Couple things:
- Lighting is the hardest part. LEGOs are shiny. Really need a diffuse light tent.
- Timing is the second hardest part. You can calculate shots per second, of course. But even then you have to be constantly doing math for dramatic pauses and such.
- iStopMotion is an invaluable app if you are interested in this sort of thing. Easy enough to do with a regular digital camera, but iStopMotion lets you use an iSight and leaves the last frame semi-transparent on the screen so you can see what you are trying to line up with.
- That's a half-destroyed Hutt sail barge in the background.
- Shout out to Wilhelm.
The inspiration for this little family project was my son coming across the hardcopy of a flipbook animation I mentioned in this post years ago.
Tags: animation, lego, starwars, stop-motion
Posted at 6:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
September 19, 2007
A game that would displease the range safety officer
OK, so here's an inspired idea, the kind of thing devised by idiots who've been drinking all weekend.
You know the game called 500? Basically you throw a tennis ball into the air. Players then run under it, pushing, shoving, and perhaps groping for the ball as it comes down. You get 100 points for catching it on the fly, 75 for one bounce, 50 for two, etc. If you touch it on the fly and drop it you lose 100 points, with negative points for touching the ball mirroring the gains for catching it. (At least that's how I grew up playing it.)
So this weekend. My college friends and I were gathered for our annual Fall session of telling stories like none of us had ever heard them before and being demonstratively juvenile. We discovered that the house we were staying in contained a model rocket and loads of propellant. Of course we had to shoot it off.
I had not done this since I was little. I was soon reminded that the key to the whole thing (or rather the key to doing it more than once) is the secondary charge that goes off to spring the nose cone and deploy the parachute which floats the whole fuselage* back to Earth.
We were doing in this in the middle of a prairie. It wasn't exactly parched, but I'm not sure Smokey the Bear (or NASA or the FAA) would have approved. As soon as the first one went up a small group of the inebriated ran out into the field, matching -- or attempting to match -- the trajectory of the descent with their own jagged strides. Just like 500, you see. But the problem was that it was dusk and the rocket went way the hell up. At it's apogee (yay, SAT!) it was lost from human eyesight. Only a few hundred yards up did it become visible and usually it was hurtling down with a half-opened, if not outright flaming, parachute. Dangerous as all hell. If you're not pegged in the face with a rocket strut you're scalded by the hot cylinder itself. It was pure comedy.
Try it sometime and remember where the game was invented, right here on Ascent Stage. For added difficulty play in an urban area with lots of obstacles.
[*] A descent stage, you might say. But you would be wrong. A descent stage is a powered rocket whose purpose is to counteract gravity during a descent (as in to the moon). But that's a great idea. Where are the model rockets with descent stages!?
Posted at 10:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
May 22, 2007
Pass it down
Saturday I attended possibly the most enjoyable baseball game I have ever seen in person. My father-in-law was in town. Our family schedule parted as miraculously as the Red Sea and living within walking distance of the park, I proposed going to see the Cubs versus our crosstown rivals the Sox. Nevermind that we didn't have tickets. Nevermind that it was the nicest day for a baseball game all season. Never mind that it was the first series with the Sox. We figured we'd get taken by scalpers, but in fact the Cubs have a licensed reseller (read: official scalper) selling gameday tickets on location. We got tix four rows from the field on the Cubs side. Cost: um, more than face.
It was perfection. Suffice to say that the wind was blowing out, no one held a lead for very long, and a certain beloved Lee (not Elia, bless his profane heart) who was on the bench with a neck spasm emerged from the dugout to bewildered but deafening applause, whiffed once, sat on three, and then smacked one into the bleachers. Oh, also the bases were loaded. (A pinch hit grand salami, for goodness sake. Can anyone tell me the last time that happened with the Cubs?) Good times.
But what I really want to talk about here is drinking beer at Wrigley. Admittedly I've only been to a few other parks in my life, but I have to think the culture of beer is stronger in The Friendly Confines. Hell, it is the only park to have baseball cards for every single beer vendor.
So there's a whole set of unwritten rules regarding buying from beer vendors at Wrigley. Here is the obligatory How To (Digg front page, here I come!):
- Yell “Hey Old Style!” like you're picking a fight or sheepishly flag down the Bud guy.
- As he works his way up or down the rows serving other fans remind him of your order periodically by throwing peanuts his way and waving the number of beers you want his direction. Actually, don't throw peanuts.
- When he gets to your row he'll normally hold his index finger and thumb like he's holding your ID. This means send it down the row.
- Do the math. $6 times the number of beers requested. Pass this and a little more plus your ID to the person next to you for delivery down the row.
- Watch as every person handles your ID, looks at your photo, and basically learns who you are.*
- Wait for the beers to be passed down to you while enduring the obligatory “sip charge!” heckling from those having to pass them.
- Flash the number of dollars you want back, implying the tip, to the vendor. Remember, he has your ID and he hasn't spit in your beer (yet).
- Enjoy beer.
[*] Does anyone find it odd that the park is now carding people this way? I'm not opposed to enforcing the age limit, but in what other circumstance would I be forced to put one of my most important identification documents in the hands of a row full of total strangers? Privacy nuts are obviously not ballpark beer drinkers.
To make matters worse, my ID is actually cracked at the top from where the top of it pokes out of the sleeve in my wallet. Apparently consistent ass-pressure over the years has made it so. The vendor in the stands told me that he couldn't sell me another one with an ID like that and, sure enough, when I went to get more after a potty break under the stands I was rejected. (Luckily, a nearby seatmate stranger -- part of an earlier pass-the-money pass-the-beer bucket brigade -- was in line right next to me. So he bought my beer.) But still, the policy is no altered, broken, or frayed ID's will be accepted. Altered, ok. But broken or frayed? Do they think we keep our ID's in some kind of Centers for Disease Control white room? It is under our ass 70% of the day, for god's sake!
I'll leave you with the completely unrelated but absolutely hilarious rant by the Sox head coach, Ozzie Guillen, the day the series started. Idiot.
