So you may recall that my dad had some heart surgery recently. The cause was a faulty valve and there was some chance that it was hereditary, so I went in yesterday and got a echocardiogram. Basically it's a ultrasound of my heart.

It's a boy?

On the screen, with everything moving and wiggling and valving and what-not, it was pretty clear what I was looking it. The still-frame, unfortunately, is more or less worthless. Apparently, as you can see in the lower-left, I have a good half of the Triforce. This bodes well for my health. I think what we're looking at here is the cockles of my heart, but it could just as easily be the surface of titan.

Yeah so the ultrasound was cool to watch, not much good on paper. But what they do is draw a line that goes through and perpendicular to one of your valves, then draw a waterfall display of how the features along that line evolve over time. It looks like this:

Basically, that's fluid velocity (derived from Doppler shift) on the Y axis and time on the X. The area under a peak tells you about the amount of fluid that came through a valve during that portion of the rhythm. I think the "hollow" peaks are a result of bi-directional flow around a closing valve (sort of like when you slam a door in a closed room—the door pushes most of the air in the direction the door is moving, but some air rapidly rushes around the edges back into the room to fill the rarefaction behind the door. Boyle's Law or some crap). Here's another one, this time of a different valve:

One of the cool parts of this procedure is that they convert these waterfall charts to audio in realtime, so when you see a peak you hear something that could be construed as the sound of the valve. It's not really; it's actually the fluid velocity represented as frequency. But the sound is awesome. Kinda eerie. And those sharp peaks, they sounded exactly like someone cracking a whip. I like to think that somewhere in the sub-cockles region, a little tiny Indiana Jones is escaping from a pit of snakes. Asps. Very dangerous.

Anyway, the short version of all of this is that a trained cardiologist using the Sonom 5500 couldn't find any sign of any defect with my heart. It appeared highly normal and I won't have any surprise aneurysms.

And I have an aeortic root diameter of over 3cm. I'm no Lance Armstrong, but I don't have to worry that mountaineering might make my chest explode or something.

I actually have travel arrangements now for my trip to Kazakhstan. I don't think they're final, as they've changed a couple times already... but the dates are starting to look more-or-less set in stone. I'll be leaving on October 15th and returning on November 1st. Hrm... looks like I'll be spending Halloween in Almaty, Kazakhstan. The flight home leaves there at 1:40am local time, November 1st. Not sure if they're into the whole halloween routine there or not. But regardless, I'll be wearing my Capitalist Devil costume.

Yeah so if things don't get rearranged again, the flights will go something like this:

Albuquerque -> Denver (1.25 hours)
Denver -> Frankfurt (9.25 hours)
Frankfurt -> Almaty (6.5 hours)
Almaty -> Aktow (3.5 hours)

Aktow -> Almaty (3 hours)
Almaty -> Astana (1.5 hours)
Astana -> Frankfurt (6.2 hours)
Frankfurt -> Dallas (11 hours)
Dallas -> Albuquerque (2 hours)

And no, not every major city in Kazakhstan begins with an "A." But most do.

Here's something really reassuring: DOE considers trips of this magnitude in economy class to be a health/safety risk and allows us to upgrade our tickets to business class on the company dime if the duration of flight is above some threshold (which this trip, with 44 hours of flight, certainly qualifies for). However, if the move to business class is too expensive, then DOE can choose to deny the upgrade. Which they did for us. So... it's a health risk, but it's too expensive to alleviate the risk. Thanks, DOE. (it's an $8000 increase per person to upgrade this itinerary to business class, btw)

But the good news is this: because flights from Frankfurt to Almaty don't happen every day, we ended up having to leave a day earlier than planned, which will strand us in Almaty for a day. Mike and I have already decreed that this day will be spent hiking in the Himalaya. Here's a view of the "foothills" of the Himalaya as seen from Almaty:

Oh yeah. Those peaks are as high as 7000 meters (23,000').

