The World aka The Cargo Cult

"A cargo cult is any of a group of religious movements appearing in tribal societies in the wake of interaction with technologically-advanced, non-native cultures—which focus upon obtaining the material wealth of the advanced culture through magical thinking as well as religious rituals and practices—while believing that the materials were intended for them by their deities and ancestors." Wikipedia


I can't get it out of my mind! We, as a person, are getting dumber by the day while we, as a species, are getting greatly smarter. If you start our knowledge "time line" from basic technology (say the hammer) and you take it all the way to advanced technology (say sub 45nm computer processors). This would make for a VERY long line. If you graph that chart's Y axis as number of people with the know how of each stage of technology .. you would get something like this.


I've pulled these number straight out of my ... lost odyssey ... so don't beat me up if these numbers are way off. It's just a depiction of what I mean.

Anyway, You get that MOST people understand how to build and use a hammer. Many times less people understand how to use electrical engineering. Just forget about actually building a processor. Sub 45nm switching?!?!?! Ya right!!! This is true for almost all sciences ... not just EE. I love EE so I always use it.


Most people live the life as part of our "Cargo Cult". With as advanced as the devices today, people will feel primitive in comparison. That feeling alone will drive someone into acquiring the "knowledge" from the magic of the device. Simply having the device and knowing how to use it will give you the feeling of "understanding" the device and how it works. In reality, the cunning engineers build the software so that is exactly how you feel. It does also become a religious (used lightly) ritual in its use. All they are trying to do is acquire the "materials intended for them by their deities and ancestors." And who could hold them at fault for trying to ascertain such a thing?

I am in no way saying that the mass populous of the world is religious in the spiritual way. Instead, we have allowed technology to guide us towards a religion of Mores Law. With each step in advancement ... most people become stupider in the grand scheme of things. This drives us to keep up on the times so we don't feel "stupid" but it's counter intuitive.

Point in case: I have automated almost every aspect of plotting large format documents in my office. People no longer need to know the large number of ins/outs of printing a document. Instead they just need to know a simple interface. After some time of using this tool the knowledge of printing is all but completely lost. When they go to another company they have trouble printing because of how complex it truly is. Now, on the other hand, I have gained HUGE amount of knowledge on what it is to truly PLOT a document.

If those that have the knowledge really wanted to ... they could take over the world. What would any of use be able to do about it? If the insanely intelligent EE Designers that are out there today were to build a "bug" into our infrastructure. Unless it were caught early ... it wouldn't take very long for that "bug" to be integrated with every device. At that point those EE Designers could exploit this "bug" and control everything. What would we do? How could we stop it? We, as simple users, have only ascertained the materials of the "technologically-advanced, non-native cultures" whom have build our day to day lives.

This thought is one of many that drive my urge to learn and learn and learn! I want nothing to do with falling behind our "native culture"!

Mind Lies

"Above all, be true to yourself, and if you cannot put your heart in it, take yourself out of it."--Hardy D. Jackson

It sounds so simple to be true to your self. Just know what you know and tell your self nothing else. How though is it possible to be true to your self when your mind lies to you? Every interaction with the physical world, that we feel/see/hear/taste/smell, is nothing more than our brain interpreting the output of our many sensors. This interpretation is just that ... an interpretation.

Take for instance this Photo:





It looks harmless enough and your brain quickly associates the squares as being a grid with two different colors. Now for the fun part. Both Square "A" and "B" are the exact same color! I'm not lying ... your brain is! Don't belive me? Print it and cut both squares out. ;)



So whats up with that! How is it possible that the "B" square clearly looks lighter than the "A" square? This illusion occurs because our brain does not directly perceive the true colors and brightness of objects in the world, but instead compares the color and brightness of a given item with others in its vicinity



Ok ... One more:

The black and white tiles are perfectly straight, but look tilted. It is a shape distortion illusion: an object will appear to take on shapes that are different from its actual shape. Like brightness and color illusions, shape distortion effects are also produced by the interaction between the actual shape of the object and the shapes of nearby figures. For the brain, perception is very often dependent on context.



So far we have seen our minds lie but now lets listen to our minds lie!

If we watch a video of a person mouthing the word "ga," but have a synced voice-over of that person saying "ba," what we end up hearing, is a third variation that's never been said! That word is "da". And even though you now know it's an illusion—you will still, when you see the video, think you are hearing "da". But if you close your eyes, and do not see the person's lips forming the word "ga," you'll hear what they are actually saying, which is "ba". We think of speech as dependent on auditory perception. But this study eerily shows just how important visual input is. From this, it's clear that our senses did not develop in isolation, but rather, they work in tandem to form an accurate perception of our world. Here we learn that the position of the lips is key in accurately hearing what someone is saying.

So there you have it. Next time someone is trying to sell you something and you ask your self "Is he lying about the product" maybe you should be asking "Is this guy really here and speaking ... or am I plugged into The Matrix?"

