Huttarances

Besides Expelled, we’ve seen a couple of other movies (on DVD) in the past month, and we’re trying to be good and jot down our impressions as we go along.

Akeelah and the Bee: Based on a true story about a girl from an inner city LA school who ends up in a national championship spelling bee. We recommend it. There are some rough spots early in the film, characteristic of the tough school where the story begins. But it gets better later on. And some characters and situations change for the better in surprising ways. Keep a few kleenexes nearby… but it’s not a heavy movie. The values are generally good, though not explicitly Christian.

Hoodwinked: We had read some good things about this computer-animated comedy about Little Red Riding Hood, but we’re not sure we would recommend it to our friends. There’s nothing terribly objectionable about it, but not much edifying either. There is some sassiness from youngsters, and brief nasal humor. The story is quirky. Some of the quirkiness works as creative or funny; other parts are merely off-the-wall. On the good side, the detective story references are fun, and the multiple-viewpoint storytelling gives some good “aha” moments.. Nevertheless, we would not recommend the film for children, as the sarcasm and post-modern satire is inappropriate for their age level; and for adults, there is probably a more rewarding way to spend your 90 minutes.

Previews: we saw previews for Kung Fu Panda and Wall-e, which both look pretty enjoyable, so we’ll be keeping an eye out for them—in a year or so, after they’re out on DVD.

There was also a preview for Prince Caspian, which we may go and support with our box office dollars.

According to a new National Geographic article, Lizards Rapidly Evolve After Introduction to Island,

Italian wall lizards introduced to a tiny island off the coast of Croatia are evolving in ways that would normally take millions of years to play out, new research shows.
In just a few decades the 5-inch-long (13-centimeter-long) lizards have developed a completely new gut structure, larger heads, and a harder bite, researchers say.
In 1971, scientists transplanted five adult pairs of the reptiles from their original island home in Pod Kopiste to the tiny neighboring island of Pod Mrcaru, both in the south Adriatic Sea.
Genetic testing on the Pod Mrcaru lizards confirmed that the modern population of more than 5,000 Italian wall lizards are all descendants of the original ten lizards left behind in the 1970s.

Of the three changes mentioned, the harder bite, the article says later, is “powered by” the larger head. Together, the bite power and the head size sound like just more of the usual Galapagos finch beak effect: shift in (average) size of a body part among a population. This kind of change is consistent with microevolution, for which there is plenty of evidence already, even if the speed of this particular change is “shocking.”

But the new gut structure is intriguing. If it is a result of random mutation and natural selection (RM+NS), it might be a significant piece of evidence for macroevolution observed in our time… evidence that has until now been lacking.

The article elaborates,

the lizards developed cecal valves—muscles between the large and small intestine—that slowed down food digestion in fermenting chambers, which allowed their bodies to process the vegetation’s cellulose into volatile fatty acids.
“They evolved an expanded gut to allow them to process these leaves,” Irschick said, adding it was something that had not been documented before. “This was a brand-new structure.”
...
There’s no dispute that major changes to the lizards’ digestive tract occurred. “That kind of change is really dramatic,” [said Andrew Hendry, a researcher not associated with the study].

So… suspending judgment on the word ‘evolved’ for now (which is sometimes merely a synonym for ‘have’), new muscles (“valves”) appeared, apparently ex nihilo. And this was, according to initial reports, a beneficial mutation. So far so good.

The next questions:

1. How complex is the “major” brand-new structure? (I.e. to what degree does this evidence support a claim that evolution accounts for the formation of new body functions and systems?)


2. What was the mechanism by which the change occurred?

The author of the research, Duncan Irschick at U of MA, seems satisfied that evolution was the mechanism. However, Hendry points out that the changes could be a response to the new environment without any significant genetic changes:

What could be debated, however, is how those changes are interpreted—whether or not they had a genetic basis and not a “plastic response to the environment,” said Hendry, who was not associated with the study. ...
“All of this might be evolution,” Hendry said. “The logical next step would be to confirm the genetic basis for these changes.”

If these changes were a plastic response to the environment, it would imply that the potential for these gut structures has lain dormant in the lizards’ genes, unexpressed and unknown to biologists, for some time. Why would they be there? Is this a case of front-loading? Or had the genes been expressed in the past, just not during recent centuries when biologists might have noticed them?

Of course another possibility is divine intervention. Intelligent Design a la Behe says that according to the evidence, an intelligent designer must have intervened at some stages during history (and Christians believe God has often intervened in history, most critically at the Incarnation); so why not between 1971 and 2004? If this is what happened, theological questions immediately arise, such as why God would have chosen to help this particular band of 10 lizards adapt to their new home. More relevant to the present paper: how would we detect this case from the evidence? I suppose it would be the same way we detect intelligent design in general: running it through the explanatory filter. On the negative side, if the morphological changes are the result of genetic differences that appear non-specific (the target area is large in proportion to the space of possible mutations) and/or simple, we wouldn’t have justification to reach a conclusion of intelligent agency in this case. On the positive side, if the genetic changes appear to be carefully engineered (complex and specified), we could infer an intelligent cause. (I’m not taking time here to go through the whole explanatory filter.)

