Category: Technology

All my life I have been extremely interested in gadgets. My dad and I would go to Fry’s Electronics all the time just to walk around and gaze upon all of the useless things that we thought we needed. I would stare at all the voltmeters and the various types of desk lamps they offered. Funny enough the one in Woodland Hills was designed like you were walking into the rabbit hole from Alice in Wonderland and I always thought that to be appropriate. As a freshman at UCI I happened to run into a remote control blimp at Fry’s in Fountain Valley. It cost like $80. Here is the story.

Now I have no real passion for blimps, but I do love and adore remote control electronics. I used to be very heavy into R/C cars and spent many hundreds of dollars, or my dad’s dollars, trying to win the races behind the Target and losing to the fat kids who had more money. In R/C car racing, just buy the best motor and you can do well. Electronic R/C that is. The coolest thing I got out of R/C life was getting my neighbor Matt involved who had some serious sponsorships from the parental units. He bought the best car, the best motor, and the best everything. We celebrated this by convincing him that he should line it up towards my friend Len’s 8-foot quarter pipe. An R/C car that weighs around 10 pounds going 45 mph up an 8-foot ramp that is vertical at the top is a freaking awesome combination. The car cleared the 100-foot oak tree and came down on the ground so hard it cracked the concrete. But I digress…

But let me digress one more time… I used to have an online journal in high school where I would write each day about random things that usually made no sense but was generally an entertaining read for the population at my school. I swear I had beaten the blog scene but never capitalised, oh well. Either way I had a webcam in my room that you could control from the web page which I thought very cool. I had a contest that asked people to take pictures of me and send them in. I planned to give no prizes but people sent me some pretty hilarious pictures. Most involved the use of MS Paint and poorly drawn or pasted pictures of penises in front of my face. But I digress…

So I really wanted to venture into the realm of flight with R/C vehicles but planes and helicopters were so expensive. So when I saw this blimp I thought it was perfect at $80 while I was a broke freshman. I showed up at the dorm and opened the box. First I had to buy some 16 AA batteries bringing my cost up another $14. This was for the remote and the mini fans. The next problem was that the balloon was not filled with air. The balloon had the dimensions of 3.5 x 2 x 2 feet, pretty freakin big, nice and shiny with some really slick lightning bolts on it which obviously was to give it the impression that it would be moving really fast.

So UCI had a flower and balloon stand which I hoped would help me out. I brought the balloon down there and begged to have it filled up. They finally obliged for some overpriced fee, damn bureaucrats, and I was walking back with a giant silver balloon with lightning bolts. I was very careful to not let this thing fly away and even tied a string to it and my shirt. I was getting really excited.

Back in the dorm I attached the main unit with the engines to it. You then need to attach weights (washers) to the balloon otherwise it floats away. After a while I got the ballast right and in my dorm room was this huge balloon with a small black unit on the bottom of it and it just hovered there, dead still. It was pretty cool. I would hang notes to the bottom of it that said things like “Go fuck yourself Geoff” or some other really poor-taste thing like that. I would then fly it out my door, down the hall, and then into the next room making best guesses as to where it was. Keep in mind that this thing moved INCREDIBLY slowly. It was too slow really, but who wants a missile blimp? Just imagine, sitting at your desk, hearing this buzzing sound, and you look to your left and all you see is this giant silver balloon slowly turning to face you telling you to fuck off. Perfect.

So now the time came to take it outside and really see what this thing could do. It was at this time that I learned some basic physics. Helium will act differently under different temperatures. So in our lovely California sun, the balloon basically started to rise and never changed its course. I had the fans at full speed and was running through Middle Earth (the dorms) as fast as I could to stay under it. Suddenly the lightning bolts were telling the truth and the balloon was moving at gulf stream speeds. I ran for about a mile staring at the sky with a ludicrously large and ineffective remote control screaming at an inanimate object which apparently only I could see. Only once I saw a plane fly underneath it did I give up and consider the balloon a loss.

What did I learn from this lesson? Nothing. I have broken several mini R/C helicopters, bought an R/C helicopter USB thingy that was the biggest waste of time, went back to Fry’s to get another balloon but was denied at the counter when I didn’t have any money, spent hours researching R/C helicopters and other things to fly like UFOs, and much more stupid stuff that I shouldn’t waste my time on or even want.

It has become clear during this election that the populace has started to consider two notions that I have not been exposed to before.

• I am sure this has been prevalent for many years, but the concept of having a two-party system is pissing people off. This comes from the fact that both options do not exactly get you to jump out of your chair and wave a hockey mom sign.
• This idea that “I will vote for Obama just to make sure McCain does not get in even though I don’t really like McCain either.” (This example works in both directions of course.) Another extension of the two-party system, because people are beginning to realise that their party does not do everything for them but, due to the lack of options, they stick to its side. What better way to do this than to vote against the perceived opposition.

Humans throughout time have had difficulty keeping track of anything more than some form of dualism. Good or bad. Light or dark. Rich or poor. Liberal or conservative. etc. In all of these examples there are of course grey areas, but these tend to be overlooked by the qualitative extremes. Our political system does just this, but instead of having starkly polar political opposites to choose from, we have decided to set our political compass in the grey and have chosen two poles that are very similar. The grey areas become the extremes (which should be the poles) and the grey areas occupy only a small percentage of the populace, mostly due to the idea that you will be ostracised if you leave the safety of the heterogeneous political middle.

Two parties have an incredible sum of money at their disposal to promote their party. Any other party that wishes to compete on the equivalent political stage will require an election that proves they can acquire 5% of the vote, and then they can receive more funding. This we know would still be only a small step to matching the financial contributions being given to the two major parties. The media finances one of the two major parties only, giving no time or money to any other options that would represent more of a correction to the political system due to their distance from the political middle.

Without even the possibility of a large standard deviation, what we have today will be able to last for a very long time. Any correction in either direction will only make small, insignificant changes to the average.

I suggest we reform our political election process to promote equality to all possible political ideas, so that the public can make a totally informed decision as to how they want to live their lives, as opposed to giving them only two choices, sometimes only one.

Install a campaign funding cap for all parties. If a party raises more than X dollars, the overflow will be evenly distributed to the other qualifying parties that have demonstrated themselves to the nation in the past. This will force parties to focus on political ideas and not spin tactics, since their money can only go so far. This will also encourage the reduction of corporate sponsorships of our candidates. Candidates will be forced to develop political answers and not spin tactics to make sure their message will be heard across the nation. The overflow idea will also grow a change in the American population. Instead of raising money to vote for candidate John, money will be raised to be able to hear new options come from the population, and other candidates. Excess money will be used to indicate to the nation that what you are hearing at the time is not enough and we want more options.

This article explains how McCain pushed for a campaign contribution limit. This was done to make sure that the government could monitor more of the money going into campaigns, which is funny since this means that McCain is advocating a bigger government.

And so it goes.