The Race to Save the Cougar Ace

Recently, I read a pretty amazing article about a team of people who rush in to save abandoned, damaged ships [wired.com]. The article follows the team through a job. There is a damaged ship that is severly listing in the middle of the Pacific. It is full of brand-new cars. They will get a percentage of the value of the cargo if they can prevent the ship from sinking, right it, and get it back to port. If they fail, they get nothing.

All they do is big-money, big-risk operations. And one crew member died in the process of this job. Here's a quote:

Titan's business plan hinged on the idea that ships could be saved by human ingenuity, not horsepower, and the company's unconventional approach worked... ...Titan won [a 1992] contract by proposing a novel approach: It hired a naval architect to create a computer model of the ship. The model indicated that the vessel would float again if water was pumped out of the holds in a specific sequence. Titan put the plan into action using a few crates of relatively inexpensive pumps; the ship bobbed to the surface as if by magic. Since then, a naval architect capable of rapidly building digital 3-D ship models has been a key member of the Titan team.

The amount of ingenuity they display is amazing. It's the kind of job that I would dream about (but would never want, in actuality) -- using mountain climbing gear to maneuver around ships, using computer models to form a solution, and racing against time to get the job done.

The article is complete with several interesting pictures of the job.

On-Line Dating Fraud

Recently, I saw a link to an article about on-line dating fraud [cnn.com].


The jist of it is that there is a growing problem with people finding suckers on the internet, form what the victim thinks is a deep, loving relationship, and then convince the victim to send them money. Here's a quote from the article:

"Barb Sluppick runs RomanceScams.org, a Web site dedicated to helping victims of romance fraud, like herself. She said the site has had more than 30,000 members since its start in June 2005.

"The number of broken hearts aside, romance fraud costs victims millions of dollars each year. Of her 30,000 members, Sluppick said, 883 people have reported their financial losses. They add up to $8,244,800.05, she said."

I was actually fascinated when reading the article. Just another reason why I would never be a good criminal -- I just don't have the creativity to come up with an idea like this.

On the other hand, I think that it is surprising that it is so easy to convince people to send money to a person they have never met in real life.

Picture courtesy of Thomas Hawk's Flickr photostream [flickr.com].

Unrecognizably Old

Eve had a response [dreamingheart.net] to the old college pictures that I posted last week. Her comment about the way we looked in college was:

"The girls look dated (clothes, hair), but they don't look so young. The guys, they look like boys."

I totally agree. It must be that guys go through a lot more physical change than women do at that age. And just to throw her under the bus, here's a college picture that she was in back in '95:


In this picture, everyone is piled onto my lofted bed, which I had the brilliant idea of putting in the middle of our dorm room (as opposed to against a wall). It turns out that having both sides of a lofted bed open is really bad, after you have had, say, 20 shots of Firewater [internetwines.com].

Someone else I know made a comment that guys eventually age to the point where you can't recognize them in college pictures anymore. And I'm not talking about when we reach our 60s or 70s. I'm talking about in our 40s.

In other words, we all reach the age where we are unrecognizably old -- where people, who didn't know you back then, can't identify a picture of you earlier in adulthood.

College Pictures, Part 2

As long as I've started this trip down memory lane, why don't I share a few more pictures?


As I mentioned before, I was on the varsity fencing team. Here is a picture of me fencing at a tournament (I'm on the left -- the one with the horrible form). Right at this moment, I am probably screaming, "Arrrrr, ye scurvy dog!"

It's hard to see, but there is a piece of metal (called a bell guard) above your weapon hand that protects your hand from getting hit by your opponent's weapon. IIRC, this was one of those tournaments where I discovered (the hard way), how much it hurts to get hit in the face with a bell guard. See Sabre fencing [wikipedia.org] for more information.

The thing that we're standing on is a metal mat, by the way. The weapons have sensors to detect if you have scored a hit or not. Many weapons need to be able to differentiate between a hit on the ground and a hit on an opponent's foot or leg. The metal mat performs that function, by grounding the weapon if it touches the floor.


Here's a picture of me (on the left) with our rat pack. It was great except that none of us could ever get a date. EVER. It's hard to say whether the inordinate amount of video game-playing were a cause or an effect of that.

Thank goodness we all learned to be better dressers...

College Pictures, part 1

My post about the reunion yesterday caused me to dig through mountains of crap to find my pictures from my college days. And what I found was hilarious. Apparently, 10 years ago, my group of friends were really into bands like Soul Coughing [wikipedia.org]. I was doing tons of mountain-biking, and I was on the varsity fencing squad (sabre, baby!).


