ponnuki

So google said no to china – then go Daddy also said no to china who’s next ? That might seems like a little incident but that is the first time in a long time that a US company publicly denounce China’s practice and also decide to not do business with china anymore publicly. Even Michelle Obama got into the story writing a letter to China reqesting explanation about this incident! All that made me wonder if this whole story could snowball into something a bit more international…

Just a simple recap about China – a communist country, that has a lot of business ties with the rest of the world. Keep in mind that China is a country, but also a huge company, any other company that China acquires becomes part of the China company, coined as China inc by Ted Fishhman . The big merger from few year ago, where times, warner bros, aol and other major company merged to become huge entity was probably brought about from China inc starting to buy many company. With it’s huge buying power, mergin many company together makes a lot of sense and create a better control over productivity and media. As you know China is also manufacturing everything we purchase, not to mention a lot of the food too.

So in short, China is the Pimp, all the other business are the hoes, Google hoes doesn’t like the pimp to play in her panties when she is not with other client, the hoe complaint ‘hey you pimp, don’t like you anymore; I quit being your hoe (with a lot more swear)’ then go daddy hoe sees google hoe leaving China pimp and say the same, ‘we hoes, stand together, and we leave you mister pimp (with a lot more swear to it too)’. But which pimp will these company will get cover under ? The US pimp ? Well, sorry the US pimp is waging war all over the place, no time to protect more hoe under it’s umbrella!

What is hard to foresee is what happen if the pimp gets mad. China is already in control of most of the world economic. As long as we keep on consuming and use chinese owned business China will be happy. Once we start protesting against China, the country that feeds all our need and desire, that could start something nasty. I find it quite cute how the United State pretend to be the world dominant power – Chinese and asia country has thousands of year of wisdom about war and strategy, they can wait while the new comer run out of breath and just buy them out. ‘Ho poor USA here let me buy you out – don’t worry it won’t hurt’.

Anyway – I have a feeling that if these event start a wave that would become the third world war, it will be a lot different type of war. China, even if they seems barbarous with what they did to Tibet, has a lot more wisdom about war than USA or even Great Britain – or probably any other country in this world. It wouldn’t take much for them to choose to dominate the world ~ and I guess it’s already too late – better start learning chinese soon!

This is a real beginner post – if you never played with arduino and laser you might find it fun, but it’s at the ‘hello world’ stage of arduino programing.

So I got myself some laser! I had a nice kaleidoscope green laser but I wanted to temper with it and ended up breaking it… Green and blue laser apart from being quite a nice colore laser, are really expensive. So I decided to buy some red laser to start with.

The Laser have 3 main component. The diode, which emits the light, the lens that focus that light, and the driver or the electronic component that help regulate the electricity to the diod itself, that is quite fragile by the way. My first instinct was to purchase the diode themselves, but realizing that there was some extra work needed to make them work for me, I also bough some more complete laser with the drivers and lens. Long story short I got some diodes, and some complete kit.

My plan is to create a device with arduino to have some sort of laser show. The first step was to connect one laser to the arduino board and see what are the posibility. Using the kaleidoscopic part of my other device I was able to put it on top of the laser.

Now the hard part is to find what can be interesting using only one laser and no motions control. Blinking feel too much like christmas light, strobing could be interesting, but can become annoying after a while, pulsating could be interesting… So the base is the arduino control over analogue port. A loop and analogue write.

Of course the most interesting would be to link the arduino react on the music rhythm, but that is a bit further down the road. I’ll tryout the basic arduino loop to create something interesting. The first thing I try was to simply input digital high and low – that was simply to make the laser blink. Using the digitalWrite to simplify the process. Later I started to play more with the analogue setting. I tried all I could with the blinking but the red blinking light was really resembling christmas light.

void() loop {
digitalWrite(LASER, HIGH); // turn the laser up
delay(120);                             //wait for a moment
digitalWrite(LASER, LOW);// turn the laser down
delay(120);                            // wait for a moment
}

So that wasn’t it. I tried modifying the delay, the pause and the length of the high value. Strobing was also an interesting effect, since the laser is connected to a kaleidoscope, but again not the effect I am looking for.

Adding random to the code made it a little more interesting

void() loop {
digitalWrite(LASER, HIGH); // turn the laser up
delay(int(random(1,100)));                             //wait for a RANDOM moment
digitalWrite(LASER, LOW);// turn the laser down
delay(int(random(1,100)));                            // wait for a RANDOM moment
}

That created an interesting effect. It started to give some sort of rhythm… but there is some sort of beat that is not there. Moving into the analogue realm I only started playing with fade in and fade out, as you can see, I didn’t get very far:

void() loop {

for ( int i =0; i<1000; i++)
{
analogueWrite(LASER,i);
}
delay(20)
}

Nothing very fancy, but I tried to match this with a fade out - creating another for loop. Again the effect is interesting - not too exciting but getting somewhere. And... that is where I got! If you have any idea what can be fun ~ I am giving up for now until I find more to do with arduino programming. I have also ordered some servo or controllable engines to give more flexibility with the project. Also I will be looking into the music integration where there could be some sort of reaction to the music from arduino, but that seems far down the road.

