How To Get Involved in Distributive Computing

Einstein@Home is a distributive computing program
that looks for gravitational waves.

Today in my digital civilization class we talked about distributive computing.  The basic idea behind this is that most computers are wasting a lot of computing power.  When your computer is running, it performs cycles.  A cycle is when a computer gets (or is given) a task to do and then does it.  This is also known as a fetch-execute cycle.  When you are not using your computer, your computer has lots of empty cycles, in other words, it is doing nothing.  Instead of wasting your computer's ability to compute, I will explain to you some simple ways you can donate your spare computing power.

Andrew's Allegory of the Cave

Don't be fooled by the smile, I am miserable that
I didn't really get anything done in this little closet!

The problem with caves is that you often get stuck in them.

Imagine in your minds a cave where the inhabitants stay for hours on end everyday.  Instead of being surrounded by thick walls of earth and stone, these wall are flat and made of concrete and drywall.  There are no windows in this cave except for one on the only door which looks into a dark hallway.  The cave has lighted rectangles to which minds are drained.

I hope you get an idea of size - small.
Notice the only window of the room...

I spent many hours in this cave today and I wonder if I really got anything done.  My goal in entering the cave was to create some meaningful content for this blog that would relate to this class.  Unfortunately, all I ended up doing was finishing up an old draft blog post, putting a license on my blog, watched numerous YouTube videos, and unintentionally offending my friend.

So the moral of the story is GET OUT, spend time outside, don't study in a closet, just because your friends are wasting time doesn't mean you should too!

Just for humor's sake: watch this about Procrastination

Photo's taken today by Taran Esplin and Andrew DeWitt respectfully.

Recent Online Missionary Work

In my digital civilization class, our teacher arranged a neat opportunity for us to speak with the missionaries serving in the Referral Center Mission.  It was really cool because I didn't even realize that there was a Referral Center Mission.  It turns out that, yes there is, and they do a lot of good.

The fascinating thing about this lecture was its timing.  Just this past week I've been thinking that I ought work on sharing the gospel more using the online tools that I have.  While thus thinking my mind drifted back to the good-old mission days and I wondered what my mission (Singapore) was like.  So, like a good citizen of the digital world I began my what-is-my-mission-like-now quest on Google.

After some searching I found out that The Church is building a new meeting house in Singapore.  That's exciting news for me, but the Singapore Church website leaves me wanting for information so I thought Google would again aid me on my quest.  One neat thing I found was a street view of the construction site (included at the end of the blog).

The most interesting thing I found was a forum of local residents talking about the Church.  When I got on the forum, the one of the latest comments said "Wat's Mormon?Are they really christians?"[sic]  Having recently felt the need to be more proactive in sharing what I believe I decided to join the conversation.


I created an account for the forum website and I shared a small bit about what I believe (go look for yourself).  It is interesting the follow up comments.


Summary
We, who know what we know, need to share what we believe with others. D&C 88:81 And I am trying to do that.


Sweet Google Map Street view of New LDS meeting house constructionsite in Singapore:


View Larger Map

Adventures in the Galapagos

Evolution is the topic for Tuesdays class discussion, so I think it might be interesting to share some experiences that I have had.  I had the opportunity to live in Ecuador for two years in middle school.  The Galapagos Islands are a territory of that country; so, while I was there, my parents took the family to go see them.  I was fascinated by the wild life I saw there.  This was the place where Charles Darwin first thought of his theory of evolution by looking at the finches (commonly known as "Darwin's Finches").  Darwin noted that among the finches he saw there, all seemed to have beaks adept to the particular foods available to them on their respective islands.

It wasn't just the finches that Charles Darwin found interesting.  As highlighted by popular culture in the movie "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World" (2003) the character Dr. Stephen Maturin is captivated by the flightless cormorants he finds on the Galapagos Islands.  This small geologic hot spot island chain has numerous examples of creatures that have evolved from their parent species to better suit their environments.  Here are some just to name a few

Book Review - The Count of Monte Cristo

As part of a class project for a mini-book club, Rhett Ferrin, Kurt Witt, and I decided to read The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas.  We were asked to share our learning/reading in different ways.

One way we decided to share out learning is by meeting up after class on Thursday and video tape ourselves giving a book review.  Watch it online here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tids7PTi1tI

My way of both sharing and creating something from what I have learned will be through the comments that I post on our YouTube video.  I invite readers to join in the conversation.  I will be creating a Diigo Bookmark and sharing it with my Digital Civilization class for the video inviting them to comment.  I have already posted it on Facebook.  I'm excited to see what kind of ripple I can make in the internet ocean. 

Please visit the video, watch it, and comment on it.

