a random walk

In some of the computational research I do, one often talks about taking a “random walk through the space.” This is to get a feel of how messy a design problem is, or how much things changed by making the same size small changes.To me (and probably no one else), there’s an interesting tie-in with music. I’ve been taking bass lessons again and working with a teacher on walking bass lines. In jazz the bass players have adopted this walking thing – taking small steps to transition between chords in a song. It takes some talent to choose notes that are not completely obvious and yet not completely random. One can’t be too interesting otherwise it’ll distract from the melodic, and not too boring otherwise the whole tune will suffer.

Looking at design and the decisions we make in design, I can see an analogy. In engineering, we don’t always want the most creative solution (especially if there’s no precedent that it’ll work or if you have to go to great lengths to make it by retooling your manufacturing), and we don’t want something to boring or predictable (else no one will buy it, and we won’t be truly innovative).

Don’t worry about me. This depresses me a little as well. I’d like to think we are always best with the crazy ideas even if it means no one else will understand .

an uncomfortable truth about air power

In my last post, I wrote about a mythical approach to transportation – one that relies on charged air. I still very much like this idea, but there are two big problems with it to be frank:

1) Pressured air (pneumatics) is much more dangerous than pressured liquid (hydraulics) – i.e. things can explode.
2) The control system for using compressed air as an energy storage medium is difficult to design.

The latter is going to be a big challenge for my air-powered bike idea. This is because as you pedal the bike and charge up your pressurized air tank that will be used to drive the wheel(s), the pedaling will constantly get harder and harder. One will require some gearing that will hopefully shift for you so that you can keep pedaling with a fairly even force imposed. Here’s a simple two-gear idea. It doesn’t require pedaling in the traditional sense, but rather an up and down motion like a stair-climber. The mechanism would require the shifting to simply lock one of the cylinders (while unlocking the other).

Air Power

Rarely do internet searches disappoint. But yesterday, I was disappointed twice by two related searches. I overheard two colleagues of mine talking about a vehicle, car if you will, that can transverse the continental US on a single tank of compressed air. This turned up nothing. Perhaps they were sharing a joke and I was naïve to the punchline. Ahh well. At any result, I did find an air-powered car that reportedly can travel 185 miles.

This relates back to a previous post I made about the nature of energy. Vehicles are particularly tricky because of what I called the discrepancy in space (i.e. they need to be portable). A windmill or a nuclear reactor are hardly portable, are they. And countless alternatives fail to meet the demands (battery powered car?).

I’m also a big fan of bicycles. Not that I’m much of a star on a bike, but I love the fact that it has long evolved as an efficient way to get energy out of humans. So, I was really excited to read in Wired magazine about an air-powered bicycle with a picture of what I thought was one. Again an internet search of air-powered bicycle didn’t get me to what I thought was a bike driven by human generated air-power. But rather, like the car, one charged by more conventional means.

Why I am disappointed about this. Well, energy and power are not the same. Energy is conserved, not power. We humans can’t produce a whole lot of power, but energy we get a lot of, some more than we need. We tend not to use the kilocalories we store up as soon as we’d like. In fact, FDA says you take in 2000 calories (kcal) a day. With a good workout, you can expend a quarter of that, or about 0.6 kilowatt-hours. So, the instructables site let me down with my future air powered bike. But poking around that sight I also saw someone state how it’d be impossible to charge a 2HP air tank. That’s just not true. One person may not be able to create that much power. But that’s the great thing, we don’t store power, we store energy! Air is an untapped storage media of excess energy.

Sooo, the bike I wanted to see (which I guess I’ll have to design someday) uses your pedaling to store energy in the bike and outputs to the wheels when you want and at what rate (i.e. what power).

singing in my sleep

If you pin the label songwriter to your list of interests/avocations, you may have been blessed or plagued by a similar phenomenon. It usually only happens to me when I’m low stress, getting a lot of exercise and thus sleeping alot. Now that summer’s on the way, my job is a little lower stress and I have more time to exercise and hence dream music. I’ve had one or two instances in the last year that were enough to rouse me out of bed and roughly record the two concepts.
Here they are:
Dream 1: June 3rd, 3am 2005
Dream 2: April 30th, 5am 2006
What do these have in common? well, for one they’re both difficult to ‘count’. They are roughly in 4/4 but they repeat in the middle of the phrase. This brings up an interesting point about music. Most of what we hear is in 4/4 and our conscious state is often to create music in this time. But when the semi-conscious takes over, one can be free of the monotonity of common music. pretty cool.

