Personal Blog

Here is my personal blog, including trips we have taken and other random thoughts. I also have a more extensive blog covering electric vehicles, sustainable energy, peak oil, global warming and other topics.

Blog: MaxBars

Posted by: Max Dunn on August 6, 2010 16:16:18

I used to eat a lot of Balance Bars but got tired of paying $1 each. So I came up with my own recipe for gluten-free bars and, naturally, call them MaxBars. Sometimes they actually turn out okay and occasionally friends will ask for the recipe, so here it is:

Ingredients:

• 2 cups non-gluten oats
• 2 cups corn meal
• 2 cups protein powder
• 1 cup sugar
• 1/3 bag of chocolate chips
• 2 cups peanut butter
• Some soy milk

Directions:

Add all the dry ingredients to a powerful mixer and mix them up a little. The actual amount is not very important and you can substitute freely. Use more sugar for tastier ones; eliminate the chocolate chips for more utilitarian bars you will only eat when really hungry.

Next, heat up the peanut butter until runny and blend it in. Finally start adding the soy milk slowly and stop just when the mixture starts to ball up. It is important to not add to much soy milk, otherwise, the mixture gets sticky and hard to work with. Enough soy milk has been added when the mixture will just hold together when squeezed. 

Butter a cookie sheet, cutting board and square or rectangular cookie cutter. Mold the dough on the cutting board about 1 inch thick. Cut out the pieces and move to cookie sheet. Bake at 275 for one hour.

 

Blog: Folded Universe

Posted by: Max Dunn on March 18, 2010 14:16:49

Let's say you were going to design a universe. If it was like ours, there are billions of atoms in a person, there are billions of people on the planet, and there are billions of planets in the universe. Thats a lot of atoms! So how could you optimize that? Remember, you are not limited to working in just 3 dimensions but can make use of all 10.

First off, you could optimize by folding on scale. That is, fold the big objects back down into the little objects so they do double duty. Planets and suns can stand in for protons and electrons. This alone can save a tremendous amount of matter.

Next, fold back in on time. Since we are only going to allow free movement in 3 dimensions in this universe and tightly control the passage of time in the 4th dimension, we don't really need to keep any matter around that falls into the past. Like a bike wheel rolling forward, we can keep reusing matter that goes into the past and don't need to create the matter in the future until it becomes the present. And since the slice of time that we exist in is very small (on the order of the Planck constant), this trick is another way of saving a huge amount of matter.

So don't despair when creating your universe, through these simple tricks you can drastically cut down on the amount of matter that you need.

 

Blog: Maddingly Perfect Wife

Posted by: Max Dunn on February 3, 2010 12:40:03

I choose to believe that my wife and I were brought together by a supreme intelligence and even for all our fights, frustrations and disagreements, together our union is maddingly perfect.

 

Blog: SmartMeter

Posted by: Max Dunn on February 3, 2010 12:27:16

Yesterday, we got our PG&E SmartMeters! The web interface isn't turned on yet and the Zigbee home network will likely take a year or more before it is enabled, but I am excited nonetheless. Here are pictures of our electric and gas SmartMeters:

 

Blog: Linus Pauling Letter

Posted by: Max Dunn on January 14, 2010 09:44:37

Today I stumbled across this letter that the famous scientist, Linus Pauling, wrote to my granddad back in 1949 asking for some chemicals. Pretty cool!

 

 

 

Blog: SF Localcation 2009

Posted by: Max Dunn on July 4, 2009 08:46:41

A "Staycation" is where you take a vacation by staying at home. But we coined a new term when we went to San Francisco for a vacation: "Localcation" for "local vacation" .

We talked about going someplace far, like the East Coast or Europe for a vacation, but realized there are so many wonderful things to do close by in California, that it seemed silly to waste a lot of energy flying to a remote spot before we have exhausted all the things we can do locally. We haven't even gotten close to seeing everything in SF so we decided to go there for a few days.

Since having a car in SF is a little silly, we took the train up there and took the bus around everywhere

 

On Sunday night, we went to the Castro district and had a fabulous dinner at Zadin, which was a Vietnamese restaurant that offered a gluten free menu. The pho was the best we had ever had, and the shaken beef was fantastic. We also had a really good bottle of Riesling that complimented the dishes perfectly. Highly recommended!

 

On Monday, Suzanne had to go to work and took Claire so Maxie and I had the day to ourselves. We kept on a tight schedule and visited the SF Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and really enjoyed the Georgia O'Keefe/Ansel Adams show. It was really cool seeing a picture Adams took of a mission and then seeing a painting by O'Keefe of the same mission. We also liked the new sculpture garden.

 

We then had lunch at the Yerba Buena center and afterwards took the cable cars to Fisherman's Wharf.

 

We rented bikes and rode across the Golden Gate bridge and took the ferry back from Sausalito. One of the highlights of the trip!

    

Dinner that night was at Asia de Cuba. In New York, we had a fabulous dinner there but this time in SF, it was extremely disappointing - Zadin was much better.

On Tuesday, we did some shopping and visited Alcatraz. The kids have never been there before, and while I have gone several times, I have never taken the audio tour before and it really added to the experience.

        

On Wednesday, we did some more shopping and visited Chinatown. But the highlight was the behind-the-scenes tour of Giant stadium. We got to go in the press box, luxury suites, locker room and dugout!

   

This was a wonderful localcation!

