David Ashley

Web Animation

2012-01-29T05:14:00.000-08:00

For some time I've wanted to be able to do web animations like flash can do, for simple games or physics or math simulations for educational purposes. But the idea of having to by Code Composer Studio, being tied to macromedia, always put me off.

Combining svg with javascript seems to be a solution. It might not be as fast as flash but as computers keep getting faster and faster that's already irrelevant.

Original source

Wikipedia Offline For A Day!

2012-01-17T21:48:00.000-08:00

This is a day to remember. Bravo, Wikipedia! This is a much nicer gesture than the nagging "A personal appeal from ..." messages for money...

The Middle Class Disappears, Rise of the Praetorian Class

2012-01-17T07:08:00.001-08:00

I enjoyed this article here.

Deaths In 2011

2011-12-31T16:02:00.000-08:00

2011-12-15 Christopher Hitchens (62)

2011-12-07 Harry Morgan (96) (Played Colonel Potter on MASH)

2011-11-19 John Neville (86) (Played Baron Munchausen)

2011-11-09 Bill Keane (89) (Cartoonist, Family Circus)

2011-11-07 Joe Frazier (67) (Boxer, fought Ali)

2011-11-04 Andy Rooney (92) (60 Minutes commentary)

2011-10-24 John McCarthy (84) (Created Lisp programming language)

2011-10-20 Muammar Gaddafi (69) (Head of Libya)

2011-10-08 Dennis Ritchie (70) (Co-inventor of the C programming language)

2011-10-05 Charles Napier (75) (Actor, one of the cops in Silence Of The Lambs)

2011-10-05 Steve Jobs (56)

2011-10-02 Don Lapre (47) (Get rich schemes, infomercials)

2011-09-15 Frances Bay (92) (Played old lady on Seinfeld, episode about bread rolls)

2011-09-10 Cliff Robertson (88) (Actor that played Charly)

2011-08-06 John Wood (81) (Played Professor Falken in Wargames)

2011-07-21 Elliot Handler (95) (Co-founder of Mattel, namer of Barbie doll)

2011-07-08 Betty Ford (93)

2011-07-08 Roberts Blossom (87) (Old man on Home Alone)

2011-06-23 Peter Falk (83)

2011-06-03 James Arness (88) (Star of Gunsmoke)

2011-06-03 Jack Kevorkian (83) (Of assisted suicide fame)

2011-05-27 Jeff Conaway (60) (Played Bobby Wheeler on Taxi)

2011-05-21 Bill Hunter (71) (Actor, Strictly Ballroom)

2011-05-15 Barbara Stuart (76) (Actress, played lots of bit parts)

2011-05-05 Claude Choules (110) (Last WWI combat veteran)

2011-05-03 Jackie Cooper (88) (Our Gang, Perry White from Superman)

2011-05-02 Osama Bin Laden (54) (According to media reports)

2011-04-28 William Campbell (84) (Played Squire Trelane of Gothos in Star Trek)

2011-04-20 Madelyn Pugh (90) (Writer for I Love Lucy)

2011-04-14 Arthur Marx (89) (Groucho's son)

2011-04-09 Sidney Lumet (86) (Director, 12 Angry Men, Q&A)

2011-03-26 Geraldine Ferraro (75)

2011-03-23 Elizabeth Taylor (79)

2011-03-20 Dorothy Young (103) (Harry Houdini's assistant)

2011-03-18 Warren Christopher (85) (US Secretary of State 1993-1997)

2011-03-17 Michael Gough (94) (Alfred from the Batman movies)

2011-03-04 Johnny Preston (71) (Sang Running Bear)

2011-02-28 Jane Russell (89)

2011-02-27 Frank Buckles (110) (Last living WWI veterran)

2011-02-16 Len Lesser (88) (Played Uncle Leo on Seinfeld)

2011-02-11 Betty Garrett (91) (Played Irene Lorenzo in All In The Family)

2011-02-10 Bill Justice (97) (Disney animator, animated Thumper from Bambi, animatronics)

2011-02-02 George Mendonca (101) (Gardener in Fast, Cheap & Out Of Control)

2011-01-23 Jack LaLanne (96) (Famous fitness promoter)

2011-01-17 Don Kirshner (76) (From Don Kirshner's Rock Concert)

2011-01-15 Suzanna York (72) (Played Superman's mother in 1978 movie)

2011-01-14 Mississippi Winn (113)

2011-01-11 David Nelson (74) (From Adventures of Ozzie And Harriet)

2011-01-09 Peter Yates (82) (Director of movie Breaking Away)

2011-01-08 John McCarthy Roll (63) (Tucson shooting, Gabrielle Giffords)

2011-01-06 Donald Tyson (80) (CEO of Tyson Foods)

2011-01-04 Gerry Rafferty (63) (Wrote song Baker Street)

2011-01-02 Anne Francis (80) (Forbidden Planet Girl)

WHORE

2011-12-22T23:01:00.001-08:00

They Hate Us For Our Freedom

2011-12-08T09:49:00.001-08:00

gleyespace

2011-11-29T21:22:00.000-08:00

I was tinkering around and I thought this looked pretty cool.

Animated Puzzles

2011-11-16T22:34:00.001-08:00

I've been working on a puzzle game where the image is animated.

The New Inquisition

2011-11-07T20:02:00.000-08:00

The New Inquisition by Robert Anton Wilson.

From chapter 1:

As Persinger and Lafreniere write in Space-Time Transients and Unusual Events, Nielson-Hall, 1977, page 3:

"We, as a species, exist in a material in which exist a myriad of data points. Upon these matrices of points we superimpose a structure and the world makes sense to us. The pattern of the structure originates within our biological and sociological properties."

To the extent that we remain conscious of this process of superimposing structure (programming our emic reality) we will behave liberally and will continue learning throughout life. To the extent that we become unconscious of this process, we will behave Fundamentalistically or Idolatrously and will never again learn anything after the hour in which we (usually unconsciously) elevate a generalization into a dogma and stop thinking.

Wow, he really nailed it with that paragraph. Welcome to the real world where everyone is asleep!

Amiga Juggler

2011-10-23T19:19:00.000-07:00

This was cool when it was new in the mid 1980's on the Amiga computer...

ETA:
Here is a really useful page where a fellow recreates the entire animation in java.

Here is a version I put together using OpenGL based on the above recreation.

The Ancient Game Of Hack

2011-10-21T13:53:00.001-07:00

link

Getting Around Laws Against Amplified Speech

2011-10-19T07:50:00.001-07:00

Just pass out those little walkie-talkies to members of the crowd. Each member of the audience is a point of amplified speech. The speaker transmits. They've got like 24 channels to choose from.

Noble House

2011-10-18T09:49:00.000-07:00

From Noble House by James Clavell, chapter 23:

For the Mo it's the age-old destiny: one-in-ten-thousand coolie strikes gold, harbors money, invests in land, saves money, becomes rich, buys young concubines who use him up quickly. Second generation discontented, spend money, mortgage land to buy face and ladies' favors. Third generation sell land, go bankrupt for same favors. Fourth generation coolie.

Turing Patterns

2011-10-05T08:33:00.000-07:00

Google image search on Turing Patterns yields interesting pictures.

Don Lapre Gone

2011-10-03T10:22:00.001-07:00

This guy was on TV during the 90's doing infomercials, get rich quick schemes. Anyone watching TV during the day when people usually have a job to go to would be familiar with this fellow. Considerably less annoying than email spammers, but annoying nonetheless.

October 2, 2011 he committed suicide while in prison. He was facing over 40 counts of fraud and whatnot.

He was about 2 years older than me. Seems to me the guy could have held on a little longer. Just to see how the whole thing played out.

Leisure Time

2011-09-30T10:02:00.000-07:00

This is very important -- to take leisure time. Pace is the essence. Without stopping entirely and doing nothing at all for great periods, you're gonna lose everything...just to do nothing at all, very, very important. And how many people do this in modern society? Very few. That's why they're all totally mad, frustrated, angry and hateful. -- Charles Bukowski

Here's another one I like:

Some lose all mind and become soul,insane.
some lose all soul and become mind, intellectual.
some lose both and become accepted
-- Charles Bukowski

Presumably there is a 4th type that manages to keep both mind and soul...

The Haber Process

2011-09-25T08:17:00.001-07:00

I've wanted to write a note about the Haber process for some weeks now.

The problem is nitrates. Growing crops and explosives need nitrates. Nitrates come from animal dung, such as bird shit. But in order for population to grow and wars (which need explosives), the natural supplies of nitrates were not enough.

This was especially a problem in Germany during WWI when the country was denied access to large supplies of nitrates. So on an industrial scale Germany had to ramp up production of synthetic nitrates.

The key is taking nitrogen from the atmosphere and making into ammonia. Ammonia is NH3. One atom of nitrogen and 3 atoms of hydrogen. The atmosphere contains the nitrogen molecule, which is N2. 2 atoms of nitrogen stuck together. The hydrogen comes from hydrogen gas. The process is this:

N2 + 3H2 <-> 2NH3

That is, a molecule of nitrogen and 3 molecules of hydrogen become 2 molecules of ammonia. The process goes both ways. Meaning in your reaction chamber you have ammonia being broken up into nitrogen and hydrogen gas, and at the same time those gasses are being converted into ammonia.

The thing is, the process favors the breakup of ammonia into the separate gasses. The ammonia has more energy than the nitrogen and hydrogen, so when the system is trying to find the lowest energy state nitrogen and hydrogen gasses are more stable. This is bad for the production of ammonia though.

Haber figured out a solution, one that I've always thought was really slick. It relies on the fact that we have 4 gas molecules on the left side of the equation, and only 2 gas molecules on the right side. That means because of the way gasses behave under pressure, the pressure is a function of the number of molecules. All things being equal, the pressure in a chamber would be lower if the chamber had ammonia in it compared to one where the same material was in the form of nitrogen and hydrogen.

Haber figured out that if you run the process under very high pressure, somewhere between 150 and 250 times the air pressure at sealevel, the reaction prefers to run towards the production of ammonia than towards the production of hydrogen and nitrogen.

That is, due to the very high pressure, the lower energy state is actually ammonia because in the end the pressure is 1/2 what it would be if we had the nitrogen and hydrogen.

The Haber process really is an example of pushing a chemical process uphill, against its natural tendency to run downhill. I imagine that in chemistry there are all sorts of tricks the chemists can do to get things to go in the right direction. Living organisms have their own tricks for doing these things also.

Note the Haber process uses catalysts throughout and there are other steps involved in producing the hydrogen and isolating the nitrogen, but those are just details.

Wikipedia's article claims that 1/3 of the human population on earth eats food that is fertilized by nitrates produced by the Haber process. Moreover there is an estimate that 1/2 of the protein in humans has nitrogen that came through the Haber process.

I think that's an amazing fact. We're all alive because of non-natural processes invented by humans. Say what you will about technology but many, perhaps most of us, wouldn't be alive today to even have the luxury of complaining about how we've lost touch with nature if it weren't for it.

London Trader - Massive Physical Floor In The Gold Market

2011-09-23T12:20:00.001-07:00

In the past days I followed a link to this interview but haven't been able to locate the link. The key thing I wanted to jot down was the assertion by this supposedly reputable source that at $1715 there will be massive buying of physical gold.

With gold hovering near the $1,800 level, a trader out of London told King World News, ... This price action has had the effect of creating bearish sentiment, but meanwhile the physical buyers are just sitting there and constantly accumulating physical gold. There are massive orders for tonnage of gold, incredible amounts between $1,715 and $1,760. This has the effect of putting a physical floor under the price of gold. If they make a push to the $1,715 level that would be suicide in my opinion. There are simply too many massive orders for physical gold down to that level for that to be breached.

Too bad it just says, "a trader out of London". I'd like to see the person whose reputation is at stake here...

So here we are and gold is at $1642.30. Where's that floor again?

Yikes, silver at $30.64. Still really tempted to buy some on credit... But I don't know, my life is complicated enough right now. Why not leave some for everyone else to enjoy...

Corruption Of Science

2011-09-23T09:42:00.000-07:00

Suppose the physics of our universe allow for some readily available components to be easily assembled, and when the thing is activated somehow there is a massive release of energy. I'm not speaking of atomic fission and nuclear bombs based on it, as they are complex devices and the nuclear material is not readily available.

I'm speaking of some other principles that might be at play. The details are irrelevant. The premise is that it would be very easy to assemble a very, very powerful bomb, such that with the right know-how just about anyone could do it easily. Suppose the destructive capacity is on the order of the Hiroshima or Nagasaki bombs.

Ok if such a thing is possible, then suppose that some tiny fraction of people would be motivated to put one together and destroy something, like a crowded city. Would it be stretching the imagination to guess that 1 person in a million would actually press the button if it were as easy as that to commit an act of destruction?

There are 7 billion people on the planet. That is 7,000 people if 1 out of every million would do something insane like set off a massively destructive bomb. If the knowledge of how to do it is widespread, what are the odds that all 7,000 people who have the motivation won't actually do it?

I'd say the odds are zero. One of the people will actually do it. Who knows what the fraction is? If not 1 in a million, 1 in 10 million? 1 in 100 million? 1 in a billion? In those cases the number of people goes down to 700, 70, or 7. What are the odds that these smaller groups of people don't have an individual that would actually do it?

I'd say again the odds are practically zero.

Now if this line of reasoning is possible to me, certainly it's possible to people who have influence and who can affect the spread of knowledge. Suppose in order to prevent the possibility of a catastrophe as described above, there is an intentional corruption of scientific truth such that the general population is kept in the dark about the real physics of the universe we live in?

We have a clear motive for hiding the truth. IF the physics of the universe allow for very powerful bombs to be made very easily, that would be enough reason to justify corrupting science. Intellectual elite would come to the conclusion that spreading lies is the lesser of two evils, the other evil being the destruction of the human race or even of all life on earth.

I personally believe just about every field of science is hopelessly corrupted, we're spinning our wheels, pursuing dead ends, getting nowhere. Somewhere in the past some misinterpretation was locked onto and accepted as truth, promoted as truth, and alternatives are actively ridiculed and denied funding. I've tried to figure out how it can be that the lies can persist, how so many individuals claiming to be scientists actively distort the truth and deny contradictory evidence, no matter how overwhelming it is.

Basically I have two different best-guesses I've come up with so far.

The first is that the physics of the universe DO allow for the easy assembly of very powerful explosive devices, and so to protect all life on earth science must be hobbled.

The second is that government intrusion in all areas of human existence has killed the profit motive. Instead of discovery of truth being a route to profit and success, the best liar is given the most government funding.

I suppose there is a third option, the human brain is just too limited and so too many people fall back on the safety of numbers (going along with the majority) instead of taking a chance at being wrong.

And there is always the option that I'm just completely wrong about everything. I'm constantly asking myself this, actually. But so far I haven't seen anything that demonstrates I'm wrong. My theories are not met with arguments, they're met with denial and a tendency to avoid even thinking about these things. I'd love it if someone else had a better explanation of what's going on in the world these days. Instead I just see everyone plodding along with their head down. And they fall back on just going along with the status quo and the majority.

OMG[4]

2011-09-23T03:46:00.001-07:00

Boy, tsunami is the right word for what's going on. I'm actually tempted to max out a sidelined credit card to buy some more silver.

www.apmex.com sells on credit.

Remember these days. This could be the last time to get on the train. The last, biggest slapdown before the manipulation ends.

ETA:Like a Chinese auction, where the price starts off high and drops until someone decides to buy, I finally was enticed to buy some more. Total cost was $31.04/ounce.

The World Empire

2011-09-22T11:07:00.000-07:00

Everything that's going on in the world makes sense when you step back and look at the bigger picture.

What we have is a world empire where all the big countries are already part of it. The top of the power structure is not the US. It's the federal reserve bank and its ability to create US dollars in unlimited quantities.

The US government itself is just one of the many vassal states that have been bought off. All leaders of all the vassal states are chosen by the ruling elite. It's done because the ruling elite controls most of the money flowing into the campaigns. They also control most of the news media. So it's easy to pick puppets to fill out all positions in governent.

That ranges from presidents to senators and congressmen. But it goes down to judges also. Anyone of importance, actually, in government. The whole world is corrupt. Practically all leaders, everywhere, are bought and paid for. Either they take the silver (bribes) or they take the lead (they're assassinated).

The power elite control the world's reserve currency, the US dollar. Since people the world over value dollars, they can be manipulated easily by bribing them. It works on an individual level and on the national level. All the big nations are already bought and part of the world empire.

Now the way the empire works is there is a big empire that is made up of little empires, in a tree like structure.

From the top level you have lines going to the US as one zone, to China as another, to Russia as another, and to the eurozone as a 4th. These are the biggest zones. Each of these zones has its own tree structure. The eurozone has all of europe underneath it.

