Wave physics was the first physics course I took when I started college. It’s considered quite fundamental to any other physical understanding. Light is a wave, sound is a wave, heat is a wave (heat is just light), radio is a wave and so forth. If you understand how waves work, you automatically get knowledge in all of these fields.

That’s why I’m including Introduction to waves as this weeks video.

I want to cover some sort of thermodynamics next week and talk about why an air-pump is a much more effective kind of heating than electricity or burning fuel. However I’ve looked through Khans videos and he has a bit too much on thermodynamics for what I want to cover, so I think I’ll make my own.

Since I haven’t gotten any suggestions on subjects to cover I’m pretty much going to run out of ideas next week, so If I don’t get any suggestions this week or next week I’ll probably have to stop the series. Remember that you can leave suggestions completely anonymous in the comments, you don’t have to register or anything; or even leave your real name.

Without further ado, I bring you Khans introduction to waves:

I just discovered a new service today, it’s called fiverr and it’s all about buying stuff for 5 bucks or doing stuff for 5 bucks!

I love the simplicity of the service, the wackiness of the “products” and the unique gems you could find for 5 bucks.

Math problem

There’s everything from “I will drink a beer for you for $5″ to “I will be your wake up call for a month for $5″. Yes, you read that correctly, there’s a person who’s willing to call you every morning for 30 days straight for 5 bucks.

After about 5 minutes on the site I had ordered “I will make an awesome sketch or a caricature of you or your loved ones for $5″. After an hour or so I got an e-mail asking for a picture and am now awaiting the result, it’s going to be exciting!

Just to fool around a bit I put up my own gig! I will make a video explaining how to solve any high-school math or physics problem for $5. I don’t have any takers yet, and I don’t think I will have either, there are a lot of people who offer math services; which is what makes the site awesome!

So, my questions to you is: What would you do for 5 bucks?

Leave your answer in the comments (and link to your gig if you decide to put it up there!).

Bridge building game

The above picture is from an iPhone game that I really like. It’s on the top list and is called Paper Bridge. It’s about building bridges like the one in the picture, and it gets increasingly more difficult. I’ve finished the whole game now, but I just wanted to put this here. I’ve played a lot of these kinds of games of different quality and I really like them all.

Another thing I like are new companies and new ideas. As you should be able to see, I have added a small widget at the top left of this post. I don’t know where it’s going to be positioned in IE6 but I’m hoping top left

The button is for flattr, a new service where you can give people small amounts of money for their content and people can now give me small amounts of money if they like my content. I got my beta invite today, and they’re dealing out more and more invites now. Unfortunately it’s not a completely open registration yet, so I’m not expecting to get many flattr’s right now. Click the button and check out the video on the web page if you’re interested. It’s a really cool concept and I’m hoping for a bright future for it.

This is a follow-up to my previous blog-post which I hastily wrote down because I felt like it. There has been some… not critique but, disagreements. The post was somewhat misunderstood, so here’s a rant.

First of all, I want to take the opportunity to say that if you would hear me saying the previous blog-post in a conversation I think you would take it very lightly as I would say it rather jokingly and light-hearted.

When something is written down it seems to take on a life of it’s own. Everything gets analyzed and immediately gets much more serious than how it was intended. This is why I have almost completely stopped writing down thoughts in this blog, I don’t like to have them over-analyzed or confronted, they’re just thoughts, thoughts means nothing—actions mean something.

I like writing down my thoughts so I can form them in some sort of completeness and analyze it myself, but if the reader of the thoughts doesn’t understand them 100%, it just makes the situation worse.

Now about the actual post. Of course I don’t feel entirely worthless because some other dude has done something I want to do. There is some kernel of truth to the whole sentiment of not accomplishing something note-worthy, but that’s just some passing thought I wrote down to be able to look back on and remember how I felt at that particular point in time.

For the sake of making the previous post more understandable, I will try to put some of my own analytics into it.

I have been consulting since I was 14 and I’ve done some stuff that I thought was pretty cool at the time. I would consider these accomplishments. But you sort of have to understand where I’m coming from. In my world, everyone has a masters degree, anyone can get a masters degree; you just have to spend 5 years and you get it in the mail. About half the people in my world work as consultants in parallel with school. Two of them have been CEO’s of 25+ employee companies and one is an Executive VP.

Now I have two choices, I can observe the real world as it is, where having a masters and being CEO of a small consulting firm is a pretty good job. Effectively saying to myself “I’m good enough”, and just settling for that.

