BYBS/W: Solar Power

Solar energy power generation systems. Image courtesy of Sandia National Laboratories.

One of the things that I really enjoy in life is when people come together to solve a problem. It demonstrates humanity's ability to cooperate, and when directed towards what I consider to be an intelligent and noble goal, it makes me feel good to be alive.

One problem that we face is the need for clean, cheap, renewable energy. Pictured here is a system that focuses sunlight to run a highly efficient electrical power generator.

Most of the technologies involved with a system like this are not new. The Stirling engine, for example, was invented in 1816. The notion of using mirrors to focus the energy of the sun has probably been around since there were mirrors. Using a computer to keep the dish pointed at the sun is probably the most recent creation.

This particular system may not be "the answer" or even a significant part of it. Some other approach could do the job better or cheaper or cleaner.

The thing that makes this remarkable to me is that it took a lot of thoughtful work to put all these elements together towards a common, relatively noble goal.

This link will take you to the full story on the system. It was created by the folks at Sandia Ntional Laboratories, Stirling Energy Systems and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

BYBS: Shared Emotion

There is an interesting that I perceive in all human beings to, in some situations, to experience or feel the same way.

People like to go to movies and laugh at the same joke or feel scared at the same scene or sad at the same point. Regardless of what you think of laugh tracks or music that underscores the emotional significance of a particular situation, such things are prevalent on TV shows.

In my particular case the previous week (hey, better late then never), I was reading a poem that talked about a particular feeling of dread when faced with a certain realization. For some reason, feeling that the author understood my reaction was profoundly comforting: the knowledge that I was not alone in experiencing this made me feel reassured.

It is an odd thing that I should take comfort in the company of others this way. The author was no there, I could not interact with them to be reassured, but this feeling of shared experience was there none the less.

BYBS: Stuck in a Rut

27-74Sertrack by Kibuyu

There are some people who might think that being stuck in a rut is a bad thing. Then again, there are some people who would start measuring the thing to see if their furniture would fit. I, on the other hand, would have already moved in.

Some days I have a hard time coming up with something to write for BYBS. I am pretty sure that taking a moment in my week and writing about something positive is a good idea, but my muse, a tired, cranky soul who would really prefer helping the likes of H.P. Lovecraft or Stephen King, does not always cooperate.

For times like this, I find that the force of habit, inertia, the will of the ball, call it what you will, can step in. Unlike a muse, which needs time, attention and cultivation, the blundering force of habit is not about to put up with the aloof antics that sometimes block me.

"But the posting won't be any good." I will protest.

"That's never stopped you before!"

Can't argue with that.

So what the hey --- here is to that which has helped me keep doing what I need to be doing.

BYBS: Chicken Breasts

Checken Breast by Mrydd

In keeping with the rather simplistic nature of my BYBS postings I thought I'd talk about chicken breasts.

As I've mentioned in the past, I'm on a diet; and this means I'm miserable. Scratch that. What I was trying to say is that, in addition to being miserable, I try to get the maximum nutrients with the minimum number of calories. This being the case, I have a running interest in high protein foods.

According to one source I've read, egg whites are one of the most readily absorbed sources of protein. The problem I have with them is that, in order to get a measly 40g of protein a day, I would have to eat around a dozen egg whites.

From time to time people have accused me of being lazy. I think they say this because it's true. In particular, the idea of boiling 84 eggs every week and then separating the whites from the yolks does not appeal to me.

Chicken, on the other hand, has about 3 times as much protein per gram as do egg whites. A modest 135g of roasted chicken breast (without the skin) contains that 40g of protein. It also comes in the convenient chicken-sized package instead of the somewhat smaller portions that eggs use. I therefore found myself in the supermarket eyeing chicken breasts.

At this point I ran into problem #2: I'm cheap. A glance at a whole chicken showed that pre-packaged breasts are over twice as expensive as buying chicken whole. For quite some time(tm) I've been buying whole chicken.

Given the stuff that I've blown money on in the past, I'm surprised that I lasted as long as I did. When I finally resorted to buying chicken breasts, I was, to put it mildly, pleasantly surprised.

