Universe of Numbers

Tim & Aeyn, Part 3

2012-02-26T08:53:00.003-06:00

It was heady days in the early oughts. Tim and his entourage had many parties at the house off 51st street. I was usually enamored with his gal-pals there but never got much further than "So... the beer is in the fridge?"

Since I knew Levi and I were going to need health insurance and whatnot, I got a salaried position at my first real job. Part of our deal was that I'd work for peanuts and they'd pay for college. I decided to move ahead with my philosophy degree at UT since I had a career in computers already and I just needed the piece of paper that says "degree" on it.

And that's how I met Peter Wheat. I'm not sure if we ever had any classes together, but Peter and I were both engaged in the Undergraduate Philosophy Association [UPA], especially the gatherings and listserv. We chatted regularly and discussed philosophy and music. One time, we were at Spiderhaus and he spouts off, "What is that god-awful Eurotrash they're playing?" Having been introduced to them by Chris, my roommate, maybe a year before, I reply, "That would be Autobahn by Kraftwerk, one of the founders of electronica in the Seventies." Abashed at his ignorance, he backpedals a little and says it's not that bad. Still amused, I talk up Kraftwerk and we discuss minimalism and techno.

I think it was during this same conversation that he tells me he's started dating this guy. "He's too good for me. He's just a really good person. Me, I'm bad. I'm a bad person. But this guy is special." I'm putting words in his mouth but that was the gist of it. Curious, I ask him the gentleman's name and he says "Tim Morris". I can hardly believe it. UT is big, like 50,000 students big. But the gays run in a small circle thereof and it should be unsurprising that they met (IIRC, through a mutual friend Mark). But it's kind of shocking to me and having met Tim's sort-of wet-blanket boyfriends before, I'm a little astonished he'd be interested in Peter.

Peter is dynamic. Acerbic. Full of life, yet uses the word odious far more than it deserves to be used. His voice is deeper than you would expect for a short guy. Tim is tall and went by the nickname Beeker in high school (made worse when he dyed his hair red for god-knows-what-reason). Tim has a high-pitched voice, prone to cracking. Tim is disarming, uncombative, a peacemaker. Peter thrives on fierce debate and fiery rants between hearty laughs and a beer. Truly a match made in WTF?

And yet, it worked. Peter mellowed a bit and Tim became more assertive in himself. I was a little out of the loop when I found out they were getting married. We had been trying over several months to get together but it was hard with Levi, twentysomethings, and writing papers to make it happen. Regardless, I was there at Opal Divine's on (roughly) April 4, 2002, when they tied the knot, not-so-reverend Jeff Casey, UPA, presiding. Peter Wheat changed his name to Aeyn Edwards. They had a room full of friends and family. They were moving to Flagstaff so Aeyn could finish his degree. There was a lot of celebration and tears.

Aeyn had had some last minute reservations so I sent him a reassuring but honest email. He appreciated it and they got along as true couples do.

After they moved, we didn't write or talk as much for awhile until they had settled down a little. I did see Tim and Aeyn at Jovita's wedding in a beautiful ceremony in Fredericksburg. But emailing and Austin visits didn't pick up much until 2004. They visited Mexico together. Tim told me once that fresh Oaxacan coffee on the beach was the best. I asked him for advice on Mexican travel and he recommended taking the ADO bus. If only he had emphasized first class we might've made it to Chichen Itza by nightfall on our honeymoon! Which reminds me, he even flew out to our wedding, April 16, 2005, which was something I frankly didn't expect him to be able to do.

He told (emailed) me about his adventures in Mexico, Seattle, Memphis, and Nashville, and how excited he was about grad school. His concentration was in media studies. That sounded about perfect given our conversations about various Salon.com articles, etc. The last email I have from Tim, dated June 8, 2006, talks about Lauren (Thuy) Vo's wedding, taking Spanish for preparation for a trip to Peru in July, and his expectation to graduate in December.

Tim & Aeyn, Part 2

2012-02-24T09:12:00.005-06:00

After graduation, I went to college at Dallas Baptist University, fully intent on leaving my parents and Pflugerville behind. Tim and I lost touch. I saw him at Jae Winn's funeral but don't recall talking much. After I lost my part-time computer consulting position to a full-time employee and lost my Dallas roommate — Loren Tunnicliffe — for the summer of 1998, I moved back to Pflugerville with my parents and gave up on Dallas (which I hated anyway, but that's another story).

