Joy Unbound

Source: http://davideharrington.com/?p=594

Nearly everything we buy nowadays is electronically scanned to ensure that we paid for the items in our bags—and under our coats.  Stores began using sensor tags and security screens in the early 1970s.  According to the New York Times, the market for anti-theft systems grew rapidly because they were viewed as “more reliable and less expensive” than having employees watch customers.

Students are being scanned as well to make sure that the words in their papers were not swiped from other sources.  Scanning papers began a decade ago when anti-plagiarism software was created to compare the phrases of student papers with other sources.  The leading anti-plagiarism software is Turnitin, which compares student papers with academic journals, Internet web pages and its library of previously submitted papers.  On its home page, Turnitin quotes an instructor as saying, “I used to spend hours on Google searching for unusual wording when I suspected that the paper was not written by the student. Now, I can search quickly with Turnitin!”

Scanning store customers and student papers are touted as substitutes for labor, so that clerks and instructors can spend less time guarding against thievery and more time doing what they do best, serving customers and teaching students.  Sounds great; sounds efficient; sounds easy!

In the years before sensor tags and security screens, the battle against shoplifters was waged with security guards and convex mirrors.  An expert on store security—quoted in Shoplifting: A Social History—argues that hiring security guards may have actually increased shoplifting because other employees were likely to think, “Pete is here, so I don’t have to watch out for shoplifters.”

Today, store clerks may think, “our stuff is tagged, so I don’t have to watch out for shoplifters.”  Indeed, stores have begun to question whether the substitution of security systems for labor has gone too far, reenlisting labor by having employees greet customers.  On a recent shopping trip, my daughter Emma and I were greeted by a handsome teenager at Abercrombie, a well-dressed woman at J. Crew and an elderly guy at Wal-Mart.  Sure, the first two were modeling clothes.  (I hope the last guy wasn’t modeling them for me!)  But, their real job is to make eye contact with customers to deter shoplifters.

Similarly, teachers might think, “I’m using Turnitin, so I don’t have to watch out for plagiarists.”  The instructor quoted on Turnitin’s website certainly thinks so, implicitly arguing that Turnitin is a perfect substitute for her own investigations using Google.  Not surprisingly, Turnitin encourages this belief.  On its website—right next to her quote—Turnitin advertises that it has crawled and indexed “14+ billion web pages.”  Choosing between Turnitin and instructor investigations seems like a no-brainer.

But wait, how many web pages are there on the Internet?

A few years ago, Google announced that it had crawled and indexed a trillion web pages.  That makes TurnItIn’s crawlers look puny, having searched and indexed only 1.4 percent as much of the Internet as Google’s.

I wanted to test Turnitin but needed a suspicious manuscript.  I had one in my hands—Shoplifting: A Social History.  I suspected Kerry Segrave of plagiarism when I heard echoes of his book while reading New York Times articles he cites.    He cites a lot of them—35 in the first 14 pages!   To investigate my suspicions, I created a document containing the 14 pages stripped of direct quotations and another one containing the New York Times articles.  I began by searching for identical phrases (of at least 6 words) in the two documents using the open source software Copyfind, which highlighted the matches it found in each document and produced the metric that 15 percent of the early pages of Shoplifting were taken verbatim from the New York Times.  (Here is the document that highlights the matches.)

But this measure captures only the most flagrant form of plagiarism, where passages are copied from one document and pasted unchanged into another.  Just as shoplifters slip the goods they steal under coats or into pocketbooks, most plagiarists tinker with the passages they copy before claiming them as their own.  In other words, they cloak their thefts by scrambling the passages and right-clicking on words to find synonyms.  This isn’t writing; it is copying, cloaking and pasting; and it’s plagiarism.

Kerry Segrave is a right-clicker, changing “cellar of store” to “basement of shop.”  Similarly, he changes goods to items, articles to goods, accomplice to confederate, neighborhood to area, and women to females.  He is also a scrambler, changing “accidentally fallen” to “fallen accidentally;” “only with” to “with only;” and, “Leon and Klein,” to “Klein and Leon.”  And, he scrambles phrases within sentences; in other words, the phases of his sentences are sometimes scrambled.

I spent hours comparing the two documents, matching phrases and highlighting the ones that were copied, cloaked and pasted into Shoplifting. My estimate is that 32 percent of the early pages of Shoplifting are taken nearly verbatim from the New York Times. (Here is the document that highlights the matching phrases.)

