The Toilet Door

So one of the first things I've been thinking about with this blog is the simple question. Who is my audience going to be?

It's entirely possible that some of my close friends or family will wind up reading it. It's possible, but unlikely that in the future my children, or children of the next generation will discover it. It's possible that at some point, some strangers over the internet will start reading it because of some content I post about something draws their continued interest. All I really know for sure is that I'm going to read it at some point in the future.

Since a future version of myself is the target audience and anyone else is a bonus, there's a few things I know I need to do to tailor the content so I'll want to read it again, I'll start with some basic assumptions or hopes about what a future version of me will be like.

1) I'll have less time in the future, due to increased responsibility and aging in general.

2) I'll presumably be wiser and have a broader range of knowledge.

3) I'll respect any content that required some intelligence and effort to create.

Taking those three things into account, it gives me a guide as to how I should think about and structure the content I create. From that I can give myself a couple of simple guidelines about what an ideal blog post should contain if I'm going to be interested in reading in the future.

- Concise and to the point

- Thoughts and ideas should contain some preliminary research and effort.

- Should cover a range of topics I'm likely to be unfamiliar with

So to ensure this post complies with my newly defined guidelines, I'm going to expand on the point and try and estimate some probability of people in the future reading my blog.

To work out the probability of someone reading my blog, we have to consider the rate of content creation, as well as the current amount of content available. We'll assume the rate of content consumption is fixed.

In 2012, there was 745 movies released [1], with an average length of 90 minutes, that's 46 days.

For TV shows it's a bit trickier something like Star Trek: The Next Generation has 178 episodes of 42 minutes each, which is 124.6 hours of viewing. Or 30 rock  has 138 episodes of 23 minutes each which is about 53 hours of viewing. If we say the average length and duration of a comedy series is about 60 hours after it's finished and the average drama show is about 100 hours of viewing, then we just need to put a number on how many of those shows are finishing each year. At a guess, I'd say there's at least 3 comedies and 3 dramas finishing each year on average. So that gives us a minimum of about 19 days.

From TV and Movies alone, there's about 62 days a year. Of course that's not including all TV content, I'm excluding things like reality TV, sports, news. It might be better to look at the number of TV channels and competing shows they have in primetime. But I'll leave that for another day. So at 62 days a year of only new video content, there's some time to catch up on the backlog. By what year is the backlog of TV and Movies going to be so great it can't be overcome in a lifetime? I'll leave that for another day as well.

The point I'm trying to get to, is that there already exists more content than anyone could possibly hope consume in their lifetime, and the rate at which it's being produced will grow as the population increases as well. The result of this is that individual blogs are unlikely to be read by anyone in the future, unless at some point, the rate at which humans can consume content is greatly increased by technology.

So. Anyone that's come across this blog before has probably seen how infrequently I update it. Part of that is due to Facebook serving as an adequate outlet for microblogging. So basically what happens is I have some random thought or something interesting worth sharing. I share it on Facebook, get a handful of comments and 'likes' and then I never consider it again. In rare cases some discussion is had.

Part of my unending quest towards self improvement is to force myself to develop new habits. With some help from some software on my phone aptly named Hab-it! One of those habits is obviously blogging & journalling my thoughts and life. I see three immediate benefits to this.

1) I can clear my mind by writing stuff down, rather than bouncing around an idea in my head indefinitely until I get a chance to discuss it with someone or work it on more.
2) I'll get more practice writing and putting my thoughts and ideas into structured essays. Which should aid with my aspirations of writing a book one day.
3) I'll get a chance to document some of my life. I watched a TED talk recently about a guy, Cesar, who made a 1 second video every day for the past year of his life. He was doing it so he'd never forget a day.

So expanding on #3, a 1 second video doesn't mean much to an outside observer, but to him it serves as an anchor point for his memories of that day. It winds up being an ordered system of remembering things. One of the benefits he mentioned was that he was making his days more valuable, so he'd try and do something worth remembering each day. Now I'm unlikely to be able to make a 1 second video each day just yet. I'd certainly try it if there was a convenient application to remind me to take one my phone each day. At least writing something each day is a start.

I've got plenty of ideas for things to write about for the next couple of weeks. So we'll see how this goes.

So basically I have a lot of stuff I look at, think about etc and I've realised that spamming it all on facebook, twitter etc would probably just annoy people to no end. So I've decided to use this as a medium to keep track of my ideas or things I'm interested in and maybe people might find them interesting too.

I present. Singularity chess. It seems complex but it'd be fun to play one day.

http://abstractstrategygames.blogspot.com.au/2010/10/singularity-chess.html

I'm sure many people have claimed they will do something when pigs fly. I now give you evidence.

Behold.

So I got a samsung galaxy the other day. It's very cool. This update comes live from my mobile phone. I must admit that swype is a very intuitive interface

So after the better part of a year trying to set up this experiment. I've finally managed to get a respectable amount of signal at my detector.

Basically the optical fibre that was meant to couple the signal into the detector was damaged or cracked somewhere. Which resulted in very poor signal to noise ratio.

I've since moved the detector onto the table and reconstructed the beam path so I now couple the fluorescence directly into the detector. Even with a fairly unoptimised alignment I'm getting massive amounts of signal. Which makes sense since I can visibly see the fluorescence coming out all over the shop.

To quantify the improvement. Previously using the damaged fibre, it took me about 5 minutes of collection at max power to get an intensity count of about 160,000 or so.

Coupling the light straight into the detector. It is taking me about half a second to get just as much. That represents an increasing in signal by about 1000 times.

Things are looking good for me

Also forgot to mention. With the fibre I needed all the room lights off and the sample and detector covered from as much ambient light as possible. With the detector on the table, I can do it with the room lights on! (obviously I wont when trying to collect publishable data on samples with much lower quantum yields)

So I haven't touched this in over a year. Figured I might give it another try. Here is the latest fun game from Something Awful.

Open Paint. Close Eyes. Draw Cat. Post Result.

As you can see, I'm terrible but it's funny 🙂

Check your garage ey?

Blog mode enabled, after 2 years I've decided to put my hosting plan to better use.

I'll just dump funny links and stuff here I guess.

Updated my phone firmware, has stopped annoying issues now. Quakelive is a bit of fun too