All over the place

On top of studying learning, I’m also studying money.  The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson is quite an interesting look at money.  It looks at the history of money and finance.  But why would I want to study money? 

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.  – George Santayana

How can we understand anything without first examining the history of a thing?  Stock market bubbles come and go, and always will.  Understanding the process of bubbles helps to understand where money can be made and lost.  Do you get into the hot new stock right after you hear about it on TV, or do you hunt things down on your own and try to come up with some sort of formulation on how you believe things will occur? 

I don’t have the answers to those questions, but I still know what I intend to do with my finances, and as such I haven’t invalidated my theories.  So that’s a good thing. 

I got rid of the last book I had, and found the library is rather lacking in books on memory.  So I decided to trek into motivation.  I probably need to look at another branch in order to find what I want, but that’s another story.  The book I’m currently reading is Drive by Daniel H. Pink.  So far, I’m agreeing with most of what Pink has said in the book, and it all makes a weird sort of sense.  So I like the book and would recommend others read it. 

I’m also once again examining Arduino, but my brain is still spinning on the same thoughts and ideas I had before.  The real question is what am I going to do with such a thing?  But then, I was listening to something on iTunes U about Computer Networks.  I was really looking for a CCNA style class, but this one is a programming class.  But the end result of the first lecture in the class was to talk about building a client/server model and connecting to the server using telnet. 

Well that makes me wonder…  Combine a lot of small but specialized Arduino devices together and have them send resultant data (but not process it) to a central server level computer.  So take a piezo element to act as a feeling sensor.  Put one in the front of a foot, and another in the back of the foot to let the foot know that it has touched ground.  Combine that with an accelerometer and you have have a way to tell if the foot you have created is level.  It’s a thought…