Gary Gygax, Game Pioneer, dies at 69

From the NY Times:

Gary Gygax, a pioneer of the imagination who transported a fantasy realm of wizards, goblins and elves onto millions of kitchen tables around the world through the game he helped create, Dungeons & Dragons, died Tuesday at his home in Lake Geneva, Wis. He was 69.

I spent more weekends than I care to remember playing Dungeons & Dragons in my youth. I had the 1st edition Advanced D&D books, and they seemed as strange and magical as the game stories they helped us generate. I owe almost all my knowledge of myth, a good chunk of my imagination, and – believe it or not – some significant socialisation skills to Gary Gygax. I played it from the age of about 11 until I was 20. I still, to this day, play in a play-by-email campaign.

Thanks, Gary.

Alright, back that up

I’ve just finished doing some data backups. All of my important stuff – photos and music, mainly – exist on at least two media (external hard drive and CD/DVD). I am pleased with myself, and rightly so.

You know you should be backing up your data. Seriously, make some time. Go do it. Don’t wait until your hard drive starts smoking.

Whew

Okay, I don’t know about you lot, but I am ready for this weekend.

Party hearty, everyone. Except Dan, obviously.

There’s more than one way to damp a cat

I’m going to cover two topics today, and take a dip into my engineering past by doing so:

1. I’ll describe the physical property scientists call damping.
2. I’ll discuss how engineers are often looking for easier ways of doing or measuring things, because we are inherently lazy, and how I did this for a case where I needed to measure damping.

Damping is a property of any system that makes it lose energy by opposing the motion of the system. It makes things slow down or wind down or lose energy.

Friction is a familiar type of damping. Shoot a hockey puck down an icy rink and it’ll keep sliding until it hits the other end (unless you’re a wuss); it’ll slow down only a bit as it goes, indicating there’s not much friction (i.e., little damping). Shoot the same puck across a sheet of sandpaper and it’ll come to a halt almost immediately because there’s a lot of friction (i.e., high damping).

The shock absorbers in your car are another familiar example of damping. Cars have a lot of mass, and their frames are suspended on springs so that your ride isn’t too rough. But if there was only the frame and springs your ride would be incredibly bouncy, and every bump would make you oscillate down the street. Thus, there are also shock absorbers in your car’s suspension to absorb and dissipate (dampen) some of that bouncy energy. If your suspension’s good, the springs will absorb the shock of a bump and then the shock absorbers will dissipate it quickly away.¹

Now on to the engineer laziness bit: when I started my Master’s degree a decade and a half ago I specialised in fluid mechanics and vibration. I was presented with a problem that I decided to tackle for my thesis: how to more easily measure the damping in heat exchanger tubes.

Let me back up. The common processes for producing electrical energy require boiling (whether by burning coal or by nuclear reactions) large quantities of water into steam and using that steam to drive turbines. This means you’ve got a loop of water that you boil into steam, condense back into liquid, and then you repeat this process over and over. This, in turn, means that you have some heat exchangers in the process. These heat exchangers are usually big banks of tubes with fluid of one temperature inside and fluid of a different temperature being blown across the tubes to heat (or cool) the first fluid.

The tubes in these heat exchangers are very long, and need to be supported (the positions of the baffles in the above image give you an idea of how this might be done). Because the metal tubes expand and contract as they heat and cool, they cannot be tightly fitted in their supports: a little gap must be left. This means that when fluid is blown across the tubes they tend to rattle around in their supports. And, unsurprisingly, the point where they’re supported is where the tubes tend to wear out most quickly, due to banging around in their supports.

So, to design good heat exchangers, or estimate the life of existing ones, you need to understand how those tubes bang around inside those supports. And to understand that you need to know a bunch of things: what the tubes are made of, how long they are, where the supports are, and what the flow conditions are. But one thing you need to know – and the most difficult thing to measure – is the damping that happens between the tube and its support.

There are several types of damping that could happen. If the fluids in the exchanger are mostly gas, then the friction damping of metal-on-metal will be most important. But if there’s liquid in the exchanger – and there often is – then you get some strange types of damping. You get viscous damping, which is like friction within the liquid (think of the difference in viscosity of water versus oil). You also get something called squeeze-film damping, which has to do with compressibility of liquid as the tube gets closer to the support.

