Time flies

but my former classmate and lab coworker, Dr Loren Miller, looks the same as when we were in college.  How is that even remotely possible?

• Watch the informative straight-talk video
• Compare with his photo in college

Gender wars of household chores

How did I miss The gender wars of household chores: a feminist comic.  It was published in the Guardian back in May!

In case you are wondering, Emma hits close to home x2.

Bee Fabric

I lost my blogging mojo after the November election.  I wrote up a very angry post the day after the election.  Decided to sleep on it before hitting post, and then decided to put it on hold for a while.  I'm back with a mix of short and longer pieces, depending on mojo.

Can I say how how thrilled I am that Ananya Vinay won the National Spelling Bee by correctly spelling a fabric, Marocain?

TBH (to be honest), until this week, I thought Marocain was a type of dress or coat. I didn't know it meant Moroccan crepe fabric.

I would further like to point out that the social media star trolling Trump on Twitter is an UC Berkeley alumna, Lauren Naturale.

The resistance is female--and Californian.

Go, Bears!

Speed is relative

During Boulder's recent heavy snow storms, I worked at home.  I work with geophysical data sets, which can be large.

My home connection speed seemed soooo sluggish so I ran speed tests with a few websites.  The results were all similar.

50 Mbps down and 6 Mbps up is a fast home connection speed.

According to Geeksquad, this is about as fast as you can expect at a residence. Why did it seem so slow?

I reran the tests at work.

1 Gbps up or down!

I know now why 50 Mbps seems slow.  ;-)

Speed is relative.

Happy belated April Fools' Day.

This was my favorite 2016 April Fools' prank, but it's actually deadly serious.

Desert tortoise militia occupies Bundy Ranch: Endangered reptiles stage heavily armored takeover of cattleman’s property.

Aside:

Do you remember the pre-internet days?  When only a few non-military (ARPANET & MILNET) sites in the country were networked together through NSFNET?  56 Kbps was blazing fast, and you had to sit at one of 6 supercomputing centers to get that.

The network expanded and so did bandwidth in 1991.  Palo Alto was an upstart compared to Boulder.

NSF decided to allow anyone who wanted a connection to hook up to their network through NCAR.  (This was before the internet and ISPs.)  Boulder might have become a tech hub anyway, but this decision certainly accelerated that development.

The network was reconfigured with even faster speeds in 1992.  Notice that the major nodes were moved to population centers, with spurs to universities and national labs.

Weather data was one of the original Big Data use cases. And we need a pretty fat pipe to push data out to the world.

Working at home, on a standard connection, is a pretty humbling reality check. I need to experience what users outside of major universities and national labs experience.

I have helped climate researchers in Madagascar and east Africa, who work within the constraints of very slow network connection speeds outside their local regions. I've also helped researchers studying pollution in countries where questioning the effects of development puts them in personal peril. They are my heroes.

Who are your heroes?

It was just one of those things...

It was just one of those weeks. Something that I thought should be straightforward, but tedious, turned out to be really hard. Several times, I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I thought I was going crazy because commands that used to work, generated screenfuls of error messages.

It got so bad at one point, I did the UNIX equivalent of "WhereTF am I?" and typed pwd (print working directory) and THAT generated errors. There was nothing left to do but to log out (of that interactive session on the supercomputer) and log back into a different node. I mentioned the odd behavior to a coworker, but neither of us connected that incident to the database migration that took place the day before.

I know, those of you more familiar with databases are probably laughing your head off right now.

Finally, after 4PM on a Friday afternoon, all but one interactive node and about half the (75,000) nodes lost contact with the disk system.  There was nothing I could do by hanging around the lab while the IT team worked to rescue the machine.

It was time to go out in the field for some riparian ecosystem research.

 I didn't use my car at all this weekend.

Boulder's bicycle network, and my condo's central location, let me do everything I needed to do by bike.  The trees are so glorious this time of year, I took the loooong way whenever I ran errands.

Oh, I bought the most expensive fabric I've ever bought this weekend.  I thought it was the Liberty Tana Lawn at $44/yard, but it was a heavier shirting at $66/yard.  I didn't check the price until after it was already cut and rung up.  But I love the print and the feel of the fabric; it is wide enough that 1.5 yards should yield a very luxurious shirt.  Think of all the money I saved on gas by not driving.  That can buy a lot of fabric.  ;-)

OOPS, I checked my receipt and Liberty's website.  It is a Tana Lawn after all, and I paid $66 for the 1.5 yard piece, not per yard.  

