Prime Ideas

I’m going to be starting a new section on HAM radio that I plan to start posting kits and other experiences I gain as I navigate the complex world of radio navigation. To get started I have received my Technician license and currently plan to take the General License test next month. I hope in the next 2 months to have my Extra Class License and learning as much as possible about this very interesting hobby.

A few weeks ago I participated in the Ride for Diabetes that took place in Tyrone Georgia and had a blast. It was fun being able to help out and receiving all the compliments about how much organized things were with us on site.

Here is a short write up on the day’s events and I plan to start posting more soon.

On Sunday May 17, 2009, members from the McDonough GA based Southern Cresent Amateur Radio Club, participated in communications assistance for the Diabetes Ride in Tyrone Georgia. Years past had seen cars driving back and forth between rest stops trying to keep them filled with supplies, and having points some 20 miles from base and spread apart along a winding 100 mile course proved more than they could manage. Communications in past events didn’t really exist and most of the people manning the rest stops had to just sit and wait for supplies that in most cases never came. I personally was met with surprise when I showed up at my assignment, as many people involved were asking questions about what HAM was and why we were there. Numerous comments were made related to years past and how they had to just sit and hope things they needed would eventually be delivered. Later in the morning I was thanked numerous times for helping out and received comments on how nice it was to be able to have requests immediately sent back to home base to have them filled. Through the day, everything from water, ice, powerade, food and rider assistance requests were sent back to base and withing 30 minutes or so, would be seen filled.

Communications between the different rest stops and home base where made over the local repeaters and worked flawlessly. I’m sure after the effect we had over the overall flow of information and supplies that we’ll become a permanent fixture in future events. People that had done this particular event for the past few years were asking why we hadn’t gotten there sooner. A few at my stop seemed to be pretty impressed that we were able to communicate so quickly between each site, helping to organize pickups, get supplies and provide over all status reports on rider counts and positions. Of course, the morning brought the obvious questions about whether we had ever heard of cell phones and the Internet, but after seeing how well everything went with us on-site, I think they quickly realized the benefits.

Overall it was a perfect day, although the rain and windy conditions did wear on you a bit by the time things were wrapping up. This was my first ever event, and other than participating in one net meeting around the McDonough area, I had never really spent much time on the radio. However, the other operators were very nice and professional to work with and I have already signed up to do the Peachtree Road Race in July. It was a true pleasure to work with the other HAM’s and they really are some of the most helpful and friendly people I’ve been around.

Glenn Hancock
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This is a rather long video but boy will it open your eyes to the US government and what the anti-drug movement is all about. Great video!

http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/blackhat-lounge/46995-awesome-documentary-must-see-if-youre-sane.html

Here is an audio interview with hempest.com that also adds more information. Note that its interesting that we can buy it and make things from it but we can’t grow it. How retarded is our government?

http://store.hempest.com/catalog/files/Thisweek.mp3

I am not going to claim that I know everything there is to know about Quantum Physics or Quantum Computing but then, who can? It would be like making the statement that there is a single person on earth that understands the current IRS tax code here in the United States. There are lots of assumptions and a lot of things stated as proven fact, but in the end, there is very little truly understood.

Take for a moment superposition: This is a word used to try to explain the fact that a particle exists in more than one position at the same moment in time, and that only the measurement of that particle causes it to choose one position over another. For example: In an earlier post I tried to explain the 2 slit experiment in which physicists say that a single electron fired towards 2 slits, travels through both slits at the same time. And that only our measurement (or attempted measurement) causes it to choose a single hole or the other. See my earlier post as to why I think this might be wrong, but for now I want to assume they are correct.

In today’s world of computers, we typically use 8 bits of memory to hold a single character. These memory bits hold either a 0 or a 1 and we have a possible 255 characters we can make up. This combination of 0’s and 1’s allows us to represent massive amounts of information and processes. Computer programs use this information in order to determine what a user just typed at the computer keyboard, or what is currently displayed on the screen. Now watch this!

Quantum Computing is the attempt to use electron states to represent this 0 or 1 by measuring the particles spin, and using that value to represent information. But as we just stated above, in the world of Quantum Physics, a particle exists in all places at once, or at least until we measure them. Physicists use this behavior to state that it’s now possible to represent an entire character set with only 8 bits. In the old system, you would have 2 states multiplied times 8 positions which yields 255 different combinations. In the Quantum Computing methodology, they claim you’d only need the 8 positions, since all 8 particles are representing all possible combinations at once.

