CHIROPTER

A Memorial for my Refrigerator

2011-09-04T00:34:00.000-04:00

When she was born, I was a boy. I walked three blocks to my neighborhood school every day to attend the sixth grade. My teacher's name was Ms. Skaros. The Rubik's Cube had just been invented, and the hot new teen fashion style was "preppy." My voice hadn't broken yet. My "girlfriend" was Anne Schultz.
"The Wall" was still hugely popular, although "That Wall" had not yet been torn down. The military action of the day in Afghanistan involved the U.S.S.R., not the United States. Rambo had just tasted his First Blood. The Officer was just becoming a Gentleman.
James Rockford could have put his $0.79/lb steak in this refrigerator. The Muppet Show could have had one of these refrigerators in their green room. The Talking Heads hadn't started making Stop Making Sense yet.
A handful of computers existed on the "Internet," although the web was still a decade to come. The hot new computers were from IBM and the software was from Wordstar. Microsoft Word hadn't been invented. Pac Man was the video game craze. Apple's new Lisa computers were a flop.
The big Packer's "B" was Bart, not Brett. The Milwaukee Brewers took their only trip to the World Series.
Pioneer 11 had encountered Saturn three years before, paving the way for Voyager 2's first real close-up and color pictures of this ringed planet and its moons. The controversy over how fast our universe was flying apart was starting to rage.
This is the world my refrigerator was born to in the year 1982. Someone else purchased this refrigerator then to keep their vittles cold, and I inherited it. Now it is time to move on to a more efficient and useful one. May she rest in pieces at the landfill.

Parallel Theories

2010-08-29T15:12:00.007-04:00

I happened to see "Parallel Universes," one of those History Channel shows where they bring together a bunch of astronomers and glitzy graphics to expound on some exotic topic. In this case, the topic of parallel universes. As usual, they pull out stacks of stock animations for fill, and interview real life astronomers to enhance the credibility of the show. Most of the water is carried by Michio Kaku, Max Tegmark, and History Channel mainstay Alex Filippenko. There are parts of the show which are quite interesting, and I grant that the show's producers have done a workman-like job of explaining very difficult topics.

Along the way they give a lesson on string theory of all things. More amazing to me is that they basically claim that string theory is accepted and is a wonderful description of the universe. Back in reality-ville, I can't think of an prediction by string theory that has been verified by observation. Strike that, I'm not aware of a single clear observational prediction made by string theory PERIOD! For that matter, many of the theories of the parallel universes described by the program ("level 1", "level 2", and so on) are described with such absolute certainty that the viewer might be fooled into believing that we already know they exist. We don't. The entire show is really on the borderline with fantasy science fiction.

These kinds of shows are cute, and at some level they build awareness of science in the general public, which is a good thing. On the other hand, their focus on the exotic and extreme topics is disappointing. Our universe is wonderful and beautiful enough by itself that it doesn't need to photoshopped and video toasted to death.

By taking marginal theories and pretending they are mainstream, History Channel is not really doing the public a service. And the professional astronomers who offer sound bites come out looking a little kooky. I wonder if they knew how much their interviews were going to be edited they would have done the show in the first place. There are several places where comical visual effects are used to make them look somewhat like buffoons.

(Except perhaps for Max Tegmark who comes off looking very serious but a little sickly.)

Putting snarkiness aside, I have this request:
Dear History Channel, overall the quality of your "Universe" shows is very high. Keep it that way by sticking to facts, and at the very least, noting where the show dips into speculative territory. Thanks.
(image credits: History Channel, excerpted for the purposes of commentary)

Pioneering Misinformation

2009-11-14T00:11:00.003-05:00

Slashdot is running a story about a physics experiment to be performed with the Rosetta spacecraft,

...but the slingshot itself will allow ESA scientists to examine the trajectory for unusual changes seen in several other probes' velocities. An unaccountable variation was first noticed as excess speed in Pioneers 11 and 12, and has since been called the Pioneer Anomaly.

Uh, no, sorry, that would be Pioneer 10 and 11, not 11 and 12. I should know, I've done a little work on the subject.

The so-called flyby anomaly that would be measured with Rosetta is quite distinct from the "Pioneer Anomaly." Both are unexplained discrepancies between measured Doppler shift data and currently understood theory, but the Pioneer Anomaly pertains to unexplained gradual velocity shifts of spacecraft cruising through deep space, while flyby anomalies pertain to sudden impulses as a spacecraft swings by the earth. Both discrepancies have been observed. In all likelihood, these experiments are telling us that our models of the classical physical forces affecting these spacecraft are not complete. Perhaps, on the odd chance that there is "new physics" involved, both anomalies are related somehow. But they definitely not the same observed effect.

Thankfully the original ESA press release gets these points correct. The more subtle points seem to have gotten lost in translation on the way to publication in Slashdot.

Thunderbird 3 Beta Review

2009-09-29T12:08:00.003-04:00

Summary:

Thunderbird version 3 is a significant upgrade and improvement to the Thunderbird line
The application is faster and more responsive
The new search capabilities are impressive
The user interface has gotten more cluttered and difficult to use, especially in regards to the message pane and "gloda" search results
Indexing and re-indexing seem a little clunky still
The Dock icon on the Mac has become next to useless for me now

I've been using the Thunderbird email client for the past 2-3 years, and it has been pretty good. It hasn't received a real refresh in that time, but that is about to change. Thunderbird version 3 will be coming out soon. I've been using the "beta" versions (beta's 2, 3, and 4) to see how it works.

The first very noticeable thing is that the client is much faster. Thunderbird 3 is now using underlying libraries which are faster (and the basis of Firefox version 3). The speed is most noticeable at start-up. Also, accessing messages, which often used to require a long pause, are now available much more quickly.

Another big change is the new "gloda" search engine. The engine basically indexes all of your messages, regardless of mailbox, into a giant database that you can search. Where before, you had to choose which mailbox to search ("inbox" or "outbox"?), now you just search everything. The resulting display is actually quite cool: you see a little time history of all your messages with your search terms, and you can click on a particular month, year, or person to zoom in on something more specific. It seems quite handy.

A final big change relates to the user interface. In previous versions, the "toolbar," which appears at the top of the main window, provided a lot of actions which you could apply to the message or messages you were viewing. Now, these tool icons appear attached to the message itself, not on the main toolbar. If your muscles are used to clicking in a certain position for "reply" or "delete," they will now be quite surprised because most of the tool icons are gone.

I think this is one area where Thunderbird as started to derail. The user interface appears to be getting cluttered and unpolished. Some icons are still sitting in the main toolbar (such as "tagging"), but others are relegated to the message pane. How these choices were made is unclear, but it makes for a tacky and confusing appearance. Thankfully, you can customize your toolbar, and bring back many of your favorite icons if you want.

I'm also unhappy with the layout of the message pane in another respect. In early betas, the message header was nice and compact, occupying a few lines of screen real estate showing the most important properties of the message such as the sender and send date. In beta version 3, this option was removed, and the message header occupies an enormous part of the screen, usually with irrelevant stuff that most people simply will not want to see. This is a big step back in the usability of the client because it forces you to scroll more, or to open the message in full screen mode just to see its contents. Thankfully, there is an extension called CompactHeader which brings back a more compact look, and also allows you to choose which "action" icons are visible for each screen. The mainline developers should look at putting this feature back in.

There's another area where polish is not quite up to snuff yet. The new gloda search can be quite handy, but the search results appear cluttered and a bit unreadable. The results are mostly message text with very tiny separators between each message. Search terms should be highlighted but are not, which makes it harder to determine the relevancy of the message to your search. For that matter, it's unclear how search results are ordered, and it's difficult to wade through all of them when you get a large number of hits. Some effort needs to be expended to make the presentation a little better in order to fully exploit this feature.

A bit more on performance. The first time you start up Thunderbird 3, it will spend a long time indexing your mail folders. This is more or less a one-time operation, but it will consume a significant amount of time and CPU while its happening. The upside is that once it's complete, you get all of those great search features. The downside is that the program seems to want to re-index quite often. Re-indexing doesn't try to do everything at once, but it's unclear what it's actually doing since there appears to be a bit of fumbling around by the program before it declares itself done.

I have a few peeves. This new version of Thunderbird no longer shows the number of "new" messages - messages I have just received - in the Dock icon. Instead it shows the number of "unread" messages. For someone like me who has thousands of unread (but useless) messages, the unread message count is next to useless. I want the icon badge to show me when new mail has arrived!

The new index files consume a significant portion of disk space (a few gigabytes). In this day and age, that's not a big deal, and we should use disk for these kinds of conveniences. However, every time any one of your messages changes, or if you get a new message, the index file changes. If you have a regular backup schedule (you should!), then you will find that it is now backing up a huge monolithic index file every time. This is a recipe for exhausting your backup space that much more quickly than before. There is not much the developers can do about this, but I would recommend that the new index files be placed in a separate directory. Most backup programs like Apple's Time Machine, allow you to exclude directories from the backup operation. If my hard drive crashes, it's no big deal that I wouldn't have a backup: I'll just reindex my mail.

Overall, this is a significant improvement, and it's nice to seem some activity in the Thunderbird line. There's some creative work going on there, especially regarding the message search functions. On the other hand, the usability of the application has taken a hit, which is unfortunate.

Double Whammy

2009-08-15T00:48:00.006-04:00

Imagine that you are a young person that had a file sharing application on your computer, and that you shared 24 songs with other people.

Now we can debate if song sharing is bad or not, but basically it's against the law, and there are penalties for breaking the law. And there's a civil lawsuit brought against you by the music industry, and you lose. Twice actually.

You might imagine that the penalty is somehow related to the cost of the songs, maybe the number of files shared. How much is that, 99 cents per song on iTunes? Oh wait, maybe because of iTunes shenanigans, most of those tracks cost $1.29 now. So what is that, $31? OK, so even with treble damages, the total penalty should be less than $100, right?

Could you imagine that the penalty is actually $80,000 PER SONG? So that your actual total penalty for all 24 songs is close to $2 million!!!

You, the poor defendant, argue that the penalty is so unconsionably high that it could not be constitutional. After all, you are but a poor individual, not a money making song pirating outfit. $2 million is nowhere near the value of the songs shared, nor the amount of damages, nor what you could even pay.

But guess which administration has just filed a legal brief that $2 million is absolutely constitutional. In fact it is "carefully crafted." Yes, you guessed it, the Obama administration Department of Justice. This is a government agency intervening in a civil trial on behalf of the music corporations, against an individual, claiming that a $2 million damage award is just fine.

Sigh.

In reality, these penalties were established by Congress, at the urging of the music industry, to prevent industrial-scale music "piracy." The large fines were intended to deter business enterprises from entering the illegal music copying business. And yet, here this law is being used to destroy a young person.

The young person in question, Jammie Thomas, admitted she did share the songs, and her trial is part of a larger strategy by the music industry to file lawsuits against their own customers because file-sharing. Thomas definitely was not a saint. But there's no way that $2 million is in any way comparable to the amount of actual damage done. Or that she deserves her own government to go to bat for the other team.

It's a double whammy really. The law with an $80,000 penalty was "crafted" at the urging of music industry lobbyists, and Congress and the (then) president were happy to sign off on it. So already the deck is stacked once against the little guy. But then -- and here is the second whammy -- the government's lawyers intervene on behalf of the music industry during the trial to say that this law is great. Indeed it was finely crafted! How can Ms. Thomas have any chance at all? I don't doubt that this intervention is actually more payback for political contributions. Department of Justice lawyers know who butters their bosses' bread.

If music file sharing were a rare and extremely damaging thing, there might be a point to having extraordinary penalties. But in fact, there are tens of millions of file sharers, and in surveys, most people considering some file sharing to be morally acceptable. The actual damage is small. As noted above, sharing a few songs with others would cost the music companies at most a few hundred dollars in lost sales. The actual punishment, $80,000 per song, is so usurious it is absurd. The fact that tens of millions of people may be liable for such huge penalties just shows how arbitrary the whole process is. Whether you get caught in the music industry's dragnet or not is the difference between sharing a few songs and sure bankruptcy. The fact that the administration's "Justice" department is intervening in favor of wreaking such personal destruction is very dismaying.

