brainwagon

Two different amateur astronomers detected an object impacting Jupiter on June 3.   Catch the video: it’s pretty impressive, and shows that amateurs can make interesting observations of our universe.    If you haven’t looked through a telescope lately (or a good one) this video shows the role that atmospheric conditions play.   As you watch carefully, fine details come and go in the span of just a few frames.    One of the more interesting “revolutions” in amateur astronomy is to use video cameras to capture these moments of good seeing, and “stack” the resulting images into high quality composites.    Anywho…. thought it was brilliant. Congratulations to Anthony Wesley and Christopher Go for these truly rare images.

YouTube – Jupiter Impacted on 3rd June 2010.

I was listening to Leo Laporte and Steve Gibson’s Security Now podcast as I was commuting this morning, and found that Steve Gibson said something which clarified how I feel about Facebook and Twitter.

Lots of people are upset about Facebook privacy concerns. I’m not really among them. If I post something on Facebook, I pretty much understand that I’m publishing it and won’t have any control over where the information goes. And really, how could I expect any different? Facebook’s entire business model is to aggregate information about you and share it with others. They don’t want your information to be private, because they can’t do anything with your private information. Facebook entices you to register by not showing you what your friends are doing unless you do. And then, it entices you to add everyone in your email contact lists. It encourages you to type in information about who you are, when you were born, where you live, and what you are doing. By doing so, it can figure out all sorts of good stuff about you, and sell that information to others.

Facebook has the power to make us all celebrities. But that means that while we might get fans, we might also get paparazzi. Fame has a cost, and we should perhaps come to grips with it ourselves, rather than asking Facebook to do it for us.

That’s Facebook.

Twitter is almost the anti-Facebook. You can view anyone’s twitter feed without joining twitter. You can see who are following and who are followers of any Twitter user without becoming a twitter user yourself. To post, you need to register, but the only thing it asks you for is a username, and a “Full Name”, which could completely be a pseudonym. Everything about twitter takes place in public, so there is never any concern about privacy: you have none. They aren’t selling your information, because any advertisers could already get access to anything you post on twitter. Anyone can.

And when Gibson put it this simply, it made me realize that I’m actually more interested in Twitter as a result. If I wanted to share private information, I already have the means to do so, and probably should do so with more thought than I really give Facebook. But if I want to share information publicly, having a bunch of privacy protections in place is unnecessary.

Yesterday was an intereseting day in baseball. In the last month, we’ve seen two perfect games pitched: the first by Dallas Braden, and the second by Roy Halladay. For those of you who aren’t big baseball fans, those were only the 19th and 20th perfect games recorded in Major League Baseball history. The last time two had occurred in the same year was in 1880.

Which brings us to yesterday. June 2, 2010, in a matchup between the Detroit Tigers and the Cleveland Indians. The pitcher for the Tigers was Armando Galarraga, who had recently been called up from the Detroit Triple-A affiliate and placed in the starting rotation. His ERA going into the game was an unremarkable 4.50.

He pitched eight and two thirds innings, with no hits, and no walks. Another perfect game in the making? The batter was Jason Donald, who hit a grounder to right field which was fielded by Miguel Cabrera, who tossed to Galarraga, who was covering first base. A perfect game!

But wait… the umpire Jim Joyce called Donald safe!

Wow. If there is one thing that is even rarer than perfect games, it’s perfect games that are spoiled by the 27th batter. There were nine prior to last night. I actually was lucky enough to see one (on TV, not live) when Mike Mussina of the Yankees gave up a hit to Carl Everett of the Red Sox in September, 2001 (the last time it happened).

But here’s the tragic thing: the umpire completely blew the call. Donald was out by a step. A long step. Joyce just flat out blew the call. Upon seeing the replay, he admits he blew the call. But baseball doesn’t have instant replay, so the ruling stands, and Galarraga misses out on being the 21st perfect game hitter.

Okay, that;’s the background: here’s my take.

