Pandora Adventure

I have a confession to make. Despite loving the internet and adoring music, I've never even bothered to try Pandora. Now, to make this a bit more interesting (to myself and my poor, unattended blog), I'm going to take a look at what kind of shaping Pandora does to my tastes. It might be boring, who knows.

When asked for an artist to start with, I put in Of Montreal. They're one of my favorite bands, and sufficiently indie. In response, Pandora started playing "Gronlandic Edit," a song from Hissing Fauna... that of course I've heard before. A

Next up is New Slang by The Shins. A nice, slow paced song and similar to Of Montreal, appropriately. Very easy rhythm, basic rock structure, slightly less centered on the vocals, though this might just be because it's not Kevin Barnes. With a voice like his it's easy to get distracted. B

Love Like a Sunset Part II by Phoenix. Reminds me a lot of the Dandy Warhols with the dream-like qualities of the sound. Also, I discover why Pandora is free - ads popping up all over the place, ack! Anyway, I'll give that one an A-

Ah, something I've heard a billion times before. Young Folks by Peter, Bjorn and John. Lyrics also somewhat dreamlike thanks to the reverberations. The whistling in this song infects my brain to an insane degree. I've always had an affection for this one. A

More Of Montreal, earlier era this time, Look at the Bell. Not as much a fan of this one; vaguely Beatles-esque, but not quite what I'm in the mood for when I think "indie". Thumbs down! Still not a terrible song. C

Time to Pretend by MGMT. Always loved this song; actually I enjoy pretty much everything by MGMT. Discography download anyone? A+

Thus far I'm really enjoying the intricacies that Pandora Radio keeps track of when it's tracking my likes and dislikes. I can pull up any song and ask why it was selected, specifically the different aspects of the song that I enjoy. Things like "electronica influences" and "subtle vocal harmony" unconsciously tug at my ears!

Next up is Jennifer Louise by Of Montreal. I like this one quite a bit; it really reminds me of the Hissing Fauna stuff with a little bit of an instrumental twist. Rhythm piano, woo! B

Is This It by The Strokes. Doesn't really do it for me for some reason. C

The King of Carrot Flowers Part I by Neutral Milk Hotel. I like the vocals and it's a little folk reminiscent. Nice and mellow and acoustic. A-

The progressive nature of Ratatat's Loud Pipes is going to be stuck in my head. B+

You get the idea, anyway. I probably shouldn't keep writing like this because I'm sure it's just going to bore everybody who normally reads my scrawl. Thus far, Pandora seems like a great listening-at-work option.

'Ello July

So much changes in the course of a year, so very, very much.

At the start of another July, I'm going to yet again be headed onto a plane for the Fourth of July weekend, but this time my world is starkly different. It's still going to be completely enjoyable - of this I have no doubt - just indescribably different.

I think back on all the people and friends I've gained, all the ones I've lost touch with, all the ones that have severed contact for one reason or another. It's all pretty overwhelming along with all these thoughts of work and stress floating around in the sea with them. Perhaps the Pacific will affect me in a similar fashion as its sister.

What's Missing?

This is a question I ponder a lot, with varying degrees of satisfaction with said pondering and its conclusions. There are some events in life where change is an inexorable and unavoidable part of life. There are some concepts, people, places, and things in life that lead inevitably to a perceivable hole in one's psyche. It's similar to the feeling you experience when you fear or realize you've left something important at home while jet-setting on a vacation. That indescribable "something missing" conception.

It's peculiar in life that it's almost impossible to predict the exact size of the imprint these people, places and things have within our hearts and minds. Something you never thought you would miss looms large when it's gone - obviously it's not a foreign concept to us, with idioms like "you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone" being well known in our society. Sometimes the things you thought would never evaporate, things that you use as the foundation for building your skyscraper, are suddenly gone.

This blog allows me to explore feelings and concepts important to me, but the former has always been severely lacking. I've been wondering why more and more lately, why writer's block halts my ability to make regular posts when before I had no such difficulties. Have I lost my muse in the past few months?