The goal of the world empire is to get every nation locked into the empire so there is no freedom left anywhere. Each little region gets absorbed into the most convenient larger region. The trouble with the eurozone isn't local. It's a major pain for the power elite trying to bring about total world domination.

Since the federal reserve is not monitored day to day, they can do whatever they want, short term. They can flood the world markets with dollars and no one outside their secret group is watching. Months to years later with court orders and freedom of information requests they will release some sanitized versions of their actions, but it doesn't matter because the media downplays it and it's too late anyway for the information to make a difference.

All the information on past activities does is illustrate how the federal reserve operates. In 2008 they made 14 trillion dollars of new money and used it to prevent the collapse of the world empire's economy.

They're going to do the same now to hold the eurozone together. Whatever germany thinks of the matter is just misdirection. Whether germany goes along with bailing out greece is irrelevant. The federal reserve will always step in and bail out the eurozone.

From the power elite's point of view if the eurozone breaks apart that is a major step backwards in their global agenda. They've already tied up europe into a union, and it is much easier to control that central power point than go back to square one and control the individual nations. So unlimited dollars will be made available to hold the eurozone together.

This is outside of the US constitution, outside of the federal reserve's mandate. There is no adherence to principles, no justice, no oversite. The checks and balances are utterly nonexistent at this point. What is going on now is the central power elite trying deperately to hold onto their power before their dream of world government utterly explodes.

Personally I think the dream of world government is a complete fantasy. It's just too unstable. Individual differences among people and among nations are just too great. One size does not fit all. Europe itself has too much variation in order to hold itself together.

I have faith that the global US dollar based empire is in the process of disintegrating. I think not only are the toiling masses sick of it, I think even the elite, the ones part of the empire, are sick of it. But for the most part they're just too caught up in business as usual to step back and admit, "You know, we gave it a good effort, but this is really not going to work."

My preference is to let the world empire phase of human history just fade away. Let's go back to individual nations, each trying to look out for their own local interests. Nations go back to trading among themselves with gold as the world's money. The human race can get by perfectly well without a single point of control.

Central control just doesn't work. It's too inefficient. Give up on that particular dream and the human race will be able to start moving forward again. Everyone will benefit.

Individual humans are not at fault now. There are no bad guys. The bad thing is the system itself. All humans are caught up in this system, rich and poor alike. That is, we're all victims of the current way of doing things. It's time to transition to a better system.

Every single person alive today was just born into this system. It was here when they got there. That means we don't really owe it our loyalty. Even the people at the top were born into their positions. It's like the whole human race is caught up in a dance not of their own making. We can come up with a better dance, I think. Poor and rich alike, even the rich all the way up at the very very top, are all victims of this system. Time to move on. No need for reprisals, vengence, justice. What's the point? Just let it all go and we can all make a fresh start.

Tsunami Warning!

2011-09-22T03:48:00.000-07:00

When a tsunami hits the water recedes way back away from the beach. Ground is exposed that is almost always underwater. This attracts people's attention, and they go explore the new area. Especially kids I suppose. They get caught up in looking around, seeing starfish and clams and whatever, nooks and crannies in the rocks.

They're usually drowned first when some minutes later the wall of water comes crashing back, dragging them often miles inland to places that almost never get touched by seawater.

Years can go by between tsunami events. Lifetimes. But some wise people pass on the knowledge to their kids that if you see the water recede strangely like that, GET AWAY FROM THE BEACH AND GO TO HIGH GROUND.

Last night I started seeing something that really reminded me of a tsunami. A massive rally in the US dollar index. And all other asset classes were falling.

3% fall in the Canadian dollar compared to the US dollar in the span of 24 hours. 2 to 4% drops in gold and silver (especially silver at the moment).

Who knows? This might be just the usual market volitility. But I'm still hoping for the tsunami.

Just in case you don't get the comparison to a tsunami (still), going into US dollars is NOT going to high ground. Going into US dollars is going exploring in the low, low tide zone. Wham! The tsunami hits, and you're wiped out.

US dollars are just paper, after all.

These days high ground is gold and silver.

Mankind's Insanity

2011-09-20T21:54:00.000-07:00

I was talking with my son today and the subject was flying cars. At one point I mentioned to him if he ever wanted a quick reminder about how insane mankind is, just think of the flying car.

I told him imagine all the resources that went into the world's roads. All the land that had to be levelled, paved over, and constantly repaired and kept smooth and worthy of vehicle traffic. Trillions of dollars. Many trillions.

Balanced against that, how much would it have cost to just invent cheap, safe, efficient flying cars?

Kurt Vonnegut - A Man Without A Country

2011-09-18T22:42:00.000-07:00

Chapter 5:

Okay, now let’s have some fun.

Let’s talk about sex. Let’s talk about women. Freud said he didn’t know what women wanted. I know what women want: a whole lot of people to talk to. What do they want to talk about? They want to talk about everything.

What do men want? They want a lot of pals, and they wish people wouldn’t get so mad at them.

Why are so many people getting divorced today? It’s because most of us don’t have extended families anymore. It used to be that when a man and a woman got married, the bride got a lot more people to talk to about everything. The groom got a lot more pals to tell dumb jokes to.

A few Americans, but very few, still have extended families. The Navahos. The Kennedys.

But most of us, if we get married nowadays, are just one more person for the other person. The groom gets one more pal, but it’s a woman. The woman gets one more person to talk to about everything, but it’s a man.

When a couple has an argument nowadays, they may think it’s about money or power or sex or how to raise the kids or whatever. What they’re really saying to each other, though without realizing it, is this: “You are not enough people!”

A husband, a wife and some kids is not a family. It’s a terribly vulnerable survival unit.

I met a man in Nigeria one time, an Ibo who had six hundred relatives he knew quite well. His wife had just had a baby, the best possible news in any extended family.

They were going to take it to meet all its relatives, Ibos of all ages and sizes and shapes. It would even meet other babies, cousins not much older than it was. Everybody who was big enough and steady enough was going to get to hold it, cuddle it, gurgle to it, and say how pretty or how handsome it was.

Wouldn’t you have loved to be that baby?

I sure wish I could wave a wand, and give every one of you an extended family, make you an Ibo or a Navaho—or a Kennedy.

Now, you take George and Laura Bush, who imagine themselves as a brave, clean-cut little couple. They are surrounded by an enormous extended family, what we should all have—I mean judges, senators, newspaper editors, lawyers, bankers. They are not alone. That they are members of an extended family is one reason they are so comfortable. And I would really, over the long run, hope America would find some way to provide all of our citizens with extended families—a large group of people they could call on for help.

32 Detonators?

2011-09-15T19:01:00.000-07:00

I was reading the book The Secret History Of Science's Postwar Elite by Ann Finkbeiner and on page 5 there was this text:

Fitch helped measure whether all thirty-two of the bomb's detonators would fire simultaneously...

The passage is related to the design of an implosion atomic bomb. A subcritical mass of nuclear material is surrounded by high exposives in such a way that when they detonate a spherical pressure wave crushes the core evenly all over until it reaches a critical mass, then it blows apart as the material fisions in a chain reaction.

I was trying to visualize how 32 pieces of explosive could be shaped around a sphere. Why 32?

I'd assume for simplicity's sake they'd want all the pieces to be identical, so a single cast could be used. Can you tile 32 identical shapes around a sphere? I imagined the faces of a cube, but there are 6 of those, and 6 won't go into 32 evenly. Then I imagined the 4 faces of a tetrahedron, and 4 does go into 32 (8 times). So could you have 4 pieces that are identical that cover a sphere? And if so could you divide each of those 4 pieces into 8 identical pieces?

I visualized 4 identical pieces but they each are sort of circular but with 6 sides. Those 6 sizes require 3 each of 2 different kinds of pieces that are mirror images of each other. 24 pieces total, 12 of each kind. But that's not 32.

I wonder if claiming there are 32 pieces is a case of misinformation. If they say 24 that suggests the likely shape. If they say 32 there seem to be many different shapes that are possible, none necessarily better.

Imagine a sphere. Mark off 4 points of a tetrehedron on the sphere. There are now 4 equal triangles. Call the 4 points A, B, C and D. The 4 triangles are ABC, ACD, ADB, BCD. Each of those triangles has a center.

Now to make one of the 4 big pieces, let's assume point A is on the top of the sphere. The border of the piece where A is the center traces the line:

1) Start at center of triangle ABC
2) Go to midpoint of line AC
3) Go to center of triangle ACD
4) Go to midpoint of line AD
5) Go to midpoint of triangle ADB
6) Go to midpoint of line AB
7) Return to center of triangle ABC.

Six sides total. There are identical big pieces centered on points B, C and D.

These big pieces can be broken down into 6 fan-shaped pieces that converge on point A and end with one of the sides. These pieces come in 2 types that are mirror images of each other.

Just playing with ideas.

Venus

2011-09-15T08:30:00.000-07:00

The planet venus has a very dense atmosphere, some 93 times as much mass as the earth's. The planet's mass is about 85.7% of the earth's mass. The surface temperature is over 800 degrees F.

.007% of the venus' atmosphere is argon (based on partial pressure, not mass). Earth's percentage of argon is .93%. Keeping in mind venus' atmosphere is 93 times as dense, if we multiply 93 times .007% we get .651% which is comparable to earth's measurement, just 2/3 of earth's value. That suggests to me the atmospheres of venus and earth might have started out very similiar.

The earth's atmosphere has only trace amounts of carbon (in the form of carbon dioxide). But venus' atmosphere is 96.5% carbon dioxide. At sealevel on earth air pressure is 14.7 pounds per square inch. Multiply that by 93 and you get 1367 pounds per square inch on venus. How much of that is carbon?

By volume 3.5% of venus' atmosphere is nitrogen, and 96.5% is carbon dioxide. These are measurements of partial pressure and not of mass. Converting these to mass percentages is easy. The nitrogen molecule has an atomic weight of 28 (2 atoms of nitrogen at 14 each). CO2 has an atom of carbon and 2 of oxygen. Each oxygen atomic weight is 16, and the carbon is 12. Adding these up CO2 has an atomic weight of 44.

OK so 96.5% of the volume of venus' atmoshpere comes from carbon dioxide with an atomic mass of 44, and 3.5% comes from nitrogen with an atomic mass of 28. Converting these to mass measurements is easy, we just take 96.5 and multiply by 44 and we get 4246, and we take 3.5 and multiply by 28 and we get 98. Add these together to get 4246+98=4344. So by mass 4246/4344 = 97.7% carbon dioxide and 98/4344 = 2.3% nitrogen.

So of 1367 pounds per square inch of atmosphere on venus, 97.7 of that is carbon dioxide, or 1336 pounds. And 12/44 of that is the carbon, or 27.3%, or 364.4 pounds of carbon.

On earth we only have trace amounts of carbon in the atmosphere. On venus there is 364.4 pounds of carbon per square inch. There is evidence that suggests to me both planets started out with similiar atmospheres. What happened to all the carbon on earth?

My answer is: Life. Life used up the carbon to make wood, starch, sugars, protein, animals, etc. Somewhere on the earth for every square inch of surface there is 364.4 pounds of carbon hidden somewhere. That's quite a lot. I expect some of it is stored in trees and living things on the surface, but I also expect a lot of it has gone down into the crust of the earth and is stuck there. The current theory is that the earth's plates are constantly getting pushed up out of the deeper interior and at the same time pulled back down under, so the surface is constantly getting recycled.

Maybe as carbon compounds get sucked down they get converted into oil and that's where a lot of the carbon went.

Anyway it seems as though conditions on Venus are too inhospitable for life as we know it to form and consume all the carbon. Probably it's just too hot there. So all the carbon is still around in the atmosphere.

Wikipedia was used as the source for various measurements.

ETA: It occurs to me that perhaps the concern about humans putting CO2 into the atmosphere is entirely unfounded based on the above discussion. Life managed to convert huge amounts of CO2 into life, and is constantly trying to do so all the time. All plant life on earth is fighting to grow, and that requires using up the CO2. As humans put more CO2 into the atmosphere, plant life will greedily consume it.

Gary North Losing His Mind

2011-09-14T17:59:00.001-07:00

There's a recent article by Gary North called "Universal Personal Bankruptcy to Save America's Economy?" where Gary North criticizes an article by Brett Arends. Gary North resorts to derisive insults (extremely low class, utterly bad form). Now, I've called people "Idiot" in this blog (Gary North himself). But then I'm not a professional analyst. I've got no reputation to protect. I'm just some nobody writing my thoughts down and making them available to the world.

Evidently Brett Arends' idea is that everyone just, en masse, defaults on all their debt. That'll solve all the current problems.

I happen to agree with that approach. I've recommended it in the past. The system is rigged such that it is impossible for everyone to get out of debt. And since so many people are in debt with a negative net worth, why shouldn't they all just default? Their net worth instantly goes from negative to zero, which is an improvement.

Gary North can be lumped into other pro-status-quo zombies like Karl Denninger. These sorts of people somehow believe in The System, in the USA, in nationalism. They believe at some point the USA will come to its senses and problems will get solved. And they're betting on this with their investments. Karl Denninger sold some software company and made enough to retire, so he's just concerned with making sure his hoarded wealth retains its value and the slaves keep working so he can buy the results of their labor. It looks like Gary North is in the same position.

Both these guys, evidently, would suffer monumental losses in the event of a general, nationwide citizen default. So they'd prefer the situation where the toiling masses just keep going on toiling forever, being good slaves, trying forever to pay down their debts even though it's impossible. "Another day older and deeper in debt."

Evidently to them it's a moral question. They managed to be savers, invest wisely, not live beyond their means. So to them it seems so unfair if people who spent so lavishly and got so deeply into debt get a free ride. "Unfair!" they probably think.

It's beyind right and wrong, fairness is irrelevant. I believe there is no way the system can repair itself. It is too far gone, too corrupt, too broken. Utter collapse is the only way out. As such the mass bankruptcy, to me, is a step in the right direction. It brings about the complete collapse that much sooner. And once we get the collapse we get to restart things and try again. I'm willing to roll the dice in the hopes the world becomes a better place.

Gary North is now not worth listening to. Too bad, he was a voice of reason as relates to the grievous mistakes the government and federal reserve are constantly making. Now he's lost it. Maybe he's panicking himself, as he's starting to believe that the system we're suffering under might actually be falling apart.

Michael Pento Leaves Euro Pacific?

2011-09-14T16:02:00.001-07:00

July 28, 2010 Euro Pacific (Peter Schiff's company) announced it had hired Michael Pento: link

Since then I recall seeing lots of articles written by him from his position at Euro Pacific.

Now he seems not to be visible on Euro Pacific's site and he seems to have gone his own way. Here's a bio from King World News: link

Excerpt:
Prior to starting Pento Portfolio Strategies and joining Agora Financial, Mr. Pento served as a senior economist
and vice president of the managed products division of another financial firm.

My take is that "other financial firm" is Euro Pacific.

I wouldn't be surprised if we were to hear Euro Pacific went belly up one of these days. 2008 I invested with them and was told I'd receive a yield in the 7-9% range. For that they took 3% off the top on the initial purchases. I never saw more than about a 3% yield. After Peter's failed attempt to win the US Senate, and since the US economy has somehow managed to hold together (such that Peter Schiff's investment strategy has not yet really paid off) I'd guess people are bailing on the company. I know I did over a year ago.

The above is just my opinion.

Play-doh Snake

2011-09-13T11:04:00.000-07:00

Kid: What have you been working on?

Parent: I'm trying to figure out how to combine all the observed behaviours of the universe into a unified theory. I've managed to devise an approach that allows for an eternal, infinitely old universe that is ever changing and ever recycling itself.

Kid: Cool!

Parent: What have you been working on?

Kid: I made a snake out of play-doh.

Parent: Cool!

Mobs In Cairo Drive Out Israeli Embassy

2011-09-13T07:59:00.000-07:00

Link

Doesn't seem like an ordinary event.

I recently read The Chosen by Chaim Potok and watched the movie based on it. It was news to me that there was disagreement within the jewish people whether it was a good idea to create the nation of Israel before the return of the messiah.

The book conveys that it was a very heated debate. Certainly carving out a nation in that area has cost the world some 50 years of tension...

I really liked the book.

10 Years After False Flag 9/11

2011-09-11T18:45:00.000-07:00

Yep, 10 years ago 3 buildings were brought down with controlled demolition charges (both twin towers and wtc7) and a bomb was detonated in the Pentagon, and the whole was made to look like the work of Islamic terrorists. Well, that's my take on it at least.

Here's a cool video on WTC 7.

Architects & Engineers - Solving the Mystery of WTC 7 - AE911Truth.org

Anyone still wonder why I call this a rotten and vile empire?

