So I decided why not come out with a fun list of predictions myself? I’m just as “psychic” as these other people claim to be (i.e. not at all) so if they can do it, I can do it too. Now, I’m not making these anywhere as strong as other predictions I’ve made. These are just for fun and to show how anyone can claim to be psychic with only very flimsy evidence behind it. Anyway, here they are:

1) North Korean aggression will spark a Second Korean War. The war will quickly turn nuclear and end badly for North Korea.

2) A star will go supernova and will be brighter than Sirius in the night sky.

3) There will be a massive earthquake in Europe.

4) The iPhone 6 (or 5S, whatever they call it) will be released and be a flop.

5) Astronomers will measure the existence of molecular oxygen in the atmosphere of an Earth-sized extrasolar planet, thus showing that it contains life.

6) There will be a near-miss from an asteroid that will swing by Earth and come less than 10,000 km to the surface. It will not be discovered until after it has passed.

Celebrity Deaths:

1) Sylvia Brown (please, please, please)

2) Joey Ratz, aka, Pope Benedict XVI

3) One of the Kardashians

Ok, so there it all is. Furthermore I will do something that no alleged psychic has ever done: after January 1, 2014 I will systematically go through and determine which of my predictions, if any, I got right.

So really, I think my prediction was a bit too conservative. Here’s what I think now. If you’ll notice, I’m also moving the timeline up a few years just because I think it can likely happen by then.

My prediction is this: new cell phones will, by and large, disappear by 2025. Yes, I think that a technology like Google’s Project Glass will completely supplant cell phones. There will probably still be cell phones around, of course, but they’ll be older models, maybe also cheap pre-paid ones. But the new, high-end cell phones won’t actually be hand-held devices like today (and they very likely won’t be called “cell phones”). The common status symbol of the past 25 years or so will be relegated to history.

Here’s how they’ll work. You’ll have your headset, or whatever it’ll be called, and you’ll be able to interact with it via voice command. But there’s another way in which you’ll also control it: by pressing buttons projected onto a surface. How? Well, take a look at this video:

The technology already exists. In fact, you probably won’t even have to actually project it, enabling everyone around you to see it. The projection itself will probably be completely within the headset and only you will be able to see it. The headset will be able to see what you’re pressing and where and will be able to match it to the appropriate virtual control. To the bystander, it’ll seem as if you’re pressing a blank wall. Right now this is technology that, while possible, really doesn’t have a practical application. Headsets give it an application. No other control system (keyboards, touchscreens, mice, etc) will be as useful as this for headsets. And really, it’s not very different from using a touchscreen, so I think adoption won’t be much of a problem.

Another interesting improvement will be the elimination of “talking-to-yourself-syndrome”. We’ve all seen people on Bluetooth who are using their phone. It’s jarring but we’ve sort of gotten used to it. The advantage of being on you head, though, is that you can run a ine down the neck and detect movement. Thus, simply mouthing words (with your mouth closed, too, so others can’t even tell you’re talking), the headset will be able to understand you. Seem strange? Well, again, it’s already existing technology:

It’s a bit limited now, but given a decade of R&D and about 1000-fold increase in processing power between now and then, it will likely be as reliable as talking to someone in real-time. And again, while this may be a somewhat pointless and obtrusive technology now (“you mean I’ve got to put that collar on to use it?”) if you’ve already got something on your head it’s not as big of a step (and it will almost certainly be a lot smaller, less obtrusive, and more discreet).

The cell phones of 2025 will not be anything like the cell phones of today. They will be light-weight, unobtrusive headsets that will be able to do all the things cell phones do today: make calls, send texts (dictated), surf the internet, download new apps, etc. And it will bring us one step closer to fully immersive virtual reality. Personal headsets can be the enabling technology where true, interactive, public virtual reality will begin, once they’re adopted.

From what I can tell, Mathematics Teacher is basically like an industry magazine for math teachers, going over various teaching topics and ideas and the like, which is cool. I never heard about it before but, a publication is a publication.