I don't think so. I came to the conclusion that something is indeed missing, but it's not a person or place; it's the concept of conflict. Writing to oneself in a journal offers no exceptional conflict, no back-and-forth dialogue save whatever internal debates one can have. And maybe this is the heart of the problem - I find very little conflict in my life, and my inner thoughts have generally reflected this. I doubt myself far too rarely in my own head. Internal conflict, I will posit, is important - more than once I have created conflict where it does not actually exist to fulfill some kind of internal necessity. It's the same with people who are particularly judgmental of others, where the boundaries of "like" and "dislike" shift like oil in water. I have no problem with people like this, for the most part, save for my inability to understand the alienation they must feel by despising something one day and then loving it the next.

But I digress! Conflict should be more a natural part of life than something manufactured. I will strive to further challenge myself, my conceptions, and my senses. When someone says something I agree with, I will simply say so; there is little point in playing an advocate for a baseless devil.

Men Who Stare at Goats, The

So this is interesting. I was listening to a bit of Coast to Coast AM the other night and their guest was Stephen Root, best known for his portrayals of Milton in Office Space and Jimmy James on Newsradio. He mentioned a new project he was working on with the likes of Kevin Spacey and George Clooney called The Men Who Stare at Goats. Isn't that the best title ever?

Anyway, the film is based on a five-year-old book that delves into attempts by the United States military in waging psychological warfare. These range from the more-or-less conventional - such as playing loud music to disarm and "break" targets in hostage situations - to full-blown "psychic" operations. Interestingly enough, the latter wasn't always considered hokey and fake. The Soviet Union is especially well known for its psychic research during the Cold War, especially on topics like remote viewing, the gleaning of secrets by "seeing" objects or documents via extrasensory means.

Also of note is HAARP, the United States Air Force's High Frequency Active Aurora Research Station. The station is essentially a large Alaska transceiver that is used to research the ionosphere in various forms - measurements cannot be taken easily in the ionosphere, as the thickness of the air there is insufficient for a balloon, but the drag makes orbit at these altitudes impossible. The array can also generate frequencies falling into the VLF and ELF range by using a pseudo-transmission antennae created by the use of auroral electrojet. In observation of these frequencies, rumor has it that strange effects have been induced into subjects. Some posit that it could be possible to manipulate or disrupt certain human mental faculties (messing with emotions, fight or flight response, etc.) using ELF (sub 20Hz) broadcasts.

Regardless, all this remains pseudoscience for now - an interesting read at the most. Among all the forms of warfare and interrogation, psychological manipulation is one of the most frightening thanks to its ability to disrupt what we think and feel internally rather than being a secondary effect from some sort of physical torture. Though having psychokinetic powers like Sylar from the Heroes series would be pretty fun. And who knows what's to come in the future? Such things could certainly be replicated with some kind of chip implant that could read your mind coupled with some sort of magnetic field to manipulate objects with. Hell, I still think it's incredible that surgeons can wear gloves that control robots when operating:

In 2001, Doctor Jacques Marescaux performed a gallbladder operation on a patient over six thousand miles away via this type of telepresence. The technology, in the future, could perform surgeries unassisted by a human thanks to gobs of data gathered through thousands of operations. This could make previously costly surgeries plummet in price and make wait times virtually nonexistant. Oh, the future never looked so bright!

Tea Party Wrap Up

So what have we learned from all this tax day tea party business? Surely there's something that can be gleaned from the concept and its execution. I've read a lot on the subject, and there are a few important points to take away.

Times are difficult for everyone, especially the working class right now, especially the blue-collar workers who are losing jobs simply because of lack of work to do. Less factories are being built by corporations, less construction is going on. Economic difficulties breed uncertainty, and uncertainty leads inexorably to fear. Change can also cause the same reaction, and can amplify the fears of those losing their jobs. A shift away from eight years of neoconservatism, complete with several politicians who sprouted from the "good old years" of Reagan to what people fear is a far more liberal administration is a big change.

