Mikhail's Exospective

Arts funding

2010-12-08T09:05:00.002-05:00

When I'm irritated at the difficulty in convincing people that the basic sciences need to be funded, I need to remember that it's only more difficult for arts groups.

Teapots

2010-12-03T22:07:00.003-05:00

Today I found an entire blog devoted to teapots. The author has been posting consistently about teapots since 2005. I love the internet.

[ Link: Teapots Teapots Teapots ]

Rebooting a blog

2010-12-03T20:56:00.006-05:00

"Mikhail's Exospective" began its life on the Blogger platform almost five years ago shortly after I had moved to New York City to begin my undergraduate education. For the first few years I documented the strange experiences I had in that city and on that campus. I also wrote anecdotes and opinion pieces. I waxed philosophical during the times of existential despair. I read Kierkegaard and Kant. But mostly I wrote quirky pieces from the perspective of an undergraduate physics student having the time of his life in one of the greatest places to live, though some might contend otherwise.

The breadcrumb trail of undergraduate anecdotes came to an end 2009 as posts became more and more infrequent. It was not that there wasn't anything to write about. I was married that summer, and marriages can have huge perturbative effects on a lifestyle. It's true. Hobbies get shuffled around. Big life choices get made. I even began going to bed at a reasonable hour. What an odd feeling that was. When I see a clock show 9 pm, I think that maybe I should wind down for the day. As an undergrad, I did most of my best work between 9 pm and 2 am.

Amongst the major life decision that were hashed out in between 2009 and 2010 was a relocation back to Canada. I'm living in Ontario now, which is still somewhat alien to me. I don't share the deep abiding passion for Tim Horton's coffee. I don't like small towns. I don't like having to drive a car all the time. I don't appreciate the dearth of good delis and food carts, which were my basic sustenance in New York. But the big plus is that I'm working a sweet job as a astrophysics grad student, programming supercomputers, and simulating how stars form. I get to travel to conferences, meet many interesting people, do public outreach and teaching, and hone my skills as a researcher, writer, and scientist. I also married an awesome girl.

So the new life is good. And its time to start telling stories again like I used to. They had even become mildly popular with some of my friends. Very mildly.

Here are some favourite past posts:

The Urban Chicken Movement

New take on Little Red Riding Hood

2009-04-13T17:35:00.001-04:00

A school assignment to reinterpret a fairy tale resulted in this fantastic animation.

Slagsmålsklubben - Sponsored by destiny from Tomas Nilsson on Vimeo.

Music: Slagsmålsklubben, Sponsored by destiny
smk.just.nu
Animation: Tomas Nilsson
tomas-nilsson.se

Shuttle launches

2009-03-17T09:07:00.003-04:00

As you may know, Space Shuttle Discovery launched recently on a mission to the ISS to deliver a new solar array. Shuttle launches always inspire me, so I write about them from time to time. It has been a long time since I've written here. I wanted to point you in the direction of some great photos of the launch.

The first is a collection of photos from Twitter users, some of which are really great.
http://www.aroundglobe.net/2009/03/space-shuttle-take-off-photos-by.html

Best of all, though, are some photos taken from the ISS, which were posted at WarrenEllis.com:
http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=3183

Enjoy.

Human Rights

2008-12-10T20:34:00.001-05:00

I saw this important video today.

First images taken of planets outside our solar system

2008-11-14T11:53:00.003-05:00

Debris ring around Fomalhaut showing location of planet Fomalhaut b - imaged by Hubble Space Telescope's coronagraph. NASA photo.

On the day I get my senior portrait taken for college graduation I read about exoplanets being photographed for the first time. This is exciting news. Read about it here.

Oh, and sorry that I haven't been writing very often. Fall semester of senior year of college is a busy one. And there's a wedding to plan, too.

Presidential Candidates at Columbia

2008-09-12T23:11:00.003-04:00

I didn't get to witness the event from inside Lerner Hall, but they had a giant screen rigged up for thousands of students watching the event from the steps of Low Library.

Caspar David Friedrich

2008-08-26T02:31:00.008-04:00

Caspar David Friedrich is my favorite artist. I like his work for the way he stops time in his paintings. I also love them for the immense, haunting, terrible expanses of nature that dwarf the human characters in his paintings. While daunting, one still feels pulled into the expanse. In The Cross in the Mountains, the pull is upward, out of this life and towards heaven. The Abbey has a kind of terrible majesty. And Wanderer shows a vast nature Man contemplates and wishes to subdue.

I was looking at art prints today. I might buy some for my room.

Abbey in the Oakwood

The Cross in the Mountains

Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog

Many more at the Web Gallery of Art.

Another one I liked: The painting Monk by the Sea.

The ATLAS Experiment

2008-08-25T01:00:00.003-04:00

On October 21, 2008, collisions are scheduled to begin taking place inside the Large Hadron Collider, the most advanced device humans have ever constructed. It is supposed to probe deeper into matter than ever before and replicate theorized conditions shortly after the creation of the universe. It also intends to discover a new particle, the Higgs boson, predicted by the Standard Model, which is the most complete theory of the physical universe. The Higgs boson is to be responsible for giving particles their masses. If you'll pardon the music, the short video below (credit to Dan for pointing this out to me) explains the ATLAS detector, one large piece for studying proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider.

Space Junk

2008-08-14T16:22:00.003-04:00

Saw this picture today. It includes satellites in orbit around the Earth and space garbage being tracked by ground radar. Read the post about it here.

The Outside World

2008-08-11T10:56:00.004-04:00

We're getting hit!! Severe thunder storm warning with chance of hail, damaging winds and/or frequent lightning are possible, according to weather.com. Of course, it all seemed fine when I strolled into the lab this morning. I only know it's storming outside because the internet tells me it is, the storm drain (presumably from campus level) runs down through the control room is making a rushing-water noise, and one of the grad students went up to the surface... err I mean to campus... and confirmed the severe storm.

From Manhattan to Mongolia

2008-08-07T00:50:00.002-04:00

A friend of mine was featured in the Financial Times. We used to work on our physics homework sets together, and reunited briefly working together with Engineers Without Borders at Columbia's chapter. She spent at least last summer and part of last year working for an investment bank in Mongolia. Read the feature here.

Olympic Architecture

2008-08-07T00:30:00.002-04:00

I wanted to post something on the interactive feature that the New York Times has available on its website. I has some pretty spectacular photographs on the new Olympic buildings constructed for the games in Beijing. You should also check it out here.

There's also an article on the main stadium that you may find of interest.

Architecture Review

Olympic Stadium With a Design to Remember

By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF

Published: August 5, 2008

The National Stadium reaffirms architecture’s civilizing role in a nation that is struggling to forge a new identity out of a maelstrom of inner conflict.

Olympic Torches

2008-08-03T13:09:00.000-04:00

I thought this was pretty cool: The New York Times had a feature on the design of the Olympic torches throughout the modern history of the Games. Take a look.

A complete dose

2008-07-30T00:18:00.005-04:00

Hit the pharmacy today and picked up an assortment of things including a "complete" multi-vitamin/multi-mineral supplement. I didn't know I had to ingest 75 micrograms of molybdenum to be "complete". But now it feels so good to complete. Prized for its high melting point, molybdenum is often used in high-strength steel alloys. Basically, that makes me Wolverine. I almost got that Hugh Jackman facial hair thing going on too. Now all I need are some retractable blades and self-healing. I wonder if I can find that stuff at the pharmacy...

Breaching Whale

2008-07-25T22:36:00.001-04:00

Breaching Physeter macrocephalus
Originally uploaded by quarrresma / João Quaresma

Check this guy out. He's so cool. Sometimes I wish I were this happy.

Dolly Zoom

2008-07-15T10:23:00.002-04:00

Doing some research on lenses for use in our experiment. I was considering different types of lenses including wide-angle, normal and zoom lenses. This is when I learned about a trick in film-making that I have noticed in some films. The trick is called dolly zoom, and involves moving the camera (dollying) towards or away from the subject while zooming in or out, keeping the subject the same size. The effect is emotionally unsettling because it seems that suddenly the foreground or background grows immensely. This is because we judge relative size using perspective as well as the absolute size we perceive the object to have.

The animation below shows what happens to the field of view as a camera executes dolly zoom.

Here are some famous examples of the effect used in film.

Here is the same effect used with LEGO. Because LEGO is awesome.

Random Funnies, New York Edition

2008-07-08T20:01:00.003-04:00

MeatWater
New Yorkers love their vitamin water so much that others are compelled to parody it. See here MeatWater.

You know you're from New York when...

1. You say "the city" and expect everyone to know that this means Manhattan.

2. You have never been to the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building.

3. You can get into a four-hour argument about how to get from Columbus Circle to Battery Park at 3:30 on the Friday before a long weekend, but can't find Wisconsin on a map.

4. You know the lights above the skyscrapers is the closest thing we have to stars.

5. The subway makes sense.

6. You believe that being able to swear at people in their own language makes you multi-lingual.

7. You've considered stabbing someone just for saying "The Big Apple".

8. The most frequently used part of your car is the horn.

9. Yellow light means speed up.

10. Red light means speed up because you know have that 1 second pause until the other light turns green.

11. You think Central Park is "nature."

12.You see nothing odd about the speed of an auctioneer's speaking.

13.You're paying $1,200 for a studio the size of a walk-in closet and you think it’s a "steal."

14.You've been to New Jersey twice and got hopelessly lost both times.

15.You pay more each month to park your car than most people in the U.S. pay in rent.

16.You haven't seen more than twelve stars in the night sky since you went away to camp as a kid.

17. You go to dinner at 9 and head out to the clubs when most Americans are heading to bed.

18. You order your dinner and have it delivered.. from the place across the street.

19. You haven't heard the sound of true absolute silence since the 80s, and when you did, it terrified you.

20. You pay $5 without blinking for a beer that cost the bar 28 cents.

21. You take fashion seriously.

22. Being truly alone makes you nervous.

23. You have 27 different menus next to your telephone.

24. Going to Brooklyn is considered a "road trip."

25. America west of the Hudson is still theoretical to you.

26. You've gotten jaywalking down to an art form.

27. You take a taxi to get to your health club to exercise.

28. Your idea of personal space is no one actually standing on your toes.

29. $50 worth of groceries fit in one paper bag.

30. You have a minimum of five "worst cab ride ever" stories.

31. You don't notice sirens anymore.

32. You live in a building with a larger population than most American towns.

33. Your doorman is Russian, your grocer is Korean your deli man is Israeli, your building super is Italian, your laundry guy is Chinese, your favorite bartender is Irish, your favorite diner owner is Greek, the watchseller on your corner is Senegalese, your last cabbie was Pakistani, your newsstand guy is Indian and your favorite falafel guy is Egyptian.

34. You're suspicious of strangers who are actually nice to you.

35. You secretly envy cabbies for their driving skills.

36. You think $7.00 to cross a bridge is a fair price.

37. Your door has more than three locks.

38. You can tell a gunshot from a firecracker and not get scared, but when you go to the burbs you get scared of hearing a cricket.

39. You consider eye contact an act of overt aggression.

40. You run when you see a flashing "Do Not Walk" sign at the intersection.

41. You're 35 years old and don't have a driver's license.

42. You ride in a subway car with no air conditioning just because there are seats available.

43. You're willing to take in strange people as roommates simply to help pay the rent.

44. There is no North and South...

45. It's uptown or downtown.

46. When you're away from home, you miss "real" pizza and "real" bagels.

47. You cross the street on a green light, and if you get hit by a car you blame the driver for "not watching where they're going.

48. You're not in the least bit interested in going to Times Square on New Year's Eve.

49. Your internal clock is permanently set to know when Alternate Side of the Street parking regulations are in effect.

50. You know what a bodega is.

51. You know how to fold the New York Times in half, vertically, so that you can read it on the subway or bus without knocking off other passenger's hats.

52. Someone bumps into you, and you check for your wallet.....

53. You cringe at hearing people pronounce Houston St. like the city in Texas

54. Film crews on your block annoy you, not excite you.

55. People from other states can't tell a polar bear from a peanut, but they know you're from NY the second you open your mouth.

56. When you are able to make a right turn at a red light.. you think it's the best thing ever.

57. Rather than waiting safely on the sidewalk to cross the street, you wait inches away from speeding traffic waiting to cut through it.

58. Your local news is national news.

59. You walk a mile in 13 minutes and think that everything should be open 24/7.

60. You know who Dr. Z is...

61. You think you know better than everyone else in the world.. when in reality.. well.. you do.

62. You call an 8' x 10' plot of patchy grass a yard.

Lighter Ignition

2008-07-02T10:40:00.001-04:00

We tested our high-speed camera yesterday.