Border Art

No, not quilt borders--I mean national borders.

With refugee crises around the world, we've been hearing a lot about 'sovereignty' and 'controlling our borders'.  I have mixed feelings about it, and a deep mistrust of anyone who claims the answers are easy.

We have a border fence between the US and Mexico.

Fence photo courtesy of Guardian.

It is an environmental disaster.  Some would say it is a human disaster.

Today, I read about a bunch of artists who erected a string of Helium-filled balloons perpendicular to and on both sides of the US-Mexico border.

They purchased these adorable balloons.  Apparently, they sell them in Home Depots and Ag supply stores to discourage birds from eating field crops.

The store-bought balloons come printed with giant eyes to scare birds away from crop fields.

Usually, fences lie ALONG a border.  But, artists, being artists, look at things a bit differently.

They put their fence ACROSS the border, in a straight line.  It's like they are stitching the land on both sides of the border together.

When is a fence not a fence but more like a tie?

The artists and the journalists, failed to mention that we have an actual string of balloons already along the US-Mexico border.  Read the US Customs and Border Patrol information site about the Tethered Aerostat Radar System (TARS) program. Aerostats are a fancy name for tethered balloons.

Map of actual Customs and Border Patrol network of aerostats (big balloons).

The TARS balloons are bigger--much bigger.

My, what big gas tanks you have!

If you file a FOIA request, you can read what I've written about field operations of very large balloons.  But, that was in a past life.  Today, I just wanna blog about art.

Now let's look at another brilliant piece of border art.  Artist Ana Fernandez painted a section of the fence separating Tijuana and San Diego to 'erase' it.

More border art on the fence between Tijuana and San Diego.

Have a good weekend!

Dressing Rodents

I've heard of dressing up dogs and cats, but rodents? I saw this hamster in an intarsia sweater at Cute Overload and it certainly deserves that title.

Then I saw Nina Leen's series of photographs of "Tommy Tucker" in costumes sewn by Zaidee Bullis.  I guess there is a long tradition of sewing and knitting for rodents.

But, could this bizarre picture be for real?  Can you make a teddy bear that tiny?

What about you? What's the smallest being you have made clothing for?

I think I started making stuff for Iris when she was a baby. But, not all the stuff got worn; babies grow so fast and I was unskilled at anticipating the season when something will fit.

Data as a foreign language

Some say that data is a different language.  I agree that it's a specialized language, often requiring domain or subject matter expertise.

But it still amused me to see that Google Chrome detects this page as Norwegian.

Saying, "yes", to translation did not result in any noticeable changes.

Use this page to access an archive of NASA AIRS brightness temperature data in WMO BUFR format.  Yes, I need to update the software tab to include more recent readers in Java and Python.

BTW,
NCEP = National Center for Environmental Prediction
GDAS = Global Data Assimilation System (DA is the complex process of inserting data into numerical weather forecasts)

Dear Jane

Valentine's day is an appropriate time to tell the story about the most painless break-up ever.  In fact, it was so painless, it was like we never dated.

My first semester of college, I was so grossed out by the food at the dormitory cafeteria menu, I spent a lot of time at the salad bar.  One time, I was surprised to see a male hand piling the raw spinach and alfafa sprouts on his plate.

It's a good thing I spoke to the hand before I followed the hand up the arm to a drop-dead gorgeous guy.  If I had seen him in the entirety, I probably wouldn't have made a friendly remark about the dreadful hot entrees; I'd have been too tongue-tied.

I kept running into him at the cafeteria and he invited me to sit with him and his friends.  It turned out that they were all varsity rowers.  We talked about the normal things that people just meeting each other in college talk about--our majors, home towns, and cultural stuff we were enjoying like books, movies, music, lectures, art shows, etc.  (This was Berkeley.  The football team was terrible and I liked that.)

We also discussed what we had done to deserve a spot at the most coveted dorm.  At that time, UC Berkeley had a student housing shortage.  Students were assigned priority numbers and the more desirable dorms were filled mainly with varsity athletes (him) and academic scholarship students (me).

I learned that he was a bit older than the other students because he had deferred college to travel the world as a print and runway model.  A model scout approached him in high school.  Modeling paid better money than the near minimum-wage jobs that most HS students can obtain.  All he had to do was stay in shape, which he would have done anyway.   Then there was the prospect of international travel.  Why not?

He and his modeling agency had a falling out when he thought it was time to go to college and they thought it was time for him to go to Paris or Milan.  (Models start out in smaller markets to gain experience.  Smaller markets are more diverse and interesting to intrepid travelers; luxury hotels in major cities are more alike.)

One time, he said that he and a teammate were going to rush through dinner so that they could walk down to Telegraph Avenue and look at books.  Did I want to go with them?

Photograph of Moe's Books via Telegraph Ave.

Yes! I love browsing bookstores on Telegraph "Ave". In fact, I used to drive to Berkeley from my suburb as a high school student to enjoy the bookstores of Telegraph Ave. I didn't feel safe walking at night to the bookstores on my own, so the offer of two very large and muscular companions was irresistible.

Photograph via Telegraph Shop

In the following weeks, he sometimes stopped by my dorm room to walk to dinner together.  I did wonder a little why he was passing by my room when his room was on the other side of the cafeteria.  Once, I saw that he wasn't in the cafeteria and went to his room to find out why.  He had fallen asleep after practice and thanked me for making sure he didn't miss dinner.

I remember being surprised when he casually undressed and changed in front of me.  I figured that models must be used to undressing in front of others.  I shrugged it off and we walked to dinner.

A short time later, I found a letter under my door.  He wrote that he was dating two women and things had progressed to the point where he would feel like a heel if he didn't make a commitment to one.  The other woman was older and the femme fatale of the dorm.  They were both older and hot; of course they were a match.

Wait, he was dating two women?  Were we dating?  Did I date a male model and not even realize it?

Years later, I leafed through Let's Go USA and under "Berkeley nightlife" it listed going to bookstores as a popular courtship activity.  I didn't know that my first semester at Berkeley.

A couple of years ago, when I was doing serious self-study about data analysis in the social sciences, I read John Molloy's Why Men Marry Some Women and Not Others.

I was surprised to learn that very attractive men often feel like they are not taken seriously for their intellect.  Many of those men prefer to date and marry very intelligent and ordinary-looking women in the belief that others will project that intelligence to the gorgeous partner.  John Molloy's advice for intelligent women was to approach gorgeous men because we were more likely to be successful in capturing their attention than most women.

So I did date and get subsequently dumped by a male model.  And that's why he would slip in a reference to the scholarship that got me into the dormitory when he introduced me around.

The femme fatale dumped him shortly after that.

When I met Bad Dad, I invited him to go to bookstores with me.  We've been traveling the world and reading together ever since.

Happy Valentine's Day.

* A Dear Jane letter is the female version of the Dear John break-up letter.

Genderbending and the real privacy problem

Blogger/Google rolled out some new statistical inference software and I was ROTFL when I saw these eye-popping statistics.  Judging by the comments and blogger meet-ups IRL, I thought this blog's readers were mainly women roughly my age working in STEM and a few men who either teach or work in STEM.

Either I am severely mistaken, or there is something wrong with Google's machine learning inference software.  You are either much younger, or young at heart.

And you are of ambiguous gender, too.  ;-)

The reason for this classification?  Because you spend time reading about technology.  And everyone knows that men, not women, read about technology, right?

On a more serious note, please take the time to read Evgeny Morozov's The Real Privacy Problem.  Here are a couple of juicy paragraphs to whet your appetite, but you should read the whole thing.

In case after case, Simitis argued, we stood to lose. Instead of getting more context for decisions, we would get less; instead of seeing the logic driving our bureaucratic systems and making that logic more accurate and less Kafkaesque, we would get more confusion because decision making was becoming automated and no one knew how exactly the algorithms worked. We would perceive a murkier picture of what makes our social institutions work; despite the promise of greater personalization and empowerment, the interactive systems would provide only an illusion of more participation. As a result, “interactive systems … suggest individual activity where in fact no more than stereotyped reactions occur.”

