Random ramblings from the Garrity family
Check out this cool vibrating moving robot we made a while ago.
Robot - take 2 from Garrity Family on Vimeo.
We made it from an old back massager and some baling wire. You take 3 pieces of wire and loop them through the holes in the mounting ring on the motor and then around each other. Curl up the ends of the wires so that they don’t have sharp ends scratching up the floor. Then you take the battery pack and hot glue it on the side. That’s all there is to it.
Yesterday we walked around Walden Pond so that everyone could get a good appetite for the roast beast.
The boys brought the marshmallow shooters they got for Christmas. They chased each other around the trails and jumped out from behind trees at each other.
They showed them to Henry David, but he didn’t seem too impressed.
My parents, who are used to Florida now, thought it was kind of cold, but everyone had a lot of fun.
We hope everyone is enjoying the holiday season. Here's what we're doing tonight - tracking Santa (from NORAD). That's right after our traditional Christmas Eve fondue dinner (Cheese fondue with Chocolate fondue for dessert).
Senators John McCain and Maria Cantwell have introduced legislation which would reinstate Glass-Steagall. The Glass-Steagall act was a law which was introduced after the Great Depression. It separated banks into different types and made it illegal for banks which held deposits to be involved in investments and vice versa. That meant that the bank that held your retirement savings and mortgage couldn’t be using the money to mess around in things like credit default swaps.
Bringing Glass-Steagall back would be a good thing. Paul Volcker has been lobbying for this for a while now. Elizabeth Warren has advocated something similar. Getting rid of Glass-Steagall was clearly a mistake and a root cause of the mess we found ourselves in last year.
Glass-Steagall was repealed in 1999 by the Gramm-Leach-Bilely act. The irony is that the first name in the name of that act is none other than Phil Gramm who was John McCain’s chief economic advisor during his campaign for President last year. I guess John learned something this year.
I hope that they can get this bill, or something like it, enacted. I wonder how messy the process of splitting up those giant banks will be though.
Every year at this time, the Boston Globe puts together a list of 10 notable Bostonians of the year. This year’s top pick is Elizabeth Warren. She definitely would be high on my list of the most interesting people in the news this year.
If you not familiar with Warren, she’s chairwoman of the Congressional Oversight Panel. That’s the group which reviews how the Treasury is managing the TARP money, and gives Congress advice on what could be done to improve regulation of the financial system. She’s also a professor at Harvard specializing in bankruptcy law, and an author of several books about the problems the middle class has been facing in recent years.
If you’ve listened to some of the key players in the financial crisis, you’ve probably been pretty frustrated. It’s been pretty clear that most of them have been talking down to us, shading the truth, and being very self serving. Not Elizabeth Warren. She and Barney Frank are the only two people involved in this who I have felt were telling us the straight truth.
It’s been awfully nice to feel like there was at least one person in the middle of all of this who would say what she thought. It was also nice to have someone who would stand up to Hank Paulson and remind him that saving Citigroup and friends wasn’t going to accomplish anything if we lost America’s middle class in the process.
If you want to see why I think she’s so great, check out these two videos of her explaining TARP to Jon Stewart on The Daily Show (sorry about the ads):
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Elizabeth Warren Pt. 1 | ||||
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| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Elizabeth Warren Pt. 2 | ||||
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Or watch her rake Geithner over the coals about AIG.
Once she’s got you all riled up, you can check out Matt Taibbi’s argument that we should draft her to run for President.
We were eating cheese and crackers one evening. There was a ginger mango white stilton cheese. We also had some sesame rice crackers. I really liked these flavors together. And I really wanted to do something with cellophane noodles, only Pete said 'Cell phone noodles', and that's where we got the name. I also really like fresh tuna, and it seemed like a black pepper and sesame crust would be really cool. This is the recipe.
Cell phone noodles with Tuna
12 oz rice noodles or asian vermicelli (made with potato starch)
1 lb tuna steak
1-2 Tbsp hot sesame oil
1 ripe mango, diced
1-2 Tbsp grated fresh ginger
2 Tbsp soy sauce
1 tsp pink peppercorns, or 1-2 tsp asian chili garlic sauce or spiracha sauce
4-5 scallions, sliced
crushed black pepper and sesame seeds
Cook noodles according to package directions until tender.
Heat oil in a wok. Add the ginger and stir until fragrant. Add the cooked noodles and stir fry a couple of minutes. Add the soy and the peppercorns or chili sauce. Stir in the chopped mango and stir until warmed through. Sprinkle the noodles with scallions to serve.
Meanwhile, press the cracked pepper and sesame seeds into the tuna. Sear the tuna over high heat (you could grill it) on two sides. Make sure the tuna stays very rare.
