Some of the other expats here were wondering how popular various candidates were in the eyes of young adults. I figured that perhaps the easiest sample size to attain was through Facebook.
Below is an image I put together with the magic of cut/paste/resize and MS Paint. All of the data comes from the built-in “US Politics Support” application created by FB itself.
And for what it is worth, Ron Paul is the most popular vato based on who I am friended with (RP has 36, Obama is in second with 10, Thompson with 7).
One of the many questions that I am frequently asked by other Westerners here in Korea, pertains to my status as a native Texan. On several occasions inquiring minds wanted to know my thoughts on the North versus South.
To their surprise, none of my ancestors had reached the shores of the New World by the time of the Civil War had commenced. In fact, once they landed, just about everyone on both sides of the tree migrated far West, to the Pacific coast. Thus, all I can really discuss is historical minutiae.
Devilish details
For instance, did you know that a number of the Indian Nations actually seceded from the Union and joined the Confederacy? In October of 1861 the Cherokees, Creeks, Seminoles, Choctaws and Chickasaws join “to make common cause with the South and share its fortunes.”
Or how about this, George McClellan, who at one point was general-in-chief of the Union army, ran as a presidential candidate in 1864? As a Democrat. Against Lincoln. On an anti-war platform. And, with a firm desire to negotiate a treaty with the Confederacy.
That didn’t get many elementary schools named after him.
And like the Battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812, the last major battle of the Civil War also occurred after the ceasefire agreement had been signed. And fortunately for the stereotype, the Battle of Palmito Ranch took place in Texas.
From Russia with love
In the fall of 1863 Czar Alexander II of Russia sent two battleships to America. One to New York City and the other to San Francisco. These were sent as a symbol of support, of solidarity by Russia, as they themselves were fighting a war with the Polish. Lincoln is even reported to have said that he supported the Russian pacification of Poland, and justified his invasion of the South for similar reasons (e.g., “save the Union, free the peasants”).
The ships were also believed to have been sent to eventually help break the alliance between the South and England. Did you know that the English (including Lord Acton and Prime Minister William Gladstone) were generally staunch supporters of the rebellion?
The English were fans of the relatively cheap cotton they could purchase from the South and were not enthused with a rebranded Tariff of Abominations, enacted by the North, which increased the costs to import it. Thus, the British even built a modern fleet of naval ships for the CSN.
Perhaps the most interesting of these vessels was the CSS Alabama, which despite numerous battles, never saw the Northern coast.
Not quite the Oregon Trail
Believing they could unite with the fledging Bear Republic (California) - which itself was comprised of many Southerners whose desire to remain independent of the Northern tax man and worried Northern politicians - several regiments of Texas riflemen trekked across the wilderness of New Mexico and actually fought several real battles with Union soldiers in the northwest part of what was then a Territory.
However, even if they had won in New Mexico, the Union had sent several regiments to California, to prevent it from seceding and thus, would have probably have defeated the motley group of Texans.
In Exile
After Union troops arrested dissidents and those sympathetic to the rebellion and installed a puppet government, the remnants of Missouri’s original government fled to Texas and setup an interim capital in Marshall, in East Texas.
And despite being on the losing side of the war, Texas became the new home to displaced Southerners, who placed a simple sign on their former properties: GTT, Gone to Texas.
So where’d the Texans go? Mexico and Brazil, where they (along with other refugees) became known as the Confederados.
While I still think Spaceballs is the best parody of the classic space opera, below are two fairly comical satires in their own right. The first is the Top 10 Robot Chicken lampoonings of Star Wars:
And the Family Guy recently aired an entire episode that poked fun of the various idiosyncrasies in A New Hope: 12345
In continuing with the war between photons and my camera, here are a few more photos from my super exciting life and times:
As I’ve previously mentioned there are thousands of westerners that move out here after finishing college, especially from Canada. These are two of my coworkers. The one on the left is originally from Romania, but went to school in Toronto. And the chica on the right is from Vancouver.
And I love you too. To be fair, I cut off the Hangul writing portrayed by the red neon sign. It says tuna.