Unfortunately, my contribution seems to be almost entire cut out of the article entirely. It’s not too surprising given that I only solved on specific problem in a textbook and the article is about teaching Mayan numerals in general, but is still a bit disappointing. At least my name is still on the byline:

So anyway, what was the problem I solved? Well to understand that, let’s delve a little bit into the Mayan number system. Mayan numbers are actually not too different from ours. They are positional, so each digit is a multiple of some base unit like ours. For example, in our system, each number is multiplied by a factor of ten. So 50 is 5 × 10, 3,000 is 3 × 10³_­, and so on. Each time you move a digit to the left, you’re multiplying it by 10. Same thing in the Mayan system, except that for them, you’re multiplying by twenty. Also, the Mayans wrote their numbers from top to bottom, instead of left to right, but that’s just a small detail.

The Mayans had unique symbols for each digit from 0 to 19 to stick in for each digit (well really, they only had three symbols, the dot (for 1), the line (for 5), and the shell (for 0). Kind of similar to tally marks). I’m not going to use the symbols for this post since it would be too confusing and too much work for me (you can see them here), so I’m going to use the typical notation of A.B.C.D… and so on, where each letter is a digit and the larger digit places are towards the left. So, for a quick example, 1024 in our system would be 2.15.4.

The only really weird thing about the Mayan numeral system is that there is a little “jog” in it. While almost every place is twenty times the value of the previous place, the third place (which would be the 20², or 400s place) is actually only 18 times the previous one. Why? Who knows? Although 18 × 20 is 360 which is very close to the number of days per year, so it’s possible that’s why. In the Mayan Long Count Calendar (responsible for the 12/21/2012 end of the world nonsense), 1.0.0 days is called a tun, about equal to a year, and is obviously a nice round number, rather than 18.0 (or really, 18.5 to be more accurate) if it were truly a pure base-20 system.

So what was the exact problem I solved? Well, given what I said about the numbering system with its strange twist, is there an easy and quick way to multiply any given Mayan number by 20? If it were purely base-20 the answer would be trivial: just stick a zero on the end (like multiplying any number by 10 in our system). But if you actually do that, you haven’t actually multiplied the entire number by 20. The second digit moves into the third digit which means it’s only been multiplied by 18, so the resulting number is a bit smaller than 20 times the number.

Nobody in any class the professor has taught had ever figured this out, nor had she, nor even the book publishers apparently had an answer (the professor had called and asked them). So here’s the answer:

1)      Stick a zero on the end.

2)      Take what is now the third digit and multiply it by two (don’t change it in the actual number, just see what it is and multiply it by two in your head)

3)      Add that number to the second digit.

4)      Regroup to account for possible roll-over in the second digit (i.e. carry the one…or two as the case may be)

5)      There is no step 5 because you’ve already finished!

It really is that easy. Basically, what you’re doing is this: When you add a zero on the end every digit is indeed multiplied by 20, except for the second digit. Therefore, you need to add that difference back into the number to get the correct answer. This can result in the second digit being to large for its place (i.e. being 18 or over), so if you need to, you can subtract 18 one or two times (you won’t need to do it more than twice, I promise), and add the number of times you had to subtract 18 to the third digit. It’s like if you were to add 9 + 7. Well, you can’t cram “16” into a single digit, so you subtract 10 once, and add the one to next place.

Let’s do two examples:

A) Multiply 8.2.13 by 20

1)      Add a zero: 8.2.13.0

2)      Take the third digit and multiply by two (so that would be 4)

3)      Add that to the second digit: 8.2.17.0

4)      Regroup if necessary (since the second digit is less than 18, it doesn’t roll over)

Therefore 8.2.13 × 20 = 8.2.17.0

B) Multiply 7.5.12.16 by 20

1)  Add a zero: 7.5.12.16.0

2)  Take the third digit and multiply by two (so, 24)

3)  Add that to the second digit: 7.5.12.40.0

4)  Regroup if necessary (40 goes into 18 twice, with a remainder of 4, so we make the second digit 4 and add 2 to the third digit): 7.5.14.4.0

So anyway, that’s it. The only problem left is to see if the rolling-over ever stops. I mean, what if the number you’re dealing with keeps making higher digits continue to roll over all the way up? For example, if you have the number (in our system) 9999999999999 and add 1, the ones’ place becomes 0 and a 1 rolls over into the tens’ place, which also becomes zero and rolls over into the hundreds’ place…which also becomes zero and rolls over into the thousands’ place, and so on. It would be unfortunate if this were to happen in Mayan numerals, since all that writing would take time.

