Bullet Lead Analysis

Recently, it has come to light that one of the forensics techniques used to tie people to crimes is totally bogus [sciencenews.org].

In certain crimes, the bullet fragments found at the crime scene are too damaged to use traditional, reliable methods to determine which gun they were fired from, etc. So, the FBI turned to a technique called bullet lead analysis:

"The traditional reasoning has been that if two bullets are chemically indistinguishable, they probably came from the same pot of molten lead at the smelter or were manufactured on the same day by the same company. In court testimonies, FBI examiners have gone so far as to say that two chemically indistinguishable bullets probably came from the same box of ammunition."

The problem, as stated before, is that this technique is not backed by any science. Studies were done, in which the following conclusions were drawn:

"The composition of castings from a single pot sometimes varied, while the composition of lead in different pots sometimes matched. That meant that bullets made from two different batches of lead could wrongly appear to have come from the same pot."

This technique has been used in criminal trials for decades. The bottom line is that in many cases, bullet lead analysis may have been the only "concrete" evidence used to convict a suspect.

Body Blading

One of the things that I was able to do last weekend (one of the first relaxing weekends in a long time), was catch up on all of the YouTube videos I have wanted to watch.

One of the videos I found was of body blading:



Essentially, a guy gets dressed up in a suit that has tons of in-line roller skate wheels, so that in virtually any position, he will be supported by the wheels. That way, he can head-first luge down a road... without the luge. It's pretty amazing.

Near the beginning of the run, the guy has to make a pretty tight turn, and he uses some ridiculous slip angles to generate the necessary cornering force. You can actually see material being left on the road from the wheels as he drifts through the turn.

Near the end, there is a tunnel section that totally reminds me of an infamous level in Test Drive 5 [wikipedia.org] (a.k.a. the best driving game EVAR). And my favorite part of the video is where he blows by a motorcyclist.

European Lodging

Last week [fluggart.com], I mentioned that we had booked our flights to Europe.

What I didn't mention is that we ended up figuring out that buying a packaged deal (flights+hotel) ended up saving us a few hundred dollars over buying flights and hotel rooms separately.

Not only did it save us a little money, but it also gave me the peace of mind of knowing where I was going to be sleeping. Remember, the last time I toured Europe without booking hotel or hostel rooms in advance, Heimlich and I ended up having to sleep in a fire escape in Vienna.

Traveling with Heimlich is never boring, let me tell you...

Motorhome Racing

Here's one of the funniest YouTube videos I have seen in a long time:



The deal is that some people get the idea to try to put together a motorhome racing league. You know, those huge land yachts? The idea being that most auto racers have a motorhome anyway, which they sleep in when they are traveling to and from races. So, why not just race the motorhome that they're bringing anyway?

In the course of things, they end up rewriting all of the rules that they wrote before the actual racing began...

Holiday Tipping

I overheard a conversation the other day, in which the subject of holiday tipping was brought up.

Holiday tipping?

Ok, I can understand that if you personally have "employees" (a regular limo driver, a housekeeper, a nanny, etc), that you would want to give them a Christmas bonus. Obviously though, I'm not a Rockefeller, and the closest thing I have to an employee is the neighbor's dog, which I am slowly training to steal other people's papers...

But I was intrigued, so I did some research, and found some lists of people you are supposed to give holiday tips to [cnn.com]. Really? I'm supposed to give my manicurist a holiday tip? Who knew?

Actually, being the rube that I am, I did not know that I was supposed to give my hair-cutter a holiday tip. That is interesting.

Tickets to Berlin

So, we finally booked the tickets for our trip to Berlin! We have been talking about it for almost a year now, and finally pulled the trigger, so we'll be going next year.

Heimlich and I seem to do everything on a very long time scale. It's almost always a year between the time when we decide to do something, and when we actually do it. Part of the reason for the huge delay was making sure that we got everything at the lowest price possible.

Going through all of the permutations of buying plane tickets through search engines or through each individual airline's website was very tedious. It was also a moving target, since the prices changed by a surprising amount week-to-week. It was also made more complicated by the huge number of options that we had. We could have found the cheapest tickets to London or Amsterdam, then flown a low-cost carrier to Berlin. Or we could have flown to another German airport and taken a train the rest of the way. Plus, we were somewhat flexible on dates. The number of permutations was staggering.

We are really excited, though. And we can't wait to go. Earlier this year, I visited Berlin for the first time, and I only got to spend a day there. So, it wasn't really enough time to see much of anything. It was just enough to give me a taste of what I could see if I had more time to spare. So, I am really eager to go back.

Weekend Mechanics, Part 2

Being a weekend mechanics has just given me a great idea for a TV show.

All you would have to do is take a couple of people with wildly-overpriced educations, hand them tools and watch them attempt to fix stuff on their cars.

Having a show where you are guaranteed to see someone get hit in the face with brake fluid, etc every episode would just be pure comedy gold.

