Volcano geeks

Growing up in Central Washington I always found volcanoes fascinating.  It was fun to climb basalt cliffs, but just as much fun to contemplate the multiple enormous lava flows that piled up 3,500 meters of basalt in some places.  It was a blast to have all that igneous geology laid out where you could hike on it, touch it, and sense the scale of it all.  Yes, that’s a bit geeky, so how have I missed The Volcanism Blog until now?

The images of the pre-eruption lava dome in their 07 May post, and the river valley between it and Chaiten town (think pyroclastic flow) really make you wonder about the sanity of the few holdouts who are refusing to evacuate.  Getting roasted to death in a pitch-black cloud of superheated volcanic ash does not sound like a good way to go.  Anyway, here’s some video:

Given the scale of the images, it’s difficult to imagine how fast the gas plume is erupting.  Most things that are miles away appear to be moving pretty slowly even if they’re moving pretty fast.  The flow appears to be moving fast, which means it’s moving really fast.  When it blows laterally instead of vertically, I think people imagine they could run away in their cars or something. Well, ... not.

When Mt. St. Helens pulled a similar stunt a few years ago my brother sent me a bag of volcanic ash that fell on Ellensburg, 45 miles to the E/NE.  It’s super-fine, very abrasive and very heavy.  People were wrapping panty hose around their cars’ air cleaners, and went through a hell of a lot of windshields.  A few roofs collapsed closer to the volcano, from the weight of the ash.

Continued...

Posted by George on 05/08/08 at 05:30 PM
Science & Technology • (0) Comments • Link

User-Friendly

In Robert Heinlein’s 1957 adventure novel, Citizen Of The Galaxy, the main character - a slave boy named Thorby - finds himself thrown into an empty cell on a spacecraft overnight.  The room appears featureless - just floor, walls, ceiling.  After searching for any kind of switch or shelf, he spends a miserable night curled up on the steel floor with the lights on.

The next day, he is taken under the wing of another boy who is amazed at his stupidity.  The other boy shows him how to operate the controls of the room, revealing hidden bed, table, light and temperature controls, a sink and a viewer full of stored media for information and entertainment.  The featureless cell turns out to be a very well-equipped cabin room.

Which leads to my definition of the term; “User-Friendly”; adj., meaning “That which is familiar to the user”.

I just spent an hour and a half figuring out how to install Flash on my son’s Linux laptop.  Admittedly I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer but it just wasn’t obvious to me.  Turned out to be only something like five clicks using the Synaptic package manager - about the same as in Windows through the browser.  But intuitive, it was not.  There were even contraindications.  What the hell is “Flashplugin Nonfree”?  Turned out that’s what I needed.  Once I remembered that in Linux, you can’t install Flash in the browser like you can Windows.  You need something called a “package manager”.

But hey - it’s easy! I suppose if I’d spent the last 13 years supporting Linux I’d think Windows was counterintuitive. 

Posted by George on 05/05/08 at 11:01 PM
Geeky • Design • (9) Comments • Link

It is difficult to live in the moment

It has been said the anticipation of a good thing is better than the thing itself.  Something analogous may be true of how the present is poisoned by dread, of knowing a bad thing is coming.

It is stunningly beautiful this morning; cool, sunny, a light breeze and the air is fragrant with the scent of violets.  I could hear various birdsongs including the cooing of a dove.  But it is Sunday morning.  I knew in a few minutes the Methodist church would begin blaring out 19th-century revival hymns on their damned electronic carillion (audible for over a mile). Not long after that, the gas engines of a dozen lawnmowers.

Sure enough, the bells have already begun.  I give it ten more minutes before the mowers start up.

Posted by George on 05/04/08 at 09:15 AM
observations • (5) Comments • Link

Movie Review: ‘The Band’s Visit’

imageI wish MrsDoF hadn’t been too busy rolling balls of yarn to go to the movies with me.  Sometimes a guy just can’t get a date to save his life.

