Silent Armageddon

There a many lessons to learn from the nuclear catastrophe in Japan: Everything breaks; people are only human; heroes exist; radiation is analogous to poop; and reactors need active attention to stay safe. I think we knew the last one, but it is worth some further reflection.

How long will our technically-competent society last? Maybe thousands of years? If our technical society fails in the next, oh, ten thousand years, hundreds (thousands?) of nuclear power plants can turn into Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi. Without a constant flow of cooling water, even the spent fuel rods can explode and spread their radiation into the surrounding regions.

I believe that this society needs nuclear power. But we also need to come up with a solution for storing nuclear waste in a way that does not require active systems to maintain its quiesence

Distribution of wealth in the US

How many people hold half of the wealth in the US?

This is a little difficult to extract from a simple Google search. But I found out these interesting things:

• There are several articles in the Wikipedia on this, notably Wealth in The United States. From this, one gets this interesting graph:

• From this, I calculate that half of the total wealth in the US is held by approximately the top 5% of the people in 2007, and approximately the top 6% in 1992.

• Other interesting findings: The Gini Coefficient, which is a measure of the statistical dispersion of the population distribution of a system: a value of 0 means a completely equal distribution; a value of 1 means the maximally unequal distribution. The US (according to this Wikipedia article) has a Gini of 46.8 in 2009 (up from 36.8 in 1968). Some have estimated the Gini coefficient in the US to be as high as 0.82.

• Another fine article, with more charts and graphs, can be found here. I need to study this detailed article!

It is worth repeating:

Half of the wealth in the United States is held by the richest 5% of the people.

In other words,

15.6 million people have half the wealth of the US, and

292.6 million people hold the other half of the wealth.

And, as I expected, the relative wealth of the richest people in the US is increasing.

Engineering Open House at University of Illinois, March 11, 2011

I offer my thoughts on the EOH at UIUC yesterday. Overall, it was a great day!

First off, the bus service from lot E-14 (at the basketball arena) was poorly executed. We waited 20 minutes for the coach that was supposed to come at most every 10 minutes. That was not so bad except (a) the people were getting pretty grumpy, and (b) when the bus arrived, the driver was a real prick. He kept whining about how there could only be one person per seat, "Federal law! I'm the one who goes to jail!" Sheese! By the end of the day, there were two coaches running, which I'm sure solved the problem. Also, the promised "tour guide" during the short trip to the engineering area had very little to say.

That's essentially all the bad news.

They couldn't have asked for nicer weather! There were several no-so-smart girls in sockless sandals. One poor girl had toes about the color of her toenail polish. But that's what kids do when Mom (or Dad) is not there to dress them.

The exhibits were awesome. In hindsight, the most impressive part may have been that there was not a faculty member to be seen anywhere! Get too close to a display and a student would ask, "Do you want to hear about my project?" Love it!

Our two favorite displays were the UIUC Formula car entry, outside of the Mechanical Engineering building (picture here)

And the Ford corporate display, featuring a 1998 ME graduate who is now an engineer at Ford in Dearborn, MI. What a nice fellow!

There was a great session with one of the Deans of the Engineering College, Michael C. Hirschi. He answered all kinds of questions with insight and patience. Of course, he was a bit distracted at first when Northwestern was about to beat Ohio State. (But, unfortunately for the State of Illinois sports enthusiast and Buckeye haters, Ohio State pulled it out in OT.) I was particularly impressed with the questions Sterling asked about the student-run clubs and the answers he gave.

Another high point was the demo staged by the UIUC fire department (or was it the Fire Protection Department at UIUC?) They had set up some boxes in the quad about the size of a small dorm room (8x8x8), furnished with dorm-like furnishings. One end of the box, facing the crowd, was open. They lit a small fire in a trash can in the mocked-up room and started a timer. Within 5 seconds, the smoke alarm started beeping--"This is your warning to get out!" said the emcee. Within a few more seconds, the fire was visible, and smoke was starting to fill the "room". At about the one minute mark, they stated that the ceiling temperature was 180F and the floor temp was still the ambient 50F--still clear to crawl out safely. One minute later, the room was actually engulfed in flames! Somewhere in that minute, the smoke detector melted and stopped beeping. They always say that you don't have much time to react to a fire in your home. This was incredibly vivid proof of that.

