Wednesday, January 16, 2013
Guide to Etiquette Around the World...
Nice little interactive infographic full of information on things like gestures, tipping, dining protocol, etc...
Incandescent Stupidity...
Via the irreplaceable Rachel Lucas, who says it better than I possibly could:
I love Project Veritas!
...is one of the best distillations of the lunacy of opposition to legal private ownership of guns, and also of the incandescent stupidity of advertising a place as a “Gun-Free Zone”.
It’s also an interesting study of people who I hope are at least dimly aware of the cognitive dissonance that would give vertigo to a rational person.
I love Project Veritas!
Zooniverse...
I ran across the Zooniverse site completely by accident yesterday. It's a portal into a series of web sites designed to allow ordinary citizens to help out on large science projects. The general theme is to help sort through very large quantities of data that aren't amenable to computer analysis. People are very good at detecting patterns, and a number of these web sites seek to exploit that with large numbers of human pattern-detectors.
For example, Planet Four (that would be Mars) is one of the sites is looking for people to help classify some odd features on the enormous collection of high-resolution photos taken by satellites whizzing around Mars. There are so many of these photos that many of them have never been viewed by a human!
You have no excuse to be bored!
For example, Planet Four (that would be Mars) is one of the sites is looking for people to help classify some odd features on the enormous collection of high-resolution photos taken by satellites whizzing around Mars. There are so many of these photos that many of them have never been viewed by a human!
You have no excuse to be bored!
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Solar Ballet...
This flare (from 12/31/2012) is gigantic: the entire Earth would easily fit within it. Via APOD, of course:
Akin's Laws...
Every time I run across these (and I've done so several times over the years), I'm struck by how applicable the majority of these are to software development:
Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design
1. Engineering is done with numbers. Analysis without numbers is only an opinion.
2. To design a spacecraft right takes an infinite amount of effort. This is why it's a good idea to design them to operate when some things are wrong .
3. Design is an iterative process. The necessary number of iterations is one more than the number you have currently done. This is true at any point in time.
4. Your best design efforts will inevitably wind up being useless in the final design. Learn to live with the disappointment.
5. (Miller's Law) Three points determine a curve.
6. (Mar's Law) Everything is linear if plotted log-log with a fat magic marker.
7. At the start of any design effort, the person who most wants to be team leader is least likely to be capable of it.
8. In nature, the optimum is almost always in the middle somewhere. Distrust assertions that the optimum is at an extreme point.
9. Not having all the information you need is never a satisfactory excuse for not starting the analysis.
10. When in doubt, estimate. In an emergency, guess. But be sure to go back and clean up the mess when the real numbers come along.
11. Sometimes, the fastest way to get to the end is to throw everything out and start over.
12. There is never a single right solution. There are always multiple wrong ones, though.
13. Design is based on requirements. There's no justification for designing something one bit "better" than the requirements dictate.
14. (Edison's Law) "Better" is the enemy of "good".
15. (Shea's Law) The ability to improve a design occurs primarily at the interfaces. This is also the prime location for screwing it up.
16. The previous people who did a similar analysis did not have a direct pipeline to the wisdom of the ages. There is therefore no reason to believe their analysis over yours. There is especially no reason to present their analysis as yours.
17. The fact that an analysis appears in print has no relationship to the likelihood of its being correct.
18. Past experience is excellent for providing a reality check. Too much reality can doom an otherwise worthwhile design, though.
19. The odds are greatly against you being immensely smarter than everyone else in the field. If your analysis says your terminal velocity is twice the speed of light, you may have invented warp drive, but the chances are a lot better that you've screwed up.
20. A bad design with a good presentation is doomed eventually. A good design with a bad presentation is doomed immediately.
21. (Larrabee's Law) Half of everything you hear in a classroom is crap. Education is figuring out which half is which.
22. When in doubt, document. (Documentation requirements will reach a maximum shortly after the termination of a program.)
23. The schedule you develop will seem like a complete work of fiction up until the time your customer fires you for not meeting it.
24. It's called a "Work Breakdown Structure" because the Work remaining will grow until you have a Breakdown, unless you enforce some Structure on it.
25. (Bowden's Law) Following a testing failure, it's always possible to refine the analysis to show that you really had negative margins all along.
26. (Montemerlo's Law) Don't do nuthin' dumb.
27. (Varsi's Law) Schedules only move in one direction.
28. (Ranger's Law) There ain't no such thing as a free launch.
29. (von Tiesenhausen's Law of Program Management) To get an accurate estimate of final program requirements, multiply the initial time estimates by pi, and slide the decimal point on the cost estimates one place to the right.