To test Turnitin’s crawlers, I uploaded the document containing the New York Times articles to my website a few months ago.  Google now matches many of the plagiarized phrases from Shoplifting to the New York Times articles on my website and some of the phrases to articles in the archives of the paper. Google also matches them to Shoplifting itself, which has been scanned into Google Books.

Turnitin fails to match the plagiarized phrases to any of these sources.  I e-mailed Turnitin’s help desk, essentially asking, “What’s going on?  Why can’t Turnitin find these things?”

A few hours later, a guy at Turnitin’s product support sent me a detailed answer that boils down to three basic points—the Internet is a big place and it takes our crawlers time to scan it; we can’t scan the New York Times because it requires a subscription; and, we can’t scan images of text like those used by Google Books.  In other words, our crawlers are puny compared to Google’s.

I decided to give Turnitin a little help, so I submitted the document containing the New York Times articles as a student paper, causing the file to be catalogued in Turnitin’s library of student papers.  This enabled Turnitin to find the file and then to compare Shoplifting with the New York Times articles.  It produced an originality report that highlighted matched phrases and concluded that 25 percent of the phrases of Shoplifting were very similar to those of the newspaper articles. (Here is the document that highlights the matching phrases.)

Nearly all the passages highlighted by TurnItIn are also highlighted by me.  However, I highlight a few more because my algorithm—embedded in my brain—casts a wider net than the one used by Turnitin.  However, the differences are relatively minor—they both present compelling evidence that Shoplifting is an example of Wordlifting.

But Turnitin needed my help to find the original sources of the plagiarized phrases, making it a poor substitute for instructors who are willing to “spend hours on Google searching for unusual wording.”  It needs the help of instructors who are willing to investigate suspicious papers; otherwise, greater reliance on Turnitin could lead to more plagiarism.

There are other ways that instructors may change their behavior if they believe that anti-plagiarism software insures them against the risk that their students are plagiarizing.  Economists give a fancy name for changes in behavior induced by insurance—it’s called moral hazard.

One instructor told me that he used to devote an hour to discussing plagiarism with his class—what it is; why it’s wrong; and, where students go when they get caught.  Now, he just tells them that he uses Turnitin and lets them infer that plagiarizing is not worth the penalty.  He lauded the change, saying it saved him valuable class time.

Relying on students to weigh the benefits and costs of plagiarism in this way assumes that they are good stewards of their future selves.  Just as some shoplifters may give too much weight to the thrill of shoplifting, some students may give too much weight to starting their weekends early.

Instructors may also change the way they write their essay assignments.  One of the best ways to suppress plagiarism is to come up with creative assignments that are literally one-of-a-kind.  For example, I like to rip mine from the headlines by asking my students to write op-eds on current legislative proposals. If I felt insured against plagiarism, I might not spend hours looking for unusual proposals and instead tell students to write their essays on any topic they found interesting.

Instructors, like all human beings, look for excuses to avoid doing things they don’t want to do.  Grading essays is hard—often discouraging—work, so instructors look for excuses to avoid assigning them.  One plausible excuse is that plagiarism is rampant, making in-class exams better measures of students’ performance.  Anti-plagiarism software may make this excuse less credible, nudging some instructors to assign more essays.  Hence, moral hazard can work in the opposite direction, something akin to moral security.  Feeling insured against plagiarism, instructors may decide to do the right thing and assign more essays.

Turnitin is also being used to teach the wrong lessons concerning how to write well.  Searching Google, I found syllabi of instructors who use Turnitin to teach students how to paraphrase well.  In particular, they ask students to check the originality reports of their rough drafts and make any necessary changes to improve their paraphrasing of sources prior to submitting the essays to be graded.  In the hands of a skilled instructor, it might teach students how to paraphrase well.  But, I think it is more likely to teach students how to right-click words and scramble phrases to get acceptable scores on Turnitin.

I want to teach my students how to write well, not simply paraphrase well.  I also fear that copying, cloaking and pasting is endemic.  Hence, I would not allow my students to use originality reports to revise their drafts.

