Aitch-Bar

Writing About (Mostly) Not Astrophysics

Monthly Archives: August 2012


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Welcome back to me, Internet!

It’s been a while, online world. I had a ponderously-titled blog called Topography Of Ignorance* over on the blogspot, begun in 2005, but it petered out in ~2008 as grad school became more and more “interesting.” Nowadays, the thought of my many witty observations going unnoticed as Dave’s go ‘noticed’ fills me with dread, so I have forced him to join forces in the form of this blog, a force of verbiage to be reckoned with. Dave’s sperm have already been mentioned, so I think we are off to a pretty good start.

What to say about myself? I’m a gentleman, a scholar, and a third thing which is the punchline of this sentence. Like most other grad students, I’m studying for a PhD because I have no other interests and my underdeveloped social skills preclude my spending much time in non-science situations. “First, master talking to the nerds” I said to myself. I am from Rhode Island, so I’m one of America’s only rightfully discriminated-against minorities. I am studying astronomy, so I’m basically being discriminated against by Congress and the American people the minute they stop looking at photos from the Mars rover. And I have “thinking of the third thing inability disorder” so medical science has it in for me as well.

My previous blog billed itself as “Astrophysics, Esoterica, General Complaints”; though some time has passed, I am still devoted to those 3 things so I’ll try to use this site to provide history’s greatest insight on them.**

*From a Oliver Wendell Holmes Quote, to relate to the everyman

**Intended in the same sense that people use when they refer to the late Kim Jong-Il as the World’s Greatest Golfer.

About to do something awesome?


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Portation

Ryan and I are coalescing into this new, joint blog. We could have used the blog I originally created, but for some reason “davidm.wordpress.com” wasn’t seen to be properly capturing the spirit of community. All 2 of my old posts have been copied over to this site.

We searched high and low for an easy way to cross-post between multiple blogs, but failed entirely. Surprising and disheartening. Time was when we didn’t used to bother with this 3rd party hosting shit; we could code a site up by hand on our home computer, in a day, with all the features we needed, and it’d be bulletproof. That was 2000. Now you install some professional-grade software on a secure machine and within five minutes of going live you have a bug infestation of third world proportions. Or some acne-laden kid in the Netherlands steals your entire computer and repurposes it to spreading propaganda for kitten-eating Nazis, before going out and not getting laid. The Internet seems to have evolved into some sci-fi dystopia where, upon leaving the Google arcology, one quickly perishes from a combination of nuclear fallout and giant ants.

Launch time is always the roughest time for a new venture. Momentum has to keep up or you fizzle. Particularly difficult when you have “things to do” because you’re a “real person.” There is something about long stretches of left-brained work that drains inspiration, and words become the Enemy. I try to keep up because it’s good exercise, and my creative homunculus no longer fits into its going-out jeans. One can always fall back on actually writing about a topic, I suppose. I’ll try to avoid that to the end.


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Lockpickbot, Part 0

(Ported from old blog)

It was a week before Christmas when I decided that my new purpose was going to be to father a robot. Excited by the prospect of exciting prospects, I went apeshit purchasing equipment to this end. Arduino, circuit components, motors, plastic sheets, batteries, yada. The last tally I recall was $400 in. Thus far all the robot does is sit in pieces in a drawer, but it does this very well, and with long stretches between charges.

The problem is not lack of interest in robots generally, but dreams which are cripplingly grandiose. I could make a robot that rolls into walls and turns left. I could attach a broom to its undercarriage and save a couple hundred on a Roomba. Unfortunately my motivation threshold is really crossed in the realm of automata who can understand commands such as “fetch me water” and “delouse this cat,” and have the appendages and power to do so. That requires a leap forward in AI programming, and probably another Arduino. $400 at The Shack is not going to get me the robot from Lost in Space. And so I was biding my time, waiting for the following Christmas when I could ask for some fuel cells and artificial muscle.

GS recently talked me back from the ledge and suggested a small robot that does something interesting and practical, which presents an engaging technical and logical challenge while simultaneously introducing a moral dilemma of a proportion usually restricted to shows on AMC. A lockpicking robot. I’ve blueprinted it in my head and then allowed my mental to leap forward five years in the future, where mass production of these bots and a subsequent glitch in their logic has led to a scenario where doors are all but useless. Like, why even bother shutting the goddamned thing, it’s just going to get opened again in an hour by some fucking robot.

Should we, as scientists, create simply because we can? Jeff Goldblum, dressed as an angel, sits on my right shoulder, reciting quotes from Jurassic Park. There is no devil counterpoint because I don’t need any other encouragement to build this thing. I guess it’s me. I am wearing a devil costume telling myself to build a robot and arguing with Jeff Goldblum.

My Geppetto-like interest might be blunted if I knew for certain that my sperm were all alive and viable. I can easily imagine years of cell phone radiation turning my nethers into an apocalyptic hellscape, haploidic Mel Gibsons constantly in search of fuel. “There is a test for that,” you say. You are correct. The test–and this holds true for tests in general–is a tool for people who are willing to have either verdict be known. Were it possible to only have a test if the answer will be yes, then that would be a good test. But, given the confines of causality, my best bet is to have no test at all until game time. Until then quantum mechanics suspends my seed in a superposition of alive and dead states. Schrodinger’s sperm. Not a good band name, by the way.


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I Forgot About the Internet

(Ported from old blog)

Twosense, God rest its soul, was scrapped in 2007. Or maybe 2008. It was 200something, a date which it is not anymore. Since then my writing has been confined to social media posts of typical length 1-3 sentences. Sometimes I issue only a single phrase, a lonely participle dangling in the breeze at the end like high-tops hung from the power lines outside some stupid hipster’s apartment. A paragraph is easy. More is not.

Does anyone remember when I won the writing award in 7th grade? I do. This is the single thing that drives me to believe that I too can throw words at the Internet and have them stick in some recognizable pattern. At one point I realized that form holds as much interest to me as content. Sentence construction is an art, and it is one of the few forms of art I can actually feel some appreciation for, philistine that I am. Note that I am not talking about grammar. I have no idea how one is typically supposed to construct a sentence. But there is texture to words, and the best sentences feel like wearing a Snuggie.

To translate, I expect that this blog will be low on meaningful thoughts and heavy on verbiage. To translate again, this will be a blog. Though, it will be a blog on purpose, a blog which is self-aware. A blog that celebrates the fact that it is a blog, and the writer is unimportant.

gg, bbl.