Interesting Stuff

This evening was our first official Bridge Club meeting of the year, and I think it went quite well. At 9:00, we only had 4 people – me, Carl, and two newbie frosh. As soon as they left, however, another newbie frosh showed up, as did Hadley, and later we got Carrie, Robin, Andrew, another newbie frosh, and Whitney. Usually, Sherri should also come, not counting anyone else who might show up. I think it’s gonna be a good year. Unit551 will be playing with us every Monday starting at 7:00 (lessons start at 6:30), but sadly I can’t make it until 8:00, so I can’t compete for Master Points. Argh! I can still play while I’m there, I just can’t compete until next semester.

So, yeah – bridge club Mondays and Thursdays at 9:00 in the 2nd story Case lounge on the west side of the building, and in November, Monday games will start going from 7:00-10:00. You should all come!

As I mentioned in my last post, I was invited to go see the SpaceShipOne launch by Chris Erikson. We were scheduled to leave at 3AM, so I tried to go to sleep early, so that I would be rested. However, I only got 1 or 2 hours; I just tossed and turned in my bed. At 3AM, we met in the East courtyard (I was the only non-Eastie), split into different cars, and left. It’s about 2 hours to get to Mojave from here. I say about 2 hours, because each of the three cars was delayed for a bit. One car had to stop and get gas. One car got lost for about 15 minutes. The car I was in got pulled over. Yeah, that’s right. at 4AM on a Wednesday morning, we were pulled over halfway from Claremont to Mojave (apparently we were going 88mph on a stretch of road with a 60mph speed limit). I’ve never been pulled over before, so I thought it was interesting, if not exactly exciting. I think that at first the cop thought we were doing something illegal, because we were hightailing it out of where ever we came from in the middle of the night on a weekday. He asked us where we were from, where we were going, and why we were going there. However, we convinced him that we really were just going to go see the launch. Chris got a ticket, but we weren’t stopped for very long. When we actually got there, we paid Chris’ share for parking ($20 per car). As luck would have it, our delays and various driving styles worked out perfectly, and we got all 3 cars to park literally next to each other. What luck! The National Guard (I think it was them – they were in camo fatigues, and had that military air to themselves) were all over, in charge of parking, crowd control, etc. We arrived around 5:30, and found a good spot by the runway. No one was allowed within 20 feet of the fence, and the fence was a good 30 feet from the runway, but we could still see everything really well. The crowd was surprisingly sparse – they were about 10 feet deep, but a very sparse 10 feet, involving beach towels, chairs, and all sorts of things (one guy who obviously expected a larger crowd brought a ladder so he could see over everyone). We had some food, hung out a while, and watched the sunrise. We also got to see a plane called Boomerang that Burt Rutan had built in 1995. It’s the oddest plane I’ve ever seen – it has 2 fuselages, one that holds 5 people and a propeller and engine, and one that just has an engine and propeller. To counteract this imbalance, the wings are different lengths. I’ve never seen an asymmetric plane! It was parked on the ground, and I got to go 2 feet from it.

The Scaled Composites website (SC designed and built SpaceShipOne) said that the launch was scheduled for 6:00, but I had heard on IRC the night before that it would be delayed until 7:00. So we hung around, and waited for a while. Apparently there was a VIP tent somewhere, where important people were giving speeches, and this was broadcast throughout the airport grounds on big speakers. The usual “What a grand occasion this is. We’d like to thank our sponsors, and everyone who helped…” sort of thing. At about 6:45, White Knight, carrying SpaceShipOne, came out onto the runway. What an amazing sight! It’s a lot smaller than I expected – WK is roughly the size of a school bus, and SS1 is as big as a large van. From reading stories in various newspapers, I had gotten the impression that WK was as big as a 747. At this point, I should probably include some background info.

For those of you who haven’t been following the whole X-Prize thing, the Ansari X-Prize is a competition to get a privately-funded craft to go into outer space (100km above sea level) carrying the equivalent of 3 people (SS1 had one person, life support for 3, and the equivalent weight of 2 people strapped into it), return to Earth safely, and repeat the feat in less than 2 weeks. Scaled Composites is a company founded by Burt Rutan, who is competing for the X-Prize. The craft, called SpaceShipOne, is carried by a specially designed airplane called Whight Knight to an altitude of 10 miles. WK then drops SS1, whose rockets fire, and SS1 goes into space. To keep from breaking on reentry into the atmosphere, SS1 has wings that fold backwards up above the plane, so that the fuselage takes the brunt of the heat. After falling for a while, the wings fold back into place, and SS1 glides to its landing. In June, this happened for the first time, and SpaceShipOne was the first privately built manned craft to go into space. The pilot was Mike Melville, who is a good friend of Burt Rutan, and had been the test pilot on several other, smaller flights.

