The humble opinions of Dustin Ho. Common topics include Computers, Starcraft 2 Beta, and SHARKS.
I remember reading in high school about the intense regimen imposed on world-class Olympic athletes, of their sports doctors and nutritionists, of their medical tests and dietary restrictions, all to push their speed and edge just a bit farther. I read the article and wondered, why don’t the world class scientists, the genius thinkers, have the same devotion to their bodies? For every workout or vitamin that allowed a sprinter to shave off seconds off his time, should there not be something similar that would allow the professor to arrive at his theory, or the engineer his perfect design, a few hours faster? Now there are many complications with this analogy, the most obvious of which is how deep the understanding of the human brain needs to be than say a human lung for specific causes and effects to be found. There also exists the problem of how to measure cognitive capacity - how much more difficult it is to quantify intelligence, concentration, motivation. But there are studies nowadays that do try that, people that try to answer the question “How can we think better?”. I’m interested in benefiting from these work these people have done.
I am now, more than ever, in a position in life where I stand to take advantage of high cognitive performance, where the opportunities available to me demand my best focus and work. At this point I think I can invest sometime in the methods and mechanisms in which I can achieve this. Now, before everyone comes at me all in arms about illegal drugs and such, please be assured that I have not lost my morals nor general pansiness for trying new things. I WILL be thoroughly looking into the research of the methods and substances I try and I WONT be doing anything dangerous nor anything illegal. Now, for my own reflection and your general amusement, I will do my best to document in this blog what I try, how they’re supposed to work, and how they worked with me.
Now without further ado, I present round 1 of my experiment:
* Exercise and physical workout regimen recommended in Transcend by Ray Kurzweil
* Most basic nutritional supplements recommended by the above.
- Generic Multivitamin (Centrum Performance)
- Omega 3 supplement (1000mg EPA 350mg DHA)
* Caloric restriction (exact numbers depending on how much I decide to care)
* Piracetam 800mg - 20 minutes before each study session
Nothing too fancy yet. Will post later on the logic behind the steps in round 1.
It’s been busy from flying back, moving in, and other new semester things.
As soon as I was fairly settled though, it was off to the races on building my desktop with Jesse. She’s all done and ready to roar now so I’ll throw up her specs. And hopefully more posts will be incoming, this semester shouldn’t be terribly hard…
Hostname: Hitagi (picture on bottom for those of you unexposed to Senjougahara fascination)
Specs:
SILVERSTONE FT01-BW Black Aluminum ATX Mid Tower Uni-body Computer Case
ASUS P6T Deluxe V2 LGA 1366 Intel X58 ATX Intel Motherboard
Intel Core i7 920 Nehalem 2.66GHz LGA 1366 130W Quad-Core Processor Model BX80601920
CORSAIR DOMINATOR 6GB (3 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
Noctua NH-U12P SE1366 120mm SSO CPU Cooler
EVGA 896-P3-1255-AR GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 896MB 448-bit GDDR3
Western Digital Caviar Black WD1001FALS 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5” Internal HD
CORSAIR CMPSU-750TX 750W Power Supply
LG 22X DVD±R DVD Burner
Windows 7 RTM (From Jesse, how come EEs get MSDNAA and CSs don’t D:)
Dell 2408WFP 24” Monitor and a ghetto Acer 20” (Which hopefully I can make it vertical sometime).
And for giggles I went with the IC Diamond 7 cooling compound (MADE WITH REAL DIAMONDS ZOMG. Got it at Chuan’s insistence that diamonds are a girl’s best friend).
Processor OCed to 3.36 Ghz, not sure if I want to push 3.8 (though a ton of people online have gotten 4+ on worse coolers than mine). Runs at 40C idle, and 65C under heavy load.
Pictures:
Close up picture: We did a decent job at cable hiding if we do say so ourselves. Fairly purty, and you can’t tell from the flash, but the LEDs on the Mobo make it look shiny in the dark.
