Let's Blow up Jupiter

I've worn this necklace for a decade continuously

2011-03-23T10:17:00.005-06:00

This necklace was given to me by my sister Jenelle and her husband Andy when they came back from a dancing trip to new zealand. Originally it was carved into a stylized fish hook as a symbol of protection especially while traveling over water. The day the necklace was given to me I put it on and I just left it on. Approximately 1 decade later on Monday of this week I took it off for the first time since. Understandably no necklaces are allowed to be worn while getting a chest x-ray. (The pneumonia is getting better thank you for asking)

Mind reading SQUIDs

2011-02-24T21:17:00.003-07:00

I have long been a fan of electroencephalogram's (EEG) a.k.a. brainwaves. An EEG monitors cranial voltage fluctuations through the skin. These voltage fluctuations are caused at least partially by the activity of neurons in the cerebral cortex (the wrinkled outer layer of the brain). Despite the mind reading power of "brain waves" in countless sci-fi incarnations there is really very little information there to be gleaned. If I may make a comparison I would say that looking at brain waves is more or less equivalent to watching the clock rate of a computer. Our brains are massively parallel computing devices and different regions of our brain ramp up their activity for different tasks. Brain waves somehow correspond to large scale activity of the cortex and while this information can certainly be valuable it ultimately carries far too little information trying to read minds using brain waves would be like trying to index the content of the internet using only character frequencies.

That is not to say that brain waves can't be used to garner some interesting information and do interesting tasks. Brainwaves can be used to determine level of focus and people can be trained to control their brainwaves to a certain extent. This has been used for some interesting devices (the emotiv device is probably the closest to having any sort of real usefulness. here is a nifty if a bit long video which includes a demonstration of the device done with none other than AI legend Marvin Minsky)

But ultimately such devices are far too limited in their information collecting ability to carry out tasks of real utility like say typing at a reasonable rate with low error. The first most obvious way to get better information is to have direct brain implants but although this might turn out to be the best way to go many decades from now since such an interface has the bonus that we can send information in as well as extract information. Such direct neural interfaces are being developed now for control of artificial prostheses complete with tactile feedback thanks to DARPA. But, even after we solve all the problems of direct neural interfaces (like decreasing sensitivity due to the slow build up of scar tissue) not everyone will want to have brain surgery so that they can check facebook by thinking.

The most elegant to get at the information locked up in our skulls depends on the use of SQUIDs. A SQUID is a Superconducting Quantum Interference Device and it enables unimaginably sensitive measurements of magnetic fields. Squids have already been used to measure magnetic fields caused by neuronal activity. In order to even detect such fields one needs femto tesla range sensitivity. It is wonderful that SQUIDs can deliver this sort of sensitivity but highly unfortunate that SQUIDs currently require cryogenic temperatures and low fields in order to operate. Let us imagine for a moment however a world in which room temperature super conductivity had been discovered and furthermore this room temperature superconducting material can be printed on silicon in the manner of current integrated circuits. In short what if one could print SQUIDs on silicon just like we can make CCD detectors for cameras. Thousands or millions of magnetic field detectors each powerful enough to detect the firing of single neurons all wrapped around our brains picking up the signal sent out from each individual neuron firing.

Admittedly such a technology is at the very least 20 years distant to be naively optimistic or the technology may even be fundamentally impossible since there is no evidence to support that room temperature superconductivity is achievable. But here at least is a scientifically plausible route to totally non-invasive and incredibly powerful brain monitoring device. This is my prediction for the "killer app" of a high temperature super conductor if one is ever found.

Today I am a man

2011-01-31T23:38:00.002-07:00

Today for the first time in my life I am a man... at least according to the social security administration. Apparently ever since I have had a social security number it has been attached to the gender code "F". It was never the slightest problem until a few days ago when new laws went into effect that made the people in human resources at the University have to make sure that everybody's information matches with the SSA info. Today I went to the SSA and had my information changed to reflect what my birth certificate and anatomy seem to suggest. Before the day is out I wanted to make a little remembrance of the day I became a man.

Bizarre things that have cut me.

2010-11-24T20:39:00.003-07:00

I was preparing dinner just now and somehow managed to cut myself. But I didn't cut myself with a knife as you might have imagined I would. I cut myself on the dried salsa on the salsa bottle as I opened it. Now I can add that to the list of bizarre things that have cut me.

buttered toast

a mattress (note not the mattress springs but the material itself)

dried salsa

It should be noted that I require at least a little bit of blood to be drawn in order to count it a cut, if no blood is drawn then it is considered a scratch. In the case of the mattress whether or not it was a cut is moot since it was really an abrasion, a particularly nasty "rug burn" if you will. But it goes on the list anyway since it bled.

bizzarre but fun

2010-11-09T00:01:00.002-07:00

admittedly I spent way too much time playing this game. The preponderance of "media monsters" named QQQ with perfect stats makes me think that perhaps that particular name is some sort of cheat to get balanced stats.