Back to my story. Mike Melville was again going to pilot SS1, and he was in his seat when WK came out onto the runway. It slowly drove by everyone, and I got a bunch of pictures (when I develop them, I’ll probably find somewhere online to post them, but that might not be for a while). WK turned around at the end of the runway, and waited. A small, old prop plane took off first, and it circled around a bit to presumably get pictures for the press. It was also one of the chase planes. Then, a sleek, white, push prop took off (it was a 2nd chase plane). Finally, White Knight took off. The three of them circled higher and higher, until I lost them in the sky (after all, they were going up 10 miles). We all went back to the cars, and listened to the radio (some people in mission control were broadcasting what was going on on an AM station). Around an hour later, SS1 was ready to take off. We all got out of the van, and looked around. We figured it should be directly over us. However, after it began, it was clear to see that SS1 was actually several miles east of us. We couldn’t see the craft itself, but we could see the contrail that seemed to go on forever. And it was going fast. I don’t know how fast it was, but really, really fast. I know that on the way down, it broke mach 3, and this was faster. Wow. I’m impressed that Mike Melville could pilot it. We didn’t know it at the time, but apparently SS1 started spinning uncontrollably, and Mr. Melville shut off the engine early. However, it was still going fast enough that it did break into space (just not as high as initially expected). The feathering went flawlessly (that’s when the wings fold back), and Melville glided in for a smooth landing (this was maybe 20 minutes later). Sometime while I wasn’t watching, a military jet took off as a 3rd chase plane. The 3 chase planes and SS1 flew in a ridiculously close formation as SS1 came in to land. At first, I thought there were only 3 planes up there, because they were so close together! Just as SS1 landed, WK flew overhead very low. It was really neat, despite the noise. After WK landed, we decided that we should go, beat the crowd, and try to get back to Mudd in time for classes (we did – we got back at 10:30). As we were leaving, the chase planes were doing air-show-type formations. All in all, it was pretty neat.

SS1 is launching again on the morning of Monday, October 4, so you have one more chance if you want to go see it. I’m happy I saw it once, but I don’t think I’m going to go for the other launch (this will hopefully be the final launch for the X-Prize). I’ve got a roll of pictures which I should get developed soon. This was just amazing, and I think it’s even more incredible because this will be in the history books. 50 years from now, when many retired millionaires routinely go into space, they will look back on this and say, “this is the craft that started the whole thing.” I’m really glad I could be there.

This afternoon at ACM, I was invited to join some people to go see the launch! Whee! I’m going to be excited and giddy all night, until we leave at 3AM. It’ll be great. However, I fear I might not be so energetic at class tomorrow. That’s OK, though, because I get to see SpaceShipOne! Moreinfo when I get back.

My second cousin forwarded me a fascinating article about how extremist Islam ideals are spread (basically, it says that the Wahhabi version of the Koran has been embellished/revised to include all sorts of anti-Jewish and anti-Christian dogmas). I wonder if and how often other religious texts are used in this way? I know that Christians who try to convert Jews to Christianity often take bible quotes completely out of context, but I don’t think they make anything up. Likewise, many modern Jewish customs were created by misinterpreting older laws. But again, no blatant embellishments/lies. Huh. I’d be mildly interested in getting my hands on a real copy of the Koran and a Wahhabi copy to compare the two. But I certainly don’t have the time to do it. Oh, well. Still, it’s good to be aware of these things.

As a follow-up about the X-Prize, I just stumbled across this wonderful comment on Slashdot. I’ve never used IRC before, but I decided to learn so I could do this. With Linux, it’s really easy! I discovered that KDE even comes with an IRC client (Ksirc)! Whee! Hope to see you online Tuesday morning!

