Author: gulley

Water surface tension

If you look closely at a puddle during a rainstorm, you see a weird thing: little balls of water skating around as though the are being rejected by the receiving pool. They disappear quickly, so it’s hard to keep your eye on them. What’s going on? What would it look like if you had faster eyes?

Via Steve Crandall I came across this lovely slow motion video of bouncing water drops. For an instant, before the intervening air is squeezed out, the taut surface of the puddle is essentially a trampoline for descending droplets. I’ve always wondered about the physics of this. Watch!

Brother Blue, 1921-2009

Brother Blue was a storyteller from Cambridge, Massachusetts. He died last week, and as one of our secular saints, his passing deserves notice. He enjoyed being at once eccentric and affirming. He had a calling, and the calling was touching souls, but he called his calling storytelling, and so it was. Like Fred Rogers, a.k.a. Mr. Rogers, it didn’t bother him if people thought he was simple. He would probably have considered it a compliment. Brother Blue’s real name was Hugh, but his brother, who was mentally disabled, could only say Blue, and so it was.

I saw him perform a few times, and I can tell you that he knew how to make it work. I once heard him give advice to younger storytellers on what to do when the audience is mostly empty chairs. Just think, said Blue, that those chairs are filled with angels. And when you heard him say it, you knew that for him, they were.

The most valuable thing I learned from Brother Blue was his secret. Brother Blue’s Secret. I have thought about it before every talk I’ve given since I first heard it eleven years ago. It’s a good one. I wrote it down, and I’ll share it with you: Brother Blue’s Secret.

The difference between Japanese and US robotics

I’m going to give you a quick lesson in the difference between Japanese and US robot research. Or how about this: I’ll just show you two pictures, and you see if you can spot the difference.

There, on the left, that’s a Japanese robot. And on the right there, that’s a US robot. They are both walkers. And yet… something seems different.

meme

Now, to be fair, these robots serve different purposes. But I feel certain that a Japanese roboticist would take one look at the headless wretch from Boston Dynamics and cry out, “For the love of God, why didn’t you put a face on that thing? Some Mr. Potato Head eyes, or a Hello Kitty sticker… anything!”

I’m not sure why humanoid robots are so popular in Japan. I’m told it has something to do with Astroboy. I will grant you there’s something creepy about the lawnmower-with-legs in the video.

Links soft and links hard

Some months ago I was reading an article in American Scientist, and I thought it would be interesting to blog about it. If I had been reading the article online, it would have been a simple matter to tag it with my little WordPress bookmarklet that would insert it directly into my blog database. But I was at a Starbuck’s reading a magazine made out of paper. Without pen or paper, I was certainly doomed to forget about the article before I got around to blogging about it. Then I remembered my iPhone. Shouldn’t I be able to take a picture of the article and have it automatically find the article for me online? Shazam lets me find music this way, and SnapTell tracks down books. Lacking any such service, it occurred to me that I could at least take a picture of the page to remind me. Here’s the result.

magazine

There’s a URL in that mess somewhere, but it took some real work to figure out after a few weeks had passed. Not so helpful. Sure enough, this article got lost in the shuffle.

Yesterday, sitting in a different Starbuck’s reading Technology Review, I found an article that I want to write about, and this time technology was on my side. The article in question had a QR Code embedded on it. This made it possible, with the help of a free NeoReader app, to jump directly from a low-res grainy photograph to a URL. Once I had the URL, I could open it in Safari and then bookmark it with Instapaper‘s Read Later feature. This transferred it from the phone to the cloud where I could retrieve it from my PC later that night. That’s still a lot of steps, but easier and more likely to succeed than a scrap of paper.

Ironically, neither method gets me past the last hurdle: a content paywall. I can’t blame a journal for wanting to make money off their content, but it’s too bad that I can’t point you to more of the article than this: Engineers restore high-resolution photos of the moon.

The reason I wanted to link to that article is a personal connection. NASA scientists are rescuing a bunch of mildewing lunar photography archives that were scheduled to be destroyed. In the meantime, they’re working out of an old McDonald’s at Moffett Naval Air Station in Mountain View, California. Here’s the defunct McDonald’s. Zoom out and look at the giant dirigible hangars. My connection is that I used to work at NASA Ames. I used to eat at that McDonald’s. But when I was there, there were no Lunar Orbiter tape reels blocking access to the fryolator.

Price-driven costing and Demand.com

I was captivated by an article in this month’s Wired: The Answer Factory: Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell. It’s a good example of straightforward proposition that makes you wonder why it hadn’t occurred to you before. The big idea is that search engines, effective as they are, only address the desire side of the equation. What if people start asking for content that doesn’t exist? No search engine in the world can find it. But that doesn’t have to be the end of the story, because the hard part is now done. If you know what people are unsuccessfully searching for, you not only know what the market wants, but also that no one else is providing it. That’s lovely.

Demand Media feeds the hunger exposed by Big Search.

The article is about Demand Media, a company that uses algorithmic search analysis to research the niche market needs of the day. It then immediately underwrites the rapid (and cheap) production of text or video content so that it can be used for its own ad placement. If you want to make money efficiently, don’t scratch where it doesn’t itch. But when it itches, scratch fast!

I immediately thought of Peter Drucker’s Five Deadly Business Sins, one of which is cost-driven pricing. As Drucker puts it: “The only thing that works is price-driven costing. The only sound way to price is to start out with what the market is willing to pay and design to that price specification.”

The media business these days is full of hand-wringers fretting about the collapse of journalism and the Decline of Western Civilization (by which they mean they aren’t getting paid). The bonfire in the newsroom is genuinely disturbing, but hand-wringing won’t make it stop. There’s something refreshing about how Demand Media smashed right through the problem and onto the next promontory. How much are people willing to pay for their media diet these days? Not much! But that doesn’t mean you can’t make a successful business. Now shut your piehole and get to work.

