Monthly Archives: May 2009

Family Visit

Posted on 2009-05-30 by pappp

I’m up in Madison, WI joining a gathering of my mother’s extended family for the week. My mother’s side of the family is great fun for me; almost the entire family is over-educated, hyperfunctional, and a little bit snarky, just like the people I associate with when left to my own devices.
I’m currently spending the afternoon/evening holding down the fort; keeping the doors open and track of the whereabouts of the family, and setting up for dinner with ingredients as they appear, which means we will be having a boneless leg of lamb, slit and packed with garlic wedges and fresh rosemary (baked), fresh green beans with portabellini, and long grain white rice. I spent alot of yesterday helping with a proper (fussy, tedious) country ham and scalloped potatoes, but there were more cooks yesterday. I don’t often get to do large meal for large group type cooking, so I’m enjoying myself.
I’m also continuing my reading spree; I finished Outliers on the way down (the part of the trip not spent driving through disaster-grade construction+wide object transport). It had a very disappointing ending, the earlier part of the book had interesting observations… the last chapter was dedicated to trite, weak conclusions based on anectdotes. I enjoyed the useful part.
Now I’m on to Lolita. I’m finding it unusually intense to read because I vastly prefer hearing (or at least reading under my breath) Nabakov’s prose. I might consider an audiobook of it, even though I usually find them frusterating, just to save my throat. I tend toward short stories for the tight prose that even most excellent authors can’t maintain over any substantal length; Lolita isn’t quite the same, but it is really excellent stylized writing. I also started the Consciousness Very Short Introduction since it’s a PDF on the n810, and thusalways on hand.
I also found a used copy of GEB (and some other desirables) walking through UW Madison’s bookstore… which is indeed the kind of place I go for fun.

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Relating

Posted on 2009-05-26 by pappp

I’ve been reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, continuing my quest to take advantage of having some time to read and culture myself. Like all of Malcolm Gladwell’s books, it is very nifty, but also frustratingly lacking in rigor. The really, really irritating part of this one (to me) is the shifty metrics he uses for success; he poses that somewhere around an IQ of 130, the competitive advantage flattens out, which I actually am not disinclined to believe. The proposed reason for this cutoff is that somewhere around the quoted 130 IQ, individuals’ increasingly weakened ability to relate to the world catches up to their intellectual advantage; this seems entirely reasonable. The problem is that this conclusion is based almost exclusively financial metrics for success; my observation has always been that the very bright tend to have a pretty strong predisposition for taking positions that are more personally than financially rewarding (he does admit to the problem. He just doesn’t do anything about it). Conversely, the best part of Outliers for me is contemplating the group of gifted kids I grew up with as samples for the described phenomena; we so match.
Sadly, one of the better matching points is the “gifted kids have trouble relating to others” portion. I’ve been feeling it more than usual lately, I blame seeing the dwindling collection of old (GT) friends passing through as the summer begins for starting it. Now it’s mostly exhibiting as frequent bouts of the “alone in a crowd” sensation most times I’ve been out of late (with one surprising exception…hurray cute smart girls, boo deeply ingrained shyness). I’ve actually heard similar remarks from a few of said old friends as well. This probably also relates fairly directly to both my failure to post anything for over a week, and my recent urge to watch through Buffy. Theres nothing quite like watching a show based around metaphors which gratuitously translate personal issues into genuine otherworldly (stabable) daemons to soothe the soul….

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Dollhouse Renewed

Posted on 2009-05-17 by pappp

Holy crap, FOX renewed Dollhouse for a second season. The best part is it looks like the renewal is based on “ancillary factors” (DVD sales, Streaming, DVR), which implies at least one major media company may be coming to understand that the video entertainment market is shifting away from broadcast TV and feature films. In related news, Sony’s CEO demonstrated a surprising grasp of new-media realties. These two little newslets are definitely the exception of late; after the disingenuous comments from Sony Pictures Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton that were doing the rounds on the interwebs earlier this week, and all the gloomy news about print media, I was feeling like all the old media dinosaurs (the established forces in the major content industries disrupted by the advent of the Internet; print media, music, and video) were actively working to commit suicide instead of trying to adapt. At least there are a few little signs that powerful people in the media industry are looking to find a way forward that doesn’t involve sticking their heads in the sand and trying to litigate the Internet cat back into its bag.

