The Amateur Geek

Blackout

2012-01-18T11:17:00.002-05:00

On January 18, 2012, the web went black.

The old guard's final attempt to control the internet will fail, just as all their previous attempts have failed. The internet is global, and it is beyond the control of one government.

Free speech is beyond the control of any one government. We control the web. All of us. We produce the content. We control free speech. And today, we use that free speech to protect the free web.

This site will stay black until SOPA and PIPA are fully defeated in Congress.

Be careful with superglue

2012-01-12T00:59:00.001-05:00

Amazingly enough, this isn't a "watch out, or you'll glue yourself to yourself" post. Nor is it a "don't get it in your eye" post. It's not even a "be careful around the fumes."

No, this is a more plebian warning. It is simply "don't let your tubes of superglue get holes in them."

Why? Because superglue cures upon exposure to air. Which means that one tiny hole, left for months, results in this:

That's a mass of solidified glue. It looks and feels like plastic. I actually cut away the metal tube, leaving just the superglue attached to the cap.

Preston Dam

2012-01-08T14:34:00.000-05:00

I took this panorama (3 shots stitched together with hugin) on Thursday while out hunting for remains of the Norwich and Westerly Railway, a former trolley line near where I live. (More on that later.)

Although I first thought it to be the remains of a trolley bridge, I was wrong; a picture I found last night revealed that the trolley followed Poquetanuck Road (2A) in that section, not this feature which is located about 50 yards north of the road.

However, it's still impressive. It's classic New England stone wall architecture, but on a larger scale. I'm very curious about what it was. Was it a dam, used to create a pond or falls for a mill? Is it the remains of an old road bridge? Was it something else entirely?

On a train...

2011-12-30T14:29:00.000-05:00

And yet I'm blogging. We're heading to my cousin's wedding in Washington, D.C., which is a seven-hour drive from home. There's no way my grandparents would be okay with spending that long in a cramped minivan, so we're taking the train.

Amtrak happens to be a lot nicer way to travel than airlines. No ridiculous security theater, more footroom, no turbulence, free outlets - and free wi-fi. This isn't the first time I've used wi-fi on a train, but it's the longest Amtrak trip I've used it on.

So now I'm blogging from a moving train, just south of Philadelphia. The wi-fi isn't bad - Blogger works okay - but Wikipedia is slow and there's no chance of enough bandwidth to upload photos. So I'll be taking this chance to work on a huge map I've been working on that encompasses the entire MBTA district.

A letter to the T

2011-12-26T19:16:00.000-05:00

From the Globe comes the sad news that the anonymous employee who brought Boston this bit of holiday spirit might face "a written warning, suspension, or termination".

I thought the prank was funny, well-timed, and in good taste. The following is what I just sent to MBTA management using their feedback form:

To the MBTA management:

The anonymous MBTA employee who programmed the Park Street sign to play "Deck the Hall" yesterday deserves not discipline or termination, but commendation. Many other transit systems - New York and Chicago, in particular - have special holiday trains covered in lights than run their systems in December. Even Amtrak outfits the Downeaster with wreaths.

To tell this employee that their action - harmless, pushing no viewpoint save cheerfulness, and genuinely funny - is worthy of reprimand is a robotic and unreasonable reaction. I hope that the MBTA will have a laugh and move on rather than punishing this employee.

Sincerely,
David Sindel
MBTA customer

Someone at the T has the holiday spirit

2011-12-26T01:47:00.002-05:00

(found via railroad.net forums)

Merry Christmas

2011-12-25T22:27:00.001-05:00

(High Dynamic Range (HDR) image created from a stack of 4 images with exposures ranging from 1/16 to 8 seconds, combined with Luminance HDR (using Ashikhmin algorithm))

Colossal

2011-12-23T14:19:00.000-05:00

Although I am a solidly left-brain person, what with my engineering classes and my persistent love affair with good data, I do have a creative interest at times. I've posted a few things about interesting art I've found, and occasionally I will make an attempt to write something worth reading.

Yesterday, probably through Reddit, I stumbled across this post about some incredible sculptures. Guy Laramee takes old encyclopedias and carves incredible landscapes out of the thin, dense pages. He even carved one out of a stack of leaning books.

The blog on which I found the page about him is called Colossal, and it's an art and design blog with an emphasis on cool installation and sculpture art.

One such artist I found on there was Cameron Booth. He takes some excellent photos, but what really caught my eye was his maps and diagrams. He takes systems like Amtrak and the US Interstate system and makes them into easy-to-read subway-style diagrams. Here's one of the numbered US routes:

(Click for full version on his Flickr)

Possible the most impressive, though, is this one of France's high speed rail (TGV) routes:

Photography

2011-12-23T13:11:00.000-05:00

"A picture is worth a thousand words."

Well, maybe. A picture can be worth almost nothing; take a look at 100 random images on Flickr, and you'll see that very few of the site's 6 billion images are worth more than a sentence.

But, when properly applied, a single image can replace thousands of words. I probably read through several thousand words of blog posts, forum posts, and old newspapers to trace the former Green Line branch that once surfaced at what is now Eliot Norton Park in the Theater District. Descriptions of streetcar lines and that "...the right tracks went under the grade of the left tracks and split, with the left branch going to City Point outbound..." are simply insufficient to describe a complex, multilevel three-dimensional track crossover - particularly one that has not been seen in 4 decades and thus no good pictures exist.

If I may toot my own horn a moment, then take a look at this map that I created. I designed it to quickly show a viewer which tracks went where, and in what configuration. In this case, it tells the reader as much as those thousands of words of prose and even more than the few grainy photographs available. It does not replace them; it cannot entirely replace a picture, however poor quality, that shows the actual tunnel rather than simply a schematic. It is helpful, too, to know that the Orange Line connected to the portal between 1901 and 1908, or that the #43 streetcar to Lenox Street was the last route to use the portal. Even when included with the images (as I did with the Orange Line), it still requires text. But the map both elucidates and replaces text, and thus the old maxim holds in this case.

Of course, pictures can replace words without being merely informative. A picture of, perhaps, a lonely pond can show desperation and loneliness just as a poem or story could. Our vision is one of our most powerful senses; like taste and smell, it can have a strong correlation with memory. How else, for example, could my father recognize a cousin that he had not seen in decades? His brain could combine old images with its knowledge of aging and provide a plausible composite which it then compared with each passerby until it found a match.

The human face, in particular, is a subject where image is superior to the written word. One ran write about a person and get a reasonably accurate portrait of their body, their mind, their mannerisms and even their voice. But the face is a masterpiece of subtlety; tiny variations cause huge changes in the way it is perceived. A few millimeters in the symmetry of the features and the relative locations of nose, mouth, and eyes is much of the difference between average and beauty, or especially between merely beautiful and truly gorgeous. Emotion is written almost entirely in our faces: the way the eyes change direction, the separation of the lips, and the minor movement of the eyebrows can signal almost anything. The features are difficult to quantify and even more difficult to describe in a nonvisual medium; the mediocre artist will find themself able to produce a tolerable if slightly lopsided facsimile of the human body, but the face will be downright unrecognizable. Much artistic skill is required even for the most basic outline, and even more if that outline is via prose, yet even the grainiest photograph provides instant recognition.

So a picture can be worth one word, or a thousand, or more than any writing could ever produce. A poor graphic, perhaps on a Powerpoint slide, can do more harm than good: instead of saving words, it requires more to explain it that it would to simply leave it out. When dealing with something complex yet quantifiable an image can disambiguate text and render only a caption necessary - but only if the image is in fact superior to the text. Only when dealing with subtle subjects: the face, or an object of beauty, or simply something beyond the ability of human language to render it - does the printed word fail completely.

But what about something for which there is no equivalent in words? Some photographs are true art; they tell a message which is as clear as if it was spoken. They express ideas and feelings. But others simply exist. They are not high art, even if they are artistic in style. (And by 'artistic' I mean legitimately artistic, with attention paid to exposure, color, and framing - or developed by mere stroke of luck. The trend of 'tilt the camera, vignette the edges, and make it greyscale' is not nearly as artistically interesting as its practitioners would like to believe.)

Some would say that these are not worthy photographs, that they must either be useful or meaningful, and I do not deny that there may be merit in that statement. But I would like to believe that a picture can simply be.

I carry a camera everywhere and I take pictures because I find the subject interesting. The two following are from Albertus Magnus College in New Haven, where a friend attends. The first was a spur-of-the-moment shot; the second I saw in an instant but it took a few moments to align.

This was from my walk on Tuesday, where I followed Massachusetts Avenue to Harvard Square. I will confess to taking a color image here and converting it to greyscale. I did so not because I think it of artistic value, but simply because I wanted the silhouette of the church. Frequently I will use such digital post-processing to improve or modify my photos; it is one of the joys of the digital age. In this case, I actually created several copies and experimented with fill brightness, contrast, and shadows to produce the effect I wanted: a blank church against a mottled background of the incoming storm.

(A note: I wrote this and posted it on my other blog back in October, and I never cross-posted it here. I felt it was worth cross-posting.

It's also an experiment in style; check carefully and you'll find that the post is precisely 1000 words in length.)

Launch Report #45 Part 4: Others' flights

2011-12-23T00:59:00.000-05:00

There weren't that many people at the launch - perhaps twenty at the most, with most of them the regular CATO crowd. That meant the range wasn't crazy, so I was able to take lots of pictures.

Here's Al Gloer's Fliskits Richter Recker on a cluster of three motors, mostly likely D12s:

And his Free Rocket #1 on an unidentified red motor:

Someone's Black Brant on a green motor, at full power but not even moving yet:

I wore my Jayne hat to the launch. Little did I know that I would not be the only one. It seems Al owns one too:

Launch Report #45 Part 3: Two-stage rockets

2011-12-23T00:46:00.001-05:00

Since this was my first time flying rockets in seven months, I didn't try anything too fancy. No clusters, no gliders, and nothing requiring a tightly-packed parachute or other finicky recovery devices.

But what's life without a little adventure? So I did fly two two-staged rockets at CATO, both old favorites with a few flights under their belts. The first was the Jinx, a rocket I was given in 5th grade by a teacher. It's solid plastic and basically unbreakable and waterproof - the perfect rocket for a cold day with lots of water on the field.

This was its eighth flight since I started keeping records and there'd been a few before then; this was its third boosted flight. I used a B6-0 in a generic booster stage I built a while back and an A10-3 mini motor in the Jinx. They're on the left rod:

It flew beautifully. Staging was low enough to be in sight yet the Jinx flew fairly high. It came down near the pads but on a wet area of the field, and a CATO member with hip waders fetched it. The booster came down just 100 feet from the pads.

My final flight of the day was my twin saucers staged on a D12-0 / C6-0 combo. As always, they were stable even in wind and a good low and loud crowd-pleaser:

As with the previous video, this one is worth watching frame-by-frame. Consistent with simulations, the saucers oscillate (both back-and-forth and speed up/slow down) due to the large area and flexible nature,

Launch Report #45 Part 2: Happiness is a perfectly deployed parachute

2011-12-22T21:20:00.000-05:00

Third flight of the day was the Mozzie on an F23-4 Black Jack that I've had since July 2009. It's a great motor - a baby F that still has enough kick to loft the Mozzie to a simulated altitude of 1065 feet. Due to the wind, the Mozzie arced over significantly weathercocked into the wind and reached a height of no more than 900 feet. But deployment was perfect and thanks to the weathercocking, it landed only 400 feet downwind of the pad.

A couple of the kids hanging around got to it before I did, which I don't normally like because I prefer to see the landing zone if a rocket was damaged on landing so I can prevent the mistake. But this landing was perfect - into the stream. Fortunately the paint suffered no damage, and the Mozzie will fly again.

Launch Report #45: CATO 180: Part 1

2011-12-22T02:08:00.000-05:00

First launch in seven months! Busy summer vacation plus going to college prevented me from getting to CATO, and I didn't bother launching on my own. But I'm home for a month now, and so I headed off to Durham for some fun.

My first flight was actually not my rocket. Al Gloer showed me a tiny little thing: a rocket about the size of an Estes Mosquito that was made out of one piece of solid plastic, right down to the launch lug. I flew it on a 1/4A3-3 micro motor, which despite its tiny size and quarter-second burn time can throw a one-ounce rocket about two hundred feet in the air. As expected, we couldn't find it.

But, for the first time, I bring you a VIDEO:

It's pretty interesting to look at frame-by-frame. The cloud of smoke expands for four frames before the rocket actually starts moving.

Second flight was my Cosmic Cobra - my long-ago first rocket - on a C6-3. A gust of wind hit at liftoff and it arced heavily over downrange, but it was high enough for safe ejection. The body tube core-sampled into an open area of field; finding it was a lot easier than removing the 3-inch plug of dirt inside it. I had trouble finding the nose cone in the high grass, but after backtracing the flight in my mind I was able to identify a probably location for it - and I found it.

Here's it just moments after ignition:

Guest Post on I Ride The T

2011-12-02T21:09:00.000-05:00

About two months ago, I was contacted by a fellow blogger, Tyler of I Ride The T, to write a guest post about my thoughts on public domain images. Et voilà, the final conceptual topic for my writing course was born.

It took a few weeks for me to write, but Tyler now has it up on I Ride The T. Tyler writes some fascinating history - I never knew just how much is under Government Center - and you're quite guaranteed to waste your next hour learning about all sorts of cool stuff about the T.

More Books!

2011-11-26T02:06:00.000-05:00

In my quest to assemble my life's library - more books than I could ever read - I picked up three at Book Barn today.

"Flatland" is Victorian social satire. About geometry. It's mostly remembered for its discussion of life in the 2D plane, rather than its scathing critique of the Victorians. It's also a fabulous way to more fully understand dimensions, especially getting an idea of the 4th dimension.

The other two I got are about trolleys. One is a 1961 book about systems all around the US, focusing heavily on the Midwest interurban lines, almost all of which are now gone. The other is a publication of the Connecticut Valley chapter of the National Railway Historical Society about several former trolley lines that once existed here in southeastern Connecticut and the nearby sections of Rhode Island. They were ultimately integrated into the Norwich and Westerly system, and included the Pawcatuck Valley Street Railway, Groton and Stonington Street Railway, and the Ashaway and Westerly Railway. It also covers the New London & East Lyme Street Railway.

Ball Square Station rendering

2011-11-14T22:56:00.000-05:00

From the Youtube channel of Sommerville STEP comes this awesome animated rendering of the future Ball Square station, part of the Green Line Extension:

Do the Impossible

2011-11-03T23:02:00.000-04:00

Bit of a filler post while I get my life in order, but here's a Firefly poster I made the other day:

MBTA lost-and-found

2011-10-25T17:19:00.000-04:00

So, I lost my room key on Saturday. It happened to be when I was bringing a friend to Logan Airport - so that key could be anywhere at Kenmore station, on a Green Line car, at Government Center, on a Blue Line car, at Airport Station, on a Massport shuttle bus, at Logan, on a Silver Line bus, at South Station, on a Red Line car, at Park Street Station, or on a second Green Line car.

