10. The Elements

A recent (and relatively minor) back injury has given me time to read The Elements: A Visual Explanation of Every Known Atom in the Universe. This book is beautiful.

Each entry of the periodic table has a full page image of the element in its purest form, followed by a full page of interesting details and tidbits about it. Of the far right edge of each spread is a panel with technical details for each element. Atomic Mass, density, crystal structure, electron configuration, boiling and melting points, even a progressive chart of the electron oribitals. Details which no one really needs to know, but they are definitely interesting to follow from one element to another.

The book is well written and the author did a very good job presenting information in language that even my mother would understand while still introducing new subject matter to those who already have a good understanding of chemistry and the elements, which is not an easy task. Aside from being a fantastic introduction to the periodic table and a gorgeous coffee table book, I think that that this book would be a good read for anyone and give a little perspective on the origins and workings of commonplace objects that are frequently overlooked.

Why I'm Always Broke

Do you know why I don't apply the many available management positions?

Because I have integrity. I wouldn't blatantly lie and throw a hard working associate under the bus to cover up a mistake I made. I wouldn't stab people in the back to get them fired or transferred because I didn't like working with them. I wouldn't say one thing to a person's face and then something completely different behind their back. I wouldn't shove my head so far up corporate's ass that I forget that my associates are real people with real limitations.

Because I'm not lazy. I don't feel comfortable sitting in the office all day and complaining about the people who work hard for me. I can't stand around and do nothing while writing up associates for not doing the work of three people each. I wouldn't find the time to conveniently go on my tenth cigarette break of the day when the understaffed store becomes busy. I would get tired of walking from one end of the store to another, desperately trying to avoid any real work.

Because I am not simple minded. I don't buy into all of the petty, middle school drama that gets dragged into the store from the salon. I'm too in touch with reality to completely ignore all of the factors that affect sales and put the blame entirely on my associates. I'm unable to focus on selling whatever the worthless item corporate is pushing for that week and letting customer service suffer, while wondering why customer service is suffering.

Most importantly, I am beyond frustrated with seeing the complacency with which my friends accept their meaningless, dead-end jobs as something so much more than that and the way in which they expect me to do the same.

Clearly, I have no working capacity to become a manager.

Swerve to the Left

I was listening to an episode of TWiT when an interesting situation was brought up. It goes a little something like this: You have a self-driving car (really, the car is driven by a network of computers) and the car loses traction. The car brakes, but it isn't enough to completely correct the situation. A car approaching in the opposing lane reports that three of its occupants are children and only one is wearing a seat belt. Do you want the car to swerve to the left and kill the children or do you want the car (for which you spent $30k) to swerve to the right and drive off the cliff?

The answer is obvious: swerve to the left.

The fact that your car knows how many occupants are in the approaching car establishes the fact that the vehicles have the ability to quickly communicate with each other. Your car would have the ability to report to the other car that it will be occupying the oncoming lane for whatever distance and that its own lane will be vacant during that period. The oncoming car can swerve into your lane as you swerve into its lane and the collision is completely avoidable. If that sounds unlikely, remember that even moderately inexpensive desktop computers routinely perform 15 billion mathematical operations per second (by the time self-driving cars are commonplace, this number will be much greater) . That is more than enough time for each car to communicate and perform the necessary calculations to ensure the safety of everyone involved.

The same method would work if there was a long line of cars behind either (or both) of the vehicles. Because radio waves propagate unilaterally at the speed of light and computers perform calculations so quickly, your car could tell all of the cars in the affected lanes what is going on so that they can all react accordingly. Of course, they would also be communicating with each other in real time to ensure the safety of their own occupants. It would be trivial to implement an ad hoc network protocol between the cars (encrypting such a network would be more complicated and use some of the processing cycles, but would definitely be doable), and doing so would help create a much safer and more fluid traffic system

9. Brick City

I stumbled upon Brick City at Meijer one day and bought it for Jason. It's a short book about world renowned buildings and cityscapes modeled in LEGO blocks. The book begins with some lesser-well-known building techniques and general information about LEGO and then showcases some gorgeous models of places all over the world. Each scene has a short blurb about it (the original architect and purpose, history, current use, etc.) and the technique and challenges of building it in LEGO, and some of the more simple scenes have step-by-step instructions. It's an incredibly interesting book if you're interested in a lighthearted look into global and historic architecture or are a LEGO enthusiast.