To serve put some noodles on a plate and top with thin slices of the tuna.
When we were making this the first time. Mom decided that the amount of noodles we had originally planned on cooking didn't look like enough, so she made the entire package. We were eating cellophane noodles all week! So bear in mind, there are more noodles than it looks like.
As part of President Obama’s Open Government Initiative, the Office of Science & Technology Policy is asking for feedback from the public about public access to the results of federally funded research. Unfortunately, the ACM (an organization I give a lot of money to each year) is resisting.
The world wide web was started as an easy way for researchers to freely share results. In the early days of the web, it was great. For a short time, you could find almost any recent computer graphics paper. I didn’t have to depend quite so heavily on giant filing cabinets of Xeroxes which I had swapped with friends and coworkers.
Now more and more of these papers are behind the ACM firewall. For example, here’s one I wrote. Try clicking that PDF link. Did you pay the ACM $99 this year? No? Well then that link doesn’t work, does it? This isn’t benefiting researchers and it isn’t benefiting me. It is only benefiting the ACM. I understand that the ACM needs a source of revenue, but that shouldn’t be a higher priority for them than helping researchers share their work.
Naty Hoffman has a nice writeup on this issue. As he says,
The ACM has no legitimate needs or interests other than those of its members!
As a member, I do not feel that their stance on this subject is serving my interests. Please, OSTP, do not use the ACM as a model for other fields of research.
This is my new invention I call it the Piepod™ (not really trademarked but it is always fun to imagine). The Piepod™ is my new mp3 player that I created. Sadly the Piepod™ does not yet have a music player in it I'm thinking about putting one of these in it is a really cheap Ipod that could work well. I made the "pie" with great stuff that had been used before so it didn't come out smooth like normal.
It's been a good year for the Garritys. Tom is a sophomore in high school and Peter is in 7th grade. They both tower over me at this point, and I'm beginning to get used to being the shortest one in the family. It's nice to be able to ask anyone in the family to help reach things on the high shelves. Mike is still at the MathWorks, and I am still working at the Media Lab. The Media Lab just moved into a new building on campus and I moved from an office in the basement to one on the 4th floor with a window - what a nice change.
We went down to visit Mike's parents in Florida in February. It's always nice to get away from the cold New England Weather for a week. This year we visited the Myakka River State Park. In the park we went on the canopy walk, and we rented bikes too. The kids also enjoyed going tubing, and playing pool in the clubhouse with Grandpa.
Our major trip of the year was to Aruba. We rented a beautiful villa right on the water on Malmok Reef. We went snorkeling every morning. We also went wind surfing, scuba diving and explored caves on the windward side of the island.
This year was my 25th reunion at MIT. I saw a lot of people I hadn't seen in years. It's interesting to see how some people have changed and others look just the same. About the same time, we went to a Pops concert celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing where we ran into several other old friends. Some of Mike's old college friends also stopped by shortly after that. So it was a good year for catching up with old friends.
We managed to get out and do several interesting things around Boston this summer. We went to see the Tall ships when they were in town. The boys didn't remember the last time the ships were here. We also went to the Micro Mini Car day at the Larz Anderson Museum.
At the end of the summer we went to the vintage car races at Lime Rock. We met up there with Mike's parents as they were on their way back to Florida after visiting folks in Vermont. It was a beautiful weekend with some unusual vintage cars, and many exciting races.
On the way to Lime Rock we went to Mass MoCA in North Adams to see the Sol LeWitt exhibit. We'd been intending to get out to Mass MoCA ever since it opened, and we were especially interested in this exhibit.
Another noteworthy thing we did this summer was join a Community Supported Fishery. This is Gloucester's version of a CSA. Every Wednesday we'd pick up about 5 pounds of fresh whole fish and have to figure out what to do with it. We learned lots of new fish recipes and ate well all summer.
Along the way we've had many interesting side projects including building things with Peter's Arduino and programming in Scratch and Processing. We also went to a MakerFaire in Rhode Island, and both Tom and Peter went to Splash at MIT. Peter was very active in other ways too, raising tadpoles in the spring, and making videos in the fall.
Tom's News
I got a bass at Christmas last year. It's red. I've joined a band with a group of friends called The Caterwaulers, and that's my primary instrument. I play trombone in the high school band, and when I'm not playing bass with the Caterwaulers I'm playing didgeridoo. The Caterwaulers' first live performance was on Friday November 13th at the LHS GWAC band night. This however was not my first performance on bass. Over the summer I went to DayJAMS, a rock band day camp, where you get a week to write an original song. The first week was fun and our band was called The Whom.
The second week I was in a band called the Awkward Silence. We wrote a song that was 9 minutes long without being boring, and it was a legend at camp for the rest of the summer.
