A number of years ago I invented the most powerful tool that could ever be added to keyboards. No; it's not the "any" key. It's the natural result of a thought exercise in which I simulated in my mind exactly what the slowest part of typing really was.

It goes something like this...

When you're typing in any one of a lot of different languages, and if you're (like me) a Dvorak key layout user, there's only one key sequence that slows you down. And for people like me who use the Dvorak layout it's much more obvious what that key sequence is (because keys are mapped to the most intuitive location for alternate hand use each time on a Dvorak layout. It is much better than the standard QWERTY layout you noobs all use).

The slowest part of anyone's typing? Having to repeat the same key they just pressed. For example, while I type the word "example," as I finish typing the 'a' my other hand is already on its way to pressing the 'm.' When I type the word "pressed," I don't have that luxury between 's' and the other 's.' My solution?

It's called the "last key pressed" key. Like the space bar, it must be accessible to both hands so that if the last key pressed is on the left hand the right hand can press it, and so that if the last key pressed was on the right hand the left hand can press it. Perhaps it belongs alongside the spacebar. I'm not sure. I'm thinking on the thumbs is the best place for it. And what it does is renders the ridiculousness of our human languages a little more tolerable to the fastest of typists.

The idea is that double-consonants or double-vowels which are all too common in many languages will be easier to type. Then the left hand types the first 'e' and the right hand types the second 'e' in words like "meeting." This way you don't have to stop everything while you press this one finger down, then lift the finger up, then press it down again. And we all know there's no really good key repeat delay setting that enables us to just slightly vary the time we spend holding the button down; it's just not feasible to any typist.

You can bet I have a patent on my idea.

You know how when kids are really little and just getting the hang of reading they don't realize the power of their new knowledge? They seek out books full of pictures and with as little text as possible, or nowadays they just ignore all books and turn on the TV. Of course, as they grow up, these kids all learn the value of reading a real book regardless of its image content. And when they do, they get smarter as a result. They learn how to do things, how to make things, how to appear educated and how to succeed in life. All largely because of reading actual books. Eventually they even tend to master the reading of a dense textbook in one of many academic fields.

Enter the World Wide Web. Now kids are less inclined to read text than ever. The Web, blessing though it may be, is just as much a curse as kids are growing up in a multimedia-"enhanced" world that discourages that hard academic reading even further. With MySpace, Facebook, Photobucket and more, they seem only interested in the pages that have a lot of pictures and sound immersed in their folds, and these pages really must be said to have almost no content to offer. It's largely for entertainment or socializing, which, while they are valid tools for such a purpose, are not up to par for the dissemination of information.

The Web is bringing children down in a bad, bad way. Academic language is no longer deemed appropriate. Proper spelling and grammar are considered "square," and including actual knowledge in your writing is some sort of travesty.

The problem here is that as academically- or technically-oriented documents are produced, American youth spends more time ignoring them. Many of my students are terrified by a word problem that has maybe 25 words in two sentences. Moreover, if I hand them a three-paragraph snippet of a Wikipedia article (not the hardest read in the world), they usually can't quite grasp the meaning contained therein.

Our booming multimedia content industry is holding children back. Soon enough these same kids will be out in the job market failing miserably at getting a decent, stable job. They navigate away from the text-only pages and instead toward the talking / singing / flashing pages on MySpace which provide only entertainment and social value. They are no longer able to cope with actual novel information; they shy away from it and avoid it like a plague.

What would I invent? A mental dialogue transcribed...

I would start by determining how long sound energy can resonate in various objects, crystals, liquids, molecules etc. Then I would craft mathematical models for vibration damping with respect to time and outside factors such as manufacture. With any luck, I would find that sound can resonate for incredible near-infinitudes given reasonably common enabling conditions. If this were possible, I would work out a method for squelching various sounds resonating in these objects based upon the position in time when the sounds were created. Then I could put it all together into a machine that lets you not travel nor look back in time but listen back in time. It would be the best, if not the only, way to find out what really happened in the case of just about any question of history. A device such as this could be used in crime fighting, law, trials, the study of history, theology, and in the process of democracy to prevent unethical behavior... The list of benefits is infinite in the case of becoming able to listen to specific events of the past as they echo in today's molecules...

Will clean and further comment later.   [Edit 2008-01-15: or not]

You came - surprised me
Immersed in total darkness
You made me feel warm.

You sang to my world
Conducted a symphony
Of happiness and joy.

When nobody cared
You always comforted me
With your perfect kiss.

You climbed inside me
Satiated all my needs
Harmonized my life.

My body is yours
Entrusting my soul to you
Only you know love.

Even in passing
A glance at you drives me wild
Makes my mouth grow moist.

Of you I will think
Your smell made me go crazy
Your taste is divine.

