Recently we have run out of a critical supply. No, there's still enough oil for the moment, the electric grid is working fine, at least in my area of the world, and there's no shortage of food where distribution is not being deliberately sabotaged. We're short of IP addresses.
When the current familiar IP scheme that you're used to was invented in 1981, networked computers were kind of rare. It was though that the 4 billion addresses possible under the system could never possibly be used up, since networked computers were primarily owned by governments and major educational institutions. In the early days, addresses were handed out like candy, with groups getting a class A (everything starting with one particular number, like all addresses starting with 12".) all to themselves just because. In addition, the entire 127 block (from 127.0.0.1 to 127.255.255.255) were all allocated to "loopback" meaning "Don't actually use the network because it's right in this computer right here." You should only need one address for that.
Later, when more and more countries were going online, it became apparent that since there were 5 billion people in the world, who all wanted to go online, and only 4 billion possible addresses, that something would have to give. More justification had to be given to be assigned large blocks of addresses instead of small ones.
This was then made worse by devices, as well as individual people and servers, also wanting IP addresses for projects like an Internet-connected refrigerator. (The refrigerator can report its state to, say, the grocery store, so instead of you ordering milk, the refrigerator does it for you.)
By last year, justification had to be given to get any sort of IP address at all. Groups with large allocations were asked to give them back. This faired poorly -- generally the response was to come up with dumber and dumber schemes to "prove" why ownership of their entire allocation was "necessary." Some organizations did in fact give their blocks back, most notably Stanford University.
So next month, we run out completely. If you want to go online -- well, too bad, all slots are full. Now what?
Thankfully, this whole thing was seen well in advance, and a new specification, IPv6 was written in 1998. (version 5 was a beta that turned out to not be very useful.) IPv6 increased the address size by four times, which due to the way that computers stores numbers, exponentially increases the possible addresses. IPv6 has enough addresses to give every atom in the solar system, if not the visible universe, its own unique address. I won't say that running out is impossible -- I suppose that in the deep future we could develop some sort of teleportation and quantum entanglement technology that makes us have a galaxy-spanning empire of hexadecitellions of people, but it won't happen anytime soon unless we're REALLY stupid about how we allocate addresses.
To use IPv6, your operating system has to support it, your software has to support it, and your ISP has to support it. Generally the las step is the sticking point. My company offers browsing customers a hybrid stack, where you have an IPv6 address, but IPv4-only websites will see you as this one address that the ISP has reserved. That address is a node that understands both protocols, and can route between the two.
China is the most excited by this news, as when IPv4 was first written, most of China didn't have electricity, much less computers, and so they were allocated extremely few IP addresses. Since pretty much everyone in China wants to go online, they need to go IPv6, or it's just not going to happen.
Everyone should try to go to IPv6, but there are some transition costs, and I think we're going to have to struggle with it for quite a while, and the pain is higher because we waited so long.
Showing posts with label Internet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Internet. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 30, 2014
Monday, October 28, 2013
Tommy Edison's questions for sighted people
Film critic Tommy Edison hasn't actually seen a single movie in his entire life, although he's heard lots of them, due to the fact that he is blind, and has been since he was born. He also enjoys photography, thanks to assisting technology.
On his youtube channel, he recently asked a number of questions for sighted people. Though people have already provided him with answers, I also thought it would be a good idea to answer him as well.
On his youtube channel, he recently asked a number of questions for sighted people. Though people have already provided him with answers, I also thought it would be a good idea to answer him as well.
Hello, I am Professor Preposterous. I am 33 years old, and have vision, albeit with somewhat severe nearsightedness. This means my vision is distorted past the range of my hands or so if I don't wear glasses.
How do you remember all those colors?
In general, I would say that there are millions of small variations on a small set of colors. A fashion designer might be able to tell the difference between "aquamarine" and "periwinkle," but to me both are just "blue." I can tell that they're a different shade of blue, but I don't see the point in differentiating further. To make a metaphor, I would compare colors to textures. A wooden object feels different to the touch than say, a plastic one, or a felt one, and if you pay a lot of attention, you might be able to tell if the wood is, say, pine, instead of spruce.
Color is actually due to the frequency of light that bounces off an object, light being an electromagnetic radiation that vision detects, the way that hearing detects compression waves in the air. There are seven basic ones:
- Red: 700 - 635 nm
- Orange: 635 - 590 nm
- Yellow: 590 - 560nm
- Green: 560 - 490nm
- Blue: 490 - 450nm
- Purple: 450 - 400nm
There's also black and white, which depend on if it is described with an additive color system (like a spotlight or a computer monitor) or a subtractive one (like paints). With additive systems, all the colors make white, and no colors make black. With a subtractive system, all the colors together makes black, and white has to be prepared separately. My computer monitor uses an additive system that can make basically every color there is from three: red, blue, and green.
Also, I would be very surprised if you were unable to provide me a similar level of detail about texture, or sound.
What's it like to be able to look at a room and know exactly where everything is? My god, that's genius.
Extremely orienting. Except that vision only shows you where everything is in a room if the room is sorted first -- vision is blocked by the first object with color that it encounters, so if something is behind something else, a sighted person can only see the thing in front. Sight also only works forward -- we see what's behind us about as well as you do, which is to say not at all. For what's behind us, we have to rely on hearing, or perhaps mirrors.
While in theory, vision's distance is unlimited, closer things provide more detail than further away things, any obstacle blocks further sight, and some of the things vision tells us are just plain outright lies. For example, the sky is not actually a thing -- there's air over our heads, but vision tells us that it's a large dome-shaped object at a large distance away, maybe 20 miles. Or the horizon, where the sky and the ground seems to touch if there are no large objects blocking it, which appears to be about 8 miles away, but moves with us if we move.
So, how come you stop and look at a hot chick? Guys at a red light, they'll stop traffic!
Vision provides a lot of information at once. Sometimes this is kind of distracting, especially with our lower brain, the one we got from lizards, hijacking everything else to think up pickup lines until we realize that we've been staring and have lost all chance of relating to her normally.
How do you remember what things look like? I mean, there are so many things. Like cars. How do you know the particular make of a car? Or vegetables? Fruit? Food?
Things don't really change all that often. If I were to hand a random object off my desk to you, you would probably recognize it instantly, because it feels the same as the other ones that you've encountered before. Let's say that I hand you an apple. The moment it touches your hand, you'd probably recognize it. Vision is the same -- seeing an object gives us the general shape, the color information, and hints at the texture of the object. Having seen similar objects before, we recognize them.
If you were somehow able to touch and feel every car extensively, every time you passed them, I think you would start to recognize particular models after about a month. Every car of a particular year, make, and model is shaped exactly the same. The color is different due to auto paint, but the texture is the same and the shape is the same. We recognize them because we've seen them before.
The same with food. Apples have the same general shape as other apples. Bananas have the same shape as other bananas.
Fashion blows my mind. I mean, you choose to wear something that looks good rather than feels good?