If the lizards’ changes do turn out to be due to changes in genes, and the genetic changes appear to come from RM+NS, what implications does this have for the theory of evolution? While it would seem to provide significant direct evidence for macroevolution, it could also seriously challenge proposed models of how quickly evolution can occur.

It would be akin to humans evolving and growing a new appendix in several hundred years, [Irschick] said. “That’s unparalleled.”

Mainstream neo-Darwinism does not propose that humans could evolve a new appendix in a few centuries. So what gives? Any way you slice it, these lizards hold some mysteries for us to ponder.

It is the glory of God to conceal a matter,
But the glory of kings is to search out a matter. (Prov. 29:2)

The lizard you may grasp with the hands,
Yet it is in kings’ palaces. (Prov. 30:28)

It will be interesting to see what further data and conclusions we are able to “search out” from these lizards in the future.

Kathy and I saw Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed on Saturday afternoon. It was very good.

Hope to have time to blog about it properly later.

If you can still see it during opening weekend, do; vote with your box office dollars.

Don’t go expecting just a light romp, though. The film is very funny at times, but at others, deadly serious.

Cool!
I just got my first programming running on an OLPC laptop. I say “programming” rather than “program”, because I merely copied and modified a “Hello World” activity. But if you can get a copy-and-modify to work, you’ve got the foundation, and the rest is details, right?

Here are some notes on how to get started quickly and painlessly on XO development. Note, this is the quick-and-dirty approach that lets you fiddle with live code and see the results right away. For significant projects, you probably want to set up a real development environment. But to me, lowering the entry barrier is essential to attracting more developers. There are a lot more people who will commit the time to learn a new system if they can wade in gradually, getting their toes wet and seeing immediate results from their small time investment. If you have to set up an emulated dev environment before you write your first line of code… and that process is not simple… the number of developers you’ll attract and the amount of code you’ll get contributed drops significantly.

Developers—especially the kind who volunteer their coding for open-source projects like OLPC —do it for the joys of the craft. We love to see a machine respond to our direction, turning our ideas into a tangible form. Seeing the XO respond to one’s changes is the hook that snags a developer and reels him in. Once he’s hooked, he will soon reach the point where he sees the value in setting up a development environment, and will be willing to jump through a few hoops to do so.
And yes, you will need to set up a real dev environment if you’re going to do any real development… e.g. if you’re going to keep your code in a shared repository, or make any frequent updates between the XO and the rest of the world (email, the web, or another development machine).

Prerequisites:

1. A working XO laptop (try ebay if you don’t already have one).


2. A basic familiarity with its user interface (“Sugar”)


3. Familiarity with the GNU/Linux command line, and an editor such as vi(m) or nano

The easiest way to get started, for me, is copy-test-and-modify. Along the way I’m reading the Sugar Activity Tutorial, and you’ll want to look at it too, if I skip a detail that’s new to you. But for now, ignore the statement there that you first need to have installed a Sugar development environment.

(See also Building the XO: The Anatomy of an Activity for some helpful nuggets.)

Obtaining and installing the HelloWorld activity

Start by downloading the HelloWorld bundle (or check the Sugar Activity Tutorial for the latest link). To download the bundle on an XO, launch the Browse activity (click the wire globe icon in the dock), and type http://divieira.googlepages.com/HelloWorld-1.xo in the address bar. (Alternatively, you can type wiki.laptop.org and then search for HelloWorld.) Once the HelloWorld activity bundle has downloaded, click the “Open” button in the black download bar near the top of the browser screen. (You may have to click “Continue” first.)

If you can’t get your XO connected to the internet, you can download the HelloWorld bundle via another computer, and transfer it over using a USB flash drive. The file then shows up in the journal, where you can click on it, then click Resume to install.

The .xo file is a “essentially a zip file built from the MANIFEST with some extra metadata, like a JAR file” (Sugar Activity Tutorial). [Side note: I find that the .xo bundles are incompatible with some zip programs, like ZipGenius, but work pretty well with jar.] Installing the activity (following the steps described above) unzips the .xo file in your Activities folder, /home/olpc/Activities. There should now be a folder there called HelloWorld.activity. It contains the Python code and metadata for HelloWorld.

Launching HelloWorld

Now that HelloWorld is installed in /home/olpc/Activities, you can launch it. Go to the Home screen (to get here, push the key on the top row of the keyboard that has a solid circle with a single hollow dot in the middle). HelloWorld should show up in the dock at the bottom of the screen as a hollow square icon. If you hover the mouse over it, you get a “HelloWorld” tooltip. You might have to scroll the dock left or right by clicking its arrow buttons. If “HelloWorld” is not there, you might try restarting Sugar (Ctrl+Alt+Erase).

