My IGNITE NM 13 - Lessons Learned from a Cheap Lightweight BBQ Grill

Earlier in the fall I gave a presentation at Ignite New Mexico 13 on intuitive concepts for structural engineering.  This is kind of a unique presentation format.  You have 5 min to give a presentation using 20 slides and the slides auto-advance every 15 seconds.  These guys want alot of ideas and they want them quick.  You have to be a bit nimble.  This 5 min presentation is actually what inspired my series of videos on a previous post.  I had been wanting to do this for awhile so I was glad I finally got around to it.

Basically this is some of the important concepts concerning building stiff structures that you learn in mechanical engineering school.  I hope you like it!

Intuitive structural engineering concepts for artists and fabricators

For the past couple of years I have been wanting to make a presentation that discusses how a person can learn alot about structural engineering techniques from a cheap, lightweight BBQ grill.  I finally got around to it.  You can see the whole six of 6 videos on my youtube channel "BezalelExodus"

Here is the first one.  I hope you enjoy it. 

Maybe the age of the hospital is over.

We Catholics have been pretty worried about the HSS mandate. Bad no doubt but there might be another way to look at it. For all intended purposes Catholics inspired by a spirit of mercy invented the hospital. That isn't gone. Maybe the hospital as we know it today has run its course. Maybe God is sending us a message. Maybe it's time for us to be open to promptings and inspiration of the spirit of mercy to develop a new framework to dispense mercy. Something that can better deal with the problems we face in the modern and emerging world.

God never closes one door without opening another :-)

Prologue: messages for Liam

About 2 years ago one of my college friends died suddenly and unexpectedly from a meningitis outbreak.  At the time his wife was 2 months pregnant with their first child, "Liam."

I knew Nick because we were mechanical engineering students together.  We worked on the same senior project team.  We built a small racecar.  That was one the toughest things I ever did.  It really pushed me to the limit and then a little further.  Sleeplessness was the norm.  One week I logged 122 hours of work.  You really had to be on top of your game through it all too.  Steel doesn't forgive.  If you get careless when you are working things go wrong quick.  A week's worth or work can go out the window in an instant because of a careless adding mistake.  There is no one who can make it all better either.  All you can do is suck it up and fix it.  I learned alot from that year and I really regreted that Nick would not be there to tell Liam the tale.  I told Nick's wife I would document it in case Liam ever wanted to know how this year played out.  It was pretty dramatic.

Some people have a stereotypical view that engineering is kind of a dry, soulless field...  I beg to differ.  At the end of the day if there is one thing I learned from this it is to never give up hope.  Things can look broken beyond all repair.  Challenges can sometimes seem completely insurmountable.  That is where Hope needs to take over.  Never, never, never, give up.  As long as you still have breath in your body it isn't over. 
I really like telling stories and this is one of my most favorite.  This will probably be a mix of the human element of engineering school mixed up with the engineering tricks we picked up "off the street."  I hope you will follow along. 

Proposed supernatural personality functions.

By symmetry I postulate there may be 4 supernatural personality functions:

Proposed perceiving supernatural functions:
Extroverted Faith,
Introverted Faith

Proposed judging supernatural functions:
Extroverted Hope,
Introverted Hope.

Here is something I came up with to remember how it works:

When the senses can't observe and intuition yields no clue there is still Faith...
When emotional fervour runs dry and reason fails to convince, do it for Hope's sake.