But I would have no choice because Turnitin offers another product called WriteCheck that allows students to “check [their] work against the same database as Turnitin.”  I signed up and submitted the early pages of Shoplifting.  WriteCheck matched many of Shoplifting’s phrases to those of the New York Times articles in its library of student papers.  Remember, I submitted them as a student paper to help Turnitin find them; now WriteCheck has them too!  WriteCheck warned me that “a significant amount of this paper is unoriginal” and advised me to revise it.  After a few hours of right-clicking and scrambling, I resubmitted it and WriteCheck said it was okay, being cleansed of easily recognizable plagiarism.

Turnitin is playing both sides of the fence, helping instructors identify plagiarists while helping plagiarists avoid detection.  It is akin to selling security systems to stores while allowing shoplifters to test whether putting tagged goods into bags lined with aluminum thwart the detectors.

I am not a Luddite.  I use an online homework system in many of my courses and I plan to experiment with student response systems.  And, I think that anti-plagiarism software is a useful tool, but should be used as a complement to, not a substitute for, instructor investigations of suspicious language, class conversations on plagiarism, and creative essay assignments.

This fall, I plan to say to people, “I’m using anti-plagiarism software, but I’m still watching out for plagiarists.”

Source: http://www.crossway.org/blog/2011/07/dont-miss-the-point-questions-to-ask-while-reading-scripture/

The purpose of reading the Bible is not to find self-fulfillment, although sometimes that’s an easy trap to fall into. There are some questions we can ask ourselves as we read Scripture to make sure we are reading for the right reasons:

• What does this passage teach about God?
• What attributes are on display?
• What work is God doing?
• How does the biblical author point us to God in this text?
• Even though God may not be explicitly mentioned in this text, how is he at work in what is happening? How is he directing “behind the scenes?”
• How does this passage either reveal or reflect the glory of God?

In addition to these information-gathering questions, we can also ask some application-oriented questions:

• Does this passage offer any models of those who miss the point by not seeing God at work and by not focusing on his glory?
• Does this passage offer any models of those who get the point?
• What can I learn from these negative and positive models?
• What does this text teach me about my own pursuits and agendas?
• What selfish ambitions and pursuits do I need to repent of in light of what I just read in God’s Word?
• What have I learned from this text that helps me keep God and his glory at the center of my life?

In short, we need to read the Bible with it’s grand mission in mind: God and his glory. It is only by living for his glory that we find what is best for us.

Source: https://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9219297/AES_proved_vulnerable_by_Microsoft_researchers

Researchers from Microsoft and the Dutch Katholieke Universiteit Leuven have discovered a way to break the widely used Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), the encryption algorithm used to secure most all online transactions and wireless communications.

Their attack can recover an AES secret key from three to five times faster than previously thought possible, reported the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, a research university based in Belgium.

The researchers caution that the attack is complex is nature, and so can not be easily carried out using existing technologies. In practice, the methodology used by the researchers would take billions of years of computer time to break the AES algorithm, they noted.

But the work, the result of a long-term cryptanalysis project, could be the first chink in the armor of the AES standard, previously considered unbreakable. When an encryption standard is evaluated for vital jobs such as securing financial transactions, security experts judge the algorithm’s ability to withstand even the most extreme attacks. Today’s seemingly secure encryption method could be more easily broken by tomorrow’s faster computers, or by new techniques in number crunching.

The U.S. NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) agency commissioned AES in 2001, to replace the DES Digital Encryption Standard (DES), which was then repeatedly being shown to be fragile even as it provided adequate security for most everyday tasks.

With this work, the “safety margin” of AES continues to erode, noted security expert Bruce Schneier in a blog posting. “Attacks always get better; they never get worse,” he wrote, quoting an expert from the U.S. National Security Agency.

Though unwieldy to execute, the attack can be applied to all versions of AES.

K.U. Leuven researcher Andrey Bogdanov, Microsoft Research’s Dmitry Khovratovich and Christian Rechberger from cole Normale Suprieure, Paris, completed the work. Both Bogdanov and Rechberger had taken leave from their respective universities to work on the project with Microsoft Research.

The creators of AES, Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen have acknowledged the validity of the attack, according to K.U. Leuven.

