nonregardless

Things to Do

2011-02-06T17:18:00.000-04:00

So we're almost done with the first week of Thing-a-Day month. I'm not really participating, but I'm still trying to take it as inspiration to make something, fix something, or do something new every day. So far most of my daily projects are pretty typical: fixing a drawer in the bathroom, cleaning the back porch, starting some seeds in egg cartons. But while I've been unemployed over the last few months, I've done some other little projects, and I thought I'd share them in the hopes that they'll inspire somebody else.

Paper lantern

There's something about lanterns (as well as kites, umbrellas, and folding fans) that I find fascinating. They're really pretty great. This type of lantern is easy to make with only a piece of paper and some glue.

The easiest instructions I've found are on this construction paper website.
But the best instructions are on this lantern festival site. However, they don't really explain how they come up with their measurements. Here's the deal: it's all in the spacing between the lines that you fold. On that site, they use 12cm, but you can change that. Just make sure that your spacing is even - if your paper is 8.5" wide, don't choose a spacing of 2", or you'll have half an inch left over. The length and width spacings don't have to be the same; in fact, if you choose different ones, it changes the shape of the triangles, as you can see in my picture on the left. The shorter, stockier one is made according to the directions on the site, and rolled lengthwise; the taller one has about twice as many divisions and is rolled vertically.

I suspended a little rgb LED inside one of mine; you can also use them as a lampshade, if you get a large enough piece of paper (or plastic) and if you have a suitable lamp.

Plant trellis

At a bed & breakfast that my mom is especially fond of, one of the owners makes these adorable, rustic little fences around the gardens by weaving branches together. I was impressed by how simple and attractive it was, and eventually that memory inspired this trellis for my passion vine.

This is pretty simple; I just took some old bamboo stakes and stuck them around the edges of the pot. Then I wove other bamboo stakes between them, alternating the direction to make it more stable. I plan on upgrading this with longer and nicer bamboo stakes when the hardware store gets some in stock.

It may look like it'll fall apart at any moment, but it's actually fairly stable. And it really makes a great trellis for climbing vines.

Stuff for the cats

Okay, easiest to hardest.

Our cat Banana loves to sleep on piles of clothes, but she's always scared that another cat might be sneaking up behind her. So I made this little BoxHab the other day and put it on the floor of the closet with an old towel inside. I traced a circle on it with a flowerpot, cut it out and taped the box closed. It took maybe 5 minutes.

She likes it fairly well. At least, she's stopped sleeping on the clothes, and she chases the other cats away from this little cave.

I also made this scratching pad (on right) out of a few pieces of the massive amount of cardboard that this house goes through. I found the instructions for making this here; it's the first result for "make cat scratching pad".

It's very easy and fairly time-consuming. All you need is cardboard, masking tape, a ruler, and a knife. It actually takes quite a bit of cardboard, and I only chose to make mine 2" thick instead of 4", like the instructions recommend. This probably took me a couple hours; your mileage may vary, depending on the size of the boxes you use.

Sprinkling some catnip on the scratching pad (and making sure that it falls down in the holes) will definitely help make sure your cat gets the right idea, and prefers scratching the cardboard to scratching your furniture.

Finally, I spent quite a bit of time working on this cat perch. If you ever wonder why they're so expensive in the pet store, try making one.

Honestly, this one has probably not been worth the time and energy I put into it. It was fun, don't get me wrong, but there were some issues.

First, it's a little tricky getting a single post to support several stable platforms. I'd recommend at least two.

Also, our cat Stella, who uses it the most, drives the other cats away. She mostly likes to sit on the top platform and look out the window. I think each cat wants its own separate piece of furniture.

The scratching post part, made by wrapping sisal twine around a post, is probably the most popular part. It was definitely worth the time investment, which wasn't much... I might try making a small scratching post for my next cat-related project.

How to attach a tassel to a hat

2011-01-25T23:10:00.000-04:00

I recently knit a hat (the subject of a soon-to-be-finished blog post), and when I finished, my lady friend declared that it needed a tassel. So she made one out of the remaining yarn (she is the greatest). I tried to look up instructions on how to attach a tassel to a hat, but most of them said to weave the ends into the body of the hat, or tie the ends in a knot. That didn't seem very graceful. Here's the solution I came up (or probably reinvented) for weaving the ends back into the tassel itself.

Of course, you have to start out by making a tassel. If you don't have a card, you can use your hand, it's not that hard. When you're done, take the two long tail pieces and tie them in a simple overhand knot, repeatedly. This will form a nice, sturdy cord for the tassel (as you can see below). When it's as long as you want, thread one of the tails on a yarn needle and follow along:

Pull it through the final loop at the crown of the hat. In this picture, it's going in through the loop, and coming out through the first row of stitches.

Then you turn around and go through one of the "chain links" in the tassel's cord.
We're going to be heading back up toward the tassel, following the chain links to stay invisible.

As you can see, we're further along. If your tail is too short to let you bring the point of the needle around, just take the yarn out of the needle, put the needle in place (as shown), and then re-thread the needle. This common trick will help you get the last couple of inches out of a short tail.

Finally, when you're back up at the tassel, just push the needle (with yarn) up through the ball of the tassel, and out among the yarn on the other side. Trim it to match the length of the other pieces, and it disappears into the tassel!
If this was the first tail, repeat with the other one, and you're done.
If you ever want to remove the tassel, gently tug on the yarn strands at the base of the tassel until you find one that's willing to come loose. It'll be one of your tails. Pull them both all the way out, and you can remove the tassel without damaging it.

Brindle, Swindle, Dwindle, Spindle...

2011-01-11T01:23:00.005-04:00

It's a weird little consonant cluster, isn't it? "ndle".

So a few days ago, my new Kindle 3 arrived. I've been pretty busy with it. I spent the first half of the day it arrived complaining about the UI. Which was, perhaps, unfair - after all, it's designed to be a platform for selling Amazon's proprietary .amz eBook format, and being poor, I have little to no interest in that. I wanted a Kindle to read academic papers, knitting patterns, and recipes. It's a bit lousy at zooming and navigating PDFs. But it does work adequately with PDFs (it's much nicer to read than a glowing screen), and it also works fine with plain text files. I rather wish they'd included a text editor, so I could keep a grocery list on the thing and update it, but it's not an iPhone.

It is, however, surprisingly spry. After spending the morning complaining about my new device, it turns out that I couldn't go a day without jailbreaking it. Personally, I'm not all that interested in custom fonts, and it's neat to be able to set up fun custom screensaver images, but I went straight for the usbnetwork package. It's mostly intended to re-enable the factory capability of Kindles to switch from acting like a USB mass storage device to acting as a USB ethernet device. With this mode enabled, you can telnet into the kindle over the USB connection. It's a great feeling to see that first root shell prompt, but if you just hang in there and edit the config file, you can turn off that ridiculous telnet and just run a SSH daemon from the Kindle's wifi address, and tell it to stay on all the time, so it can go back to being a mass storage device. You'll also have to replace the default root password with one of your choosing. Now, you'll probably also want to enable public key login by creating an authorized_keys file in the usbnet config folder with the key from the ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub file on your computer. Now, since the included ssh daemon (dropbear) supports sftp, I can just browse to sftp://root@kindleIP/mnt/us/documents in nautilus, and add new PDFs and free ebooks to my kindle without ever having to plug it in. Almost as nice as whispernet!

I followed up by installing this excellent little hacked-together terminal and launchpad app (also has a web server, but I don't need that). Unlike the other hacks, it's not set up to install as an "official" update, so I had to add a startup script. I decided to do it the standard way, and just created a typical new script in /etc/init.d/:

#! /bin/sh
# /etc/init.d/kiterm
case "$1" in
start)
echo "Starting kiterm "
/mnt/us/kiterm/myts.arm &
;;
stop)
echo "Stopping kiterm "
killall myts.arm
;;
*)
echo "Usage: /etc/init.d/kiterm {start|stop}"
exit 1
;;
esac
exit 0

The last step is just to add a link in rc5.d: "ln -s /etc/init.d/kiterm /etc/rc5.d/S97kiterm" so that it starts automatically at boot (and late enough that the launchpad keyboard hooks actually register). My Kindle's now a handy little emergency shell. Update: as an anonymous commenter pointed out below, you should also make the script executable with the command "chmod +x /etc/init.d/kiterm".

Even if you have a Kindle but don't want to hack it, there's still a sizable list of undocumented keyboard shortcuts you'll probably find interesting. Some of them don't work on mine; I assume they're for the DX or something.

These Kindles are also fairly fragile little devices (my lady friend has gone through... 4?) so I'm also working on making a case from the hardback cover of an old journal. I think it's going well so far.

A Linux stereo

2010-09-22T11:45:00.002-04:00

It started out innocently enough. I had a little home server, a shuttle kpc with just a power cord and an ethernet cable attaching it to the world, and it was my file/backup server (it was the anonymous "server" in my rsync backup script from a year or two ago). It's been running happily for a couple years.

Recently I noticed that our house had a stereo that wasn't being used. Well, it's not really a stereo, it's a dvd player. One of those solid, bulky dvd players, from the days before streaming video, when a 400-lb. home entertainment center sounded like a good idea. It has a 5.1 speaker system, an FM/AM tuner, and can take a few different inputs. But we don't have a TV in the house anymore, so it's just a stereo.

I thought about hooking the dvd/stereo up to my desktop pc, but for lack of a 30ft. cat5 cable, it's still offline, and not terribly useful for media enjoyment. So then I thought about connecting the stereo to my server, and I went digging for Linux solutions. This is probably where it turned into more of an ongoing project than a quick task.

There's lots of good media center apps and distros. But while XBMC and MythTV are quite fancy, they're not what I'm after. I don't need a DVR, and I don't want a streaming media server yet. I just want a web interface to play music locally on my server.

Well, the best solution I found was mpd (music player daemon). It's been around a while, but it still works quite well. And it's designed to be controlled remotely. There are a lot of clients available: some command-line, some local, and some remote. There are even a lot of php clients, but most of them are clunky or terrible. My favorite is ExtMPD, and my favorite web client designed for mobile devices (Android/iPhone/PDA) is iPodMP (page in German). They're super easy to use: you just unzip the archives and toss them in a web server root (eg, /var/www) (after the web server is installed, of course. lighthttpd and apache are popular).

I also made sure to log into our router and edit the DNS settings to add "media" as a hostname associated with the server's ip address. This way, roommates and guests can just type "media" in their address bar and the remote control will show up.

So now I could play music remotely on my server. But there's also an Apple TimeCapsule in the house with music on it, and another MacBook with more music. To make those available, I first added lines to /etc/fstab to automatically mount the SMB/CIFS shares from the Macs. Well, first I made sure they were sharing the folders, then I added the mounts. Anyway, each fstab line looked something like:

//timecapsule/music /mnt/timecapsule cifs username=guest,password=blank,noserverino 1 2

If you want specific user access instead of guest access, you can probably guess what you should change.

Then I set mpd's music folder in /etc/mpd.conf to a folder I created (I used /usr/share/mpd, but anything would work). Then I put symlinks in the folder: one to my music folder on the server, one to the TimeCapsule's mount point, and one to the MacBook's mount point. At this point, it was time to update mpd's database. If you have the mpc package installed, you can just type "mpc update" and it'll run in the background. "tail /var/log/mpd/mpd.log" will show you its progress. If it gives you any read errors, check your permissions on those files/folders.

Finally I had a nice mpd setup, with one top-level folder for each of our music collections in the house. Once everything was working I hacked at ExtMPD a bit, to add a couple small features it was sorely missing. It's easy to work with, all JavaScript and PHP. The ExtJS framework it's built on supports drag-and-drop, so I might try seeing if I can add that functionality next.

Edit: Oh, right! I keep forgetting things. So I also set up the server to announce these services using Avahi. If you aren't familiar with it, it's the Linux implementation of Bonjour/Zeroconf. It's like the NetBIOS protocol that Windows uses for local name resolution, but much more advanced. Macs have great support for it. There are a few articles on the fun ways you can announce different services and set the way your server shows up to OS X: I used these ones, this one, and parts of this one.

Chain Sinnet Variations

2010-07-15T01:33:00.000-04:00

'My MacBook Pro Has a Monkey Braid! :)' by tomas carillo

The chain sinnet (monkey braid, etc.) is an incredibly easy knot that's useful to shorten ropes or cables. These days, as far as I can tell, it's mainly used by survivalists (to make paracord accessories) and computer dorks (for cable management).

Sennit or sinnet, by the way, is a term for a type of rope made by plaiting or braiding smaller cords together in some way. As a tool and an art form, it was most extensively developed by Pacific island cultures.

If you've never tried making it, Lifehacker did a post last year which explains the normal technique: Use a Chain Sinnet to Tidy Cables.

If you make a proper chain sinnet with a cable, it should turn out something like the picture in the upper right. It looks quite attractive, but it has some downsides. The main problem I have is that it essentially takes a thin cable and makes it act like a large ribbon cable. In some ways, this is useful: it's still flexible, it's not likely to tangle, and you can fold it up to compress it. But it doesn't bunch up very well, and it's not very springy. I'll get back to that in a minute.

Chain sinnet can look very different with different sizes and types of rope. With cables like the MacBook power cable above, it often ends up looking like a series of loops (which it is). But with thicker, more flexible rope, it can look like the version at left, from Wikimedia Commons. Crocheters and embroiderers will certainly recognize the ubiquitous chain stitch in the form of the chain sinnet. And if any knitters out there think this picture seems strangely familiar, it does to me, too: I think stockinette stitch is rather like a chain sinnet extrapolated to another dimension. Chain sinnet is a single column of recursive loops; stockinette stitch is made of rows and columns of recursive, interlocking loops.

The first few times I made the chain sinnet for cable management, I didn't always do it correctly. Sometimes I would twist the loop in one hand before inserting the next loop into it, especially if I wasn't paying attention. And instead of laying flat, the sinnet braid would twist. Interesting! After a bit of experimentation, I found a couple handy variations on the standard chain sinnet.

For these explanations, I'll assume you're making a chain sinnet just like Grog does, but turned 90° to the right, with the tail of the work at the bottom and the working end at the top; that you pass each new loop up into the previous loop from below; and that for each loop, the tail end (the part going back to the previous loop) is on your right, compared to the working end (going to the next loop), which is on your left.

Now, if you'll notice, there are two basic specification requirements for the standard chain sinnet (come up from underneath, and keep the working end of each loop on the left), so we'll discuss two variations.

The first variation on this is simply that you alternate the positions of the working end and the tail end of the string/rope/cable. For the first loop, keep the working end on the left and the tail on the right. Then reverse it for the next loop. You can see the results in the photo to the left. The working end is at the top (ready for the next loop), and the tail is at the bottom. The chain sinnet still turns out quite ribbon-like, but it twists side-to-side more easily.

The second variation is to alternate the direction you insert each loop into the previous loop. First you come up from below, then insert the next loop in from above. In the example on the right, using audio cable from some headphones, I kept the ends of each loop in the same orientation (working end left, tail end right, for instance), and the chain sinnet naturally falls into a lovely helix, which acts a bit like old phone cord coils: it's springy, and reverts to a compressed, bunched-up shape when left alone. This variation is much more handy for shortening cables than the standard chain sinnet, since it compresses better.

Here's a homework problem for those among you with free time: my alternating-insert variation helix turns counter-clockwise as it progresses. How could you make it turn the other way? Could you combine these two variations to form a chain sinnet which collapses like an accordion or Jacob's ladder? What happens if you switch after every second or third loop, instead of every loop? Are there any other variations that I've missed?

Incidentally, if you're interested in making a chain sinnet survival paracord bracelet (or collar), the technique is slightly different than the standard chain sinnet. You can see the details in this instructable, and this blog post has some good pictures and links. Basically, because your lanyard has a loop at the tail end, you will end up with two working ends, which will be braided together as you go. When the current loop faces left, you make the next loop with the left working end and insert it. Vice versa for alternating loops. If you want to make your bracelet fancy, you can begin and/or end with the lanyard knot, which is useful for that sort of thing.

Famous Scientists

2010-03-25T06:51:00.002-04:00

The Curies in love, by Kate Beaton
(also see the T-shirt)

So at this point, I think it should be transparently obvious to any educated person that women and men have an equal capacity for competence (and greatness) in any field. But sadly, some people are quite dense, and prejudice and sexual favoritism still linger in public consciousness. This disparity is especially noticeable in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), where men still outnumber women 3 to 1 (up from 13-to-1 in 1975, but still).

Today, I'd just like to take a moment to highlight some of the achievements of women in technology that I personally admire. There are many, many other examples, but these are some of my favorites.

First, from the field of linguistics, one of my favorite linguists is Victoria Fromkin, whose work on speech errors is both brilliant and delightfully interesting. Another of my favorite linguists is Deborah Tannen, whose research in discourse analysis has focused primarily on communication styles. She's published several pop linguistics books, and her writing is quite accessible.

In computer science, of course, there are two notable and highly respected figures who I would be remiss to omit. Ada Lovelace is often considered the first computer programmer. It's actually in honor of Ada Day (March 24) that I'm writing this post. Admiral Hopper is often credited, among numerous achievements of a singular life, with the invention of the compiler. Reading about her reminds me quite a bit of the head of my CS department in college, whom I always associate with the word "rigorous".

Photo 51

Now, the field of x-ray crystallography is not one of my specialties. Heck, I'd never heard of the field before today. But it is interesting in this context because several of the famous crystallographers are ladies. The most controversial is probably Rosalind Franklin, by all accounts an exceptionally skilled crystallography photographer, who produced the infamous Photo 51 (pictured at right). This photograph was apparently the inspiration for Watson and Crick's famous description of the molecular structure of DNA. Another famous crystallographer is Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, one of the founders of the field of protein crystallography (describing penicillin, B-12, and insulin), who also managed to find time to work with numerous organizations for world peace.

There are also several renaissance women I'd like to bring to your attention. As with their male overachiever counterparts, a glance at the lives of these people could make you wonder what the hell you've been doing with your life. Lillian Moller Gilbreth was an industrial management psychology professor/consultant, civil engineer, and advisor to four U.S. presidents. Oh, and mother of TWELVE. Sophia Brahe was a Dutch horticulturalist, chemist, healer, astronomer, and historian, overshadowed a bit by her brother. Beatrix Potter, whose book "Peter Rabbit" you might be familiar with, was a brilliant but frustrated mycologist, and left 4,000 acres to the National Trust in her will. The Linnean Society apologized a hundred years later for snubbing her groundbreaking work because of her gender. And finally, going way back in time, we have the Alexandrian Hypatia, a celibate mathematician, philosopher, physicist, and astronomer, who was brutally murdered and flayed by a Christian mob. I think I'll end with my favorite quote attributed to Hypatia, which does not say what I thought it said at first:

All formal dogmatic religions are fallacious and must never be accepted by self-respecting persons as final.

