Diligence and Temperance

Destination

2008-05-30T19:49:00.000-07:00

Our hearts aligned we look ahead, knowing what we seek,
and so our steps have purpose now, we walk most happily.
What blessing to the wanderer a destination is,
What blessing to the man who roams a place that will be his.

2007-06-06T20:37:00.000-07:00

I started a new blog on optics and physics today as well.

Moving

2007-04-15T20:11:00.000-07:00

The nice thing about moving a blog is that you don't have to do any heavy lifting. All you have to do is type a bit.

Anyway, I've been experimenting with WordPress a bit because of a couple of key features that aren't here, namely tagging and math typesetting. I'll be doing most of my blogging from over there now.

Doug

Learning and caring and being rich

2007-04-04T16:41:00.000-07:00

The study: People were presented with different sets of images in a sort of memory game. If I read it right, some images were associated with a picture of a coin and others were associated with a scrambled picture of a coin. The learners were told that they would actually receive a coin for every one they saw during learning.

Learning speed was negatively correlated with wealth, whether that was net wealth or income size. Basically, richer people had more trouble connecting the coin with its associated image than poorer people.

The conclusion of the authors wasn't that the rich people were less intelligent but rather that they cared less about the coins--they already had plenty.

While the intent of the study was to show diminishing returns of money as wealth increases, the thing that interests me the most is the assumption behind the study: that learning happens more quickly when you care more.

Round Two: accepting the challenge

2007-03-29T09:05:00.000-07:00

Last year around the beginning of March began a neat time in my life, one of the times when I was really excited about something. That time opened up doors for me, teaching me a bit of Java and some Python and that I can do a lot on an hour a day.

That period ended about June 1st even though I didn't realize it had ended until a few months later and didn't fully recognize it until perhaps last December. I am really glad I took the challenge that I did take. I learned a lot and I think I could do a much better job the second time around on the same project.

Today I read a comment on a Paul Graham essay that rang out as a challenge. Here it is:

I worked for startups all through my 20s, but now at 37, I, I find myself up against point #9.

9. Family to support

I'd love to found a startup, but having a wife, two wonderful kids, and a $500K mortgage give you a very different perspective on the startup lifestyle.

I imagine a startup incubator where the founders are provided with salary and benefits comparable to working for a corporation, and they are encouraged (forced?) to maintain a reasonable life/work balance, (The latter is probably the hardest to achieve; a startup requires an almost monomaniacal focus).

Well, I'm going to be 30 in less than a week. I have 5 children and a mortgage and I'm planning to complete a PhD. I want to publish my intention here to

continue to take great care of my family,
continue to progress on my degree and
start a company that I can be proud of.

I'm tired of people telling me that I can't.

I take this comment and others like it as a challenge and, having conferred with my wife and having prayed, I accept the challenge.

So here begins round two. I made a few mistakes in round one. Perhaps I can avoid them this time through.

My startup was a cool idea rather than something that I care about enough to sacrifice for.
I delegated my commitment to others. What I mean is that as I progressed I ran into things I didn't want to do. Rather than stay committed to making sure those things would happen I found others and hoped they would make the things happen. The delegation wasn't the problem so much as the relaxation of the commitment to make sure that they actually happened.
There came a time when I started focusing on tools instead of on producing results. Tools are important. But if you are going to do anything results have to be paramount.
I didn't talk to my target audience. I produced a product that I intended to sell to a certain group without ever actually talking to that group.

I've considered a lot of options. I can quit graduate school and start working. That doesn't feel right at this point. I can stay at graduate school and focus on it alone. Actually, for some reason I can't. I just can't seem to trust myself that graduate school right now is an adequate use of my time and my talents. Or I can go for it.

So I'm going for it. Wish us luck.

Inkscape

2007-03-24T12:30:00.000-07:00

Physicists end up doing a lot of writing and presenting. It is fairly well accepted that something written by a considerate physicist should not only have text but should also have lots of nice diagrams and equations. Some would argue that a physicist making a presentation should have just about no text. The more theoretical ones would then ask for nothing but equations, charts, and diagrams. The more practical ones would maybe allow one or two equations but then ask that all of the rest of the talk be made up of charts, pictures and diagrams.

I've been using tools like OpenOffice, Windows Office, and LaTeX to make my diagrams. But I see these beautiful diagrams all the time in presentations and publications that tell me I've got to find something better. So I've asked around a bit and looked around a bit and no one has been able to give me an inexpensive answer: the guys who make the nice diagrams are all using Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw.

Well, I think I've finally found an open source answer to Adobe and Corel. Inkscape is one of the cooler programs to hit the planet. It is vector based and powerful. It is layered and has all kinds of operations and transformations that can be performed on different visual objects or groups of objects.

Simple interfaces are all the rage right now with every person wanting to be like Google. I like simplicity. But I have to say that Inkscape is more fun than simplicity. When you begin using it you will probably have to stare at it awhile before you can do anything cool. You will wonder why there are only four types of shapes to draw, squares, stars, and circles, and spirals. Open up a couple of the tutorials under the help button, though, and I think you may begin to fall in love. Transforming the star object alone may keep you entertained for 10s of minutes. Incscape is fairly intuitive and in some ways it is simple. But a better discription is that it is rich and deep. There are a lot of tricks to learn in there.

And then, after you feel that you are starting to get familiar with things, press Ctrl+Shift+X and boom! You have opened up the hood and have direct access to the XML format of your document in editable form.

Anyway, it's free, powerful, and fun. Check it out.

Doug

Herbie, blankies, and things

2007-03-21T08:16:00.000-07:00

When I was 3-4 I had a favorite blanket. I sucked on it and some of the corners were pretty tattered. My mom repaired the edges and it never was the same after that.

Our kids still miss Sarah, our old '93 Ford Aerostar. They are fond of Sparky and Jonathan as well. But just like people can't replace each other perfectly neither can Sparky perfectly replace Sarah.

A lot of men find certain pairs of shoes or certain shirts that they just like. Even as they wear out they just want to stick with them.

I know that things are not people and won't ever be. But for some reason I think people are happier when they have a certain affection for certain things. What do you think?

Freedom, self control, and a baby

2007-03-14T17:19:00.000-07:00

Setting the goal: A couple of weeks ago I had a talk with one of my advisers. I told him my concern, which was that it would be very easy to pass two years here and at the end realize that I am no closer to completing my PhD than I am now. What could I do, I asked, to make sure that didn't happen?

He wasn't sure of all of what needed to be done but he did have one suggestion. He suggested that I start writing papers.

So I'm going to do that. I struggled for a bit to get going until Monday the 9th. At that point I committed to try an experiment, which would be to write one page of scientific article each weekday for one month. (Actually, the goal is a bit more complicated than that--after a point I can spend time on figures and referrences and formatting for submission instead of on writing pages.) And I did it every day that week, just by adopting the rule that I wouldn't do anything else (even check email etc.) until I had finished each day.

Not keeping it, and the excuses were sane: The next Monday (two days ago) Gina had to go to the hospital at 10:00. As far as we knew the most likely scenarios were C-section or induction and we would be parents that day or the next. Anyway, with the large event impending I decided the day before that I would forgo Monday's page. Gina prompted me and tried to help me write but since I had made the decision to let myself go I didn't write. After a lot of time spent doing little extras to prepare Gina in case of an emergency C-section, the doctor came and wrangled the baby from a breech position into one that was head down. After a bit of monitoring the wrangling was deemed a success. We ended up being sent back home with the baby in its newly adopted head-down position.

That evening I got emails about working on a grant. I was to come up on Thursday to work things out regarding it. Well, working things out with two bosses is usually tricky. I decided I had better check email the next morning. Unsurprisingly I got an urgent email suggesting that I needed to get up to Los Alamos to begin helping write a grant that, if funded, will settle the financial side of things until after I graduate. That's a big deal. Luckily, Gina's mom is in town so I felt like I could leave Gina in good hands. I went up there. Between four hours of commute time and meetings with two different individuals I spent the rest of my day pretty handily. I let myself forgo a page yesterday as well.

Recommitting and learning about freedom: But 4 hours gives you a lot of time to think about things. I started thinking about taking responsibility to make things happen. I thought about taking control of my life and what that means. One thing that it means is not letting myself off the hook so easily.

I can't make a lot of daily personal commitments. Responsibilities to family and employers are critical and I can't take up the whole day meeting internal commitments to the exclusion of external ones. But I can make some. And there is almost always enough space to stick to them. Daily writing is an experiment. I don't know that I'll stick with it for good. But I'm doing it now.

Today it seemed like the baby wasn't moving and we went to our appointment early to make sure things were okay. The baby was okay. But it was turned back to the breach position. But before the appointment I had finished the page for today.

Tomorrow we go in expecting to have the baby before Gina comes back out because no one wants to turn the baby again only to have it turn again. The appointment is for the afternoon and I have to work on the funding proposal in the morning. But I believe that if I don't let myself off the hook I will be able to write that page.

And maybe after enough pages of quality science . . . maybe then I'll graduate. We'll see. What matters for now is the process--not the destination.

So much fun

2007-03-03T18:27:00.000-08:00

Gina got me a ping pong table for a birthday present when she saw it at Walmart for $50. We took a few days to set it up and had it ready by this last Wednesday evening.

Today Denis, my friend from Russia, and Puff, my friend from China, came over with their special paddles and we played. First we played one on two, rotating around so that each person got a turn to be alone. Then we played one on one. Then one on two again and finally one on one. I was beaten once in every situation and I won once in every situation. It was so dang fun. Maybe life is actually about ping pong . . .

It would be a treat to play enough to offer a good challenge to Rob, James, Bart, and SamB. Watch out, boys. My chinese friend has some tricks to teach me.

We took a break to let the kids start learning how to play. They are still pretty short for the table and they are still learning how to hit and how to hold the paddle.

When it was all done and they had left Gina asked if it had been nice. I wanted to express my gratitude. I told her it was as much fun as I had had in this house. That got me in hot water. I had to explain that it wasn't in the same category as a lot of the other great things that have happened in this house and couldn't properly be compared.

One problem is space. We put up the table in the largest room of the house. Then we cleared that room of every bit of furniture. It was still small enough that the walls interfered from time to time with our game. Well, we may end up growing out of this little home at some point. Still, it's been great over the last 3.5 years.

Only two weeks and two days until the baby is due.

Doug

One reason you don't want me for president.

2007-02-20T19:34:00.000-08:00

I spent the weekend in Pasadena CA in a conference on quantum information at Caltech. It was a blast. I was kind of in charge of our little caravan and I paid all the gas bills for our van. The total was $192 for gas going there and back. It took us about 11 hours each way not including breaks.

On the way when I wasn't driving I was finishing "Let my people go surfing" by Yvon Chouinard. He founded and grew Patagonia kind of by accident and ended up making it a company with a mission. The mission is to slow down the destruction of the earth. I loved the book.

Anyway, Gina and I decided to become conscious of how much we use of different resources like electricity, gas, gasoline, water, and so on. Over the years we hope we can find ways to cut our use of each one in a reasonable fashion.

But that and our van dying yesterday morning got me thinking. Our life here in Albuquerque would be nearly impossible without our cars. Stores are all miles away. School is far away. Public transportation is slow, rare, and inconvenient. Biking around town turns out to be quite dangerous because of the way the roads have been made and the way cars drive. The whole thing is a waste.

I know what I would do about it if I were in a position to act. I would start hiking taxes on all products based on fossile fuels. I would do it now, but in a small way. I would increase taxes by 3% each month and I would keep up that policy of increases for the next several years. All proceeds from the tax would go toward building infrastructure for mass transit solutions and bike trails. In other words I would systematically and gradually make mass transit cheaper and safer and individual motorized transit more expensive and let people adjust their lifestyles accordingly. I'd like to think that perhaps within 10 years of such a policy the Salt Lake Valley would stop filling up with crap every winter . . .

Special Relativity

2007-02-08T14:31:00.000-08:00

I wrote the first chapter of a text book on Special Relativity. I think I might call the text "Special Relativity in your bones" because the goal will be not so much to learn about it academically as to have it become a part of the way you think about the world. By the end of the textbook you should be able to hear that a bullet moves at x miles per hour and calculate in your head the length contraction and time dilation associated with that bullet. And you should know how to mentally rotate time into space and vice verse as you think hop from one special referrence frame to another. You should be able to derive the whole theory from the premise that the speed of light is a law of physics.

It assumes high school math and has been fun to write. It's modeled on the Saxon math textbook series. Anyway, since beginning I have found out that writing the thing is going to be a bit of a recursive process. If you want to read through the first chapter let me know. I'd love feedback.

I'll add a comment to this post when I get to a finishing point on any given unit. Currently finishing such an incremental part of the book consists of the following tasks:

I've written the explanatory section
I've written up the problems (20 to 30)
I've written up the solutions
I've found and included an appropriate quote
I have the content outlined for the next 5 units
I've taken into account any feedback that I've received on previous units.

8 minutes and 47 seconds

2007-02-03T08:20:00.000-08:00

It's been (plenty below) freezing here in the mornings so I've been putting this off for a bit. But this morning I went outside with my GPS and walked over to a little trail about .2 miles from our home. After walking on the trail for another .2 or so miles I reset the GPS odometer and started jogging. I wanted a benchmark time so I tried to jog at a reasonable pace and then just keep running until I had gone a mile. Anyway, it took me 8 minutes and 47 seconds. It was cold enough that my throat was hurting by the time I was done. And I notice that my calves are a little sore now so I'm clearly not in running shape. We'll see how much I improve on that over the course of the year.

Did I mention that due to a lot of scrambling by my friends up at LANL I am funded through the summer? That means awesome insurance for this next baby. Very nice.

I'm going to use comments on this post to keep track of my 1-mile times. We'll see how it goes.

That kid who flunked chemistry

2007-01-30T09:37:00.000-08:00

His older brother seemed to be good at everything and was recognized as a scholar. Not only that but he was a great swimmer, and got along well with everyone.

The younger brother was nice, and quiet. But he definitely didn't get all A's. After high school the younger brother went to community college. But he couldn't care enough about a lot of the classes to attend. Administrative problems began piling up.

A world class physicist out at Columbia intervened and got him transferred to Columbia despite his poor transcript. He still refused to attend classes that didn't interest him. He still flunked chemistry.

I just read the story of Julian Schwinger and I love it. He wrote his first paper in theoretical physics when he was 16. At the community college he continued giving all the time he could to physics. After transfering to Columbia he continued his pattern and completed his PhD dissertation before finishing his undergraduate degree. He went on to be the first person to really pin down quantum electrodynamics for which he won the Nobel Prize. He was one of the few people Feynman had to hold in awe. But I think my favorite thing about him is that he flunked chemistry.

There was a boy who knew what he cared about and excelled in it and didn't let other things get in his way. (Note: it only worked so well because he was so dang good! But on the other hand, would he have been so good if he had allowed himself to be distracted?)

the Code of Doug

2007-01-21T19:36:00.000-08:00

I've always wanted to distill true principles about life and apply them. At various points I've come up with statements that I called by the name "Code of Doug." The whole thing is a work in progress and this one is not complete. But I thought I might as well put up a link to what I have. Perhaps the knowledge that it is up there in its imperfect form will help me to complete it more effectively. Anyway, I'll link to it from the side of the page.

To hold the photon's shadow

2007-01-19T07:59:00.000-08:00

Hi, guys. I thought I would talk a bit today about my current direction of research. It's a pretty simple goal to state: we want to hold the photon's shadow.

Of course, photons don't have shadows: if you send two laser beams together they will pass right through each other, each progressing as though the other weren't there.

That's true to a point. When the laser beams start getting strong they temporarily (or sometimes permanently) change the nature of the matter they traverse. When they are (or if they were) really strong one must begin to say that they change the nature of space itself.

Those changes to media through which beams propagate can then allow one beam to have an indirect impact on a second beam. There is now a shadow.

This type of change can be used for optical switches. People can make LCD screens (which are just large arrays of liquid crystal optical switches) that are activated and deactivated by light.

But it can also happen in air. If the laser is strong enough it will change the properties of the air it traverses--density, temperature, and so on--and that will change the index of refraction of the air. Just like heat wafting up from the fire leaves a shiny, plasticy shadow, so can heat from the heart of a laser leave a more structured, plasticy shadow.

A moderately strong (100 mW--somewhat dangerous) laser produces around 3*10^17 photons per second (here I'm assuming visible light). Let's see: 9 zeros means billion, 12->trillion, 15-> quadrillion. So the laser produces around 300 quadrillion photons per second. Your eyes are so sensitive they can see a single photon if properly adjusted to the dark. That's why shooting them with lasers is a bad idea.

Anyway, the effects I've been talking about would be hard to observe from a moderately strong laser. Crank it up by a factor of 1000 or 1000000 and keep the profile reasonably tight and you should see them alright.

If we want to use the photon's shadow to build quantum circuits and make precision measurements we need to go the other direction. Instead of looking at the net shadow of 300 quadrillion photons we want to see the shadow of a single photon. Obviously, that isn't going to happen in air.

Or at least not in ordinary air. It just may happen with a specially prepared gas. Imagine a set of identical atoms. Now smack them with highly ordered light rays of specific wavelengths and specific strengths coming from specific directions. The light interacts with the atoms and the atoms with the light and the whole, beautiful as it is, is different than the sum of the parts. What you have now is an artificial construct, an ephemeral chimera. What are its properties? They depend on the nature of those light rays. In other words, you have some ability to control its properties.

We know what properties we want: we want the nonlinear index of refraction to be such that shadow of the photon would be enhanced over the shadow it would have in ordinary air by about a factor of one quintillion. And we want the chance that the photon will be absorbed to go to zero. Now it is a question of getting as close as possible to what we want.

All in all, it's a pretty cool project . . .

My new hero: Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy

2007-01-14T20:32:00.000-08:00

This is word for word out of a neat book Gina just found for me and got from the library called Success Built to Last: Creating a Life that Matters. There are a lot of amazing stories in the book. I think this is my favorite one so far. The bolds are my own.

