Intractable Problems

Welcome To Starfleet Academy

Comment from Stu about the problem with commuting to the local community college got me to thinking about similar problems, where you are darned if you do, and darned if you don't. (You can tell I am feeling a little mellow today.) There is the oft retold tale of Captain Kirk (Star Trek) back when he was in Starfleet Academy. The instructors had set up a simulation for which there was no possible solution. The intent was see how the students held up when faced with disaster. Kirk hacked into the simulator and reprogrammed it so it was possible to come out on top.

Then there was a story I heard from a guy who used to work for a Big 8 accounting firm. On one hand they had the president of the company telling them they should not be working more than 40 hours a week. On the other, he had a supervisor telling him to bill as many hours as possible. 70 or 80 hours a week is what he expected. This guy compromised and worked 50 to 60 and that seemed to satisfy both bosses. I thought the accounting firm was really screwed up if they couldn't get their story straight. It would be one thing if they were engaging in some kind of psychological harassment to whip their troops into line, but I doubt it. They were probably just like many overachievers: flaming volcanoes of spew. Oops, not quite so mellow now.

So, if we lived in conspiracy land, we could imagine that the powers that run PCC have deliberately set up this parking problem to see how the students respond to it. You know, I like conspiracy theories as much as the next guy, but I don't buy this one. I think we just have a bunch of bureaucrats trying to force us into a model that might have worked 50 years ago, but which is now obsolete and counter-productive.

Update January 2017 replaced missing picture.

Duke of Ural

Ural Motorcycle with Sidecar

From Ross.

Update January 2017 replaced missing picture, added caption.

Long Hall

I spent some time waiting at Emanuel Hospital yesterday afternoon. I had brought a book to read, but I was too tired to focus, so I spent my time walking up and down this hall. Two and a half minutes per round trip makes the hall about 110 yards long. If you click on the image to see the full size version, then you should be able to see a reflection of me in the spherical mirror mounted on the ceiling. I am standing in front of the exit door at the one end of the hall, taking this picture. At the far end of the hall is the entrance to the ICU wing where my mother spent her last days, but that was several years ago. I have been to Emanuel several times since I moved to Oregon, but never as a patient.

Update January 2017 replaced missing picture.

Timber Construction

We had dinner at the Deschutes Brew Pub in Portland last night. 40 minute wait for seats, so we walked over to Powell's and looked around for a few minutes. When we got back we still had some time to kill.

So we're sitting there waiting for our number to be flashed and I'm looking around at the way the place is built. It's an old building that has been gutted so you can see the original wood beam roof trusses. Big chunks of wood along with some big chunks of iron. Sorry about the picture. Too dim up by the ceiling, too many bright lights everywhere else. Those two dark triangular things sitting on top of the double beam are cast iron. Funny that they would use these elaborate cast iron brackets at the base when they only used simple notches to retain the top ends of the beams.

They've also brought in some new chunks. One is being used as the reception desk. Looking at the end of this block, I can see several cracks. However, on the side where there should be a corresponding crack in the surface, there isn't. Weird.

And then there are the large wood frames they erected to enclose the dining areas. These serve no structural purpose, they are only there for decoration. All the new wood seems to have lots of cracks and splits. None of the old appears to have any.

Update January 2017 replaced missing pictures.

Light Versus Dark

A woman who was hit by a police car was awarded a million dollars or so the other day.

"Chris Boyle is a very professional police officer who was unfortunate to have a pedestrian clad in black pants and black coat during a dark winter night, run across the highway while not in a crosswalk, directly into the path of his police vehicle," Beaverton's attorney, Gerald Warren, wrote Tuesday in an e-mail to The Oregonian.

Never mind the stupidity or the tragedy. What interests me here is the choice of black clothing at night.

When we lived in Phoenix, everything was white or light colors. The outsides of the houses, the gravel that covered the yard, our clothes and especially the insides of our house. It was all white. We eventually did paint some of the rooms, but they got pastel colors.

When we moved to Oregon we went looking at houses and every one we looked at had a dark interior. Walls painted dark colors, or paneled with dark wood. To our eyes it looked gloomy.

Almost twenty years later and we have definitely moved away from bright white and light colored pastels. The bedrooms have been painted dark, possibly vibrant, colors, and the rooms on the main floor have gotten a color that is a couple of shades darker than pastel. The basement is still white, but that's just because SWMBO hasn't made it a priority.

I was out walking one night and I realized I was wearing all dark clothing. Not a good idea, but it just happened. I would have to make an effort to go against my natural inclinations in order to obtain light colored clothing.

I think I kind of understand what's going on here, but I'm not sure. Something along the lines that since our eyes are not constantly subjected to bright light, we are more able to detect variations in color and contrast. Light colors just don't have enough variety to keep our interest. Under bright light situations you want minimal variation in order to avoid having to constant adjust your vision. That is, once you have adjusted to a certain level of brightness, you don't want to have to keep changing it. Makes your eyes tired.

In any case, if you live in Northern half of the country, you may want to think about what you are wearing when you got out at night. Especially if you are going to be crossing a highway.

Calculating Local Time from Raw GPS Data

Here is an example of the kind of math I had to deal with at work several years ago. I wrote the explanation up for my kids. As expected, they showed no interest.

Calculating the timezone offset from the Longitude that we get from the GPS.

(GPS - Global Positioning System). We have a GPS module we use in our radio to get the current time. But the current time is GMT (Greenwich Mean Time), which doesn't mean much to someone in Timbuktu. We also can get our longitude from the GPS. So from the Longitude and the GMT, we can calculate what timezone we are in, and with that we can figure out what the local time is.

• Longitude is given in milli-arc-seconds (mas).
• There are 3,600,000 mas in one degree (60 minutes * 60 seconds * 1000)
• There are 15 degrees per time zone (360 degrees divided by 24 hours per day).

1. Divide Longitude by 3,600,000 gives longitude in degrees.
2. Divide result by 15 gives timezone, which is the same as the hourly difference.
3. Multiply result by 3600 to get timezone in seconds
4. Multiply result by -1 to get the direction to agree with Microsoft's timezone variable.

Combined, we have:

Longitude * 3,600 * -1
-------------------------
15 * 3,600,000

Reduced we get:

Timezone = Longitude / -15,000

Quote of the Day

Am I not a man? And is a man not stupid? I'm a man, so I married. Wife, children, house, everything. The full catastrophe.

From Zorba The Greek. A nice, short, one line description of life. I liked this line the first time I heard it. The comparion of everything we hold dear to a disaster.

For a long time I was never going to get married. It wasn't until I was in my early 30's, had gotten a degree and a decent job that my mind started to change. I am pretty sure age was the dominate cause of this change. I started getting some really dark dreams, they might even be called nightmares. They felt bad. Then I met a girl and she agreed to marry me and in short order, the nightmares stopped.