startled

The many accusatory faces of the cucumber I ate this evening.

Tue, 26 May 2015 00:22:35 -0700

The many accusatory faces of the cucumber I ate this evening.

Layovers

Sat, 26 Apr 2014 21:50:21 -0700

Terminal C at Denver International Airport is an amazing place. I imagine the poor archaeologists of the future as they try to make sense of this site.

“Why is there a Learjet hanging over Mesoamerican ruins? Did the Mayans even have business jets? Could they have used them to expand northward from the Yucatán peninsula all the way to Colorado?”

“So this jet doesn’t seem to have any access to the outdoors, but it was found near a kind of primitive kitchen. This must have been a festival hall, with the captured aircraft used as a ceremonial centerpiece during great feasts!”

“As we dug further below the ruins, we found evidence of an underground train system. Does this invalidate our timeline of North American civilizations, and push the invention of the subway all the way back to the Pre-Columbian era?”

Airports are weird, but at least they’ll contribute to entertainingly inaccurate doctoral dissertations in the millennia to come.

(If you find yourself on a layover here, as we did last weekend: Root Down offered a far better dining experience than we were expecting in an airport!)

2013’s costume: “The surveillance state.” It seemed...

Thu, 31 Oct 2013 15:11:05 -0700

2013’s costume: “The surveillance state.” It seemed topical.

Natalie and me

Tue, 09 Jul 2013 10:13:32 -0700

I was doing my quarterly scrub of the terrestrial spam folder when something caught my eye: a hand-addressed letter from none other than Natalie Portman! It was nice to think that she took the time out of her busy day of not starring in The Professional 2 to send me a personal note.

But what’s this? She actually sent me two letters! How flattering! I’ve never interacted with Natalie Portman in any way, and here she is sending me missives through the archaeo-mail, with real stamps and everything. I’ve probably only seen like five movies that she’s been in, and that’s if I count Léon and The Professional as separate films.

She’s been signing autographs for the majority of her life, which has probably contributed to her utterly impeccable and incredibly consistent handwriting. I only ever sign my name on those little cash register checkout screens anymore, and I’m amazed every time when the clerk accepts the post-modern abstract squiggles that my signature has degraded into.

Much to my chagrin, Natalie makes clear that this correspondance is all business. “We’re no friends” she says with a casual stroke of the pen. Let’s keep it semi-formal and stick to first names. Okay, ~~friend~~ Natalie, I can play hard-to-get, too.

But Natalie, the next time we see each other (which will also be the first time we see each other), I’ll remember the countless hours you must have spent writing out my name, practicing until you could reproduce every curve perfectly. It honestly creeps me out a little, but I’ll play it cool in person because I wouldn’t want to hurt your feelings. I’ll just say “Oh, uh, thanks for the cards, they were very thoughtful. I totally meant to write back, but I’ve been so busy, you know. I hope Mathilda: The Professional 2 is going well. Uh, see you around I guess!”

Happy Screensaver Day, everyone!

Fri, 05 Jul 2013 01:26:41 -0700

Happy Screensaver Day, everyone!

If Films Were Reviewed Like Video Games

Sun, 30 Jun 2013 16:01:13 -0700

If Films Were Reviewed Like Video Games

A camera problem

Sat, 29 Jun 2013 23:44:46 -0700

I have a bit of a problem. Depicted is most of the camera gear I own. I’m obviously holding one more in order to take this picture, and then there’s all the ancillary lights and batteries and chargers and bags and cleaning supplies and who knows what else that wouldn’t fit on the table.

It turns out that I can’t really use all of these at once. There are even one or two things in that picture that have never been used, embarrassingly enough. So, I’m paring back, selling some of the newer stuff and donating the rest. Cameras that sit in a drawer aren’t doing nobody no good.

Even more embarrassing is that the number of cameras and lenses I have purchased in the last couple years may well exceed the number of photos I have shared online. Maybe I could fix that.

Ice Planets

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 00:30:00 -0700

I got these Ice Planet Creation Kits from the internet, and they work really well!

Tovolo makes a kit for giant cube-shaped planets, too!

The ice planets are sadly much too small to support interesting lifeforms, like tauntauns or AT-ATs. Created with filtered water, they don’t even have enough interesting mineral content to support a paltry mining colony. As space real-estate goes, they’re almost worthless. But not without uses!