Pollard Strassen Polynomial Evaluation Method of Factoring, and a Variation

2010-10-18T21:46:00.004-06:00

I admit I was reading Prime Numbers by Pomerance again and I have taken a fancy to one of the factorization methods described in the book. The book only gives a single paragraph on the method and I thought it would be fun to talk about it here. The idea is essentially this, to factor a number n pick chop the numbers less than n up into equal sized blocks and multiply all the numbers in these blocks together mod n and then take the greatest common divisor of the product of these blocks of numbers with n. Once we hit a block of numbers which has a gcd > 1 then if the gcd < n then we have a proper factor of n or if not then we can just search through the numbers in that block one at a time, checking to find the first number with a gcd with n greater than 1, and wallah!

Since we are guaranteed at least one factor in the numbers less than n^1/2 we only need to worry about breaking up the numbers less than that up into blocks. Rather intuitively the best division of work would be to make the blocks all sized equally and so you naturally come to the decision to make the blocks of size B = n^1/4. In order to make the calculation of the products of these numbers as quick as possible we take the time to construct the polynomial p(x) = x * (x-1) * (x-2) * (x-3) * ... * (x - B + 1) and reduce its terms mod n. Once we have that polynomial we just have to check gcd(p(B*i), n) to see if there is a factor of n in the block of numbers [B*i, B(i-1)] until we find an i that it works for.

I rather like the algorithm it isn't quite as cool as the rho method of factorization but it is surprisingly elegant and effective and has the additional advantage that it is clearly guaranteed to work. Just for fun I want to propose an idea that is almost certain to be worthless as an effective means of factorization but nonetheless appeals to my sense of aesthetics.

These polynomials which we are using to quickly evaluate the product of chunks of numbers are using the fact that factorials are nice smooth numbers with a lot of factors. In Pomerance's book he motivates the polynomial evaluation method by talking about how if one could evaluate factorials easily then factorization could be achieved by a simple binary search since gcd(k!, n) > 1 if k is greater than the smallest prime factor of n and equal to 1 otherwise.

Being a physicist I rarely have to care about the exact integer value of a factorial and instead am perfectly alright with using Stirlings approximation to the factorial as though it were exact since for any numbers for which it would be arduous to calculate the factorial exactly the error in its approximation is the most minuscule fraction, far below the error that one could hope to measure in a physical experiment.

But of course if we are interested in the factorization of n! then if we are off by even 1 the factorization will be completely different. Clearly trying to directly apply the binary search idea utilizing Stirling series is useless. The fractional error may drop dramatically with size but the absolute error still grows exponentially. So trying to keep enough terms in the approximation to get within 1 of the value of the actual exponential is a losing game. We could simply try all the numbers "close" to the estimated number but besides the fact that we might have to try an uncomfortably large number of candidate numbers in order to be certain of having tried the actual factorial there is a more serious problem. If we were trying to factor a 10 digit number the size of the factorials involved would be millions of digits long which is just a tad bit of overkill for factoring a 10 digit number. So if we want to keep the operations manageable we should really properly evaluate the factorial mod n. But because the factorials are so much larger than n even a tiny difference percentage wise in the value of the factorial would correspond to many times n and so give answers which are well mixed on n.

From all of these considerations it would appear that we would be much much better off simply doing trial division or for that matter actually using the Pollard Strassen polynomial evaluation method to factor our number. But still one might potentially be able to use Stirlings approximation or something like it (perhaps an appropriate adaptation to keep coherence mod n) might work out in the end.... perhaps even make for an actually useful factorization algorithm... I doubt it though. Still it is fun to think about and I would consider it something of a triumph to design a factorization algorithm that used the stirling approximation that just wasn't worse than the sieve of Eratosthenes.

Listening to bubbles to find dark matter

2010-10-02T09:04:00.004-06:00

The departmental colloquium this last week was given by Peter Cooper who is part of the COUPP search for dark matter. Just like all the other dark matter searches the idea is to make your detector have as much material in it as possible and try to shield it as much as possible from any known interactions, cosmic rays, background radiation, etc. What you don't shield away you want to be able to discriminate anything we know about and then what you are left with must be dark matter.

In the case of the COUPP experiment they are using bubble chambers deep underground with several tons of scintilator oil on top. A bubble chamber works by keeping the fluid inside it at a temperature which is just above its boiling point. But because a bubble of gas takes more space than the liquid it takes a little bit of extra energy to make a bubble form. When a cosmic ray or other particle comes through the liquid it deposits energy and this extra little kick can make bubbles form in the liquid.

Usually in a bubble chamber you would be interested in the track that a particle leaves in the detector. But anything that leaves a track of bubbles interacts way too strongly to be dark matter. So the question is how do you discriminate between dark matter single bubble events and more boring single bubble events? The answer is you listen to the noise the bubbles make when they are made! alpha events in the chamber caused by trace amounts of radioactive materials in the device will show up as louder bubbles!

