In fact, nothing sends a chill up my spine more than when an experiment in Physics could potentially disprove a well accepted theory. Every time that has happened historically, the world changed (and usually for the better.)

But, I’m not a physicist and while I enjoy playing with the mathematics of quantum computation, I am a math major historically, and a mathematics buff through and through. Thus, I’m putting out this request to anyone who sees it. I want to know any unsolved problems you know of (beyond the obvious clay mathematics prizes) that you are aware are unsolved. Whether they are simple conjectures from combinatorics, to open questions from long long ago. If you have them, I want to hear them. If only so I have more fun things to play with whenever I get time.

Plus, it’d be pretty spiff to have one page (this blog entry) on the web as a central resource for mathies who are interested in these problems.

KJR

TTC dream map

It got me thinking about Toronto and our interesting, but underwhelming public transit system. It’s a real problem that we are still clogging up our vehicular arteries with streetcars (see Queen St. during rush hour) and trying to compensate for it with patches to the existing system, or incrementalism, rather than simply doing it correctly the first time. What’s crazier though is we claim we do the incrementalism to save money, when in reality these subway designs and relief lines have been in planning since the early 1900s and if they were built when they were originally suggested, they would have cost less money overall than building the equivalent system today would have.

Anyone who has driven in this city will easily agree that the road system, at best, has difficulties handling the traffic load at that time, and at worst is actually fundamentally dangerous. This has become particularly worse now that the city is starting to densify downtown, and the condos have introduced an entirely new group of drivers and pedestrians further amplifying the problem. Many people who live along the TTC simply take the subway, but as I have experienced (and no doubt many of you have experienced), riding the TTC between 4:30 and 6:30pm on a weekday is as futile as trying to keep a snowball whole in a 400 degree oven. With either shoulder-to-shoulder discomfort on the streetcars, or a wait for the 3rd or 4th subway car before you can even get on the train at St. George or Bloor station interchanges.

It’s not like I’m saying anything new though. There have been a huge number of suggested improvements to the current system. It’s not like there’s a lack of good ideas out there, and even taking a small portion of any of those maps and starting to build it now would immediately make life for ordinary people in Toronto (and surrounding area) better and more importantly safer.

If we build it now, we will save money in the future, it’s that easy. These subways need to be built as the city grows, and as anyone can easily see, Toronto isn’t going to start shrinking anytime soon.

Our governments (municipal, provincial, and federal) won’t do anything about it unless Torontonians start demanding it now and demanding that we build it right the first time. A lasting, solid system that Canada can be proud of.

Just my thoughts,

KJR

Chaos and order is necessary for motion or advancement. Without some chaos or movement there would no energy in a system to move it forward. For example, the most perfectly ordered system (mechanically) I can think of is a hunk of metal. It sits there, and until something applies a force to it, it doesn’t move at all. Similarly the most energetic chaotic system I can think of would be something like a bomb, it explodes, there is no predicting what will happen to the individual fragments and the energy is quickly dissipates and becomes useless.

Yet, a car engine is almost exactly those two elements brought into harmony. The hunk of metal (the piston) acts as an enabling constraint for the explosion of the gasoline. This allows work to be drawn from the system. From an ordered constraint, and a chaotic energy source, we get work.

After some thought, it’s easy to arrive at the heuristic that for an independent system that is self-emergent to organize in a “useful” fashion to produce work, it requires chaos in the form of some energy being released, or some normally uncontrollable flow, and it requires order in the form of an enabling constraint to allow for “work” to be drawn from the chaos. In a non-humanistic sense, work commonly just means reproduction of the existing codes/idea in order to produce more of those objects in an effective manner. In an economic sense, it means the production of better and more efficient systems for producing value and wealth.

In a human sense, it means progress.

I must admit for some jobs where only a single non-reproducible object is created, this may seem a bit silly. (Unless of course, the object is a piece of public art or the like). However, for jobs like software development where the good could be open sourced and reproduced at will to everyone or jobs engineering tools like the RepRap (3d printer) which other corporations can take and use to build entire new industries of commercial products, this suddenly seems like a great idea. And if you need more people just imagine the next pretty easy to envision premise: 20% of the population of Toronto gave 10c every day, you’d have enough money to build a large organization devoted to developing software for the benefit of everyone and afford to live a comfortable happy life.

Now, I don’t say you should give the money to a person who hasn’t proved that they are willing to develop and work and I definitely think you shouldn’t force people who don’t want to commit to something to commit. However, let’s just say, for sake of argument, you could get this capital flow, say a 10c investment from this group each day for a year. This would be laughably nothing to each person individually. So what, in theory, could come of something this simple?

This organization could work on developing educational software and could build systems for educating the next generation.  It could work on new tools for teachers so they can better target the strategies for their children’s education. It could work on improving wikipedia, or even afford to pay teachers (or evaluation organizations) to go and check open sources of information like wikipedia and provide definitive and free textbooks. It could develop training resources for large businesses so they can more efficiently run their organizations and provide more ROI (and thus even more jobs.)

This organization could take existing open databases of the government and develop efficient websites for public transit to ease travel, or develop open source displays that could be cheaply manufactured for transit stops. They could develop trans-partisan platforms like TweetCommons, Open Parliament, PollingReport or How’d They Vote, opening the government in ways it had never been before – Making it easier for everyone to know who they are voting for and what the politicians really stand for.

This organization could develop existing hardware projects further and bring home some of the most amazing technologies of our age. For example, they could work on the reprap project and make 3d printing affordable and easily spread, I know OCAD students would all love to have a 3d printer in their house. They could develop pick and place robots that help with making complex circuit boards. They could develop cheap and effective home based manufacturing and prototyping tools that at first would be used by makers, but over time could easily change how we live and play.

This idea, implemented correctly, would take many open source projects to the next level by bringing good engineers, designers and artists into the open source world creating for everyone.

And all of this from less than a quarter of Toronto donating 10c a day for a year, a little more than 1% of all Canadians, and less than .5% of Americans.

This realization always amazes me. The ROI on that 10c would be incredible.

1337hax0r.com is dead, and hopefully this won’t turn into a yet another political blog again. 1337hax0r was best when it was just me discussing the world, life and things and not when I turned into a total political nutbar.

Regardless, this is my new home for longer thoughts. Feel free to read, comment and enjoy. Maybe I’ll write a lot, maybe I won’t write at all, but at least now I have a place to write again.

Have fun.