I can see my house?

We took the red eye back from San Francisco, and we arrived in NYC at sunrise. In this picture, I think my house is visible, but I didn't recognize where we were until it was almost too late:

You can see the George Washington Bridge on the lower right, and I believe Teaneck is generally in the middle-left region of this picture.

Here's a better shot of the GWB as we flew over the Hudson River:

Here's one final view, that may include my house, possibly CCNY, but definitely includes the GWB, upper Manhattan, and the Bronx:

Toilet paper delivery

After their first all-day Sushi picnic at the beach - the Widget corporation needed a special delivery

I actually saw this truck in the parking lot at work. Feel free to comment if you have a better caption idea.

Berkeley Bumper Stickers

We stayed in Berkeley on our recent trip. This is a collection of some bumper stickers we saw around there (click the pictures to embiggen):

Home Birth Rockstar

My dog ate the weapons of mass destructi☢n

Shame they ran out of space

Must be email address, National Grid

I get my electricity from National Grid, when editing my profile I noticed a curious information tidbit.

Who would have thought that the entry in an email address field would need to be an email address?

Also – here is a sneak preview to what I've been doing with Matlab lately (that is me in the photo). More to come on this...

Thank You Header

We recently received a mailer from Fairway. It seems they forgot to add some info:

They also seem to have a custom Lorem Ipsum:

Algae Growing in a Cup, a Timelapse

So when my basil plant finally died - there was a thriving algae community growing in the water. I decided to let it live on and continue to provide my apartment with oxygen. Here is a short time-lapse video I made of it.

Heat wave and BART strike

We just got back from a vacation to the San Francisco area. We arrived in time for a record-breaking heat wave and a mass transit BART strike. Both of which finished right after we left. We managed to have a great time anyway. I'll probably blog about this a bit more, once I have time to go through our pictures.

I assume because of the heat, and California's regular wildfires, there were "no fireworks" signs all over the place. For example, on one side of the street:

But that didn't stop this sign, around 20 feet down the road:

Citi Bike is failing at physics

It seems that New York City needs to take some remedial STEM – the promotional materials for NYC BikeShare have an elementary physics mistake.

Their marketing materials state:

[the bike] has a low center of gravity for a more stable ride.

It turns out that a moving bicycle, is actually less stable when the center of gravity is low. Much like a balancing a pencil (low CG) is harder than balancing a broomstick (high CG). This phenomenon is explained well in this article about robot bicycles.

I emailed citi bike to complain and they responded with this:

I'm fairly certain that the engineers involved in constructing these bikes have looked at the pros and cons of both high and low centers of gravity, and found this to be the best option for the widest range of people.

I cannot argue with this. I've ridden these things in Boston and in Washington DC and they are indeed very stable; nicely done engineers! The stability has absolutely nothing to do with a "low center of gravity." In fact the stability to ride might actually be due to a high center of gravity for bike+person compared to more aggressive bike frames.
The next thing citibike said was:

Besides, almost anything with a lower center of gravity is going to be more stable based on simple physical laws.

Correct and irreverent again. Objects siting motionless on the ground will be more stable with a low center of gravity. But bikes mid "ride" are more like an inverted pendulum than a stable object. Here are some suggestions for a new description.

I wouldn't normally be so fast to recommend remedial classes ... but just last march NYC made a subway poster which mathematically embarrassing at best. Also, several years ago Eli previously discussed the state of science education in NYC which left much to be desired.

I'll end this post with a snobby message from Boston: get it together New York!

Cell phone tower camouflage

The ridiculousness of cell phone tower camouflage is well known. See, for example, Keeping Up With The Parental Units or this excellent gallery. Today, I noticed a different sort of camouflage:

They tried painting the cell phone antenna to look like the brick behind it:

At the end of the day, this still looks ridiculous. At a certain point they should just embrace the antennas as is, and stop trying to hide it.