Spice

I had the spiciest meal of my life today! This beat the Sichuan style meal I had in Beijing and the time I had a Thai restaurant not hold back. I went to smoke eaters with some coworkers today. The restaurant serves buffalo wings with 7 levels of spice. Most of us find their highest level quite spicy, but still easily edible. The restaurant also has the hell fire challenge where they make extra spicy wings and you have to eat 12 in 10 minutes with no drink or napkins. None of us wanted to do that, but we wanted to try the higher level of spice and figured we'd have a few of those and the rest of the meal would be level 7 wings. The hell fire challenge wings were covered in a thick brown sauce which was basically habanero paste. The others had less than one wing, I had two. After that the level 7 wings tasted mild.

What I learned: If you start to hiccup on your first bite of spicy food then stop. If you continue and a few tears run down your face then stop. If you still continue and for a moment your mouth seems to cool down, don't think that means you can handle more. Even if there's some guy at the next table actually doing the challenge and looking like it doesn't even phase him, still stop.

Wow, I ended up with a lot of time to play sudoku on my iphone (how's that for a euphamism?). Well I found my spice limit, and have no need to repeat that experience.

Luckily my stomach calmed just in time for Julie and Saeed to feed me dinner. Thank you Julie and Saeed!

Google Wave

Someone is starting a rumor that google wave is a firefly reference. Which I'm believing because they use Shiny! in a message and the error message really is "Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal".

KC and Naples Part 2

It's been pointed out that I kind of sped through the posts on KC and Naples. Didn't mean anything by it. I think I just had the backpacking trip on my mind and rushed through the others. Here's attempt #2.

In KC we went on a great bike ride. I was very happy that the bike seat hurt my butt a lot less than it had in the past. A lot of the time in KC was spent talking to my family which was great, but makes for some boring blogging. For my Grandma's 75th birthday we had dinner at my parent's house. For mother's day we headed to the plaza for brunch and then did a short walk to Starbucks where we discussed Bringing Down the House and gambling strategies, which is a bit odd since I don't think anyone in my family goes to a casino with more than $100. While it was nice to meet my friends' babies, I'm not really at a point where babies hold a lot of appeal (all me, nothing to do with their babies). I did head out to a bar with Ben to play pool which was great, especially since I was playing fairly well. It really highlights how much moving I've done that it wasn't just that I didn't know if I had told people about where I live now, but wasn't sure if they knew about the move before that.

I headed to Naples on a Saturday and got there Saturday night. My flight happened to show up at almost the exact same time at the gate directly next to Steve's flight. We grabbed a surprisingly cheap rental car (thanks to whoever it was that set us up with that) and headed to the Inn on Fifth which is a cute hotel on a cute street in Naples. Downtown Naples actually felt a lot like Santa Barbara, except the people were older. We met up with what we decided were for the most part the male college friends on the bride's side, which oddly includes Laura. Had some good sushi then bought some booze at CVS and headed to the hot tub at the hotel - again brought back some memories of SoCal life. Next morning we headed to the wedding. It was a tad hot outside, but there was ice water that was very helpful. It was cool to be one of the friends and know most of the people in the wedding party. And the bride looked so happy - awwww. There was quite the MIT crowd so I spent a lot of the wedding party catching up with them. A crowd also headed outside for a bit to marvel at Florida's sudden down pours. After the wedding a few of us met up at the bar next to the hotel. Then off to the out of towner dinner. I spent a lot of this time describing to Laura the "plans" for Mike's bachelor party. The dinner was nice especially because the bride and groom had more time to talk. Next morning some of us met up with the bride and groom at the bar next to the hotel for breakfast. Then off to some thai food, Edison house, and airport.

