L.A.B. Unleashed

A student in the Netherlands designed a scooter that would run on hydrogen …

the idea is to charge the battery with a fuel-cell system, which would derive its energy from a tank of hydrogen. While scientists are working to make such systems more efficient, obtaining hydrogen (by splitting it out of water) is for now too costly to be practical. Scientists disagree whether it will ever be viable.

The article boasts that the prototype scooter has a top speed of 40mph (same as mine), and could travel around 124 miles on a tank of hydrogen (I can go ~ 100 miles on a tank of gas).  Sounds like an average scooter to me.  The cool part is actually harnessing this hydrogen energy in a way that is practical, which is something that is pretty far off in the distance.  Here’s evidence that we are getting closer.

How about a solar powered scooter?  That’s slightly more viable, but the technology still isn’t cheap enough to make a prototype of this nature a reality.   A professor of mine at Sweet Briar holds a patent for a solar powered lawn mower, and during the time I was there drove a car with a license plate that shouted – GO SOLAR!

It’s about time that I customized my scooter, installed some after market addons … maybe a chip to give it that extra boost of power.  Seriously, though … I actually just added a rear carrier and a basket, so now I can truck around with all the essentials.  We went down to hang out on the boat tonight and I packed a towel, seis cervesas, kobe’s bone, chips and dip!

Great for lugging stuff to and from work as well!  The rear carrier hardware was made for the Honda Metropolitan scooter, so it fits perfect, but I had to search around for the right basket.  I ended up with a gym basket from The Container Store and am very pleased with it’s size.  We secured the basket to the carrier hardware using a bungee cord with hooks, which is awesome because I can easily remove just the basket if needed.

Next improvement on my list?  Maybe some green undercarriage lighting … just because it would look so cool. 

My buddy Ryan sent me an incredibly exciting article this morning entitled "Major Math Problem Is Believed Solved By Reclusive Russian" … sounds mysterious, doesn’t it?  The major math problem the article is referring to is the 6th Millennium Problem called The Poincare’ Conjecture.  Named after Henri Ponicare, a french mathematician born in the 19th century, this millennium problem deals with concepts of topology. 

Topology is an area of mathematics that studies general properties of surfaces and other objects.  Topology has a really interesting way of looking at things.  Imagine that you have a football and a soccer ball made out of clay.  In topology, a football is the same as a soccer ball, because one can be morphed into the other – a ball is a ball.  Coffee and donuts – the classic example … As Paul Erdos, Hungarian mathematician, said "A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems".  In topology, a donut is also the same as a coffee cup – given a clay donut, you can move most of the clay to make the cup and leave a small outter ring to make the handle.

Another example of topological thinking would be to take the Subway map of Boston.  Note the intersections between the different lines, and the actual subway stops.  Printing this map on a stretchable piece of rubber paper, you can stretch and morph this map into any shape you want.  No matter how you deform the map, all the intersections and stops remain the same, and so we can say that the map’s configuration has not changed.  This same process can be applied to a circuit board in a computer.

So, the funny thing about the "reclusive russian", Grigori Perelman, is that he did not post a paper of his proof in a mathematical journal to claim the $1 million dollar prize.  The proof  was posted on the internet, and many pieces were left out.

The sketchiness may reflect how a genius interacts with mortals. Dr. Perelman may believe some things are so obvious he needn’t bother to explain them step by step, say mathematicians. If readers are too dumb to fill in the blanks, he doesn’t care. Or, he has better things to do than justify every tortuous step, as proofs must.

Others have taken it upon themselves to explicate his work — and find no major flaws. Like Torah commentaries, they dwarf the original. Dr. Perelman’s 2003 paper is 22 pdf pages; the 2002 paper is 39. But "Notes on Perelman’s Papers," in which Prof. Kleiner and John Lott of the University of Michigan explain them almost line-by-line, is 192 pages. A book on the papers is expected to top 300 pages. A "complete proof" of Poincaré, based on Dr. Perelman’s breakthrough and published last month in the Asian Journal of Mathematics (which Prof. Milnor describes as throwing "a monkey wrench" into the question of who gets credit), is 328 pages long.

