Small is Beautiful

I read an interesting quote from the book Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered:

"A Buddhist economist would consider this approach excessively irrational: since consumption is merely a means to human well-being, the aim should be to obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption.... The less toil there is, the more time and strength is left for artistic creativity. Modern economics, on the other hand, considers consumption to be the sole end and purpose of all economic activity."

The author is referring to the current economic paradigm of endless growth.

Artistic creativity is a good reason to value one's own time. If I have $20, then I can use it to buy stuff that I'll get bored of eventually, or I can use it to not work for some period of time so that I can be artistic and play. That's why I love the internet -- being artistic there is free.

I'm trying to find this book so that I can read more. There will be many interesting problems that arise in the future because of our dwindling resources. They will be challenging because they will be so multidisciplinary and will challenge our "business as usual" economic models and culture.

I'm excited to see if our economic model of infinite growth changes in the future. Of course, it will have to eventually because there aren't infinite resources anywhere. How long can it go on? Changing culture is never easy.

Note to self: Read Small is Beautiful (I have a bad memory)

Minecraft Conveyer Belt

I like designing circuitry in Minecraft because it makes my degree actually seem useful while I'm in school. Recently, I built a device that brings a block from one point to another automatically. It can be used to ferry ore from a mine to a city, for example.

Until recently, I was a Youtube noob and had never made a Youtube video. I decided that I didn't want to be a noob anymore so I made a crappy video of the conveyer belt.

You can now download a map containing the conveyor belt to learn how to build it.

Linear Quadratic Regulation

I'm working on my 4th year project in electrical engineering and we are designing an autopilot for a Quadrotor. So far we've used PID controllers to try and control the beast. Luckily, MATLAB has a nifty function to tune PID controllers for you. Unluckily, that function doesn't work for one of our mathematical models. I'm not sure why, but it's definitely busted.

Long story short, I have to learn about some other method of tuning that isn't "automatic" (i.e. it's gonna be manual and manual means a lot more painful mathematically). I'm hoping that Linear Quadratic Regulation will be my golden ticket to not failing my project.

I'm reading a document about it now. Hopefully describing it here will ensure that I actually understand what I'm reading and it doesn't just get dumped out of my brain.

For those of you who haven't heard of a Quadrotor, this is a fine specimen. Ours actually has a giant bubble around it to prevent it from getting too injured when we inevitably crash.

The controller will adjust the individual rotor speeds to determine which way the Quadrotor flies. The craft determines where it is in space from 16 cameras that we have set up around the room. They give it (x,y,z). Then we tell it where to go and it goes there (in theory at least).

Mathematical Biology

Mathematical biology! After having read about mathematical biology in a Wikipedia article, I couldn't sleep last night. I kept thinking about how you might model plant growth or how plant photosynthesis could be used to generate energy.

I was googling for a free text book on the subject to sate my curiosity when I found this link: http://spot.colorado.edu/~dubin/bookmarks/b/1240.html

There was a textbook there from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. The author goes through many mathematical derivations, but he takes the time to apply it to living things.

He wrote about Phi, the golden ratio and how it could be seen in a sunflower. phi is the ratio between consecutive Fibonacci numbers as n goes to infinity.

Grow cell, turn, grow cell turn, etc. But how much of a rotation should you perform for each step? The pattern is made most efficient with a certain amount of turning. One of the greatest beauties of nature is that evolution solves mathematical problems on its own over time. The sunflower contains the best solution to the problem. The link has a little app that lets you try different rotation values and it builds a sunflower based on them. It turns out that Phi (1.61803...) is the best solution.

The golden ratio exists all over nature because the optimal growth solution has evolved over time. That's pretty amazing.


This all makes me think that the Fibonacci sequence might lead to some interesting Minecraft designs...

Why?

I've created this blog to enable future versions of me (and perhaps you) to look back and know what past versions of me were thinking.