Above is a picture of me (on the right) and Birch [livejournal.com] while on a trip with the fencing team. Not only was I considerably lighter, but I had this idiotic idea to cut my hair really short, which made me look frightening similar to pictures of my father when he was in the military.


Above is a picture featuring The Bearman and Adam [livejournal.com]. They were hanging out in my dorm room. I made sure to crop all of my Star Trek posters out of the picture...


And finally, I won't embarrass these individuals by identifying them. But the picture was taken around our bomb- and riot-proof dorms, a short 2-mile walk to classes (uphill in snow both ways...).

10-Year College Reunion

I have started getting informational material from the Case alumni association about the 10-year reunion. Evidently, there will be many activities on Friday, May 16, and Saturday, May 17, including tours of the new fancy-schmantzy dorms and labs. And there will be a big banquet at the Intercontinental Hotel.

The informational material points to http://www.casealum.org/, but I haven't been able to get any other useful information from that site, because it uses flash and pop-ups (both of which I refuse to unblock on my computer).

Anyway, I know a lot of my former classmates read this from time to time. Right now, I am leaning towards not participating. But if anyone is planning to go, please let me know (apparently, I would only be interested if I'm going to see people I am still in contact with anyway).

Cornell Ranger Walking Robot

I recently saw a story on the Cornell Ranger robot: Cornell robot sets a record for distance walking [cornell.edu]. From the article:

...the Cornell Ranger robot just kept going and going April 3 when it set an unofficial world record by walking nonstop for 45 laps -- a little over 9 kilometers or 5.6 miles -- around the Barton Hall running track.

As a former researcher in the field of walking robots, I concur that it is quite an accomplishment.

There are plenty of walking robots out there like the Honda Asimo [honda.com], or the Sony robots [google.com], plus the countless others that have never left the laboratory. One of the chief architects behind the Cornell Ranger robot, professor Andy Ruina, is trying to prove a point to the rest of the robotics world -- most roboticists are doing it wrong, and the evidence is in the enormous power consumption of existing robots.

When people walk, they swing their legs freely. It doesn't take an enormous amount of energy to swing your leg into position for the next step, or even to support your body with one leg. But if you look at walking robots today, most of them do the equivalent of tensing up all of their muscles to swing a leg into position for the next step. It is questionable whether these robots will ever become practical to perform every day tasks due to the power consumption.

Ruina's lab is producing robots, such as Ranger, that take advantage of natural dynamics to allow walking with a minimum of energy consumption.

A Thousand Splendid Suns

While I was up at the 2008 SAE World Congress this week, I finished reading A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini [amazon.com]. Hosseini was the author who also wrote The Kite Runner [amazon.com].


The Kite Runner focused on the ethnic divisions among the people of Afghanistan, and how those divisions have shaped Afghani life. In particular, he focused on the Hazaras, which is an ethnic group that has many parallels to the Kurds or the Palestinians.

In A Thousand Splendid Suns, ethnic divisions take a back seat as he describes the lives of two women, and how women were affected not only by the Soviet invasion and the coming of the Taliban, but also how women's rights differed by geographical area.

I think that Hosseini has a real gift with storytelling. I bail out of about half of the books I try to read in the first 100 pages or so. This book is similar to the Kite Runner in that the story it contains is interesting on several levels. He includes enough detail that the characters seem real and identifiable with. He wraps in tons of details about Afghani culture and life in such a subtle way that you are not even aware how much you are learning. And he doesn't rely upon contrived suspense (as in books by Dan Brown, like the Da Vinci Code [amazon.com]) in order to keep the reader hooked.

Picture of A Thousand Splendid Suns via mamichan's Flickr photostream.

Game Show Problem Applications

So, I've posted [fluggart.com] about The Monte Hall Problem [wikipedia.org] before. This is the counter-intuitive problem where you have the choice between a bunch doors, and no one ever believes that there is a strategy that will allow you to win more often then just choosing randomly.

I recently saw a New York Times article [nytimes.com] showing an application of this problem in real life. Honestly! Here's a quote from the article:

"The Yale psychologists first measured monkeys' preferences by observing how quickly each monkey sought out different colors of M&Ms. After identifying three colors preferred about equally by a monkey — say, red, blue and green — the researchers gave the monkey a choice between two of them."

"If the monkey chose, say, red over blue, it was next given a choice between blue and green. Nearly two-thirds of the time it rejected blue in favor of green, which seemed to jibe with the theory of choice rationalization: Once we reject something, we tell ourselves we never liked it anyway (and thereby spare ourselves the painfully dissonant thought that we made the wrong choice)."

