North Korea: Please re-evaluate "military first"

In all the rhetoric coming from North Korea it is clear they are placing in the back shadow the want for reunification. In the past this meant invading South Korea, and since then it meant bolstering their military might to some day try again. It seems that day will never come, even North Korean leadership know this. They are playing the cards they have dealt to them to blackmail the world into concessions. But why? Why "military first" as a national policy? Reading the bellicose rants from their press releases it is easy to see that for them, military means survival. They feel that without a strong military confrontation and stance, they will be ignored and made irrelevant. I feel that someone, and I hope some people have tried already, to tell them they should exchange "military first" with "reunification first". Why not bolster your nations strengths in social and economic growth rather than military. Why not make themselves better people first, rather than warriors without a war, or at least without one they have a hope to survive. It seems very petty, and too immature to be the actual reason they are completely broken as a nation: their leadership wants to be seen as a god, no matter what. Not even as a great leader, but as a living god to be worshiped. Can't there be a middle ground? Why not a benevolent dictator that leads by virtue and honor, rather than childish games of name calling and global extortion?

Chromebook Pixel: Another follow up

I rarely buy something I can't touch first but after I saw the Pixel announced I knew exactly what they did. They made the perfect developer laptop, and that's what their intention was.

I think most people are like me, and what I am looking for is:

• Full size, fully functional keyboard. I was skeptical at first- after I ordered the machine I realized I hadn't even looked at the keyboard layout. THen I looked online before it shipped and saw things like a power button, a search key, no function keys. That was off-putting but nothing was really missing. Search key instead of caps-lock. That's better. The keys that I thought "weren't" function keys, actual are. They just have actual functions now.
• Bright big display. With 4:3 aspect ratio you can get more screen by going vertical. Other manufacturers with full size keyboards that have 16:10 or 16:9 won't get as many vertical pixels. This display is actually quite huge considering the amount of pixels it has- making it 'bigger' than my 30" monitor at 2600x1700. But not only is it huge, I can use it well too. The problem I've had with the 30" is having to move my head to see all those pixels on the screen. I end up using that display at a very crisp 1280x800 instead. On the pixel I can use all those pixels, and see them all. The display is small, but huge.
• Thin, yet sturdy. It's not made of plastic, this thing is pretty solid. Some laptop screens are way too thin and seem like they would bend or flex. This one is thin but solid. I threw the thing off my bed last night at 3am after I fell asleep watching a documentary on North Korea- the thing SLAM on the floor probably scare the crap out of the guy living below me. Not a scratch. I thought the hinges would have bent or something, because this thing hit really hard, but nothing. No scratch.
• Expansion, ports: Pixel has SD card reader to expand memory. I would have been happy to get USB 3 but to be honest I don't really transfer files too much any more. They are saved on the network.

So far I'm loving my Pixel, even though to be honest it's not my primary because it just stays home for now. I do some work on it from home but I am tempted daily to bring this to work to start using there because the feel of this machine is just great. My only dislike for the machine and probably the main reason I wouldn't use it at work is the glare. I hate screens with a reflection. This one is great to work at home but at work I'll have other light sources to ruin the experience.

Plato's Guardians

In Plato's Republic there is a discussion of the Guardian class, those that are imbued with power from the society in order to help guard it from itself. The only way this Guardian class can exist is if it has a special privilege. This class are the guardian/ruling class of the society. In the Republic, Socrates discusses the founding of a republic with Glaucon and Adeimantus and determine that this Guardian class is necessary for the stability of the republic to exist. I was thinking, yes this may be the case- that a balance of power given by the people to this ruling class is a fair trade, as long as the power is within reason and is held in check.
What we have been seeing lately in the US has been concerning to most people. Increased militarization of federal and even local police forces, aquisition of immense stockpiles of arms and ammunition, and possible use of drones to target citizens.  While I don't agree with these practices, I am curious to see how they are measuring to the success of the guardianship model as it has been applied to the earth.  Over the past century the 'guardian' has been gravitating toward the western world, almost completely dominated by the US.  During this time there have been questionable actions to wage wars that, even if you haven't read all the conspiracy theories on the subjects, seem completely non-credible. With all the ties and connections in countless publications and documentaries about the false flag operations throughout the world, I think we are all just on the edge of our seats to see when the next one will happen- ever since Sept 11.
But getting back to this concept of the Guardian.  Are we better off as a nation to have the guardian government militarize our homeland? Has the increased militarization over the past century helped or hurt the communities they have most affected?