I can't help but think of a picture of a physicist carefully listening to the vibrations of tiny bubble floating deep in the dark and hoping to hear snatches of unknown harmonies of nature.

I got the most AMAZING seats to see Hamlet. (and for $5!)

2010-09-30T22:34:00.004-06:00

Thursday last week I went to see Hamlet at the pioneer memorial theater. The performance was quite good and I think so was the editing of the play. I have long been quite the fan of the play Hamlet. I have read the play more than once and gave serious effort to memorizing it at one point (I actually managed to memorize the first scene in the first act before I gave up). Until a week ago I had only seen it performed via recordings. But Last Thursday I got to see it live and much to my good fortune not only did I get to see it live but I got to see it from an EXCELLENT seat. Jenna went to the theater ahead of me and purchased the tickets a little less than 30 minutes before the show started and then when I arrived she nonchalantly led me to the best seats in the house. Two seats on the very front row and at the dead center of the very front row! The theater has a program where U students can buy tickets to get the best seats still available 30 minutes before the performance for $5 a seat. Apparently the people with the season tickets who normally would have occupied that space had canceled. For any play this would have made me happy but that this happened for HAMLET!! it is just so amazing. The last time Hamlet was performed at the PMT was in the 80's and no doubt will not be performed again for a decade or two more. To give a perspective on how difficult such seats are to obtain a conversation with our neighbors revealed that they had season tickets and had been sitting in the same seats for 30 years! Furthermore the people who normally sat in the seats we were occupying had also been sitting there for many years (though how many years exactly I alas did not ask).

Is Hinchliffes Rule True?

2010-09-22T21:26:00.005-06:00

This paper actually got published in 1995 and Title, Author Name, and Abstract make up the entire paper. I must say I thoroughly approve.

The Poo From Hell

2010-09-14T17:49:00.002-06:00

I recently moved in to a new apartment I have up until this point been reasonably happy with having a new apartment. I really like having a kitchen and bathroom of my own instead of sharing them with strangers as I have been doing up until this time.

I found it endlessly annoying that I couldn't keep a roll of toilet paper in the bathroom and finish it off myself because I was at the house so much less than the other people using the bathroom and invariably someone else would use my toilet paper. At the last house I lived at I bought around 30 rolls of toilet paper to put in the bathroom. Of those rolls that I put into the bathroom I myself used the last few sheets only 2 times. Which gives a rough estimate that other people were using more than 90% of my toilet paper. Eventually I started taking rolls of toilet paper in to the bathroom from my room with me and using whatever was there if I forgot.

I must say that at my new apartment I was quite enjoying having my own bathroom (I am enjoying having my own kitchen much more but that is another rant entirely). The ability to shower whenever I want to without waiting for some one else and, better, not having to wait for someone to finish their shower when I need to go to the bathroom is very nice.

I never thought of it as an advantage that when I found a great big nasty dump sitting unflushed in the toilet I at least had people to blame for it. I had thought (silly me!) that when I had my own toilet I would never have to encounter such a situation again. But beginning about a week ago little floating turds started showing up in my toilet bowl. They are very hard to flush because they are so buoyant so at first I assumed that they belonged to my very own bowels and had simply been left behind when I flushed since they were so very floaty. I don't generally check to make sure that everything that went down when I flushed doesn't come back up a few seconds later. So I must have flushed and not noticed when these things remained behind. However something of an entirely different magnitude has been happening. When I came back from school Monday night I was immediately greeted by a horrible eye burning stench permeating my apartment. I thought that something in the garbage must be going rotten and perhaps the dishes in the sink had been allowed to sit for too long etc etc. After a quick cleaning of the kitchen and turning on the air conditioning to help diffuse the smell it became less by a little bit.

The smell was ebbing away only very slowly with this treatment and so when it cooled down somewhat outside I opened up the door to my balcony and went to turn off the air conditioning. But this time when I passed by the bathroom the stench became extremely strong and I realized suddenly that something rotten in the kitchen was not the culprit at all but instead it was something rotten in the toilet. I flicked on the light and saw a disgusting poo soup floating in the toilet bowl. The soup was complete with disgusting brown/orange colored water and several extremely buoyant logs of brown sludge. After flushing a few times I finally got it all to go away and immediately my apartment began to smell much better.

After finding such a thing waiting in my toilet for me to discover I couldn't help but wonder if someone had come into my apartment while I was away and had intentionally left this there for me to discover. I wasn't sure if I had locked the door or not and it was possible that someone had just come in and decided to help themselves to my restroom fascilities. I hoped that the problem was temporary and had been caused perhaps by a plumbing problem in an adjacent apartment.

