And now it’s arrived! So the question is: what’s the first book I should buy? An obvious choice would be Infinite Jest, as the Infinite Summer project is underway and (as I have learned) toting a thousand-page book around on a cross-country flight is less than perfectly convenient. But, of course, I already own that book. And, as Matthew Yglesias points out, you don’t want to buy Kindle versions of impressive books that you can prominently display to buff up your credentials as a person of culture. And the worst would be to display a giant, impressive book on your shelves, but one that was clearly unread and in pristine condition, even though you really did read it, only you read it on your Kindle. Worst of all possible worlds.

The idea, then, is to find a good book that I haven’t yet read, but not one that is too good — not good enough that I’d rather have the dead-tree edition. Any suggestions?

And, living here in California, which a friend of mine notes is a beautiful land with a decidedly savage side, it’s not bad to have a means of communication that doesn’t depend on the grid, be it the electric grid or the Internet/phone grid. My in-laws live in Pacifica, south of San Francisco, which is hemmed in on all sides: the ocean to the west, mountains to the north and south, and the San Andreas fault to the east. A big earthquake could easily isolate them from the rest of the peninsula. So my father in law (N6FG) helps run a 2-meter repeater on a nearby mountaintop; he and and my mother-in-law (K6IIP) participate in local emergency response groups.

A friend of mine joked that amateur radio is the original social networking tool. (Well, unless you count the postal service.) Early in the last century, when radio was young, the advent of high-power vacuum tubes made it possible for amateurs to build transmitters that allowed them to talk to other hams all over the country, and around the world, ionospheric conditions permitting. At night, when the lower layers generated by solar radiation dissipate, a vast electromagnetic mirror called the F layer forms several hundred miles up. Signals from the surface can bounce off this mirror essentially all the way around the planet. Hard-core DXers still go to great lengths with antennas and legal-limit (1500 watt) transmitters to make contacts with Morse code. (And then there are the truly crazy ones who go on expeditions to remote islands off Antarctica solely for the purpose of making nearly 100,000 ham radio contacts all over the world.)

With the advent of transistors, and, more recently, digital signal processing, modern ham radio rigs can range from the relatively simple and inexpensive (like mine) to unbelievably complicated units going for over $10,000. So it’s one of those hobbies that you can get into at a number of different levels, you might say.

Electromagnetic bandwidth is limited by its very nature. And of course the governments of the world have to regulate who gets to use what portion of the available spectrum for what. The International Telecommunication Union coordinates this across borders. It’s pretty fascinating to study the US band allocation chart. When you do you’ll see that amateur radio has been granted little slices in a lot of different ranges: 160/80/60/40/30/20/10 meters, (the HF bands) and 6/2/0.7 meters (the UHF/VHF bands). By far the most popular among hams is the 2 m band, 144-148 MHz. The reason is that with a low power mobile unit, it’s easy to make contacts on 2-meter (144 MHz) FM repeaters which are scattered all over the country.

Repeaters listen on one frequency, and re-transmit the signal on another. This means that someone with a signal too weak to pick up with his or her mobile unit directly can be heard by the repeater, and then their signal can be sent out at much higher power, covering a big range, typically 50 miles or more. Sort of like a big megaphone. Often repeaters are run by local amateur radio clubs, and access is left open to whoever wants to use it. The clubs run weekly “nets” where all the members check in, news and announcements are shared, and so on. Ham clubs provide comm support for events like bike races, festivals, and so on, and there are also more official emergency radio amateur emergency services (RACES) that some folks help with.

There’s no “broadcasting” on amateur bands, and only licensed folks can use them legally. (Though there are a lot of renegade truckers out there, sick of the CB chatter, who are rogue 10 meter amateur band interlopers.) On the amateur bands one endeavors to make two-way contacts, and you are required to identify your station in any such contact, periodically.

The problem with UHF/VHF, though, is that propagation is limited to about 100 km at the most, typically. For making more distant contacts, you need the longer wavelength HF bands. The longer the wavelength, though, the less available frequency bandwidth there is. Building an antenna for 80 m operation, for example, is non-trivial; even a half wave dipole is 40 meters in length!

