The Lansey Brothers' Blog

Why you should skip expensive wine

2012-01-22T01:00:00.000-05:00

A friend of mine (A. Green) held a small wine tasting event where the guests guessed the price of each wine as they tasted them. She bought the wines and arranged the tastings but did not guess. The participants were pretty educated, but not wine experts. I did not participate, and there were no plans to graph the results until I discovered the data so hopefully these are completely unbiased.

Below we see that there is no correlation between the actual cost of the bottle and the price that it tastes. The conclusion? Save your money and don't buy wine over $15!

In case you are curious, below you can see all the data points.

Thanks to alert blog-previewer Eli we have the following relevant links about how the price of the wine can actually change how good it tastes for you.

There, I fixed it

2012-01-19T20:14:00.000-05:00

Well, I didn't fix it, but I saw this at the Brooklyn Brewery, on a temperature monitoring panel:

I imagine one of their fancy, integrated temperature sensors broke, so they just replaced it with a $40 off-the-shelf probe thermometer.

Don't Mind Me I'm Just QWOP'ing Along

2012-01-17T21:23:00.000-05:00

QWOP, the ridiculously hard pointless game. Well me and some friend had a marathon, to see who could actually beat it before they ran out of patience. I present to you...

Credit Card Image Designs part 3-4/?

2012-01-15T11:40:00.000-05:00

I've been trying for a while now to get a ridiculous image on my credit card. See tries one and two. Each time they seem to reject it for one reason or another.

I think they rejected this one because of this clause:

Any photo that might result in non-acceptance or other problems at the point of sale

My plan was to tell the cashier "no, its the center oval that turns blue if stolen" or "it is only starting to turn blue because you are holding it" and then mutter something about how low-tech it is not to tell the difference between another person just holding it and actually having stole it.

Anyway - I have high hopes for the card below that still has a chance to make it past the capitalone sensors!

Edit: Card rejected ... an appeal has been submitted.

Edit: Appeal rejected

A Week of Me

2012-01-14T20:22:00.000-05:00

Well we have made it, a week of me. That's right I now hold the blog record for consecutive posts SEVEN. Yep, I had ulterior motives. Not only did I want to make it up to our loyal readers for a missed month but I wanted the record, MWAH HA HA HA!!! But its not all bad, you got the posts I should I have posted and some bonus posts. Also, I have now helped with the poorly represented Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday by increasing the number of post on those days. Plus since that 5th anniversary post I have been working tirelessly (literally) to makes sure that the 4-5 AM time slot is represented, come on I dare you to see how many times I have posted between those times since October.

Speaking of October and our fifth anniversary. Since then and until recently I missed almost no posts, this is just another thing I have been doing for you loyal readers. Let us see how many other records we can break here today. Eli holds the record for number of comments in one post at 16, I think we can beat this with all you loyal readers saying what you think about this momentous event. Although, I think it is silly to try and break Yoni's 29 image in one post record (here at least). I will however point out that in this week I have posted 29 images so far, so I will post one more and call it a day.

Welding

2012-01-13T04:00:00.000-05:00

Prepare to be amazed by a blast from the past. I took a welding class about 3-4 years ago. That's right this blog post has literally been years in the making! The class was offered by a local vocational school and was geared as adult continued education. I learned arc weld, MIG weld, brazing, and how to cut steel with an oxyacetylene torch.

This was my basic welding setup. I had an auto-darkening helmet, this meant that when I struck an arc the goggles immediately darkened so I wasn't blinded, but when I wasn't welding I would be able to see what I was doing. Additionally, I am wearing a welding coat, its treated cotton. Also, thick leather gloves. On the right is a wire brush for cleaning up welds and on the left is a welding hammer, its to clear off slag.

This is my brazing and oxyacetylene cutting getup. Same shirt and and gloves but wearing brazing goggles. On the theme of a long time coming, I was clearly way ahead of the times. Watch out guys, we're dealing with a badass over here.

Master of Engineering Part 3

2012-01-12T23:30:00.000-05:00

At about 11:30 at night while working on the final project for my combustion course (analysis of a RD-180 rocket engine), I recieved this email.