This is one of the stranger stories I’ve heard. It turns out that following the destructive Korean war, the populace turned to cheap and reliable cans of spam to satiate their diets. It is still a staple that can be found in any store in more varieties than Bubba Gump Shrimp. Everyone I work with was given a brief case filled with spam in honor of their holiday, Chuseok, which is currently being celebrated. And like many others, I become cross-eyed upon tasting this nutritious delicacy.
So, despite being several thousand miles away, the American South has somehow wedged itself into the pop culture here. This wall is just outside a popular Western bar and plays host to a plethora of random license plates, posters and trinkets. Oh, and that is the state flag of Mississippi — not a merger between the Dutch and the Confederacy.
Remember when Bart Simpson skipped school and talked his way into an R-rated movie called Naked Lunch? And moments later he walked out perturbed, saying that there were two things wrong with that title. Well, the same goes for Room Candy.
As you can tell, we had all been drinking a lot of Korea’s finest water-based beverages. And the blue thing in my hand is actually a plastic sword. Very exciting, I know. The other bloke is a buddy of mine from Scotland (has the stereotypical accent and suave Sean Connery attitude). The two girls also enjoyed the Scott and the sword.
There are a million and a half restaurants whose patrons cook and eat from these open-pits. The main dish is called Changkuksang and is complimented with an assortment of leafy vegetables. The red stuff is not tomato sauce, rather it is spicy sauce that is served with just about every meal here. The guy on the left is one of the funniest guys I’ve met and hails from Australia (though he’s lived on nearly every continent). Across from him is his fiancée who I think is from England or maybe New Zealand — she’s a Briton of some variety.
Only in Korea can you buy a product from Blizzard in a corner store. More on their zealous fandom.
That pretty much sums up the nation of New Zealand, right?
About a month ago my younger, globe-trotting sister (seriously, she’s visited something like 20 countries) flew out to the land where Hobbits are made.
And oddly enough, 4 million regular-sized humans live and work in cities comparable to those found in America; complete with electricity, running water, even the internets.
If you’re interested in seeing what another Texan thinks of our dragon/unicorn infested world, you may be interested in her travel blog, complete with pictures.
Here are the first of a million photos I’ve taken. I have some videos too, but the quality isn’t terribly good — plus the cool ones are were done in a dark night club.
My friends and I found an authentic Pancho’s Mexican Cantina in Itaewon this weekend. It had legit tortillas, guacamole, and most importantly, sombreros. Here I am posing with the token Mexican host (he actually spoke Spanish) and our Korean waitress.
This was one of the bartenders at the NB club in Gangnam. He didn’t speak English, but made up for it with some very strong drinks. This place was pretty damn packed too (I’ll try to put something on Youtube).
Simply put, caca means “shit” in Spanish. While Konglish is en vogue, perhaps Spanorean or something will one day become the lingua franca.
A couple of my students. The one on the right actually spent a number of years in Canada and speaks fluent Canadianese. Oddly enough her younger, hyper brother is in the same class.
Korean toddlers are bar none, some of the cutest kids I’ve seen (rivaling even my young niece and nephew). During the afternoon you can see them running around with their mothers, spreading fuzzy feelings faster than OMG Ponies!
This is fairly self-explanatory. To give you some context, the owners know exactly what it says and the store location is strategically placed along the main road in Itaewon. Brilliant.
Botnets are basically an automated collection of zombie computers. The term zombie computer comes from the fact that a virus, trojan, or some kind of malware has compromised the security of the system and it in turn can be used remotely for nefarious purposes (like sending massive amounts of spam).
Unfortunately the impression most non-technical people have of infected computers is that diseased computers are isolated islands that only ruin your TPS reports and latest budget outlays.
The truth of the matter is that millions of these zombied computers are actually controlled by a select few hacker groups. And interestingly enough, a gigantic multi-billion dollar black market has emerged from this “organized chaos.” The perpetrators sell and siphon off resources to the highest bidder, who typically utilize the systems to hawk a slew of wares across the unsuspecting interweb. Worse yet, some of the organizations that manage the botnets use their collective bandwidth capacity to blackmail organizations into submission, or else the target(s) will suffer a massive DoS.