Click on the HelloWorld dock icon to launch it. You’ll see it appear, flashing, in the circle of current activities in mid-screen. Soon it will launch, and will show you its simple display: a huge button labeled “Hello World”, and some standard decorations across the top. We have ignition! Click the button, and the screen flashes.

Tip: you can use Ctrl+Q to exit the program.

Modifying HelloWorld

Now to get our hands dirty…

Return to the Home screen and launch the Terminal activity (a rectangle with a shell prompt, “$_”).
Tip: Use Alt+Tab to switch between running activities without returning to the Home screen.
Another tip: don’t launch activities prodigally. The machine is limited to 256MB of RAM. Treat it like a PDA rather than a laptop in this regard. (The activity circle on the Home screen is supposed to indicate the amount of memory used by each activity by the size of its on-screen sector. To me, though, they all look the same size.)

Once the terminal opens, cd to /home/olpc/Activities and type ls. You will see a list of user-installed activities. (The ones that come with the system are in /usr/share/activities.) Type

cd HelloWorld.activity

and ls again. (Remember Tab-completion is there—a welcome relief given the small keyboard.) The Sugar Activity Tutorial has info about the various files in this directory structure, but the one that gives us immediate gratification is HelloWorldActivity.py. Edit this file with your favorite terminal-based Linux editor (ed seems to be unavailable… sorry, real programmers!). If you’re not familiar with vi(m), I suggest nano, because it has on-screen help.

nano HelloWorldActivity.py

Behold the Python code for HelloWorld, which is admirably simple and nicely commented. To see the most visible bang for your buck, I suggest finding the line that sets the button label:

self.button = gtk.Button("Hello World")

and changing the string to something unmistakable. I used

self.button = gtk.Button(u"Hello World Unicode IPA: u03B8u026Au014B")

because I’m working on an IPA exploration activity (help wanted!). But

self.button = gtk.Button("Hello Jim")

will work just fine, especially if your name is Jim.

Save the file, and that’s it… no need to explicitly recompile. Make sure any running HelloWorld is stopped, and launch it again from the Home page dock. Your change should show up on the screen! It’s putty in your hands!

Where to go from here

If you know Python, you can keep hacking HelloWorld right on the XO and have lots of fun. But eventually you’ll want to get a development environment going. You’ll want to change the name of the activity and rebuild the bundle. Happy hacking!

The point of this post, though, is that you can get a taste of XO programming without all that setup.

Note for when you get a little deeper into development: Unfortunately, in the downloadable Hello World, setup.py is out of date (with respect to bundlebuilder.start(), which now requires the Activity name as an argument). Use the version of setup.py on the activity tutorial page instead. But I don’t think you need that unless you are rebuilding the activity bundle.

You may have heard of Gentium, an open-source “typeface family designed to enable the diverse ethnic groups around the world who use the Latin and Greek scripts to produce readable, high-quality publications. It supports a wide range of Latin-based alphabets and includes glyphs that correspond to all the Latin ranges of Unicode.”

Now, two new “Basic” versions have been released:

The Gentium Basic and Gentium Book Basic fonts have passed our final rounds of testing and are now officially released to the general public. Each family has a complete set of four weights: regular, italic, bold and bold italic. Gentium Book Basic is generally heavier than the original Gentium and better for some publishing uses. Both families also include a few OpenType and Graphite smart font features, including optimized diacritic positioning.

The new fonts are called ‘Basic’ because they support a smaller set of characters than the full Gentium fonts. They only support basic Latin and a handful of extended Latin characters. There is no Greek or Cyrillic, or even full IPA. The purpose is to provide early versions of the new weights that meet the needs of most Latin script users.

Our next release will not be a Gentium font at all, but a ‘Basic’ release of our Andika font for literacy. Watch our web site for that release. After that we will return to the main Gentium fonts and complete an update of the existing regular and italic to add extended Cyrillic, ancient Greek glyphs, Unicode 5.1 updates, and smart font capabilities.

Gentium, Gentium Basic and Gentium Book Basic are available at:

http://scripts.sil.org/Gentium

I’ve blogged previously about cartograms, specifically the interesting ones on WorldMapper. WorldMapper has had maps visualizing statistics like number of physicians, poverty levels, life expectancy, alcohol consumption, military spending, species at risk, and many others.

Now WorldMapper has come out with a new series on religious adherents. You can see which parts of the world have the most religious adherents in general, which ironically doesn’t look that different from the map of where the most non-religious people are (those maps show India and China, respectively, as bulging out of proportion to the rest of the world). You can also drill down through Abrahamic, Dharmic, and Taoic Religions, down to Quakers and Shias. The smallest group they map is Zoroastrians.

An interesting contrast is brought out by the maps of Christians and Muslims (click on the images to go to the Worldmapper site and access larger versions):

The proportionally-Islamic territories occupy a fairly contiguous band across North Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and Indonesia. Territories on the Muslim map are either bulging, or tiny.