Or; I can say “I want to do more, be better and improve myself continually”.

I don’t like the “Good enough” mentality. Sure, I’ve accomplished something by working as a consultant and by getting a masters, but you know what? That’s not really that special. I spend 8 hours a day on something just like everyone else.

What matters to me is what you do in those other 8 hours. Right now, I think I spend around 2 of those 8 hours coding, I spend 3 of them watching TV shows and I spend 3 of them surfing HN and Reddit.

The reason I look up to luddep so much and those other people who are just like him, is that they spend their extra 8 hours on doing something productive and important. They spend their free time on improving themselves.

So if I only spend 8 hours on something important every day, like every other human being in the world, how could I possibly claim to be improving myself? I don’t think I can and that’s what I mean by not accomplishing anything. I piss away my 8 hours (or at least 6) when I could be doing something important with them.

So why am I writing this post instead of using my time for something productive? I don’t know, maybe I’m just really fucking lazy, maybe my theory is wrong, maybe I am satisfied at being average (in my world).

That’s why I labeled the previous post “thoughts”, because it’s just that, thoughts. I don’t have the answer to any of these questions and I don’t actually know if any of the questions are in any sense even relevant. I don’t actually walk around and think “What am I spending this hour on? What am I spending that hour on?”, I do what I like to do, do what I have to do and go about living my life as best I can. Don’t you sometimes think “How could I be better?”. If you don’t, I’d say there’s something wrong with you.

There are certain people who make me feel completely worthless but at the same time give me something to shoot for and motivates me to raise the bar and achieve my goals. These people have almost always been the same age as me or a couple of years older, but for the first time in my life I have come across a dude that is so far ahead of me in life that it makes me feel like I’m twelve.

Francisco Tolmasky is the founder of 280 North, one of the coolest startups I know of, and I recently came across a tweet of his.

Having dinner with @280north @johnhering and @luddep

@luddep is the guy that has been making me feel worthless lately. I’ve talked a bit with him on IRC and he’s a really cool guy, totally down to earth and nice and all. He’s a Swedish guy from Uppsala and went to IT Gymnasiet, not that different from my own back-story.

This is what bothers me though; this kid is fucking 18 years old and he’s done a bunch of really cool small projects, has time to learn and code Objective-J so much that he’s really into the Cappuccino community, and obviously a very talented coder (which would lead him to have dinner with Tolmasky and 280). He’s 18 and he’s hanging out in San Francisco with some of the most awesome people in the world.

Having dinner with Tolmasky and 280 is to me like having dinner with Justin Bieber is to a 14 year old girl.

And where am I? Living outside a small town in an even smaller town trying to find time to code without failing school. It’s a very lighthearted not-that-negative way of feeling worthless. I know the only thing I could possibly do to change things is work harder and be positive. I just felt like complaining a bit and making some excuses.

Edit: Read the follow-up on this blog-post.

One of the specializations I’m considering the most for my masters is “Scientific calculations and simulations”. It’s a mix between programming and physics which I like. It’s about creating a model of the physical problem then letting a computer solve it. Anyway, one of the courses I’m taking right now is a sort of primer for that specialization, and so far I like it, even though I haven’t done much yet. The course is on the finite element method, which is a specific method of letting computers solve problems.

I did the first exercise yesterday and the result looked kind of neat so I want to show you. The exercise was about calculating the temperature distribution in a rectangular disc with a hole in it. Inside the hole the temperature is 1000 degrees and outside the disc the temperature is 100 degrees, so the question is what does the temperature look like inside the disc? Another thing that you “automatically” calculate is the flow of heat from the inside to the outside of the disc.

This is what the disc looks like divided up into 336 element on which we’ll calculate the temperature.

Disc with 336 elements

And when I let the computer solve it, it’ll look like the following, which shows the temperature distribution.

Disc with 336 elements solved for temperature distribution

This is all pretty well and good. To give you an idea of what use this is, this thing could be a model of what the temperature would look like inside a large square metal bar with a pipe inside it, inside could flow something very warm while the entire thing would be dipped in a coolant. This solution lets us know what the temperature will look like inside the metal bar, as well as how much heat will flow to the outside. With this information we could learn how to optimize the cooling process. A very simplified model of course, but it’s just an introductory course. Now, being the engineer that I am, of course I could be happy with just 336 elements, I naturally have to over-do this thing. For no reason what so ever.

