The Problem Everyone probably knows of the concepts of teleportation or mind transference. You step into a thing and pop out somewhere else, or you put on a metal helmet, close your eyes, open them, and find yourself in a brand new body (not necessarily organic either!). These may be actually doable. If so, they could revolutionize society. But there is one little detail that has nagged me on and off the past few years, something that I have occasionally seen discussed in science fiction literature.

An interesting article came up in my feed today. This is an area I am particularly excited about because it covers one of the fundamentals of life - shelter. In later posts I plan to go into more depth on what I think the rest of the fundamentals are. Housing is both something we cannot do without and a vehicle of speculation. This is not a good thing - lack of affordable housing and the resulting problems not only have a huge opportunity cost but also impact entire swaths of the economy and quality of life.

There was a very interesting article that popped up in my RSS feed yesterday. This article talks about a conference proceeding where a way of modifying the shape of cartilaginous tissues using electric currents was described. While it is limited to tissues containing collagen, this actually covers a pretty good chunk of the human body, most interestingly the eyes. As someone who wears glasses, I’ve often contemplated LASIK. However, while it does have a pretty good success rate I am fairly attached to my vision and I’m not too comfortable with the known potential side effects from vaporizing part of your eye.

Trust is when you can rely on an entity to behave in a certain way in a given relationship. This can be based on varying degrees of evidence of the reliability of the entity, ranging from none at all (effectively just faith) to decades of shared experience. Trust is important because it allows us, to an extent, to engage in interactions with another entity without having to constantly be suspicious of their motivations and intentions.

Code for the project mentioned is located here So I was working on a thing in go, nothing too major just a little doohickey to refresh my go skills. As a student worker, I provide AV support for classrooms. We use a program called RoomView Express to monitor all the Crestron equipment, although pretty much all we care about is help requests. I didn’t feel like installing RoomView Express on my laptop, and I also wanted to be able to get help requests without having to walk all the way back to the office only to turn around and walk back.

This is the first time I’ve attempted a technical write-up of something I debugged. I want to get better at doing this because it’s important to be able to effectively communicate a process and solution, especially when other people may be depending on your explanation. I think next time, I might keep some notes on the side as to what I did instead of recalling all from memory, and probably preserve all of the testing code I write as I debug as well so that I can give more visual examples.

Hello world! Why is it that “Hello World!” is the traditional first program? Does it symbolize the birth of a new creation? The start of a new journey? A rite of passage for newcomers to the mystic arts of programming? A celebration of achievement? Or was it just coincidentally used as an example in a foundational textbook and from there wormed its way into all other introductory texts and rites of initiation?