Muslims

The Christians map, by contrast, has fewer distorted territories: most of the world looks like pretty much like the Population Map, with the notable exceptions of North Africa and the Middle East. [Update: and Japan.] (Russia and Australia are disproportionately small, but not totally squashed, on both the Christians map and the general Population map.)

Christians

Population

This reminds me of a statement I heard once regarding the history of Christianity; it might have been from Lamin Sanneh, or maybe an author in the Perspectives course (somebody tell me if you know). Namely, that while some religions expand by conquering and holding territory, Christianity expands by being driven out. For example, the first Christians lived in Jerusalem, but were soon dispersed by persecution (as recorded in Acts) throughout the Roman empire. The faith grew within the empire, and a few centuries later, the Roman emperor became a Christian. But Rome declined and fell, conquered by barbarians; Christianity survived because it had already spread to the periphery, in places like Ireland and Morocco. The Church later became well-established in Europe, but now has sharply declined there; again it has grown by spreading to the New World. And now while US Christianity is arguably in decline, the Church of the South and East is becoming the majority and is taking the leadership in upholding Christianity’s historical doctrines. Maybe this can’t-rest-on-one’s-laurels history explains why Christians seem so evenly distributed on the world cartogram.

Incidentally, note that these maps all show the proportion of the world’s adherents to a given religion that live in each territory. Thus comparing the maps of Christianity and of Islam, for example, doesn’t tell us anything about whether a given country (e.g. Nigeria) has more Muslims than Christians or vice versa. It only tells us (approximately) whether Nigeria has a bigger percentage of the world’s Muslims than it has of the world’s Christians, or vice versa.

A few days ago I ran across two weavers who also spin their own yarn and thread. They told me about this new fine thread they have that is great to tat with and is invisible! Well, I had to have some, so even though it was expensive, I bought enough to make a motif or two. Here they are…

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.

.

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Pretty nice, eh? This may not be as practical as some thread, since it is invisible, but it is kind of a novelty. And it was harder to work with since you can’t see it.

I asked these two weavers what other work they had done and they said their best work was for an emperor for whom they made a new suit which he wore to the annual parade. It made quite an impression on the town, they said. They tried to tell me that if you were truly wise, you could see the thread, but I don’t think they were telling the truth. What do you think?

Happy International Tatting Day, my tatting friends! Maybe I can get some REAL tatting done today.

Don’t miss Virgle – “The Adventure of Many Lifetimes.”

Earth has issues, and it’s time humanity got started on a Plan B. So, starting in 2014, Virgin founder Richard Branson and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will be leading hundreds of users on one of the grandest adventures in human history: Project Virgle, the first permanent human colony on Mars.

• test your Pioneering potential
• watch the video

Then if you’re ready to go, upload your own 30-second video:

Explain why you want to live on Mars and you could win a coveted slot on the earliest, most uncomfortable and dangerously untested manned space flights to the new New World – or a fabulous prize!

Last night I realized we could go ahead and try out the wii remote / VR demo using candles. Sure, we wouldn’t be doing real head tracking, but at least we could verify that the wiimote was “seeing” infrared sources, and we could actually run Johnny’s demo program with real input!

So I lit a couple of tea lights, and voila!

That’s the wiimote down there under the stool.

I felt like I was enacting some arcane ritual, waving candles around before an altar. But it worked!

I was glad for the extra output (green text) provided by the demo program. Often, the computer lost track of one or both IR sources, and the perspective jerked out of whack. Being able to tell which IR source the computer could no longer “see” helped to figure out the limits of the technique. E.g. you had to keep the candles within the wiimote’s field of view, which is smaller than you might think. Also, you have to be careful that the candle flames don’t gutter too much, and don’t get obscured by holding the candles at an angle where the rim blocks the flame’s light. For the latter reason, it’s probably better to place the wiimote high rather than low. The demo ran most smoothly when I kept the candles in a small, confined area and moved them slowly. Hopefully, IR LEDs would not be as fragile.

I blogged earlier about Johnny Lee’s head tracking with a wiimote as a poor man’s “virtual reality” technique. Well, I have been inspired enough by this idea to go beyond talking to actually implementing it.
Time to report on progress.

Before I do that, let me pass on the cool news that Johnny’s VR technique has become so influential, it has already gotten the attention of game developers and has made it into a commercial game. At least, that’s the rumor, though the game won’t hit the streets till May. And the feature is only available as an “easter egg”, so it’s not entirely mainstream. Still, this is a great chance for the technique’s practical value to be proven. If the head-tracking feature is popular with customers, we’ll likely see it popping up everywhere.