But today when I came home from school again for the second day in a row I was greeted by a foul eye burning stench and then shortly thereafter by a floating mess in my toilet bowl. This time however the poo is even more buoyant and no matter how many times I flush the toilet some of it comes floating back to taunt me. It as if someone ate a life preserver and a whole bunch of rotting meat to make the most persistent and foul smelling poo imaginable, and then they took a nice long dump in my toilet while I was away.

Today I am certain that I locked the door when I left which fact combined with its regularity means that most likely this problem is a plumbing problem of some sort. Though I must say it also has to be related to the extraordinary buoyancy of the poo involved and perhaps someone in one of the other apartments has a secret passion for spaghetti made with foam pool noodles.

LD #18, maybe another time....

2010-09-08T19:58:00.002-06:00

I never really got started on the game for this competition. I haven't made a post about my abject failure to do anything of note because between school and moving in to a new apartment I have had very very little time. For the competition I decided I wanted to do something with sound and very quickly came to the conclusion that I should make enemies sounds and in order to defeat them you had to cancel their sound out. The sounds you could make would be limited by the monsters you had defeated. I hadn't really figured out how to make the game interesting or fun but the idea seemed original and I have long wanted to learn to manipulate sound via programming. However the choice to use sound was my undoing. I near instantly discovered that my desktop has some issue with using sound in pygame... after reinstalling the module I just sort of gave up. The theme was basically my least favorite out of all the possible themes (even the joke theme double zombie rainbow) the inability to even run the simplest sound programs in the programming language of my choice pretty much drowned my remaining enthusiasm and I figured I would just play video games for the weekend instead of make them.

However I still feel that game might be fun to write at some future point so... maybe I will actually code it someday (I give it odds of about 40 to 1 against)

Ludum Dare #18 "Enemies as Weapons" Begins

2010-08-20T20:01:00.002-06:00

Since this game competition is conveniently set for the weekend before school begins and I don't have anything else I absolutely have to do I have decided to participate in Ludum Dare 18. (a 48 hour game making competition) I The theme is officially "Enemies as Weapons" and now the cogitation begins.... What should I do with that?

11:11 make a wish

2010-08-06T23:12:00.002-06:00

I don't really remember who introduced me to this but I remember being out in the parking lot of my high school late one night and I looked at the clock and it was 11:11. When I mentioned this to a friend who was with me they told me to make a wish. I have since adopted the 11:11 wish tradition and since I just made an 11:11 wish I decided I should try and spread the tradition.

The rules of the 11:11 wish are these 1) you must have randomly glanced at the time and discovered that it is 11:11 you cannot contrive to see the time in order to make the wish. 2) The 11:11 wish can only be made at night if it is 11:11 in the morning it doesn't count (of course you could argue that really then it should be the 23:11 wish but that doesn't sound as cool now does it?). 3) The wish must be made before the time changes to 11:12.

If you choose to adopt the 11:11 wish feel free to modify the rules as you like but these are the rules I adhere to.

We must save the oceans

2010-08-05T13:32:00.003-06:00

I have long been afraid that the real fight to save the environment will not start until it is too late. It is easiest to see the damage we are doing on land because that is where we live. It is easy to recognize that a barren landscape stripped of trees and devoid of greenery has had real damage to it. But a lake still looks the same when it is full of fish as when it is empty. but a lot of devastation we are causing is easy to see, if we look.

I have often been asked to help save the rainforest by helping to buy protected forest land. I just saved 7.4 sq feet of rainforest by clicking the link on this site. The biodiversity of the rainforest is astounding and so is its rate of destruction, this is also true of the ecosystems of the ocean. Unfortunately unlike the rainforest I can't simply donate to a charity (or click a link) to help have a couple of acres of ocean added to a sort of wildlife reserve. Many barriers stand in the way of creating a similar program for the oceans as already exists for rainforests. The ocean belongs to no country and no one and unfortunately this simply makes it all the easier for the ocean to be a victim of a tragedy of the commons.

Sylvia Earle has been building an organization in an attempt to create a program to create these protected areas of ocean she calls "hope spots". In 2009 she was a ted prize winner and she gave this ted.

Creating these protected waters is a wonderful idea and I think it is probably something we will have to do if we want to really save the oceans, but it isn't the only thing we will need to do. The ocean is getting screwed over not just by our practices of directly exploiting it but also by the way we live. Plastic and garbage that find their way to the ocean stay in the ocean and we now have something called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch of course the patch is called "great" not because it is rather nifty but because it is gigantic. Estimates of the size of the garbage patch vary but the LOW estimate is that is about the size of Texas and there is another similar patch in the Atlantic. The buildup of plastic and other detritus in the oceans is killing birds and whales and no doubt is causing other sorts of trouble which are more subtle. Just as worrying is the acidification of the oceans caused by the uptake of atmospheric CO2. The acidification will adversely affect the organisms which create corals. While I think global warming is tragic because of the loss of the polar ice caps and to a lesser extent because of the raising of the sea levels and the displacement of people that will cause; I am more afraid of the loss of our coral reefs and just of screwing up the chemistry of the oceans in general.

