Spyglass' Ramblings

Misleading Newspaper Articles on Climate Stir Firestorm

2012-02-01T22:29:00.000-06:00

Astonishingly misleading OpEds published over the weekend in the Wall Street Journal ("No Need to Panic About Global Warming") and Daily Mail ("Forget global warming — it’s Cycle 25 we need to worry about (and if NASA scientists are right the Thames will be freezing over again)") have stirred up a hornets' nest. There is no need for me to dissect the rampant (and long-debunked) misinformation contained in these propaganda pieces. Others have done so quite effectively:

Know Your Nuts

2012-01-23T17:44:00.000-06:00

A handy-dandy visual reference for the wonderful world of fasteners:
http://mikesenese.com/DOIT/2011/10/visual-glossary-of-screws-nuts-and-washers/

Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011

2011-12-16T14:14:00.000-06:00

One of the great intellectual lights of our age has been extinguished.

A prolific author and regular columnist with Vanity Fair, Hitch was an intelligent and articulate voice of reason in a world where the marketplace of ideas seems increasingly dominated by the voices of irrationality. And though I seldom agreed with his politics (he was a classical conservative in the vein of William F. Buckley, not to be confused with the know-nothings of the current radical Right), his arguments were always persuasive and compelling.

As one of the "Four Horseman" of the New Atheists movement, he was a lightning rod of criticism, which he always countered with grace and aplomb, leaving those who dared debate him quivering in a tangle of their own illogic.

The Onion nailed his essence so well with a simple headline:

Fumbling, Inarticulate Obituary Writer Somehow Losing Debate To Christopher Hitchens

Loss: The Good Kind

2011-03-13T00:36:00.003-06:00

Once upon a time, I could eat everything in sight, and not gain a pound. When I graduated from High School, and on up through my twenties, my weight was pretty consistently 150-155 lbs. I wore jeans with a 32" waist. But then I hit my thirties, and something happened. My metabolism slowed down. That, combined with a sedentary occupation that largely involves sitting at a computer keyboard, resulted in a gradual expansion of my waistline. I was losing the Battle of the Bulge.

In short, I got fat.

Not ponderously fat, but noticeably overweight. It was easy enough for me to laugh away the fact with wisecracks such as "Sure, I'm in shape. After all, pear is a shape." Hey, I had become an oblate spheroid, just like the earth.

But, the fact of the matter is that I had joined the throngs of Americans who have a weight problem. I didn't like it. No sir, not one bit. So I did something about it.

It all started last Fall when one of my co-workers convinced me to be his workout partner in GET FIT, a 12 week fitness program for faculty and staff operated by UT-Austin's Fitness Institute of Texas. The program consisted of 3 hourly workouts per week (one cardio workout, one circuit workout, and one weight-lifting working), combined with one lunchtime lecture per week, primarily focusing on nutrition. And it worked.

And here is how. Some of the information that follows was gleaned from the course, and some from my own research. (I'm not a doctor. I'm not a nutritionist. I'm not a trainer. Heck, I haven't taken a biology course since High School, and my PE credits came from Marching Band. I'm just an interested amateur who did his homework, so take any advice I give here for what it is worth. If you are serious about weight loss, it is always wise to consult a pro.)

Do The Math

Weight loss and weight gain come down to simple arithmetic. If you consume more calories than you burn, you gain weight. If you consume fewer calories than you burn, you loose weight. It really is that simple, although there are some subtleties involved in optimizing and maintaining weight loss in a healthy way, and I'll be hitting the high points of those. Forget about fad diets. They are unsustainable, and sometimes harmful to your overall health (*cough*Atkins*cough*ketoacidosis*cough*). Stick to the basics. Stick to the math.

Document, Document, Document

Record what you eat and win. Count up your calories. Be aware of what you are consuming. And also record your weight. It is annoying, it is time-consuming, but it is also a useful tool for helping you to track your progress, and gives you a way of knowing how and when to modify what you are doing if you are not getting the results you expect. You can write all of this up in a journal, or there are plenty of applications and web-based tools for helping out with this. I used Livestrong.com's MyPlate, which includes an extensive database of the nutritional content many common foods, including menu items from major restaurant chains and brand names commonly available in grocery stores. That makes the calorie tracking much easier.

I used the weight tracking feature of MyPlate to generate the weight chart shown above. Note that weight can vary pretty wildly from day to day. This can be somewhat smoothed out by weighing yourself consistently at the same time of day. (I always weigh myself first thing in the morning right before jumping into the shower.) Even then, day-to-day changes can be quite erratic, due to things like how big your last meal was, progress of the food through your digestive tract, and salt and water intake effecting osmotic balance. Don't sweat day-to-day changes. Look for long-term trends. The Hacker's Diet website (an excellent resource created by the founder of AutoDesk as a result of his own weight loss experiences) even discusses the mathematics of performing such long-term trend analysis (hooray for weighted moving averages) and provides tools for assisting with such analysis.

I should point out that I used these tracking methods to tailor my caloric intake to a goal of losing between 1.5 and 2 lbs per week. (Realistically speaking, 2 lbs per week is the maximum that one can lose safely without running the risk of causing severe health problems. I was really pushing my luck.) I aimed for a daily caloric intake of 1200 calories, but ended up averaging about 1500 calories (with much spikiness in my caloric intake), and hit my weight loss targets. What your caloric target should be depends upon YOUR metabolism and activity level, hence the need for tracking.

Another thing I found helpful along these lines was a body-mass analysis provided as part of the GET FIT course. DEXA analysis was performed both before and after the course to provide hard data on the composition of my body in terms of fat mass, lean tissue mass, and bone mass. DEXA (dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry) works by performing full body digital x-ray scans at two wavelengths, one of which is absorbed only by bone, and another, at lower energy, which is partially absorbed by soft tissue. The results are compared on a pixel by pixel basis to calculate the density of the material at that point, which in turn is used to calculate overall body composition.

DEXA is primarily used to diagnose and assess conditions involving reduced bone density, such as osteoporosis, but it is also useful for calculating fat composition vs. lean body mass. That said, there are other techniques for measuring body fat which do not involve radiation (even though this involved quite mild levels). Why did the GET FIT program choose this one? I don't know, but I suspect that somebody is getting some research publications out of it. I should keep an eye on PubMed for the names of anyone involved in running the program.

I was a bit disappointed to learn from my follow-up DEXA assessment that my muscle mass had not measurably increased. But, on the bright, it had not decreased either, and my body fat percentage had gone down from 37.8%, which, clinically speaking, is obese, to 30.7%, which is still in the overweight range, but definitely an improvement. (I briefly flirted with the idea of posting images of my DEXA scan here, but the soft-tissue scan is a bit...revealing. I decided not to go "Full Monty.")

Portion Control

What seems to have made the biggest difference for me in achieving my weight loss goals, more than being careful of what kinds of foods I ate and how much I exercised, was how MUCH I ate. Let's face it, portion sizes have gone crazy in our culture. Go to a restaurant and order a salad, and you'll wind up with a bowl of salad made from entire head of lettuce (and drenched in a vat of fatty salad dressing). Order a small drink, and you'll end up with what would have been called a large when I was a child. Portion sizes have become inflated beyond reason. Is it any wonder that obesity is so rampant in this country?

The solution? Don't eat as much. Really. Having been raised by parents who grew up during the Depression, I always tended to feel a little guilty if I didn't clean my plate. No more! Get a huge meal at a restaurant? Eat half of it, and take the remainder home to make another meal. Two breakfast tacos? No thanks. One will suffice. Hungry Man frozen dinner? No thanks. This little Smart Ones entrée should do just fine.

The belly complains at first, but give the stomach a bit of time to shrink down a bit, and you'll grow accustomed to smaller portion sizes.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

That having been said, watching WHAT you eat is indeed important. Fast food, fried food, refined sugars and flours, high-fructose corn syrup (I'll work up a posting on the perils of THAT at a later date), hydrogenated fats: we are bombarded with foods that are bad for us. A major step towards good health is eating smarter. That means more fruits and veggies, more whole grains, more fiber, and choosing leaner cuts of meat. That also means fewer of the bad things listed at the beginning of this paragraph. Part of this involves simple common sense, but it also calls for a bit of learning. It is important to bone up on the differences between unsaturated fats (good) and saturated, hydrogenated or trans fats (bad). It is important to learn the difference between HDL cholesterol (good) and LDL cholesterol (bad) and how added dietary fiber helps reduce LDL. It means learning about the three categories of macro nutrients (lipids, proteins, and carbohydrates) which make up our diet and how the body uses them. It means doing some homework.

Notice that I "fewer of the bad things." Just because you are trying to lose weight, it doesn't mean that you have to deprive yourself entirely of the yummy (but unhealthy) foods you love. It is okay to indulge yourself from time to time. Just the other day, I enjoyed a fried seafood platter for lunch. Not exactly the healthiest of choices. The evening of the last day of GET FIT, I split an order of Bananas Foster with my workout partner. The key is moderation. Splurge from time to time, just enough to keep cravings at bay and to give yourself a treat. Just don't do it every day. Well, you can give yourself a treat every day. Just make it a healthy one. And TRACK THOSE CALORIES.

As for vitamins, if you are worried that you are not getting all of the micro-nutrients you need from your diet, then by all means take them. Just don't go overboard. Otherwise, all you are doing is turning yourself into a source of overly-expensive urine.

Speaking of which, drink plenty of water. Most of us don't get nearly enough, and it does help with weight loss.

Timing Is Everything

Have you ever noticed that nutritionists and weight loss experts tend to recommend a large number of small meals spread throughout the day, rather than a small number of larger meals? (It seems that the Hobbits had it right.) Have you ever wondered why?

Well, it turns out that the body processes calories on a just-in-time basis. It doesn't matter what you did hours before eating or what you will do hours after eating. If you don't burn your caloric intake within a few hours of consuming it, those calories WILL be converted to fat. Use it or gain it!

The upshot is, spread your caloric intake out over the course of the day. The only times your body really needs a higher dose of calories is for breakfast (when your body has gone for many hours running on reserves, hence the need to "break your fast") and right before and/or after a hard workout. When athletes "hit the wall", the glycogen reserves in their muscles have been depleted. Their muscles no longer have the energy needed to move. That is why carb-loading with a mixture of simple sugars (for short-term energy) and complex carbs (for long term energy) is used before strenuous exertion such as workouts or athletic competitions. Workouts should also be followed immediately (within half an hour) by a mix of complex carbs, sugars, and proteins. The complex carbs and sugars are for replenishing the muscles' glycogen reserves, and the proteins are to help feed those aching (and, hopefully, growing) muscles. (More on this in the next section.) Protein bars and shakes are a popular option for this.

No Pain, No Loss

You can lose weight without exercise, but it isn't a good idea. The simple fact of the matter is that when the body is short on calories (as it has to be in order for weight loss to occur), it will metabolize whatever is at hand, and it is easier for the body to metabolize the proteins in your muscles than the fat in your beer belly or love handles. Weight loss without exercise translates into not only fat loss, but also muscle loss. By exercising while dieting, that process is combated by putting your muscles into a state where they are constantly trying to rebuild, slurping up amino acids (the building blocks of proteins) from the bloodstream to pump up the muscle fibers, hopefully at a faster rate than your milkshake and burger-deprived metabolism is chowing down on them.

Another major benefit of exercise when trying to lose weight is this: higher muscle mass translates into a higher base metabolic rate. The more muscles you have, the more calories you burn even when you are doing nothing more than sitting on the sofa watching television. What's more, in addition to the increased caloric burn rate experienced directly while exercising, that elevated burn rate carries over for a few hours after working out as the elevated metabolic rate gradually cools down. (Calories burned WHILE exercising are only a small slice of all of this. My three hours of exercise per week during the GET FIT program probably translated, at most, into about 1000 calories burned per week. The main benefits really are the carryover burn and the increased base rate.)

There are two primary categories of exercise: aerobic and resistance (weight) training, and any workout program should contain elements of both. Aerobic workouts are geared towards increasing heartbeat and respiration, and include activities such as running (or even walking), dancing, biking, or using an elliptical machine. After about 20 minutes of performing such activities, the metabolism enters into a state in which calories are burned at an elevated rate, which makes aerobic exercises a perfect match for those seeking to lose weight. Aerobic activities also help improve stamina and general cardiovascular health. Ideally, one's pulse should be kept in a specific target range for the duration of the aerobic workout. If the pulse rate is to low, the full benefits of the workout are not being realized. If the pulse is too high, well, then one is running the risk of harm. The specific target range is primarily dependent upon one's age. A good rule of thumb is 220 minus age.

Resistance or strength training is specifically geared towards building strength, power (they really are two different things), and muscle mass. You may not be aiming for an Atlas body, but increasing muscle mass and tone even somewhat is still desirable for the reasons described earlier. Resistance training methods include weight-lifting (with either free weights or exercise machines) as well as exercises which use the body's own weight as the source of resistance, such as pull-ups and push-ups.

When doing resistance training, remember that the goal is to push the muscles right to the point of failure. You want to fail. That is the only way to push the muscles into strengthening themselves. How much resistance? How many repetitions? In general, find the absolute maximum you can lift just once (without hurting yourself), then subtract about 10 or 20% of the weight. Use that resistance and do as many repetitions (or "reps") as you can, pushing yourself to the point of failure. Just when you think you can't do any more, squeeze out one more rep. (Your goal should be to do somewhere between 6 and 15 reps. If you can do more, you aren't using enough resistance. If you can't do that many, you are using too much resistance.) Take a breather for a few minutes, then do another set. Rest again, then do another set. And again. Then move on to another exercise. It is hard. It is agonizing. But it is rewarding.

At some point, you probably had a Health teacher or P.E. coach tell you that sore muscles the day after a workout are caused by lactic acid. Don't believe it. Sure, lactic acid will cause some soreness immediately following a workout, but all the lactic acids are reprocessed well before the next day rolls around. What actually causes the soreness is that an intensive workout introduces a multitude of microscopic rips in the muscle tissue. This is good thing. That triggers biochemical signals which tell the metabolism "Hey, we need to build some more muscle over here. Haul in the amino acids." (Of course, I'm greatly oversimplifying the process here. Biochemical processes don't like to be anthropomorphized.) At any rate, revel in the pain. It is sign that the muscles are a construction zone. Whichever muscles you've worked to the point of soreness, don't work those the next day. Give them a day off to rebuild. Otherwise, you run the risk of overtraining, which is counterproductive.

Here, again, a little homework is in order. Learn the major muscle groups and which exercises target them. And, perhaps more importantly, learn to do the exercises properly and safely, with good form. Failure to do that will almost certainly result in injury.

Don't have access to a gym? Go for a jog for your aerobic workout. For your resistance training, use your own weight. Push-ups require no equipment other than a patch of floor, and pull-ups can be done with an inexpensive bar. Can't do a pull-up? No problem. Begin by doing assisted pull-ups. Stand on a chair next to the bar and lower yourself down (something which most people should be able to do at least once). Climb back on the chair and repeat. This is called "working the negatives," and the concept can be applied to a broad variety of exercises.

Moving Forward

When the GET FIT program concluded at the end of November, I signed up for a membership at the Cedar Park Recreation Center, which is on my way home from work and has a reasonably well-equipped gym. I must admit, though, that I let my membership lapse when New Years rolled around. Gyms do have a tendency to get packed around that time of year. I'm still careful about what I eat, and my weight has stayed fairly consistently around 178 (down from 211 when I started GET FIT). And I'm down to a 33" waistline. Ideally, I would like to lose a bit more weight, as well as increasing muscle mass a bit. In short, it is time to get back to the gym.