My Dark Little Secret

2009-08-06T21:49:00.002-04:00

All these years I've been trying to keep my true citizenship a secret.

Darn you, kenyanbirthcertificategenerator.com for finding my birth certificate!

Noctilucent Emissions

2009-07-29T10:36:00.004-04:00

There's a new study suggesting that "noctilucent clouds" are caused by the plumes of space shuttle launches, which is somewhat ironic for me. For those that don't know, noctilucent clouds are the highest clouds found in the Earth's atmosphere. They are ice crystals floating high in the mesosphere, where large amounts of moisture are not typically found, and are usually only seen in twilight when the setting sun illuminates them against the dark sky. There is also evidence that these clouds are a modern phenomenon, within the past century, and so they may be related to human activity, or perhaps climate change.

Noctilucent clouds over Lake Saimaa. Photograph taken by Mika Yrjölä. Permission by Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License (from Wikipedia).

Early studies have suggested that noctilucent clouds were caused by space shuttle launches. The space shuttle exhaust plume is composed mostly of water vapor. As the shuttle launches into orbit, it can dump significant amounts of water vapor into the upper atmosphere as it passes through it. More recent studies by Dr. Michael Kelley have added credence to that idea: shuttle launches in 2003 and 2007 produced corresponding noctilucent clouds.

NASA launched a satellite called AIM in 2007 to study noctilucent clouds. AIM stands for Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere. AIM continues to study the phenomenon using several instruments, including two imagers and a meteoric dust measuring device.

The part I find ironic is that NASA launched a satellite to study a phenomenon caused... by the launch of NASA satellites!

OK, there are far more noctilucent clouds than can be entirely explained by shuttle launches, so this is not a complete exercise in navel-gazing. The shuttle-noctilucent connection was known before AIM was selected by NASA.

Update 2009-07-30: Added noctilucent cloud image from Wikipedia.

Solar Dud or Doozy?

2009-07-08T01:42:00.004-04:00

There is some news in the past few days that the a few new sunspots are appearing, it may be that the next period of solar activity has begun. Will it be a dud or a doozy?

The sun has a quite regular cycle that repeats about every 11.5 years. Each cycle represents a reversal of the the sun's magnetic field -- magnetic north becomes south, south becomes north -- so it actually takes 23 years for the sun's magnetic field structure to return to its starting configuration.

During one of these 11.5 year cycles, the sun's magnetic field gets tangled and wound up in its circulating convective zone, located in the outer third of the sun. Once in a while, the magnetic field pokes out from the beneath the surface, and a sunspot appears. So sunspots are indicators of the how chaotic the magnetic field is within the sun.

Solar activity is a problem for us on the earth since the energetic particles ejected during solar storms can affect communications, power grids and the orbits of satellites. Being able to predict the the solar cycle, both timing and strength, is a valuable tool that can save lives and equipment. Unfortunately, predictions have been more of an art than a science.

I was really intrigued by a presentation at the 2005 AAS conference several years ago by Peter Gilman and Mausumi Dikpati, which claimed an improved method for solar cycle prediction. Their solar model showed that the solar convective zone had large scale circulations, almost like oceanic currents on earth. They also showed that it takes approximately three solar cycles for the solar flows -- which are almost like conveyor belts -- to make one circuit. Thus, they could train a reasonably accurate predictive model, based on the known solar activity from three cycles before (with the added benefit, that it produces predictions for about three cycles into the future as well). Their prediction was that the current solar maximum would be delayed by 6-12 months, but 30-50% more intense than the previous cycle. The "conventional" predictions were calling for the beginning of the cycle to begin in early 2007, while Dikpati and Gilman's group were calling for activity starting in the late 2007 to 2008 time frame.

Well at this stage, it's clear that both the conventional and new Dikpati/Gilman predictions were wrong, since we're past halfway into 2009 before any serious solar activity has appeared. But it's interesting that the onset of the cycle has indeed been delayed from its expected appearance, which indicates that perhaps there is something behind the Dikpati/Gilman model. The "conventional" prediction was recently revised, and now claims that the next cycle will be a dud -- weaker than usual. I've had a little harder time determining if the Dikpati/Gilman group has revised their forecast for the strength of the cycle.

Either way, I think it will be an interesting cycle to watch. I actually hope this solar cycle is an extreme -- either a dud or a doozy -- rather than an average one. Extremes are much better test cases for theories than boring average cases. While I have something to lose if this cycle is a strong one, at least it would be lost in advancement of science.

Ipod 3.0 software update

2009-06-21T16:37:00.004-04:00

The iPod3.0 touch software update doesn't look that compelling for the iPod touch first generation. Here's what they advertise as new:

cut and paste - want
landscape keyboard - kind of want
spotlight search - meh
buy media on your ipod touch from itunes - do not want
stereo bluetooth - could not use (2nd generation only)
head to head games - could not use (2nd generation only)
shake to shuffle - do not want
parental controls - do not want
new languages - do not want
automatic wifi hotspot login - do not want
push notifications - probably won't use
itunes store account creations - do not want

My question is whether I will have to pay the $9.95 just to keep
up-to-date with security updates and bug fixes for the older
version of the iPod touch operating system.

Damn the Torpedoes

2009-06-01T00:08:00.004-04:00

Warning: spoilers!

Recipe of the Star Trek movie: (1) One part damn the moral dilemma, full action ahead! (2) Two parts damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead! (literally) (3) Three parts damn the bridge procedure, I'm going on the away team! (4) Most. powerful. mining ship. evar. (5) Seasoned to taste with a pinch of red matter. (may substitute deus ex machina juice if required) Smooth over plot holes with a frosting of computer graphics. Served as a non-stop space action movie with a Star Trek logo pasted on top.

The tasting: I liked it for the action part, I quite liked the acting and character interactions, but as a Trekkie film, it wasn't really there for me.

Pick a Side, Any Side

2009-03-21T14:55:00.011-04:00

Does it matter what we believe, as long as we believe something? That's what a television news commentator would urge us to do:

Believe in something! Even if it's wrong! Believe in it!
-- Glenn Beck, Mar 2009

The video is in this Comedy Central clip, around time 3:10:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
IndigNation! Populist Uprising '09 - The Enragening
comedycentral.com

OK, you might argue, this is just a typical opinion
entertainer on one of the several "news" networks, trying to
fill up on of the 24 hours the network is on the air, every day.
Let's even excuse the fact that Beck seems to believe all of what
he is saying, down to the teary-eyed professions of love for his
country and the little guy (see video above). Is there something
to what he says?

As it turns out, perhaps. A recent survey by Anthony Leiserowitz asked television viewers which of several "news" shows they watched before the general election in 2008, and about their general beliefs. Of those who watched the specific shows of interest, they broke down approximately evenly between left-leaning (such as Olberman, Colbert and Stewart), and right-leaning shows (such as O'Reilly, Hannity and Limbaugh).

What fascinated me was this question,

We should always be willing to fight
for our country, whether our country is right or wrong.

A whopping 70% of those who watch right-leaning shows agree
with this statement. Which means if our country is wrong, no
matter how egregiously wrong, 70% of these viewers would still
support military action? The left-leaning shows are really not
much better, with 30-40% of viewers responding that they agree
with the statement. Of the respondants that didn't watch any of
the specific shows, about half agreed that we should be willing
to fight no matter what.

Note that the question was not about whether we
should "support the troups," although that phrase has it's own
moral ambiguities. No, the question was whether we should
support our country, in military action, even when that action is
something we know to be wrong. I wonder if the right-leaning
watchers still agree with this statement, now that a Democrat
holds the presidency.

I'm a little taken aback by this philosophy. It basically
says that a large number of citizens place country above
morality. Or rather, that our nation creates its own
morality by virtue of its existence. These respondants are
willing to hold and support beliefs that they know to be wrong,
simply because the name of their country is attached to it. I
guess I would prefer it to go the other way: that our country
earns the respect of the righteous by actually doing the right
thing in the first place.

Der Party Starter

2009-02-02T22:48:00.001-05:00

One of the Superbowl commercials that I really laughed at...

Just how much is a teenager worth these days?

2009-01-13T22:55:00.002-05:00

Sadly, we now know the answer:

"Martinez had arranged through a third party to have his [14 year old] daughter marry the older teenager, identified by authorities as Margarito de Jesus Galindo, of Gonzales, California. In exchange, Galindo was to pay Martinez $16,000 and provide him with 160 cases of beer, 100 cases of soda, 50 cases of Gatorade, two cases of wine, and six cases of meat, Greenfield Police Chief Joe Grebmeier told CNN.

Apparently it's a common practice in the Oaxaca province where the people involved were from, but it's also a little chilling to know the negotiations revolved around a few cases of gatorade.

Merry Mitchella Repens!

2008-12-24T15:36:00.004-05:00

Merry Christmas!

I found this on the forest floor today. My best identification is Partridge berry (Mitchella Repens). It's supposed to be edible, but not tasty, so I didn't try it, but it did remind me of the season.

When Good Democracy Goes Silly

2008-12-18T10:53:00.005-05:00

Voting is such a joke. Well, it must have seemed that way, for some people as they made their way to the Minnesota polls. I've watched a little of the Minnesota Canvas Review Board webcast at theuptake.org, and in the space of a few minutes some crazy ballots came up, reflecting our dear Minnesotans' sense of humor.

The first one thought it would be fun to change the name of candidate Franken, to Frankenstein, but I bet they didn't expect their mischief to appear on state-wide TV! [ Especially since they spelled it wrong. ] The Coleman campaign advocate was brazen enough to suppose that the voter was voting for someone else named Frankenstin, and definitely not candidate Franken!

The second ballot voted legitimately for Senate, but on lower level offices, our voter clearly subscribes to Flying Spaghetti Monsterism. All hail to His Noodly Appendage!

I'm glad for my Minnesota brethrens' senses of humor, but perhaps the voting booth is not the place to express it.

Update: Here's one more. I for one welcome our new Lizard People overlords.

Tomato Legacy

2008-12-16T15:59:00.002-05:00

Well, today I finally finished the last of my summer garden tomatoes. The last bunch was picked green before the frost right before Thanksgiving, and they slowly ripened over the past few weeks. Most of those last ones were small cherry-like tomatoes, and not so tasty, but a few were great! I had a grand total of 70 tomatoes from three plants. I will definitely try this again next year.

Multiplier Effect - some results

2008-12-15T15:42:00.001-05:00

My previous post, "Multiplier Effect," outlined the economic impact of various possible stimulus packages. On the top of the list -- those stimuli that provide the greatest productivity improvement per dollar spent -- were capital infrastructure improvements.

President-elect Obama's new plans include:

Save one million jobs through immediate investments to rebuild America's roads and bridges and repair our schools: The Obama-Biden emergency plan would make $25 billion immediately available in a Jobs and Growth Fund to help ensure that in-progress and fast-tracked infrastructure projects are not sidelined, and to ensure that schools can meet their energy costs and undertake key repairs starting this fall.

and...

Create a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank: Barack Obama and Joe Biden will address the infrastructure challenge by creating a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank to expand and enhance, not supplant, existing federal transportation investments.

It sounds promising, but of course the devil is in the details. As this Washington Post article points out, many of the actual projects will be more maintenance-type activities, rather than huge monorail systems. But if the goal is to improve the job situation at the same time as improving national infrastructure, these types of projects will certainly help. The big risk, when spending large amounts of money quickly, is of fraud, theft and corruption. In that case, the money will still have a stimulative effect -- even the thief spends his swag -- but the national will not get the full benefit.

"A goodbye kiss from the Iraqi People"

2008-12-14T15:20:00.005-05:00

From the BBC, Shoes thrown at Bush on Iraq trip (click link for video):

A surprise visit by US President George Bush to Iraq has been overshadowed by an incident in which two shoes were thrown at him during a news conference.
...
In the middle of the news conference with Mr Maliki, a reporter stood up and shouted "this is a goodbye kiss from the Iraqi people, dog," before hurtling his shoes at Mr Bush, narrowly missing him.

Around the world, American leaders are now welcomed with open arms and bare feet! Who knew that in Iraq, it was a sign of endearment to play doggy-fetch with your slippers?

