I realized I should have posted this a long time ago, but better late than never.  In my spare time I have joined up with some friends to write an iPhone app, called iSamurai. Our website is www.toykite.com, and iSamurai has gotten some really positive reviews and response. We actually have fans, which is awesome.
The game turns your phone into an imaginary sword using the accelerometers (”measures acceleration”) in the phone to figure out how you are swinging the phone.
The game is two player, so you can fight a friend and duel, each sword blow either blocked or landed depending on how you hold and swing the phone.  It is pretty funny to watch, people get very excited.  I had a few friends at work try the game and narrowly avoid throwing their phone through a window as they swung energetically towards their foe.

We’re still doing updates, new version coming out (hopefully) soon.

I’m trying to catch up on my book reviews, books I thought worth recommending to others.

3 Cups of Tea:

Greg Mortensen is a mountain climber who failed to climb Everest and then became friends with a small village who nursed him back to health on his trip down.  He later decided to build a school there for the children, the first school for the village.  After that success he began a program to build many schools all across the Pakistan and Afghanistan region, many specifically for girls who could not get an education otherwise.  It’s about making things go right (eventually) in chaotic and difficult circumstances.
I particularly enjoyed the character study of Greg- perfect example of someone with good intention trying to make it go by willpower alone, no concept or skill at administration or coordination, just brute enthusiasm and determination.  You can get a long way on that, but he really began to grow in his ability to have an effect once he accumulated allies and people who admired what he was doing so much that they began to lend a hand, and particularly once he allowed people to take control and delegate some responsibility to them.
The other really interesting detail is just how much money other groups are throwing into the region, on less ethical goals.  Two groups, really: the US military, and the Islamic fundamentalists.  The military was bringing in huge money to Afghansistan and to the Pakistani government, but typically in the form of weapons and munitions.  The amount of money for infrastructure or health was pretty minimal.  Also, a lot of that money was covert during the Cold War, so the people receiving weapons did so from black market contacts or straight up criminals, never knowing to thank the US or thinking this was conditional upon human rights or anything else.
The Islamic fundamentalists were really interesting; they hailed commonly from Saudi Arabia, and would arrive with suitcases full of cash to build schools by the hundreds.  These schools are called madrassas, and teach both religion intensively and general education.  Many of these religious schools were much like our Catholic schools- run for and paid by Catholics, but focusing on general education.  However, the other schools were used as recruiting grounds for radical islamic groups, and most of the terrorists under Al Qaida were recruited or trained in these madrassas.  The Islamic leaders did something else very clever- they watched for the best and brightest among the students and sent them to religious college in Saudi Arabia, then returned them home again, wealthy and educated, with the command to acquire multiple wives and many children.  They are planning on the long game, winning by population control alone.

I’d never heard of this angle on global politics before.

But political commentary aside, 3 Cups of Tea is a bluntly written but inspiriting story, and Greg Mortenson is worthy of praise for his educational efforts.

I’ve been thinking a lot about space travel recently, particularly the recurring theme in the sci-fi world of ’seed ships’, ships that take hundreds of years to reach their destination, carrying everything they need to start a culture from scratch. They locate a habitable world first, then load up and go.
There is this incredible (and real) device called a 3-D printer that allows you to build parts, any part, from plastic or metal dust.  There are several ways you do this, but my favorite is where they lay some dust down, then shine lasers from different angles to intersect at the spot of dust they want to melt.  The liquid dries quickly, but by sprinkling down layer after layer of dust, and melting into liquid only the parts they want, they can ‘extrude’, or melt into being, an entire part.
I was thinking about the fact that you are going to want to replace ANY part on the spacecraft at will during the hundred year voyage to your new home, so a great idea would be to make every part on the spaceship out of material that can be used in a 3-D printer, and store digital copies of every part you make the spaceship out of.  Then, as long as you take enough metal powder with you, you could remake the entire spaceship!  And if you were really clever, you could plan on stopping by asteroids on the way made up of the metal type you use.
The trick would be how to design each part so that they could be made piecemeal in the (relatively small) printer and then assembled within the spacecraft.  Also, electronics are normally made from HUNDREDS of different materials, which would be too complex.  You would need to rethink all of your electronic and mechanical design to limit the number of elements used to just a handful, OR you would need a way to convert basic, plentiful elements into all the elements you need.
The awesome thing is that given sufficient interest we could build a spacecraft with all the properties described above.
The only problem is that a) our propulsion technology is so limited it would take hundreds of thousands of years to get to the nearest star, and b) without some form of artificial gravity the passengers would all die of various illnesses after several decades in space.

Bummer.  Give us two, three hundred years though, and we’ll be so ready.