Bicycle Evolution

Yesterday, I spent about 90 minutes in a local bike shop testing some new road bikes. My first reaction was how astonishing bikes have evolved in the last six years since I last bought one. But now in retrospect, I’ve changed that view. Lookit, no machine requires as much physical human energy and makes such efficient use of it as the bicycle. Exercise equipment will gladly accept your energy but it does little with it – rarely does it even use this to power it’s 5-volt intelligence. So I believe we are extremely sensitive to the slight advances in bicycle design since WE are so intimately tied to the energy system.
For example, those funny little shoes you see on those skinny guys clicking about the coffee shop – do you need those to do any serious biking these days? The reason they developed was because most people bike in sneakers that have evolved to absorb (get rid of) the energy transfer to your foot from all that pounding the pavement. The bicycle shoe developed as a reaction in recent years because you want to maximize your energy delivered to the pedals – so your sneakers are working against you here!
Unlike the automobile, efficiency in cycling is directly in-line with speed and racing. As a result, all the design activities in cycling have been towards that single goal: make it more efficient since efficiency is speed. In automotives, this is clearly not the case. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all the engineering design that went into Formula-One racing actually help us all have more efficient cars ! (there problaby is a small tie-in but I can’t see it now)

Unfortunately, making the cycle more efficient introduces various contradictory sub-goals: make it lighter vs. make it stiffer, or make it comfy vs. make it fast. Furthermore, since buying a bike is like buying a car (a mode of transportation) but also like buying clothing (many complex interfaces with the human body) cycle manufacturers can make the slightest change in a design that seems, from our perspective to seem like a real technological leap. The danger in all this is that the ignorant consumer (even one who hasn’t gone in a bike-shop for 6 years) can often be tricked into Formula-One spec’d racing bikes!

Magic Number 3

On this day 5/9/06, I want to discuss the most underrated number, the number 3. Perhaps our nature is to think of the world as in base-10 and base-2 for some strange psychological or biological reasons (10 fingers, and the bi-symmetry of ourselves, left-vs.-right). But through a series of posts I want to talk about base-3, and I’m not the only one. In a wonderfully readable article in American Scientist, the author shows the following graph that indicates that base-3 is optimal! What does that mean? Well, it means that we should be striving to make a computer that runs on Base-3 instead of Base-2. Not only is base-3 best for us (in terms of least headache in writing down numbers and doing simple math on them – yes, easier than our base-10 that we’ve spent a life time studying), but it also could make computers run much faster and more efficiently.

Here’s a great puzzle related to this base-3 business:
“You are given 12 balls and one of them has a weight defect – either heavier or lighter. We don’t know which one it is. You are allowed to use a balance pan three times to find the defective ball. What process should you follow?”click here for the answer.

more on this base-3 stuff later…

Flaming Lips – At War with the Mystics – Review

I was excited to buy the latest Flaming Lips
music (I’m almost exclusively buying my music online these days – my favorite site is Musicmatch – both for its prices and its diversity). Something about the previous release, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, really grabbed me and I wanted more. Given the reviews of War with the Mystics, I was sure that I would see it similar. After a few weeks of listening, I have to say it’s not as magical as I hoped.
The Flaming Lips has always been a band that is pivoted on humor, which I think is great. But the more they’ve veered towards progressive-rock the harder it is to make this work. I was a big prog-rock fan for the longest time – listening to music made in the early 70′s. As I became a musician as a teenager, I thought it’d be fun to write and play such music. But, alas other influences pulled me more towards jazz. At any rate, I’ve realized that playing truly progressive rock or the more specific and stilted prog-rock is more than just sci-fi synth sounds and fantastical titles. Here is a band trying to make a prog-rock album and failing to do so, unlike Radiohead’s Hail to the Theif or Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot which are progressive although the both bands would hate to be labeled that way. Yoshimi… was successful at combining both the Flaming Lips usual campiness with truly complex and beautiful music. That album also had more warmth partly due to the smooth bass sounds that appear to be missing on Mystics. They seem to have maintained an edginess on Yoshimi that, like the previously listed bands (Radiohead and Wilco), make it hard to pin the prog-rock label on – even though they deserve it.