As someone in the applied sciences, fashion doesn't work well with me either. But people who wear things that look good usually like the attention that they get for doing so enough that they're willing to put up with a surprising amount of discomfort.
What's it like to go somewhere all by yourself?
On one hand, liberating. On the other, lonely. I was kind of surprised with the idea that you couldn't travel alone.
What about driving?
I learned to drive 17 years ago. When I first started, it was unbearable -- having to keep track of everything and do so many things at once took more brainpower than I had available. Over time, I got used to it as more and more things became habit and could be relegated to the unconscious, until I could drive and listen to the radio and muse about philosophy all at the same time. Cell phones are a bad idea though. And texting -- texting is just asking for trouble.
What's it like to walk around in the snow?
Snow doesn't support your weight and sinks when you step on it, with an annoying crunching sound. It's also super easy to get lost, the massive amount of reflected light gives sighted people a headache, it's wet, and it's cold. In my opinion snow can go die in a fire.
How do you not see something that happens right in front of your face?
Vision uses a huge amount of brainpower all by itself, so if you do it, your brain takes a lot of shortcuts. A sighted person can see something and not recognize it, or could be facing the wrong direction, because vision only works in front of you. Anything above or below, or behind, will just not be seen at all. If your sighted friend is facing the wrong way, his vision is just not going to help.
How do you lose sight of something? I mean, like you drop money on the floor and lose it?
Sight only works one layer deep, as it were. If the money goes under or behind something, sight will tell us that nothing's there. If money falls into the sofa, and we look at the sofa, we'll only see the sofa, not the money. Sometimes moving around can give us new information, like putting our head to the floor before looking at the sofa (oh hey, there's that quarter!)
How do you lose your car in a parking lot?
Unfortunately, cars are not all that unique. One particular make, year, and model of car, in a particular color, is as specific as it gets. There's at least three cars in any particular lot that exactly match the description of my car, so I'll walk to one and....this is somebody else's car. Damn it!
How do you miss the exit while driving? Wouldn't that be blatantly obvious?
With distractions, usually. You have to look at quite a lot of things very quickly, and the recognition step of vision sometimes comes too late due to the speed. Okay, avoid that car, check the rear view mirror, check the side, see the sign, avoid that other car, wait, that sign was indicating my exit. Damn!
Thanks for the questions, Tommy. Tommy maintains both a channel about his experiences with blindness and how he deals with it, and his reviews of movies.
Sunday, November 11, 2012
Technology Sociology
Yesterday, during my work break, I learned of a cool thing, and a tragic thing. The cool thing is that a young father, wanting to share his love of the Zelda series of video games with his daughter, has been reading the text for her. As the daughter would prefer that her avatar in video games be female, he has been changing the references to the hero, Link, being a boy, to being a girl. To preserve this once she does learn to read, he hex edited the rom and re-burned it with the references all changed. Some awkwardness ensued, as all text had to remain the exact same length, lest all pointers thereafter become wrong, corrupting the entire ROM. Link is ambiguous looking enough so that this works out.
At first, the comments that the father received were admiring, especially from young women who wished that they could have enjoyed media in this way. However, after the blog entry had been up for about a day, suddenly a storm of people came in infuriated that he altered the original game, feeling that he was somehow ruining it. A veritable torrent of rants, whines, and complaints that he was infringing Nintendo's copyright ensued. Perhaps these people were trolling, or perhaps they felt that any modification of their favorite thing detracted from it, even hypothetically, but it did make me wonder one thing about the world of technology.
Is the world of video games and computers sexist? I do admit that there were only four people in my graduated class who were female...and none of them graduated as a computer scientist. All of them switched to math or other related majors. None of them really explained why, but when I look around, I suspect it's the culture. Computer science has been so male dominated for so long that a fraternity-esque "dudebro" culture that's as disconcerting for an average women as a knitting group consisting primarily of bitterly divorced mothers would be for an average man dominates the scene.
Some pundits posit that this doesn't really matter, but I think it does. Many of the most important pioneers in computer science have been women, such as the very first programmer ever, Ada Lovelace, or the inventor of higher level languages, Admiral Hopper. Other fields also had problems of a sexist culture, such as medicine, and they resolved it by treating sexist behavior as completely unacceptable. I see no reason why computer science can't do the same.
Sunday, September 23, 2012
Tree Math
I haven't had a lot of time lately, but I ran the math on my plan to solve global warming by planting trees, using Wolfram Alpha, which has access to significantly more figures than I do. I'm not encouraged.
Taking the most extreme position possible, suppose we covered the entire land surface of the earth with Pawlonia Tormentosa, a fast growing, carbon sucking tree. These trees are planted every 25 feet across every part of the earth not covered in water. Homes, businesses, farms, freeways, and anything else we want to do on the earth is buried beneath. This works out to 1.12 trillion trees.
Each tree sucks, over the course of about 7 years, about 3*106 grams of carbon straight out of the air. At this point, it can be cut down and it will regrow from its own stump. The wood would then have to be not burned, but instead either buried or made into objects that we plan to keep for a while, such as houses. Based on the weight of the wood, the number of trees, Wolfram Alpha found that every seven year cycle would suck, assuming I didn't make a decimal point error here, 74 parts per million of carbon dioxide out of the air. In this time, human activity would replace another 35 ppm, what with all the coal and oil we've been burning. To reduce the carbon levels from the current high of 393ppm to the pre-industrial level of 180 ppm would take 7 cycles of this -- 49 years.
This isn't going to happen. Much of the earth could not sustain a forest so thick that the branches of neighboring trees touch. There's deserts, where the trees would die from lack of water, mountains where the trees sap would freeze so hard that the tree would literally explode, beaches where the salted earth would drain the moisture back to the soil, killing the tree. We could not move our farms underground without an explosive increase of our energy use to keep our farms lit and alive, not to mention watered. And if we're not willing to install solar panels and drive hybrids for the sake of the earth, we certainly aren't willing to live like murlocks in little caves. We like the sun and the breeze and the other amenities of the surface world.
The best solution is clearly a compromise between these insane extremes. More solar, less coal, trees where it makes sense, wooden structures where it doesn't. Slow the change to the point where we can adapt to it as it comes.
Taking the most extreme position possible, suppose we covered the entire land surface of the earth with Pawlonia Tormentosa, a fast growing, carbon sucking tree. These trees are planted every 25 feet across every part of the earth not covered in water. Homes, businesses, farms, freeways, and anything else we want to do on the earth is buried beneath. This works out to 1.12 trillion trees.
Each tree sucks, over the course of about 7 years, about 3*106 grams of carbon straight out of the air. At this point, it can be cut down and it will regrow from its own stump. The wood would then have to be not burned, but instead either buried or made into objects that we plan to keep for a while, such as houses. Based on the weight of the wood, the number of trees, Wolfram Alpha found that every seven year cycle would suck, assuming I didn't make a decimal point error here, 74 parts per million of carbon dioxide out of the air. In this time, human activity would replace another 35 ppm, what with all the coal and oil we've been burning. To reduce the carbon levels from the current high of 393ppm to the pre-industrial level of 180 ppm would take 7 cycles of this -- 49 years.