But then there’s the 40 m band, long enough wavelength for distant contacts, and short enough that it’s not hard to build a simple dipole antenna. On my roof I’ve built a simple one from parts I got from Home Depot and some coax cable from eBay, and a little gizmo called a balun I got from the radio store. I got a HF transceiver from my colleague and friend Tony Tyson (KQ2I) who has been a ham since before I was born. I put it all together, and have pulled in signals from Georgia, Quebec, Indiana, and someone speaking Spanish (Mexico?). I also have a half wave dipole for 2 m, and check in on the local nets.

But I have made no contacts yet! Why? My license needed upgrading…so I just took the ham General Class exam last Sunday, passed, and now can legally transmit on that band, though my rig only goes to 100 W. (Anyone interested in making contact? I need to lose my 40 meter virginity.)

Actually I have not done all that much with ham radio yet, but in fact the scientist in me is intrigued by the possibility of working on a large radio array to measure the highest energy cosmic rays. The Europeans have an advanced concept for a large scale radio array, E-LOFAR, which can actually form an image of a particle shower produced by an incoming proton with an energy of 10²⁰ electron volts (that’s 10 million times the energy of an LHC proton). The large Pierre Auger air shower array, in Argentina, has been recording such events with water tanks scattered over a county-sized region, combined with atmospheric fluorescence (AF) telescopes (mirror arrays pointed at the sky). Radio arrays have the potential to cover a much broader area, for a lot less cost. It also works 24 hours a day, rain or shine, unlike AF. Other people are proposing to sink antenna arrays into the ice near the South Pole; my bet is that this will not yield as big a sensitive area, but who knows?

Anyway, as the hams say, “73″ to you all…

It’s the coolest clock ever. It runs fast. It runs slow. It runs forward. It runs backward. It stops. It is precisely the right time once every five minutes. The clock is a striking illustration that time is fleeting and unreliable. The escapement features a hideous bug, literally eating the seconds as they pass. The passage of time is terrifying, after all.

Last week’s New Yorker has an article [pay per view] by Patricia Marx about Baselworld 2009, the annual watch fair. Although I find the article annoyingly cutesy, it has some interesting tidbits. I guess there’s little reason to buy these watches besides the ineffable associations with the brand. So watchmakers go to extraordinary lengths to craft and define their brands:

Among the countless blowouts at Baselword, Breitling’s is considered to be the most lavish. A few years back, guests were taken in buses to a quarry that had been transformed into a mythical Persian landscape, appointed with sandpits and palm trees. Camels and white stallions roamed the premises, as did chickens. Guests were given flowing robes and head scarves to wear, and sat on cushions, where they were entertained by belly dancers while being served a Middle Eastern banquet and forbidden hooch. Hookahs were passed around. “Just when you thought it was over,” Roberta Naas, a watch-industry writer, told me, “one of the walls disappeared, revealing Siberian tigers and tiger tamers in cages.” After the animal act, the cages vanished in a puff of smoke, and, lo, another wall lifted and the pseudo oasis turned into a pseudo disco. Another year, at what the Breitling people call their “terrorist party,” the buses were pulled over at an abandoned warehouse by men in full military garb with machine guns, who subjected the passengers to interrogations. Afterward, there was dinner and dancing.

This was all in the middle of Switzerland. For a Swiss watch company. To what end exactly? You obviously can’t sell your watches on the basis of their time-keeping ability, so you craft a completely arbitrary image. And, amazingly, it actually works. Fortunes are being made selling bulky, antiquated, unreliable time pieces. The last paragraph of the article pays homage to the fact that time belongs to physicists:

It turns out that memories may be a thing of the future, if as some physicists believe, time runs backward (backward wristwatch, houseofrave.com, $28.95). More bad news: time may be running out of time. Other physicists speculate that our universe could mutate from space-time to just plain space. Time itself would cease to exist. Even your platinum Sotirio Bulgari with a perpetual calendar will be no good then ($212,000).

I have no idea what she’s talking about. Maybe our local expert on the arrow of time will chime in?