I appreciate Johnny’s focus on the joy of engineering and moving technology forward rather than on exclusive personal gain:

I’m proud. If this pans out, it’ll be only 5 months between the initial research prototype to integration into a major product release. Sweet! Happy to see my stuff being used. Humorously, there were 3 other demos on the GDC expo floor showing variations of my head tracking demo. =o)

Just in case you are wondering: No, I don’t get any royalties or benefits for the use of this technique in games. Personally, I’m much happier impacting the state of technology on such a large scale in such a short period of time rather than struggling to transform it into personal financial gain. In terms of my original intent behind creating the head-tracking demo, it has already been a wild success beyond my highest expectations.

As a side note, I’m sure it won’t hurt his financial gain either, long-term: having such a big success on his track record will certainly commercial open doors for him in the future.

Obtaining a Wiimote

Back to the do-it-yourself head-tracking project. The first requirement is a Wii Remote Controller. Not having a Wii system, I had to buy a remote separately. They sell for about $40, e.g. at Amazon. Not having used a Wii, I discovered in the process that a Wii remote is not the same as a Wii Classic Controller or a Wii Nunchuk Controller (each about $20).

I hesitated to spend $40+ on a project that I might not do much with; so rather than buy a wiimote outright, I went to ebay (here’s my carefully crafted wiimote search) and bid fairly low. My limit was $30 including shipping… any more than that and I could just wait (or not do the project). After losing about a dozen auctions, I won one (new) for $20.50 + $7 shipping, and soon I had a wiimote of my own!

Bluetooth Connectivity

The next hurdle was getting my computer to talk to the Wiimote, which happens over Bluetooth. When I bought my laptop almost 2 years ago, I opted against the Bluetooth option. So this week I borrowed a Bluetooth to USB adapter from a friend. Since I hadn’t used and debugged Bluetooth connectivity on this laptop—indeed, anywhere—before, the hurdle was a bit higher. It took me a few days to work out the kinks. Some resources I used:

• Getting the Wiimote working with the Windows Widcomm drivers
• List of Working Bluetooth Devices
• MS Knowledge base: Cannot install a Bluetooth device after you install Windows XP Service Pack 2
• How To: Connect your Wiimote to your computer via Bluetooth
• How to: BlueSoleil BlueSoleil is a 3rd-party, commercial Bluetooth driver/software package.

The BT adapter I’m using is an IOGear GBU311. Initially, I downloaded the drivers from the IOGear web site and installed those. I didn’t have any trouble getting Bluetooth going in general. The computer was able recognize the wiimote device, and also was able to connect successfully to my wife’s PDA (IIRC, I sent her a small file and it worked). However, I couldn’t get my laptop to connect successfully to, or receive data from, the wiimote. My wife’s Mac seemed to have no problem. But whenever I tried to connect to the Nintendo Bluetooth device from Windows, a wizard dialog appeared called Security Setup. It asked for a passkey for pairing. The instructions I was looking at said not to attempt to pair, so I clicked the Skip button. Nothing happened. There was no way to finish the wizard, so I just had to click Cancel, and there was no connectivity. (Maybe it would have been possible to pair… I don’t know how I would tell what passkey to use. The wiimote didn’t come with any documentation. I could just make one up, I suppose, and see what happens.)

I read in the above resources that IOGear devices did not work with BlueSoleil, but someone had gotten IOGear / wiimote working using method 1 of MS Knowledge base article “Cannot install a Bluetooth device after you install Windows XP Service Pack 2“. I tried method 2 of that article first—updating the driver; it seemed to allow me to skip pairing once, resulting in a successful connection (shown by two green arrows on the wiimote icon); but the green arrows quickly went away, and I couldn’t get the Skip button to work after that. I then tried method 1, renaming the Bth.inf file and then reinstalling the IOGear driver. Still no dice.

So then I downloaded and installed the BlueSoleil driver.
The GUI was a little different, but it was self-explanatory, and I was soon connected to (not just detecting) the wiimote!

I ran the WiimoteLib test program, and watched with delight as the buttons I clicked on the wiimote were immediately reflected onscreen in the checkboxes:

So I’m very happy with progress so far. Bluetooth connectivity to a given device apparently depends a lot on what “stack” you’re using … the one that comes with Windows, the one from your Bluetooth device manufacturer, or a 3rd party like BlueSoleil. I’m tickled to have gotten it working at all, since this is a low-level issue that is beyond the scope of Johnny’s how-to’s.

On the other hand, BlueSoleil’s driver is not free. The free evaluation copy is limited to “5MB data”. I have no idea how much use time that would represent. Registering the driver costs 15 euros. Am I willing to pay that much additional, just to try out head-tracking? I could try some more with the IOGear drivers.

Infrared Emitters

Now that I have the wiimote—essentially an infrared digital camera—talking to the computer, I need something infrared for it to see. Something connected to my head. You read on the web that candles are a good infrared source for the wiimote, but unless you’re Santa Lucia, wearing candles on your head while dodging left and right seems a bit risky.

