On the curious connections of Mark Twain.

What do these two things have in common:

• A lake which is the source of the news frenzy-causing bacteria in 2010
• A Castle in the very north of Israel built around 1230?  

The answer: Mark Twain visited them both.
This is particularly remarkable to me as I stumbled upon this little tidbit of knowledge in the same week the bacteria were making the news and I myself visited the castle in Israel.
The news coverage of the bacteria always made sure to mention that Mono Lake was a very harsh environment, and that arsenic was abundant there.  It sounds like the kinda place that would kill you to dip a toe in!  Interestingly, Mark Twain saw the very basic (as opposed to acidic) nature of the lake as a positive aspect of the area.  He writes of how easy it was to do laundry, dragging the dirty clothes in the water for a few minutes to have them come out clean as the best wash lady  could hope to render them.  There's a lot more that he divulges about the wonders (and discomforts) of this strange location in his book "Roughing it," in a chapter titled "The Wonders of Mono Lake."
Not surprisingly, the official site of Mono Lake also works hard to correct the idea of the lake as a toxic dump.  NASA and strange bacteria are no stranger to Mono Lake; it was also in the news back in 2003 for a different crazy bacteria.
While visiting Nimrod's Fortress (really, nothing to do with Nimrod), I heard from one of those little tourist audio stations a quote that Mark Twain had called these the "most well-preserved ruins of its kind."  Actually, the quote is quite varied, as I think most places it appears it has been retranslated to English after being translated to Hebrew originally.  However, here is the quote in full, available here or here:

Two hours later we reached the foot of a tall isolated mountain, which is crowned by the crumbling castle of Banias, the stateliest ruin of that kind on earth, no doubt. It is a thousand feet long and two hundred wide, all of the most symmetrical, and at the same time the most ponderous masonry. The massive towers and bastions are more than thirty feet high, and have been sixty. From the mountain's peak its broken turrets rise above the groves of ancient oaks and olives, and look wonderfully picturesque. It is of such high antiquity that no man knows who built it or when it was built. It is utterly inaccessible, except in one place, where a bridle-path winds upward among the solid rocks to the old portcullis. The horses' hoofs have bored holes in these rocks to the depth of six inches during the hundreds and hundreds of years that the castle was garrisoned. We wandered for three hours among the chambers and crypts and dungeons of the fortress, and trod where the mailed heels of many a knightly Crusader had rang, and where Phenician heroes had walked ages before them.

So, there it is.  Mark Twain certainly got around, and his accounts of his travels are just as colorful and fun-loving as his works of fiction.

Mordecai's first faint

So, this past Friday, I fainted for the first time in my life.

After sleeping in a bit, I decided to go on a bike ride to a place I'd heard about a few times, Nesher Park.  It's a very nice place, with two suspension bridges (made of steel, not grass), and a large cave. There's also a geocache hidden there.

As it happened, Nathanael was gone to his lab, and I wasn't necessarily planning to be back in time for the frisbee game in the afternoon, so I decided to go alone.  I grabbed my bike, phone and water bottle and took off.  Across campus to the gate is all downhill, but once off campus, it was uphill for a few kilometers.  Determined to make it to the top without stopping, I settled in to a low gear and kept cranking.  Reaching the top, I was proud of myself, but noticing that I was less hydrated than I should have been.  I had also skipped breakfast, so I was feeling a little light-headed from the long uphill climb.  After pulling in to the park entrance, I stopped and stood up, straddling my bike, and took a little drink.  Then I went to take another drink, tipping my head back.... The next thing I remember is pleasantly waking up on the ground.

Waking up was by far the nicest part of the whole experience.  I had the exact same feeling as when you sorta drift out of sleep, snuggled deeply in blankets, and refuse to think about what time it might be.  I remember thinking "wow, what a dream I had about riding really fast, and then crashing."  Then I thought "hmm that's funny, I'm lying with my bike between my legs"
Then I thought: "why is my waterbottle over there emptying the last bit of water out of the neck?"
It was about then that I noticed some blood on the pavement by my chin.  After a quick check for oral bleeding (none. hooray!), I evaluated my body, trying to see if there were any injuries.  I determined I had cuts of unknown degree and unknown locations on my face, and my jaw was sore.  Once I decided I was ok to move, I sat for a bit and drank the last water that couldn't get out of the water bottle.  Seeing the last of the water trickle out when I came to is the only time indicator I have for how long I was out; apparently only a few seconds.