"But Dr. Chen says that the monkey’s distaste for blue can be completely explained with statistics alone..."

"If so, then the monkey’s choice of red over blue wasn’t arbitrary. Like Monty Hall’s choice of which door to open to reveal a goat, the monkey’s choice of red over blue discloses information that changes the odds."

More Matlab Gripes

Ok, here's another gripe that I have about Matlab (at least, the older version that I own and use). Let's say that you want to plot two sets of data, so you write a simple script:


The output from this script is the following plot:


If you look at the manfile for linespec (which define properties for things like lines in plots), you will find the following pre-defined colors that are available to use.


So, let's say that you use the same script, but want to specify the colors. One would reasonably expect that the pre-defined green in linespec is the same as the green that is used by default in plots. But it's not. Let's say you run the same script, but specify that one line should be blue and one line should be green:


You will get the following plot:


Not only is the green a different color, but it's a color that often does not show up well when shown on a projector. So, the result is that you have to constantly define your own custom colors if you want to specify line colors in scripts (if you care about people being able to read them, that is).

Red Sox Fans Try to Jinx New Yankee Stadium

Over the weekend, I saw this news article: Yanks unearth Sox jersey at new stadium [yahoo.com]. Apparently, during the construction of the new Yankee stadium, a construction worker (who is a Red Sox fan) threw a Red Sox jersey into the concrete being poured.

Here's a quote from the article:

"Team officials watched Sunday as construction workers removed the jersey, with slugger David Ortiz's name on it, from 2 feet of concrete in a service corridor of the stadium that's under construction."

"The team says a construction worker — who is a Red Sox fan — recently buried the jersey there while on the job."

"The Yankees plan to donate the jersey to charity, and may pursue a lawsuit against the construction worker."

A lawsuit? I can't wait to hear this one...

Lawyer:	"Your honor, this construction worker attempted to jinx the New York Yankees..."
Judge:	"This has to be the most asinine lawsuit I have ever heard. How could a group of grown men believe in jinxes in the first place? I'm sure that garbage and all kinds of other crap finds its way into concrete at construction sites all of the time. Get out of my sight, all of you..."

Space Shuttle Prep

On kottke.org, I recently saw a link to a series of images [bmwsporttouring.com] showing how the space shuttle is prepared for launch. It includes a lot of pictures from the Vertical Assembly Building that I found very interesting.


The link contains about 40 images, starting with the arrival of the external fuel tank, to the attachment of the rocket motors and the shuttle module, through the cargo prep, to the launch. Fascinating.

Conference Peer Review Systems

I am becoming increasingly frustrated with the peer-review systems that are used by major conferences and journals.

Let's say that you write an article or a paper, and submit it to a technical conference or a journal. Copies of your manuscript will then go out to other researchers in the same field, who evaluate the work, decide whether or not it should be accepted, and suggest (or mandate) changes that should be made to the manuscript before it is published.

The idea is good, because only people who are doing research in a similar field of study are going to be qualified to fully understand what is contained in the manuscript and evaluate the quality of the research.

The problem is that by definition, other people in a similar field of study are your competitors. They are competing with you for funding from government agencies, publications, recognition in the field, etc.

Increasingly, what I have seen is that the comments coming back from reviewers are suggestions to cite certain papers or works. And although the identities of the reviewers aren't known, it appears that most reviewers are suggesting that authors cite works that they (the reviewers) have published in the past. Papers that are cited more often gain recognition in the field (along with their authors), so people are definitely motivated to try to get their works cited as much as possible.

It seems to me that the peer-review system is broken (or is, at least, close to being broken). Instead of receiving constructive comments, authors now seem to be receiving a lot more requirements to cite particular works. I'm not sure if I perceive the increase of this problem because I was much more naive a few years ago, or because the types of conferences and journals I have been submitting manuscripts has changed over the years.

But I'm not sure what the solution is. It is a hard sell to convince journals and conferences to police their reviewers, since 1) these organizations are already overworked as it is, and 2) reviewers are difficult to find.

Akron Proposal to Bridgestone/Firestone

A few months ago [fluggart.com], I posted that Bridgestone Firestone was trying to decide what to do with its North American technical center. The three options that are currently on the table are: an extensive renovation of the current facilities, building a brand-new facility in Akron, OH (where it is currently located), or building a brand-new facility near Nashville (where the corporate headquarters for the North American division are located). The decision is to be announced later this year.