An excellent talk by Douglas Adams

2010-07-29T12:00:00.002-06:00

I was perusing the talks on the ted site (a wonderful site by the way if you aren't familiar with it) and I ran across this gem, it is a bit long but very entertaining.

http://www.ted.com/talks/douglas_adams_parrots_the_universe_and_everything.html

I never knew Adams was an ecological activist.

Great Stelline Recipe

2010-07-28T14:58:00.004-06:00

A while ago we purchased some star shaped pasta named Stelline. I tried out a recipe using it and it turned out great, so I am going to share.

Ingredients

12 oz box of Stelline pasta
3 tablespoons olive oil
3 cloves of garlic, minced
1 onion, chopped
1 zucchini, diced
1/2 red bell pepper, diced
2 cups water
2 teaspoons vegetable soup base*
2 leaves fresh basil, chopped

*I used some stuff called "better than bouillon vegetable base" which rather obviously is a bouillon substitute and I am not sure how this would translate into bouillon, but you could definitely use that instead or replace the soup base and water with an appropriate amount of vegetable broth (or chicken broth if you don't care about the dish being vegetarian)

1) saute the onion and the garlic with the olive oil in a saucepan until the onion is slightly translucent.

2) add the zucchini and red bell pepper and saute 4 minutes

3) If necessary move the mixture into a pot large enough to contain all the ingredients (My saucepan is too small to accommodate everything). Add the water and the soup base and bring to a boil.

4)once the mixture begins boiling add the stelline and cook for 4 minutes constantly stirring.

5) mix in the basil and let sit for 5 minutes.

6) enjoy (parmesan cheese is great on top!)

Turning a sphere inside out

2010-07-26T23:26:00.002-06:00

I first encountered the problem of turning the sphere inside out in a class on knot theory some time ago. At the time I saw just a small clip of the procedure they show in this video but I didn't really understand exactly what was going on, I just thought the video was cool. I ran across this video quite a while ago and I must say it is extremely entertaining and they explain the problem very well.

The keys to the kingdom, Lord Sunday

2010-07-17T00:52:00.002-06:00

I finished reading the last of the books in the keys to the kingdom series today and I will say this is probably one of my all time favorite series. I've never read anything by Garth Nix that I didn't like and these books are no exception.

If you want to read the books I highly recommend them and they don't take long to read they are written on the level of a children's book and you can read through one of the books in just a few hours. If you don't care to read the books or have already read them then read on otherwise consider skipping this post until I won't be spoiling the books for you.

The essential plot of the series is that the universe was created by a being called the architect who also created a whole other dimension called "The House" which watches over the universe. The House is divided into 7 realms corresponding to the 7 days of the week and particular denizen of the house is given one of seven keys giving them power over one of the days of the week in the universe and that corresponding domain within the House. After a nice long 15 billion year run the architect decides to call it quits and commit suicide. Apparently the architect is unable to commit suicide herself since she imprisoned a part of herself in a prison which she made to last until the end of her creation. Unable to kill herself without taking everything else with her she breaks herself into 7 parts each one being a part of the "will" of the architect. Which we are meant to take in the sense of "last will and testament". These 7 parts of the "will" are given to the 7 rulers of the days. Each part of the will telling a different ruler to relinquish their power to a mortal "rightful heir". Whereupon all of creation would be destroyed and the "rightful heir" allowed to build a new universe as they saw fit.

There is a bit of a complication in the carrying out of the will since those entrusted to carry it out decide not to commit suicide and destroy the universe. Instead they lock away the different parts of the will for 10,000 years at which point the story line of the books actually begins when one part of the will escapes and manages to dub a mortal rightful heir. The rightful heir then goes on to slowly gain power and dominance in the house collecting each of the keys and each part of the will in turn. All the while blissfully unaware of the fact that the ultimate goal of the will of the architect is the destruction of everything. Our hero Arthur, the rightful heir, works over the course of all 7 books in an effort to save and protect which he does seem to manage to do at least right up until the last part of the last book when all of creation is expunged.

I have read rather few books where the entire universe gets destroyed. I must say I didn't expect that to happen what with the heroes generally managing to save the day, especially in a children's book. I must say though a 7 book series has got to be the most elaborate suicide story I have ever heard. (though since the true purpose of the will is concealed right up until the last few pages of the last book the books really read just like any other children's adventure story).

I want to go to other stars, but the moon will do.

2010-07-14T21:51:00.004-06:00

Looking up at the stars at night and looking out at the sunset I often feel a strong desire to visit other stars and see alien sunsets. It doesn't even really have to be me that visits these other stars it is inspiring just to think that at some point a pair of human eyes will be watching a sun set that is not our own. It ultimately doesn't really bother me much that humanity will one day perish. But it is somehow deeply saddening to think that by humanities end we might never have stepped away from our home planet.