Posted at 11:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)
March 23, 2007
Go Vandy!
This doesn't happen very often.
Update: But this does. Ouch.
Tags: basketball, ncaa, sweetsixteen, vanderbilt
Posted at 5:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
March 20, 2007
Heading for a black hole
This is how things get done in Hollywood, so why not for the new Coudal film 72°?
“It's always the sign of a good meeting when you decide to go grab a quick drink right after work and you wind up leaving the neighborhood bar at around 8:00.”My god, what have we done?
Posted at 6:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
December 13, 2006
Track level
A view of our holiday track layout. Complete with derailment.
Posted at 6:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Intercoastal
For Turkey Day I spent some time with the male members of my family on the now-annual fall fishing trip to coastal Texas. This was the site of last year's encounter with Larry the Fishing Guide. We hired him again. Most decent guides know where the fish are. Larry has a preternatural ability to know what the fish are doing. He reads the barely-subsurface topography of the intercoastal and can tell you why a school of drum is in this place but not 15 feet to the north. Of course, he's constantly on his cell phone with other guides so there's bit of a hive mind aspect to the local knowledge. But still. Larry's uncanny.
Larry has a great verb: “to box.” As in “Nice one, John, that'll box for sure.” As in “that fish is large enough not to get us arrested if we keep it so we can put it in our onboard freezer box.” To say “that'll box” is easier, you see.
My favorite Larry trick? He sets the drag on his poles (which we all use) to the exact tension so that if the drag lets out you know you have a fish that'll box. If the drag does not give then you'll be tossing this particular fishie back. Think about that. Drag tension varies from reel to reel and yet he is able to set the drag precisely to differentiate a 19“ redfish from a 21” redfish. It worked too.
The new experience this year was flounder gigging. You go out at night into the extreme shallows and stand at the bow of your floodlit flatboat with a trident ready to spot-and-spear the flounder. It is so primitive and, well, satisfying. There's absolutely no sport to it at all, but it is astonishing how much fun it is. It just shouldn't be, but it is. Bloody too, as the pierced, spewing flounder are arc'ed into the holding tub on the end of trident.
Actually the best part is the marine life you see. In those shallows with that much light at night you encounter herons, crabs, jellyfish, mullet, redfish, and even porpoise. In fact, for most of our evening we had a two-porpoise escort. They played off whichever side of our boat was away from shore, effectively pushing fish into even shallower water for us. Smart creatures! The flip side of this natural beauty is the clear evidence of human negligence. Propeller-scarred lanes of sand criss-cross the grassy shallows like a satellite photo of Europa. Granted, navigating the tricky waters and tides of the intercoastal is difficult*, but some of these scars were deep and suggest foolishness rather than ignorance.
It is a bit eerie too. Some people gig flounder without a boat by walking in the shallows. These die-hards trudge through the muck with a lantern powered by a car battery floating in a sytrofoam enclosure tethered to their waste. They also drag a bag of bleeding flounder. This is intrepid bordering on stupid given the sharks that patrol the same shallows. The last thing I'd want is to try to outrun a blood-crazed shark with a car battery strapped to my waist.
[*] Quote of the Trip: “John, do you know how to use a sextant?” -- father-in-law after we somehow ended up in Corpus Christi bay at night miles away from where we should have been. I am ashamed to say that I did not know how to use a sextant. But if he had an astrolabe ...
Posted at 9:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
December 12, 2006
Party as a verb
The deafening silence on this blog is attributable to one thing only: the obscene workload of preparing for our holiday party. Trying to one-up ourselves each year seems to be driving us asymptotically closer to insanity. And yet, it is a damn good time, bigger than Christmas day in some ways. Certainly more work, usually more fun. It all went down on Saturday night.
We were worried about the fire marshal and the ATF. The first because we invited way too many people and we don't have a gigantic space. The second because, well, let's just say the freeze-distillation of the homemade apple cider succeeded.
To combat the crush of people that inevitably orbit the bartender we devised a few ploys to get people down into the basement/mancave. We set up a DJ table downstairs. Two laptops -- one running the Hercules DJ Console, the other running Ableton Live -- were connected to a two-channel mixer which hooked into the stereo system. The trusty Denon AVR-4306 (oh how I love that piece of machinery) ably handled playing Christmas tunes upstairs and the mixer's output downstairs. Everyone wants to be a DJ and, after a few drinks, no one seems to care that you aren't. (Beatmatching, like downhill skiing, is not really something to be done drunk.) It was great fun.
We also set up a prom-style photo wall, inspired by an excellent photostream on Flickr (which I cannot find at the moment) link (thanks, Craig). Borrowing a friend's kickass SLR and installing some remote control software we were able to rig it so that the revelers had only to hit F9 to take their own shots. A laptop displayed the output immediately. 800 photos later, I am amazed at what people will do in front of a camera. In any event, the ploys worked and by 9pm the basement was throbbing with people vamping for the camera and thumping to the choons.
Adding to the rave-like quality on the lower level were this year's party favors. Traditionally we've created a mix using Coudal's superb Jewelboxes. One of the great things about these cases is that the hinge between the covers creates a nifty little chamber. Coudal encourages creative uses of the chamber so last year (for a mix called “Shaken”) I filled the chamber with red, white, and green Tic Tacs. I was pleased with the results. So imagine my surprise when I learned that Coudal actually now has an entire sub-line of Jewelboxes with Tic Tac-filled hinge chambers! Flattering, I suppose. (Hard not to love Coudal. Even if they did steal my idea!)
Anyway. The rave-like quality. This year I searched high and low for glow sticks that were the proper size for the hinge chamber. My idea was to have red and green glowing CDs. Turns out glow sticks are made in a bewildering variety of shapes and sizes for everything from costumes to golf balls to fishing lures. This last category -- called Lunker Lights -- was the perfect size for the chamber. The effect was stunning -- though it only lasted for about 8 hours. Rave on! (For those who enjoy stylistically schizophrenic playlists, the tracks are listed here.)
