Challenge Impossible

Peer School

2008-10-12T18:36:00.003-04:00

Goals:

Further the general education of each member via peer developed content that emphasizes the presentation of material from members as much as it depends on the feedback and attention of the members.
Include people from multiple backgrounds and disciplines.
Encourage presentation from multiple forms and diverse backgrounds.
Encourage the broadening of the entire group by approaching material outside of the expertise of all members.
To improve all members communication skills, especially oral and written.
To help professionals discover new ways of looking at their fields by presenting their knowledge to an interested group of non-experts.

Models of Success:

Modern Marvels – Those guys can make anything interesting. Who knew that Saws and glue could keep me watching for an hour a piece?
Socrates – The school of Socrates, where the emphasis was on communication, discussion, and the art of asking good questions. They had a deliberate disassociation from testing and measurement of achievement.

Keys for success:

An active community of participants of which at least half of the people consistently present.
Food & drinks.
An openness and desire for members to be interested in learning.

Its one thing to be interested theoretically, it is another to be so interested in the face of one’s other obligations in life. The more rewarding the experience is from the outset, and the more value people feel they are getting, the better the long term prospects are.

A distraction free place for meeting.

Whether this is some member’s house, or a common community room, it must be devoid of outside interferences that might suck away the attention span of the members.
It may help to use varying and non-obvious meeting places to keep things interesting. Such as people's homes, coffee shops, park pavilions,

A set of organization on discussions.

Some people are naturally more aggressive than others in group conversations, and without some sort of organization on discussion, the more passive members may soon become disinterested entirely.

Minimize the amount of work for non-presenters.

Solutions to this problem might be to break apart a concept into a series of lectures of growing complexity on a given subject.

Emphasize a balance on deep and broad explorations of a subject.

If the material is too broad – then people may feel like the material is lacking in quality or substance.
If the material is too deep – people may feel like the material doesn’t relate to them enough to be meaningful and they may not be prepared to absorb and collaborate or contribute.

Balance safe subjects known to be interesting to the group, and subjects that may push the boundaries of people’s general areas.
Meetings should always be recorded with audio for later review. Video is also highly encouraged

Watching your own presentations is one of the best ways to improve weak points in your presentation skills.

Collaborative Presentations are legitimate.

If a group wants to work on a short film, or cover a topic in tandem, that’s perfectly reasonable.

Example Agenda:

Start of meeting with an organizer making a few opening remarks. The point here is to mark a definite start of the meeting to encourage some organization.
Open the floor to any willing presenters.

Valid topics could include:

A ‘day in the life of’ on your field of expertise.

Make sure to cover as concrete examples as possible, and to try to distill what you normally do into the parts of which might be of most value to someone outside of your field, or which might offer the best insights into what it is that you do, and why.

An in-depth covering of a topic that may be of common, but shallow depth of understanding for others.

Try to give meaningful depth, and help others by including explicit ways in which the depth of the information ties into their lives in a way that the new knowledge has a good chance at being gainful.

Embodied Energy

2008-10-12T18:31:00.002-04:00

Thermostats in our homes measure air temperature, and so we generally think of the temperature of the house in terms of its air temperature. But there’s more to it than that. We rarely think of the temperature of all the other stuff in your house. It makes a bigger difference than most people give it credit for.

Ever notice that when it’s been cold outside for a few days, and suddenly it warms up to what you’d consider a really hot day? But you don’t really need your air conditioner?

I still need to crunch the numbers a bit – but over the summer I noticed that the factors I thought would be important for predicting how hot my house would get or how much electricity I’d need to cool my house.

I was using these factors:
Outdoor High Temperature
Outdoor Low Temperature
Indoor Morning Temperature
Amount of Cloud Cover

What I found was that there was an additional factor – the average temperature my house had been for the past few days.

It takes a few days for all the materials of my house to settle on a temperature. The air temperature, in contrast, can fluctuate within hours.

So I got to thinking why that might be.

I’ll give two scenarios here:

1) Your house’s air temp has been 65 degrees all afternoon. In the evening you turn on the heater and your air temp goes up to 70 after an hour.

2) Your house’s air temp has been 70 degrees all day, with the heat on the whole time.

Do you think that if you lay down in bed – will you be cooler, warmer or equally temperate in the 2nd example? I’d guess you’d be warmer in the second example. After all, the bed itself is 5 degrees warmer to start with in the 2nd example. The bed doesn’t warm up right away when you turn the heat on – because the thermostat turns off the heater as soon as the air gets to 70 degrees.

Another thing to consider is radiation heat. If the ceiling of your house is 85 degrees (which can happen in many houses on a sunny day), then the energy of the ceiling’s radiation will warm you up more so than if it had been cloudy, and the ceiling was 77 degrees, even if the air temperature was 77 in both cases.

So, two houses at the same temperature reading may not feel the same, depending on the embodied heat of all the stuff in the house.

Like anything – embodied energy can help and hurt you. It’ll probably help you if you’re aware of how to take advantage of it. If you ignore it, it’ll work against you.

One design where embodied heat helps you is with a Tromble Wall http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trombe_wall , which is essentially a material with a lot of mass that is placed in the sun’s rays. In cool weather will absorb lots of heat during the day and radiate that into the structure it’s attached to during the night.

The Spanish have used this concept widely in their architecture. Big thick walls lined with white material act as a temperature moderator. In the hot daytime, they gradually absorb energy, at night when it gets cooler, they give off most of that energy. The next morning, they’re cool again, and get warmed up by the sun. This lets you have a comfortable temperature all day inside because the thick walls are always the temperature that you want them to be, as opposed to the air temperature outside, which is the opposite of the ideal temp.

It works best in an area with wider temperature swings. In the Southern US, where summer temperatures are high day and night – different solutions may be more applicable – but the concept of embodied energy is still worth having in the back of your mind the next time you go over to the thermostat to change the setting.

Creating Change

2008-10-12T18:14:00.000-04:00

In order to make any real changes in the world you’ve got to get a lot of people involved. Most of us won’t play critical roles in the changes that society faces in our lifetimes, and most of the changes will seem to happen without our involvement at all. But that’s okay because not everyone needs to be a die hard for progress to be made.

Sometimes though, a problem comes along that is big enough or that we believe in enough that we feel the need to do something about it. We might not know what the solution is or we might feel like solving the problem is overwhelming. This is a common reaction that all people can feel when confronted with a problem whose solution seems external to them.

Some people will choose to make small changes in their lives. Maybe they change the products they buy, the things they teach their children. Maybe they give a little bit of money to someone working for their cause, or maybe they change the way they vote. Maybe they simply try to change the way that they treat people.

Some people will make bigger changes. They might volunteer for the cause. They may change jobs or move to a new place. They might go back to school or spend time trying to convince others to believe in the cause as well. They might organize a local group to start a discussion about the cause.

Some people will be in a better position to generate change than others. People who are in positions of power may not be aware of all the problems facing the world. They may feel just as powerless to make a change if they feel as though there is no support or calling for such a change. They may not know enough about the problem to know what solutions are best to pursue. Even with all of those obstacles - they might be receptive to working for change if that change is something they believe in.

For the vast majority of us who are not in a great position to create change, we can support those can. We can do this in many different forms. We can help to convince others to also support those in power. We can directly offer our support to those people. Or we can lead by example by following our beliefs in the sincere hope that others will follow suit. We can help to convince others who are not convinced yet. If the facts are on your side, you can always eventually win through honesty, integrity and humility.

The point is that we each have some way to help create the world we envision. Just because our professions may seem tangential or our ability to contribute may seem small – each person can genuinely help.

If you feel like progress is happening too slowly, but are unwilling or unable to increase how much of your life you are giving towards a cause – instead of losing hope, concentrate on supporting others higher than you or on building the number of people on your side. Any genuine legitimate action is superior to inaction. When everybody participates - things really do change.

Saving Money On Electricity

2007-12-26T21:54:00.001-05:00

Sometimes we don’t think about actions we take in a way that puts into perspective their consequences.

Today I want to talk about how this affects our electricity usage.

Different perspectives:

1 watt running all year costs $1.

1 watt running all year from Coal sources emits ~20 lbs of CO2.

1 watt running all year from Coal sources emits ~.068 mg of mercury.

One watt isn’t too bad, but one watt is about enough power to keep a high-efficiency LED night light running.

The average home in the US uses about 5,000 kW hrs of energy from electricity a year. That’s equivalent to running 570 watts of power all year.

5,000 kW Hrs a year costs $600.
It emits 4.75 tons of CO2 / yr, and emits 38 mg of mercury.

What I find interesting is that for every watt of average electricity usage you stop using, you’ll save a dollar every year.

If you replace an old refrigerator or old air conditioner, this could quickly turn into hundreds of dollars.

