Charles Denault III

With the release of the new Prada Smartphone produced by LG, I’m confident that all of the rich and fabulous donning nothing but the most expensive and exotic clothing and jewelry, will be first in line to get their hands on it. It’s nothing special. It’s a phone. It’s no better than any other smartphone on the market. It doesn’t have breakthrough features, it isn’t a thousand times faster, nor does it run a new OS. It’s simply an android phone. Yet they’re trying to pull a fast one on consumers with deep pockets. They’re trying to throw a brand on an ordinary item and make it more valuable. Nearly every company in the world is guilty of doing this at some point… Polo, Lexus, Armani come to mind. The products may be built to slightly higher standards, but in fact they’re just rebranded with a name that is associated with status. It’s a psychological marketing trick.

Whether or not it will work this time around is up to LG. The interface is a poor monochromatic display of a childish graphic designer trying their hand at simplicity. The phone, sans Prada branding, looks identical to any other Android powered phone on the market. And what really gives it up is the big LG plastered on the back of the device. If they really wanted to create a brand, they wouldn’t annex their own line. They would give Prada all of the pride. You don’t see Toyota underneath the logo of every Lexus on the face of the planet, but anyone in the industry knows that’s who manufactures the cars. People don’t care who makes the phone. They don’t care what company is bottling their cologne. They’re buying the product for its functionality, and sadly its name. Slap Tiffany on any WalMart bracelet and a girl’s heart will melt.

LG could have underlying intentions as well. Prada is almost certainly attempting to create a desirable phone, but LG might be trying to improve its own image. LG is known for making some subpar products. Their TVs and other electronic devices grace the shelves at low cost big box stores, and people have come to associate them with creating inexpensive, nearly disposable products. Their move to partner with Prada could be a subtle attempt to begin making consumers wonder if their products are actually of much higher quality. After all, why would Prada parter with a company such as LG unless they were creating high-quality products.

We’ve seen this before LG. Time to hang it up.

When I first started coding PHP, my source files looked like an aggregate of languages. I had inline CSS wrapped with PHP and a crude mixture of XHTML and HTML bouncing around the file like a bilingual child with ADHD. I took a little hiatus from coding for the past 8 months and returned to find an old website in shambles. Everything still functioned perfectly fine, aside from a score of permission problems, but the code was impossible to read. I began the immense task of “porting” the code over to a more readable, functional, and modular layout. I didn’t just code. I sat there and looked at it, examining every single class, function, and echo that produced the web app. I realized how easy it would have been to do this from the start, and I’m pretty disappointed with myself (considering I’m so concerned with having a solid set of standards to abide by).

This is what I’ve started doing, hopefully it will become habitual soon:

• All classes are organized with a clear nomenclature and file location. For instance, all classes are as follows: /public_html/site_root/includes/classes/class.core.php It’s important to not use custom extensions (.inc, .whatever) as it could create huge security problems.
• Without losing a significant amount of performance due to the heaviness of a framework (I still prefer to write all of my classes) I chose to avoid templating systems by this: I have your standard page.php file (right in the site root) with the necessary JavaScript and CSS (see below) file calls in the head. I write the layout using HTML5 and style it exclusively with a stylesheet. ZERO inline styles. The necessary programatic logic (that cannot be simply included) is written into the file (with heavy comments). The main logic of the page is included in a separate file, stored like the following: public_html/site_root/includes/page_name.descriptor.php
• All CSS and JavaScript are in their own respective directories, such as /public_html/site_root/includes/css etc.

My online shipping business, which I hadn’t done much with due to lack of time because of school, was sitting online waiting for me to work on. I had finally gotten all of the bugs out of the code, the finishing touches put on, and a killer ordering system in place. It was ready to go. I was about to start dumping money into advertising and hopefully start churning a pretty penny. And then it all fell apart.

My suppliers went out of business. A bridge was closed in our town, causing the traffic to literally come to an end. Their road was on a dead end now, and there were no customers. They closed up shop, and left me out to dry.