Dear Graduate Student,

Rutgers Counseling, ADAP (alcohol and other drug assistance program) and Psychiatric Services office, located at 17 Senior Street, is available to help you resolve the many pressures you face as you juggle your classes, research, teaching, jobs and family responsibilities. Please, if you need help, get completely confidential help from this office.

After the inexplicable crazy laughter ended, I leaned over to my friend Sergey with whom I was working on the project and said "But who has the time."

Dinner Party

2012-01-11T23:30:00.000-05:00

You may have figured it out by now, but if not, I was way to busy during the conclusion of my last semester to blog. Now you may ask, but what about the last week in December, you where done with classes. Well that was the last night of Chanukah and the night I had my traditional (as in the traditional food, not a traditional party) Eastern European dinner party. For years my friends have heard about these foods, so I decided it was time for them to have some.

This was my second themed dinner party after the Soup Party (which I think I blogged but can't find now). I made Challah, Tzimmes, Chulent, Vegy Kishka, Kasha Varnishkas, Potato Kugel, and Gefilta Fish and not the jarred stuff. It was fun telling people the names of stuff than saying eat it and find out what it is.

Orange stuff in the middle of the table is the vegy kishka, and next to it is a bowl of kasha varnishkas.

Now you can see the challah and a better look at the kishka and kasha varnishkas. Also, you can see some dreidel spinning going on as it was the last night of chanukah.

In addition to the dreidels some of Moshe's toys made it to the table. You can see the little toy train on the table. some of the track came out as well and there was some dreidel spinning on those.

The shoe pile. In the end about 20 people came to the party (although not all at once, max was probably about 12-15).

Aryeh Cooks: Pumpkin Bread

2012-01-10T13:38:00.000-05:00

For Thanksgiving I decided to make pumpkin bread, clearly this post has been a long time coming. The pumpkin bread is a dessert bread, so really a cake. This is also the first recipe for a baked good that I created.

The recipe:
3.5 cups of flour (all purpose is best)
1 cup of sugar
2/3 cups of brown sugar
1.5 cups of pecans
1 can of pumpkin puree (29 oz, enough for two 9" pies)
4 eggs
5/8ths of a cup of oil
1.5 teaspoons of baking soda
1 teaspoons of baking powder
1/2 teaspoon of salt
2 teaspoons of vanilla (I use vanilla sugar, but vanilla extract is fine)
2 teaspoons of cinnamon
1 teaspoon of ginger
1/2 teaspoon of ground cloves
1/4 teaspoon of ground nutmeg
2 greased 9"x5"x3" loaf pans

Start by putting the pecans into your oven on a baking sheet at 350 degrees for about 8 minutes. After they cool down give them a course chop. Leave the oven on.

Mix all the other dry ingredients together in a mixing bowl (leave the pecans separate).

Its interesting how artistic a bunch of spice can be. Also, if you place spices on a plate like this you can smell them in different combinations.

Next beat the eggs together until they become a lighter yellow. This incorporates air bubbles that can expand when the bread is baked. Mix the beaten eggs and other liquids with pecans. If you haven't added the pumpkin puree to the liquids, do so. Mix the liquids together well.

It should become thick and gloppy, but not as much as a finished batter would.

Now mix the liquids into the solids. Just mix long enough to bring the batter together. Pour out into the greased loaf pans.

This is a double batch which is why there are four pans. The batter has a very rich orange color which remains through the baking. Bake for an hour, then pierce the bread with a knife or toothpick if it comes out clean it is done baking, if not bake longer until the knife or toothpick comes out clean.

At the Thanksgiving table.

Master of Engineering Part 2

2012-01-09T04:30:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I posted about my getting my Master of Engineering Degree. I showed you a bunch of the design work that I did. Here is some of the construction that I did.

This is my setup to cast the rubber sealer head out of urethane rubber. In the bottom right is the mold that I printed using FDM, above it is a spray can that holds a silicon release agent that I sprayed into the mold, to the immediate left of that is the hardener that hardens the urethane which is in the tin in the center. The scale I used to ensure that I had the correct ratios of the urethane and the hardener.

Here is the urethane cast into the mold.