This isn't going to happen. Much of the earth could not sustain a forest so thick that the branches of neighboring trees touch. There's deserts, where the trees would die from lack of water, mountains where the trees sap would freeze so hard that the tree would literally explode, beaches where the salted earth would drain the moisture back to the soil, killing the tree. We could not move our farms underground without an explosive increase of our energy use to keep our farms lit and alive, not to mention watered. And if we're not willing to install solar panels and drive hybrids for the sake of the earth, we certainly aren't willing to live like murlocks in little caves. We like the sun and the breeze and the other amenities of the surface world.
The best solution is clearly a compromise between these insane extremes. More solar, less coal, trees where it makes sense, wooden structures where it doesn't. Slow the change to the point where we can adapt to it as it comes.
Sunday, April 22, 2012
The Trolling Tax
According to Slashdot, there's a new game coming out. Depending on how you play, it could be free. Or it could be $60, plus another $100 for the ability to speak to other player with a microphone. This fee depends on if you're a nice guy who helps other players, or a shameless troll. The article doesn't explain the exact mechanics, but I assume that there'll be a fee for the game as usual, but players who are well behaved will collect refunds until they have all their money back.
Left unmoderated, the average Internet community quickly declines in quality, as trolls and other attention seekers make the area significantly more annoying to be around. The attention seekers will go to any length of effort to be the center of attention, and the trolls just like pissing people off for the sake of being obnoxious. This is bad for business, as you now have a community of people who annoy the crap out of you pretty much for the sake of annoying the crap out of you. And players who get insulted, harassed, or intimidated too often will stop playing. There's not enough funds from these obnoxious jerks to pay for the server alone, so clearly they must be punished.
The helpful players, however, tend to encourage additional sales. A community of useful and helpful people is fun to be around, to the point where you'd pay money to stay. And this is what the company is banking on.
Most other games just charge everyone the same price, and then ban players who become excessively obnoxious. And even then, the bar is set rather high, as a banned troll will stop paying on the spot. I'm quite familiar with this model, as my own job revolves around removing the unproductive customers that pay $19.99...and then cost the company $10,000 in bad behavior.
The parent company, Valve, is now quite famous for their unusual payment plans. They recently made one of their games, Team Fortress 2, completely free to play, but made customization options available for extra cash. These customization are super popular, as it differentiates your character from the teaming masses, and players are gleefully paying out the nose for the chance to show some personality.
This is not the first time the Internet confronted these issues either. Cracked's David Wong wrote an article several years ago about the radical moves that would be required to prevent trolls from destroying the Internet. Why? Because people want to make money, and obnoxious people are threatening to ruin that. And if there's one thing I've noticed about America, it's that threatening people's income never goes well.
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Pirate Drone
The Pirate Ba has had an ongoing arms race with the media companies that produce the content that they are distributing. The servers are seized by court order, and blocked at the ISP level. To get around this, a new, utterly insane plan has been brought to bear.
The new plan is to build servers that operate in aerial drones, reaching the internet through radio link, and periodically alnding to change batteries and other maintenence. To take the drone offline, it wouldn't take a police action. It would require an air force.
Due to the current state of international law, the air force would have to be the air force of the local nation (Sweden), or else it's an act of war. Should the authorities convince the Swedish air Force to attack the drones, the drones could quite easily fly to Finland while the planes are taking off. Should the Finnish Air Force then deploy, then the drones would fly to Russia, since Russia doesn't care about electronic piracy.
Authorities would have to jam the radio link, which is harder than it sounds.
Saturday, August 13, 2011
The Accidental Spammer
One of the strangest facts about fighting spam is that most spam comes from people who aren't even aware that they are doing it.
There are eight types of problems I deal with at work, and the top two are people spamming without even being aware that they are. See, the spammer lost access to audiences with his own accounts long ago. Either his ISP doesn't tolerate it and booted him, or does tolerate it and was blacklisted, so all his emails fall into the ether before reaching his customers. So instead, he infects people with a virus that gives him the passwords to their accounts, and spams in their name. When this doesn't work, the spammer resorts to guessing passwords, just in case someone decides to use "password," "123456" or their username as a password, because a shockingly high number of people do.
Alternatively, botnets can hack a number of popular installations with remote file injection, and the spammers love to insert mailer scripts into these. mailer scripts that send out hundreds of thousands of emails before being noticed.
The best protection against the first kind is to regularly scan your computer for viruses, using any one of the anti-virus products in the market, most of which you can at least try for free. Use a strong password, such as the first letter in the lines of your favorite poem or song in random capitalization, with a number or punctuation mark, and at least 12 letters long.
To prevent the second one, make sure your content software is up to date. Many packages even allow auto-upgrading, informing you if they are out of date and providing a handy upgrading button so that you can order it if you wish.
There are eight types of problems I deal with at work, and the top two are people spamming without even being aware that they are. See, the spammer lost access to audiences with his own accounts long ago. Either his ISP doesn't tolerate it and booted him, or does tolerate it and was blacklisted, so all his emails fall into the ether before reaching his customers. So instead, he infects people with a virus that gives him the passwords to their accounts, and spams in their name. When this doesn't work, the spammer resorts to guessing passwords, just in case someone decides to use "password," "123456" or their username as a password, because a shockingly high number of people do.
Alternatively, botnets can hack a number of popular installations with remote file injection, and the spammers love to insert mailer scripts into these. mailer scripts that send out hundreds of thousands of emails before being noticed.
The best protection against the first kind is to regularly scan your computer for viruses, using any one of the anti-virus products in the market, most of which you can at least try for free. Use a strong password, such as the first letter in the lines of your favorite poem or song in random capitalization, with a number or punctuation mark, and at least 12 letters long.
To prevent the second one, make sure your content software is up to date. Many packages even allow auto-upgrading, informing you if they are out of date and providing a handy upgrading button so that you can order it if you wish.
Thursday, January 13, 2011
Autotranslation
I'm still hovering in that sick zone where I'm ill enough to want to do nothing but sleep when I have free time, but not quite sick enough to take a sick day from work. I tried sitting down with a notepad to come up with an idea, but only got an incoherent scribble out out that. I might have interesting ideas while whacked out of my mind on cough syrup, but then I'm too messed up to actually, you know, write them down.
So to amuse you, I have translated a comedy classic, the log commercial, into Chinese. I don't actually know any more Chinese as a language than "Hello, how are you, My name is Professor Preposterous, I am an American," but mechanical translation technology has gone a lone way since then. The log commercial is, of course, a parody of slinky commercials that ran in the sixites.
Google literally translates the log song's lyrics as:
This would be a mouthful to sing, so for that, I pidginized the lyrics until they fit.