One down … six to go!

A great while back I started reading The Golden Ratio, a story of PHI, a never ending, digits never repeating number ~ (1.61803398…..).  In a previous post, I was just getting through the introductory chapters and was excited to read more about how phi shows up all over nature.  Well, it’s taken me a while for many reasons – time constraints, my exceptionally poor and slow reading skills, the ruler that I was using to read line by line broke and it took my 5 weeks to find some scotch tape to fix it … but I have finally got to some very interesting parts of the book.  My appetite for the mind boggling ways this ratio appears everywhere is slowly being fed.

The Fibonacci Sequence, as seen in The Davinci Code, has shown up a lot – a sequence of numbers where the prior two add up to the next, so 1 1 2 3 5 8 …, and so on.  It turns out that the higher the Fibonacci sequence goes, when you look a the ratio between two consecutive numbers in the sequence, it converges to PHI – the golden number.  You can see this pattern here:
5/3       = 1.667
8/5       = 1.6
13/8     = 1.625
21/13   = 1.615

And when you think of a Fibonacci sequence as a rate of growth, and apply this to nature, the golden ratio shows up many places.  The arrangement of floret in the head of a sunflower, the placement of leaves on a stem, the hexagonal scales on the surface of a pineapple, and the beautiful nautilus shell all have the golden ratio incorporated into their structure.   The nautilus shell, has the unique property that as it increases in size, it’s shape remains unaltered – "although changed I rise again the same" – Jacques Bernoulli (1654-1705). 

Beyond structural patterns, I was fascinated to read about the flight pattern of the Peregrine falcon and how they follow a logarithmic spiral (resembles the nautilus shell) at speeds of over 200mph when attacking their prey!  And this one is really crazy … mapping the family tree of a drone bee.  A drone bee you ask?  This is a male bee who hatched from an unfertilized egg.  An unfertilized egg you ask?  I have no idea … so please don’t ask!  These drone bees have no father and one mother.  Female bees, on the other hand, are born from the fertilized queen’s eggs and become female workers or queens themselves.  The book then outlines the intriguing family tree of a drone bee:

one drone has one parent (its mother), two grandparents (its mother’s parents), three great-grandparents (two parents of its grandmother and one if its grandfather), five great-great-grandparents (two for each great-grandmother and one for its great-grandfather), and so on.  The numbers in the family tree1, 1, 2, 3, 5 … , form a Fibonacci sequence.

There is so much beauty in these numbers – they are what makes nature so exquisite.  I am now half way through the book, and have officially added it to my recommendation list!  Here’s hopping the end of the book is less than 6 weeks away!!!

This has been on my radar to try for a while now.  Two good friends at work did a lot of the development for it, and there was a great deal of hype surrounding just the notion of it at Lotusphere back in Janurary.  IBM recently posted this brief message on their website asking, "Are you a nomad?".  Then, I just saw referenced on Ed Brill’s blog another write up by someone who has actually gone through the install process.  Looks like there is a nice dialog of comments started by other readers too.

The one thing my laptop does not have is a USB 2.0 device, which is recommended for the install process.  As a frequent mobile employee, I can see how carrying around Notes on a USB device would be quite useful; so I will have to use one of my machines at work (with USB 2.0), and try it out for myself!