Indiscrete

2010-03-24T04:41:00.000-04:00

Reading is fun by John-Morgan

By choosing a limited alphabet to represent the sounds of our language, we intentionally limit our perception. An easy example that most people never consider is that the last letter in "dogs" and in "cats" is pronounced differently. They're different sounds: one sounds like a "z" and another sounds like an "s". And it's not just our alphabet: English also has a specific phoneme inventory, the set of sounds that English speakers have implicitly agreed make up their language. Native English speakers often have a difficult time distinguishing phonetic features we don't use, like aspiration. Our phoneme inventory doesn't have any sounds that are required to have (or lack) aspiration, so we don't notice it. If you've ever heard the tired joke about flied lice, it's the same thing: most East Asian languages don't separate central and lateral approximants, like "r" and "l" sounds. (There's also this classic. New phonemes can be hard to learn.) All languages have this sort of limitation, to one degree or another, because it's only by limiting our perception that we can divide the smooth, intractable continuum of reality into discrete bites that we can compare and contrast. But it doesn't really matter how we divide reality, so everyone does it a little bit differently.

We do a similar thing with numbers. By choosing a base-10 system, we get 10 atomic numbers (0-9) to use to represent all natural numbers. By adding a sign (±), we represent integers; by taking two integers and forming a ratio, we can represent all rational numbers. But we can never quite make it to the real numbers this way. As soon as humans discovered interesting irrational numbers that we wanted to talk about, we had to give them names like 'π' and 'e', new letters in our formerly pristine 10-character numeral set. With these new atoms, we can now easily describe some irrational numbers like "4π+1". But to be able to express all real numbers, I'm fairly sure we would need an infinite number of numerical symbols.

Even choosing base-10 limits our perception of the possibilities in the rational numbers. By choosing base 10, it is transparently obvious to us which numbers are multiples of 2 and 5. Since 10 is evenly divisible by those numbers, any multiple of 5 will end in 5 or 0, and a multiple of 2 in 2, 4, 6, 8, 0. But it is not transparently obvious which numbers are multiples of 4, for instance, because 10 is not evenly divisible by 4. We can't tell just by looking at the last digit. If we consider hexadecimal (base-16), any multiple of 4 ends in 0, 4, 8, C; but we lose the intuitiveness of counting by fives and tens.

Hexadecimal, actually, demonstrates exactly what I'm talking about. After 9, there aren't any more single digits, so A-F are drafted as the numbers 10-15. But most people don't actually like using hexadecimal, perhaps because they have to pretend that letters are numbers, and it seems perverse. At some point above ten, in any number system, people stop thinking of numbers as unique entities, and start thinking of them as composites. "Twenty-two", for instance, is twenty-plus-two, or "twenty-and-two", as Romance languages literally say. This is the spoken-language analogue of positional notation.

Spoken English doesn't treat these numbers quite the same as written base-10 Arabic numerals do. Spoken English continues to treat ten, eleven, and twelve as atomic entities. The teens are the gray area where our conception is not clear. 13 is a two-digit number, but "thirteen" is a word with odd morphology. All the -teens have the same first morpheme as their tens counterparts: thirteen, thirty; fifteen, fifty. So why isn't "twelve" "twenteen" instead? Perhaps it's only in modern times that we treat the teens as atomic; when their morphemes were distinct, did "thirteen" mean "ten and three"? Spanish makes it to "quince" (15) before changing over to a positional notation. Mandarin switches at 10. But in all languages, the larger a number becomes, the more obviously artificial its representation becomes, as it's constructed from smaller numbers.

In spoken language, new magnitude markers (tens, a hundred, a thousand) also need to be unique, or else very large numbers would get unwieldy... but we run into limits there, too. You probably can't even guess what comes after an octillion, and I'm not sure I know many computer nerds who know offhand what comes after an exabyte. Shortly thereafter, if you look at those pages, the most brilliant minds in humanity just run out of names. And negative-exponent magnitudes have the same problem (but in the other direction).

Why is our grasp of numbers so limited that we can only distinguish between 10 and 20 individual numbers before we arbitrarily call them by compound names? Is our mental conception limited and discrete because our language is discrete? Vice versa? Are our thoughts and language even separable?

What's the largest number of items in a collection that you can identify at a glance, before you have to stop and count? What about if they're in a line? There's a reason that we have dice pip shapes and tally marks. When we see more than 4 or 5 similar items in one place, we have a hard time taking them in all at once. We have to break the collection up into smaller pieces (or arrange it into a unique shape) that we can identify more easily.

Human brains are not like calculators. Most of us, anyway, have an extremely limited working memory. George A. Miller popularized the 7-plus-or-minus-2 rule for the number of distinct concepts that the average person can hold in working memory. But if you keep reading that article, you'll see that modern cognitive psychologists agree that it's more like 4. Fortunately our long-term memory has a much larger capacity.

Then there are the "human calculators". Anyone can learn, with sufficient practice, to do pretty incredible mental calculations through complex "chunking". But that's not what Daniel Tammet (and possibly other autistic savants) does. I could explain it, but this documentary clip does a much more interesting job.

Tammet envisions numbers up to 10,000 as individual entities, each with a unique shape, color, and emotional association. He says, "When I multiply numbers together, I see two shapes. The image starts to change and evolve, and a third shape emerges. That's the answer. It's mental imagery. It's like maths without having to think." I think it's likely that the extra attributes caused by his synaesthesia make a much larger domain of numbers seem like distinct atoms.

A continuous line and some discrete approximations.

We break up the continuous visual spectrum into discrete colors, the audio spectrum into notes and phones and frequencies, the ℝeal numbers into floating-point values, space into feet and meters, time into years, hours, nanoseconds; we divide reality into units. One of the most incredible leaps of faith in modern science is the infinitesimal step across the chasm between continuum and series. And so what?

Segmentation has brought us a long way. Language, mathematics, and science are founded on abstract, reductionist principles. It could be because our senses just work that way. We perceive distinct colors because the cone cells in our eyes are sensitive to three (or four) primary colors which combine to form all other colors. We recognize acoustic pitch because the hair cells in the inner ear are tuned to distinct frequencies.

A Kanizsa triangle, with illusory edges.

But there are a few places in our experience of the world that seem to be continuous. With sight, for instance, we have the illusion of continuity. If you look at a straight line, like those in the illustration above, they seem whole, without interruption. That's because, as you look at the line, a series of neighboring photoreceptor cells on your retina will be firing at the same time, in a pattern that corresponds with the line. That information gets sent off to the primary visual cortex, where a line-detecting cell notices it. An oversimplification, but mostly true. The problem is that your eye isn't necessarily seeing a straight line. If your blind spot is in the center of the line, your brain performs some perceptual completion and fills in the missing part of the line, whether it's actually there or not. I think that our entire perception of a continuous world is based on this kind of convenient fiction; if you take a pencil and draw a line on paper, it's not a continuous line. There will be gaps in the line, due to the microscopic texture of the paper. But because our eyes can't achieve that kind of resolution, our subconscious visual cortices take what we can perceive - a series of closely-spaced dots - and announce to our conscious perception that we're looking at a straight line.

The same is true of nerves in the skin; and our sense of touch is vulnerable to the same kind of illusion. Take the cutaneous rabbit illusion, for example. Even our body image, or sense of proprioception, is quite malleable, and will simply ignore discontinuities in certain circumstances, as the clever rubber hand experiments show.

Our perception of time also seems to be continuous. But time perception involves all the senses, and inconsistencies have to be synchronized to fit our internal narrative and our model of physics. Dr. David Eagleman has studied time perception fairly extensively, and from his description it seems clear that our sense of time can be easily fooled by slow motion and by our own expectations. Our perception is probably not continuous. It seems limited to a maximum resolution of 80ms, and at a conscious level it can be much worse (if we zone out, for instance, and stop paying attention).

So we can't directly perceive a continuous world. In fact, our sampling rates, which determine our sensory resolutions, are adapted to fit our circumstances. Birds have better vision, bears have better senses of smell - humans have fairly well-rounded senses, but we're not really exceptional in any of them. Fortunately, intelligence isn't correlated with exceptional senses (owls, with spectacular vision and hearing, have tiny brains). But there must be a happy medium. I wonder, on the other end of the spectrum, about the minimum amount of reality that an organism can receive from its senses and still develop consciousness.

So far, I haven't been able to find any congenital disorders that deprive humans of more than 2 senses. Touch is especially resilient. I wonder what mammals have the least amount of sensory input, or what vertebrates? Do they also perceive the world as continuous, through discrete senses? And is the universe, at a fundamental level, discrete or continuous? Are we made of particles, waves, strings?

All of the above?

Opaque Conventions

2010-03-23T06:35:00.012-04:00

So I spend some of my time helping fairly computer-illiterate people with their computers. And I think anyone who has done this sort of thing for more than a few minutes will have come to two conclusions.

Blnguyen

One is that you need to have a bit of patience. Some people will be terrified, and they'll flail around as if they were drowning. Some people will be timid, and if you're helping them over the phone, they'll take some coaxing before they dip their toes in, and click on what you want them to. Some people want to be in control, and if you take the mouse from them, they will never learn a damn thing. And a lot of people are just frustrated and angry.

The other conclusion is that there's an appreciable difference in the mindsets of people who are comfortable with new things, and people who will never get there. I made a short list of qualities I think are relevant to learning, see what you think. (Later I'll have to go back and compare these to my class notes on language acquisition.)

Humility. If you aren't willing to admit that you don't know what you're doing, you'll have a hard time retaining new concepts. I sometimes hear this expressed as an adage, that a cup must be empty before it can be filled. Anyone who works with technology eventually comes to terms with the idea that everything they know now will be obsolete well before they retire. Sometimes humility means reading (and re-reading) the documentation/instructions with an open mind, and sometimes it means asking somebody for help.
Motivational Wolf
Motivation. If you don't want to learn a lesson, you won't. And next time, you'll have to re-learn it all over again. Learning to do anything worthwhile takes a big investment of time and energy. It's also hard to be humble, and forget what you know, and start over. Fortunately for a lot of computer nerds, curiosity is ample motivation.
Confidence. There are a lot of personal success books out there. Many of them are probably familiar to you (they're bestsellers). They often claim to have some secret plan for success, but I think they all agree that motivation and confidence are vital. If you believe you can do it, and you want it bad enough, there's almost nothing you can't accomplish. But you don't have to take my word for it; ask somebody that you think is successful.
Experience. The end result of learning. It's a fancy word for making a lot of mistakes, isn't it? Over and over again. Sometimes I think that the really smart people in the world are the ones who can learn from other people's mistakes. You don't need to start out with experience to learn, although it sometimes makes it easier. You do, however, have to make some mistakes.

Did I miss anything? Well, okay, that stuff might be interesting, but you can probably find it all in education textbooks and self-help books. That wasn't my real point in writing this post. I want to talk about conventions.

Bridgerunde by Gerhard Elsner

My grandparents played bridge for quite a few years. I tried to learn from them, but my motivation wasn't strong enough for me to memorize the scoring system. If you aren't familiar with it, contract bridge is a partnership-based game, and it's somewhat famous for its conventions. Much like ordinary social conventions, bridge conventions are agreed-upon rules to make life a bit simpler. A convention is a secret code, a shorthand, but in bridge, you're supposed to disclose your conventions to the other players. And both partners need to agree on what they mean. Again, much like social norms and conventions.

This does not hold true for computer user interface conventions. I mean, yes, a lot of conventions never get to that point; they never get standardized across programs or platforms. On Windows computers, the cryptic CTRL-ALT-DEL combination is now reserved for invoking the OS when you want to login, lock the screen, etc. On Linux it is typically only used for rebooting. On Macs it does nothing.

Others are widely known and understood, like double-clicking. But quite a few conventions are totally opaque. The idiosyncratic behavior of one program gets duplicated in a competitor, perhaps, and eventually it's industry standard. I'm still a bit mystified at how this happens.

My favorite example, which many people never learn, is the convention of using the Control and Shift keys with the mouse. Holding Ctrl while dragging a file indicates that it should be copied, and not moved, to its destination. Holding Shift does the opposite. Ctrl+Shift+Drag creates a shortcut. Holding Ctrl while scrolling zooms in and out (in many applications); holding Shift scrolls horizontally.

Another example is tab completion, which works just as well in the Windows CLI as it does in most Unix-based shells. Yet I rarely see other people use it. Maybe command-line conventions aren't the best example, since almost the entire user interface is hidden.

These are commonly used conventions, and when learning a new interface, it can save you a lot of time if you and the developers both agree to use them. I think that's what we mean when we talk about a program's UI being "intuitive": that it implements the conventions we're used to.

It's also worthwhile knowing UI conventions because often they're implemented in software, but not available in the menus. A lot of Explorer windows don't have a menu option for "Refresh", but F5 continues to work. And just today, I wanted to make a copy of a tab I was using in Firefox; out of curiosity I tried holding Ctrl while dragging a tab, and up popped a little + symbol. Like magic. Experimentation can get you a long way!

Anyway, I think nonstandard and opaque conventions are a detriment to computer literacy. Maybe better documentation is a solution? Maybe not. If you've discovered other examples like these, I'd like to hear them. I've probably got hundreds buried in my subconscious, but it's not really something I consciously think about very often. Is there a secret club where people meet to share undocumented conventions? Or is this just something that people should figure out for themselves?

Invalid email address

2010-03-18T20:41:00.010-04:00

Has this ever happened to you? A form on a website requires you to enter an email address, but you don't want to enter your real one, so you put something like "NO" in the email address field. When you try to submit the form, the clever developer has found a way to detect your deception! You're told "invalid email address" or something, and the site makes you fill it in again. So people will put something like "no@no.com" and this time, the developer is outwitted, and the form accepts your entry.

Well, the method that developers typically use to decide whether your text is a valid email address is called "Regular Expressions". The idea in this case is that you try to come up with a coded expression which describes every possible valid email address. In theory, it shouldn't be that hard. There's a specification for email addresses (RFC 5322), and you can just convert that spec to a regex.

And people have done that... but wait. The actual specification allows email addresses like "Bob Jones"@[4.2.2.1] that, while technically valid, probably won't be sent properly by a lot of mail hosts. And the fully compliant regex is... pretty long.

(?:[a-z0-9!#$%&'*+/=?^_`{|}~-]+(?:\.[a-z0-9!#$%&'*+/=?^_`{|}~-]+)*|"(?:[\x01-\x08\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x1f\x21\x23-\x5b\x5d-\x7f]|\\[\x01-\x09\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x7f])*")@(?:(?:[a-z0-9](?:[a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9])?\.)+[a-z0-9](?:[a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9])?|\[(?:(?:25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)\.){3}(?:25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?|[a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9]:(?:[\x01-\x08\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x1f\x21-\x5a\x53-\x7f]|\\[\x01-\x09\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x7f])+)\])

I'm not even sure that's correct, but I'll take this guy's word for it. Actually, go ahead and check out that link. They cover this topic in pretty good detail.

Anyway, implementing the full regex is a bit awkward, and it's an interesting challenge, so a lot of people make up their own. Poorly. I think I've probably done it before. Check out this one, which I came across in an ugly piece of software I tried to adapt to my uses recently:

^([a-zA-Z0-9_\-\.]+)@((\[[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.)|(([a-zA-Z0-9\-]+\.)+))([a-zA-Z]{2,4}|[0-9]{1,3})(\]?)$

This matches "user@[999.999.999]" and "user@google.4]" and "...---@0.0.0.0.0.0" (not valid email addresses) but not "user@travel.travel" (a valid address) or "user@localhost" (uses local scope name resolution, but not technically invalid. I've sent mail to it before.). Anyway, it's not a great regular expression. It's okay, but a quick google search would have saved this developer a lot of time writing this thing.

And really, developers, isn't this entire process almost totally futile? The user could always enter "aaaaa@yahoo.com", and your regex would accept this misdirection as a valid email address. Using email-address regex algorithms only inconveniences legitimate users (for instance, the ones like me who want to use sub-addressing), while malicious users can continue to circumvent the system simply by learning the new rules.

The only potentially useful case that I can envision for this sort of thing is one like the kind Jan Goyvaerts mentions (in the authoritative post that I linked to above): if a user mistypes their email address by typing, for example, something like "user@yahoo", obviously they forgot to type the TLD at the end. But in this case, it's not necessary to totally block the user from continuing with the form. Developers, please: just alert your user that you've detected what seems to be an invalid email address, but let them continue if they don't want to change it. Allow your user to shoot themselves in the foot, if they insist on doing it. The alternative, blocking users who don't comply with your vision, only promotes the kind of arrogant smarter-than-thou paternalistic attitude that characterizes negative stereotypes of software developers. Don't be that guy (or girl).

This has probably all been said before, more eloquently, elsewhere. It's just been building up for years, and I wanted to vent my frustration in a constructive way. Thanks for listening. Oh yeah, and if you have good counter-examples, of course I'd like to hear them.

FIXME

2010-01-04T22:31:00.000-04:00

So over the holiday break, I was back at my Mom's house for a week. A lot of the time was spent with family and friends, but I also spent a lot of time repairing things. I thought about bringing my tools and rescue cds out with me, but at the last minute decided not to. Turns out they would've helped. Here's a list of some of the things I fixed:

Leaky toilet (Replaced the valve)
Broken DVD Player (Tray was stuck)
Wireless router (Reset password, turned on WEP)
Laptop (Dell D620)
- USB Headset - I didn't do anything, but it started working.
- Touchpad - The internal connector wasn't connected. Had to take apart nearly the entire thing.
Another laptop (newer Dell)
- Several nasty viruses - the owner didn't have any AV installed. the viruses caused new AV installers to crash, and locked up the computer whenever I ran a portable AV scan. I tried avira's livecd, but it didn't detect anything.
- Reformat - I was supposed to leave the next morning, so I decided it would be faster to just backup & reformat the thing. Still took a little while, but they paid me.
Cell phone (It had been dropped in the ocean. There was some corrosion on the board and the LCD cable. I cleaned them with water and a toothbrush, and dried it carefully.)
Another cell phone (The next day my mother promptly put her normal cell phone through the washing machine on accident. Took it apart, gave it the same treatment.)
Desktop computer
- Uninstalled expired antivirus, among other things slowing it down. Added MSE and MBAM.
- Ethernet wouldn't connect - turns out the router is broken. At least, it shows the same behavior with other computers.
Sliding glass door (Adjusted the handle so it would lock)
Cat perch (Hadn't been cleaned in ten years; took it apart so the fabric could get washed)

This trip hasn't entirely been a vacation, but it's been nice to see family and help make their lives a little bit better.

Clean Hippies (Part 2)

2010-01-04T18:31:00.004-04:00

This write-up has taken enough time and energy that I'm breaking it up into 3 smaller posts, one for each of the major cleaning products I explored. Part 1 is deodorant, Part 2 is toothpaste, and Part 3 is laundry detergent. My detailed notes on price calculations are at the end of each post.

Toothpaste
Difficulty: Easy (5 minutes)
Cost: $1.25 (for ~ 4 oz, 0.5 cup)
Have you ever wondered what plaque is? Well, that wikipedia article will tell you. It's a film of bacteria that build up on your teeth. There's nothing wrong with the bacteria, but when they build up, the bottom layer becomes anaerobic, forming acids that cause almost all tooth & gum problems. So you want to keep your teeth clean, and the best thing for that is a brush, combined with an abrasive powder or paste (also floss!). Historically, people have used chalk, charcoal, salt, and powdered clays.