Case in point, the title track on Yoshimi (tracks 3 and 4) and ripe with humor and ol’fashioned r’n'r rebellion that ties them to their “she don’t use jelly” roots. In comparison on Mystics, tracks like “Free Radicals” builds up an all too-polished spoof of 90′s Prince. It’s hard to believe the track clocks in at only 3:40 since the simple gtr-riff gets old real quick. The vocals on the album are delivered in the same charming, thin, unassuming Coyne style that pulled our heartstring on “Waitin’ for Superman” but somehow there’s just too much being said in this album to get the same affect. I don’t have the best ear, but the vocals on “Haven’t Got a Clue” are simply not in tune. Don’t get me wrong – I agree with the political message of the CD, but I was expecting more from the music.

design: part art, part art, part science

I was working with a student today who was writing a paper on whether
design (specifically engineering design) is part art or part science. In
a way, this phrase we use to describe something as an art more than a
science is really simply a colloquialism – and perhaps shouldn’t be the
basis for a rigorous study. But, the student is very sharp and really
went into a lot of varied texts to discern an answer.
In the end, I was impressed with his study with the exception of how
“art” is used. When we describe something as an art more than a science,
we mean that it has an intangible element that defies an easy
explanation or way to instruct others. Design is clearly prone to this.
Often experience and intuition are used to determine what’s a good idea
over a bad idea. Experience and intuition in design fulfill this
definition of “art.” But, further, Design also overlaps with the
definition of art as in the “production of aesthetic object” to quote m-w.com).

So in this way, we can define design fulfilling two separate definitions of art. Also, there is of course the technology in design. How things are made, and the complexity of those objects. So, if you are forced to define engineering design to someone – you can tell them it’s part art, part art and part science.

Trolley Volley

About 2 years ago, Gabrielle and I were camping up in the Pacific Northwest, and were about to head back to Seattle. I was thinking I should get a souvenir but nothing really reflected my experience there. So, when we realized we had to hurry to make the next ferry I grabbed a package of 6 dice in lieu of a beer-cozy, and we headed out. On the long ferry ride, there’s not much to do, so we started to think of a new dice game that wouldn’t just be all luck. (It seems that dice games lack strategy a lot more than card games, doesn’t it?) Today, we are still the only players of Trolley Volley – partly because friends that we attempt to teach are dubious of playing a game "we made up". But, it’s a real game – it’s been play-tested now 100′s of times. So, I present to you a brand new game for an old-fashioned medium.

Trolley Volley

• Required: 6 6-sided dice, 2 people
• Objective: Be the first to reach 25 points.
• Scoring:
• a trolley of length 3 (1,2,3 or 2,3,4 or 3,4,5 or 4,5,6) = 1 point.
• a trolley of length 4 (1,2,3,4 or 2,3,4,5 or 3,4,5,6) = 3 points.
• a trolley of length 5 (1,2,3,4,5 or 2,3,4,5,6) = 5 points.
• a trolley of length 6 (1,2,3,4,5,6) = 7 points.

Trolley Volley has a similar flow to volleyball (hence part of the name). One person is offense, and as such they are the only one who can score. The other person is defense, and their goal is simply to re-gain the offensive position.

Play follows any number of volleys or rounds. The following is a description of a single round.