Edited: I should have explained that this is a cigarette lighter being started, filmed at 2000 frames and played back 60 times slower. It was filmed with a high-speed camera, which (tragically) only take monochrome video.

Creative assays in photography

2008-06-30T22:04:00.007-04:00

I took some more photos this weekend, together with my girlfriend. We often took turns as subject/photographer. This evening, to wind down, I did some editing in Adobe Lightroom. Photo editing is very relaxing for me. Here are the results:

I don't often photograph in the rain. I don't have the protective equipment for my camera. But we were carrying the camera around through the city and were caught in a downpour. Luckily, we found shelter under some scaffolding and I took the opportunity to begin taking some shots. We were in the Union Square neighborhood, walking along 13th Street.

This shot, also taken under the scaffolding on 13th Street, made us of a out-of-focus trick I read about recently in Popular Photography. Out-of-focus shots rarely work. But if you try for it, go way out of focus, then play with the lighting afterward until you get a kind of surreal shot like this one. You'll still need an interesting subject to shoot or a good silhouette.

Sheila took this shot. I'm very satisfied with the composition and depth of field. There is clear separation between subject and background. The shot was made more interesting, in my opinion, by applied an aged photo effect.

This one turned out really well. I was trying to shoot Sheila against a background of misty rain, but the differences in dynamic range between subject and background made it very hard to get capture details in both dynamic regimes. The camera was pointing west and it was getting into the evening. The sun was just started to pour through the clouds. The rain still falling gave a nice haze as the sun cast shadows of the buildings. Still, after some lighting changes, I'm extremely satisfied with this shot, and how Sheila's silhouette looks against the backdrop.

Moving from one gmail account to another

2008-06-30T20:36:00.002-04:00

I discovered a method for transferring the e-mail in one gmail account to another. I receive e-mail at two primary e-mail address. One is my gmail address and the other is the academic address given out by the university. I eventually had the university's mail server bounce all e-mail directly to my gmail account, since the school mailbox was constantly filling, but gmail's storage space grows approximately in tandem with the volume of e-mail I receive in kilobytes.

There still remained the task of importing all the old e-mails from the school's IMAP account. This was accomplished when I learned that with gmail's IMAP support, I can configure Mozilla Thunderbird to read e-mail from multiple IMAP accounts. There is a tutorial for how to configure your Thunderbird program for gmail here. Labels in gmail show up as folders in Thunderbird. I can then move all the old e-mail that I was already reading in Thunderbird, previously configured for my school account, to the appropriate folder/label in gmail. The process took some time, but wasn't so bad.

Now this same technique can be used for two gmail accounts. I have one old account and one new account. I no longer use the old one, but it still contains important messages. I want to transfer them to the new account for archival purposes. Use the same tutorial to configure Thunderbird to read both accounts. Then drag-and-drop the e-mails from one account to the other. The process will take some time as each e-mail must be sent and received again, but this is the best way that I know how. I'm writing this blog post because when I did a google search for ways of moving messages between gmail accounts, I didn't find anything terribly convenient. It's possible others have already used this technique, or that better methods exist. Let me know if you have a better way.

Summer Work

2008-06-25T10:19:00.003-04:00

I thought it was time for a short update. I've begun work at the Columbia CTX Lab. CTX is an acronym for the Collisionless Terrella Experiment. The experiment studies plasmas confined inside a magnetic field much like the Earth's or Jupiter's. The field arrangement is called a dipole and is generated by passing a large current through a coil suspended in the middle of a large vacuum chamber.

Plasma is the state of matter created when regular gas becomes so hot that the atoms break apart into a sea of positively-charged atom (ions) and negatively-charged electrons. Charged particles become trapped in magnetic fields and spin in little circles around the field lines. This is called cyclotron motion. Additionally, the hot electrons are bouncing between the north and south poles of our magnetic field. This bounce motion happens in Earth's magnetic field too. Some charged particles coming from the Sun become trapped in the Earth's field and entire the upper atmosphere in the polar regions where collisions account for the aurora.

The plasma is created inside CTX by puffing hydrogen gas (or other gases) into the chamber and which is then baked in microwaves. The microwaves are specially tuned to the cyclotron frequency of electrons, which then heat up and break the atoms apart and form a plasma.

Studying plasma confined in our experiment, we can learn things about the magnetic fields of planets like Earth or Jupiter. We can also learn about instabilities and turbulence in plasma, which is a huge concern for scientists doing research in nuclear fusion. Turbulence and instabilities disrupts plasma confinement and stifles efforts of achieving fusion. Succeeding in overcoming plasma instabilities could lead to a clean, safe, sustainable and abundant energy supply for the future.

Concert in the Park

2008-06-24T21:45:00.004-04:00

The New York Philharmonic was performing a free concert on the Great Lawn of Central Park tonight and I went to go catch some of it. It was a beautiful night for a concert, but even with sound amplification, open air acoustics don't lend themselves well to live music. I was sitting too far from any speaker system or the stage to hear much of the concert. I did take a few fun shots before the concert, though. Here they are.

Photo shoot at the Cathedral

2008-06-04T00:05:00.005-04:00

I went to the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine today. I didn't have much time to spend there, and part of the interior is still under renovation, but with the help of my tripod, I got to take a few really satisfying shots of the interior of the Cathedral. I've posted them to my Flickr page, but also here.

I hope you like them!

Amazon suggests

2008-06-02T14:15:00.006-04:00

I noticed this a few weeks ago when checking the prices for storage cabinets. I went to Amazon.com and was struck at what their website was automatically suggesting I buy in conjunction with my storage cabinet, and what this might suggest about the organizational habits of video game junkies.

OK, now I can get rid of that image on my hard drive. Just thought it was humorous.

Physics is like...

2008-05-26T01:17:00.003-04:00

Studying physics is about continually running into problems, but of a unique kind. It's like having a flat tire, and never having changed one before. Moreover, you aren't carrying a spare and you're still unsure how to operate the jack. You find yourself with a trunk full of thick books of an obscene weight about how to theoretically change a tire, and there's an older man who speaks only somewhat intelligibly about changing tires, but doesn't offer any examples, or at most rudimentary ones like, say, a bicycle. He is, however, pointing to a repair shop where you could fetch a tire. But you'll have to get there on your own effort. And it's three miles down the road. Get to work.

Gratitude

2008-05-23T01:36:00.004-04:00

I suspect that in all moments of greatest satisfaction, greatest ecstasy, greatest joy, or awe, or wonder, or happiness, our thoughts are never resting on the essence of that emotion, but are instead directed towards some object: a person, an achievement, a moment in history, the majesty of nature, or divinity. This object so consumes our own minds and beings that all apprehension of the self is lost. With the disconnection from self comes the liberation from cares and concerns about personal comforts. As a more concrete example, imagine standing in view of the Grand Canyon, or witnessing the Aurora Borealis. Allow the photographs to assist you, if you like. To be wrapped up in such a spectacle and then to entertain thoughts of personal greatness would be pure narcissism. Instead, our joy is wrapped up in its object and we feel truly free.

If I were to suggest that we should aspire to exist disconnected from ourselves as such, you would think me unreasonable or perhaps as having adopted or invented a new Eastern-sounding religion. While not suggesting this, I do think that we have words to describe people more, shall we say, inwardly-focused: selfish? egotistical? If preoccupation with self is disparaged, should we turn our thoughts completely outward or is it more about balance?

To these questions, and many ones that immediately follow, I do not have answers. But I've been thinking about gratitude in relation to these. I have found a tremendous joy in the relationship I enjoy with my girlfriend. We were discussing these things over a meal recently and found some of our happiest memories were of those times where we were least concerned about actually enjoying ourselves. Paradoxical, perhaps, but in line, I believe, with most people's experiences. When chasing after an emotion as an object, seeking to recreate that emotion, an idolatry of happiness results. And much like a wooden statuette fails to answer any appeals made to it, the enterprise ultimately fails. Instead, she and I found that we were both happiest when this preoccupation with personal enjoyment was absent and we instead had only contentment—an acceptance of the limited time we had to spend together, an acceptance of the limited resources we both have as students, a patience about where our lives are going and what the future holds, and instead a gratitude for the blessing we both are for each other, and the joy that this brings.

There is often little we can do to effect much change in our present circumstances. And this itself is a fairly terrifying thought. I may be a prophet of gratitude; however, I am a poor practitioner. Gratitude, and the peace that comes with it, requires, as far as my experience tells me and my reading guides me, a death to self. And if such dying is not continual, I've found, love soon turns to lust, pleasure turns to greed, rest turns to sloth, and enjoyment turns to gluttony. These vices are all excesses of the self, and somewhat of an interminable frustration for as long as this world and this mortal body exist to tempt me.

I write these things not to preach or admonish, but only because this is what I am learning and personally discovering. I write for myself more than for others. And if you have objections, please do share them in the comments. If you have found an easier way to be happy, please do write about it. I leave you here because it is late, and this article has grown long. The summer is before me and I expect there will be much to write about. I hope you'll read along.

Tortellini

2008-04-16T01:53:00.002-04:00

I saw this on a door leading into a common room/kitchen, shared by many students, where we all get along so very well.

For the record, I do not have your tortellini.

That season again

2008-04-15T01:26:00.002-04:00

I'm registering for next semester's classes. It will be my senior year! What do I choose? Should I brave that fluid dynamics class? What about an introductory general relativity class?

I have to say, though, that so far the class I am most excited to be taking next semester is one called American Maritime History. Not sure what to expect. The professor has fantastic reviews. I think the course may involve reading Moby Dick. Should be a welcome break from the head-smashed-in feeling of physics classes.

Motivation

2008-04-14T19:55:00.009-04:00

I had an interesting weekend for many reasons. One of these was some volunteer work done on Sunday afternoon. I visited a nursing home and spent about two hours there, assisting with a church service and talking to a few of the residents. I left there shortly before 4 o'clock with a bit of a strange feeling. It sparked a mix of optimistic and pessimistic thoughts while on the bus and subway rides home.

The attitudes of the residents were mixed. Some were happy and quite pleasant to talk to, while others had a more dreary attitude. Still others were senile and gave responses that had little or no connection to the questions I posed.

One interesting remark that I heard more than once was "well I'm still here." Depending on the intonation, this can be either full of optimism or quite cynical.

What motivates us to continue living? On the crosstown bus, staring out the window, I saw people walking down the street in ostensibly good health. They had their mobility; their bodies were supporting them. Bodily motion was an easy expression of their will to relocate. Some people do not have those freedoms. They need another to push them along. Our bodies are in continual decay. This is inevitable. Our spirits, though, if we have nothing to renew them, will experience the same downward pull.

I wonder sometimes why it is that people still persist in their struggle to stay alive and well. Is it in order to experience some future joy? What if such joy is not guaranteed? What if our idea of this joy requires half a lifetime of dedicated effort and at the end of it, we realize that our achievements have not brought us the happiness we thought they would, though we may have earned riches, power and esteem along the way. I'm not trying to dissuade anyone from ambition or hard work; I admire these things and encourage people to follow their aspirations. I guess it is a question of motivation, because if the end goal is personal gain, then I fear the pursuit will not be satisfying.

Love seems to be a worthwhile motivation, doesn't it? People struggle to survive because they love and are loved by others. It is worth living just to give of that love and to receive it. That thought was something that crossed my mind.

What struck me the most, perhaps, during my experience at the nursing home, were those people who said "Well I'm still here," as if that were reason enough to keep breathing. Do they mean to say that as long as they are alive, it is worth living? Is there ever a point at which you cannot make that claim anymore?

I have no solid conclusions. I welcome your suggestions, or your reasons for living. My prime encouragements come from expressions of love, both given and received. Additionally, I am greatly comforted to read on this struggle as expressed in the fourth chapter of St. Paul's second letter to the Corinthians, which is concluded with,

Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. -- 2 Cor. 4:16-18 (NIV)

Read the entire chapter for the full effect.

Manhattan Bridge - New York in HDR

2008-04-05T21:20:00.001-04:00

Manhattan Bridge - New York in HDR
Originally uploaded by alan.millington

I found this great photo today on Flickr while talking about high dynamic range (HDR) imaging with some other applied physics majors. HDR sometimes works by blending multiple exposures of a single image to capture details in areas that would otherwise be washed out by dark or light. Here, we see the underbelly of the Manhattan Bridge. It's kind of a spooky picture.

Some photographers consider HDR a perversion of their art form, while others see it as opening new artistic possibilities. I fall in the latter camp. You can usually distinguish an HDR shot from a regular photo and each style has unique challenges. I like shots like this because they can be much more dramatic and surreal than the real thing.