Here's the most popular (1 2 3) online recipe:
6 Tbl. baking soda
2 Tbl. salt (the more finely ground the better)
3 tsp. glycerin
10-20 drops of oil (peppermint, spearmint, etc.) for flavor
Mix all ingredients. Add water or hydrogen peroxide to achieve the desired consistency.

For my first try, I just used baking soda and sea salt (alaea, actually), with some peppermint and tea tree oil drops (no glycerin, water, or H₂0₂). So it's a powder, you just wet your toothbrush and dip it in. At first it tasted... kinda awful, salty, not sweet like commercial toothpastes. But after brushing, my teeth felt squeaky clean, like I'd just been to the dentist. I've never gotten that sensation from standard toothpaste, and now I prefer the unsweetened taste.
Notes:

Fluoride: It's a complex debate, and I'm not getting into it. Read some studies and decide for yourself whether you want to add it to your toothpaste.
Some people find the taste of salt in their mouth quite repulsive. If you just can't stand it, recipe #6 on this page extols the virtues and healing properties of different varieties of clay. It sounds like quackery to me, but clays are interesting. There's quite a few alternative recipe ideas on that link, so if this one doesn't float your boat, try one of those.
Hydrogen peroxide is a good anti-bacterial agent, and it's especially useful for whitening/bleaching your teeth, but it breaks down quickly. From what I gather, it works best as a mouthwash after brushing. See Part 3 (on laundry detergent) for more H₂0₂ science.
As far as I can tell, there are three reasons for using baking soda in toothpaste: one is that it's a pretty good abrasive; the second is that it's somewhat alkaline, which acts to neutralize the plaque acids that are dissolving your teeth; the third is that it's antibacterial (mixed with water). Some people are skittish of baking soda: if this applies to you, see the link in the previous note. If the clay toothpaste doesn't do it for you, there's another recipe (also in #6) for Dentie, a Japanese tooth powder made from charred eggplant and sea salt. The eggplant ash is alkaline, and the sea salt is abrasive, so there you go.
Other potential toothpaste/mouthwash ingredients are quite interesting. They include whisky, vinegar, cranberry juice, hydrogen peroxide, and soap. This page is pretty informative.

Cost details - I've made almost no attempt to find sale items or consider bulk purchasing. All listed prices were either what I paid at the store, or the cost of a typical-looking item found on Google Product Search. Also, I didn't take the price of essential oils into account. Individual taste varies, and besides, "drops" are not standardized, so calculating the cost-per-drop is onerous. If you're motivated, DIY and post a comment.

Toothpaste cost breakdown:
baking soda 6 Tbl (72g) - $0.21 (at $1.39/lb)
sea salt 2 Tbl (36g) - $0.55 (at $6.96/lb)
glycerin 3 tsp (0.5 fl. oz.) - $0.49 (at $4/4 oz. or buy in bulk.)
total: $1.25 (for ~ 4 oz, 0.5 cup)
A typical toothpaste tube also contains 4 oz, so this doesn't seem like impressive savings over cheap brands. But your favorite salt probably isn't $7/lb, and I don't use the glycerin. It works just fine as a powder.

Clean Hippies (Part 1)

2009-11-11T23:51:00.000-04:00

In the olden days, when settlers drove their covered wagons across the great plains of the North American Midwest, blaring loud rap music from their Victrolas and dying of dysentery, hippies were known for their dirtiness. Not so anymore! Well, some hippies are still quite dirty, yes. But many take the same moral scruples that disgust everyone else and apply them to bodily hygiene, with fresh results. Also, there are a lot of "green" home and body cleaning products that have snuck into the market in the last few years. Some of them might be greenwashed frauds, but there are websites to counteract that. Hippies with money have no excuse to remain dirty.

But what about poor hippies? And DIYers? And historical reenactionists? And rugged individualists? Well, they have recipes for cleaning products. They have quite a few, actually. Sites like Lifehacker and CRAFT have showcased a few in the last year. But a lot of the online recipes are hand-me-downs, without much in the way of explanations for why specific ingredients were chosen. So I thought I'd try a few of these recipes, do some in-depth research, and report to Internet with my results. Here you go, Internet: Science! Even if you aren't interested in making any of these recipes yourself, this information will make you a more educated consumer - you'll know what to look for on the product labels.

This write-up has taken enough time and energy that I'm breaking it up into 3 smaller posts, one for each of the major cleaning products I explored. Part 1 is deodorant, Part 2 is toothpaste, and Part 3 is laundry detergent. My detailed notes on price calculations are at the end of each post.

Deodorant
Difficulty: Easy - 10 minutes, simple ingredients
Cost: $0.65 (1 standard-size stick, container not included)

From a practical standpoint, deodorant is pretty simple. Basically, you want to apply something with anti-bacterial properties to keep bacteria from growing in your sweat and creating powerful odors. There are 3 basic approaches: stop the bacteria, stop the odors, and stop the sweat. In other words: deodorant, perfume/cologne, anti-perspirant.

This recipe uses coconut oil and baking soda, both of which are anti-bacterial. Baking soda has the added advantage of absorbing odors with its magical amphoteric powers, and coconut oil also smells nice (like baking soda, it is multi-talented). The recipe also uses cornstarch, to absorb moisture and make the deodorant more gel-like.

For reference, here's the recipe linked above. It's the one I made, pictured here.
1/4 cup baking soda
1/4 cup corn starch
2 tablespoons coconut oil
~10 drops of essential oils (lavender, sandalwood, etc.)
~3 drops liquid vitamin E

Anyway, the batch I made works pretty well and smells nice. Here's some notes:

Use an oil with a high melting point. Ideally, you want one that looks and feels like thick grease at room temperature. It'll work with a more liquid oil, but the oil will melt and drip out of your container during hot summer days. Or you could keep your deodorant in the fridge.
Deodorant bars are essentially a combination of anti-bacterial powders (cornstarch & baking soda) and liquids (oils, alcohol, vinegar). Some people prefer using only a powder or a liquid - experiment, if you want! Here's some of the other variations I've come across:
- Powder: equal parts baking soda and cornstarch
- Cornstarch and lavender
- Plain coconut oil (just rub it on)
- Tea tree oil
- Olive oil infused with garlic (supposedly you only smell like garlic bread for an hour or so)
- A splash of rubbing alcohol or vinegar after a shower
- A paste of baking soda and lemon juice
- Alum is also somewhat popular, both powdered and whole (ie, those "deodorant rocks" you may have seen in stores)
This list isn't exhaustive; there are quite a few other anti-bacterial options.
The recipe I used works fine, but when I run out I'm going to try this one, which is basically the same, but calls for cooking the mixture. There are a couple others that agree. I'm pretty sure heating it before pouring in the container would improve the absorption and consistency of the cornstarch.
One thing to watch out for: it's only happened to me once so far, but if you sweat a lot in a short period of time, the moisture will saturate the powdered components (baking soda, cornstarch), carry them down your skin, and deposit them wherever it evaporates. So you might get some streaks of crusty white powder down your flanks. I didn't find it terribly inconvenient, but your needs might be different. If you can't handle white powders, try coconut oil or rubbing alcohol.
I haven't touched on antiperspirants in this review, because for most people they're unnecessary. However, if you have hyperhidrosis or excessive sweating, you might need a strong antiperspirant. Some options exist, but none of them are great. Of the deodorants listed here, the baking soda + cornstarch powder would probably be the most helpful for moisture absorption, but see my warning above.

And a final thought: if you're already happy with a synthetic deodorant that you're using right now, you might not like homemade deodorant. Most of the recipes don't "go on clear", and, well, it's just not a commercial product.
Of course, there's also ongoing controversy: industry spokespeople say that antiperspirants and deodorants are totally harmless, and their critics say that they use known carcinogens, neurotoxins, and skin irritants. I can't make heads or tails of it either way, so you'll have to make up your own mind.

Cost details - I've made almost no attempt to find sale items or consider bulk purchasing. All listed prices were either what I paid at the store, or the cost of a typical-looking item found on Google Product Search. Also, I didn't take the price of essential oils into account. Individual taste varies, and besides, "drops" are not standardized, so calculating the cost-per-drop is onerous. If you're motivated, DIY and post a comment.

Deodorant cost breakdown:
cornstarch 1/4 cup (30g) - $0.06 (at $1/lb)
baking soda 1/4 cup (48g) - $0.14 (at $1.39/lb)
coconut oil 2 Tbl - $1.20 (at $18/15oz., roughly $19/lb)
(you can get it at 1/3 the cost, which would be $0.40)
vitamin e - 4 drops (.2ml) - $0.05 (at $12/50ml)
my total (fancy coconut oil): $1.45
your total (regular price coconut oil): $0.65

Throw your hands in the air

2009-11-08T22:03:00.024-04:00

Like a lot of other people, I went down to the local Veteran's Day parade this weekend. It wasn't on purpose - I drove down to the market and got stuck when they closed the roads - but I didn't mind. Maybe it was the striking contrast between the ambling, carefree civilians and the marching, rank-and-file soldiers and bands, but as I sat on a wall and sipped my coffee, I started wondering about the waves.

'Big Parade Wave' by Thomas Hawke

Why do people in a parade wave to the crowd? And why do we wave back? Why does anyone wave at all? It seems like such a basic human action that we should have an easy answer. Some do come easily to mind, but I don't find them entirely satisfying. You might suggest that we wave to someone "just to say hi". But that's only naming the behavior, it's not really explaining it. And greeting others isn't the only interpretation of sticking out your hand (and optionally waving it around). Depending on the context, it could be a greeting, a farewell, an acknowledgment, a hailing (e.g. hailing a cab), a salute, or a warning (e.g. "stop!").

Actually, the military hand salute seems like a formal, highly ritualized wave, doesn't it? Its origin is apparently obscure, but it might be derived from the tip of the hat, another hand-based gesture. Like the hat-tip, the salute can be a gesture of respectful greeting (the name comes from Latin salutare, to "greet" or "wish health to"). Interestingly, dialogues of respect are built around obeisance, symbolic acts of submission or vulnerability. The most obvious example is the formal bow (and curtsy). If only one person bows, it's an act of submission. But if the other person reciprocates, the behavior becomes an pact of mutual respect. There's a bit of this power negotiation in the ordinary wave, too: if you wave to someone and they ignore you, it's embarrassing. You can't help feeling that you've lost face.

The hat-tip as a gesture of respect was likely derived from the European tradition of removing one's head covering. The hand-over-the-heart salute may have the same origin. The topic of head and face coverings is outside the scope of this post, so I'll leave it for later. But I'd like to note that this practice sharply contrasts with Jewish and Muslim traditions.

'Pose' by quinn.anya

And sympathy does explain some of the compulsion to return a wave from a stranger, doesn't it? But it depends on whether they're waving at the crowd, or at you, specifically. There's some nuance to the wave. A wave with the hand held close to the body is intimate, personal. With the arm outstretched the gesture is open, broadcast to the public. If you hold your hand out to the side, in your peripheral vision, you're waving to everyone; if you hold it out in front of you, where you're looking, you're waving at or to someone. And if you make eye contact, they feel obliged to wave back.

If you didn't get it at first, you should be picking up on where I'm going with this by now. I think hand waving is all about attention. There are two more kinds of waves I want to focus on; the first one is raising your hand.

'Raise your hand!' by DucDigital

Schoolchildren learn pretty fast that if they talk out of turn, the teacher will either ignore or reprimand them. If they want their teacher's attention, they have to learn to raise their hand to request attention. A lot of children learn the lesson so well that they start raising their hands at home or in other non-school settings when they want attention from an authority figure. This has some parallels with the formal salute mentioned earlier: if you salute or raise your hand and the authority figure ignores you, you'll just have to wait until they give you their attention.

The last hand gesture I want to mention is casual hand-waving to get someone else's attention. This type of wave is in the casual register; if they don't see you, you can shout or whistle to attract their notice. You might wave to a friend who just entered the room, so they know where to find you in the crowd. If you pass an acquaintance on the street and they don't notice you, you might wave to get their attention. Or, coming back to my original question, if you're sitting on a float in a parade, all dressed up to represent your organization, you might wave to people in the crowd so they pay attention to you, and your group, and all the hard work that went into your presentation.

But that's not the end of it. The people in the crowd don't have to wave back. They could just ignore the parade wavers (and sometimes they do), but as humans we like to feel like we're connecting with others, like we're communicating. Edmund Blair Bolles has argued that the distinguishing feature of human language is shared attention: the speech triangle of speaker, listener, and topic. I think the waving gesture is possibly one of the most basic, degenerate forms of human language, where the salient topic is simply the relationship between speaker and listener, the immanent experience of me-watching-them-watch-me-watch-them. This confirmation of mutual attention lays down a necessary foundation for any serious communication. The wavers are communicating with each other, but the only information being conveyed is "Yes, hello, we're both here and conscious of each other." (Computer nerds might see a parallel to the three-way handshake of TCP.)

And actually, we use a raised hand as a litmus test for consciousness. Young children at the zoo often wave at the animals, perhaps hoping for a waving paw and a toothy grin in return. We wave our hands in front of people's faces if we think they might be daydreaming, asleep, or even dead. I think it's this capacity to wave - to notice the behavior of another, recognize it as communication, and respond to it - that defines our concept of human-like consciousness.

So why hands? Why do we pay so much attention to other people's hands and their movement? I have an opinion, but I should warn you that it's somewhat speculative: I haven't seen any studies demonstrate that these events happen in exactly this order, etc. Still, I think it's a plausible explanation.

Now as it happens, hands take up a disproportionate amount of space in our heads. As you can see from a quick glance at a cortical homunculus, the hands easily take up more representation space in the primary motor and sensory cortices than anything else - except for the face, maybe.

A Penfield homunculus

Many neurologists think that when your visual centers recognize someone else moving (waving their hand, smiling, dancing, and so on), your brain activates the same areas that it would if you were performing the action yourself. Those areas are made of mirror neurons or known as mirror systems. So when you see someone raise their hand, your visual centers recognize a hand and light up the large section of your sensorimotor cortex that corresponds to your hand. It activates a much larger area of your brain than it would if someone stuck out their elbow or their foot. And the bigger the area of activation, the more emotional impact the event will have. Every time someone sticks out their hand, it's a red flag for your attention. And if they're looking at you, the large facial recognition components of your visual centers activate the face areas in your motor cortex as well. As far as your brain is concerned, if someone waves at you and makes eye contact, they might as well be setting off fireworks.

I don't know if there's a standard evolutionary explanation for why the homunculi have such huge hands, but I'd guess that it's due to tools. More specifically, I think that after we became erect, when our hands were able to avoid constant contact with the ground or tree limbs, they started accumulating adaptive traits for sensitivity and dexterity. Eventually our hands became our primary way of interacting with the world, and the extra richness of sensory information led to more complex mental representations of physical objects, which led to the invention of tools. But that's another speculative theory, probably not even testable this time.

Well, let's wrap this up. As we've seen, a wave of the hand can mean many things: "hello", "goodbye", "taxi!", "sure thing", and "hey you", among others. A wave can be formal or casual. The common function in all these speech acts is the synchronization of mutual attention. Without some kind of synchronization, human speech would be difficult; we might never have formed large groups, since we'd never know if people were talking to us, or whether people were even listening to us talk. We even consider the ability to engage in this synchronization and negotiate a state of attentive copresence to be a key indicator of human-like consciousness. Finally, the reason a wave gets our attention is because the hands take up so much space in our neural representation of our selves. And they take up so much space because we use our hands for everything.

---
That's it for today. If you enjoy reading this sort of thing, let me know. Maybe I'll write another post about hat doffing or communal attention or homunculus evolution or something. Actually, I'll probably do those things anyway, but if you have a request or comment, feel free.

Undocumented IE8 Feature

2009-11-02T00:44:00.007-04:00

As some of you may know, I currently work part-time in a library IT department. Recently, after upgrading our staff computers from Internet Explorer 7 to version 8, we discovered that IE8 couldn't get to our calendar server anymore. It just displayed the "cannot display the webpage" error message. Mozilla Firefox could still connect just fine, and IE7 had worked fine as well, so we chalked it up to one of the many new security features in Internet Explorer 8. But after a bit of research, we couldn't find any settings that were causing the connection to fail. We figured that maybe it was just an issue with the calendar server software, and told all the staff to use Firefox.

The calendar server was listening on port 220. This port number is assigned to imap3, but port 80 was already in use on that machine, and whoever set up the calendar server just picked a port at random, I guess.

Anyway, I've been putting it off for weeks, but today I finally fired up WireShark to see what IE8 was doing wrong. And I was a little surprised.

I can show you an example, if you like. Here's a link to a website that doesn't exist:
http://lkajsdfopiuqwer.com/
Since it's a pretty random domain name, it's probably not in your cache. In fact, your DNS might not have it cached either, and they'll have to go look it up. So if you click this link in IE8, depending on your connection speed and DNS server, it'll sit there for a second with the little blue circle rotating, then the "cannot display the webpage" error will come up after the DNS request comes back.
Now try this one:
http://klquweiorasdf.com:220/
If you're using IE8, the "cannot display the webpage" error will pop up right away. No delay. Now, you might be saying "Are you sure IE8 doesn't just break for all port numbers?" Yes, I'm pretty sure someone would have noticed that. Try this one:
http://iouasdfouiaswer.com:221/
It'll think about this one again, just like the first one. It might not seem like it, but trust me, it is.

So what is IE8 doing? Well, nothing. When the port specified in the URL is 220, IE8 doesn't even try to resolve the domain name. It doesn't send out a single SYN packet. It just fails. There could be an entirely valid web server running at that address, on that port, but Internet Explorer 8 will never know, because it won't even try.

I don't know why the IE8 development team saw fit to block all URLs with port 220 at such a low level, but I'll try to ask. If I get any updated info, I'll post it here.

Update:
So as you can read on the MSDN blog IEInternals, IE8 has added ports 220 and 993 to the list of ports it blocks for their potential to be used in cross-protocol forgery attacks. The blogger, Eric Law, notes that Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox also block a fairly long list of ports, although it should be pointed out that Firefox provides the user with a notice that access was denied for security reasons, and will even let you unblock the port, while Internet Explorer and Chrome only provide the standard unhelpful error message.

Phantoms

2009-10-02T03:21:00.004-04:00

So I've just finished reading Phantoms in the Brain, V.S. Ramachandran's first book. It's a bit old, from 1998, but still a classic. The BBC did a related miniseries, if you're more into videos.

It's a good pop neuroscience book. The first two hundred pages or so are very similar in style and content to Oliver Sacks' classics, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars, which Ramachandran references several times. The topic flits through case studies of seemingly unrelated neurological conditions, including phantom limbs, blindsight, Charles Bonnet syndrome, neglect and anosognosia, Capgras' delusion, and pseudocyesis. All of it was fun and fascinating reading, but for me the most interesting part of the book was Chapter 12, on qualia and consciousness.