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The APS receives so many abstarcts for their huge annual conference that they cannot afford to peer review them. As a result, all submitted abstracts are published in the conference proceedings—including this:

Tisk tisk on LANL for ignorning this genius...

Rob Coker found this in the APS conference manual while he was attending (in Denver, I think), and showed it to me at work the following week. I had always meant to scan it and display it here, but the idea was lost in Thesis Madness™. Thanks to Nina for finding it again and sending it my way!

Oh, and here's the organization that he belongs to: The Orion Foundation. Chock full 'o pseudoscience. My favorite part is the proof of censorship by LANL's arXiv staff. The Cliff's Notes version goes like this:

LANL: You submitted your paper in 10 parts; please submit it as one part.

GENTRY: Here it is in 10 parts again.

LANL: You're being a rube; we're suspending your account.

GENTRY: You're repressing me!

LANL: Feel free to submit your paper as one document and we'll add it to the archive.

GENTRY: You're repressing me!

LANL: Sorry, so much time has passed that we passed the arXiv project on to Cornell University. Please go bother them and leave us alone, you boob.

-----------------------
UPDATE: Turns out The Orion Foundation and its "sister site," halos.com, are both wholly-owned subsidiaries of... Robert V. Gentry. What a surprise. Check out this in-depth analysis of Gentry's arguments concerning "polonium radiohalos."

Ladies and Gentlemen:

The as-of-yet-unnamed ultra-cuteus.

Check out his weird eyebrow whiskers! There are, in fact, eyebrow whiskers on the his left side... they're just black. Personally, I think he's related to this guy from ST:TOS: :: : : : : :

I think this guy is Bene, but Lokai's color pattern is the one that matches the cat.

But enough of that crap... more cat photos! (click on any photo to see the whole gallery)

Looking small and fragile.

Not everyone in the house was happy about the new arrival.

Fou is acting like quite the diva.

RA!!

Yeah so I was thinking about getting a ragdoll purebreed from this woman in town who is a breeder, but she was dragging her ass. So I decided that it would probably be better to adopt a cat from one of the shelters in the area since this means that I'd be saving its life and I could get a kitten for only $60 instead of $600.

Today I drove down to Espanola and checked out their selection. There was a really affectionate orange cat that I picked out first but it turned out that he had been adopted earlier this morning so I had to pick a different one. I let a bunch of the smallest kittens out of the cages and let them run around. This guy was the fiestiest and most playful. He also happens to be really affectionate.

He's 9 weeks old, freshly neutered, healthy, and exceptionally cute. He's a little farty... but maybe that's just because of the lame food they give the cats at the shelter. Kitty!

Speaking of which, he needs a name. Some names that have been suggested:

* The Flatulator
* Bumble Ward (reference to a Kevin Smither interview we were watching)
* Boötes (it's a constellation known as "The Bear Watcher" and Fou is about the size of a bear... and it has the adorable abbreviation "Boo"... and he's got a sorta white boots coloration pattern... and hey... diaeresis!!)

By all means, contribute suggestions here. The official name will not be chosen at least until Dan has time to get back from Spain and make some smartass remarks here.

Anyway, so the big question is whether or not the Fou and this guy will get along. So far, Fou has acted like a big prissy bitch and seems to be rather offended at the new cat's presence. They don't fight, but Fou runs away from him and doesn't accept petting from anyone if the other cat is around. Hopefully in a day or two they'll be hanging out and what-not.

Just as a bonus, I happened to get a really good picture of the Fou today too:

The following is included largely as a result of Robin's repeated references to the "Pig Truck Incident" in Cryptonomicon and because I know you all love scatological jocoseness.