Happy chair

2008-03-27T15:47:00.001-04:00

Packaging matters

2008-03-10T02:15:00.005-04:00

I bought honey on Saturday. Honey to put in my tea. Tea to soothe my throat which is sore from illness. And what added to the comfort? The shape of the bottle. It's a bear. That's the main reason I bought it over other brands. Mmm, Dutch Gold Pure Honey from Clover Blossoms. It's friends with my cow.

Inadvertently, I also stumbled across cowdepot.com. I'm slightly disturbed that stores like this exist. And delighted.

Might even be funnier than another site I found today. (This one has nothing to do with cows. Or bears)

Life without living

2008-03-06T00:56:00.009-05:00

I've been occupied with a lot of what feel like very unsuccessful thoughts on a little Greek word zoe (ζωή). I've been setting it against a word with a similar translation, bios (βίος). They both mean life. Now, if you will indulge me, I will begin using definitions taken from a theological dictionary. Before I proceed, I must add that many thoughts here are borrowed and built off of a sermon given by JR Vassar in New York City on March 2, 2008. The charges and challenges of that oration (available here) served to stir my mind enough to write these things down.

I am investigating these two word choices for life as they might have been used in New Testament Greek. Bios, then, is the physical matter-of-fact kind of life. It is the ongoing biochemical machinations that keep us from returning to dust. I am highly distrustful of claims that this is all that there is to life. Were we given seventy years to pursue pleasure and shun pain and then have our story be completed? Thoreau writes about living deliberately:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, to discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and to be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

There is a difference between living and being alive. This is a great fear of many: to discover after many years that one had never really lived, or that one had spent an entire lifetime chasing a fleeting happiness that evaporated moments after the pleasure was obtained. As an exercise, visit any newsstand or bookshop and begin scanning the magazine covers. Each is replete with suggestions on how one might find greater happiness and satisfaction through new diets, possessions, fashions, beauty products or sexual skills. None of these ever satisfy. It's how silly magazines that tell us how to be better keep selling.

There is a reason, I feel, why we crave these things. It is not just that we crave happiness, it is that we crave something that is meaningful and eternal, some thing that is an end itself. If we fail to find this lasting satisfaction, we will spend a lifetime chasing after cures for our own boredom.

To contrast bios, there is zoe. This word is spinning my thoughts in circles because it contains all the deep frustrations of the last year of my life. Zoe translates from the Greek to life as well, but a different kind of life. Zoe is life imbued with fullness and deliberation, with purpose and fulfillment. It encompasses joy and contentment, not just temporal but eternal. I mentioned the New Testament context of this investigation of thought because zoe comes up in an interesting passage. The sixth chapter of John's gospel sees Jesus addressing a crowd of materialist Galileans who are seeking to be fed again. They are concerned about their practical needs: pursuing pleasure and shunning pain. When Jesus begins talking about a bread that will satisfy them permanently, the Greek word used in the gospel is zoe.

I am in the third year of completing an undergraduate degree. Myself and my colleagues are chasing after degrees that promise career fulfillment. We chase after jobs that will secure our health, our families, and our futures. To accompany this is every addiction imaginable: parties, people and pleasure. Each with the promise of zoe. I am not satisfied with this! I pick up the cup expecting to drink the sweetest nectar and sand pours down my throat! I hate this rat race of "making our mark," or "showing our mettle." There is nothing certain in this life. There is nothing satisfying in this life. I could have a blooming career and then see my health fail. I could lose all my wealth in investments that turn sour. I could lose my job, or be rejected from future places of work. Sometimes it seems that the only evidence that life is in fact more than just endless struggle is found in small moments of joy, such as when enveloped in beautiful writing or music, or gazing at a sunset, or a sky of a million stars, or in moments of quiet communion with a dear friend or lover. To borrow from CS Lewis, these experiences of the sublime that we point to are only fleeting wisps of something more: "the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited."

Let me borrow from him again because it concludes these thoughts well. We are obsessed with the idea of a meaningful happiness or satisfaction that lasts for eternity, and that there is more to living that merely respiration and procreation. To this obsession with eternity,

Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth's expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came though them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers.

I return to this theme often in my writing. It is for me perhaps the most important one of all. For what should we spend ourselves—all our energies and all our strength? To this we will give ourself and it will own us. Wall Street will own us. The American Dream will own us. Our careers, our degrees, our social connections—they will own us. My thoughts return to that earlier passage in John's gospel. In 6:27 he writes, "Spend your energy seeking the eternal life that the Son of Man can give you." (NLT) And the word John chose for life here was zoe.

Dinner tonight

2008-03-04T17:43:00.002-05:00

Welcome to the more Spartan diet...

mixed cheeses
mini carrots
dried apricots
stone ground wheat crackers
mini papadums

Camouflage

2008-02-19T15:31:00.001-05:00

Courtesy of Vedant.

I'm sorry, your wasabi is fake

2008-02-11T14:20:00.000-05:00

This came as a bit of bad news. Most people, even Japanese, do not realize that they are eating imitation wasabi. Wasabi is a plant in the same family as cabbage, horseradish and mustard, and its root is used as a spicy flavoring. However, most wasabi used in sushi bars in North America is fake. The real stuff is too expensive. The fake stuff comes as a powder made of mustard seed, horseradish and green coloring. These are mixed with water to form a paste.

This tragic news brought to you by Wikipedia.

Modern algebra

2008-02-11T14:16:00.000-05:00

Eh, so I should have made it all the way to Cayley graphs in my modern algebra textbook reading last night. Instead, I hit subgroups of cyclic groups, realized it was dense as a brick and fascinating as a phone book, and then called it a night. Instead of learning the stuff, I caught myself watching a silly song about math. And girls.

Into the Wild

2008-01-29T18:39:00.000-05:00

I've been listening to the soundtrack to "Into the Wild," a movie I strongly regret having slipped by without my having watched it. I found one of the songs from the soundtrack on YouTube. It's about a melancholy disenchantment with society. I adore this song. If I had Eddie Vedder's voice, I'd spend all day listening to myself.
The DVD comes out in March. I'll make my girlfriend watch it with me. Hopefully she won't object.

Synopsis:
INTO THE WILD is based on a true story and the bestselling book by Jon Krakauer. After graduating from Emory University in 1992, top student and athlete Christopher McCandless (Hirsch) abandons his possessions, gave his entire $24,000 savings account to charity and hitchhiked to Alaska to live in the wilderness. Along the way, Christopher encounters a series of characters that shape his life.

Lyrics:
Oh it's a mystery to me.
We have a greed, with which we have agreed...
and you think you have to want more than you need...
until you have it all, you won't be free.

Society, you're a crazy breed.
I hope you're not lonely, without me.

When you want more than you have, you think you need...
and when you think more then you want, your thoughts begin to bleed.
I think I need to find a bigger place...
cause when you have more than you think, you need more space.

Society, you're a crazy breed.
I hope you're not lonely, without me.
Society, crazy indeed...
I hope you're not lonely, without me.

There's those thinkin' more or less, less is more,
but if less is more, how you keepin' score?
It means for every point you make, your level drops.
Kinda like you're startin' from the top...
and you can't do that.

Society, you're a crazy breed.
I hope you're not lonely, without me.

Notre-Dame, Montreal

2008-01-11T18:55:00.001-05:00

Notre-Dame, Montreal
Originally uploaded by mikhail.klassen

I've uploaded a few pictures from my recent visit to Montreal to Flickr. I might upload a few more later. These are only a few of my favorites from the visit, and I didn't take all that many. The complete set can be viewed here. I'd love to read your comments.

2008-01-08T20:23:00.000-05:00

Consider the following 6 minute short about happiness titled "More" by Mark Osborne.

From Osborne's website:

The Academy-Award® nominated animated short-film tells the story of a lonely inventor, whose colorless existence is brightened only by dreams of the carefree bliss of his youth.

By day, he is trapped in a dehumanizing job in a joyless world. But by night, he tinkers away on a visionary invention, desperate to translate his inspiration into something meaningful.

When his invention is complete, it will change the way people see the world. But he will find that success comes at a high price, as it changes himself, as well.

The theme of happiness has come up multiple times in this blog. To understand happiness, or joy, depending on your definition, is to understand why we live. Would we still bother to continue living if some esoteric source promised us misery for every remaining day in our life? Is the promise of happiness enough for us to keep on living? What if we lose our soul in the process of searching for this happiness? What if it is only short and fleeting? Where is joy to be found and can we find a living wellspring of this joy that can give our lives purpose and contentment? Has this not been the aim of every honest person who ever lived?

Some past thoughts on this theme:

Here comes the snow

2007-12-15T23:05:00.001-05:00

I'm bracing myself.

It would be a lie to run away

2007-12-12T16:37:00.000-05:00

Jon Foreman released a free song promoting his new EP. It's available to download here after watching a short advertisement. The song is titled The Cure for Pain.

Photo featured in New York guide

2007-12-08T13:16:00.001-05:00

Players on Avery Fisher balcony
Originally uploaded by mikhail.klassen

I'm now a published photographer in the 4th edition of the Schmap guide to New York. One photo of mine, of the brass section of the New York Philharmonic playing on the balcony of Avery Fisher Hall, is being included in this edition. The guide has an online version that allows you to explore a map of New York with important places marked. Associated with the different markers are photographs. Mine belongs to the batch associated with Avery Fisher Hall.

Capacity for excellence

2007-12-01T20:59:00.000-05:00

I'm taking a break from work and warming up with some coffee. I'll get back to studying soon, but I thought that I would put down this interesting thought.

As humans we appear to be unique among all earth's creatures in our ability to reflect on ourselves. A curious thing about animals is the high degree of excellence that they display in their actions and in the things that they produce. A spider always builds an intricate web, wolves hunt in coordinated patterns, migratory birds demonstrate tremendous diligence in their travels, and various other kinds of animals show great intelligence, but all these things are done, it seems, out of complete instinct. You don't see geese getting lazy and settling in early before reaching their destination, and I would argue that if they possessed the power of self-reflection, they would fly south and stay there instead of returning to Canada. (An exception may need to be made for my cat, who demonstrates excellence only in napping.)

Now you could argue that natural selection permits only those animals who truly display remarkable traits to survive, but by that logic, you would expect humanity's members to be much more inspiring than they often are. From my perspective, it seems that humans are the only creatures having the privilege of being able to choose the pursue of excellence. Our time could much more easily be spent in leisure, expending only the minimum amount of effort that would be able to procure for us a little more comfort. And some are willing to settle fairly low.

But excellence needs a purpose. Our labors, ultimately, are a service. They are a service that must be offered to something or someone. The object of our striving is often ourselves, our future comforts, our families or posterity. Sometimes, it is labor offered to some "higher cause," a noble goal or mission. What kind of goal will be high enough to motivate us to excellence? Will it be our own comfort or material possessions? That seems silly. Excellence demands toil and struggle and pain. It feels rewarding to produce excellence, but it will wear you down. And you can't take anything with you once you're done with this life. A consequence of mortality is that much of what we do is rendered fairly meaningless, whether it is excellent or not.

There are some days in which I feel that the only reason I continue on living is because I feel conditioned to think that there is a different way to live. This is what I'm trying to understand. It is an imprint on my heart that renders me dissatisfied with everyday existence and causes me to look higher for meaning. I want to produce excellence, but I want there to be a purpose to it. If I can somehow escape the self-indulgent ignorance that I see most people blissfully persisting in, and somehow live for something of transcendent meaning that will prevent my labors from being rendered void upon death, then I think I will know what it means to be truly and properly human.

For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? -- Mark 8:36

The next fourteen credits?

2007-11-15T20:48:00.001-05:00

It's registration season for the next semester's classes. I browsed through the humanities, I honestly did, but I found a lot of hyperspecialized classes and courses taught by teachers of ill repute. I have no tremendous interest in either category of classes since I won't gain much perspective from the former, and a good book easily substitutes for the latter category of classes. There's also the pressure to complete the technical requirements of the major. And so the current registration load-out looks like this:

Advanced Mechanics
Applied Physics Lab
Intro to Plasma Physics
Modern Algebra
Undergraduate Research
Racquetball

That constitutes fourteen credits and the modern algebra class could be dropped since I'm really only just curious about it. I'm not sure how I'd ever use that stuff. I might still change things around if I find a really interesting humanities class. The philosophy class I want is only offered in the fall.

There was considerable pressure from classmates to take a general relativity class, but I'm substituting that with racquetball. Eh, they're less different than you think.

Labs in pictures

2007-11-02T22:37:00.000-04:00

I'm too tired to write about the tumult, the busyness and the excitement of the last month. I realize that there hasn't been much heard from me via this blog in a while. I still have these pretty pictures burning holes in my hard disk, desiring placement on the web, and it takes a little less energy to post these than to present something that could easily amount to The Treatise of the Month of October 2007. Instead, I present you with a few photos taken during recent laboratory sessions. Enjoy.