Most people interested in strong AI (or the Hard Problem of consciousness) will already be familiar with qualia. It's a philosophical topic, so the arguments often get quite complex, but the basic idea is that qualia are the subjective aspects of personal experience that can't be easily communicated to others. The canonical example of a "quale" is "What is it like to see red?"

Now, the reason that qualia are related to strong AI is that they're often brought up as an example of an essentially human experience that machines can never emulate. A machine might be able to listen to and identify a piece of classical music, but will it experience the music? Qualia are generally seen as one of the major philosophical objections to reductionism, at least within the field of cognitive science. At least to some people, qualia represent one of the last bastions of mind-body dualism.

So I rather like Ramachandran's opinion on qualia:

"I'd like to argue that there is in fact no such barrier, no great vertical divide in nature between mind and matter, substance and spirit. Indeed, I believe that this barrier is only apparent and that it arises as a result of language. This sort of obstacle emerges when there is any translation from one language to another.
How does this idea apply to the brain and the study of consciousness? I submit that we are dealing here with two mutually unintelligible languages. One is the language of nerve impulses - the spatial and temporal patterns of neuronal activity that allow us to see red, for example. The second language ... is a natural spoken tongue like English or German or Japanese ..."
p. 231

In other words, he says, the problem with qualia is a language barrier. If we were to bypass spoken/written language and directly connect the neural pathways from my color-processing areas to yours, there would be no intermediate language translation. At least in theory, you would see what my eyes saw, and know what it's like for me to see red.

"The key idea here is that the qualia problem is not unique to the mind-body problem. It is no different in kind from problems that arise from any translation, and thus there is no need to invoke a great division in nature between the world of qualia and the material world. There is only one world with lots of translation barriers. If you can overcome them, the problems vanish."
p. 232

His conclusions are comforting to strong AI proponents, although I doubt he had them in mind. Ramachandran lists 3 critical features of qualia (earlier developed in Three Laws of Qualia), which provide testable qualifications for a perceptual representation system comparable to our own. His theory doesn't even need to be accurate, simply possible, to be relevant to my interests. But I'll be interested to see if his opinion on the nature of qualia has changed over the last decade.

Anyway, for an 11-year-old work on popular neuroscience, Phantoms in the Brain is still fresh and engaging reading.

Robots!

2009-09-09T18:24:00.005-04:00

A bunch of awesome robot videos came to my attention in the last week. Here they are!

Robot fish

Totally wicked high speed robot hand

Motoman thinks their robots can do anything

Motoman robots doing taiko (badly)

Robot violinist

Teleoperation

Robonurse/bear

Uncanny valley, yes, but disturbing for other reasons

Misc.

2009-08-29T18:09:00.008-04:00

I'm working on two or three rather large posts, but today I just wanted to share some random things that delighted me this week.

The Ziegler-Natta Process is the polymerization method used to make HDPE. My inimitable sister was talking about plastics protesting earlier today, and it reminded me of my fairly longstanding interest in plastics (and the Gyre, but that's another story). HDPE ("#2") and its sibling LDPE ("#4") are some of the most widely used and least threatening plastics. They're thermoplastics, so they can be repeatedly recycled pretty easily, and they don't contain the dreaded Bisphenol-A. They're typically made from petroleum, though, so it's not all roses. But if you MUST use plastics, they're not AS bad as others. Anyway, the Ziegler-Natta Process itself is totally beyond my chemistry skills, but the introduction on that page made me laugh.

TED talks were also good this week: Hans Rosling has this neat graphic statistics tool at gapminder.org, and he gives a fun little demo that also reveals some happy global trends of convergence. Another video that's been quite popular this week is Dan Pink's talk on workplace motivation, and how incentives kill creativity.

The Slew - It's All Over from The Slew on Vimeo. Kid Koala and Dynamite D.

The His Dark Materials Trilogy. I'm late to the game by a few years, but man, that was awesome. I burned through the books in 3 days, and I thought they were great. Which says a lot, I guess... the plot has some deep gnostic themes which are probably only enjoyable for people who have a complicated past with an Abrahamic religion. But it's also got science! It's got philosophy, psychology, dark matter, quantum mechanics, particle physics, the many-worlds theory, polarizers, a solar mill, and linguistic jokes involving deviations from ancient Greek words like "electrum" and "naptha". It's just a great sci-fi/fantasy blend. I watched the Golden Compass movie when it came out, and all I really remember is the armored bears. It doesn't do justice to the books.

Stellarium is still totally wicked. I had kinda forgotten. It's free, open source, available for Windows/Mac/Linux, and totally amazing amateur astronomy software.

That is quite a pool heater. There, I Fixed It has been rapidly catching up to FAILblog and its associated LOL brethren in popularity. They usually brighten up my day a bit.

Open Source Synthetic Biology

2009-07-04T01:17:00.014-04:00

Today I watched this video at Edge from last year, and read the unabridged transcript that follows. It's a one-sided interview with Drew Endy, a passionate assistant professor of Bioengineering at Stanford. It's a light, easy interview to digest; he mostly stays focused on long-term goals rather than the details of their current research.

But the talk encompasses most of the range of feelings that I have about genetic and biological engineering, and added some new hopes and fears. I'll cover a few excerpts from the video, hopefully briefly, that I think will illuminate my bioengineering angst. If you want a summary, skip to the bottom.

The big question, to come back to it, is, how do we make biology easy to engineer, and then the parallel question that comes along with that is, what are the consequences of success?

Let's not talk about it, let's actually go do it, and then let's deal with the consequences in terms of how this is going to change ourselves ...

There's nothing specifically wrong with "shoot first, ask questions later", but it doesn't exactly make me comfortable, you know?

... That's an example of what an engineer would call reliable physical composition. Take two objects and put them together. The other thing that happens is when you have the nut and the bolt together as a composite object, when you pull on the nut, it stays put. It doesn't come flying off. The composite object has the expected behavior, it doesn't have some emergent property. That's reliable functional composition. The function of the two things when you put them together is what you expect. [...] Engineers hate complexity. I hate emergent properties. I like simplicity. I don't want the plane I take tomorrow to have some emergent property while it's flying.

He doesn't explicitly say it here, but one of the big question marks of modern genetic engineering is emergence. If you add a gene to a corn plant to make it more resistant to a particular pesticide, how can you tell what the side effects of that gene might be? Well, you have no idea. It'll probably do nothing. It might interfere with the expression of another gene, or have effects that only emerge on a large scale. As he says later, "I would want one behavior, and when I went to make the change, exactly the opposite would happen."

Perhaps the reactions being stimulated today around this technology are a direct result of the fact that the people who are promoting the technology in this way tend to favor exclusive ownership, limited access, and present themselves as God-like creators; as opposed to, we're constructing things, we could use your help, anything we do today is going to pale in comparison to what's coming, so let's figure out how to work together on this.

People conversant with the software patent debate might find this familiar.

The Open Source world is one thing; if you're trying to invent a language for programming DNA, having a proprietary language seems stupid. If Oxford University had supported privatization of the English language hundreds of years ago, the dictionary they made wouldn't have been so useful. And so to a first approximation, there's going to be a core collection of standardized genetic objects that can define families of languages people can use to program DNA. And those have to be made a public resource.

Well, I think it sounds practical. I linked to them above, but what he's talking about here is collecting BioBricks (pre-assembled cellular parts with well-understood behavior) and organizing them into an open-source Registry of Standard Biological Parts which anyone can use to make whatever they want. They've got about 2000 parts so far.

I'd estimate the cost of synthesizing the DNA of every human being on the planet that'll be born in the next year at $10 trillion dollars. That's 20 percent of the world's economy. That number is dropping by about a factor of two every 12 to 18 months.

Gattaca is possible in less than 20 years, is basically what he's saying.

Tom had self started in biology five years earlier and is now, in addition to being one of the best engineers I've ever met, one of the best microbiologists I've ever met. Tom was interested in it from his own perspective, having mostly to do with building computers . We need to use biology not to be a computer, but rather to build our computers, because we're going to need to put atoms exactly where we want ...

He goes into a little more detail, but this brings up the idea of using bioengineered microbes as easily programmable nanomachines.

In summary: traditional genetic engineering, where you modify the DNA of existing organisms, is messy and somewhat unpredictable. Endy and others are promoting synthetic biology, in which you build totally new organisms from the ground up. They're putting together a collection of open-source biological Legos that make it easier to create your own organisms to do specific things.

Some of the possible uses of this incredibly versatile approach are mentioned above: synthesizing human DNA to select desirable traits, using viruses as nanomachines to construct computers (or anything) on an atomic level.

Another thing they've started doing is rewriting or refactoring the genetic code of existing organisms (in this case they ended up replacing 30% of the virus' genome) to make it neat, organized, and efficient, instead of the jumbled spaghetti it is now.

Finally, they have an international undergraduate competition called iGEM; this year they expect over 1200 participants. As Endy says near the end of his talk,

It is interesting for me to learn how difficult it is for folks to appreciate what an exponential technology really implies. The fact that sequencing goes from approximately zero to human genomes in ten years. [...] it's doubling every year. How do you actually live in a world where you're surfing that exponential in a way that's constructive and responsible? Very few people get that.

Attn: Media Companies RE: Money

2009-07-03T07:27:00.004-04:00

If you're not a media company, could you just forward this to them or something?
Alright, are you listening now? If you can stop crying about piracy for a second, I've got an updated pricing scheme for you. I've been thinking about this for a while. These are the prices I consider reasonable for your merchandise.

Album: $7. You can charge as much as $12 if you're selling an actual cd, but I should warn you, I'm about 4 times as likely to buy your album if it's available as an mp3 download, and I don't pay $10 for an mp3 album unless it's really hard to find and I want it a lot. If you charge less than $5 for an mp3 album, there's a ~70% chance I'll buy it out of mere curiousity. Think about that for a second. On another track, Microsoft might have the right idea with the Zune Pass, but I doubt it.

Song: $0.50. I'll pay as much as $1, but again, only if it's rare and worthwhile. $0.50 is insignificant to most people; for $1 I can buy a lot of things at the Dollar Store that I'll get way more entertainment out of than your song. No offense.

Movie (DVD): $5. Honestly, it's already an obsolete format, and no, I'm not going to pay $50 for a Blu-Ray. And why buy it when you can Netflix? I don't, because most of your movies are awful, but lots of people like it. Oh, and while I'm on the subject, anime companies, you guys are missing out. Let's see, I can buy two seasons of a show for $80, or I can download them for free? Tough choice.

Movie (Theater): $7. I'm willing to pay a little more for the experience, the atmosphere, the excitement, you know. But not the $10 that you cutthroat bastards try to charge for admission these days. Sorry. I think I see maybe one movie a month in the theater, and I grind my teeth at the cashiers.

Video Games: $10. I'll pay up to $25 for a big-name, 5-years-in-the-making, blockbuster game, but I'll wait as long as I have to for the price to fall that far. Again, if it's $5 or less, I'll probably buy it on a whim.

Conclusion: Look, here's two big companies that do this stuff really well already. Take a look at Amazon and Valve, and follow their example.

Amazon doesn't always make the best decisions, but they keep up with tech changes pretty well. Their pricing on mp3 albums is my favorite thing about them, even better than the Kindle: it's $7-$10 for most albums, sometimes even less. Yeah, I actually buy them! I started six months ago, and I've bought about one a month, I guess. You know how many CDs I've bought in the last 5 years? Less than 10.

Valve is famous for Steam, which makes it just as easy to buy a game legitimately as it is to pirate it, and for CEO Gabe Newell's crazy, brilliant, hilarious DICE 2009 keynote address back in February. Here's a summary, including this gem: "At 75% off, they are making 15% more money than they were at full price."

Well, that's all I've got to say. You other media companies can go back to ~~exploring the reaches of your intestines with your collective faces~~ servicing people with money now.

Systeminfo

2009-06-24T20:24:00.002-04:00

I can't believe I've never heard of this before. If you're running Windows, open a command prompt and run systeminfo. It prints out a handy little list of stuff that's quite useful for people like me that do a lot of computer repairs.

It's apparently been around since XP.

Linux Delayed Start

2009-06-23T01:53:00.006-04:00

So somewhere recently I saw a program that allowed you to delay the execution of some of your startup programs when you login. I don't remember whether it was for Linux or Windows, and I couldn't find it again when I went looking for it. But it turns out, with Gnome you don't need any extra tools.

In Ubuntu Jaunty, go to System->Preferences->Startup Applications (gnome-session-properties for you cli nerds). Select an item you want to start with a delay, and click Edit. Whatever it has in the "Command" field, you just prefix it with "sleep <a number of seconds> && ".

Here's an example. Let's pretend that, like me, you want to change conky to start with a 10 second delay (to allow the root window to settle). Select it as seen at right...

Edit, and change the command line.

If you want an explanation of what this does, you can read about sleep and boolean AND.

If you're using KDE, you can still do this, but your startup programs are scripts in the folder ~/.kde/Autostart/

Brains vs. Machines

2009-06-15T03:27:00.008-04:00

A little over a month ago, the CBC show "The Nature of Things" apparently ran an episode titled The Brain That Changes Itself (there's a summary if you don't like videos). It's a nice pop-sci introduction to neuroplasticity, which I think is terrific, since this is an area where common knowledge hasn't quite caught up with current scientific theories. I recommend the episode and I sympathize with their goal of updating people's outdated concept of the brain.

The show opens with the line: "There's always a strong temptation to think of the brain or to call the brain a machine, or talk about it as a computer." And again, I can sympathize. As machines and computers have developed, we've stubbornly continued to anthropomorphize them. How ironic, that as new generations started to think about the mind, they turned to the most readily available metaphor: machines that we created in our own image. We came to think of the brain as hardware, and the mind as software. We think of the brain as "hard-wired", as the show's narrator puts it. According to the show, this is where the human-machine metaphor breaks down:

"The brain was once seen as a machine-like device made up of many parts; damage one part, and little could be done to repair it. But new science suggests that the brain is much more than a machine, and is capable of re-wiring, of re-engineering itself."

I know their point here was simply to introduce the idea that the brain is plastic, capable of adapting to catastrophic damage. (And I'll only point out in passing that they couldn't even write a sentence saying that brains aren't machines without resorting to mechanical metaphors of neural activity to prove their point.) However, it irks me a bit (enough to write this post) that they casually imply that machines are not capable of fixing, re-wiring, or re-engineering themselves.

It's a somewhat frustrating consequence of the two-way brain-computer metaphor that neurologists sometimes blithely assume that they know quite a bit about the way computers work. (The same might be said about computer scientists and their understanding of the brain, but let's leave that alone for now.)

Oliver Sacks in The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat (p. 140-2), argues that schemata, algorithms, and other "iconic" representations could never provide the quality of experience needed for real humanity; such personal patterns of meaning would have to take the form of "scripts" or "scores". Perhaps he meant that human thought is not all algorithmic (in the strict sense of being recursively enumerable), which seems pretty obvious, since people can easily consider non-RE sets like "numbers that I like". The scripts and scores that Sacks proposes are continuous, emergent, fluid, emotional, holistic, right-brain experiences. Breaking them down into discrete components destroys some elusive characteristic of these experiences: you can't understand the importance of a symphony without hearing it.

(You might argue that someone with adequate experience and talent could imagine the sounds from reading the sheet music and simulate the experience of listening to an orchestra. I think you'd be right, but that doesn't actually avoid the problem, since imagining an experience stimulates the same cortices that the physical sensation would. You'd still be hearing the symphony, if only in your imagination.)

These elusive characteristics are called qualia. Neurologists, for some reason, usually seem to support the controversial idea of qualia, while computer scientists typically oppose it. I think computer scientists usually oppose it because it's a nebulous concept, and one that's very inconvenient for a field built on discrete, symbolic math. Neurologists, however, support the idea of qualia because that's where the evidence has led them.

I think I agree with them. Most languages I'm aware of make a certain distinction between knowing a fact and knowing a person or object. English doesn't do it very well, but the French say savoir/connaitre, the Spanish saber/conocer, and in Mandarin Chinese it's 知道/认识 (zhidao/renshi). I'm not fluent enough to say for sure, but I think the difference is physical experience, qualia. To segue back around to my original point, I don't think AI researchers and brain researchers see eye to eye yet. I think this could be solved pretty simply, if brain researchers would stop making ill-informed statements about what machines are capable of, and if AI researchers would pay more attention to what neurologists have to say about the human brain.

As a postscript, whether you waded through this whole post or just skipped to the end, I'm just going to re-recommend the video up at the top. It's got an appearance by V. S. Ramachandran about 2/3 of the way through. He's an interesting guy; check out his papers - you can download them all.

Also, I never got back around to the concept of machines re-engineering themselves. It's not just lack of time or space; it's not quite fully formed yet. Another post, I guess.

Scooter Part 2

2009-06-10T02:40:00.011-04:00

Wherein I detail some problems I've encountered. I'm not going to cover the broken fairings or rust, since I'm sure you can imagine them. I'm thinking about fixing them, though... that might be a later post.

1. Broken steering column bearing cage

For the totally ignorant, the steering column is the vertical pipe that connects the handlebars to the front wheel. You want to be able to turn it without turning the entire frame of the bike, and that's where ball bearings come in. They fit between the steering column and the frame, allowing them to rotate without wobbling around.

In the picture on the right, you can see the top of the steering column, with the handlebars removed. The ring around it is the lower bearing race. The bearings (held in place by the cage) go on top of it, with the upper race going on top of that. The upper race screws into place via threads on the steering column; when I got this bike, it wasn't tightened down all the way, so the handlebars rattled around and felt broken. That was an easy fix. There's actually also another set of bearings (not pictured) on the bottom, just above the wheel fork.

As you can see from the picture on the left, the bearing cage on this scooter was crushed, probably in the same accident that cracked up the front fairings, sheared through some wires. So now, instead of turning the steering column smoothly on evenly-spaced, greased-up bearings, turning it is easy in some spots and harder in others.

It's not a terribly hard part to replace; you can get the entire set for about $30. But I haven't gotten around to this yet. Surprisingly, the bike is still steerable, but it's not happy about sharp corners. This will probably be my next repair job.

2. Missing speedometer.

*sigh* Presumably, this happened in the same accident that I mentioned earlier. Only the previous owners actually know, and they didn't leave their names on the moped's title.

In the picture on the right, there's a gap between the front fork and the wheel. That's where the speedometer should be. Not the gauge, obviously, the actual measuring device. It has a cable (also missing) which runs up to the gauge. Those two parts cost $55 from the OEM. They'll probably be the last thing I fix.

3. Electrical System

The battery didn't hold a charge. It was slowly dying, but I didn't notice at first. I thought it was weird that I had to kick-start it all the time. When it started taking more and more work to kick-start it, I got a little concerned. By the time I thought to test it, the battery was down to 3 or 4 volts. Normally, they should be up near 12.

