D. Des Chene

Otto’s revenge

Sat, 08 Nov 2008 04:35:52 GMT

Source: Mary Somerville, On molecular and microscopic science (J. Murray, 1869) 247

Don’t mess with the Octopus! This eight-armed cephalopod, living in an aquarium at Sea-Star Aquarium in Coburg, Germany, didn’t like the bright light overhead in his living quarters. So he put it out by squirting it with water—several times. Aquarium workers kept a watch at night to find out what was going on. It seems that in addition to blowing out his aquarium light Otto likes to juggle his hermit-crab aquarium-mates; he also amuses himself by redecorating (“Otto the octopus wreaks havoc”, Telegraph (UK) 3 Nov 2008).

Octopuses are masters of disguise; they are among the smartest of invertebrates.

They are capable of “observational learning”, that is, of learning by observing the behavior of other octopuses.
Graziano Fiorito and Pietro Scotto, “Observational learning in Octopus vulgaris”, Science 256, no. 5056 (Apr 1992) 545–547.
They can learn to open jars containing prey.
Graziano Fiorito, G. B. Biederman, Valerie A. Davey and Francesca Gherardi, “The role of stimulus preexposure in problem solving by Octopus vulgaris”, Animal Cognition 1.2 (Oct 1998) 107–112; doi 10.1007/s100710050015.

718 Frequencies

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 03:04:23 GMT

Bexel Broadcast Services

How a political convention looks to its radio-frequency coordinator (see the lexicon below for a guide to the acronyms):

In total, 718 frequencies were used or reserved for use during the convention, said Jim Schoedler, POLCOMM 2008 DNC RF coordinator. They broke down as follows:

207 wireless mic frequencies
144 frequencies used for two-way radio, including repeaters
111 frequencies for RF intercom
96 frequencies for IFB for talent
43 microwave channels
117 held in reserve or identified for other purposes

[…] Schoedler knew there wouldn’t be much frequency shuffling required as broadcasters moved from the Pepsi Center to INVESCO Field.

“When I compare[d] the two, we found they are not very different. Both facilities act as a shield to a certain amount of RF and are fairly similar,” he said. That knowledge gave Schoedler confidence that a frequency assigned for use at the Pepsi Center should be acceptable for use at INVESCO, he said.

However, there was one notable exception: use of 7GHz COFDM camera transmitters, he said. “There are STL and TSL signals basically shooting over the stadium,” he said. “Testing by Denver stations revealed that the use of the 7GHz channel for COFDM microwave camera transmission from inside the stadium would interfere with the STL and TSL transmissions passing overhead. To resolve the issue, no 7GHz COFDM camera transmission was allowed at INVESCO Field,” he said.

Making sure that devices don’t interfere with each other required “purity-testing”. Not this kind—this kind. (The page I quote here describes the setup at the 2004 Democratic Convention. I assume that the 2008 Convention required similar testing.)

For four days, the Fleet Center presented the most hostile RF interference environment on the planet. Most local broadcasters had other obligations so the DNC enlisted the help of experienced local ham radio operators, many of whom were electrical engineers. Coordination was handled by Louis Libin of Broad-Comm.

Peter Simpson, KA1AXY (left) worked for the DNC RF frequency coordination and interference enforcement team. Three days prior to the start of the DNC, each piece of RF-generating equipment needed to pass RF-purity testing. Peter insured that each piece of RF equipment entering the area possessed an "RF tested-OK" sticker. No sticker, no entry.

Louis Libin is chairman of the Political Conventions Communications Committee, which handles frequency coordination at both conventions. He describes the challenge facing engineers at these events:

This year is the worst spectrum year ever for all different types of use. For instance, in St. Paul, we are able to use the lower UHF channels and divide them up for walkie-talkie use, IFBs and things like that. In Denver, we are stuck for spectrum because none of the channels in the lower UHF band are available. The FCC has granted us an STA to use business band, and as far as I know, this is the first time that we’ve ever used business band for broadcast-related uses.

