The Endeavour

I ran across the book Team Moon by Catherine Thimmesh when I took my kids to the library. The book’s subtitle is “How 400,000 People Landed Apollo 11 on the Moon.” This children’s book focuses on the thousands of people who worked behind the scenes of Apollo 11. It highlights some of the things that went wrong or could have gone wrong. One of the early pages of the book quotes the speech that was prepared for President Nixon to read if the mission had failed.

Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace … These brave men, Neil Armstrong and [Buzz] Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.

Grim words for a children’s book. And yet without some explanation of the dangers they faced, it’s impossible to appreciate the astronauts’ bravery. When I was a child, I was puzzled by talk of brave astronauts. In my mind, astronauts simply got on board a rocket the same way I got in a car. What was brave about that? It didn’t occur to me that they might not return safely.

Team Moon reminded me of Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose. The image of the Lewis and Clark expedition I had from childhood was about as naive as my image of astronauts. I pictured a couple men with coonskin hats in a canoe going on a little trip, not 33 soldiers on a three-year mission. (The name “Lewis and Clark” doesn’t help, implying that they were the expedition rather than the leaders of the expedition.) I didn’t appreciate the scope or danger of the voyage until I read Ambrose’s book as an adult. I hope someone writes a children’s book in the style of Team Moon about the expedition if there’s not already such a book.

Computer chips can use significantly less energy if they don’t have to be correct all the time. That’s the idea behind PCMOS — probabilistic complementary metal-oxide semiconductor technology. Here’s an excerpt from Technology Review’s article on PCMOS.

[Inventor Krishna] Palem’s idea is to lower the operating voltage of parts of a chip—specifically, the logic circuits that calculate the least significant bits, such as the 3 in the number 21,693. The resulting decrease in signal-to-noise ratio means those circuits would occasionally arrive at the wrong answer, but engineers can calculate the probability of getting the right answer for any specific voltage. “Relaxing the probability of correctness even a little bit can produce significant savings in energy,” Palem says.

In applications such as video processing, a small probability of error would not make a noticeable difference. It would an interesting exercise to separate those parts of a system that require accuracy and those that tolerate error. For example, a cell phone might use high-accuracy chips for dialing phone numbers but low-accuracy chips for controlling the display in order to extend battery life.

The Code Wizard blog posted some anecdotal evidence of attention span varying as a function of nationality.

The author looked through the visitor statistics on his blog and observed that Americans spend less time per page than visitors from other countries. Visitors from Canada, Australia, and England spend far more time per page and click more links while they’re there. I’m not aware of anything in the content of the blog that would be intrinsically more interesting to folks outside the US.

It’s not hard to use Greek letters and math symbols in (X)HTML, but apparently it’s not common knowledge either. Many pages insert little image files every time they need a special character. Such web pages look a little like ransom notes with letters cut from multiple sources.  Sometimes this is necessary but often it can be avoided.

I’ve posted a couple pages on using Greek letters and math symbols in HTML, XML, XHTML, TeX, and Unicode. I included TeX because it’s the lingua franca for math typography, and I included Unicode because the X(HT)ML representation of symbols is closely related to Unicode.

The notes give charts for encoding Greek letters and some of the most common math symbols. They explain how HTML and XHTML differ in this context and also discuss browser compatibility issues.

I was talking to my wife about my web site last night. One my daughters interrupted with “You have a web site?!” Then one of her sisters put things in perspective. “Yeah, but it doesn’t have any games.”

The amount of spam I receive on this blog has increased greatly and so I’ve gotten more aggressive about spam filtering. If you post a comment and it never appears, please send me a note at my last name at my domain name dot com.

I added a Google custom search engine to my web site this weekend. You can always get Google to limit it search to a particular domain by starting your query with site:domain, but custom search engines are more convenient and more configurable. You can specify which sites to search, so you could combine multiple domains or specify individual pages. I configured my search engine to search my domain as well as several articles I’ve written that are posted on other web sites.  

I also created a custom search engine for my employer’s software download site. The site’s built-in search feature only indexes project descriptions. The custom search engine indexes everything Google can find on the site and so it includes reference material such as product manuals. The two are complementary: the built-in search returns a list of products while Google returns a list of pages.

The duck-billed platypus is the most recent species to have its genome sequenced. These odd animals are even more strange at the DNA level. Some features of their DNA are avian, some are reptilian, and of course some are mammalian. See the Science Daily article for more details.

I’ve made a few changes to my blog and my personal web site and would welcome your feedback.

I added a widget on my blog sidebar to make it easy to subscribe. It seems to work well. Let me know if you have problems.

I added tags to my blog posts. The tag links should help people find more closely related articles if they’re interested.I’m still figuring out how I want to use tags and categories. For now, categories are high-level groupings and tags are more detailed. Also, posts generally fall into one category, maybe two, but often have multiple tags. I appreciate what Thomas Guest said on his blog about eliminating categories and just having tags, but I haven’t decided I want to do. I’ve thought about adding a tag cloud, but I don’t want the sidebar to be too cluttered. Maybe I’ll add a cloud and cut out the category list. I would appreciate your suggestions.

My personal website now has a sitemap for humans. I’ve had a sitemap for search engines but realized I needed to make it easier for humans to find things on the site as the number of pages has increased.

Update: I just looked at this site with Internet Explorer 6 for the first time. All the content that is supposed to be at the top of the right sidebar is at the bottom, and the main content is pushed off to the left. Has the site always looked bad under IE 6 or did a recent change cause this? Any suggestions how to fix it?

This weekend I stumbled across the book Houston Deco at the library. The book is filled with photos of Art Deco and Art Moderne architecture in Houston and the surrounding area. I had no idea how much modernistic architecture there was in Houston until I read the book. Some of the photos were of buildings I’ve seen or even been inside without paying much attention to the architecture. More photos are available at the Houston Deco website.

Edward Hallowell coined two great terms in his book Crazy Busy: C-state and F-state. 

C-state is clear, calm, cool, collected, consistent, concentrated, convivial, careful, curious, creative, courteous, and coordinated.

F-state fractures focus, is frenzied, feckless, flailing, fearful, forgetful, flustered, furious, fractious, feverish, and frantic.

Multitasking leads to F-state and activates different parts of the brain than C-state. Just giving F-state a name and being aware of it helps to back out of it.

I moved my blog this weekend from the limited version of WordPress provided by my web hosting company to self-hosted WordPress. Please let me know if you have any problems with this new version.

I ran across this on Guy Kawasaki’s blog, what he calls “the cleverest idea I’ve seen in years.” It’s a water pump for developing areas that works by having children play on in. Here’s a video from National Geographic demonstrating the pump.

During the Victorian era, Scotland produced the best engineers in the world. It became routine for British ships to have a Scottish engineer on board. Star Trek’s Scottish engineer Montgomery Scott reflects this tradition.

Source: Victorian Britian

Hospitals often paint clowns on the walls of the pediatric wing assuming children like them. When someone finally asked kids whether they like clowns, they found that not one out of 255 kids questioned did.

See No Clowning for Hospitalized Kids for details.