Our ATF worries were less Ruby Ridge, more Al Capone. There's nothing wrong with making your own hard cider, of course. It turned out very well, if a little dry. But the real hit of the party was the Applejack. This potent distillate is made by putting a quantity of cider out in the snow for a few days, letting the non-alcoholic liquid (which is most of it) freeze, scraping that off, repeating. Liquid volume reduction, no alcohol reduction. (Some pics at the end of this photoset.) You can figure out the rest. It isn't precisely legal, but then who says I didn't just leave the tub out in the snow by accident? Calvados is the name of store-bought heat-distilled Apple liqueur. I'm quite certain it tastes nothing like my Applejack. But people clearly drank it at the party and, refreshingly, we've had no reports of blindness or death.
The last bit of party fun for which I was responsible (i.e. those things having nothing to do with food or decoration) was the train track. Every year we alter the track layout a bit and this year, frankly, we might have overdone it. For years we've had the traditional living room and tree base interlocking loops. But that's for amateurs we decided. And by we I mean, me and my two sons. Nah. I just mean me. So we devised the trans-dining room spur. Since we were cramped for space I laid out a single track that would head into the dining room, loop around a side table, and then return on the same track. Silly me. Electricity (which flows in the tracks and powers the engine) no likey being made to double-back on itself. So that was a colossal failure. “Daddy, why can't you make the train run?” [heart rends] I didn't realize you had to be an electrical engineer to build a toy train.
This set off a quest for two reverse loop track thing-a-ma-bobs. Inserting these into a loop of track basically segments off a stretch of track with reverse polarity so that the electrons may once again be happy and your train may run ... until it gets to the junction point of the original polarity whereupon it stops and you have to go over to the control panel and reverse the direction manually. Way too cumbersome and not at all fun. So, we had to pitch the spur idea. But did we pitch the trans-dining room express? Hell no. We just made it bigger so that we could have a full fledged electrical physics-behavin' loop. This was a source of great displeasure for my wife. (“Do you know how many drunk women in high heels are going to trip on that?!”) Chugga-chugga choo-choo.
Let's end with the stats:
76 people drank ...
2.5 handles of vodka
3/4 bottle stoli vanilla
1/3 handle gin
1 bottle scotch
4 cases of beer
2 bottles champagne
1 liter coke
1/2 handle bourbon
3 bottles merlot
3 bottles red zin
2 bottles chardonnay
1 bottle pinot grigio
1 bottle pinor noir
16 oz. homemade cider
1/2 gallon homemade applejack (god help 'em)
and ate ...
9 lb ham
36 rolls
1 9×13 spinach squares
50 bacon-wrapped dates
1 bucketload of queso
2 mega-bags Fritos scoops
1 plate asparagus appetizers
2 loaves pepperoni bread
2 dozen mini-cupcakes
1/2 recipe goat cheese torta
assorted Twinkies, Ho Ho's and cupcakes
1 apple cake
1 9×13 gooey toffee butter bars
dozens of sausage bites (1.5 packs of puff pastry)
1/2 recipe Oreo truffles
1 bag hugs pretzels
prosciutto swirls
and did not eat ...
choco-covered fruits
my sister's cookies
fudge
pralines
brownies
Until next year, happy holidays!
Tags: applejack, christmas, cider, dj, party, toytrain
Posted at 3:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
August 7, 2006
Nike plus iPod minus Nike
Have you seen the new doodad from Nike and Apple? The receiver that you hook onto the iPod nano and the transmitting pedometer that you put in your shoe? It looks perfect. It'll track my runs (even indoors -- take that, GPS!) and then synch it all online when I dock the iPod. Perfect.
Except, wait. I have to buy new shoes that fit the pedometer? And they have to be Nike running shoes? But I hate Nike running shoes. I think most people hate Nike running shoes. Well, this sucks. It's like ... Nike is locking people in to proprietary hardware just like ... Apple. Hmm, making more sense now.
The Intertubes of course offer a few solutions to this. Some people are velcroing the pedometer under their laces. Others are just sticking it in a little lace-attached pouch.
All fine shoehacks, but I thought I could do one better. See, I have flat feet -- Kansas flat feet -- so I run with orthotic inserts. Turns out they are almost exactly the right depth to fit the little pedometer, if properly cored out. Note that this might work with the regular inserts in shoes. Orthotic inserts are not that much deeper than the factory inserts. Try it.
Remove the insert.
Grab a power tool for shaving off the hard plastic. Make the hole a little smaller than you need.
Pop it in.
Behold your new cyborg shoe.
Posted at 10:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)
July 26, 2006
Tracking
Today I pulled a $1 bill out of my wallet and saw that it had been stamped with the Where's George URL. I had read about the dollar bill tracking site before, but this was my first encounter with a tracked bill. So I popped in the serial number and I learned that the bill had previously been in Carmel, Indiana.
Kinda cool, but the real experience was digging into the Where's George site. It is a huge community of mindbogglingly dedicated bill-trackers. The site has merchandise for sale, forums by region, external fan sites, scoring competitions -- things you'd associate with a popular band or videogame, not a site dedicated to tracking denominations of US currency.
But that's the thing. The map of a bill's travels around the world isn't so much the story of the $1 note as it is a visualization of straight-line vectors between fellow dorks. The money is secondary, really. Think of an indiviual bill as little more than a slow-motion chain letter between likeminded, trainspotting money geeks. Once the bill arrives it is plotted on the map and the community grows by one. Where's George doesn't track money; it uncovers people who care about tracking money.
Which reminds me of the wine bottle re-gifting from last year. You may recall this as the experiment to see how many times a bottle could be re-gifted. It started in Chicago, jumped once in Chicago, then made its way to Miami where I have lost track of it.* Like Where's George this small network isn't so much about where the bottle is as a map of people crass enough to re-gift proudly.
And that's what's cool about a social networks. Often the stated reason for the networking (professional connections, hobby information, etc) becomes secondary to the social insight that comes of it. The link makes the node. Not the other way around.