I saw The Band’s Visit this evening at the historic Normal Theater.  It’s a 2007 story about an Egyptian police band travelling to give a concert at an Arab culture center in Israel.  They get on the wrong bus and end up stranded in the wrong town; a town in the middle of nowhere with no hotel.  Locals take them in for the night.

It’s a very different kind of film from the American movies I’m used to. I went because I have never seen a full-length Israeli film, know very little about life in Israel, and have very little context for Arab poetry or music.  There’s no ‘action’, no politics and very little religion. It’s character-driven, quiet, and a quite unadorned look at the lives of people in the Israeli town, and in the Egyptian band.  The characters once had dreams, they’re lonely, grieving, impatient, defeated or self-important, and the story, to the extent there is one, is in how they behave when thrust together.  It has some moments where the whole theater filled with laughter, and at least one moment where you’d best have a hankie.  At least, I needed one when the band leader explains to the beautiful restaurant owner what happened to his wife and son.

Oddly enough the film was rejected for an Oscar in the ‘foreign films’ category because it had ‘too much English’ in it.  Though, if Egyptians and Israelis needed to communicate, that’s the language they have in common…

Posted by George on 05/03/08 at 09:15 PM
Reviews • Movies • (3) Comments • Link

The Manchurian Candidate

Sometimes I wonder if Anne Coulter is secretly working for the Democrats, as when she speculates that Barack Obama might be a “Manchurian Candidate”.  Keith Olberman asks… “Annie!  You ever seen the Manchurian Candidate, the classic original with Frank Sinatra and Lawrence Harvey?  The Manchurian Candidate is about an American war hero, ex-POW, who while he’s in captivity, gets brainwashed by the Chinese...”

Posted by George on 05/03/08 at 10:29 AM
Politics • (3) Comments • Link

The Empire Strikes Barack

It’s difficult to imagine what campaigning would look like in a Galaxy Far Away (video below the fold)…

Continued...

Posted by George on 05/02/08 at 10:11 PM
observations • Humor • (1) Comments • Link

Internet Combo Plate

There’s no common thread in these posts - just good stuff I enjoyed reading and want to share:

  • Karmen at Chaotic Utopia learns that McCain is an anti-science moron in ”Seeds in Svalbard; your pork-belly future?”
  • You don’t hear much about voluntary celibacy these days but Paul at Cafe Philos explains his choice
  • Cajun relates a story about a swirling lake of doom.  And the best thing about it?  Human error!  Man I love stories like that.
  • Dana is having heart failure over her discovery that even conservative columnist John Derbyshire can see what an acephalic twit Ben Stein really is.
  • Chris Clarke describes the relationship between commuter trains and neighborhoods in Commute.  It reminds me of a scene from HG Wells’ Time Machine;
    “...I have watched the neighbors’ lives through the train’s lens. The new plastic toy tricycle left in different corners of the yard fades in the sun, is supplanted by a series of bicycles of increasing size. Trees are planted, grow, bear flowers and fruit, are pruned, succumb to blight. Roofs deteriorate in each winter’s storms...”

  • WeeDram tells us just exactly how much he likes John McCain.
  • ***Dave warns that if you’re a Transportation Security Administration screener and you bring a gun to work, you’ll face really severe penalties.  And you won’t believe just how severe!!!
  • Finally, Brent Rasmussen at UTI recently took his family to his favorite steakhouse.  Great food, live country music under the open sky, but if you get up and dance, they politely ask you to stop.  You just know there’s some industrial-strength stupidity behind it, and it turns out, there is. 

Posted by George on 05/02/08 at 08:21 PM
observations • (1) Comments • Link

A trip down (microfilm) memory lane

IBM’s 1890 data tabulator reading census data cards with pools of toxic mercury?  Robotic data storage on microfilm?  A US defense computer kept alive by Russian vacuum tubes?  And much more!  In the BBC News video Computer Dinosaurs.  Some seriously, awesomely cool stuff from early computing days.