This is the cryostat for containing liquid helium.

I'm overseeing the transfer of liquid helium from the storage container to the cryostat. I love the gloves and the fountain of cryogenic fluids in the background.

The apparatus for the Michelson Interferometer experiment. This device caused me quite a bit of frustration. It's so delicate. Once the fine motion is engaged, it moves parts to a precision of 0.0001 mm. Nothing I'm allowed to touch should ever be expected to be that precise!

This is a part of our equipment illuminated by our white light source. Look at the neat "rays."

There are also more pictures available on Flickr. Because I'm a dork.

Timeless tunes trapped in technology

2007-10-03T20:44:00.000-04:00

I have acquired a piece of ancient technology. In fact, I was laughed at for not recognizing what it was when I first happened upon it. There was a man at a fair on campus, and there was a small pile of 8 track tapes he was giving away for free. When I first saw the curious plastic cassettes I asked what it was, but was then laughed at. It was nice to feel "too young" for something for a change. At the moment I found the tapes, I felt a surge inside of me that was archaeological and part scavenger. I picked up the single tape that appeared to me the most appealing and walked away the proud "owner" of my first 8 track tape.

I got the album "Eat It," by 70s rock group "Humble Pie." According to Wikipedia, these guys were pretty big back in the day. Now I really want a way of playing their tape. The fact that I can get their music in half a dozen other media formats, both online and offline, is inconsequential to me. I wanna play this tape. My tunes are trapped inside. That will require investing in an 8 track tape player. A preliminary ebay search has yielded some positive results. The players are cheap, but I fear there may be large shipping costs. I need to look into this further. I found one that even includes a "fine tuning button." Ooh, a single button for all my fine tuning needs! Must be a pretty robust button. I'm looking forward to pushing it.

Addendum: I later learned that 8 track tapes competed and lost against cassette tapes for, among other reason, lacking the ability to be rewound. For something as large as the old Nintendo cartridges, I'm very surprised it can't be rewound except by first removing it from the device, flipping it over, and then putting it back in.

humanity vs. Humanity

2007-09-30T14:45:00.000-04:00

I have been having a miserable weekend. Hopes of a restful and entertaining trip to the Cloisters have been dashed by demands more pressing bearing down on me. And hopes dashed always induce a pungent melancholy in me. We juggle so many competing desires and obligations that sometimes the center of gravity shifts too far forward and we tumble into a heap of mistakes, regrets and cancellations, amidst a flurry of unuttered curses and frustrations.

I am a student, and I have committed myself to becoming a scholar. I understand that many hours are required to develop a mind trained to analyze and solve problems. Every week I am greeted by wide cornucopia of texts, tests, reports and problems. The scholar's cross is one I willingly bear, and not one that I would quickly trade. There are times, however, when I wish I could set it down, just for a few days to remember who I am.

I catch myself thinking that I must be doing something wrong. Man was designed to toil, but not to despair. Work and effort merely make our bodies stronger and our minds keener. But despair taints ever exercise with bitterness and fear, bringing atrophy to both our physical and mental faculties. I am hungering for a different way. There is hope, I believe, for a different way to live. You see glimpses of it, sometimes, in certain people. Despite uncertainty, despite pain, they choose to respond in joy. Not a flippant, superficial kind of happiness, but genuine happiness. I am recognizing this as more than a desirable way to live, but the way we all intend to live, and fail. The desire for all the qualities of peace, hope, understanding and joy exist, I would wager to guess, in every person. Recollections of when we have felt these qualities return to us at odd times, but with a little bit of sadness we dismiss them as nostalgia. We hunger for these things like a man hungers for bread. And if a latent hunger exists in us, does it not mean we are creatures designed for eating bread and that bread must be somewhere available?

All of these qualities we desire I am grouping together under the label of Humanity, because it is how I believe we were intended to live. It seems, though, that every time we try to live out this Humanity, a darker, vitriolic nature comes to the fore and spoils our efforts. To this nature many have already ascribed the label humanity and they speak of our human condition. What is our condition? That is not a question I can try to answer without inviting criticism from opponents to my worldview. For this post, it hardly matters either. I mean only to say that whenever we try our hardest to surmount fear, anxiety or pain, our weak nature usually prevents us from shaking off those undesirable burdens completely. And even when we feel we are succeeding, a tragic change in circumstances will see us cursing and crying once more. The old nature is back, and we are bowing to its idols, whether that means clasping at the bottle to drown our sorrows, or cursing the next fool to cross our path.

I distrust the arguments that ours is but one nature, inherently good, or otherwise completely evil. Neither am I completely satisfied with the arguments that it is some kind of admixture of both desirable and undesirable qualities that we must merely accept and cope with. Our enjoyment of the desirable qualities—indeed our craving for them—points us in the direction of a Humanity we all wish we had more of. Our mortal frailty repeatedly brings us to face our lamentable attributes, our darker humanity. Our friends, the scientists, to whose ranks I belong, offer no truly satisfying explanation from materialism. And our poets and romantics point us only at objects and times where these qualities were felt, but which do not imbue the qualities in themselves. What I would like to see, both in myself and in others, is a daily crucifixion of the dark, lamentable weaknesses, and a resurrection of a new Humanity in its place. This desire is akin to the existential leap into the Absurd that our philosophers spoke about. But it was something they didn't know how to do, yet their happiness depended on it. I am not better equipped to make this leap because it is a human effort dependent on Human strength, the latter being precisely what I am trying to find. A futile cause? The largest cross isn't ours to bear, and ultimately I have found that surrender works better than surge, and faith better than a fight.

Free speech

2007-09-28T23:23:00.000-04:00

I wanted to add one more note regarding last Monday's events. My views on the event were the same as our university president's. I oppose the view that we must shut our eyes and ears because there exist people and views that we do not support. Even if we feel so firm in any one of our particular views (generally speaking, now) that nothing to the contrary could ever dissuade us from them, this should not keep us from letting ourselves be challenged by the opposite point of view. If we believe that we are correct in our views, then we must learn to give defense to these views. If Ahmadinejad accepts an offer to attend an academic forum of world leaders at Columbia University, and join in the debate and rise to the charges and challenges brought against him by our university president, then let him speak. We can raise our voices in opposition to his policies, to his racism, to his human rights violations, but we cannot merely shut him out. An invitation to speak does not imply endorsement of his person or his platform. In the words of Lee Bollinger, Columbia University president,

We need to understand the world we live in, neither neglecting its glories nor shrinking from its threats and dangers. It is consistent with the idea that one should know thine enemies, to have the intellectual and emotional courage to confront the mind of evil and to prepare ourselves to act with the right temperament. In the moment, the arguments for free speech will never seem to match the power of the arguments against, but what we must remember is that this is precisely because free speech asks us to exercise extraordinary self- restraint against the very natural but often counter-productive impulses that lead us to retreat from engagement with ideas we dislike and fear. In this lies the genius of the American idea of free speech.

The entire transcript of the opening remarks made by Lee Bollinger are available here.

Ahmadinejad at Columbia

2007-09-24T22:06:00.000-04:00

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made a controversial visit to Columbia University yesterday. He was invited to speak by the dean of Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) John H. Coatsworth. Ahmadinejad's talk was a part of the World Leaders Forum that takes place every year, inviting world leaders to Columbia University as part of their stay in New York City for the United Nations.

The event sparked a massive study rally and widespread protesting. Many were incensed that Columbia would offer up such a prestigious platform to a man known to sponsor terrorism, dispute the holocaust, pursue an unsettling nuclear enrichment program, and make threatening statements towards Israel. The official position of Lee Bollinger, Columbia University president, whose introductory remarks to the forum are available here, countered against the protesters' position by stating,

Columbia, as a community dedicated to learning and scholarship, is committed to confronting ideas—to understand the world as it is and as it might be. To fulfill this mission we must respect and defend the rights of our schools, our deans and our faculty to create programming for academic purposes. Necessarily, on occasion this will bring us into contact with beliefs many, most or even all of us will find offensive and even odious. We trust our community, including our students, to be fully capable of dealing with these occasions, through the powers of dialogue and reason.

During the talk, he directly confronted Ahmadinejad on his principles and policies--something we as students were hardly expecting. He stated in his address, "We at this university have not been shy to protest and challenge the failures of our own government to live by these values; and we won’t be shy in criticizing yours. Let’s, then, be clear at the beginning, Mr. President you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator." The New York Daily Intelligencer called this a "verbal smackdown," while today's headline on The New York Post read "U. DA MAN! BOSS HITS IRAN PREZ WITH THE OL' COLLEGE FRY"

Ah, the Post: the finest tabloid journalism anywhere.

I took some pictures of the protesting. I couldn't getting into the event because news of tickets sales was released only to a limited number of people, so by the time most students learned of the event, it was sold out. A more complete set of digital photographs are available on my Flickr page. For news about the event, I liked the New York Times article, but a Google search provides many more. I was personally interviewed by Voice of America and am quoted in an article on their website. That was exciting, though my words came out a little muddled.

Posted below are some photos from the event. I welcome your comments and please take a look at those on my Flickr page.

No lab this Friday

2007-09-20T13:10:00.001-04:00

The lab technician informed us this morning that the cryostat has sprung a leak. The lab has been postponed until reparations can be made. The cryostat is crucial in keeping helium in liquid form. The inner flask carries the helium. It is surrounded by a vacuum, followed by a liquid nitrogen jacket to absorb thermal radiation from the outside, which in turn is also surrounded by a vacuum. The helium must be kept in liquid form to maintain an electromagnet at superconducting conditions. This allows it to support a high current and generate a 7 Tesla magnetic field (over 100,000 times stronger than the Earth's field), which is needed for us to carry out our experiment (measuring the quantum Hall effect). I'm bummed because now I need to change my plans. I guess I'll do homework instead.

Skipping class for Yo-Yo Ma

2007-09-19T00:31:00.001-04:00

Avery Fisher Hall
Originally uploaded by mikhail.klassen

Some friends and I left campus at around 7:30 this morning to head over to Lincoln Center. The New York Philharmonic was having a dress rehearsal for the 2007-08 opening night performance this morning and Yo-Yo Ma was going to be playing Dvorak's Cello Concerto.

We all skipped class for the opportunity. I would have attended a quantum mechanics class at 10:35 had I not decided this little excursion to be worth it. At 8 AM the five of us stood in a long line that snaked through Lincoln Square while members of the brass section of the Philharmonic entertained us with popular tunes. Credit Suisse sponsored the free event and was event responsible for the free water and chocolate that was being handed to the people as they waited.

We stood in line for over an hour until being admitted into Avery Fisher hall. We were quite pleased with our seats. They began the rehearsal with Dvorak's Carnival Overture--a very fun piece. Then Ma stepped onto the stage to everyone's applause. It was amusing to see his playing style. He really looks like he's having fun up there, almost like he's kidding around, while still playing everything perfectly. At times during the rehearsal, even while playing he'd lean over towards the conductor and I could see the expression on his face. It said, "Ah, Maazel, you like that, eh?" At other times his face merely shone with a kind of Buddha-on-amphetamines quality that we all wish we had.

After the intermission, the orchestra played Dvorak's 7th Symphony--also a great piece. Tonight's concert was sold old days ago, so I was very pleased to have been able to attend the rehearsal. The concert was broadcast on PBS at 8 PM. I learned of this after calling home. Altogether, I think it was well worth a single missed lecture. I hope my professor would agree with that.

More photos on my Flickr page.

Back in action

2007-09-17T11:12:00.000-04:00

The summer drew to a close, the research almost complete, and the last three weeks were spent with friends and family home in Montreal. The SCUBA certification went well, apart from one lost T-shirt and one unfortunate underwater navigation mishap that forced us to surface.

I'm back at school now, with a courseload that is more than full, and a possible new research job on the way. I will also be working as a TA for a vector calculus class, which will be good practice for other classes like electrodynamics, based almost entirely around vector calculus. Towards the end of that, I'll be working in four dimensions as we expand into relativistic electrodynamics.

I apologize for the dearth of posts in the last few weeks. The transition back to school has been very busy. There was lots of running around, catching up with old friends, seeing professors, sorting things out with payroll, attending classes, completing homework assignments and trying to remember all the things I learned last semester.

There has been no shortage in topics I plan to write about. I have a very exciting lab coming up on Friday. We hope to measure the quantum hall effect, which I'll describe briefly in future. The cool thing is that we get to work with a liquid helium and a superconducting magnet at 4.2 Kelvin. I suppose most people don't understand how excited I get at something like that.

Anyway, I will write more in the coming days. Until then, I leave you with some photos taken this morning.

