Most people doing CNC machining with linux are using real-time extensions, largely based on the enhanced machine controller linux/RTE kernel written largely by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
There are some great reasons to loathe Hollywood, and I think you've hit a bunch on the head. To that, I'd add that they're distracting people from critical issues -- the idea that more people watch American Idol than vote for the freaking President is just appalling. My point is that many evangelical people of any faith, and even some atheists, set up a dichotomy with themselves labelled as 'good' and anyone who opposes them necessarily being 'bad' -- and if the people in the 'bad' camp are outcompeting the people in the 'good' camp, well, that means they must have sold their souls to whatever uncompromising evil the person making the judgments believes in.
By the way, you should read some Neil Postman. I recommend "How To Watch The TV News" and "Amusing Ourselves To Death". I think, given your comment, you'd appreciate what he had to say about entertainment and its effect on Western thought and culture.
>I don't understand why such a large portion of the Church is opposed to science and evolution.
I have a theory about this. I'll try and condense it. Let's say you have two populations: one who believes in religion/god X, and another who believes something different. Call them X, and notX. Let's say, further, that the notX group is doing 'better' -- more money, more influence, more hookers and blow, whatever you want to define 'better' as. How does the group X rationalize this? There are only two possibilities: the X group is wrong, and their god doesn't exist, or (they believe) the notX group is being helped by the Forces of Darkness, whatever those are. If god X is on the side of the X group, well, they'd *have* to be doing well, right? so the only possible way someone else could be doing better is if they are agents of the Enemy of god X. Once you've made that step, it's easy to demonize anyone who believes differently than you.
Many evangelical Christians loathe Hollywood: money, fame, beauty, and pure evil (to hear them speak of it.) Many radical Muslims loathe the West in general for exactly the same reasons.
If you are religious out of fear, you regard anyone else who even appears to challenge your belief system, even if it's just by the way they live, as being threatening and an enemy. Note the 'out of fear' -- there are many good religious people. I hope I'm one of them. There are also nasty atheists. In the end it's not about the religion, it's about why a person takes a belief. People who can't handle their beliefs being challenged react aggressively to suppress those challenges, because they threaten the person's choice in belief, and by so doing, the person's self-worth. Groups of people like this, are mobs, and dangerous.
I worked for a college doing primary school science education, and we looked at doing hydraulic logic, but it was innately messier than we felt like running in classrooms. Instead we developed optical logic computation, using cheap, reliable nightlights. Y'know the ones that turn on when it's dark? Well, that's a NOT. With some tape covering parts of the lightbulbs it's easy to make a NOR -- put two nightlights near the sensor of another, and if either is on, it's off. It's harder to make a NAND because you're relying on the sensor sensitivity, so you have the two lights some distance away with eg a couple of books on either side of the channel, to keep other light from adjacent circuits from messing with the signal. It won't trigger with just one, but if both are on, the output triggers. The very best part? The clock circuit. Take three nightlights and set them up so that each one has its bulb beside the next one's sensor. A is on, which means B is off, which means C is on, which means A is off, which means B is on... To adjust your clock rate you just add more lights to the circle. As long as it's an odd number, you have an oscillator. (in fact, you can get multiple pulses running around if you have more than 5.) Then you arrange a linear series of nightlights, triggered by one of the oscillator lights, that fans out to clock the entire circuit. From that point, flip-flops and XOR's and everything else are easy.
If you want to see something strange, start making odd-number circles that intersect so the pulse trains begin interfering with eachother. If you have three circles with different numbers of members in each, you quickly get to a point where we couldn't predict the evolution of the blink patterns past about three seconds.
Don't laugh: if you spend time looking at some of the patents for perpetual-motion machines (*always* quality entertainment) many of them include brakes to keep them from overspeeding.
Needless to say, the brakes seem to last a long time.
Most of y'all are misunderstanding this bill. He doesn't define social networking because A: it's impossible to define, and B: it's *not his problem*. All he has to do is come up with a bill that sounds good, so he can flog it when it's re-election time. He has no intention of it passing -- in fact, that's to his advantage. ("See? I tried to pass this Good Thing, but my enemies shot it down! Vote for me and I'll try again, even *harder*!") There's hysteresis in the self-correcting system, and he's gaming it. He proposes something stupid, that can't work, but sounds good, and when someone else says it can't work, at some later time, the public perception is that the fault must be with the person who says it can't work, and that more such legislation should be proposed. It's a type of security theater.
