Schierer Space

With a new member of the household, it’s been pretty busy around here. I have much to report, but haven’t had time to do any reporting.

Here is a list of what I’d like to take some time to write about… as a promissory note and a to-do list.

1. R is growing fast. We have a 1 month growth chart pic and many more. I will get these online soon.
2. N continues to be a joy. He’s learning so fast now I’m not sure school will be ready for him in two more years. He’s working on reading and spelling simple words. He’ll be 3 in May.
3. Snow! We finally got real winter weather here in central NY. Pics of outdoor snow constructions will be coming soon.
4. New PC research. With our tax returns burning a hole in our bank accounts, I’ve begun the process of specing out a new machine for K. We also need to get Win7 installed before N wipes out our much-more-difficult-to-secure WXP household PC.
5. New PC constructed. I’m using it now to write this post… and will use it to edit the pics to post them. I owe you comments on Win7, and performance of the new machine. Not to mention the build process itself. Must keep installing stuff if I’m going to get into a position to clear out this list.

Ok. Must get back to installation.

Thanks to R’s tendency to only sleep when supported vertically, I’ve been putting her in the Baby Bjorn and finding other things to do. These things need to be generally stationary and relatively quiet. This means that I’ve been catching up on my Discover magazines, quickly exhausting Turner Classic Movies On-Demand and finishing off some video games (with headphones on).

As a result of this I have several random observations:
A) Watching The Manchurian Candidate (1962) while heavily sleep deprived is especially surreal. It also gives you crazy violent dreams, so I wouldn’t recommend the overall experience. ^[1]
B) I’ve now completed Bioshock which I started back in December. There was about a three week hiatus, but I made a pretty hard push to finish it over the last few days/nights. I really have to applaud the writers and designers for writing a compelling storyline with reasonable psychological and ethical hurdles. The scenery is very dark and bloody and combined with adult dialog, the game is rather squarely rated “R”. However, despite this, it rarely seemed gratuitous like other shooters I have played (and generally stopped playing). There was suitable opportunity for a ‘thinking player’ rather than a ‘rapid reflex’ player to ambush/evade/out-think the enemies with sufficient moments of sheer combat chaos to keep the heart going. I have Mass Effect waiting in the wings, but I think I’m going to evade game-commitment and install NFS:Undercover next. ^[2]
C) Every time I read another article about the plasticity of the brain, and the growing field of neural-mechanical interfaces I really feel like I’m in the wrong line of work. I am continuously amazed at how remarkably flexible and adaptable the brain is at integrating with new inputs. This is reinforced by watching N learn to spell, associate numbers with objects and generally become more sophisticated physically and mentally every day. We’re starting this road again with R, and so quickly she develops reactions to certain stimuli.

1. Great movie though. Angela Lansbury as the manipulative Mrs. Iselin is fantastically dark. [↩]
2. Yes, I purchase and play games well after their initial release dates. Both Bioshock and Mass Effect have recently released sequels. I do this to keep my PC costs in check and to get a true bargain for my entertainment budget. I think I picked up Bioshock for about $10, and got a ridiculous number of entertainment hours out of it. [↩]

As seen on actual ESD^[1] mandatory training material (emphasis mine):

“Static electricity is a simple form of electrical energy. Every time you walk across a carpet, touch a doorknob, and get a spark it’s because you were splitting electrons. When you move, you generate an excess of either positive or negative charges on your body. Upon touching something conductive, the excess electrons are trying to find an electron of the opposite charge in order to neutralize themselves. So, an imbalance in electrons creates a difference in potential, which may cause an ESD event that may cause damage to circuitry.”

This is so fundamentally wrong it just hurts my brain. First off, in the Standard Model of elementary particles, electrons are indivisible. Even if you could split them, doing so by casually walking across a carpet would result in a significant release of energy. (Note, the annihilation of a single electron would be essentially unnoticeable from an energy release perspective, but if it happened as easily as simply walking across a carpet, we would have serious problems.) The amount of charge one can feel dissipating on a doorknob is on the order of 10^18 electrons. If they were really combining with “electrons of the opposite charge” (aka positrons… or antimatter electrons) this would result in a significant antimatter explosion. Something on the order of 100-200 kilojoules. Enough to heat about 40 kilograms of water one degree. Or for the 10 grams in the tip of your finger… pretty much vaporization. (Somebody please check my math on that.) Regardless… ouch.

I sent a correction. I’ll be interested to see how well received it is.

1. That’s ElectroStatic Discharge for you non-technical acronym types. [↩]

Cooties took a bit more effort to model in Excel than HHCO because the game has distinct states. The objective is to collect all the body parts of your Cootie bug which include: 1 Body, 1 Head, 1 Mouth, 1 Pair of eyes((A single molded piece)), 1 Headgear^[1] and 6 Legs. However, you must collect the Body followed by the Head before any other parts may be collected. Each part is selected based on the throw of a standard 6-sided die. If you successfully add a part to your bug, you get to roll again in the same turn. I didn’t model this, but rather did the statistics based on number of rolls required.

