Category: Geek stuff

If it involves physics, math, computer science, electronics or has general geek cachet, this is the place for it.

f = m * a

In a conversation at the end of Sunday’s walk, we realized just how much energy is actually involved in such a trek. Our vertical ascent was about 1100m, spread between climbing Yoke and following the ridge of the Kentmere Horseshoe. That is about 75kg of me personally, plus a pack. Imagine me falling from 1100m up, and you begin to appreciate the gravitational potential energy built up through the (not entirely efficient) expenditure of chemical energy. We also traveled more than 20km, as the crow flies. Then, there is the fact that we had to absorb all the energy from all the descents into our muscles and dissipate it. Add in the energy required to keep us warm, balanced, and thinking, and you are racking up a good number of calories.

It’s amazing how far some dry cereal, two sandwiches, a couple of chocolate bars, and ones various short and long-term energy stores can go. The fact that I didn’t feel unusually hungry at any point during the weekend suggests that those stores were not seriously depleted.

As you may guess, this weekend included a lot of interesting discussion about physics, biochemistry, and physiology. We also learned a good bit about sheep.

Map fusion

Annoyed that whichever mapping / aerial photography site you prefer doesn’t have a particular area in detail? Flash Earth may be helpful. The site compiles data from a number of mapping providers, including Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google. Switching between them is as simple as clicking a name in the list that hovers on the left-hand side of the page.

It also makes it easier to find the latitude and longitude of a place than any of the competing services do. Wadham College is 51˚ 45′ 21.0 ” N and 1˚ 15′ 15.8″ W. Our flat in Church Walk is 52.2″ N, 48.5″ W. My favourite Japanese restaurant is at 49˚ 17′ 18.8″ N and 123˚ 7′ 50.1″ W.

This ability to seamlessly and usefully combine data from multiple sources is one reason why open access to information can be so valuable.

Now at eye level

Google Maps has added street level views. Check out Times Square or the Golden Gate Bridge. People in major American cities may now switch from looking at their roofs from space to looking at an archived image of their front door from across the street.

For a general collection of interesting things that have been spotted using Google Earth and Google Maps, see Google Sightseeing.

Document metadata

It remains somewhat amazing to me that governments and major international institutions so frequently forget what it means to distribute documents in Word format. In particular, people are surprisingly ignorant of how Word tracks changes: making documents into a palimpsest of revisions, not all of which you want the outside world to see. You don’t want the comment about how pointless one of the ‘key items’ in your ‘corporate vision’ is making it into the file that gets passed to the New York Times. Even the early copy of the Summary for Policymakers of the 4th Assessment Report of the IPCC that I have includes a few notes about edits that still need to be done.

Hopefully, closed standards like Word documents will fall by the wayside during the next decade or so. It is insane to be distributing so much information in a proprietary format for no good reason (just one more manifestation of monopolistic dominance). Hopefully, whichever open document format eventually comes to be standard will have better means for assessing and controlling what information you are inadvertantly embedding in your press releases, reports, spreadsheets, etc. Until then, lax security is likely to keep offering some interesting glances into the drafting processes of such publicized documents.

PS. One other thing to remember is that the standard jpg images produced by Adobe Photoshop include thumbnail files that are not edited when you change the image. As such, a face blurred out of the large version may still be recognizable in the embedded thumbnail version. The same goes for areas that may have been cropped from the image entirely. I am sure Cat Schwartz isn’t the only person who has suffered public embarassment because of this. No doubt, many other pieces of software include such counter intuitive and potentially problematic behaviours.

Non-metaphorical icebreaking

A couple of interesting random facts that I came across today, about the ferries that operate in the Baltic, including between Tallinn and Helsinki:

  1. Many of these ships have an ice class of 1A Super, which means they can travel through sea lanes where the ice is one metre thick, provided they have an icebreaker out front to break it up a bit.
  2. At least some of these ships (belonging to the Finnish shipping company Eckerö Line) were specifically made NATO-compatible, so that they could be rapidly converted into troop carriers in the result of the Cold War becoming hot.

The details of icebreaker design are quite interesting, though I suspect that building them will not be a growth business in the decades to come. Of course, if the northern polar region melted enough for icebreaking routes to be profitable forms of shipping, that might prove to be untrue for a certain period of time.

Quicktime movies from iPhoto

Here is a useful iPhoto trick that Mac users may not already know: if you select a batch of photos, then select “Share > Export” you can create a QuickTime movie. You can have each image show for whatever length of time you like, set the size of the movie generated (in pixels) and add music. You can do this by simply selecting a collection of images in the library, by selecting an album, or by selecting a slide show. If you want to add music, you need to do the last of those.