(with gratitude to Bruce Schneier, from whom I learned a lot of these concepts.)
I'm consistently impressed with the tech/geek articles that show up in VF and The New Yorker, both of which I subscribe to. A lot of people move back and forth between the two, so I guess I should expect it. Similarly, New Scientist does some good work (although often pretty shallowly and without a lot of fact-checking.) But I find it reassuring that a number of fairly high-end magazines, that are read by the rich and influential, are all saying things very like what I read on slashdot, usually with a lag time of about two years. It gives me hope that at least some people who are making Big Decisions have at least been exposed to data from people who actually know what they're talking about: it's not just business flacks and PR people, whose biases are worn on their sleeves, feeding data to the decision crowd.
There are people doing that already, actually. I have a friend who does research on manned mars missions and they simulate them in a desert in Peru, and another in Arizona: put five or seven people in there, in lightweight space suits, for a month, with tools and machinery, and figure out what's difficult to operate and how it should be modified, and observe the interpersonal dynamics. I wish I had some links, but it's just something she talks about a lot.
I don't think it requires complete introverts, or mild Asperger's, or any of that. All you need is three reasonably friendly, happy people, who get along, currently, with other people.
The problem is: this doesn't describe the people NASA is selecting as astronauts. They have to be incredibly driven: they need PhD's and the ability to pass moderately rigorous physical requirements, and the tenacity to push their lives and other goals aside until they manage to outcompete everyone else who is trying to become an astronaut.
If NASA wanted to find people fit for this kind of mission they could look at submarines, at monastaries, or just find people who are described by their friends as "someone I would enjoy being stuck on an island with." What they DON'T need is a bunch of hyperintelligent, hypercompetitive people: exactly the people who manage to get their feet in the NASA door.
In other words, NASA needs to select, rather than choosing those who want to be selected.
Now that we've gotten that settled, let's do the same thing for politicians and CEO's, coz a lot of the problems we're facing today are because exactly the same kinds of people as this poor unstable woman are running our country and companies, for exactly the same reason: they're the ones who have pushed the hardest to get there, and are, as a result, scary people who will fight hard to maintain what they have.
Or, we could just bundle about 1200 kilos of pot along with the Mars astronauts, and ditto politicians and CEO's. If they pass a drug test, they get fired.
What you're talking about is a very deep problem. Everyone is biased. Gladwell absolutely cherry-picks his evidence to support his thesis. The problem is: most people don't realize that, and don't go looking into the greater picture. Obviously you do. It's really frustrating to talk to people who don't. Gladwell's stuff is ripe for cherry-picking in its own right -- quoting the most convenient parts to support what a person believes, and even more misleading when the source for the convenient parts is itself the result of editing and selective choices.
I don't really see much difference between New-Age-types on the left, Young-Earth-types on the right, or business- and pop-psychology-types off in their respective corners. They're all believing based on a very selective choice of evidence, from which their beliefs are justified. I really like Gladwell -- I've corresponded with him -- but he's doing something similar (although he's doing it as exposition rather than religiously.)
Ironically, perhaps, one of the things he talks about in Blink is the problem you have when your initial, intuitive response collides with your intellectual reasoned response, because (there's evidence that) in order to process something we have to believe it at least somewhat, first. So, in the same way, when we read Blink, we have to believe he's right, and then think afterwards about what is sustainable.
I learned a lot from both it and "the tipping point" -- the width of his coverage is amazing. The material is *very* attractive to business- and new-age-types who will leave with nothing more than the conclusions, but I think it's the background and support material that's more interesting: the primary sources. Check it out from a local library and give it a shot. I don't think you'll find the time wasted, even if you completely disagree. There's a rebuttal book out there called "Think" that might also be worth your time, although I haven't read it yet.
If you live in an arid environment, you already know all about static electricity. When I pull a polypropylene-fleece blanket off a bed that has a wool blanket, at night, the sparks will literally light up the room for the duration of the pull. I work in an electronics place, a design center so we don't have full bunnysuits, and everyone is familiar with the necessity of touching something metal as or soon after you stand up from sitting in a chair. I regularly work with hardware interfaces to my computer, and am pretty used to leaning forwards in a chair, and the separation from the chair back charging up enough that when I touch the circuit board, the computer reboots.
At the bottom of this page is a graph of air dielectric strength vs. air pressure. If you can get a 2 cm spark, that's about 60,000 volts. That's plenty to pass through the plastic case of a computer to something inside, or through the insulation on test leads, as I can tell you from personal experience.
