While I was studying 20th century music at the end of my music major at Bowdoin, I was shown (by someone, I have no idea who) a painting (i.e., on canvas, not a musical painting) that Shostakovich did, entitled “Self-Portrait”. Or at least I think it was called “Self-Portrait”, regardless that is what he considered the painting to be. As Shostakovich has for some time been one of my favorite composers (if not my favorite — his string quartets are among my favorite music ever written or played; Even now I am listening to the 4th movement of no. 11, and some of my fondest memories as a violist stem from the playing of these quartets), I sometimes go on long searches to find whatever book this came from or some reprint online or *something*. To date, though, I have never found it, and any search for “Self-Portrait” coupled with Shostakovich returns a series of his musical compositions which bare that name. If anyone out there knows anything about this painting, please post something about it here!
The painting is very somber, almost depressing. It depicts a man with very little definition walking away from the point of view of the painter. The color palate is very dark, as I remember. I would estimate that only 15% of the frame is taken up with the walking man and the rest by his surroundings on the street he is traveling down. This is how I remember the painting, though I never fully studied it and my memory could be very flawed. But, he’s definitely walking away from the point of view of the painter.
If I could remember who showed that painting to me (over 4 years ago now), I would just email him/her. My memory is not that good.
Cheers.
UPDATE: There has been a briefing by the Pentagon which has video of the missile launch, the “kill,” and a brief analysis. The launch occurred on time with no delays due to weather (only 2-3 foot seas). It looks like the shoot down was successful and the hydrazine tank was, in fact, destroyed along with the satellite. The collision occurred at 153 nautical miles above the Earth (~283km).
UPDATEII: Also, what do you know… it looks like there is already amateur photography of the debris field and the hydrazine trail, courtesty of Rob in Maui, Hawaii.
As many of you may know the US military is planning on shooting down a rogue spy satellite in a decaying orbit. It is designated USA-193. The satellite failed immediately after launch and was reported by amateur satellite watchers to have a decaying orbit. The official reason for shooting down the satellite rather than allowing it to deorbit on its own is that the ~5000 pound satellite contains about 1000 pounds of frozen hydrazine propellant that could potentially deorbit into parts of North America. It has been confirmed that the USS Lake Erie, a Ticonderoga class guided missile cruiser, will fire a modified SM-3 missile to intercept the satellite. This may occur sometime within a couple hours of this post, but it looks like weather might delay the shot.
Despite assurances from the US, there has been wide speculation that the reason for shooting down the satellite is to test US anti-satellite (ASAT) capabilities, specifically as a reaction to the unannounced test by the Chinese which destroyed a weather satellite dubbed FY-1C in early 2007.
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Has anyone watched the Lost episode from last week? I think Teebs did if his away messages are any indication. They went back to the whole flash-forward thing again. I may be in the minority here but generally I like the idea of flash-forwards. I think they added a lot to episode 401. This episode was a complete wash though. They focused way too much on Sayid in the future and seemed to, once again, just randomly introduce ridiculous plot lines (with the whole Ben Linus boss thing in the future) that can’t possibly all be resolved no matter how long the show goes on. And, most importantly, they sacrificed any significant development on the island for this new crap in the future. Lame.
On an unrelated note, I was talking with afischer tonight about some random things and brought up my previous ‘Gmsh’ post. He said mostly what I expected … that is, “no one will remotely care about Gmsh”, but then said (paraphrasing), “no, I bet there is some ridiculous vdov.net groupie out there somewhere who feverishly anticipates anything new that comes onto the site”. I replied, “yeah, there may be, but I’m pretty sure if I met this person I would likely hate him/her … what does that say about vdov.net?”.
Nothing good, that’s for sure. Ha!