So, why do this elaborate waste of time? For one, translation technology amazes me. At work, I handle requests from all over the world, but officially, they're supposed to be filed in English, as we are an American company and cannot reasonably be expected to have, say, French speakers on hand. So when someone doesn't speak English....they can run their comments through this translation program, and be able to talk to us anyway.
Technology, hell yeah.
So to amuse you, I have translated a comedy classic, the log commercial, into Chinese. I don't actually know any more Chinese as a language than "Hello, how are you, My name is Professor Preposterous, I am an American," but mechanical translation technology has gone a lone way since then. The log commercial is, of course, a parody of slinky commercials that ran in the sixites.
Google literally translates the log song's lyrics as:
楼梯上滚落下来什么
单独或成对
运行在你的邻居的狗
什么是伟大的零食
和配合你的背部
它的日志，日志记录。
它的日志
它的日志
它的大，它的沉重它的木材
它的日志
它的日志
这是比坏更好，这是很好的。
每个人都喜欢的日志
你会爱上它，登录。
This would be a mouthful to sing, so for that, I pidginized the lyrics until they fit.
楼下的什
么辊
粉碎了邻居的狗
也许可以吃
很容易携带
这是一个日志
的日志的日志
它大，它沉重，木质
的日志的日志
更坏，它的好
你会爱上日志
每个人喜欢日志
So, why do this elaborate waste of time? For one, translation technology amazes me. At work, I handle requests from all over the world, but officially, they're supposed to be filed in English, as we are an American company and cannot reasonably be expected to have, say, French speakers on hand. So when someone doesn't speak English....they can run their comments through this translation program, and be able to talk to us anyway.
Technology, hell yeah.
Saturday, January 8, 2011
Hot Ice
My illness is getting worse. Here's a video of a very clever chemist making "Hot Ice," a substance that cheerfully freezes at room temperature, yet in its liquid state looks exactly like water, and frozen looks exactly like ice:
Enjoy your chemistry
Enjoy your chemistry
Monday, December 27, 2010
Defeating CAPTCHAs
Another coworker of mine mentioned to me that a hobby of his was defeating CAPTCHAs, and that instant, I realized that there were two completely different routes to do that. One social, and one technological. CAPTCHAs are, of course, a Completely Automated Public Touring test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Those squiggly letters you're forced to enter to post on a forum, register new accounts, or whatever. They make them to prevent mechanical submissions, which get really annoying, really quickly.
The technological approach is to basically reinvent OCR, Optical character Recognition. OCR has gotten a lot of funding as a way of automating the conversion of paper documents into computerized ones, to gain the advantages of computerized documents -- easy transmission, copying, editing, and so on. An OCR approach analyzes the graphical elements to determine which letter they were originally, and enters that. Supposedly, really good ones can work with just a 3-pixel row.
The social approach is to decide that only humans are capable of reading the bent and distorted letters of a CAPTCHA and convinces them to do so. One common approach is to offer something in exchange, like file downloads, or pornography. There are plenty of people who will willingly do just about anything to get more of those things, including decipher letter puzzles. It's not as fast, but it is plenty reliable. After all, the goal of the CAPTCHA maker is not technically circumvented, a human being is solving each and every one of their little puzzles. Just...not in the way they had hoped. Social attack CAPTCHA are promptly cached and used to hammer the server with mechanical submissions.
My coworker, however, said he took the technological approach. He took pride in the quality of his OCR craftsmanship, boasting on his only requiring of the right three rows to totally guess the correct answer.
The technological approach is to basically reinvent OCR, Optical character Recognition. OCR has gotten a lot of funding as a way of automating the conversion of paper documents into computerized ones, to gain the advantages of computerized documents -- easy transmission, copying, editing, and so on. An OCR approach analyzes the graphical elements to determine which letter they were originally, and enters that. Supposedly, really good ones can work with just a 3-pixel row.
The social approach is to decide that only humans are capable of reading the bent and distorted letters of a CAPTCHA and convinces them to do so. One common approach is to offer something in exchange, like file downloads, or pornography. There are plenty of people who will willingly do just about anything to get more of those things, including decipher letter puzzles. It's not as fast, but it is plenty reliable. After all, the goal of the CAPTCHA maker is not technically circumvented, a human being is solving each and every one of their little puzzles. Just...not in the way they had hoped. Social attack CAPTCHA are promptly cached and used to hammer the server with mechanical submissions.
My coworker, however, said he took the technological approach. He took pride in the quality of his OCR craftsmanship, boasting on his only requiring of the right three rows to totally guess the correct answer.
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Music Education
Once upon a time, I was a hobby musician who would engage in one hour music writing contests -- you had to write a song in one hour, songs are voted by the writers (excluding your own), and winner gets...bragging rights for the week. I even took a music class to become a better writer, which was linked to a singing class that I was no good at. I think it's hilarious that I got an A in the music writing, but an F in the actual performing, making me some sort of hypothetical musician. Can write great songs, but only in theory. And of course with the weekly contests...I was almost always last place.
Anyway, all I've studied music all my life, and all the crazy things I tried to do for just the write sound, are all quite familiar to an amazing group of musicians that I just discovered. Los Doggies are musicians who dissected for me tons and tons of incidental music. Video games. Animals. Telephones. All of them have a complex musical basis. The website takes them all apart, showing them sheet music, and even playing the sound note by note if you don't know how to read sheet music. (I can, not quite fast enough to play the song in question.) This site has taught me more about music than years and years of musical education in only a few minutes.
I'd like to know why. All of education could probably benefit if I could just figure out why this site is so engaging and informative.
Anyway, all I've studied music all my life, and all the crazy things I tried to do for just the write sound, are all quite familiar to an amazing group of musicians that I just discovered. Los Doggies are musicians who dissected for me tons and tons of incidental music. Video games. Animals. Telephones. All of them have a complex musical basis. The website takes them all apart, showing them sheet music, and even playing the sound note by note if you don't know how to read sheet music. (I can, not quite fast enough to play the song in question.) This site has taught me more about music than years and years of musical education in only a few minutes.
I'd like to know why. All of education could probably benefit if I could just figure out why this site is so engaging and informative.
Friday, November 26, 2010
Space Internet
People love the internet. Especially astronauts. You can get all kinds of practical information, keep in touch with family, and there are countless amusements for the boring parts. Just one problem: It's hard to get off-planet. It's really hard in high earth orbit, and past about the moon or so, just plain outright impossible. TCP/IP, the backbone of the internet, would literally time out before signals could reach, say, Mars, even when Mars is at its closest. To say nothing of the return trip. My Mars base is ruined!
NASA does have a solution that they call DTN, which they use in the space station and other orbital places. DTN has a much much much longer timeout. If you're patient, you could run signals as far as you need to. And this gives me an idea.