>The New Yorker, famous for its fact-checking, got it all wrong.
should read:
The New Yorker, which used to be famous for its fact-checking, got it all wrong.
I say that as a long-time reader and subscriber. Two issues ago, they had a typo: extraneous letters in the middle of a word. As regards fact-checking, they're getting sloppier all the time. I rarely know much about the specialized articles they write, and even I see things I know are wrong (and I do go look them up.) I feel badly slagging them for this, because they're currently writing some of the best social commetary and relentless exposé material out there. Their gains in relevance have been matched by loss of accuracy, apparently.
Malcolm Gladwell's book "Blink" talks a lot about the differences between first impression and actual, thoughtful reaction to a situation, including some interesting studies on what happens when the two conflict and how measurement of the effects of those conflicts on reaction time can tell us a lot about how the brain is processing material. There's controversy around some of his conclusions but I strongly recommend the book and everything else Gladwell has written.
The brilliant Polish scifi writer Stanislaw Lem wrote, as I recall, that planets underwent several phases of intelligent development, one transition being when they started orbiting stuff, another when they had so much junk in orbit they couldn't launch anything else because it would collide with stuff already up there, and yet another when the automation and AI cruising around managed to get together and form orbital intelligent life that actively blockaded the planet below. I think he was writing this in the '60's, although I think I remember Heinlein writing about orbital debris in the '40's.
Every once in a while SomaFM's secret agent station plays some Burt Bacharach and I think "man, he's so underrated: this is *amazingly* good music." And, somewhere inside me, the last lingering echo of my 21-year-old self tries to commit suicide.
Maybe I should've said "more than the OP ever wanted to know". I read books about this. You probably do, too. But the vast majority of people want roughly one paragraph, leading off with a summary, and optionally followed by three or four sentences of details, for their five-to-twenty-second explanation. When people ask me a question about something interesting, my usual response is "do you want the five second explanation, the thirty second one, the five minute one, or the thirty minute one?" Of course, when I say that, they invariably answer "the five second one, please!" I think it's to my credit that more often than not, we end up somewhere in the five minute explanation, but maybe I'm just oblivious to them trying to escape.
This would be difficult research (although I wouldn't mind being on the team) but it'd be interesting to do a survey of which industries use the most attractive sales reps. I can tell you from personal experience that in the semiconductor/board manufacturing industries: not so hot, but the medical optics/optometry field? zowie. The reps for the botox people would be even hotter if they could move their faces... So we get pictures of -- or, better, a chance to talk to -- twenty reps from each of some different industrial lobbyists, er I mean representatives, and a wide cross-section of people writes down their impressions, and then we see if there's any association between company size/rep attractiveness, or an association between product profit margin/attractiveness, or even (one assumes this would be true) attractiveness/post-sales-pitch profit for the company involved.
By the way, I doubt they even *need* reps, but I'm trying to imagine a 20-something woman doing a Viagra sales pitch. It's just innately weird. I'm sure it happens, though.
9-1-1 caller: "the guy down the street just crashed his bulldozer into my living room!" Answer: Deal with the problem at your end. 9-1-1 caller: "I put locks on the doors, but guy down the street just crashed his bulldozer into my living room again!" Answer: Deal with the problem at your end. 9-1-1 caller: "I built a huge fence in the yard and bought guard dogs, but guy down the street just crashed his bulldozer into my living room again!" Answer: Deal with the problem at your end.
There are times you *can't* deal with the problem at your end. Little towns in Georgia trying to pass laws making Internet pornography illegal? Someone trying to deal with the problem at their end.
The problem with using biological solutions to build triglycerides is that, to the best of my knowledge, that's mostly a multicellular process. Bacteria and yeast only do sufficient lipogenesis to form their cell membranes: you have to go to large multicellular systems that can afford to do long-term energy storage to get fat cells that happily (and with surprising efficiency) make fat until an individual cell's composition is better than 99% triglyceride. They're also unbranched, so cracking them is mostly going to get you butanes and hexanes. There are microalgae that produce stuff that's easy to turn into diesel oil, but even then it's tricky to make it anything near economical.
Slashdot Mirror
Most people doing CNC machining with linux are using real-time extensions, largely based on the enhanced machine controller linux/RTE kernel written largely by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
There are some great reasons to loathe Hollywood, and I think you've hit a bunch on the head. To that, I'd add that they're distracting people from critical issues -- the idea that more people watch American Idol than vote for the freaking President is just appalling.