I've Been...Busy

2011-02-24T11:04:00.001-06:00

Busy indeed, and not just with my day job.

I originally set up the Whiskey…Tango…Foxtrot? blog as a place to tinker with WordPress' support for LaTeX. In the last month or so, it has taken on a life of its own, serving as a repository for notes and links related to my efforts to clear away the cobwebs in my brain on topics related to physics. I'm especially proud of the ever-growing timeline of the development of modern physics, complete with links (where available) to the original source papers documenting the discoveries. (After all, if one truly wishes to understand an advanced physics topic, what better way than to read the document in which its discover introduces it to the world?) And, hopefully soon, I'll be posting some translations from French of some of the works of Henri Poincaré.

Science Education for the Masses

2011-02-24T10:54:00.000-06:00

Here are a few lovely sites I've stumbled upon today which provide videos illustrating scientific concepts in layman's terms:

Bravo! We need more outreach like this.

And, of course, let us not forget KhanAcademy.org, which provides high-school level video lectures on math, science, and other topics.

George Orwell on How to Make a Proper Cup of Tea

2011-02-24T10:45:00.001-06:00

I initially found this at www.booksatoz.com/witsend/tea/orwell.htm, which does not appear to be reachable at the moment, so I've rescued it from Google's cache....

A Nice Cup of Tea

By George Orwell

Evening Standard, 12 January 1946.

If you look up 'tea' in the first cookery book that comes to hand you will probably find that it is unmentioned; or at most you will find a few lines of sketchy instructions which give no ruling on several of the most important points.
This is curious, not only because tea is one of the main stays of civilization in this country, as well as in Eire, Australia and New Zealand, but because the best manner of making it is the subject of violent disputes.

When I look through my own recipe for the perfect cup of tea, I find no fewer than eleven outstanding points. On perhaps two of them there would be pretty general agreement, but at least four others are acutely controversial. Here are my own eleven rules, every one of which I regard as golden:

First of all, one should use Indian or Ceylonese tea. China tea has virtues which are not to be despised nowadays — it is economical, and one can drink it without milk — but there is not much stimulation in it. One does not feel wiser, braver or more optimistic after drinking it. Anyone who has used that comforting phrase 'a nice cup of tea' invariably means Indian tea.
Secondly, tea should be made in small quantities — that is, in a teapot. Tea out of an urn is always tasteless, while army tea, made in a cauldron, tastes of grease and whitewash. The teapot should be made of china or earthenware. Silver or Britanniaware teapots produce inferior tea and enamel pots are worse; though curiously enough a pewter teapot (a rarity nowadays) is not so bad.
Thirdly, the pot should be warmed beforehand. This is better done by placing it on the hob than by the usual method of swilling it out with hot water.
Fourthly, the tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons would be about right. In a time of rationing, this is not an idea that can be realized on every day of the week, but I maintain that one strong cup of tea is better than twenty weak ones. All true tea lovers not only like their tea strong, but like it a little stronger with each year that passes — a fact which is recognized in the extra ration issued to old-age pensioners.
Fifthly, the tea should be put straight into the pot. No strainers, muslin bags or other devices to imprison the tea. In some countries teapots are fitted with little dangling baskets under the spout to catch the stray leaves, which are supposed to be harmful. Actually one can swallow tea-leaves in considerable quantities without ill effect, and if the tea is not loose in the pot it never infuses properly.
Sixthly, one should take the teapot to the kettle and not the other way about. The water should be actually boiling at the moment of impact, which means that one should keep it on the flame while one pours. Some people add that one should only use water that has been freshly brought to the boil, but I have never noticed that it makes any difference.
Seventhly, after making the tea, one should stir it, or better, give the pot a good shake, afterwards allowing the leaves to settle.
Eighthly, one should drink out of a good breakfast cup — that is, the cylindrical type of cup, not the flat, shallow type. The breakfast cup holds more, and with the other kind one's tea is always half cold before one has well started on it.
Ninthly, one should pour the cream off the milk before using it for tea. Milk that is too creamy always gives tea a sickly taste.
Tenthly, one should pour tea into the cup first. This is one of the most controversial points of all; indeed in every family in Britain there are probably two schools of thought on the subject. The milk-first school can bring forward some fairly strong arguments, but I maintain that my own argument is unanswerable. This is that, by putting the tea in first and stirring as one pours, one can exactly regulate the amount of milk whereas one is liable to put in too much milk if one does it the other way round.
Lastly, tea — unless one is drinking it in the Russian style — should be drunk without sugar. I know very well that I am in a minority here. But still, how can you call yourself a true tealover if you destroy the flavour of your tea by putting sugar in it? It would be equally reasonable to put in pepper or salt. Tea is meant to be bitter, just as beer is meant to be bitter. If you sweeten it, you are no longer tasting the tea, you are merely tasting the sugar; you could make a very similar drink by dissolving sugar in plain hot water.

Some people would answer that they don't like tea in itself, that they only drink it in order to be warmed and stimulated, and they need sugar to take the taste away. To those misguided people I would say: Try drinking tea without sugar for, say, a fortnight and it is very unlikely that you will ever want to ruin your tea by sweetening it again.
These are not the only controversial points to arise in connexion with tea drinking, but they are sufficient to show how subtilized the whole business has become. There is also the mysterious social etiquette surrounding the teapot (why is it considered vulgar to drink out of your saucer, for instance?) and much might be written about the subsidiary uses of tealeaves, such as telling fortunes, predicting the arrival of visitors, feeding rabbits, healing burns and sweeping the carpet. It is worth paying attention to such details as warming the pot and using water that is really boiling, so as to make quite sure of wringing out of one's ration the twenty good, strong cups of that two ounces, properly handled, ought to represent.

(taken from The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Volume 3, 1943-45, Penguin ISBN, 0-14-00-3153-7)

My Hobby: Collecting Hobbies

2010-06-29T21:48:00.003-05:00

I have come to the realization that there is a hazard inherent in possessing a broad range of interests. I have a tendency to accumulate hobbies and projects. This can be problematic for someone with the attention span of a gnat. Something (usually stumbled upon serendipitously) grabs my interest, I throw myself into it with zeal for a while, researching it, cobbling together just enough resources to get my feet wet, then.... Ooh, shiney! Something else captures my attention.

Rinse, repeat....

And so it goes. Over time, my home fills with the detritus of unfinished projects, a mishmash of half-finished wonders and curiosities. (There's another hobby of mine: finding opportunities to use the word "detritus." It tickles me to say it. Detritus! Hehe.) And, all along, I think to myself "I'll get around to finishing that...someday." Consequently, I've become somewhat notorious for starting projects and not finishing them. The rare occasion when I DO finish a project is therefore truly cause for celebration.

So, as an aid to myself in organizing and prioritizing these hobbies and projects, and to give others a bit of insight into my interests, I present my hitherto unknown "List of Hobbies and Projects," complete with annotations regarding their current status. Enjoy.

Genealogy

As hobbies go, I have to admit that this is one with which I've had more luck sticking to than others. I really got started in 2004, just a matter of months before my mother passed away. I've been fortunate enough to be able to dig back far enough to intersect with the work of other researchers on many of my family lines, and I've been focusing on filling in the gaps. For the past three years, I've served on the Board of Trustees of the Pace Society of America, an organization devoted to genealogical research involving the Pace surname (although I've sadly missed the last two national meetings). I've gone about as far as I can go with online research (except whenever sites such as ancestry.com add new content), and am in dire need of visiting numerous courthouses and cemeteries around the country, as well as needing to visit the University of Tennessee Special Collections Library in Knoxville to study the Rhea Papers. I'm also needing to consolidate and compile the results of my research thus far into a more easily-digestible format, which I've really only done thus far with one of my family lines.

A few years ago, my interest in genealogy briefly intersected with my interest in programming. I had the brilliant idea of writing a family tree viewer which would allow the user to navigate through familial relationships in a rich 3D environment. I studied the GEDCOM specification and started planning out how I would write a GEDCOM parser. But, before I had a chance to write a single line of code, a new version of MacFamilyTree came out with the very feature I had envisioned. Timing, as they say, is everything.
Wet-Plate Collodian Photography

Some of the oldest objects in my possession are a handful of "tintype" family photographs dating back to just after the Civil War. In researching how to care for and preserve these photographs (even going so far as to consult with an expert on the subject at the Harry Ransom Center), it was only natural for me to wish to delve deeply into how they were made. Combined with a pre-existing long-standing interest in photography, a desire to try my own hand at it followed naturally. Heading along the path to making my own "handmade" photographs, I have acquired several antique lenses, as well as materials for building a camera body. The only thing currently standing in my way is figuring out a way to mount my box-joint jig to the mitre guide of my table saw, a task which I probably could have completed in less time than it took to write this article.
Bookbinding

Once upon a time (in 1993, in fact), while performing at the Texas Renaissance Festival, I portrayed for a time a pikeman in the Newmarket Guard. In fleshing out the background details of the character, I decided that his occupation was that of bookbinder. Naturally, the next step was to research that skill a bit such that I would "know the lingo" and be able to convincingly pass myself off as such a craftsman. Before I knew it, I was actually wanting to try my hand at bookbinding. I acquired several books on the topic, but was stymied on acquiring certain tools and materials. (The nascent Web had not yet become a hotbed of e-commerce where one could obtain just about anything imaginable.) And so, this emerging hobby was nipped in the bud, never to be pursued further. But, perhaps someday....
Galvanic Etching

For several years now, I've been intrigued by the "steampunk" aesthetic, and I have been mightily impressed by the work of some of the artists and craftsmen who have embraced it. Among these is one Jake Vonn Slatt, who, among other things, has embraced "galvanic etching" as an artform. (It is essentially the same process as electro-plating, except that the piece being worked is placed on the opposite electrode such that metal is removed rather than being added.) It is a rather simple process, and I've acquired most of the tools and materials necessary to try my hand at this, but simply have yet to bring them all together. I was distracted by some other interest, but do not recall what....
Clockmaking

As with bookbinding, clockmaking is another potential hobby which has never really gone past the research stage. Books and plans eagerly await my order once I have the time. (Yeah, I know that things hate to be anthropomorphized.)

Woodworking

I've long enjoyed engaging in woodworking projects, especially with my brothers. We've built a bed frame for my spare bedroom, but we still need to complete the headboard. To really do it the way I would like to, I need to make some progress on another project listed next, a CNC routing machine. I'm also wanting to build a 12' x 16' gambrel roof storage shed (with loft) for my backyard, but I need to finish drawing up plans so that I can apply for a building permit. Once that is built, I'll be able to free up a tremendous amount of space in my garage. And, at some point down the road, I would like to build some nice dining room chairs to replace the mishmash of chairs I currently have. Of course, good hardwoods are expensive.
CNC Milling/Routing Machine

You may have noticed a pattern thus far: I like to make things. An important part of that is having the right tools. And the geek in me likes for those tools to be computer-controlled. I desperately want to build a CNC router or milling machine. About a year ago, I wrote a rudimentary G-CODE interpreter, G-CODE being the standard programming language for driving CNC devices. However, my big stumbling block has been interfacing the computer with the physical world. It was a heck of a lot easier in the old days when all computers came with old-fashioned serial and parallel ports. RS232 was easy to deal with. Now things are getting easier again. Over the weekend, I acquired an Arduino micro-controller.
Arduino Programming

Arduino is an open-source hardware and software platform for providing digital and analog interfaces between computers and the physical world for rapid prototyping. I've made excellent progress thus far with the simple sample projects described in the book which accompanied my Arduino, and now I'm wondering where I can get my hands on bulk quantities of discarded floppy drives so that I can cannibalize their stepper motors. Soon, nothing will be able to stop my army of robotic minions and... Oops, inner monologue on speakerphone again.
Gardening

I've come to a stark realization. As much as I enjoy gardening and having access to fresh, home grown veggies, the soil does does not get along with me. Nor do the searing hot central Texas summers. My current garden, an experiment in utilizing the square-foot gardening method, has resulted in mediocre, weak, malnourished bug-eaten plants. The geek inside of me has lately been whispering to me, "Take it inside. Use aeroponics and LED lighting. Nutrients, moisture, lighting, and temperature will be tightly controlled. Arduino-controlled. With a camera-bot to automatically take time-lapse images of each plant each day. Wouldn't that be cool? Monitor and control through the Web. And enjoy fresh tomatoes, peppers, onions, and collard greens year-round." Tempting, and even doable, but likely overkill. Besides, I think I should master more basics first.
Motorcycles

About a year and a half ago, I finally took the MSF RiderCourse and added the Motorcycle Class to my Driver License. Alas, I've not yet procured a bike. I'm not wanting to go further in debt, so I would rather not finance, but other expenses have kept me from being able to save enough for an outright cash purchase. But I am soooo Jonesing to ride....
Aviation

A decade ago, I was taking flying lessons, but never finished. My biggest mistake was buying a house on the side of town opposite from the airport. My biggest regret, never getting to build and fly a Cozy Mk. IV. Occasionally, the skies still call to me....
Painting/drawing

When I was a kid, if I wasn't reading, I was drawing. I come from an artistically-inclined family, and I enjoy creating art, yet I've done so precious little since reaching adulthood. I miss it, and really should get back into it. I keep telling myself that....
Sailing

Growing up far inland upon the Llano Estacado, the sea has always held a certain allure and fascination for me. To this day, visiting the shore remains a special treat for me. When I started portraying a pirate character at TRF and delved into character research, that interest only grew. I've even learned during the course of my genealogical research that one of my ancestors, Matthew "The Rebel" Campbell, was a ship's master. I long to sail, and I've procured a vessel: a 24' homebuilt Piver Nugget trimaran, which I have decided to dub "Fiddler's Green." Alas, I've not yet put it in the water. It is as old as I, and desperately in need of work, mainly paint and some fiberglass repair. I've removed the outboard hulls (the "amas"), and have stripped the old paint from them. I've also erected hull cradles to hold them upright while I redo the fiberglass on their tops, which will be the next step. That will have to wait until September or October when it is no longer too hot out to work with epoxy resin. After the fiberglass is repaired, I'll repaint the amas, then move on to the primary hull. Working on that will be a fairly big challenge, especially when it comes to removing the boat from the trailer and flipping it to repaint the hull. I have a plan regarding how to go about that, but it will be a daunting task.
Music Theory

From the 5th grade through my first semester of college, I played the trombone. Sure, I was taught how to read music, but I was never exposed to the true fundamentals of music theory. All of my life, I had been puzzled about why musical scales are structured the way they are. What is the real difference between major and minor scales? Why does the only major scale in Western music without sharps or flats start on a C rather than an A as one would expect? Over the years, I've managed to find the answers to questions such as these through independent study, and on more than one occasion, I've been tempted to write an introductory text on the topic for the benefit of others with similar questions (as opposed to most existing introductory texts, which seem to focus on notation). After all, I have such copious quantities of spare time.
Instrument Making

I've mentioned my enjoyment of making things, as well as my interest in woodworking. One area where I've wanted to apply these interests is in making musical instruments. I suppose that started when I got my hands on a concertina (which I am still endeavoring to learn to play). It is a cheap, mass-produced 20-button Anglo concertina, with a garish, shiny red finish and plastic buttons that tend to stick. I look online at higher-end models that, realistically-speaking, are well outside of my price range (especially for an instrument for which I've not yet mastered the rudiments), and I think to myself, "Ooh, so pretty. I think I could build one of those." In fact, I probably could. The bellows would be made in much the same way as the bellows for the wet-plate camera that I'm planning to build. I've disassembled the concertina I own (hoping to figure out a way to fix the sticking buttons - I think I need more robust button springs), and the internal structure is rather simple, but I don't really see the point in expending the effort until such time as I really learn to play the instrument. If I do end up building one, I imagine that it will be a 30-button model to open up the range of available keys.

