Computer History Museum

Yesterday, Urmi and I visited the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. Since Urmi and I are both a bit geeky (me more than her, although she joked on the way there about naming a pet MOSFET), we had more fun than any two young computer scientists are expected to have without the internet. A scant few miles from Google, the Computer History Museum features exhibits covering 2000 years of computing -- although many of the early computers are only now recognized as computing devices (tools such as abacuses, mechanical calculators, Napier's Bones, etc).


The Computer History Museum (CHM) also features a working example of the Babbage Difference Engine No. 2, invented in the 1800s by Charles Babbage and widely recognized as one of the most ambitious computing devices ever designed. Charles Babbage is one of my personal favorite people in history, and seeing the difference engine in action was well worth the price of admission to the museum. The CHM's Difference Engine is one of only two ever built (the other, at the Science Museum in London, is rarely demonstrated), and it is truly an amazing device. The machine computes the value of polynomials using no more power than a human-operated hand-crank. The internal numbers are stored on vertical columns of gears (like below), and percolate from one side to the other as the user cranks the drive shaft.


Once they reach the end, the Babbage engine "prints" them simultaneously onto a reel of paper as well as a tray of plaster, for use in printing tables of numbers. They had configured the machine to produce a 7th degree polynomial (the largest this particular machine can handle), but the machine could easily produce all sorts of different mathematical series. Babbage originally envisioned the machine as a means to produce tables of numbers without any human mistakes -- mathematical tables, such as logarithm tables, were a specialty of his and he particularly hated finding mistakes in his tables. For more details on Charles Babbage or Difference Engine, see Wikipedia.

The rest of the museum was equally amazing, featuring computers from the Apollo Mission, the Bletchley Park Enigma project, and more. Some highlights are below:


An actual wheel from the Colossus Machine, and one of the only remaining intact parts from a functional Colossus. Although the Colossus machine was not a Turing-universal computer, the Colossus machine was integral to the British efforts to break German encryption in World War 2. However, the machine was a groundbreaking effort at the time, and the fact that its design remained classified (and the blueprints destroyed) kept many of its original engineers from being credited with their work on early computers.


Wiring from the Cray 1 super computer. This was the first super computer, built in the mid 1970s by Cray Research, which is to this day a leader in super computing. The machine itself looks a bit like a piece of office furniture from 1970s, but the internal design is a brilliant work of engineering to maximize the speed at which the early computers could operate. This particular machine was used to simulate atomic explosions, meteorological phenomena and more. I'm glad that computers are not built like this anymore.


Joke napkin provided by an early Silicon Valley startup, showing that the get rich quick nature of Silicon Valley has a long history.


Intel goodie given out to employees -- a keychain containing an actual pentium computer processor, albeit one that failed testing.


A "Furby" from the CHM's artificial intelligence and robotics exhibit. A surprising number of the robots on display in the exhibit were children's toys. I'm not sure if I would describe the Furby as particularly intelligent, but I suppose it was no less so than many of the other devices on display.


The Utah Teapot. Aside from the Babbage Engine, this was the display that I found the most exciting. The Utah Teapot is a widely used graphics primitive used to demonstrate different graphics algorithms, mostly since it's a smooth surface, without texture, but with fairly complicated internal geometry. Early computer graphics algorithms had difficulty with the handle and spout of the teapot. Many libraries for graphics contain the teapot as an included object, and there are dozens of in-jokes in the graphics research literature related to teapots with bizarre textures (fur, leopard print, etc). Of particular interest, the widely used GLUT library has a procedure (glutSolidTeapot) that does nothing but make a model of this particular teapot. This is the original teapot that the model was based on.


An early server from Google, circa 1999. Back in 1999 (when I started using Google), this server would have been one of the ones handling user queries.

For more pictures (but less detail), check out my Picasa Web Album.

Castle Rock State Park

View from Goat Rock in Castle Rock State Park
Yesterday, Urmi and I went for a short hike in Castle Rock State Park, located along scenic Skyline Boulevard in the Santa Cruz mountains. We've hiked in this area before (including Russian Ridge, El Corte de Madera, and Pescadero), but Castle Rock was a bit different. For one, the trail we followed took us through dense forest as well as along the edges of cliffs. In several places, we had to climb over rocks and cross small streams, which was fun but a bit more adventurous than we're used to.

Castle Rock State Park is particularly famous for rock climbing, but we had fun with the wildlife here. The migrating birds are just starting to return to the Bay Area, so we saw several Jays, Sparrows, and even a particularly up-close encounter with a hummingbird. We also enjoyed the fresh wildflowers which are just now starting to open up.


Waterfall along the Saratoga Gap Trail


Wildflowers taken near the top of Goat Rock


Small bird taken during our hike


Close-up encounter with a Costa's Hummingbird. This female flew right in front of me and starting eating from a flower I was taking pictures of. One of the luckiest shots I've ever had.


