youwot?

Fish and hydrolysis?

2015-12-23T12:28:00.003-08:00

Ok, people. Just finished a binge reading session about how fish breathe. THINGS YOU MIGHT NOT HAVE KNOWN BECAUSE I DIDN'T.

NO HYDROLYSIS IS PERFORMED BY THE FISHIES. I'm embarrassed to report that the puzzling energetics of this possibility are what started the whole binge-reading session. Very obvious in retrospect, but let's move riiiiight along: the oxygen that fish breathe is not the oxygen bound up in H2O (those bonds are far too strong for a cold fish gill to be able to do anything with). Instead, it's free oxygen gas molecules (O2) dissolved in the water that are diffusing through -- much like how it's O2 dissolved in air that diffuses through mammalian lung membranes.
When you boil water, the first bubbles that form are from the dissolved oxygen in water boiling off.
Ergo: if you want to kill some fish: boil a bunch of water, pour it into a bucket, and then put the fish in. Bye bye fishies.
We (humans) also do this (kill fish) all the time by emitting oxygen-consuming waste (i.e. raw or poorly processed sewage) into our streams. (Though I'm curious how much waste-dumping-induced fish is due to de-oxygenation, and how much is due to nasty toxins that screw up fish biology. Or derivative effects on the ecosystem (algae blooms/death, etc). You get the picture.)
There is crazy little dissolved oxygen in water. We all know that air is 21 percent oxygen -- but most fish are just fine with water with 0.0005% dissolved oxygen (5 ppm). They get tetchy when dissolved oxygen drops below this, and will begin to suffocate and die when the dissolved oxygen gets to 2 ppm or lower.
Ram ventilation: this is great! Most fish use the muscles of their cheeks to pump water through their gills ("buccal pumping"). Some fish, however (mackeral and certain types of sharks) have completely lost this ability: they can only breathe if water keeps passing through their gills as they swim, meaning THEY WILL DROWN if they stop swimming. These sharks are known as "obligate ram ventilators" and include the great white shark, the mako shark, the salmon shark and the whale shark.
After extracting oxygen with their gills, fishies discharge carbon dioxide (waste) into the water. Keep this up in stagnant water and you'll get water with no oxygen and a whole lot of CO2. How do humans make sure they don't kill their expensive fishtank fish? They hook up fish tank aerators which (in their simplest form) create turbulence. This replaces the carbon dioxide with oxygen.
Water temperature affects how much free oxygen is available: colder water retains dissolved oxygen much more easily. This results in e.g. more active fish (trout) preferring cold-water environments, and more sluggish fish (carp) being totally fine in warm, stagnant water (=> your aunt's backyard pond that never gets cleaned).

[This is all totally irresponsibly cribbed and possibly misquoted from ~15 articles on the internet. Sorry, no sources because lazy.]

Garbage flying through pneumatic tubes at 80 km/hour

2014-09-13T11:37:00.000-07:00

Woah! I knew Barcelona had a progressive bus system, but I just found out it also has a very cool (and very green) pneumatic waste collection system for their street trash cans. (It was built for the 1992 Olympic games, but has been expanded to cover much of the city.) You walk up to a sparkling clean bin on the street, pop in your garbage/glass/paper/plastic, and then it's sucked through vacuum tubes to a compression chamber at 80 km/hour. The complexity of this system is incredibly impressive!

From IEEE:

"The covered containers have portholes with chutes connected to a subterranean vacuum network. Sensors in the portholes indicate when the trash needs to be emptied, and they can help ensure that only one kind of waste material is traveling through the pipe at a time. The waste is moved through the underground pipeline by air pressure created by large industrial fans. The pipelines converge in a central processing facility, which directs the waste to the proper container. From there it is trucked to a landfill, composting plant, or other final destination."

This video (in Catalan) shows some clips of how of it works. I've linked to the fun part, where you get to see the underground pipes, the diverter valve, and control room:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZ2yzodup9w#t=1m12s

[Source: City of Barcelona's website: http://goo.gl/tLoKqO ]

I poked around a bit, and found that the city of New York did some research into implementing this in Manhattan, since (from the 2013 feasibility study), "reducing the number of trucks used on the island’s densely encumbered streets could offer significant environmental, public-health, and quality-of-life benefits." There were two proposals analyzed: one pneumatic pipeline under the High Line, and another in the Second Avenue subway. It seems the plan is still hanging in the balance. On the positive side, the study concluded that both designs were physically/operationally feasible, and that, compared to manual/truck collection, operating costs would be 30% lower, energy use would be reduced by 60%, and that greenhouse gas emissions would be cut by more than half. However, high initial capital costs would mean that "overall costs, including debt service, would be 55% higher in the High Line case and 30% higher in the Second Avenue Subway case." Fingers crossed!

Impressions of South Korea

2014-07-21T01:05:00.002-07:00

July 4. Go somewhere! Where? Google says South Korea's not too expensive -- why not?

And thus the adventure began! Our only goal: soak in the culture, history, technology. In seven days.

This is a dashed-off set of notes, woefully incomplete. I mostly enjoyed learning about Korean history, none of which is represented here -- I can recommend many books and podcasts if you're interested.