Multiplier Effect

2008-11-23T05:00:00.001-05:00

Because of the developing economic crisis, I've been reading more economics blogs. My favorites are Econbrowser, hosted by Profs. Hamilton and Chinn; Macro-Man an anonymous but extremely incisive and hilarious day-trader^*; and Follow the Money by Brad Setser. Any other reader favorites?

One excellent post by Prof. Chinn has direct relevance to governmental policy initiatives to deal with the economic problems. Her post is based on work by Mark Zandi of Economy.com. The question is: given that the economy needs to be stimulated, what method of stimulation yields the largest economic benefit. The benefit here is expressed as the stimulus multiplier, which is the amount of increase in GDP per unit of stimulus. For example, if we simply gave every person in the country $1, each could go out and buy a McDonald's value menu item. But the benefit doesn't stop there because with the increased consumption, McDonald's has to hire more workers, who in turn consume more; purchase more supplies from its suppliers, who in turn hire more workers, etc. So in principle, a $1 stimulus package can have more than $1 benefit to overall production.

So which economic stimuli had the greatest benefit? The top three were:

Temporarily Increase Food-stamps (multiplier 1.73)
Extend Unemployment Insurance Benefits (multiplier 1.64)
Increase Infrastructure Spending (multiplier 1.59)

The first two items have the obvious benefits of keeping people on their feet, but also provide an extra 64-73% advantage beyond the direct stimulus. Of course these benefits can only be temporary. On the other hand, the third item has the advantage of improving neglected infrastructure -- a long term "capital gain" -- while at the same time providing an extra 60% bang for our buck.

Now for the worst stimulus concepts:

Make Bush Tax Cuts Permanent (multiplier 0.29)
Cut Corporate Tax Rate (multiplier 0.30)
Make Dividend Tax Cuts Permanent (multiplier 0.37)

Since these multipliers are less than unity, it means that for every dollar of tax break, the country's production actually goes down. Of course some small segment of the population may benefit from such tax cuts, but in hard economic times, it's not clear why they would deserve a benefit when the broad population and the overall economy do not. To be fair, a few of the tax cut concepts do a little bit better, most most are break-even at best.

Note that these tax cuts that are discussed most readily as the solution to the economic problems have some of the worst possible effects on the economy. In fact, a tax cut actually hinders production, compared to other stimuli. Dr. Chinn discusses some reasons this may be true.

What fascinates me is the question of whether the multipliers work in reverse. If reducing corporate taxes by $1.00 hobbles the economy by $0.70, then would raising taxes by $1.00 improve the economy by $0.30? As heretical as that sounds, it seems that while raising taxes will withdraw $1.00 from corporate coffers and hence from the economy, it enables the government to spend $1.00 on more needful and worthy areas (say, on stimuli that have a large multiplier!).

The situation is somewhat more complicated because each of the stimulus concepts have different time scales, so it would require a more delicate touch than brute force. But it would be nice if, in the political dialog about what to do next, actual economic data would be used rather than mindless rhetoric with zero substantiation.

Under the Gunn

2008-11-20T00:15:00.008-05:00

Last week I went to a presentation by Tim Gunn, well known as one of the hosts of Project Runway. I went with my friend Maggie and her friend April. It was held at the University of Maryland at the student union. Ostensibly, the purpose of the presentation was to help students transition their style from school to the workplace.

(my best photo, because they requested no-flash)

In reality, he spoke for a few minutes on that topic (his primary wisdom was, "be responsible for your look.") I was hoping for a bit of a slide show -- at least some kind of "do's" and "don't's" -- but he disabused us of that possibility early on, because he thought a slide show would be interpreted too literally by his viewers. To me that sounds like a bit of a cop-out.

One interesting thing I did learn is that Mr. Gunn has no formal training in fashion design, which is impressive because he has quite a good eye when advising his students.

Mr. Gunn is also extremely gracious, in person just as much as on his television shows. He's just an endearing guy. I have no doubt that, if there had been time, he would have loved to meet everybody in person and learn about their life story. Unfortunately the size of the crowd was huge, and the ballroom was packed to the gills! This turned out to be a problem at the end of the presentation, when Gunn wrapped up and moved for the door. The crowd literally mobbed him! Here's the scene:

(yes, that's him on the left, I only got the back half of his head...)

Eventually he waded through the crowd, and escaped through a service door. Whew! Hopefully he'll carry on his interesting career!

Pardon Me, I'd Like to Cash in My Constitution

2008-10-27T03:15:00.007-04:00

Recently the ACLU has been making a big deal about the US Government's declaration of a "constitution-free zone" around the perimeter of the country. The government has assumed that within 100 miles of the "external border" of the United States, border patrol personnel may detain and search any person or vehicle, including U.S. citizens, for the purposes of border enforcement activities. Get that? Even though you might never have crossed the border, you may be stopped and subject to being searched if you are within that zone, without a warrant. The ACLU site opines that this assumption places up to 2/3rds of the population within the so-called constitution free zone. My part of the country looks like this.

Yes, I live in the zone, and could be subject to searches. In fact, I am subject to such a zone every time enter or leave the security of my place of work. But these "border searches" are taking place far from any real border, on public roads, and are practiced on the general public.

I appreciate that the ACLU is resisting these types of actions, but I wanted to understand from where exactly this authority derives. After a little research, I found some answers. The authority comes in two parts, one from the law, and another from administrative regulation. The law is 8 USC 1357, whose crucial part reads,

1357 (a) Powers without warrant
Any [authorized] officer ... shall have power without warrant—...
(3) within a reasonable distance from any external boundary of the United States, to board and search for aliens any vessel within the territorial waters of the United States and any railway car, aircraft, conveyance, or vehicle

So there you have it, within a "reasonable distance," border agents may search any vehicle without a warrant. But what distance is reasonable? Well, that's where we need to turn to the administrative regulation, as encoded in the Code of Federal Regulations (8 CFR 287.1 specifically), which specifies,

287.1 Definitions.
(2) Reasonable distance. The term reasonable distance, as used in section 287(a) (3) of the Act, means within 100 air miles from any external boundary of the United States or any shorter distance ...

These regulations are written by the executive agencies, as a way of codifying and interpreting how the law will actually be implemented. In this case, 100 miles is seen as "reasonable" by definition, rather than by any other claimed rationale.

But is this anything new? No, in fact. The definition of a 100-mile wide border has existed for at least several decades, and does not begin with the current administration. I found that the 100-mile limit was specified in the CFR as early as 1953 (Fernandez v. United States; 321 F.2d 283). The appeals court in that case found that a search 70 miles from the Mexican border was reasonable -- given the specific geographical and immigration situation. As of the date of that case in 1963, the "border" checkpoint 70 miles from Mexico had been in operation for 31 years, so this practice has existed for at least 75 years!

However, it is clear that the practice of unwarranted border searches is expanding, and it's a troubling sign. The truly scary part is that the search for illegal immigrants is being used as a pretext for other searches, such as for contraband. For law enforcement, it's a no-brainer. Why send "regular" police to do inspections if they need complicated stuff like warrants, when it's easier to send "border protection agents," who don't really need anything to start tearing through your personal belongings. As various agencies, including the border patrol, immigration and customs have been consolidated into the Department of Homeland Security, it is even easier to designate an everyday enforcement activity to be a warrantless border patrol activity. As more "border crossing" inspection sites are instituted, the more more we become a police society.

As a postscript, there are some daring people challenging new inspection sites. Consider Mr. checkpointusa.org, who has been documenting the increase of the interior "border" checkpoints in the southwestern U.S. for the past few years. You can see some of his encounters here and href. He routinely approaches the checkpoints and takes control of the situation. Dude has balls of granite.

The Tomatoes Made It This Season

2008-10-08T08:00:00.001-04:00

This year the tomatoes worked out! My mom and dad came in May and helped pick out and plant them. (OK, let's be honest, my dad did all the planting.) There are two indeterminates planted against the front of my house (both Early Girl), and one determinate of unknown type planted a bit further out.

So far I've gotten about 30 tomatoes, and there are still a few on the vine at various stages of maturity. Almost all of them have turned out well. The determinate plant produced the largest crop, although I have to admit that the Early Girls were tastier and more tender.

The Early Girls are now close to 11 feet tall, definitely taller than I can reach! The cages are pieces of concrete reinforcement mesh from the local home center.

This year is much better than two years ago, when some kind of blight destroyed my entire tomato patch. I think I got a hand-ful of cherry tomatoes out of that effort. This year I even gave a few away!

I'm Not a Physicist, but I Play One on TV

2008-10-05T00:54:00.002-04:00

If you watch television, you might have seen two separate advertisements -- one for high-end LCD televisions and the other for solar panels -- but both are from the same company, Sharp Electronics Corp USA. This summer they began a major advertising campaign for both products, as unrelated as they might seem, as life changing products. Both feature a curious white-haired academician expounding the virtues of Sharp's wares.

The LCD television commercial starts like this, (video)

Seems like you need to be a physics professor to choose the right TV. Luckily, I am one. ...

while the solar panel pitch begins, (video)

I'm an astrophysicist, a star gazer, but here's something cosmic I discovered on earth, ...

Both commercials are narrated by a flaxen-haired, well-dressed man, identified by the caption "Professor Gerard Fasel, Astrophysicist." Who is this man? Is he really an astrophysicist? Read on, you may soon know him better as "Albino Security Guard."

Dr. Fasel is indeed listed on the faculty at Pepperdine University as a "Visiting Professor." His college biography lists courses taught in physics, mathematics and astronomy. He also appears to have teaching ratings at ratemyprofessors.com for the years 2003-2008, so we can assume he has been teaching at least part-time for most of that period of time.

However, according to Dr. Fasel's list of publications in the subjects of physics and astrophysics, his last publication of any sort was in 1995, or 13 years ago. The article, "Dayside poleward moving auroral forms: A statistical study," was published in the respected Journal of Geophysical Research. During his academic hayday of 1992-1995, he published a total of four refereed publications, either as primary author or co-author. All of these publications regard the study of terrestrial aurora, which is in essence a study of the interaction between the solar wind, earth's magnetosphere, and upper atmosphere. By the way, the phenomenon of terrestrial aurora, while very interesting, has virtually nothing to do with what I would call astrophysics, nor with solar-electric power.

But Fasel is much more than an academic! Dr. Fasel's acting career, as listed by IMDB has shown much more activity. In the past six years he has had four significant acting parts, both in television and movies. His next role will be in the movie The Truth About Angels, due out in 2009, where he plays the coveted albino security guard role. I'm sure Rutger Hauer is howling mad that some physicist beat him to the punch!

Sharp Electronics is proud of its spokesperson. In a press release on July 14th, 2008, announcing their campaign, they wrote,

... The commercial will feature Professor Gerard Fasel, a visiting professor of math and physics at Pepperdine University. With a PhD in Physics and a sophisticated and engaging persona, Professor Fasel lends a scholarly credibility to the new solar and LCD commercials.

The important words here are "lends a scholarly credibility." Based on his scientific publishing record, my opinion is that Dr. Fasel is no longer an active researcher in science, and indeed has spent more time acting in the past decade than publishing research papers. I think it's pretty clear that he is not an astrophysicist, since none of his articles discussed astrophysics. For that matter, he has not published work related to solar physics, televisions or solar panel technology either. I don't doubt that Sharp took the time to give Dr. Fasel a tour of the manufacturing plant and its technology development labs, and Fasel probably has a reasonable understanding and appreciation of the physics that goes into the technologies that he is advertising. But judging by his research and teaching history, I doubt that he has any better skill choosing a television or a solar panel than your average Joe Sixpack.

In my opinion, he is simply an actor -- a spokesmodel -- hired by an advertising firm and used to make the company's technology seem more credible. They hired him for his interesting looks, his personality, and yes, the three letters "Ph.D." at the end of his name. Couldn't they just have easily hired him to do a commercial for medicine? Hmm, I think I could write the script...

EXPERT: Seems like you need to have a Ph.D. to understand cold remedies these days. Luckily I have one. ...

Oh Dr. Fasel, will you star in my commercial?

(Photo credits: lifechangingbox.com; Sharp Corporation, 2008)

Close Call

2008-09-27T13:20:00.006-04:00

Frank, a friend, recently posted a nice article about his white water rafting trip on the Lower New River in West Virginia, including photos.

