I've been in the interesting position of giving talks to job talks to international students recently. I spoke at my old university in Sendai when the guys at HR asked me to help them out. They would tell me that it was one of the most energetic talks in terms of speaking and student responses he's ever seen.
To me, this was all normal. I used to be an international student and I know that people that leave their countries to live in other places are different. I used to be one and I know beyond a doubt that people like these aren't ordinary. Living in a different country, especially where language and culture can be so different isn't easy. But yet at the same time, differences like these aren't seen as challenges, they're more like experiences.
I don't watch TV, nor have I owned one in the last 6 years. I have long since forgotten the trivialities of the news, sitcoms, dramas and "reality TV." Once you flip it on, for the most part, you are none the wiser, none healthier, none more intelligent or more motivated, but only you are briefly entertained. The hidden costs are high and I would ask, how much do you value your time? What is it in life that you wish to accomplish? And how much closer to your goals today compared to yesterday?
I've started planning, making schedules and lists of things to do recently. I have unending lists of things to learn, interesting ideas to pursue, personal goals and exercise to do. I also work and the only time I have is on the weekends to tackle personal interests. Time is limited which also bounds what I may accomplish. Perhaps in a year, I may only be able to accomplish 2~3 medium goals and where as bigger targets may take a number of years. Once realizing that and estimating the number of "able-bodied" years one has remaining, the number of big targets you can expect to hit are countable. This also assumes that nothing bad happens and you actually try. Time is finite and life is short.
What then, are noble goals? For when you become old and look back and be without doubt be satisfied with what you've done? I have yet to figure this out and have turned to a study of motivation.
There exists a wonderful video compilation of Neil deGrasse Tyson entitled We Stopped Dreaming. I would recommend those who have time to watch it because it talks of the motivations of the space program, its impacts and a sense of beauty. Pursuing daunting technological feats is no easy task, yet the outcomes of noble projects is both emotionally moving and socially meaningful. Seeing this video was mentally refreshing so I started to search for more and came across a series called the Carl Sagan Series which is also worth watching.
These videos bring a sense of inspiration, yet it is the fleeting concept of inspiration that I wish to better define because I wish to make it concrete, meaningful and actionable. If I were to define inspiration, it would be about finding non-trivial goals and meaning, which I think is a better definition than one would find in a dictionary. And the more I think about it, the more this definition fits the idea of inspiration and dreaming bigger.
This answer still begs the question "what are non-trivial goal?" to which I have no answer yet, but at least I have a better idea of what to look for.
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Monday, March 19, 2012
Keyboards and accesible technology
Of all the pieces of high technology I interact with, I interact with the keyboard the most. If I didn't have to, I wouldn't be using a mouse-- my hands have memorized most of all the shortcuts I'll ever need to know for Windows, Ubuntu and the Mac... not to mention shortcuts for all sorts of applications; the mouse, actually slows me down.
Then I've realized, out of all the hardware I've used, the one piece that hasn't improved at the breakneck speed of technology is the lowly keyboard. Computers crunch numbers faster than ever and after we've hit the mhz barrier, we've promptly started adding more cores to our CPUs, I have no idea what is next after that. Monitors have gotten bigger and so have hard drives. Despite all the money being thrown to making our hardware go faster, our systems are still input limited. Humans, interacting with their machines is the the biggest bottleneck.
I've always found it funny, coming from a semiconductor background, seeing the billions of dollars and the extreme high tech being used in the field to make ever finer patterns and faster circuits. It is no easy feat, I know for sure, but yet we march on to create cities of circuits on the equivalent of a pin head.
Technological breakthrough is really about solving important problems. There are infinitely many hard problems in the world, but what are the most important? I suggest, if you have time to read the writings of R. W. Hamming, especially that of his essay, you and your research. There are few writers in the world that I enjoy reading, Hamming is one of them. I would recommend reading Hamming's book The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning How to Learn because he presents many important and interesting ideas, especially one about finding important problems to work on and the second which I like is to act with a sense of direction, because the furthest you will ever go on a random walk is approximately equal to the square root of all steps you've ever taken. Such is the difference of excellence and mediocrity.
When it comes to important problems, I really do think it is a matter of making technology accessible to people. There are too few people that truly understand how to harness the power of technology. With a few thousand dollars and a couple of computers, I can easily crush my competition at crunching data. The same goes for putting simple robots together and automating repetitious tasks. People that know how to command technology, have a force multiplier advantage. Literally, they can have the power of an army of brains at their command. Unfortunately, for those that are unequipped with these skills, they are defenseless.
