When Bad Things Happen to Good Oranges

Check it out, I dun blowed me up some oranges!

How did I do it? I waited till dusk, wrapped a firecracker in saran wrap, then poked a hole in an orange and inserted the firecracker so just the fuse was sticking out. Then, with my camera on a tripod (bulb mode, F8.0, ISO 100), I lit the fuse, opened the shutter, waited for the bang, then closed the shutter. TADA!... a cool photo, using only the light from the firecracker to expose the photograph. I did it three times, and each came out looking cool, but different:

The Second Great Depression

To give you an idea of what to look for to know if we have experienced anything similar to the first Great Depression:

August 30, 1929 : Dow @ 382
July 8, 1932 : Dow @ 42

So after ~3 years, the Dow was at ~11% of its peak value.

What would this look like in modern times? The Dow peaked at 14093 on October 12th, 2007. If we experience a similar plummet, then sometime in September of 2010, the Dow would bottom out around 1550.

This gives you an idea of just how bad a "real" depression is. That is an average decline of 6.1% per month. The worst we've seen, since our recent peak of 14093, is about a 3% decline per month, over a 9 month period. Yes, this is quite bad, but it is (so far) only half as bad as the slide experienced during the Great Depression.

It could be worse. A lot worse.

Clusters are Beautiful

I have a computer cluster living in my living room. Ain't she puurrrrdee?

MatLab vs Octave Benchmark

I just thought I'd share some informal benchmarking results with the world. This is with Octave 3.0.0 and MatLab 2008a. I'm running on Ubuntu Linux, 8.04, 64-bit, with an AMD Athlon X2, 2.2 GHz processor, and 2 GB of RAM. I wrote a little modulator-demodulator thingy, which is not very fancy at all. Its just a couple of for-loops, some non-vectorized Euclidean-distance calculations, and some comparisons.

Octave : 7.5 Seconds
MatLab : 1.5 Seconds

That's a 5x speed advantage for MatLab. I like open-source stuff, and Octave is lighter-weight, so I'll still use it, but MatLab sure shows off the fact that it has been low-level optimized. When I need a 5x speed boost, I'll certainly power up MatLab, and when I need way more than that, well, then its time to go to C++, and move things over to my cluster :)

Egg Trick

Hate peeling hard-boiled eggs? Try this!

I tried it, and it (pretty much) worked. I think the best part of the advice is to add baking soda to the water before you boil the eggs. Two tablespoons per quart is probably about right. This reduces adhesion, and makes them really easy to peel.

Pseudo-random Number Generators

Fascinating. I just learned that one can construct a pseudo-random number generator out of any one-way function. Then I tried it out in MatLab with a few simple experiments, and yup, it works. Thats cool.

Gold ion beam-beam collisions

Science sure is purrrdee, ain't it? This image was stolen right off of Wikipedia, because it was so pretty, I just couldn't help myself.

Hadronized Charged Particle Debris

...and here's another Wikipedia article on a different topic, related to some of the research I did as a graduate student. The "pareto perspective" is a pretty helpful one, in many areas of life.