So, tonight we went bowling again. It was just Rami, Amanda, Travis, and me, so it was nice and small. However, we had some really good games! The first game, we all broke 100, which was pretty cool. We then had some lackluster games (I had one where I didn’t break 70). However, Amanda managed to get 162! This involved 5 strikes (3 of which were in a row) and 2 spares, though it also involved a zero frame (two gutter balls in a row). Wow. Go Amanda! Travis was close behind, setting a personal best at 151 (I think… it was 150-something). Though I did break 100 a couple other times, I didn’t have any spectacular scores like that. Eh, well. There’s always next time.

Well, despite my efforts to find a ride to see it (it’s only 75 miles away from school), it looks like I am going to miss Burt Rutan’s try for the Ansari X-Prize. Which is too bad, all in all. This is history being made. Not as big as the moon landing, but I’d say that this is as important as, say, the Mercury Missions. I think it would be absolutely awesome if I could go into space when I retire. That would be pretty sweet.

Not much else is going on, so I’m just gonna end this here (finally! a semi-short post!).

So… it just occurred to me that I should put some national news up here again. At the moment, I’m reading through an article about the job crunch in America. Despite what our current administration is saying, the economy is still in a recession. People are still losing their jobs, and the few new jobs that have been created pay significantly less than the old ones. This makes me worried, because in 2 short years, I will be out of here, and looking for employment (or grad school, if things continue like this). This appears to be particularly grim, as it appears as though Bush will win again.

I wish I could find it again, but I can’t, so I will describe an article I read in the Star Tribune over the summer. This guy took data about every election since the Republican party last reinvented itself (as I recall, this was in the 1940’s), and correlated the party in power with every conceivable economic factor – GDP, unemployment, average income, tariff rates, stock markets, jobs created, inflation rates, national debt increases, governmental spending, you name it. With perfect correlation, every indicator he looked at was better for the democrats than the republicans. He even tried letting the first year an administration was in power count for the previous administration (because the first year, you’re still feeling the effects of the previous group). However, this did not change the correlation at all. Either way, Democrats were better for the economy across the board. If you want a job in the next few years, vote democrat! For that matter, if you don’t want more of your civil liberties and “unalienable” rights violated, vote democrat. Granted, Kerry is a pretty bad candidate. However, Bush is quite possibly the worst president this country has ever had. This must not be allowed to continue!

So here’s an odd problem – the power button on my monitor is broken. At the moment, this is ok because it’s on and it displays things just fine; but I can’t turn it off. This will be a problem at the end of the year, however, because once I unplug it, I doubt it will turn back on without some tinkering. Well, it can’t be that hard to replace a switch. I guess the hard part will be making sure that the whole thing is grounded before I start (to a first approximation, CRTs are 45,000-volt power supplies that can store these huge charges for months at a time – learn about lifters). So… yeah. not a problem yet, but it will be eventually, and in the meantime, it’s weird. The monitor is about 10 years old, and it’s lasted pretty well (we got it with our Windows 3.1 machine), so I can’t really complain. and it will be fun to fix, once I get around to it.

In national news, electronic voting seems to have been thrust upon us. I think the article gives a fairly good treatment of the topic – electronic voting machines are going to be used all over the US in this election, and it is too late to change them for this election, despite numerous security problems and outcry from what seems like most of the educated populace. I fear this is only going to muddy up what I consider the most important election of the past 50 years. Well, we’ll see how bad things get.

On a happier note, California is going to vote on giving $3 billion to stem cell research. Unfortunately, I am not a registered voter in California (I am in Minnesota instead), so I can’t cast a ballot here. However, I really hope this goes through. I really don’t see how anyone who is informed on the issue could possibly be against stem cell research. Even assuming that pro-life people have a leg to stand on in the abortion issue (which I contest), that barely applies at all to stem cells. Blastocysts, which are where embryonic stem cells come from, are blobs of goo small enough that you can’t see them with the naked eye. They resemble algae much more closely than they resemble people. Cutting them up does cause them to lose the ability to become a person (though they need to be implanted in a surrogate mother before that could happen anyway, so it’s not like they are going to be people if left to their own devices). However, they have huge potential to help actual people. They are potential cures to Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, amputations, blindness, psoriasis, and a slew of other diseases and disabilities.

