Now THAT’S what I’m talking about!

Administration takes aim at distracted driving. Need I say more? It’s about bloody time!

I also saw this a few minutes ago. I say he’s flat out wrong! Now, I don’t disagree with a democrat lightly, but in this case I have a very good reason. The repubs don’t want sick people to die quickly; where’s the profit in that? Funeral homes and undertakers make a measly few thousand dollars per person, and that’s all. Tons of missed opportunities and lost revenue. No, they want us to linger on for months or years but stay sick, and that way the health-care industry (yes, industry) can potentially make millions off of a single patient if they can keep him or her just sick enough. The health-care industry works on the same principles as the cigarette industry, just with higher prices and slightly less tar. As long as they’re alive and you can sell them stuff, isn’t that good enough?

A Quick WTF

Wow, what a week! I’m at school pretty much all day every day with my new schedule, so I’m not going to have much time for this blog for a while… as it is, this post will be pretty short so that I can get back to my physics homework. But still, I just had to share this gem. My physics class uses an online system called Lon-CAPA for the homework, and so far I’m not terribly impressed:

Should I enter the units or not?

Someone wasn’t too careful about programming their conditions… on the other hand, this also tells me that the text “Do not enter the units” is actually part of the problem description, i.e. they aren’t just generating it as needed. There must be a flag set somewhere to keep track of whether the units are required for a particular problem, so they could make their system much more consistent by using that flag to decide whether or not to tell students to enter units (rather than relying on simple old-fashioned static text).

Fun, fun, fun! I still have quite a few problems to do, so I may end up posting again today if I find another thing like this…

Gallons of Electricity?!

I know the whole “blog post based on a news story” thing is probably getting pretty old, but I couldn’t resist writing a bit about this story. In a nutshell, some U.S. car companies are finally starting to come out with cars that are primarily electric, but they’re advertising the efficiency of said cars in miles per gallon. The upcoming Chevy Volt will get a supposed 230 MPG for city driving!

Seriously, is it that hard to come up with a reasonable measure of an electric car’s efficiency? I suspect there’s a lot more to this than simple incompetence, although that’s probably a big part of it.

To be sure, I think there are components of a shrewd marketing ploy here. Not many people have an extensive knowledge of electricity, and the major corporation is, as usual, taking advantage of that. Converting between two almost completely unrelated measurement systems is bound to create anomalies, and if they’re the right measurement systems, a set of figures can be made to look much more impressive through those anomalies.

Admittedly, a lot of GM’s marketing people probably don’t know the first thing about electricity either, so it’s unlikely that many of them even know there’s anything wrong with their claims. That said, I would be surprised if no-one at all on the inside saw the problems with the figures; they might not have spoken up, or they might have just been ignored and/or booed for trying to shoot down a great-looking gimmick. GM isn’t doing all that well right now, so they’re probably desperate to look good in whatever way they can.

I can think of a few much better systems off the top of my head. For example, miles per kilowatt-hour would probably work, especially if they would also publish the maximum capacity of the batteries, also in kilowatt-hours. Along similar lines, something to do with Joules or kilojoules would work too. Another good solution would be to just post how far the car will go on a full charge before it needs to be plugged in again. That, in conjunction with battery capacity and charge time, might be the best solution overall.

Of course, we computer geeks all know what GM’s real mistake was: rather than follow the usual procedure for making a gadget look impressive (i.e. making up a load of bogus technobabble), they actually tried to use a familiar, existing system! Better to leave the customer completely mystified and in awe of your supernatural powers than to say something they’ll even think they understand.

“Yes, I’m wondering how many Megahertz this new car has?”

“Does this model have a thermodynamically inhibiting foobarizer widget?”

The Half-blood Prince and the Kindle

I just got to see Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince today. It was awesome! I think the first two movies were a little better, but this one was very close to that quality level. There were a bunch of things that were left out, but that’s understandable given the limited screen time they have to work with. They added a couple of minor things, but none of the additions really detracted from the story or strayed too far from the book. All in all, I highly recommend it.