So I, of course, tried to contact lost-and-found. Logan's lost-and-found is run by the state police and is highly efficient. There's an online form to use and you can view a list of items on their website.

The MBTA is not so helpful. The main number given on the website - (617) 222-3200 - just goes to their phone directory with no convenient lost-and-found option. The South Station number goes to an answering machine even during business hours.

What are useful are the individual line numbers. Each colored line maintains its own lost-and-found, and they are manned and have helpful operators. But the numbers are not publicly available! You have to get them from an attendant at a manned station like Park Street, Airport, or Kenmore.

For your convenience, here are the numbers:
Blue: (617) 222-5533
Orange: (617) 222-5403
Green: (617) 222-5220
Red: (617) 222-5321
Silver: (617) 222-2432

Getting to and from in Jamaica Plain

2011-10-17T22:16:00.002-04:00

(Originally posted here at Walking Boston)

Jamaica Plain is a practical problem. Packed into just 3.07 miles are 38,000 people, including 32,000 adults. Fully half of them work away from home, and just 1600 of them can walk or bicycle to work. This leaves 16,500 people who must leave the area in a relatively short time via a limited number of road and rail corridors.¹ In practice, almost all who head into the downtown area leave by just 3 routes: Huntington Avenue in northwest side of the district, the Southwest Corridor on the east side, and Centre Street between them.

But Jamaica Plain is also a conceptual problem. What is the best way to get these 16,500 people to work? Is there a single best way? Should the goal be the quickest commute? The most environmentally friendly? Are some modes inherently better than others?

These questions have been inherent in Jamaica Plain since its inception. I believe a bit of history is in order. Starting with the coming of the West Roxbury Railroad in 1857, Jamaica Plain was designed as a "streetcar suburb" where the majority of residents would ride horse-drawn streetcars into the city.² The first of many such lines was the West Roxbury Railroad in 1857.³ Workers could house their families 4 miles from the hustle-bustle of the Common, yet only have a forty-five-minute ride to their job. In an age without cars or even bicycles and where a horse was a major expense, this was an excellent deal for the middle class. The streetcars were electrified at the end of the century. In 1903, the last segment of the continuous line from Park Street to Arborway was completed.³

By the early 1900s, Jamaica Plain was well-connected. This 1925 Boston Electric Railway (BERy) map, drawn at the peak of the streetcar's dominance, shows numerous lines running through the area. North-south arterials to center Boston along Huntington Avenue-Centre Street-South Street (the #39 line) and Tremont Street-Columbus Avenue (#43) connected with east-west side routes like the #41 (Jamaica Plain to Dudley) which connected with the Washington Street Elevated on BERy's Main Line. From Forest Hills one could ride into Roxbury, Dorcester, or even out to Dedham, and the Huntington Avenue lines also sent cars across the Muddy River to Brookline.

(Click to go to the file page on Wikimedia Commons for a larger version)

But even though that 1925 map shows a glorious network of streetcars, it also hints at its own destruction. Already, then, downtown surface routes and outer suburban routes had begun the conversion to bus routes. Buses have certain advantages over streetcars, namely the flexibility in routes and the lack of a need to maintain track in the middle of busy streets. They also have disadvantages: they are less popular because it makes it much easier for an area to suddenly lose its service, and because they carry fewer people and get stuck in traffic where streetcars could enter the Tremont Street Subway downtown.

Gradually, Jamaica Plain lost its streetcar lines. This was not an isolated incident, but a wide nationwide trend. In places such as Los Angeles, automobile manufacturers secretly bought lines and promptly abandoned them, forcing commuters to chose between riding their buses or buying their cars. In Boston, the M.T.A. was formed in 1947 to protect the city's public transit. Some lines were saved, but not even the M.T.A. could stand against the might of the automobile. The #41 was bustituted in 1949; the #43 lasted until 1956 before being cut back.⁴ By 1953, the network had become this:

Even after the creation of the MBTA in 1964, the #39 survived because of high ridership. ² After the "A" Branch of the Green Line (the Watertown Line) was "bustituted" in 1969, it looked like the cuts were at an end. Jamaica Plain still had the #39 running though its heart on Huntington Avenue, Centre Street, and South Street to Arborway (Forest Hills). Designated the "E" Branch, it joined the "B" and "C" branches and the Ashmont-Mattapan Line as the last remaining streetcar lines in Boston. (The "D" Branch runs along the Highland branch, once a commuter rail line. It did not become light rail until 1959, at which time it caused a trolley shortage that led to the end of the "A" Branch.)

But the "E" Branch was a ticking time bomb. When the Orange Line moved from the old Washington Street Elevated to the Southwest Corridor (nearer to the center of Jamaica Plain) in 1987, MBTA leaders decided that the end of the "E" Branch was redundant.² It also happened to be the only remaining part of the system where streetcars ran in mixed traffic, rather than in a dedicated center median or private right-of-way.

A streetcar along the short remaining section of street running, here at Mission Park.

So in 1985, the "E" Branch was cut to Heath Street, leaving two miles of empty tracks through the heart of the neighborhood. That section was replaced by the #39 bus, the second-busiest bus route in the system.⁵ ⁶ Jamaica Plain was devastated, and furious. The MBTA called it a "temporary suspension", but the "A" Branch had taught locals that euphemism meant "permanent".

As part of Big Dig mitigation, the MBTA was required to restore streetcar service along the Arborway Line. But public opinion was mixed; many of the area's residents are young professionals who do not miss the streetcars because they never saw them running down South Huntington Avenue. What were once poor, mostly black blocks now sport newish sedans lining the sidewalks. Studies were done and plans made; on a recent visit to the State Transportation Library I found several linear feet of materials regarding restoration.

After the MBTA failed to restore service, lawsuits were filed and quietly dismissed. The T is strongly against the return of trolley service; street running track is expensive to maintain and the T's debts are already high. The last lawsuit was dismissed in January 2011, but the local papers did not even find out until August.⁷

The MBTA maintained the platforms (which now serve the #39 bus) in case service did return. This sign at Forest Hills is brand new, even though no Green Line trolleys have stopped in 26 years.

So where does that 154 years of history now leave the esteemed JP? It is an area in transition, a shifting mix of black and white, rich and poor, young and old. The stub of the "E" Branch serves the northern third of the area, though only the last few stops are in residential area rather than the Longwood Medical Area. The 39 bus chugs down the middle. The Orange Line rumbles through the east side of town under grade. Rusting trolley poles still populate the two miles of the former Arboway Line. And at Forest Hills, the streetcar tracks lie silent facing the shiny new signs, the last vestige of hope for those who believe that Jamaica Plain depends on the streetcars.

South Huntington Avenue, with light poles and trolley poles

Streetcar loops at Forest Hills at night

As of the 2000 census, of the 16,500 commuting JPers, 9000 rode in cars - and 7500 (83%) drive their own car, with just 1600 carpooling.¹ (Numbers are rounded.) Of the 7300 who commuted by public transportation, 2400 rode the #39 bus. 4200 walked to take the Orange Line, and 600 to the stub of the "E" Branch (almost all at Heath Street⁶). (Just 40 rode the commuter rail to outer areas or as an express option to South Station).¹

At 38,000 people in 3.07 square miles (2000 acres)¹, Jamaica Plain hosts 19 people per square acre, a figure higher than any full-sized North American city and twice that of Boston as a whole.⁸ Such a number is much in line with European cities, which typically cluster 20 to 30 people per acre (an acre is 200 feet on a side). However, in European cities, few people drive. Trams are more common and public transportation is generally better, and those who drive typically chose extremely small cars or mopeds.

Thus, Jamaica Plain has the worst of both words: a dense concentration of people and a large number of drivers, with one car for every 5 residents. These cars add pollution to the air - and the last thing Jamaica Plain needs is worse health. The general agreement, then, is that more commutes should be converted to public transit. But the #39 bus is at capacity, and the Orange can only add a certain capacity, especially considering that it is inconvenient for most residents in Jamaica Plain. (From Pond Street, for example, it is 1.3 miles to Green Street which is inconceivable in any bad weather, and just half that to the #39 corridor.)

Jamaica Plain, then, faces several options for its transportation future, none of which are entirely palatable. The simplest is to merely leave the transportation system as is. As the #39 gets even more crowded, some riders will choose the Orange Line instead. Although it is limited in capacity, an extra thousand riders a day from Jamaica plain would be manageable. But this plan does nothing to prepare Jamaica Plain for a sustainable, healthy, clean future.

One idea considered in some of the Arborway studies was to convert the #39 bus to electric trolleybuses. On the surface, it is an attractive option. Trolleybuses can climb hills easier, produce no pollution, and consume no costly diesel fuel. However, two problems arise. First, because of the limitations of the wires, they aren't any more flexible than a trolley car. Second, this would introduce a fleet of vehicles that don't share parts with many other buses on the MBTA system. The other two electric fleets are the four routes out of Harvard Square and the Silver Line buses. To reach either yard would require diesel running down city streets.

Trolleybus near Harvard Square

The option preferred by many but not all residents is the return of streetcar service. A two-car train (three-car trains are generally prohibited from street-running) can hold 200 people (400 at crush capacity), versus 55-70 on a regular bus or 70-90 on the longer buses used for the #39.⁶ (Streetcars and buses run at the same frequency)⁹. Streetcars have an air of (ironically) permanence that is perceived as being beneficial to neighborhood growth. Were the trolleys to return, they would be there to stay.

The nuclear option is to eliminate street-running entirely and dig a new tunnel under South Huntington Avenue. Such a tunnel would be an immense undertaking: 3 miles from Brigham Circle to Forest Hills to eliminate all street-running tracks. It would be monstrously expensive and would require either a tunnel-boring machine, or else ripping up 3 miles of Jamaica Plain's central artery. The benefit, though, would be permanent grade-separated light rail service to Jamaica Plain. If Jamaica Plain continues to grow, such a tunnel may be necessary in 50 or 70 years (unless cars are phased out and streetcar service returns to dominate the corridor), but for now it is highly unlikely.

The ultimate question, though, is not just about what type of transit is best for Jamaica Plain. It also is about what type of transit those 38,000 people want. Do they want trolleys to return even if they have to mix with traffic? Would they prefer such service to gradually return in sections, or in one fell swoop? Or would they prefer more modest upgrades to the current system? It will not be an easy decision to make.

The conceptual problem extends beyond modes to fares as well. No matter what type of transportation works for Jamaica Plain, it's costly for residents to ride. 5718 households, about 2500 of them families, live on less than $30,000 per year.¹ For many of them, a $40 per month local bus pass or $59 subway/bus pass ($480 and $708 annually, respectively)¹⁰ represent a hefty barrier to transit use. These costs are only expected to rise when the MBTA implements a fare increase sometime in 2012.

The two-hundred-dollar per year difference also pushes lower-income workers to the #39 versus the Orange Line. Not only is this transit inequity unfair to the workers - as they require 26 minutes (plus traffic delays)) to reach Back Bay from Forest Hills versus 12 minutes on the Orange Line⁹, but it hurts the MBTA by overcrowding the bus while the Orange Line runs under capacity on most trains.

It is suggested that a leveling of the cost of the Subway and Local Bus passes would help this inequity, as would the return of the trolleys (which have more precedence over traffic than do buses). However, the root of the issue is the relatively high cost of the fares. My 1949 Boston Electric Railway fare map shows the streetcar (now local bus) fare at 5 cents and the subway fare as 10 cents. Adjusted for inflation, these equal 47 and 94 cents in 2011 dollars. At $235 and $470 per year in 2011 dollars ¹¹ (assuming 2 trips per day, 5 days per week, 50 weeks per year), the former fares were significantly cheaper: a worker could ride the Washington Street Elevated, or a #39 streetcar into the subway, for the equivalent cost of a modern bus pass - and this on a streetcar network far superior to today's.

Especially if the fare jumps significantly (and I've seen estimates of up to 80 dollars for a monthly subway pass), transit will be moving out of the range of those Jamaica Plain residents who need it most: those who cannot afford a car. But the MBTA is significantly in debt, and the money must come from somewhere. That somewhere is a conceptual question all on its own: should those riding heavily-subsidized outer belt commuter rail pay more (and have more of them drive and pollute)? What about disabled persons who cost the system $40 per ride on The Ride's specialized vehicles? Or what about those who drive only to park in MBTA lots? Should the state pay more to benefit only the eastern third? There is no easy answer.

Works Cited

1. "JAMAICA PLAIN 2000 Census of Population and Housing". Boston Redevelopment Authority. 15 December 2003. Retrieved 14 October 2011.
2. "Jamaica Plain". City of Boston. 2011. Retrieved 14 October 2011.
3. Greer, Michael (2002). "Streetcars in Jamaica Plain: A History". Jamaica Plain Historical Society. Retrieved 14 October 2011.
4. Wikipedia contributors. "Boston-area streetcar lines". Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 31 July 2011. Retrieved 14 October 2011.
5. (Three bus routes are almost identical with about 14,500 riders per day: The #39, the #66, and the SL5).
6. "Ridership and Service Statistics". Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority. 2010. Retrieved 14 October 2011.
7. Ruch, John (26 August 2011). "Trolley comeback killed by court". Jamaica Plain Gazette. Retrieved 14 October 2011
8. Newman, Peter W. G. and Kenworthy, Jeffrey R. (1989). "Gasoline Consumption and Cities". Journal of the American Planning Association, 55:1, 24-3. Retrieved 13 October 2011.
9. "Route 39 Schedule". Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority. Retrieved 14 October 2011.
10. "Bus Fares & Passes". Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority. Retrieved 14 October 2011.
11. "CPI Inflation Calculator". United States Bureau of Labor Statistics. Retrieved 14 October 2011.

MassDOT and image reuse

2011-10-06T13:43:00.001-04:00

I recently added a link on my blogroll: "Commonwealth Conversations", the official transportation blog of MassDOT. As well as highway projects, MassDOT is in charge of projects like South Coast Rail that involve new passenger rail or transit service, so much of the content is about such projects. They also post about MBTA projects.

One such post is today's, which announces approvals for the new Assembly Square station on the Orange Line and the rebuild of Orient Heights on the Blue Line. I am very glad to see both projects advancing.

There is one image in the post: a shot of the front of Orient Heights station. I recognized it immediately, because I just moved it to Wikimedia Commons yesterday.

It is originally from Flickr, posted here. I moved it to Wikimedia Commons with using a web interface because the photo is available under a free-use Creative Commons licence. This means that it is eligible to be used freely on Wikipedia and other sites as long as the terms of the licence are met.

