Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Stephen Hawking is giving a talk at Caltech tonight. And this is the line to get in. The talk is at 8:00, and this is the line at 4:15.

My office is in an old house, and we have a patio with a little barbecue on it. So in honor of the beginning of Spring, we had a cookout today. We do this fairly often when the weather is nice. I usually do the cooking. And it’s great fun. Have I mentioned lately that I really like my job?

It’s springtime, and time for the ME72 Engineering Contest. This year’s contest was a departure from the past ones I’ve been to. For the first time I remember, it was held outside, and this time, the contest was to build a machine to launch a small object across the field. They had a horizontal rope 30m from the launch pads, and 5m high. The machines had to send their payload over the rope. Beyond that, the longest distance would win.

The machines ran two at a time against each other. So the winner each time was the machine that threw its payload the farthest in that round. There were basically two types of machines used. Most were catapults of some sort, using rubber tubing as a large rubber band to store energy for the launch. They were basically large slingshots. Most of these machines used a small electric motor to stretch the rubber bands. Some had very short launching tracks to fit within the space constraints. Some had longer tracks that started out vertical and had to pivot downward to the proper launching angle. The machines had to fit within the horizontal area of the launch pads.

The second type of machine was a variation on a trebuchet. There were two of them in the contest, and they did very well. One of them was finally eliminated in a later round when its throwing arm buckled during a launch. They repaired it, but it just wasn’t the same, and it ended up losing.

In the end, it came down to Team Savage Rabbit against T.T.B. (Team To Beat). A catapult against a trebuchet. Both machines were very dependable, but in the final contest, the catapult shot its projectile just a little bit farther. The winning margin was only a few feet.

Anyway, it was a fun afternoon.

I just found out that the paper about My Pet Project has been published in Seisomological Research Letters:

The USGS Earthquake Notification Service (ENS): Customizable Notifications of Earthquakes around the Globe

I’ve had co-authorship on papers before, but this is the first time a whole paper has been published about something that I invented. Yay.

Years ago, I started a collection of ‘farewell pages’ from dead dot-coms. At first it was great fun, collecting shots of Kozmo.com, Firedup.com, and of course, the big fish, Webvan.com.

You don’t hear much about things like this any more, but they’re still going belly-up. Just this evening, I did a search and found a bunch more for my dead dot-com gallery. I have 427 entries now.

And it’s always fun to have a look down Internet Memory Lane.

I snapped a few more pictures of Comet Holmes last night. It’s a bit dimmer now. The first picture is a 10-second exposure on ISO 400. I finally figured out how to set the camera for long shutter times. Compare the second picture today with the second picture yesterday. Both are 1-second exposures on ISO 800. They look pretty similar, but for some reason, it looked a lot dimmer to the eye.

Just for the record, the telescope was a Celestron C-8 with a 32mm eyepiece, giving about 60x. The photos were all cropped and then scaled down by a factor of 1.9, so they are all showing the same size field. The camera is a Canon A560, and most importantly, it was attached to the telescope with Scotch® brand packing tape.

Today I heard about Comet Holmes, so I wanted to go out for a look. And it’s nice and bright. It should make for a good show on Wednesday when I do candy-and-telescopes for the neighborhood kids.

It was bright enough that I thought I’d try to photograph it. I’ve done duct-tape astrophotography before. So I got some packing tape and attached my new camera to the eyepiece. Then I set it on manual, no flash, 10-second timer and shot some pictures. The top one is with it set on ISO1600, which came out pretty grainy. The lower one is on ISO800, and it’s a bit cleaner, but doesn’t show the dust cloud around the comet as well. Still, it’s pretty remarkable as these things go. And it’s a bit more spectacular than the last time I tried to photograph a comet. Anyway, I think it’s not bad for a basic point-and-shoot camera taped to the eyepiece.

It’s System Administrator Appreciation Day. But I can’t say it better than Andrew Leonard did in Salon:

“If we understand contemporary globalization as a process that is in part driven by the emergence of a global network of computers, then it is no understatement to say that sysadmins make the world go ’round.”

Anyway, it’s novel to have a day that’s dedicated to my occupation. So be nice to me, of I’ll do something to your email…

Today I went to a screening of “Quantum Hoops” here on campus at Caltech. This was easily the most entertaining sports documentary I’ve ever seen. It tells the history of the athletics at Caltech, and the Caltech basketball team’s effort to break a 20-year losing streak. And, above all, it’s great fun.

The film describes Caltech as exhibiting the ‘purest form of amateur athletics’. The players are recruited out of the regular student body. There are no athletic scholarships, and no special preference for admission. One funny part of the movie talked about the basketball coach’s experience trying to recruit players. He visits basketball players who are also smart. He encourages them to apply to Caltech. And then they don’t get in.

And like all sports documentaries, there’s a climactic ‘big game’ that will have you on the edge of your seat.

The director was there, and he said that the movie should be released later this year. Go see it. It’s good.