Fortunately, it doesn’t. Let’s take a Mayan number that would be like 999999etc: 19.19.17.19. If you were to add 1 to this number, the places would keep rolling over until you were left with 1.0.0.0.0. So, let’s see if that happens when you multiply by 20:

1)      Add a zero: 19.19.17.19.0

2)      Take the third place and multiply by two (17 × 2 = 34)

3)      Add that number into the second place digit (19 + 34 = 53): 19.19.17.53.0

4)      Regroup: 53 ÷ 18 = 2 remainder 17. So the third digit becomes 19 and the second becomes 17: 19.19.19.17.0

Phew! The rollover stops at the third place in all cases (I can say this since this is the case where the number are at their largest).

So that’s my solution. As my professor might say “it’s good clean fun!” So anyway…wait…hold on, what’s that at the end of the article?…

I have a program that can convert our number system into Mayan numbers? I don’t have a problem that can convert our number system into Mayan numbers. That’s means I need to make one, quick! My e-mail’s on the thing! And the deadline where everyone loses interest is in three days! ARRRRRGGGG!!!!!

See you on the 22^nd!

This past quarter, I took a class called “History of Mathematics”. It seemed interesting, there was nothing else to fill my schedule, and, as it turns out, it will could towards my elective credit for my degree. During the class we had a homework problem which asked to find a simple way of multiplying a Mayan number by 20. Nobody could solve it, and the teacher (Dr. Shirley Gray) stated that in all her years of teaching the class, no student of hers had ever solved the problem. She had even written the textbook’s authors and they didn’t have a solution either. Well, I solved it.

It seems like a simple problem. But to understand it, we must understand how Mayan numbers work. Mayan numbers are, essentially, a base-20 positional system. It is like ours, except that each successive digit it twenty times greater than the previous one (in ours, of course, each digit is only ten times greater).

Based on this, it should be trivial to multiply by 20: just add a zero on the end (like multiplying by 10 in our system). However, there is a slight problem. For some reason, the third digit in a Mayan number is only 18 times the previous digit (meaning that 1-0-0 in their system is equal to 360, not 400). Adding a zero on the end won’t result in a number twenty times greater.

So, how do you do it? Well, I can’t write the answer here because I don’t want to inadvertently mess up getting the paper published. Dr. Gray did grill me on whether I found the solution online (which I didn’t, of course. Plagiarism is a very serious academic offense and if I had found it online, I would have stated so in the first place. I understand her caution completely). What I will say, though, is that the solution is simple, quick, and you don’t even have to convert the Mayan number into our own system to do it (they didn’t use Hindu-Arabic numbers, naturally. It was system of lines and dots written vertically, with a strange shell shape for the number zero. See here).

Where the paper comes in is that Dr. Gray was already writing a paper on Mayan numbers and wants to include my finding in it. So it’s not really my paper, but it’s still a mention in some official publication. Which is more than I’ve ever done so far.

So, when the paper is published, I will announce it here, as well as the actual solution with the proof I developed. It will interesting to put on my resumé, right below ‘recording “Hollaback Girl” with Gwen Stefani’ (true story! Also, sorry…)

Google has announced that they are working on, essentially, augmented reality glasses. Of course, technology like this has been worked on for decades with little to show for it. But this seems, possibly, different. This this time, it is a large high-tech company with a track record of producing practical and highly profitable technological innovations. If anyone has a shot to making these glasses widely available it’s them.