If you think Simitis was describing a future that never came to pass, consider a recent paper on the transparency of automated prediction systems by Tal Zarsky, one of the world’s leading experts on the politics and ethics of data mining. He notes that “data mining might point to individuals and events, indicating elevated risk, without telling us why they were selected.” As it happens, the degree of interpretability is one of the most consequential policy decisions to be made in designing data-mining systems. Zarsky sees vast implications for democracy here:

A non-interpretable process might follow from a data-mining analysis which is not explainable in human language. Here, the software makes its selection decisions based upon multiple variables (even thousands) … It would be difficult for the government to provide a detailed response when asked why an individual was singled out to receive differentiated treatment by an automated recommendation system. The most the government could say is that this is what the algorithm found based on previous cases.

Someone asked when I was going to post the backlog of sewing and knitting projects. Stay tuned, because I do have some stuff to share for our girly sides. But first, I want to take a statistical detour about how my local public middle school, a school that is above average on an absolute scale and compared to schools with similar demographics, was labeled a "failing" school by NCLB (No Child Left Behind).

We are in "Program Improvement" status for the second year in a row because of what Bad Dad calls a statistical fluke. Actually, it is not a fluke. It is an entirely predictable misclassification by a bad statistical algorithm. I would like the lawmakers who passed NCLB to take a statistics test and publicly post their scores on their congressional websites.  Would that be too much to ask for in the name of democracy?

Could someone come up with a blog badge for blogs of indeterminate gender?

In the days before helicopter parenting

The cat in the hat came avisiting.

So why do people ask what the mom was thinking?  Why does the dad get off scot-free in the blame game?

The Mom From ‘The Cat in the Hat’ Finally Speaks by Sarah Schmelling explains all.

You need to read this. Really.

Physics, abridged

Bad Dad and I are taking Coursera's Introduction to Astronomy class. There is something comic about going through all of physics in one week of review. This week's docket covers classical mechanics in a bit over an hour.  Then we spend an hour covering electromagnetism and then finish up with quantum mechanics in half an hour.  It's a good thing I served as a teaching assistant for quantum mechanics for three semesters, or else I might be lost.

Next week, we get to do astronomy, the stuff that's new to me.  I hope I can keep up.

This reminds me of the Reduced Shakespeare's complete works of William Shakespeare.

Quantum Mechanics and the Electoral College

Eric, Bad Dad and I have been discussing election statistics off-line.  Eric sends this:

"I can rant all I want about the misinterpretation of p-values and how it leads scientists who are (perhaps) otherwise competent to say stupid things.  But, as always, Randall Munroe at XKCD cuts through the fog and says it so much better (and more hilariously)."

Please click through and hover your mouse over the cartoon to read the joke he embeds in the image metadata!  It will show up in a popup box.

Bad Dad also pointed out the relationship between the electoral college and quantum mechanical expectation values.  And thanks to Eric, I understand how Nate Silver apportions out the votes.  Both explanations sounded like Bayesian statistics.   Randall Munroe explains it all.

@ LHC, I'll remember that when my daughter starts her own band.  I did a really tiger mom thing and got her vocal coaching because her drama teacher confided that the only thing that held her back from a larger role last year was her singing.  She got a big part this year.  ;-)

What is the p-value of chocolate?

Eric sends this link about the benefits of chocolate.

Drum roll, please: The higher a country's chocolate consumption, the more Nobel laureates it spawns per capita, according to findings released today in the New England Journal of Medicine.

And guess who leads the pack? The Swiss, of course, closely followed by the Swedes and the Danes. The U.S. is somewhere in the middle of chocolate consumption and Nobel Prize winners per capita. To produce just one more laureate, the nation would have to up its cocoa intake by a whopping 275 million pounds a year, according to Dr. Franz Messerli, who did the analysis.

"The amount it takes, it's actually quite stunning, you know," Messerli chuckled. "The Swiss eat 120 bars - that is, 3-ounce bars - per year, for every man, woman and child, that's the average."

Bad Dad, a PhD in Chemistry, says that these are fighting words:

"I attribute essentially all my success to the very large amount of chocolate that I consume," said Eric Cornell, an American physicist who shared the Nobel Prize in 2001.

"Personally I feel that milk chocolate makes you stupid," he added. "Now dark chocolate is the way to go. It's one thing if you want like a medicine or chemistry Nobel Prize, OK, but if you want a physics Nobel Prize it pretty much has got to be dark chocolate."

