Anyway, the SIPs for “Principles of Combustion” are entertaining. I particularly like “kth species”:

Key Phrases – Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
detonation and deflagration waves, detonation cell width, diffusion flame jets, limiting tube diameter, detonability limits, spin detonation, liquid fuel droplet, premixed laminar flames, reaction zone width, unconfined detonations, premixed gases, confined mixtures, detonation structure, detonation limits, fuel species, laminar diffusion flame, thermal and transport properties, burner rim, kth species, burner inlet, mass burning rate, j mwj, quenching distance, combustion problems, detonation wave

On the morning of 8/13 the sky was deep red and purple; then, as the evening drew in, the temperature dropped suddenly down to around 60F, and a thick blanket of fog covered the coast.

This is what I saw leaving my office that afternoon:

Your goods would be subject to a 4.4% tariff, unless you operate in Cuba or North Korea, in which case your tariff would be 60%.

This definition is interesting because of the peculiar requirements it places on garments it includes.  Say the weight fraction of down is x, the weight fraction of other waterfowl plumage is y, and the remainder of the garment (which is made primarily of man-made fibers) is z=1-x-y.  For your garment to be included in this category, the following three requirements would have to be met:

1. x + y > 0.15 (green)
   
2. x / (x+y) > 0.35, or in other terms, x > 0.538 y (blue)
   
3. x > 0.1 (red)
   

These requirements are illustrated in the figure below:

If you run awry of these requirements, and your overcoat also does not “contain 36% or more by weight of wool or fine animal hair,” then the rates go up.  The regular-folks tariff jumps to 27.7% and the dirty-commies rate hits 90%.

In 2008, by the way, we imported 36,485 dozen such coats (reported in dozens), having a total customs value of $3,472,687 and having a weight of 277 metric tons, almost 94% coming from China.  That comes out to an average customs value of $7.93 apiece for a coat weighing on average about 630 grams.

I suppose, instead of researching coats I could probably have been working just now.

p.s. My convert-figure-to-image script doesn’t work because the transparency effects require PDF rendering.  So I had to crop it manually from the PDF using gimp.

I’m quite fond of PSTricks, a LaTeX package which allows the author to make use of PostScript’s extensive computational and graphical capabilities from within a TeX document.  My project for this week was to come up with a way to give these figures to my advisor, who works exclusively in MS Word. So what I needed was a way to export TeX figures to graphics files. Here’s what I came up with.

Essentially, I create a file which includes the \pspicture environment and all the graphics commands, which I call somepicture.fig. I then \input{somepicture.fig} into my main document when I want the picture to appear. When I then want to convert the picture into a standalone graphic, I run a script called figuretops.sh(link to file) which performs the conversion by making use of the very neat “file here” notation in bash:

cat >> filename.tex <<EOF
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{pstricks-add}
\usepackage{calc}

\begin{document}
\thispagestyle{empty}
\color{white}
\fbox{
\color{black}
\input{}
}
\end{document}
EOF

When I run LaTeX on this file, it gets to the blank \input{} directive and asks the user for the filename. I solve this by echoing the filename into the LaTeX invocation in the bash script. I then clean up temporary files and use

convert -density 300 somefigure.eps somefigure.png

to convert the eps image to a 300-DPI image.

Here’s a source figure, the bash script, and an image it produced:

Here’s another (naively crafted: TeX source) but more interesting figure:

But anyway, there I was, reading about number 22, “Takeout Robots” on the free library, which provides links to lookup the meanings of important terms embedded in the text.  One such term is “takeout” which maybe if you’re a plastics manufacturing professional you know what it means, but I don’t.  So I hovered over “takeout” hoping for a definition.

Instead I get: “takeout: a financing to refinance or takeout another loan.”  Hm, that’s not too helpful.  Maybe it’s a fluke.  After all, it does give a proper definition for “injection molding.”

Also “originate in.”  Funny choice to hyperlink “originate in” but not “Japan”, which is where takeout robots ostensibly originated [in].

But if we press on, we find that this pneumatic swing-type model of takeout robot is similar to a sprue picker, where sprue is “a chronic disorder of the small intestine.”  Moreover, takeout robots attracted attention at NPE 1973, where NPE could mean any one of “NullPointerException (java)”, “Natural Penis Enlargement”, or “Nutrition Program for the Elderly.”

But I distort.  National Plastics Exposition (presumably the correct choice) is also listed as one possible meaning of NPE (buried as the fourth choice of 6…), but still- maybe the Free Dictionary folks haven’t realized that context plays a part in semantics.  On the linked page, there are ten automatically-generated links, of which four are flat out wrong (takeout, sprue, molder, and AEC); three appear correct (though they’re all specialized terms: injection molding, servo drive, programmable logic controller); one is ambiguous (NPE); one (North America) is a gimmee; and the last (originate in) is just bizarre, serving only to draw attention to the fact that this automatic link-generating machine doesn’t know what it’s doing.

“but Brandon, don’t you ever do anything but complain?”

at times, it seems, no.

Somebody, somewhere, made an inside joke to that scene.. because I’ve seen a scene of a guy in a sauna saying “It’s love. remember it?” and I feel like I’ve seen it more than once, but I’ve never seen this movie.  So I think, maybe in a TV show (or some later, lesser movie), there was a scene where a guy said that to somebody.  Some writer made an inside joke and I could be in on it if I just remember what movie.

So, all that ranting I did about the network admins at the bren school? It’s gradually dawned on me, and has now been confirmed empirically, that the entire UCSB network, which I think is all of 128.111, is off limits.  Been over 48 hours now.  It seems I actually pissed off the intrusion detection system of the whole university.  i.e. a state agency.  heh.

So tomorrow I have to go to the university network services department (wherever it is- I can’t exactly look for it on the web if I can’t browse www.ucsb.edu), hat in hand, et al, to try to get them to take me off their list.

This makes the severity of their response all the more surprising.  I guess it’s good I waited until they hired me back before this happened.  Still not absolutely sure that this is the correct diagnosis, but I can’t imagine anything else.  I guess I owe the bren staff an apology.  For all I know, network services made them take down ssh.

[ my critique about secure imap still stands ..]

Boy is my face red.

Addendum 2009-06-03 10:28 AM

network connectivity appears to be back to normal; I can again browse the ucsb web and check email from home.  No need to look up the information security office after all!  Yay!

All of these were made possible by ssh, (which stands for Secure SHell), one of the classic and certainly one of the most secure network communication programs in existence. SSH gives me access to a machine that is nearly equivalent to actually sitting at the keyboard, uses strong point-to-point encryption and allows me to transfer files and send data from other programs through secure “tunnels”. Fortunately for me (at the time), I was at CMU, which has a remarkably enlightened network administration policy that advances productivity and creativity on the users’ terms, while using sophisticated monitoring to detect and block irregular or inappropriate access.

At the time, I found CMU’s network admins to be a nuisance, but they were blessedly reasonable in comparison to the folks at UCSB. Computing here is hamhanded and kludgey, and services are bare-minimum (not to mention entirely microsoft-oriented). The standard answer to questions is “No.” And they make the collossal mistake that is so familiar in the IT-infrastructure world: they forget that the point of network security is not only to secure the network, but to secure the activities of the network’s users. It would be a bonus for them to consider facilitating productivity over simple enforcement.

As a consequence, they make positively bizarre policies. For example: They don’t let you choose or change your password. They assign you an 8-character “cryptographically secure” password that you can write on a sticky note and place on your monitor. THEN, they don’t provide secure email access– so every person who checks email over the free wireless network at a conference sends his cryptographically secure password in plaintext over IMAP. They don’t seem to support AT ALL sending mail from remote– their SMTP server doesn’t listen to me when I’m outside the network, anyway.

The only reason I’m writing about them is because they just shut off the one secure service they once provided, which was SSH, even if it was to an 11-year-old box running solaris. Now I have no access to work content (”Use dropbox,” said the admin when I asked– I guess outsourcing to a private company is preferable to running a daemon).

Of course, before I asked, I had to give my own demonstration of hamhandedness, so I tried to find computers running sshd on port 22 on the Bren School network (128.111.110/23) using nmap. I am not a hax0r so my use of nmap, say, lacks finesse. Now it seems I’ve angered the Intrusion Detection System and ALL traffic from my home IP address (which is static) is filtered completely. I can’t even see the Bren webpage from home (nor my home webpage from work), much less check my email. And, since I can’t access the Bren SMTP server I can’t send email TO anyone at work from home, which means I have to work from the office all the time and go “off grid” when I come home at night. Its now been 36 hours since my nmap attempt and still nothing. For all I know, their automated IDS firewall permanently blocks IP addresses, which seems unduly punitive for a false positive but- that’s the breaks.

So now I have to wander in, tail between my legs, and ask them to remove the IP address from the filter, sit through a lecture about how much of an asshole I am to try to use network infrastructure in a sophisticated way, and probably wait 7 to 10 days for them to “get to it.”

See, this is the reason I’ve never kept a blog before: I HAVE NOTHING TO SAY.