They go on to tell us that it will be possible to have computers that can overrun time itself, due to the fact that according to Quantum Physics, and supposed tests, particles can actually communicate information with no respect to Einstein’s theory of relativity and the speed of light.

So, let’s consider for a moment a computer made from particles that are interpreted via the rules of Quantum Physics. What would it tell you? I want to store the word “mouse” in it’s memory. How would one accomplish this? According to Quantum Physicists, the computer would require a lot less memory to store the entire word and would be capable of communicating this information faster than the speed of light, heck, instantly. But thinking through the logical use of this computer gets a little crazy. I mean, lets consider a computer that could store information as quantum bits instead of our current magnetic type bits.

The first hurdle we have to face, is how do you move them from one location to another if they just instantly pop in and out of existence? Once you figure that out, we’d next have to determine how to preset a state for the particle before we transmit it. Then we need to somehow, magically transmit this bit of information from point A to point B. Let’s just say we figured this out. We get our little computer pumping little quantum bits out like the mad physics machine it is. We now want to try to have it remember something.

Hmm, remember what we said in the beginning? According to Quantum Physics, our little bits don’t really have a state at all until we actually measure them. In fact, we really don’t even know where the little things are until we measure them. Oh, and to make it even more interesting, we can’t really know where it is at all because we can only measure one thing at a time. We can find it, or we can measure it’s spin. Since it’s the spin we’re after, let’s just stay focused on it.

So we figured out all of our problems and now want to store the word mouse. So we set out to measuring our little quantum bits to determine what they are set to, but we actually want to adjust them to be set to a letter “m” for the first letter we want to send across the wire. So let’s say we get this done and give it a little push onto our wire. Well, we don’t really know where it is and since it pops up wherever and whenever we measure it and exists everywhere in every possible state until then, it would seem a difficult task to push it, but lets say we do.

Now we’re at the other end of the wire and we’re ready to see what it says. Remember that the other end of the line has no idea we sent an “m” to them. So they attempt to measure it, but hold up, taking seriously what was said about this little devil, we also need to assume that no one else tried to measure it along it’s way. If so, they would have effected the bit and perhaps changed its state. Perhaps even a small blemish in the line in which it was sent caused it to pop into existence along the way and change its state.

Ok, we’ll assume we have a perfect straight path and all is good, so now how to measure? Just like bit which is on or off, an electron has a spin up or a spin down, so we will just measure it to see which it is. But unlike a normal bit, we have to make some pretty major assumptions that everything is still working the same as when it left. We also have to initiate the read since the electron really doesn’t exist anywhere until we try to read it. It would seem we still only get a possible of 2 states from a single bit so the comments of a single quantum bit being able to somehow store more information than a current memory bit does, well, seems a bit strange. Yet they always do end Quantum conversations with the fact that no one really understands a thing about it.

The point to this article is that while experimentation is great and we learn a lot from it, I personally feel that we’ve give Quantum Physics a life of it’s own that might just be too far fetched to be real.

I’m sure that there are many aspects of these Quantum Computers that I just don’t understand and may never be able to understand. However, I feel that at the moment, we waste a tremendous amount of time and money, in search of magic. Either Quantum Physics is wrong, which is what I lean towards, or Quantum Computing just makes no sense.

Who’s to know? At this point, no computer has been built using this technology and the tests that have been done to show it works have been flimsy at best. Yet years have already been invested and most likely billions of dollars moved towards making the illogical logical… After all, a computer is 100% logic and nothing more…

– glenn hancock

Most people have some idea of how to create a file on their computer. Whether it be a Word document or a simple text file. However, most people have no idea how some of the cool things get done in the Unix and Linux operating systems and I hope to share one very small program called “ln” that allows you to do some really cool stuff.

First a few examples:
There are two types of links on Unix/Linux and we’ll get to both. The first is called a symbolic link and would normally be used to link a directory. For example: You have a folder that has gotten quite a bit larger than you expected and you need to move it. You have a lot of users or perhaps a website using the folder so moving it seems to be more complicated than you want to think about. Lets see the steps involved:
1) You find where you want to put the information.
2) You issue the command: mv currentfolder newfolder
Where currentfolder is where it is right now and new folder would be the full path to the new location.
3) You create a symbolic link to the new location back to the old location. Lets assume we’re in the folder where the original was before we moved it. issue the command: ln -s newfolder currentfolder

So in step 3 we created a symbolic link from the new location back to the original location. Now your site or systems are back on line and no one even knows you moved the data. So what’s with this hard link stuff? Well, hard linking is done with the “ln” command as well but without the -s on the end. What it’s used for are situations where you have a file that you want to share between multiple users but you don’t want to duplicate it by copying. You’d like them all to be able to make changes to it and when those changes are made you’d like for everyone to all see them.