View of Castle Rock Falls from the top of the falls.

More pictures can be found on my Picasa page.

Death Valley

Death Valley from Dante's Point

I've always wanted to see Death Valley, a national park in the Southern US renowned for its lack of water and for nearly killing a group of lost travelers in the 1800s. Today, the park is well visited, particularly in the Spring when the flowers are blooming.

Urmi and I visited the park last week, but we had the misfortune to arrive during a storm with near hurricane force winds, lots of cold weather, and more. We visited many of the major landmarks: Badwater Basin (the lowest place on North America), Devil's Golf Course, and more. Most of the landmarks in Death Valley have similarly ominous names (Furnace Creek, for example, is famous for frequently being among the hottest places in the world), showcasing Death Valley's famous inhospitality. The scenery, though, creates a spectacularly barren landscape of brightly colored rock, salt fields, and other bizarre sights.


Mesquite Sand Dunes, our first stop in Death Valley, are a set of windswept sand dunes several hundred feet high. This picture shows one of the largest dunes, with the eastern Death Valley mountains in the background. This is something of an iconic shot of the sand dunes.


This picture is surreal once you understand the context. In the foreground lies the Badwater Basin salt flats. Badwater Basin is the lowest location in North America, 282 feet below sea level, and is composed of a several inch thick layer of pure salt. In the background is the tallest mountain in Death Valley, Telescope Peak, at 11,043 feet tall. I would suggest that the hikers provide a sense of scale, but they really don't. Telescope Peak is visible from nearly everywhere in Death Valley. Badwater basin is named as such because water from the nearby springs is salt water, and is not drinkable.


One of our stops in Death Valley took us to the aptly named Devil's Golfcourse, a field of razor sharp salt crystals and rock. Like the Badwater Basin, Devil's Golfcourse is mostly composed of salt, but unlike Badwater, the underlying substance is rock (Badwater is mostly fairly soft soil). The fields were named because, according to our guidebook, 'the links are so nasty that only the devil could play golf here'. Sure enough, the links are full of sharp salt crystals (shaped by wind and rain), lots of holes and miles upon miles of difficult terrain.


My personal favorite picture from our death valley trip. When we went to hike in Golden Canyon, we stumbled upon a Boy Scout troop having lunch. I caught this picture of them enjoying a rest after hiking the canyon.


The day we visited Death Valley was cloudy and very windy, so the weather was quite striking. We saw several lenticular clouds (like these) throughout the day. These were taken from Zebrewskie Point.


On our way out of the valley, we decided to make one last stop at Salt Creek to watch the sunset. The sunset from the valley was phenomenal, due to the weather and reflective terrain.

More pictures of Death Valley available on my Picasa Page.

Radio Silence

Sorry about the silence here for the past two months. General craziness aside, I just haven't had much interesting to say, nor time to say much. Here's a brief overview of what I've been up to:

• In my continued quest to find interesting ways to present my pictures, I've decided to upload some selected (and often slightly edited) photos to Flickr. I'm not a huge fan of the lossy jpeg compression they use, but the photostream concept is well suited for posting a few photos a day that aren't necessarily related to eachother.
• Played through all of the excellent DS visual novel 9 hours, 9 persons, 9 doors. Lots I could say about this, but my brother beat me to the punch. In short: Best game I've played on the DS, and probably the only game I've played in the last few years that's kept me up to all hours of the night trying to figure out what's going to happen. Comparing this to a typical Hollywood thriller is like comparing Inception to the Disney cartoon of your choice. If you like suspenseful novels (note: even if you don't like games) and own a DS, play this now, if for no other reason than to ensure we Americans get more games like this.

And yeah, that's about all I got. Lots of other stuff going on, but nothing really interesting.

About the Durga Pujo

So I've gradually been filling my picasa gallery with photos I took during the 2010 Durga Pujo celebration in Kolkata (Panchomi, Shoshti, Shoptomi, Ashtomi, and Nabomi). The Durga Pujo is the biggest celebration of the bengali year, and I spent it this year with my wife's family in Kolkata. I've attended this celebration for many years in the US, but it's a whole different thing in India. In the US, there's one celebration per city (and not in all cities), and the celebration goes on for just a single weekend. In India, the celebration lasts four days, and is growing to cover six. All four of those days are crammed into a saturday afternoon and evening in the US.

In Kolkata, the Pujo is marked by each neighborhood or area building a pandal. Traditionally, pandals are structures to house the idols and protect them from the elements during the Pujo, but they've evolved into something entirely different. Nowadays, pandals range from small, roadside pujos, to enormous structures built to resemble castles, temples, and more. Each of these large pandals typically has a theme, although the theme can be nebulous. All of them are temporary structures, usually built over the course of a month or so, and then torn down after the pujo.



Inside the big pandals, there are often artworks, lighting, and wide open spaces, all designed to draw people into the pandal and enjoy the pujo. The idol itself (see above for an example idol taken near EDF) represents six gods: Shiva, Ganesha, Karthik, Lakshmi, Swaraswati, and of course, Durga. Most of the idols depict Durga defeating the demon king, Asur. Each of these gods have a traditional depiction, such as Durga wielding ten weapons and riding a lion, killing Asur with a trident. Ganesha is depicted with a pet mouse, and Karthik with a pet peacock. Swaraswati is depicted with a pet swan and Lakshmi with a pet owl. Asur is sometimes depicted as a demon, and at other times with the head of a bull.

A big tradition in Kolkata is what is known as Pandal hopping, where families will visit dozens of the biggest pandals in the city. We visited well over twenty during the five days of the Durga Pujo, and visited a handful of others that we couldn't even get into due to the line. In later writeups, I'll write about the specific pandals we visited, and a little about each of them.

Bi-weekly Background 2010.08.01

So a while back, I was trying to decide what to do with my photography library. I like having the photos in Picasa and sharing them with friends and family. I also like seeing my pictures in use, but I'm not quite ready to release them to wilds on the interweb for all to consume. After a few weeks of chewing on this, I came up with an idea: Every week, I'd release a few of my pictures, cropped and resized as desktop backgrounds.

My tentative plans are to release two pictures a week -- probably Monday and Friday, schedule permitting -- free of charge, as a Creative Commons, No derivatives, Attribution content. Any picture I take is fair game for this, except those of friends, family or other clearly recognizable people (distant crowds are okay). Some days might be nature or scenery pictures, others my attempts at astrophotography, or even abstract art that I think would look good as desktops.

Keep in kind that I'm an amateur photographer -- some of these are going to stink -- and I don't have the photoshop knowhow to churn out great pictures by the dozen. Initially, at least, I'll be releasing cropped pictures in reasonable desktop sizes, but otherwise untouched from my camera. Schedule is liable to be subject to change; I have a busy job, and I travel frequently, so there may be delays (foreseen or unforeseen).

Eventually I'll place an archive of these on my website, but for now, I'm going to use my blog to do that.

Anyways, without further ado, here is my first free desktop, Purple Flowers:

1024x768, 1280x960, 1600x1200 1440x900, 1680x1050

This was shot with my trusty telephoto 55mm-250mm lens on my Canon Rebel EOS XSi. Although this is a telephoto lens and typically doesn't focus well at close distances, I've found it can take some great macro-like shots at its maximum focal length from my standing height. The flowers themselves were found while hiking along the Tomales Point trail out by Point Reyes, just north of San Francisco.

Exploratorium & Galilieoscope

Yesterday Urmi and I went to the Exploratorium in downtown San Francisco. Being both science inclined folks, we're both suckers for science museums (even the ones which are aimed primarily at kids) and the Exploratorium was no exception. Unlike many of the science museums I've been to, the Exploratorium is mainly a hands-on sort of place. They have exhibits demonstrating pendulums, echos, optical illusions (including on that gives you the illusion of being in a rotating barrel), and all manner of scientific principles. My personal favorite was one demonstrating the Curie Point, a temperature at which a ferromagnetic material becomes paramagnetic and loses its ability to be attracted to magnets. The Exploratorium is also set in a gorgeous location, with a lake (full of ducks, swans, etc) and small park. I took plenty of pictures, which are available on my picasa account.

While there, I picked up a Galileoscope, which is a cheap, low-powered, DIY telescope based on the same model that Galileo used to observe Jupiter, the moon, Venus, and Saturn. In its default configuration, it's a 25x zoom telescope, good enough to make out a lot of detail on the moon, see the moons of Jupiter, and more. The telescope also comes with a Barlow Lens attachment, which doubles the 25x zoom. I haven't quite made this Barlow lens attachment work, but I used the default configuration last night to view several stars (sorry, no clue which ones -- I used whatever I could see from our apartment) and the moon. I took some great (if slightly blurry) shots of the moon as well. My best is below.

Clearly visible are several impact craters and maria, as well as Copernicus crater. This was taken about a halfhour after moonrise, so the moon really was this color. I took this using the highly scientific method of sticking my camera up against the telescope and snapping pictures. I don't recommend this -- it was very hard to get shots in focus, and if I bumped into the telescope, all bets were off.