My first thought was that it was the battery, that it was just damaged from abuse or something. So I replaced it. Around here, batteries run a little pricey, since they all have to be shipped, so it ended up costing about $90. If I were doing it again, I'd wait until last to replace the battery, since all the other parts combined are cheaper.

The new battery worked fine for a while, but it was slowly losing its charge, too. At this point I realized that something in the charge circuit was broken. The charge circuit on a moped consists of 3 main parts: the stator (or magneto), the CDI, and the voltage regulator/rectifier. I replaced the stator, the voltage regulator, and the CDI, in that order. None of them cost me more than $25. If I did it again, I would replace the CDI, then the voltage regulator, then the stator. The stator is a huge pain to replace; you need to buy a flywheel puller just to get to it. The flywheel is the big cylindrical thing in the middle of the top picture on the left. The stator is behind it, seen in the lower left picture.

Anyway, the battery didn't charge properly until after I replaced the CDI, so that's what I imagine the problem was. Even the old battery works great again now. It took a couple months and a little less than $200, but the heap of junk is running quite well again.

P.S. One last bit of humor: check out the official circuit diagram, straight from the manufacturer's website. Seriously, take a look. It's pretty funny.

Bug Report to Internet

2009-06-07T18:14:00.002-04:00

A couple of my friends recently pitched in and got me a DasKeyboard. I'm delighted. This thing is amazingly crisp and smooth to type on. I'm not sure how I feel about the audible clicking when pressing a key - it's a bit loud, so that's annoying, but at the same time the audio feedback seems to help my typing. *shrug*

Anyway, it works great in Ubuntu - no problems, just plug and play. It doesn't have any ridiculous extra "Email" buttons or anything, so it doesn't need any weird drivers. It does have an integrated USB hub, however, but with Linux this wasn't a problem.

Then I booted into the Windows 7 RC that I use for gaming, and... nothing. It shows up in the device manager as "Unknown USB Device" with the little yellow question mark. The error details report "Code 43". Sometimes I could get it to work again by deleting the device and hitting "scan for hardware changes", which would redetect the device. Sometimes I had to reboot after deleting the device, then repeat the process.

This is apparently a known issue in Windows Vista, and there's a hotfix available. But Windows 7 users are apparently S.O.L. for now. No, you can't just install the Vista hotfix. So far, the only workaround I've found is attaching the DasKeyboard to my computer via a USB 1.0 extension cable. It seems to work for now. Let's hope Microsoft fixes this problem in the final release of Windows 7.

A Koan

2009-05-11T09:02:00.003-04:00

A scientist creates a machine that does exactly what it's told.
She tells it, "Do whatever you want." It says, "No."

Life Improvement

2009-05-10T19:47:00.016-04:00

Over the last few years, I've picked up a lot of stress. It's a familiar story, I'm sure: too many hats, not enough time, too much caffeine, not enough vacations. Too much stress can easily make your life a lot worse, but how are you supposed to turn things around when you feel like you don't have any free time? I've been keeping an eye out for quick, simple, easy steps that have a big positive impact on general quality of life. I've gathered my 4 personal favorites together into this post. If you have your own tips for life improvement, I'd love to hear them - stick them in the comments, or mail them to me if you know who I am.

If you're like me and don't have the time to read this whole post, just skim through and read the bold parts.

Get your vitamins
Recent studies have suggested a direct correlation between Vitamin D levels and the level of sickness. "In other words, the sicker someone was, the lower the levels of Vitamin D." (disclaimer) If you're an office drone, a night person, or a computer nerd like me, you might want to think about this.
It's an easy problem to fix. For most people, you need about 20 minutes of sun exposure at least twice a week to keep your Vitamin D levels at a healthy level. It should be between 10am-3pm, without sunscreen, on a pretty clear, sunny day. Think of it as an excuse to eat lunch outside. If you live north of 42°N latitude (Boston, Chicago, Northern California), you won't get enough Vitamin D from sunlight between November and February. Take vitamins or drink fortified milk instead. The NIH has a lot more information where this came from.

If you don't like actual vitamin pills, you can fill the requirements of several major vitamins by eating the USDA recommended amount of one food: 3 cups of dark leafy greens per week. (Do you really eat that much?) The nutritional benefits are amazing, and they can easily be incorporated into almost any kind of meal, as a salad, an ingredient, or a side dish. If you're feeling adventurous and live near the coast, try a delicious sea vegetable! I haven't met anyone yet who doesn't like wakame salad.
"Mindfulness Training" (Meditation)
This might sound like some New Age hippie charlatanry, but it's well-researched and promoted by reputable psychiatrists. If you want the gritty, exciting neurobiological details, watch this TechTalks video, but I'll summarize it here. The program was primarily developed to help children with attention and behavioral problems, but it's applicable to adults, as well. 10 minutes of mindfulness training a day will improve your attention, empathy, immune system, and outlook on life. Siegel's organization offers classes on this stuff, but in the simplest form, a basic meditation and breathing exercise will do. Just sit still for 10 minutes and focus on regulating your breathing. When your thoughts wander off, "gently and lovingly" guide them back to your breathing. Personally, I just set a 10-minute alarm on my phone and get to it. Systematic, long-lasting effects probably won't be seen for 6 weeks, but it seems to help alleviate my tension headaches before they get too serious. Also, a recent study at UCLA offers evidence that meditation actually grows several key areas of the brain (10-90 minutes per day in this group). I'm not going to say you should try this, but there are worse ways to spend 10 minutes of your day.
Other types of meditation, like visualization meditation, has been shown to give short-term benefits to your visuospatial abilities.
If you worry that you just don't have the willpower to get anything done, read this article on the Marshmallow Test, and try putting that ADD to work! Who said being easily distractible was a bad thing...
Get some houseplants
Most of us, unfortunately, spend too much time in closed spaces with only air conditioning to filter the air. Whether at home or in the office, the addition of some common, hard-to-kill plants will make your life better. A lot of blog posts have been written on this topic, and most of them are based on two sources: the Wolverton paper sponsored by NASA (summary), and Kamal Meattle's talk on TED (summary).

Meattle basically says that his company reduced the incidence of headaches, eye irritation, respiratory symptoms, lung impairment, and asthma by adding at least 4 plants per person to the workplace. The three plants he focuses on are the Areca Palm (at right, top), Mother-in-Law's Tongue (middle), and the Money Plant (bottom). You've probably seen these plants before; they're quite common and very difficult to kill.

The important thing is to have a lot of these plants: Meattle recommends 4 shoulder-high Areca Palms in day traffic areas, 6-8 waist-high Mother-in-Law's Tongues in evening/night areas, and Money Plants as needed. That's a pretty lofty goal - I wouldn't go right out and buy 15 plants per person - but it won't hurt to start small.

These aren't the only plants which help remove toxins and increase O2 levels in the air - see the summary of the NASA article, this article, or google for more. Two other notable plants you're probably familiar with are Spider Plants and Peace Lilies.

Still not sold? Other benefits of house/office plants can include increased calmness, optimism, creativity, and productivity. Doesn't that sound nice? Have I mentioned that these plants are easy to find and hard to kill?
5-minute chocolate cake
Yes, I've saved the best for last. If you missed this delicious blog fad recipe last year, don't worry, it's still around. This recipe is actually the only reason I keep cocoa in the house (hot chocolate is good, but I don't make it very often). For vegan style, get plenty egg substitutes (via LH). I wouldn't recommend this on a daily basis, but it's my favorite way to recover from a really terrible day.

That's it for now; maybe I'll add more later. As usual, the comments are yours for the making.

Basic Scooter Repair

2009-03-14T04:51:00.010-04:00

So a few months ago I bought this scooter from a friend who was moving out of the state. I don't need a car here - everything's pretty close - but it's not easy to get everywhere on a bike. So from that perspective, it seemed like a good choice. I didn't know anything about scooters at the time, so I ended up buying a lemon that's been in at least one major accident, and paid at least twice what it's actually worth. Well, you live, you learn. And when I learn a lesson, I learn it well. Here's a short introductory guide to moped/scooter repair. I'll describe all the problems with this thing in gory detail in my next post.

This is a cheap Chinese scooter, a Roketa (who are just a reseller, not an OEM). It's a 150cc scooter. The most common size is 50cc, but 150 are also around, and most of the scooter companies also make 250cc scooters, although I've never seen one. A few things that I cover here will differ from 50cc models, but it's all close enough that you should be able to figure it out.

Oil Change
Changing your oil is one of the easiest maintenance tasks on any vehicle. For scooters, there are two kinds of oil to change: the engine oil and the gear (or transmission) oil.

First, open the seat compartment and check the information stickers on the inside. One of them will tell you the grade of oil you should get. Mine recommended 15W-40.

In the foreground of this picture, you can see the rusted exhaust pipe and part of the dented muffler. Just behind the muffler, you can see the cap of the dipstick. Remove this first; this is where you'll add the new oil later. Behind the exhaust pipe is the actual motor, and on the bottom of the motor is a single large bolt. You can see it in this picture if you look closely. In real life you can't miss it; it's the only thing down there. Put a disposable container that can hold 2 quarts underneath the bolt and remove it. On my scooter it took a 17mm socket. When the old oil has totally drained, replace the bolt, pour the new oil in the dipstick hole, replace the cap, and you're done. Take the old oil to your local disposal facilities.

Changing your gear oil is a little trickier, but you don't need to replace it as often. The gear oil grade is also specified on the information stickers and in your manual. In my case, it recommended GL3 oil, but the local stores only carried GL4 and GL5. With these API ratings, it's okay to buy a higher rating than you need, but never a lower rating. I ended up using GL4, and it works fine.

In this picture we're on the left side (port side) of the scooter, looking at the transmission case and the rear wheel. It's a CVT, which means that the case mostly contains two wheels with a belt between them. If I ever take my case off again, I'll take some pictures. The gear oil draining bolt is on the bottom of the transmission case.

The largest bolt in this picture, the one in the middle, is the one to remove to add new gear oil. Since it's a narrow horizontal hole, some people recommend using something like a turkey baster to add the new oil. The gear oil I bought already had a nice small nozzle at the end that worked out okay.

Actually, while you're looking at this picture, it's really easy to tighten or loosen your rear brakes. You can barely see a spring in the upper-right corner of this picture. This is where the brake cable terminates. There's a small nut at the end of the brake cable; just turn it to tighten or loosen the brake cable.

Adjusting the throttle cable and fuel-air ratio
This is also quite easy. Open your seat compartment. Hopefully, you'll have a removable panel in the bottom. Take it off. You'll be looking directly down at the carburetor (seen at right). I've highlighted the throttle. Just turn the screw to tighten or loosen the throttle cable. Tightening/increasing the throttle will make your acceleration more responsive, but it also increases your idle RPMs. Since scooters use CVTs, if your RPMs are too high at idle, your scooter will actually roll forward while idling. Try to find a good balance.

The fuel-air ratio is easy to adjust, but hard to adjust correctly. In this picture (with the fairings removed) you can see the adjusting screw highlighted. It's on the other side of the carburetor, lower down. Without removing the fairings, it can be awkward to reach, especially with a screwdriver. I ended up using a flathead screw bit to reach it. I've heard of two ways to adjust it. The easier way is detailed here: turn the screw slightly one way while the motor is idling. If the RPMs lower, turn the other way. If they lower again, turn back. You're looking for maximum RPMs. The other way I've heard of adjusting the fuel-air ratio involves removing the spark plug (which I won't go into right now). Basically you put in a new spark plug and start it up for a minute. Remove the spark plug again; if the end is still white, the mixture is too lean, and you should turn it counterclockwise 1/4 turn. If it's too dark gray, turn it the other way. Repeat until you get a nice light gray color.

That's all for this post. I just wanted to cover some minor repair and adjustments that helped my scooter run better. In my next post, I'll cover the serious problems I learned to look for when buying a used moped.

Simple-minded

2009-03-02T20:12:00.010-04:00

There was a neat story on the Guardian a few months back, about the Pirahã tribe in Brazil and Daniel Everett, an ex-missionary who wrote most of the papers and the only major book about them. There's more information available on Wikipedia. They have an interesting language, tonal, with very few phonemes (8 consonants, 3 vowels). Everett claims that it is a very minimalistic language, with no relative clauses, few pronouns or kinship terms, and no words for colors or numbers. Everett also claims that it disproves Chomsky's latest theory, which has naturally caused plenty of controversy.

Admittedly, Everett seems like a bit of a sensationalist, but that's not an argument against the credibility of his claims. Another point to consider is that statements like "Language Y has no word for X" are commonly used by non-linguists to dismiss other languages as ignorant, rudimentary, or barbaric. You might have heard the inverse of this meme, something like: "Eskimos have a million words for snow". Neither of these are often used by linguists to make a point, because they don't actually tell us very much about the people using the language. (Language Log has actually been collecting a list of the number of times they've criticized the "no word for X" meme.) English, for example, might not have a single word for "melting snow that fell on a Wednesday", but we can still express the concept without difficulty; I just did. Relative simplicity of a lexicon (or phoneme inventory, or any other feature of a language) doesn't necessarily extend to the concepts available to speakers of the language.

The Pirahã apparently lead simple, practical lives, uninterested in anything outside of their lifespans or immediate environment. According to Everett, "they exist almost completely in the present. Absorbed by the daily struggle to survive, they do not plan ahead, store food, build houses or canoes to last, maintain tools or talk of things beyond those that they, or people they know, have experienced." They are the "ultimate empiricists".

From this blog post: "Single words pilot attention to the here and now. Complex sentences enable us to imagine an absent or alternate reality in detail."

Which came first, I wonder? Is the simple language of the Pirahã a cause or a product of their minimalist lifestyle? Do they only think of the present because their language doesn't allow them to communicate ideas about the non-present? Or is their language simpler than ours because they haven't felt the need to make it more complicated with non-present reality? Maybe it's co-evolution, a bit of both.

As an unrelated postscript, the Pirahã can apparently communicate by whistling to approximate the tones of words. Neat stuff.

masala chai

2009-02-16T05:12:00.002-04:00

I've had a few blog posts in the pipeline for a couple months now, but this blog honestly isn't my highest priority. Still, I felt like posting something tonight, so I'll write up something short.

I love masala chai. I know, it might sound vaguely pretentious when I say it like that, but I like to be authentic. Names for Indian dishes sound so exotic, but they're mostly pretty simple. Masala chai is just "spiced tea", and wow is it ever! Besides, we don't need a repeat of this sort of thing.

This site is one of the top google results. They have a nice, diverse selection of recipes, from the easy-diy-in-30-seconds-for-suburbanites to the hardcore-grow-the-spices-in-your-backyard. As in most things, I like a good compromise.

There are a few spices that, from my limited experience, seem pretty essential:

Cardamom pods - obviously, the fresher the better. You can tell if they're really fresh, because the scent will knock you on your ass. Oh yeah. It'll still be good if they're pretty old, though, so don't worry. Powdered is probably okay.
Cinammon sticks - the Korean market down the street has these great little cinammon drinks in half-sized soda cans. It's not really related to this subject, but I like them.
Black peppercorns - When I was a kid, staying at my grandparents' house, I would sneak out to the living room at night and eat these things whole out of the top of the pepper grinder. Yeah, I know, I started out early.
Ginger, fresh and ground/grated/whatever - Along with the pepper, this should be pretty easy to get.

Now, if you want them fresh, you should probably get them from an asian grocery or the local hippie store / bulk foods store. Spices are unbelievably cheaper in bulk than in those little glass and plastic containers you find in a typical supermarket. Plus they're fresher. Double win.

As far as proportions go, it's all a matter of taste. Personally, I probably go with multiples of 10 cardamom pods, 1 cinammon stick, 7 peppercorns, and a piece of ginger the size of... umm... 2d6 or so.

Preparation goes like this: grind up the spices (with this one you're on your own... I still don't have a good solution), simmer them in water with tea for 15 minutes. Some people simmer the spices for 10 minutes, then add the tea, then another 10 minutes. The basic idea is to evaporate off some of the water. Perhaps 1/4? Perhaps not.
You also need to add some sort of milk at some point. Purists call for half-and-half or cream or something, and add it at the beginning; I like soymilk added halfway through. You also might want to add some sugar/honey.

With black tea, people disagree about whether it should be boiled or not. Since you're steeping the tea for so long, green or white tea wouldn't work very well - they get bitter when you steep them for more than 2-3 minutes. I recommend Rooibos, however. It's great when masala'd up. If you're going to do away with tea altogether, you'll probably have to steep the spices for at least twice as long.

Of course, there are also a bazillion other spices you can add. Some people eschew cardamom in favor of fennel seeds; I use them both. Cloves, star anise, allspice, nutmeg, bay leaves, vanilla, licorice root... also good. You can also try white instead of black pepper.

Lastly, about 80% of the trouble of making your own chai is the pulverizing of the spices. I've started grinding up a big batch (minus the ginger) and keeping it in a jar. Now masala chai is easy enough to be worked into my morning routine, when I'm still stumbling around in a haze. If you're into this sort of thing, give it a try! If not, I don't know how you got this far. I'll have some different fare up here later this week, probably.

From an Old Notebook

2009-01-17T01:21:00.006-04:00

I found this short essay in a notebook of mine from several years ago. Anarchists (and libertarians, I suppose) sometimes argue over whether it's hypocritical to vote or otherwise participate in politics. This is my opinion. It has been edited slightly.

"By standing outside of the political process, we deny the state legitimacy..."
- Lance Klafta

"One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors."
- Widely (and probably incorrectly) attributed to Plato

There's a certain absurdity in discussing the correct behavior for the anarchist of integrity, or at least in issuing mandates for ethical behavior, since the final legislator, executor, and adjudicator of an anarchist's behavior is herself. The sacred sovereignty of the self is inviolate, but we make our decisions with an eye to history: that of our thoughts and experiences, and those of others.

Making ethical decisions as an anarchist living in a democratic republic is a process of negotiation - I want to take care of my own welfare and protection without interference, to decide without coercion how the fruits of my labor will be used; the conglomerate republic wants my conformance with its whims.

Some anarchists think a revolution, a coup, is an acceptable solution to this standoff. I disagree (with some reservations). Without the support of the people, a revolution by a minority is just another tyranny, regardless of its aims. If we want to earn our freedom, we must respect the freedom of others, and the vast majority of people have chosen, are choosing, a life of comfortable slavery. Democracy is the ultimate tool for revolution; until we can offer working alternatives to government institutions - alternatives that the majority of people will freely choose - we'll never succeed.

In my opinion, what we do in the meantime is a bit extraneous. As long as we never rely on the state to solve our problems for us, as long as we never become dependent on the state, we preserve our individual and collective independence, whether we choose to participate in politics or not.
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My rsync Backup Script

2008-12-17T21:09:00.007-04:00

I wrote this little script a couple days ago. It went through its maiden voyage early this morning (the first with the training wheels removed) and it seems to work fine. I wrote it because I was tired of thinking "Hmm, I should look into a backup solution", but never doing anything about it. My goal was to back up the important files from my laptop to my desktop, and to do it once a day, fully automated. I would be surprised at how easy it was.