If you are familiar with distributed or grid computing, this next info nugget is not at all surprising: the aggregate power of these botnets dwarfs the fastest of all supercomputers and then some.
And to add more drama to this situation, botnet owners not only battle one another for more systems (by hacking and infecting one another), but their ever-evolving strains of viruses are designed to counterattack anti-cracker organizations and endeavors.
For instance, if I used my computer to sniff and trace suspected botnets, upon being detected the botnet would retaliate with a massive DoS that would effectively end my investigation. Thus, it is typically very difficult to find and prosecute those directly responsible for the torrential flood of spam that propagates across the internet (the latest Storm war alone has resulted in a double-digit growth in spam this past summer).
So, how exactly do GPGPUs fit into this equation?
Well, the common thread is that botnets and GPGPUs are both effective at what they do due in large part because of parallelization.
Again, the prevailing non-technical view of video cards and processors is that there is one (1) core underneath all of the glossing packaging. However, this is not the reality of the situation.
One of the reasons why supercomputing firms such as Cray were able to calculate, transform and manipulate data at mind blowing rates is that their innovative systems employed the use of parallelization to maximize throughput. Systems developed by Thinking Machines and Cray used thousands of processors to accomplish feats that one computer or hundreds of independent computers could not do alone. It is this collective cooperation that efficiency is achieved, and is in many ways similar to how the human brain works (massive parallelization).
And for a number of reasons - chief of which is energy consumption and heat dissipation - many semiconductor firms have begun cramming multiple CPU cores into each physical processor. For instance, the Core Duo from Intel has two CPU cores attached at their silicon hips; and for nearly a year Intel has sold quad-core versions as well. AMD, IBM and others have also sold dual and quad-core varieties of their CPUs (the last PowerPC used by Apple was a dual-core G5 from IBM and as of last month Sun began selling an octo-core).
As a result many programs have to be rewritten to take advantage of this mutli-brain innovation — it is a detail oriented task that few programmers are proficient at (although help is coming in the form of toolkits from both AMD and Intel as well as the HPC community).
Putting the U back into Bungholio Marks
With the advent of stream computing and unified shaders, GPGPU is now the name of the brains found on newer video cards. And while the tasks of these video cards have traditionally been pigeon-holed to a select few tasks, they are now capable of sequencing proteins, accelerate anti-virus software, and a slew of other resource intensive tasks that can be quickly surmounted if processed in parallel.
Over the past five years, in addition to the traditional “main” core, consumer-grade video cards have all come with multiple shader “cores,” and by cores I don’t mean anything nearly as big as a fruitfly. For instance, nVidia’s latest and greatest 8800 Ultra card, comes with 128 shader “cores” that can be utilized to perform calculations in parallel. ATI’s newest 2900XT comes with 320. Even Intel’s latest integrated chipset (GMA X3500) includes 16 shader units.
And the world of desktops and laptops is not the only place you will find these products. In the latest battle between video game consoles, the much ballyhooed Cell processor found in the Playstation 3 has numerous “cores” including 8 SPEs; the XBox 360 has many different types as well, including 48 shader units.
And for the same evolutionary reasons all mammalian brains remained parallel in nature (redundancy, multi-taskable, scalable) this trend will probably never abate any time in our lifetime. (Note: SLI and SIMD are different topics).
No one snowflake is responsible for the entire avalanche
So while, one ALU, APU, or even CPU may seem relatively powerless in the scheme of things, hundreds and thousands of them working in tandem can provide a powerful toolset for programmers to manipulate. The same can be said for a compromised computer system. Its loner status is nothing compared to the aggregated power of thousands working in conjunction.
- A True Urban Legend: The state of Michigan threatened local beavers with a $10,000 per day fine for failing to remove their dam.
- A Real Auction on eBay: Winning bid receives an ass-kicking from ‘me’ personally.