I dearly hope we will prove ourselves capable of leaving our home solar system but while I think humanity hopefully will spread to other stars one day such a feat would be nothing short of the most monumental undertaking in human history. But humanity needn't go to another star to leave home we needn't even head off to mars (though that would be fun too). We simply need to go back to the moon and put down some roots.

The other day at sunset I was aching with the desire to go to another star system and the impossible distances involved. The moon happened to be out as well and I caught a glimpse of it looking beautiful and suddenly so very alien itself. Going to another star will remain a distant fantasy all my life but going to the moon is something I really could do in my lifetime. So I'm going to add another long shot goal to my list; set foot on the moon.

Bad Jokes as a passtime for waiting in line; or 10.1 tropical fruit jokes

2010-07-10T22:09:00.004-06:00

While waiting in line for rides at a theme park me and my companions were entertaining ourselves by inventing bad jokes of a particular strain. Since this pastime rather reminds me of the 101 themed jokes posts a friend used to make I shall reproduce a part of them here as 10.1 tropical fruit jokes. (I always thought that 101 bad jokes on a theme was really too many for a blog post)

1)
Q. What tropical fruit gives the worst diarrhea?

A. The Poopaya

2)
Q. What is the most religious tropical fruit?

A. The Popepaya

3)
Q. What tropical fruit do plumbers prefer?

A. The Pipepaya

4)
Q. What tropical fruit do people smoke?

A. The Pipepaya

5)
Q. What is the spikiest tropical fruit?

A. The Porcupaya

6)
Q. What tropical fruit is the best at karate?

A. the pap-HI-YAHH!

7)
Q. What tropical fruit would you want on your team for a tug of war?

A. The Pullpaya

8)
Q. Which tropical fruit is the hardest to keep from peeing on the rug?

A. The pup-paya

9)
Q. What tropical fruit is the most agreeable?

A. The papayeah

10)
Q. What tropical fruit do you use to go to the bathroom?

A. The Portipaya

10.1
Q.

A. The Pollpaya

Delicious Vegetarian Stuffed Mushroom Recipe

2010-06-20T22:04:00.003-06:00

I had some portabello mushrooms to use before they went bad and I looked online for a stuffed mushroom recipe and I found http://whatscooking.us/2008/03/05/lunch-special-stuffed-creamy-portabella-mushrooms/

Which looked delicious so I decided to modify the recipe to make it vegetarian and made out of stuff I had on hand. I was extremely happy with the result so I'm going to share.

Step 1) put a stick of butter, 6 0z of cream cheese 1/4 cup water, 1 tablespoon sugar, and 1 tablespoon grapefruit juice in a sauce pan and heat and stir until it thickens a bit.

Step 2) Add a diced red bell pepper, garlic powder and chili powder to taste to the sauce and let simmer

Step 3) Dice and Sautee an onion in a separate pan. Remove the stems from your portabell0 mushrooms chop them up and add them to the onion and let them cook for a bit.

Step 4) Add the onion and mushrooms to the cream sauce and fill the mushrooms with the mixture.

Step 5) Top the mushrooms with parmesan cheese and bread crumbs.

Step 6) Broil the mushrooms until the bread crumbs are a golden brown.

I was making 4 stuffed portabello's with the above recipe and I had a bit too much sauce but some of my mushrooms were much smaller than the others so your milage may vary.

enjoy

Commencement

2010-05-11T15:45:00.002-06:00

This last Friday I finally participated in the commencement ceremonies for the degree I earned a year ago. There was a university wide commencement ceremony which I attended but had to leave early from and a convocation ceremony which I got to sit all the way through. After coming out on the other side of the graduation ceremony I think I would have been better served to simply go to the university wide commencement ceremony and just ignored the existence of the convocation. At the convocation I got to walk across a stage while someone read my name... it wasn't really much to get too excited about. I would rather go to the ceremony where the bulk of the program is made up of speeches instead of disconnected contextless names.

Although it is somewhat nice to have some personal recognition in hindsight it definitely wasn't worth sitting through everyone elses names in order to get my few seconds to cross the stage. Or at least it isn't worth it when I could just as easily get a ceremonial conferral of my degree just by attending the commencement, albeit not a a personal one.

My poker book got delivered to a gynecologist:: or why ups should be spelled phonetically

2010-03-11T23:02:00.005-07:00

I ordered "The Mathematics Of Poker" a little while ago and on Wednesday of last week it got delivered.... or at least on Friday when I checked the tracking data online to find out what had become of it I discovered it had been delivered and signed for... but not by me. At 3:00 on the dot Wednesday someone named "Kristie" had signed for my decidedly absent package.

