I've Had Better Days

My grandfather was the quintessential engineer.  He was also a professor, and his daily wardrobe - without fail - consisted of a white dress shirt, sporting a pocket protector, and a pocket full of writing implements.  I've followed in his footsteps so far as pursuing the engineering profession, and I regularly carry a pen or two in my shirt pocket, but I've never gone so far as to get myself a pocket protector.  Today gave me pause when this happened:

I've been a practicing engineer for 11 years now, and it's safe to say that for every day I've gone to work wearing a shirt with a pocket I've had a pen in that pocket.  So that's at least 2,200 opportunities for a catastrophe like this to happen.  I guess I should feel fortunate that I've come so far without a mishap.  And I do.

But why couldn't I have been wearing a shirt that I don't like?  Maybe it's time to follow in grandpa's other footsteps.

The Ninjas

I love these lyrics:

The ninjas are deadly and silent

They're also unspeakably violent

The speak Japanese, they do whatever they please

And sometimes they vacation in Ireland

If you haven't heard Barenaked Ladies sing this song then do yourself a favor and click here.

Asparagus Fries

Tonight was leftover night.  By happy accident we stumbled upon a new treat: Asparagus Fries!

This was the creative process:

• Wash asparagus
• Break off root end
• Lay in single layer on baking sheet
• Bake 15 minutes at 350 degrees
• Enjoy some portion of asparagus
• Put remaining portion in refrigerator for 3 days
• Remove asparagus from refrigerator
• Lay in single layer on baking sheet
• Bake 10 minutes at 350 degrees

Voila!  Asparagus Fries!  They're crispy, with a nutty flavor, and yet they're asparagus too.  Super tasty.

Bon Appetit!

Dear Facebook

To whom it may concern,

I understand, based on yesterday's news of your acquisition of Instagram, that you are in desperate need of a new VP of Merger's and Acquisitions over there.  Clearly somebody is allowing you to pay way too much for your newly acquired businesses, and I'd be glad to step in and put a stop to this nonsense.

Let's have a look at what you overpaid for Instagram.  By the numbers:

• 1 office
• 12 employees
• 30 million members

Here's what I'd offer:

• $500,000 for capital assets
• $500,000 per employee (roughly four times their average annual salary, I'm guessing)
• 12 x $500,000 = $6,000,000
• $671,000,000 for the members
• This assumes advertising revenue of $0.15 per week for 20% of the members over 20 years, accounting for inflation

Total Cost: $677.5M

For a total savings of: $322.5M!

You're welcome.  But before you let the old VP go, please have him set my new salary.

Sincerely,
David Sevy
Aspiring Facebook Executive

Daylight Savings

We're now a few weeks past daylight savings, although my VCR (purchased in 2000) thinks it was a more recent event.  I manually reset the time when we "sprang forward" on March 11th.  Over the past weekend it re-adjusted itself, so that it's now an hour ahead of where it's supposed to be.  Thanks technology!

I hear a lot about daylight savings every time it rolls around.  Around our house there is no love lost on having to roll the clocks forward and backward, or throwing off the kids' schedules.  Fortunately springtime is not the worse of the two time changes, since it effectively gets the kids to wake up later.  Fall is the real problem, when all of the sudden the early risers are up way too early.

I've heard the whole phenomenon attributed to Ben Franklin, although this year I read that he didn't actually advocate a changing of clocks.  His idea was more along the lines of ringing church bells to get people up earlier when the sun rose earlier.  That sort of communal, forced wake up is probably not ideal either, but more and more I look at Arizona (which doesn't observe DST, for those not in the know) and I think they may actually be on to something.

In this day and age it's difficult to believe that time-shifting is really doing much to save energy.  It's definitely no longer necessary to rise early to get all your work done for the day, unless you're actually a farmer.  For the rest of us we have the miracle of electric lighting, which I'm sure most of us use throughout the day regardless of the sun's position outside.