Even more photos here:
https://plus.google.com/photos/103965006877318223800/albums/6037983076092381505?authkey=COPXiuC5tKLljQE

Urban landscape (Seoul, Busan)
First impressions:
- Both are massive (Seoul, pop. 10.14M, by far the largest city I've been to). Density is staggering. Like a video game with an infinite urban background, or a casino full of Manhattans, stacked vertically and horizontally.
- No downtown (there are downtowns everywhere).
- The population is young (also in Busan) and fairly wealthy (by tragic contrast, the elderly population is very poor).
- High-rise residential buildings like stacks of dominoes that go on forever. In the densest part of the city centre, shop signs jut out into every square inch of sky.
- Trendy, beautiful coffee shops with massive department-store windows that overlook a corner. These sit above e.g. a massive retail store on the ground floor selling beauty stuff. On top of coffee shop: a restaurant. On top of that: a nightclub. Etc etc.

Technology:
- LCDs atop buildings all over the city. Parts of Seoul feel like Blade Runner, Times Square.
- You really can stream YouTube on the subway; plenty of people do.
- Many restaurants have pagers or buzzers installed on the table; you press it to summon your waiter, place your order, ask for extra napkins, etc. Very cool.
- You use the same RFID transit card on subways in different cities. You can also use this card to pay a taxi fare.
- Everyone (70% of pop?) really does have phablets. You've read it and it's true (how do the males store in pockets? Forgot to look). Seems more social norm than technology-driven decision.
- In addition to restaurants, in cafes you're given a buzzer after ordering a coffee. You stand there and watch them make your latte; your buzzer goes off. This protocol is followed even when you're only customer in the shop.

Urban infrastructure:
- Subways are crowded, but efficient. Glass walls enclose the tracks (to reduce noise/dirt, or because of S.K's suicide problem?); a musical motif (one for northbound, a different one for southbound) announces the impending arrival of a train (a trumpet fanfare in Seoul, Vivaldi's The Four Seasons in Busan).
- No public rubbish bins anywhere. Argh. And yet city doesn't have a littering problem (Confucian propriety leads population to carry around their rubbish?)

Sights, streets, food
- Street food cooked everywhere -- little shacks with plastic chairs and plastic tablecloths serving up seafood, beef, dog, or rice with kim-chi. Tteokbokki, deep-fried corn dogs.
- Beach strip in Busan like Honolulu, Barcelona, and Miami beach rolled into one: clubs, music, beautiful people, restaurants. Streets bursting with life. Vendors selling fireworks, exotic cocktails.
- Many brands have "happy" in the name (exercise equipment, coffee cups) -- seems to be a cultural obsession (again, to counter the suicide problem?)
- Every subway station doubles as an impromptu shopping mall: handbags, diamond-studded skulls, socks, jewelry, clothes, shoes.
- So much generosity and kindness: bowing is gentle, nice. Done even with sincerity and humility in seemingly "too cool for you" nightclubs. Young man who spontaneously pressed money into our hands one night to give to street musicians because he was so happy we'd come to visit Korea.
- Handling money always a graceful two-handed gesture (cash, credit cards). If two hands not available, one must touch the elbow.
- No fourth floor in one of our hotels (!) (#4 traditionally bad luck)

Countryside, landscape, architecture, history, art
- Dark mountains and mist always in the distance; Tolkeinesque take on "Hermit Kingdom"
- Rice grows by side of the road everywhere. Entire paddies, but also next to traffic lights. Brilliant green blades; unmistakeable.
- Traditional Joseon dynasty architecture all over country: even some freestanding gas stations, 7-11's are built in this style (iconic black tiled roof with curled-up corners).

- Confucian, Buddhist temples dot the countryside, marks of the rich (and troublesome) history with China, Japan

- Traditional Korean masked dramas part of cultural heritage; fantastic mask museum in Hahoe Village near Andong (center of country)

A big shake

2014-07-15T21:41:00.001-07:00

Big day for my father today! So proud of him. :-)

The University of Nevada in Reno jjjjjust completed building a new fancy set of shake tables for doing seismic tests on large engineering structures. With multiple tables working in tandem, it's the biggest of its kind: there are three 14- by 14-foot, 50-ton-capacity hydraulically driven shake tables in the 24,500 square-foot lab. And today, for its maiden voyage, it took one of my father's designs for a ride.

Here's a time-lapse photo of building the bridge in the lab:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjDcEA4f40M&feature=youtu.be

And here's the big shake:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kX-DT5FXXI#t=40

I love the way they conduct these tests: they take a portfolio of actual past earthquakes ("Christchurch, New Zealand, 2011"), and then punch in the vibration parameters for each one to actuate the shaking tables. The simulations start with the mildest earthquake, and work their way up up to the most severe: the tests that ran today culminated with a simulation of the Kobe, Japan earthquake from 1995.

To measure the impact of the quake on the test specimens, they stick various force and torque sensors on the pieces they're testing -- in this case, a framework of columns and beams to support bridges. The sensors transmit a stream of material stress and strain measurements for later analysis.

On the left is a picture of a "standard Caltrans" bridge column hit by the 6.7 Northridge, California earthquake in 1994 (sorry, goofy dropshadow not mine). On the right is the most badly damaged column in my dad's bridge at the end of all tests. It swayed and flailed all around, but ended up almost perfectly vertical.

Standard column from 1994 Northridge quake

The John Stanton gladiator!

More info:

http://www.carsonnow.org/story/07/15/2014/unrs-new-earthquake-engineering-lab-hosts-multiple-shake-table-experiments

Gene guns, climate change, and GMO 2.0

2014-06-13T01:14:00.002-07:00

Almost every sentence in this article was a fascinating fact I didn’t know:

Why We Will Need Genetically Modified Foods, MIT tech review.

It’s long, but not rip-out-eyeballs long, and every section is worth it. It describes the new “v2.0" genome engineering tools and the science they enable; the difference between transgenic and non-transgenic genetic modification (read: old school vs the new stuff); historical advances in agronomy (techniques for developing disease, insect, pesticide resistance); the “Green Revolution”; crop yield as the One True Metric; thinking about climate change’s impact on crop yield as a “production fire”.

