6/1/2009
ANNOUNCING: PROJECT NATAL
We (Xbox) finally announced Project Natal to the world today, and it looks like the response has been extremely positive! Check out these articles:

Hands-On Coverage:
  - CNet News: You can believe in Microsoft's Project Natal
  - E3 2009: I've Played Natal and it Works
  - Gizmodo: Testing Project Natal: We Touched the Intangible
  - From Stick Figure To Mind-Blowing Controls
  - Engadget: Project Natal video hands-on, impressions, and further details
  - T3: Microsoft Xbox 360 Natal first play at E3
  - Telegraph.co.uk: E3 2009: Project Natal hands-on preview
  - GameSpy: E3 2009: Project Natal Hands/Feet/Groin-on Preview
  - Gizmodo: Project Natal Won E3, and Maybe the Motion Control Wars

Day 1 Coverage:
  - Time Magazine: Microsoft Whacks the Wii: A First Look
  - CNet: Microsoft's Project Natal: What does it mean for games industry?
  - PC World: E3 2009: Microsoft's No-Controller "Natal" Steals the Show

(or click here to browse thousands of Natal news articles.)

To see the original press conference, with two live demos, click here. You might want to skip ahead, as it's two hours long, and only the last 25 minutes are Natal. Skip to 87:00 for Natal; 98:00 for the first live demo (breakout); and 101:00 for the second live demo (paint).

In brief, Natal is a depth sensor for the Xbox that can track the movement of your entire body: shoulders, hips, elbows, wrists, knees, ankles, head, etc. - your entire body, with truly fantastic precision - and you don't have to wear anything. It's also got a microphone array so you can use voice commands, and a color camera to do things like object digitization and face recognition.

Pretty exciting stuff!!

To hear more about my role in the project, please see my 'about Natal' page.

5/25/2009
TEASER: keep a close eye on Microsoft's keynote at E3 early next week. I'll say a bit more after the event...!

UPDATE: watch it live, online, Monday, June 1, 10:30am Pacific / 1:30pm Eastern:
Microsoft's E3 keynote live

9/1/2008
Census data for 2007 was released today. I found this very interesting:

"The rich-man, poor-man gap also widened with the nation's top one percent now collecting 23 percent of total income, the biggest disparity since 1928, according to the Economic Policy Institute. One side statistic supplied by the IRS: there are now 47,000 Americans worth $20 million or more, an all time high."

8/10/2008
The original Geiss plug-in / screensaver now works at any screen resolution!

8/3/2008

SOLVING THE OIL CRISIS IS NOT ROCKET SCIENCE

...but because it takes a lot of time and energy to research, understand, and think it through, 99% of us have no idea what should actually be done about it, on a policy level. I'm writing this to set that straight. If you can follow me just for the duration of this article, I'll walk you through the whole thing. You should be an oil guru, with a complete understanding of how it all works, by the end; and you should understand which solutions are pretty solid, which are totally bogus, and why.

The price of something is generally determined by the available supply of it, versus the demand for it. Whether or not the supply (of oil) is still increasing, or can keep increasing, is up for debate - but we know that eventually (and probably soon), supply (production) will start to dwindle, as we run out of the stuff.

Demand, on the other hand, has increased like mad, thanks to the rich countrys' energy-hungry consumerism, and thanks to the rapid development of India, China, and others. And if you think the current demand pressure is high, just wait five years!

But, there is no conspiracy. The big oil companies are not fixing the prices; they don't need to, because people are oil-mad and NEED the stuff, and are competing for it by paying higher prices before reducing consumption. It's NOT rocket science. If you hear people talking conspiracy, they just don't understand this basic principle of economics. When there isn't enough of something to go around, and people really need it, they start bidding for it. This is simple supply and demand, a fundamental law in economics. The price goes up until, at some point, it is painful enough that some people drop out of the bidding - i.e., until people start driving less. When the price goes sufficiently high that enough people are driving "enough less", reducing the demand to meet the supply, then voila, the price stops moving. (That might be a high price, though.) The price settles at the edge of the pain - where it is just painful enough that some people change their behavior (drive less), to make up for the lack in supply.

Now, how can we fix this problem? There are a few options, and they are not all mutually exclusive. They are: use less; stop speculation (day traders); more domestic drilling; subsidize gasoline (or rebate checks - same principle); or a windfall profits tax on the oil companies.

Oil speculation is sometimes blamed for the recent price spikes. Yes, it is somewhat to blame, because it increases the volatility of the price of a barrel of oil. However, unless someone is consistently stowing away mountains of ready-to-sell barrels, as an investment, then there is no long-term effect on the price - it's just "noise" in the signal. These little spikes aren't fun, but they are dwarfed by the fundamental price rises that accompany deficits in supply. I'm not worried about little daily fluctuations; I'm much more concerned with the long-term: making sure our discomfort is minimized, and that our economy survives.

Using less is always cheapest - it's free. Making more efficient cars also pays itself off, bigtime. But both of these happen naturally, because this is the only possible personal response to high gas prices (...and auto-makers will make what people want). Let's look at the policy options, though - that's the part that people don't seem to get.

First, we could drill more in the U.S. For two reasons, this is the lousiest idea I have ever heard of. (Yeah, it takes a long time to come online, but I'm thinking longer-term than that.) The first reason drilling is not great is that it won't really dent our prices. Oil is traded freely on a global market; if we're producing more here, then everyone else will be bidding for it just like we are, and the producers here will (naturally) sell to the highest bidder - they'd be really stupid not to. So, increasing supply here by 10%, the benefit of that - the demand relief - goes to the whole world. If we use 1/4 of the world's oil (or less as developing nations grow), then for our own demand-relief purposes, as a nation, it's as if we're only producing an extra 2.5% - just one quarter of the perceived benefit. Most people just don't get this. Sure, it will help, but it will help everyone on the planet equally - not just us. (Although, whoever gets the $$ for producing those barrels sure will be rolling in it... more on that in a minute.)

On the flip side, say we become protectionist, and sell our gas only within the U.S. That doesn't work either; unless we can produce 100% of the oil we need at home ourselves, then we are in a bidding war for the fraction that we do have to import. And if half of our oil (imported) is selling locally for $5 a gallon, while the other half (domestic) is selling for $2.50 a gallon, guess which people will want to buy? And guess what that means? HIGH DEMAND. Consumers will say "I'll pay $2.60 if you sell it to me, instead of to him for $2.50; that's still better than $5!!" and so on, all the way until it's "well, $4.90 is still better than $5!". Eventually, the domestic selling price meets the global selling price. You can't diverge from the global commidity price, unless you either fully close your borders (which we can't do because we import most of our oil), or ration, or subsidize.

Rationing happens naturally, when prices become painfully high, people use less, and prices stop rising, settling in at the edge of discomfort. We could also do government rationing, where each person is allowed a certain amount. However, this is extremely cumbersome to administer (truck drivers need more; how much? etc.) and really sucks for everyone who really NEEDS more gas and would gladly pay for it (to avoid their business being shut down, etc). What we have now works just fine - let individual 'decide with their dollar' (throttle their own consumption based on the pain and price) - there is zero administration, and everything will flow much more naturally.

Subsidies are a bad idea, economists universally agree (although most people, and most politicians, don't understand this). Within an economy, they only serve to keep the price artificially low, which encourages use beyond what is available, which can lead to shortages and outages. Or, in the case of the global liquid market, if just a few countries subsidize, it "feels" good to their citizens, but in the long run, they are shooting themselves in the foot (and other countries, too). Their artifically low prices encourage higher consumption, which worsens the problem (for everyone). Every dollar their citizens save at the pump is a dollar more they have to pay in taxes, so they're paying for it anyway; but they're also making the situation worse for everyone, by over-consuming, which drives the global price up higher - and which also makes their subsidy more costly. So, ultimately, subsidies do NOTHING to solve the problem; they just make it worse.

Rebate checks are the same thing as subsidies; instead of the government using taxpayer money to help lower the cost of a barrel of oil, they just give everyone a check (of their own money) back at the end of the year. It's all the same, and it's all a really bad* idea. (*Although, in combination with a windfall profits tax on oil companies, it's a great idea - this is the only way to keep them from getting super-rich. More on that in a minute!)

Before moving on to the next idea, let me also mention another idea why increased drilling is ill-conceived: because it will be worth so much more if we wait longer. People think we're desperate now - but just wait 20 years! When all of the world's oil is used up, but we still have a bunch offshore and in ANWR (the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) - they will be total gold mines. (At that point, it might be worth it to cut off our borders, and have our own local supply and demand - it might actually (frighteningly) be worth it.) So, why cash in our chips now, when we know it'll be worth drastically more in the long term? Although I don't personally believe in country vs. country, what nationalistic people everywhere should be pitching is, "let's use up their oil first; then ours will be worth so much more." Another way to put it is: "don't cash in short-term comfort for long-term survival."

The last - and best - idea is a windfall profits tax on oil producers. It should be clear by now that the price of a barrel of oil is set pretty naturally, and that the oil producers just happen to make serious bank off of it (lucky them). But think of the expense to the world! Why not just take that profit and hand it back to the people (via subsidies or rebates)? Well, as already discussed, it does encourage more consumption, which is ultimately bad. However, it could also keep the price at $8 a gallon (manageable) instead of $30 a gallon (total destruction of the economy). It could also buy us an extra, oh, say, 5 years of a functioning economy, while research into alternatives continues.

So how do we move this massive profit out of the hands of oil producers, and shift it back to the people? First, let's try to shift it back to the government - and then the government can use the money to issue rebate checks, or lower income taxes, or whatever. (We're talking about a LOT of money here.) If we can shift the flow of money away from the producers and toward the government, we're solving the real problem.

To do this, we must tax the production of barrels of oil - NOT the sale of gasoline. Taxing production is totally effective, and taxing the sale is absolutely worthless, as far as moving those profits from the oil companies and back into the people's hands.

Let's look at the 'bad' idea first. Say it costs an oil producer $0.50/gallon to produce the oil. The producer then sells the oil at the global liquid market rate, say, $3 a gallon. Their profit is $2.50. Then, Joe drives up to buy fill up his tank. The gas station slaps on the $1.50 in taxes that we're accustomed to (taxation at the point of sale), and Joe pays $4.50/gallon, the price we are familiar with.

Now imagine that tax is increased; so the gas station still purchases gas for $3/gallon, but now adds $3/gallon tax, bringing the pump price to $6/gallon. Joe pays more; but the producers - the primary beneficiaries of skyrocketing oil prices - still made their wopping $2.50. Remember, we want to re-route the flow of money away from the producers, and back to the people. Increasing taxes at the pump does not do that.

