When we encounter i, it seems like such an odd and miraculous thing that the square root of -1 should exist, because we've always been taught that a negative times a negative is positive, from a very early age.

An age, perhaps, before we take it upon ourselves to question such things, because the sign rules for multiply/divide really aren't totally intuitive either. What does it mean to multiply by a negative? We could say that in a times -b, perhaps, that we are adding a negative bs together, but what if they are both negative? Removing negatives doesn't really have a natural meaning, although the concept itself becomes quite concrete if you work with Constructive Solid Geometry 3D modeling.

Really, there should be nothing shocking about i at all; roughly speaking, math is defined by sets of things, and operations upon those sets which have been proven to behave in certain ways.

Math is difficult for me, and proofs require far more discipline than I have. But every complicated bit I have eventually "gotten", I enjoy and value immensely, and I never forget it. I hope in the future I can slowly absorb more. The only power I have is the ability to solve computer problems, and math is what the real amazing problems get solved with.

In only 5 short years, you've become the Wal-Mart of MMORPGs. May you fund Blizzard's development efforts on their next MMO for many more years to come.

Some errors are non-recoverable. I walk slowly now, and I talk slowly. Time has taken its toll, and I no longer want anything or aspire to anything. I can tolerate things seemingly forever, but they have weakened and undermined me over time.

I don't want people around to remind me that I had emotions, or attempt to reactivate and take advantage of them. I am incapable of trust, and all those things for which it is a prerequisite.

I am a ghost now perhaps, as I walk through the world unseen and disconnected. Or maybe as a mechanical construct, functional, but without a soul. In any case, I am no longer quite human.

With no outside interference, my mind spins endlessly, like the winds on Neptune, still bent on formulating solutions to problems I no longer have any hope of solving.

To those that know me in real life, I am no longer the one you knew. Or perhaps, I am no longer capable of acting like the one you knew. You cannot help me, you cannot save me, and there is nothing more I can do for you, either. This is not a mood, this is not a phase, this is terminal.

Please, just move on.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavity_magnetron

A magnetron is a really interesting device to me for many reasons. It highlights to me just how mysterious and complex things are in the electromagnetic spectrum. Developments during WWII around the magnetron, and it's application to radar, really highlighted the strengths and weaknesses of the cultures of England, Germany, Japan, and the USA, at the time.

The Germans didn't like the the lack of precision inherent in the magnetron, and went with klystrons instead, which were much less powerful and portable at the time. The English figured out a way to work around the frequency stability problem with the magnetron, but didn't have the money to turn their discoveries into production systems... but the USA did. The Japanese weren't really all that interested in radar, but they were keen on attempting to use the magnetron for a death ray, and to that end tested it on animals and, quite likely, humans as well. To their test subjects, it was probably little consolation that the concept was completely impractical in the end.

Today they still reside in a little compartment in our microwaves, tucked just behind a sheet of mica; this miraculous bit of vacuum tube-era technology that, even considering the energy required to heat the filament, is still apparently more efficient at generating microwaves than solid state devices.

fun with canvas(LJ doesn't allow scripts). Doesn't work in Internet Explorer, but nothing fun does.

Canvas vs SVG:

Canvas has taken some heat for duplicating effort with SVG, but having done silly, pointless tricks with both now, it's obvious to me they are suited to different problems. It's extremely easy to draw arbitrary things in a canvas element, such as rectangles, and arbitrary shapes via the stroke/fill/lineto/close/start/stop metaphor fairly common in vector systems. Also renders text, gradients, and pixmaps easily.

If what you want to do is take a vector image and do some dynamic stuff with it, however, SVG is the way to go. Do the image in a drawing program, export to SVG, add some IDs to the tags you need to manipulate, and go from there.

Note either way, it won't work in MSIE without hack code from people who can be bothered to deal with that sort of ugly shit.

Make of this what you will. Correlation does not necessarily imply causation, but that does not imply that correlation is irrelevant. Adding in Asians(non-hawaiian, non-native alaskan) cleaned up the correlation a bit, as I suspected it would.

Washington DC was not listed on the free PDF sample from CQ, so I had to omit it. I don't think I would be reaching too far to guess that it would increase the correlation.