In the random life of Arin, I just met James Cameron.  He was getting a tour of JPL, so my crew showed off our formation flying robots.  We gave the whole spiel about how they are designed to detect Earth-like planets around other stars, and he was very interested, said we “were doing great work”.  He is damned sharp, faster and quicker to get each concept than our academic peers who we normally give tours to.
I’m officially impressed.

heh, he also said: “you guys are almost doing the ‘pre-research’ for Avatar.  In order to have any reasonable time frame of exploring other stars, 150-200 years, you’d need a pressing reason to do so. Avatar was based on the idea that this had already happened, and that’s exactly what you are trying to do- find an Earth like planet.  Very good work.”

Like I said, a cool guy.  I did NOT tell him I haven’t actually seen his movie yet.

Another book summary:

Economists’ discussion of how to help the bottom billion often focus not on financial aid, but on raising certain pillars of society first.  Human rights are those pillars.  There are several parts to this book that really grabbed me, even though it is written with the dry language of an economics professor, and not a novelist.  He goes into great detail on a phenomena nicknamed the “Dutch Disease”, which is the destructive effect that bringing aid money into a developing country has on their export industry.  I spent 10 hours just looking at how a developing economy depends upon its export industry, and how best to help their country while still protecting the export industry’s growth and development.

The other part of the book that was remarkable was the observation that the most important indications of future growth were the pillars of a society in the form of human rights, legal ethics, business ethics, banking ethics, etc.  These are the things we take for granted but depend upon for our normal lives, that once gone leave you crippled and unable to do business, unable to trust your government or military, unable to communicate freely and live. 

Easy to forget, I think, because such things are hard to quantify.  A failure of statistiticans, is what that is.

LA does not have what you would call “seasons”, but occasionally weather does wander through on its way somewhere else.

These are two views from the street above my house. Note the snow on the mountain in the background left down from the night before.

House with snow, and Flowers bloomed everywhere.

Safe for work. Count the passes the team in white makes. Very funny, good luck.

This comic has been around forever, but I just ran into it recently.

Anything that I’ve ever done or wanted to do is somewhere described in www.xkcd.com

For instance, walking, messing with my engineering peers, enjoying the bliss of emacs, flying, sudo powers and holding a fan still just because I can.

Probably one post in five is basically me. Not sure if I should admit that in public…

Update- I just spent my lunch solving this one. Step 2 is genius.  If you can solve it you know you did well in school.

I just ran across http://conceptart.org for the first time, a site that exists for illustrators and artists to collaborate and encourage each other- very cool but what really got me was a contest they host called Last Man Standing, which is a no-prize-but-honor contest where artists from the site submit their work and are whittled down in subsequent rounds by respected judges to a single artist judged to be the “Last Man Standing”.

Unfortunately the contest is pretty informal, so they haven’t organized a good website for the results of the contest to be seen. Instead, all they have is a series of forum posts that show all the results. There are mid the 3rd year of the contest right now.  The 3rd year 1st round results are pretty easy to find, but for earlier years you have to dig a bit.

WARNING- the illustrations are often placed closer to the horror side of fantasy than the children’s section, but they are well drawn all the same.

Here are 5 examples pieces that caught my eye, taken from a round whose theme was “Underneath it All”:
http://www.conceptart.org/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=287055&d=1201024671
http://www.conceptart.org/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=287017&d=1201023880
http://www.conceptart.org/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=286798&d=1201014759
http://www.conceptart.org/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=286812&d=1201015148
http://www.conceptart.org/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=352581&d=1208842175

Official Spiel: “Looking back over a long career, architect Moshe Safdie digs deep into four extraordinary projects to talk about the unique choices he made on each building — choosing where to build, pulling information from the client, and balancing the needs and the vision behind each project. Sketches, plans and models show how these grand public buildings, museums and memorials, slowly take form.”

In truth I have always had difficulty appreciating architecture- which is why I carefully listen to every TED talk on the subject with the hope that someday it will make sense to me.  At the end of this talk the speaker gives a quote and a personal poem, which I found quite good.  The rest of the talk sadly made little more impact upon me than the 4 prior architects’ talks.

To quote morphologist 1917 Theodore Cook: “Beauty connotes humanity.  We call a natural object beautiful because we see that its form expresses fitness, the perfect fulfillment of function.”

Architect Moshe Safde’s Poem:

“He who seeks truth shall find beauty

He who seeks beauty shall find vanity

He who seeks order shall find gratification

He who seeks gratification shall be disappointed

He who considers himself the servant of his fellow being will find the joy of self expression

He who seeks self expression shall fall into the pit of arrogance

Arrogance is incompatible with nature

Through nature and the nature of the universe and the nature of man we shall seek truth
If we seek truth, we shall find beauty.”