- Space Projects from the Drawing Board: Daedalus and Longshot
- Donnybrook takes on Tyler Durden: New technology promises a thousand players per map in deathmatch
- And below is Anonymous Power, an odd compilation of clips synced to power-hour beats:
In a quick nutshell, Moore’s Law suggests that the number of transistors crammed into a CPU doubles every 18-24 months. This adage has arguably become a self-fulfilling prophecy and is typically cited by many industry observers as a barometer for continued leaps in processor performance.
However, this is the classic example of correlation being conflated with causation. And it is somewhat frustrating to read accounts by media outlets gushingly laud “billions of transistors” as if that is inherently a good thing. The truth is transistor count is agnostic in terms of actual performance, or rather it is an inconsequential variable (i.e., not all transistors are utilized equally).
For instance, in the past, various auto-manufactures have marketed horse power as the standard of performance. But more HP does not necessarily equate to faster quarter-mile speeds or better fuel consumption. Or to put it another way, this would be equivalent to suggesting that the more a car weighs the faster it is. The heavier the engine, the faster it will go.
And to the chagrin of the Chicago ad agencies, these claims are simply false rhetoric.
Barometer schmerometer
German-engineered vehicles are famous in part for the relatively small, yet powerful engines. This development was spurred in part by the government, which for decades has levied a taxation on engine block sizes — due to the erroneous belief that the wealthier you are, the bigger engine you can buy — it is a tax specifically targeted at “eating the rich” who are thought to create more pollution (the Bundestag is now looking at taxing emissions instead of block sizes). Furthermore, Japanese and Italian motorworks are also notorious for their high-performance relative to their low-mass due to widespread use of special, light-weight composites and alloys.
This mass-based tomfoolery was taken to the opposite extreme in the Eastern bloc, when state-controlled car manufactures were managed under a quota system. And the “heavier is better” philosophy underlying the quota directed companies such as AZLK to create some of the heaviest yet most uncomfortable and unreliable cars ever.
Heavier than air
There are countless counterexamples exposing this flaw, after all, how do you measure performance between heavier airplanes like the A380 versus a nimble F-22? Is speed or cargo room the most important? (I wouldn’t put it past the defense industry to construct heavy, but useless aircraft).
The problem with looking at transistors as the leading contributor of performance is that merely adding more transistors does not automatically cause better performance. In fact, it could theoretically have just the opposite effect as seen with the original Itanium.
Unfortunately transistor counts wholly ignores the multitude of hardware design variables that have contributed to todays breakneck speeds, such as out-of-order execution, SIMD parallelization, on-die caches and SMT (not to mention software written to take advantage of these developments).
For years, one of the pillars in the RISC versus CISC debate was in part over how many stages an optimum pipeline needed to be: 5, 10, 15, 20? And at various times the actual performance crown (measured by SPEC scores), flipped back and forth between design camps (Alpha’s versus Pentium Pro’s comes to mind). Thus raising the question, is more better? If yes, why not create a 1000 stage pipeline?
A microscopic balancing act
For instance, the original Pentium had a 5-stage pipeline, the Pentium Pro had 14, the Pentium III had 10, the original Pentium 4 (the first to use the NetBurst architecture) had 20, and Prescott (the last P4 NetBurst revision) had 31 stages. [As a RISC comparison, the original G4 used by Apple had a 4 stages, the G4e had 7, and the G5 had 10 stages]
During the development of these chips, two of the leading factors the designers had to juggle was throttling instructions-per-cycle and power management (watts consumed). And the resulting tradeoff found in the current Core architecture underlying the latest Intel chips: it has a mere 14 stages (inherited in part from the 12/14 from the Pentium M). [Note: BeHardware has one of the easier to understand write-ups on the pipeline evolution from NetBurst to the current Core]
Pipeline stages have not been the only battle ground either. During the height of the megahertz wars, both AMD and Apple went to great lengths to disspell the notion that “more is faster.” And guess what? It turns out that not all megahertz are created equal: “The Megathertz myth.”
Ultimately focusing on trillions of transistors misses the bigger picture, because it wholly ignores the flow electrons will actually travel and how they are productively utilized while they zig and zag.