A DTN over radio link connects a caching computer to the Internet...by downloading all the pages it can get a hold of, transferring email, and uploading new pages and transmissions (such as, say, blog posts), and storing this. It would transmit once per day. Space stations or other planets now receive the internet via the caching computer. Admittedly, every page in it is, on average, a day old, but it is as it appeared on Earth yesterday, and it would work at area network speeds (100Mbs is cheap, and 10,000 Mbs is...available.)
This way, people in space can look up things on wikipedia, or write blog posts, or upload the Mars vacation photographs to their blog. From their perspective, the Internet just doesn't update very often, but it still works. And back on Earth, you might get notification late, but you will get it. It's the best I can think of without, you know, altering the speed of light.
NASA does have a solution that they call DTN, which they use in the space station and other orbital places. DTN has a much much much longer timeout. If you're patient, you could run signals as far as you need to. And this gives me an idea.
A DTN over radio link connects a caching computer to the Internet...by downloading all the pages it can get a hold of, transferring email, and uploading new pages and transmissions (such as, say, blog posts), and storing this. It would transmit once per day. Space stations or other planets now receive the internet via the caching computer. Admittedly, every page in it is, on average, a day old, but it is as it appeared on Earth yesterday, and it would work at area network speeds (100Mbs is cheap, and 10,000 Mbs is...available.)
This way, people in space can look up things on wikipedia, or write blog posts, or upload the Mars vacation photographs to their blog. From their perspective, the Internet just doesn't update very often, but it still works. And back on Earth, you might get notification late, but you will get it. It's the best I can think of without, you know, altering the speed of light.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Inspiration Machine
Did you know that there are "writing prompts" that help you come up with topics? There are ones for bloggers like Squidoo's, Creativity Portal's imagination prompt, or even one from Writer's Digest, which sounds very prestigous.
They won't work for me. Every single one produces prompts that could never ever ever come up in the context here, all about insane ideas to make the world better. Let me go grab one now:
On the other hand, what you don't know can and probably will hurt you. If you deny the law of gravity and step off a cliff, you still fall. If you deny seeing the stop light and run through it, you still get a traffic ticket. If you don't know that pressing the button will result in the floor receiving a 10,000 volt charge that will promptly fry you, that doesn't protect you either. If you get hurt because you were unaware of something, the universe rarely does anything other than stop to point and laugh at you. If not knowing truly protected you, then we should ban schooling and live forever as a nation of invincible imbeciles.
It makes a big friction when I read, say, H.P. Lovecraft, who believed that some information was clearly bad for your sanity to learn. His stories are chock full of characters suffering harmful stimulation. This seems patently ridiculous to me -- the only harmful stimulation I know is too intense for your sensory organs, damaging them by excess. Light so bright it burns your retinas, sound so loud that it bursts your eardrums, or touch so hot that you burn your fingertips off. And there are precautions to protect you if you know that this kind of thing is going to happen. When you shoot a gun, it's extremely loud, so you wear ear protection. Wear special sunglasses if you're going to stare at the sun. I also thought when Lovecraft went on his inevitable rants about "the thing that mankind was not meant to know," that he was being a pretentious jackass. (Okay, so this kind of thing is essential to the cosmic horror genre. Everything's out to get you, even if that doesn't make sense.) I know some terrible secrets about the universe, but I can tell you, and you won't go insane:
1. Space is so large as to be practically infinite, and may be truly infinite
2. All but an iota of this is incredibly hostile to Earthly life, such as humans. There is no air. There is intense radiation. There is a distinct lack of gravity. Unless you protect yourself from these things, you die.
3. Therefore, the universe was not made for us. We live in a bubble of unusual properties, vastly different from the norm.
4. Also, most of the universe is indifferent to our existence, and probably not aware, even if parts of it are able to think (ie: aliens)
Still with me? Still sane? Suck it, Lovecraft.
So, if I can't use writing prompts, how would I inspire myself?
I have an idea of a program that, mad libs style, throws together common keywords, combining them in strange and unexpected ways. Most of these will be stupid. (Chemical house sewage pants! Umm...no thanks.) Occasionally, one will be brilliant, and then I can go write about that. And sometime when I have spare time, maybe I'll actually write this program. What language should I use? Python? Perl?
They won't work for me. Every single one produces prompts that could never ever ever come up in the context here, all about insane ideas to make the world better. Let me go grab one now:
It has often been said, “Ignorance is bliss,” and “What you don’t know won’t hurt you.” Do you agree with these statements? Why or why not?Ignorance is bliss insomuch as what you don't know about, you don't worry about. It's one reason why intelligent people tend to be unhappier on average: they can imagine way more ways for everything to go totally wrong. When I was a child, I didn't know about economy, or chemistry, or nutrition. I ate when I was hungry, slept when I was tired. I can't live like that anymore. When I was a young child, I thought it was stupid that commercials often advertised drinks as "100% juice." I could see juice for sale in a million different places, and I didn't see anything special about it. What was this non-juice that could possibly be so terrible? Clearly, advertising "100% juice" meant you were less creative than your competition. Now that I'm an adult, I know. If it's not juice, it's probably ultra-cheap sugar water with some flavoring added so you don't feel completely ripped off. The sugar water will, of course, contain none of the vitamins, minerals, or phytonutrients in juice, but will rot the kids teeth just the same.
On the other hand, what you don't know can and probably will hurt you. If you deny the law of gravity and step off a cliff, you still fall. If you deny seeing the stop light and run through it, you still get a traffic ticket. If you don't know that pressing the button will result in the floor receiving a 10,000 volt charge that will promptly fry you, that doesn't protect you either. If you get hurt because you were unaware of something, the universe rarely does anything other than stop to point and laugh at you. If not knowing truly protected you, then we should ban schooling and live forever as a nation of invincible imbeciles.
It makes a big friction when I read, say, H.P. Lovecraft, who believed that some information was clearly bad for your sanity to learn. His stories are chock full of characters suffering harmful stimulation. This seems patently ridiculous to me -- the only harmful stimulation I know is too intense for your sensory organs, damaging them by excess. Light so bright it burns your retinas, sound so loud that it bursts your eardrums, or touch so hot that you burn your fingertips off. And there are precautions to protect you if you know that this kind of thing is going to happen. When you shoot a gun, it's extremely loud, so you wear ear protection. Wear special sunglasses if you're going to stare at the sun. I also thought when Lovecraft went on his inevitable rants about "the thing that mankind was not meant to know," that he was being a pretentious jackass. (Okay, so this kind of thing is essential to the cosmic horror genre. Everything's out to get you, even if that doesn't make sense.) I know some terrible secrets about the universe, but I can tell you, and you won't go insane:
1. Space is so large as to be practically infinite, and may be truly infinite
2. All but an iota of this is incredibly hostile to Earthly life, such as humans. There is no air. There is intense radiation. There is a distinct lack of gravity. Unless you protect yourself from these things, you die.
3. Therefore, the universe was not made for us. We live in a bubble of unusual properties, vastly different from the norm.
