Legos and Jimson weed

Someone really likes legos and Spinal Tap. Here is the famous "but this one goes to 11" scene, recreated in Legos in stop motion animation. Also recreated is a concert scene in Legos.

Just as weird, this afternoon we were talking about a chapter in Berton Roueche's The Medical Detectives about a family who grafted tomato plants to Jimson weed rootstock. Hint: this is not a good idea. You can read a little about it here.

If your are a House fan you probably will recognize some of the plots from Roueche's book:

The creator of the television show House, M.D. hasn't made it a secret that he was inspired in part by Mr Roueché's writing, but I wasn't aware of the degree to which the show's writers mined the articles in this book for inspiration. In the first season of House, episode 5 ("Damned if You Do") is related to what happens in the article "Antipathies"; episode 6 ("The Socratic Method") is related to what happens in the article "Live and Let Live"; episode 8 ("Poison") is related to the article "The Dead Mosquitos"; and episode 13 ("Cursed") is related to "A Man Named Hoffman".

Besides the Tomato/Jimson weed chapter, there is one about why hospitals don't have aerators on their water faucets ("Three sick babies") and about surplus denim jeans making people sick in Fresno ("The dead mosquitoes"). Pretty interesting book :)

A Titanic cover up

There is a good TED video of Robert Ballard, the guy who found the wreckage of the Titanic. Interesting guy and certainly has done great stuff, but it annoys me that he's a bit disingenuous since he knows that a lot of money has been spent by rival superpowers (the same ones that funded space programs) mapping, exploring, sampling and recording the oceans. In fact, he is most famous for directly benefiting from the national coffers -- "finding the Titanic" was actually the cover story for a secret military mission to find two famous submarine wrecks: the Thresher and the Scorpion. Speaking of submarines, I thought this was an interesting book.

But back to Titanic. Ballard's released the latitude and longitude of the wreck (details are here including the percentages of survivors by fare class). Ninety-four percent of the first class women and children survived, but only ten percent of the second class men. The website also says "Ironically, most of those who drowned were Americans."

At least Ballard isn't as annoying as James Cameron's obsession with robotic subs. But I have to admit, this is amusing :)


Another famous submarine cover-up, Howard Hughes' Glomar Explorer, is left as an exercise for the reader. Here is a teaser:

... the wealthy eccentric Howard Hughes constructed the Glomar Explorer, an enormous barge built for the ostensible purpose of mining manganese nodules from the ocean floor. Although manganese nodules are real, the mining venture was actually an elaborate hoax.

You can even watch the declassified burial at sea of soviet submariners recovered by the Explorer.

A Malc and Russ update

Malcolm Gladwell talked about "How to hire the right person" at the 2008 New Yorker conference. He talks what the NBA and NFL scouting "combines" tell us about hiring good teachers and lawyers.

Here's interesting column on "Gladwell's Brain" from The Washingtonian. Included is the now infamous "perverse and often baffling" contest:

The mischief peaked with what Gladwell refers to as “the contest.” He and another young science reporter, William Booth, chose a phrase and competed to see who could insert it in the newspaper faster. The contest culminated with the phrase “perverse and often baffling.”

Booth wrote a story on mollusks. “The copy desk took out ‘often,’ ” he says in the recording, “arguing, I think correctly, that mollusks were either baffling or they weren’t.”

Finally, with the clock ticking, Gladwell struck gold. He discovered that Washington is home to both the country’s highest number of gastroenterologists per capita as well as the highest fees for gastroenterology, flying in the face of supply-and-demand rules.

Baffling indeed, and possibly perverse—at least by the standard of Post editors. Gladwell won the contest.

But is that story true? Maybe, maybe not :) The article includes links to Malc telling the very entertaining story.


Finally, I recently was in a meeting where I said something about "the tyranny of vision statements" (I'm not a big fan), which reminded me of this take by Russell Ackoff. You might remember his and Quay Hays' visit to Fresno State a year ago.

Over 8g's, but who's counting

The results of the study of the last ballistic Soyuz re-entry are in the news. Richard Garriott, video game guy and future space tourist, rationalizes that everything will be OK for his return in October, but I think he's a little optimistic. But in his shoes, I would be too since thinking about the alternative would be depressing at best :)

Jim Oberg is a space expert and written about Soviet and Russian space missions. He has an awful looking website but if you scroll down past the UFO stuff there are pictures about how the Soyuz is supposed to re-enter. It stays connected as three pieces just before hitting significant air, at least that's the way I understand it.