A new air filter might cost fifty dollars, in one year the savings in electricity would pay back for itself compared to the old filter, if the average power use dropped 50 watts. After the first year, I’ll be saving $50 bucks every year after that compared to maintaining the status quo.

How much potential savings is there out there for the average person to tap into?

It depends on what kinds of things you have running in your house. There are plenty of good sources on how to make your house more efficient.

Just remember that 1 watt of average usage equals 1 dollar, and you will be more aware of the consequences of the amount of electricity you use.

On Light bulbs III

2007-09-20T22:23:00.001-04:00

A while back I wrote about compact fluorescents and how great they are and all that.

I figured a 2 year follow-up was in order.

So far, I've replaced 1 bulb that burned out, and I had one break when I moved.

Every other bulb that I bought two years ago is still shining as bright as they day I bought it.

My electricity bills dived noticeably (about 20%) after I switched. I've never had a pre-CFL electricity be higher than a post-electricity bill on a month-by-month basis. The biggest savings are in the winter which is nice here in the northeast, where heating costs are pretty expensive compared to my electrical bills - which are very cheap compared to my peers since I choose to forgo air conditioning.

What has been harder though, is to get my parents to convert to compact fluorescents. Lots of people their age say the same thing - "I don't like the light it throws".

I'm wondering what the deal is with that. The light doesn't bother anybody my age that I've talked to. At all. Sure, I can tell that there is a difference. But I'm not able to say one is superior to the other.

Is it that the older generation is more used to having bulbs that look the same way they always have?

I don't think that's entirely it. My parents switched from "soft white" to the bluer hued light bulbs a few years ago. so its hard to say that they're entrenched in one particular style of lights.

Maybe they just psychologically think that blue is superior?

Maybe CFLs have a stigma because they were poorly implemented a couple
decades ago with inferior technology.

Maybe their eyes are different? Can we figure that out? we know that the actual areas of the light spectrum that incandescent give off is different than a CFL. Does the human eye get used to certain frequencies of light and prefer them? Does the eye lose sensitivity to certain frequencies as people age?

My mom says the light is ugly. If I had to see it through her eyes, would I agree? (As in, if I could somehow take a picture through a filter that exactly matched her retina, would I be forced to agree that - yes - when seen through her eyes it is ugly.) This would be as opposed to saying, our eyes physically see the light the same way - but our brains interpret it differently.

I don't know which it is.

If its the eyes themselves - then maybe when I'm older I'll have CFL light too.

If it is psychology, then the light would probably just take some getting used to.

Signal -> Noise in Group Settings

2007-07-25T19:16:00.000-04:00

This is a little exploration into something I was thinking about today.

My hypothesis is this:

Over time, the influenial members of a group will become dominant, such that the overall characteristics of the group will take on the properties of the influencers.

A little Mathematical Example To Set It Up:

If you graph a set of random data points it looks like a bumpy random graph.

If you have a bunch of random sets, and sum up the values at each point, you don’t get a random graph anymore. You get a uniform graph.

It’s like “White Noise”. You have a thousand signals all mashing up against each other - and the total sum of all the signals is a uniformly bland mildly randomly fluctuating signal we call white noise.

Now - let’s say you took the same system but introduced signal interference.

Let’s say some signals were “influencers” and others were “influenceable”. The influencers change nearby signals to be more like themselves. They don’t change themselves. The influenceable are dynamic, strongly picking up the properties of their neighbor signals, and weakly changing nearby signals to be more like themselves.

Now, in this system, initially, you’ll get a uniform signal, as you did before.

Again, my hypothesis is this:

Over time, the influencers will become dominant, such that the overall signal will take on the properties of the sum of the influencers.

What are the implications?

If there are lots of random influencers, you’ll get a uniform signal like before.

But if the number of influencers is small, or if the influencers tend to all have similar characteristics, you’ll get a signal that is driven by the influencers.

The original problem I wanted to solve was this:

Can I build a simulation to figure out how much of an impact an influential member of a group had compared to those who prefer to follow?

So I’m going to build something like this:

Take a 100x100 table of data, with each row being a “member” and each column being “some thing that they believe in to a certain extent”. The value of a particular node (x,y) tells us that x person feels F(x,y) about issue y.

Then I’ll put in a correlation of influence. Some people will be big influencers, others will tend to gravitate towards the ideas of others.

Each person x will have a list of “neighbors” that they directly affect. So, an influencer with a lot of neighbors should theoretically cause their values to become much more prominent in the overall system.

The question I want to find out is – how much of the overall signal over time is driven by the top X% of influencers? None? Lots?

How about if influencers operate in a heirarchy? Where some influencers influence other influencers.

Another question: How far away from the original signal can you get simply by selectively crafting the influencers? What if influencers can change the number of others that they influence over time?

hmmmmm..

One more: How simple of a system can you have before the effect is obvious?

Why Projects Always Take Longer Than You Think

2007-06-01T20:24:00.001-04:00

When it comes to estimating tasks as a software engineer, most people usually estimate the time it will take for a series of tasks, total them up, and that’s about how long it will take. Some methods are most sophisticated than others, using average case and safe estimate cases, and totaling those up - but fundamentally, everyone is still working with averages.

The problem that most people run into is that they’re trying to intuitively fit a normal distribution on the length of a task, and pick the average time.

That’s all well and good. If you’re more or less right with your estimations of the average time, your total time will be accurate, right?

Well, maybe not.

The reason is that tasks don’t follow a true normal distribution.

But why?

In a true normal curve, you have a continuous number of possibilities for every option. But with real-world estimation, no task can take less than zero time. So, the probability distribution of a task is bounded by zero. The percentage of tasks that take zero time is zero, and grows from there. However, there is no upper bound on how long a task will take. The percentage of tasks that take infinite time drops to an infinitesimal amount over.

So, when you pick the average, you’re saying, half the time it’ll take longer, and half the time it’ll take less time, overall it’ll even out. But it won’t. The tasks that run short are bounded by 0, whereas the tasks that run long have no bound. Because of this the area of the curve before the 50/50 mark is less than the area after the curve.

You don’t want your average to be the 50/50 mark of when the task will be finished. You want your mark to be the 50/50 of the area, which takes into account the bounding problem.

This number will always be higher than the original.

Which is why you’re always late with your projects.

Or you’re just a slacker.

Dynamic Electricity Billing

2007-05-21T23:22:00.000-04:00

The nature of a power grid is such that the more power you have to generate at once, the more expensive every bit of power is.

There are a few good reasons for this:

1. As the demand rises, the power companies have to generate more power from older, dirtier, and less efficient power plants. These plants take produce less power for each dollar it takes to run them.

2. As a seasonal effect - fuel becomes more expensive when demand rises. Coal and gas are most susceptible to fuel prices. (Solar power is actually cheaper at peak times because peak times are hot sunny afternoons, when solar cells are most effective.)

Thus, it might cost $1,000 to produce the first megawatt of electricity, but $1,500 to generate a second megawatt.

When Demand Rises

The demand for electricity rises to its highest during the day between noon and six on summer days as homes and businesses are all running air conditioners. At night demand falls because outside temperatures drop and air conditioners don’t have to work as hard.

The other limiting factor of the power grid is that enough power plants need to be built to supply people at the maximum load time. This means that the power grid is frequently operating well below capacity. It also means that the limiting factor on how many power plants we need is strongly associate to the number of air conditioners running on the hottest summer days.

That’s not to say other things don’t require electricity too – but overall, its air conditioning that causes significant fluctuations in demand.

(Lighting doesn’t cause as much of a difference as you might imagine – mostly because businesses run their lights during the day while homes tend to run their lights at night.)

How Pricing Will Change

One change the electric suppliers have learned from the telephone industry is basing their rates on time of day. In the future, you’ll get billed a higher rate in the afternoon than at night. As a homeowner this is good news, since you can just push up your thermostat when you’re away from work, and overall your bills will drop. Businesses on the other hand will have to start thinking about more efficient electricity usage if they want to keep electrical costs down.

But maybe that’s a good thing.

As rates rise, demand will fall. A certain portion of people will turn up their thermostats knowing that it will cost them extra otherwise.

This will allow more old power plants to run at lower capacity on peak summer days. It’ll decrease the amount of coal and oil power companies need to buy to run their plants, which will lower the rate overall. In turn, the best plants will be providing the most power which will also moderate prices. This might even also quicken the speed for the oldest plants to get decommissioned in place of newer supplemental power plants, such as solar, which run best on peak days. Wind is also an option in many areas.

We’d be trading our most expensive and polluting plants for renewable energy. Or at least much cleaner coal plants.

Though I’d personally prefer a power plant that didn’t emit greenhouse gasses.

Tracking Your Electricity Usage

2007-05-09T23:11:00.000-04:00

A while back I thought about ways to improve energy usage - and taking away a concept I've learned from my profession - is that you can't do a good job improving something if you don't know exactly what's wrong with it.