Exported Quicktime movies seem like a pretty good option for sending photos of a trip or party to people who request them. The file sizes are very manageable, the image quality is decent, and it is easier than mucking around with sending dozens of individual files.

Here is a random example. It consists of some graffiti from Paris, Vancouver, Helsinki, Dublin, Tallinn, and Oxford. One annoying quirk is how adding music massively increases the file size. The same collection of images with an mp3 playing in the background produced a file of over 65 megabytes.

After iPhoto?

I have always found the slide show system in iPhoto a bit awkward, largely because of how you cannot drag images out from it into other applications, as you can with normal albums. That means if you want to edit one of those images in Photoshop, you need to track down the original in your library or an album.

If I ever do get a dSLR, I will probably need to switch to something more robust for storing image files. Even working with the jpeg files from my 3.2 megapixel camera, it gets cranky when too many are being worked with at once. That is with 1.25 gigabytes of RAM, drop shadows off, thumbnails at one of the three default sizes, and a minimum of other programs running. One can only imagine how it will treat 10 megapixel RAW files.

Another problem with iPhoto is that it doesn’t offer many options for having different versions of the same file. At the very minimum, I want to retain the original jpeg at maximum resolution and then have a 1024×768 pixel version that has had the contrast and levels adjusted an appropriate unsharp mask applied. Being able to store additional versions would be an advantage, especially if they are intelligently linked to the original. I don’t want it to be confusing which is which: a situation largely unavoidable in iPhoto, unless you want to look at the image properties for every file you glance at.

Interesting gear

Wadham College espresso machine

People with a fascination for gear should have a look at Cool Tools. The sort of people who make a point of reading through the MEC catalog are likely to enjoy this site. Some of the pieces of gear look highly useful. For those unlikely to lose it, a windproof umbrella might be a worthwhile investment. Some of the kitchen gadgets are decidedly strange, or serve very rare and limited purposes. For creative sorts, there is a kit for those who want to assemble their own dulcimer. Damsels with dulcimers cannot be guaranteed “a sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice”, but they can be offered tools to help in building their own igloo.

Some of this may end up on my gear wish list.

A more aggressive collection of useful gadgets is described at Kit Up. While much of it is specifically military, some of it is appropriate for hiking and camping as well.

PS. This metal pencil is also quite cool. It uses some kind of metal alloy that writes on paper in a way that looks like pencil, yet cannot be rubbed out. For years, I have wanted some neodymium magnets to play with.

Temperature and civilization

Green College tower

While in high school, Sid Meier‘s Civilization II was a time waster of choice. The prospect of directing human civilization for 6,000 years has an understandable appeal. By the time I was at UBC, Civilization III had eclipsed its predecessor. I once spent more than thirty consecutive hours playing it; at the end, I lost a massive thermonuclear war with Mahatma Gandhi. These games satisfy a number of driving human ambitions: from virtual immortality to the ability to be in control of human progress to the chance to decimate one’s enemies with precisely planned joint warfare operations.

I haven’t played any Civilization games since arriving in Oxford, but an aspect of our present situation has reminded me of it. One important technology for moving into the modern era in the game was refrigeration. As of now, our flat is deprived of this technology. Given how fruitlessly and noisily the compressor on our fridge seems to operate, I suspect that the coolant has escaped. Hopefully, it wasn’t comprised of ozone-depleting CFCs.

[Update: 21 May 2007] Because the compressor was running pointlessly, we chose to turn it off. Unfortunately, a member of the St. Antony’s maintenance team came by this morning to investigate our fridge complaint. Rather than knocking or waking anybody up, it seems he just came in and turned on the (useless) compressor, probably muttering to himself about what fools we were to complain of a broken fridge when it was only actually turned off.

I guess we will need to leave it on, eating up power and whining pathetically, until the college dispatches another of their stealth repair operatives.

In a different light

Blue berries

Every once in a while, the Natural History Museum and Pitt Rivers Museum hold an event in the evening. The main area of the Natural History Museum gets nicely illuminated and you get the chance to explore the Pitt Rivers Museum with a torch. That’s the British term for a flashlight, alas. There will be no carrying around pitch-soaked bundles on sticks. That would suit the mood of the Pitt Rivers, but would unacceptably endanger the artifacts. These two museums are certainly the most interesting ones in Oxford, and quite essential for all students to see before they leave.

Even so, such events are well worth attending. Last time, there was an elaborate shadow puppet show. The next one is happening on Saturday May 19th. It runs from 8:00pm to 11:00pm. My account of the previous event can be found here.