Northern Song

Wow. I know it’s a joke, but such a left-field, “who saw that coming” sort of joke that it leaves you a little speechless. It peters out after the Gil Scott Heron reference (which is a brilliant touch, by the way). I know Talib Kweli’s comments were scripted, but his ability to sound coherent while talking about orbital techniques makes me think he’s not a dumb guy.

It’s interesting to see how Buzz Aldrin is expanding his presence in the popular culture. He’s been on the Simpsons, done a children’s cartoon, endorsed a line of model kits, and now rapped with Snoop Dogg. Neil Armstrong has almost completely faded away. It sounds like his response to being the first man on the moon has been to recede from the public eye. I respect his integrity, but it’s no fun to see a good man hide himself. Buzz will always be the second man, and that gives him more latitude to be himself.

From io9:

On June 12th, Saychev Peak on Matua Island erupted, hurling ash and steam into the air. Luckily, NASA’s International Space Station was watching. This stunning image, from the Earth Observatory, reveals some rare details about this eruption.

The shockwave from the blast pushed the cloud cover open like a pebble tossed into a pond covered in algae. The island is located in the middle of an island chain that stretches from Japan to the Siberian Peninsula. The USGS has more info.

I don’t think my mother knows about this blog. Mom, if you do stumble over this, move on. There are some funny pictures down below.

I just spent 40 minutes having a “conversation” with my mother. It’s really a monologue, with occasional cues. I heard about my parents’ trip to Mt. Shasta, how important it is to have a kerosene lantern in a cave, the Paris Sewers, my cousin’s pregnancy, her elementary school library, my father’s massage chair, how much she likes aquariums, the statuary at the old California Academy of Sciences, the current mysteries she’s reading…

I’d like to have a conversation, but she’s not good at just listening and responding. Conversations are built from back and forth, and she’s no good at relinquishing control. She’s Abe Simpson, telling stories because that’s what she does:

We can’t bust heads like we used to, but we have our ways. One trick is to tell ‘em stories that don’t go anywhere - like the time I caught the ferry over to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for my shoe, so, I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on ‘em. “Give me five bees for a quarter,” you’d say.

Now where were we? Oh yeah: the important thing was I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn’t have white onions because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones…

She’s lonely and desperate for conversation. The only people she seems to talk to anymore are immediate relatives and store clerks. She doesn’t want to exchange ideas any more because she’s got her opinions and she’s not going to change them. She doesn’t cotton to being wrong. I wish she’d get out into the world more, but she doesn’t like traveling alone. She won’t go to a movie or a museum by herself, and since my dad doesn’t take her she doesn’t go. He goes out all the time, but to concerts and shows that don’t interest her.

I fear this in myself. I know that I have a tendency to ramble and to go off on useless trivia that I picked up. Will I be her in 30 years? I hope not.

A recent opinion piece by Ricky Jay in the NY Times reminded me of the Great Flydini. It turns out he’s available on YouTube. This is the highest quality version of the video I could find, and it benefits from the addition of including Johnny Carson’s intro and close. Carson (and Dick Cavett, as well) was an amateur magician and often had magicians on his show. He was very willing to let them perform in their own style and the Tonight Show was one of the last places where you could see and hear great close-up magic. For whatever reason, the only magic that gets on TV today is large, flashy stage magic and the very highly stylized magic of Criss Angel and David Blaine.

Anyway, here’s Flydini. Remember, it’s a comedy act with a touch of magic. You can probably figure out the tricks. The magic is the creativity of what happens.

There are two new search engines vying to at least partially unseat Google: Bing and Wolfram Alpha. There are actually many search engines bubbling under the surface out there, each with a unique spin on how searching is done, but these two are getting all the buzz. It’s a good thing, really. As good as Google is, its algorithms can’t be bias-free and can’t yet read your mind. Sometimes a Google search will focus in the wrong direction for what you want, or sometimes there is too much “noise” obscuring what you want. Searching for “John Smith” may not find the John Smith you want.

I haven’t yet tried Bing (it was still under wraps last I checked, about a week ago). It seems to be more of a commercial advisor, helping you sort out options when you want to compare prices and such. Or at least that’s what the ads tell me.

Wolfram Alpha comes from Wolfram Research, the folks that produce Mathematica. It aims to be the equivalent of an almanac, a storehouse of numbers and basic facts. If you want the population of each US state, you could go through each entry in Wikipedia or try to Google a page with that info. Enter “state population” into Alpha and you should get a list of populations. Except you don’t. Alpha seems to have a “Rain Man”-like bent; if you hit a question it can answer, it will perform well and sometimes surprise you with its depth. If it doesn’t understand (and right now that happens a lot) it just hits a brick wall.

A friend told me to type in my first name into Alpha. It poured back census information and projections about how many Jeffs there are in each age cohort and a few other facts. Apparently I was born at the end of the great Jeff Boom and my name is slowly dying out. Not many Jeffs under 30:

(the graph shows the percent of all Jeffs at each age.  Presumably the total area under the graph is 100%)

It’s also amazing for math. It’s basically a front-end for Mathematica, so you can enter a math function, or an integral, or ask for a graph, or ask for a polyhedron and it will make it happen. Want to know the value of gamma(2.3)? It’s 1.166. Wait, there’s more!

