Jeweled Battleshorts

Troubling news here at the only blog with an Irish Pikachu category.

The heavily-anticipated Super Smash Bros. Brawl is out in the United States, but apparently without our beloved Hibernian Hero! [ Gamespot forums post | entry on disturbingly-named blog ]

This proud member of the diaspora cannot recall a comparable disappointment since the tragic failure of the Easter Rebellion in 1916, and I have read two whole books on Irish history!

I for one am holding out hope that Pikachu’s leprechaun hat is tucked away hidden inside the game somewhere, waiting to be unlocked by the right combination of moves (perhaps right then left then 70 consecutive Peach/Wario match-ups.)

A sad development indeed with St. Patrick’s Day just a few days off.

This year’s IFComp winner, Lost Pig is some of the best interactive fiction I’ve played in a while. Here’s the opener:

Pig lost! Boss say that it Grunk fault. Say Grunk forget about closing gate. Maybe boss right. Grunk not remember forgetting, but maybe Grunk just forget. Boss say Grunk go find pig, bring it back. Him say, if Grunk not bring back pig, not bring back Grunk either. Grunk like working at pig farm, so now Grunk need find pig.

The invention of a successful new machine takes hard work and brains. It usually also requires lots of capital. This typically comes from investors whose involvement is predicated on the expectation that they will be able to exploit the machine exclusively for a period of time. Easier said than done!

I’ve been reading a book about experimentation with steamboats in the early United States. It’s pretty dismal stuff, and kind of a nice counterweight to all the upbeat inventor success stories I have read before. Historical Biography selects for winners, but sadly, history itself is replete with losers.

Apparently, a federal patent office overwhelmed to the point of dysfunction isn’t unique to our era. Patent Office troubles plagued the inaugural generation of American steamboat experimenters. Without them, a successful steamboat might have been achieved earlier, and we might have stood on stronger commercial footing in our ensuing conflict with Great Britain.

It seems to me that those of us in consumer software development should be glad that compilation to byte or machine code provides our work with some degree of protection outside the expense of a formal patent. But we still have to worry about somebody else obtaining one on flimsy grounds and coming along to clobber us. I’m not sure that I’m against all software patents, but a lot of them sure seem to have been granted for ideas that I don’t consider novel.

Josh has a new article up about “spacediving”. The enormous speeds we ordinarily associate with atmospheric re-entry result from de-orbiting. If you just go straight up and straight down, re-entry speeds are reduced to the point where spacediving ceases to be impossible and becomes merely gonzo-stupid.

Proceeding from this premise, the beryllium heat shield on Alan Shepherd’s Freedom 7 Mercury Spaceship must have been fairly over-designed. Freedom 7’s non-orbital, ballistic trajectory reached a top altitude of 187 kilometers (116.5 miles). If you dropped an anvil from this height through a vacuum, it would hit the ground at about 1,755 meters per second (5,758 feet per second.) Of course, in Earth’s atmosphere the anvil would reach terminal velocity before achieving this speed.

15 minutes and 22 seconds after blast-off, Freedom 7 splashed down 486 kilometers (302 miles) from its launch pad. That corresponds to an average Eastward velocity in the same ballpack as our idealized anvil — about 527 meters per second (1,730 miles per second.)

Cringely has a surprising article this week about the use of giant kites to harvest electricity from the wind. The hardest part of flying a kite is launching it, and I’m a little hazy on how they plan to get these monsters off the ground, where the windspeed is modest. But the proponents think they can generate electricity for the game-changing price of 0.5 cents a kilowatt hour. Forget windmills, this price beats coal. Reportedly, the Google People are involved, which suggests this is science fiction rather than fantasy.

It’s gratifying to see somebody draft aerospace engineering to fight global warming. I’m reading an interesting book, Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility, which suggests that efforts to reduce global poverty can also help combat global warming. The conventional wisdom says that economic progress will result in more industry and therefore more pollution. The authors of Break Through argue convincingly that nations must escape poverty before they feel secure enough to focus on environmental issues and expend the kind of resources necessary to really secure rain forests and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The authors advocate a new Apollo project (again with the aerospace engineering!) to jumpstart large-scale clean technologies that we can share with them and, of course, use ourselves.

I’ll keep riding my bike to work, but this is good stuff.

Josh Bell from the old neighborhood has written an interesting article about Ride-Sharing over Facebook.

Time to start yet another social-networking account?

I now commute by bicycle, partly because it’s fun, but primarily to limit my greenhouse gas emissions.

I’ve only recently started thinking about the fact that I always change out of lanes when I can’t keep pace with the prevailing speed of traffic. However, if I see a red light or a stopped car ahead, I typically have continued on in that lane with the understanding that I’m not reducing overall traffic throughput.

Unfortunately, this seems to preoccupy many automobile drivers behind me. They apparently cannot bear to be going any slower than physically possible. They will often elect to switch out of their lane (or switch partially out of their lane), speed up, pass me, switch back, and then slam their breaks on when they realize they are about to smash into the right side of a garbage truck.

