Guess Who Hates Denver

4:55 am EST / 2:55 am MST
Wake up, drive to Boston Logan.

7:00 am EST / 5:00 am MST
Flight from Boston to Denver Int'l.

11:00 am EST / 9:00 am MST
Arrive in Denver. Hang out a bit in the Red Carpet Club, which sports no electrical outlets. Get to the gate for the next flight.
Distance walked: 0.4 miles

12:20 pm EST / 10:20 am MST
Stand in front of the gate for the flight. Wait until 10 minutes before take-off. Walk up to the counter and ask why boarding hasn't begun yet. Be told that the flight is actually boarding from a gate halfway down the concourse. But the doors have closed now. And, since terrorists hate America, the doors cannot be re-opened to admit late passengers. Even though the airline is 100% at fault, having not updated the flight listings on the screens. Go check out customer service, see if they can stick you on the next flight.
Distance walked: 0.2 miles

12:30 pm EST / 10:30 am MST
Get wait-listed on a flight in two hours, or get confirmed tickets on a flight in four and a half hours. It would take six hours to drive from Denver to Lead, SD. The flight to Rapid City is 45 minutes, driving from Rapid City to Lead is another 45-ish. Flight still makes sense. Go hang out in the Red Carpet Club, which still sports no electrical outlets. Develop an intricate plan whereby Rick grabs the one potentially available seat on the wait-listed flight, then you and Simon follow a few hours later on the other flight and attempt to rent a car and grope your way in the dark in a snowstorm from Rapid City to the mine. Hope that this doesn't really happen.
Distance walked: 0.5 miles

2:00 pm EST / 12:00 pm MST
Get to the gate for the wait-listed flight. Stand around for twenty minutes. Get rejected due to women with babies who need to get to South Dakota for some reason. Go find some food. Wait for the next flight.
Distance walked: 0.5 miles

4:30 pm EST / 2:30 pm MST
Get to the gate for the next flight. Get boarded.
Distance walked: 0.1 miles

5:00 pm EST / 3:00 pm MST
Fly away from Denver, only four hours late for preliminary meetings at Homestake.

5:15 pm EST / 3:15 pm MST
Have some bullshit fall off the nose of the airplane and have an emergency generator fan kick in that is "so loud" for the pilot that he decides, rather than flying 30 more minutes to Rapid City, you should fly in circles for 30 minutes to burn fuel before landing back in Denver. Do whatever the pilot wants, because if you object, you find yourself in Guantanamo.

6:00 pm EST / 4:00 pm MST
Get told to go back to customer service, and to ask if there is an earlier flight you can get on, or if you have to wait for the plane with the bullshit nose job to get fixed. Get told that it really is necessary for all passengers to "de-plane," which is a verb, while a tech works on some fan on the outside of the plane.

6:02 pm EST / 4:02 pm EST
Get a glimpse of the nose of the airplane. Think to yourself, there's no fucking way this plane is getting fixed in the next hour.

6:10 pm EST / 4:10 pm MST
Once you are back inside the terminal and away from lying flight crews, receive a text message saying that the airplane isn't getting fixed.

6:30 pm EST / 4:30 pm MST
Go back to customer service. Get told that there's another flight leaving right now -- get there quick like a bunny, you might just get on. Be that guy running in an airport.
Distance sprinted in boots and a backpack while dragging wheeled luggage: 0.3 miles

6:35 pm EST / 4:35 pm MST
Get superseded by more women with babies.

6:50 pm EST / 4:50 pm MST
Go back to customer service. Have United book you on an entirely different airline for a flight to Rapid City in two and a half hours, because United has decided that it has done precisely what you paid it to do. Head over to that other flight now.
Distance walked: 0.7 miles

7:15 pm EST / 5:15 pm MST
Arrive at the gate for the new flight. Get told that you aren't actually booked on this new flight, and that you must visit the customer service desk to get processed. Walk over there.
Distance walked: 0.3 miles

7:30 pm EST / 5:30 pm MST
Get processed at customer service. Head back to the gate.
Distance walked: 0.3 miles

7:45 pm EST / 5:45 pm MST
Get back to the gate. Wait there. You're boarding in 30 minutes.

8:20 pm EST / 6:20 pm MST
Notice that the plane is stuck under a sheet of ice in Billings, MT, and therefore isn't here quite yet. Also notice the proximity of Rapid City to Billings, and dream of the shit you are walking into.

8:45 pm EST / 6:45 pm MST
Wait for that plane.

9:00 pm EST / 7:00 pm MST
Wait for that plane.