Curious what a snub cube looks like?

It will also tell you the volume and surface area of the snub cube.

Unfortunately, Alpha (like many 14-year-old boys) has a very math based view of the world. After reading an article on China’s “One Child” policy, I entered in “world population projection” and got

which tells me the projection of the world population vector (v) onto another vector (u). I’m not sure what dimension this takes place in, nor how the world population can be a vector quantity, or what vector I would project it onto.  I certainly wouldn’t mind being orthogonal to a few annoying people, but I don’t believe that’s an option for me.

I like Alpha at its best. It’s really a great resource for math, and promises some interesting ways of looking at factual data. Unfortunately the best features seem hand-wired and don’t carry over. Some programmer thought the age distribution for names would be a cool feature and coded it in. Until somebody decides to focus some time on the “population” displays, they will remain lame. I think having an online almanac is a really good idea, but it’s going to take a lot of work to make one worth using.

It’s been a while since I last wrote an entry. This is not because nothing has happened, but because there has been so little time to write. I post pictures on Flickr and put occasional updates on Facebook, and this blog is third in line for updates. However, I did want to write about an excellent weekend Alyssa and I had.

For four years running, Make Magazine has held a big expo in San Mateo. The intended audience are “Makers,” a sort of DIY crowd. Make is close to the center (or would like to think of itself as close to the center ) of a movement of people that are not content to be passive observers but who really want to get their hands dirty. It’s a wide territory with jewelry makers, tinkerers, sculptors, backyard engineers, and front-yard engineers all participating. Alyssa and I love to go because there is so much creativity everywhere that you can’t help getting excited. There are some presenters that do things so simple that I know I could do it right away and some people doing things that I still don’t fully comprehend.

Science teachers are all about hands-on exploration of the world, and they are well represented at the Faire. The Exploratorium always has a big booth and the telescope makers of the Chabot Science Center were there this year as well. Zeke Kossover has done a physics demo magic show for the last two years. I know how all of his demos work, and I do many of them myself, but I still enjoy watching. Here he is with a giant smoke ring maker.

The Clock of the Long Now folks were there with a prototype gear for their clock. As a way of drawing awareness to the long term challenges that face humanity, they are trying to build a clock that will operate without human intervention for thousands of years. Brian Eno help design the chimes, which will intone at century and millenium intervals.

There are a lot of kids doing amazing things. I went to a talk by a 14-year-old who is the CEO of his own game company. He invented a chemistry based game called Elementeo. It looks dorky but he’s selling it through Amazon and the ACS. I got a copy but I’m having trouble getting Alyssa to sit down for a round. I think she may claim I have an unfair advantage. Waiting for food, I saw this kid walk by with a bike he built himself. He actually lifted some of the components from a busted bike, but he and a friend built the frame themselves, out of bamboo. It was a little intimidating, but it was also clear that he succeeded because he never thought about failure. He just built the thing. Definitely a lesson to take home.

On the more spectacular end, someone built a giant robot hand. What’s more, the hand was controlled by a sensor equipped glove. The hand was taller than most people and could pick up (and crush) 55 gallon drums like beer cans. It was awesome, in the traditional sense of inspiring awe.

Once again, steampunk costumes were very popular. I took a lot of pictures, even occasionally asking for poses.

There were many amazing things, but the thing that I’ve thought the most about doing is based on this gentleman’s camera. He’s taken the lens from an old Duaflex camera and mounted it on the front of his digital camera. It’s so simple, but so interesting that i need to try it soon. I’ll post my experiments when it happens.

Alyssa got to be a guest blogger for Nerdabout, writing up her experiences. Here’s her version of the weekend.

Twenty years ago, my dad had a fellowship to work at Scotland Yard. He would spend a month or two each year working in London. I think he loved it. After one stay, he came back talking about a place called the Cabaret Mechanical Theatre. A bunch of Automata makers had banded together to make a tiny museum of their work. A lot featured animated puns, and that’s what stood out in his mind. It sounded like a fascinating place and I resolved to find it when I went to London.

I finally made it, and it was in Covent Garden just where he described it. The animated puns were mildly amusing but the clockworks that made everything run were fascinating. The Barecats were the mascots of the place: a wind up cat that was guided by a tinier windup cat. Who was in control, the person turning the crank or the cranked object?

I think I know where I fall in this graph.

A beautiful time-lapse of the night sky over the course of nine hours.

Galactic Center of Milky Way Rises over Texas Star Party from William Castleman on Vimeo.

(I’m also jealous of his photo equipment — 15mm f/2.8 fisheye!)

Hydro Shock

Originally uploaded by alan_sailer

Not my picture, even though I dearly wish it was. This is from Alan Sailer, a guy that takes amazing high-speed shots in his garage. Harold Edgerton would be pleased.