I don't believe in violence against computers...

Me: Comsol, why won't you simulate?

Comsol: You made a geometry error.

Me: No, I fixed all of those. We already went through the geometry.

Comsol: Well, you didn't assign a material to Domains 4 and 5.

Me: There are *no* Domains 4 and 5.

Comsol: Yes, there are! And you didn't assign them a material. How do you expect me to do my job when you don't assign a material to every domain?

Me: I really don't think there is a Domain 4, or 5. Can you show them to me?

Comsol: No! You should *know* where they are!

Me: I'm sorry, I just don't know where they are, or how you're finding them.

Comsol: Oh, so it's my problem? You don't like my simulations? Maybe I'll freeze up on you and let you take some time to think about how lucky you are to even have me. Most people would be really grateful for such expensive software.

Me: Maybe I'll just run this in FDTD and figure out the photonics. I can come back later for the electrical.

Comsol: I don't want you looking at other modeling software! I have all the physics you should ever need!

Reading creates a place in time

There's been a surge of decluttering in my life lately. Among other things, I have been sorting through my books and reading lists, crossing off books I've read and making sure they are present on the spreadsheet I've been keeping since middle school to document my bibliophilic triumphs. As I've looked back through the list, the strongest impressions I have are where I was when I was reading some of these books.

I remember reading Quicksilver by the pool on a cruise, although Eliza from System of the World is linked to my bedroom during grad school, where I read every night before bed. Books I wouldn't have remembered that I had read remind me that I read them and learned about social connectedness from Six Degrees primarily on the stationary bike during undergrad while I was dealing with knee injuries. And I have read an awful lot of books in airports, DTW in particular, it seems.

I don't know if this location associative memory is common for other people. Thinking about it, I realize it's quite distinct for me, even beyond my reading. When someone reminds me of a conversation, I frequently ask them where we were when we talked about it and that context triggers the entirety of the discussion. My best theory is that I've moved so many times that knowing where I was is almost as good as knowing when something happened. My next question is whether this will be an equally pronounced effect as I'm starting to switch to e-books.

Past self to future self

Joe Reddington wrote an interesting post about leaving notes for yourself to better appreciate various aspects of your life. He uses a google calendar email so he gets emails from himself at unexpected times. I have a page in one of my notebooks which I call "Notes to My Future Self."

My list is more practical: "F.S., you do not like the chai at Espresso Royale, you like their croissants." "Important! Do not apply bug spray within 8 hours of shaving legs!" I like the idea of expanding it for more kindness and appreciation, although it becomes less of a record and rather a series of moments rippling forward or backward along the time-stream of life.

Typing with The Time Machine

My university library has a spectacular collection of rare books and manuscripts, and I have taken some time to visit and read through the original, hand written drafts of H.G. Wells manuscripts of The Time Machine. It was amazing for many reasons, particularly my personal love for sci fi and the chance to have a few thousandths of an inch of mylar between me and the origin of some of the greatest sci fi classics. Hundreds of handwritten pages, drafts with notes and cross outs.

Handwriting is becoming an obscure art. I've found sending handwritten thank you notes has become such a novelty that I almost always get a note (usually email) in response. I like the speed of typing, but I know I process information recorded by hand very differently, it's even been shown to have an impact on memory retention and how well you learn. I'm also curious if handwriting versus typing has changed the authorship process.

It has certainly changed engineering. Drafting writing used to be a required course. Some of my grandfather's notebooks have lettering that is as uniform as a typed font. Now, engineering handwriting is so bad, it's considered a joke. In grad school, I was desperate to avoid a teaching assistantship that would require me to grade anyone's handwritten homework. Now we type everything else, and the biggest concern is selecting a font that is both appropriate and will help reach a page requirement.

Fonts have an interesting history. I like the quick overview from Thinking with Type (pdf). I think they also have a book, but it has more design focus than I'm interested in. I'm particularly intrigued by the convergence between handwriting and fonts. After reading the H.G. Wells manuscripts, I started a project on that convergence. The library has digitized many of the manuscripts in the collection. I downloaded several of those, and used them to find all the letters in the alphabet.


It's very easy to make a font from your own handwriting using tools like MyScriptFont. After collecting all the letters, I loaded them into their pdf template, uploaded it to the website, and got a new font back.