More recently, I had an opportunity to try my hand at playing a bowed psaltery while visiting Scarborough Faire. It is a rather simple instrument, both to play and, seemingly, to build, and might serve well as a starter luthier project. I've found several sites on the Web describing how to do so, but have not yet taken any steps in the direction of making it a reality. After all, I already have plenty of projects on my plate.

On top of that, I wouldn't mind trying my hand at building a hurdy gurdy. I'm not sure why. Perhaps it is because it is an instrument which few people have ever seen or heard. Most people would not have even heard OF it were it not for the Donavan song of the same name. (When he wrote the song, Donovan supposedly had never seen or heard the instrument, but wrote it for a friend who was in a band called "Hurdy Gurdy.") Helping to bring such an ancient instrument back from obscurity holds some appeal for me.
"Spyglass' Wee Book O' Sea Shanties"

One little side project that I work on now and again is compiling a small booklet of sea shanties (a holdover from my days of portraying Spyglass), transposing as I go into the keys of C and G (the keys which are playable on my concertina). The first step was figuring out how to get Lilypond (a music engraving program) to integrate with LaTeX (the venerable typesetting program). Once that hurdle was overcome, I began, bit by bit, getting some of my favorite shanties down in print, but have only completed a few thus far. I also plan on including some hand-drawn illustrations, an opportunity to resurrect my drawing skills.
Physics

When I withdrew from grad school in January of 1992, I did so with every intention of eventually returning. Alas, as the years have gone by, the prospects of that actually happening have whithered more and more. Putting aside for a moment the income crunch while attending school (which could be partially offset by attending on a part-time basis), I can't really imagine the prospect of handling the paycut afterwards that would accompany getting a post-doc position. That having been said, I do miss it, and regret having what was intended to be my profession sidelined into an avocation. In an effort to jump-start the old neurons, I've engaged in a program of self-study, both to review the things I've forgotten, and to push out beyond what I learned in grad school. My primary areas of interest are the foundations of quantum theory, the measurement problem, collapse theory, and gauge theory. (If I ever get my head around Lie algebras, I'll consider myself lucky.)

I'm currently re-reading Rindler's Essential Relativity. (I had the pleasure of meeting Wolfgang Rindler at a conference when I was an undergrad. Very nice fellow.) Next on deck will be A Unified Grand Tour of Theoretical Physics by Ian D. Lawrie, Elementary Particles and the Laws of Physics by Feynman and Weinberg, Feynman's Thesis, A Guide to Feynman Diagrams in the Many-Body Problem by Mattuck, The Theory of Fundamental Processes by Feynman, Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell by Zee, Foundations of Space-Time Theories by Friedman, The Inflationary Universe by Guth, Supersymmetry by Binétruy, and A First Course in String Theory by Zwiebach. This will take a while....
Ground Penetrating RADAR

I don't recall the details, but I suspect that it was through a documentary sometime in the early to mid 90's that I was first exposed to the concept of ground penetrating radar, primarily as applied to the field of archeology. It caught my interest, and I have long pondered ways of improving the functionality of the technology. Of late, I've wondered if synthetic aperture radar technology could be applied to the problem, or perhaps even nascent quantum radar technologies. Up to this point, this has been primarily an intellectual exercise, but I sometimes find myself tinkering with the prospect of building my own GPR rig for experimentation, a prospect which has recently been bolstered by finding an account by a grad student of building a simple, inexpensive SAR setup using recycled hardware. Hmm. I do have an old microwave oven sitting around whose magnetron would make a nice emitter....

This list is by no means comprehensive. I've not included a litany of home improvement projects and repairs that I have queued up, nor my desire to transform the old propane tank sitting in my back yard into a smoker. Not to mention... well, you get the point. There is always something to do. If nothing else, I am never bored!

If there is a common strand running through all of this, it seems that most of these projects tend to get held up by one or more of three limitations: money, time, and energy. Regarding the latter, have I mentioned that I am intrinsically lazy? After a long day of work (and a long commute), it is so much easier to plop down in front of the TV with my laptop, researching potential new hobbies.

Ooh, toys....

2010-06-23T16:19:00.003-05:00

Meet Chumby, a digital picture frame/internet appliance with a 3.5 touchscreen display. Essentially an ARM device running Linux, it was designed by its creator, Andrew "bunny" Huang, to be hackable, and he even encourages creative uses of the device. It is even available in kit form. Some have even tinkered with connecting it to Arduino devices, an idea which has sent my mind reeling with ideas, including using this combination as the controlling mechanism for a small CNC router that I've been wanting to build for quite some time.

Now, at just over a c-note, the Chumby packs in a lot of value, but doesn't offer much in the way of screen real estate. That's where the just-announced Insignia Infocast comes in. Available exclusively through Best Buy, the Infocast is basically a scaled-up Chumby with an 8" display. And Mr. Huang has provided details on the Infocast for would-be hackers. Ooh, the possibilities....

UPDATE: Arduino and Chumby procured. Let the fun begin...

Of Bees and Spherical Chickens

2010-06-18T15:10:00.004-05:00

In tackling problems in science and engineering, a vital tool in the problem-solving arsenal is making assumptions which simplify the calculations by ignoring or minimizing the contributions of factors which have little or no impact on the outcome. Examples of such simplifying assumptions include ignoring friction and air resistance, or, in the case of particle physics, ignoring the effects of gravity. So pervasive is the use of such simplifying assumptions, that it has spawned a joke which eventually made its way into an episode of CBS' "The Big Bang Theory." (Finally, a series about My People!) This practice of simplification even became fodder for an xkcd comic.

This practice of making simplifying assumptions can be extremely useful. It can transform calculations which might ordinarily require a supercomputing cluster into something that can literally be calculated on the back of an envelope. But it can be taken too far. There is something of an art to knowing what can be safely ignored and what actually has an impact, and it is largely experience which provides the proper guidance. When BP recently attempted to place a collection dome over the gushing well-head in the Gulf of Mexico, the effort failed because BP engineers had failed to take into account the fact that methane does not behave the same at such great depths as it does as standard temperature and pressure. As a result, the methane (at high pressures and low temperature) combined with seawater to form methane hydrate, essentially a methane ice, thus clogging the collection pipe.

There is another example of oversimplification and its consequences which is even more broadly known among the populace, the popular bit of folklore which states that science had once proven that bees cannot fly (despite obvious evidence to the contrary). Everyone has heard this little nugget, which has become so pervasive in our culture as to become a cudgel for science-bashing, and several scholars have dug into the history of this tale to determine where it originated.

In the October 1996 issue of Physics World, an article appeared entitled "The strange case of the bumble-bee that flew" by Ken Zetie. In it, he wrote:

But how did the myth about bees not being able to fly start? When does the story date back to? J McMasters states that the story was prevalent in the German technical universities in the 1930s, starting with the students of the aerodynamicist Ludwig Prandtl at Gottingen. The story goes that a noted Swiss aerodynamicist, whom McMasters does not name, was talking to a biologist at dinner. The biologist asked about the flight of bees and the Swiss gentleman did a "back-of-the-napkin" calculation of the kind I described earlier, assuming a rigid, smooth wing and so on. Of course, he found that there was insufficient lift and went off to find out the correct answer.

In the meantime, the biologist put the word around that bees could not fly, presumably to show that nature was greater than engineering, and the media picked up the story. The truth, then as now, wasn't newsworthy, so a correction was never publicized. The people I meet, therefore, continue to tell me that science is a load of crock because it once proved that bumblebees cannot fly. And they will not hear otherwise, especially not from a scientist.

This "J McMasters" as it turns out was a Boeing aerospace engineer named John H. McMasters, who had earlier published an article about this very topic in the journal American Scientist: "The Flight of the Bumblebee and Related Myths of Entomological Engineering" (Am. Sci., Vol. 77, pp. 164-8). In an e-mail exchange discussing this article, McMasters reveals that he had been told that the Swiss aerodynamicist in question was one Jacob Ackeret, a well-established figure in the field of supersonic aerodynamics, but this could not be verified, so Ackeret's name was left out of the article. McMasters goes on to relate that, following the publication of his article, he was inundated with mail, including Xerox copies of page 8 of a French monograph on insect flight by the famed entomologist August Magnan, Le Vol Des Insects (Hermann and Cle, Paris, 1934), which contains the following line:

Tout d'abord poussé par ce qui fait en aviation, j'ai appliqué aux insectes les lois de la résistance de l'air, et je suis arrivé avec M. SAINTE-LAGUE a cette conclusion que leur vol est impossible.

En anglais, this reads:

Driven by the fact of aviation, I have applied the laws of the resistance of air to insects, and I arrived, with Monsieur Sainte-Lague, at the conclusion that their flight is impossible.

Mr. Sainte-Lague appears to be the mathematician André Sainte-Laguë, who was no light-weight in his field. Whoever originated this meme regarding the inability of bees to fly, whether it was Jacob Ackeret or the team of Magnan and Sainte-Laguë, we are talking about knowledgeable, credible scientists and engineers. How could such individuals reach such bizarre conclusions?

First of all, it should be pointed out that the account given by McMasters clearly depicts Ackeret (or whatever other Swiss engineer it might have been) clearly proclaiming his result with tongue firmly planted in cheek. He obviously recognized that assumptions he made in performing his back-of-the-napkin computations presented an overly-simplified analysis of an horrendously complex topic, thus leading to a clearly preposterous conclusion. As for Magnan and Sainte-Laguë, no information is provided regarding their analysis, but it is fairly safe to assume (if you will pardon the conceit) that they also made the mistake of oversimplifying the problem. If one tries to analyze the wings of a bee as if they operated like aircraft wings, the lift they generate is clearly too low to allow flight. But bee wings don't work like aircraft wings. Thanks to high-speed photography and more detailed analysis (taking into account the complexities of how bees actually fly, such as the constantly changing angle of attack of the wings), modern scientists have a very clear understanding of the dynamics of bee flight.

Yes, scientists and engineers do make mistakes, being human beings after all. (For a rather dramatic example, one need look no further than early 20th century naysayers of rocketry who illustrated their lack of understanding of Newton's Third Law and the Law of Conservation of Linear Momentum by claiming that rockets could not possibly work in space since they would have no atmosphere against which to react.) But the beauty of it all is that science, by its very nature, is a self-correcting mechanism.

CP violation observed in B-meson systems by the D0 detector at Fermilab's Tevatron!

2010-05-18T21:00:00.001-05:00

While the eyes of the physics world have been glued on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the physicists toiling away at the LHC's predecesor in Batavia, Illinois have been hard at work making new discoveries. Team members of the D0 Collaboration at Fermilab's Tevatron have announced the observation of what appears to be a CP violation in the oscillation of neutral B-mesons into their own antiparticles.

Okay, now that I've made the eyes of any non-physicist reading this glaze over, perhaps a plain English explanation of this outcome and its significance is in order. It is perhaps easier if I start with the latter in order to provide historical context. To do that, we need to start at the beginning. The very beginning. The Big Bang.

Okay, perhaps we don't have to back up quite that far, but we should at least back up to the discovery of the Big Bang. Back in 1929, astronomer Edwin Hubble was studying the electromagnetic spectra of distant astronomical objects, specifically galaxies, and noted that they were moving away from us. (Well, from the standpoint of General Relativity, it isn't so much that they are moving as it is that the intervening space is expanding.) In fact, the further away they were, the faster they were moving away from us, an observation which confirmed a theoretical prediction by the Belgian Roman Catholic priest Monsignor Georges Lemaître in 1927. By 1931, Lemaître had carried his theories regarding the expansion of the universe to their logical conclusion, that at some point in the past, the entirety of the universe was concentrated into a single point, a "Primeval Atom," which then exploded and formed the universe as we know it. The concept was referred to derisively by Fred Hoyle as the "Big Bang theory," and the name stuck. (One cannot help but be struck by the irony of the fact that the concept of the Big Bang, the established reality of which is frequently denied by Biblical literalists, was first posited by a priest.)

Now, no theory can properly be called a theory (as opposed to a hypothesis or conjecture) without meeting certain criteria, one of the most important of which is usefulness in making testable predictions. The Big Bang theory was no exception, and one of the predictions of the theory was the existence of a sort of "after glow" of the Big Bang in the form of cosmic microwave background radiation, a prediction which was confirmed in 1964 by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson of Bell Labs. (I had the pleasure of speaking with Robert Wilson on a few occasions while I was an undergrad back in the late 80's. Very nice guy. But I digress.)

All very well and good, but what does all of this have to do with the new discovery at Fermilab? I'm getting to that....

As the Big Bang theory gained broader acceptance among cosmologists, particle physicists started piping up with an objection. They pointed out that matter and anti-matter particles are always produced in pairs, and that the Big Bang should have spewed out equal quantities of matter and anti-matter particles, which would have promptly annihilated each other, leaving a universe filled with nothing but a sea of gamma radiation. No matter. This conundrum is referred to the baryon asymmetry problem.

But we are here. And the Big Bang happened. Whodathunk?

A possible solution to this quandary was proposed in the mid-60's by Andrei Sakharov, a Soviet physicist as noted for his political activism as for his scientific accomplishments. (In 1980, he was arrested for protesting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.) Sakharov proposed a theoretical model in which there might be an asymmetry in the behavior of matter and anti-matter in certain types of interactions, and that such an asymmetry could lead to a net quantity of matter remaining after the bulk of matter and anti-matter mutually annihilated itself in the wake of the Big Bang. Furthermore, Sakharov argued, such an asymmetry would manifest itself as a violation of CP conservation.

"And what in blue blazes," I hear you cry, "is that?"

Before I define "CP," I should digress just a bit and comment on the concept of symmetry and its relationship to conservation laws. The concept of symmetry is fundamental to theoretical physics. Monumentally fundamental. All conservation laws are rooted in symmetry. Conservation of momentum is the result of translation symmetry. Conservation of energy is rooted in time symmetry. Conservation of angular momentum is a consequence of directional symmetry. And the importance of symmetry goes even deeper than that. In quantum field theory, a special type of symmetry called "gauge symmetry" is imposed on the fields that the theory describes. Requiring gauge symmetry causes terms describing force interactions to pop right out of the field equations automatically, whether it is the electromagnetic force, the weak nuclear force governing beta decay, or the strong nuclear force which bind quarks to form protons and neutrons. It is a beautiful thing to see.

But just as important as symmetry is in theoretical physics, there is a related concept called "spontaneous symmetry breaking." It is this concept which allows the Higgs field to give fermions their mass, and which caused the electro-weak force to split off into the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces as the universe cooled after the Big Bang. In theoretical physics, when a symmetry is broken, something interesting is happening.

Which leads us back to CP violation. The concept behind CP (charge-parity) conservation is as follows: perform an experiment with a collection of particles. Then swap all of the particles with equivalent particles of opposite charge (in other words, their anti-particles), then perform the experiment again, but watching it in a mirror. The outcome of the experiment should be identical.

But, as it turns out, CP symmetry is not always obeyed. Such an asymmetry as described by Sakharov was experimentally detected in 1964. Neutral K-mesons (also known as kaons) were observed to turn into their own anti-particles and back again repeatedly. This in of itself was not a surprise, but the rate at which each part of the oscillation took place was not the same, and this is where the "CP violation" was happening. There was subtle difference in the way matter and anti-matter were behaving, which was in line with Sakharov's solution to the issue of matter's dominance in our universe. But the asymmetry observed in kaon oscillations was not enough. Not by a factor of 10,000,000,000.

