My kids were feeling somewhat left out each time I dropped a Star Wars reference in conversation – something I apparently do a lot. Hoping to shore up this gap in their cultural education, I rented and watched all three(*) movies from Netflix with them. Parenting can be tough! (*I am, of course, referring to A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. I’ve heard rumors that there is another trilogy using the Star Wars name, and it even had Samuel L. Jackson asking “ __‘What’ ain’t no planet I ever heard of. They speak Bocce on What?” But the ones I saw were CGI-frenzies. (There’s also rumor of two sequels to The Matrix. Yeah, riiiiight.)) ...

Supercomputing 2010’s keynote was Clayton Christensen, the author of The Innovator’s Dilemma (and its numerous follow-ons), whose research, studying the demise of companies over time, is utterly fascinating (to me) and I can’t believe I hadn’t read before. He has studied the demise of companies over time — think Digital Equipment Corporation (cut up into bite-sized chunks in 1998, the rest of which was eaten by Compaq, which was eaten by HP), SGI (a darling when Jurassic Park came out, but ultimately liquidated in 2009, assets bought by Rackable systems), and Sun (bought by Oracle). He’s observed recurring patterns of market disruption. For example, in the case of DEC, their rise was predicated on being cheaper than mainframes. As they gained more experience, the minicomputers became more reliable, but were still in the $100k range. DEC itself was subject to PCs meeting a nascent market need willing to tolerate PCs being utter crap (early-on), but at a far different price point. As PC technology evolved, it became compelling enough that few were buying VAXen. ...

The other night, one of my kids managed to spill soup into the vents on the top of the oven door, which then dripped between the two oven door glass panels. Googling around, I discovered this is not uncommon, but there were scant instructions for cleaning between the glass of an oven door. Rather, forum contributors were evenly divided among “buck up and live with it,” “sell the house,” “call a professional to repair it,” and “replace the oven” — roughly my priority of options. Since this was a relatively new kitchen remodel, my better half was antsy to have it fixed. As I’m always up for a challenge, I thought it would be helpful to document the process in case anyone else has a need for cleaning between the glass of their oven’s door ...

As I’ve aged, evidence of my lost cat-like stealth comes in the form of various snapping, crackling and popping noises I make when I walk. They’re freakish sounds, though I have no pain associated with it. In fact, it actually feels good when I stretch at night. The most common popping noises people have are associated with knuckle cracking. (… which I don’t do.) Knuckle joints look like the diagram to the right: two bones contact at their cartilage. Cartilage is surrounded by synovial fluid — a soluble lubricant. All of this is surrounded by a joint capsule. ...

When I first heard someone mention the term dolphin kick, I thought it was a reference to the 1980s Patrick Duffy show, Man from Atlantis. The BBC says the dolphin kick “replaces a standard underwater leg kick with a whipping motion that minimizes water resistance.”1 It’s a little easier to make sense of this if you watch the video. Suffice to say, if it’s done correctly, as has been used by Michael Phelps[3,5], it confers an advantage to the swimmer. ...

I’ve been researching date/time formats for inclusion in a software product, and wanted to share some of the thought processes involved.Use case: an engineer or scientist wants to plot something over some time period. All time periods are possible, so we must provide years down to minutes. For example, a coastal engineer surveyed said he: “visualizes the results of the global wave prediction models we run. I am typically dealing with long term (20 – 40 year) datasets of hourly to sub-hourly model data.” ...

There are a variety of milk-based products available in the store. Just sticking to cow’s milk for the moment, here’s the periodic table of viscous milk products, ordered by decreasing fat content: Butter – 81% milk fat. A stick of butter (8 tablespoons) has 97.2 grams of fat (880 calories!), which breaks down into 62% saturated and 25% monosaturated. Trivia: West of the Rockies, butter sticks are 3 1/8″ x 1.5″ x 1.5″.4 Heavy Cream – 36 – 40% milk fat. Whipping Cream – 35% milk fat. It’s used to make whipped cream. Obviously. Sour Cream – 16 – 21% milk fat. Like buttermilk (see below), except it starts from cream instead of milk. Low-fat sour cream has thickening agents like carageenan or corn starch. (I was surprised at its fat content.) Light Cream – 18% milk fat, used for pouring into coffee.1 Half and Half – 10% milk fat, also used for pouring into coffee. Its fat content is insufficient for whipping. Evaporated milk – 6.5% or more. Liquid obtained by the partial removal of water (only) from milk[5]. 1 C condensed milk is equivalent to 1 C evaporated milk plus 1 1/2 C sugar. Whole Milk – 3.5% milk fat3. After drinking skim for a few weeks, this tastes soooooo creamy. Yogurt — 3.3% milk fat. Lowfat Milk – sold as 2%, 1%, 1/2%. Sometimes it’s fortified with skim milk. Skim Milk – Usually “0%,” but it’s technically less than 1/2 gram per cup. Sometimes protein is added, making it more viscous. **** Buttermilk – usually non-fat; “traditional” buttermilk is the tart liquid leftover from churning butter. 2 It can also be made by adding 1 tablespoon white vinegar to 1C low-fat milk, letting it stand for ten minutes. These amounts are squishy, so your mileage may vary. However, to put the fat content into perspective, a cup and a half of whole milk would be equivalent to a tablespoon of butter. (1.5 cups * 240g/cup * 3.5% fat = 12.6 g fat; 1 Tablespoon butter = 15 g * 0.81 fat = 12.2g fat) ...

Bellevue is blacked out. Behold! The Bellevue Blackout challenge is to find all of the geocaches within the city limits. Unlike the Delorme or Thomas Guide challenges, where one finds a cache in a region defined by each page of the respective road atlas (and does a lot of driving in the process), this one kept me relatively local. Since I traverse that corridor five times a week, I reasoned I could pick up stuff here and there. How hard could it be? 🙂 ...

I don’t watch much television , but when I do, it’s because my Tivo’s found something cool. Like: last night’s introduction to RFIDs by Dr. Chris Diorio, chairman and CEO of Impinj[5]. His presentation is available online1, so I will just summarize some of the things I learned. Who wants them? Business! Among the benefits: For the supplier, RFIDs provide a way to track a product through its complete lifecycle. ...

Mister Peabody, set the Wayback Machine to three years ago, pick a spot during a really long product release cycle. Partly out of boredom, but mostly to mess with development manager at the time, I had asked one of the developers to swap out the splash screen. The product logo was thus modified: **Official** **Battle-ready!** Appropriate text was substituted, changing our tagline from “Enjoy the view” to “Today is a good day to PLOT!” Laughs were had, and it was removed before alpha testing several months later. ...