2010 Summer Music Mix

So this summer I started realizing that a lot of the indie shit that I was listening to had a similar surf-pop feel to it. I thought it would make for a good summer mix, so I started putting together a playlist. I decided to include only music which was released this year (by this I mean it was on an album or single released this year). I included a good amount of other stuff besides the surf-pop, if you're not feeling that. I wanted to post this earlier (looks like I starting writing it a few weeks ago), but didn't get around to it until now. But hey, you can enjoy summer music anytime, maybe even more so once the weather starts turning cooler.

Wish List

I think to go into a lengthy explanation of what I want to happen this weekend would be far too obtuse of a blog post. So instead I have narrowed down the key things that need to happen this weekend.

1. Honor the Entry
2. Get Basils no earlier than 1:30am
3. Somehow break into west
4. Tag Stadium 110 somewhere on campus
5. duct tape someone who hasn't graduated (from Carleton) yet.
6. Get Mark riled up about something that no one really cares about
7. Dance to Yadda Yadda Yadda
8. Consume more than one bottle of the cobra.

I guess I'm looking for you guys to add in the rest.

The Future is Upon Us

Martin Aircraft has announced that they are finalizing their prototype jetpack that they hope to begin selling within a year. While the first will be sold to emergency workers, they will be sold to wealthy buyers as well. The estimated cost: $100,000 (I would choose a jetpack over a Porsche any day). They will have a range of 31.5 miles (due to FAA Ultralight regulations) and a maximum height of 8000 feet. To see it in action, go here:

http://www.martinjetpack.com/video-gallery.aspx

WHO IS READY?!

Living My Life To The Tune of Toto

Hey All,

So first off, I know this post is long overdue. Over the past couple months my life has been a fire storm of events, emotional ups and downs, and other such things. So with all that said, how about I give you and update as to what I have been up to.

First and foremost, the biggest part of my life has involved going to Africa twice this summer. The first time I went was for a scholarship program. A group of 6 students and two professors traveled to Tanzania (Specifically the island of Zanzibar) to film a documentary on an NGO (Non-Government-Organization) doing unique works to charity. Now you are probably asking: "Hey Nonberg, where are the sweet pictures of the pirate flag?) Well, to that I would say, it was impossible to take pictures with the pirate flag considering the airline lost my suitcase with the flag in it. I did not get the flag back until the airport. At that time my camera was out of batteries. I could write volumes on what happened in Africa, but hopefully I'll be able to share my documentary with all of you when its done in the next month or so.
My second trip to Africa was for a family vacation. For my parent's 60th birthday, they decided to give each other the gift of a safari (their life's dream forever.) I saw some animals I never thought I would ever get to see in person. If you guys are interested in seeing some of the pictures I took check out this link:
http://picasaweb.google.com/nonbergsinkenya2010
So that's my life in a nutshell over the past couple of months. Right now I am currently starting my second year at school and am now the new assistant coach here on the team. I can't wait to see everyone in a couple of weeks.

I'll Leave You With this

that's mt Kilmanjaro in the background. I'll be summiting that in January.

I'm in Bolivia!

Hey you all so I finally made it down to Bolivia. I guess I really never explained why I made the trip down to South America and some of you probably didn’t even know I was down here to begin with. Well I was offered a job to work for an alumn managing some stores he owns in Bolivia. I figured this was a once in a lifetime opportunity so I accepted. The job in itself is only ok. I work in a bookstore here in La Paz. We have a decent selection of used books that we sell at reasonable prices and we also sell different camping and hiking supplies like backpacks, tents, sleeping bags, pretty much anything you would need to travel or hike. To be honest it almost feels like I’m hustling out on the streets since I’m constantly bargaining for prices with our distributors and trying to get people to buy from us. Our sales have also dropped in the last few months since other stores that sell the same stuff have opened up. La Paz is also not the most attractive city, so I was amazed to see that the majority of our clients are tourist. From far away the city looks really cool since it’s surrounded by mountains, but once you get close it’s pretty dirty and poorly developed. Other parts of Bolivia are supposed to be really pretty so I may travel out some once I get my first paycheck.

I’m staying in an apartment that my boss has rented out for us and has subsidized part of the cost. My roommate is a Carleton grad from ‘09 who works with me and has been in South America for a while. He is pretty familiar with the city and the store so he has pretty much been showing me around until I get the hang of everything. We also went out with a group of his friends last weekend and I proceeded to get really drunk. To make a long story short altitude makes you get drunk faster and I blacked out got lost in La Paz, lost my phone, that I had just bought a few days ago, and got home at nine in the morning to find out that my boss had spent most of the morning trying to find me to help him get stuff from the market, so much for first impressions.