Which brings us back full-circle to the findings of the D0 team. The CP violation which they have observed in B-meson oscillations in the Tevatron is significantly larger than that observed in 1964 with kaon oscillations. Possibly large enough to explain the baryon asymmetry problem. Which would explain why we have a universe of stars, galaxies, planets, trees, puppies, Legos, and Bugatti Veyrons, and not a universe of pure energy.

For more info, take a look at the RESONAANCES blog and the Quantum Diaries Survivor blog, both of which have interesting discussions about this discovery. The New York Times also has an article about this discovery.

Saturn's Enigmatic Hexagon

2010-04-12T15:30:00.009-05:00

One of our planets has a hex on it. Seriously.

Perhaps I should back up and explain. Back in 1988, scientists analyzing images of Saturn sent back by Voyager 2 noticed an odd structure in the cloud banding circling Saturn's North Pole. One of the cloud bands was shaped like a hexagon! [Godfrey, D. A., 1988: A hexagonal feature around Saturn's North Pole. Icarus (ISSN 0019-1035), vol. 76, Nov. 1988, p. 335-356., doi:10.1016/0019-1035(88)90075-9.]

The public was dazzled and puzzled by the images. Atmospheric scientists looked at them and said "Oh, a standing Rossby wave. Interesting." Some of these scientists went on to work out the hydrodynamic calculations of how this structure might have been formed as a side effect of a cyclone near the boundary of the hexagon. [Allison, M., D.A Godfrey, and R.F. Beebe, 1990: A wave dynamical interpretation of Saturn's polar hexagon. Science, 247, 1061-1063, doi:10.1126/science.247.4946.1061.]

When the Cassini probe reached Saturn in 2006, the northern polar region was shrouded in winter darkness, but the Cassini VIMS team was nevertheless able to image the region in infrared. (See image to the right.) Sure enough, the hexagonal shape was still there, although the vortex that had been swirling about one of its sides was gone, which was verified in the visible spectrum as daylight began to creep back into the polar region in early 2009.

Keep in mind that the absense the cyclone on the periphery of the hexagon does not automatically render the analysis by Allison, Godfrey, and Beebe incorrect. The sinusoidal "wobble" of the polar jet stream could easily persist long after whatever triggered the initial perturbation goes away. Such persistant structures in the atmospheres of the gas giants is not unprecedented. In the Jovian atmosphere, a cyclone known as the Great Red Spot has persisted for centuries. The only real mystery is whether the cyclone observed adjacent to the hexagon by Voyager 2 was actually what triggered the oscillation, or if something else was the culprit. Scientists continue to dig into the issue. Some have even speculated that the driving force might be convective currents of hotter gasses upwelling from deep within Saturn's atmosphere. [Fletcher LN, Irwin PG, Orton GS, Teanby NA, Achterberg RK, Bjoraker GL, Read PL, Simon-Miller AA, Howett C, de Kok R, Bowles N, Calcutt SB, Hesman B, Flasar FM. Temperature and composition of Saturn's polar hot spots and hexagon. Science. 2008 Jan 4;319(5859):79-81.]

Just this month, it was announced that Oxford physicists Ana Claudia Barbosa Aguiar and Peter Read had managed to duplicate this hexagon structure in the lab in a tank of swirling fluid. [Ana C. Barbosa Aguiar, Peter L. Read, Robin D. Wordsworth, Tara Salter, Y. Hiro Yamazaki, A laboratory model of Saturn's North Polar Hexagon, Icarus, Volume 206, Issue 2, Cassini at Saturn, April 2010, Pages 755-763, ISSN 0019-1035, DOI: 10.1016/j.icarus.2009.10.022.]

This experiment provided confirmation of an earlier experiment. In 2005, researchers at the Technical University of Denmark had achieved similar results with a similar apparatus. [Jansson, T. R. N., et al, 2006. Polygons on a Rotating Fluid Surface. Phys. Rev. Lett., 96. 174502.]

So, the science on this topic is humming along nicely. That having been said, some in the general public still seem puzzled and bewildered by all of this. A hexagon formed by clouds? It seems counterintuitive that such a structure could possibly exist. However, a closer examination of the images reveals that the sides of the hexagon are not perfectly straight, nor do the polar winds of Saturn make abrupt, crisp 120 degree turns at each of the hexagon's vertices.

Consider the graph below illustrating the simple expression (in polar coordinates) r = 2 + 0.07 * sin(6*Θ). Keep in mind that this is not even remotely intended to serve as an analysis of the dynamics of the Saturn hexagon. Heady hydrodynamic equations involving vector fields would be required for that. What I am attempting to qualitatively demonstrate here is how a stationary Rossby wave could conceivably resemble a regular polygon.

With the amplitude of the sinusoidal component set to be sufficiently shallow, and the angular component being multiplied by 6 (forcing the resulting figure to possess the six-fold radial symmetry of the D₆ dihedral group, a property shared with true hexagons), the resulting figure (composed of nothing more than curves) appears at a glance to have the form of a hexagon.

So, a hex upon Saturn!

"Nature by Numbers"

2010-03-26T15:13:00.000-05:00

This video offers an exquisite glimpse into the mathematical beauty of nature:

Here is an explanation of the mathematics touched upon by the video.

Assume the Position with Mr. Wuhl

2010-03-19T10:11:00.003-05:00

My college history classes were never this much fun.

In 2006 and 2007, HBO aired two specials featuring comedic actor Robert Wuhl. Filmed before a class of New York University film students, the specials featured Mr. Wuhl offering up hysterical lectures on history as viewed through the lens of pop culture. Mr. Wuhl really should do more of these things.

(Not entirely safe for work due to language and a brief appearance by a nude Hedy Lamarr. Rawr!)

Assume the Position: "History is Pop Culture" (April 2006)
Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Assume the Position 201: "History is Based on a True Story" (July 2007)

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Not out of the woods yet, but things are getting better....

2010-03-16T14:36:00.002-05:00

As I mentioned in a previous post, there are signs that the economy is starting to rebound. Sadly, job growth/loss (the indicator which most directly impacts most people) always lags other indicators, but there is good news even there:

This is a chart showing monthly job gains/losses. After steady declines in job losses since the President signed the Recovery Act in February 2009, the economy is actually starting to gain jobs. Of course, it will take a while for jobs to open up for the bulk of people who have lost work during this downturn, and layoffs do continue. (A dear friend of mine was laid off just this month.) But the worst does appear to be over. The trends are moving in the right direction....

April 2 Update: The "bikini graph" has been updated with the latest data......

OK Go's Amazing Viral Videos

2010-03-16T13:40:00.000-05:00

Surely you've seen it by now. The band OK Go has released the official video for their song "This Too Shall Pass," and it is cropping up everywhere in the InterWebs. Including here:

What can I say? I'm a sucker for anything involving Rube Goldberg machines. Few things tug harder at the heartstrings of my Inner Geek. And for more rampant geekiness, Wired.com has an article on the making of this video, complete with behind the scenes footage.

However, I should point out that this is not the first video from this group to go viral with this very song. There is a previous unofficial video, made with the help of the Notre Dame Marching Band. (Alas, embedding of that video is disabled at the request of the band's label, EMI, one of many bones of contention which brought OK Go to the decision to part ways with EMI.) As with the Rube Goldberg video, this one is shot in a continuous take. And this one is a Band Geek's delight.

But wait, there is more. OK Go had an even earlier video go viral (albeit not to the same degree), with the video for their song "Here It Goes Again." The novelty here? The band performs a choreographed dance on treadmills....

Integrating Lilypond with more complex LaTeX documents

2010-02-07T21:26:00.006-06:00

In a previous post, I described my trials and tribulations in getting the Lilypond music-engraving package to work with TeXShop, a Mac-based front-end for the LaTeX typesetting system. The example used to illustrate the technique was a rather simple document, with no included external images or files.

As I've continued my rediscovery of LaTeX (having first been exposed to it as an undergraduate), I've come to realize that the rather straightforward techniques I had described previously break down when dealing with more complex documents. This first came to light when I attempted to incorporate Lilypond content into a LaTeX document built with the Tufte-LaTeX classes, a collection of layout classes created to render LaTeX documents using the design principals of Edward Tufte, author of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, and one of the worlds foremost experts on the presentation of information. A self-documenting example of the output of the Tufte-LaTeX book class can be seen here.

To really understand what went awry when trying to incorporate Lilypond content into a Tufte-style document, it is necessary to take a closer look at the Lilypond-LaTeX.engine configuration file that I came up with (these engine files merely being Unix shell scripts which are invoked by the TeXShop GUI front-end when it comes time to build and render the document):

#!/bin/bash
export PATH=$PATH:/Applications/LilyPond.app/Contents/Resources/bin
# Delete existing output (PDF) file
rm "$1".pdf
# Create directory to put all temporary stuff
mkdir -p "$1_r"-out/
# Invoke L-B
lilypond-book --output="$1_r"-out --pdf "$1"
cd "$1_r"-out
pdflatex "$1"
# Copy output (PDF) file to parent directory
mv *.pdf ..
# Delete temporary stuff
rm -rf *
cd ..
# Delete (empty) temp directory
rmdir "$1_r"-out
# Display output (PDF) file
open "$1".pdf

Note that a temporary output directory is created to which the output of lilypond-book is directed. Why? When lilypond-book is invoked, it reads in the specified .tex file, processes any lilypond commands it finds, and uses them to create small graphics files containing the rendered music notation, then rewrites the .tex file, replacing the lilypond commands with \input commands pointing to small .tex files which, in turn, use \includegraphics commands to load the images generated by lilypond. Pdflatex is then invoked on the newly rewritten version of the main .tex file, resulting in the generation of the output PDF. If a separate subdirectory were not used for the output of lilypond-book, the script would fail when it tries to overwrite the original version of the primary .tex file with the updated version. By creating the output in a subdirectory, the original .tex file is preserved.

The problem with this approach in a more complex document, such as the case of something built with the Tufte-LaTeX document classes, is if \include or \input commands (or related commands) come into play, not to mention ancillary files such as .toc (table-of-contents) files. In the specific case of the Tufte-LaTeX example, external graphics are loaded into the document via the \includegraphics command, the path to which is determined by the \graphicspath command. (In retrospect, a simple solution to this specific problem would have been to simply edit the argument of the \graphicspath command to specify an explicit rather than relative path, but that isn't exactly what I came up with, nor would it solve the issue of the .toc file.) When lily-pond book spits out a new copy of the .tex file, then internally invokes LaTeX to process it (even before the explicit invocation of pdflatex found in the engine file shown above), LaTeX tries and fails to find the external graphics called by the \includegraphics command, and the overall process fails.

My first successful workaround to this issue was to simply make use of a pre-created output directory (rather than one created on the fly as in the engine file above) and make sure that this output directory contained copies of the graphics subdirectory and other ancillary files. However, despite the fact that it works, such a workaround is too cumbersome to be practical since the ancillary files would have to be constantly synchronized to the output directory.

After further tinkering (mainly in the command line environment, bypassing TeXShop entirely), I came up with a better way: renaming the primary .tex file to have a .lytex extension. Lilypond-book will accept a .lytex file as input, and the output can be written to the same directory with the standard .tex extension, thus negating the overwrite issue. The included graphics are found, and all is well.

Well, that worked specifically for the Tufte-LaTeX class. But what about for even more complex documents. For example, when creating a book with LaTeX, it is common to maintain a minimal primary file which then uses \include commands to bring in the individual chapters, which are contained in separate .tex files. For example, suppose we have a main file called master.tex with the following contents:

\documentclass[11pt]{book}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\begin{document}
\author{Me, Myself, & I}
\title{My Magnum Opus}
\frontmatter
\maketitle
\tableofcontents
\mainmatter
\include{chapter1}
\include{chapter2}
\include{chapter3}
\end{documents}

Furthermore, let us suppose that the three chapters consist of the following files, called chapter1.tex, chapter2.tex, and chapter3.tex respectively:

\chapter{It Begins}
This is the content for the first chapter....

\chapter{The Middle}

Now the plot thickens....

This time, with music!

In Western music, the primary reference tone is the pitch A above middle C, which is defined by ISO standards as having a fundamental frequency of 440Hz. In twelve-tone equal temperament, the frequencies of all other tones within that octave are related to this pitch according to the following formula:

\begin {displaymath}
F(n) = 440 \times 2^{ \frac{n}{12} }
\end {displaymath}

Note that this "twelth roots of two" scheme does not provide pure harmonics of the sort obtained with Pythagorean Tuning or Just Temperament, but it does avoid the "wolf tones" found in those older tuning systems in the transition from one octave to another, thus allowing music to span multiple octaves or to be transposed into different keys.

To find the frequency of the note in the next octave up, simply double the frequency. To go down an octave, divide the frequency by two.

With frequency intervals thus defined, we can begin dividing the continuous acoustic spectrum into discretized structures known as scales. Here is a one octave chromatic scale:

\begin[quote,fragment,staffsize=16]{lilypond}
\set Score.timing = ##f
\override Staff.TimeSignature #'transparent = ##t
\relative c' {
c4 cis d dis e f fis g gis a ais b c
}
\end{lilypond}

\chapter{Finale}
The thrilling climax....

Note that Chapter 2 includes the same lilypond code that I used in my first article. For the reasons explained earlier, this will cause lilypond-book to fail. However, if we change the filename of that file to chapter2.lytex, and run lilypond-book against it with the command "lilypond-book --pdf chapter2.lytex", a proper chapter2.tex file will be generated (albeit with a harmless warning about "\begin{document}" not being found), and we can then process master.tex with pdflatex normally, including multiple runs so that the table of contents will be properly generated.

So what about including lilypond code in the main file? Well that is an entirely different kettle of fish, and has thus far proven to be problematic in my experiments. For the time being, it appears that stuffing the lilypond code into include files might be the best way to go.

Apple announces iPad...and not much else

2010-01-27T14:03:00.002-06:00

No announcement for iPhone 4 or any hardware refreshes for the iPhone line. No Mac announcements.

The iPad is nice, and does a nice job of extending the iPhone/iTouch interface to a larger form factor. My reaction? Meh.

I would love to have that hardware, with the touch interface enhancements, but able to run Mac OS X applications. Looks like the eventual replacement for my aging MacBook Pro will likely be a MacBook Air (or whatever is equivalent six months to a year from now). But first, I need to replace my now non-functional G5 tower, preferably with RAID storage, so that I have a home server to securely store my data. (I'm thinking perhaps a Mac Mini connected to an external RAID enclosure via FireWire, or perhaps the Mac Mini server configuration with two hard drives.)

We now join our recovery, already in progress....

2010-01-26T22:48:00.002-06:00

Complete GDP data for the 4th quarter of 2009 isn't in yet, so this chart only shows three quarters for that year, but the signs are good. Of course, as usual, jobs are lagging, so many people fail to realize that the economy is in fact in a state of recovery.

Sadly, rumor has it that President Obama is poised to repeat the same mistake that FDR made in 1937, buckling to GOP pressure to cut Federal spending, a move which put the brakes on progress made by the New Deal in getting us out of the Great Depression and resulted in the 1937 recession, a mistake which I've touched upon before. (An economic boom is the time to curtail government spending and pay down the debt, not during a tepid recovery. This is basic material covered on, say, day 2 of an Economics 101 class.) We'll see what news is in store for us in the State of the Union Address tomorrow.

