Flying Field of Doom

It's embarrassing how obvious something can be once you figure it out. In our neighborhood we have a nice grassy field which hardly anybody ever uses, so it's essentially my own personal RC plane flying field, right at the bottom of our street. However, it has a Bermuda Triangle, a Zone of Doom, an Eater of Planes... and it took me way too long to figure out why.

One year of RC planes

I just realized it's been a little over a year since I started messing with RC planes. Here's a summary of my experience so far. (Hint: it involves a bunch of foamcore and hot glue, a lot of crashing, and only a little blood.)

Before 2013 I had been flying small RC helicopters on and off for several years, namely the Blade mCX, the Blade mSR, and the Blade mQX. I found I enjoyed tinkering, fixing, and modifying the helis at least as much as flying them, which created a perverse sort of incentive to fly recklessly, since I wasn't particularly worried about the consequences of a crash. (I'd get a strange little thrill after each crash, wondering what I'd get to analyze and fix this time.) For a brief time I was into customizing the mSR with silly aftermarket parts (eg machined aluminum swashplates), but that got old pretty quick--what I really wanted to do was build things from scratch, maybe even things of my own design.

Building helicopters from scratch is a pretty advanced undertaking, and is nearly impossible at the scale I was comfortable flying. (I often need to fly near my kids if I'm going to fly at all, and so larger scale helis scare me.) Thus in early 2013 I decided to try my hand at RC planes.

Re: Counting the Cost of Nuclear ... and Road Traffic Accidents

(This is meant to be a response to Dominic's blog post Counting the Cost of Nuclear ... and Road Traffic Accidents, but his blog didn't let me post a comment of this length.)

---------------

I hesitate to respond, since I agree with your basic thesis on the hypocrisy around driving, and that hypocrisy stems in part from people's willingness to condemn anything as long as it doesn't require them to change their own behavior. But as The Internet Is For Disagreeing™, I must be a devil's advocate here.

I disagree with the knee-jerk calls to ban nuclear power, but they do stem from fear. You quote compelling statistics that show why we shouldn’t fear nuclear power--or rather, that if we fear nuclear power, it would be consistent to fear cars much more. You do this because you’re a scientist, and the beauty of science is that, through its discipline, we use measurement to set aside our fears (and our hopes) when deciding what is true. This discipline doesn’t always work, but it’s the best way we have to overcome the frailties of the human mind.

In an ideal world, these statistics would (through the rigor of scientific thought) overcome fear in the public mind. But the problem in this case isn’t ignorance of the statistics, it’s the scale of the fear. Fear of nuclear power is deep and profound, and not just because people are hypocritical and wicked.

Most obviously, there's a strong cultural fear of nuclear power because it was first introduced in the form of doomsday weapons. The public knows that our arsenals of nuclear weapons could Totally End Civilization, and yet somehow nuclear power plants are supposed to be safe. The problem is that the “somehow” is unclear for most people. Though the scale and speed of the reactions are different, though the safeguards and control measures are different, though a nuclear reactor will (as I understand it) never fail in the form of a nuclear explosion, the association is still there in people’s minds.

Even once we accept that controlled nuclear fission is a much less scary beast, there remains the problem that the beast is still genuinely dangerous, and on a very large scale, and is only made safe by harnessing it very, very carefully. We can take comfort in the fact that Fukishima has much stronger safety measures than Chernobyl did, but the fact is, if there weren't brave and brilliant people fighting to restore cooling right now, it would (as I understand) continue to heat up, then melt down, then turn into more than just a regional crisis.

Luckily for us, there are brave and brilliant people stabilizing the situation. But the tendency of a nuclear reactor, left unattended, is to get worse rather than better, and catastrophically so. That kind of failure mode is something new in the world, and it speaks to people’s fears more deeply than the (statistically more significant) threat of auto accidents.

Inside each nuclear reactor is a Fury harnessed. To ask people to accept it is to ask them to believe in the safety measures you've imposed. Because most of us are unlikely to ever understand the safety measures in any great technical depth, trusting in them is an act of faith. Ideally, it should not require faith, but just analysis of statistics. But in this case fear trumps statistics for all but the most scientific minds. Thus, when the safety measures fail publicly, and technicians (the Fury Harnessers themselves) scramble to contain the danger, it's no surprise that many people lose faith.