I started taking notes, but realized that my notes were basically bullet points of every other sentence in the article. I took notes anyway. I’m happy to share them if you’re interested.

Read it. You’ll love it.

If you want moar science, Wikipedia’s GM methods section is [also] fantastic. It explains the two main methods for transgenic delivery: gene guns and bacterial parasites, both of which are science fictionny and awesome. Here’s a long paste, just because there’s nothing I can cut:

“In the biolistic method, DNA is bound to tiny particles of gold or tungsten which are subsequently shot into plant tissue or single plant cells under high pressure. The accelerated particles penetrate both the cell wall and membranes. The DNA separates from the metal and is integrated into plant genome inside the nucleus. This method has been applied successfully for many cultivated crops, especiallymonocots like wheat or maize, for which transformation using Agrobacterium tumefaciens has been less successful. The major disadvantage of this procedure is that serious damage can be done to the cellular tissue.

Agrobacteria are natural plant parasites, and their natural ability to transfer genes provides another method for the development of genetically engineered plants. To create a suitable environment for themselves, these Agrobacteria insert their genes into plant hosts, resulting in a proliferation of plant cells near the soil level (crown gall). The genetic information for tumour growth is encoded on a mobile, circular DNA fragment (plasmid). When Agrobacterium infects a plant, it transfers this T-DNA to a random site in the plant genome. When used in genetic engineering the bacterial T-DNA is removed from the bacterial plasmid and replaced with the desired foreign gene. The bacterium is a vector, enabling transportation of foreign genes into plants. This method works especially well fordicotyledonous plants like potatoes, tomatoes, and tobacco. Agrobacteria infection is less successful in crops like wheat and maize.

Introducing new genes into plants requires a promoter specific to the area where the gene is to be expressed. For instance, if we want the gene to be expressed only in rice grains and not in leaves, then an endosperm-specific promoter would be used. The codons of the gene must also be optimized for the organism due to codon usage bias. The transgenic gene products should also be able to be denatured by heat so that they are destroyed during cooking.”

Finally: coincidentally, I first read this article at the same time the recent New Yorker article on Soylent came out, which also discusses the challenge of food production in the face of climate change. If you didn’t read that one, the two of them fit really well together.

So, elections.

2014-06-03T02:37:00.000-07:00

So, elections. (California has a primary today, June 3).

We all scramble to study up and make informed decisions. We hunt for endorsements from the sources we trust. They're in the form of free-text blog posts (read: unstructured; annoying to scrape and index) that we find after much Googling and clicking. We sift through their arguments to see if they make sense, research lists of names we're seeing for the first time, choose candidates for offices whose duties we'd be hard pressed to describe. We're bemused when the California Green Party's endorsements for state propositions 41 and 42 exactly contradict those of the San Francisco Green Party. Well, then.

Why hasn't tech solved this?

Why can't something like proxy voting (I indicate the organizations whose endorsements I trust) meets OkCupid (I answer questions on issues I feel strongly about) meets the public record (each candidate's relevant history, voting or otherwise) yield lots of fun, competing, easy-to-use services that make voting a civic duty we're all a bit more confident about?

votesmart.org's "VoteEasy" site from the 2012 federal election looks promising, but its execution is laborious (it feels like sitting down with TurboTax for a soul-destroying "visit all sections" session). It also doesn't allow you to quickly bisect the search space with questions of your own.

Other stuff:

It doesn't look like any US sites have (yet?) used Google's Civic Information API to actually help people with the voting process itself. I hope this changes.
I've come across a handful of startups that are (or were) doing "this kind of thing", but they all missed the mark: votinginfoproject.org, votifi.com, vote4us (dead).
One site I do always enjoy rooting around on is beta.congress.gov. You can look up representative/senators from any congressional session, read which bills they sponsored (sometimes a surprise), and see how they voted on any others. (It's reassuring to play with, and feels almost gawkerish. Even in the Snowden era, there is transparency to be found here.)

What sources do you use at election time? What tools do you want?

Catching up with Liquid Fluoride Thorium reactors

2014-06-02T01:24:00.000-07:00

I spent some time reading about Liquid Fluoride Thorium reactors (LFTRs) this weekend. These are a much safer alternative to the light-water [nuclear] uranium reactors (LWRs) in use all over the globe today.

First off, the history of how we ended up with the light-water nuclear uranium reactors we have today may surprise you. Lots of cribbing here from a recent Economist Babbage post:

Most of today’s reactors, whether they use boiling water or pressurised water, trace their ancestry back to the USS Nautilus, the world’s first nuclear submarine, launched in 1954. At the time, the LWR was just one of many reactor designs that existed either on paper or in the laboratory—using different fuels (uranium-233, uranium-235 or plutonium-239), different coolants (water, heavy water, carbon dioxide or liquid sodium) and different moderators (water, heavy water, beryllium or graphite).

The light-water reactor of the day, with its solid uranium-dioxide fuel and water for both moderator and coolant, was by no means the best. But Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of America’s nuclear navy, chose it because it could be implemented faster than any of the others, making it possible for Nautilus to be launched on time. The LWR also appealed to Rickover because it produced a lot of bomb-making plutonium as a by-product.

Welcome to the 1950s.

Babbage then explains the historical import of that single decision:

After that, the die was cast. America’s first commercial reactor, the 60-megawatt Shippingport station in Pennsylvania ... used essentially the same light-water design as Nautilus. Henceforth, the rest of America’s commercial reactors would follow suit. Other countries subsequently copied or licensed much the same light-water technology.