I will usually roast a whole chicken for 3 hours, quite a bit longer than the minimum time of around 2. I'm that scared of food poisoning. By comparison, being completely paranoid and cooking the precut stuff for twice as long as required takes an hour.

Whereas it usually takes me a while to cut all the meat off a chicken, a chicken breast just needs to be cut up into cubes. I'm thinking of cutting them up ahead of time, they're easier to work with before roasting.

Being the sort of person who replied to the joke: "Does anal-retentive have a hyphen in it?" with "Which edition of the dictionary are we talking about?" using chicken breasts also means that I don't have to worry as much about how much fat I'm getting along with the chicken. I'm the guy who blogged about the USDA food database, remember?

So the moral of the story is: chicken breasts, good; JJ Abrams, meh (just curious to see if anyone read this).

BYBS: An Uplifting Moment

Turimetta Sunrise by Christopher Chan

I had an uplifting moment last week. As I was walking through a parking lot to get to my car, the sun was shining brightly and it just felt good to be alive. Nearby plants were vibrant with life, the breeze was cool, the sun comforting and it just seemed like everything was right.

Even the blazing heat of my car (you know, when the sun is beating down on your dashboard and the inside feels like an oven) felt nice.

For me, these moments are rather few and far between. I don't really know why I felt that way just then, only that it was wonderful while it lasted.

BYBS: Cookouts

Counselor Cookout and Putt-Putt Party by ASCAA

For someone that doesn't get out enough(tm), it's been good to go to a few BBQ/cookout/what have you style events. I get to see a bunch of people in a reasonably positive setting and eat some stuff that tastes good (even if it's not that good for me).

I'm not the most social person in the world. I don't even live next to the most social person in the world. I doubt I even live on the same block. I therefore have to keep trying when it comes to this sort of thing so for me, stuff like this is another opportunity to keep at it.

And sometimes I even have fun.

BYBS: A Good Read

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow is an interesting read for those of us who want something relatively light about internet style futurist societies.

The actual plot revolves around (I'm not making this up) a struggle over who gets to control Disney Land. That Doctorow can get me to keep reading a book with that premise is a pretty impressive feat all by itself.

The book is also full of cool ideas. One of the things that I found the most interesting is the notion of "woofie." Woofie is a kind of measure of what other people think of you, though the particulars are never really explained fully. There is "right handed woofie" which measures what others who you agree with think of you, and "left handed woofie" which measures what people who disagree with you think.

It also has economic repercussions - if you have lots of woofie it is implied that you can get more resources out of society - but once again, this is never explained.

As someone who does not enjoy exercise for it's own sake, I spend a lot of time reading while I'm pounding out my 60 min. Having something to take my mind off the fact that I am exercising can make the difference between getting in 60min and getting in 10min.

BYBS: Spiritual Exercises

Two girls exercising by mikebaird

There are lots of things that I do that do not have an immediate reward. Some of them are recognizable like dieting and exercise. I change my diet, but my waistline does not immediately shrink. If I eat a pint of ice cream, I don't expect to see my weight increase by 5 pounds over night. But over time these things have a very definite effect: though my day to day weight may vary like a drunken sailor navigating an alley, the trend does go up or down.

This posting is about the same principal applied to a different area: the mental or spiritual. There are exercises that I do that have a long-term benefit, but I often times find them even harder to do than the physical ones. After all, you can't measure mood by standing on a scale and then use that info to graph your progress.

One of these exercises are my BYBS postings. Over time I have found that I lead a happier life when I regularly stop and think about the things I am grateful for. As a person who is at times overly focused on stuff that I don't like it is important for me to remember the things that I do like.

If you would care to share, comment on similar examples of mental or spiritual exercises that help you.

BYBS: Open Source Software

Open source software has done a great deal to make the modern internet that I know and love possible. Over the years, I've used quite a few of these packages to do my day to day work. Here's a very quick glimpse of a tiny fraction of the packages out there that have helped me:

GNU is one if not the pioneer in the open source arena. They were at it a long, long time before it was fashionable or even thought to be possible. Though not know by lots of non-technical people virtually nothing on the internet would be working today without these folks.