Posted by George on 05/02/08 at 07:54 AM
Geeky • History • (2) Comments • Link

Hey, I almost forgot

Hey, I almost forgot… isn’t this National “Mission Accomplished” day?  Yeah!  No wait, that was yesterday, which was also National Prayer Day.  I missed them both, but somehow don’t they kind of belong together?  National exercises of ineffectual self-congratulation?  Jesus said pray in private in the closet and we made a national day out of it.  And still call ourselves a Christian nation.  Well at least we still hate gays, whom Jesus never mentioned in any way. 

No, really folks, I kid, I kid because I love.  But if we didn’t think there was some big guy in the sky who will bail us out of our mistakes, mightn’t we pay more attention to the possibility of screwing things up in the first place?

Posted by George on 05/02/08 at 06:59 AM
Religion • (2) Comments • Link

Steering by idiocy

HeliSoft

A helicopter was flying around Seattle when an electrical malfunction disabled all of the aircraft’s electronic navigation and communications equipment.

Due to the clouds and haze, the pilot could not determine the helicopter’s position. The pilot saw a tall building, flew toward it, circled, and held up a handwritten sign that said “WHERE AM I?” in large letters. People in the tall building quickly responded to the aircraft, drew a large sign, and held it in a building window. Their sign said “YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER.”

The pilot smiled, waved, looked at his map, determined the course to steer to SEATAC airport, and landed safely. After they were on the ground, the copilot asked the pilot how he had done it.

“I knew it had to be the Microsoft Building because they gave me a technically correct, but completely useless answer.”

(Hat tip to A Normal Backyard, who has been photographing the Spring return of migratory birds to his yard)

Posted by George on 04/29/08 at 07:31 PM
observations • Humor • (4) Comments • Link

Theory is practical in practice

Regarding DOF’s recent post Theory is Practical, I had a real life example of this today.  This week’s problem set in my class was about graphs, and one of the problems reads


Whenever groups of pigeons gather, they instinctively establish a pecking order. For any pair of pigeons, one pigeon always pecks the other, driving it away from food or potential mates.  The same pair of pigeons will always choose the same pecking order, even after years of separation, no matter what other pigeons are around. Surprisingly, the overall pecking order in a set of pigeons can contain cycles – for example, pigeon A pecks pigeon B, which pecks pigeon C, which pecks pigeon A. If A pecks B, we say that A is dominant and B is submissive.
(a) Prove that any set of pigeons can be listed in some order so that every pigeon pecks the following pigeon.
(b) Prove that any set of n pigeons can be listed in some order so that the number of pairs of pigeons where the dominant pigeon appears before the submissive pigeon is at least [some expression]

The concreteness of this problem was designed to help the students understand not only cases where graphs can be applied, but to make the problem easier to understand.  I certainly thought that it would have this effect when I read it, and it seems much less intimidating than “Prove that every orientation of a complete graph has a Hamiltonian path,” which is what the question is “really” asking.  My office hours indicated that it did not succeed in these goals.  This was the question I got asked about much more than any other question, and most students seemed really confused by what the pigeons had to do with the problem, or even what the problem was asking.  It’s interesting to me the amount of confusion which this caused.  The students are still struggling with the basic concepts of graphs, so they had a lot of trouble thinking of the “right” way to abstract the problem, and then on top of that prove things about it.

I’m not sure what the best solution is for all this.  Throughout much of the course, I’ve heard about how the material seems irrelevant to computer programming, and that the material is too abstract.  Should we ignore complaints about the material, and give the students a heavy dose of abstraction, give the applications after students have done the homework (which might lead to frustration when students don’t know what theorems are “for"), or perhaps keep using problems like this.  I don’t know, but it’s certainly interesting to think about.

(This is not to harp on the author of the question, who is a very good teacher.  I think these issues are difficult, and there is no right answer.  I just found the students’ response interesting and noteworthy.)

