8-bit

The Times' Week In Review this week collected stories under the heading of "Playing Games," and they're accompanied with adorable Game-and-watch-style graphics. Actually the stories aren't all really game-related, but it was cute of them to bring them back to a theme, like in a crossword.

It's all in the curves

Driving through Beverly Hills with the windows down, I heard the driver of a passing Mercedes utter an involuntary “Whoooaahhh!” that rushed past in the slipstream. I realize that flashy new cars tend to draw an inordinate amount of attention in the first few months of their life, but Beverly Hills is about as jaded an environment as you find, and the R8 was the subject of more cellphone photos than a Lindsay Lohan-Paris Hilton bar brawl.

And when so many cars hide their motors under a plastic shroud, the R8’s overachieving 4.2 is proudly displayed under a transparent cover for all to see. You can even order twin white L.E.D. lights in the engine bay to bathe the motor in a soft glow when the parking lights are on. That’s cool.

The Times has a gushing review of the 2008 Audi R8. This beauty is like the one reason why I wouldn't want to save the environment by buying a Prius. Look at those curves! Never mind the 0-198mph in 15 seconds or whatever, that thing is just flat-out hot.

Artistic Parallels 2.0

Ellsworth Kelly - Colors for a Large Wall



vs. my own Random Color Generator



Chance shall displace decision and reason.

The Internet, it never ceases to amaze me

I Hate Cilantro

And I thought there were no other sufferers! Evil leaf! How you plague our foods so.

The Future of Aviation

Today, Marion Blakely, the current Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, gave a keynote at the Women in Science symposium. She spoke briefly about some challenges of being a woman in science, and how there will always be tradeoffs in terms of the work-family balance, but mostly she was quite positive about the issue. Then she introduced some of the changes that's going on in aviation and the FAA, and some really interesting challenges that they face:

• Technology: The tech being used today is mostly still the same as those used the 1950s. Air traffic controlling and radar are still the same. This poses a problem in terms of scale, as they expect the number of passengers to increase to 1 billion from about half that now in 2015, and as the number of small jets is increasing. The routes being used today still use a waypoint system that was developed in the 1950s to help deliver mail. In order to reroute to increase efficiency and be able to bring aircraft closer together, they have to overthrow the old tech. Radar updates a plane's position every 6-12 seconds, which is not precise enough for safety. Also, pilots now have little situational awareness; they don't know of other planes near them, and rely on the air traffic controllers to tell them. The FAA is planning to move to satellite based, automated systems, with transponders on the aircraft. (Really exciting problem from a networking/systems standpoint! Reminds me of the news of the military putting a router in space. Think of the synchronization/routing/packet loss issues!)


• Growth in private flight: she mentioned the X PRIZE winner, Burt Rutan, and microjets, which are 6-seaters that are available for ~$1 million, as things to watch. Within 2 years we might see the first commercial flights into space on Virgin Galactic(a!). It's an inherently risky business, so how much should the FAA regulate it? Is this a matter of adventure sports or transportation? At least they have to insure the people on the ground are not put in danger.

• Environmental issues: Though there are new propulsion systems available that are energy efficient, commercial liners are replaced every 20-25 years, and general aviation who knows when, so one can't hope for great changes in that direction soon. However she said they were investigating using alternative fuels, from a safety standpoint as well. And she mentioned how changes in the flight operation can be a big change: usually on descent, planes will dive to a certain altitude, stop, dive again, stop, which requires a lot of restarting of the engines. She saw in Louisville, UPS had coordinated their planes to descend smoothly, such that all the planes were evenly spaced going down and timed perfectly. It decreased emissions by 30% and also the noise level below a certain altitude.


• Private sector spurring change: helicopters flying in the Gulf of Mexico to oil rigs charged a lot for extra safety measures. They installed transponders on the craft and ground stations on the rigs. Now aircraft flying over that area also want to take advantage of those ground stations to plan better routes.


• Safety: right now it's the safest time ever to fly. The most dangerous part of a flight is the trip to the airport. In terms of security from human factors, they're working on reducing the delay from the sidewalk to boarding to 30 minutes.

There were some other points about the economics of paying for all this, how in the U.S. has a tax on the tickets when most other countries have fees, but I can't recall the specifics. Her presentation was great though, very informative and delivered very competently, in a comforting Southern drawl. It seems you get to learn about a lot of fields in aviation, as she talked about how the air currents in the U.S. are particularly difficult so lead to more delays, to the new Boeing aircraft that's coming out, to issues of policy and organization.