Give the kid the perfect game. Donald was clearly out. As far as I can tell, everyone involved, from teams on both sides to the umpire agree that he should have been called out. It would have been the end of the game, so there is no needless speculation of how it would have changed the game: the game would have been over, except that Donald has one less hit in his batting average, and Galarraga would be properly recorded as the 21st pitcher to throw a perfect game. Any other outcome is a travesty of rules over substance. The rules should enable us to get the call right, not require that a wrong call be made official.

And cut Jim Joyce some slack. He blew a call. Yes, it was a bad call, but he freely admits and would absolutely reverse his call if it were in his power to do so. You don’t make mistakes at your job? Get over it.

it seems like the last month has been rife with stories of corporations doing things that annoy and irritate their customers. Facebook privacy concerns. Google sniffing Wi-Fi. Apple rejecting apps for inscrutable reasons. Heck, BP not checking their blow-out preventer.

Each of these have caused me a bit of annoyance: some perhaps more than they should, some less than they should. But the subject of today’s rant is AT&T’s New Lower-Priced Wireless Data Plans. Their own press release says that customers can choose between two new more affordable plans: “either a $15 per month entry plan or a $25 per month plan with 10 times more data.”

Wow, sounds great huh?

Well, for some people it probably is. Maybe even for me. Let’s look at my data usage over the last few months:

As you can see, I’m probably safe in the 2GB usage pattern, so I could in theory sign up for the 2GB data plan for $25 and save myself $5 a month. So why am I unhappy?

Three things:

First of all, there are overages. Cell phone companies love to charge you overages. Let’s say that you sign up for the DataPlus plan, and use 201 megabytes in a month, instead of 199 megabytes. AT&T will nicely charge you $15 a month extra for the next 200. And $15 for the next one after that. Let’s say you have a bad month, like I did, and you use 1GB of transfer. AT&T will charge you $75 for that 1GB. If you just signed up for their DataPro plan, you would be charged only $25, and you’d get twice the data for that. It’s not like they have to pay some human overtime to come in and move your data around: the data is already delivered. They could charge you less, but they choose to charge you more, to entice you to do what I do, which is to sign up for a more expensive plan as a hedge against large overages. My current unlimited data plan is the best kind of hedge: a fixed rate plan. I typically use about 1/4 of what the 2GB limit would give me, but I don’t have to worry: if I need the bandwidth, it’s there. With the new proposed plan, I have no such guarantee, meaning I have to watch my usage more carefully, which is an added mental annoyance that I didn’t have before.

While I’m on this kick, here’s another pet peeve about overages. The phone company knows how many minutes you’ve used. They know how much data that you’ve used. They could just give you the option of having your service stop when you reach your limit. Previously, this was declared “impossible” by AT&T, with the net result that in a fit of teen… shall we say… indiscretion my son managed to run up a $700 cell phone bill by exceeding his minutes. Now, AT&T has the mechanism in place, but will charge you $4.99 for that privilege. That’s just extortion.

The second thing that annoys me is that AT&T is finally offering cell phone tethering. “What’s annoying about that, you ask?” Well, previously you couldn’t get tethering on the iPhone from AT&T, but today, they annouced that you can get it for $20. And for that… you get…. well, pretty much nothing. Yes, you can hook your laptop to the network via your iPhone, but you don’t get any extra bandwidth. AT&T is charging you more for the bits you sent from your laptop, based solely on their point of origin. Sure, they might reasonably expect that users who make use of tethering will use their data connections more, but they already are going to shaft you when you hit your overages anyway. That’s what those overages are meant to deter. To spend an extra $20 on top of that seems absurd.

Lastly of course, the sizing of these plans may be adequate today, but as network speeds improve (well, on OTHER cellular networks anyway) and as the demand for more bandwidth from applications like video grows, these plans will grow increasingly burdensome for more and more consumers. Which, of course, AT&T will be happy to charge you for, as you rack up more overages.

