goats: strip from October / 29 / 2003

I have entirely too many T shirts. I was cleaning out the closet the other day, looking for formalware, (I have to go to a memorial service) and I realized that Tshirts are vastly over represented proportionally to other clothing items.

I began worrying whether I had too many because I was falling victim to marketing, as Tshirt sellers are wide and more numerous than vendors of other clothingstuffs. But upon reflection, most of my shirts were obtained for free or from friends/family.

I'm often worried that I'm not spending money or time properly, and check and recheck my past actions and expenditures, though I'm rarely ever surprised or ashamed at what I find. I suppose if I had more free time, or discretionary money, the purchases that made less sense would begin to occur more. As it is, about the only thing I do too much of is drive around. Gas is expensive.

I have been planning for some time, to move to a different city, but things keep being pushed back. I'm trying to achieve some measure of financial independence so I can spend more time doing things I prefer to. I'm also auditing some math courses at the local college, to try and plug my stunning ignorance in this area.

I suppose I shouldn't feel that it's time wasted, I'm still pretty young, and need to learn and establish in order to be more effective. But setup is tedious. And learning is fun, but somewhat depressing occasionally, as learning sometimes consists mostly of mapping the area and depth of your ignorance. Useful information, but still unhappy.

I may never be good at exploratory coding, but it won't be for lack of trying.

Inertial Electrostatic Confinement (IEC)

There are such interesting things to be found on the internet. Note that the title is a little misleading. Inertial Electrostatic Confinement devices generally produce very little fusion, and generally low power levels. It's as a theoretical technology that it is interesting. I'm not aware of any IEC devices with cores much above a meter in diameter. There's just no money in it, at the moment. Everybody wants to make pebble-bed fission reactors and tokomak fusion reactors, at the moment.

It is perhaps unfortunate that IEC devices can be built so small. If the boundaries to entry were higher, we might see more funding and research in it. Sadly, 'real scientists' rarely have time to experiment with things within the reach of common man. Even though a proper IEC device would need to be enormous to reach the break-even point, the fact that small versions can be built by ordinary mortals may have poisoned the concept for serious investigation. It is similar to the great gulf that exists between commercial aerospace and amateur designs. You have essentially Estes rockets, large Estes rockets, custom large Estes rockets, and then a great gulf of nothing, until the large expensive commercial, government and military launch vehicles. Little research gets done on the gulf between them, and no bridging technologies are created. Some of this is being rectified, by the relatively new Xprize efforts, and new entities like SeaLaunch, but it's still very stratified. And uptake of new technologies is minimal. Anything from the amateur end is badly integrated, and deemed useless. Anything from the government end is so expensive and mired in existing systems, it never achieves a useful genericity.

But, I suppose there are vested interests in making developed technology seem arcane and complex, to justify research expenditures. And amateurs are hard pressed to develop general technologies.

Were I an idealist, I would say that the amateurs will be the ones to close the gap. As open-source internet communities spread from software to hardware, they'll embrace and extend out to large scale technological development.

But the scaling between a software project and something with a few hundred thousand moving parts, and spanning several scientific and/or engineering disciplines is daunting.

And amateurs seem far better suited to immerse themselves in psuedoscientific stupors, building and rebuilding half-imagined perpetual motion machines, antigravity generators, and historical replicas. Interesting that lots of people in this vein seem to refer back to the research of Nikolai Tesla. I've become increasingly of the opinion that he's become even more of a personage of borrowed authority than Einstein and Galileo, these days. There's no easier path to renegade science respectability than conjuring an analogy between your downtrodden theories and Tesla's mad and fantastic electronic designs.

If I see one more design based on a fundamental misunderstanding of angular momentum involving magnets or electricity, I may give up entirely.

I'm of the opinion that some sort of organized effort would be necessary. Some forceful extension of amateur science into the realm of real exploratory research. Sadly(or happily) our social and technological situation is hardly stable, and things continue to change rapidly. So such a movement may occur or be obsoleted without much forewarning.

Penny Arcade!

I have to say, this AT&T cellphone I have is the worst user experience I've ever had. The coverage is terrible, the phone is cheap, and the access sporadic. I would encourage folk to look elsewhere.