9:30 pm EST / 7:30 pm MST
Wait for that plane.

9:45 pm EST / 7:45 pm MST
Hey, an airplane. Board the plane.

10:00 pm EST / 8:00 pm MST
Fly to Rapid City in a prop plane in 30 mph crosswinds.

11:30 pm EST / 9:30 pm MST
Rent a Jeep. Do a 45 minute drive to Lead.

1:30 am EST / 11:30 pm MST
Get to Lead. Get a sweet hotel room. Get some fucking sleep.

Total distance walked in Denver Int'l: 3.3 ± 0.5 miles. 0.5 miles because I used Google Maps, a thumb, and alcohol to do the calculation. And also the error analysis. It's more like ± 0.5 miles ± 0.2 miles.

I should add that Simon bet me it was 2.8, which is within 1σ. I'm not sure how he did that, especially because he's French and they use the metric system.

I have to link to one of the many articles about how Palin is so annoying, because how often do you get a quote like this:

"This is basically an incredibly expensive project that doesn't help commuters, doesn't help create jobs and may drive whales to extinction"

These Panasonic RP-HC500 noise-cancelling headphones are pretty boss. So much so that I've composed an ad.

Are children and wild animals constantly making noise at you? To hell with them. They'll get theirs. Until then, chill them out with the RP-HC500. The headband adjusts so that you don't get a stupid crease in your head. The ears swivel 90° in case you are a rabbit. The power is supplied by one battery, which for some reason was never enough for any gadget until now. It's plenty. Stop making me use so many batteries. Make me use up the 80 AAA's that I've accumulated for no reason at all.
The bass is deep enough to listen to Boston, while the treble is high enough to listen to Boston, so everyone should be happy. A blue light comes on to let people know that you are on the moon. The noise cancellation is second only to actually being deaf. We even include an extra two-pronged gadget that no one can figure out what it does. It's better than Bose and it's way better than putting a bowl of water over your head, plus you can listen to music, although it probably costs more.
By Panasonic. We Make And Sell Things^®

"Opinions are only worth having if you are willing to strangle people who disagree with you."

-Ryan

Which explains why his political vector had the same direction as mine but more than twice the magnitude.

Fun Math Exercise -- Solutions!

If you're not trying to program a spaceship, you should probably skip this blog entry.

Two methods that I've discovered so far:

1. Straight-up geometry.

   • Starting with a collection of points, start with any random point in space (e.g., the average of the point set, or one of the points in the set, or whatever). Take this initial point as your initial sphere center. Find the maximum distance from that point to any other point in the set. This maximum-distance point will be the first point defining your sphere.
   • Define the sphere as being centered on that initial point, and the radius as the distance to that far point. Keeping the radius as the distance between center and far point, start moving the initial center towards the far point (thereby shrinking the radius). Calculate how close the center point can get to that far point before another point in the set hits the sphere radius. Whichever point hits the sphere radius next is the second point defining your sphere.
   • Keep the sphere radius attached to these two points. The center is now an equal distance between the two points. Start moving the center towards the halfway point between the two radius points, shrinking the radius appropriately. Wait for a third point to hit the radius. This point will be the third point defining your sphere.
     • If there is no third point before the center reaches the halfway point, then the sphere is defined by the halfway point as the center and the radius as the distance from the halfway point to one of the radius points. Done!
   • With three points defined, calculate the circumcenter of the triangle that they define. Start moving the center towards the circumcenter, shrinking the radius to keep the three points attached to the radius. Calculate when a fourth point will hit the radius. You then have your sphere. Done!
     • If there is no fourth point before the center reaches the plane of the three radius points, then the center is the triangle circumcenter and the radius is the distance to any of the three radius points. Done!

2. Recursion.

   • Do some crazy shit found in Christer Ericson's Real-time Collision Detection called Welzl's algorithm.

I'm assuming this field is vague enough that the first method, which I sort of intuited, can be Malling's algorithm. If so, please label it properly.

Paying a fixed rate for utilities really changes your lifestyle dramatically. I didn't realize the freedom I had until my landlord offered to install an A/C unit in my room for free. He's partly doing it because he's a nice guy and partly because, if he doesn't do it, I'm going to end up installing an old 100,000 BTU unit. I can do it because I pay a fixed rate for utilities. When the situation finally settled in my brain, I started realizing that I could totally have a night-light again. And it could consist of five 60-watt bulbs.

I've essentially tapped an unbounded source of power, somewhat akin to harnessing the zero point energy. I could sell some of my room's electricity to Warwick and Pawtucket (indeed, the only other towns I know of in Rhode Island). By my calculations, which come exclusively from playing SimCity, I could make around $1000 / month on power alone.