No Commentary Needed

2009-12-18T09:47:00.004-06:00

http://therealmfg.blogspot.com/2009/12/exactly.html

The "Climategate" er....Thing

2009-12-07T09:40:00.001-06:00

Recently, a large cache of e-mails and computer code was stolen from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia and published on the web. After a flurry of quote-mining, right-wing pundits have been quick to seize upon a handful of messages as a "smoking gun" proving the existence a left-wing conspiracy to promote an Anthropogenic Climate Change hoax. Of course, the reality of the situation is that the stolen data indicates nothing of the kind....

As for the hackers' claims that climate researchers are keeping data to themselves that should be made public, this is also far from the case. Dig through all the raw data you like. It is all out there....

Magic Highway USA

2009-12-06T22:34:00.000-06:00

Once upon a time, people envisioned the future with bold optimism, and nobody presented such visions of the future better than Disney. Check out this film from 1958 exploring the highways of the future. It is quite fascinating to consider which of the predictions have come true (even if not in the way imagined), and which have not.

The big thing they missed, of course, is traffic jams.

Tip o' the hat to Doc Parker for pointing this one out to me.

The Bohr-Einstein Debates - With Puppets?

2009-12-06T12:35:00.000-06:00

The philosophical back-and-forth between Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein helped lay the foundation for Quantum Mechanics. And, make no mistake, Einstein's approach to the problem was far more nuanced than his famous "God does not play dice" line would suggest. His philosophical challenges to Bohr's strictly mathematical approach helped drive the science forward considerably.

So what better way to present this essential element of the history of science than with puppets?

The Bohr-Einstein Debates, With Puppets from Chad Orzel on Vimeo.

Uber-Cool Space Shuttle Footage: STS-129 Ascent Video Highlights

2009-12-05T21:34:00.002-06:00

STS-129 Ascent Video Highlights from mike interbartolo on Vimeo.

Spectacular footage compiled by the Systems Engineering and Integration team at JSC. I especially like the video shot from the Solid Rocket Boosters during SRB separation and during splashdown.

I should point out that some of the music in the video is performed by the Celtic band Clandestine, which features some old friends of mine from my TRF days, E.J. Jones (best damned bagpipe player in North America), and vocalist/percussionist Emily Dugas.

(Hat-tip to Stacy Bakri for pointing this one out to me.)

3D Mandelbrot Sets (Sort Of)

2009-11-19T13:40:00.010-06:00

Imagine the beauty and complexity of the Mandelbrot set in three dimensions. Fractal enthusiasts are indeed trying to tackle this, as evidenced by this page at skytopia.com.

Okay, technically these aren't true Mandelbrot sets, or even true fractals. Due to a quirk of quaternion mathematics, true fractals generated by quaternions can only exist in even-numbered dimensions of four or higher (quaternions being, by definition, four dimensional), hence these structures are referred to as pseudofractals. When attempting to measure the fractal dimension of pseudofractals, the calculation diverges. (At least this is what I've heard. I've not attempted the calculations myself, but should give it a stab.) Hmmm, space-time is 4D. Possibilities. A time-varying volumetric Mandelbrot set, anyone? Note the expanses of smooth sections. True fractals should be more...foamy.

For something closer to the real McCoy, there are always 3D cross-sections of 4D quaternion Julia sets, discussed here and here.

A basic overview of the mathematics of higher-dimensional fractals can be found here. For a little more depth, read this and this.

I Can't Believe I Totally Missed RH Day!

2009-11-19T11:35:00.000-06:00

Yesterday was RH Day, celebrating the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Riemann Hypothesis with a series of lectures world-wide. In conjunction with this, the American Institute of Mathematics (AIM) has publish the AIM Problem Lists, listings of some of the most important outstanding problems in mathematics, which of course includes proving the Riemann Hypothesis.

Proving or disproving the Riemann Hypothesis is widely regarded as the Holy Grail of mathematics. In 1900, the legendary mathematician David Hilbert listed it as being among the most important unsolved problems in modern mathematics. Last year, DARPA included it in its list of 23 Mathematical Challenges. Settling the issue of the Riemann Hypothesis is also among the Clay Mathematics Institute's Millennium Problems.

Stupidity on Parade VIII

2009-11-05T11:11:00.003-06:00

To paraphrase a line from a recent episode of "The Guild," there is so much FAIL in that video that I don't even know where to begin. This is a clip of "Dr." Charlene Warner, talking about the "physics of homeopathy," as if homeopathy has anything to do with reality. This is the sort of garbled nonsense that results when pseudoscientists try to use real science to support their woo. This person has absolutely NO clue what she is babbling about. If the stupidity density in her vicinity gets any higher, she runs a risk of collapsing into a singularity, but it will at least be interesting to have a chance to observe the production of Hawking radiation up close...

The Latest Song Stuck in My Head

2009-11-05T09:21:00.005-06:00

"Voodoo Child" performed by the Rogue Traders, written by Elvis Costello (well, he wrote a riff sampled in the song), James Ash, and Steve Davis, not to be confused with the song "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)" by the Jimi Hendrix Experience.

Doctor Who fans will remember this as the song playing when the Master unleashed the Toclafane on the Earth in the Episode "The Sound of Drums." (Yes, I'm a nerd. What's your point?)

It is interesting to note that lead singer Natalie Bassingthwaighte (who has since left the band) also appeared in the Australian soap opera "Neighbors." Her appearance was disguised in this video so that the song would be judged on its own merits rather than from a celebrity halo effect. Other notable actors to have appeared in "Neighbors" include Russell Crow, Kylie Minogue, and Dichen Lachman (who is currently appearing in Joss Whedon's "Dollhouse" as Sierra).

Making Lilypond work with TeXShop

2009-11-01T15:57:00.002-06:00

I have a confession to make. I have a secret desire to someday write a book on music theory, if only to have the opportunity to start the chapter on key signatures with a quote from Harry Chapin:

Those of you who are musically inclined will note that we have switched to a minor key, which of course means that the plot is about to thicken.

But, hey, how to pull this off? Typesetting a book that would contain equations describing the properties of sound is tough. The best tool for that would be LaTeX (with which I am fond of using the TeXShop front-end). And music engraving is even tougher. Quite frankly, most computer-generated music notation is of very poor quality. Fortunately there is Lilypond, which ostensibly can be made to work with TeXShop.

For the benefit of those not in the know, TeX/LaTeX is a very old system for doing page markup and typesetting, translating markup codes in text files into DVI, Postcript, or PDF files. I was first exposed to it as an undergrad on a VAXcluster back in the late eighties, and it remains the de facto standard for papers submitted for publication in scientific and mathematical journals since it contains very powerful commands for formatting mathematical expressions. Since it is command-line based, many graphical front-ends exist for simplifying its use in the GUI era, of which TeXShop is but one example.

Similarly, Lilypond interprets its own markup commands from a text file to generate engraved music, the output of which can be incorporated into the output of the LaTeX processor.

So I downloaded LilyPond and followed the instructions for making it work with TeXShop, but I kept running into errors which my Unixy shell-foo skills were inadequate to resolve. Finally, after a few months of ocassionally twiddling with the issue, I found an example of settings for the Lilypond-LaTeX.engine configuration file which worked a little further than any others I had found. After correcting some minor errors in it, I wound up with the following:

#!/bin/bash
export PATH=$PATH:/Applications/LilyPond.app/Contents/Resources/bin

# Delete existing output (PDF) file
rm "$1".pdf
# Create directory to put all temporary stuff
mkdir -p "$1_r"-out/
# Invoke L-B
lilypond-book --output="$1_r"-out --pdf "$1"
cd "$1_r"-out
pdflatex "$1"
# Copy output (PDF) file to parent directory
mv *.pdf ..
# Delete temporary stuff
rm -rf *
cd ..
# Delete (empty) temp directory
rmdir "$1_r"-out
# Display output (PDF) file
open "$1".pdf

Note that this verson contains no error checking in the shell commands, so if it fails, it will not fail gracefully, but at least it works. The end result? Given the following .tex file:

\documentclass[12pt]{amsart}
\usepackage{geometry} % see geometry.pdf on how to lay out the page. There's lots.

\title{Lilypond Example}
\author{Glen Mark Martin}

\begin{document}

\maketitle

In Western music, the primary reference tone is the pitch A above middle C, which is defined by ISO standards as having a fundamental frequency of 440Hz. In twelve-tone equal temperament, the frequencies of all other tones within that octave are related to this pitch according to the following formula:

\begin {displaymath}
F(n) = 440 \times 2^{ \frac{n}{12} }
\end {displaymath}

To find the frequency of the note in the next octave up, simply double the frequency. To go down an octave, divide the frequency by two.

With frequency intervals thus defined, we can begin dividing the continuous acoustic spectrum into discretized structures known as scales. Here is a one octave chromatic scale:

\begin[quote,fragment,staffsize=16]{lilypond}
\set Score.timing = ##f
\override Staff.TimeSignature #'transparent = ##t
\relative c' {
c4 cis d dis e f fis g gis a ais b c
}

\end{lilypond}
\end{document}

I end up with the following output:

Pirates, keep an eye on your parrots!

2009-10-29T16:53:00.002-05:00

Converting iPhone Voicemails to Custom Ringtones

2009-10-29T16:29:00.001-05:00

Recently, I received a voicemail from a friend that was so endearing that I not only wanted to preserve it, but I wanted to turn it into a custom ringtone and associate it with the Contact for that person. Unfortunately, the iPhone provides no straightforward mechanism for doing this.

Getting the Audio File
After a bit of time consulting the all-knowing Google, I came to the conclusion that turning the voicemail into a ringtone for my iPhone would be trivial, provided that I could get the voicemail onto my computer as an mp3 file (or any other non-DRM audio format which can be imported into iTunes.) However, getting to that point proved to be a bit tricky. Here are the options that I found:

Jailbreak the iPhone and ssh into it to find the Visual Voicemail audio files. Hmmm, I could probably pull that off, but I'm not liking the idea of getting my iPhone bricked during a future update.
Route an audio cable from the headphone jack on the iPhone to the mic jack on my computer, and record the voicemail directly. Nope, don't have the right cable on hand.
Sign up for a service that will retrieve voicemails and e-mail them to you. Bingo!

To implement option 3, I went with gotvoice.com. It is a subscription service, so it is necessary to provide a credit card number to sign up, but they do offer a free 14-day trial. When subscribing, I had to provide my phone number (duh!) and my voicemail PIN so that the service could access my voicemail, along with an e-mail address. Once the service planted a test voicemail to verify access I was ready to go, and was able to go onto their website and get my existing voicemails transferred and e-mailed to me as mp3 attachments. Weeee!

Ringtone Conversion
Once I had the mp3 saved to my computer from the e-mail message, it was a simple matter to convert it into a ringtone. First of all, I needed to trim the audio file since GotVoice had added information such as time stamps and phone numbers to both the beginning and end of the recording. To do this, I used Audacity (with the LAME mp3 encoder to enable mp3 export).

Next, I double-clicked the edited mp3 file to open it in iTunes. At this point, it is tempting to open the contextual menu for the item in iTunes and select the "Create Ringtone..." option, but this will only work with items purchased through iTunes. It should also be noted that the name which appears for the item in iTunes (and later on the iPhone) is taken from the audio file's metadata, not from the file name, so I had to open the contextual menu for the item and select "Get Info." In the resulting window, I selected the Info tab, and set the Name field to the value I wished for the ringtone to appear as, then clicked "OK."

Next, I selected "Preferences" from the iTunes menu. On the General tab, I clicked "Import Settings..." (which is mis-named as these settings also impact the export conversion which I was about to perform.) On the "Import Using" popup menu, I selected "AAC Encoder." Next, I clicked the "OK" button on both dialog boxes, then opened the contextual menu for the item, and selected "Create AAC Version." A new copy of the item now appeared in iTunes. I used "Get Info" on this and noted the location of the underlying file and went there in the file system and copied the file to a different location, and changed its file extension from m4a to m4r. I went back into iTunes and removed the new item entry then went back to the file system and double-clicked my newly renamed m4r file to open it in iTunes. It now appeared in the Ringtones section of iTunes, and the next time I synced my iPhone, the new custom ringtone appeared on the list of ringtones available on my phone.

DSCOVR May Fly After All

2009-10-23T17:45:00.000-05:00

Paid for, built, and grounded by the Bush Administration to gather dust in a Maryland warehouse, DSCOVR may get off the ground after all. Designed to sit at the L1 Lagrange point between the Earth and the Sun in order to measure the Earth's albedo, the Deep Space Climate Observatory has the potential to settle the climate change debate once and for all. Now Congress has apropriated $9 million to start the process of refurbishing the probe in order to get it fit to launch again.

This is why Alton Brown rocks

2009-10-09T14:51:00.001-05:00

On the Jimmy Fallon show, A.B. demonstrates a novel approach to making smoothies. It involves powertools and a fire extinguisher....

Denial of Reality

2009-10-01T13:34:00.005-05:00

Skepticism is a good, healthy thing. It is a key component of rational empiricism, the bedrock of the scientific method, which in turn is the only "way of understanding the world" which has a proven track record of actually working. Skepticism is a powerful tool for avoiding deception, especially self-deception. I love skepticism, and feel that the world would be a much better place if more people employed it. By all means, challenge assumptions. Challenge the status quo. Employ critical thinking. Use the large cluster of neurons between your ears. Just make sure you have the facts to back it up.

That said, it should come as no surprise that too much of a good thing can be bad. To be a skeptic in the face of overwhelming evidence (with absolutely no contradictory evidence) is simply being obstinate. It is even worse when such stubborn skepticism is rooted in nothing more than ideology.

Today, when someone claims that the Earth is flat, we pat them on the head and think to ourselves "poor, deluded fool." We pity the person, because we know that they are wrong. We know this not out of arrogance, but because of the mountains of evidence (with zero evidence to the contrary). Even the ancients knew that the world wasn't flat. (Eratosthenes managed to come up with a fairly decent measurement of the Earth's circumpherence back in 240 BCE, and sailors had long noted that the tops of the sails of oncoming ships appeared on the horizon first.) We have circumnavigated the globe. We have seen our oblate-spheroid world from space, and even from the Moon. (Of course, the latter point is questioned by still another flavor of reality-deniers who are equally as wrong as the flat-Earthers. They persist in using the same arguments again and again, despite the fact that these arguments have been repeatedly and thoroughly debunked, a common characteristic among reality-deniers.) Moving from the realm of science to that of politics and history, we have Holocaust deniers, ranging from neo-Nazis to the current Iranian leadership, all ideologically driven to ignore the overwhelming evidence which proves them to be factually incorrect. One might as well deny the existence of gravity. Of course, all the denials in the world would not stop such a person from falling if they were to step off of a ledge. Reality ultimately trumps rhetoric.

There exist, however, other truth claims that are not so clear cut, at least without access to specialized or up-to-date knowledge. In the ancient world, it was obvious to sailors and scholars such as Eratosthenes that the Earth was round; but, as far as the bulk of humanity was concerned at the time, the Earth was indeed flat. The weight of the body of evidence had not yet built up to a sufficient preponderance to convince the skeptical, nor had the existing evidence yet found its way into the common body of knowledge and discourse. To compound this issue, the false claim of the Earth's flatness continued to be reinforced by obsolete false evidence, such as ancient theological cosmologies, which continued to be promulgated with a considerable societal inertia. This latter issue of a societal echo chamber is particularly pernicious in allowing false claims to linger well past all reasonable consideration.

