cww.blog!

I'm writing this from a warm couch, about 50 meters from the frigid waters of the Atlantic Ocean that roil across the street and beyond the beach. After a snowy and delayed departure from Pittsburgh and a half-sprint across the overly warm airport in Philly, I arrived in Manchester, New Hampshire, to be greeted by my uncle and to find my checked bag indeed also made the quick trip through the City of Brotherly Love. Several hours later, we've eaten dinner, chatted, and are cozy with kitties.

I'll be here on Plum Island for a quick four days, punctuated briefly by a trip to Boston to do a Harvard beer and robots run and to see my sister (and, hopefully, bring her up to the island for a couple days).

For now, I think I'll have a Smuttynose.

Posted by cww at 09:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Several days ago, Andrew inquired about the music I have on my iPod. This reminds me a little of when I took an inventory of the contents of my freezer. If you look closely at that the comments for that entry, you'll see I was berated by my mother for introducing Helen to Bombay Sapphire gin. Ah, well.

So, here you have it... a list of some of the particularly good artists in my new iPod Nano.

• Stéphane Pompougnac
• Fluke
• Guster
• Jethro Tull
• Juno Reactor
• KMFDM
• Laika
• The Crystal Method
• Thievery Corporation
• Venus Hum
• Zero 7

Mostly, I tend toward dark and groovy music like Fluke and Juno Reactor, but as you can see, it's also punctuated by some of the fantastic, older stuff like Jethro Tull. Aqualung is one of my favorite Jethro songs, but every time I try to get a guitarist at a bar to play it, they decline and say they don't know it. It's a pity, really.

I'm afraid this list might be a little disappointing to Andrew, since I don't have any 2 Live Crew or Right Said Fred. However, I don't like that music. Those "I'm too sexy for my hat" lyrics were novel, oh, the first 60 times I heard the song in 1992, but that's really not what I want to hear when I'm waiting to board my flight or trying to do some work.

As far as the 1990s go, I can only think of one popular song I still enjoy hearing. That's Scatman, by Scatman John. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you should definitely check out the music video (incidentally, it's recorded from MTV, back in the lost history of when they actually played music videos) over at YouTube. Wikipedia also has a pretty cool article about the Scatman.

Posted by cww at 12:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

The feline eye has a very similar structure to that of the human eye, which has allowed researchers to experiment with bionic implants on cats with failing sight. The blindness is probably a condition induced in the laboratory, but my opinions on that are more appropriate for a night at the pub, not a blog entry. Regardless, the bionic eyes use an array of 5,000 microphotodiodes (which should give about an image with pixel dimensions of about 70x70) to provide the cat with an image it would not otherwise be able to see. This seems like a really cool application of microtechnology, and it will be very interesting to see what happens to the future of this device.

Stock photo courtesy absenseNow, let's take this idea and extend it a little further. A tiny, fancy camera in your eye could do a lot of things, after all.

First, let's improve the number of photodiodes we can put on the surface of the chip to, say, 1,000,000. That gives us a 1 mega-pixel image. What can you do with an image in the mega-pixel regime? Well, you can zoom into it, for one thing, and that would give the user the ability to see things really far away. You can also filter out natural light and view only the infrared part of the spectrum picked up by the photodiodes, which would give the user the ability to sense heat. What about using terahertz photodiodes in addition to visible light photodiodes? Then, the user could see through walls! Well, they would have to be thin walls, but they would be walls just the same. All this, without even changing the basic idea behind the device.

The military currently uses nifty but bulky binoculars to provide these functions to its troops, so wouldn't it be a vast improvement if they could just implant the binoculars into the troops' eyes? Well, that's where I see this going, and I think that's pretty neat.

Posted by cww at 08:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I'll soon start a little bouncing across the country, as I go to Massachusetts to hang out with the family and then to Missouri to do some consulting work. The flight plan takes me to Philadelphia, Manchester (New Hampshire), Boston, Pittsburgh again (where I get to sleep in my own bed for a night), Chicago, Springfield (Missouri), back to Chicago, and then back to Pittsburgh. Six different airports in seven days? I've had worse.

One of my Christmas gifts was an iPod Nano, of which I make extensive use currently and which will certainly prove to be incredibly convenient to have during my bouncing. A little music and a good book go a long way toward making a flight seem shorter, as I found out on my most recent Houston-to-Pittsburgh flight. There's nothing like an enjoyable tune to make the time pass.

Are any of you planning any winter getaways? I know Andrew could use a trip to Tokyo...

Posted by cww at 05:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I had dinner with an old friend, Boris, last night, and his assessment of my future in academia echoed an opinion I've heard countless times: "You'll be the crazy professor."

