Superelement

Build your own C-17

2008-10-16T01:22:10Z

C-17 Globemaster Model Airplane

CrossFit, oh let me count the ways! or reasons. or something.

2008-07-30T05:10:05Z

Today marked the beginning of my third CrossFit week. I have come to realize that there are three characteristics of the program that will keep me coming back.

First there is the group. It helps me to have a set of peers who are subjected to the same torment. It builds a community, or maybe misery just loves company. As an added bonus they are interesting people of all ages and walks of life.

Second it the workout of the day (or WOD). Previous workouts for me revolved around the same thing every other workout, with an "arms" day or a "legs" day. Now I don't even have to think about it, I show up, there is a list complete with warm-up and rep count. And it will always challenge me, no matter how fit I am. Why? Because of point three.

That third point is the tracking of data. Maybe I've been in school for too long, or maybe it is the engineer side, but I like the numbers. Points, time, whatever. If I log it, I can track it. Given time, I'll see the improvements. A quantifiable justification for all the work. Plus, it will always be a challenge because it is a delta comparison. Always calculated as the difference from n-1.

Today was
CrossFit warm-up x3
10 each of
Sampson Stretches
Over Head Squats
Pushups
Pullups
Situps
Back Extensions, "Good Mornings",or "Supermans"

WOD
For Time:
21 Thrusters 115#
Run 1600m or Row 2K
15 Thrusters 115#
Run 800m or Row 1K
9 Thrusters
Run 400m or Row 500m

I did the rowing and less weight, but at least it was a starting point, and I will get there.

finite_elephant @ 2008-07-20T20:55:00

2008-07-21T03:03:50Z

What I learned this weekend: Don't try the "Suffer on Saturday in City Park" Crossfit class and then spend the afternoon moving and leveling 800 pounds of landscape rock.

Or if you do, don't plan on moving very fast on Sunday.

Joining a Crossfit Gym

2008-07-16T20:46:13Z

For those of you on the lookout for signs of the apocalypse, I have one for you that may or may not be mentioned in Revelations.

I joined a gym today.

Well, it was bound to happen after my annual physical last week. Really it was a combination of factors, including the doctor visit, general restlessness, and the years of sitting in front of a computer. Now was a good time to start, since some of the PhD work is leveling out. This way I can get my body in shape to match the take-no-prisoners-killing-machine that my mind has become. Or something like that.

The gym is in Fort Collins, called Emergent Fitness, or EmerFit (though the shortened name reminds me of some sort of seizure). The guy running the place (Chris) has a number of Crossfit classes every day, and in spite of his demonstrated desire to kill me on the first day, I think I'll be back tomorrow.

A touch screen tattoo that is fueled by your blood

2008-02-22T23:14:08Z

It looks like that future we have heard about ~~has arrived~~ is in the concept phase. At the Greener Gadgets Conference in New York, there was a Bluetooth enabled touch screen that is designed to be inserted between the skin and the muscle. That's right, an animated and interactive tattoo. But that is not the awesome part.

The basis of the 2x4-inch "Digital Tattoo Interface" is a Bluetooth device made of thin, flexible silicon and silicone. It´s inserted through a small incision as a tightly rolled tube, and then it unfurls beneath the skin to align between skin and muscle. Through the same incision, two small tubes on the device are attached to an artery and a vein to allow the blood to flow to a coin-sized blood fuel cell that converts glucose and oxygen to electricity. After blood flows in from the artery to the fuel cell, it flows out again through the vein.

It runs off energy from your blood. How cool is that.

Grand Engineering Challenges for the 21st Century

2008-02-17T04:27:45Z

The National Academy of Engineering has listed the grand challenges for engineering in the 21st century. You can even go to their web site and vote for which you think is the most important challenge to meet in the next ~~100~~ 92 years

They listed challenges in four areas: sustainability, health, vulnerability, and joy of living.

In the area of sustainability, they identified challenges in environmentally friendly power, nuclear fusion, capturing carbon dioxide, countermeasures for nitrogen cycle problems, and providing acess to clean water.

For the area of health, "reverse-engineering" the brain, computer catalogs of health information, and developing new medicines.

The section on vulnerability covers a counter to the nuclear threat, sustaining the aging infrastructure of cities and services, and could potentially include the improved medicine challenge mentioned earlier.

For the joy of living area, challenges in personalized learning, improved virtual reality, securing cyberspace, and my personal favorite, engineering the tools used for future scientific discovery.