If I were going to do it over, I would have optimized the letter placement so the tails were aligned and the font looked more like cursive script. It was also a challenge to have a consistent darkness of the letters, and I ended up having to recolor a number of them to make sure the entire font was readable.

If you are interested in the font, you can download the .otf file here.

If you need instructions on how to load an .otf so you can use it on your computer, check out these instructions.

Drowning yourself

In September, I'm planning to run a half marathon at Smoky Mountains National Park. I've previously trained to run a half. The race was at the end of March, where most of my runs were on a 0.2 mile indoor track or through muddy/icy trails in Illinois. The race was also last March, and in the time since, I've evaluated my desire to ever run again and spent some time fiddling around in physical therapy.

So now, I'm training in the Texas heat. Not as humid as Illinois, but undeniably hotter. It is the first time in my life I have actually dripped sweat. Dripped from every possible edge of my body. Who drips sweat off their elbows? I had no idea that was possible. It reminds me very much of the Hyperbole and a Half tale of trying to run a race in Texas.

It's a situation in which I've found very rapid learning. After all, I get to iterate three to five times a week. Keeping water cool? Goes in a bottle with a cover so that the combined contribution of heat from my hands and the sweltering ambient are the slightest bit reduced. I've borrowed from the ladies of my high school soccer team, using vet wrap to make a head band. I'm just now adding a hat to my running attire, as well. 

More than anything else, I've learned to be appreciative of my eyebrows. I often wondered about the evolutionary function that has kept eyebrows around. Eyelashes clearly protect the eyeball, but eyebrows...? We're not cats, the eyebrows aren't whiskers helping me find my prey or alerting me to the impending annoyance of things touching my face. But running, dripping sweat, and sunscreen melting off...they are suddenly damns protecting my eyes from a blinding salt infused torment. I have undervalued them for far too long.

[1] Image from Aviator31

Purgatory

I think purgatory must be like driving through an endless parking garage in which every spot is taken and the corners are too tight for you to speed up. And just to really get you, every so often a spot is filled with a smart car parked as far forward as it can go.








[1] Image from: FlickrLickr

Orphan Black promoting clone sympathizers

This summer, I took some time partially off from grad school to plan experiments and write a couple papers. Most importantly, I got a change of scenery, and won't be on campus for about two months.

In my temporary summer of pseudo-leisure I have decided to come back to writing, but first I started and immediately finished watching the first season of Orphan Black. At the end of season one (yes, spoilers ahead) the set of clones decode a genetic marker and find an IP notice. Suddenly, this cohort of characters that I agonized with for ten episodes were the physical property of a corporation that was also trying to subdue them.

Worrying about the orphans' plight is a nice substitute for the harder questions about the rights actually entitled to sentient and self-aware beings. We have a terrible dilemma when addressing traits that fall along a spectrum. Crows can solve problems, monkeys examine implants on their heads when presented with a mirror, and we have all kinds of dilemmas about what will constitute an artificial intelligence. I don't have any real doubt that eventually we'll deal with human clones, or computer based intelligence. At what point is ownership of such an entity "inhumane"? What if it's a copy of your consciousness? (Check out Mindscan while you're thinking about your alternate selves.)

Interesting decisions have already been made, too. RadioLab produced a show about how there is already a court-case ruling that mutants are not humans to allow cheaper imports on X-men toys. GMO is hotly contested...do we treat glowing fish and bananas that vaccinate kids the same as higher producing crops or German Shepherds that are bred to minimize hip defects? How about in vitro fertilization? Or the use of a third party egg to eliminate mitochondrial disorders that would be passed on to offspring? Where do all these things fall on the spectrum of ethics, technology and wonder?

I read Agent to the Stars a couple years ago and loved the idea of a Hollywood agent becoming responsible for the introduction of an alien race to humanity. As he stated, there have been too many movies with aliens as bad guys, they have a terrible image. I wonder if the same could be done for AI or clones? Is Orphan Black trying to soothe our fears of Storm Troopers, or Oblivion-esque maintanence duplicates? Maybe our shared outrage with Sarah and Cosima when their decoding interface announces their lack of legal standing is an early step towards our future empathy with clones?

A beautiful day in the neighborhood

There's a park about two towns away from me. I run there pretty much every weekend I'm in town, and when I'm training for anything, it's usually where I do my long runs.