I presume that they didn’t notice anything beyond my bicycle intruding on their fundamental human right to (briefly) change their position with respect to the positions of other objects at a large rate.

Aside from being dangerous, these irrational drivers are wasting fuel. So from now on, I resolve to switch out of my lane if I can’t keep pace with the car behind me, regardless of overall traffic throughput.

I am intrigued by all these little, split-second decisions our minds make, often without conscious direction. For example, I have gotten really good at catching fumbled objects. I marvel at it because I know how hard it would be to teach a computer the same trick.

Earlier this year, I read Jeff Hawkins’s interesting book On Intelligence. Hawkins believes that the ability to recognize patterns and sudden departures from them is central to intelligent action. He goes into great detail describing the sophistication of sensory perception. Hawkins further believes that our minds accomplish this through the application of an as-yet undiscovered, high-level, invariant mechanism.

What if Hawkins is right about the centrality of patterns, but not about the mechanism? What if intelligence is little more than the ruthless application of a zillion simple edge-detection and flood-fill algorithms?

Perhaps I will start treating Photoshop with a little more respect.

A muppet, a wiki, and a B-52 member all intersect at one single web page. Truly the highest and best use of the Internet.

I was finally able to participate in Bike to Work Day this year.

There were a respectable number of bikes on the road, a few of which were operated by old folks who appeared to be in better shape than I am in.

As expected, there were also inconsiderate and clueless automobile drivers. And for some reason, Georgetown seems to be their Mecca. One behaved as though my bike and I were invisible, changing into my lane and forcing me to get out of the way to avoid an accident. On the way home, I was parked in the right lane at a stop light when a taxi cab driver behind me, in apparent frustration that I occupy volume, started honking.

But I received my free bagel and T-shirt. I self-actualated. It was a good time. Outpacing cars and trucks on a bicycle is always exhilirating.

So how many of us will be biking to work Monday?

If you look at commuting time, biking is by far my fastest route to work. The important factor isn’t the distance between my home and my office, but between my office and the gym. In my case, it’s about four city blocks. A little on the long side, but doable. I’d need to get better at getting ready quickly in a locker room environment, where I have to observe time-consuming protocols that aren’t necessary at home. It’s sort of like elevator-etiquette, but naked.

Since I’m currently commuting by subway and not by automobile, I suspect that the benefit to the environment of switching would be modest. I guess if enough riders made the change, it would relieve crowding and might make the subway more attractive (or less unattractive) to automobile commuters. Of course, extra trains and better schedule-keeping would accomplish that, too.

If nothing more, Bike to Work Day is valuable because it promotes dialogue, and reminds us that that we have alternatives.

I’m finally caught up on sleep from the Desktop Matters conference and subsequent hiking trip to Zion last weekend. Both were great!

Some thoughts:

• With the new Apps Framework, progress on the Binding JSR, and some great RAD tools, desktop Java has become a serious contender. If they can nail the deployment problem, look out!
• The real night sky makes the city sky seem like one viewed from some other planet.
• When clinging for dear life to a chain along a steep, narrow ridge, gloves are helpful.

This year, I outfitted my Festivus Pole with an ornaments rig.

If you didn’t watch TV in the Nineties and don’t read the Style Section, Festivus was created by American Philanthropist and Inventor, Frank Costanza, as a less commercialized alternative to more familiar and incompletely-secularized winter holidays.

As a convert from one of those holidays, I had a lot of cool ornaments lying around, but no tree to put them on. Would it be against the rules to put them on the Festivus Pole? According to Costanza:

instead, there’s a pole. It requires no decoration. I find tinsel distracting. [emphasis mine]

So decoration wasn’t required, but it wasn’t forbidden, either - as long as I avoided the “distraction” of tinsel.

The next problem was how to hang ornament hooks on a thin, Aluminum cylinder.

Many Festivus observers favor heavy, solid poles. My own is a light, segmented, telescopic pole from Home Depot. These are typically attached to specially-made clippers, cybernetic claws, etc. Because the top segment collapses into the bottom one, my pole is not uniformly cylindrical, which enabled me to suspend a chicken wire sinusoid from the joint.

This design, inspired by the work of George Hakkio, has three attractive features:

1. the appropriately inexpensive, even shabby aspect of the chicken wire
2. gobs of usable surface area
3. the entire rig can pivot to be viewed at any angle

Here are the results.

Note my great-grandmother Mary Kathryn Moir’s hand-made angels, kitten, sled, boots, clowns and elephant, as well as the traditional California Sea Otter (from Shani’s trip to Sea Otter Shirts in Monterey) at the rig zenith.

The base is a display box the folks at Home Depot let me have. The pole’s bottom fits snuggly into a (hidden) slot.

After covering the top with a sock to protect my ceiling, I extended the pole out and locked it at a length ever so slightly higher than my living room. Then, I wedged it in vertically.

Happy Festivus, everyone!