February 1st, 2008
The extra ten t-shirts weren’t going to hold up for long with the soda ash on them, and fortunately Beth opened up her tie-dye studio/kitchen for a marathon dying session. It takes longer than expected to fold and tie the shirts and mix and apply the dye. I got 10 shirts done in about 6 hours, though I had to keep the patterns basic in the interest of time (and fatigue). 9 of the shirts came out pretty well.
The bottom three are my favorites. The yellow and periwinkle work pretty well together in the spiral, so my attempt at making orange by mixing red and yellow in situ didn’t quite work out.
I guess I’ll be wearing a lot of tie-dye this year.
Posted in Art | 2 Comments »
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.
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 »
January 21st, 2008
The 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 »
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 »
November 29th, 2007
The 2008 Science Blogging Conference is coming up January 19. I attended last year and will be co-leading a session this year on “Public Scientific Data”. My selfish interest in public data is wanting to try to improve the visualizations I see in science papers, but I can’t readily do it without the data. The other discussion leader, Jean-Claude Bradley, is a real scientist, though, running a real open science chemistry lab at Drexel.
I started a skeleton outline of some of the issues at the conference wiki, and I’m happy to see others have expanded it.
Posted in Graphs, Local, Math | No Comments »
November 18th, 2007
Three years after getting new countertops, we finally got around to replacing the vinyl backsplash with tile. Though we hired someone to install the tile, we still had to do a lot of prep and clean-up work ourselves.
The first problem was that earlier electrical work had left a channel cut out of the drywall and stray wire for the under-cabinet lights.
I placed nail stoppers where the wiring crossed the studs and rerouted the wires to exit the wall underneath the cabinets where it would be hidden by the lights. I repaired the drywall with nylon mesh over some thin metal sheeting sold for roof flashing. The rest of the existing backsplash had to be removed, too, because it wasn’t flat everywhere. Removing it caused more damage to the drywall, which I smoothed with drywall mud.
Finally we were ready for the installers, who did a good enough job, but had to come back to fill in some gaps in the grout.
Here’s the final product after reinstalling the under-cabinet lights.
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
November 7th, 2007
Here is a summary graph of the 2007 Chapel Hill Town Council elections [source data]. Each horizontal bar is a precinct, and the heights are proportional to the number of votes cast in each precinct. Each color is a different candidate, and the sub-bars widths are proportional to the percent of votes that each candidate got in the corresponding precinct. Precincts that had too few votes to show up well have been omitted (Country Club, Hillsborough, Mail-in, and Provisional)
With so much information it’s hard to pick out too many details. However, it’s easy to see how Ward and Raymond did in each precinct since they’re on the edges and have a stable baseline.
The order of the candidates is by overall finish position, and the order of the precinct is by percent of total Czajkowski/Hill votes that went to Czajkowski. That makes it a little easier to see how those two candidates matched up in the battle for the fourth seat.
Czajkowski got the final spot on the council in a close race, though there is quite a bit of variation among precincts. Not sure if the variation is due to political make-up of the precincts or to targeted campaigning.
I notice my precinct, Estes Hills, was one of the best for my friend Will Raymond. Maybe my yard signs helped!
Update:Here’s another view, highlighting the broad range of results for Czajkowski. Each circle is a precinct.
And a similar one, this time with circle size being proportional to total precinct votes and color being set based on the Czajkowski/Hill ratio. Red precincts went for Czajkowski and blue for Hill. You can see some correlation among the incumbents and among the challengers.
Posted in Graphs, Local | 3 Comments »