As for car accidents, the fear there is less because it’s diffuse. When one person dies in a car accident, it’s a catastrophe for a family and heart wrenching for a community. This happens over and over again in our society, but it’s scattered. It’s rare that a single car accident affects an entire city, let alone an entire nation. But when an out-of-control reactor seems to threaten a nation and beyond, people’s fears are aligned in space and time and the response is naturally amplified. Cars are more dangerous in the aggregate but less likely to incite a response for this reason.

My point is not that anti-nuclear sentiments are correct, but that they are natural, and to me it’s clear why people would react this way. We may believe nuclear power is worth the risk, and (armed with favorable statistics) we may be comfortable with our hubris in harnessing the Fury for our own ends. But we shouldn’t be surprised that many people are terrified along the way, particularly when thing go wrong. And if that leads to some inconsistency of thought, we should blame at least some of it on the hubris, and not just on frailty of the human mind.

(If you'd like to comment, please do so on Dom's original blog post.)

When You Go

I've recorded a cover of Jonathan Coulton's wonderful song, When You Go (original). My version is based on a piano arrangement by Jarrett Heather.

Here's my version, with my own piano and vocals:

When You Go by tdl

Alibi

[by Tom Lokovic, circa 2007.]

Two weeks after his twenty-seventh birthday, Mel framed himself for a murder which he didn't commit. He did this to win the favor of the victim's widow. That is, she became a widow in the process, but she wasn't one at the time, and in any case he didn't even know she was married.

This may take a bit to explain.

Mel lived alone in a rent-controlled apartment in Lower-East Side Manhattan. He'd been unemployed for six months now, having found that Loan Officer was a job ill-suited for a man of his ambition. At least, that's how he thought of it. The real problem had been the ambition of Mel's manager, who had orchestrated a certain amount of fraud through the agency. Mel's coworkers were complicit in this, and Mel was thought to be, though in reality he had trouble following all the winking and whiting-out of numbers. The manager had finally let him go, offering a tiny bribe in exchange for Mel's promise of silence. Mel assured him that he couldn't explain what had been going on if his life depended on it.

Spinola's Bake Shop

Our friend Stacey has opened a wonderful bakery in our town, Murrysville PA. Spinola's Bake Shop has cakes, cupcakes, cookies, pastries, candies, and (soon) fresh baked bread.

I'm not unbiased, since I created the website for the bakery. But everything I've eaten there is amazing. Highly recommended.

http://www.spinolasbakeshop.com/

Fix my Flat

Fix my Flat

I'm like George Washington in those old-timey fighter jets he flew
as he fought to shed the imperial yoke of the British in World War Two.
Like me, George knew the painful truth of Power and Oppression
as his musket fire, raining down, taught Tyranny a lesson.
I know today how Georgie felt as he took on the Crown;
I'm stranded in this parking lot so late Starbucks closed down!
Look,
George didn't give his life against those Zeppelins on that fateful day
so I could wait an hour and a half tonight for AAA!

--Tom Lokovic

MIDI for C# / .NET

I've just released an open source library for MIDI support in C# / .NET. The Google Code page is here:

http://code.google.com/p/midi-dot-net/

This is my first foray into C#, .NET, and Windows programming in general. That's right, I've been programming for twenty years, professionally for twelve, and I've never written any software for Windows until now.

I wanted to do some MIDI programming and assumed that Windows would be the best OS for it. Then I figured I might as well learn one of Microsoft's more recent offerings, so I looked into C#. Then I found out that there is no direct support for MIDI in .NET, and so I proceeded to wrap the Win32 bindings. It turned out to be cleaner and better documented than the alternatives I saw, so I figured I should share it with the world.

Not exactly the most efficient way to get some MIDI programming done, but it's been fun.

A Physical Asymptote

This is the coolest art piece I've seen since the Wooden Mirror...



From the description:

This machine was inspired by dreaming about gear ratios and considering the unexpected implications of exponential powers.

Each worm/worm gear pair reduces the speed of the motor by 1/50th. Since there are 12 pairs of gears, the final speed reduction is calculated by (1/50)12. The implications are quite large. With the motor turning around 200 revolutions per minute, it will take well over two trillion years before the final gear makes but one turn. Given the truth of this situation, it is possible to do anything at all with the final gear, even embed it in concrete.

