Folding space, thus reducing time.

"The silence isn't so bad. 'til I look at my hands and feel sad 'cause the spaces between my fingers are right where yours fit perfectly." - Vanilla Twilight by Owl City.

This song, specifically this little chunk of the song, has been looping through my head. It's also been the ONLY song on my playlist for the past few days. I see no direct correlation.

In other news, it's been a while since I've posted. I've been trying to take this weekend to get caught up on life, and this blog post was one of those things. My classes, as I thought, are proving to be difficult which in turn makes them that more interesting. It is nice to be challenged. And fairly refreshing.

I don't have a whole lot to say today. I had a bunch of things I wanted to put in here, but they've escaped me now. Oh well. Maybe while I'm playing Super Mario Brothers Wii I will figure them out again.

Computer assisted design - It takes an idea and makes 3D stuff

So, it's been a while since I've last updated. Yes, a little bit over two weeks. However!! In my defense, I've had a lot of preperations for Christmas, New Year's, and helping my sister move out of our parent's house. The end of 2009 was quite full, but very pleasing.

With the beginning of 2010 underway, the second half of the academic calender is about to begin. I've discovered, that the academic calenders don't seem as important as they once were in high school. Mainly because there are 3 points in which a person can graduate from college, unlike in high school when everyone graduated at the same time. In college, you look at them only to tell when classes start, end, finals week begins and ends, and when any breaks/three-day weekends occur. I've used it a few more times than that to figure out deadlines for the Undergraduate research conference, but that's about it.

However, I'm also excited to start my classes. I have some difficult classes ahead of me starting this coming Monday (January, 11th). They should prove exciting though. Upcoming, I have Calculus II, Human Anatomy, Machine Structure and Programming, Public Speaking, and a Computer Science Seminar course. This will be the deciding point about where I want to go with my education. Right now, I'm sitting at a point where I could choose any one of a million possibilities that involve computers and technology. However, I have focused in on three or so possibilities. The first is taking a purely Computer Science route. Taking on this as my only major would involve taking up a minor, which based on the classes I'm currently enrolled in, would likely be Biology. It is one of the quickest minors I can obtain without taking the Mathematics minor built into the Computer Science major. Another route which is closely similar is Software Engineering. This differs from Computer Science near the end of the academics. Some courses are no longer required, but a few others are then required in the place of the dropped courses. An idea that springs to mind is, 'Why not go for both?' That is very possible. However, a little bit of digging brought up another alternative. This being Cognitive Science. With various concentrations, I could major in this and have a deeper understanding of 4 different fields (Computer Science, Biology, Philosophy, and Psychology). Should I concentrate in Computer Science while majoring in Coginitive Science, approximately half of a Computer Science degree would be earned. And THAT has made me think of earning 3 degrees. However, this would then require me to push myself harder academically then I've ever pushed myself before. And I have a feeling that I would be the first to walk down this path. My interests in computers has drawn me toward Artificial Intelligence. And that's why I'm tempted to look at Cognitive Science, since this is one of the larger focuses of the field. I'm not sure what I will be doing, but I have until late March to figure it out.

But everyone needs balance in their life. As I talked about in my last post, I've involved myself into a game called Warhammer. This past weekend, I spent some time with friends of mine and we sat around almost all weekend and built models that we had either purchased or had been gifted with. Based on the game's point system for their models, I have roughly 1200 points in models alone. With various 'upgrades' that the game system can provide and proxying 1 piece, I can field an army worth almost 2000 points. This makes me smile. I was able to go from 0 points - 2000 points in nearly a month. However, this will involve a great deal of painting, patience, and possibly frustration when they released my army's updated armybook. It is due for release in February and very little information is being released to the public. I am new to the scene, so I am not particularly phased by the lack of information. From what I've read, however, this is not exactly a promising sign. From the rumors I have been reading, I fear that one of my model units (called the Pestigors) won't be useable anymore (point wise, that's nearly 10% of my army). But, we'll just have to see if January will produce any more rumors or facts from Games-Workshop.

I think that will conclude my update for today.

Except for this: I still haven't forgotten about the photographic, audio, or video versions of what I want to do with this blog. I'm still trying to determine the best ways of getting these accomplished with no cost to myself, which is proving difficult.

A different kind of acceleration

I strongly believe that each and every geek has some sort of gaming that isn't console, handheld or computer-based. I used to dabble in Dungeons & Dragons while I was high school and my first year of college. My second year and so far in my third, I've participated in a little bit more than just that. I've played several campaigns in the realm called World of Darkness. It's similar to D&D, but the rules are a bit more strict. It's more serious than D&D, which on some levels makes it a little bit more attractive. Alas, though, these two wonderful tabletop games are not the purpose of this post.

Where I'd like to draw your attention to, only because it has recently fascinated me, is the realm of Warhammer. Specifically, the Warhammer Fantasy section of Warhammer. And by recently fascinated, I mean I've started to really get into it over the past two months or so. The game runs a little bit like this: You choose your race, you buy models of that race to represent your army on a battlefield, and you fight against another army based on a couple pieces of paper and some(times a lot) of d6.

The army I have chosen is the Beasts of Chaos. As their name suggests, they're an army of beastmen and various nasty creatures. As far as I can tell, they're kind of a difficult race to get a first grasp of and to win consistently with. This is due to their lack of everything but melee options. Because I only recently obtained some of my own models, I have been proxying with models from various other armies that my friends have graciously let me borrow for games. Now, don't get me wrong. The Beasts do have *some* magic. However, I have not had very good luck with it. I can't decide if my army is just not suited for magic or Manfred (the first model I received, and the General for my army) just really does not like magic. He has tried to be all magical twice. The first time he exploded on the field, and the second time most of his spells just kinda fizzled.