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DorkbotLex #3

Posted on 2009-05-17 by pappp

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I made it to the third Dorkbot event in Lexington yesterday, and it was again a great show. This time there were four excellent presentations of the kind of artistically tenological projects dorkbot is meant to showcase. The first presentation was Clint Davis, showing a spatially aware music controller, built from an arduino, some infrared range finders, and Pure Data. The second presentation was of a solder-free LED hula-hoop by Lauren Sherrow (pictured above). There was then a showing of Aaron Miller’s Day of Defeat-based machinima piece I, Bots, about variously self-aware bots on a DoD public server. Finally, Jordan Munson showed off his work on a new generation of electronic music interfaces, including an OpenSoundControl controller on an iPod touch, and using a wiimote as a gestural interface. At the end there was a lot of discussion about organizing social/cultural events for geeks and hackers, I wish more of the Collexion folks had been there to participate.
The better of the pictures I took are up in a flickr set.

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Very Short Introductions

Posted on 2009-05-14 by pappp

I learned about Oxford Press’ “A Very Short Introduction” series from Dr. Goldsmith during CGS500 last semester. Think of them as cliffs notes for reality; little 100-150 page volumes on a wide assortment of topics, written as an introduction to the topic by an expert. The only problem is they are rather expensive at around $9 a pop, and I’m not the only one I’ve heard look at the list and realize they want pretty much the whole set (around 200 at the moment). This is where the Internet kicks in. The Internet always brings me such great things. I’m not linking to it from here (that would be illegal…) but the usual places furnish a torrent of 85 volumes, a torrent of a partly overlapped 32 volumes, and some individual volumes that add up to about half the series. I’m still missing a few that I would like, especially “Intelligence”, “Sociology”, and a few individual philosophies/religions… hopefully the power of the interwebs will come though on that. I find this arrangement pretty ideal; to me PDFs are of comparable value to physical copies. On one hand; they don’t contribute to “stuff” (physical possessions to which I am attached), which I’m generally opposed to, and I can pack them onto the n810 and literally have a library in my pocket. On the other hand, reading extensively from screens isn’t at all good for the eyes, and isn’t quite as versatile as dead trees. This kind of thing almost makes me want one of the various “e-paper” reader appliances… its a shame they’re so damn expensive and limited (reading about them a while ago, the iRex iLiad looks like the winner of the bunch at the moment, but is even more expensive than the more common Kindle and Sony Readers). A full set of these on a connected eBook reader comes surprisingly close to the dream.

The books are incredibly, incredibly dense; I’ve been working on the Maquis de Sade one for two evenings now, and I’ve made it through about 50 pages of actual text. This is really, really unusual; for a reference point, when I gave in on the “You can’t criticize it until you give it a [serious|better|honest|another] try” argument (an argument I hate for all things) on the Harry Potter series, the whole series took me about 8 hours (for the record, my opinion of it didn’t really improve). This, however is EXCELLENT by every metric. It is thorough, well written, and intensely thought provoking; part of why it takes so long is that I’ve had to stop to evaluate my own beliefs on various topics. Some interesting things I have had to clarify to myself:
* I’m a materialist (no non-physical “self”) who believes in free will, or at least higher order effects which are indistinguishable from it. This is apparently an unusual combination.
* I don’t believe it’s reasonable to model humans as rational actors. That is the degree to which we are, mostly unconsciously, influenced by objectively irrelevant circumstance leads me to believe that, on average, for any given decision by any one individual, the decision is not made by a rational process. Dr. Pushkarskaya’s talk on biases in decision making in CGS500 provided concrete evidence for that assertion. I also prefer to imagine people are simply irrational, rather than immensely shortsighted and/or incredibly stupid.
* I tend to evaluate things based on net misery (or, conversely net happiness), which is an odd sort of Buddhist-tinged humanism. Net means net, the discussion of the conventional wisdom about removing bandages in this TED talk gets into that nuance pretty well.
* Based on the metric above, I DO believe that humanity is, on the whole, progressing, as a direct result of cultural, social, and technological development.
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Thinking about this sort of thing makes me want even more to some group reading this summer with friends, there are SO MANY things I want to get to there should be plenty of opportunities. I think I might pass around (post?) my current list and go with whatever others want to read from it.

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Endings

Posted on 2009-05-10 by pappp

At the beginning of the semester, I wrote up my expectations for classes, so I would actually have them at the end of the semester to compare. The semester is over, so now it’s time to compare.