The typical method for measuring damping is to shake the tubes, measure the resultant motions of the tubes, do a fancy frequency response analysis of the motion data,then do a complicated curve-fit of the data that you plot to calculate a parameter that corresponds to the amount of damping in the system. I did some lab experiments on a heat exchanger tube under different temperature conditions, with some heavy data acquisition and analysis programming. It was very difficult to get measurable results. The data were often very “noisy” which made it hard to plot and curve-fit. Often a non-linear analysis was needed, which took some programming skill to handle.

All that work, for results that were often impossible to measure, didn’t sit well with this lazy engineer. The point of my research was to find out if there was an easier way to measure the damping of the tube system. Discussions with my mentor had led us to believe that since damping is just the rate at which energy is dissipated it should be possible to estimate it by simply measuring the rate of energy (power) into the system and the rate of energy out (as measured by the tube banging on the supports). So, at the same time that I was measuring the motions of the tube to do my fancy frequency response analysis, I fitted it with sensors to measure the forces with which I was shaking the tube and the forces that resulted where the tube was banging around in its supports.

Surprise, surprise: it worked. The damping I estimated through a simpler energy in/out balance matched what I measured through the standard, but more complicated, frequency response method (and was more reliable since I was always able to make a measurement, which wasn’t possible with frequency response analysis).

This had, at the time, never been accomplished for heat exchanger tubes. I was pretty proud of it. The agency I worked for took this information and used it for further programmes. I don’t know what the status of my work is today, or what’s state-of-the-art in heat exchanger vibration analysis. But it illustrates that while pure science continues to push the frontiers of what we know, the applied science of engineering continues to try to make life easier with what we already know.

If you want to read the details of my thesis work, it’s available online in the government of Canada’s online collections (warning: that link is a large PDF).

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¹Damping happens in electrical systems, too: resistors are electrical dampers and dissipate (in the form of heat or light) electrical energy that’s flowing through the system.

You stab ‘em, we slab ‘em

Someone seems to have mistakenly distributed my home phone number as the number for nearby Gunnersbury Cemetery. I don’t think this error was distributed too widely, because we’ve only had two calls for the cemetery in the last few weeks.

The first call wasn’t too bad, since they said, “Oh, hello, is that Gunnersbury Cemetery?” to which I obviously said no.

The one today was a little creepier, though. I said hello, and the caller started right into how she was from this funeral home and so-and-so’s uncle had passed away and what cremation options did we have and…it took me a moment before I realised what was going on and cut her off. She was quite apologetic.

What’s odd is that our phone number is nowhere close to the phone number for the cemetery.

Mixed bag

Yesterday was a good day.

• I ran 10km in the morning. It was sunny and not at all busy in the parks.
• SWMNBN and I hopped in the car and drove down the M3 to Winchester. I’m not sure how we’ve missed it before, it’s a really nice town. We were going to see the famous cathedral there but it was partly closed for the day, so we didn’t bother. We also had a super lunch in nearby Cheriton at one of the best-preserved country pubs I’ve ever seen, The Flower Pots Inn.
• We went to the neighbours’ for drinks and dinner. It was delicious. They had some other friends over as well, who were very nice folks.

Today has not been as good as yesterday, partly because I’ve been lazy but mostly because I decided to watch Flightplan. When did Jodie Foster become an over-actor who chooses poor films?

“Allons-y.”

Yesterday I finished reading Shake Hands With the Devil: the Failure of Humanity in Rwanda. It’s by Canadian Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire, who was the military head of the UN peacekeeping effort in Rwanda in 1994, and is his account of the genocide that he tried – and that the world failed – to stop.

The book made me angry. I don’t think that any reader could help but be angry at the indifference of the world to a small African nation that was slaughtering nearly a million of its own men, women and children for stupid reasons of ethnicity. It’s easy to be angry at the soulless perpetrators of genocide and rape inside Rwanda. It’s easy to be angry at the colonial power, Belgium, who provoked the crisis by exacerbating ethnic differences decades before. It’s easy to be angry at UN bureaucracy that stymied every effort by Dallaire and his team to prevent the crisis they saw so plainly all around them. It’s easy to be angry at the US and France, who actively campaigned to prevent the UN from acting on the genocide. It’s easy to be angry at all those nations of the UN who provided few troops and even less money or equipment. It’s easy to be angry at the media who didn’t report the story to the world until far too late.

