Stan’s Obligatory Blog

This is an odd sight on the Caltech campus. It’s 8:00 in the morning, and all these people are lined up to get tickets to hear Stephen Hawking speak tonight. Among scientists, he’s apparently something of a rock star.

On Sunday Morning, I went out to Beverly Hills for their annual Safety Fair at the farmer’s market. I’ve been there before, and it’s usually a pretty fun time.

The people from Quake Cottage had their portable earthquake simulator there. Erik and I both rode it, and it was pretty realistic. Although I suppose when the Big One actually happens, what are the odds you’ll be sitting in a chair that’s bolted to the floor and has nice big handles to hang on to?

This year I didn’t see the gourmet tamales place there. But that was all right. I still had a nice carne asada sandwich for lunch, followed by a chocolate Nutella crepe. Yum.

And of course, we got to talk to lots of people, hand out earthquake information, and answer lots of questions. So overall it was a pretty good time.

Back in 1984, I bought a pinball machine. It was a 1979 Bally Future Spa game, and I used to play it a lot when it was in an arcade in downtown Huntington Beach. For many years, it was the weird centerpiece to my bachelor living room, as well as a piggy bank. I never removed the coin mechanism, so I fed it quarters every night. And I managed to save lots of money that way.

Several years ago, I lent it out to a friend from work. He and his wife liked pinball, and they had two young boys, too. So the machine got some good use. But over time, it broke down and gathered dust. So last weekend, they brought it back to me. And I got out the schematics and started fixing it. Over the years, I’ve fixed this machine many times. It’s where I learned about electronics.

When I first tried it, it was stone dead. Some poking with a multimeter found that the main power supply fuse was burned out. So today I stopped off at Radio Shack and got a new one. Then the machine powered on. But the backboard lights were off, and the flippers didn’t work.

Part of the legacy of the time the machine spent by the beach is that a lot of the connectors are corroded from the salt air. This has been a problem for as long as I’ve had it. So I’ve managed to compensate by just wiring things together with alligator clips to bypass the worst of the corroded connectors. And after positioning three alligator clip jumpers, I was able to get the game to self-test and boot up. Then I played a couple of games.

Next, I replaced all the rubber pieces. My friend had bought a nearly-complete rubber kit for it a while back, so I put all those on today. I also noticed that the battery on the main board had come loose, which is why the game couldn’t remember the high score. So I soldered that back on with a little bit of wire.

The last details to take care of are some new rubber pieces for the four little posts, and a new target to replace the broken one. I ordered all these tonight. So pretty soon, I can introduce Lucinda to pinball. Don’t know if she’ll like it or not, but I think I’ll have some fun with it.

Today when I was reading my mail, I saw the Caltech calendar for the week, and it said that today was the ME72 engineering contest. This is the course where students are issued a ‘box of junk’ and have to use it to build a machine to compete in a contest. It’s sort of a ‘final exam’, but even though there’s a winner and a bunch of losers, it’s really more about the experience.

This is the first time in many years that I’ve made it out to watch. Sadly, most years I only find out about it after it’s over. So it was a treat to get to go see the contest again.

Today’s contest was to take a short length of chain and carry it somehow up a plastic mesh slope. The machines competed two at a time, and many of them included features to actively interfere with the other machine. So this made for great entertainment.

Many of the machines had wheels with little sprockets on them to engage the mesh and let them climb the mesh. But the mesh was pivoted at the top, like a carnival ladder climb. So a machine that climbed high on the mesh could fall off, and several did.

Another strategy was a small grappling hook. One machine had a hook that it fired up the mesh and then used a string to hoist the chain up to the hook. At the same time, it had a net that it launched sideways to cover its opponent. Unfortunately, launching the hook proved problematic. When it worked, it worked very well. But if it missed, then it was all over for that machine. In the end, they made it to the semi-finals, but the hook misfired, so they didn’t make the finals.

The final round was between two climbing machines. Both were two-part devices, with one piece to climb with the chain, and a second piece that could move around and try to interfere with the opponent’s machine. So this made for an exciting final round. The two climbers went up the mesh, but the smaller one got the jump and was higher. For a time it looked like it might fall off, but the hooks on the wheels managed to hold on to the end, and the designers got the trophy.