In hindsight, that was a terrible mistake. Producing copious quantities of plutonium is just about the last thing a commercial reactor needs to do. It creates huge handling and storage problems as well as all manner of security and proliferation headaches. On top of that, the LWR’s other drawbacks ensured that commercial reactors would henceforth be more expensive to build and costlier to operate than might otherwise have been the case.

The technical details are well worth a read. A few snippets:

For instance, the cooling water in an LWR is not only radioactive and corrosive, but also under extremely high pressure. As a consequence, light-water reactors need to be housed in fortress-like containment buildings in case the cooling system fails and radioactive steam is released into the atmosphere.

Another problem concerns the bundles of rods that contain the uranium-dioxide fuel. These have to be removed from the core after only a few years of burning and stored in cooling ponds, even though no more than 3-5% of the energy in their uranium has been consumed. Their zirconium cladding swells and distorts as a result of temperature differences and radiation damage. There is always the danger of fuel rods rupturing if left in the reactor too long.

Within the fuel rods themselves, the fissile material becomes steadily poisoned by short-lived byproducts, such as xenon-135. This causes dangerous instabilities that make managing the reactor tricky. Such instabilities are what caused the Chernobyl reactor to explode. As if all that were not enough, dealing with a light-water reactor’s long-lived radioactive byproducts remains a Faustian nightmare.

Though the U.S. is too heavily invested in uranium-based reactors for a switch to be economically viable, China, India, and Norway (who all have less developed nuclear power infrastructure) are all researching reactors that use thorium as a fissile source. All three countries are first testing more conventional reactor designs that use solid thorium fuel rods; if these prototype reactors pass safety and efficiency tests, the transition to LFTRs could begin in only a few years. The Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics hopes have an LFTR reactor running by 2017. This could be a big deal: India has set a goal to supply 25% of its electricity from nuclear power by 2050.

Links:

Good, clear overview of LFTR technology:
http://rein.pk/thorium-reactors/

Nice longform Wired article from 2009:
http://www.wired.com/2009/12/ff_new_nukes/all/

Babbage blog post from above (good overview of both the history and tech of US nuclear reactor development):
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2013/11/difference-engine-0

If you're a picture person:
https://www.google.com/search?q=lftr&tbm=isch

USB Tethering on Android with Mac OS

2012-08-12T20:13:00.003-07:00

Sweet!

How to enable USB tethering from an Android device onto a Mac OS machine:

Install the EasyTether Driver
Install EasyTether Lite to test (and upgrade later to support them when it works!)
If you have trouble, read their excellent FAQ, which includes hacks to bypass carriers' tethering blocks.

ProxySwitchy not reading .pac files on Ubuntu

2011-11-08T10:10:00.001-08:00

Finally found a workaround for ProxySwitchy not reading .pac files on Ubuntu after the latest Chrome update:

http://insready.com/en/blog/how-make-proxy-switchy-work-again-after-latest-chrome-update-linux

tom mccarthy

2011-01-19T21:09:00.000-08:00

listened

blown my mind: tom mccarthy, who i'd never heard of until i heard him talking to my favorite quail [eleanor wachtel on writers & company]. the man is nuts, visceral, a schizophrenically articulate beat-academic who was apparently short-listed for the booker last year (though i had a start at reading his new novel, the letter C, and it didn't grab me maniacally in the manner i require. never mind -- i shall persist). his interview is fantastic, ecstatic, multidimensionally creative, weird.

he's written Tintin and the Secret of Literature, "a reading of Hergé's Tintin books through the prism of structuralist and post-structuralist literary theory", and since 1999 has operated as 'General Secretary' of a 'semi-fictitious organisation' called the International Necronautical Society (INS) "devoted to mind-bending projects that would do for death what the Surrealists had done for sex".

yes he's been accused of being pointlessly pretentious. i admit i'm a total sucker for it all anyway [e.g. martin amis].

excerpts of him chatting don't do him justice, but here are some vaguely representative bits & bobs:

on some of his previous writing, hidden meaning, freud's The Wolf Man:

"...what Freud is really talking about is not a pyramid; it’s a crypt. cryptos means hidden, anything buried. And it’s a site—it’s a linguistic site of encryption. I mean, psychoanalysis is “the listening cure.” The psychoanalyst tunes in to the patient almost like a kind of radio ham tuning into some mysterious frequency, and what they find when they tune in, via Freud, to his patient, is this kind of double eavesdropping in this multilinguistic zone, because the wolf man was first Russian, then spoke English and French, and is talking to Freud in German. They find this kind of polyglottal crackling zone of words, which contain images and memories and associations, kind of encrypting one another to produce this weird neurosis, almost like a linguistic tumor. And I found that very, very compelling..."

on the modern fascination with secret messages and codes:

"it's a populist manifestation of Calvinist culture, basically. For the Calvinists, we were living in a world of signs. As Francis Bacon said, “Nature is God’s second book.” It’s a text—it needs to be interpreted. I mean, you get it in the Greeks, in Virgil—every flight path of a sparrow or movement of an ant over a tuft of ground is a message. It is a sign—it needs interpretation. In more modern literature you get this sensibility very much in the work of Thomas Pynchon or William Burroughs, the sense that we are living in a world of signs, that there’s an order behind the visible that needs to be drawn out through interpretation.

