So, I pretty much got a minimal amount of sleep last nightmorning, and not a whole much more the day before that. So, I’m running pretty close to empty, but at least I don’t have anything big and wildly unfinished due tomorrow. Dumping core right now probably isn’t the best idea, but like drunk people, I’ll think it’s a good idea at the time and just go with it.

Man, I still can’t believe that we got finalist in the MCM; it’s strange, because you hope that you do well, but you have to grid yourself for an almost inevitable disappointment. The more hope, the bigger the disappointment, so you try to make sure you don’t hope for anything. Well, this time around my hopes got vindicated; we’ll see how all these open applications hold up. Also, maybe I’ll outline the models we used in the MCM. Hmm.

On a completely different subject, I’ve been solicited by two different honor societies in the last week: one a general honor society, and a physics society. Now, while I’m of the opinion that recent xkcd comics have been falling in quality, I do invoke a particular comic http://xkcd.com/703/ that I happen to agree with, which I might embellish with a more explicit statement: honor societies are useless. Many of them are based on grades, and fail to actually say anything about their members that aren’t apparent from the other activities they engage in. The membership fees are not a problem: societies obviously have overhead costs, which the fees need to cover. Rather, their mere existence is annoying. Note that I haven’t actually been an active member of any honor society (if I have, then I’ve forgotten about it), so I may be very wrong in my rant.

With that out of the way, I’m gonna muse a bit on some thoughts I had on someone else’s thoughts.

It’s interesting how people tend to assume that the future will be similar to the present; it’s not hard to see why. America hasn’t undergone a societal restructuring since, oh, maybe the 1970’s? I would say that we’re due for some upheaval or at the very least some major evolution in our physical spaces, but I’ve developed a bit of an aversion to the phrase, and it’s true that we have no idea when social changes will happen at any time. Cars have been the main mode of transportation for a few decades, and it seems that consumerism has been the dominant viewpoint for about as long. With this in mind, it isn’t too surprising that people tend to assume that the near future will be similar to how the world is right now. Well, I’ll have to look into changing that.

Well, well, well: guess who’s MCM team got a finalist designation! Meaning that we were in the top 1% of the MCM teams; unfortunately, I think that the lack of graphics in my section might have contributed to our failure to attain outstanding (right, so I’ll stop with the self-blame and try to maintain a better self-view). But at any rate, I’m pretty stoked about the whole high-percentage thing, and we’re gonna have a quick little celebration. Additionally, I spent a fair amount of time in the machine shop, possibly the first time I’ve put in time on a Monday, and I don’t see anything that’s stopping me from doing so the rest of the days of the week. Life is pretty good.

Well, except for homework, an exam, and a big paper. Those are a bit less happy; also, the fact that I’ve made about zero headway into the BAP problem, anim3, and the app app are somewhat depressing. Also, I only have 2 REU’s left to hear back from: cross the fingers and sacrifice the pigs! It’s gonna be a couple nail-biting days/weeks.

tldr: I’m annoyed by how a particular Amway marketing scheme works.

I don’t like it. It’s been a semester (and a year) since it’s happened, and I still don’t like it. It’s not a raise-a-ruckus dislike, nor a taser-toting-demonstration dislike, but just a post-on-a-blog level of dislike, especially since no one else is talking about it.

Okay, so what am I talking about? On my particular campus, I’m been solicited twice to join the Worldwide Dreambuilders (mostly because I have feet in the music and math communities), an organization dedicated to helping young people like myself build a business and make some money. Specifically, using the power of the internet, people can create internet storefronts and empower themselves to break free of the stone-and-mortar stores that we’ve been dependent on for so long, cultivating young businessmen and women in the process.