Oberg's IEEE Spectrum article "Internal NASA Documents Give Clues to Scary Soyuz Return Flight" has some "interesting" comments back and forth between Oberg and a reader accusing him of being overly dramatic.

One of the links from Oberg's comments takes you to this translation of a Russian news account of farmers coming to the aid of the Soyuz.

On the ground there was a black apparatus, which looked like a pot. A moment we approached there was a boom. We jumped back. Immediately, a cover, which looked like a fry pan flew off and an antenna jumped out. The apparatus was so hot that ground started burning. We were waiting what would happen next. Then a man fell out of the pot. He was in the cosmonaut outfit. As we approached we could read "Yuri Malenchenko." "We are cosmonauts," he told us, neither his hands or feet were moving. He was pale and sweaty. We put him on the ground, gave a pillow under his head, while he asked to get others out. There were two women. I carried in my hands Peggy (Whitson) and So-yeon Yi, who appeared from the capsule. The American removed her glove and shook my hand. I said that this is Kazakhstan, Aitekibisky Region, but she did not understand Russian. Neither did So-yeon Yi, so I mostly communicated with Malenchenko. He asked us to take some gadget out of the capsule. The capsule was very small, while all our guys were huge. We picked the skinniest in our brigade -- Kanat Kydyralin -- he pulled the radio and some other electronic device.

You can see how small the pot (to hold three adults!) is here.

I’ve always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific.

The Fresno Metropolitan Museum has a new director, Dana Thorpe:

The board of trustees' announcement this week follows an eight-month national search. Thorpe will succeed Kathleen Monaghan, who has been the top administrator since October 1999... Dana (pronounced Hannah) Thorpe said in a telephone interview Thursday that The Met presents an opportunity to build on the foundation set by Monaghan.

What? (pronounced "Whaaah?")

Reminds me of an old George Carlin album. I couldn't find it exactly on the Internets, but this is close:

You can call yourself whatever you want. You can spell your name S - M - I - T - H and pronounce it "Jabnowski" if you want to.
"Name?"
"Jabnowski."
"Can you spell that?"
"S M I T H"
"Huh?"
"They're all silent, never mind!"

Software's classic mistakes

Steve McConnell released results of his 2007 survey about software development blunders and compares them to the "classic mistakes" described in his book Rapid Development.

"Noisy, crowded offices" was fourth, reminding me of our previous conversations (about 2/3 of the way down this posting, and this posting too).

Back to that paper I mentioned yesterday, "Building an Information System for Collaborative Researchers: A Case Study from the Brain-tumor Research Domain" by Mamrak, Boyd, and Ordonez (Fresno State people can click here for full text). The paper's been a great source of quotes for me to draw on to illustrate problems with requirements (I quoted from it in my response to Rita Vick's article). Here's an excerpt from Mamrak et al.:

A third clinician was genuinely interested in using our information system. However, every time we met with him to determine his data input and query requirements, his needs would shift from our last meeting. This process extended over several years: with every presentation of a fast prototype, and even when the first version of the system was implemented and installed, at every meeting with him we came away with several pages of notes indicating changes that he still required. When we expressed our concerns to him about our inability to converge on a common understanding of his needs, he constantly assured us that we were 'getting very close' and that the next time we would surely have it 'right.'

End of semester stuff

More random things: I previous wrote about launches to "high inclination orbits. A recent Popular Mechanics has a nice diagram and talks about space shuttle aborts.

A Hodg-man posting reminded me of Match Game's Gene Rayburn, and ended up with videos of celebrities smoking on television.

Over seven million people watched a three year old describe Star Wars, but how many of you have seen it with Spanish subtitles?

Bob Sutton has a couple of interesting applications of his "no asshole rule": a theological approach, and a sad tale of bullies in the medical world. It seems like there's another wave of cross disciplinary work going on with the healthcare. This reminds me of the paper by Mamrak, Ordonez, and Boyd about working with medical folks on an information system for their brain tumor research. Great quotes. More on that later.


