See The Terminal Through a New Screen

Posted on April 24, 2012 by apfergus

Are you a Renascence programmer? Do you want to be moved by sights one cannot behold within the windowless walls of your office? With the awesome power of screen you can work from a quaint bohemian coffee shop or taking in the vistas of a windswept mountaintop. Anywhere with wi-fi, really, provided you can see your network through vpn or some such.

Of course you can’t sit there forever. So you need to be able to have your processes run after you disconnect. That’s why you should use screen: a window manager for terminals that will happily keep chugging away in the background and can be reattached from any connection. Continue reading →

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Talking to the Enemy

Posted on April 20, 2012 by apfergus

I just listened to the most recent episode of This American Life, Your Own Worst Enemy. The premise of the show is that sometimes people do things that aren’t good for them. In the 3rd act, we follow a very religious man who is also gay. He believes homosexuality is a sin and helps operate an organization for ex-gays.

When the organization expands to include a program for teenagers where they are often sent unwillingly by concerned parents some young people take notice and start to protest. Eventually a leader of the protests meets with the administrator. Even though the young demonstrator goes in, ready to have a debate, and he freezes. Instead he just talks, honestly and openly about his history.

The shock leads to a productive discussion of two equals, acknowledging the other’s strengths and fostering a relationship that may not have led to dramatic changes, but closed the program for teens and at the very least affected the lives of the two in positive ways.

When I encounter something I don’t agree with, this is how I want to present myself. Even though I’m often described by those who know me well as being docile and unaggressive, what temper I have flares when I discuss something. I used to be religious. I once was a deep ecology environmentalist. To some extent, I still remember why. I remember what it felt like. I have a common ground with a lot of people in many situations that I rarely tap into in lieu of spitting out cold, hard information.

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Book Review: You Are Not So Smart

Posted on March 29, 2012 by apfergus

David McRaney’s blog You Are Not So Smart seems to have made more of a splash in the mainstream media than in the skeptical sphere. Late last year a book of the same name was released which I just recently had the opportunity to sit down and read. McRaney brings something to the table that has mostly been missing–a discussion of how the brain plays tricks on its owner beyond pareidolia.

Continue reading →

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Hypothetical Garbage Rocket

Posted on March 24, 2012 by apfergus

Unfailingly, in any social circle with more than a few nerds, there will be that conversation about launching trash or nuclear waste into the sun to get rid of it. From there, it usually goes into arguing about the safety of putting hazardous materials on top of a potentially explosive vehicle and lobbing it to an altitude where it could disperse over a huge area if anything were to go wrong.

What I want to know is why don’t we launch it into deep space? It would be easier. No, really. It would take less energy to send a payload into deep space than it would to drop it into the sun. A really fun set of gravitational mechanics problems called Hohmann transfers describe how to move from one circular orbit to another. Since we’re interested in being devoured by the heat of the sun or ending up in deep space, we only need to worry about half of a transfer. Continue reading →

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Adam and Jamie are So Amazing

Posted on March 21, 2012 by apfergus

It wasn’t until fairly recently, probably in the last five years, that I started really watching Mythbusters. Now it is one of the two most significant reasons I subscribe to cable. Jamie, and Adam in particular, have been active outside the show doing and saying things I can totally get behind, encouraging people to think, learn, and just be passionate about what they love. This week shall be positively rich with new and delicious content. Color me very enthusiastic.

This past Sunday premiered Unchained Reaction, which looks like it will focus more on design and construction as opposed to high-excitement science demonstrations. This could easily be pretty cool. Tinkering is really fun and rewarding (even when you’re not so good at it, like me) so piquing curiosity about building things just for the fun of it is a net positive.

This Thursday my wife and I get to see the Behind the Myths Tour at it’s stop in Cleveland. I’m not entirely sure what to expect, but I am pretty excited. Being a veteran of helping to organize fun physics demonstrations, I’m intrigued by what sounds like an actual live experiment or measurement with audience participation. Most of what I’ve seen has some hands-on activities for the audience, but is really more of a “Hey, isn’t this neat? What you’re seeing is…” on the part of the demonstrator.