All of this could have been avoided. Not their unfortunate closing, but mine as well. I feel like this is a mistake that far too many entrepreneurs make. I had all of my eggs in one basket with these guys. Here are some possible scenarios that could have played out:

1. Personal relationship with the owners crumbles, they stop helping me out and I lose my product supply.
2. They strictly control the price of the products and I have no choice but to agree because they know that I have no where else to go.
3. Their business gets shut down and I’m left with a useless website.
4. They decide to get into online shipping as well, ending their agreement with me.

The 2nd law basically states that the entropy of a system never decreases or remains constant. Or rather it can never become more organized, or less disordered.

Yet nature has been churning out more and more complex organisms for the past few billion years, so what’s going on here? How can a system (in a slightly different sense of the word) become more complex? How can humans have evolved from simple bacteria? Wouldn’t it make sense that humans would be devolving?

Nature does amazing things. When you look at the genomes of both humans and simple bacteria, you find something amazing. Even though humans are far more evolved, their DNA has been shrinking in a sense. There’s some single celled organisms with genome sizes far larger than the human genome. I believe this is because nature is obeying the 2nd law. It’s continually decreasing disorder.

The first organism to gain a genome, most likely some exotic form of a single celled guy or a virus, probably had built a genome much, much larger than currently exists. The vast majority of the DNA didn’t do a thing, not because it didn’t code for anything, but because the cell didn’t have anything to do with it. It hadn’t yet built the necessary organelles and enzymes. It was the simplest of everything.

The cell began to increase in complexity. The only way to do this, without violating the laws of the universe, is to allow the DNA to increase entropy. This is where the magic happens. When the cell increases entropy, or increases disorder, it subsequently increases efficiency. What better way to progress evolution? Abide by laws that should break systems down, whilst secretly building more complex machines. All by accident. They’re rebels, in a way.

It makes perfect sense too. Imagine the possibilities that could stem from random mutations throughout a near infinite number of organisms over the past 4 billion years. Combine this with DNA uptake systems and suddenly you have a rapidly evolving, however random, set of organisms. All fighting the second law of thermodynamics, mostly losing, but the lucky ones survive to reproduce and push the species forward.

Do this long enough and you wind up with a human. The pinnacle of evolution.The organism destined to get to know the universe.

For the first couple weeks of running OS X Lion, I hated Mission Control with a passion. Couldn’t stand it. I’m a hardcore multitasker. When I’m not writing research papers for school, I’m running Coda in one space, Chrome in another, iTunes in another, Calendar, Mail, etc. I like to have them all in different spaces. But I suddenly realized the flaw with Spaces in Snow Leopard. I couldn’t have different workflows. For instance, when I’m making vinyl signs I like to have illustrator to the space next to Chrome, but when I’m in dev mode I prefer to have it down next to photoshop. That way I can switch right over.

Mission control came along and I about shit a brick. Nothing worked. I hated it. Then miraculously, I discovered you could four finger swipe between all the mini-expose’s of each space. Suddenly I can rearrange all my windows with ease, get to any space with minimal effort, and easily see EVERY window open at once. Absolutely amazing.

I was reluctant in choosing a suitable title for this post…

When I watch my dog or cat navigate through the house with perfect precision, I can’t help but wonder. What’s going on inside their heads? I’ve narrowed it down to two possibilites. It’s either muscle memory from countless repetitions or they have the ability to draw the floor plan in their minds, similar to humans. But even for me, it’s tough to produce a two dimensional picture of the floor plan of a house in my mind. Instead, I can visually think my way through. I can imagine that I’m walking out of my room and taking a left down the hallway, where I take a right into the living room. I pass the couch to my left, with artwork to my right. I can’t tell you the number of steps I need to take, but I can think it through in my mind. I believe the animals are doing the exact same thing.

I’m a somewhat experienced hunter, having been sitting in the woods every season since I was just 10 years old. I’ve come to know a fair amount about the patterns of the animals, most notably deer. They have intricate trail systems spanning for miles upon miles through the woods. Trails that the average person wouldn’t even recognize as they’re so complex. Yet the deer don’t just make new trails whenever, they follow the existing ones. We frequently create new trails with our 8 wheeler out through the swamps. We do it every two years or so, to keep the vegetation in a constant cycle so we don’t destroy the land. Every time we create a new trail, there is countless deer sign (prints, rubs, scrapes, poop) up and down it. They’ll follow the trail, probably because it’s just easy walking, but it’s the fact that they use the trails that caught my curiosity.

