Another way that this fallacy presents itself is when someone from a wealthy nation travels to a poorer nation, which is the only way to virtually travel back in time. Some tourists think, “Oh, how quaint that the people here take their clothes down to the river by donkey and wash them in the fresh river water! How natural! This is how humans should live. I envy these people.” Shut the hell up. No you don’t. There is no rational person that washes clothes by hand that would not prefer to have a washing machine to do it for them in a tenth of the time with a hundredth of the effort. Anytime the adjective “quaint” comes to mind, ask yourself if you really mean it in a positive way. As an immigrant back to The Old World, I catch myself falling victim to this fallacy sometimes.

What set me off on this little rant was a TED Talk, by Sherry Turkle, that I saw this morning about how the internet and smartphones and texting and social networking is making us more lonely. What? Are you out of your mind? I disagree with just about every point made in this talk.

As with absolutely everything, you can do smartphone social networking too much, but reasonable people set reasonable boundaries. Yes, I have been in a room with two other people, and every one of us was using their smartphone. But I’ve also been in a room with two other people in which all three of us were reading books. Does that mean that books are destroying our relationships? Down with reading! Why aren’t we talking to each other?! Give me a break.

The world is getting better for humans by almost every metric, but something in our brains makes us long for days of yore when life was actually harder than it is now. You know that quote by Stephen Hawking?

Time travel might be possible, but if that’s the case, why haven’t we been overrun by tourists from the future?

Perhaps it’s just that no one wants to come back and live in the relative squalor.

I have known for some time that the location of every commercial aircraft is known more or less in realtime and the information is publicly available via either the airline or a government database somewhere. However, I’ve never had much of a need for this information.

Then, someone came along and realized how to best present this data. Your modern smartphone, after all, knows its latitude, longitude, angle relative to the Earth’s magnetic field, and angle relative to the Earth’s gravitational field. So if it also knows the location of any other object, be it a star or a friend or a train station, it can calculate, using fairly simple geometry, when you are pointing the phone in the direction of that object.

Presenting Plane Finder AR (the AR stands for Augmented Reality). For $2.99, you can point your phone at any airplane you see in the sky and it will tell you the airline, the flight number, the city of origin, the destination, the distance from you, and the current velocity. With only a dozen uses, I have gotten well over three dollars worth of enjoyment out of the app.

Most of the planes that fly over me here in northern Spain are going from southern Spain to the UK, usually with Ryanair, but occasionally I’ll see one going from Florence, Italy, to Atlanta, Georgia, or from Barcelona to New York City. Although this information is really quite useless to me, it really is an awful lot of geeky fun.

A shot from my living room window. The plane is behind the black box.

The World Wide Web is the only thing I know of whose shortened form takes three times longer to say than what it’s short for.

— Douglas Adams, The Independent on Sunday, 1999

In Spanish, it’s even worse, since each W requires four syllables with uve doble. Stephen Fry has suggested we say “wuh wuh wuh”, but that sounds like a dog barking to me.

Given the ubiquity of hypertext “web” documents, for me, it comes down to this:

The fact that you have to put the http:// before all of your web addresses anyway already tells your browser and the server and everybody that you’re looking for a hypertext document, so the “www.” is entirely superfluous!

But old habits die hard, even if they are a waste of resources. Just think of all the bandwidth we are dedicating on a daily basis to sending those four bytes to represent the “www.” across the wires!

Even Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the whole darn thing, said back in 1999 that the WWW prefix was outdated:

Nowadays, however, the web server may be far and away the biggest service foo company has, and it might make sense to give it pride of place. Remember you can only do this with one service. You could use http://foo.com/ which is after all easier to type, even though people expect to have to type the “www”.

This issue seems even more important now that we’re in the age of Social Networking in which web links are passed around in dizzying quantities, giving rise to an entire industry of URL shortener services.

I hope that more and more companies will figure this out and buck the trend. It’s easy enough to forward a URL with “www.” to one without it, so your customers will still find you. In the mean time, you can find me at erikras.com, not www.erikras.com.

How was this discovered? The Gregorian calendar – the one we use in modern 21st century western society – repeats itself every 400 years. Therefore, to calculate how many times the thirteenth falls on each day of the week, we only have to examine 400 years, or 4800 months. A bloke by the name of B.H. Brown did this by hand in 1933, but now we have computers. The program to do this is completely trivial once you have a calendar algorithm to follow the Gregorian calendar like all modern computer languages have built-in. Trivial or not, I couldn’t resist…let’s calculate how many times the 13th falls on each day of the week, shall we?