"And I guess this manifests itself in many ways, in more subcultural formats. Even in the paranoia of the Christian parents of America who want to listen to Iron Maiden records backward and find the Satanist messages in them. Of course, maybe one in every hundred chance “message” that emerges could be construed as Satanist—the others turn out to be things like 'Give me a peppermint,” or 'It smells of fish.'"

he has a nice point about how popular literature (well, novels) after the promise of modernism made a bit of a safe turn back towards the stultifying safety of 19th c romanticism...

don't make many like him these days.

tom stoppard on terry gilliam on the film brazil

2011-01-17T13:14:00.000-08:00

came across this in krasny's memoir off mike (collection of vignettes from his interviews over the years), which i picked up over christmas in point reyes. i intensely hated the experience of watching brazil, and yet it's surprised me what an impression it must have made: it has firmly stuck with me over the last couple of years. i suppose that's much of the purpose of dystopian literature and film? anyway, laughed on reading this, as i'd felt brazil to be so resonantly orwellian:

Stoppard tells an amusing story of his work with Terry Gilliam on the film script for Brazil. He kept telling Gilliam that everything sounded too much like Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Gilliam told him not to worry. Two years after Brazil was released, Stoppard saw Gilliam, and Gilliam admitted he had never read Nineteen Eight-Four before they worked on the film. He had read it for the first time just that week. He told Stoppard the parallels and similarities between the two works shocked him.

from

Off mike: a memoir of talk radio and literary life, by

Michael Krasny

i'm kind of obsessed with water right now...

2010-11-11T22:46:00.000-08:00

...and behold! If you microwave a given quantity of water and an equivalent mass of ice:

Although it only takes an increase of a few °C to melt the ice, and the water has to heat up by about 80°C to boil, the water will normally boil before the ice melts!

What is going on?

There are two effects happening here, one of them is that to melt ice takes a huge amount of energy, the equivalent of heating water by about 80°C. This is because in ice water molecules are locked together by quite strong hydrogen bonds, and to melt it has to break a lot of these bonds, which takes a lot of energy.

The second effect is that ice just doesn't absorb microwaves nearly as well as water - this means it actually heats up less.

Why does water absorb microwaves better than ice?

A microwave oven cooks by creating microwaves, a form of light or electromagnetic radiation. These are produced on the right hand side of the oven and are sent into the main oven. They reflect back and forth creating a standing wave.


The microwave oven gives out microwaves (a form of electromagnetic radiation) which then reflect back and forth across the metal box.	As they do this they create an electric field which will point up and then down about 2.5 billion times a second.

In the microwave the electric field will point upwards and then downwards about 2.5 billion times every second. This means that anything charged will be pulled upwards and downwards by the field produced by the microwaves.

Although water molecules don't have an overall charge, their oxygen atom is slightly negative and their hydrogen atoms are slightly positive (they have a positive and negative pole so are called polar). This means that in an electric field they will rotate to align with the field.


Each water molecule is made up of one oxygen atom which is slightly negative and two hydrogen atoms which are slightly positive.	If the electric field points upwards then the positive hydrogen atoms are pulled upwards and the negative oxygen atoms are pulled downwards, so the molecules rotate.

If the field keeps changing at 2.5 billion times a second they will keep rotating which will give them energy so the water heats up.


If the field now points downwards then the oxygen atoms will try an reverse their direction. All of this rotation transfers energy to the water and heats it up.	Although the ice molecules also feel a rotational force they are locked into a crystal and rotating would involve breaking bonds between molecules. So they hardly move and they absorb very little energy.

In ice the water molecules are all locked together in a crystal structure by hydrogen bonds. These bonds will stop the water molecules rotating, which means they can't absorb much energy from the microwaves. This, in turn, means that the ice doesn't heat up.

Aaaaa! So cool!

From http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/content/kitchenscience/exp/-324719c1f8/

befoozlement of Kultur and the consequent hell

2010-10-07T23:27:00.000-07:00

I actually can't believe I'm reading this. Ezra Pound, writing in 1917:

....The hell of contemporary Europe is caused by the lack of representative government in Germany, and by the non-existence of decent prose in the German language. Clear thought and sanity depend on clear prose. They cannot live apart. The former produces the latter. The latter conserves and transmits the former.

The mush of the German sentence, the straddling of the verb out to the end, are just as much a part of the befoozlement of Kultur and the consequent hell, as was the rhetoric of later Rome the seed and the symptom of the Roman Empire's decadence and extinction. A nation that cannot write clearly cannot be trusted to govern, nor yet to think.

-- "At Last the Novel Appears," from The Egoist, February 1917.

The irony (tragedy?) is that his madness drew him straight into the arms of the fascist and antisemitic ideologies of the 1930s, leading to a treason arrest, poetry written in adulation of Mussolini, and ultimately the postshumus publication of a certain Canto "CXX", asking (too late?)
"Let those I love forgive / what I have made".

See also
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/pound/fascism.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cantos

graham greene, luis bunuel, j.m. coatzee

2010-10-06T01:37:00.000-07:00

read
graham greene, short story cheap in august. deeply affecting.

watched
luis bunuel, the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie, 1972 [french] film by the notorious [spanish, modern, surrealist art film] director; in US won academy award for best foreign film. not unpleasant, but a bit baffling: where is the line dividing the random and the absurd? tried quite hard to find meaning in the bits that seemed beyond satire (so much shooting, priest wanting to be gardner), but didn't come up with much, and was suspicious that so many websites laud the film without an analysis. one thing i managed to take away: i read that bunuel was at the end of his life and nearly deaf when he made the film, and on reflection i realized that it did feel a bit like a silent dream-world, how one might experience scenes of life with no sound: intently focusing on one scene or another, then moving one's attention because one can't hear what's happening beyond what one can see.

listened
interview with j.m. coatzee, who is on my list of excruciatingly good writers...a funny fellow, in person much more reluctant/measured/guarded/defensive/serious than i would have expected (he apparently refused to discuss his life or his writing in the interview, and upon being asked which books he felt were important, after a big wind up of this-is-a-very-loaded-question-you-know, he finally admitted that he supposed he could include the iliad as having lasting impact(!) also mentioned plato, so i've picked up the republic...) my favorite bit was a lovely theory about why beckett switched to writing in french (without explanation): included in my random jumble of notes below that will remain a jumble of notes.

