Oh, and I almost forgot the other video entertainment that we came up with for 6.270 lab... the 24-hour Iron Chef marathon. How great is that show? I want to be Chairman Kaga. I do not understand the Japanese.

So I won a bottle of champagne on the flight from Albuquerque to Denver for knowing that torus is a five letter word for "donut-shaped." The flight attendants thought it would be a really hard question that would take people a long time to figure out. The fact that I knew it off the top of my head left them a little bewildered. Maybe I've been hanging out with nerds for too long.

I went rock climbing the next day with Albert and Nathan and a bunch of SIPB people. I learned that I lack the strength to do a one-legged squat. This seems to be the next critical technique that I need to advance in rock climbing. All of the 5.7 and 5.8 climbs are too easy; and everything 5.9+ is impossible because I get into a situation where I have no good hand holds and one good toe hold way up by my waist, and I have to stand up on it to get a good hand.

Then, yesterday, I did 17 hours in the 6.270 lab straight. It was weird. Jess, Ehren and I rented a few kungfu movies and watched them in the lab. I highly recommend "Twin Warriors" with Jet Li. It's another Wo Ping thang and I found it a better movie than Wing Chun.

Today was the 6.270 mock contest, and it was great. In the previous two contests, we've had issues getting the controller boards out to the contestants in time and as a result there were a lot of people not very far along at this point. Last year I think there were about five moderate robots in the mock contest. This year, we had the controllers out day one, and there were twenty robots in the mock contest, 15+ of which were fully operational.

Also tonight was the Sci-Fi Marathon. I stopped by to check out the end of Ghostbusters [it's great to watch a cult classic amidst the cult], all of Hardware Wars, some great classic trailers and the new trailer for the upcoming Lord of the Rings, and then a bit of the 3D version of "It Came From Outer Space." Good stuff.

Well, my ten days of high-altitude, breakfast burritos, and bizzare monster work ethic are over. My flight out of Albuquerque is in six hours, and it's a two hour drive, so there really isn't much point in sleeping.

Besides, I need my requisite ass-early assy-breakfast at waffleass. Ever since the first time I flew out here and had to return a rental car at some ungodly hour, I've made wafflehouse a personal tradition. And for no good reason at all. Maybe it's just because I think it is so cute that Lukas loves wafflehouse. Anyway, it's certainly not the food.

The last ten days have been some very odd ones. A lot has happend, most of which I won't write about here for the sake of career preservation. Everything went great. I met Dimitri, liked him, made a good first impression. Don dropped what he was doing to help me out for three days, and John for ten! Everything is so productive when I'm out here, I can't wait to come back.

I'm going to try to engineer a trip out here for the beginning of April, so that I can sneak in a trip to the Trinity site, which is only open two days a year. We'll see if Molvig will let me get away with that.

There really wasn't a "weekend," per se. I've been working with John all day from when I wake up to when I go to bed. Progress is being made a frightening rate, and John is even more optimistic about the coolness of the project than I am.

Kim appeared magically in my cube today; I didn't even realize he was in town. He seems pretty optimistic about my suggested thesis project as well. He was not awed by the implicit adaptive mesh as I was, and seems to think that it's not really any different than standard AMR. Hopefully before he leaves on Thursday the combined powers of Me, John, and Dimitri can convince him to turn away from the dark side.

There is significant talk about having me stay here longer. This is good in all ways except it would mean I couldn't have Ethan formerly of Ojamoj on my radio show Wednesday, and I'd miss another segment of Junkyard Wars. Oh well. We'll see what happens. I'm absorbing information like crazy here and I really just enjoy being here. But if I don't get home sometime soon, the 6.270 organizers are going to defenestrate me.

Well as much as Dimitri impressed me when I met him two days ago, today I got to spend the whole day talking with him and he just blows me away. I am so inspired.

He loves to digress and tell stories to spice up otherwise dry technical material. The weirdest story he told me was about the room I work in. I work in the high-bay of the Scyllac building, which used to house a theta-pinch fusion reactor experiment. This reactor included an enormous capacitor bank for its pulsed power needs. One day, apparently, there was an accident and someone fell into the capacitor bank.