As an interesting side note, I found this article on special effects a while ago which included a pretty good section on one of the scenes from the new movie. The fire effect is indeed impressive, and the amount of effort that went into it really showed. The only complaint I have is, predictably enough, one of grammatical ignorance: the article calls Voldemort’s undead servants “inferis,” but “inferi” is already in its plural form. The Latin singular form would be “inferius,” as an attentive reader of the series or anyone with any inkling of English’s Latin roots would know. Still, apart from that nitpicky point, the article is well worth the read.

I was shocked, but not all that surprised, to hear about the recent Kindle controversy. Since the method of delivery for purchased “books” is over the Internet as far as I know, it isn’t a very big leap from download to deletion. I’m not at all surprised that the technology has this kind of potential for abuse; a lot of computer technology does right now (for example, most implementations of RFID). It’s incredibly ironic, however, that one of the books they deleted was George Orwell’s 1984. It seems pretty obvious that whoever made the decision to do this had not actually read the book, otherwise they would know that this is exactly the kind of thing against which it protests.

I can’t help but wonder if the whole controversy was manufactured: what if someone wanted to make a point and deliberately set a trap for Amazon to make them look bad? It seems almost too perfectly controversial to have happened by chance. It could’ve happened by accident, sure, but it’s a little unlikely. Out of all the books that could have been wiped off of people’s devices, why the one that will cause the biggest uproar?

This is yet another reason not to use a Kindle, and I know I certainly won’t even consider it now. Quite apart from my old-fashioned attachment to nice, solid, paper books, the idea that Amazon could just waltz in and delete my digital property is just scary. Why even bother with such a single-purpose and unreliable solution like the Kindle when I could just get a laptop and have access to the whole Internet? (which, incidentally, would be pretty hard to just “delete”…)

Then there’s also the thought that, if Amazon can delete entire books off of people’s Kindles just because they feel like it, anyone can probably do it; the trick will be figuring out how to do it, and then every Kindle will be — dare I say it — like an “open book” to anyone with the right knowledge. So it isn’t just unreliable, it’s downright insecure. This monster of a security issue makes your average Windows PC look like the digital equivalent of Fort Knox.

On a happier note, I am completely done with summer school! I think I managed to get all A’s too, which means my 4.0 is safe for now. I’ll know sometime next week, but right now I’m busy planning all the relaxing, goofing off, and personal projects I’ve been meaning to do. I enjoyed my summer classes as much as it’s really possible to enjoy summer classes (plus I learned a whole ton of interesting stuff), but I am very relieved to be finished.

I’m back!

I know it’s been quite a while since my last post; it’s mainly because of summer school that I haven’t been active lately. I’m almost done with that, though, so very soon I’ll have a few weeks to do other stuff including the occasional blog post here.

An interesting development came up this week: I got my power supply! It’s this one from NewEgg, and I think it’ll be plenty to drive one ignition coil. I’m planning to do some test runs this weekend to see if I can get some really good sparks/arcs, and if I can, I’ll be sure to post pictures fairly soon. The main thing I’m worried about is that my MOSFET might not be up to the task, since it’s only rated for 250v… I have 3 separate snubbers around it though, so it should be okay.

On a very different and more amusing note, I found this gem a few minutes ago when I was glancing at the news on Yahoo:

That's great, but what does it have to do with Susan Boyle?

Definitely a WTF candidate, don’t you think?

Sarah Palin’s economy and the TaBrNaCl

What Would a Sarah Palin Economy Look Like? The list in that article is just the tip of the iceberg, as it were. And the worst part is, it’s still quite possible: she might run for president in 2012, and then she wouldn’t have to use John McCain as a puppet. But really, what would it be like? She might decide to buy Neiman Marcus entirely, and move all of its stores to D.C. so she could shop for designer clothes whenever she felt the urge. She might start an expensive war with Russia, as if we needed to go through another one of those. She would quash innovation, slowing the economy still further, and might even end up dragging the United States down to third world status.