MIT crowd at the wedding:

Lost Coast

Last weekend I headed to the Lost Coast with a portion of the usual hiking crowd. We drove up on Friday night. Put down some tarps on the beach and slept in our sleeping bags looking up at the stars. Saturday morning we drove to the start of the trail. We did the 24 miles from Mattole to Blacksands Beach over the course of Saturday, Sunday and Monday. Hiking 24 miles with basically no elevation over 3 days was sounding pretty easy so we had planned out some extra hikes we could do. Well, we didn't have to hike on the sand for very long to realize this wasn't the cake walk we expected. Then we hit the segments where the sand was replaced by piles of rocks and we started wishing for the sand. The creek crossings threw in another bit of unexpected challenge, especially with backpacks and heavy wind - I wish I had spent more time practicing balancing on the Wii Fit. While the creeks weren't that deep, none of us wanted to hike with wet feet. The trip did have some time pressure because there were sections that became impassible during high tide. The added challenge was cool, but my knees did not appreciate the constant tilt of the path due to walking in one direction next to the ocean, they weren't too thrilled about me slipping in one of the creeks either.

It was a cool adventure. We were next to the ocean the whole time and got fairly close to some seals and birds. Also there was a bunch of drift wood and people had built some amazing shelters out of them (according to the ranger a lot of the building was done by boy scouts), unfortunately they were all claimed by time we got to them. Another cool thing is this area is owned by the bureau of land management. Unlike most parks where you can't have fires and have to register for labeled campsites, the BLM is fine with fires and you just camp anywhere on the trail you feel like (although there are some obvious spots where people tend to cluster). So we did get to make use of some of the drift wood and had fires going Saturday and Sunday nights. An added bit of adventure is there are some bears in the area so we had to keep all the food in hard plastic bear boxes and place them a good distance from camp. That way even if the bears find the food all they can do is knock the boxes around. Unfortunately we didn't get to see any bears, fortunately we didn't have any bear encounters and the boxes didn't get moved at night.

The driving itself was a bit of an adventure, especially between the ends of the trail. Luckily only the other car took the dirt road with small creeks running through it. I'm pretty sure if a prius was bottoming out, the mustang would have just been stuck. It was also quite a shock to see the 101 become a 35 mph main street through small towns.

Jeremy was the offical photographer of the trip and all his pictures along with captions are up here.

I think the full set of pictures is worth checking out, but here's a smaller selection:

Naples

Two weekends ago I headed to Naples for Julie and Saeed's wedding (congratulations!). The wedding was very nice. It was great to see some of my MIT friends. Somehow I went the whole time without getting to the beach. But I did get to see Edison's Fort Myers home.

KC

Three weekends ago I headed to KC. It was great to see the family. Got in some biking and Wii fitness. Also got to be there for mother's day and my grandma's birthday (well at least close). Also got to meet my KC friends' many children.

Slumdog Millionaire and the Supreme Court

First - I finally saw Slumdog Millionaire. Did anyone else feel like they were watching a Forrest Gump remake? I liked the film (but I also liked Forest Gump), but for most of the movie I really had this sense that I've seen this before and then it finally hit me.

Second - It felt to me like there were a lot of supreme court nominations recently (3 in the last 4 years). If you want actual information you could look here or you could keep reading my speculation based on no research. The last nomination prior to 2005 was in 1994. So if you are around my age then it's likely the first time you paid attention to nominations wasn't till 2005 and even if it wasn't, your experience is an 11 year stretch without any. Based on that experience you might expect nominations to be very rare.

But (based on guessing) no one gets on the supreme court before the age of 40 and most probably finish up by 80. So a justice keeps the job at most 40 years and if there are 9 of them you'd expect a nomination around every 4 years and probably more often since 40 years is the upper end. So the last 4 years have seen a fairly reasonable rate, it's the 11 years prior to that were odd and screwed up my sense of the supreme court justice turn over rate.

Thanks Steve for the correction.

Wolframalpha

If you haven't seen wolframalpha yet, it's worth checking out. Some people are trying to play it up as a competitor with google. If that's how you view it you'll be very disappointed. If you take a look at their sample searches there's some cool stuff there. But what they don't seem to play up is that you now basically have free access to mathmatica (one line at a time).

So try stuff like
10*x^3+0.5*x^2+x+100=0
or simplify (x^2 + 4*x + 3)
or d(e^(x^x))/dx
or 4 * (boltzmann's constant) * (300 K) * (100 ohms). Yes, google calculator will do the last one, but it doesn't change the units to (nV^2)/Hz like wolframalpha does.