Anyway, I went to the local hobby store by my house to buy myself some glue to start putting these guys together. I started with my Bestigors since they're metal and take almost no time to put together. Right now, the primer is drying, and I'll soon be able to paint them. Don't know what kind of palette I'll use on them, but I'm sure it'll look awesome...eventually. I'd take some in progress photos, but I don't really have the lighting for it (or for painting them in the first place). If I can get some decent lighting, I'll take a picture of them primered and various stages in their painting progress.

Myriad of possibilities

Every once in a while I go on binges of geekiness in hopes of bettering myself. Well, often this makes me, in fact, appear even more geeky to the rest of the world. In tonight's binge, I decided that some of the things that I have stumbled upon while scouring the internet should get posted to my blog and shared with the world. Granted, I understand that nobody reads this yet, but someday, it'll get read and enjoyed.

The first thing I wanted to share is not actually from the internet, unless you buy it there. Conveniently, at the end of this segment, there will be a link to where you can purchase this book. For my birthday, I received a book called The Geeks' Guide To World Domination by Garth Sundem. I read it in bursts because it's actually pretty good stuff. In essence, this book is geek humor at its finest, talking about science, math, latin, beer, and many other geeky subjects. But something that I found to be very true to my own existence is the following passage from Sundem's introduction to the book:

"...we rocketeers remained geek kings and queens of only the rocket club (and - in the spirit of full disclosure - later the jazz band and the math club and the chess clubs. Wow, this is actually rather cathartic). Today, with highly specialized knowledge of all sorts driving the world, it is as if more and more people are clamoring for inclusion in these clubs. Everyone now wants and needs information, leading to a much wider pool of adoration for the alpha geeks in each discipline.

It may be no revelation that yesterday's geeks rule today's world. A quote widely misattributed to Bill Gates: "Don't make fun of geeks because one day you will end up working for one." But with most of society now acting as phytoplankton at the base of the ecosystems in wich geeks are the alpha predators, we are not only driving the traditional geek fields, but we're starting to drive cool as well."

After reading this, I started thinking about my life. No no, I'm not going to get all emotional and sappy about my hard-knock life. But I am going to say that I'm pretty sure that I've made the correct choice going into Computer Science and Software Engineering. Although it is a very geeky field (in a tie with the physics, chemistry and mathematics), I will be the person who will say, "Yes. This can be done." Thus, envied by everyone. Now, I just have to work on being ridiculously good looking and life will be happy! Haha. Who am I kidding. Anyway, here's your link to purchase this book.

Moving onto the second the I wanted to share is Wil Wheaton. Okay, I'm not actually going to cut him up into little pieces and give everyone a piece of Wil Wheaton, but I'm going to turn your attention to a couple of things that he does. First one, is his Twitter account. Good stuff to follow. And easy to do if you have Google Chrome and Chromed Bird. The second piece of information about Wil Wheaton I want to bring everyone's attention to is his blog, WWdN: In Exile. It's fun to read, and I'm glad I stumbled upon it. And finally, he has two podcasts that I have downloaded and am currently listening to. So far, I haven't listened to Memories of the Futurecast yet, but I do know that Radio Free Burrito is absolutely brilliant.

The last thing I want to share with you tonight is short video series called The Guild. It grabs various stereotypes about video gamers (specifically MMO gamers), and pulls the attributes apart and takes a handful of them to their extremes. It's highly entertaining. Not that I encourage the use of torrents or anything, but you can easily find the first two 'seasons' of The Guild on Bit Torrent search engines, or you can watch them through YouTube. Or, apparently, you can go to their website: WatchTheGuild[dot]com and....ya know, watch it.

And on that note, inspired by Mr. Wheaton, I'm going to add another thing to things that I may think about adding as features to this blog. That addition may be a podcast. Not wanting to do this alone, I tried to convince a friend of mine to co-host a podcast with me, however, this may not happen with her until the end of January at the earliest. I might solo one before then...but who knows. I'm still trying to put everything together to get a reader base before I attempt to get much of a listen base. Though now that I think about it, it might be an amazing idea to get both of these off the ground. Heh, I'm a genius.

Space and time are...relative?

I'm in the process of moving out of my bedroom. Don't worry, I'm not actually moving anywhere permanent. I'm just packing up all my stuff and pretty much moving/storing it in my parent's basement until I am done with school and/or get a place of my own. With me being at school 8-9 months out of the year, my mother decided that she would like to use my bedroom as a guest bedroom. She has similar plans for my sister's bedroom, since she has started talking about moving out and into an apartment with one of her best friends.

I've also contemplated adding another feature to this blog: having photoblog content. Or perhaps even a photo webcomic. I'm still playing around with all of the features that Google is capable of (or has purchased), so I'm not entirely sure how or when I might implement these ideas.

I'm also excited to say that I'll be beginning the programming of my research project later this week, along with writing up some either web code or game code for a project with students from the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities. My research is trying to find underlying patterns within a few of Cellular Automata using Particle Swarm Optimization. With any luck, it won't backfire. The game/advertisement is a space conquest game that I've been asked to do some web development for and possibly some Java programming. We'll see how it goes. I haven't connected to the server where everything is being stored for a few weeks, but oh well.

Infinite in time, mass, and velocity

Welcome to the Quantum Singularity blog. This blog will be used to document various things within my life. In short: I don't know the purpose of this blog. It could touch on things I find amusing, progress that I make on my research, hardships that I may be dealing with, or anything else under the sun. I will also be keeping a mobile blog as well. A link to it has been posted on the sidebar on the right hand side. Based on it's name, 'Singularity: On the Run', I plan to throw just quick posts there when I don't have access to a computer or don't have time to write up a full blog post.