[*] Maybe this Christmas I'll start a site called Re-Gift Tracker (no, better: Re-Giftr). You'll be able to enter UPC codes for obviously regifted items and see where they came from. And then there'll be an interface to Cork'd. And then Amazon. And, and ... oh my, Web 2.0 fame and fortune here I come.
Posted at 8:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
June 15, 2006
How to create a LEGO mosaic
When my oldest son was born in 2001 LEGO offered a cool online "Brick-o-lizer" that would take an uploaded photo and turn it into a five-tone grayscale grid of 1×1 bricks from which you could create a wall-hanging mosaic. LEGO would send you the exact right amount of bricks in bulk. Putting it together was as easy as paint-by-numbers. I did this for him and for his little brother in 2003.
My daughter was born a few weeks ago and so naturally I went back to the Brick-o-lizer to create her mosaic. Imagine my horror to find out that it isn't available anymore. How could I deprive my baby girl of her LEGO mosaic? Well. Obviously. I couldn't.
So, here follows instructions for doing it manually in Photoshop. (But before we begin, let's be sure to acknowledge the unbelievably talented people who create LEGO mosaics in full color without a grid at all. I bow to your supremacy.)
 | First, prep your shot as a square. For portraits, tight in is best. People will naturally view your mosaic from a distance or squinting to maximize contrast so details external to the person in the portrait will be lost (and a benefit-free pain in the ass to snap into the LEGO grid for you). |
 | In Photoshop, resize the image to 440 × 440 pixels and apply the Mosaic filter in Filter > Pixelate > Mosaic. Choose a cell size of 10. Then play with the brightness and contrast with an eye towards highlighting the most important details of the portrait. |
 | Change the photo to Indexed Color, select a Custom palette, and choose six shades of gray. The easiest way is to click on the grid and then when the color palette comes up choose Web colors only. Select white, black, and then a light, medium, and dark gray. |
 | In Preferences > Guides, Grids, & Slices set the Grid to a prominent color, gridline every 10 pixels, and subdivisions 1. Turn on a grid with View > Show > Grid. |
You'll need to do some manual computation. The grid is 44 × 44 which is 1,936 bricks. Eyeball or, if you prefer, count as many of each of the five colors you will need.
You'll then need to go to the LEGO shop and order the bricks. You'll need one X-Large Gray Baseplate , one set of 2×4 Roof Tiles Steep Sloped Black, one set of Black Roof Tiles 25° (2×2, 2×4, Corner), and then as many 1×1 Studs in White, Light Grey, Medium Grey, Dark Grey, and Black as you need.
Once it all arrives, use your gridded Photoshop image or print it out and enjoy a few hours of mind-numbing bricklaying.
Posted at 7:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (26)
April 8, 2006
Brown, I'd prefer you didn't
I just remembered something that made me laugh a while back. I was talking to a friend of a friend who works for UPS. We were joking about the tagline "What can brown do for you?" when he told me about an internal effort to galvanize support for the new campaign. The execs were trying to think of something catchy when someone suggested "Operation Brownstorm." This stuck. As a storm of brown might.
The teams, I was told, couldn't believe that management would go with such a blatantly scatological reference. Not only that but employees were encouraged to "Get behind Operation Brownstorm!" Um, no thank you. I'll stay right out here in front. A safe distance from the squall.
Lesson: when Googling for name inspiration be sure to deselect the mature content filter.
UPDATE: If you want to mount an awareness effort on the color brown, you might have a look at the Chicago Transit Authority's Countdown to a New Brown. There's built-in potty humor there too, of course, but no storming as far as I can tell.
Posted at 11:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
March 17, 2006
South by
The Interactive portion of the venerable culture festival known as South by Southwest concluded this week. I was there for much of it before departing for a somewhat hellish two days in Beijing ("East by Far East "). The event was one nerdgasm after the next. "Digital creatives" from all around crowded panels, keynotes, and the hallways to suckle the free wifi and listen to how They Too Could Be Web 2.0 or how they could design the next community app. In fact the conference was a great example of a community simultaneously inhabiting the virtual and physical realms. Attendees in the audience chatted in giant IRC rooms that corresponded to the individual panels often with the speakers on the platform chiming in backchannel or replying in the real world. As this was my first SXSW I can't compare to previous events, but people told me this time it was more entrepreneurial in flavor, less tools-based. Sure, there were panels on CSS, but mostly topics were on community and startups or abstract concepts like convergence, a buzzword on which I blathered.
The best part by far of course was meeting people. Networking and beer-drinking is built right into the conference proceedings. You have to love that after-event parties are listed in the program. And attendees were genuinely interested in talking. You never quite knew who you'd be standing next to. Chances were high he or she had just sold a company to Yahoo or Google, but you know, so what? So might you soon. The Austin tech scene was well represented. So was the Chicago scene, such as there is one -- and that pleased me. Chicago design mavens Jim Coudal of Coudal Partners and Jason Fried of 37Signals delivered the opening keynote and basically entreated the crowd to drop complexity, focus on creative entrepreneurship and then wait for the money to pour in. The crew from Threadless was there too, a great example of doing just that. (Maybe there's a chance for a Chicago company-funded party next year along the lines of Seattle's South by Northwest bash? South by Midwest?)
As a guy from IBM, perhaps the former paragon of complexity, I was pleased to be mostly taken on my own merits. It usually doesn't happen that way. There's a kind of stigma of respect when I normally tell people I work for the 'BM. It is almost always positive, mind you, but the fact I work for IBM often overpowers anything I might offer individually. Not at SXSW. People didn't much give a shit. I liked that. Hell, Craig Newmark of craigslist told me he worked for IBM for 17 years prior to quietly changing the world. See there's hope.
OK, no more compass puns. That's my direction anyway. Oh god, jetlag delirium.
Posted at 6:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
March 13, 2006
Recombinant design
SXSW 2006 Interactive Playpen. LEGO wonderland. Aerial Rorschach.