So that’s the executive summary. The operation must be legit, since it’s apparently worldwide, and someone somewhere would have caught on eventually if it wasn’t. However, it looks a whole lot like a modified pyramid scheme: once you buy into the business, you get newly minted business licences and a web site (among other things: I’m not familiar with the process). Now, you want to generate money, so you tell all your friends about it (I like to call this ‘forced word of mouth’), and point them towards your storefront. Also, you obviously start to rely on your storefront for goods rather than any where else, since you get wholesale prices (I’m not sure how these compare to retail). But, if you tell your friends about it, then they might just set up their own storefronts and stop buying from your store. You need to keep the secret of your success to yourself, right? Wrong; you get a kickback for each referral you pull in, so you’re still winning from advertising yourself fully.

So how’s that like a pyramid scheme? You buy into the process, and have an incentive to keep it going; one easy, quick way to get a fix is to get someone else into the process, too. The fact that they incentivise drawing other people in is the key point. A secondary point is that the process utilizes your personal connections and acquaintances to try and make a profit: if you remember that BK marketing ploy, which exchanged burgers for dropping friends on Facebook, it’s similar (in a way. It has a tendency to twist your world view so you view people as potential profit streams, although I guess it isn’t any different for any other business, other than the fact that no one outside of your circle of friends would care about your business).

So I don’t like how they operate, especially with their pitches. You can tell that pitch is packaged: when someone tells me they want to pitch a business proposal to me, I want them to get to the point. If my understanding of the industry is hamstrung to the point that I can’t figure out what your business does in a 30 second pitch, then I shouldn’t be even considered as a business partner (and if you can’t do a 30 second pitch, especially with preparation, then you probably shouldn’t be in business).

For such a grass-roots marketing campaign (which is the essence of the process), it’s surprising to find out that Amway is behind it. The whole deal with selling shell businesses must be working for them, though, since they wouldn’t continually run a profit drain.

Also, they seem to be targeting impressionable college students. A talking point I remember is that since we’re young and understand the internet, we’d be the best at running these sorts of businesses (tangent: I brought my work on EZLO to one meeting, since I thought that he wanted to see some actual web-programming work that I had done, since he was pretty vague about what the business would actually do). It’s not because we’re young and understand the internet, but because the old formula (choose your target demographic (preferably gullible), and tailor your message to it) still works on the internet. We need money, and they promise some if you put in some work. However, there’s no value added by the shell business, so the only value comes from the personal connections made by the business owner.

What’s also creepy about this is that there’s next to no information on the web on these guys anywhere, except for the disgruntled former member that shows up everywhere. No one is willing to tell us what goes on in these seminars or business meetings that these guys attend, which raises red flags for me; does one need to pay to enter these seminars? If so, then the matter is much more serious: heck, if you have to pay for anything to essentially work for Amway, then it is still a much more serious matter than I’ve made it out to be above.

It’s been a while since these things have happened (at least a semester ago), but I’m going to post this anyways with hopes that someone does their homework before joining up, and perhaps gets to the bottom of this, or gets a ‘real job’ or runs a real business that adds value to society.

So, I’ve been doing some thinking (surprise!); while we as a society worry about an apocalypse that forces us back to the dark ages, there is precious little done about it. It’s mostly just something to entertain ourselves with (I’m guessing that it’s also easier to write for, because if 99% of the population is gone, then you don’t have to write or ignore a whole bunch of people, or set the story somewhere like backroad Canada), which isn’t surprising, but it got me thinking about how quickly humans can rebuild a society after a worldwide event. For instance, the fall of Rome ushered in a very long dark age, with much of the knowledge either being forgotten or revered to the point of hindering further progress (okay, I just realized that I’m thinking along the lines of Asimov’s Foundation. I just realized it, after carrying this idea around for a week. Man, my mind is just falling apart). If anyone prepared for the fall of Rome (which wasn’t that great anyways), then they didn’t do so very well.

So, how would we do better at transmitting information across a dark age?