If we don’t create a new trail, neither do they (assuming that there aren’t any other significant changes to the woods). So here’s miles of trails that the deer systematically, and predictably, follow throughout the year. They’re not randomly walking these trails, which means that they have to be doing the exact same thing that we do when we walk the floor plan of our house.

It makes sense that other animals would be able to do such similar things with their mind. It’s necessary for survival. Imagine the animals that couldn’t remember their way back to safety. Don’t you think natural selection would have killed these off very early? Of course.

I think that the difference between their minds and ours is very little. If anything, it was only our body that enabled us to rise to where we are today. Had we not developed the capabilities to vocalize, use our opposable thumbs, etc. our brains would be little use to us. Passing down the acquired knowledge and skills would be infinitely harder (although we frequently see this, for instance in crows which was recently discussed at TED). It’s almost as if our brain is capable of nearly anything, it’s just waiting for the necessary mechanical pieces to finish the puzzle. Evidence of this might be shown in the latest experiments with animals and humans controlling computers using thoughts. The monkey with the robotic arm is exceptionally eye-opening. So isn’t it possible that the brain size is directly proportional to the complexity of the body? Obviously, as you look at various animals their respective brains change in size with their body size.

My apologies if this is dated or debunked. I’m just thinking out loud.

We can move forwards, backwards, left, right, up, and down. But imagine if we could move those three dimensions? Instead of moving within those dimensions, what if we could just pick them up and move them. We already do this, we’re doing it right now. We’re all doing it at relatively the same rate. The faster we travel through those three dimensions, the faster we move those dimensions. So if we’re just sitting still on the Earth, we’re moving those dimensions at the same speed as someone who’s walking down the street; this is because the differences are extremely negligible. Though imagine the astronauts that are rocketing through space. They’re moving the three dimensions at a somewhat faster rate than we are.

When you move those three dimensions, you are traveling through time.

Time travel is nothing more than the moving of dimensions. The real question lies in whether or not we are capable of moving those dimensions backwards. After all, time travel into the future is extremely easy. You simply have to travel extremely fast. In other words, you simply have to move very quickly through the usual three dimensions in order to notice a change in the fourth dimension. So hop on a space ship traveling close to the speed of light, travel around the the solar system, and come back and you’ll have effectively traveled forward in time. For instance, if you spent 1 hour on the space ship traveling at the speed of light, something in the order of thousands of years would have passed on Earth. Similarly, if you were able to stand on the edge of a black hole, without being crushed into an infinitesimally small point of matter, you could also experience a massively large movement of the fourth dimension.

I never realized how much time I spent staring into the deep abyss that we call Facebook. I literally always had it open in one tab of Chrome, I had the app on my iPhone, and I got notifications, texts, and emails all day long. It controlled my life, and there’s no moderating it! Sure, you can tone down the number of emails you get, but as soon as someone posts to your wall, messages you, etc. you have to log in to see. Then you spend an hour stalking old flings, looking at childhood photos, playing games, and writing rather inane and cryptic messages on your friend’s walls. Following my brother in law, I went cold turkey and deleted that bad boy. I never looked back since.

With all of my new found free time, I’ve accomplished a lot of cool things. I’m opening a new business on the West Coast, I had time to work on ChuckFish.com, and I got to spend a lot of my spare time learning new things. I read through a few books. Here was my last reading list:

Social Engineering

A brilliant read on the inner-workings of the human mind and how people behave within society. It dives deep into the black arts of manipulation and related concepts. It’s tough to describe, but I recommend it if you’re interested in people/psychology.

Alpha Dogs

A great book on how small business owners stayed small, yet grew to become market leaders. Features a bicycle shop that does several million to an ice cream shop that lets managers essentially do whatever they want! It’s a neat read following neat businesses.

I read a few other books that weren’t as noteworthy, but at the time of this writing I’m about to open DNA, The secret of life by the one and only James D. Watson.

A little thought I had while bear hunting in Canada.

I’m not too sure of the implications of this, nor do I know if there is a need… Hell, I don’t even know if it’s even remotely possible.

