Wave, particle, photon

Light is a puzzling thing, since it exhibits behaviors of a particle, and of a wave. David Morgan-Mar includes an interesting, understandable (that is, I understand what he's saying, though some of the finer points of the phenomenon escape me) discussion of this as part of his annotations on this strip: http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/1944.html

You may need to scroll down a bit.

Vignette: the cockpit

InIn the dim, swaying light of a single lantern Stephen saw someone looking at him with a mix of respect and anticipation. “This is Jamie, your loblolly boy, said Jack, (“though to be sure, she is loblolly girl, or even a woman,” thought Stephen) and this would be your station in combat.”
InJamie stepped aside and Stephen saw a group of wooden chests that had been lashed together into a low table. The room, and the chests, were painted a uniform red. “This would be the operating table, I take it. But is it not strangely dark and damp? Relatively speaking, that is – I mean no reflection upon your ship, upon my word.”
InThe Sophie, of course, was a sloop, not a ship, and though Jack might have excused its being taken for a brig (indeed, its general outline was very much that of a brig), his first impulse was to correct Stephen’s mislabeling of his command. “But,” he thought, “he is a guest, and he may not be used to the ways of the sea yet. And I hope that he will stay and agree to be our surgeon, which may not happen if I am constantly critical,” so instead he only said, “well, yes, we are under the waterline, you know. You’re much less likely to have a cannonball interrupt your work down here than if you were up above, and it will be a bit quieter, too.”
In “Is it very loud during a battle?”
In “Oh, yes, particularly when you’re right next to the guns. Even four-pounders like ours make a tremendous din when they are fired, and if we can get some long twelves, they make even more. I remember that after the Nile, a particularly furious fight, we all had to talk in a roar for days afterward. The guns had been so loud that it affected our hearing, do you see?” he added, when Stephen made no reply.
In “I believe I understand,” said Stephen. He had advanced into the room and was peering into its darker corners. “I don’t see any instruments here.”
In “No sir,” said the loblolly boy, speaking for the first time, “no sir, Mr Blankney, the former surgeon, he took his instruments with him and we have yet to receive a new set.”
In “Ah,” said Stephen.
In “The Sick and Hurt Board sends a chest aboard, or so I have heard.” Jack said. “Come, let us go up on deck again. I’ll show you the masts and rigging. Jamie, see that we get some instruments from the Sick and Hurt, or do you think that you’ll need Dr Maturin to accompany you?”
In “Begging pardon, sir, but I don’t know. I can check and let you know, if you would like.”
InJack nodded. “Yes, do that. Dr Maturin, after you. We’ll go up the ladder to your right.”

---

I'm not sure that the first paragraph works, whether it's clear enough that Stephen's thoughts regarding the loblolly boy run concurrent to Jacks speech. It might be too muddy. Thoughts?

Please alter course 20 degrees starboard

Partial transcript of an early 20th Century wireless (radio transmissions using Morse code) conversation between a battleship and an unknown vessel. The transmissions of the two vessels are similar, so I have made the battleship's transmissions boldface, for clarity:

Battleship: ...you are on a collision course. Alter your heading 20 degrees starboard.
Unknown Vessel: You are on a collision course. Alter your heading 20 degrees to starboard.
B: Repeat, you are on a collision course. Alter your course 20 degrees starboard.
UV: Please alter your course 25 degrees to starboard.
B: This is your last warning. Alter your course 20 degrees starboard. I am a battleship.
UV: This is your last warning. Please alter your course 30 degrees to starboard. I am a lighthouse.

Fragment

In“Stephen,” said Jack, “we can’t just pluck up the anchors and go, you know. The boiler fire is out, and the wind is dead on shore.”
In“The fire is out?”
In“Yes. The powder hoy is coming alongside, or will be any moment now, once she’s finished with Breisis.”
In“And its presence is connected with the putting out of the boiler’s fire, I collect?”
In“Of course; what a fellow you are, Stephen. The powder hoy would never come alongside otherwise – the slightest spark and we’d all be blown to kingdom come.”
In“Oh,” said Stephen, and then after a moment, “could the boats perhaps pull the ship out of the harbor, do you think?”
In“She’s a sloop, Stephen, not a ship. And besides, that would mean putting to sea with an empty magazine, or nearly empty. We used almost the last of our powder in escaping from that Frenchman. Not to mention all of the water we pumped away, which we still haven’t replaced, or not all of it. Yes,” he said to a knock at the door.
InThe door opened and Killick stepped in. “Gunner’s compliments and the powder hoy is alongside. Sir,” he added after a moment’s hesitation.
In“My compliments to Mr [Gunner] and beg he will carry on. Tell him no more than five barrels of the white grain; we may be going foreign. And as soon as the powder is safely stowed and the powder hoy is away the boiler should be lit.”
In“Compliments, no more than five barrels of white, light the boiler when safely stowed it is,” Killick replied, withdrawing and pulling the door closed behind him.
In“The water, which we’ve only replaced a little less than half of. Is there somewhere that you need to go? I might be able to send you in one of the cutters with Bonden.”