The duo have a new website at tested.com. Content is beginning to appear, but the final shape of things isn’t yet obvious. A podcast appears to be in the works, but has yet to debut. In addition to Adam and Jamie there are two tech writers Will and Norm who will be producing content for the site. Add it to your RSS feed reader and see what comes out.

Of course this next Sunday brings us the season premier of the flagship series, Mythbusters. It appears we’re in for more duck tape. Check out the previews.

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A Timely Bible Story Time

Posted on March 16, 2012 by apfergus

The Christian Right backlash over the whole birth control thing is starting to grate. Also, I’m starved for ideas and want to write something just so I can stay with it. So let’s see what the bible says about all this, shall we? Your one-stop shop for everything you need to know is at Skeptics Annotated Bible. However, I’m not a fan of King James, so lets take a peek at some of this from NET Bible. Continue reading →

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Self-Promotion Sunday: Infrared Remote

Posted on February 26, 2012 by apfergus

So I made a new toy to amuse myself. I picked up a small TV remote and an infrared (IR) sensor from SparkFun. They’ve got some code that will work, with a bit of modification, to print values to a serial connection to a computer. Once you’ve mapped which button produces which signal, you can start adding code to produce certain behaviors determined by button press. The power button blinks a red LED, channel up rotates the servo 10-degrees counter-clockwise, channel down 10-degrees clockwise.

 

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Interesting Things 22/02/2012

Posted on February 22, 2012 by apfergus

I’m still alive. There was supposed to be a Sunday Self Promotion this past weekend, but I just wasn’t feeling recording a video. I botched an attempt to build a radio control from a kit, but substituted a $2 IR sensor and a TV controller, which might actually be more fun, anyway. Maybe the radio control can be salvaged, but I’m missing a 9V battery for my DMM.

In the meantime, here’s the most interesting thing I’ve read on the Internet this week, an excerpt and a review of “The Lifespan of a Fact.” It’s a dialogue between a writer and a fact checker arguing over the importance of having correct details in a nonfiction article. I’m not sure I’m comfortable with embellished, blatantly inaccurate prose being presented as a nonfiction article. If you want to create art, do so, but don’t expect to be treated like a journalist only insofar as you please.

 

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Greatest POTUS Publicity Photo Ever

Posted on February 9, 2012 by apfergus

Photo Credit: Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

A few days ago the White House hosted a science fair. I’m not familiar with the details, but there’s the white house press release and a justifiably celebratory article on Make. As a graduate student myopically obsessed with my own career prospects, going into science and technology can seem like it was a mistake.

But you know what? This is the way forward–getting young people psyched about learning, discovering, and building. When I see things like that fantastic photograph of the President marveling at a kid’s marshmallow shooter or appearing on Mythbusters (one of two reasons I need cable TV) I’m encouraged that he seems to be doing something that I think needs to be done. This is my slightly delayed high-five to humanity. Get excited and make things!

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Blogs You Should Be Reading

Posted on February 3, 2012 by apfergus

Back when I created this blog and still had some aspiration of being an effective communicator and advocate of science I actually did have a relatively concrete idea of what I wanted to do. There is all manner of cool physics happening in all sorts of odd places, like electric guitars or driving around curves. Between being unable to convince myself I really understand them and not being able to communicate them to a general audience, I just can’t produce content like that fast enough.

If you want to read content like that, though, you should be reading Dot Physics. Rhett Allen is amazing. He once wrote an article analyzing the claims that Fabian Cancellara had a motor hidden in his bicycle, which combines two of my favorite things: physics and bicycle racing. On the front page at he time this was written he has an article on the physics of Minecraft and another on Angry Birds. Move over Physics of Star Trek.

I’m also going to shout-out to Good Math, Bad Math, written by Mark Chu-Carroll. He takes a completely different approach, which is to write about interesting topics so unrelated to anything I know that I never would have known about them to look them up before he explained them. It seems like you can’t swing a dead cat in the blogosphere these days without hitting an astrophysicist, most with more credentials that me. So I really get a kick when I see people blogging about professions so far removed from my own that I’d probably never be able to access them otherwise. Like Swedish Archeology.

Which is partially how I started to gravitate towards statistics, since there does seem to be hole there. That brings us back to my lack of confidence in my understanding and ability to communicate. Besides, you can learn all of what I know from getting a copy of Bevington and Robinson and taking a week or two to go through it.

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