I cleaned my wounds with some tissues and borrowed water from a big birthday party that was happening in one of the gazebos in the park, and then went on to look around the trails and find the geocache.  I was a little concerned that I would scare some people since I didn't know how scary my cuts looked, until I realized I could take a picture of myself with my phone as a 'mirror' of sorts.  In this way, I discovered one of the benefits of a beard: it not only hid the worst cut, but since my beard is dark, you couldn't tell by looking at it that part of it was wet with blood, instead of just sweat.

While I was hiking in the park, two dogs started to follow me around.  It seemed like they were abandoned or runaways, since they were very friendly, and both had collars (with no tags or id).  However, one of them was very thin and thirsty, and I was sad since I don't know of any shelters that I could take them to.


The bike ride home went great, and I got back just as the frisbee game was ending.

A few days later, everything is healing nicely, and I'm trying to make sure that I keep good tabs on my hydration level.

Gap's recycle your blues Oct 6-20

If you're in touch with the latest in things running around the internet, you probably heard about the Gap logo crisis. Basically, Gap changed their logo on their website, people hated it, Gap tried to spin it positive by encouraging submissions, and in the end they said, never mind we'll keep the old one and didn't quite admit to making a mistake.

However, as much as I myself really, really, really don't care about Gap's logo, and have never purchased anything from Gap (I do nearly all of my clothes shopping second-hand), I wish that this other action by Gap would get more press: Gap's donation program Another, more thorough description

Basically, if you bring old, worn-out denim (of any brand) to Gap, you'll get a 30% off on a pair of new jeans.  The donated jeans get turned into housing insulation through Bonded Logic and distributed to various housing projects.  The last time they did this promotion, some of the insulation went to Katrina rebuilding projects.

Now, obviously, a lot of perfectly good jeans will be going to the Gap instead of to a Salvation Army store, or Goodwill or other options that provide clothes for those with lower income.  However, I think that the idea of a store that addresses end-of-product-life issues WITH AN INCENTIVE is a wonderful idea.  RadioShack long ago had a battery recycling program for people who brought batteries in to be replaced.  This was great, but was never really well-known, and if a person was buying a new cordless phone instead of just a new battery, they would almost never recycle their battery from the former phone.  There was no reason to go to the trouble of hauling a dead battery with them that they were never going to use.

Anyway, I think that the only negative here is Gap's potentially less-than-great treatment of overseas labor.  Which, as far as Gap itself goes, I don't know too much about.

One of my (many) chess sets

A lot of people collect things-- stamps, coins, baseball cards, cars, debts, stocks, socks... you name it, most likely someone, somewhere collects it. I made a decision a long time ago that I would collect chess sets.

Now, I also like building and making things (part of the reason I am an engineer...). So, obviously, it was inevitable that I would make at least one chess set. Browsing the internet, I'd come across a few different "nuts and bolts" chess sets, but they all seemed like they compromised in some way. Usually, there were a few pieces that seemed like quite a stretch interpretively. Or maybe a piece seemed stretched literally; there's a normal sort of height pattern for pieces in relation to one another, and a lot of the hardware piece sets didn't do a good job of following that.

So I set out to make my own, better "nuts and bolts" chess set. As with any good design project, I started out by defining the requirements:

• The chess pieces will conform to standard chess piece height conventions (more on this at the bottom)
• The chess pieces will conform to key chess piece features (it should be obvious what each piece is)
• The chess pieces will be made of unaltered hardware (with the allowable exception of cutting all-thread to length)
• The chess pieces will be disassembly-friendly.
• The chess pieces will use no glues, welding, or solder.
• The two sides will be differentiable without using paint.

The results are below in the picture and slide show.

From hardware set

Turn on the comments for the slide show to see some of the details of making each piece. A list of the parts used is available here.

For the interested: My rant on chess sets

There is a certain order to chess sets which dramatically helps with recognizing pieces and gives a sort of creative framework which I find very appealing. I'm much, much less inclined to play/purchase a set which breaks these 'norms.'

I think one of the most salient features of a good chess set is that the pieces conform to a given height scheme: the pawns should be short and about half the height of the king/queen. The rooks (castles) should be the second shortest. The knights and bishops can be approximately the same height, but if one is taller, it should be the bishop. The king and queen should be approximately the same height, with possibly a top point of a king's crown taller than the queen.