4. Also, most of the universe is indifferent to our existence, and probably not aware, even if parts of it are able to think (ie: aliens)
Still with me? Still sane? Suck it, Lovecraft.
So, if I can't use writing prompts, how would I inspire myself?
I have an idea of a program that, mad libs style, throws together common keywords, combining them in strange and unexpected ways. Most of these will be stupid. (Chemical house sewage pants! Umm...no thanks.) Occasionally, one will be brilliant, and then I can go write about that. And sometime when I have spare time, maybe I'll actually write this program. What language should I use? Python? Perl?
Saturday, November 6, 2010
Embedded DNS
DNS servers are a very simple computer that must be online and connected to the Internet 24/7. You can make it do other things too, but the important thing is that it's able to direct people who ask about your domain to your computer, even if they ask at obscure times like the very early hours of the morning. DNS is simple work, so most people make these computers do other work for them as well, like email gateways, load balancing, or some other task.
Computers use electricity to stay on. But not in the same amounts. A computer with an overclocked, top of the line processor, a massive RAID array, and deep deep banks of ram is going to use significantly more power than a budget CPU at factory set speed with a "green" hard drive. Electricity costs money. Not much, but it adds up over time.
I'm imagining a very simple embedded computer. It uses a very low power CPU. It has a modest amount of RAM. It has a flash drive with a basic OS and DNS support and configuration. And it has a robust network card. With a 5V DC connector, I store it in my local ISP's closet, where it can easily get power and bandwidth. It doesn't need hard drives. It doesn't need a monitor. It has no moving parts, and will gleefully point people to your servers for years and years and years.
The cost to run this thing is minuscule. we could get the cost of them down to maybe $80 at most if we print a lot of them, and that's assuming a proprietary CPU architecture like ARM. ISPs could store entire closets full of them for all their customer's hosting needs. Just one problem.
I can either make it reconfigurable on the fly, or I can lock it down so that it's hard to alter. If I make it hard to alter, then you'd have to go to your ISP's closet to change it, which is a pain if you have to make a lot of changes. (Changes like new domains, moved your computer to a new IP, or whatever.) If I make it able to take your connection from your desk PC, then it's so much more convenient, but runs the risk that someone may be able to hack your password, spoof being you, and poison your information with fakes. Suddenly, your website redirects to l33t Bob's house of hackery, cleverly disguised as your company's website and stealing your customer's information for nefarious purposes!
I could compromise and allow it to only connect from one IP, and require a special encryption key to do so.
Computers use electricity to stay on. But not in the same amounts. A computer with an overclocked, top of the line processor, a massive RAID array, and deep deep banks of ram is going to use significantly more power than a budget CPU at factory set speed with a "green" hard drive. Electricity costs money. Not much, but it adds up over time.
I'm imagining a very simple embedded computer. It uses a very low power CPU. It has a modest amount of RAM. It has a flash drive with a basic OS and DNS support and configuration. And it has a robust network card. With a 5V DC connector, I store it in my local ISP's closet, where it can easily get power and bandwidth. It doesn't need hard drives. It doesn't need a monitor. It has no moving parts, and will gleefully point people to your servers for years and years and years.
The cost to run this thing is minuscule. we could get the cost of them down to maybe $80 at most if we print a lot of them, and that's assuming a proprietary CPU architecture like ARM. ISPs could store entire closets full of them for all their customer's hosting needs. Just one problem.
I can either make it reconfigurable on the fly, or I can lock it down so that it's hard to alter. If I make it hard to alter, then you'd have to go to your ISP's closet to change it, which is a pain if you have to make a lot of changes. (Changes like new domains, moved your computer to a new IP, or whatever.) If I make it able to take your connection from your desk PC, then it's so much more convenient, but runs the risk that someone may be able to hack your password, spoof being you, and poison your information with fakes. Suddenly, your website redirects to l33t Bob's house of hackery, cleverly disguised as your company's website and stealing your customer's information for nefarious purposes!
I could compromise and allow it to only connect from one IP, and require a special encryption key to do so.
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Back to Analytics
When I reviewed the site analytics, I saw something tragic:
This poor unfortunate soul. Girlfriend's gone, heart's broken, and wants her back at all costs.
I don't know the entire situation, but she's probably gone forever. When people break up, that's usually the end of that relationship. I would advise, if this person asked, to get a new girlfriend. The earth has 6,900,000,000 people, and at least 3,500,000,000 of them are female. at least one of them would almost assuredly want a relationship with you.
If you really want to pursue reversing your breakup, you face a very uphill battle. You must remove the condition that made her leave you in the first place. Which requires you to first figure out what that was, which may lead to some very painful introspection. Did she disapprove of some habit (which you will now need to quit at all costs), dislike your lifestyle (which you must totally change), or was it something else? If there's a new person in her life, you will need to displace them, by being that much better than he (or she) is.
I don't guarantee success. Even if you changed everything, sometimes she's just tired of your face (or something else you can't help).
(Also, how did that lead to me?)
Other searches were more...prosaic:
I predict that the 2088 Olympics will be held in a city of some kind. (Well, obviously, Sherlock!) It will be a summer Olympics by schedule. The city hosting it will face the paradox that faces all Olympic hosts: to develop the infrastructure that the Olympics requires, typically attracts industries that pollute like crazy, but the athletes at the competition expect a pollution free city to exercise in. What's a city to do?
Probably some sort of clean-up project, sane or insane.
Depending on the scale, what you want is a "shovel" or a "backhoe." Very big holes can also involve "explosives." The smaller tools are preferable for smaller ditches because there are fewer ways to accidentally injure yourself with them.
Materialism is the philosophy that only the physical universe exists (or is important). Computer science is the field of study of storing and manipulating information. Materialist philosophers would point out that there is a physical basis to the information represented. In a computer's case, the software is a pattern of electricity in the processor or memory, and stored as a pattern of magnetic fields on the disk when not in use. So, no problems there.
And now, team WTF, the confusing ones:
You won't find that here, if at all.
Why?
how to get girlfriend back -saveabreakup.com site:blogspot.com
This poor unfortunate soul. Girlfriend's gone, heart's broken, and wants her back at all costs.
I don't know the entire situation, but she's probably gone forever. When people break up, that's usually the end of that relationship. I would advise, if this person asked, to get a new girlfriend. The earth has 6,900,000,000 people, and at least 3,500,000,000 of them are female. at least one of them would almost assuredly want a relationship with you.
If you really want to pursue reversing your breakup, you face a very uphill battle. You must remove the condition that made her leave you in the first place. Which requires you to first figure out what that was, which may lead to some very painful introspection. Did she disapprove of some habit (which you will now need to quit at all costs), dislike your lifestyle (which you must totally change), or was it something else? If there's a new person in her life, you will need to displace them, by being that much better than he (or she) is.
I don't guarantee success. Even if you changed everything, sometimes she's just tired of your face (or something else you can't help).
(Also, how did that lead to me?)