There seems to be a lot about residual prana ~ and yet I haven’t read a lot about it. What I describe about residual prana is the energy that is left behind, in a room, on an object, on clothes or in people and in animal, that stagnate and almost becomes an entity.

Every day I rest and eat, meditate and do yoga which gather energy from the food, from the air and form my own body energy. Taoist define the chi to come from the planet, the universe and from within (here is a nice article about all the source of chi in the taoist perpective). Where ever the energy comes from, everyday I gather energy and then I use it.

When using that energy most of the time we use it without creating much residue. We work, play, create and spend energy and that’s it. Sometime we do an action and it create an emotional reaction, sometime it can be manifested positively, like a musician performing a touching piece, sometime it can manifest negatively.

For example: we work on a computer and we get really angry at how it doesn’t work the way we want it to be. In these moment, emotional reaction seems to : first use more energy than an action devoid of emotional tension, and second the extra energy used seems to stick on the object or the situation present at the moment of the emotional tension.

All these residual energy becomes a charged orphan energy, stuck to an object. Most of the time these energy are neutral to us, meaning that we don’t interact with them much, they stay where they are created. But sometime these energy will affect our moods and our own energy. I believe that any form of matter or energy is always trying to survive and evolve, that is what I refer as yoga. We can observe it in life form, but it’s also applicable to inanimate object and to energy without masse or form (hence why matter has complexifie to the point of creating life). If we follow this idea to residual energy, we can conclude that a residual energy living on an object will try to ‘survive’. How can it survive? Probably by re-creating the same emotion in someone else and gathering the residual energy from that reaction, not from a conscious decision, but simply as a mini current of energy that has been spin in a certain way with human emotion ingrained, attracting the same type of energy.

So in short – someone use a computer, gets angry because the computer doesn’t work the way it suppose to work, residual energy is created and stick to the computer and then the person leaves. Someone else comes in, try to use the computer – somehow something happen that make the person angry – more residual energy is created – and the first residual energy is fed by that second person. Now the 2 persons talk to each other about the bad computer, feeding even more energy into that residual energy (prana goes where the mind goes) – they talk to anyone that uses that computer etc. Next thing you know the computer is broken and need to be replace.

So what to do with residual energy ? Most of the time it’s hard to detect when I am affected by these residual energy. It can be categorize as mild mood swing – to spike in out energy. It’s hard to tell since there is so many factors, food, residual emotion from our own life. My practice has lead me to understand a bit more when my energy swing and or mood swing comes from exterior source ~ which is really helpful to discern what I need to work on, or if something needs some energetic cleansing. So awareness is really useful to detect these residues, you will soon realized that you can ‘feel’ the residual energy. As a practice you can walk in a room where there was emotional tension or a verbal fight, and see how it feels. To become aware of these vibration will create a good protection to start with. Then you can use other method to cleanse these energy or to further protect yourself from it.

All these residue can be remove with practice like Divine Light invocation, where a current of prana is created, thus attracting residual energies and other entities (or personal patterns) to be disolved into a greater source of energy. Like water turning into vapour rising to the cloud to be transformed and purify ( I know, I know rain is not consider a pure form of water anymore ~ but rain used to be one of the most energized form of water…)

Smudging and incense also have that capacity to cleanses the residual energy, as well as mantra an other vibrational tools (shakers, drum, crystals or loud speaker if used as a cleansing tool…). Of course if residual prana is on the body – water is the first treatment to heal any of these vibration. Salty bath can also be use to cleanses residual prana from our body.

As you can see residual prana is a concept that can be very helpfull in yoga, as well as in healing and other cleansing practice. It’s also a concept that can be very useful in your workplace or in your home ~ or anywhere you would like to have a peaceful environment.

EDIT: Just so people are aware I am using the excellent book Learning processing written by Daniel Shiffman, which I forgot to mention since this article is part of a series of article about my self taught Processing training. END OF EDIT ~ This is my second project for processing fish pond. It’s not a game or anything, more an interactive pond where you control a fish that grows every time it eats food.

It’s mainly to practice object oriented programming with arrays and arrays of objects. With some random rain drop, I also practice with the rotate and translate function. Understanding that when using translate, your 0,0 coordinate becomes that translate. In order to draw a X and rotate it from it’s centre, you need to use negative value.

int r = 0;
void draw(){
translate(100,100);
line(-10,-10,10,10);
line(-10,10,10,-10);
rotate(radians(r));
r = r++;
}


Would create a X shape that rotate from it’s centre. The radians is used in order not to have to ply around with PI which is the default for the rotate function. I also used the % modulo to try to add some visual to the rotating X. The modulo is what remain after dividing a number by another number. So 10 % 3 is 1, and 9 % 3 is 0. It’s an interesting function to be able to create pulsing images.

In my last project blood in order to calculate if the mouse was on top of the first drop of blood I used a simple if mouseX to check if the mouse was over the drop. This time I used the dist function that calculate the distance between object. That created a cleaner code to verify if the fish was near enough of the food.

There is no goal to the game, simply to eat the food and grow the fish ;) I guess my next project will combine a goal as well as an interactive part… stay tune!