Whereas I might have said, "The driver honked his horn loudly as he attempted to pass a truck full of pigs. The pig truck swerved and I got sprayed with pig shit," Neal Stephenson would say:

The primary horn of THE GRACE OF GOD was apparently going unheard, possibly because it it was competing for audio bandwidth against large numbers of swine voicing their displeasure in same frequency range. With aplomb normally seen only among senescent English butlers, Bong-Bong reached up with his horn/gearshift hand and gripped a brilliant stanless-steel chain flaining from the ceiling of cab with a stainless-steel crucifix on the end of it and jerked downwards, energizing the sceondary, tertiary, and quaternary honking systems: a trio of tuba-sized stainless-steel horns mounted to the roof of THE GRACE OF GOD and collectively drawing so much power that our vehicle's speed dropped by (I would estimate) ten km/hr as its energies were diverted into decibel production. A demi-hyperbolic swath of agricultural crops twenty miles long was flattened to the ground by the blast, and, hundreds of miles north, the Taiwanese government, its collective ears still ringing, filed a diplomatic protest with the Philippine ambassador. Dead whales and dolphins washed ashore on the beaches of Luzon for days, and sonar operators in passing U.S. Navy submarines were sent into early retirement with blood streaming from their ears.

Terrified by this sound, all of the pigs (I would suppose) voided their bowels just as the driver of the Pig Truck swerved violently away from us. Certain first-year-physics conservation-of-momentum issues dictated that I be showered with former pig bowel contents in order to enhance shareholder value.

Another passage that I found amusing came shortly afterwards, and I'll include it here as a bonus—though it contains nothing about butts, poo, or hyperbolas (sorry).

We then covered an amount of distance equivalent, in terms of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt, to one more Lewis and Clark Expedition Day, a convenient unit of distance, danger, perspirational weight loss, poor sphincter control [Ed: Ok, so butts.], wishing you were at home, exasperation, & emotional toll which I will hereinafter abbreviate as LAC.

As these two passages both fall within what is by far the most odd chapter of the book thus far, I thought perhaps you'd like to read it to gain a bit of perspective. (And yes, that site has the entire book online for those of you who relish the idea of reading a 1150 page book on the screen of your laptop.)

So today I had my first appointment for getting the medical folks at the lab to sign off on my readiness for international travel. For starters, I had to get up to date on my immunizations, which I haven't really had any of since 1991. For travel to Russia and Kazakhstan, Occ. Med. recommends that I get immunized against Typhoid Fever, Hepatitis A, Hepatitis B, Tetnus, and Diphtheria. These all come in the form of shots.

Now I'm not a big fan of needles and I distinctly remember once, as a small kid, having to be strapped down on a guerney before they could give me a shot on account of my attempts to punch the doctor. Today was somewhat less dramatic. As usual, I made jokes with the nurses to calm my nerves and the lady at the reception desk promised to give me a lollypop if I didn't scream. When it came time to actually get the shots, the first one happened before I realized it. It literally was painless. It was sensationless to the point that I thought she was kidding when she said it was over. I am amazed at the extent to which medical technology has advanced since 1991. The nurse said that the reduction in pain is because they are now able to make much sharper and thinner needles. All but one of the shots was totally sensation free. The last one contained a compound that stung a little bit, but nothing that would make me flinch or wince or any of that. I basically was in awe of the benevolence of the entire process.

All of the shots have possible side effects that don't sound too exciting, so we'll see if I suddenly feel like ass over the coming hours/days. But for now I feel awesome and... immune.

The Occ. Med. people also gave me a huge amount of stuff to bring with me on travel. My favorite is a laminated fold-out that has pictures of various things I might need to communicate across a language barrier:

So cool.

They also gave me Cetafen (aches), Cepacol (sore throat), Proprinal (pains), Sudafed (congestion), Pepto-Bismol (nausea/leaky ass), Loperamide (leaky ass), Ciprofloxacin (really leaky ass), Zolpidem (knock-your-ass-out), as well as an assortment of bandaids, bandages, and alcohol wipes.

Concerning the Zolpidem (also known as Ambien): it is a prescription-strength sleep aid for people who need to shift their schedules by ~12 hours in basically one day. They said, "if you take it during a flight, be sure that you have at least 8 hours before you have to get off the plane. We had one guy take it 4 hours before he arrived and he was basically in a coma when they landed." Sweet.

So I'm reading Brent's comments on the new Nintendo controller...

Buh?

...and I can't help but feel that it is somehow reminiscent of the Rez vibrator.

Nintendo: Not just for kids anymore.

But in all seriousness... the concept of a 3D orientation sensor for input is pretty intriguing. Just think... now they could make a PowerGlove that was actually cool and, you know... worked. This, in turn, could lead to a remake of The Wizard. So. Bad.

So a Life Gem can cost as much as $20,000. And that seems pretty steep. I'm thinking I'll open a budget outfit that, instead of harvesting carbon from the creamated remains of your loved ones and forming it into a diamond, I'll turn it into graphite and make you a pencil. It would be much cheaper, and more useful. You could... I dunno... write something nice about them.

Nina and I went on a hike on Sunday out on the mesa past the airport. I took a bunch of pictures of flowers.

Click the photo to see more.

Bob switched our DSL provider and in the process brought us from 640kb/s to 3Mb/s incoming bandwidth and from 240kb/s to 384kb/s outwards. So a much fatter pipe. Also, no more 2GB/month cap. Sweet.

He also bought nerdhouse.org, though we don't have anything up there yet other than the mousercam image.

Speaking of Mousercam, I updated it somewhat. For starters, it is now in the arcade cabinet rather than on my workstation. I figure the faces people make while playing arcade games should be more interesting than my ugly mug full of ennui whilst coding. Also, it has motion capture so it only takes snapshots while there is motion in frame. Since I am now hosting the image locally, I have it updating every 10 seconds instead of 60.

Adapted from I Love Cheesecake by Mary Crownover. Oreo crust, cheesecake with melted chocolate chips and chocolate liquer, and a chocolate whipped cream with chocolate chunks in it. All from scratch. Yeah.

A perfect excuse to get a spring mold from the cooking store in town that I didn't know existed until recently. This was my first cheesecake attempt, and while it doesn't look too good (the sides have potting voids and the marble swirl I was going for failed miserably), it tastes awesome.

Hij doet het erg professioneel!

[Dutch: He does it with professionalism]

Since the arcade machine parts finally showed up, I have made the following modifications:

* Momentary pushbutton above marquee wired to the motherboard's power switch. When the computer is off this button turns it on; when the computer is on, this button sends the shutdown command.

* Momentary pushbutton above marquee that will eventually turn the monitor and marquee light on and off. I've contracted Bob to build me a small switched relay box that has two outlets on it and will be controlled by a 5V input signal. The box is nearly complete but not quite yet.

* HDD activity light in the corner of the bezel.

* Hole and grommet in the bottom rear panel for the power and network cables.

* Replaced bottom of control panel to be more rigid.

* Routed a cable through the bottom of the control panel to allow me to mount the audio controls to the bottom of the control panel on the player 1 side.

* Black plastic enclosure around light fixture and fabric covers for the inside of the speaker grills to block light leakage.

* Purchased 2 bar stools on Ebay

* Got a motion-capture application set up and moved the webcam over, but haven't yet put a hole in the bezel for it (so currently the image is of the back of the keyboard drawer).

Last Wednesday Sarah showed up on her way home from spending the summer on the NM-Mexico border doing something involving raptor wildlife management [I think she trains falcons to do triple-lutzes]. Nina found a really cheap ticket to come out for the weekend, so she arrived on Friday and left Monday morning. It was a very brief visit, but fun was had by all. Edward and Dani were in town unexpectedly as well, so we all went hiking out on Deer Trap. Lots of people I haven't seen in a long time. I think Nina and I are going to go to Hawai'i this winter.

This is the [very large] caterpillar that was climbing up the carport wall this weekend. It will eventually become a Western Tiger Swallowtail Butterfly, which are by far the most impressive butterflies we get here in Los Alamos.

The caterpillar made several trips up and down the wall and is now missing, so maybe the plywood roof of the carport didn't suit its needs. But we got to examine it closely as it made its way along the wall. The dark stripe that runs along the back is actually a long internal tube called the dorsal vessel which contains the heart and pumps blood out around the caterpillar body. You could see pulses of fluid traveling along it from the back to the front at a rate of about 0.5 Hz. It was really cool.

I've been reading Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon again, and I must admit that I love this book. The humor is right up my alley. The following is not meant to represent the funniest thing in the book... it's just a passage that made me laugh a lot. And there have been many such passages.

He realizes something: The Americans must have done the impossible: broken all of their codes. This explains Midway, it explains the Bismarck Sea, Hollandia, everything. It especially explains why Yamamoto--who ought to be sipping green tea and practicing calligraphy in a misty garden--is, in point of fact, on fire and hurtling through the jungle at a hundred miles per hour in a chair, closely pursued by tons of flaming junk. He must get the word out! The codes must all be changed! This is what he is thinking when he flies head-on into a hundred-food-tall Octomelis sumatrana.

Tonight's dinner: Chicken Jamabalaya adapted from Joy of Cooking (--celery, ++mushrooms) and boiled artichokes.

Gas prices rose thirty cents per gellon on Thursday and another dime on Friday. A gallon of low-octane now runs $3.11 here in town. All of this, presumably, in speculation of a shortage as a result of --GulfRigs; --PortOfSouthLouisiana.;

$3+ per gallon is above my threshold for doing long road trips by myself. I didn't have time to organize a trip with someone else (and the arcade machine finally showed up) so I ended up not going anywhere. My plan was to climb Mount of the Holy Cross in central Colorado, which would have been a backpacking trip (with a night spent above 13,000').

But instead I did the following:

The original bottom plate of my arcade control panel was just a 1/16" thick piece of low-denisty fiber board. This was extremely flexible and not load bearing. The way the control panel attaches to the cabinet is by bolting through the bottom panel. This resulted in a situation where if you press down on the front of the panel, the back would raise up slightly. So I went to the lumber yard and got a scrap piece of 3/4" birch and made a duplicate. The only problem with the now very rigid bottom plate is that it sticks out about 5/8" from the bottom of the sides of the control panel. For the time being I covered this with a strip of electrical tape. Painting to come later.

I installed an 18" flourescent light fixture on a couple of S brackets behind the marquee. Then I suspended my two speakers from the lamp with custom brackets made of computer case card slot covers. The speakers used a metric thread which surprised me. An M6 threaded hole really looks like a 1/4-20 hole and now I have a box of 1/4-20 bolts and nuts. Hrumph. And to make the whole thing uglier, I didn't have any bolts whose heads would fit within the wall-mount holes on the light fixture, so I used wood screws and small blocks of wood. I'll have to post a picture of this monstrosity... It is truly ugly. Luckily, it lives inside the cabinet (and behind the light shroud of aluminum foil) so no one will ever actually have to look at it.

I discovered that wire tie adhesive binding posts are amazingly expensive. To the tune of $0.40 each. I went to buy a bag of 100 of them at the local electrical supply place and my jaw almost hit the floor when the guy said the total was $40. I told him where he could stuff it and went to Lowes, where I was expecting to find the same quantity for $5 or something. No. 5 of them cost $1.88 at Lowes. Not significantly cheaper, but smaller quantities. They really do make cable management inside the case a breeze. I can't wait to get all the cabling done just so I can take a picture of the neat cable layout and send it to Brent.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Yellow delivered two in-tact boxes of arcade machine parts today.

Spent about an hour and a half getting it built as they neglected to include instructions. When everything was up and running, I was disheartened to discover that the monitor had a horrible flicker problem. Nothing I could do would make the flicker go away and it made the gameplay unbearable.

Bob and I scoured the web for a solution to the problem and found vague references to similar problems and none of the solutions worked. In the end, we found that the people who make the ArcadeVGA video card that I use have a special utility for use with the D9200 arcade monitor which I have. But they sure don't advertise it well, or say... include it with their driver distribution disc...

Well, whatever. It took a whole evening of futzing around to get it up but it's totally working and Bob just 0wned me bigtime in Robotron.