Govindappa Venkataswamy thought he had found purpose in life when three cousins died in the las three months of their pregnancies. His broken heart drove him to devour his medical school training, bent on becoming an OB-GYN. His intent was to rescue people like his cousins, but he never got the chance. Fresh out of medical school rheumatoid arthritis crippled him, making it impossible for him to deliver babies. He was hospitalized for years and suffered pain that still grips him to this day.

“You don't spend your life helping people just out of sympathy. You know that the sufferer is part of you,” said Dr. V., as he is known today. Not only does he have great empathy empathy for the pain that his patients endure, but he did not let his permanent disability limit his ambitions. He started over, this time studying opthalmology to confront a different need. In India, there are nine million blind people—most of whom suffer from cataracts, which are curable with surgery. Dr. V. opened an 11-bed eye hospital in his brother's home in Madurai to perform free or low-cost cataract surgery. He even designed instruments suited to his crippled hands, and these tools enabled him to perform 5,000 surgeries in his first year.

Today, his clinics perform over 200,000 surgeries annually and are among the largest single providers of eye surgery in the world, having given sight to more than one million people in India. Dr. V. made the process of conducting operations so efficient, it could be done as fast and almost as cheaply as making a burger.

He believes that it may be possible to 'franchise' his operations throughout the world, recruiting people and resources to his dream as if it were McDonald's. They sell billions of burgers through thousands of stores, he tells everyone he meets. “We can sell millions of people new eyesight, saving them from starvation.” The clinics run a profit even though 70% of the patients pay nothing, or close to nothing, and the clinics do not depend on donations or government grants. With his hands hopelessly crippled, you would think he had earned the right to give up. Instead, Dr. V. refused to let that interrupt his commitment to save lives. He could not change his condition, but he could change the way he thought about his goal and, as a result, he is changing the lives of millions.

Sketching something that might work

2007-01-10T12:09:00.000-08:00

Preface: The goal is to place good information at the center of health-related decisions. Right now noone, not even Drs. or medical institutions, has good information on which specialist, organization or group is the best person to go to for treatment of a specific issue.

The problem is tricky because hospitals and such not only have to guard their data for privacy reasons but also because they view it as valuable and tend to be hesitant to share it.

Here is a plan that might work for getting institutions to be more sharing and might make people more aware of the differences out there:

Gather information on everybody and report the info to each individual institution.
Publish information on the top 5 institutions and possibly on the bottom 5 institutions.

A starfish's dilemma

2007-01-05T09:23:00.000-08:00

In my life here at UNM I have spent years trying to figure out how to solve world problems sprinkled with three intense bursts of entrepreneurial activity, each of which was eventually quenched. I have watched my own behavior with chagrin. Why was I so inconstant? Why didn't I focus on solving health care if that was my stated goal? This most recent burst of activity was quick enough to start and finish that I had a better chance to realize more consciously what I was doing.

You have heard the story of the man who walked along the beach saving starfish one by one by throwing them back into the ocean. The number of starfish was so large that he could never save even a small percentage. Still he continued to walk along and throw them into the water. A man stopped him and asked why he continued to save starfish when the number of beached ones was so large he would never make a difference. The man tossed another starfish in and said "I made a difference to this one."

I am not the man tossing starfish into the ocean. I am one of the starfish still in the ocean. I am studying the nature of the tides and of starfish motion to understand the socioeconomic process that puts so many starfish on the beach. Every once in awhile I see a threat to myself and my little starfish family. As the threat approaches I drop my observations and calculations and frantically build a shelter. But the threat swims right on by and I find that I don't want to spend my life building a shelter when threats are only illusionary: there is a bigger problem to solve. So I go back to normal life and to trying to crack the process that beaches so many starfish.

The health care system is the process that is beaching perhaps millions of human starfish. The threats are times when funding through graduate school looks shaky. Western Capital, SongPiper, and Lobo Mind Loan are the shelters that I have built when things seemed insecure. While finances have been iffy I have had a lot of drive to start something up. But when funding seemed secure the three ventures have seemed like distractions from the real problem that I want to solve, that is health care.

In this light my actions over the past 3.5 years make a lot of sense: when my family seems threatened I begin energetically building. Invariably I find shelter before the building is done and building begins to seem like a distraction because it no longer meets my most pressing need. Now the most pressing need is to solve a larger problem that all of us starfish are facing. However, the fact that the actions make sense is not enough: it would be better to have my actions succeed in meeting the needs that drive them. As the primary need has swung back and forth the actions have also swung back and forth and in the end I have accomplished little outside of learning and making much ado about nothing.

What I need to do is figure out how to meet both needs simultaneously. If I can impact health care substantially and support our family doing it then I have found a company that will work day in and day out. When we are just fine I can use my intuition and my head and my diligence. When things are much less assured I can use my heart and my intensity and determination to make things work.

I talked about the socio-economic problem of the starfish population. I am pretty convinced that the primary problem in health care is not a technical one but an economic and social one. And I think that the key solution to the problem will be informational. I want to create a truly competitive environment in the health care world by providing decision makers with information and health care providers with performance feedback. How to make a company out of that I don't know.

Happy New Year

2007-01-01T21:00:00.000-08:00

The following is an exerpt from my journal of yesterday outlining goals for the new year. There is a lot of thinking and planning and more doing left on all of the goals that I wrote down but this is a start. Anyway, here it is.

New Years Day and Eve together make up one of my favorite holidays. If Christmas celebrates the coming of Christ, and Easter his death and resurrection, then for me New Years celebrates the fact that we can repent. What hope there is in repentance! What hope there is in the fact that we need not be bound by our failings of yesteryear. What excitement there is behind the acquisition of new habits and ways of life.

I hunger to make worthy resolutions and then to have life blessed by them. What I have found so far is that I need a trial process or a filtering process on my resolutions. Living by some of them improves our quality of life. Living by others sounds good but ends up not leading to a true improvement. And I'm not sure that I will know in advance what is true. The resolution to write in my journal has been one of the neatest ones so far.

So in a way the concept of a resolution isn't the right one for what I have found to work best. Perhaps the concept of proposals is a better one. Regardless, I hunger to see my life become better than it is right now. Here is not an official list but, at least for now, a brainstorming list:

Time myself regularly in the mile and progress in running times over the course of the year
Take charge of education for our children and see that they begin to get a great one
Court Gina as though I will ask her to marry me at the end of the year. Then actually ask her.
Gain an intuitive and mathematical understanding of general relativity.
Become a salesman in the best sense of the word
Become a teacher in the best sense of the word (is this the same as the previous one?)
Earn enough money to create a 10 thousand dollar buffer and any reserves we need for known expenditures and dry months
Go camping with the family 5 times
Learn to be a real friend and allow myself to take pleasure in the association of others.
Write at least 8 academic papers and submit at least 7 of them for publication
Live each day as if the day is a gift and will be gone forever by night.

As I write these I love them. All of them need to be elaborated and thought out quite a bit. All of them can be considered macroscopic goals and their accomplishment will require some real planning and doing. So as a last goal I suppose I ought to include time to think about their accomplishment. At the same time they are all long sentences. It would be wise to come up with a short mental representation for each goal so that I can quickly remind myself of each of them. The exact choice of that representation will be quite important.

I showed the goals to Gina and she approved. And I like them. They are therefor no longer just a brainstorming list but a set of guidelines to be used as tools to help me live an excellent year this year. Happy New Year!

Quantum graininess

2006-12-26T02:17:00.000-08:00

Everybody knows about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. How much they know about it varies. Most know it as a limit to the knowledge that we can have about quantum systems. Some know it more specifically as a limit to the knowledge we can have about the value of two conjugate variables. Some can derive the uncertainty principle from other basic rules of quantum mechanics.

Last year as I first began to learn about quantum optics I was extremely surprised to learn that phase and number can be considered to be conjugate variables in a loose sense. If you know photon number perfectly you can do so only by destroying photon phase.

Anyway, the HUP shows up all over the place and becomes a problem any time you want to perform a measurement. I suppose that the question that I want to pose now is simple: when you have a nonlinear effect that manifests itself as an effect on the phase of a system that phase will have an uncertainty that corresponds to your knowledge of the number state of that system. If the phase is classically proportional to the strength of your nonlinear interaction then you might map that uncertainty onto the strength of your nonlinear interaction. From this mapping can one state an uncertainty principle for the precision with which the strength of the nonlinear interaction can be specified? It seems like if you could this might open up a way to analyze fundamental limits to your ability to make precision measurements using nonlinear optics.

So how should I get at the problem? The first way you might get at specifying the uncertainty of a quantity is by representing it as an operator and seeing what it commutes with. I think, however, that nonlinear interaction strengths are not likely to be observables but rather parameters that you can estimate using observables. So I guess that the analysis might follow one that you would use for other important but unobservable parameters like phase.

Alma's Tao

2006-12-19T06:13:00.000-08:00

After talking about diligence and temperance Alma continues giving advice to his Shiblon in verse 11:

See that ye are not lifted up unto pride; yea, see that ye do not boast in your own wisdom, nor of your much strength.

I like that verse a lot. One thing interesting about it is how in the last phrase Alma seems to acknowledge that Shiblon has much strength even as he asks him not to boast of it. This morning I was thinking about the verse in terms of how it might help me practically in getting things done. I think there are a couple of ways.

First, it reminds me of Benjamin Franklin's autobiography. One thing he states and tries to teach is that if you want to get something good done it is wiser to get yourself out of the way. To paraphrase, he says that you can get a lot more accomplished if you aren't worried about getting the credit for accomplishing it.

But a second thing comes out of Alma's sentence and that is a matter of focus. When you want something to happen you need to look somewhere for the power to make it happen. If you are full of pride and see accomplishments primarily in terms of your own qualities of wisdom and strength then I think you are focusing on the wrong things. Because nature is much more powerful than you are you should be focusing rather on the way that things outside of you work. Your strength is local and limited. So is your wisdom. But natural laws have amazing power. If you can flow with them and make use of them then perhaps you can really get things done. Now you have something scalable.

So let me give an example: you can use your amazing powers of persuasion to sell a crummy product. You'll make some sales but only as many as you can get to happen by running around and convincing. And hopefully at some point you'll get stuck with your own reputation. Or you can sell something that is excellent enough to knock peoples socks off. In this case you still may need to start off running around finding people with knockable socks. But now, because you are acting in accordance with the way things are, you have a success that can really grow.

Hot, hot chilli

2006-12-11T08:27:00.000-08:00

Check out this article about some chillies that blow the socks off of our habaneros.

Who should clean up the bathroom?

2006-12-10T20:38:00.000-08:00

Okay. Here is something that is on my mind a bit.

First, I know that my primary responsibility is my family, including myself. That said, tell me this. We have about 6 billion people on the earth and all of us share some problems. How much responsibility should we each take for these shared problems? How much should we do to prevent irreversible changes to the planet? How much should we do to help cure diseases? To prevent unnecessary deaths due to innefficiencies? To feed hungry children?

Anyway, the point isn't to try and find problems. The point is to talk about responsibility and life choices. The thing is that if every person focuses only on taking care of his or her family the side effects of that inherently good and important process may do real and irrevocable damage. On the other hand 6 billion seems like a large enough number that if that group works with any kind of unity a lot could be done.

Anyway, goodnight.

Founder's Touch

2006-12-04T10:54:00.000-08:00

I read "The Founder's Touch" this past week about Paul Galvin and the beginning of Motorola. Now that was a wild ride. Paul and his partner went all out two seperate times before Motorola ever began. Both times they landed flat on their faces, the first time shut down because they couldn't pay inventory tax and the second again because they ran out of money. Motorola was bought from the ashes of the second crash. For years after it was up and running they were up against the wire, nearly crashing and burning again several times, but this time they pulled out of it. Oddly enough I think that part of their later success was because of the tight times at the beginning. Reading the book I got the sense that they formed a very tight team. Here are just a few of my favorite quotes:

"Even small problems seem big when they are not solved. Making an effort to solve them keeps them small." P.V. Galvin

"When a man and a woman have shared the hardship that Lillian and I have shared, there are not words that can easily describe how much they come to mean to one another." P.V. Galvin

"He had a unique way of adding up a man's potential in his own mind. Someone once said of him that 'he could remember a mistake a man had made ten years before.' It was true that he could recall these episodes of error, but what he watched closely were the ways in which the man either benefited or did not benefit from the mistakes. One of his favorite sayings was, 'I don't mind a fellow who is dumb but I can't stand one who is numb.'" Petrakis quoting Galvin

"Do not fear mistakes. Wisdom is often born of such mistakes. You will know failure. Determine now to acquire the confidence required to overcome it. Reach out. . ." P.V. Galvin

Doug being random: Choosing books and weird stuff about optimization techniques

2006-11-25T19:04:00.000-08:00

About 12 or 13 years ago I recommended a book to my dad that I had quite enjoyed. I knew there was a part toward the middle that you kind of had to slog through but I thought that it was worth it. Dad started it and about a month later I asked him what he'd been reading lately. "Nothing, really. Just haven't wanted to pick up a book and really get into it lately." That was weird. But I thought I knew what was happening. "What did you think of the book?" He hadn't enjoyed it enough to keep going. So looking at my own experience I made a guess about what was happening. "I think that what is happening is that you aren't enjoying the book but you kind of think you should read it. When you want to read something you think that if you are reading you really ought to be reading the book I recommended. But you don't like it so you end up not reading anything." He was impressed with my insight (which is probably why I remember this story in the first place!) and told me that that was what had been happening. I released him from the book.

Gradually I have come to decide that a book is not something I have any obligation to (probably Dad felt the same way: it wasn't loyalty to the book that was holding him back). There are so many excellent books out there. And there is plenty of chaff. So if I have begun one that seems to be mostly chaff I drop it. Actually, these days I tend to begin a good three different books simultaneously. The ones that gets enough of my respect to be finished win.

To a certain extent I am a believer in this strategy in life. You try a lot of things and keep the ones that work. On the other hand . . . did I already tell you the story of the neural nets? Neural nets can be used to search a parameter space for the best spot. You can give them different behaviors. If you make them completely linear they find good spots quickly, but not necessarily the best spots. They are finding local maxima. You can also add some random noise to their behavior. If you add a bit they will jump out of the local maxima and are more likely to find the true maximum. If you crank up the randomness more and more though they go crazy. They become more and more likely to reject the global maximum and search and search forever.

We have memories and a finite lifetime. So one option is to search for a set amount of time with a fair amount of randomness and then gradually turn down the randomness and settle in to something that is pretty darn good. Actually, that approach is used as well. Physicists talk about an annealing algorithm where spaces are searched by beginning with a system at a high temperature (high temperature means lots of random motion) and then gradually cooling the system, letting it gradually settle into a nice spot in the parameter space.

Perhaps this desire to learn about everything and taste a little of everything is part of an instinct for optimization. I guess I just hope to be neither so sedated that I get trapped in a local maximum or so hopped up that I can never find a place to make my home. Hopefully the mental temperature will gradually decrease leaving me in an excellent solution by the time annealing occurs.

Why are the Olympics worth watching?

2006-11-12T20:50:00.000-08:00

So why are the Olympics worth watching? Why are they worth having? How does it benefit anyone if one person can run really fast? And yet I love the Olympics. I love the film Chariots of Fire. Who cares if you can spell a million rare words in a day when spell checkers are pretty good? What does it matter if one girl can spell a lot of words correctly? And yet I loved the film Akeelah and the Bee. Who cares if a rocket goes into the air? And yet when the boys in October Sky made their rocket shoot up into the air, it mattered. We were elated. Something internal seems to be saying that performing to the very best of your ability must be of value in and of itself. It isn't just about the race or the spelling bee or the rocket. It is about persevering despite difficulties. It is about a spirit stretching mind and body to capacity. It is about reaching toward the divine.

How can I conclude anything other than that the striving in and of itself has value? And yet we still need food. We still need a safe place to sleep and clothes to wear. So certainly working toward ends grounded in more quotidian needs has value. It seems like if you are going to put your heart into something it is worth thinking about that something and how it relates to the larger picture. Do you like how it relates?

The most joyful times in life may be when you can let go of hesitations and fears and second thoughts and focus all out on the completion of a goal. For me to do that I have to trust the goal and know deep down that it is a worthy one and a good one. Perhaps, considering the lessons of these films, I should rethink what it means for a goal to be a worthy one. I might have rejected any of those goals as being strictly Rococo. But a Rococo goal for which you can truly strive is certainly better than a lot of functional goals that you bind yourself to only because you must.

This life is a beautiful one. I believe that we are to reach to the heavens. And I am inspired by so many people who have done so.

Doug

Thanks to the octillions

2006-11-05T20:09:00.000-08:00

I'm grateful for the chance to be alive at this fascinating time. Things are changing forever. Now! In our lifetime! I'm grateful for the chance to build up a family alongside Gina. I'm grateful for the chance to learn about how light and the smallest particles behave and to see the mysteries that are troubling the world of science right now. I'm grateful for our new fishtank and the peppy little zebra danios that are zipping around in there right now. I'm thankful for the generosity and love of family, friends, and colleagues that makes this life not only barable but great. I'm grateful for the occasional good book that I have the pleasure of running accross. (Gina and I have been having some fun with Goose Girl and Enna Burning lately. Young adult lit, written by a young mother out of SLC!) I'm greatful to be alive at a time when the world isn't yet destroyed (or even completely tamed) but when we can travel to see so many parts of it and see so much footage of it. I think right about now may be when the opportunity to see natural beauty on this planet has reached its apex. . . I'm grateful for the law of tithing and the steady stream of miracles that have helped us not only survive but thrive through this time of family growth and graduate school. It's been truly remarkable. I'm grateful for the priesthood and the ability to do something powerful and real when our family or our friends need help.
I'm grateful to learn that there is no end to the challenges in this world. That there will always be new things to learn and new things to do. I'm grateful to the French, Italians, Indians, Afghanis, and Thia and to the good-old Americans for a remarkable set of cuisines to explore. And I'm grateful to all those octillions of little chloroplasts and chloroplast-like bacteria for their incredible work in maintaining our current out-of-equilibrium condition.

Happy November.

Thanks, Bart, for the reminder tonight.

Doug

Ode to ArtRage2 and the Balance Game.

