Archive for August, 2007

Google Flight Sim

Posted: 31 August 2007 in Uncategorized
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TechCrunch just posted a story about a hidden feature of Google Earth: a flight simulator. To get there on a PC, just hit Ctrl-Alt-A and on a Mac, it’s Command-Option-A (capital A). You can choose between flying an F16 or an SR22 prop plane. The F16 is fast but the controls are a little pickier, while the SR22 is slow and more stable.

Some key commands to get you going (if you’re impatient, like me):

  • left/right-arrow — ailerons left and right (this makes you roll if you’re unfamiliar with aircraft terms)
  • up/down arrow — elevator up/down (this makes you go up or down)
  • shift + left/right arrow — rudder left or right (this turns you right/left)
  • page up/page down — increase or reduce thrust

Game play is a bit sucky, but as TechCrunch points out, the nifty feature here is the fact that you are flying over real images. The downside, of course, is that those images aren’t 3-D. In the screenshot below, I am flying up Broadway in Manhattan approaching Central Park.

Google Flight Simulator - Manhattan approaching Central Park

Dog Obsession pt. 3

Posted: 31 August 2007 in Uncategorized
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Whenever we make up our bed and put all the decorative pillows on it, Willow loves it. After a night of visitors, we came into our bedroom to find Willow passed out beneath a minor avalanche.

My dog Willow sleeping on our bed beneath an avalanche of pillows

This picture was taken with my new cell phone on the highest quality level (1600×1200). The image was too large to send to myself via email so I bought a 1 GB micro SD card off of newegg for about $12. It’s a great way to get around spending extra on picture/video messaging. It won’t be saving me anything, though, since my phone plan includes more free messages than I’m likely to ever use.

Supergeek to the rescue!

Posted: 31 August 2007 in Uncategorized
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Clive Thompson has an interesting article in Wired a short while back that explains why we can all rest easy: there are geeks like Bill Gates in the world who can have compassion on more than eight people at once.

Phew. I can finally get some sleep. I was seriously worrying what’s going to happen when oil supplies start to run out given that the entire world economy depends on it. No more. Oh and global warming? Fahgetaboutit! A geek will save the day because he can think in terms of mega, giga, tera, peta, exa, zetta, yotta — because .. wait for it .. his job demands it. Just to reassure us that he hasn’t just emerged from Gates’ backside, Clive does throw in an occasional aside as to how Gates is a drooling social bafoon — but don’t be fooled. This piece is little more than worshipping at the Gates throne.

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Don’t wash windows – become a prostitute

Posted: 29 August 2007 in Uncategorized
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A friend of mine sent me an odd story about how Italian police officers are now spending their time: stopping the heinous crime of washing your car windows at a stoplight. At first, I thought, well that’s a bugger-all odd thing to be concerned about (I always think to myself in incorrect, bastardized British slang). Then it became clear:

“Foreigners are also blamed for much of the street crime in a relatively safe country. Most people wielding sponges on street corners are Romanian gypsies, often young women and children.”

And there we have it. The gypsies. For as long as there have been gypsies, the good people of Europe have shunned them. And now they have found one more way of making their lives that much harder. Anyone caught committing this godless act (window-washing) is subject to confiscation of the tools of the trade (sponge, rag, dirty water), fines, and imprisonment. The magnificent mayor of Rome justified these draconian regulations:

“People must realize that behind the window-washers there is exploitation of minors, which is a crime. Like prostitution this is a racket that must be smashed.”

I can just see him banging his fist down on a podium as he says that last bit. So now window washing is on the same level as prostitution, which is exactly what these gypsies might have to resort to if they want to eat.

Abandon New Orleans

Posted: 29 August 2007 in Uncategorized
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I am going to say this even though it is not politically correct. Abandon New Orleans. Help the people there move out and establish new digs. It has long been known that New Orleans is sinking. As sediment is poured into the ocean from the Mississippi River, the Earth’s crust (1) bends under the weight. Currently this is resulting in the city sinking at the rate of 1-8 mm per year. So when the next Katrina comes, and everyone agrees that it will, all of this effort and money will have been for naught. Plus more people and pets will probably die.

So why are we down there rebuilding on rotten ground? It seems like there is almost some religious zeal driving people to reestablish this Mecca of jazz, Mardi Gras and debauchery. Is that too harsh or prudish? Seriously, is it just so that we can have a great party town? The arguments I have seen tout the Army Corps of Engineers new plan to protect the city against future disasters. Geologists say this is futile. There is nothing we can do when the whole crust is bending beneath the weight of the sediment dumped by the fourth longest river in the world.

Now granted, there is a lot of historical importance to New Orleans. Preserving that is not a complete waste of time. It doesn’t mean people should be building their homes there. Let me just conclude with these thoughts from Geology.com:

  • Hurricanes will repeatedly impact New Orleans
  • Sea level is rising and reduces the effectiveness of any levee system over time
  • The city is subsiding and this also reduces levee effectiveness
  • The current levee system is vulnerable to terrorist attack at many points

Discovery News: “Two Years Later, New Orleans Still Sinking”

(1) Actually it is the entire lithosphere that is bending which includes the crust, the Moho, and the upper mantle.