When the aforementioned change is poorly understood by those who fear it, said change becomes a menace. There are fundamental misunderstandings in this country about how taxes work - myths have become reality, and reality has sometimes become myth. This stems from the fact that there appear to be two main forces that make up the Republican Party - the wealthy who oppose tax hikes on the rich because of self interest, and the lower- to middle-middle class workers with conservative values in both economic and social settings. Obviously, as with any political grouping, there are a myriad of reasons why they fall here on the spectrum.

A fair chunk of both of these groups are single-issue voters, choosing one or two social issues to focus on like a laser (see: gay rights and/or abortion). The wealthy group are obvious proponents of the conservative philosophy simply because they have more to gain the more regressive a tax is. The tea parties were not made up of corporate executives or rich bankers, nor were the protesters largely protesting social issues. So who were they?

I hypothesize that the protests consisted mainly of middle-aged, white, lower-middle class workers. They appear to be working against their own interests, but this is where the fundamental flaw in understanding begins. Liberalism, over the past three decades, has become the ideology of meddling. Liberals take your money, they want to control your health care, they want to tell you how to raise your children, they want to take away your guns. Conservatism has become an ideology that promotes freedom, with free markets and the "freedom" to be as successful as your hard work denotes.

The problem here is that this freedom allows the people who have money to regulate themselves and everyone who doesn't have money. It's completely factual that in 1970, the average CEO made approximately thirty times what the average worker made. In 2005, this figure passed one hundred and ten times. The philosophy of the free market deems this okay, that it will self-correct - the flaw in this thinking is that income inequality is self-perpetuating in our current political system. Access to education, health care, and job opportunities tend to follow indicators such as household income, which in turn lead to a higher income later in life.

The reason why these beliefs are held in common among the tea party protesters is one outlined earlier - fear. The fear of not having a job tomorrow, the fear of loss of one's self-sufficiency, and the fear of things they don't comprehend. I honestly don't believe that many of those lauded as leaders in the Republican Party believe in what they tell those who follow them. It's fairly manipulative, but it's working. Socialism is something that will bring said leaders closer to their working class foot soldiers, so they proclaim that it's been tried, doesn't and can't work. They use the fear of losing control to twist issues like health care and child-rearing to their advantage; if somebody who is not you decides you can't see the doctor today, what control do you have left? If you can't have high powered weaponry in your home, you lose control over who you allow into your comfort zone and who you do not.

Blame is a powerful thing. Confused people use their own prejudices to determine who to point the finger at, their own usual suspects. The complexity of the current economic crisis illustrates this point well. I've had discussions with coworkers about who exactly is to blame; in reality, at least in my perception, the blame should be spread among several actors. The Congress of the late nineties failed to act (actually, they did act, but unanimously in the wrong direction), loan-seekers failed to do enough research on their own buying power, and mortgage lenders most certainly took part in predatory lending. My coworkers, however, cite a piece of legislation I couldn't quite find that disallowed the ability to refuse a loan if the recipient was a minority. This seems to be a complete misunderstanding of how the wall fell down in the first place, considering mortgage lenders were desperate to obtain any loan, whether it would default or not, in order to pass the buck along to the banks and get their commission.

The best description of the groupings this past Wednesday that I've heard today was that they are simply a cargo cult. The perceive effectiveness in left-wing protests and emulate them superficially without the underlying effort to back it up. What could possibly be the end result? Workers movements live and die by the concerted efforts and solidarity of the middle class against the wealthy to gather and unionize, to fight for their rights and against income disparity. With half of the nation's workers turned against the other half, the point is drowned and smothered before it even gets its feet off the ground.