It has been thought that technology would be a great equalizer, unfortunately this isn't the case. The more correct saying is that technology is a great enabler for those that understand how to wield it, yet too few understand how to do so. As I push further to look for better input mechanisms to write programs better, I come to realize that I am fighting the input bottleneck barrier harder and harder. Am I look for great frameworks? Am I looking for a great text editor? What more is there that would allow me to interface more naturally to the guts of a program I wonder? I imagined using voice command to like Apple's Siri to write programs and then it struck me, they're on to something with human computer interaction, but they're not quite there yet, but I can see the direction where things could be going.
Technology needs to be more accessible; companies that understand this and know how to empower their users will eventually become as profitable as Apple.
Then I've realized, out of all the hardware I've used, the one piece that hasn't improved at the breakneck speed of technology is the lowly keyboard. Computers crunch numbers faster than ever and after we've hit the mhz barrier, we've promptly started adding more cores to our CPUs, I have no idea what is next after that. Monitors have gotten bigger and so have hard drives. Despite all the money being thrown to making our hardware go faster, our systems are still input limited. Humans, interacting with their machines is the the biggest bottleneck.
I've always found it funny, coming from a semiconductor background, seeing the billions of dollars and the extreme high tech being used in the field to make ever finer patterns and faster circuits. It is no easy feat, I know for sure, but yet we march on to create cities of circuits on the equivalent of a pin head.
Technological breakthrough is really about solving important problems. There are infinitely many hard problems in the world, but what are the most important? I suggest, if you have time to read the writings of R. W. Hamming, especially that of his essay, you and your research. There are few writers in the world that I enjoy reading, Hamming is one of them. I would recommend reading Hamming's book The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning How to Learn because he presents many important and interesting ideas, especially one about finding important problems to work on and the second which I like is to act with a sense of direction, because the furthest you will ever go on a random walk is approximately equal to the square root of all steps you've ever taken. Such is the difference of excellence and mediocrity.
When it comes to important problems, I really do think it is a matter of making technology accessible to people. There are too few people that truly understand how to harness the power of technology. With a few thousand dollars and a couple of computers, I can easily crush my competition at crunching data. The same goes for putting simple robots together and automating repetitious tasks. People that know how to command technology, have a force multiplier advantage. Literally, they can have the power of an army of brains at their command. Unfortunately, for those that are unequipped with these skills, they are defenseless.
It has been thought that technology would be a great equalizer, unfortunately this isn't the case. The more correct saying is that technology is a great enabler for those that understand how to wield it, yet too few understand how to do so. As I push further to look for better input mechanisms to write programs better, I come to realize that I am fighting the input bottleneck barrier harder and harder. Am I look for great frameworks? Am I looking for a great text editor? What more is there that would allow me to interface more naturally to the guts of a program I wonder? I imagined using voice command to like Apple's Siri to write programs and then it struck me, they're on to something with human computer interaction, but they're not quite there yet, but I can see the direction where things could be going.
Technology needs to be more accessible; companies that understand this and know how to empower their users will eventually become as profitable as Apple.
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Downloading tons of cooking videos to watch offline
I get complicated work done by writing software and thanks to that work I've managed to generate $200k of savings using "spare time" to write an application to automate analysis work at one of the research facilities. Considering the value I provide them, it's cheap for them to spend $3000/month to fly me out of Tokyo 3-4 times a month to get things done during the week and I fly back to life in the big city on the weekends in Tokyo. That's how I roll.
The other great thing is that I have managed to get myself a lot of free time from the software I've written. All of this time gets plowed back into reading and studying more about code to help me speed up the software development process further. There are even times where it is possible for me to get away with out having to do any "real" work since I've got a lot of things automated and it's just a matter of waiting for the data to become available after long data crunching runs. It basically means that I've got lots of time to pour back into study and become even better at coding.
The fun thing about having a server at home: downloading cooking videos
Over the last year, I put a lot of thought debating between getting a computer in the cloud or something at home. I opted to shell out about $600 for a decent home server and I don't regret it. I don't need the reliability of a cloud computing setup and I've got plenty of computing power instead. To get something comparable on Amazon's AWS, I'd have to pay $2800 for a similar dedicated system. Since I have no need for a cluster just yet, I'm more than content to have a home server. The skills I pick up now could possibly be transferred over to a cloud computing platform later on. But the basics of say, knowing how to control computers remotely through a terminal remains the same.