I was going through some upheaval in my own life. I desperately hated screwing up my relationship with Katy Boggs. I hated feeling conflicted and sinful all the time. I hated denying my inner nature. It was a weird and important summer for me and I wanted to reconnect with some of my old pals. I got Tim's number from his mom and he caught me up on UT and being a student guide for the freshman. At some point in the conversation — I imagine he was feeling me out — he tells me he's gay. I'm like, "Oh yeah?" and he says, "You're still there. I wasn't sure with you being a Baptist, [etc.]"

I haven't seen Tim in ages and I decide to go to his LBGSA meeting at the Spiderhaus coffee shop just so we can chat. Well, the meeting is packed and I barely get to talk to him. But, since he's so busy, it's about the only guaranteed time I can see him so I go to them every now and then. It's there that I met my eventual roommate, Chris Cotham.

At this point in time, Tim and I are still interested in faith but looking for something different. One Saturday, we tried a messianic Jewish synagogue. It was pretty cool. We liked the Hebrew reading and lunch that followed — oh man, the homemade challah was outstanding — but I nearly outed him at the lunch table and he performed the most amazing conversation change act I have ever heard. So much so, I completely forgot how it happened.

I got a job working for a computer lab at ACC. Newly moneyed, I needed to find a roommate so I could move out of my parent's house. I met Tim to view his loft with Misty White to see if I would fit in there. For two people with no kids, it's kind of a disaster area. After sipping some Maker's Mark with him, I ask Tim if they usually keep all their cabinets wide open as it's kind of a head-thwap danger. He laughs, "If that bothers you, you and I would make terrible roommates."

One time, Tim asked me to help him move a couch. Up three flights of stairs. Winding stairs. "Never again!" I thought, and yet when it was time for him to move out, I helped him — we dumped that thing off the third floor balcony and didn't give two cares about it.

Slashdot got user accounts and I started a blog on my ACC homepage. My blog was filled with juicy personal details and diary-style entries -- exactly the sort of thing that doesn't belong in a public forum (my online resume had my social security number in it! Oh the naivete!). But it was honest and Tim read every entry, commented on them, and encouraged me to write more.

Tim signed (nearly) all his emails:


Smile.

-tim-

It's hard to read that, thinking about him now, without some sinking feeling behind it. But it was heady days in the early oughts...[to be continued].

Tim & Aeyn, Part 1

2012-02-23T12:18:00.004-06:00

Recently, I friended a high school classmate on Facebook who was in Latin and band and mentioned Tim Morris. I thought she might not have heard. That started me down memory lane. What follows is my reconstruction of my intersection with Tim's life.

Tim and I went to elementary school together for a year or two before he switched schools. Mostly, I remember recess where he succeeded in outracing me time and time again. I was very jealous of his running ability.

We met up again in band and various classes at Pflugerville Middle School. We were both devout Christian geeks who enjoyed music, faith, and goofing off. While I never picture myself in Tim's core group of friends, we were close enough and got along well. Most of my band friends played trombone and Tim was no exception.

In high school, band got Tim interested in musicals and theatre. He played Daddy Warbucks in Annie. At some point, he decided to try out for drum major. I asked him why and he said, in his usual self-deprecating manner, something like "I'm not that good at trombone."

Other than waving his arms in the air, Tim also enjoyed Latin club. We plagued Miss Moore's classroom with puns and geeky humor. Miss Moore is a fine and genuine soul and I regret all the frustrations I must've caused her. Tim wouldn't have cause for any regret though. He was about the most perfect classroom student you can imagine. He listened carefully — all the while doodling his little shapes in the margins of his notes — and asked good questions.

He never studied, though. I know because that's what he told me. His Latin was fairly atrocious and he went to Latin club because he liked the socializing and school-subsidized trips. His family was lower middle class like most of us. His father worked for UPS and his mother for a fabric store. (Tim worked at the fabric store during the summer. I visited him there once. I think he enjoyed the gossiping hens as much as the steady work.)

