Turkey Day is coming... I'm hungry. I've been thinking about more computer analogies. This is kind of complicated but makes a little bit of sense. In software, things are built to work with other systems. Things are abstracted to simplify software development for instance. You don't have to know the details of graphics hardware to write a 3D game because Direct X is an abstraction layer that takes care of it. I spend a lot of time thinking about how strange it is to be alive, the weirdness of it all. I also think of day to day reality as a blanket on the weirdness that might be something I should spend more time focusing on.

If everybody believes in and loves flying pigs but I'm sure that they don't exist it doesn't change the fact that I live in a world that revolves around the mythical beasts.

Here is a colorful picture I took of Downtown San Diego from the roof of one of the tallest buildings in East San Diego. The two antennas are used as part of a wireless network that provides Internet access to non-profits and low income housing computer labs. I'm not really formally trained in this stuff so you can imagine my surprise when I was able to connect to yahoo.com using it. It's pretty good thing to have on my resume but I never really though about the magnitude of it untill I took that photo a few days ago.
Ther reason I think the photo is unique is because there is a lot of backlight from the water which creates sort of a negative skyline.

Lots of blogs are talking about the abundance theory paper floating around. It says that we evolved so that when we have food in abundance we eat as much as we can so that when the lean times come, we're prepared and have a spare tire to keep us going. Ahh, but the lean times are a relic of our caveman past. So is exercise. Cavemen had it easy, they had to run from lions and tigers and polar bears so motivation wasn't an issue. Luckily I was blessed with a high metabolism. I probably would have died during the first caveman famine but now I have an advantage. Our evolutionary path is doing a 180 in a matter of a few thousand years. Humans are gifted with the ability to adapt. We have eskimoes and Kenyans thriving in completely different environments.

Here is my theory of the day. Our current lifestyle is very eskimo like. We hang out in our air conditioned igloos in the desert and generally don't get very much exercise. Eskimoes don't get much because they'll get eaten by Polar Bears or freeze. They have sled dogs, we have cars. We humans are pretty smart animals so we've figured out how to make seal soup up there without much competition from other animals. My point? They have already adapted to an environment similar to ours that we're just becoming acclimated too. We'll all evolve into short, eskimo like people in a few thousand years. Being tall may be attractive to women but my 6'5'' friend is constantly banging his head on doorways and other lowhanging obstacles. As the concussions mount his ability to impress women with witty pick up lines rapidly declines to the point where us average height guys can compete.

Here is the quote by Peter de Jager that sums it up "Any technology which creates abundance poses problems for any process which existed to benefit from scarcity."

If you look at that quote from a biological perspective, the process which exited to benefit from scarcity is our entire digestive system. We're going to be fat AND hungry people for a long time to come.

I just saw an ad selling a $1,000 entertainment system for the back of cars that included two video screens in the back of the front seat headrests as well as headphones for the kids. My first thought was, overpaid, crappy, career obsessed parents. Then I thought, what if the kids can't hear their parents reminding them to put on their seatbelts because they're watching Britney Spears disrobe on the ABC Family Channel. The driver looks back at his kids to repeat himself and crashes into a Starbucks at which point the kids fly face first into the Liquid Crystal Displays that now act as thier surrogate parents. Neglect is becoming fashionable. I sound like I'm preaching but I was raised by myself and society so by writing this I try to remind myself to avoid my own destiny.

People give me crap when I say that I think democracy has major problems. They say I'm not patriotic. George W, that's Will not Bush has a column at the back of Newsweek. He brings up a quote from Abe Lincoln that makes me wish I was alive to see him preside.
"It is unworthy and ultimately untenable to have the most basic questions settled-and unsettled-by votes. The nation needs a foundation more durable than the sand of opinion that can be easily shifted in each election"
That's one of the best leaders in the history of this country saying that the electorate isn't capable of making up it's mind. I love America because we can vote. Even after the Patriot act, we've got a lot of freedom left here. Voting is great when it comes to local matters. People who care seem to be more involved locally than on a national scale. That means that people who turn out to vote on local matters are probably more informed. That is an amazing thing. People voting for a president because they "hate them durn libruls" or they think it's trendy to hate corporations shouldn't have any say in what direction we're heading. Will's column mentions "Protestantism has an incurable problem of doctrinal instability." That's also true for democracy. The BIG issues need solid solutions that aren't based on religion or emotion or anything that contradicts basic human rights (see capital punishment).

My hobbies are few but I become obsessed with them. One of them is racing cars. Before I could afford to race a real car I bought the most realistic racing simulator available on a computer and spent a large part of my time learning racing theory and techniques. When I graduated I bought the fastest sports car I could afford. Yeah, I get a lot of crap from my friends but I love driving my Miata. I race it in Auto Cross events at Qualcomm. That's a picture of me racing to the left. I've never smoked crack but when you finish a lap of driving flat out you get a very cracklike feeling. I'm not fabulously wealthy just yet so I race on street tires which aren't very sticky but it makes for a lot of fun high speed drifting.