While we were in Berlin, it was announced that the city of Akron (together with the county and state) has presented its proposal [ohio.com] for incentives to be given to Bridgestone Firestone to keep its technical center in Akron. Here are some selected quotes from the article:

"State of Ohio, Akron and Summit County officials made an estimated $68 million pitch Wednesday to persuade Bridgestone Firestone Inc. to keep its technical center and 600-plus high-paying jobs in the city."

"The proposal would have the Summit County Port Authority owning a state-of-the-art technical center building at one of two locations in the city and leasing the building to Bridgestone Firestone at what County Executive Russ Pry said would be favorable rates."

"The city could end up buying the current Firestone Parkway technical center building for as much as $5 million, he said."

"The scope of the proposal is not the same as the nearly $900 million East Akron redevelopment project that involves building new global and North American headquarters for Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., Pry said."

Backup of Windows

Adam recently posted [livejournal.com] that he was looking for a way to backup/clone a Windows installation. There are a number of pieces of commercial software that will do the job (some better than others, of course). I use a different approach to backing up and cloning Windows installations...

What I have found is that it is pretty easy to make a backup of a Windows installation from another operating system. For instance, if you had two different Windows installations on the same computer, you could use one to make a full and complete backup of the other one (by simply copying the files from one location to another, then compressing or burning to disk).

It is kind of annoying (and time-consuming) to install Windows a second time, for the sole purpose of backing up the first one. Plus, if your hard drive dies and you have to replace it, you would have to install from scratch before you could restore the image that you created.

This is why I use linux. On all of my Windows computers, I have a small partition on the hard drive with a bare-bones linux installation (no GUI) that I use to back up the Windows installation from. The partition is large enough to store a copy of the Windows installation, so that when I want to reinstall, I just have to wipe the Windows partition and copy the files from one partition to the other. I reinstall all of my Windows computers once a year, and it takes a fraction of the time it would take to install from scratch.

If you didn't want to put a linux partition on your hard drive, you could use a Knoppix live-CD [knoppix.org] (or similar) to burn a copy of the Windows installation directly to DVD (and then you could easily restore in the same manner).

Using this method gives me full control over what is backed up and how. I have found that a clean Windows installation with drivers, etc can be burned onto a DVD (after deleting pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys).

Berlin Photo Essay

Ok, last post on Berlin for a while. I finally have finished with the photo essay I have been talking about:


The photo essay consists of 22 photos, with associated descriptions. I could have put it together using Flickr, but I thought it would be easier to use this other format to tell the narrative.


Above is a picture of Heimlich that I love. She's standing next to a statue of a dog at the Pergamon Museum.


The above picture of the Aston Martin that I spotted in Potsdam is just included for the few car lovers that read this weblog. ..and because it was so surprising to finally see one in person. I cannot believe that someone parked one of those on the street.

More pictures from Berlin in my Flickr photostream.

More entries about Berlin: April 1, April 2.

Food and Sights in Berlin

Here are some more choice shots from Berlin:


There is one long stretch of the Berlin Wall which is still standing, which is called the East Side Gallery [wikipedia.org]. Above is one of the works that was painted onto it. The works are being rapidly eclipsed by graffiti, and we even saw people writing on it.


Food is my favorite part of any trip. There were great bakeries all over the place, so we got our fill of delicious bread and pastries. Although I was very adventurous with food (as always), I learned that weird breads (that have fillings or any special ingredients) generally will NOT taste good to Americans.


And, of course, the most amazing part of any city in Europe is the architecture. There are beautiful buildings hundreds of years old, right next to ultra-modern structures. And somehow it works. Our cities look downright boring next to theirs.

Photo essay coming in a few days...

More entries about Berlin: April 1, April 3.

Back from Berlin

So, if you were wondering where I have been, Heimlich and I just got back from our vacation in Berlin:


Unfortunately, it was pretty cold over there, so we had to wear 800 layers of clothing. As a result, we look like the Michelin Man in every picture. The pictures of us look like they put a bunch of museums in Antarctica, and that's where we took our vacation...


It turns out that there are tons of things to see in Berlin, so we never were bored. Above is the Monument to the Murdered Jews in Europe [wikipedia.org]. As you might imagine, a lot of the sights were related to WWII. For example, Exhibit B (at Checkpoint Charlie [wikipedia.org]):


The rest of our pictures have been uploaded to my Flickr photostream [flickr.com], but they really don't tell a narrative. Plus, the sheer volume of pictures is going to prevent most people from looking through them. I'm working on a photo essay consisting of 20-30 pictures, but it won't be ready until later this week.

More entries on Berlin: April 2, April 3.