Dr. Dobb's has two things worth at least a skim: "Has agile peaked?" and "Requirements are required reading". Here's a quote:

Driving up the cost of the 2010 census is the Harris Field Data Collection Automation (FDCA)—essentially a mobile hand-held device on the front end... —which was supposed to save taxpayers $1 billion, but instead may end up costing $3 billion extra. Why? Because, according to people who participated in real-world trials, the mobile FDCA system (which will be used by 600,000 temporary census takers) is just too doggone hard to use.
...
Harris is standing behind its FDCA system, claiming that the computers actually are easy to use. "After you spend about 30 minutes to an hour familiarizing yourself with it, it's as easy to use as a modern cell phone," said a Harris spokesman. Well now, that's comforting. After 30 minutes of fiddling with a new cell phone, I'm lucky I haven't chucked it.

Finally, two short videos: a cockpit video of the downwind and final approach to HNL. This is the usual approach with Waikiki to the right, Pearl Harbor, and then a right turn to land. Second, there's been a clamor for years to get the 1986 CBS Fresno miniseries on DVD. You can torment yourself by watching the intro and a brief clip.

Videos that only a computer science person could love

My characterization of a good Alan Kay keynote is something to make everyone in the audience irritated :)

But in this short (2.5 minute) excerpt from an ACM conference talk, Kay really bashes Dijkstra.

Several years ago SD&M had a Software Pioneers conference. The speakers list was incredible, but I can't get the videos to work anymore. But you can watch Kay's talk, and Dijkstra's talk here and here.

Bonus video: Senator Obama fielding a question about sorting integers at Google.

Mad Money, Yo-Yo, and Eudaemons

I'm not usually a big Charlie Rose fan, but I'm a fan of HBO's From the Earth to the Moon so I watched this episode. Strange combination of three segments: Jim Cramer (the Mad Money guy with the yelling and sound effects on CNBC), followed by (starting at 8:37) Andy Chaikin and Tom Hanks talking about From the Earth to the Moon, then (starting at 35:30) Yo-Yo Ma.

Speaking of moon stuff, an Apollo 11 fecal bag sold for over $200 recently. Unused, thank goodness.

In other news of the weird, the Biography Channel has been showing the "breaking vegas" episode about the UCSC folks who used computers controlled by toe switches to predict the results of sloppily installed roulette wheels. The remarkable thing was this was in the 1980s. When I used to teach the CSci 1 class the book (The Eudaemonic Pie) was on my list of books they might be interested in, along with other books like Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer. They roulette people went on to apply chaos theory to investment.

Instead of counting cards at the blackjack table, or looking for non-uniform routlette wheels, why not buy lotto tickets? If each one dollar ticket gets you a 1-in-X chance of winning, and the jackpot is over $X, isn't your expected return greater than $1? Kind of, but to get jackpots that high a lot of people buy tickets, which means you would probably have to share the winnings, reducing the expected return. But sometimes it works :) Scroll to the bottom to see an example of covering all the numbers in Jai Alai.

Random stuff

I've been too busy for coherent thoughts, so here's a few disjointed things:

Music. While talking on the phone to a friend who was shopping at Lowe's I overhead the Backstreet Boys "I want it that way" in the background (followed by a Human League song, ugh). So I was thinking, I should lip synch my own YouTube Backstreet Boys video (not really), but you should watch this guitar player, even does the harmonics, and for those of you more classically inclined, Pachelbel's canon in an usual style. He also does a G&R song, using a loop. I think the first time I was aware of an acoustic guitar player using a pedal-activated loop was seeing Phil Keaggy do it (or a more recent version). But for pure slap harmonics, watch this.

Trivia: What is the connection between Phil Keaggy and Jimi Hendrix? Probably nothing.

Then there is always Andy Mckee.

Student evaluations. Interesting article about the notorious RateMyProfessors.com site correlating with IDEA, one of the more famous system for student ratings of instruction.

Costco. ABC News did an nice story on Costco. The maximum mark-up on any item is Costco is 14 percent, and they are one of the largest buyers of cashews in the world. The biggest selling item is toilet paper.

Seed pans. I really like these seed pans from the UK. I first read about them in Sunset.

Of earthquakes and money

The LA Times has a story about the next 30 years of California earthquakes, but what you need to know is summed up in this picture -- Rancho Cucamonga is in the middle of it :) The story has a link to a similar northern California picture. When it does happen, you can track it here.