In this case, it's a CC-BY-SA 2.0 licence. The BY term means that attribution is required: free reuse is only allowed if the author is properly credited. The SA term requires sharealike: any modification of the file must be licenced by the reuser under a similar free licence.

Use on Wikipedia meets those terms: clicking on the file takes you to a description page that credits the author, and Wikipedia itself is released under a free Creative Commons licence.

But MassDOT's use does not meet the terms. Both the Flickr version and the Wikimedia Commons reuse require attribution and sharealike. MassDOT's blog does not mention that the photograph was taken by Scott Lapierre, or provide a link to the Flickr or Wikimedia page, and it fails to release the resized version under a free licence. It's an easy and very common mistake to make, and one I've made myself in the past; I only personally became responsible about it after I started uploading files to Commons. Hopefully MassDOT, as a state agency, can set an example with correct attribution of free-use photos.

Professionalism

2011-10-05T23:47:00.002-04:00

Even after everyone else has gone to bed, the city is still awash with light. Long after midnight, one can walk out on the Harvard Bridge and be surrounded by 360 degrees of lights. The Financial District is lit twenty-four hours a day. Even in Brookline - where nary a soul stirs past the stroke of twelve - many storefronts keep the lights on for security.

But even when the city is lit, the people are still asleep. By midnight, most major streets are empty of sober folks, and the Mass Pike slows to just a few cars per minute. Away from bars and frat houses, the only people I pass on my walks are dog walkers and a few couples returning late. At a time when much of the city is at its most beautiful, with the stillness and the overlap of dark and light, almost no one is there to appreciate it.

Even when that stillness is interrupted, there are still wonderful things. Take, for example, that most piercing of disturbances: an ambulance speeding down Commonwealth Avenue, sirens blaring. It is noisy and bright, the symbol of injury and sickness - the antithesis of everything beautiful about the night.

But take a closer look as it speeds down the avenue at midnight. Although there are none of the traffic jams present during the day, there are still a few cars at each stoplight. Each time the ambulance driver approaches a red light, a device on the truck turns the light to green (a so-called green wave) to speed its passage.

Now, watch and listen. On each block, the ambulance starts to brake several hundred feet before the light. But as soon as the light is green and the cars ahead form a clear path, the motor begins to roar. The driver downshifts this laughably overpowered vehicle and it shoots forward, accelerating cleanly through the traffic light.

So what, you may say, that the driver operates in this manner. How could it matter?

But watch the speed of the ambulance. Because it only brakes for a moment in the middle of the block, and because the driver accelerates as soon as the way ahead is open, the vehicle never slows below 30 miles per hour, and with a few clear blocks it may reach highway speeds.

Even if it saves just fractions of a second per block, over the two miles from Kenmore Square to Packard's Corner that might mean ten or even fifteen seconds. To one patient that means nothing, but over dozens and hundreds of emergency runs, that few seconds might save a life.

That to me is the essence of professionalism, that that ambulance driver handles their vehicle in this unorthodox but efficient manner. That they might perform this tedious brake-gas maneuver five or ten or twenty thousand times so that a stranger might survive, and they do this not out of charity but because they are doing their job to the very best of their ability. It is not a skill than can be acquired in a classroom, but only by experience and by the passing down on institutional knowledge.

It is no less a credit to the engineers who designed the vehicle, too, because they showed remarkable foresight when they put an eight-hundred horsepower motor in a truck barely larger than a large pickup - because they knew that someday, that vehicle might need to accelerate quickly, over and over again.

It is a peculiar notion to call beauty. Efficiency, yes, but a roaring motor is rarely beautiful. But I will call it beauty, because what is beauty but a system in perfect harmony?

(Originally posted at Walking Boston)

It Tolls for Thee

2011-09-29T16:59:00.003-04:00

An early morning experiment in writing bad fiction, complete with the most overused and cliche 6-word opener of all time. Trigger warning for violence and suicide.

"It tolls for thee"

It was a dark and stormy noon as the distant bell tower finished its last stroke. He did not know where it was; it could be as far as Downtown or Needham, or perhaps the Mattapan church belt. It did not seem to matter which church it was anymore; after days of frustrating searching, he found that no bells within two miles could possibly play that pounding low song, haunted parody of a melody.

It was a deep sound channel, man, the hemp-soaked young man at the record store drawled to him. Like in the ocean, you know? Four years of “audio engineering” and he never learned to be professional. But the glorified roadie was all too correct. The tiny house at 38 Thorndike, it seemed, was just in the wrong place. Sound from that distant tower bounced off exactly from the wrong roofs and walls, combining at this improbable node and turning his modestly decorated living room into a hellish echo chamber fourteen times a day. On the hour, every hour, seven in the morning to eight at night, came that unearthly ringing. It stayed in his ears constantly, until he could barely tell whether it was real or imagined. Day or night, sun or rain, it was there.

Any sane man would have moved. Brought buyers in at half-past the hour and bought a house a few streets away. It was not that he was not physically strong enough; he was not yet a very old man. But this house was also the house where his wife had been. He was a practical man and did not believe in such things as ghosts, and yet he knew she was there. She was there in his head, in his memories. On at the threshold could he conjure the feeling of her tender lips; only in the cramped bedroom would her lusty smile surface in his brain. No, to leave this house would be to leave her – for the final time.

The ringing in his ears subsides for a moment, and he contemplates going outside for the first time in a week. If he could put her aside for an hour, then perhaps he could clear his head and-

And that that exact moment, the hedonistic thug on the other side of the thin clapboard wall chooses to power on his heavily distorted amplifier. His reaction is measured yet automatic, as if he has been mentally preparing for years. He reaches into an empty drawer and retrieves an ancient revolver. It is surprisingly heavy in his hands. He is unfamiliar with the heft; he has not touched except twice a year to blue the steel. From a yellowed cardboard box in the back of another drawer, he pulls out six small bullets a places them one at a time into their chambers. Click. Spin. Click. Spin. He knows exactly what will happen. In a few minutes, the hooligan will get bored of creating obnoxious screeches, and he will go to the corner store. He will walk down the sidewalk, directly in front of the man’s house. The man practices aiming, firing, turning the gun upwards. He spins the cylinder and stifles a laugh: he’s playing Russian Roulette with bullets in every chamber.

The low tones begin. It is one o’clock.

Allston Depot

2011-09-28T01:36:00.000-04:00

Two of the most thought-provoking books I've read are Freakonomics and its sequel. Although they focus mostly on economic ideas, they also explore some unintended effects of public policy. Besides my human appreciation of irony, I find it fascinating to see how one thing can cause a chain of events. As a future engineer, it's important for me to see how one decision I make can have effects down the line.

Over the last century, engineering standards for trains have increased in a similar manner to how those for cars have increased. Just as manufacturers can no longer make Pintos that blow up when they get hit from behind, they can no longer make wooden trams or railroad cars that cannot survive a collision with an automobile. Today's modern light rail vehicles (colloquially, trams and trolleys), for example, are significantly heavier than the PCC streetcars that dominated during the 30s to the 70s. (The PCCs weighed just 35,000 to 42,000 pounds; 70s-era Boeing cars weight 67,000, and modern Type 8 trams weigh 85,000 pounds empty - and 130 passengers can add 20,000 more on top of that.)

Although fuel usage is not an issue for electric trams, weight can still be an issue. Should Green Line cars ever use the Pleasant Street Incline in South Boston again, the flyover ramps would have to be rebuild for the heavier modern cars. It is for this reason that the PCCs are still used on the Ashmont-Mattapan Line: the three bridges on the route would have to be rebuilt from scratch to accommodate the newer trams, and they would not be able to get an exemption to use lighter European trams because the line has grade crossings where a tram could conceivably hit a car. There's also no sense in abandoning reliable old cars when there's still a shortage of new cars.

Engineering standards, particularly crashworthiness standards, also affect mainline rail operations. Speeds are limited on many lines because in order to run above 70 miles an hour though grade crossings, the first car must be a locomotive or unoccupied car. FRA (Federal Railroad Administration) rules require certain steel side beams for operation above 125 mph. These side beams are located right where fold-down stairs go, so the high-speed Acela has no stairs - and can only stop at high-level (4 feet high) platforms.

Heavy modern steel railroad cars also require more energy to slow down, and to speed up, than the light wooden cars of years past. Again, this poses little problem with electric locomotives (or self-propelled electric railcars), but only the Northeast Corridor plus (most of) the New York and all of the Philadelphia commuter lines are electrified. When, like Boston, all of your commuter lines are diesel locomotives hauling 4 to 8 cars, it is impractical to have stops less than about 2 miles apart. Although their are some exceptions (Melrose, Needham, and Dedham have 3 stops within 1.5 linear miles, and West Roxbury has a 4-stop cluster), the trend is for fewer, wider-spaced stops, particularly on the newer lines.

During the nadir of rail travel - from about 1950 to 1980 - many lines were abandoned, or service was reduced to starvation levels. To reduce maintenance costs and to save on fuel, many stations were closed even on active lines. The Worcester-Framingham Line, like others, saw a number of its stations closed, particularly in the inner belt. Stations at University (BU), Allston, Brighton, Faneuil, and Newton were closed, leaving the Allston-Brighton area devoid of good transit options and heavily car-dependent.

The Allston depot was built in 1887 by the Boston & Albany Railroad, replacing the 1868 "Cambridge Crossing" depot. Although it closed at an unknown date, it still stands where Cambridge Street crosses the Mass Pike. It was once Sports Depot restaurant; now it's Regina Pizzeria at the Depot. (It housed a steakhouse even when it was still operational.) I took a walk two weeks back, to explore Allston and to photograph the building. With permission from the manager, I took some shots. It's a fairly large building, and the first two are panoramas I stitched together.

Front view from Cambridge Street

Side view from Franklin Street

Side view from the pedestrian bridge over the tracks and Mass Pike. Note how the former platform area is now an enclosed dining area - a brilliant reuse.

The saga of Allston Depot is not yet over, though. CSX is leaving Beacon Park Yard (the large rail yard between BU and Harvard) and moving those operations to Worcester. This will permit the MBTA to run more trains on the Boston-Framingham segment with less freight interference. Harvard is calling for the establishment of a new stop in Allston, and money talks. If the MBTA can purchase the tracks in that area, then they may well remove or relocate one to make room for a platform. The favored site is under the Cambridge Street bridge - exactly where the stop was first located 143 years ago.

(First posted at Walking Boston, here.

Rebuilding Rama: done!

2011-09-27T13:45:00.000-04:00

Two months ago, I started rebuilding Rama, one of my favorite rockets. This required a near-complete replacement of the motor mount and the cotton wadding that supports it, repairs to the body tube, and a new paint job.

I finished all the repairs before college, but it wasn't quite finished. On Sunday, when I was home for a few hours, I added the second coat of white paint.

It's not perfect, as the upper end of the body tube is still slightly crumpled, but it's far better-looking than before. The red writing on the body tube no longer shows through a single coat of paint. The clear acrylic fins, which I carefully masked, are barely visible against the body tube (as they should be). And, perhaps most importantly, it's ready for a lot more flying. The new 18mm motor mount has no engine block nor motor hook, so it can take any 18mm motors, including Aerotech 18/20 reloads, or even longer experimental loads.

Walking through Somerville and the North End

2011-09-27T13:39:00.000-04:00

On last Tuesday evening, I went to a public meeting in Somerville. It took me one trolley, two buses, and a lot of walking to get to Somerville High School. That's an indication of the poor state of public transit in the area (I missed a bus at Lechmere, so my options were waiting 30 minutes for the next bus, or a mile's walk), which I'll touch on more later with the Green Line Extension.

The meeting was about the upcoming Lowering McGrath study, which is a really cool thing. They're going to take an ugly concrete viaduct from the 1950s, which carries Route 28 but divides Somerville, and transform it into an at-grade boulevard. It will facilitate pedestrian and bicycle access and unite the two sides of the city.

The meeting got out just past 8. Rather than take a bus, I decided to walk back to Boston. I wasn't sure I wanted to walk four miles (or more) through the unfamiliar street grid of Cambridge, so I headed for the North End. This route took me along a mile of Route 28, including much of the viaduct. It's a monstrosity, and it wasn't the best walking. The sidewalks - where there were sidewalks - were narrow, unlit, and often flooded.

In Somerville, I passed a building with several arched doorways that I though might have once been a trolley barn. The pictures I took were, sadly, dramatically underexposed. It turns out, though, that it is related to the history of the first elevated railway in Boston, a short-lived monorail. I hope to return soon and take pictures.

My journey took me over the Route 28 bridge under the Green Line's Lechmere viaduct. The viaduct is closed for construction at Science Park, but it still provided a fascinating photographic subject. The viaduct, which turns 100 next June, still contains some original catenary (overhead wire) poles:

Any view west from the bridge is blocked by the Museum of Science, but the hundred-foot arches of the viaduct provide wonderful framing for the Bunker Hill Bridge. (The Spaulding Hospital is on the right side of the bridge.)

I played with saturation on the top image. I love the artistic manipulations that digital photography permits.

From the Charles, I walked east on Nashua Street. My camera was still on night setting when I took this shot of a shuttle bus. It's not the quality I was seeking for Wikipedia, but instead I find a little artistic merit:

From much of the North End, the Bunker Hill bridge is visible above trees and buildings. The Big Dig was in many ways a colossal waste, but I love the bridge. Bridges are frequently beautiful - the same curves that make them strong are often aesthetically pleasing - and this is among the best. It is clean and white, resembling a pair of sailboats more than a freeway.

I walked down Causeway Street, behind North Station and TD Garden. The street was for almost a century covered by the Causeway Street elevated, yet just seven years after its removal few traces remain. Its remains, too, are a future photographic target for me.

At Government Center, after 3.3 miles of wandering, I finally gave in and boarded the T. I hoped to photograph the Brattle Loop, once a busy streetcar turnaround for cars from as far as Medford and Chelsea. Now it's usually empty, with the former platform visible to the thousands who pass through the station despite a wall that hides much of it. However, that night, it was occupied by spare Green Line trams.

(Crossposted from Walking Boston here)

I am a Feminist

2011-09-21T01:12:00.001-04:00

I am a feminist, and I am a man. I do not see this as a contradiction. I am a man because that is who I am; I did not choose to be a man. I am a feminist because I chose to be a feminist, because I believe in the apparently radical idea that women are people. People, just people, exactly as men are people.

Some people tell me this is a contradiction. They say that a man cannot be a feminist, because feminism is about women, and I am not a woman. Or they say that it is silly to be a feminist, because I am not a woman, and giving women equality will not give me anything. I find this to be ridiculous: should I not believe in the equality of black people because I am not black, or not fight for gay people to marry simply because I am not gay?