I think being the crazy professor is a pretty cool idea, and I imagine something like that would happen based on my views, standards, and so forth... but, why is it that people think of me as a professor, and suddenly, the word "crazy" pops into their heads? I'm not exactly a lunatic, after all, and most of the things I do are relatively down-to-earth. Perhaps your run-of-the-mill professor wouldn't show up to class with bright purple streaks in his hair or what-have-you, but maybe that's the difference between crazy and normal? Maybe the difference has more to do with my ridiculously broad range of interests? I'm not really sure.

If any of you happen to have an opinion on this, I'd love to hear or read it.

One other thing Boris mentioned was pretty interesting. In his robotics work, he occasionally comes across people who are capable of doing tons of different things on a project, like computer programming and control systems and sensing and on and on, and it often turns out that regardless of what subjects they studied for their advanced degrees, they did their undergraduate work in physics. It seems physics, when taught places other than where I did my undergraduate work in it, actually covers a very broad range of topics, and this becomes incredibly useful when dealing with the applied sciences later in one's career.

Now, I hate to cut this entry short because I rather enjoy writing about academic things, but it's after 8:00 AM now, and I haven't been to sleep yet. So, good night.

Posted by cww at 07:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Per the separate recommendations of Tamara and a guy at Katy's new years party, I started watching Firefly yesterday evening. The pilot was an hour and a half long, and it looks like I'm in for an exciting ride.

Firefly seems to be set in the not-too-far-away future, where space ships still use fossil fuel combustion for propulsion and the common space port is a dodgy affair. The environment is created in the style of a futuristic western, combining outlaw heroism, horses, twangy guitar music, and even the odd piece of ambulatory poultry.

In many ways, it reminds me of Farscape, in that the protagonist crew is an assortment of renegades with dubious histories and conflicting objectives, and everyone seems to have a flair for getting into trouble.

The series was cut by Fox after the first eleven episodes, so I guess that's all I get to watch, but so far, I'm looking forward to it!

Posted by cww at 05:19 AM | Permalink

The United States Department of Transportation has a sub-department called the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, which presumably hires a bunch of statistician/actuary types and feeds them giant spreadsheets of travel data. The employees then go blind and insane after staring at only the numbers zero through nine for eight hours every day. But, before they go blind and insane, the data are converted into semi-human-readable statistics which can tell the public rather a lot about, for example, what's happening on the ground and in the air when it comes to airlines.

They have a web application that can retrieve analyses of airline delays, and the things it displays are potentially very interesting to those of us who travel often.

Here is a table I whipped up quickly that compares the delay times among the airlines I frequently fly for the 2006 January 1 to 2006 April 1 time frame. You'll notice American, every Dallas-ite's favorite airline (one of mine, too), takes the cake when it comes to delays. US Airways, which I fly between Pittsburgh and Boston, has the most favorable rating.

Another interesting statistic I found when compiling this table is that every airline in the list had more than 20% of its flights delayed during that period, except for US Airways, which had only 17.39% of its flights delayed. My experience with US Airways, when I compared it to other airlines, has always been very good, and I guess it's not just me — the numbers back me up.

Posted by cww at 03:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

It's official. According to the Carnegie Mellon University Student Information Online web application, my current student status is graduated. So, I now hold a masters degree from the #3 ranked graduate department (up one from last year!) in computer engineering.

Now, to see about this Ph.D... my applications are all complete, and I am looking forward to reading the glowing letters of acceptance and offers of large sums of money that come my way in March and April. Haha!

In other news, my cold is basically gone, and I can breathe normally now, with the exception of the odd trip to the Kleenex box.

Also, Katy and I have watched most of the first season of House on DVD over the past several days, and we absolutely looooove it. If you haven't seen it, and you're even remotely interested in intellectual banter or diagnostic medicine, this is your chance to show the world that you are fully capable of watching a really cool television show! Oh, and you'll be able to tell all your friends about interesting ways of determining whether someone's husband is cheating on them, which I guess has its perks.

As for everything else, I'm being pretty boring these days... basically, I'm trying to find something to do for the next seven months. My search will probably take me to the "input your resume" part of Monster.com tomorrow, after which I will browse a million jobs in which I'm grossly uninterested or for which I'm ridiculously overqualified, and then I'll get dismayed and wonder whether I'd be better off trying to make a quick buck just selling useless things on eBay from the comfort of my study at home? But, I digress. I'll keep you posted.

Posted by cww at 03:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Another year, another 365 days of not knowing what the future has in store.

As I was at the end of October, I'm currently sick. Cough, congestion, obnoxious nasal voice, you name it, and my doctor will hear about it later this week. I imagine Katy is also getting sick, since we got back together over our Christmas holiday in Houston, and we've been spending a fair amount of time together in Pittsburgh since then. She has to teach at Pitt tomorrow morning, bright and early, so it has been a relatively short reunion for us. Regardless, we're in it for the long run now, and we're both exceedingly happy about it.

Now, I need to go find some decongestant... happy new year!

Posted by cww at 09:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)