Well here I am again, unable to sleep, emotional, and thinking about castration again. I think maybe my mind is unstable right now or something — THE ROOTKIT. *dun dun dunn* Though, the idea of castration is still interesting to me. It would be a very big decision, and once done there would be no turning back. Commitment to moving onward into the seas and jungles would be required — no looking back, no turning back, no thinking back. It would definitely solve the problem of the whole very idea of ‘marriage’. Would just straight close the topic. =)

I think it would be best for me to avoid audio engineers. As I think I am beginning to discover, IT and audio engineers do not mix very well. No elaboration or detailing will be provided. -_- In addition, I think I need to withdraw or decline my activity around people, and minimize my presence without physically eliminating it. Over the past 3-5 months a lot of things have been and had happened. I took a break from me and decided to stop being me, thinking, just go with the flow, and give my time to God. From the experience, I liked the parts about giving my time to God but I didn’t like the parts about going with the flow, stop being me & thinking, and pseudo-trying (LOL) to integrate with people. It doesn’t work and I feel like my mental capacity and capabilities have sunk, dwindled, and declined. I haven’t thought critically or very well at all.

I have realized, or perhaps re-realized, that I definitely do not think well on my feet. I have also come to acknowledge to myself that I apparently have a sort of blind-face personality / autopilot mode when face-to-face with people; I become a blind conformist. I don’t even realize it until later when I think back upon moments sometimes. Sometimes even I catch myself being under that “mode” (not sure whether to tag it as a perspective, influence, or psychological mechanism) and try to genuinely interact and respond with data from my core but somehow in some magical way am unsuccessful. (Probably goes back to the rootkit and muteness/butchering stuff.) Like, one moment I am sitting by myself pondering on things in my mind about things — i.e. how a social conversation I might be in would go, what things I would say, how other people would respond, and particularly my own responses to questions the way I would answer them would my rootkit/muteness problem cease to exist — and then a moment later it would happen and I would have the opportunity to respond the way I had planned, BUT just SOMEHOW I am suddenly and quite mysteriously unable to respond… so then I either don’t respond, take too long to respond, or butcher it (in other words, the response that comes out my mouth does not actually match up to that which is/was produced in my mind and doesn’t actually mean the same and thus no point in having tried to respond in the first place because the value of my response had deteriorated to nothingness).

And what about if I just ignore the butchering/muteness/rootkit and keep trying? I think I actually might be making things worse. Everything has its time and place, and unfortunately for me, most things are poorly timed thus come out wrong and end up dirtying and mixing up the pool of water.. and then it is a bigger problem because to reverse the situation and someone’s understanding is either impossible or pretty much requires the Holy Spirit to be involved. Once something is said, the person who received it will store that value and everything after will be influenced by that first value (whether indirectly or directly — even if there isn’t any statistical correlation because statistics don’t matter). For example, when you receive a first impression of someone your impression and understanding of that individual is further built and developed based upon your first experience (which is the ‘first impression’ of said individual) with that individual.

When you start a relationship and go through experiences together, that is why you and your mate are able to enjoy and be enthusiastic about particular memories or events. When you go up to someone else with that enthusiasm and joy and try to share it with someone else through your expressions, the reason they will not be able to match up to your level of emotions and experience is because they do not have that experience to its fullest the way you and your mate did. They are missing “building blocks” to understand and comprehend your joy. Your joy is based upon your experience. That experience involved a conglomeration and wide variety of different aspects of the human body and system — emotional, social, mental, physical, psychological, biological, etcetera — and all of those worked and were together to help make said experience as great, as joyful, as emotional, and memorable as it was. If there is ANY piece missing for another person, it can have the GREATEST detrimental effect in them being able to vibe with the emotions you are trying to express and share to and with them.

And that is why when I butcher things I believe in the majority of cases it would actually be better for me to shutup, listen if any is possible, and just be present. Unfortunately, in some cases that is a good conversation closer, but better that then having the wrong understanding and impression of me for the sake of potential future encounters that might come the way they should have come out in the first place. If the pool is dirtied already, trying to fix that later will usually be futile because earlier experiences are serving as a blockage and major obstacle, and since I’m not God and can’t go back and pinpoint the very and particular details that are in the way to figure out a way to get them reversed and out of the way, … more harm done continuing to speak in butcherings and missayings.

Think before you speak. Listen because you have two ears and one mouth. Why? Don’t be foolish. It’s easy to watch others make the mistakes and errors you would make, and recycle their experiences to be your wisdom. Be efficient and don’t reinvent the wheel unless there’s no way to avoid it.