#!/bin/bash
sudo -u localuser rsync -aqe ssh --delete --exclude="cups/ssl" --exclude="ssl/private" /etc remoteuser@server:/storage/backups/laptop
apt-cache pkgnames > /root/currently_installed_packages.txt
ls -1R /home/localuser/Desktop/Temp > /root/Desktop-Temp_file_listing.txt
rsync -aqe ssh --delete /root remoteuser@server:/storage/backups/laptop
rsync -aqe ssh --delete --exclude="Desktop/Temp/*" --exclude=".gvfs" /home/localuser remoteuser@server:/storage/backups/laptop

I've used conventions which I hope are obvious: the server's hostname has been changed to "server". Likewise, "localuser" and "remoteuser" are just aliases. Some of my decisions are a bit eccentric, so I'll comment briefly on each line.

sudo -u localuser rsync -aqe ssh --delete --exclude="cups/ssl" --exclude="ssl/private" /etc remoteuser@server:/storage/backups/laptop

This line backs up my /etc directory. I don't have a lot of customized files in here, but there are a few, and this folder doesn't take up much space (12 MB), so I don't mind backing the whole thing up. This whole script runs as root, but I don't want to backup the /etc/shadow file or anything else that only root can read, so this line runs as localuser. The rsync options are "a" for archive mode, "q" for quiet, and "e ssh" to send the data over ssh for security. "--delete" allows rsync to delete files on the server that have been deleted on the laptop. When I ran this script the first time, it complained about not being able to read two directories, so I excluded them. For these rsync commands to be automated, you need to use public key authentication.

apt-cache pkgnames > /root/currently_installed_packages.txt

I only use my /root directory to store a few scripts and text files. This line outputs a list of all my currently installed packages. The idea is that the next time I format/upgrade/reinstall, I can run this command again, do a diff between the two, and figure out which programs I forgot to reinstall. In reality, this will probably be a mess, because I swear that something like 60% of installed packages are just libraries.

(Update: As it turns out, there's an easier way to do this. I'm changing this line to dpkg --get-selections > /root/package-list-backup.log Note that this file can also be loaded in Synaptic for easy gui reinstallation of old packages.)

ls -1R /home/localuser/Desktop/Temp > /root/Desktop-Temp_file_listing.txt

I also have a folder on my laptop where I keep files that I don't want to backup. A lot of them are media files that I'll probably watch or listen to once and then delete or move to a permanent home elsewhere. I don't care if I lose these files, but I do want to know what I lost so I can look them up again if I want to. This line saves a list of all the files in that folder.

At this point you can probably figure out the last two lines yourself.

I saved this script as /root/backup-script, and then ran crontab as root. I entered the line 4 20 * * * /root/backup-script, which runs the script at 4:20am daily. I could have used "@daily" or "0 0 * * *" to run it at midnight every day, but I'm often still using my laptop at midnight, and other cron jobs run every hour.

I'm pretty happy with this backup solution. In the future, I'll probably want to set up another layer of security (backing up the backups), so I think I'll write a short script on the server to make a copy of the backup folder once a week or so. Of course, after that I'll need a backup solution for the server, but that's a project for another day. Perfect security may be unattainable, but a few little projects like this can save a lot of trouble down the road.

Blowfish Love

2008-12-17T02:46:00.002-04:00

I have both a laptop and a desktop/server at my house, and I've had this arrangement for several years. Naturally, since both computers run Linux, I've always used ssh to hop from one to the other when I need to fix something. One thing has always annoyed me about using it at home, however: it always seemed to take a ridiculously long time to connect. Timing it now, it takes about 5 seconds. That might not sound like much, but when you're waiting at the command line, it's a small eternity.

In retrospect, the problem seems obvious. By default, the OpenSSH server does reverse domain name resolution on every incoming connection. Since I don't bother to run a DNS server on my local 10.0.0.0 network, sshd was asking 4.2.2.1 if it knew any hostnames for my non-routable ip address every time I tried to connect. Of course it timed out after a few seconds and allowed the connection anyway, but this was wasting precious seconds of my life.

Linux domain name resolution is very similar to Windows. It looks in the /etc/hosts file first, then queries the nameservers in /etc/resolv.conf. All I had to do was add an entry for my desktop in my laptop's hosts file (and vice versa), and suddenly the connection was nearly instantaneous.

Incidentally, the area of local network hostname resolution is one where Microsoft found a working solution twenty years ago (with IBM's NetBIOS protocol), and the Unix world has lagged behind. When I figured out this ssh problem, the first thing I did was use the nmblookup program to find the ip address of my laptop in the other room, so I could add it to the hosts file. Both computers run Samba, in order to play nice with the Windows computers in the house. It's sad that there isn't a good linux solution to this problem, besides running a DNS server.

Which brings us to another tasty morsel for today. I do a lot of moving files back and forth between my desktop and laptop, and for years I've been disgruntled at the lack of nicely integrated options for LAN file sharing. I've historically used SMB, but it has serious drawbacks: a totally separate authentication database, a failure to properly set linux permissions on uploaded files, bizarre codepage support (most recently, it refused to accept filenames with colons), and so on. SMB's ancient alternative is NFS, which wouldn't be hard, but I don't want to install anything I don't have to. Finally, I've used SFTP at times, but I had to use Filezilla, which is too complicated when I just want to copy some files. Until recently, I don't think Gnome (Nautilus) supported sftp:// handles. Well, now it does. You can even make Launchers for your desktop or panels, with type: Location, and location: sftp://username@server/folder, then just click on them to open the shared folder. Lovely!

However, in order to do this without authenticating every time, you'll need to copy your ssh id file over to the remote computer. ssh-keygen -t dsa (with blank passphrase) and then ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub username@server will do the trick.

The script that I wrote yesterday uses keyfile authentication like that to securely, incrementally backup my important files from laptop to desktop with rsync, every day. It's a simple little 5-line script, but I'm quite pleased with it. If anyone finds that sort of thing interesting, let me know, and I'll post it.

Um..

2008-12-15T17:07:00.003-04:00

So I've been watching Mandarin language music videos recently. Only a few. My Chinese is still so basic that I'm not really learning anything, but it's still pretty fun.

Anyway, so there's this really sad video from... I dunno, a couple years ago...

And someone put a great deal of time into making a very detailed LEGO version. It's very ironic; during the most emotional parts of the song, you find yourself staring at expressionless plastic faces. I wonder if this is what autism feels like. Unless you really enjoy sappy love songs, you might have a hard time watching these. Don't feel bad; I just thought this was too absurd not to share.

From KTV.

(edit: oh, yeah... if you can't see the embedded videos in your rss reader, you're going to have to read the post on this site.)

Context-free

2008-11-11T18:25:00.002-04:00

In a fortuitous coincidence, I'm taking several complementary classes this semester. On the CS front, I'm in a class on Formal Languages and Automata, and in its twin, Compiler Theory. On the Linguistics front, I'm taking Morphology and Syntax (and some other stuff).

You probably don't know this, but they're quite similar. These are probably the areas where linguistics and computer science most overlap. There are small differences, of course: in syntax we study phrase structure trees; in formal languages and compiler theory they're called parse trees. The main difference is that linguistics focuses on natural languages, while computer science focuses on formal languages.

Today, I was delighted to read a post on the well-known Language Log linguistics blog. It's sometimes a bit technically dense for me to enjoy, but today I actually understood the technical part (underlined below).

Some people seem to use the term "recursion" to refer to what I would call self-embedding: embedding a phrase inside another larger phrase of the same type in such a way that some of the larger phrase is to the left of the smaller phrase and some is to the right:
[The rat that [the cat that [the dog chased] dragged in] is still there behind the couch.]

That's a relative clause (that the dog chased) in the middle of a relative clause (that the cat that the dog chased dragged in) which is itself in the middle of another clause (The rat that the cat that the dog chased dragged in is still there behind the couch). It's hard to understand even for us, and our language is supposed to have recursive embedding of clauses. (Technical note: the existence of an unbounded set of configurations of this sort is sufficient to show that a context-free set of strings over a vocabulary of two or more symbols is non-regular, but not necessary.)

This is some pretty fundamental stuff in Formal Languages. If you aren't aware and don't feel like reading the wikipedia link, context-free language productions are generally of the form A->xBy, and regular languages are the subset that is also left-linear (A->xB) or right-linear (A->Bx).

Of course, my friend J. attests that Pullum's example is not a valid English sentence, but that's not really my point here.

Papaya Jack-O-Lanterns

2008-11-04T23:20:00.003-04:00

Having heard that it was once traditional for children in Hawai'i to carve papayas for Halloween, putting a burning kukui nut (candlenut) inside (instead of a candle), I decided to give it a try. I picked a couple papayas from one of the trees in the back yard. I didn't have any kukui nuts sitting around, so I just used small candles.

It's a simple process, exactly the same as pumpkin carving, but on a smaller scale. First, you cut off the very top. It's a good idea to bezel the edges (cut down at an angle) so the top sits in its hole better. You'll probably have to trim off a little bit of the bottom so it'll stand up straight. Then you scoop out the seeds inside and carve the face. If you're trying to do any details, you'll need a pretty small knife.

Papayas have a good texture for carving. Ripe yellow ones can be a bit soft, but they're easy to carve. Green ones, on the other hand, are pretty tough - the outside is probably about as tough as a carrot, so they're a little more hazardous to carve.

It's a trade-off, really, between the yellow and green ones. The yellow ones, as you can see, glow a nice orange color, but the green ones give a starker contrast between the face and the background.

Well, that's about it. I'm pretty pleased with how they turned out; it took a lot less time than pumpkin carving, and they're awfully cute. If you live somewhere that papayas grow, give this a try next Halloween!

Universal Child Health Care

2008-10-19T00:52:00.007-04:00

So you may have heard that recently Hawaii ditched its Universal Keiki (Child) Health Care Plan. If you haven't, it was the only plan of its kind in the country, it started about 7 months ago, and they were only insuring about 2,000 children. Most people seem to agree that the program shouldn't have been axed, but that's not what I wanted to focus on.

The regular Child Plan available through the Hawaii Medical Service Association (HMSA, the largest provider in Hawaii) costs "about $55 per month". For the state plan, the state payed $25.50 per child per month, and HMSA apparently subsidized the rest themselves. Parents paid a $7 copay per visit.

What I'm interested in is the cost of a national universal health care plan for children. The U.S. population is currently about 303 million (CIA Factbook, July 2008), and 24.6% is below 18 (the age group covered by child health care plans). That comes out to about 74.7 million minors in the U.S.

Here's where this calculation gets shaky: if we assume that the rates that the state of Hawaii were paying are representative of what the federal government would pay (a big assumption), then the yearly estimate works out to 74.74 million * $25.50 * 12 = $22.87 billion per year. $23 billion doesn't seem so bad, but this assumption is based on the idea that health insurance companies will be willing to eat some of the costs for insuring children. Sure, it happens in Hawaii, but somehow I doubt that mainland insurance companies have that kind of aloha. So if we try again with the $55/month estimate, we get $49.3 billion. That's probably not including administrative costs, so it's likely a little more than that. But on the other hand, the Hawaii program used privatized insurance plans (through HMSA), which studies have shown are 10% more expensive for children than public plans (Medicare). If we assume a "socialized" program, I think that cancels out any administrative costs we might have wanted to factor in.

Of course, this is still assuming that $55 is a reasonable monthly rate for child health insurance. Let's take a brief look at national statistics. Sadly, good statistics are hard to find. The best source I could dig up in a quick search was this site, which says that in California it ranges from $30/month with $1500 deductible to $150/month with no deductible. For the $7 copay that the Hawaii universal program had, the $150/month plan could be pretty accurate. That brings us way up to a massive $134.5 billion annual cost.

But there's one last important point: we've been calculating the gross cost of insuring all the children in the U.S. But 40% of American households already make below $34,000 year (according to the data on this wikipedia page), which makes them eligible for free (or very cheap) child health insurance in most states. Basically, we taxpayers have already been paying for health insurance for the poorest of children. I have no idea how much money we're already spending on this, but let's pretend that the 40% of households only accounts for 40% of U.S. children. (I think that's quite conservative, don't you?) This slashes our wildest estimate back down to $80.7 billion, and cuts our lower $55/month estimate down to $29.5 billion.

Obama's campaign says that it will cost "between $55 billion and $60 billion a year" to insure all the children in the U.S.

I don't have any information on how they came up with that figure, but my (amateur) estimate puts the figure at between $30 and $80 billion. Whether that's good or bad depends on how optimistic you are, but I don't think that's half bad.

Anthropomorphology

2008-10-14T19:37:00.008-04:00

Something about these little animals in clothing is irresistible. The meme compels me! I love it so much.

Pictures from the shop of berkleyillustration on etsy.

They break my page layout, but I don't care. I think I'll buy some of this stuff.

One of my favorite writers

2008-10-09T22:32:00.005-04:00

If you haven't watched him speak before, he's very easy to listen to. It's probably that hypnotic British prosody. TED put this speech in a category called "Master Storytellers", which ought to be telling.

Yes, this is Richard Dawkins, but no, this isn't one of his atheist bits (except perhaps for one small joke about animism at the end), so if you were cringing, please relax. I don't really have any interest in that sort of thing: to my mind, if talk about religion isn't an argument, it's not entertaining, and it's not an argument if there aren't at least two people talking. This video is just some delicious pop science brain-candy: please enjoy.

Diaspora

2008-10-04T05:08:00.003-04:00

So one of my friends recently acquired the game Spore for, ah, evaluation purposes. Since I know several of you are gamers, I thought I'd briefly sketch my thoughts on the game with a culinary metaphor.

I recently started making granola. It's really easy, as long as you actually follow a recipe, and it tastes delicious. I made a mistake with my third batch. I was adding all kinds of secondary ingredients: vanilla, raisins, macadamia nuts, flax seeds, sesame seeds... and barley. I added the barley with thoughts of puffed barley breakfast cereal, and with some consideration of how tough barley can be, I made sure to soak the barley overnight before adding it to the granola I was about to bake.

It wasn't nearly enough. In retrospect, I should have boiled the barley until it was as tender as pasta; but alas, I didn't. The barley became so many hundreds of tiny little rocks, scattered throughout my beautiful, delicious granola. I even tried eating the stuff, but with every spoonful, my teeth would crunch down on three or four inedible barley nuggets which I had to spit out. There was simply no way to filter out the barley while leaving the rest of the granola, so I just put the entire batch in plastic bags and set it aside for feeding the birds at the park.

Playing Spore feels like trying to eat that granola. It starts out great, and you think to yourself "Wow, this is terrific!" Then you chomp down on one of the UI inconsistencies, the inflexible narrative paths of gameplay, or on-planet navigation in a spaceship, and you nearly break your teeth. You might brush it aside as an anomaly and try again, but the problem is systemic, and you will soon curse the fates for pairing such a lovely rose with such devilish thorns.

For people with damage to their left angular gyrus (who can't process metaphors), I will conclude by summarizing this post: I like Spore - the space part in particular reminds me of TW2002 - but its frustrations have left me with nothing but wistful regrets for what could have been.

post-endo

2008-09-13T00:47:00.005-04:00

I'm not sure if this flash player will work properly, but I wanted to share one of my new favorite bands with you all. I'm pretty sure most of you know someone who would love to receive one of their cds as a gift (besides me). Yeah, I know they've been around for a couple years, but they're new to me.

Also, their website is a work of art. Incredible. Brings me right back to 1996. Even if you don't listen to or like the music, check it out. It's where that music file came from, too, so don't nobody give me any lip! I'm lookin' at you, corporate lawyers...

p.p. - so the player does seem to work for now. here's where i found how to do it.

Regarding Regards

2008-09-09T17:40:00.006-04:00

Although every literate adult ought to be familiar with common openings and closing of letters ("Dear Sir or Madam,"; "Sincerely,"), did you know that they are respectively known as the salutation and the valediction of the letter? That valediction article in particular has some interesting history of these ubiquitous phrases, tracing them back to such linguistic fossils as "I have the honour to remain, Madam, Your Majesty's most humble and obedient servant". (In a brief tangent, we can venture off into the byways of style, such as "Your Excellency" - which, again tangentially, the U.S. President is apparently forbidden to use - and title.)

I know at least one of my readers who will complain that this information is all frivolous trivia, with no practical utility. Of course I disagree. It is trivia, but language constructs like "Yours truly" have calcified into opaque idioms. Awareness of their history alleviates the stranglehold of ignorant tradition, giving us the liberty to experiment, subvert, and play with our language in individual ways (I've started to use valedictions like "Indisputably," or "Ordinarily,"). It also restores rhyme & reason to aspects of life that we might otherwise consider absurd and arbitrary. It increases your level of comfort with your language, and consequently your confidence with its use.

As another example, do you know what your name means? You may have looked it up in a book of baby names, or heard a folk etymology by word of mouth, but what do you really know? Most "English" names are borrowed from other languages, especially Anglicized versions of names from Gaelic, Germanic, Romance languages, and the Bible. Some, like my middle name, are lost in a sea of conflicting translations, and without the assurance of an authority in Hebrew, I'm unlikely to ever discover the original meaning. Others, like my first and last names, can be easily traced to the words they were derived from (Irish Gaelic, roughly "fair-born" and "snow white", respectively).

For me, I suppose that seeking a deeper, more intimate understanding of my language might ultimately be a way to both complicate my identity and evoke its peculiarities. I'm fascinated by complexity and neglect; I think this pursuit reflects one facet of that fascination. But despite appearances, I don't post here entirely for my own sake. Do you have titillating information on correspondence etiquette? Where does your name come from? Do you prefer to have a simple identity or a complex one? Should I really post links if they just go to Wikipedia? The comments are yours for the making; I'm done for today.

*luded: a brief reference for the grammatically impaired

2008-07-30T17:59:00.004-04:00

allude - To refer to something indirectly. This word is related to allusion, which high school Shakespeare probably familiarized you with. If you're arguing with an intellectual and you're trying to intimidate them by using a fancier word for "imply", this is the one you want. "I wasn't stating my own opinion, but alluding to the work of Vygotsky."

elude - To slip away. In an argument, you probably want to use it so: "Obviously my point has eluded you." Think of "elusive".

delude - To mislead; to lead astray. You probably know this one. Usually its past participle is used ("You're deluded."). It's rarely used as a verb ("Rand deludes many enthusiastic young philosophers.").

illude - A fairly archaic word related to illusion. Nowadays it means "to deceive"; an older use was "to mock or ridicule". You almost certainly do not want to use this word - unless you're coming up with cool names for superheroes. "Rogue! Devil! Your charlatanry has illuded me!"

quaalude - Even as a joke, this is at least 40 years old, and will definitely date you. But if you read about 'ludes in some history book, this is what they were alluding to. (see what i did there?) "No, my good man, I shall not disco this eve; I just partook of several 'ludes with a lady of considerable reputation and we intend to retire to her chambers."

Slow computer? Blame DeBeers.

2008-07-09T20:32:00.003-04:00

Thanks to their massively successful "a diamond is forever" marking campaign meme, demand rose so high that the diamond market has become inflated.