Disc with around 1500 elements

Disc with around 1500 elements solved

This last one took around 3-4 hours to solve with my computer I’m happy I don’t have to pay for computer time!

What I’m worried about in this field however is that as things get more complicated we need to use more sophisticated software, and I think there will be less and less focus on doing algorithms and more and more focus on just using commercial software. I don’t want to be a user, I want to be a creator.

I have a funny story. Many years ago me and my dad had talked about how rockets worked in space. We had the understanding that rocket pushed “on” something, like the ground, to be able to exert a force on itself. So when in space it seemed strange that a rocket should work because there’s nothing to “push on”.

After learning about newtons third law I came to understand that this was not the case, then I moved on. It seems that I’ve never spoken about the subject with my dad again because a week or so ago he came home very happy because he had figured out how rockets work! Apparently he had learned Newtons third law somewhere during the day.

This got me thinking to how many people there must be out there that don’t know these fundamental physical laws that explain how things in our every-day world work. Like why dice hanging from a mirror in a car seem to “be still” for a while when the car accelerates and such. You know, things you actually do see every day.

That’s why I want to start a blog-series on this blog that I will call Physics Friday; and this is the first post. If you like it, I will keep it going. Starting off, I want to introduce you to khanacademy.org, a very smart guy that has made around 1500 instructional videos on practically every topic in science. I will use his three videos on Newtons three laws in this post. If in the future you want me to cover a subject differently or a subject that he hasn’t covered, I will make a video myself.

Obviously I can never add something that you can’t find on his site or somewhere else on the internet, so the idea is kind of to specially adapt the material to you loyal readers of this blog. My purpose is to either sift out the good stuff out there or to create something that uniquely explains your question. So lets start off!

Newtons three laws

The first law essentially covers inertia, but the video is simpler than that. It explains why it requires force to move or stop things. It’s a bit slow in the start but bear with it, it’s worth it.

The second law covers what force, acceleration and mass is. It talks about the difference between weight and mass. (In Sweden we incorrectly say we weigh 75kg, when that’s actually our mass). It shows some nice examples of calculation as well.

Newtons third law is the “how rockets work in space”-law. It explains that every force has a force in the exact opposite direction, some people call it “Every action has a reaction”. It is by far the most interesting law.

Did you enjoy the videos? Answer the polls below to give me an idea of how (and if) I’m supposed to continue with this blog series. Please, please leave comments on these posts as well with ideas of what you want explained. I will try to answer any questions you have and try to explain it so that anyone could understand it! So, what do you think?

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I like comic books, I like helping people and I like new companies and people who try to start up their own thing. That’s why I like Kickstarter and that’s why I funded the above project with $25! For 25 bucks I get the 3 first issues signed, for 300 bucks, you could get your own super-villain created in your own image! Or however you would like it to be created. Check out this video and tell me you don’t want to give this guy money, I dare you!
(You can click the picture above to get to the funding page)

When I’m going to Japan I will have to live with a laptop as my only computer. Right now I use my iMac for anything serious and my laptop is just for bringing to school and friends when I want to have something to surf or code a little on. The problem is that I know my MacBook Air isn’t going to be “enough” for me if it’s going to be my only computer. I’m going to be doing a lot of photo editing, probably some video editing and just generally be using it all the time, so I want something more powerful.

New MacBook Pros

I came to the decision that I was going to buy a MacBook Pro to have in Japan instead of my Air a couple of months ago, since then I’ve been waiting for Apple to release the new MacBook Pro’s. They did so just a couple of days ago and there are some good news and some bad news. The good news is that they lowered the prices on the entire lineup and threw in some pretty nice stuff on the new 15″ models. The bad news is that the biggest update on the 13″ models were the battery, they got a new graphics card but they still have the old CPU’s. It sort of stings because I think the 15″ laptop is huuuge, but I don’t want to be stuck with an old CPU.

I’ve been very much back and forth on this entire 13″ vs 15″ issue, but right now I feel that I actually do want the better performance of the 15″, and hopefully I can learn to live with the size of a 15″ laptop.

The thing that has sort of sealed the deal is that I’ve compared the Swedish and the Japanese Apple stores for prices, and it breaks down as follows:

So as you can see the difference is quite a lot. I have a big problem with the fact that I want to buy it now. When I’ve decided I want to buy something I usually want to buy it right away, because there’s no reason to wait…

But as you can see, there’s a lot of reason to wait. I’m obviously not going to buy a 15″ in Sweden considering the price of it in Japan. But if I were to buy a 13″ in Sweden, I could add just 859 SEK to get the much, much better 15″ in Japan—that’s nothing!