Ok - so what happens if we place the tax on the production of a barrel of oil? Everything changes. Say we slap on a $2/gallon production tax. If the producer was spending $0.50 to produce it, thanks to the whopping new tax, it now costs them $2.50 to produce it, and when they sell it competitively ($3/gallon), they only make $0.50. Their profit margin went from an unheard-of 83% ($2.50 profit on $3.00 of revenue) down to 16% ($0.50 profit on $3.00 revenue) - a common and reasonable margin for a corporation. (The key is to tax them just enough to eat up most of their profits, but leave some, so they continue to operate.) Notice that the price of gas at the pump is the same! - the producers can't just raise their prices, because they have to compete with a global market - nobody would buy their gas if they try to sell it above $3 a gallon. But now, instead of windfall profits being made by oil producers based in the U.S., you now have 80% of that profit ($2.00 out of $2.50) flowing back to the government, where it can be used to fund renewable energy, or offset income taxes. Basically, it goes from the hands of these rich oil companies, back into the hands of the people.

It could be implemented in this way, as a tax on the production of a barrel of oil; it could also be accomplished by making a new tax bracket for corporations whose gross margins exceed, say, 30% (perhaps limited to companies peddling limited natural resources). Either way, the principles are the same, and it would solve the problem.

There is one (and only one) point of resistance we can expect: implementing this would utterly smash oil stocks, because their profits would drastically drop. Expect resistance because of that. So, yes, it will hurt those investors - but those investors are artificially rich right now, making serious bank off of a commodity that really should be returned to the people. And this is the only real way to do that.

There is a bonus for the first countries to do this, too: their oil producers have less incentive to drill now, while everyone else is drilling like crazy, to sell their oil at these "high" (relative to the past - not the future!) prices. That means that our oil producers would tend to relax, and save their oil more for the future, more than producers in other countries - and that will pay off for them bigtime, in the long run.

THE ECO FACTOR

On an environmentalist note: don't worry about the oil - there's not enough carbon in oil to destroy our planet. The real carbon threat is COAL, which, without a little legislative help (and your support), we could burn for centuries. As oil skyrockets, we'll turn to electric cars, and coal is our cheapest form of electricity, so we'll burn twice as much coal as we do now, in order to keep driving. So, COAL is the real carbon threat.

What alternatives are there? Photovoltaic solar (power from pretty solar panels) is about four times as expensive as coal - i.e., not even remotely viable on a large-scale yet (imagine paying 4X what you pay now for electricity!) (and remember: the money has to come from somewhere). However, wind is only about 20% more expensive than coal or [already-subsidized] nuclear, on average. But electricity sells on a national liquid market - the grid. But power producers don't want to build wind, because their profit margin is 20% higher if they build coal. If you want them to build wind, that's the problem to fix!

Fortunately, with a tiny bit of no-brainer legislation from congress, we could slap a 20% tax on coal. Yes, we will pay for it (our electric bills will go up 20%). However, pipe that money into subsidies for building wind and concentrated solar (mirrors and sterling engines - not expensive photovoltaics), and voila, they start replacing coal. Between oil disappearing, transportation shifting to electric (already cheaper, per mile driven), and coal shifting to RE (renewable energy), our carbon crisis is 90% solved. And the extra 20% we're paying for RE-over-coal is dwarfed by the amount we're saving by driving on wind power (electric) instead of $8-a-gallon gasoline - everyone wins, both the consumer and the environment.

I do recognize that there are storage issues with wind, and that it can come and go. (Concentrated solar can use molten salt to cheaply store heat all night, on the other hand.) However, we can safely get up to 40-50% of our power from wind, without worrying about this too much. Let's get to that mark, and then worry about how to solve the other 50-60%. (My hunch is that we'll have come up with some pretty excellent solutions by then, judging by how huge the demand for it will be.)

We need congress to tax coal (and channel the money into RE) to the tune of about 20%. As individuals, we need to tell congress, loud and clear, that we are happy to pay 20% more for electricity, to save our planet. We also need to be supportive of wind in our neighborhoods - no nimbyism (not-in-my-back-yardism). And we need to call politicians out on it, when they suggest short-term solutions. These problems need long-term solutions - we (literally) can't afford anything else.

8/2/2008

A few months ago, I discovered this huge bump on my head. It turns out, it's a benign osteoma, or bone tumor, on the parietal lobe of my skull. Fortunately, it seems to have grown pretty quickly, and then suddenly stopped. However, I can't help but wonder if it is linked to my cell phone usage. I went through a period of very heavy cell phone usage (3-4 hours per day), starting in july 2007, and ending in march 2008. I discovered the bump shortly thereafter, in may 2008 - and coincidentally, it is on the right side of my skull - the side I use my cell phone on.

I don't care what studies can or can't confirm - it's simple physics. Electromagnetic signals fall off by the distance from the source, cubed - that means that if you get twice as close, the signal is eight time stronger. So when you have something right up against your brain, sending a signal that can reach a tower two miles away - even if it is a fairly low-power signal - it's still a bit scary.

I'm not going to go as far as to say that my cell phone caused it. But I wouldn't be surprised, at all, if it was a factor that pushed some little group of bone cells 'over the edge' on just the wrong day, starting the tumor.

12/7/2007

HOPE vs. EXPERIENCE... or is there more to it?

 

Looking around, it seems that all that people see in Hillary Clinton is experience, and all they see in Barack Obama is hope. Sorry - but I see more. I see a man with superb critical thinking skills, up against an opponent whose mind, to me, actually seems like it might be a bit feeble. I also see a man with a firm awareness of his own ego - up against an opponent who lights up like a christmas tree, eyes glowing, whenever her ego is stroked. It scares the living crap out of me to see her reaction, when a crowd cheers for her. Things like this reveal a lot about the maturity of a person's mind; they are good indicators of the person's ability to pull the truth out of a big mess of information, emotions, propaganda, and pressure. We want prudent judgment for our country, not emotional or reactionary behavior; emotion, ego, irrational fear, anger, and most of all, pride, have no place in a president's thinking. It is very important that our president have a healthy analytical mind, aware of itself and how emotion (including ego, anger, and pride) can skew good judgment.

But so far, in everything I have read, "critical thinking skills" have never been mentioned - are people even thinking about it? I see this as perhaps the single most important skill a president can have. Running this country is like running a giant business, only, far more complex. The position of president is really all about managing and balancing things and making judgments to simultaneously maximize everyone's gain in a huge slew of domains. You have to be smart as hell to do a good job. It's one of those things where every additional IQ point, equanimity point, well-roundedness point, and every bit of every other form of intelligence we possess, makes a real difference. Decisions will be wiser, and everyone wins. It seems very clear to me, within minutes of watching him, that he is far better equipped to do this. Is it just charisma? Or is it a genuine connection built on the fact that he actually gets it, and exudes a bit of wisdom that we're not used to seeing?

Back to the main topic though. The "fruit" that comes from good critical thinking skills is good judgement, leading to positive results. We have seen mention of Obama's "good judgment" in his opposition to the Iraq war, from the start - even when this stance was unpopular. And he didn't oppose it because he was just some anti-war hippie; he opposed it because it was obviously a sham. Anyone with good critical thinking skills, and a basic grip on the [objective] news at the time, saw this; but 90% of the population just blindly followed the Bush lead and bought the whole thing. Now, in hindsight, it should be clear that the only thing that can save us from these kinds of mistakes is critical thinking skill; our own failure to use them, and our president's, cost us a heap of reputation, 3,000 dead U.S. soldiers, 100,000 dead Iraqis, and $500 billion dollars thrown in the trash can. If our country can't suddenly learn good critical thinking skills, then at least, hopefully, we could pick a leader with them.

Of course, the candidate must also be ethical. I also think Obama is more ethical than Clinton - he fights fairer, and he doesn't engage in overzealous vote-pandering like she does. He also isn't afraid to go against the grain when it's necessary, which is hugely valuable. He's steady, and he thinks long-term. He's got way more than just hope; he's got a fantastic mind.

One final thing that scares me: her tax returns show $109 million in income (between her and Bill) over the last 8 years. Obama and his wife make about $1 million a year income (mostly from his books), and he grew up poor as dirt. I think these factors have a really big impact on how each of the candidates sees the world. Some evidence: consider that of the $109 million the Clintons made, they only gave $10 million to charity - and all of that was at the last minute, in 2007, because they knew she was running for president and they wanted to look good. Sorry, but anybody hoarding $109 million (who needs that much money?), and not taking joy in giving large amounts to good causes on a regular basis, is very misguided, in my opinion.

And one last thing: it doesn't really matter if she's a woman, or if he's black. This is not about any of that stuff. The important thing is if they will be a good captain of the ship. Yes, I'd love to see a woman or a black person as president, but it's about 1% as important as picking someone who will do the job well, and serve 300 million people (and 6 billion people peripherally) well. That is paramount, in my view.

12/7/2007
Here's a cool idea for making Burning Man more eco-friendly. Lots of visitors have solar panels that they only use one week of the year, for this event. How about some Nevada resident setting up a small business to keep those running the rest of the year? When you leave Burning Man, you drop your panel off at the truck, and get a claim ticket. They run them all year, making some cash; when you come back next year, you get your panels back for the week, plus a check for 50% of the earnings. (The truck is parked outside of the boundaries of the event, where using money is still legal. If you don't show up, they mail you a check.) When you leave Burning Man, you leave your panels there again. Not a bad idea, I don't think... I posted it around to a few eco and BM blogs; hopefully it will reach the right ears and next year we'll see it happen!

Another thought I had: wherever there are cooling towers, there are huge amounts of waste heat - that's the point of a cooling tower: to cool off hot liquids. So, why not use that waste heat to make ethanol from sugar beets? (Making ethanol requires large amounts of heat.) That would help green up those large coal power plants all over the country - maybe even get them some partial carbon credits, which would translate into money, once our government gets its head out of its ass and creates a carbon tax. It would also dramatically drop the cost of ethanol, since the heat would be free. (Please note, though: until someone figures out how to make ethanol from cellulose, making it from corn is a joke. It should be made from ultra-sugary plants, like sugar cane or sugar beets.)

We can also use the waste CO2 from burning the coal to grow lots of algae, like the MIT pilot project. You can then harvest the algae for its oils, which, if you use the right strain, make up 50% of the algae's mass - not too shabby!

ECO RANT

But nothing is going to help like a nonrenewables tax. Anything coming from a non-renewable source would be taxed; at first, it's an amount that's barely noticeable, but every year, it scales up. The change is gradual, so that no businesses are disrupted - they have plenty of time to adapt. The increased costs are beared by the consumer, not the business (they pass on the cost increase to the consumer); but as the nonrenewable tax phases in, income taxes go down. So yeah, people will pay more for gasoline, and electricity, and beer that was shipped 2,000 miles, and Fiji water; but they will pay less in income tax - on average, they will exactly cancel each other out. Eco-sensitive consumers will save, and wasteful consumers will pay more, encouraging eco-sensitive buying habits.

We should also start phasing in a tax on energy-gobbling lighting and appliances. Appliances in the same class compete: the best performers get 10% rebates, while the worst performers get hit with a 20% tax. The tax is just a transfer payment - the government doesn't earn any income here. The cost of the products is just being biased to reflect their energy performance. The bias, of course, phases in over 10 years - but, very importantly, starts phasing in immediately. For lighting, regular incandescent light bulbs need a $2 tax, so they cost the same as a Fluorescent or Compact Fluorescent bulb (1/4 the energy), and Halogen bulbs (which use 10X the energy) need a $10 tax. All phased in over time, of course, but starting now. Also notice that in the long term, consumers will save massively; their lower income taxes enable them to afford the eco-tax, but also, they will save a lot more due to their lower energy bills.)

These are a few of a handful of things we can do right now, that are cheap, easy, and failsafe, to rapidly drop our CO2 emissions. By converting some income tax to a nonrenewables tax, as well as shifting subsidies from coal & nuclear to wind (forget solar), increasing automobile CAFE standards, and quickly bringing all building and lighting codes up to date, we could easily start reversing our CO2 output within a few years, all at reasonable cost. We just need to elect people who will actually do it, and we need to make sure they are properly educated about *how* to do it right. So please support those eco-agencies like the NRDC; part of their job is to testify to congress and help lawmakers understand what is useful and what is dumb!

Now on to: THE CRISIS NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT YET.

Automobile efficiency won't make much of a dent in global warming, because we're slated to run out of oil (at the price we know it) in about 5-15 years. (Coal, which could power us for centuries, is what will really saturate us with CO2.) But we're going to run out of oil waaaay before we run out of coal. However, that is an even bigger and more immediate problem that global warming, which no one seems to be aware of yet. Think about it. As soon as people have to start bidding on oil (because there's not enough of it), the price will increase - a lot, tenfold, who knows how much, but it'll be bad. That is likely to happen in the next 5-15 years. So then, what do we do? We start growing fuel - biodiesel from plant oils, and ethanol from sugars. The problem is, we only have so much land suitable for agriculture. In regions with plenty of water, we're using all the land, and in regions with a lack of water, we're using all the water. (Often more - aquifers everywhere are overpumped and dropping.) So we can't add cropland. But we need land and water to grow fuel. Fuel will be worth a fortune, so huge numbers of farmers will start growing fuel instead of food; as a result, we won't have enough food, and that scarcity will make food prices skyrocket right along with fuel. Very simple rules at work here!

As if that wasn't bad enough, there is another food problem: modern agriculture depends on fertilizer made from nonrenewable oil; once we're out of that, we're in big trouble. (For fuel it's not a problem - just compost the solids back into the soil, and burn the mineral-free hydrocarbons as fuel. But for food, which permanently removes minerals from the soil, it's a problem.) But hey, at least farmers will get pretty rich by growing fuel.

So, you can see the stupidity in delaying an increase in automobile CAFE standards. Say we currently have 10 years until this food/fuel crisis hits. If we do nothing, we can keep up the good life, as usual, and we have 10 years until our cost of living (food, fuel, and everything that depends on fuel) skyrocket. Or, if we make a moderate investment in our automobile efficiency today, the oil we have left might last 20 years. I don't know about you, but paying a few extra bucks for a car sounds like it's worth 10 more years of "the good life" to me. This is why I'm a hybrid owner - my conscience just can't let me participate in the colossal waste that is happening right now, and the consequences that are coming because of it. You can hold your breath for hydrogen if you want, but I suspect it's a lot like nuclear fusion: 30 years ago, it was 30 years away - and it still is today.

Realistically, we will have to switch to electric cars, powered by electricity from coal (worst case) or wind (best case - with just a moderate carbon tax, wind could easily dominate). Short commutes will be affordable, but long-distance travel & goods transport will cost quite a fortune, unless we have a true quantum leap in battery technology - which is more likely to happen, if the entire world is depending on it.

10/10/2007
MILKDROP 2 IS HERE ! ! !
Happy 10th birthday to Winamp itself - if you go to winamp.com and download the new Winamp 5.5, you'll find a nice surprise inside - MilkDrop 2!

MilkDrop now runs on DX9 and fully supports pixel shaders, adding huge amounts of complexity and potential to the presets. I did my best to get a bunch of cool presets written by the launch date, and some of them are truly spectacular, but honestly, this is nothing - it is capable of so much more, I just need to experiment some more. (Just since the final build last night, I came up with a dozen of the best ones yet, BY FAR. We'll update it in a week!)

If you have a crappy old graphics card, it's basically going to look just like MilkDrop 1. But if you have a newer one (GeForce 5700+ or Radeon 9600+), pixel shaders will turn on and make some wonders. If you check it out, take a look at these presets:
      Aderrasi - Air Handler (Kali Mix) - Painterly
      Geiss - All-Spark
      Geiss - Drop Shadow 1
      Geiss - Electric Storm Half-Digital 2
      Geiss - Rose 5 Crossfire Beats
      Geiss - Reaction Diffusion 3
      Geiss - Thumb Drum
            (the above two use reaction diffusion to create thumbprint-like patterns!)

Other cool new features
      BACKSPACE now takes you back to previously-viewed presets
      Edit pixel shaders on-screen, see instant results
      Noise textures (2D and 3D), read textures from disk, gaussian blurring of prev. frame, etc.
      Preset "mash-up" feature lets you mix and match presets to quickly make awesome new stuff.
            (on the preset editing menu - hit 'M' and look @ the bottom)
            (also try the 'A' key for quick mini-mash-up)

So, keep in mind, it's a work in progress, I will be updating it with more presets over the coming weeks, so when you see a new version of Winamp come out, chances are good MilkDrop 2 will have some nice new surprises for you!

6/28/2007
I am planning to turn my bicycle into a hybrid soon; this means it will be able to brake regeneratively when going down a steep hill, charging a battery. Then, on the way back up that hill, the energy in the battery can be used to help you get back up the hill.

So, I am looking for old Lithium Ion laptop batteries in good condition. If your laptop died on you and you have no use for the old battery, but it is in good condition (i.e. the laptop was running off the battery for 2 hours or more), please consider donating it to my project! I will likely need half a dozen of them, in series, to get the voltage necessary (and total amp-hour capacity) for this to work well.

So, if you can help out, please write me an email (guava at geisswerks dot com). I will be happy to cover the shipping costs! :)

6/28/2007
I am back from mexico / guatemala... pictures are here!

6/27/2007
Nvidia finally posted the 2-minute hi-res video we made for Cascades, complete with technical narration. You can watch the video here. (Warning: video is 85 MB!)

Also, if you want to know how the effects were done, check out the powerpoint slides from our talk at GDC ('NVIDIA Demo Team Secrets - Cascades').

4/9/2007
Well, a bit of news to report: I am officially unemployed! I left my job at Nvidia about a week ago. It was a great gig, but something in me is really thirsty to shake things up and go do other stuff for a bit. My plan is to take a healthy dose of time off and embark on a lot of the traveling adventures that are virtually impossible when you're employed. I'll be mostly on the road through the end of summer, but when I get back, I'm planning on working on some serious music visualizer goodness (...applying almost 4 years of Nvidia demo team know-how to this poor, forgotten field - I can't wait!). I'm also hoping to find part-time work of some sort around that time, enough to pay most of the bills, but still leave me with enough time to spend time with friends, get regular exercise, cook food at home, and all that good stuff! We'll see... =)

For those interested in my travel plans: Alan and Lisa and I are headed to Death Valley in a few days, and then Jarrodd & I are taking a short trip to Oregon. After that comes a big trip (6 weeks!) through Central America. Toward the end of june I'm heading out again for some backpacking in Utah and Arizona, finally winding up in Ohio near the end of July, to stick around for a month and spend time with much-missed friends & family. Who knows, all of that might change, but that's the current plan!

3/14/2007
I recently wrote a program to help people learn to play (or compose!) Gamelan music. It plays songs from notation (simple text files), and highlights the notes as they play. You can also adjust the volume of all the instruments in the orchestra - even the sangsi vs. poulos parts - so you can isolate parts and hear (learn) them better. Comes with six songs that are part of our (Gamelan Anak Swarasanti's) set list.

3/14/2007
I gave a talk at GDC (the Game Developers Conference) last week on the demo I worked on from june to november of last year, Cascades. About 170 people showed up, not bad! Anyway, you can download the slides here if interested. Here's the talk description:

NVIDIA Demo Team Secrets – Cascades
Discover how NVIDIA’s demo team built the “Cascades” demo, where complex rock structures are generated on the GPU for glistening cascades of waterfalls to crash down upon. Our engineers will also cover the realistic shading and displacement mapping techniques used in the demo and also how the GPU water particle system works. Particles are able to spawn other particles, as well as collide with a complex 3D terrain.

2/19/2007
Cascades is finally available for download from nzone! Note that it requires Vista, a GeForce 8000 series, and a version 100.64 or later display driver (released just a week or so ago).

2/4/2006
A few months ago I started playing with the Santa Cruz Trash Orchestra. It's super fun. I won't go into detail here (you can just check out the site) but I wanted to post some mp3's of our first official gig! We played at UCSC's College Night, which is a fine dinner and "cultural experience" (their words) for the students. Anyway, here are the MP3 tracks. Enjoy! (BTW, I think the first three are my favorites.)
    1 2 3 4 5 6

12/14/2006
I finally finished building my solar tracker prototype! Check it out:

     

This is basically a little device that keeps something pointed at the sun. It has two light sensors at a 60-degree angle from each other. The microchip reads the light values from the sensors, then tells the DC motor which way to turn in order to get more light. As you hold it in your hand and move it around a light (indoors), it always orients itself to stay pointed at the light. It's kind of fun to see. :) Here's a movie:


It's built using a half-bridge circuit, so you can drive the motor in either direction (swapping the voltage across it) from a single source. In this case, the source is a 9V battery, but for the real thing I'll use a 12 V AC adapter to drive a much beefier motor. I selected the components so the circuit would work with 9V or 12V.

So, once I get the beefier motor hooked up, I'm going to weather-proof this thing and stick it on my roof and have it drive a solar panel. Having a solar panel track the sun increases your average output by about 30%. (And note - all these parts cost $40, while a commercial tracker runs $500!)

However, I plan to also stick some mirrors on the sides of the solar panel, to increase the amount of light hitting it. Without ridiculously large mirrors, I can get about 2.5X sunlight hitting the panels. (The trick with solar concentration, though, is that it only works if you're always pointed straight at the sun - there's no such thing as a "light funnel" - this is the reason I built this device in the first place.) My overall goal is to see how cheap I can solar power for ($ per watt). Between self-installation, cheap tracking (+30%), federal + california subsidies, green tags, and dirt cheap solar concentration (+150%), it should be pretty darn cheap!

For the more technically-oriented: the setup consists of a PIC microcontroller (a 4 MHz, ultra-low-power, $1.85 microchip), 2 light sensors, 2 transistors, 4 MOSFETS, 5 diodes, a capacitor, and some resistors. Basically every component but the MOSFETs and the DC motor only cost a dollar or less. The P-channel MOSFETs were about $7 each and the N-channel were $3 each. But they're pretty heavy duty and should drive a real load with a smile on their faces. :)

(You can't just drive a beefy motor from the microcontroller - it delivers 5 V but at very low amps, and 5 V is stretching it anyway, for a motor. You really need to run the 5V through power drivers, like the transistors & mosfets here, to switch on a REAL power source, like a 9V battery or 12V supply from an AC adapter.)

The really sad thing is that this took me probably 80 hours to make. I had never used or programmed a PIC microchip before, or programmed their assembly language; nor had I ever used a transistor or MOSFET (I didn't even know how they worked). The nice thing is that I could probably build another one (even having to redesign the circuit) in about 5 hours. And perhaps the best thing is that I can now build just about anything I want: devices that sense temperature, light, touch, etc. - and that drive [beefy] motors and light up LEDs and so on.

If you've programmed other assembly languages and picked them up quickly, and have some familiarity with the basics of electronics, then I recommend the PICkit 2 starter kit from Microchip Direct. It's only $50 and comes with software (IDE) and a USB connector (so you can upload compiled code) and the chip and a prototyping board that connects the chip and the USB device. It's pretty handy and it comes with some sample programs. Microchip's documentation for their processors is super top-notch, too.

11/8/2006
We (Nvidia) launched the GeForce 8800 today. This is a really, really, really awesome day for people who love realtime graphics. It is screamin' fast and can do so many new things (a la DirectX 10) it's not funny: stream out, geometry shaders, uncompromised instancing, REALLY fast branching, constant buffers, dynamic indexing, full native 32-bit float support, etc. - the list goes on and on. And to boot, it's over twice as fast as our fastest 7000 series GPU!

I wanted to take advantage of a bunch of this stuff, and came up with the idea of making an endless vertical rock tower whose polygons were generated (from noise and other functions) all on the GPU, as well as pouring water over it to make pretty waterfalls. The final result - dubbed Cascades - turned out pretty well.

       

Cascades runs on Vista using DirectX 10. The cool thing about this demo is that the CPU is virtually idle. Everything happens on the GPU. The polygons for the rock are actually *created* (and streamed out to a vertex buffer) all on the GPU, using marching cubes. In the particle system for the water, particles are emitted, propagated, and destroyed on the GPU using a geometry shader. Collision with the rock (and sliding along it) all happens on the GPU, and particles can even spawn other particles (mist) when they hit the rock.

When you zoom in close to the rock, you see some really cool Displacement Mapping. It's something you have to see realtime (screenshots don't communicate it) but when we showed it to the launch audience today, I had the pleasure of hearing about a thousand people gasp in unison. :)

There are some cool bug critters flying around; their flocking behavior is driven fully by the GPU, so they can avoid hitting the rock. They're also drawn using instancing, so (virtually) one single draw call draws them all.

We also used to have vines growing and branching all over the rock, but no matter how technically impressive they were, they still looked kind of cheesy (especially when you zoomed in close and the rock's displacement mapping shader kicked in, but the vines were still growing on the "outer hull" of rock polygons). So we nixed 'em.

10/29/2006
About 6 months ago I got poisoned by Raid Deep Reach Fogger (which you can buy at any corporate grocery store) which left me with numb arms and legs, and a host of other problems, for 3 months. This product is one of the "bug bombs" you use (if you're insane) to kill bugs in your house. My housemate used it in the garage to kill some bugs... you set it off, seal the room, and stay out for a while. Trouble is, the garage is connected to my room via a laundry chute, which no one remembered existed. The chute was closed, but not sealed... so as I slept overnight, I was breathing in the fumes.

As I went to sleep that night (I had been working in my room for a few hours already), I felt really bloated and yet incredibly hungry. I also was seeing some kind of weird sparks when I closed my eyes. I had totally forgotten about the bug bomb, though, and just shrugged it off. In the morning, my arms and legs were extremely numb. My lung capacity felt like it was at about 20%. And my IQ had dropped about 30 points. I could hardly hold a conversation! I also found out (a bit later) that I was completely and totally impotent. And surprisingly, this was the most tenacious of all my symptoms, taking about 4 months to get back to normal.

I went to urgent care, who told me to go straight to the ER. Due to my low IQ and a recent string of disenchantment with western medicine, though, I didn't take that advice. (My main beef with western medicine - although I acknowledge it has a lot to offer at times - is that it's built on patching symptoms, rather than treating root problems. Usually a treatment creates a new problem. In practice, a doctor rarely considers diet, lifestyle, etc - they'll give you a drug without even asking about your diet! I find it hard to get them to listen to me (they're busy and often power-tripped). And finally, finding holistic health with your average western doctor is like pulling teeth, and even if you try to get it out of them, they often won't tell you common sense information due to liability concerns! Anyway, that's the end of that rant, for now...)

So instead of going to the ER, I did it my own way. I took it easy, got good rest, ate super healthy organic food for a good while, drank lots of carrot juice, got moderate exercise (to sweat), and took plenty of vitamin support, as well as milk thistle (which is *the* herb for liver detox). Whenever you're cleaning toxins out of your bloodstream (mainly via sweating/fasting), you need liver and kidney support, because those filter your blood, and get overworked.

So, back to those gnarly symptoms. The lung and IQ issues tapered off to mostly-normal within about a week. The numb arms and legs, however, lasted for 3 months. Even at the end of the 3 months they phased in and out. One interesting thing is that taking B vitamins daily *really* helped with the numbness. Vitamin B is the main supporter of your nervous system, and you can't overdose on it because it's water-soluble (B and C both are).

So, after about 4 months, my arms and legs felt normal *most days*. But one night I went to a sauna with a few friends, just for fun. It's 220 degrees in there and you sweat unbelievably. Well, the next day, when I woke up, my arms and legs were all numb again - for two whole days! Putting two and two together, I realized that the sauna must have expunged a lot of my fat cells, which is where toxins and pesticides are stored in your body (and in non-organic dairy products, too, for that matter). Once I realized what was happening, I wasn't as worried. But this exemplifies why it's important to take liver/kidney support herbs whenever you fast or go to a sauna - because you're putting all that stuff back into your bloodstream, and your liver/kidneys will have to process it all.

The symptom that lasted the longest was impotence. I wasn't super worried since I had seen something allegorically that helped me understand it, and that was, of all things, the movie Supersize Me. In that movie, he eats exclusively McDonalds for a whole month. After about two weeks, he goes completely impotent. I inferred that it was because his body was so busy dealing with toxins and rebuilding cells and preventing cancer, that it said "no no, sir, no sex for you. This body will not be spending precious resources making seed (a very energy- and mineral-intensive process) while there is more critical healing work to be done!" And sure enough, once my other symptoms had (luckily) all gone away, that one went away as well. But it did still scare the living shit out of me.

If you read the label for Raid Deep Reach Fogger, it sounds pretty harmless. Those fucking assholes... this stuff is NOT harmless. If you read the pesticide fact sheets (all over the web) for Cypermethrin, the active ingredient, you find that it's mildly (?!) toxic to mammals. However, it's HORRIBLY toxic (like, 20 times more toxic) to aquatic life. So when you open your window to let that stuff disperse into the air, and it goes and lands in a stream or the bay, you can feel just super about it. (Or you could just not ever use this crap in the first place!)

I went to a neurologist eventually, thinking, I at least want to hear what they have to say. He said that because my motor reflexes still worked when it first happened (...the urgent care tested those out), that there should be no permanent nerve damage. What had been damaged were the myelin nerve sheaths, which take about 3 months to regrow - about the time it took my symptoms to go away.

I recently went to a very very good acupuncturist (Adam Atman, in Campbell, CA). He has a radio show every week, that I've listened to for years, where he discusses all the scientific studies that came out that week, compares them to previous studies, and so on. (Finding a doctor / L.Ac. that has deep knowledge of both eastern and western medicine is a huge bonus, in my book.) Anyway, I finally went to him. I found he has amazing intuition - he basically knew all of my health issues the moment I walked in the door. After a nice long consultation, he recommended I do a 4-day water fast to get the rest of the toxins out of my fat cells, because if they sit there for years, that's what causes cancer. And really, the *only* way to clean out your cells is to fast and sweat.


FASTING

So here I am, writing this on day 4 of my fast. It's about noon on sunday, and I haven't eaten anything (except for a tablespoon of green stuff per day) since thursday's lunch. Aside from slight light-headedness when I stand up quickly, I feel fine. I've been living a normal life, biking around, talking to people, being very productive, and so on. I've noticed my brain is in a "low-power" mode, conserving energy it seems. It can't do math as quickly, but I seem to have gained elsewhere - my mind has a much stronger grip on conceptual things. There is also a trememdous amount of creative stimulus; I have thought about many, many things I've never thought about in my life before. It's quite an experience. I have felt blissful, and happy, and comfortable the whole time. (I practiced a bit beforehand, skipping a few dinners the week before the fast, and avoiding dairy and bread and any kind of sugar). Then when I started it, thursday afternoon, I never had a *single* pang of hunger, or sensation of low blood sugar (which I am normally quite susceptible to, being a person who rarely skips a meal) the whole time. I honestly can't believe it.

Actually, I don't expect you to believe me (that I am doing great after 4 days without food), because I wouldn't have believed it until I experienced it myself. But I am being 100% intellectually honest with you. I don't want to spread misinformation, I am not attached to the dogma that fasting is good. But I am finding that it is. But I do wonder why I feel *good*, with 28 years of toxins being dumped back into my bloodstream. Perhaps my body is cleaner than I thought. Perhaps that sauna did the trick. Or perhaps I don't feel worse because my body is so happy that it's being healed... maybe it knows what's going on more than my brain does.)

To be honest, the only reason I was open to the idea of fasting was because of my sauna -> numbness experience. But that, plus the thought that almost all ancient wisdom cultures involved periodic deep fasting, and that animals naturally fast when they are sick or toxified, made me open to trying it. I have learned that I can go a LOOOOOONG time without food and feel great (...handy for traveling!). I now understand that we mostly eat for pleasure - that the body really only needs trace amounts of vitamins and minerals to be healthy and rebuild cells; most of our energy must come from oxygen (...I infer this because visibly, after 4 days, I look virtually the same, still with the same little band of fat at my belly and love handles that I've always had, and no noticeable loss of muscle mass). If you want to be healthy, it's not a matter of eating lots of uber-healthy foods - you need very very little of them (a tablespoon a day if it's the right stuff! - Vitamineral Green in my case). It's more about avoiding toxin-laden foods. Plus, eating less is healthier in general - rats that are fed less live 30% longer. It seems that most of that copious eating we do (I'd guess at least 50%) is to support our high-blood-sugar addiction, which creates a false sense of energy when you get a fix. But once you're no longer addicted to 3 sugar spikes a day (and note that bread counts as a mild sugar here), you find out what your body really needs, and it's quite a surprising thing to experience. (Another thought - if your blood sugar is so much more stable without bread (or sugar), maybe we shouldn't really be eating bread?)

I recommend you see a smart holistic doctor before trying a fast. I don't think everyone has this easy a time with it. My acupuncturist told me I have a good constitution for fasting, whereas others might not. Plus, for brevity, I've left out details here (sorry - this thing is long enough already).

Anyway, I hope this story helps you in some way. Be choosy about your doctor; don't use poisons in your house, trust people who say chemicals are mostly harmless, or trust a chemical to be harmless just because it is legal. Eat less, and specifically, eat less toxin-laden food; and occasionally take some milk thistle and go sweat your ass off in a sauna. And although the jury (for me) is still out on whether the fast is necessary for flushing toxins (although I can't imagine it wouldn't help some), I still recommend fasting just for the experience... it is an amazingly wonderful spiritual, educational, and creatively inspring experience. Perhaps the most healthful benefit of fasting is in what you learn about your body, which you can then use for the rest of your life to improve your health. You learn things that are so counter to our cultural beliefs that the only way to actually learn them, most likely, is by experiencing it yourself.

To your health, friend! :)

10/28/2006
Posted Hawaii photos!

10/15/2006
Wow... I haven't updated this thing in almost 4 months? Yeesh!

This weekend has reminded me how very special Santa Cruz is. Saturday night I went to an A-Cafe (anarchist cafe) gathering at a house... it was remarkable. Tons of super nice people, good conversation, not a single drunk or obnoxious person (but plenty of delicious home-brewed beer drinkin'!), skill workshops, a riotous puppet show, tons of home-press literature, lots of fiddle playing and dancing, and a chicken. Can you ask for more?

Yes! Followed by a brazen squaredance today, where a few fiddle players and many dozens of people infiltrate common spaces and have a blast squaredancin' like a bunch of idiots. It was too fun.

There are two other special things about Santa Cruz that people in other cities might want to know about and start up wherever they are. The first is the Guerilla Drive-In, where they project movies every friday night, outdoors somewhere, usually on a large warehouse wall. People (mostly on bicycles) bring blankets and chairs and beverages and enjoy a good (usually subersive or thought-provoking) movie. If there's nothing like this in your city, maybe you should start one...?

The other thing is Free Skool (at tribe.net) (in Santa Cruz) (wiki). The wiki article makes it sound like an official school, but it's not. You just grab the calendar and drop by whatever classes you feel like. It's all totally free - they're classes taught by people, for people, and not for money. It's really awesome. They have it in a lot of cities, actually. Classes include bike repair, spanish conversation skills, survival gourmet, trash orchestra!, knitting, baking, yoga, and (truly) all kinds of other stuff.

This kind of stuff gives me hope in a world that is increasingly becoming one giant corporate monoculture. When everyone consumes the same digital entertainment produced by a handful of people, how can you expect to learn anything new or useful, or feel connected in meaningful and human ways? It's no wonder everyone is on anti-depressants. Maybe they should prescribe fiddles.

6/30/2006
Found this great article today on Warren Buffet's recent decision to give his billions to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for them to philanthropically allocate. Counter to many computer geeks, I've long been a huge supporter of Microsoft. I think a lot of people are anti-Microsoft just because they're the top dog. But I've always thought they did an amazing job (once you get past an initial learning curve) of enabling developers and giving them amazing tools. (That was further bolstered recently by their DX10 reference rasterizer I'm using at work; it is so robust my jaw is permanently buried two feet in the floor.)

Anyway, the other - and much bigger - reason for my support has been due to what Bill & Melinda have been doing with their fortune. Maybe eight(?) years ago I read that they had decided to leave only $10 million to each child, and to give the rest back to society. Then I started to read articles on how they were doing the giving, and I was blown away. They've been using this vast wealth in the most efficient ways possible. They don't have the ethnocentric or nationalistic giving barriers that most people have. And they're logical about it; they don't just give where it feels good to give - they allocate the money where it will make the biggest difference. And they don't just give - they create infrastructure and organizations and set up conferences to bring in experts and get them solving problems that are tractable but yet unsolved, because rich white people would have no benefit in solving them.

So - go Microsoft! I hope you earn as much money as possible. Maybe you don't do everything right, but in the end, you have my support all the way. (Sorry Linux guys. I think Linux is great too. But I hope you see my point!) Warren Buffet's decision to let the Gates Foundation handle his fortune is a testament to how amazing it is. Hopefully it will inspire other rich people to put their fortunes in good hands as well. You can't take it with you, and it would likely just ruin your children...

6/14/2006
Hey, it's been some time, maybe I should post something here eh?

Life has been (mostly) wonderful lately. I've been playing with a Gamelan orchestra which has set my brain on fire. It's way too fun. I would probably call this my first real exposure to playing music, and it's absolutely wonderful. We played at an all-weekend hippie rave event in the redwoods recently, called Raindance (photos here), which was a super blast.

I'm taking a few days off this weekend to go camping in Sequoia National Park & Kings Canyon, which are down in the Sierra Nevadas. My friend Beth from high school has driven out here for a few weeks and we're heading down there with her son Cade (he's 2), it should be a blast. They have the largest trees (by volume) there in the world - by far. They're *huge*. Some have circumferences of over 100 feet and are almost 300 feet tall. (Up north are the tallest trees - around ~320-330 feet tall - but they're not nearly as massive.)

I have a public service announcement to make. DO NOT eat mushrooms you find in the woods. Some you can eat and feel fine for a while, and then three weeks later you will suddenly die of organ failure. There are about 20 different types of unpleasant death from eating unknown mushrooms. So don't do it! (Don't worry, I didn't. Sort of.)

I saw An Inconvenient Truth (the Al Gore global warming movie) this weekend. It was fantastic. You know you're a freak if this movie makes you cry at the end! It was really good. I even learned a few things. I didn't know some of the nuances of ice shelf melting, and it never occured to me that the earth would have an annual CO2 cycle ("breath") because most of the land is in the northern hemisphere! It's a fantastic movie and it seems like it would even be palatable to conservatives, thankfully - except for the longer-than-they-should-have-been scenes about the 2000 election. ** One thing I was very disappointed in, though, was that I didn't hear the word "extinction" once. People on the other side of this debate love to mention that the atmosphere has had higher CO2 and higher temperatures before. This is true. But the difference is that those changes all happened slowly, over thousands or millions of years. This is happening fast - REALLY fast. Species don't have time to adapt, and they go extinct. The longer the lifespan of the species (plant OR animal), the fewer generations there are to absorb the impact of the change (through genetic adaptation), and the less likely it is that the species will survive. Not a word about this. And honestly, this thought occurred to me only recently - I haven't heard it mentioned anywhere yet. Maybe you heard it here first...?

The other thing I'd point out is this: in the end of the movie, they mention a few dozen ways you can reduce your global warming impact. They mention buying carbon credits (green tags or CarbonFund/Terrapasses), and they mention buying a hybrid. But what no one talks about is that if your main concern is carbon (and not our limited supply of fossil fuels), buying a hybrid is a HUGE waste of money. You could spend the same $ on green tags and sequester (or prevent) many many times more carbon! You won't be driving the cool car, but you'll be making a much bigger difference. (Or you could do both. If you're overpaid for whatever it is you do.) Anyway, I would love to see a chart plotting all the things they mentioned, in order of cost ($) per ton of carbon saved.

You might have noticed that I redesigned the front page to the website here a few weeks ago. I hope it's easier to navigate now. My site had grown into cybersprawl (gasp, I hate cheesy lingo) for the last 10 years and was due for an overhaul. Now you should be able to jump to anything within two clicks, like a good website. =)

It's hard to believe the solstice is right around the corner. Life flies by so fast. I am 28 now, whoa! It feels like a nice age. I feel good. I have realized lately that this is my life - all the little moments, likeable or not, including all the things I'm doing and my attitudes toward them - and that if I want my life to be better someday, I need to change it *now*. So, I've been doing that, and it's been great! There is no future... there is only this. Woot, brother. Woot.

4/2/2006
I just picked up what is perhaps the most awesome masterpiece ever worked by human hands (in my opinion, of course).

UPDATE: I posted a movie of Lee solving the puzzle. It's quite amazing, check it out.

UPDATE 2: Awesome! A podcast interview with Lee where he talks about some of his puzzles and how they're made and solved. You won't believe it.

It's a barcode burr puzzle designed & made by my friend, Lee Krasnow. It's a wooden cube, about 3" to a side, made from six identical crazy-looking shard-like pieces. There is no empty space inside. On the faces where these six pieces interface, there are pins in some faces, and grooves in others, for the pins to ride in, making little mini-mazes. The effect of this is that one piece's motion will be restricted by the position of another piece. All in all it takes a giant binary sequence of 127 moves to entirely disassemble the puzzle into its six pieces. Check out some pictures I took, showing it in various stages of disassembly:



To get the hang of it at first, I had to stick numbers on that identified the six pieces, otherwise wrapping your head around this thing is impossible. Also notice the piece of paper behind the puzzle; that is the list of moves (64) required to get the first piece out. Then it takes 32 more to get the second piece out, then 16 for the third, and so on - for a total of 127 steps.

I simply can't believe it is possible to build something like this.

I think he has a few left (and he doesn't think he'll ever make any more!) if anyone is interested in picking one up. =)

3/18/2006
Just updated the Veggie Guide! [ view in web browser ] [ download Word document ]

2/18/2006
I just wrote this letter to some of my friends. Thought I'd share. It's kinda fun.

Hey hey hey hey friends!

My housemates and I did something super fun tonight. We went to Safeway (disclaimer: an uncommon destination) and were standing in the checkout line and noticing the horrible assortment of magazines they put in your face at the checkout. So we hatched the idea to go to the magazine isle and pulled a few copies each of: Scientific American, Yoga Journal, The Economist, Sunset Magazine, Utne Reader, and so on - the magazines that help empower or educate people, rather than making them feel insecure or obsess on stupid celebrity gossip. We then took this fresh assortment to the endcaps at the checkouts and put them in front of the most sickly-looking-girl magazines we could find. It was a strangely delightful thing to do.

Hopefully that little maneuver encouraged people to buy magazines that are better for their mental & physical health, as well as sent a message to the store manager. It's not a super genius new idea, but it's subversive, harmless, positive, and SUPER FUN. I really highly recommend it. =)

May the universe massage your spirit in seductive ways.

Love, Ryan

1/30/2006


I had a bright idea. I recently ordered about a dozen different decently-priced compact fluorescent light bulbs, of a variety of brands, from two websites. Then I rated each one of them based on:

1. color - the light from most CF bulbs is either too stark white (fluorescentish) or too yellowy yellow; I wanted bulbs with a nice in-between shade, which is usually a gorgeous, slightly rosy tone. I judged how the light hit both skin and walls/furniture.
2. length - how long is it? important so that it will fit into smaller sockets (remember, CF's have that big base) and the ugly spiral won't be visible.
3. start delay - how long does it take the bulb to kick on (when cold)? (they can range from instant to almost a full second)
4. cost - the cheaper, the better
5. packaging - the last concern, but still a concern. Less packaging (cardboard) is better; so is (plastic) packaging you don't need a chainsaw to open!

• The ultra-ultra-compact (4.25") Maxlite Micromax Spiral at bulbs.com, for $4. This one is very bright, comes on instantly, is the shortest bulb I've ever seen, has the perfect color, and even has good packaging. Order a whole bunch of them!!
• The also-very-compact (4.50") Maxlite Spiral at Aubuchon.com, for $2.50. Just as good as the Micromax (delay, color, etc.) but 38% cheaper and only 0.25" longer.

• There was no clear winner in this category; none of the bulbs were worth special ordering.

• The 5.0" Maxlite Micromax Spiral from Aubuchon.com, for $2.50. The packaging on these is lousy but in all other respects, this is a vastly superior bulb. (Same great light color, comes on instantly, etc.)

11/29/2005
It's that time of year again, when tens of millions of Americans go outside and chop down perfectly healthy, carbon-absorbing trees to place indoors for a month, and then chuck to the curb. Why not buy a smaller (and much easier to manage) one with the rootball intact, and plant it when you're done? Then it can have a long life of carbon-absorbing goodness. (That's even better than getting a plastic tree!) Killing Christmas trees sure was fun back in the day, but things have drastically changed, and we need to rethink our traditions before we destroy our environment. That means changing our own behaviors AND talking to others about it, encouraging them to do things differently, and more sustainably.

While you're at it, think about this as a gift for a loved one this holiday season: a Terrapass. For around $30-$50 you can make their car carbon-neutral for the whole year! (It will make up for the ~8,000 pounds of CO2 emissions their car generates from burning gas.)

UPDATE: I used to recommend Terrapass, but now recommend Carbonfund for several reasons. First, they have better prices (per ton CO2). Second, they're a nonprofit (which means you can deduct your donation). And third, the types of sequestration they do are more effective and long-term than Terrapass's.

While I'm ranting, I want to point something out. It's about tax cuts and trickle-down economics. You always hear the rich saying that we need super-low taxes to encourage economic investment. Sure, that's true, it does encourage investment. The implication is that without it, economic investment will be discouraged, and the economy will crash. But think about it for a second. Think about a billionaire. Do you think he or she decided to be a billionaire over being an artichoke farmer because of the tax cuts? No. He likely did it because he's either obsessed with money and power, or because he's naturally driven to succeed and produce and create. Those are the preconditions that drive people to become super rich and powerful, and they're the ones handling 80%+ of the cash, and hence the investment, in our economy. Now... imagine that taxes go up (gasp). Do you think he's suddenly going to call it quits? Hell no! He'll just work harder. Invest smarter. Sure, he might divert 5% to foreign investments. But not much of it; the U.S. already has some of the lowest tax rates in the developed world. We'd have to seriously hike our rates to start driving investment overseas. Meanwhile, allegedly-temporary-but-usually-permanent tax breaks are handed out every 7 years when the market crashes. When are they to be repealed? It's pretty hard to take that back out of somebody's pocket once you've put it there. (and, and of course, the economy would crash and the world would end, or so they will tell you.) So on we slog, forward march, into a future of ever-dropping tax rates and ever-declining social programs and safety nets... more costly and poorer quality education... ever-widening gaps between rich and poor... more struggle for hardworking low-income people, more crime, more unhappiness. Even the handsomely profitable corporation I work for (yes, I am a stinking hypocrite) almost never pays more than 20% in taxes... less than a poor person. Is the economy really the only thing that matters? But the real question is... does THAT even matter? Would the economy really crash if we hiked tax rates? I don't believe so. I think it's a rich status quo that's aggressively propagating that belief, and no one is challenging it.

I'd also like to say something about the gap between rich & poor, and our standard of living. Right now, the distribution of wealth is very polarized (more than ever... it's been increasing for 80 years and is still increasing at full speed). Lots of people are buying $50,000 luxury SUV's while others are struggling to afford healthcare, education, or even decent housing. Haves and have-nots. What are the haves doing with their excess cash? They're not (usually) giving it to charity. They're not solving the world's problems with it. They're buying cars and yachts and mansions and vacations... stuff that gets them off. We are surrounded by it, it's the norm - if you have money, you blow it on this kind of stuff. Now, granted, you worked hard, so spend a little on yourself. But how about spending a little on NOT yourself, eh? If the money flowed more in that direction, we'd have hundreds of thousands more people working on renewable energy technology, efficient organic agriculture, recycling, pollution control, curing disease, building houses cheaper, etc. - instead of building iPods, designing expensive advertisements, and building SUV's. It would be a different world. And it's all driven by... each of us. By me, and by you, every time we buy something. By where we spend our almighty dollar. Should I buy a $10,000 wristwatch or 200 car-years worth of carbon credits, for the same price? Well, at least one can shove the wristwatch up one's ass...

"Vote with your dollar." It's worth far more than your electoral vote.

10/24/2005
Updated some photos!

10/19/2005
Hello hello! I guess it's been a while since I last posted. How sad, lots of great stuff has happened that I should have been writing about!

Life is good. We had our first drops of rain in six months just a few nights ago, at night, and they made the most beautiful sounds as they fell. And the morning sun has been unobscured by fog lately, allowing that gorgeous golden sunlight to hit things before 10 am, which is quite a treat in this often-foggy-in-the-morning little place. The full moon has been gorgeous this past week, too.

Laura had her baby! Little Ruby ("Roo") is the most adorable little creature I've ever seen. Super mega congratulations Laura, Chris, Forrest, Anaiis, and Cosmo! :)

Some friends and I did a KFC protest a few weeks ago and a nice man named Bradley from Santa Cruz Indy Media came by and covered the event. He and a young lady doing a film project interviewed me on animal rights stuff: what the KFC protests are about, vegetarianism, health, making moral decisions, etc. If you know me and I've never ranted to you about it (ha! right) or if you'd like to hear some of my thoughts on the subject, it turned out really well, and you can get the 12-minute interview here in .mp3 format.

My friend Luke sent me a link to some funny dinosaur comics at qwantz.com. There are hundreds of them. They are neat. That is why I like it.

My friend Rob had a loft-warming party recently up in San Francisco and I met a nice young woman named Natalie there. She promised to send me a cool DVD and I promised to send her a magical Mountain Goats compilation. Which we both did. Little did I know that the DVD would have one of the funniest things I've ever seen on it. (And I haven't even found the short she meant for me to see yet!)

My mom is in Italy right now, believe it or not! She called me today - she was having a *blast*. I am *so* happy for her. (She's never been to Europe before.)

I also have been meaning to share some insights into getting better gas mileage. (Boy am I glad I have a hybrid these days, with gas at $3 a gallon!) Anyway, I've learned that by capping my rpm's at 3,000 when I'm driving up a really steep hill will improve my (long-term average) gas mileage from 43 to 46; and by trying not to drive much above 65 mph, I get a whopping 48.5 long-term average (for my last 2,000 miles!). I knew wind resistance was roughly proportional to V^2 (velocity squared), but I didn't realize it would make that big of a difference! (Oh, and I also keep the tires pumped up to about 35 psi cold / 40 hot - the car handles much better and it makes a ~2 mpg difference.) I also take a spot behind a fast-moving giant truck when I can get it - that makes another 2-3 mpg difference as well (on the highway - this one's all about the wind).

Ok... I think I'm out of steam for now. Notice it's been 5 months since my last post... I love programming but I hate doing other stuff on the computer (even though I often do because it's more efficient), especially when I'm at home, and that's the reason I seldom update this thing.

I leave you with a wonderful poem about endings:

Do not stand at my grave and weep I am not there; I do not sleep. I am a thousand winds that blow, I am the diamond glints on snow, I am the sun on ripened grain, I am the gentle autumn rain. When you awaken in the morning's hush I am the swift uplifting rush Of quiet birds in circled flight. I am the soft starlight at night. Do not stand at my grave and cry, I am not there; I did not die.                                 --Mary Frye

5/14/2005
I designed a cool t-shirt today:



Teeheehee... how fun is that. The image is "Saturno Devorando su Hijo" (Saturn Devouring his Son) by Goya, which, back in high school, I thought was the coolest thing ever painted. Ironic that I now find immense value in it for a totally different reason (and it kinda grosses me out nowadays). Click on the image to see it bigger, or click here to get the large, losslessly-compressed TIF file.