While I have to agree that these are all noble pursuits, and these would really solve some of the major problems we currently face, I really feel like it is a bit short sighted. If you look at the list of the greatest engineering achivements of the 20th century, I really doubt anyone would have even hit half that list when making predictions in 1908. I would say we are in for things in this century that are barely on the radar for anyone at this point.

The summer home observatory

2008-02-12T22:00:45Z

If I had an observatory at my house, I would be out there all the time. If I had big telescopes at my house, you would have to pry me away with a crowbar. People would be sick of hearing me talk about the stars and planets, and they would run and hide every time I got out the pictures.

But alas, it is not so for everyone.

As reported in the Independent, Pope Benedict XVI is moving the observatory off the grounds of his summer residence.

Science is to make way for diplomacy at the Pope's summer residence, with the dismantling of the astronomical observatory that has been part of Castel Gandolfo, south of Rome, for more than 75 years. The Pope needs more room to receive diplomats so the telescopes have to go.

Moving it to make more room to receive diplomats? I think the stars would be more interesting, but nobody died and made me Pope.

You really should know if you are missing a liver.

2008-01-30T21:21:51Z

Every once in a while, an e-mail comes through that reminds me that I work in a strange place. And rjlippincott reminded me that I should share these things with you.

_________________________________________________________________________________
From: LAB MANAGER
Sent: Yesterday
To: EVERYONE THAT WORKS WITH TISSUE

Subject: Missing Liver

If anyone is missing a liver, it’s in the RF Ablation lab with Tony’s name on it.

The LEGO brick turns 50, decides to buy a Corvette.

2008-01-28T21:07:11Z

As my google homepage was kind enough to point out, the lego brick turns 50 today.

The 50 year anniversary is for the little plastic brick, not the company. The company itself was founded 76 years ago as a wooden toy company.

The LEGO history began in 1932 in Denmark, when Ole Kirk Christansen founded a small factory for wooden toys in the unknown town of Billund in the south of the country. To find a name for his company he organized a competition among his employees. As fate would have it however, he himself came up with the best name: LEGO – a fusion of the Danish words “LEg” and “GOdt” (“play well”).

LEGO has re-released one of their original sets, the Town Plan, in honor of the occasion.

One thing that has really amazed me about LEGO bricks (besides the whole best-toy-ever angle) is the level of control they have on the tolerances for each brick. They are made from ABS plastic, which has a shrinkage of around five thousandths of a millimeter for every millimeter of dimension of the part. According to LEGO, thier tolerance is one thousanth of a millimeter. Too small and the parts won't come apart, too big and they won't stick together. To get that across billions of bricks, and across 50 years of technology changes for tooling, and across all the hurdles of mold design and lifespan, that is pretty impressive.

Cold? It is summer in Antarctica!

2008-01-21T23:37:12Z

Just in time to make the rest of us feel better about the cold temperatures around here, the National Science Foundation opened the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station.

Just to make the single digit temperatures here feel like nothing, take a look at the webcam of the site, and note the current weather.

Forget Surgical Steel, give me Surgical Copper!

2007-12-30T07:15:10Z

I was using the downtime during this time of year to catch up on some reading. In the Machine Design trade magazine there was an interesting article that caught my eye. Testing of copper as an anti-microbial surface. The comparisons with stainless steel are interesting, because most of the metal surfaces in an operating room are stainless of some sort (304 or 316 stainless).

E. coli, a food-born pathogen, that in the elderly and children can lead to life-threatening hemolytic uremia syndrome, was one of the first bacteria tested. Room-temperature results showed that on pure and 99%-copper substrates extremely high levels of the bacteria dropped two orders of magnitude in only 45 min and were completely gone in 75 min. There was a similar pattern at 4°C (39°F). It took between 75 and 180 min for a drop in bacterial counts from 100 million to total eradication.

It even seems effective against MRSA (Methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus), the bane of hospitals everywhere.

I was aware that copper was toxic to living cells, mostly through design work where biocompatibility was tested, but the mechanism was news to me. Copper's toxicity to cells comes from the Oligodynamic effect, where some metal ions demonstrate this toxicity. The mechanism is not yet understood, but possibly the cause is the denaturing of the bacteria's proteins. Silver also demonstrates this effect, and this is why it is used in the treatment of burns via silver nitrate impregnated gauze (something else I can attest to).