1. Teach the scientific method, with a healthy dose of skepticism and some anti-authoritarianism (perhaps bordering on libertarianism): we don’t need a repeat of the monastic system serving as the only place where knowledge was kept, and kept stale at that. Also, despotism seems to come naturally to societies: libertarianism, not so much.
2. I don’t know if this is true, but I would think that the knowledge of the Romans/Greeks was preserved by so few people because it was not very useful: the Aristotelean division of elements explained things, but it didn’t allow anyone to build better fires or harder metals. Hence, all the knowledge passed on should be directly useful, or explaining how those things that are useful work.
3. Teach a natural progression of scientific/mathematical topics, starting with things like kinematics and basic chemical theory, and explaining how to make/recreate the apparatuses that are used while progressing along different topics (recovering topics in greater detail is an excellent idea), possibly ending with the creation of semiconductor technology.
4. We should probably include grand ideas like plate tectonics, evolution, and some cosmology, even in passing. Remember: it took us how long to figure these things out?
5. Definitely include instructions on how to make a printing press.
6. Use English, simple as possible. Latin, despite being a language for elites, survived for a very long time as the way to pass around information. We’ve finally broken that paradigm as most of scientific papers being written in English, but most people can’t read the sort of English used in your average science paper. If we don’t ‘dumb it down’ for this process, then it will not be useful.
7. Gloss over the details: the readers will probably be recreating the steps as they go, so that they don’t need every detail spelled out for them (especially since we should be covering basic math and stuff at least once). Also, keeping things concise will allow us to keep the volume slimmer, and easier to transport.
8. Tie it all up into a book (physical, easy to transport and read with no technology). This is a weak point: if we don’t have many copies floating around the world, then the book won’t survive a particularly bad apocalypse. Also, it might decay before humans are ready to take advantage of the things in it again, say, a few generations. So it’ll have to come in a very resilient format, but it’ll also have to be dirt cheap; additionally, the information in it needs to be useful to people now, probably as a broad overview of everything scientific. Cheap and resilient don’t usually match together, so that’s one hurdle that would have to be overcome.

And then there are some things that I feel shouldn’t go into such a tome:

1. Leave out biology specific to our physiologies: after an apocalypse, we have no idea what state the survivors will be in, or how they’ve changed, or how the surrounding environment has changed.
2. Leave out philosophy: it isn’t useful, and thinkers will be able to piece together most of the theories we’ve come up with so far once they have a functioning society.
3. Keep political/economic discussions to a minimum: introduce democracy, but we’re not going to make this a treatise on capitalism vs. communism. Maybe give a page to it.
4. No/minimal history: even if you need to know history to avoid repeating it, we really have no idea what sort of rules will be operating after an apocalypse.

Is this inane? Of course. Would it be an excellent hedge if an apocalypse did happen? Of course. Do I plan on actually writing/editing a post-apocalyptic textbook and/or crowd sourcing it with a wiki? Um, I’ll get back to you on that.

If this does go anywhere, I’m dubbing it the “post-apoc txt”.

One of my projects in progress depends on the generation of different colored objects (Trust me, once I actually get a release pushed out, it will make sense (actually, I also need to push out a new iteration of my LaTeX editor. Note that I’m putting the name up for reconsideration)). First, I’ll define HSV space for y’all: assuming that you are familiar with RGB space… or, RGB space is the definition of colors by red, green, and blue components (hence the acronym RGB). Usually, computers will use 8 bits to define each channel, for a total of 24 bits to define a pixel. But I digress. HSV uses hue, saturation, and value for it’s definition, hue being the color (say, orange versus blue), saturation the presence of that color (ex. 0 saturation is white, total saturation a bloody red), and value the brightness (ex. 0 value is black, high value something not-black). In this particular case, I’m using HSV since I can set the saturation low, value high, and change the hue for a rainbow of easy-on-the-eye colors. However, it is problematic if one can’t distinguish between two objects that are supposed to be different.

One strategy that comes to mind is using some sort of binary division (for illustrative purposes, I’ll take hue 360 = hue 0): Take the first value to be 0, then 180, then 270, then 90, etc. However, it isn’t dead easy to code, and another programming scheme that could work is merely adding a constant to each iteration and modulating it by 360 (ex. 0+105->105+105->210+105->(315+105)%360->60 (where % is the modulus, otherwise known as the remainder)), which is dead easy to code. However, adding a constant could result in trouble: if you choose 90, you’ll start getting duplicate colors after 4 steps. 91 isn’t much better, because while the colors are not exactly the same, they are pretty close, perhaps nigh indistinguishable. How do you choose the constant that will put off disaster for the longest time?

