2009-05-25 Monday - Running

I used to love to run. 5 miles a day was typical...

Then came the years of letting work consume the available hours in my day...

And then came my illness last year that sapped me of my strength...

Then the emergency surgery last year...the first 3 months afterward were very tender times for my body...I was very cautious about putting my internal organs under any stress.

And then earlier this year, I felt a relapse of my illness coming back...

So, attempts to return to any previous levels of fitness have not gone as smoothly as I had hoped.

But on Saturday I did 0.35 miles

On Sunday, I raised that to 2.0 miles

And today, I continued with 2.0 miles

My body could run further, and longer, but I am holding back until I give my organs a chance to adjust to this new stress level.

But I feel good at the end of the run. My body remembers much. I can feel old dormant strengths returning to wakefulness.

"Rock Steady, Airborne"

2009-05-25 Monday - New [used] Camera

I recently picked-up a used camera, a Canon PowerShot Pro Series S3 IS 6MP with 12x Image Stabilized Zoom



I have to say I am very pleased with it.

6.0-megapixel CCD captures enough detail for photo-quality 14 x 19-inch prints

12x optical zoom lens with USM and UD lens element; 2.0-inch vari-angle LCD display

20 shooting modes and My Colors photo effects

DIGIC II, iSAPS, and Flexizone AF/AE for fast, precise results; 2.3-frame-per-second continuous shooting performance

Powered by 4 AA-size batteries (alkaline batteries supplied); stores images on SD memory cards (16 MB card included)

2009-05-25 Sunday - Correct Breathing

Everyone breathes, but not everyone breathes correctly.

Shallow breathing is probably one of the underlying causes of many ill health effects (mental and physical).

Practitioners of ancient physical/mental disciplines know this truth intimately.

I was fortunate once to have the opportunity to talk with the great Japanese Shotokan Karate Master, Hidetaka Nishiyama, over breakfast, about correct breathing. His advice: learn to "...breath through your toes". Of course you don't actually breath through your toes, but his words were an attempt to express the sentiment with sufficient strength to indicate how deeply one should endeavour to breath.

There are different breathing techniques for different purposes...

There is the slow rhythmic breathing that stills the mind and brings the mind into harmony with the body during meditation...

There is the deep cleansing breath to purge the body of toxins...

There is the deep cycling breath to build the life-force energy charge (known as qi, ch'i, or ki) of the body for maximum physical exertion...

There is the sharp explosive breath of the Kiai ("spirit shout") - which is used to both marshal the body's total defensive posture to absorb a punishing blow - as well as used to focus all of the vital energies into a single point of attack...aligning the mental, physical, and spiritual forces for the maximum force.

These thoughts about breathing were on my mind yesterday as I sat in a pharmacy - taking my blood pressure.

The initial reading of the systolic pressure was quite high. Subsequent readings were all within a +/- range of only a few points.

Disappointing.

I tried the simplest meditation breathing techniques...but the results were not very encouraging.

Then I remembered the words of Master Nishiyama.

One breath, one life.

A single deep cleansing breath technique.

The new reading?

21 points lower.


When I was in the hospital last year for my emergency surgery, part of the recovery process required using a simple device to exercise my lungs to avoid the risk of fluid accumulation. The nurse remarked on my lung capacity being unusual for someone just out of surgery...and my feeling is that decades of training in breathing techniques was the reason. During the initial admittance examination, I was asked to breath deeply and slowly during an automated MRI scanning process...but the technician had to switch to a manual mode because my breathing pattern was outside of the parameters their software was programmed to recognize for a typical patient.

That and $3.50 will buy you a cup of coffee. hehe.

2009-05-18 Monday - Freedom Through Frugal Living

Fabulously Frugal: Living Well on Less Money

Your Money or Your Life, Transforming your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence

2009-05-18 Monday - Self-Improvement

Over the years I have used a simple system of 3x5 cards, one for each day of the week, with a list of topics / skills that I would focus on for a given day of the week.