Photos? Why?

I attended graduation for several of my friends today, and I was struck by the number of photos that people were taking. For instance, before the graduates-to-be appeared, people busily took photos of the empty stage. Why? Do they really think that they're going to want to look at that photo in the future? "Oh, lets look at the pix from Jonathan's graduation. Ooh - look, it's the stage! Can I get an 8 x 10 of that? And maybe one for my wallet, too?" One person near me took so many pictures that she killed the battery on her camera before they even started to award the degrees.

A few might have been checking light levels, focus, etcetera, but don't try to tell me that all of them were.

Recycle

I can't decide if this photo is ironic or appropriate. Perhaps it's both.

I accidentally backed into and broke one of the recycling tubs, so I headed down the the DPW to get a new one. I was a bit puzzled as to what to do with the old one, but then I realized - recycle it!

[EDIT: It seems that I failed to consider the DPW workers, who decided that the broken bin wasn't intended to be recycled. They left it beside the other empty bins when they collected the recycling yesterday. I'm not sure what to do next. - 5/23/08]

I don't know about you, but I'm in favor of armed kangaroos

While developing VR helicopter flight training software, Australian techs included some kangaroos, they being a common sight in Australia. As they were using object-oriented programming, they did this by taking the object they had used for the other terrestrial creatures, which happened to be enemy soldiers. Unfortunately, since this was object-oriented programming, the kangaroos inherited all of the coding that underlay the basic enemy soldier: including the capability to fire back at the helicopters.

Urban legend states that the kangaroos fired stinger missiles at the helicopters. Snopes disagrees, stating that the glitch was discovered very early in the programming - so early that weapons had not been programmed in any further than firing the default profjectile: a large multicolored beach ball. My interpretation of this is that no pilot trainee was ever faced with a beach ball-wielding kangaroo, but I wouldn't be surprised if that was left in as an option that could be activated, if so desired.

Causes of disaster: problems of coordination

What follows is a portion of my (as yet unfinished) thesis:

Recent literature has focused on several aspects of disaster management. Bier (2006) proposed that a major cause of the debacles following hurricane Katrina was due to “problems of coordination … between multiple organizations and multiple levels of government” (emphasis in original). She goes on to say that these coordination problems arose from combinations of miscommunication and differences in assumptions regarding who was responsible for what. The systems involved in anticipating and reacting to a disaster on the magnitude of Katrina are many and complex, but a train vs school bus accident that occurred near Chicago, Illinois, provides a similar, albeit smaller example of a disaster caused or exacerbated by a failure of coordination between agencies, though individual agencies may have performed their own functions correctly.

On 25 October, 1995, a school bus approached a paired railroad crossing and traffic-light-controlled street intersection. In order to trigger a green light, the bus had to proceed over the tracks, to the short strip of pavement between the railroad tracks and the street intersection. The length of this strip of pavement was such that, although there were no other vehicles between the school bus and the intersection, the rear of the bus extended into the railroad right-of-way as the bus waited for a green light.

On the approach of an express train, a railroad sensor sent a signal to the railroad cross bucks, which flashed; and gates, which closed, striking the bus as they did so; and to the traffic light, prompting it to halt crossing vehicular traffic in preparation for giving the bus a green light. After the light turned green, but before the bus driver had a chance to react, the train struck the bus’s rear with enough force to rip the bus’s body from its chassis. Five children died. Several more were injured.

Several factors contributed to this collision. For one, the amount of warning (approximately 25 seconds, on the day of the collision) provided by the railroad to the traffic signals became lost in translation between the railroad and the traffic engineers; the traffic engineers believed that the time between their system’s receiving the ‘train approaching’ signal from the railroad and the arrival of the train was longer than it in fact was. This was exacerbated by accumulated changes in the layout of the associated streets, which decreased the distance between the roadway and the railroad crossing. Before these changes, a school bus could safely fit between the crossing and the intersection. After these changes, it could not. The programming of the street traffic signals also changed. These changes were not communicated to the bus company or the railroad. Changes were also made in the railroad’s signaling procedures, including the amount of warning provided by the ‘train approaching’ signal they provided to the traffic signal, but these changes were not communicated to the highway engineers. All of these changes and the lack of clear communication regarding them combined to place a stopped school bus on the tracks, and to give that bus inadequate time to clear the tracks before the arrival of an express train.

