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Wednesday, February 28th, 2007
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Tuesday, February 20th, 2007
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Thursday, November 9th, 2006
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Just got back from the Sushi and Sake Fest at the Westin. That makes two nights we've gone out on the town THIS WEEK. It was a good time and the money went to a cause, but I think it's the last time we drop $100+ to eat sushi standing up.
On Tuesday we saw a concert and had dinner at The Triple Door. I'll be going back there soon. Nice nightclub, and every table has a great view of the stage. Food was pretty good too.
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Wednesday, October 25th, 2006
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Because I just signed up for twitter, so I have yet another way to post useless crap: GoodBrain.
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Sunday, October 22nd, 2006
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...bagel, smoked salmon and cream cheese for breakfast.
Urp.
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Thursday, October 19th, 2006
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So much for my early summer ambition to start posting in this journal again. I've been posting a bit more often in my blog, but I remain ambivalent about it, about whether I want both a public (geekfun.com) and a private space (this LJ), and about how to divide the two.
I've also been exploring many of the various social networking sites, with an eye towards how Reed's alumni association can do better outreach to alumni online. I've set up accounts on:
- facebook (445 Reedies, most current students and recent grads)
- friendster (841 purported Reedies)
- tribe (234 purported Reedies)
- orkut (157 purported Reedies)
- myspace (875 purported Reedies)
I haven't invested any effort in my profiles, nor am I likely to until I have some idea of what I want to do with them. The interesting thing is that there are a few people I've seen on multiple networks who seem to check in and post updates to all their profiles with some regularity.
I'm thinking I need to recruit someone who already spends time on these things to start colonizing them for the alumni association.
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Wednesday, June 21st, 2006
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I think I'm going to start using this live journal again. I think it's a better place for little updates than my blog at Geekfun.com.
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It's amazing how simple things can be if you take a moment to consider what's really important.
I'm working on creating a datamodel for a new application. It's pretty simple, and I'd just started, but I already had a handful of little pieces of metadata as part of the model that I thought were going to be useful and important. Each piece of metadata created a number of questions that I wasn't really ready to answer, so I took a break to think about what I was doing.
I sat for a while considering how all the pieces should fit together and then decided that maybe I should sit down and outline how the features of the app were going to evolve. What was the smallest amount of functionality that would be useful? What should I add next, etc?
In about 5 minutes I'd filled a page in my notebook with an outline of what should be done in each of 5 major phases. Most of the little metadata pieces weren't going to be necessary until the 5th phase, and some of them clearly weren't going to be important until the application actually had a significant number of users.
So, I came back and whacked away at all the unnecessary complexity I'd added. Things are much simpler now. I'm sure I'll have to repeat this process often.
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Thursday, March 24th, 2005
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Just peeked in here to check out whats going on in the reedlj community. At some point soon I really need to study if and how recent grads are using the web to connect with eachother in new towns.
Hi everybody!
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Saturday, November 30th, 2002
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Saturday, November 2nd, 2002
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Sunday, September 29th, 2002
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I am currently on hiatus from this Livejournal hosted weblog. I am not sure I will return. In the meantime I am posting to http://www.geekfun.com via blogger.
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It is interesting reading about alternative trasportation fuels since there are so many ways to assess their viability.
I am tending to favor technologies that, in practice:
0. Promote general energy efficiency
like hybrids
1. Cause no-net gain in atmospheric C02.
Renewable carbon-based fuels like bio-diesel fit, as does solar/wind & hydro hydrogen production. I am suspicious of CO2 sequestration technologies because I think there is a lot of incentive to save money by dumping c02 rather than sequestering it.
2. Reduce dependence on fossil fuels (which reinforces #1).
In the long term, the future for fossil fuels is uncertain. In the near term Fossil fuels all have greenhouse gas implications and petroleum fuels increace our dependance and our involvement in unstable regions.