I think at this point even the so called rulers would be relieved if it all came crashing down. Despite unimaginable wealth I expect they're living in their own hell. Fear of losing control. Fear of being found out. Fear of reprisals.

If you have nothing, you have nothing to lose, so there's little to be afraid of. They have everything (in a materialistic sense) and so have everything to lose, so they're probably crippled by an endless fear of losing any of it.

If I could push a button and switch places with them, I wouldn't. I'd still prefer if their influence on human affairs went away though.

Johnny Reeferseed

2011-09-11T09:23:00.001-07:00

Some time in the 70's I recall reading some book, seems to me written by National Lampoon, that mentioned a character Johnny Reeferseed that went around planting marijuana seeds. Like Johnny Appleseed.

It might have been "A Dirty Book" or "Another Dirty Book" or "Letters" all of which are by National Lampoon. I'm not really sure though. The running joke was he'd have these vague descriptions of where he'd planted the seeds. "Behind the Save Mart on Route 47" is an imitation of one of them.

Seems to me if one were so minded one could just go plant seeds randomly around the country. It is a weed, after all. If legalization efforts aren't working maybe just giving nature a helping hand would serve. The costs of trying to hunt down and eradicate each and every crop that pops up would be prohibitive.

Hemp makes better cloth than cotton and doesn't deplete the soil. Oil from the seeds would make an excellent biofuel (biodiesel) and would be renewable. I think hemp plants produce massive amounts of fiber + oil per unit of land. There's nothing noble about making it illegal, or the War On Drugs. Just the powers that be trying to cling to the status quo. My take is what you do is your own business if you're not hurting anyone else. Who but a psychopath could disagree with that?

Gary North Sold Out?

2011-09-11T07:19:00.001-07:00

In this article Ron Paul Has Saved Us From Hyperinflation Gary North makes the argument that hyperinflation can't come because the only way it can occur is if the government / federal reserve pump more and more money into the economy, and that won't happen since Ron Paul has warned everyone to be on the lookout for it.

Gary North is saying the only way hyperinflation can come about is through rampant money printing. That is very odd, I think.

Imagine a huge bowl shaped earthen dam. It's miles across. It's a giant circle of dirt piled up, the cross section is triangular, very wide at the bottom and narrow at the top. The bowl is filled with water, right up to the brim. The water is very deep.

Now there is a huge pipe pouring more water into the reservoir. As water is slowly filling the reservoir, teams of workers are busy piling more dirt on the rim of the earthen dam to hold back the new water. They can cope with some flow rate without the dam bursting. But if the flow is too big, the water will breach the top of the dam at some point and start flowing out.

If such an event occurs, the water itself will wear away the earth, allowing more water to flow, which wears away more earth. Here is an example of something like this happening. October 4, 2010 there was an accident at the Ajka alumina plant in Hungary:

The reservoir got too full and broke out of the dam, then all hell broke loose.

Coming back to our earthen dam, if the pipe filling the dam were to suddenly go into overdrive and pour vast amounts of new water in, the crews building onto the dam couldn't cope, and the water would overflow, and the dam would fail, releasing almost all the water.

See where I'm going with this? The federal reserve is the pipe filling the reservoir with dollars created out of nothing. The reservoir is the total amount of dollars existing in the world. The dam itself is the world's desire to hold onto the dollars as a store of value. If the federal reserve were to pump too many trillions of dollars into the world, everyone would panic out of dollars, causing hyperinflation.

So Gary North says, "Aha! This can't happen now, as Ron Paul has warned us what the federal reserve is up to, so they can't get away with it! We're safe from hyperinflation!"

What about all the dollars already in the world? If something happens to cause enough people to fear the dollar's value won't hold up, they'll start selling dollars and buying... whatever is seen as a better store of value. Say gold and silver for example. Now if this activity causes still more people to flee the dollar, the panic can set in and more and more people start fleeing, as the dollar's value is collapsing against all sorts of real things. It is a stuation of positive feedback, the falling dollar causes people to flee the dollar, which causes the dollar to fall more... and so on.

Just like the dam bursting, no force on earth can stop it from releasing all the water it is holding back. It all happens too fast.

Anything can trigger the first leak. Not only massive amounts of new dollars dumped into the world economy. Enough panic moments spread around that can't be halted would do it.

Why is Gary North making the bold claim that hyperinflation can't occur? Hyperinflation might be just the exponential out of control creation of new money, such that the value of each monetary unit goes to zero. But there are many routes to the value of each unit going to zero, not just the one that Gary North claims Ron Paul warned us about. It's all about a loss of faith in the currency. Once faith is lost, game over for the currency.

Did Gary North accept an offer he couldn't refuse? Either that or he's an idiot. Once more we now have to be careful not to blindly listen to an expert.

James Sinclair's $1764 Gold Call

2011-09-09T15:12:00.001-07:00

This is just a note to self that James Sinclair claimed once gold crosses $1764/ounce that will signify a collapse in faith in the us dollar and things would really start to break down.

Well, here we are way past that mark ($1859 or so at today's close) and I'm not seeing any massive failures yet.

Every prediction of doom gives me a sense of hope. I want this whole rotten, rotten system to collapse and die. I hate the world empire with my whole heart. When the predictions of collapse fail I'm once again disappointed.

I've said this before. Limbo is worse than Hell. At least in Hell you know you're in Hell and you try to improve your situation. Limbo is a form of Hell that is just bad enough so that you're constantly miserable, but not bad enough for you to really do anything about it.

I think the world is sick of being in Limbo. Heaven or Hell would be an improvement at this point.

End The IRS

2011-09-09T10:36:00.001-07:00

Seems to me a more effective strategy to deal with the ongoing economic problems than "End The Fed!" would be to just end the IRS.

The income tax is a penalty imposed on productivity. If you earn beyond a certain maximum amount you start getting penalized more and more. You're being punished for being productive! There is something inherently unjust and improper about this. People who earn enough start getting more and more outraged by it, and so just when they'd be paying the highest level of income tax, their tax burden starts falling.

It starts falling because they start figuring out ways to game the system to reduce their taxes. If you go down that path you'll undoubtedly find there are limitless ways of avoiding paying taxes on income. It's just a question of investing the effort. There appears to be a point where if you're earning less than some amount your best bet is just bite the bullet and pay your taxes.

But if you're earning more than that, it is in your best interest to pay a tax specialist whose purpose is to help you avoid taxes. Meaning it costs you less to hire an expert to massage your income with the intent of avoiding taxes than if you were to just pay the taxes outright. The savings increases faster and faster as your income goes up. Really rich people pay practically no taxes at all.

Anyway my point is that since income taxes penalize the productive poor + middle class the most, and there is no realistic hope of squeezing the rich to increase tax revenues (they'll just mutate and figure out ways to avoid taxes), let's just abolish the income tax altogether.

Along with income tax this all applies to corporations as well. Abolish corporate income taxes. Abolish social security taxes. In fact abolish taxes of any kind. There would be massive changes in behaviour. Corporations wouldn't bother trying to offshore profits to avoid taxes. They wouldn't invest in known failing endeavors just to get the tax writeoff.

Every employee of the IRS can be laid off, saving the government a bundle. Tax attorneys can be put out to pasture. Boat loads of paper pushing can be eliminated, saving the trees as well. All around there are huge benefits almost certain to occur in terms of increased productivity. Lots of people sitting on the sidelines not earning as much as they can just because they feel the income tax is unjust will step up and start producing more, now that they get to keep it all for themselves, which is the way it should be.

Eliminate capital gains taxes, estate taxes, any taxes at all on profits of any kind. If you manage to acquire wealth, it's yours, free and simple, to do with as you please. That's the way it should be.

How will the government pay for operations in this case? Very simple. We admit that our national currency is purely one of fiat, not backed by anything. We admit it has no viability as a lasting store of value, and that its main purpose is as a medium of exchange. We no longer try to pretend otherwise. The Federal Reserve simply creates money out of nothing and this money is used to fund government operations on all levels. It is a hidden tax on every holder of dollars that is currently a stealth tax, but which would be openly acknowledged.

That's all there is to it. If the dollar rises in value too much, the government just dumps more of them out into the market, driving them down. If the dollar falls in value too fast, the government stops printing. I think the open market operations of buying and selling US Treasury debt instruments would be enough to control the amount of outstanding dollars in circulation. Too many dollars? Sell treasuries. Too few dollars? Buy treasuries. I'm speaking of the point of view of the federal reserve. Oh, and eliminate the primary dealers and the pretense that there is an actual, honest market in US treasuries. The federal reserve can do its dirty work right out in the open, for all eyes to see.

The point is to give up the pretense that the income tax is actually a critical part of the system and that we have sound money. We don't have sound money. We have fiat money. Embrace the fact and give up the horribly damaging impact of the income tax once and for all.

Pump And Dump Alive And Well

2011-09-09T10:22:00.001-07:00

Seems to me lately waves of "analysis" are being put out, the tendency being:

1) At a local peak in the DJIA + etc. the tone is "Buy in, prices are going up, buy! buy! buy!"

2) Then there is very quickly a reversal and prices start falling.

3) At a local bottom the tone is "Things are going down! We're going to see 50% loss. Sell! Sell! Sell!"

4) Then very quickly another reversal and prices start rising.

Anyone paying attention to the ebb and flow of these alarmist writers would have been fleeced again and again. The trades would be buying at the top and selling at the bottom, losing money every time.

Certainly the method is pandering alternatively to people's fear and greed. I'm surprised at the seemingly concerted, systematic nature of the consensus of opinion, as if it is being deliberately shaped.

The motive seems to be not so much amass as much wealth as possible from the middle class that still has managed to cling to some savings, as the people that would be taking the wealth already have essentially infinite wealth on the books.

Specifically the rich people already are sitting on so much wealth that they're not spending that the goal of increasing it is largely pointless. It seems to me there is another agenda at play here.

The other agenda is to extract as much wealth as possible from people's life savings, so they're reduced to having no stored wealth at all. Why? I think the purpose is to force people back into the workforce. If you're broke you've got to come up with some way of providing for yourself. The act of earning a living increases the level of goods and services in the economy (your own productive contribution).

So in other words, their goal isn't to increase their wealth but instead to decrease yours.

If everyone has enough saved money to live on, the money is irrelevant because no one is producing anything for the money to buy. This occured when so much gold was brought back from the New World to Spain that essentially everyone in the country was rich. So everyone stopped producing and the productive capacity of the nation was obliterated.

If you've got any wealth to protect, keep in mind there are forces out there trying to pick away at it little by little.

Excerpt From City Of God

2011-09-09T07:42:00.000-07:00

City Of God by Paulo Lins is a book written in Brazil about life in the 1970's among gangsters in a suburb of Rio. After I saw the movie I was interested enough to get the book. Presumably the book is based on truthful events. I made it around 2/3 of the way through the book and stopped because the sorts of stories shared didn't seem to be evolving -- it was more of repetition than increasing depth or variety.

Stories are of the form 1) Introduce character 2) Character engages in various illegal activities 3) Character interacts with other criminals 4) Character dies violently at hands of police, other criminals, or retribution from a victim.

The things that change are the crimes committed, the circumstances of the death, the length the individual enjoys a somewhat successful life... The stories are interesting and horrifying at the same time.

One part of the story involves a hoodlum who has been arrested and has to serve a 5 year period in prison. He ends up being the sexual plaything of some stronger male in the prison. His life is miserable in terms of the indignities he has to endure. Seemingly there is no way out. There are a number of such bullies in the prison that each have their "harem" and other minions and so there is a stable power structure. The prison guards are bought off with bribes. Smuggling and drug dealing goes on. Typical stuff portrayed in lots of movies showing prison life.

What was new was a very brief passage where all the victimized inmates conspire among themselves, and on a certain date put their plan into action. They systematically and quickly murder every single one of the kingpin bullies except one, who was permitted to live on the condition that he confess to all the murders and so protect everyone else from blame.

From then on life in the prison is much more tolerable. People just do their time and are released. What was hell became much improved.

I wonder if the portrayal of prison life in the USA media is deliberately exaggerated in order to keep the sheep in line. Or alternatively is prison life deliberately made worse in order to accomplish the same purpose.

Vileness Of Parents

2011-09-08T15:49:00.001-07:00

I remember 1984 timeframe I went to UC Berkeley for a couple of years, the 2nd year I never went to class because I was always playing with the then new Amiga computer. I wrote lots of software for it in 68000 assembly language. I really was addicted to the machine, writing graphics programs, games, whatnot.

My dad pushed me to go into college. I never had much drive to go. Looking back I realize he had dreams for my future. I had had no specific dreams, I just liked working with computers. I remember I wanted to live forever, I suppose that was the main dream. Why ask the question, "What should I try to do in this life?" when one can ask, "What can I do to get an infinite number of lives?". If you can live forever, you don't really have to make any irreversable choices.

So my dad was sort of steering the vehicle of my life for a while there. Looking back I realize I only started to be happy once I took the controls back from him and started making choices for myself. I wish I'd realized that sooner. I realize now my dad had a very limited vision for what one ought to do in life. Very typical, mundane, unoriginal. And I realize that constantly he had this tactic that whenever his vision of my future was in conflict with my vision or preferences, he would actively sabotage my efforts to pursue my own goals.

Looking back I realize my dad only cared about bragging rights with his buddies. Buddies he'd gone to CalTech with or he'd grown up with. My satisfaction and happiness were irrelevant, he cared only about being able to brag to his friends about having a successful son, like they claimed to have.

There was this one other son who was 7 years older than I was. I remember he used to love math. He explained the concept of limits to me once when I was around 9. Limits as in if you keep getting closer and closer to the value of 2, you can get arbitrarily close, and so for all practical purposes even if it would take an infinite number of steps you're really at 2 in the limiting case.

This fellow graduated from Stanford with a math degree. Some very short number of years later he entrolled in Harvard and got a law degree. Now he's a tax attorney, squeezing a cut out of the estates of dead people when it comes time to execute their wills. What happened to the love of math? The guy is very wealthy. But will he look back on his life with satisfaction?

My dad always wanted to have a son he could brag about, probably in competition with this fellow. I dropped out of UC Berkeley after the 2nd year, never returned to college. First half of the 2000 decade I was mostly at a company, got as high as Vice President, good salary. I rose pretty fast in the company but that was easy as it was a small startup. My dad was all buddy-buddy with me back then, having a son who is a VP.

Somewhere along the line I lost faith in the company, it was clear it was going nowhere-- incompetent management. Eventually I had a falling out with the CEO and he let me go. Right about then my dad broke off contact. He's got grandkids, but that wasn't really important to him I guess. I think my dad missed the bragging rights that went along with his son being a VP.

I told my own son that there are all sorts of things that one can do during a lifetime, all sorts of ways to live a life. The typical approach of going to school, going to college, getting a job, moving up in ranks, getting married, family & children, retirement... that's just one option. That was the path my dad envisioned for my future. When it was clear that path, in all its details, was not going to happen, my dad walked away.

I told my own son that it was good to have dreams. It was good to have visions of what he thought his future would be like. I told him no matter what his dreams are, if he wants them to come true enough, he can make it happen. I told him I suppose I have some visions of what his future will be like, but his dreams are the important ones. My job as his father is to help him make his dreams come true. Not destroy his dreams trying to push him into making my vision of his future come true.

I've come to realize I'm looking forward to the day my father is dead. The world will be a better place with that person out of it. He's truly a disgusting human being, in oh so many ways. The reason I hate the baby boomers is mostly because of him. I can't imagine missing him.

There were some good things about the old man. A lot of them. But somewhere along the way the bad things took over, and the good things faded away or went into hiding. The man that I used to love as my father died a long time ago, and I've already made peace with that. The thing that goes by the same name and lives in that same old house is some alien monster, something vile and toxic that I don't know, nor do I want to know.

Don't fuck up your kids.

Avoid GLD!!!

2011-09-01T07:19:00.000-07:00

GLD is an exchange traded fund that is supposed to be fully backed by actual physical metal. I don't believe it, personally. If you want to own gold, get it and take delivery so you can hold it in your own hands.

Ditto for SLV which is the silver equivalent.

I don't trust any ETF's anymore, I think overall they don't do what they claim. I believe in general they do the opposite of what they claim to do. Their purpose is to create stability (or stratification) in the markets.

Here's how I believe GLD works, but the general principle is the same for all ETF's. Note GLD is operated by the very people who have the most to lose if gold actually skyrockets in value. Keeping in mind that their goal would be to suppress the gold price, when a person buys some GLD, the money used is prevented from actually going towards the purchase of gold. No gold is bought. My guess is US treasuries of some sort are bought. But since no gold is actually purchased, there is no effect on the price of gold.