Posted at 8:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
February 25, 2006
More fun at SxSW
Because the speakers and bands and screenings simply won't provide enough stimulus some folks have created the SxSW Interactive Playpen. Done wrong it could be as grimy and soulless as the free building areas of LEGO stores; done right -- and there's no reason to believe it won't be done right -- it could be a hell of a lot of fun. Can't wait.
Oh, I'm also a panelist on the first day: Convergence and Transformation. That'll be fun too. Bring some LEGO blocks.
Fellow Chicagoans Jason Fried and Jim Coudal are the keynotes.
Gonna be there and want to meet up? Let me know:
Posted at 10:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
February 19, 2006
The essence of sport
I saw an all-star basketball game in Houston this weekend. Nah, not the NBA one. I got to see my brother-in-law participate in a Special Olympics qualifying tournament. For a while it was hard not to get choked up whenever a game started, quite honestly. (They played 8 minute games.) These kids -- some were adults, but all were children in a way -- came ready to play and were as into the contest as any athlete I've ever seen. The joy on their faces was genuine and unbridled.
My brother-in-law, a physically-talented 16-year-old with Down's Syndrome, stole the show. Last week he had the dubious distinction of receiving a technical foul for swearing on the court (for a not discreet "Goddamnit!"), but this week his notoriety was all the good kind. In game two his team won 8-6 on his two three-point buckets (one of which was all net) and a layup -- and they play on full size courts with regulation baskets! He would run back after his shots and taunt the crowd into louder praise. It was high comedy. But there were other heros too, some of whom never even touched the ball. Autistic kids who would crack a rare smile when their team (or the other team) scored; Downs kids so severely afflicted that a high five was an effort, but one gladly made; kids with all manner of protective eyewear and headgear who would've suffered through the whole event in chainmail if that's what it took to participate.
You might think that such an event would be hard on an expecting parent. The gymnasium was a collection of reminders of the ways in which the miracle of conception can go awry. But actually I felt the opposite. That gymnasium was also a collection of reminders of the way that true happiness has a way of trumping the saddest twists of fate.
How often do you get to see sport in its purest form? Competition without caustic rivalry, accomplishment without showboating? As in most aspects of life for those with mental disabilities, the tournament showed absolutely no recognition of differences in race, gender, or ability. Everyone was legitimately there to have fun. The difference between this tournament and the rowdy, gaudy crowds that poured into Houston for the NBA All-Star game all weekend could not have been starker.
Posted at 9:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
December 25, 2005
Tradition
The full family rarely convenes at my parents' house for Christmas Day any more. With our own families now and out-of-town in-laws it just doesn't happen as often as it used to. So it is heartening to see that some traditions stand the test of time.
My mother decorates the main bathroom with hundreds (perhaps thousands) of little Santa figurines that she has found over the years. It is actually a little terrifying. Like urinating in the woods at night and knowing you're being watched by dozens of glowing animal eyes. But one item that is always present is a set of letter blocks that spell CHRISTMAS. Inevitably at some point in the merriment someone scrambles the block into this lovely anagram. Has been going on for years. Ah, tradition.
Posted at 10:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
December 13, 2005
Portrait of the Author as a Young Dork
Gizmodo is running a great contest asking for a scanned photo of readers "looking like the biggest dork in the world at age 10-18."
Yes, I owned a thin tie with piano keys on it. Yes, I had parachute pants. But maybe I'm too close to this to judge.
What do you think? Should I enter? Be honest.
No, really. Be honest.
Posted at 6:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)
December 7, 2005
The Physics of Santa and His Reindeer
This piece of Internet humor never gets old. Every holiday season I stumble upon it and crack up. Not sure where it originated. I'm sure I've had it for at least ten years.
- No known species of reindeer can fly. But there are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects and germs, this does not completely rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen.
- There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. But since Santa doesn't (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total - 378 million according to Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million homes. One presumes there's at least one good child in each.
- Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house. Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept), we are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75-1/2 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding and etc. This means that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second - a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.
- The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized LEGO set(2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight. On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that "flying reindeer" (see point #1) could pull ten times the normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine. We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload - not even counting the weight of the sleigh - to 353,430 tons. Again, for comparison - this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth.
- 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance - this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy. Per second. Each. In short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and create deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity. A 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.
Posted at 10:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
November 27, 2005
Survival
Recently, coincidentally, I read two books with remarkable similarities. You'd not think there was much overlapping advice in How To Survive A Robot Uprising and Cheap Psychological Tricks for Parents, but the techniques for dealing with children and automata run amok are mostly interchangeable.
Test yourself. Which of these tactics refers to sugar-addled toddlers and which to killer cyborgs?
Stay out of sight
Individual -------- may be weak and dim-witted, but as word spreads the entire swarm will react as a single organism to engulf and destroy you. Kicking an anthill is no fun when the ants are the size of a pit bull.
Stay calm and seem uninterested
No matter how hard you try to make your point in your best stentorian English, no matter how emotional you get, -------- just looks at you with that "whatever" look.
To save a comrade: First merge, then separate
Run to a comrade, deliver a quick bear-hug, and then dive in a random direction. A -------- might temporarily lose track of your identity during the hug, especially if you are wearing similar clothing. You can gain precious seconds while the -------- reacquires its target.
Distance before familiarity
Brief exposures and slow movements toward the object reduce fear and create an atmosphere of familiarity.
Administer punishment within minutes of misbehavior
The -------- who sees the behavior should deliver the punishment immediately instead of waiting until the other -------- gets home to do it.
Memorize your lies, or be honest
A -------- has a stellar memory and laser-beam concentration. If -------- doubts your veracity, this menace may refuse to listen to any further emanations from your slobber hole.
Useful, eh? Doubly so for those of you who skipped the adoption route and built android children instead. Good luck out there.
Posted at 10:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
November 12, 2005
Shallowed ground
I took a long weekend fishing trip to coastal Texas last week, which explains the brief posting hiatus. It was in almost all respects the very opposite of the fishing trip to Canada I took earlier this year -- except that we were still catching large fish, thankfully.