I'm actually using most of the energy to play Ninja Gaiden II. My Xbox has started making occasional odd sounds, like a deep low-frequency hum that shakes my floor, which I attribute to having to pump additional megawatt-hours into my ninja so that he can keep up with all the bullshit in that game, like packs of wolves with what I think are knives. Let it be known that ninjas do not require limbs or a direct means of locomotion to be able to attack you from far away.

Fun Math Exercise!

I need someone to give me an algorithm for finding the smallest bounding sphere for a set of points, which doesn't require me going terribly far out of my way to solve a system of linear equations. For example, if it can be slammed into a for loop, that would be superb. If you don't know what a for loop is, get away from me. I can't be touched right now.

I've been asked more than once why we should bother sending humans into space to do the work at which our robotic landers and rovers have been so successful. The answer is: because they actually aren't terribly successful.

The probes we send to other planets have a very narrow set of tasks they are able to perform. The Viking landers could take pictures of stuff. Spirit and Opportunity can roll around, and they can drill things. The Phoenix lander can dig a bit, but it can't move. Our latter Mars missions also have a bunch of fancy equipment for measuring flux capacitance and theta radiation. Which is good. We can learn a lot from that.

All of those pieces of equipment which are specially designed for use by the robots, however, can easily be stocked into a small human laboratory. Plus a lot more bulky equipment. Large centrifuges and whatnot. I hear scientists enjoy those. Need a soil sample? Send Johnson outside with a trowel and a Ziploc baggie. Five minute process. See something interesting a few miles away? Hop on a little rover and go take a look. A few hours at worst. Basically, if there is interesting science to do, just do it.

Robots can't particularly match that versatility at the rate we're currently progressing. Robots must be told what to do at every step of the way, so that they don't become permanently stuck in a sand dune or run out of juice during dust storm season. This is a little annoying, because signals between here and Mars take between three and 20 minutes one-way. So, if you're navigating a robot through a dense rocky field, and you tell it to move about ten feet per communication and then wait for confirmation that you haven't driven the robot off a cliff, your average speed is at best 1.7 ft/min and at worst 0.25 ft/min. That's lame. I'd just jump over that shit, because I'm a human, and I'll do as I please.

Of course, we can eventually wring a bunch of interesting science out of the rovers and landers. However, we can only learn as much as we think we already know. At the cost of tens to hundreds of millions per robot, you only invest in robot science that you know will find something definitive, like an answer to the question of water on Mars with the possibility of ancient life. The rover isn't keeping its eyes pealed for interesting and strange phenomena outside the realm of its narrowly-focused mission. Humans, by nature, excel at that. That's why we have things like antibiotics and radios. Science born of random observation ought to be sustained, even at high cost.

I'm currently gathering the balls to post this to the grad student listserv, amid the torrent of more legitimate offers.

Roommate Wanted for $500 Shithole on Brook St

I'm a Brown physics grad student who enjoys listening to Akon and is generally disrespectful towards people and property, looking for anyone of a similar caliber to fill a vacancy in my apartment located approximately 1600 ft from campus. Window blinds are closed at all times. Washer and dryer in inaccessible locked basement, as if to taunt you. Landlords are nice people who live upstairs and enjoy rolling heavy objects back and forth on the floor at odd hours of the morning for no reason. Third-floor apartment rented by nudist. Kitchen counter tilted at 10-degree angle due to new dishwasher. Electricity oscillates at a mean of 71 Hz. A stone's throw from the fire station and a giant church. Two-hour street parking available. Call to set up a time.

I can't wait to go to the movies.

1:38:29 PM davemallingsband: i cant even get excited about seeing this upcoming The Happening movie
1:38:36 PM zwieselite: i don't even know what it is
1:38:51 PM davemallingsband: its m night shyamalan. and a happening occurs. now.
1:38:59 PM zwieselite: jesus
1:39:30 PM davemallingsband: and since its m night shyamalan its probably the inverse of what youd expect. i.e., its actually not happening
1:39:38 PM zwieselite: or its happening backwards
1:39:45 PM zwieselite: or inside a box
1:39:56 PM zwieselite: but nobody knwos they're in a box
1:40:15 PM davemallingsband: but we will know
1:40:18 PM davemallingsband: after it happens

I've used Matlab, which is the greatest program in the world, to plot the success of M. Night Shyamalan's career:

I've also rigged up a scale projecting the success of this Happening movie in terms of how radical it will be: