Joule thief circuit

The Joule thief is a really fascinating circuit, simple yet very intricate. Basically, it’s a step-up converted in its most elementary expression. I will spare you the theory since there is plenty of information on it on the web; rustybolt.info is a good place to start.

Joule thieves in all sorts of forms have been featured countless time on DIY websites and I felt it was time I build one. However, I did not want to leave the circuit at the breadboard stage because as it stands, the joule thief has characteristics that make it very attractive for all sorts of low power applications and I figured a flash light would be a very good home for a joule thief, where having the option of using dead batteries is certainly a big plus not to mention using less cells because the circuit steps the voltage up. Why dead batteries? Because a battery is never really dead, its voltage just falls down logarithmically until it hits a point where the device it was powering up stops functioning, which does not mean the battery is totally drained but rather that its voltage has fallen below . . . → Read More: Maglite Joule thief]]>

Joule thief circuit

The Joule thief is a really fascinating circuit, simple yet very intricate. Basically, it’s a step-up converted in its most elementary expression. I will spare you the theory since there is plenty of information on it on the web; rustybolt.info is a good place to start.

Joule thieves in all sorts of forms have been featured countless time on DIY websites and I felt it was time I build one. However, I did not want to leave the circuit at the breadboard stage because as it stands, the joule thief has characteristics that make it very attractive for all sorts of low power applications and I figured a flash light would be a very good home for a joule thief, where having the option of using dead batteries is certainly a big plus not to mention using less cells because the circuit steps the voltage up. Why dead batteries? Because a battery is never really dead, its voltage just falls down logarithmically until it hits a point where the device it was powering up stops functioning, which does not mean the battery is totally drained but rather that its voltage has fallen below a usable level. Since joule thieves are step-up converters, they can take that “dead” battery, and give it a new life by stepping up its output voltage to usable levels again.

The build

A 2 AA batteries Maglite

For my flashlight, I opted for a maglite body for its sturdiness and simplicity. I have been using those for years and they have served me well, but with traditional incandescent lamp bulbs (I do know they make LED versions now), they eat through batteries like crazy. So the challenge was to convert a 2 AA battery maglite so it could run off a joule thief circuit and a single AA but could easily get converted back to using a lamps(As I will tell later, the joule thief’s light output is not so strong … sufficient in most cases but not strong).

As I would be using one less battery, the trick was to use that space to hold the circuitry. I proceeded to cut a perfboard the size of an AA and soldered all the components on it with the heads from two nails as connectors. Inductors being already pretty hard to come around, one tailored to this application would be next to impossible to find so I had to hand wind one using 20 or so turns of 40 awg enameled wire (almost hair thin (also hard to find, look for it on ebay)) around a ferrite core to build the joule thief’s coil. Once everything was in place, I soldered the circuit ground wire, which when making contact with the flashlight’s body, would turn it on or off. That wire had to be routed inside the plastic insert that normally holds the lamp and its metal pad in place so that when you turn the head of the maglite, it screws up and presses the pad against the body, thus closing the circuit. In order to allow the maglite to be converted back to using a lamp, I just cut a notch under that pad so that pressure on it would contact the wire and ground it.

For protection and isolation, the circuit was wrapped it with acrylic tubing (some leftovers from the time my computer was watercooled) and inserted in the body. Finally, I installed the LED at the top, with its two pins bent to fit in the holes normally meant for the incandescent bulb. The lens fits perfectly on it; the only way to tell it’s a modified maglite is to look at the bulb.

The circuit being constructed.

Testing the circuit.

A correctly working joule thief.

The finished circuit in its protectective acrylic tubing.

It works!

Results

I will right away admit that I am a bit dissapointed with the light output of the circuit. Though I did expect it to be a whole lot less than the incandescent bulb, it is barely usable. The culprit is certainly the LED. At only 3mm, it can only do so much with that waveform going through it ; it’s rated for 20mA and its getting 12 so the circuit is doing a correct job keeping in mind that joule thieves are quite inefficient ( in the order of 30-40% judging by the duty cycle). Using a larger inductance is out of question because it reduces the frequency without modifying the waveform but using a larger wire gauge (thus lowering the resistance of the coil, see below) would probably help. What also does appear to make a difference is the type of transistor used, I noticed that the current draw of the LED was only 9mA with a 2N3904 while it jumped to 12 with a PN2222A. Both are general purpose NPN so maybe another type of transitor would do better. As a side note, the circuit will not work with FETs, I have found plans to build a joule thief with those but its much more complicated.

