Thane Plambeck

James Webb Space Telescope

A Team Purple operative is working on the software for the James Webb Space Telescope. It's to be launched in June 2013 according to this page.

Klingon cruiser or Hubble successor?

THANE: When's a good time to come down and see the telescope? You're still working on it, right?

PURPLE OPERATIVE: Yes. It does not yet exist. We do have a full scale test article of the sunshield. They are practicing folding it. Not that exciting. There is a full scale model that travels around, but it's packed up right now. There really won't be hardware to see for 3-4 years.

Chinese Lead

Now it turns out that there's lead in Chinese-made Ugly Teeth.

Where's the fun in that?

Anyway, I have a question about all this Chinese lead.

Isn't lead a sort-of valuable metal? I just checked, and the price of lead per pound (about $1.67) is more than the price of aluminum ($1.13). [Source: Kitco Metals.]

Admittedly, lead can't hold a candle to nickel ($14.37), but it does hold up well against zinc ($1.26).

So—who's the Chinese guy who says, "Hey mac—throw some lead into those Ugly Teeth, and then ship it" (?). Wouldn't it be simpler (and cheaper) to just not throw in the lead?

Maybe lead is hard to get out of the constituents of paint?

And what's paint made out of, anyway?

I'm clueless, as usual.

California Rocks

California Rocks
Originally uploaded by lilredtank

Shock and aftershocks

Most recent aftershock at the top:

1.4 2007/10/30 21:38:50 37.412N 121.763W 7.3 7 km ( 5 mi) NE of Alum Rock
1.4 2007/10/30 21:30:51 37.426N 121.772W 7.5 8 km ( 5 mi) NE of Alum Rock
1.2 2007/10/30 21:23:39 37.413N 121.756W 9.8 8 km ( 5 mi) NE of Alum Rock
2.1 2007/10/30 20:41:31 37.397N 121.747W 8.7 8 km ( 5 mi) ENE of Alum Rock
1.7 2007/10/30 20:39:29 37.427N 121.770W 9.1 8 km ( 5 mi) NE of Alum Rock
1.3 2007/10/30 20:35:02 37.345N 121.705W 8.9 11 km ( 7 mi) ESE of Alum Rock
1.8 2007/10/30 20:31:57 37.430N 121.772W 9.5 8 km ( 5 mi) NE of Alum Rock
1.4 2007/10/30 20:26:53 37.404N 121.749W 8.4 8 km ( 5 mi) ENE of Alum Rock
1.3 2007/10/30 20:26:18 37.493N 121.758W 24.9 14 km ( 9 mi) ENE of Milpitas
1.3 2007/10/30 20:22:44 37.428N 121.777W 8.9 8 km ( 5 mi) NNE of Alum Rock
1.6 2007/10/30 20:16:12 37.404N 121.750W 8.2 8 km ( 5 mi) ENE of Alum Rock
1.3 2007/10/30 20:13:48 37.403N 121.749W 8.2 8 km ( 5 mi) ENE of Alum Rock
1.5 2007/10/30 20:12:55 37.419N 121.745W 11.1 9 km ( 6 mi) NE of Alum Rock
1.4 2007/10/30 20:12:23 37.409N 121.675W 7.3 14 km ( 9 mi) ENE of Alum Rock
5.6 2007/10/30 20:04:54 37.432N 121.776W 9.2 8 km ( 5 mi) NNE of Alum Rock

5.6

The USGS just put up the number—5.6 on the Richter scale. Close to Alum Rock, in the south bay.

Earthquake

An earthquake just rumbled through Palo Alto.

It lasted for at least 5 seconds.

Must be a reasonable size to last that long!

I left my office, went into the house and everyone but Norbert (Gloria, Cole, Owen, and Pearl) was just coming out from under the kitchen table.

Doomed: Meyer Library

Stanford has announced that Meyer Library is going to be ripped down "by 2012."

I noticed that nowhere in that Stanford Daily article do they name the architect of the building, the "Internationalist" John Carl Warnecke, who is also responsible for the Stanford Bookstore, the Stanford Post Office, and (farther afield) the truly weird AT&T Long Lines Building, a apocalyptic and windowless skyscraper designed to "protect the valuable equipment within." It looks like something you'd see looming in the background of a Terminator movie. I don't know much more about that building, but I wonder what's in it today. Who has the corner office in that building, I wonder?

Back to Meyer Library. From the Stanford Daily article:

* * *

"Meyer Library is essentially doomed," said Andrew Herkovic, director of communications and development of libraries. "The building has not aged very gracefully, it needs millions of dollars worth of seismic upgrades and it's not cost-effective to keep it in the long term. It's also, in my opinion, an eyesore."

A second reason for the library's demolition is its violation of previous plans for campus layout.

"The original campus master plan wanted that area to be a corridor, not a building," Herkovic said. "Today it is very much in the way of traffic, and it also stands out oddly as a building larger than those around it. Architecturally, that's considered a defect."

* * *
In this way earlier painstaking debates about Stanford architecture are swept away.

I don't really like the building, either, and I'm glad to see it go, I guess, but it makes me wonder whether it's worth thinking about architecture at all in a serious way. Particularly on university campuses, all it takes is a few administrators to throw out the word "architecturally" and "violation," and that's it.