Odd units of measure

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 14:11:54 -0700

I found this old ruler packed in a box of things from my childhood room. It looks like something one of my parents brought home from work, and that I probably nabbed to draw the straightest lines my four-year-old fingers could manage. Rediscovering it now, and looking past the groovy 70’s industrial styling, I noticed something peculiar.

From a distance, this Uarco ruler looks like a typical specimen of the common American ruler, with inches on one side and centimeters on the other. On closer inspection, it becomes clear that this ruler holds no truck with Système International. There are five different scales on this ruler, and not one of them is in metric. They are:

Inches divided into ¹⁄₁₆″ increments, classic and traditional.
Tenths of inches, presumably for making 1:10 scale drawings.
Inches divided into ¹⁄₆″ and ¹⁄₁₂″ increments, for making 1:12 scale drawings.
Then, considerably more odd, lines every ⁵⁄₃₂″. The spaces are labeled from 1 to 43, then they skip a space, and then they keep counting from 45 to 100. The numbers 1 to 45 are also repeated on the right-hand side, right under 45 to 90.
Last there is a set of lines spaced an inch apart that count up by 150 per line. This row is marked with the label (CARDS), which happens to be the key to unlocking the ⁵⁄₃₂″ mystery.

I love esoteric units of measurement, and this ruler introduced me to a new one: instead of millimeters or miles or parsecs or picas, this ruler lets you measure distances in stacks of punch cards. The conversion is about 150 cards to the inch (the nominal manufacturing thickness is 0.007″ ± 0.0004″ per card, specified in decades-obsolete ISO and ANSIstandards that will still set you back $30–70 if you’d like to read them today).

How does that relate to ⁵⁄₃₂″? I guessed that it was for measuring the columns in punch cards, but that didn’t seem to add up. I’ve never actually used a punch card, but in all of the legends of the times of yore, each card had 80 columns (a property that lingered on in command-line interfaces well after the sell-by date). This ruler is numbered from 1 to 45 twice, sort of, with no special attention given to column 80. It also turns out that the columns on IBM punch cards are slightly less than ³⁄₃₂″ wide, so much too narrow.

If the ruler wasn’t for IBM punch cards, maybe there were alternative punch card formats? It turns out that one of the precursors to the ubiquitous IBM card was the 45-column “Hollerith” card, which used columns spaced precisely ⁵⁄₃₂″ apart! The cards are named for Herman Hollerith, who invented tabulation machines to speed up the processing of the 1890 US census (spoiler alert: the population tally was 62,947,714, and then all of the records caught fire). Using machines to count up results automatically was pretty clever for its day, decades before electromechanical computers (though also decades after Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace were dreaming about sophisticated card-driven computation engines, so it’s not like the idea hadn’t been kicked around before).

He built and sold different versions of these machines through his company, the Tabulating Machine Corporation, that later merged into the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, that was later renamed International Business Machines.

In 1928, four years after adopting its new name, IBM released a new kind of punched card that used narrow rectangular holes instead of the old circular ones. The thinner punches let them squeeze 80 columns onto each card instead of just 45. IBM quickly stopped making machines for the 45-column cards, and doubtless assumed that the obsolete format would soon disappear. They were wrong.

You see, IBM was granted a patent on this new “square hole” technology, which made it expensive for competitors to develop compatible machinery. Instead of coughing up the licensing fees, rival Remington Rand figured out a new encoding for the old 45-column cards that doubled the information density (effectively turning them into 90-column cards!) while still using the same old round holes that Hollerith had started with. This format was given a boost in 1950, when Remington Rand bought early mainframe manufacturer UNIVAC, which was redesigned to take advantage of the information-dense “90-column” cards. Some of those machines remained active in government and military installations well into the 1980s. They’ve probably all been replaced with a couple of Apple ][’s by now, but I like to think that there’s still a UNIVAC plunking away in a bunker somewhere, chewing through frayed and yellowing Hollerith cards to tabulate payrolls for a nearby army base.