Often I’ll ditch a piece of software because it doesn’t fit my needs. Or because it’s not open source and a reasonable alternative comes along. Or because it frustrates the hell out of me. A year ago I developed all my unstructured meshes in Gmsh, which is a great little language for developing everything from very simple to very complex finite element geometries, which can then be imported (with some difficulty sometimes) into your PDE solver of choice. Or, as I’m doing in my chemical engineering class right now, you can write your own solver. Writing your own is solver is a wonderful exercise and very important, but insofar as you can use unstructured meshes, there’s really no reason to reinvent the wheel when Gmsh is so much better now than it was. There are obvious limitations to unstructured meshes for certain problems but they work very well for the types of problems I’m working on, especially because I often have absolutely no idea what the solution is going to look like for my dynamic systems. There is a nice little community around the software as well. It’s always great to find that software you initially dismissed over a year ago has totally reinvented itself and fixed all the issues you had with it previously. Regardless, check out Gmsh, even if you don’t do finite element calculations or calculations at all. It’s pretty fun to play around with.
Oh and it does a fantastic job of optimizing elements. This was done in 30 seconds on a single processor in a ~3-4 million element tetmesh, and basically completely eliminated the bottom 2 quadrants of mesh quality (the range in “mesh quality” here (I won’t explain the details), is 0 -> 1). If you can’t see it (someone who knows please explain to me why firefox on linux screws up image scaling so bad … I’m sure there is a simple solution but I definitely don’t know it), a blown up version is here.
You have all probably forgotten that once there was a podcast on this site. The podcast isn’t coming back but something very similar is! That’s right, the Rt. Rev. Fischer, like Lazarus himself, has risen from the tomb. I am now an official DJ for Brown Student Radio (BSR). They liked me enough to give me a 1.5 hour timeslot on Saturday starting at 5:30. You can listen to it streaming live or you can get after the fact at my very own archive of the show. The on air radio station is WELH Providence 88.1FM. However, you are not going to hear my show on the actual radio airwaves. This is because BSR shares their station air time with The Wheeler School, a very nice private high school in Providence. So Wheeler broadcasts from 6:00am to 7:00pm and BSR gets the rest of the time. My show inconveniently ends at 7:00, just shy of actual airtime. Hopefully, I can get a real on-air slot over the summer (who knows?). There are a lot of things that are nice about BSR compared to my former radio home WBOR Brunswick 91.1FM. It is a more tightly run ship, their website is much better, and their internet broadcast is much superior. The drawbacks are a meager 150W broadcast tower (compared to 300W at WBOR), the fact that they share the air time with the Wheeler School and a Spanish language station, and they really make you work to be a DJ (8 hours of service a month… not that bad really). However, BSR is trying to get a license for a Low Power FM station under the official call letters “WBSR.” Low Power FM stations are something that I have wanted for a long time and in my opinion would radically change the US music scene if they proliferate. For more information check out The Prometheus Radio Project and the Wikipedia article on LPFM. I am planning on generating a good rant on the FCC and its problems, corporate radio, LPFM, and various related topics, but for now just know that the Rt. Rev. Fischer is back on the air.
Tonight I was surfing around the internet trying to find something interesting to read (one of my favorite activities) while the pseudo-sweet sounds of Amunblane and the Electrocustics (Lucas & Nate playing everything under the sun on what has become a 6-guitar collection in my house) wafted through the hallways and into my office. Amazingly, something I saw made me think — a lot. I initially dismissed the title “Publisher Tests Selling by the Chapter” in my RSS feed from the Wall Street Journal. After some introspection on the idea, I came back to the article, and was disappointed by my inability to read the full article as, of course you know, WSJ requires a subscription. So I didn’t read it. Instead I’ll go on a major rant about this and many other things tie into a general theory of how we as a society consume content through technology, and offer a historical perspective on the subject. I may be very wrong about all these things, though I think it brings up a number of interesting issues that are worthy of consideration. (more…)
This year I will celebrate the 10th anniversary of my Belushi movement (BM). This post is my public call to action!
[Some background: In 1998 I moved to Cleveland, Ohio to attend Case Western Reserve University. With the exception of a half dozen white undershirts, I left all of my shirts behind. For those of you that don't know me, this was a tragedy. I am a connoisseur and collector of fine, Goodwill t-shirts.]