30. (von Tiesenhausen's Law of Engineering Design) If you want to have a maximum effect on the design of a new engineering system, learn to draw. Engineers always wind up designing the vehicle to look like the initial artist's concept.
31. (Mo's Law of Evolutionary Development) You can't get to the moon by climbing successively taller trees.
32. (Atkin's Law of Demonstrations) When the hardware is working perfectly, the really important visitors don't show up.
33. Space is a completely unforgiving environment. If you screw up the engineering, somebody dies (and there's no partial credit because most of the analysis was right...)
The Last Roll of Kodachrome...
Fascinating documentary about a professional photographer who got the last roll of Kodachrome film ever produced. The photographer is Steve McCurry, a famous National Geographic photographer.
Back in my film photography days, I used a lot of Kodachrome (and also Ektachrome). Digital cameras (especially the incredibly capable cameras starting 3 or 4 years ago) have completely upended photography. As I've noted before, for myself the freedom to take as many photos as I want has been the biggest impact. With film, I carefully rationed each frame, as they were expensive. With my modern digital cameras I can take thousands of photos and store them on a single SD card, or even hours of video – and the incremental cost to me is precisely zero...
Back in my film photography days, I used a lot of Kodachrome (and also Ektachrome). Digital cameras (especially the incredibly capable cameras starting 3 or 4 years ago) have completely upended photography. As I've noted before, for myself the freedom to take as many photos as I want has been the biggest impact. With film, I carefully rationed each frame, as they were expensive. With my modern digital cameras I can take thousands of photos and store them on a single SD card, or even hours of video – and the incremental cost to me is precisely zero...
Obama: an Unmitigated Disaster...
Interesting piece by Arnold Trebach. An excerpt:
To put fine point on the matter, our president terrifies me, even though during most of my life I have been a liberal Democrat and voted for him in his first election.I sure would like to see more of this sort of rational thinking from progressives and liberals...
If viewed honestly his first term has been an unmitigated disaster. The national debt is at an historic high. So is unemployment. Despite these sad, undeniable facts, he was elected to another term. That of course is typical of his history for much of his life. He is a master politician of the Chicago school and yet a disaster as a manager and practical leader.
Shenandoah...
Just ran across this beautiful rendition of one of my favorite American folk songs: Shenandoah:
Monday, January 14, 2013
Stereoscopic Images...
When I was a kid, my uncle had a little device called a “View-Master” (which you can read about here) and a bunch of “reels” for it showing photographs of U.S. National Parks. The twist is that the View-Master showed you 3D, full color photographs – reasonably detailed and quite sharp. I was fascinated by the thing; that 3D effect was entrancing. I had no idea how it worked, though I could see that there were actually two photos of each scene on the “reels”, one for each of my eyes.
The phenomenon exploited by the View-Master is the same one that lets us see the real world in 3D: the fact that our two eyes are a short distance apart and see slightly different perspectives on the same scene. Our brains process that information and turn it into the vivid 3D world. View-Master uses photographs taken by two cameras spaced apart horizontally (like our eyes), and then presents them to our eyes to trick our brain into seeing essentially the same 3D image we'd see if we were actually there, where the camera was.
For years I've played with stereo photographs without any special equipment or software, either to take them or to view them. For example, the photos below I took yesterday with a hand-held camera. First I took the photo on the right (which is actually for your left eye); then I moved the camera about four inches to the right and took the photo on the left (which is actually for your right eye). Nothing tricky about this, other than I held the camera as close to the same height as I could, and was careful to point it at the same object for each photo:
Here's the part that may seem a little magical to you if you've never actually done it: you don't need a View-Master (or any other stereoscope) to see these images as a 3D image. You just need to be able to cross your eyes. Seriously. This web site has a great description of how to do it (right where it says – wait for it – “How To Do I”. Just as the author says, once you get started with it, it's remarkably easy to do. I've been doing this for 30 years or so, after accidentally discovering the technique myself (I didn't read about it until many years later).
If you use my image pair above, you should see some little pillars formed by something rain-resistant (like a pebble) so that falling rain erodes everything around it, but not the pillar holding up the rain-resistant item. These rain pillars are very common around here because our rain normally falls straight down – we generally don't have wind and rain at the same time. These pillars should be vividly 3D if you do it right. The sticks above the mud will also be vividly 3D. Can you do it?
This 3D imaging is something I'd like to putz around with, now that I have some time to do it...
