Steven S. Holland

Let’s say you have three light switches, one of which controls a single  light bulb hanging in the middle of a room.  The light switches are outside of the room, and with the door shut there is no way to see that the light is on — no light under the door, through a keyhole, nothing.

How can you tell which switch controls the light bulb if you can only enter the room once?

EDIT:

Solution: You turn on the first switch for a long time, say 10 minutes, then turn the switch off and turn on the second switch and immediately enter the room.

1.) if the light is on, the second switch is connected to the light.

2.) if the light is off, but the bulb is hot, it is the first switch.

3.) if the light is off, but the bulb is cold, the third switch is connected to the light.

This is just really cool. It’s a water balloon colliding with a guy’s head in slow motion (1000FPS = 1000 frames per second). Played back at 30FPS (normal video) that is a slowdown rate of 3% of normal speed.

I am always fascinated by things like this in slow motion. There was a great Dave Chapelle skit where he talked about how anything in slow motion is instantly much cooler/funnier. It’s true. Movies always exploit this effect.

Take anything, the simplest thing, and slow it down like this, and it becomes this amazing, beautiful sequence. I still remember being in grammar school and watching this video where they slow down a bunch of normal, everyday actions — and one, of course, was a simple drop of water incident on standing water. The coolest thing ever. That image sticks with me to this day.

So I have been using the Ubuntu linux distribution on my work desktop for a few weeks now, and have acclimated pretty well. There are still some things that I need from Windows here and there, and I was looking for ways to run a virtual version of windows inside my Ubuntu OS. After asking around to a few people who are way more knowledgable in Linux (Aaron, and Justin, mainly) I was looking into VMware. VMware costs money, though, and so I decided I would give VirtualBox a shot, since it is free (it’s also open source), and from what I have read online it’s a good alternative to VMware. Instead of potentially killing my Ubuntu installation at work (which has required an awful lot of tweaking and extra libraries for the code I am running), I gave it a test run on my laptop, starting with the inverse problem of running a virtual machine of Ubuntu OS inside WinXP.

I must say that it was extremely easy, and fast to install the virtual box. I ran into a few issues with the screen resolution inside the virtual box, but that was fixed by installing some extra files that virtualbox default loads onto the desktop of the ubuntu installation. So far I have not noticed a lag in opperation (I alloted 256MB of memory to the virtual machine, and gave the system an 8GB partition of the hard drive), and it solved one of my huge complaints about Ubuntu a year ago, last spring, when I had installed it and played with it — the network settings for the wireless card are by default accesible to the Ubuntu virtual machine, so I should be able to connect readily to different wireless networks without so much hassle with the wireless networking settings (which, unless I missed something, only allowed one network setting to be stored at a time). So far I am liking it a lot. Now the real test will be on Monday when I attempt to install WinXP on top of Ubuntu…

Turns out that Creative was sued for basing the listed size of its hard drives in base 10 instead of base 2, leading to lower actual capacity than the drive’s advertised size. Link!

I bought 2 creative hard disc MP3 players between 2005 and 2006, so apparently I am entitled to either 50% off a 1GB player or a 20% discount from their website. This may mean some purchases are in order from Creative!

I have been getting a lot of comments and trackbacks that are spam, so I reluctantly are changing it so that i have to approve all first comments for them to appear.  After that, if you have had a comment approved, you should be able to post as normal.

I passed my oral thesis defense today, so I currently have a masters!

In celebration, watch this:

Today! 10AM. I have put a lot of work over the past few months into putting together my thesis, and I am hoping that will pay off.

I found this xkcd comic strangely appropriate — hopefully I am not subconsciously doing something like this during my presentation:

I guess there aren’t imaginary antennas…

My brother Tom sent me an email today, letting me know he will be on the Johnny B radio show tomorrow morning (April 4th, Friday) with Mud Morganfield ( son of Mickinley Morganfield, a.k.a. Muddy Waters…) as a promo for a show they are playing at Buddy Guy’s Legends in Chicago, IL tomorrow night.  He will be on 97.9FM or on the web at http://www.wlup.com/Airstaff/johnnyb.aspx – scroll down to the “listen now” tab

The show is on tomorrow between 6AM and 10AM, but word on the street is they will be on sometime between 9-10AM Central Time (10-11AM for those of us on the East Coast).

Anyway, tune in!

Perhaps this is a bit of thesis writing induced lunacy, but after talking with a friend of mine, I am currently planning on running the Chicago marathon in Oct 2009.  She seems to think I won’t do it.  I am currently far too out of shape to run the marathon this year, and I figure a year and a half will allow me to gradually get back into running shape (which I have been looking for a reason to do for a while now).  I also have another year of course work that would make running the marathon in October of this year a scheduling pain, whereas in fall 2009 I won’t have any courses.  SO, this is a record — hold me to this.  If I fail to uphold this goal…well, then you can point to this post, and rub my nose in my failure.  But I am determined not to let that happen.   I am also gonna keep tabs of progress on here, as I see fit.  I even added a category for this. 

It’s on!

Back in the 1960’s antenna sites started getting a tad crowded, and one solution proposed was to connected many transmitters to a single antenna, using a parallel network of bandpass filters that would allow isolation between transmitters.  After looking for ways to accomplish this at VHF, it was found that resonant cavities could be formed using a readily found, well constructed, tight tolerance, cheap and widely available solution — beer kegs.

It was found that a coaxial resonantor could be formed by making a center conductor that is adjusted to tune the frequency. As the article states, many problems were overcome in order to make them as successful as they were, and the article estimates tens of thousands of radio transmitter sites around the world equipped with these bands of beer kegs transformed into resonators!