Speaking of weird religious things, tabernacle has got to be one of the weirdest words I’ve ever come across. If you know your chemistry, you may already know where this is going based on the title of the post… I’ve been seeing the chemical formula NaCl all over the place for years, and thinking it would be funny if you could do something creative with the letters. Well, now I’ve found it: the formula TaBrNaCl is a fairly close phonetic approximation to the aforementioned word “tabernacle,” and it sounds pretty nasty (if you have a periodic table handy for reference so you know what the symbols mean). It would be a mixture of Tantalum, Bromine, and of course, Sodium and Chlorine. I’m not sure I even want to know what those chemicals would do when mixed together, and I’m certainly not curious enough to want to try it. I haven’t taken my chemistry class yet (yes, there’s only one listed as a requirement for my AS in CS); it looks like I’ll start that next spring, the semester before I graduate if all goes well. Whatever, I still don’t want to try mixing my own TaBrNaCl…

I know I’m not posting very often; that’s because of school. Sometime in early August I should be able to post a little more often, although I may not since I’ll be so worn out from my summer classes… oh well, maybe next year sometime?

But seriously, folks. I will try and get some details up about one of my less unspectacular high voltage projects soon. I’m also planning on ordering a decent power supply for my ignition coil driver, so maybe I can do some nice spark-filled posts on that before fall semester starts…

The Fugitive of Critical Mass

I’m a pretty big Green Day fan, so of course I ordered 21st Century Breakdown as soon as it came out. This post is not a comprehensive review of it; I’ll save that for another day, preferably when I have my own whole website set up. Right now I just want to talk about one of the songs: Last of the American Girls. I quite like this song… it’s catchy in a pop sort of way, but at the same time it has that special Green Day touch. And, of course, there is some interesting stuff buried in the lyrics if you have the right background knowledge.

A couple of the lines caught my attention in particular: “She rides her bicycle, like a fugitive of critical mass” and “She wears her overcoat for the coming of the nuclear winter.” Now, according to this forum thread, the “fugitive of critical mass” is actually a reference to the Critical Mass bicycle rides, a means of protest for apparently quite a lot of people. I had something else in mind when I first heard that part of the song, though: The Atomic Cafe. There is one scene, which I actually saw in class today (which is what suddenly inspired me to write this now), where a little boy puts on a lead suit (*shudder*) and gas mask with the help of his father, and then rides off on a bicycle. The lead lining in the suit is supposed to protect him from the radiation emitted by atomic explosions, but he probably ended up dying of lead poisoning… my mental image explains a few other lines, though: the “overcoat” could be the lead-lined suit, and it’s long been speculated that the “end of western civilization” could be brought about by a nuclear war.

There is also a reference to Hurricane Katrina, and the line “She’s a runaway of the establishment incorporated” is, in my opinion, criticizing the government for being too wrapped up in profit for big corporations. The song touches on how paranoid people can be sometimes (“She’s got her little book of conspiracies right in her hand”), mentions what seems like ancient history in entertainment now (“She plays her vinyl records singing songs on the eve of destruction”), and briefly brings up the issue of extinction (“She is paranoid like endangered species headed into extinction”).

Anyway, interesting stuff… even if my insight into its meaning is way off, it’s still an interesting (and, in my opinion, awesome) song.

Neda was her sister

This is possibly one of the most moving things I’ve ever read. Quick background: a young woman, Neda, was shot and killed in Iran at a protest. As far as I can tell, it was a peaceful protest (on the part of the protesters, that is), really just involving a lot of chanting. In one of the videos linked to from the USA Today blog, it sounds like the classic chant of “Allahu akbar.” But apparently, a pro-government militia member (hiding on a nearby rooftop, I might add) got tired of the chanting, not to mention a bit trigger-happy. He shot her in the heart, and she died “in less than two minutes.”