Diving the Robert Gaskin

2007-08-27T18:39:00.001-04:00

After some searching, I found a video on YouTube of a dive to the Robert Gaskin, a wreck off the coast of Brockville visited in yesterday's advanced open water certification dive. The video gives an idea of what it's like to dive near this wreck. The divers in the video are obviously better equipped and better trained than we were: they were diving with two tanks of enriched air (Nitrox), reserve air, diver propulsion vehicles, video equipment, and underwater lights. They also entered the wreck, which we were forbidden to do because of the associated danger.

Dive Adventure, Part 2: Wreck Diving in the St-Lawrence

2007-08-27T18:34:00.001-04:00

The Sunday dives were much more enjoyable because they took place in Brockville, Ontario, where the water is deeper and clearer. Our deepest dive took us to a depth of 91 ft at the wreck of the Muscallonge. According to one dive site:

It was named Vigilant when built [1896], but was renamed Muscallonge a few years later. During its years of operation, the Muskie was know as the largest tug boat on the Saint. Lawrence. While tugging a small boat, the Ajax, around midnight, the crew was surprised by fire. Nine thousand gallons of petrol was aboard at that time. The captain cut the ropes with the Ajax so that it would not sink too. At 3:10, the fire was raging and at 5: 30, the four containers exploded sending flames to more than 80 feet up. The 10 crew members were all picked up by the Ajax.

Because of the depth of the dive, we were burning through our tank reserves very quickly. The reason for this is that the regulator supplies air at the ambient water pressure to keep our lungs from collapsing. The greater the depth, the more air is inhaled with every breath. I began my descent with 3000 psi in my tank. By the time I reached the solid clay riverbed, my tank was at 2000 psi. At 1000 psi we had to start our ascent in order to allow for a three-minute safety stop at 15 ft to allow nitrogen dissolved in our body tissues to be removed. Our bottom time was less than 20 minutes as a result. The most impressive part of the dive was during the descent, near the bottom, just as the dark, daunting shipwreck came into view.

After a surface interval of about an hour, during which we were debriefed, ate lunch and allowed our bodies to remove residual nitrogen from our tissues, we commenced our fifth and final dive of the weekend. This adventure dive was designated the proper wreck dive. It was the wreck of the Robert Gaskin at a depth of 55-70 ft. The Gaskin was a barque, launched in 1863 and sunk in 1889. From another dive site:

The story of the Gaskin reads like a really bad horror novel. It was innocently trying to help raise another ship when a possessed pontoon tore loose and shot through the Gaskin's hull, killing it. While the Gaskin was in the process of being brought back to life and was nearly at the surface it was killed again when a hose on the pontoon broke sending the ship back to the bottom. She was brought back to life AGAIN and had been towed several hundred feet towards safety when the pontoon said, "I don't think so" and tore the stern off the Gaskin putting it on the bottom for the third and final time.

We got to swim around the wreck a peer inside, but we were strictly forbidden from entering. Wreck penetration dives are extremely dangerous without proper equipment and training. We were promised that we wouldn't gain our certification if seen inside the vessel. The hazards were fairly obvious: rusted bolts, unstable wooden beams, parts of the ship jutting outwards into the water, plenty of things to get caught and entangled on, together with a riverbed of zebra muscles, which can be razor sharp. We were careful and kept a safe distance from any hazards. By this dive, our buoyancy control was much better and we could safely hover over the ship to peer inside without accidentally dropping into it, or floating off toward the surface. We noticed a few fish, too: yellow perch and guppy fish. I'm a poor underwater naturalist. My dive buddy, a wildlife biology student, was thrilled by the fish much more than I was. Hopefully, I can learn from her. Below are a few photos that I borrowed from a website. They are both pictures of the Gaskin. I hope you like them.

Pictures from the Muscallonge wreck of the first dive

Dive Adventure, Part 1: Diving Skills

2007-08-27T13:30:00.001-04:00

I had the great opportunity this weekend to complete a certification course in "advanced open water" scuba diving with a close friend of mine. I spent two evenings last week completing the theory work and swimming pool exercises at a dive center in Montreal. Throwing nine people in a small pool wearing buoyancy control devices, air tanks and flippers made for cramped underwater party. We completed a few buoyancy exercises (pivoting on our fins while at the bottom, hovering with our legs crossed in a lotus "Buddha" position, hovering inverted with our faces near the bottom, etc.) and went home.

Saturday saw us at one dive site suitable for training and certification, but rather poor for recreation. All our dives for the weekend were intended as "adventure dives" that would expose divers to new challenges and situations, building dive skills and confidence. The first dive was our "peak performance buoyancy" dive, which tested the same skills practised in the pool earlier that week. The second dive was more difficult, with underwater navigation as the skill being tested. I performed poorly on this exercise, having confused certain tasks and duties with those of my buddy. It was made more difficult by the extremely poor visibility and considerable current at this dive site.

The third dive of the day was a night dive that started at sunset. It took us down to the same site with underwater flashlights in hand. We stuck close to our dive groups on that dive. I took the advice perhaps a little too seriously because I got slapped in the face by another diver's fins more than once.

A visit to Roosevelt Island

2007-08-16T16:54:00.000-04:00

I wanted to write a little post about my recent visit to Roosevelt Island. A friend and I did a bit of fairly tame urban exploration a few weekends ago. We found that a 5 minute tram ride over cityscape and East River lands you onto a sliver of land called Roosevelt Island, and that the place is stranger than we envisioned.

It doesn't get wider than about 800 ft and is encircled by a road. At the northern tip there were a few apartment complexes, while the southern tip holds a park that fenced off by an electronic gate that closes at night. Both the north and the south have hospitals, despite the island being only about 2 miles long. The pace of life defies its proximity to Manhattan. Where there were people, they were enjoying the pleasant day, listening to music.

The park at the southern tip is open during the day and admits joggers, bicyclists and people fishing the river. It offers a view of the United Nations headquarters and East Midtown. The real reason for our visit was to see the Smallpox Hospital. It was designed by James Renwick and opened its doors in the 1850s to admit patients suffering from the disease. It offered separate quarters in order to isolate and quarantine patients. The hospital operated for about a century before being left abandoned. Today it enjoys landmark status, preventing its demolition, but if action isn't taken to protect the structure, it may collapse on its own. We saw it bolstered and braced with wooden beams to keep it from breaking apart.

The premises of the structure were surrounded by a fence and two fenced gates. At night, the structure is illuminated by green lights, giving the creepy structure an even eerier glow. Further north of the derelict hospital, you can spot Strecker Laboratory -- a lab for research into pathology. The lab also fell into ruin, but it has been renovated in recent years. I have come across no reports of activity since that renovation, however.

We eventually left the park to explore the rest of the island. We found the building known as The Octagon, the former entrance and administrative building for an insane asylum. We expected to find a museum and learn about the history of the building, but instead found it was now the entrance to a modernized residential complex. That struck us as odd. Not much association to the building's past remained, save for a few black and white photographs framed and hung on the perimeter of the foyer.

More info on the attractions on Roosevelt Island
Some pictures of the Renwick Ruin (Smallpox Hospital)
For more, use the power of Google

From one devil to another...

2007-08-08T09:05:00.000-04:00

... as per C.S. Lewis in The Screwtape Letters, where the senior devil Screwtape is passing advice about the ways of the underworld to his nephew Wormwood. Note: from their perspective, God is obviously the enemy:

[God's] ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him. But we want a man hagridden by the Future—haunted by visions of an imminent heaven or hell upon earth—ready to break the Enemy's commands in the Present if by so doing we make him think he can attain the one or avert the other—dependent for his faith on the success or failure of schemes whose end he will not live to see. We want a whole race perpetually in pursuit of the rainbow's end, never honest, nor kind, nor happy now, but always using as mere fuel wherewith to heap the altar of the Future every real gift which is offered them in the Present.

That was the best thing I read yesterday—an otherwise long and tiring day. I like the last sentence best. You see the effects of following this advice almost every day in this city.

Krazy Glue saves lives

2007-08-06T16:37:00.000-04:00

My typical engineering arsenal includes duct tape, zip ties, a Leatherman Micra pocket knife, thumb tacts, white adhesive putty and a tube of ethyl cyanoacrylate. These basic tools enable me to fix or modify most things around my dorm room to my preference. Today called for another feat of engineering, and this time things failed.

Yesterday, my eyeglasses decided to spontaneously disassemble with little hope of reparation. With limited vision I got back home from east Midtown and then proceeded to dig around for the package of contact lenses I had knew I had buried somewhere in my room. It didn't take long and I had the cardboard container of lenses before me shortly. Like Pandora's box, I knew it signified pain and struggle and much prodding of the eyeballs, but with vision and clarity as its promise. And so I had to relearn the art and science passed down to me in the hallowed chambers of optometry many months ago.

A shame! Months had elapsed and I was but a poor neophyte of the ocular arts. I needed to make up for lost time. Much prodding of the eyeballs ensued till at last the flimsy membraniferous cups adhered to my corneas. At last there was vision!

But I am a reluctant convert to this myopia-cure and before long I had acquired a tube of cyanoacrylate, what most call Krazy Glue, and I had set about repairing my eyeglasses as best I could make do, so that I could once again use them to cast austere gazes upon my surroundings. The exercise was more or less a failure. I succeeded only in nearly producing a permanent bond between my fingertips and the frame of my glasses.
What joy. Now my fingers were covered in the tenacious substance, which had by now dried and formed rough patches on my thumb and index fingers--the same fingers I would be using to remove the contact lenses from my eyeballs later in the day. Moreover, I learn that cyanoacrylate degrades to formaldehyde when bonded to organic materials.

Thankfully, the formaldehyde produced remains below toxic levels and in fact other forms of the bonding chemical, 2-octyl cyanoacrylate or n-butyl-cyanoacrylate, are used medically to bond sutures because they degrade more slowly. They go by names like Dermabond or Traumaseal. I learned that the chemical was even developed into a spray that saved many lives in the Vietnam War where it could be used to quickly seal wounds and prevent soldiers from bleeding to death before they could get medical treatment.

For the next few days I will see the world in a slightly different way, at least until a new pair of glasses can be purchased. I am currently taking suggestions as to the style and fashion of eyeglasses I should pursue. Recommendations are welcome. Perhaps there will be a revival of the pince-nez or the monocle.

Back so soon?

2007-08-03T15:36:00.000-04:00

It turns out that there is a rocket launch planned for Saturday. The Phoenix spacecraft is schedule to take off at 5:26 (EDT) tomorrow morning. Before the Martian rovers Spirit and Opportunity have even finished their missions, NASA is sending another $325 million project to the red planet, the first in a series of "cheap" exploration missions to the red planet. I had been completely unaware of this mission, whose purpose it is (again) to investigate the possible existence of water on Mars in the past and environments suitable for microbial life. The probe will be launched aboard a Delta II rocket like the one pictured on the right.

This sparked a conversation in the media lab office where I work part-time. Ken mentioned something about strange and remarkable straight channels or markings on the surface of Mars.

Ken:	"Straight lines—that's not natural. Nature doesn't form straight lines."
Mikhail:	"Are you implying that you think there's intelligent life on Mars?"
Ken:	"I'm not implying anything!"
Doug:	"Just because they can drive doesn't mean they're intelligent."

Supermassive black holes hiding from us

2007-07-31T17:25:00.001-04:00

Black holes are already hard to observe. The evidence of their existence is their effect on their surroundings: accretion disks, high-energy radiation, jets of radiation and matter, etc. Active galactic nuclei (AGNs) are supermassive black holes that power galaxies. They produce tremendous jets out into space. Depending on our viewing angle, we classify these either as radio galaxies, quasars or blazars. But now astronomers have found another kind of black hole located at the centers of some galaxies that is surrounded by a thick galactic shell of dust and gas, blocking out radiation. These "hidden" galaxies were not discovered until recently for this reason. There's an interesting and fairly short article about the discovery on Space.com. It is believed that these hidden holes are responsible for about 20% of the x-ray background radiation that pervades the universe.

Stingrays in the sky

2007-07-27T16:34:00.000-04:00

Sometimes I'm always tempted to switch my pursuits to aerospace when I see really interesting developments in that field. One such idea is the blended-wing body (BWB) aircraft. Since around the 1950s, the basic idea behind commercial aircraft has remained fairly unchallenged: a long metal cylinder with a tail and wings, plus engines mounted underneath the wings. But engineers have long understood that if the entire body of the aircraft were generating lift, you could create a quiet, more fuel-efficient aircraft. So you get this flying-wing concept that looks something like this:

Sitting inside one of these would be more like sitting in a small amphitheater. With the engines mounted at the back, there would also be less noise inside the plain and on the ground. The aircraft would generate more lift and less drag. But the acceptance of the design hasn't been swift. There are some problems: Aerodynamically, it is more difficult to control. Also, in the event of an emergency, the hatches that would traditionally be placed along the length of fuselage might be insufficient for quickly vacating the plane, so new safety protocols would need to be drawn up.