Writing in general is becoing underrated...I speak from the bosom of an educational institution that is in the process of turning itself from an instituition that studies writing to an inst that studies all kinds of other 'cultural artifacts', some exceedingly transitory in nature.

(contrast that with what susan sontag said on the Big Ideas lecture)

one can't fully belong, inherit the judeo-christian-greco-tradition without understanding the philosophy of aristotle, plato.

horace - classic is one that somehow keeps being read (said that 2000 years ago!)

written about beckett, ford maddox ford, kafka -- could all be considered outsiders...

FDF: became outsider bc of social scandals
kafka: constitutional outsider, woudl have been an outsider wherever he was. his outsiderdom was only compounded by the fact of having been born a jew in troubled times, ieven in autrohungary of the end of the 19th century
beckettt - outsdier by temperament, election.
dostoyevsky - outsider bc of external circumstances, being caught up without full premeditations in student secret movement, being packed orf to siberia for a long period. returned with mark against his naem which was dificult to obliterate.

beckett's writing gives him "a sensuous delight".
also joyce, in different ways: knew the english language with a completeness.

joyce in ulysses, beckett, at least while still writing in english, there exists a conoisseurship, a delight in the perfection of the writing itself.

that sensuous side of his own writing was perhaps what beckett reacted to when he, in effect, gave up writing in english. needed a greater rigor of e.g. a strictly romance language, fewer seductive possibilities in lexical choices -- playing off the romance against the germanic, which is not possible in any other language. beckett never explained fully why he made the switch, so it's for us to guess why he made it. he felt the [irrelevant?] seductions of english post-1945 just felt to be something he'd done, he'd played with language enough, it was time to move on.

american authors he admires (but has never written about):
melleville, whitman, faulkner, emily dickinson,

read dostoevsky, tolstoy "on their own terms" (meaning wrt their fear, devotion to god).

the fall

2010-10-04T19:52:00.000-07:00

watched
the fall, labor of cinematographic love, simply gorgeous. jess recommended it to me a year ago and i never seemed to be in the mood... turns out one doesn't need to be in the mood (and it makes me now want to crawl back in time and see all the films she's ever recommended, e.g. delicatessen, though i fear i've left many too late...)

film made possibly twice as enjoyable by following this blog post as we went along which ids most of the scene locations. nearly fell over that a spot that had reminded me of a park in buenos aires was in fact that very spot (somewhere there's a photo of jess and me standing exactly where darwin stands).

bits and pieces:

"indian" (as in cowboys) imagined by alexandria to be indian from india
darwin's monkey and much of their conversation a reference to alfred russel wallace, a contemporary of darwin's who independently proposed evolutionary theory but whom darwin (sort of) beat to the punch
favorite scene shift: of priest's hat to this desert scene; beautifully done
doves out of mouth as symbol of ascendant spirit of god (ref):
"[A] white dove is regarded, both in historical narration and in works of art, as the impersonation of the Spirit of God—a divine breath, a brilliant and unsullied symbol of the Trinity. We are told in history that the Spirit of God descended, in the bodily shape of a dove, upon the head of the Saviour immediately after his baptism by St. John.* The Holy Ghost is almost invariably figured in works of art, under the semblance of a dove, as has already been shown in several examples given above,t and as will be seen in many to be hereafter given."
the ending sequence of silent films can't be roy because he's now paralyzed?

nice writeup for afters:
http://thefilmist.wordpress.com/2009/11/21/best-of-the-2000s-4-tarsems-the-fall

2010-10-01T00:34:00.000-07:00

listened
Interview with Peter Carey, author of Parrot and Olivier in America

Funny, slightly bitter fellow; surprising how a two-timer Booker prize winner only "discovered reading" in his twenties -- and then it was the fiction of Kafka (wild, disturbed, disillusioned) that got him. It reminds me of the guys I went to school with only "discovering classical music" in their late teens, and then it was always Mahler Mahler Mahler that they fell in love with. Ugh.)

Talked about Carey's latest book, an alternate-universe fiction of Alexis de Tocqueville’s 19th century journey to the US (Tocqueville came to the US after the reign of terror ostensibly to study the penal system, and ended up writing his famous Democracy in America).