That lead me to the idea of installing web-cameras with image recognition that constantly viewed my Electric, Gas, and Water meters. Then I'd have a program running on a computer reading from the web cameras, and graphing the data in real-time.

Thus, I'd always have real-time access to my energy usages, and it'd be able to really easly tell how much a hot shower cost me in real dollar terms -- or whatever other household activity I was doing.

The idea then would be to make this preatty cheap to build and install. Then improve the software to the point where it quickly points out likely problems in a user's energy usage.

I think a lot of people would improve their energy usage if they had much more frequent data than they get from their monthly bills.

Fortunately, the electric company where I live has an online interface that will give you daily usage in kW.

Though its not as good as hourly data might be, daily trends are very helpful because I can remember on particular days what I was doing that might have used more or less and get a feel for how much certain activities are costing.

It might even make me think twice about running the dryer for a few extra minutes next time.

Thoughts from a Hack Game Developer

2006-12-07T00:44:00.000-05:00

I’ve been reading about different ways that people go about designing games, and one of the concepts that really stuck with me was ‘If you build your game with X, you tend to get X.’

What I took away from it was, the way you design something will show up in the final product and your users will know. Be it a game, a book, software, or anything else creative.

This got me to thinking about how I design my games. I feel like I take the “whatever works”, sort of haphazard approach. I’ll be playing a game, watching a movie, or in the car, and I’ll get an idea and run with it. There’s nothing approaching a formal method I use to build games, nothing like rules engines, systems for diagramming decision trees, or anything sophisticated. The result is that I generally get a game with a cool concept, and some pretty good mechanics, but not a lot of cohesion between the pieces and certainly none of what the kids call ‘Polish’.

I’m basically the Amateur Hack archetype of a designer. The kind of guy a game publishing company would probably laugh out the door. I’m cool with that.

But still, sometimes I wonder – maybe if I used a little bit more sophisticated methods for building a game, then when people played the game, they’d say “this game is really tight, the rules are totally balanced and polished.” Yeah, whatev. I’m not trying to build polished games. I’m out to make fun games. You know, the kind of games that make me all psyched up. The kind of game that makes me want to make more games.

Some of my friends were really excited when my games came out. Not just because I made them. In fact, some people were pretty skeptical at first. They were just humoring a raving lunatic at first. But they were genuinely excited the first few times through the game.

And to me was saying that the premise was strong. Subsequent plays found parts of the games to become a mix of bland, predictable, complicated, or inconsistent. Over time the more annoying aspects started to stick out worse than the good things. -- The games weren’t polished. The players wanted the crap that I’d glossed over in the first iteration fixed.

That’s easier said than done.

I’ve found the things I do to create a new game are quite a bit removed from the tasks and methods used to tighten up a game.

At any rate, I need to figure out how to get better at the tightening up part of game development.

If I come up with something, I’ll let you guys know.

Atlas / Ajax

2006-11-09T18:23:00.000-05:00

I have to say that I'm totally psyched about the near future of ASP.Net development after attending a training last night.

Microsoft's framework for beefing up the user experience in .Net Web applications last night will really bring down the barrier to entry for companies to start exploiting the same tricks that have made Google the darlings of the internet community.

Of course, Google will undoubtedly keep pushing the envelope. But this framework will bring Google's type of web-apps to the mainstream business software development world.

Lacking Depth of Substance

2006-09-19T21:25:00.000-04:00

There are so many new venues for media out there that didn’t exist a decade ago. You have You Tube, Deviant Art, YTMND, and several good music sites. All of these are great forms of expression for artists. But lately, I’ve gone back to reading books again.

I’ve been getting the feeling lately that our attention spans keep going down. There are some fantastic flash animations, images and video shorts out there – but it has taken up the attention space of telling stories with substance.

Maybe I’m just looking in the wrong places – but despite all the new forms of expression, it seems like we haven’t really seem much meaningful work. The field is dominated by a girth of fleetingly amusing or interesting snippets. Some things gratify my attention for a few minutes, only to be forgotten a few days later. Others allude to an enticing tip of an iceberg - only to find that the creator created nothing that exists beyond it. Just empty shells of promising ideas.

It isn’t that I don’t like many of the things out there: I just wish I saw some inkling of things with substance now and again.

But maybe that’s not the web’s strength. Maybe I’m just hoping to find depth in the wrong places.

Who Wants a Cool Roof?

2006-09-13T22:39:00.000-04:00

Does anyone else out there get annoyed in the summertime when they see a huge flat retail building with a black-top tar roof, and think, “That’s hot.”

I start wondering – how much are the owners paying for air conditioning? A lot of these buildings are quickly constructed with cheap steel and little insulation. The black tar roof is quick and cheap and simple. It’s also really hot in the summer time. Black tar can get up to about 175 – 200 degrees Fahrenheit on a hot summer day.

I understand that when a business starts up, they don’t have very much capital, and that they need a facility quickly and cheaply.

But it turns out there are a lot of low cost additions or alternatives to black top roofs that have a positive return on investment within a couple of years in energy costs. Couple this with the fact that a more efficient roof can allows a building to reach the same level of cooling with a less powerful (cheaper initial cost) air conditioning unit, and you’ve got yourself the makings of a good idea.

Energy Star has already started working on this one. They have certified several types of Cool Roof technologies. They have painted metal roofs, white ceramic, and many other options. They’ve also designed thin paneling that can be installed overtop an existing roof with no structural changes required.

A white roof can be 75 to 100 degrees cooler than the same roof in black.

This also helps out with the Urban Heat Island effect, which contributes to greater energy needs in urban areas due to higher temperatures caused by more dark materials and less vegetation than rural areas have.

There’s also a market for personal homes. However, sloped roofs don’t see as much of a benefit from improved materials as flat roofs. This is mostly because the amount of sunlight hitting a sloped roof is less than that of a flat roof. Further, sloped roofs usually have better insulation and ventilation that make the benefit of a cool attic less crucial. In most houses there’s a crawl space of some kind on the top floor, whereas in a flat roofed building, the top floor is usually within inches of the roof.

Still, if your home is in a warmer sunny climate, there’s still a sizable cost savings to choosing a lighter colored tile than a darker one. But if you’re like me, and live in a cooler cloudy climate, then you’re better off insulating the space between your living space and your attic, or planting deciduous trees on the Southwest and Southeast corners of your building. (That’d be Northwest and Northeast for people in the Southern Hemisphere.)

All that said, next time I’m in the market for a new roof - a.k.a. no time soon – I’ll be looking into the energy efficient options.

A Practical Example of Measuring Your Effect

2006-08-18T05:43:00.000-04:00

In my last article, I brushed the surface on my theory of lifetime productivity.

After reading the past article, it seems as though the conclusion is that to do the best, one should evenly excel in all three categories. However, I would contend that the better strategy is to make sure one is always trying to improve all three categories.

So, here’s an example of how growing can beat out a long-term even approach:

Jimmy Plunko is a software developer. He’s bright, but pretty new at the profession, so we’ll call him a 5 in skill. He works at a big company building up a vanilla, but successful business application. He likes his job, but he’s not passionate about it. Work ethic 5, and direction 5.

He gets a call one day from a friend. His friend has an opening at a new company working on a software application for 3-d rendering new Frisbees designs. Plunko is a former UlimateFrisbee champion, and knows he’d be passionate about working on frisbees. But the frisbee industry is tough, and most companies fail. If he went there, he’d be working with some other talented and passionate people, because the risk involved in trying to break into the frisbee industry up is going to attract only the people that really love frisbees too. We’ll call the new opportunity work ethic 8, direction 2. 2 is a stretch. I mean, come on - its frisbees.

So, Plunko, thinks about the potential scores here:
Where he's at now: 5 * 5 * 5 = 125 (skill * work * direction)
At the Frisbees: 5 * 8 * 2 = 80

According to this, Plunko should stay where he’s at.

But, if Plunko works at the Frisbee company for a while, he’s going to learn some new tricks that he’d never learn at his big company, because there are just some problems you only have to solve when you’re building frisbee software. But knowing how to solve them will make him a little more skilled at solving all other problems. So, after a year because of the new problems he’ll have to solve, his skill will turn into a 7.
7 * 8 * 2 = 112

Plunko’s skill level isn’t going to rise as fast building up the business application. After a year, his skill will rise to 6, but his work ethic will drop to 4, because he finds the work boring and wishes he was working on frisbees instead.
6 * 4 * 5 = 120

If the frisbee company succeeds, the usefulness of his work goes from very low, to something good. If they become the #1 force in frisbee research, suddenly the direction of the company becomes 5. (Hey, we’re still talking frisbees here, not exactly life changing stuff).

Now his score becomes:
7 * 8 * 5 = 280

That’s way better than the 120 he’d be at working at the job he has now on the business application.