Here it goes:

You can take a piece of DNA that codes for a protein. You can then break it down into the specific amino acid. That’s pretty self explanatory. We’ve been doing that for years now. Then you know the specific order of the amino acids. You officially have the primary structure of the protein that is being coded.

Then, using a “cheat sheet” of sorts, you could determine whether the amino acids form an alpha helix or a pleated sheet when they’re linked with hydrogen bonds. You now have the secondary structure. Repeat this process until you determine the tertiary and quaternary structures.

We already know the exact structure of many proteins, so assuming the amino acids follow the same rules when they fold. A comprehensive database can be formed to describe the specific folding, linkage, etc. A simple program could easily render the structure, allowing us to easily view the entire structure. Whether or not this is already being done, I’m not too sure… but I thought it might be neat. Who knows what sort of implications this could have, perhaps it would be the first step in visualizing more complex interactions between proteins, organelles, cells, tissues! Who knows! After all, I do believe that there is a pattern beneath everything and every organism on this planet is just a set of instructions.

Since the dawn of computers, scientists have longed to bring intelligence and consciousness to their computers. Countless attempts at beating the turing test, machines that can play chess, natural speech interpreters; it’s all a collection of algorithms written by a human trying to play God. Functions with specific arguments, designed to return an even more specific result. This sort of system can never yield anything other than a pure computation machine.

Biologists hardly understand the systems that make humans tick. It was only recently that “junk DNA” turned out to do something after-all. The electrical signals from the brain can be monitored endlessly, however the neuroscientist still cannot produce a picture of the cognitive canvas. They claim modern marvels by designing robotics that interface with brain, yet the true mystery is the brains elasticity and willingness to accept and control such devices, not their primitive technology.

I believe that computers are bound to go through phases, just as any other technology has done. Much alike the hand mill/steam mill example, the present day computer is not the pinnacle of technology, but merely an extremely basic version of what’s to come. Quantum computing will be the logical next step. The proposed computing power of such a machine would be unparalleled by today’s technology. Quantum computing, however, will be replaced. I believe that the ideal design lies within that of biological processes.

First, we must learn to understand the system. It will start with a primitive organism, such as a bacteria. The genome of the species will be fully documented, and programmable. Geneticists will be able to “code” for new genes, producing miraculous results. DNA will become the ultimate programming language, much like assembly for computers.

Scientists will then learn to utilize such protocols as chemotaxis and photosynthesis, one of the most elementary functions of these bacteria. More about DNA will slowly become understood, and the miracles of birth will be recorded in a clear and concise manor, easily reproduced.

Soon everything regarding biological species will be understood. From the way humans think, to the subtle differences between man and dog.

I believe that geneticists will uncover a higher level programming language embedded within the DNA. I believe that this language is going to be found within the non-coding regions of the genome, which was largely regarded as “junk.” It’s going to be at least a decade before it’s truly understood, and perhaps an additional decade before the conceited scientists realize they made numerous mistakes and misconceptions the first time around.

If computers have taught us anything, it may be that hardware is the structure for which everything is built, but the true innovation lies within the software. Even still, the software may have numerous levels. For instance, everything is ultimately built on a set of processor instructions, which then the operating system interacts, on top of which the programs run. For a system as elastic as the brain, which can lose ½ of it’s mass and still function perfectly, it wouldn’t make much sense that everything would be written in the lowest level language.

The brain structure has to stem from instructions within the DNA. Yet imagine if the coding regions of the DNA are merely construction instructions, while the operating portion resides within the noncoding region. The noncoding region is actually a cryptic structure which defines the very algorithms that control every process within the organism. This would also solve the age old question as to why the DNA of a chimp closely (98.something%) resembles that of a human, and a banana has somewhere around 50 % of similar DNA.  It’s because each organism, regardless of its structure, behaves and acts the exact same. All of this did, theoretically, extend from one single organism way back when… when the first cell adopted viral DNA! They’re all operating on very similar instructions, adding further validity that animals are not so different than you and I. (Assuming you’re human)

Deoxyribonucleic acid, more commonly known by its acronym DNA, is the fundamental code that makes up the human body, and all other life forms on the Earth. Before I dive into my little analogy, let me give you the specifics on what DNA is.