So this ruler was designed for an office that dealt with UNIVAC mainframes instead of IBM big iron. With it you could estimate how many cards were in a program, measure scale drawings of circuit boards or inch-to-the-foot blueprints, and quickly determine which column on a card might have been spindled or mutilated. I ended up reading a lot more about this than I expected, but I still have a few questions left. It’d be nice to know roughly when it was made (the Computer History Museum has a similar ruler in its collection, but doesn’t list any dates). I’d also like to know what the precisely spaced holes are used for, or what the crossing dashed lines on the black side might line up with. And last, I need to ask my parents if either of them ever actually used it to measure any real-life punch cards.

Save the Sea Shadow!

Tue, 01 May 2012 03:19:00 -0700

This is the coolest boat the United States Navy never wanted. It was designed during the Cold War to demonstrate what a next generation navy could look like with advanced automation and stealth technology. It will be sold to a scrap yard about three days from now.

As the ‘pedia will tell you, the Sea Shadow is an experimental ship built by Lockheed in the early 80’s. Shortly after the F-117 Stealth “Fighter” was delivered, the Lockheed Skunk Works proposed applying their expertise in radar stealth to ship design. They built the Shadow from 1982 to 1984 just up the road in Redwood City. It’s a tricky thing to hide the construction of a 563 ton, 164′ long boat in Silicon Valley, so assembly was cleverly hidden aboard the Hughes Mining Barge. The HMB-1 is a storied vessel in its own right, a submersible barge designed for a secret mission to recover a sunken Soviet submarine from the sea floor, and whose fate has been linked to the Shadow’s since the latter was built.

Aboard the Shadow’s floating dock.

The Shadow’s distinctive shape is a necessity for radar stealth, but that’s not the only thing that makes it unconventional. To minimize wave disruption, the majority of the ship’s displacement is below the surface, further reducing the radar signature and maximizing stability in rough seas. This configuration, known as “SWATH”, is poetically described on the wiki page as like “creating a ship that rides atop twin submarines”. Operation of the boat was largely automated to minimize crew size, and while there are twelve bunks aboard, the minimum complement is just four sailors. Lieutenant Kennedy’s comparatively tiny PT-109 was built for a crew of 17.

A quarter of the ship’s crew, monitoring the state of the art graphics.

In 1985, the Sea Shadow went for sea trials to test Lockheed’s stealth claims. They towed the whole barge to southern California and conducted the tests off of the Santa Barbara Channel Islands under cover of darkness. Navy submarine spotting airplanes were dispatched to try to detect the stealth ship while it hid off the coast of Santa Cruz island. The powerful radar equipment had no trouble spotting a submarine’s periscope peeking above the surface from miles away. The Shadow, however, remained invisible. Even when the pilots were given the exact location of the boat, it was still incredibly difficult to pick it up on radar.

This is where the story starts to turn sad. More than 25 years later, ships in the US Navy don’t bear much resemblance to this amazing boat. Astute readers may note that the ship is not named the USS Sea Shadow: it was never commissioned as a Navy ship, who abandoned the program altogether. It remained secret for years, but was later unveiled on San Francisco Bay in 1993. It sat largely unused for the next decade in San Diego. They dragged it out occasionally to run a test or two, and supposedly the technology is finally being used to inform future ship designs, but the original ship remains unused. In 2006, it was reunited with its old pal the HMB-1, when the ships were decommissioned and towed out to join the Suisun Bay mothball fleet. The Shadow is still kept hidden inside the barge where it was built, not too far from the Benicia Bridge on Interstate 680. At that time, the Navy announced that both ships were available for donation to a suitable maritime museum.

The Hughes Mining Barge visible in Suisun Bay.

Six years later, the Sea Shadow is up for auction, and not in a museum at all. Before you try to figure out whether you and a few friends can afford to buy the most awesome party boat ever, be aware that the terms of the auction are exceedingly clear: “Scrapping shall be accomplished by melting, cutting, tearing, crushing, or breaking the item or component such that no resultant piece has a dimension exceeding five (5) feet.” The Navy has given up on finding a home for these boats, and decided that it’ll be easiest to sell them to the scrapyard.

These guys know they’ve got the ultimate party boat.

This is kind of bumming me out: I think the Sea Shadow is beautiful, an inspiring example of clever engineering and technology. I’m not a fan of warships particularly, but I’m fascinated when creative people of any discipline design something that makes you rethink the entire category. It’s less inspiring when groundbreaking artifacts are reduced to scrap. I remind myself that art is not eternal, but I’m also idly wondering how hard it would be to start a maritime museum.