With a single battery at 1.435V, I got two days of continuous lighting, not bad. At that voltage, the current draw is about 65mA. I was not able to measure the pull of the standard incadescent bulb for comparison because the inline resistance of my multimeter was too consequent, but one interesting thing I noticed was that below a certain voltage, the light would start to flicker at hertz or so. Its hard to see in the picture, but I added an electrolytic capacitor for bypass; it could have something to do with that.

Even though I said that the light output was nothing to brag about, I did take the flashlights to many trips in the woods,  with some lasting a few days and it has held up perfectly. With your eyesight accustomed to the dark a bit, you can see at a few meters  and whatever task your hands are doing is lit well enough for comfort. With all this serious usage, I have not yet ran out that dead battery. Too bad, I wish I could have gone out asking my hiking buddies for dead batteries.

With LED flashlights being quite effective, I can’t vouch for the potential of this circuit for such applications. Certainly, using dead batteries is a plus as they are relatively easy to come by, but the low light output would certainly be a killer for most of us because when it comes to photons during a moonless night in the woods, more is just better.

Still a very fun build…

On rustybolt.info’s post about my joule thief

According to rustybolt (thanks), my coil is mainly to blame for my poor performing Joule thief. The wire used is too thin and has a consequence opposes too great of a resistance ( I should have tought about that) to the current, thereby limiting the LED’s brightness. There is a very clear article on Joule Thief coil selection on his site.   He also points to the transistor being responsible for the loss of efficiency. Next time I get my hand on that maglite (I’m travelling right now so it’s an ocean apart from me), I’ll revisit the circuit.

My music library is far from being 120GB so even if I feed the Ipod all my tunes, I’d still have a lot of free space on it. Granted, you can mount the Ipod as a mass storage device and stuff the rest with anything, but here’s the catch: Ipods will only format to FAT32 or HFS+ file systems if you use iTunes. As a consequence, if you pick HFS+, you will not be able to use them on windows and some *nix (if they lack the HFS+ support module) and if you choose FAT32, backup solutions such as backtintime will not work (they need a journaling file system).

So I took to partitioning my Ipod with two different partition using a different file system for each, FAT32 and EXT3. I tough it would be a simple task, but turns out that it wasn’t. Just formatting the Ipod and letting gtkpod rebuild it did not cut it; . . . → Read More: Partitioning an Ipod]]> I recently inherited my sister’s “defective” (but fixed for 5$) 120GB Classic Ipod and managed to partition it the way I wanted. It was not a trivial process so I tought I’d share my experience with the web so others can benefit from it.

My music library is far from being 120GB so even if I feed the Ipod all my tunes, I’d still have a lot of free space on it. Granted, you can mount the Ipod as a mass storage device and stuff the rest with anything, but here’s the catch: Ipods will only format to FAT32 or HFS+ file systems if you use iTunes. As a consequence, if you pick HFS+, you will not be able to use them on windows and some *nix (if they lack the HFS+ support module) and if you choose FAT32, backup solutions such as backtintime will not work (they need a journaling file system).

So I took to partitioning my Ipod with two different partition using a different file system for each, FAT32 and EXT3. I tough it would be a simple task, but turns out that it wasn’t. Just formatting the Ipod and letting gtkpod rebuild it did not cut it; the device would stutter, only play the first few seconds of each track and give off artifacts while displaying the CD covers. And when plugged in iTunes, the software would report the device as corrupted and offer me to reset it. I thought that gtkpod must be missing on something so I should use iTunes instead yo rebuild it, but iTunes would still ask me to reset my iPod. Here is what worked after a fair amount of tinkering:

1. Reset the iPod with iTunes (on a different computer since this tutorial assumes you are using a *nix).
2. Plug it on Linux and run the following command on the user partition. My Ipod is a 6th generation classic, there is no partition for the firmware, it sits somewhere on the MCU flash, but it appears that older Ipod use a firmware partition so leave it alone. Paying attention to that particularity, here is the commands you need to run:
   1. Unmount the plugged int Ipod with umount  /dev/sdXY Where X is the device letter of your Ipod and Y is the partition number.
   2. dd if=/dev/sdXY of=ipod.bk bs=512M Where X is the user partition of you Ipod and Y is the partition number. This will effectively copy 512MB of raw bytes from you Ipod partition and save it to the ipod.bk file.
3. Next, take your Ipod and format it the way you want using fdisk. If you have a firmware partition, do not destroy it! Keep the following points in mind:
   1. Use a Master Boot Record (MBR)
   2. All partitions should be primary
4. Finally: dd of=/dev/sdXY if=ipod.bk bs=512M Where X is the user partition of you Ipod and Y is the partition number. This is going to copy back that 512MB file we extracted earlier from the Ipod, setting that partition the way it was before the repartitioning.

Voilà! Plug your Ipod in, upload music with you favorite app and do backups with your file system of choice. Mine is happily working with that setup: Ipod stuff on FAT32 and backintime on EXT3.

The quirk I got with this technique was that both iTunes and the Ipod report the full size of the internal hard drive as being available for music while in reality its not; it looks like the firmware keeps a record of the empty space withing the files of the user partition (why it is not computing it is anyone’s guess). You should probably be careful not to fill it up to a point where the two partitions would overlap (although that should not happen if the firmware is paying attention but then again, not tested).

Enjoy!

Friends!

I think we let ourselves carried over by the first’s commenters’s misconception about CO2. The debate (if there is to be one) should be about the post and in there, it’s indicated verbatim that CO2 isn’t toxic to humans and that it’s the greenhouse effect that is potentially harmful for the earth as a closed system.

Climate change is in my opinion part of a bigger issue: one of resource management. The earth can certainly afford a bit fossil fuel burning and resource usage as anyway, it will one day be engulfed by the heat of the sun as it expands towards its red giant state.

I have had a fascination with oscilloscopes for a very long time. While being incredibly useful (for those who are into electronics that is), they have a mysterious sense to them that still gets me after all those years of hanging out with complicated machinery. I remember clearly seeing rows and rows of them during my first university year, having only a very rough idea of what they were for but still knowing, judging by their numbers, that they must be very useful for every electronics bench to get its own. They are what epitomizes the knobs and dials (screen in this case) strange and obscure apparatus of the modern age.

So much so that . . . → Read More: A milestone]]> Too bad I work alone and mostly at nighttime. Otherwise, I would have some people around to share the sheer joy that I am experiencing right now. For a lack of that, I’ll turn to the web. Just an hour ago, I completed a major milestone in my main project line. I am ecstatic as with work of this magnitude, the light at the end of the tunnel is always months away( and right after, you get into another tunnel…) Here is the writeup on the situation.

I have had a fascination with oscilloscopes for a very long time. While being incredibly useful (for those who are into electronics that is), they have a mysterious sense to them that still gets me after all those years of hanging out with complicated machinery. I remember clearly seeing rows and rows of them during my first university year, having only a very rough idea of what they were for but still knowing, judging by their numbers, that they must be very useful for every electronics bench to get its own. They are what epitomizes the knobs and dials (screen in this case) strange and obscure apparatus of the modern age.

So much so that I decided to program one from scratch for my final engineering project; I had very ambitious plans for it. The electronics would be managed by a Microchip PIC18F4550 – a USB microcontroller – and the application on the host PC would be programmed in C#. Its killer feature would be that its display would be 3D, giving the user one more dimension for visualizing, combining and probing waveforms. Turned out implementing the USB stack was a major bitch (should have used Microchip’s ready-made one…) so I decided to get signals through the sound card input. No big deal, the main application was agnostic as to where its data came from. Then, the 3D part was a huge headache too (80% of the code, a primitive but complete 3D engine), but I got trough it and in the end it worked well enough for a public showing. I will post all its code and some screen shots when I find the motivation too, but for reasons that will be developed upon at this time, I decided no to further its development. Simply put, I had discovered the world of Open Source and realized that platform-locking my project (DirectX, .NET) was not inline with my philosophy of getting good electronic tools in the hand of the masses.