All of this brings us to a modern truth claim which is of considerable significance to our species. I refer to anthropogenic climate change, or, as it is referred to in the common vernacular, global warming. The scientific evidence overwhelmingly supports it. Every single argument commonly leveled against it has been thoroughly and repeatedly debunked (see links below). And, most damningly, those who reject the reality of global warming are almost all far right wing conservatives. This idealogical connection is a major red flag. Would it not be the case, if there were valid objections to claims of global warming, that such objections would come from members of the entire political spectrum? It seems almost as if global warming denial is a prerequisite for labeling oneself as a conservative, and the right-wing radio and television pundits, bloggers, and politicians continue to peddle discredited false objections to the masses.

The circles of friends in which I move tend to consist of intelligent, rational people. A tiny subset of these friends, still, mind you, otherwise rational and intelligent, are quite conservative, and almost universally reject global warming claims. I've heard their arguments. I could argue back until I'm blue in the face, but it doesn't do any good. On this topic, purely on the basis of dogmatic ideology, they've rejected the real world. And that saddens me, because these are people I love and value as friends.

Here is some material that they really should read:

RealClimate.org, a climate change blog maintained by actual climate researchers
The RealClimate.org Wiki, the first group of links of which point to the following debunking sites
How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic
Climate change: A guide for the perplexed
Responses to common contrarian arguments
NERC Climate change challenge
Climate change - the big picture
Anti-global heating claims - a reasonably thorough debunking
Myths vs. Facts: Global Warming
Skeptical Science

Play With Your Neurons

2009-09-30T14:04:00.001-05:00

http://www.neave.com/strobe/

Go ahead. I dare ya. It is tons of fun. Just don't operate any heavy machinery for a while....

Felicia Day: Do You Wanna Date My Avatar?

2009-09-30T09:39:00.003-05:00

Okay, I admit it. Ever since I saw Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, I've had a crush on Felicia Day. I find beauty and intelligence to be an irresistible combination.

Wired.com has an interview with her, primarily discussing her online series, The Guild. And check out the promo below for the upcoming season of that web series. It is a nerd's delight...

(Hmmm. Wonder what server she is on in WoW?)

Exploring the Night Sky

2009-09-29T14:18:00.000-05:00

The Sky of Earth (be sure to check out the VR link on that page, especially in full screen mode)
GigaGalaxy Zoom
Google Sky

Stupidity on Parade VII

2009-09-19T23:57:00.000-05:00

I've heard a lot of idiotic things ooze out of Rick Perry's mouth, but this one is likely to blow away his chances for re-election by demonstrating just how out of touch he is with the woes faced by ordinary folks. Good riddance.

Dr. Norman Borlaug, 1914-2009

2009-09-14T18:41:00.003-05:00

Sad news. Dr. Norman Borlaug has passed away at the age of 93.

"Who?" you might very well ask. Penn & Teller explain very nicely in the following clip:

"Agora" Trailer

2009-09-07T16:33:00.002-05:00

"Agora" tells the story of Hypatia of Alexandria, a philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer, and arguably the most extraordinary woman of the ancient world, who was murdered by a mob of Christians in 415 CE. It will be interesting to see how faithful this film ends up being to history.

Spectacular Shots of ISS from the Ground

2009-09-07T16:14:00.004-05:00

Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy blog highlights some spectacular images of the International Space Station captured by astrophotographer Ralf Vandebergh with a manually tracked 10" telescope. (Yep, I said "manually tracked." No stepper motor.)

Teaser trailer for "Avatar"

2009-08-20T15:34:00.003-05:00

It won't be formally unveiled until tomorrow, but the teaser trailer for James Cameron's upcoming "Avatar" can be seen here.

Watch "Ghostbusters" online for free this week!

2009-08-17T08:25:00.002-05:00

In celebration of the 25th anniversary of the release of the film, Sony and YouTube have teamed up to stream "GhostBusters" for free all this week. Weeee...

"Alive in Joburg"

2009-08-13T11:27:00.003-05:00

This short film by Neill Blomkamp formed the basis for his upcoming feature, District 9.

Stupidity on Parade VI

2009-08-13T09:22:00.009-05:00

A recent editorial on health care reform in Investor's Business Daily contained the following little nugget:

"People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the UK, where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless."

It seems that the writer of this editorial was blissfully unaware that Professor Hawking is in fact a British citizen. He was born in Oxford, grew up in London, and is currently the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, a chair once held by Sir Isaac Newton.

And the medical treatments for his ALS are provided by the UK's National Health Service.

In responce to this bit of, well, uninformed tripe, Professor Hawking said the following (of course through his speech synthesizer, which lacks an English accent and thus might be considered the source of IBD's, er, confusion):

"I wouldn't be here today if it were not for the NHS. I have received a large amount of high-quality treatment without which I would not have survived."

The IBD article has since been stripped of the Hawking reference. More about this in articles at the Guardian, the Daily Mail, the Register, and the Telegraph.

Of course, this is all part of a larger debate about health care reform in the United States. There are certainly things to be concerned about in the proposed reforms, but rational debate and discussion about them is being drowned out by vacuous and uninformed screaming about things that are not even part of what is being proposed. The "deathers" like Sarah Palin who carry on about mythical "Obama Death Panels" and falsehoods about people being forced to drop the insurance they currently have and like are starting to make the "birther" nutjobs look relatively sane. Conservative talking heads like Limbaugh, Beck, and Malkin spout the lies, their listeners and viewers naively take it on faith that they are being told the truth, go out to town hall meetings with elected officials and vent their anger. Sadly, the most susceptible targets for this misinformation campaign are the elderly, who are being falsely told, point blank, explicitly, that Obama's proposed reforms will kill them!

This isn't civil political discourse. This is a one-sided screaming match.

(FYI: For an interesting glimpse into what is wrong with our current system, take a look here.)

Terry Gilliam Strikes Again!

2009-08-10T09:46:00.001-05:00

@ Yahoo! Video

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale

2009-08-01T13:32:00.002-05:00

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

Jack Dagger on the Tonight Show

2009-07-31T14:55:00.002-05:00

Last night, an acquaintance of mine (by way of the Buccaneer's Beach Bash) appeared on The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brian and showed Conan how to throw knives and axes.

In the past, he has tutored David Boreanaz in knife throwing for an episode of Bones, and has also appeared in an episode of Monk.

He fibs a bit at the beginning. "Jack Dagger" is not his real name. Ladies and gents, meet Mr. Todd Abrams....

Stupidity on Parade V

2009-07-29T09:15:00.007-05:00

It seems that Bill O'Reilly has absolutely no grasp of basic mathematics, not that this is a big shock....

For some bizarre reason, comprehensible only to himself, he seems to think that there is some strong correlation between population size and life expectancy, invisible to professional mathematicians and statisticians. Mark Chu-Carroll over at the "Good Math, Bad Math" blog sets the record straight quite nicely.

Ah, nostalgia...

2009-07-27T23:12:00.000-05:00

Alice in Wonderland Trailer

2009-07-24T10:19:00.005-05:00

A teaser for Tim Burton's version of Alice in Wonderland is out, and it looks quite promising. This project is certainly an ideal vehicle for Burton's skewed cinematic asthetic, and Johnny Depp seems quite at home as the Mad Hatter. (Is it just me, or was Johnny Depp born to play over-the-top characters in tons of makeup and outlandish wardrobes?)

Stupidity on Parade IV

2009-07-23T13:24:00.005-05:00

The stupid...it BURNS! Must be the metal oxide salts...

Rainbows didn't appear in sprinklers twenty years ago? Right.... Outta the gene pool, lady!

The Science of Apollo 11

2009-07-21T10:08:00.005-05:00

Although the primary impetus behind the Apollo program was absurdly geopolitical (beating those pesky Commie Ruskies to the Moon), once we actually got to the Moon, science rightly took center stage. Wired.com has a nice article about this, but the best part is that it links to two historically relevant science resources:

A PDF of the Apollo 11 Preliminary Science Report (NASA, October 1969)
Free access to a special Apollo edition of Science (Vol. 167, Issue 3918, 30 January 1970)

This isn't dumbed-down pop-sci tripe. This is the real deal, and I'm loving it.

"Man on the Moon!" - Cronkite and Apollo 11

2009-07-20T08:17:00.007-05:00

Forty years ago today, everyone on the planet who had access to a television was glued to it, watching grainy images of what is arguably the most significant milestone in the history of human civilization. President Kennedy's call for putting man on the moon had been fulfilled. As the world watched Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin bound about the surface of the Moon, most Americans heard this momentous event summed up by a voiceover of four simple words from the CBS News anchorman:

"Man on the Moon!"

Those words were uttered by Walter Cronkite. The camera cut away to Cronkite as his professional demeanor slipped away in a tidal wave of joy and pride. He removed his glasses, and a huge grin swept across his face. For a moment, he was giddy and speechless. His viewers forgave him for that, for they were right there with him, just as they forgave him six years earlier for shedding tears while announcing the death of JFK.

After all, he was "Uncle Walter," a man whom we invited into our homes every evening to find out what was happening in the world. In an age before 24 hours cable news channels and the Internet, he was America's town crier. Not just a talking head who read the news, he was an actual journalist. On D-Day, he landed behind enemy lines in a glider with Allied Troops, and flew on a bombing mission over Germany. He covered the Nuremberg Trials, the Cold War, the Korean War, the War in Vietnam, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., the Watergate scandal, and the Iran Hostage Crisis. And his word was trusted.

His iconic sign-off, "That's the way it is," was a nightly pledge to his viewers that he would faithfully and objectively report the facts to the best of his ability. The only time that he allowed himself to deviate from this objectivity was a rare on-the-air editorial from 1968. Following the Tet Offensive, Cronkite journeyed to Vietnam to assess the state of the conflict. His conclusion was that the war was unwinnable, prompting President Lyndon B. Johnson to proclaim, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost Middle America." Weeks later, LBJ announced that he would not run for reelection. Such was the gravitas of Walter Cronkite.

So it was that when America watched the televised coverage of Apollo 11, most chose to watch Cronkite's coverage. Since the earliest days of the Space Program, he had eagerly covered it, with all the wonder and curiosity of a child. He loved the Space Program, and made no effort to hide it (while still somehow maintaining a sense of journalistic objectivity). It is no small wonder that watching the glory that was Apollo 11 choked him up for a while, right along with his viewers. And it is all the more tragic that he is no longer with us to celebrate its 40th anniversary.

"We came in peace, for all Mankind." Uncle Walter said so.

Bill Gates did something good!

2009-07-15T14:21:00.004-05:00

The folks of Microsoft's Tuva Project have made available videos of a series of lectures by one of my personal heroes, the late physicist Richard Feynman. *yeah*

The downside: it requires Silverlight. *boo*

Speaking of personal heroes, here is a video of another (no Silverlight required): the last television interview with the late Carl Sagan discussing his book, The Demon-Haunted World:

Lest anyone wonder why I like living in the Austin area

2009-07-13T12:31:00.002-05:00

These photos are from a Saturday evening Kayaking excursion on Lady Bird Lake...

Stupidity on Parade III

2009-07-09T09:56:00.005-05:00

Wow. I've always thought that the Netherlands might be the kind of place where I might want to live. Now I'm sure. Yeah for "militant secularism." That, and the fact that the expected high temperature here in Austin, TX today is 106°F, whereas the temperature in Amsterdam right now is 61°F. If only I could telecommute from there.

For the record, contrary to what the reporter says, polygamy is NOT legal in the Netherlands, and the bit about a "suicide pill" is complete bollocks. What do you expect? This is Fox News we're talking about, after all. Facts have never really been of interest to them.

Stupidity on Parade II

2009-07-08T20:54:00.002-05:00

Watch the stupidity pour out as Brian Kilmeade opens his mouth. This guy is on TV why?

Say it isn't so....

2009-07-07T20:01:00.002-05:00

I was quite dismayed to learn today that former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez will be teaching a political science course at my alma mater this fall. Until today, I was quite proud to be a Tech graduate. That is no longer the case. How can I take pride in being associated with an institution which hires as an instructor a man who has brought shame to this nation by aiding and abetting war criminals and subverting the Constitution?

This is a sad day for Red Raiders everywhere.

Codex Sinaiticus

2009-07-07T08:36:00.005-05:00

A digitized version of the Codex Sinaiticus, the oldest known version of the Christian Bible, is now available online. It is a fascinating glimps into the history of the text. For example, the 4th century Codex Sinaiticus does not include Mark 16:9-20, which most biblical scholars regard as a later interpolation. The Codex also includes several books which were later excluded from the official canon.

Stupidity on Parade

2009-07-06T21:30:00.004-05:00

Epic fail on so many levels. At least this makes me feel less embarrassed by the idiots on the Texas State Board of Education.

A Collection of Spectacular Space Images

2009-07-05T19:33:00.004-05:00

Some of these are a bit old, but well worth seeing:

Thierry Legault's remarkable images of the Space Shuttle Atlantis and ISS transiting the sun. (Be sure to spend some time on the rest of the site. Those aren't the only amazing images there.)
The volcanic eruption of Sarychev Peak as seen from ISS, in 3-D (get your red/blue glasses out), and as an animated clip.

Omega-sub-b Baryons observed at Fermilab's Tevatron

2009-07-03T21:50:00.004-05:00

Fermilab's CDF team have announced the observation of Ω_b , a baryon consisting of two strange quarks and one bottom quark (s-s-b). The existence of this particle was predicted by the Standard Model. However, the mass measurements for this particle are in conflict with results produced by CDF's sister detector, DZero, which had raised the possibility of previously unknown physics possibly in conflict with the Standard Model. Either way, it is exciting. A preprint of the team's Phys. Rev. D. submission is available at arxiv.org.

A Traditional Approach to Wood Finishing

2009-06-25T16:31:00.002-05:00

The wood finishing section of any home improvement center is chock full of easy to apply combination stains and finishes which go on in just one or two coats. Unfortunately, they often contain ingredients which are quite toxic and not exactly "green," such as polyurethane or Verathane. On a recent episode of "The New Yankee Workshop" (actually a re-run of an older episode), a more traditional finishing method was demonstrated. Although it takes considerably longer and more effort, the components are of much lower toxicity (although appropriate safety precautions should still be taken with them - its not like you should drink shellac or inhale the vapors), and the result is a stunningly beautiful finish. Here are the steps:

1) Sand to 220 grit
2) Apply boiled linseed oil thinned with mineral spirits, using a cotton cloth. Wipe excess and let dry for a couple of days. This will bring out the richness of the wood color and grain.
3) Apply shellac (orange shellac, for example) as a protective topcoat. 10-12 thin coats. Dry time between coats is a couple of hours for thin shellac, overnight for thick.
4) Polish out brush marks and dust with 400 grit and 600 grit wet/dry sandpaper.
5) Polish with 0000 ("four aught") steel wool
6) Apply a thin coat of paste wax (this will temporarily dull the finish), allow it to dry according to the manufacturer's instructions, then buff out with a cotton cloth to restore the gloss. One or two additional coats can be applied if desired.

My Work Blog

2009-06-18T17:23:00.002-05:00

You may have noticed that I haven't posted any Exchange or PowerShell items on this blog lately. That's because I've taken to doing this over on my "official" UT-hosted work blog at http://blogs.utexas.edu/glenmark/ .

Misc. Goodies

2009-06-12T13:12:00.004-05:00

First up, a must-have for any technogeek's home library: Apollo 11 Owners' Workshop Manual from Haynes Press. Now I can finally figure out why the engines on the dusty old LEM in my garage won't fire up on cold mornings. (Of course, here in central Texas, we only get cold mornings a few days out of each year. This time of year, I really start to miss those days.)