What a horrible way to die… at least this incident may have some positive effects yet. I’ve read several statements so far hoping that “her death is not in vain.” I don’t think it will be. If she isn’t already considered a martyr, she will be soon. The discontent at a rigged election will quickly evolve into downright outrage at cold-blooded murder, whether the government actually sanctioned it or not. I seriously doubt that Ahmadinejad or Khamenei personally had anything to do with this; after all, they can only lose standing from it. But still, it looks pretty bad for them, since the guy who pulled the trigger is one of their supporters.

Anyway, back to the post that I originally started commenting on: I honestly think that, within a few decades, those notes are going to be immortalized in history books. I think they will eventually be primary sources that people look at when they want the perspective of someone who was actually there during the upheaval in Iran. I think Neda’s death will end up being an important turning point in Iran’s internal conflict. I think that, regardless of how it turns out in the end, this will be an important event in world history as well.

Here’s hoping that the situation in Iran is resolved soon, in a positive and beneficial way, and without too much more bloodshed… Rest in peace, Neda Soltan.

Ozone? I don’t think so…

I had an interesting thought earlier today. Despite it being the middle of June, I was, for some reason, thinking about that old movie A Christmas Story. I was thinking specifically of the scene where Ralphie’s father is setting up his lamp: Ralphie, narrating as an adult, says “The snap of a few sparks, a quick whiff of ozone, and the lamp blazed forth in unparalleled glory.”

What I realized is that the bit about ozone is highly unlikely, if it’s even possible. Ozone is primarily generated by either ultraviolet light, which was not present in any significant quantity in that scene, or corona discharge. Now, even assuming that their house was wired on a 220-volt line instead of 110, I seriously doubt that could generate much corona discharge at all, if any. Certainly not enough to produce a detectable amount of ozone. Typically, to get a decent amount of corona around an electrode, you’ll need at least a few kilovolts (the more the merrier), and a reasonably shard needle point rather than the relatively blunt metal surfaces present in appliances like lamps.

Don’t get me wrong though, I like the movie. That’s one of my favorite parts, in fact. I just like poking wholes in TV plots, because it’s a fun mental exercise trying to figure out how exactly the writers fail to accurately capture reality. Expect at least one nitpicking post on Star Wars sometime soon.

What a day (so far!)

Yep, it’s already been a pretty interesting day, and it’s barely halfway over. First, I got a call from the college to let me know that my summer class is canceled for the second time this week. The professor has a cold, and is apparently still not doing too well. While I am kind of glad to be able to stay home, I do hope he’s feeling better soon. My dad also had some people over to trim the trees that have been banging against the house lately, and although the early-morning trimming process wasn’t exactly quiet either, I think it’ll be a good thing in the long run.

Then I turned on my computer and, glancing at the news, saw that the WHO has declared a swine flu pandemic. Not that it’s any deadlier now; its spread has simply been officially recognized as global. A few bits of advice: if you don’t already have it, avoid touching your eyes, nose, and mouth as much as possible, and try your best to avoid getting too close to sick people; if you do already have it, cover your nose and mouth when you sneeze or cough, preferably with your sleeve (a tissue or even your hand is okay, but be sure to wash up afterward); and either way, wash your hands a lot. My main worry is that the swine flu still seems to be spreading in the northern hemisphere, even though the flu season here is most definitely over.

Then there’s also the set of e-mails that I got offering me a chance to transfer to Hawaii Pacific University, and that might even qualify for the Daily WTF. I hadn’t checked this address for a while since the school migrated student mail to Gmail last month (I’m still psyched about that change), so this is the first of three messages…

"We look forward to seeing you online!" -- Yeah, that's a really good reason to transfer!

But then, after that e-mail, they decided to top themselves with two more (as far as I can tell, they’re identical except for the subject line, so I’m only including one of them):

What a great place for Computer Science majors!

Fun, fun, fun… maybe I’ll play some Dungeon Runners™ later on to relax a bit after all this excitement. After all, blasting monsters with fireballs etc. can be pretty relaxing…