Never been one to let the carrier drop

If Buddhism is base 2 (four noble truths, eightfold path) and Christianity is base 3 (Trinity, 12 disciples) what is base 5?http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_reciprocal_magic_square

Still climbing. Passed another milepost.. it read ‘Bhudda Dance’. 😉

Contact

It’s all it takes

To change your life, to lose your place in time

Contact

Asleep or awake

Coming around you may wake up to find

Questions speak

Within your eyes

Now more than ever

You realize…

And then you sense a change..

And nothing feels the same

And all your dreams are strange

Love comes walking in

Some kind of alien

Reached for the opening

Simply pulls a string..

Another world, some other time

You lay your sanity on the line

Familiar faces, familiar sights

Reach back, remember with all your might

There she stands in her silken gown

The silver lights shining down..

And then you sense a change

And nothing feels the same

And all your dreams are strange

Love comes walking in

Some kind of alien

waits for the opening

simply pulls a string

love comes walking in..

Sleep and dream

That’s all I crave

I travel far across the milky way

To my master I’ve become a slave

’til we meet again

some other day..

And then you sense a change

And nothing feels the same

And all your dreams are strange

Love comes walking in

Some kind of alien

waits for the opening

simply pulls a string

love comes walking in..

I can not remember the last time I was this happy.

Christine’s depression never seems to end

Cause she’ll never be as skinny as the girls on friends

She’s got fat lips and thin lips, she’s jealous of a Q-tip

She’d take stupid over fat

She stuck her fingers down her throat for the very last time today

And she walked away..

Malcolm’s got his image, his rock and his glock

and if he lives to be 20 he will have beat the clock

he’s got his ride and his pride and girls by his side

He makes stands with his gun in his hand

He saw his best friend lying on a stainless steel tray

and he walked away..

and the destination’s clear

anywhere but here

(chorus)

Doesn’t  matter that you’re lying in the gutter

Doesn’t matter that your brain’s all cluttered

Doesn’t matter that you’re covered in scars

You’re never in the gutter with your eyes on the stars

So walk away from the boyfriend bruises

and the shame of the game that your brain knows you’re losing

and that job that you do it just robs you of who you can be when you’re free from this mentality

So you’re home by the phone getting stoned all alone with your chat room friends, your Korn and Ramones

but the phone don’t ring and Joey just sings ‘Sedated’ – you got to learn to hate it!

(repeat chorus)

Since memory and CPU are very nearly free, why don’t programs compiled in debug mode keep a copy of the entire stack & state so that it’s possible to step *backwards* from a breakpoint as well as forwards? It seems like this would be extremely useful especially in failed assertions..

So, I’m tempted to revisit my brute-force primefinder, now that I’ve discovered that I can buy time on a supercomputer* for next to nothing. I looked into Amazon’s EC2 cloud a couple of years ago for a project I was doing for a client, found it wasn’t a good fit, and then never really thought about it any more. However, recently I started a project for another client that *is* a good fit, and as a result I’ve been putting EC2 through it’s paces – and I can see that doing things like brute-force testing a large problem space for potential solutions to the p/q problem is something EC2 would be *very* good at. (Any problem that can be broken into small chunks and would therefore run well on a cluster). And, CPU on EC2 is relatively cheap. Storage and bandwidth cost money, but we don’t really need either of those.

I know – just what I needed, another pet project. 😉 [actually, revisiting an old one]

* = well, very large cluster anyway

So, here’s a list of movies that I *wish* were encoded on high res formats. Incidentally, this may also be a pretty good list of my favorite

1) Pump Up The Volume

2) Hackers

3) Who Framed Roger Rabbit

4) the Animatrix

5) Pink Floyd: Delicate sound of thunder

6) U2: Rattle & Hum

7) The mind’s eye series. (I know, this would be a major undertaking since they were originally rendered for NTSC and would have to be rerendered)

8) Groove

So, as most of you have noticed, money is broken. Various people have different theories on how it’s broken, why it’s broken, or what we should do to fix it, but only a few billionares actually think what we’ve got works well.