I get the motivation: there are people out there who use many times even my usage, and pay no more than I do. I’ve heard that 3% of cell phone users account for 40% of all data transmitted in the Bay Area (read it somewhere today, didn’t save the link, but even if the number is wrong, it’s probably not very wrong). Obviously, AT&T would love to get those people off the network, or at least lower their usage, because then the network behaves as if they upgraded it: they have more available bandwidth that they can sell to more customers. Heck, I’m not even really objecting to the pricing: it’s a powerful incentive to lower usage of the 3%, while actually lowering my bill MOST of the time by $5 a month. But cell phone companies already have a lot of hostile practices in place that are bad for consumers. They charge a fortune for text messages, which is idiotic. They limit voice minutes, and place no real limit on overages. They charge you for early termination. Activation. Enough. We love our cell phones, we want to use your product, but you guys have to toss us a bone once in a while.

I suspect that it might be better to pick up an iPod touch and run Skype most of the time, and get a Pay As You Go cell phone to keep in my car for emergencies. I’d probably save $400 a year on cell phone bills, and it would piss me off less.

This concludes the rant of the day.

Slides and coverslips are back ordered, so I am still playing with stuff I can front illuminate. For your viewing pleasure, ordinary table salt, magnified 70x.

As you might have guessed, I’m a “collector”. Not of anything in particular, but of anything that interests me even vaguely. A few years ago, I bought an old Zeiss Jena laboratory microscope at a swap meet for (if memory serves) around $50. It’s a very nice, heavy microscope and included a pair of Zeiss eyepieces (7x and 10x) and a pair of objectives (10x and 40x). I hadn’t done much with it, but recently I’ve begun to think of fun things that I might do with it, so I dusted it off. Of course, to share pictures of what I see, I’d need to be able to take a photograph through it, so the first order of the day would be to see what I could do with my little Canon SD1100 (a small point-and-shoot camera). Since I didn’t have any microscope slides, I just clamped a dollar bill onto the stage. I installed the 10x objective with a 7x eyepiece, roughly aimed an led flashlight at the mirror, and clicked this picture:

Not bad at all. The image isn’t very well focused because, well, it isn’t very well focused, and because the dollar wasn’t clamped flat, so bits of it are in focus and out of focus, but it’s very promising. I need to setup a good light source and get some slides. Stay tuned, I have something in mind.

Addendum: I found a plastic container that had some small writing on it, which was a tiny bit flatter and setup my camera. I tried zooming in to get rid of the round vignette around the image, and shot these two pictures. Looks like this will work just great. I need to mock up a little mount to hold the camera, and work on getting a better light source, and then some slides and cover slips (already on order) and then… some slightly more interesting pictures hopefully.

While I was surfing around this weekend, I was reminded of the old sweetcode.org website (sadly, which is no more, but you can still see courtesy of the Internet Wayback machine if you like) and found an old chunk of code that I had archived that was written by Danny O’Brien based upon an idea by Don Marti. It basically would scan a text, break it into syllables, and then output any haikus (segments of text that have the 5-7-5 syllable counts). The program further allows you to specify that the haiku should start with a capital letter, and end with a period.

It was a bit broken, but a few minutes of hacking got it working again, and I fed it one of my favorites: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Here is a smattering of some of the better ones it found.

He never spoke of
the softer passions, save with
a gibe and a sneer.

You understand? I
am to be neutral? To
do nothing whatever.

She knows that the King
is capable of having
her waylaid and searched.

But then, when I found
how I had betrayed myself
I began to think.

Some letters get more
worn than others, and some wear
only on one side.

I can stand this strain
no longer; I shall go mad
if it continues.

Twice he struck at the
chamber door without any
reply from within.

He put out his hand
and coldly grasped that which she
extended to him.

It is all dark to
me. But perhaps it may grow
lighter as we go.

I’m not sure why I find these so amusing.

If you have a browser that supports the HTML5 geolocation facilities (such as Mobile Safari on the iPhone, or certain recent versions of Firefox) then you can try clicking on the following link to find out your Maidenhead grid square. It may not remain there forever, since it is just hosted on my machine, but it should work reasonably well. At the right is a picture of what it looks like on my iPhone.