In the end, there is simply no justifiable reason to buy it in Sweden, not even the better resale value of having a Swedish (and not International) keyboard when I’m going to sell it again; so I’m going to have to wait either way. And in Japan, I really cant find any reason for buying the 13″ when the 15″ is so much cheaper there.

So, bottom line. Even though I don’t like the size of the 15″ the performance is noticeably better, and the added screen size and much higher resolution might actually come in handy when using Photoshop and such. The 13″ has much better battery life and is actually portable, but I just can’t stand paying premium price for old hardware; no matter how “hardware agnostic” I usually am.

There will be some minor difficulties with having to sell this computer before I leave and then have to be in Japan without a computer until I’m able to buy the new computer there. But in the end, it’s going to be worth it to have the top-of-the-line stuff. I think.

Mark down April 11th as an historic date in your… history book! It was the date of the first dekompile, the first stand-alone puzzlehunt created by me and Emanuel.

The event has been in the planning phase for a long time and along the way there have been many changes and updates. The game was originally planned as a larger, more fun, harder and overall more challenging version of The DreamHack Game which I’ve hosted for many years (some of them together with Emanuel).

It was planned as a 2-day puzzlehunt, more in the style of The Game, and covering a large area of Gothenburg. We intended all tasks be shorter, around 2 hours a task, than The DreamHack Game but overall more difficult. We thought the shorter tasks would lead to a more coherent experience with less “sitting still and just looking at the screen”-time, and perhaps would ease the making of a real storyline behind the entire game.

Unfortunately, we were not able to get enough people together for the event to afford to host it. We only marketed the game through our own contacts and previous players of The DreamHack Game and our British version The i-Hunt; obviously that wasn’t really enough.

To make something happen anyway we ended up making the game into a 10-12 hour competition with 4 teams on the starting-line. We kept the tasks aimed at betweeen 30 minutes and 2 hours, unfortunately we didn’t really have the resources to create that many location-based tasks. I think we created a pretty well-rounded game though and the players did seem to enjoy it. I think they got a lot of value for the 100 SEK ticket price.

Two tasks shined especially much I think. The reason is probably because those were the only tasks that me and Emanuel worked on together, that usually produces better results. One task we started planning about 9 months ago and started creating 6 months ago, the other one we came up with on the spot.

Foul play

The Race for the finish line

This task was not so much about graphics or figuring stuff out that much. It was about the race. It was supposed to be a pretty fast and hectic race without much stopping. First of all, they got instructions that they had to SMS keywords to 72223 (which went to our application), when they sent in he right keyword, they would get something back.

They got some pictures of various places, named in order (1.jpg and so forth). In the first was a picture full of noise that they just had to open up in Photoshop and play around with the levels to uncover a URL. This led them to the first place they were supposed to visit. At that spot we had written dekompile on a small note that was already there (tricking them not to look there). When they saw the note though (which most teams did pretty fast) they SMS’ed in what was on that note and they got instructions in the SMS on where to go next, and the race was on.

I liked this task because it involved a lot of steps, they weren’t all that useful or hard to figure out or anything, but in keeping it easy I hope we kept it as much of a race as possible. With the SMS’es we also let the players have confirmation all the way through that they were on the right track.

Some stats!

Emanuel created these pretty graphs to send out in our final e-mail to the players. They show how many wrong answers each team had and how much time they spent on each task. It gives a small view of how the game is played and what kind of progress you should expect in the game.

This first one shows the amount of minute spent on a task on the vertical axis and the task number on the horizontal axis. The second graph shows total amount of time played and number of wrong answers per team.

Team Progress

Wrong answers and total duration

What happens next?

I strongly disbelieve this will be the last dekompile, but we can’t hold the game in this format. Even if we were to market it more widely I doubt we would be able to get a big enough crowd that it would be “worth it”. It’s always fun to host the game, but it’s a lot of work and we have to make it work economically as well.

Since both me and Emanuel are going away for a year, we’ll have that time to gather new ideas and come up with the perfect format for the future game. There are a lot of ideas out there on how to change it to make it more publicly appealing without loosing the challenge, and that’s what we need to do. We’ll have a year to pick the best idea and to plan it accordingly. I think it can be awesome!