I was inspired to make our own ice cream after watching Eric make it with his daughters.  He recommends the Ben & Jerry's Homemade Ice Cream & Dessert Book.  For the past two years, we've been making all of the ice cream we eat at home.  Our chocolate flavor uses 1/3 of a bar of Trader Joe's "pound plus" (500g) dark chocolate (72% chocolate) per quart of ice cream.  (That pinch of salt and dash of vanilla in the recipe makes all the difference.)

We have to make a double batch because it's time, again, for a certain spooktacular birthday party.  The birthday girl wants chocolate cake, with chocolate frosting and chocolate ice cream.

I wonder if I can administer cognitive tests to the birthday party guests before and after chocolate consumption?  Now that I am taking two Coursera statistics and data analysis courses, I can crank out the (often meaningless) p-values in R.


What are you doing to help our nation achieve total world (Nobel) domination?

Some nerds go on a hike

along the mesa trail after being kicked out of the computer lab at NCAR's Mesa Lab (aka the Sleeper building).

Unlike the previous days, there were no afternoon thunderstorms and the mid-afternoon heat and altitude were challenging.

Nerd 1: (Looks at watch.  4:45 PM)  What do you think?  600 watts per square meter?

Nerd 2: (Looks at sky.)  Given the altitude, perhaps 650.

Nerd 2 works at the Department of Energy's Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program Southern Great Plains (SGP) Central Facility, Oklahoma so she looks at solar irradiance data for a living. Nerd 1 has no excuse other than being a nerd.

A quick search yielded a compendium of solar irradiance data servers put together by NREL.  Following the link to National Wind Technology Center, enter in the day of the hike and voila.  Click to make the graph below bigger and you will note that, taking into effect daylight savings time and averaging over the noise of passing clouds, Nerd 2 was spot on!

Check out the solar irradiance back at the beach on an exceptionally sunny and cloud-free day.

BTW, solar irradiance is a measure of the amount of light energy per unit area from the sun, integrated over all light frequencies.  See the solar spectrum and images of the sun at different frequencies, including the UV and X-rays.  Fortunately, the ozone layer screens out much of the UV so we don't fry here on the surface.

If you want to see how much power you can generate with photovoltaic cells on your house, take a look at the climatology of solar irradiance near you and multiply by the efficiency factor for the type of panel (a number much less than 1 or 100% efficiency).  Does the sun generally shine when you need to draw power?

The reliability and availability of solar power deserves it's own post.  Later.

Two nerds drive up a mountain pass...

The minivan gives the outside temperature.
The GPS unit gives the altitude.

She: Our lapse rate is slower than the saturated adiabatic lapse rate.

He: That's because we are driving into a storm front.

She: Isn't that what I just said?

Bystander in the backseat: Huh?

Background: If a parcel of dry air is lifted adiabatically (without exchanging heat with its surroundings), then the temperature cools off 9.8 degrees Celsius per 1000 meters altitude.  If the air is saturated, it cools off more slowly,  about 5 degrees C per 1000 meters.

Traveling between Durango and Silverton, along the Million Dollar Highway, our elevation went up by over 3000 feet or about a 1000 meters, but the temperature only changed about 3 degrees C.

That very low lapse rate implied that we had crossed the boundary between two distinct air parcels--what is commonly called a front.  It might have also implied that we got caught in the upslope of a diurnal mountain-valley circulation, but it was the opposite of the type of calm and sunny day that sets up that type of wind pattern.  It was cloudy and cold.  When two air masses collide, a violent storm can erupt.

Sure enough, it started to rain as we crested the pass, gradually becoming heavier and there were even a small amount of hail.  What a great day for a picnic!  ;-)

On that day, it did NOT look like this picture from Wikipedia commons, but it was beautiful nonetheless.

Happy Half Tau Day

Even though I concur with Bob Palais that Pi is Wrong, I hope you have a good day tomorrow.

I am swamped at home and at work, and the tutorial on how to knit a circle in any stitch pattern will have to wait. Perhaps Tau day would be a good target deadline. After all, the method relies on the crucial fact that

circumference = τ*radius

which looks so much more elegant than

circumference = 2*π*radius

I never did like how it takes 2π radians to go one full rotation. The beauty of τ is that one τ is one rotation. How intuitively easy to remember! τ and π were both in historical usage but π had better PR and edged out the more elegant τ.