This new one is implemented on an OS of mine (Elements, but beware, the post is very outdated) and thus completely web oriented and RESTful. The user interface is described in XHTML, SVG and JavaScript with all of it getting served along with the oscilloscope function by an ATMega328p with 32kB of static EEPROM storage. That’s a web server, TCP/IP stack, a file system and oscilloscope running on 32kB of Flash, 32kB of EEPROM and 2kB of RAM embarked on a 16 MHz chip! It had been a web server for quite a while, but tonight, I got it to behave like a usable oscilloscope. I am a happy man…

A manager is essentially a problem solver. While the nature of the problems is certainly very vague, it goes from implementing a measure pushed down from higher up in the organization to dealing with a sick employee, but essentially, it all falls under the umbrella of problem solving because managers only have a very indirect responsibility on the product or service delivered by their organization.

It follows as a logical conclusion that a well managed entity will not have any problems, but that would be no permanent achievement to the manager as he knows very well that issues will soon reappear in the changing environment he works in. Incidentally, the best manager will not only have made his organization problem free, but will have implemented the mechanisms to solve them without any sort of oversight or implication on his part, since such are the characteristics of ideal processes. At this point, he will have fulfilled his role has a manager, he will be laid off or moved elsewhere, and the group of . . . → Read More: The paradox of management]]> It recently occurred to me that the job of a manager (so often praised in our knowledge economy) is essentially a paradox, as its ultimate objective is to make itself obsolete.

A manager is essentially a problem solver. While the nature of the problems is certainly very vague, it goes from implementing a measure pushed down from higher up in the organization to dealing with a sick employee, but essentially, it all falls under the umbrella of problem solving because managers only have a very indirect responsibility on the product or service delivered by their organization.

It follows as a logical conclusion that a well managed entity will not have any problems, but that would be no permanent achievement to the manager as he knows very well that issues will soon reappear in the changing environment he works in. Incidentally, the best manager will not only have made his organization problem free, but will have implemented the mechanisms to solve them without any sort of oversight or implication on his part, since such are the characteristics of ideal processes. At this point, he will have fulfilled his role has a manager, he will be laid off or moved elsewhere, and the group of people he once led will continue to thrive and adapt without him.

Utopia aside, it feels to me like the most efficient, elegant and adaptable systems on this world always have an organic feel to them or are even naturally organic. Look at the web, look at social media, look at cities, look at society but most importantly, look at life around you.

There will always be a need for oversight and stewardship in the future, natural selection is too cruel for blunt application on human organizations, but I foresee that the current role of manager will redefine itself to that of an enabler, where the crux of the job is no longer to direct, but rather to create the conditions or more precisely, the ecosystem where an ideal can bloom, exist and subsist.

I ought to give credit to Matthew Crawford’s inspiring book, Shopclass as Soulcraft for an hint on this idea. In fact, it would not surprise me if he had thought of it before I did.

Their bite is considered one of the most painful that can be inflicted by any insect (the Schmidt Sting Pain Index excludes insects other than Hymenoptera); the longer the bug is allowed to inject its saliva, the worse the resulting bite, and as the saliva liquefies muscle tissue, it can in rare instances do permanent damage. [...] Occasionally when encountered by a larger predator, such as a human, they have been known to “play dead” and emit a fluid from their anus. Due to this they are assumed dead by humans only to later “come alive” with painful results.

When I . . . → Read More: An impressive find]]> It looks like a cockroach but it has no antenna and appears to have its abdomen shell sutured preventing it from flying. Nonetheless, its by far the largest insect I’ve ever encountered in nature. While at my friend’s place, I grabbed the latest issue of National Geographic, opened a random page an saw a big photo of this very bug in all its splendor. It was part of a small feature on entomophagy. Turns out this is a benacus deyrolli, or a giant water bug as its commonly referred to. I should have been more careful, the Wikipedia article mentions that

Their bite is considered one of the most painful that can be inflicted by any insect (the Schmidt Sting Pain Index excludes insects other than Hymenoptera); the longer the bug is allowed to inject its saliva, the worse the resulting bite, and as the saliva liquefies muscle tissue, it can in rare instances do permanent damage. [...] Occasionally when encountered by a larger predator, such as a human, they have been known to “play dead” and emit a fluid from their anus. Due to this they are assumed dead by humans only to later “come alive” with painful results.

When I was done taking the pictures, I released it in my frontyard only to find its empty exoskeleton two weeks after in my friend’s dog mouth.