Guess and check is a time-honored method, and it yields okay reults: I made up a constant and used to to almost no ill-effect. However, one could do better. Checking each constant by hand is tedious, but only by hand: if you brew up a script, then its turns out to be a bit simpler.

For a naive script, we do iterations until we get a duplicate of a previous iteration: the number of iterations before termination is a measure of quality, where higher numbers are better. Note, as a curiosity, that if the bound were some prime number, rather than 360, then many constants will turn out to be the maximum number of iterations with this method. However, we still need to take into account how close the subsequent hues are (for instance, 1,2,…365 works, but it really doesn’t).

To work around this, I used a sort of logistic function to decrease the amount of influence later numbers have, since the application doesn’t expect someone to be using 50+ objects at once. To do this, I weighted the hue-distance between the nearest colors (for each color added: I didn’t go back and recalculate all the distances for each iterations, although that *might* give us a different answer) by the reverse logistic function translated so that the first 20 colors had a pretty big say relative to everything else. Ah, well, here, have some code.

[python]
#colorlen.py
import math

n = 360

def modlen(a,b,limit):
nominal = abs(b-a)
h = (limit-b)+a
L = (limit-a)+b
return min([nominal,h,L])

def fitness(i,prev):
return sum([1.0/(1.0*modlen(x,i,n)**1.0) for x in prev])

def total_fitness(m):
i=m
f=0.0
steps=0
prev = [0]
while not(i in prev) and steps<50:
f += fitness(i,prev)*1.0/(1+math.exp(0.01*(steps-10)))
prev.append(i)
i = (i+m)%n
steps +=1
return f-steps

def main():
lst = [total_fitness(m+1) for m in range(n-2)]
best = lst.index(min(lst))
return best+1

print main()
[/python]

While writing this up, I’ve realized that I could do some more work on this and have some pretty graphics to show to everyone. Hmm, I’ll have to fit this in somewhere…

Oh, and hope this was helpful to someone. Dunno, go and write code fruitfully?

So, I utterly fail at keeping my blog up to date over the time period when I had a decent amount of time. My break mostly consisted of either hacking on the bottleneck assignment problem solver (I’ve transitioned to a C++ based one from Python), trying to get my newly minted academic application system framework to a version 0.1, sleeping, and slacking off. The time off was nice, but I need more of it without the drop in productivity that comes with going home.

In other news, I’ll be trying to clear out my old draft posts, update my zenphoto to include various reprap photos (soldered up 12 opto endstops yesterday: just need to pump out some 46 aluminum parts in a month), and finish this E/M take home test. I’ll be around.

Have a story. Haven’t forgotten about that (yet). I’ll update with more information on everything later.

The story’s about a woman talking to her imaginary friend. Had an interesting time noticing that I’m developing an idiosyncratic style.

—————————

Status: “let it go…”

Me: “Like this.”

She dropped the stone into the pond, watching the ripples lazily sprawl over the water. She turned to her with an inquisitive look.

“You try, now?”

She was wearing a coat and a beanie of sorts, appearing inquisitively bespecled while sitting back from the water.

“It’s okay.” She pushed her glasses up her nose. “Why are we here, again?”

Tentatively, she tossed a stone farther out, tracing a gentle arc through the air before again plummeting into the frigid expanse.

“Just because; it’s nice to get out once in a while, right?”

“Well, you usually only talk to me when you’re bored or stuck. Well, now at least. Which is it this time?” She leaned forward, resting her chin on a fist.

“I’m throwing stones into a pond: what do you think?”

“I think you’re still bitter about it.”

She scooped up a stone and tried to skip it. 3 skips. I never was really good at this, she reflected.

“Can’t we talk about something else? We used to talk about everything when we were younger.”

