Author: gulley

St. Frank’s Infirmary: the blog

I have known St. Frank since my days in California, many years ago. He has been a steady friend of the Star Chamber throughout its tenure, and has contributed many pieces to this site, of which the most graphically disturbing is surely The Naked Felix. The proprietors of this site cannot in good conscience recommend you read this piece unless you are helmeted and buckled in to a secure reading chair.

At any rate, St. Frank has started his own blog which I recommend without reservation. He’s a funny guy. St. Frank’s Infirmary.

Many languages

I have a book, Languages of the World, in which a page is devoted to each of maybe 150 different languages. You don’t learn much about each language, but flipping through the book is a pleasure in much the same way as strolling through a botanical garden and admiring the amazing variety of plant and flower forms. It’s a spellbinding tour of the remarkable shapes that human thought can take.

St. Frank recently pointed me to the even more comprehensive Language Museum, which is maintained by Zhang Hong, an internet consultant and amateur linguist in Beijing. As he says in his description of the site:

The Language Museum is a linguistic website which offers the samples of 2000 languages in the world. Every sample includes four parts: (1) a sample image, (2) an English translation, (3) the speaking countries and populations, (4) the language’s family and branch.

Two thousand languages! Now that’s a grand tour… you’ve got good old standbys like Yoruba, Wolof, and Tagolog, but then you can go crazy from Northern Kissi to Southern Nambikuara, this last being a native Brazilian tongue which, from the looks of it, never gets written down except by visiting linguists. Also represented are extinct languages like Gothic and synthetic languages like Lojban.

Most of the passages shown in translation appear to be either biblical in nature or something from the Human Bill of Rights. But my favorite is this sample of Greenlandic branch of the Eskimo-Aleut language Inuktitut: Kinal uunniit pisinnaatitaaffinnik killilersugaanngitsumillu iliorsinnaatitaaffinnik nalunaarummi maani taaneqartunik tamanik atuuiumasinnaavoq, sukkulluunniit assigiinngisitsinertaqanngitsumik which is taken from an Eskimo weather report. It translates to English roughly as Snow snow snow snow snow snow and snow followed by snow snow light breezes and scattered assigiinngisitsinertaqanngitsumik. Assigiinngisitsinertaqanngitsumik, it appears, is a kind of snow.

All code will eventually be open source

cropper.png
Here’s a nice Innovator’s Dilemma style example of how easy it is for free software to come along and take money away from a perfectly good commercial product. If you want to take a screenshot in Windows, you can always use the built-in “PrintScreen” capability, but it’s pretty limited. SnagIt, from TechSmith, is a much nicer full-featured tool. You can select all sorts of different kinds of regions and you can save them in many formats: GIF, PNG, JPG, and so on. It won the PC Magazine Editor’s Choice award for three years running, and it’s been adding lots of features every year. Now you can capture animations, scrollable regions, and text. At $40 a copy, it’s not that expensive either.

I’ve actually been in the market for a nice screen capture tool. Here’s what happened. I downloaded a free trial of SnagIt, and I discovered that SnagIt would definitely make me happy. But I really don’t need all those extra fancy SnagIt features, nice as they are. And while I was pondering how much of my $40 would be paying for features I’ll never use, I came across this post on the UI design blog flow|state. It told me that maybe Brian Scott’s free Cropper is all that I needed. I downloaded Cropper, and sure enough, it’s exactly what I needed, neither more nor less. And free is a price I’m willing to pay. I have no idea how much Cropper will cut into SnagIt’s market, but it has to hurt to see competitive high quality software being given away in your space.

If information wants to be free, then I would add that software wants to be a service.

Early sunsets in December

sungraph.pngEvery winter I look forward to Earliest Sunset Day. Here in New England, the sunlight drains away with distressing speed in October and November, so I always feel a little warmer inside (even though there are currently 8 inches of snow on the ground) knowing that the sunsets will start getting later and later starting around now in December. In fact, when I went to check my trusty SunGraph program this year, it informed me that Earliest Sunset Day for my location was on December 9th. If you live near me, you too can celebrate the illusion that the days will now appear to be getting longer. Of course once you factor in the dawn, the days don’t actually lengthen until the honest-to-goodness solstice on the 21st.