His post reminds me of a time about 8 years ago when I floated down the Youghiogheny River (the "Yough") in southwestern Pennsylvania with friends. One of the friends was kind enough to arrange the trip, including lodging us in his vacation house (which he built!), and hiring a rafting outfitter. Unlike Frank's experience, our outfitter simply provided us with rafting equipment, a short safety talk, and then we had to prepare for our two minute time window at the put-in site. No guide. And all equipment was optional, including helmets. Guess which option I chose.

We had a lot of fun on the upper part of the run. A few of us fell out on some of the more challenging rapids, but we stayed safe. Then we came to Dimple Rock. The outfitters had warned us about Dimple Rock during the safety talk. Basically it's a small rapid with a large rock at the bottom. If you don't approach at the right angle, it's easy to hit the rock and flip your raft.

Well, we definitely did not approach at the right angle, and we definitely flipped our raft. It was a little bit eerie to hear people from the shore trying to coach us, "stroke, stroke! STROKE!" but as we approached the rock, the coaching subsided to, "UH OH!" We bonked into the rock, tossed over, and the whole crew fell into the drink. (The safety instructions we were given about the "high side" technique were forgotten.) I actually fell into the water on top of our host. I popped up after a few seconds, and the host did a few seconds later, and we both scrambled out. Some of our raft crew actually floated down river over some more rapids without a raft!

I realize now that there was a significant chance of me or someone in my crew dying. I could have hit my head and been knocked unconscious, or I could have been pinned under a rock, and drowned. Those few seconds underwater, at the mercy of the currents, seemed like forever. I will never take something like that so lightly again.

Here are two videos on YouTube showing the rafting wrecks at the same Dimple Rock. However, one difference is that the year we ran it, the water was much lower, and there was actually a small falls approaching the rock. I found out later several people have died there. There's a hollow below the rock which sucks people under.

Owl-tastic

2008-09-25T03:18:00.005-04:00

As I've said before, I'm lucky to work at a place which has some reasonably natural areas, with basically no urban development. I regularly walk through these areas, and once in a while I see some great wildlife scenes. On the even rarer times when I remember to take a camera along, I can capture the scene.

My best moment so far was finding two owls perched together over a small creek on September 3rd. I'd seen a single owl several times perched near the same location, and some bird-watchers had told me they had spotted an owl's nest nearby as well. I had imagined it to be a solo owl nest, so imagine my surprise when I saw two next to each other! I actually ran all the way back to my office to get my camera, and the pair was still there when I got back for this photo (in fact they had gotten a little closer!). This is a pair of barred owls, which is common in North America. I assume they are pair-bonded, but I never saw any owlets. The fact that they are out of the nest together suggests that, if the pair reared any owlets, they are now out of the nest. This was probably a relaxing evening out for them! (please see OwlCam and their wonderful DVD to find out more about their young-rearing cycle). Just after I took this photo, one owl flew away, and then about a minute later the other owl flew right over my head to another perch. They were very silent.

The next day I did remember to take my camera, and caught this fox crossing the road. I've seen the same fox at the same place several times, so this is his local hunting grounds. He spotted me while I was setting up for the photo, thankfully posed, and then walked off into the brush on the side of the road. There is a nearby pond, so I suspect he has lots of frogs, birds and ducks to go after.

Of course, there are the ever present deer. This photo was taken last year when there were a lot of deer seen roving the workplace, even in the more urbanized parts. This year, however, the deer have been a lot more scarce. Perhaps they have been removed or lured away by maintenance staff. However, today I came across a herd of eight deer, about three does and six fauns, which is the most I've ever seen at one time! They were very close to the trail and I walked right past. The largest doe stared me down, stomped her hoof and snorted, but I held my ground too. The others retreated into the forest.

Here's another shot from last year, with a smaller herd near the edge of the forest. There is a feeder on-site for deer, which is supposed to reduce the number of ticks and tick-borne disease, and this photo was taken near that feeder.

(Previously, previously.)

(Sorry about the image quality, but all of these photos are taken near dusk with a cheap consumer camera with few manual settings. The red-eye is due to flash. Non-flash photos are hopelessly blurry due to long exposure times.)

Unstable Physical World

2008-09-03T08:55:00.000-04:00

A very interesting paper just appeared on the arxiv.org preprint server. It presents the work of two different groups measuring the radiactive decay rates of two specific isotopes, Silicon-32 and Radium-226, who found some strange and intriguing results indeed.

Scientists believe we live in a universe where physical "laws" apply the same everywhere. It shouldn't matter whether we are on the earth, the moon, or the depths of outer space, the equations and theories should be the same. Radioactive decay is governed by the so-called "weak force," which is in principle a nuclear-scale force that shouldn't really care about the anything beyond the nucleus itself. So it is natural to expect that Silicon and Radium should decay radioactively at the same rate wherever we find it.

But that's not what was found by Jenkins et al. in their analysis. Taking data from two different laboratories, at Brookhaven National Laboratories in New York State and another in Germany, the authors found the decay rate goes up and down with an annual cycle. See this blog entry for a graph. The variations are less than a tenth of a percent over the course of a year for both radioisotopes.

The authors speculate that the effect is dependent on the distance between the sun and earth, which also has an annual periodic modulation as the earth moves in its orbit between perihelion and aphelion. Of course, this would violate our precepts about the physical laws governing radioactive decay. They further speculate that this may be due to a changes in the amount of solar neutrinos that reach the earth, which might somehow modulate the nuclear decay rates. Or, perhaps it is a variation in the "fine structure constant" with distance from the sun (the fine structure constant dictates the strength of the weak force).

However, if you look closely at the graph, you will see that the radioactive decay rates and the distance variations do not match up quite that well. In fact, the measurements lag the distance template by a few months. I can't imagine what force law could describe such an oddity, but it is definitely not a simple distance relationship.

An experimenter needs to be worried about subtle biases. Both of the experiments were done in the northern hemisphere. Perhaps there is some kind of earth-bound seasonal effect? For example, there could be seasonal temperature variations that affect the sensors. Or, it could be something even more subtle, like annual changes in the cosmic ray flux which affect detector dead-time. An interesting test would be to use a southern hemisphere lab where any seasonal biases would be reversed. There have been some other spectacular results which have been later retracted due to failure to account for equipment (mal)function. A famous example of this was the discovery of a 2000 Hz optical pulsar in Supernova 1987a, which later turned out to be electrical interference from another piece of equipment. These people are not dumb, it's just that the physical world can be more complicated than the ways we can control.

It's worth noting that this paper has apparently not yet been refereed. It's quite possible that during the refereeing process, a lot of these points will be addressed, or the conclusions of the paper might change. Until then, it's still a quite fascinating result!

We'll Tell You How Much Democracy You Can Have

2008-09-02T05:10:00.003-04:00

Slashdot Headline: In MN, Massive Police Raids On Suspected Protestors

I have no doubt these people were planning some kind of disruption, but is disruption necessarily illegal? No, but it would be embarassing during the convention. Unfortunately there is no such thing as embarassment in the first degree, so the police and FBI went for bogus fire code violations instead. I would think that the house I live in is a "free speech zone." Yay for democracy.

My friend Tod says it more forcefully. And Glenn Greenwald is all over the issue. It's very disturbing.

Location Does Not Compute

2008-09-02T04:35:00.003-04:00

I just got an iPod Touch about a month ago. iPhones and iPod Touches have a cool "locate-me" feature which allows you to press a button and find where you located on the map, anywhere in the country. The Ipod does this over Wi-Fi only by finding known wireless access points, based on a drive-by scan done by SkyHook Wireless.

A few days ago this feature started going haywire and putting me in Boulder, Colorado. No matter what I did, I ended up there.

Now I know why. My next door neighbor moved to Boulder a few months ago and must have brought his wireless access point along! Crap! This is a case where a very cool technology, the ability locate yourself anywhere in the country by interrogating the wireless environment, has gone wrong. The problem is that SkyHook has made a simplifying assumption that the environment does not change between the times that they do their surveys. In reality, people move and bring the wireless gear with them. I don't doubt that the iPod software sends all wireless access points it finds, so SkyHook can dynamically expand its database when new access points pop up, but that doesn't handle the case when an access point is physically moved. The result is a frustration for me.

Prepare for Take-Off!

2008-06-28T13:46:00.000-04:00

Another in my series of insect taming adventures. Previously.

Rainbow - Once Again

2008-06-25T15:41:00.004-04:00

Since so many people couldn't see the cross-eyed version of the 3-D image, here is a version you can try with 3-D red-cyan glasses instead (red filter over left eye). Of course, you need the glasses for the effect to work, as opposed to the cross-eyed version which doesn't require any equipment at all, if you can get your eyes to work right. It's not the best kind of picture for red-cyan glasses, but the effect still works quite well. Be sure to click on the image for a larger version. Unfortunately the Blogger upload process has made the image a bit more "ghosty" than it started out with.

Rainbow in 3D

2008-06-24T00:27:00.009-04:00

A friend recently published photos of her trip to Florida, where she saw a double-rainbow at sunset. It's a nice catch, and even nicer because she caught it at sunset close to the summer solstice, where the sun sets farthest north (you can read more in the comments).

As it happens, we had a chain of thunderstorms pass through here in Maryland just before sunset. A colleague told me to come out right now! because of a nice rainbow. My colleague was right. The rainbow was brilliant, and the second rainbow was also easily detectable. In fact, the supernumerary rainbow was also evident. Even though it was still drizzly, I snapped a few photographs. So as a complement to my friend's seaside rainbow, I give you an.... errrr... another rainbow.

To spice it up a little bit, I tried a simple technique to make a 3D image for the first time, a so-called cross-eye image. To view it, you will have to cross your eyes until you see three images, and then try to focus. Click the image to see a bigger version. I usually try to "lock" onto a landmark like the lamp post or the car. For more viewing help you can read this nice tutorial by Ray Tomes. He also describes the simple cha cha you need to do to make your own 3D photos. The only trick is that the photo you take while standing on the left should appear in the right panel of the cross-eye image.

I admit, the composition isn't the best, and a rainbow also isn't the best demonstration of the 3D effect, but the 3D effect is quite stunning for all of the foreground objects. It's so easy to do, and wonderful to look at. There are lots more cross-eye photographs linked from the tutorial mentioned above.

UPDATE (25 Jun): I'm sad to report that about 3/4ths of the people that tried to view it, couldn't see the effect. It's too bad because the effect is quite striking.

Oh Bubbler Where Art Thou?

2008-06-22T04:53:00.004-04:00

I'm proud to say that I'm from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It has some wonderful distinctions such as Summerfest on the lake, and the Milwaukee Domes. We also have another strange distinction of being one of two small isolated regions in the country that drink their water from bubblers instead of something more mundane, like a water fountain. Actually, they're the same thing, but Milwaukeeans are proud of their bubblers. I still have a "bubbler" t-shirt to commemorate my home town. (I also love my Moo-waukee t-shirt, but that's a different story.) I still remember going to college in California and getting strange looks when I asked for the nearest bubbler. Strangely, if I'd gone to college in Boston, they would have probably known what I was talking about, since that is the other place in the country that maintains the bubbler shibboleth, as shown quite nicely by this regional dialect survey.

The survey also turned up another oddity. I've lived my entire life in a soda zone. While most of the country says pop or coke for sweetened carbonated beverages, the places I have lived (eastern Wisconsin, California, and Maryland) are all known for saying soda instead. To me pop sounds like what kids would say. And coke... it's just kind of silly. I don't say pitbull when I mean dog now do I?

It's also fitting that one of the dialect survey questions is actually about the pronunciation of the name Craig. To be honest I don't know how to answer that question.

Reference. The Dialect Survey conducted by Bert Vaux, who, ironically, has moved to the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee.

He Must Have Used the Wrong Balloons

2008-04-24T11:41:00.007-04:00

What do you do, if you want to raise awareness for a cause in Brazil? And none of this boring stuff like asking for donations. How about flying from one city to another carried only by children's party balloons? Father Adelir Antonio de Carli thought it was a good idea too, and he even took the precautions of wearing a thermal jump suit and crash helmet. It sounded like he was planning ahead, but what he didn't take into account was that the winds weren't blowing to his destination city, and instead took him out to sea! In a story that channels Scott Fischer's ordeal on Everest, the priest called his supporters from above the ocean via satellite phone and spoke with them as he was descending. Eventually contact was lost, and to date, only a handful of balloons have been found, and hope is fading. Oh dear. Next time, do a little more research on the wind patterns. Assuming there is a next time, that is.

