, 8 Amp pelt (as they are known in the computer over-clocking world). And, wouldn’t you know it, I have an 80 watt max, 8 Amp max source that plugs into a cigarette lighter socket. I’m gonna rig it up with a heat sink and some holder that will allow me to hold a drink with the heat sink being where the AC pumps air out. I’m gonna have some nice cool drinks and a nice cool circuit in my car.