“Well, that was then.”

4 skips. Pond such as this had too much grass, and not enough stones laundered by the surf to skipping perfection.

“I mean, you haven’t talked to anyone about it since it happened a month ago. You really need to-” she hefted a rock, and threw it overhand “-get it out.” The rock buried itself in the park turf on the other side of the pond.

“Well, then let’s talk about it.”

“I would rather you talk to someone else about it. It’s not good to keep these sorts of things internalized.”

She almost pegged a dog playing frisbee. Obviously, the shoddily clothed youth playing with it would be willing to wade into the pond to retrieve the disc. Probably should hit him in the head and put him out of the misery he would certainly

“Hey!”

She had gotten off the bench and was waving her hand it front of her face with a slight look of concern. She grabbed her wrist, and gave a tug.

“Let’s go before you hurt someone.”

The park wasn’t crowded yet: it wouldn’t be until after 3. They walked for a while along the path, heading towards the nearest buildings rising over the trees. Back to the jungle of concrete and steel. Back to an empty apartment. Home.

“Okay, so tell me what’s on your mind. You’ll have to talk to someone else, obviously: I haven’t been someone to talk to for 10 years now.”

She squeezed shut her eyes, thinking: “It’s him I’m thinking about. I’m… just, so angry. Still. I… just…” A single tear.

“Don’t worry, hun. I know all the details.”

Small smile. “Yeah, I keep forgetting about that.”

“I think,” she pondered for a bit, “you just need to learn to

So I’ve decided to use Zenphoto as my image manager of choice, since it drops in nicely and it’s not impossible to use. I’d rather roll my own, but I’ve been planning on using my spring break for other things. However, the number of bugs and the un-zen like nature of zenphoto doesn’t settle well with me, so chances are better than zero that I’ll be whipping up a custom image manager sometime. Anyways, it’s time for me to go make a starfield and whip up a new style for my spankin’ new zenphoto install.

So I didn’t get around to updating last night before going to bed at 3:30, but I’m getting around to it now. You should notice the site overhaul: I still have a garish gimp flame-plugin thing, but I needed some green, and making something by hand just wasn’t working out. The color scheme is based on brown, just because it is? I tried it out, and it worked, so I ran with it. Also, I brought back the side bar.

More important news: it is spring break for me! It’s partly why I spent an afternoon screwing around with my blog style, and I hope that I’ll get a load of things done this week ’round. As I said before, I’ll hope to grab pretty much everything else that I’ll need to finish the reprap before the heat death of the universe, and if certain professors are around, I’ll stick around and cut some more parts. That in itself would be a pretty good use of my break, but I’ll also be looking at describing and improving my algorithm for the BAP problem I’ve been talking about: keeping people in the dark about what I’m talking about is no fun. I’ll also clear out my old list of draft posts, make up/set up an image manager that isn’t crappy, and work on EZLO. On top of this, I do need to finish the homework profs have assigned over the break, finish applying to REUs, and save the world. Oh, and anim3 needs some serious work.

Well, I think it’s about time to get started on these things. Stay tuned.

So, I figured that I would just update everyone on exactly how I’m throwing my life away. First and foremost, I finished another set of reprap parts, this time the z-axis support brackets. If I can move it along, and my partner in crime joins in, then we’ll have these parts made in no time. Now, I won’t have access to the machine shop for the next week, so implementation will halt for a while. That’s not such a bad thing, since I need to get everything else caught up with the machining. I have plastic, and a bunch of bare pcbs, but no bearings or even a guarantee that we have the rods we need, nor any of the SMD parts we need to solder to the pcbs; heck, I’m not even sure how we’re going to do the extruder, especially since swighton (originator of the extruder design) doesn’t have a good extruder either. If we’re going to finish this by the end of March (highly optimistic, and probably not possible if I want to keep all of my limbs) then I’ll need to really step up the rest of the parts of the projects, which dovetails with the presence of a spring break! Now, it’s almost time to go out with friends and hit the town, so I’ll leave more thoughts for later.