The cherry on top of this bizarre story is that Father de Carli was raising awareness for a truck-stop chapel!

A Mighty Wind

2008-02-03T09:59:00.000-05:00

The second week of my visit in Alexandria really blew. Literally. We experienced a wind storm like I have never seen. Walking between the hotel and the Library of Alexandria, I was almost blown off my feet several times. The biggest difference between this storm and the storms I have experienced before, is that the wind was continuous and strong for so long.

By itself, the wind made our personal lives interesting, but there were broader implications. Because the wind was so strong, commercial ships outside Alexandria laid anchor further out in the Mediterranean than usual. In fact, they anchored right over the spot where two major communications cables pass, and severed the cables. The internet to Egypt was crippled! While this story made news in the rest of the world, we experienced it directly at the library. Web and email browsing crawled almost to a halt. Thank goodness that the students we were working with had already downloaded the data they needed.

The effects were not just felt in Egypt. The severed cables also connect other parts of the Middle East and India, which also experienced sever disruptions. Who knew a little wind-storm could have such a global effect?

Pyramid Power

2008-01-27T02:59:00.001-05:00

Mostly a travelog here. Yesterday, Saturday, was our one-day excursion to the Pyramids of Giza. It was wonderful, impressive and inspiring. After a long bus ride from Alexandria to Giza, we visited the site of the great pyramids and sphinx. We were permitted to enter the great pyramid of Kheops and climb to the large hall in the inside. Let me just say that even though I have seen many television documentaries about the pyramids, so I know what it is like visually, there is still something humbling to be standing in the same hallway built thousands of years ago. The Egyptian students feel a strong respect for their ancestors, which I appreciated.

Afterwards, we entered the museum of the solar boat, sitting next to the great pyramid. The timbers of the boat look maybe 200 years old, not many thousands!

The area is a strange chaotic mix of the encroaching city, which basically comes right to the doorstep of the pyramids; the rustic majesty of the pyramids themselves; and the unfortunate flocks of souvenir hucksters.

At that point, we realized we had lost one of our group, who we eventually abandoned. Eventually we found out that he left the pyramid site and took the train back to Alexandria by himself!

After that, we had a conference dinner with University of Cairo officials, and also members of the Egyptian science ministry. It was a long day, but I'm glad I went.

Shock to the Google System

2008-01-25T03:58:00.001-05:00

There is nothing more strange than to visit your friend Google in a foreign country, and find that all the words are squiggly backwards!

Since I am staying in Egypt, Google automatically converts to Arabic mode, which has writing from right-to-left. It's a new experience to be typing on the right hand side of the search box instead of the left.

Walk Like an Alexandrian

2008-01-25T03:34:00.001-05:00

I arrived in Egypt on Sunday, and it's already Friday! I'm participating in a workshop to train young African and Middle Eastern students in the techniques of X-ray and gamma-ray astronomy. The workshop is being held at the New Library of Alexandria, which of course has the library and also a planetarium and museum. Alexandria is located at the Mediterranean coast, and the library is right at the coast. The library is shown by night (with moonlight glinting from the reflecting pool.

So far I haven't actually done much sight-seeing since we are focussed on helping the students. I have learned one small strip of Alexandria between the hotel and the Library very well, and nothing else!

The conference hotel describes itself as a "heritage hotel" in its brochure. As far as I can tell, this is a kind way of saying that it has lofty goals of being a high-class establishment, but is slowly falling apart. In my room, both a telephone and lamp are non-working.

We will be visiting the pyramids of Giza tomorrow for a day-long excursion. Hopefully I will find some nice souvenirs. However, I think the nicest souvenir would be to get a library card for the Library of Alexandria.

Getting Parked On

2008-01-17T17:15:00.000-05:00

I read with some amusement and dread a few days ago, about a Pennsylvania man who was charged for disorderly conduct for writing an obscenity on the check he used to pay a parking ticket. I have to say I know what this man is going through.

The one time I visited Philadelphia, I got an parking ticket for being about three minutes over time limit. It was especially frustrating because I had just arrived in the city, parked in a 10-minute loading zone, went straight up to my friend's apartment to fetch her, and came straight back down to move my car. Now I see why I got the ticket.

The new reality television show Parking Wars reveals that Philadelphia parking enforcers are literally hiding and waiting for parking limits to expire. (Unfortunately the producers didn't go with my Scab Pickers reality show concept, and did parking instead.)

I was ticked off enough that I made out my check to the "Money Grubbing City of Philadelphia." And they cashed it. Good thing I didn't cross the line between annoying and obscene.

The Towel has been Thrown In: A New Car

2008-01-13T12:40:00.001-05:00

OK, so I finally gave up on my old Camry. It has served me well through almost eight years, but it was time to move on. Thank you Camry!

The new car is a friendly little used hybrid Prius that I bought from a person in Virginia. Vis:

So far I am quite happy with it. The previous owner took very good care of the car. When a friend got in the car he exclaimed, "Dude! Are you sure this is not new?"

It's a very geeky car. It's all about saving energy. When the car comes to a rest at a stoplight, the engine turns completely off, which is a bit disconcerting. When starting up again, the electric motor and battery can get you going, but the internal combustion engine starts (silently!) if you want to accelerate quickly or go over about 30 MPH. The "brakes" are actually regenerative brakes that use the electric motor as a generator to save your kinetic energy in the battery.

My favorite geeky part is the Star Trek-type visual displays in the on-board computer:

How do I re-route the ODN conduit?

The Thermodynamics of Heating a House

2008-01-12T02:24:00.001-05:00

Follow along as I explore trying to make my house a little more energy efficient, look at my energy usage history, and do a little thermodynamics. There will be some small equations, but I'll explain them in words as well. At the end, I discover something about the insulation efficiency of my house.

I live in a region which is heating-challenged. Every house or apartment I've lived in has had issues with heating in the winter and cooling in the summer. Builders in this area just don't seem to get that a little insulation goes a long way. For my current house, the homeowner's association also decided in its infinite wisdom that it would rip out all the old oil-fired boilers because they were too expensive, and replace them with electric baseboard heaters, because they are more economical. Whatever insane reasoning that led to that decision is now negated, especially since electricity has doubled in price over the past two years here. While it is true that electric heaters themselves are 100% efficient, the power plant and transmission lines are not. Furthermore, baseboard heaters tend to be mounted on outer walls below windows, so much of the heat can be conducted through the wall and escape the house.

I'm trying a few new strategies to try to make my house more comfortable, given its current limitations. First, I added transparent window films to almost all of the windows. The idea is that they hold an still pocket of air against the window, which adds an extra insulation factor. They also can contain small drafts so that cold air can't get in. It does take some work to install them, which basically involves stretching a huge sheet of saran wrap onto double stick tape mounted on each window frame, but eventually I developed a pretty efficient method (especially for smoothing the wrinkles).

A second thing I did was install curtains in the living room doorways, in order to keep the heat from escaping to colder parts of the house from the room I use most. These are cheap but heavy curtains I got on sale at Wal-Mart, hung from an expandable shower curtain rod across two doorways. Finally, I put some foam-board over my back door. It's a thin wooden door that conducts a lot of heat out.

I think these efforts have helped in a very qualitative sense. The living room is much less drafty, especially near the windows. Before installing the films, a cold down-draft from the windows would collide from an up-draft from the heaters to make chilly turbulent zone right where I was sitting. These drafts are gone now. The curtains also definitely help keep the heat where I appreciate it most.

Comfort is good, but I'd also like to know if this is saving energy and money.

PEPCO kindly puts my energy usage history on each bill, so it was a matter of collecting a few old bills and entering them in the computer. That's shown in black below (click for larger image).

The plot shows the number of kiloWatt-hours I use each month (ignore the red and blue curves for the moment). Unfortunately, I don't have data yet for December, the first month that I installed the window films or curtains, so I have to put the efficiency question on hold for now.

I decided to check out this plot a little more carefully. I use the greatest energy in the winter, obviously for heating. There are also small bumps in the summer, corresponding to cooling. Up until recently, I had a very old air conditioner which I rarely used, so my cooling expenses have never been large.

What to compare this with? Well, the there is a nifty number called a heating degree day used for heating calculations. Basically, any day that the mean temperature dips below 65 degrees Fahrenheit is considered a "heating day," and for that matter when the mean temperature is above 65 it is a "cooling day." The number of heating degree days is the number of degrees the mean temperature is below 65. The US National Climatic Data Center (not to be confused with the Climactic Data Center! Ooo la lah!) provides tabulated historical heating and cooling degree day data. The monthly total heating and cooling degree days are shown in the above plot (red=heating; blue=cooling; averaged over Maryland & Washington DC).

It's no big surprise that the heating and cooling curves match up with my energy usage pretty well. It's physics after all.

In fact, the Mr. Quantitative in me wants to do more. I decided to perform a linear regression between these quantities, with energy usage per day as the dependent variable, and heating/cooling degree days per day as the two independent variables. The simple function I tried was:

E = Constant + H(T_h) + C(T_c)

where H(T_h) is some function of heating degree days (per day), and C(T_c) is another function of cooling degree days (per day), both of which describe power usage versus temperature. This equation has the interpretation that I use some constant electric power all the time (for lights, water heater, etc.), plus the amount I use for heating and cooling, which depend on temperature.

The obvious choice is to make the two electric heating functions, H and C, proportional to temperature. However, I found that wasn't a good fit, as you will see below. Instead, there is an activation threshold. For small temperature excursions, no heating or cooling is required, and I don't use energy. This would be my comfort zone, the temperature range I'm willing to tolerate. I imagine I have a larger comfort zone than many people. As the outside temperature gets more extreme, then I use energy to maintain the inside house temperature within the comfort range. This function can be written as a constant when the heating/cooling temperature is within the comfort threshold, and a linear function outside of that. The linear coefficient of the function describes the number of kiloWatt-hours per day needed to heat (or cool) the house one extra degree Fahrenheit.

The fit works quite well, and here is how the results look. On the heating side, the function H(T) looks like this:

This means that I am willing to tolerate mean outside temperature drops of about 6.5 degrees (F) below the baseline temperature of 65 degrees before turning on the heat, and then I use about 0.84 kWh of energy per day for each degree (F) that it gets colder. At the current PEPCO price of 10.96 cents/per kWh, I pay an extra 10 cents per day for each degree colder that the outside temperature goes below about 59 degrees.

On the cooling side, the curve looks like this:

I'm apparently willing to tolerate large excursions before turning on the air conditioner (up to 10 degrees above the 65 degree baseline), and then I use 1.31 kWh of energy per day for each degree above that (for a cost of about 14 cents per day for each degree).

Finally, it's worth noting that I use 9.7 kWh of energy every day, no matter what the outside temperature is, just keeping the house going. I know for a fact that my refrigerator uses about 3.8 kWh every day on average, or about 40% of the total. It's a very old refrigerator from 1982 (!) which needs to be replaced. I used my handy Kill-a-Watt energy meter to measure this and other devices in the house. The refrigerator is by far the largest constant energy user.

Interestingly, last winter I changed from incandescent and halogen lamps to compact fluorescent bulbs. I predict this should save me between 1-2 kWh per day. A change such as this is barely detectable on the graphs, given the season and monthly fluctuations.

As one final exercise, I can estimate the overall efficiency my house, the effective "R-value". This quantity is defined as the reciprocal of the amount of heat lost per unit time per exposed area per degree temperature change, and has units of ft² per (BTU/hour/Fahrenheit). I already know the second quantity, since it's the linear heating coefficient I found above (0.845 kWh/day/F = 120 BTU/hour/F). The exposed area of my house is about 2000 ft², giving an effective R-value of 17. (NOTE 14 Jan: my original value of R-0.7 was had a unit conversion error and was incorrect).

An overall insulation efficiency of R-17 is okay but not great. As pointed out here, a house in my region (zone 2) demands an R value in the range of 18 (walls) to 49 (attic). However, as one of my commenters notes, there are other factors to consider, like how much air circulates through the building.