My point is that many evangelical people of any faith, and even some atheists, set up a dichotomy with themselves labelled as 'good' and anyone who opposes them necessarily being 'bad' -- and if the people in the 'bad' camp are outcompeting the people in the 'good' camp, well, that means they must have sold their souls to whatever uncompromising evil the person making the judgments believes in.
By the way, you should read some Neil Postman. I recommend "How To Watch The TV News" and "Amusing Ourselves To Death". I think, given your comment, you'd appreciate what he had to say about entertainment and its effect on Western thought and culture.
It's not pining, it's passed on.
Or would that be, paed on?
>I don't understand why such a large portion of the Church is opposed to science and evolution.
I have a theory about this. I'll try and condense it.
Let's say you have two populations: one who believes in religion/god X, and another who believes something different. Call them X, and notX.
Let's say, further, that the notX group is doing 'better' -- more money, more influence, more hookers and blow, whatever you want to define 'better' as.
How does the group X rationalize this?
There are only two possibilities: the X group is wrong, and their god doesn't exist, or (they believe) the notX group is being helped by the Forces of Darkness, whatever those are. If god X is on the side of the X group, well, they'd *have* to be doing well, right? so the only possible way someone else could be doing better is if they are agents of the Enemy of god X.
Once you've made that step, it's easy to demonize anyone who believes differently than you.
Many evangelical Christians loathe Hollywood: money, fame, beauty, and pure evil (to hear them speak of it.) Many radical Muslims loathe the West in general for exactly the same reasons.
If you are religious out of fear, you regard anyone else who even appears to challenge your belief system, even if it's just by the way they live, as being threatening and an enemy. Note the 'out of fear' -- there are many good religious people. I hope I'm one of them. There are also nasty atheists. In the end it's not about the religion, it's about why a person takes a belief. People who can't handle their beliefs being challenged react aggressively to suppress those challenges, because they threaten the person's choice in belief, and by so doing, the person's self-worth. Groups of people like this, are mobs, and dangerous.
>Oh, and IANAL, but you quash subpoenas :] There's no 's' in quash.
So that'd make it 'quah' then?
I worked for a college doing primary school science education, and we looked at doing hydraulic logic, but it was innately messier than we felt like running in classrooms. Instead we developed optical logic computation, using cheap, reliable nightlights. Y'know the ones that turn on when it's dark? Well, that's a NOT. With some tape covering parts of the lightbulbs it's easy to make a NOR -- put two nightlights near the sensor of another, and if either is on, it's off. It's harder to make a NAND because you're relying on the sensor sensitivity, so you have the two lights some distance away with eg a couple of books on either side of the channel, to keep other light from adjacent circuits from messing with the signal. It won't trigger with just one, but if both are on, the output triggers.
The very best part? The clock circuit. Take three nightlights and set them up so that each one has its bulb beside the next one's sensor. A is on, which means B is off, which means C is on, which means A is off, which means B is on... To adjust your clock rate you just add more lights to the circle. As long as it's an odd number, you have an oscillator. (in fact, you can get multiple pulses running around if you have more than 5.) Then you arrange a linear series of nightlights, triggered by one of the oscillator lights, that fans out to clock the entire circuit. From that point, flip-flops and XOR's and everything else are easy.
If you want to see something strange, start making odd-number circles that intersect so the pulse trains begin interfering with eachother. If you have three circles with different numbers of members in each, you quickly get to a point where we couldn't predict the evolution of the blink patterns past about three seconds.
Don't laugh: if you spend time looking at some of the patents for perpetual-motion machines (*always* quality entertainment) many of them include brakes to keep them from overspeeding.
Needless to say, the brakes seem to last a long time.
Most of y'all are misunderstanding this bill. He doesn't define social networking because A: it's impossible to define, and B: it's *not his problem*. All he has to do is come up with a bill that sounds good, so he can flog it when it's re-election time. He has no intention of it passing -- in fact, that's to his advantage. ("See? I tried to pass this Good Thing, but my enemies shot it down! Vote for me and I'll try again, even *harder*!")
There's hysteresis in the self-correcting system, and he's gaming it. He proposes something stupid, that can't work, but sounds good, and when someone else says it can't work, at some later time, the public perception is that the fault must be with the person who says it can't work, and that more such legislation should be proposed. It's a type of security theater.
(with gratitude to Bruce Schneier, from whom I learned a lot of these concepts.)