Modern humans have a fascination with time: how quickly it passes, what happened yesterday, what will happen tomorrow. I like to believe that physics has a role to play in this. On the one hand, Einstein was so kind as to show that time is a fairly complicated, observer-dependent quantity. And thus the only time that is really meaningful is, in some sense, the time we measure on our own watches. So we had better keep track! On the other hand, we have now firmly established that the Universe has not been around forever. It is only 14 billion years old. There is a huge psychological difference between living in an eternal Universe and one that has a finite history. It’s now incumbent upon us to keep track of the Universe’s age. Unfortunately, we’re still a little unclear as to the Universe’s life expectancy. Current indications are that the dark energy will continue to accelerate the Universe’s expansion, and therefore the Universe will last forever (instead of ending in a Big Crunch). However, given how little we understand about dark energy, this is at best an educated guess—nobody would be all that surprised if it turned out to be a much more complicated scenario. And so, in this framework of a Universe with a finite age, and an uncertain future, it makes sense to keep careful track of the passage of time. It is now 3:10:12 PM Mountain Standard Time on Friday, June 5. I need to get back to work.

- One billion downloads in nine months. This is a really, really big number. For perspective, this is equivalent to every man, woman, and child in the US downloading three iPhone applications. Or one out of every seven people in the entire world downloading an application. It’s one download every time your heart beats for your whole life. It’s one application download for every hundred stars in the galaxy. Or one application every fourteen years, for the entire history of the Universe. This is a lot of downloads. In a market space that didn’t even exist a year ago. All of this has happened in only nine months (an average of more than 40 downloads a second, day and night, nonstop). Here’s a “visual” of one billion, from the wikipedia page:

- The billionth download happened to be the application Bump, something I posted about last month (and, because of April Fool’s, was considered suspect). Small world. Maybe Andy will get to shake Steve Jobs’ hand? That would be almost as exciting as my brother hanging out with Lindsay Lohan.

I want one, I want one! A new, totally tricked-out 17″ MacBook Pro with solid state drive:

2.93GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
8GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM – 2X4GB
256GB Solid State Drive
SuperDrive 8x (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
MacBook Pro 17-inch Hi-Resolution Antiglare Widescreen Display
Backlit Keyboard (English) / User’s Guide
Apple Mini DisplayPort to DVI Adapter
iWork ’09 preinstalled
Aperture preinstalled
AppleCare Protection Plan for MacBook Pro (w/or w/o Display) – Auto-enroll

All for just $5,875.

But, there is a possible cure. I give to you Snap Circuits.

This has to be one of the funnest, most accessible geeky kid’s toys ever. It completely takes away the overhead of electronics assembly, allowing even very little kids to assemble circuits well before you’d trust them with a soldering iron. All the pieces are color-coded in bright primary colors with the standard circuit notation imprinted on top. The projects are largely fun — things like driving a little motor that turns a fan blade, which, if you mount it upside down, eventually generates enough lift that it shoots off and sails up the ceiling. There’s no chance of exploding capacitors or burnt fingers (which I’m sure for some of you makes it completely un-fun, but we’re talking 5 year olds here). Instead, what kids get is fast understanding of how circuits work, at a level that they can understand and really enjoy.

On top of just being extremely cool, for some reason Snap Circuits seems to have way more cross-gender appeal than the old Heathkits. It somehow cracked the code of not seeming like a gender-coded toy. There are no pictures of kids on the package (male, white, or otherwise), and it’s brightly colored without being frilly. There is also no assumption of past apprenticeship, where one was supposed to have learned soldering and breadboard wiring from some older family member. As such, I know as many girls as boys who are enamored with Snap Circuits (and although I probably don’t hang with the most representative sample of kids ever, the Snap Circuits flickr pool seems to bear my impression out).

So, if you have a kid in your life and don’t mind being stigmatized as the adult who gives nerd presents, consider Snap Circuits.

The cool thing is that Hubble has been keeping itself scientifically busy doing astrometry (high accuracy positional measurements) with the Fine Guidance Sensor. Past papers that have come out using FGS data are some of the coolest and most underpublicized Hubble results, so I’m jazzed to see that they’re cleaning up while everyone else is idle!

It’s a magnet from a disemboweled hard drive, mounted right underneath a bottle opener. Snags the bottle cap like a charm.

However, the other day, he nearly got me:

“Did you know it can emulate the HP-15C?”

Be. Still. My. Heart.

The HP-15C is simply the finest piece of handheld computing technology ever. (Take that Steve Jobs). I got my first 15C back in high school, and it was the only calculator I used for the next couple of decades. I could operate it in the dark. I lost it in an airplane seat back pocket and have never gotten over it.

