topic for study

I'm always looking at lots of problems in various areas. But in the last 10 years, the larger part of my work is on this new area, trying to understand the Internet and the Web, trying to understand the underpinnings. In computer science, we don't have great mysteries. We want to solve problems, but it's not like we have mysterious objects we don't understand. It's not like Physics, which has the Universe, or Economics, which has the Markets, Neuroscience has the Brain, and Biology the Cell. For us, the computer and its software are huge, complex, powerful, and fascinating, but we constructed them. Intrinsically, there's very little mystery.


In many ways, the Internet and the Web, we did not create them. They arrived, appeared, emerged. All these other artifacts, software, processors, and so forth, there was a designer, a team, an entity that intentionally built them. The Web emerged from an interaction of millions of entities on the basis of deliberately simple protocols. Thus the Internet and the Web are our mysterious objects. Computer scientists are looking at them the way other scientists are looking at their mysterious objects. We have to look at them using the scientific method: observations, measurement, experiments, verifiable theories, applied mathematics.

- A Conversation With Christos Papadimitriou (emphasis mine)

What a way to engage the web.

Best Food In All Sports

You can read it in Velonews, talk to the Chipotle CEO, or take it from Chrisitian Vande Velde. And if they're good enough for him, they're good enough for my family. I hope that guy wins the whole thing. Wins the Tour de France that is, you can tell by the picture that he's already defeated most of the burrito.

I think the results are clear, the star of this year's Tour de France is not some wizzy nanotube bicycle or new electro-shifter. It is the humble burrito, power-mega-fuel to some of the most power-mega athletes on Earth.

[edited 2008-07-16 9:31 PM to shorten links]

Yeah, this pretty much describes why I do it.

From Cory Doctorow's Little Brother:

If you've never programmed a computer, you should. There's
nothing like it in the whole world. When you program a computer,
it does exactly what you tell it to do. It's like designing a machine
­­-- any machine, like a car, like a faucet, like a gas­-hinge for a door
­­-- using math and instructions. It's awesome in the truest sense: it
can fill you with awe.

A computer is the most complicated machine you'll ever use. It's
made of billions of micro­-miniaturized transistors that can be
configured to run any program you can imagine. But when you sit
down at the keyboard and write a line of code, those transistors do
what you tell them to.

Most of us will never build a car. Pretty much none of us will
ever create an aviation system. Design a building. Lay out a city.

Those are complicated machines, those things, and they're off­
limits to the likes of you and me. But a computer is like, ten times
more complicated, and it will dance to any tune you play. You can
learn to write simple code in an afternoon. Start with a language
like Python, which was written to give non­-programmers an
easier way to make the machine dance to their tune. Even if you
only write code for one day, one afternoon, you have to do it.
Computers can control you or they can lighten your work ­­ if you
want to be in charge of your machines, you have to learn to write
code.

I'm finally getting around to reading Cory's book, which has been sitting on my desktop in PDF form for the last couple of months. I just got to this chunk at the end of chapter 7 and thought I would share it. By the way, the book is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, that means you can go download your own copy, I highly recommend it.

He even mentions Python, only the second time I've seen it come up in anything nearing pop culture. That is, if you count XKCD as pop culture.

make your own juggling clubs

added some photos to my flickr stream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/16913236@N04/

Oak dowel rods, four two-liter bottles, four 16oz bottles, two tennis balls, four rubber furniture feet, four screws, four washers, a dozen staples, yellow is electrical tape and gray is duct tape. Bing, bang, boom, you've got clubs.

Took about an hour and 20$ to make, but the next batch should be 5 to 10 dollars cheaper, as I'll be redesigning a bit to take better advantage of recycled materials. So far they've worked very well for me and seem to be holding up. I have to believe that while ugly, these things could compare with the higher end clubs since they use the same three piece design as clubs that cost three times as much or more. They're a bit light at around 170g per club, but next time around I plan on upgrading from 5/8" dowels to 3/4" and possibly going up from 18" long to 20". That should add the 50g needed to bring them up to the same weight as the pro clubs.

The plastic wrapped handle is the most significant difference between this design and other homemade clubs I've seen on the web. It's probably also the most important step to get right when building. Balance may be a bit off, but since I've only juggled with "real" clubs once I couldn't say for sure.

Check out http://kingstonjugglers.org/gcp/ for the original instruction page or http://www.scribd.com/doc/3876105/The-Green-Club-Project if you just want the document.