Next up, an example of what happens when technogeeks have too much time on their hands: "A Unified Quantum Theory of the Sexual Interaction." This is a truly hysterical read, at least for anyone who has ever studied quantum mechanics. The author fails, however, to cover scenarios where couplings between the |M> and |F> states potentially lead to the emission of child particles, with a probability P(t) which varies sinusoidally over a period of 28 days. Of course, this would necessitate the inclusion of creation and annihilation operators, which means that the model would have to be re-formulated as a Quantum Field Theory. The author also fails to model the field emitted by some |M> states which repulses |F> states with a strength proportional to the |M> state's comprehension of this admittedly arcane type of humor.

On a more serious note, SpringerLink has a paper by T. Ryan Gregory of the University of Guelph in Ontario entitled "Understanding Natural Selection: Essential Concepts and Common Misconceptions." This paper should be required reading for anyone engaging in the YEC/ID vs. TOE debate, especially since the vast majority of arguments put forth by YEC/ID proponents tend to be predicated upon rather outlandish misconceptions about how evolution and natural selection actually work. As someone who hasn't actually taken a biology class since high school (it wasn't required in my undergraduate physics curriculum), I found it to be an illuminating read.

Is it "Trek?"

2009-05-19T20:45:00.006-05:00

Last week, I watched the new "Star Trek" film (in IMAX, no less). Yes, it is a fun movie. It is a thrill ride that will appeal broadly to non-Trekkers, and has enough tips of the hat to the original to appeal to the core fandom (right down to a red-shirt crewman inevitably getting killed), and I encourage anyone to see it. But there were things about it that bugged me.

J.J. Abrams deftly took an all-too-overused sci-fi conceit, time travel, and used it with great effect to literally reboot the moribund franchise, establishing quite clearly that what is unfolding on screen is literally a pristine, new timeline, where established canon for anything subsequent to the birth of James Tiberius Kirk is officially out the window. Anything goes. Assumptions about what must take place for the sake of continuity with Trek of days gone by no longer apply. Forget about Spock ever taking a trip to Vulcan to calm his raging hormones in "Amok Time." Not going to happen. That was the life of Spock Prime. The new Spock will have to sort things out his own way, potentially with the help of a certain Communications Officer.

No, I can't say that turning the snow globe of Trekdom canon over and giving it a good shake is what bothers me about this film. I think my issue is something more aesthetic. I can overlook the overused lens flares, and the shaky camera work, both of which were exacerbated by the IMAX format. I don't even mind the revamped production design aesthetic. The uniforms were true to the original, while being updated enough to not look cheesy. The overall look of the ship, well, I'll get used to it, even though the nacelles and secondary hull just look wrong. I even kind of liked the fact that the shuttles used at Starfleet Academy looked worn and battered, covered with scrapes, dents, and peeling paint. Let's face it, the Academy would get hand-me-downs from the rest of the fleet. So, what is it that just doesn't sit right with me?

Oh, I'll just come right out and say it. J.J. Abrams, what the hell were you thinking shooting the Engineering scenes in a fricking brewery? Those scenes completely demolished willing suspension of disbelief. A brewery in no way resembles the inside of a starship. The walls and floors were made of concrete, for crying out loud, not to mention the fact that no engineer constructing a spacecraft would make such inefficient use of interior space. Even a reproduction of the set from the original series, as cheesy as it was, would have been more believable.

It is a minor thing, I know. So much about the film was so very well done, but every time that the scene cut to Engineering, I was left thinking "Is this Trek, or the opening credits of 'Laverne & Shirley?'"

On the next installment, please set aside some of the budget for a proper set, one that won't yank the audience out of the story. Please.

Two Beautiful Astronomy Videos

2009-05-19T20:33:00.002-05:00

The Bad Astronomy Blog at DiscoverMagazine.com has links to two beautiful astronomy-related videos. The first is a trailer for a planetarium show that I would dearly love to see. On top of everything else, it is narrated by David Tennant.

WAA Trailer 1 from NSC Creative on Vimeo.

The second is a time lapse exposure of the Milky Way rising in the night sky. It is truly a majestic sight.

Priceless: 'Star Trek:TOS' Theme on a Theremin

2009-05-13T09:27:00.001-05:00

BSG Alumni Invade CSI!

2009-04-16T22:11:00.012-05:00

Tonight's episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, "A Space Oddity," not only deftly spoofs Star Trek and Trek fandom (especially its more hardcore elements--you know, the ones that embarrass the rest of us), but it also tips a hat to the gritty gestalt of Ronald D. Moore's re-envisioning of Battlestar Galactica, with a little insider help.

In the episode, a television producer is murdered after unveiling at a sci-fi convention a preview of his remake of a much-loved cult series, Astro Quest. There is no attempt to hide the fact that Astro Quest is supposed to refer to Star Trek, from costume and set design to a scene lifted almost directly from "Gamesters of Triskelion" (the same scene that South Park once parodied to perfection). The line "He's dead, Jim" even closes out the teaser, and there are several variants of McCoy's famous "I'm a doctor, not a ...."

But the episode really sparkles due to its nod to BSG's influence on the genre. The preview of Astro Quest Redux is not well received by the audience of hardcore Questers. It is dark, gritty, and the characters are clearly flawed individuals. In the shots panning over the stunned convention audience, Grace Park (BSG's Boomer/Athena/#8) can clearly be seen, then Ronald D. Moore pops up, points an accusing finger at the producer and shouts "You suck!" I almost fell out of my chair. Irony lives! To top it all off, Kate Vernon (BSG's Ellen Tigh) is a guest star on the episode.

George Washington on Science

2009-02-14T13:35:00.005-06:00

I've stumbled across some wonderful quotes from our first President regarding the importance of science.

From his first State of the Union Address in 1790:

Nor am I less persuaded that you will agree with me in opinion that there is nothing which can better deserve your patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.

From his last State of the Union Address in 1796:

The assembly to which I address myself is too enlightened not to be fully sensible how much a flourishing state of the arts and sciences contributes to national prosperity and reputation.

The State of the Economy

2009-02-10T16:07:00.003-06:00

A few hours ago, the Senate passed the stimulus package 61-37, largely along party lines. It will now go to conference committee to reconcile it with the version passed by the House. Lest anyone underestimate the magnitude of our current economic woes, here is a rather chilling chart published on the Speaker of the House's blog:

For anyone who is buying into the currently-circulating conservative meme that it was World War II and not the New Deal that got us out of the Great Depression, take a look at this:

Sad News: R.I.P. Ricardo Montalban and Patrick McGoohan

2009-01-14T20:17:00.003-06:00

Ricardo Montalban passed away today in Los Angeles at the age of 88. No matter how outlandish the role, whether as Captain Kirk's genetically-enhanced nemesis Khan Noonien Singh in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, Fantasy Island's enigmatic Mr. Roarke, or simply as a pitchman singing the praises of the "soft Corinthian leather" in the Chrysler Cordoba, Montalban always exuded class and panache.
Patrick McGoohan escaped this world yesterday, also in Los Angeles, at the age of 80. First rising to stardom as secret agent John Drake in Danger Man, he went on to create and star in the iconic series The Prisoner. He would later win two Emmy awards for appearances in Columbo, and his performance as Longshanks was a highlight of Braveheart. Be seeing you, No. 6.

Video: Skewed Views of Science

2009-01-13T18:22:00.000-06:00

So well put...

Majel Barrett Roddenberry Dead at 76

2008-12-19T09:57:00.004-06:00

Full story at Yahoo! News. Interestingly, she had just finished doing voice recordings for the ship's computer in the upcoming J.J. Abrams reboot of the Star Trek franchise.

Time Sinks

2008-11-11T13:39:00.002-06:00

Assembler
Magic Pen

The Fantastic Contraption

Entourage Generational-Suffix Bug: Good News & Bad News

2008-11-03T10:55:00.002-06:00

As recounted in an earlier post, we've encountered a lovely little bug in Entourage where users whose Display Name ends in a string which can be interpretted as a generational suffix (I, II, III, IV, Jr, Sr, with or without trailing periods) cannot be added to Exchange sharing permissions via Entourage. PSS has just reported to me that there is a workaround. I have verified that the workaround indeed works. The downside is that the workaround requires that the user know the samAccountName of the user whom they wish to add to their sharing permissions.

The workaround is pretty straightforward. In the "Select User" dialog box, click the "Advanced..." button. In the resulting "Advanced" dialog box, enter the domain name and login name (samAccountName) of the user to be added.

Sometimes Servers Just Need A Stern Talking-To

2008-10-23T17:00:00.003-05:00

Here I am giving one of my Exchange servers a piece of my mind.

Photo by Ryan Starck

Fixing the "Unable to activate send-on-behalf-of list" Error

2008-10-23T15:57:00.004-05:00

This MS Exchange Team Blog article (as well as this follow-up) go into great detail about the history of this notorious error, but erroneously claims that it only occurs in muli-domain environments. We have the issue here, and we have a single-domain forest.

The short version is that Exchange Server 2003 SP2 introduced changes in the security model for the delegate-setting process which, combined with updates on the client end, result in the following error when a user attempts to modify delegates:

The Delegates settings were not saved correctly. Unable to activate send-on-behalf-of list. You do not have sufficient permission to perform this operation on this object.

This error does not occur for all mailbox, and we've found neither rhyme nor reason for when it does, but there is a fix.

For Outlook 2003 users apply this patch, then perform the registry modifications described here.
For Outlook 2007 users apply this patch, then perform the registry modifications described here.

Entourage Issues with the Office:mac 12.1.3 Update

2008-10-23T15:47:00.004-05:00

First notice I saw about the issue was here:

http://blog.entourage.mvps.org/2008/10/office_1213_update_breaks_sending_exchange_meeting_invitatio.html

The reported issue is an error -17997 being generated when Entourage users attempt to send meeting invitations. I was unable to reproduce the issue in my own testing, but that was before the following two updates:

http://blog.entourage.mvps.org/2008/10/update_on_1213_problems.html

http://blog.entourage.mvps.org/2008/10/update_on_1213_problems_part_2.html

It seems that the problem manifests if the Entourage identity contains POP3 and/or IMAP4 accounts in conjunction with the Exchange account, with the non-Exchange accounts added to the identity PRIOR to the Exchange account. Both updates mention workarounds. MacBU is aware of the issue and is working on an update.

The two workarounds mentioned are:

Drag the message from the outbox to the drafts folder and sending it from their (a clumsy workaround at best)
Recreate your Entourage identity from scratch, making sure to configure the Exchange account BEFORE configuring any non-Exchange accounts. Please note that this will force re-synchronization of the local cache data, which can take a considerable amount of time for large mailboxes. One way to minimize this would be to configure Entourage to only cache partial messages (In the account settings, Options tab, select “Partially receive messages over x KB”).

Tutorial: Using .NET GUI Widgets in PowerShell

2008-09-30T14:18:00.007-05:00

One of the great unsung features of PowerShell (which forms the foundation of the Exchange Management Shell) is its ability to expose the full range of functionality offered by the .NET framework, and, more specifically, the GUI widgets provided by that framework. I was blissfully unaware of this until encountering a sample script on "Glen's Exchange Dev Blog". (That blog, by the way, is an excellent resource, and I highly recommend it. Entirely different Glen, lest there be any confusion. He is far more knowledgable about this stuff than I.)

In the script contained in that blog entry (upon which the following script is largely based) I discovered the wonderful world of rendering GUI elements from within PowerShell scripts. I was able to learn quite a bit about the subject by dissecting that script and a few other examples found around the web, but I was unable to find anything in the way of a tutorial on the topic. Furthermore, although the .NET frameworks are well-documented on the MSDN website, the proper syntax for accessing those objects via PowerShell is not provided.

What else could I do other than write my own tutorial?

This screenshot illustrates what the final product will look like.

No fancy IDE such as Visual Studio is required. I do all of this in Notepad on a machine with the Exchange Management Shell installed. (The example script is Exchange-specific, thus the requirement for EMS; but the GUI widgets can also be utilized in a pure PowerShell environment.)

Let us begin by opening a blank document in Notepad and typing in the following commands for loading in the .NET assemblies for the drawing tools and GUI widgets (watch for line wrapping introduced by the browser):

[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("System.Drawing")

[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("System.windows.forms")

The "System.Drawing" namespace exposes DGI+ graphics routines (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.drawing.aspx ), where the "System.windows.forms" namespace provides standard Windows interface features (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.forms.aspx ).

For the sake of readability, as well as to ensure that commands are issued in the proper order, I divide the remaining portion of the script into three sections, delimited and labeled by comment lines, corresponding to function definitions, widget definitions, and the main body of code.

Let us define the window into which we will be drawing our interface:

# widget definitions

$myWindow = new-object System.Windows.Forms.form

Now, we set its parameters, specifically its name, size, and so forth, then tell it to display itself:

# main program body

$myWindow.Text = "Exchange 2007 GUI Demo"

$myWindow.size = new-object System.Drawing.Size(1000,600)

$myWindow.autoscroll = $true

$myWindow.topmost = $true

$myWindow.Add_Shown({$myWindow.Activate()})

$myWindow.ShowDialog()

Now we can save this script and run it from the shell. Remember to save the script with a ".ps1" suffix. To run the saved script, open the Exchange Management Shell, use 'cd' commands to navigate to the directory where you've save it, then invoke the script by name. Be sure to prefix it with ".\" to tell the shell to look for the script in the current working directory rather than in predefined system paths. It isn't terribly exciting or functional. Essentially, we have here a classic "hello, world" script which doesn't even bother to say "hello, world." After all, we are only drawing an empty window onto the screen, but it is a workable skeleton from which to hang the rest of our script.

Notice that our window stays on top, regardless of what other window might have focus. This is because we've set the $myWindow.topmost attribute to true. I've only included this to demonstrate one of the attributes available for window objects. If you like, delete the relevant line, or comment it out by prefixing it with a "#" character. Then save and run the script again to see the change in window behavior. (You remembered to kill off the previous window, right?)

You probably noticed that, as always, our little PowerShell script is a little slow in getting started. This is unfortunately quite common, and endemic to the design of PowerShell since the CLR is bloody slow at loading up .NET libraries. Take a look here for a tip on speeding up the performance of PowerShell, especially the startup of Exchange Management Shell and Exchange Management Console.

Let's put in a way of specifying the server from which we will be pulling our data. We will create a drop-down menu populated with the names of all of the servers in our Exchange organization, but first let's create a label object for this menu. Right after the initial definition of $myWindow, but before the main section where we set its attributes and tell it to display itself, add the following text:

# Add Server Drop Label

$ServerNamelabelBox = new-object System.Windows.Forms.Label

$ServerNamelabelBox.Location = new-object System.Drawing.Size(10,30)

$ServerNamelabelBox.size = new-object System.Drawing.Size(80,20)

$ServerNamelabelBox.Text = "Server Name"

$myWindow.Controls.Add($ServerNamelabelBox)

We have to define this and any other widget and add it to $myWindow before we tell $myWindow to display itself, otherwise the widget won't show up. Here, we've created the label object, its location, size, and text contents, then added it to the list of controls in the $myWindow object.

Next, we move on to the drop-down menu itself. Right after the code you've just added (again, this has to be before you actually draw the window), add the following:

# Add Server Drop Down Widget

$ServerNameDrop = new-object System.Windows.Forms.ComboBox

$ServerNameDrop.Location = new-object System.Drawing.Size(90,30)

$ServerNameDrop.Size = new-object System.Drawing.Size(100,30)

get-mailboxserver | ForEach-Object{$ServerNameDrop.Items.Add($_.Name)}

$ServerNameDrop.Add_SelectedValueChanged({getMailboxStores})

$myWindow.Controls.Add($ServerNameDrop)

Adding the drop-down manu (ComboBox) works just like adding the label above, until the line after the size specification. Here we actually invoke an EMS command to get a list of mailbox servers, then add the results to the Items property of the drop-down menu.