That is, no actual gold is taken out of the market so the purchase itself doesn't affect the gold price. The insidious effect is that money that would flow into gold and cause it to rise in price is actually neutralized. Any price rise in gold occurs due to market activity elsewhere.

In practical terms, if the money flowing into GLD actually took real gold off the market, the price of gold would have risen much faster and much higher than it has. Note all this is just my own personal beliefs. I believe in time GLD and SLV will be exposed as utter frauds.

The stability effect comes in when money that would drive up the price of the ETF's underlying target is not actually purchasing anything at all. As such money flowing into ETF's is neutralized. ETF's are effectively just like gambling. They're also like ponzi schemes. Anyone selling their holdings of ETF's has to be paid from money paid in by other purchasers of the ETF.

Note I believe for certain ETF's the federal reserve and / or the US government has promised to cover any losses. In the case of GLD if people panic and start pulling money out, they'll find they can't all get paid! That's because a lot of money flowed into GLD when gold was at a lower price. Since gold has gone up so much in recent years, there isn't enough money in the fund to actually pay everyone the full amount, as if all the actual gold had really been purchased. That is, there isn't enough gold to sell to actually pay everyone off at the prevailing gold price.

This is where the (theoretical, from my point of view) guarantee by either the federal reserve or US government comes in. I believe certain big players like JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs and such were directed to create the GLD and SLV ETF's as a means of preventing money from flowing into gold and silver, which would mean the end of the US empire, the US government, the federal reserve. So as a self defense measure the ETF's were created and the SEC and other regulatory agencies were told to turn a blind eye to them. Moreover there had to be an implicit promise to cover losses incurred if there ever was a run on the shares of either ETF and if the underlying metal had gone up in price. In that event, the us government or federal reserve would simply create money out of nothing and it would pay off holders of GLD or SLV shares who wanted to cash out.

The real problem would occur if holders of GLD or SLV wanted to just take delivery of the metal itself rather than the dollar equivalent. We will continue to see every effort made to discourage people from taking delivery. I imagine even cash bonuses over and above the GLD or SLV price would be offered just to encourage accepting paper instead of metal.

Now the point of me writing this entry is that I just saw a post here that claims CNBC has shown video that shows inside the vaults of GLD. "See! GLD is honest, here's the gold, nothing to worry about!"

Methinks they doth protest too much. That is, this video coming out to "prove" that the gold is really there does, for me, the exact opposite. It proves to me there is no gold. Or at least very much less than there should be.

CNBC is part of the controlled media of the empire, keep that in mind. If there is a general flow of money out of GLD, this is a very bad situation for the empire. So the empire is trying to stop the flow. If the concern that is causing people to flee the GLD is the general belief that there isn't really any gold held by GLD, then such a video would be a natural response. Show the sheep some nice safe looking vaults filled with yellow bars and claim it's gold and claim it's the gold held by GLD. The assumption being people will believe the claims without question.

Note the above doubts cast on GLD and SLV and ETF's in general are just my own personal beliefs in light of my understanding of how this rotten and vile empire operates. I have no shred of proof to back it up. If I'm wrong, no big deal, the world goes on. If I'm right and you hold sizable positions in GLD and or SLV, you've really got something to worry about.

In this blog I've promoted SLV and GLD in the past, years ago, when I myself first started to get into owning precious metals. Anyone can be duped for a while, remember that.

Come On Irene

2011-08-26T15:11:00.001-07:00

I don't really have anything to say, I just thought that was funny.

Keynesians - Failing Since 1936

2011-08-26T10:42:00.001-07:00

This guy really looks like a miserable, vomitous mass.

Trigger Points

2011-08-25T20:34:00.000-07:00

Watching the various movements day to day suggests to me certain trigger points where shit happens once the trigger occurs. These are just gut feelings, not backed up by any rigorous analysis.

1) Shit happens when the dollar index drops below 74. It usually gets shoved up above 74 within a few days.

2) Shit happens when the gold to silver ratio gets below 40 to 1. That is, silver gets to be too valuable compared to gold, and silver is slapped down within a few days.

3) Shit happens when breaks above a neverending sequence of lines in the sand. Lately they seem to be every 100. Gold is held at 1500 for a while, then it breaks up and tries to pass 1600. It is held there for a while, then it breaks and tries to take out 1700. It's like there is a mechanism trying to prevent gold from rising too fast. When it starts rising, lots of big players start raising margin requirements which force leveraged "investors" to sell and this slams the price back down quickly.

4) Shit happens when the Dow Jones drops too much too quickly. Some mechanism comes in and props it up within a few days.

The terms "overbought" and "oversold" are bandied about. I think they're simplistic. I just get a vague sense that there are certain forces that come online once certain specific events occur.

What is the force behind these things? I assert it is the US Empire, which truly is a world empire, all the big countries are really part of it as much as they pretend to be independent, sovereign nations. The Federal reserve is the agent of the global US empire, with its ability to secretly create money out of nothing and so bail out any of the empire's minions (such as foreign central banks). The forces controlling the US empire care nothing about the US itself, they care only about the global empire. The question of constitutionality is irrelevant. They've been trying to suck every last bit of freedom out of the world for a long time now.

There already is a global currency, it's the US dollar. There is no longer any such thing as cutting the european union loose and letting it twist. It's part of the empire, so it must be supported, otherwise the empire falls apart.

The thing is, this ability to use the secret creation of dollars to essentially bribe the world into submission is starting to fall apart. There is too much misery suffered by the people living under the empire's crushing weight. If you're miserable you have little interest in supporting the status quo.

The empire is not working anymore. Misery is rising faster than their ability to cope, and indeed their efforts are actually increasing the level of misery. The key point is that the very idea of a central controlling body is unworkable. The human race is about to learn that the hard way.

Draw Your Own Conclusions

2011-08-23T18:18:00.000-07:00

Jack Layton just died:

Here is Exeter from This Island Earth

Three Big Liquid Asset Classes

2011-08-21T17:35:00.001-07:00

Seems to me there are only 3 big liquid asset classes that wealth can run to.

1) Equities -- stocks and such
2) Paper cash and bonds (promises to pay paper cash in the future)
3) Resources (gold, silver, copper, oil, wheat, etc.)

Now, gold and silver are the big ones for #3. Oil is falling lately, I believe.

The talking head mainstream media is delivering a corrupt message (when do they do otherwise, actually). The powers that be are absolutely in a panic because massive wealth is tied up in #2 -- cash and bonds. They absolutely do not want that wealth escaping #2. Because that's the end of this current corrupt system. Game Over.

They have come to realize they can't stop wealth from flowing into #3, but they're still doing everything they can to talk down gold + silver, claiming they're bubbles, etc. But their FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) isn't working, and they realize it. The world is wise to their tricks, at least it's starting to wise up in a big way.

So they really want to divert attention away from just how risky #2 is (paper fiat currencies are all headed to their intrinsic value, which is zero).

So their tactic is to spread fear, uncertainty, doubt into asset class #1. Trying to spread the concept that stocks are going to crash. The reason is as wealth flees #1, it will go to #2 (and unfortunately for the corrupt banking elite, some will go to #3, but they can't win them all). But better an engineered collapse of #1 than wealth flees #2. So we get the corrupt message that stocks are heading lower.

Anyone who makes the claim that the stock market is going to fall, yet makes no mention that cash and bonds are going to evaporate, you can be sure either they're a shill for the esablishment or they're just idiots.

Here's the scoop. Cash and promises to pay cash in the future (bonds) are going to zero. Sooner rather than later. Anything is better than those. Even overvalued stocks.

OMG[3]

2011-08-21T17:22:00.000-07:00

***BIG*** events in gold these days. Venezuela is calling home its gold on deposit overseas -- which in all likelihood has been loaned out 100 to 1 (or more) along with all other gold deposited in bullion banks in the Empire's effort to suppress the gold price.

Talmud Applied To Ben Bernanke

2011-08-18T18:17:00.000-07:00

Teach thy tongue to say, "I do not know."

The horse fed too liberally with oats becomes unruly.

Truth lasts forever, but falsehood must vanish.

Few are they who see their own faults.

First learn and then teach.

Do not to others what you would not have others do to you.

The noblest of all charities is in enabling the poor to earn a livelihood.

What is intended for thy neighbor will never be thine.

The wine belongs to the master but the waiter receives the thanks.

No man is impatient with his creditors.

Mention not a blemish which is thy own, in detraction of thy neighbor.

Man sees the mote in his neighbor's eye, but knows not of the beam in his own.

If thy friends agree in calling thee an ass, go and get a halter around thee.

He who teaches his son to trade is as if he taught him to steal.

Let the fruit pray for the welfare of the leaf.

Woe to the country which hath lost its leader; woe to the ship when its captain is no more.

He who multiplieth words will likely come to sin.

I could go on...

Gold: .75 Coins Per Person

2011-08-18T12:05:00.000-07:00

According to Wikipedia's page on gold, 165,000 metric tons of gold have been mined in all human history. That's 165,000,000 kilograms of gold. If the population of the earth is 7 billion, that's .02357 kilograms of gold per person, on average. Or 23.57 grams per person. A typical gold coin contains 1 troy ounce of gold, or 31.103 grams of gold. Which means, on average, there is enough gold to go around so that each person can have about 3/4 of a single coin per person.

In the case of silver somewhere around 44 billion ounces have been mined in all history (source). That's about 6.3 coins per person on average.

Due to wealth concentration the reality is the vast majority of people have none at all of either type of coin.

Of course most people don't have any paper money either.

Ralph Langner on Stuxnet Cyber Weapon

2011-08-17T05:26:00.001-07:00

This is a TED talk on cracking the Stuxnet virus, which was designed (almost certainly by operatives in the US government) that very specifically attacks machinery used in Iran's nuclear program. I thought it was fascinating.

Dollar Collapse Means Equities Collapse -- Why Is That Again?

2011-08-14T14:22:00.001-07:00

Death Star Washington Mulls The U.S. Dollar's End is an article by Andrew McKillop where he talks about the repercussions of a collapse in the dollar. I quote:

To be sure some asset values - gold, oil, food - would break free, and start the inflation spiral in real asset prices, but making the economic and social impact of "dollar disappearance" all the more apocalyptic, we would certainly have a radical mark down or outright collapse in equity values. This would develop its own momentum and all by itself would implode the global economy and collapse world trade activity, a true zero sum game.

He asserts "we would certainly have a radical mark down or outright collapse in equity values."

Why, exactly, is that, may I ask?

There is a body of "analysts" that make this claim. But they never, ever, ever back it up with any sort of argument or reasoning. Odd, that is.

Why didn't he mention the impact on bonds, denominated in dollars? If the dollar collapses in value, absolutely certain it is that a promise to pay dollars would itself collapse in value. That's all a bond is. A promise to pay dollars at some future date. But if the dollar becomes valueless today, it will still be valueless tomorrow. So the bond is valueless today also.

OK. So you have some wealth in equities. You become convinced the dollar is going to collapse. So in a panic, you sell your equities, and hold... dollars? That would be madness.

Equities represent a portion of a company. They are not a promise to pay dollars. In theory they are traded in the free market, and they achieve their market value, in relation to all other things of value. By custom equities are quoted in terms of the major currencies (whatever the currency is in your country). Most often US dollars. That doesn't mean the equity represents a promise to pay you dollars if you care to exchange it for them.

No, not at all. The dollar amount just represents what the market price, in dollars, for that equity is.

Now if the dollar goes to zero, I'd expect the dollar price in equities would go to infinity. They will have some value even if the dollar doesn't. A finite number divided by zero is infinite. Or more accurately, a finite number divided by a very small number is a very large number.

Panic selling of equities represents herd mentality. It is effectively a bet on the soundness of the dollar. And making such a bet, at a time when the dollar is collapsing, would have the perverse effect of propping up the dollar.

In this environment, who exactly would be buying equities? I'd expect the super rich insiders seeking to ever more concentrate their wealth. They've got tons of dollars they want to get rid of. Along comes a herd of suckers willing to sell their valuable equities in exchange for them. Sure thing, chumps. Here are your dollars. Give me your equities. I'll take them off your hands...

So the collapse of the dollar is slowed a bit, for a while. And the fools that panicked out of equities are happy for a while, they've got dollars. Then the dollars continue to collapse, and the holders of them now face a nightmare scenario. Go back into equities, after they've probably rebounded and are on the upside? Go into bonds? Hold the dollars? Go into precious metals?

I can see the concept of selling equities and going directly into precious metals. The real, physical kind you can hold in your hands, not paper promises. But selling equities and sitting in dollars? Insanity.

On an individual basis one could examine each equity owned and determine the impact of a collapsed dollar. Some will be hurt, some will actually benefit. But the blanket statement that "all equities will suffer" is Just Plain Wrong. It's propaganda. Whoever says that ought to be examined for their corruption. Are they part of the misinformation campaign bent on squeezing every last iota of wealth out of the middle class? Perhaps.

Nothing is black and white. Be careful when you find yourself being herded.

FOFOA FOS

2011-08-14T11:58:00.001-07:00

Does Fiat Produce Endles Sea Of Wars?

FOFOA disagrees with the assertion that fiat currencies generate an endless series of wars. I quote:

I really despise this kind of gold bug rhetoric because it damages the true story of gold by destroying the credibility of the gold community in the eyes of everyone else. This concept that fiat produces wars is almost axiomatic within the gold community. It is used as a powerful argument for the return to gold money. But what if this gold bug axiom is actually a fallacy? What if it is simply wrong? How much effort has been wasted over the years? How much credibility lost?

I'd be more concerned with the loss of FOFOA's own credibility. Up until I read this blog entry I can't recall anything significant of his that I've disagreed with. But the sheer stupidity of his assertion that fiat currency does not cause wars really, really, really lowers my opinion of this guy. I'm wondering if he accepted an offer he couldn't refuse from the Military Industrial Complex. In other words, I wonder if he Sold Out.

Fiat currency does not cause all war. Even under a gold standard, warfare (as in, fighting) will always be the ultimate method used to settle disagreements. Face it, there is nothing beyond warfare that things can escalate to. That's the final way of settling disputes -- fighting. So what?

Fiat currency enables wars. It makes it easier to finance wars. It prolongs the length of wars. It increases the severity of wars.

Without fiat currency, if wars had to be financed in real money, as opposed to paper "promises", governments could only go to war using money extracted painfully by taxation. That acts as a very simple deterrent to escalating to warfare -- it becomes extremely expensive and painful.

FOFOA = JACKASS on this issue, as far as I'm concerned. I'm going to have to go to more care in reading his material -- everything he writes is now suspect, in my opinion.

Isolated Roadkill

2011-08-12T09:30:00.000-07:00

A lonely road passing through barren land is the site of the meeting of an automobile and a wandering wolf. The wolf is killed, the automobile is shaken but unharmed.

Some flies happen upon the wolf's corpse. They feast. They mate. Eggs are laid. Maggots hatch. They eat, grow, turn into flies. They mate, produce more eggs. More maggots. The numbers of maggots grow exponentially.

The wolf's carcass is consumed. Some flies have lived their entire lives feeding off the carcass. Many thousands of flies and maggots are left with nothing to eat once the carcass is exhausted. The flies go their separate ways, looking for something to eat. Most of them die. All the maggots die.

Fed Probably Guarantees Gold + Silver Shorts

2011-08-11T22:03:00.000-07:00

This is just my opinion, but I suspect the Federal Reserve has informal guarantees to protect large institutions who, on its suggestion, sell short silver + gold. Just saying they'll guarantee against losses means they don't have to invest any money at all, they can get other people to do it.

A bunch of phone calls and massive short selling occurs. If they're ever forced to protect their henchmen (as I suspect happened in these takedowns in the last few days) they would just massively sell short the metal in question themselves, the squeezed henchmen buy back in to cover their shorts, and now the Fed holds the large short position. Then it's their worry when to unload or cover.

This sort of thing happens all the time. Small business loans are guaranteed by the government, so the government has to only put up money in the event of losses. The big home lending organizations (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) work the same way, they loan out money with an implicit government guarantee to protect them from losses. Already exercised, actually.

Records recently came out the Federal Reserve poured 14 Trillion dollars into all sorts of places when the TARP was approved back in 2008 -- places like foreign central banks. The world is an empire already with a single world currency, the US dollar, and naturally the Fed had to protect all the satellites. So there's no real surprise why the truth is the 800 billion TARP fund was just a cover for the massive amounts of money the Fed was going to be dumping around.

The Fed could just claim it was using TARP funds. But when it was forced to show some of its books, the total was something like 14 Trillion dollars, or around 17 times what the TARP had alotted.

What can you do with 14 Trillion dollars? You can manipulate every market. You can crush gold and silver bugs. You can buy all sorts of toxic bonds that the market doesn't want.