One Friday, I left class and headed home for the day. Outside the university building were credit card company representatives, surrounded by students. At the center of the crowd was a table full of t-shirts with funny sayings or pictures. One in particular caught my eye; on the front was a picture of John Belushi from the movie “Animal House.” Awesome.
At this point, I had been wearing, washing and re-wearing the same six FTL t-shirts for nearly a month. So I inquired and one of the representatives told me I could have the Belushi shirt if I filled out a form signing up for a new credit card. Overcome by my hatred of doing laundry, I caved. Bush league. I know.
Several weeks later, life was very different. My shirts from home had arrived. My Belushi shirt had its place in my collection. My new credit card was cancelled and my mailbox was stuffed daily with dozens of unsolicited pieces of mail offering me other new credit cards - credit cards I did not want.
The BM was born. I started sending the business reply by mail envelopes back. I sent them back empty, full of the information sent by other credit card companies, trash left in the dorm mail room. I didn’t care. Nine years and seven moves later, I still receive between 3 and 6 credit card offers a day. I also still send the business reply envelopes back. What can I say? I’m regular.
I hope you are moved to help out. That reminds me, I have some mail to send.
Today, I found a gap in my knowledge of basic physics. The story seemed right for my first post to vdov.net.
The first derivative of position is velocity and the second derivative of position is acceleration. What is the third derivative of position called? Hmm. I didn’t have a special purpose for this information, but I was curious. So I did some searching and found out it is called the jerk (link). I was so excited, it was as if the new phone books were here. I also found out that in the UK, the term jerk is instead sometimes referred to as jolt. Lame. [Side note: This summer I am moving to England. I will not conform.]
I shook the thermos song out my head long enough to wonder about the next derivatives. That’s right, there are more! How many of them have names? According to the physics FAQ, it has been suggested that the fourth, fifth and sixth derivatives be called snap, crackle and pop. Nothing has been proposed for higher order derivatives. The Rice Krispies terms don’t seem to have caught on. It’s a little surprising to me they haven’t. Scientists aren’t above adopting funny names or names that have funny acronyms (e.g., Proton Enhanced Nuclear Induction Spectroscopy). Do scientists hate elves? Maybe just the registered trademark variety.
That concludes my first post. I’m somebody! I’m in print! Things are going to start happening to me now.
I have been very excited about the beginning of this season of Lost for quite some time. My excitement was augmented by my meeting/sitting next to Matt Fox (Jack Shepherd) on a plane from Seattle to Redmond, OR in late December. Alas, last night I was not able to watch the show, so I will watch it today. However, this morning’s blog feeds did not bode well for episode 401. From Commentary’s blog Contentions comes this short post. And I quote:
Gibberish. It was absolute and total gibberish. Once again, it simply set up a series of new unanswered peculiarities rather than doing a thing to address the 27 plotlines its writers have already laid out. In particular, the revelation that Dr. Jack’s doctor father is also an Invisible Man living in a cabin on the Lost Island — if you’ve never watched, don’t ask — relocated Lost to the land of camp. I don’t think there is now any question that the writers and producers of Lost are just making it up as they go along, that they have created mysteries without first knowing the solutions and that, when they reach a dead end, they just make up another mystery. We’ve been had.
Damn it. Of course, this is exactly the crap that every Lost fan is afraid of, and exactly the type of writing that convinced me in the middle of Season 2 to stop watching (I decided to keep watching, in the end). I hope my feelings on the episode are somewhat less negative, but I doubt it.
Cheers.
is the surface tension, 
is the radius of the sphere, 
is the permittivity and 
is the electric field. The following derivation follows simply by application of a little algebraic gymnastics and Maxwell’s equations/stress tensor (where 
is the charge density and 
is the total number of charges).
multiplier coming from the fact that this is in fact a sphere), which is given by: