Infocard: Useful Knots

I often need knots. I have often learned the knots I need. But these two things never happen close enough together to result in long term knowledge storage. This Make blog post gave me the idea of collecting a few useful ones and putting them on wallet card.

Front:

Back:

Printed front and back on a business card and then laminated, it can nestle in my wallet until I need them. Alternatively, for this particular application, I could secret cards in amongst any ropes I might use so they are johnny-on-the-spot at the right moment.

And speaking of applications, I was also thinking this could be a neat idea for other things. How to mix drinks, electronics cheatsheet, math formulae, What To Do If Arrested, etc. In fact, it seems like such an obvious idea I spent some time googling to see if anyone had set up a Web 2.0 social networking site to do this. Nothing. So I hereafter document my process for my future self and anyone else who wants to make one:

1. Design it up a bit. In this case, I tried to pick some knots that were both unlike each other and also widely useful. There's a loop, a general "tie to a post", a stopper that can also make a second type of loop and finally a bend, which is a knot that attaches two ropes. I also wanted a "scenario" that would tie it all together (ha!). And it all has to fit on a business card.


2. Once the contents were identified, I drew all the images with pencil. I actually first started with some copyright-free knot images from a Project Gutenberg book, but there were a few problems with that. The main one was that not all the knots I wanted had drawings. Also, the images were too busy to be shrunk down that small.


3. Trace with pen. May not have been strictly necessary, but didn't take too much time anyway. Scan. Load into Gimp and fix any boo-boos. Smudges, pen dropouts, etc. With a cheap graphics tablet, I could have skipped a lot of this.


4. Bring into Inkscape and auto-trace bitmap into a vector format.


5. Use Scribus to lay out the page.


6. Print onto business card template thingies. Get laminated.

If this were an online service or community or whatevs, there would be PDFs and/or inkscape/scribus files. However, I don't have a way to host anything but images here. Suggestions?

Artistic Voice, And Poundage, Being Suppressed

You may remember my previous, paradigm-shifting, boundary-pushing art installation. A chance remark from a coworker caused me to think of another. No pictures, sadly, and it only lasted about an hour.

The idea was: The cubbies kind of look like a vertical cross section of an apartment building. So I filled them with doll furniture to simulate different apartments. One had a bed, another a lamp and armchair, another a toilet and sink, etc. There was room for the cellphones to perch on the "floor" but I really intended the phones to live in the apartments--sleep in the beds, sit in the chairs, etc.

Sadly, some humorless nitwit removed it all because some VIPs are coming through. And we all know VIPs will instantly be turned to powder if they crack a smile. (The VIPs canceled a few minutes later, but now I shan't share. Or maybe I will.)

Unrelatedly, my birthday has come and gone and I didn't quite meet the goal of -60 lbs. However, I'm exactly 3.5 lbs short of it and closing fast, so I'm not too disappointed. What's weird is that the stupid Wii doesn't seem to notice. I deliberately wear exactly the same clothes every time I weigh in and have lost at least 2 lbs since it started tracking me, but no. Then again, it cares more about BMI which changes less rapidly than lbs (they are both linear, but I mean numerically).

They'll Have Nothing To Lose But Their Chaindrives (Invention Idea #5)

Why do I have to have a job? There are basically four reasons: Food, shelter, medical care and luxuries.

Those are listed in rough order of importance. Theoretically an order-of-importance list is also an order-of-most-money-spent list but that's probably not literally true. However, from the point of view of reducing costs, it kind of is. $500 that I must spend on food is a tougher nut to a short budget than $2000 that I throw away on bingo. Put another way: Say I wanted to stop working. What's the first problem I absolutely must solve? It isn't "where am I gonna get my $2000 of bingo money". It's "how do I eat".

So how would I eat? One common solution is to start your own business. But that's still a job, albeit one where you are the boss. I'm imagining a socialist utopia where nobody would have to do any work at all. We'd just recline on chaise lounges all day.

I could grow my own food in my yard. That's still a lot of work, though. Planting, weeding, chasing away predators, harvesting, processing, etc. However, this is all repetitive, physical work, which is perfect for whom? Robots!

The first thing you need is a big field. (You could do this in your yard, but for reasons of efficiency and scale, farm-like installations are probably better.). Enclose the entire thing in glass (height determined by the crop) to make it a greenhouse. This also excludes many, but not all, bugs, animals and weedseeds.

Install some sprinklers. You'll be using a lot less water than usual for two reasons. One is that because the field is enclosed it will lose less to evaporation from the ground or respiration from the plants. The other is that you can collect any runoff and reuse it. (Why don't they already do this? Maybe it seeps down to the groundwater first? Perhaps my field should be enclosed on the bottom, too.)

Send in the seedbots to do the planting. Seeds and the planting thereof are relatively uniform, so this is a general robot. We may need to bury guide cables underground that will indicate to the robot where the rows will be. However, optical guides, GPS or other technologies could also be used.

All of this, btw, is controlled by computer. It could either be a hulking 1950s-style centralized FARMIVAC thing or an ultra-modern distributed intelligence ant-model thing. For instance the seedbots detect that it's planting time, the sprinklers detect moisture levels, etc and everything Just Works kind of like a natural ecosystem.

Now is the somewhat harder, more nebulous part of my vision. Each growing plant species needs different care. Some might have to be checked for mold, some might need petting or to be sung to or whatever. And they are all harvested differently. You can just cut down cornstalks but you have to pick apples. All this variation means different robot types. That said, this isn't an insoluble problem.

Another option is trained monkeys.

(I googled around for a bit and found some talk about robot or automated farming, but there didn't seem to be any cohesive vision or big plans. In all seriousness, it seems like this is a major lack. Growing food is an absolutely necessary, but peasant-level job. Until robots do it, peasants will remain.)

WeeMote

This blog is supposedly about all the different stuff I do and yet never once, in my entire N years on the internet, have I ever posted a picture of the little clay things I sometimes make.

Meetings Are My Most Productive Time

The projects I'm involved in don't have many meetings. In fact, we basically have zero. But some related projects (and by "related" I mean "not at all related, but they share an uber-manager") have a ~45 minute meeting once every two weeks or so and for some reason I'm required to attend despite the fact that none of it ever affects me or needs any input from me.

Nonetheless, I love these meetings. Several times over the past several months this has happened:

1. I'm stuck on how to design or build something in the workshop at home.
2. I think about it for days or weeks, making no real progress.
3. Meeting time rolls around.
4. I bring some paper and pencils with me and start drawing even dumb ideas for solving the problem.
5. I exit the meeting with a solution on paper.

I'm not sure which is the more valuable aspect: The enforced "away from the computer" time or the "draw even dumb ideas".

I ♥ My Moleskine

I asked for a "squared" Moleskine for Xmas because I'd heard such good things about them. ("Square" means graph paper and "large" means "not pocket sized"--it's only about 8"x5".) I can confirm that it is awesome. I'm not even sure why it's so awesome. It's definitely well made--nice binding, good quality paper, pocket in the back, elastic strap and bookmark. And it's not just that I'm having fun using it, because I was using a regular spiral notebook before and it wasn't this awesome.

I found the perfect pencil case. It's actually a case for a removable car stereo, but I don't have that car, let alone the stereo, anymore (if I ever did).

Inside are the pencils I mentioned once. Notice that I've got them tagged with tape so I can tell what lead type is in each. Also, extra lead and a kneaded eraser.

And now a couple pics of the Genius At Work. The page sizes seem to be almost exactly how much room I need to explain an idea and draw an illustration of it.

The only thing that could make this better would be if it were exactly the same as it is now, only it also uploaded an electronic version automatically. In vector format. Also, it would be made of ponies.

Invention Idea #4?

I tried to research whether this has already been invented, but I'm too lazy, too busy and too dumb to be complete. The fact that I've never heard of this will have to be enough to show that it hasn't been invented well enough.

The basic idea came from the Wikipedia fundraiser. Why does Wikipedia need to raise funds? All the "real" work of creating and editing articles is done for free. I don't know if their software costs are $0, but they should be. It's possible they might need to pay for specialized knowledge to set up some configuration files and so forth, but that's about it. Oh and servers and bandwidth.

Why are servers still trapped in the "single big centralized cost" world that software development and encyclopedia authorship used to be trapped in? Why couldn't the articles on Wikipedia be distributed across the world? It would be kind of like BitTorrent, but for small files and in real time. Another example, which is perhaps close enough to not even be an analogy anymore, is FreeNet:

Freenet works by pooling the contributed bandwidth and storage space of member computers to allow users to anonymously publish or retrieve various kinds of information. It can be thought of as a large storage device which uses key based routing similar to a distributed hash table to locate peers' data. When a file is stored in Freenet, a key which can be used to retrieve the file is generated. The storage space is distributed among all connected nodes on Freenet.

If Wikipedia were on FreeNet and my browser knew how to get there, wouldn't Wikipedia have zero server costs? The problem of bandwidth still exists, though. Most articles are rarely accessed, but some articles are accessed a lot even if for short periods of time. For instance, I bet the Inauguration 2009 page was reloaded a few times yesterday. Whoever's computer happens to have that article will get hammered. (Also, traffic analysis would reveal that they were hosting that article, which would be a problem for free-speechy issues. Probably FreeNet has already thought of this and has a solution?)

However, I think even this problem could be overcome with some redundancy and distribution. Put that page on multiple machines and everyone accesses different ones. Of course you have editing race conditions that way, but I dismiss those with a wave of my hand (while not volunteering to solve them).

(Reading farther down the FreeNet page I see there are IRC-like and forum "APIs" for using FreeNet as a network in this way, so I'm probably behind the times with my invention idea. However, it looks like they are mainly using it as an anonymous way to share porn whereas I'm interested in saving money by distributing cost.)

Quickie

I got a Math-Problem-a-Day Calendar for Christmas. It's kind of a disappointment because the answer to each problem is the number of that day and a lot of these are barely even math problems, such as 2⁰+0*sqrt(9).

That said, it is definitely possible to have good math problems where you know the final answer but the puzzle is how to get there. Yesterday's, which I just finally solved today, is a good example.

2.8 + 2.24 + 1.792 + 1.4336 + 1.14688 + 0.917504 + ...

The sum is yesterday's date, 14. But I couldn't figure out what this series was until someone (who happens to have this same calendar, btw) stopped by my office and mentioned Ramanujan. That got us talking about continued fractions (i.e. "I don't get continued fractions." "Me neither."). Which is all the hint I'm going to give for now...

Incremental Backup

• So far, I've lost about 55 lbs. That's 4 or 5 pant sizes, I think, plus now my winter coat doesn't fit anymore. Naturally my workplace has NOW decided to have a Biggest Loser contest. I could have won one of these fabulous prizes! I'm almost tempted to regain it all so I can lose it for the free iPhone. (Actual prize may vary.)


• The PVC piston idea doesn't work. Or rather, it works really well, but not for high temperatures. Maybe a water pumping thing might work, but otherwise it just gets gummed up with melty yuck. Also using insulation for the displacer is contraindicated as a fire hazard. /turns off smoke alarm. Needless to say, the engine was unsalvageable.


• Because of the above, I'm starting a new engine. For various reasons, probably all stupid, I'm thinking of going rhombic. I sat down the other day to quickly figure out the stroke length given stuff like the gear diameter. Just an easy little geometry problem until my face imploded. Also, finding cots (commercial/off-the-shelf) hardware that can be used for a medium-sized Stirling is non-trivial.


• This cool thing is in free beta. I hope that doesn't mean they are going to charge for it later, because then we won't have future classics like Two Regular Guys.


• I got a Moleskine "square" (i.e. graph) paper notebook for Christmas. Coupled with my mechanical drawing pencils, it is really awesome. I should post some pics of what I've been doing with it.


• Read Clock of the Long Now. It was very interesting and enlightening and life-changing and so forth, but they left out sufficient detail for my geekiness: Details on the mechanism. It's a single-function, mechanical, binary computer. Like the Difference Engine only in binary. Should be a snap to implement in Lego. I even started designing it but I just don't have enough time to do more than that.

How Do You SolveRepresent A Problem Like Mariaechanics?

First, this. (Explanation)

It would be cool to make something like that, but more general. A wider scope of problems, more construction elements, more universal attachments, etc.

The standard method of genetic programming is to represent your algorithm/whatever as a tree. The leaves are data and the nodes are operations that the "universe" supports. Then two parents producing a child via "sex" is just trading subbranches. Mutation is random changes.

That works for a linear sequence of steps because there's a standard way to traverse a tree. The question is, how do you represent a machine in a tree? It's (usually) not a linear thing.

Take a wheel and a stick. They are two leaves, I guess. The node is the operator "attach"? But where? I need to know where on the stick AND where on the wheel. And if the connection is rigid, floppy, powered or what. Where is all that knowledge stored? How can I "break out" each of those things to allow them to mutate separately? Also, you can't have a whole-organism coordinate system, for instance, because a single mutation messes it all up.

Another idea is to use an algorithm to build the machine and represent the algorithm as a tree. But what's the advantage of that? I didn't realize until this morning: This is exactly what embryology is. A machine isn't a linear object, but constructing a machine is a linear process.

So to attach a wheel and a stick, I'd have an embryology something like this:

1) Place stick
2) Locate end of stick
3) Locate center of wheel
4) Attach

Or maybe:

1) Place stick
2) Advertises marker at X
3) Locate marker
4) Locate center of wheel
5) Attach

The marker system would be key. If there's more than one stick in the structure, "locate end of stick" is ambiguous. Whereas if the stick knows that it is, say, the left shin, it can hang out cards saying "I'M THE LEFT SHIN" and "HERE IS MY LOWER EXTREMITY" and the wheel can look for that.

Could one of my graduate students get on this and give me credit so I become rich and famous but don't have to stop the N projects I'm working on to get it done? Kthx!