With the advent of fly-by-wire controls, computer assisted flight, and lightweight materials, Boeing is on its way to developing a BWB aircraft. It is working together with the X-plane program at NASA. The X-48B flew for the first time last week. It is an 8.5 % scale model of the aircraft pictured above. Weighing 500 pounds, it is able to soar to 10,000 ft altitude with its three turbojet engines. The craft was piloted remotely, with visual information being passed to a pilot via a forward-facing camera mounted on the plane.

It will likely still be a long time before the BWB design finds its way into commercial air travel. It will more likely debut as a military transport around 2022.

Things like this make me want to go into aerospace. There are so many cool things happening in the field (cf. Scramjets).

United Nations Plaza

2007-07-20T15:47:00.001-04:00

United Nations Plaza
Originally uploaded by andy in nyc

I found this tremendous photograph when searching for images of the United Nations. I greatly regret missing this monument during my visit there two weeks ago. It is a prophetic passage from the book of Isaiah and speaks of a time I look forward to.

Visiting the United Nations

2007-07-20T15:35:00.001-04:00

United Nations Headquarters
Originally uploaded by globalNix

About two weeks ago I made the effort to visit the headquarters of the United Nations. I'm slowly visiting the canonical New York sites with the understanding that much as I love this city, I expect to live here only for a season of my life and that I will likely be taken elsewhere in two years. It is impossible to predict these things.

My interest in the the concept of the United Nations has been almost accidental. I participated in Model UN for about a year and so became familiar with its structure. The site of its headquarters, the seat of the major councils, was also of interest. Architecturally, the golden ratio was employed for its construction. The major chambers were each donated by a Scandinavian country. The site lies adjacent to the East River on a plot of land that used to be of little value and foul-smelling. It was purchased by Rockefeller and donated to the United Nations for the construction of the headquarters. Many other locations where considered--even placing it on a ship.

The visit itself was a bit of a disappointment. It was a tremendous feeling to visit the council chambers, but the building itself felt like an old airport. This idea first enters visitors' minds when they have to empty pockets and remove their belts and watches for xray. My bag was stowed with a security guard as I entered the building. Inside, the lighting, the walls and the floors gave it more of that airport feel.

I didn't greatly enjoy the tour because our tour guide, though gracious and kind, answered some question vaguely and treated us a little like children. The gardens were closed at the hour I left the building.

I spent some time prior to my visit and afterwards exploring the neighborhood. I found several buildings that served as the permanent missions of various countries to the United Nations. I believe I found that of Eritrea and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. I am of the opinion that there are far too few duchies left in the world. The word hardly sounds like it should be noun. The status of adjective would please my ears much more. "How are you feeling today?", "Oh, quite duchy, thank you."

Long days in the City

2007-07-18T13:16:00.001-04:00

HDR South Street Sea Port
Originally uploaded by photomono

Ever since my camera's photodiode kicked the bucket, I've had much less impetus to go exploring, but here are some pictures borrowed from Flickr, taken by photographers more competent than myself.

On the afternoon of Independence Day, I made my way down to South Street Seaport to see the ships docked at pier 17 near the old Fulton fish market.

As I wandered through the neighborhood, I was pleasantly reminded of the Old Port in Montreal, with its cobblestone roads and old buildings. And then I was struck by something horribly incongruous; something I never would have seen in the Old Port. I was disheartened to find that the South Street Seaport had been infiltrated with such trendy stores as J. Crew and Abercrombie & Fitch. This was not how I wanted to see the past preserved.

I ducked into a little art gallery that existed to raise funds for the artists of the neighborhood. The entrance showcased incredible feats of photography, but as I meandered to the back corners of the second floor, I was slightly disturbed by thoroughly bizarre pieces of modern art. I nearly jumped when a television sitting on the floor of a narrow hallway began playing a movie on its automatic loop. The quiet and eerie space was pierced by the sound of a middle aged woman in the video screaming "Mortality!" over and over again. Had she been actually standing there, my startled self might have shown her the meaning of mortality.

I had had about enough of this weird gallery, so I left. I fled past the trendy shops and onto the pier. People were already milling about in anticipation for the nighttime fireworks, in which I wasn't terribly interested. I bought myself a $3 pass that granted me entry onto two vessels, which I explored as best I could before the museum hours ended. One of the vessels was a "light ship," not for its measure in weight, but for its function as a kind of lighthouse at sea. These vessels could go where no lighthouse could be built and anchor off the shore, shepherding larger ships safely into New York's harbor. The vessel had a great amount of information regarding maritime navigation, which is a fascinated subject for me. I may write about it here one day.

For now, however, I need to return to the job. Lunch break is over.

Reubens Tube

2007-06-27T19:49:00.000-04:00

I'd once seen a video of a demonstration like this before, but that was over two years ago and I had forgotten about it. Today I discovered it again. A Reubens tube allows for the creation of "standing waves," that is, waves of air pressure traveling simultaneously up and down the length of the tube at particular frequencies that create constant regions of high and low pressure. The standing waves are created by a speaker tuned to particular frequencies. Add propane and you have yourself a light show.

Sigh, yes, I like this sort of thing. Recall my area of study and you'll understand why.

The most famous pigeon

2007-06-24T15:40:00.000-04:00

I apologize if anyone was hoping for something intelligent and edifying to read today. I am the one who could use such a message. Instead, I offer you knowledge of a subject you probably never cared to think about:

Homing Pigeons

During the time of the Second World War, over 3,000 soldiers were part of a special unit of the army called the United States Army Pigeon Service. It was responsible for the training and use of some 54,000 war pigeons for the purposes of reconnaissance.

War Pigeons?

That's a very strong image. I'm sure Frank Miller will have his hand in the production of a movie eventually. 300... pigeons. Prepare for glory. Anyway, in learning about war pigeons I came to understand that occasionally animals are awarded medals for their gallantry. One particular pigeon, named G.I. Joe, was awarded the Dickin Medal for saving a small Italian village during World War II. It carried a message informing the Americans that the village had already been captured by British forces the day before an American bombing was planned. You go, pigeon.

If it hadn't been physics

2007-06-19T23:35:00.001-04:00

In another life, I might have pursued this...

All we are saying is give pecs a chance...

2007-06-13T19:48:00.000-04:00

I was eager to return to the gym this summer, but a visit to the school gym to renew my membership was met with a surprise! Surprise fees, that is. Because I'm not taking any summer classes, there is no "student life fee" secretly laundering funds in campus facilities and gym prices jumped up $110. Gah!

I was reluctant to sign up for that, so I left quietly to consider my options. Today I visited another local gym, figuring that they must offer cheaper prices. They seemed like the local "community" gym, run by hippies with a little space and a lot of love. Their website was certainly quite ghettofabulous. Only it didn't offer any pricing information.

I visited today and I was met by a chill dude behind the reception desk at the top of a narrow flight of stairs. He was only too happy to tell me about the gym, but when my eyes saw the price, I was already crossing off the locale from my mind. They were more than twice what I would have paid back in Montreal. That leaves only the school gym to reconsider. Hmm. Can't we just make abs, not profits? I'll buy you a protein shake and we'll call it even.

Dead

2007-06-09T19:48:00.000-04:00

My camera kicked the bucket today. Basic functions still seem to be working but the photodiode is no longer picking up anything. All pictures turn out completely black. I can't afford to replace it.

Poop.

Atlantis launches

2007-06-09T07:49:00.001-04:00

Many things can be said about NASA. Many of these are unpleasant. Much as I'd like to see the organization reformed and freed from congressional pork barreling, when I see photographs of a shuttle launch, it renews my hope in the organization and even in some sense in humanity. In science, you see international collaboration like you do not see in your other fields, especially when you consider the "big science" projects like CERN and ITER and the ISS, though many people think the ISS is stupid.

Mostly, I just wanted to share this shot of the launch of Atlantis, which occurred yesterday. The mission, STS-117, is carrying the second starboard truss segment, a set of solar arrays and a new station crew member, Clayton Anderson, to replace Sunita Williams, who is set to return on Atlantis.

The Urban Chicken Movement

2007-06-05T17:57:00.000-04:00

A little known movement indeed it is, but there are people actively bringing the joy of chickens to the urban setting. Why keep chickens?

Why not?

Actually, there are no practical reasons why you should even entertain the notion of keeping chickens in the city, but some, I suppose, derive great satisfaction from it. You may suspect that their free egg output will cover the cost of raising them. You are wrong. Eggs are not worth much and you really don't eat that many. Why then?

Because they look awesome. Chickens belong to a class of comic animals that continually wear an expression of dignified stupidity elevated to an almost regal degree. Pigeons and cats also belong to this category.

There's one last reason why you might want to keep chickens, and that is to design for them the world's coolest chicken coop. You could unleash all manner of civil engineering and architectural flair, and have the squawking of many happy hens as your reward.

Here's one option:

Actually, that was totally ripped off of Finnish architect Matti Suuronen's Futuro House, designed in 1968 and meant for people. Oh well. I think it would make an awesome chicken coop.

What possessed Mikhail to write this post, you ask? I saw something funny on WikiHow.com.

Google Maps' new "Street View" spies on cats

2007-06-02T13:00:00.000-04:00

For those of you who have not yet discovered Google Maps' new "Street View" feature, you need to check that out immediately. It's not available in all cities, but for fun you can check out New York. Google purchased panoramic street-level imagery that was likely obtained from a company that just drove a van with a special camera through the streets snapping 360 degree shots several times per second.
One woman complained that Google was spying on her cat (see Boing Boing article), which is just barely visible through a window, sitting atop a cat perch here. The Boing Boing article also has a number of humorous comments. I think Street View is a really cool new feature and it's obvious Google is trying to one-up Microsoft's Bird's Eye View feature, which I also really enjoy. For the consumer, the competition is a good thing: It means more cool features for us, for free!

Nontrivial happiness

2007-06-01T15:36:00.000-04:00

Happiness is much less obvious than one might assume. I have been considering why is it that we are happy (or not). I found that we can rarely give anything more than an arguably superficial justification for a state of happiness, by citing the weather for instance. I think that it is crucial to find joy in every circumstance, and certainly this is made simpler when the circumstances are favorable, such as on a sunny day. Circumstantial happiness is transient, however, and it is not the kind that I am seeking to understand. I always wish for favorable circumstances, but I do not want my happiness to be dependent on them.

Similarly, dependencies can form between people. While one often finds great assurance and encouragement in our relationships to other people, the danger again is that these suddenly become absolutely necessary for happiness. Periods of isolation become unbearable. I suppose that part of this is human tendency—to seek out other people and form bonds with them. Even these, while perhaps less transient than the weather, are still not wholly reliable for happiness. In fact, a great deal of strength of character and effort is required to maintain peace in our human relationships, and they can often become the greatest sources of struggle and turmoil.

I confessed to some friends recently that I was becoming more of a misologist every day. This misology—a "hatred of reason"—was one that Kant observed in his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, in which he explains how ill-suited our reason really is in guiding us towards happiness. Kant rather believed that reason was to guide us towards a good will that might lead us towards right action. I'm not sure if Kant ever really dealt with the issue of happiness. He tried too hard to swallow all human experience under the rational, when emotions are often irrational. One does not save a drowning person because we are obedient to the categorical imperative, but because a very strong human impulse impels us to. Perhaps a similar human impulse is impelling us to desire happiness.

What is it that keeps us alive every day? What purpose is there in facing our struggles each day anew? Here's something that caught my eye recently:

Seventy years are given to us!
Some even live to eighty.
But even the best years are filled with pain and trouble;
soon they disappear, and we fly away.

-- Psalm 90:10 (NLT)

I thought, Oh great! If these are my best years, then there's plenty more fun to come. I am fully convinced, though, that there must be some reason for contentment under any circumstances. I do not want to become impervious to pain, like a stoic. Reason is something continually meets our impulse towards happiness saying you cannot find it here. But still! I believe the answer must be something so obvious that it goes unnoticed. I contrasted this passage with another taken from the epistle to the Philippians. The author writes that happiness was a kind of spiritual maturation, but also a secret to be learned.

[...] For I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do everything through him who gives me strength.

-- Philippians 4:11-13 (NIV)

Understanding public hostility towards religion, I answer that I do not preach. I inquire. I study. I seek to understand things for myself and I only write down a fraction of these thoughts here. My conclusions are that happiness is not something wholly sustainable with the resources of our mind, our relationships or our circumstances.