DNA is a polymer, which is composed of monomers called nucleotides. The nucleotide consists of a 5-carbon sugar, a nitrogen containing base, and a phosphate group. The DNA consists of four different types of nucleotides, which differ only in the nitrogenous base. The four different nucleotides are represented by the letters A, T, C, G which correlate to adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine, respectively. The DNA is organized in two complimentary strands, which form a double-helix shape.

Where does this crazy stuff come from? The easy answer is that it comes from the parents of the critter (or you). So your parents each donate half of their DNA, which combine to create a unique offspring.

So this DNA is contained in a ton of places throughout the cell, but generally every cell in the human body contains a copy of your DNA. It’s stored safely inside the nucleus of the cell. So when something needs to be manufactured inside the cell, a little enzyme comes along and unwinds and unzips the DNA into two separate strands. So this is like the source code for humans.

When we look at computer programming, we generally have two classes of programming languages. Compiled and interpreted. Compiled programs are written using a programming language, such as C++, and are run through a compiler to make a functional program. The compiled program can be reverse engineered or decompiled into the original source code. Interpreted code is written just like any other program, however it’s not compiled. It’s interpreted and then returned each and every time it’s executed.

Now back to the cell…

Inside the nucleus we have some DNA, which then needs to get executed, or translated, into a functional protein or enzyme. The DNA runs into an enzyme which then compiles it transcribes it into a piece of RNA which then will eventually directly code for the protein. So the cell is actually maintaining a copy of the original DNA inside its nucleus at all times. This helps decrease the possibility of “accidents” or mutations. DNA acts like a combination of interpreted and compiled code. It is first interpreted which generates the RNA and then compiled into a protein. To perform a task.

So sure, there’s a copy of all the genetic code lying around in every single cell within every single organism but theres also the product of the entire code — everything within the organism that isn’t DNA. Every piece of an organism was coded by DNA, so why can’t we just break down those pieces? Why can’t we decompile them into the code that made them? Wouldn’t that make understanding organisms so much easier? We could decompile each and every enzyme within the human body, and learn how it’s exactly constructed.

There’s a huge difference between reading code and understanding it. Sure, anyone can look at latin and pronounce the words correctly, but you have to have an advanced understanding of the language to get anything out of it. You need to know not how to say the words, but how to understand their meaning. If we can understand not what each piece of DNA makes, but also how it makes it… we would make a quantum leap of which I can’t even begin to fathom.

So you’ve spent hours on end (or thousands of dollars) developing your e-commerce website to sell your killer products, but you just can’t seem to get the amount of traffic you want! What do you do? Buying traffic doesn’t help you out at all and is just a bad idea in general. Well throughout my research I’ve developed a solid list of tips and tricks to getting your site noticed.

1. Niche Forums: Go ahead and register on all of the forums that are in your niche. Put your website link in the signature of each post and go through answering questions people have. The more links you have out there, the more chances someone will click it. Do this on a regular basis.
2. Site blog: This one may seem obscure for many people. Create a blog and regularly post to it. The posts can be anything from product tips and reviews to promo-codes for your store. If you post promo-codes, be sure to post them around the forums as well!
3. Yahoo Answers: Post answers to questions on Yahoo Answers and Google Answers with your link as the source. It’ll help curious people click their way to your products.
4. Facebook Page: If you haven’t already, try creating a facebook page for your business. Invite all your friends and offer promo-codes and do a giveaway every now and then. Use status updates and facebook ads to promote your page. *It should be noted that facebook’s newsfeed algorithm doesn’t display pages if the user isn’t engaged or if it doesn’t think it’s relevant. I’ve noticed solid traffic increases though.
5. Product Manuals: Upload all of the product manuals to your website in HTML format. This will help will long keywords and give users another reason to visit your website.
6. Review Section: Let users write and upload reviews about your products.
7. Post Reviews Elsewhere: Write reviews about your products on other review websites. If you have a webcam, videotape yourself reviewing your products. Post all over!
8. Create a place page: If you’re marketing to a specific geographic region, you can create a free Google Place page, which will help with negative results.
9. Froogle/Base: Add your products… it can’t hurt.
10. AdWords: This is a no-brainer, but often skipped because of the prices. It’s worth it to advertise with AdWords, especially if you choose to have results on the Google Search Results pages. Suck it up and spend the money.

And that’s all for now!