Desk picture: Speaking of cabling, I never noticed that nightmare underneath my desk O.O The 20” on the side still sort of irks me - time to get an Ergotron mount and make it go vertical, perhaps?
Oblig. Hitagi picture
I can’t believe we’re at the halfway point of the Summer already. It feels like I just got here last week. =X So I felt like typing up some of the random notes I took from lectures here (they’re usually in a Moleskine Jeff gave me like… ages ago. I finally found a worthy use for it) so they’ll be in a more… permanant form. You know, just in case I get thrown in a pool or something. Not that that’s a fairly common occurence, but I felt that I should give an example. Right, so on to the notes:
* Trust breeds trust. Transparency reduces leaks, builds community.
* When two people are in conflict, first thing to do is to make sure you have the same information.
Generally, smart people given the same information make the same decision. (notable exception are “religious” beliefs - deep seated perspectives)
* Don’t claim to know everything. Killing a great idea early is incredibly easy to do. Ideas are incredibly fragile. Nurture them. Don’t be so quick to close the loop - even bad ideas can lead you on the path to a good one.
* When you see a problem, fix it! Or develop the solution to a stage where others can fix it themselves.
* We often underestimate the importance of giving credit to other people, to thanking other people.
* It’s impossible for a rule to be so well defined that it handles all the corner cases. Use your best judgement, not rules.
* Show humility - ask people when you don’t know the right answer. You’ll be better off.
* When a situation makes you say “I’m afraid of embarrassing myself.” - its a sign for a great opportunity. You’ll be doing plenty of embarrassing things in life - get used to it.
* Having fun is a sign of peak efficiency - it indicates a task that is challenging, but is within your capability. Look for things that feel fun!
I absolutely love my Waterfield bag - but recently had the desire to trade it in for a more mobile model (oh Chrome… you tempt my heart so even though you lack an external easy-access pocket). My 20 minute bike rides every day are normally a hard-fought battle to keep the bag balanced on my back. No longer! A key feature of Timbuk2 and Chrome bags are the third-leg/stabilizer strap/thingy that hooks the other side of the messenger bag to the strap. $10 at http://www.amazon.com/Lewis-N-Clark-Luggage-Strap/dp/B00004SR9P/ref=pd_sbs_a_4 gives me the next best thing. Evidently it’s pretty successful at what it’s supposed to do - hook two luggage bags together, but it’s been really great at stabilizing my Waterfield while I’m on my bike. I’ve been thinking of sowing it on - but let’s give it another week or so shall we. Anyhow yeah - for $10 the thing works great.
It’s been a whirlwind of things ever since I’ve gotten here and I must say the most interesting times I’ve had are not concerning work nor places I’ve seen, but the people I meet. I think I’ve connected with more people in the past month than I have since the beginning of college (beginning of TAMS might still be ahead in the game though), thanks to the insane amount of friendly interns at work, Ouyang and his program at UCSF, and JJ/Paul with their chums at Berkeley. It hasn’t always been easy (I find that looking for the correct dials to turn my weirdness levels to is always a challenge for non-engineering crowds), but it’s certainly been fun.
There’s a key difference between forming a connection and just making an acquaintance - we’re talking about that kind of friendship that is kind of weird on Facebook, because you aren’t /really/ friend-friends and you aren’t just brief acquaintences either so it feels sort of awkward (at least for me it does - the large majority of my friends on Facebook fall in one of the previous two categories =X). However I feel that that sort of thing is exactly the tipping point for casual social interaction - you spend just enough time spent talking and/or doing stuff (say, a weekend? how very convenient) such that there exists enough common ground that it’s not terribly awkward to get to know the other party further. You have a chance to break past that initial outer persona that you’re stuck with as an acquaintance and get to see just a bit of what that person is, you know, /normally/ like.
