Signatures were once used to express something personal about the sender or convey a useful notice. Today, abuse seems to be the norm. It’s just an observation. If you actually like these messages, just go right on sending them…

My folks say that I’m a simple guy — too much so for my own good. I like to see the best in everyone. And if, God forbid, I had a reason to be upset, I didn’t see the need to actually be upset and compound the problem.

With experience, it would be increasingly difficult to maintain this attitude. I would hate to have to live with anger.

I’d like to mention that it is partly because of 110mb that I had gained so much experience with Web development, and that I now know so many worthy individuals. Thanks.

The blog will continue to be accessible at this address, while the experiments are now to be conducted at Area 51. As projects mature, they may be migrated here or simply redirected, resources permitting. The other homepage is still quite young and boring, but there will be all sorts of goodness.

Thanks for your continued readership!

You can blame it on Chris Anderson’s book Free. After reading his book, I started kicking around the idea of what we can do that’s ‘free’. Sure, we have free bits (open-source hardware designs, available code, etc.), but we don’t have free physical widgets. Now combine that with our love of creating shear havoc (AVC, C&D letter, Portable Rotary Phone), and you get Free Day.Nobody gives away a free physical thing. There’s always a catch. So up front: you have to pay shipping. Other than that, it’s open season.

• $100 max per household
• You pay shipping
• Limit of $100,000 in giveaways for the day
• Starts 9AM MST January 7th, 2010
• Ends 11PM MST January 7th, 2010 (or when we hit $100k, whichever comes first)
• Rainchecks for popular items will be allowed

So… go grab some parts?

Totally unrelated photo of the moment, just because. May the warmth of the flame carry us through the long winter nights of finals preparation?

It is morning and I have two final exams later today back to back… and I’m slightly ill. As a result, I have been taking a lot of time off to think about random things. Today will be a disaster, but I’ll survive. I know that whenever I think of my wonderful friends. Because of you, I feel that I am not alone in the world. Because of you, I feel that I am special. Because of you, I have an audience for my silly exploits. Because of you, I can pour my mind out onto the internets. If you’re reading this, I thank you very much for sharing in my thoughts.

Sometimes I feel that I have not spent as much time with you as I could have. While I am not studying, I am your regular hacker and script monkey, instead of being useful. I might even have offended you at times when I am not feeling my best. And during the past few days I have not been keeping up at all with what’s going on around me. It is my ultimate goal to be useful to society… but how could I, if I could not even help my closest friends? As I partake of this wild life’s journey, there are those that I would not, could not forget. I hope you can forgive my selfishness.

It may sound strange, but I’m going to say this anyway: I love you and I treasure your friendship. Knowing you has made my life meaningful in so many ways, and I have grown so much because of you. I am proud to know you all.

Bark with me if you’re my dawg?

It is this same complexity and inefficiency that differentiates us from the machines that we design. In general, we try our best to design components to be as simple as possible. The benefits of The benefits of simplicity are threefold: firstly, simple components are cheaper to manufacture and maintain; secondly, simple components are often more efficient (but not always); finally, simple components are easier to understand and operate. Although the tools that we design have progressively grown more complex to fit our needs, many existing designs have been drastically simplified. For example, watches used to contain carefully constructed clockworks of gears, weights, pivots, and springs all working together in synchrony. Gradually, battery-powered motorized watches replaced the old-fashioned mechanical designs, eliminating the tight constraints that made these older devices costly to produce. Nowadays, digital watches run by integrated circuits have become popular. The ingeniously designed clockwork of yesterday has not disappeared altogether, but it is not nearly as common. While integrated circuits are arguably more intricate than mechanical and motorized methods of keeping time, they are constructed of repeating elements and trivial to mass-produce. And compared to these older designs, digital watches have far lower power requirements.

The same could not be said of us, or indeed of most other constructs found in nature. The simple motion of lifting an arm involves the perfect cooperation of numerous bones, muscles, and connective tissue. Neural signaling and processing is centered in the brain, an organ whose sheer complexity we have only begun to grasp, but whose number-crunching power is vastly inferior to that found in our microprocessors. Language and communication between individuals is inefficient and inaccurate, relying on assumptions and sometimes translations to convey even the simplest of ideas. It is amazing how simply smiling would utilize most of the facial muscles, whereas the same message could probably be contained within a datagram of a few bytes.

Our inefficiency and complexity is not a weakness, however. While it is true that our machines are highly optimized and therefore perform specific tasks extremely well, we have a robustness that our designs lack. All it takes is a single loose screw or solder joint to render a watch inoperable. A single broken transistor may render an entire computer chip unreliable. And if a datagram is even slightly altered due to noise, the entire message may be lost. On the other hand, our complexity makes us inherently redundant. Though we may become ill or injured, our illnesses and injuries do not affect us the same way that damage affects our machines. Our performance may degrade as a result of injury, but the degradation usually scales to the degree of injury. We try our best to design redundancy into our creations, but they are still very susceptible to Byzantine failure.

The ECCERobot may be inefficient and complicated, but it also inherits our robustness. By copying our own mechanisms, we try to create a robustness that is difficult to design from scratch. But where did our own design originate? Our structure does not appear optimized; indeed, it does not imply a purpose at all. We were not designed, but refined through eons of selection.