Number of hours exercised must equal the number of extra years lived to make back the time investment in the exercise. To be a worthwhile investment, amount of time spent exercising must be less than the number of extra years lived, thus you are gaining time.

So assuming every day you exercise 1 hour, and that this would extend life expectancy by 3 years, the extension of 3 years would equate to 26,280 hours of life extended. Therefore if you exercise for an hour a day from birth, at the age of 82, your investment would balance out, and any further exercise investments would not pay off. This is assuming the lifespan extended by is static.

Yahoo! rolled out a cool new search engine results page. I have to say, such a drastic change was long overdue for search engines.

Interestingly enough it has a few of the elements I thought could be useful when I posted about it a while back. The new design is centered, it has a sidebar with a notepad. The best new feature is the ability to search any website from within Yahoo!. There's awesome tabs on the left that appear to be dynamic, and change based on your search term. Brilliant! Ads are also closer to the center, and should be good for increasing profits.

Nice new search engine results page, but too bad all of Yahoo!'s other internet properties are an absolute mess.

To keep my mind off of the mass of physics and organic chemistry I have to do, more writing to keep my mind off things and delay the inevitable.

There was a very interesting discussion on NPR the other day about germ line gene therapy. I had heard of gene therapy, but germ line gene therapy was new to me. Something about modifying the damaged mitochondria in egg cells or something and having healthy monkeys be born. The ensuing discussion included talk about how it was immoral and whatnot.

I don't really think there's anything wrong with "designer babies", as long as the designer element is restricted to physical ability. After all, if you created a child that looks good or more physically fit, no harm done. The kid would probably (?) be happier overall, although this is hard to say. Who wouldn't want to eliminate the risk of having a child with some physical deficiencies. Obviously I'm looking at this from a practical standpoint only.

While there's nothing wrong creating modified people physically, there's a large risk in improving mental ability through gene therapy. This has an inherent danger because this would essentially create two strata of people. These Human Version 2s would have superior intellect, so who knows what could happen.

Any person created through germ line gene therapy would need to be tracked, regardless of whether the modifications are physical or mental. If the modification is mental, the individual would need to be contained completely.

Selectively breed beans for maximum size until x(?) generations later, they are tomato sized super beans so large that a couple could be a meal. Would be very cool. No idea how many generations it would take. But once I get a pad I'll probably start testing until the end of my life. Hopefully the beans will at least have doubled in size by then.

Why beans? Beans are healthy and nutrient dense. They're delicious. But they're small, so they're perfect for breeding.

Organic chemistry. Oh joy. It's especially difficult since I've forgotten everything I learned in chemistry. Arrhenius acids and bases, Lewis structures, acid base pairs, all of it gone when I vomited the facts onto the final exams.

Now I have to relearn all this stuff by week's end.

Because the first strike can easily mean a win for either side, determining the best ways to allocate the resources is important. The top players are skilled simply because they have fine tuned it to a point.

In all RTSs, you can basically harvest resources or build attacking units. Because the rate of resource acquisition and creation of new units is essentially constant, simple flowcharts can be created to determine the various combinations of units for optimal expansion or offensive capability.

Just another idea I will pursue when I've got loads of cash, time, an F430, and a nice McMansion.

There must be a reason all (most) great ideas seem to come from kids in college. The atmosphere is stressful, hellish, overwhelming. At the end of the day, you're just exhausted. But this in turn, makes everything else seem like the most fun thing to do in the world, thus inciting motivation.

I use Meebo simply because it's a webapp, and won't be slowing down my computer. For some strange reason, Meebo thought it would be a brilliant idea to make chatlogs public to everyone. A simple search with some keywords will bring up plenty of results. Just search for

site:http://chatlogs.meebo.com/ "keywords"

And all that stuff will be brought back. You can narrow things down as well if you add a separate "username" part to the search. While you can't see the usernames straight out, a simple View Source will solve that, which makes it even worse. Of course it's dependent on the fact that the individual uses Meebo, but whatever. Digital records are great, but only if you're the only person who can see it.

The weather reporting is a bit too broad. It's bright as day out, and the theme is showing some sort of cloudy doomsday.

Oh what's this? I've got a counterargument to my "money buys happiness" reasoning.