Grid Square

If you are using Firefox, the accuracy might be good, or might be bad. It really depends on how effective Google’s IP based geolocation is in your area. At my brother’s house in Hillsboro, OR (near the Intel Campus) it was very, very accurate. Of course, if you are using the iPhone, it uses the built-in GPS. Feel free to swipe this idea and use it however you see fit.

If you find this useful, please let me know, and I’ll consider making a more permanent home for it. I’d also welcome any other suggestions on things that might make it more useful.

Addendum: I made some improvements (notably, to also give the accuracy of the measurement, and added a small google maps display) and IRC #hamradio buddy autojack confirmed that it works on his Android phone, and thoughtfully provided a couple of screenshots.

Today, someone who had a big influence on my life (and whom I’ve never met) passed away: legendary recreational mathematician Martin Gardner. I learned about it from Phil Plait, of the Bad Astronomy blog, courtesy of his twitter feed. Phil writes up his own thoughts here:

Martin Gardner, 1914 – 2010 | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine.

I was first exposed to Gardner’s writings in Mathematical Games when I was still in grade school. Our local library used to give away books that they no longer wished in their collection, and at one point, they discarded a couple of decades worth of Scientific American. As a voracious reader of science, I carted dozens of issues home in my book bags over the span of a few days. While I had a wide variety of interests, I read two columns out of nearly every issue: C. L. Stong’s Amateur Scientist and Gardner’s Mathematical Games.

Others will cite Gardner’s greatest contributions as a skeptic, but the lasting impact that he has on me is conveying the mystery, the magic, and the fun of mathematics. It was through his pages that I first learned of John Conway’s “Game of Life” and cellular automata. Of the game Hex. Of Penrose tilings. Of public key cryptography. Of polyominoes. Of game theory. Flexagons. Polygonal dissections. Of machine learning. And dozens of puzzles that intrigued me for hundreds of hours.

I have eight or nine of his books, and still enjoy perusing them for puzzles I haven’t attacked before. His columns were often on cutting edge bits of mathematics, but neither tried to pander to the lowest common denominator, nor to be accessible to only a small mathematical priesthood: his work was accessible and challenging. He basically created recreational mathematics.

It’s hard to overemphasize that importance that the joy and exuberance that he brought to mathematics had on my life, and I’ve met dozens of others with similar stories.

Thanks for all your contributions Martin.

“He was a man, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again.”

Hamlet — Act 1, Scene 2

Over the last couple of days, weeks, and even months, I’ve been pondering my participation in various social media: mostly my efforts at blogging and podcasting, but also my participation in things like Facebook and Twitter, as well as the possibility of using things like YouTube. I thought I’d toss out some ideas and ask for some feedback, so if any of this resonates with any of you out there, please feel free to comment.

My first posting on the brainwagon blog occurred on July 21, 2002. Since then I have posted 3,418 posts about a wide variety of topics. I’ve viewed this blog as an outlet for some of my geekier interests: if you look through it, you’ll see some trends which ebbed and flowed: podcasting, programming (especially my Atari 2600 and checkers), mathematics, and of course my recent fascination with ham radio. You’ll also see a scattering of just links to blogs and news items that I found enjoyable. I made two conscious decisions: I wouldn’t monetize my blog with advertising, nor would I seek to become a “pundit”, a talking head whose job it is to render opinions from on high about what people should or should not be doing or thinking.

I’m mostly pretty happy with those basics, except for one thing: I don’t feel like I’ve helped develop a community of people who are interested in doing the same. My blog, as interesting as the subjects appear to be to me, doesn’t seem to be very inspiring to others, at least as far as I can judge based on comment and email feedback. (Yes, there has been some positive feedback, but not as much as I would like.)

I’m faced with two conclusions.