The offense player has four dice and the defense has two. Both players roll their dice simultaneously being careful not to lose track of what dice are theirs. Offense is attempting to make a trolley or a straight (in poker terminology) of either 3, 4, 5, or 6 numbers in a row. A successful trolley must have at least one or both of the defensive player’s dice. The defense player is attempting to prevent this or to get any three of a kind (again, where at least one is from the defensive player), which would trump or derail any of the opponent’s trolleys. After the first simultaneous roll, the offense player must first decide which of his four dice she/he will re-roll. They can choose to stay or re-roll 1, 2, 3, or all 4. After they pick up their dice to re-roll, defense makes the same decision on their two. Both players then simultaneously roll their chosen dice, and the volley is now complete (yes, that’s a short volley!). Based on the dice values, the players determine whether the offense scored a successful volley or not. If not, then the players switch roles.

Derailing

I mentioned the concept of derailing the offense by the defense achieving three of a kind. Many times this will stop a trolley that overlaps the three of a kind. For example, let’s say after the second roll of dice the final outcome is:

		4
2	3	4	5
2		4

 Where the offense has rolled the blue numbers and the defense has rolled the red. Even though the offense got a nice trolley of 2, 3, 4, 5 (remember a successful trolley has to have at least include at least of one of the defense’ die), the defense wins the volley since it created a three of a kind block ( 4, 4, 4).

The Situation

Let’s say that the result was slightly different…

		4
2		4	5
2		4	5

Here, the defense has achieved a three of a kind, but there is nothing to block, since the offense was not able to make a trolley. Of course, it is clearly, the defense’s turn to be offense, but additionally you enter into a mode of play, we simply call – the situation. This is basically like a hat-trick in hockey. The new offense player gets 5 dice to roll, and the defense has only one to fend off the trolleys.

 

That’s it – kind of confusing to learn, but quite easy to play. A couple practice rounds and you’ll quickly advance in the ranks of all-time best Trolley Volley players. Currently, there are only the two of us.

 

 

The hardest logic puzzle…

The hardest logic puzzle I’ve encountered seems to be lost. At least I can find no reference to it online, so I’ve taken the liberties (or perhaps you view it as an injustice if you are the original author) to rewrite the problem here.

Tale of the Diseased Monks
One Sunday evening after working in the fields, the secluded monks of the Kaetorsian order gathered for evening prayers. After the usual somber songs and pious prayers, the high priest said, “I have a grave announcement. It appears a horrible disease has fallen on our community this fine spring day. Some of you have acquired a disease from working in the fields today. I know this because the disease results in a purple spot on your forehead, and I can see that some of you have this. From what I know of this most evil disease – you will remain unharmed for 14 days. After which, the disease will spread to others, and you will experience a most painful passing that may last months. If we are not careful, this disease will completely destroy our peaceful monastery. Therefore, I ask that those of you who have this spot please remove yourself from our community before these two weeks are over. Despite the fact that all of you have taken a vow of silence, and a vow of humility, and thus will not be able to inform one another of the forehead spot, and even though we lack mirrors and the lake is choppy and you are unable to see for yourself whether you have this spot, you are all trained highly in the ways of logic and will be able to deduce on your own whether or not you have become infected. In this way, we will carry on as we always have. You will work in solitarily all morning and we will congregate here every evening to welcome one another to this holy life we share. Some of you would prefer that I simply point out those of you who are diseased and while I have not taken the vow of silence that you have taken, my vow of humility prevents me from calling attention to your dysfunctions. Good night”
The next few days passed as they always have. The monks that had been infected seemed as good natured as the others, and no one treated one another any differently. However, after more than a week, as the two week deadline approached, an air of nervousness crept in. The second Saturday after the high priest’s announcement was particularly tense. The next day marked the two week deadline before the disease was to spread again, and the diseased monks were still working and praying along side the healthy ones. After the congregation disbanded from the Saturday evening prayers, the monks returned to their private quarters. On Sunday, two weeks after the high priest announcement, all of the diseased monks were gone. Through their highly tuned logic skills, they were able to determine that they had been affected and removed themselves.
How many monks were infected? And how did they determine it?