If one day my posts suddenly stop, it's probably because I got a flat tire and wrapped myself around a eucalyptus tree. I've almost died a couple of times and it's sort of true what they say, your mortality grabs you by the balls and tugs. Unfortunately mortality has a great ass and I like getting my balls tugged. My philosophy is that we only live once, no afterlife.

I just had a good visual of what my idea of life is. If you've ever watched a rock sitting in the middle of a creek or river you sometimes see an eddy or mini whirlpool in its wake. That's what I think of human thought or life, it's just a temporary eddy. It's no doubt very complex, fluid dynamics isn't an easy subject to grasp, but in the end it's just water. With that in mind, I'm trying to take myself less seriously, enjoy the ride.

This post is for the guys and some of the girls out there I love the Internet.

I hate the fact that our society thinks this is indecent. Our elected officials (Ahnuld) engage in gratuitous violence and it's "entertainment so it's ok" Well, I think the above is not only tasteful but pretty damn entertaining too.

If you haven't figured it out, I am really really bothered by people who don't understand why religion and government should be separate or who think that the death penalty is a deterrent. It's crazy, like knowing the world is round arguing with somebody who's convinced that it's flat. Farg.

I graduated a couple years ago with a degree in business/finance but I was hired to write software and do wireless networking for a living. Sometimes after a long day of coding I'll have dreams where I'm actually a part of a computer, there is no user interface. It's really strange. I wake up confused and have to remind myself that I have arms and legs. It makes me want to stuff a chip in my forehead because it's pretty great to feel so connected. I think I have Attention Defecit Disorder so the ability to store a bunch of information in an array and forget about it but have it instantly accessible is very appealing to me. I'm addicted to information. I get a weird high when I sit down and get ready to stuff my head full of it. I feel like a music addict connected to Kazza with a crappy old dial up connection except the modem is my brain's limited ability to get information in. Bandwidth isn't the end, music is.

Here's some of my array code in case you have ever wondered what type of stuff makes software tick. Can't post much, might get fired.
string[,] strArrayColumns = new string[2000,26];
strArrayColumns[intResultArrayintPageResults,22]= Convert.ToString(drResultArray["Foreign_Languages_Spoken"])

The following quote sums up just about everything I ever wanted to know about physics but never realized...
This may also help to answer the question raised by the Anthropic Principle. Our Universe seems to have known that we were coming. The conditions for life are extremely stringent. Life and consciousness can only exist in a very narrow band of physical parameters. For example, if the proton is not stable, then the Universe will collapse into a useless heap of electrons and neutrinos. If the proton were a little bit different in mass, it would decay, and all our DNA molecules would decay along with it.

In fact, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of coincidences, happy coincidences, that make life possible. Life, and especially consciousness, is quite fragile. It depends on stable matter, like protons, that exists for billions of years in a stable environment, sufficient to create autocatalytic molecules that can reproduce themselves, and thereby create Life. In physics, it is extremely hard to create this kind of Universe. You have to play with the parameters, you have to juggle the numbers, cook the books, in order to create a Universe which is consistent with Life.

However, the Multiverse idea explains this problem, because it simply means we coexist with dead Universes. In other Universes, the proton is not stable. In other Universes, the Big Bang took place, and then it collapsed rapidly into a Big Crunch, or these Universes had a Big Bang, and immediately went into a Big Freeze, where temperatures were so low, that Life could never get started.

According to a bunch of Scientists and Business leaders, we'll develop AI (Artificial Intelligence) smarter than ourselves within 30 or so years. That moment is known as the Singularity. Sounds very Matrix but so did "flying machines" only 100 years ago and we didn't even have computers to help with design until a few decades ago. I'm thinking it'll be good for us because all of our processes will become super efficient. Taxes may even drop to the level they are now even after the inevitable nationalized heathcare kicks in. Computers will be able to write software. That's going to be the turning point. Nobody can even begin to know what that'll mean to us. Of course this all sounds crazy but I think the biggest change will be the a sort of massive healing. We can have software therapists helping people break the cycle of family dysfunction.

These super smart electronic minds should be running our country IMO but there are going to be people who think that will be the end of democracy. We don't let animals in the zoo vote to eat whatever they want or nobody would leave. That's why we have a representative democracy, checks and balances. Not too long ago the majority of the population approved of slavery. I say we give them an island and watch them create a utopia. I'll be the first to move there. When we're young, if we're lucky we're raised by intelligent and caring parents. When we get older it doesn't change, we look for the Holy Father or some other kind of enlightenment instead. These wise old CPUs could become the parents a lot of us never had.

Insight of the day... I just bought a bunch of Budget Gourmet frozen meals.. I ate 3 of em then I realized it would have been cheaper to just buy an overpriced and less bland Quizno's sub sandwich. Budget my ass.