A classic indicator of the king is a cross topping his crown. (I'm particularly proud of the fact that my hardware kings are phillips head screws, and thereby are topped with a cross.... sneaky...).  A classic indicator of the queen is a many-pointed crown.  The only piece which is never radially symmetric is the knight; most of the time the others will be radially symmetric. In the case that a set is actually representing people with faces, this radial symmetry can be neglected in favor of more sculptured people.

 If you want to see the other chess sets in my collection (minus a few recent ones) you can see them here.

From chess pictures

Mordecai's favorite alloys

There are some spectacular results from centuries of material science and metallurgy. One of the spectacular things about metals in particular is the incredibly complicated interactions and the sometimes non-intuitive results that come from mixing metals.

In fact, it's not even just what's in the mix... but what happened to it, and even how fast it happened. Metallurgy is like baking, but more complicated. The fact is that there are large amounts of information that help to understand some parts of metallurgy, but there is NO way to accurately predict a lot of the properties for an untested alloy.

Even in simple two-metal systems, say nickel and iron, there's a lot of surprises. For instance, Invar, a 36% nickel 64% iron alloy which has the unique property of extremely low thermal expansion (less than 1.3 x10^-6 1/K). Pure iron's thermal expansion coefficient is about 12*10^-6, and pure nickel's is about 13. But put them together in the right ratio, and you get 1/10th of that!

Another favorite is Monel; I remember what's in Monel because it reminds me of money... and in monel is copper (pennies) and nickel (nickels, duh!). Monel sold industrially usually includes some other trace materials as well. Monel is stronger than either copper or nickel are by themselves. It also exhibits exceptional corrosion resistance.

And, one more cool alloy is Nitanol, a nickel-titanium alloy that is both super-elastic (you can bend it like crazy and it will spring back unharmed) as well as a shape-memory alloy (you can heat it up and under special circumstances it will change shape).

And the last favorite alloy is finally one that has no nickel in it at all... it's a eutectic alloy of Gallium, indium and tin called Galistan. Just like the copper-nickel alloy was stronger than either copper or nickel, a eutectic alloy melts at a temperature lower than either of the things its made of. Galistan freezes at -19 C (-2.2 F), so it's liquid even colder than water! Remarkably, pure gallium has a melting point of 29C (85 F), and so will melt in your hand. Also remarkably, pure gallium expands 3 percent upon freezing; like ice, solid gallium is less dense than liquid gallium. If you're interested in more boiling water level of melting (melting tea spoon, for instance), then you want Fields metal or Wood's metal. You can buy both gallium and Field's metal here: http://www.scitoyscatalog.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Store_Code=SC&Category_Code=H

DiscWorld

In my lifelong quest to continue to do fun things and collect nerd/geek cred, I recently was introduced to Terry Pratchet's fantastical DiscWorld series. It's one of the few fiction works that I've read recently, and I enjoyed its snarky commentary on human nature.

I have found that the fiction works that I do actually enjoy tend to be ones with grand orchestrations behind them. Virtual worlds that have so much background and context that it's like a masterpiece painting. I tend not to enjoy fiction works that are just 'normal.' If it's set in the past, then I think I have trouble allowing for that strange combination of the real and the imaginary. If it's a poor work in an imaginary setting, I tend to feel like I'm missing parts of the world. But stories with a map, with a culture, with a context... those have more promise.

(Narnia, LOTR, star wars, etc.)

I guess, in summary, there's more to a story than the story.

There are a million things that can go wrong...

As I was reading a certain article online (linked at the end), I came across a quote from a NASA engineer working on super-cool next gen mars rover. The quote was particularly interesting, and I thought of how other people might finish the quote. I have to admit that I'm only an engineer, and not one of these others, so feel free to tell me how wrong I am. (*laughs to self at the implicit suggestion that people are still reading this blog.)

Art major: "There are a million things that can go wrong; fortunately, I can decide that each one is an artistic statement, and it is no longer really 'wrong.' "

Business major: "There are a million things that can go wrong, so we shouldn't invest too much into this."

Music major: "There are a million things that can go wrong; so keep practicing."

Political science major: "There are a million things that can go wrong. Most of them already have."

Theatre major: "There are million things that can go wrong, but with a good ad lib the audience will forgive you. Just make sure the stage crew get it right for the next show."