For my birthday party this year, I saved all of our cardboard from several months, and we built cardboard forts and armor in the back yard. Then we had a giant battle with foam swords and nerf guns. It was a lot of fun.
Peter's News
I had a pretty good year this year. I found school was a little easier in the beginning because I was able to find my classes. I had a lot of hair this year, until June. After my birthday, Mommy shaved most of it off. Halfway through we took a picture that you can see here. I liked having short hair in Aruba because I was not overheating. In February, we went to Florida again. This time was not quite as fun for me. It was not as fun for me because I had to have stitches done on my knee halfway through the week. I was riding on a folding bike at Grandma and Grandma's, when it folded up under me. I got a big cut on my knee, so we rushed to the hospital emergency room to have it stitched up. While I was having my knee stitched up, Mommy let me use her iPhone to play Bejeweled and watch Tom & Jerry in order to take my mind off the big gaping wound in my leg.
I also got my braces off this year. I was very excited and happy that now I can eat sweet yummy crunchy sugary gummy food. Once I got back from school that day, mommy let me take a whole bag of popcorn and eat it all to myself.
We also went to Lime Rock this year. It was very cool and exciting. Grandma and Grandpa also came with us. We met two people at the B&B we were staying at that worked on an Austin Healey that was in the races. The Austin Healey was very cool.
That's all our news for this year. If you want to get our news all year long, you can follow our blog. For more information about how to use the blog, see these instructions. Let us know what you've been doing; you can always leave a comment here.
The reason we were messing around with the plumbing arrived today. It looks like this:
Isn’t it cute?
It’s really big. That’s a problem. We live in a cape which was built in 1950. The doorways and hallways are all really narrow. The guys that delivered it had to work hard. They had to come in the front door and all through the house because the door near the kitchen was too narrow. They used a pretty neat system to move the fridge through the house. They had some straps which went under the fridge which clipped onto a belt and suspenders thing that they wore. They did a great job. Chris gave them a good tip afterwards.
We got it from sears. I can’t stand the appliance salesmen at sears and refuse to buy anything from them, but they had an ad with a really good price on the fridge Chris wanted, so she went in there. They gave her the usual runaround, but she came home with a good deal on the one she wanted.
Why go to all this bother? The kids are both 5’ 8” or so now and growing at an alarming rate. They eat a lot. We needed a bigger fridge just so we wouldn’t have to run to the grocery store every day.
I’m not sure whether I’m ready to tackle Taylor Branch’s 700 page account of the conversations he recorded with Bill Clinton during his presidency, but David Runciman’s review in the London Review of Books certainly makes it sound like a good read.
Clinton is certainly one of the most fascinating characters of our time, and Branch had amazing access to him during his entire presidency. It will be interesting when the tapes themselves are released someday, but it may actually be more informative to have this account by the person who made them.
I've been trying to figure out how to get the kids in the Scratch Club to try new things. I decided to try something a little different this year. Since we have two classrooms, I didn't think that I could get everyone working on the same thing in both rooms. So I decided to make the two rooms work for me instead of against me. Today when the kids arrived I said that everyone in one of the rooms would be working on a special project, and if you wanted to work on your own stuff you had to go into the other room.
I only had eight kids stay in the 'special' projects room in the end, but I think that was all for the best as I could get them all involved. Today's project was to do an Exquisite Corpse in Scratch. While you may not necessarily be familiar with the term Exquisite Corpse you probably know the concept. You may be familiar with images where you divide the page into thirds, and one person draws the head, another draws the body and arms, and a third draws the legs - that's an exquisite corpse. In writing, you may start a story on a blank page folding the top of the page down so only a few words are visible. The next person continues the story from those words, again folding the page down to only leave a few words visible for the next person. Repeat until the page is full, then you open up the page and read the story aloud. We used to do exquisite corpse stories when we were out at a restaurant with the kids. After you order and you're waiting for the food to arrive, you have just about the right amount of time to do a story, and of course they're usually hilarious. Sometimes the food would arrive before everyone had their turn and the kids would insist that we finish the story.
So what would it mean to do an exquisite corpse in a programming language? With Scratch being such a good platform for drawing and for storytelling it would be easy to do a graphic or story exquisite corpse in scratch. But that's not what I wanted the kids to do, I wanted the program to be the exquisite corpse. So I came up with a plan to have each programmer do a small piece of the program in a certain order. After you finish one part of the program you switch seats with the programmer on your left and continue programming with that program.
Somewhat to my surprise it was a very successful day for the workshop. I think the kids that stayed for the workshop were a little unsure at the beginning. I think they were even a little surprised at how much fun it was. One of them at the end asked if we can do it again - that by itself lets me know that they had a good time. In the end, that's what I want - I want them to think that creating their own programs can be fun.