Rosicrucian Museum

The other day Urmi and I went to see the Rosicrucian museum in San Jose, which was a truly incredible find. I had no idea that there was such a famous egyptology museum in the western US, much less in San Jose (LA would still have surprised me, but considerably less -- LA seems to get everything cool). Anyways, this museum was full of really cool replicas of famous artifacts. Everything was very dark inside, and we couldn't use flash photography, so I had a good time playing with my new DSLR's shutter speed and aperture settings to get good photos.
I put a collection of photos in my Picasa:

Enjoy!

Snow in DC

So I woke up this morning to be greeted by this -- at least five inches of snow, probably more. Now I'm from Eastern Washington, so snow is something I'm used to. Since I moved to the east coast, however, I've developed a less-than-positive view of the stuff, largely because most people seem to turn into idiots when it's on the ground. It's going to be fun heading in to work today. Wish me luck.

Collages

Urmi and I are big fans of doing creative stuff with our photos. We make scrapbooks, post them in galleries, and even make collages. Today Urmi sent me a program called Shape Collage which is pretty cool. I used it to put together the above collage from a bunch of our photos. Urmi will probably kill me for posting even such a small slice, but all the photos are already in our gallery, so I'm probably safe :)

Thanksgiving done right (and mostly vegetarian)

Urmi and I always go overboard for Thanksgiving, which is bizarre given that I can't even eat Turkey, and Urmi isn't a big fan. This year, we decided to cook no less than eleven dishes, ranging from a Tofurkey roast to both pumpkin and pecan pies. To immortalize our efforts, I decided to write about our oversized meal on the blog.
The Tofurkey - Contrary to popular belief, a Tofurkey is not a Turkey made from tofu. Rather, it's a blend of tofu and wheat gluten -- both vegetarian sources of protein -- to produce something with vaguely the same texture as a turkey. Look for more of this in the future. I thought this was a win, but Urmi hated it.
Our Pies - The pumpkin pie was obviously edible, but the pecan pie was the undisputed winner of the contest. I discovered that using dark brown sugar and dark corn syrup is the secret to making an awesome pecan pie.
The Feast - Urmi with the full feast: Beans, Asparagus, apple cider, tofurkey, salmon, garlic mashed potatoes, vegetarian gravy, and, my personal favorite, mashed sweet potatoes.
Anyways, probably going to post recipes for some of our dishes shortly. Most of these originated elsewhere, but we've modified them extensively enough that I think they're our recipes now. Until then, enjoy the photos and try not to drool on your keyboard.

Photos from Vienna - Mk1

We've posted a bunch of photos from our trip to Austria. We're still organizing things, so please excuse the dust. More to come.

Odd Things in Austria

No vacation is complete without some odd stories and/or photos. Our trip was no exception. Here are a couple of my favorites:


This pigeon really, really wanted to go to Vienna from Salzburg. It took five of us to get rid of it, which partially answers the question of "How many Austrian train employees does it take to eliminate a pigeon?"


The (apparently) world-famous Opera Toilet in Vienna's Karlsplatz station. It cost 0.60 euros to enter, and it played very loud opera music the whole time. The mens room had a piano in it for reasons which I have not yet been able to fathom.


We saw these girls near the Parliament building in Vienna, and I later saw more of them near Wien Sudbanhof while on my way to the airport. They appeared to be handing out flyers to people either walking or driving by. What are they advertising? I haven't the slightest clue. I suspect that they may be ghost busters. Or vacuum cleaner repairwomen. Anyone with a more rational explanation please step forward.

Back from Vienna...

Hi everyone! So I spent the last week in Austria with Urmi. Urmi had a conference (UC 2008) that coincided with our one year wedding anniversary, so I decided to tag along and see the sights. Austria is a pretty cool place, although we had quite a bit of trouble with the language and, I think, spent far, far too much time walking. Photos coming soon -- we took over 700 of them, and Urmi is (I'm sure) still snapping away. Until then, enjoy these...


Zell am See from Smittenhohe

Salzberg Old Town

Werfen fortress from the road to Eisreisenwelt (where none of our photos turned out very well)

An old castle we saw while biking on the Danube

I wrote a few other posts while on the plane back from Austria. The flight was over 11 hours long, and I had a decidedly unpleasant experience with the Atlanta airport while I was waiting to get back to Ronald Reagan. Anyways, expect to see a few reviews of books that I read on the plane, as well as a few photos of bizarre things we ran into in Austria.

Honeymoon Photos

A few of my favorite photos from our honeymoon in March... I was going through these looking for a new profile photo for the top-left and remembered just how amazing the bottom of the Kiluea-Iki crater was -- although it was hot as all hell.

Clockwise from top left... Urmi and I at the bottom of Kiluea-Iki trail, road-closure at the end of the chain of craters road (no joke, huh?), Urmi on the Kalalau trail along the Na Pali coast, and Urmi looking out over the ocean on the northern shore of Hawaii.
More photos available through our wedding website. (Quicklink to the photos)