Posted by Dan Hertz on January 26, 2007
Today’s bit of incredible coolness comes to you courtesy of my friend Jessie. She is, alas, too cool to have a blog or webpage, but not too cool to point out neat things to me. If only all my former students were this cool, I say 
She alerted me last night to this important paper, which deals with the subject of how one can physically make a hyperbolic surface. It turns out that it is very difficult to do this using traditional techniques such as with strips of paper and glue, and while this may not be one of the greatest challenges facing humanity at the moment, it is certainly a bit of a pain if you’re trying to show someone what a hyperbolic surface looks like.
Enter the miraculous crochet hook. Because it turns out that not only can you crochet a hyperbolic surface but that this is in fact probably the best way to make a sturdy and usable such surface. Now I happen to think this is really cool. This article is an interview with the authors of the other paper (who happen to both be from Cornell, incidentally) and it includes some nice color pictures of the crocheted surfaces.
So there you have it. They’re pretty time-consuming to make, though, since the number of stitches in each row increases exponentially as you move outwards (what with them being hyperbolic and whatnot), so I don’t know if I really want to suggest it to Beth. But if you’re looking for something moderately pointless to do, I think it’s a great project
This discovery, is, without a shadow of a doubt, probably the single most important mathematical occurrence in the last hundred years. And yes, that statement qualifies as hyperbole. But that’s sort of the point, you see? :sigh: Apparently that pun was too subtle for some people.
Posted in Fun, Science | 2 Comments »
Posted by Dan Hertz on January 25, 2007
My wireless keyboard had a bit of an accident with some coffee last night and while I thought everything would be ok, the w key no longer seems to work 
This is bad.
I’m going to have to try to take it apart in a more thorough way and try to clean the contact for that key or something. But this is obviously very sad.
EDIT: I have taken apart my keyboard and found that there seemed to be some residual water stuck between the layers of circuit board (which are basically thin plastic sheets) that are the guts of the keyboard. And lo and behold, a bit of wiping and cleaning and everything seems to be working again. I am very relieved. For a minute I was going to update the entry on wordpress before I remembered that I can do it from MacJournal, which makes life a whole lot easier.
Posted in Computer | 1 Comment »
Posted by Dan Hertz on January 18, 2007
So this post is something of an experiment. I’m trying to set things up so I can write my entries in MacJournal and just have it actually do the posting to WordPress. In principle this should be no problem at all.
This is also the grand plan for the work blog, actually. And all things considered it is actually a fair bit easier to write my posts using MacJournal than it is to do so using the WordPress composing page. And this way if I want to have a draft, I can just wait to send it to the blog, of course. Which is all rather nice as well.
Of course there are things like post breaks and things like that which I have yet to figure out how will be formatted here in MacJournal, so I’m going to have to do some work to see how to make those things work. Those aren’t things that I use very often, though, so I don’t think it should be too much of an issue. What is more of a problem is that MacJournal seems to be rather more forgiving in terms of what sorts of graphics it’s willing to display. MacJournal is perfectly willing to display eps files, for instance, which are generally what Root does best at spitting out for plots. However, you can’t send an eps file to a blog, it seems. I don’t think this is really a failing of MacJournal per se, since the problem is rather than eps doesn’t render on webpages as far as I know. So I need to start converting the eps plots to some other format, probably png or jpeg or something. And that’s a bit of a pain in the ass.
I tried uploading the old entries for work to an alternate blog (which is private and can thus only be viewed by select people which at the moment means just me), which has worked pretty well except for the fact that none of the plots have come up. And converting the plots from eps to pdf hasn’t worked either, which is not good. So I’ll have to see about making all my future plots as some better graphics format, although I’m not sure I really want to try to go through and actually convert all the old plots. But that may be something I have to do if I am going to present my work blog as an example of how beautifully all this works.
Of course, the comments and things don’t get stored with the blog entries down on this end of things, at least as far as I know.
Posted in Blogging | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Dan Hertz on January 16, 2007
So some of you may know that I have, in working on my thesis research, abandoned the traditional idea of using a notebook to record everything I’ve been doing to record the progress of my research. This was done when my advisor recommended that I try using a very nice piece of software called MacJournal, from Mariner Software. This has the nice feature of allowing me to tag entries, much like a blog, and paste in plots effortlessly, organize things in a much better way, put in tables, make lists, copy and paste in emails, and that sort of thing. The software is of course useful for more than just scientific journal keeping, and is actually somewhat designed as a back end of blogging, so I could probably use it as my blogging interface and then just upload things to wordpress, for instance.
Anyway, lately I’ve become increasingly worried about the issue of backing up of things, though. Because of course the very nice thing about having things in a lab notebook is that they’re nice and solid. And a hard drive failure, or me dropping my laptop isn’t going to mean a massive loss of anything important. Of course all my actual scripts, data files and so on are stored on the computers here and are backed up frequently, but it would be a serious pain in the ass if I were to lose all the stuff from my MacJournal files.
So, the question that has arisen in my mind. Wouldn’t it be neat if I could use MacJournal as the blogging back end that it’s designed to be and keep all of my entries as a blog somewhere? Well, there are some problems with that. Like, I can’t really have it as a public blog for a variety of reasons. One main reason is that I don’t want it to be public because I can’t be publicly displaying CLEO results. Another is that I don’t want my intermediate stupid errors being shown in a public place. However, it would be awfully useful to have it be somewhere that I could tell my advisor to go look at it. The optimal thing would be to put it on the LEPP server in the “non-public” side, where only people who are members of the collaboration can look at it (because it’s password protected). So I guess what I have to do is to convince the computing group that they should allow me access to a mySQL database (of which I’m quite confident we have some here at the lab) so that I can run a wordpress blog for my analysis.
Or maybe this is totally crazy and nuts? I don’t know how much time and effort really goes into setting up a wordpress blog, for instance, or how much time and effort it would be to put all my old entries from MacJournal into it. But it seems like it would be really useful to be able to access it from any computer anywhere in the world, for instance, provided I had https. And of course this would eliminate all worries about backups because everything at the lab is backed up on a regular basis.
Posted in Academics, Blogging | 5 Comments »
Posted by Dan Hertz on January 13, 2007
Well, the other homeland, I suppose. In yesterday’s New York Times, there’s a little piece about an article that was published some time ago explaining why Danes are the happiest people in the world. Or at least believe themselves to the be happiest people in the world.
Again, you have to be registered to read it, I suspect, but this is yet another excellent reason to register at NYTimes.com. And no, I swear I am not doing this as an ad for the New York Times.
I think that the authors of the study are definitely onto something. There is very much an culture of low expectations in Denmark. You don’t hear stories on the news about “Is Denmark losing its dominance in stem cell research? And during the Olympic Games, there’s no expectation that Danes will win lots and lots of medals. I mean, if someone wins a medal, whether it’s silver or bronze (let alone gold), that’s great. But there’s no expectation that “we’re going to win more medals than anyone else” or anything like that. Similarly, much as Danes love Denmark, they still have a hard time imagining why anyone would really want to live there. People used to continually (and may still, for all I know) ask my parents, who had lived there for well over fifteen years, when they were going to move away. Because, really, would you want to stay in Denmark forever? Surely not.
My friend Knud pointed out that there is undoubtedly a strong correlation between low expectations and income equality. There’s a nice little article about this on wikipedia which demonstrates that Denmark does indeed have one of the smallest spreads in income in the world. Basically, no-one in Denmark grows up thinking that that they are going to become fantastically wealthy. And so that probably plays no small role in it as well.
Posted in Links, News | 12 Comments »
Posted by Dan Hertz on January 12, 2007
This is a bit of an odd thing to be celebrating, so to speak, and it’s not like I’m actually going to be doing anything celebratory to mark the occasion, but today marks the one-year anniversary of when I had my seizure last year, with the dislocated shoulder and pool of blood and everything, as detailed in my blog in the post here and here.