Historicism in action
I would argue that FLOPS and MIPS are a much better indicator of real-world performance than that of Moore’s Law. It is no surprise then, that the fastest supercomputers (Top 500) are not measured based on the collective amount of transistors they are comprised of, but rather, the LINPACK metric which establishes performance numbers measured in FLOPS. Furthermore, when a new CPU is introduced, the designers typically use the tests created by the SPEC board, which measure performance based on mathematical calculations — not transistor counts — to benchmark their “true” performance.
In the end, what journalists and industry observers should do to measure performance trends is plot points on their affectionate charts and graphs detailing FLOPS and MIPS… in terms of dollars and watts. Kind of like the Big Mac Index published by The Economist.
As it stands right now, Moore’s Law is not a measure of performance and merely stands as a testament to extreme miniaturization (barring benchmarks, for all we know no performance increases have occurred).
I wonder if there is any kind of common advice guidance counselors give to kids that want to write tomes — the really thick books that everyone references but no one reads.
Case in point, economist Guido Hülsmann recently had his 1000 page masterpiece published this month. It covers the life and times of Ludwig von Mises, an economist whose wiki entry hardly does him justice.
Incidentally enough, I met Hülsmann in the summer of 2004, the dog days of August to be exact. I was attending an economics seminar in the quite countryside of Auburn, Alabama.
The first real encounter actually involved me giving him a reverse bearhug, preventing him from running away. While I struggled to subdue the energetic German, several other economists-in-training grabbed one of those orange water coolers that dot the sidelines of sporting events and doused him with a cold shower (Daniel D’Amico of GMU was another one of the culprits).
That’s certainly one way to become acquainted.
Later that evening I bumped into him at a local bar whereupon he hid any visible signs of animosity and shared stories over the finest imported beers (Heineken I think). A friend of mine that works at the parent Institute hosting the seminar mentioned that Hülsmann had just capped off the finishing touches on the first real biography of Mises. So, quite naturally I asked Hülsmann what it was like tackling such a monumental task.
He looked at me and said he was relieved it was over, due to the arduous work involved.
You see, while he his research activities had been funded by various donors, he was a one-man army tackling a intercontinental subject matter that most contemporaries would have several other researchers assisting with. In fact, if you check out the acknowledgment section of the book, you will see the numerous experts that had to be contacted throughout the globe, to effectively perform this exhaustive and original exposition. And for the most part, he did it alone.
Did I mention that there were only two people really qualified for the job? (You basically had to be a professional economist fluent in the tongues of Mises, not the least of which is German). So it was either him or Hans Hoppe and Hoppe was very busy with other projects.
Which brings me to a friend of mine, B.K. Marcus, who is acknowledged for his services in Hülsmann’s opus.
About a year later, around the same time I was writing my first piece on the FCC, I was introduced to a polymath, a genuine autodidact through attorney Stephan Kinsella. It turns out that this fellow traveler was in the middle of proof reading and editing Hülsmann’s tome — a full-time job in and of itself.
Anyways, over the following weeks and months we exchanged messages over IM, some of which pertained to the laborious task at hand. He mentioned that there were various pieces of information that unfortunately stood the test of time. For instance, in describing the collegiate culture Mises grew up in, Hülsmann notes:
Student life was generally organized through fraternities, which tended to segregate based on place of origin. This provided newcomers to the capital city with a network of their countrymen for mutual support; it also introduced them to established former members who could later be helpful in finding suitable employment. But the fraternities often degenerated into associations dedicated to excessive collective alcohol consumption, and tended to glorify violence and a militaristic lifestyle, with variants of a half-baked nationalistic ideology. (p. 65)
And based on my own first-hand experience with modern fraternities, these observations do not seem to have faded over the past century.
A mobius strip
In many ways, the debut of the book has completed a circle started three years ago. At that time I was juggling two different graduate fields, neither of which truly captivated me. One I finished, the other I put on hold.
However, I also befriended a number of the students and kept in touch with several of them, including four others who were the same age as me. Two of them are now finishing PhDs in economics (one at U of West Virginia, the other at GMU), one is getting a PhD in political science at U of Colorado at Boulder and the other is finishing up a PhD in history at UC Riverside. And all of them are passionate about their concentrations (three of them are even partial towards the Austrian School).