This time, instead of a maniacal Indian guide who used his free time hunting moose with an axe, we had Larry, a weathered good ol' boy with enough life experience stories to have our rapt attention during the lulls between finding fish. Larry was a native of Aransas Pass, Texas, a small nearby town whose economy, like most of coastal Texas, ebbs and flows with the fortunes of the energy sector and the abundance of catchable wildlife that swim in or fly over the intercoastal waterway. Tip: when talking to a guy about his experience working on a deep sea oil rig don't make the mistake of jokingly asking him if he still has all his digits. To my mortification, he raised a hand and showed me that, in fact, he didn't. Ha ha, bad joke. But he took it in stride and proceeded to tell us a horrifying story of being trapped in a cage elevator that had stuck under the drilling platform. Perfectly describing the universal fear of climbing partially out of an elevator only to have it begin moving again Larry told us matter-of-factly how the unstuck cage sliced off his finger as he grasped the ledge. Comes with the territory, I guess. He actually seemed more irritated at having been hooked in the nose by a huge spoon lure from a novice client's cast on his guide boat. (This client, unbelievably, tipped Larry $5 and said he should get himself a beer after he removed the barbed tip from his face and continued to guide them the entire day!)
Of course, even with Larry, Mother Nature rules. Some houses on the coast were still boarded up from Rita, which thankfully missed to the north. The intercoastal waterway itself is an ever-changing expanse of extremely shallow water whose sub-surface topography is a constant challenge to boaters. The waterway with its dredged shipping channel for barges is more like a series of rivers that flow together and apart -- except that the "land" between the rivers is water too. I'm glad I was drinking beer in the passenger seat. Navigation is the real reason to have a guide. Lifelong natives of the area can flit around the waterway at high speed deftly reading slight changes in the surface to know when three feet of water suddenly changes to six inches. The ability is uncanny and more than once our tag-along boat without Larry grounded itself suddenly, embedding its prop into the mud and spewing a halo of muck far into the air. (Incidentally Larry hates tag-along boats. He says it is "like dating a fat girl.")
You too can experience the stories and marine life expertise by visiting Larry's website. Be sure to check out the Blast and Cast special (hunting ducks in the morning, fishing in the afternoon). I don't hunt, but I like the sound of it.
Posted at 1:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
September 18, 2005
The evolution of the LEGO computer block
Recently we've been sifting through about six tubs of LEGO bricks that I grew up with and still own. It has been an archaeological dig through my past. Not only is it fun to find certain blocks I used to love, but I'll often come across some aborted or half-destroyed creation and I'll almost instantly (and quite eerily) remember why I built it or what corner of my LEGO universe it occupied. This is from two decades ago, mind you. But the real treasure in this dig are the non-LEGO items buried in the brick-silt. Small, fractured toys, leaked batteries (and their dried acid), dessicated food stuffs, and all manner of childhood jetsam probably make up 5% of the brick tubs. Your hands become visibly dirty after running them through the tub for just five minutes. But even the scum tweaks nostalgia a bit.
I've recently discussed The coolest LEGO brick ever. During the latest excavations I made it a point of picking out all the computer-type bricks I could find. Here's what I found.
First, the classics, in two versions. There's the command line terminal on the left and the flashy-button sci-fi bleep-bloop box on the right. No one ever knew what that one did, but it flashed and bleeped and it seemed right at home on the launchpad. The evolution of the colors is the interesting thing in how it roughly sketches the evolution of real case colors. The earliest blue computers derived from spaceships and command bunkers, evolved into the beige-box ubiquity of the IBM PC era and thence to the whites of the post-iMac world.
The special find was this version of the command line model. It is inverted so that it hangs above the minifig user. Because, as is obvious, computers that you dangle over your head mean that you have a lot of screens to keep track of and that you are, thus, supercool.
In the LEGOverse computers seem to have taken a step backwards after the golden age of space-inspired computer blocks. At least the early machines had screens. This lot of button panels seem like a throwback to analog days. Not sure what to do? Press the red button.
'Course, sometimes you needed the big iron. Here's the only LEGO mainframe with removable front plate that I know of.
And lastly, assorted bricks that belong to what you might call targetting computers. The one on the right actually lit up when attached to a battery. Still not as cool as the classics, but in their vectory goodness they echoed Battlezone, flight sims, and other important arcade games of the era.
At this point I thought I pretty much had the complete evolution of LEGO computer bricks documented -- at least up to the point that LEGO sets and themes diversified to the point of incoherence. (What in the hell is Bionicle?) But I should have known better. LEGO geeks have done a far more thorough job of documenting computer bricks than I ever could. But hey, even the best archaeologists only confirm what's already known, right?
Posted at 3:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
August 27, 2005
Chicago Triathlon
Tomorrow I'll join a few thousands others swimming, biking, and running in circles in downtown Chicago for the annual triathlon. It can't be any worse than last year when I had a three hour wait between the closing of the transition area and when my wave jumped in the drink. And then, within a few minutes of the swim I got a goggle lens kicked out in the aquatic melee.
This year sponsor Accenture will be sending live racer telemetry to the web. Not just splits but actual map location data and (so they say) streaming video of finishes for every racer. This will be pretty cool, if it works. You can send basic text information to your phone too.
So if you have nothing better to do at 7:36 AM Central time on Sunday, scoot over to the real-time athlete tracking page. My bib number is 2510. Last year I finished 35 seconds shy of three hours. Here's hoping I can at least do it with a minute to spare this year.
And if the map data doesn't update after the swim portion would someone please call the Coast Guard?
Posted at 2:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
August 16, 2005
The coolest LEGO brick ever
Came across this recently while sifting through our LEGO bins. This brick -- this single brick -- could transform an otherwise completely uncool assemblage of 2×2's, 4×1's, and slanted roof bricks into a state-of-the-art lunar outpost.