Things I Remember

• I remember a shock site failing to scare some friends of mine due to the sluggishness of a school computer.
• I remember a stupid conversation with Andrew about being a jerk at the mall before he fell asleep and I used his computer to meet somebody new named Delilah.
• I remember peaking at 130 wpm on the Keyboarding II typing test in high school.
• I remember our trebuchet, and transporting it with a rickety trailer from Andy's house. On the ramp off of Circle Drive onto the highway, it nearly fell over and we had to stop to tie it back down.
• I remember being deliriously tired at Eric Dean's house and playing Axis and Allies in his living room after the sun rose. It was the one I didn't like as much, the Japan-included "classic" edition.
• I remember seeing a random car crash right outside our dorm in freshman year. A little pop and that was it. Less bravado than I'd always expected.
• I remember Mario pajama pants that were a Christmas gift that I received in the following summer. I thought I'd never use them, but I use them all the time in the winter. Thanks, Amanda.
• I remember driving home from work at Best Buy one night after a downpour and turning into the right turn lane only to have my car begin to float. It was flooded, but continued to work... for another two weeks or so. It finally went kaput when I was driving home on the morning after a small party with work people. It threw a rod through the engine block.
• I remember picking all the M&Ms out of the cookies at school and eating them first. This was because I always liked the rest of the cookie the most.
• I remember the ritual of getting Chipotle and arriving at Andrew's apartment to watch American Gladiators and Heroes.
• I remember racing to Valentino's every day for lunch, and Tom's propensity to eat double the amount everyone else ate.
• I remember wishing I could have gone out in John's canoe when the park flooded rather than being stuck at work. Scott was almost stranded on a stray island, I'm told.
• I remember walking to Andy, Tony, and Matt's apartment during freshman year when Andrew wasn't around and I was bored. On my way one time I saw a girl who I had a crush on from Physics class in Coffman Union, but decided better of it.
• I remember seeing the setup in the aforementioned Tony/Matt/Andy apartment and wondering exactly what the three of them did aside from sitting at the computers. There wasn't much room for much else.
• I remember being amazed with myself for testing into UMTYMP in the sixth grade, an accelerated math program, but quit after the first year ate up all the free time I would have used having fun.
• I remember being very confused by the Science Classroom Building; there are two different entrances for different sets of rooms.
• I remember crossing the Washington Avenue bridge and listening for "ghosts" with Andrew and Leigh, the latter not able to take our impromptu spiritual investigation seriously.
• I remember my job in the dorm - sitting in a computer lab ten hours a week. At least $90/wk was enough for me to have spending money. More valuably for myself and my friends was my ability to print for free at all hours.
• I remember playing Monopoly and Yahtzee with Chelsea and the way she pronounced "mortgage" and "kitty" in her British accent.
• I remember my father being laid off when I was young, and how forlorn he was some days when he was searching for a new job.
• I remember staying up late some semesters because I had no class until late into the afternoon. The only things that were on were Survivorman and How It's Made marathons on the Science Channel.
• Speaking of Les Stroud, I remember seeing his "urban disaster survival" special on the Science Channel. Of specific note was how he threw an object into the glass of a vending machine to obtain food. Believe me, it looked incredibly awkward.
• I remember my first night of living alone.

I Blame Patriarchy

So I've been delving into a lot of reading on the subject of gender, feminism, and patriarchy. A lot of very interesting things come up when you really think about this stuff.

Masculine conditioning in our society obviously points males to maintain certain norms. The stereotype of the male condition is, of course, the unfeeling and stalwart being who deals with things on a completely detached and distance level. The effect has been compared to that of Effexor, an SNRI which essentially begins to block out feelings to the point of a person resembling a zombie.

Men are socialized, in a general sense, to be everything that is specifically not feminine. Concepts like empathy, sharing feelings, and addressing emotional concerns have been virtually eradicated between two heterosexual men. Most guys I know would grow really freaked out and uncomfortable if a male friend approached them and began talking about how hard it's been dealing with being dumped, or how concerned they are that the other is angry. Guys are simply "supposed" to be equipped to deal with these feelings alone rather than showing weakness by going to others.

And what do guy friends do when something devastating happens in their life, say a parent or significant other dying? They go drinking. Not only is drinking a social lubricant, but it provides a way for men to actually connect with one another, providing a sort of plausible deniability in their feelings. This is pretty sad, really. The constant drive for competition in the normative male makes showing vulnerability a horrible thing. I've seen this first hand with a lot of my friends; there are some of them that I could never even imagine opening up to, describing how I feel about certain things, etc. It's kind of sad, really. There are some, though, that are a lot more receptive to it, but it's tough to get them to open up themselves. Maybe it's some kind of fear of exploitation?

