Star Simpson

Hey, click to spot me in this video, just posted at the Intellectual Ventures Labs blog about the Making Of a sweet TED demo:

In honor of midterms, I present you with someone else’s words. I found this quote an enlightening answer, to an acquaintance who professed to be gender blind/merit-based (in hiring) and therefore claimed to need not do any research on social equality:

Several problems are encountered in efforts to ensure fairness. One of them is convincing ourselves that our judgments really are prone to error. A second problem in the attempt to ensure fair evaluations is that people find creative ways to justify their perceptions. To take one example, to reassure themselves — and others — that they have rejected stereotypical attitudes or can judge fairly in spite of them, people point to professional women they admire and respect. For another example, people point to women who are successful as evidence that hiring and promotion practices are based on merit. Finally, people use examples of incompetent women to explain
women’s overall lack of success.

Such examples, however, are irrelevant if they are not representative of the general population. My claim is that they are not. They are atypical — exceptions to a general rule confirmed by the preponderance of the evidence. Examples that represent exceptions do not refute general findings. For instance, on Wall Street in 1996 only 8 percent of the managing directors were women (Truell 1996). Each of the women in that 8 percent is an exception someone might cite as evidence that women can succeed in the investment business. Invalidtion of the general rule, however, requires proof that the rule typically does not hold; it is not good enough to show that it occasionally fails to apply.

– Virginia Valian in “Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women”

Prof. Barbara Liskov, MIT Institute Professor of Programming Methodology

Coming to this blog soon after midterms: the biggest news I have yet had the honor to write.

PS Happy Women’s Day tomorrow!

Deep one night in January, I was amazed and awed to observe myself flying around a 3-dimensional Koch snowflake — a fractal polyhedra — in a dream.

This is a Koch Snowflake. I imagined this in 3D.

So I spent several of the following weeks trying to render what I saw, by writing sketches/programs written Context Free Design Grammar, and in POVRay. I didn’t really “finish” that, but I got a bunch of interesting/beautiful pictures and I learned a bit about 3D graphics programming, notably through collaborating with David B.  Here’s a little of what I made:

These are from experimenting with recursion in CFDG:

We called what follows next the “Simpson-Barksdale Pyramid”. (It’s math, and that means you must name what you make after yoursel(ves)). This is the best of my POVRay renderings. The attempt to make a 3D koch snowflake ended up with something more like a Sierpinski triangle, three-dimentionalized. Click to see the large version.

An older version of this rendering made a guest appearance in a post below.

I heartily welcome any suggestions on how to render these more clearly & beautifully.

One of the classes I’m currently taking is on public speaking (6.UAT — required for all MIT electrical engineers and computer scientists), of which probably the best part is getting to watch clips of people giving good, interesting talks.

In that context, I got to see this (3:53) clip of Carly Fiorina speaking on things she learned about ethics, courage, and change while she was CEO of HP. She clearly rocks this talk on three points — she speaks clearly, she gestures well, and the content is substantial and interesting. I really like what she had to say here:

What distinguishes people who are successful in life is what do you do with your fear..Courage is not the absence of fear, courage is acting in spite of fear. But because everybody is afraid, what most of the time people are afraid of is something new. The essence of entrepreneurship is risk-taking. The essence of business is risk-taking.

Hey Readers!

Followers of this blog may have noticed the month-long hiatus I’ve taken from blogging so far. I pretty much air-dropped into a really intense term this semester at MIT, and haven’t had time to come up for air. Posts will probably be sparse for the remainder of the term (until May), but there are at least two tasty posts coming down the pike right now on some cool things I’ve been doing and thinking about.

Cheerio! Thanks for staying tuned.

*

When I first met Rob, it was clear that we would get into wacky high voltage electrical hijinks — perhaps this was clear from his lab coat and mad scientist goggles, or perhaps because of the tesla coil he’d built and was standing next to — but, either way, it was evident.