I suppose in the intervening years we’ve gotten used to irrational devotion to electronic gadgets, but the 15C had to have been one of the first targets, at least in geeky circles. If you mention the 15C to a nerds of a certain age, our eyes grow misty at the utter perfection of it. It was a calculator that simply got everything right.

The genius of the 15C is multifold. First is the form factor. It’s essentially the same as an iPhone, held in landscape mode, with a nice weight that fits well in the hand. The buttons are large and well separated, and there are no more or no fewer than you could want. (In comparison, modern HP calculators are crammed with a thicket of unusable little buttons. Ick.) Second is the glory of reverse polish notation. The 15C operates with a memory stack, which when operating with RPN allows you to perform complex calculations with no need for parentheses. Third is the 15C’s unnatural durability. A former dog of mine literally mangled a friend’s 15C, and it continued to work in spite of the large teeth marks denting the keys. Fourth (and most critical for getting me through years of physics labs and observing runs) was that it’s programmable. That’s no big deal these days, but huge in the early 80′s. Spreadsheets were hardly widespread, and when one timed balls going down ramps or any other such repeated trial, doing repetitive calculations was a breeze on the 15C.

Now, am I alone if my love for the 15C? No, indeed. On Ebay, a 15C in good shape can go for hundreds of dollars. (And if you buy one, it’ll still work. I’m guessing one will not say the same about the iPod in 30 years.). There’s an on-line petition begging HP to bring the 15C back.

And, there are people out there writing emulators for it to run on the iPhone. If you ever see me with an iPhone, this will be why.

Suffering from its exorbitant price point and a dearth of titles, Sony’s PlayStation 3 isn’t exactly the most popular gaming platform on the block. But while the console flounders in the commercial space, the PS3 may be finding a new calling in the realm of science and research.

Right now, a cluster of eight interlinked PS3s is busy solving a celestial mystery involving gravitational waves and what happens when a super-massive black hole, about a million times the mass of our own sun, swallows up a star.

As the architect of this research, Dr. Gaurav Khanna is employing his so-called “gravity grid” of PS3s to help measure these theoretical gravity waves — ripples in space-time that travel at the speed of light — that Einstein’s Theory of Relativity predicted would emerge when such an event takes place.

It turns out that the PS3 is ideal for doing precisely the kind of heavy computational lifting Khanna requires for his project, and the fact that it’s a relatively open platform makes programming scientific applications feasible.

No particular reason, really.

A particularly large chunk of the detector — its heaviest piece — was lowered this week. CMS stands for Compact Muon Solenoid and it’s the solenoid itself (preassembled with the central portion of the detector) that made the journey underground Wednesday. The solenoid is a large magnet, generating a 4 Telsa magnetic field (100,000 times stronger than the Earth’s magnetic field) with a total stored energy of 2.66 GigaJoules (equivalent to half a tonne of TNT), and is responsible for our ability to observe tracks and measure the energy of charged particles. It’s an essential and expensive component of the detector.

This test of gravity was a challenging engineering feat. The solenoid weighs 1950 metric tons — as much as 5 jumbo jets — and is 16 meters tall, 17 meters wide, and 13 meters long. It had a 20 centimeter clearance with the walls of the shaft leading underground. The gantry crane supported the detector by 4 massive cables, each with 55 strands, and operated by a hydraulic jacking system with sophisticated monitoring and control systems. The process took about 10 hours, which is a long time to hold one’s breath!

Luckily, we have a fairly thorough understanding of Newtonian gravity (unlike quantum gravity) and this lowering experiment was able to confirm our calculations. In other words, the solenoid now safely rests 100 meters underground! All in all, 15 slices of the detector must be lowered, with the solenoid being piece number 8. The last slice will make its descent this Summer, just in time to complete the assembly and record the first collisions this Fall.

Now I’ve always assumed that the gadgets in Bond movies aren’t real – I just thought that well thought out special effects and some fake blades/bullets/electronics made them look like they were doing the jobs they were supposed to do. So I was amazed to read an article in The Guardian reporting that the Aston Martin used in Goldfinger and Thunderball just sold for over $2 million, partly because most of its gadgets are in working order!

Driven by Sean Connery, the car boasts built-in Browning machine guns, tyre slashers, an oil slick ejector and a retractable rear bullet-proof screen.