The Future of Energy (is much like the present)

Yesterday, Vaclav Smil, professor at University of Manitoba and prolific writer about energy, spoke at the Future of Energy Series here. His talk was titled "Transforming Energy Techniques," but he mainly discussed how energy techniques are not going to be changing anytime soon. He said it was a historical lecture, and those types of lectures are not given enough about energy, since in the media one usually just hears about new technologies all the time. (He also disliked using the word "technology"; "techniques" are what should be focused on). He was quite exciting and fun to watch. Here're notes:

• The three major "prime movers" on our planet today, the steam turbine, the car, and the electric motor, were all developed in the 1880s, and their basic technology has fundamentally not changed since then. We may have more efficient versions of them, but if the engineers who invented them saw them today, they'd be able to recognize the components. The only modern invention that's comparably important is the gas turbine from the 1930s.


• So, new technologies have not spread. Prime movers capture the market slowly, but stay there for a very long time.


• Same is true for sources of energy: oil only surpassed coal as the main source in the U.S. in 1964. In the 20th century the U.S. used as much coal as oil.


• Before coal, wood was the main source of energy, and for 1 billion people today it still is. The U.S. only switched from wood to coal in the 1880s, in China in the 1960s. Techniques become embedded in society and stay there.


• Once a technique is in place, infrastructure builds up around them. There's tons of investment already in refineries, mines, oil fields, gas lines, etc., that one can't just decide to switch to something else in 5 years, or even in 20 years. He mentioned huge circles of natural gas line pipes that run from Western Siberia, to France to Britain, through Spain back to the Mediterranean to Turkey and Bosnia. These lines would be useless if they didn't have something to pump through them. Change can happen, but it will happen on the order of generations.

• It takes a long time to get high performance. Two other historical examples: people only conquered famine in the 19th century; horses: a good harness only came around for them 1000 years ago, and only in the 19th century did people figure out how to feed them properly.


• Stats on world energy consumption: Subsaharan Africa uses ~5 gigajoules/year, India ~15, China 40, European countries 100-130, Japan 170, U.S. 340


• Energy in China: instead of competing with Japan, China wants to compete with the U.S. So instead of building bullet trains across the country, they put down 6-lane highways.
  
  In the 1980s, they experienced one of the largest housing booms in history. All the buildings though had concrete walls. Concrete is a terrible insulator of heat, and no one had fiberglass + wood, or triple windows.


• Asked if he thought there was any new technology that he thought could catch on, he emphasized that the major problem was scale. Wind turbines only produce 2-3 megawatts each, so the Chinese just plop down a 600 megawatt coal plant instead. The electric car hasn't passed that test, that of having millions of them run for a decade. The internal combustion engine has passed that test. Also he mentioned how if everyone started driving electric cars tomorrow, then we'd have huge drainage of the electrical networks at various intervals of the day as people recharged them, and where would that energy come from? So, he didn't really suggest any potential new energy source/technology.


• He mentioned that he optimized his house so it uses 1/12 of the energy of his neighbors, but this would not catch on in the developed world, because we are a culture of consumption. If we save money, we'll use it to take a plane to Las Vegas or buy a new car. 30% of the houses in the U.S. are custom built, and the average size of those houses are 5300 square feet. So we can't save energy through houses if we need 200 lights to light our homes. The U.S. has a "Texas mentality" and no one is going to opt for voluntary limits on consumption.

So overall, a kind of pessimistic but realistic view on energy. I guess those flying wind turbines won't be a viable solution yet.

Parallels Redux

..because the last one was so much fun!

This time we're doin' it New York style:

Koyaanisqatsi:


GTA IV:


(via city of sound)

Artistic Parallels

Some finds from working on my art paper:

Jeff Wall, A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai):


Hokusai, from 36 Views of Mount Fuji:


Cezanne's vision (from Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Sense and Non-Sense):

In Le Peau de chagrin Balzac describes a "tablecloth white as a layer of newly fallen snow, upon which the place-settings rise symmetrically, crowned with blond rolls." "All through youth," said Cezanne, "I wanted to paint that, that tablecloth of new snow...Now I know that one must will only to paint the place-settings rising symmetrically and the blond rolls. If I paint 'crowned' I've had it, you understand? But if I really balance and shade my place-settings and rolls as they are in nature, then you can be sure that the crowns, the snow, and all the excitement will be there too."

Finally, some similarities between the Van Gogh Portrait of Pere Tanguy and the walls in my room:


Percentage of paper written: 0%
Van Gogh appreciation: 60%