I'm consistently impressed with the tech/geek articles that show up in VF and The New Yorker, both of which I subscribe to. A lot of people move back and forth between the two, so I guess I should expect it. Similarly, New Scientist does some good work (although often pretty shallowly and without a lot of fact-checking.) But I find it reassuring that a number of fairly high-end magazines, that are read by the rich and influential, are all saying things very like what I read on slashdot, usually with a lag time of about two years. It gives me hope that at least some people who are making Big Decisions have at least been exposed to data from people who actually know what they're talking about: it's not just business flacks and PR people, whose biases are worn on their sleeves, feeding data to the decision crowd.
There are people doing that already, actually. I have a friend who does research on manned mars missions and they simulate them in a desert in Peru, and another in Arizona: put five or seven people in there, in lightweight space suits, for a month, with tools and machinery, and figure out what's difficult to operate and how it should be modified, and observe the interpersonal dynamics. I wish I had some links, but it's just something she talks about a lot.
I don't think it requires complete introverts, or mild Asperger's, or any of that. All you need is three reasonably friendly, happy people, who get along, currently, with other people.
The problem is: this doesn't describe the people NASA is selecting as astronauts. They have to be incredibly driven: they need PhD's and the ability to pass moderately rigorous physical requirements, and the tenacity to push their lives and other goals aside until they manage to outcompete everyone else who is trying to become an astronaut.
If NASA wanted to find people fit for this kind of mission they could look at submarines, at monastaries, or just find people who are described by their friends as "someone I would enjoy being stuck on an island with." What they DON'T need is a bunch of hyperintelligent, hypercompetitive people: exactly the people who manage to get their feet in the NASA door.
In other words, NASA needs to select, rather than choosing those who want to be selected.
Now that we've gotten that settled, let's do the same thing for politicians and CEO's, coz a lot of the problems we're facing today are because exactly the same kinds of people as this poor unstable woman are running our country and companies, for exactly the same reason: they're the ones who have pushed the hardest to get there, and are, as a result, scary people who will fight hard to maintain what they have.
Or, we could just bundle about 1200 kilos of pot along with the Mars astronauts, and ditto politicians and CEO's. If they pass a drug test, they get fired.
>There are other people around here who do it better anyway.
If there are, I haven't read them lately. I wish I had mod points, and I hope you post more.
That's what I was aiming for, and I thought I did it correctly. Shrug.
What you're talking about is a very deep problem. Everyone is biased. Gladwell absolutely cherry-picks his evidence to support his thesis. The problem is: most people don't realize that, and don't go looking into the greater picture. Obviously you do. It's really frustrating to talk to people who don't. Gladwell's stuff is ripe for cherry-picking in its own right -- quoting the most convenient parts to support what a person believes, and even more misleading when the source for the convenient parts is itself the result of editing and selective choices.
I don't really see much difference between New-Age-types on the left, Young-Earth-types on the right, or business- and pop-psychology-types off in their respective corners. They're all believing based on a very selective choice of evidence, from which their beliefs are justified. I really like Gladwell -- I've corresponded with him -- but he's doing something similar (although he's doing it as exposition rather than religiously.)
Ironically, perhaps, one of the things he talks about in Blink is the problem you have when your initial, intuitive response collides with your intellectual reasoned response, because (there's evidence that) in order to process something we have to believe it at least somewhat, first. So, in the same way, when we read Blink, we have to believe he's right, and then think afterwards about what is sustainable.
I learned a lot from both it and "the tipping point" -- the width of his coverage is amazing. The material is *very* attractive to business- and new-age-types who will leave with nothing more than the conclusions, but I think it's the background and support material that's more interesting: the primary sources. Check it out from a local library and give it a shot. I don't think you'll find the time wasted, even if you completely disagree. There's a rebuttal book out there called "Think" that might also be worth your time, although I haven't read it yet.
If you live in an arid environment, you already know all about static electricity. When I pull a polypropylene-fleece blanket off a bed that has a wool blanket, at night, the sparks will literally light up the room for the duration of the pull. I work in an electronics place, a design center so we don't have full bunnysuits, and everyone is familiar with the necessity of touching something metal as or soon after you stand up from sitting in a chair. I regularly work with hardware interfaces to my computer, and am pretty used to leaning forwards in a chair, and the separation from the chair back charging up enough that when I touch the circuit board, the computer reboots.
