Author: gulley

Me being interviewed in EE Times

You may have seen my recent interview in the Times.

Okay, it wasn’t actually the NY Times. It was the EE Times. EE is a big city right next to NY. It’s even bigger than NY.

Right: EE Times stands for Electrical Engineering Times, and I was interviewed by chief editor Junko Yoshida as part of an article about our web community, MATLAB Central. It came out pretty well, I think:
EETimes.com – Social engineers get caught in the Web. The pitch that set the story in motion was the idea that engineers aren’t social, so why are they getting social on the web? Engineers, as everyone knows, prefer to eat lunch in their cubicles and keep company with their slide rules, Boba Fett action figures, and twenty-sided dice.

Of course this idea is flawed: even the gangliest geek knows it’s no fun to play Dungeons & Dragons alone. Still, it was enough of a hook to hang a story on, which is a good thing, because we got to talk about our site. Something significant really is happening with the traffic growth we’re seeing on our community site, but I associate it with the same trends that we see everywhere else. The bottom line is that social computing works. If you can find ways to aggregate individual effort for the common good, a lot of good stuff happens. You see that in the consumer space with things like camera reviews and Netflix recommendations, and you see it in every engineering discipline. It all adds up to a lot more traffic to our File Exchange and Newsreader sites. For instance, suppose you needed to generate time-varying Rayleigh fading channels based on autoregressive models to support your fading channel simulation. Well, what would you do? I’ll tell you what you’d do. You’d end up here.

Taxes and togetherness

I am a procrastinator. You might guess this means I was up last night doing my taxes. I was. I don’t mind admitting it, because mostly I have come to terms with my eleventh-hour tendencies. And anyway, coming clean about it is a win-win situation. Suppose you finished your taxes weeks ago: I’ve just given you the chance to do some self-congratulatory tut tutting. If instead you, like me, were toiling away late last night, then we can share the warm camaraderie of sinners. Like huddling outdoor smokers, we can savor the fraternal bond of our dangerous habit.

There’s something to this togetherness business.

I was once interviewed while waiting in line to hand over my tax return just before midnight on April 15th. How, the newspaper man wanted to know, did it make me feel? Stupid? Disorganized? No, I said, surveying the mass of humanity around me, all of us bent on the same object. I found it exhilarating. Look at all of us, all here doing exactly the same thing. Doing something important together. I remembered feeling the same way the first time I went grocery shopping for a Thanksgiving dinner that I had to prepare. Sure, Safeway was crowded, but here we all are, doing the Thanksgiving dance.

I don’t enjoy paying taxes, but it’s fun to watch how everyone responds differently to the same call, myself included. Paying taxes online takes the crowd away from us, but Twitter can give it back. Here’s a snapshot of Tweetscan last night. I was looking for anyone who mentioned taxes on Twitter at midnight on April 14th.

We have few enough shared rituals anymore. But after all, deep down we’re still grunion that merge in the surf at the bidding of the moon.

Print your landscape

Three-dimensional printing is a wonderful thing, and it keeps getting better. A few years ago, I bought a beautiful model of a transfer RNA molecule. All you had to do was tell them the Protein Data Bank ID, and your favorite molecule can be yours.

Of course not everybody gets excited by molecules. But other markets are opening up. Let’s suppose you’re really into World of Warcraft. For 20 hours or more every week, you are Sturmdrang the Pitiless. Now you can get a 3-D print of your online character from FigurePrints.com. That has to be a deep market. It’s brilliant!

And if Warcraft isn’t your thing, now you can get a nice 3-D topographical map of your favorite terrain from LandPrint, as described here: LandPrint.com Creates New Market for 3D Printing with 3D Physical Landscapes. I might have to get one of those. I’ve been thinking about a nice relief model of western Kansas.

X-36 pictures

The other day when I was trying to track down an old friend from my previous job, I ended up on a Beach Volleyball photography site. Because that’s what I used to do in my old job: pro beach volleyball. Yep. I was quite the pro beach volleyballer back in the day. You can probably find me in these action shots.

x-36.jpg

Actually, I worked with a guy who later went on to be a professional photographer of professional beach volleyballers. My real previous job was at NASA where I worked on a plane called the X-36. In the airplane business, you can spend years working on an airplane that never gets built. The good news is that they actually built and flew the X-36. Sadly for me this happened six years after I left the job. You can see from this picture that it was just a little guy, a 1/3 scale unmanned technology demonstrator. Because it was so small, it was often roughed up by the meaner planes at Edwards Air Force Base. Here it is being menaced by a gang led by the SR-71. That SR-71 thinks he’s so great.

Lots of other good pictures here.

But those are all the official NASA pictures. When did the X-36 take up beach volleyball? Here is a shot taken by VolleyShots photographer John Geldermann at the Induction Ceremony for the X-36 into the USAF Air Museum in Dayton, Ohio (July 2003). And those are the people I used to work with long, long ago.

Managing the tide of delicious information

When I was in grad school I asked a mathematician friend of mine how the real math insiders stay current. It was just inconceivable to me that they would sit at home and plow through giant stacks of the latest journals. He told me the secret: it was all done with preprints and word-of-mouth recommendations from a small network of trusted friends. Nobody read anything that hadn’t already been vetted by a buddy.

That’s all well and good, but how do you find those high-quality recommendations? That’s exactly the problem that web technologies can solve, first with blogs and feed readers, and more recently with Twitter.