Apologies for the blurriness, I got tired of trying to find a more optimal way of exporting a PNG from an embedded chart in OpenOffice.

Once there was a land filled with many lovely gardens. Upon some grew flowers; in others grew fruits, grains, and vegetables.

One day it was decided by the king, and most of the citizens agreed, that all plants are just as good as any others, and it became forbidden to remove weeds. And so one by one, the once beautiful gardens fell to the invasive weed species. Occasionally a citizen would try to remove them, and they were sent into the dungeons. Even digging them up and transporting them somewhere else carried the swiftest and harshest punishments the kingdom could deal out.

Gardens free from weeds fell upon suspicion; surely the citizens there were secretly preventing weeds from growing, many thought. And so weeds were sown in those gardens until they looked just as bad, and became as unproductive, as all the other gardens.

It has been many years since a traveler has come from this kingdom, so I do not know what ultimately happened. Many believe that, facing starvation and misery, the citizens finally turned on the weeds and restored their gardens to their original beauty and productivity.

But many people suspect, as I do, that the citizens of the kingdom simply starved to death; such was the strength of their common beliefs and laws.

There's a big puzzle that's unfolding before us rapidly. Economy rules the world, the value equation at its heart. Money greatly lubricated economy, but beneath it there is still the trade of things of value, taking advantage of specializations.

Some practical, pragmatic things to consider are, who has value and will continue to produce value into the next few decades, and what is it they might want in exchange for that value.

Assuming precise brain modification is still a ways off, we can assume most human instincts will persist. People want to eat and drink, sleep, be safe, be entertained, socialize in some manner, have sex in some manner, and so forth. These are the roots of the economy.

Thinking just off the top of my head, I think security will be the safest economic sector. Your automated factory will do you no good if you cannot safely move materials into and goods out of it. Your clients cannot buy your product if they are being killed by angry mobs of poor people. Your land ownership will do you no good if you can't control access to it. Your grain harvesting robots will do you no good if they are destroyed by people, or other robots for that matter.

The future may see a scarcity of many things, but angry mobs and killer robots are not likely to be among them. The poor angry mobs will eventually be neutralized as a threat, more or less, but high tech threats will thrive forever.

The people with economic power of all kinds, will all need increasingly sophisticated security. Those are the only people that are relevant, as technological advances drive the poor and the stupid into a deeper and deeper power deficit.

In terms of what to do with them, China still can't kill people in coal mines fast enough, try as they might, and America isn't even trying(though some may argue the drug war is a feeble and economically impractical attempt). In the end, I think they will simply be walled in somewhere ugly. And again, maybe that's what all the prisons are for. If only they didn't cost so much per occupant...

The two things I enjoy reading now are: 1) the D Language specification, and 2) Rifts™ RPG rulebook and source books. I've been in solitary way too long. I am known for my reclusiveness, but unfortunately I am still human. Working alone for years at a time sucks really bad, and as a result I am losing both my sanity(no big loss) and my productivity(much more important).

The man, the vision:

• His "Carrot Top" impression has killed more people than malaria, scarlet fever, yellow fever, mauve fever, lotto fever, and fever fever combined.
• The lower two-thirds of his esophagus and his entire stomach are made of tar paper, after an incident in grade school where he was dared to eat an entire beehive.
• After accidentally burning down his apartment several hundred times, he was forbidden by the local fire department from doing anything. A dalmatian has been permanently stationed in his apartment, and has been trained to bite him if he starts to do something.

I could have done worse no doubt, but I also could have done a lot better, if given the choice.

On a side note, Blizzard is making too much money, and it's destroying them. Any time that much money is around, one cannot keep the leaches away; the slick bastards with slicker lawyers that know, better than anyone except perhaps the government, how to separate money from the people who've earned it.

Given the unemployment rate, and my belief that no one is interested in looking into it's systemic root causes, and the fact that it has become politically impossible for congress to do anything meaningful, it appears we are sliding into a ditch from which there is no escape. The Asian Tigers are ascendant, and the fast-burning European-American descendants of barbarians, along with the even more recently civilized peoples they live beside, are slipping back to what they know best; barbarism.