I live in a house in which multiple rooms are rented out independently of each other. I wasn't certain if a Kristie had perhaps moved in recently and for some reason had decided to retain my package for safe keeping in her room instead of in the mantle in the front room. At least before I went about complaining I needed to find out if in fact I lived with a Kristie. After asking a number of my room mates and someone at the coffee shop that shares the plot of land on which this house is built I discovered that there was indeed a new female resident of the house but no one knew her name. Eventually the matter was solved by calling the land lord who informed me that the only woman living here went by the name of Angela (we shall ignore for the moment the fact that Yu-ling has been living here for longer than I have and she is definitely female).

Satisfied that there was no Kristie in the house the question became what address had my package really been delivered to? A little information could be gleaned from the tracking page.

SALT LAKE CITY, UT, US	03/03/2010	3:00 P.M.	DELIVERY
	03/03/2010	1:51 P.M.	A CORRECT STREET NUMBER IS NEEDED FOR DELIVERY. UPS IS ATTEMPTING TO OBTAIN THIS INFORMATION
SALT LAKE CITY, UT, US	03/02/2010	9:16 P.M.	DESTINATION SCAN
	03/02/2010	2:51 P.M.	A CORRECT STREET NUMBER IS NEEDED FOR DELIVERY. UPS IS ATTEMPTING TO OBTAIN THIS INFORMATION
	03/02/2010	6:59 A.M.	OUT FOR DELIVERY
	03/02/2010	4:01 A.M.	ARRIVAL SCAN
SPARKS, NV, US	03/01/2010	7:04 P.M.	DEPARTURE SCAN
	03/01/2010	12:59 P.M.	ORIGIN SCAN
US	03/01/2010	2:19 A.M.	BILLING INFORMATION RECEIVED

A correct street number is needed for delivery? What on earth did that mean? How did UPS manage to lose my address? I decided to go look and see what was on the adjacent streets at 1031 E and I found that in fact there was a house at 1031 one street over and in the other direction there was a hospital. There was no response when I knocked at the 1031 house and I assumed that delivery to the hospital was essentially impossible. Checking online showed that the address of the hospital was 1050 E giving it no commonality with my own.

As I was walking back from the 1031 abode however I saw the UPS carrier making his rounds and hurried to talk to him. I asked if any packages had perhaps given him some trouble on Wednesday and he responded that none had. I told him that I had been expecting a package and that it had been delivered and signed for by a Kristie but that I had no idea who that was. Very fortunately for me he knew who this Kristie was and told me that my package must have gotten delivered to a Doctor Hinson. Why this could possibly have happened neither he nor I had the slightest Idea though he assured me that the package was addressed 1050 E 100 S and to doctor Hinson.

I got online and found out that Doctor Hinson was an OB/GYN though I failed to find the location of her office. I let the matter sit until Monday. On monday my package arrived battered and bruised with a ups label that had apparently gone over the top of a label with my correct name and address partially ripped off. The box had been opened and retaped though the book inside was no worse for wear.

Checking the tracking page now there are two delivery lines one right after the other.


SALT LAKE CITY, UT, US	03/08/2010	3:42 P.M.	DELIVERY
SALT LAKE CITY, UT, US	03/03/2010	3:00 P.M.	DELIVERY

And then immediately after it dated 2 days after I had already received my book

SALT LAKE CITY, UT, US	03/10/2010	8:25 P.M.	A CORRECT STREET NUMBER IS NEEDED FOR DELIVERY. UPS IS ATTEMPTING TO OBTAIN THIS INFORMATION / THE RECEIVER PICKED UP THE PACKAGE THAT WAS BEING HELD FOR THEM

SALT LAKE CITY, UT, US

03/10/2010

8:25 P.M.

A CORRECT STREET NUMBER IS NEEDED FOR DELIVERY. UPS IS ATTEMPTING TO OBTAIN THIS INFORMATION / THE RECEIVER PICKED UP THE PACKAGE THAT WAS BEING HELD FOR THEM

I still have no idea what really happened in this whole mess but I thought the oddity was sufficient to merit sharing. This at the very least justifies me in a long time habit of half jokingly (now somewhat less than half jokingly) pronouncing ups as oops.

Kissing Numbers

2010-03-07T15:54:00.005-07:00

The kissing number in a certain number of dimensions is the greatest number of spheres that can be brought to touch (or "kiss") a central sphere if all the spheres are the same size. in one dimension the kissing number is 2. In two dimensions the problem is slightly less trivial but hardly difficult. It will probably not come as much of a surprise that the best arrangement in 2 dimensions is the familiar hexagonal arrangement.

A little thought will show that all the angular space around the central circle is taken up. Since the centers of 3 equally sized spheres mutually in contact with each other form an equilateral triangle.

So the minimum angle between the centers of any two circles touching the central circle is just Pi/3, the angle of an equilateral triangle. The sum of the angles between the centers of all of the circles touching the central circle must add up to a full 2*pi and each of these angles must be at least Pi/3. So the most circles we could possibly get to touch the central circle is 2*Pi/(Pi/3) = 6 circles. Since the hexagonal arrangement actually achieves this maximum we have our proof.