There's been quite a bit about salaries lately. The CRA posted information about 2006 starting salaries for graduates in SEH (science, engineering, and health):

CS tied for second with health majors for the highest median salary at the bachelor’s level ($45,000) and tied for first with engineering at the master’s level ($65,000). This compared to median salaries among all science, engineering and health fields of $39,000 at the bachelor’s level and $56,000 at the master’s level.

Compare this to the recent AAUP report about faculty salaries (summarized here, full report here). You can look up salary information by college in the appendices of the full report. If you're interested in UC and CSU salaries, you can find out down to the person by going here.

The AAUP report discusses salaries of college coaches as compared to faculty:

Table B presents two years of average salaries for head football coaches, average salaries of full professors, and the ratio of the two for the eleven Division I-A football conferences. In 2007-08, the average salary of the coaches is $1,040,863, a 12.4 percent increase over the $925m683 average paid in 2006-07. By contrast, the average salary of full professors at these universities in 2007-08 is $104,523, 3.5 percent more than the $100,998 paid in 2006-07. In 2006-07, the average head football coach earned 9.2 times the average full professor's salary; that ratio increased to 10 this year.

Remove the receiver gently so as not to jiggle the switch hook

This "four foot" phone dial reminded me of the 1927 film teaching Fresno County residents how to use a dial phone. While you are there at archive.org you can watch the 1949 short film "Life in the Central Valley", or the Kirk Douglas feature The Big Trees where he and some Quakers have different ideas about sequoia trees.

When push buttons replaced the telephone dial, I wonder if a film was made explaining why the numbers on a calculator are arranged differently than numbers on a telephone? :)

Solid smoke

Joe Kittinger (the guy who jumped out of a balloon at 102,800 feet) was honored at the National Air and Space Museum. ABC did a nice interview. Also honored was the NASA Stardust team who flew aerogel through the tail of a comet. Aerogel is weird stuff, I bought tiny pieces on ebay. These pictures from JPL are amazing: a real brick looking like it is floating on smoke, and crayons insulated from a flame, demonstrating aerogel's thermal properties.

Changing the subject, Dr. Dobb's Journal published an article about Byzantine faults. We spent a lot of time in graduate school thinking about Byzantine agreement while formally specifying systems. The topic comes up when you have distributed critical systems that need to agree.

Speaking of agreement, an idea behind mutation testing is that programs written from the same specification should produce the same answers. In high school I was the operator for a payroll system that was replacing manual procedures. Unfortunately, the payroll software was being written while we were using it every week to cut $100,000 in payroll checks. Because of round-off, the software was not getting the same answer the parallel paper-and-pencil process. As this post in Risks says, there was "huge panic, much headless chicken behaviour" (the follow-up Risks post is also good). Our accountants did not like being a few cents off each week :)

In most men there lurks a lesser man, and his presence smells in the sun

Yes that title is from the same book as the previous two blog titles :)

Anyway, summer is about here, so I recommend that you have a pool party and tie dye something. We had great success with pillowcases and sheets (but never did a couch). But now fashion designers are muscling in on my creative space.

I noticed that Stanford is hosting a talk by Randy Breen from Emotiv Systems (the abstract for the talk is interesting). They've devloped a non-invasive EEG neuroheadset (a lot different than where things were back in the day).

But the big story of today was getting a Pegge Hopper signed poster at the sale, and listening to the Radio Lab show about how songs get stuck in your head (featuring Oliver Sacks).

There is a degree of mercy beyond which any man is rude to inquire

OK, the title doesn't have anything to do with this blog post, but I decided another quote from Ernest Gann's Fate is the hunter was in order (you can get a lot cheaper copies :)

The real reason for this post is that I finally had time to watch a video on Tim O'Reilly's blog. Eben Moglen really goes after O'Reilly about how he wasted the last 10 years promoting open source. It gets hot at the end, but worth watching.

Moglen gave a keynote at the December 2006 Sakai conference, then had a lunchtime "discussion" with a Blackboard attorney about the infamous patent. More recently, he spoke at a MySQL conference.

We have merely nodded to fear. Now we must shake its filthy hand.

Men's Vogue (who knew there was such a thing?) has an article about the world of "freight dog" pilots and their wacky cargo (the author was also briefly featured on NPR).

Delta airlines has a big hit with their new, sassy safety video (starring "Deltalina"), and even released it on YouTube. Is finger-wagging universally understood? On Seinfeld there was no question about what it meant.