This is the partially constructed sealer. The urethane hadn't hardened yet (it took a week) and I had not threaded the other three posts yet. You can see the load cell in place. I don't have a lot of pictures of the construction because when you are machining things to a few thousandths of an inch precision you can't really be thinking about getting pictures of it. Plus my hands tended to be covered with cutting fluid, so I really didn't want to be grabbing for my camera all the time.

This is the completed product during testing (about 1:30 AM on a Sunday if you where interested). For the testing I just pressed down with the device on a slab of concrete and had a friend operate a valve with a pressure gauge on it.

Here it is tipped on its side so you can see it in all its glory, minus the counterbored holes on the bottom that I didn't have time to do.

Master of Engineering Part 1

2012-01-08T13:26:00.000-05:00

Some of you may have noticed that I have failed to post for some time. I have a good reason for most of it.

Over the course of the past month I have completed my Master of Engineering degree. I completed my final courses, and successfully defended my research.

Here is some of what I did this past semester while working on the ANDERS for Bridge Decks Project. The part of the project I was associated with was the bridge repair part. My job was to design and redesign components for the robot.

This is where the project was when I first became involved, the robotic arm would be attached to the robot and the drill would drill holes in the road.

These where the first two things I designed. On the left is a device that can be pressed against the concrete around the hole that was drilled (the black part is rubber) and sealant would be pumped into subsurface cracks in the concrete to repair it. On the right was a design for a two part epoxy mixing device. Two different components would be pumped in from the top and forced to mix as they run through the device.

This is what my first design was modified into. The change was for ease of construction and because it used materials I already had on hand. It is effectively the same thing as the previous design with an added load cell to measure how much force the unit would be pushing down on concrete with.

Now we are moving on to the next part of the project. The whole drilling and sealing system. I decided that it would be most efficient if we where to use the same screw rail being used to actuate the drill to also actuate the sealer.

The next step was to improve upon the design of the drill mounting. I took advantage of existing mount points on the motor housing inside the drill to shorten the end effector. Additionally, you will note an intermediate design for the sealer attached to the design.

I wanted to see how compact I could make the entire end effector. So I removed the load cell (large short cylinder mounted between the drill and the screw rail) and moved it to the robot arm. With this removed i could make is as compact as possible. However, I also needed to invert the motor that powered the screw rail (black, silver and gray cylinder) because otherwise it would hit the ground. Additionally, if you look between the previous design and this one you can see a small black ring attached to the backside of the plate holding the screw rail together. This is how the end effector connects to the robot arm. You can see from the placement that in the compact design it is much closer to the inertial center of the end effector. This means that it would be much easier for the robot arm to rotate it the 180 degrees necessary to switch between the drill and the sealer.

My adviser did not like the compact design so he asked me for a combination of the compact and non-compact design (also not liking a number of intermediate designs). The result is above. The load cell has been moved but the screw rail and its motor are in-line with each other.

Lighting a nook

2012-01-05T18:44:00.000-05:00

We had a small, dark, strange alcove in our bedroom.

Stacy decided it would make a nice reading nook, if only we could light it. So, with some expert advice from my father, a bit of work,

and, I think, a decent amount of mess,

I hung, and wired a new lighting fixture and switch.

Now, there's plenty of light in our reading nook:

Art with Machine Learning

2012-01-01T22:55:00.001-05:00

The other day my friend Nathan pointed me to the a Google+ post of Mohit Muthanna here.

Take all the pixels of a photograph, and rearrange them so that the final image looks like an artist's palette -- something to which you can take a paintbrush and recreate the original image.

Below is an example of an image he made, using k-means to cluster the pixels.

But why stop there? I decided to try going ahead and automatically paint the image with the palette. If you were to do this by painting every pixel with average color for its cluster, then this is just a form of posterization (a cute way to do image compression).

Sierra Nevada CA

Instead I chose to use the original pixels, but to replace each pixel with a random pixel from the same cluster. The difference is admittedly subtle ... but it sometimes looks nice. Note that the pallet used to paint each picture is usually shown below it.

Sierra Nevada CA

I tried several non-random ways to paint the picture too, such as shifting pixels inside a given cluster

and sorting the pixels in each cluster by brightness (top to bottom).