Here are a couple of the projects from the Club. You can click on them to see the program in action. Just remember that this is an exquisite corpse, so it's not supposed to make much sense if you weren't there. It's about the experience of creating it.
The New York Times annual Year in Ideas section is out today. That’s always worth checking out. As their intro says:
… we have hunted eclectically, though not without discrimination, for noteworthy notions of 2009
Some of them you’ve probably noticed, like the one about adding noise makers to the new quiet hybrid and electric cars. I think this is a terrible idea, unless it’s something like this one which lets you choose between sounds like a V8, a V12, or the Enterprise from StarTrek.
I also liked the application of the Google page rank to determining the sensitivity of ecosystems to species extinction. Which reminds me that you should check out Cleve’s great explanation of the page rank algorithm.
Some other ideas I enjoyed from the NYT section include:
So what do you think are the most notable ideas of 2009?
You may think that digital cameras have killed off film, but it’s not that simple. Check out the following two projects.
You may already have heard of The Impossible Project. This is a group of former Polaroid employees who are attempting to reopen a factory in the Netherlands and produce new instant film. It certainly is an enormous project, but there are a lot of Polaroid fans out there who are rooting for them to succeed.
And then there’s the flickr user Dark Orange, who has posted this set of photos of a machine a friend is building to manufacture film. There aren’t a lot of details, but it certainly is a beautiful contraption.
Do you know who HM was? He was one of the most important patients in the history of cognitive neuropsychology. In 1953 he had surgery for epilepsy. The surgery was successful in the sense that it controlled the epilepsy, but afterwards he had severe anterograde amenesia. This means that he couldn’t remember anything between the time of the surgery and a few moments before the present. Basically, he couldn’t form any new memories.
His name was William Scoville. He is important in the history of science because researchers knew exactly what part of his brain had been damaged to cause the amnesia, and more importantly, because he let scientists use him for a research subject for the rest of his life. Researchers learned a lot of fascinating information from studying him. For example, there were certain types of motor skills (e.g. moving around a new house) which he could learn.
William died in 2008, but he continues to help scientists who are studying how the brain works. he donated his brain to science. The Brain Observatory at UCSD is currently dissecting it to learn exactly what the damage was. If you go visit their website now, you can watch the brain being cut into slices over a webcam. I’m guessing that some of you won’t think that’s cool, but I think it’s pretty fascinating. You’ll have to tune in soon though, they’re almost done.
Robert Sapolsky is always fun to listen to. He gave the class day lecture at Stanford last spring. It’s a neat talk about what makes us humans the uniquerest (his word, not mine) animal.
If you enjoy it, check out some of his books. They’re very informative, and lots of fun. For example, Why Zebra’s Don’t Get Ulcers is a pretty good explanation of why stress effects our bodies the way it does. If you’d prefer more stories about his summers in Africa following a baboon troupe around, you might enjoy A Primate’s Memoir, or the special that National Geographic did on stress.
This morning it was simply pouring rain and I didn't think I'd get a walk at all before work. However, as I was checking my email the clouds suddenly blew apart and the sun broke through. So I got my walk with the dog after all, and the bright sky with the still wet roads had wonderful reflections like this. Unfortunately the iphone photo doesn't really do it justice. 
Here's an applet I wrote that draws clocks in 5 different numeral systems. From the top row down, they are:
The first column is the hours, the second column is the minutes, and the third column is the seconds.
In the first 4 rows; a green dot represents a 1, a blue dot represents a 2, and a red dot represents a –1.
Source code: RosettaClock.scala
Built with SPDE and Processing
This is actually kind of useful for learning to count in the different systems. Each of the systems has some distinctive patterns which you recognize after a while. It’s also pretty neat to see them together though. For example, you can clearly see how skew binary and ternary start out together and then start to go their own ways when they reach 7.
The Congressional Budget Office released their estimates of what individuals would pay for health insurance under the Senate Bill. I’m sure you’ve seen this reported in the news. It usually has a headline like Some Health Premiums to Rise.
Sometimes it pays to ignore these news reports and actually look at the actual document. Our neighbor John Gruber (who knows a bit about health care) did, and here’s what he found. The short version is:
… reform will significantly reduce, not increase, non-group premiums.
If you’re confused, go read his article.
The Royal Society turns 350 next year. They’ve set up a cool website as part of their celebration. It contains a timeline which lets you scroll through and see some of the more important Royal Society papers and some context of what was going on in the world at the time. They’ve included links to PDF copies of the papers. Some of my favorites include this one by Newton, this one by Benjamin Franklin, this one by Maxwell, this one by Barbara McClintock, and this one by Hawking and Penrose.
Go check it out and look for your favorites.
Via the Real-Time Rendering blog.
