Fifteen Years Ago in a Galaxy Far Far Away

I’ve finally decided to restart my blog after one and a half years with a bit of nostalgia from exactly* one and a half decades ago. But I don’t want to dwell on old friends and inside jokes. Instead, I want to tell you, oh faceless reader, about a neat game we invented.
That year, I was the president of one of the nerdiest organizations at one of the nerdiest universities in the country that focused its springtime energies on one of the nerdiest movies ever made.

Spring is celebrated with a campus-wide festival where various groups make “booths” – essentially elaborate carnival games. We had a paltry budget in comparison to many fraternities, etc. and were ridiculed at first by our tiny matte-black one car garage. Fortunately, the org’s VP was a great artist and went through a box or two of pastels on an amazing mural (replete with S&M Jabba-slave Leia, of course.)

Alone that might have been enough, but our “game” involved a two-part toss. Most carni-games, as you can imagine, are single toss events: knock over, shoot down, toss ring, etc. Ours was based on first throwing the grappling hook – a magnet at a metal target. Attached with a generous four-five feet of twine were some well-worn action figures from our childhood. Based on the position of your grappling hook – which if you were careful you could slide about on the metal panel (careful not to pull too hard or it’d come off) – you then swung your figures in hopes of getting them through a hole.
1. for A New Hope (the 1^st one): this mimicked the escape of Luke and Leia from the stormtroopers.
2. for Empire: this mimicked Luke’s takedown of an AT-AT.
3. and for Jedi: a fictitious furry romp of Chewy and an ewok (yes, I know – bit of a stretch).
Each of these increased in complexity. The final one required swinging out around a tree. It was all pretty rickety but oh-so clever. Throwing the magnet grappling hook was easy and inconsequential. But when it came to trusting the hook’s position and letting the action figures swing away, player’s clutched the pieces with apprehension pondering (often fruitless) strategies. And, when Luke smacked the pegboard legs of the AT-AT, you couldn’t help but guffaw. You should make this!

* Well, I started this two weeks ago, so by the post date, this is no longer exactly.

Merging Energies

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about hybridding. A hybrid, in the modem context, is something that will combine multiple energy sources to perform a single function. Two things about this are difficult. First, the device must be fairly intelligent to manage the 2 sources. Simply, plug it in and close the switch will no longer suffice. To totally geek-out, this requires MI MO (multiple input, multiple output) nonlinear controls. But on a more practical level it requires things (components) that can actually merge energy. Is that hard? For hydraulics, pneumatics, and electricity it’s a mere T-junction, but how to do it more mechanically? Well, turns out the answer is in the blog title. That clever planetary gear train, or the epicyclic gear train is the best way to do this. I’m wondering how many patents Toyota and others have filed on appropriating this old (albeit wonderful) technology.

Timing is a Thrill

There is an intense immediacy in life when things happen quickly, unexpectedly-something that I hope I can always experience. And what exactly is spawning this Hallmark-grade drivel? Three things:

1. I had a jam with my band the other day that I’ve been listening to a lot on a recent trip back east. Here it is in all its nakedness. Often when we get together we just launch into a jam like this. Usually it takes a while to hit a stride, but in this we really fell into some energetic rhythms quickly. What a thrill!
2. I just made a connecting flight through Cleveland just now in which I felt it necessary to sprint between gates. I was glad to find that my flight home hadn’t left without me. Nor did it leave without the 10 other people who leisurely boarded on after me. Ah well, timing not well spent perhaps? I quietly eliminated my private shame by relishing in the rare situation in which one is allowed to run wildly in a public place-where one is pitied and cheered on as opposed to scorned. What a thrill too!
3. I think Concentric finally has a gig again –after more than a year. We we’ve been ready for some time but I’ve been lazy about booking one. It has happened unexpectedly and with no effort on my part. Another thrilling occasion!

5ive Things I know to be true, but have a hard time convincing others

I don’t read many blogs and so I really don’t have much to inspire me on that end. But, one of my favorite is 5ives a humor blog by Merlin Mann who is, dare I say, a fellow Web.2.0 renaissance man. Whatever. I found myself having a number of conversations over the last few days that lead me to compile this (rather unfunny) top five list of my own. Here goes: 5ive things I know to be true, but have a hard time convincing others.