It’s easy enough to see how ancient astronomers determined the solstice: they watched where the sun rose and set and noted when it stopped moving south and appeared to stand still (sol+stice derives from sun+still). But without accurate timepieces, I wonder how long it was before they realized that the earliest sunset did not coincide with the solstice. My guess is that some clever Greek had it all figured out a few thousand years ago.

Unearthing the battle for Kiev

Elena Filatova is a Ukrainian woman who gained some notoriety on the web for her remarkable pictures of the condemned zone around Chernobyl. Since posting those pictures (which I highly recommend), she has added more material to her site. One is a short photo set of the Orange Revolution, the event that has happily displaced Chernobyl as the world’s number one association with Ukraine. Another is her collection called The Serpent’s Wall, which describes her adventures as a camper and souvenir collector on the World War II battlefields around Kiev.

We get a steady diet of World War II nostalgia in the US, almost all of which, understandably, centers on campaigns with American involvement. But as Germans and Russians will point out, our war was much shorter than theirs and much less costly (more than that, ours was short BECAUSE theirs was long). The number of people involved in the battles of the Eastern Front simply boggles the mind. Filatova’s site lets you see through the eyes of someone from the Ukraine. I appreciate her pictures and her pithy no-nonsense prose. You learn that her favorite discovery isn’t a potato masher or a silver SS Death’s Head ring, but a box of German chewing gum. She also has a nice collection of personal photos taken by German soldiers during the 1941-1943 occupation of Kiev.

Even today, the war goes on killing. The landscape is riddled with bunkers, unexploded landmines, and artillery shells. Next to a picture of what looks like a twelve year old kid, she says, “Local boys are the best guides through the bunkers. In each village there is someone who lost arms, hands playing with the war toys. They are invalids of war.”

Animated engines

Ever wonder how a Wankel rotary engine works? Matt Keveney’s excellent animated engines site does more than just show you a little diagram. You get a lovely, instructive animation. Actually, a Wankel rotary is pretty straightforward to understand. It’s just got that marvelously rude name going for it.

It’s more fun to look at some of the less well-known historical engines. For example, here is the very first steam engine, which spawned the industrial revolution and launched a thousand dark satanic mills.
Also of historical interest is the unusual Gnome rotary engine, which was used in World War I planes like the Sopwith Camel. The entire engine spun around, fixed directly to the propeller shaft. Spinning the engine gave it lightweight air cooling, but there was no throttling (besides “on”), and the wicked gyroscopic torque killed more than a few pilots.

Other engines are more newsworthy. Look at the small, lightweight two-stroke engine and you can see why it’s unpopular with environmentalists: it’s particularly easy for unburned fuel, which is a nasty pollutant, to blow straight out the exhaust. And finally, the lovely and super-efficient Stirling engine that may save us all some day. It’s so efficient, in fact, that you can buy one that will run forever using only the heat of your hand.

To give you an idea of the sort person who would make a site like this, note that he also has an entire portion of his website dedicated to instructing people in the art of hand-carving propellers. The world needs more people like Matt.

Panama Canal time lapse

Here, as found by Google video, is a lovely time lapse movie of the Miraflores locks on the Panama Canal. Watch gigantic boats take the water elevator up and down, one after another. The canal actually defines an entire class of ship: Panamax vessels are limited 106 feet in width. In the movie it is indeed evident that these boats were designed with Panama in mind. Otherwise it would be too much of a coincidence that so many of them just squeeze through with only enough room for a deck of cards on either side. American aircraft carriers, on the other hand, are so big that effectively live in the nineteenth century. Headed to San Francisco from New York? You’ll be taking a long trip around Cape Horn in South America.