2006-10-28T20:56:00.000-07:00

Hi. Sorry I missed last week. We were gone Friday and Saturday and then had family Saturday and Sunday. Monday I was working my tail off to catch up and then the week just flew by.

Let me start off by mentioning the coolest software I currently know of: Artrage2. What is it? It is a simulation of the painting experience.* A really good simulation but with the advantages that you don't have to buy paints or canvas and that there is unlimitted undo so you can't really be stuck on a mistake. The user interface is amazing. Wonderfully intuitive, good looking, and powerful. The paint actually mixes on the cavas as you paint unless you have it dry first. The brush can have different pressures. Default is a lot of pressure. In that case you slather on the paint in Van Gogh fashion and the texture is amazing. I've tried the program on a regular computer and on a tablet. It's about 30% cooler on a tablet. But it is still the neatest application I know about on an ordinary computer with a mouse. I have the free-ware version but plan to upgrade pretty soon to the 20 dollar version. And not only for the extra features. Also just to reward beautiful work that has benefited the world (and me personally) by throwing cash at it.
The whole thing makes programming seem like art more than craft. Maybe almost like some organic wholesome magic. They brought something to life.

*(It also simulates pencil, pastels, etc. but I'm focusing on the oil painting capability.)

On to the most interesting thing I am trying right now. I call it the balance game and the idea is to make life into a game. I have my life divided into categories of physical and spiritual health, family, work, church. Each category is divided up into specific things that I can do for points. Points in each category are summed and then the totals for the categories are multiplied to compute the overall score. That means if I flunk a category I flunk the game. All the math is done by a spreadsheet and I can see how I'm doing. So far it's been fun enough and a great reminder on a fair number of important things.

Anyway, goodnight.

Some fun things

2006-10-15T14:14:00.000-07:00

Camping. Friday and Saturday evenings I went on my last camp out for my last calling. It was a great time with amazing stars, clean air, good company, plenty of rock formations to climb and wildlife. I saw a wild raccoon for the first time in my life and a huge owl. We got photos of the owl and of a woodpecker. I don't know what kind they are but the photos should be good enough for recognition.

A lot of my best memories involve being outside and seeing the beauty. Maybe all except for some births, baptisms, and things of the most human sort. My only conclusion from that is that perhaps I ought to take a bit more time for recreating . . .

I'm starting a bird photo collection. I'm pretty excited about it actually. The goal is to photograph as many different species as possible. Right now I'm at two with the owl and the woodpecker. I want to put the photos somewhere on the web. Perhaps Geocities or Flicker or something. I'm not sure the right place. Just want free and easy.

pbwiki.com The coolest free and easy sight I know about right now is pbwiki.com. You can start your own wiki in about one minute and from there it is super-easy to modify into whatever you want. The wiki is extremely easy to edit and can be password protected so that only a certain group can edit it. You can upload photos and files etc. and add pages with no real hassle. I think it is an awesome tool for collaborative creation of whatever you want to make. But right now I just use it to collect all the different ideas that I need to write down in one place that is easy to organize and accessible from anywhere.

Graphics. One thing I really haven't wanted to face is programing graphics. For whatever reason it just hasn't interested me very much. That's a shame because that is a super-important part of anything like a game or web-page. But that's that for now. I love text. I really like structure. (By structure I mean math, physics, game-rules, etc.) But not the graphics so much.

So what the heck. Maybe I'll focus on what I want to work on this week. Maybe this week I'll look at following a song and measuring how well that song is followed over time.

Oh. I got a new calling that should be pretty darn fun: ward website administrator.

Beautiful Day, Feedback Loop, What if corporations become mere husks?

2006-10-07T09:38:00.000-07:00

Man, it is a beautiful day and I'm feeling great. It's a beautiful time of year and I get to spend it surrounded with these kids, and with excellent people at work, church, and school. Los Alamos is still fun. Yesterday I spent most of the day playing with coupled differential equations designed to model interactions between atoms and light. And a little time exploring general properties of density matrices. And about 4 hours commuting up there and back (not so bad . . . had a friend along who is a philosopher(5 years)-turned-computer-scientist(a few years and a lot of money)-turned-quantum-information-theorist along to talk with). And a bit of time at the temple. Today is more free. And tomorrow I will be released from my current calling and be given a new and fascinating one. More about that when the time comes.

Feedback Loop

We are at a pretty fun time right now with SongPiper because there is nowhere to go but up. I want to get statistics each week on the number of visitors to the sight. Right now I think that the number is about zero. It should be anyway: there isn't much in the way of worthy content there at this point. Each week we can find out how many visitors we have and as long as the number is improving I guess we can say that we are succeeding. That's all I want to do right now is establish a positive feedback loop between the sight and the three of us. Then we'll see what happens.

What if corporations become mere husks?

A couple of my heroes are Sam Walton and David Packard. Both of them seemed to be pretty down-to-earth and seemed to have tried to do a lot of good even as they built amazing companies. I think both companies have done a lot of good as well. But now . . . both companies are both huge organizations. What guarantee is there that they will maintain their integrity as companies? I don't think there is one. After reading their biographies I wanted to do what they did. I wanted to found a great company. But now I'm not sure that a great company will stay great. And if you have created something powerful that isn't guaranteed to stay moral have you really done a great thing?

General Conference, Interstellar travel, uncomfortable truths (SongPiper)

2006-10-01T16:24:00.000-07:00

General Conference today and yesterday. Now you can get it at any time by going to www.byu.tv. I love it. We decided to put the TV into the closet and take a more active roll in deciding what to take into our home. We want a way of finding out about the best things out there so that we can get them in our own time and in our own way. Also I've been using a neat site called Reddit as a source of news etc. But, after a couple too many surprises from following links, I've decided to stop using it. The key to sites like that seems to be finding one where the people who use it share both your interests and values. If I find one I will be all over it. For now I guess I'll go to the Economist for non-local news.

Interstellar travel

So I was quizzing the kids on the planets today and it got me to thinking about space. You know, the closest stars are still amazingly far away at a bit over 4 light years. It would be pretty cool to get a robot out there . . .

Anyway, I think the chances of finding anything as nice as earth anywhere close are astronomically low. So if we want to be settling other places it seems to me that we need to learn how to thrive in environments that aren't all that hospitable. It would be pretty interesting just to see how much we could do in Antarctica or under the earth or something. What would it mean to thrive? If we're talking about eventual space colonization it would mean getting to the point where you can grow and reproduce without much help. If we could make settlements on the moon or on Mars that could grow on their own then I would start to feel excited about the possibility of spreading out a bit.

I think it's cool stuff. Cool from the perspective of technical challenges, of human challenges, and of open-ended opportunity. The whole idea reminds me a little of the LDS pioneers making their way out to a barren wasteland and settling it and making a beautiful place to live.

SongPiper

Ok, so last week I talked about trying to make this whole SongPiper thing into a game with points. Well, having website means that we get immediate feedback on things like # visits, and visit depth. I think we can monitor the number of links to our site. Also if we made our games web based could we measure the time that people spend playing them? I could change the games over time trying to optimize that parameter with the idea that it gives some indication of the value people give to playing the game. So that is the direction that we are thinking in.

I figure that watching a few kids without much time playing around with things they know nothing about might be a little boring. But there it is. This blog is called Diligence and Temperance. If that isn't a promise of an unexciting ride what is!

Seriously though, the blog isn't earning its name. Rather, my actions aren't earning the name. The name should rather be “wandering about learning a lot but not sure where to go or how bad I want to get there.” The concept from the beginning was to answer the question of what one could do with an hour a day if one applied the dual concepts of diligence and temperance. I believe that one can accomplish a lot. I felt like I did accomplish a lot. But that ended somewhere in June, after only 3.5 months of progress. Then my clear initial goal had been accomplished and I looked around and found myself unsure of where to go next. And I failed to meet my short term goals for July 15^th. Since then I haven't done much worth noting and writing the blog has become embarrassing because I make public my lack of direction.

But now there is some direction. We have some clear metrics that we can work on. I'm not sure that we are committed to working on them yet so perhaps that is the next step: to see if we are ready to take complete ownership of our metrics. If we do we will make the sacrifices to see them improve over time. If we don't we might as well not waste our time with anything else. We have busy, full, interesting lives. There is no reason to pretend to do something we aren't going to do.

Let us see what happens.

Doug

Begin Again.

2006-09-24T20:36:00.000-07:00

Time to begin again.

Here is a pass or fail goal. It is difficult enough that I may well fail. But it is this: write a tune-scrolling game using pygames this week. It needs to display a tune and scroll it across the screen. You have to keep up with it by pressing the names of the notes as they go by. It will speed up as time goes by.

SongPiper is important. Even if only for learning. We can learn to build and sell products. We can learn to work together effectively. We can learn to build a company. This is a great time because we all have the income we need from other sources and yet we are all young and ready to do and to learn. This endeavor can only open up opportunities for the future.

All the advice I've read says to make a simple product and release it soon. That way you get feedback before you elaborate on a useless concept. That makes sense. But I haven't really liked releasing something that I'm not too proud of. What good is feedback when what you release is imperfect in many obvious ways?

I do want metrics. I want immediate feedback on what I'm doing. I want to make this thing into a game with points so that I can know if I'm doing a good job. But there are no points. I have to figure out what it means to do a good job . . .

Goodnight.

2006-09-17T19:25:00.000-07:00

I made a New-Years Resolution when I was 16 to start writing in my journal once a week. I wrote that resolution among others in my journal. That was January 2nd of 1993. The next entry was January 18th of 1993. I decided that once a day would be easier to remember than once a week. So I've kept nearly a nightly journal since then.

Anyway, I've now accumulated quite a bit on the history of one young man. I think that I write mostly for the benefits that come from the process of writing. But I also value the results. I've been trying to figure out how to preserve them. I want to gather them from the various booklets and hard-drives and bind them together. I checked out self-publishing options on the web and found a pretty neat (and well-publicised) company called Lulu.com. I may use them to do the honors.

As you may remember SongPiper is currently on hold from my end. Ryan's end too. I think Denis may be toying with the code a bit. I am optimistic, however. If we can get through the necessary paperwork I will move from full-time to part-time at LANL. That should reduce the time crunch a bit.

Slow Progress, Great Life

2006-09-09T20:22:00.000-07:00

I am now hired full-time at Los Alamos. I love it. I love the environment, the people, and the projects that I get to work on. But it means a full 40 hours a week. And if I'm working on-sight (which most days is not the case) I'm doing a commute of almost 2 hours (each way). And there is a quantum optics course that seems to be taking a fair amount of time each week (15-20 hours!).

Anyway, between all of those things and normal home responsibilities I have been struggling to keep it all together. My one-hour-a-day may have to be put aside for a bit.

I see a future where I am taking no classes and where we live by the lab, eliminating the commute. Can you imagine being able to treat graduate school like a flexible 40 hr/week job? That may be what I'll be doing soon. So the hour-a-day can come back soon with a vengeance.

Regardless, life right now is awesome. I love this chance to enter into the world of information physics and quantum optics. I love working on real projects and figuring out what is going on.

Have a great week,

Doug

Pippen and Merry

2006-09-03T19:56:00.000-07:00

What do you want out of life? What do I want out of life? Sometimes I just want to be able to settle down in a comfortable home with green grass, raise happy kids, and read as many books as I want.

Another part of me really wants to be questing. That part wants to preserve and even improve on our world through some kind of heroic activity.

Maybe Tolkien expressed the two desires as well as anyone with his portrayal of the Shire on the one hand and the lives of the hobbits who left on the other hand. I want the life of the Shire. In one way the life of the Shire is the point. It also seems to miss part of the point: can I live a life to myself if there is a way to make the world at large a better place? And what of Pippen and Merry? They grew in a way that those who stayed at home never would.

People first.

2006-08-26T20:08:00.000-07:00

Awhile back I read that book by Jim Collins and his research group called Good to Great. I really enjoyed it. It wasn't a physics text and couldn't be because it was about something human. But there were a lot of principles taught that I thought might be worth taking to heart when trying to start a company.

Anyway, the very first principles surprised me though they shouldn't have. They were this: the people in the company are the most critical part of the company. Not assets, direction, ideas etc. Focus on getting the right people and the others follow. So I'm trying it out. I am now working with two of the best guys I know trying to start our little company. So far it has been a pleasure. Both of these guys are as green as I am. Just like I don't know programming, Denis doesn't know web design. Ryan doesn't know marketing. But I am confident that we can learn. And these past couple of weeks when we have been working together have been really neat. I feel like something is really coming together.

Anyway, it's fun. Have a great week.

Doug

2006-08-20T17:00:00.000-07:00

Last night I started learning lisp. So far it seems a lot like Matlab though I haven't gotten to the real stuff yet. But the author of the book that I am going through said something interesting about the language and the programming environment surrounding it that I found interesting: he said "So, one way to look at Lisp is as a language designed to keep you in a state of flow." Anyway, that reminded me of the lesson that I learned from the Portuguese woman that I wrote about last week. It will be interesting to see how it goes.

Ryan came up with several neat games designed to help people learn specific musical skills. Denis started messing with our website. I figured out how to use Jsmooth to wrap a JAR executable with a windows executable so our first version should be downloadable from the website in the next few days.

Anyway, it's a great time to be alive. Will someone gather a complete and extendable list of US doctors? We need tools to help us find and choose our MDs.

Doug

Current Status, building trust, and lesson from a Portuguese mother.

2006-08-13T09:04:00.000-07:00

Current Status:

Los Alamos is a go. Cool project and our family will be well provided for. I can't think of a neater way to finish off this PhD.

Our home is clean and nice and we are all together.

Our oldest daughter started 1st grade and likes her new class and teacher a lot.

Our second daughter starts kindergarten tomorrow. She is excited.

Our garden is thriving with all this unexpected rain.

And we (Denis, Ryan, and I) began weekly teleconference meetings for SongPiper. It should be great. My main projects this week will be to improve distribution methods and to add a little color to the exisiting Java program. I plan on getting those things done.

Building Trust:

In fact I believe that it is vital that I do get them done. Because to a certain extent this whole endeavor will be a matter of coming to trust ourselves and each other to produce results. That trust can only be built if we actually produce those results. And I think that this whole thing will be fun, rewarding, sustainable, etc. only if that trust can be earned and maintained.

Lesson from a Portuguese woman:

I served an LDS mission in Paris France from July of 1996 to August of 1998. I say Paris but that was just the general area. In the suburbs of France was a town called Mantes-la-Jolie. It means Mantes the beautiful or Mantes the pleasant, and I'm sure that at one time it was pleasant and beautiful. Monet settled not far from there at Giverny to paint his own garden over and over. But it turned out in 1996 and 1997 to be a scary area because of a huge housing project called Val Foree that was there.

Anyway, our congregation actually met in a nearby bedroom community called Mantes-la-Ville. The congregation was small and close and consisted of a group of really dedicated, stellar families. Mostly young with children and mostly middle class. One of the families was from Portugal. The mother and father spoke French only moderately well and they didn't seem particularly well educated. When you went to their home, though, it was really neat. The home was well-crafted with an ample yard. There were birds and home-produced eggs and meat and there was great cooking. The husband was a mason and the wife was like a woman out of the 1800s with a million domestic skills. They both worked and worked and seemed to enjoy it and they made beauty around them.

Anyway as the woman was going through some of the many motions of keeping her home in order I asked her if she enjoyed all the work. She paused and gave me an answer that I remembered. "Mmm, I like the work so long as I am not thinking about other things that I have to do while I am doing it."

If she was cleaning the chicken she didn't want to be concerned about doing the laundry. The answer surprised me because I was expecting a no or a yes rather than a conditional. But I came to really like it.

If I am doing one thing but worried about another I can't enjoy it. If I am doing one thing but want to be doing something else then I can't enjoy it. But when I can forget other things and lose myself in the task at hand, almost any task becomes intrinsically interesting.

If I can manage that there are still two possibilities left. The first is that at the end I am completely happy with what I have spent my time doing. The second is that at the end I feel like I have tricked myself or betrayed myself. I get the first when I have managed to lose myself in something that is aligned with what I need to be doing. The second comes when I have managed to lose myself in a mere distraction to the neglect of more important things.

So that is a trick I think about fairly often. How do I combine Apollo and Dionysis? How do I align my actions with the most important things and yet, at the same time, allow myself to get lost in the moment? How to I keep moving toward the destination and at the same time fully partake of the journey?

Anyway, have a great week.

Doug

Getting to work part II.

2006-08-07T09:05:00.000-07:00

Lake Powell is done (it was a blast!). Vacations are over (only wish there could be more). The semester is starting and two kids are starting school. I expect some semblance of equilibrium now, which means opportunity. Opportunity to build the routines and the habits that will get things done. I read a nice article on getting things done. Pavlina lists a whole bunch of practices designed help you perform at maximum efficiency.

The very first one is clarity. So I thought it might be worth becoming very clear about what I am trying to do with my limited time. Basically I have three short term goals.

Graduate with PhD by Dec 2007
Develop independent income stream of at least 4k per month by Dec 2007
Live a rich family life on the way.

The first two objectives listed here are very concrete pass-fail goals. The third will take a little fleshing out. But it is important enough that it needs to be up there anyway.

The second practice is flexibility. Here he explains that there is a difference between end goals and the paths that you take to get there. He suggests that you keep your end goals fixed but that you be flexible with the paths that you will take to get there. I like that balance because it makes sense. You just can't know all the details of the paths that lie ahead. But you can know where you want to go and plan the path as you go.

My plan for working toward these goals on a daily basis is this:

Take time. If it is important, take time for it. Scripture study is important to me. So I make time for it even if I wake up late. Exercise is important to me. Cleaning our home and working to make Gina's life pleasant is important. Getting something concrete done to move toward the completion of a PhD is very important. My time is flexible. For that reason I can and am taking time to do the most important things each day.
Take it in steps. Each day I have concrete objectives and to focus on them until they are completed. Those objectives are chosen with the goal of moving toward the three large goals. That way at the end of a day I can know that my time has not gone for nothing.
Celebrate the small. Each micro-objective accomplished is a time to celebrate and express gratitude. I don't know quite why this feels important but I believe that it is important.

That's about all that I have fleshed out right now. But it is enough to feel good about things. Now to work.