This was great nerd fun.

I had to take a little trip to the USGS office in Menlo Park for a two-day meeting. The topic was the Volcano Hazards Program’s web site and how they are going to host it. They knew that I’d done some research on how to handle large surges of web traffic after earthquakes.

The trip up was easy enough. I was up at 00-dark-hundred and went to the airport in Burbank. While waiting for the shuttle bus, I was treated to the sight of dawn breaking in the east. The flight up to San Jose was short, and when I got there, I saw a limo driver holding a sign with my name on it. That’s the first time that’s ever happened. They had sent him to pick me up and take me to the office.

When I got to the office we all took our places at the conference table. And we stayed there. All day. They had lunch sent in so we would have no reason to leave the room. Yikes.

At the end of the day, I took Caltrain up to San Francisco to have dinner with an old friend. Jim and his wife Heather are both people I knew back when we lived in Texas. And it turned out that they met because of me. So I went to the city to meet him for dinner. The train ride was pretty nice. The last time I rode Caltrain was in ‘93, and it was a wretched rough ride. But now they’ve put in new concrete ties and welded rail, so it’s a lot better. And the train up to the city was an express, so it only stopped a few times along the way. I was impressed.

When I got there, Jim was at the station. We walked a few blocks and just randomly picked an Italian restaurant. It was good. We each got a small pizza, and we traded half so we could try the different flavors.

After dinner, I had to head back. The train back was a bit slower, since it stopped at every station.

The next morning, I got up and decided to walk to the office. There were other people from the meeting staying at the same place, and they offered me a ride, but I thought that the walk would be entertaining. I saw the Animal Art Gallery, with dog photographs by ‘the dogumentarian‘. I saw seagulls perching on top of the train station. And I saw an intersection where the city provided orange caution flags for pedestrians to use while crossing the street. The light poles on each side had tubes welded to them to serve as flag holders.

When I got to the office, I saw the “I’m Out of Estrogen – And I Have a Gun” bumper sticker. Then I got a cup of tea and went in for the day’s meeting. Being that it was Valentine’s Day, we had a little plate of Hershey’s Kisses and heart-shaped Dove chocolates on the conference table right next to the speaker phone.

At then end of the day, SuperShuttle took me back to the airport. They got me there early enough that I was able to switch to an earlier flight. But I had a little trouble finding the proper gate, since the video screen for departures had a Windows error message box on it.

I got home about 8:00 on Wednesday night. Total time away from home: 38 hours. I’m an incredibly bad traveler.

A few weeks ago we bought a new vibrator at Babeland. We were looking for something with good power that’s also portable. The Silk Touch Egg fit the bill. It’s powerful and portable.

There is an old engineering proverb that says, “Faster, Better, Cheaper — choose two of the above”. There are tradeoffs to everything. In this case, the motor goes like Gangbusters for about 10 minutes and then it starts to stumble. The little AAA batteries just don’t last long enough.

I checked the Energizer web site. They have data sheets on their different batteries. For the AAA Energizers, the data sheet shows that the total capacity of the battery depends strongly on the discharge rate. At 25mA draw, you can get 1,200mAh out of it, but at 400mA you only get about 400mAh. So I hooked up my little multimeter to it. Turns out my meter only reads current up to 250mA, because it pegged immediately. So we know the current draw is over 250mA. And this definitely puts the batteries into the ’short-life’ range. And according to the graphs on the second page, at that level of discharge, we should see the voltage start to drop in a fraction of an hour, which was what we saw.

So, bein’ a geek, I started thinking about rigging up a bigger battery pack for it. The simplest thing to do would have been to put an external battery pack on it and just use the existing control. But the control has five pulsed modes that we’re not interested in. We just want the continuous mode. And the speed control is a little thumbwheel that’s kind of hard to use. So I figured I could just build my own speed control unit and attach that to a battery pack.

So I borrowed Lucinda’s Snap Circuits set for testing. I set up a basic NPN transistor circuit to control the motor speed. I experimented with different components. Then I got some actual components from my electronics junk box, just wiring everything together with alligator clips on the floor. After a few tries, I settled on a basic configuration. The transistor I used for the main speed control is a bit oversized for this. It’s rated at something like 40W, and this circuit is only dealing with about 1-2W. But that’s all right. It was just sitting in my junk box.