I believe that equality is necessary on its own merits, that no person should be denied an equal chance because of something as trivial as because they happen to be female. I do not need to justify its benefit to me, because having a fair society is worth anything I can do. But even the silly arguments make me think. What does feminism bring to me? Can it be justified on a personal level, in addition to a global level? It maybe is not important that it can – but it can absolutely be justified on any level. I am a feminist because I think it is good, but I am also a feminist because it is good for me.

I am a feminist, because when I walk into my job, I will have the very best possible coworkers. They will have been chosen at every level for their ability and creativity, their rationality and brilliance. There will be women there, because maybe they will not have been told at five and ten and fifteen and eighteen and twenty-two that women don’t become engineers, that maybe they should become a nurse of a teacher instead, because that’s what women do. There will be women sitting in the fancy chairs, because we will have purged from our collective memory banks the idea that only men can make decisions.

I am a feminist, because I will have sex with a woman, and I will know that we are having sex because we want to have sex with each other. It will be good sex, because she will have been taught that her body is good and she can enjoy it, and that sex is good and she can enjoy it too. I will not worry that she would rather be having sex with a woman, or with no one, or with someone else entirely – because she will not feel a pressure to ignore her feelings and have sex with a man – and I will know that we are having sex because she happens to want sex. She will not feel shamed by society for having sex, even if she has sex with other people too, or if she gets birth control so that she does not have to have a baby.

I am a feminist, because I will watch movies, and I will watch television, and I will watch strong female characters. Except I will not even think of this, because strong female characters will be so normal I will not notice them, because they will not be an anomaly any more. I will watch these women have jobs and hobbies and talk to each other about things besides men, because that is how women act in real life.

I am a feminist, because I will hold doors for people. I will not worry about being expected to open doors for women simply because they are women, and I will not worry about insulting a woman’s strength by opening a door for her. I will open doors for people because it is basic human kindness, and I will be able to open doors for all people.

A note: this was originally written about 2:30 in the morning a few nights back. It's an amalgam of several nights of thought. It's written in a bit of an idiosyncratic style, I realize, and I refuse to have it any other way.

(Originally posted by me at Walking Boston.

New Blog: Walking Boston

2011-09-21T01:10:00.000-04:00

Having received permission from my professor to do so, I will be hosting my Honors College blog posts primarily on Blogger, at walkingaroundboston.blogspot.com. When I crosspost items, I will link the copy to the original.

Favicon!

2011-09-21T00:20:00.000-04:00

So, Blogger recently changed the design settings. Among other changes, you can now choose a favicon - the tiny square image that displays next to the title in the browser tab.

I like this, because I read a lot of blogs, and sometimes I have 30 or 40 tabs open. If I (or you) want to find mine, it's now easy: just find the tiny radioactivity symbol.

I'm back!

2011-09-15T00:53:00.000-04:00

Cross-posting between blogs should begin tomorrow. Sorry for the delay; the other software is buggier than Blogger. I lost a 500-word post the other day... only to replace it with an 1130-word opus about walking around Boston.

And I've been editing Wikipedia quite a bit. In fact, with two consecutive edits today (uploading a nice geographic map of the former A Branch (more on that later), and then putting it into the relevant article), I hit two milestones: 2000 edits on Wikipedia (since July 2006) and 1500 edits (including uploads) on Commons (since December 2010).

Crossposting

2011-09-09T13:25:00.000-04:00

For my Honors writing course at BU, I am required to keep a personal blog, with at least 12,000 words over the next 14 weeks to get full credit. Some material there will be of pertinent interest here, particularly posts about the history of Boston and the MBTA. Most of my "Ruins of the T" material will be crossposted to both (with my professor's permission).

In which I take a walk

2011-09-09T01:32:00.000-04:00

Normally, I'm an indoors person. Don't get me wrong, I love nature, but I spend many of my waking hours on my laptop, comfortably protected from the weather. Plus, I spent the first eighteen years of my life in suburban Connecticut, in a small neighborhood. It's not a terribly exciting place to walk around, and there's no sidewalks on the main road if I want to go further. I also can't go out past sunset, because no one else is about so the natural assumption would be that I was up to no good. There's a nice woods behind my house, but it's not a good place to walk after dark either due to the sometimes twisty and uneven trails.

But now, I'm in Boston, which has the useful trait of being a fairly large and rather safe city. There are hundreds of streets to walk down with sights galore: buildings, a rather impressive river, lots of people, and of course trains (active subway and commuter rail, and abandoned infrastructure). I feel safe walking around most of the city, even at night; the areas near BU (Cambridge, Fenway-Kenmore, Back Bay, and Brookline) are all good safe areas.

So, I've taken to walking, both to class (even though I could catch the BU shuttle bus for a few blocks) and just for fun. The BU Campus is 1.5 miles from Kenmore to Packard's Corner, and there's lots of fun stuff a similar distance away. Brookline in particular is a nice place for strolling.

Today, I had a few errands to run. I walked up Commonwealth Avenue to the student union, then back down to Kenmore Square. I decided to walk to the Back Bay Best Buy (actually next to Hynes) to get an ink cartridge for my printer. I took the long way to Mass Ave, via Beacon Street and Charlesgate East. At Charlesgate, between Storrow Drive and an access ramp, there's a random house:

It stands alone among the Muddy River and a mix of rusting highway ramps. It's too far from the Green Line to be an old headhouse or vent (like the emergency exit on the corner of Charlesgate East and Newbury Street), and it doesn't seem to be occupied. Perhaps it's a fancy maintenance shed. Whatever it is, it's mostly covered in Ivy.

From there, I walked across the Harvard Bridge and through MIT on Massachusetts Avenue. At Central Square, I took the stairway down into the T and filled up my Charliecard. I considered walking back to BU via Cambridgeport and the BU Bridge, but that would be another 3 to 4 miles back to Hynes, so instead I boarded the Red Line inbound. At Park Street I changed to the Green Line, on an extremely crowded tram. I squeezed my way out at Hynes and strode into the Best Buy.... only to learn that they did not have the ink cartridge I sought. I went back to my dorm via Newbury Street and Bay State Road, using the convenient pedestrian underpass at Kenmore station to safely cross under Commonwealth.

Still, it was a great walk. The weather was finally clearing up after three dreary days, and the view from the middle of the Charles was spectacular. My total walk was about 3.7 miles including the bit coming back from Hynes, which is probably more than I walked all summer. Thanks to all this walking, I'm hungrier than I was when sedentary. I anticipate moving to a four-meals-a-day schedule within a week or two.

Boston at Night

2011-09-08T01:08:00.000-04:00

I've taken to carrying a camera around everywhere I go in Boston. It's five years old and only 3 megapixels (the same as my cell phone), but it's making me notice things I normally wouldn't, and it's very exciting having a city to photograph. (I lived for 18 years in a cowtown, okay? Not a bad place, but not many people or buildings.)

It was raining tonight at the first BU Astronomy Society meeting, but we went out on the 6th floor roof of the College of Arts and Sciences anyway. My pictures were blurry, badly lit, and out of focus, but I had some fun with them anyway.

Cambridge, with accidental camera wiggle:

Cambridge, with digital brightness manipulation:

Lights on Commonwealth Avenue, digitally saturated:

Walking back between the brownstones on Bay State Avenue:

Ruins of the T: An introduction

2011-09-05T23:50:00.000-04:00

I'm now in Boston, which means this blog is getting a bit of a thematic change. I can't work on rockets right now, but I am in a city that has lots of my other geeky obsession: trains.

The MBTA operates a systems of buses, trackless trolleys, light rail and heavy rail subway and surface lines, and mainline commuter rail. Amtrak operates 4 passenger services out of Boston, and CSX hauls freight.

But there's a lot more that doesn't run anymore. The Boston Elevated Railway, Eastern Massachusetts Street Railway, MTA / MBTA, and many smaller systems ran streetcars everywhere in Eastern Masachusetts, of which just four lines* plus a heritage line remain. Countless rail lines (Central Massachusetts Railway and others) and branches (dozens off the existing commuter system alone) have dropped service or been abandoned, leaving stations, bridges, and rights-of-way behind. (To say nothing of old stations on active lines.) There's a huge amount of ruins - everything from staircases leading to platforms that no longer exist, to whole tunnels and stations behind brick walls.

Much of it can be seen. A lot is on the surface, on the streets of Boston and in surrounding towns. A few things can only be seen beneath the surface, like the unused turnaround loop at Government Center. I plan to go out and photograph as much as I can. Much can be seen already on Google Maps Street View.

Here's a map of what I plan to visit and already have. Links to pictures go up as I upload them to Blogger and Commons.

View Random (mostly old) MBTA bits in a larger map

*Green Line B, C, and E branches, plus the Ashmont-Mattapan Line. The Green Line D branch was formerly commuter rail and only became a trolley line in 1959.

In Boston

2011-09-04T01:06:00.001-04:00

I am now in Boston at BU!

...and now I'm going to sleep.

Reynolds / Washburne 2012

2011-09-01T19:21:00.001-04:00

Don't like the Democrats or Republicans? Want a real independent in 2012? Then vote for the Browncoats. Captain Malcolm Reynolds for President. Zoe Alleyne Washburne for Vice President. They aim to misbehave.

It's a digitized, colorized, and vectorized version of this poster that I made back in March.

The original vector version (this is a smaller jpeg) is high enough quality to use as a poster up to 24x36 inches without loss of quality. Let me know if you want a copy.

Pictures of the Irene aftermath (with video bonus!)

2011-08-31T11:34:00.000-04:00

We got power and phone service back last night, and that makes us very lucky; much of CT does not have power back yet, and some might not get it till next week, because Connecticut Light & Power is overloaded by the sheer volume of downed trees. My neighborhood has cable back, but our connection is down, so I'm at the library for internet right now.

This 6" log fell across my street; fortunately it was soft, so I was able to break it up and remove it.

30-foot branch about 15 yards from my house.

Tree back in the woods, bent in a U by a branch that fell and speared it.

The pointy one in the background is an 11" thick tree, snapped in half by the storm.

Two 30-foot branches, collectively weighing about a ton. The bush took a hit but the garage got off without a scratch.

And now, the video ~~daily double~~ bonus: I took a video. It's fuzzy and shaky, but hey, video. You can see the downed cable (in the video I mistake it for the phone line), a downed branch stuck up in the front tree, and the remains of the log I moved.

I'm Alive!

2011-08-29T16:08:00.000-04:00

The hurricane wasn't as nasty as we feared; it was a tropical storm by the time it hit. We had some monster branches down, but no house damage, and no one I know is hurt or homeless.

But, the power's out, and projected to be out for a while. Half the state is without power, and the rich/politically connected folks in Hartford and Fairfield County are the priority. Apparently, Connecticut Light & Power is bringing in crews from as far as Colorado and Canada. So, the next time I have power at home, much less internet, might be at college on Saturday.

However, not all is bad. My dad's office has power (ramen and a hot pocket never tasted as good as when I hadn't had hot food in 36 hours...) and internet, so I'll be hanging out here a lot. My grandparents have power, which means hot showers are possible, and the roads are mostly okay. (After I removed a 6-inch log from our street, that is).

It was also clear last night and with the blackouts there was almost no light pollution. More on that later.

Goodbye Internet

2011-08-27T22:58:00.000-04:00

Irene is coming; scheduled to hit us hard tonight and tomorrow. Thunder is starting; that means we're turning the computer and the router off shortly, and we stand a good chance of losing power. So I might not have internet access for a few days.

Surreal

2011-08-27T01:39:00.001-04:00

After it being clear earlier this evening - I took my binoculars out for a few minutes - it's clouded over. These clouds are the very outer fringes of Hurricane Irene:

The next time I see a clear sky... may be in the eye of a hurricane. That's surreal.

(Image: Fair-use screenshot of Intellicast water vapor satellite imagery)

A (galactically) nearby supernova

2011-08-25T20:10:00.000-04:00

Phil Plait reports that there's a new supernova in the galaxy M101, one of the nearest galaxies. It's only magnitude 17.2 right now, not visible without a 15+ inch telescope, but it's supposed to brighten to magnitude 11 - enough that I may be able to spot it with my 8-inch scope.

This is a pretty major event; there's only been one supernova in recent years (in 1987) that was closer. It's a Type Ia supernova, which unlike many supernovae is not formed by the collapse of a supermassive star. Instead, it is created by a binary star system, consisting of a large, cool, and massive red giant and a small, hot white dwarf. The white dwarf steals material from the red giant; when it reaches 1.38 times the mass of the sun - the Chandrasekhar limit - it can no longer support itself, and it begins to implode. Carbon, normally not prone to nuclear fusion, fuses into magnesium in what is called carbon detonation, and the thermonuclear 'flame' destroys the star in a burst of energy equal to two billion billion billion billion billion of the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima.

Discovery notice
Archival discovery of possible precursor stars

Central Corridor Map - improved

2011-08-24T01:14:00.000-04:00

I've been busy recently, what with college packing, Wikipedia, and cartography. I just finished the first of several vector maps of the Central Corridor Rail Line, for use on Wikipedia and their website. This is a lower-detail image; I'm currently finishing the high-detail large-format map.

I used the PNG version because it has a white background (the svg would have my blog's green background), but it links to the main svg.

The danger of using stock images

2011-08-21T01:20:00.000-04:00

So, I was putting away books at the library the other day, and I suddenly stopped. I was looking at a Luanne Rice novel, "The Edge of Winter". I has this photograph of a young women on it:

(All images here are fair-use images: low-resolution versions of copyrighted material, for non-profit educational use only.)

I walked over and pulled out another book: "Finding Alice", by Melody Carlson:

Note the similarities: It's the same young woman, in the same skirt and jackets and boots, walking on the same wooden barrier.

Now, here's the back cover of "Finding Alice":

It's the exact same image that's on the cover of the Luanne Rice book. Quite clearly, the photos are stock photos, and the publishers didn't know (they have different publishers) that they'd been used on another book.

Image maps

2011-08-19T01:38:00.000-04:00

Image maps are a neat little HTML trick (that I really hope works in Blogger). They let you assign shapes on an image (circles, rectangles, and arbitrary polygons) with attributes. They can display text when you mouse over them, link to websites (useful for things like an interactive periodic table), or act as a detection (on click or mouseover) that triggers other events.

W3C specification document

I made one from this map I made of the Abraham Lincoln, a train in Illinois (now integrated into the Lincoln Service name). Mouseover tips show tips for making geographics maps of train systems; the title links to the article on Wikipedia.

Mabus Arrested

2011-08-17T21:46:00.000-04:00

Mabus, aka Dennis Markuze, is among the craziest and nastiest trolls out there. For 15 years he has been spamming James Randi, PZ Myers, Jen McCreight, and anyone else in the atheism movement he could find. He moved from general wackiness to stalking and increasing legitimate death threats, including going to an atheism conference (and getting stopped from going into others). He made dozens of new Twitter accounts every day, just to threaten people who he happened to disagree with, with all manner of gruesome death. He threatened families, and threat-spammed anyone, even minors. He made it very clear that this was no clear harassment; he was a danger.