Nursing/Premed: "There are a million things that can go wrong. If it is this, this or that, someone dies."

Finally, the real quote which inspired this post:
NASA Rover Engineer: "There are a million things that can go wrong, and our job is to identify all of them and make sure they don't happen."

And, the article:

"NASA previews its sexiest Mars Rover yet"

http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/news/ci_16096017

Other interesting facts about the Curiosity rover include that James Cameron, of TITANIC and AVATAR fame, is "in the loop" on this NASA project, since the rover sports 3D cameras. He might be using the 3D footage to make a documentary picture, similar to ones that have been made about the Astoundingly successful Spirit and Opportunity rovers.

(Of course, the James Cameron publicity doesn't hurt NASA's "cool factor" PR...)

You can follow the curiosity rover on twitter:@MarsCuriosity and spirit and opportunity: @MarsRovers

On Dreams

Dreaming... it's a crazy thing. In fact, just sleep is pretty crazy.

Exhibit A (from when xkcd was better than it is today):

http://xkcd.com/203/

Besides xkcd's great take on the absurdity of dreaming, it's a topic that has caused much wonder and interest pretty much since ... the beginning of man.

There's an interesting podcast from Radiolab that has a few sleep topics.

I know at times sleep has seemed to be an obstruction to me, when you're having fun or getting things done and don't really have any desire to sleep. One such time was when we were working on a deadline for compiling the massive Solar Splash Team Report, and all the Figures and Captions etc had to be reformatted. In the process of finishing that document, I stayed awake for some 40 hours. While working on it, I didn't really feel tired, just sitting there, getting water and some snacks, plugging away. However, once I stopped... boy was that a loopy feeling. Dazed, confused, wandering. It's a really unique experience.

I find that it's not too terribly difficult to stay up all night (for me) if the situation is right. In general, some sort of hypnotic source of visual stimulation helps a lot to pass the time. I remember a time in High School where I had recently fixed a garage sale lava lamp, and just sat up till sunrise watching the lava lamp. You have a really interesting perspective on things the next day... things that wouldn't normally seem so connected are linked in strange ways.

And this post wouldn't be complete without mentioning Lucid Dreaming, where you're conscious and in control of your dream, or without mentioning the scariest dream I ever had, which was a fever-inducing hyper-realistic dream which challenged my ability to define reality. Or my second most terrifying dream (which has recurred, always exactly the same), a terrible tale of helpless and lonely struggle. Maybe more on those sometime else...

Dreaming is a mysterious event that is a nearly universal human experience, transcending (to some extent) cultures. The experience of a dream is a strong counter-example to how people perceive reality, or, in the parlance of "Worldview Questions:"

What is real?

I know my answer, and it has been tested to its limits. Do you know yours?

To hug you when I cannot reach.

I dreamt last night I saw you

in Cedarville, behind a door.

Awake, I dreamt it could be true

and hoped to hold you more.

Asleep, it seemed not so clear

that between two apart, a hug can't be.

but maybe words can make us near--

be arms across the sea for me

To hug you when I cannot reach.

-For Joanna, by Mordecai.

Facebook and Relationships

After talking with each other and some friends, Joanna Taylor and I have decided that it would be most clear if we display our relationship status on Facebook. We both believe that this makes it
more clear to others around us that we are not interested in pursuing romantic relationships with anyone else at this time.

Although we believe that because we are both Christians our dating is motivated by different values and goals than what maybe an average person would consider for
dating, we have come to the conclusion that we can avoid confusion with others by being very public about our continuing process of getting to know one another to discover if we are who God has for each other.

January

Ok, I'm not going to apologize for not posting anymore, b/c it is everytime.

I went to Bethlehem for Christmas. It was interesting, and not at all like I expected.

Highlights:
--holding a boa constrictor in manger square on Christmas night.
--seeing "Solomon's pools" (not at all related to Solomon. Thanks again, crusaders)
--seeing the Herodyon
--finding this one awesome door somewhere in the city of Bethlehem.

More recently, I saw "Avatar" in 3D.
In an interview with Popular Science, the dude who made the movie said that the story had to be compelling, since people wouldn't go see a 3 hr movie just for the technology it showcases. He was wrong. The movie is so-so. Predictable plot, stereotypical characters, etc. The only reason I went to see it was because of how awesome the 3D technology is. super-cool.