Archive for October, 2005
October 18, 2005 at 9:23 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Continuing the theme of our sly silent nonhuman companions (many of whom are dying around here, too):
We moved our Book Scanning computer (”doesticks”) to our upstairs office from our basement today. As I mentioned earlier, it was a brilliant clear day. Sunlight reflected from the fall-foliaged maple tree in the treelawn filled the office with orange sunset colors, all afternoon. This is not just “orange” in the sense of a bright crayon, you know; this is fluorescence on a vast and brilliant scale. The sugar maple is re-emitting light in wavelengths quite different from what’s hitting it and reflecting off its leaves. All you need to do is look at it with funny-colored sunglasses to see the extra colors.
Now, it’s Autumn. And we all know why trees change colors.
But I was once a molecular botanist, see, and so I have, like secret knowledge only available to people who read obscure journals and teach biochemistry and stuff, all about phytochrome and other plant photoreceptors. And, dude, I’m sitting there in that glowing orange office thinking: they have to be able to see themselves. Where “see” is some odd distributed light-detection response.
Yes, sure, the coloration arises due to the breakdown of chlorophyll and related carotenoid photosynthetic pigments, and shifts in the colors of anthocyanins. And sure, the leaves are destined for abscission, and of course it would be stupid for the tree to hang onto them and risk dehydration by passive transpiration in the dry cold months of winter. And I can see where you’re going evolutionarily, with your just-so adaptive stories: there’s no animal reader for a tree to signal in Fall, no pollinators, not even many pests to speak of. And yet some species make what looks for all the world an extra effort to be brilliant and fluorescent.
What are they up to? Who are they waving these red flags at? Because of my secret molecular botanist training, I just don’t trust ‘em to be as dumb as their popular reputation would imply. Because, when you get right down to it: there are many trees that don’t bother with a showy display in autumn.
Who are these showoffs talking to, and what are they saying?
October 18, 2005 at 7:12 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
A very well-bred signal compression method:
Pursuing a second improvement objective, the student group proposed to optimize both reverse and forward wavelet transform coefficients using the modified GA method. Once again, the modified GA performed better and faster than standard wavelets, locating a solution (in just 10 generations with a population of 50) superior to that of the original GA (which required 500 generations with a population of 200). These results conclusively prove the usefulness of evolving both reverse and forward wavelet transform coefficients.
(Via IlliGAL blog.)
October 18, 2005 at 7:04 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
For all the years we’ve lived here, cool autumn dusk has been the Time of the Crows. They fly in thousands, in converging aerial streams, calling out their plans as they come back into town from their days in the hinterlands. They’re seeking out one another’s company and roosting in some unlucky city block or suburban wood lot, sometimes moving to a new roost when it gets too noisy or offensive or unseemly (for crows) at the current one. There they stay the night in the dark warm evergreens or over the steam tunnels on campus, and crap all over everything, and then carefully wake everybody up in the morning flying off to their day jobs, back in the hinterlands, where they can get back to the important business of baiting squirrels and picking at eyeballs.
I know they talk to one another. I’ve watched them for a long time, and I hear the dinosaur in their voices more than any of their kin. They, I’m sure, are the smirking descendants of the ones that killed all the others off: the world-enders of the last time ’round.
But of course that’s just my imagination.
Tonight’s the sort of night they should be streaming across the sky. It’s chilly, but not freezing yet. Clear. Good night to find a roost in town.
I count three. I saw more than that this summer, lying dead on the lawns.
Who knows? Maybe they’ve moved off somewhere else, somewhere safer. Surely they have their folk stories of previous plagues. Maybe they’re just lurking, waiting for this West Nile Thing, or the flu they’ve heard about, to make its move and build them their next bubble economy.
I hope so.
October 18, 2005 at 6:26 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox) includes this tidbit:
Whenever you post anything to the Internet — whether on a weblog, in a discussion group, or even in an email — think about how it will look to a hiring manager in ten years. Once stuff’s out, it’s archived, cached, and indexed in many services that you might never be aware of.
A young first-year graduate student colleague asked me the other day, “Bill,” he said (they all call me by my first name, no matter how many times I correct them — how cute!), “Bill, how are you planning for the job market when you graduate?” To which the correct answer was of course, “Sonny Jim, when I graduate, I am a job market.”
Prejudice, Mr. Nielsen, does not become you. But it does help classify you. Keep up the advising, so we will know where you have been left standing.
(Via Pharyngula.)
October 18, 2005 at 12:54 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Just in case you missed it, over the course of the last six years or so: We are so fucked.
EFF reveals codes in Xerox printers:
At the Secret Service, which helps develop such technologies with other government agencies and industry, spokesman Eric Zahren said the tools are designed “simply to make it more difficult to utilize that equipment for the illegal activity of reproducing genuine U.S. currency.”
Here’s how you can read your very own Mark of The Beast. And there’s a bit more here.
(Via Nelson’s Weblog.)
October 18, 2005 at 11:11 am · Filed under Uncategorized
A little kudzu issue:
Why am I thinking of J. G. Ballard?
October 18, 2005 at 9:02 am · Filed under Uncategorized
FAL.net - Horrton Hears a Heart. (Via BoingBoing.)
October 18, 2005 at 7:32 am · Filed under Uncategorized
A Social Science of Architecture:
As such, some systematic data collection could have a considerable impact on this field. Do corridors or suites make the faculty and students produce and learn more? Does vertical circulation work as well as horizontal? Should we put faculty in close proximity to others working on the same projects or should we maximize interdisciplinary adjacencies? Which types of floor plans increase interaction? Which types of interaction produce the most knowledge created, generated, and preserved? Do we want to build buildings that encourage doors to be kept open, so as to make the faculty seem approachable or should we try to keep doors closed so that they can get work done? In this field as in most others, a great deal can be learned by directly measuring the relevant outcome variable; in architecture, quite remarkably, this has only rarely been attempted.
October 18, 2005 at 7:10 am · Filed under Uncategorized
The firewall flueless gas fire. (Via BoingBoing.)
October 18, 2005 at 7:02 am · Filed under Uncategorized
O’Reilly Radar > Patents and the Flu:
I understand the argument that intellectual property laws incent companies to invest in drug research, and that circumventing those laws could inhibit development of drugs that would ultimately save many lives. It seems absurd, though, not to have a discussion about ways to preserve Roche’s interests while providing against the possibility of a pandemic. I’m disappointed to see Leavitt’s simplistic response. More people died from influenza during the 1918-19 pandemic than died in all of World War I; I’d hope that it would not be patents that would prevent the government from protecting against a future pandemic. The tech world has good reason to complain about software patents, but in comparison, this is far more troubling.
October 17, 2005 at 11:56 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
update: A 150dpi scan of the entire page from which this detail has been taken can be seen here.
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