Rob, hacking.

We spent the better part of the last month attempting to make electrets, which are usually discussed as a footnote (if a fascinating footnote).  Electrets are similar to magnets, except that instead of a metallic object that stores a magnetic field, electrets are waxy objects that store a permanent electric dipole charge.  You can create a brick of wax with a potential across it, of several hundred volts!

Unlike magnets, which are composed of ferrous materials or metals, electrets are usually made of things like wax, and the process for making them seems by description to be fairly straightforward, at a glance.

The general idea is that you melt a bunch of slightly polarized wax molecules and then, when you put this whole waxy soup in an electric field, all the wax molecules line up parallel to the electric field lines — and later, when the wax cools, this field freezes into it so you can take the block of wax out of the field and still see a big voltage across it.

In practice, we tried a couple of different methods. The first involved an enormous 34.5kV / 0.1A “ground pig” transformer — so called, because it is too big and heavy to have been the sort of gigantic transformer you would see on a telephone pole (which would be a “pole pig”), and had to stay on the ground instead. That project resulted in a whole bunch of big sparks, some arcing, and a rectifier nearly igniting, but zero electrets in the paraffin wax we tried to electretify.

the 34.5kV ground pig

All of the rest of our experiments were conducted with a less intimidating 12kV/60mA neon sign transformer, a bridge rectifier, and a 0.1uF/30kV smoothing capacitor to help keep the transformer from getting too angry and zapping across the plates.

We also discovered that paraffin wax is the wrong wax for making electrets. One paper suggested that if you irradiated paraffin wax with beta radiation, you could produces electrets of just as good quality as carnauba wax electrets — but it seemed far easier to just go find some carnauba wax.

Since wikipedia mentions that carnauba is sometimes used in dental floss, we went ahead and boiled a big pot of maybe 5 cases of dental floss, extract the carnauba. Unfortunately, modern day floss manufacturers appear to simply grease your teeth with the ordinary paraffin, and so that didn’t work either.

Five-cases-of-dental-floss Stew

Finally, we melted an entire can of shoe polish (a fine blend of quality waxes — for SCIENCE!), which made everything smell like a pair of really well polished shoes. This was in the hopes that maybe the shoe polish would have carnauba wax in it, but, whatever is actually in shoe polish, we found no volts there.

So, sadly, we’ve had negative results so far. If anyone has pulled off electret-making, or knows of a cheap supply of carnauba wax, please inform, post-haste!

The Apparatus

_{Reference:
How to Make an Electret
The Electret Effect In Paraffin Wax
Electrets on wikipedia}

And a short video (0:50) of us testing:

So, back in 2008 I first read about a German company selling packets of powdered alcoholic beverages — rum, vodka, whiskey flavors — and got totally fascinated by the idea of making powdered alcohol.  There are a couple food science patents that describe the process, and I basically gathered that you need an industrial kitchen tool, called a spray dryer, to make the powder.

Since I didn’t have this tool, I proceeded to interview several of my mechanical engineer friends about how a spray dryer is supposed to work, and, with a rough idea of the contraption as well as some warnings about avoiding a powdered dust grain explosion — but without having seen a real spray dryer — built my own version.

As soon as  I finished, I stayed up all night combining the rum and maltodextrin mixture under dry nitrogen gas — and ultimately produced a nearly inedible, but definitely flammable, alcoholic taffy.  It was a sort of success.  And, despite this taffy having a texture somewhere between toothpaste and molten chewing gum, the stuff was effective, and retained its high alcohol content for several months.

Now the year is 2010, and I’ve just finished a month-long internship in Seattle, where I met a cadre of food scientists working on a top-notch science cookbook.  I could not have been more delighted to find that they had a real bonafide spray dryer in their collection of tools! (It also has this nifty peristaltic pump) Naturally, I asked to use it, to try the experiment again.