Getting back to work

2006-07-30T15:50:00.000-07:00

Some Definitions

Work: action directed toward a goal.

Temperance: balance made possible by hope and by adherence to ordered priorities.

Diligence: temperate work sustained over time.

Honor: a quantity obtained by achieving goals so long as that achievement is not at the expense of more fundamental goals. (This is not a general definition. Rather it is a concept meant only for this blog.)

As I wrote last week I want to be able to move quickly from ideas to implementation. Ironically that means that I will have to take time to lay some ground work. Let me lay out a road map of this blog:

Big goal: a successful 1 hour per day company built using the principles of work, diligence, and temperance. Can it be done? I can't prove that it can't be done. But I can try and prove by example that it can be done.

Smaller goal: make and sell interactive tools to enhance musical education. This is fun, interesting, and we have worked on it. There is a real market and we think we can make a contribution.

Yet smaller goal: tool up to make simple but effective tools quickly.

Even smaller goal: make very simple, distributable, portable, interactive GUI using Python. Must have 2 modules, a data folder, and use one sound element and one graphical element.

Most of this week will be spent in Lake Powell with Crew 335. The rest will mostly be in Los Alamos. That leaves me a good three hours to work on the "even smaller goal." We'll see what can be done.

Muddling through to direction

2006-07-24T10:57:00.000-07:00

I'm going to just type and type, trying to discover whether and how I really want to continue.

So yesterday in church during the sacrament I realized that I did want to go forward. The thought made me happy. But it was a transient thought so I want to process things a little.

One thing that came pretty clearly was the sense that the next 2.5 to three years will pass very quickly. At the end it would be pretty nice to have created something alongside the PhD. Why?

Because it's a challenge.
Because creation of non-evil things is a good in and of itself.
Because I think that if I can do a good job I can see future opportunities open up.
Because there are byproducts like interesting experiences that will be gained and skills that will be developed.

A second thing that I realized is that I am less committed to this exact idea (SongPiper) than I am to the idea of building up a company. We can be flexible if we have to, we just need to do something that works.

One thing that I know is that I can't be happy building my own business if it means that I will be doing a crummy job at work (school). I have to be doing a great job at work (school). And I want to do a great job bringing this thing to life. And it is fully dead right now, good and dead. But it can come to life.

I really believe in the concepts of diligence and temperance. I want to take this as an opportunity to experiment with these concepts and bring them to higher forms and combine them with other principles like patience, hope, and faith.

About patience. I am not intrinsically patient. And I only believe in certain forms of patience: impatience can be a virtue also. Sometimes impatience is linked with the recognition that things are not as they should be. And the action required to change them. That's good impatience. But for me impatience is also linked with a fear that something will never change. For example when I began my graduate program in Baltimore I wanted me PhD to come quickly in part because I doubted whether it would come at all. Patience in working toward your goals is absolutely necessary if you are going to do something large. So what does that patience come from? For me it comes from two different sources. The first source is a combination of hope and vision. It is a belief that the thing you are working for 1) will come to pass if you persevere and 2) will be worth the work, time and effort. I guess the first source is a recognition that the price is worth paying. The second source of patience is akin to reading a good book while standing in line. If I can figure out how to live a good life while working toward the good thing then waiting isn't so bad. The second source of patience, then, just comes from lowering the price you are paying. Anyway, if patience means that you learn to live with being dirty so you stop being excited to shower--it could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on the situation.

That's what you get when you just start typing: tangents. My biggest fear with moving forward is that I need to be focusing on something more important. So here is the deal: I think the time is here to focus on building something. And hopefully that something can be flexible enough to begin to fill real needs. Or maybe this something is just a toy something. And if so perhaps I can learn lessons that will be valuable as things progress. Here we go.

How about this: the most intelligent, living approach is not an a priori approach but rather an iterative feedback approach. If that is the case then I don't need to know everything from the beginning. In fact it would be a mistake to decide everything at the beginning. So perhaps it is more important to move forward and develop some skills and start listening to feedback than it is to worry about whether I am doing the very most important things right now.

Alright, enough. Let us begin. SongPiper is a learning and a doing company. We emphasize quick implementation of fun ideas and simplicity rather than elaboration. If a project isn't fun we don't do it. Or at least we step back and figure out how to do it right. Or we find something that is fun. Because we learn through feedback and iteration we try to make the creation-feedback loop as fast as possible.

Teec Nos Pos

2006-07-23T07:48:00.000-07:00

We got stuck there. Altell didn't cut it. We hiked over barb wire fence for a phone but that failed. The hogon had no phone. But we got the car going and made it back down to Teec Nos Pos from which we called a tow truck to get the van and some friends to get us.

Allen and Camille were the friends. They drove a good hour to an hour and a half to get to us and took us into their home. My parents lent us their van and Gina's brother Ben drove it down and we all drove up to Gina's home.

It's given me the opportunity to think a little about security and about self-reliance. We accepted a lot of help when the van let us down. I was grateful for it. I am grateful for it. And I can't help but think how valuable it was to have friends and family who we know and trust and who were willing to go out of their way to help us when the chips were down.

Self-reliance is a fiction. An important fiction, but a fiction. We weren't born self-reliant and we won't die self-reliant and in between there is never a time when we are self-reliant.

But we try. We think we might have to stop taking Sarah, our 230000 mile 93 Ford Aerostar, on long trips. Perhaps by changing vehicles we can at least lower the chance of something like that happening again. Anyway, given that real self reliance is a fiction, what should we try to achieve?

I don't know. But I have two partial answers. One, try to give more than you take. Two, try not to put yourself in helpless positions. Rather try to put yourself in helpful positions.

Report: this week I learned a bit about Pygames.

Alignment and caring

2006-07-17T08:03:00.000-07:00

Tkinter is nice. I wrote my first simple, toy GUIs.

But for the most part I've been absorbed in modeling modeling phase interactions between two lasers in an EIT medium. The whole concept of seeing a photon without absorbing it is super exciting. And it may help me finish up this PhD.

I've also been busy getting ready for 2 weeks out of town. First is a week in Utah seeing first Gina's family then the Bradshaw family then the Tate family. Then comes a half week in southern New Mexico. It's an academic research retreat involving a BEC experimental group, a BEC theoretical group and a quantum feedback and control group. Finally we have a half week in Lake Powell with the venture scouts. Nothing to complain about. But a lot to get ready for.

The bottom line is that there is a lot that can easily squeeze this whole venture right out of my life. I have to decide if it is worth it to keep it going or if it would be better to just streamline things a bit.

A tree will grow large and strong over time. It doesn't take much time in any given week. But if you want to guarentee its growth you will have to dedicate some time. Actually, time isn't the right word. Perhaps the right word is care. I like that better because it implies attention so that you can see what the tree needs and then action to fulfill those needs. Perhaps the limiting resource in my life isn't time or money but the ability to care.

Perhaps you can love an infinite number of people in an abstract sense. But how many people can you care for in an active, nurturing sense? One? Ten? One hundred? Your time and personal attention have to stretch thin at some point. And how many goals can you dedicate your life too? Probably only one. (Tangent: Of course most goals don't need you to dedicate your life. They just need a little slice of it. And different goals need different slices. A tree or any other organic thing needs regular attention more than lots of attention all at once. Certain types of problems really need a lot of attention all at once and are more difficult to solve in little slices.) All the rest of your goals in that case are subgoals. Means to ends. That means that they have to be evaluated within the framework of larger goals. If they are not aligned with the larger goals and with each other you are likely to find yourself wandering around frustrated. But how many subgoals can you care about simultaneously? For me it is hard to care about many more than one at a time. When I focus on one the others seem like distractions. But no matter what's easy and what's difficult life requires the juggling. (And juggling is a great metaphore. You only interact with one or two objects at a time while the rest are in the air.) So I juggle.

This whole discussion is a rational description of an intuitive decision making process. The model is not complete. And it's pretty abstract. But the question that I want to think about right now is this: do I care enough about SongPiper to make it happen? Should I care enough about it to make it happen? If not then either it isn't aligned with my larger goals or I don't see how it is aligned. If not then another direction is in order.

Our most important set of choices may be those that determine what we care about.

More like a journal entry . . .

2006-07-09T15:05:00.000-07:00

This was the first week wherein I was able to spend more than a single day up at Los Alamos. It was a treat. I feel like I got some great things done, modeling the two-photon absorption and cross Kerr nonlinearity of a four-level atomic system and looking at squeezed states.

For a long time I've been searching for the perfect medium in which to do analytical mathematics. There may not be one. But after avoiding Mathematica for years because of one silly thing (I hated it that you had to push shift-enter rather than just enter to compute the value of an expression) I'm falling in love with Mathematica. I think I like the whole functional programming concept in general. But Mathematica is more than just functional programming (as far as my needs go, anyway). It's functional programming with a huge set of venerable and powerful mathematical, analytical, and numerical tools already present. I haven't found a good module to do linear operator algebra in there though so I might have to write one of my own. But there must be something out there.

Anyway, that took up most of my mind-share this week. But I did email Ryan the first version of SongPiper where the user can customize their own levels.

And I half decided that that will be where it stops. I read a nice article on short-term decision making in startups and realized that I have been guilty of it. I've been patching up a rough draft in a language that I think I want to abandon instead of having the courage to switch tracks before I invest too much more. I want to move things over to Python. But I don't know Python yet so that will take a bit of time to do.

So I have no idea how long all this should take because I haven't developed in Python much before and because this will be a busy couple of weeks.

Let me finish with a quick argument for doing what you like doing: If you do what you don't like to do you might possibly get good at it. Then everybody will want you to keep on doing it. But if you do what you do like to do you probably will get good at it. Then everybody will want you to keep on doing it. And you'll agree with them.

Have a great week.

Love
Doug

Sales

2006-07-01T15:28:00.000-07:00

Haven't sold the copy. I did get the program to be able to read files. I didn't use that ability to renovate the levels yet.

Sales goals. I need to think a bit about sales goals. In a way, you might say that a company is sales. If there aren't sales there isn't a company. If you have a product that everybody and their brother buys and if there is a margin there then you have a company. You might say that a key requirement for the success of any company is sales.

But at least this week, a sales goal didn't sit well. It didn't sit well on a couple of counts. First of all, sales seemed like a distraction at this time when development seemed key. But secondly and more importantly, it was a goal for other people rather than for myself. That fact can easily lead to problems. It can lead to manipulation, to dishonesty. Perhaps less obviously, it can lead you to forget the best interests of the perpective buyer and focus instead on a sale. There seems to be something about a goal that involves changing the behavior of other people that is incompatible with the ideals of a company built to do good.

So there is a tricky thing to think about: you want people to buy your product. But if you make selling it your primary focus you can shoot yourself in the foot morally and probably strategically as well. The best solution that I have for the moment is that sales should be a goal, but only as a byproduct of excellence in other areas. There are really only two other areas: product development and communication. You make something that people will value and then you find ways to let them know about it.

So I think it is OK to have sales aspirations. There is no company without sales. But as far as reaching those aspirations with short term goals, I don't want to do it using sales goals. Rather, I want to focus on product development and communication. I guess the aspirations are goals. But by focusing on your own actions and not on the actions of others you can avoid a lot of the morally grey spots that come from a more direct focus on sales.

So that's what I intend to start doing.

Doug

Getting Specific

2006-06-25T19:31:00.000-07:00

This is a lot more exciting when I have goals that are aligned, challenging, and very concrete. Here are my goals for this week:

To sell my first copy of the program
To give it the ability to read note orders from text files and use that ability to renovate the levels offered by the game.

This past week or so I have been trying to make daily progress on the program. And I got the MIDI to work at the push of a button for the JDK. And then I figured out how to get it to work for the JRE (turns out you have to alter the JRE slightly to get it to work there.) And I've learned how to read and write files and created my first little code for musical notes. But in my spare time, that is in my time walking around campus or sitting on the bus I've been reading up on Python. I'm thinking of switching over . . .

Does anyone want the honor of purchasing the very first copy of SongPiper ever sold? The going price is $20. This is the only chance to be the first person ever to buy.

Doug

Diligence revisited

2006-06-18T17:20:00.000-07:00

There are only a few things in life worth being truly diligent about. Creating and selling a computer program, in and of itself, isn't one of them.

Being a good husband, that's one of them. Being a good father and son, that's one of them. Giving time for the things you most care about, that's one of them. So what is my purpose in this particular quest?

I figure that I'll be finishing up here at UNM in something like 3 years. By that time if we are pretty blessed we could have a couple more kids, leaving a family of 8: two parents and 6 kids. Kate will be 9, and the youngest might be a newborn. What would we do after that?

The typical route that a PhD in science points to is first a post doc (or a few post docs!) and then a somewhat permanent position somewhere, possibly in academics, possibly in government. The post doc could be fun. Some of the best places to go in my field are college towns in Australia, Canada, France, and the UK. Maybe I'll do that just for the experience. But the real question comes after that. What do I want to do for the rest of my life.

At that point there is a decision. My education is so specialized that the places in the world where it could be well-used are pretty limited in number. Do I want our family to follow my work around wherever it might take them? That's one question.

Another question is do I want work in the traditional sense. I struggled for about 6 years trying to decide what I wanted to do professionally. Maybe the struggle is over, maybe not. Time will tell. But what I have come to believe more and more is that I want to steer my own course. I want to control the rudder and follow the ideas and dreams that come as they come. I want to have a job not because some employer wants to give it to me but because I created a job. I created something of value and got it out there to people who wanted it enough to pay for it. It's the independence. But not only the independence. It's the potential to create. And not only to create, but to create something that will have a positive impact on this little world.

So after years of not knowing what I want I think that I can now say that I know what I want. Now I have to figure out how to get it in a way that will be consistent with my current roles and responsibilities and loves. That is what this whole thing is about: it is about making the future that I dream of a possibility.

From where I sit it seems like a no-lose proposition. At the worst I will have created a toy business and a product that no one values enough to buy. But I will have learned some valuable skills in the process of failing, and maybe the next attempt wouldn't fail as badly. (Actually my biggest fear is worse than that. It is that I will have missed an opportunity to do something more important, more salient, because I will not be in tune. How to avoid that I am not sure except try to be listening.) At the best when the time comes to graduate I will be in a position to give full time to the endeavor and perhaps in a position to exit or to gradually move things over into an area that will impact something that seems to matter a lot. Like better health care for less cost. Or like keeping this world as beautiful as possible. Or like helping a lot of people to realize their dreams and potentials. (What would be really cool, too, is if we could buy a home near our families with a nice back yard for the kids to play in.)

Anyway, that's a little bit on the why of this all from the big picture perspective. At the same time the project is challenging, interesting, engaging, and generally fun. When short term challenge/enjoyment/fun matches long term dreams and aspirations I think it is time to get excited. And I am.

Goodnight.

Introducing Ryan Williams

2006-06-14T13:10:00.000-07:00

Ryan just finished his doctorate in music. He specializes in trombone performance and is currently playing for the Air Force. He has been my good friend since I was in 6th grade and has agreed to try his hand as SongPiper evangelist and product development guide.

I am totally excited to have him working alongside me. Like me he has a full load with family, church responsibilities and a full time job. Like me he has committed to keep himself accountable by keeping up a blog documenting his thoughts, efforts, and accomplishments.

First thing is First

2006-06-14T06:02:00.000-07:00

So brethren, your foremost priesthood duty is to nurture your marriage—to care for, respect, honor, and love your wife. Be a blessing to her and your children.

Elder Russel M. Nelson, May 2006 Ensign page 37.

Learning

2006-06-10T20:34:00.000-07:00

I keep on reading these essays by Paul Graham. He's beginning to convince me that I should invest is learning some other computer languages. Lisp and Python. One of the things I loved most about physics as I was first learning it was that it gave me new ways to think about the world. Statistics was another subject that did that for me. Learning Java (not that I've learned it, but that I've been in the process of learning it) has done the same thing for me and I think that new modes of thinking that I have been forced to adopt have even been useful in my physics research. Even if I never program seriously in either language, learning them could still be valuable for this reason. But everything takes time. So we'll see.

To a certain extent what you have in this life is what is in your mind. When you lie down at night and close your eyes that's what you have. So if it is filled with interesting things to think about and memories of time with people you love and beautiful places and so on that's worth something. So if learning Lisp will make my mind a more interesting place then I want to do it.

Over the past few days I found out that making the computer sing middle C was much easier than I thought. (Cool! I can make typing result in music!) So that is done. And I quickly found out how to make the notes on the staff dynamic thanks to Sam Baird's help (he actually sent me sample code with a professional looking staff and notes and everything). So the programming goals stated may be turn out to be too easy for this 45 day period. The other half of the goal (meaning sales) I haven't even begun working on.

One thing I am working on is rewriting the pitch detector. (I think it is a little buggy and that I can make it more stable. It seems to make an error about one in every 10 estimates. More if there is a lot of acoustic noise obscuring the signal or if the signal is outside of the sweetspot, and less if you have a loud clear note in the sweet spot.) I've been trying to rewrite it in the image of a good Java program, an exercise which has been a little frustrating. I haven't figured out ways to increase modularity and simplify the thinking behind the code without slowing down the program. But I guess that currently speed isn't the main concern so much as the quality of the result. So it should be worth it to try and simplify the code and sacrifice some speed if it means a code that gives the right answer more often even if it is a bit slower.

By July 15th

2006-06-01T15:55:00.000-07:00

Part of the game that I'm playing is that I want to see how much I can do without spending any money. I hope that when it becomes truly necessary I will know to abandon that mode of operation. Right now I want to acquire an appropriate web domain and create an appropriate website. I want the product to advertise the website and the website to advertize the product. I want to make sure that anyone who has the product will know where to go to get another copy.

Anyway, that means spending money, if not too much. So how can I play the game? It is time for the company to start paying for itself. Another way to say that is it is time for me to do some of the real work. It is time to try and sell.

But it is also time to keep on trying to make sure that there is something worth selling. So I want to keep working on improving SongPiper. (I'm not settled on the name yet. If you have better ideas, let me know!)