13th Histogram Calculator

When you click “GO!”, the calculator will start from today, January 13, 2012, and count which weekdays fall on the thirteenth of the month over the next 400 years until January 13, 2412. Here’s a hint: it goes up to 688.

GO!Reset

Exciting, huh? There was only one Friday the 13th in 2011, in May, so I've been waiting months to post this.

This occurrence is so common that I felt it didn’t deserve much more than a tweet. What I heard a few minutes later was, ironically, exactly that, a bunch of tweeting. It is fairly common for birds to be perched on my building’s antenna at dusk, but today there were so many that they didn’t all have a place to sit. And then I saw…

Flocking birds really must be one of the most gorgeous phenomena in all of Nature. The natural ebb and flow and organic rhythm of their movement is what ballet dancers mimic on stage. Up and down and left and right, all in perfect synchronicity, and…without a choreographer!

What I love most about flocking birds is that we scientifically minded apes, using computers, have figured out just how incredibly simple an algorithm is needed to create such a seemingly complex emergent phenomenon. I know, because I wrote a program to do it. And yet, none of the beauty of said phenomenon is lost by our understanding of it.

My ability to identify birds is almost as strong as my ability to identify flowers or mushrooms or insects in that it’s pretty much non-existent, so I don’t know if these were starlings, and could thus merit the awesome term murmuration, a word which came to the attention of internauts recently with that video from Ireland. My video is not nearly as jaw-dropping as the one from Ireland, but I was certainly mesmerized as I was filming it and the several times I’ve watched it since. I just wish I’d had a less obstructed view and a better microphone to capture the whoosh! as they changed direction in an instant.

As quickly as they arrived, they departed, leaving me feeling lucky to have witnessed their momentary aerial ballet.

After realizing that M was a showstopper, imagine my surprise when I figured out that I could write my last name, too! Radium-Samarium-Uranium-Sulfur-Selenium-Nitrogen!

At this point, I had come too far not to make little periodic table boxes with the atomic number and weight of each element to line up like Scrabble pieces. But what format to use? Periodic table boxes vary wildly, with different fonts, text alignment, and which values are included. ptable.com has a very impressive dynamic HTML periodic table, with various facts as you hover. periodictable.com went with pictures of each element. Pure substances are shiny!

Eventually I found this list of periodic table PDFs available for downloading and printing. The first one on that page is the standard one for the California Standardized Test. As soon as I saw it, I was immediately thrust back to my lab bench in Chemistry class calculating moles and reaction yields. I had my format!

So here we go…

And finally, in her highly radioactive two element glory…

I might have to make some t-shirts of my own…

To the geometrymobile!

This is the composite photo, taken by Letian Wang in Beijing, China, on December 10, 2011, that originally sparked my interest. You can see that the radius of the Earth’s shadow is slightly greater than the Moon’s diameter.

First of all we need to define what we mean by “shadow”.

For the purposes of this post and subsequent calculations, we will only be dealing with the umbra, the dark bit where no direct sunlight hits the moon. We will be ignoring the indirect sunlight that is refracted through the Earth’s atmosphere during an eclipse, bathing the lunar surface in reddish hue.

Okay, let’s do some math!

Here we can see the relationship between the radius of the umbra to all the distances involved. Do I even have to mention that the diagram is not to scale?

If we draw two more lines, we get two congruent right triangles.

Since we know they are congruent, we know their sides are proportional and can write the following equation:

…which we can solve for the radius of the umbra:

When we plug in the values for the radii of the sun and Earth, we get:

Over time, with the two elliptical orbits involved, both the numerator and the denominator of our distance ratio vary. The ratio of the distance from the Earth to the Moon (d_moon) to the distance from the sun to the Earth (d_earth) is at its maximum when the Moon is at its apogee and the Earth is at its perigee (we are ignoring the likelihood of these two extremes coinciding, of course).

The ratio is at its minimum when the Moon is at its perigee and the Earth is at its apogee.

When we plug these back into our bigger equation, we discover that the radius of the Earth’s shadow at the distance of the moon varies from 4479 km to 4735 km, or from 2.578 to 2.725 moon radii.

To visualize this, let’s look at the minimum and maximum shadow sizes compared to the Moon.

Not a very big difference, I think you’ll agree. We did, however, answer our question.

At least now astrophotographer and artist Laurent Laveder will know the range of sizes for his hoops for his incredible lunar eclipse photography.

The laptop was very interesting, loaded with about twenty different apps, from drawing programs to reading programs to a programming app much like the original Logo Turtle that captivated many hours of my prepubescent youth. There’s a front-facing video camera for video conferencing and a fully featured web browser. Another key feature is its durability. You can drop it off a table with no damage, and you can even use it in the rain. It won’t work actually underwater, but how many laptops do you know of that work in the rain?