But of course, most Frisbee companies don’t make it. So we’ll say the company’s got a 20% chance of making it.

Even still, if the company goes belly up, he’ll be working now at a skill level of 7. And because he has a skill level of 7 now, maybe he works at another vanilla company in a position where he’s making more engaging decisions, and his work ethic is a 6.

So, two years later, if the Frisbee company fails, and he goes back to working on some other business application, he’s still much stronger than before at this score:
7*6*5 = 210

Just to sprinkle a little bit of expected value on this:
The 280 score is probably only 20% likely.
The 210 score is probably 80% likely.
So, the theoretical expected score is 280 * .2 + 210 * .8 or:
224.

So, the options are this:

Where he's at:
Score 125 for the next year, and 120 for the next 2 years:

With the frisbees:
Score 80 for 1 year, 112 for a year, and 224 the 3rd year.

That’s:
365 for staying put over the next 3 years.
416 for going after the Frisbee opportunity.

More importantly, no matter what, he’ll be in a better position to get more points down the line if he switches companies now, because his Skill level and Work ethic will be better after 3 years. And he won't second guess himself for never following his passion.

What this example illustrates is that putting yourself in a position to improve yourself can be a much better decision in the long run. I think the point was:

Concentrate more on building your long term prospects rather than creating something average now.

And:

If your potential is high, your output will naturally be high too.

Or maybe just:

Its good to work on what you're passionate about.

A Way To Measure Your Effect On Society

2006-08-03T19:32:00.000-04:00

Hypothesis: The most effective way for a person or group to effect positive change is to maximize skill, effort, and direction.

Skill : a combination of knowledge and natural ability. It can be increased through learning.

Effort : time spent working. It is bounded by the time of the day and the length of a lifetime.

Direction: how efficient your actions are in attaining your goal. In a large sense, direction is based on WHAT you decide to work on. In a small sense, direction is HOW you decide to work on it.

The best way to get something accomplished is to maximize Skill and Effort.

To make sure that what you are accomplishing is exacting positive change, you need direction.

Getting the most out of Skill * Work * Direction is a quick and effective means of measuring your effect. (I'm hypothesizing)

Here's a couple of examples:

A mediocre MRI technician, working part time at hospital.
5 skill * 5 work * 8 direction = 200 overall effect

A highly skilled programmer, working 70 hours a week on a start-up company that fails before it ever ships a product.
10 skill * 10 work * 0 direction = 0 overall effect.

A mastermind crime boss who steals from and kills the innocent:
10 skill * 10 work * (-10) direction = -1000 overall effect.

Of course, if the guy at the start-up succeeded and it became the next Google (direction 8, perhaps?), he'd have a score of 800, and would be blowing away the MRI guy in net effect.

What's your score?

Peru - First Impressions

2006-06-12T22:58:00.000-04:00

A thick fog enveloped us on May 20th as our plane touched down in Lima, only a few hundred yards from the Pacific Ocean. For a Peruvian living in Lima, it was a foggy morning like any other, but for a couple of foreigners the warm desert fog seemed glaringly out of place. But Lima was just out of reach as we longingly gazed out towards the muted skyline from the airport, both of us wishing to be anywhere else in Peru but at the airport at six in the morning.

Three hours, an uncomfortable nap, and one insanely sweet, Bubble-Yum flavored Inka Cola Light later, our plane soared into the air to our final destination: Arequipa. The White City.

Fixing Pittsburgh

2006-04-16T22:33:00.000-04:00

So I've been catching up on Pittsblog, and I decided to throw in my own two cents on a perennial subject of hand-wringing, fist-clenching tribulation (at least for the locals): how do we fix Pittsburgh?

First of all, any discussion of the ills of our fair city inherently implies that there's something wrong with it. At least, something wrong enough to outweigh all the good it has. Maybe it's our "smoky steel town" history, our inability to retain young people, the weather, the crazy-ass road system, etc., etc. Let me throw in another suggestion: maybe it's our collective inability to focus on the positives! So what can we do to accentuate the things we do have?

When I think about Downtown, what comes to mind? The stadiums. Point State Park. The total lack of activity after 5pm (Cultural Dist. excepted). The views from Mt. Washington. Three rivers.

My wife and I visited Portland, OR last Memorial Day weekend. I thought it was absolutely beautiful. I think there are a lot of parallels to Pittsburgh there - mid-size city, riverside parks. But one thing that sticks out for me is - we spent practically two full days within the "downtown" city limits, and never ran out of things to do.

Going back to my list of Pittsburgh activities - what is there for a family to do that's a regular downtown draw? Notice I said regular - so the Regatta and the Arts Festival are out. (Portland, btw, has the Rose Festival... stop here if you want to end it at "Steel City" vs "City of Roses" :)

Point State, IMHO, is terribly underused. Yes it's an island of tranquility in the midst of the city, and there's the history of Fort Pitt to boot. But honestly, the whole time I worked downtown I can't say I ever really stopped down to the Point specifically for the peacefulness. It's much more about the green space, to me, and there are a number of neat little spots downtown for a nice lunch in a natural setting. (Trust me - take the Enjoy book and try to hit every downtown restaurant in it. We must have found a dozen little parklets here and there.)

What I would like to see is an area along the river for amusements - something to get everyone out of the house and down to the city on warm spring evenings. Something like the Navy Pier in Chicago or the Inner Harbor area of Baltimore. I'd like a combination of restaurants and outdoor entertainment (maybe under a tent or other open shelter, for when it is the weather holding people back). Bessemer Court is, in typical Pgh fashion, a worthy but insufficient effort in the (general) right direction. Whee - water choreographed to Rick Springsteen!

Ok, so people come and eat, see a live band or ride a ferris wheel - then what? How about shopping? Portland has the Saturday Market, which isn't actually strictly limited to Saturdays. It's similar to the Arts Festival, but it runs practically year round. They don't isolate the food booths from the crafts, either - so there's actually a half decent chance that the Fried Oreo people will *gasp* buy something. This is what I would like to see down at the Point - but please, let's be more mindful of the plastic chairs and the lawn-trampling masses so it's not an eyesore.

Then I would take it one step further. Run a Molly's Trolley, an amphibious WWII relic, or just a plain old PAT bus down Penn/Liberty Ave smack into the Strip, gratis for anyone with a booth voucher. Have them point out all the cool places along the way - the O'Reilly, SPACE, the Wood Street Galleries, the CLP. Mention all those awesome restaurants, hawk that Enjoy book. *cough* local business *cough* While you're at it, talk up the architecture and the walking tours.

How about bike, wagon, and rollerblade rentals? How about a farmer's market - and not up at the City-County Building? How about making the City a weekend destination? Once we've got that, we can start talking about big name retailers. We can think about redesigning downtown living space. We can start making transit connections to Oakland, the North Shore, the East Hills - because the people will be wanting to come here not go there. And they will come not just to see the rivers and the views, but to enjoy themselves while they're here.

The only way any of this would succeed would have to come from the marketing. Not marketing the region, or its identity, or whatever. We have a regional identity crisis, ok? And guess what - the neurosis is coming from us. We've convinced ourselves of our own second-rate, also-ran status. It's us, the people from the suburbs and the surrounding areas, who need to be convinced that downtown is somewhere worth being. Once we've got that, everyone else will follow.

Are All New Ideas Evolutionary?

2006-04-06T01:03:00.000-04:00

My creativity seems to be generally cyclic. I’ll be highly creative for a time, and then have a lull for a while. Usually during this lull, at some point I start consuming new media, be it TV shows, movies, games, books, conversations with people, whatever. Once I start consuming this new media I get inspired by a whole set of new ideas that spark the next highly creative period.

So I got to thinking the other day that what we’re capable of creating is limited by the influences around us. And further, what we can accomplish in our lives is limited by the sum of human knowledge during our lifetime. Archimedes was a super genius Greek mathematician, but he had no chance of figuring out the General Theory of Relativity (E=mc2) that Einstein came up with, simply because physics was in its infancy at that time. Meanwhile I would conjecture that in the 1900's some other physicist would definitely have derived the General Theory of Relativity within 10 years of Einstein had he say – been more interested in going to the bar every night. I make this claim based on the fact that Einstein’s figured out his famous theory while working as a patent clerk. He was a genius – but for him to come up with the theory, the field of physics must have already been pretty close to that breakthrough when he was born.

As another example - The Beatles weren’t ready to write Norwegian Wood in the early 1960’s, because even though they were one of the most talented bands ever, their knowledge of the music scene just wasn’t there in 1960. They had to do a lot of drugs and go to India first.

A lot of times, I think artists and other people get too paranoid about being heavily influenced by outside ideas that they fear anything they create will just be an evolution of different current ideas. But really, that’s people can do. Ideas that seem revolutionary, like the Einstein example, are more about a really talented person living at a time where humanity’s current knowledge sits on the cusp of a development that, though it may not be a huge conceptual jump, it turns out to have huge implications.

