Thumbs up to Newark Electronics. I just placed an order for some ICs and I put the wrong expiration date on my credit card form. They promptly called me to resolve the problem and got the order on its way. Plus, they sent me a free catalog and it's huge! They sell everything.

A partial thumbs down for waking me up with the call... but how would they know that I like to be asleep at 3pm?

Did you know that the speed of light in a vaccum, c, has an exact value? It does. It is not subject to uncertainty or the accuracy of some empirical measurement. It is exactly 299,792.458 km/s.

This guy [link rottten] would have you believe that this stems from a seemingly arbitrary definition of what a meter is. I think he is wrong, and I'm going to proove it. The exact meter was based on the exact value of c, not vice versa. I think the exact value for c is based on the exact definitions of the permmitivity and permissivity of free space, and Maxwell's equations.

I find it odd that you can't find a good discussion of the exact speed of light anywhere on the web or in any of my physics texts. But I'm pretty sure I'm right.

Give me a few days, and I'll prove it. Really. I will, I think.

For at least a few years, my copy of Gleik's biography of Richard Feynman has been sitting on my bookshelf, unread. I'm not sure when I bought the book, but I'm certain that I never actually sat down and read it.

I went over to Rob's place and found him in the midst of his obsession, working with locks. His entire bed and desk were covered with cylinders, cores, springs, pins, keys, blanks, frobs, files, sidebars, and all manner of ameateur locksmith tools. Inspired, I returned home and examined my meager collection of lock goodies - which happen to be on the shelf just above the Feynman book.

With my one-track mind currently on the locksmithing track, the red spine of the Feynman book led to the following train of thought: Genius -> Feynman -> Safe Cracking. Richard Feynman was fanatical about locks. In particular, he liked to open high-security safes just to mess with people's heads. I picked up the book and looked up safe cracking in the index.

The short passage was mostly common Feynman knowledge, but the next passage caught my eye. It was his description of driving down the mesa from Los Alamos towards Santa Fe. It occurred to me that there are a number of odd similarities between my life and Feynman (ignore for the moment that, in comparison, I am a complete and total ignoramus). We both were students at MIT, we both hold degrees in physics, we both are into locksmithing, we both tinkered with tube radios as kids, and we both worked for Los Alamos in the weapons division. Granted, he plays the bongos, has a Nobel Prize, is a genius, and is basically... better at everything. But aside from that...

I found his description of the view driving out of Los Alamos to be remarkably similar to my own:

"Across the desert spotted with pale green bristles, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains rose like luminous cutouts thirty miles to the east, as bright as if they were a few city blocks away. The air was clearer than any Feynman had seen. The scenery left emotional fingerprints on many of the Easterners and Europeans who lived in its spell for two years. When it snowed, the shades of whiteness seemed impossibly rich. Feynman reveled in the clouds skimming low across the valley, the mountains visible above and below the clouds at once, the velvet glow of cloud-diffused moonlight. The sight stirred something within the most rational of minds."

Maybe that doesn't seem so profound to people that haven't been there. But for the same reasons that Feynman was tickled about having developed "an aesthetic sense" as a result of having lived there, I have come to realize that the southwest is the most intrinsicly beautiful region I've ever been to.

So my thanksgiving was somewhat less than profound. I sat around eating velveeta shells & cheese (w/ tuna) by myself. To top that, I spent the next day watching and taping the 9-hour Junkyard Wars marathon. Yeah. I am a party animal. Let's see... moving on... yesterday I basically slept a lot and then made up a components list for an electronics project I plan to build. Today, I did nothing at all.

What a completely boring and unproductive long weekend. And why am I telling you this? And why are you reading about it? I have no idea. I just don't want to fall into the groove of not posting here, and I really have nothing at all to talk about. My weekend was lame. Now I'm looking at an all-nighter to catch up on the research and classwork that I should have done.

"I can't find my frob and there's cruft all over me."

OK, so Junkyard Wars is pretty cool. TLC hosted a sneak preview of one of the third season semi-final competitions, featuring the sole American team, one of which is an MIT grad. And, bonus, he spent 10 years working with Survival Research Laboratories, which blows my mind. Oh and he has cool glasses and is cute and I want one.