The final product

One of my friends, who creates music as a hobby, recently bought a pair of AKG 601 headphones. While I do listen to a fair amount of music, I would not consider myself an audiophile or anything close to that. However, those headphones do make a difference I can notice in the quality (or lack thereof for low bit rate MP3s) of whatever is being played. There is only one small problem with them. Being massive open headphones, my friend’s sound card is only able to put out an acceptable level of sound at maximum volume; his MP3 player, on the other hand, is simply incapable of driving them. The AKG 601 have a rated impedance of 120 Ohms while normal earbuds seem to be around 20. As a result of a soundcard’s output impedance being too high, a normal speaker output  is not capable of providing enough current to the headphones.

They are huge, expensive and leak a lot of sound, so he does not plan to use them on bus rides, but there are still some serious downsides with having to drive them at maximum volume:

At the time I am starting to write this piece, I have only spent two months and half in this field of cubicles but I feel like a man in his forties, jaded and purposeless from all those years wasted away in floors of false-walls, desks and computers. How can they do it, those colleagues of mine to whom I have never spoken a word, but on which I spy relentlessly in the hope that I will someday understand; understand how they came to accept this fatality of modern work.

What I mean by fatality.

On many occasions, I have shared my desire with my relatives to do what I love most full-time while possibly making enough money to live a frugal but comfortable existence. Almost systematically, I have been replied that work is a . . . → Read More: The fatality of modern work]]> This is translation of a text originally written in french and published around April 2009 on amoriscreatio.com, a friend`s blog. The original version can be found here. It turns out that translating is not as easy as it seems, even if I am both the original author and the translator. Incidently, my apologies are given in advance for everything that still has a french syntax to it.

At the time I am starting to write this piece, I have only spent two months and half in this field of cubicles but I feel like a man in his forties, jaded and purposeless from all those years wasted away in floors of false-walls, desks and computers. How can they do it, those colleagues of mine to whom I have never spoken a word, but on which I spy relentlessly in the hope that I will someday understand; understand how they came to accept this fatality of modern work.

What I mean by fatality.

On many occasions, I have shared my desire with my relatives to do what I love most full-time while possibly making enough money to live a frugal but comfortable existence. Almost systematically, I have been replied that work is a necessity before a leisure, that it’s one of those things in life you cannot avoid and that whatever your occupation, you should see it from a positive eye, especially if it pays well. In brief, work is a fatality every member of a society at least a bit conscientious of his quality of life must submit to.

The individuals I work with, should I present them the same question, would most likely give me the same answer. Not that I have asked around, but the fact that I have great difficulty in conceiving them being empty enough to fall under the charms of this paradigm, brings me to the same conclusion.

Times have changed; the western man no longer works solely for subsistence. It seems the American dream has taken over the latter as the first motive of work even tough it is no synonym of accomplishment. Yet, we still justify this quest for manufactured and artificial comfort as a necessity not unlike that of serfdom a few centuries ago. Only now, we seem to be in servitude of economical growth.

A disconcerting superficiality.

It took about ten seconds for discomfort to settle inside me. The moment I first sat in my cubicle, number 441 on the 4th floor of some government building, I kept immobile, stopped my breathing and opened my ears to the ambient sounds. On a background noise of typing, computer hums and various other humanly sonorities, I could hear two women converse; one explaining the traumatizing experience of driving her pet in emergency to the veterinary hospital and the other mechanically acquiescing. The rhythmic flow of typical linguistic constructions evoked a profound disinterestedness from the latter, but the axioms of office life dictated that she could not politely bring this conversation to an early but still overdue end. Trough extrapolation or empathy, I saw myself in a few years time in the very same situation and this is when I really sensed the discomfort. I could not see past my walled cubicle, but it felt like the field was closing in on my person, engulfing me in an insipid lifestyle.

Every day now I encounter this sort of situation where my colleagues chat about the weather (even though they will spend the entirety of the day inside), ask one another how they are doing (even though they do not care) or how their week-end went (even though they still do not care). I agree, those are sometimes legitimate questions, but I am also fully aware that they most often are asked out to promote a polite and concerned image. An image that I am currently forced to project myself, but which I find profoundly dishonest and artificial so incidentally I do my best to avoid those discussions like the plague for I do not want to foster any false friendships in this context. And I could be in the wrong, it could be that all of this is authentic; regardless, I do not want to hang around individuals who cannot converse about anything else.