I postulate that when taking on the supernatural life you might start using these to replace, augment, or elevate your natural personality functions. I suspect your introverted/extroverted (attitude) function order would remain the same. So, I being an ENTJ if I were to to take on the supernatural personality traits would have a function order that changes as follows:

Part of the inspiration for this idea came from the 1907 Catholic dystopia novel "Lord of the World."   by the priest Robert Hugh Benson.  You can read it online here since it is in the public domain:
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14021 

  It is a really interesting book and I highly recommend it.  The author has some interesting insights on human nature.  Also,he creates a world where psychology and science have made faith irrelevant for most people.  The few remaining Catholics (including the pope) deal with situations where both reason and emotion for Faith are not effective.  I think a similar situation occurs with people very very far advanced in the spiritual life.  I suspect something like this would proceed the "Dark Night of the Spirit," as described by John of the Cross.  Mother Teresa reported a similar phenomenon.  It would see to me that faithful people deprived of the ordinary perceiving and judging functions would need to use supernatural virtues.  Faith, Hope and Love.  Faith seems more perceptive and hope seems to me more on the judging side.  Love is an act of the will and orientation of the heart.  I would think it would be a different kind of entity than faith and hope.  We won't need faith and hope in paradise but we will still have love.  

Here is one of the more interesting excerpts from the book on progress in the spiritual life that I think sheds light on what I am trying to say.

"

He expressed it to himself by saying 

that there were three processes through which God led the soul: the
first was that of external faith, which assents to all things presented
by the accustomed authority, practises religion, and is neither
interested nor doubtful; the second follows the quickening of the
emotional and perceptive powers of the soul, and is set about with
consolations, desires, mystical visions and perils; it is in this plane
that resolutions are taken and vocations found and shipwrecks
experienced; and the third, mysterious and inexpressible, consists in
the re-enactment in the purely spiritual sphere of all that has preceded
(as a play follows a rehearsal), in which God is grasped but not
experienced, grace is absorbed unconsciously and even distastefully, and
little by little the inner spirit is conformed in the depths of its
being, far within the spheres of emotion and intellectual perception, to
the image and mind of Christ.

" 

So for clarity, here are the natural, more or less commonly accepted contemporary Jungian/Meyers Briggs function orders.

And here are the resulting new supernatural personality function orders:

One interesting observation, is that 4 new major subgroups of personalities emerge. You also go from 16 different types of personalities, to only 4 different types of supernatural personalities.  These four groups are the same in the sense that they all have the same supernatural personality function order.  My working names for these groups are seen in the chart: scholars, mystics, charismatics/inspirers, and the implementers/organizers. I suspect that people common to a subgroup would potentially understand each other very well and would have similar priorities.  Not that people from different subgroups wouldn't get along. If everyone did this in theory we would all get along very well.

Interestingly this would suggest the ordinarily gentle, sweet and nice ENFJ would look very similar to the ordinarily rough and demanding ENTJ.  Many types that would ordinarily be very different look similar when using the supernatural personality functions.  Also, people that once looked very similiar are not very different.  All the NTs and NFs are now in totally different groups and not similiar to their prior peers at all. 


Very open problems and questions. -

I only have very rough ideas of what the characteristics of these four new supernatural functions might be.  For instance I suspect the people with Extroverted Hope high on their function order might tend to display a focus on works. Whereas people with Extroverted Faith might be very open to grace that might inspire works.  This is all very rough.  If these supernatural personality functions exist in any sense, I do not totally know what they would look like.

I am not really sure that the names of the 4 subgroups are appropriate or even what their emergent characteristics might be. For instance I suspect that the Introverted Faith, Extroverted Hope (IxxJ) group and the Introverted Hope, Extroverted Faith (IxxP) might be flipped.  In our normal life IxxP's are often somewhat mystical, but is people were actually using these funciton orders the IxxJs might actually be more mystical caused by their primary interest in introverted faith. 

There are many more that I do not have time to write. 

 

Time to Midnight... Countdown until drones are legal in U.S. civil airspace

Not too long ago the FAA was tasked with generating regulations that would allow drones to fly in U.S. civil airspace for commercial applications.  These regulations should be set in place by Sept 15, 2015.  Drones are on their way for better or worse.  There will be economic payouts and their will be problems.  Privacy issues will be big as will security.  At the end of the day I suspect this will be a huge business opportunity much like the internet was back around 2000.  In my spare moments I like to think of ways I might cash in.  Well actually I do more than just think...  I made this timer to mark the occasion and keep me motivated to move forward.  Enjoy!