8. No Monster No

It's week 17 and I have some catching up to do. Today in my previz class, Matt passed around a book he picked up on kickstarter. No Monster No is a cute story about a little girl who befriends the monster under her bed and teaches him how to fit in with her peers. The cool thing about this is that the author of the book illustrated it with fabric. It sounds really weird and unusual because it is. I've never seen a book produced in this way and it works so well that I'm surprised that no one has done it before. If you have children and see this book, BUY IT.

7. Gulp

Mary Roach is one of my favorite authors. We somehow share the same morbid and entirely inappropriate, yet moderately tasteful sense of humor. Her books always keep me in stitches and Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal was no exception. Mary opens the book with the importance of saliva and the olfactory senses and ends with the process of defecation. While I didn't enjoy this book quite as much as Stiff or Bonk, it is definitely worth reading.

On another side note, I am thoroughly impressed with the amount of technology that the Clinton-Macomb Public Library springs for. To begin, the digital catalogue will tell you exactly where a book is located (or, at least, where it should be located) and there is a service that will text you that information, along with the book's call number. The catalogue itself is so much more useful than many of the ones I have used in the past and can almost always decypher the book or subject matter I am looking for.

The library also has self checkout machines so that you don't have to interact with a librarian. Just set your books on the pad (I assume that they use some sort of RFID tags), scan your card, and tap OK. The process takes 10 seconds and you're on your way. If every library had the money to adopt this system I would visit them much more frequently.

6. There's a Hair in my Dirt

My friend Connie recommended this book while I was doing research for my previz class. Gary Larson, creator of The Far Side wrote There's a Worm in my Dirt in the style of a children's book. It's definitely not. The book does paint a fairly accurate description of wildlife in a wildly entertaining and memorable story. I would definitely recommend it to anyone with a sense of humor and the book may soon be finding a place on my shelf.

On a side note, I just switched to Chrome. Firefox was being completely reasonable and using all 8 gigs of my RAM. The bastard.

5. Psych Textbooks

My psychology class was absolutely abysmal. The instructor insisted that we cite a source for everything we say, including opinion pieces. This made most of my required responses incredibly drab and uninspired. I did make a good few points about the globalization of culture toward the end of the class, which I think she liked. Among the things that made me dislike the class is the fact that I had to pay for two completely different, but equally important text book.

The first one was PSYCH, which I bought from the Macomb bookstore. This book was pretty solidly written and explained many things in a technical way that really made the material interesting for me. I also like that it included a small "True or False" quiz at the beginning of each chapter so that I could recall information that I had previously learned or heard of. The book did include a number of full page ads for the publisher of the book, which was completely unnecessary in a $90 text book. Unfortunately, Macomb sold me the incorrect book and my return window had closed before I realized so.

This didn't cause much of a problem until one night I needed information from one of the trivial inserts in the official class book. I was prompted, out of desperation of the imminent homework deadline, to buy the ebook version of Mastering the World of Psychology. This is without a doubt, the most absolutely useless piece of tripe that has been written in the history of human civilization. It is dumbed down to the point where I learned almost nothing from the book and only used it to get information that I needed to do my homework and look up answers for the online quizzes. The book lacks any sort of imagination or accurate information. Do not like!

4. Total Recall

Because my copy of 28 Days Later shipped from the UK, it didn't arrive in time so I printed a copy of the 1990 version of Total Recall from Drew's Script-O-Rama. The 2103 version was okay, but I'm partial to the '90s burly action Gods. It was an interesting read and I picked up some tricks that I used while writing my own screenplay. I did notice that many of the action sequences had been reworked somewhere during the filming process. That's all I really have to say about this one.

3. 28 Days Later

One of the assignments for my previz class was to read a screenplay, so I picked up a copy of 28 Days Later on Amazon. I was surprised that even with how frequently I get distracted by my thoughts, it took about as long to read this as it did to watch the movie (just shy of 2 hours).

It was a really good experience for me because I got to think about how what is written relates to what appears on the screen and how that relates to how the audience is presented new information. There were many things in the screenplay that I simply didn't notice in the movie until I watched it again. Despite the fact that screenplays leave generous amounts of detail up to the director and others working on the set, reading this presented a much more vibrant picture of what was actually going on in the movie. I would definitely recommend that anyone who is interested in cinematography read the screenplay of their favorite movies.