Remember that this data is all based on my house before I made the few changes above. Neither my usage data nor the climate data for the winter heating season are available yet. I hope to see improved efficiency!

Update (14 Jan): Oops! I made a unit error when converting from kWh/day to BTU/hr (missed a factor of 24). After the correction, the overall insulation efficiency of R-17 is more reasonable.

When do you throw in the towel?

2008-01-06T15:34:00.000-05:00

Since 1999, I have been the proud owner of a Toyota Camry, which my parents graciously gave it to me. This Camry was born in 1992 and has had a string of owners, starting with as corporate fleet, then to some other wanker, then my parents, and now me. It startles me to think that this car pre-dates the beginning of The X-files!

Well, gradually over the years, this car has been becoming more difficult to maintain. I try to do the standard up-keep, but more and more things are starting to fail.

The most recent failure is the passenger side window motor. Unfortunately for the current season (winter), the window has failed in the most awkward state (open), which can make for uncomfortable driving (breezy). The driver-side window failed a few years ago, so it's likely that the other window motors will go bad at some stage. It also means that I can't keep anything valuable inside the car, and it certainly isn't waterproof when it rains, like it did last night. On the positive side, I don't have to preoccupy myself with locking up!

Surely, as this is a very old car, there are many components that are near their failure threshold. And, as any rider of my car knows, I also just live with some of its (er) shortcomings. It's just a matter of time before more things go bad. The question is, how long do I keep dumping money into it for repairs?

Over the past few years, I've become more conscious of this problem. I've justified it to myself on the basis of, this $X repair will keep me going for another year. Last summer I spent a considerable amount on some repairs, with a certain amount of resolve that it would be the last time. So here I am, less than a year later, and something new has come up.

My friends and colleagues all say, "Dude, just get a new car!" Good point, but I'm way too analytical to just do that.

Unlike my first car, a Nissan Sentra (also a gift from my parents! Thanks again!), I don't have as much of an emotional attachment to the Camry. So from an emotional standpoint, I'm probably willing to let go.

Economically, the amount of repair work required to get the car into a "good" condition is approximately equal to its re-sale value if it were in good condition. So from that perspective, its probably worthless to me.

From a timing standpoint, it's good in a way. I have some travel coming up, where I wouldn't need a car anyway. On the other hand, it would have been "nicer" for this to happen in December. I could have donated the car to charity, taken a tax break for 2007, and bought a car at the end of the calendar year when it might have been easier to get a good deal.

From a personal convenience standpoint, it's not so great. I'm the kind of person that takes forever to buy a can of shaving cream, much less deciding on ditching a car and buying a new one. I don't relish spending my time visiting car dealerships, or going through the hassle of buying a used car.

There is no magic conclusion here, but my gut is telling me it's time to trow in the towel.

No Longer A Furnishing Virgin

2007-12-03T02:11:00.002-05:00

This is the first new piece of furniture that I've ever owned.

Red is not my favorite color, but I've decided that it's a color that goes well with my house, and the greens of the forest outside my window. It replaces an absolutely dreadful sofa, that was collapsing... literally.

A Whole Lotta Libido Goin' On

2007-12-03T01:35:00.000-05:00

Would you run for president? I probably wouldn't, but if I did, it would probably be for reasons like saving the world, or some other altruistic B.S. like that. But not Lee L. Mercer, Jr.. No, he has much bigger fish to fry. Here is one of the many reasons he is running for president:

49. To Prove the United States Government killed my sex life, my wife sex life, my daughter-in -laws sex life both may sons and other of my family members sex life with Espionage Experimentation and Espionage Exploitation sex killing. (sic)

I'm glad that someone has the courage to use the presidential pulpit to air his dirty laundry about his dirty dancing. And his wife's. And his sons'. And their wifes'. (How he has all of this in-depth knowledge about his family's intimate lives... is not something I want to know).

I suspect Mr. Mercer's problems run deeper than his sex life, but it's clear he's running for almost purely personal reasons. Which, strangely, makes me think of our current president.

Thanks to Swing State Project for the link.

Restless Blackjack Syndrome

2007-11-14T00:57:00.000-05:00

I can't imagine how difficult it must be, to be afflicted by the horrible condition known as Restless Leg Syndrome. Suffers have symptoms like, "an urge to move, usually due to uncomfortable sensations that occur primarily in the legs." When I was a kid, we called that being antsy. But from the nifty little article on Wikipedia I gather that at least some people have real problems with it.

Thankfully, Mirapex is ready to heal your restlessness (with a doctor's prescription of course). I experienced a Mirapex advertisement today, and one phrase blew my mind:

... if you experience increased gambling, sexual, or other intense urges, then see your physician...

Come again? Should we be calling it Viagrapex? That must be some potent stuff indeed.

I kind of thought of Restless Leg Syndrome as a great alibi when you kick your partner in bed. Sorry honey, I guess it's the RLS acting up again! (wink, wink) But it sounds like the side effects are even worse. After all, it's easy to blame an innocent kick on RLS, but it's quite a bit harder to explain how you got caught binging on Butterfingers at a Texas Hold'em poker orgy. I guess it was the Mirapex, sweety!

World's Highest Product Placement

2007-11-06T23:09:00.000-05:00

Continuing on the theme of the Everest show, I started looking a little more closely at the climbers' jackets, and I started seeing things. Well actually, I started seeing corporate logos. In particular, the best climber, Mogens Jensen, has a bunch of "gsk" logos stuck to his jacket and his hat. Could that be the drug conglomerate Glaxo-Smith-Kline? Yep.

And if I wasn't mistaken I also saw logos for Motorola and (maybe?) ask.com.

Now I seriously doubt that Glaxo-Smith-Kline manufactures mountaineering parkas or hats, nor does Motorola.

Of course not. These climbers are advertising for corporate sponsors. What I don't know is whether they found their own personal sponsor, or if the producers provided a certain number of "product placement" emblems throughout the show. On the one hand, it's clear that "gsk" has been Mogens Jensen's personal patron for at least two years (he's an asthmatic, and I'm sure they have asthma medicines for sale). On the other hand, product placements are sure money-makers for reality shows. Other shows like Top Chef have so many product placments that it's hard to draw the line between entertainment and advertisement anymore.

I predicted that by the third season, we would be seeing aspiring young actors auditioning for the show. Now I wonder if we will instead be watching a climber drinking his Evian springwater while warming his feet on a Coleman Stove and watching CNN on his Motorola mini-TV...

Beyond the Limit

2007-11-04T12:00:00.000-05:00

The Discovery Channel is airing a new season of its reality program, Everest, Beyond the Limit. I find it fascinating that the show is sponsored by Mastercard. The producers are already working on the new hit series, Your Credit, Beyond the Limit. I mean really, did Mastercard even look at the title before they sponsored it?

The program itself is quite fascinating. It's a reality-info-tainment documentary of climbers that pay a guide service for the privilege of climbing Mount Everest. I assume that the producers are paying for the same privilege for their camera and sound men to trail along and catch all of the grueling details. And to attach small cameras to the Sherpas that blaze trails and help climbers. The so-called SherpaCams™ can go places that normal mortal camera dudes can't.

The danger of death is very real, much more real than Deadliest Catch, where Alaskan crab fishermen lounge around at sea level and breathe luxurious 21% oxygen. Climbers have to deal with high altitudes, icy and windy conditions, and bad weather. The casualty rate is usually not measured by whether somebody died in the season, but how many died. And even those who don't die are susceptible to losing their fingers or toes (or nose!) due to frostbite. But this is not a huge surprise, to anybody who has read the book Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer.

The really interesting thing is that the conditions are so extreme, and the location is so remote, the documentary crew are not really impartial observers any more. Last season, a climber David Sharp died right on the trail as other climbers hiked by. There is some controversy over whether Sharp was seen by the climbers early in the climb on the way up, or later on their way down. Still, the expedition leader David Brice made the decision to continue his expedition and provide no rescue assistance. Understanding that the camera crew, Sherpas, and Brice himself were being paid by Discovery channel and the other climbers, one can imagine that the urge to continue the expedition was quite strong. We have a TV show to make here. Interestingly, the portion of the video where Sherpas encountered Sharp was editted out of the show. It's not clear if there was a "right" decision that could have been made, but in that kind of situation the decisions of the filmmakers themselves could have life-or-death consequences. (Another example of this is the documentary Black Tar Heroin which followed several heroin users for a year in San Francisco.)

This is the second season of the Everest show. I can already see that the producers have "selected" the climbers for the greatest entertainment value. So far we have been introduced to the Biker Dude, the L.A. Reporter, the British Pub Mate, and the Asthmatic Athlete. I'm surprised that none of them is an aspiring actor trying to get onto Desperate Housewives. It's so hard to get onto reality television these days, don't you know?

Frilly Liveried Land Lubber

2007-10-20T09:13:00.000-04:00

Every year the US federal government basically has an employee "pledge drive" for charities called the Combined Federal Campaign. It's an interesting idea: get employees to pledge a certain amount, and then the government takes the money right out of your paycheck! Other employers do that too.

This year's campaign was more surprising than usual, since it's the first time they have peppered the workplace with these bizarre posters.

I get it. They're playing off of the Pirates of the Carribean. There are other posters that goof on Field of Dreams, Happy Feet, and Shrek.

But it's just not clear to me how a rastafarian pirate dressed in a glitter jacket is going to stimulate the charitable spirit. I mean, pirates pillage, don't they? (But then again, it's not clear to me what Postal-Shrek is supposed to mean either.)

Let's take a closer look at this scurvy dog. Check out his hair:

What are those? Yep, they're carabiner-earrings! And looking still closer, there are other keychains braided into his hair as well. If that's where he keeps his keys, he must jingle a lot every time he swabs the deck or climbs the forecastle.

Check out his feet too:

Uh huh, those are slippers with paper clips attached. This is is a very fashion-challenged pirate, but at least he is utile.

I believe that this year's pirate (and baseball hero) was played by David Lipscomb (man at pictured podium). Mr. Lipscomb, I salute you playing along with such a ludicrous concept.

Tipping the Moving Men

2007-09-29T13:50:00.000-04:00

One thing my parents never taught me was to tip the moving men. Probably it's because they'd never hired a moving company in my lifetime up to that point. It just never crossed my mind that professionals that were being paid once should be paid again. Some people are probably rolling their eyes and saying, "Duh!" right now.

When I moved here to Maryland, my employer paid for a moving company, and that moving company screwed up in many ways, including being several weeks late on the delivery end.

But now I wonder whether my stuff was in "limbo" for those several weeks because I never tipped the pick-up guys. It's a revelation that is actually very disturbing to me if true....

This came to mind recently once, when I was thinking about getting a new refrigerator, and wondering if you should tip the delivery guy. And the answer is, probably yes. Then it came up again a few days later when a newly arrived coworker said he tipped his movers $30 each. And there were six guys!

Apparently there is an undercurrent of monetary gratuity that I am completely obvlivious to!

Iridium Craze

2007-08-28T00:43:00.001-04:00

This summer I have spent a bit too much of my time searching for Iridium Flares. For the uninitiated, the flares are sun glints from Iridium Communication Satellites which pass overhead at regular intervals. Each satellite is one of a constellation launched by Motorola in the late 1990s. Motorola's idea was that mobile, wireless, global communication would be the wave of the future... and that satellites would make the wave even more future-y. They got half of the equation right, mobile communication is big, but the satellite constellation was too late, too expensive (more than a dollar a minute!), and just too inconvenient for consumer use. Motorola's venture eventually failed, but was resurrected to service the U.S. Military (for which late, expensive and inconvenient are ideal conditions).

But aside from largess, it turns out that Iridium satelllites have another cool property. The communication antennae of these birds are shiny and large enough that a specular reflection of the sun is possible, that make wonderfully bright flares as seek from the ground. For the geeks out there, the satellites are at an altitude of about 780 km. The sun subtends about a half a degree of arc, which means the specular reflection should be spread out about ~6-7 km on the earth's surface. Since the satelllites travel at about 7 km/s, the maximum flare lasts just a few seconds. In reality, there is a more diffuse reflection which spreads out a larger area and makes the flare last for about 20 seconds total.

The flares are very bright, very specific to your location, and very short. It's quite possible for you to see a bright flare, and a friend just 10-20 miles away sees barely anything. Thus, when chasing flares, it's important to know three important things: where you are, the precise time, and where to look.

