The fire alarm “testing” in our building was initially limited to intermittent, loud chirps. Around 9:45, they ran the alarms for fifteen minutes straight. I tried offsetting the cacophony with Neil Diamond (who seems to have released only “Best of” albums for the last 25 years) played at full blast. After two rounds of singing […]
Cascade Bicycle Club has a new High Performance Cycling “program” for cyclists who like to ride fast, hard, far, and climb hills. Claire Petersky beat me to the obvious counter-suggestion: Is there also going to be a Low Performance Cycling Open House, for cyclists who want to lollygag and dawdle? This would teach skills in
Low performance cycling Read More »
The schwag of the conference was limited to a breath mint/toothpick dispenser courtesy of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, one of the “gold” sponsors of the conference. I don’t know if they’re intentionally suggesting anything to the 90% male attendance at the conference, but biting down on the mints did help me keep my cool and
Teeth grinding on Northwest Airlines Read More »
Since the early-afternoon presentations were all going to be over my head (eigen this, partial differential that), and Minneapolis’ weather was a sunny 52°F, I punted on lunch and went biking. I had hoped to do a quick ride over to the St. Paul side, return and shower for the late afternoon session.
When I worked the trade show/presentation circuit in the 1990s, I’d often have to hunt down “lost” components of our booth. On the way to the super secret customer package storage depot, I’d see the inner operations of hotels. Employees weren’t maintaining the facade they do in public, tossing stuff around, fraternizing in the nooks,
Disgustipating hotel food Read More »
It’s bad enough that we’re using Greek letters for hurricanes and product release phases (how’s that for juxtaposition?), but yesterday’s presentations became progressively top-heavy in their use of mathematical notation. Even though I used to be a math gΣΣk, it was too much and I bugged out around 2:30 to go biking. (That’s the excuse
Today was my first full day at the visualization conference in Minneapolis “dang it’s cold here” Minnesota. All of my local contacts informed me there were still tickets available for the Packers-Vikings game. Not wanting to find out if pigs were clogging the airways, I passed up the opportunity and went to the conference.
Centroidal Voronoi Tessellations Read More »
(Doesn’t have the same ring as Freakonomics.) In a previous entry, I tried to quantify the economies of bicycle commuting. There were several interesting comments that I wanted to call out.