We have made very strict, but necessary, guidelines for spectrum use that the networks and stations have all adopted. We also have other types of guidelines that have never been implemented before, such as the number of feet inside or outside that you need to separate the wireless mic from the receiver before you can use the mic. We’ve never had that before. Somebody is going to be only separated by10ft from his receiver; it’s great that they have a wireless mic, but the fact is that they are using that whole channel, and it’s actually putting a signal out that’s going far and has the potential to cause interference.

Between the mathematical and the natural, there’s a “technical sublime”, an awe at the scale of operations like these—a scale that defeats the imagination, even though the object of wonder was made by us.

Already in 1832, the spectacle of the railroad, conquering the vast American landscape, gave rise to feelings of a “technolgical sublime” (Leo Marx, The machine in the garden (Oxford, 2000; orig. publ. 1964), 195, quoting an article in Scientific American, 1832):

Alpine scenery and an embattled ocean deepen contemplation, and give their own sublimity to the conceptions of beholders. The same will be true of our system of Railroads. Its vastness and magnificence will prove communicable, and add to the standard of the intellect of our country.

That prediction has, sadly, not been confirmed. Not by the railroads nor by any of our more ethereal systems of communication.

Lexicon: RF = radio frequency; IFB = interruptible feedback (the transmission of instructions, etc. to on-air talent by way of wireless earphones); CODFM = coded orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (a way of improving the efficiency of RF communication by dividing a wide band of frequencies into many narrow bands); STA = special transmission authorization (granted by the FCC); STL = studio-transmitter link; TSL = transmitter-studio link; UHF = ultrahigh-frequency (the soon-to-be-obsolete TV frequency band).

Sources:

“Two-tiered strategy holds RF interference to a minimum in Denver”, Broadcast Engineering, 10 Sep 2008.

Ipsos, “How they’d put a bug in Palin’s ear tonight”, Daily Kos 2 Oct 2008. Very informative; refers to the preceding.

Stephen Lawson, IDG News Service, “Political Conventions Will Be Abuzz With Wireless Data”, PCWorld, 22 Aug 2008; available also at itbusiness.ca.

The power of infinity

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 06:16:42 GMT

Source: Jennifer & Kevin McCoy, Eternal Return. Edith-Ruß-Hauses für Medienkunst, Oldenburg (exhibition 20 May–16 July 2006).

Imagine a universe like ours, but with an important difference. In this universe Fred Hoyle was right. No Big Bang, no Big Crunch, just an everlasting Steady State. Everything that can happen, does, infinitely many times.

Baseball is like that, if you ignore the fact that it hasn’t been around forever, and probably won’t be around forever. But in a sport where almost 2500 games are played each season (it used to be fewer, of course) and which has had over a hundred seasons, many unlikely events have occurred.

From the “Stat of the Day” blog at Baseball Reference comes an example. Only once since 1956—and perhaps since the beginning of baseball time—has a pitcher picked off three players in an inning. Tippy Martinez, pitching the tenth inning in relief for the Baltimore Orioles against the Toronto Blue Jays, picked off Barry Bonnell, Dave Collins, and Gene Upshaw. The game is beautifully described by Tom Goodman, who follows up the climactic play with this:

He picked off the side, I said to myself over and over. He picked off the side. I slumped back into the chair. I wondered whether anyone else was listening to this game. I looked at my watch. It was nearly eleven o’clock. I thought maybe I should call someone to let them in on this game, but I didn’t dare tear myself away from the radio.

The Orioles won the game later on a home run by Len Sakata, an infielder who’d been sent in to catch during the crucial inning.

Sources: Tom Goodman, The Greatest Game Never Seen, Swing and a miss, 14 Jul 2004. See also Childs Walker, “Unforgettable win by '83 O’s remembered”, Baltimore Sun, 24 Aug 2008.