Consider the power consumed in your home, and I think you'll find that the energy going into lighting is a fraction of the total consumption.  Appliances run all hours of the day, and don't get less use because the clocks change.  Heating and cooling systems run according to timers and thermostats.  There may be some efficiency from having higher or lower settings in "off" (sleeping) hours, but not much.  Comparatively, lights are a miniscule power draw.

It's time for a change!  The next candidate for state legislature that runs on a platform of Daylight Wastings will definitely be getting my vote.

Lego Fallingwater

The Lego Architecture series has intrigued me since it first appeared, and this past Christmas I received a set of my own.  I thought it'd be fun to document the build process brick-by-brick.  A YouTube search revealed that my idea was not original by any means (over 50 similar videos!) but I still thought it'd be fun.  I've been wanting to try some stop motion with my older Sony digital camera anyway, and this seemed like as good a subject as any.

I built a camera stand from Legos, lacking a small enough tripod for the height at which I planned to shoot.  The whole setup was simple, and admittedly crude, and I would make a few changes if I were to repeat this process.  For one, the camera stand needed to be slightly more rigid, as evidenced by the slight jitter between frames.  For another, although the Sony image quality looks good it requires two AA batteries to run and this film went through two sets of batteries.  In the future I'll be getting an HD webcam if I decide to produce another similar film.

The "Studio" Setup

Although the stop-motion build-up was fun, I really enjoyed adding the live waterfall to the scene.  I used Blender with the Blam add-on for static camera matching.  The whole matching process was very straightforward once I got the latest version of the add-on installed.  (NOTE: when upgrading an add-on from an older to a newer version it's necessary to remove the old version, install the new version, AND restart Blender.)

I don't think I got the Lego geometry, for channeling the fluid simulation, exactly right.  It looks pretty good in most spots.  The 3D view of the geometry is shown below.  I tried to constrain the flow as it left the Lego creek bed.  This worked for the first part of the simulation, but eventually it overflowed and ran out the sides.

3D geometry matching the Lego creek bed (roughly)

To overcome this "leakage" problem I ended up creating a mask and compositing the Fallingwater image over the top of the fluid simulation sections that I wanted to hide.  I know where the masking is happening, and it doesn't look particularly obvious to me.  Hopefully that's true for the casual viewer as well.

This was the node setup used to combine the two shots and mask the overflow.

Vanity, In Plate Form

I do not get why people find it worthwhile to put personalized plates on their car.  Even so, I do enjoy checking them out when I'm on the road.  It's fun to try to decode them, usually.  Occasionally you come across one that doesn't make any sense - I wonder about the people who pick plates that aren't understood by their apparent audience, namely me.  I mean, not just me, but if you're picking something to show to the general public, of which I am definitely a member, shouldn't they be able to understand it?

This wouldn't be such a big deal to me if it weren't for the fact that people are paying money for these things.  It's a relatively trivial amount, I suppose, but even so it seems like money wasted.  I mention all this because today I found another type of personalized plate that I find as bad as those that are incomprehensible.  In this case, however, the plate was the exact opposite of being hard to understand.

During my morning commute I found myself behind a car that looked something like this:

The Volkswagen GLI

As the caption indicates, this is a Volkswagen GLI.  And in the case of the car I saw this morning, it was sporting this personalized license plate:

VWGLI

What?!?  I'm already driving right behind you, where the manufacturer has clearly marked the car's make and model with chrome logos and lettering.  As seen in the photo, this is also true for anyone with a front-side view.  So why would you possibly want to spend any amount of money to duplicate that information for anyone in the vicinity of your vehicle?

Maybe this driver took some misguided advice from the Utah Department of Motor Vehicles:

Hello?  This does not tell me "why" to choose a personalized plate, just what to put on it!  Somebody should have explained to this driver that the DMV is only out to get more of your money.  You do not, in fact, have to take their advice.

I do not get it.