And by state-of-the-art I mean in the way computers were before GUI's made them all sissy. This terminal was for minifig people who could read computer code straight off the monocrome screen. Hell, that's probably assembler on there. And they only needed three buttons. Yellow to evacuate the launch pad. Green to light the candle. Red to blow it to smithereens if it veered off course.
Now that would be a cool casemod.
Posted at 8:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
August 7, 2005
Deprivation and focus
Last year I spent an hour in a sensory deprivation tank and thoroughly enjoyed the experience -- so much so that I mentioned it to a friend and before I knew it ABC News had dubbed me a "floating enthusiast". Well, the celebrity has worn off and I'm still a float tank devotee. Last Thursday I returned to the tanks, but this time I was armed with a waterproof iPod case and underwater headphones.
It all goes back to Autour de la Lune, the haunting, minimalist album by Geir Jenssen aka Biosphere. Many months ago I had commented to a friend that the harmonically rich drones from this album coupled with a removal of non-auditory sensory input (such as when partially submerged in a bathtub) was like an out-of-body experience. My friend mentioned that, in fact, there were real sensory deprivation chambers in Chicago. And thus the story picks up. The first two times in the tank I was in silence, listening only to my breathing getting slower and the pulsation of blood through my inner ear.
But this time I was ready for audio. Call it extreme sensory focus, if you will, enabled by a deprivation of all other sensations. The unit worked flawelessly. I floated as normal, iPod on my chest. The ear inserts which sound awful out of water came alive when submerged. The water in the tank acted a bit like a speaker diaphragm. It was like my head was in the middle of a surround sound field. Truly audiophile-quality listening.
I chose Autour de la Lune because it was the music that originally got me thinking of sensory deprivation, but more importantly it was the only kind of music that I felt would work with the timeless, motionless nature of the tank. My reasoning was that any kind of music that conveyed the passage of time -- that is, music with a beat, or with lyrics, or with any kind of discernible structure or movement at all, indeed anything with discrete tracks -- would jar you out of the hypnagogic stasis of the tank. Jenssen's opus fit the bill perfectly. While there are tracks on the album the tones blend seamlessly throughout. There is absolutely no way of knowing where you are in any individual track as the timbres and harmonics cycle, overlap, and interact. (Sample here, here, and here.) I must say, it worked beautifully in the tank.
The album is the result of Jenssen's access to Radio France's archival recordings of a dramatization of Jules Verne’s De La Terre A La Lune (From Earth To Moon). You'd think this was a factor in my selection too, since a float in the nothingness of the tank must in some way approximate a spacewalk or the noiseless, lightless experience of deep space. Alas, this only occured to me after the fact. Truth is, the experience is more about inner space than outer space.
As in previous silent floats I found myself coming in and out of lucid mental moments. The music was enveloping; it felt like I literally floated in it. At times I forgot I was hearing anything and just drifted off into thought or a kind of dream. I do know that these brief flares of dream-like visions were much more intense than in silent floats. (No hallucinogens or controlled substances involved.*) Twice I recall having vivid flashes of people becoming increasingly more physically deformed. But these were brief, not part of any larger dream narrative -- for one, I wasn't asleep -- just glimpses of something from my mind.
A few times I was unable to distinguish the music from the sound of nothingness. I don't mean silence. Even a silent tank is quite loud after a while. Your ears can ring from the noise of your vascular system doing its work. (The tanks provide earplugs, if you like.) Because so much of Autour de la Lune is composed of harmonics at the extreme ends of the sonic frequency there were times when I did not know what I was hearing -- music, myself, or the echo of both in the reverberant saltwater solution.
To me the best ambient music effects the same kind of experience as a sensory deprivation tank, focusing the mind, providing a sense of envelopment, and effacing the passage of time. If NASA won't let me tool around in the Manned Maneuvering Unit, I guess this is the next best thing.
[*] I did eat the better part of a poppyseed coffee cake that morning, so it is possible that I had a higher than normal level of opiates in my body. I'm pretty sure I was unaffected by this.
Posted at 10:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
June 26, 2005
Tips for bulk-shucking crawfish
Do it outside. Juice will splatter when you crack the carapace.
Keep separate containers for shucked and to-be-shucked mudbugs. They look remarkably similar and after removing the meat from a few dozen you'll start to confuse the two piles if you use one container.
To remove tail meat, do the following. Press down with the thumb of one hand where the tail meets the body. Push towards the head with thumb. Rip head off with other hand, discard head. You should have two legs (or more) still attached to the tail and a small white Y-shaped piece of meet sticking out from the tail (pulled from the body itself). Crack off the carapace where the legs are connected. Push index finger, nail first, between the meat and the shell from front to the end of the tail, severing the connection between the two. Pull out meat. Remove small, usually dark vein that runs the length of the tail. The key is to pull it out rather than rip it out since there is a small piece of meat that covers the vein and might as well be retained if you can do it.
Darker-red crawfish have harder shells. On these dark crawfish, you might want to crack the tail like you would do with a lobster before attempting the above.
Your thumbs and forefingers will develop lots of micro-cuts. This is nothing to worry about.
Assuming you seasoned your crawfish with liberal amounts of cayenne (and related hot stuff) your hands will begin to burn after about twenty or so shuckings. It seems the spice-infused crawjuice just seeps in. This is something to worry about. It hurts.
About 17 lbs. of crawfish generates as much meat as pictured above. Lots of work. Best to make certain you're really into crawfish before undertaking. Good luck.
Posted at 11:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
June 9, 2005
On your game
If any of you doubted my previous observation that fishing line and condoms are marketed identically please note the product I encountered in Canada.
Sensation, Extra Smooth, Extra Tough, Big Game. Someone has a great sense of humor at Trilene.
Oh and when they break! Not sure which is worse.