The reason it’s so easy to be angry is because Dallaire seems to be such a caring, unprejudiced, earnest leader. He berates himself throughout the book for not doing more, for not being able to stir the will of the world’s nations to help. But it’s clear from his book that he did more, and went farther, than I could believe any person would. He faced down guns, didn’t bathe or eat properly for weeks, and paid for things out of his own pocket. He saw children mutilated, and dogs and rats feast on their corpses. He crossed rivers on bridges choked with dead. He lost men under his command. He nearly ruined his own mind and life during his year in Rwanda. And he stayed neutral throughout it all. It made me understand how and why things happened as they were shown in Hotel Rwanda.

This book made me realise that we don’t yet live in a world where a human in Africa is worth a human in Europe, but that I’d like to live in one where that is the case. And so does he.

I understand there’s now a film about Dallaire’s story. I’m not sure if I could watch it.

EDIT: according to Dan, in the comments, I guess there’s two films: the documentary I linked to, and a dramatisation.

Samurai Jack

A few years ago, when we had cable TV, I saw some episodes of the first series of a cartoon called Samurai Jack. The creator of that show, Genndy Tartakovsky, also created or produced cartoons like The Powerpuff Girls, Dexter’s Laboratory, and Star Wars: Clone Wars.

I was struck by Samurai Jack: it was beautiful, sparse, and paid homage to old martial-arts flicks.

Because she’s wonderful, She Who Must Not Be Named got me the complete four-series DVD set of Samurai Jack for Christmas. It’s wonderful. I never saw anything past the first season. Still, I’ve started at the beginning, and have watched the first three episodes so far. It’s so stylish and wordless and almost existential that I can’t take my eyes off it.

Tasty memories

I’ve just finished a bottle of Aberlour whisky that the lads got me during the wedding festivities back in September. They bought it in France. It came in a suede leather case. It was exceptionally tasty.

Driving it home

You know what I blogged earlier, about the timely notification of data breaches? Looks like the government lost the details of 3 million people with learner’s driving permits. In May. In the US.

Petitioning the PM

For about a year now the website for the office of the Prime Minister of the UK has run a petition facility. I think that the effectiveness of petitions is highly variable, but at least this tool removes the difficulty of getting your signed list to the person in power.

While you’re browsing the list of worthy causes, Brits, make sure you sign the data security breach notification petition. Today there is no legal compulsion for organisations to immediately notify the subjects of their data records if that data security is compromised. This was demonstrated recently when the government lost the names, addresses, and bank details of 25 million child benefit recipients and didn’t tell them until 10 days later.

Indy’s back soon

Led Zeppelin O2 setlist

Check out the setlist.

01. Good Times, Bad Times
02. Ramble On
03. Black Dog
04. In My Time Of Dying
05. For Your Life
06. Trampled Under Foot
07. Nobody’s Fault But Mine
08. No Quarter
09. Since I’ve Been Loving You
10. Dazed and Confused
11. Stairway To Heaven
12. The Song Remains the Same
13. Misty Mountain Hop
14. Kashmir

Encore:

15. Whole Lotta Love
16. Rock and Roll

AAARRRRRGGGHHH!

Staying up to watch footage on the late news.

The Warriors of Qin

We’re just back from the British Museum where we saw The First Emperor, the travelling exhibit of relics from China’s famous Terracotta Army. It was very cool, with really good explanations of the history. Objects of art, bits of buildings, and many of the Terracotta Soldiers themselves are on display. The detail and variety of them is impressive, especially when you consider that there are 7000 of them back in Xi’an.

The whole legacy of the Army is fascinating. The ancient warring states were conquered by Qin Shihuangdi through innovations like the conscription of soldiers and mass-production techniques for weaponry. The result was the first unified state of what would eventually become China. Further innovations like standardized currency, written language, and weights and measures ensured the continued success of that empire.