As an anecdote about the potential of stem cells, there is a man in Germany who lost his lower jaw to cancer 9 years ago. Over the summer, doctors made a scaffold for a new jaw, and covered it with stem cells, bone marrow, and various chemicals to facilitate growing. This was surgically placed on the man’s shoulder, where it grew for two months. Then, it was taken off of his shoulder and attached to his head. He now has a new, working jaw, and can speak better and even chew soft things. Admittedly, they used adult stem cells (which, unlike embryonic stem cells, do not come from embryos). However, embryonic stem cells show even more promise than this, because the same line of cells can make any kind of tissue (adult stem cells, in contrast, can only make a few kinds of tissue, and are not nearly as resilient). The story about the German guy can be found on New Scientist.

Well, that’s about it for now. Much is going on in the world right now, and we should all try to stay informed. I’m tired, so I’m now going to bed. Good night!

So, you know how over the summer I spent a fair amount of time setting up Linux, and it was a lot of work, but once it was done it was great? Well, about a month ago I figured out what was wrong with emerge – there were 15 bad blocks on my hard drive, which I couldn’t get rid of for the life of me. And supposedly modern hard drives will swap them out automatically. Well, I called Best Buy, and they decided to come out and replace the hard drive entirely. That happened about a week ago. And the new one didn’t have any working operating system on it. It claimed to have Windows XP, but that would give me the much-beloved Blue Screen of Death as soon as I booted up (while some people are surely saying this is typical of Windows, XP has mostly been better at this, to be fair). Anywho, I’ve now got Gentoo back up, and most of my system is back on. I’m still missing sound, my 2nd monitor, and a bunch of little, unimportant things (Shockwave, for example), but it’ll come. I guess the biggest problem right now is that I can’t seem to get my 2nd monitor working. And I can’t find the specs for it online, which is a bit weird. Well, I’ll get it eventually. In the meantime, I should be back online semi-regularly now. Though there are still some weird things going on with my system – for some reason, I can’t turn on DMA on my hard drive (this loads stuff into memory fast enough to play music and movies without them skipping). Perhaps I forgot to build something into the kernel. I need to learn more about that. Oh! and whenever I try to shut down X, it hangs and I have to power cycle. This isn’t really a problem, since after my other monitor starts working I shouldn’t have to turn anything off for 9 months, but in the meantime it’s a little weird.

Um… oh! news from Bridge Club! At the Activities Fair, we got roughly 30 more people to sign up for bridge-club-l (our mailing list), which is just fantastic. And for those of you who I haven’t told yet, Unit 551, the local ACBL sanctioned bridge club, has lost their lease on their building, and will be moving to the LAC starting at the beginning of November! So it looks like Mondays and Wednesdays we’ll have competitive games, and Thursdays we’ll have fun, teaching/learning/screwing around days. It looks to be a good year for bridge club, all in all.

Classes are going ok, all in all. Systems is absolutely amazing (CS105 Systems, not E59 Stems). We’re learning how computers work. Really. The first week, we went over data representations (two’s complement arithmetic, etc), and we’re now tackling assembler for the IA32. However, we have been looking at other architectures as well (SPARC jumps to mind as a prominent alternative example). Anywho, it’s a lot of work, but absolutely fascinating! This is the stuff I’ve always wondered about. My other classes are going ok. Nothing great, but certainly no complaints, except that my CS81 (Logic and Computability) class seems like a review of CS60 but with a boring prof. Well, I’m sure it’ll get better soon.

I haven’t been paying attention to world news for a couple weeks, so I have nothing to post about right now (hopefully that’ll change). um… my world news is that many of my friends are going to be abroad this semester. Yeah. It’s a little weird, but neat to hear what they’re going to be doing.

Oh! and for a strange, nerdy time, read up on John Conways work concerning Surreal Numbers. The subject is just that. And since I am in a weird mood, I leave you with a quote from my History82 reading last week:

“Having been entertained with no new theory now for a long while, I am sinking into a mere practical farmer. I have not a single new thing at present, except one experiment I am making to convert moss into dung, by endeavouring to rot it in a dunghill, by mixing it with fresh horse-dung. I shall let you know the result. If I succeed I shall be able to multiply my manure greatly.” – Henry Home, in a letter to William Cullen, 1752.

I’m pretty glad I didn’t live back then.