I have a few goals that I want to accomplish within the next 2, 5, 10 year timeline:
- Return to college and eventually complete a Ph.D. in Computer Science
- Regain a high-level of physical fitness
- Prepare myself physically for a solo circumnavigation voyage
- Strengthen my language skills to facilitate my travel/adventure plans
- Extend the range of consulting services I can offer my clients

To prepare myself to accomplish these goals, I recently updated my cards with the following self-improvement plan:

Monday
- Language: German
- Physical Fitness: Agility, Speed, Flexibility
- Science: Mathematics
- Computer Science: PHP, Ruby, Python

Tuesday
- Language: French
- Physical Fitness: Strength, Endurance, Running
- History
- Computer Science: Cloud Computing

Wednesday
- Language: Italian
- Physical Fitness: Agility, Speed, Flexibility
- Science: Physics
- Computer Science: C#, VB.NET, ASP.NET

Thursday
- Language: Spanish
- Physical Fitness: Strength, Endurance, Running
- Science: Chemistry
- Computer Science: Java, Spring Framework

Friday
- Language: Japanese
- Physical Fitness: Agility, Speed, Flexibility
- Science: Astronomy
- Computer Science: Erlang, Scala, Parallel Programming

Regardless of whether I have time to complete all of my goals for a day - at least I have a plan - which eliminates indecision.

I'll review/revise the plan every three months and adjust. Future language focus will include Mandarin and Arabic.

2009-05-17 Sunday - Inflation is coming

Deflation fare thee well – Part I: In search of real returns in an unreal world - Eric Janszen

Everyone is wrong, again – 1981 in Reverse Part I: The Great Divide – Eric Janszen

2009-05-09 Saturday - Olympia Wooden Boat Fair

I spent the afternoon in downtown Olympia - enjoying the festivities at the Olympia Wooden Boat Fair....sponsored by the Olympia Wooden Boat Association









I bought a few stones that were custom etched by Reflections Custom Etching (etchers.com)



I also enjoyed a very relaxing 20 minute chair massage by GetInTouchMassageOlympia.com

Sebastian Dean, a very interesting vendor, was selling handmade drums: handmadedrums.com

2009-05-02 Saturday - Extinction Level Event Theories

New Blow for Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid Theory

Deccan Traps in India

The Deccan Traps are a large igneous province located on the Deccan Plateau of west-central India (between 17–24N, 73–74E) and one of the largest volcanic features on Earth. They consist of multiple layers of solidified flood basalt that together are more than 2,000 m thick and cover an area of 500,000 km²

(...)

A suspected large impact crater has been recently reported in the sea floor off the west coast of India. Called the Shiva crater, it has also been dated at sixty-five million years, right at the K–T boundary. The researchers suggest that the impact may have been the triggering event for the Deccan Traps as well as contributing to the acceleration of the Indian plate in the early Tertiary.[6] However, opinion in the geologic community is not unanimous that this feature is actually an impact crater.[7] Also, the reported age is in the middle of the ages given for the Deccan rocks.

Massive Volcanic Eruptions Could Have Killed Off the Dinosaurs

2009-05-02 Saturday - Computer Science as a profession

The field of Computer Science often suffers from a mis-perception by the general public. At best, the general public might view Computer Science as a necessary evil for the continued advancement of technology to improve the quality of life for society. At worst, practitioners of Computer Science are viewed a "typist".

So it was refreshing to find a presentation by Dr. Jeannette M. Wing:

• President’s Professor of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University


• Assistant Director, Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate, National Science Foundation

Computational Thinking and Thinking About Computing

Her presentation briefly touched on: Five Deep Questions in Computing

The following books were very influential in expanding my own perceptions of science, the profession of being a scientist, the value of encouraging curiosity in a child's development, and the joy of discovery:

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Shift in Simulation Superiority...

International Assessment of Research and Development in Simulation-Based Engineering and Science, released on Apr. 22, 2009, by the World Technology Evaluation Center (WTEC).

This WTEC panel report assesses the international research and development activities in the field of Simulation-Based Engineering and Science (SBE&S). SBE&S involves the use of computer modeling and simulation to solve mathematical formulations of physical models of engineered and natural systems. SBE&S today has reached a level of predictive capability that it now firmly complements the traditional pillars of theory and experimentation/observation. As a result, computer simulation is more pervasive today – and having more impact – than at any other time in human history. Many critical technologies, including those to develop new energy sources and to shift the cost-benefit factors in healthcare, are on the horizon that cannot be understood, developed, or utilized without simulation. A panel of experts reviewed and assessed the state of the art in SBE&S as well as levels of activity overseas in the broad thematic areas of life sciences and medicine, materials, and energy and sustainability; and in the crosscutting issues of next generation hardware and algorithms; software development; engineering simulations; validation, verification, and uncertainty quantification; multiscale modeling and simulation; and SBE&S education. The panel hosted a U.S. baseline workshop, conducted a bibliometric analysis, consulted numerous experts and reports, and visited 59 institutions and companies throughout East Asia and Western Europe to explore the active research projects in those institutions, the computational infrastructure used for the projects, the funding schemes that enable the research, the collaborative interactions among universities, national laboratories, and corporate research centers, and workforce needs and development for SBE&S.