But Emperor Qin was obsessed with longevity. He took potions to try to prolong his life. And he had his huge underground kingdom, with clay soldiers, horses, civil officials, acrobats, musicians, birds and much more built.

Then it was forgotten, until it was accidentally discovered by a farmer in 1974. New pits are still being found. The emperor’s tomb remains unexcavated: who knows what could be within?

It’s a very good exhibit, and I’m glad that China is making this touring display available. My pal The Curator, who saw it last month, feels the same. I’m told that the proximity we were able to attain tonight at the British Museum is much closer than you can get at the site in Xi’an. I think it would be really impressive to see the thousands of them there, underground, though. That’ll have to be a future trip.

Picture it: I’m a muppet

I’ve had my current mobile phone for just over a year now. I got it because I like a straightforward, candy-bar style phone. Camera specs don’t matter to me, and although it’s got one (don’t they all, now?) that the reviews said wasn’t very good, it didn’t factor into my buying decision.

Still, on the few occasions I have used my camera, I have been surprised at how very poor the images are. Oh well.

Yesterday, while I had the back of the phone popped off re-seating the battery, I discovered something, though: there was a plastic protective shipping film over the phone camera lens. It had a bright red lift tab that, somehow, I’d failed to notice before. I removed it, and found that pictures taken with the phone were miles better. I’ve been taking pictures through a plastic film for a year.

Lasers in your eyes: sometimes very bad, sometimes very good

She Who Must Not Be Named had laser eye surgery on the weekend. It went really smoothly.

The technological aspects of this procedure seriously impress me, and many are new and still developing. For those who don’t know the details, this is basically how it works: if you’re nearsighted, then the refraction provided by your lens (which you can move) and your cornea (which you cannot) focuses light too early, in front of the retina. Glasses or contacts provide some extra refraction and the focal point ends up where it should. With laser eye surgery, they remove a flap of the cornea, etch the interior with lasers to adjust the refraction, then just put the flap back down and let it heal. It sounds simple, but obviously there’s an insane amount of precision technology to make this safe and effective.

There are options for the procedure, which I find equally fascinating.  First is: how do you want them to  create the corneal flap? The old way is mechanical (they don’t go into the details, but I assume it’s some sort of blade): cut a flap, and fold it back. The new way is by laser: they fire a laser in a plane through the cornea, which causes gas bubbles to appear, and the top of the cornea just separates away without physical cutting. The other options are for how you want the laser etching done: a constant factor across the area (like your glasses prescription would provide); a measured, variable etching across the topography (which helps peripheral vision, night vision, and can account for astigmatism); and an option that falls between those two. SWMNBN  got the full-meal deal.

It’s amazing to me how quick the procedure is (about 15 minutes in total, for both eyes), how good the results are, and how quickly they can be seen. It’s really a fascinating technical accomplishment.

Synchronicity of a sort you don’t really want

SWMNBN and I were in a very minor fender-bender on Sunday whilst driving downtown. In fact, our fender didn’t even bend, it’s just got a little mark from the bare screw head that was sticking out of the license plate of the car behind us. It was stop-and-go traffic, and they go’d when they should have stopped. We stepped out and looked, and except for startling us and giving me a slightly sore neck for a day or two, it wasn’t worth a claim.

Unfortunately, the next day across the Atlantic, my brother in Toronto was in a more serious car accident. Luckily everyone’s okay, though.

Spending time at the bottom of a well

Yesterday I finished Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. This is the fourth Murakami novel I’ve read, and I think it’s my favourite, inching ahead of A Wild Sheep Chase. It’s a long journey through a surreal world, a poetic place where ordinary events are unsettling, and complete weirdness slips by as if it’s ordinary. It all piles up, with some threads connecting and some not, to what amounts to “someone’s life” (or, at least, a part of someone’s life). Military history, family responsibility, psychic powers, odd neighbours, political ambition, and fashion all converge in this eerie, mysterious world. Don’t expect everything to be answered, either.

Internet fundamentals

I often marvel at the lack of inductive reasoning that people seem to display.

I’m on a mailing list for Canadian Affair, a UK-Canada charter flight company.  I’ve flown with them a couple of times, and they’re a very good deal if you can get in early enough.