However, after two weeks in Australia, and confounding factors for several weekends on either end of the trip, I haven't been to Lake of the Woods in easily six weeks. It feels like fall just happened there. Sections of the prairie have been mowed down. The birds, which were looking so bright and spiffy during spring and summer when they were eager to impress the ladies, are a little dreary and starting to pack on their winter weight.

Other things are brighter, the milkweed is starting to seed, and there's plants covered with milkweed bugs, from squishy early instars of their life, up to full grown bugs. Some of the pods have split open, and the perfect fish scale patterns of their seeds are showing, or the silk is leaking out of the pods, begging to be touched.

Some stretches of grass were swarmed with grasshoppers. As I ran, I flushed dozens out with every step, flying in all directions and sometimes crashing into me as I went.

It was the most sensory hour of my recent life. Even though I work with things in the nanoscale every day, it felt like a totally different flavor of detail to experience the world in. It was like seeing the park for the first time, but still knowing my way well enough to not worry where I was going.

Entrepreneurial approaches to research

I listened to The Lean Startup a while back. I never finished it, but I got far enough to listen to the section on small batch testing. The key concept is that, although it seems counter-intuitive, it's better to move a product all the way through processing rather than moving an entire batch through each individual stage.

I had a frustrating encounter that showed the advantage of this methodology when doing a set of measurements on my latest samples. I recently built an automated testing setup that reduces testing time from a day to several minutes, and provides much higher resolution in the outputs.

It was great. I could do measurements so fast, it was easier to stay in the lab, and then post-process all the data later. In that post-processing, I found some element in the setup wasn't quite aligned, and the data was coming out hinky.

Had I tested and processed each device in series, it would have been obvious within one or two sets of measurements that all was not well, and the dozens of other data sets wouldn't have been wasted. An interesting crossover from a most irksome experience.

Paper cranes reach the final frontier

Last week Robert J. Lang gave a talk for the computer science department at my university. He has a Ted Talk that presented a very accessible version of his talk to a lay audience, versus the emphasis on algorithm development and its applications to origami that he shared with us on Wednesday.

I've always preferred modular origami and tessellations  I found the symmetry and elegance much more immediate, and I loved seeing how repeating units could be built up:

I haven't done much origami in years, except the occasional piece as a gift or decoration for someone. However, seeing the interface between algorithm, art, and engineering that Lang presented (like the up and coming Eyeglass Telescope, or Miura's folding solar panel for Japanese satellite) refreshed my interest. I need to see if I still have paper around...

What can a student say to Congress about engineering education?

One of my projects over the last several months has been organizing a small delegation of undergraduate students from the university IEEE section to attend the Congressional Visits Day in Washington, DC. CVD is an opportunity for technical professionals to speak to their representatives about the importance of funding education and research in science, engineering and technology fields.

I attended a couple years ago, and I was struck that the bulk of participants were men, either in senior positions in their careers or retired. I think that's a strong demographic to speak on the need for developing engineers and technical capability, but I think it's important for students, actively engaged in their engineering education, to speak up about their experiences. The first hand perspective of someone going through an engineering curriculum offers an insight into what students are experiencing now, rather than a rehash of more, shall we say, historic time frames.

Another reason I think taking the students is to make sure they're exposed to the realities outside their field. In the 112th Congressional Class, there are six engineers and three other scientists out of all the representatives on the Hill, and they're all in the House. That's the same number of accountants, and less than a third of the lawyers. (Stats here.) Without no science background, there's a tremendous amount of information that's easy to glaze over and misunderstand. As engineers, we have a responsibility to look at the factors that feed our technical capacity and recognize the impact that decisions for the short term will have years down the line. We need to make the technological contributions accessible and show the impact clearly, in terms of jobs, money and the metrics that our representatives are interested in.

IEEE has some great resources, and I'm pleased that the students I took did so well. However, the budget changes every year, and things only seem to be getting more expensive. It's critical to remember that this isn't a one-shot effort.

 

Firefly butts for better plasma screens...

As I've been continuously aggregating prior art and other background information for my research, I've really enjoyed tracking one specific thread on biomimicry and bioinspiration. A couple of my favorites:

Fish cloaking - Some silver scaled fish have crystals inside their scales which affect how light reflects off their bodies, making them much harder for predators to see.

Firefly lanterns - The pattern of a firefly "lantern" (the apparently correct name for glowing insectoid hindquarters) couples light out very effectively, and might make LEDs and displays more efficient.