This movie also illustrates one of the happy facts about the isthmus of Panama: that it is situated in a rainy tropical part of the world. As you watch the movie, keep in mind that operating the water elevator all day long always involves draining water from the higher level to the lower level. That water isn’t pumped back up; God puts it up there (by means of intelligently designed clouds). One of the limits on traffic through the canal is actually how much fresh water is available to dump through these locks. As reported on here in the Economist, the need to better manage the freshwater resources required by the locks is having a positive effect on environmental research into the effects of deforestation. Globalization can be green once you see how things are hitched together.

Toponymy – the naming of places

Linguists and sociologists have, for years, been making dialect maps on which are displayed, for example, those places where people would be likeliest to refer to a water fountain as a “bubbler.” Professor Bert Vaux keeps an excellent archive here on his website at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee (where, strangely enough, people sip their water from bubblers).

Another approach, which should have been obvious but never occurred to me before, is to simply use a computer to crank through place names that are already recorded in map databases. For instance, if you looked at a great big map of the US and noted down all of the waterways called “brooks” and all of the waterways called “creeks,” would you see a geographic trend? Answer: yes you would. And here is lake vs. pond.

This work is presented on a site called pfly.com. I can’t figure out who the author is, but it’s darn good work. Here’s another good one: of the city name suffixes -burg and -ville, does -burg reveal a German immigrant trend? So many other questions you might ask: are there more “Bear” place names in the east or the west? In California, are there more Sans than Santas or Santas than Sans? And ever since that sleepless night at Devil’s Twitchy Eyelid National Monument in Wyoming, I’ve wondered how many National Park names involve the word “Devil” in one way or another. Now the answer may finally be at hand.

NEWSFLASH! Ask and it shall be granted unto you. A very cool internet-age thing has happened: I posed three speculative questions in the preceding paragraph, and pfly himself came across this post and answered my questions in the comments section. That is indeed something worth giving thanks for. Thanks, pfly!

Go read the comment, but here are the graphical results. Bear place names. San vs. Santa. Devil in the placename. I have to say, I was amazed by the number of Devil’s This-and-That places out there. I joked about Devil’s Twitchy Eyelid, but pfly did the research to show that there actually are the following Devil body parts: tailbone, toenail, windpipe, jawbone, and bottom.

Nightmarish lunation

Is there a Dark Side of the Moon? Yes, the same way there’s a dark side of the Earth. It’s called night time. On the moon, night time lasts two weeks. There is, however, something more mysterious called the Far Side of the Moon. One side of the Moon always faces the Earth. It’s impressive to think that, until the Soviet Union sent Luna 3 to the Moon, no one had any notion what the far side of the Moon looked like. The odd fact that the Moon stares at us fixedly from one side probably convinced more than a few observers that it was a flat disk (and by logical extension, that the Earth was too).

In fact, though, the Moon slightly tips its hand and shows us somewhat more than a pure hemisphere. This process is called lunation, and it is akin to the Moon bowing slightly as it dances around us, watching us all the while. If you take pictures of the Moon every night of the month, you get a sense of this pitching motion. I had seen this kind of thing before, but recently NASA’s astronomy picture of the day was an intense high speed version of lunation that gave me vertigo: APOD: 2005 November 13 – Lunation. For some reason, they chose to animate it at warp speed, and the result is disturbing, something like being fed upon by giant insect lit by a strobe. Menace and the Moon are friends for a reason.

MATLAB Contest

We had another MATLAB Programming Contest, and in terms of participation it was our biggest so far. We like contest themes that fit somehow into the zeitgeist, so the puzzle this time around was a generalized version of the notorious Sudoku puzzle genre.

Aside: if you are ever in a Sudoku-solving pickle, I’ve got just the salve for your itch here: Sudoku Satori – The Sudoku Solving Assistant.

We had 3061 total entries. You can see all the sudoku > Statistics” href=”http://www.mathworks.com/contest/sudoku/statistics.html”>gory statistics here if you like. One fun thing we did this time around was create a map (using the Frappr service) where people could show us where they live. Take a look. Only thirty or so brave souls (of the 168 who played) put themselves on the map, but even so you see how global the distribution is.

As usual, Matt did an excellent job summing up the activity in a contest evolution report. The distinctive zig-zag pattern in the accuracy-vs-speed plots was particularly pronounced in this contest.