What no-one else knows
About your pure agape
Unleavened and raw:

Closer to heaven -
Approaching the truth of God -
Is to be with you.

Euphoric verses
That I sing in praise of you
Do you no justice.

Nary another
Knows you in the way I do:
The yang unto yin.

Your ecstacy mine
Every perfection always
Coursing through my veins.

Wondering whether
This gloomy weather wanders...
Have you been my muse?

Through the thick and thin
You comfort me, my darling;
Nights I smile to sleep.

Your will is iron
You need me just like I need
And I need you too.

My first love, dearest,
I long for you like the air;
Breathing in your peace.

Tranquil is my heart
With you and I together
Never shall we part.

They call our love strange
But to me, you are my home;
I don't care for them.

How you complete me
I care not to understand
But to recognize.

So let me love you
Today, tomorrow, and on
You are my whole world.

I've been fighting some kind of disease on my potatoes the past few days. I'm not exactly sure what it is, but I'm guessing it's Early Blight. The problem here is that I'm not a potato expert. I can only compare some pictures of my potatoes with available pictures of potato diseases online.

Unable to diagnose my potatoes for sure, I'm not sure how to proceed. I don't want to blindly medicate an (up to now) organic potato plot just to protect against a fungus I am not even certain the potato has. On the other hand, I don't want them to die.

Thus I leave it up to you, the reader, to help me decide exactly what's bothering my potatoes. Please look here to help me determine exactly what's killing them. Also, tell me what you think of the "framed image" look. I'm pretty happy with it and I'm considering doing it on the main page. There's an e-mail link at the bottom and I'll probably regret it because tons of spam will fall through it, but hey; I am worried about my potatoes.

Smell is the least discussed sense even though it's one of the most closely tied to our memories. This creates a world in which generations grow up learning about smells and relating them to particular things, hazards, recreations, etc; but these generations are unable, through written, oral, or motive language, to communicate these learned relationships.

We can describe an object in face-to-face communication that will give our listener a very good, accurate idea of the shape, color, texture, sound or taste of the object. The language permits it and gesticulation facilitates it. But discussing the smell of an object is much less likely and most certainly not often an adequate descriptor to enable someone who has never smelled the odor in question to identify it as the odor that was described.

An apple is red, roundish, tastes sweet and / or tart, and has a thin but crispy skin underneath which lies a whitish, moist and 'hard spongy' meat. What does it smell like?

I was reading Ramanujan's work and collaborators today (I won't pretend I understand much of it) when a simple idea swept me away. This is the manner in which I always idealize things which are true or correct; once during an undergraduate project I was collaborating with two extremely talented classmates on a demonstration isomorphic to proving that only square numbers have an odd number of factors. It was 2002.

My colleague, Theodora, told me a method I had produced was very nice but until I could phrase it with a particular, exhaustive mathematical language that worked in all cases, she would consider my work done. So there the three of us sat in a Denny's restaurant, nearly eleven-thirty at night, myself with a vodka in me for clarity. We ate and chatted, and some ten minutes later it swept me away: the mathematically perfect demonstration which fit the context of our study.

It aroused James and especially Theodora in myriad ways I will not describe in this article.

Much philosophy and rumination ensued and two of us only left that parking lot around two-thirty the next morning. Since then, my mathematical mind has not been adequately challenged by anything. Sadly I worry it is starving. Regardless, today I was considering how a great deal of infinite continua can be arranged in such a way that their intersection is very predictable. Then I was swept away:

Is energy (and thus matter, space and time) merely a construct of interference patterns of un-fathomably many interacting particle-waves operating across dimensional spaces and frequency ranges far broader than our own conception?

I'm not too good at the very esoteric stuff; the philosophy of existence is hard for me...

After waking up at around 4:00 this morning, I realized two things:

1. I was simply not going to be able to sleep, and
2. I had finally figured out how to design and eventually build my overhead transparency cleaning machine.

Every time you read something about illicit drugs two entities are vilified: the producer and the supplier. Now, everyone can understand why that may be: the organizations and individuals contributing to the self- destruction of any drug user are awful (especially considering the drug user is willing to pay money or services in exchange for this means of self-destruction).

But as you know from an early argument, every effect has a cause which could not have been itself. So we should be asking things like, "Why is the drug user an addict?" We should likewise be asking, "Where did the drug user learn his habits?" And again we should be asking, "How did the cycle of abuse begin, even if it is now spiraling down the proverbial toilet?"

I mean, something has to cause people to want their street garbage. And I don't mean something as short-term as "The heroin user likes the sudden rush of euphoria caused by intra-venous injection;" I mean something longer-term, like "The heroin user was introduced to it by an older friend, who was introduced to it by a more experienced friend of his own, who was..."