I’m happy to say that there have been no symptoms of any sort since then, and aside from the fun of having to experiment with a variety of different medications in the meantime, I haven’t had any kind of other neurological symptoms at all. The current drugs have even more or less eliminated the slight twitching that I used to have, which may or may not have been related (apparently those are probably myo-clonic seizures).
Posted in Health, News Flash | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Dan Hertz on January 12, 2007
This link is something that my mother sent me, and you need to have an account with the NY Times in order to be able to read it, but since it’s free to register to get one, getting to read this article is really sufficient reason to sign up.
The inventor of the ramen noodles has just passed away, sadly, but the article pays tribute to him. Thank you mister Momofuku Ando.
Posted in Links, News | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Dan Hertz on January 10, 2007
Yes, it’s time for my pedantic nature to rear its head again, I think. Why?
Well the PBEM Amber game is being conducted using a Google Group. Which for the most part seems to be working very well. You can set it so that you receive the messages on your email account or, as I have it set, you just read them on the group. That does require that I actually check the group frequently, but it’s not like I’m not a compulsive checker of websites or anything. And there are ways of uploading files to there, having pages that everyone can see (for general information and stuff), which is all very useful.
But when you start a new discussion thread, there’s something that bothers me. Quite a bit, and I’ve only started two new discussion threads so far. What is this terrible thing, you ask? Is it a misplaced apostrophe? No, possibly worse than that! It’s the dread misuse of “momentarily”. As in, after you’ve posted your message, a page appears showing the following sentence:
Your message will appear in Amber Online momentarily.
Now this is obviously not what they mean. What they mean is that a message will appear presently. Or soon. If it were to appear momentarily, it would have to subsequently disappear. And that wouldn’t be good. At least I think not.
On the other hand, Jason is telling me that English is a living language and that it will inevitably evolve. And that I therefore need to get over this. But there are perfectly good other words that cover that meaning. And momentarily means something else. I think this is one worth fighting for, even if it’s not a battle that I can win. But then again, I still believe in using the subjunctive, and I think most everyone else considers that battle lost quite some time ago.
Posted in News Flash | Leave a Comment »
Posted by Dan Hertz on January 8, 2007
Today’s random link of fun and weirdness comes courtesy of Fark. I’m not sure why someone decided that this was a good thing to make a list of, but the following is a list of lines from Star Wars which would be improved by replacing a word with pants. These lines are ranked by the number of votes they’ve been getting, so expect them to get steadily less amusing as you read down the list, but I must admit that the top few are pretty damned amusing.
When I told Maria about this site she wanted to link it from her blog, but I pointed out that, being the geekier person, I think it’s only fair that I should be the one to put a link to it on my site. Much like the line rider videos.
If it weren’t for the fact that it would confuse too many people, I would probably add “I find your lack of pants disturbing” to my email signature
Edit: I have been informed by my far cooler/geekier friends that this is soooooo 2002, and that I must live under a rock on the internet. I’m not moderately embarassed to even have this on my blog. But what can I do? There are undoubtedly people out there who haven’t been exposed to this, and I’ll consider it a gesture of goodwill towards them. That’s right people, I’m willing to look stupid, just for you.
Posted in Links | 1 Comment »
Posted by Dan Hertz on January 4, 2007
So have you ever been in a parking garage in a city and noticed those spots that are reserved for hybrid cars only? Well it turns out there’s more to it than just that. At least in Baltimore. In the parking garage Beth uses there has recently been a notice up talking about renewal of hybrid registration stickers. You apparently have to pay an annual fee of $25 to have your hybrid car registered, but the benefits quickly outweigh that cost. Because not only do you get to park in those spots, but you only pay half the usual rates for parking in the garages in the city. And since parking in Beth’s garage is $140 a month, the $25 registration fee is made back pretty quickly.
I suppose this is an effort by the city to encourage more people to drive hybrid cars, but it seems a little odd that it’s not publicized more or something. I don’t know to what extent similar programs exist in other cities but it seems like the sort of thing that is worth looking into, at least. And it does seem like another reason why owning a hybrid car would be nice. I wonder how much it costs the city to have this sort of financial encouragement? It seems likely to be money well spent in any case.
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