North Korea is so crazy.. and so interesting.

I find myself quite interested in North Korea. It is a stale fragment of the cold war that's still alive today, as if frozen in time. I started my fascination with DPRK years ago when I happened across a documentary called 'Welcome to North Korea'. This documentary told in a somber tone gives a great overview of most of the North Korean crazy. Two other very entertaining documentaries are the ones done by Shane Smith from Vice here and here. While of course there is a little overlap to the other documentaries, these contain a lot more first person dialog and close calls when Shane taunts his tour guides and does some things that I thought would get him kicked out of the country or thrown in jail.

Besides the documentaries there are plenty of websites that poke fun at their leadership. My favorite when Kim Jong-Il was still alive is Kim Jong-Il looking at things, and of course now there is Kim Jong-Un looking at things. And of course there are also tons of memes, my favorite is the hungry Kim Jong-Un meme.

I won't go into all the crazy details here because I think that is part of the fun in watching the documentaries, but unfortunately none of the documentaries are recent. All of them from when Kim Jong-Il was still alive I think the most recent one a few years ago. Since then they have been hit hard by famine. Although I find this all very interesting I'm also kind of scared of how this will all end. If they keep arming themselves and building more and more powerful weapons they may end up provoking their own annihilation- which won't likely happen. If provoked the world will likely want to decapitate the North Korean leadership and help install a replacement regime to slowly, probably over several generations, bring them back to the world community.

If you watched the documentaries above and weren't convinced that it is their people who are the most crazy, not just the leadership, watch this documentary from National Geographic. This documentary switches between telling about the first person perspectives of the visitors as they are taken on the standard tour, similar to the Vice documentaries, but also follows the work of an eye surgeon performing 1000 cataract surgeries over 10 days.

Rail guns: fastest way to mars (or moon) and back?

I recently took a look at some of what has been done for the Google Lunar X Prize to see what has been thought up of for launch vehicles. It doesn't seem like this is a concern for the participants, probably because they just figure they will stick whatever they are building to the end of a very large bottle rocket and aim up. I've been thinking about the problem of reusable launch vehicles and what would be the best way to get things to the moon, and thought first of rail guns. They are definitely reusable but require a ton of energy to launch something with enough force to reach the moon, and there is the issue of the earths atmosphere altering the trajectory. Then I thought, what If the railgun were in a low earth orbit, like a geosynchronous space station, that would receive payloads from earth to then blast off to the moon. Rail guns are also the perfect method to continuously launch materials back from the moon. Probably from its surface. The only issue I see now is- how do we bring that payload to a stop without destroying it. On the way back to earth its fine- if we are just sending raw material back it won't even matter if it is destroyed, just needs to hit some quiet place on target and the payload can be reclaimed. On the surface of the moon we would want those materials to end up safely- as parts or materials for building permanent structures, or materials for robots or settlers. For hitting the moon I'm thinking of how the approach would be. It would need a very accurate shot- from the rail gun satellite we would really likely attain that. Then, the spacecraft would need to be able to land without using too much re calibration of trajectory or expelling a large amount of fuel to slow itself down. This is where I'm a little stumped, probably because I don't know any of the physics involved. I'm assuming the shot that reaches the moon could enter an orbit that decays its velocity to a point where the resulting velocity is very low and only due to the acceleration of the moons gravity, not from the force that brought the satellite to orbit. To land safely I was thinking of inflating a large air bag to the vehicle that would soften the landing, and strike a surface so that the vehicle would roll on the surface and slow due to friction. I added a graphic below to illustrate- the projectile wouldn't "land" but would come in at an angular descent, gravity would cause the projectile to pull in, and on-board instruments would detect the object coming closer to the surface, setting off small amount of thrust to level the descent.