I've never had a whole lot of female friends that actually open themselves up. Most of the ones I knew in high school, with a few exceptions, fell into two categories: those popular and high-up ones that always carried a peppy sense of "happiness" without ever seeming to show any sort of chink in their armor, and the ones that seemed to expect that I was the normative male, causing feelings to be pushed off the table. There were then the shining few who would open themselves up, to an extent, but it seemed some things still remained buried. It then became difficult to adjust to actually having someone available to speak about what's driving me to do things. In never really having opportunity to open up before, it's tough to move to doing just that.

Honestly, this may be why I'm so intent on making friends who lie on the opposite side of the gender spectrum. I suppose that such societal norms make it a lot more comfortable to open up to women. The strange thing is, though, the person who I spent a lot of time with in the first few months of living out here was a girl, but for all intents and purposes may as well have been a guy. Everything was shut in, guarded. It just felt horribly awkward whenever I tried to ask her how she felt about essentially anything. Maybe that's merely because it's strange to see a male share his feelings, no matter who's doing the listening?

More thoughts on this later, probably. Gender studies is fascinating.

On the Nature of Life

I've been thinking; there's a shocker. I've been thinking about the people who read this, and if I don't know them, what drives them. Even if I do know them, I'd love to know more. I think in these days, people have so little time to be introspective. They're not forced to sit in the dark at night rather than watch television and browse the internet. I'm a creature of consumption, and I'm consuming media constantly.

But what about you? I have some questions, and if you'd be kind enough to answer them, I'd be delighted. Anonymous or not, go ahead.

What's the biggest risk you've taken thus far in your life? Mine happened very, very recently. I packed up and moved to a place I did not know. A place that did not know me. I began full time employment when I had never been employed full time for more than a three month period. I left something I had never been without for so long; school, family, friends. I knocked down the majority of the castle, and am picking it up again piece by piece. I couldn't be happier with myself, with my adventure.

What do you consider to be your biggest failure? That is, a decision you made that led to a dead end. And, most importantly, how was it good for you? I've had a few. In the past few months I've let people know how I feel rather bluntly. I had a spectacular failure; what was an attempt to take a big step forward took me back to the starting line. I had a wonderful success; that success still remains with me today, and I'm thankful for it. Did I make the wrong choice in either case? I don't think so. I made a choice; every binary choice is half chance. What did it help me with? That's a little harder to pin down, but the events of the past few months have taught me a truth that you never realize as a kid. When you're young, you think that it only goes up from here, that you will be older with more money, more things, more excitement. But there's got to be a climax, a point where you hit your stride, and have attained all you need to be happy. In other words, you can't always get what you want.

How has choice and risk shaped who you are today? I used to be very conservative with choices. I was a kid who would have a crush and never really act on it for fear of taking such a risk. Recently, after rekindling old friendships and creating new ones, I've grown accustomed to taking a diving leap. Of course, it's good to look before such a leap, but you still can't always predict the outcome. I've recently realized that I have to separate things into what I can live without and what I can't. I have to be very picky about what drops into that second bucket; before I would have played it safe and dumped all my thoughts, dreams, and feelings into that category. Now I feel more discerning.

I hope to hear from you soon, readers, however few or many of you are out there. Thanks for reading this.

"Taking a risk, doing things where you actually have a chance to fail... that's what being young is."

- Ira Glass

Conservation of Angular Momentum is Great OR I Miss Physics Class

In other words, I've been listening to music spinning in my chair. Wheee.

I've done some super specific tests (watching a clock and counting rotations) to figure out my angular velocity ω. With my arms held inward, I make five rotations in seven seconds, resulting in an average angular velocity ω1 of 4.488 rad/second. With arms outstretched, I make five rotations in twelve seconds, resulting in an average angular velocity ω2 of approximately 0.417 rotations/second, or 2.618 rad/second.