5/4/2005
More great news - MILKDROP IS NOW OPEN SOURCE! Happy day! If you go to the main MilkDrop page there's a link right there to the source code. (5/14/05 update: you can now also visit the SourceForge project at https://sourceforge.net/projects/milkdrop/ )

2/3/2005
Great news - I have begun the process of open-sourcing Drempels, so others can help develop it! It should appear on SourceForge.net in the next few days.

2/3/2005
I was in rainy 'ol Whistler with some pals last week. We went there to snowboard, but the rain made sure we had very little of that. So, we came up with Moon Rocks. A Moon Rocks is a drink; it's a mixture of (vanilla) soymilk, (real) maple syrup, and either whiskey or dark rum (bacardi gold). We drank a bunch 'o those suckers, because man, they're GOOD.

After that, we had a nice partie at my house. I decided to make a bunch of Moon Rocks for the occasion. That led to formalizing the recipe for easy manufacturing of pitchers of this fine drink. And leads me to the point of this post. To make a pitcher of 'em, take 1 carton of vanilla soymilk (the small ones - like 1.2 L or something like that) and pour it in a pitcher. Then add 0.75 cup of real maple syrup (not that high fructose corn syrup crap) and 0.75 cup of bacardi gold (or whiskey). You're set. Serve on the rocks or straight. (The official way is straight, though, because there more irony (wrong word, sue me) in a drink called Moon Rocks if it's not on the rocks.) (Oh, and by the way, you refer to a glass of it as "a Moon Rocks" and you refer to the drink in general as "Moon Rocks".)

12/16/2004
It's that season... the season of giving. I've been trying to figure out ways to help encourage people to give lately. A few bucks here and there makes a big difference in the long run. So I've set up a "charity gift list" at whatgoesaround.org.

Over the years, I've never taken money from individual users for any of my visualization software (although early versions of Geiss did feature a voluntary "send me the lowest bill of your home currency" appeal, as more of a novelty than anything else). What I should have been doing all that time, though, was redirecting people to the handful of charities that I think do very important work. So, I've finally set it up:

Click here to see my charity list and, if you like, donate a few bucks
to one or more of these organizations.

WhatGoesAround.org is very cool - the money goes 100% directly to the charities (except for the standard % that goes to the credit card company, if you pay via credit card). If you are making a large give to a single organization on the list, consider writing a check straight to them. Giving through WhatGoesAround.org is also cool because you don't get on any mailing lists (i.e. the charities you give to won't be able to spam you with paper mail!).

Thank you very much for your support, and happy holidays!

10/23/2004
Updates!

Life is good. Went camping in Big Sur last weekend with some friends, and had a fantastic time, despite getting absolutely pummeled with rain.

Saw Ween here in Santa Cruz last week. I love Ween. They are the best!

Now there are some thoughts I've been having, and some info I've been wanting to share, so here goes...

VOTEPAIR BEGINS VOTE MATCHING
If you are (or know) a Nader voter in a swing state, PLEASE check out http://www.votepair.org/. They put you in e-mail communication with a person in another state with whom it would be strategic for you to agree to cast each others' votes, but in your own states. For example, just say your name is Wiefer and you're in California and you want Kerry to win, but you know your vote won't count because Kerry's going to get California anyway. And say Billy (who votepair.org hooks you up with) is in Ohio (a very swingy state) and wants to vote for Nader, so Nader can get 5% of the popular vote (to get federal matching funds in 2008). Well, if you agree to trade votes, your Kerry vote (cast in Ohio) actually counts, and his Nader vote (cast in CA) still counts toward the 5% popular vote Nader needs. You both win!
     Now, before you go jumping to conclusions about whether or not it's "wrong" to do this, please apply those prized critical thinking skills. Read their FAQ - it is detailed and honest. Consider that the electoral college makes most peoples' votes NOT count, and this is one way people can overcome that, and make their vote count. If everyone used votepair, in fact, it would (almost) be the equivalent of having a popular vote, instead of the insanely-thresholded electoral college crap we have today. (Remember, Gore won the popular vote by 1 million votes in 2000!)
     Keep in mind that although a few people will try to abuse the system, there are strong deterrents - mainly, the fact that you and this person will likely exchange email several times and you can figure out if they're full of crap or not. And even if they trick you, so what, you haven't lost anything - Kerry will still win California; but statistically, if 80% of the participants are honest, you've gained 0.8 votes for Kerry in Ohio (just to go with our example).

EACH OF US HAS ONLY FOUR OPTIONS
...regarding the eating of factory-farmed meat (vs. free range meat). They are:

1. Ignorance - you've never bothered to investigate the horrible lives these animals must endure.
2. Indifference - you know the facts, but you just don't care enough to change your eating habits or where you buy your food. The 2,000 animals you'll eat over your lifetime are sad about this.
3. Cruelty - you know the facts, but because nobody's going to tell YOU what to do(!), or possibly because you're an asshole, you will go on supporting this industry with your dollars. (I'd like to remind these folks that just because an animal can't do math doesn't mean it doesn't have a full-blown nervous system, complete with emotions and desires - ever had a pet dog?)
4. Abstinence - you know the facts, and you've taken the compassionate choice of boycotting factory farmed meat. You now eat meat only when you can get it free range, or you might have given it up entirely.

• Boycott factory-farmed meat.
  • only eat meat when you can get it free-range/organic.
  • every time you can't get it, request it. say, "I'd buy meat here if it was free-range... can you please get it?" or "I'd be happier if you had free-range meat." They're not likely to order it until people ask, and they realize people want it.
• For meat/dairy/eggs, eat only organic & free-range. (this means no hormone treatments, no antibiotics, and usually, much better living conditions.)
• If you can't get free-range meat, think carefully about what kind of factory-farmed meat you're going to eat.
  • ocean-caught fish is a (relatively) good choice. They lived their whole lives naturally, then asphyxiate over the course of a few minutes. They have it the best, by far, of all of our food animals, and fish is much healthier than the other meats. (Of course, overfishing is a huge problem, so don't go splurging!)
  • choose beef over poultry or pork. Bulls have it pretty good (relative to the others), grazing outside; and one bull feeds a lot of people.
  • if you can afford it, get a steak instead of a hamburger. 80% of the hamburger in this country comes from spent dairy cows (not bulls), which have horrible, miserable lives... whereas, relative to other food animals, bulls have it pretty good.
  • avoid pork - pigs are generally even smarter than dogs, but on factory farms, they are often confined to a metal stall the size of their body for most of their adult lives. They quickly go insane. Plus, they're so biologically similar to us that we use their heart valves for our grandpas. Makes eating them seem mildly cannibalistic, doesn't it?
  • avoid chicken and turkey because 1) the factory farming conditions for birds are absolutely revolting, and 2) they're so small; it takes hundreds of them to equal one bull.
• Never, ever eat foie gras, veal, or lobster. Do a little google research if you don't know why eating these things makes you an evil person. (The lobster is because it's cooked alive. Try that one on yourself. It's no fun. Try it to a pigeon in public - you'll get arrested; do it to a lobster at a restaurant - nobody cares. How pristinely logical and fair we are!)
• Buy free-range eggs. Factory farmed "broiler chickens" (the ones we eat) live in huge warehouses, where they are crowded, surrounded by corpses, and don't have access to much fresh air. They are routinely fed antibiotics so that they can weather these conditions without dying. But egg-laying hens have it much worse - they are kept 5-6 in a small cage, where they're lucky if they can even spread a wing. According to PETA, it takes an average of over 30 bird-hours in these conditions to produce just 1 egg. Please buy free-range, organic eggs!
• Eat less meat. Once a day (or less) is probably ideal, health-wise, anyway. Everybody wins, and you even have some incentive to go out & try new, delicious foods.

9/21/2004
It's election time again, and just so you know:

I attacked and took over 2 countries.

I spent the US surplus and bankrupted the US Treasury.

I shattered the record for the biggest annual deficit in history (not easy)!

I set an economic record for the most personal bankruptcies filed in any 12 month period.

I set all-time record for the biggest drop in the history of the stock market.

I set a record for most days on vacation by any president in US History (tough to beat my dad's, but I did).

After taking the entire month of August off for vacation, I presided over the worst security failure in US History.

I set the record for most campaign fund raising trips by any president in US History.

In my first two years in office over 2 million Americans lost their jobs.

I cut unemployment benefits for more out-of-work Americans than any other president in US History.

I set the all-time record for most real estate foreclosures in a 12-month period.

I appointed more convicted criminals to administration positions than any president in US History.

I set the record for the fewest press conferences of any president, since the advent of TV.

I signed more laws and executive orders amending the Constitution than any other US President in history.

I presided over the biggest energy crises in US History and refused to intervene when corruption was revealed.

I cut health care benefits for war veterans.

I set the all-time record for most people worldwide to simultaneously take to the streets to protest me (15 million people), shattering the record for protest against any person in the history of mankind.

I dissolved more international treaties than any president in US History.

I've made my presidency the most secretive and unaccountable of any in US History.

Members of my cabinet are the richest of any administration in US History. (The poorest multimillionaire, Condoleeza Rice, has a Chevron oil tanker named after her.)

I am the first president in US history to have all 50 states of the Union simultaneously struggle against bankruptcy.

I presided over the biggest corporate stock market fraud in any market in any country in the history of the world.

I am the first president in US history to order a US Attack AND military occupation of a sovereign nation, and I did so against the will of the United Nations and the vast majority of the international community.

I have created the largest government department bureaucracy in the history of the United States, called the "Bureau of Homeland Security"(only one letter away from BS).

I set the all-time record for biggest annual budget spending increases, more than any other president in US history (Ronnie was tough to beat, but I did it!!).

I am the first president in US history to compel the United Nations remove the US from the Human Rights Commission.

I am the first president in US history to have the United Nations remove the US from the Elections Monitoring Board.

I removed more checks and balances, and have the least amount of congressional oversight than any presidential administration in US history.

I rendered the entire United Nations irrelevant. I withdrew from the World Court of Law.

I refused to allow inspectors access to US prisoners of war and by default no longer abide by the Geneva Conventions.

I am the first president in US history to refuse United Nations election inspectors access during the 2002 US elections.

I am the all-time US (and world) record holder for most corporate campaign donations.

The biggest lifetime contributor to my campaign, who is also one of my best friends, presided over one of the largest corporate bankruptcy frauds in world history (Kenneth Lay, former CEO of Enron Corporation).

I spent more money on polls and focus groups than any president in US history.

I am the first president to run and hide when the US came under attack (and then lied, saying the enemy had the code to Air Force 1)

I am the first US President to establish a secret shadow government.