Source: http://whizzpopping.tumblr.com/post/8208421103/religion

Kudos to Oleg for sharing this with me.

religion.

Source: http://michaelhyatt.com/5-reasons-why-you-need-to-get-better-at-saying-no.html

I have a hard time saying “no.” Perhaps you do, too. I think it is more common than we think, especially for those who are empathetic or nurturing. We just hate the thought of hurting someone else’s feelings.

I didn’t really notice this problem in myself, because for most of my career I have had an assistant who said “no” for me. If someone had a request, they had to get through her first.

This gave me the buffer I needed to consider the request more carefully. I then let her say “no” on my behalf. The fact that I didn’t have to deliver the bad news myself kept me focused and productive.

Now that I have left the corporate world, everything has changed. I don’t currently have an assistant (a problem I am working to remedy). That means the requests are all coming straight to me.

For example, a few weeks ago, an acquaintance—someone I met briefly at a conference—sent me an email. These aren’t the exact words, but this is typically of the kinds of requests I now get:

I read your blog daily and follow you on Twitter. We met briefly after your speech in Dallas. I am going to be in Nashville next week and would really like to meet with you.

I am in the middle of a personal crisis and could use your counsel. I know you are busy, but this is really important. It would mean the world if you could make time for me. Could I buy you breakfast, lunch—or just coffee—to pick your brain?”

I ended up saying “yes”—and was kicking myself almost immediately. The lunch meeting ended up being a total waste of time. He didn’t come prepared. In fact, when it was all said and done, I had no idea what he really wanted.

The problem is that I am now getting several of these requests a day. It could be a full-time job if I let it.

But that’s not going to happen, thanks to the encouragement of my family and close friends. There is too much at stake. They are holding me accountable.

I have now resolved to say “no” to everything unless there is a really, really compelling reason to say “yes.” In other words, I have switched my default response from “yes” to “no.”

Sure enough, I have getting plenty of opportunities to practice!

As I was thinking about this today, I was reminded again of why it is so important—not only for me, but probably for you as well. I wrote down five reasons.

If we don’t get better at saying “no,”

1. Other peoples’ priorities will take precedence over ours.
2. Mere acquaintances—people we barely know!—will crowd out time with family and close friends.
3. We will not have the time we need for rest and recovery.
4. We will end up frustrated and stressed.
5. We won’t be able to say “yes” to the really important things.

This last one was the clincher for me. Every time I say “no” to something that is not important, I am saying “yes” to something that is.

Note: if you think this is somehow unspiritual, think how many times Jesus said “no” either explicitly or implicitly, so that He could stay focused on His Father’s business (see John 11:5-6 for one example).

Source: http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/07/25/1941229/Is-the-Masters-Degree-the-New-Bachelors

Jobs have changed because there aren’t as many of them. Machines do a lot of the tasks that used to be done half a decade ago. As a result, more higher education jobs are in demand and fewer menial tasks are required. These are the first steps towards pushing the entire monetary system to total collapse.

Mechanization displaces menial jobs, and as mechanization becomes more advanced, so too will more jobs become displaced for two reasons: 1) machines perform most specialized tasks far better than a human and 2) machines are far cheaper, don’t form unions, and can work every day of the year.

For example, take the taxi driver. He must perform a difficult task of driving and navigation. However, recent advances in artificial intelligence have allowed Google to create an entire fleet of cars that more or less drive themselves. While only experimental, these will become more and more integrated into society. Taxi companies may eye it suspiciously at first, but it will eventually overtake the industry.

Taxi drivers do not need degrees. So you can see how the demand for jobs that use our more basic skills are being phased out and replaced. Jobs that require creative thinking, complex problem solving, and complex pattern recognition are in demand, because machines cannot do them.

The unstated value of college degrees, in my estimation, is that they provide the corporate world a politically-correct avenue for helping them select candidates that are ‘the right kind of people’.

In fact, joke liberal arts majors serve this function very well, because the knowledge itself is useless, thereby providing even stronger evidence that the degree holder comes from a well-off background.

Pure screening system. The whole idea isn’t that you learn anything particularly useful in college, it’s that it makes it easy to reject enough candidates to keep the applicant list manageable.

Well, now more people have BS degrees and they need to screen more people out. It’s just that simple.