Now, in both situations, my momentum should be approximately the same - L = Iω, where I is my moment of inertia and L is my angular momentum. To figure out my moment of inertia in the first case, I have to cheat a little and assume I'm a uniformly distributed cylinder. I'll assume the chair I'm using weighs about forty pounds, since it's a computer chair with plenty of steel on it, and seems to weigh about 3-4 times what my ten pound weight weighs. Added with me, that's about 92 kilograms. The me plus chair system has a varying radius, but I'll assume it averages at about fourteen inches, or 0.3556 meters. Thus, the moment of inertia is:

I1 = (mr^2)/2 = (92 kg)(0.3556 m)^2 / 2 = 5.816 kg-m^2

My angular momentum in the first case is therefore:

L = (5.816 kg-m^2)(4.488 rad/s) = 26.106 kg-m^2/s

And I can find out my moment of inertia in the second case by using the same equation:

26.106 kg-m^2/s = I2*(2.618 rad/s)
I2 = (26.106 kg-m^2/s)/(2.618 rad/s)
I2 = 9.97 kg-m^2

The only thing different between the two situations in a practical sense is the radius of my arms; we can find how much I "spread out" my weight with:

9.97 kg-m^2 = (92 kg)(r^2)/2
r^2 = 0.216 m^2
r = 0.466 m

Essentially, it's like my weight was "spread out" by a factor of 1.31 in the second scenario. This seems pretty realistic. Though my arms are a small part of my weight, my "wingspan" is fairly significant and the weight of my outstretched arms can add a lot to the moment of inertia. Think of it like a see-saw, where the further you are from the middle, the more upward force you exert on your partner's side.

Error could be introduced by my shoddy timekeeping, pushing with more or less force in either scenario, and the friction and air resistance differences in the two situations. When my arms are outstretched, air resistance can play a big part. Friction will also obviously have more effect on the second scenario, since I'm spinning for longer. Also I'm not a cylinder. Oh well though, it was just for fun. Need to do some good math here and there, even if it's just a little algebra.

King Corn

I'm sure everybody who's lived in America at any point is familiar with high fructose corn syrup. Virtually every product on the market today which contains any sweetener at all also contains HFCS rather than actual cane sugar. I've been interested in exactly why this happened for awhile now, and thought I'd share some research and thoughts on here.

Before the 1970s, high fructose corn syrup was basically unheard of. Products contained mainly beet or cane sugars, which were generally imported from several countries around the world. The United States keeps nearly all sugar it grows locally, in addition to very large imports of the commodity. This was a perceived problem in the early seventies. Imports were expensive, and importing this large amount of cane and beet sugar was a necessary evil that caused food prices to stay fairly stable. A man named Earl Butz was appointed as the Secretary of Agriculture under Nixon. The goals of the administration included reducing the amount of money the average American spent on food. This would allow them to consume more in the other areas of their lives, stimulating the economy. So how exactly did they decide to do this?

Butz was well known for encouraging a monoculture attitude when it came to farming. That is, he wanted farmers to plant their entire field with the same crop. Now, anyone who's up on their nineteenth century Irish history knows one of the big problems with monocultures - vulnerability to a single pathogen or other irritant. This is circumvented quite well by new farming technologies such as pesticides and genetic engineering, making the issue nearly moot.

Nearly.

Now, what crop did you suppose Butz and the USDA decided to focus on? What crop is the one you're most used to seeing when driving through rural areas in practically any state, in particular the nation's breadbasket? Corn, of course. The United States grows nearly half of corn worldwide. This is mainly because of extensive use of high fructose corn syrup; for this reason, the corn you see growing in most fields is engineered to be perfect for this purpose.

High Fructose Corn Syrup has recently surpassed cane and beet sugar in American consumption.

Modern field corn is different from sweet corn. It has a distinctly chalky taste, as it has sacrificed the majority of its nutrition (proteins and minerals) for starch, which makes it more useful for being broken down. This is not a unique phenomenon to corn - most crops now are engineered not for nutrition, but for yields. Under Nixon and Butz, farms were encouraged to buy and sell in bulk. Subsidies, which had been based on the size of farms in the past, were now based on yield. While this may seem reasonable at first, if one looks at the practical effects, it means the more efficient a farmer is in growing crops, the more money the government bestows upon him. Thus, it's no longer a goal to farm nutritious or high quality crops, but rather to grow as much as possible.