Prior to the accident, traffic engineers received several complaints that the traffic signals failed to give traffic adequate time to clear the railroad tracks before the arrival of a train at the crossing, though no collisions resulted. Each time, the engineers checked the functioning of their system by comparing it to its designated programming, and found that the traffic signal properly did what it had been programmed to do. Similar tests by the railroad indicated that the railroad’s circuitry and signaling functioned properly and did what they had been programmed to do. At no time prior to the morning of the accident* did anyone evaluate the system as a whole, or evaluate it in terms of meeting the ultimate need of clearing vehicular traffic, under all weather and traffic conditions, from the crossing in advance of a train’s arrival. Additional factors contributed to this collision, but the fact remains that poor coordination between highway and railroad engineers led to the deaths of five school children, and to the injury of several more.** {{124 National Transportation Safety Board 1996;}} When this type of poor coordination is multiplied by multiple additional agencies, the possibilities for missed opportunities in mitigation and response can only be expected to increase.
________________
* On the morning of the accident, a traffic engineer was observing the combined rail and street intersection, on the possibility that heavy rush hour traffic might elucidate a problem where previous investigations had not. During this observation, the engineer witnessed the collision. {{124 National Transportation Safety Board 1996;}}
** The crew and passengers of the involved train were uninjured. The bus driver suffered minor injuries. {{124 National Transportation Safety Board 1996;}}

2 x 4s, hamburgers, and driveways [draft]

A friend of mine recently observed that a 2 x 4 isn't actually two inches by four inches (it isn't two feet by four feet, either). The reasons for this, as I understand, is that lumber was originally measured by what came off the saw - in other words, wood was cut to a dimension of two inches by four inches, and that was your two by four - pretty straight forward. Problems arose, however, regarding the surface of the wood, which, having just been sawed, was rough and splintery. Customers started asking for the wood to be smoothed down, and the lumber yard was happy to oblige, but the smoothing process takes off some of the wood, leaving an ostensible 2 x 4 actually 1 & 1/2 inches by 3 & 1/2 inches.

But the point of this is that it got me thinking about language. Even though our wood may be 1 & 1/2 inches by 3 & 1/2 inches, we call it a 2 x 4, and if you ask a carpenter for a 2 x 4, she'll know what it is that you're looking for. As a society, we seem to have agreed that 2 x 4, in the context of lumber, does not refer to the actuality of the thing that it describes. It's kind of like the quarter-pounder hamburger whose weight was a quarter of a pound before cooking, but now weighs something other than a quarter of a pound (something less than a quarter pound, I imagine). And this isn't too far removed from the oft repeated "why do we park in driveways and drive on parkways." Words don't always mean what they mean; sometimes we agree that they mean something else.

If you're not confused yet, don't worry: things get worse.

If we take a step back, we realize that there is nothing inherent in the word two that indicates a whole number between one and three. Nor is there anything inherent in four, or 4, for that matter, that indicates a whole number between three and five. We can see this on one level if we recognize that 2 isn't two to all people. For those speaking Spanish, 2 is dos, while for those speaking German, 2 is (I think) zwei. All of these languages have 2 in common, but if we were to go to ancient Rome, the number between one and three would be II.

So the word or label that we apply to the concept of two is non-intrinsic. If we had all decided that two meant three, for instance, the world wouldn't be functionally different. All that matters is that we agree on a word's meaning, not what we agree that that word means.

Our 2 x 4 becomes increasingly removed from reality.

Because our use of 2 x 4 is an agreement to assign a meaning to the phrase 2 x 4, in the context of lumber, that differs from the generally agreed upon meaning of 2 x 4. We agree to consistently disagree with what we have all previously agreed upon, but only to do so in certain well-defined situations, viz lumber.

We can make this all even more complicated by observing that we make our agreement on the meaning of two by using terms that also lack inherent meaning, but which we have assigned an agreed meaning to. We ultimately have a house of cards built by M. C. Escher, in which each piece looks fine, but the totality is absurd; but I'll spare you that discussion.

[Edit (21 May 2008): yes, the 2nd to last paragraph is deliberately obscure]

13 Year Old Steals Dad's Credit Card to Buy Hookers

The hookers apparently got suspicious when they were asked to play HALO instead of engaging in their usual activities, but they agreed to it. Work is work.

