Engineers and Lego

Hilarity ensues.

A happy Passover to whomever it applies to.

Growing half an onion

I needed half an onion for some food, and didn't want to waste the other half, so I put it in a zip-top plastic bag and stored it in the fridge. And promptly forgot about it. We recently came across it again while cleaning the fridge:

The back half still has its peel:

But the roots and leaves are growing happily, unaware, it seems, that they've only half an onion.

Yuri Gagarin

Yuri Gagarin.  Nothing I can write gives true merit to what his flight of Vostok 1 means to me and to the people of this earth. Выпьем за Гагарина! (Let's drink to Gagarin).

Happy Yuri's Night to you and a good World Cosmonautics Day to all.

Exclusive Credit Card Image Designs

I have a "Platinum" credit card ... don't ask me what this rare metal has to do with my credit, I think its kind of funny how these companies try to make their cards sound appealing. Capitalone was nice enough to let us put our own image on our card (Eli has already taken advantage of this) and so I decided to create my own exclusive club. The invitation only "GOLDEN SAPPHIRE ROYAL BLACK CARD" with not one, but two AmEx Centurions. It also sports a gold encrusted wooden frame. The use of a competitor's logo is blatantly against the policy - but I'm hoping that my image will slip through the sensors (you will be sure to find out if it does).

Once I get my card, I plan to try to get into luxury airport lounges, and act incredibly surprised at any business notaccepting credit cards even though I have a Golden Sapphire Royal Black Card.

I would also be glad to receive any suggestions for more antics to pull off with this incredible card.

~~~~~~~~~~

UPDATE: The censors have rejected my request

Sorry the image you submitted for your Capital One® Image CardSM has been rejected. We will not approve any images that contain the following: Material that could infringe on the copyright or trademark rights of another party, including branded products, marks, or business names.

Can anyone think of a good, exclusive-posh-sounding bank name? Maybe even a recommendation for an obnoxiously swanky looking logo not under copyright?

Contenders:

• American Epxerss
• Wells Fargone
• Goaldman Sax Group
• Organ Stanley
• American Regal Bank
• US Imperial Bank

And some possible icons

This blog post is false

The first rule is there are no rules...

Angel In The Crosswalk

Happy April first (thanks to Sergey who had a camera on him when we saw this).

How long it takes to get to work

For most of the months Dec-Feb (2010-2011) I recorded the times I left for work and the times I got there (excluding days that I stopped for gas etc).

I took almost exactly the same, route each trip, driving from my personal parking spot next to my apartment to the same spot in my office lot. I worked from home on snow days (except for one ... see the outlier). I usually covered the clock in my car so I could not be biased into a different driving pattern.

The curve fitting was done with my log fitting Matlab program (which you should all download if you ever need to fit a scatter plot of points to linear, exponential, logarithmic or power law curves). The slope of the line is 0.9589 which is very nearly 1. This means that for these months that traffic had a surprisingly small effect on the driving times.

photo seen previously on the blog: Cairo at night

This goes against my intuition and anecdotal experience of it taking longer to drive in when I leave during rush hour (8-9). I think part of the reason for this is that I took a good chunk of these data during the winter break of a few universities, so traffic would have been lighter than usual. Also, I don't have enough data to get a good error bars around these numbers. I'd expect traffic to be less predictable during rush hour.

Chip Art

As part of my research for my Ph.D. I needed to have some small-scale structures fabricated (you may recall my all-nighter at BNL). Recently I haven't been doing much of that, sticking to theory and simulation, but I left a little surprise in the GDSII file I sent to the ``fab team'' operating out of The Cornell NanoScale Science & Technology Facility (CNF).  And they found it! [Click through for full size]

These were actually some of the larger features I hid on the chip, but I think they came out really nicely.

Two things:
1. I was inspired by the work of the talented people over at The Silicon Zoo to put this on the wafer. You should check their site out (the zoo starts a couple lines down).
2. I forget where I got the silhouette picture from, but I think it was from Ironic Sans's The Histogram as the Image post (modified slightly).

Update 6:17PM
SJester's comment made me realize that I didn't comment on the size scale here! The whole cityscape is around a third of the width of a human hair. The width of the Empire State Building is around the diameter of a bacterium, and the antenna on top of the Empire State Building is as wide as the wavelength of UV light (smaller than all the other ``ROY G. BIV''), and the width of the antenna on the WTC is smaller than a rabies virus! This is approximately three billion times smaller than actual size.

Additional Studies on The Recent Evolution of The American Urinal

Some time ago Eli first documented the new species of urinal americanas urinalas aqualess.  At the time he questioned whether this was a naturally occurring species or if it was the result of genetic engineering.  Unfortunately, we here at The Lansey Brothers' Blog Investigative Team do not have any information about the validity of these allegations (If you do have information on this matter please leak this information to us, the people have a right to know).  I am here to alert our readers to the fact that it has become an invasive species.  Previously shown to be exclusive to arid climates it has begun to appear in this moist north eastern climate.  Additionally, it has shown the ability to rapidly adapt to the wetter beer addled climate.  I present to you my findings on this newly discovered subspecies urinalas aqualess vortexsius.

While the changes in this subspecies are not large they have resulted in a significantly improved fluid processing capabilities.  The elongated neck area, over previously observed samples of this species, has resulted in increased vortex creation allowing for improved drainage and user amusement.  This has resulted in the capabilities of this species to proliferate on college campuses and then the rest of world.  While initial studies indicated a solitary lifestyle, it has been recently shown to have the beginnings of a pack mentality, as shown below.

While is has yet to be seen in packs larger than two the speed at which it is forcing out older species is concerning.  In this image you can even see the remains of the previous species to inhabit this region.  The only logical conclusion is that this new species may have cannibalistic tendencies toward older outdated species.  If pack sizes continues to grow at this rate we on the brink of a great extinction.

This is the greatest issue of concern since Global Cooling.  Please write your government representatives, we need to stop this global extinction of the americanas urinalas due to loss of habitat and violent encroachment on territory by the urinalas aqualess vortexsius.  Action must be taken before it is to late.  If worst comes to worst we can always create a americanas urinalas sanctuary.