This is the biggest Gannt chart I’ve ever seen.
Readers of Make: blog have seen their maker’s bill of rights, which I love. Worldchanging has a great article about how design for hackability is actually design for sustainability, since handy types can fix/upgrade their devices instead of tossing them when they get broken or obsolete. Sweet – I smell a change in the world.
For no particular reason: the beat frequency between the LEDs on the CAN-enabled PICs blinking on my desk and the Ben Folds song “All U Can Eat” is ~0.06Hz.
I wonder how you make a program that can automatically detect the bpm of a song (for syncing with slideshows, for instance)? Low-pass it and look for regular spikes at bass drum frequencies? There’s always the option of having someone tap on the spacebar in rhythm to the first 30 seconds of a song, then averaging the time between taps.
Okay, now I’m just procrastinating.
I first saw this on mchang’s fridge. At some point I should make a collage of all these quotes and frame them up on my wall.
Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. –Ranier Maria Wilke
So the question is: how do you live a question? I suppose this quote is telling me that I shouldn’t look for the answer to that one and let it hang unresolved, but that would be an answer, which is contradictory.
It’s always been a disquieting yet quietly triumphant thing to me that humans are able to live with logical contradictions while knowing they’re logical contradictions. Definitely wouldn’t go so far as to say that Godel’s incompleteness theorem explains what makes us human – it doesn’t say anything of the sort – but contradictions are still an amusing and pervasive phenomena that I’m still trying to come to grips with. Does not compute… but it’s kind of cool that it doesn’t.
…you really like reading papers. Gosh, I feel like such a non-engineer when I say this.
I mean really like. Last year my favorite readings (edging out even sci-fi stories) were the Robotics papers for Gill’s class and things like Shannon’s original paper on information theory. I stayed up nights earlier this semester reading Papert’s stuff. Now I’m kicking myself for not doing theoretical research earlier. All the research stuff I’ve done at Olin has been “hey, a new lab! buy equipment, haul furniture, hello I am a code monkey.” Haven’t done much research, to be honest. And in high school I read very few papers, they were mostly biotech, and I just didn’t get into that stuff as much (too many immunology acronyms to remember) and that was for fun, not for research of any sort.
I’m currently crawling my way through “Opportunistic beamforming using dumb antennas.” It breaks my previous slow record for reading in English; 3 hours net reading and I’m 3 pages in (out of 19). The previous record holder was the Calculus of Variations textbook I crept through for my PDEs project two years ago, and that was 18 pages in 6 hours, three times as fast. It takes time for me to work through the math and look up new terms (did you know there’s an imaginary error function? It’s called erfi. I’m pronouncing it “er-fee,” which makes it sound like the name of a puppy.)
It’s a great balance, actually. Mathematics, but applied mathematics. Complex and abstract enough to be entertaining, but tied to reality so I actually care enough to keep going when the entertainment factor fades. A mix of probability and discrete math, with a good heap of graph theory thrown in – my favorites. Something where good programming skills helps, but it isn’t all you do. Where hardware knowledge helps, but it isn’t all you do. Where the boundaries between doing abstract mathy stuff, computational simulation, and actual physical implementation are paper-thin and crowded close together.
Did I mention the math? Ah, textual data – if it’s mathematical, it’s got to be written down, and so I can read it! In contrast to this, I’m still looking for a good textbook on how to lay out PCBs properly. It appears to be something people “pick up.” (My PCBs are awful – I can use the software, but I really don’t know what I’m doing with it aside from plugging the right things together. “They’re all connectedlike!” “Holy cow Mel there are huge loops everywhere and what the heck did you do to the ground plane.”)
I wish more electrical engineers would write good books about their work. I have a nagging feeling that I’ll be trying to fill this gap as time goes on.
It’s good that I’m forcing myself to take some time off to travel and work, otherwise I’d just stay in academia forever, and that wouldn’t necessarily be good for my growth. Strength in diversity of experience, Mel. The paper you’re reading now mathematically proves that (in a way).
Finish this section! Model Rayleigh fading! Sleep so you can get up when the sun rises and get more glorious natural light!
This is likely a reprint, because I swear I’ve written this somewhere before.
The Blinky Lights theory of electrical engineering: they make us happy and confuse the heck out of everyone else. How strange must it seem to an outsider to walk into a lab and see adults cheering at a tiny flickering red dot? “What’s that?” “THE LAST THREE YEARS OF MY LIFE HAVE BEEN VALIDATED!” And then a slurry of acronyms that leaves the observer bewildered as to why they’re getting so worked up at an effect a preschooler could have produced with their thumb on a flashlight button…
I’m exaggerating and stereotyping for comic effect, but that’s the thing about software and electrical engineering; the things that look most difficult are often the easiest to accomplish, and vice versa. Get this peripheral button to send a keystroke to the computer? Agonizingly hard. At the end of it, what do you get? “Congratulations, you typed a B.” But once you have that, it takes all of 5 minutes for someone else to modify your code to send the entire text of Galileo to the computer with the same keystroke. “Wow! Brecht in a button!”
Little blinking lights symbolize the completion of an often tricky technical solution. It’s like telling someone “wave this flag when you get to the top of Everest.” The flag is a low-resolution indicator of the journey. You wouldn’t ask the climbers why they didn’t just wave the flag in their backyard in the first place. That’s not the point.