First of all — I learned a lot about why my old design would never have produced even spray-dried orange juice.  My droplets were too big.  My drying column was too short, and my mixture was too sugary.  I didn’t have a vacuum to separate the vapors from the solids (I did have a rather proper cyclone, and collection chamber! Nice to see I got some parts right).

This time I managed to produce a powder!   But it was a totally nonalcoholic, tame powder, and none of the rum I put in.  Basically, I combined alcohol and maltodextrin, and used the high tech spray dryer to separate the maltodextrin right back out. So much for my rum! I have no idea whether or not this is progress.

I’ve been given a few leads on how I might improve the process, though they also make the project sound even further out of reach — something about making a double emulsion, using a lipid layer, to better encapsulate the ethanol. Rest assured, though — I will try again!

_{For reference:
A food science patent from 1972 describing a method for creating powdered alcohol
Wikipedia has a fairly informative article on Alcohol powder
More on spray drying}

This is a picture of me and MIT Lab for Chocolate Science (LCS) President, Anna dancing in lab coats after an LCS food science demo, after the Boston CyberArts Gala this December. Food science is a great reason to dance, and I will party this hard again after I successfully make powdered alcohol.

Photos from the snowshoeing expedition to Mount Rainier, are in!  These are some snapshots of native Minnesotans Jenny, YiLing, Sara, and Don, and I experimenting with human-made bear claws for clambering over deep pristine drifts of snow on big mountains. 

(note, most of these are screenshots I took from the annoying kodak.com photo sharing gallery Flash website, because I couldn’t be bothered to make a login account, just to download the bunch) 

Hopping stumps at the scenic stop

view from the pullout

more scenery on the way to Rainier

this is what it looks like when a crowd of Minnesotans gets into gear

consulting the topographical map to find the ridge walk

we walked along the valley until someone said, “oh! the ridge must be up there!”

so we begin a nearly vertical ascent

this is Jenny, attempting an epic scale

we all had different theories about the best way to get there

looking out to the north, from somewhere halfway up the ridge, while taking a break to eat

what could be better than hummus sandwiches on a mountain?

this is either just before or just after we decided the ascent was impossible and dumb, and opted to go sideways instead

Don, stark.  And those curious ripples that were in the snow

the ripples reminded me a lot of a cooled lava flow, but I’m told is not usual for snow.  In any case, this is what we were walking on.

I think Mt. St. Helens might be in this photo

or this one.  Anyway, the clouds are pretty cool.

Some of the valley and the ridge we tried to climb.

We finally made it!  By going around and up the side, we found the ridge trail we’d meant to hike.

an unfortunately-too-zoomed-out shot of me, snowshoeing.  I guess it’s hard to get enough mountain in the photo that we both look actual-size.

Jenny and I taking in the sights, pondering new frontiers.

And, that’s it! 

It is my honor to have such talented friends as Sadie Scheffer, and an even greater pleasure to get to wear the clothes she makes.  Sadie and I first met as freshman at MIT, and Sadie was already an experienced glassblower and crafter, who’d arrived for the glass lab and to study mathematics.

Sadie’s currently a full-time artist in San Francisco, and has an extensive line of nice handmade bike gear in various high-end SF bike shops — so when Sadie told me she was coming to Seattle to audition for a glassblowing Lab at Sea, and especially since I’ve been biking so much this month and could really use some nice gear, I naturally cajoled her to bringing some of her splendid handmade custom bike jerseys with her.

Here’s me in my brand new awesome Sadie-made jersey:

You’ll note the awesome turtleneck which thoughtfully zips up in the back so that you don’t have a zipper in your face — and which you can easily pull up over your face to cover your ears.  And, though you can’t really see it, there’s a big heart sewn on by Sadie herself, over on the right side.

This jersey is not only beautiful, but kept me plenty toasty on a particularly chilly ride in the rain across lake washington — I think air temp was around 45°F.