In retrospect I should've suspected something given Tim's favorite music: musicals, Annie Lennox, and Bjork. Those were his two divas. "Never disrespect a man's diva" he would later tell me. He also had a very lonely Calvin Klein poster of a man in his underwear. Now, you may not know this, but that is kind of uncommon for an openly Baptist teenage boy to have in his childhood bedroom.

He was the first to play Jesus Christ: Superstar for me. That, and, ah-hem, Believercise. He was also the most well-informed young man in my class. He had coffee and read the newspaper every morning and listened to All Things Considered on NPR in the afternoons, which I picked up from him when the radio was spinning "Black Hole Sun" to death.

After graduation, I went to college at Dallas Baptist University, fully intent on leaving my parents and Pflugerville behind. Tim and I lost touch... [to be continued].

Hibernate to swap file in Debian

2011-11-04T12:55:00.003-05:00

This howto was very useful.

Notes:

If you're still on ext3, you need to use dd instead of fallocate. I have 2GB of RAM. With compression, 1.1GB of swap was a safe bet after getting this to work and my initial 2GB swapfile was way more than necessary. So, I deleted it and recreated it. Note that you have to edit /etc/uswsusp.conf to update the resume offset if you delete it and recreate it.
dd if=/dev/zero of=swap bs=1M count=1100
If your box is as finicky as mine, it will rename your drives in a heartbeat. UUID is a must. In /etc/uswsusp.conf, change resume device = /dev/sdXX to /dev/disk/by-uuid/XXXX...
resume device = /dev/disk/by-uuid/XXXX... splash = y compress = y early writeout = y image size = 970451681 RSA key file = /etc/uswsusp.key shutdown method = platform resume offset = 2827561
It took me quite a bit of trial and error to get this to work, but it is much safer than repartitioning.

You need to edit /etc/default/grub to have:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="resume=UUID=XXXX... quiet"
Run dpkg-reconfigure uswsusp to rerun everything and do an update-grub to finalize things.

Cool Abstruse Goose cartoon

2011-08-03T09:47:00.003-05:00

I thought this cartoon was awesome. (Compliments of the Bad Astronomy blog.)

Is free will scale invariant?

2011-07-14T10:41:00.003-05:00

Sean Carroll drags up the old argument about whether free will is emergent, innate, or imaginary. It's an insightful review. I like the compatibilist approach, though for me it haunts of the quantum gravity problem. Enjoy.

Shuttle, JWST, etc.

2011-07-11T12:00:00.000-05:00

I watched Space Shuttle Atlantis take off on its final mission on Friday. It got me all teary-eyed but I am looking forward to a new direction for NASA. I like SpaceX. They will be great for LEO. The idea of NASA doing something bigger like landing on an asteroid and eventually Mars is very exciting.

However, we have bigger fish to fry at the moment. All this talk about canceling the James Webb Space Telescope is extremely frustrating. Enormous amounts have already been sunk and much of JWST has already been built. I would welcome an audit of the project, but flushing all that money down the drain is pennywise and pound foolish.

If you support basic research, please contact your Senators and Representatives.

Lastly, keep in mind that NASA's budget is slightly less than what we spent on air conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan last year. Basic research is good for all humanity. Let's keep it going.

A dog-bone-shaped asteroid and its two moons

2011-03-29T08:55:00.000-05:00

Got this via Bad Astronomy. The animation near the bottom of the story is fantastic. I love watching the asteroid spin end-over-end like a bone tossed into space...

Fusion Burial

2011-02-26T15:03:00.000-06:00

One of the things my sons like to talk about is how things never "truly" touch. That is, there is always some space between the atoms and what we call "touch" is really just an effect of electromagnetism.

I had this crazy idea this morning to alleviate this problem when you die: Mutual burial by fusion. So, you and your spouse, e.g., could have your bodies plasmacized and fused via nuclear fusion. With enough power, you could make a tiny lump of uranium together. Some of the helium byproduct could be siphoned off to help pay for the procedure.

The Solar System to Scale

2011-02-22T13:22:00.000-06:00

Wow this infographic is awesome!