Lately I have sort of noticed that I have not posted as intimately as I used to here on Joy Unbound. I think what I will try to do is to post more of what I am thinking, the problems I am having, etcetera. After all, this is my personal blog; I do not expect anyone to read the things I post here, nor am I trying to get attention. To put simply, I suppose, this would be a gateway to relieve myself from some of life’s burdens.

Last weekend I went on a 3-day youth camp. That is all. I have essentially filed the event in the black hole section of my mind. I wish it didn’t have to be this way, and I know I could have allowed things to be different but lo, I have stumbled and fallen short at my own hand. It really all started somewhere at the beginning: first, I did not bring a tent and should have thought about doing so. Second, I was alone; I did not trust my environment because I was unfamiliar with it, but still — I COULD have let this go. Third, I locked up to the the gender-based dressing of the youth; all or most males shirtless (and hairless), and females.. well, I don’t need to elaborate. It is summer, it is hot outside, there is a lake nearby — how do you expect females to dress?

Before I write further, the first two points I soo easily could have let go but I didn’t. Now what if I had let go of these? Hmm, say I had a tent — I would trust the interior of my tent and thus feel safe to change clothes (privacy is a good word to apply here). I came to the camp a bit exciting and looking forward to things. I would have setup my tent somewhere, brought my stuff into my tent, and changed to a clothing profile that would have been good for both general day use and aquatics (was originally planning on swimming in regular clothing) — basically 2 shirt layers instead of 3, short pants instead of long pants, no socks, and water shoes. Then I would have hung around at the tables waiting for group activities… though now this part gets more into the unknown because I am not sure how I would react or feel amongst a group of stronger, hairless, mostly buff people.

Maybe I would have gone off myself to go exploring the campgrounds. Perhaps I would have gone separate from the group and go swimming alone or something. What would I have done in the water anyway? I mean, just get in, go swim a few meters out, swim back, and then what? ?_? Maybe I might just hang out around the docks dangling my feet into the water and watching the jetskiers and what other people do. And then when people would play volleyball I know I would have joined in (and periodically go take a dip to refresh myself). Perhaps I would have had an opportunity to go jetskiing or tubing. Both of those would have been fun, occupy and pass a good part of the day. There were public restrooms down at the docks too, so that means other places to change (so even if I didn’t bring a tent…) and better-than-port-a-potty restrooms to use for defication.

As far as being amongst youth in the lake (and even whether it would be with mostly girls or mostly boys or a balance of both girls and boys) I am not sure about. Not sure what would be done or what would happen (or what did). Not really seeing a lot of activity in this part. But then we would go back up to the camp and eat and stuff (good food was cooked by the way). In this theoretical what-would-and-could-have-happened thought, I think I would have enjoyed being with the youth, myself, and the experience. I probably wouldn’t have talked or said anything much and would probably mostly have just ‘been’ there and present.

But, unfortunately, that is not the way it went. Going back several paragraphs, it was all because I allowed myself to lockup. Had the first two points not occurred I think the third wouldn’t have been a major issue and easily negligible. True, I probably would have spent a lot of my time in places here and there throughout the experience looking down at the ground and keeping myself from meditating (and quick-lusting) on beauty (oh how embarassing that could be would someone notice me doing that), but that would have been fine.

Instead, though being fully conscious of the situation and scenario I was presented unto myself, I allowed it to develop and within no time became locked for the rest (actually, the WHOLE) camping trip. First it started out as I should have brought a tent (would have been a plus but my car was fine; next time I will just bring a tent — lesson learned! I did not feel safe, secure, or comfortable sleeping in potentially intimate proximity with a male let alone one that was hairless, buff, and a personality like that most men who fit the first two descriptions would be) and worries of where I can change securely and confidently (but was too afraid and embarrassed to ask for advice, if there were any public restrooms around, if I could borrow someone’s tent without fear that someone might just so happen to hop in while changing, or something).

With worries upon worries, it crutched me but I still had so many conscious opportunities to BE STRONGER and made better by experiencing more, experiencing the unknown, getting out of my comfort zone, and simply — in relationship to God spiritually, and just as a person — be made a better and stronger person. It’s like one of those moments where there is a lot of resentment, but you know that smarter and intelligent, more mature people push aside resentment, take responsibility, and thus claim and attain greater honor to themselves and in my case, also for the glory of God and His works.