Flight of fancy: instead of hooking your system up to the blinky-LED, route the end “success!” signal to a magical black box, which does the following when it’s triggered:
Ah, I wish.
In her maternal zeal, my mother has given me what can only be described as a “cute” haircut of the “bowl” variety. As in, my 3-year-old cousin wears the same style. I need… gel, or something to muss it up or otherwise make me look older than 10 (I would use scissors, but that just sounds like a bad idea).
The lack of sunlight is bothering me this year more than I’ve remembered it doing in the past. I’ve always gotten peeved at a lack of long days, but now I actually grimace when I look out the windows at 5pm. Is this why people go to grad school in California? Anyways, darkness signals my brain to stop studying and start lazing around with books, which is bad during the end of term crunch. I have projects to finish, darn it. I want my sun.
After visiting my old high school with Yifan (IMSA ’06, Olin ’10) on Monday, I finally got my IMSA password reset and seqed through a backlog of messages. It’s been a while – months, verging on a year – since I checked my high school email and notesfiles (messageboards), so I’ve been woefully out of touch with the IMSA gang. Apologies for that, folks. I’m going to need to get better at keeping up wtih my alumni groups.
Walking through the hallways visiting teachers made me realize I was finally one of those crusty 20-year-old alumni that the 15-year-old kids look at with “who are you?” eyes. The last time I was back at IMSA, at least some of my younger IMSA friends had been there; now they’re all graduated. None of the people at the couches (my old hangout between classes) knew me, nor did they know anyone who’d known me. Nobody was at the womb (another hangout nook under a staircase enclosed by a bench). I tried to sit in my old spot, but I’d grown a few inches and didn’t fit quite as well any more.
Then I went through notesfiles and found out that while I’ve been chugging away at Olin, the folks I knew in high school have gone travelling, graduated, gotten jobs, gotten married, and then – baby pictures. That’s a lot of people and things to keep track of – I wonder how older adults do it; they know so many more folks. I used to be amazed that my parents sent out hundreds of holiday letters every December; now I wonder how they keep the list down to so few.
Just saw two short videos of two baby boys screaming their tiny heads off. Welcome to the world, Julian and Luke! My father’s youngest brother’s new twins bring the Chua-side cousin tally up to 9, rapidly catching up to the Lim side’s 14.
Also, I’m continuously surprised to find out that my shy little brother has somehow turned into a confident young man (really an adult – he’s 18 on Tuesday) sometime in the almost-7 years I’ve been studying away from home. If I’ve got one regret about going away for school, it’s that I didn’t get to see him grow up. But I really like the person he’s growing up into. I’m not-so-secretly hoping my grad school will be near his college so we can get to know each other again.
Happy birthday, kiddos. And a birthday shout-out to my cousin Mark (who goes to Babson) who passed the “I’m not a teenager any more!” mark this month as well. Mmm, milestones.
I’m home in IL for the holidays, wandering bored through a shopping mall because my mother’s returning things, when I get a phone call.
“Hey! So, ah, Eric found this design competition…”
“Where are you?”
“We’re in the library. I know you’re in Illinois, but – are you by a computer?”
“I’m almost afraid to ask, but when’s the deadline?”
“Ah…. midnight?” (It’s 6:30pm.)
There goes my evening. The next 5.5 hours were spent happily chatting away on phones and laptops while simultaneously brainstorming, developing, and presenting 4 different product concepts for the (month-long, apparently) competition. Papers flew. Pixels flew. I completely bewildered my mother by asking her to pose next to an electrical outlet. And the final products were… not too bad, in my biased opinion – downright decent if you consider they were done with no planning on a randomly assembled distributed team in the span of a night, minus dinnertimes.
Random acts of engineering. That, plus the excellent potato-leek soup we had for lunch, just completely made my day.
Speaking of distributed teams, I just want to say I LOVE MY TEAM*. Phil and Hiroo from Scotland are gorgeous designers and absolutely wonderful to work with for our distributed engineering design course project, and Chandra was infinitely patient with everything and totally kickass at making our prototypes both structurally sound and manufacturable. Hopefully I made up for my ineptness over videoconferences (can’t… read… lips…) by introducing shiny software; since it was a more mechanical-ish design challenge (coffee cup holders) I thought my computer skillz would go unused, but awareness of online collaboration tools was definitely helpful.
*originally intended to refer to the distributed team, but thinking about it right now I can honestly say I love every single team, group, and committee I’m on this semester – not just “like,” “tolerate,” or “uh… it’s a valuable learning experience,” I really love the people on them and the spirit in them, which is incredibly unusual… and boy, it feels good. I want this feeling more. The world is such a happy place when you have awesome teammates to work with.
It’s 2am Eastern, so I’m getting an early snooze in an attempt to make up for sleep debt. G’night, folks.
This is more amusing if you’ve taken CompArch, and only works if you’re running Windows.
Okay, so it’s not the most exciting thing in the world, but I wasn’t aware that interface existed before. The random things you learn when you browse through books (in this case, Essentials of Mechatronics by John Billingsley). Mr. Gutenberg, I don’t know what I’d do without you.
When you procrastinate on art homework by sniffing around Windows memory dumps, you know you really need a Thanksgiving break. I’m off to the studio.
