I see the light

What is he on?

I was waiting for my bus to bring me to salsa last week.¹ It was drizzling at the time, with some driving gusts. I'm wont to stretch my neck, tilting an ear to a shoulder² and pointing my nose upwards. Due to my off-kilter gaze my attention was caught by raindrops, falling.³ They were back-lit by a street lamp. Against the night sky, it looked like a swath of comets, like something in the opening of TNG. I had a moment of vertigo, like I was inside an optical illusion. It was amazing.

There's the rub.

Yet another reason why humans make terrible scientists. Our thoughts colour our perceptions; Giving us preconceptions, if you like.

We are convinced the next time it will come up heads, since it came up tails so many times already. We are shocked when famous people turn out to be other than virtuous paragons... surely all the money, good-looks and social influence correlate to a good nature.^4,5 If we are feeling all happy, we are more likely to get the wool pulled over our eyes.⁶ If a person annoys me, he/she can't be right.⁷

And, at the end of the day: do what I say, not as I do.

I can't wait for the robots to take cover, everything will move smoothly.

*****

¹In the main, I am better at at keeping the beat now, thanks to the... clave!

²The more possible one.

³Sure, it sounds poetic, but since the water spheres and I were standing near a bus-stop, as opposed to a volume of space removed from objects of a significant mass, poised at the apogee of a parabolic flight in a gravity well, or a high magnitude magnetic field, the water obviously falls.ⁱ

4

⁵It seems rather recursive if you ask me.

⁶Forgas & East, 2008

⁷Heck, I probably didn't bother listening in the first place, since he's obviously going to be wrong.

*****

ⁱOther exceptions are welcome.

Always Be Guilty

Preamble

Of late, one of our lab PCs has been giving us trouble. It crashes at inappropriate times, e.g. during experiments. The instrument supplier confirmed that the current CPU wasn't up to the job.

As such, I've been emailing the guy in the computer company¹ that assembled it to see the CPU upgrades the motherboard can handle. The guy was very helpful, he gave me the motherboard name and supplied a list of compatible dualcores. I was curious to see if quadcores could be used.² He promptly got back to me with a list of those. 3GHz+ quadcore was too expensive, so I figured that I'd go to my friend, Google,^3,4 to see if a slower quadcore matched/out-matched a faster dualcore. A blog called Coding Horror,⁵ decided it for me. In a nutshell, if the requirements aren't rendering-heavy/parallelizable the change isn't worth it.

I emailed the guy, just a bit more, confirming that I'll be going with dualcore and then that I'll be in touch with the order details. While I was doing up the purchase order,⁶ I checked out a standard on-line computer sales thingy and found it at a much lower price.

Preamble Summary

I was in touch with a guy about buying a CPU upgrade, but found it cheaper somewhere else and the guy is waiting on my purchase.⁷

Coffee's for Closers

So, after much wrestling (figuratively speaking), I decided I wasn't going to order the CPU from the guy, irrespective of the time the guy Guy⁸ spent helping me. This meant I had to e-mail Guy and tell him I won't be buying the part from his company.

I composed a terse email, which I then tried [and failed] to pad out to sound friendly:

Hi Guy,

A colleague found the CPU at a lower price from an alternate vendor and we decided to purchasing it from them.

Sincerest apologies for the inconvenience I have caused you,

I conferred with Damian about it and he said I should come up with something less honest and possibly, well, nicer.

Hi Guy,

Our IT specialist happened to have a spare CPU because of a delivery mix-up, so we will not need the CPU afterall.

Sincerest apologies for the inconvenience I have caused you,

Damian had another gander, and observed it looks like a blatant lie. I agreed and imagined Guy'd see through the thinly veiled rebuff. So I defaulted to the first e-mail. I felt bad to send it to him, but somewhat soothed by "giving it to him straight."

And so I waited with trepidation for Guy's rejoinder:

Hi Martin[,]

That is fine[.]

Thanks for the opportunity[.]

Cheers[,]⁹

Guy

I felt like I had just kicked a puppy. I certainly hoped that there was at least tincture of sarcasm there. If that wasn't the case, the only images that came to mind were of Gil, "Ah jeez, I almost had that one."

I still feel a bit bad about it... so here I am writing it down; the internet is the new confessional!

* * * * *

¹I'm not tellin' which company it is. Let's just rule out Dell because they were terrible at getting back to us even with preliminary specs (10s of weeks!), let alone a quote. The company we did go with gave us our PC within 5 working days- win!

²I ascribe to the Tim "the Tool Man" Taylor school of hardware.

³A sore hoke on the aul to the prestigeⁱ that many have suffered (Newton/Leibniz, Bell/Reis/Meucci, Rowling/Stouffer/Jacobs, etc.) is the galling discovery that their original idea wasn't.

⁴Everything you need is on the internet. With this in mind, "I always Google before I do my own bit."ⁱⁱ

⁵Earlier today, I read through it to disable the pesky automatic update/restart on XP. This irritant persists on XP if you don't click "restart later" every 10 minutes. Without going into configurations or command prompt it cannot be disabled and if one were silly enough to ignore the pop-up window, it will just go ahead and do restart anyway.

⁶By "I," I mean I assumed a managerial/hands-off position as one of the first year PhD students, Damian, did it.

⁷True, I could have said that in the first place, but seemingly extraneous information helps with decision making.^iii,iv

⁸It seems rather dehumanizing to call him "the guy"; I'll give him a proper name.

⁹Either the lack of punctuation was a subtle snubbing, or he was a bit emotional about the fracas.

* * * * *

ⁱName that quote.⁴

ⁱⁱComing soon to a vendor of cheesy customer endorsements near you.

ⁱⁱⁱWell, that is what they say.

^ivI just dropped arguably off-topic footnotes/knowledge on you, my readers, because I can. Whatchu gonna a do about it!?^α

* * * * *

^αIn further unrelated news, Hippo becomes mayor of a village (link).^β

^βIn truth is less unrelated and more allusive.

The life and death of a Snowmonk

So, snow.

For the first time, since I was a pudgy little boy in my shell overalls and wellies scooping snow around my father's work-van, we got a substantial amount. So much so that UCD ground to a halt and the Sports Centre was closed over the weekend. We had to cancel training as a result. But that doesn't mean we didn't go to UCD. The dedicated, the bored, few gathered in the Sports Centre car park and hatched a cunning plot to create life and then cruelly snuff it out in the form of Snowmonk.^1,2

And so the Lords giveth:

And They taketh away:

... and away:

... and away:

... taketh just a tiny little bit more away:

In summation:

Even considering the glare cast by the rose-tinted past, Best Snow Day Ever.

¹ In our defence, it was going to suffer a painful, attritious death, alone and unloved. We performed a service really. Besides, surely, having created life, we have supreme authority over it? You know, tell it when to go to bed, what school it is going to, etc.

²We went with Snowmonk for obvious reasons. That go without saying.

2009: The Director's Cut: Scroll the Finalth

And now for Máirtín's nod to materialism.

My favourite possessions of the year are:

My head scarf: I got it in Morocco back in February. We were forced to buy them on the way to the Sahara, €10, as far as I recall. It kept my porcelain face safe from the abrasive sand and scouring sun all the way to the tallest dunes in the country.
The hitherto snubbed¹ shroud rose to favour when I tired of trying to turtle into the wide brim of my fleece. I wrap it round my neck and jaw-line. Since it is 2.62 m long it goes around a few times.² Now my neck and chest are safely tucked in.

My gyroscope: I got it as a gift from Cillian and the Mrs. I look forward to coming to grips with the mathematics/physics behind it.³

My netbook: I've had some [self-inflicted] problems the past few months with my desktop, so I spend most of my time with the VGA cable to my 20 inch monitor connected to the little one. That and its mobility got it on the list.

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¹I've been waiting 12 years to use that phrase appropriately! Another highlight to the year. It is from Nobel Laureate Séamus Heaney's An Advancement of Learning.
² It goes around 5 and 3.5 times.^i
3Pardon the pun, or not. Hell, if you complain about it, I'll just delete your comment!

^{_____________________________________________________________________________________
i}If I tie it really tight around my head it is the former, if I take care to keep it loose, it is the latter. I took out the measuring tape and found that the circumference (C) of my neck is 39cm, a tight wrap is 53cm and loose wrap is 69cm.
I went nuts and assumed that my neck and scarf were cylindrical, so I could calculate the volume ( V=HC/4π) of each of the cylinders, taking 15cm as the neck height. There is about 4 times more air in the loose wrapping. w00t!