The world is fully globalized. If we lack global economic power, and we subscribe to WTO principles, there's no reason we should expect to hang on to the land and resources we reside on. We will be brushed aside collectively, like the native Americans before us(but in far greater numbers), onto marginal lands that cannot possibly sustain us all.

What will happen then?

A whole lot of evolution.

Saw a documentary about Ikea last night. Saw young Ingvar in the particle board factory explaining a few processes, and all I could think of was, this guy, this Viking, does not belong in a particle board factory. Ingvar was designed to get on a big ship and go raiding and hacking people's limbs off. Instead he's pressing buttons in a factory, watching glued bits of wood go sliding down a conveyor belt.

What's the point of being a young man any more, in western civilization? Opening jars and taking an interest in power tools really only gets you so far. May as well be a woman and have better legal protection. Technology has made bitches of us all.

I still hate wiggers most of all, followed closely by party-line liberal male academics. I should do a full ordered list sometime, when I have a few hours to kill.

In the end, I'm not sure if it's hate. I think hate is more of a personal thing, or in a situation where you mislead yourself into thinking it's personal. These categories of people I hate, categorically, is more of simple annoyance, but "annoyance" has too many syllables and isn't as punchy as the old "h" word.

On Mac OS 10.6, iChat asks you if you want to change your status from away to online when you come back from being away. That's one of those little details that most people wouldn't bother with. It's nice for me, because I'm not always prepared to chat with people, and if they catch me early I have a tendency to be more terse with them than I really want to be.

In the months I've been using a Mac it's been a continuous experience of little surprises that, from a programmer's perspective, I always think, "aww, that's really nice of them to spend all this effort to implement feature X, just to make the experience that little bit nicer."

to recap:

• My Mac Mini. At $599.00 you'd be crazy to buy a PC desktop now(unless you're a gamer). I have both; I use my PC for games, the Mac for everything else.
  
  
• Perfect Hair Forever, and 12oz Mouse. I am amused perpetually just thinking about various scenes from these shows, at random times. I try not to annoy people by reciting my favorite scenes, which are all of them.
  
  
• http://www.digitalgunfire.com Industrial music that is generally kick-ass. Sometimes they go a little too slow and goth, but it's worth it for the new music that I would not discover any other way.
  
  
• My mountain bike. I've logged over 5000 miles on it since 2005. Raleigh M80 FTW.
  
  
• http://e621.net (not safe for work, or home, or anything). I like the furry pr0n, even when it isn't good, it's generally amusing. Sometimes horrifying. But always interesting.
  
  

For most, life is a tapestry of hundreds of tiny pieces of warmth and color, the friends they know, the home, the families, all woven together through time by fate.

For some, a force among this web rises above the rest, growing brighter and hotter, until it is the only warmth they feel, and the only light they see.

They cannot turn away from the light, it looks so beautiful, and the warmth of it's billowing, glowing rays feels so good against their skin.

They spend so long staring into this light they slowly become blind, and their skin becomes callous and numb to warmth of any kind.

The bright light fades, and the world becomes dim and cold. They fumble across the ground, trying to see, trying to feel. The world is all still there, but it no longer gets through. It no longer has any effect.

They walk about the same world you do, many you would not suspect. They do what they must do to survive. Outside they are driving to work, preparing presentations, washing dishes, buying groceries. Inside they are blinded and freezing, and they know they will never see or feel that wonderful light again. The color is gone, the taste is bland, the sound is flat, and it will probably forever more be so.

Yet they carry on. Some simply because the instinct to survive is so strong. Others are augmented in their desire to persist, because you made the mistake of loving them. Because a lifetime of inner darkness is more bearable to them than the thought of tears streaming down your cheeks.

I roll along the dark, quiet street, in the comfort of a wide bike lane, on a Saturday night. People drive calmly by, and TVs glow in living room windows in the houses I pass. It is the tranquility of a moment in time, tranquil like most of America was, a tranquility that shrinks with each passing year into the fewer and fewer nice places remaining.