And what did the police in Montreal (his home base) do? Nothing. They chose to ignore complaint after complaint, despite all indications being that he might hurt someone. Only after he started threatening a Montreal resident, and a petition was created that (legally) emailed the Montreal police every time it was signed, did they start an investigation.

Today, the police tweeted that an arrest has been made in the case. This man is clearly mentally ill; perhaps he will get the professional help that he obviously needs. Hopefully, those in the movement will feel (and be) less in danger.

Tim Farley has an excellent and complete accounting of the whole story; I highly recommend you take a few minutes and go read it.

That's no Burger King, that's a...

2011-08-17T00:03:00.000-04:00

...train station?

Should you find yourself to be driving on South Street in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, you might find yourself passing Depot Street. Should you look down it, you might notice a very unusual building. It's the fanciest Burger King you ever saw.

(From Wikimedia Commons; click for filepage)

Why such a fancy restaurant in a blue-collar town? It didn't start out life as a fast joint. This is the original Old Colony Railroad depot, dating from 1893. (The new commuter rail station, from 1997, is half a mile south.) It was designed by Bradford Gilbert, who designed a number of well known buildings, including a version of Grand Central Terminal that was demolished to make way for the current building.

This is, apparently, real.

2011-08-16T17:08:00.000-04:00

This is a vertical wind tunnel, often used by skydivers to train. It's also capable of making epic things happen.

Free-use images on Flickr

2011-08-14T22:51:00.000-04:00

I don't, as a general rule, use Flickr. Not that there's anything wrong, but I don't really need a new photo hosting service. All my good images - maps and high-quality images - usually find their way to Wikimedia Commons. My rocketry pictures and other personal stuff, I just upload directly with Picasa and Blogger, or I upload them on a forum like TRF if I use them there. Not all animated GIFs work directly in Blogger, so I have a spare Imgur account lying around somewhere.

That's not to say, though, that Flickr is bad. In fact, I'm quite fond of Flickr, because unlike most image hosts, they give users a setting to release images under various Creative Commons licences. Only a small number are so licensed - 196 million of 5 billion, or about 3.9% - but 46 million of those images have Attribution or Attribution-ShareAlike licences. Those types - which permit derivatives and don't restrict commercial use - qualify as free images.

That means that they can be used, without restriction, on all Wikipedia articles. 46 million images represent a body of images 4 times the size of Wikimedia Commons, the normal image source for Wikipedia. Since Wikipedia doesn't allow linking external images, there's a system set up where free images can be migrated to Commons.

I've started transferring a few images, mainly to fill the gaps in the current MBTA images. There are some very good photographers on Flickr who allow free use of their photos. Here's a sampling of them; click on them to go to the Commons file page for embiggening and attribution.

MBTA Commuter Rail at Providence:

Davis Square on the Red Line:

Streetcar at (pre-renovation) Mattapan:

Blue Line platform at Government Center:

Central Corridor Rail Line now has a website

2011-08-14T00:12:00.000-04:00

centralcorridorline.com is now the official home of the Central Corridor Rail Line project. I've been in communication with one of the project leaders, as they're currently using my map (from Commons) on the page. Which is not only perfectly legal (I released it into the public domain) but pretty awesome as well.

Dear Google Chrome dictionary

2011-08-12T19:27:00.000-04:00

Heterosexist and heterosexism are words. Transphobia and transphobic are also words. Thye're quite important words when we're talking about equality. Learn them, and don't try to tell me that they're not words.

Worst Patron I've Ever Seen

2011-08-11T23:54:00.000-04:00

The library I work at is pretty slow; we get anything from 2 patrons an hour (Tuesday nights) to 20 (weekday mornings during summer reading, and Saturdays). Most of our patrons are friendly or at worst indifferent (and I don't work directly with most of them; I put away books).

The worst ones are definitely the parents of small children that ignore their children. I understand that they want to check out books or browse the internet. But they are still parents, and they can't arbitrarily discard their parental duties.

A 2-year-old will not sit calmly and solve a puzzle. A 2-year-old will mess up the puzzle, walk around, and mess up the neatly arranged books. A 2-year-old cannot be left unsupervised.

Some 5-year-olds will solve a puzzle, or play with the blocks, or even read a book without supervision. If their parent knows they will, then that's okay. But many 5-year-olds are not that mature, and they need a constant eye on them.

One such child was in today. He was energetic and almost completely unresponsive to anyone speaking to him; he may be on the autism spectrum. I first found him in the adult fiction section, where he was busying himself removing books to make a hole for his head. When he bored of that, he tried to climb the shelves. His mother, at this point, was up at the front desk unaware of his antics.

I stopped him, replaced the books, and watched him wander off. Within 30 seconds, he'd knocked down a row of kid's books, intentionally. At this point I took his hand and told him he was going up to mommy (who, at this point, was still clueless).

He immediately ran back to the kid's section but didn't knock any more books around, so I went back to work. About two minutes later, I heard a loud thump behind me. The boy had gone up to the mezzanine, taken a large 5-pound book, and managed to throw it over the 4-foot railing. I scooped up the book, went upstairs, and scooped the kid up in one arm. Only when I carried him to his mother did she understand what he'd been doing - and even then she had little to no control over him.

That's the only time I've had to physically restrain someone, and I was only willing to do it because he was putting people in danger. That first book was only fifteen feet from me, and he moved fast. A five-pound book falling from the mezzanine (the rail is fifteen feet above the floor) could easily hurt someone, like the patron sitting at a computer who could have been right in the path of another book.

Filesize: in physical terms

2011-08-10T01:45:00.000-04:00

Kilobyte. Megabyte. Gigabyte. And now Terabyte. We here these terms very frequently when talking about storage space and file sizes- but what do they mean? How do they translate to items we're familiar with?

A bit is a 0 or 1. A byte - a unit capable of handling one letter, or one basic color - is equal to 8 bytes. Everything is expressed in terms of bytes.

A kilobyte is 1 000 bytes.
A megabyte is 1 000 000 bytes.
A gigabyte is 1 000 000 000 bytes.
A terabyte is 1 000 000 000 000 bytes.

(There are also binary versions, using 1024, 1048576, etc bytes, but they don't differ by more than a few percent.)

The smallest .txt files are about 4 kilobytes. A Word document starts at 12 kilobytes and a three-page essay is about 25kb. An image from a digital camera is between one and 6 megabytes. A four-minute mp3 song is about 10Mb. Photoshop CS5 - one of the largest programs in existence - requires up to 1GB of space to install.

Now, consider a piece of ordinary 8.5 x 11 (A4) paper. At 80 zeroes and ones (10 bytes) per line, 25 lines per side, 2 sides per page, a single sheet of paper works out to 500 bytes, or half a kilobyte.

Two sheets of paper, then, are equal to one kilobyte. One megabyte (2000 sheets) will stack about 6 inches high. One gigabyte (2 million sheets) of paper will fill a 5-foot cube, or one minivan - and weight 6 tons. One terabyte of data stored in this manner would require 33 C-5 Galaxy heavy lift cargo planes to carry.

But that's a wholly inefficient method of storage - we have more characters than just 0s and 1s to write. What about writing?

An average book is six by eight by one inch, 400 pages long, and has 200,000 words averaging five letters long. That works out to one million characters (plus 200,000 for the spaces), or about 1.2 megabytes. (The bible is about 4MB and was formerly a standard unit of storage capacity.

One gigabyte would then be 800 books, or several bookcases, or a 34-inch cube, weighing 1400 pounds. One terabyte would be 800,000 books, or 20 mid-sized libraries, and would require just 4 jets to carry.

Okay, then, we're gonna use electronic media. What about the good old floppy disk? It's nothing great, but at 1.44Mb in a small package (3.5" by 3.5" by 0.1") it's still superior to written storage.

One gigabyte of disks (700 disks) would stack to 7 inches square and 2 feet high. Weighing 'just' 31 pounds. You could carry a gigabyte of floppies in a milk crate. Even a terabyte of floppies could be delivered in a single 18-wheeler.

CDs, at 700 megabytes each, are even more efficient. One gig fits on a pair of CDs with room to spare. You could fit a terabyte's worth in the trunk of a small car and still have room for a cooler.

Modern memory, though, is even better. A 32 gigabyte flash drive can be held in the palm of your hand. My new laptop (more on that later) has a 500 GB hard disk...and that's the standard model. For less than 100 dollars, you can now buy a one-terabyte external hard drive that weighs just a few pounds and is smaller than a hardcover book.

The winner, though, is still the human brain. One thousand terabytes (one petabyte) of storage in just three pounds. But, for the first time in history, one dedicated person could probably acquire enough storage to match that.

Here's so much of what is wrong with the world

2011-08-09T22:46:00.001-04:00

(via Pharnygula)

Women STILL earn 25% less than men, for the same educational level. In fact, women earn the same as a male with about 2 years less education - and those figures are for women who work full-time year-round.

A man without a high school diploma earns the same as a woman with one.
A man with a high school diploma earns the same as a woman with an associate's degree.
A man with an associate's degree earns the same as a woman with a bachelor's degree.
A man with a bachelor's degree earns the same as a woman with a doctorate.

A man with a master's degree will earn, on average, more than a woman of any educational level.

That's not acceptable. There's no reason to pay someone a quarter less than they deserve, on account of them being female.

Sexism: makes the EGE very, very angry.

Ledge Light

2011-08-08T00:41:00.000-04:00

The New London Ledge Light is a unique lighthouse - probably the only marine lighthouse designed in a French Revivalist style. When it was built in 1909, local magnates Steven Harkness (Rockefeller's buddy, and namesake of Harkness Park) and Morton Plant (whose estate is now UConn Avery Point) insisted on a stylish design, rather than a simple tin can. The resulting structure is a square three-story house with a small light tower atop it.

The lighthouse has a rich history; it guided ships safely to port during the 1938 hurricane and welcomed submariners back to the Groton base during WWII. The lighthouse was converted to solar power and automated in 1987; the last crew returned to shore for the last time. (3 men had lived aboard the lighthouse at all times, to maintain the structure, wind the light, and spot ships in distress).

The lighthouse began to deteriorate, but a local couple has now formed a group and begun restoration with the intent that it become a museum. Project Oceanology, a non-profit educational group based out of Avery Point, has begun running a small number of tours with their Envirolab boats. I went with my family on Saturday, and it was quite impressive.

I'm starting to collate my images, so they'll be a couple posts over the next few days.

Although restoration has started in most rooms, and is nearly complete in several, one room on the west corner of the second story has been left untouched. I took a panorama from the doorway. Such a panorama is extremely difficult - any movement of more than 1% is noticeable on the final panorama, which meant I had to keep the lens within an inch while rotating the camera (my phone). Here's what Hugin produced from 14 images:

The World Wide Web is 20

2011-08-07T23:42:00.001-04:00

On August 6, 1991, Tim Berners-Lee created the first web page at CERN. It wasn't the first use of the internet - Usenet and other message boards were up before then - but it was the first web page. Berners-Lee used hypertext - the predecessor of HMTL - to create the page.

The Web didn't catch on right away. That first website was only accessible at CERN, because they were the only ones with web browsers. The first commercial browser, Mosaic, didn't come out till 1993.

(A note: the Internet is the global network of computers and routing systems. The World Wide Web is a service of interconnected hypertext documents (web pages) that are communicated via the Internet. The Internet existed before 1991, but services did not use modern hypertext documents.)

But, 20 years later, the internet has changed beyond anyone's imagination. Most information is easily available, shopping and phone calls are often done online, and revolutions have been created online. It's perhaps the most spectacular technological development in human history.

Juno launched!

2011-08-07T23:30:00.001-04:00

For the first time in fifteen years, there is a probe inbound to Jupiter*. On Friday, after a last-minute hold at t-4 minutes, NASA's Juno probe left Kennedy Space Center at 12:25pm aboard a Atlas V heavy-lift booster.

Two years from now, the probe will pass very close to Earth for a gravity assist. Via this quirk of orbital mechanics, it will steal some orbital momentum from the Earth and reach Jupiter in just three more years.

It's set to study Jupiter's water ratio and core mass - which will help determine how it formed - and precisely map its gravitational and magnetic fields. It will also study the polar components of Jupiter's magnetosphere and the massive auroras it creates. However, the main purpose of the mission is to better understand the cloud systems that cloak Jupiter. In fact, the mission is names for the goddess Juno, wife of Jupiter, who could see through his veil of clouds - just like the probe will.

It's the first solar-powered probe to reach the gas giants, made possible by new advances in solar panels. Previous craft, like Galileo (the previous Jupiter mission) used radioactive thermal generators, which generate more power than solar panels. Juno's instruments are designed to use less current than previous probes.

Many spacecraft carry an interesting tribute. Many have CDs containing names of project members; the Voyagers carried the famous golden records. Juno is carrying three Lego minifigures: Jupiter, Juno, and Galileo.

Orange Sky

2011-08-02T17:46:00.000-04:00

This is what my neighborhood normally looks like at dusk:

This is what it looked like yesterday evening. Now, this one is the original image, before color-balancing.

The sky was spectacularly orange. The weather had already been weird - threatening a thunderstorm, but no storm; very dark sky then lightening, and mammatus clouds, which I'd never seen before. But then, about 8 pm, the sky turned orange all over. Very weird.

Here's a panorama I took of about 120 degrees of sky. The wires are a bit messed up, but otherwise this is exactly the way it looked.

RIP Wireless Mouse

2011-08-01T02:24:00.000-04:00

After two years, my wireless mouse finally died. It was a generic Microsoft mouse - the one Microsoft product that actually worked as it should.

The left mouse button finally stopped working. It worried me at first, because the same symptoms - inability to click anything, switch tabs, or close windows, or even open the Task Manager - are indicative of a more serious problem, like the computer freezing up.

I figure I just wore the switch contacts out. At perhaps 6 clicks a minute, four hours a day, that's 1440 clicks a day - or more than a million clicks. The little metal contacts in the switch had been getting shakier - I had trouble clicking and holding recently - and they finally just gave out.

I'm currently using an old wired mouse, which is spectacularly annoying. But it beats the touchpad.

Everyone has their addiction...

2011-07-29T01:02:00.000-04:00

Some people smoke, some people drink. Me? I buy books.

I already own a lot of books. They fill up two six-foot shelves, plus three feet and a milk crate in my closet, plus a set of technology encyclopedias under my bed. And that's just the ones I owned before December 2010.

...to say nothing of the magazines. I have thirteen years of Sky&Telescope, plus a couple of Sport Rocketry.

Up until last Christmas, I had my books under control. Yes, they'd started expanding into my closet, but that was organized, and it was space just waiting to be filled. But then I got about 18 linear inches of books for Christmas, and I had nowhere to put them. So, they became a pile on the floor.