They do not do it because they believe in it, but because they play the game; or is it that trough inevitable conditioning, they no longer question themselves? How can you show any interest about the low-level bureaucratic hardships of project in a sub-organization or some massive department? I don’t understand. Is it egoism? A desire for promotion? A tacit acceptation of this fatality? A pure lack of consciousness? The sheer variety of human minds that populate this planet leads me to believe to some entertain a genuine interest for this occupation, but that a thousand of them ended up in the same building appears to me as improbable. So, what type of person must you be to accept to spend a sizeable chunk of your conscious life as a cog of this administrative machine?

Profile of a victim.

Who are they and who should I be in order to become comfortable in such an environment? How can they tolerate an existence passing before their eyes in a monotonic cycle of work days, short evenings of numbing TV watching and a week-end instantly ruined by the perspective of yet another Monday? To this question I have found only one plausible answer: the absence of ambitions that cannot be realized by the simple accumulation of capital or social status. The fatality of work matches perfectly the very human goals of family, material comfort and peer recognition. However, it is grossly insufficient at fulfilling any desire for creation or intellectual development, which can only be fully realized when one is in full control of their existence and even more so their intellect.

Buried alive

My ambitions, I believe, are part of the second category and cannot consequently be fulfilled in this present context. I am then forced to choose between the pursuit of those ambitions of the plain acceptance of this fatality. Both options are risky, but one is necessarily nobler while the other confers greater security. If I select the path of reason and continue my progression in this present situation, certainly a physically comfortable one, I will be constrained to bury part of myself with the risk of it coming back to haunt me later on in life. On the other hand, if I follow my ambitions, I risk failure and could see myself having to accept the fatality of modern work and live with the sour taste of defeat for the rest of my days. I prefer the second options, burying a part of oneself is seldom advisable; plus, there is merit in the simple act of trying. But when I expose my vision to others, all I get for feedback is that I am an idealist, that my projects are nothing but utopia and that I am heading for a major disappointment. Although my interlocutors most often fit within the aforementioned descriptions, it remains that there is wisdom in their sayings as for lack of examples, they can only judge my success as unlikely. It seems that their solutions always consist of a change in attitude and an increase in openness towards variety of experiences my situation could bring me.

A question of attitude.

There exists a multitude of trades on this planet which could be classified as interesting. If I suppose for one second I had an infinite lifespan, I would have no problem with trying each and every one of them. However, the transient nature of our existence constrains us to make choices, and I have decided to spend my energies on things I genuinely like rather than trying to convince myself of the good of my present position. We have to be honest with ourselves.

The prevention of the creative process or the constraints of intellectual work.

Intellectual work, in an organizational context, is more than often issued and controlled in a hierarchical manner as the responsibility for success lies generally on higher echelons. Incidentally, those higher echelons expect that work be done in accord with their vision and with tools they are familiar with. While this state of affairs is totally justifiable, it has the major drawback of impeding the creative process, which can only strive in a horizontal manner when cooperation between individuals is involved. Mechanical work that requires no imagination and thus no creativity is generally attributed to workers. The difference here is that we are not transforming metal but information; since information is manipulated with the intellect, bureaucrats are then intellectual workers.

A place of decay.

The location this text questions is a place of decay, where every employee’s brain is slaved and drain of its energy in long hours spent facing a screen repeating more or less the same administrative processes. Upon coming home, this employee is overwhelmed with a feeling of mental fatigue and can not do anything but mundane leisure. The origin of this phenomenon is evident: the body tires. Sadly, after repeating this routine every single day, the individual looses his intellectual vivacity, killed by years of cycling between office work and television. A schism is created, where work and leisure can no longer cohabit. Work being intellectual, leisure time can no longer be of this type. He becomes uniform, inanimate, but more so less interesting and less interested; what used to make him question and think has been replaced with a never satisfied need to evade to a world where everything is simple and unchanging. Some do evade this fatality; those who have and authentic love for what they do; a passion exempt from the prospect of social promotion or peer recognition. But those are too rare of a species.

Manipulating oneself.
An ambition is a dream in effort of realization. Consequently, what transforms a dream in an ambition, what constitutes the effort is action. The amplitude of this action then depends on the magnitude of the ambition and its nature. Can it be realized in the near future? What sacrifices need to be made? How much effort needs to be expanded before coming to an end?