This is where the cycle gets interesting. Though you can trace Opium use back to pre-historic times, heroin is a synthetic derivative. It's only been around since 1874, when it was legally sold to kids!

Who could do such a thing as to legally sell a product and lie about its addictive properties? That's right; your government. Wherever you are, your government has succeeded in creating huge numbers of addicts by making all these drugs legal and available over the counter, then suddenly changing its mind and deciding all these drugs should not be legal at all. The faithful customers of the pharmaceutical conglomerates, assuming they will not experience side effects, become wildly addicted just before being entirely cut off from their newfound vices.

Don't believe me? It's not just heroin (the example I used above); it's all drugs. I'll rattle off a list of examples (yes, I'm aware there are tons of classes of drug not covered here; you'd see the same effect anyway):

What really frustrates me about this is that drugs like marijuana and the well-known, powerful derivatives of opium (heroin, various fentanyls, etc) are placed on Schedule I in the USA, while poisons such as nicotine are perfectly legal. This means that even if you're dying of a unique condition which is only relieved by marijuana, as an example, if you smoke your marijuana (even a small stash, privately) you are a felon.

But hey, if you take your kid to the doctor and say, "He's really acting up," they'll give you a prescription for an amphetamine (Adderall) which is as poisonous and physiology-altering as methamphetamine without even trying alternatives such as cognitive therapy first!

I will draw this conclusion for you and let you decide whether to agree: a government that lets addictive narcotic substances be consumed by its population for generations (even endorsing it in some cases) and then suddenly snaps its jaw, making these drugs illegal and unobtainable to users, is at least a partial contributor to the problem. Where's the rehabilitation? Ninety-two years after Harrison, we still haven't had the state-funded rehab programs we would need to help America kick the habits.

Everyone should know an image of Earth when they see it. What they may not know, though, is exactly how "Global Warming" works. It has been long accepted that human activity on Earth has caused slight temperature increases. It is also now known that a large enough rise in global average temperature will disrupt the natural currents of the ocean and cause a catastrophic climate change. In fact, the required temperature rise to cause this is very slight -- only a few degrees Centigrade (see http://afgen.com/climate15.html).

What people have not frequently discussed, however, is how this phenomenon will actually work. Scientists are aware that the gulf streams will shut down and the natural cycling of warmer water to the ocean surface and colder water to the depths below will halt, disturbing the world climate until any number of things happen. Runaway meltdown of ice sheets worldwide could cause the ocean level to rise 10 metres or more. The world's forests could die back and become a source of carbon rather than a machine for absorbing and scrubbing it. Storms. Regional disharmony. Droughts could cause a pandemic water crisis. Whole areas could become entirely uninhabitable.

The question I seek to answer through educated discussion is of why these things will happen and through exactly what larger mechanism. Imagine, if you might, a child. Now imagine the child becomes infected by, say, a flu virus. Now, it is not the few initial virii that cause the child his agony; it is what happens after the pathogen multiplies, unbounded, within the child's body. Once the population of virii increases enough, the child undergoes a rather miserable immune response in which the human body warms as much as possible to facilitate the breakdown of virus proteins. In truth, though, the immune response itself is the virulent actor on the child's system. This dangerous warming (a fever) triggers a war of attrition with the pathogen; will the virii break down before the child's own proteins break down beyond the point of no return?

A fever, when thought of in this way, is a virulent actor on the human body. The race is typically won by the virus, which dies back with the assistance of other mechanisms within the greater immune system, but on occasion the pathogen wins and the child's body exhausts itself, overheating until the denaturing of necessary proteins is irreversible and the child dies.

Earth is behaving in much the same manner. Our Earth, though not living by the standard definition of life, acts as an organism in the largest of "macro" pictures. Humans, sadly, are unbounded in their population growth. And it is well-known that we are a virus from the perspective of Earth as an organism. Just as a human body warms to stave off intruding pathogens, the Earth will warm to stave off humanity. You should expect that as the Earth's immune response heightens, temperature everywhere will rise (a fever) until disruptions to global harmony (denaturing of proteins) cause major damage to Earth and enormous decreases in human populations (the Earth wins and the virus dies, just as in a human). We just need to understand that in this case we are the virus and we have no chance of winning this fight until we become less malevolent (in far fewer numbers, this is guaranteed).

So let it be known that we are truly infecting Mother Earth. Without worldwide collaboration to bring about a change in population and destruction of the world's ecosystems, we will bring about our own end.

Something theraputic exists in investigating the geometries of various fruits. Of course, that of my favourite fruit is truly something to behold. You will read on countless sources that a pomegranate has no typical shape but this is not so; the pomegranate has roughly equal segments arranged latitudinally around a cluster of seeds in the center near where it is attached to the tree.