After the camping thing, we stopped as this gas station outside the campgrounds in the small nearby town that sold icecream in cones with toppings up to a foot long from the rim of the cones. I didn’t eat. Then a few pictures were taken outside next to someone’s RV. I didn’t join. Terminate it like the boss, yeah! I had an extra passenger with me in my car (so I had 3 passengers this time instead of 2) on the way back to the River of Life church just right outside Springfield and had a relatively decent ‘socializing’ *awkward the way I am writing this here) and relationship-building through the trip. I didn’t feel locked and shutdown in my car on the way home.

But.. I failed, miserably. I don’t get too many opportunities like this and I wish I did. When I passed so many opportunities I knew I could have just snapped back and resolved the situation and enjoy the camping trip, I realized that I had passed the point of no return and felt heart broken. Enough time had passed that what’s the point? I would look weird, nobody would understand so I would be even more weird and strangely looked upon and misunderstood, and to change/fix the situation now is just… unthinkable. My heart was broken. I felt very distant from God. My heart hurt more.. I was lonely, hurt, and cold. My inner machine and a part of my rootkit had activated and gone into full motion; I became locked up and displaced from reality. I stopped eating (only ate when it was forced upon me — which happened only 2 times I think for small things) and almost essentially ‘fasted’ (k not really, I never consider myself to fast because I never know the true intentions, true motives, true reasons for why I stop/am not eating) the whole time. I know that I went around 40 hours without eating in the second half of the trip and when I finally got back to my apartment I ate something.

I’m still feeling the hurt even now. I just feel lonely and hurt. Last Tuesday not many youth had shown up to the youth meeting at church, and it seems like over the next month many of the youth will be gone to other states and things. I remember someone at the camp ground had said, while things were getting packed (or maybe after), that now summer is over and school begins. More hurt, more loneliness, more cold. more.. more.. more . . . but hey, I brought it upon myself so I’ll just shutup and get with the program

Not that my laptop would need one, but I want to find a way to make my laptop even cooler and improve airflow through its chambers. Since this is the objective in mind, the primary factor for this would be the amount of air a fan in a laptop cooling pad could move in a minute, represented as cubic feet per minute (CFM). The problem is that when you start your research to find a laptop cooling pad that is actually geared toward performance, you will never actually find it. Instead what you will find are products tagged with the word “performance”, and that the way they are marketed is whether if they have blinking blue LED lights in the fan, how quiet the fan is, and if the fan can spin fast enough to slice your fingers off. None of these factors have anything to do with performance and are in fact realistically the opposite. There is a fundamental trade off between quietness and performance (aka by how much air it can feed to your laptop). Sometimes they even leave out the CFM from the details page of laptop cooling pad products. So much for being for “performance”.

Now I am writing this with my laptop in mind. My laptop sucks cold air in from the bottom and pushes hot air out the sides. Many laptops out there have this the other way where they suck cold air in from the sides and push hot air out the bottom. Personally, I think this is illogical. The advantage of my laptop is that it pushes rising hot air out the sides, but the disadvantage is that it breaths from the bottom. So when you cover up the bottom of my laptop that could pose some issues. The advantage of having it the other way around is that usually nothing covers the sides of your laptop so at least it can breath, even if it is just a little bit because the bottom might be covered up.

Yeah, I understand laptops aren’t really for hardcore stuff, but at the moment I cannot afford a decent video card with a full desktop setup (monitor and keyboard — not going to settle with an anchorboat CRT or a cheap keyboard) for my workstation. On top of that, my workstation actually needs more RAM too. All this would end up costing me several hundred dollars up to around $800. If I get a monitor, it might as well be something that I will want to live with and tolerate in the long-term, such as a 22″-24″ LCD. Video card? Please make it worthwhile so that I could at least play all the current latest games at medium quality — that will be more than enough for me. I actually need RAM because 4GB is proving to be not enough for my workstation with the things I do on it. I could also use another 2TB harddrive, and in fact might as well replace the 500GB and 1TB drives I have both with 2TB drives and look into getting one or two 60GB+ SSDs.

Now if your laptop pushes hot air out the bottom, it probably won’t make a significant difference which laptop cooling pad you get. After all, the fan in your laptop can only push out so much air. I mean, I am sure it will do a little bit to use a laptop cooling pad, but it probably will not be significant enough to make it worthwhile. This is another advantage of pushing hot air out the sides instead of through the bottom.