It would even be funnier if they had contestants with actual technical achievements in their career. You know:

"The next contestant has a PhD in Astro-Physics. He was the first person to identify an extra-solar planet and pioneered new techniques in radio telescope interferometry. Now let's watch as he tries to figure out how to use a wrench..."

Weekend Mechanics

One of our friends owns a fleet of cars that would put some of the smaller car rental offices to shame. This weekend, I'll be attempting to teach him how to change the oil in a car.

It's going to be like the blind leading the blind.

Seriously, this has all of the makings of a future posting on Fark [fark.com]:


"See, after you get the car jacked up, you take this wrench-thing and remove the hooby (which is the technical term for whatever this thing is)..." I would video tape everything, but I'm afraid that it would become evidence.

At least I know not to try to use a shotgun to remove the lug nuts [yahoo.com].

Are We Being Watched by Flying Robot Insects?

I keep seeing links to articles written by alarmists. Many speculate about the latest robotics projects DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is currently working on, or whether we're already being watched by flying robot insects [typepad.com].

I suspect that most of us would be horrified if we really knew what was state of the art.

There have been a lot of articles in the press about the latest crop of robotic insects that are being developed (such as the one at the Harvard Microrobotics Lab [harvard.edu], or the one being developed at Berkeley [berkeley.edu]). Here's one of the articles [economist.com] that I was speaking of. Many articles cite the difficulty of generating sufficient lift from flapping wings, or getting the right motion to utilize phenomenons such as wake capture or delayed stall (you can't just flap wing-like things up and down and expect to generate lift).

But most people probably don't know that the problem has already been mostly solved. The CIA's Office of Research and Development created an autonomous flying insect robot that was literally the same size as a dragonfly. It carried its own fuel, and could be directed by a human operator. It was called the "insectothopter", and it was developed in the 1970s. It is now sitting in a display case at CIA headquarters (which I have actually seen). Here is an article [boston.com] that mentions its existence. I wonder what has been done in the 30 years since...

My Youthful Look

I constantly have a problem with people under-estimating my age. Apparently, I look way younger than I actually am.

Into my mid-twenties, I constantly got carded while trying to get into R-rated movies, while my companions (who were the same age) were not.

Now that I have a job out in the real world, I am constantly being shocked by people asking if I'm in college. I have a post-graduate degree. I have been making real money for a few years now. How young could I possibly look?

Is it my total lack of facial hair? Do I dress like a teeny-bopper or something? Is it the massive quantity of hair gel that I use? Am I really that convincing at acting like a juvenile?

Synthetic Motor Oil

Last week, I went to a lecture being hosted by the Cleveland section of the Society of Automotive Engineers (of which I am a member). The topic of the lecture was motor oil, and why there are so many varieties.

Of particular interest to me and many of the other attendants was whether synthetic oil was really better for your car than conventional oil. The lecturer went through all of the components of motor oil, from the base oil to all of the additives. Motor oils have all kinds of additives in them to reduce friction, change viscosity, and a ton of other things...

Basically, the take home message that I received was that the base oil in synthetic motor oils is superior to that in conventional oils for resisting volatility and breakdown in high temperature applications. However, the additives in synthetics are consumed at the same rate. And because the maximum quantity of additives is regulated, they will be consumed in the same amount of time, regardless of whether you use synthetic or conventional motor oil.

The bottom line being that if you switch your car over to synthetic motor oil, you cannot go longer in between oil changes.

Automedia has an article about synthetic motor oil that basically says the same thing. Unfortunately, it is difficult to separate a lot of facts from myths about synthetics, because a lot of the information is put out there by the oil companies, who have a vested interest in convincing consumers to pay more.

MP3 Player Preset Buttons

One feature I would like to have on my MP3 player are preset buttons.

When you are listening to the radio, you have all of these preset buttons
that you can use to change the channel. That is convenient to have in the
car, because if you get sick of one genre, you can always instantly switch
to another one.

You can't really do that with an MP3 player now, though. Let's say that
I'm driving down the road, and I'm listening to my 80gigs of 80's hair band
music. But for whatever reason, I want to switch over to my collection of
hard-core gangsta rap (queue image of Michael Bolton in Office Space). I
can't really do that without taking my eyes off the road. Some players
have shortcuts that you can customize, but they still are still not in the
same league of usability as the preset buttons on a radio.

Ideally, what I would like to see are dedicated buttons that are totally
customizable. Then I could set it so that when I hit soft button #1, a
particular playlist starts playing in shuffle mode. And no matter what
mode the player is in, when I hit button #2, it starts playing a particular
genre on shuffle. And when I hit button #3, it should start playing a
particular folder in a non-shuffle mode. Having presets would make an MP3
player far easier to use in the car, because you could switch what you are
listening to quickly and easily, with minimal distraction.

Defroster without A/C

My 2002 Acura RSX-S is a little quirky. For instance, whenever you turn the knob to make the heating or air conditioning air come out of the vents on the top of the dashboard, the A/C is automatically kicked on. There are plenty of times when I want air to hit the windshield, but don't want the A/C on. For instance, there are some days when I am worried about the window fogging up, but it is warm enough to have the windows open.