Johnny recommends attaching infrared LED’s to safety goggles, especially goggles that already have ordinary LED’s built in. I wasn’t able to find the latter at Home Depot when I looked, at least not for a reasonable price. So I’m not sure what I’ll use for a mount.

But I went ahead and bought the LED’s: $2 each at Radio Shack.
Unfortunately, that’s a huge markup over the 21-cent Vishay TSAL6400 at mouser.com.
I guess what I’m paying for is retail distribution. To buy 2 LED’s from mouser.com would involve at least $6 shipping. With the local Radio Shack, I did the shipping myself and came out ahead.

Next Step

The next step is to hook those LED’s up to a power source, so that the wiimote can see them and I can try out his demo program with actual input. Then I need to figure out how to mount them on a hat or glasses.
The adventure continues…

According to the New York Times,

The power to fly is so handy that it has arisen multiple times during the evolution of life…

...when a nectar-eating bat hovers in midair to sip liquid sugar, the mammal’s sharp-edged flexible wings generate the same sort of precision whirlwind lift detected recently in studies of insect flight. As the bat curls its membranous flappers in and out three times per second, a series of tiny cyclones form at the leading edge of each wing.

...As Dr. Hedenstrom explains, a bat can use its skeletal finger bones and the muscle fibers in its taut wing membrane to precisely control the wing’s curvature and angle of attack from one moment to the next. His co-author, Geoff R. Spedding of the University of Southern California, points out that the entire surface of the bat wing is covered with pressure sensors that relay information to the bat’s brain about what the air is up to and how best to shape it. “We don’t yet understand how the whole system works,” Dr. Spedding said, “but it ends up generating a beautiful, orderly airflow over the wing that is just what we’d dial up if we could dial up flow [emphasis mine—Lars].”

Read the full story here: Flapping Past Gravity’s Pull, Bat Has a Vortex at Its Wings

Amazing. The nectar-eating bat beats its wings 3 times per second, continuously adjusting the curvature and angle of the wings (how many changes per beat?) in response to sensed air pressure over the wing’s surface. “We don’t yet understand how the whole system works.” Certainly our rigid-wing, steady state aircraft are miles below a bat in aerodynamic sophistication. And this only deals with the task of staying aloft; it says nothing about acceleration and braking, or the use of echolocation to target and intercept insects that are executing their own complex maneuvers in the dark.

The phylogenetic distribution of flight defies common descent: Darwinists cannot claim that a common ancestor of honeybees and bats (or even of hummingbirds and bats) could fly. Urbilateria, the hypothetical last common ancestor of arthropods and vertebrates, “may… have been small, bilaterally symmetrical creatures with radial cleavage, coelomic [i.e. body] cavities formed by the outpouching of the archenteron (enterocoely), and anterior tentacular appendages formed by coelomic outpouching” (Early Animal Evolution, under Clues about Urbilateria). In other words, they might have had primitive tentacles at best; nothing like wings.

So evolution believers have to assert that flight “has arisen multiple times during the evolution of life.” Imagine … complex designs unmatched by our finest aeronautical engineering arose by trial and error, through a gradual process in which every slight change must give a significant advantage. That’s like trying to find a monotonically rising path from Los Angeles to New York. And then doing it again, a different way.

Maybe that’s why newspapers like the NYT cannot consider the feasibility of evolution, and just have to assert it.
Otherwise they’d go bats trying to avoid collision with the obvious implications.

Can’t wait for The Hobbit to come out?

Tide yourself over with this clip by Sam Shenberger.

Take a look at the winners from the POVRay Short Code Contest #5.
Pretty cool!
First place especially is an elegant piece of work.

This basket of flowers pattern was designed by a new tatter, Laurie W. Amazing, and so lovely. I look forward to using this on a card or something like that with some tatted flowers.

From Tatting Pattern Calendar – July 16

These are earrings I made for a friend of mine. It is a pattern I modified, because I was having trouble with the thread breaking. Pattern by Nina Libin found here.

These last two motifs are from a book my parents-in-love found for me when they were in Holland last year. It is called Frivolité Vroeger En Nu. This book was published in 1977. It is full of fun ideas and patterns from delicate motifs and edgings to edges for curtains and decorations for clothing made with larger thread and yarn.

These two motifs were made with pearl cotton (size 5?)

I got a bit behind on the Tat It and See pattern by Jane Eborall, but finally finished it up today. So here he is! He still needs some blocking and a new background, but I was too excited to get him finished to wait for perfection.

And I am going to call him #11 for the 25-motif challenge.

The thread is Omega 50, which I find hard to tat with, though I love the colors.

They say that “whatever you measure gets better.” Certainly it’s easier to improve something if you can tell whether and when it’s getting better. [Cue obligatory tie-in to random mutation and natural selection! Except in this case, both mutation and selection have intelligent input.]

