It was exactly one year ago that I spent an amazing evening celebrating the summer solstice with many thousands of Valencians on the beach, bonfires strewn about and music and celebration to be had. It was one of my more memorable nights, and it was exactly one week before I left Valencia.
I have got to get out of this place.
11 members of the LC, plus one German alum from Braunschweig, are going camping up near Suches, GA this weekend. Plus it’s the summer solstice tonight, and Masato leaves for Romania on Wednesday. Perfect timing.
This is what I have written as my Return on Investment project for my Dale Carnegie course. It involves Project01, A.K.A. Engineering the Next Generation PBoX.
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
I will make Project01 active and sustainable for when I am gone. There will be a sustainable Organizing Committee set up for the duration of the project, with at least 3 TN takers and 3 EP makers in terms of committees. The project will need to realize four total exchanges by the Spring of 2009.
BASELINE PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT
– Stable project brand and common business plan usable among all Committees.
– Numbers of exchanges already in the system: 4
– 3 permanent OC members plus one OC VP per country involved
IMPROVEMENT OBJECTIVE
Go from current stage to a stable branded project that has a clear message for all committees involved. Prepare to recruit at least 3 EPs to go abroad in Spring.
“DRIVERS OF SUCCESS” TO BE EMPLOYED
– Self-Confidence: take confidence in the future of Project01 even after I am gone.
– People Skills – become capable of selling the idea to both TN takers and EP makers as well as companies and potential EPs themselves.
– Develop Leadership Skills – Get others to take ownership of the project and its importance to AIESEC and our own LC, and their own LC.
ROI AND NOTES
– New engineering AIESEC members
– More engineering opportunities for those members
– Restoration of the relevance of AIESEC and of our LC
– Building and Maintaining Rep
To hell with the ego-tourists. This is the real way forward. Stop thinking you’re all that for using acidic batteries in your car to increase your mileage per gallon – although that is better than carbon credits, but so is cycling.
It’s this kind of thinking which will really drastically reduce your carbon footprint. For scientific proof (although with the recent fervor around biofuels, it’s clear no one cares about that anymore), check out the time-tested laws of force and work, both of which are directly proportional to mass – the unchanging weight, if you will.
Briefly, work is directly related to energy (what we all need, and what we’ll never get more of) by: ΔE = W, or the change in energy (which produces things like life, your light turning on, and your car moving forward) is equal to the amount of work done to change that energy. Work is defined, in terms of kinetic energy (energy in action) as:
W = ΔEk = Ek2 – Ek1 = (1/2)mΔ(v2), or the amount of work done is equal to the change in kinetic energy (say, 0 to 60 in 4 seconds?) which is equal to one-half the mass of the object times the velocity squared. Fundamentally, what affects how much energy we use is how much mass an object has (speaking practically, how much it weighs) and how fast it goes. Since we’re not figuring out instantaneous wormholes anytime soon, the only way to make the work go down is to decrease the (…Bueller?) mass!
If you’re still not convinced, another equation for work is W= Fd, or work is equal to the force times the distance exacted upon an object. That one’s simple: you can push against a wall all day but not have done any work because your force does not happen over a distance, but if you were to run your car in park and gas the engine for a minute, you would have done quite a bit of work because of the distance the pistons in your engine would have traveled. Don’t do that though because that’s against the spirit of this post. Force, in its turn, is related by F = ma, or the force is equal to the mass times the acceleration of an object. This is why you don’t really feel any force against you when you’re in a train or plane or car moving at a constant speed, because it’s not accelerating, and so there is no force on your body relative to the earth / vehicle. However, your pistons are changing their acceleration at an amazing rate, constantly reversing direction, which represents a double acceleration change. Once again, this one is most fundamentally only changed by reducing the mass of the object in question, but not gunning your engine at a red-to-green light change is another way to be smart about it.
In short, a fabric car body can be a great sustainability milestone. Since the car will weigh less, it will require less energy (and therefore less fuel) to make it go the same distance as before, and lighter cars are also less lethal weapons to innocent bystanders.
The other day I had a vision of a temple to the human genome.