Little Haiti

Little Haiti

Look around--it's paradise!
Exotic spices ride the breeze
through tropic sun and sidewalk
vendors haggling in foreignese.

I'm visiting a far-off land
today. It cost a dollar eighty
on the bus through Chinatown,
past Wal-Mart here to Little Haiti.

A portly tattoo-covered lady
fortune teller draws my eyes
with signs: "I Do Do Voodoo" and
"Large Medium, Small Price."

She scatters shells, a chicken foot,
some roots and seeds, then draws a breath--
"Your future holds adventure! Travel!
Acid reflux! Love, and death!"

Amazed, I ask for more. She looks
around, alert, and draws me in.
"The key to growing wealth is--
do you have a lucky bank card PIN?"

"I hope so--is mine lucky? I
use Fifty-Seven-Eighty-Two."
She frowns. "It's not too bad, but you
should have me charm your bank card too."

She's been away a while--it must
be a complicated spell.
But when she brings it back,
my luck is changing, baby. I can tell.

-- Tom Lokovic

From 1999: Foreshadows of the Economic Crisis

From Flutterby, a 1999 New York Times article about the passage of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. This act removed some of the safeguards put in place after the Great Depression. (Some claim that this was a significant contributor to the current crisis. Others disagree.)

Sen Phil Gramm (R-TX) arguing for the repeal:

We have a new century coming, and we have an opportunity to dominate that century the same way we dominated this century. Glass-Steagall, in the midst of the Great Depression, came at a time when the thinking was that the government was the answer. In this era of economic prosperity, we have decided that freedom is the answer.

Rep Jim Leach (R-IA), in favor of the repeal:

This is a historic day. The landscape for delivery of financial services will now surely shift.

Sen Bob Kerrey (D-NE), in favor:

'The concerns that we will have a meltdown like 1929 are dramatically overblown.

Now for the dissent:

Sen Dorgan (D-ND), arguing that it removes safeguards that could lead to a financial crisis:

I think we will look back in 10 years' time and say we should not have done this but we did because we forgot the lessons of the past, and that that which is true in the 1930's is true in 2010.

Sen Paul Wellstone (D-MN), against:

[Congress] seemed determined to unlearn the lessons from our past mistakes.

Wow.

Flower

Last night I discovered an unbelievable game for PS3. It's called Flower. It falls into the category of exploratory, atmospheric non-violent games, which isn't a genre that tends to impress me. This one, though, affected me deeply.

The developers (thatgamecompany.com) call it "a video game version of a poem", but I think it's more accurate to describe it as a meditation. With meditation, you don't get anything out of it unless you're in the right frame of mind, and willingly release yourself to the experience. So it is with Flower. If you play it in a task-oriented state of mind--an achiever's mind--you will quickly barrel through the game and completely miss out on its beauty.

Flower is "easy" in the same sense that watching a sunset is "easy": to talk about its difficulty, to treat it as something to be overcome, is to miss the point entirely.

The premise of Flower sounds ridiculous if you say it out loud: you control a cloud of flower petals, driven by the breeze through a series of lush, immersive outdoor scenes, touching other flowers and bringing life to the environment. Here's a clip:



This clip doesn't do justice to the experience. The environment is incredibly reactive. The lighting, the sound, and the music integrate beautifully. The weather, and particularly the sky, change as you progress through the game, creating very distinct emotional settings. You make your way through the environments by tilting SixAxis controller, which starts out feeling strange but quickly comes to feel as whimsical and buoyant as the petals themselves.

Flower is available for PS3 in the Playstation Store.

Terrible Towel Instructions

(Click for full-sized image.)

To the Legion

  To the Legion

The sacrifice we make today
will live in song for future kings,
but first our story was beheld
by Janus in the dawn of things.

Before the ancient cities rose,
before the primal morning light,
the destiny of worlds was writ
for Janus of eternal sight.

The Owl of Minerva knows
the path a mortal man should take,
but where the path will lead is known
to Janus in the Temple Gates.

To Mars I dedicate my sword.
For Rome I go to fight and die.
I end today as I began:
in Janus's immortal eye.