3. Builds on our existing technologies and infrastructure.
Fuels that are liquids at atmospheric temperatures and pressures are easy to store, transport and dispense. Hydrogen requires a substatial new infrastrucute. Ethanol & Biodiesel can be stored, transported, dispensed and consumed using existing infrastrucuture & deployed technologies with minor or no revision.
Powerplants that make use of such fuels are already commercialized and highly refined.
Hybrid cars take advantage of the existing infrastructure & internal combustion technology to deliver improved fuel efficiency with the convenience of an ordinary car. Burning alternative liquid fuels in them creates a compelling package.
Biomass fuels make use of agriculture.
4. Allow for and encourage continued evloution
Existing hybrids can transition to fuel cells as a hydrogen infrastructure evolves, or as technology for converting liquid fuels to hydrogen improves.
Existing hybrids can make use of alternative liquid fuels.
Existing hybrids benifit from improvements in internal combustion engine technology, control circuitry and electric motors.
Existing hybrids create economic incentives for improving battery technology, control circuitry, electricity generation and electric motors.
More expensive fuels create incentives for more efficient vehicles.
In the short term, this leads me to favor hybrid cars and biodiesel since they do the best at fitting in to our existing market. The long term is much muddier. I remain unconvinced that a hydrogen economy is the way to go. Theoretically, it offers a much more efficient use of energy than burning hydrocarbon fuels, but how efficient will it be? It still requires taking some energy source and converting it to hydrogen. That hydrogen is then converted to electricity, which is converted to motion.
What if something comes along that lets us use hydrocarbon fuels as efficiently, or lets us store electricity as densely as we can store hydorgen? It seems to me that the timeframe for a hydrogen economy is large enough that alternatives could emerge.
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I'm reading this article about GMs big bet on fuel-celled cars.
They are taking a radical approach, driven by the realization that a fuel-cell car needn't be a conventional car with a fuel-cell and a big electric motor in place of the traditiona internal combustion engine.
Instead, the have created a platform with 4 wheels attached. There are no breaks or traditional steering linkages. Everything is drive by wire. The chassis give tremendous flexibility in the body layout.
GM thinks that by discarding traditional car design, they can make cars more modular and in so doing, save a lot of money which might offset the extra expense of the fuel-cell.
They then make a leap, that I don't quite understand, unless this really does let them get the cost of cars down, to the idea that this may allow them to offer cars to a larger world wide market, to people who can't even conceive of buying a traditional automobile. (I wonder, maybe, if what they mean is that they would do this by selling the cars below cost in countries without gasoline infrastructure (like china) thereby freezing out competitors.)
So, I'm just thinking of putting this together with Ford's idea that maybe transportation will be a utility, provided by the car companies, which isn't so far fetched when you consider how popular leasing is these days, and when you consider that auto companies provide the financing for a lot of cars.
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Wouldn't it be cool if windows audio let you set volume levels on a per-application or application group basis? I am sick of alerts blaring out when I turn up the audio to listen to music.
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Neo-noir=who turned on the lights!?!?!
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I have long advocated a nice fried appetizer before every meal as an important weight loss tool. This advice was proffered for laughs and shock-value, but I was always at least half serious.
When fat hits the lower intestine, it triggers the release of a hormone that gives you a feeling of fullness and satiation. So, it stands to reason, I reasoned, that a good shot of fat in advance of a meal would leave you less hungry for what was to follow.
I thought of this today, because I was just reading an article in the new york times about the new credibility cast on the once radical Atkins diet, and the increacing likelyhood that the mainstream guidelines about diet emphasizing carbs over meat and fat, may in fact be part of the problem with obesity in this country.
The Atkins diet seems quite decadent, by some measures. It promotes the consumption of protien and fat and prohibits the consumption of refined carbohydrates, including bread, pasta, rice, sugar and the like. Vegetables have come to be tolerated, but only just. Upon closer inspection though its decadance is compromised by its prohibition of desserts.