I finally found a page where someone described the process to get the defogger on without the A/C:

• Turn the car off.


• Turn temperature knob to full blue (all the way to the left - counter-clockwise).


• Turn vent knob to off (all the way to the left - counter-clockwise). Make sure the vent knob is in the face position - NOT the auto position.


• Hold down air recirculation button as well as A/C button.


• Keep both buttons depressed and start car.


• Keep both buttons depressed for 7 seconds.


• The A/C light should blink.

Voila! I am copying it here so that I can find it the next time I need it. I wish that car manufacturers would stop adding useless features that owners have to spend lots of time trying to figure out how to defeat.

Saying No to the Vet

On rebecca's pocket [rebeccablood.net] I saw a link to an article on the Slate about how verterinarians are increasingly pushing services, vaccinations, etc. causing pet health care costs to rival those of people.

"Dr. James Busby, a 67-year-old veterinarian in Bemidji, Minn., sees things differently. He's the kind of curmudgeonly realist of a vet you don't find in the hyper-attentive yuppie neighborhood where I live. Busby has become so fed up with his profession the he has self-published a book, How To Afford Veterinary Care Without Mortgaging the Kids. He writes that he has had a satisfying 40-year career, 'but sadly, I would never enter the profession today, if I had to practice the way things are currently done.' He sees too many vets who try to 'push as many procedures and services … as the pet owner will tolerate, in order to generate as large a cash return as possible.'"

I think that the parallels between verterinarians and auto mechanics is interesting. When some sleazy mechanic is trying to convince you that you "really need" a radiator flush or whatever, it is hard for many people to say no. I would imagine that it would be even harder to say no to any portion of your doggie's health care. I think that one of the problems is that verterinarians are assumed to be held to the same standards, ethics, and regulations as regular doctors -- but they're not. But it is so easy for them to prey on human emotion.

Match Game

One of the things that I keep threatening to do is to host a match game [wikipedia.org] with some of our friends. You know, that game where people have to try to guess their partner's answers to questions like, "What does your partner do that most annoys you?", or "Which of your body parts would you most like to change?", or "What was your last fight with your partner about?". I think that it would be hilarious, given our group of friends.

I think that Heimlich and I would be screwed, though. There is no way that we would win. Part of the problem are questions like, "What is your favorite food?" Heimlich can never keep track of the things that I eat, because I will sometimes refuse to eat things that I loved the month before. There is no consistency to the things that I eat, which understandably drives her nuts.

Another major part of the equation is that I have the worst memory ever.

DARPA Urban Challenge

Well, the DARPA Urban Challenge is over [theregister.co.uk] and the winner (Carnegie Mellon) has been announced. The DARPA Urban Challenge was a competition between teams developing autonomous cars that have to run around in an urban environment, obeying traffic laws, interacting with other vehicles, and planning and replanning their routes without human guidance or intervention.

It has been a little difficult getting detailed information. I am interested because my PhD adviser has been involved, along with several of my former co-workers. Team Case apparently did not get selected from the National Qualifying Event to go to the finals. I caught this interesting little blurb [wired.com] on Wired about what happened to them:

"It was a case of too much work, too little sleep, and too much voltage that nearly doomed Team Case's entry in the DARPA Urban Challenge. One team member accidentally connected 24-volt laser range finders belonging to the team's robot dune buggy, named Dexter, into a 48-volt power supply, frying them instantly."

"Dexter is the only car in the race without any seating for humans, and it's the only one to be built from the ground up as a robot car. It made a good showing in the 2005 Grand Challenge, covering 81 miles of the 132-mile course for Team ENSCO before a blown tire forced it out."

The blog on Wired [wired.com] actually has had the most detailed information that I have been able to find on the event.

Pub Crawling is Back!

A few years ago, I took over as the organizer of the Cleveland Oasis Club, which was a pub crawling group. I organized pub crawls for a few years until I unsuccessfully attempted to transition everything over to a new organizer. Since then, there haven't been any pub crawls in the Cleveland area.

Well, the pub crawls are back [clevelandoasisclub.net]. A group of friends of mine have put it back together, and their first crawl will be this Saturday, in Willoughby.

View Larger Map

1. 8pm - Willoughby Brewing Company
   4057 Erie St., Willoughby
   (440) 975-0202


2. 9pm - Ballentine
   4113 Erie Street, Willoughby
   440-942-5151


3. 10pm - 1899
   38228 Glenn Ave, Willoughby
   (440) 269-1899


4. 11pm - Friend’s Cafe
   4131 Erie St, Willoughby
   (440) 918-9100


5. midnight - Mullarkey’s
   4110 Erie St, Willoughby
   (440) 946-7181


6. 1am - Frank and Tony’s
   38107 2nd St, Willoughby
   (440) 602-9780

Heimlich and I won't be able to make this one, but we're not missing the next one. That one will be in December in the Warehouse District.