--Tom Lokovic

One of Many

  One of Many


Through thick and smoky air inside a busy bar in Memphis
I settled down to drink beside a tired-looking Elvis.
Absently I asked if I addressed the honest deal;
He snorted, took a swig, and he said "Tell me: what is real?"


"For screaming mobs I sang and rocked my pelvis for a fee;
Their desperate eyes, in tears, perceived a God that wasn't me
And so I came to know that only death would set me free."


"One day I got away--I went to Elba more or less.
I spent my time in unfamiliar quiet happiness.
The music called me back, but now I move about unseen:
I have an army of my counterfeiters as a screen."


"In me the people found a fragile King they couldn't save.
Now they just believe in copies, not the archetype they crave.
And they're right--I'm not the light--I'm just a shadow in a cave."

--Tom Lokovic

Lukemoist

A while ago I coined the unpleasant term "lukemoist". Here is an example usage of the term:

A: "It rained yesterday. Is the lawn wet?"
B: "Not really."
A: "Is it moist?"
B: "Maybe a little."
A: "Would you say that it is lukemoist?"
B: "Gross. I would not say that."

There are no hits for this word on Google, so I declare this to be the first usage of the term on the web.

I am so proud.

Grid Cat

Ever since I was a kid, I've had this strange affliction.

Whenever I see a uniform grid, particularly one tilted at a 45 degree angle, I see a cat. A big cat, like a tiger.

Don't see it? Let's color it in a little.

That's pretty much the level of detail that jumps out at me, though I can add some characteristic features to make it more obvious.

See it? Now look back at the top grid, and try to see it there.

I see this everywhere. Chain link fences. Tiled floors. Rubik's Cubes. Graph paper. Anything with at least 3x3 squares. And it's been this way pretty much my whole life.

It wasn't until recently, though, that I ever mentioned it to anybody else, or tried to convey visually what I see.

If he were fancier, he'd look like this:

Spiro Hop

We got this for Emma and Lucy this Christmas.

Zen Shorts

Our kids have way too many toys. I worry about this sometimes.

Our kids also have way too many books. But I don't worry about this so much. I approve of books. I know I should take my kids to the library more often (have I ever taken them there?), but failing that, if my kids are going to own too much of something, books are probably the way to go.

I also like to give my kids choice. If they want a particular book, I tend to respect their preference instead of pushing towards something that I would prefer. I figure they'll stay more engaged if it's something that interests them.

Unfortunately, as a result of this latter policy, a lot of our kids' books fall into a certain category. You probably know the one. Let's call it the Regurgitated Corporate Swill category. Pretty much anything with a recognizable TV or movie character falls into this category. I've generally tried to steer my kids away from this category, but not strongly enough to prevent the accumulation of, for example, Dora Does the Same Damn Thing Over and Over Again volumes 1-50, not to mention The Inane Treasury of Disney Princess Stories: Wishing, Dreaming, and Sighing.

So it was that this weekend, on the way to the bookstore, I made a bold, tyrannical declaration: either the kids would walk out of the store with nothing, or they'd walk out with something that I chose. There was less protest than I expected, and after a bit of browsing we walked out with Zen Shorts.

Zen Shorts is a beautiful little book about three kids that meet a panda who lives just down the street. His name is Stillwater, and he's a peaceful soul. As he plays with them, he shares three stories, adaptations of Zen koans, that give some perspective on their own lives.

It's simple, fairly short, and the art is beautiful. The girls love it, and (unlike many of their books) I don't feel like tearing my eyeballs out while reading it to them. Recommended.

Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog

This weekend I stumbled across Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, a three-part musical miniseries starring Neil Patrick Harris, directed by Joss Whedon. It's a fun little piece, apparently written during the WGA writers' strike. It comes across as low-budget but with good production value, and the music is decent.

And it seems I lucked out: they were streaming the episodes for free this weekend, but have since taken them down, and now you must buy them from iTunes. Their business model is clearly of the "stir up word-of-mouth via short-term free distribution, then switch to paid distribution" ilk. And I guess I can't blame them: I liked it a lot, and so I recommend it.

If I am a pawn in their scheme, at least I am not an unwitting pawn.