We got to watch the show, in which "The N.E.R.D.S." built a steam-powered car from junk and then raced it against a British team (and won). It was pretty exciting. Watching it with an MIT crowd was definitely a plus. I want to do extreme robotics...

Another late evening... no, wait, it's 7:00am. And I'm nocturnal again. I got up at 3:00pm yesterday and this sort of behavior has been a habit as of late. I go to bed after class and a research meeting, I get up for dinner and then do my homework at night.

At 5:40am I bought coffee for a homeless man called Maurice. He and I hung out in front of Dunkin Donuts for awhile. Really nice guy.

So the sun just came up and I've been awake for 16 hours. Here's my dilema:

Peter is in town visiting some friends for the weekend. Rob, Z, Hani, Peter, and I are going out to do some exploring this evening starting at 10pm. That's 15 hours from now and will run for at least four hours.

Mars Week starts today and runs from 7pm to 10pm. I paid money to register for this, so I should probably go.

The Legend of Drunken Master opens today and I really really want to go see it while it has a fun crowd. The only opportunity to see it today is the 2:40 showing out in Alewife, which means leaving at 2:00 and getting back at 5:00pm.

SO... I either stay up from yesterday at 3pm to tomorrow morning at 2-4am (~36 hours) or I ditch drunken master. I guess I'll have to watch it next week. I've got the DVD on order anyway.

So this guy I know in Virginia, his phone number is 4-WAY-LUS(t). We always joke about it. Now I've stumbled upon Phonespell.org which will find stuff like this for you.

My phone number, unfortunately isn't anything but gibberish. But my office number is Alf-Toast!!

The Harvard-Yale hack. Outcome: partial success.

After working on constructing the balloons, beavers, detonators, and control electronics for nine hours friday, I went at 11:00am yesterday for the deploy. We did some final prep work and integration tests, then got ready to transport everything to Harvard.

We were hoping to launch just before halftime, but by the time we were ready to load the balloons into the cars, it was already the third quarter. The first three cars held three balloons and four people. I was assigned as the central balloon wrangler, so I went in the first car. We had lots of fake "Harvard Mars Week 2000" fliers, and we were handing them out and talking to people about the non-existant upcoming conference.

Fortuitously, the perfect place to launch from (upwind of the stadium) was right where the tailgate party was taking place. We were surrounded by very very drunk Harvard jocks who could care less about some dorks with big mylar balloons talking about Mars. Also, the Harvard cops generally stay away from the tailgate party to avoid busting 90% of the undergraduate population for underage drinking.

It took forever for the next car load to arrive. With only four minutes left in the game, we finally got the last balloon on site. As quickly as possible, we attached each balloon to the central maillon and taped a detonator deflator to it. The deflator wires were attached to the electronics box, which, in turn, was attached to the beaver bag. We stripped off the false front panels on each balloon, removing the Harvard "H" and revealing the letters "MIT."

Stan made a call to Jeremy, who was inside the stadium, to get the all-clear for launch... and off it went. There was an amazing amoung of wind, and the giant mass of balloons promptly accelerated to about 25 miles per hour. It worked perfectly. It went straight for the stadium and was about 100' over the wall when it reached the edge.

After a moment, Jeremy sent the release code to the balloon and the shape of the beaver bag changed as a single beaver popped out. It's parachute opened and it glided down into the stadium. Everyone cheered. The drunk Harvards were confused.

The rest of the beavers seemed to be stuck in the bag and we were getting a little anxious that all of this effort would only lead to one beaver being dropped. But after another 10 seconds or so, the bag decided to release the remaining 11 beavers which all came down in a huge flotilla. It was great.

The detonator code was then sent to the balloon and several of the balloons were flattened as the wind pushed the helium out of the freshly burned holes. We didn't want the electronics package to come hurtling down on someone, so we left one balloon with no deflator. Unfortunately, we underestimated the bouyancy of a single balloon and, despite carrying 7 empty balloons and the electronics package, it continued its meteoric rise into the sky, clearly traveling away from us at high speeds.

Several of us walked around the stadium to see if there was any sign of the beavers. We ran into Jeremy and he told us what it looked like from inside. The first beaver was right on target, landing right in the crowd. The remaining beavers dropped just on the far side of the far wall, probably in the street. By the time the first beaver had dropped, the game had been over for about 10 seconds. He says no one was paying any attention to it.