Zurich

Below are a few more examples,

NJIT Library

Sierra Nevada CA

Israel

England

Last Shuttle Launch

Calais

The code to do all this was written in Matlab, with the help of M. Chen's K-Means function. I'd be glad to give anyone the code, just email me or G+ me.

Guess the serving size

2011-12-29T15:13:00.000-05:00

I noticed the following informative label on a bottle of vegetable oil I recently purchased:

I imagine that Stop & Shop's marketing team has enforced plastering of similar nutritional information on all products, but this one in particular probably could have left off some details. See if you can figure out the serving size:

On the other hand, it does allow us to calculate the mass energy density: 35.86 megajoules/kg. For what it's worth, gasoline has a mass energy density of 47.3 megajoules/kg, so you can figure out how far a car will go with it.

Google Revives Frames, Hogs Screen

2011-12-27T21:00:00.000-05:00

Google has recently been overhauling the look of the user interface across many of its products, like Gmail, Google Docs and Blogger. While some of these changes might be good, they all seem to have one markedly un-Google side effect - wasted screen space.

The old Google left no pixel un-turned in their zealos march to higher screen utilization. They innovated ways that seemed impossible, like saving 5-10 pixels of space by doing away with the historic windows bar that all old-fashioned programs have at the top of each window. They shaved a few pixels more with extra-thin scroll bars and other tricks that worked so well they soon became industry standard. All of those efforts are wasted by the new user interface designs.

As an example, see my screenshot of Google books below.

Notice that the actual page of the book is about 1/4 the total available screen area, while the description of the book gets a little more than 1/8 of the screen. You can set the page to "full screen" but even then half the screen is still wasted by all that vertical whitespace. What is really preventing you from increasing the amount of screen you can use is a trick from the old days of the web, called Frames.

Without too much trouble, I demonstrated with a geometric proof that there is far more blank whitespace on the screen, than there is actual book. Honestly I think it is nothing less than tragic for this to happen on what used to be the screen-saving hero of the Internet.

If enough people send in their complaints, Google will listen! Please send feedback saying that you want your screen space back again!

To give your feedback about Gmail

Login, click the gear in the upper right corner
Select "Report a bug"
Highlight some unnecessary whitespace
Preview -> submit

To give feedback about Google Books:
http://support.google.com/books/bin/request.py?hl=en&contact_type=survey

See my feedback below:

Google books has recently implemented Frames with wide wide vertical margins in the Google books page. This is a huge problem because frames are confusing to navigate and they hog precious screen space.
Please revert back to using modern designs rather than frames, that horrible monster slayed towards the end of the wild-west days of the internet.

Know any other ways to give feedback? Post in comments.

Authentic blog post: Insect edition

2011-12-22T19:24:00.002-05:00

I believe I have found the most disgusting candy ever:

I would like to point out a few things. First of all - WORM! Second of all, WORM! Third of all, this candy has a genuine worm, but artificial flavor. Priorities, right?
In fact, check out the complete ingredient list:

In case you can't read it: Malitol syrup, Insect Larva, natural and artificial flavoring. That's right, INSECT LARVA! What's next, crunchy frog?!? Here's a closeup of the "insect larva:"

Yum!

Gingerbread Houses in New Mexico

2011-12-18T19:22:00.001-05:00

In New Mexico they really love their Gingerbread houses.

Authentic blog post

2011-12-15T18:31:00.001-05:00

I recently came across this package of guacamole which is made with an authentic recipe. I suppose that means they don't make it up as they go along like my recipes; they have an authentic recipe.

The Awesome Foundation

2011-12-11T21:51:00.001-05:00

I have recently become a trustee of The Awesome Foundation, Boston Chapter. See the introductory post and a very old photo of me here. See recent news about it from NPR's Marketplace segment here.

