Riot Heatmap

I’d like to make a world heat map of the riots going on. Doing a quick google search didn’t get me any results of such an app. I was thinking about riots because of somewhat of a long story. There is a podcast that I listen to called The White Vault, that has a voice actor that lives in Chile. Now recently the podcast had to postpone an episode because there was a riot going on in Chile and it was unsafe for the voice actor to make it into the studio to record. This got me curios about riots.

There are many questions I have about riots. How do they form, what is the root cause, what are the initial conditions, how do governments handle them? How useful are they for bringing about real change? What sort of metrics and data can we collect to answer these questions? Can we then use this collected data in order to predict when riots will form? Riots are interesting and seemingly most of the world experiences them.

But, for the heatmap, I think initially the heat should be based on the number of news articles.  Make another map that is based on NLP extraction of the number of deaths/money/etc that shows how actually bad the thing is.

Could look into doing it using javascript sort of like:
https://hicsuntdra.co/blog/earth-global-wind-map/
https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/orthographic=-76.30,32.01,1308

But, really i’d like to also link to the list of the news articles/outlets etc.

I know d3 is pretty complex but maybe something like:

http://d3.artzub.com/wbca/

where maybe the connectors would be the country that was reporting on the riot.

Spatial Queuing Theory with Holes

So, consider a dynamic wireless sensor network.  We wish to minimize the average wait time for each of the nodes in the network to be serviced by new information.  We however do not want to increase the   By using the bounty hunting algorithm we can do this.  I might want to look into routing algorithms.

Consider poison point processes with holes.  When we have a single neighborhood we have a poisson point process, when we have multiple neighborhoods we will have non-overlapping regions where no tasks are generated.  This is where the “holes” are.  Stochastic Geometry is the area of mathmatics which is interested in this.

But, I’ve not really been focused on wireless sensor networks, and it is a bit of a stretch to fit bounty hunting to it (at least as far as I can tell.  My first papers might suggest otherwise).  But with my current direction I have more interest with spatial queues, I have queues rather than wireless sensor networks.  So, there is spatial queuing theory, but there is not a spatial queuing theory with holes!  The paper “Risk and Reward in Spatial Queuing Theory” deals with spatial queuing theory for the dynamic traveling repairman problem.  All of these systems assume a region without holes or space where no tasks will be generated.  This is an important thing in the real world as there are generally spaces where there won’t actually be tasks.  Therefore, I think I need to incorporate the concept of Poisson Point Processes with Holes.  Then build from that what to expect based on the size of the holes and locations.  The holes matter because the distance the servers must travel between the next task is dependent on the size of these holes!

So, I think this is important.  Actually I think that holes might not be general enough.  It would be better if I could generalize to any space.

Algorithmic trading

Wow so it has been a long time.  I’ve recently been looking at stocks again and just two days ago I found a stock and I was like I should buy that.  Then I didn’t.  But I really really should have because it then proceeded to go up by 20% in 2 days.  So, this made me look again into algorithmic trading.  I found a couple really good resources:

https://www.quantopian.com

https://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/index.php?f=1325

Quantopian will let you design your own algorithms for trading on old data and will also let you run it through robinhood.io or interactivebrokers.  I think I like IB better but should start with robinhood.io as there are no fees.  But this is awesome!

Build tools

So, I’ve been learning about some software engineering tools so that I can make my life easier while developing:

jitpack.io and https://travis-ci.org

jitpack makes it super easy to depend on a repo that is able to be built using gradle or maven.

travis-ci does continuous integration for your projects.  This means that if you are testing your code you will be doing it all the time.  And well I’m still not sure how to create test cases for mason as it doesn’t necessarily create the same output every time.  So…  But it is still cool.

Ethics and Incompleteness

So, I was talking to my wife 🙂 about ethics and the types of ethics.  She told me that there is this form called consequential ethics and deontological ethics.  And there are I’m sure a bunch more.  But, what I have discovered is that they each have a set of axioms and from these they base all of there conclusions.  However, I believe that we here are encountering a similar problem as Godel’s incompleteness theorem.  Basically, a complete and consistent set of axioms for all ethics is impossible.

http://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/31726/can-g%C3%B6dels-incompleteness-theorems-be-applied-to-ethics is a link I just found and he references Tarski’s undefinability theorem.

Bioengineering

So, I was thinking that it would be interesting if we made a uniform harvesting mechanism.  Essentially all produce such as potatoes, corn, tomatoes, grapes, carrots, etc would all be grown in the same manner.  So, like if we modeled it after growing corn you would have a similar plant that would produce a husk and instead of inside being corn you would have carrots and grapes etc.  This way the harvesting would be easier as it is more uniform.  It can be optimized for space so the crop density and yield would be high.  The other nice thing is that it would be able to grow in a variety of climates.  This would solve a lot of problems.