Some more stories about these boats:

Ben Rich, former head of the Lockheed Skunk Works, wrote about the Sea Shadow in his memoir Skunk Works.
Photographer Scott Haefner and friends snuck into the mothball fleet a couple years ago and took some amazing photos, including some of the Shadow.
In 2009, the Wall Street Journal published this article about the hunt for a home for the two ships.

Weekend bike tune-up

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 02:46:00 -0700

I got a new bike from my favorite store! Craigslist! It’s a mountain bike with folding-in-half superpowers. It’s about a dozen years old, so a good bath and a repair or two were in order. It was a beautiful day today, perfect for getting the bike tuned up and going for a ride.

Here’s the before shot. The shifters are broken and need to be replaced, and I picked up fancy new pedals to trick it out a bit. I don’t know a lot about fixing bicycles, but I do have a lot of wrenches, so that’s almost the same thing.

A couple hours later, and I’ve finally gotten most of the bits off that need to come off. Not visible in this picture: the sea of wrenches behind me, almost all of them the wrong size for whatever it is I’m trying to do. All that’s left now is reassembly, readjusting the derailers and brakes, and my test ride!

The finished product! I did manage a quick jaunt around the block before it was completely dark out, and I’m pleased to report that many of the 21 nominal gear combinations appear to work, and that the brakes both engage and release when expected, more or less. A successful afternoon project!

Neutral Milk Hotel (sort of)I gave up on ever seeing Neutral...

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 23:02:26 -0700

Neutral Milk Hotel (sort of)

I gave up on ever seeing Neutral Milk Hotel in concert years ago. Band leader Jeff Mangum famously suffered a nervous breakdown after their final album, well chronicled in this 2008 Slate article written ten years after the release of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. The band’s last official appearance was in 2001. In the years following there were frequent rumors that Mangum was working on a new album, or was planning a new tour, but all of these proved to be hoaxes.

Then, in late 2010, the rumors became true. At least, a little bit true: a one-night engagement put on intentionally without promotion or fanfare to an audience of less than 100 invited guests. It wasn’t yet clear if this was a one-off event, or if he was really making a comeback. Then, a few months later, announcements of a small east-coast tour in 2011, and a surprise appearance in Liberty Park for Occupy Wall Street protesters.

So, after a many-years wait, we were lucky enough to see Mangum in concert last night in Oakland, part of a west-coast tour that will culminate in appearances at Coachella. I hope he’s as happy to be performing again as that audience was to hear him. They were able to beg him back for a second encore after the house lights came up, and weren’t quite ready to leave even as the stagehands cleared the guitars and microphones. Highly recommended if you can’t help but sing along when you hear “Holland, 1945”.

Linotype: The Film Sure, Helvetica the movie was pretty good, if...

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 00:45:00 -0800

Linotype: The Film

Sure, Helvetica the movie was pretty good, if you like mainstream movies about typography. Incorrigible hipster that I am, you could find me at last Tuesday’s west-coast premiere of Linotype: The Film, presented by director Doug Wilson and hosted at the beautiful Typekit offices in San Francisco.

It was pretty swell! Linotype machines are marvelous to behold. The dizzying array of moving gears and cams and belts and pulleys make other complex contraptions, like, say, sewing machines or manual transmissions, seem trivial by comparison. As you might expect, the film chronicles the invention, rise, and fall of the typesetting machines, and the printing revolution they sparked. The explosion in availability of books and newspapers made possible by hot metal type was on par with the invention of the printing press before it, or of digital publishing afterward.

The story is told through the voices of operators, historians, and the community of artists and tinkerers who keep the remaining machines running. It’s the sort of documentary that reveals a glimpse into a fascinating subculture you would never otherwise hear about.

The DVD should be available sometime this summer. I’ll probably host a showing, but if the movie becomes too mainstream by then, I’ll have to make it a double feature with Farewell, Etaoin Shrdlu, the other documentary about Linotype machines.

Halloween’s over

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 10:14:44 -0700

Halloween’s over

Almost All Saints’

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 21:39:00 -0700

This is what I threw together for Halloween this year. I’m not sure what it’s supposed to be, either, but the skull head is both unnerving and comically oversized. It does place some limits on peripheral vision, clear communication, and food consumption.

“I just want to say hello!”

“I am sad about lunch, for my mouth does not open.”