To support my need for raw food, I was thrilled to find some great summer recipes in the new "Everyday with Rachel Ray" magazine.  Nice publication by the way!  My favorite part was an insert called 7 meals in 7 days.  It provided a complete shopping list for all 7 meals, making my trip to Whole Foods super easy.  Although, Kevin might argue that the after-work-crowd had INFESTED the place, making it difficult to maneuver, leaving things picked over and hard to find.  Note to self … Whole Foods, weeknights, between 6 and 8 pm – avoid it at all costs … it is like a war zone!  Good thing the meal I made when we got home helped ease our shopping agony …

Minus the poached chicken topping … it’s all raw!  Very easy to make … especially if you have a food processor.  The crisp, clean, refreshing, flavor was quite pleasing to my 85 year old palette.

• Remember taking those horrible high school pictures?  The ones where you could choose laser beams in the background, but only if you paid the extra $4.95 per package.  You waited patiently in a line that circled around the gymnasium, then plopped down in front of a white screen and bright lights.  The photographer usually cocked your head an awkward way, had you fold your hands on your lap, told you to say cheese, and before you knew it, the moment had been captured forever.  This shot would of course be around to haunt you for the rest of eternity.  I’ve come to the conclusion that the head shot for my new article is one of the BEST representations of that BAD HIGH SCHOOL PORTRAIT I have ever seen.

• What is it called when all you can eat is raw food?  Because all I can smell is grease, I am having aversions to any food that is cooked.  Yesterday my diet consisted of Iced Tea for breakfast (no more coffee …. AHHHH … the greasy smell!!!).  Sushi for lunch.  Tomatoes, Mozzarella, a Spinach Salad with Goat Cheese for dinner.  And I topped off the night with a gelato in the North End for dessert.   I am going to call this super special diet [insert sarcasm here] RAWITARIANISM (raw-it-tar-ian-ism) – yummy!

There was a special on PBS not to long ago that went behind the scenes of the dance company Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.  Now, if you are one of those readers that doesn’t feel like reading much further based on me using the word "PBS" or "dance", give it a chance a read on – Alvin Ailey is not your typical dance company.  Everyone can enjoy it … it’s not just for the typical theater goers, or ballerinas, or dance enthusiasts alike … I would argue it can please even the people that don’t normally enjoy dance at all! 

The music is soulful and funky; the choreography is athletic, dynamic, and fast paced; the overall image on stage is bright and full of energy.  All their pieces really draw you in.  They perform in Boston every April, but since that is 10 months away, I highly recommend checking out this PBS special.  Especially if you have high definition TV — it is almost as good as sitting in the Wang Center.  This particular special walks you through the "ballet" Love Stories – part I, II, and III – representing Past, Present, & Future.  It’s funny using the word "ballet" with Alvin Ailey, but trust me … it’s no Swan Lake.  The piece Love Stories is put together by 3 different choreographers, all with 3 very different dance and teaching styles.  Part I (Present) starts out as a slow flowing piece, and then breaks into full fledged improv pandemonium – the dancers themselves throw together some huge lifts and kicks and fast twirling pirouettes – very cool stuff.  Love Stories Part II (Present), pumps up the audience with its hip hop style choreography hitting the climax, while Part III (Future) takes it back down, just a notch, but ends strong with the audience standing and clapping along to the strong beat of the music. 

This is a must see … so set the Tivo, the DVR, and check it out when you are feeling culturally inclined!  Also, you can download an excerpt from Love Stories here.

In the latest issue of The View magazine (June/July 2006), there is an article entitled Getting the most out of Lotus Domino Domain Monitoring: Tips, Tricks, and Best Practices.  There has been an IBM Redpaper, Lotusphere Presenations, and other publications on DDM, so I tried to make sure this article represented some less explored aspects of DDM, maybe some of the less intuitive ones.  From the very first drafts I worked on with the editor, we realized that instead of writing a standard informational article, more of a tips and trick guide would be beneficial.  I immediately took on an interactive writing style and walk the reader step by step through many examples, showing screen shots along the way.  I hope people find this useful and enjoy!

On a side note, since my sense of smell is gone, I am waiting for my super human powers to kick in and compensate.  I’m hoping to gain dog-like hearing, but I would settle for 20/20 vision at this point.