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.