Decoder Rings for the Net Naif

One of the great things about the Internet is that, while it encourages the creation of fierce micro-cultures built around arcane factoids and bizarre practices, it simultaneously facilitates the cheerful and articulate explanation of the same. Where you might stumble across the phenomenon known as Juggalos (I can’t recommend that you follow that link), you’d learn more by zipping over to the more sober description at Wikipedia. Similarly, would you rather learn about the Church of SubGenius here or here? It is a great comfort to know that if a hipster twenty-something tries to spring some truncated textspeak on me like TL;DR, a quick trip to UrbanDictionary.com will set me straight.

meme

My latest find, courtesy of a recent reference to The Juggernaut Bitch!! is KnowYourMeme, a sort of Snopes of the meme world. I was pleased to see a reference there to a neighbor of mine. FU Penguin, written in the town where I live, is a profane tonic to counteract CuteOverload and LOL Cats. It appears on KnowYourMeme as one of many Single Topic Blogs. Cake Wrecks? Owl Tattoos? WTF?

Start your engines and prepare to waste a lot of time.

The Robotic Amoeba

I’m a sucker for the robot videos on BotJunkie, and this soft deformable robot is no exception. It’s fun to see how a blob bot can be made to work, but I’m especially impressed with the video itself. I love the pencil animation at the beginning.

Back in the original desktop publishing revolution, it took people (non-designer people) a while to figure out the basic aesthetics of fonts and page layout. After that, some people who would never have become commercial artists or designers just happened to have a flair for design, and their snazzy documents gave them an advantage in the workplace.

These days something similar is happening with video. The tools to make high quality video are now in people’s hands. Not everybody can take advantage of those tools, but some people are naturals. This video was made by grad students. I’m reminded of the awesome Six Minutes of Terror video made by JPL about the two rovers arrival on Mars. It’s a professional job, for sure, but it’s much slicker than it “needs” to be. My favorite part is the cinema verité shot of the parachuting space probe headed for the surface. We’re looking through a shaky camera being held by a (purely imaginary) guy skydiving next to rover.

Anyway, videos are getting better and better, even when made by grad students. I’m betting that screwing around with the demo reel is a great way to put off actual work on the dissertation.

Home-made UAVs

A UAV is an unmanned aerial vehicle. In the old days, a home-made unmanned aerial vehicle would be called a model airplane, or perhaps an RC (radio-controlled) plane. But the fancy-pants term UAV is well earned these days because of the amazing things amateur enthusiasts can do with them. It’s remarkably close to what much more expensive military UAVs can do.

For example, I read a fascinating article in Make magazine about the GPS-driven autopilot you can put into your kit. Sadly, the article is not online, but the article’s author Chris Anderson (who happens to be editor in chief at Wired magazine), runs a whole web site called DIY Drones. They’ll help you get started, and when you’re ready they’ll sell you an miniature open source inertial navigation unit that costs less than $100. That’s something that couldn’t be had for less than a hundred times that cost only a few years ago. By the time you’re done, you’ll have a device that can go spy on your neighbors. I won’t dwell on the point, but you can easily imagine many more mischievous uses for a cheap easily built spy plane.

If you make them small and nimble enough, you can fly indoors. Here’s a simple blimp that can pilot itself around your building, but the engineers at MIT have made something much niftier: precision-controlled helicopters. This video is especially impressive.

Here’s a Popular Mechanics article from last year about MIT’s indoor flight lab: Crash-Proof UAVs Fly Blind at MIT’s RAVEN Aerospace Controls Lab. I wish I had this stuff back when I was in grad school!

Fundraising for autism research

Every year in October Wendy and I do our best to get you to pay good money to send us around a horse track. The part about the money is serious. It’s hard for you to earn it and we accept it with respect. The horse track, on the other hand, is a MacGuffin. It’s not really the point, but it focuses the action into a story. You pay, we walk. But what about the money? We give it, by way of Autism Speaks, to medical researchers who are trying to turn autism from a voracious family-devouring monster into a historical curiosity.

jay

There are a lot of charities competing for your money. Let me tell you why mine is the most important: my son Jay is autistic, and dealing with autism sucks rocks. That’s the most accurate statement of my situation… I chose this malady because it chose me. This gives me great sympathy for others in my predicament.

I realize that, by itself, my personal connection may not convince you to give, so I ask you to consider this. Autism rates continue their mysterious climb, and now parent-reported rates of autism are greater than one percent (1 in 91). If you don’t already know a child with autism, you will. Unless you can do something to stop it.

You can.

Donate to Autism Speaks by supporting Jay’s Team (http://bit.ly/give4jay).

Many of you already have, and I thank you for that. As usual, I conclude this note with Wendy’s annual message.

Continue reading “Fundraising for autism research”

The talking piano

Fourier analysis tells us that you can do a darn good job modeling any periodic waveform by adding together a series of sine waves. The image below was lifted from the Wikipedia article on the Gibbs phenomenon, in which the goal is to assemble a square wave.

synthesis_square

On Jim Bumgardner’s KrazyDad blog I came across this talking piano. It’s from a German-language documentary, but the modeled words are in English. What’s going on? In a process similar to Fourier analysis, you can play lots of piano notes that together add up to a pretty good approximation of someone talking. Spoken words have lots of structure, and musical notes are building blocks of acoustic structure. With the help of a computer and many-fingered robotic pianist, you can make a piano talk.

It’s an uncanny sound. I think it’s just begging to appear in a haunted house movie.