GNU is responsible for thousands if not more programs. One of the most fameous is a compiler suite known as "gcc"

The letters "GNU" are emblematically geeky of the organization and stand for "GNU's Not Unix." Yes, the "GNU" in the "GNU" are the same.

ASF is the Apache Software Foundation. The name "Apache" originally came from the observation that the major software package from them, a web server, was prone to problems and needed lots of adjustments, called "patches" by software people. Thus people observed that it was "a patchy web server." The name stuck and the server was called "Apache."

In addition to Wikipedia and other popular projects, the Wikimedia foundation also makes the software that is used to host their projects, MediaWiki, available for free. The package is used by a variety of people to host information sites.

The Eclipse Foundation is responsible for the excellent software development package, Eclipse. They hold a place that is near and dear to my heart since I have used that package to develop software for years and year. To my mind, it is one of the best environments available for such a purpose.

There are many, many other open software systems available that find use in a variety of situations. Click on the logos to find out more about them. I think that this sort of effort, with their emphasis on helping others rather than making a quick buck, are truely a blessing.

BYBS: A Walk in the Mountains

Rooiberg Mountain Pass by Martin_Heigan

Went for a walk in the beautiful mountains today and chose this for my BYBS entry. Didn't have a camera, so this isn't what it really looked like, but you get the idea.

BYBS: Wikipedia

I don't know how many times I've turned to Wikipedia for information, but it's a lot. The site consistently has very high quality articles on an unbelievable range of topics. What's more, the whole thing is put together by the very people who browse the web.

In short, the site is a showcase for what I wish more of the web was like: people working together to help each other in an "ain't it cool?" sort of way.

BYBS: Bananas

In addition to being tastee, bananas are also good sources of potassium. Like most fruits and vegetables, they have far fewer calories than processed foods of equivalent weight.

Modern bananas became popular because the previous popular type of banana, the "Gros Michel," has been largely wiped out due to a fungus.

BYBS: The Best of Times, The Worst of Times

It was hard to find anything good to say today. This quote, however, made me chuckle:

It was the best of times,
it was the worst of times,
it was the age of wisdom,
it was the age of foolishness,
it was the epoch of belief,
it was the epoch of incredulity,
it was the season of Light,
it was the season of Darkness,
it was the spring of hope,
it was the winter of despair,
we had everything before us,
we had nothing before us,
we were all going direct to heaven,
we were all going direct the other way
- in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

A Good Host

A strange host

There is one school of thought that says that we are just hosts to ideas: that the ideas are the species and that we are a way for them to perpetuate themselves. While that casts human beings as mere beasts of burden, I always liked to think that we have more to say about what's going on than that.

One way of looking at it is that we are hosts, as in "would you like to have dinner with me and the wife?" style of thing. In that sort of situation you have the choice about who is going to come to the event and who won't.

While this still does not allow for complete freedom (annoying commercial jingles that you cannot get out of your head anyone?), it does allow room for consciously trying to promote something by being the host. In particular, I like to think that we can choose to promote what we view as good, as beautiful, or right.

I admit that I don't have any original ideas, and that the best I can do is just borrow what looks good to me. This seems like a nice compromise.

BYBS: Oranges

Simple and yet delicious

I find it remarkable that something so simple compared to other things that I enjoy can be so good. On a cold and rainy day, when the sky is overcast and gloomy, its nice to be able to gaze out from my warm hole with a nice orange.

Photo by "Rock Paper Image"

BYBS: Help from the Web

Despite years of working with computers I'm still undecided as to whether they actually solve problems or create new ones. In particular, I find myself confounded over and over again by problems of the form:

Me: Move this from here to here.
Computer: <does nothing>
M: Why didn't you move the file?
C: You didn't say "simon says."
M: Alright - "Simon says."
C: What?
M: Move the file!
C: You didn't say "Simon says."
M: <gets out mallet>

I have found help countless times from those people who have posted information about how to solve problems like this; though the details might be slightly different.