Random bits I noticed:

Tocqueville genuinely feared the tyrrany of the majority (Carey does today, too, in the "era of Palin")
the contradictory, quaint (perverse?) 18th-century US practice of putting family crests on e.g. business cards, when the revolution was all about breaking with the monarchy
Tocqueville questioned whether art in the 1830s American mercantile consumer-obsessed culture could genuinely be cultivated/valued

sylvia beach, spinoza the proto-computer

2010-09-24T11:55:00.000-07:00

listened
Interview with biographer of Sylvia Beach, publisher of James Joyce's Ulysses, funky bohemian lesbian running around Paris in the 1920s, champion of modernist literature, proprietress of "Shakespeare & Company", an English-language bookstore catering to expats in Paris in the 1920s and 30s. Friendship with Hemingway, Gide, Eliot, Joyce. Excerpts of Beach's own voice on the radio, of Hemingway (!) reading.

read
Spinoza, excerpt from Ethics.
Heard him mentioned on the Rebecca Goldstein interview (oops, another post). Fascinating guy: 17th-century Dutch philosopher, hints that the universe is deterministic and computable (ordered, yet infinite), seems to refute any anthromorphism of God (alludes to him more like a robot that happened to have output a description of the universe, with no moral intent or purpose.) Cries foul on those who claim that God does have a plan with ethical intent, but included in that plan is the goal that we not know his plan -- he attacks this as sloppy logic (that "not knowing what the hell is going on" does not imply "God must know, and he also must not want us to know"). Sounds a lot like a refutation of "I think therefore I am" (Descartes' mind/body problem, which actually I read somewhere else he also violently disagreed with). Concludes that it's thus silly for us all to run around hand-wringing about God being angry. Unsurprisingly, he got himself kicked out of the Jewish church because of his radical views. The book that included the excerpt (Main Currents of Western Thought, Franklin Le Van Baumer, fabulous but woefully Spinoza-skimpy) skips his supposedly "geometric" discussion/proof for the determinism of the universe (which I would love to read -- reminder to self to pick up his full work). Suggestive how (in my translation -- haven't looked up if this exists in the original) God and Nature were given different pronouns (Him, Her) (almost suggesting nature is another player in the game, diminishing the role of God?). Spinoza talks about God's decrees but Nature's laws. Take that, God.

david mitchell, susan sontag, annie cohen-solal

2010-09-20T23:17:00.000-07:00

listened
Thoughtful interview with David Mitchell on the history behind The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, a childhood of stammering, Black Swan Green. He reads a lovely passage of The Thousand Autumns in there.

read
David Denby on SS's passion & lament for the slow decline for modernist cinema:

In 1968, in a long piece on Godard in Partisan Review, Sontag wrote that the director’s “approach to established rules of film technique like the unobtrusive cut, consistency of point of view, and clear story line is comparable to Schoenberg’s repudiation of the tonal language prevailing in music around 1910.” Film, then, was the last great wave of high modernism. Or at least a certain kind of film, in which form became experimental and philosophically resonant: the movies of Resnais but not Buñuel, Bresson but not Dreyer, Godard but not Truffaut, Bergman’s “Persona” but not Bergman’s “Smiles of a Summer Night.” In such works, film amounted to nothing less than the making of new forms and the making of souls.

watched
Fractured interview with Annie Cohen-Solal (French academic, historian, and new biographer of Leo Castelli, pioneering New York gallerist (if such a term exists) of much of the late 20th century. CR in typicaly annoying, interjecting form... :/

iTunes store in a browser!

2010-05-17T09:59:00.000-07:00

just found http://app-store.appspot.com, which allows you to browse the iTunes store without iTunes. woo!

wunderground road-trip feature

2010-05-14T08:18:00.000-07:00

Spiff road trip feature on wunderground: enter your time/location for each of (start, end), and get back a nice little annotated map of the weather forecast along the way.

Can't wait for Big Sur this weekend! :)

Update: ha! Did you know you can buy a weather station? You! Sitting at your little computer, right now! You buy some hardware (they're nice enough to guide you in placing your 14-foot rain collector funnel), get your own personal weather station ID (KDAYZY!), and then you can upload the data stream to wunderground. Love it. I'm going to get one and tether it to the free-range chickens on the fire escape.

Ambient Weather WS-1080 Wireless Home Weather Station w/ Data Logging

The Ambient WS-1080 is a compact, easy to install complete weather station with impressive reliability at a very low cost.

This weather station measures wind speed, wind direction, temperature and humidity (both inside and outside), rainfall and barometric pressure.

The weather station’s touch screen console displays a wide range of parameters in an easy-to-read format on a large LCD. The attractively thin console can be placed on a desktop or mounted to a wall.

Includes a USB port and EasyWeather software, a simple to use windows application that allows real time monitoring of the WS-1080 Home Weather Station. It can be used to progam weather station parameters and alarms. You can also log data as well as view collected data in various graphical formats.

Importing a Google calendar into Korganizer / Lucid / KDE 4.4

2010-05-10T09:36:00.000-07:00

How I got my Google calendar(s) to show up in Korganizer:

1. sudo apt-get install akonadi-kde-resource-googledata
2. In Korganizer, click on the ‘+’ sign and add an akonadi resource

3. Sign into Google calendar; click on “Settings” in the “My Calendars” section to the left; choose the calendar you want to import; select the appropriate green ICAL icons depending on whether your calendar is public/private; right-click and select "copy URL"; paste this as the akonadi resource.

4. Make sure only the new Google calendar is selected as an akonadi resource! Somehow all of my existing calendars were already selected (and thus duplicated, and then I had to go delete them later)

In case you have problems, you can kill Korganizer and manually edit ~/.kde/share/config/kresources/calendar/stdrc (I set "active = false" to my duplicate calendars because Korganizer basically froze up trying to display so many calendars. I was then able to remove them after they weren't displayed.)

(Note to future self: see also http://gcaldaemon.sourceforge.net/usage11.html ?)