Guess who’s back… back again… Guess who’s back…Guess who’s back…Guess who’s back…Guess who’s back…Guess who’s back…Guess who’s back…Guess who’s back…

I hate that stupid song. But it is nice to be in Claremont again. It’s great to see people again, to have the ambiance that can only come from a nerd school, to have the 95-degree weather. Kenny and Amanda (my new suitemates) are already moved in too, and Robert (my new roommate) comes tomorrow morning. I’ve just about gotten all of the stuff I stored in my room back to its rightful owners. It’s shaping up to be a pretty great year (though I have yet to start classes, mind you).

On Saturday, we went to the State Fair with the Kaemmerers. I hate to say it, because I love the fair, but this year it didn’t seem so great. There wasn’t anything spectacular in the Technology building (last year there were segways you could rent), there wasn’t anything particularly exciting in the Fine Arts building (though there were some very neat photographs and sculptures), I didn’t know anyone who had submitted anything for judging. Don’t get me wrong, I had a good time. It just seems like there is nothing to really remember this fair by, since it was pretty much the same stuff again. Well, it was still fun. The only memorable thing is that I watched Carol get pickpocketed, though by the time I had my suspicions verified, the guy was nowhere to be seen. Dad, Carol, and I were talking, and this guy sort of walks into Carol, apologises, and walks on. However, as he apologised, he patted her side several times, which I thought was a bit weird. I felt rather stupid asking her if she still had her money, but she didn’t! The guy made off with $14, and luckily Carol wasn’t carrying her ID or credit cards or anything. This was loose cash in a front pocket of some fairly tight jeans. It was fascinating to watch this happen, in a morbid way (well, morbid is probably the wrong word, as death was not involved. It was still a bit unsettling). I hate to say it, but this guy was wonderful at this and had pickpocketing down to an artform.

Most people wouldn’t call this odd, but for the rest of the day I kept checking that I still had my wallet. It’s weird – I know my chances of being pickpocketed are pretty slim and they did not change when I saw this guy, but all of a sudden, it could happen to me and I had to watch out. I guess this is how my mom (and many other people as well) feels after the latest media scare, be it West Nile Virus or terrorists or anything else. And as illogical as I knew it to be, it still felt right to continuously check on my wallet. Huh.

Lets see… not much else is going on around here yet – we’re still unpacking and moving in. Classes start on Tuesday. Tonight was the frosh talent show, and it was pretty good this year. There was a mix of real talent, funny stunts, and absolute crap. and lots of napkin balls, of course. As Kenny said, it looks like we have a good crop of frosh this year.

Oh! Here’s some wonderful news in the world of voting – actually two bits of wonderful news. The first is that Florida’s e-voting machines must now have a paper trail. After all of the problems that e-voting (the American way; Indian e-voting machines are fine), it looks like someone with at least a little power is trying to correct this. In previous touch-screen voting elections, counties have registered over 100% voter turnout, negative votes for certian candidates, and a different number of votes cast than people who used the voting machine (to name a few problems that have actually occurred in Florida with these machines). Another problem that was recently revealed is that Florida lost the voting information from the 2002 Senate vote due to a computer crash, so there is no way to check it now. Much of the tech/nerd/online community is adamantly against Diebold’s touchscreen voting system because it uses proprietary software that cannot be checked for fairness/accuracy/security, and gives no voter-verifiable paper trail to show that the votes cast were recorded properly. I think that when the tech community unites against a new technology (or rather, a certain manifestation of it; there’s nothing wrong with the concept of e-voting), people should pay attention and think twice before embracing it. In India, the e-voting machines use open source software so anyone can make sure that the machines really do count votes correctly. They are more secure, and have fewer ways to be tampered with (Diebold’s machines can be rigged given 10 minutes alone with one, say in the morning while it is being set up), and most importantly, they have a paper trail. The paper trail is the only way to make sure that all the votes were really counted correctly. I can’t understand why Diebold won’t embrace these ideas.

The other wonderful piece of news is that international observers will be monitoring the presidential election for fairness. The Republicans barred the US from having the UN monitor the election (which personally seems like suspicious behavior), but now OSCE will be stepping up to do it. Sadly, I think that we really, really need this. This Slashdot comment summed it up quite nicely. I wish this sort of thing wasnt’ happening. I wish people would wake up and see all of the horrible things in the world. I wish there was something I could do about at least part of it. I just feel so powerless when I read about these sorts of things, and then remember that roughly half the country supports the people who are doing these things. *sigh* Well, at least this election is hopefully going to go better than the last one. Baby steps…

Well, I’m tired and Robert is coming in the morning. Good night!