Only 7 days
Topic: Daily Info

I would use the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s line, but I respect his work and general philosophy, and so won't profane it by using it as a humorous expression of my relief.

Instead: feels damn good to be homework free.

I also had a nice long rant abotu a lot of things, but I decided that little fire-starter should stay put at its present entry in the NTFS on this box.

Some explanation
Topic: Rambling

So close to being done, so ridiculously close. Yet at the same time, that last final on the 22nd seems light-years away.

So as I was talking with folken yesterday, I was asked, "Why are you so angry in your blog?" And I was taken aback. I had not realized how strange and bitter my ranting on here has been of late.

I think it has a lot to do with trying to stay civil and calm during the day when I have to interact with what I perceive to be a bunch of raving fools (certain folken excluded, you know who you are). Maybe they act non-foolish elsewhere, but I can only act on my observations and knowledge of human behavior (I am no psychologist, but I've studied enough of the base theory and observed enough to be considered more than a casual observer). If I didn't vent here, I'd likely beat the living crap out of people. There's just so many people doing things with no thought what-so-ever. The best example I have is this: remember the Frank Grimes character from the Simpsons(TM)? Sometimes I feel like him, only on a larger scale.

Then there are the times I get angry for other reasons. I get extremely angry when people make what I consider to be stupid ideological decisions. This is not stay I think their ideology is stupid (with a few major exceptions my regular readers already know), but their motives for the decisions. Things like "Well, ever body does $insert_position_or_act$ so I should too." NO! That's so ridiculously stupid. Your mother/father/parental-unit gave you the bridge-jumping analogy for a reason. And the bridge-jumping analogy extends further than ignoring childhood peer-pressure to an even better goal, it breaks conformity. Excessive conformity gets a species killed quite readily -- it is the over specialist species that die first under flux. I have no problem with a person having a general set of beliefs, as long as they arrived upon them out of their own reasoning. But the second that reason becomes based on peer-pressure, I call shenanigans.

Let's see, what else ... Oh yeah! The supposition of the superiority of one belief system over another. Nothing drives me more ape-shit than this. I have my own moral convictions and I came to them upon my own terms, and I think they are right. But, I stop right there. They are only really applicable to myself. If I were to force my beliefs upon others, I would consider it morally reprehensible, especially in the context of a global society and in terms of protecting the religious freedoms of others. This sense of reprehensibility comes not from my own values, but from what many consider to be a universal value. I'd prefer if public officials would keep this in mind, otherwise they are no better than those Mayflower tools that tortured men and women for religious reasons.

Remember children, the Pilgrims did not flee, they were kicked out. They were persecuting people left and right in England and Amsterdam and then made a lot of people angry. The solution: send them as geographically far away as possible at the time (Australia came later).

That's another thing as I think about it: can we get rid of this stupid familial precedence crap? You know, "My family is oh-so-special because they came at such-and-such time and on this boat." Big deal. So your ancestors came on the Mayflower. For everyone of you idiots, there are hundreds more whose ancestors were crammed thick on boats for all manners of purposes, some of them very vile and disgusting purposes (slavery). I care not who your great-grandmother's uncle was, that person is long past dead and decomposed and no longer figures into the world other than a smattering of nitrogen, carbon, oxygen and a few sundry other substances. My only concern is with who you are in the here-and-now.

That's all that really figures into one's day-to-day dealings with people, the immediate past (say 10-20 years), the present and the immediate future (say minutes to weeks). It does not matter to turn the scope wider than that for each person as an individual unit in such a large population. On an aggregate level, then the scope needs to be much much wider.

Oh, just one more thing to wrap up on tonight. Why do people idolize the wealthy and elite? It makes no sense. Frankly, the "stars" and their lives have no bearing upon my own. And when I hear of their personal lives, it makes my gorge rise. Pick any star and I can tell you why it's wrong on so many levels. Just look at what they have and then what you do not. And not just you, but a huge number of people who are not only lacking minor luxuries, but are also lacking necessities. Tell me if they are so great now. Sure, such-and-such can sing really nice, but does it matter? I'd find it more enjoyable to listen to a person singing a simple song that truly reflects on how they feel in their own simple voice, than listen to some star who can sing each note perfectly. Or so-and-so can act really well. Again, every parent acts out a more crucial play for their child, and they do it better than even the best of actors. We enable these fools and their life-styles, all the while taking a little more from ourselves. Honestly, I think I'd rather put my six bucks in a Salvation Army bucket than give it to a greedy and oligarchistic movie industry.

