Archive for January, 2008

Tie Dye Lesson

Tuesday, January 29th, 2008

Saturday, Beth and I traveled to Saxapahaw for a tie-dying session with fabric artist Jean Cerasani who teaches classes at the local Carrboro ArtsCenter among other places. I learned quite a bit and dyed four shirts, three of which turned out pretty good.

tiedyejan082.jpg tiedyejan084.jpg tiedyejan086.jpg

I was hoping that Jean would have some magical tie-dye tricks and came in wanted to do something out of the Mandelbrot set. The spiral was as close as I could get, using this Wikipedia image as inspiration. The middle shirt is supposed to be a sunflower — not bad, but room for improvement.

I like the third shirt best. The bottom dye was from dipping, so it’s more solid than usual. I was looking for a way to add some texture to it and Jean suggested thin dark stripes along the folds, which became dots when the shirt was unfolded.

The only problem is I still have ten more shirts treated with soda ash and ready for dye…

Posted in Art | No Comments »

Science Blogging Conference 2008

Monday, January 21st, 2008

2008 Science Blogging Conference LogoThe 2008 NC Science Blogging Conference went well despite the unusually wintry weather scaring off a few attendees with long drives. The first session I attended on Open Science set the unconference tone for the day with the speaker serving more as a moderator for an audience discussion. Publishing was hot topic including debates on the merits of online publishing, peer review and embargoes.

I co-hosted a session titled Public Science Data with Jean-Claude Bradley who runs an open science chemistry lab at Drexel. In the spirit of openness I created my slides in HTML with Slidy and put them on-line (Public Science Data slides). It’s a good thing I did since I forgot to take the VGA adapter for my MacBook and had to use Jean-Claude’s machine, though there were plenty of MacBooks in the crowd for me to borrow an adapter from if necessary. I found out later that the title of out session had misled a few folks — they thought the word “public” meant it would be about government data. We should have called it something like Open Science Data.

Anyone interested in the topic of open science data should check the wiki page for the session. I started an outline there, and some anonymous angels filled in lots of nice content and links.

Posted in Local | 1 Comment »

Project Euler Tester

Sunday, January 6th, 2008

After fanatically solving 160+ Project Euler math/programming problems whenever the came out, I’ve accepted an invitation to be part of the testing team. I’ve always thought the problems were very high quality regarding clarity and scale, and now I can confirm that those attributes are quite deliberate based on the discussions I’ve seen leading up to problem publication.

The “one minute rule” is well known at the site and is a requirement that any problem be solvable in under a minute of computation time on a midrange computer. Another rule is that integers larger than 64 bits not be required for the solution; some of my solutions have needed BigInteger, but I guess I missed some optimizations.

One downside to seeing the problems before they are published is that I can’t compete with the few testers who try to be the first to solve each problem as it comes out. That’s OK with me, and besides I don’t see all the problems ahead of time. There are two separate testing teams, so I can compete on some problems if the timing is right.

Posted in Math | 3 Comments »