Other searches were more...prosaic:
2088 olympics and pollution
I predict that the 2088 Olympics will be held in a city of some kind. (Well, obviously, Sherlock!) It will be a summer Olympics by schedule. The city hosting it will face the paradox that faces all Olympic hosts: to develop the infrastructure that the Olympics requires, typically attracts industries that pollute like crazy, but the athletes at the competition expect a pollution free city to exercise in. What's a city to do?
Probably some sort of clean-up project, sane or insane.
engineering a ditch
Depending on the scale, what you want is a "shovel" or a "backhoe." Very big holes can also involve "explosives." The smaller tools are preferable for smaller ditches because there are fewer ways to accidentally injure yourself with them.
materialism computer science
Materialism is the philosophy that only the physical universe exists (or is important). Computer science is the field of study of storing and manipulating information. Materialist philosophers would point out that there is a physical basis to the information represented. In a computer's case, the software is a pattern of electricity in the processor or memory, and stored as a pattern of magnetic fields on the disk when not in use. So, no problems there.
And now, team WTF, the confusing ones:
electrical sex stimulator.com
You won't find that here, if at all.
diaper change simulationWhy?
Friday, July 30, 2010
Amazing Blogathon
I hear amazing news: Blag Hag is holding a massive posting-for-charity tomorrow. The author will be posting every half-hour for the entire day. 48 massive, interesting posts, without ceasing.
This is quite a feat. I struggle to keep up one post per day. So I hope she raises a lot for her charity.
I had to spend a lot of today rewriting my resume, since my only copy was on Google's document service, and they lost it. Argle-bargle-bargle-bargle.
This is quite a feat. I struggle to keep up one post per day. So I hope she raises a lot for her charity.
I had to spend a lot of today rewriting my resume, since my only copy was on Google's document service, and they lost it. Argle-bargle-bargle-bargle.
Saturday, July 24, 2010
Safety Twitter
To some degree, crime is a communication problem. Crime used to happen mostly in the gloom of night, or otherwise when no one was looking. See, responsible social people dislike it when people are victimized, and have formed organizations that punish offenders. In modern times, this is the police and courts. Police halt offenders in their tracks, and turn them over to the court system for punishment. So to successfully commit a crime, one must keep the police unaware of it.
So Discovery news reports that a think-tank imagines a Twitter-like interface (possibly even twitter itself), in which people can anonymously report the locations of crimes, which will rapidly attract police attention. If enough people keep this up, crime will effectively be impossible. Fairies dance and unicorns sing in Utopia.
Of course, a big rub that Discovery points out is that humans are not cyborgs that can magically connect to the internet. Crime is most common in neighborhoods where people can't afford expensive electronics, and the obvious answer of public terminals attracts vandalism. (There are some people out there who just love to ruin things for other people, even if they get no direct benefit from doing something like that. Give a street a public terminal and inevitably someone will doodle on it, someone else will pee on it, and someone will use it to look up porn, even if 95% of the other people use it responsibly.)
Another approach has been the UK's plastering of ubiquitous cameras. From what British people have told me, that did not work. People resented the cameras, especially because the government took an obnoxiously paternal approach to objections. (Namely, "It's for your own good, now STFU.") Crime did not noticeably reduce, as the local thugs took to wearing face-obscuring garments like hoods, and the cameras got endlessly vandalized by angry citizens.
So Discovery news reports that a think-tank imagines a Twitter-like interface (possibly even twitter itself), in which people can anonymously report the locations of crimes, which will rapidly attract police attention. If enough people keep this up, crime will effectively be impossible. Fairies dance and unicorns sing in Utopia.
Of course, a big rub that Discovery points out is that humans are not cyborgs that can magically connect to the internet. Crime is most common in neighborhoods where people can't afford expensive electronics, and the obvious answer of public terminals attracts vandalism. (There are some people out there who just love to ruin things for other people, even if they get no direct benefit from doing something like that. Give a street a public terminal and inevitably someone will doodle on it, someone else will pee on it, and someone will use it to look up porn, even if 95% of the other people use it responsibly.)
Another approach has been the UK's plastering of ubiquitous cameras. From what British people have told me, that did not work. People resented the cameras, especially because the government took an obnoxiously paternal approach to objections. (Namely, "It's for your own good, now STFU.") Crime did not noticeably reduce, as the local thugs took to wearing face-obscuring garments like hoods, and the cameras got endlessly vandalized by angry citizens.
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Net Neutrality
Net Neutrality is a political Internet structuring idea that requires Internet service providers to handle all bandwidth equally. Internet service would be a dumb pipe, like your water main. (Not quite like the telephone. Your telephone company knows what numbers you've been calling and how long you've talked. They are, however, prohibited from listening in. That's typically done by the government, with a court order.)
The ISPs generally dislike this, as they want to promote some traffic over others. They'd rather favor email and WWW over, say, Bittorrent. They complain that Bittorrent sucks up all their bandwidth, costing them money. (When the bandwidth runs out, you need to buy more capacity, or it'll slow down for everyone and your customers complain.)
Internet companies, like this blog's host, Google, fear that a lack of Net Neutrality will mean that they will be extorted by every ISP in the land. That every month a representative will come by and demand money, and if not granted it, will throttle all traffic to unacceptably slow speeds without quite cutting it off (because cutting it off entirely will be seen by the customer as censorship of the company, while slow access will suggest problems on their end.)
The ultimate in neutrality would be my earlier proposed grid Internet in which there is a massive array of underground routing boxes, all connected to their immediate neighbors. One could, for very little money, have a choice of connecting to one of four boxes, and connecting to several would make your own connection more robust. When connected to several, your connection would go through whichever was most available and least congested. ISPs would pretty much be obsolete. The main reason that this plan isn't being done is that it would require many many ditches dug, and land-management authority that only the government has. Also, the need for more and more routers would quickly rack up a budget in the high millions nationally. (I think connecting the entire world this way would cost in the trillions). The main advantage to it is a communication infrastructure that is for all intents and purposes indestructible.
Main arguments for opposing neutrality are to point to the Pareto principle, an economic principle that points out that many things are divided 80/20 instead of the 50/50 one would normally expect. 80% of the money is earned by the top 20 richest people. 80% of the sales are made by the top 20% of salespeople. 80% of the spending is done by 20% of the people. And so too, with bandwidth, which costs money, 80% of it is used by the top 20%. Since ISPs price their services per account rather than per gigabyte of traffic, ISPs would like to throttle down those top 20%. Or, alternatively, they could price by usage, but that doesn't sell very well.
The ISPs generally dislike this, as they want to promote some traffic over others. They'd rather favor email and WWW over, say, Bittorrent. They complain that Bittorrent sucks up all their bandwidth, costing them money. (When the bandwidth runs out, you need to buy more capacity, or it'll slow down for everyone and your customers complain.)
