Money has no inherent value. Money has only the value that is given to it by its holder. Donate time and you retain the ability to ensure that that time has value. Donate money and you’re passing that responsibility on to the recipient. If the recipient is irresponsible with it, then you have effectively given no value; the value is only in your own eyes, as you are the one who has given value to the money, not the recipient.
Does this mean you shouldn’t donate money? That depends on the recipient. Simply be sure to do your own due diligence to determine if your donation will be used wisely or squandered away. Do not donate blindly.
Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime.
Donate cash and a man may eat for a day. Donate your knowledge and a man can find his way so long as he is willing.
There have been many distributed computing projects around for years. Basically these projects work by sending out data to many computers to do calculations on in the computer’s spare time. It started with Distributed.net attempting to crack MD5 encryption with brute computing force. As Distributed gained popularity other projects started popping up en masse. The SETI@home project focuses on detecting interstellar communications from across the universe by sorting through massive amounts of radio telescope data.
One project I personally participated in was the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, also known as GIMPS, searched for a specific type of prime number called a Mersenne prime (if you hadn’t already figured it out from the name of the project). There are several projects which attempt to solve the puzzles of protein folding. One of them is Rosetta@home. But what do you get when you take the Rosetta engine and apply game theory to it? That would be a new type of distributed computing project called Fold It.
As their tag line says, “Solve Puzzles for Science”, the game is a series of protein folding puzzles. The first puzzle can be seen at the right. The gist of the game involves reorganizing the amino acids and backbones of the proteins. You move them into configurations which are compact while requiring as little energy as possible to maintain such a configuration. As the game progresses the puzzles become more difficult as the proteins which are presented become more complex.
If there are people out there who simply can “see” how proteins work in their mind’s eye—protein savants—then this game could catapult protein research forward. The Fold It site mentions that there will be a feature added over the summer that will allow for players to “design” proteins. Models which work in the Rosetta simulator can then be synthesized in the lab. This aspect of the project is most intriguing to me. It opens the door for anyone to have the chance at creating a protein which could be the key to curing AIDS, solving the world’s energy crisis or any number of issues. If you would like the chance at helping with cracking one of the most important scientific problems biologists are currently tackling, have a look at Fold It. So far, I’m having a blast folding!
What do computer science, business and knitting all have in common? They all have their own language. Within computer science we talk about bits, compilers, pipelines and buses. In the world of business and finance there are p/e ratios, entities, assets and liabilities. If you don’t knit then purling and “the English method” make no sense and good luck trying to understand what “*K2tog, ps; rep from * to end” means.
It is obvious that someone who only knows English can not verbally communicate with someone who only knows Spanish. But it is less obvious when two English speakers come to the table to talk investments and one speaker does not know the language of finance. Unfortunately the conclusion often is that the speaker who lacks financial literacy is simply stupid. This type of attitude holds many people back from fixing his or her problem of ignorance so that he or she remains in the dark forever.
The line between being ignorant and lacking intelligence is a line which is rarely drawn. Ignorance can be fixed. Ignorance is simply a state of not being informed about a subject. This a problem which has a solution through education.
When it comes to literacy about subjects like physics, chemistry and biology the American culture has groomed its citizens to acquire the language of each subject through the university system. But this is not true of subjects like personal finance and investing for retirement. From talking with friends and family, it seems most people receive minimal education on such topics while in high school. Generally I hear they had to take a single class or there was a week or two of personal finance tucked away inside another class. My hope is that this changes promptly. [If anyone has examples of schools which are taking the time to teach students about finance, please let me know in a comment!]
Over the past few years I have slowly but surely been teaching myself exactly what money is and represents, becoming financially literate. While I recognize that there are already a slew of writers tossing their opinion in the ring, I intend to do what I can to help, if only within my small sphere of influence. The first step to fixing a problem is recognizing what the problem is, which from my experiences has generally been simple ignorance of financial language.
If you want to learn more, especially if you feel out of control of your finances, start by reading sites like Motley Fool and subscribe to Get Rich Slowly. Read the writings of authors like Warren Buffet and Robert Kiyosaki. The first step towards literacy is education and the Internet does an amazing job of bringing education into our homes at little to no cost.
To paint your living room you have to remove all the furniture. Then you must lay down covers so the floor does not get paint on it. After that comes the masking of windows, door frames, etc. Now you are ready to get paint all over a set of clothing you don’t particularly care about. Then, hopefully, some of the paint gets on the walls. What if you could skip all of that and change the color and even the texture of your walls just by pressing a few buttons?
To pull off such a feat, augmented reality comes to the rescue! Augmented reality, or AR, is a blending of “true” reality and virtual reality. Generally AR systems use computers to track the motion of objects and use that data to overlay useful information into our field of vision–such as adding virtual objects to the real world. Most applications to date have involved camera setups which track 2D “barcodes” to achieve motion tracking.
This morning I stopped by IGN.com for the first time in months and immediately encountered an interview with Harald Seeley of CryTek. While the interview is quite interesting, talking about licensing CryENGINE 2 and its future applications, the demo video that they are showing off is the bread and butter. The demo is a recreation of a Sony Bravia advert from 2005 which involved a couple hundred thousand “bouncy balls” that were rolled down a street in San Francisco. For the demo, the balls were replaced with the ever classic 3D model–the teapot!
This demo hits home for me, as I am a proponent of simulated reality technologies. The graphics hardware of tomorrow combined with advanced rendering software like CryENGINE 2 get us one step closer to simulated reality becoming…reality. The demo shows hundreds of thousands of (apparently rubber) teapots bouncing down a modeled street among many cars as bystanders watch wondering what the hell is going on. Take a peek and drool as you realize that video on par with Pixar movies is being rendered in real time.
With the first post at randallagordon.com comes the dawn of my attempt to help change our world. I will write as regularly as is reasonable to promote topics which I am passionate about. I’m certain a lot of what I write will be a rehash of familiar concepts. But I believe that the more ways a concept is retold, the more chance that it will sink in for someone who didn’t understand previously. Topics covered here will include a mix of rants and arguments, political statements, self-help and how-to articles and as a platform to provide information about my current projects.
I will soon be discussing why saying the alphabet in reverse can be a useful teaching tool. The importance of feedback in social situations has been on my mind lately, so there will be articles discussing why your friends are your true sixth sense. As I believe an exercised mind is a healthy mind, there will be plenty of push for mental workouts and education. Morality in the corporate world is a special concern of mine, so I shall write about best practices in sales environments (are you a sales samurai or a sales ninja?). And there will be the occasional technical article, such as how to make your own midichlorians…
In general, there will be a bit of everything to look forward to. Hopefully you will enjoy what I have to say, and possibly even find something useful.