Patron saints of the library

Sun, 27 Jul 2008 21:21:45 GMT

St. Isidore. Source:
Wikipedia Commons

What with budget-cutting, FBI snoops, and book-stealing, libraries need all the help they can get. In the US, the patron saint of libraries is St. Jerome, translator of the Old Testament from Hebrew into Latin; in Europe St. Lawrence (probably the first of that name) watches over them. The patron saint of that branch of the Library of Babel known as the Internet is Saint Isidore (,), best known for his Etymologiæ, an encyclopedia of ancient learning that became the most-used textbook of the early Middle Ages. The Hindu protector of libraries (and of learning generally) is the elephant-god Ganesh.

“Qui sont les Saints-patrons des bibliothécaires?”, Bibliobsession 25 July 2008.
“Who’s watching over our libraries”, Warrior Librarian Weekly s.d., citing unpublished work by Robert Lee Hadden.
“Patron Saint of Internet Shines in New Data Center at Boston College”, Chronicle of higher education 2 Dec 2006.
Chris Reidy, “Internet saint overlooks BC data center”, Boston.com 1 Dec 2006.
Nate Anderson, “Patron saint of the Internet smiles on Boston College data center”, Ars technica 3 Dec 2006.

Visualizing large graphs

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 06:45:51 GMT

Start with a set of nodes (picture them as dots). Suppose there are n nodes in all (say 3), numbered from 1 to n. Construct an n by n table (if there are 3 nodes, it will look like a blank tic-tac-toe board). Put a 1 in the entry in row i, column j to indicate that there is an edge from node i to node j. (Edges can be pictured as arrows connecting the dots.)

The result is called a directed graph, “directed” because each edge has a starting and an ending node. (In the case of 3 nodes, the table will look like a finished game of tic-tac-toe, with 1s for Xs and 0s for Os.) The table is called the “adjacency matrix” of the graph.

A sparse matrix is a matrix most of whose entries are zero. A sparse adjacency matrix corresponds to a graph with rather few edges. Airlines don’t schedule direct flights between every pair of cities they serve; instead relatively few cities are joined directly, so that in most cases to get from one city to another you’ll have to go through a “hub”. The adjacency matrix that corresponds to the airline graph will be sparse.

Source: Airline Route Maps

All this by way of introducing some striking images. A research group at AT&T (more research! less spying!) has put together a gallery of large graphs. The sparse matrices represented in the gallery come from the Sparse Matrix Collection at the University of Florida. The collection contains 1890 matrices from a wide range of projects: fluid dynamics, quantum chemistry, network analysis… The example below is described only as arising in connection with an optimization problem.

Yifan Hu, Gallery of large graphs

From Infosthetics via 0xCD. If you like matrices, visit the Matrix Market at NIST.

Words for music

Thu, 29 May 2008 05:00:13 GMT

1,219,096 lyrics from 71,565 performers (as of 28 May 2008). For example:

D’un bout à l’autre de la semaine
Sur les boulevards dans les faubourgs
On les voit traîner par centaines
Leurs guêtres sales et leurs amours
Dans des chemises de dix jours
Sous la lumière des réverbères
Prenant des airs de Pompadour
Ce sont nos belles ferronnières
Ce sont nos poupées, nos guignols, nos pantins
Écoutez dans la nuit
Elles chantent ce refrain:

C’est nous les mômes, les mômes de la cloche
Clochards qui s’en vont sans un rond en poche
C’est nous les paumées, les purées de paumées
Qui sommes aimées un soir n’importe où

Letras de Música

by letras.mus.br

Nous avons pourtant
Coeur pas exigeant
Mais personne n’en veut
Eh ben tant pis pour eux
Qu’est que ça fout
On s’en fout!
Nul ne s’y accroche
Il n’y a pas d’amour
Les mômes de la cloche!

At a sister site you can download charts and guitar tablatures of many of the same tunes. The charts include popups showing chord diagrams for each chord—very slick.