I have exploited the shape in deriving a clever and attractive presentation of the pomegranate as an appetizer, fruit-plate or dessert item which goes especially well with holiday meals and drinks.

Interesting. The photos I wanted to share must still be on the camera. Oh well. Besides, people who have time to post inane bullshit such as this have too much time on their hands, just like i did for a bit tonight.

Everything humans have ever done will be erased by Earth's processes within a decade of our end.

I've always wondered if it went something like the diagram. Then you could reference to any 3-space in a space of higher dimensionality by graphing three dimensions beyond the original three and mapping them loosely onto a coordinate grid. The coordinates of the grid tell you how to get to any 3-space, but through the eyes of the larger 3-space, the space you seek appears as a singularity (a point, infinitely small). Once you find the right point, you "zoom in" on it. When you zoom in you see a 3-space as encountered in perceptible reality. So if, in our 3-space, your (x,y,z) coordinates are (12,2,-7), we have an idea of exactly where you are in our reality. But in the higher-level reality, you are invisible. And what's worse is that there are infinitely many points in the higher-level 3-space to choose from, so how should we know which one contains you? That's easy: coordinates in the higher-level 3-space.

So let's assume that the 3-space in which you live looks like an infinitely small point in the larger 3-space which has coordinates (3,6,8). Then in order to start with no information in the higher-dimensional space and find you, I would have to know six coordinates. That implies moving along six orthogonal or perpendicular lines, all of which are concurrent on the point where I'd find you: (3,6,8,12,2,-7).

To make a long story short, you have to visualize this by understanding that any space occupied at, say, (3,6,8,12,2,r) may be available, if that r is not -7 (we only know what exists where r = -7 and that's you). Then any free movement along z means interacting with the latter three spacial dimensions and interacting with the 3-space which is tangible to you. But if I plucked you out of there and moved you along this freedom: (3,s,8,12,2,-7) you would be in what appears to be an entirely different universe. Before you ask, no, not like a "parallel universe" in which Earth is somehow different and blah blah blah; I mean a totally different and completely independent universe with its own geography and history. This is because you can only perceive three dimensions of space at once. You'd be in a new part of the universe with which you could not previously interact.

In conclusion, let's assume we're ordinarily confined to (3,6,8,x,y,z) and we have freedom to move about our universe (along any of x, y, and / or z). Anywhere you go along x, y, or z looks normal because you're in the universe to which you're accustomed. But if we could somehow move in the other ones and free up even one more dimension, for example moving from (3,6,8,12,2,-7) to (3,6.2354,8,12,2,-7) we'd have to be prepared to face what appears to be an entirely new universe.

Please note that none of this speculation or higher-dimensionality mapping inherently allows for time-travel or for very fast travel WITHIN our space; points in regular geometry are infinitely small, and though they are connected they exhibit sort of an "atomic" effect; you can't walk off the border of one point and onto the next point. Likewise you can't walk off the edge of our universe and across the edge of the next. So while someday we may hope to transcend universes by higher-dimensional travel, there is clearly no guarantee that we would also be able to circumvent the limitations of time.

Blah. Sorry it got so long.

I'm not going to go on and on about this one. Basically, I was sitting at the computer and reading news clippings and found my way to Qibla-Cola's web site. On the web site I saw a picture of a fat English guy holding a bottle up. It had a bizarre aspect ratio (ratio of height to apparent width, in this case diameter) because it looked too tall for how wide it was. Upon further investigation, the bottle said 2L on it, so it was supposed to contain the same amount of soda that a 2L bottle of Coca-Cola contained. I decided to take it upon myself to work out what the height and apparent width of an "optimum" bottle of cola would be and then to decide whether Qibla or Coke were closer in shape to perfect. The results are kinda weird.

I spent a few hours making the box and a few days putting coat after coat of stain+clear on it. Some of the harder parts of creating the box included putting in the power button and the LED power indicator. It was actually quite easy getting the motherboard and power supply in, though, and I love how it came out. One thing I would change if I were to do it again is I'd get a good saw that would enable me to cut angles so there would be no edges visible on the wood. Beveling all the corners came out nicely with my sander, because it's pine (very soft). Here are the finished system specs:

• VIA Epia 1.0GHz processor
• 512MB DDR2 RAM
• 300GB SATA Hard Disk
• 2GB UDMA/100 Dedicated Swap Disk
• Built-On VIA 10/100 LAN and 1x PCI rtk 8139D card
• 4 80mm fans @ 5v instead of 12
• 1 40mm fan @ 5v instead of 12
• Slackware 10.1

Here's a link to the Diagram of how it works. It runs relatively cool and looks nice out on display. Any questions or comments should be directed at me.

JChatIRC applet ( require Java 1.4 available here)