I am an avid feed reader. I spend a significant chunk of time every day with Google Reader. It’s my preferred way to kill time. It’s hard to believe this now, but there was a time when the big problem with surfing the net was “where do you start?” Now if you’re not finding really interesting stuff within minutes of sitting down at the computer, you’re just not trying.

In fact, as everyone now knows, the problem is just the opposite. Too much informational richness all the time. Sturgeon’s Law says ninety percent of everything is crud. The Feedreader’s Corollary is that you never have to see any of it… unless that’s your idea of a good time. You can eat quality information 24 hours a day. Sometimes I worry that there must be some kind of psychic gout that corresponds to the ills of gluttony on rich food.

By way of managing with this embarrassment of riches, it has become popular to write about how you cope. Recently my friend Dan forwarded a useful note on how to manage inbound information: Feed Reader Down, Reading Up. The author, Connie Reece, describes how she has run up against the curve of diminishing returns with feeds. Now she relies more on Twitter and a tightly bound community of like-minded people. She also likes to use Instapaper, a nifty little application that was news to me.

I still like reading my feeds, but I’m trying out Instapaper and Twitter. Here’s my Twitter page. I’ve heard it said that Twitter is an acquired taste. It’s taken me some time to come around, but it’s starting to win me over.

Sight-seeing on Mars

Yowza! Check out this panoramic landscape from Mars.

hebes-chasma.jpg

It’s from a place called Hebes Chasma. What you’re looking at is a plateau in the middle of a canyon 8000 meters deep. That is to say, this thing would make a dandy bathtub for Mount Everest (8848 m). Mind you, that mountain could use a good scrubbing, what with all the tramping and the digging and all those filthy climbers.

It’s too bad we don’t have Google Maps to show us the neighborhood on Mars. Oh, I almost forgot that we live in the future! Of course we have automatic mechanical Mars Maps!

The ESA site that describes these pictures is also worth a visit. I really like living in the future.

(via Riding with Robots)

Swiss spaghetti harvest

Happy April First!

From tingilinde I found this gem: a genuine BBC documentary on the Swiss spaghetti harvest of 1957. At first I thought it was a newly minted faux-old spoof. But, my God! you just can’t fake that BBC voice over. What a pro! Fortunately, there was an attached link to the Museum of Hoaxes that described in great detail the story of the Swiss spaghetti harvest. In it, we learn that the commanding voice belongs to one Richard Dimbleby (that name! that voice!).

Since 1955 Panorama had been anchored by Richard Dimbleby, whose authoritative, commanding presence had made him one of the most revered public figures in Britain. If Dimbleby said it, people trusted that it was true. As one of his colleagues at Panorama put it, “He had enough gravitas to float an aircraft carrier.” Which is one of the reasons why the spaghetti harvest hoax fooled so many viewers. His participation lent the hoax an air of unimpeachable authority.

“Many of you will have seen the vast plantations of spaghetti in the Po valley.” Lovely! I can only guess that global warming might be good news for the spaghetti crop. I hear they’ve got fettuccine growing as far north as Smolensk.

Airplane on a Treadmill Definitive Analysis

I was late to the Airplane on a Treadmill party, so maybe you were too. Not since the famous Monty Hall and the Goat problem has so much hot air been generated by an online puzzler. Stated briefly, here is the problem:

Imagine a plane is sitting on a massive conveyor belt, as wide and as long as a runway. The conveyer belt is designed to exactly match the speed of the wheels, moving in the opposite direction. Can the plane take off?

What’s your answer? I must confess that I was seduced by the wrong conclusion for a while. This problem has now been around so long that the Myth Buster guys have had the time to demonstrate it on TV. Even if you have been aware of this problem for a few years, I recommend the writeup on the eponymous airplaneonatreadmill.com site entitled Airplane on a Treadmill Definitive Analysis. It’s a nice piece of writing about physics, and it does what so much of good science writing does: reframe the question using clearer terminology. In particular, look at his rewording of the problem into three separate but related problems.

Simply put, cars grab onto the ground to pull themselves forward. If you move the ground, they can’t go anywhere. Planes, in contrast, grab onto the air to pull themselves forward. If you move the ground, they really don’t care so much.

The Electric Company’s “Sign Song”

From my earliest TV-watching years, I remember we had a movable antenna on the roof that you could orient based on which channel you wanted to watch. You had your pick of three or four channels, depending on your appetite for static and snow.

By the time we got cable TV, thereby enabling our local PBS affiliate, I was already past the Mister Rogers and Sesame Street years. But I was in the demographic sweet spot for The Electric Company. And because nothing ever goes away anymore, I now have the pleasure of sitting in front of YouTube with my daughter and dredging up my favorite bits of 1970s educational TV.

For example, I was trying to remember all the words to the Sign Song that starts off like this: I like fish food, you do too. Don’t look now your hair is blue. Doesn’t sound so clever, eh? Well, here it is. Judge for yourself.

Just you try not humming that later on today.

In fact, looking back years later, I’m amazed at the talent they drummed up for that show. Morgan Freeman was a regular on the show. And although I knew that Tom Lehrer wrote the LY song for The Electric Company, I was surprised to learn via YouTube that he actually wrote a handful of other tunes, including the Silent E and the charming N Apostrophe T number that I only just discovered.

It’s amusing to think that my daughter is watching this on a small screen with low quality video, just like I did in the 70s, only for her it’s a TCP/IP feed to a small corner of my computer monitor.