That requires two separate goals for this session, one to obtain a certain amount of cash, and one to make some improvements. Here they are:

By July 15th of 2006 I hope to

Sell 5 copies of SongPiper at $20 a copy.
Make 3 substantial improvements in the program:

Improve look of flashcards using Sam Baird's scheme and graphics or something similar
Enable the user to enter in their own note sets
Enable the user to play middle C on demand

I believe that the first goal is not too ambitious but I really don't know yet. I don't know how I shall go about doing the selling. Any ideas? The second goal I think will be challenging but doable given my current time constraints. What I hope is that I will be able to make many more improvements than that.

Is the focus wrong here? Should I be trying for leverage in my sales by selling to groups rather than to people?

Doug

Marketing 100

2006-06-01T15:30:00.000-07:00

My ideal marketing scenario looks like this: you make a product and as time goes on you get feedback that you implement and the product gets better and better. Eventually it crosses a threshold such that it becomes contagious. Then it markets itself. At the same time users are forming a community around the product. They are improving it and adding value that you couldn't add alone. It becomes a lasting cultural phenomenon.

So that's the dream. But before it can come to pass I imagine that it will take time to find out who the market actually is. And some time to communicate with them and to sell the product. And time to optimize the product.

The trick is that right now I'm starting from scratch. I haven't sold a thing. So I need some ideas for how to get the ball rolling. Those ideas are to be collected in this post. When I came up with 100 company ideas there came a point when I had to choose one. Marketing ideas may be different. There may be quite a few practices that will bolster each other.

This time I will collect all 100 ideas in a single post by editing it every so often. Here goes:

Try to ride the American Idol wave. For example have them market it! (Brad Bushman, Rick Bradshaw)
Get a lot of free copies out there using the internet. (Cathy Webster)
Get a lot of copies out there by getting them installed initially with new computers. For example if all Dell laptops came with a free copy . . .
Try an internet subscription model. (Spencer Cook)
Sell to Universities. (Heather Cook)
Partner with a company that already distributes in the education or in the music market. Have them do the selling. (Jonathan Jones)
Sell it over Ebay. (Jeff and Katie Giras)
Sell it using Amazon. (Jeremy Wallace)
Advertize using Google.
Make the program and then sell the rights to it. Don't even worry about marketing. (Tom)

One thing I commit to doing: I will try and keep track of the number of copies sold so that I will know when the goal of one million copies sold is reached. I would like also like to keep the running total posted somewhere like McDonalds did for a long time. If you think that is a really bad idea let me know.

Feedback.

2006-06-01T15:16:00.000-07:00

So I have now gotten the first copy out to quite a few people and have gotten some great feedback.

This post is to store that feedback. Here goes:

Make the pitch detector less sensitive to background noise. (Brad and Tiffany Bushman)
Make the flashcards look more professional. (Sherise Payne, Sam Baird)
Let the user sing the correct note for longer before going to the next flash card (Tiffany Bushman's family)
Doesn't work right on Macs yet. (Bart Bradshaw, Rick Bradshaw)
Let the GUI show the user the measured amplitude. (Rick Bradshaw)
Play a reference note so that the user can figure out where they are. (Bushmans, Gina, Sam Baird)
Add levels of difficulty so that beginners can have fun too. (Gina, Bushmans)
May not work on PCs if the users don't have an updated JRE. (Ryan Williams, Karen Tate)
Enable the user to enter in a sequence of notes so that they can make their own drills. (Sam Baird, Gina Bradshaw, Bushmans)
Show the number of flash cards so that the user knows how fast she is progressing. (Heather Cook)
Create a drill to help people sing intervals. (Bushmans)

Obviously there is plenty of work to do. I intend to edit this post every so often to add further ideas and feedback.

Summer goals: academics

2006-05-28T16:01:00.000-07:00

The summer lasts until some time toward the end of August. Here is what I hope to do before the first day of Fall Semester:

Complete every problem in Sakurai's Modern Quantum Mechanics
Perform a full signal analysis for coherent 2-photon interferometry.
Form a reasonable model of cross-Kerr nonlinearity and linear absorption in atomic mercury in the transparent regime.

The last two are subject to the vagaries of research. In other words if my bosses or just the direction of the fields I am working in require that I work on something else I will do that. If they don't, this is my course of action.

Goal setting

2006-05-27T07:40:00.000-07:00

That makes two cycles of goal setting and achieving. I guess that there will be a lot more cycles before this is all done.

For me goals are a funny thing. It is one thing to set them and another to commit to them. When I set an initial goal it is partly a goal and partly a guess. I try to stretch reality a bit, but not too much. I don't really know if I can achieve the goal. Another question is always whether it is the right goal.

So for the first bit of time I think that part of what drives my work on the goal is research. I'm trying to find out if the goal is actually achievable. And also if it aligns well with the larger picture of what I am trying to do. So far in each cycle there has come a point when the time has been about 60% or more up when I have had to really decide whether or not I would commit to the goal. In both cases it still seemed pretty iffy whether or not I could achieve that goal. In each case I responded to that questioning time by first hesitating and then praying and then moving forward with having decided to get the job done. That last decision seems to be only partially in my control. And I think it has to do with what I believe in my heart are the answers to the two questions that I was researching. Can I believe that the goal can be accomplished? Do I believe that it is worth accomplishing? I think my heart kind of waits for an affirmative on both questions before it truely signs onto the goal that was set weeks earlier.

After each job has been done there has been a bit of a let down. A celebration, but also a desire to rest and renew my sense of direction. Possibly a lack of direction and a bit of burnout as well. Certainly I have wanted to stop with the type of work that got the goal accomplished and step back for awhile.

It is tempting to think of this last step as wasted time. And definitely burnout is bad, especially if it lasts. So is a lack of direction. But I think that at least part of this time is really important. When you are committed to a goal you become pretty obsessive about it. At least if the goal is tough to achieve. And you become pretty myopic. You have to because the accomplishment of the goal comes through the exact or recursive execution of a hundred little details. But when the goal is reached it is time to look around and open your mind to the possibilities around you. When you are climbing the mountain you need to watch the trail so that you don't stumble. But when you get to the first outlook I think it makes sense to stop and look at the view. Maybe you can enjoy just being there on the mountain. And maybe you can see better what you need to do next. And maybe you can rest up a little physically but also spiritually.

I'm not done with this step yet. I was surprised by the early completion of task 2 and my mind is still a little bit clamorous. So for that reason I am not ready to set the next meaningful goal. Not yet. But I am beginning to look toward a new type of goal to supplement continued progress with SongPiper (the name of the program for now). I am beginning to think about how to bring it to people who will use it. And pay for it.

Doug

Task 2 completed! Want a copy?

2006-05-24T07:58:00.000-07:00

Our goal was the following:

We want a fully operational GUI-pitch detector combo that is nice enough that we won't be ashamed to distribute it.
We want to put it in a format where a non-expert can install it on their windows PC with no external help.
We want to accomplish these things by June 1st 2006.

That goal was completed yesterday. The GUI-(pitch detector) combo is workable. I decided (felt like inspiration) to go with flash cards for this first product. Anyway, a note is displayed. If you can sing the note and maintain it you will be shown a new note, picked at random. Then you sing the new note. Gina and I have tried it with the piano and with our voices and it works. There are a lot of improvements that I want to make over time. But the bottom line is that it works! It's simple and it works.

The second part of the goal, like the first part, is met. It turns out that NetBeans automatically generates a set of JAR files that are easily deployable. I just give Brad a folder and he opens it and clicks on the JAR executable and up comes my program. (The only caveat is that he has to have JRE installed to run it. And I haven't tested to see if the program works for older versions of JRE, I only know it works for the current version.) I had to tweak things a little to make the flash cards deploy with the rest of the program. I'm sure that there are some things I can do to make distribution more effective. But start simple, no?

My jogging buddy, Brad Bushman, is going to a family reunion this weekend. I told him yesterday morning that the first simple version was getting close to completion and he said that his inlaws are music crazy. So he asked me if I could get him a version by today that he could show it off to them over the weekend. He said he would try to get feedback. Tonight I deploy the first copy.

Want a copy? I want to sell the program for $20 a pop. It's not enough to pay anyone full time until a whole bunch start getting sold (meaning thousands per year). But I want it to be a small enough expense that any normal family can buy it and not be affected too much one way or the other. (Sight reading for voice is a rare skill right now. I think that we can make it a lot more common.) Anyway, when you get your free copy I hope you won't think "it's free to me so it has no value." Rather I hope you will think "this little thing is pretty cool! Maybe if Doug did ____ it would be even cooler. I'll have to tell him. You know, I know some people who would really get a kick out of this. I should show them. Maybe they'll buy a copy. At $20 they can't lose." (Right, so I fantasize a lot.)

Anyway, all this is leading up to my offer (which is really a request for help). If you want a copy, tell me. Anyone who requests one by email to me or in a comment to this blog before June 15th (Heather's birthday) will get one sent to them by email. For free, of course. If I don't have your address just post it. You might post it in some kind of simple code like with the first letters of a sequence of words giving the address. That way I think it is unlikely to be found by a spam robot. OK. I had better get back to my physics.

But before I leave can I say that I am amazed? Last week it seemed like I would never make the goal. In the past few days it just came together. Way faster than I was thinking! Now how often does that happen? Yahoo! (TM) :-)

Doug

Task 2 week 5

2006-05-21T07:30:00.000-07:00

I was pretty down about things this week. I was getting lost in a maze and June 1st was rapidly approaching. I hadn't made concrete progress all week. Not only that but Denis hadn't been able to contribute like he wanted and decided to back out formally.

Friday night I thought about things. Should I back up and make a new goal that would be more appropriate to the current situation? It would make total sense.

But somewhere inside was the knowledge that I didn't want to give up. The only thing was Gina. Would she agree to let me make an extra effort? Would she be willing even to sacrifice so that I could? (Nothing I do gets done in a vacuum. Extra effort somewhere means sacrifices elsewhere. In this case it means that I will be working a bit in the evenings and mornings as I can fit it in. That means extra effort from Gina.) She assented. So I'm going for it. I think we can have something that is worth being proud of by this June 1st.

Actually, the whole thing is getting to be pretty fun. Meaning, not just the process of making the product but playing with the product itself. The product is becoming fun. And it's getting better.

Thanks Gina! This is going to be fun.

This week's concrete progress: I learned how to get arbitrary gifs onto the GUI and to update them during run time. And I made most of the appropriate gifs. (I know. It's not too impressive. But it is all a necessary part of this first product.)

Doug

Alone. For now.

2006-05-19T16:02:00.000-07:00

Denis has been under a good bit of pressure lately between finals, a car crash, an impending month-long trip to family in Russia, a chance to present at a prestigious optics conference called CLEO, and so on. For that reason he hasn't been contributing like he wanted to. He has decided that it won't let up for a bit and has requested that I not let him hold me back. He's signing off. After Russia we can see where things are.

Anyway, the goal that we set together seems pretty difficult to make alone. We'll just have to see.

Regardless, I am here to build a company. Not to become a computer programmer or just have fun but to learn how to build a company. In my view there is no company until you have revenue. And I don't see why there should be revenue until there is a product worth selling and worth buying. So I don't know about the timing. But I am pretty clear about the goal: I want to produce something worth selling and worth buying.

I see creating a company as something similar to earning a PhD. In both cases you are trying to create something worthwhile and original. In both cases you have to learn a lot to do so. Both can take a good chunk of time and commitment. Both can open doors and create opportunities that would otherwise remain shut. I am excited to have the chance to be involved in both.

Task 2 week 4

2006-05-13T16:08:00.000-07:00

Now I can make it look pretty cool. But it's still just pretty cool text. What I want in the end is a musical score. One with notes whose appearance will change over time.

I think that the first application that we spread around might be flash cards. The note stays on the screen until you sing it. Then a new note appears. That way you have something of a game. But how should I draw the notes and the score? It doesn't seem too hard to just draw some things. But it would be neater and more scalable if there were a well worn path for representing notes on the screen that we could take.
Can't find one yet and only 2 weeks left.

Constraints: thinking out loud

2006-05-13T15:09:00.000-07:00

My brother Bart and I used to imagine up various super powers and what one would do with them. Every once in awhile we would create someone who was pretty much omnipotent. Things got boring about then because how can you have a plot involving someone who can do anything? The imposition of constraints in that case made things fun. How much could you do with just the power to shoot sharp pencils out of your fingers?

Yesterday I had the neat juxtaposition of opportunities. In the morning I read Lehi. I was trying to apply his words to my role as a young men's advisor: And if ye say there is no law, ye shall also say there is no sin. If ye shall say there is no sin, ye shall also say there is no righteousness. And if there be no righteousness there be no happiness. And if there be no righteousness nor happiness there be no punishment nor misery. And if these things are not there is no God. And if there is no God we are not, neither the earth; for there could have been no creation of things, neither to act nor to be acted upon; wherefore, all things must have vanished way.

Here we have Lehi explaining that law is central to God's creation. If you remove the law you lose the creation. I couldn't help but try and apply the scripture to my calling and to other endeavors. And if ye say there are no expectations, ye shall also say there is no breaching of those expectations. If ye shall say there is no breaching of those expectations, ye shall also say there is no success. And if there be no success there be no happiness. And if there be no success nor happiness there be no failure nor misery. And if these things are not there is no young men's advisor. And if there is no young men's advisor there is no young men's program, for nothing has been created; wherefore, the whole program may as well have vanished way.

Anyway, what I was thinking during the study is that when you are in charge of a social program you are asked to perform an act of creation. You are trying to create something that is more than a bunch of people gathering together to waste time. And what I was learning was that creating or maintaining a social program requires the defining and maintaining of a code or standard of conduct. If there is no code or standard there is no society.

Or perhaps it all applies better to a game. If you don't define the rules of the game, if you don't define the ways in which you win or lose the game, you have no game. And so you create a game by defining rules or constraints. And goals.

The second opportunity I had yesterday was to grade some biophysics homeworks. The assignment was mostly on entropy. So energy is constant in our universe as far as we can tell. But entropy is always increasing. You can decrease the entropy in a part of the universe so long as you have a larger increase in entropy in the universe as a whole. Entropy prevents you from using energy to do work. Imagine that you are given a fixed amount of usable energy in an isolated system. Usable energy is called free energy. As time goes by the entropy in your system increases and you begin to run out of free energy. After enough time has gone by the entropy in your system is maximized and you can do nothing more. Even though your total energy has remained constant, you have lost the order in your system that made it physically possible to access that energy. You have lost your free energy.

So what does this have to do with the rest of the discussion? Because the way that you increase the entropy of a system is by removing constraints on that system. If you remove the constraints quickly you forfeit your chance to do work with the free energy that used to be present. A certain amount of free energy is lost. Forever. To the whole universe. For example, if you have a box of air there is a pressure on each of the walls. You can use that pressure to push something. If instead you poke a hole in the wall of the box and let the gas escape you allow each particle to follow a less constrained trajectory. The particles will escape and you will lose your pressure having done no work. Your free energy is gone.

Task 2 week 3: the GUI updates immediately!

2006-05-06T15:21:00.000-07:00

Got the pitch detector running as a thread. Found out how to update the GUI from that thread. So now I actually get real time feedback as I sing from the GUI. It's pretty cool! The main problem now from a user's standpoint may be that the thing is too fast. When I take a breath or when my voice quavers so does the image. Do I want to be updated quite that fast on what I am doing? I think it might be more pleasing to see some continuity. It might be nicer to have a metronome that you can sing to. The frequencies yielded by the pitch detector during the time between two beats can be combined to say whether you were on target or not. It would also be nice to see a frequency history that accumulates over time, to sort of watch yourself sing (or play the violin or whatever).

It took 3 weeks to figure out how to update the GUI from another thread, working on it about an hour a day. To do it again would only take a couple of minutes.

This all goes to show once again that what we are doing right now isn't writing a program so much as learning how to program. I learned about threads. I learned about Swing and about the NetBeans IDE for writing Swing GUIs. It may be that from a global economic standpoint we are wasting time. Plenty of people know how to do all of these things right? Why not have one of them build the program and have us focus on the things that we do well? But it's neat to learn this stuff. And fun. And I think that we will eventually get where we want to go as long as we stick with it.

Anyway, there is a lot to learn and this could be a long term project. But for now it is time to celebrate: we have a working pitch detector that updates the user in real time on what their voice is doing. Cool!

Tasks

2006-05-02T20:57:00.000-07:00

Pitch Detector. How about one that a piano tuner would want?
Sight Reader. You can enter the melody by hand or have the program generate (not necessarily melodic) tunes.

Lobo Mind Loan

2006-05-01T11:49:00.000-07:00

This semester the number of graduate students who decided to come here was considerably higher than the expected number. The Department is short on the funds to support them all like it promised to. All that leads me to think again about something that I was strongly considering initiating last February. Here it is:

Last August Mark, an excellent student, graduated from my group. He was offered a few different and interesting jobs. One of them was a short term job with high pay. I think it was something like 8 months and 80 k. It wasn't his first choice because it didn't provide a lot of security.

But I couldn't help but guess at the reasons for the odd job offer. Why the high pay and short duration? Here is my first guess: they wanted a job done but they didn't want an employee. Mark had a very specific expertise that could help this company improve their products. If he had accepted they could have extracted the valuable knowledge without acquiring a long term liability. My second guess is that they actually do want more quality employees, but that they don't know a good way to find out if you will be one without having you work for them for a little while.

Now I want to ask a question: was Mark very much more valuable the semester after he graduated than he was the semester before? I think that the answer is no. Only somewhat more valuable. But before he graduated he was probably earning about $1,200 per month rather than $10,000 per month.

Mark isn't alone in having a very specialized and possibly quite valuable expertise. Ideally a PhD student comes to know one specific topic better than anyone else in the world. Not every student achieves that ideal but I believe that a fair portion of them do.

Right now PhD students at UNM are supported on either TA-ships or RA-ships. Both become great opportunities to learn to do research and to learn to teach. It's a great system, especially for training up future teachers and researchers for the academic world. There is one weakness: you can get a little cloistered. You don't get to learn how the world works. Especially how the other large research sectors, government and industry work. And it is hard to know if at the end you will be prepared to work in either. Or even if you would like to work in either. The pay is also pretty low if you want to raise a family and live a normal life.