The shift in governmental policy coincided with the rise of big agriculture business. Farmers were advised by the USDA to "get big or get out" by Butz, and the end of feasibility for the family farm fast approached. Large corporations were able to purchase chemicals and equipment in bulk, saving them millions. Small and family farms struggled to keep up with the ridiculous efficiency of these titans, and were quickly forced to tap out of the business for good. In turn, the corporations used farming techniques like genetic engineering to increase the size of their yield (and decrease the nutrition of their crops) and thereby increase the size of their subsidy check.

Americans noticed that the quantity of food went up for their dollar while completely blind to the quality rapidly diminishing. Obesity has since become an epidemic as the demand was increased by the supply. Larger portions of cheaper, less nutritious food were offered to the masses; more food was necessary to supplement that lack of nutrition. Hence, obesity has become America's most prevalent health problem. People not only now have extremely high caloric intake, but the computer revolution has caused sedentary lifestyles to become the norm.

And it's no surprise that when the makers of the documentary King Corn had their hair tested, they averaged 56% corn in composition. The documentary sees two college friends and their quest to know the corn industry inside and out. In the process, they move to an Iowa farm to grow an acre of corn, receiving $28 in Federal subsidy for their effort. The two plant 31,000 kernels of corn in eighteen minutes thanks to modern technology; they spend about two hours farming over the entire year. Of course, owning a thousand or fifteen-hundred acres requires far more effort, but not nearly as much as it used to. The film is amazingly informative and I highly recommend it.

The corn watertower in my hometown of Rochester, Minnesota.

Digg Annoys Me

So I came across a thread about a new method the ESRB is using to get better ratings out to parents for video games. Essentially they have a website where they display a bunch of descriptions of games, telling about their content with somewhat of a context. For example, instead of just looking at TF2 and seeing it it's rated "M" and a couple of descriptions why, it could say something like "a first person shooter where two teams compete with one another in an online environment. Contains significant amounts of blood and guts in a cartoonish context." et cetera.

Now, I don't see anything wrong with this. So a regulatory agency wants to put something out there that's pretty easy to access and all in one place. Nothing changes for the average person who buys video games, right? It's not even that they're making it harder for minors to purchase games of any stripe. But of course, there is somehow still irrational hatred for the ESRB trying to deliver more information to parents to allow them to make a more informed decision:

Why bother? NOTHING will satisfy the nanny groups until every game has been turned into a PG game. Sure she praises it now, until she needs to rile up her base and starts going on the evil of games again. I think we have learned a valuable lesson to how to stop the political madness. Get a campaign started to Give money to the opposition party during election cycles and explain exactly WHY you are doing it. If enough gamers/free speech supporters/etc band together and give money to political groups who support OUR view, politicians will quickly change their tune.

This kind of slippery slope argument is really, really stupid. Sorry, I'm not fan of censorship, not at all, but taking steps to inform more people is never bad.

There's always a backlash in the video game industry to school shootings, and video game advocates always say the same thing - that parents should be more responsible for what their kids are exposed to. This is true: parents are chiefly responsible for such things. The thing about this story is the fact that it allows parents to make more informed decisions. It doesn't restrict free speech. It doesn't make games "evil".

There's a reason why slippery slope is a fallacy. Way to go, Digg.

Speaking of Digg and their blind support for everything Ron Paul, apparently he appears on every "Choose Your Own Cabinet" list that the New York Times posted. He peaks at #3 for Treasury Secretary and is #7 on Secretary of State, where for Defense, Homeland Security, and Attorney General he's somewhere in the 4-6 area. People are really stupid. At least Noam Chomsky made it in the top 20 for Defense and State:

Foggy posted:
Would [Noam Chomsky] be better in defense or state

The New Zorker posted:
merge them, dep't. of power/linguistics

Collegiate Adventures

Obviously, throughout my collegiate academic career, projects and labs were a part of the Electrical Engineering lifestyle. Returning to the University of Minnesota campus and conversing with some team members on said projects jarred some great memories and late nights of working on these sorts of things.