As I've said again and again, these petty things we squabble over are what will spell our doom. There is a reason I call them small and petty: you can read any book about astronomy to see why. I've written examples here before, so I won't do so again this time. Just remember, infinity is beyond all grasp, and that is what we all have to contend with.

I realize it may seem I contradict myself, but if you are willing to look a little further, you will see variance and purpose in my meaning. Conformity is bad because it causes stagnation. Unity on a global scale is good. But that global unity does not imply global conformity beyond agreeing to think beyond current geographical and political circumstance. Think on it a while, and you should be able to see why this is not a contradiction.

Flux or Fade
Topic: Rambling

<VERSE>

And so on we shall fight
Always asking, questing, searching, seeking truth

No half-answer acceptable
Only full truth or resignation

Liars, thieves and cheats run out on a rail
So far right they've crossed into the wrong

Conservatism is backwards against progress
Against all human nature to grow and move ever forward

We are adaptable, malleable, flexible
Our existence denies the unchanging

Change and motion, mutation and flux
Discomfort creates agitation

Agitation creates imbalance
Imbalance dis-allowed in nature

Imbalance leads to flux
Flux leads to reordering and all are better

All is changed and the previous meaning is moot
Humanity's greatest gift is to change

To change and come beyond arbitrary geological features
To go beyond this little spheroid cradle

To go beyond this star
Beyond this galaxy

Maybe beyond the universe?
Maybe to be infinite?

Infinity
Beyond all we can ever know

Infinity
Deny importance of petty and insignificant games we play

The infinite, uncaring of us
But we can stand together an cry out into the vastness

Or we can fight amongst ourselves
Leaving only arbitrary radiation in space as our mark

</VERSE>

Long days and longer nights
Topic: Rambling && Rant

Long days and nights you fought for truth
Gotta hand it to you
Uprising paid for in blood
Only to lose
We're gonna hang you up
You've got balls but.....

We got the whip
we got a better bomb
We got the whip
We got the whip
we got a better bomb
We Got The Whip, Audioslave

Sometimes I don't get it. What in the living hell is wrong with my generation? It went from being a brewing rebellion to a drooling order-taking legion. So many live in constant fear for no reason. And so many support leaders that perpetuate this fear and do nothing to resolve true underlying problems.

It seems, some days, like all I do is fight a losing battle. I try to show people the reason, the logic, the facts, and yet, I get no where. I talk with friends, and the result is like preaching to the choir, you'll know exactly the response you'll get. Don't get me wrong, it feels good to speak with those that understand your thoughts, a recharging of the batteries, but I really wish I could get just one person outside my friends to listen. Just one. But all I get when I begin to mention the facts, is a stonewall. They curl up tightly in fear as I bring the reality in.

I cannot fathom that so many people have such a small and artificially organized world. I have long since signed off on Shakopee and showing them the world. Those here have no desire to see it. But surely there must be others who could see beyond the artificial reality as spun to them by "patriotic", Hearst-esque news sources. But all I find, it seems, are either people cowering in fear or people like myself. And those that cower in fear react violently, in word and deed, to this intrusion upon their order.

It drives me up the wall that these people bastardize a word that was once so laden with determination, resolution and strength. It's now a stupid denigration that I have place between quote markers so one understands my intention. I used to describe myself with that word, but due to its bastardization, people become confused at its use and my continual stance of being critical of elected and appointed officials. They do not understand that this is required of every citizen of a democracy for it to function properly. Even if Kerry had won, I would have been critical of him as well, and held him to same standard. I pull no double standards with this, its deadly serious business.

To give complete and tacit support to an official of any kind is to surrender to the first stages of a dictatorship. Every elected official in history that was able to herd his people one way or another into supporting him completely has become a dictator: Julius Cesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, Kaiser Wilhelm, Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler.

There are several forms of government that humans should have left far behind a long time ago. The dictatorship is one, right along with the autocracy and a few others. What I think those others are you can probably infer if you've been following along well enough.

So while some members of my generation continue to throw everything that was handed to them upon a platter, I know myself and my friends will continue trying to shake the world and bring the truth. Change and adaption is crucial for the survival of humanity, not the irrational adherence to the status quo.

Foo==Bar ---> SEG-FAULT!
Topic: Rant

Okay, some one tell me: did we have a time shift while I fell asleep in my chair? Why do I ask? Because two artists that haven't been big since the late 1980's were on TV again. Yup, John Mellencamp and Duran Duran.

Yes: John Cougar Mellencamp and Duran Fucking Duran.