Really? These are actually features of the car? (I had a model of this particular car as a kid and so am very familiar with the features). Apparently so: the guy who demonstrated it fired blanks from the machine guns and said

“If there had been real bullets in the guns I would have taken out the whole front row of these people who have more money that most countries do.”

(and don’t pretend you weren’t tempted).

Well, now I’ve got to figure out how to get me one of these Bond cars (Clifford, I’ll ask around to see if they’ve got a Bond bike that folds up into a watch for you). And it’s got to be a good one – not one of those stupid 70s car/boats that Roger Moore drove – it’s a Connery or a Brosnan for me.

Lest you be thinking that all the original features can’t have been real, I’ll leave you with this

Other gadgets include three revolving number plates including the registrations 007JB and JB007.

But a passenger ejector seat with removable roof panel has been replaced with a standard seat.

Mum, Dad, Sara – if you read this and you’re stuck for what to buy me next Christmas …

One thing’s for sure; if I do decide on this career change, having been a scientist will give me remarkable options when choosing my Q.

The first (above left) shows a sort of woven/wicker child seat that has been added on. That’s fun. Notice also the back wheel fender has been replaced by a flat thing that looks like a back seat. That’s because it is a back seat. This is a very common modification, and you see people riding along with a sitting passenger using this a lot.

The next (right) shows the passenger system of the stand-up variety. You can buy the little foot stands for your bike, screw them onto the rear axle, and carry your friends around. Very common. (We used to do this sort of thing as kids, but I’ve not seen it in such a long time, and did not know there was now standard equipment you can buy for any bike!)

The third (below) is my favourite, as it’s just so bizarre and wonderful. It’s a sort of adult bike incorporating a child’s seat complete with a set of handlebars…. and why not?!

Are these (latter) common in Europe? Anywhere else? I have never, ever, seen this before.

-cvj

Just launched: the ipod nano.

-cvj

P.S. It is hardly nanotechnology, but it’s still a great name and a good looking device, so I’ll turn off my physicist-side for a moment…..

Back in those days, I also spent a lot of time in my room with a hot soldering iron, building circuits of various sorts. (If I had not breathed in so much soldering lead fumes and soldering flux, goodness knows what dizzying heights of intellectual achievement I could have reached. Raspy voice: “I could ‘a been a contender…”)

There is a connection between those two paragraphs. Electronic generation and modification of sound. I spent of lot of time making weird noises in my room with the aid of transistors, resistors, capacitors, inductors, and all those wonderful things you hardly see any more when you open up a modern electonic device.

Why am I telling you this? Well, Robert Moog, one of the masters, a pioneer of the field of electronic synthesizers -who without a doubt indirectly inspired what I was doing in my room, since everybody I listened to was playing his instruments or decendents of them- died on Sunday. Those hobbies of mine certainly helped me focus my interests and skills along the way to becoming a scientist, so I’d like to thank him for whatever role his work played in shaping my trajectory.

I heard the news on NPR and there is a collection of links and sounds from several NPR segments at a nice page they’ve built, which is here. I also saw some links at Swoon.

Thanks for the sounds, sir!

-cvj

Except that, for a change, it paid off. Several people fall in love with the thing and buy it. It works wonderfully and makes sense. Reading what he says in the interview (coupled with the fact that the interview is in the newspaper’s business section) it seems that he’s looking to sell the company. So much for the “mom and pop” TLC treatment of every customer….

What’s the betting it won’t be a British company shortly? Sigh.

-cvj

I hope so. You know, with all this activity involving the space shuttle’s robotic arm in the news (and do you remember the big deal that was made of it when it was first unveiled so long ago?), I’m particularly disappointed that robotic arms did not go mainstream. I was hoping that by now we’d all have robotic arms in the trunk (UK: boot) of our cars. Can you imagine how useful that would be at Home Depot, (UK: Homebase)? Or better, now when you’re on the freeway and one of those plastic bags goes under your car and sticks to the exhaust, you just have to live with the fact that it is going to melt and irretrievably stick there and give a burning stink for weeks or months. You can’t wait for an exit to come up so that you can get off the road and peel it off! Deploy the robotic arm, and send one of your passengers* out on it to go under the car and peel it off!

-cvj

*LA drivers – “passenger”=”dude you’re giving a ride to his car at the other end of the parking lot”