The next line is where things really get interesting. Here we tell the $ServerNameDrop object to execute a function (which we've not yet written) called "getMailboxStores" any time the selected value of the drop-down menu changes. Next, we add the object to $myWindow's list of control objects.

Since we've not yet written the "getMailStores" function, if we save and run the script now, then select something from the drop down (which should now be populated with the names of all of the Exchange servers in your organization) we will get an error in the shell saying something like the following:

The term 'getMailboxStores' is not recognized as a cmdlet, function, operable program, or script file. Verify the term and try again.

At E:\Working\scripts\demo.ps1:23 char:59

+ $ServerNameDrop.Add_SelectedValueChanged({getMailboxStores} <<<< )

No biggie. We'll be adding that function shortly. But first, let us create the datastructure into which that function will place its results, then the GUI widget in which that data structure will be displayed.

In the "widget definitions" portion of the script, place the following:

# Add Data Table

$Dataset = New-Object System.Data.DataSet

$storeTable = New-Object System.Data.DataTable

$storeTable.TableName = "Mailbox Stores"

$storeTable.Columns.Add("Store Name")

$storeTable.Columns.Add("Store Size (MB)",[int64])

$Dataset.tables.add($storeTable)

This creates an abstract internal data structure to which our function will return its results, defining its name and the columns it contains. This then is attached to a meta-structure to which we will later attach an additional table.

Next, we create the GUI widget for displaying this. This widget is known to .NET programmers as a DataGridView. The "getMailboxStores" function will actually associate $storeTable with this DataGridView object.

# Add Data Grid View

$myDataGrid = new-object System.windows.forms.DataGridView

$myDataGrid.Location = new-object System.Drawing.Size(10,60)

$myDataGrid.size = new-object System.Drawing.Size(450,500)

$myDataGrid.AllowUserToAddRows = $False

$myDataGrid.AutoSizeColumnsMode = [System.Windows.Forms.DataGridViewAutoSizeColumnsMode]::Fill

$myDataGrid.RowsDefaultCellStyle.BackColor = [System.Drawing.Color]::Bisque

$myDataGrid.AlternatingRowsDefaultCellStyle.BackColor = [System.Drawing.Color]::Beige

$myDataGrid.BorderStyle = [System.Windows.Forms.BorderStyle]::Fixed3D

$myDataGrid.ColumnHeadersDefaultCellSTyle.ForeColor = [System.Drawing.Color]::Maroon

$myDataGrid.ColumnHeadersDefaultCellStyle.BackColor = [System.Drawing.Color]::Tan

$myDataGrid.RowHeadersDefaultCellStyle.BackColor = [System.Drawing.Color]::Tan

$myWindow.Controls.Add($myDataGrid)

As before, we create the object, define its properties (in this case, size and location), then add it to the Controls list of the $myWindow object. I've also illustrated modifying various appearance properties and behaviors here. Note the syntax for accessing properties and methods for child objects that are not explicitly loaded in the first two lines of the script, as in the case with [System.Drawing.Color]. This syntax could be simplified by explicitly loading each of these class namespaces at the beginning of the script, but I'll leave it to those more knowledgable about the plumbing of .NET to comment on which would be the most efficient approach.

Setting the AllowUserToAddRows property to $False prevents the display of an extraneous blank line at the bottom of the grid. (Try commenting out that line and running the script to see the difference.) By setting the DataGridViewAutoSizeColumnsMode to Fill, the table data expands to fill the entire grid window. I would like to have set the FillWeight properties on each column so that less space is occupied by the "Store Size(MB)" column, but I have been unable to determine the proper syntax for doing so within PowerShell. (If you can figure that out, by all means post a comment.) As it is, the "Store Name" column must be manually expanded to see the entire name for each store.

Now, on to the "getMailboxStores" function.

Near the top of the script, after the two lines which load the GUI assemblies, lets add a new comment to denote the section for containing our functions (for readability), as well as the actual code for our getMailboxStores() function:

# function definitions

function getMailboxStores(){

$storeTable.clear()

$server = $ServerNameDrop.SelectedItem.ToString()

$db = Get-MailboxDatabase -server $server

foreach ($objItem in $db)

{

$edbfilepath = $objItem.edbfilepath

$path = "`\`\" + $server + "`\" +$objItem.EdbFilePath.DriveName.Remove(1).ToString() + "$" + $objItem.EdbFilePath.PathName.Remove(0,2)

$dbsize = Get-ChildItem $path

$storeTable.Rows.add($objItem.Identity,$dbsize.Length/1024KB)

}

$myDataGrid.DataSource = $storeTable

}

After clearing our table structure, we pull the currently-selected server name from the drop-down menu, then perform a Get-MailboxDatabase operation on this server. The results are stored in an array called $db, then we iterate through the contents of this array to store each database name and size into our table. Then we tell our DataGridView object to use this table at its data source.

Now we have a script which is actually doing something useful. Let's extend the functionality and make use of some of that window real estate that we have set aside in the right-hand side of the window. Let us place another grid view in that part of the window, and up by the drop-down menu, add a button to fill that view with a list of mailboxes (and associated mailbox statistics) corresponding to whatever store database is selected. First, find the section of code where we add $storeTable to the list of tables in $Dataset, and add the following after it:

# Add Data Table for mailboxes

$mbTable = New-Object System.Data.DataTable

$mbTable.TableName = "Mailboxes"

$mbTable.Columns.Add("Display Name")

$mbTable.Columns.Add("Account")

$mbTable.Columns.Add("Primary SMTP Address")

$mbTable.Columns.Add("Prohibit Send Quota (MB)",[int64])

$mbTable.Columns.Add("Usage (MB)",[int64])

$Dataset.tables.add($mbTable)

Now we create the DataGridView corresponding to this. After the previous Data Grid View section (just before the main program body), add the following:

# Add Data Grid View for mailboxes

$myDataGrid2 = new-object System.windows.forms.DataGridView

$myDataGrid2.Location = new-object System.Drawing.Size(480,60)

$myDataGrid2.size = new-object System.Drawing.Size(500,500)

$myDataGrid2.AllowUserToAddRows = $False

$myDataGrid2.AutoSizeColumnsMode = [System.Windows.Forms.DataGridViewAutoSizeColumnsMode]::Fill

$myDataGrid2.RowsDefaultCellStyle.BackColor = [System.Drawing.Color]::Bisque

$myDataGrid2.AlternatingRowsDefaultCellStyle.BackColor = [System.Drawing.Color]::Beige

$myDataGrid2.BorderStyle = [System.Windows.Forms.BorderStyle]::Fixed3D

$myDataGrid2.ColumnHeadersDefaultCellSTyle.ForeColor = [System.Drawing.Color]::Maroon

$myDataGrid2.ColumnHeadersDefaultCellStyle.BackColor = [System.Drawing.Color]::Tan

$myDataGrid2.RowHeadersDefaultCellStyle.BackColor = [System.Drawing.Color]::Tan

$myDataGrid2.ColumnHeadersHeightSizeMode = [System.Windows.Forms.DataGridViewColumnHeadersHeightSizeMode]::AutoSize

$myWindow.Controls.Add($myDataGrid2)

Note the addition of setting ColumnHeadersHeightSizeMode to AutoSize. This is to account for the fact that some of our column labels are long enough to wrap around to the next line.

Now we move on to an entirely new GUI widget. Let us create the button. Right below the code that you just entered, add the following:

# Get Mailboxes Button{

$fsizeButton = new-object System.Windows.Forms.Button

$fsizeButton.Location = new-object System.Drawing.Size(480,30)

$fsizeButton.Size = new-object System.Drawing.Size(120,23)

$fsizeButton.Text = "Get Mailboxes"

$fsizeButton.visible = $True

$fsizeButton.Add_Click({GetMailboxes})

$myWindow.Controls.Add($fsizeButton)

Save and run the script to make sure that each of the interface elements we have created thus far are being rendered properly and are in their proper place. Of course, if you click the button, an error will be thrown in the shell. After all, we are invoking a function which we have not yet written, GetMailboxes. Up in the functions section, right after our getMailboxStores function, add the following:

function getMailboxes(){

$mbTable.clear()

$store = $storeTable.DefaultView[$myDataGrid.CurrentCell.RowIndex][0]

write-host "* Enumerating Mailboxes in" $store

$mb = Get-Mailbox -Resultsize Unlimited -Database $store

foreach ($objItem in $mb)

{

if ($objItem.DisplayName -eq $null){$DisplayName=""}

else {$DisplayName = $objItem.DisplayName}

$account=$objItem.SamAccountName

$primary_smtp=$objItem.PrimarySmtpAddress

if ($objItem.ProhibitSendQuota.Value -eq $null){$quota=0}

else {$quota=$objItem.ProhibitSendQuota.Value.ToMB()}

$usage=(Get-MailboxStatistics -Identity $objItem.Identity).TotalItemSize.Value.ToMB()

write-host $DisplayName, $account, $primary_smtp, $quota, $usage

$mbTable.Rows.add( $DisplayName,$account,$primary_smtp,$quota,$usage )

}

write-host "* Done Enumerating Mailboxes in" $store

$myDataGrid2.DataSource = $mbTable

}

The function starts off by clearing out the table of results from any previous operations, then the RowIndex of the currently selected cell in $myDataGrid is read to determine which mailbox store will be operated upon. A Get-Mailbox command retrieves all of the mailbox objects for the specified database and stores them in an array object called $mb. We then iterate through each of these mailbox objects, pulling out the Display Name, the SAM Account Name, primary SMTP proxy, the prohibit send quota, then finally dive into a Get-MailboxStatistics command to pull the current usage. These values are then added to a row in $mbTable. Once the iterations are done, $mbTable is specified as the data source for our second data grid view.

If you save and run this script, you'll be able to select a server, select a mailbox store, then hit the button to get a listing of all users in that store. Note that hitting the button without specifying a server will result in an error. I'll leave error handling code for this contingency as an excercise for the reader. Ditto for handling cases where TotalItemSize has not yet been set. (Get-MailboxStatistics fails on mailboxes which have never been logged into.) Also note that, for stores with a large number of mailboxes, it can take a while for any output to appear in the right-hand data grid view. Nothing actually gets displayed until all of the mailboxes have been iterated through and the datasource assignment at the end of the function above is reached. However, thanks to the write-host command, we can track the progress of the operation by watching the output in the shell window. Alternatively, we could, if we so chose, add a StatusStrip object along the bottom of the window and display there what account is currently being processed, but I'll leave that as an excercise for the reader. For an example of this, take a look at http://thepowershellguy.com/blogs/posh/archive/2007/01/21/powershell-gui-scripblock-monitor-script.aspx .

This has actually turned into a pretty handy script for presenting an overview of our Exchange stores. (I actually wrote it with a work-related task in mind.) You can even click in the column headers to sort the data, all taken care of automatically by .NET. But what good is all of this if we can't share the results? Let us address this by adding export functionality, and to trigger these exports, let us introduce yet another common GUI element: the menu strip. Fortunately, we've left some space above the drop-down menu and button.

After the code where we defined our button, add the following:

# Define menus

$myMenuStrip = new-object System.Windows.Forms.MenuStrip

$FileMenu = new-object System.Windows.Forms.ToolStripMenuItem("&File")

$FileExit = new-object System.Windows.Forms.ToolStripMenuItem("&Exit")

$FileExit.add_Click({ $myWindow.close() })

$FileMenu.DropDownItems.Add($FileExit)

$myMenuStrip.Items.Add($FileMenu)

$ExportMenu = new-object System.Windows.Forms.ToolStripMenuItem("&Export")

$ExportStores = new-object System.Windows.Forms.ToolStripMenuItem("&Stores")

$ExportMailboxes = new-object System.Windows.Forms.ToolStripMenuItem("&Mailboxes")

$ExportStores.add_Click({ ExportStoresCSV })

$ExportMailboxes.add_Click({ ExportMailboxesCSV })

$ExportMenu.DropDownItems.Add($ExportStores)

$ExportMenu.DropDownItems.Add($ExportMailboxes)

$myMenuStrip.Items.Add($ExportMenu)

$myWindow.Controls.Add($myMenuStrip)

These interface element definitions are pretty straightforward. We create each element as a new object, define the "on_Click" action for each clickable item (here we encounter two functions which we will define next, ExportStoresCSV and ExportMailboxesCSV), add the menu items to their respective menu items list, attach the menus to the MenuStrip object, then attach the MenuStrip object to the controls list of the window form.

Now, on to the two functions which are triggered by these menu items and actually perform the CSV file exports. Add the following to the functions segment of the script.

function ExportStoresCSV(){

$exportFileName = new-object System.Windows.Forms.saveFileDialog

$exportFileName.DefaultExt = "csv"

$exportFileName.Filter = "csv files (*.csv)|*.csv"

$exportFileName.InitialDirectory = ".\"

$exportFileName.ShowDialog()

if ($exportFileName.FileName -ne ""){

$exportFile = new-object IO.StreamWriter($exportFileName.FileName,$true)

$exportFile.WriteLine("Store Name,Store Size (MB)")

foreach($row in $storeTable.Rows){

$exportFile.WriteLine("`"" + $row[0].ToString() + "`"," + $row[1].ToString() )

}

$exportFile.Close()

}

function ExportMailboxesCSV(){

$exportFileName = new-object System.Windows.Forms.saveFileDialog

$exportFileName.DefaultExt = "csv"

$exportFileName.Filter = "csv files (*.csv)|*.csv"

$exportFileName.InitialDirectory = ".\"

$exportFileName.ShowDialog()

if ($exportFileName.FileName -ne ""){

$exportFile = new-object IO.StreamWriter($exportFileName.FileName,$true)

$exportFile.WriteLine("Display Name,SAM Account Name,Primary SMTP Address,Prohibit Send Quota (MB),Usage (MB)")

foreach($row in $mbTable.Rows){

$exportFile.WriteLine("`"" + $row[0].ToString() + "`",`"" + $row[1].ToString() + "`"," + $row[2].ToString() + "," + $row[3].ToString() + "," + $row[4].ToString() )

}

$exportFile.Close()

}

These two functions are essentially identical except for the data table from which they read and the list of items that they write to the csv files. Each begins by instantiating a saveFileDialog object with the default extension and file browsing filter set to "csv". Once a file name and save location is set, the file is created and column labels are written to it. The function then reads through each row of the relevant data table and writes the appropriate column to the file, delimited by commas. Note that string data should be written to the file wrapped with single quotes lest the text string contain any commas to throw off the delimitation.

That about wraps up this tutorial. We could go on and add even more functionality, such as making more detailed mailbox information and stats appear when a mailbox is double-clicked, or adding contextual menus which appear when an item is right-clicked exposing actions to perform on the object. Try modifying widget properties. Try other widgets in the .NET framework. Explore the documentation and experiment. Enjoy.

Full script listing (be careful of column wrapping by the browser):

[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("System.Drawing")

[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("System.windows.forms")

# function definitions

function getMailboxStores(){

$storeTable.clear()

$server = $ServerNameDrop.SelectedItem.ToString()

$db = Get-MailboxDatabase -server $server

foreach ($objItem in $db)

{

$edbfilepath = $objItem.edbfilepath

$path = "`\`\" + $server + "`\" + $objItem.EdbFilePath.DriveName.Remove(1).ToString() + "$" + $objItem.EdbFilePath.PathName.Remove(0,2)