That is, Aristotle didn’t live in ancient Newfoundland, he lived in ancient Greece, a place brimming full of philosophers. He was a product of the people and writings that influenced him more than he was an independently revolutionary thinker. Aristotle just did philosophy better than his contemporaries in subtle new ways that suddenly made sense to everyone, and so we remember him.

Imagine what you would be capable of if you grew up on a deserted island with plenty of food, but no interaction with society for your whole life. If you were lucky, you’d come up with something resembling a language. Maybe. That’s about the best you could hope for.

Based on that, it seems that allowing yourself to be selectively influenced by good and new ideas, and keeping up with current developments is more than an acceptable part of creative development – it is an essential ingredient.

I guess what that all means is that original creativity is an addition to the known sum of human knowledge. And that no ideas exist in a vacuum. Or rather that ideas that do exist in a vacuum are starting from scratch, and are therefore extraordinarily unlikely to create something new and significant.

Where's My Beefy New Desktop, Dude?

2006-03-21T23:43:00.000-05:00

Last August I talked about hardware trends in terms of what is changing in the landscape of consumer electronics. But I think an update is in order here, as several things have changed, and there were a few things that I didn’t really talk about in the first article.

I was recently in the market for some new hardware because my current computer had run out of hard drive space and I’d run across a game that my video card wasn’t good enough for. So I got to thinking about what has and hasn’t changed over the 10 years since I’ve been a computer consumer.

I tend to be willing to spend between 1,000 and 1,500 for a new system, so if we take price as a constant, all other things equal, if I were to buy a computer in 2006, it should be about the same ratio of goodness from a computer in 2001 as that computer would be to one from 1996. That is, ever 5 years, the various components should increase at the same multipliers. (You might have heard of Moore’s Law).

In 1996, I was running a 166 MHz Pentium I, on 96 MB of memory and 1.6 GB hard drive. Sadly, I was also using this machine in 2002.  But in 2002 I bought a new machine. 1.8 GHz P IV, 512 MB memory, and 40 GB of hard drive space. Furthermore, the memory that I did buy with this computer was RDRAM, which is very fast. If I were to buy a comparably priced computer in 2006, it would be about 2.8 GHz P IV, 1024 MB memory, and 160 GB of hard drive space. Plus, the 1024 MB memory is SLOWER than the 512 I bought in 2002.

Whew – that’s a lot of numbers. The point is this, from 1996 to 2002, the hard drive got 25 times bigger, the processor was 10 times faster and the memory was 5 times bigger. From 2002 to 2006, the hard drive got 4 times bigger, the processor got 1.5 times faster, and the memory was 2 times bigger. If Moore’s law were holding up, we’d expect to see much more even numbers there. (The extra year from 1996 to 2002 doesn’t explain the jump).

What we’re looking at from 1996 to 2002 was a new generation of machines. In 2006, consumers are still buying the same family of Pentium processors, and the same type of memory. It’s the same generation of hardware. Just a gradual evolution.

So what explains this difference?

The main thing is all of the research by hardware companies in notebook computers. Notebooks in 1996 were total crap. In 2002, they were decent, but not great. In 2006, most people I know who own a computer have a notebook, and overall notebook sales have surpassed desktop sales. They spent gobs of money racing to get market share, expending time and money on minituraization and power consuption in current technology. Plus the explosion of Wi-Fi. (I'm not saying this is a bad thing).

The other thing is the onset of flat-panel monitors. Almost all new desktops are packaged with flat-panel monitors, which are still on the expensive side. So, since my numbers kept price constant, the flat-panel ate away at other hardware I could have bought. A new desktop with a CRT would have the following specs in my price range. (Who wants a CRT these days though? I scowl at mine daily. There are days I go to work just so I can stare at my dual-19 inch flat panels in silent reverence. Its so choice.) Ah-em. Anyway - the CRT 2006 era system came out like this - 3.0 GHz, 2 GB memory, and 250 MB hard drive. That ups the ratios slightly, but only the memory ratio is comparable to 1996 levels at that point. And keep in mind, that memory is still slower than the memory from 2002.

As a side note – the fast memory from 2002 turned out to be dead end technology for various reasons. It basically turned out that doubling your RAM speed wasn’t as good as making your RAM twice as big. Especially when the big RAM cost less. Cause people bought big cheap memory over small fast (expensive) memory.

There are a few hidden benefits to current technology – current processors are now Dual-Core or hyper-threaded. That basically means that you can run more programs at once without your computer slowing down. Intel has invested a lot of money betting that you care more about running a lot of things rather than one thing quickly. It’s a smart bet, considering how most people use their computers.

There was also a lot of money spent on 64 bit processors. AMD has come out with some successful 64 bit processors, and has really surpassed Intel in that area. Most of the money Intel spent on the 64 bit processors seems to have been wasted. So that’s another reason why we may have slowed down.

Clock speeds haven’t increased but your computer hardware’s capability of multitasking has. Unfortunately, software and software developers haven’t caught up to Dual-Core technology yet, so buying a dual-core probably won’t be as big of an advantage as it seems for another few years until your favorite operating systems and compliers are re-written to take advantage of the new hardware. Tough luck.

The elephant in the room though is that consumers aren’t buying computers as often as they used to. Is it the chicken or the egg? Would I perceive that I needed a new computer if new hardware was on the scale of 10 times better, rather than 2 times better than what I currently have? Or is it more that I am satisfied with a computer that runs every program I can possibly pay attention to at once – without any problems?

Computers seem to be approaching the curve of diminishing returns when it comes to price in compared to what new stuff you can do with it. That’s why mobility is all the rage. People are realizing there’s a lot more value in a computer they can use where and when they want than a stationary power-desktop that doesn’t do anything stunningly better. The exception are power-gamers, but at this point they’re a small minority in the computer market.

The hardware industry looks to me as if it is going to become more of a commodity, if it already isn’t, where profits are very marginal. The good thing is that everyone will be able to afford multiple computers in the near future. The bad thing is, new and exciting developments in consumer electronics are going to keep slowing down, and will never get as fast again as they were in the 1990’s. (Unless we meet an alien race or figure out fusion power or something else totally whack like that).

*sigh* I said all that and I didn’t even get to tell all you guys about the cool new transparent computer technology. I guess that’ll have to wait for another time.

Group Inspired Creativity

2006-01-28T14:25:00.000-05:00

Creativity often seems to be as much a product of a vibrant communities as the contribution of any particularly great individuals. There are many examples - the technology explosion from Silicon Valley, Florence during the Renaissance, European political theory in the 1700’s, Seattle’s music scene in the 1980’s and 1990’s, Pittsburgh’s robotics because of Carnegie Mellon. The list goes on and on. Once a community reaches critical mass, not only do its members spark ideas in each other, but the community itself naturally attracts talent from a wider and wider range as it gains a reputation for success.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past year, its that you don’t need to be great to start doing great things. You just need to do something. If you’re surrounded by a group of people who bring their own ideas and thoughts and inspiration, refining your ideas becomes a very rewarding part of the process in its own right. Let greatness happen later. I know too many people who seem to be stymied by perfection.

I was thinking of this based on a conversation I had with a friend the other day over dinner. My friends and I have been playing games our whole lives. I’ve started making my own. It’s a great group of people, because we have a solid mix of men and women. We also have a wide range of backgrounds from software to art, business, parenting and social work. All of us enjoy the playing games though, so it really helps get a broad perspective for what people really like about games.

My creation has also helped inspire some of the other people to get back into their development. We all sort of gave it a go a couple of years ago, made a lot of mistakes and got quagmire in details. I would love to see one of my other friends show off a game they’ve made sometime soon. Its wonderful to be in a creative community that’s capable of generating good ideas. I’m excited for the next step where I show these games off to strangers.

- Jake

From the random link dept.

2006-01-24T00:17:00.000-05:00

I found this on Penny Arcade - it's Brad Wardell's notes as he tests the AI for Galactic Civilizations II. Really good stuff.

SuperCharged Web Surfing

2006-01-09T21:15:00.000-05:00

I remember ten years ago going to AltaVista and searching for stuff. I would scrounge through a shoddily list of results until I eventually found a decent site. Then about four years ago Google came along, and suddenly the results of what I searched were exactly what I was looking for. But there was still a problem -- I had to know what to look for. In other words, I had to know what I wanted to find before I found it. I was constantly in a rut of checking the same five or six sites that rarely had an update I wanted to read.

That’s all changed over the last year or so. With sites like delicious, MetaFilter, a real explosion of quality blogs, such as Science Blog, and the spread of RSS feeds, I am now satisfied. I don’t have to know where to look anymore. Other people find good things and tell other people about it. Word of mouth spreads like wildfire. The group knows the gist of what I want to read about before I do. All I have to do is screen the top 50 or so headlines for what really catches my attention and I'm set.