This of course brings with it very very big questions such as biodiversity, aesthetics.  This might be solved by creating new biodiversity by not having it grow exactly the same, but in the general pod like structure.

This also makes me wonder about growing meat and tissue in plants.  Both plants and animals are organic matter.  That is a bit weird, but why can’t we customize the bark or shell of a plant to produce more complex structures?  Essentially bioengineering is awesome and scary and will produce some really cool things hopefully.

These things seem like things we’d like to take with us to other planets.

Smart Apartment Communities

I am getting a new apartment and am going to move-in in October!  This time it is a fancy one, not a basement of a house, but well it is still technically in a basement (subterranean as the apartment office calls it).  It is fancy in that it is part of an apartment complex.  The best part though is that I will be moving in there with my then to be wife, Leslie :).

So, last night Leslie was on her amazon because she was checking the shipping order for one of her friends wedding gift.  I was watching and she accidentally scrolled down too far and I saw what she got me for my Birthday!  She got me a Raspberry Pi 3!  So, it is a bit early for my birthday, but I don’t care.  I’m getting a raspberry pi!!!

This got me thinking of multiple ideas of what to do with it…  From making the whole kitchen into a smart kitchen.  Where we have smart outlets, automatic faucets, lights that turn on when you walk in or off when you leave, and automatic alarms that go off if the oven has been on for longer than you set it for, sound system controller, humidity regulator (since a basement probably will need a dehumidifier), temperature controller. dishwasher monitor, voice controlled kitchen timers…. I mean the list just goes on and on and on!

This got me thinking that apartment complexes would be the ideal candidate to start renovating for smart living spaces!  Essentially a smart community.  They could operate on there own smart/micro grid, have there own micro water plant (because why don’t we operate water and sewer like the micro-grid?  I mean that way the entire water system is not so easily polluted by a single source.  Also, that means a more exact amount of water is able to be cleaned etc.  idk but seems like a cool idea right?), also there would be solar panels installed on all the roofs (or at least those that make sense).  Then they could also renovate the apartments themselves.  Of course the more you pay the more the automation and the higher end the appliances etc are.  Of course you would want the smart house to be easily able to integrate the apartment resident’s devices and personal augmentation.  That way they could add more automation themselves if they desire.

So, that is a lot up front.  But, if the complexes start offering for a significant rent increase the basic smart house, they could start to increase there revenue and start to renovate the communities and start to make there company stand out.  Eventually they would have the dream of my last paragraph.  Of course if they are building a new community they might consider doing this from the start.

So, that was a fun idea I had.  I think that this would be a fun business to get into.  Contracting with apartment companies to renovate their apartment communities.

 

Bounty Electricity

What if each appliance posted a bounty for providing in real time the amount of electricity it needed to function.  The bounty would first be attempted by the house itself and if the house did not have any spare electricity in its batteries then it would post a bounty out for that electricity.  The first to supply the needed electricity would win the bounty.  Would not limit it to only the power stations supplying the electricity.  Could be houses nearby that could provide the electricity.  By using a bounty hunting system and using a first to supply mechanism or something similar it would be essentially like the cloud robotics except instead of putting a bounty out for the servo positions we are putting a bounty out to receive electricity!

Machine Learning and History

I’ve had this idea for doing clustering and data mining of history texts.  Would be interesting to creating learning algorithms that can learn timelines and context.  Essentially history textbooks are structured possibly geographically and as a time series of events.  Then doing graphical analysis and social analysis on these structures.  Could compare history texts and see what is left out and maybe what each text places more emphasis on what events.  Also, doing this across time to see how history texts have changed in what the historians themselves find interesting.  Possibly finding patterns in history itself that were not evident or obvious without such algorithms that can crunch large large volumes quickly.  Doing the normal sentiment analysis as well.

This could then lead to producing a better picture of different countries and people groups and how they were formed.  Possibly doing anomaly analysis or creating other types of filters to uncover gaps in the history texts themselves.

This of course seems like it should have been done.  Main issue is getting digital copies of the history books for the algorithm to work with.  So, it may not have been studied.  Creating learning algorithms that can understand human history seems like an important area of research.  Especially as we are writing history now it is important to maintain a grasp of the entire picture and how everything fits together.

Cooking when Sick

When feverish and hungry, follow your instincts.  They are raw and ready to be used when sick.

  1. Moist, piping hot chicken slathered in a spicy bbq sauce
  2. Wrap in a soft, refrigerated taco shell nestled in a bed of snappy spinach
  3. Drink warm water or tea

Eat when fluctuating between hot and cold.  The meal matches your symptoms and most likely your disposition.  The effect it has is almost immediate.  It sends you into a blissful state of peace knowing that you are not the only thing here with such a crazy temperature differential.

 

Of course your appetite quickly vanishes though.  Not really sure why.  Can’t wait to be better.