Now, in my web design class, we’ve been working with two development environments for HTML and CSS. there was Adobe’s Dreamweaver, and the considerably less fantastical Crimson Editor, whose only real upside was that it was free. As the deadline came closer, I decided I would throw the site together over a couple days on Dreamweaver by staying at the lab late, but thanks to some kleptomaniacs in the building, the room that I was told would be open until as late as 10 at night, was locked by 4 o’clock and not accessible to the public. Thus, over the course of a weekend, I hammered through the antiquated Crimson at home, productivity and morale boosted by Kit’s graciousness to lend me a 17″ Samsung he had laying around for dual-screening.

Development went rather well, my only real obstacles consisting of aesthetics such as rounding the corners of divs. One trouble, however, ended up being a stalking predator in the grass, waiting for the opportune moment to strike; I was having issues with my divs moving to where I wanted, and accidentally planted the seeds of woe by designating their position as “fixed” in the CSS.

The following day, I wrote the final few pages, and posted the link to my site on our class discussion boards. When I went to view the site and make sure the link worked, to my horror, I discovered that the “fixed” positions that had been defined to me as keeping a div in one spot, “even when scrolling,” had in fact removed the idea of scroll bars completely! Sections of the pages were cut off by the window borders with no way of viewing them. After researching the positioning system deeper, I was enlightened to the concept of absolute positioning with relative positioning for divs within divs.

One would think that this task would be simple to carry out, and for a seasoned web-designer, I’m sure this scenario is a non-issue, but this was hardly my case. Diving back into my code and changing the positioning caused my page to detonate beyond all readability. The following battle that lasted for 3 hours straight showed me just how much my page was a cobbled together catastrophe of ropes, crudely nailed wooden planks, and duct tape. divs, and classes were created and destroyed like the primordial matter in the early stages of planck time following the big bang. Phantom divisions shunted my text about on the page while I struggled to re-size images and rebuild navigation bars. At last, I emerged somewhat victorious, my mind flayed by the channel cast of HTML and CSS syntax. At a time during the war, I thought Dreamweaver, which I at last had access to, could prove a secret weapon, but by that time my code was so gnarled that Adobe’s interpretation of my code was unintelligible.

It was submitted at the eleventh hour, and is almost everything I wanted. Feedback is appreciated:

Welcome to Your Future.

Also to all the other dads out there… enjoy your day and make the most of it!

Having searched the various lifehacker-esqe blogs and self-help sites, I was unable to find the ultimate mass photo manager.  Google’s Picasa 3 is promising but a little clunky (and lacks native Flickr support), F-Spot looks quite nice, but alas is Linux-only (thus alienating my photo collection), and Adobe Organizer which costs money (came with my copy of Photoshop Elements 6) future support and upgrades are a joke here…

Here’s where Adam Savage comes in.  Although my luck in the past has been more hit than miss with using the “@” message on Twitter, the prospect of getting to the bottom of this mystery was enough for me to give it a try by asking the man himself:

and much to my surprise, the humble Adam Savage did me the honor of not only answering my question, but explaining his selection as well:

Without going into the details of how Twitter has changed how I view the availability of otherwise unreachable people…

Mr. Savage, thank you for making my day.

Only in the luxury of intelligence and self awareness are pieces not meant to fit together forced into union. Unbalanced ecosystems, pollution, zeppelin travel, humor. None are naturally practical. None are pragmatic. All are introduced or conjured up by humans.

Due to their massive intelligence in contrast to other creatures, human thinking can almost be defined by the ability to perceive the impractical. The human body isn’t efficient in the least for basic survival: Our skin is soft and easily torn. Our nails and teeth are dull, and our strength and stamina is pitiful compared to the rest of the animal kingdom. Only through superior intellect can we survive. How ironic that extreme intelligence let’s us afford to be stupid; to imagine the irrational.

Thus, I theorize that if we were to find intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe, our first clue would be nonessential technology brought on by the leisurely use of otherwise overwhelming mental facilities.