Some of my friends seem to be constantly surprised with all the stuff that I find on the internet. I tell them, “I don’t actually find anything, I just know how to look.” It’s like the difference between panning for gold in a stream and having someone bring gold bars to your house. It takes pretty much no effort. I just set up a dozen RSS feeds off of aggregator sites, and the rest is reading headlines and following stories that are able to immediately catch my attention. There are so many interesting things that I never, ever have time to read them all.

You might think that I am missing things, by just going along with what everyone else out there is reading. But I don’t think that’s the case. I never found this much good information before I used aggregators. The trick now is to know when to stop.

Michelle Ramin, Artist

2005-11-30T22:18:00.000-05:00

A very talented and good friend of mine from college has launched a website to showcase her artwork. Its interesting to me to see her artwork, knowing her so well, because its obvious that it genuinely comes from her soul.

Please take a look if you are interested.

http://www.michelleramin.com

Do you take WiFi with your coffee?

2005-11-14T23:27:00.000-05:00

Disclaimer: Obligatory "homework" post ahead. 'Sup Cindy. :)

So... I've been reading Common Times lately for my news. Today they ran this story about the growing rate of prevalence of communication technology. It got me thinking about this post from Rich at Aldo Coffee, about the business risks of being a free WiFi hot spot.

I agree somewhat with the points he makes - a small business owner can't afford to take the liability of an attack based from their network as an origination point. The costs tripling bit surprised me somewhat - either Telerama is heavily subsidizing their WiFi business, pillaging their commercial broadband customers, or both. A decent speed dedicated business line shouldn't be going for more than $80/mo. Granted, his post was from 9 months ago, and costs have definitely dropped since then.

So I wondered if a technical solution would exist that might help regulate traffic for someone in the position to offer free wireless. Because, reading that story, it seems to me that in the near future, not having it is going to become the greater liability. The stuff Nintendo is doing with the DS indicates to me pretty clearly that localized, spontaneous use of networking capability is going to rapidly become the norm. And what better way to attract customers than to be a servicer of that need (as well as slinging some mean Joe to boot)?

The first time I read Rich's post, I'd envisioned a completely different set of problems; the largest being loitering. How would you mitigate the exploitation of your generosity? Also, how do you stop someone from hogging all the free 'width, slowing everyone else to a trickle?

The solution I had in mind would be a modified standard access point with some additional web interface. It would implement a ticketing system that could optionally be integrated with a cash register or credit card reader. So - user buys a latte, user gets a ticket. The ticket is good for 1 hour at a rated speed, at which point the subscription expires. But by then he's thirsty again anyway. You can't "combine" tickets (ie, get your friends to hook you up) because they're tied to a specific IP address assigned by the AP. You could make the subscription speed or length vary based on the purchase. You could also configure it to work like a debit card, which might help solve the hacker problem. Instead of a subscription you get X megabits of up/down traffic, and once you've used it it's gone.

I'd be astonished if a product with these or similar features is not available today. I'm inclined to believe that there is some sort of indemnity or insurance available as well. I don't hear about libraries being spammer dens or hacker havens, so somebody's on to something. All that leaves for Rich to figure out is how to cover the expense.

Hey, did I mention I have some ideas about that, too?

On light bulbs, contests, and other miscellany

2005-11-14T22:33:00.000-05:00

So, given that I have this new house and all, I've had a prime opportunity to implement a migration from incandescents to the new hotness. Care to guess how many bulbs it took? So far I'm at 24 and I could easily go another half-dozen. Thanks to Home Depot though, it hasn't cost a whole lot to do. They're currently selling six-packs of the 14 Watt (60W equivalent) bulbs for $9.97. That, in layman's terms, is what they call a really sweet deal. Considering they sell a single bulb, same rating, for $5; that's 66% off. (In fact, I told the Home Depot guy as much while I was making my purchase. Got to spread the cult of CFL ya know...)

But, you say, that seemingly shameless plug for the luminous wares of the Commercial Electric corporation wasn't enough? Well then, I shall tell you, on top of the price, EnergyStar is offering a chance to pay your energy bill for a year! Which brings me to the point of this post.

Inside the six-pack of bulbs is a scratch off ticket with your id number. You can take it to this page and find out if you won. Except, with the four packs I bought, each ticket had the exact same id number. Is that legit? D08469. You too?

It got me wondering if, for these kind of promos, it's easier to print one whole big batch of "unique" identical loser numbers, and then run off the 100 odd winners as actually unique prints. Seems pretty cheap, but maybe they figured no one would catch on? I mean, how many people would buy 24 CF lightbulbs at a go, right?

Return of the Matt

2005-11-14T22:05:00.000-05:00

Hey gang.

So you may have been wondering where I've been the past couple of months. All two of you. Well, my sincere and heartfelt thanks for your concern. In fact, over the last few weeks I've bought a new house, renovated my old house, hosted several odd birthday parties and get togethers, pushed two application releases to production (one as I post!), and otherwise encountered a large number of non-blog-oriented forms of distraction.

So, when I showed up at the Pittsburgh Blogfest IV last Wednesday, feeling oddly postless and with a faint sense of déja vu, I realized I'd best get my posting keister in gear. Prepare to be post-blasted.

If it's any consolation, I have 100+ unread emails in my work inbox. You still love me, right?

Lottery Shenanigans Part II

2005-11-01T19:44:00.000-05:00

Last time, we explored the idea of whether or not playing every number in the PowerBall lottery was profitable.

Turns out, though, that there were several errors in my original calculations. For instance, if you take the cash up front, you receive half the jackpot value. The annuity pays the full amount. Unfortunately, the annuity really is not a good option for someone trying to buy every ticket because of the massive up-front investment cost.

Another error was my omission of non-jackpot prizes, which turns out to be much more significant than I anticipated. If you read the comments, you'll see these prizes are very significant.

I have recalculated the value at about a 63 million loss if you take the cash payout and a 50% tax. It’s a 1.3 million loss if you take the annuity with a 50% tax. (I used 35% tax before, which is too low. Taxes pretty much are what finally kills the whole concept).

I was going to talk about what practical problems you'd face if you tried to buy every ticket. But since it turns out not to be profitable, its sort of pointless.

The main three problems you'd run into are The Money, The Legality, and Getting The Tickets.

Its not explicitly illegal, but there are problems, such as anybody you'd want to share the risk and profits with would have to be from the same state.

The money is a hard problem to overcome, if you don't already have it. (Impossible, I'd argue at this point, since its mathematically unprofitable).

Getting the tickets isn't any easier, since you have to go through licensed vendors. You'd either have to buy lots of lottery machines and print them yourself, which would cost a lot of money, or you'd have to buy online which is mostly illegal, and they probably have no way to facilitate your requests for 150 million sequential tickets in time for the next drawing.

So, I’d highly recommend against buying every ticket. You'd probably wind up broke and in prison.

Should You Play Every PowerBall Number? (If you could)

2005-10-19T14:55:00.000-04:00

The Power Ball has reached a $340 million dollar jackpot, and a lot of people are talking about it in the news.

I got to thinking, how big does the jackpot have to get before it becomes statistically profitable to buy a ticket for EVERY SINGLE NUMBER. (positive expected value, or Plus EV, to us stat geeks).

So, here are all the calculations I did. For those of you uninterested in the nitty-gritty, go all the way to the bottom for the findings.

$1 gets you a 1 in 150 million chance of winning.
The jackpot is $340 million.

If you play every number, it would then cost $150 million dollars.

If you play every number, and nobody else wins the jackpot you win $340 million.
340 - 150 = $190 million PROFIT.

If the jackpot is split with one other winner, you’d win $170 million.
170 – 150 = $20 million PROFIT.

If the jackpot is split with two other tickets, you’d win $113 million.
113 – 150 = $37 million LOSS.

The post-gazette stated yesterday that there is about a 55% chance someone will win tomorrow.

So, we can assume that if you play EVERY ticket, there is a 45% chance you’d be the only winner, and a 55% chance that you’d have to split the pot.

If we make some conjecture here, and say that the chance of only 1 other winner is 50%, a 30% chance of 2 other winners, and a 20% chance of 3 other winners, we can come up with an approximate expected value for playing every number.

So, $190 * .45 + $20 * (.55) * (.5) + (-37) * (.55) * (.3) + (-65) * (.55) * (.2) = 85.5 + 5.5 – 6.105 – 7.15

Or $77.745 million profit.

But, of course, you need to pay "the man". If tax is 35%, does that take away your advantage?

The EV equation becomes 74 * .45 + (-36.5) * .275 + (-73.55) * .165 + (-91.75) * .11 = 33.3 – 10 – 12.1 – 10

(To be more fair, I added a +3 to all those numbers, because we really only need to pay for 147 million numbers).