I took the photo above with my little digital camera (no tripod!). The streak is an Iridium flare with a 15 second exposure. It is chopped because I started the exposure late. The black lines are power lines next to the road.

Catching a Flare

I knew in advance where and when to catch the flare because I knew those important three items (my position, the exact time, and where/when to look).

I use the web service called Heavens Above to predict flares times. It is very straightforward to create an account. One of the first things when you create an account is to enter your coordinates (latitude and longitude).

You can determine your location most easily using Jef Poskanzer's ACME Mapper (or, you can use a GPS device if you have one). Just find your self in the Mapper by clicking the link, and panning and zooming (or searching). Be sure to zoom in close enough so that you are within a kilometer or less. Then read off your latitude and longitude from the indicator. Here is what you need to look for:

Then it's a simple matter of plugging those examples into the coordinate boxes of Heavens Above. For example, the latitude box for the coordinates above would look like this:

and the same for the longitude box. Ignore the "Minutes" and "Seconds".

Once you enter your coordinates, you should be at the Heavens Above main page. Click on the Iridium "next 7 days" link to get predictions of flares near you for the next week.

Handy tip: focus on the -5, -6, -7, -8 or -9 flares. Because of the crazy astronomical magnitude system, more negative means brighter. Thus, the most spectacular flares are -8 or -9 (but these are rare).

Now you have your list of flare predictions. The last thing you need is the precise time. If you have a GPS, use it. Flares predictions are exact to the second, so you need a clock accurate to one second as well. The easiest thing to use is your cell phone clock, which is actually synchronized very accurately by the cell phone company. Unfortunately, your cell phone usually gives minutes and no seconds, so you will have to guestimate to the number of seconds. You can also synchronize your wristwatch to an official time server (such as the US server) and use that.

Now go out and watch. I have two final tips. First, the time given in the prediction is the time of flare maximum, so be sure to be looking a few seconds early. Usually you will be able to see a faint, fast-moving dot before it starts to get really bright. Second, if you are looking for flares at 50, 60 or 70 degrees altitude above the horizon, this will be much higher on the sky than you think. Be prepared to crane your neck. For lower altitudes, you will need to find an open space away from tall trees.

I guess my fascination is two-fold. For one thing, the really bright flares are quite spectacular. The brighter flares are easily the brightest objects in the sky for those few seconds. For another thing, there is something wonderful in how regular and predictable the universe is.

World's Deadliest Kitch

2007-08-27T23:33:00.001-04:00

Now it's time for this month's media commentary.

The show World's Deadliest Catch was a pretty interesting show, although after three seasons, there's not much more the producers can do with a show about crab fishing in the Alaskan Sea... But now we have

Ice Road Truckers
Lobster Wars
Wildcatters
Tuna Wranglers

Tuna Wranglers? Are they kidding me? What's next, Scab Pickers?

Can't they let a good idea die a peaceful death? Nope, they're going to milk the "deadly job" theme until it's undead, just like they did for: game shows, reality shows, home makeover shows, poker shows, pretty much in that order.

Owing Myself

2007-07-17T00:39:00.000-04:00

I have a procedural question. If I go on personal holiday with time off work, and am then struck by a nasty sinus-throat-lung illness which puts me out of commission for a few days, is that vacation or is it sick leave? I took a trip somewhere to see family, so it must be vacation; but I was laid up in a dark room for two days, so that seems like sickness.

I suppose it was really my personal vacation, so I am the one responsible not to get sick for it. Perhaps then I should also be responsible for my own private cache of sick days, sort of like self-insurance. Then I could be my own benefits coordinator and say snarky things like, Sorry, you can't get sick on this vacation. You were sick last weekend! I could also do mind-blowing things like taking a vacation from my vacation! Adios Phil, I'm taking a day off from all this fun!

Excuse me while fire myself.

Berry Berry Good to Me

2007-06-21T00:43:00.001-04:00

I have the luxury of living near an agricultural research center, so even though I live in a "city," a short walk of five minutes puts me among cattle pastures, corn fields and a swamp (er, sorry, wet-lands). And I've been doing more walking there, which makes me more attentive of the flora and fauna than people who just sachet through in their Hummers (which I do too, sans Hummer).

I did not realize that the road-side is filled with berries! Last weekend there were a goodly number of mulberries and black raspberries that looked ripe (the left and middle photos). The mulberries were pretty decent sized, but the raspberries are just tiny little buds. I have to admit that I snacked on the ripe ones, which I quite enjoyed. There is a huge patch of blackberries (the right photo), but they are definitely not ripe yet. When they are, I will definitely be there to partake, thorns permitting.

Wednesday I stopped briefly to take these photos (but not to take fruit), and just at that moment a service security guard pulled up and asked me what I was doing. I figured I would get a scolding, but what actually happened was she first assumed I was a USDA worker (!), and then she warned me to look out for deer (!). Not as one nature lover to another, and not for any health reason, but just to beware that a deer might jump out and spook me! How considerate.

As a kid I used to sneak-and-snack on neighbors' berry patches that were hanging over the sidewalk. My dad and I were even more brazen at the local university, which planted Service Berry trees around the campus library (we knew them as Juneberries). We would troop to the library with buckets and come back with them full! Juneberries are a little like blueberries, but a little fleshier. Curious college students would stop and ask questions, assuming we were university staff cleaning up toxic plant material. Little did they know. I'm not really a nature-boy, but I know a few good berries when I see them. I am guessing some friends must have even more berry experience than I do.

Footnote: the title is a play on a friend's play on words.

I'll Fly Away

2007-06-21T00:04:00.001-04:00

Here I am wrangling my little insect friend on the set of the next blockbuster movie hit, The Butterfly Whisperer. Thank goodness my camera was ready just then.

Update: now I know it's a "Red-spotted Purple."

New Shoes

2007-06-07T02:18:00.002-04:00

Apparently I am now equipped for the hybrid sport of soccer-bowling.

A Tarnished Silver Lining

2007-06-06T03:13:00.000-04:00

I'm watching a television show on PBS called Haley's Hints. It's pledge week and they seem to be running a scad of 1-minute household hints all together. Here are some of the hints:

Cleaning pet hair from your couch with kitchen gloves;
Opening a tight peanut butter jar with a rubber band as a gripper;
Removing tarnish from silver with water softener and table salt;
Storing old gift wrapping paper and wallpaper rolls in panty hose!

These are pretty cool hints. Technology and wealth have created tremendous benefits to our society, but they also have created the strangest of little problems that need to be solved. Like, "what the heck will I do with all this old wrapping paper and panty hose?"

I wonder, what would a third-world person think if they saw this show? American culture is pervasive. Perpetual TV re-runs of Dallas and Webster have guaranteed that, so the rest of the world knows about western proclivities. While Juan is sorting coffee beans in his hut, he can dream of the time when he can clean his own silver.

Now please excuse me, I need to buy some panty hose.

Mountains of Uselessness

2007-05-28T23:31:00.000-04:00

I usually let my incoming (physical) mail stack up quite a bit before I pay attention to it. That may not always be a good thing when it comes to paying bills on time... I realized just now why I resist paying the bills. It's not the pain of actually paying the bill, but rather the hunting through mountains of crap mail to find the good stuff and real bills. The photo above shows three weeks of junk on the left, and the important stuff on the right (it's almost imperceptible).

It doesn't stop with the two or three "Pennysaver" fliers per week. Nor does it stop with the actual junk mail. Nor the credit card offer from United Airlines every week for the past three years! No, even when I open actual bills, there is more junk mail inside. My phone company keeps urging me to sign up for DSL service even though I tried them, their service quality was crap, and I canceled my account with them. Thank goodness my family doesn't send me junk mail too!

I probably get more than 500 pages of junk material per month. That's a whole ream of paper! In comparison about 20 pages of that is stuff valuable to me: letters from friends or important bills. If we are ever serious about becoming a "green" society, we really need to get rid of junk mail. With over 105 million households in the US, there are probably about 3 million tons of paper going to waste every year.

We talk about email "spam" filtering. I would really like to have physical junk mail filtering as well. But unlike spam which usually gets filtered at the receiving end, I think junk mail should be filtered at the sending end. I get so much repeat junk mail, it would make sense to have a little box on the envelope marked "⊗ RETURN TO SENDER, DON'T EVER SEND ME THIS CRAP AGAIN."

I realize that this is not a new topic, but I just had to vent for a moment. Now I know how Andy Rooney feels.

Police Release Me

2007-05-27T16:21:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I was waiting at a traffic light to turn left. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. For three full cycles I waited with another car in front of me while all the other traffic directions were allowed to pass, but we were not. Finally both of us realized that something was wrong with the traffic light (or the sensor), and decided to turn left against the red light, when the way was clear.

Of course, a police car appeared out of nowhere immediately and chased after us. Not surprising since it's next to a police station. I pulled over, but the police car zoomed past and snagged the first guy. At first I drove away, but eventually I realized it wasn't fair for the other guy to get tagged for a defective traffic signal¹, so I drove around and talked at the officer. I say "talked at" because he wasn't really interested in hearing anything I had to say. After I explained my version in twenty words, he ignored me for about fifteen seconds, and then blurted some kind of joke (I guess) which was meant to get me to leave (I guess). Me, being Mr. Slow-on-the-uptake, took a little while to figure this out. I did park and give my phone number to the guy being cited, in case he needed a witness for court.

Later the guy in the other car did call me to thank me. It turns out the officer did not cite him for a moving violation, but did write a citation for some other minor infraction. It turned out mostly okay.²

The thing that ticked me off was that we could have been waiting at that light for 20 seconds, or 20 minutes, and no matter when we finally decided turn, that cop could have showed up just at that moment. Police officers do a great service to our community, which I appreciate. In principle he did the right thing for pulling (one of) us over. On the other hand, it's pretty unfair that citizens should be punished for a defective traffic signal.

¹ - The other man was African American so I was a little concerned he would be arrested for DWB, while I got a free pass.
² - The other man wondered if the traffic light problem was a set-up. It is the end of the month. Did officer have to meet a quota?

Secret Easter Service

2007-05-11T00:32:00.000-04:00

Goddard was swarming with Secret Service agents during the visit of the Queen. It turns out that they are locals: their training facility is just north of Goddard. Many Goddard people have seen a mysterious black SUV if they leave the Center on Soil Conservation Road. That SUV is guarding the Secret Service facility. Let's take an interactive tour:

A B C D E F G

Click for detail: Fake Town | Fake Airport | Driving Range | Performance Range | Underground Storage | Obstacle Course | Black SUV

The fake town and fake airport are for "real-life" exercises involving urban and airport situations. You can see that there is a simulated half of Air Force One, but not the whole airframe. I've seen a television program where agents were shown practicing various security activities (VIP arriving by airport, bombing in an urban environment).

The driving test range appears to have different kinds of paved street configurations, presumably for practice cornering and turning. The "performance" range, as I called it, is probably for high performance manuevering practice, like "J-turns" (you can even see the turn guide lines painted on the tarmac). It also appears to have a heli-pad.

I'm guessing that point E is some kind of underground storage, perhaps for munitions (especially considering the Jersey barriers obstructing the entrance). The obstacle course is not so obvious, but it's easier to see on Microsoft's Live Map of the location, and it contains a bunch of different swings, pits and balancing obstacles. It looks challenging!

Finally of course, the Black SUV (or maybe it's a van on the day this photo was taken) is present near the intersections of Soil Conservation Road and Powdermill Road.

There are probably other Easter Eggs to find, it just takes some diligent scanning. For example, the old Beltsville Agricultural Center airport is just to the southeast, and I believe the Secret Service uses that for training as well.

By the way, none of this is particularly secret. All these maps and satellite photos are available to the public via Google Maps, and several of the locations listed above were showcased on a recent Sixty Minutes story about the Secret Service.
This map brought to you by GMapEZ and Google Maps.

Crack (juice) is good for you!

2007-05-10T13:58:00.000-04:00

I found this interesting article on CNN, that pure fruit juice supposedly does not "cause" children to become overweight.

There is something fishy going on there. Both pure juice and artificial juice-flavored drinks contain a lot of sugar. It shouldn't matter which kind of juice a person drinks.

