A New Direction

My thesis is, finally, finished and is in the process of being graded. I have a lot of thoughts on the process along with plenty of regrets, but I feel that it’s probably more prudent to wait until after my formal defense is finished before writing about any of those things here. But yes–I’ll do a recap and post a link to a PDF sometime in the next month or so, but now there are many more important things to discuss.

In what will doubtlessly be an exciting and tumultuous transformation, this here wordpress is going to become michaelwolfe.net: internet mecca. I haven’t decided if I’m going to be taking my hosting elsewhere, but in the meantime I’m going to try and muck around with this page and see if I can’t make wordpress.com work for me. But yeah, I’m gonna clean it up, post more personal information, and better integrate it with my web presence more generally. And, ideally, I’ll be posting more.

videos of turntables

Today we’ve got a guest post from my good friend Joel. I’m not sure it needs much more introduction than that–I just found this really interesting and thought some of you might as well.

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I think i first saw a turntable video for an old funk or soul 45. It made sense to me, you have something which is only on vinyl, but someone wants to put on youtube. How do you do it? film it and upload the film, of course! And the first few I saw were just a guy holding his camera and maybe putting it down once the song was queued up and playing.

Then there is stuff like this, where the music has been reissued and put out on cd, so it’s not necessary to film the record, but this is still nice. You can see the lp cover, his assorted junk. It provides a little bit of a visual, as opposed to a name on a blue screen, rotating images of the band, a shot of the record label or whatever else accompanies song videos.

You want an economic stimulus?

So, as some of you might know, I’ve got some problems with the new stimulus bill. I can’t say that I have the knowledge or economic know-how to criticize the effectiveness of Keynesian stimuli, but I am fairly sure that the whole thing is an effort to keep our absurd and untenable standard of living afloat. Quite frankly, I’m convinced that any such effort is doomed to fail simply because the American lifestyle that I’ve grown up with is completely unsustainable. That’s all I’ll say on that, I’m just using this as a segue to a subject that is, by all accounts, ten times more fun.

My thinking is, since we’re already going to spend $1 trillion, I say let’s spend it on something awesome. Roads? Awful. Cars and the auto industry? I’d rather they didn’t exist. Defense spending? Don’t get me started. Science and the arts? Well, yes–I’m fond of those. But what we really need–and I hope that all my executive and congressional readers are paying attention–is a continental network of maglev vactrains.

How fast are maglev trains? Real frikkin’ fast–Shanghai’s transrapid achieves a top speed of 431 km/h. But you know what happens when you put that same train in an evacuated (airless) tunnel? All of a sudden you can start moving the damn thing at thousands of kilometers per hour. I’d sure like to be able to take a train to LA and get there in under an hour, how about you? Besides, I imagine that building this thing would create quite a few jobs, don’t you? And, as infrastructure, it will continue to be very valuable for years to come.

I’ve also got a neat link on the subject: R.M. Salter’s 1972 RAND report on the “Very High Rapid Transit System”. Where was our leadership? Why do we not have this system in place currently? What’s a couple trillion dollars, when you can have super trains? Government, don’t let us down on this. Again.

New Internet Policy

In light of recent thesis-related productivity failures, I think it has become time to [temporarily] sever my connection to the ‘net. Of course, if this page were the only evidence of my being online, one would probably think that maybe I should I log on a little more often. Alas, most of my time is spent in an awful quagmire of RSS feeds, TEDTalks, and old He-Man episodes on Hulu.

My new policy is this: I’m only allowed online for ten minutes every two hours. Exception: I’m allowed to use my phone’s data connection, but I’m restricted to a low-speed connection and Google Reader is strictly off limits. The idea is that if I make using the ‘net as painful as possible, perhaps I’ll actually get some work done.

This blog may updated more frequently as a possible side effect, as I don’t need to be online to write. I imagine that it would be a better kind of procrastination.

A CS Project

So I had a couple of long nights this week putting the finishing touches on a project for my intro to CS class. I can’t claim that I’ve made anything revolutionary, or even fully functional, but I’m fairly pleased with the quality-to-effort ratio, adjusted for my lack of skill and experience.

In any event, the project depends on user-generated content, so if any of the four or so people who have this on their RSS readers want to check it out and make a quick post or two that’d be great–it would help illustrate how it works for my grader. You don’t have to be a Harvard affiliate, that whole schtick is just in there because the project is meant to be “relevant to life at Harvard.”

Thanks! Oh, and the project is here: Suggestion Box