Journey from the outside in, part 1

2011-02-22T12:02:00.000-06:00

Pentacene is black powder used in organic semiconductor research. It has a number of electromagnetic properties that make it a good candidate for such research, though given its propensity to oxidize in the presence of air, it has not been used commercially at this time.

It is formed as a series of five benzene rings joined together and as such is a polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon, or PAH. PAHs are a class of compounds that have serious implications for human health. Many are carcinogenic or teratogenic. They're found in everything from oil and coal to meat cooked at high temperature.

The black atoms in the second image are carbon and the white ones are hydrogen. While you might be tempted to think "Oh, it's full of carbon? That's why it's mostly black!", you should take a look at tetracene, which is a brilliant orange.

Back in 2009, IBM researchers in Zurich used an atomic force microscope to look at a molecule directly for the first time. Their choice of molecule? Pentacene!

Interestingly, atoms had been pictured numerous times before then but not molecules. This is because atoms are much more structurally sound than molecules are. Another way of saying this is that the inherent bonding energy of an atom is much greater than the bonding energy of molecules. And that is why breaking chemical bonds yields explosions like TNT and breaking atoms creates much larger nuclear explosions with much less material.

(As usual, thanks to Wikipedia for hosting these images and making it easy to find basic information about Neat Stuff[tm].)

Steady as she goes...

2011-02-08T11:30:00.000-06:00

I had been looking forward to taking Linear Algebra this Spring, but it's been difficult with the baby. She hasn't been sleeping well and my wife needs extra support. Add to that a mega dose of reality and I haven't been too excited about physics of late. If you want a soundtrack to that, try this. I feel sorry for the poor woodwinds in that one.

As an alternate path into science, I've been looking into grid computing. The biggest obstacle has been thinking about example scenarios for me to try out new code on. At first, I was thinking "well, it's tax season", but the tax problem set is so serial the parallel bit is entirely trivial.

If you have any suggestions on everyday problems that can be modeled with grid computing in a not completely trivial way, feel free to post.

Entropic time, an interesting approach

2010-11-08T11:10:00.002-06:00

Sometimes you just have to stop what you're doing and read something awesome. For me, this weekend, it was was the paper "Entropic Time", by Ariel Caticha, seen courtesy of the arXiv blog.

While the notion of using entropy as a source for a universal clock is not a new idea and neither is its use as an arrow of time, I really appreciated the relatively simple mathematics behind this model as well as the author's empiricist bent: "My recent work explores whether the laws of physics might be derivable from principles of inductive reasoning."

From a cosmological perspective, the paper falls short insofar as it provides no resolution to the core quandary of entropy: Why did the universe start in a such a low-entropy state? It also seems to be adding a hidden entropic fabric to the universe that, while not unphysical, remains inaccessible to the theory.

Having said that, this fine paper does play to my sense of "Why isn't fundamental physics simpler than it is?" And as such, I look forward to reading more of his papers in the future.

A New Asymmetry Between Neutrinos and Antineutrinos?

2010-11-02T11:18:00.001-05:00

Physicists working on the MiniBooNE experiment at Fermilab believe they have confirmed 20 year old results that antineutrinos experience a 4th flavor oscillation that neutrinos do not. This is a charge-parity violation and harkens toward new physics, in particular, helping to explain why we mostly see matter rather than antimatter in the universe. It may also help explain dark matter, though I have a hard time imagining how one state of antineutrino would explain the clumpiness we see in dark matter models of galaxies.

The paper was published in Physical Review Letters. You can read a preprint at the arXiv.

The Fine Structure Constant is Probably Constant

2010-11-01T14:16:00.000-05:00

I really enjoyed this article at Sean Carroll's excellent Cosmic Variance blog: The Fine Structure Constant is Probably Constant. It discusses how a constant is just a special case of a scalar field and that if a scalar field varies over spacetime that it must have mass. That causes all kinds of problems for theories of varying alpha. Very interesting stuff.

Negative Temperature

2010-10-27T11:39:00.000-05:00

I saw this on Fark and I wanted to share it.

For your enjoyment, Wikipedia presents Negative Temperature:

Temperatures that are expressed as negative numbers on the familiar Celsius or Fahrenheit scales are simply colder than the zero points of those scales. By contrast, a system with a truly negative temperature is not colder than absolute zero; in fact, temperatures colder than absolute zero are impossible by definition. Rather, a system with a negative temperature is hotter than any system with a positive temperature (in the sense that if a negative-temperature system and a positive-temperature system come in contact, heat will flow from the negative- to the positive-temperature system).