Colophon

The giant polystyrene skull came from China by way of a local drugstore, and was never intended for use as apparel. After some quality time with a power drill and jigsaw, it was upgraded from patio decoration to wearable mask.

A little black eyeshadow helps keep the eye sockets dark and creepy.

The Victorian outfit was sourced years ago from the excellent Gentleman’s Emporium of San Jose. It is maintained in a high alert ready condition, as suitable occasions for Victorian wear may strike at any time. The black glove liners were pulled from my snowboarding gear.

Upper photos taken by Ben using a Canon PowerShot S95. The third photo was taken by Brad using my crappy camera phone.

My car is the pinnacle of engineering excellenceSCENE Mazda...

Sun, 04 Sep 2011 20:15:00 -0700

My car is the pinnacle of engineering excellence

SCENE

Mazda headquarters, Hiroshima Japan, the early 1990s

SENIOR FUEL SYSTEM DESIGN ENGINEER

I’ve got it! We’ll wedge the fuel filter into

this narrow gap above the differential!

JUNIOR FUEL SYSTEM DESIGN ENGINEER

Are you insane? It will be almost impossible

to service if you put it there.

SENIOR

Nonsense! It’s conveniently close to the fuel

tank, and most small children will be able to

reach their arms blindly past the drive

shafts and feel around for the filter.

JUNIOR

But what about tools? Those kids need to fit

a socket wrench up there, and have enough

space to undo two hose clamps with pliers.

SENIOR

I’ve been assured that this part of the

chassis will have a minimum of razor-sharp

edges. And besides, children have excellent

imaginations. They’ll have no trouble

visualizing all of the bolts and hoses.

JUNIOR

This is absurd. I can’t believe you’re even

considering this!

SENIOR

Look, what’s the recommended replacement

interval for the fuel filter?

JUNIOR

Let me check… 60,000 miles?

SENIOR

Have you seen the engine they’re planning to

use on this thing?

JUNIOR

Of course it’s the new 13B-REW Wankel Rotary…

Oh. Oh, of course. I see.

SENIOR

Exactly. Only luck will keep those engines

running past 30,000 miles, anyway. By the time

the fuel filter is a concern, most owners will

have thrown the car away in frustration.

JUNIOR

I understand now. This is brilliant. Gosh, is

there any way we can make the filter even

less accessible?

SENIOR

I hear the exhaust engineers are planning on

adding extra heat shields all around the

differential!

BOTH

[laughter]

This picture may not look like much to you, but I call it “triumph.jpg”.

Eight years and twenty days

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 22:33:22 -0700

Eight years and twenty days

Repairing your Hotpoint HDA3440G05SA dishwasher

Sat, 30 Jul 2011 00:20:00 -0700

Check this out:

That used to be a solenoid that opens the drain on our washing machine. Now it’s a lump of fused plastic and metal. A dishwasher that does not drain its gross, used dishwater is hardly a labor saving device at all.

There are, of course, corners of the internet devoted to forums where old-timers share advice on maintaining household appliances. The consensus seems to be that this solenoid will fail if the timing mechanism holds it open too long. The old solenoid is obviously busted, but to keep the new one from suffering a similar fate, the timer should be replaced, too.

$74.82 to partadvantage.com later, and we’re back in the dishwashing business.

The newly installed WD21X10060 drain solenoid kit.

The new WD21X10155 timer (background) set to replace the old.

Make sure to transfer the WD16X10007 cam to the new timer.

When you’re done, be sure to take apart the old timer. It works like a little phonograph, with switches that trace along through six grooves. The blue gear takes one full washing cycle to rotate, coordinating the actions of the different motors like a player piano. There is no electronic logic.

Apology to all sixteen of my feed subscribers

Fri, 08 Jul 2011 16:44:00 -0700

I’ve been messing with some Posterous settings that invalidated the entire RSS feed, so posts you’ve already read may be reappearing in your inbox. Uh, sorry about that. In other news, you can now reread some of your favorite recent posts from my blog thing.

Squirrel!I have a lot of photos to sort through, but here’s one...

Wed, 06 Jul 2011 21:34:10 -0700

Squirrel!

I have a lot of photos to sort through, but here’s one while I wait for my plane to board. The squirrels in Zion National Park are a little bit fearless. Stop feeding them, for serious!