Would I design my own laptop cooling pad, it would consist of this:

1. Walls with rubber at the edges of the surface protruding — you would fit your laptop onto the surface into this “seal tight” enclosure that prevents air from escaping around the sides of the laptop
2. Higher performance fans ranging from 50CFM to 250CFM models to forcibly push air through the laptop and wherever there be holes and air spaces; the seat tight enclosure will increase the pressure of air through the laptop — sure maybe not astronomically — but to whatever the strength of the fan is. This will improve temperatures at least moderately
3. Air suction from the sides

The pros of both without the cons. I would love to see a product like this, and would go for one with a 120mm Delta fan that pushes around 250CFM. Indeed it would be quite loud at around 60-75dbA, but I don’t care about “loud” — I want performance.

Scanners are very nice. However, the problem with ordinary scanners is that they have zero-focus; in other words, if you scan a 3D object the parts of that object that are farthest away from the glass surface will be blurry (and very easily). The cameras are specially fine-tuned to the distance of the glass and are meant to scan flat things such as documents — a single sheet of paper facing the camera on the flat glass surface. Or maybe photographs.

But the point is that these scanners do not focus. And this is where my idea sprouts. Imagine some sort of device that is like one of those arcade claw things (remember Toy Story? ooooh, THE CLAW). Instead of the claw, you could place a photo-camera through from the top. There would be some sort of balance mechanism or grip to make sure that the lens are ground level. There could be different fittings pieces for putting the lens through as many cameras will have lens that come in many different sizes. There could also be some sort of height adjustment for those lens that are long (or perhaps so that you could adjust the distance that you want without zooming in). Additionally, there could be like a ring of white LEDs around the where the lens fit in so that it would illuminate everything in front of the camera lens.

On the x- and y-axis there could be a ruler measurements (preferably in SI units). Furthermore, on the two or four rails that contain this ruler (and that you slide the camera cranes along) there could be these holes at increments of 1cm; these holes could be used to lock an axis into place.

The photographer — you, or the user — could place a motherboard on the flat table surface that this device sits on, and then decide to maybe snap a photograph every 2cm on both axis. In the end, you would have probably almost 100 photographs. You would then feed this into the program that would come with this device. This program would take the photographs and stitch them into a high-resolution panorama. Depending at what increment you went by could also determine the quality of this panorama. If you took a photograph at every 1cm you could easily end up with a gigantic handful of photographs, but the program could use this to try and attain the flattest yet highest quality panorama (though at the edges of this panorama lens warping would occur as usual).

This could come in three packages:

1. Everything but the table surface — you plan on using your own table or own surface to assemble this device over.
2. You get the table with everything else. The surface of this table would be a white plastic. Beneath it would be a large series of white fluorescent glass tubes arranged at just the right distance from one another to evenly illuminate the white plastic. This is kind of like the thing that they put your x-rays on when they want to look at it. You would have to buy your own tubes though (for the sake of safer and cheaper delivery).
3. Specially designed version of the second package where you could take a Rebel XT (or some common high-end photography camera), plug it into the device, and have the program automate the entire photographing and panorama for you. Just put the object you want to “scan” under the device, click Start, and wait for the process to complete.

What you could do with this device:

• Produce simple yet highly accurate 3D models of small and medium sized objects (like motherboards and computer chassis)
• Produce a super-ridiculously-high-quality “2D scan” of an object (like a PCB, circuit board, motherboard, or the circuit-board to your MP3 player :\ )
  • So that you don’t have to post an awful OH I CANT HOLD THIS CAMERA STILL AND MY LIGHTING SUCKS blurry picture of your project online
  • So that you can make textures for a computer game, which you could also use perhaps as a reference for a map or model
• Produce bitmaps and models for bump- and parallax-mapped textures
• Produce proper scans of objects with 3D elements that would otherwise turn out blurry to unreadable by an ordinary scanner
• Oh the possibility! Do I have to list everything for you? o_o

That is the general outline of my idea. There could maybe be three different sizes for this — small, medium, large — based on how big of a working surface area you need. But it would be really cool to have a device like this around. There just isn’t any decent or proper device out there for doing this.