Advantage of an Individual Retirement Account (IRA)

I know I'm getting old because I used to post about cool things like pokemon popping out of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) when trying to understand the mysteries of the universe, and now I'm writing a post about retirement savings accounts. Welp, I guess it won't be long until I'm wearing diapers again...

Put bluntly, an IRA is a bank account where you can invest money and not have to pay taxes on interest (Roth IRA), or delay paying taxes on interest (Traditional IRA). So, a Roth IRA sounds a lot better, right? Well, in a Traditional IRA you put the money in before income tax, so your interest is earned on tax free money, and then you pay taxes once the money is withdrawn. Dang, I just realized how boring this topic is, but I'm going to power through. Okay, so I'm a fan of the Roth IRA for two reasons: 1) It's super easy to add money too because you just transfer money from your normal bank account to your Roth IRA account and you don't really have to worry about tax forms, and 2) since the amount of money you can put into either type is limited to $5,500 per year, if you can save $5,500 of after tax money, you're really saving like $7,500ish (I'm not going to calculate stuff) of pre-tax money.

So, that's the basics. I highly recommend Mr. Money Mustache and Mad FIentist if you want to get serious about saving money. Also, /r/financialindependence is a great community.

Shipping Container Homes and Tiny Houses

Buying a home is expensive (duh). I'm a pretty cheap and eccentric guy, so I stumbled across shipping container homes (like the ones that are stacked up on cargo ships) and tiny houses. First things first, how are theses different from trailers? Well, tiny houses really aren't much different, they're basically just smaller, but more upscale trailers (like $57k for an off the shelf 117sqft home which is about $487 per square foot). Making a DIY tiny house is much less expensive. On the other hand, shipping container homes tend to be permanent structures made from one or more containers that are often stacked in cool ways. The containers themselves are pretty darn cheap, about $1k-6k (depending on newness) for a 40' x 8' x 8' container (320sqft). That's $3 to $18 per square foot (before adding things like electricity and plumbing)! To put that number into perspective, most houses I've seen, you'd be lucky to find anything under $120 per square foot. So, in essence tiny homes save you money by reducing your consumption and shipping container homes save you money by re-purposing mass produced containers. Obviously, you still need to buy land.

Elm From Tumbleweed Tiny House Company

Inside of the Tiny House

Modern Shipping Container Home

Spoonflower

The actual fabric! (rotated)

The design

Spoonflower inspired me to start designing fabrics that I could use to make Arm Pillozzz. Spoonflower is a neat site that allows you to upload images and tile them to create patterns. Then you can order them or just post them online so that other people can order them. You get 10% of any sales and you get a 10% discount on your own fabrics. Ordering a pattern on the basic cotton fabric is $17.50 per yard length (the rolls are 42" wide), so it's expensive compared to commercial fabrics. But you can make pretty much anything you want. It's like a zazzle/cafepress type site for fabric.  Most of my patterns are rigidly geometric, but I think I'm a pretty creative geometrist (Geometrician? Geometer? Whatever, I like geometry.) I think pattern design is math intensive considering that to effectively repeat a unit block, the boundaries of the block have to be consistent when repeated. Also, there are a lot of colors, and the way they interact and compliment each other is very interesting. Here's my first pattern!

LiteCoin Mining

I started looking into mining LiteCoin. I'm not too sure that it will be profitable, but I thought I'd give a shot with an old computer that goes completely unused. I installed Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (long term support) because Windows XP is not going to be supported by Microsoft after April 8, 2014. I downloaded the LiteCoin wallet and the bootlogger quick sync file. The syncing was only supposed to take an hour, but it took about four. Good start. Guess that's what I get for using a 10 year old computer. Anyschmows, I still have to download a mining program (pooler's cpuminer) and join a mining pool. I could go it alone, but it's practically impossible to get any coins by yourself. An analogy to the way LiteCoin (and BitCoin and all other altcoins) are mined is everyone is throwing darts trying to hit the LiteCoin and whoever hits it, wins. So my slow computer is a tiny dart and fast computers are machine guns. So, to distribute the effort and end up with a partial coin instead of nothing, pools were formed and the more computing power you contribute to the pool, the larger of a percentage of the LiteCoin you'll get when your pool wins. Kind of like a lottery pool.

Interestingly, mining is what keeps the network safe, as the math that your computer is doing is checking the validity chain of other people's transactions. Neat stuff.

BarSign

I made an app! It's brilliant. Well, kind of. If you hate ordering at loud bars, but you still go to loud bars. I call it BarSign and it's available on Google Play here. It's a list of drinks that you can select from and the your selection is displayed in large text for you to show to the bartender. Pretty nifty, I think. I made it with the MIT app inventor which is pretty simple to use, and I really like it, but it is somewhat limited.

Categories

Drinks

Please!

Hop Farm and Fechtmann Number

So, like most other people (especially males), I like to drink beer. Good beer. What's good beer? Essentially, any beer that I haven't had before or a very alcoholic/bitter IPA. While I was studying fluid mechanics in college I noticed that all the dimensionless numbers (i.e. Reynolds Number, Capillary Number, Mach Number, etc.) gave a quantitative number, but were qualitative in that the number would fall into a certain range that corresponded to a certain flow regime. Blah blah blah, engineering. SO, I devised the Fechtmann number, which is given by the formula:

Where V is the volume of the drink, A is the alcohol percentage, P is the price and v (a.k.a. nu) is Hershel's Coefficient. If you've had the drink before and liked it, Hershel's coefficient is 1.1, if you haven't had it before it's 1.2, if you  had it before and thought it was okay, then the coefficient is 1 and if you had it before but didn't like it the coefficient is 0.9. So, basically the higher the Fechtmann number, the happier you'll be. It also says that you need to try new things and if something is very alcoholic and cheap, just order it.

Since I like IPAs so much, my brother and I decided to grow hops. Our dad didn't realize what he was getting himself into when he allowed us to build a trellis :) But now he thinks it's pretty cool.

My dad next to our trellis posts

Hops about midway through the growing season

pssssyyyyunnnggg

Hands in the air

ヘ(^_^ヘ)(ノ^_^)ノ