Of course, this is all just speculation. I'd love to talk to someone who can point out all the reasons this couldn't work so I don't have to think much about it anymore, but until then I'll just assume this could work.

The benefits of my approach are very clear, so I really do hope it is viable:

• No need for tons of fuels for launch. We don't need to get there in a hurry, so even a minimal launch force would suffice even if it takes weeks or months to reach the moon.
• The same method would be used for return vehicles. If we really intend to mine the moon we would want to send the materials back very easily and with low cost. This is possible with my approach
• Launching vehicles on the way to the moon from orbit reduces the complexity and energy requirements of launching from earth. 

After thinking a bit further about this idea it became even more clear that geosynchronous orbit should be the end position of both 'sent' and 'received' payloads for each body. A gun in orbit around earth would launch a projectile such that the force used to send the projectile would help to maintain or change its own orbit or transfer energy to a flywheel. The target body the projectile is shot at would receive the payload in its orbit. Taking this a step further, a ground station could launch  a payload into low earth orbit, later met by the stage 2 launcher meeting the payload in low earth orbit. Once the payload is received and prepared for firing, the second stage would fire toward the moon, targeting a lunar orbit to meet the next stage for descent. This stage would prepare the payload for delivery to the surface.  Here, at stage 3, the payload is equipped with the lander. Lander would use reusable fuel to land to the surface, deliver the payload to the surface, and then reclaim fuel from surface material, and enter stage 4 preparation.  Stage 4 preparation would be a base station on the moon that would launch the lander back into orbit, meeting with stage 3 module.

To re-cap the 4 stages:

1. Earth launcher, launch payload to meet low earth orbit module 
2. Low earth orbit module, launch payload to meet lunar orbit module
3. Lunar orbit module, land using reclaimable material from Lunar surface
4. Lunar launcher, after Lunar orbit module reclaims sufficient material, launch to lunar orbit

At stage 4 it is required that material is reclaimed from the surface for future use in descent, this would be fuel to power thrust for a soft descent. I found a document here describing the fuels that can be used for the descent to lunar orbit. Another possibility for this last leg is a space elevator. Elevators on earth require far stronger material due to atmospheric turbulence. The moon however does not have this issue and could possible be built with far weaker and lighter materials. Space elevator may be the better option at a later phase, after the network of these stages is scaled to be able to utilize much larger mass.  From the Wikipedia article, a space elevator would require materials equal to 6100 tonnes for a single strand capable of tethering a counter-weight. Also, a space elevator would be subject to micrometeorites, potentially damaging or destroying a single strand system.

Chromebook Pixel Follow up: Linux chroot, Steam

Since my last post I tinkered a bit with setting up Linux on this machine using Crouton. This is far better than installing a separate OS and booting into it. With Crouton all I have to do is pop open a terminal (ctrl-alt-t), type shell, then sudo startxfce4. The X display pops open in a seconds and I'm up and ready. To toggle between this environment and chrome is simple too- ctrl-alt-back is chrome, ctrl-alt-forward is developer console,  ctrl-alt-refresh is the X window. It is also easy to access ubuntu from the shell without X, this way I have access to all those great CLI software packages from the terminal just by entering the chroot.  Enter:  'enter-chroot'.  Crouton also can be configured to install more than just xfce4 environment,  however xfce happens to be my favorite of the ones included with crouton. The steps I took to get this up and running were found in this brief article at lilputing.com.  I then took the steps necessary to set up my development environment for work stuff; got my build of my software going after quickly configuring and installing its dependencies. Next I went about tweaking some of the environment configuration so the texts were more readable. I tried several DPI configurations and font sizes. It seems that not all the fonts scale according to the DPI setting, and unfortunately the containers that hold the texts don't stretch in most applications. Eventually I  just settled for something in the middle. Not scaled as nicely as in ChromeOS but not too small that I can't use it without eye strain.