End of 8 Weeks

The first half of this semester was pretty intense. Despite the fact that the psychology instructor was a psychotic bitch, I managed to get an A out of the class and did learn some pretty interesting things. The art class was incredibly easy and even though I didn't learn very much from it, I still found it to be interesting for the most part. On campus, I still have business communication, in which the instructor is an airhead and managed to lose everyone's first assignment, then input the grades for the first exam wrong (showing that I had a 59, which does not happen), and then completely lose my exam. We'll see what happens with that. Also, I absolutely hate group work.

I'm getting a lot out of my previsualization class. I can't draw particularly well, but I'm getting a little better and learning some good tricks. I read a few screenplay and wrote a short one of my own in the class, which I will post more about later. We watched Amélie to showcase good cinematography and I really enjoyed the movie. There is a big project coming up, for which I am still working out the details and may or may not post about later.

That has been my life for the last 8 weeks. I will now attempt to blog at regular intervals and continue with my reading list while catching up on all of the other areas of life that have been getting neglected. 

8 Weeks

I'm not entirely sure what gave me the idea that I would be able to read a book a week while taking two accelerated courses and two on campus courses. I will try again in 8 weeks, when my accelerated courses have wrapped up and work double time during the summer to catch up and then get ahead for the fall classes I'm going to take. In the mean time, here are some of the things that I have learned this week:

White matter is white because of a fatty myelin sheath that insulates it from the sea of ions that the body is comprised of. Alternatively, grey matter is grey because of the lack of myelin.

Nerve impulses travel roughly 2 mph in grey matter, but up to 225 mph in white matter.

During the paleolithic era, when humans first started drawing on cave walls the paintings were all of animals. It wasn't until the neolithic era that humans began appearing in these paintings.

The history of Egypt is much more interesting than I had ever imagined.

When taking a business card, you should comment on it rather than putting it directly into your pocket.

Young people have no idea how to communicate and are very awkward.

That's all I can recall for now because I'm overworked and sleep deprived. It's probably going to be a rough 8 weeks, but I think that I can handle it. I still haven't decided how I feel about my classes, but will probably post a conclusion soon.

2. The Art of Failure

Another book from the Playful Thinking series, this week's book was The Art of Failure. It was written by a professor at the NYU Game Center. The author discusses the paradox of gaming (much like the paradox of painful art), which goes something like this:

1. As humans, we avoid the negative emotions that failure cause us.
2. Games present us with the constant threat of failure.
3. People seek out opportunities to play games, which often result in failure.

Ultimately, the most likely explanation for why we play games similar to why we watch horror movies. Research shows that while we consume any sort of fictional media, there are two parts of the brain that remain consistently active for the duration of the event. In the case of the horror flick, one of these parts focuses entirely on the movie. This is why you jump when something scary happens. The other part keeps track of all of the other things going on around you, what the people in the theater are doing, where you are, and reminds you that you are watching a movie. This is why you don't run out of the theater when something scary happens. While we can be fully engrossed in a game and any failure can be devastating, we always have the option of walking away and telling ourselves that it was just a game.

The author performed a small case study in which he asked people to play a short game he had created and rate their enjoyment of the game. The study showed that players who completed the game without failing once rated the game lower on average than players who failed at least once. Players who failed too frequently to complete the game rated the game only slightly lower than players who never failed. The author also talked about specific and general causes of failure and how these perceptions can change the way characters react to the failure and how much they enjoy the game.

Failure in the storytelling aspect of a game is a tricky subject. While most literature and film is shown in a third person perspective, games usually force the player to take on the role of the protagonist. In fiction, we can feel empathy for the protagonist as we watch his (or her) world fall apart, this generally doesn't work well in games because the players' and protagonists' goals are generally aligned. A failure (personal tragedy) for the protagonist is a failure for the player. There have been a few games that have successfully pulled off tragic endings (namely, Red Dead Redemption) and there are games that focus on deception and complicity to keep the players' and protagonists' goals in line.

100 Years of Physics

Sometime during the 14th century, the Italians developed a way of grinding glass so that the new curvature of the glass bends light in a way that changes the focal point of the light. These lenses were often used in spectacles to correct one's vision. More than a century after lens making had become relatively commonplace, two Dutch lens grinders combined a pair of lenses in a tube allowing them to make objects appear larger than to the naked eye. Thus, the microscope was born. The next four hundred years saw many improvements and novel new uses for these devices, and you can now buy a basic one on Amazon for under $50.