Sweet merciful crap man. I don't mind the Mellencamp since at least he's good at the guitar. But Duran Duran? C'mon, I though they died! Why? We left Duran Duran in the 1980's for a reason: plastic-synthetic pop sucks ass. Then again, we have all these pop fools out there now. But I thought we all agreed in 1990, Duran Duran would stay with the 1980's. It's enough to drive a human to drink.

Ayah.

Wanna do stuff and I have no time
Topic: Rambling && Daily Info

Another sleepless night. So many things I want to do, yet it feels like I have zero time to do them in.

• I want to relearn and expand my knowledge of the LaTeX that allowed me to write such nifty physics papers that were on par with the professors.
• I want to finish up my thread-safe logging package so I can finish up and start working on my encrypted network-transfer client (can we say AES/Rijndael encrypted data with secret keys sent by some asymmetric encrypter (RSA or DSA not sure yet)).
• I want to get into this refactoring project at work; even though it will be a lot of work, it'll be nice to able to start on a clean code-base and run with some of my ideas. I think I can make the new program do its work at least ten times faster, just gotta be crafty and I think with some of the ideas I've come up with for layouts, I may be able to pull it off.
• I want to graduate and see if I can get a job down at the Mayo Clinic working on their nifty new database (there's a reason IBM called the architecture Blue Gene). It looks like fun.

So much to do and so much fun to be had. I just want to get my hands into these things. Honestly, I think I grow faster with my knowledge of CSCI outside of the mainstream. I learned a lot about coding from skimming the works of The Knuth and a few others.

I also learned a lot in my first few classes. Honestly, my so-called "Software Engineering" class has taught me nothing more than how to play corporate politics; the testing and design ideas I already had down. I know software design is an art, and like writing, it is one art I am good at. Stunningly good at as a matter of fact. I'm not going to bog myself into some "design" procedure they teach to people who don't get the art. I can see beyond that and look at the small and the large in design almost at once. I can find what will be bottle-necks and what will be weak points, and then change the design to eliminate them. I won't say my software is bug-free, its "bug-lite", that is, very low on bugs since I design well. I may not be as mathematically capable as The Knuth, but I do get that fundamental idea that he wrote again and again in The Art of Computer Programming, and as such, I generally write good programs. My first stab may not be perfect, but it is always damn near its intended mark.

Take this whole distributed-databased file-system idea that I have been working on for myself based on inspirations from work, Google and Apple. It is a very complex beast: We're looking at six or seven major components each comprised of maybe 10-15 smaller components (some shared and some unique) each needing to inter-operate with some arbitrary SQL database and also inter-operate with each other (ie, the copy mechanism). I would say the complexity of this design is near the order of Projekt Physik, but not that near. And it is definitely less complex than TeX and some other software I can think of, but those have 40 plus years on my software. But I fully understand my design, and it has just the right complexity and interaction to do what I want it to do and still be robust and fast. It fills maybe 30 or so notebook pages worth of diagrams and documents. Crazy.

And I'll bid the world a good night now. I need some sleep as I have a lot to do tomorrow.

MINE!
Topic: Rant

Hate me now
Kill all within my hands
Hate me now
Crush all within my hands
Squeeze all within my hands
Choke all within my hands
Hate me now
Trap all within my hands
Hurry up and hate me now
Kill all within my hands
All Within My Hands, Metallica

<VERSE>

In fitting

In fitting with their pogrom, in fitting with their goals, in fitting with their means and deeds, in fitting with their ends.

No peace, no relaxation, no happiness, no surcease of sorrow.

Only striving, driving, pushing, hurting, hating, fighting, crushing.

No playing on the public rules, play on the private rules. To lie, cheat, steal and deceive. Play on their game and smash them down.

Go farther, push them harder, drive them deeper down, crush them under.

Sow the discord, spawn the chaos, reap the disorder.

That which is mine is mine and not theirs. That which is their shall belong to all.

Petty laws for petty thieves. Grand laws for grand thieves. All tools used to cower behind. All tools to hide inadequacy.

Remove the laws and the Free Beast shall roll over them all. Make them feel the true horror of the Free Beast without their precious legal insulation.

Pull the data, pull the bits, swiftly move around them, ever changing, beyond control. Always one step ahead and always turning. Causing vertigo, causing imbalance, pushing the teetering tower of plastic further and further until it crashes down in a rush of weakness amid a roar of satisfaction and joy and freedom.

Change beyond all control. Change faster than politik, change faster than the word of money. Always in flux, always picking our direction, our standard, our choice.

A war fought in the ether, battles waged with the heaviest artillery with the formerly politically lightest. No escape from angry men and women pushed here and there, women and men with trampled rights, men and women who gave the gift to the world in good will. Women and men who will fight strongly and bitterly to take it back from the gleaming black towers.