Nuclear Weapons and Morality: A view from Los Alamos

 In the early 1980's of the Cold War Rev. John Conway at the Immaculate Heart of Mary Parish in Los Alamos, NM, brought together a group of weapons scientists and engineers in his parish to write a report on the morality of nuclear weapons work.

When I first came to Los Alamos I inquired of the local priest what his opinion of the primary work of the town was.  He directed me to this document.  I found it very interesting.  I may not agree with everything that is in here, but I feel it is a very personally honest document.  I actually lived at the home of one of the contributors a number of years ago.  For the last three decades a copy of this document has been sitting on the selves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary Catholic church library.  I do not believe many people outside of Los Alamos have seen it.  In the last couple year's I got the permission of the parish priest to make an electronic copy of the document and freely distribute it.  You can download the book here.

https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B29ZDwwo2r_KSUd1X2hhbEZramc

I have made this copy for people who are generally in the morality of nuclear weapons, and war in general.  I believe this is a very interesting document from a historical point of view as well.  I think it is a shame it is not more well known since it is a first hand account of Catholic nuclear weapons scientists and engineers at Los Alamos.

I have been meaning to do this for quite some time but I finally got around to making the electronic copy today.  Unfortunately I do not have a scanner so I had to make do by making my own "book scanner" using some scrap steel and my digital camera.  Sorry but I cannot help but share a photo.  I welded the camera fixture you can see in the picture above this morning.  I like the way it turned out.

I hope you enjoy reading this document. 

My plan to revitalize Detroit

 Some people are aware that over the last 8 months or so I have become quite fascinated with personality types and research on personality and culture.  What many people do not know is part of the reason why.  Actually what follows explains only a fraction of my interest, but that will have to do for now.   

Anyways, terms of Jungian/Meyers Briggs personality theory the biggest difference between people in the population is whether they are Sensory (S) or iNtuitive (N).  Roughly speaking S type people enjoy concrete things they can learn about with their senses and N type people tend to naturally be more abstract thinkers.  The vast majority of the population tends to be S type.  For myself I an N type abstract thinker.  When I took the test it was only about 10% confident on all the dimensions except S-N.  It was 89% confident I was N.  Among my friends I tested only two people were on the same order of magnitude confidence on the N side.  Both were INTP.  One got the same confidence I got and the other was I think 92% confident.  Both of these guys are very interesting people to talk to.  I suspect I have one ENTJ friend who would test similarly, but this person knows too much about the test now and it would probably be meaningless.  Anyways I digress...  The point is I am a pretty abstract guy for better or worse. 

Anyways during my initial learning about the S-N difference I came across this youtube video.



When I saw it I thought to myself that it was pretty mean-spirited.  It seems there was a bit of arrogance present.  As I saw other people talk about the S-N difference on forums and
youtube I would often see this arrogance.  It was often times subtle but there.  I thought to myself it was quite cruel.  Anyways, there was one valid point that I thought might be worth addressing.  Our current society is setup in such a way that many jobs that are probably traditionally appeal to S type people no longer exist or are on their way out.  A prime example is manufacturing.  I used to be a machinist.  Machinists often times speak of a "sense of touch" or "sense of feel," that helps them diagnose whether they have a lathe or mill setup correctly.  I make the argument this is a very "Sensor" type of intellectualism.  I now work with alot of physicists, and the dual intelligence for them would be "physical intuition." they always like to talk about.  What I am getting at here is that there may be different types of intelligences out there and we should leverage them all to improve our economic output.  As it is now though, increased automation means machines can do many of these jobs better than any person.  On the other hand we are currently living in a world that is increasingly being deluged by streams of data.  Everything from oil exploraiton to the stop market to marketing to cyber-security has tons of data to sift though. There was an interesting article this month in Harvard Busines Review talking about it.

Data Scientist - The sexiest job of the 21st century
http://hbr.org/2012/10/data-scientist-the-sexiest-job-of-the-21st-century/ar/1

Clearly there is a need for people to sift through lots of abstract data and find useful patterns.  Unfortunately this is a job that will probably mainly appeal to rare, abstract, N-type thinkers with programming and math backgrounds.  I am guessing most "data scientists" are INTPs actually.  The point is, we have alot of potential to make some real gains form our data deluge but we don't have people with the skill to take advantage of it.  In the trade we sometimes like to call this field "data mining."

Well for some reason at roughly the same time I was begining to study personality types I also came across some videos on human echolocation.  A good explanation is given here:



So I started to think to myself... " If the brain is adaptable enough to replace a lost sense perhaps we can develop totally new senses... New senses that allow us interact with abstract concepts in new ways."  Then I thought.  Maybe we can use emerging haptic technology and smart materials to build human-machine interfaces that allow us to transmit data to humans through touch.  This way all those machinists who operate by "sense of feel," can transfer their skills to the new data mining problem.  Now I say, "Why are we hiring engineers to do data mining when prehaps we should be hiring miners?"

I ran this idea by a Professor from Scotland I collaborate with and he suggested I check out sensory deprivation tanks to see if it could be a method to increase the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for this application.   I looked into it and I found one in Santa Fe.  I finally made it there to test drive it this morning.  Here are my results:

Here is the sensory deprivation tank.  It is full of salt water at 98 degrees F to match human body temperature.  You are totally buoyant in it.  You float right to the top.  They close the lid and it is pretty much sound and light proof.  It is totally dark inside.  Basically the idea is to cut you off form all sensory excitation.  Some people report seeing hallucinations while being in one of these tanks.  I paid for a 1 hr ride and got in to try it out. 

 

First thing I noticed was that after a little while your whole body starts falling asleep.  Then after it falls asleep, it falls asleep in a new way.  I never realized my body could fall asleep in so many different ways.  All in all I would say my body fell asleep in at least 4 or 5 different ways.  Another interesting observation is that after awhile you do start to loose some sense of where the boundary of your body is.  Especially if you sit still.
I also want to point out this is probably the closest you can feel to the weightlessness of space outside being caught in some kind of freefall.  Oddly enough it is really hard to roll over in the water.  My body was very stable staying face up.  My neck was a bit sore for awhile, but I found putting my arms over my head helped with that.  I think being in this tank causes your propioception and nocioception to increase.  I could very acutely feel all the sore parts of my body.  Probably because there was nothing else to feel.  If you move your arms in the tank they do begin to feel oddly heavy.  I was told that some people feel very odd in the tank because they have nothing to sense.  I did not seem to mind this at all.  I think I could have stayed in there for awhile.  I was told their record was 6 hrs.  I suspect the tank forces S type people into the world of intuition and abstract thinking.  I am guessing because I am such an abstract thinker I may have already been in my natural element.  I would be curious to hear what someone with a sensor personality thinks. 
Some people apparently like sleeping in there.  If you need it really quiet and dark to sleep I can see how that might help.  I have a book that talks about the medical and physiological ramifications of being in space.  I am going to read it over and see how it compares to what I experienced. 

Some odd things I experienced are the following.  First, you really in some sense do experience a heightened sense of touch.  I could run my finger over parts parts of my stomach with hair folicles and I could feel those sensations very acutely.  I compare it to sitting at my desk now and it was definitely amped up in the tank.  Also I ran my finger over the facial hair on my nose.  I could very very distinctly hear every single hair  on my upper lip move.  It sounded almost loud. I try it right now and it can hear the hairs, but the sounds of them bending all blend together.  When I was in the tank I could hear each individual hair.  It was quite unique. This is a good result because I suspect I need this kind of sensory discrimination to build new tactile human-machine interfaces.  I put a picture that I took right after getting out of the tank that shows the current state of my facial hair for reference.  I have alot of other thoughts on this, but they will have to wait for another day or personal conversations.  