Internet companies, like this blog's host, Google, fear that a lack of Net Neutrality will mean that they will be extorted by every ISP in the land. That every month a representative will come by and demand money, and if not granted it, will throttle all traffic to unacceptably slow speeds without quite cutting it off (because cutting it off entirely will be seen by the customer as censorship of the company, while slow access will suggest problems on their end.)
The ultimate in neutrality would be my earlier proposed grid Internet in which there is a massive array of underground routing boxes, all connected to their immediate neighbors. One could, for very little money, have a choice of connecting to one of four boxes, and connecting to several would make your own connection more robust. When connected to several, your connection would go through whichever was most available and least congested. ISPs would pretty much be obsolete. The main reason that this plan isn't being done is that it would require many many ditches dug, and land-management authority that only the government has. Also, the need for more and more routers would quickly rack up a budget in the high millions nationally. (I think connecting the entire world this way would cost in the trillions). The main advantage to it is a communication infrastructure that is for all intents and purposes indestructible.
Main arguments for opposing neutrality are to point to the Pareto principle, an economic principle that points out that many things are divided 80/20 instead of the 50/50 one would normally expect. 80% of the money is earned by the top 20 richest people. 80% of the sales are made by the top 20% of salespeople. 80% of the spending is done by 20% of the people. And so too, with bandwidth, which costs money, 80% of it is used by the top 20%. Since ISPs price their services per account rather than per gigabyte of traffic, ISPs would like to throttle down those top 20%. Or, alternatively, they could price by usage, but that doesn't sell very well.
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Farming Afar via Game
In both the US and China, farming simulators are increasingly popular. Possibly in other countries too, I just haven't heard news reports about it. Such games involve pretending to farm by digging plots in a big grid, click for seed, click for water, click for harvest, and so on. It gives me an idea.
The games are popular because of their abstraction. What if there was a robot, able to do those various mundane tasks, with a supply of seeds and the ability to gather and distribute water? It would scan its environment, and report it to a game interface. People playing the game would indicate to "dig" various plots, water them, and which seeds to plant. The robot would receive instructions from the game, dig, water, and plant at the coordinates.
Each day it would report back to the game about the conditions. When the seeds sprouted, ground moisture and chemistry (reported as percentages of USDA recommended, "Nitrogen is at 53%, add more fertilizer!"), and the like. And players could resolve problems with a click.
At some point, the robot would report the plant ready for harvest. The player clicks. The robot slices off parts of the plant of commercial interest (like fruits, corn cobs, lettuce leaves), or if inapplicable, pulls the entire plant (carrots would be yanked, not cut), and puts it in a bin. The remainder of the plant is plowed under for fertilizer. Post-harvest, the robot reports the area as fallow, ready for another planting.
It'd be slow, compared to online farm games. There, crops are ready in as little as 2 hours, with the slowest crops taking maybe 7 days. Real crops would take at least 40 days, which may leave players feeling like they're lacking in accomplishment.
But unlike farm games, one would receive more than virtual money for this. The harvest bins would have a sale-able product, the profits from which could be split between the robot owner, the game producer, and the player. Playing the game could net you real actual money, possibly.
....nah, this is too insane.
The games are popular because of their abstraction. What if there was a robot, able to do those various mundane tasks, with a supply of seeds and the ability to gather and distribute water? It would scan its environment, and report it to a game interface. People playing the game would indicate to "dig" various plots, water them, and which seeds to plant. The robot would receive instructions from the game, dig, water, and plant at the coordinates.
Each day it would report back to the game about the conditions. When the seeds sprouted, ground moisture and chemistry (reported as percentages of USDA recommended, "Nitrogen is at 53%, add more fertilizer!"), and the like. And players could resolve problems with a click.
At some point, the robot would report the plant ready for harvest. The player clicks. The robot slices off parts of the plant of commercial interest (like fruits, corn cobs, lettuce leaves), or if inapplicable, pulls the entire plant (carrots would be yanked, not cut), and puts it in a bin. The remainder of the plant is plowed under for fertilizer. Post-harvest, the robot reports the area as fallow, ready for another planting.
It'd be slow, compared to online farm games. There, crops are ready in as little as 2 hours, with the slowest crops taking maybe 7 days. Real crops would take at least 40 days, which may leave players feeling like they're lacking in accomplishment.
But unlike farm games, one would receive more than virtual money for this. The harvest bins would have a sale-able product, the profits from which could be split between the robot owner, the game producer, and the player. Playing the game could net you real actual money, possibly.
....nah, this is too insane.
Sunday, December 20, 2009
That Plane Treadmill Thing
There's a common internet debate that asks if a plane on a treadmill, where the treadmill moves backwards as the plane moves forwards (thereby canceling its movement), if the plane will successfully take off. Apparently, depending on how the treadmill's actions are conceived, the answer is "yes" or "Eventually."
If the treadmill matches the wheel's speeds, then the push from the engines will accelerate the plane to a speed such that it takes off, relatively quickly. Not as fast as a plane on a cement or asphalt runway, but still relatively quickly.
If, however, you insist that the conveyor belt somehow also matches the engine speed plus the wheel speed, you end up with a paradox where soon neither one can be a real number. Either the conveyor belt jams at some point, at which time the plane takes off instantly, or the wheels tear from the plane due to friction (and the now unhindered plane takes off, albeit in a state that will require a crash landing). In fact, that answer amounts to mathematical nonsense.
Why? Let us say that the plane's wheels are Wb, the conveyor belt is Wc, the plane's engines produce We. The plane's velocity, Wv, is defined by: Wv = Wb + We - Wc. If Wc = Wv, then Wb + We must equal zero. Otherwise, as Cecil Adams puts it, "A + 5 = A." Since the plane is attempting to take off, We is probably greater than zero. Therefore, Wv != Wc.
QED.
And even if you reject that, the plane's velocity will reach Aleph-1, the conveyor belt will reach Aleph-0. Aleph-1 is greater, the plane takes off. Also QED.
If the treadmill matches the wheel's speeds, then the push from the engines will accelerate the plane to a speed such that it takes off, relatively quickly. Not as fast as a plane on a cement or asphalt runway, but still relatively quickly.
If, however, you insist that the conveyor belt somehow also matches the engine speed plus the wheel speed, you end up with a paradox where soon neither one can be a real number. Either the conveyor belt jams at some point, at which time the plane takes off instantly, or the wheels tear from the plane due to friction (and the now unhindered plane takes off, albeit in a state that will require a crash landing). In fact, that answer amounts to mathematical nonsense.
Why? Let us say that the plane's wheels are Wb, the conveyor belt is Wc, the plane's engines produce We. The plane's velocity, Wv, is defined by: Wv = Wb + We - Wc. If Wc = Wv, then Wb + We must equal zero. Otherwise, as Cecil Adams puts it, "A + 5 = A." Since the plane is attempting to take off, We is probably greater than zero. Therefore, Wv != Wc.
QED.
And even if you reject that, the plane's velocity will reach Aleph-1, the conveyor belt will reach Aleph-0. Aleph-1 is greater, the plane takes off. Also QED.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
