Unbelievable story, $500 car in a rally
go read Jalopnik:
http://jalopnik.com/5497042/how-a-500-craigslist-car-beat-400k-rally-racers
… This is the multifaceted tale of Bill Caswell, a man who bought a crapcan off Craigslist to run against $400,000-plus rally cars in a World Rally Championship race. It is a tale of a guy who had a welder, a bunch of credit cards, and a lot of free time but no real backing or funds. It is a story of a dude who taught himself how to build an FIA-legal roll cage because he wanted to spend the fabrication fee on race tires instead. It’s the story of a gearhead who drove a rustbucket to a third-place finish in an FIA-sanctioned event.
Blank origami cd sleeve
A friend on a mailing list pointed out that you can fold a US Letter sheet of paper to make a cd sleeve. Neat! I found the original instructions for an origami cd case at Tom Hull’s site but estimating (and refolding) made a messy result, so I whipped up a template using OmniGraffle with marks numbered to his steps: origami-cd-sleeve.pdf. Using the entire printable area on my printer, I get good results.
Email packrat
I’m an email packrat. I have organized, compressed archives of nearly everything I’ve received or sent since 1999. In duplicate. I qualify “nearly” because in 2006 I switched to maildir after corrupting an mbox and out of necessity began culling several mailing lists. And the only reason it only goes back ten years is that I can’t read some of the tapes and can’t find a second copy on a different medium or simply don’t have the operating system any more (OS/2, for example). But that isn’t the point. The point is that I found an email I sent six years ago in less time than it took to write this entry and I did it using little more than grep (I really must sit down and index all of that with mairix).
Yard sale find
I don’t know why I picked it up. Maybe because there was just enough power left in the batteries to run a couple of calculations and the self-test before they died, but for $2 I bought a circa-1983 HP 12C financial calculator. It’s missing the owner’s manual, the vinyl sleeve is in tatters and the quick reference lost its spiral binding long ago but the calculator itself is in excellent shape.
$9 worth of button cell batteries later, I have a working RPN calculator. It’s a neat little device and HP still sells it in two models- one of which switches between RPN and Algebraic modes- and supplies (pdf) manuals and guides:
- HP 12C Summary
- HP 12C Solutions
- HP 12C Users Guide
- HP 12C Quick Start
- HP 12C training modules [4.2MB zip]
I don’t know what I’m going to do with it but I’ll leave on my work desk and see if I use it. I usually have a Lisp session open in a terminal or a newer, faster computing device nearby, but it’s quite fast for what it does compared to slapping together a one-off and checking the result.
Vacation bug identification?
On the first day of our beach vacation we found a number of large (about 1.5” long), red-legged, solitary wasps digging dime-sized holes in the sand between the patio pavers. They were industrious, sweeping out the sand with their forelegs and brushing it away with their hind legs. These bugs were not aggressive despite the kids’ investigations, nor were they bothered by my crouching and moving around to take snapshots with my pocket camera even when I flashed it a few inches from them. I took several shots but only two turned out okay (time for a better camera):
Digging wasp, hole #1.
Digging wasp, starting hole #2.
I witnessed the wasp drag some bug into the burrow but wasn’t ready with the camera. Comparing to pictures on the ‘net, I think they are “golden diggers”.
Happy birthday Nate
Four years old. Monday night we wrapped and set out presents and Maria put the big red birthday plate and a party hat at his seat at the dinner table so he would find it at breakfast. I think we were more excited than he was until he unwrapped the gifts from his uncles Joe and Stephen (no longer pronounced “the uggles”) and found “Krypto, the Super Dog” videos and books. It’s all super dog and space aliens with him lately, with his serious-voiced emphasis on how the latter are “not too scary.” This weekend we’ll have his birthday party, the third celebration of it, actually, after having cake for the kids at school and another cake at our Fourth of July party. It’s good.
Chemistry humor
Derek Lowe’s web column In the pipeline has a section titled Things I won’t work with with pithy observations like this one:
If you’d like to make your mark, this seems to be a relatively unexplored field. The problem is, the mark you’re most likely to make is in the nature of a nasty stain on the far wall.
There is some funny stuff, even if your chemistry education (like mine) stopped with making nylon, slime, distilling alcohol and scorching lab benches with poorly thought out (or supervised, or contained…) uses of oxidizing reagents. The visitor comments are also good reading as is another of Lowe’s sections Things I’m glad I don’t do.
Lockhart's Lament
Slashdot picked up Scott Aaronson’s recent comments on Keith Devlin’s column from last spring on mathematician and teacher Paul Lockhart’s 2002 commentary on the state of mathematics education. I’ve duplicated the pdf locally: Lockhart’s Lament. As one of the kids who didn’t “get” math until after college, I couldn’t help but smile as I read it.
Read it, but for the impatient, below are excerpts of one of the choicest parts:
The Standard School Mathematics Curriculum
LOWER SCHOOL MATH. The indoctrination begins. Students learn that mathematics is not something you do, but something that is done to you.