Big things are afoot. So many things are breaking down, the frequency of events is increasing at an increasing rate, and the severity of events is increasing. The US dollar is in the process of disintigration, and with it the US empire.

I think tyrants of the past would have drooled at the totalitarian state the world has morphed into over the last 100 years. The sooner this whole shit pile collapses the better. Flush it all and let's start over.

Gold More Valuable Than Platinum

2011-08-10T15:05:00.000-07:00

Gold - 1796.40/ounce
Platinum - 1773.00/ounce

Perhaps this whole, vile, disgusting fiat currency system we've all grown up with is finally exploding. Good riddance.

Glaring Short Sale

2011-08-03T13:48:00.001-07:00

Good lord, what a glaring short sale opportunity. The above chart represents one of the US Treasury bond prices. When the price goes up, the implication is that investors want to own US Treasuries, and interest yields go down. This sudden, ridiculous rise is screaming, "SELL ME SHORT!". Which means sell today US Treasuries you don't have, and wait a while for the price to crash, then buy them back at a lower price to cover your short.

What's the story? My theory is that after the comedy of the US Federal budget has "ended" the Federal Reserve goosed the markets by massively buying US Treasuries, to mimic the free market situation which would exist if investors had been pleased by the outcome and had a renewed confidence in the Full Faith And Credit Of The United States.

It's market manipulation, ridiculously transparent. Nothing's changed, nothing's solved. The Fed is trying to manipulate public opinion. A rising US Treasury price sends the message, "Hey, this is a safe investment." The Fed probably hopes the idiot investment community will, on an individual basis, come to the conclusion, "Hmmm. I thought this whole debt ceiling thing was not really solved, they're just postponing a solution, and I was thinking treasuries would be falling. But they're rising! So maybe everyone else knows something I don't know... perhaps everyone really is convinced the US has solved their money problems. I guess I'll buy some US debt myself then!"

My advice, though, is to just stay away from US treasuries. Don't buy 'em, don't sell 'em short. Too much like gambling. Just buy silver and gold instead.

Science

2011-07-10T16:59:00.000-07:00

Science is finding Truth that depends on the minimal amount of Faith.

-- Dave Ashley

Faith In A Higher Power

2011-07-08T19:10:00.001-07:00

It occured to me recently that there is a (to me) disgusting commonality about almost all the human beings I know either personally or by reputation. This is an unquestioning faith in a higher power.

That is, an entity of whatever form that is larger than the person in question that the person has blind, unquestioning faith in, and that the person gets very, very touchy about when that faith is put into question.

For most people the higher power is a god of some sort, such as the christian god. But surprisingly the higher power can be lots of other things, such as:

* The scientific community

* The system itself, or the establishment

* The US, or the US Empire

* Their alma mater

* The majority's choice on any subject in the person's country

Now what I found especially interesting is that each person having this faith in his or her own higher power also has contempt for everyone else's choice for the higher power they have faith in.

I suppose the higher power I myself have faith in is Truth.

I'm reminded of Richard Feynman's quote, "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." I love Feynman. Personally I think any blind faith in anything is a bad thing. Most of what's ugly in this reality is caused by that, in my opinion.

Nuclear Spin

2011-06-29T07:28:00.001-07:00

Well the news networks seem to be slanting all stories into hyping up the imaginary impact on whatever nuclear facilities might be nearby.

Nebraska: Floods potential impact on a nuclear waste storage facility
New Mexico: Fires potential impact on nuclear weapons research facility

Give me a break.

Pure sensationalism.

I only was forced to listen to mainstream media when in the motel I was staying at, during breakfast, some other guest turned the TV on.

Wordle

2011-06-08T08:50:00.000-07:00

Wordle

Escape Binary Thinking

2011-06-07T19:24:00.001-07:00

One of the "news" sites I read constantly has articles where the title is "Bulls or bears, who's in control?" I'm getting sick of them.

Coke or Pepsi. Take your pick!
Republicans or Democrats.
Cash or Bonds.
Arsenic or cyanide.
Master or slave.

It's endless. I've come to realize that such binary options ought to be seen as an alarm. When you're presented with a binary choice, you need to automatically start wondering what's being left out. You always have more options:

1) Don't make a choice at all
2) Choose something else not listed
3) Ignore the very question itself in favor of some more pressing concern

"Neither of the above" is an option too. Even if it's not listed.

The International Banking Rectal

2011-05-28T10:22:00.001-07:00

I don't really have anything to say, I was just playing with a program that explores jumbled words and discovered cartel and rectal use the same letters and I thought it rather funny...

Peer Approval

2011-05-27T08:02:00.000-07:00

I remember in 1995 when I was working at Catapult Entertainment when I devised a solution to a problem related to the X-Band modem.

I was working on the game hack for Super Street Fighter II. Catapult sold a device called the X-Band modem which plugged into your Sega Genesis game console, and you plugged a normal game into it. Like the Game Genie, the X-Band modem device would modify the game's ROM image on the fly to change its behaviour.

The modifications were to enable modem / network play of two player games. That way a couple of kids each in their own home could connect using the X-Band network and play against each other.

So a game had to be hacked so that one player reads from the joystick plugged into the game console, and the other player's joystick input comes from the modem/network from the other player. Each game console has to send its joystick data over the network to the other player. So what happens is out of the network system you get matching pairs of joystick values, one provided by each console.

These matching pairs of joystick data are indentical on the two consoles. The joystick data is the combination of what direction the joystick is moved in (if any) plus any buttons pressed (if any). As long as both consoles running the exact same program are provided with the same joystick values, these two games ought to be doing exactly the same thing -- so both players in completely different locations will experience the same game, and it will be exactly as if they were both next to each other playing the game on the same console.

In practice some complications arise that have to be dealt with, but that's where the work comes in. One of the problems that arose when I started at Catapult was the buildup of these matching pairs of joystick data. Because there is no guarantee the two game consoles will be exactly synced in time since they are not started together (down to CPU clock rates of around 7.16 megahertz) and their clocks are not absolutely identical anyway (can be off by some number of parts per million), always one console will be ahead of the other in terms of running the game program.

So that means one of the consoles will have to wait a while for the other. And the waiting can actually ping back and forth, so at first console A is waiting for console B, then some time passes, and now console B is waiting for console A. When this waiting occurs, it's possible that extra joystick values accumulate in the pipeline.

Now, these joystick values are matched pairs of joystick readings. They accumulate into a FIFO, which is short for First In, First Out. Periodically both sides take a joystick reading then send the value over to the other side, over the modem. At the same time each side receives a joystick value from the other side. The sent values and received values are lined up so both sides are certain that both sides have identical pairs of values. So these pairs are accumulating on both sides, and they're also being consumed on both sides by the game program itself.

The game program uses the pairs of joystick values from the FIFO when it needs to know what the players are doing. So the FIFO can grow and shrink as the number of waiting pairs rises or falls. In practice a problem occurs where the number of pairs sitting in the FIFO keeps growing and growing and growing over time, little by little.

This ruins the gameplay. Because the games are always running at 60 frames/second you want joystick values to be also taken at 60 / second to match, in order to have the control feel responsive and quick. Moreover you want the joystick readings to be as up to date as possible. You don't want, say, a 1/2 second delay between you moving the joystick and the effect being visible in the game, because that destroys the gaming experience. People can tolerate about a 1/10th of a second delay without noticing it, but any longer and you really start to feel it.

So if you're accumulating joystick pairs at slightly over 60/second but you're consuming them at 60/second, they will build up bit by bit. As soon as you get over 6 extra pairs in the pipeline that gaming experience starts to suffer. In practice the X-Band system would start building up more and more pairs in the pipeline until as many as 30 or more were sitting in the queue, representing a 1/2 second delay or longer.

This is intolerable, but that was a side effect of the implementation that I had to start out with. So this was a crucial problem that had to be solved.

Now here's the point of this entry. I want to share how I solved the problem. My solution was to send a single extra bit of information over to the other machine. This single bit was 1 if the FIFO contained two or more entries in it, and 0 otherwise. Each side sent this bit over to the other. This bit represented a useful piece of information sent alongside the joystick data itself.

Now the trick is that since both sides have matching joystick values and also matching bits from the other side (as well as their own bit), both sides can know when there is an entry in the FIFO where both bits are set to 1. When such an element is detected, both sides know it at the same time and so both sides can individually make the decision to just throw away that entry.

By throwing away the entry, the number of pairs sitting in the FIFO can be kept to a minimum, and latency can be reduced to a minimum. The key was both sides being able to agree on when it is safe to throw away, or discard, perfectly valid joystick data for the sake of keeping the pipeline as small as possible.

Now that was actually a very clever solution. But what makes it really sweet was at the time there were a couple of other programmers who were full time doing these game hacks. One was Richard Kiss. He was working on the SNES side along with another programmer. When I devised the solution for discarding joystick values, I explained it to Richard and he immediately appreciated the elegance of the solution. He'd been facing the same issue on his side as well. Richard was my peer, he was doing identical work but on the SNES (I was working on the Genesis). I devised a clever solution to a technical problem, it worked, and a peer understood it and appreciated it.

Most of the time when you're doing your engineering work you're all alone and no one is aware of the clever solutions you come up with. It's nice when someone you respect who understands the technical details is around to recognize the elegant solutions you devise.

gcc bug

2011-05-17T18:49:00.000-07:00

This program never exits when compiled with -O2.


#include stdio.h

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
  int i;
 printf("sizeof(int) = %ld\n", sizeof(int));
 i=0;
 do {
 } while(++i);
 return 0;
}

The Old Voting Public (TOVOP)

2011-05-12T08:36:00.000-07:00

When you distill all the noise about all the various things going on, when you work through the corruption in politics, government, wall street, banking, the mainstream media, when you get past the horrendous budget deficits the US is piling up, past Peak Oil, incompetence in the aftermath of Katrina, the Gulf Oil Spill, 9/11, Osama "finally" getting killed...

It all boils down to The Old Voting Public (TOVOP) versus the whole rest of the human race.

Imagine the pilot of a ship. Anonymous people behind the scenes select him. If he doesn't do as they tell him, they replace him. It doesn't matter if what they're telling him to do is immoral or wrong, that's just the way it is. If he doesn't steer the ship the way they want, they'll replace him with someone who will. And there are always plenty of volunteers.

The captain knows if he resigns in protest, it will have no effect anyway. He's seen it already before. That's how he got into power anyway, perhaps. The captain before him resigned. Now he's driving the ship, and he gets the orders, and he sees how he's being told to crush lots of other little boats in their path, and he feels awful. But orders are orders.

The ship is going to crush the little boats in its path. The anonymous crew that selects the captain have their own agenda. The captain steers the ship, but he can be replaced. He's just a figurehead. The man at the controls. If he rebels he'll be replaced. He's powerless.

This analogy applies to the military power of the US. It's doing the bidding of the anonymous group behind the scenes. Everyone in government is the same, they're not driving the government, they're being told what to do, and they obey orders. Or they'll be replaced.

It's everywhere the same. Do as you're told or you'll be replaced, because your position of power is granted to you by this anonymous group behind the scenes, somehow.

Who is this anonymous group behind the scenes? Aha! They go to great lengths to hide themselves, without even trying. Rumours of The Illuminati. Skull and Bones, other secret groups. Freemasons. There is the Jewish Banking conspiracy. The Rothschilds. Who is it? Where are they? It's hilarious, actually. There must be some small group with all the power pulling the strings, right?

Get past all the B.S. and you find the answer. The evil behind the scenes is the TOVOP. The Old Voting Public. And their power stems just because they choose to exercise it. They go to the polls and cast their vote -- in their own self interest -- more than any other voting block. The young people don't have a chance, they don't vote in unison enough (or even vote at all, out of frustration). So the TOVOP wins every time.

The TOVOP cares about government benefits it can receive. Social Security and Medicare. That's it. That's their agenda. All the whole twisted mess of corruption stems from that one desire. All the horrible things the US does in the world are for the sole purpose of giving TOVOP what it wants, which is a cushy retirement.

There is no evil here, by the way. Unless you want to call the system itself evil. The system that has been built up over thousands of years, leading to a giant controlling empire whose levers of control are being pulled by old people who just want whatever they can get. Out of self interest.

Everyone acts out of self interest. It's human nature. No big deal, nothing evil in it. The problem is that a tipping point has been reached and there is not enough to go around for TOVOP to get what it wants. The whole wealth of the earth is being directed at them, and it's simply not enough. There are too many of them. And the young people of the world are starving.

Nevermind the plight of the poor and middle class in the USA. They're benificiaries of the US empire, they're along for the free ride, actually. They get enough scraps to keep them content. Their life is much, much easier than their counterparts in the world, particularly in the developing nations. An hour of a USA peon's time buys a lot more resources than an hour of an outside peon's time. The USA peons complain, but when all is said and done, they've got it pretty good compared to the poor people outside the USA (and Europe).

What's becoming unsustainable is that the poor of the world are being crushed so much that they can't get enough to eat. There is not enough, under the current system, for them to survive and for the TOVOP to get all the benefits it wants. The TOVOP controls the military power, and their orders are clear. Keep The Checks Coming.

The captains driving the ship of the US empire are doing all sorts of ingenious things trying to keep the game going. But the physics of the situation are asserting themselves. Reality cannot be hidden forever. This system will be brought down from outside. When life becomes so miserable and hopeless for the poor and struggling of the world that they finally say Enough is Enough and change the rules.

And TOVOP will collapse into crippling poverty. It won't just be a haircut. They'll be shaved bald. The bulk of them are wholly dependent on government handouts for their livelihood. A lifetime of social security payments in lieu of them preparing for their own retirement. Such old people will suddenly become destitute.

When will it happen? It's happening now. Ongoing. Bit by bit the system we've all grown up in is dying.

I for one welcome its death. It had a long run, now it's time to try something else.

Great time to buy some physical silver on this recent (massive!) pullback. Long term nothing has changed, silver and gold are going up up and away and the dollar and all other paper currencies are going to zero.

OMG[2]

2011-04-24T22:15:00.001-07:00

Squirrel Martial Arts

2011-04-22T05:43:00.000-07:00

This morning while looking out the window I saw a couple of squirrels engaged in what looked to be some martial arts combat. It was amazing. One was chasing the other around and around the trunk of a large tree, up and down, ranging from maybe 6 to 20 feet off the ground.

It was amazing. The trunk is vertical and they're gripping it and racing around and around. The chaser managed to take a nip out of the one he was chasing every so often, it looked like. Somehow they can propel themselves quickly and at the same time maintain a grip on the turnk.

When I was a kid I used to do that sort of thing with chain link fences, you can race up a tall chain link fence by pushing yourself up with your toes and holding on with your hands, your fingers will just slide through the wires and you can get a grip, and you can move forward as fast as your muscles can carry you -- the burden of maintaining a grip is negligible.

Prior to this ninja-like battle (probably one squirrel was defending its territory) I had been watching a squirrel hunting all over the ground for stuff to eat. I was thinking about the caloric balance, the squirrel can't expend more energy scavenging for food than the food actually delivers.

Judging by the number of squirrels around here though it doesn't seem to be a problem.

A couple years ago I bought a 50 pound bag of feed corn at a livestock supply depot. It was sitting on the porch, and eventually it got infested with some weevil insects. They were through and through it. I had had a vague idea of using the corn to feed the squirrels and then, in an emergency, being able to use the increased squirrel population in the vicinity as a food source.

With the bag infested with insects I wanted to get rid of it, so I dumped it out in the back yard. Then for months the pile of old corn was the battleground of squirrels, as they fought to control it. One would be eating pieces of the dried corn and another would try to come in and get some, and the first one would chase him off.

There would be lots of partially eaten kernels around. Forget talk about "Harmony of nature" and the concept that animals don't waste anything... Evidently there is a part of the kernel that a squirrel finds most desirable, just sort of the center part. The squirrels would gnaw that and then toss the kernel aside -- still with plenty of "meat" left in it. They don't just eat a single kernel until it's all gone, they just eat some of the core out and toss it aside.

They were doing that when the pile was still very large. But then pile started to get smaller. and later the squirrels came back and started eating even the partially eaten kernels. Little by little it seemed nothing whatsoever remained of the bag.

Nature is fun.

What's Up With Oil?

2011-04-18T07:30:00.001-07:00

It occured to me that the recent rise in oil is awfully convenient for the US Empire. Here's how it goes:

1) Oil price rises. OPEC countries pay no more for the oil itself as they're just pumping it out of the ground anyway.

2) OPEC countries rake in far greater profits as margins increase with the rising price of oil (in dollars).

3) OPEC countries, under threat of attack by the US or invasion, turn right around and turn their profits (dollars) into US Treasuries, financing the horrendous US budget deficits (1.5 Trillion dollars/year and rising).

4) US government takes the cash (which it got in exchange for worthless IOU's paying negligible interest, AKA US Treasuries), and pays its ongoing expenses, the money flows out into the world.

5) Other countries work like slaves to acquire the dollars so they can go on living and they use them to buy oil, which all modern life depends on, from OPEC nations.

6) Goto step 1.

The Federal Reserve can sneakily take up the slack for a while, and can create dollars out of thin air and covertly funnel the money to the primary dealers to get them to buy up the US Treasuries on initial auctions by the US Treasury Dept., but in order to have this all work long term the oil money flow has to be operating.

And it all works better as oil prices go up and up, as more money gets pumped into US Treasuries and it gives the US Government more ability to keep on operating.

I believe the crash in oil back in 2008 was due to US punishing Russia for getting "uppity" in the Georgia / Ossetia engagement. Russia, an oil exporter, was raking in huge profits on oil and was using those profits to gain access to credit to borrow massive amounts of money to move back into Superpower status again. And the US couldn't have that... so it crashed the price of oil and Russia's house of cards toppled.

It seems to me this time the USA Empire will allow oil to rise because it has, in the interrim, managed to consolidate its control of the world's central banks, so that even though oil will be rising, it will be tabboo for any big bank to extend credit to any of the "bad guys" (Russia, Venezuala, perhaps more?) that have lots of oil to export.

Moreover the USA Empire has made doubly sure the oil exporting nations take note of what's going on in Libya. Which is nothing more than, "You've got oil? OK, consider yourself under our thumb, as unless you do what we like, we're going to bomb you back to the stone age."

The US Empire is an animal that is dying. It will do anything to survive. Nevermind that its actions are doomed to fail, that they can't be sustained indefinitely. But before it actually winks out of existence it will do everything it possibly can to hang on to just a few more minutes of life. As any animal instinctively does...

OMG

2011-04-08T13:05:00.000-07:00

Time To Take Profit In Dollars

2011-04-07T19:39:00.001-07:00

Lots of talking heads are asking, "Should we take profit in gold and silver now? Have they topped?"

The very question itself is offensive to me.

Here's the real way to look at it. For about 100 years, ever since the Federal Reserve was created, we've been on paper (fiat) money to an increasing degree. Gold + silver collapsed towards the end of that bull run in paper, but the bull run in paper is over. The fiat currency game is once again collapsing.

So naturally money is going back to gold + silver. And staying there where it belongs. The true act of taking profits is not going back into paper. Rather the act of taking profits was to enjoy the incredible, mad, insane, crazy almost 100 year bull run in fiat paper, and finally at the very end before it all comes crashing down, take your profits, and retreat back to real money.

The way to look at it is back then, paper was better to hold than gold + silver -- more return on your investment. OK, now it's time to get out of paper and back into gold + silver. Paper's gone, see-ya, bye bye now. Back to real money. And then from there into other tangible things, such as real estate, commodities, companies, etc.

But not back into paper. Oh my goodness no. So when someone asks you if it's time to take profits in gold and silver, know it's a loaded question calculated to trick you into riding back into oblivion on the fiat train...

Imperialism!

2011-04-06T12:47:00.001-07:00

Geraldine Ferraro Died

2011-04-03T08:19:00.000-07:00

March 26, I remember when she ran for the presidential 1984 race with Mondale.

I used to say she was really Hal Holbrook in drag.

I mean, how come we never saw the two together at the same time? Spooky, eh?

Silver Just Keeps Going And Going And Going...

2011-03-24T08:47:00.000-07:00

I don't really have anything to say, I just wanted to use "Going and going and going" in a blog entry...

Goodbye, Carbon Tax!

2011-03-22T11:00:00.000-07:00

Original article here.

What Was Carbon Finance?
By: Andrew McKillop

As a leading investment banker put it: “Carbon is getting more and more difficult. A significant amount of the business that is done in the carbon space should shift”, which when translated from finance talk to human language means that the loose “consensus” on creating a global carbon tax, without calling it a tax and trading around this new asset has likely cracked beyond repair. The smart money is now beating a retreat from playing with carbon finance assets, and remaining players in the carbon market are seeking any way out they can find, as turnover on emissions markets goes only one way – down.

This is a major turnaround in a short period. What was always a fragile consensus on the urgency of using financial engineering to deal with the supposedly critical issue of global warming can be traced back to the 1997 Kyoto climate conference, involving 193 nations, and specially the European Union's 27 member countries. The unsure plan, which featured the introduction of greenhouse-gas restrictions and tradable credits to pollute in a future and hypothetical global carbon market, was made mandatory in Europe from 2005 but is now breaking down almost daily.

In particular the U.S. and China, the world's two biggest emitters of CO2 grapple over how, when, and to what extent they can reduce CO2 pollution – while steadily rising numbers of credible scientists set the question of whether CO2 is a pollutant at all. Are we going to treat CO2 like dioxin, pesticides, GM crop and nanotech wastes, asbestos, drug wastes, heavy metals, nuclear wastes and radiation – or not ?

NO PLAN B
The latest casualties of the death of the Kyoto plan are companies who bet they would get a turnover boost out of buying and trading credits to release carbon into the environment. Using leverage through derived financial products carbon finance boomers talked loud about a coming market able to rival the US$ 21 trillion market in crude oil, based on real physical oil shipments with a value less than $ 1.5 trillion a year at current oil prices. So far, in a now declining market, the carbon market is only a blip on finance trading screens. Banks and brokers traded 93 billion euros ($ 128 billion) of carbon credits and derivatives in 2010, according to New Energy Finance.

A growing number of leading edge new brokering ventures in the so-called carbon space, with nice names featuring keywords like “clean, green, ecological” have started closing down, firing staff and liquidating their remaining paper assets. Most are shifting to scoop up remaining national government incentives, subsidies and hand-outs for renewable-energy and recycling projects, develop new investor assets from these, and keep trading. Their hope is that in the absence of a global consensus, investors will channel funds into incentive programs set up in local markets, such as India, where they hope to make more money than they would have made from selling credits under a global, UN-sponsored plan.

Remaining and rearguard business communication used to defend this strategy argues the two biggest economies blocking progress on emissions, China and the USA, are ignoring the claimed constant rise in global temperatures, which last year matched the highs of 2005 when European carbon trading was made obligatory, and that droughts and flooding continue to wreck harvests from Pakistan and Australia to Brazil and Russia. Financial players particularly exposed to loss from continually declining emission credits value, such as Deutsche Bank warn that the price of carbon languishes at less than half the level it claims is needed to meet the UN’s aims for controlling global warming.

This rearguard action is however doing little to stem the tide of investor retreat. Intercontinental Exchange Inc., the voluntary-basis carbon trading platform set up in fanfare on the Chicago Climate Exchange shut down on January 31, while JPMorgan Chase shut down its carbon credit origination at several offices, and fired the staff it acquired when it purchased EcoSecurities Group Plc, the biggest carbon finance offset and derivatives developer. The Geneva-based International Emissions Trading Association says its membership has declined by nearly 20 percent since its international trading division was given a major public relations launch at the 2009 climate summit in Copenhagen.

FOLLOW THE MONEY
Carbon emissions trading, and creating, distributing and selling a host of derivatives was hot stuff in the financial world as recently as 2009. Today however a typical comment from executive search agencies which placed steely-eyed high flyers committed to saving the planet in the 4-year window of good times around 2005-2009 now adopt a philosophical tone. “All the people I’ve seen who went into carbon trading have failed and moved out,” says Jason Kennedy, CEO of London-based headhunter Kennedy Associates, adding: “There’s not enough volume and not enough investment.”

Today these high flyers are constrained to downmarket. Current favourites can for example include designing biogas reactors, recycling car tyres or municipal rubbish and moving into niche activities like advising on sustainability and designing low energy downdraught housing, to scoop revenues from remaining players in the modest market for new energy and cleantech gimmicks.

Carbon trading is now a backwater of the global commodities market, not even included in the benchmark Dow Jones-UBS Commodity Index or other leading indexes such as Rogers International. Without institutional investors demand spurred by global emissions limits, the price of carbon can only languish compared with the constant and massive government tax and revenue base provided by the same fossil fuels that policy makers claimed they are aiming to marginalize in the fullness of time.

Killing the golden goose of a new tradable asset able first to be talked up, then materialized as paper chits with high nominal face values to entice unwary players, that is investors, shifts this failed scam from the realms of credible, to incredible. Derived products in the carbon finance space had already become more than usually unreal in the four short years of 2005-2009 during which they were marketable. They had included value creation based on the reliably fertile imagination of brokers and securities traders, extending through the hoped-for value chain stretching from the smoke stacks of power plants, to a motley crew of downstream and related carbon focus activities. When the bell rang 'Time up”, however, little or nothing was left behind, underlining that the carbon finance bubble was as classic as any other previous asset scam we have known.

WHAT NEXT
Chances are relatively high the carbon finance bubble, when fully collapsed, can be as unmemorable as the boom in rayon textiles. bakelite radios or VHS recorders – just one more failed attempt to create value. Alternatively, and depending on the trend for oil prices and the future of nuclear power, both of which are being played out right now on TV screens and Web sites worldwide, the carbon finance scam may be recovered, and recycled in mutant version.

What will be needed, to recycle and recover carbon consciousness above all features public relations, communications - and regular grade propaganda. Climate crisis of any kind is therefore critically needed, and could or might be the focus of energetic rearguard attempts at saving Sister Carbon by banks, finance houses, brokerage firms and their friends in government.

With nuclear power likely to languish under a Japanese radiation cloud for some while, and oil prices able to advance towards $150 per barrel as Arab dictatorships and absolute monarchies struggle to survive, the attraction for politicians of major oil and energy consuming countries to rebrand and relaunch soft energy may grow. In this scenario, carbon finance may be dusted off and recycled by government-friendly media, in an attempt to cajole consumers into using less energy, paying more for it, and liking it.

On this outlook the jury can only be out to lunch. Heroic attempts are underway to talk down the Japanese nuclear disaster, and limit oil price rises through designer bombing raids on the Tripoli bunkers of Colonel Gaddafi. With nuclear power restored as the official best and nicest solution to both high oil prices and global warming (and who cares if that is true or not ?), and Saudi Arabia's ruling elite given a nice long stay of execution, the need for carbon finance can naturally shrink and disappear- underlining the basic fact it was just another finance scam.

By Andrew McKillop

Squirrels Do It Too

2011-03-21T21:03:00.000-07:00

First day of spring (ok, technically yesterday since it's taken me so long to write this).

I happened to see two squirrels going at it. I'd never seen that before. I called my 9 year old daughter to take a look.

The male comes up behind and mounts the female while she's leaning on a tree stump, he pumps a few times, they pause, a few more. Takes about a minute maybe. Then they separate and run around and kind of play with each other some more. Quick, jerky movements. Then the process repeats.

Another "Patents Are Evil" Story

2011-03-20T06:27:00.001-07:00

NAND devices are digital electronic devices that store huge amounts of data in a circuit with no moving parts, are very small, and preserve the data even when power is not applied. They are also very cheap.

There is one issue they currently have. There is no guarantee that every single bit of information can be written to reliably. When you go to erase regions of the devices (by initializing them to all 1's) over time some bits can't be reset to the 1 state. And off the production line a very small number of bits never can be set to 1.

The bits that can be written are guaranteed to survive 1000 erase-write cycles. NAND devices are perfect for firmware on embedded devices, as 1000 upgrades is more than enough (how many bugs can there be, or new features, after all?). Well I suppose WindowsCE could have a lot of bugs...

It turns out it is pretty easy dealing with the bad block issue. That's where whatever controlling device or program that is accessing the NAND manages how to handle data regions that don't "take". The operating system can just check after a write, see if the data written is actually there. If it isn't, it can mark that sector as bad and use a spare sector somewhere else instead. Part of the NAND can be held in reserve for replacing bad sectors as they fail.

The only issue is, the complexity of handling the bad blocks is a burden to every piece of code that wants to use the NAND. In the case of linux certain filesystem drivers can handle the NAND quirks but others can't. It's a problem that any embedded developer using linux has to reinvent pretty much each and every time -- a ridiculous situation.

It seems to be there are patent issues invovled. Some jackass has received a patent on the most obvious solution to the bad nand sector problem -- just a simple table lookup approach where the bad block gets mapped to a known good block. Simplicity in itself, any programmer would know that's a viable approach. And the idiot US patent office has given some entity a patent on it. Laughable if it wasn't so harmful.

I believe the effect of this patent is that a manufacturer (like Micron or Samsung or any of the chip makers) can't simply introduce a mapping mechanism into the NAND device itself. Consider -- a device could have all the logic for detecting and remapping bad blocks integrated into itself so that from the point of view of the outside world the NAND device is is perfect, meaning there are no bad blocks at all, every write is successful. But such a solution can't be introduced because the best and most obvious way of doing it is encumbered by a patent.

Simple justice comes into play. A manufacturer like the above listed decides, "I'm not going to play by these rules." Rather than pay the patent troll his ill-gotten gains, they just don't enhance the value of their product. And the consumer suffers.

That's What She Said

2011-03-17T18:28:00.000-07:00

I got to use this in a chat:


[8:39:07 PM] Jason Klebs: Well, I don't
know what changed, but it got smaller
from the last time I saw it.
[8:39:16 PM] David Ashley: That's what
she said.

Linux Kernel Fault

2011-03-14T08:27:00.000-07:00


% zcat /proc/config.gz | grep IKCONFIG
# CONFIG_IKCONFIG_PROC is not set
%

The above is a nerdy linux joke, comment if you get it. If you even care...

It's similiar to "This statement is false."

Arguments In Favor Of Fiat Money

2011-03-07T12:01:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I consider the opposite side to the one I've adopted as my own. For example right now I'd prefer real, sound money backed by some real asset (silver, gold, oil, something scarce that has value that can't be created out of thin air) to what we have today, which is where money can be created in unlimited amounts by the Federal Reserve Banking System.

However if I had to try and find a reason to have the fiat currency system we have, I did come up with this one:

Suppose that we live in a world where there are just vast, vast numbers of con-men who want to get as much money as possible and don't care about ethical considerations. One realm is in startup ventures where some new technology is going to be pursued. Suppose that in all such areas, the vast majority of people soliciting investment money to pursue some technological advancement are actually liars, who have no intention whatsoever of actually trying to advance science and technology (or eventually turn a profit) at all.

Rather, their goal is to just attract investment dollars. They say they want to build something, create something, move technology forward, release a product or service, yet in reality they gauge their success by how much investment capital they can attract and control.

These people are experts at attracting investment money. They learn through experience. Success is when someone puts money into their venture. Now they need to put together some operation that simply has enough appearance of pursuing the stated mission to satisfy the investors, and to continue attracting more ones. An ideal situation is one in which realistic sounding progress can be claimed, yet there is no completion. Rather, things look promising, and we can actually complete the product if we just had a little more money...

Such people arrange the corporations they form such that the instant investment money does come in, some (as much as they can get away with) is peeled right off the top and goes directly into their own pocket. Perhaps they justify this as a reward for getting funding for the operation. Whatever, this piece of the investment was the goal of the solicitor (con-man) all along. So when the funding comes in, they take their reward. Then they redouble their effort to try to get even more investment money (which is easier now since they can claim that at least some other group was willing to invest in the endeavor, granting it some credibility).

If the pursuit actually does yield a marketable product or something of value, it's not clear whether the con-man would even know how to proceed. His expertise is in getting the funding, not managing a profit-producing operation. He'd probably just use the breakthrough as fodder to attract more investment money, now he could claim the product is proved out and viable, we can take it to market if we can just manage to get a little bit more money.

He wants his cut to be as big as possible, and he wants it right now. He doesn't want to have to wait for a company to actually grow and be accepted by the market and start generating real profit. That process takes too much time. Rather, he wants to run out all possibility of further investment income on an endeavor then move on. Some of these guys have done this 6 or more times, they're expert at getting funding. They know nothing whatsoever about creating successful companies. But they know all sorts of tricks for getting investment money.

OK, so if we assume a large majority of enterprises seeking funding are of this corrupt kind, what of the honest ones where some individual actually wants to produce something real of value?

Such a person is now at a disadvantage. His skillset is in line with the realm of the technology being pursued, not in getting funding. He also naturally assumes the system is honest, that his innovation will be its own selling point. As such he hasn't gone down the path of becoming an expert in gathering funding.

So he finds it harder to get funded than the liar career fundraiser. The career fundraisers take most of the available investment money, and they know the tricks on how to get it, and so the honest innovator is starved out. If he learns about the reality, he might get so disgusted he just gives up and stops trying to thrive in this corrupt environment. On rare occasions he'll perservere and actually get funding somehow and go on and produce real wealth and a profitable commpany. After all, this must happen at least occasionally, because little by little humankind does advance in its understanding and capabilities...

But my point is that the honest innovator is crippled in such a toxic environment. Yet he's the only one who will actually advance technology, and so improve living conditions for everyone. The corrupt career fundraiser only manages to make money for himself, he doesn't create anything new or improve the human condition at all.

So here's the point I've been working toward. In such a corrupt environment, in order to get scarce, fought over funding into the hands of the honest innovator, perhaps drastic measures have to be taken.

One such drastic measure is adopting the practice of simply flooding the investment envirionment with so much easy money that even though almost all of it is sucked away by the career fundraisers, at least some can get into the hands of the true innovator. Because without such drastic flows of money, perhaps he'd abandon hope and end up getting no money at all.

Perhaps the innovations of the lone genius are in fact so absolutely, unimaginably valuable to humanity that the absolutely insane, incomprehensible amounts of fiat money creation and currency debasement are justified. Because after all, only the innovator actually creates wealth and improves the human condition. And perhaps even though vile parasites have to be given vast wealth in order to get a tiny drop of money into the hands of the true innovator, in the end The System Works. Innovation does occur at a meaningful rate, and life does go on.

Anyway, that's one of my possible ways of justifying fiat money. But I don't really believe in it. In fact, I'd just as soon remove all funding from central planners at all, cut off the tap at the source. In that world, money becomes extremely scarce, and the profit motive itself has a chance to come into play. People seeking to invest would be risking real money of value that can't be replaced at the press of a button.

As such investors would be far more likely to be more picky in what endeavors they fund. They'd do more due diligence. I'd guess in such an environment the career fundraisers couldn't actually exist. Their history of success at fundraising yet repeated failure to deliver a product would catch up to them, and they'd find fewer and fewer people with wealth willing to put it at their disposal.

Anyway just wanted to write down something I've tossed around in my mind.

The Corn Engrosser

2011-03-02T11:50:00.000-08:00

When I was a kid I had this book Robin Hood that I've managed to hang onto that I read many times:

We all know the story, Robin Hood steals from the rich to give to the poor. I'm certainly not a populist or socialist, rather the precise opposite. You want something, you work for it. Anyway there was a story in the book about The Corn Engrosser that has stuck with me.

The Corn Engrosser was a rich man who bought up all the corn in as large an area as possible until he controlled it all, then he could sell it back to the hungry people at a large markup, making profit on their need to buy in order to stay alive.

The Corn Engrosser is painted as a loathsome individual, universally hated. He hides some gold coins in his sandals, and Robin Hood tricks him into telling of the hiding place. Robin robs him and as readers we're happy and content that justice has been done.

I'm wondering about the equivalent situation today. There are billionaires that have enough wealth to buy up the entire world's production of wheat on the futures markets. Yet strangely, they never do. Why not? Certainly no one could accuse them of taking a moral stance against it. After all I'd consider rich people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet as utterly immoral or at best ammoral.

My take is in today's world a rich person couldn't get away with trying such a thing. For one thing, if the people couldn't buy food cheaply enough, they'd mass and riot. Governments are scared to death of that (with good reason). So governments have to make sure food is available. If a rich SOB cornered the futures market and bought up all the food, it would quickly be noticed.

What could the government do? They could sell a huge naked short position in order to thwart the hoarder's profit attempt. Rather than driving up the price of the commodity, the price would stay low, yet the ready cash of the rich SOB would be exhausted until he can't buy any more. Perhaps a margin call is engineered and he's forced to sell, allowing the cancelling out of the naked short position. If done carefully the rich SOB can be handed his ass.

This happened to the Hunt Brothers in the late 1970's when they tried to buy up silver. As a side note, it's often talked about how silver hasn't yet reached the nominal highs it touched in the late 1970's, and this is used to assert silver can't be in a bubble. Let's not forget the Hunt brothers were buying up like crazy, and that's the big reason silver rose so high so fast back then. No one is buying like that these days. Rather it's small people buying silver as a hedge against Fed Monetization efforts. Paper's going to zero value. Silver won't. But I digress...

OK so a government has to control the price of food, has to defend the public against a rich SOB (the Corn Engrosser) who would try to hoard the food and get a monopoly and profit on people's hunger.

As such it calls into question my complaint about the strange, vast, huge naked short position in silver. Perhaps government sees it is protecting the public from a manipulative long position as the Corn Engrosser's position would be. I'd hesitate to attribute such a praiseworthy motivation to their actions though. I think they're inherently evil and monstrous, and incapable of doing anything for the right reasons.

Anyway if the government is protecting me (as a member of the public) by selling silver short, I'd just as soon take my chances. Thanks, but no thanks. The fact is the cure for high prices is high prices. Prices going higher mean more production becomes attractive. More production reduces prices. Clear negative feedback situation going on.

Besides which silver isn't something you absolutely have to have, like corn or wheat could be. The government is manipulating silver (and gold) downwards because they're trying to prevent the collapse of their paper currency and ponzi scheme economy.

Elliott Wave Principle Book Available Free Online!!!

2011-03-02T10:29:00.000-08:00

Here is an article I found of interest.

EWI is now giving away their book that presumably tells you how to invest based on these wave principles.

Here's the reality of the situation. The reading of the waves is akin to reading tea-leaves and making decisions based on what one observes. Now, if everyone reads the same tea-leaves the same way, they'll all act the same way if they follow the same rules.

That's the point of giving away this EWI book for free. They want to get more suckers... er... investors on board this "system". Which is in reality a ponzi scheme of its own, that depends on people actually acting as a group.

Suppose you can convince a lot of people that some stock is going to go up. So they all buy it. And voila! The stock goes up. That's all that's going on. There is no predictive magic in the EWI scheme. It is just a way of getting a lot of people to do the same thing at the same time. If you get in first, you can make money (either buying or selling).

Presumably in the past they charged for this wonderful tomb of information. But now in order to keep the ponzi market going they need to get even more suckers on board, so they're giving the book away. Laughable!

Then I saw another article with this headline: Gold and Silver Sunny Days, Marc Faber Top Busted, Elliott Wave Wrong as Usual which I thought amusing. I guess I'm not the only one that thinks this Elliott Wave business is a scam.

Not everyone can make money trading in the stock market. If everyone does the same thing, buys at the same time, sells at the same time... where is the wealth creation? The whole point of the EWI is to sneakily take money from the masses of chumps that believe in it. Don't be one of the chumps.

Broken Pipe

2011-02-26T07:41:00.000-08:00

I was out in California recently and saw a stream of water running along the ground in the gutter area of a strip mall, and followed it to its source. I found it was a broken PVC pipe about 1.5 inches in diameter that was feeding a sprinkler system. I think a car had run over the end of the little island in the parking lot and crushed the pipe, causing water to stream out.

By the time I actually went to track down the source of the water it had been flowing for on the order of 8 hours (at least) that I know of. Maybe longer. I had seen the stream of water at some other place before I went to bed. On a whim I tracked it to its source the next morning.

So here's this broken pipe in the ground with water pouring out. The flow rate is about like 3 or 4 garden hoses turned full on, maybe more, just pouring out nonstop, hour after hour. People walking by, ignoring it. Not their problem. The waste offended me, so I started trying to think of a way to turn it off.

Long story short I wandered around and found a fellow who was working on spreading tar on a roof and I borrowed an old small crescent wrench from him and I turned off a valve in the metal pipe that fed the PVC one, and the water stopped flowing.

Since then for several days I checked and the valve was still off, and no repair work had been done on the sprinkler system. I can only guess at how long it would have been flowing until someone else came along and turned it off.

The green arrow in the image shows the location of the leak. It's at 33 44 2.95 N 117 48 48.86 W

Truth

2011-02-23T06:27:00.000-08:00

When theory is subject to experiment, humanity converges on the truth. When theory is not subject to experiment, humanity never converges on the truth. Truth is the most precious product of humanity.

Good Time To Buy Into Silver

2011-01-24T14:22:00.000-08:00

With this recent pullback ($26.97 down from above $30 in the last few weeks) it's a great time to buy some physical silver. That is, if you can locate any. One of the places I buy from reported they hope to begin shipping the product I wanted in the middle of February.

At some point the spot price will go to zero, but you won't be able to buy any real silver for that price.

Test

2011-01-11T08:41:00.001-08:00

Death Before Disillusionment!

2011-01-10T12:26:00.000-08:00

I wonder if years from now that will be the defining theme of the 60+ population of today. These people, that I like to call Baby Boomers, and who I almost universally loathe, seem to be so caught up in their belief systems that the prospect of updating them carries more fear than death itself.

In the coming years choices will have to be made, business as usual is not an option. Death is on the line now, or very shortly. These older people will be faced with a choice of adapting to the changing realities, or sticking with their belief systems and dying.

I wonder if in droves, faced with adapt or die, they'll choose death. The overwelming feeling I've been getting, when I try to interact with them, is that adapting is not going to be an option for them.

It may be that early 2011 is a turning point for me personally, it may be the period I finally gave up on the 60+ crowd myself.

Leslie Nielsen Then Anne Francis Die

2011-01-03T07:49:00.000-08:00

The image is from the movie Forbidden Planet (1956). The guy in the picture is Leslie Nielson, he just died November 28, 2010. The girl is Anne Francis, and she just died January 2, 2011. Coincidence? I think not. I'm just kidding.

R. Buckminster Fuller, Omni-Crackpot

2011-01-02T08:58:00.001-08:00

I've been meaning to write something down about this fellow for a long time. RB Fuller is a very famous inventor, futurist, whatnot. He created the Dymaxion Car that had a lot of amazing innovations (rear wheel steering for one, so it could park in tight parking spaces). "Buckyballs" are named after him, since he had the patent on the geodesic dome. Every soccer ball has the form of the geodesic dome, BTW, with 12 pentagons and 20 hexagons.

This guy wrote a lot. He was involved in a lot of big projects that went nowhere. There was some big housing project on the Mississippi that featured a giant open air living space under a transparent dome. Families would live in regions separated by normal, opaque walls, but there would be no ceilings. I wonder about the insect problem, and also the noisy neighbor problem, as well as the rotten garbage smell problem that such an approach would almost certainly guarantee. The project was cancelled, seemingly after it was almost ready to get built.

I got interested in reading RB Fuller's Synergetics books. He makes some amazing claims, about how he's figured out the structure of the universe at the bottom level. Sounds promising! I got a used copy of volume 1 of Synergetics and started to read it when it arrived.

He goes on and on about how you can pile spheres on top of each other to create stable forms. He has a way of packing spheres around a central sphere that creates a perfect, symmetric packing with 92 spheres. Coincidentally 92 is the atomic number of the last stable element, Uranium. This (as near as I can find) is the single, solitary datapoint that justifies RB Fuller's entire thesis.

He's created some ridiculously cryptic geometric constructions built on top of packed spheres. And one of those constructions has 92 spheres and is symmetric, and that matches Uranium, therefore the entire complex system must be correct!

He claims his system solves the 4 color map problem (or proves it... the problem being any 2 dimensional map can be colored with no more than 4 colors such that no two adjoining regions are of the same color. 3 colors isn't enough, and 5 is overkill. 4 is just right. It's an accepted truth, yet proving this is a complex problem). I never got to the part that actually proves the 4 color map problem. In fact I'm not sure if I even got through the first half of the first volume.

The guy does drone on. He uses his own jargon all the time. "Omni" is especially common. I like to think of RB Fuller as an Omni-Crackpot. My theory is the guy had a visual brain, everything was pictures to him. And he was obsessive. So he went down the path of trying to visualize a geometric construction for the universe. I think he labored on his vision for decades. Meanwhile he was famous and could raise funding for his various pursuits. He could convince people with money that this guy was either a genius or insane. When they thought he was a genius he could get some funding.

So he worked on his geometric theory for a long time, then wrote it down in Synergetics. My god, how convoluted it is. You're presented with endless little factoids that you have to accept on faith as being worth remembering. There is no big picture, no explanation as to why you need to know this stuff. Endless repetition. "Wait a minute? Didn't he just say this same thing 2 chapters back in a different way?" The organization is a joke.

I found I just couldn't finish it. If you have to study, study, study in order to understand someone's insight, you have to have faith that where he's trying to take you is somewhere worth going. Somewhere as I was plodding through the work it just dawned on me that this guy is taking me to la-la land. I realized he was a crackpot. Nothing would come of this pursuit. No great insights, no bottom level understanding of How It All Works. I gave up. Rather than continue on to the end of volume 1 and go on to volume 2, I fell off the wagon and decided This Guy Is A Crackpot and went on with my life.

If he has anything worthwhile to say, he's his own worst salesman. If there is anything worth knowing, someone of faith (Faith in RB Fuller's genius) would have to absorb all the material, then re-present it in a much more appealing manner. Then maybe it can impact the world in a positive way.

As it is these books are useless to the world. As valuable as indecypherable sanskrit. The demands made on the reader are simply too great. Because the thing is, you don't get credit for just reading through the pages, one after another. You have to absorb the material, understand it, be able to think just as RB Fuller did. I don't believe there are more than 5 people on this planet, and perhaps as few as 0, that have actually done that.

So for my money RB Fuller is just the world's most famous crackpot.

Another contender might be Nikola Tesla, but I'm not sure. Everything RB Fuller ever wrote seems to be readily available. Tesla's works seem to have been hidden or lost, but rumours of how amazing they are persist. Maybe there is something to Tesla, I just don't know. But I'm convinced there is nothing whatsoever to RB Fuller's theories.

Anyone want a slightly used copy of Synergetics?

Another New Year

2011-01-01T09:56:00.000-08:00

January 1, 2011. This is the last year until 2100 where the last 3 digits of the year can be represented in binary (0 or 1). We've already had 2000, 2001, 2010 and are just starting 2011. Then after the year 2111 the next last-3-digit-binary-year will be 3000.

Not that any of that matters of course.

I meant to check in on the Rose Parade this morning, but I completely forgot.

Here's my current list of deaths in 2010.
2010-12-28 Agathe von Trapp (97) (Liesl from Sound of Music)
2010-12-20 Steve Landesberg (74) (Dietrich on Barney Miller)
2010-12-11 Mark Madoff (46) (Son of Ponzi King Bernard Madoff)
2010-11-28 Leslie Nielsen (84)
2010-11-10 Dino De Laurentiis (91)
2010-11-05 Jill Clayburgh (66)
2010-10-19 Tom Bosley (83)
2010-10-16 Barbara Billingsley (94)
2010-10-14 Benoit Mandelbrot (85)
2010-09-29 Tony Curtis (85)
2010-09-21 John Crawford (90)
2010-09-11 Harold Gould (86)
2010-08-21 Nancy Dolman (58) (Annie from Soap)
2010-08-08 Matt Simmons (67) (Harping on Peak Oil)
2010-07-12 Harvey Pekar (70)
2010-06-13 Jimmy Dean (81)
2010-05-29 Dennis Hopper (74)
2010-05-28 Gary Coleman (42)
2010-05-22 Martin Gardner (95)
2010-05-02 Lynn Redgrave (67)
2010-04-16 Daryl Gates (83) (Police Chief of LA)
2010-04-02 David Halliday (94) (From Halliday + Resnick Physics books)
2010-03-24 Robert Culp (79)
2010-03-14 Peter Graves (83)
2010-02-20 Alexander Haig (85)
2010-02-10 Charlie Wilson (76) (Of Charlie Wilson's War)
2010-01-27 J.D. Salinger (91)
2010-01-24 Pernell Roberts (81)
2010-01-22 Johnny Seven (83) (Regular on Ironside)
2010-01-16 Glen Bell (86) (Founder of Taco Bell)
2010-01-08 Art Clokey (88) (Creator of Gumby)

Fucktard World

2010-12-29T22:01:00.001-08:00

Here's a gripe entry. If you don't want to read me griping about something, better stop reading now.

Lately (as in over the past several years) I've been seeing a tendency towards more and more fucktards asserting themselves on the internet. "Fucktard" is a generic insult I like the sound of, sort of a mixture of "Fuckhead" and "Retard", yet more vehement than either. It's meant to convey a sense of utter disgust. You don't just say the word, you spit it out under pressure.

Here are some recent examples:

1) I make an anonymous edit to a wikipedia page, adding some useful information. Some fucktard undoes my edit with the comment, "Source?". YOU FUCKTARD! I AM THE FUCKING SOURCE. THAT"S WHAT WIKIPEDIA IS ALL ABOUT. The information was correct and accurate. Who is this asshole to undo the edit just because I don't include a reference to someone else as the expert? The implication is that no real expert would contribute to wikipedia. FUCKTARD!!!!!!!!

