Remember the last time I went to Moscow and I posted a brief comment about how geocaches seem to show up in Los Alamos when I'm gone?

Well... today 13 new caches appeared in town... and I'm gone. I'm not quite in Moscow yet (I fly out tomorrow and arrive Sunday), but I'm in Albuquerque (having just flown back from Boston) and I have no chance to get to those caches. By the time I get back, it'll probably have snowed all over them and they'll be lost until spring. Oh well...

In other news, I left my softshell, hat, and gloves on a plane in Atlanta. Sweet. They have them in Atlanta and will send them to me, but obviously not before I leave tomorrow. So off I went to REI to pick up replacements. Who knows, maybe I can track them down when I'm in the Atlanta airport tomorrow, but I doubt it considering that my layover is only an hour.

In other news, I called up Alex while in Boston and told him I'd stop by Cruftlabs yesterday night. When I got there, it had ballooned into a whole Cruft reunion... all of the original players were there along with most of the people who had lived there for some period after I left. It was great to see everyone and to see how the warehouse has evolved over the years. It's still going strong, now with up-to-code electrical and even a passed insurance inspection! We had thai food, Greddy tried to spin (the green light is on, greddles), and we spilled drinks onto Galen's vinyl. Fun was had by all—thanks everyone for the impromptu party.

It wasn't until I got to the airline check-in counter a few minutes ago and was told there was no reservation for me that I discovered that my ticket to Boston (which I did not set up) was booked under "Mouser Williams." The agent went ahead and gave me a ticket, but the ticket says Mouser on it rather than Richard. I'm at breakfast right now, but when I'm done I'm going to try to go through security, where they will try to match my ID to my ticket... I foresee fun.

UPDATE: Hrm... no problem at all. I handed the guy a ticket that said mouser and an ID that said richard and they didn't blink. I hope security in Boston is just as for-show... but I'm not hopeful, given Logan Airport's recent history.

The fun part about going to Moscow with diplomatic types is that you get to stay in the fancy hotels.

I'm going to be in the Boston area Wednesday night until Friday morning. If anyone wants to get together, let me know.
And I'll be in Moscow next week... though I doubt the people who read this and live in Moscow will want to get together socially.

In other travel news, my boss just called me and told me he needs to send me to Kazakhstan next week—a trip I'd much rather take, but I've already got the Moscow thing arranged and couldn't take him up on it. @!#*%&!

I'm noticing that the really exciting trips here all happen at the last minute, while the ennui-tastica ones are arranged months in advance and in such a way that they conflict with anything exciting.

Came across this video of the main character from Uncharted: Drake's Fortune dancing around to El Chombo's Macarron Chacarron. I just figured that you'd want to see, ya know... the lyrics. So that you could sing along.

When I was home for lunch yesterday, I heard a weird noise coming from the front of the house. I looked out the front window and saw a lot of dust in the air, as if someone had just driven by on a dirt road. Of course, there is no dirt road in front of my house... I went outside to check it out and found this:

That's my neighbor's mailbox in several pieces scattered around my front yard. It's at least 30' from where it was originally located. In addition to the mailbox, pieces of a little timber wall that separates my yard from the neighbor's were in the road along with some branches from one of the junipers. You could see the tire track about 3' in from the curb coming all the way down the block. Apparently they veered back into the street right at the corner of my lot in order to avoid a street sign and the junipers, but they just clipped one of them. No major damage to my property, but I imagine the neighbor probably isn't happy. I had a cop come by and look at it, but there was no sign of the neighbor.

I like how the mailbox stuck the landing. I give it a 7.8 because it clearly came out of its tuck early.

If I had to guess, I'd say this was probably Christina on another wild bender.

Here's a board I cranked out over the last few weeks.

It's a datalogger for an extremely sensitive radon detector. I'm pretty happy with how this one came out; there were no fab problems or rework that needed to be done. Pam did make some... interesting layout choices (notice how the SD card is inserted upside down? yeah she choose that part, not me), but the board worked the first time we plugged it in, the firmware ported over from the surrogate hardware perfectly. And, as a bonus, the fab shop gave us blue substrate for some reason. They actually make a yellow PCB, which would of course be my first choice, but the cost per plate is something like $300 higher. Buh?

Spent the weekend in ABQ participating in the 2007 Dog Bowl tournament. I entered C singles and doubles, though I didn't have a doubles partner (Dick broke his hand during practice a couple months ago) so they set me up with some random guy.

In doubles, we won our first match in two games against a pair of UNM students. The second game we lost to a teacher-student pair from a college in Santa Fe. They were better than we were and we lost in two games, though the games were close and it was a good challenge.