Epistemology

I'm having a reasonably packed May, but I'll get to that in another post. But while waiting for my flight back to CA I finished up Epistemology by Richard Feldman. The book is, not too surprisingly, about Epistemology, aka Theory of Knowledge. Reading Anathem got me interesting in checking out certain areas in philosophy. In particular the parts discussing if pure mathematical concepts live in a universe of their own and then filter down to our own, and if so does our universe filter down to other universes. Also if I stayed in high school in Paris I would have taken a theory of knowledge class for the IB and I always kinda wondered what it was about.

Well Epistemology was nothing like the stuff in Anathem. On one hand I liked finding out what theory of knowledge is all about, on the other hand as someone who took mostly science and engineering classes in college it's really weird to see a subject that has been studied for thousands of years and yet has no definitive answers.

So quick(ish) summary. The traditional analysis of knowledge is that the requirements to know something are: 1. it is true 2. you believe it (not in a blind faith way, but a generally think it is true way) 3. you are justified in believing it 4. the justification for the belief does not essentially depend on any falsehood (the last one is just to deal with certain weird cases). There are a lot of ways to describe what it takes for a belief to be justified. The main one the author backs is you know what you think you see and what you think you remember and from those essential facts you can build up beliefs. Others involve things like you're justified if the belief fits into your whole system of beliefs or if you are able to track as something goes between true and false. But he shows why those others really have problems.

Then he goes into skepticism which is asking if there's much you can really be justified in believing. Gets into a lot of the how do you know you aren't a brain in a vat with a computer making you think things are happening to you. And almost all knowledge is built on induction, but just because something has always worked a certain way in the past do you really know it will do it the same way in the future. The main response is even if you aren't absolutely certain it will happen the same way you are justified in thinking it will. So if you distinguish knowledge from absolute certainty then it still works. There are a number of other skeptical arguments and not all of them have been dismissed by the traditional analysis of knowledge.

He talks about science and epistemology. One part is scientific studies show that humans very often get some basic logic and probability questions wrong which along similar lines to skepticism makes you ask if there's much that people are really justified in believing. The author's arguments against this seemed the weakest of any in the book. He also discusses if epistemology should take a more scientific approach. He argues it doesn't really need to which also comes off a bit weak (maybe I'm showing a bit of a bias).

I sort of expected the book to be a bit more concrete about how you evaluate when you know something and distinguish what knowledge is justified and what isn't. I guess it does exactly that, except more philosophically (not surprisingly) than I expected.

Not sure that I'd recommend the book unless you've been wondering what theory of knowledge is about for over 10 years or if your name is Angie.

CA special election

Here's the results of the California special election. All the budget measures failed. The one thing to pass was limiting raises for the legislature during bad budget years.

I was able to vote the exact opposite of the rest of CA. On one hand I feel like a contrarian, but on the other hand I was the one voting how the legislature asked me to. Maybe I'm the only sucker.

Maybe this is what I should have patented...

What happens when a need for variety meets the kitchen of a single male who eats 2 to 3 meals a day at work?

Wait for it.

Wait for it.

Vindaloo oatmeal.

Awesomeness!

Take oatmeal with a normal amount of sugar and add a generous amount of vindaloo then stir. From the moment I had the idea of spicy oatmeal I was scared. Up till that first bite when I realized that a new snack had been born!

Patent Application

My first patent application was published on Feb 5!

I wouldn't expect anyone here to read it, because either you're not a patent lawyer or you are a patent lawyer, but have no interest in reconfiguring batteries for medical devices. But there are a few pretty pictures if you follow the link.

Implantable defibrillators are kind of weird to design because most of the time they are super low power, but every once in a while they need to be really high power. Typically for the low power stuff you want a low voltage battery and for the high power stuff you want a high voltage battery (that statement sounds more obvious than it actually is, but I will spare you from that tangent). The battery voltage used is usually a compromise between the two. Marcus and I came up with the idea of reconfiguring multiple batteries using switches so you could have high voltage when you need it and low voltage when you don't. The patent also expands on that idea in a few ways.

Well hopefully some time in the next 5 years or so we'll find out if it actually gets accepted (oh patent office, why do you take 5 years to read an application?).

Oh - and this is post #400!