Just your basic run of the mill update

Diet

60% good, 40% bad.  Was eating healthy for a while (all last week), but when my trip got delayed I fell off the wagon.  I’m supposed to be travelling for work but right now, but due to delays typical of the oil industry, I’m on hold.  I don’t want to buy any food that will spoil so I’ve been eating out, which is sometimes good but mostly bad.

Exercise

It’s amazing how fast my body improved in aesthetics from lazily cranking out some pull ups now and again.  I haven’t started going hardcore, but banging out some body weight exercises now and again to get the ball rolling and everything is looking good.   Will hopefully start sprints/jogging soon.  I am training as if I will enlist at the end of the year, with the goal of being able to get a perfect PFT.  That would be 20 dead hang pull ups, 100 crunches in 2 minutes, and a 3 miler in 18 minutes.  That’s going to be tough considering my PR in CC was 17:36 when I was training 5 to 6 times a week.

Finances

Things are looking great!  I got nearly 5000$ back from my taxes last year, and tomorrow they will be applied to close out 1 of my loans.  Sometime next month I will be able to pay off another, and be down to 20k in college loan debt at 6.8% interest.  After that I just need to pay less than 2600$/month and I will be debt free by the end of the year!  I spent a lot of this month due to vacationing with my cousins/brother in mammoth, but other than that been doing a great job meeting my reduced budget.  Full update to come in a week!

Life

Being on hiatus for travel is amazingly frustrating, but other than that things are going great.  Currently I’m reading a lot, thinking of what to do with my life, and enjoying my time.  Currently one of my roommates is planning to move out and we have to find a replacement, but other than that things are perfect.

Minimalization

I’ve minimalized a bit more, and I’m loving it.  If I were to build storage under my bed I could fit everything I own in a room half the size  (10’x5′) or even less.  I still have some junk, but will likely toss it/donate it the next time I move.

Business plans

Been super lazy about generating business ideas or even playing with my Arduino, doh!  Constantly reading and learning about money though, so I don’t consider this a total bust.

Leaving Behind Media

Very hard to stop!  I always have the urge to surf the news, but so far have been resisting okay.  I occasionally gloss over facebook, but don’t read yahoo news, ocregister, lifehacker, or arstechnica anymore, wohoo!

When preparing to interview at my current company, I googled “interesting interview questions” and one that I came across was, “what would happen in the short and long term for society if teleportation were discovered?”  I randomly remembered this (because a friend posted an article by a blogger exploring the implications of self driving cars, so not too random), and though it would be fun to explore because I feel I won’t fall asleep for a while.

This question, much like zombies, cannot be explored without setting some ground rules.  For example, if people could teleport like in Jumper, the implications short and long term are simple: widespread crime and the death of the human race or the breaking of the human race into groups of familial/communal groups.  So since that would be no fun to explore as a positive technology, let’s make some assumptions:

• Teleportation requires a pad to send and receive, meaning things must physically be placed on them.
• Teleportation requires a small but finite time to accomplish.
• Teleportation pads have traceable transactions, meaning using them for crime would require great ingenuity.
• Teleportation obeys the speed of light limit, required or a discussion of the physics becomes too abstract.

Now this is a decently defined and explorable situation (wow I’m such an engineer).  Thinking a bit further, there is another major assumption which we must make before exploring the idea.

• Teleportation costs some amount of electricity.  Based on the cost, the implications will be far different.  At a cost of pennies we could look at interstellar travel, amazon becoming 99% of the economy etc.  At the energy cost of a nuclear bomb, the implications are much more different.  For fun let’s assume it costs about the amount of energy to light a light bulb for 1 hour to transport any item which fits on the pad anywhere in the universe.  Spacetime is complicated, so let’s just assume the universe operates only under newton’s principles.

Already we can see  I must make numerous assumptions to define the problem and have a meaningful discussion of the subject, and each assumption I make cuts down on the implications or at least alters them.

So in the short term, cars will become completely useless except for racing and transportation from transporter pads to local areas or vice versa.  Every industry will be affected.  Amazon can deliver things to your house, so can a farmer.  Wars will be completely different because personnel can be moved instantly and the logistics of supplying an army will be completely different.  An inability to block transporter pads will mean the entire world burns as one country sends military through pads in enemy countries, so let’s assume transporters have some sort of screening.

But then, when thinking of war, we must think if there is a size limit to teleportation, for transprorting a man or a tank will surely change the implications for war.  And while addressing the idea of size, we must address mass.  Doesn’t mass decrease as a body increases toward the speed of light or something?  Anyway, there are many short term implications, but I am getting tired so let’s move to some long term.

Space travel will be revolutionized.  Imagine sending a probe with a transporter to other planets, and able to send personnel and equipment.  Astronauts could sleep at home.  Probes could be sent to other solar systems, as fuel could be transported to them mid flight to increase their speed close to the speed of light.  Althogh the implications of magically adding mass to a space ship again, mess with the physics of the situation.

If you transport something to a transporter pad, does it have the same velocity as the pad it came from or the pad it transported to.  If you sent something to a space ship and it wasn’t going the same exact velocity as the landing pad, it would basically be a bullet.  Even on Earth that would be true as the Earth is moving relative to the sun as well as the center of the universe.  So eventually the implications get too bogged down in the science and the only meaningful implication would require teleportation to be so well defined that it would be pointless, because as developing the rules for teleporation you would shape the interpretation.  It is similar to imagining an alternate universe.  With nothing concrete, assumptions must be made which will undoubtedly shape the interpretation.  So the most important takeaway, Mr. Interviewer, is that I understand one of the key points of engineering: check your assumptions.

Or rather, why do they spend so much money on a mode of transportation?  By my calculations, if I made 100,000$ a year, after my budget of roughly 2k per month, taxes, 6% 401k match, 5.5k into a Roth IRA, I could save about 30k per year.  That means to buy a decent car I would have to work for AN ENTIRE YEAR, making over double what most people make!  to buy a BMW 135i with some options, I’d have to work a year and a half.  A cool car is not worth a year of my life, especially not my young life when I should be living it up.

Is a cool car really worth a year of your life?  A year of college for your kid?  An entire year off work?

Psych, season 4, episode 7, a man on a bike witnesses something he shouldn’t, and is spotted, then proceeds to flee some men who are shooting at him.  Miraculously he temporarily manages to escape them by climbing  the fire escape into his own apartment.  What does he do?

…

HE SENDS A FREAKING EMAIL!

Now me, I would have loaded my gun and hid to wait.