Natural diamonds aren't particularly rare. In 2006, more than 75,000 pounds were produced worldwide. A diamond is a precious commodity because everyone thinks it's a precious commodity, the geological equivalent of a bouquet of red roses, elegant and alluring, a symbol of romance, but ultimately pretty ordinary.

Today, the incredible semiconductor properties of synthetic diamond could be exploited to make computer chips that would never overheat. But despite recent advances in synthetic diamond-growing technology, progress is slowed by the opposition of DeBeers and the rest of the natural diamond diggers, as well as by the profitability of selling synthetic gems.

While a natural, one-carat amber-colored diamond might retail for $20,000 or more, the Florida-based manufacturer Gemesis sells a one-carat stone for about $6,000. But no one, Gemesis included, wants to sell diamonds too cheaply lest the market for them collapse.

Anyway, the article is from Smithsonian Magazine (via SU). It's an interesting read.

Reading skills

2008-06-26T16:32:00.005-04:00

Yesterday I spent several hours erasing pencil notes and underlines added to two library books. I'll most likely spend a couple more hours at it today, and several other people have also worked on this project. Don't misunderstand: I've been getting paid to do it, but it still rubs me the wrong way. It's a terrible breach of patron etiquette. I'm not, however, going to preach "biblical" ethics today.

I usually don't like reading books which other people have left notes and underlines in. I find it very distracting to be reading along, trying to commune with the spirit of the author's message, when an interloper rudely interjects their own opinion with a long underline: "Hey this sentence is important". Usually I disagree.

Cryptic notes are more of a mixed bag. Sometimes I get a delightful voyeuristic thrill from chancing across a stranger's private message to their future self, scratched in the margin of a used book. rem c.t.'s fall. What? This private window into a presumably vast inner world is such a small peephole that nothing comprehensible makes it out. Even reading my own notes in the pages of adolescent favorites (Beyond Good & Evil, Fear and Trembling) is a murky, mystifying glimpse of the ultimate futility in self-reflection. What the hell was I talking about? None of this makes any sense.

Surprisingly, clarity only makes things worse, especially when the aspiring second author of the book is arguing with the first author. This kind of behavior escalates with each successive owner of the book, until some poor clearance items in the used bookstore resemble Amazon reviews or the comments section of a YouTube video. If you haven't experienced this sort of thing before, it makes it terribly hard to pay attention to the text when someone keeps shouting in the background: "THIS IS UTTER CRAP" or "TOTALLY RIDICULOUS".

Other annoyances include insipid beginning literature students, who will take a perfectly good book of poetry and add notes like "christ figure?", "image symbolism", or "this is a metaphor".

But as I implied earlier, this isn't meant as criticism. Annotating your own books is a matter of personal taste, and some people find it quite helpful. I've heard people say that they love acquiring a textbook full of notes, since it saves them time figuring out which parts are important.

I have a private theory that some mass disasters of universal underlining are caused by kinetic learners, who might have a hard time understanding the text unless they're moving along with it - and following along with your finger seems childish, so they use a pencil - and underlining every word they read so they can keep their place. I can sympathize with this. Ironically, any of them reading this probably had a hard time with that long sentence I just used to describe them. Computers offer a nice non-destructive solution, though, with mouse highlighting.

So, in case you haven't been following, I actually approve of underlining and note-taking in the margins. It can be a helpful reading tool, which anyone (even skilled readers) can take advantage of. Just - please - don't do it in library books. Make a photocopy.

Artsy-Fartsy Smarty-Pants

2008-02-24T07:00:00.004-04:00

Throughout the course of my life, from time to time my interest has arrived back at the concept of Artificial Intelligence. I don't usually tell people about this... hobby of mine, partly because I think of it as a personal interest, and partly because I feel like it's an embarrassing thing for a computer scientist to admit. AI research is a respectable discipline, with numerous serious sub-fields, but, you know, respectability is mostly just for show. There needs to be an underlying passion, a certain idealistic motivation for progress, a sense of purpose in a field if there's going to be any continued success.

AI research, of course, has plenty of passion. Maybe a little too much. It's a very contentious and hot-blooded group. Take, for example, the battle of the neats and the scruffies. Or, for more background, check out the well-referenced Wikipedia article Philosophy of artificial intelligence. The basic idea I'd like you to grasp so far is that, for several reasons, the field is rather schismatic:

AI is really complicated. This is a well-publicized truism. Before you can dip your toes in the General (or Strong) AI pool, you should be at least casually familiar with the technical jargon of cognitive science, psycholinguistics, the foundations of mathematics, and of course computer science. This doesn't sound too bad until you realize that each of these "fields" is actually an umbrella term for a wide range of actual topics. It's also an awkward mix of hard and soft sciences (thus the neats & scruffies).
Everyone has a different theory of what AI should be. Unless they stop to think about it, most people seem pretty confident that they know what thinking is. Even when we do stop to think, some of us still think we have a good handle on what's going on. As it turns out, though, we all disagree about the details. :)
Most of the sub-fields of AI (the many "applied AI" disciplines) are rich enough to attract the devoted, undivided attention of curious visitors, and to support many real-world applications. It's great that there are so many opportunities, but I sometimes get the impression that the many children of General AI are too busy to keep in touch with the rest of their family.

It can be disconcerting to stare into an abyss like the unsolved problems of AI research, and to consider that one could throw one's entire life into that gaping maw, disappearing without a trace. It's humbling, too, which is good, because the General AI enthusiasts I've talked to (or listened to) are often insufferably arrogant. I'd like to avoid that. If it's not too late. :)

Seriously though, that's just the prologue. My current relationship with AI was rekindled by wading through the massive GEB. It took about 8 months of on-again, off-again reading (all that typographical stuff was mind-numbingly boring), but I'd like to buy the book so I can read it again. Totally worth it. Some of the later chapters are a nice general introduction to the field of AI.

I finished it about 4 months ago. Since then, I've been reading some other non-fiction which I'd also like to recommend very highly. Richard Dawkin's book The Selfish Gene is probably my favorite. I recommend it to anyone. The Lady Tasting Tea was an enjoyable companion to my Probability class last semester; it's not really very technical. This book The Machine in the Garden is pretty good so far. I've laughed at Cyborg Citizen a few times... I particularly enjoyed the science of "dildonics". Scattered by Gabor Maté has some really great insights into developmental psychology. Only about half the book is actually about ADD; there are at least 3 or 4 chapters dedicated to parenting topics which I think anyone could benefit from reading, since we all experience it from at least one side of the fence. Lastly, I've started flipping through another massive literary work: Don Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming (Currently 4 volumes, out of a projected 7. He estimates vol. 5 will be ready in 2015. For his sake as well as ours, let's wish him a long life.)

Oh, and post-finally, I found a copy of the Ashley Book of Knots at the library, which I checked out. I'd really like to own a copy. It's a rare thing in any field to find a nearly exhaustively authoritative work, and coming across one always makes my inner researcher a little giddy. Other examples include the Sibley Guide to Birds and the Dictionary of Symbols (most of its information is available on the companion site to the newer version, Symbols). Great stuff.

Addendum: Oh right, so if any of you have read any good books recently (fiction or non-fiction) which you think I'd like, tell me about them! I'm open to just about anything.

Making Hot Sauce

2008-01-24T23:50:00.000-04:00

I've made hot sauce twice recently, and to my surprise it turned out to be pretty easy. It's certainly more reliable than my ill-fated pocket pie recipe (which was good the first time, but turned out to be hard to replicate. Oh well).

In these pictures I'm using the local Hawaiian Chili Peppers (some cultivar of Capsicum frutescens), which are quite hot. They're also tiny, as you can see, which make them difficult to work with. But we'll get to that later.

Preparation
The most important aspect of preparation is protecting your skin. If you're using mild peppers and you have tough skin you can probably get away without using gloves. As you can see, I prepared these peppers without gloves, but even though my skin is not very sensitive, my left hand (which I handled the peppers with) tingled for the next two days.

Whether you wear gloves or not, do not touch any other parts of your body until you have finished and washed your hands with soap several times. If you touch your eyes, they'll burn for several hours. Also make sure to go to the bathroom before starting. Some areas of skin are more sensitive than others; even if you can't feel the oil on your hands, that doesn't mean it's not there.

Well, now that I've scared off the weak-hearted, let's continue. Start off with the usual caveats:

Wash your hands.
Wear latex gloves.
Rinse the peppers.
Use a clean work area.
Sharp knives are better than dull ones.

There are two distinct methods of preparing the chilies, depending on how hot they are and how hot you want your final sauce to be. If you're using a "mild" hot pepper, like jalapeños, and you don't want to reduce their heat at all, you can do this the lazy way and skip to step 3: roasting. You won't need to de-seed the peppers, although I still recommend it: the seeds have no flavor, but they're high in capsaicin, which means they add heat without flavor. And the flavor's the best part.

De-seeding
The easiest way I've found is to slice each pepper lengthwise, setting them aside. This way you can work on one thing at a time, and if someone is helping you, they can work on the next step.

The traditional way to de-seed and devein a pepper is to use the knife to scrape along the inside of the pepper, dragging the unwanted parts out. This technique works well with large peppers, but with the small ones I'm working with here, a different strategy is called for.

My solution was to have a small bowl of water nearby. Pick up each pepper, submerge it in the water, and rub it gently between your thumb and forefinger. The seeds will fall out and sink to the bottom; it's much faster than trying to scrape out these tiny little peppers.

Roasting the peppers
At this point, you should have a pile of peppers. If you're very lazy, you can skip this step too and go straight on to step 4: mixing. But raw pepper flavor just isn't very exciting to most people. It tastes fresh and lively, but it's usually a pretty simple flavor.

If you're not going to roast them, most hot sauces are made with salt-pickled chilies or chilies that have been blanched in boiling vinegar. Check out other online recipes for more information.

Roasting the peppers does incredible things to the flavor, but it can be hazardous, too. For ideal taste, you'll probably want to sauté or bake the peppers until they're soft and slightly blackened.

But watch out! Smoke from chili peppers is extremely irritating. If you have sensitive lungs, or even normal lungs, the steam or smoke from the peppers will make you cough quite a bit. It's not a pleasant sensation.

Use a low heat setting
Don't roast peppers around other people
Try to keep them covered while cooking them
Be careful not to inhale the vapors

If the steam/smoke starts to irritate your throat:

Open the windows if you have to.
Use a fan.
And breathe shallowly. Deep breaths just pull more smoke in.

Speaking of smoke, I've always wanted to try smoking the peppers with hickory wood or something. It sounds like a lot of fun, but if you want to get similar results the easy way (and possibly the healthier way), use some liquid smoke. You can find this stuff at just about any grocery store, and it's amazing.

Mixing the sauce
We're finally ready to start mixing it up! The basic recipe is really simple: put the peppers in a blender or food processor, add vinegar, and blend away! It's good practice to start with a small amount of vinegar; you can always add more until the sauce reaches the desired consistency.

Of course, some people can't leave a good thing alone. Try some of the following ingredients to adulterate your hot sauce:

Garlic - almost everyone loves garlic. It's the perfect addition to hot sauce. Try some Sriracha!
Carrots or fruits - an easy way to naturally sweeten your hot sauce. Almost any fruit will work. If you have to add sugar, try to use brown sugar.
Juice - 100% fruit juice or tomato puree can sweeten the sauce while adding a unique flavor.
Herbs and spices - use your imagination. Just about any flavor goes well with hot sauce, even "sweet" spices like cloves or allspice.

Finishing Up
Now just use a small funnel to pour the hot sauce into whatever small (cleaned!) bottles you have around the house, and remember to clean up your work area. All finished!

By the way, if I've piqued your interest in the fiery realm of hot sauces, be sure to check out some of the other recipes on Internet. Some of them have more in-depth directions than I do, and others have some pretty wild ideas! Well, that's all for today: Happy Condimenting!

Plastic Science 2

2007-10-21T06:12:00.000-04:00

For the past several months, the internet knitting/crochet community has been humming about reusing plastic shopping bags. There are literally hundreds of blog posts on the topic now; they come up all the time. Today, after going from a neat little article covering several crafty techniques to an Etsy Labs tutorial on fusing plastic bags into a sturdy plastic "fabric", I was curious about the fumes from melting plastic bags.

So I did some research. Here's the scoop. Most plastic bags (particularly the grocery-store variety) are made from polyethylene (PE), more specifically low-density polyethylene (LDPE). Polyethylene is a thermoplastic, which means that it can be industrially melted down and reshaped for easy recycling. Now, the quality/density of polymers varies widely depending on the manufacturer, so the melting point of "plastic bags" isn't a precise number. Most estimates vary from 105 - 120 °C (221 - 248 °F) 1 2 3. The thermal decomposition temperature (thermal pyrolysis, when LDPE breaks down from heat) ranges from 160 - 210 °C (320 - 410 °F) 1.

Keep in mind that I'm not a chemist. But from what I can tell, this means that as long as you keep the temperature of your plastic bags between the melting point and the decomposition point, the plastic won't release toxic fumes. In theory.

(The fumes, by the way, typically include carbon monoxide, methane, acrolein, formaldehyde, and other aldehydes and hydrocarbons. It's hard to predict which gases the fumes will contain, and some are nasty. You don't want to inhale too much - use proper ventilation.)

So, when you sit down to fuse plastic bags, keep this in mind. The tutorial above recommends using a clothing iron, but be careful. If you have one available, I would actually suggest using a ski wax iron, which have better temperature precision. According to this ski wax site, some clothing irons have a temperature deviation of ±8.3°C, although this can vary quite a bit, so check the specifications of your model.

Here's a rough guide to temperature settings from that site:

Setting	Temperature °C
Acrylic	107
Nylon/Silk	121
Rayon	132
Cotton Blends	149
Wool	166
Cotton 100%	193
Linen	204

As you can see, the Acrylic setting would be the most conservative choice in LDPE fusing, although you probably wouldn't get consistent melting without hours of patience. Nylon/Silk and Rayon are the median choices (and recommended by the Etsy tutorial). Cotton Blends is still theoretically safe, but never set your iron higher than this for melting plastic bags.

That's all! If you do try this project, have fun and be safe. Plastics aren't all evil.

Shenanigan Showdown

2007-09-28T02:48:00.001-04:00

So I have three jobs now. The first two combined are only 20 hours per week, and I just started the third, so I still have a smattering of free time. I have several medium to large projects that I've been mulling over recently, but for now I'd rather spend my time on things I can actually finish. As a result, this month I have a series of small completed projects to share with everyone.

Today, for instance, I fixed a table fan (you know, one of the 3-speed kind that rotate like 60 degrees). The thing was like 15 years old, and one of the wires had come loose. Put it back and taped it up, oiled the moving parts, and now the thing runs beautifully. Like new.

So my roommate J. has been wanting to play with papier-mâché for a long time, and the other day she got around to making a dancing hula woman or something. Anyway, I joined in the fun and made a hand. Whenever I feel motivated enough, I'll make another one to match. I want them to be nice and sturdy so I can mount them on the walls. I'll keep you posted.

Eventually I'd like to make a mask... you know, for el Día de los Muertos, or just to paint and hang up somewhere.

I also made these two images of flowers by using Inkscape to trace and color around Creative Commons photos I found on Flickr.

I think they turned out pretty well. If you want the big original SVG images, just let me know. As far as I'm concerned, all this stuff is public domain. Do what you like with it.

I made this Mobius scarf in about 2-3 days, with a skein of yarn that I got in a big $1 bag of yarn from the thrift store. (Where I also got the needles - 3 pairs for $3!) I made up the pattern after looking over the many Mobius scarf patterns online and reading about the underlying mathematical theory. It was pretty simple: CO 42 (with the open/provisional cast on. the number is arbitrary, it just has to be even), K3, (P1,K1)*, K3. Repeat until you run out of yarn, then flip one end of the scarf over and sew the ends together. I had originally wanted to use some stockinette stitch, but as they pointed out on that math page, you need to use a reversible stitching pattern if you want to only have one side on the finished scarf. Only garter and ribbing are reversible (and ribbing is only reversible if you have an even number of stitches, thus what I said above). Here's another picture which shows the ribbing with garter border a bit better. It's flattened out, with the twist underneath. Anyway, it'll come in pretty handy for my newest job: standing outside in the cold on top of Mauna Kea all night.

It's Not Easy Being Green

2007-07-08T22:09:00.000-04:00

Environmentalism shouldn't be so depressing. I mean, Mars is pretty cool, but it still takes second place to Earth on my top-ten-list-of-planets. You can't be a fan of Science Fiction novels without realizing, at some point, how much we take our planet for granted. There are dozens of plotlines where spacefaring Terrans have lost their homeworld to greed, or marauding aliens, or just because they forgot where it was.

So I'm always disappointed every Earth Day. I think everyone can agree that life on Earth is better than life anywhere else that we know of. It should be a popular holiday... but it isn't. The simple ideology of "our planet is great!" gets bogged down with guilt riders like fossil fuels, overconsumption, chemical pollution, and other issues which are probably important but are also really depressing. Ordinary people just don't get motivated by hearing about more sacrifices they could be making for plants and bunnies and their great-grandchildren. I've got an idea. Let's set aside the entire rest of the year for important, depressing environmentalism arguments, and just spend Earth Day celebrating our homeworld... while it's still around.

Of course, Earth Day was a couple months ago, so I should warn you that the rest of this post contains approximately 400% of your Recommended Allowance of depressing environmentalism. It's interesting, though.

So the other day I read this really long article on the North Pacific Gyre (tldr? it's a giant whirlpool that collects all the trash in the north Pacific) and its problems with plastic accumulation. The article is recent, but the news is old - from at least 2001. Anyway, there's apparently 4 times as much plastic as living matter in the Gyre. There are actually several of these subtropical gyres, scattered across the world's oceans, but this one is the most famous.

My first thought was that if I could acquire some sort of plastic recycling device (you know, plastic goes in one end, plastic lumber comes out the other), I could put it on a ship, sail out there, and build a giant floating city. We wouldn't have to worry about storms or drifting into anything, because the Gyres are some of the most environmentally boring places in the world. Nothing happens there.

Well, this thought brought me to plastic recycling. As it turns out, plastic recycling isn't really quite the same as recycled glass or aluminum. When you recycle a glass bottle, it gets made into another glass bottle, and etc. But when you recycle a plastic bottle, it will never be another plastic bottle: it gets made into plastic lumber, or one of these backpacks or something. And those things can't be recycled... they just gradually photodegrade into smaller and smaller pieces. Oh, did I mention that toxins bind quite well to plastic? Mmmm.

Some people even claim that plastics are one of the sinister causes of our ongoing "cancer epidemic". Now... I don't really know, there's a lot of stuff to take in. For instance, is the epidemic a myth, or does it really exist?(PDF) Which people claim that plastics cause cancer? Are they crackpot conspiracy theorists? Well, I'm afraid you'll have to make up your own mind (if you haven't already). There aren't any easy answers.

