Hypersonic Sound

You don't get to hear anything but this is the guy that came up with Hypersonic sound. It was mentioned in an awesome book called, The Daemon, that I just finished. It sounded Sci-Fi but it the end it is a real technology.

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41 years old and I want to play with Legos

Okay, I never had the Legos Mindstorm Kit but man does this post over at boingboing.net really makes want to go out and build Lego robotic devices.

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The Banned Book Library

There is a great post over at BoingBoing.net, about a kid who started keeping banned books in his locker. I think that it's awesome that he has started to encourage others to read the classics. Whenever I hear of anyone banning a book all I can think about is a great book by Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, it is the reason why the moment a society bans one book or censors speech that society finds objectionable it starts the ride down the slippery slope towards a police state.

Books should be read, not burned.

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Data Overload

I found this on the New York Times Technology page. It is an interesting article about the government and the data that it has collected. The Unites States has been publishing this data for years electronically, and on paper. The CTO for the government is now putting more data on the web and even asking citizens to rate how useful the data was that found. This small blurb I found interesting. By rating the data, the government can create data about what is useful and what isn't. The opens it up for a couple of questions that I have: If most people don't find a particular data set useful will the government stop collecting it? Or will it stop offering the data at all?

Either way just because some piece of data may not seem relevant right now doesn't mean that it won't be relevant at some future time. I don't mind that the government is rating their data but what will it do with the metadata (data about the data)? Will that be for our consumption? What purpose would there be to major waterfowl flyways? Doesn't seem all that interesting, until you decide that you want to build an airport. With the airplane accident in New York last year, that seems to be incredibly interesting data to look at if your building a new airport.

Data is interesting but it might not be interesting to everyone. Rating is a really good idea because it lets you know what people find useful. My biggest fear though is stopping to collect certain data sets that my appear to be not useful. And the reason to stop collecting the data is to save money on the budget. This is congress constant push regarding the budget. Members question throwing money at science research projects like the life cycle of the fruit fly. So they stop funding the research, and just increase the use of pesticides on orange trees to kill them. Twenty years later the incidence of cancer goes up and no one know why. That is an extreme thought experiment but that is really the entire concept of collecting data sets in the first place. We may not know what it means now but I can bet that given enough time something relates to that data set. And it can probably help us in the future.

Removing data sets or stop collecting data on particular data sets can be harmful. We just don't know. So again I ask a simple question, what is the government going to do with data that is considered not useful?

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Star Trek, Calculus, Finals Week, SCHOOL'S OUT FOR SUMMER!!! What next?

I have not been blogging for a while. A lot has happened and I've been working on finishing up school this week. Everything will be done this Tuesday; I will then be working on this blog and making it more interesting. But first up...

STAR TREK PREMIERED THIS WEEK

Bear and I went to this Thursday night. All I can say is that it was pretty darn good. I was very happy. J.J Abrams did do something that I thought was completely unexpected. Without generating any spoilers I was very surprised that they did not resolve the issue. There is a time travel involved but the solution did not involve time travel to resolve it. In fact, it was never resolved - this was a completely welcome surprise. I will like to say that this Kirk was very fresh and more cocky then William Shatners Kirk, considering the age differences between both Kirks it makes perfect sense. The minute they showed Dr. McCoy I thought I was watching a younger DeForrest Kelly. Not that Karl Urban looked like DeForrest Kelly, because Karl Urban is very hot (not in this movie) but he was really channelling DeForrest Kellys' Bones. Uhuru was extremely hot and surprised the heck out me. Chekov was brilliantly funny, reminding us of Star Trek IV looking for Nuclear Wessels. John Cho didn't have a huge role as Sulu but overall he was great with the sword. Simon Pegg stole every scene that he was in period. He was beyond the original Scotty and it was great. Lastly, Leonard Nimoy reprising his role as Spock and confronting a young Spock was very good. Both actors picked up on each others take of Spock and incorporated both perfectly. Zachary Quinto can fill those big shoes.

All in all, I love Star Trek and this movie has taken Star Trek into a whole new universe which means that instead of rehashing old storylines we will see entirely new story lines. And what happens in this new Star Trek doesn't change the canonical universe of Star Trek:TOS - it is completely a different reality which makes me love it.

FINALS WEEK

I have been studying for finals week but I'm still nervous. It will always come down to this final.

SCHOOL'S PIT FOR SUMMER!!! What next?

Ok, it turns out that I couldn't have any of my classes for school this summer. So I'm taking the summer off. What I will be doing is refreshing myself with perl. I really liked last semester and taking a course in Python. What I liked about Python though was really IDLE. It's a GUI IDE for Python but it also has a console that allows you to load files and write one-liners as wells as entire subroutines. And I thought it would be great to have something similar for perl. I want something like a shell - it can access files within the filesystem. I also want to be able to write one-liners to check out ideas. I want to create modules that can be retained in memory and utilized. Also, I want to wrap everything into a GUI that runs within Cocoa. This means that I will have to refresh my memory on working with perl (5.10 to be exact), have Cocoa bindings so that I can write graphics to run in a separate window. (This will be much later.) And, possibly, incorporating some aspect of Parrot. This is extremely ambitious of me. I keep stating that I will do this but I never do. Now, I have an entire summer to work on one part of it. The shell. I know that there is a perl shell project and Zoidberg, which is the same thing to the perl shell project. But I want this to be a learning experience for me. I don't want to take those ideas and use them for mine I want to learn more about perl/cocoa/parrot. The only way I learn really well about and language is to have a project. So this will be mine. If I have something that I think will be worth others playing with I'll post it here.

Also, I want to blog about something that really has people coming to my site. I figure if I blog about perl and my project then people will be interested to see what I've accomplished. If it really works out maybe after summer I put it on either Google Code or Sourceforge. Anyways, that is the plan. So after finals, and school it's time to work on the blog.