It's a tranquility that is doomed to failure, because I already know how it will end. In the heart of the neighborhood, The One shall move in. He shall bring with him his fecund wife and his many criminal children, and there will come burglaries, disorderly behaviour, and finally, a shooting. A neighborhood watch program will spring up, with posturing and bravado about carrying guns, alarm systems will be sold, and the families will soon move out to somewhere else. The property values will drop, permitting the allies of The One to move in along beside him. Together they will spread chaos and corruption which no one can legally stop. And the transformation of the Boise-Nampa-Caldwell area will be complete.

This is how America works. This area has a lot going for it, but given 10-20 years, it too will fall. It too will be unsafe, for one such as me, to ride along its streets at night.

But for tonight, Boise's North End sleeps and dreams of World Peace, equality, and other endearingly idiotic liberal notions. They will welcome those that will run them off and corrupt their children even more than public schools and the Internet, and will probably blame themselves even as they flee.

I will blame no one, because it is simply the way this formula plays out. All I hope is that I am either somewhere else, or dead, when this inevitably comes to pass. Like a slaughterhouse, like a morgue, I know what will happen there, but I don't want to see it happen.

If anything, I find that things that are too short are a bigger problem. The fact that "too long; didn't read" has become somewhat of a meme among sassy Internet circles is, to me, another harbinger of our demise.

I have issues with patience myself. It's fine to disregard reading something where the author isn't giving you anything worthwhile, but if that's the case, there's really no purpose communicating at all with the author. No need to be cool, just drop it. Go to another thread.

To get into information theory a bit, lots of things require context and background. One idea I picked up by way of one of my heroes, Noam Chomsky, is that limiting people to very short conversations, as in TV interview format, greatly restricts the depth of ideas they are able to communicate. It tends to result in people saying they believe in this or that, they agree with this guy or that lady, and that's about it. They don't have time to explain why.

And I'm afraid it causes people to lose the ability to think deeply. Deep thought, deep consideration of someone's ideas, and the patience to listen to the expression of them, is really the foundation of a democratic society. It is the political wealth and capital of a democracy.

We're not going to collectively agree about most things in the USA, because that's the way it was designed. That's freedom and liberty. We have no state-sponsored religion, and the laws applied to individuals in normal situations are very basic and relatively straightforward, leaving us free to believe pretty much anything we want.

However, if we want this thing to work, we have to listen to each other and be able to find effective compromises. Sticking to partisan camps and name-calling across the aisle is completely worthless to the democratic process. I'd trade a Caldari freighter full of Obama zealots or Obama haters for a frigate full of thoughtful moderates.

(Yes, I'm enjoying EVE Online at the moment; more on that later)

So anyways, think big thoughts, read big thoughts, write big thoughts. Being concise is good, but don't do it(or demand it of others) at the expense of "why". You expose yourself when you let people see these things, and it leaves you vulnerable, but in the long run it's better for a thinking person to endure the criticism and possibly change their ideas, than to live happily on a foundation of questionable principles.

The whole concept of reparations for genocidal acts seems to me bizarre. Humans conquer and destroy; that's what we do. That's how we got here. It's how I have this computer and can type on it and have it seen by anyone on the global network(regardless of whether it's actually seen by anyone or not). It's evolution.

If anything, genocide survivors should be thanking those responsible for culling the weak and/or the stupid from their herd as a result of their incomplete attempt at genocide.

In the more complete instances where the culture essentially died and the few survivors assimilated into others, then it is simply, a loss. Your group lost. Don't be a sore loser. Central Asia as a good source of these.

As for the Neo-Nazis, I really wish they would drop the Jew thing. The EuroJews in question are just a really successful hybrid that, amongst other helpful characteristics, has a natural ability to extract money from people, particularly stupid people, and hang on to the money they have. I suppose they should be mad at the Jews for bilking their weak rather than culling them, but that's not really the angle they are taking with this.

In any case, I think history, from WWII all the way up to today, has shown that attacking Jews probably tops the list of Really Bad Ideas. As far as Nazi concerns, there are more pressing issues(I would think) than Jews, seeing as how other races, particularly those intent on remaining culturally distinct, are actually a significant and expanding threat in this country to people who are culturally white.

White is not a race, but I would consider it a de-facto ethnicity in the US.