So, should someone call Vegas to find out the odds on one of them writing a tome, or has the interweb ended the age of really thick books?
[Note: Picture #1 takes place just after Hülsmann got soaked. #2, Hülsmann is sitting to my left as is Andrew Neumann who is at the U of West Virginia. The guy in front of me is David Veksler, webmaster of Mises.org and fellow Aggie. #3 was just an excuse to make me look popular]
Remember that cludgy old Newton? I had one for a year, back in 1995, and found it be of little use — aside from its inherent paperweight abilities and the obligatory game of Tetris during geometry class.
Now that Apple has released the anticipated iPod Touch, which is basically the iPhone sans phone-abilities, is this basically what a PDA should be like? Or is it just the opposite?
As far as the phone capabilities go, since it has WiFi built into it, all some enterprising individual(s) needs to do now is create a VoIP hack that allows you to do the unthinkable. Right?
I plan on grabbing the Touch within the next week or so and am crossing my fingers that a hack will be available shortly (so much cheaper and convenient for international calls…).
The only thing I wish that had been included was a digital camera, even a dinky one. [I already have a phone and don't care for virtual keyboards (I played around with an iPhone before I left the West, I'll stick with a meatspace QWERTY)].
Prior to World War I the intelligentsia of Europe and most of the academic world spoke German. Yet, while hundreds of the greatest minds may have shared the same dialect, in some cases this seems to be the only commonality they had with one another — as their philosophical beliefs and theorems diverged in the most polar of ways. This of course is no different than with the lingua franca of today, English.
For instance, economist Ludwig von Mises, philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Adolf Hitler were all born and raised in Austria at around the same time (Wittgenstein and Hitler were a mere six days apart).
That said, I found the following picture of interest:
I couldn’t tell you much more about Wittgenstein aside from the material gleaned from his wiki entry (although one of my “logic” professors was a proponent of ol’ Witts theories); to me he seemed like just another logical positivist and socialist — philosophies diametrically opposed to the a priorism and liberalism espoused in Mises’ Privatseminar.
It would be curious to know how the two men (Witt and Hitler) would interact with one another, say in 1940, 50 or so years after that picture was taken. Wittgenstein’s family was Jewish and eventually migrated to parts of the West (both America and England), and Wittgenstein himself was opposed to the Nazi regime. [Note: Mises, who was also Jewish and an ardent critic of Nazism, was forced to flee to Switzerland and America, and had much of his corpus confiscated by the Nazis and later the KGB]
And as an added bonus, here are two strange bedfellows:
The backstory on the image above can be found in the National Security Archive at George Washington University. It eerily foreshadows to the Cheney’s 1994 interview with C-SPAN regarding the aftermath of Iraq after Operation Desert Storm.
See also: Wittgenstein, Austrian Economics, and the Logic of Action (PDF)
One of the many questions that I am frequently asked by other Westerners here in Korea, pertains to my status as a native Texan. On several occasions inquiring minds wanted to know my thoughts on the North versus South. 
Or how about this, 
The English were fans of the relatively cheap cotton they could purchase from the South and were not enthused with a rebranded 
After Union troops arrested dissidents and those sympathetic to the rebellion and installed a puppet government, the remnants of Missouri’s original government fled to Texas and setup an interim capital in 
So, how exactly do GPGPUs fit into this equation?
Putting the U back into Bungholio Marks
In a quick nutshell, 
This mass-based tomfoolery was taken to the opposite extreme in the Eastern bloc, when state-controlled car manufactures were managed under a quota system. And the “heavier is better” philosophy underlying the quota directed companies 
During the development of these chips, two of the leading factors the designers had to juggle was throttling 
I wonder if there is any kind of common advice guidance counselors give to kids that want to write tomes — the really thick books that everyone references but no one reads.
Did I mention that there were only two people really qualified for the job? (You basically had to be a professional economist fluent in the tongues of Mises, not the least of which is German). So it was either him or 
A mobius strip
Remember that cludgy old Newton? I had one 
