Cutting thru a city grid is the same distance as going around the perimeter. There is no time saved from zigzagging through the middle if you never actually travel diagonally.

Found the SuperYo yoyos I used to have in 4th grade. Now to figure if I liked Sonic Spin more or Renegade.
http://yoyoexpert.com/forums/index.php?topic=44265.0;prev_next=prev

Chiisana Boukensha by Masato Coda

Blissful Solitude Ambient Mix compiled by Fluidified

Good article on why most Blockchain startups don't really have value and are more rails for other tech like AI, etc.
https://medium.com/@jamie247/99-of-blockchain-startups-are-bullshit-4cf11a549895

Oie ni Kaeritai (Cover) by Blake Robinson

Rather than wear VR/AR headsets, it's more interesting to me to try to bring VR literally into the real world using 3D projection mapping.  No one has to wear any fancy goggles; anyone walking by can see exactly what you see and step into the same world you're in.  Imagine walking by your favorite supermarket one day to find that it's been transformed into massive crater in the ground.  Forget the supermarket.  Imagine if the giant castle before you started to collapse as a monster emerged from within.  Best of all, everyone around you can see it and hear it with you.  Contrast this with VR or AR currently where everyone else around you only sees you running around with a headset, playing more or less with an imaginary friend world.

No, 3D projection mapping is not just a big movie screen.  Below is an example of 3D projection done literally on a castle to make it appear like it is moving, crumbling, transforming... Yes, the example...[More]

This was inspired by a dream I had that was mildly unsettling.  In the dream, you were in a house with a few old-school moving pictures on the wall - the kind that required a handcrank to animate except the owner found a way to keep the pictures moving on their own for a long time, to the point the owner had long passed away and the pictures were still moving.  Over time, the mechanical devices keeping the pictures moving start to wear out, and the pictures start to slow down.  What becomes odd is that if you look closely enough, you start to notice that every so often, a frame goes missing or blacks out, as if the universe flickered and the camera captured a moment of nothingness.

Of course, that dream could have been a lot of other things, such as mechanical issues with the camera that shot the footage, but what it got me wondering was 1) if the universe was a simulation with a frame rate, 2) whether we could capture the flickers in between the frames to prove it.  This...[More]

Imagine having no sight, no hearing, no senses. The world exists but you wouldn't know it. Your body depends on this place outside your reality, but you aren't even aware of having a body, of its actions from your thoughts, of others who see you and perhaps try to interact with you. God probably thinks we're in a coma.

I only just now realized I have a rooftop in NYC. What terrible timing...

The average is not a real number. If one fish is fresh water and the other salt, optimizing for the average kills both.

Let Me Tell You a Story by Blake Robinson

This is a long piece but one I've been thinking through for a long time.  I've come gradually to see people as being in one of three Tiers when it comes to their motivations, mindset, and ability to make things happen.  Before I begin, I want to make clear that this is not about one group of people being better than another.  It is also not a relative scale or spectrum; the conditions for each group are discrete.  There is no in-between.  It's how you think and are motivated most deep down, not how you want to be or what you portray outwardly.  Lastly, these are mindsets, not people.  It has nothing to do with social status, quality of character, etc.  For sake of discussion, we assume everyone is well-intentioned, honest, and overall good people.  

This topic can be easily misconstrued as judgmental or arrogant, but it’s important to see that I am not saying people should be one way or another, just that there exists the dynamic...[More]

I normally run my stuff through spellcheck just to check for quick errors.  The other day I had about 100, all for "readability" and "conciseness" under the pretense of grammatical errors.  What?

Here are some of the examples:
"perhaps as a result of..." => "perhaps because of"
"the only thing they really have is the past" => "the only thing they have is the past"
"it's...[More]

Some let the world shape their dreams.  Others let their dreams shape the world.

From what I've been able to read so far, it seems there's enough energy right at the edge of our atmosphere to power the entire planet for free.  The energy comes in the form of charged particles from the sun called solar wind, which is much more energy rich than what makes it past the Earth's magnetic field to our ground-based solar panels.  It is what you see responsible for phenomena like the northern lights (aurora borealis).  Our atmosphere shields us from harmful radiation, likewise reducing a lot of this to just the sunlight you feel on Earth, but if you go outside the atmosphere, it is practically unlimited energy, free for the taking.  This could be collected through a sail, kite, or even just a regular conductor (at the ionosphere just before space, it's pretty close to actual electricity) with no worries of pollution or detriment to the environment.  What I'm surprised about is there hasn't been more interest to reach it, as it seems like such a land grab.