Somehow yesterday I got onto the topic of monitoring the usage of electricity by various appliances in the home. Regardless of one’s conclusions about anthropogenic global warming, most of us see a benefit in cutting our own energy usage, both for our own budget, and for responsible stewardship of the worldwide resources God has entrusted to us. When you see that leaving your desktop computer on overnight costs you $10, or that your kwh rate is double the normal because you left some lights on in another part of the house, you are more motivated to make a change than if you just don’t know. Yet most of the time, that information is not easily accessible. What high-tech gadgets or low-tech methods could bring out those numbers? The answer needs to be something affordable, and shouldn’t require an electronic engineering degree to operate; otherwise my wife and I won’t incorporate it into our daily routine.

I looked around at some options, but can’t say I see a perfect solution. I’ll list a few possibilities that I came across. I would be very interested to hear about ideas you have and methods you’ve tried.

1) A common ammeter ($20 and up).

• Advantage: cheap and plentiful. I’m no electrician, yet I have one of those multimeters to check light bulbs, batteries, and so on.
• Disadvantage: you have to know what you’re doing. You may be able to measure the current for a single appliance, if you can string wires from the plug to an outlet and have your ammeter in the loop, without electrocuting yourself or frying your meter. Then you have to do some math to interpret the results. Not your grandmother’s home power usage monitoring tool.
  
• Disadvantage: only works on appliances with plugs. You can’t measure usage by your electric air conditioner or ceiling lights, and it’s not very convenient to check the fridge or dishwasher.

2) A plug-in usage meter ($25, $60 and up). Examples: Kill-a-Watt ($25 – shows kilowatt-hours only), Kill-a-watt EZ ($60 – shows cost too), Efergy Energy Saving Meter, Watt’s Up Pro. These meters plug into the wall, and have an outlet on the front that you plug an appliance into. They display electricity usage info in a form that’s easy to understand and interpret; some even calculate the cost for you, once you’ve entered the rate you’re paying for electricity.

• Advantage: affordable. If it helped you significantly reduce you electricity usage, it would quickly pay for itself.
• Advantage: safe and easy to use (as long as you can reach the plug).
• Disadvantage: again, only applies to devices with plugs. And it looks like it would take a lot of room at the plug, so there would be some cases, e.g. with crowded power strips, where you would not use this at the drop of a hat.

3) A whole-house usage meter ($150 and up). Examples: Power Cost Monitor, Wattson, Powerkuff. These devices attach to the electric supply entry point of your house in some way—either at the cable, or at the panel—and measure the amount of power in use. They come with a transmitter and a remote display unit that you can carry around with you. That way, you can go inside, turn on a light, and watch what happens to your usage rate.

• Advantage: lets you monitor anything in your house.
• Advantage: provides a total usage figure to give you perspective on the power consumption of an individual device. E.g. you can tell whether an electric stove uses 1% or 20% of your typical whole-house usage rate.
• Disadvantage: costs too much for a quick no-brainer purchanse. But still within reach for the reasonably serious energy saver, and almost certainly worth the money.
• Disadvantage: by itself, is not simple to use to check the usage of individual appliances. You have to know and compare your whole-house usage (which may fluctuate) with and without a given appliance running. No doubt that’s why companies offer kits combining whole-house and plug-in meters, like this one.
  

Both plug-in and whole-house meters come in versions that offer additional features like:

• Recording power usage over hours and days
• Calculating statistics like average, minimum and maximum usage
• USB or other computer-accessible connection

Consumer reports (Nov. 2007) has an interesting article on “smart meters” that replace your standard electrical meter,

and can send consumption data by radio signal directly to the utility company. That two-way capability eliminates monthly visits from a meter reader. More important, it also means power companies will be able to monitor consumption as it rises and drops throughout the day, which in turn will let them introduce dynamic pricing based on simple supply and demand economics. “There’s no point in having smart meters if you’re going to have dumb rates,” says Rick Morgan, a commissioner with the Public Service Commission of the District of Columbia. Customers will be able to track those variable rates and their daily consumption on their utility company’s Web site or by requesting a display unit.

CR discusses the pros and cons, and concludes:

But for now, smart-meter technology seems to be moving forward, with companies like SCE leading the way. By 2012, SCE hopes to have 5 million customers using smart meters. That level of deployment would reduce consumption by 1,000 megawatts each year, equal to the total annual output of a major power plant.

You don’t have to be Al Gore to appreciate how that’s good for the planet.

I’ll buy that!

So, in conclusion… what do you think about buying one of these gadgets or kits?
How much would you be willing to pay to have easy access to usage information?
What do you already use to keep track of power consumption?

Craters seen in the new images of Mercury taken by the MESSENGER spacecraft; supposedly formed by meteorite impacts:

Craters in the cement slab in our newly-remodeled master bedroom this past week; formed by the removal of carpet tack strips:

Coincidence? You might think so, except that there is

The implications defy comprehension…

Johnny Lee’s YouTube videos,including Head Tracking for Desktop VR Displays using the WiiRemote, have earned him oodles of recognition, including “#1 rated YouTube Video (All Time)” as of 1/1/08.
If you haven’t seen some of them yet, head over and take a look. If you’re not wowed, you get a full refund (ha).