The brilliant piece of logic states that Michael Jackson could make $400 million a concert, yet he died at age 50 of a drug overdose.

1. What does dying early have to do with happiness? Nothing. The individual seems to be assuming that he killed himself because he was unhappy, but this has not been proven, therefore it is an invalid argument.
2. The argument says nothing about his happiness. It says, he makes a lot of money, but died early. Nothing about happiness.

Outlogicked. My logic is undeniable!

Once again I've been told that "money does not buy health and happiness". I hear this way too many times.

It is illogical to think that money does not buy happiness. Money buys both health and happiness. Money buys everything, as long as you have enough of it.

1. It is undeniable that people want different things, whether it be an experience or physical object.
2. It is also undeniable that when people acquire what they want, they become happy, because they reach their objective
3. But how are experiences (such as travels) or physical items (such as Mont Blancs) acquired? Money of course.
4. Therefore it is only logical to see that money buys happiness. The logic here is undeniable as far as I see. There is no reason for anybody to continue saying stuff like "money does not buy happiness". Of course, people may go to different lengths to acquire that wealth which may negatively impact their health, but ultimately, it differs from the question.

Also started reading Beyond Freedom And Dignity. I was just thinking about the book too and boom, I saw it on the library shelf. It's interesting, but a tough read. Lots of metaphors, and I have to rack my brain to see the connection.

Woot got a new phone. LG Rumor 2. Its UI is surprisingly polished and is on par with the iPhone's. Nice battery life too. Definitely beats my old Motorola KRZR.

So I just registered for my college courses last night. It's ridiculous how much these classes cost. It's even more ridiculous that some of these even require classes to learn. It's also ridiculous how pathetic and slow the user interface was.

My summer business didn't go quite as well as I planned on. It went decently, but not great. Seeing those classes was like getting punched in the face. I don't want to take them. I have to if I want a roof over my head and at least some bread. I think the hell I would be enduring flashed across my mind several times, at which point my chest started hurting and I had to think about something else.

Completely unrelated stuff, I found a great new band. One good thing about summer, I'm discovering a lot more great music. It's a song from The Strokes - You Only Live Once. The alternative video is simply amazing. Maybe I'm a sucker for scifi stuff. Something about the thought of a space probe hurtling off to somewhere we will probably never reach is awesome. I guess it is like an immortality of sorts. Immortalized through your creations. Even after the Earth has passed (hopefully not in a nuclear holocaust), this creation remains, reaching farther than anything else has.

I just realized that every time I add a book to my lists, it updates one time for each book. Awkward to realize those people I've been networked with are bombarded with an endless string of business books. Put an end to that right quick.

Interesting read.

When you have money, is the pain of not having even more worse than hunger?

Messed with a Palm Pre the other day at a store. Still doesn't match up to the iPhone. It has a rather flimsy feel because of the plastic body, but it was better than most other phones.

Commercials themselves were pretty strange already but...

  

Semi related article I read a while back. Neither of these methods of creating an AI seem to be reasonable. Both appear to require an incredible amount of input that would be unreasonable, and if they were created, they would not be capable of reasoning in a timely manner.

Programming basic common sense facts would take ages. It's not reasonable either. My idea would be to create an AI, and because of the lack of physical limitations, the machine can be trained under controlled conditions and learn all of these faster than it would take to program the facts in because it has the capability of learning.

The other idea seems even more complex than Mindpixel.

My line of reasoning assumes the determinism is true. All events are caused by preceding events that prime the action to occur, no matter how "in control" of the event one may seem to be. Therefore, there is no free will. Free will does not make sense. All decisions are reached based on certain considerations, as they are not random. What are the considerations? Obviously the inputs. But the resulting action is an output determined by inputs, therefore, intelligence is nothing more than an extremely sophisticated program which makes decisions based on inputs. Thus AIs can be created once all the decision making variables are in place. A newborn is capable of developing into an intelligent individual capable of reasoning and learning, which is what I assume the ultimate goal is - a machine that can reason and learn like a person. So why not simply program a machine with the same capabilities of a newborn and simply train it. Learning is determinism in a sense.