What good is metaphysics then, since it is something only the mind grasps at. If you contend with me, then you also content with every existential philosopher who has discovered that here is nothingness and there is something, perhaps happiness, perhaps meaning. My there takes on a spiritual dimension, as it did Kierkegaard. In a nonpluralistic sense, I think the answers to these questions of happiness can only be found there.

There is much more to say, but my point was this: happiness is not at all a trivial thing.

More photos on Flickr

2007-06-01T09:21:00.000-04:00

A bunch more shots from my recent walking tour are now on Flickr. The photo set can be accessed here. Feedback is encouraged.

NYC Walk #2

2007-05-28T15:20:00.000-04:00

Here are just some shots from my second major walk through the city. There's nothing terribly exciting to say about it, but maybe my sour mood is just preventing me from being creative. The walk was long and the weather fairly poor. The worst part was cutting through Central Park searching for a single dry patch where I could sit down and eat my dinner: half of a beastly sandwich left over from the previous day. I ended up leaning against a tree under the shelter that its leaves and branches afforded from the rain. My umbrella held up fairly well, especially given that it was $5 device that you expect to fail catastrophically within 20 seconds.

At the first sign of rain, I drew the umbrella from my backpack and hit the catch release button. For all its dramatic deployment, the minuscule coverage seemed only marginally larger than that of the average kippah. Still, it served adequately for the day and it hasn't self-destructed yet.

The first part of the day was spent checking out the new Greco-Roman wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a temporary exhibit entitled "Spain and Modernity." I wanted to see the Gaudí pieces, especially those related to the Sagrada Família. The project completion date for that cathedral is 2050, but as Gaudí once said, "My client is not in a hurry."

After the Met, my shoulders were hurting—probably from carrying the beast'wich around for hours. It was too early to eat, so I just wandered around the Upper East Side looking for a coffee shop and looking at all the people. Most of them were dressed handsomely and carried with them either a briefcase or shopping bag from any of the outrageously-priced designer clothing stores that dominate that part of town.

My walk took me all the way down to 60th Street and the entrance to Central Park, where I saw the Obelisco Transportable. The need to use a restroom took me all across to the West Side again, where I briefly visited the Time Warner Center at Columbia Circle. For dinner I trudged through the Park again, searching for a dry spot. None found. I ended my walk back where I started: 86th and Broadway, to catch a movie and then return home.

The second walking tour was a little draining—perhaps because it was unusually long or perhaps because it was spent entirely alone. I'm already planning the next major exploratory tour, though I haven't decided whether to visit various abandoned sites on Roosevelt Island or whether I'll take a tour of the United Nations Headquarters and walk down the area along the East River.

Obelisco Transportable

2007-05-25T10:27:00.000-04:00

I was tipped off by a post I read over at Gothamist about a "mobile landmark" that was going to be in New York for a while. The post caught my attention. It pertains to a piece of art created my Mexican artist Damián Ortega called "Obelisco Transportable," which represents a "pragmatic yet wryly playful approach to a global society in which the balance of power is constantly in flux, and in which populations shift and drift from one place to another."

I thought it was clever, so visited it on my second major NYC walk, which I will document soon. For those interested in visiting the temporary monument to our changing world, it can be seen at the Southeastern corner of Central Park, at E 60th Street.

New York City Walk #1

2007-05-17T22:04:00.000-04:00

I'm kicking off a series of entries documenting interesting walks in the city. I've decided that with a minimum of two years left in the City--given that I complete my undergraduate studies here--time is short and the City is huge. The greatest way to see a city is on foot. The character of a city is not in its monuments, or in its famous sights but in its streets. Zipping between these in taxis or subways will provide only an instant gratification that quickly fades. A city is much like a person, a comparison Plato had already made. You cannot begin to appreciate a person's character simply by their appearance. So I want some time entrenched in New York, noticing the small details together with the more monumental ones. And I'm determined to find some bakeries too. Where are they hiding?

Exploration Gear

Camera
Pocket notebook
Pen
Backpack
Any good book
Pocket map (to plan new expeditions or for emergencies)
Bottle of water
Music

I use the pocket notebook to write down things I see and find interesting. I also record things I want to look up afterwards. For instance, let's say you find an interesting restaurant. The atmosphere seems nice and price is alright, but you didn't come for a meal. Write down the name and location. Afterwards, check out the reviews and see what other people have said. Perhaps it would be a nice place to revisit at a later date, this time bringing company. I really dislike eating alone, anyway.

My backpack is a swiss army knife of useful things. These days it contains all the basic things I could need without being bulky. That means there's usually a book or magazine, a metal-plated Bible, some emergency food, ibuprofen, pen, highlighter, a pad of paper and a map of New York. One item once removed was sorely needed a few weeks ago. I have chalk-pen that was much used in the days of freshman accelerated physics, but then was retired along with the all-night team homework marathons. During a recent review session for my civilization class, I was found all chalkless with a dire need to draw a diagram. The item has since been replaced.

Tonight's Walk

I began by poking my nose around in the neighborhood. I straddled the border to Riverside Park and admired the tall trees. Thank you, Rockefeller. On tonight's journey I discovered:

The IBM Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory at Columbia University, which was operated by IBM until 1970, when control was turned over to the university. The Watson Lab was actually housed in two buildings (Lab #1 and #2). Tonight I found Lab #2. I had been aware of Lab #1 for a few months. There's a lot of history associated with this place:

The first hands-on course in computers was taught here
The first supercomputer (NORC) was built here
The first personal computer was built here

More history about the Watson Lab can be found here, a website obviously made with a lot of love and nostalgia. On with the journey:

Two townhouses constructed by the architect Robert D. Kohn. The buildings, beautiful and ornate, surrounded by a tiny and meticulously maintained garden, are known collectively as "The House" according to a plaque that also indicated it as national historic landmark. The image at right is taken from MSN birds-eye view maps.
Then I found a tiny museum that I never knew belonged to this neighborhood. I took down the museum hours, and perhaps I'll visit it again.

There really isn't much else of note to say. I found St. Anthony Hall, the home of the semi-secret "literary" society. I don't know much about their activities, but I wonder how many literary activities are actually carried out.

After finding the museum I was pretty hungry since it must have been after 8 PM and I still hadn't had any dinner. I found a little pizza shop and got myself a slice. After a little more looking around I decided to head home. That was enough for one night. I still had to document everything! This post alone has consumed a lot of time, but it's been fun.

Summer reading and music

2007-05-16T21:50:00.000-04:00

Nothing much to say: I've started work on my summer project in numerical acoustic ranging. So far it has progressed well despite some computer frustrations. I'm living in a suite largely vacated of occupants (I'm the only one left!), which puts a bit of a damper on my spirits. I remedy this with trips a local cafe where I spend my time reading. I don't make much progress because I begin to doze off. I'm not drinking too much coffee lately and I hope to get off it completely.

I finally finished Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a work I had almost finished reading over winter break before the start of the semester. I've now begun reading 1984, which has been on my reading list for years. As always, the summer reading list is overly ambitious, but I'll try to get through a handful of good books. After 1984, I'll attempt Goethe's Faust in original German. A cursory investigation promises a very difficult read. At least every other line contains unknown vocabulary.

As for music, if anybody has any good summer music recommendations, please drop them in the comments. I've been listening to a little bit of The Unseen Guest today. Their website links mentions a free song to be downloaded here. Perhaps you'll enjoy it.

Most horrific awakening

2007-05-11T08:16:00.000-04:00

It is now shortly after 8 AM and all is well except for the jackhammering being carried out somewhere on the street not far from my building. After only 5 hours of sleep I am wide awake, but less so than about 2 hours ago. I was awakened shortly before 6 AM this morning to the loudest of crashing sounds. It sounded like a tremendous explosion had occurred somewhere outside in the distance. It was loud enough to pull me out of sleep.

I stared out the window without knowing the time to see a sky and horizon of bright orange. That sight, coupled with the loud exploding sound, and a mind that thinks in terms of worst-case scenarios had me nearly convinced a nuclear device had detonated in New York City! I checked the time, but what did it matter. It wasn't daylight hours, or shouldn't be (I'm not usually awake at this time!) The sky was bright orange! There's only one thing that can turn night to day.

I climbed out of bed rapidly and put on pants. If was going to have go somewhere fast, I'd be leaving soon and I'd want to be wearing pants. Then I closed my window. The inhalation of radioactive material is the worst possible exposure you can get. Alpha-emitters, in fact, only ever become dangerous when ingested.

Then I began booting my computer. I needed to know whether this was for real. Somebody will be reporting on this in minutes if its real. As the minutes passed, however, the sky grew to be less orange and more blue. Traffic outside seemed normal. No sirens or emergency vehicles. Then I saw no articles reporting the imagined disaster. Just stuff about the goings-on in Congress.

As my fears began to subside, the pieces came together. I did not yet mention that it was raining lightly and there were occasional thunderclaps. The blast I heard must have been thunder originating near my building. To explain the orange sky, I consulted a website to give me the exact time of sunrise, which for today was 5:43 AM. I must have been catching the tail end of that sunrise. With the low clouds gently raining and the light fog, red light would have been scattered all throughout the sky to give that strange colored appearance.

After the whole experience I began reevaluating how much I really want to live in New York. With my second year at university recently completed, I was saddened by the thought that college is now half-done. I love New York. The architecture, the parks, the restaurants, the museums, the concerts, and the streets make me never want to leave. But at the same time I realize that it's terror capital No. 1 and that's scary. I wouldn't want to be anywhere near a radiological disaster. This morning I looked up a useful website for those living in New York or any big city. It's from the New York City Public Health Emergency Preparedness Page:

What should I do if a nuclear or radiological incident occurs?

As mentioned above, the key to safety in any public health emergency is to pay attention to local radio and TV broadcasts for information. Until instructions from City or State officials are issued through such broadcasts, please take the following precautions:

Remain inside, keep the windows closed, and minimize the opening of doors to the outside.
If you are outside, find shelter in the nearest building.
Turn off fans, air conditioners, and forced-air heating units that bring in fresh air from the outside. Use these only to circulate indoor air.
Do not allow children to play outdoors.
Do not eat any fruit or vegetables grown in an area directly affected by radiation fallout (radioactive particles that may settle on the ground). This is unlikely in the event of an incident occurring in New York City. Furthermore, if foods in the area are affected, government officials will provide uncontaminated food and water.
If you must go outside for lifesaving activities, cover your nose and mouth and avoid stirring up or breathing in dust as much as possible.

Coney Island smells like freedom

2007-05-09T17:33:00.000-04:00

To mark the first full day of freedom from exams and major academic commitments, a friend and I took the Q train down to Coney Island, which feels lightyears removed from Manhattan: and in several ways. Coney Island is completely different, like a time capsule. It was known to the native Americans as the land without shadows because the south-facing beach is bathed in sunlight all day. To the Dutch settlers it was known as Conyne Eylandt (Rabbit Island), from where we derive the modern name. It felt decades-preserved with the iconic old roller coaster in the "space age" theme park Astroland and the parachute jump tower which had been constructed for the world's fair.

The adventure started when we got off the Q train at West 8 Ave, and left the station at the wrong exit. The station was designed to funnel people into the New York Aquarium, which had been our intended destination, but we left the station into what looked like a POW camp, with barbed-wire fences and torn-up ground. After a huge detour, we eventually found our way.

The purpose of the trip was to visit the New York Aquarium because fish are ridiculous. Perhaps you've heard my underwhelming fish attack story, which I wrote about back in August of 2006. The Aquarium was pretty satisfying. I have a new appreciation for the immense blubbery mass of the Walrus. Nothing that can weigh up to 4000 lb ever looked more graceful.

The eels at the aquarium also blew my mind. I was not aware that they actually used electric organ discharges for navigation. Their vision is very poor, but by firing off low-voltage pulses they create a weak electric field around them that allows them to sense other objects. Apparently these cast an "electric shadow," but no further explanation was provided. When prey approaches or if the eel is in danger, it can rapidly fire discharges at voltages as high as 650 V. The organs responsible for this electrical ability take up 80% of the eels body. The vital organs are all contained within the forward 20% of the animal. The electric organs function like a battery, with thousand of stacked disc-like cells that create an electrochemical separation with ion-pumping proteins. Each cell can create a potential difference of 0.15 V. A particular neurotransmitter triggers the discharge.

After leaving the Aquarium, we walked around the beach and the boardwalk until we reached this cluster of shops and sideshows, reminiscent of the amusements parks that used to thrive on the island. The town was pretty sketchy. We had figured it best to seek food along the beach, because it ought to be cheaper right? No.... I spent eight dollars on a sausage-dog and soda that will probably give me food poisoning. "Dear Lord, please disinfect this food," were my thoughts. No tummy-rumblings yet...

I think that's all I'll say about Coney Island for now. By the time we were thinking about leaving, a fog at descended onto the tops of buildings, including the old parachute jump tower, which is what I'll leave you with for now.