 

Blog: Media Center Reinstall

Posted by: Max Dunn on January 13, 2009 09:42:12

Some people spend a lot of time working on cars, some people with gardening, others cooking. They usually enjoy spending time doing these things and would like to spend even more time on them if they could. For me, I seem to spend most of my time working on computers, and while I enjoy a lot of it, sometimes - not so much.

Take for instance my setting up of a Windows Media Center for watching all our TV and movies. When it is working, it is really great. We can record HDTV, play movies and watch Internet TV all on one box using a remote control in our living room. However, the amount of time I have struggled getting the Windows Media Center working and dealing with all its crashes and quirks has not been very enjoyable.

Just recently, the PCI-Express slot in the motherboard died and so I decided to replace the motherboard. I realized that I would have to re-install all of Windows and all the supporting drivers and programs, but I didn't think it would end up taking almost two days to do this! The most frustrating part is that it wouldn't recognize the tuner cards, but after hours of deleting drivers and reinstalling them, it suddenly recognized one of the cards.

So I am glad that it is working again, but I can't say that my time spent struggling with the Windows Media Center was particularly fun or a skill that I think will ever be very useful.

 

Blog: Presidio Reputation

Posted by: Max Dunn on December 30, 2008 10:20:02

A friend was asking me about the reputation of the Presidio Sustainable MBA program in the greater business community, and this is what I replied:

First off, inside the community Presidio does have a very good reputation. One reason is that Hunter Lovins is a professor there and is famous for co-writing "Natural Capitalism". Also, Presidio seems to be the top sustainability MBA program, maybe even a little more respected than Bainbridge and Dominican. Outside of these three that were designed with sustainability woven throughout the entire curricula, the other programs seem to be more traditional MBAs with some sustainability thrown in.

Secondly, since the Presidio program is new - only starting its first Sustainable MBA class in 2004 - it will be years before they have been around long enough to build up a strong reputation in the greater business community. Certainly schools that have been around for a long time like Stanford, Harvard and Berkeley will always have higher reputations and the big, traditional firms will focus on recruiting graduates from there. So if you want a job with Citibank, Lehman Bros, AIG, or another top-notch firm, then the traditional business schools are the way to go. ;-) But if a company is looking for someone that can help with sustainability issues to reduce costs while also helping the environment, they will likely recruit at Presidio rather than Harvard. So while Presidio might not be as well known now, as sustainable issues become more and more important, their reputation will grow.

Lastly, it is true that if you say that you have an MBA from Stanford, people go "Ahh" but if you say you have an MBA from Presidio, they ask "What's that?". But in the end, I decided that reputation didn't matter that much to me. I didn't want to spend 2 years engulfed by people that just wanted to make as much money as they could, but instead wanted to be immersed with people that were passionate about being involved with businesses that would make the world a better place. I also didn't want to spend 2 years learning about classic business theory which got us into this financial mess in the first place, but instead wanted to learn the next generation of sustainable business theory that will produce a businesses that are resilient to turbulent times and that our grandkids would be proud of.

So it is a good question on whether to opt for a traditional MBA program that has strong credibility or to take a chance on a "startup" sustainable MBA program that isn't as well known. However for me, the credibility of the program wasn't as important as what I would learn and who I would be around.

 

Blog: Presidio Sustainable MBA Acceptance

Posted by: Max Dunn on December 30, 2008 10:00:39

It has been a lifelong goal of mine to get an MBA. However, for years I was busy starting and running 4 businesses so when I finally retired in 2005 and looked at the traditional MBA curriculum, there was not much there that I didn't already know. But then last year, I picked up a brochure about the Bainbridge MBA at the Green Fair and became intrigued by the idea of a green MBA.

The Bainbridge program looked great, but it seemed hypocritical to fly to Washington once a month for a "sustainable" MBA program. So I started looking for one closer to home and found the Presidio School of Management in San Francisco.

The Presidio program is a "startup" and had its first class in 2004. What attracted me is that sustainable issues are woven throughout all curricula, rather than being confined to a few extra classes. So for instance in economics, they teach standard economic theory, like how GDP counts a heart attack the same as installing solar panels, but then continue talking about ways of evaluating the benefits of these money flows differently. Also they cover the basic accounting principles, but then go on to teach how to account for the "three P's": profit, people and planet. Now this is something that is interesting to me!

So I applied to the program and on December 18th, heard:

Congratulations! You have been accepted into the MBA in Sustainable Management program at Presidio School of Management for Spring 2009.

The orientation is on January 14th and the residency weekend starts right after that, so I am excited to be starting right away!

 

Blog: Emotion Matrix

Posted by: Max Dunn on December 17, 2008 09:14:34

Often we think of emotions in a one-dimensional way, like thinking of a person as being either happy or sad or somewhere in between. But in reality, I think emotions are much more complex and are produced by the interaction of several different moods. For instance, if someone is sad and tired, these moods will combine to produce depression. But if someone is sad and energetic, it will likely produce an anxious state.

Here is a matrix that illustrates these combinations:
 

	Tired	Energetic
Sad	Depressed	Anxious
Happy	Kick-back	Manic

 

These interactions are actually continuous, so if someone is happy and in between tired and energetic, it will likely manifest itself as being bored. This produces a whole range of emotions as the various moods change subtly.

There are lots of other mood interactions as well. For instance, acceptance/anger versus tired/energetic. The important point is that emotions are not simply one-dimensional but interact with other moods to produce new emotions and if we want to fully understand emotions, we need to consider these interactions.

 

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