Here’s Sadie just shortly after she arrived in Seattle, this taken while she helped me decipher the source of an optical illusion, which explanation had eluded me prior:

Sadie’s Etsy is truethatbikes.

You can also find some of her incredibly rich illustrations at her blog, or if you are in SF, her bike stuff is in stock at Mission Bikes.

Ever since MIT’s finals ended, every single day has been an unbridled adventure, meeting lots of new people, exploring a totally new city, and trying an unstoppable smorgasbord of new things.

For starters, I’m in Seattle for January, where I’m engaged as an inventor at Intellectual Ventures Labs.  Let me say they have a better collection of toys than I’ve seen elsewhere, including ultra-precise wire EDM tools.  AWESOME!

Outside of work, the greatest first-time thrill yet was definitely last weekend’s snowshoeing adventure on Mt. Rainier.  Tetazoo alum Jenny H, some Minnesotan friends, and I, drove out to Rainier — it’s so close – just a few hours of driving, and suddenly we’re at altitude, in deep snow!

Snowshoeing felt maybe like getting brand-new robot legs powered on for the first time.  I naturally proceeded to gleefully stomp up and down the big deep snowbanks to see what it would take to fall through, before we departed on our three hour trek.  Snowshoes are great!

My first impression was that snowshoeing is like having a modified bear trap attached to your feet to help grip onto snow — I later surmised it’s much more like having pretty excellent bear claws attached to your toes.  There’s a lot of engineering in the design of modern snowshoes.  (It also seems ridiculously apparent now why Big Foot must obviously have quite big feet.) 

When I’m not scaling snow-covered ridges, I bike daily to work and back across Lake Washington.  I have one of the best bike routes in the world.  I commute 16 mi., through vastly varying scenery, across a lake and Mercer Island, with occasional hills and some flats.  I even ride through a transit tunnel designed just for bicycles, decorated end-to-end with gorgeous painted murals.

On the side, hacking has been going at a strong pace, as well.  I’ve been working on three main projects.  First, making electrets — last night, Rob F and I experimented with using a gigantic 34.5kV transformer to freeze electric fields into insulating materials (as long as they respond to an E field while liquid, and solidify — like wax or plastic).  Just as a magnet stores a magnetic field, an electret stores an electric field.  If it works right, you should be able to stash a couple hundred volts of potential, in a block of wax!

Unfortunately, during the first field test, we got some arcing zaps that burnt some of the our setup’s plastic.  Then, on the next run, we burnt the rectifier into a smoking mess.  So, further experimentation is postponed until Wednesday.

Secondly, I’ve started and finished winding a motor, which I intend to build a bicycle wheel around and as a front hub generator.  Next, I will design and CAD the hub that this motor core will fit into!

Thirdly, David B and I have been making really gorgeous fractal art using a language called Context Free Design Grammar.  It’s a great tool for very succintly making beautiful images like fractals, and other recursive designs.  My goal is to play with space-filling curves, ideally something that fits into a five-pointed star, to make something I can mill into a beautiful inlay of some sort.  Pictures soon!

Before I got to Seattle I left Boston and spent a couple weeks in San Francisco — I drove directly from San Francisco airport to Pacifica beach for an afternoon of surfing in the sunshine, and watching fishermen catch crabs off a pier, vying for catch versus a sea lion.  What a great way to exit the east coast in winter!  The major highlight of that bit of my journey was a stunningly beautiful bike ride out to Stinson beach, on a day so clear and calm that even the water going under the golden gate bridge was glassy.

I got to visit lots of friends, and had an amazing and hilarious Christmas dinner with a five or six other folks.  Over the course of the dinner, it came out that none of us had ever celebrated christmas before — each for different reasons –, but that we had all had studied the computer science book Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs — in a crowd including a biologist, a mathematician, and a couchsurfing traveler from Turkey!

Just a couple days after that, I flew up to Seattle to help program RGB laser projectors at Hacker Bot Labs for a new year’s party which went fantastically.  And that brings us to today!