• Case: Antec 902
• Processor: Intel Core i7-930
• Cooling: Corsair H50 self-contained water cooling
• Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R
• Memory: Crucial Ballistix 6GB (3x2GB in triple channel) DDR3 1600
• Boot Drive: Samsung Spinpoint F3 HD103SJ (1TB, 7200 RPM, 32MB Cache)
• GPU: Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 (1GB DDR5)
• PSU: Corsair 750TX
• Data Drive, Optical Drive, and Card Reader: scavenged from unused computers at home.

I have the system overclocked from the stock 2.8 GHz to 3.8 GHz. It’s stable and smooth, and the H50 provides plenty of cooling, even when the processor is at 80-90% load. I installed the H50′s cooling fan backward on purpose. This means that the radiator for the cooling sits on the back exhaust of the case, and not on a back intake. I based this off of an article at Tom’s Hardware which suggested that preserving overall airflow of the case is more important than getting cool ambient air for the processor’s radiator. I find that both processor and Northbridge temperatures do not exceed 65C, which is 15-20C below their suggested limits. I am also very pleased with the H50′s noise performance, since I can hardly hear it. The 902 is also a very quiet case in general, unless all the fans are turned up to high.

All in all, this build is a success! I did it for $400 under the “custom configuration” style websites, a full $550 under the Dell equivalent, with a better case to boot. As an added bonus, I now feel fearless about putting my own components together. If you are considering making such a step, just know that pieces these days don’t fit together the wrong way (for the most part) so it’s hard to “put it together wrong” and that your actual assembly process will probably take you twice as long as you think it will. Email me if you want tips or ideas. Otherwise, I think Tom’s Hardware and AnandTech are great for ideas. Check out MicroCenter for your processor (I saved $99 by going to this “brick and mortar” store) and investigate Bing Cashback for your online purchases.

Unrelatedly, I heard an interesting discussion on the Nature Podcast about an experiment that calls into question something called the “testosterone folk hypothesis.” Most people associate testosterone with aggressive, antisocial, and egoistic behaviors. However, researchers found that testosterone actually resulted in people being more fair in negotiations when blinded to the drug they had received. Here is the fascinating, yet somewhat unsurprising part: those people that were told that they had been given testosterone behaved less fairly and more aggressively in negotiations. Essentially, the prejudice about testosterone influenced people in the opposite way of the actual hormone! Read the full paper free, here, courtesy of Nature.

On July 11, my lovely friends Jonathan and Lida just had a beautiful baby girl named Eva Ann. She’s the first baby that I’ve actually known since the beginning, and despite her predilection for emptying her bowels when I hold her, I am fascinated by her.

Lastly, (since I am wary of counting chickens or bragging), I will add that my first academic paper has been submitted. It is called Predicting criticality and dynamic range in complex networks: effects of topology. You can read the preprint abstract here, or download the preprint PDF here from the arXiv. My collaborators were Juan G. Restrepo, my advisor, and Woodrow L. Shew, a physics-trained neuroscientist with the National Institute of Mental health, a part of the NIH. I am really excited about this submission, and will post any news about it here.

I finished watching a sequel season called Ghost in the Shell: Stand Along Complex (2nd GIG) and really loved it. I wrote previously about the first season of this series and pointed out that I enjoyed how it treated issues of technology. In the second season, I realized that what I like the most is the particular issues that the writers brought up about artificial intelligence. Specifically, through the “think tanks” called Tachikomas (pictured) there are numerous discussions among them that I believe are meant to be a weak A.I. trying to decide whether or not it is a strong A.I. or still only a weak A.I. In context, you should read “think tank” in the military denotation as a tank that thinks, and not in the political denotation as a lobbying research “think tank.”  Weak A.I. is the kind that lives in Searle’s Chinese Room and seems like a person but just isn’t. Strong A.I. is a  non-human intelligence that is actually intelligent in the sense that it thinks and is conscious (as humans are), beyond just doing human-like computation with identical output. The Tachikomas were interesting to listen to because of their setup: they are child-like helper robots, synced in memory every night, but allowed to differentiate from each other throughout the day (since they are not always synced). They therefore seem to do and think about different things each day, resulting in a bizarre setup when they confer and each instance of the machine is talking to the different versions of  itself that diverged through experience through the course of the day.

Meanwhile, since I have been saving tutoring money to upgrade my home computer, I have been back in computer hardware research mode. In the process I stumbled upon the following article that demonstrates that professional PC gamers have the physical health of old chain-smokers, but the minds and reaction times of professional athletes. It’s not surprising, but it’s fantastic that someone did the research. Here is a link to the article. Anyway, the only thing I’ve purchased so far is an Antec Nine Hundred Two case that was 50% off, new.

Here is the thing I can’t figure out: which of my persistent mindsets is more accurate to reality? Is it the sleepy and somewhat contemplative emotional mindset? Or is it the face-to-the-sun headstrong and sanguine mindset? How does one find out?

Hot Dude Party is on a break for the summer, and Chaos is in a serious MCAT study zone and therefore not very much fun to be around because MCAT is all that’s on his mind. But on May 26, we played a show at Herman’s Hideaway and my brother took photos, for example the one above. Meanwhile, in real life, closer and closer to finishing my first paper for submission.

Gabby is out here for two days for a conference, and it’s awesome to see him. He seems to work his ass off, and I really admire him. He’s staying at the St. Julien hotel, and it’s seriously posh inside. I haven’t been in a nicer hotel since staying at 21c in Louisville, KY.

I can’t stop listening to this song: Little Lion Man, by Mumford and Sons. It’s so good. Their whole album is good. A million thanks to Mike Larremore for the recommendation on these guys.

Last night I finished Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex which falls nicely into cyberpunk anime, but has so many nice threads and connections to Singularity theory. In fact, I thought Stand Alone Complex’s treatment of technology in general was really really good. This was a significant contrast to IronMan 2, which as far as I can tell, sees the future of technology as a bunch of hidden hinges in motorized metal parts. I think the IronMan sort of future looks a little bit more macho, but is so far from the mark. In my opinion, the future is at the interface of biology and computer science. Things will get smaller, lighter, and harder to see and detect. Anyway, I would rate Stand Alone Complex very high due to coherence of plot, universe, and exceptional animation. I’d put it up there with Dennō Coil for overall enjoyment in the futurist genre.  Watch it!

1. My academic homepage at CU’s applied math department: Daniel B. Larremore
2. My personal website: tomorrow i will run faster…
3. Fun stuff, like my contribution to NPR’s Planet Money: Lawnmowing efficiency
4. My band’s website (recently created! I am pumped): Hot Dude Party

Eventually, it would be nice to get results for some of my publications, but of course, having publications is a necessary condition for them to show up in a search. I would also like Twitter to stop showing up.  I disabled the automatic feed from twitter to the blog.  If you still want to read twitterbits, just follow from twitter directly.

Meanwhile, life is good. I am running the BolderBoulder this coming Monday, and feeling decent about it.  I also picked up a sweet new cycling outfit from Wheat Ridge Cyclery, which makes me feel a lot faster.  I assume that it helps when the shorts match the jersey.  I would estimate that I now go about 20% faster. “lol”

Research is going well.  I am starting work with an undergraduate student named Kevin Murphy, and he seems to be really sharp…and works hard too. This should make for a good summer.  Meanwhile, I am still working on a draft of the paper that we hope to submit pretty soon on the dynamic range of excitable networks. Dane and I have also started collaborating on a project about percolation. We’ll see how it goes.