As a means of "giving back" I have myself started doing this, though the information is so specialized as to be of use to only a very few people (ever want to know how to link C code dynamically with Java, but only when using MingW and Cygwin together through Eclipse? Neither do I actually). Nevertheless, posting even trival instructions has given me new appreciation for people who post help info --- it takes a lot more work than I thought!

I am going to try my hand at posting some stuff that may be more generally useful to people. We'll see how it goes. Till then have a great week.

VYSW: Rest in Peace

I'm sure that someone will miss you...

Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time, but I have created no Vent Your Spleen Wednesday (VYSW) postings in quite a while and it doesn't seem like the internet is exactly overflowing with people who want to join. Despite being #2 on Google for a search for vysw, I think it's time to like the mangey dog rest in peace.

The good thing about doing this that I can always have a "Back from the Grave!" style posting or a Halloween special :-)

BYBS: Reasoned Discussion

Copyright (c) threestooges.com

I enjoy being able to talk seriously every once in a while about stuff like the nature of consciousness, whether honesty and accuracy are the same thing, and other, ultimately pointless topics. I'm grateful that there are other people that I can talk about this stuff with and that they discuss it seriously...at least some of the time.

Part of the problem with such ruminations is that they tend to make me feel isolated. A lot of times other people are simply not interested in talking about such things at that instant, or maybe their attention is focused on other questions. The net effect on me, however, is that I feel very much alone.

When I can speak to someone about my ramblings, I do enjoy striving to communicate my point of view (i.e., that I'm right goddamn it!), but something else about discussion surprised me recently.

I was trying to explain something and got the "blank stare." In another situation I might have just written it off as the person not being interested in the topic, but, because it was such a serious topic, I realized that the problem was that my wonderful explanation wasn't.

The surprising thing was that the process of trying explain it better, and the experience of seeing the other person strive to get it made me feel less isolated, whereas I would have thought it would make me feel more isolated. Watching another strive for understanding made the whole "aha" moment for them much more satisfying than just pummeling another person's argument.

It also helped that they had brownies where we talked. Not that I ate one. Instead I had 3.

The Impossible Dream

Is striving towards an impossible but desirable and worthwhile goal a waste of time?

For time out of mind there have been people who strove towards perfect meditative state, achieve world peace, or total knowledge. From a practical standpoint, these people know that their goal cannot be attained, or perhaps attained by them, yet they strove all the same; and what's more, people continue to quest for these goals to this day.

So what do you think? It this a waste of time or is it a worthwhile activity? Should people only work on things that, while they cannot hope to achieve, they may contribute towards the achievement of (a great work)?

BYBS: Symbiosis

Symbiosis usually describes a situation where organsims of different species coexist for mutual benefit. For example, bees and flowers: the bee gets food and the flower gets pollination.

At least according to Wikipedia, this is actually a "mutualistic" relationship. At one end of the spectrum is parasitism, where one participant benefits and the other is harmed. The next step in the range is "commensilism" where one of the participants benefits and the other is not harmed, but does not benefit either. The other end of the spectrum is mutualism, where both participants benefit.

The interesting thing is that these relationships can change as time goes on. A relationship that starts out as parasitistic can evolve into one that is at least commensalistic and from there to one that benefits both partners.

There are many species of bacteria that when allowed into our digestive systems can become parasites. But other organisms that may have once been parasites have changed so that what currently lives more or less without trouble that we see today. There is even evidence that such "guests" may supply vitamin K. One possible explaination for the appendix was that it provided an area for "friendly" strains of gut flora to stay while the digestive tract is purged due to diseases such as choloera.

I find this ability to change from parasite to partner encouraging when I look at problems that we face with groups of people that are currently hostile to one another. If things in the natural world can change from fierce enemies to fast friends, then maybe there is reason to hope that various groups can eventually work out their differences.

Our wars and conflicts are nothing when compared to all out and total war that is often seen in the natural world. If they can make peace, then how hard can it be for us, whose conflicts are so much simpler.