It’s cool to play around with, and I’m glad I quenched my curiosity about it, but with a powerful Mac with a 30″ screen in my office, the OLPC laptop doesn’t get much attention. My secondary motivation for purchasing the laptop was to give it to my first born child as a first computer. But then her grandfather gave her a freakin’ iPad, and she loved it, so I thought the OLPC laptop would be a lost cause.

When my parents were visiting last week, I set up an old MacBook Pro of mine for my parents to check their email when I was working in my office, and Nora became fascinated with the MacBook. When her pawing at it got a little too vigorous for my liking, I told her to leave it alone. She cried that she wanted a computer, and then I remembered the OLPC laptop. I pulled it out and plugged it in to charge it up. She absolutely loved having her own computer that didn’t require a constant stream of Be Careful’s from adults. She learned how to open it (it’s not easy the first time you hold one) and turn it on. The trackpad and keyboard elude her capacity so far, but she loves pretending to be a computer user like her old man. Her playhouse was designated as her “office” and she set up a chair and desk to work in there.

My little entrepreneur in her office. She works in her pajamas, just like her old man!

The Give One Get One program ended on December 31, 2008. Now you can only make selfless – though tax deductible – donations, but I’m sure you could probably find one on eBay. Click here to donate.

I picked up a bottle and continued shopping. At the checkout, I asked the cashier if she knew anything about this wine, and she responded that it was a great wine for the price, a good “weekday” wine, and it was the wine that her father drank with his lunch everyday.

The wine was quite good, definitely one of the highest quality/price ratios I’ve ever consumed. I won’t bore you with those bizarre adjectives wine connoisseurs use, as I’m not one. But I am a bit of a psychology connoisseur, so I would like to discuss things this winemaker did very, very right in packaging their wine.

First of all, the name is genius. It literally means “red [horse] mane”, hence the horse logo, but out of the corner of your eye, or with the movement of someone pouring you a glass, any Spaniard or wine drinker knowledgeable about Spanish wines is going to see the words Crianza and Rioja, both of which are marks of quality and their usage is highly regulated. You have to get official certification to put either word on your wine bottle. Crin Roja is neither crianza nor Rioja; it’s from a vineyard called Vinícola in Castilla La Mancha.

Secondly, you almost never see gold netting on bottles of wine in my price range. Only the very finest wines, usually reserva or gran reserva are netted. The internet tells me that this tradition originates from an intent, by rich Europeans of yore, to prevent the house staff from opening the expensive bottles in the cellar for themselves before refilling and recorking them with an inferior wine.

Why is all this important? Not only do these clever tricks make the wine sell better, but they actually make it taste better!

The industry of expensives wines is mostly all bullshit. Blind taste test after blind taste test have shown that those of us that are not wine experts (and the experts, too, to some extent) base our estimations of wine quality on subliminal and priming stimuli, with price being the primary factor. As neuroscientist Jonah Lehrer explains in his book, Proust Was a Neuroscientist,

What these wine experiments illuminate is the omnipresence of subjectivity…Our human brain has been designed to believe itself, wired so that prejudices feel like facts, opinions are indistinguishable from the actual sensation. If we think the wine is cheap, it will taste cheap. And if we think we are tasting a Grand Cru, then we will taste a Grand Cru.

Our sensations from drinking wine are interpreted by a subjective brain that is also factoring in biases and beliefs and expectations. Just like the placebo effect still works even when the patient knows they are getting a placebo, cheap wine in a fancy gold netted bottle with words that look like crianza and rioja will taste better, even if you know it’s all just clever packaging.

¡Salud!

Today on my walk around town, when I hit “shuffle” on my iPhone, it chose a random song to play from my entire music collection, which, currently at 53 gigabytes, doesn’t even come close to fitting on my iPhone.

Of course this is a natural consequence of both higher wireless bandwidths and higher storage and retrieval capacities of enormous server farms (a.k.a. The Cloud). If your iDevice is always online with cloud computing, then the need for syncing data from your computer to your iDevice has pretty much vanished, if all the data is available on high bandwidth servers.

It’s pretty clear to me that the future revenue model of the music industry will be one of subscriptions to stream any music the subscriber desires (or to download with a small fee per track). The artists would receive a certain amount every time their song was streamed or downloaded. This is called the Open Music Model and is just what Spotify does.

For now, at least, to my mind conditioned to the current model of music ownership, iTunes Match is one of the coolest services I’ve used in a while. It’s definitely worth $24.95 of my money every November 15th.