I can never bear to give up my books. I have a copy-paper box full of children's books that have too many memories for me to give up; it's up in the attic with my high school papers and textbooks. So there was no way I was going to give up a lot of my books, especially since many of them are reference works that I pull up occasionally.

So they sat. In March, they were joined by some books from a former teacher of mine who was cleaning out his shelves, and in April by a William Gibson novel I bought in Maryland. More filtered in, gifts and purchases.

Then, the last straw. I bought four books at Borders on Sunday, then ten at Book Barn today. (I had a $25 gift certificate, so they cost me just ten dollars total.) No way those were goin gon the floor too; my mother would rightfully murder me.

So, while college shopping, I picked up a cheap bookshelf. It's thin fiberboard, but it works for what I need it for. Three shelves, a foot wide.

It's almost full from the last 8 months of books.

. . .

I think I'll get another one. At thirteen dollars it's worth it.

In any case, here's the books I bought today:

Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama
Arthur C. Clarke, The Songs of Distant Earth
Arthur C. Clarke, The Fountains of Paradise
Arthur C. Clarke, The Sentinel

Three novels and a collection of short stories by one of the greatest science fiction writers who ever lived.

Orson Scott Card, Ender's Shadow

The excellent parallel novel to Ender's Game, which they did not have in stock.

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Still among the funniest novels ever written.

Martin Gardner, Wheels, Life, and Other Mathematical Amusements

Recreational mathematics.

Alexander Ziwet and Louis Allen Hopkins, Analytic Geometry

Not so recreational mathematics. To teach myself higher-level geometry. This is old - a 1937 edition of a 1913 title.

Galileo Galilei, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1967 translated edition)

This is where modern science truly started. This was the title that brought heliocentrism to the masses, and the book that got Galileo tried. Given that I've parodied it (because I was being sarcastic on an English paper) it's time I got around to reading it.

Tracy Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine

The story of the creation of one of the first modern computers. Does for computers what Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance did for motorcycles - show the interaction between man (and, at Data General, a number of pioneering women as well) and machine as it becomes an art. It contributed to the idea of programming as an art and a philosophy as well as a science, and it's one of the finest engineering books around.

GIMP skills

2011-07-27T21:40:00.003-04:00

So, when I was up in Boston for orientation, I took this picture at Back Bay on the commuter rail platforms:

It's a lousy picture in several ways. The perspective is awful, there's glare from the lights, it's fuzzy, and oh yeah, there's a clueless grandma who walked into my picture. (Definitely a grandma - she later started talking about her grandkids.)

But I have GIMP, and after several attempts, I got a decent picture. I straightened it to an almost-flat view of the sign, and I managed to remove the grandma then repair the picture.

I also did some sharpening of the text. Most is still unreadable, but the date is definitely 1920 - old enough that the photographs are public domain.

It's not perfect; my patch jobs are pretty bad and the perspective is still wonky. But it's good enough to have uploaded it to Commons:

"Things I Won't Work With"

2011-07-26T23:39:00.001-04:00

I recently discovered a very interesting blog: In the Pipeline. It's a blog about chemistry, written by a professional chemist, and it's very interesting.

But the best feature, by far, is the posts tagged "Things I Won't Work With. It's about chemicals that are so dangerous even this experience chemist won't touch them with a ten-foot pole. They include chlorine azide which is so explosive it requires sheet-iron suits to work with even tiny amounts, isocyanides which just smell bad, dioxygen difluoride which detonates spontaneously at -300 Fahrenheit, and nickel carbonyl which has several different ways to poison you very quickly.

But the scariest? Chlorine trifluoride, ClF₃, used in the semiconductor industry. It's among the most powerful oxidizing agents known and among the few that beats oxygen at its own game. It'll burn things that are already ashes. It will set just about anything on fire - even the sand in the sand bucket (which normally will put out any fire). Here's a description he quotes from rocket scientist John Clark:

"

It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water-with which it reacts explosively.It can be kept in some of the ordinary structural metals-steel, copper, aluminium, etc.-because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride.... If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes.

"

Scary stuff indeed.

Lincoln Logs.

2011-07-26T20:24:00.000-04:00

Admit it, you just got hit by the nostalgia bus.

They came up in discussion while I had my friends over today, so we spent fifteen minutes playing with them. And you know what? They're every bit as much fun as when I was a kid. You can build all sorts of neat stuff - the beauty of a modular building system.

There were a few broken ones in the box from years ago. I actually have now managed to fix them, as I can now successfully glue the breaks.

Rebuilding Rama

2011-07-23T02:09:00.000-04:00

Continuing with repairing about half my fleet this summer, I'm doing a major overhaul on the Rama. It started out as an attempt to make a finless scale model, then it was just a scale model, and then it was just ugly. I have more about it here.

Any other rocket with its record would just get retired. It's survived six launches, which is an eternity for a scratchbuilt rocket. In the first went unstable, in the second it got its fins broken off, in the third it crashed, in the fourth it crashed again, in the fifth it actually did well on a D motor (after previous failures on Cs and a B), and in the sixth it wasn't quite stable.

But, I don't want to retire it just yet. It's a fun and hardy rocket; that 3" mailing tube can take a lot of damage. It also makes a good testbed for high-thrust 18mm motors; I plan to use it to test my own someday once I'm Level 2 certified.

So instead of scrapping it, it gets a complete rebuild.

The nose 'cone' - which is actually flat - is a mailing tube end cap filled with solidified wood glue for weight. I trashed the foam board than formerly covered it; my replacement covering will be a better-fitting piece of poster board. I trimmed down the screw eye so it won't poke through any more.

The forward edge of the body tube is squished and the layers are coming apart from the multiple crashes. I'm squeezing white glue between the layers, then clamping them shut till they dry, which should render it pretty solid. The inside of the tube has gotten pretty chewed up, so I'll give it a coat of wood glue to make it smooth. Easy exit for the parachute, and easy to clean after the flight.

I realize now that part of the reason it's so survivable is the filling - I filled the space between the motor mount and body tube with cotton batting, stuffed tight. Which is not as stupid as it sounds - the stuff comes chemically treated to be flameproof.

The shock cord mount is pretty solid, but I needed to add some filets to the forward centering ring. Next I'll trim the motor mount tube to be flushed with the centering ring, which will give me more parachute space.

I ripped out the rear centering ring entirely; it'll be replaced by a higher-quality, better-centered ring made from several layers of cardboard. I'm leaving out the motor hook and moving the motor mount slightly forward to correct the stability problems with the 18mm reloadables.

The launch lug needed reglued. The fins, ugly as they are, are solidly set so they'll stay for now. Once all the internal work is complete, I will prime everything (except of course the fins) and then paint it a nice flat white - no more red mailing tube label showing through.

Migrating to the new Rocket Reviews site

2011-07-23T01:22:00.000-04:00

I was out of the rocketry world for most of the past year; I've just been too busy with school and getting into college, to say nothing of my Wikipedia addiction. So I failed to migrate myself onto the new Rocket Reviews site, formerly known as EMRR.

But I'm finally starting to do so. It's going to take me a little while - I've got about 20 flights where I need to update the motor designation on the new system, and 20 more that I have to upload.

But for now, here's my flight logs, flight statistics, and my reviews. They've been updated in the sidebar as well.

(Dick Stafford, I know you'll read this. Care to point me towards any of your always-helpful posts?)

42 years ago...

2011-07-20T23:58:00.002-04:00

Men were walking on the moon for the first time.

Pluto now has 4 moons

2011-07-20T11:10:00.001-04:00

Via Phil Plait comes the news that a fourth moon of Pluto has been discovered in new Hubble Space Telescope images.

The new object is tiny - just 8 to 21 miles across. Which isn't tiny compared to, say, Manhattan, but it is incredible when you realize that Pluto is currently three billion miles away. Which means that spotting the moon - provisionally designated S/2011 P1 - equivalent to having a marble orbiting a beach ball on top of the Empire State Building. And then spotting that marble from Chicago.

We've known about its largest moon, Charon, since 1978, but the two other moons, Nix and Hydra, were just discovered in 2005. Makes me wonder what we'll find next.

I can't wait till New Horizons shows up in 2015. We will learn a lot about Pluto and its moons very quickly.

The Shuttle and what it means to me

2011-07-19T01:05:00.000-04:00

In less than three days, the orbiter Atlantis will land back on Earth. It's a bittersweet moment for me.

On one hand, the Shuttle program has been a good thing, if not a total success. We never got even close to the weekly launches originally envisioned, nor can 14 lives be brought back, but there were 133 safe launches. Science was done; satellites were launched, and the Hubble Space Telescope was brought to space.

The Chandra X-ray Observatory, which did for X-ray astronomy what Hubble has done in visible light. Magellan, which mapped Venus. Ulysses, which showed us the poles of the sun and explored cometary tails. Galileo, which explored Jupiter. All of those probes were launched by the Space Shuttle; without it, they could not have done their missions, and science would be weaker.

The Hubble Space Telescope has done more than any other telescope in history. By accurately measuring distances to Cepheid variable stars, it has provided the (then) most accurate estimate of the Hubble Constant and thus the age of the universe. It has provided crucial evidence for the acceleration of the universe's expansion. It has found black holes in the center of galaxies and proto-planetary disks in the Orion Nebula; it has watched a comet impact Jupiter in our own solar system, and taken the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field, the deepest (furthest-looking) image of the universe yet. It's discovered optical counterparts to Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs). And it was launches and repaired (5 times) by crews on the Space Shuttle.

The International Space Station has been brought up and maintained in large part by Space Shuttle missions; the Shuttle has also provided occasional orbit-boosting burns. We now have a miniature city in Space, and even without the Shuttle we might be able to keep it a while.

But it's a sad day for NASA. For the first time since October 7th, 1958, (when the Mercury program was announced), the agency has no real program for human spaceflight. The NASA Authorization Act of 2010 suggests a new booster by 2016, but funding is in doubt. The Constellation project was canceled after going far over budget. There's not public nor governmental support like there was for the Apollo program.

The Shuttle, like I said, also was not perfect. 14 astronauts died aboard on two separate incidents. Preventable accidents. 14 of 359 is a one-in-25 fatality rate, a death rate comparable only to heads of state. Officials estimated the chance of a fatality at one in 100,000; Richard Feynman (when serving on the Challenger investigation panel) was closer when he said one in 100.

Costs skyrocketed, always and every time. The original estimate was $640 (adjusted to 2011 dollars) per pound to orbit; the actual figure was more like $27,000. Russian rockets can do it for $2250 per pound.

But it's just about over. NASA is left with a nearly blank slate. Hubble's successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, is in big danger and may never leave the ground. NASA's budget is being razed for political purposes. There are serious questions as to whether NASA will have another program like Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, or the Shuttle program. There are even those who question whether NASA will ever launch another astronaut.

Unless there is another politically-based race to space - and there may yet be with China, a country that has shown interest in weaponizing space - there will not be another program like Apollo where the whole country and all the politicians throw their hopes on it. Not unless there's something extraordinary, on the level of extraterrestrial contact or the creation of a faster-than-light drive.

The future, it seems, is the private space companies. Scaled Composites made SpaceShipOne, the first private spacecraft, and now they're creating space tourism. SpaceX is making the first new heavy booster in a decade, and the first one not created directly for NASA or the military. They plan to fly humans before 2020 in a reusable spacecraft.

This fall, I will be entering college, majoring in mechanical engineering with a concentration in aerospace engineering. At this point in time, it's what I want to do with my life. I love rocketry, I love designing things using mathematics, and I love solving problems. I can't guarantee that in four or five years I will still want to design space boosters or turbopumps, but I can guarantee that I will have a solid background in physics, mathematics, computer modeling, and design, and a degree that gives me a lot of flexibility to do what I want.

I also can't guarantee that I'll be able to get a job in aerospace engineering come 2015. The industry is going to be reeling from the end of the Space Shuttle program, and this is an industry that goes through heavy contractions on a periodic basis anyway. It's questionable how quickly private space launches of people and goods are going to grow the market for young engineers. It's a growth market eventually - lots of people and things are going to be sent to space, and they will need a lot of engineers to design a lot of rockets - but the question is when the sudden uptick begins.

And China has shown an interest in weaponizing space, which is problematic for someone who considers himself a pacifist. I haven't entirely codified my morals yet, but I think I would be very conflicted if I was to work on something that might be used not to launch a GPS satellite or a telescope or Captain Kirk, but instead to attack the other guy's astronauts or communications satellite.

But ultimately, this chronic pessimist is pretty hopeful. Whether or not NASA survives in anything like its present form, there's going to be a lot of space launches, and I believe I may be part of that. I'm definitely going to be doing something interesting. There is so much cool stuff out there, and I'm just optimistic enough to believe that space will be occupied, space will be colonized, and if we're very very lucky that it won't get weaponized. I believe that space will be revolutionized, revolutionized within my lifetime, and this revolution WILL be televised, in full-color 1080p 3D holo-screen view. I believe that the future can be as shiny as Star Trek even while the people are as real as Firefly. I want to be the one who designs the machines that make that future.

My name is David Sindel, and I'm going to be a rocket scientist when I grow up.

Hugin

2011-07-18T02:05:00.005-04:00

So, I've mentioned before that I'm a fan of free and open-source software. I browse the internet with Chrome, use Tor to get past blocks, and waste time playing Nethack. I use OpenRocket do design my rockets. I use GIMP for heavy editing of pictures (and creating animations) and Inkscape for vector graphics.

Now, I've added a new one to my stable. Hugin is a free, open-source panorama photo stiticher.

But it's more than just a photo stitcher. You can give it a bunch of images - I've personally done 11 without it crashing, but it can support at least 127 images - and it'll do almost everything for you. It'll balance colors so they all fit together, choose points to match up, and then morph each picture so that they all match up perfectly. Then, it spits out a beautiful panorama, in your choice of .tiff, .jpg, or .png.

It's really neat for me, because I like panoramas, but I'm bad at putting them together. I cobbled one good one of a mural in Park Street station in Picasa, but it can't correct perspectives at all. I attempted a couple in GIMP, but it doesn't have the spherical perspective correction nor the automatic color matching. But Hugin solves all those problems.

Here's what my own Picasa combination looked like:

And here's the panorama created by Hugin:

No contest there. (It's the southbound station building at Westerly.)

Other panoramas I've created using Hugin today (linked because they're big files, up to 12 MB):

L-13 work

2011-07-16T20:01:00.000-04:00

I'm finally getting back into building and repairing rockets, after a few months of not doing much due to school.

I started with my Goddard L-13. Last time, I fixed one of the scale details and added nose weight.

I started with a swing test this time. With a C6-3 (as heavy as even the 18mm D motors) inserted, I found the balance point and swung it on string to determine stability. It's an old standby, and good for rockets like this where simulation software doesn't work as well.