In the fantasy in my head, this temple was built a little over one thousand years from now, in a non-divided world (hopefully stateless). The temple is situated in Olduvai Gorge, known as the “Cradle of Mankind,” as an homage to our place of Rising. It was designed as mankind’s own magnum opus, with absolutely no detail spared and no corner cut. There are no moving parts in the entire structure, but it is lit and “powered” by the highest of nanotechnology’s offerings at the time. Energy is stored in batteries when the Sun hits a metal plate that sits atop the temple, acting as a much simpler and more long-time effective version of photovoltaics. There are no copper wires or bulb lighting; the only electric pulse needed is “piped” through nanotrenches inherent inside the structural material and the light, which only comes on when there is a visitor, is piped-in (and stored) sunlight. The temple’s holy of holies is situated deep within the earth, as the temple is designed to withstand almost anything that could harm the Earth. It was built to stand as a testament either before mankind was destroyed by some outer or inner force, or before mankind had to evacuate Earth, and could someday return to remember his origin.
The structure is made of a uniform nano-formed substance which is impossible to break by any conventional means, and is perfectly proportioned according to statutes like the Golden Mean and also the ratio of man’s figure, as in the Vitruvian Man. Everywhere within the structure, inherent in the design and not elaborated by generated-culturally significant symbology, are testaments to the reality of the human race, as in a coded book. There is a reference to our understanding of when major evolutionary milestones took place, complete with pictures and most importantly stored DNA of everything from archaebacteria to the chimpanzee, and if possible a preserved specimen, directed in a tree of our evolution. The date of the consecration of the temple, recorded both as a number and as a radioactive isotope (universally understandable) is present. In the hall leading to the holy of holies there are 46 double-helixed pillars designed exactly according to the human genome (this hall is probably extremely tall). At the base of each pillar is a specimen, men on one side and women on the other, of people representing as diverse a gene pool as possible according to haplotypes, who have chosen themselves to be preserved as “offerings” to the eternal testament of our genome. Their blood sample is included at the base of the pillar as well. Inside the holy of holies, at the altar, is a depression the size of the average human hand, fingers spread out. Next to it is a ceremonial knife. When a visitor uses the knife to cut their hand sufficiently and presses it into the depression, the warmth and chemicals of the blood flow into tiny channels to activate a sensor which, if the person is a human, displays their own genotype against the backdrop, which I don’t know what that is specifically. It also plays a message appropriate to the discoverer.
I don’t know why that’s significant, but the day when man is peaceful, sapient, and united enough to produce such a testament will be a glorious one indeed.
Last night I went with Thomas and Shaun to see the North Mississippi Allstars at the Variety, much thanks to WREK rep. It definitely was a much-needed show, as I have not seen a show proper since 2008 began.
Them funky blues must have invaded my psyche, because last night I had one of the most horrid and lengthy nightmares I’ve ever had in which a nuclear device exploded in the city, and while those who could survive tried to take shelter in thick buildings some kind of Resident Evil-style (except much faster and far more sentient) zombies began relentlessly attacking survivors and after many macabre deaths (including that of Steve Jobs for some reason) we were able to communicate with them, and then they put us through an elaborate and extremely difficult series of group or one-on-one “survival games,” of which some were deadly to play and others were not (like “twenty questions”), but failure resulted in death for sure, and success merely resulted in more games. It was as I was reflecting in the dream whilst going through such a gauntlet at the utter despair I faced – no hope for food or water and simply playing on until a mistake comes, should I continue playing the game or succumb to Death of the Endless? – that I was bitten by a small black bug on my leg in this “real” life, and after squashing it, I lay shivering for an hour, unable to return to sleep. I think that the “no end in sight” may be an allegory for a Battle I am fighting right now.
I can think of only one comparably awful nightmare, which was had when I was sleeping across from the “haunted” room in the ancient East Wing of Sumatanga’s lodge whilst a counselor for elementary camp there several years ago. The dream then was a sixth “Planet of the Apes” based on the original continuity (not a dream of me watching it, but the dream was in fact the imagined film) and the end of that dream still haunts me to the point that if I ever become a filmmaker I will include it shot-for-shot and sound-for-sound as the end of my masterpiece.
I am way exhausted and I still have a large homework to do. Gotta keep movin, keep movin, blues falling down like hail.
A long time ago, one of the last people I’d ever expect to teach me something like this made me realize that “amusement” literally derives from the statement “without thought.”
I didn’t check my email for over 24 hours, and I not only cooked tonight, but I did it with no meat. Plus we cleaned about 70% of the horror that has been our house.
Soon, very soon, I will begin playing with my camcorder and seeing what that will look like on here.
This is about the eighth time I have tried to copy this disc of old AIESEC GT videos, which I spent eight hours in the fall transferring from VHS. I’m also painfully hungry and a small bag of pretzels ain’t cutting it, but I am hoping for some deelish food after tonight’s GPM.