I plan on staying here in South America for a few months unless I get offered another job but I’m not holding my breath on that. I’ll most likely end up returning in May and start applying for grad schools and looking for jobs. This means I’ll miss the alumni meet, which kinda blows, but I might pass by Carleton in the spring. Also what is the deal with the Brocation? I really don’t mind if you guys plan it while I’m out here but lets get the ball rolling. Alright well I hope all is well in the states have fun at the alumni meet and will keep everyone posted on my trip.

Segway chief hoist with his own Segway

If you missed it, here's the tragic, but not really ironic story, and one of the many takes on the whole event. I thought there must be some sort of literary term for this kind of thing, but the closest I could come up with was the he was hoist with his own petard. But replace petard with some equally French word meaning complicated, expensive contraption that is really no better than the alternatives. But you can get around faster than walking without all the costs of driving a car! . . . Bicy-what-do-you-call-'em-now?

Anyway, I really just wanted to use this as an opportunity to post on my favorite world-revolutionary product that wasn't. And to post a bunch of pictures of people looking ridiculous on Segways:

Senior Year WTF?

This is senior year? Really? I've actually been here for 3 years? This is what goes through my mind every morning. Then, I think: "What do I have to do today? Hmmm I have work, then one class, and then like 5 meetings. Oh, and I should work on one of my compses, maybe. Or drink. Hmmmmm."

So, what's new about this year? First, I'm living in basement Memorial, otherwise known as The Pit, and it's amazing. Our common room isn't quite as large as the Stadium common room (it's hard to tell), we only have a half kitchen, but my room is gargantuan, nearly as large as the triple I lived in last year. We threw our first party last night, a triple-kegger (yes that's right) and it was a major success. I did realize that the Stadium carpeting made throwing parties sooo much easier, but we had a mopping party today and our room is as clean as ever. We also live down the hall from a pool table and a foosball table.

Secondly, comps. So I'm double compsing this term and next term, meaning that I only have 2 classes and subsequently, no class on Friday. This is awesome in terms of scheduling, but I have not been doing enough to prep for my Russian test in 3 weeks (case in point: this post).

Third: I've joined the equestrian team! Which means that I have an hour-long horseback riding lesson every week and I'll probably do a show sometime. I am very likely the only male on the team, but there might be another one. I decided to join the equestrian team because I felt like a bad Kansan because I'm not very experienced with horses and because I would like to live in southern Siberia next year, where horseback riding is a very useful skill. Maybe not so much jumping, but still.

Fourth, the FLOOD! So it started raining sometime Tuesday night and continued raining moderately hard until Thursday night. On Thursday, the fields surrounding West had already flooded and the Lakes had risen substantially. By Friday, the river had grown beyond its banks and inundated the entire town. Stadium and West were islands in a very large lake. The football field/track are destroyed. Allen house (and those other ones next to it) had to be evacuated. Froggy's was damaged heavily and the fire department was flooded. This is the worst non-tornado natural disaster I've ever been in.

So yeah, that's a glimpse of what I've been up to. Life is busy, but I've done that intentionally because I want to get everything out of this year that I can.

Hey guys

I haven't written in a while, partly because I've been busy studying for my prelim exam and the beginning of the school year. That and I guess I've just been too lazy to write to update y'all on the goings on in my life.

The prelim exam is a two day test, covering everything that I should have learned in 4 years as an undergrad and in my first year as a graduate student in physics. So: Electricity and Magnetism, Special Relativity, Classical Mechanics, Quantum Mechanics, Statistical Mechanics, oh, and lots of math. All of the Ph.D. candidates have to pass the preliminary to continue on in the program, we generally get two shots in case we don't pass the first time. So about the last month of the summer I spent trying to be prepared for the exam. More than once during the process I was struck with the impression that I had learned too much, that the sum of human knowledge was too great, and that maybe solipsism would be a more tractable philosophy.

My New Theory of Everything:


Back to the point. The prelim exam kind of sucks, and it certainly isn't the best way to test our propensity in physics, but I guess I made some connections while studying. And--yes--I did pass, so that's what matters at this point.

So the day after the prelim was over classes started--as a grad student, I do miss having long breaks of not having to do anything school related. This term I'm taking Gravitation (General Relativity) which I think will be a fun course.

I have a light course-load because I've found a professor who actually has some extra grant money lying around and is willing to give me some of it to help him do his research. This part of grad school, I've found, is not always as easy as it sounds. Anyway, the professor that I'm working for has been researching granular materials, particularly their critical point where they transition between being liquid-like and being solid-like.