From time to time, I post posts about particularly broken things (like margin accounts). Today, I’m going to point out a set of ratios – the money : human time available, money : physical resources available, money : information available, and money : energy available ratios.

The one I’m going to focus on first is the money : information available ratio, because it is the one that is the most demonstratably broken. When people create new intellectial property, they are presumably creating value for humanity. When a artist records a new album or a programmer writes a new application, they get paid for it. What’s interesting about this is that it seems like a lot of our prized monetary systems – like inflation – are based on the idea that there should really be a fixed amount of money in the world, and it should be tied to physical resources. i.e. your $1 buys you 0.0001 ounces of gold. The problem with this is that when people create things that are all, or even mostly, ideas, it *breaks*. They’ve just created a new resource. It’s like they synthesized that 0.0001 ounce of gold out of nothing! In order for it to work out okay, you really need to inject more money into the system, *without* inflation, to line up with the more stuff (information, movies, albums, whatever) that now exists.

Next, the money : energy available ratio. This one goes several ways. We’re spending money to buy stored energy (i.e. gasoline, NG, etc) and to buy energy converted from the sun, wind, falling water, etc. But whenever someone insists on generating energy via some direct-from-the-sun conversion method, they again mess with the whole system.  Again, it’s like they’re synthesizing more gold. We’re supposed to have a certain amount of energy for sale, all stored as oil here and there, and there they go demonstrating the ability to produce unlimited amounts of energy with just a little bit of technology.

Next, the money : human time available ratio. This is where things get *really* broken. The assumption in america seems to be that every one who wants to be able to buy things and eat and live indoors and the like should either A: work, B: have rich parents, or C: be disabled. In general, it seems like people think there’s something immoral about not wanting to work. This would make sense if we didn’t have a *shortage* of real jobs. But the reality is, a lot of our jobs are makework – shuffling papers around, system overhead caused by the monetary system itself – or work that a really simple robot could do, and probably will do soon. Part of what we need is to embrace that in a world with 6 billion people, *not everyone needs to work*. Many hands make light work, say the Chinese, and by all indications they’re right. Especially when those many hands are connected to many minds that can program computers to do the work for them. 😉 However, the current system makes it very difficult for those who don’t work to continue, for example, living indoors. This is, in fact, dumb.

Next, the money : physical resources available. You can make a good case that right now, there is a finite amount of stuff – raw resources, metals, oil for plastics, whatever – in the world. Also a finite amount of land. However, space exploration and nanotechnology could both change that, if we wanted them to. If we put the kind of energy into discovering new ways of generating wealth that we put into blowing each other up over the existing wealth, we could all be wealthy beyond our wildest dreams. What we’ve got now is a system for resource allocation that has the government paying farmers to not grow food while people dig through trash cans in order to feed themselves. It’s broken, and it really needs stripped out and replaced.

This didn’t actually take me that long to figure out, but I can easily see how it could take someone a while, so I thought I’d include a code snippet for the benefit of our Googling friends:

URL url = new URL(“http://whatever”);
URLConnection urc = url.openConnection();

urc.setRequestProperty(“header”,”header-value”);
urc.connect();

InputStream in = urc.getInputStream();

Here’s another Sheer Jam track – Kayti was feeling sad and asked me to play her some love music, and so I did – I recorded it in case she wanted to have it to listen to later, and she’s graciously allowed me to share it with my 2.5 fans out there. 😉

http://www.sheer.us/stuff/kayti/KaytiLoveSongs.mp3.

[Actually, by my download numbers, I apparently have more than 2.5 fans. Some of my tracks get hundreds of downloads a month – but they’re mostly in China. I don’t really understand this]

This is also one of the few tracks I have up recorded with Ivory, which I’m very fond of. I’m looking forward to sometime soon (maybe as soon as the 30th.. *bounce*) having enough spare change to buy a friend’s x86 mac, and finally having enough CPU to run Ivory for 64/128 note polyphony. For my friends who are musicians, if you haven’t played with Ivory, it is the holy grail of software pianos. It is kind of big, though.. it wants 2G of RAM minimum, and it comes on 9 DVDs.