In the show, a group of kids were chosen by fate to journey to the digital world and, with the help of digimon partners, rid the Digital World of its darkness and evil as the “Digidestined.” Along their journeys, the Digidestined had encounters where it was necessary for their digimon partners to digivolve, or move up a level in power. To do this, the digidestined had to find crests pertaining to one of their most notable traits, for instance, the computer wiz-kid, Izzy (who I suspect was a Linux user, by the way,) had the crest of knowledge. Tai, the de-facto leader of the group, had the crest of courage. Other crests included love, friendship, reliability and hope.

This is where I run into an error with the digital world: If this dimension is based solidly off of Earth’s computer networks, and is in fact, a digital world, then it would be built completely out of binary code.

Binary code is a style of encoding information using ones and zeros. A code consisting of only two digits being rearranged in varying numbers can quickly become complicated. For instance, if you type the word “cat,” the code representing each of those letters is 01100011, 01100001, and 01110100.

Now, I’m not saying that the combined computational power of ALL the world’s computers isn’t pretty hefty, but I just can’t see it being enough to generate an entire alternate world as the result of anomaly and chance, and then having that world subject to providence run by such emotionally abstract ideas as courage, friendship, and love. The binary code for love would be so complex that no form of technology known today would be able to decode it, even if given billions of years to do it in. In my opinion, a world based on binary, would be constricted to a far simpler, and much more rigid metaphysical state.

This is where I believe Quantum Mechanical reasoning comes in. The very idea of a digital world existing lends support to the “Many Worlds” Interpretation of quantum mechanics. In order to better understand, here’s a brief bit of information about a rival interpretation to “Many Worlds.” The “Copenhagen Interpretation” of quantum mechanics states that all particles can be described by a wavefunction, which is a mathematical representation of the probability of a particle to be found in a location or state of motion. Wavefunction is very delicate, as just the act of measuring a particle causes the mathematical probabilities of that particle to collapse into a “real” state. This is called wavefunction collapse.

Many-Worlds denies the objective reasoning of wavefunction, and believes that every possible outcome of every event exists in its own history or universe. Put simply, every event that can occur in our universe (but doesn’t) occurs in an alternate dimension alongside an infinite number of other universes. This realm is aptly dubbed the “Multiverse.”

Getting back to Digimon, using the “Many Worlds” Interpretation as explanation, I don’t believe that the digital world is derived from our world’s computing power, because we do not have the technology available. The digital world is instead fueled by the immense power of another dimension’s (or group of dimensions’) quantum computers.

Quantum Computers do not use binary code. The ones and zeros of binary code represent the two standard states of electrons, negative and positive. Alternations of electrical current in the patterns described by binary code is what runs our computers today. Quantum computers, however, use the thirty-two quantum states of electrons. Although it’d still be a monumental task, I believe that quantum code could have the potential for facilitating providence based on emotions in another dimension.

The reason people think that the digital world is the result of our computing power is because the digital universe only intersects our world at specific points: our communications network. That provides us with a way in. The multiverse provides all else. I may come back and revise this essay later, but right now I must go to bed.

He was probably best known for his book: Jurassic Park, and also as the creator of the television series: ER.

Crichton was, in my opinion, a science fiction genius.  He could take fantastic ideas like resurrecting dinosaurs, controlling the weather, and time travel, and make it seem believeable!  He embedded these concepts in so much real science, that one could not help but wonder why scientists weren’t ALREADY breeding raptors.

A great writer, a doctor, and an inspiration to people everywhere.

Here’s to you, Michael.  Rest in peace.

Call it a mild obsession if you will, but I think LED’s are quite wicked-cool.  For example, posted above is our new TIX clock which we picked up from ThinkGeek.com.  No, it’s not binary, but it’s not the most simple of things to read either… the lights randomly shift their orientation, so it can be quite a challenge.  It has been fun to use to tell time and my wife and I have been inclined to use it even though there are far quicker clocks to read at hand.  Another perk: it’s bright as heck! making for a nice nightlight.