But there's also the obvious problem of our wonderful new robotic friends deciding to kill us all for whatever reason. The 3 laws cannot be hardwired. If it is a true AI, it could potentially override the "laws" because it has the capability of reasoning. Humans have things that are hardwired, such as habits and such determined by genes. However, these are nothing more than a "default" setting, capable of being overridden by the mind with sufficient effort or manipulation. Therefore with this hypothetical AI, if the human mind is fully modeled there is a significant risk that any 3 laws will be overridden if certain undesirable human characteristics are included. Therefore specialized "dumbed down" robots would be required for all tasks, otherwise there would be significant risk. Maybe only several AIs can be made that are not stripped of their capability to learn, and even these must be fully contained.

The most basic program of intelligence is simply "randomness". Random action, thought generates input into the environment, and possibly a response, allowing learning to occur.

Most Difficult Areas To Address
- Pattern recognition required for learning. Visual, auditory, physical, taste, balance, etc.
- Factoring the endless internal variables that affect a situation
- Determining which variables are even necessary for a task, such as emotion.
- Determining how the variables are connected
- Determining how closely the variables should mimic the human mind
- Creating the variety of machines with and without particular features

-Random Motion
|-Reflex
|-Learned Program
|-Preprogrammed

Often I don't plan things well. I have a terrible habit of jumping into things, forgetting the planning stage altogether time and time again. It's an irritating habit, and often I'll end up wasting time and such. It is also possible to refine every task down into a simple methodology for easy execution, even brainstorming. Hit upon a decent way last night for new webapp ideas.

Using the main trends of the internet, combining them in different ways and applying them to any niche yielding easily generated unique ideas. Came up with two actually good ones, but I was lazy and didn't get out of bed to write it down and forgot.

- From centralization to the collective, harnessing the power of masses through the internet
- From centralization to the individual
- Shift from local software to webapps
- Freemium, new pricing models
- Online communities and interactivity. Nothing needs to be done alone anymore in a virtual sense.

Also, Grand Map. A massive chart that will organize everything in life into a giant map flowchart of some sort.

Bit of reorganization. New Business and Ideas And Concept Design categories. The business will eventually be ported to a new blog once I hit my profit goals.

Got back from Nevada. First stop was Vegas. Walked about the strip for a little while. For such a freakishly hot location, there seems to be little concern about water usage. From the plane, Las Vegas was dotted with pools and patches of bright green. The second morning woke up at around 4:00 and began driving to the Hoover Dam. Pretty cool. Then drove to the Grand Canyon. Was pretty amazing for the first 20 minutes or so, but then it got boring due to the lack of visual diversity.

Afterwards drove back to Vegas at around 6:00 PM. Watched a beautiful desert sunset. The Hoover Dam would have made from some amazing industrial photographs. It was pitch black, but the area was lit by several spotlights which had a light blue glow. Plus they were building a new suspension bridge. The patterns created by light and shadow should have been perfect. Unfortunately, I had no idea how I could compose a beautiful shot. Afterwards one of the most amazing scenes was driving through the mountain passes until Las Vegas springs into view. A field of glittering yellow lights as far as you could see. An amazing sight.

Thoughts on the hotels.

Circus Circus - Why did we even visit this place. Creepy clown decorations, and seems like a fitting scene for a clown horror film. It was built before 1970 though.
Luxor - Exciting exterior design, but the interior was rather bland.
Venetian - Beautiful design inside and out, but not the best.
Caesar's Palace - Very grand design. High end stores finish it up.
Bellagio - My eyes melted when I entered the building. Beautiful ceiling of glass umbrellas in a massive foyer. Also a fantasy style indoor garden with mini ferris wheel and large watering can. Incredible marble mosaic tile ground all around and water arches. Very unique blend of luxury and fantasy. There was also a chocolate fountain at a store, a la Willy Wonka.
Wynn / Encore - Probably second only to the Bellagio. Marble tile with butterfly mosaic pattern. Incredibly bright and airy with modern decorations - crystal light covers. Saw a $10,000 table with a base made of a giant cut amethyst crystal.
T.I. - Themed design. Not bad, but not amazing.
New York New York - Nice exterior. Interior was nothing exceptional.
Mirage - Pretty nice tropical interior.