CICLing 2008: CFP

Posted: 28 August 2007 in Uncategorized
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The 9th annual Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics is calling for papers. The conference will be held in Haifa, Israel from February 17-23, 2008. Two of the keynote speakers were professors of mine last semester. Alon Lavie works on machine translation (including for low-resource languages) and machine translation evaluation. Kemal Oflazer was a visiting professor here at CMU last semester and advised me for a lab project on Old English morphology. He’s one of the leading proponents of finite state technology for morphological analysis and has done a lot of work with Turkish, which has a very rich morphology.

Submission Deadline: October 15, 2007.

The full CFP is given below:

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Chinese internet watchdog

Posted: 28 August 2007 in Uncategorized
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Well, Chinese internet users are getting the shaft yet again. Beijing police are going to be putting cartoon police officers on the top Chinese web portals. These nifty little guys will warn users that they shouldn’t be looking at illegal websites. Isn’t that sweet? We wouldn’t want all those minds polluted by notions of liberty, religion, or political dissention.

The Space Station goes gimmicky

Posted: 28 August 2007 in Uncategorized
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As a big fan of both Star Wars and the International Space Station, you would think that the upcoming marriage of the two would delight me. You would be wrong.

Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber will be flown to Houston, where it will be sent off by Chewie and a host of other minor Star Wars characters, including R2 and some stormtroopers. Then, it will be carried along with the new Italian-built Harmony node to the space station by STS-120 (Discovery) on October 23rd. At the end of the mission, it will be brought home and probably gain a few tens-of-thousands of dollars in value as a result. The reason for this gimmick is the 30th anniversary of the Star Wars franchise.

I suppose the reason I hate this cheap, pointless exercise so much is that I am really angry with people not appreciating the sheer awesomeness that is the International Space Station. Most Americans would be shocked to learn that there are currently people living in space. The fact that they don’t already know it says to me that something has gone horribly wrong in our national psyche. So NASA feels the need to allow this gimmick to proceed, perhaps in hopes of increasing awareness and therefore funding. Maybe it’s not so much anger I feel as it is sorrow, for the futility I sense in trying to change the status quo with such a cheap trick.

Or maybe I’m just being way too dramatic — a charge that has oft been levelled at me. I will not deny it. Probably the LucasArts people wanted to generate some buzz for their franchise and the NASA geeks, having a high probability of being devoted Star Wars fans, accepted gladly.

Space.com: “NASA Shuttle to Launch Luke Skywalker’s Lightsaber”

FreeAlert.org

Posted: 28 August 2007 in Uncategorized
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Last year I worked on a project with my friend Israel Kloss called FreeAlert. The site is not-for-profit and was originally intended to help refugees entering the Washington, DC area find things they need for free. It now covers major metropolitan areas all across the United States and is intended to benefit everyone.

The idea is simple. Enter some keywords and get matching free items off of craigslist for your city sent to your cell phone. You can enter up to 5 sets of keywords and each set has exclusion terms. This makes it so that you can receive notices with the term computer but without the term desk. Israel just took the site out of private beta last week and it is currently in public beta mode.

It was an interesting project for me because it gave me the chance to work in python on some http and smtp protocol code. It also gave me the chance to work on processing xml and rss feeds. Definitely some cool stuff there and it has resulted in a spin-off that will probably be functioning fairly soon. Israel is one of those people with a lot of great ideas and he has the personality to inspire you with them. Plus he is also one of those rare people that actually care enough about the suffering of others to actually try to do something about it, which you just have to admire.

So, please, check it out and let us know how we can make it better.

Total Lunar Eclipse Blues

Posted: 27 August 2007 in Uncategorized
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Much to my sorrow, it looks like seeing the total lunar eclipse that is to happen early tomorrow morning is not in the cards. The eclipse will begin just after 4:51am. At that point, the moon will be 18 degrees above the western horizon, which means I’ll have a hard time getting to a place in Pittsburgh where I can view it free of buildings, mountains (hills), or trees. By 5:30am, when half of the moon is consumed by the partial eclipse, it will be a mere 12 degrees above the horizon. By the time the total eclipse starts, it will be about 6 degrees above the horizon and dawn will already be brightening the sky. If I lived in Los Angeles, the moon would be a whopping 36 degrees above the horizon when the total eclipse began.

At least I still have the Aurigids to look forward to this Saturday. We’re going to Donna’s mom’s house, in semi-rural eastern Pennsylvania. The viewing won’t be as good as my uncle’s location in Ohio, but it will certainly suffice. The Aurigids are a meteor shower caused by the passage of comet Kiess in 4 AD and later in 1911 AD. A trail of debris circles the sun in its path and the Earth occasionally passes into this trail. The great news is, it appears that this year we are poised to go straight into the heart of this debris field. The bad news is, it will again be mainly viewable on the west coast. The shower will peak around 4:30 in the morning in the west. The last Aurigid shower had mostly bright meteors that came in vivid colors. The next Aurigid shower won’t be in my lifetime.

NASA: “Strange Lights: The 2007 Aurigid Meteor Shower”

The Aurigid Meteor Shower Viewing Campaign

Update

There will be a team from the University of North Dakota travelling to Las Vegas to provide a live webcam feed of the lunar eclipse.

National Geographic has a nice graphic showing how much of the eclipse will be visible where.

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