 

 I almost forgot - How I am going to revitalize Detroit.  It's simple really.  I am going to buy cheap industrial space in Detroit, fill the empty space with a bunch of floatation tanks.  Hire the unemployed factory workers, suit them up with my new visual-audio-tactile human-machine interface.  And train them to find useful patterns in data by sense.  I will contract out teams of "data-sensors" to companys that need complex data mining tasks completed.  We will do everything from cyber-scurity to picking stocks.  This will be the rough equivalent of the Native American tracker hunting game.  The difference will be now they will be hunting for abstract patterns in data instead of deer or rabbits.  I will also work on building high-dimensional interfaces that will allow the "data sensors" to interact with the data in new ways.  That is a work in progress. 

ENTJ Heaven

As the fiscal year draws to a close I find myself dreaming of a far off place...  A place where no one works outside the hours of 8-5 because all the work got done during normal working hours because everyone at work was really motivated and got everything done.  A place where you do not have to wonder whether or not someone who is tasked to do something will do it.  A place where people need only minimal management.  A place where the work is challenging, creative and meaningful.  This is a place I would like to call ENTJ heaven.

In ENTJ heaven everyone is optimistic.  They love thinking out loud and brainstorming and creacting.  If someone has a challenging creative idea people try to come up with a way to make it happen.  Pessimism is rare in ENTJ heaven. 

In ENTJ heaven when work gets out everyone goes to the swimming pool and plays water polo.  Not inner tube water polo.  I mean real water polo.  Where you can relieve your stress by swimming around and chasing a ball and pushing people underwater.  ( inner tube water polo???)  After everyone is done playing water polo and getting a fun workout they then go get dinner.  It is usually really artisan because for some reason most ENTJs seem to be good cooks.

After dinner there is a jam session.  For some reason most ENTJs seem to have some form of musical talent so that is good too.  Some nights they might forgo the jam session to watch a TED talk, or go see a band or a play.  Then the ENTJs go off and do things like build haptic devices to cure dog blindness or plan a trip to Nepal.  As the night starts to wind down they go have some drinks in the hot tub before going to bed.

That is how it is in ENTJ heaven...  Actually to be honest I have it pretty good.  I am not sure I am that far away... But I really wouldn't mind playing water polo once in awhile :-). 

My musing on the security implications of 3D printers for the Culture of Life

Recently I heard Tim Staples talk on Catholic Answers about the upcoming election and the issues of most importance to Catholics.  He mentioned the 5 top non-negotiable issues and then went on to briefly mention there were a number of other things that should also be non-negotiable including pornography.  I immediately thought to myself, "is he implying we need to criminalize pornography?"  It seems like an almost impossible thing to enforce in our current society simply because of the technology that is available to us today.  Even if it was criminalized I am not sure what practical effect it would have since we have the internet, digital cameras, and other countries that may not criminalize pornography.  Throw in openly available cryptography software and it just seems like a big mess.  I feel like it has the potential to turn into something similiar to the prohibition of alcohol.  I have thought about it for awhile and been reading about the issue, and I am curious to see what would happen if we tried it.  It may or may not be successful in the sense that people actually stop watching porn.  If your goal is to actually stop the spread, manufacture and use of pornography I am not sure criminalization is an effective way to do it.  I can see it going either way.  But I digress...  This made me think of something more interesting. 3D printers.

3D printing technology has really taken off in the last decade.  I would not be surprised at all if in the next decade or so everyone has ready access to a 3D printer capable of printing a wide variety of polymer parts. Online repositories already exist of things you can download to print.  A good example is the "Thingverse"

http://www.thingiverse.com/

So this implies that these printers could also be used to manufacture contraband.  It is not inconceivable that someone could print out a plastic gun using 3D printer technology.  Actually it has already begun:

http://venturebeat.com/2012/08/23/3d-printing-weapons/

here is another interesting article.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/markgibbs/2012/07/28/the-end-of-gun-control/

So it is very possible that criminals of the future will make use of encryption and steganography to distribute files to print out contraband.  People will be printing out guns and knives and pipes and who knows what else...  And there will be no practical way to stop it. 