-- RESULTS --

Or about $1.2 million profit for playing every number. Damn, that’s still profitable, but just barely, considering you invested $150 million. You'd have a 45% chance of winning a lot of money, and 55% chance of losing money, which probably plateaus as high as a $100 million loss.

I don't recommend buying every ticket.

If there were no taxes, it would be completely different. In that case you could probably start a mutual fund just to buy lottery tickets and give away the dividends to shareholders, over time it would certainly have a net gain better than the stock market. *grin*

Also, as the jackpot continues to grow, the chance you'd have to split the pot also grows because more people play when the jackpot is high. So I'd speculate that the statistical profitability of the game is never going to make it worth buying every ticket.

Let There Be Lightbulbs - Part II (of 2)

2005-10-02T18:36:00.000-04:00

Somebody realized it would be cool if you wired up some fiber-optic cable to a big satellite-dish shaped mirror on a roof that always points at the sun.

Fiber optic cable transmits light very well over short distances, and as such, you can run some cable from the roof into the building and get sunlight – natural sunlight – all through the building, as long as the sun is up. It even works if its partly sunny, because there’s so much more ambient light from the sun, compared to lighting we use. Ever turn on a lamp during the day in a bright sunny room? You can’t really tell the lamp is on. Same deal. You’re pumping all that super-bright sunlight into the building, so you can spread out the sun’s light to a lot of rooms.

What is this ideal for? Well, its not so good for homes, because homes like lighting during the night. No sun, no light. But guess what – Americans use more electricity for lighting during the day than at night. What it is good for is the workplace.

The ideal place is short large-area buildings commonly found in quickly-built office parks, and warehouse type construction where internal lighting is required because large parts of a building have no natural light. Sunnier regions will benefit more. Sorry Pittsburgh and Seattle.

Once you get the cable laid down, the energy cost is virtually zero. It just needs a 9 volt battery to run a GPS monitor and a little motor so that the Mirror on the roof always points at the sun. The cable is about as complicated to install as wiring up normal electric overhead lighting, though more expensive. For taller buildings, they need to use a different kind of fiber optic cable that costs way more, so anything over 4 stories is not cost saving at this point.

Like the compact-fluorescent bulb, the cost savings grow over time.

They also have a tax-benefit for installing systems like this.

There are other psychological benefits that go with using natural light too. Its an intangible, but if they can show that people working in natural light have higher attendance and less sick days, then it could add to the savings of a solar lighting system.

Only a few buildings have currently installed this solar lighting system, but I would really like to see some feedback from both people who work in these places, and the financial numbers from the companies.

I admit, this one is a lot more experimental than the compact-fluorescents, but it sure sounds cool.

Let There Be Lightbulbs - Part I

2005-10-02T15:16:00.000-04:00

There are a lot of new technologies in the lighting business.

Part I

Compact – fluorescent bulbs give off very nice light, require one fourth the power, and last from four to sixteen times as long as a standard incandescent light bulb. They cost about $4 per bulb.

A 100 Watt incandescent bulb that you run for three hours a day, costs about a dollar a month in electricity. An equivalent fluorescent bulb costs you about a quarter. That doesn’t sound too impressive. But then – the incandescent will burn out sooner.

So, a fluorescent bulb running for 3 hours a day every day will last about four years. During that time, you’d have to change the incandescent light bulb about four times. So that’s an additional two dollars or so you save, assuming an incandescent costs about fifty cents apiece. (Not including the inconvenience of changing a light bulb).

Since the fluorescent light bulb is going to last four years, it makes sense to see how much less energy the fluorescent is over four years compared to the incandescent. That’s about $.75 * 12 months * 4 years. That comes out to $36. Now, if you consider the extra cost of replacing 4 incandescent over that time, that’s $2, but we have to take away the extra cost of the fluorescent to begin with, so that reduces our savings by $2. Still with me?

The bottom line is, over the course of four years, a fluorescent costs about $34 less compared to a standard.

Well, that’s really something now. Thirty four dollars for a light bulb? Who knew. And that’s just one light bulb. And - the total savings over the life of a bulb is the same regardless of how often you use it, but the more you use a light, the faster you’ll save.

I dunno about you, but I'm done with incandescents.

Comment Spam

2005-09-29T11:53:00.000-04:00

Challenge Impossible has received its first Comment Spam! Yay!

I've turned word-verification on so that bots can't post bogus comments anymore. Sorry for the inconvenience, but its better than having links to PRON in the comments. After all, I agreed on Kryptia that I wouldn't post links to PRON on my blog.

Happy huntin.

Before Katrina

2005-09-18T14:28:00.000-04:00

A few years ago I read a book about the effect of climate changes on history. Scientists are able to tell, for instance, based on tree fossils and soil sediment when Mesopotamia had cyclic periods of drought. These droughts caused famines which mostly happened at the same time as the fall of major civilizations, such as Babylon, Sumer, and others. The main modern example that the author used in the book was the growth of New Orleans since the French used it as a small port to move fur back in the 1700’s. The author, like many others was well aware of the danger of a flood on New Orleans, the weakness of the levee system, and the effect of offshore oil drilling and the draining of the swamps on the degradation of the natural protection the swamps provided to the city.

I remember reading this at the time, and thinking, “Yep, that all makes perfect sense.” Yet, I also remember being relatively unconcerned about the problem. Not because I didn’t care, but because I figured “Whatever, this country is rich and smart, we’ll figure it out, and fix whatever weak points there are before something really bad happens.” I think there was a lot of this going on for a long, long time before Katrina.

An obvious and widespread awareness of the problem existed, but there was a lackadaisical, somewhat Groupthink mentality towards solving it. After all, everything had been okay in the past when hurricanes had hit Louisiana, so there wasn’t any acute pressure for improving the infrastructure or re-growing the swamps that are now open ocean. This lack of acute pressure combined with the extreme expense of a solution pretty much prevented any serious improvements.

But nature doesn’t wait, I guess.

Maybe other time bombs get more attention in the future.

Projects That Fail To Get Off The Ground -- And What to Do About It

2005-09-03T21:49:00.000-04:00

I often have difficulty sustaining ambitious projects. I am a creative and industrious person and I come up with a lot of cool projects to work on. Unfortunately, most of them die after the initial burst of inspiration. I know I’m not alone on this. I’ve been thinking lately about why this is the case, and how I can solve this problem. I’ve found certain circumstances where the “lose momentum and become dormant” problem does not apply.

There are a few reasons why certain projects fail to Get Off Of The Ground, and why others succeed. I currently have two similar projects that are cruising along quite successfully -- my deviant art gallery, and this blog. They share similar characteristics that promote my continued involvement.

1) Initial start-up effort is small.
2) How to continue the project is obvious and simple. (Write an article, or upload a photograph).
3) Working on the project is easy even if I haven’t thought about it for a while.
4) Updates are instantly available to the audience. (Instant gratification for my labor).

All of these characteristics are the opposite of the projects I have failed to get off the ground. Here’s an example -- I like to design games. I’m frequently inspired to design strategy games, only to build the parts that interested me most before I lose steam trying to figure out how to tie it all together.

1) Start up effort is large. You have to develop a pretty solid rule set, and then physically build the game before you can start playing.
2) How to continue the project is not obvious or simple. Its very easy to get stuck with scope problem in the design phase. Try to do too much, and it becomes overwhelming to keep track of everything. Try to do too little, and its not original enough to be worth working on.
3) If you’ve let the project go for a while, the complexity makes it difficult to recall the concepts that had made sense earlier.
4) Working on the project has no external rewards unless you finish at least a playable version.

I think a few solutions to this exist though. Here’s 5 ideas that I think would help. These are largely influenced by project management concepts that I’ve learned from being a professional software developer.

a) Have a well defined roadmap to lay out all the wide-swaths of what needs to be accomplished before you’re ‘done enough’. Make sure to complete this step before you lose the initial inspiration. If you can do this, you’re halfway there. I think.
b) Try to build the roadmap in such a way so that it has parts which don’t heavily depend on each other. That way you can dissect the project into manageable parts, and mostly forget about them once they’re in good shape. That way, you won’t get overwhelmed keeping track of everything as the project grows.
c) Always keep a written record of your progress. Even if this is just a simple paragraph or two, or a listing of items in a spreadsheet, it’ll help you immensely later on.
d) Maintain a task list which always contains some easy things to do, so that when you come back from a break, you’ll have something to ease into.
e) Try to work with other people who are enthusiastic about the project too. Even if this is just in the form of having people look at the project as it is coming along and say – “Hey man this is cool. Keep it up.”

I would love to hear other people’s thoughts on this subject. Any ideas on what might be missing are welcome, as are things that have worked for you. I just can’t imagine that pure passion alone is the reason behind all successful people’s success.