I wonder if more of the touch surfaces in hospitals and operating rooms will be designed with at least a minimum amount of copper, with that minimum determined by an effectiveness at killing bacteria. There is also the question of allergic reactions, the effect of oxidation, or the allowable contact time before there is a noticeable effect on healthy tissues.

The slacking is strong in this one.

2007-12-27T01:00:57Z

I trust that everyone had a great Christmas, things are slowly returning to normal around our household.

My wife made sure that I had something I can blame for my lack of progress on the dissertation in 2008. She got me the Lego Star Wars II video game. It has Star Wars! It has Legos! Will the fun ever end?

Here is why I am so excited:

And another one, because I can't resist.

I am pretty sure you can write me off the productivity list until at least March.

Didn't these people watch 2001: A Space Odyssey?

2007-12-22T07:58:47Z

Dave: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
HAL: I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.
Dave: What's the problem?
HAL: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.

So apparently the new Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) that is being developed for our much neglected return to the moon is going to be able to navigate on its own. The premise is to be able to dock with the lunar lander if the crew (who will all be on the lander) are unable to perform the docking maneuvers.

[HAL won't let Dave into the ship]
Dave: All right, HAL; I'll go in through the emergency airlock.
HAL: Without your space helmet, Dave, you're going to find that rather difficult.
Dave: HAL, I won't argue with you anymore! Open the doors!
HAL: Dave, this conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye.

Last year, they were telling us how they are getting system computers to update crews on the craft's status.

[on Dave's return to the ship, after HAL has killed the rest of the crew]
HAL: Look Dave, I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over.

Are the people writing specs at NASA just sitting around watching Stanley Kubrick movies?

Hat tip to IMDB for the movie line quotes

Inflation and the Six-Dollar Burger

2007-12-21T02:42:26Z

Random thought for the day:

Carl's Jr. needs to plan for success. A few years ago they came out with a new hamburger, called the Six Dollar Burger. The premise was that this burger was just like the ones you get at the sit-down (non-fast food) type restaurants, where they charged you six dollars for it. So you would get a six dollar burger for a lot less. When they launched it, I think it was around $3 dollars for the sandwich and like $4.50 to $5 for the combo.

Here's where I don't think they were thinking ahead. Fast forward a few years. Inflation starts to take an effect, and the prices rise. When I was at Carl's Jr. a few days ago, I noticed that most of the combos with Six Dollar Burgers (now there are quite a few of them) are upwards of $7. The sandwiches alone are $5. At which point the Six Dollar Burger for $5+ doesnt seem like the most amazing deal ever.

What are they going to do when the Six Dollar Burger costs more than $6? Change the name? Like I said before, I don't think they were planning for success. Hell, it was this kind of not thinking things through that gave us the Y2K issues.

But hey, it is fast food. And this was the same marketing department that used Hugh Hefner, Paris Hilton (link may be NSFW), and the infamous Flat Buns commercials to sell their product.

Steven Wiltshire, Artist

2007-12-21T00:10:36Z

Recently I saw a YouTube video of Steven Wiltshire, an architectural artist from the UK. He was diagnosed with autism at age 3, and has been drawing architechture since age 11, when he recreated the London skyline from memory after a helicopter ride.

In the video, this ability is demonstrated by taking him to Rome, flying him around for 45 minutes, and then giving him three days to recreate the skyline. All without additional reference, based solely on his recollection.

Here is the panorama that he drew over the three days.

There is a lot we have yet to learn about how the brain works.

Oh yeah? Check out MY watch!

2007-12-13T06:06:05Z

Wired has an interesting article on the atomic clocks they are working with at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder.

A part that made me smile, was the description of the Time and Frequency Division's facilities:

With its fading beige walls and checkered linoleum floors, NIST's Time and Frequency Division hardly invites a sense of precision. Distracted-looking scientists in slightly rumpled button-downs roam the halls, occasionally sparing a quizzical look for outsiders. Graduate students wander in funny T-shirts, passing offices and labs crammed with manila folders and well-used tools, while cables and pipes zigzag across the ceiling.

That is the exact description for every laboratory space at every university I have ever attended or visited. Seriously, all of them. The University of Colorado (both the Boulder and Denver campuses), Colorado State University, The University of Texas at Austin, and even MIT. It must be some axiom to the often quoted theorem "The worse you look, the smarter they think you are." but applied to lab space.

The description of their atomic clock also sounds like a grad student's project:

a jumble of polished lenses and mirrors converging on a gleaming silver cylinder, all protected by a tent of clear plastic nailed to a frame of two-by-fours.