The knack

2007-05-02T13:40:00.000-04:00

I was made aware of this by my dean of engineering. He's a hero. The students are making t-shirts.

Joost goes live

2007-05-01T22:05:00.000-04:00

What may become the next big internet revolution went live today: Joost is a free high-quality internet television provider. I've expressed a number of times that TV will eventually move to the internet because nobody wants to modify their life's schedule just so they can catch their favorite show. Joost is kind of like YouTube on steroids, in that it offers video on demand, but this time the source of the videos is the major entertainment companies. It also comes with web features built in. From their site:

You get great internet features too, such as search, chat and instant messaging, built right into the program - so you find shows quickly and talk to your friends while you watch. And with no schedules to worry about, you can watch whatever you want, whenever you like - as often as you want. Joost is completely free, and works with most modern PCs and Intel Mac-based computers with a broadband connection.

That's great, right? Well, like the early days of gmail, you still need to get an invite to join. I'm trying to get one right now. I found a blogger, Chris Lanier, that's giving away a limited number, so you might want to try his site.

Good luck.

Something sophomoric

2007-04-28T20:55:00.000-04:00

According to Wikipedia's etymology for the word sophomore:

The word is derived of the Greek word sophumer, which in turn comes from sophom "dialectic exercise"; or from the words sophos, meaning "wise", and moros, meaning "fool".

Something foolish for today:

The cutting edge

2007-04-18T16:00:00.000-04:00

At the cutting edge of robotics and computer science, you have this:

It's called a Keepon. More information here.

Inertial Confinement Fusion: I'm published

2007-04-17T08:35:00.000-04:00

For those interested, an article I submitted to the Canadian Undergraduate Physics Journal titled "Inertial Confinement Fusion: The Physics and the Future" was published in their April issue. The article covers some of the basics of nuclear fusion and discusses one very interesting approach to achieving controlled fusion on earth, which is by compressing tiny pellets of nuclear fuel by striking it with lasers from all sides.

To read the article, click here. The article isn't very technical and a modest background in physics should make it quite readable. Many Canadian universities have the CUPJ available in their physics departments, so students can pick up hard copies there.

For the wiki article on ICF, click here.

Black hole animations

2007-04-03T15:01:00.000-04:00

Ramesh Narayan, an astrophysicist from Harvard, gave a presentation on black holes at yesterday's physics colloquium. I just wanted to share some of the animations with you because I think they're really impressive.

The first one, by the UCLA Galactic Center Group, which was the most impressive animation for me, is a series of images taken from stars in the Sagittarius constellation. There is a mysterious dark object known as Sagittarius A* (pronounced A-star and often written Sgr A*) that is having a very powerful gravitational effect on the surrounding stars.

These images were actually taken of stars near the center of our own galaxy and indicate the presence of a supermassive black hole. Estimates on the mass of Sgr A* based on Newtonian physics and the pure Keplerian orbits of the nearby stars place it at 4 million solar masses. Numbers like this blow my mind, but apparently supermassive black holes can have masses up as high as 10¹⁰ solar masses. One solar mass is about 2 x 10³⁰ kg.

The animation is a pretty large file: about 4 MB, but very worth it. Watch the high eccentricity of S0-16.

Watch Animation (SWF)

Another animation, if that one doesn't do it for you, is one from the Chandra Resource page at Harvard. It's an animation, which wasn't part of Dr. Ramayan's presentation, but is still fun to watch. It is an artist's impression of a neutron star being torn apart and consumed by a black hole.

Watch black hole devour neutron star (MOV)

NanoDay/Bill Nye in New York

2007-04-02T22:18:00.000-04:00

On Saturday, I volunteered at an event called NanoDay, which was held at the City College of New York. My duties as a volunteer were fairly tame, mostly involving guarding a giant macroscopic model of a carbon nanotube constructed of interconnected balloons. The placement of this model probably wasn't that wise: it was the first thing people would see as they entered the Great Hall on the second floor of Shepard Hall at CCNY. Far too many people had the sudden urge to grab a balloon and jiggle the whole structure up and down, or climb inside for a photograph.

The structure survived intact. The event itself was a great success with several prominent people and groups present. I had a the honor of meeting Bill Nye, somewhat of a childhood hero of mine. He didn't have many words for me, with all the people wanting a photo taken with him. I had suffered the misfortune of an uncooperative camera. I suspect it's dying. Not only will the batteries drain with disheartening rapidity, sometimes the only image returned is some psychedelic collage of purple and black. You'll just have to believe the things I say, even if I can't garner any photographic evidence.

Bill Nye's favorite exhortation of the day was to Change the World! Although he said it in only a semi-serious way, with an event like this designed for 500 high school students from around New York, I think he really meant it. In his presentation, of which I could only enjoy the ending, he couldn't help but mention the scary issue of global climate change, which is still being discredited by politicians and community leaders around the country. I think he really believes that in some way it will be up to this next generation of young minds to bring about a global change.

Elephants explained (Part II)

2007-04-02T21:55:00.000-04:00

The last post definitely needed a little more explanation, the main question being why there should be elephants walking the streets of New York. Indeed as we kept up with them, people behind shop windows oblivious to the event just stood there gaping and confused. As it happens, the Ringling Brother, together with the Barnum & Bailey Circus is currently in town and last Tuesday night, the elephants were unloaded in Queens and walked through the tunnel into Midtown and then all along 34th street to Madison Square Garden. I suppose it is a publicity stunt of some sort, but it certainly wasn't well advertised. Still, hundreds of New Yorkers were somehow made aware and lined the streets waiting for the event. I was tipped off by my friend Andrew who organized an expedition to go see the elephants and we stood there watching the whole event.

The party started around midnight, which the elephants exiting the tunnel around 12:20. We stood at 34th and Lexington, holding a pretty decent vantage point behind the police barriers. When the elephant caravan passed by, which merged with the stream of hundreds of people running to keep up along the sidewalks. It was a challenge to keep weave through the human sea while snapping shots of the elephants and keeping an eye on where your friends were.

It was a good break from the academics. We saw some funny people along with some very serious people, who charged the circus with mistreatment of the animals. One character was shouting out his adoration for the large beasts, while another menaced, "As long as nobody steps on my shoes!"

Elephant March - Part 1

2007-03-28T02:41:00.000-04:00

I will be missing out on a lot of sleep tonight because of this and because of two yet-to-be-started problem sets due tomorrow, but it was definitely worth it to see elephants walking the streets of Manhattan!

I'll write up a real account as soon as I deal with my homework and then recover some sleep.

NASA probe experiencing possible gravitational anomaly

2007-03-27T21:12:00.000-04:00

Back in 1972 NASA launched the Pioneer 10 space probe and then a year later launched Pioneer 11. These probes were designed to study the asteroid belt and Jupiter. Now, decades later, the probes are still in contact with Earth. At the very least, we have telemetry data about them which we receive by bouncing microwaves off of them. Their onboard nuclear power sources (called radiothermal generators which are basically thermocouples attached to a big lump of plutonium-238) are still active. RTGs are the only choice for deep-space probes, with solar panels becoming obsolete once the probe is about as far out as Jupiter. The telemetry data from these probes is indicating that there seems to be some kind of odd force pushing against these probes as they make their way further out of the solar system. Speculations about the nature of this force abound, but could be due to something in rudimentary physics that was just overlooked, or it could have a more exotic explanation. For instance, dark matter could be involved, or perhaps Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation behaves differently at large distances. Physicists have certainly postulated such things before.

As of February of this year, Pioneer 10 was over 92 astronomical units (AU) away from the sun. One AU is equal to the distance from the sun to the Earth, or about 150 million km. One suggestion as to why the probes might be somewhere other than their expected locations is that energy radiating away from the nuclear generators recoiling off the main antenna is perturbing the satellite. This effect (photon pressure) would be very subtle, which could explain a similar anomaly wasn't detected for the Voyager probes, also hurling through space beyond the reaches of the solar system. Some calculations show that this effect could account for 50-75% of the Pioneer anomaly.

Recently, several decades of telemetry data for the two probes was recovered. It had previously gone missing, limiting the data that the analysts could study. The lost data was found in deep storage at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab--roughly 40 GB of data stored on about 400 magnetic tapes. Transferring this data to computer and cleaning it up is going to suck for the data analysts, but it could help explain this strange anomaly.

Read the full article here.

Heat up your coffee using a laser

2007-03-25T20:55:00.000-04:00

Hack-a-day reports about the use of a 2 kW laser used to heat instant coffee or tea. In about 19 seconds, the laser deposits enough energy into your cup to give you a nice steaming drink. There's little more information I can really share because the researchers/scientists/grad students who were messing with the lab equipment haven't come forward and explained their little hack. That's probably a wise decision. But there's a great video for it!

I gotta get myself one of these things.

In other news: this is the first in what could be a short series in blogposts about creative uses for lasers. Canadian readers should look around their universities during the month of April when the Canadian Undergraduate Physics Journal releases their April 2007 issue. It will contain an article I wrote about nuclear fusion by inertial confinement via laser. That stuff is so nuts! (Not nuts, Vedant).

Teaspoon guitar slide

2007-03-25T09:16:00.000-04:00

This made me very happy yesterday.

Great picture: Wreck of the American Star

2007-03-24T10:06:00.000-04:00

Originally an ocean liner built in 1940, the American Star served many roles during its lifetime. In 1994 it was sold again and was being towed to Thailand to become either a hotel or a prison ship when it was caught in an Atlantic storm. The tow cables broke and control could not be re-established. It ran aground on a sandbar in the Canary Islands. The ship has since broken in half with only the front part still resting on the sandbar, though it seems that this part will even collapse as well. Until then, the sight of the wreck is spectacular and one photo was voted to be among the best in Wikimedia's collection for this 2006.

I hope you like it as much as I do.

To see a satellite view of this geographic location, off the island of Fuerteventura, click here.

Sand sculpture explosions in reverse

2007-03-18T16:50:00.000-04:00

Everyone likes a good explosion. Watching them in reverse is somehow more satisfying because it's like watching order emerge out of chaos.

World's most ridiculous taser

2007-03-15T00:00:00.000-04:00

OK, so I can't actually call it a taser because TASER International owns that trademark. This device, called the "Lorentz Gun" was built by Greg Leyh of Lightning on Demand.

The device fires darts trailing fine "seed wires" at ground targets up to 35 ft away and then begins discharging its capacitors at a potential difference of 110,000 volts, sending a 15,000 Ampere current through the plasma created from the vaporized wire. Here's where the gun derives its name. The current through the plasma channel sets up a concentric magnetic field. The ions in the plasma experience a Lorentz force that pushes them back into the center of the beam, keeping the plasma from dissipating.

How devastating is such a device? Well I imagine it produces all the normal effects expected of a taser, but the website also explains:

Damage to the target can vary widely. Most spectators experience some degree of sinus discomfort after several firings, due to the high brissance of the plasma explosion.

Nocturnal labor

2007-03-14T23:44:00.000-04:00

Things I've noticed about working after 3 AM:

The spectrum of musical preferences suddenly enlarges to include everything from Brazilian psychedelic rock to German a Capella.
You become emotionally involved your work with devastating results should your work reject your efforts. Repeated failures make you begin to suspect that your work has conspired against you. "That bug wasn't there before!", "The problem expects to be completely solved. How obnoxious!"
You expect other people to be awake at the same time and send you e-mail with at least the same frequency that you receive e-mails during the day.
All the sleeping people in the world begin to exert a "peer pressure" on you and you feel obliged to conform to the practises of your fellow humans and go to sleep.
You eventually quit your work and try to sleep, but residual caffeine causes you to lay in bed with your eyes open, thoughts swirling in your head. You eventually fall asleep to have strange and terrifying dreams. I dreamt once that my floor lamp was trying to grope me. How do you wake up from that one and look at your lamp the same way?

That's about all I can think of based mostly on my own experiences. Maybe you guys can add a few of your own.

Signs of Life

2007-03-05T03:01:00.000-05:00

I wanted to account for the lack of updates. It's definitely been a couple of days that started off with so much hope and so much ambition, only to have the fat, sweaty hand of life come crushing inwards towards my face. I'm trying to build a case for the courage needed to survive the next few days, but then university will recess for a week and I'll be leaving the city for some solid napping and couch-borne laziness. When not deeply submerged in rigorous somnolescence, I plan on vegetating on my sofa with a stack of movies in front me.

Ah, you know, I had a mind to write some things about the finitude of human strength and capacities, and how humbling in fact it is to be human--a frail creature with such wild ambitions as making sense of the universe that surrounds him. However, it's 3 AM and I've hardly slept this weekend. Goodnight.