Second, take a look at this video:

Absolutely everything that is shown is what smart phones do today: listening to music, taking pictures, making phone/video calls, getting weather, looking up info online,  texting…it’s like wearing an iPhone on your head.

Furthermore, and something I stressed in my former post, it is very lightweight, and not cumbersome at all to use, like a real pair of glasses. This is essential. If it was a giant bulky headset, no one would want to buy it, no matter what it did. Plus, when not using it, you can still see where you’re going. You don’t even have to take it off.

Now, what needs to happen is for someone to make a virtual reality app. Something like Second Life that you can stream through the glasses. True it won’t be fully immersive, and you might need to have some sort of controller hooked into the glasses (note to Google: be sure to include USB or microSD slots), but it is a first step. From there you can build onto it to eventually create fully immersive virtual reality.

Anyway, based on all this, I predict two possible outcomes: 1) Google will introduce these within a few years (2014-15 frame) and make billions, or 2) This will flop by Apple will come out with their own version a little later (2014-17 frame)  and make billions (maybe they can call it the iEye ) Either way, the next wave of personal technology is rapidly approaching.

Well, I found it. I was walking along one day, thinking about it when it occurred to me: what if it’s in the same place that all other videos ever made in the history of the universe are? YouTube.
So, yeah, failure of imagination. But to be fair, it was released under a different title in the US called simply “A Brief History of Disbelief”.

Anyway, I’m happy.

The usual objection is over the past 4.6 billion years (the age of the Moon), the rate that it’s been moving away at hasn’t been constant. The mechanics of lunar recession is complicated, having to do with the distribution of oceans and landmasses on the Earth (different distributions produce different gravitational “tugs” on the Moon as it orbits). Today’s rate is actually quite a bit higher than it has been in the past. So directly extrapolating today’s rate into the past won’t actually give you the correct answer.

And then…there’s this:

The Moon is currently 385,000 km away (on average. The Moon’s orbit is actually somewhat eccentric).

385,000 km / 3.8 cm per year = 10.1 billion years. Far older than the accepted age of the Earth.

So even if you do blindly extrapolate backwards, the Moon doesn’t actually end up colliding with the Earth. So not only do creationists not do their research, they also suck at math!

While I do believe this is necessary at some level, there’s really nothing substantive about atheism or non-religion in general. There is secular humanism which does have positive core values, but that usually just gets lost in the mix.

I’ve also struggled to come up with something positive while at the same time promoting critical thinking. It’s kind of contradictory to lay out a set of positive values, but then saying “and be critical of everything, even what I just said”. Imagine if a Christian said, “God loves you and wants to save your soul, but also question everything. Even question whether this God exists in the first place.” It just makes it confusing.

So, what I thought I’d do was simply tell my own story of how I got to where I am today in my atheism. Well, not just atheism. Atheism is practically nothing. It is a mere sentence in the thick novel of my personal beliefs. I am a secular humanist, a transhumanist, and deeply convinced of the value and correctness of scientific methodology and of the ongoing scientific endeavor.

First, my parents. I grew up in a non-religious household. My mother is also an atheist, though not much of a critical thinker. She’s into things like Carl Jung and Carlos Castaneda; fairly flakey things about consciousness and perceiving the universe. But she’s not really hardcore into these things. She’s like the moderate Christian version of them. Sort of believes it, but isn’t devoted to it. My father was into Scientology, but was never a member; mostly because he had no money and they wouldn’t have him.

After my parents divorced, I lived with my mother and she decided to take me to the Ethical Culture of Brooklyn. If you don’t know, the Ethical Culture is a group dedicated to ethical ideas. Everyone was accepted, and no one was made to feel inferior because of their personal beliefs. It’s sort of a non-religious Unitarianism. But its main focus is on ethics: what is right, what is wrong, how we should act, etc, but also the discussion of those ideas, not just swallowing it whole without thought.

We stopped going after we moved to California. We tried the Ethical Culture here but didn’t it interesting enough to stay. A year later, when I was 12, I met a girl (now my wife) who asked me to go to her and her friends to church, which was the Methodist Church. I agreed, and found it kind of interesting. I eventually went through confirmation and joined the church, but I never really believed in it. I had just done because that was what everyone else was doing so I figured why not.