Anyway, here is what one might do:

Gather a list of companies and the technical problems they would like solved and the kind of people they would like to recruit
Gather a list of upper-level graduate students and their greatest strengths and strongest interests
Try to pair up the two. The companies would put in 30 k for 6 months. No taxes or paperwork beyond the 30k. The company doing the work takes a commission of 10%. The rest of the money goes to paying a stipend, paying tuition, paying taxes, and so on.

Companies benefit from the chance to take advantage of specific expertise, and from the chance to try out perspective employees in an inexpensive way.

Students benefit by having the chance to learn a little about the real world and by having a temporary increase in funds. They can also form job leads for the future.

Professors benefit because they can fund more students in a more exciting fashion.

Professors and industry benefit by forming stronger ties with industry and having any cross pollination that can come from such ties.

UNM benefits because it will become known as the place to go to graduate school if you want to come out with an understanding of the technical work place.

Albuquerque benefits because it can have the chance to keep a larger portion of it's quality graduate students in the area.

The University benefits as it becomes known as the best place to come to graduate school if you would like to go into industry down the road and as it becomes able to fund more graduate students than it would be able to take on otherwise.

What do you think?

Task 2 week 2: glacial progress

2006-04-30T15:21:00.000-07:00

The progress seems glacial. And yet what I learned how to do this week will be crucial. I learned how to have two different programs coordinate their timing with each other. Specifically I wrote a little thing that turns on my pitch detector which then goes about producing a note. Immediately after that note is stored control of the CPU is handed over to a second program that uses the value of that note. The next step is to improve on that second program so that it will paint a picture that will alert the user to frequency of the pitch being detected.

So back on March first I went to a meeting with Denis. I felt like there were two babies that needed to be born. The first I felt like I was in as good a position as anyone in the world to bring to fruition. The second I knew I needed to hand it off to someone qualified. Denis was nervous about the first and excited about the second. So we started learning to program. It's been fun.

The first baby still looks exciting. Am I crazy to be considering twins?

Merril J. Bateman on Diligence

2006-04-26T06:59:00.000-07:00

I wish to illustrate the process of acquiring truth with the mind and the heart and then suggest that living faithfully and serving with all one's heart, might, mind, and strength are really functions of steadily enduring, of doing one's best each day, in contrast to great bursts of energy that one tries to prolong. (Merril J. Bateman pg 16 of the April 2006 Ensign)

Task 2 week 1

2006-04-23T16:05:00.001-07:00

Yesterday afternoon it was Kate first. Elsie followed, hot on her tail. Then Kate again. Then it was mayhem between the three girls. The count by the end of the day was Kate 4, Abigail 4, and Elsie 6. Timmy didn't start in until this morning. This morning in our bed he started vomiting too. I was teaching so Gina stayed home while I went to church. I think that Kate and Abby are pretty much over everything now but Elsie is still a bit iffy.

That was (I hope past tense is appropriate!) probably the most exciting adventure of the week. I got the yard tilled and helped my PhD advisor move. Elsie continued to progress toward walking. Kate decided the other morning that she could read the Book of Mormon so we let her tackle one of the verses each scripture study session. I'm pretty impressed with what she is doing.

Anyway, to the point: tangible progress was nil. We made our next goal and have started to hack away. I learned about threads and producer/consumer pairs and about action events and such but I haven't yet implemented anything.

I've been having trouble with mental discipline. Rather than thinking about the technical challenges that we face I keep finding myself thinking about the marketing challenges that we face. I find the problem a fascinating one: how do we reach and educate thousands of people? Neither of us has time to go and sell to one person at a time for too long. (Say that we want to hire a couple of people. Say the labor is neither expensive nor cheap. Then we have to come up with at least $8000 per month just to pay for labor. Say we sold at the $100 a pop that one of the priests in our priests quorum thought that the simplest version of our pitch detector would sell for. If 50% of the revenue becomes that salary we would require 160 successful sales per month. But we want to hire developers, not full time salesmen!) Anyway, we need to figure out a way to get some leverage. I believe there are a lot of ways. We just have to find them. I think I will start listing marketing ideas as they come so that they don't get lost. Perhaps I'll try for 100 for old time's sake.

Anyway, this week I think my task will be to implement what I've been learning. It is time to begin playing around in GUI land. The dream is this: a working (meaning live pitch updates) GUI by Saturday.

By June 1st

2006-04-20T12:40:00.000-07:00

I think I read the definition in Hyrum Smith's book. Not sure though: "a goal is a dream with a deadline."

Anyway, here is the dream and the deadline:

We want a fully operational GUI-pitch detector combo that is nice enough that we won't be ashamed to distribute it.
We want to put it in a format where a non-expert can install it on their windows PC with no external help.
We want to accomplish these things by June 1st 2006.

After that Denis leaves for Russia for a month or so. I will be working in between Albuquerque and Los Alamos so we'll see what gets done.

Progress Report 7: did we make it?

2006-04-15T19:04:00.000-07:00

This month and 15 has flown by. But it would have gone by with or without the goal.

In this post I get to judge whether or not the goal was achieved.

Here is the goal as stated on March 1st: a distributable working prototype of a simple system available by April 15th.

First, could we distribute what we have done? Technically yes. We can send it out and anyone can run it.

Second, does it work? Again, technically yes: What we have is a pitch detector that takes in sound and displays integers 1 through 12 depending on the note you sing or play. It works surprisingly reliably though I believe that we can do more optimizing. And it works in real time. It is actually pretty fun to sing and watch the integers change by 2 if you move by a whole note or by one if you move by a half note. And it is fun to see the note that you sing.

Third, is it a simple system? Definitely.

So actually, I think that I ought to be able to look at what we have done and feel pretty proud. Intellectually I know that it was a real challenge and that we rose to it and learned a ton. And I am proud. I'm actually amazed that we wrote a working program in this foreign language that was Java. And the physics behind pitch detection turned out to be a lot more interesting and complex than I had thought. But we did it.

However: while we technically met the goal and did a lot of good work, the spirit of the goal was not met. I didn't just want the program to be distributable. I wanted it to be something we would be proud to distribute. We're not there yet. Denis succeeded in putting together a simple little GUI that start a method and read in a note and display it. I succeeded in making a simple pitch detector that can take input from a sound card and process that input and end up with musical notes. But when we put it together something didn't work. The GUI wouldn't refresh the field in which it was supposed to display the note until the loop providing new notes was over. Even if we fed it info inside the loop and even if we tried to force it to refresh (using commands suggested by generous Java Guru Sam Baird). So what is the current real time feedback? It is commandline text output. Not too impressive.

I think that I have a lead on why it isn't working and what to do about it. This week's project will be to learn all that I can about threads and events and how different objects can talk to, listen to, and interrupt each other. Maybe we can figure it all out.

Bart (thanks Bart, you're the only person that I know actually reads the blog regularly. Your feedback helps give this thing meaning.), in a comment appended to my last blog, asked what next. Now that we have started this project I want to complete it. To me that means 2 things:

I hope to see this progress to the point where we can be proud of it as a quality addition to this world. I see quality as being measured by three metrics: robustness, "funness", and depth. Robustness means that it needs to work well and under a variety of circumstances. It needs to become dependable. Funness means that you will want to spend time using the program because you like using it. For pure pleasure as well as for any higher reasons. Depth means that you can make it a tool for your own use and extend it for the use of others. It means that users can add value to the product over time so that in the end the product has more value than we could have given it alone.
I want to know that a million families have used this program. It is really one of those things that I can't understand not having. We just need to make it known and accessible.

I recognize that those are ambitious goals. I believe they are achievable. But I don't know it. That wedge between belief and knowledge is part of what is going to make this a fascinating ride.

Finally, let me acknowledge my true gratitude to Gina. The pitch detector did not get completed in the target one hour per day. Not even close over this last week. She has been a remarkable support and friend through all this. Thank you Gina. Thank you so much.

Thanks for reading.

Doug

The pitch detector works!

2006-04-15T06:57:00.000-07:00

At least for my own and Gina's voices. Yeehaw!

Progress Report 6: One week left

2006-04-10T08:22:00.000-07:00

First off, my apologies to any reader who hoped for a weekend entry. Our home Internet is temporarily out while we wait for a new modem. So I will be posting this tomorrow, that is April 10th Monday morning.

Elsie's Birthday is today! One year old already. Wow, has that passed fast! What a cute little toddler is coming to replace our infant of yesteryear! I ought to figure out how to post photos to this sight. She is a real cutie.

This was a neat week. I was in a meeting for most of the day on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. It seemed pretty much like an ordinary meeting. But when I stepped back and looked at what I was actually doing I couldn't help but be amazed. I was in a meeting between 12 world class scientists (they were the world class scientists and I was a welcomed observer), including a Nobel Prize physicist. And they were all sitting around brainstorming on the creation of a working, scalable quantum computer using neutral atoms and lasers. I pretty much just observed and learned. The next day I was in our yard shoveling manure. Br. Roberts from our ward (Vice President of the New Mexico Appaloosa Club or something like that and a former Navy Seal) and his brother-in-law dumped a truck load of manure onto a tarp in our front yard. I took a couple dozens of wheelbarrows full into our back yard.

The thing is that whether I was watching plans be drawn for a quantum computer or shoveling manure, when I didn't have to be thinking of the work at hand I was thinking of how to get up a skeleton program by the 15th of April. On Wednesday I found a computationally cheap (I hope) way to convert the array of little endian bytes into shorts. On Thursday I found a nice pitch detection algorithm that looks like it is easily fast enough to use real time. On Friday Denis agreed to write a class that will read in a value in Hz, interpret it as a note on the musical scale, and give an appropriate visual cue. He hopes to be done this coming Thursday. On Saturday I wrote a simple class that obtains audio from a microphone and converts it into an array of shorts. Tomorrow (Monday) I hope to perfect that class and implement the pitch detector. So I hope to be ready come Thursday to meet with Denis and put everything together. Bottom line, I think we are going to get it done by this Saturday. And I think that the meeting of the goal will be a miracle, a gift from a loving God. And I think that miracles happen all the time.

Have a great week.

Doug

Progress Report 5: General Conference, work, progress report, teamwork

2006-04-02T12:26:00.000-07:00

General Conference was excellent but I couldn't process it all. I felt like I was watching a shower of pearls pass by and I could only catch one here and one there. I would like to establish a routine of review and go through all the talks a few times each to see what I can glean.

A normal man works 8 hours or more a day most of the days of his grown life. And we're taught that it was ordained to be so from the beginning. What that means to me is that work has a place in fulfilling our purpose here on earth and that it can be a teaching experience. So when I approach work and school I want to approach them with an attitude of one who is learning spiritually as well as in other ways. And not just learning like the mind learns but also learning as muscles learn under stress. Not just spiritual learning but spiritual exercise and training as well.

This idea is part of a broader concept, the concept that we are here to learn and to become more like our God and Father. I think this amazing concept can inform our decisions about how we handle our attention, talents, our finances, and to what we choose to love. I guess it is my hope that as I participate in one exciting challenge after another that I might keep my heart and mind aware of the larger picture. I hope to treat this life as a spiritual quest for progress as much as an adventure. Time is so short here on the earth. There is so much to be done. I can't afford to lose my way by taking my heart off of the most important things, off of God and off of the well being of people around me.

So where do I hope to put my attention over the next months? I hope to put it on learning. On coming to understand and apply the great truths that are offered me everyday but that take so much effort to really take advantage of. I hope to repent every day. Because, again, life is short. It's too short to procrastinate changes for the better until later. I have to make them now.

This week I finally got to look at raw data. It was exciting. I had to learn a bit about classes and objects and Java syntax to do it and I had to learn some specifics about the Java sound API as well. But I saw the data. Unfortunately it was completely unintelligible: it was an array of bytes taken directly from the audiostream entering the computer from my microphone (after ADC of course). The bytes were displayed not as ones and zeros but as crazy characters from I don't know how many different alphabets. But at least I got to the bytes! Now I have to figure out how to turn them into a sequence of numbers that can be analyzed and how to handle them in the stream in such a manner that I won't miss any data while analyzing it. April 15th looms. It will take a miracle to complete a working pitch detector by then. I do, of course, believe in miracles. So maybe we should try for one. I am unsure. I want to but I am scared to lay it on the line. And I want to keep priorities straight. I don't want the miracle coming through giving up time reserved for things more central to my life . . .

Teamwork. I think that most people would agree that I am pretty independent and introverted. I like it that way. I like to be very much in control of my life, opportunities and activities and that kind of control can be more difficult to maintain when you work with other people. And yet, the best thing that I have ever done, which is my family, is very much a team enterprise. And I love it.

So here is a question: what is neater? A) you stay independent and get nothing accomplished of any lasting merit, B) you stay independent and accomplish something of lasting merit, C) you work with many others and get nothing accomplished, or D) you work with many others and accomplish something of lasting merit. (Note: I really don't know where the question mark belongs in a question like this! If you know please tell me how I should do it.) What I have come to realize is that I think that option D is by far the neatest. Even more surprising is that I am beginning to think that it is about sixes whether B or C is a more attractive option. The thing is this: if you accomplish something on your own, good for you. If you work with others, good for you and them. More people benefit. So what I think I am learning is that introverted or no, I think that working with a whole team devoted to a goal is neater than working alone. But how shall we go about recruiting the best bunch of free workers we can get?

Progress Report 4: Java

2006-03-26T15:03:00.000-08:00

Yesterday we cleaned the home. We didn't just clean it. We made it more cleanable. I love that. One thing that seemed pretty clear to me by the end is that a project completed is worth more than a few projects merely begun. Despite that fact I still kind of want to start the student consulting thing. But for right now there is plenty to do.

I am a little bogged down in Java right now. I think that by the time the program is written I will have to be a Tenderfoot. Right now I am not yet a Scout, much less a Tenderfoot. But I will say that I love it. I think it is powerful, rich, and beautiful. I love the way the structure works. I love the accessibility and the universality. I'd like to find excuses to use the language in my numerical simulations down the road and also in making presentations.

As far as the signal processing side of things I am feeling pretty good now. I found a great text, the computer music tutorial, by Curtis Roads. Then using key words from the text I found referrences to many modern methods for solving the "pitch detection problem." The methods that I came up with on my own were there. But there are many others as well. So the math part I now feel pretty good about. It's just the real time control of sound data using Java that we really need to get a handle on. It's a little iffy whether we will make the deadline or no. It still seems possible. But we'll see.

It sounds like Denis is making some good progress. We'll get there soon enough!
Doug

Progress Report 3: Arches

2006-03-19T08:13:00.000-08:00

A good chunk of the week was spent either preparing for or going to or being at Arches National Park. And what a treat it was! Seeing the kids climbing on the redrock, digging in the sand, exploring the brush and learning about the animals and plants gave me a feeling of contentment as a parent that I don't always have. (I want so badly for the kids to see and do some of the neat things that I have been able to see and do!) What made it better was to have family with us. Gina's mom came and was delightful with the kids. And then Peter and Jonathan came for the tale end. It was great.

So progress may have been curtailed by all the activity and absence. Still, I found and downloaded NetBeans and NetBeans IDE + JDK 5.0 Update 6 and installed them. Our sound card wasn't recognized by Windows so I had to find it and reinstall it. And we bought a $10 computer microphone from Walmart so now I can input sound. (Google Talk anyone?) I wrote my first applet and applications in Java using NetBeans and compiled and ran them successfully. I learned briefly what object oriented programming is. (Yes, I really am that much of a novice with regard to computer programming. I had to learn a little before I understood what I was doing with NetBeans.) And I complemented my simple Fourier domain algorithm for pitch determination with another simple algorithm that works completely in the time domain. They are both my own algorithms, which is probably bad. I should search the literature some more to see what others have done.

Anyway, now the tools are in place. I can input audio, I have Java, an IDE, and all of the necessary documentation. I think the next step is to start playing with sound. The goal for this week, then, is to start manipulating real time sound. Once I do that I want to display real time and fourier transform graphs of the sound patterns coming from my voice while I sing a given pitch. Then it is time to begin perfecting the pitch determination algorithm. So it will be time to get to work. Tomorrow.

Progress Report 2: running

2006-03-11T10:43:00.000-08:00

When I was in kindergarten we took a bus home from school that dropped us off at the bottom of a large hill. I had lots of energy so often I liked to run home. I didn't run the hill all at once though. Instead I picked chunks. I would look at a car in the distance and say “I'm going to run until I get past that car.” And I'd do it. Then I'd pick the next object. It felt neat to get to each object. It felt like I had accomplished something. This week I expressed to Gina some of my doubts about the direction that Denis and I are taking and whether we would succeed in the end. She counseled me to stop worrying so much about things far far away and make very concrete goals and accomplish them. Smart lady. The thing is that if we take this route the project will be rewarding no matter what. But I think that it will succeed. Right now there are not very many routes to failure. We can't go bankrupt because we have no expenses. Pretty much the only way we can fail is by quitting. And that comes from either discouragement, distraction, or boredom. And those come from either forgetting to look at the big picture or forgetting to go for and then appreciate the small successes along the way. This blog is meant to help me avoid both of those pitfalls.

Now I still take the bus for school. (I guess some of us grow up slowly!) I take the bus to campus and then walk across campus and finally across a major street called Lomas to get to the UNM physics building. The stop light for Lomas is lopsided. It is green for a long long time for the traffic (mostly cars) that goes east and west. And then it is green for a short time for the traffic (a lot of pedestrians as well as some buses and cars) that goes north and south. So there is a short window of opportunity and a bona fide penalty if you miss it. Anyway, when I learned this I began to run when I saw the light turn green even if I was a fair ways from the intersection. I would sometimes make it across in the nick of time. This week I had stayed a little too long on the south side of campus helping students solve physics problems and I was going to be late for the information physics group meeting. A new thought occurred to me: why not jog while the light was red? Then when it turned green I would be there ready. So I did. I think that is a pretty significant change in thinking. In the beginning I didn't recognize that a green light was an opportunity. So I didn't really notice it. Later I recognized it and got up the energy to go for it. Finally, just recently I began anticipating the opportunity in advance and getting myself into the perfect position to take advantage of it. Anyway, what I've learned is that if you want something there may be an opportunity that will come up. Your job is to move now while it isn't there so that when it does come you are ready.