I've also had reports that AT&T's data service is not as fast as advertised, showing little advantage over the frontrunner of mobile data, Sprint Vision.

It's good to know someone else feels my pain.

happy thanksgiving, enjoy your obesity-risk activities.

For those who celebrate christmas, prepare your shopping lists.

I have dreamed great dreams
and I have seen them taken.
No, not taken, denied.
Dragged wailing into day's light
left to die in harsh contrast to waking life.

I have seen great cities,
unknown, rising from the plain
growing new before my eyes.
Towers and spires, none the same
telling a tale of lives I cannot follow.

I have woken to dawn,
fading visions into memories I curse,
hating them for hints of loss.
Wanting to wake again, back
back where loss is memory.

There are no roads back
no paths to follow
only failing memory.
Only fading hopes.

I have lived great triumphs,
victories without war,
friends I never lose.
My influence spread gently,
designs and ideas accepted,
my plans writ large upon the world.

Plans and triumphs that grow
live, dance, and change.
Giving me great surprise,
children grown beyond intent.
Joy and Satisfaction.

I have seen my plans of triumph fade
obsoleted, grown past.
My memories of them poisoned
by new eyes, seeking every flaw.
Nothing left but hints
marking old mistakes.

These things I remember
like glances of stories
too fast and light to hold them,
only scents of their meaning left.

I curse my memory in both directions.

I cannot hold my past self fast
the younger man who dreamed great things
the details slip and splotch
even two days past I struggle to contain
the tiny pieces of my lost dreams.
I cannot quite lie
that nothing of me dies with them.

But these memories burn me.
Better to be nothing,
than remember enough to regret,
than to feel enough to weep for loss.
I would rip past days from me
deny my past, forget my dreams
to live in peace
free of comparison.

Both paths are denied.
I lose myself in fading memories,
my past dreams and old hopes tatter and are gone.
Left are memories of memories
just holes that held something, their shapes hinting at the loss,
the blackness there telling me
telling me I too am gone, in measure.
Yesterday's dreamer is dead.
I am all that remain.

So today too, I will dream.
I will dream great dreams,
I will see great cities,
I will live great triumphs,
and I will remember them,
failingly, haltingly, in tattered record
to pass them to tomorrow.
So he too will despair,
and he too will worry that something of who he was
lives in those fading things.

There is another hope
another dream.
It does not visit me in visions.
but lies above them.
Today I am upon a hill
I climbed part of it yesterday
tomorrow I will climb another.
And I must dream, must hope
each hill brings me closer
to where it comes from.

That each day's dying
and each day's steps trace a direction
a path of lives and plans
that points to a man
some day
some when
a man wearing something like my face
with something like my name
who carries some dim piece of me
a man who needs not fear memory
who fears no dream of fairer places.
a man who has come home.

Ah, what a week.

My friend Loren has a child, healthy and good thus far. An early problem with jaundice has been averted with modern technology(a UV lamp). I am very happy for him and Liz, and simultaneously very discomfited by the association of age this brings up. I am not that old yet.

Great fun this week watching Kasparov battle the top computer chess program again. The final battle will be on Tuesday. watch at x3dchess website here. Good chess commentary on the match archives too.

Interesting things happening in the Go world too, as you can see at Gobase.org. The male and female holders of the Honinbo title are getting married! and Japan lost the first Internet Japan-China match. Get on IGS, for good internet play, certainly better than I can handle.

on the IRC side, we at #immortal on irc.lucifer.com got to talk to a guest speaker today, Mike Treder, the Executive Director of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology. Mr. Treder was very gracious in answering questions and exploring interesting ideas. the log should be available on the main page of the Imminst.org website. It was very interesting, and quite a lot of fun. The CRN publication to read is the new nanofactory feasibility study at jetpress.

er, ah, and, yeah.

I'm doing okay. In an interesting side note, I started taking Strattera a few days ago, some subjective difference, we'll see how a month or two of trials go, and I'll submit a more detailed report then.

Oh, and everybody is required to go to the library and get the book "Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the way we make things" or you can just buy it here.