Square Signals

2010-02-21

Meet the Tempest Prognosticator

I’d like to introduce you to a superior olde-timey invention: the tempest prognosticator.

The prognosticator is essentially a very ornate leech-powered barometer created by George Merryweather in 1850.

Apparently, leeches become agitated as storms approach. The Doctor imprisoned a leech in each of twelve bottles; a whale-bone attached to a central bell is hung from the top. When the leeches climbed up the bottles, the bell would ring. The idea: if the bell rings incessantly, there’s probably a storm coming.

Supposedly, the prognosticator does actually work to some extent. But given that mercury barometers were invented in the seventeenth century, I’m not sure why the good Doctor bothered. I like to think it’s just a manifestation of the mad science archetype.

One more thing: as if this device’s name weren’t already wonderful enough, it was originally introduced as “An Atmospheric Electromagnetic Telegraph, conducted by Animal Instinct.”

2010-02-08

Rankmaniac 2010: the Game!

I made a game for you with my friends Daniel and Chris. It looks like:

It’s fun, but it’s also for science. How, you ask?

First, we’re capturing players’ results (time and tags needed) to learn which movie tags are most useful.

Second, we’re trying to win a silly Googlebombing contest on the term “rankmaniac 2010,” and we figured that we’d do it by making some interesting content rather than by using dirty SEO tricks.

So if you like the game, thank us by linking to it. Because Caltech needs to beat Carnegie Mellon. We don’t have football; we have this.

2010-01-24

“As We May Think”

This 1945 essay in The Atlantic Monthly is eerily prescient of the way the web works today, albeit via microfilm cameras and projectors.

Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, “memex” will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.

Vannevar Bush wrote this piece while director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development—the office which had just successfully completed the Manhattan Project.

Besides its proposal for the “memex” device itself, this essay riveted me because it so cleverly described a fundamental difference between books and our brains. On paper, information is necessarily linear: essentially, it’s an organized listing of facts. But your brain doesn’t store information that way. It’s associative.

That’s why we can find information on Wikipedia (and the web in general) so effectively: it’s organized more like our brains.

2010-01-08

We used to play Motherboard Roulette, where we’d take five–second turns with a soldering iron trying to knock out a running computer. Of course, we’d agree on a few off-limit areas first. They used to last a few rounds! Man, they don’t make motherboards like they used to.

— Matthew Maurer, a Caltech CS major; paraphrased.

2010-01-05

Time Travel by the Numbers

So, you’ve got one of those time travel boxes from Primer, you go back in time, and now there’s two of you. But wait, what about mass conservation? The universe is now like 75kg more massive! We may be time-traveling, but we can’t go violating the rules willy-nilly.

My Caltech physicist buddy Chris figured out how much power those boxes would take to make a new 75kg person in 8 hours.

In units of Nagasaki explosions: 2.4 Hz.

2009-12-27

Well-done but fork-tender?

I’m home for the holidays in St. Louis, it’s frickin’ cold, and that means it’s time for rich comfort food!

The first thing you should know: short ribs are one of my greatest weaknesses. So I picked some up, and as I looked around for new braising ideas, I started wondering why braises are ever tender given that we’re cooking them at a simmer—or even a boil! Order a well-done steak, and that’ll be inedibly tough at a mere 160°.

Thankfully, Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking knows all:

Under 120°: water’s inside muscle cells. The meat is slick and chewy.
120°–140°: myosin coagulates, squeezing water out of the cell and into the sheaths surrounding muscle fibers. Now your meat is “juicy.”
140°–150°: collagen denatures and shrinks, squeezing water out of the fibers and onto your pan. Now your meat is dry and dense.
160°+: collagen starts melting into gelatin, adding succulence. The fibers it held together will now fall apart easily.

So your meat can seem tender because it’s full of juice when you bite into it (120–140°), or it can seem tender because the dry, stiff fibers fall apart easily and ooze velvety gelatin (160°+).

Tough meats like short ribs are full of collagen and other connective tissues, so they’ll only be tender at the higher temperature. “Tender” meats like filet don’t have much collagen, so they won’t produce gelatin at high temperatures. They’ll just be dry.

Boiling your braise will just make the fibers tougher, so braise at a low simmer. That’ll still dissolve the collagen, though it’ll take longer.

Other braising tenderness tips: cool the meat in its braising liquid, and it will reabsorb some lost fluid. Slice the meat across the “grain” of muscle fibers, so the fibers in each bite are short.

Of course, if you cook your short ribs sous vide at 133° for long enough, the collagen will still melt, and your meat will still be rare.

2009-12-16

Work Dilation

Maybe you’ve heard of Parkinson’s Law:

Work expands so as to fill the time allotted.

Jim Boyk, my very wise piano teacher, recently shared his converse:

Work contracts so as not to overflow the time allotted.

To provide a little experimental data, Jim told me the story of an emeritus Caltech math professor we’ll call John.

When John was just a little professor, his mother noticed him spending many hours toiling inefficiently on his homework, so she enacted an unorthodox restriction: he could only work for one hour a night.

John naturally thought his mother had become tyrannically anti-educational, and he struggled to finish his work in the time allotted. But he got more and more done each night until finally, he could do it all in an hour! Now he could spend all that extra time bettering himself in other ways—or just having fun.

Anyway, Jim told me I needed to be practicing way more efficiently, so he limited part of my work to 15 minutes a day (down from perhaps 30 or 45) and tasked me to even more done in that time.

So I started keeping a detailed log of my practice. Time records help me find my big time sinks, and notes keep me focused on the few measures that need work when I return the next day. I really do get more done now in half or a third the time!

I tried this idea on my finals, which just ended. Like most Caltech students, I’ll often end up spending all day “writing” a paper with nothing but a blank page to show for it until 2:00 AM. For my two final papers, I gave myself four hours to finish a first draft, and for once, I actually got them done in a reasonable timeframe.

Obviously, we do have hard limits at some point, but I’ve realized that I’m really bad at guessing where mine are.

2009-12-12

Final Edition: Twilight of the American Newspaper

Richard Rodriguez’s thoughtful essay has broader scope than its title might suggest: it mourns not only the decline of newspapers in general but also the loss of community in modern cities and the increasing “me”-ness of our generation.

It’s so full of disarming points, in fact, that this side-thought (not even a whole paragraph dedicated to it!) has kept my cogs spinning for days:

We are a nation dismantling the structures of intellectual property and all critical apparatus. We are without professional book reviewers and art critics and essays about what it might mean that our local newspaper has died. We are a nation of Amazon reader responses (Moby Dick is “not a really good piece of fiction”—Feb. 14, 2009, by Donald J. Bingle, Saint Charles, Ill.—two stars out of five). We are without obituaries, but the famous will achieve immortality by a Wikipedia entry.

How do you decide which books to read or which movies to see? These things used to live and die by critical reviews, but now we see what Twitter thinks. Or just take the average. What used to matter was the authority of the reviewer: we trusted this one over the other because he was a reputable source.

Now when we’re picking from YouTube search results, we watch the videos with the most views, or with the highest ratings. But then look at the comments: you’re trusting these people’s opinions? Really?

Say you’re shopping for t-shirts on Amazon. “Showing 1 - 24 of 27,015 Results.” Your sorting options: price, newness, and average customer rating. The highest-reviewed shirt? Hanes Beefy-Tee—a.k.a. paper bag: the shirt.

When it comes to subjective details, does democratization of taste really make sense?

2009-12-09

Here goes…

Exciting news: I’m joining the UIKit team at Apple.

With luck, this won’t mean I’m disappearing into an interminable void.

2009-12-07

At a Secret Santa event, I got the oddest “pizza cutter” I’ve ever seen.