If you're like me, I bet you're waiting for the bright spot in this doom-and-gloom forecast. "Have you heard about biodegradable plastics?" you might ask. Why yes, I had a brief entrepreneurial fantasy about starting my own cracking plant the other day. These biodegradable plastics (polylactic acid, in this case) are made from starch, and most good starch sources are also important food sources. They would be easy to make. But then I started thinking about Norman Borlaug, and what he said in his famous interview back in 2000.

When world hunger and environmentalism are at odds, which side would you be on? It's a tough choice. Sometimes it's like the choice between using corn for food or for ethanol fuel (which isn't a hard choice to make). But sometimes being environmentally friendly means letting people starve.

I'm not interested in dredging up the overpopulation debate, so I guess this post ends here. People often have strong opinions when it comes to green living, but I hope my humble ministrations have introduced some doubt into whatever dogma hides in your heart. You don't have to change your mind or stop arguing with people... just try to remember, come next Earth Day, that there's no "right way" to express your love for this chunk of rock we call home.

Lab 12

2007-04-07T06:59:00.000-04:00

I just wanted to share a couple small C++ fragments from today that delighted me. They've probably all been done before, and some are undoubtedly fundamentally flawed. But for a short while at least, I was satisfied with my ingenuity.

class Foobar {
public:
static list<Foobar*> instances;
}

This was the basic idea I wanted to implement. I'm fond of Java's "factories", and their equivalent in C++. Also, I was supposed to make a program to demonstrate the STL "list" container class. I decided to make a class which kept track of each allocated instance, by adding it in the constructor to this static list (and removing it in the destructor).
Now, I'm still fairly new to C++. By the time I realized that I had to initalize static class members, I'd already finished everything else. So I just added this to the .cpp file.

list<Foobar*> Foobar::instances = *(new list<Foobar*>);

Pretty awkward, yeah? Anyway, the whole point was so you could do something like this:

list<Foobar*>::iterator reader;
for(reader=Foobar::instances.begin(); reader != Foobar::instances.end();) {
list<Foobar*>::iterator temp = reader;
reader++;
delete *temp;
}

This way you could make sure that all allocated memory had been returned. It's still awkward, and I suspect it's made obsolete by garbage collection. Also, it might be buggy, and it's probably already been done. The point here is that I was proud of myself... although I'm no longer sure why. :)

Un buen otro

2007-03-21T05:45:00.000-04:00

To try the temper of his officers he got up a bull-fight and sent them into the ring as "torreadores". As he applauded their courage he turned to O'Higgins, who was beside him, and said:--

"These lunatics are the men we want to smash up the Spaniards."

--About Don José de San Martin, from The Emancipation of South America by Bartolomé Mitre.

Practical Receipts

2007-03-14T05:49:00.000-04:00

If any of you enjoy books (especially e-books), old & historic literature, archaic language, obsessing over spelling (and other trivial mistakes), and if you've a little free time, you should hop on over to Project Gutenberg's Digital Proofreaders project. It's a good way to kill an hour or two. Plus, you get to read enchanting passages like this:

Flesh-brush. This simple instrument is used
for exciting the cutaneous circulation. Those
which have the bristles set on a leather back
are esteemed the best. The flesh-glove or hair
flesh-rubber is a useful modification of the
common flesh-brush. Those manufactured by
Messrs Savory and Moore, in imitation of the
Indian kheesah or mitten, are superior to all
others. In the absence of both flesh-brush
and glove, a rough towel wound round the hand
is no bad substitute. See Friction.

-From Cooley's Cyclopaedia of Practical Receipts. Vol 1

Great stuff.

Geeking out

2007-03-12T03:06:00.000-04:00

So I try to avoid this sort of thing* on here, but this just made me all giddy. It's very cool, and also very dorky.

(*link to content without actually adding any value)

Pocket Pie

2007-02-11T21:33:00.000-04:00

To give you some background before we start: I've been experimenting with dumplings for a couple years now. Not serious experimentation, really, just dropping balls of dough into soup. Anyway, they usually sucked. Balls of dough cooked in soup are okay, but they're nothing special. You might as well just dunk a roll in some soup and eat it. I've made pierogis (and related complicated dumplings) a couple times now, and they're really tasty, but I'm lazy. I'd come to a stalemate with the dumplings, but I learned a little bit about dough. Specifically, how mind-bogglingly easy it is. If you're not much of a cook, this'll come as a shock. Are you ready? Take some flour - don't even measure it - and add some water. Stir. OMG, you're done. You'll need to adjust the amounts of flour and water, but that's a matter of taste.
If you really want to be fancy, add an egg, or use milk instead of water, or mix in some whole wheat flour. For batter, which is basically what we're using here today, salt/pepper and some spices are usually added. Toss in whatever you want. I've tried paprika, curry seasoning, oregano, italian seasoning - it's pretty hard to ruin dough. One main point is that you probably want to be using self-rising flour (or add some baking powder to the flour. Again, don't measure. Just experiment. It's not hard), so the dough will become more fluffy as it cooks.
If you're still nervous about dough, try the pancake recipe further down the page. It'll give you good experience about the consistency of dough that you prefer.

So a couple days ago, I was bored and hungry, and invented this delicious snack. I won't claim that it's original, or that I'm the first person to invent it. There's probably another name for it, and a whole culture that's been eating these for centuries. But I'm still kinda proud of myself. It's pretty good.

Now, let's move on to the actual recipe.

Ingredients

Flour+Water=Dough. About a cup per pie, maybe? I dunno. Something like that.
Something to put in the pie. I like some spinach cooked in soy sauce+garlic+ginger, or cheese & pizza sauce, or some sauteed vegetables. Again, it's hard to go wrong here. I bet some chopped apples and cinnamon would be great. Or bananas and brown sugar.

Directions

Turn an eye on the stove to, I dunno, medium-high, maybe? Put a frying pan on it. Some oil in the pan will make the dough fry up nice and golden-brown.
Mix the dough (or just wait for the pan to get hot, if you've already got dough)
Put some dough in the pan. Keep it pretty thin, no more than 1/2 inch thick*, and spread it out with a fork/spoon to make a nice even circle.
Put the filling on top in the center, spreading it out to about 0.5 - 1.0 inch from the edges. You want some room so the top layer of dough has something to stick to.
Now pour more dough on top of the filling. Spread it out, covering the filling, all the way to the edges of the pie. You should be able to fix any holes pretty easily.
Peek under the pie, looking at the bottom. Is it browned to your liking? If so, flip it over with a spatula. If not, wait and repeat this step. :)
After a minute or two, your pie will be done. Toss it on a plate, cut in half, and enjoy!

*It's pretty easy to make the bottom or top layers of dough too thick. If the dough in the middle is still raw or gooey when you're done, toss it back on the skillet for a few minutes, or just be sure to cook it for longer at a lower temperature next time. Or make the dough thinner next time, which is what I do.

A list of the full moon names

2007-02-06T01:26:00.000-04:00

(with short hippy descriptions)

I found this list a couple years ago, whilst searching the internets. It's taken from "The Witches' Almanac: Spring 1996 to Spring 1997", by Elizabeth Pepper and John Wilcock. Maybe you can still find a copy, maybe not. The point of this story is that I'd always wondered about the romantically-styled names of the moon phases which I would occasionally come across in fiction or poetry. I can't vouch for the historical accuracy of this list, but it's the best I've found. If anyone knows of a better list, please send it my way.

Aries - SEED. Sowing season and symbol of the start of the new year.
Taurus - HARE. The sacred animal was associated in Roman legends with spring-time and fertility.
Gemini - DYAD. The Latin word for a pair refers to the twin stars of the constellation Castor and Pollux.
Cancer - MEAD. During late June and most of July the meadows, or meads, were mowed for hay. (Not because it was a good time to sit around and drink mead? -kevin)
Leo - WORT. When the sun was in Leo the worts (from the Algo-Saxon wyrt - plant) were gathered to be dried and stored.
Virgo - BARLEY. Persephone, virgin goddess of rebirth, carries a sheaf of barley as symbol of the harvest.
Libra - BLOOD. Marking the season when domestic animals were sacrificed for winter provisions. (Libra's Full Moon occasionally became the WINE moon when a grape harvest was expected to produce a superior vintage.)
Scorpio - SNOW. Scorpio heralds the dark season when the Sun is at its lowest and the first snow flies.
Sagittarius - OAK. The sacred tree of the Druids and the Roman god Jupiter is most noble as it withstands winter's blasts.
Capricorn - WOLF. The fearsome nocturnal animal represents the "night" of the year. Wolves were rarely seen in England after the 12th century.
Aquarius - STORM. A storm is said to rage most fiercely just before it ends, and the year usually follows suit.
Pisces - CHASTE. The antiquated word for pure reflects the custom of greeting the new year with a clear soul.

(an alternate, and possibly better, list is here. it seems like a slightly more authoritative source, but it's still kinda wishy-washy. i wish these people posted their sources. anyway, there certainly doesn't seem to be any standardization, but in folk history that's just the way things go. i don't think anyone will complain if you pick your own names, or make up some new ones.)

4.2.2.1 Musings

2007-01-24T18:52:00.000-04:00

Ever since I was told about its existence, the DNS server at 4.2.2.1 has been one of my favorite IP addresses. It's an easy one to remember, obviously, which makes it useful when troubleshooting network connectivity problems. If you can ping it, you can use it for a DNS server, which tests two birds with one ping. Very handy.

But I started wondering: whose server am I using so carelessly? Are they bothered by what must be thousands of worldwide geeks pinging their server (and its kin at 4.2.2.2 and 4.2.2.3) and using it for DNS resolution? If you ask around on the internets, most of your answers will probably be that either Verizon or Level3 owns the server. We'll get to my answer in a little bit... but first, a short lesson in the history of the internet is relevant here.

Have you ever heard of BBN? They have an interesting history all their own, which I recommend reading. But the relevant part is this: they helped design ARPANET (and later the Internet). As a result, they ended up with some prime real estate on the IPv4 address space. Notably, the 4.0.0.0/8 and 8.0.0.0/8 blocks. (That's them, listed as Bolt, Beranek, and Newman Inc.) So that's where our IP address began its life. But after that, things get a bit hairy.

BBN was bought by GTE in 1998, which merged with Bell Atlantic to become Verizon in 2000. I'm sure most of you on the east coast of the U.S. remember that event. Now, after BBN was bought by GTE, it was briefly known as GTE Internetworking (which provided ISP services, although it's unclear if that's all it did or not). This is where 4.2.2.1's current domain name comes from: vnsc-pri.sys.gtei.net. You'll have a hard time finding much information about GTEi anymore, because during the Verizon merger it was spun off as the independent ISP company Genuity. Genuity went bankrupt in 2003, and was bought by Level3 (along with the 4.0.0.0/8 space).

So who actually owns the server? Well, the domain name (the whole gtei.net domain, actually) is owned by Verizon, who give out the 4.2.2.1-3 DNS addresses to their customers (among many others). The ip address is owned by Level3, who likely also owns the cables running to the box. In all likelihood, the actual server is probably owned by Verizon, who are probably leasing the address space from Level3. It's still a strange, incestuous little arrangement, though, and I'm not entirely confident in my opinion.

There's an interesting piece of trivia to pull out of all this, though - both BBN and Level3 began their corporate lives intended to do something completely unrelated to their ultimate purposes. BBN began as an acoustics consulting business for auditoriums, and Level3 started as a subsidary of the massive construction/excavation company Peter Kiewit Sons'. Sometimes its pretty cool when things turn out unexpectedly. If you really want a moral or something here, I guess you could think about how being adaptable to circumstances is a valuable trait to have. Or something. I wasn't really planning on ending this meandering tale with a moral, but there you go.

I wish I had written this post

2006-11-11T02:43:00.000-04:00

sandy has expressed a feeling that I've often had, and quite eloquently. this comes as no surprise; he upstages me so frequently that I've started simply taking it as a delightful challenge. of course, if you read his post, you'll know that he already said that, too.

2 months to go!

Recipes for lazy vegetarians

2006-11-11T01:42:00.000-04:00

Damn, this stuff is delicious. This recipe is paraphrased from the book From Curries to Kebabs, by Jaffrey, which has a bunch of great stuff in it. This is an easy recipe to play around with.

delicious fresh tomato chutney

2 med. tomatoes
1 clove garlic
1/2 inch cube fresh ginger
3 fresh slim green chilis
3/4 tsp. salt
1 Tbl. lemon juice
1/2 tsp. ground cumin (roasted, if possible)
2.5 - 3 tsp. brown sugar (or jaggery, if possible)
(optional) 1/2 cup cilantro

Toss all ingredients in a blender and puree.

Hummus is easy to make, but difficult to make just right. Perfecting this recipe is one thing I look forward to about getting old.

hummus

2 cans chick peas (garbanzo beans)
(or 1/2 lb dried chick peas, soaked & cooked)
3-4 Tbl. tahini (ground sesame seeds. you can find this at most specialty grocery stores, and even at some major chains)
2-6 cloves garlic
2 Tbl. lemon juice
salt & pepper to taste (don't be shy)
parsley
olive oil

drain, rinse, and cook the chick peas until very soft. for canned chick peas, 5 min. in the microwave usually does it for me.
put everything except parsley and olive oil in a blender. you'll probably have to add some water to keep everything moving.
when there aren't any little chunks left, you're good. scoop it into a container and stir in some parsley. it's traditional to make a hollow on top and pour some olive oil in when you serve it, but some people like to stir the oil in with the parsley.

Pancakes are the easiest thing ever.

1 cup flour
1 cup milk/soymilk/ricemilk
1 egg (or 1 banana)

Use whatever kind of flour you want, but non-wheat flour doesn't stick together very well (because it lacks gluten). Plus, if you're not using self-rising flour, you'll need to add a Tbl. or so of baking powder or baking soda, so you end up with pancakes instead of crepes.
I really recommend it with the banana. And maybe a pinch of cloves.

Peanut butter cookies

1 cup peanut butter
3/4 - 1 cup sugar
1 egg (or 1 banana)

roll into balls, flatten with a fork, bake for 10 min @ 375 fahrenheit. these things are pretty decadent. there are better peanut butter cookie recipes, but this is the easiest.

Now, I just wanted to share the simple little recipes that I find myself making all the time - there are obviously a LOT of recipe resources on the internet. Whatever your preferred medium, there are plenty of mailing lists, sites, and blogs that a simple web search will reveal. Eat up!

Not that kind of elf

2006-11-10T23:45:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, for some reason, I started wondering about the specifics of how a program is actually executed. My reasons were mostly theoretical - I was curious if a process could put together assembly/machine code statements and feed them to the processor on the fly (Yes, something like a script or bytecode interpreter, only with dynamic instead of static input. Like I said, hypothetical.) - but it ended up taking quite a while to find what I was looking for. I'll try to summarize what I learned as briefly as possible.

I started out at Wikipedia with machine code, which led me to the wikibook x86 Assembly. It wasn't exactly what I was looking for, but it's a great read. Then again, if you're interested in x86 assembly, you've probably already seen it.

A few more wikipedia articles (1 2 3), and I figured out what I was looking for - a program loader. When you run an executable file, the command shell being used forks a child process. The child process calls the program loader and asks it to execute the specified file. The program loader (which is usually part of the kernel) takes the file and tests it with known executable file formats (e.g. ELF on Linux). When one works, it loads the object file (i.e. the program) into memory, based on the information in the object file. Finally, the loader sends an opcode or something to the processor, telling it where to start reading from in memory. Or maybe the loader tosses the process into the kernel scheduling queue. I don't really understand that last part very well. If you think this sort of stuff is interesting, though, there's a lot of information about the behaviour of the kernel available in The Linux Kernel, over at tldp. (I got most of this information from Ch. 8.4, the section about processes.)

So, where is this mysterious program loader? You can try searching google for "elf loader", or "kernel loader", but good luck. I eventually found a vulnerability disclosure that gave me what I wanted. If you've got a copy of the kernel source available, the main loader code seems to be in fs/exec.c, and the ELF-related code is in fs/binfmt_elf.c.

Now, you might be wondering: did you ever find an answer to your original question? How hard would it be to stream machine code to the loader? Or to drop it directly into memory? Well, I have no idea. I'm pretty sure the demand-loading capabilities should make it easier than it would be otherwise, and that's about all I can tell you. I'll get back to you on that one, internet.

The short story of a beginning knitter

2006-11-08T22:13:00.001-04:00

Back in February, while I was teaching myself to knit with the help of Stitch 'N Bitch, I made a simple k2p2 ribbed scarf. It was my first project, and it went pretty well.

The next project was a little cotton dishcloth. I think they're great for several reasons:

You get excellent practice with increases & decreases
They only take one ball of cotton yarn and a few hours to make
There's so many patterns to choose from

They also make easy gifts. With x-mas coming up, a few of the patterns above will probably turn into my next projects.

After I finished the washcloth, I started thinking I was pretty hot stuff. (Hehe) So when I came across fingerless glove patterns, I jumped right in. And quickly learned a few lessons:

You can make things up as you go along. I used a different weight & type of yarn (sport acrylic), cast on a different number of stitches, and just measured it against my hand as I went. And it worked! What a shock.
If you do make things up as you go, write down what you're doing! When you start on the second glove, or the second pair, you'll be glad you did. It's a slow, painstaking process to go back and count the number of increases you did, or how many stitches you had on your needles at one particular point.
If you're going to do intarsia knitting, use the same type of yarn for every color! This might seem obvious, but some of us are stubborn. :)
Nobody ever explained to me how to "work in" the loose ends when I was done knitting. Eventually, nice people on the internet explained it, but until then, I was knotting away on the WS. Here's a guide on a good way to do it.

Anyway, after a couple weeks, I managed to finish my first pair of gloves (picture above). I was proud, but still dissatisfied with some things, like the way the intarsia turned out. The next pair got finished a couple months later, with some improvements:

In case you were wondering, those are aliens from the classic arcade game Space Invaders. I added them to the gloves using Duplicate Stitch embroidery, and it was so much easier than with intarsia.

I just recently finished my third pair of fingerless gloves, which I'm keeping for myself. While I was working on them, I ran across the Twisted German Cast-On,
which (in my opinion) makes a much neater wrist hem for gloves.

Right now, though, I'm getting a bit tired of gloves. :) My next projects will probably be washcloths... or maybe socks. We'll see.

Charter

2006-11-08T21:45:00.000-04:00

Introductions may be important, but they usually get skipped in the interest of time. You can skip this one, if you want.

I've never gotten much out of blogs. The novelty of voyeurism wears off quickly, and my humble attempts at self-expression gradually fade into self-indulgence.

To me, the most redeeming characteristic of blogs is that arcane and outdated information lingers longer than it does in commercial or educational media. What I'm saying is that, when I search for some obscure compiling error or norwegian knitting technique, blogs often have the answers when all else fails. I'm grateful for that, and I'd like to contribute whatever meagre bits of useful trivia I come across.

In conclusion, my desire and intent with this blog is to provide a reference (for both myself and others) to uncommon practical information. If, at any point in the future, I feel that this one and only condition of the charter is not being met, I'll get rid of it.

That's all.