The average number of rolls required to complete the bug, based on 100 Monte Carlo runs, is 44 rolls. I’d estimate a tolerance of about +/- 5 rolls. Any individual player is not likely to reach this number, however, since any one lucky player at the table will end the game considerably earlier.

There is about a 20% chance of victory by 28 rolls for any single player. For four players, the game is over 60% of the time by this point. By 40 rolls, about 45% of players will have won meaning our table of 4 will have completed over 91% of the time. I did have one ’simulation’ exceed my modeling table with no victory after 100 rolls. The next highest was 77 rolls, but the density increased significantly below that.

Now if we can just get Nate to settle down enough to roll when it’s his turn we might actually get through a game in under 30 minutes.

1. In the modern version this includes antenna, a hat or a bow. [↩]

Yes really.

Nate got a series of classic kids games for Christmas: Hi-Ho-Cherry-Oh, Candyland, Memory and Cooties. With the exception of Memory, these are all games of complete and total chance. For those that haven’t played,^[1] three of them basically go like this:

1. Invoke a random event.
2. Execute required action.
3. Has victory condition been met?
   • If so, yippee.
   • If not, repeat from step 1.

For Hi-Ho-Cherry-Oh, the randomizer is a spinner with 7 positions. Four positions let you take from 1 to 4 cherries off your tree, two positions penalize you 2 cherries and the last causes you to loose all of your cherries. Once you have collected 10 cherries, you win.

So being the geek that I am, I found myself wondering the average number of cherries gained per spin. At first this is simple (1+2+3+4-2-2)/6=1. Unfortunately, there is that nasty bucket which is a variable penalty. Rather than create the entire statistical equation,^[2] I simply created a Monte Carlo simulation in Excel. After about 100 ‘games’ it was clear that the average payout is between 1 and 1.1 cherries per turn.((This is determined as the 10 cherries needed to win divided by the number of spins required to get there. Even though the last spin might put you over 10, you can’t get that many off the tree.))

The shortest game is three spins (4,4,4;4,4,3;4,4,2;4,3,3). There are 10 winning series as the spins could come in any order and 343 possible outcomes. The odds are 2.9% of winning in the minimum amount of time. Of course the odds of a shorter game improve with more players as the game ends if any of the players succeeds, so roughly this increases to 11%. The maximum game is theoretically infinite, but about 40% of the time 10 spins or fewer are required (85% of the time for four players). By 20 spins, a solitaire game is over 75% of the time (with four players this would increase to 99.6%).

Ok, I now return you to your regularly scheduled intra-holiday period.

Maybe I’ll work on Cooties tomorrow. Candyland is just too annoying.

1. Really? [↩]
2. Involving Markov chains, etc. [↩]

First, thanks to all our vets for what you’ve done for us and this country.

And secondly, it’s 11:11:11/11/(09). Just thought you should know.

Thanks to a post at Me and My Boys, I learned that Nantucket island is actually mining their landfill.

Beyond the environment winning here, I’m am amused because this is truth following fiction as this is just what Stirling predicted would happen in his book Island in The Sea of Time.

For those unfamiliar with the book, the island of Nantucket is arbitrarily plucked from the modern era and transported to circa 1250 B.C. Geographically, they are still on Nantucket Island, it is only the when that changes. Faced with a lack of refining and technological assets they eventually begin mining the landfill for electronic components and other refined materials. Cool, huh? This was one of my favorite details from the book. Necessity meets ingenuity and bang: elegant solution.

With the price of copper and some precious metals skyrocketing, it does make you wonder when this becomes financially worthwhile on a grand scale. What percent of the material needs to be useful for the separation process to be worthwhile? I have no idea, but it is a compelling thought.

This past weekend we headed out to Burlingame Road to watch the Limestone Creek Hunt Club hold their Hunter Pace event. Well it turns out that waiting for teams of horse riders to come buy is a bit too much for the 2 year old, so we only watched one group come by. Of that group, only one decided to make the jump.

Later we headed out to Valley Falls to visit J&J. On the way we stopped for lunch where I tagged a few pics of Nate.

I also found this sign strangely amusing, as if they expected the NBA to come through or something.

Apparently even The Corps wants to assure that the 18 year old behind the wheel of a multi-ton up-armored Humvee (HMMWV) has read the manual.

Well technically, the Quick Reference Guide. This photo is of the actual sticker on the actual dash of an up-armored Marine Corps HMMWV. So not only is this massive vehicle prone to rollovers the short term solution appears to be a dashboard warning sticker.

Hoo-rah!

(FWIW: That’s Nate’s hand. We pulled him out of the driver’s seat about the time he started reaching for the ignition switch.)

A day when I get to read stuff like:

The spatial duality is analogous to the duality between delay dispersion and frequency selectivity or between Doppler frequency dispersion and time selectivity in wireless channels.

I think I almost understood that in context.

Curious? You can read Intrinsic Limits of Dimensionality and Richness in Random Multipath Fields online.