2) I'm interested in what's involved in doing something, say some engineering work. Say creating an HDMI core for an FPGA. I do a google search and I don't find it already done. But I do find discussions of people asking about details of what's involved. And the responses invariably are, "Why do you want to do that?" or "Why not just buy an off the shelf part like xxx?" or "That would be very difficult.". YOU FUCKTARDS. IT IS NONE OF YOUR FUCKING BUSINESS WHY I WANT TO DO IT. IF YOU DON'T HAVE USEFUL SUGGESTIONS, SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!!! AND I DON'T NEED YOU TO SAY IT'S DIFFICULT, YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW DIFFICULT IT WOULD BE FOR ME TO DO IT, ONLY (PERHAPS) SOME IDEA OF HOW DIFFICULT IT WOULD BE FOR YOU TO DO IT, AND I DON'T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT THAT ANYWAY. However to provide a bit of detail, one has lots of reasons for doing such things.

How do the off the shelf components come to be in the first place? Someone somewhere has to be expert enough to do it. It may be done just for reasons of wanting to know how to do it. One might want to create a new off the shelf component to compete with the existing ones. One might like doing things for oneself, regardless of how difficult it is, as the knowledge of how to do them can be very valuable. Or maybe someone wants to keep busy while they're out of work and doing a complex project utilizing only one's own resources looks good on a resume. There are tons of reasons for doing things that are not necessarily the easiest or cheapest way.

That's about all I want to get off my chest right at the moment. Damn fucktards. They seem to be coming out of the woodwork more and more these days. My patience with them is pretty much gone.

Ben Hunter

2010-12-29T19:19:00.001-08:00

This fellow was a host on KTTV in the 1970's, he used to tell interesting stories. He spoke of some jellyfish like animal he found on the beach and for some reason it caused a cut to stop bleeding, I remember that story. I've been trying to dig up info on him, occasionally over the last 20 years. I remember my dad watched his broadcasts and liked him, then in the 1980's or 1990's I tried to ask my dad about this fellow, but he had completely forgotten him, he had no idea who I was talking about. I wonder how much I'll forget as I get older and older...

He wrote a book called The Baja Feeling. There is a site on the internet where someone went and found the house in Baja he lived in. Evidently he died in the 1980's.

HDCP Cracked!

2010-12-29T08:03:00.001-08:00

I just found out that HDCP has been cracked. HDCP is the encryption scheme used to encrypt digital content that is sent over an HDMI link. I recall several years ago there was a discussion of a weakness in HDCP, that if a single entity could gather enough encryption keys from devices that use HDCP one could reconstruct all the information necessary to break the system.

Evidently that has been done. You can google search for "HDCP MASTER KEY.txt" and find it on the internet.

This means Blue Ray is compromised as well. A Blue Ray player reads the disc and sends the high definition video and audio to the display using an HDMI cable, but the data is encrypted using HDCP. Since HDCP is cracked, one can now tap into the digital stream and recover the unencrypted hi-definition digital data and do whatever one wants with it.

There is no recovery from this from the point of view of the people wanting to sell encrypted digital content. I mean, there is no solution, no way out. Their game is over. The hi-definition digital data is available to anyone who wants it.

I'm a little late in noticing this development, it really occured in September 2010 (it seems from internet searches).

I believe HDMI is a low voltage differential signal standard (LVDS). LVDS IO pins are readily available on FPGA chips these days, such as the Xilinx Spartan-3E series. I believe it has been possible for a long time now to generate an HDMI compatible audio / video bitstream to send to a display using readily available opencores.org IP cores written in verilog or vhdl. But the HDCP encryption part probably didn't exist, due to the key issue.

It'd be a cool project to make an HDCP stripper that just takes an HDMI/HDCP input on one side and outputs the HDMI without HDCP on the other, with a button that randomly generates an authenticated device ID key so the HDMI/HDCP source cannot ever use the blacklisting scheme to thwart the process. [NOTE: Do you want such a device? If you're willing to pay me to make it, contact me.]

Every HDCP capable device has an ID that is provided by some central committee (that licenses HDCP for private use). If a device is determined to be compromised (allowing recovery of unencrypted data) the original design allows for its device ID to be added to a blacklist. The current blacklist is included on content that uses the HDCP encryption, such as blue ray disks. Players are supposed to irrevocably update their blacklist accordingly and not send data to blacklisted devices, and if they don't they risk being blacklisted themselves.

Anyway that "solution" doesn't work either since HDCP itself is cracked and an essentially unlimited number of authentic device keys can be generated. One could even piggyback a known-good device that has sold millions of units! Wouldn't that be hilarious. An entity plays by the rules 100%, creates uncrackable hardware, and sells many, many units, then some "pirate" comes along and clones their ID and makes a device targeted solely to allow recovery of unencrypted data. And there is nothing that can be done to stop this.

Give it up, guys. Data cannot be protected forever. The effort to try is like holding back the tide. Been there, done that, it doesn't work. So get with the program.

Connecticut Yankee

2010-12-25T09:20:00.000-08:00

Sam Clemens (aka Mark Twain) is my favorite author. One of his books is A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court. A quote from that is here:

I was hungry enough for literature to want to take down the whole paper at this one meal, but I got only a few bites, and then had to postpone, because the monks around me besieged me so with eager questions: What is this curious thing? What is it for? Is it a handkerchief? --saddle blanket?--part of a shirt? What is it made of? How thin it is, and how dainty and frail; and how it rattles. Will it wear, do you think, and won't the rain injure it? Is it writing that appears on it, or is it only ornamentation? They suspected it was writing, because those among them who knew how to read Latin and had a smattering of Greek, recognized some of the letters, but they could make nothing out of the result as a whole. I put my information in the simplest form I could:

"It is a public journal; I will explain what that is, another time. It is not cloth, it is made of paper; some time I will explain what paper is. The lines on it are reading matter; and not written by hand, but printed; by and by I will explain what printing is. A thousand of these sheets have been made, all exactly like this, in every minute detail--they can't be told apart." Then they all broke out with exclamations of surprise and admiration:

"A thousand! Verily a mighty work--a year's work for many men."

"No--merely a day's work for a man and a boy."

Belief Is Costly

2010-12-12T19:15:00.000-08:00

Philip K. Dick is quoted as saying, "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." Lately it has occured to me that the nervous system will zero in (over time) on the most efficient theory of reality. Meaning if there is a theory that requires all sorts of detail, special cases and whatnot it will be replaced by a simpler theory with fewer special cases that explains at least as much.

It occured to me that one could say, "Truth is that which requires the least faith."

PK Dick's statement is about reality. My statement is about Truth. His is a black / white check for reality. Mine allows for a gradual improvement on the Truth level at the expense of the Faith amount. Reduce the Faith requirement little by little and you're getting closer and closer to the Truth.

And when no Faith is required, you're at absolute Truth. Or Reality. Same thing, I guess.

20 Things I Learned About Browsers & The Web

2010-11-25T06:50:00.000-08:00

Google launched some interactive book explaining some basic concepts about the internet here .

I just learned thing #21: Just because you're a giant company filled with PHD's of all varieties and you're pouring money into basic research, donating heavily to open source browsers like firefox, you won't be able to get simple text display to work on the internet!

Note the text is cutoff in the book. You can just make out the first few pixels of the next row of text. Is there more text below? It's impossible to scroll down to it.

What a joke.

A Personal Appeal From The Outlaw Jimmy Wales

2010-11-23T08:11:00.001-08:00

I can't resist when I see this nag-for-donations on Wikipedia's pages (which really says A personal appeal from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales) immediately thinking of The Outlaw Josey Wales. That's the first note.

The second one is that it is a little embarassing. Sure, we all love wikipedia. But I mean, having to spange us for donations all the time? If wikipedia were to vanish it would reappear within 3 months. Probably as googlepedia. Which reminds me, I should probably register that name...(Doh! Google already has it.).

Why not build wikipedia upon a distributed architecture, like the USENET system. Imagine a hash system where based on the hash of the page name, a different computer actually handles the server load. Or perhaps an approach like the DNS database, which is distributed throughout the internet.

That way, there wouldn't be any central server demanding money for its continued existence. If Jimmy Wales were to step out of the way, a new and perhaps better wikipedia would quickly appear that wouldn't require someone to whine for donations all the time...

People are addicted to wikipedia now. So the "Wikipedia-like service" that it provides will never, ever go away. That service is now immortal. It has no dependence on Wikipedia or Jimmy Wales anymore. It owes its existence to the hoards of people that want it to exist. Let's all give a big hand to Jimmy Wales for making it a reality, but his work is done, the world doesn't need him in the loop forever, begging for a handout.

Sanjaya Maniktala: Where Are You?

2010-11-18T20:23:00.000-08:00

I'm starting to read the book, Troubleshooting Switching Power Converters: A Hands-On Guide by Sanjaya Maniktala. He presents the above puzzle as an attempt to put his readership in its place. Meaning Be careful! Don't trust your intuition!

Here is an excerpt from the book:

In [The figure above], we have two identical capacitors. One is charged to 10V. Then it is connected directly across the other capacitor. What are the final voltages across the capacitors?

The "correct" answer is 5V. But actually, I am going to leave you guessing about the exact reason for this (if you don't already know). There are several websites dedicated to this topic, so please Google freely. It is interesting to learn that half the energy originally present inside C1 is just lost somewhere! Where, why, and how? I must add that recently a senior colleage of mine disagreed with the traditional resolution of this paradox. He said, "Show me!" And that is a good thing, because however obvious it seems to be, we must ultimately take it to the bench and try it out. So we did! We charged up a big electrolytic capacitor to 10V, and then immediately connected it across an identical uncharged one. The final voltage? About 5.7V, not 5V. I still don't understand that! Though I suspect it was probably a result of the tolerances and mismatching of the capacitors involved.

Ok, this is one of those common moments in my life where I question either my own sanity or the sanity of the whole rest of the world. First of all, the question is trivial. The equation for the energy stored in a capacitor is E=(1/2)C V^2. That is, half of C (the capacitance) times the square of the voltage. Energy goes up as the square of the voltage.

So if some amount of energy is stored in the first capacitor, and none at all in the second, and they get connected, clearly the final result will be the energy is evenly distributed among the two capacitors. However the final voltage across the two would not be 5V (half what we started with). Because in the end that scenario would have exactly 1/2 of the energy missing. 5V is half of the original 10V. But since energy is the square of voltage, the 5V charged capacitor only contains 1/4th the original energy. And two of them together only contain 1/2 the original energy.

With me so far? If textbooks of the past claimed that after the connection you have 5V on both capacitors, something is seriously wrong. But suppose they arrived at that through experiment? The result works its way into common knowledge, people accept it without question. They ignore or forget the fact that it contradicts the physics of the situation.

Now Maniktala comes along and repeats the experiment, and he gets 5.7V! Not 5.0V. And he's mystified! He can't make sense of it. So he chalks it up to errors in the experimental procedure. What a cop-out. No balls at all.

The problem was the conventional wisdom was wrong. Theory states that in order to conserve energy, the voltage across the two capacitors has to be 1/sqrt(2). That's 1 divided by the square root of 2. That way, when you square this value, you get 1/2. And the two capacitors each have half of the initial energy. So in a perfect world the voltage would be 7.07106781V across both capacitors.

But it was observed (in the past) to be 5V. My explanation? The old days had poor quality wires, and the wires inside the capacitors themselves were impure and had some resistance in them. Also the switches used were of poor quality. As such when a switch is "closed", there is a period where it goes from being open (infinite resistance) to closed, where it is supposed to have zero resistance. But no switch can go from infinite resistance to zero resistance instantly in the real world. It has to go through all values, continuously, to get to zero. And it doesn't even get to zero, in the end. The switch is not superconducting, after all.

So the reason why experimenters measured 5V was because 2.07106V worth of energy was lost in imperfect wiring, components, and the switches. My guess is it just magically happened to work out that the imperfectness was just exactly right to result in the final voltage being exactly 1/2 the starting voltage. So people said, "Aha! It will always be exactly half. After all, a nice even factor of two can't be coincidence. That's now the rule we can all live and design by."

But then time goes by, materials are more pure, more perfect, switches better, and someone repeats the experiment. This time it comes up 5.7V! The losses due to resistance (which end up converting some of the energy into random heat, BTW) are not as much with these more modern materials. And Maniktala can't wrap his mind around it! All his hard earned experience and knowledge is now suspect. His whole world is rocked to the core. How can he even admit his not understanding the situation in a textbook?

I mean, now I'm reading this and I'm faced with the question. If this bozo can't figure out what's going on in this trivial situation, how much can I learn from him? What other misconceptions is he going to try to pass on that I might not catch?

So my instinct was to try to Do The Right Thing and contact this guy directly, point out the error of his ways, show him the results of my ingenuity. And I gave up after about 10 minutes trying to locate an email address for him. So I thought I'd blog the story here.

Welcome to my life, BTW. This sort of thing happens to me all the time.

Joke I Just Invented

2010-11-17T16:02:00.001-08:00

There was this army base where as a perk the officers of corporal rank were able to take a shortcut to the mess hall. Any rank below had to walk the long way around, and the soldiers of higher rank had a different barracks so they were already right next to the cafeteria.

The shortcut was through a tunnel that cut through a small hill, but it was so convenient all the corporals would use it all the time.

One day soldiers started getting sick and were having to be sent to the infirmary. It turned out only corporals were getting sick. The doctors were going crazy trying to figure out what was the cause. Finally some bright young doctor followed a corporal throughout the day and discovered the tunnel they were using. He took some samples and found there was a bacteria growing in the damp walls that was infecting the corporals.

He got back and started to write up his report. A general poked his head in when it got around that the doctor had solved the mystery. He asked, "So, what was the problem?"

"Corporal Tunnel Syndrome."

ETA

14 MP MY ASS

2010-11-17T07:11:00.000-08:00

Just got one of these on sale at CostCo for $129.99 plus tax on $159.99, so around $143. It claims 14 megapixels. I don't believe it. I mean, literally, I don't believe it. It's not true.

I ran a test under linux on one of the images captured.
djpeg P1000021.JPG | pnmscale .5 | pnmscale 2.0 | cjpeg -quality 99 > test.jpg
That command unpacks the jpeg image into ppm format, a tool scales it down by 50% in width and height, then scales it back up 200% in width and height (to restore the original dimensions), then it is converted back to a jpeg file.

In my browser I then open up two windows, fullscreen, and in one I view the P1000021.JPG file and in the other the test.jpg file. I click to zoom in the image (since the browser, firefox, scales the image to fit in the browser window) so I can see it 1:1 pixel size, and have to scroll around with the scrollbars to view it. I adjust both browser windows to view the same part (lower left corner of the image).

I can then switch between the two browser windows, which are exactly on top of each other. So I'm doing an A/B flip between the two images, which are the original image, and the image I made where I scaled it down by half, then doubled the size.

The results? I can't tell any difference in pixels between the two images. This means the full size image has no more information than the image that is 1/2 the width and 1/2 the height.

I tried the same test where I went down to 25% then scaled back up 4x, but I could see a bit of blur / sharpness between the two images. So there was a difference.

The implication is that those 14 MP are really just 3.5 MP doubled in width and height. "You wanna camera with 14 megapixels? We got it right here." With this approach I could make a camera that would output a billion pixels. It's a scam.

Having said all that, I really like the camera for the price, so I'll probably be keeping it. It's a big step up from the old camera. The only thing is, knowing that there is no additional information in the 10.5 extra MP I'm getting, there is no point in storing them (or even downloading them). I'll switch the camera to lower resolution mode.

ETA: 20101128 Decided to return the camera anyway. It requires too much light and the images look awful when it's not available. Ordinarily I'm a big fan of Panasonic.

Do Nothing Machine

2010-11-16T03:49:00.000-08:00

Inspired by Make Magazine's Most Useless Machine.

Sea Monkeys

2010-11-14T08:48:00.000-08:00

Some Ongoing Projects

2010-11-12T22:45:00.000-08:00

Experimenting with LED flat panel backlight power supply.

Hacking Ceiva digital picture frame.

Make Magazine "Most Useless Machine" project.

Sega Genesis development board update (currently in limbo until associate develops hardware).

USB data capture device (part of oscilloscope or logic analyzer).

Bring up fpgagen on Spartan-3E starter board. Wire up 3 bit RGB DAC to VGA connector.

WIFI implementation.

Brain research.

Wii HomeBrew (porting existing code, develop debugger, more reverse engineering of Wii internals).

Moog synthesizer simulator. Digital filtering experiments.

FPGA projects using VHDL.

High resolution digital microscope.

Encode XWindow arbitrary display region into mpeg without v4l or vnc.

See if Wii Impossible Mission has an exploit.

Hacking Vonage VTR-VD device.

Distributed production, could one craft electronic circuits with a directed ion stream (similar to a TV picture tube)?