The main problem I read about is the practicality of transporting the energy back to Earth, as much of it can be lost if you try to just beam it or conduct it through a massively long wire.  If we go further out than near space to collect from the solar wind directly, that problem becomes even larger; the distance grows from perhaps just 50 miles to now on the order of thousands of miles.  It seems to me a silly problem though if you really are able to collect that much energy; surely you can spare just a tiny bit of that energy to power whatever it takes to bring the load back to Earth.  According to some articles such as phys.org, every 200 sqft of collection could power a thousand homes, which is more than enough for a city or two if you just send roughly a closet-sized sail into space.  If you stay at near-space to collect the ionized form instead of going all the way into space itself, the collection area can be smaller as it is closer to just raw electricity that you can tap into.  What probably wasn't in consideration before was the means of storing the energy at large enough capacity and transporting the energy in loads, rather than trying to shoot it back to Earth.  What's exciting to me though is that it seems Elon Musk might have similar ideas here with his almost perfectly arranged trio of companies focused on space (SpaceX), battery efficiency (Tesla), and solar energy (SolarCity - not solar wind collection but close enough); you could almost see Musk one day deciding to merge SpaceX and Tesla as well to then build spaceships and space stations powered directly by the sun without ever having to refuel back on Earth.  The storage and transportation problem almost seems like it'll solve itself over time as clean energy technology gets better.

An interesting proof of concept might be to set up a weather balloon or lightning rocket to first tap into the charged particles concentrated at near space and send it back to a lightning rod or tower back on the ground.  It's not the full utilization of all the energy up there, but it's still a massive amount of energy that would be useful to power a city or two, especially if it's free.  It's also fun to imagine a city with a super long kite in the sky causing man-made lightning to continuously strike the center to keep it powered.  Perhaps one day we can figure out how to generate lightning without the trailing wire.

What would...[More]

If you drop a book a thousand times and just one of those times it doesn't fall, then that is the one datapoint worth looking at. (inspired from "I Origins")

I was thinking about light the other day and how we only see a very narrow part of the spectrum (visible light).  A funny thought came to mind that if we were able to see higher-energy light like x-rays, we would actually not be able to see most of the world, first because there aren't enough x-rays but second because even if there were a lot of x-rays, it'd go through most things on Earth, so we'd only see the densest matter like bone and rock.  In other words, something with x-ray vision wouldn't be able to see our flesh and blood.  They might think creatures like us have telepathy or telekinesis because the parts of us that connect our bones or contain our vital processes are invisible.  And then something with even higher-energy vision, such as gamma rays, wouldn't be able to see us at all.  The whole time we think we are living in daytime, to these creatures, it would be pitch-black night.  Such a creature would likely have to be made of extremely dense matter to not only survive but actually thrive in an environment of high-energy light, where it is normal to constantly be bombarded by the likes of x-rays and gamma rays.  They would likely be so dense they probably wouldn't even notice if they passed right through the softer materials they couldn't see; they'd literally walk right through us and not flinch.  It gets difficult to speculate any further on such a universe from this angle.  Just trying to picture a creature made of lead or mercury is too out there.

But what if...[More]

Free will can arise from a deterministic universe, just as life arises from the inanimate, just as infinite arises from the finite.  The same numbers that compute finite values can compute infinity, the same atoms that create inanimate matter can create life, and the same laws of physics that lead to cause-and-effect can lead to free-willed agents on the stage that is fate.

Note: This post is my own recollection from 2013, when there were only a handful of cryptocurrencies (before even Ethereum existed).  Most the points made here, however, can be applied to blockchain in general as a high level of what the technology really capable of.

     I first heard of Ripple and its cryptocurrency token XRP back in 2013.  At the time, it was obscure but considered one of the more promising alternatives to Bitcoin.  Not only did it reduce Bitcoin's minutes-to-hours settlement time to mere seconds, it allowed anyone to create new symbols to represent practically anything - new currencies, companies, debt, even countries or people - anything - with just a few mouse clicks.  Just like that, your new symbol was then tradable 24/7 by anyone with its value determined completely by the free market.  Ripple was not just a currency; it was literally a global decentralized exchange.  Already there were symbols to represent the US dollar, the Euro, gold, even other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, and just like the base currency XRP, these could all be traded or sent within seconds.  On top of that, the technology did not require mining, meaning the energy costs of the millions of computers crunching computations to maintain Bitcoin would be unnecessary.  Best of all, the technology was already done and live.  Anyone could create an account on the Ripple website and use this functionality firsthand.

    ...[More]