2010-04-17T09:03:00.000-07:00

was reading this guy's great hiking blog, and on the page of the hike i'm doing today he makes a passing comment about the role of camouflage in the evolution of skin pigment (extrapolated from banana slugs, white people, and inuit indians, woot). the basic question is: ok, we can all think of two rough reasons for skin color: (1) to block bad UV light, and (2) for camouflage. but how do you explain the fact that inuit indians' skin color seems like a statistical outlier in a plot of of skin color vs. these environmental factors? (yes, this is rough. camouflage is obviously a function of predation risk and, more subtly, the evolutionary rate and cost of developing or undeveloping an already-existing trait. totally ignoring all that here.)

there's a nice little ask a scientist page that cites a bunch of research in the last 10 years on this:

[...snipped section on how UV light's role in synthesizing vitamin D in humans...]

In environments where UV light is weak, natural selection would tend to favor lighter skin, to increase the body’s ability to capture UV light and make more vitamin D. An exception that proves the rule is the case of the Inuit, who live in the North American arctic (with low UV light levels, especially in the winter) and yet possess relatively dark skin. This seems to be due to the abundance of fish in the Inuit environment and, therefore, in their diet: fish are rich in vitamin D, so the Inuit are saved from having to synthesize this nutrient using UV light.

that immediately led me to think well, but what selective pressure would cause inuit skin tone to be darker, then, since there isn't lots of UV light in sun-starved alaska that trigger the growth of UV blocking proteins in the body. fortuitously, his next sentence is:

In summary, the known physiological effects of UV light would suggest that natural selection would tend to favor a skin color (or level of skin melanization) that blocks excess UV light to protect DNA from damage and folate from destruction while allowing enough UV light through to supply the body with vitamin D (Jablonski and Chaplin 2000).

ok, but then what selective pressures would cause white skin to evolve, which would seem to be kinda sucky as suggested by the presence of a multi-million-dollar sunscreen industry? author (Dennis C. Chang) claims:

Genetic analysis of the MC1R gene substantiates and enhances this story. Even though black African peoples are extremely genetically diverse, most (and perhaps all) make exactly the same MC1R protein (Harding et al. 2000). Meanwhile, white Europeans have an abundance of MC1R gene variants, each making a slightly different MC1R protein. As mentioned before, many of these European alleles are actually defective. It appears as though (after hominids lost thick body hair) natural selection has forced people living in Africa to keep a certain MC1R allele, one that is naturally active and therefore causes high eumelanin production. In the high-UV environment of most of Africa, any mutation making MC1R less active would have a negative effect, leaving its possessor susceptible to UV-induced DNA damage and folate depletion. People who migrated into more temperate latitudes experienced a relaxation of this constraint and an opposing selective pressure: mutations decreasing MC1R’s activity (and in the extreme case rendering MC1R nonfunctional) would have a favorable effect, allowing its possessor to make more vitamin D.

papers cited at the end.

word.

London Society: A Monthly Magazine of of Light and Amusing Literature for the Hours of Relaxation, Volume 67

2010-02-13T12:10:00.000-08:00

Word of the day: "marcescent".

Marcescent leaves dry out in autumn, stay on a tree through winter and fall in the spring when new buds break. From classical Latin "marcidus" (withered), whither (oooo) the now archaic English word "marcid" (withered or rotten).

Also used metaphorically in such literary gems as the 1895 "London Society: A Monthly Magazine of of Light and Amusing Literature for the Hours of Relaxation, Volume 67" by James Hogg and Florence Marryat:

But why talk of gaunt marcid penury on Boxing night? Surely every man woman and child gets enough and to spare of roast beef and plum pudding at Christmas tide in this boasted land of Christian charity.

on lenses

2010-01-08T19:45:00.000-08:00

The lens inside your eye contributes only about 25-35% of the focusing power of your eye. The rest comes from...

...can you guess? :)

The answer is: your cornea. According to the NIH, "The cornea acts as the eye's outermost lens. It functions like a window that controls and focuses the entry of light into the eye. The cornea contributes between 65-75 percent of the eye's total focusing power." Which makes sense: it focuses incoming light down to a small area on the surface of the lens, which, via ability to change curvature, can be squished or stretched such that it in turn focuses the light precisely on the surface of the retina. Nice little bootstrapped two-tiered design there. (And note that the larger corneal refractive power means that its radius of curvature is necessarily smaller than that of the lens -- it's more curved than the lens. Which, if you'd asked me to draw a picture of the cornea ten minutes ago, I completely would not have gotten right)

Ok, now the second quiz question: in addition to helping keep dust and grit out, the cornea also serves what important function?

Give up?

...

(I know, the suspense is killing you...)

A: It screens out some of the most damaging ultraviolet wavelengths in sunlight. While too much UV exposure can mess up all parts of your eye nicely (and here I'm thinking of the guys with the Fresnel lens at the Maker Faire), I guess the cornea does have the capacity to absorb a fraction of that light without damage. Cool, man.

Now go play!

End-of-year giving

2009-12-31T11:32:00.001-08:00

Updated list (this after visa's fraudometer went off and they called to make sure my credit card hadn't been stolen :)) --

American Civil Liberies Union - making sure we don't get pwned by wackos
ACLU Foundation (for corporate matching)
Electronic Frontier Foundation - digital rights advocacy
International Rescue Committee - humanitarian aid for refugees
Natural Resources Defense Council - fantastic environmental protecection advocacy group
United Way - education and health services for less forunate Americans
Project Prevention - help all children be born to loving parents that want them (kinda sketchy grassroots organization, but I like their innovation)
PopOffsets - offsetting our carbon by letting less-fortuntate women control their reproductive freedom (their mission, like that of Project Prevention, strikes many people as eugenics-y, but again, their approach is innovative and their goal is reproductive freedom, not population totalitarianism)
Friends of the Urban Forest - because a green San Francisco makes me wonderfully happy
KQED - all my friends in the little box in the kitchen when I work from home!