The theory behind the diet is that our bodies are i'll adapted to consuming carbohydrates. They cause our bloodsugar levels to climb dramatically, and our bodies respond by dumping insulin into the bloodstream. These high insulin levels are said to have a variety of ill effects, from promoting storage of fat, to desensitizing the body to insulin and thus promoting diabetes.
This is the result, it is argued, of the fact that our bodies evolved to a hunter gatherer lifestyle, and haven't had a chance to adapt to the carbohydrate rich diet of an agricultural (or post agricultural) society.
Certainly this last point seems quite reasonable, and, it appears that some of the mechanisms behind the other assertions are looking more likely.
This is going to be a big fat mess for science . In some ways, it shows why the scientific method is so successful, because, old assumptions are constantly examined and re-examined in light of new evidence.
I worry though, that this isn't going to play well among the general public. It is going to appear that the scientists were wrong, that the Drs lied to them, that the Drs made them fat with their bad advice.
It is going to get worse because this is going to be a battle of various entrenched interests, all of them claiming scientific authority while also being driven by less nobel motivations. There will be pride and power. There will be America's puritanical streak. There will be vegetarians & malthusians. There will be cattlemen.
Of course, this represents a real opportunity too. Science is often viewed as cold and boring, but consider the possibilities such a controversy can raise. Think of the drama. This could be great.
It won't be simple as everyone should do this, or everyone should do that. I am going to bet, that most people don't have the proper biochemistry to live long and prosper with a high-carb diet. I am going to bet though, that there is a small but significant number of people who are suited to such a diet.
The interesting thing, I think, is whether their numbers are increacing, or whether they are holding relatively constant. In simple terms, this would seem to be an favorable adaptation. Human life is no longer simple though.
For one thing, many of the obvious ill effects (assuming Atkins is right) don't generally hit until later in life. People have had the chance to breed. By the time they suffer and die, their children are likely largely grown and self sufficient.
In some ways, modern medicine reverses this somewhat. By prolonging life, at great expense, it may put the burdens of diet induced ill-health back on younger generations, deceacing their own abiligy to successfully raise children. Of course, medicine is good enough these days that that burden is probably small compaired to the advantage of having the older generation alive and earning. Plus, health insurance collectivises much of the burden.
It also isn't clear (to me, at least, and I admit I need to learn more) that, ultimately, the Atkin's diet doesn't bring its own set of problems, or simply cause many of the same problems through different means. I'd bet that, in the old days, people were lucky to live long enough to be killed by their diet (other than starving, or being poisoned). Why would people be any better suited to a diet of plenty of fat and protein than they are to a diet of plenty of carbohydrates?
Did we evolve to cope with always having enough to eat? Why would we?
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What global economic conditions would be required to recreate the capacity and capability of the electronics and semi conductor manufacturing currently concenrated in Taiwan, and would those conditions (still) exist in the aftermath of the distruction ofTaiwan's production capacity by a few nuclear weapons.
This question is inspired by a bit of an interview of the author of a peice in Harper's called "Unmade in America" which talks about the risks inherent in the global supply chains adopted by corporations at a rapid pace over the last decade.
These supply chains have eliminated reundancy in the name of efficiency. Operations are increacingly decentralized, but individual operational functions are increacingly centralized. Rather than having two plants building fuel injectors, GM may only have one. Rather than keeping a stock of fuel injectors on hand at engine manufacturing facilities, GM relies on just in time manufactring and delivery to make sure that engine manufacturing continues apace.
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Thursday, June 27th, 2002
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So, what's to stop someone from creating a trumped up situation to establish legal precedent?
For example. The RIAA just won a million dollar settlement against a company because the company's employees were swapping MP3 on the company network.
That seemed like a lot of money. And I began to wonder, what if the company was a front, set up by the RIAA. What if their infringement was engineered for the legal precedent it could set and what if their defense was intentionally lame.
A little investigation suggests that the company the RIAA sued probably isn't a front. But...
What is to prevent our civil courts from being gamed in this manner?
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