I had a little Radio Shack ‘project box’, so I used that for the case. I had to buy a volume control and knob, a diode, an LED for a power indicator, as well as a tiny little circuit board to mount stuff on. Then I had to cut the circuit board down to get it to fit into the box. Everything was so packed in that I had to put electrical tape on all the connectors to keep things from shorting out. But in the end, I got it to fit. The batteries are just mounted on a little piece of plywood. I’ll get a digital camera case or something like that for them to live in.

Power comes from either a D-cell three-pack, or from a 5VDC power supply that I found in my junk box. So it can run with or without an outlet. And either way, it’s pretty powerful.

Today I was walking across campus to go to a meeting, and I found a chunk of dry ice on the sidewalk. There is a guy who delivers it to Chemistry on Tuesdays and Fridays, and sometimes pieces break off when he’s unloading it. They’re usually just little chips, but sometimes there are bigger pieces. One of the things I find tremendously amusing about working on the Caltech campus is that finding dry ice on the sidewalk is not all that unusual. And when I find a bigger piece, I pick it up to bring home, so Lucinda and I can play with it.

So today I found a piece that was almost the size of a brick. I got excited and picked it up. I put it in my bag. Then I realized that I was on my way to a meeting, so I couldn’t take it home. There was no way to keep it cold until it was time to go home. So, what to do?

In the end, I dropped it in one of the fountains just to watch it bubble. It was amusing in a geeky sort of way.

Have I mentioned lately that I love my job, and not just because I can find dry ice on the sidewalk?

Today I got notice from my friend Dave that Comet McNaught is bright enough to see during the daytime. I’d heard about this comet, but it was too low during the evening to see it over the houses across the street. But the report said that it was now bright enough to see during the day. So I immediately went out to look.

I stood in the shadow of the roof of my house, but I couldn’t see it. So I got my binoculars. Then I found it. It was impressive. It was as good as the nighttime comets I’ve seen from here, since the light pollution here in Los Angeles usually makes it hard to see the comet’s tail. But this one was bright. I could see the head, and a little bit of the tail. I tried to find it with my telescope, but without stars to guide me, I couldn’t find it. Still, I was able to get a photo of it. I used my Canon S2 with about a 10x zoom. You can see the comet as a little fuzzy point in the photo. The tail doesn’t show up in the picture, but it’s still impressive that it’s visible at all.

Since I’m not a night person, it’s perhaps a bit unfortunate that I have astronomy as a hobby. So it’s nice when I get a chance to do it during the day.

Momofuku Ando has died. In case you don’t know, he invented instant ramen noodles. It’s amazing how little things can change the world.

As recounted in his 2002 autobiography, “How I Invented Magic Noodles,” Ando’s eureka moment occurred in 1957, when he noticed a long line of customers waiting for service outside a noodle shop. He asked himself if there was not a faster way to serve all those busy-but-famished construction workers and salarymen

This is a story in the same class as the invention of the tortilla chip. It’s a small thing, but one that touches many people’s lives.

And I always thought it was sad that the inventor of the tortilla chip did not become fabulously wealthy. It only seems right that someone who changes the world should be rewarded. And in this case, it’s a happy ending:

The focus on convenience, taste and price turned Nissin Foods Co., his small Osaka company, into a $3-billion multinational corporation with 29 subsidiaries in 11 countries.

The full story is here:

www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-ando7jan07,1,1366040.story?coll=la-news-obituaries&ctrack=1&cset=true

This evening, I went over to Hollywood to the Center for Inquiry to join in their monthly Skeptic’s Book Club. I’d heard about this when Jodi mentioned it last month. This month’s book was Astro Turf. I’d read this book last year and really enjoyed it. So when I heard that M.G. Lord was going to be at the meeting tonight, I figured it was worth the trip.

The group was very pleasant. We got to ask M.G. questions about the book and about the process of researching and writing it. And M.G. signed my copy, and was even nice enough to sit for a souvenir picture. It was a very fun evening.