And the truly exciting part for me is that everyone I connect with is so interesting. And I’m not talking about the superficial personas, but the core of the person - their values, their drive, their goal. As soon as a certain level of comfort is reached between two people - this artifical wall that we put up comes down and I am just overwhelmed by who they are. It’s a rush I don’t usually get to experience often - and as a closet extrovert it’s rather enjoyable.
—-
Now I realize this all sounds unbelievably fruity and if I just met you also comes off as veeeery odd, but in the end you’ll find out I’m plenty odd and had an unbelievable amount of thinking time on the Caltrain with my DS batteries out (knew I should’ve packed that charger) so take it how you will.
Or just ignore the whole thing and just pretend I say “hey, it was great fun meeting so many different people - and if we get the chance I’d like to hang out again sometime”. That would be fine too.
Cheers!
Went with Ouyang to go see Paul/JJ in Berkeley the past weekend. I’ve been getting pretty bad at updating this - everything has been rather busy =X So to be time efficient, random thoughts!
* Berkeley was great fun - felt like Austin with better weather (though it was 80 and Paul would say “oh my god it’s so hot”). About the same number of trees, building heights in about the same proportion, but there was definitely more asians and some more hobos.
* We met a ton of people. At first we thought it was just because JJ/Paul are just that sociable but they explained that most of them are from the same high school and as soon as they met one… they met all the rest. Plano:TAMS::MontaVista::Berkeley!
* It’s a small (asian) world - I met a few friends’s friends’s friends O.o
* To reduce confusion, introduce the girl that you’ll be massaging as your girlfriend, hmm JJ? That way Ouyang and I don’t have to stare at you oddly and wonder if people at Berkeley randomly massage people =O.
* Speaking of that sort of thing - I have nothing but respect for Danica, she took Paul’s “paulisms” in stride in an amazing fashion. Good for you Paul xP
* It was good to see that JJ/Paul haven’t changed that much. Paul is still Paul and JJ is still JJ (except noone calls him that. not enough Johns I suppose) =).
* I’m in a love-hate relationship with the public transportation here. It’s very convenient until you have to transfer. There must be 5 different public transport systems in this area and only a few are compatible with each other. But it gets me around so I suppose I can’t complain.
* Beating an Elmo pinata senseless was fun in some sort of primal way. As well was stuffing a Spanish-speaking Tickle Me Elmo in a bag and watching him squirm. Actually… that was just creepy.
All-in-all, it was pretty fun! I’m definitely looking forward to going back up sometime xP
More Pictures from Ouyang
http://www.facebook.com/davidouyang?ref=ts#/album.php?aid=2307746&id=23926208&ref=mf
One of members on my team also volunteers for the Computer History Museum as a docent in his free time and was kind enough to show us around!
Babbage Difference Engine #2 - veeeerry cool. Can calculate 7th order polynomials at a fairly decent rate! The story behind is rather amazing as well - Babbage designed the whole thing in the 19th century and drew up the specs but it wasn’t until 20 years ago that someone actually bothered to check out his design (wiki it for more info). We got to see a demonstration of it work and the precision of 8000? or so moving parts was simply beautiful.
A Enigma machine.
One of the original hard drives. Holds 10 MBs!
One of the original Google servers. Evidently the data center Larry and Sergey used billed them by the square footage of space, not the amount of power they drew, so they stuffed as many cpus as they could into a single rack (if you look closely you can tell it’s sagging xP).
Old school Kernighan and Ritchie
Original Windows! and a copy of Carmen Sandiego
A calcuator watch! Without the watch. (Just for you Chuan)
There was a ton of other nifty things there that I didn’t bother to take a picture of (Deep Blue, a prototype mouse, old Apple machines to name a few). I was also amazed at the stuff from my lifetime (Sony Playstation, the Palm Pilot) that can be counted as computer history (this industry moves so fast! obsolete is like 5 years). But yeah, very cool! Definitely recommend dropping by if you’re in the Bay area.