Posted by Lucas on 04/28/08 at 10:31 PM
(4) Comments • Link

Xubuntu 8.04 on IBM ThinkPad T-21

You wouldn’t think an eight-year-old laptop would be good for much.  Its PIII processor and paltry 512mb of RAM, plus its puny 30 gig hard drive just don’t add up to a lot of firepower.  This wasn’t a problem until a month ago when a couple new Microsoft patches came out that just bogged it down.  Even a fresh build didn’t help.

But the IBM ThinkPad T-21 is just too good to throw out.  It was a maximally-engineered model with a carbon-fibre frame, a crisp, easy-typing keyboard, and a great screen topped with a titanium lid.  And it was cheap: it sold for three grand when it was new, but I bought for my son a couple years ago for one-tenth that much.

I tried Ubuntu on it but running Ubuntu is a young laptop’s game.  Ubuntu is intended to compete with Windows Vista and it’s really needs a P4 with a gig of ram to run well.  (Vista needs much more) An older machine like this one needs a lighter, more stripped-down OS.  Then Webs05 sent me this email:

Xubuntu 8.04 is [great]!  There is no other way to put it! So far I am having super amazing results. And I am currently installing it on Katie’s laptop, which means they fixed A LOT of previous issues. Katie’s laptop is the old X23… Anyways, try it out. I am going to be writing a post soon.

Well that’s interesting because the ThinkPad X-23 is a smaller but otherwise very similar machine as far as the operating system is concerned.  And I did try it out, splitting the HD into two primary partitions and putting the /home in the second partition, with / and /swap in the first partition.  It works great, it’s reasonably fast, it suspends well, and the wireless works fine.  It even set up the Broadcom 54g wireless card with no problem. 

Xubuntu is Ubuntu without all the gingerbread; it doesn’t waste CPU cycles trying to be pretty.  And it works: this old laptop has a new lease on life.  I’m putting a new battery in it and giving it back to my son.

One little thing though: do you suppose the Ubuntu people could quite naming their releases things like “Feisty Fawn” and “Gutsy Gibbon”?  It just sounds kind of Disney, like a character on one of their “video-only” kids’ movie releases.  Couldn’t they call it something cool like “Great White” or “Leopard”?  Oh wait, that one’s taken…

Posted by George on 04/28/08 at 09:38 PM
Geeky • Software • (3) Comments • Link

Monday Morning Music: SPIN

Some very funny stuff:

(Hat-tip to Greg Laden)

Posted by George on 04/28/08 at 06:11 AM
Reviews • music • (1) Comments • Link

Educational Contraband

image
Dana over at En Tequila Es Verdad picked up on something I said in the post about ‘A little thrill in learning’ and took off in a whole different, wonderful direction with it: Educational Contraband.  Go check it out, then think back to your favorite teachers: were they smugglers, most of them?  When you were with them, did you have the feeling you were being let in on a secret?

Posted by George on 04/26/08 at 01:42 PM
Education • (4) Comments • Link

Theory is practical
“Education would be much more effective if its purpose was to ensure that by the time they leave school every boy and girl should know how much they do not know, and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it.”

- Sir William Haley

I’ve always been interested in math education for the main reason that mine worked out so badly.  As a dyslexic child, I had a difficult time reading numbers (still do) and the first six grades seemed to consist almost exclusively of memorizing tables.  Until that was done, no logic! no problem solving for you!  But since it was almost impossible for me to memorize tables, I grew up believing I was “bad at math”. 

Fast-forward a number of decades.

DOF co-author Lucas, who has some serious math chops, told me he’d rather kids spend a lot of class time understanding one problem very deeply than ploughing through a whole page of the same kind of problems.  And yeah, that sounds right.  He translated that to science with ‘more time on theory than lab work’ and, hmm… I wasn’t sure about that.  Lab work is important, I thought.  Wouldn’t you get theory from lab work?  Well not necessarily…

Continued...

Posted by George on 04/26/08 at 01:23 PM
Education • (3) Comments • Link
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