Yet there are some buildings is hard to imagine Stanford ever blowing away. The Quad, for example, and maybe Hoover Tower. Everything else could easily get ripped down I think. They're doing it already, in a big way, on the west campus.

Queen of the Night aria, III

Queen of the Night Aria, II

Queen of the Night Aria, I

From Raph Waldo's Religion

The church at this moment is much to be pitied. She has nothing left but possession. If a bishop meets an intelligent gentleman, and read fatal interrogations in his eyes, he has no resource but to take wine with him. False position introduces cant, perjury, simony, and ever a lower class of mind and character into the clergy: and, when the hierarchy is afraid of science and education, afraid of piety, afraid of tradition, and afraid of theology, there is nothing left but to quit a church which is no longer one.

[more]

Interesting CGT paper in the arXiv

Abstract to Doron Zeilberger and Aek Thanatipanonda's new paper, "A Symbolic Finite-state approach for Automated Proving of Theorems in Combinatorial Game Theory":

We develop a finite-state automata approach, implemented in a Maple package ToadsAndFrogs available from our websites, for conjecturing, and then rigorously proving, values for large families of positions in Richard Guy's combinatorial game ``Toads and Frogs''. In particular, we prove a conjecture of Jeff Erickson.

Fill-in-the-blank and complete the pun

Via Scot Morris:
* * * *

WITCH PARKING ONLY

VIOLATORS ____________________

Thanedom, II

So, it occurred to me that I should see how many Facebook THANEs there are, too.

Facebook says "500+", which I read as "You might as well count the stars, there's one hell of a lot of THANEs, and sorry to disappoint you."

It turned out to include some THANEEs and THANESANs, and a THANEEYA, amongst other variants, but most of them were straight-up THANEs like me.

I scrolled through them page by page, finally reaching the P's.

There, between

THANED PIYADARAKOM

and

THANE PLANTIKOW

I found—

Nothing.

Not even myself.

Thanedom

The unexpectedly large number of Plambecks on Facebook (a Facebook login is required to view that page—anyway, it's almost 100 of them) raises the ugly possibility that the world might actually contain more than one THANE PLAMBECK.

There's even an ALASDAIR PLAMBECK. He plays volleyball somewhere in the Bay Area, it looks like. Where there's an ALASDAIR, could a THANE be far behind?

I'm thinking the chance that there is already another THANE PLAMBECK is maybe a coin flip. And if I go out and win the Nobel Prize or receive some other undeserved recognition, I'll bet the chances will only improve.

It's a disturbing thing to think about.

questions

1) When will the machine serving these plambeck.org web pages finally roll over and die?

Context: The web server that's just delivered this web page to you is an extremely old Gateway PC, originally manufactured in 1993 or so and consigned to the garage about 1997 as useless techno-garbage, but then reawakened and called to duty suddenly like some mouldering two-star general in moment of national crisis (roundabout 1999), and now sitting high over Silicon valley in a Google-friend's luxurious "machine room" like some unlikely pasha. I like to think of it enjoying the view below. About 2 years ago its network card died, but I just put a new one in there, and everything suddenly sprung back to life. Greg helped me turn off all the services on the machine except httpd so that it's basically hacker-proof, or at least seems to be.

2) When it dies, what will I do with what's here? I have something like a backup, but not really. It would take a lot of work to resurrect all the spaghetti content that's entangled on this web server. Is it worth resurrecting? And what about the stupid company name generator page, on which I decided to run Google ads and keep making more and more money, without my lifting a finger?

words not worth it

1) atavistic
2) noisome
3) negritude
4) slough
5) ovine

"Move along, son. These aren't the words you're looking for."

Not a Scrabble Bingo

DIMBOID ... perhaps it's an unintelligent robot? [ No, too bad ]

BaD IDIOM, I guess.

Lexical observation

CINNABAR is kind-a, sorta, RABBINIC spelled backwards

Atom @ TAK

A while back I ordered a card game from the Royal Society of Chemistry called Atom@TAK.

It took forever to arrive, but finally came today.

The cards represent chemical elements, and you score points by forming ionic compounds (maybe that's what they're called, I don't know—I'm no chemist).

For example, if you have two H (hydrogen) cards and one O (oxygen) card, you can form H₂0. Laying that compound on the table causes an explosion that destroys the most-recently formed compounds your opponent(s) may have formed already.

Only have the two "O" cards? If you have an "Energy" card, you can combine them to form O₂. But there's no explosion.

HCl and O₂

Radioactive compounds irradiate your opponents' most recently-played cards for two rounds, sending them irrevocably to the "graveyard", unless the opponent is able to form a lead "Shield" (Pb + shield card).

Your score is the sum of the atomic numbers of all the elements appearing in your surviving compounds after all the cards in the deck have been exhausted.

You don't need to know any chemistry along the way, and you learn the identities of some poisons also—for example, CN^- (cyanide).

cyanide

The "Antidote" card can be used to protect yourself from a cyanide attack.

the antidote

Great stuff!

flickr atom@tak slideshow
* * *

NB: Of course, this still does not mean I'm a nerd.