Because I built the aft end so heavy, it wasn't stable even with the additional 17g of nose weight from June. I added nose weight with quick links; it took an additional ounce (28g) before it was fully stable.

I cut two 1.5" lengths of .25" steel rod, then hand-drilled two more holes into the base of the nose cone. I glued them in and put a cap of wood glue on top to keep them very secure.

I also coated all remaining balsa areas of the nose cone with wood glue to protect them from ejection charges, especially since I find that I may need to add to the stock ejection charge of Estes motors since the body tube is fairly large. Previously, I have had no luck getting the parachute to unfurl.

The other remaining problem was the launch lug. The instructions have you place a single long lug near the bottom of the rocket. Which works okay if you build light rockets, but I build heavy rockets. So I took a short piece of launch lug and glued it higher up. (Both lugs are hidden among scale details). It's painted silver and now blends in.

Next: probably The Great Punkin.

MBTA Orange Line route diagrams

2011-07-16T01:54:00.002-04:00

My latest project on Wikipedia: Historical route diagrams on the MBTA Orange Line.

It's been pretty tricky. Having a standard set of route diagram template icons to work from helps, but they're from the German wikipedia, so their abbreviations are all in German, as is some of the documentation.

The Orange Line is also especially tricky because its route has varied a lot. The Green Line streetcars have had many different routes, but they always shared the Tremont Street Subway. The Red Line has always been centered around the connected Cambridge and Dorcester tunnels. The Blue Line, the East Boston Tunnel.

But the Orange Line strays a lot - in fact, it no longer uses any of the route that it did in 1901, when the major elevated sections were opened.

In 1901, the Charlestown Elevated carried trains from Everett to the North End. Some cars went along the Atlantic Avenue Elevated to South Station; others went into the Tremont Street Subway through center Boston. All met up in the South End and took the Washington Street Elevated to Dudley Square.

In 1908, the Washington Street Subway opened through center Boston, and the Tremont trains were diverted through it, leaving the Tremont Street Subway open to streetcars. Thus, the first modern section of the Orange Line - from Friend-Union (now Haymarket) to Boylston-Essex (now Chinatown), stopping at Milk-State (State) and Summer-Winter (Downtown Crossing) - was born.

In 1938, the Atlantic Avenue Elevated closed at South Station then completely due to lack of ridership; it was torn down for scrap during World War II.

The MBTA (formed 1963) did not like elevated lines; they are noisy and prone to derailments on sharp curves. In 1975 the stop at North Station was placed into a tunnel and a new tunnel carved under the Charles. The line was extended to Oak Grove along the commuter rail tracks, and the Charlestown Elevated was torn down.

The Washington Street El came down in 1987, as the Southwest Corridor project relocated the line to a trench alongside Amtrak and commuter rails. The service along southern Washington Street was sorely missed; the Silver Line bus service began to fill its place in 2002, but many feel that a true rail line is needed.

Na nanananana nana na Katamari Damacy

2011-07-13T18:42:00.003-04:00

Kathack.com. That is all.

Giant Color-Changing Squirrel

2011-07-12T20:57:00.005-04:00

A few miles south of center Lima, there's a giant color-changing Jesus statue. It's about 100 feet tall, and lit up at night with different colored lights.

Somehow, talking about this, I promised my sister that I would make her an animated, giant color-changing squirrel.

So here it is. I had to learn quite a bit to make it. I had to figure out how to make a mask, how to work with layers, and how to animate a GIF image.

Click for a larger version.

Happy Birthday, Neptune!

2011-07-12T16:11:00.000-04:00

According to The Bad Astronomer, it's Neptune's first birthday of discovery.

Cool!

Wait... what does that mean?

It means that it's been 164.8 years (one Neptune orbit) since it was discovered on September 23, 1846.

Mostly. There's a lot of complications. Neptune doesn't orbit the sun; like everything else in the solar system, it orbits the barycenter - the center of mass. Due to Jupiter and Saturn, the barycenter isn't exactly in the middle of the sun.

There's also other stuff. Like, we aren't sure the exact hour it was discovered. Its orbit isn't quite regular due to the gravitational tugs of Uranus and Pluto and Jupiter. And there's competing coordinate systems to choose from.

Also, Galileo. He spotted Neptune in 1612 (the greatest pre-discovery yet known) but thought it was a star because his telescope had limited resolving power.

But today, or thereabouts, is one Neptunian year since its official discovery. I'm going to celebrate by spotting it tonight.

How have I lived 18 years...

2011-07-12T01:28:00.000-04:00

Without realizing that [shift] + mousewheel = scroll sideways?

It happens to be incredibly useful in image manipulation programs, especially when editing maps at small scale in GIMP.

It also works on web browsers (or at least Chrome, anyway) but frustratingly not in Word or Notepad.

Peru.

2011-07-11T00:30:00.000-04:00

I got back on Tuesday from a vacation in Peru. It was quite a good time.

We flew in to Lima on Saturday night. After a harrowing ride to the hotel (Peru does not believe in traffic laws or speed limits; he who is first wins), we got to see my sister (who is in Peru on a semester abroad) for the first time in 4 months.

We spent Sunday walking around Miraflores (a suburb just south of Lima). Miraflores is borderd by the Pacific Ocean on the west, and the 300-foot cliffs are spectacular. The Malecon - a string of small parks and walkways on the edge - is a great place to walk. We also had lunch with my sister's host mom.

Monday we flew out to Cusco, the former Inca capital city. It's at 11,000 feet and gets more UV than any other city on the planet. We were late (Peruvian Airlines is not good at flying when it's bad weather) but got there just in time for our tour of Cusco. It included the Cathedral of Santo Domingo, Coricancha, and Sacsayhuamán. The Spanish colonial stuff is neat, but what truly fascinated me was the Inca architecture. No mortar (for their later works), beautifully cut stone, and it's earthquake-proof.

On Tuesday we spent the day walking around Cusco, eating Peruvian food, and buying stuff. We spent the day taking it easy to get acclimated to the altitude. We actually couldn't sleep well that night, because we closed the window. My brain actually would not let me sleep - first I got nightmares, then my mind was racing and I couldn't sleep, and then my knees hurt. I had to go outside on the patio and walk for a while to get some oxygen, and then after opening the window we all slept.

On Wednesday, we got up early to take the train to Machu Picchu. Our ride did not come, and it took several minutes of me dredging up my best Spanish to convince the hotel concierge that indeed we needed a taxi right then or we would miss our train. (Peru as a country is not big on the concept of "now"). But, we made our train with a minute to spare.

PeruRail runs very nice (if slow) service; our train served a nice breakfast, and the views out the dome car were incredible. The line runs through a steep river valley for almost the whole length. We got off at Km 104 (6 Km from the Aguas Calientes / Machu Picchu stop, which is in the valley 1500 feet below the ruins) and met our hiking guide. He was an awesome guide - very funny, and extremely knowledgeable.

After waiting for the next train to meet our hiking companions - a Dutch couple. We hiked up a restored section of Inca trail to Wiñay Wayna, a huge group of ruins located at 8800 feet (2800 feet above where we started, which is a lot of climbing in thin air). It contains dozens of giant agricultural terraces (each 4 fete high, 10 wide, and hundreds long) as well as a group of buildings. It's also located on the steep side of a nearly inaccessible mountain. The Incas were awesome.

From there we joined the more famous section of the Inca Trail, which was a mostly easy climb. (except for the "gringo killer" - 50 nearly vertical steps at 9000 feet. Which I ran up, cause i'm awesome like that.) At 9100 feet we came to the Sun Gate, a narrow pass. From there, the views of Machu Picchu are spectacular. (pictures eventually)

From Intipunku we hiked down to Machu Picchu itself, then took the bus down to Aguas Calientes town, where we had dinner.

Suffice to say you don't want to know the details, but I woke up sick on Thursday morning. We didn't get up early to get tickets to hike up Wayna Pichu (which has great views of the site) but I was healthy enough later to get up and meet our guide for our tour. I can't really describe how amazing the place is; it's just incredible.

(Jim Carrey was also there, randomly. We saw the horde of photographers surrounding him.)

We took the train back to Cusco that night. We opened the windows and I slept well for the first time since Lima.

On Friday we again spent a lot of time waiting for Peruvian Airlines - I derived every possible tiling of the plane that conforms to certain chacteristics while waiting - but we got back in time to go to dinner with my sister. Pardo's makes excellent roasted chicken.

We spent Saturday walking around Miraflores. We took a tour of the Huaca Pucllana, a pre-Inca pyramid constructed with earthquake-proof design. On Sunday we took the Metropolitano (a very well-designed rapid bus system) into Lima center... and randomly ran into a parade. The Peruvian president was there. Famous people count: 2.

We also went down to Barranco - another suburb - and rode the tram at the Electric Museum. An original Breda tram - very neat.

We flew out on Monday night, got back into Newark. 757s are a wonderful aircraft, but sleeping is not a recommended activity aboard. And tray tables make for awful pillows.

Tremont streets

2011-07-08T01:18:00.000-04:00

Tremont Street is one of the major throughfares in Boston. It's got lots of history on it - and under it: The Tremont Street Subway, the oldest in America, was built in 1897. It still carries Green Line trams.

"Tremont" comes from "Trimontaine" - Trimountain - one of the original names of Boston. Beacon Hill was once triple-peaked and taller, hence the name.

The original Tremont Street runs 3.3 miles from Boston Common to Brigham Circle. But it's not alone. Inside Route 128, there are no less than seven other Tremont Streets, including in the adjoining communities of Newton, Cambridge / Somerville, Everett, Malden, and Melrose. And there's more outside 128, including two in Taunton / Dighton and two around Plymouth.

And this is a fairly unique thing. There's a handful of Tremont Streets outside eastern Massachusetts - but nowhere near this density. It's obvious that a lot of cities and town wanted to copy Boston.

But the navigation just gets worse. In the same area, there are also 2 Tremont Avenues, one Court, five Places (one in downtown Boston), and three Roads. Many are connected to the various Tremont Streets. In fact, a single Tremont Street has two different Tremont Places connecting to it - one in Peabody, one in Salem.

Here's a map I made:

View Larger Map

I'm back from vacation

2011-07-05T16:27:00.000-04:00

And, while I'm still getting organized, here's a really awesome Tool cover (on koto!) to keep you entertained:

Vacation

2011-06-24T23:57:00.001-04:00

See you in July. I'll backpost some stuff about my trip, but I have no internet access till the 4th.

I am graduated.

2011-06-23T20:37:00.002-04:00

That is all.

Graduation.

2011-06-23T16:17:00.000-04:00

Less than 2 hours from now, I will be graduating high school.

It absolutely blows my mind. When I started this blog. I was a freshman. I was still a week away from the exams at the end of my freshman year. I wrote like a freshman and I was as socially adept as an onion. (They make everybody cry.)

So, this blog has been an experiment. A long-running and rather successful one. (I wasn't going for fame or popularity, just keeping myself sane and cataloging all the random stuff I find on the internet). And I've had a lot of fun.

I'm not sure what's going to happen now. I'm certainly going to keep blogging, and with the same pseudonym. It may be on this blog, or it may be a new one for college. I'm currently leaning towards keeping The Amateur Geek for the random geeky stuff, and having a few side blogs for occasional fiction writing, political ranting, and photography.

In any case it's been a fun ride. Regular posting (I've got a major backlog) resumes shortly.

Three Years

2011-06-19T00:27:00.000-04:00

Once again, I managed to miss my blogaversary. Go me.

But yeah, on the 10th it marked three years of me blogging. Which is a scary long time.

This (I think) will be post #1145. Which means I've only posted 328 times in the past year, although most of my misses were recently, due to English and other hard classes.

And, of course, I've spent the last year applying to college. And now, I've just been officially oriented as a Boston University Terrier.

Hopefully, I'll be able to blog a lot over the summer. After that, I'll be in college, and once or twice a week will be the average. (More, if I have something to procrastinate about.)

I'm back

2011-06-18T17:44:00.002-04:00

I apologize for the sudden drought of posts. First came exams, then Orientation. Expect regular blogging to assume shortly.

The Resolution of Life

2011-06-12T21:59:00.000-04:00

I've heard various claims for just how accurate the resolution of the human eye is. Wikipedia says a theoretical maximum of 1.2 arcminutes (60 arcmin = 1 degree = 1/360th circle) with practical limit around 1.7 arcmin; true 20/20 vision is the ability to recognize patterns at 1 arcmin line width.

(That said, however, there are certain situations where the human eye can detect much smaller resolutions. Stars only 0.1 arcseconds (1/600 arcminute) in width can be seen with the naked eye because of their high brightness. Lines against contrasting backgrounds are also more visible; with clear air, one can make out a 2-inch (5-cm) with power line from a distance of several miles. At 2 miles distance (3.2 km), this is equal to a resolution of about 1/20 arcmin, or 3 arcseconds.)

Assuming the resolution of the human eye is 1 arcmin for normal images, then, what resolution does a computer screen need? I personally sit 24 inches from my computer screen (laptop, on my lap); at that distance, one minute of arc is equal to 0.18 millimeters. Given that in the worst-case senario, you need two rows of RGB pixels to produce a color pixel, this means a pizel size of 0.09 mm - equal to about 280 pixels per inch.

My personal display is about 7.5" by 12" - equal to 2100 by 3360 pixels at this "lifelike" resolution. (In reality, it's 800 by 1280 - 38% of the resolution). The largest displays right now are usually 1920 x 1200 pixels, and about 24" by 15". An life-resolution image on one of these giant desktop monitors would have to be 4200 by 6720 pixels - a whopping 28 megapixels. (All image sizes given here are for jpeg format; multiply by about 4 for PNG format).

Which, in terms of cameras nowadays, isn't that much. You can find 14-megapixel cameras for under $300, and Canon offers a 10-megapixel camera for $100. (Nikon will sell you a top-of-the line DSLR with 24.5 MP if you have 4 figures to spare). But the problem lies in the filesize. A good estimate is one megabyte per three megapixels for an image with a reasonable amount of detail - so that giant 4200x6720 image will be almost 10 megabytes. (70 will fill a CD). Even the laptop-size image is 3 megabytes.

(It should be mentioned that, sitting 10 feet from a TV, 0.5mm pixels will suffice for reality. Few HDTVs offer this size pixel, but any laptop does. A life-resolution image for such a 60" non-widescreen (36" by 48") TV would be only 1800x2400 - taken by almost any digital camera on the market - and just 1.5 megabytes in size, equal to 90 Mb/s for 60fps HDTV. (1080p HDTV is just 1080 pixels wide, or only about 60% of the resolution of life).

So, this brings us to the real question: what is the resolution of life? Well, let's assume the human field of view is 180 degrees by 180 degrees (it's actually a bit smaller, but this makes the numbers easier). From left to right, you'll need 10800 arcminutes - 10800 pixels. Thus, at best, a human can view a 10800 x 10800 image. Any image larger than that is unnecessary unless it can be zoomed; higher resolution cannot be detected by the human eye.