I took the world's sympathy for the US after 9/11, and in less than a year made the US the most resented country in the world (possibly the biggest diplomatic failure in US and world history).

I am the first US president in history to have a majority of the people of Europe (71%) view my presidency as the biggest threat to world peace and stability.

I changed US Policy to allow convicted criminals to be awarded government contracts.

I set the all-time record for the number of administration appointees who violated US Law by not selling their huge investments in corporations bidding for government contracts.

I have removed more freedoms and civil liberties for Americans than any other president in US History.

I entered office with the strongest economy in US History and in less than two years turned every single economic category heading straight down.

RECORDS AND REFERENCES:

I have at least one conviction for drunk driving in Maine (Texas driving record has been erased and is not available).

I was AWOL from the National Guard and deserted the military during time of war.

I refuse to take a drug test or even answer any questions about drug use. (wink, wink)

All records of my tenure as governor of Texas have been spirited away to my fathers library, sealed in secrecy and unavailable for public view.

All records of any SEC investigations into my insider trading or bankrupt companies are sealed in secrecy and unavailable for public view.

All minutes of meetings of any public corporation for which I served on the board are sealed in secrecy and unavailable for public view.

Any records or minutes from meetings I (or my VP) attended regarding public energy policy are sealed in secrecy and unavailable for public review.

With Love,

GEORGE W. BUSH
The White House, Washington, DC
Note: this information should be useful to voters in the 2004 election.
Circulate to as many citizens you think would be helped to be reminded about this record.


Other useful stuff:
     http://www.electoral-vote.com/ - how it would turn out if the election were held today.
     Bush vs. Kerry on science
     And don't forget the lies Bush was spewing in March 2001, prior to invading Iraq!

Don't be a lamer - please vote in November! To register, get the form at the post office, and drop it in the mail. Grab a stack of forms & give them to your friends!

7/7/2004
I was just reading through my [digital] journal and found this wonderful old entry:

As my boss often says, "If nobody is puking, you are simply not having fun yet." I truly believe in such a fathom. Think on the word "emetic." An emetic is something that is of persuasion to be Causing vomiting, or provoking vomiting from Greek emetikos, of course. Puking often prompt a depletion of the electrolytes, for which aloe, bandaid and gatorade readily remedy with fantastic pluses appended after the name. Please to use sparingly as electrolytic mosfet is lodged in your chuck.

6/22/2004
If you haven't played The Bush Game yet, I highly recommend it. WARNING: there are some parts with serious vulgarity. Beyond that, though, it is a masterpiece. If you have [or are?] a conservative relative or friend who can't wrap their brain around the 900 ways Bush has totally looted this country's treasury and future, this is a fantastic way to educate them about it. It takes about an hour to get through, but the game only takes up a minor portion of the time; most of it is like watching a documentary, clicking through the scenes and the dialog. It goes into great depth on the Bush tax cuts, including the estate tax and dividend tax; trickle-down economics and the deficit; how all of these tax cuts were distributed between the rich and poor; and so on. To boot, the whole thing is funny, and has decent music. The thing that I really appreciated, though, is that the explanations are good, and that they don't mislead. They give you facts and statistics; there are very few subjective generalizations. (Well, okay, there are some... but it's better than a lot of information I've come across. Most of them are in the name of humor.) And it stars He-Man, the Hulk, Mr. T, the Teletubbies, Rosie O'Donnell, Voltron, and much, much more...

5/31/2004
My friend Johan sent me a link to these interesting thoughts written by Kurt Vonnegut a few weeks ago. Quite interesting. And my friend Luke recently sent me a link to this article about Feldenkrais, a healing art that I knew very little about beforehand, but now am pretty interested in checking out. (Luke is studying to be a practitioner.) Anyway, just posting these here because I found them very interesting and maybe, just maybe, you will too.

I'd also like to comment about my lack of political bite on this blog(?) lately. The sense of urgency is gone, for me. After 9/11, and before this bogus war began, I felt like we were all being completely neo-conned, and that 95% of us were buying straight into it - and we were. It scared the gonads out of me, and so I spoke as loudly as possible, to bring these discussions to the table. (I recall my family being downright frightened I'd become a target for the CIA or something. I never bought it - there were too many hundreds of thousands of me's - but still, what does that say?) Anyway, it's better now - about a year and a half ago, public debate started to open up. I'm not as scared for our future (and the future of the world) now. I know people are smart, and that the more these things are talked about, the more we'll all come to the right decisions (whatever those are). But the more censorship we have - explicit (Clear Channel, Disney) or implicit (shallow patriotism) - the less we will collectively work things out and come to good decisions; the less our democracy will function. Things are in the open now - Pelosi and Gore even recently took the final step, being brave enough to publicly mention how incompetent Bush is (wake up!, it's been clear as glass for years now). I am sleeping better at night now.

One more thing. Most conservatives that I talk to back up their steadfast support of Bush, especially when comparing to Kerry, by saying, "I'd rather have a bad leader with strong convictions than a waffley, fickle muff-head like Kerry." Personally, I can't understand this; I think it's a stringy rationalization for voting for a weak representative of the neocon agenda. But I hear it over and over. But I just don't see how that's going to solve a $500 billion-a-year record deficit, soothe a world united against us, or cause just one domestic issue to actually get some attention for once. (Personally, I think a huge bonus of the "War on Terror", for Bush, is that it draws attention away - far away - from his ineptitude at handling domestic issues.)

I'm voting for Kerry, only because he's not as bad as Bush. But my heart, and my logic-driven over-thinking engineering mind, will always be (unfalteringly) with Dennis Kucinich.

5/24/2004
Hmm, I should probably put a little update here for my friends & family. Let's see... what's new?

I took a few weeks off after our crazy NV40 launch (the new chip we built at nVidia; also known as the GeForce 6800). I painted my office (one wall a vibrate matte sun-gold, the other three a light, desaturated green), went snowboarding with Johan up in Tahoe, hung out with Joe & Kaite (who are moving here soon, yay!!) and went to Mexico for a week. Okay, okay, it was Cancun, which is pretty different. But I got to speak insane amounts of Spanish and swim in a warm ocean for a change. Not to mention that the beach was absolutely gorgeous. Plus, they are pretty responsible about the ecology down there; that was nice to see. (I guess it's the least you can do after decimating a several-mile strip of beachfront jungle.) I also finally did Scuba for the first time (wow! except for the mild-case-of-the-Bends) and finally, finally figured out how to bodysurf. That was quite fun.

Hmmm... what else... I finally caved in and got a cell phone. We'll see how handy these little things really are. (I assume it will come in fairly handy, at least once or twice a year. But when I factor in the amount of life-work-energy that paying that bill every month represents, I wonder if it's worth it. That will be decided later.)

Um, that's it for now. :)

4/13/2004
First, happy birthday to my cousin Meaghan! :)

Second, I've finally finished my 12-page "veggie guide", as I've informally been calling it. The official title is "Eating for Life: How to Ditch Meat and Improve your Health" [ view in web browser ] [ download Word document ]. The introduction describes it quite well:

In a dizzying world of fast, fake, and processed foods, this guide will help you get back to a healthy, natural diet, and help you support your needs comfortably - without taking 32 lives per year. It can help you eat far less meat, or none at all. It's a guide to successful, sustainable vegetarianism - not "frozen-broccoli-and-pasta" vegetarianism. And it answers the question: "If you're supposed to eat a minimal amount of meat - or no meat at all - what the heck do you eat?" And you might be pleasantly surprised, and inspired, by the answers. Reduced meat consumption is excellent for your health; it increases life expectancy and is directly linked to lower rates of heart disease, cancer, osteoporosis, obesity and many other conditions & illnesses. Inside, you'll find all the information you need to make this transition, and adopt a diet far healthier than what most Americans eat (on a good day). You'll find tons of ideas on great plant-based protein sources, and many other great foods, as well as tips on how to shop for them & prepare them. You'll find pertinent information about vitamins and minerals, especially those of concern to vegetarians (or anyone who is eating a small amount of meat). You'll even get tips on shopping at a natural foods store (which can be confusing at first), a handful of excellent recipes, and a "big picture" framework for bringing it all together & keeping it simple. Reducing your meat consumption is also good for your fellow inhabitants of the earth. In these pages, you'll find the essential information you need to save, on average, 32 animals' lives per year - try to beat that by adopting from the Humane Society! If everyone in the U.S. were to have this knowledge and reform their diet, over 9 Billion unnecessary deaths (and, in the case of birds & pigs, miserable lives) could be avoided each year. Just remember: any reduction in meat consumption is worthwhile; being strictly vegetarian (or vegan) might not be for everyone, but minimalism - taking a minimum of life, and never more - should be. It is the author's hope that this guide serves you well, informs you, inspires you, and makes you healthier & happier.

Please feel free to download it, print it, read it, study it, highlight it, snuggle it, braise, toast or steam it, make copies, share it, read it on the radio, paste it on buses, or leave it in random public places. =)

Also, in case anyone might find them useful, I've posted these: (Word documents)
    [ critical thinking questions ]
    [ famous quotes ]

2/24/2004
Today President Bush officially endorsed a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. Apparently, somehow, equal rights for gay people and straight people fall outside of the definitions of freedom and equality that he preached so much at the onset of his wars. All I have to say is, George, and my fellow Americans, keep your religious beliefs, and your bigotry, out of my constitution. That's a document meant to support and guarantee freedom and equality, period.

Some believe being gay is 'unnatural.' That's false, though - it's extremely common in the animal kingdom, and throughout human history (rampant in some cultures). Plus, what is 'natural' about anything these days? Why don't we ban everything that's unnatural: pesticides, cars, television, pharmaceuticals, etc. - and legalize everything natural: cannabis, opium, prostitution, etc? Of course, it's not that simple.

Some also believe that being gay is a 'sin'. First of all, that's a belief largely based on religion; and the last time I checked, we had an alleged separation of church and state. Second, calling it a 'sin' it completely invalidates the humanity of gay people. It views them not as people, but as sub-humans busily performing deviant sexual acts. Sorry, but the gay couples in this country who want to get married are largely normal people, like you and me, who happen to be in love, committed to each other, and sharing a life together much like a straight couple would; they just happen to be of the same gender. If you're straight, then likely, from the time you were extremely young you can remember looking at the opposite sex and feeling an attraction there. Doesn't that tell you something? Do you think gay people choose to be gay? The belligerents in this debate should be praying to their God(s) that they weren't wired the other way.

So they can't have kids naturally. But neither can women after menopause, or people with fertility problems. So we s