As for the kid, the last sentence of the article explains the rest.

As reported on money.co.uk.

Something I wonder about Star Wars

If young Anakin is a poor slave, building a robot with parts that he's scavenged (and probably time that he's scavenged), then why is he building a protocol droid? Wouldn't it be more useful to him to have a robot that could do physical labor, to reduce the amount of work that he and his mother have to do? Or some sort of fighting robot, so he could gain freedom for his mother and himself?

If Star Wars was an RPG

Less than a week ago, I stumbled on Irregular Webcomic, a series of several occasionally intertwined comic strips done with Lego minifigures and figurines made by someone else for RPG purposes, whose subjects cover many of the things I was into as a teen (and in a closeted way, I suppose I still am into). The comic has published close to 2000 episodes, so it took me two or three days to get through them all, but that's because I had other things to do as well (e.g. work, clean out the cats' litter box). The comics also include humor at a variety of levels, some of it based on misunderstanding, some of it meta, some of it involving early 21st century physics - basically, marvelous stuff for geeks such as myself and several of my friends, and in cases where an understanding of science is necessary, there's often an explanation given below the strip for the uninitiated. Check it out for yourselves.

The gentleman behind Irregular Webcomic, however, is also involved with Darths & Droids, a reimagination of Star Wars as an RPG. [Ed: those ignorant of RPGs may stop reading here.] Ah, yes, you think, another RPG set in the Star Wars universe. But no, not exactly. This comic imagines that there is no such thing as Star Wars, that Jedi Knights and the Force are character classes and phenomena dreamed up by the GM, and regarding which the players have no clue ("It's a type of Monk named after a cheese. Lawful Good, unfortunately.") and part of what is so marvelous about this version of events is that it allows the writers and readers to ponder over and poke fun at some of the peculiar decisions made in writing those six films. Or, one film, so far, as they're only about as far as the beginning of the pod race in Phantom Menace. So, check them out, to.

If Darth Vader is from a long time ago...

... does that me that he ran on vacuum tubes?

In the same vein, what happens when he crashes?

Captain Piet: Beg pardon, My Lord, but Lord Vader has crashed again.
Grand Moff Tarkin: Just give him the three-fingered salute for me, will you?

It's not easy to eat a Daddy Long Legs

Shadow found a Daddy Long Legs today, but though she was able to catch it easily, she had a very difficult time eating it. It's legs kept getting caught in her whiskers, and when she looked up at me the spider was siting on her muzzle, straddling her nose and mouth. I wish I'd had a camera; it was very funny.

One more thing about Davenport's flood management strategy

In my previous entry on Davenport, Ohio's flood management strategy, I forgot to mention one major point: by not erecting floodwalls and levees to protect their city, they avoid the false sense of security that those walls provide. New Orleans may be the most obvious example of why that sense of security is false, but it is by no means the only one.

* earlier this year, a levee failed in Fernley, Nevada, forcing 3500 to evacuate.
* The North Sea Flood of 1953 claimed hundreds of lives in Great Britain and several European countries.
* Several levees failed during the (United States) Midwest floods of 1993. (link is to an abstract of a research article regarding those levee failures.)
* In May of 2007, Pueblo, Colorado suffered a flood that involved failure of an informal levee. (pdf)
* ...

Friendship is a one-way street

I lived in Providence for several years, but somehow never got around to taking a photo of this. So, I had to get this one from http://datajanitor.blogspot.com/2007/05/friendship-is-one-way-street.html

Why I'm happy about Davenport's flood

Davenport, Iowa, has flooded several times in the past, and it is flooded again as I write this. Davenport is not noteworthy in this, as many of the communities along the Mississippi river are facing floods, but it is noteworthy in being the largest city on the Mississippi river that is without major flood defenses. Instead, Davenport has strategically managed its floodplains, placing less vulnerable properties there, such as parking lots and parkland. Isolated properties on the plain have their own flood walls to keep water out, but these aren't designed to force the river to stay within its banks; floodwaters flow around these islands of dry space. Residences and businesses are not located in the floodplain at all, and therefor don't need to be protected by permanent levees. The city doesn't escape flooding entirely unscathed, but the costs of cleaning up parking lots and parks every seven or eight years are far less than those of paying every year to maintain a system of dikes and levees.

Consider photos at http://quadcityimages.blogspot.com/2008/04/2008-flood-update-monday-afternoon.html

What makes me happy about all of this is that the strategy is working, and other flood-prone communities may take notice of Davenport's success and alter their own flood management strategies. Mother Nature always wins; work with her, not against her.

Also, the bridge is out ahead