Starting out with a research group can be slow, and my first simulation seems to be... inconclusive at this point. But I can tell you about one aspect of my work that has been interesting. That has been learning how to do general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU). So what does this mean? A GPU is the primary component of the graphics card in your computer which carries out many of the computations necessary for displaying graphics on your screen. Compare this to the CPU (C for Central) which carries out all of the other instructions from the programs running on your computer. What you may not know about your CPU is that while your task manager or activity monitor tells you that you are running many processes, each of which are in turn running several threads (a single set of instructions) all at the same time, your CPU can only actually handle one set of instructions at a time. So it actually cycles through all of the threads, but does so so quickly that to you, your iTunes music plays simultaneously while you type your paper and search for distractions on the internet. (Many computers now have dual, quad, or multi-core processors where each core actually can run threads simultaneously with each other). What makes a GPU special is that it has hundreds of cores and can run at least that many threads at once. This was originally useful for computer graphics, especially in video games, where, for example, you might have some 3D object which you could represent with a large array of data. Then in order to figure out how to display the object on the screen, how to light it, etc., you need to perform some calculations on the entire array of data. While GPU's generally can't do a single calculation as fast as a CPU can, their ability to do many calculations in parallel can make them much faster at this type of calculation. So these types of calculations are offloaded onto the GPU greatly increasing the overall speed of the program and allowing programmers to make more detailed graphics.

Of course, computers are being used to handle very large sets of data for many more reasons today, including research. So it is only natural that researchers and others would want to get in on the power of graphics processors. One company that has made that possible is NVIDIA with their CUDA architecture, which is what I've been learning to use. They created a library extension to the commonly used C++ programming language that can be used with any of their graphics cards in production today. Learning to write programs in parallel has been interesting and difficult at times. I have to worry about things like two threads accessing the same memory which can make algorithms to do simple things much more complicated. But I'm finally getting the hang of it and pretty soon we'll see what kind of a speedup it can have on our programs. Anyway, I think it's kind of interesting stuff and it's a pretty safe bet that computers and computer programs will increasingly rely on massively parallel processors like GPU's in the future.

Finally, I realize that got kind of long and I don't know if it's really interesting to everyone else, so I'll leave you with the youtube video I've been enjoying this weekend:



Someone needs to mash this up into a debate between Phil Davidson and Basilmarceaux.com. I smell youtube gold! Get on that internet.

Behind the Scenes: A Look at the Statistics of Stadium 110

Right after I finished packing to return to Carleton, I began browsing the blog editing section of Blogger and realized that they added a wonderful new feature without me noticing. Once again displaying its tendency towards world domination and evil without being quite evil, Google has begun recording statistics about how many people visit Stadium 110. One can see how many people visited on a certain day at a certain hour, what OS they were using, which browser they browsed upon (through? is it a window into the internet?), and from what country they were surfing this complicated series of tubes known as the World Wide Web. These results are, of course, fascinating.

These statistics reveal the demographics of our pageviewers. While Stadium 110 has an obviously strong appeal to citizens of the United States, I must say that I was proud to see 7 pageviews from Russia. I believe that the most surprising statistics may be found at the bottom of the graph: 4 people in Latvia and 3 in India and Luxembourg have experienced the force that is the Ocho. If YOU happened to be one ofour international viewers, well done sir (or madame)! You have discovered a future cornerstone of American society.

Our viewership is also surprising Mac-oriented, with both Safari and OS X taking the top spots in the browser and OS categories. I must admit that I am surprised by the fact that Internet Explorer defeated both Opera and Chrome. If YOU use IE: SHAME! I am also interested in the fact that Android defeated iPod and iPhone. If I had to guess, I would say that the typical Stadium 110 viewer is an upper-middle class American who just can't use AT&T. Google can make a fortune on this info!

Another interesting feature of Google's statistics is that it reveals the search keywords used to find Stadium 110. As can be seen above, our blog has provided valuable advertising for Middlebury's Moscow Program, MSTRKRFT, and Guido van der Werve. It has also provided valuable information for those looking to find naked black men and Elliot Bartis. Dave showed a lucky person just how wonderful being funemployed can be and Tim brought it to Minnesota, while Alfredo didn't exactly answer the question regarding the safety of pajaretes but provided priceless information about milking cows for the sake of alcohol consumption.

I look forward to using this data to make Stadium 110 more user friendly and appealing to its viewership. With the help of Google, Stadium 110 is already one step closer to the oh-so-lucrative joy of Monetization. This post here already contains every single element that has made Stadium 110 a phenomenon that has taken 3 of Earth's continents by storm! My goal: a view from Antarctica by graduation.

UPDATE: At approximately 1:00 PM on September 11, 2010, Stadium 110 received a milestone 50 page views. This is unprecedented in the history of Stadium 110 and is a sign of the pageview potential of Stadium 110. A stock broker would be unable to handle statistics like this if we went public.