As it turned both she and her friends really didn’t believe in it either, and stopped going. I found myself alone there now, continually pressured to go by my mother. She obviously didn’t believe either, but she said I made a commitment to them and so need to see it out. Eventually I convinced her that I hated going and she let me sleep in again on Sundays.

It was during this time that I really started questioning religion and whether God exists. I hadn’t believed them before, but I hadn’t really been critical of it, and mostly didn’t even understand the concepts. I was an “implicit atheist”, where my non-belief was simply due to the fact that I hadn’t been indoctrinated into it. It was here where I shifted to “explicit atheism” where I did begin questioning and coming up with logical reasons why there is no God, and understanding just what “God” is. I now knew what I was rejecting.

So for a few years I did that until my sophomore year of high school when one of my friends, who was pretty devoutly Catholic, invited me to his church. I decided to go, but due to curiosity about what Catholics believe, not because I thought it might be a way to the truth. I went there for a couple years, and, I have to say, I actually enjoyed it. I didn’t think any of the Catholic dogma was true, but they were nice friendly people to be around. They weren’t pushy at all about their beliefs. I mean, I went to their youth group, called Life Teen, and there was a lot in there about what the church’s teachings were and how to be a good Catholic, but I was never singled out. I felt part of a group that was being taught. And I definitely learned a lot more about Catholic teachings than I did about Methodist teachings at the Methodist Church.

But I eventually decided to move on. During this time I had also really learned a lot about critical thinking and the scientific method, both from my teachers at school and online articles (particularly about.atheism.com). It was in these that I saw the true majesty of the universe. The fact that we have the tools to objectively understand the very fundamental nature of reality is astonishing.

The true power of science is in its ability to test and verify theories, and to discard those that do not conform to nature. It is this that really distinguishes it from religion. There is no faith, there is no condemnation of questioning, and there are no logical gaps and fallacies. There is just no comparison. Science is adaptable. It takes this premise that we don’t know anything about the universe, and tries to figure it out. It doesn’t claim a dogma, then try to work backwards to find the evidence for that dogma. Everything is open to investigation.

By the time I was in college I was pretty set in being an atheist. I still say that I would believe in God if there were sufficient evidence (and given the nature of the claim, the evidence would have to be extraordinarily good), but nothing has made it in so far. There are just no good reasons to believe that a supreme being exists in the universe, and a great many reasons to believe otherwise.

I still struggle with personal beliefs, though. I first discovered transhumanism when I was 19 through Marshall Brain’s web pages. At first I didn’t like it. It just seemed too bizarre and undesirable to me. But, eventually, I sorted through it with my mental critical thinking tool kit, and found there was something here. We could make people better, or rather, develop the capabilities to let people make themselves better. We could develop the technology to upload the human mind to become immortal. We could develop the technology to create vast simulated realities and live in them as literal god-like beings. It is practical.

I’ll close out here with my rejection of my belief in extraterrestrial life, and not just because it’s my latest personal discovery. I had believed that aliens must exist in some form somewhere. Given the incredibly vast number of stars in the universe, coupled with the relative ease it is to make life, the universe must be teeming with life and other civilizations. But, as I started to investigate the consequences of those beliefs, I found that they were incompatible with the universe I saw around me. Where were these aliens? I believed aliens would colonize a large volume of space, as large as they possibly could, and do it quickly, since their only limited by the speed of light. So why aren’t they here already? Eventually, I realized that the simplest explanation was that they didn’t exist at all. It was devastating to me. I wanted to believe that alien life existed so badly, but the evidence just didn’t bear it out. I had to discard that belief, but it was actually not so bad. Because of my experience with having to prune my beliefs when necessary, I found that I was glad I came to a logical conclusion. Critical thinking gets easier, the more you do it. Changing your beliefs that you hold dear, gets easier.

And it’s a good thing too. We don’t know the nature of the universe when we’re born. It makes no sense to then pretend to.