A few exciting applications come to mind:

1. Johnny calls for Wii games that incorporate head-tracking-based perspective. I agree, that would be pretty neat. It would be especially suitable for single-player (or rather, single-player-per-display) games, since the perspective shown on a display can only be correct for one head.
   
   But why be limited to one vendor-locked system? Johnny’s technique works on PC’s, not just Wiis. From watching WiiMote playing Half-Life 2 on a computer, it looks like HL2 can already take Wii Remote input, without having to modify the HL2 source code. If you took head movement as simply another way to express “strafing” left/right and forward/backward, you could already have HL2 hooked up to wiimote head-tracking control (as a supplement to keyboard and mouse).
   
   But to actually achieve the looking-through-a-portal effect, I’m sure you’d need to go deeper. I think it could be done by a mod though, i.e. not requiring changes to the Source engine.
   
   In a similar vein, I would love to incorporate the virtual portal feature into some of my favorite 3D screensavers. Since there is usually no mouse input involved, it should be fairly simple to modify the programs: they just need to move the camera position and angle.
   
   
2. Windowing systems! There are some 3D windowing systems out there with great eye candy, but I think you could really use an easy way to see what’s behind those front windows. Wouldn’t you like to be able to move your head left and right to peek around them?
   
   Caution: the mouse location will have to be reinterpreted based on head position!Otherwise, you’ll thinking you’re clicking on a behind object, when actually that object is not even “visible” to the mouse.
   
   The display part doesn’t seem like it would be that hard to implement in KDE or Gnome, or whatever Window Manager they use… but if it requires changes at the X11 level, fewer people would be qualified to do it.
   
   
3. Big graphs/diagrams in 3D space:
   
   Our organization, like many, generates large diagrams (and would generate many more, if there were a practical way to view them). For example, complex data models, org charts, process diagrams, ERDs. Large ones can be printed in a plane, but then
   1) you need a large printer, or a magnifying glass to read the result;
   2) you start to get more and more spaghetti lines that either cross each other a lot, or go way out of their way to avoid crossing.
   
   End result: it’s difficult to follow relationships.
   
   Rendering the nodes and edges of such a graph in 3D space would eliminate many of the crossing / routing problems. But how to view such a 3D representation?
   There are viewers available for graphs in 3D space, but they have the limitation of being rendered in a flat screen.
   
   Solution: use this “head-tracking portal” method to enhance the user’s ability to navigate and look around the 3D structure. Note that if you want to be able to interact using the mouse as well (e.g. click on a node), the mouse interpretation would again have to take head position into account.
   
   

A couple of caveats with the method that weren’t obvious to me at first:

1. Doing this requires that your computer have Bluetooth hardware. That’s not a big deal; Bluetooth support is not rare. However this laptop doesn’t have it.
   
   
2. Johnny Lee’s head tracking technique does not track head rotation, only head position (relative to the display). I believe this is because the Wiimote sensor only detects the apparent direction and position of the two infrared sources relative to itself… so it can’t distinguish between your head getting further away (the apparent distance between the two IR sources decreases) and your head turning (the apparent distance between the two IR sources decreases).
   
   Maybe we need a chin light, so these can be better distinguished! With a third (non-colinear) light, if the distances between all 3 lights decrease proportionally, we know the head is getting further away. If the distance between 2 lights decreases but the other 2 distances don’t, the head is turning (but which way? Here’s where we need to actually use the wii’s accelerometers. Johnny, can you show us how to mount a second wiimote to a baseball cap, and rig up some cheap VR goggles? ).
   
   Keep in mind though, Johnny’s “window/portal” metaphor doesn’t depend on that sort of head-orientation tracking. When you’re looking through a window, the view shown by the window doesn’t change much when you turn your head. Moreover, you can only turn your head so much before (a) the wiimote can’t see your infrared emitters, and (b) you can’t see the screen!
   
   So you have to keep in mind that his method has the above limitation, and thus isn’t practical for applications that involve 360-degree immersion.
   
   On the other hand, you can always supplement head position tracking with the usual mouse and keyboard control for rotation and movement (translation).
   
   
3. Cost of the project: a WiiMote costs about $40 from Amazon or Nintendo; a sensor bar costs $18 from Target (or make one yourself – the LED’s cost about $2 each at RadioShack). Not counted, assuming you already have them: a Windows computer (or time to port Lee’s sample program), with a display, and Bluetooth. The required software is all free.

For next time: I have been impressed by Johnny’s presentations, and have drafted some thoughts about what makes them so successful. But those thoughts will probably have to wait for another post.

Has anyone ever died in a linguistic accident?

This post is just a lure to catch curious readers of xkcd.

If you came here by googling after reading Dangers, please leave a comment so I’ll know I caught somebody. Thanks!