1. C# is the best programming language.

2. Lefties should play right-handed guitar, and righties, left-handed guitar. Why? because the hard part is fretting the notes not “starting” the note. Keep it strung upside-down too – it looks cool and free you from all the hackneyed riff patterns

3. When moving to a new home, people tend to take a long time to unbox themselves and feel guilty about it. The best approach is to open all the cardboard boxes and dump out the contents on the floor. Remove the cardboard! It is a bureaucratic hurdle to your need to get settled.

4. Phil Collins established himself as one of the best drummers of all time with Moroccan Roll.

5. We should teach base-12 (dozenal as opposed to decimal) to grade schoolers – it is superior to base-10 in every way.

iTunes Purchase

I uncreatively use Microsoft and Yahoo! for nearly everything I do. It’s not that I don’t see the superiority of Google or Macintosh it just I prefer to go with what’s popular and easy for these things. I see now that when it comes to music, I’ve lost out. I totally dig the new WiMP (version 11 beta), and have bought a bit of music from MSN and MusicMatch. I even helped start a business that sells local wma files as opposed to the aac and m4p files that Macs use, but I eventually had to install iTunes and use their store to make the following purchases. So sad to see that some labels or musicians only want to sell on iTunes and not these stores or the local online route. Ah well. Since I wasn’t able to bring myself to completely switch to iTunes, I immediately burned my purchases to music-CD in order to re-rip them to mp3PRO (my preferred unlocked format). I saw the CDs in a traditional CD store for some $18 or so, but decided I rather forego the fancy artwork for the downloads (which cost less than $10). So here’s what I bought.

“People People Music Music” by Groove Collective : The sixth full CD by perhaps my favorite band of the last 10 years – ever since their release of “We the People”. The music produced by the band (which despite their name is relatively cohesive over the 6 albums – very few member changes for a group of studio-grade jazzers of NYC) continues to fly under the radar of both critic and popular acclaim. That’s too bad. ‘Tis especially a shame that jazz-fans and jazz-critics are not able to appreciate the music, but maybe now that they are on Savoy, things will change. Granted the music is fun, but it also has its complexities. This album shows the band engaging in melodic and harmonic themes extending well beyond 8 bars, and solos that are truly stirring. The album lacks some of the rhythmic complexities we heard on Dance of the Drunken Master, but all in all a rich set of new jazz material. By the way, I am completely comfortable calling this jazz even though purists will be more apt to call it funk or sugar-free jazz.

“Observing Systems” by Tied and Tickled Trio : The second album I bought from iTunes was one I’ve been pining for for years now – but well worth the wait. This is a German band that makes a darker shade of acid-jazz than Groove Collective. What’s gone is the danceable jam-band tendencies, but what replaces it is the brooding glitchy trip-hop underpinnings that reek of euro-trash sophistication. Here is finally a group which I can say is closest to what I try to do in my music. Of course, what we struggle to do with four people, they manage to pull off with 3?! My guess is that trio doesn’t translate to a three-person band in this case. At any rate, this is a hard album to find in the US – but represents (along with the Groove Collective CD) some truly innovative jazz IMHO.

Puzzle: Tale of the Eccentric Vintner

The following is my adaptation of a puzzle offered by an old friend. The original is a little too bawdy so I’ve recast it…

This one eccentric winemaker believes the secret to great drink is to have the grapes squashed by the feet of dancing maidens. He has arranged for one on Saturday and another for Sunday. Given modern health regulations the dancers are required to wear booties, but the vintner is unwilling to spend much money on such disposable footwear. Given that each dancer will be required to squash both chardonnay and cabernet grapes which cannot contaminate each other, and that the dancers are unwilling to wear booties worn by one another – What’s the least number of pairs of booties that the vintner needs to buy? And what procedure is necessary to ensure that the dancers’ feet won’t have to share booties and that the two kinds of grapes do not contact each other.

Hint: 1) it’s fewer than you think, 2) no it’s not 3 pairs, and 3) one can wear booties over other booties.

my big software accomplishment

I set myself – what appeared to be – a very generous deadline about 5 months ago to finish a piece of software I was writing in time to show at a conference. The conference was just last week and so the weeks leading up to it were busy with final touches to the code and its complimentary website.
The website is http://www.graphsynth.com. The software that one can download from that site is entitled GraphSynth and its snapshot is shown here. I believe that the software is quite revolutionary but it will be most inscrutable to many of you. In a previous post, I talked about my interest in mathematical graphs to not only simplify complex things in life but also to design or create new complex things. GraphSynth is designed to do just that. It implements various graph building functions to allow one to make a set of rules to define a creative domain, be it, music, art, engineering design, or architecture.
At any rate, the software is available publicly to anyone interested. There’s quite a bit of theory behind it, and making rules takes time. I have many other things going on in life, and this was quite an enjoyable distraction – back to making music and trying to snag more research money.