Finally, let me say that I love driving to Champaign/Urbana! The country road are so peaceful and pretty. I especially like the sunsets!

Utilizing the Focus Micro-adjust of the Canon 7D

I have attempted to utilize the micro-adjust on my Canon 7D for the four lenses I own. I was not quite sure how do do this, so I just made it up.

My technique was to stretch a tape measure along the dining room table, and put a high-contrast card vertical to the table next to a specific mark on the tape measure (e.g., the 16-inch mark, which is red on my tape).

Then I put the camera on a tripod, set it to ASA 100, and set the camera to "A" mode with the widest aperture possible. Finally, I set it up to do a mirror lockup and a 10 second delay.

Examining each picture, I look for the shot with the card in focus, along with the "16" mark on the tape. And also the "15" and the "17" on the tape needs to be the same amount of out of focus. (For the 11-16 Tokina, the widest aperture kept at least four inch marks in color. The Canon 50 was the most dramatic, of course.)

I have created a Picasa web album of the final set of photos, and you can find it here.

Canon7D Micro Focus Adjust

Here are some typical pictures from this process.

The final setting for the 55-250mm lens (+10)

My 50mm f1.8 set to +20

My 50mm f1.8 set to +15

My 50mm f1.8 set to +10

The final result I record here, as much for my own benefit as anything else.

Canon EF-S 18-55 -- +8

Canon EF-S 55-250 -- +10

Canon EF 50mm f1.8 -- +19 (!!!)

Tokina 11-16 f2.8 -- +10

So, every lens is off in the same direction. These numbers mean that the camera will make the focus point too close to the camera. Moving the adjustment positive moves the focus point towards infinity (away from the camera).

I really do not know if this is a function of the lens or to camera or both. But I am astounded that all of my lenses are so far off from what I presumed (being "Canon quality" (whatever)) they would be: a value of zero.

Race Report, Naperville Turkey Trot; November 25, 2010

Naperville Lion's Club Turkey Trot, November 25, 2010: 08:00

Conditions: Low clouds and mist, 38F (3C)

There were 6131 people who completed the Turkey Trot, with a best time of 14:54 and the slowest time of 1:06:12. The complete results can be found here.

With so many people, the start was quite slow. They asked the runners to self-sort themselves into groups based on their expected pace, from 6:00/mi to 12:00/mi in 1:00 steps. This stretched out for about 3oo yards down the road! I decided to take a spot about 200 yards from the starting line, just behind the group at the 10:00/mi placard. My goal was to get close to 12:00/mi for the entire race--a very aggressive goal!

The gun sounded at 8:00 sharp, and we all tried to move forward, to no avail. Slowly, slowly we sauntered to the starting line. Oh, so slowly! It took me approximately 8 minutes to reach the starting line!

My initial pace was just over 10:00/mile, as I expected it would be (adrinaline and all that). This quickly came down to a more sustainable 11:30/mile. There was a lot of weaving--it seems that 10% of the folks decided to run for long enough to be able to say that they "ran the Turkey Trot," and then walk, side by side with 5 of their closest friends and talk about life, the universe and everything. These barriers kept appearing over and over again--it was very frustrating for me.

I had my Garmin GPS/HRM set to auto-lap at 0.5 mile increments so I could keep track of my average pace in a meaningful way. I was able to maintain the sub-12:00/mi pace for the first 1.5 miles!

For some reason, my legs felt very heavy this morning. I tried not to think about it too much.

On Marty's advice, I also tried not to think about my heart rate, but rather focus on my pace (only). I was keenly aware of my heart pumping, but it never seemed to be stressing out. So I perserveered!

Aurora Special Olympics Run for the Athletes 5K, Saturday November 6, 2010

I completed this race in good condition! Final time: 39:50 (according to the timing) or 39:41 (according to my Garmin Forerunner).

Best part: I won first prize in the raffle!

Here are the data from the Forerunner, first the heart rate and pace:

And the summary information:

I ran for 60 minutes this morning on this route (including 2 minutes of wal at the outset and 4 minutes at the end). West Aurora High School is at the upper edge, left of center, of this image.