I don't know that this business was the best choice of the 100 and some odd. But in a way it doesn't matter. This business is a way to begin running, a way to move forward so that as the future arrives we are prepared. Have a good week. Doug

Progress Report 2, business

2006-03-11T09:56:00.000-08:00

I have a couple of doubts about the way we are going about this from a business standpoint. The first is that the more I read about successful technical businesses (IBM, HP, or even Thomas Edison's companies) the more I believe that they probably need to be sales driven. Sales and marketing. They need to be about serving people or meeting their needs or wants somehow. So I am nervous to be investing in technology first rather than in people first.

My second doubt is whether we should be the ones to do the hard core technical work. Why should I be programming when there are literally millions of people out there who are all more computer literate than I am and probably tens (hundreds?) of thousands of people who are both more computer literate and have a better understanding of the whole acoustics, digital audio world? From a business standpoint the answer is that I probably shouldn't. I should find people who are much more qualified and have them come along.

So why are we starting like we are starting? For a few reasons, I guess. First, because the stuff is so cool! At least at the beginning I think that we want to have the technical fun. In our world the fact that we don't know things is exciting. It means a steep learning curve and we love that. Second, because it will be nice to have at least some understanding of what is going on when we do have to bring on some experts. And it will be easier to sell the experts of the ideas if we have already done some of the work. Third, because we can afford to. We are both solvent without this business. We haven't given up our day jobs. So even if this is the slow way to do things we can go ahead and take this route for the fun of it.

Finally, I think that the learning is important for another reason as well. Better ideas come when you have more specific knowledge. And you can better judge the soundness of those ideas. I'd like to think that even though this may not be the quickest route toward building something up it may still be a good one. Still, marketing and technical talent need to come into the picture at some point not too far from now . . .

Progress Report 2, technical

2006-03-11T09:31:00.000-08:00

It's been a week and a half and we are now in that phase of the project where the project begins to expand before your eyes. Quick recognition of pitch is seeming more complicated than I originally thought: the lower frequencies that people normally sing at are in the 50 Hz range. A simple Fourier Transform rule says that at that speed the best you might expect to resolve the frequency in 0.1 seconds is on the order of 10 Hz, which is a spread of at least a half note on either side. For a voice with the right timbre (harmonic, and it looks like most Western musical instruments are more or less harmonic in timbre) I guess that you can use the spacing of the partials (I think partials is the word they use for non-fundamental frequencies). In addition it is looking like a simple Fast Fourier Transform may not be the best way to go and also like a typical person's voice may have a fairly broad spread around the fundamental frequency in the first place. I could go on but you get the picture that there is still a little learning to do in terms of acoustics, signal processing, and human perception of pitch.

On the more technical side of programming things are moving forward. It looks like there are a ton of resources out there to help you begin processing digital audio with Port Audio being just one. Sun has a very well documented sound API in Java so we are leaning toward Java. We've heard it said that Java applications can be slow, but the proof is in the pudding for our application. I figure that once we have something written it shouldn't be too hard to take to another language and compiler should that prove necessary.

This is super interesting and fun from a robotics standpoint as well as from an applications standpoint. I'm starting to realize that computers now have quite a few input and output ports that could be used for a lot of different things. How would you like to control a remote robot using your sound card? Or a USB port? Or your Ethernet port? Or look at the huge amount of information that is communicated to a computer's monitor. Right now in the lab you have to buy special cards if you want to have analogue and digital input and output ports to control devices like the microscope that I was adapting. I think it could all be done through the ports that the computer already has. And with a proper adapter you could get all kinds of signals into and out of your computer very quickly and simultaneously. I think that giving the computer senses (good sources of local information) and hands (good ways to get things done) is a neat concept. The cool thing is that nothing need be changed about the standard pc to add these extra functionalities. It would only take a little external hardware and some software. And it doesn't take too much imagination to see how all of this can work toward inexpensive medical devices . . . the goal would be to have a million devices that all work off of one adapter. Just change the device like you change out one color of lego block for another.

Progress Report 1, lessons from kids

2006-03-04T07:51:00.000-08:00

So I figure the weekend is a good time to give progress reports and write thoughts. You can expect something each Saturday or Sunday.

I think that getting a working prototype that will be worth selling completed by April 15 is probably the most serious technical challenge I have faced. I'm not a programmer. I don't know how to make a windows program without using expensive proprietary software tools. I don't know much about digital audio technology. I just understand the physics of sound and have a really cool really simple program that I want to write.

Here is what I have learned so far:

It's nice to have a partner. Denis (V. Seletskiy) is just as excited about all of this as I am and perhaps more capable.
Sound is transduced by the microphone from vibration into voltage oscillations. The sound card converts those oscillations into a digital signal by sampling them at some rate (the rate ought to be faster than twice the highest frequency you care about by Shannon's theorem and the highest frequency we can hear is about 20kHz so 40kHz and above is fine) with each sample just changing a voltage amplitude into a digital number. The digital numbers are typically 8 or 16 bits in length and I think that you may be able to choose the format.
There is a nice audio programming library (http://www.portaudio.com/) available for free for real time manipulation of sound. They make no licensing restrictions on products compiled with their library so I am more than grateful.
I still am not sure what happens to the sampled data while it is being taken or how the input and output functions work. I don't know if certain file types are generated automatically or if it is put into some kind of buffer or what. And I don't know how to find out.
I don't know anything about programming for windows. If you know of any resources that would help me with either side, that is with the user interface or with the real time manipulation of sound, please let me know. I want to make that deadline.

Lessons from kids.

This first one is from when my little brother Andrew was about 3 or 4. We wanted to do something and he needed to finish his food first so I asked him to hurry. "Okay!" he said. So he took a bite and chewed frantically and started running around the table. Then he got another bite and ran around the table more. He felt like he was hurrying. But he ended up going slower than before. I thought it was hilarious but I also tried to remember it so that I could notice if I ever did the same thing.

The second one is from this morning. Kate didn't want to help us clean the house. Actually she wanted to but didn't want to be cold so she couldn't leave her blanket. I ran to get her her coat but she couldn't get it on because it was too small. Then she couldn't clean because Abby made Kate's bed but not how Kate wanted it. But she couldn't redo it because taking apart the bed would be like messing up the room and we were trying to clean. So I pulled off the covers for her so she could make her bed. Then she hid under the sheet and couldn't make it because she was stuck. I got her unstuck and . . . you get the idea. The thing is I think she half believed her reasons. And she was miserable the whole time. I sat her down and taught her the concept of lying to herself about what she could do by telling the story of her morning. Then she started working and stopped finding reasons why she couldn't and she was remarkably cheerful. Happy. Gay. And productive. So the question is "How much do I do that to myself?"

Until next week,

Doug

Choice Made, blogs more rare, a goal.

2006-03-01T18:54:00.000-08:00

So the choice is made at least for now: musician feedback and music DDR. Feel free to use any ideas posted here.

Anyway, there is competition. We've scoped it some. But we like competition because it will force us to improve ourselves. I think we can provide something of value.

Anyway, now the blogs will become more rare. I will try to make an update once a week. But really I only have about an hour a day that I can spare for this whole venture so I'm going to be devoting that to action.

But let me state right now the first goal: a distributable working prototype of a simple system available by April 15th.

Doug

98, 99, 100 and more

2006-02-28T09:50:00.000-08:00

I kind of want an amazing idea for 100 but I don't have any really amazing ideas in mind and I want to move forward from brainstorming to choosing and performing. So here are 98, 99, and 100.

Sawdust. I guess the fuel market is pretty crazy right now. I learned from Gerald Baca that there is a lumber mill/saw mill that is generating a huge supply of sawdust and doesn't know what to do with it. If we could make it into a clean fuel . . . or even sell it for gardens and pets. I really love the idea of waste products becoming useful. (Thanks Gerald!)
Treat your concrete. There are a ton of new homes here. The builders recommend that the buyers treat their concrete but most of them don't take the time to do it. I bet we could go around to new developments and offer to treat their concrete and get a lot of jobs.
Rocks. Similarly, all the developments here in the west side of Albuquerque xeroscape with rocks. I bet home owners would pay a reasonable fee to keep all the rocks picked up.
Working day care. How about a day care where the kids work instead of sit and play. I think that child labor laws might be an issue here. But the point would be education for the kids. Perhaps the work is done as service rather than as a way to make money. How about that? How about a sort of day care for older kids where all they do is learn to serve. They could help Habitat for Humanity build houses. They could winterize homes for the elderly. They could offer free car repair to certain groups and improve parks and pick up litter.
Sports day care. Maybe not as noble but pretty fun to run. I think this is self explanatory except that you choose the most fun sport you think you could safely facilitate.
Private Airplanes. They are so expensive. But they can't be as expensive to make as they are to buy. I know there is some sort of regulatory barrier to entry going on here. It would be interesting to learn what it is and crack it. Now making private planes makes for a pretty cool company!
Kid's picture collages. The parents save the kids artwork in a box and then pay you a small fee to digitalize it and put it all in a convenient format on a cd or dvd. You get to save them all and chuck them all at the same time!
VCR-->DVD. You could transfer everybody's collections over for them.

90-97

2006-02-27T11:23:00.000-08:00

Paper watch. It would be interesting to have a service that watched for all the academic papers that come out related to a key topic.
How about a system of questions and answers. I need to know how to make a 97% efficient hologram. So I pay you to teach me.
Research for hire. OK, so this is an old idea. But it's still interesting! Say you want to know if AireBorne really works. You hire someone to test it out.
High School. This can't happen on an hour a day. But I think it would be fun to gather a bunch of sharpest and funnest people that I know and put together a school that would blow the socks off of any that exist. And we would do it out in the boonies like a farm/monastery.
Sensors. Turning a real world signal into a voltage signal is just really cool. I would love to have a company that perfects and makes sensors of all kinds. At first we wouldn't have any new technology. We would just creatively use and market existing technologies.
Commercial Real Estate. Only the goal isn't just to make money. It is to change the way cities work. I don't see any good way of curbing urban sprawl other than either curbing population growth or changing lifestyles. It would be neat to develop housing concepts that simultaneously enable higher density living conditions and higher quality of life. How about the ground floor is Walmart, the roof is a park, and accross the street is the University? This may require some capital outlay . . .
Origami for hire. Because Origami is cool. We could pick some really cool folds, achieve excellence in them, and use them for wedding decorations and high class parties.
Optical component library. Half of our time in the lab is spent looking for components. Another 10% is spent ordering new components that we should have somewhere. If there was a solid library system it could save many dollars and a lot of money. It would be worth paying someone to develop and maintain a real system . . .

Getting Life in order.

2006-02-26T16:54:00.000-08:00

Sunday is a day to rest and reflect. So no 8 ideas today.

So on February 7th I laid out a road map that I am trying to follow:

1. Get life in order and generate 100 practical ideas (right now I only have 3!).
2. Choose one idea and devote 1 hour a day to making it a reality.
3. Gradually increase the time I devote to it as it begins to pay for our lifestyle and my tuition.
4. Graduate and either go full-time or sell it to begin the next project somewhere else.

As of Tuesday evening I will have completed my list of 100 ideas. It has required a fair amount of work coming up with this list but I think that the time hasn't been wasted. I think that I have been forced to adopt a certain way of thinking that might be worth practicing. And it has helped me better understand the incredible magnitude of the array of options that are open to us. It has also allowed me to test my ability to give a little time and a fair amount of thought to this endeavor on a daily basis in something of a gradual and nonthreatening way. So far there are several ideas that would be worth pursuing and at least two that need to happen like a child needs to be born. Since I can't handle twins I will need to sell one of the concepts to a good parent. And I have some possible parents in mind.

But this post is meant to be a reflection on the first part of requirement number 1, which is getting my life in order. Daily investments are going well. Exercise, planning, sleep, scripture study, time with the kids and helping around the house, time to talk and laugh with Gina, deep study time for physics, time to work on my current research project (Quantum lithography. Right now it can beat the diffraction limit N photons at a time where N is up to 4 or 5. I need to see if the process can be sped up by a factor of about 10^18 without losing the improved resolution and visibility.), journal writing, work with the young men's program, etc. Really there are 3 things that I need to build into my way of life more and more solidly:

Planning by installation. Many projects take overseeing over an extended period of time. That requires regular attention. However, attention is my most scarce resource. I need to continue to develop a system that will allow me to give the required regular attention but keep my mind free to work on other things in the interim. Let me say that better. When I was about 5 my father promised on a Wednesday evening that he would buy an Atari for us to use if I would remind him on the weekend. That evening as I went to sleep I said to myself over and over again "Remember to tell Dad to buy the Atari. Remember to tell Dad to buy the Atari. Remember to tell Dad to buy the Atari . . ." I continued saying that to myself over and over until the weekend came and I was ready to remind him. When I went to see him on Friday I knew what to say. I said it but he had already bought the machine. I can't afford to use that method to keep track of my tasks and obligations because there are too many now. And the time scale is one of months rather than days. I need to become very adept at planning to invest in an event or in a goal by installation. Take plants. Maybe one needs to be checked and watered weekly. I need to be able to check and water the plant weekly and not think very much about the plant for the rest of the week.
Execution. I can plan to water that plant once a week. I also need to water it. Execution has to be simultaneously tough and flexible. Tough so that when I plan I can trust myself to perform the required action at the required time, and flexible so that if something truly important comes up (someone needs a blessing, one of the kids is really struggling, Gina is sick in bed, a friend is in need) I can reprioritize and act immediately.
Delegation: this is a crucial skill that I really need to develop. Here is a neat little list that my wife showed me from a book called "If you want it done right you don't have to do it yourself."

Prepare beforehand.
Clearly define the task to be completed. Be specific. Ask the person to whom you are delegating to repeat the information back to you to ensure that he or she fully understands.
Clearly outline the time frame within which the delegated task must be completed.
Define the level of authority he or she is to use with this task: authority to recommend, authority to inform and initiate, or authority to act.
Identify checkpoints when you will meet with the delegatee to review progress and offer guidance if needed. Schedule these meetings frequently at first, taper off as you see the task being mastered.
Hold a debriefing session to discuss what went well, what could have been improved, and what has been learned.

Finally there is one principle that is going to be crucial: grace. "It is likewise through the grace of the Lord that individuals, through faith in the atonement of Jesus Christ and repentance of their sins, receive strength and assistance to do good works that they otherwise would not be able to maintain if left to their own means." (LDS Bible dictionary under Grace) I believe that I am out to do good. I believe that as I exercise faith and repent I can receive strength and assistance to do that good. I believe that I will be helped by God and by man and will only succeed with that help. I believe that I will receive that help in abundance and will therefor succeed.

82-89

2006-02-25T20:08:00.000-08:00

Babysitting for Gyms. I know this is already done. All over the place. But not everywhere. And where it isn't done there is frustration. And so it was suggested that I figure out a way to make this service more ubiquitous. (Thanks Brad Bushman!)
Electrical Safety. Talking with an electrician I noticed a pattern in the times when he or others were "hit." Basically the pattern was that the electricians would take precautions and turn off hot wires and breakers and then someone at a distance would flip the switch while they were working on something else. So the idea here is to figure out a simple way to make sure that electricians have local control over the heat of a given wire. (Thanks to Eric Estep, electrician for interview.)
Dissertation Archives. Dissertations are ostensibly not only a summary of work on a certain topic but a source of important original research. Currently, however, they are largely hidden to the world because they sit in campus libraries, mostly unavailable. I think that everyone would benefit from having the dissertations made available to the world to search through and read as needed. This has to be done whether by me or someone else. (Thanks to Darrin Law for the conversation that sparked this thought.)
NEPA and other laws can make actions for the benefit of the forest difficult to perform. Part of that is just paperwork! TurboTax has streamlined paperwork for everyone who pays taxes. But there are a lot of other activities, particularly activities that have to do with the federal government, for which the paperwork could be steamlined in a similar manner. (Thanks to Chad Horman for the information leading to this thought.)
Bill analysis. It would be really nice to have congressional bills immediately digested, sorted, and indexed so that everyone could know what congress is working on. (And the information would also be hugely useful after the bills were passed.) I think congress itself and others in the area would be the first to want the information.
Accelerated math. Most people don't want to homeschool. But many want their child to excel in at least a couple of areas. I believe that there is a gigantic waste of mathematical potential in our public schools. It would be pretty neat to have a private track for math or other subjects that would mesh with public school. The kid goes to school but leaves a period early for math. They get the benefits of normal school, but actually gain the math skills that will let them thrive in the science and engineering world.
Language Preschool. So if kids are most able to learn a language as preschoolers are we missing out by not teaching them a language at that time? Gina has a whole curriculum for the purpose of teaching such a preschool that was prepared by Dr. McKee at BYU. (Thanks Gina!)
Computer diagnostics for cars. So you get the lights going off on your dashboard but you have to take the car in to a mechanic to interpret them. Wouldn't it be nice if one gas station just had the computer diagnostics on sight and charged an extra 5 bucks for you to use it?