The phenomenon exploited by the View-Master is the same one that lets us see the real world in 3D: the fact that our two eyes are a short distance apart and see slightly different perspectives on the same scene. Our brains process that information and turn it into the vivid 3D world. View-Master uses photographs taken by two cameras spaced apart horizontally (like our eyes), and then presents them to our eyes to trick our brain into seeing essentially the same 3D image we'd see if we were actually there, where the camera was.
For years I've played with stereo photographs without any special equipment or software, either to take them or to view them. For example, the photos below I took yesterday with a hand-held camera. First I took the photo on the right (which is actually for your left eye); then I moved the camera about four inches to the right and took the photo on the left (which is actually for your right eye). Nothing tricky about this, other than I held the camera as close to the same height as I could, and was careful to point it at the same object for each photo:
Here's the part that may seem a little magical to you if you've never actually done it: you don't need a View-Master (or any other stereoscope) to see these images as a 3D image. You just need to be able to cross your eyes. Seriously. This web site has a great description of how to do it (right where it says – wait for it – “How To Do I”. Just as the author says, once you get started with it, it's remarkably easy to do. I've been doing this for 30 years or so, after accidentally discovering the technique myself (I didn't read about it until many years later).
If you use my image pair above, you should see some little pillars formed by something rain-resistant (like a pebble) so that falling rain erodes everything around it, but not the pillar holding up the rain-resistant item. These rain pillars are very common around here because our rain normally falls straight down – we generally don't have wind and rain at the same time. These pillars should be vividly 3D if you do it right. The sticks above the mud will also be vividly 3D. Can you do it?
This 3D imaging is something I'd like to putz around with, now that I have some time to do it...
Rolling in the Deep, an a capella Cover...
After seeing my post yesterday, reader Larry E. sent along this video of another similar artist. Awesome:
More of Mike Tompkin's stuff here...
More of Mike Tompkin's stuff here...
Weight Bearing!
We just got back from a followup with Debbie's surgeon – and she now has permission to start putting weight on her (formerly) broken knee. This is a huge milestone for her! She's ramping up slowly, from 15 lbs today to her full weight in three weeks. Woo hoo!
The Bronze Rat...
A parable, via reader Jim M., with a nice twist:
A tourist walked into a Chinese curio shop in San Francisco . While looking around at the exotic merchandise, he noticed a very lifelike, life-sized, bronze statue of a rat. It had no price tag, but was so incredibly striking the tourist decided he must have it. He took it to the old shop owner and asked, "How much for the bronze rat ?"
"Ahhh, you have chosen wisely! It is $12 for the rat and $100 for the story," said the wise old Chinaman.
The tourist quickly pulled out twelve dollars. "I'll just take the rat, you can keep the story".
As he walked down the street carrying his bronze rat, the tourist noticed that a few real rats had crawled out of the alleys and sewers and had begun following him down the street. This was a bit disconcerting so he began walking faster.
A couple blocks later he looked behind him and saw to his horror the herd of rats behind him had grown to hundreds, and they began squealing.
Sweating now, the tourist began to trot toward San Francisco Bay .
Again, after a couple blocks, he looked around only to discover that the rats now numbered in the MILLIONS, and were squealing and coming toward him faster and faster.
Terrified, he ran to the edge of the Bay and threw the bronze rat as far as he could into the Bay.
Amazingly, the millions of rats all jumped into the Bay after the bronze rat and were all drowned.
The man walked back to the curio shop in Chinatown .
"Ahhh," said the owner, "You come back for story?"
"No sir," said the man, "I came back to see if you have a bronze Democrat."
Sunday, January 13, 2013
Beloved Leader...
Via Jim M.:
Kim Jung Un had NO military experience whatsoever before Daddy made him a four-star general. This snot-nosed twerp had never accomplished anything in his life that would even come close to military leadership. He hadn't even so much as led a Cub Scout troop, coached a sports team, or commanded a military platoon. So he is made the "Beloved Leader" of North Korea. Terrific!
Oh shoot! I'm sorry. I just remembered that we did the same thing. We took an arrogant community organizer, who had never worn a uniform, and made him Commander-in-Chief. A guy who had never had a real job, worked on a budget, or led anything more than an ACORN demonstration, and we made him President of the United States – TWICE!
I'm sorry I brought this up. Never mind.
Best White House Petition Evah!
Sign it here! As I write this, it's three quarters of the way there. The entire petition:
Eliminate armed guards for the President, Vice-President, and their families, and establish Gun Free Zones around them
Gun Free Zones are supposed to protect our children, and some politicians wish to strip us of our right to keep and bear arms. Those same politicians and their families are currently under the protection of armed Secret Service agents. If Gun Free Zones are sufficient protection for our children, then Gun Free Zones should be good enough for politicians.
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