Are you smarter than a chimp?

Ron Paul Youtube Debate

Ron reflects on the debate here.

Ron Paul on The War on Drugs

Contributing to Wikipedia

I'm taking a course right now, MSE 582: Surface Physics with Dr. David Cahill, where we have been assigned to create (or significanlty improve upon) two Wikipedia articles that would be equivalent two writing two 6 page papers (double spaced). When I first heard that he was going to try this new assignment in lieu of actual papers I was pretty excited because contributing to the online encyclopedia as opposed to typing some paper at the last minute that will just get scanned and returned with an "ok you did it" grade.



Everybody loves wikipedia so I needn't go on about how great it is and how much I use it. But the whole contributing thing sounds new to most people and it certainly was for me. Aside from a few minor hiccups with image copyrights (which I still haven't resolved) it was disturbingly easy to create a new article. You just create an account using your email address then you have free rein to edit anything on there (yes, you could change the definition of ... to ...) and start new pages. I had already written my article in word, so it was as simple and copy -> paste. Formatting takes a little practice but what I would recommend doing is finding an similar article/definition that you like. Then copy -> paste the entire thing over just replacing the titles, etc with what you want.



The first article had to be on a surface sensitive technique, something where you get information about a material's surface but not from the interior. I chose something that a few professors here at UIUC have been pioneering called coherent diffraction imaging (CDI) just click on that link if you want the definition. The pictures in this post, I uploaded for the definition.

Tonic Immobility

About a month or so ago The Discovery Channel was doing their annual Shark Week. Normally I don't like shark week very much because they dramatize everything around the sharks and make them out to be these nasty man eaters. I am a diver myself and am always in search of sharks underwater. I have had a few experiences with the creatures that I would call spiritual, they have this dark energy to them that I really respect. In my experience they are just as curious about humans as we are about them. Certainly accidents happen where a shark or a human ends up dead, but it is rare.

Anyways, I came across this show on shark week about this guy called "Sharkman." He is a hardcore shark lover and seeks to spread awareness of sharks in order to save them from you know who. Well, in all his diving he discovered that the nose of sharks is very sensitive and if you rub their nose they can fall into a sort of trance called tonic immobility.

In this video you can see shark man massaging a reef shark into such relaxation that he is able to balance the shark, motionless, in the palm of his hand. Incredible! Also, at one point he lets the shark float backards away from his hand then gives the shark a choice: food or more massage. The shark clearly chose more massage. Although you can't see the food very well, thats how it was narrated when it was on TV. So the shark was interacting with the human in positive way.

I was simply blown away by this when I saw it on TV. Later in the show he goes on to do it on a tiger shark and get this, a GREAT WHITE. He swims without a cage with a great white and at one point he actually gets the great white to tow him along by her dorsal fin (after the massage of course). The whole point is that sharks and humans can live in harmony if people would just learn to respect them. They aren't these vicious man eaters that people make them out to be, not really even close to that actually.

In this video Sharkman is on scuba but usually sharks are scared away by the vibrations caused by scuba bubbles. When he swims with the great white he is just snorkeling to calm her down as much as possible. Sharkman is also a great free diver, which enables him to swim around for minutes at a time on a single breath. Its not the most safe thing to do and I should know. I have passed out underwater on two occasions. Your dear author is lucky to be here blogging!

The music in that incredible video is performed by one of my favorite bands, moe.. I am still trying to figure out the name of that song, will get back to you on that.

More Flight of the Conchords

"If every soldier in the wo-orld
Put down his weapon and picked up a woman
What a peaceful world this world would be-eee...
Redheads not warheads
Blondes not bombs
We're talkin' about brunettes not fighter jets
Oooh Oooh it's got to be Sweet 16's not M-16's
When will the governments realize it's got to be funky sexy ladies?"

"Foux da fa fa
Foux da fa fa fa fa
Foux da fa fa
Ah ee ah"

"You can take me out to dinner that might be quite nice
you could buy me a burrito and some beans and rice
but that won't get you into pants paradise
They call it a fly because it takes you up to heaven oh oh

A kiss is not a contract but it's very
nice. It's very very nice."

Check these out too, if you missed my last post on Flight of the Conchords.

Real X-Wing

Side note: I have temporarily removed all the posts about the details of my auto trading software (ATS) in light of the coming competition. I realize that people found this information helpful, and that was part of the reason I originally posted it. Other traders and I got ideas from the software's trades last year and it was nice to have a record of the program's successes and failures.

At any rate, my goal was not to make things hard on myself in future competitions and right now people are starting to write software for the 2008 IB Olympiad. So I'm sorry if you didn't get a chance to read as much about my software as you would like, it will be back up after the 2008 competition is over. I will likely start posting about the most updated version of my auto trading software when the competition gets underway.

If people have questions you may continue to email me about the competition and I will try and get back to you. But I plan on doing better next year and I don't particularly want to make that goal any harder to achieve than it already is. Good luck to this years contestants!