My guess is that there is a selection effect going on: that parents of children who desire or can afford pure juice, are the ones that pay more attention to the total diets of their children, and thus prevent them from becoming overweight. The implication of the article is that we should "drink more juice" because it's good for us. But I suspect the reality is more simple than that... If you drink more sugary juice -- no matter what kind -- you will get more overweight!

I'm sure I could devise a study that could conclude that crack makes children more alert and active... but that does not mean that cocaine is "good for you."

The fact that the obvious question was not discussed, whether children who drank water instead of juice were healthier or not, suggests that the researchers came to the study with an agenda. I found it interesting that there is no sponsorship information about the study.

According the study, children who drank more pure juice ate less fat and other bad stuff. However, is that really a cause and effect relationship? Do children really desire to eat less fat because they drink "pure" juice? I doubt it. I think the two are correlated, but not causally related.

To be fair, the author of the study does say that parents should look at the "total number of calories that the child is taking in ... and ... the activity level of the child." Good points. I suspect that these two factors are the important ones, and the kind of juice is irrelevant. This "total calorie" information is buried in the last paragraph of the press release. It's just that a headline like, "Children Who Eat Fewer Calories and Exercise More are Healthier," is not very sexy for the industry.

There was another article about a week ago, "New Study Shows Citrus Juices Have the Highest Nutrient Content," which suggests to me that the Florida juice industry is engaging in a media campaign.

Updated (3:04pm): added cause and effect paragraph.
Updated (11 May): my friend CW corrects some of my erroneous assumptions (see comments).

A Royal Flush

2007-05-09T01:13:00.001-04:00

Her Majesty the Queen of England paid a visit to Goddard Space Flight Center today. I don't have any pithy insights. We waited outside near Building 3 for about an hour and then she and her entourage passed by on her way from talking to the Space Station to a presentation in Building 8. She was within lunging distance, but not grabbing distance.

She paused and chatted with some women close to me. Her demeanor -- or should I say deQUEENer -- was aloof, yet kind. People around me (and myself) offered comments like, "Good morning!" or, "Welcome!" to tempt a response, but she did not make much direct eye contact or physical contact with anyone specific. A queen isn't meant to connect too closely with the commoners. She apparently did have more personal contact during other parts of the visit.

We also had a short glimpse of her at the Goddard Visitor's Center, where she "planted a tree." Which means, she and NASA Administrator Michael Griffin each turned over about a teaspoon full of soil. A good thing too, since they will move the tree from its photogenic ceremonial position to someplace else where it won't die so quickly. Gardening was never so easy for the Queen.

Prince Phillip seemed more chatty. As I mentioned before, I think the Goddard visit was probably his desire. He stopped and had more direct conversations with the crowd in front of me, and was definitely intrigued by the astronauts. Good for him, a Prince should have some hobbies too.

I'm not a big one for pomp and circumstance, but it was still a special moment for the place that I work. None of my photos turned out very well, but thankfully I was with a group that got some nice shots. Aside from the enjoyment of the moment, the most substantial thing I came away with was a hefty sunburn on my face.

Queen for a Day

2007-05-07T22:22:00.000-04:00

The Queen of England is coming to Goddard Space Flight Center tomorrow. I don't really know why... I suspect it's because Prince Phillip wanted to see something spacey. The royals are in the US for the 400th anniversary of the Jamestown settlement. Anyway, it's sure to be a zoo tomorrow at the center. There are whole parts that will be blocked off, and the Queen's motorcade will cause all the major streets and highways to be blocked too.

The Queen is giving a short address to a small group of people that were selected by lottery. I was not in that group (harumph). But I'm still interested, so I will try to catch her as she walks between buildings, or plants a tree at the Visitor's Center. She plants enough trees, she could probably open a shovel store.

A brief note to employees suggests that as we "wave and address Her Majesty ... as 'Your Majesty' or 'Ma'am;' address the Duke as 'Your Highness' or 'Sir.'" They make it sound like we might bump into her on the way to the jacuzzi.

Of course, Goddard has spent the last week primping. All the pavement lines have been repainted, the shrubs have been shorn, and the lawns have been flattened. Well, the parts the Queen will see have been primped, that is. Other parts of the center have almost knee-high grass. Budget cuts you know.

It occurred to me that maybe the Queen has never seen anything bad or nasty. She always has an advance entourage which makes sure everything is just perfect before she arrives, so maybe she simply has no concept of "dirty" or "disrepair." Maybe she thinks that all paths are paved with red carpets, and all the toilets are gilded.

For that matter, she doesn't have to deal with money or passports. One of her attendants surely takes care of all such mundane matters. We all laughed when President Bush, Sr., was amazed by laser bar-code scanners at the local grocery store. But has the Queen ever even been to a grocery store? Food simply appears in her larder and is prepared by her expert chef.

I think it would be cool to trade places with the Queen for a day. I would experience the luxury of unlimited wealth and power, and the alien world of pomp and protocol. She would experience life as a commoner, and have to work for a living. That would be cool. For a day.

A Highly Fortified Virgin

2007-04-18T02:05:00.000-04:00

I have discovered that my wireless provider Virgin Mobile (USA), runs a pretty tight networking ship. Which is to say, it's difficult to get arbitrary packets from the mobile handset (Audiovox 8915) to the internet at large. First of all, direct socket connections to the outside internet are blocked. This conclusion is based on using MidpSSH to connect to various ports and failing.

Virgin appears to be running a proxy which intercepts only HTTP traffic and forwards it onward (but only for ports 80, 8080 and 443). Note that this does not mean that arbitrary socket traffic can be sent over port 80, just HTTP traffic. That's still could be interesting since MidpSSH is able to communicate through an HTTP proxy server.

Finally, Virgin seems to have some kind of denial-of-service detector which prevents too many accesses to the same host over a short period of time. Since MidpSSH is an interactive application, it ends up making lots of brief connections to the server in proxy mode. After about five connections in series, the proxy returns a "Network Gremlins" message, which messes up the SSH negotiation process.

In short, there appears to be no way to pass arbitrary data through the Virgin Mobile proxy. That's kind of a bummer, and not so cool.

UPDATE: (20 Apr) by snooping the phone's file system, I discovered the IP address of Virgin's proxy server that the handset talks to when web surfing. It turns out it's just a standard Apache HTTP proxy server running on port 80! I was able to telnet to it using MidpSSH and request random web pages from the Internet. While this doesn't solve the problem, the fact that there's a standard proxy there suggests that one could use the proxy CONNECT command to open a persistent socket connection, at least to port 443, which is what CONNECT was intended for. And it works! I was able to connect to an SSH server. But... after about 10-15 seconds, the socket is closed. I can only assume that Virgin's firewall limits the lifetime of TCP sessions to prevent global firewall resources from being tied up. Sigh, another dead end.

Connecting to the Audiovox 8915

2007-04-15T12:20:00.000-04:00

I recently got a new mobile phone, an Audiovox 8915. In the era of whateverBerry super-smart phones, the Audiovox is just a kinda-smart phone. You can send images from (using the built in camera) and to it, and you can send sounds to it. It can also browse the internet, if you can call interacting with a 128 x 160 pixel screen browsing. I should point out that the interface of this phone, compared to my previous Audiovox 8500, is much improved.

Here are a few things that I have learned. First of all, one can connect a data cable to the handset. I used the FutureDial cable number 19 (which has a built-in Prolific PL2303 USB-serial converter). This is important for connecting to my Mac OS X machine, since there are no Mac drivers compatible with the Curitel USB interface within the phone itself. The Prolific drivers can be found on their web site. There are some people who have hacked the similar Audiovox 8900 and the Virgin Mobile Snapper. They have been able to upload graphics, sounds, and game applets. The graphics and sound part sounds a little strange to me, since I can just message myself with a graphics attachment and save that as a wallpaper or screen-saver.

I was able to decipher the binary phone book formats of my old and new phones enough to be able to download and parse the old phone book entries, and convert and upload the entries to the new phone. Too bad BitPIM doesn't support this phone. The developers seem to have a moratorium on development for it, after seeing enough people with problems. Sigh.

By snooping the phone's file system, I also found a reference to an XML file containing the phone's capabilities. Here are some interesting tidbits:

It has an ARM7 processor;
It accepts MMS messages up to 100K in size (and graphics 480x640 in dimension);
It accepts J2ME java downloadable programs (JVM version VMID 2.0);
The networking software is capable of IPv4, SSL-3.0 and TLS-1.0;
The web browser does tables but not Java or Javascript;

I'm very interested to see if I can upload Java applets such as Google's map applet or the MidpSSH SSH client, but I'm also wary of bricking my phone.
At least one brave person has tried it and documented how he did it. The hacker in me says, "cool."

Making the GCN More Useful with GreaseMonkey

2006-11-18T15:17:00.000-05:00

For people who do research on gamma-ray bursts, one of the central clearing houses is the GCN. This service provides hot new results about the most recent GRBs. Unfortunately the presentation is a little spartan: most of the pages are plain text and there is no cross-linking between circulars and to GRBs. Here is an example circular:

Mozilla Firefox

TITLE:   GCN CIRCULAR
NUMBER:  5818
SUBJECT: GRB061110A: Correction to GCN5817 
DATE:    06/11/12 19:45:13 GMT
FROM:    Johan U. Fynbo at U.Copenhagen  <jf

Johan P. U. Fynbo (DARK) report:

Unfortunately I made an error in the gain-co
reported in GCN #5817. Here are the correct
photometry. In the NOT images taken about 8

As you can see, it's just plain text. Because of that, the page title is "Mozilla Firefox" and there are no hot links on the page.

I've created some GreaseMonkey scripts which tweak the contents of GCN notice and circular pages. The first one, GCN GRB Linker, adds links to each GCN circular and notice for every reference to a GCN or GRB that it can find. It correctly handles multiple GRBs on one day (i.e. it points to the single repository on the GCN for all bursts from that day). Let's see
how that looks:

Title: GCN #5818: GRB061110A: Correction to...

TITLE:   GCN CIRCULAR
NUMBER:  5818
SUBJECT: GRB061110A: Correction to GCN5817
DATE:    06/11/12 19:45:13 GMT
FROM:    Johan U. Fynbo at U.Copenhagen  <jf

Johan P. U. Fynbo (DARK) report:

Unfortunately I made an error in the gain-co
reported in GCN #5817. Here are the correct
photometry. In the NOT images taken about 8

Much better. Now there are links to take you to useful places like the web was intended to do.

The second script is called GCN Coordinate Query, and it inserts a set of queries to three common astronomical databases wherever a set of GCN GRB coordinates appears. This makes it easy to do simple searches around GRB positions without doing complicated gymnastics with the mouse.

See below for the script download information.

Prerequisites:

Intense interest in gamma-ray bursts
Use the Mozilla Firefox browser
Have GreaseMonkey installed

Downloads:

Cutting and Pasting with X Windows on the Mac

2006-11-18T13:41:00.000-05:00

If you are a hardcore X windows person like me, working on a Mac presents certain issues. Mac OSX applications hosted by X windows are more or less second class citizens. Most X windows people are used to copying directly to the clipboard by selecting, and pasting with the middle mouse button. However, on the Mac, the behavior not really consistent.

For clipboard contents created by non-X applications, pasting into X with the middle button works fine.
After selecting something within X, pasting back into X with the middle button works fine as well.
However, when you want to copy from X to a non-X application, then you need to go through the extra step of invoking "Copy" from the "Edit" menu. This is especially frustrating when you want to copy a URL from an Xterm to Firefox.

What I really wanted was "just" a way to automatically copy the X selection to the Mac clipboard. I puzzled over complicated descriptions such as these, until I finally just did some experimentation. It turns out it can be done!

Just edit the .Xresources file in your home directory (or create a file with that name), and add the following to it.

XTerm*VT100.Translations: #override \
       <btn1up>: select-end(SELECT, CLIPBOARD, PRIMARY, CUT_BUFFER0)\n\
       Ctrl  <keypress> Insert:insert-selection(PRIMARY, CUT_BUFFER0)

Then you should restart X (or at least "xrdb -merge ~/.Xresources"). For emacs, you should add the following to your .emacs file,


(setq x-select-enable-clipboard t)

I've been very happy ever since.