ⁱⁱIts density is 0.01% of liquid water and it follows that eventhough its heat capacity per unit mass is about 25% of that of water, its heat capacity per unit volume is about 0.0015% that of water. If its temperature has the potential to change so easily, why can I barely feel my radiator‽ <sup>iii

iii</sup> "Thanks for asking, Máirtín..." When objects are heated their density changes. In the simplest case, the heat source is on the ground, i.e. the lowest position in the accerating reference frame.^iv The fluid heats, gets less dense compared to the fluid overhead and experiences a buoyancy force, and convection ensues. A critical Rayleigh Number marks the transition from conductive to convection dominant heat transfer. Bluntly, compared to water, Air does not have much going on.<sup>v

iv</sup>Without an applied force objects, don't do much. Kinda like drunk people and cattle prods.

^vI got the air expansion coefficient and kinematic viscosity here. For water I got them here. The diffusivities took some tracking down. I decided that the diffusivity of oxygen in air would suffice for air and water's turned up after some googling. As far as the temperatures go... I picked what my radiator felt like and what my room feels like, respectively.
____________________________________________________________________

Some interesting links that cropped up while I was sifting through the calculations to put in the post:

Rood, E.S. "Thermal Conductivity of Some Wearing Materials", Physics Review Letters, pp 356-361 Vol. 18, 1921. Damn her units. In the abstract she has a mismatch of SI units and neglects to list the pertinent units of the conductivity.

These guys had lots of indepth stuff on the properties of cotton, Air permeability, Weight per unit area, and Thermal conductivity. ^α

This guy did a great job on calculating the condesnation temperature for one's breath.

This lady composed a Matlab program for calculating the Schmidt Number of binary gas mixtures
____________________________________________________________________
^αThey had it as: 53 W/m/K. I was rather sceptical of that. I suppose my scepticism is rooted in associating cloths with insulators. They are probably good insulators because of all the air in them... Nonethless I stand doubtful.

2009: The Director's Cut: Scroll the Second

So. Another highlight... mark of the year.

'Twas the Year of the Nemesis.

Being the eldest of 4-6 children for 11 odd years, I am wont to rib the younguns. Harmless ribbing. I assure. Diorraing and Cárthach never kicked up much of a fuss, a bit of moanin' and huffin' is all. And then she came along...

The first time was documented before. Since then, there have been a couple of tête à tête:

A common tactic I employed in the past was telling the youngest- Diorraing, Cárthach and now Molly- "I was Mammy/Deirdre's first baby." It is a long time since I did it to Diorraing, but I think his response was reserved and accepting. Cárthach reacted as expected; a bit of moaning and assertions to the contrary. And then she came along...
I made the usual claim. Initially, she was rather outraged.¹ Things quickly unravelled as Sagacious Sextus turned to/on me,"My daddy isn't dead [giggles]."
Once more was I brought low by the lowest rung of progenous ladder.

More recently, I was home for a dentist visit. She brings 4 beakers to bed. 4. I took one from her on the sly. Of course, she noticed. At first, she yelped at "mammy" about it.² When it became clear that her cat's paw wasn't on duty, she told me with much glee,"I'm gonna tie you up with a rope and leave you on the road so a car can get you!"

Those are the most memorable instances. I expected Christmas to be the blowout of the decade.³ As luck would have it,⁴ it was a civil occasion.

Once. Once, there was an order to things. A hierarchy.⁵ And then...
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¹"No", "I'm Mammy's baby."
²Granted, an adorable yelp.
³Decades run from year one of a decade, not year "zero."ⁱ It is the end of a decade, but really. The Y2K bug strikes again.ⁱⁱ Who's doing the counting around here?
⁴Good or bad depends on your perspective.
⁵Disclaimer: This is rampant "poetic licence." At least in the past, it was limited to the elder brothers; She's not even 3!

ⁱUnfortunately, people are idiots and wikipedia is far too egalaratian for my tastes.
ⁱⁱCheck out Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie for The Lost Scrolls of Frosty. I tried finding free versions of it online, but their site no longer hosts it :(