* Digital Controls (EE572) /Walcott
– Expected: Its going to be hard. Its going to be a lot of work. Its going to teach me a whole new model for thinking about things, and make me actually learn the signals material I half-learned in Signals and Systems (EE421). Every expectation that it will be a good course.
– Actual: I’m actually a little disappointed. I didn’t feel like I had the prerequisite knowledge for the class, and spent the whole semester struggling to catch up. Also, everything was abstract enough that it would be difficult to apply to the kinds of situations I wanted it for. I should have bailed to the applied controls class, the people who went that way showed me what they did and it was more applicable (and easier). Oh well, this was reasonably interesting anyway, and it’s good to stretch ones self.
* Solid State Electronics (EE661)/Hastings
– Expected: The graduate version of EE360 “Introduction To Semiconductor Devices”, which I didn’t really feel like I absorbed as well as I should have. I’ve heard good things about the class and good things about Dr. Hastings’ handling, so I have high hopes.
– Actual: I pretty much guessed right, I actually understand semiconductors reasonably well now. It’s a shame they try to sterilize the quantum mechanics out of the undergrad version, this are actually easier with limited portion of quantum than trying to hand-wave around it. It would have been nice if it got a little more into fabrication, but there isn’t time, and my interest is mostly because the way UK’s fabrication class is taught doesn’t appeal to me (boo industry focus).
* Introduction to Cognitive Science (CS585/CGS500) /Goldsmith
– Expected: Definitely going to be a fun course. Lectures are going to be scattered, and the material may not be of much utility, but it will definitely be interesting and fun, and shouldn’t be too time consuming. Looking forward to being able to do some non-technical writing again.
– Actual: Called this one pretty well too, it was really fun, Dr. Goldsmith is a VERY interesting and well connected person. I got play with things I can’t usually justify spending time on, and accelerated the expansion of my ever-growing reading list. I’d recommend this class to just about anyone reasonably smart and interesting.

In another ending, the assured broadcast run of Dollhouse also ended Friday. It was not a satisfying ending, but it was a perfectly good plot development episode. I’m sadly not hopeful that FOX will continue it. Maybe we’ll get a movie like last time this happened (to make the disclaimer I always feel the need to put on such comparisons, Dollhouse is no Firefly, but if you aren’t judging it against Firefly it’s a perfectly good show).

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Overcommitment…

Posted on 2009-05-06 by pappp

Is a state of being and a way of life. Better to be interesting than sane, right?
I may have done myself in this time though, I don’t think I can get an honest feedback-employing controller running on my XY Table by Friday… but I can probably get something that sufficiently resembles one to get away with it. Again.

As far as the specific case of burying myself for fun, I designed and understand an algorithm, I’m just finding myself unable to implement it in a timely manner; I haven’t worked with an ATMega chip’s timers in too long. I know what I need is to run my pair of 8bit timer/counters so that the full 255 count is 2kHz (1uS high, 1uS low, 50% duty cycle square wave) set the output compare registers so it actually runs at about 1500Hz (toggle and reset on match), and use the (scaled) difference in the output pulse train and the pulses from the encoders to adjust the output compare registers up/down to accommodate missed steps. I’m just being dumb with BOTH the encoders and the timers, so it doesn’t work.

EDIT: Toggle at TWICE the desired output frequency, not half. Dumb.

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Passing Obsessions

Posted on 2009-05-03 by pappp

I INTENSELY wanted to hear female-voice country/pop this weekend while studying. I’m not really sure why, I’ve been noticing that I did in fact grow up in the south lately, and it’s clearly a related phenomenon, but I only have nebulous suspicions as to what triggered it. Therefore, a playlist full of The Wreckers and Taylor Swift to assuage the urge. I need to go out and talk to (flirt with) a “Look at me, I’m a peach” sort of girl to remind me how irritating they are so I can put an end to this.

In a related note, listen to the melody of “Tears on my Guitar” (current single) then the melody of “Dear Lie” (single about a decade ago)… recycling plastics is good for the environment, what is recycling pop hooks good for? I’m pretty sure the same hook is in something else that was on the radio, maybe one of SR71’s singles?

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Stepper Drivers

Posted on 2009-05-02 by pappp

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I got a set of RepRap Stepper Driver v.2.3 kits to use for my CNC project, and was having no end of trouble with them, but finally had a breakthrough that has two of the three working…and one definitely, definitely dead; the magic smoke escaped from #3. The trick: the SOIC packages were ever so slightly bent in shipping, and I was a little too conservative in the application of solder paste, so some of the contacts around the IC were intermittent. After I finally found it, which was a little difficult because the pressure of a test probe temporarily fixed the problem, all that was needed was punching down a couple pins with a hot soldering iron. With two boards working I’m now in business to finish off the XY table.

Because I’m getting proud of it, a picture of the framing and drive for the XY table in the state it was in the other night.
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All it (just for the table) really needs mechanically now are the bolts attaching the lower lead nut assembly to the middle crossbar, and the table itself to be attached to the rails and lead nut assembly on top (need to pick up some short flathead screws to countersink in for that). To be safe it should probably also have the bearing assembly/leadscrew protector/encoder mount tubes installed where the floating brass nuts are in that picture.
The workspaces in both images are noticeably horribly, horribly messy; both pictures were taken at the end of a couple hours of work, right before cleanup. I (unsurprisingly) tend to keep my workspaces compulsively clean.

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