Most familiar systems cannot achieve negative temperatures, because adding energy always increases their entropy. Some systems, however (see the examples below), have a maximum amount of energy that they can hold, and as they approach that maximum energy their entropy actually begins to decrease. Because temperature is defined by the relationship between energy and entropy, such a system's temperature becomes negative, even though energy is being added (the heat capacity is negative).

Taste receptors in your lungs? And they're useful for treating asthma?

2010-10-26T11:30:00.000-05:00

Researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine had previously discovered that the smooth muscle of the lungs contains bitter taste receptors. Now, they have found that these taste receptors can be used to open the airways, a potential new treatment for asthma.

What I want to know is, how does this relate to that time-honored way of reviving someone who has passed out by passing a strong odor under her nose?

Intel GM45 Driver Virtual Desktop Problem Solved!

2010-10-25T13:02:00.000-05:00

I've had this issue for awhile with my work laptop, a Dell Latitude E6500 running the latest Ubuntu stable. Essentially, I have a dual-monitor setup with my secondary on the left. X would never set the virtual size correctly by default and I had to run "Configure Display Settings" applet to fix it every time I booted.

Since hibernation has been hosed since upgrading on 10/10/10, this has been a very annoying ongoing issue. After Googling around a bit, I decided to remove the "Virtual 2720 1024" line from /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Voila, the virtual desktop size is being set correctly!

The tell-tale sign of this situation was here, in /var/log/Xorg.0.log:

(II) intel(0): Allocated new frame buffer 2752x1024 stride 11264, tiled
(II) intel(0): Allocated new frame buffer 1472x1024 stride 6144, tiled
(II) intel(0): Allocated new frame buffer 2752x1024 stride 11264, tiled

However, since I deleted the Virtual line, the Xorg.log has this instead:

(II) intel(0): Allocated new frame buffer 1472x1024 stride 6144, tiled
(II) intel(0): Allocated new frame buffer 2752x1024 stride 11264, tiled

... which is apparently what it should be doing. Yay.

The Earth as a Cosmic Ray Hard Drive

2010-10-25T12:46:00.001-05:00

Courtesy of the arXiv Blog: Geomagnetic Record To Reveal Sun's Route Through Galaxy

I think the headline is a little optimistic, but it may be possible to get enough signal from the noise to reasonably constrain certain assumptions about the sun's path through the Milky Way, at least for certain time segments.

It did make me think about the Earth being like a hard drive with galactic information encoded on it via cosmic rays, though. It makes a nice image in my brain. Should probably photoshop something later...

Exoplanets survive their star’s fiery death. Or were they born from it…?

2010-10-22T16:28:00.000-05:00

Courtesy of Bad Astronomy: Exoplanets survive their star's fiery death. Or were they born from it?

I've often wondered if our species will target red dwarf systems for long-term colonization due to their typical long life.

Vincent van Google

2010-10-19T08:31:00.000-05:00

Vincent van Google: Artist uses Google Street View to paint the world.

Universe of Numbers

2010-10-19T08:28:00.000-05:00

The purpose of this blog is to serve as a braindump for solutions to problems I have found as well as to link to interesting physics, astronomy, and other random items. I don't expect many readers, but hope it will be useful to someone, somewhere, once.

The title comes from the movie π, wherein Maximillian Cohen, the main character, narrates:

Restate my assumptions:

One, Mathematics is the language of nature.

Two, Everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers.

Three: If you graph the numbers of any system, patterns emerge. Therefore, there are patterns everywhere in nature.

Evidence: The cycling of disease epidemics;the wax and wane of caribou populations; sun spot cycles; the rise and fall of the Nile. So, what about the stock market? The universe of numbers that represents the global economy. Millions of hands at work, billions of minds. A vast network, screaming with life. An organism. A natural organism. My hypothesis: Within the stock market, there is a pattern as well... Right in front of me... hiding behind the numbers. Always has been.

Despite that, I promise this won't become a quant-blog!