Posted at 3:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
June 8, 2005
Done fishing
The lake is home to Ojibwa Native Americans, many of whom provide guiding services to fly-in fishermen like us. Tough fellas, the Ojibwa. The best guide, Bruce, was a quiet badass with a tattooed list of crossed-out former lovers on his right arm. He explained to us very matter-of-factly how he hunts moose around the lake. Not with a gun, not with a bow, not even with a trap. No, Bruce hunts and kills moose with ... an axe. Just sneaks up on them -- moose sleep standing up like cows -- and thwack-thwacks them in the neck until they die. Trust me, if you saw this guy you would not doubt this story one bit. To facilitate getting the moose back to camp Bruce would normally hatchet it to death as it slept standing in shallow water. Thing is, Bruce can't swim so if there were any, you know, issues while hacking the half-ton beast to death Bruce could have a problem on his hands rather quickly. Bruce scared me a little bit.
A fishing trip with the guys on a remote lake is rather like life on a sailing ship in earlier centuries, I'd wager. Specifically I think the incidence of scurvy might be comparable. When every provision at the camp has to be flown in you just have to have priorities. Case of Labatts or apple bushel? Canadian Club or fresh berries? Luckily even in such conditions human ingenuity thrives. Turns out that the Inuit people who live well north of Trout Lake near the veggieless Arctic Circle have a fascinating method to avoid succumbing to Vitamin C deficiency. OK, follow this. Algae + moss = lichen. Lichen grows on rocks near the Arctic Circle. Lichen contains Vitamin C. Humans cannot digest lichen. But caribou can ... and do. That's right. The image you have is correct. Inuit get their veggies by disemboweling caribou and squeezing out half-digested lichen sausages from the entrails. Yum yummy!
But that's not all! Caribou are smart enough to swim across lakes to islands to give birth to their calves because they know that wolves -- their natural predators -- can't swim. And because caribou hair is hollow even a newborn calf can float in the water and quickly learn to swim back to the mainland. And this is why Bruce the Axe-Hunter does not stalk caribou.
Here's a typical day. Correction, here is what every day was like exactly. Wake. Eat breakfast of carbohydrates and pork. Fish until noon. (Start drinking at first catch.) Find shred of shore to build a fire and cook fish for lunch in cube of pure, snow white lard. Keep fishing until 5pm. Happy hour until dinner. Dinner of carbohydrates and [other meat]. Sit around fire, drinking. Actually the best part of the evening was by far the appearance of the Northern Lights. It was hard to take your eyes off them as they pulsed their way into the whole night sky. Like zoning out in front of a screensaver.
The forests around Trout Lake are straight out of Middle Earth. Sphagnum moss covers the ground giving it a strangely suburban lawn feel, until you step foot into it and realize the spongy sensation is what you thought the astronauts must have felt like bounding along the moon in that much-replayed Apollo footage. It is hard to believe such density of living things could exist on what is essentially exposed rock -- what is known to geologists as the Canadian or Pre-Cambrian Shield. Glaciers basically shaved off all the topsoil and deposited it into the heartland of the US (thanks for that!) leaving a gigantic expanse of rock. But travelling around Trout Lake you are reminded again and again how life will take hold in the least hospitable places. From a distance you see an island grown over with trees, a fractal crayon box of greens. But as you get closer you realize that the spongecake biomass that it all grows out of is just the accumulated recycling of eons of plant life that took hold, died out, and decayed -- creating a little more for the next round of life to grab hold of.
I really feared connectivity withdrawal up there. With no cell service, no phone line, no TV, and of course no Internet I wondered how I would cope. You know what? I didn't even think about it. I'm not nearly as dependant on being wired in as I thought I was. This realization may have been the best part about the trip. Hmmm, no. Catching the biggest Northern of the trip at shore lunch in front of everyone else. That was the best part.
I wanna go back.
Posted at 10:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
May 26, 2005
Where the sidewalk ends
Off the grid until next Thursday. I'll be fishing in a lake with no roads in much less telecommunications infrastructure.
My normal travel gear has been stripped to a shell of its former glory: iPod, noise-cancelling headphones, iPod battery pack, digital camera, cellphone (won't work, but gotta bring), and phone charger. My god, that kind of minimalism makes me shudder. Like a tech methadone clinic.
This will be good for me.
Posted at 10:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
May 21, 2005
The Complete Angler
My father and brother and I are headed to Canada with friends for our first fishing trip in over 15 years. Naturally, we had to restock our gear supply. So we visited the frighteningly expansive Bass Pro Shops in search of a craggy old fisherman who could help us find what we needed. We certainly found him: a leathery, nearly-toothless Vietnam vet who could speak in English for sentences on end without seemingly ever using a word I understood. ("Psst, Dad. Did he just say that the crawler harness behind the bottom bouncer might catch on the planer board? Right, OK, thought so. Good to know.")
Who would have guessed that fishing line and condoms would be marketed so similarly? You have XL for extra long, smooth action and XT when extra toughness is required and of course there's new-kid-on-the-block Sensation monofilament for "Greater Sensitivity, Strength, and Control." Having Mr. Fishervet unironically explain the differences between the types of prophyl- er, fishing line made me feel slightly unclean, quite honestly. He didn't particularly care for the condom analogy, either.
And because I know you're wondering, we bought Sensation ... for pleasure.
Posted at 4:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
March 30, 2005
It was a different time back then, 1957 or '58
This is one of the funniest things I have seen in ages. The Old Negro Space Program is a ten-minute documentary that's one part Negro Baseball League, one part NASA, and all Spinal Tap. The parody of the professor and the crappy Photoshopping cracks me up. Keep your eye out for Peter 'Stinky Pete' Carver.
As a sidenote, NASA had a single African-American astronaut, Robert H. Lawrence Jr., during the race for the moon, but he died in an air crash in 1967.
[Via Coudal]
Posted at 4:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
That warning paint comes in handy
Somebody's an Illini fan on the Trump Tower construction site.
Thanks Laura and Jen!
Posted at 9:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
March 13, 2005
Fantasy and reality
Baseball season's almost here and that means fantasy leagues are gearing up. Steroid usage is all the talk too with fans on the slippery slope of a debate over what constitutes "real" athleticism. (Steven Johnson pred