One is that I’m interested in stuff that nobody else is interested in. That’s certainly a possibility, a very strong possibility. But when I go to places like the Maker’s Faire, or even interact with some of my fellow geeks at work, it seems that there are people out there who are interested. If I extrapolate that to the entire country, there really must be thousands of people who are potentially interested in the kinds of things that I’m interested in. Heck, I found a website for a guy who is interested in two of my more eclectic interests (Egyptian hieroglyphics and checkers, of all things) so you people must be out there.

So, I’m left with my other conclusion: that I’m not reaching other people in a fashion which inspires them to respond and engage. I think that there are several possible reasons for that. I think there are basic questions about technology: am I doing all I can to maximize the effectiveness of what presence I do have on the web? Would more use of Facebook/Twitter be helpful? Or maybe YouTube/Vimeo/iTunes podcasting? Or is there room for a new kind of social media that works to generate the kind of community vision that I crave?

But frankly, I think the problem is more basic than that.

I’m basically one of those people who is mostly happy living inside my head. I have recognized and even relished in the idea that what I like is relatively rare and geeky, so I haven’t done a lot of work to actually build the real social bonds that connect me to other people who share my visions and interests. Thus, the problem isn’t at the root a technological one: it’s likely a problem of my own personality and behavior.

While I think that making any significant changes to my personality is probably out of the question, i do think that there are changes to my online behavior which could be achieved. Just as I am trying to convince myself that frequent exercise is good for me, I can try to “exercise” my own efforts in building social bonds based upon mutual interest and vision.

The other thing is to try to simply do more inspiring stuff, and figure out more dynamic ways to share it. Many of my software projects are still in the “not-ready-for-release” stage, but that’s kind of cowardly of me. If you read that I had developed some code that did something interesting, and that I’d release it someday, you’d be bored and uninspired. If however, I released it and let you play with it, that’s much more engaging. And if I showed how you could use it to do cool things (like, say, predict when the ISS is overhead and photograph it) that would be more inspiring. I should recognize that I have only a couple of minutes of your time at best to get you interested and thinking about the stuff I like, and that if I really want to get you on board, I’ll have to work harder at it. I guess that it boils down to a simple new thought:

Mark, expend some effort to engage your audience.

In conclusion, I’m interested in finding peers and mentors who have built the kind of online presence and community that I’m seeking. If you have a blog or podcast that you are proud of, or have used Facebook or Twitter to build an online community, or just have some reading on the subject that you have found useful, please drop me a note at brainwagon at gmail.com if you would be interested in talking to me about this kind of thing.

Thanks again.

Before computers, my first love-affair with geekiness was an interest in telescopes and astronomy. For the past few years, I’ve slacked off considerably in my telescope making activities, but every once in a while I see something that piques my interest. Gary Honis has a fascinating webpage that details several conversions of digital SLR cameras and webcams into a form which allows them to be used for astrophotography. I found the following link to be particularly interesting for planetary photography, since the webcam is a reasonably high resolution and shoots at 30fps. For bright objects like the moon and planets, this means that you can capture moments of good seeing, and use them to generate nice pictures. Archived for future perusal:

Instructions for Converting Microsoft Lifecam Cinema HD Webcam for Telescope Use -by Gary Honis.

The camera is actually very reasonably priced (only $54.03 via Amazon).

While I am surfing around, I discovered that Google made good on their promise to release the VP8 codec they obtained from their acquisition of On2 earlier this year as a royalty-free open alternative to other video codecs. This isn’t of much use right now to end users, but hopefully this will result in a more ubiquitous and portable web video standard.

The WebM Project : Welcome to the WebM Project.

Google has a new API that enables you to easily embed a selection of fonts into web pages. It seems to work!

Try googling for “Google Font API” for more information.

Or you could merely click this link.

Sweet.

I work on video and audio files fairly often using a variety of free tools. FFmpeg is particularly useful for modifying video, and this hints at some of the fun you can have when you combine it with ImageMagick.

How to layer/remix videos with free command line tools « The Broadcaster Project.