Butterfly scales - More well known...the scales of butterfly wings are capable of incredible color mixing.

Valentine's Day Heart

I'm not much of a Valentine's Day person, but I gave it a shot this year, knitting the stylized anatomical heart by Kristen Ledgett at Knitty.

It took about a day, while I was reading/reviewing papers to make my qualifying exam presentation, and I am rather pleased with how it turned out.

 I wish the valves were a little more visible on this picture, but the variegated yarn makes for poor contrast.

Evolution of Language: The Good, The Bad and The Annoying

As a relatively loyal Linux user, I had never heard the term "Apple Ecosystem" until just a few weeks ago. Recently, though, it's been coming up constantly. Every time I hear it, I feel like Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."  

Generally, I enjoy the fluidity and adaptability of language, American English in particular. I didn't realize how amazing this is until I was in Mallorca for a conference. We had a local tour guide for a day, and someone recommended that she "google" something. She commented how much she liked how we could make new words as needed in English, and that she didn't think it was as common in Spanish.

However, I don't think absconding with a word and diluting the incredible complexity associated with it, as in the case of the new 'ecosystem', has any additive value to the language. And it drives me crazy.

Nerdy Delicious

During Christmas break, I spent several days in Denver, and stumbled on a really fun little place called Euclid's in LoDo.

Happy hour is called study hall and the beer menu is categorized by complexity, with each level labeled as a different kind of math! Normal restaurant review things like food and service were also outstanding.

It was an excellent find.

Reflect from a distance

During a summer of undergrad research, the student who was training me left for three weeks to go to Japan. Our project was not in its most successful phase and the industry PI had been increasingly merciless in hounding this student. Upon returning from Japan, he seemed unruffled by the external hazing we were receiving, a dramatic shift from his extreme distress regarding the PI and project even as he left the lab to drive to the airport.

I attributed it to the relaxation of a vacation, but he told me that whenever you have to make important decisions or solve hard problems, you need to get away from it for a little while. You can see things from a different perspective, let your mind work in the background, and be away from the immediate environmental pressures associated with whatever you're trying to sort out.

I try to take a least one big trip a year, just to invite a little perspective shift in. I particularly like it around the new year, where I can look at bigger pictures goals without being distracted by the small things that become clutter in your life at home.

How do you know an extroverted engineer?

He looks at your shoes when he talks to you.

Engineer jokes abound for a reason. I think we get trained to think in math and look at everything as a problem to be solved. Plus we seem to have a lot of introverts. A lot of the time most people spent practicing social interaction, we spent hanging out in our heads and never finessed the people skill set. Personally, I think we hang our old posters up in academic buildings so we can look at something besides the other people in the hall as we walk by them.

However, yesterday I walked across the engineering quad and was looking at someone who had a sweatshirt I liked. In that awkward moment when he realized I was staring, instead of the standard everyone-looks-away or the territorial stare-down, he just smiled and everyone's day carried on a little more smoothly. Now, to implement a new interaction algorithm!

Hiatus-ish

With semester starting, my attempts to make updates on my projects here became amazingly abortive. A few things that I think are of note, with updates to follow:

• Note taking and textbooks on a tablet
• Learning vector calculus - kind of like learning another language
• Calculating my physical displacement - very eureka! 

Hanging out with the Higgs

When a world megaproject creates one of the most expensive scientific instruments of all time, a lot of attention seems an understandable result. The CERN quest for the Higgs boson has certainly garnered a lot of attention, and not just in the scientific community.

Commentary has come from many sources (my favorite being The Onion explanation of the LHC or the "$50 Billion Science Thing"). Even Dilbert got on board:

The Higgs-bleed through into culture has shown up in fiction, satire and television. 

Alpinekat made a rap explaining the fundamentals of the epic scientific endeavor several years ago, which I love sharing. 

Most recently, someone sent me a video of the sonification (translating measured data into sounds) of the Higgs-Boson. For more explanation, including the sheet music, check out the article Higgs the musical.

What's the most probable sorority/fraternity?

Using the list of the fraternities and sororities on North-American Interfraternity Conference and the National Panhellenic Conference wikipedia pages I did a quick and dirt frequency analysis (more commonly used for cryptography/code breaking).

Apparently for a sorority AΔΣ is the combination of the most popular letters, while ΔΣΦ takes it for the frats.