Only Green

It seems that the folks at the Graduate Center of CUNY have gone a little Green-crazy.  Apparently, they only want you to recycle only green plastic and green cans, as well as some mysterious green white paper, and throw out everything else.

Birthday Present

Last night I was at Rutgers in a computer lab working on a presentation for my engineering economics group class project when I get a Google chat from my mother telling me that my birthday present was in her trunk because it was to heavy for her to carry into the house. Well I of course wondered what it was my mother had gotten for me, so when I home at 2:00 AM and popped open the trunk of her car I was happy to see this.

My mother got me a window AC unit for my room, the central air system in my house is not good enough to keep my room cool if I am using my computer, so I had in past years asked for a window AC unit, and now my wish has come true.

Not the best fit know to man, I used quite a bit of clear packaging tape to make up for the fact the the accordion part could not actually stretch as far as it is supposed to and to block the bottom of it (there is a decent gap between the bottom of the AC unit and the window ledge in my room.

Google Chrome Review

This post is going to list some reasons why Google Chrome is the best program ever. I mostly compare it to Firefox because if your still using Internet Explorer then you don't even deserve to use Google Chrome.

1. It saves screen space.
   Any place on a screen with something you already know is wasted space. Windows naturally wastes a whole horizontal bar across the top of the screen unless your using Google Chrome. They have managed to work around window's shortcomings and they put all the tabs open inside that top bar. (See screenshot below)
   
   
   
   
2. You can type google searches in the address bar
   That's right, they save even more space by avoiding that little search form that firefox has on the top right.
   
   
3. Two click access to your favorite sites
   To go to gmail I type 'g' in the search/url bar then hit 'Enter.' I type 'b Enter' and it goes to bankofamerica.com
   
   
4. Super Stealth Mode
   Ever want to log-into your spam email account without losing your current session? You could use an inferior browser, like IE, or you can click ctrl-shift-n to open a new chrome browser which will have its own cookies (so you can be logged into both at the same time).
   
   
5. Its amazingly fast
   Faster than you can possibly imagine. It take a tenth of the RAM that Firefox needs which is a billion times less than IE.
   
   
6. Slow running tabs don't slow other ones.
   If one tab seems to be crashing, you don't even need to close it, your other tabs are safe with Google Chrome.
   
   
7. They have a sense of humor.
   See below.
   

Recently I got a bad virus on my computer which has destroyed function in many programs. As with all good computer programmers, chrome errors are funny, see below.


"Aw, Snap!
"Something went wrong while displaying this webpage. To continue . . . . "

It actually stopped working all together when the virus got out of controll so I did something you would never want to do volutarily . . . uninstall it. I got the following message:


"Are you sure you want to uninstall Google Chrome? (Was it something we said?)"

Timex error 745007

I usually am pretty good at crashing computers, even when I'm not trying.  I just have that magic touch.  I've crashed touch displays in museums, Metrocard vending machines, every operating system I've gotten my hands on, etc.  Recently I even managed to crash my watch:

One morning I see that my trusty Timex Expedition watch no longer wanted to display the time.  Instead, as you can see, it only displayed "74 50 07."  To try and save it, I took it apart:

On the flip side of the display I found:

It turned out that pressing that little metal tab which hangs over the giant orange sticker reset the watch (I didn't even need to insert a battery!), and now it's as good as new.
And so, I'm on to the next challenge.  What should I try and crash next?

Important Fire Safety Tip

Today's Fire Safety Tip comes courtesy of CCNY's Marshak Science Building.  The tip is "Don't do this:"

Visualizing Areodynamics with Snow Patterns

There was a snowstorm one windy night - with the wind going smoothly in one direction. The pattern that the snow left made the aerodynamics of the various cars clear.

A new blog

I have started a new blog called Behind the Guesses.  It is by and large a physics / math blog, so I imagine only a subset of our normal readers might find it interesting.  At the moment I only have an intro post, but I have an exciting post all ready for Monday, so check back then.
Here's a small preview of some topics you can expect to see:

• The Quantum Harmonic Oscillator Ladder Operators
• Newton's Laws
• The Dot and Cross Products
• And more...

And here's an excerpt of Monday's post as a sneak preview:

Now, at this point, many texts define, with no motivation other than future ``convenience'', two operators

(5a)

(5b)

and proceed to show how these can be used to simplify the Hamiltonian and easily solve the problem. While it is an elegant and quick solution, this presentation is completely useless. I find it highly unlikely that Dirac sat down to solve this problem and tried a whole series of random operators

and so on, along with their complex conjugates, until he lucked out with the solution in (5)...

from Behind the Guesses

See you all there!

A Look From Up High

In the past I have spoken of my job, to be more specific here and here. For those of you who are to lazy to click those links and who can't recall what my job is here is a quick description. I fly a tethered blimp and take pictures of stuff. The taking pictures part has finally come to fruition; last week over spring break we finally where able to fly the blimp in the air outside (we had to wait for nice weather). Of course before we could fly it we needed an SD card for the camera, so I had them buy a 16 gig SD card, and I had the extreme pleasure of installing it and discovering that I could now take 4795 12 megapixel pictures.


I know you have been seeing a lot of my head, but at least here it is from approximately 30 feet high.


From 60 feet high, with a jeep driving by.


Picture of the roof of the building we store the blimp in.


90 feet high, legally we cant fly it higher than about 500, however we had slight equipment failure at this point. The up-link from the camera to me failed so I lost a picture of what the camera was looking at, and of course I am working to fix this problem so next time we can post some pictures from really high up.

I joined a lab and went on a hike

The many layers of snow covering a volvo that never moved.

One layer of snow from a great snowstorm

Mount Monadnock in New Hampshire . . . It was covered in snow - waist deep in drifts.

Notice the hole where my foot crashed through the top layer of hard snow and I went in up to my knees.

The lab I work for is headed by Michele Rucci.

http://aplab.bu.edu/people/current_members.html

Iused a picture from California
http://lanseybrothers.blogspot.com/2007/07/lab-safety.html