I trust Math and Science and not much else. They are not an evolved, naturally selected, genetically mutated, interpreted sensor but instead a repeatable and provable field of study.

I feel I should mention that I got these pictures and some of the info from www.sciam.com.

Thread this Mr. Interrupt!

Ahh yes ... Threading in software development has always been a powerful but expensive technique. Not Cash Money expensive ... Brain Money expensive. You have to make sure your not tromping on other memory and interrupting your way around life (what! Stop my current process so you can do something?! Ha!). All the while trying to keep clean and precise code. What if it didn't have to be that way? What if your Video driver didn't have to interact with your running thread via interrupts. What if you could just say "Video Driver ... please give me a display" and it starts it's self and runs on it's own core with it's own memory with out the worry of trashing other processes memory ... AND NO INTERRUPTS!

Enough interrupts already.

This is a Huge topic here recently in software development. We are getting more and more multi-core processors with more and more cores. Mores Law stats that will only increase exponentially ... to the point that no "man in the middle" controller could keep up with the requests. Also just imagine the amount of interrupt hardware would need to be implemented for each core.

For A Change, I Think It's Time For A Change!


The Propeller microprocessor has exactly what I have been looking for in a processor. This is an 8 core, 32 bit, 80MHz, 160 MIPS, 40 I/O pins power house. This processor doesn't use interrupts in any fashion. At first this was such an odd way of developing but now I wish I could develop on nothing else.

This is a basic run down of how to develop with this chip.

First you write an "Object" (Parallax's way of maintaining some OO functionality) that does a task such as generating video that prints text to a TV. This Object would have a few public functions that you can pass data to and from the object, such as what text to print. Then you develop a second object ( lets call it "Controller") that will "instantiate" your TV Object and pass text to it.

When the Propeller starts up it loads your Controller Object into the first available processor. Your Controller Object then call a "Start" function in your TV Object witch starts a second processor with the code for your TV driver. Now both Objects are running at the exact same time on the exact same clock cycles but completely independent of each other.

Your Controller Object could also load a Keyboard Object that does nothing but watch for input from a keyboard. During the long pauses between key inputs your Controller object doesn't have to wait for an Interrupt to return from the Keyboard Object to continue to pump data into the TV Object. So now you have 3 processes running on completely different processors all at the exact same clock cycles.

Do you see the power here? I don't have to write any special techniques to handle waiting on a process to finish so I can updated my display.

Now there is still shared memory that needs a "Man In the Middle". On the Propeller they call this the Hub. If you look in the Graphics above you'll see a kind of wheel with an end that moves from each processor to the next. This is a slower process but is easy to take into account while developing a tool.

Now for the REALY kewl stuff. HYDRA Game Development Kit ::: I wont go into it ... but check it out!!!

I just couldn't resist!



I love ranting about geeky things and my opinions of life to any one who gets with in listening distances. I would say most of the the time no one really cares about my topic of conversation ... that sure doesn't stop me from talking about it any way.



Take for instance the big bang theory. All the matter in "our" universe is thought to exist in a single location before it "popped" releasing time, space, matter and antimatter. Once the war of matter and antimatter finished we were left mostly with matter that cooled allowing the protons, neutrons and electrons to join forming the first particle ... Hydrogen ... our most abundant. Where o where did all that "energy" come from and why wasn't it able to stay compact?

Here is my slightly educated guess. As we know, all Galaxy's have a super massive black hole in there centers. This happens from the huge dust clouds "nebula" that started building after the big bang. With each piece of dust that is added the total mass increases causing more and more magnetic grip to build pulling in more and more pieces of dust. After some time the huge amount of magnetic pull heats up the center of this massive cloud causing it to "explode" (compact a huge amount of matter into a very small place). That shouldn't be possible with the amount of matter we see in these clouds. Here come dark matter to my rescue. We know it exists but not how to detect it. But it makes up a large majority of our universe. So take that same massive cloud's total mass and say quadruple it. With that amount of mass the gravitational pull would also be quadrupled. This would make it possible to compact all that energy into a very small place.

I'm almost there! ;)

We have no idea what happens beyond the event horizon but with that much magnetic pull ... time and space would completely break down as we know it. I believe that this huge explosion at the center of these clouds creates a new universe with it's own time, space and matter. This massive black hole also continues to gobble up all the matter around it ... feeding the amount of energy inside the black hole.

So if you look at our universe. It continues to expand at an exponential rate even though the huge amount of gravity inside should be pulling it back in. Starting to see my connection? We say this energy that is causing our universe to expand is dark energy ... but what is that? I believe it's the warped time/space of another universe caused by these super massive black holes interacting at a magnitude greater than our entire universe.

If this were to be true ... then every universe is not only linked via these black holes but built by them. Just imagine ... something so destructive it can eradicate entire solar systems but also build a universe of countless solar systems from the ashes of the old ... so to speak.