1) Calculator.java - it may seem innocuous and simple. It may seem utterly useless. And it was all these things, but it was really the first programming project I went through that felt complex enough for me to be proud of. The goal of this project was to create a Postfix Calculator. Essentially what this meant was to make a calculator in Java Swing that would take input like 3, 4, and + and spit out 7, for example. It honestly wasn't too hard, and creating the Swing frame was a fairly involved and interesting process. This is also one of the first times where a nasty habit of mine began to rear its ugly head: I am a code hog. I get on rolls where I will simply sit down and code for 5-6 hours at a time unheeded. This means I finish projects rapidly and sometimes when group members are not available to observe or help. This project specifically exemplified that, when I did a good 70% of the project before my group members were even involed. Oops!


2) The Magic Cubes - ah yes, our Senior Project. I have to explain this quite frequently to people who ask me about big projects I had completed during my time at the U of M. Essentially, they were intended to be an interactive piece of furniture, which was initially a large plastic couch. When the couch showed up and lacked transparency, we sent it back and instead ordered a set of three cubes which were intended to be lit from within as dual-purposed lightning and seating elements. These proved much more suitable for the task, and we set to work creating multi-coned inner pieces to which LEDs could be affixed, and the cones could (mostly) direct lights to a single side.

The LEDs we used had a ridiculous three watt power maximum. For power transformation, we used a single ATX power supply which peaked at a couple hundred watts, which was more than sufficient for our purposes; namely, fifteen of the KingBright RGB LEDs. The LEDs were driven by PWM generators made by Texas Instruments, which in turn were driven by Arduino microcontrollers. The Arduinos were ridiculously easy to figure out and program, even with the serial communications required by the PWM driver. Sensors were also integrated that could "hear" sound and "see" changes in lightning, allowing the piece to react to human interaction.

Regardless, the entire thing worked out pretty well, which a vast array of colors available for each side of each cube. It was fun to work on, but there were several long days and late nights trying to finish the stupid things. Matt Oehrlein managed to do some work on them over the summer, which can be viewed here.


3) GeneriQuest 4000 - another programming assignment that I worked on with some close friends. Our task was to author a MUD, a text-based network-enabled and multiplayer game, which was original and interesting. Obviously, the largest criteria was to create something that allowed several people to play using telnet clients. What we created was somewhat like the run-of-the-mill fantasy MUDs, with wizards and swords and MOBs.

The overall coding was certainly bloated and filled with the possibility of buffer overflow exploits, but the game actually worked and could be played to completion. From start to finish with three people, the game took about forty-five minutes. The classes, Wizard, Fighter, and Cleric, had to be meticulously balanced against one another lest one be overpowered and overshadow the rest. It was a lot of fun and a little strange to have a spreadsheet with different attacks available to each class, crunching numbers about scaling options. Also quite amazing was the beta testing phase. One incident which sticks in mind is when I was testing higher level behavior and buffed a character for Jason. Essentially it allowed him to kill a level one or two player in one hit fairly easily. Andy logged in only to be instantly cut down by a single attack from Jason. The game then became how fast could Andy run around and dodge Jason, who was hell bent on smacking the crap out of him.

Obviously, the game had some big flaws - for instance, the only way we could make fighting monsters even remotely fair for the monsters was to have them counter-attack whenever a player made an attack on them. This made the Cleric class fairly essentially, since they were the only one that could replenish hit points quickly. We also made (what I thought was) a cool tick system, where regeneration and attack rate were throttled by a counter, which I believe was on a two or three second timer. Players could only attack once per tick, and would regenerate health once every few ticks. We also hard coded the game map instead of making it more dynamic, which was certainly a mistake, but in retrospect we had spent enough time on it. We won the "most original" award from our professor, conferring to us ten bonus points, which clued us in that we may have spent exactly the right amount of time on the little C program.