Microscopes are frequently used by students in high school biology classes to examine the structure of cells and how cells can interact with each other or their environment. The ones I used in high school were fairly sophisticated - multiple magnification levels, safety features so you don't scratch the lens when changing levels, backlit from the bottom through a diffusion grid. I didn't really think much of the technology behind them, and I still don't, because microscopes are a fairly common object in the time period we're living in. Microscopes provide crucial insight into basic biological structure that can't be obtained from a book.

In the same way that microscopes are essential in biology classes and the Bunsen burner is essential in chemistry classes, particle accelerators will one day be essential in physics classes. In 100 years particle accelerators will be available in the physics classrooms of every high school.

Recently physicists at the University of Texas created a "Table Top" particle accelerator, capable of reaching energies only previously achieved at major (read: billions of dollars and hundreds of feet in length) facilities. The size is reduced by a factor of about 10,000, and I assume that the cost of constructing the accelerator would be reduced by a similar factor. Assuming that the price of a linear accelerator is an even billion dollars, the price of the table top accelerator would be a mere hundred thousand. Big bucks for you and me, not so much for a university or school district. 

Particle physics have paved the way for some of the most important discoveries of modern technology. While computers predate the current atomic model, it wasn't until the widespread acceptance of quantum physics and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle that we learned how to miniaturize the transistor using a single electron flowing through a silicon wafer, that the modern computer revolution occurred. Modern communication systems, industrial systems, and surgical techniques all rely on lasers to perform precise operations, none of which would be possible without a clear understanding of both the wave and particle nature of light.

Much as early microscopes helped accelerate the progress of biology (and therefor medicine),  particle accelerators have helped accelerate the progress of physics (and therefor technology). Just a  few hundred years ago having access to a microscope would have been a great privilege, but now it is trivial to find or buy one. A hundred years from now the same will be true of particle accelerators and we will be in a completely new era, where everyone has access to pieces of the puzzle that is the mysterious nature of physics, and an era in which we may discover everything there is to know about the subject.

Of course with the discovery of new physics fundamentals will come an entirely new generation of technology to exploit those fundamentals. From the manipulation of gravity and time, to warp drives and teleporters, to things that our still Newtonian brains haven't even considered to be within the realm of imagining.

1. Uncertainty in Games

Being the holidays, this week has been hectic for me. I decided to finish a book I got last year called Uncertainty in Games. It's part of MIT's Playful Thinking Series, which currently has just two books, but is worth checking out.

The book was a very interesting look at different and sometimes surprising sources of uncertainty in popular genres of games. For example, classic Mario games have no random elements. The game levels and enemy locations are exactly the same every time you play through. All of the games' uncertainty comes from the player's ability to time their actions correctly as they run through the levels. Strategy games such as chess rely completely on a player's opponent for uncertainty.

Zynga's Facebook games are interesting because the company makes money from uncertainty. Players have an amount of uncertainty in their every day schedules, so they never know if they will make it back in time to perform the next action that they need to take. This keeps players coming back on a daily basis, and in some cases paying real world money to correct a missed opportunity. In the long run, it is the uncertainty in the story line (if you would call it that) and future improvements that keep players returning to the games. An "I want to know what they will add next," sort of addiction. Of course, there are small random bonuses that players occasionally receive, but these have a very minor effect on the game.

In fact, most games are designed in a way such that randomness has relatively little effect on anything. In war games such as Risk, every battle is determined by the rolling of dice, an intrinsically random event. However, throughout the course of the game, the outcome of the die rolls will regress toward the mean, statistically evening out. This is a purely mathematical concept and doesn't require the player have any knowledge of it. It does mean that while the victor of every battle is randomly determined, the uncertainty in these types of games (and most games where a die roll or card shuffle provide a level of randomness) lies in each player's ability to out-strategize the other.

In the end, there is no tried and true rule to determine how much or which type of uncertainty to incorporate into a game, but many of the most popular and fun games have many layers of uncertainty that have been finely tuned to craft an entertaining and enjoyable experience.

This Year's List

There are a few things I would like to accomplish this year and are as follows:

1. Read or finish a book a week.
2. Turn some of the scenarios in my head into short stories or books.
3. Create a new blog template from scratch, or close to it.
4. Create and stick to a maintenance schedule for the tings that need it.
5. Get my finances back in order after buying a house.

We'll see how this goes.

More on #1 in a few minutes.