After finishing with dpi tweaks I took the time to check out Steam for Linux.  I hadn't tried this yet so I didn't know how far I would get. Apparently there are very few titles ready for Linux from the games library I have. I wasn't really looking to sit down and seriously play any titles, although it would have been nice if that were an option for counter-strike source.  I ran through a bit of half-life and it was quite strange running it at 2600x1700. From far away (in game distance) the textures look intricately detailed, but moving closer they just start to blur; pixels grow. It is strange to see at the same time very detail where i can hardly see the lines of tiny pixels along side a large scaled up and stretched texture over a crate.

After all the tweaking, reconfiguring, etc- I am finally settled and I'm starting to really like the configuration I am left with. I am still not at the point where I can honestly say I wouldn't be happier with a MacBook - but at least now it is comparable.

PIXEL

Today I received my Google Pixel. So far, it is fantastic. I have a few comments about some of the features that struck out to me:

First of all- it's just chrome:
I saw chromebooks in Best Buy stores and read about them briefly online but always assumed that the Chrome OS had to be at least a little bit more than just chrome- it is but it isn't All you get is a task bar and system tray and a way to tile your chrome windows. Absolutely nothing else runs outside of chrome, and what I found more surprising is that all your configuration for the system is through chrome. I guess I missed this part when I had read about them earlier- at first I was OK with this but now I'm a bit scared. I'm feeling a little trapped but I just got to let go of it all and embrace the chrome.

Keyboard & Track Pad:
Great to type on- great size and arrangement- keys feel very natural but the travel on them is quite minimal, feels like some of the keys may not depress straight down, but at angles- but upon inspection this isn't the case. All the buttons are great- the big track pad works just like my old MacBook except some of the gestures I was used to aren't here such as 2 or 3 finger swipes.

Battery:
For some reason the battery life was not that great the first day- I tried charging at the office all day and when I got home it was still at about 50% charge- I'm assuming there is some smart charging technology involved trying not to over charge? Maybe it needs to discharge first? On day 2 I got a full charge after an all night plug-in and found the battery life to be mildly satisfactory.

Display:
Can get plenty bright and it has a wide range to choose for brightness.  I never cared for glossy displays because of glare. The touch screen is quick and accurate but I doubt I'll use it much. Actually, it is kinda annoying because I'm always brushing away dust that lands on the screen- now when I do that I may accidentally change my cursor position or click something.

Netflix:
Playing video sounds amazing. I thought that the way the speakers are configured on the machine that the sound would be obstructed if I the laptop were sunk into a blanked when I'm laying in bed but the sound is amazingly clear.

PROBLEMS:
Aside from the ones that I expected prior to the arrival of my pixel, I was surprised to discover the following issues:

Netflix:
After setting up my pixel to go to Developer mode I had a feeling Netflix would be blocked, considering it is not allowed in Linux on Chrome. I was correct, no Netflix for Dev mode.

Speed:
Even though this is the top of the line chromebook and comparable in cost to macbook (almost 1500 after taxes) performance is kinda crappy. I've noticed performance issues running youtube video and other slowness hickups are apparent compared to other machines I use.

No Java:
Java support is non-existant on Chromebook. I went to install Minecraft from chrome, installed, but the plugin could not load. Later found out that Java is not on chromebook.

Poor printing support:
I have a network printer. Unfortunately the only way to print from chromebook is through cloud printing service requires the printer to somehow connect to the cloud service independently of the chromebook. My printer does multi function, scan and fax, so obviously I can't have these either.