"Aah! I guess that's probably a zero percent chance of survival type of event, right?" I said.

"Oh no," he replies, "there was nothing left. He was totally vaporized."

SO... some poor guy was totally vaporized when he fell into the capacitor bank in the room where I work. That's not one you hear everyday...

So here are some pictures of the snow yesterday. First, a picture out my window of my rental car. Next is a picture of the parking lot at noon, after they declared a snow day. Compare that one to this one, which was taken in the same place, almost exactly one year ago. Finally, here's what the one hour, mile-long drive home looked like. The only thing moving in that picture is the snowflakes.

From the office of the division secretary:

"The Director is closing the Laboratory at noon today. Please take care driving home."

SNOW DAY!! It's really coming down out there. I guess maybe the work will begin in ernest tomorrow.

OK so yesterday was a long day. It started at 3AM EST for some reason. Anyway, here's the stream of consciousness recap:

I love standing there in government center seeing the blue train pull up with it's "WONDERLAND" banner on top, because it means that I'm going to the airport and it makes me feel like I'm going on some magical adventure. Taking off in the rain is so great. The jet exhaust does really awesome things to the standing water on the runway, and then you're in the sensory deprivation cloud for several minutes, only to gradually break through and realize that every day is blue skies at 30,000 feet. And clouds are always so beautiful from on top. I love flying.

I spent the flight reading from Dimitri's book about steady shock waves. They served me a "breakfast burrito" which was some sort of sick joke reminding me that I wouldn't be in Los Alamos until after Chiliworks had closed. Yuck. Unfortunately, I was on the wrong side of the plane to see the mountains as I landed in the new Denver airport. But I did see some really interesting ground texture over Nebraska of all places. The crop rotation zones and irrigation circles had blowing snow on them an had accumulated a sort of chiaroscuro effect, making each little section of land appear to be at a different elevation. I took a couple pictures of it. But I need to do some work on them for the effect to come out.

Denver airport is cool from the outside, our plane taxied right by the main water cooling towers. Reminded me of the ones at Harvard, only much larger. The one-hour flight to Albuquerque was much more enjoyable, as I was sitting next to a woman who ended up being a post-doc in atmospheric sciences on her way to a conference. She had done particle physics research as a grad student and caught me reading the rad-hydro book. We had a great discussion and the trip was over in no time. My bag was the first one off the carousel.

Today's rental car: The cherry red ford focus. CD player, freshly washed.

I drove straight to Sandia peak and paid my $14 to go up the tramway and look around. Unfortunately, in the winter the tram is clogged with ski/snowboarder people and it was much less serene than I was hoping for. Also, there wasn't very much snow at all, even at the top. But it was still a great view and very relaxing.

On the road again, I drove up to Los Alamos in record time, arriving an hour and a half before I was supposed to meet John. So I drove around the city, saw the burn damage and how they had leveled most of the dead houses and trees. They're starting to rebuild slowly. I went by TA-55 and saw the landmines and the guard tower and the triple-razor wire. I don't know why I like looking at that facility. I drove to White Rock and went to the overlook, which was completely empty and peaceful. I was too late for the sunset, but it was still fantastic.

Returning to John's, I found him there and with a new car! His new car is way nicer than his crapulent Bronco. Luckily, though, he hadn't thrown the Bronco away. The apartment was pretty much as I left it. In fact, there were still things on the phone message pad in my handwriting. He had accumulated a bunch of mail for me, including four Megaball donations! I forgot to change the address back to Boston!

The two of us went out to meet Dimitri at the Central Ave. Grill. Dimitri, as it turns out, is the single coolest guy ever. I was worried that he would have a stiff upper lip and not be any fun, but he is great. His hair is longer than mine, he's very laid back but gives off this aura of genius. The three of us had a long discussion of various lab projects, my standing, my clearance, my future, etc. Very good things happened. And just by meeting him I'm so incredibly inspired to work like a maniac for him. This is such a good thing. Tomorrow the work starts in ernest.