Some ambitions will materialize themselves without any work while others will require constant action, which is regrettably not the easiest for humans who have a strong tendency towards stability and facility once they are within reach. On top all the effort required to accomplish an ambition, we must also combat ourselves, fight this desire to let go and let the flow against which we were advancing overtake us; “what’s the point…” Against ourselves, two weapons are of particular efficiency, conviction and manipulation. Conviction pushes us towards realizing our ambitions trough faith while manipulation entices us to act on ourselves and our environment for the purpose of creating conviction. One must precede the other; conviction only is very often not sufficient, especially for more rational types. We can dream all we want, but sometimes, we must artificially create the conditions necessary to break ourselves out of comfort and push towards battling an imaginary nemesis whose sole function is to motivate us. To barricade ourselves in fortresses of biased beliefs and see evil everywhere except where our ambition lies. Sometimes, this can be the only way of escaping the sea of facility we live in.

A personal opinion in a relative world.

Does salvation resides in the liberation from organizational thought? Not for everyone. Most appear to be perfectly content where they are at, because of personality, because of unconsciousness, because of ambition, because of necessity, because of a need for servitude, etc. In a sense, what seems to be a fatality pleases the majority; negative for some can be positive for others, or it could be the simple acceptance of the order of things. So how do they live within it, what drives them? Most likely the instinctive ambitions upon which western society is built and the need to preserve them once they have been acquired; the rest is only consequent. The only thing that is certain is that I cannot accept this fatality.

Why all this? Moralizing others is a very audacious activity that very often turns sour, so I content myself with asking questions and sharing the results of my thinking with whoever will bother reading them; with the hope that they will in turn questions themselves.

On the hypothesis that Wikipedia is contributed to by people of all walks of life but with the common characteristics of having been educated in a modern schooling system and being intelligent enough to achieve the level of writing implicitly required. I think I can advance that any society or group of individual that attains a similar level of knowledge, regardless of where they started will, given enough time, necessarily become exempt from irrational belief. Only with Wikipedia, this stabilization came about much faster due to its relatively small size, its virtual nature . . . → Read More: Wikipedia as hope of an agnostic society]]> In Wikipedia, articles are evolved word by word by contributors to a stable form that reflects consensus. Hence, the rate of change in articles not about ongoing events will tend to diminish over time. Trough having spent a considerable amount reading a vast array of articles, I am confident in claiming that Wikipedia maintains a consistent agnostic point of view with regards to religion (as mandated by its encyclopedic nature). Divinity is definitely present, but it is constrained to where mentions of it are pertinent. In other words, Wikipedia is a secular organization and has become so solely by the consensus of its members; consensus trough discussion and reason.

On the hypothesis that Wikipedia is contributed to by people of all walks of life but with the common characteristics of having been educated in a modern schooling system and being intelligent enough to achieve the level of writing implicitly required. I think I can advance that any society or group of individual that attains a similar level of knowledge, regardless of where they started will, given enough time, necessarily become exempt from irrational belief. Only with Wikipedia, this stabilization came about much faster due to its relatively small size, its virtual nature and the fact that it has been relatively spared by special interest groups.

Even though the level of intelligence in society is far below that of Wikipedians, it has been steadily increasing ever since we as a species started communicating ideas.

There definitely is an emerging tendency not to affiliate to major religions (sects are a problem of a different nature) among the populations of western countries, where the average level of education is much higher than in the rest of the world. As the average individual acquires an increasingly broader knowledge of the environment around him, society as whole acquires the ability to understand concepts that once would have been too complicated of too esoteric for it to grasp. Take the Roman Empire for example, where Christianity replaced paganism as the most popular religion. It certainly took a while for common knowledge to evolve to a point where it could understand the tenets of monotheism but after a few centuries, it had almost completely eradicated polytheism for monotheism was a much more fitting choice for the conditions at the time. In the same manner, Monotheism will move away from the cultural sphere to the personal sphere and will eventually become history. Nonetheless, it’s a lengthy process; social inertia slows down its propagation down the different levels of society. Intellectuals became skeptical about the existence of an anthropomorphic god and its pertinence to the human condition more than a century ago. Then, governments followed this current of thought by separating church and state. Afterwards, attendance of religious services by the wealthier classes started diminishing noticeably only recently and eventually the lower classes of society should follow along the same path. Except for a few cases (the human brain is built to believe after all), society will in the future have completely parted itself with any sort of organized religion.