The panel found that SBE&S activities abroad are strong, and compete with or lead the United States in some strategic areas. Both here and abroad, SBE&S is changing the way disease is treated, the way surgery is performed and patients are rehabilitated, and the way we understand the brain; changing the way materials and
components are designed, developed, and used in all industrial sectors; and aiding in the recovery of untapped oil, the discovery and utilization of new energy sources, and the way we design sustainable infrastructures. Data intensive and data-driven applications were evident in many countries. Achieving millisecond timescales with molecular resolution for proteins and other complex matter is now within reach due to new architectures and algorithms. The fidelity of engineering simulations is being improved through inclusion of physics and chemistry. There is excitement about the opportunities that petascale computers will afford, but concern about the ability to program them. Because fast computers are now so affordable, and several countries are committed to petascale computing and beyond, what will distinguish us from the rest of the world is our ability to do SBE&S better and to exploit new architectures we develop before those architectures become ubiquitous. Inadequate education and training of the next generation of computational scientists and engineers threatens global as well as U.S. growth of SBE&S. A persistent pattern of subcritical funding overall for SBE&S threatens U.S. leadership and continued needed advances, while a surge of strategic investments in SBE&S abroad reflects recognition by those countries of the role of simulation in advancing national competitiveness and its effectiveness as a mechanism for economic .

(...)

NEW PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
Most of the new petascale systems are built on multicores with complex memory hierarchies. From the programming standpoint, these new large multicore systems present another major disruptive technology—a challenge even greater than cluster computing and message passing. According to John Hennessy of Stanford
University, this is “the biggest problem Computer Science has ever faced”. Simple porting of highly scalable codes like the QBOX or any computational mechanics codes will not lead to any reasonable efficiency, and it carries the danger of largely underutilizing these very expensive petaflop systems, as the PITAC report
suggested. Researchers will need to rewrite their application codes and rethink carefully their corresponding algorithms and software. Numerical libraries such as ScaLAPACK will have to undergo major changes to accommodate multicore and multithread computing. The complexity that this involves can be illustrated with a
simple example: Consider a system with 128 cores per socket, with 32 sockets per node, and with 128 nodes per system for a total of 524,288 cores. Let us also assume that the system has four threads of execution per core. Hence, the total number of threads that a researcher has to handle is two million, a large number of threads indeed!

Management of so many threads is an almost impossible task, even for very experienced programmers, and therefore new programming languages are required to deal with this enormous multithreading complexity. New languages from the High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) program of the U.S. Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (DARPA) point the way toward the next-generation programming environment on petaflop computers. Specifically, Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) languages for the SPMD (single program multiple data) model, such as Unified Parallel C (UPC), co-Array Fortran, and Titanium, and dynamic
languages (X10/IBM, Fortress/Sun, Chapel/Cray), offer many advantages for programming in the new environments. They support both private and shared data, distributed data structures, one-sided memory communications, synchronization, and collective communications. PGAS languages are a good fit to shared memory computers but also to hybrid shared/distributed architectures, and they have locality that may be important when dealing with more than 100 cores per chip.

UPC, in particular, is expressive enough to allow programmers to hand-optimize. An example is shown in Figure 5.5, where UPC is compared against MPI for gather/scatter operations used in finite element codes; there is a clear factor-of-two speedup by using optimized UPC instead of MPI. In terms of the dynamic languages, X10 emphasizes parallel safety, whereas Fortress and Chapel emphasize expressivity. Fortress uses a math-like representation; X10 and Chapel employ a more traditional programming language front-end. Before the HPC community is likely to adopt these new languages, however, there are many challenges to be addressed, including interoperability with the existing languages, scalable memory models, and parallel I/O procedures.

2009-05-01 Friday - Funny Animal Videos

http://www.knoxville-zoo.org/einstein.htm