At the bottom of this page is a graph of air dielectric strength vs. air pressure. If you can get a 2 cm spark, that's about 60,000 volts. That's plenty to pass through the plastic case of a computer to something inside, or through the insulation on test leads, as I can tell you from personal experience.
Apparently I can't manage the html tag for an accented e, so I'm no better than they are.
should read:
The New Yorker, which used to be famous for its fact-checking, got it all wrong.
I say that as a long-time reader and subscriber. Two issues ago, they had a typo: extraneous letters in the middle of a word. As regards fact-checking, they're getting sloppier all the time. I rarely know much about the specialized articles they write, and even I see things I know are wrong (and I do go look them up.) I feel badly slagging them for this, because they're currently writing some of the best social commetary and relentless exposé material out there. Their gains in relevance have been matched by loss of accuracy, apparently.
Malcolm Gladwell's book "Blink" talks a lot about the differences between first impression and actual, thoughtful reaction to a situation, including some interesting studies on what happens when the two conflict and how measurement of the effects of those conflicts on reaction time can tell us a lot about how the brain is processing material. There's controversy around some of his conclusions but I strongly recommend the book and everything else Gladwell has written.
The brilliant Polish scifi writer Stanislaw Lem wrote, as I recall, that planets underwent several phases of intelligent development, one transition being when they started orbiting stuff, another when they had so much junk in orbit they couldn't launch anything else because it would collide with stuff already up there, and yet another when the automation and AI cruising around managed to get together and form orbital intelligent life that actively blockaded the planet below. I think he was writing this in the '60's, although I think I remember Heinlein writing about orbital debris in the '40's.
Every once in a while SomaFM's secret agent station plays some Burt Bacharach and I think "man, he's so underrated: this is *amazingly* good music." And, somewhere inside me, the last lingering echo of my 21-year-old self tries to commit suicide.
Maybe I should've said "more than the OP ever wanted to know". I read books about this. You probably do, too. But the vast majority of people want roughly one paragraph, leading off with a summary, and optionally followed by three or four sentences of details, for their five-to-twenty-second explanation.
When people ask me a question about something interesting, my usual response is "do you want the five second explanation, the thirty second one, the five minute one, or the thirty minute one?" Of course, when I say that, they invariably answer "the five second one, please!" I think it's to my credit that more often than not, we end up somewhere in the five minute explanation, but maybe I'm just oblivious to them trying to escape.
This would be difficult research (although I wouldn't mind being on the team) but it'd be interesting to do a survey of which industries use the most attractive sales reps. I can tell you from personal experience that in the semiconductor/board manufacturing industries: not so hot, but the medical optics/optometry field? zowie. The reps for the botox people would be even hotter if they could move their faces... So we get pictures of -- or, better, a chance to talk to -- twenty reps from each of some different industrial lobbyists, er I mean representatives, and a wide cross-section of people writes down their impressions, and then we see if there's any association between company size/rep attractiveness, or an association between product profit margin/attractiveness, or even (one assumes this would be true) attractiveness/post-sales-pitch profit for the company involved.
By the way, I doubt they even *need* reps, but I'm trying to imagine a 20-something woman doing a Viagra sales pitch. It's just innately weird. I'm sure it happens, though.
9-1-1 caller: "the guy down the street just crashed his bulldozer into my living room!"
Answer: Deal with the problem at your end.
9-1-1 caller: "I put locks on the doors, but guy down the street just crashed his bulldozer into my living room again!"
Answer: Deal with the problem at your end.
9-1-1 caller: "I built a huge fence in the yard and bought guard dogs, but guy down the street just crashed his bulldozer into my living room again!"
Answer: Deal with the problem at your end.
There are times you *can't* deal with the problem at your end. Little towns in Georgia trying to pass laws making Internet pornography illegal? Someone trying to deal with the problem at their end.
As someone else said, 2,2,4-trimethylpentane's autoignition resistance is defined as 100 octane. more than you ever wanted to know about octane.
The problem with using biological solutions to build triglycerides is that, to the best of my knowledge, that's mostly a multicellular process. Bacteria and yeast only do sufficient lipogenesis to form their cell membranes: you have to go to large multicellular systems that can afford to do long-term energy storage to get fat cells that happily (and with surprising efficiency) make fat until an individual cell's composition is better than 99% triglyceride. They're also unbranched, so cracking them is mostly going to get you butanes and hexanes.
There are microalgae that produce stuff that's easy to turn into diesel oil, but even then it's tricky to make it anything near economical.