One thing I've been having issues with recently is that I have a terrible internet connection at the hotel I stay at. I even have to set youtube to play videos at the lowest quality to just barely not get the videos to skip. So after getting quite fed up about the terrible speeds, I've opted to spend the evenings hacking on code through a terminal and telling my server at home to download packages to add functionality to the server.
I started on an automated youtube video downloading program just yesterday. Me, being a fan of such cooking shows as Anthony Bourdain's "No Reservations" and a variety of Jamie Oliver's shows, I've found a few users with a huge repository of uploaded videos. All I needed was something to query youtube to get back a list of videos and a module to download the video files. I started hacking the 2 together last night and finished it this afternoon. I have 800 files queued up for download and the process will keep running even after logging off. I can only imagine what other content I would be interested in getting access to offline.
What other interesting projects I could do with a server at home? I am not sure yet but another idea would be to scrape for good books to read. I'm starting to enjoy reading books far more than reading on the internet.
Monday, March 12, 2012
A multi-billion dollar product?
Imagine the following: "a stupid + asshole filter".
Yup, that's it. Need I say more?
Part of the work is done here already with the stupid filter. Now we just need an asshole filter.
And finally, just for fun, throw in this video somewhere:
There is probably a nobel-prize sitting in here somewhere too I bet.
Yup, that's it. Need I say more?
Part of the work is done here already with the stupid filter. Now we just need an asshole filter.
And finally, just for fun, throw in this video somewhere:
Saturday, March 03, 2012
Diversification out of the Yen
Been still flying between Kagoshima and Tokyo. A few nice things about the business trips is that I rack up miles and the second is that I get a small stipend for travel expenses. The amount has added up to a nice little allowance over the salary.
In other news, since approximately November, I've been diversifying myself out of the yen since the yen has skyrocketed after financial crisis and the earthquake last year. The elder Japanese were great savers and have a lot of forex based assets and which may have returned among other things. Personally, I had a feeling that with the YEN-USD trading at about 75 at one point, I thought it would be prudent to start converting yen into other currencies, mainly AUD and CAD. I sold yen about 78 to the AUD and about 79 to CAD. The AUD has rocketed upwards recently which has been a nice upside.
Economically wise, I am not sure at all where the market will be in the next 2~3 months. The Greek debt payment is coming up on a few weeks and the economic conditions in Europe doesn't look really good. There is also a lot of money printing going on driving up the price of the stock market
Semiconductor consumption in China is growing like crazy right now and I think that domestic consumption will increase as affluence increases. Labor in China is still fairly cheap but they are growing fast in terms of technology. Both China and Korea are putting a lot of pressure on Japan since the expensive yen is hampering exports from here.
Japan will have to diversify out their manufacturing, but I think their biggest weakness is that they're not very good at dealing with international business. LG and Samsung are growing like crazy right now and their investment into R&D is huge (easily in the billion dollar range). I think that both China and Korea are going to have some pretty huge growth potential in the future.
As for the US, I think the only thing they really have going for them right now is Silicon Valley as their manufacturing is pretty weak compared to the capacity in Asia. Once Asia has figured out to climb the value chain and get into software, the US is pretty much doomed.
In other news, since approximately November, I've been diversifying myself out of the yen since the yen has skyrocketed after financial crisis and the earthquake last year. The elder Japanese were great savers and have a lot of forex based assets and which may have returned among other things. Personally, I had a feeling that with the YEN-USD trading at about 75 at one point, I thought it would be prudent to start converting yen into other currencies, mainly AUD and CAD. I sold yen about 78 to the AUD and about 79 to CAD. The AUD has rocketed upwards recently which has been a nice upside.
Economically wise, I am not sure at all where the market will be in the next 2~3 months. The Greek debt payment is coming up on a few weeks and the economic conditions in Europe doesn't look really good. There is also a lot of money printing going on driving up the price of the stock market
Semiconductor consumption in China is growing like crazy right now and I think that domestic consumption will increase as affluence increases. Labor in China is still fairly cheap but they are growing fast in terms of technology. Both China and Korea are putting a lot of pressure on Japan since the expensive yen is hampering exports from here.
Japan will have to diversify out their manufacturing, but I think their biggest weakness is that they're not very good at dealing with international business. LG and Samsung are growing like crazy right now and their investment into R&D is huge (easily in the billion dollar range). I think that both China and Korea are going to have some pretty huge growth potential in the future.
As for the US, I think the only thing they really have going for them right now is Silicon Valley as their manufacturing is pretty weak compared to the capacity in Asia. Once Asia has figured out to climb the value chain and get into software, the US is pretty much doomed.
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