MIDDLE SCHOOL MATH. Students are taught to view mathematics as a set of procedures, akin to religious rites, which are eternal and set in stone… Contrived and artificial “word problems” will be introduced in order to make the mindless drudgery of arithmetic seem enjoyable by comparison.
ALGEBRA I. So as not to waste valuable time thinking about numbers and their patterns, this course instead focuses on symbols and rules for their manipulation.
GEOMETRY. Isolated from the rest of the curriculum, this course will raise the hopes of students who wish to engage in meaningful mathematical activity, and then dash them.
ALGEBRA II. The subject of this course is the unmotivated and inappropriate use of coordinate geometry… The name of the course is chosen to reinforce the ladder mythology. Why Geometry occurs in between Algebra I and its sequel remains a mystery.
TRIGONOMETRY. Two weeks of content are stretched to semester length by masturbatory definitional runarounds.
PRE-CALCULUS. A senseless bouillabaisse of disconnected topics. Mostly a half-baked attempt to introduce late nineteenth-century analytic methods into settings where they are neither necessary nor helpful.
CALCULUS. This course will explore the mathematics of motion, and the best ways to bury it under a mountain of unnecessary formalism.
Impressions of Southern India (Day 3)
20090519 (Day 3)
Bangalore is, I’m told, less populous, more sprawling, less polluted and- thanks to the IT and construction boom- more affluent than much of Southern India. English is spoken everywhere to some degree. The region is entering the monsoon which means it’s cooler than normal but humid and it rains each afternoon and some evenings. It’s very tolerable, they used to call it the “air-conditioned” city. This is also the wedding season and in the evenings little temples are lit up and there are celebrations and dancing spilling into the street. It’s an overwhelming culture shock. Weird juxtaposition outside the office where an ox cart stands next to parked cars in front of an advertisement for a website. My company is taking care of most of the details. This is a relief. I’m adjusting to the time zone better than my colleagues and don’t feel lagged but do get a caffeine headache at 4am.
The local cuisine is not as hot as you’d think, savory and spicy. They do have these little red pods that look like a dried currant but definitely aren’t- those are hot. Everything is settling well.
The hotel is a business apartment in a gated compound. Clean, slightly dated but adequately modern. Air conditioned and with amenities including 24-hour security (even a taxi driver mentioned how the extremists frighten everyone). I’m having trouble with hot water but it might just be the shower valve as my colleagues have it scalding hot. There are also random blackouts that last anywhere from a few minutes to an hour. I’ve already been caught once in the hotel elevator for five minutes of darkness and now take the stairs.
Impressions of Southern India (Day 2)
I recently spent three weeks for work in Bangalore. I’m hopelessly Western and middle-class. I’ve excerpted from some of my emails…
20090518 (Day 2)
Let me describe what it’s like here. The first thing was the flight in, it was pouring rain. I’ve rarely seen such a downpour. The landscape is beautiful, flat plains slightly muddy and then these ragged groups of mountains jutting 4000 feet up. It’s just before the monsoon season and the outskirts are caramel-colored dirt interrupted by green pastures and crazy quilts of two- and three-story housing. The airport, for all the reputed expense, is new and efficient but unimpressive after seeing Dubai International. The rain and lightning, I’m told, is unusually severe for this time of year. The monsoon hit early on the coast.
The drive to the hotel in a little white cab the size of a Ford Fiesta was harrowing. Sunday evening is a slow time but there is a veritable riot on the roads. It took me ten minutes before I realized they drive English-style on the left side of the road. Little cars squirming and jockeying five abreast on a three lane road, scooters and small motorcycles- many with their lights off- juking in and out of traffic. Some carry two or three passengers, legs outriggering, or are laden with makeshift bundles. A few have loads that obscure the bike and rider. Women often ride side-saddle behind their men. City buses and tall narrow trucks pepper the traffic. Autorikshaws- three-wheel, two-stroke death traps from the look of them- sputter along, crowding other vehicles, apparently ignoring the traffic, pulling 180 degree turns, jerking to the side to pick up or discharge fares all the while doing a smokey double-duty to keep the mosquitoes down.
The rain puddled and vehicles of every description are stalled on both sides of the road, hoods up, men crowded into them or sometimes just abandoned with lights flashing while a few meters down the road the owner walks. Bicycles and pedestrians go every which way.
The thirty minute cab ride to and from the office is more crowded still and I found myself wincing and flinching at the near misses. One of my London colleagues, quipped that a British cabbie would last two minutes here. Another can barely look out the window. If you imagine the arrivals gate traffic at JFK sped up to 35 to 45 mph, laced with the motos from Naples, sprinkled with an antique bicycle race and the foot traffic from Times Square you’d have a pretty good idea what the confusion looks like minus the stray dogs, indolent cattle and the occasional goat.
Ross Lonstein