This this made me think of something else.  What effect would this have on the issue of abortion?  Right now the pro-life movement is working diligently to criminalize abortion.  I heard a presentation at the Catholic Medical Association annual conference a year ago where someone pointed out that the pro-life movement is very young in comparison to movements like the slavery abolition movement in North America.  They pointed out that it took many centuries to abolish slavery and in comparison the pro-life movement is not even half a century old.  They made the point that the pro-life movement may have a long road ahead of it.  So given that outlook what effect will technology have on the issue?

Well sensor technology is getting cheaper by the month.  Recently a $2 device was developed that could attach to a smartphone to give you an eye exam.  Smart phones and medical apps are being developed at a rapid pace to monitor a variety of vital signs and to tell people when to take their medicine or exercise etc, etc.  In the not too distant future smart phones may interact with embedded medical devices.  Given this reality coupled with the development of 3D printers it is entirely possible that even if abortion was criminalized in the United States some underground pro-choice group could build plans for a home-made vacuum aspiration machine that could be downloaded off the internet.  The plans could be encrypted and hidden using stenganography.  People could even use onion routing to make it less traceable.  There would probably be almost no way to stop this from happening.  

I do not bring this up to sound discouraging to the pro-life movement.  I bring it up because given the  potential for a long-term abortion-abolition movement I would like to suggest that they consider the possibility of how technology may alter the social and culture landscape.  If the pro-life movement is really concerned with preventing abortions and saving lives it may be worth considering what could happen even if the criminalization of abortion is achieved.  Criminalization alone may not be effective at actually signifigantly reducing the number of abortions.  It may be worth taking into account when strategic decisions are made on the use of human, spiritual and physical resources at the disposal of the pro-life movement.  I feel that if you want to be successful you don't go to where the ball is, you go to where the ball is going to be.  Given that Catholics often have  a very long-term outlook so I am confident it will all be worked out in the end. 


We are definitely entering a brave new world... Be ready.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/aug/17/sex-reproduction-aarathi-prasad

The Pig Roast of Fall 2012

Every so often I get some notion in my head that I have to bring to fruitiion.  That was the case about a year and a half ago.  For some reason I got the idea that I should roast a pig.  My original plan was to find a butcher and get the pig and roast him in a hole and have a party.  I told a firend of mine and she was very pessimistic about the whole thing.  She said - "you can't roast a pig, you have to kill it and skin it and dig a hole...,:  Well I thought to myself I wasn't really planning on doing all of that but now that you mention it that could be fun too.  So I decided I would be involved with the whole operation from live pig to dinner.  It took awhiel because my job keeps me busy and I had to coordinate with my friend who was going to teach me the skinning and roasting but we finally did it.  Here are the pictures. 

 Here is the pig to be roasted.  I was told he was really mean and did not grow to expectations so he was going to get eaten. 

 Here is the pig post skinning and gutting. 

 Halving the pig. 

  This is the bacon.

 The back of the pig.

 The leg we will roast.

 Chickens on the ranch.  They will probably get eaten later. 

 Canning. 

 Starting to dig the hole. 

 The dirt was really rocky so we had to use a digging bar. 

 Digging the hole. 

 A chicken plucker. 

 A scooper to move the ash.

 preparing the fire

 Burlap sacks

 Here is the pig wrapped in his foil. 

 Here are the embers ready for the pig. 

 We used some colored.  

 We out an extra fire on top just to be sure. 

 Digging up the food. 

 Pulling the bags out of the whole. 

 Food coming out of the burlap. 

 The meat was so soft I could take it right off with a plastic fork.  It just fell apart. 

 Some of my students enjoying the cookout.

 Maybe this goat will get roasted next. 

 Now I am wondering if I should try to roast a pig on every continent.  Europe or Asia first?














I am wondering if now I should roast a pig on every contient.