This gives me a bit of hope.

It should be noted that society or the popular web encyclopedia for that matter, both subject to the laws of evolution, will not necessarily evolve towards some ideal of rationality and scientific thinking. Should humanity adopt a different vision on knowledge and objectivity, Wikipedia will have to either adapt or cease its existence. Moles have been steadily losing their eyesight over time with even some of them having a layer of skin covering their eyes. If you spend all your time deep in sand and dirt so as to avoid the hardships of the world above, you will loose sight. Evolution does not strive at attaining some ideal, it strives at finding a best fit for a definite environment; and this sometimes mean that some characteristics which we now consider a step towards that ideal might need to be evolved away for the good of the entity concerned.

However, there are absolutely no signs that would make Creation remotely plausible. Creation is in a sense only a philosophical possibility. Everything points towards Evolution as the key process that generated complexity. But what if God had used it to save a bit of time? As a process and most likely a mathematical one, Evolution could be an equation that feeds back on itself, be chaotic and would self-generate complexity. It also would . . . → Read More: Reconciliating Creation and Evolution]]> If the world really is seven thousands years old or not no one can say for sure. But then again, we might all live in a Matrix and our lives are only a massive conspiration… Conjecture aside, I found out that Evolution is in a sense compatible with Creation. Actually, not the Creation as portrayed in the Bible but nonetheless an act of creation. Anyway, the Bible is a big metaphor and thus should not be taken word for word: the world is way too complicated to have been created piece by piece. I would want my God to be a smart individual, and just like any other individual with brains, this God would have devised a technique to generate this universe without making too much of an effort.

However, there are absolutely no signs that would make Creation remotely plausible. Creation is in a sense only a philosophical possibility. Everything points towards Evolution as the key process that generated complexity. But what if God had used it to save a bit of time? As a process and most likely a mathematical one, Evolution could be an equation that feeds back on itself, be chaotic and would self-generate complexity. It also would have no end but definitely a starting point and some initial conditions. So the equation, devised by God on its free time, that made this universe possible started off at the Big Bang and had in parameters enough of an initial condition to cause the slight asymmetry during baryogenesis that made matter possible. Some years later came us, our intelligence, and a very consequential amount of evidence that lead us to theorize that it could not have happened any faster than 14 billion years.

Unless God had a computer.

God created the equation on his laptop, pressed start, paused it after 6 days (or after 14 billion – 7000 simulation years) to check on the results and realized that where all his previous attempts had generated universes full of uninteresting blobs of matters lazily interacting with one another like in a lava lamp, this one generated us. The simulation has been going on ever since because we are quite a show. God slowed it down 7000 years ago to a speed where he/she/it and his/her/its acquaintances can keep pace with our hilarious existence. Here is creation and God is a smart person: mathematics did all the work for him; creation happened when God wanted to watch.

God is just like a curious human being watching a run of the Game of life. People watching the Game of life are just like God, even if they are not suppose to, they can always interfere in order to save a block from a certain death from a collision with a Lightweight Space Ship.

Or it could very well be that the simulation is still going. Whether 14 billion years were compressed into 6 days, if its really been 14 billion years, if its been a lot more or a bit less than that in the super universe that contains us or if there is no time past our universe is of no object. We all live in the same referential and generating us really took around 14 billion of our years.

Evolution works and if it were not for its discovery, there would be an awful lot of very useful inventions that would be missing from our life today. Whether the entity too many of us refer to as the Biblical God used it or not to create us is another question, but it certainly did it in way that has enabled Evolution to follow its course even today and if was smart, it certainly used it to create everything as well.

The earlier aversion to accepting a God less than infinite in all directions is overcome in part by the recent appreciation that an evolving God is superior to a static God. You tell me, which god is greater? A God incapable of improvement, or one constantly perfecting?
Kevin Kelly

That being said, here is another reason why I do not believe in the Abrahamic God: it was obviously made up by humans. Just like I did in the previous paragraphs, you can say whathever you like and as long as it makes sense to you, it can be applied to a divinity.