Yup. All they are missing is the aluminum foil, and they're set!

All facilities observations aside, the article points out some really cool things. The current precision of the clock described above is 10^-15 seconds. That is about a thousand-million-millionth of a second. In that amount of time, light travels about 300 nanometers. For comparison, the width of a human hair is about 80,000 nanometers. At that precision, they have to compensate not only for the relativistic effects of the earth's rotation and orbit and such, but the changes in that velocity by relocating from one floor to another. Mind boggling. And it doesn't stop there. The system they are currently working on has a target precision of 10^-18 seconds. A thousand times more precise.

The are also working on making these super-precise atomic clocks smaller. Not just a little bit, either.

"We're trying to shrink down ... with the whole thing the size of a sugar cube and able to run on AA batteries," says O'Brian. The most obvious application is making GPS receivers much more accurate, but a tiny atomic clock would have other applications as well.

At the University of Pittsburgh last fall, researchers used a NIST-produced atomic clock the size of a grain of rice to map variations in the magnetic field of a mouse's heartbeat. They placed the clock 2 mm away from the mouse's chest, and watched as the mouse's iron-rich blood threw off the clock's ticking with every heartbeat.

There is a lot of cool things going on in those cold-war era concrete buildings in Boulder, that is for sure!

Alien Spider attacks the Space Shuttle...

2007-12-12T04:41:16Z

Isn't that how Starship Troopers started?

I know that most of Kennedy Space Center is a nature preserve, but damn!

via Boing Boing

So everybody else got their Prius today, right?

2007-12-12T03:54:33Z

The other day at work we got a notice that the 2008 IRS rate for mileage reimbursement was being increased to 50.5 cents per mile. For 2007 it was 48.5 cents per mile. Now it is my understanding that this is supposed to cover the cost of operating a vehicle for business purposes. So lets ponder that for a minute.

Let's assume that there is no increase in maintenance costs for your vehicle (which isn't true, but makes this a conservative calculation). That leaves changes in the cost of gasoline as the major contributor to the cost hike.

I drive a truck that gets about 16 miles per gallon (MPG). Given the vehicle I drive, and the increase of two cents per mile, this would cover the increase in cost of gasoline to the tune of 32 cents per gallon. But it turns out that in Colorado, the last year saw an increase of 73.8 cents per gallon, according to the Department of Energy. (That number will change weekly, I'm sure)

That means I would have to drive a car that got 36.9 MPG. More than twice what I actually get. So that got me thinking: "What kind of car would I have to drive to have the actual increase in cost covered?"

It turns out that, according to the EPA, for 2008 models, nothing but hybrids will hit 36.9 mpg. In fact, even most of the hybrids miss the mark. Only the hybrid Prius and Accord exceed that MPG rating.

"But wait!", you say. "These numbers aren't decided by Colorado! It is for the country as a whole!"

"Good point", I say. For the US as a whole, it went up only 70.7 cents per gallon. So our meager improvement still only brings the necessary MPG rating to 35.3. That doesn't change much related to the cars.

It just makes you wonder how they come up with these numbers.

from the conference exposition hall

2007-11-15T21:47:56Z

There are always interesting things at the exposition halls that accompany most conferences that I have been to. IEEE and ASME meetings have vendors with really cool measurement systems, books you can't find anywhere else, and other fun and exciting things for those with skewed interests such as me.

Working for a medical device company, I have attended shows that are meant for physicians, places like SAGES, or ACS. Those expos are full of other strange and interesting things. It took a little while to get used to the videos of surgery or some of the more heinous devices people were showing, but all in all it was cool stuff.

It was all good until I walked though the exposition hall of the annual meeting of the AAGL. (Go ahead and click the link to see who they are... I'll wait.)

There are things I never needed to know existed. Most of them are in that room.

I'm just sayin'.

Childhood on Demand

2007-11-14T22:27:57Z

I started thinking about this one day when I watched my nephew react to having his picture taken. He immediately ran over to the photographer (his mom) and asked to see the picture. I have seen this behavior in my own kids since then, and it really drives home how the changes in technology are providing a completely different childhood from the one that I knew. These kids will have no concept of sending pictures to get developed. This might not seem like much, but there were lots of things associated with film development when I was growing up:

Dropping the film off at the store.

Picking it up days or week later (maybe an hour or two if you were in a hurry).

Sharing the pictures with everyone else when you got home.

Taking many rolls of film with you on a trip.