In three dimensions a good solution is found by taking the optimal 2 dimensional hexagonal arrangement of spheres around a central one in a plane but now it is possible to add spheres above and below the plane that touch the central sphere. Three spheres can be placed above and three spheres below the plane of the hexagonaly arranged spheres while still contacting the central sphere. The arrangement gives 6 + 3 + 3 = 12 as a lower bound for the kissing number in three dimensions. The centers of the spheres arrayed around the central one now form the vertices of one of the Archimedean solids, the Cuboctahedron.

Is this the optimal arrangement or is there possibly some more clever arrangement which could fit an extra sphere or two in? Generalizing our tactic for the two dimensional case we can ask what is the minimum angular space taken up by each sphere. A calculation of the solid angle taken up by a sphere touching the central sphere gives. Pi*(2-sqrt(3)) = 0.841 steradians. Dividing the total number of steradians by this value gives 4*pi/(Pi(2-sqrt(3)) = 14.92 So this gives us a definite upper limit of 14 spheres that we can fit around a central sphere.

But this bound ignores the fact that spheres do not fit flush with each other so we can't hope to fill all the angular space around the central sphere. Consider an arrangement of equal sized spheres placed at the vertices of a regular tetrahedron such that all the spheres touch each other. If all the spheres around the central sphere could be made to form such tetrahedral arrangements such that the lines between the centers of all touching exterior spheres form equilateral triangles clearly this arrangement would be optimal. I worked on a proof for a bit but already in three dimensions the problem is quite hard and I am not quite sure how to approach it. Nevertheless such tetrahedral arrangements are not possible in 3 dimensions or in any higher dimension either. The triangular packing of 2 dimensions is unique.

The Robots are gone

2010-03-03T22:24:00.002-07:00

So the vast swarm of high school students is finally gone. It did end up turning out that my office was pretty much unusable between the hours of 2:30 and 9:00 and even during the day there came to usually be someone running around. Apparently there were roughly 150 students involved in the project in total though the number that I saw there usually averaged much closer to 30 people at a time.

I resisted posting over and over again about the inconvenience. I don't mind working in the library but there is a certain indignity in not being able to use my own office. Of course as everyone would tell me I was more than welcome to come and use my desk but when there are dozens of people coming and going and working together and discussing things and when those people are furthermore high school students... I think it will not be hard to convince you that the library was a much more conducive work/study area.

I really found it very irksome that the administration didn't deem this intrusion of my work space significant enough to merit a simple e-mail warning me of the swarm in advance. I first learned of the plan to share my office with these students when someone came by to install a box with the key to my office right next to my door. I wondered if perhaps my presence in this office had somehow gotten overlooked and on some official roster somewhere I was really supposed to be in one of the more populated grad student offices.

But after the last students had left and the copious amounts of garbage, and carpet, and plywood, and electronics, and dirty dishes, etc had been cleaned out of my office I got a letter from the department chair in my box.

Of course my first response was that this was some sort of official departmental action and therefore bad news. When I opened it I discovered it had a gift card in it. It actually turned out to be something of an apology.

Tim Anderton
Department of Physics and Astronomy
115 S 1400 E #201
University of Utah
Salt Lake City, Utah 84112

Dear Tim,

I would like to thank you for your accommodating the West High Robotics team during the past six weeks as they built and tested their robot in the James Fletcher Building. The group was very appreciative of the use of the grad student offices and the lab next door as this facilitated the construction and testing of the robot. Last year, the labs and office spaces for the robot build were located in Chemistry, but the mechanical construction took place in the Department of Physics and Astronomy machine shop.

I had not envisioned the amount of time the team would spend in the Department, and the number of people and/or computers that eventually were crowded into your small office. I know the imposition was rather severe at times. On behalf of the Physics Department and West High Robotics, I have enclosed a small gift card to the University of Utah bookstore. I sincerely appreciate your patience in the midst of all the chaos!

with Best Regards,
Dave Kieda
Chair, Department of Physics and Astronomy
Professor of Physics
University of Utah
Salt Lake City, Utah 84112

I am of somewhat mixed feelings about this. After the robotics team had gone I was happy to have shared my office with them. True it was quite a pain at times but at the same time I definitely approve of the project and think it is a good idea for them to have access to such a space in the department. The thing I most would have wanted is to have been asked permission or, failing that, at least been warned. On the other hand of course if I had been warned then I very probably would not have received this gift and apology. Especially since I would probably have ok'd the the use of the office anyway perhaps this is preferable. I can't help but wonder though if perhaps this is a manifestation of the fact that is often easier to ask forgiveness than permission. Ah, well C'est la vie.

P.S. On the off chance that Dave Kieda is reading this, Thanks for the letter and the card! I appreciate it despite my griping about my lowly status within the department.