So, two hours and I haul my arse to the airport for a fun and exciting five-hour flight to Denver. I don't think I've ever been to the Denver airport before, certainly not the new one. If I'm lucky I'll get some good aeriel photography of the rockies.

Then it's on to Albuquerque, where, if I'm lucky, I'll get some good land-based photography of fighter jets and what-not. I arrive at 1:30 local time, and I don't have to be in Los Alamos until 6:30, so I think I may go up on top of Sandia Peak again. I've only been up there once and never when it was snowy.

Time to pack the 'puter.

My sleep schedule is all messed up and I'm supposed to be getting on a plane for Los Alamos bright and early Monday morning. Ugh.

6.270 is so much farther along this year than it was last year. I saw people with complete robot chassis running around under autonomous control today, and it's just the end of the first week. Last year, we didn't even get the boards out until 3 weeks into the contest.

The mystery hunt: I tried to solve some of the problems last year while I was in Los Alamos, but couldn't make heads or tales of any of them. This evening I stopped by the Tetazoo team hangout and helped them solve one problem. There were about 40 people there, most of whom had been working steady for the last 30+ hours. Those questions are ludicrously difficult.

We came in second. Congratulations to Setec Astronomy, they won. Way to go Albert.

Whoa! The water has been off in the apartment since midnight, and they just turned it back on...

...and the toilet started screaming. It's not something you hear everyday.

Tales of the Weird Shipping...

Ever order two things from the same place that are shipped separately but via the same service on the same day, only to have them take widely disperate amounts of time to arrive?

Ever order two things from the same place and have them shipped on the same day but they arrive by different carriers?

Anyway, so I ordered a bunch of stuff from Amazon a while back and it's slowly trickling in. I have learned that UPS is both faster and slower than US Mail. If you're ordering Volumen, you had better use US Mail. However, don't use US Mail for Everything, Everything; Mine is still in the nether regions somewhere. UPS does a good job delivering the Beastie Boys Video Anthology but a rotten job with books.

Speaking of the Beasie Boys video anthology, or the "Beasties Boy" as my chump-ass roommate referred to them earlier, it is really a fine product. I thought I'd give this whole "music video DVD" thing a shot so I ordered the three linked above. The Bjork disk is good in the sense that it is 15 great songs and all the videos are wonderful, but that's all it is. Precisely zero additional features. The Beasties Boy DVD has 18 songs, 40 remixes, audio commentary by the band and the directors including my boy Spike Jonze, some humorous alternative angle stuff, interviews, storyboards, still photos (some also by Spike Jonze!), some additional short stuff and a free poster.

And god damn that "Alive" video is hillarious.

Available starting today on Amazon, Jackie Chan: My Stunts. It looks like a big extended remix of all the outtakes that generally come during the credits of his movies.

Hey, we finished the rail assembly. I'm feeling down. My body is all messed up. I needed something to cheer my up. It sorta worked.

This robot, Mechadon, is one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. I am instantly Mark Setrakian's biggest fan and basically in awe of everything Team Sinister does. I remember seeing one of their other robots, The Master, on RobotWars 1996 and thinking it was a really clever design.

Oh dear, now this is embarrassing...

When the clock struck midnight, January 1, 2001, I was playing Super Mariokart with my roommate Tong. That's somewhat less exciting than last year's lightsuit fiesta...

The good news is that I won, via a triumphant use of the lightning bolt. So I guess that's sorta festive...

OK, now everything is better. I was feeling bad about my lack of a cool new year's event... so I got myself engaged in a high-level math discussion with Tong's math department grad student friends.

Holy crap, these guys are thinking on another plane of existance. I am struggling to wrap my measily brain around the concepts they're throwing around. My brain hurts. But here's a good logic puzzle that we just went over:

There are two integers, greater than one, A and B. Mr. Sum knows the value of S=A+B, Mr. Product knows the value of P=A*B. The following conversation ensues:

Mr. Sum: You cannot know what A and B are.

Mr. Product: OK, I now know the value of A and B.

Based on this dialogue, what are the smallest possible values for A and B? Bonus Question: Is there a unique solution for A and B?

This may seem like a silly question, but the math required to reach the solution just floored me. I am in awe of this question.