Having copies of the bad pictures as well as the good ones.

The big thing was that you had to wait. Taking pictures and seeing the results were separated by hours to days to weeks. You don't have to wait anymore.

This trend continues with Tivo, or any other "on demand" TV service: the concept of network schedules for shows is quickly becoming irrelevant. YouTube (which was talked about previously) means most any video that I can think of from 80's music to The Muppet Show videos are available instantly. Even using the iPod in the car. Now that last one probably isn't much different from having CDs or other recorded music for them to listen to, but the big difference is the scale. There are thousands of songs on my iPod, so if there is a request from the back seat for a Sesame Street song (or Veggietales, or Disney, or ...) the odds are that it is available.

Even cell phones play a role in this. Want to talk to grandpa? Tell mom, she can have him on the line in less than 10 seconds. Nevermind that he isn't even in the state, or you aren't even at home.

Now, I don't want you to think that the little ones are always running around demanding things (though sometimes they do), or even that we constantly give in (though sometimes we do). There is just an unprecedented availability for people these days, and these guys have never known it any other way.

I don't know that this is a good thing or a bad thing. It is just different.

Now, gall durn it! Get off my lawn!

Domo Arigato, Kiddo.

2007-11-11T05:31:55Z

All you have to do to turn a 5 year old into a fanatic for early 80's rock music is show him the youtube video.

Seriously. You play Mr. Roboto for them once in the car, then show them the video. Now he won't stop asking for it. Who knew that 80's rock music was written at a 5 year old's level? Actually, that's what our parents were saying the whole time.

Excuse me while I go play the "Robot Song" one more time...

Chocolate Capacitance

2007-11-09T01:44:58Z

Halloween has come and gone. There are two ways to tell. First, there is the dehydrating Jack 'O Lanterns. But more importantly there is the Pawn-the-Kids-Candy-Off-On-My-Coworkers-Before-I-Eat-It-All scheme. Which means for a week or two after Halloween there are bowls and baskets of candy all over this place.

After a while, it just sits there. Sad really, kind of depressing.

That's where we are at now, or were at until today. Now it is a test media.

Ever wonder about the electrical properties of Hershey's Chocolate?

That's right. 5.2 and 3.9 nF (nanofarads). I think we need a larger sample size to determine distribution. Then we should call Hershey and have them work on the process capability.

Please Note: I did not do this. They were sitting on top of a filing cabinet already labeled. I am not responsible for this nerd-fest. Mostly beacuse I didn't think of it first.

Congratulations to Dr. Pruden!

2007-11-05T23:13:37Z

I found out last week that one of my professors has been honored with the Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering. Dr. Amy Pruden-Bagchi taught my Biomolecular Tools for Engineers class two years ago (gasp! has it been two years already?). You can read the university's announcement here.

I offer my congratulations to Dr. Pruden, I can't think of anyone that deserves it more.

Where's the chapter on saying stupid things and getting fired?

2007-10-31T20:05:44Z

A couple weeks ago, while in Barnes and Noble, I picked up a book that I thought would be interesting reading. The book is by James Watson, who was awarded part of the 1962 Nobel Prize for determining the double helix structure of DNA. In fact, I had just read his book about this discovery, appropriately named "The Double Helix" and enjoyed the tale. So the new book, Avoid Boring People (which if you look closely at the dust jacket, says "Avoid Boring Other People") looked to be a worthwile investment.

The premise is a book on lessons learned during a life working in science. In fact, at the end of each chapter he has a list of "lessons learned" during that phase of his life.

That was before all this news stories last week, like saying things about intelligence in Africa, having scheduled talks canceled, and resigning his position at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

I wonder if there are any lessons learned in the book with regards to saying stupid stuff to reporters? I'll let you know when I get to that chapter.

HDR Photography from my Travels...

2007-10-29T22:30:53Z

After being introduced to the concept of high dynamic range photography (hat tip to tdj ) I took some of these during my August trip to France.

Most were taken using the automatic exposure bracketing on my Canon XTi, and then were processed using Photomatix. When I gain a little more experience with this, I'll try some different settings and the HDR functionality of Photoshop.

Obligatory shot of the Eiffel Tower.

The Crown Jewels Room in the Louvre (the far end has cases with the crowns in it, some of the largest cut diamonds I have ever seen):

Stained glass from inside La Sainte-Chapelle...

Le Château de Vincennes:

It was fun, and I like how they turned out. I think it is especially useful for taking pictures of stained glass inside.