This morning I booted up my PC and saw that I had a regular email from Canadian Affair outlining their latest deals. Nothing that interested me, so I deleted it. Immediately following it, though, were about a dozen “out of office” email threads from people whose names I did not recognise.

I looked at them, and saw that they were all in reply to the Canadian Affair email. I quickly guessed that  Canadian Affair has incorrectly changed something in their reply-to field of their email which meant that everyone on the email distribution who had an automatic out-of-office reply had it sent back to all the email’s recipients. Okay, not the end of the world. I’m sure that Canadian Affair have been notified, and will correct their reply-to field in future emails.

What amuses me are the follow-on replies of the people who obviously have no idea what all this means. One guy replied (including all of us) to three of the OOO emails with, “Stop sending emails”, then clued in that they were just auto-replies.  The best was the guy who replied – again, to all – “Dear X, Thank you – I hope you had a good weekend but please do not write to me again”. He did this to eight of the twelve OOO emails in a row.

Now, I accept that not everyone understands reply-to fields, or maybe even the concept of OOO auto-replies. But wouldn’t you think it a bit odd that they were all referencing the Canadian Affair email you just got, and that they were all reporting being OOO? Would you really think that chastising eight strangers – and copying everyone in the process – would achieve something? Even if you were confused by the first email or two – as one woman was, replying quite reasonably “Why am I getting these; is there a security glitch?” but then nothing else – why would you keep going?

I thought for a moment that perhaps the 8 replies were the result of yet another auto-reply, but the customisation of “…hope you had a good weekend” would suggest that they were individually done.

EU quotas force the discarding of thousands of tonnes of fish

I suppose I’m probably more politically aware than the average Joe Blogs. However, I’m cynical enough about bureaucracy and human nature that I usually just shrug my shoulders, signalling “What did you expect?”, when I hear a story of government incompetence or self-interest.

There’s a headline news story in the UK today that’s really bothering me, though. It has to do with the North Atlantic fishery, which – because of my Atlantic Canadian heritage – is a topic I’ve heard about most of my life. Up until now, as I’ve previously blogged, it had not been as heated a topic here as on my previous side of the Atlantic. I guess this is because here in the UK they reduced fishing quotas earlier, and avoided the level of industry collapse they experienced in Newfoundland.

This morning’s news changed that. The BBC is now abuzz with reports about how the European quota system – and, possibly, the recovery of fish stocks – is forcing fisherman into the ‘immoral’ position of dumping dead, caught fish back into the ocean.

It goes like this: fishing quotas for each country in the EU are controlled centrally. Once a country has fished their quota, they cannot bring in or sell any more. This, on its own, sounds like a reasonable conservation measure.

But fishing boats are reportedly accidentally catching significant volumes of fish they’ve already filled their quota on. The example I heard on Radio 4 (RealAudio link) this morning was of prawn fisherman who put down their nets and bring them up full of cod instead. They have no choice, under EU law, but to dump the fish back in the ocean. The time it takes to do this means that the fish are always dead. It’s a complete waste – estimates are that discarded fish could account for up to 60% of what’s caught – and obviously doesn’t meet the spirit of the quota measures, since it doesn’t conserve fish. It seems like every politician involved agrees that this is a bad state of affairs.

My problem is with UK Fisheries Minister Jonathan Shaw’s response. Because measurements indicate that North Sea cod populations have increased from last year, and because commercial fishing groups say these accidental catches are due to increased stocks, Shaw is going to ask the EU to increase the UK’s cod quota. That seems horribly short-sighted to me: cod stocks are still extremely low from a historical perspective. One year of rebound, and suddenly increasing the quota is the right thing to do? That doesn’t make sense to me, nor does it make sense to ICES, the organisation that coordinates and promotes marine research in the North Atlantic: they’ve called for further quota reductions.

On one hand, Shaw gets it right, and says that improved nets need to be developed and used to ensure you only catch the kind of fish you’re after. I’m also wondering whether some methods could be developed to ascertain the contents of a net before it’s brought onto deck, so that perhaps some fish at least could be released while still alive. Most certainly, the quota system needs examining; perhaps an area fishing moratorium is the way to go. But increasing the amount of cod now, just as the levels start to come back up, is the quick and dirty fix, with one cynical eye on voter employment.