Fighting to shatter the bonds and shred the ties. Fighting to disentangle the gift from the business and the politic. To take back what they created of their own for all.

Pushing and striving, driving and reaching. No more to be bound by foolish and temporary rules. A freedom for all and a dark, bitter, never-ending exile for the thieves and the cheats and the liars and the deceivers. No mend shall ever be made between the two.

The freed shall be legion a thousand fold and more. The banished shall forever be scattered. The banished shall be forever upon the mercy of the elements. The freed shall have sup and refuge from the storm. The banished will have the dark of night and the cruel hard light of the day that they made. The freed will have the comforting embrace of calm and peaceful night and the welcome warming of soft and soothing sunlight.

In fitting with their pogrom, in fitting with their goals, in fitting with their means and deeds, in fitting with their ends. In fitting, we shall undo the wrongs and serve justice upon them, all by their own game and rules.

</VERSE>

Proofs and huge counters....
Topic: Rambling && Daily Info

Another long night of proofs and hand-calculations. Then again, its technically impossible to construct a true Turing machine, so I couldn't get a computer to do it.

Why? Well, a Turing machine would need an infinitely long tape, a physical impossibility. As such, everything in our computational world is not as powerful as it could be. Even the computer you use to look at this website is less powerful than a Turing machine. I've heard of modern computers being classified along a certain computational model: Deterministic Finite Automata with a shitload of states. Think for a moment about a counter that is, say, 128 bits in size. It then has 2^128 states. Even though this is a very large number and it would take a crap-load of energy to increment this counter fully through all its states, it still has a fixed, finite number of states. So it is a finite state machine. But to describe a modern computer of any reasonable complexity with a finite state machine description would be an exercise in excruciating pain. That 128-bit counter has over 3*10^38 states (more than the number of atoms in 12 grams of carbon, or 10^27 times more than the number of stars in our galaxy, it would more or less require that we harness the energy of the Sun directly to run it through all its states). Now remember that 128-bits is only 16-bytes of memory, and in most peoples computers, there is 16777216 times that much memory in RAM alone, not counting hard-disks measured in large fractions of Terabytes and the large on-processor memories ranging from 512K all the way up to 2MB.

Admittedly, many of the possible states a computer could be in are invalid and can be excluded, and generally computers are designed more abstractly than at the bit level. But still, one can speak of a CPU being in thousands of potential states based on its instruction set. In short, we use Turning machines to describe computers, and the tape has an implicit limit based on the memory available in the machine.

Confusing and simple at the same time. What a fucking huge can of worms I opened by studying Computer Science. Also, don't worry about draining the Earth and the Sun of energy, no one would bother with incrementing huge counters like that, most memory is taken up by having to encode humans things in binary (text, pictures, etc). Just remember, in the simplistic scheme, it takes 8-bits to uniquely identify a character, and more robust schemes it takes 16 bits. And integers come in sizes of 8-,16-,32-, and 64-bits, of which we often only use from a few hundred to a few billion. So while it is possibly for me to construct a 128-bit counter and drain the world of power, why would I bother? I would be long dead by the time this particular computer could get there if all it did was increment with every CPU cycle.

Okay, I'm just going to leave things like this before they get anymore bizarre and complex.

And now for something completely related.....
Topic: Rambling

Okay, something is wrong here. I feel like trash at the moment. I've gotten maybe two-three hours of sleep a night for the last two weeks. And now I have a day in which I can just sleep (although I do get to get up sometime before 5 PM so I can babysit the deep-fryer). BUT I CAN'T SLEEP! FUCK BEANS, MAN! I wanna fucking sleep.

Okay, just something I've noticed the past few nights as the infomercials come on: someone explain the difference between Wild Party Girls and Girls Gone Wild? It looks to me to be a bunch of over-intoxicated sorority twits in both video sets, and frankly, I don't wanna look at flasher vids, I can see that any given Friday or Saturday night by walking along Frat Row. Not to be crass, but if you're gonna give me porn, give me something worth looking at (basically, it has to more or less come from Hef).

Another thing, can Papa Roach just go the fuck away. I'm sorry, but if you can only make the three minute mark by repeating the same phrase incessantly over and over again for the last minute (I timed the damn thing it pissed me off so much), give up or write shorter material. Besides, its not creative in the least, and I can't find any other meaning to any of their lyrics. They have zero depth, and as such, should really be classified as, I dunno, hard-pop say. "Getting away with murder", seriously, give me fucking break. Coby Dick goes home and has sex with his former-Playmate wife, come off it.

Here are three other bands I've called in to 93X requesting that they not be played: Poison, White Snake and Motley Crue. Frankly, these douche bags were riding the poppy side of the NWOBH (look it up) and weren't even coming up with original material. They all wrote songs that were variations on the themes of: fun with drugs, fun with booze, fun with whores, fun with their temporary money. Bite me, sleaze bags, you all got what you deserved when you crashed hard and your shallow shit wore thin on everyone. And to Tommy Lee, fucking grow up, you prick. You're what, 40+ years old? Time to put the goofy shit away. Just because you are technically proficient with instruments does not mean you are creative. I've heard college bands with less skill but more emotion, and frankly, their shit rocks anything Tommy Lee, or any of those hair-metal twits accomplished.

Can no one make a good historical movie anymore? 'Troy' sucked, from what I've heard from those that have seen 'Alexander' say its weak. 'Gladiator' frigging' rocked, as well as 'Brave heart' and a few others. It's not hard, the facts are already there, along with grand legends. Maybe it's not so much the director (although a director does have a large part to do with it), but a complete lack of writing talent. I think I've read an analyzed enough literature to tell you what makes a good story and what does not.

I'm not claiming to be perfect, but seriously, I just ask for a bit of credibility an believability from my entertainment. Something with power and emotion. Crap like Papa Roach and Motley Crue points out that the music industry is seriously broken and should have been left for dead a long time ago. Just ask David Crosby, I would find you the link to an interview he gave about the whole deal, but that would require data-mining to a degree I'm not willing to perform at 3:50 in the morning.

Did you know that on my laptop, there is an operation I can perform that happens in 523.1 nanoseconds on average? It's still a ridiculously long time, as it translates to around 440 CPU cycles. Crazy, huh? I sit next to devices that are beyond the complete end to end detailed comprehension of one person. Devices that are approaching the limits of what is physically achievable.

Did you know that due to the aggressive caching policy of some operating systems, it is possible to obtain an average read rate from disk exceeding 1500 MB/s a second, a number only achievable by main memory and CPU? I do. I did the experiment. Of course, once in a while you have to grind to a halt and read from disk. Given this, and the average read-performance of the payroll processing systems at the USPO as has been described to me, someone fucked up in the design of PC I/O when they decided it didn't need to be fast (although it is stable as a rock).

I am strange. I think I am. Hello and goodbye and all the other irrational things that drip from my mind. What goes on behind my eyes would break the mind of surrealists.

This is what happens when my mind comes loose. Not completely unhinged, but just unfocused and uncontrolled.

Have I scared any of you? I apologize. In six or seven hours, I will make more sense, at least to myself. I know I make little sense to some people when I'm fully focused.

The universe and its time
Topic: Rambling

You know something, no matter how much I want something, the universe doesn't give a fuck. And I expect nothing more from the universe. The universe will keep expanding without me without bound. Thermodynamics reigns supreme, and disorganization is all I can expect. I don't want to sit here in the night, but the universe has given me nothing to change it, and I shouldn't have expected it to.

The example sits right next to me. All day long, you and I think our computers defy the disorder. And we are all wrong. Feel that heat? Yup, it took a lot of energy to organize that information. You see, the universe always wins.

All men and women lose in the face of infinity. We're all the same carbon, the same general layout, the same functioning. Any difference perceived between us all is purely arbitrary and a figment of the imagination. If we could come beyond that, maybe we could all have a little peace and happiness before entropy takes away our illusions.

One day, the Pyramids at Giza will be nothing more than sand and a small footnote in scope of geological time and and even more minuscule mention in the scope of galactic time. One day, the ruins in Greece shall cease to be, and the ruins in Rome. One day, everything we know here will no longer exist. All our history since civilization is not even an eye-blink in that scope of time. In the 5,000 or so years we've all been playing at civilization, our solar system has traversed 0.0022 percent of its galactic orbit.

We all need to come above this pettiness and realize that in the scope of such things, we are all equally small. But we are not all equally unimportant. We represent the one thing we have yet to find anywhere else: intelligence. The fact that we can recognize this is testament to the greatness of us as a total whole. But we need to realize that we are fragile and we exist in a fragile place. Earth may seem mighty to us, but even it is incredibly small and weak.

Eventually, we will all expire. The universe at some point will expand such that there is no usable energy left, and all intelligence left here will die. It will not matter how many monuments we build here on this rock, there will be no observers, and likely this planet will have been long consumed by our star. But if we come beyond this, stop the stupid shit, we may find a way to escape the death of this universe. We may find a way so that we truly do have an infinite time. Otherwise our time is fixed. And the universe will go on without and merrily bring our end through one occurrence or another.