Now, recall that that's on a half-sphere. If half the circumference is 10800 arcminutes - or 10800 pixels - then the radius would be 3438 pixels. For a hemisphere, surface area A = 2 pi r², or about 74.3 megapixels.

That's the magic number, then:

74.3 megapixels

. Which, among other things, means that a 25 Mb jpeg contains sufficient information to be indistinguishable from reality, even on a full-wraparound display.

Working on the L-13

2011-06-12T19:07:00.000-04:00

My Fliskits L-13 did not have very good luck on its last outing. It was unstable under the larger motor, and a bit of flashing got ripped off.

To replace the flashing, I first tried to use similar plastic. But bent plastic has to be formed that way; trying to bent 1/64" plastic just causes it to break. So, instead, I found some old tin flashing I had squirreled away. It's thinner than the plastic, but it cuts straight, bends easily, and matches the paint perfectly. It's now fixed in place.

For stability, I decided to add nose weight, because there's no rear weight to remove, and it being a scale model I couldn't just add larger fins. I drilled two 3-centimeter deep (1.25") holes into the base of the nose cone, on opposite sides of the eyebolt. Each hole perfectly fits a 1" length of quarter-inch steel rod. Once they're fully glued in, they'll add 0.6 ounces of nose weight, which should keep it stable even on the heavier C6 and D motors.

The one remaining problem is the parachute: it never manages to come out. It's probably the parachute protector which I like to use. Perhaps a baffle may be a good choice.

Listen.

2011-06-09T23:19:00.002-04:00

This is music:

Google Guitar

2011-06-09T20:06:00.000-04:00

I love having an electronic tuner. Among other things, I can figure out what the notes of the guitar currently on Google are.

It's a G major scale, from a low G up to the B an octave and a third above it.

The arrangements of the notes (B' is an octave above B, etc):

C
E
          A
G       D
B       F#
G'      A'
B

Weekend of my Senior Year

2011-06-06T22:39:00.000-04:00

Extended weekend, that is, as it started on Thursday, with Awards Night. I won awards for having the highest math and science awards in the senior class - made even better by learning that my sister had got both three years ago. Mandachan was up on stage several times, including receiving a band award, and three of my close friends also won scholarships.

Friday night was my very last high school band concert, and it was my best. We played three neat songs in Symphonic Band, ending with von Suppe's Light Cavalry Overture. It was by far the most difficult and demanding piece I have ever played, and it was fantastic. You can listen to it here. Then, we played 4 good songs in Jazz Band, ending with "Rock with You" - an actual rock version - in which I had a solo. Finally, everyone in marching band came out into the audience to play one final song. I dropped the octave and played the trombone part on my trumpet at purely ridiculous volume. The perfect end to four great years of band.

After the concert, we hit the road. I drove to Bridgeport, and my dad (who, it should be noted, is rather awesome) drove the rest of the way to Penn State (a 7-hour drive, on I-80, overnight) for my last ARML math competition. Not a bad drive, except for the piece of semi-truck coilspring that got caught in our undercarriage for a few miles and made us think the bumper was falling off). I was on the Connecticut B1 team, and we did great. Third place in the nation in the B division, which means we'll be getting brand-new top-of-the-line TI N-spire calculators. I was one of three on the B1 team with a 7/10 on the individual round. (8/10 qualifies you to take another test for nation ranking). For the first time, there was a CT student who took that runoff - go Kei!

Here's my cell phone shot of the Delaware River Viaduct at Delaware Water Gap. Built in 1908-10, it's the largest continuous-pour-construction concrete structure in the world at 1452 feet long and 65 tall. It was built as one of the crowning jewels of the Lackawanna Cut-off for the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad, and it's in the beginning stages of being restored for NJ Transit passenger service.

After getting back on Sunday, I went straight to the final party/banquet for tennis. My last time hanging out with my team, and my coach. Buncha wackos, all of em, but a great team, and I will miss them.

Finally, I finished and printed out my senior critique - my last high school thesis paper, and analysis of an entire novel. My final title was "Console Cowboys, Razorgirls, and Artificial Intelligences, oh my: Elements of Transhumanism in William Gibson's Neuromancer". Doing it on Gibson's seminal cyberpunk work was far more enjoyable than reading a "classic" piece of literature.

So, that was my weekend. The end of band, tennis, and math team for my high school experience, and my last major paper completed. Bittersweet, but a wonderful weekend.

Want to get lost in Boston?

2011-05-30T23:33:00.001-04:00

Then perhaps hop on the T.

Do you want to go to Fenway? (Green Line D branch)
Don't accidentally go to Fenwood Road (Green Line E branch).

If you're visiting Harvard (Red line), then you probably don't want to get off at Harvard Avenue (Green line B branch).

If you're going to Longwood Medical Area (Green Line E branch) on the east side of the Muddy River, I'd recommend not taking a D branch train to Longwood Avenue.

If you're heading to Central on the Red Line, watch out for Central Avenue on the Ashmont-Mattapan High Speed Line.

Don't confuse Kenmore (Green line) with Kendall / MIT (Red Line) or Kent Street (C branch).

St. Pauls Street pops up on two different Green Line branches - B and C!

You can hop the D branch to Newton Highlands or Newton Centre... but make sure you don't want to be on a commuter train to Newtonville or West Newton... or a Silver Line bus to Newton Street.

Massachusetts Avenue is a long road... and the Orange Line and Silver Line don't stop at the same place on it....

Make sure to differentiate between Chestnut Hill Avenue (B branch) and Chestnut Hlll (D branch).

If you're looking for Riverway on the E branch, then you definitely do not want a D branch tram heading to Riverside.

There's Washington Street (B branch) and Washington Square (C branch), and there's Wood Island (Blue Line) and Woodland (D branch).

But the biggest mistake of all: if you're at South Station and looking for a Silver Line bus to Worcester Square, then it would be a very, very bad idea to board a train to Worcester.

MBTA Silver Line map - Inkscape

2011-05-29T23:59:00.003-04:00

This is the result of about six hours of work in Inkscape. I had to learn arc drawing, grouping, polygons, and more to create it... but it's done, it's perfect, and it's uploaded to Commons. I even managed to get the text to upload correctly on the first try.

It's a schematic map of the Silver Line rapid bus service run by the MBTA in Boston. The official maps aren't great, and I wanted a clear map to illustrate the Wikipedia article.

(Click to go to the file page)

Inkscapin'

2011-05-28T14:21:00.000-04:00

I took a screenshot of Google Maps, imported into Inkscape. Traced the rail line with Bezier curves, then added Underground-style markers for the stations. Rectangle for the scale, text labels for scale and stations, and then a title. Mess around in the XML documentation to remove a couple problematic empty textboxes... and here we have a brand-new shiny vector graphic of the Ashmont-Mattapan High Speed Line.

(This is a PNG version so I can use it on Blogger; click on the image to go to the original infinitely-scalable vector version.)

Something from Nothing

2011-05-28T01:51:00.000-04:00

I usually tend to get a lot of decent pictures. Some luck, some skill, and some fancy work in Picasa.

But sometimes, I get pictures like this: almost completely featureless:

But then, I can still play with them. Increase fill light, auto-contrast, then deepen shadows, and you get this:

It's an Amtrak station sign in Providence, RI. Not great quality, but decent. You can even make out the bricks on the wall.

More T Pictures

2011-05-28T00:40:00.000-04:00

All are from my March 23rd trip. Click on the link to go to the Commons file description page.

Ongoing construction at Science Park (which is now temporarily closed for rebuilding). Note the fancy old black wrought-iron catenary wire hangers:

A station sign at Wellington. This platform is intended to serve the express track (barely visible in the bottom-left corner) which has never been used. The commuter track is in the background.

Two abandoned RDCs (Rail Diesel Cars) sitting on a dead track in Boston Engine Terminal. These served with the Boston & Maine and the MBTA, and are visible from the Orange Line between Sullivan Square and Community College.

Three shots at Community College.
Sign:

Platforms:

And its namesake behind it:

And three shots at South Station, taken from my outbound Amtrak train. Here's a couple of bilevel coach cars; based on my analysis it's the P527 5:35 local to Worcester.

Here's a train entering the station; I believe it to be #918, the 5:00 inbound from Stoughton, with the end of P527 behind it.

And their two locomotives:

What would Connecticut look like with Route 11?

2011-05-25T21:35:00.000-04:00

Like this:

View Route Eleven in a larger map

I included exit ramps for exit 4 (half completed to Route 82), exit 2 (to Route 161, presumably), and to I-95. (No ramps from 11 to 395 will be made). I don't know where exit 3 will go.

Launch Report #44: CATO 173

2011-05-25T00:00:00.000-04:00

(Yikes, almost six months since I last flew a rocket..)

I finally got out to a CATO launch on Saturday. I had math team practice beforehand (the depths of my nerdery are astounding, neh?) so I only had time to fly three rockets. Still, lots of fun.

First was the first flight of the MLAS. It's still not quite finished - needs some fillets and some paint - but enough so to fly. I put it up on a C6-3, and thanks to the extra nose weight I added it flew perfectly straight. One parachute got a bit melted, but there was no damage.

Second was the Multi-Goon on three B6-4s. Somehow, it didn't work right. I think that one igniter got pulled out slightly while I was wiring up the cluster, and it ignited late, causing the rocket to spin in midair immediately after leaving the launch rod.

Third was by Fliskits L-13 on a D13-4W White Lightning reload. The 18mm reloads have a lot of punch, and this one was no exception. Unfortunately, the L-13 wasn't quite stable. Just off the launch rod, it took a 90-degree left turn and heading for the northern horizon at about 30 feet altitude. Fortunately, it's a light and draggy rocket, so after the motor burned out it floated pretty gently back to earth. No causalities, and the only damage was a small scale detail (replaceable) which got knocked off by the launch rod.

Interestingly, these three flights now put me at a recorded total of just over 3,000 Newton-seconds of impulse burned.

And more T.F. Green station pictures

2011-05-19T23:29:00.000-04:00

Previous installment

Here's few more shots I just uploaded, looking in and at the massive quarter-mile skyway which now connects the station to the airport:

All images should link to the file information pages. Here is the category of all T.F. Green station pictures.

Ruggles pictures

2011-05-19T23:21:00.000-04:00

I've finally finished uploading all my Ruggles pictures from my February trip to Wikimedia Commons. Here they are.

Artwork inside the overhead walkway:

Snow-covered commuter rail platform (part of the platform was cleared off)

Looking at the platform from under the overpass:

A station sign; color has been saturated a tad:

Looking over to the Orange Line platform:

An inbound Orange Line train:

Heading away:

And an outbound train:

Finally, after 15 minutes of waiting, a commuter rail train arrived, #1608 inbound from Needham. Here's the cab car leading the train:

And a surprise! New locomotive, Motive Power MPI36 #11, pushing the train. I was one of the first to get a picture:

A few minutes later came #1809 outbound to Providence. Here's a shot of passengers boarding:

I'm too lazy to link to all of them individually, so here is the link to the category on Commons, which has my images plus a few others.

College Mail

2011-05-16T20:35:00.000-04:00

Unsolicited mail from universities I did not look at: 24 lbs 6 ounces

Mail from universities I had some interest in: 2 lbs, 2 ounces

Mail from universities I applied to but am not attending: 8 lbs 8 ounces

Amount of college mail going in the recycle bin: 35 pounds

(Total mail and received-during-visit stuff from BU: 2.1 pounds)

I like this kid.

2011-05-11T00:41:00.000-04:00

Chris Whitehead goes to school near Cambridge, England. He's not a terribly rebellious boy, but he's decided to take a stand. His (apparently public) school's dress code does not allow shorts, even during the hot months of spring and summer. And of course they're not allowed to wear jeans - they must wear "plain black tailored trousers or knee-length skirts without slits". And fitted trousers happen to be about the most miserable thing possible to wear when it's about 70 degrees out. You sweat, they stick, they ride up, and it's just plain uncomfortable - and hard to concentrate.

So, he and other students are justifiably angry over the capricious policy. But young Mr. Whitehead doesn't want to actually break the rules - being uncomfortable is one thing, but getting in trouble is another. So he looks for a loophole, and he finds it. The section of the dress code about trousers and skirts does not specify gender, because that would be discriminatory. But girls can, by society's arbitrary rules change into leg-baring skirts, while boys cannot.

Well, forget those unwritten rules, because Chris Whitehead is wearing a skirt. Knee-length black skirt, borrowed from his sister. He's a bit more comfortable, and the administration is taking notice (hopefully) that students are dissatisfied.

The astute reader will notice I did not mention his age. He's in Year Eight - twelve years old. That's roughly eighth grade here in the US, and it happens to be middle school. Middle schoolers are sadists. A large number are bullies, including those that are well-adjusted before and after. Any boy showing signs of being gay/bisexual or effeminate, or otherwise not conforming to the heterosexual hyper-masculine paradigm is a ripe target. This is a brave young man.

Chris Whitehead is standing up to authority, and he's doing so in an excellent way. I am very pleased also to see that his parents are publicly in support of his decision - and so are many of his peers.

Small MLAS update

2011-05-11T00:19:00.002-04:00

I haven't had a lot of time to make progress on the MLAS lately, but I've gotten a bit done.

After it getting soaked, the nose cone shoulder didn't fit quite right - no matter how I sanded it, it wouldn't slide smoothly. So I took it apart a bit, cut a slit in the cardboard shoulder, and glued it back together, so it's about 1mm smaller in diameter.

That millimeter looks to be just enough. I hope to have the whole thing ready for painting (again...) in a few days, for a flight at CATO on the 21st.

Physics Exam... sorta.

2011-05-10T23:49:00.000-04:00

So, yesterday, just after noon, I'm sitting down to take my physics exams. I fill out the forms, open the shrink-wrapped test, and... the fire alarm goes off.

Everyone heads outside. A few minutes later, a fire truck shows up; over the next 20 minutes it is followed by six more from two different towns. Turns out, two gas detectors went off in the old steam tunnels under the school. They had to go in with oxygen gear and such to make sure it was safe.

We were outside for over an hour; fortunately it was sunny and warm, and everyone stayed pretty calm and behaved.

Long story short, I missed the Mechanics section of the exam and will be retaking it on the 20th. I did take the Electricity and Magnetism section since we were back inside by 2:00; I feel that I did fairly well.

Physics Exams Tomorrow

2011-05-09T00:30:00.000-04:00

I take both parts of the AP Physics C Exam - Mechanics, and Electricity & Magnetism - tomorrow afternoon. I'm pretty freaked out. It's very hard material, and I didn't learn all of it in class - especially the calculus sections, which I had to teach completely to myself.

**Breathe**