To do this we’d create an original file on disk in some folder on the computer. Then we’d issue the command:
ln originalfile.txt newfile.txt

Where the originalfile.txt is the full path to the name of the file you wish to link to and newfile.txt is the full path to the new linked file you want to create. NOTE: Relative paths work as well here.

There are many cool things you can do with the link command and as an example Apple has released their latest Leopard OS to the world. One of the things it has is a very cool thing called Time Machine that not only backs up your data but provides a very cool interface for restoring things. In fact its so cool that the next time a friend comes over it will be the first thing you show them. Now when has that ever been the case? Hey Joey, take a look at my backup!

Anyway, the primary thing that allows Time Machine to do its job are hard linked files.

–glenn hancock

When getting into the higher levels of mathematics, it is necessary to completely understand what a function is and how you can use it. This blog entry will discuss this fairly simple topic and attempt to explain it in such a way that someone not versed in mathematics might understand it.

By the way: If you don’t want to read all this, click here to just watch a video…

Before we get started on what a function is, I wanted to discuss very quickly an example of why functions are important in Physics, Chemistry and yes, even business. Lets say that you are given the task of watching someone drop a baseball off of a very tall building about 450m tall ( yes very exciting! ). Your task is to sit and write down height values for every 1 second of its fall.

Since you are very board and aim to please, you quickly pull out your pencil and you start plotting points. These points might look like the following graph.

Note that in the above graph, we’ve plotted our points as the blue dots but there is also a red curve connecting them all. If you also refer to the left margin of the graph, you’ll also notice that there is a function there of 449.36+.96t-4.90t^2. So what does all this mean? Well lets dissect:

First of all, the dots represent a real world example of storing data. At some point however, people got tired of sharing all this data back and forth and started looking for other ways to represent the same facts. I mean, if we could see the same graph with a short function, who wants to sit and take a bunch of numbers and re-plot them to see what is going on? So, a function is nothing more than a mathematical representation of a path. At some point, someone was looking at all those points and said, hey Honey, take a look! If I take the number 1 and plug it into this formula, it puts a point in the exact same place as my data point. And a 2 does as well. So now, when Joe calls I can just give him this function and tell him to pick a point in time, plug it into the function and out comes the distance above the ground! She was very impressed..

So, a function is nothing more than a formula of sorts, where you plug in an x value and outcomes our y value. Just an easier way to deal with sometimes complex sets of data. However, in order to call your new function a function you must first test it by using the vertical line test. If you plot your points and at any time a vertical line dissects the graph in more than one place then you don’t actually have a function.

Also note that there are two key terms associated with the function. Domain and Range, in which the Domain consists of your x-values and the range consists of all the possible outputs of your y-value. So for example, in our case of dropping something off of the building that is 450m tall, a value of 500m for the range wouldn’t make any sense. At the same time, if it took 9.8s to fall to the ground, looking at a time of 15s wouldn’t make any sense either. So we’d say that our domain (our x value) consists of all points between 0s and 9.8s. Now, if we were to plug in 0 into our function it would give us 450m, and plugging in 9.8 would give us 0 height. So we’d say that our domain values that are valid are between 0 and 9.8.

Obviously, our original plot graph consisted of you taking 10 readings as the object fell to the ground. What happens tomorrow if I were to come to you and tell you that I need to know exactly where the object is at 1/2s intervals? Well, you’d have to get out your pad, run back to the building and drop another object so you could collect more detailed points to provide to me. What fun!

Functions to the rescue! What if I told you that I could give you a function to represent that objects path to the ground and you didn’t need any data points at all? And no matter what time interval you plug in, it will tell you precisely how high above the ground it was? Well, if you aren’t crazy over all this data collecting, you’d probably be very happy. No more collecting data, we have a FUNCTION!

We now know what a function is and I suggest you make sure that you understand the concept completely for a number of reasons. 1) its absolutely the simplest concept you’ll deal with in Calculus and 2) Its a necessity to understanding anything else I talk about in future discussions of Calculus.

–glenn hancock