Security, and moon dust

Two unrelated things: there are fewer sky marshals than you think. I haven't seen one on a flight for a long time. I would rather have sky marshal than a pilot who's supposed to be flying the landing approach discharge his gun (Wired has a funny picture, the Associated Press has pictures of the bullet hole, and Bruce Schneier has a post about something even scarier :). But, Mythbusters busted the following idea:

Boyd said Saturday's incident could have been much worse.

"At that altitude, you puncture the skin of an airplane, it's going to go down. They were very lucky," Boyd said.

But certainly a plane that's miles off course and unresponsive near Hawaii would certainly attract a military escort, wouldn't it?

“Air shuttle 1002, I've been trying to contact you for the last 90 to 100 miles. I understand you've passed Hilo. I'm going to turn you back to the northeast bound to get you back to the Hilo airport. Is there some kind of emergency situation going on?”...

None of Hawaii Air National Guard's F-15s was alerted, said Capt. Jeff Hickman, spokesman for the Guard.

In fact, the Guard has not responded to any calls for emergency scrambles for civilian flights in Hawaii since the 2001 terrorist attacks.

Changing subjects to something less scary, NASA studied why moon dust smells funny in space but not on earth:

Moondust on Earth has been "pacified." All of the samples brought back by Apollo astronauts have been in contact with moist, oxygen-rich air. Any smelly chemical reactions (or evaporations) ended long ago.

This wasn't supposed to happen. Astronauts took special "thermos" containers to the moon to hold the samples in vacuum. But the jagged edges of the dust unexpectedly cut the seals of the containers, allowing oxygen and water vapor to sneak in during the 3-day trip back to Earth. No one can say how much the dust was altered by that exposure.

Books and eyes

Bob Stein was Thursday evening's keynote speaker at the library's "Future of the Book" colloquium. Stein's co-director of the Institute for the Future of the Book, and was in the digital publishing world from the beginning, and I still use pieces of an ancient CD-ROM from his Voyager publishing company called Defending human attributes in the age of the machine containing video and full text of three of Don Norman's books, including The design of everyday things.

Turning the tables on him, Yvonne Rogers and Frances Aldrich published the results of a usability study of the CD-ROM titled "In Search of Clickable Dons - Learning about HCI Through Interacting with Norman's CD-ROM". More recently, there is a couple paragraphs about how the "Nasty Norman" has turned into the "Nice Norman".

In his keynote talk, Stein also talked about working with Alan Kay. That reminded me that there is a March 2007 TED talk by Kay available now.

Speaking of user interfaces, a Slashdot item reminded me of eye tracking. Using eye tracking to replace a pointing device like a mouse is an idea that occurs to everyone, but it isn't as easy as it sounds. Some of the best eye tracking data comes from the world of newspaper publishing. Check out these these two short videos tracking webpage viewing, and a heatmap (and explanation).

HAL as a fish

Honda has a 30 second advertisement in which piranha are talking to a car. But why do they sound like HAL from 2001? Not that I'm complaining, just curious.

The crab is also interesting.

Go here and then click on "WATCH THE VIDEOS". The site lets you download the ads as .mov files, which is also sort of odd. Not that I'm complaining.

Danger! Will Robinson

CBS has full episodes of "classic" television shows for you to watch, including the original Star Trek (three seasons), Hawaii Five-0 (one season), MacGyver (one season), the Twilight Zone (two seasons), and Melrose Place (one season). Melrose Place? How did that get in there?

"Where no man has gone before" still creeps me out especially the glowing eyes. It was supposed to be the first episode but the network execs thought it was too much? So it ended up the third episode. Something like that. But it was the "NO KILL I" episode that had me hiding behind the neighbor's living room chair in 1967.

If you don't consider those "classic", TVLand has some full episodes of the Andy Griffith Show, the Beverley Hillbillies, and Gunsmoke.

NBC has Miami Vice (but I can't find the infamous "Glades" episode), the A Team, and Alfred Hitchcock for your vintage viewing pleasure.

ABC is a little light on the classics, unless you consider My So-Called Life classic :)

AOL has full episodes of Lost in Space (ugh), Alias Smith and Jones, the Bob Newhart Show (now there's a classic), and clips from Iconoclasts, which isn't old enough to be classic, but I though the episode of Sean Penn and Jon Krakauer in Alaska talking about making the Into the Wild movie was good.