Donnie’s Blog

Over a year ago I got a really nice set of kitchen knives from the Misono UX10 line. They are really nice; I really enjoy using them for cooking. (I even take them on trips when I expect to be cooking! I use this set of knife-safes to transport them safely.) However, over time they have gotten noticeably duller, so it was about time to get them sharpened. I could have taken them to someone to get them sharpened, but I decided it would be more fun to learn to sharpen them myself, so I went ahead and bought a couple of water stones.

There are a variety of different water stones available, and I really didn’t know what to pick. Here is one website that has a selection of water stones. The Chosera stones looked really appealing, but the ones I wanted were out of stock, so I went ahead with the Shapton professional line of water stones. I chose a 1000-grit stone and a 5000-grit stone, which hopefully will be good to start with.

I also need to learn the proper technique for sharpening my knives, which is complicated slightly by the fact that Misono knives have more of a bevel on one side of the knife than on the other. This aids in making very accurate cuts. I enjoyed this feature of the knife, so I want to preserve that in my sharpening efforts; some people restore this to a 50/50 bevel, but that’s just not for me. Here is one website that describes how to sharpen knives; I will have to look for more when I get my water stones.

Today the Caltech CS department is getting rid of some old (very old) computer and electrical equipment, and it’s always fun and entertaining to go over it and see if anything interesting is being tossed out. Sometimes you find stuff that’s really useful for a personal project (say, a couple capacitors rated at 50KV for that Tesla Coil you are building), but sometimes you just find something awesome. That happened for me today, because I found this:

This happens to be a 64-processor parallel computer, called the MOSAIC, that I programmed for CS20 during the third term of my sophomore year. It was a crazy little computer. The processors were connected up into a 2D mesh, and they could send messages left, right, up, or down. They only had about 64KB of memory per node, if I remember correctly, so you had to be pretty careful with your programming.

Communication and parallel computation were even crazier, because the communication channels between the processors were slack 1. That means you could send one message, and then the next send would block until the receiving processor actually read the message off of the channel. And the processors weren’t very bright, so it was very easy to have your program lock up the entire MOSAIC if you didn’t route your messages properly.

In CS20, the project was to simulate all of the components of a processor on this parallel computer. So, a few processors would be assigned to simulating ALUs, a few processors would handle stack operations, one would handle instruction decoding, a few would simulate heap memory, and so forth. It was such a fun project to work on, unlike anything I had ever done before, and I still remember it with great fondness to this day. Peter Hofstee was the teacher for CS20 that year, and I’m glad he came up with that crazy project.

I think I’m going to have to frame one of those boards and put it up on the wall!

Guess what I saw at the Sydney Airport:

That’s the new Airbus A380! It’s one big plane! It can seat more than 500 people. Fully loaded it takes ~9K feet to get off the runway - nearly two miles, which is a little disturbing because the LAX airport runways are between 10K and 12K feet long. Not a lot of leeway there!

Well, everybody who knows me knows I’m already afraid of flying, so it’s not a big surprise that this thing scares me. But it is still really cool to finally see one up close!

If you ever liked Rubik’s Cubes, check out these beasts: V-Cubes

The short version is that some professor figured out how to make Rubik’s Cube puzzles with sizes all the way up to 11×11x11. Right now his company is selling up to 7×7x7 “cubes” (they are actually slightly rounded), with larger versions in the offing.

I decided I just had to check these out, so I went ahead and ordered the set that includes the 5×5x5, the 6×6x6, and the 7×7x7. Should be fun!

For about the last month I have been really working hard to rearrange my working area at home, because it was just unusable before. I didn’t have enough room to do much of anything, and what little room I had was really unenjoyable to use.

So, I got a new desk - a really nice large desk with plenty of filing space, and I have been cleaning things up and throwing things out like crazy. But the last thing I needed was a storage cabinet, for all the odds and ends that couldn’t really go anywhere else. Blank media, blank paper, tools, planispheres, that kind of stuff. (Actually, I already have a good place for my planisphere…)

I finally found the storage cabinet I wanted on Office Depot’s website, so I ordered it earlier this week. I got an email confirmation with details on how to check my order status, so I went ahead and checked out the order page.

Lo and behold, the very first order status, before anything has actually happened, is called “Buyer’s Remorse.” What’s up with that??

(The only thing that made me feel any remorse was that the estimate said it was going to take a month to get my storage cabinet.)

I was browsing through MSNBC.com (the CNN.com clone) this morning, looking at some of the pictures of the Chinese Olympics facilities, and lo and behold, I came across this picture of the aquatics center:

• The National Aquatics Center

The pattern on the wall is called a Voronoi diagram, and is formed by taking a bunch of random points, and dividing the space into regions that are closest to a particular point. The boundaries are lines that are equidistant between two points.

The ceiling of the aquatics center uses the same technique:

• Interior of the National Aquatics Center

Who knew?!

Evidently there was a sizable earthquake today.

Unfortunately, I didn’t feel it since I was in the swimming pool when it happened.

So now I am trying to figure out if it is a massive nationwide conspiracy.

For some reason, the “Monty Hall problem” has been coming up pretty frequently lately. The basic idea is as follows:

You are on Let’s Make a Deal with Monty Hall. You have three doors to choose from. One of the doors has a NEW CAR behind it. The other two doors have goats.

1. You choose one of the three doors.
2. Then, Monty Hall opens another of the three doors, revealing… A GOAT!
3. Then you have the opportunity to either change your choice to the remaining closed door, or to stick with your original choice.

Is it in your best interest to stick with your original choice, or change your choice after finding out about the location of one of the goats?

Unless you are well-versed with basic probability theory, the correct answer is actually pretty counterintuitive. I won’t go into that; Wikipedia has a great article about it.

But I do have one complaint - who decided that you lose if you get a goat? I think it would be pretty awesome to have a pet goat. You could name him “Chewy” and keep him in the back yard. Now how could anybody call that “losing”?

I haven’t written anything since I got back from Australia, so I thought I had better put up at least a brief update. When I got back it was straight into the first term, and I am still settling into it.

I was able to get a telescope down to Australia and get some great pictures. However, astronomy photos always seem to require a lot of post-processing to bring out all the details, and I still have some work to do. But, here is one for you:

This is the Tarantula Nebula, also known as 30 Doradus and NGC2070. It is in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a nearby dwarf galaxy, which means it’s about 160,000 light years away. It’s pretty stinking bright.

So far the school year is promising to be a smooth one. There hasn’t been too large a glut of students in any classes so far, and TAs can always help with that!

You can definitely smell burning in the air, too. :-/

Everybody wants to be just a little cooler. Then the power goes out and nobody is cool. I find the irony delicious, for some reason.

I’m glad that I finally got a UPS on the computer at home; it survived this power outage without any problems, and now it’s turned off, waiting for the power to come back.

Of course, for the time being, none of this has affected me since I’m at work! It’s nice working in a lab full of computers - nice and cool.

In the catastrophe vein, there was a minor earthquake this morning at about 10:30am. Magnitude 4.7, it turns out. I guessed 4.2 when I felt it, so that’s not too bad.

Yay California. Last weekend the mountains catch fire close to home. This weekend the power goes out and there’s an earthquake.

I have got to get me a new state.