Paper Made

Tue, 16 Oct 2007 17:44:21 GMT

Technorati sometimes speak slightingly of paper as “dead trees”. That is an injustice. Paper was a great advance in the material culture of writing—and so too of thinking. How many brains would be incapacitated if they did not have pencil and paper to aid them? Computers have changed our habits only a little.

Note. Much of what follows is paraphrased from the page at Mémoires vivantes referred to below; this in turn is extracted from Michel Esteffe & Paul Delage, Saint-Cybard d’Antan.

By way of Isabelle Rambaud’s weblog, I paid a virtual visit to the Musée du Papier in Angoulême (Isabelle Rambaud is an archivist and conservator now working in the département of Seine-et-Marne). The museum is located in the factory of the most famous manufacturers in the region, Joseph Bardou, best known as the maker of Nil brand cigarette papers. (An earlier trademark ‘JoB’, from the initials ‘JB’, will have been familiar to some older readers of this age.) The factory at Saint-Cybard manufactured not only cigarette papers but also “muslin” paper, “serpent” paper for envelopes, and so on.

Source: Mémoires vivantes; this rendition
probably by Léonetto Cappiello (1875-1942).

Like many of its counterparts in the US and Great Britain, Joseph Bardou regarded its employees, two-thirds of whom were women, as a family, and provided medical services and child-care facilities for them. At its peak the factory employed 200 people. It was eventually sold by the heirs of Bardou in 1968, and ceased operations in 1970.

Machine à enchevêtrer. Source: Mémoires vivantes.

Boredom quantified

Sat, 21 Jul 2007 07:04:07 GMT

How are we all feeling today? Find out by consulting Moodviews. The graph below shows how much boredom was reported in Livejournal posts recently. Via ReadWriteWeb.

Graph created by MoodViews

Old vibrations

Sun, 20 Aug 2006 19:09:40 GMT

A hundred years ago, X-rays were supposed to be good for all sorts of things. Now we know better. In The X-ray Century, Perry Sprawls and Jack E. Petersen reproduce a series of reports on the discoveries of Roentgen and others in 1896 (start with the last page and work backwards). They include a summary of Edward Trevert’s Something about X-rays for Everybody, published in 1896.

Source: Sprawls & Petersen

Trevert’s full name was Edward Trevert Bubier. He wrote popular books on electricity and radio, including the Electro-therapeutic handbook, with full directions for home treatment of nearly all diseases that can be cured or relieved by the application of electricity (New York: Manhattan Electrical Supply Co., 1900) and The ABC of wireless telegraphy, a plain treatise on Hertzian wave signalling (Lynn, Mass.: Bubier Publishing, 1906).

Something about X-rays has been reprinted in facsimile (Medical Physics Publishing, 1988).

More Toys

Fri, 07 Jul 2006 00:23:42 GMT

Source: IceCube

More toys for scientists. The IceCube neutrino detector is essentially a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice, 1400 meters below the South Pole Station, in which an array of optical sensors is placed to detect the Cerenkov light produced by the muons that result from collisions of neutrinos with water molecules. The shielding for the detector is the Earth itself, all 8000 miles of it: IceCube is designed to detect neutrinos striking the Earth at its north pole.

Among other things, the detector will aid in the search for magnetic monopoles and weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), which are one candidate for the “dark matter” which accounts for over three-quarters of the mass of the universe. See IceCube Collaboration: J. Ahrens et al, “Science Potential of the IceCube Detector” in Proceedings of the 27th International Cosmic Ray Conference, Hamburg, Germany, 7–15 August 2001, 1242–1245; John Baez, This Week’s Finds, no. 232 (18 May 2006).

Alien army captured by physicist

Sat, 01 Apr 2006 01:00:50 GMT

Scientists get the best toys. Gordon Watts posts a photo of an optics experiment at Life as a physicist. Another picture from the lab itself.

Also, via Cosmic Variance, an experiment on polarized light that may be evidence for the existence of axions. See also Nanoscale Views (Doug Natelson) and Uncertain Principles (Chad Orzel). The paper is Zavattini et al. Experimental observation of optical rotation generated in vacuum.

Ouvrir une fenêtre

Wed, 04 Jan 2006 17:04:09 GMT

‘Braille’ is one of those eponyms that has become so familiar it no longer registers as a proper name. L’écriture Braille was the invention of Louis Braille (1809–1852), the son of a blacksmith. He lost his vision at the age of three after an injury to his left eye led to infection which,

Source: Google.fr

spreading to his right, deprived him of both.

The Braille script was an adaptation of a system invented by Charles Barbier to allow soldiers to communicate silently at night. Louis Braille, then thirteen years old and studying at the Institut Royale des Jeunes Aveugles, reduced the number of dots from 12 to 6 and later added codes for mathematical and musical notation.

On Braille’s birthday (4 January), Google honored him by transcribing its logo into Braille.

Ceux qui augmente le bonheur de la vie humaine méritent une niche dans le Panthéon de l’histoire. Ceux qui le diminue méritent seulement l’oubli. Pas même l’opprobrium, qui est quand même survie, mais simplement l’oubli, permanent et total.

References

Google link via Clavardage.

“Louis Braille”. wikipedia.fr. Last edited 4 January 2006.

“Louis Braille”. wikipedia.org. Last edited 4 January 2006.

“Le système Braille”. ophtasurf.free.fr. S.d. (2000–2005 for the site).

Zina Weygand. Vivre sans voir. Les aveugles dans la société française du Moyen Age au siècle de Louis Braille. Préface d’Alain Corbin. Paris: Créaphis, 2003.

Crashing infinitely

Mon, 19 Dec 2005 16:15:13 GMT

The following remark about a hard-drive failure struck me as worth preserving for application elsewhere.

…for some reason the slaves replicated bad data from the master and then ended up crashing infinitely.

Source: del.icio.us weblog.

I only have eyes for you, Microsoft

Fri, 25 Nov 2005 14:48:31 GMT

A discussion of DRM (digital rights management) and what it might lead to: songs or movies that won’t even play on the device they were intended for. Imagine the possibilities if biotechnology reaches the point of implanting devices in your brain. “For your eyes only” will have a whole new meaning.

See David Berlind, “DRM technology has its first two major trainwrecks”, ZDNet 28 Oct 2005. This is one of a series of posts on DRM. Via Library Autonomous Zone. On Sony’s latest misadventure, see “Virus installed by music CD” at Philosophical Fortnights.

Duck!

Mon, 21 Nov 2005 22:56:38 GMT

Warren Siegel, a physicist at SUNY Stony Brook, has written “Are you a quack?” (he must have met a few). Philosophers can’t be quite so abrupt. We’re not usually in a position to say that our theories have been well-confirmed by experiment, for example. (Intuitions are not experiments.)

I once had a man come to my office at Hopkins. We chatted for a while. As he left, he gave me a little blue book entitled I am a Visitor from the Universe with a Message for Your Planet. Who am I to say what he was? I haven’t even read the book yet.

Leuckart’s charts

Wed, 16 Nov 2005 01:16:34 GMT

The Marine Library at Woods Hole has put online an exhibition of the Wandtafeln (wall charts) of Karl Georg Friedrich Rudolf Leuckart (1822-1898), the “father of parasitology”.

Marine Library, Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institute

These were published between 1877 and 1892 as aids to the teaching of natural history. There are in all 113, devoted mostly to invertebrates, each an exemplar of the art of scientific illustration (the thumbnail here is of the 55th image in the series). Among other achievements was his work on trichinosis, which “led Rudolf Virchow to establish the first meat inspection laws in Germany”. In those days, you see, the government listened to scientists.

The exhibition includes, in addition to images of the posters, a biography, a list of references, and a virtual tour. (Link via Bibliodyssey, which has quite a few entries on scientific illustration.)

Blogging Rights

Tue, 08 Nov 2005 00:48:28 GMT

The EFF has put together a guide to legal issues relevant to weblogs: liability, the privileges of journalists, adult material. See “Guide for Webloggers” for similar material from Reporters without Borders.

EFF

Figurative

Sun, 30 Oct 2005 02:11:58 GMT

Source: Illus. London News

Once upon a time, newspapers were illustrated. Artists drew or painted or engraved pictures which were then printed on paper, often in color. Hard to believe, eh? Now you can see a wide variety of illustrations from the Illustrated London News, the “world’s first ever illustrated weekly newspaper” (1842). Via Ramage.

Trésor Direct

Sun, 30 Oct 2005 01:29:26 GMT

The Trésor de la Langue Française, a digitized corpus of French literature, now allows direct links to words. For example:

http://atilf.atilf.fr/dendien/scripts/fast.exe?degringoler

gets you citations for ‘dégringoler’ (note that accents should be omitted).

Jean Véronis at Technologies du language has made a search form.

Here’s the code:

<form action="http://atilf.atilf.fr/dendien/scripts/fast.exe" method="get">
<input name="mot"><input value="TLFi" type="submit"></form>

He has also made a plugin for Firefox.

Steam Generator Legros

Sat, 01 Oct 2005 13:58:52 GMT

From the French booksellers’ site

Credit

Galaxidion:

FABRE Jean-Henri. - Souvenirs entomologiques.

Le volume 11 contient la vie de J.-H. FABRE, suivie du répertoire général analytique des souvenirs entomologiques, par le G.-V. LEGROS, préface de J.-H. FABRE.

Volume 11 contains the life of J.-H. FABRE, followed analytical general repertory of the entomological memories, by the Steam Generator LEGROS, foreword of J.-H. FABRE.

Where did that steam generator come from? It turns out that G.-V. is an abbreviation for ‘générateur-vapeur’ or ‘générateur à vaporisation’—either a steam-generator or a humidifier.

On Fabre and his lo-tech science, see Dominique Autié, “Les livres scolaires de Jean Henri Fabre” at Balles de match.

Harlem in the 30s

Sun, 18 Sep 2005 03:52:15 GMT

Photographs by Aaron Siskind from the archives at the George Eastman House. The passage of time has given the furnishings of the rooms he photographed a perhaps spurious air of distinction; still the “most crowded block in the world” was surprisingly genteel. Via Wood s Lot.

Aaron Siskind, ca. 1940–1941

Cathédrale de Bayeux

Mon, 12 Sep 2005 03:41:51 GMT

Une belle photo panoramique de la Cathédrale de Bayeux. Par Ossiane à L’Œil ouverte. Il faut avoir installé Quicktime pour la voir.

Giorg Omotescu

Tue, 09 Aug 2005 03:53:52 GMT

Generate anagrams and pseudonyms. From your name, from famous phrases. Dena Tresserec recommends it. From Jaron Vinsee at Technologies du langage. Don’t worry, it works in English too! Just tell ’em Alcofribas Nasier sent you.

Life under the microscope

Thu, 14 Jul 2005 14:00:56 GMT

Droplet, a website devoted to microscopic images of protozoa.

Piotr Rotkiewicz

Striking photographs of a variety of tiny creatures, arranged by taxa. At the right is Vorticella, a “sessile, peritrich ciliate”, at 25x. Includes links to the Integrated Taxonomic Information System, a database of information on biological taxa with a nice search engine of other biological databases. Via Ramage’s Marginalia.

Snaps of Blue Velvet

Thu, 14 Jul 2005 05:28:32 GMT

Square America has snapshots from the 50s through the 70s. Some are ordinary. A few have a touch of the uncanny. Strange to think that the decor of the earlier shots is what I saw all the time when I was growing up. Now I know what it’s like to be campy, quaint, and picturesque. See also the Boat Lullabies. Via Ramage.