In fact, I’m my own guinea-pig. I’ve started a new, fairly large and ambitious project, but certainly something I am capable of doing in my spare time within six months or a year. I’m going to try out my new suggestions here, and see how it pans out. I’ve already created a basic roadmap. I’ve contained the scope of what I want to achieve before I’ll consider it complete. I may post more on this project as it progresses.

Like Candy From a Baby

2005-08-29T22:24:00.000-04:00

My wife, Michele, is co-starring in an upcoming play; a performance which benefits Pittsburgh Action Against Rape. The show, "Voices Carry," will premiere at the Mt. Lebanon High School Fine Arts Theatre on Saturday, Sept. 10 at 7pm.

The play and the music were written by two good friends of my wife, who also reside in Mt. Lebanon. The script contains themes of sexual abuse and is not appropriate for children. Tickets are $10 at the door, or $8 in advance by calling 412-805-1563. The entirety of the proceeds, after costs, will go to PAAR. But I'm not here to help boost the proceeds part (though that certainly would be nice!) - I'm here to complain about the costs part.

You see, this play, which is being put on entirely for charity, will cost $450, payable to our fair township & school district. I think. No one seems to be entirely sure which shadowy taxing authority is imposing this fee, but the point stands: to use the stage, $450.

I might add - this is just the cost for the 4 hour block they will need to perform the show. If they wanted access to the stage, say for minor details - building a set, running light and audio cues, maybe something crazy, a rehearsal - they'd need to fork over an additional $450 per 4 hours.

Did I mention this production benefits a charity? As such, the company is rehearsing in living rooms and other available space, and is going to wing something for the crew setup.

This fee was thrust upon the production company after initial agreements were made to reserve the stage. Originally, the ballpark figure bandied about was on the order of $100-150, with an understanding that that covered things like preparation and rehearsal time. However, perhaps due to, hmm, a need to recoup some substantial losses, the deal has been "altered."

So please, I hope you'll attend - to help raise awareness for abused women, to help raise awareness for these insidious fees, and to help ensure that PAAR actually ends up with some proceeds to receive.

Oh, and by the way - do you know of any space that would host Brownie Troop 1093's meetings? Lincoln School is still trying to charge them $10 a pop. (That's a considerable amount of cookies.)

Hybrid Engine's Mass Appeal

2005-08-21T14:47:00.000-04:00

Hybrid cars should appeal to every side of the landscape.

Conservatives can feel good about hybrids because they decrease the United States dependence on foreign oil to run our economy. A large portion of our oil comes from nations which are often at odds with our interests, any significant drop in our foreign oil dependence serves to improve the global position and security of the United States.

Environmentalists should be behind hybrids because they reduce the rate of harmful emissions into the atmosphere caused by burning gasoline. This primarily includes toxic materials, such as CO, and greenhouse gases. Furthermore, hybrids are available now, whereas other technologies which might lower gasoline consumption are much further from market availability.

Pragmatists should be behind hybrids because, with gas prices at $2.50 a gallon, they pay for themselves after a year or two in lower fuel costs. Additionally, hybrids are already a proven success. The industry is passing the “Early Adopter” phase as the word comes in that these cars really are of good quality.

Airlines, railroads and truck companies should be behind it because a large portion of their costs are from fuel. Several airlines currently list fuel as their #1 cost, over labor, with gas prices at their current level. Although there may not be large opportunities for improving the efficiency of jets and large diesel trucks, a decrease in the overall demand of gasoline spurred on by the adoption of hybrids would lower the market cost for all fuel types.

Auto makers stand to fall behind by not developing more efficient vehicles. Hybrid cars are being sold as fast as than they can be made. There are wait periods up to six months for some models. SUV sales, while still very high, have leveled off. Developing hybrid SUVs and hybrid domestic cars is going to become a necessity in the future.

Every industry in the US stands do gain from decreased gas prices. Cheaper costs for transporting goods and increased consumer disposable income would increase sales, profits and the availability of investment money.

Large oil companies are probably the ones to lose the most in this deal. But its not as bad as you might think. There are many costs that go into the price of gasoline, few of which impact the oil companies’ profits. Its not like with oil prices being at $60 a barrel that the oil companies are generating twice the revenue as if oil prices were $30 a barrel. They can make about as much money if gas sells for $2.50 as they do if it sells for $1.50, as long as the market competition allows for them to take a reasonable cut.

The energy bill passed two weeks ago has incentives for buying fuel efficient vehicles. This is a good first step, and I would really like to see a more aggressive approach to these sort of incentives in the future. Everybody wins.

Hardware Trends

2005-08-13T19:25:00.000-04:00

Over the past three years or so the traditional benchmark for computer power – Processing speed -- has become less and less meaningful. Processing power just isn’t as important as it used to be. Consumers no longer need to buy a computer every three or four years just to keep up. The result is that hardware is now improving in more diverse ways than before. Consumers now look for much more than processing power, and in order to stay competitive, hardware companies have taken notice.

The biggest trend in hardware is in mobility and portability. About the same time desktop sales started dipping because processing power no longer forced them to buy a new computer every three years, laptops started improving dramatically. Laptops today are just so much more appealing than they were a few years back. They’ve closed the gap bigtime with desktops – and its not because of processing.

Its almost a blessing that battery technology has stalled for so long, because hardware companies have been forced to think up new and clever ways for miniaturizing technology and decreasing power consumption while maximizing performance. This has given us low-electricity consumption processors that still run competitively fast, affordable high quality LCD flat-panel monitors, USB, quality aesthetics, and the growth of wireless. All in an effort to promote laptops.

The mobility just adds a whole new dimension to their appeal. I like that I can sit on my couch and write this article. I like that I can watch a DVD while I’m on the trolley going to work. I like that I can take my laptop over to Matt’s house and we can collaboratively work on projects. I like that I can “work from home”, but really, be anywhere with Wi-Fi. With a laptop, Wi-Fi and a cell phone, -- I’m completely connected and my physical location is totally irrelevant. (More on this later)

This wave of hardware development is just going to keep increasing the diversity of applications as hardware companies think about ways to make people want to buy new computers. I can’t wait.

I wonder if The News is in town too...

2005-08-12T20:24:00.000-04:00

On my way home from work I was surprised to find out that they're filming a movie just up the street. I couldn't find a thing about it on IMDB, but according to the Pittsburgh Film Office, The Graduation is filming in the area.

They had the block on Morrison blocked off between Overlook and North Meadowcroft, but when I went up there to look around all I saw were a bunch of trucks and trailers and some guys standing around doing apparently nothing. You know, just like PennDOT, minus the orange vests and helmets.

I didn't even get to see a famous movie star/rock legend like... Huey Lewis. Bummer.

Bandwidth is good for you

2005-08-12T08:48:00.000-04:00

One thing has me totally geared up lately. In two weeks, the Verizon dude will be wheeling up to my house to hook me up with sweet, sweet bandwidth. Yes, I'm getting FIOS.

I used to really loathe Verizon, with that special kind of loathing reserved for other ruthless, monolithic, we're-a-monopoly-so-we-can-screw-you corporations (like oh, say, Adelphia). But their customer service has turned around dramatically over the past year or two. And now with FIOS on the way, they're going to start expanding to provide TV as well. I love that they're going to send the cable companies cowering.

Instead of subscribing to phone and cable separately, now you're going to have just one information service company. And that means one bill, and fewer bills is good, right? At least there will be some much needed competition. The big difference though will be in distinguishing bandwidth (as a utility) from content (as a service). More on that in future posts.

Hey everyone

2005-08-12T08:07:00.000-04:00

Hey everyone.

Jake said it - last night's get together was a blast. Going not as bloggers but as "comment groupies" made no difference. We had a great time talking with everyone. And, yes, we also finally got the stern smacking around we needed to get started on our own. (My arm still hurts...)

So, let's get started.

Inauguration

2005-08-12T00:33:00.000-04:00

The Pittsburgh Blogfest III tonight was a smashing success. The event was well attended and the people surprised me by how fun and motivating they were. Even the post-gazette sent a reporter and a photographer. I enjoyed talking with everyone there.

The direct effect of Pgh Blogfest III is that Matt and I are shoving our blog out the door tonight. We've been spurred on by the call to action from Cynthia over at MyBrilliantMistakes . No more bothering with all the startup overhead details. Who needs a well thought out name, a URL, or a formal theme? You can save the pre-release details for the People Who Never Actually Get a Project Off Of The Ground. (More on this in an future).

What we really have going for us is a wealth of opinions and an drive to see more coverage of things which interest us. The bottom line is, we’re stepping up to the plate and contribute to the community out there because we’re tired of just being readers. We’re not worried about what 'the community’ means at this point. Whoever takes interest in what we have to say is good enough for me.