From our website:

The Awesome Foundation for the Arts and Sciences is an ever-growing, worldwide network of people devoted to forwarding the interest of awesomeness in the universe.
Created in the long hot summer days of 2009 in Boston, the Foundation distributes a series of monthly $1,000 grants to projects and their creators. The money is given upfront in cash, check, or gold doubloons by groups of ten or so self-organizing “micro-trustees,” who form autonomous chapters around geographic areas or topics of interest.
The Foundation provides these grants with no strings attached and claims no ownership over the projects it supports. It is, in the words of one of our trustees, a micro-genius grant for flashes of micro-brilliance.
Since its humble beginnings, many Awesome Foundation chapters have sprung up globally to conserve, sustain, and support the worldwide ecosystem of awesomeness. Projects have included efforts in a wide range of areas including technology, arts, social good, and beyond.

Any Ideas folks? Send them over! (cc me).

Austin is Weird

2011-12-08T20:01:00.001-05:00

Austin is a weird city. On one hand, it's the capital of Texas, which is a pretty weird state. These were two random houses we saw:

I can't imagine anyone in New Jersey flying its state flag (without trying to be ironic), yet this seems to be pretty standard fare in Texas.

On the other hand, it seems to be the hipster capital of Texas, too. Austin is also the home of the Whole Foods mothership:

Inside, they had these really cool electronic price stickers on the shelves which I assume lets them adjust the pricing on a shorter time frame than most grocery stores.

There were also some pretty funny signs and garbage can options outside:

This is one particularly cool-looking building I noticed:

Finally, Austin's famed bar/music scene starts quite late:

Verizon Change address Hidden Fee

2011-12-04T18:07:00.001-05:00

When changing your address with Verizon high speed internet, they will tell you there is no charge. What they don't tell you, is that there is a $110 hidden fee for the technician to come out to your apartment and do "wiring" even if the previous tenants of your apartment had Verizon.
To put the $110 in perspective, my monthly charge was only about $20 so this one charge was worth almost 6 months of internet. I called them as an irate customer and they said the charge was "valid" because the technician came by, no matter what they told me on the phone. When I insisted, spoke to a supervisor, and threatened to blog -> they were able to lower the charge by $20. I told them that this wasn't enough to stop me from blogging, but I would mention this courtesy in my post.
And now to complete this post with some more internet Verizon stories:

from imur/reddit and from xkcd below:

Smoked Turkey

2011-12-01T07:00:00.000-05:00

Last Thursday, for Thanksgiving, in addition to the regular roasted turkey, I decided to do something different and smoke a turkey. You may recall that last January, Aryeh and I built a cold smoker. The smoker can also be operated in hot smoker mode by putting the hotplate inside the main chamber.

After a quick surface blowtorch treatment as a special precaution (to instantly kill any salmonellas which may have been hanging out), I loaded the turkey into the crate and got it all smoked up:

Nearly 10 hours later, after a quick trip under the broiler to finish, the turkey was done.

Randomness

2011-11-29T17:44:00.001-05:00

In the mode of Yoni's post from earlier this week, I will post a couple of random things.

The contraption on the right used to fill that nook. It was placed there about five and a half years ago. I had honestly forgotten what was behind it.

You know its time to buy new sneakers when you go finger spelunking in your footwear when bored.

Fire, RV, Sierra Nevada, Snow

2011-11-27T11:04:00.001-05:00

This post is just about a few old photos

From my family's great California RV trip (long exposure photo where I blew on the coals).

From the parking lot where I work last winter. Lets hope we get that much snow again!

Aryeh Doesn't Cook: Blue Fin Tuna Sashimi

2011-11-22T11:56:00.001-05:00

This isn't really an Aryeh Cooks post, mainly because if it was I would have mobs of angry Japanese with pitchforks trying to kill me for cooking Sashimi grade Bluefin Tuna. Some friends of mine told me that they where planning on going to a Japanese food mart called Mitsuwa where a few times a year they bring in a whole tuna. In this case a 600 pound Tuna.

You can really get a feel for the size of this fish from the pieces on the board.

This is my friend Ayaka with the head and tail of the fish, you can see how big the head of the fish is in comparison to her.

And finally the piece of fish I got.

Just look at that color.

Thin slice, consumed raw. Up to this point I have never actually eaten raw fish, so I have gone from nothing to a ton in no time flat. As it turns out I am not a huge fan, but the texture of the fresh fish is literally melt in the mouth. So for all of you Sushi lovers, go drool, for all you others, you can do whatever you like.