The Count Of Monte Cristo

After class, we (my mini book club - Kurt Witt, Rhett Ferrin) deliberated about which book we should choose.  We discussed reading a Charles Dickens novel, however we wanted to go with something we had never done before.  As I recall, none of us had ever read The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas so we thought that that would give it a try.  Besides, the story is set in an appropriate time period (post Neapolitan), we'd all heard great things about the novel, and it would be a worthy challenge for us.

Thanks to my DigiCiv professors, I learned that college students could get a year of Amazon Prime for free!  Yay!  I placed my order and on Saturday the book came.  More blogs to follow...

Book List for Mini-Book Club!

Well, as soon I heard about our new assignment to have a mini-book club in this class my mind started racing about what books I should read.  I immediately thought about "A Tale of Two Cities" by Charles Dickens because I had already read it, I had posted a bookmark on Diigo about it and my DigiCiv teachers mentioned my bookmark.

Next, when I got home I looked at the Honors Program course description for this Honors 202 class because I knew that it had a list of books for the class.  So from that I added three more books to my list, which finally looked like this:

• A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
  I choose this book because it is an excellent work about the French Revolution and would help me and my group better understand it.
• The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester
  First of all, the title is awesome and the subject matter fascinating: the story behind the making of the Oxford English Dictionary.  I thought this book would do quite well in relationship with our study of the Enlightenment and the organization of knowledge.
• The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
  Having already talked significantly about capitalism in class, I thought that this would be an excellent choice for a more in-depth read and better look at Adam Smith's ideas of the separation of labor, the market and the invisible hand.

Romanticism and Second Life

In response to my digital civilization teachers' suggestion, I want to draw a few comparisons between this YouTube video highlighting Second Life and Romanticism.  What are Second Life and Romanticism?  Second Life is a digital world where you can do almost anything that you do here in the real world and then some.  Very much focused on the individual and creativity, Second Life has a lot of ties with Romanticism.  Romanticism was an artistic movement that arose out of Germany in the late-17th and 18 centuries.  Romanticism emphasized nature, the individual, creativity and imagination.  With Romanticism, the artist became the hero, feelings were exalted, and nature became a work of art.  Rules of poetry were broken for free expression.  William Wordsworth, a poet of this time said about poetry, "All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings."

Second Life is a new form of romantic expression in our times.  The video showed the beauty of the "nature" inside Second Life.  It highlighted the imagination of the individuals who have artistically created the 3D world of Second Life.  On the Second Life website there are some videos about what Second Life is.  The emphasis of these videos is that you can create your own world and become your own new person.  Just like Romanticism, there is a large emphasis on imagination, creativity, the individual.  Just as Romanticism broke previous poetic rules, Second Life breaks many rules of the real world.  For example, in Second Life you can fly, go anywhere, and make anything.

Romanticism

View more presentations from Gerald Lucas.

Communism, Socialism, Socialists... Sociology?

Auguste Comte (1798-1857)

The industrial revolution is on my mind.  With the world changing during the 18th and 19th centuries, like was mentioned in my class, "the world was ripe for new social ideas."  Many of those social ideas came from people like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.  Not only was this a time period of new social thought but it was a time for study social thought.  Not only was Marx a socialist, he was a sociologist, but not the first.


Auguste Comte, the father of sociology, (he actually coined the word), was Marx's predecessor by about 20 years.  According to Comte, every society passed through three stages of development: religious, metaphysical, and scientific.  The first stage, religious, is when a society believes that supernatural forces control the world.  The next, metaphysical stage, a society turns to the idea of "fate" governing all affairs.  Finally in the third stage, the scientific stage, a society moves beyond superstition and explains things through observation, experimentation, and the scientific method.  At least for what it was worth, Comte did a great good at explaining what had happened to the society around him around the time he was alive (1798-1857).

Also when discussing the industrial revolution in class Prof. Burton mentioned the idea of "solidarity."  Here comes another sociologist: Emile Durkheim.  First of all...  Solidarity, noun (säləˈde(ə)ritē) unity of feeling or action.  It has to to with how much a person feels connected to society.  In the industrial revolution people there were many people who feel a big disconnect because they no longer were in control of the means of production.  Durkheim studied solidarity in the context of suicides.  He concluded that too much or too little integration or solidarity with society as well as too much or too little regulation by society could cause a person to commit suicide.  For example, Durkheim described some suicides as being "egoistic" meaning that the individual killed him/herself because they did not feel connected enough to the group.

Suggestions to the reader:

• Add some more flavor to your reading by looking up what sociologists have to say about historical time periods
• Ask yourself, what is the line between being too integrated into society and being too free of society?
• Additional fun industrial age stuff:  I went to this museum about the flour mills in Minneapolis.  It is just another example of the mass production factories of that era.