May I suggest you view Vi Hart's lighthearted take, Pi is (still Wrong)?



Math and physics aficionados should read Pi is Wrong and the Tau Manifesto. The first time I read Pi is Wrong, I smacked myself on the forehead. Doh, why didn't I think of it before? I am not to blame for those pesky factors of two; it's the stupid notation! Read section 3.1 Quadratic Forms of the Tau Manifesto and admire the elegance and consistency.

Aside:
I took Numerical Analysis with Bob Palais while he was teaching at UC Berkeley. It was a really fun class and I never forgot the lessons he taught me. I remember the day he explained higher order Runge-Kutta schemes and their numerical stability looked to be the best thing since sliced bread. Then he broke out in a rendition of The Rolling Stones' You can't always get what you want.

Unfortunately, there is always a catch. Numerical stability and accuracy is gained at the cost of computational speed and memory usage.

When I needed to implement Runge-Kutta integration of Hamiltonian systems for my PhD research, I found myself humming the Rolling Stones. I found the right trade-off balance so that my molecular dynamics simulations converged quickly and accurately enough to allow me to graduate. Thanks, Bob. ;-)

And the feathers flew

In 20 consecutive days, I was away for all but a 10 hour stretch and a 36 hour stretch. Within those 46 hours, I unpacked, did laundry, repacked, went to work (and unpacked from my office move in abstentia), and slept a little bit.

It's been hectic. No wonder I came back a little under the weather.

What did I find at home? Not toilet paper. We were running low before I left, but I didn't have time to get any. Do you think the other toilet users in my household would have bought some on their way home from work or school? We don't lack for stores en-route in our high density urban infill neighborhood.

OTOH, Bad Dad helped out on a coworker's field experiment in addition to his regular work and he was a single dad two weeks in a row. Plus, they claim that we haven't truly run out unless ALL bathrooms are out of TP and we have no facial tissues in the house.

When I got home, Bad Dad said that he had to spend Sunday at the office so I had to supervise homework and take care of the home front on my own. I have to admit that the field campaign and single dad trump cards are compelling.

I also discovered that my daughter had only one weekend day left before her end of semester video project was due. She told me that her partner dropped out the prior Wednesday, she wrote her script on Thursday, and it was due on Friday of the following week.

The script had more than half a dozen characters so I asked her who she had lined up as actors and her filming schedule.

You guessed it.

I told her to work those phones double time.

Then she showed me the script with her notes on costumes and wanted me to make them .right now.

In the end, she rounded up two friends who brought their own hats. That pile of cut up brown paper bags on the dining room table turned out to be headdresses (who would have guessed?) and we found all the feathers, fabric, belts, jewelry and pins she needed in my sewing room and closet.

There were feathers flying everywhere downstairs during and after headdress construction, but I have to admit the headdress was very creative. It's pretty cool to come home to a child who sees a grocery sack as an Aztec headdress (with paper curls) and a husband game enough to put it on and read dialogue like he means it.

I was always a method actress anyway. If you play a happy family, you can almost believe it yourself.

When you shouldn't trust the GPS

That's the San Francisco-Oakland Bay bridge looming above us and shown in red on the Garmin's screen. That's fine, but the unit appears to be telling us to drive right into the water. (Click to see bigger and in more detail.)

Since we didn't have a boat/car combo, we decided to use the on-ramp from Fremont via Folsom.

Visual Rhyme

Modern Art Notes recently posted another visual rhyme. So here's mine.

A complex pojangi, "traditional wrapping cloths that are hand stitched from scraps of ramie or moshi cloth" showcased at Sri Threads.
And this oil painting by Hedda Sterne, which I found via MAN's very interesting post about her life.

More Visual rhymes from MAN:

• Flying into spring
• El Greco and Picasso

More cool stuff from MAN

• Art Madness II (a riff on March Madness)
• MAN's annual swimsuit issue, with frolicking!
• Picasso's guitars
  

and Sri Threads.

• Eaves
• A Boro Hemp Edo Komon Kimono: Pattern upon Pattern, Patches and Holes The human condition, explored through folk textiles. Very humbling and moving post.