In singles, I was seeded #1 so I got a bye on the first round. My second round game was at 8 in the morning, and I made the mistake of assuming they'd have food there. They generally have bagels to eat, but for some reason they were late arriving this time. I had brought a snickers bar with me and ate that, and felt OK going into the first game. I went up 12-0 on the guy (a 70-year old dentist from ABQ called Dr. Bob), and eventually won 21-14. However, at the end of the first game, I was really feeling hungry, was out of candy, and the bagels still hadn't arrived. It was amazing how it affected my performance. I couldn't move or react as fast as I'm accustomed to and I ended up losing the second game 16-21. By the end of it, I was really hurting for food and there were still no bagels. I lost the tie-breaker 1-11.

I was pretty annoyed with my performance and the assumption I had made about there being food. As I stewed over that, I ate some of the bagels that predictably showed up just after my match. Having eaten those, I played a consolation match (best of three games to 15) against a guy from Flagstaff. I won 15-0, 15-4. Amazing what a little food will do... Next time, I'm bringing some emergency rations.

This is awesome. It's a free monospaced TTF font for doing electronics timing diagrams (see the link for an example). For the non EE types out there, this is probably worthless. But for me it is the best thing since breakfast.

"Then finally our archer opted for a slightly different tactic..."

This comes from a cache entitled "Psycho Urban Cache #13 - Impossible! Give Up Now!", which is located atop a 140' stone pylon in the middle of the Potomac river (formerly it supported a bridge, which is now gone). The technique of choice for retrieving this geocache seems to be to shoot an arrow trailing string up and over the pylon, then haul up a climbing rope and ascend that. It's pretty ridiculous.

As long as I'm on the subject of weird things overheard at geocaching.com, here is one that comes from a log on a cache I hid:

"...this one had something for the whole family, provided the family included electrical engineers and people wearing long pants."

Congratulations to Nina, who this morning passed her qualifying exams and is now a doctoral candidate. Woo!

OK, I know that the impetus behind my plane and conveyor post was the similar post made on Jason's site, and that the bulk of the unusually large traffic to my site that day was from his link to my post. However, in case any of you who read this aren't also reading Jason's website, I thought I'd repost some information that he put up today:

Mythbusters is taking this one on. They built a quarter-mile conveyor, and will attempt to launch an ultralight off of it. The episode will air next month. Anyone in the Los Alamos area who has the Discovery channel, PLEASE invite me over to watch it as I have no means at my house.

An interesting note is that they have a slightly different wording to the problem than was used in Kottke's post (and mine). Here is the original wording:

A plane is standing on a runway that can move (some sort of band conveyer). The plane moves in one direction, while the conveyer moves in the opposite direction. This conveyer has a control system that tracks the plane speed and tunes the speed of the conveyer to be exactly the same (but in the opposite direction). Can the plane take off?

And here is the Mythbusters wording:

If a plane is traveling at takeoff speed on a conveyor belt, and that conveyor belt is matching the speed in reverse, can the plane take off?

This is a much simpler wording, but I think it actually exacerbates the ambiguities that arose in discussion of the initial wording. Both statements fall prey to an ambiguity in frame of reference. Clearly, in both cases, the plane moves relative to the conveyor belt... but in what frames are the speeds measured? Is the plane travelling at takeoff speed relative to the conveyor? Or relative to the Earth (and its atmosphere).

You'll recall from the previous discussions on this question that if the plane is moving at "takeoff speed" relative to the atmosphere then it takes off and it doesn't really matter what the conveyor is doing. If the plane is moving at "takeoff speed" relative to the conveyor and the conveyor is moving at "-takeoff speed" relative to the Earth, then the plane isn't moving relative to the atmosphere and it just sits there. For an even weirder interpretation, consider the plane moving at "takeoff speed" relative to the conveyor, and the conveyor moving at "-takeoff speed" relative to the plane! In this case, the plane and conveyor are moving in opposite directions and at the same speed relative to each other... but what the plane-conveyor system is doing relative to the Earth is undefined, thus the plane could be stationary relative to the atmosphere, or could be traveling at nearly the speed of light. This interpretation obviously sheds little light on the problem.

Personally, I find it very odd that you might measure the speed of the plane in one frame of reference and the speed of the conveyor in another. It is a very unnatural way to conduct one's affairs and leads to oddities like the last case stated above. Also, no rigid body moves with a non-zero speed in its own frame of reference. Thus, if we're saying that both the conveyor and the plane are moving at some speed > zero, then we are presumably talking about measuring these speeds in the Earth frame. While this is not the only way to interpret the wording, it is the only way that makes any real sense. And in this interpretation of the wording, the plane takes off.

I hope that the Mythbusters guys don't try to inflict some bizarre frame combination on us.

But, of course, in a real-world scenario, the stationary plane sitting on a moving conveyor would be rather difficult to pull off, since the plane doesn't have very fine control over its thrust at very low power and the conveyor has almost no influence on the plane's velocity since those pesky free-rotating wheels separate them. I think it will actually be rather difficult to keep the plane from accelerating.

However, I think the Mythbusters crew is reasonably scrupulous and won't go out of their way to demonstrate a conclusion that is only valid in the most contrived of interpretations.

500 years of modern physics predicts that the plane will take off, and so do I. I look forward to see the experimental results.

SCIENCE!