Location Does Not Compute

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!

Another in my series of insect taming adventures. Previously.

Rainbow - Once Again

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

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?

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

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

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?