Static Electricity

Spreadsheet Template for Sharing Cost Among Friends

My genius friend Daniel Martin-Alarcon (at right) built a masterpiece G-Docs spreadsheet template for splitting costs among friends and/or roommates.

This template is entirely free and editable by the public so go ahead and fill it up Internets! ... but you probably want to make a copy for serious use ...

Here is the link in full textual glory:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AsXzBtTq7IoLdEJLMk5veTQtcXh5MTZoQXJZcUtJeUE&usp=sharing

My roommates and I have been using this for about a year – from party supplies to toilet paper – it is ridiculously convenient.

Here is an example: I bought two things, that benefited myself (N1) and my 2 roommates (N2, N3). My "anonymous roomie" bought one thing which benefited all of us.

Here we immediately see who owes money and who is owed. (some names redacted).

If they pay you back, it is logged in the system and it all balances out. The beauty of using this (and why it works so well with long term friends and/or roommates) is that they don't have to actually pay you back directly. Instead they can pay the next electric bill or pay a mutual friend that you owe money to, things will even out (and if they don't you can add colors to highlight scumbag friends).

If you liked this doc - search up Daniel's email address here and thank him for having me post this here, in his own words:

for the greater enlightenment of humanity

Low cost Schlieren Visualization

Have you ever wanted to see air? A couple weeks ago I made an attempt using the difference between two images ... calling it a poor man's Schlieren imaging.
Last week, I managed to get a proper Schlieren imaging setup built for only $9 (not counting the cost of a DSLR camera). It worked well enough that the setup graduated to my website: DIY Schlieren Flow Visualization, and a youtube video with cool(?) music in the background.


This is a picture of the setup:

But really you should checkout the page on my website with the description here:

http://jonathan.lansey.net/pastimes/schlier/index.html

Open Letter to Discovery Kids

Dear Discovery Kids / Paragon Publishing,

My son recently got this book as a gift:

It is a nice enough book, with lots of pictures, many of them nominally 3D. I guess that counts as "bringing learning to life." However, one (non-3D) picture caught my eye:

Firstly, I am please to see that Pluto is not in the picture. Nevertheless, there is something very wrong with it. Discovery Kids, I'll give you a few seconds to see if you can find it. ... ... See it yet? And no, I'm not talking about the bizarre green color of space -- maybe it's a garish false-color IR photo or something. What I concerned about is the source of the light in this picture. I was under the impression that the Sun is the primary light source in our solar system. Yet, there appears to be a far brighter light source off the the left hand side of space, since the sides of planets Saturn, Earth, Mercury and Uranus that face the Sun are all in shadow! (Yet, strangely, the Sun isn't?) This is a pretty sad mistake.

I wanted to find the source of this image. A quick look at the photo acknowledgements showed me that the way you produced this book was to simply use a ton of stock images, with a handful NASA images thrown in:

Now, granted you don't want to spend lots of money to make a cheap book, and you could have chosen even worse stock images (check out this one; it has the sun shadowed!), but if you're trying to produce educational books, at least make sure it's correct! This isn't a "subtle" mistake like the Wrong Stars In Titanic Movie debacle, this is something glaringly obvious on the main focus of a two-page spread that you should have caught! When I asked my five year old son what was wrong with the picture he figured it out, so your editorial team should definitely have caught it. I hope you do better in your other books.

Poor man Schlieren imaging

I recently learned about Schlieren imaging, got excited by this video, and thought I would try a crude version.
Details may follow eventually, but in the meantime, here are two photos of the air above a flame. (Zoom in on the lower one to see it closer).

Of course both of my brothers were already familiar with it (being a physicist and an aerospace engineer).

How to get your credit card info stolen

There was an article in the Bergen Record about a police chief who had his credit card info stolen. He said,

“I still can’t believe how easy this way for her,” Russo said. “I’m almost intrigued by this. I want to know how she did this. I’m dying to have these questions answered.”

While I don't know how that particular crook did it, this is the picture they included:

Let's see that up close:

Maybe the next crook will just read the paper!

While he was "clever" enough to cover up the last two digits of the card, only 10 possible combinations satisfy the credit card checksum. Of those, only three (do the calculation yourself!) have rounded top-left corners in the first of the last two digits. This guy's a prime candidate for the @NeedADebitCard Twitter feed.

More microscope pictures

So I covered my freshly cooked rice with some plastic wrap and this grew!

Checkout the right eye of this bug which is in focus, you can see the compound eye.

And this is a lunometer (a bit of foreshadowing about a blog post in the distant future)

Adventures Buying Facebook Likes

I'm starting a community of people fighting injustice and promoting ethical treatment of UUIDs ... or so it says on the Facebook page. Actually that's pretty much all its says on the page which you can see here. The website links to www.something.com (as of this post).

I really wanted to buy some likes for my new page but apparently Facebook frowns upon this – so instead I spent a couple bucks on real Facebook ads with the expressed goal of garnering likes. It turns out they are pretty cheap and really effective at getting "likes"

I'll let it slide that they rounded down pretty heavily here to get the "$0.01 per like" measure breaking every engineering principle that would have rounded 0.019 to $0.02

Anyway, at the point of this posting, the page less than a week old already has 839 likes – that is more than double the Facebook page for my bicycle horn project which has been up for more than a year.

The only post on the page says "the twitter page is up!" (see below) ... and following the link to twitter reveals a single tweet "the Facebook page is up!" (as of this post)

A large proportion of these likes come from dubious profiles of people who've likes thousands and thousands of things. This profile (NSFW) had 17 friends but liked a total of 1756 things. Other profile photos looked suspiciously like celebrities. So far there is only one legitimate comment on the CAUSE Communities Facebook page – a particularly redundant "I LIKE IT"

In any case I highly doubt these 800+ people are as concerned about the abuse of UUIDs as I am. Why are they liking the page? For more on why Facebook ads will be bad for your business see the Veritasium videos here and here.

Anyway, this UUID adventure is just beginning...

Note:

The amazing picture is by Moyan Brenn on, www.earthincolors.wordpress.com

Lag BaOmer In Southern California

This past week I was at Camp Pendleton at the ExFOB event (Here are some videos the Marine Corps posted from the event, I will post more in the future as they do.  Hopefully some will have me in them).  Camp Pendleton is in northern San Diego County, and as you may have heard there are some fires.  So to start you off I will show you some pictures of ground squirrels in the middle of the field where the event was held.

I will follow this up with pictures of MV-22 Ospreys I saw flying at Camp Pendleton.

Friday morning I woke up with my rental car covered in ash, and while driving home after the event I noticed that it was 110 degrees outside.

Now that I have spent all this time building up to it I will show you why no one will be lighting bonfires for Log BaOmer in my area.

 This fire was about six kilometers from where I was, and there where a few times that I saw flames.

 The ash and smoke from these fires made it all the way to Los Angeles (about 100 miles away) where there are air quality warning in places.

This is the results of a small fire that occurred on the side of I-5 after a vehicle collision last Wednesday, that closed I-5 northbound.