We saw what might have been the parachute from the first beaver sitting in the stands; there was no sign of the other beavers. This probably means that someone picked them up, and that's just fine. We all walked back to Nick's place and watched the video that Jeremy's girlfriend had shot of the event. Unfortunately, her camera proficiency left a bit to be desired.

When the balloon first comes over the edge of the stadium, there's a great shot if it. Then, just as it drops the first beaver, the camera goes crazy. I guess she was excited. Then she zooms in on the beaver bag and watches it until the remaining beavers drop, at which point she loses it again and that's all we see. But it's still a really cool video, to see this big ass balloon come flying at high speed over the stadium. It was really moving.

We celebrated at dinner, then everyone went to sleep. We were exhausted.

Well, it's been a long two weeks without a net connection. But much to everyone's chagrin, I'm back.

So much has happened in the last two weeks that I fear I won't have time to write it all here. Perhaps the most interesting thing is that Si-fu Jeff came up from Austin and I trained for advancement in Wing Tsun. I'm now student grade one. Somewhere around here I have an entry that I wrote about the experience that I intend to transcribe into this blog, so you'll have to wait to hear more.

The other significant item is the Harvard-Yale football game hack. It's today, and I'm on my way to deploy it in one hour. We're airdropping 17 large stuffed beavers wearing MIT shirts from a giant mylar balloon, hopefully right into the crowd. They've got little cute parachutes and everything. I give it one chance in ten of working at all. Wish me luck.

I'm reading through some notes my advisor gave me on expanding the phase space density about local thermal equilibrium when I come across a portion in which he uses the phrase:

"...a veritable orgy of tensor algebra..."

I have nothing to add to that which will make it any more funny.

What's going on? Jesse left yesterday afternoon, by now he's back in Munich. Yuri, Bill, and Sergei left yesterday morning, by tomorrow they'll be aboard their new home (and dig that new spaceflight design...).

I reinstalled linux 6.2 on wanker yesterday, after a rogue FTP process brought the /home partition to its knees. ugh.

Oh, and of course, I didn't get paid. Cashier's office had no check. Payroll said there was no money in my account. Molvig wasn't in. His secretary sent me to Linda. Linda sent me to Dorian (hubba hubba). Dorian sent me to Clare. Clare wasn't in. After emailing Clare and Molvig, something finally happened and now I have money in my account. They'll cut me a check tomorrow and I won't be broke. Until then, I have exactly $9 to my name.

[it appears that a post that should be here somehow never got into the blogger database, so i'm rewriting it to the best of my memory]

As the age-old addage goes, if it's not MIT payroll, it's AT&T legal.

I finally got ahold of MIT payroll this morning and got them to agree to cut me a check tomorrow. This is good because right now I'm stealing food from my roommates to survive.

But then, when I got home from my research meeting, I found my cable modem service not working for the umteenth time this month and a message from some guy at AT&T computer security. He tells me that my service has been suspended because some (4) educational institutions have complained of portscanning from my computer.

I explained that I had detected the intruder yesterday and had reinstalled the whole computer, just to be safe. He tells me I can't have my service back unless I can produce logs to prove that there was a security breach on my machine. But, of course, the logs were detroyed when I repartitioned the harddrive.

I am so very very annoyed... I don't understand what kind of policy would require me to keep my machine in a rooted state. Makes no sense; I hate AT&T. If I could find another service provider for my neighborhood, I'd be defecting as we speak. But no such luck, I have to call their legal department to appeal their decision to terminate my shitty service.

---- 2 hours later ----

Well... that was actually a lot less painful than I was expecting.

The AT&T legal lady was very kind, helpful, and direct. We discussed how ironic my situation was, she concluded immediately that I had done the right thing, and that was that. I have to accept a three day suspension of service so that AT&T can tell the educational institutions involved that they took action.

Oh, and they issued me... a Warning!

Which basically boils down to "don't be such a lazy jerk." If I had just plugged the security holes that I knew about when I first did the reinstall, this wouldn't have been a problem. Interesting, it seems that the bulk of the portscanning occurred Halloween night - about 12 hours before I reinstalled the box. I guess that means my response time is pretty good. Unfortunately, AT&T's is about 12 hours longer than that.

A three day suspension isn't so bad, I guess...