Following up with his interview on Fresh Air on NPR, I picked up the Future of Physics, a new book by physicist Michio Kaku. I have only just begun to read, but I am already intrigued by the idea.

The book centers on predicting the future up till 2100. All of the futuristic ideas presented in the book already have prototypes in various laboratories around the world. I have ventured a few pages into the book and have encountered computer chips the size of atoms and as cheap as scrap paper, contact lenses that can act as an interface to the Internet, and augmented reality glasses than can paint a false projection of the world around us.

One problem I have with this book is that it shows us a utopian image of the world in 2100. While it is always good to be optimistic, I feel that the author does not account for any of the downfalls of these new inventions. Of course, this is very early into the book, and he may address my concerns later on. To his credit, he has predicted the end of Moore’s law, a law governing how computing power should grow: at an astounding rate.

When I read about the use of computers to create an augmented reality, I was reminded of the Pendragon Adventure series of books. In one book, huge, futuristic pyramids were constructed on a very technologically-savvy planet. The entire population of the planet lived in these pyramids. The appeal was that the giant behemoths allowed the people to dream and live in an augmented reality they controlled, a perfect life, so to speak.

The downfall of this augmented reality was that the world outside slowly began to change as nature retook its property and began to encroach upon the pyramids. Worse, all the denizens were inside dreaming and had no wish to see whether the rumors of destruction outside were actually true.

Whether our future will one day turn out like this is unlikely, but only time can tell.

Matterhorn

Just two days ago, I finished reading the book Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War by Karl Marlantes. Marlantes himself was a soldier in the Vietnam War and I was lucky to have read this novel after I read his latest book What it is Like to Go to War. The novel essentially follows the author's own tour in Vietnam, but he adds some extra ideas for storytelling effect and doesn't go into as much detail about his own feelings as each event occurred.

What really struck me about the book was how inefficient the handling of the war was. Not only was it a mistake to enter the war, but even more atrocities were committed under the radar after that as well.

Some of the bigger mistakes are easy to see: the battalion giving up a key hill and letting it fall into enemy hands, the battalion nearly starving its soldiers on an endless march (in the book, the soldiers name the march the "Trail of Tears Operation"). However, other smaller issues are ignored by the war commanders, most importantly racial issues. Eventually, this issue spins out of control, and a well-liked leader by soldiers of all color is accidentally killed.

Aside from cringing at all the mistakes the armed forces made during the war, just in this small Marine regiment alone, I was shaken by the raw emotion the characters expressed at each event, and how effectively they were conveyed. One such moment is when the main character is debating in his head whether he accidentally killed the young soldier he was trying to save, all the while knowing a bullet from his M16 was what pierced the young man's head.

All in all, I felt this was a very eye-opening look into one of the most controversial periods in American history. I just wish there were more books like it.

Back To School

The school craze has started once again. As an eighth grader in my school I am now used to school life and there don't seem to be any surprises in store this time around. Within a day of getting to back to school, I realized that my summer was just a distant blur. School has become such a prominent and important part of my life that everything else takes a back seat once I have to go back.



Once I realized how quickly the memories built over summer can topple down, I recognized the immense value of photos and home videos. Without these tools, our lives can become absorbed by our occupations.



I remember reading about a very creative solution to this dilemma in the book Moonwalking with Einstein. One person the author interviewed records every second of his conscious life. If he ever wants to see what he did on a random date, he just has to look through his volumes of hard drives, find the correct day and comb through the footage. This would be especially useful for resolving family debates and finally proving who in the family really has the best memory!

The Numerati

I am currently reading The Numerati, a book detailing the rise of computer science and technology geniuses. A couple things that caught my interest so far:


Supermarkets have been gathering data on our purchases for a long, long time. They just haven't found out how to implement their ideas and send us specially targeted ads that should catch our interest according to our shopping patterns.


Of course, gathering the data is the easy part: every day, we are corporation's willing test subjects. The hard part is finding the patterns. Not only do computers have to search through thousands of possible patterns, but there are so many complexities involved that could throw the computer off track and give researchers the wrong idea. It is the job of researchers to find these complexities and teach the computer what they mean and how to avoid them. Or, they could send the computer on a hunt and learn a thing or two about us from it!

First Blog

Hi. The posts here will be about my experiences. I have varied interests from swimming to reading Fortune magazine.



These first few blogs are going to share my experiences at the U.S. Space Academy in Huntsville, Alabama. It was an amazing experience, and it was all thanks to Congressman David Wu's Education Opportunity scholarship. The link to that website is here: http://education-opportunity.com/



Below is the essay I wrote that won me the scholarship. Out of four topics, I choice one that asked me to describe in detail a futuristic object or piece of equipment that we may see some day, how it works, and how it will help humanity, Earth, and the era of space exploration.

Piezoelectric Bubble

Unless we can clean up our act on Earth, Mars looks like the next step for humanity. By no means will colonizing Mars be a routine task. Many road blocks stand in our way. One of these impediments is an energy source.

Employing the concepts of piezoelectric energy, scientists and engineers could create an ingenious device. A “bubble” would surround a colonist city. It would consist of three layers: the outside layer of a glutinous and flexible substance, the second layer a strong metal with channels of an electricity-conducting metal, and the third, an amalgamation of plastic and rubber shielding the citizens from the energy produced. At the apex of the bubble, a metal rod would sit between the first and second layers, gathering all the energy and allocating it to the necessary locations.

The Martian wind is constantly blowing, and the location of the city would be no exception. The outside layer of the bubble would be a substance that is capable of creating piezoelectric energy. The wind would blow onto this first layer, compressing it between the minute distance between it and the second layer. The result: energy is created. This energy is channeled into the electricity-conducting portions of the second layer. Each of these “roads” would lead up to the apex rod, handing control of the energy over to the “brains” of the bubble, and hence providing energy to the city.

If the Martian wind is blowing with too much gusto, the first layer would have to be pushed away from the second by a mechanism to ensure that the production can continue smoothly. Also, the first layer would have to be replaced at some point, or be rendered useless.

Perfecting this idea would solve some of the energy problems for colonists and Earthlings alike.