Gratuitous Use of Packaging

I know I haven’t written an entry in a while, and this short one really doesn’t satisfy, but here goes.
This is a picture of 3 packages that arrived at our house last week. Each contained exactly one small item (the light green packages). All are from the same company and yet each uses a different packaging material.
Why weren’t they shipped in the same package?
Why were such huge boxes used? All three could have been shipped in the same padded envelope. Technically, we got a good deal on the shipping and handling and the company lost out. But in the end, we all lose. That sounds cheesy, I know, but the point is being environmentally minded might actually be inline with aspects of technological advances and economic improvement in as many cases as it challenges these ideas.

A Definitive and Graphical Guide to Human Energy/Power

I’ve been talking on and off about how we don’t use our own human energy anymore – everything is electric or hydrocarbon powered. In the spirit of hybridding, it’d be nice to harness human power where appropriate. There are better studies of this topic than what I’m about to write, but this one is compact and pretty!(?) When I bicycle (bicycles are a great way to get our energy out – see my prev. blogs: 1, 2, 3). I can push the pedals with about 200 pounds of force (~900 N), I can bike continuously for 30 min. (1800 sec), and I can move my feet about 10 rev per second (10 m/s). If I plot these limits in a figure (Figure 1). I can multiply the three values together to get an energy output. I can provide 4.5 kWH! my house eats 15 kWH a day – I could reduce my electric bill by a third.

Not quite. It’d be impossible to do all three at once. For one reason, that’s almost 4000 (nutritional) calories. I only take in half that in a whole day. In any half hour exercise session, one would like expend up to 500 calories. That scoops out a major portion of our graph (see Figure 2).

Finally, just like an electric motor’s Torque-Speed curve, I wouldn’t be able to provide the max force at the max speed. Let’s assume a linear relationship between max force and max speed. As you see in Figure 3, this removes a triangle off of the back wall. That backwall (force x speed) is actually power in watts – more on this in a moment. Furthermore, the floor of the plot is distance (speed x time). You have to pace yourself, right? So, I wouldn’t be able to sprint for the full 30 minutes. Let’s carve out unreasonable distances as well. Lastly, the left plane of the figure is momentum (force x time). This is the least physically intuitive of the six, but we can guess that one would be able to provide the max force for the full 30 min. So, we carve out some of that too. The result is a an plot that shows what one can provide – roughly a maximum at that 500 calories, or ½ a kWH – and rest assured, you’ll be pooped after that.

Many tasks though have a power requirement. Power is not conserved, though. And you can store energy slowly (low power input) and expend quickly (high power, but over short time). If we look at the power vs. time curve we can see what one could provide with the view provide in Figure 3. This is shown in the final figure (Figure 4) and indicates that my assessment is a little on the high side. But it’s something like 1 kW for 15 minutes that we grown adults are good for.
That’s not too bad is it? One can probably do quite a bit with that.
(P.S. all these graphs were made in the new Microsoft excel 2007 beta version)

Fantastic Island Game

Here’s another thing, I couldn’t find anything about online. It’s a little puzzle called the Fantastic Island Game – obviously some mangled translation from Chinese, but it’s no simple or cheap puzzle. The peices have a nice feel and a lot of thought has been put into its design.
As you can see from the pics, you get 7 pieces (ala Tetris) that can be assembled into, get this, 124 different simplex pyramids (like the one I solved at the bottom). The mind’s activity during this ‘puzzling’ is quite refreshing to me. I know a little bit about how puzzles can be solved computationally, so sometimes I get bored with such things because I know the best way to solve some puzzles is to follow a rote set of actions. But, in general, we need to keep pushing ourselves to solve such puzzles if we wanna keep our wits about us (what I mean is, as we get older, we need to exercise that ol’ wetware).
Part of the freshness offered by this puzzle, is the 3-nature that the pieces congeal in. From my previous posts, one can see my fascination with ternary systems, and this is a great example. As you build the pyramid, pieces aren’t to the left/right of or above/below one another (as in the binary way of things we usually consider) but the interactions are harder to define.

Anyway, a lot of fun and getting good at this is good for ya – my humble opinion.