74-81

2006-02-24T08:18:00.000-08:00

Reward list. Most money for research gets won by people who propose to look into something. That is OK. But for me there is something neater about the prizes offered to people who have already performed. There are lots of prizes and bounties out there but it can be difficult to find one for you. (If I could win any that I know about I think it would be the P=NP? prize.) I think it would be neat to collect all such prizes in some ordered format and make them available to everyone.
Bounty site. This is pretty similar but instead of going out to search for prizes that already exist you provide a listing service to invite bounties to be offered. (I'll pay $10 for every pound of scrap metal. $50 for each joke that can make my boss laugh out loud. Ten percent of the pick for every cherry tree that you pluck clean.)
Reverse E-bay How about a place where you describe the job you want done and take bids. The best value-bidder wins. It's not as simple as Ebay because there can be a lot more than price that might go into the value equation. Unless you can make the product requested very specific.
T-shirt logo contest. Get entries focused on a theme from high school art classes all over the place. Best entries get made, marketed, and sold and the submitters get a share. (Thanks Gina!) (I like this as a promotion for another business as well.)
Dust. Optical and nano labs work better if they are super clean. There are now several vacuum systems and other systems that clean about 99% of the dust out of the air. Put a few in series and you could get very high purity in the output air. The attractive thing here is the price differential between products intended for households that are sold in the store and products intended for the lab.
Patent rehash. So you have a concept and you want to see if it's been done before. You go to the US patent office. And you research. And research some more. And then a little bit more. At the end you think that maybe you have something new. But all this time you have been searching around rather than being productive. Either that or you have forked it over for an expert to do the work for you. There has to be a better interface to this vital information. The patent office doesn't have a huge incentive to provide it. The lawers benefit from a bad interface because it makes their job more difficult and specialized. The rest of us could use a better system. I think many would pay a reasonable fee for a better system. Especially if it had a google alert feature notifying the user of all patents that pass that are related to particular areas. Also, reading patents can be a vital way to come up with new and better ideas of your own. A nice system for finding relevant patents would speed research.
Pig slop. Stores need something to do with their produce as it goes bad. I think they trash it which is a waste. Why not gather it from all the stores and restaurants and feed it to pigs and chickens?
Yard drive. In Provo they have a program where once or twice a year the city collects yard trash. Branches, leaves, grass, etc. Then they compost it. They sell the compost and actually make a profit for the city. We need that in Albuquerque.

66-73

2006-02-23T09:38:00.000-08:00

Energy patrol. You go around to homes to check for all the simplest things that are wasting energy. And you fix them. Two hundred dollars per visit and an average savings of $100 per year in energy costs.
Landscaping. A lot of people buy homes and repair them and sell them. One part of the home that is usually not changed to much is the landscaping. But for some of the higher end homes I think that a good landscaping job can make a huge difference in the value. It's a big part of the difference between a home and a manor . . .
Garden Design. A given home has areas that are shaded by different amounts, that are exposed to different water conditions, etc. If you determine what plants thrive under what conditions in your city then once you have a map of the home and the trees etc. you could come up with a design for a garden that could thrive. A little planning might go a long way.
Solar Patch. You could sell a little patch that interacts with UV light. That patch could be worn by people outside. When their UV exposure gets to a certain point they know it is time for a change. Or if they are sunbathers they know its time to roll over.
Educational Supplies by Subscription. Instead of having every home with devoted parents becoming full of educational supplies (like arrays of counting beads, letters, texts, etc.) you could pool many parents together and they could check out items as they are needed. (Thanks Gina!)
Applesauce. Gina makes killer applesauce. We could make quintuple and sell it. Then more.
Magnets. There is really no cooler toy than a magnet (or, better, a collection of them) for adults or kids. These things need to be promoted and given to every kid and most adults in a lot of forms. Why aren't there way more magnets in homes? Why aren't there cool magnetic toys on most of the desks in most of the offices in the US?
Scrap book makers. Give us your messed up piles of photos and documents and we'll make cool family books out of them. (Thanks Gina!)

58-65

2006-02-22T19:23:00.000-08:00

Book binding company. I've noticed that pretty much every book that I have purchased off of Amazon has been poorly bound. It would be nice to work with existing publishers to offer a version of existing text books that is bound better than the current ones. Basicly you center the whole business around the book as a physical entity and make a better one than we have.
Book rebinding. Or you could take books already made and remake them in stronger form.
Kid's books. Similarly, it would be nice to have books for kids that are virtually indestructible. Maybe if the pages were made of the same cloth that some clothing tags are made of . . .
Healthy food for hospitals. I don't know if I want to do it but it needs to be done. People look to hospitals as an example of how they should eat.
Dried fruit and nuts vending machine. I'd like it. But then, I never use vending machines. Is there a dichotomy between long term and short term thinkers that means that this won't work? Well, brainstorm now, edit later.
Paint recycling. You collect the paint, and let people buy it. They can mix their own colors. (Thanks Gina!)
Pencil Vending machines all over campus. Now this I could see using. If the price weren't insane. In fact I would love to have these. Notebook vending machines too. (Thanks to Denis V. Seletskiy)
Physics Curriculum for gradschoolers. It's funny because the physics curriculum is one of the most traditional and well established curricula out there. And the body of knowledge is systematic, well contained, and beautiful. The subjects are deeply intertwined. And yet the curriculum needs a lot of work. The learning track is not nearly as systematic or iterative as it could be and learning all the fundamental concepts can be like a treasure hunt. A lot of work could be done here.

50-57

2006-02-21T11:33:00.000-08:00

How about a company dedicated to gathering the most beautiful photos?
It would be pretty fun to help people begin herb gardens.
Could lead tours to cool places. Like the Great Barrier Reef, or, more locally, some of our New Mexico caves.
How about beginning a semiannual Albuquerque chef cook off? The participants and winners get publicity. The paying audience become the judges.
Mobile oil change unit. (you call them, and they come and change your oil for 10 bucks extra.) (Thanks Gina J. Bradshaw!)
Taxi by appointment for the elderly and others. You work it out so the taxi is running all day. (I couldn't do the driving but I might be able to arrange a regular schedule.)
Troubled children monitored by retired parole officers. (Paid by parents or by state.) (Thanks Gina!)
How about some kind of annual recycling technology convention? Prizes for the most practical and promising technologies.

42-49

2006-02-20T14:13:00.000-08:00

Make a better graduate level optics text. We really need one. There just isn't anything that cuts it right now.
Equipment rental. I don't know whether you would just rent access to a great wood shop or rent the tools but there are a lot of tools that almost nobody would use every day but a lot of people would use on occasion. It would deffinitely help people who want to repair their cars or do fancy things for their homes.
Garage. People who want to repair their own cars are always wanting to find some place to repair them. And their neighbors often want them to find a different place. How about providing a great place to come and repair your car and combining it with an onsight auto parts store?
Computer purchasor. It might be nice to be able to say to someone "Here is 1000 dollars. Take 10% of it. Use the rest to get me the best computer you can." They would ask you what you do and what you care about and then make the purchase. And they would give you back the change.
Sack lunches. We save a lot of money because I generally eat food that Gina made rather than restaraunt food. And often I get better food. What if we scaled it up a bit and sold lunches right here on campus?
Shipping I don't know if this counts because it isn't a full fledged idea. But 3 things: off-shore manufacturing keeps going up, and purchases over the internet keeps going up. At the same time fuel prices have been rising. These are three megatrends that make the shipping industry dynamic, important, and possibly open to some real changes.
Aldi How about a franchise of one of the neatest grocery store out there?
Private Community Center From the southwest side of Albuquerque you have to travel like crazy to get to a place for a kid to play soccer, learn gymnastics, learn dance or karate, or anything like that. You have to travel like crazy to get to a gym. This would be a winner. May take more capital than I want to dig up though.

34-41

2006-02-17T19:25:00.000-08:00

Medical education for parents: how do you recognize an ear infection? If the parent knew right away it would save unnecessary medical bills on the one hand and trauma on the other hand. Video for the most common things that parents take kids in for that they don't need to take them in for. "Here are 4 common rashes that we don't do anything about but that parents take their kids in for all the time. Here is what to do." (Thanks Gina Jones Bradshaw).
How about video cameras that are a little cooler. Like how about if the camera is somehow mounted on your glasses and the memory and power are in your back pack?
Noninvasive realtime measurement of blood sugar levels. You can actually monitor the impact of your diet and activities.
Design and build equipment for windsurfing.
Teach windsurfing.
Bagel Toaster: People burn their hands pulling bagles out of toasters. What if you built a toaster that made it easy to get your bagel out? (Thanks Collin Trail.)
How about a less invasive measure of blood pressure? (Some people get a rise in blood pressure when they know it's being taken. You could get better results if you avoided this problem.)
Writing and publishing company combined. You commission writing to meet a need.

26-33

2006-02-16T19:46:00.000-08:00

Export Albuquerque specialties. Green chili and pottery.
Car repair by subscription. Ideally this would reverse any perverse incentives to over-repair a car. Or damage it. If the mechanic is receiving a fixed fee to keep everything in shape then the only incentive is to do effective preventative maintenance.
Research sales, make shopping lists and menues. You could save a lot of women a lot of work. (Thanks Gina Jones Bradshaw)
Reconcile EOBs with medical bills. You could specialize on a few policies and take a percentage of the dollars recovered. I think from what I have seen personally that this would be a bonafide service. (Thanks Gina Jones Bradshaw)
Weekly summer activity list: daily games, book list, educational activities, family field trip suggestions. Could include bulk acquisition of certain types of passes like zoo passes etc. (Thanks Gina Jones Bradshaw)
Real time jogging speed measure and reporting system.
Real time swimming speed measurement and reporting system using underwater speakers or headphones. As a swimmer I know this could help. You really don't know too well how fast you are going so much as how hard you are trying. Maybe you could do little things that would improve your speed without taking extra effort. But it's hard to know without a little feedback.
Medical lab. Those things can be way too slow. And that not only lead to unnecessary anxiety and worry but can also be dangerous. It would be neat to begin a medical lab whose positioning was that it got good results back to doctor and patient in the fastest turn around time possible. Really focusing on turnaround time like a fast food restaraunt.

18 through 25

2006-02-16T10:43:00.000-08:00

I want to get moving so it's time to really brainstorm. I'll try for 8 per day.

Street vendor. How about selling crepes from the street like they do in France? Or hot dogs? Say $2.5 a pop with lots of Nutella. (Thanks Bart, J-dawgs, and all those frenchies.)
Musician feedback: you could give real-time feedback on pitch and or rythm. The violinist or trombonist could learn to get the pitch spot on and refine the ear. I like this because it is so physics oriented and game oriented at the same time. It would almost seem to be a waste to practice scales without it.
Musician DDR: DDR is not very different at all from what an excellent music teaching program would be like. If you change the arrows to ordinary musical notes and add a transformer you have a pretty powerful way to learn to play music. And it becomes very game like with learning to site read becoming almost addictive.
Nose. This may be a bit beyond me right here right now but it would be very cool to do medical diagnostics using an artificial nose. Like a breathalyzer but with enhanced capabilities. So noninvasive! I read that dogs can use smell to tell if someone has cancer with reasonable accuracy . . .
New City Friend You get off the plane in a strange city and after security someone helps you with your carry-on, leads you to your rental car that is ready and waiting, and gets you where you need to go. They know what kind of food you like and what restaraunts would serve it, they have recreation options listed and arrange to have your luggage taken straight to your room without your even seeing it.
Tablet Math Every method of entering mathematics onto a computer is a hastle. But it sounds like microsoft has some software that will let you write the math out by hand and will actually be able to interpret it in terms of symbols. That would be pretty cool. Especially if it were then combined with something like Mathematica or Maple or MathCad. It would be like drawing on the chalk board except that the chalk-board could turn around and regraph the equation that you had written more accurately.
Fuel Efficiency monitor. How cool would it be to have real-time information on your fuel efficiency? It shouldn't be too hard to keep hooked up to the odometer and the gas tank . . . And people could train themselves to drive efficiently.
Pairing rewarders. How about if you have two tags and when they are placed in proximity they give a little reward? When our kids are cleaning up they have the most fun if the bag that holds the legos becomes interactive. If it eats the legos or dings every time a lego enters or anything like that they love it. What if you had some kind of little sticker where something goes and one on the thing and when they get close enough that the item is in its proper place it give off a reward?

15, 16, and 17

2006-02-15T08:48:00.000-08:00

Market a new device to make canning peaches more convenient. (Suggestion Gina Jones Bradshaw, invention Judy Jones)
Grow produce using hydroponics. I think hydroponics and aeroponics are cool. It would be fun to get really good at one crop.
Rate performance of doctors and real estate agents (for example using a star system). I don't know where the revenue would come from but we need some kind of formal system to help us choose service providers like these. I also think that if there were an efficient feedback system for medical care then the need for punitive lawsuits would decrease. The punishment would be simply that everybody would know if you were an incompetent or careless doctor and your business would decrease. But feedback isn't just a punitive thing. It is also vital if you want to do the best that you can. And it is fun. People like games, video games and conversations at least largely because of the immediate feedback that they get from them. They train themselves and hone their skills using that feedback. I think we would have better doctors and better real estate agents etc. if we could provide mechanisms for fast accurate feedback.

First 14 ideas

2006-02-13T19:47:00.000-08:00

Cyberspace real estate for optics. Like Tew's milliondollarhomepage.com but specific to optics and perhaps more ordered for the user's convenience. (Thanks Tew and Denis V Seletskiy.)
Consulting. Right now I'm a world-class expert on the spatial modulation of ultrafast lasers. I could pass on that expertise to various companies. Then, as I learn, perhaps I can develop a company specializing in consulting. (Thanks Cathy Webster.)
Brokering student consulting. Here at UNM are all kinds of niche-expertises. Why not help graduate students leverage their knowledge for experience and financial support? (Thanks Denis V. Seletskiy)
Scientific data archiving. A lot of data is collected and then allowed to go dormant. If there were a system for archiving data that could be easily used and accessed, that would be huge. I think government grants would be very forthcoming in this area.
Online Tutoring. Take my current revenue source to a broader audience. (Thanks Bart Bradshaw.)
Textbook design . . . how about a practical course in technology for high schools? (Thanks Jake Kolander.)
Produce Class in hot topic. For example, arrange an awesome course in PHP for 200 bucks a head. Try to have 100 people take the class.
Promote music It would be a lot of fun buying a radio station to run not for proffit in and of itself but rather for proffit as a promoter of music.
Western Capital New Mexico What's wrong with 10 k per deal? Also, a local investment firm wants to add commercial real estate to their list of offerings. They have a huge lead base and could feed right in to WCNM (Thanks Dad)
Design and sell scientific T-shirts (“I put the stud in study”) (Thanks Guy Kawasaki.)
Create efficient market for used scientific equipment. (Thanks Denis V. Selestskiy)
Sell the sweetest pocket protectors! They could be used as advertising for companies like the geek squad, and a million engineering and computer science companies. They could go around at science conferences.
Sell my invention: the robust femtosecond optical vortex maker.
Medical Diagnostics. Try to make better versions of current optical sensors.

100 ideas begin

2006-02-13T11:40:00.000-08:00

I figure that ideas are easy to come by and harder to implement. And some ideas are easier to implement than others. So it makes sense to compile quite a few before I get too specific. Hopefully having done this I can be a bit more flexible. Soon enough I will have to choose one or some combination or synthesis. At that time I can begin being critical and weighing the options. Right now I just want that list of 100. Also, I'm no business mastermind so I've been asking others for suggestions. I will try to write down the sources for the suggestions as I put them down.

Before I go let me share a little more of my thinking on ideas: I want to be free with my ideas. First of all, a big part of why I am in all this is to do some good. If someone takes an idea and runs with it or alters it and then runs with an improved version the world becomes a better and more interesting place. So why not share pretty freely? Second, I think that the idea will be less important than the implementation of that idea. So I don't see the world so much as a competitive market for ideas as for ideas that are well implemented. It is easy to transfer an idea. It is harder to transfer an excellent implementation of an idea.

Title change and a new venture

2006-02-07T12:40:00.000-08:00

Perhaps the title of this particular blog will continue to change from time to time as it evolves. The title was Better Healthcare Less Cost, which is a goal that I would like to strive for when the time comes. But in the mean time I am removed from that by what has to be accomplished now. Right now I would like to come to a deep understanding of quantum electrodynamics, finish my PhD, keep my family alive and thriving, perform well in my ecclesiastical duties, and start a company that will have me prepared to make a dent in health care when I graduate. Everything in it's season, no?

The new title is Diligence and Temperance. I noticed this odd pairing of virtues when I was reading Alma 38 in the Book of Mormon and it really struck me. How do you grow a tree? Not by working really hard one day and then abandoning it but by making a little effort on a regular basis. How do you get into good physical shape? Not by pounding the gym real hard one day or even all day everyday. Rather you have a consistent and regular plan and you stick with it over time. How do you become an expert in a academic field? The same way. By combining temperance and diligence. How do you start a business? Usually what I hear about is insane hours and insane workloads and insane sacrifice. I believe in sacrifice. But I believe that true sacrifice is giving up what you value for what you more deeply value. So I want to build up a business with in the constraints of my current rich, full life by using the principle of coupled diligence and moderation.

It may be that I hold this odd pair as a talisman as a cover for my weakness. In starting something truly worthwhile my weakness is that I have very little time. OK, in truth I have as much time as anyone else. What I can more accurately say is that I want to start something great but that starting something great isn't my first priority. It comes after my duty to God, after the well-being of my family, after personal health, after my pursuit of truth, even after my current pursuit of a PhD. So if starting something is so far down on the priority list, how do I even have a hope of succeeding? I intend to invoke that amazing pair of powerful concepts, diligence and temperance.

By keeping my priorities in order I need never become burned out. And by consistently pushing ahead I can work toward continual progress toward my most cherished goals. I'm excited to start something. It's hard to stop thinking about it. But somehow I have to start something without giving up those things that I truly want most. I believe that I can. Here is the plan.

My first business plan:
1. Get life in order and generate 100 practical ideas (right now I only have 3!).
2. Choose one idea and devote 1 hour a day to making it a reality.
3. Gradually increase the time I devote to it as it begins to pay for our lifestyle and my tuition.
4. Graduate and either go full-time or sell it to begin the next project somewhere else.

So if you have ideas for me please send them. Remember the constraints: little time, and little capital, and it has to promote the general good. Ideally it could be capable of supporting a growing family on one hour a day.

Bart Bradshaw

2006-02-06T11:25:00.000-08:00

Check out this active blog by my brother, Bart. It is clear that he intends to do something of use!

http://26vibrations.blogspot.com

To do something of use

2005-12-27T15:18:00.000-08:00

In a world with a million choices I suppose there is a time to simply pick a goal and go after it. Or pick a problem and seek to solve it. This blog is in part a journal. But it is a journal with a focus, and that focus is on my chosen problem and how I might take part in solving it, on my goal and how it might be achieved.

Here is the goal: better healthcare for substantially less money for every person in the United States of America. Less money paid in the form of direct payment of bills, less money paid in the form of taxes, and less money paid in the form of insurance premiums.

So that is the overall goal and I think that there are a million routes that can work toward the achievement of that goal. I want to take some of them.