122% Performance

122% Performance. 19-0-0

The lefty 901s were victorious! Going out on top, untouchable! Working towards the weekend!

Greenhouse Door

Check out my super sweet greenhouse door!   We took a garage door track and and used it to hang the door. I think it turned out pretty well; it doesn't open as easy as I would have liked, but I think that is because we didn't use real track so there is a lot of friction.

Sliding Door

Garage Door Track

Pretty cool, right!

In other news Nanny's Navy got another win last night in spite of some abysmal play all around.  I am am getting worse at the mental aspects of ultimate, especially when I handle.   Though, in all fairness, I about 75% of the turnovers I threw hit the receivers hand, but I think it is because I am putting a lot of spice on the throw due to being really sweaty. 

MARS NEXT WEEKEND!

Update! Scatterbrained!

First off,  I know y'all have been wondering exactly how terrific the fireflies were.  They were awesome, and I had a great time.  We went swimming in super cold water (i.e. mountain stream), played some card games, and had a giant campfire.  Somewhere in there was pizza, and trying to divide  a rectangle into seven pieces, minimizing the cuts (or length of the total cuts).  I also learned some cool models on how they sync up and why. I wouldn't say fireflies was better than P-days, but I think given the circumstances it was equivalent.

After coming back from fireflies I went to the ANS conference in Atlanta.  ANS is primarily a power generation focused conference, so it isn't really my cup of tea.  A lot of the emphasis in this meeting was how nuclear energy is still an option, but privately there seemed to be undercurrents that this isn't the revival that that was expected pre-Fukushima.  Fun fact, did you know that two nuclear plants were shut down in the US?  San Onofre (June) and Kewaunee (May). Note that these were not shutdown because of reactor safety issues*. Combined with the delays at Vogtle**, it is an interesting time. 

However, I did meet a lot of people who might help with the job aspect.  However, I don't really know if I want to work in the nuclear industry. . . I think I am going to move into the bum house with David. Maybe our generation can be the failed generation!  No, I just don't feel like I am changing anything working in nuclear security.  I originally did nuclear because I wanted to study power generation and save the world, but I don't think generation is the key for our energy crisis - maybe we can't be saved by technology.  Gah, I feel like a senior all over again.

Anyway, I am starting to work on a slightly different project now, which is the non-destructive assay of spent fuel casts.  The idea is to determine the if it is possible to measure the radionuclides in a spent fuel cast cheaply, and then determine if there is a way to measure what the operator says is in the cast is actually in the cast.  (The idea is that a malicious agent would remove some of the spent fuel for further reprocessing to extract materials.)

*I guess you could argue that a steam generator leak posed a safety issue for San Onofre, but it wasn't a reactor issue.  There was regulatory uncertainty in the San Onofre case, and as a utility in California you need to buy the power that you said you would produce but where not - a double whammy if you are not producing power.

**So why build in Vogtle, GA? The public utilities in Georgia (as well as in SC and TN) can start charging for the power rate before they actually produce anything, helping to offset the large capital cost of nuclear.  This might be a reason why the new nuclear constructions are in the south where such agreements are common.

Synchronous Fireflies!

This is gonna be awesome!  Just letting y'all know you should be jealous.  Also, submitted my first article to IEEE today!

Navy Ninjas (summer league)

The Navy Ninjas deftly handled a vicious beat down from Domestic Violet.  It was a pretty good game, both teams made small runs.  We won the game by defense, as expect for a few points our offense was terrible.  These high schoolers just don't cut - gotta get out there and run.

The RECKON matchup

Tonight the 901s (I don't know why we are the 901s, only one of our players are from Memphis) are defending their IM League title, playing left handed and running only on the lines. Turns out I have a lefty chicken wing sorta thing.

Call Graph Challenge (Missing Edge)

In my data mining class last fall we had a challenge problem that was to find the missing edge of a call graph.  We were provided with the anomalous telecommunication information of two cities, Moria and Standelf (these two cities in middle earth corresponding to two cities in the US - we were told at the end but I didn't write it down). Namely (for an entire month) we were provided with the days (number of distant days that two nodes communicated during the month), calls (number of distinct calls that the nodes made during the month), secs (the commutative length of all calls), and texts (the number of distinct texts) and our job was to predict the probability that two nodes within the graph would comunicate with each other. With the news about Verizon (or other telecoms - I haven't really paid attention) providing the NSA with similar information I thought this project was really cool.

Example call graph

Our group ended up using my  neural net, which was actually a little bit worse than to tossing a coin to decide if a link existed. I know other groups did much better (maybe getting up to 70-80%) but I didn't really pay attention. My real problem was compute power, I was using NetworkX (LANL network code, in python on a single node) and it was pretty slow to run.

I just wonder how useful this information is to the NSA. Say that they can classify 90% of the missing edges (a call between party A and B correctly). With millions of calls, 90% still leaves hundreds of thousands to sort out by other techniques.* Look at the calls distributions  lots of people make lots of calls. Look at the call duration and texts; most of the people make short calls and send out lots of texts. ** Most of the people don't leave much of a footprint to go off of.

I think the long tail is due to call bots / ISP, no human talks that much

I still can't figure out the spike around 5500 texts

I think that I should note that I am not committing on the right / wrong of the utilization of this data, merely that I thought it was cool that something I learned in the classroom was actually useful.

*The AI going into the voice to text translators, and then data mining on that information.
**I apologize for the terrible graphics.

Super Awesome Range Simulations!

Yay!  I can simulate ranges accurately with GEANT4!  What I did was compare my GEANT4 simulated ranges to those published by the NIST in ASTAR and ESTAR.  A ratio of 1.0 indicates perfect agreement. For the most part (asides from being lazy and only running a low number of Monte Carlo trials) I have very good agreement to the NIST values.

Alpha

Electrons

Greenhouse Building

I got a fun project at Ijams this week!  Greenhouse end building!  The idea was to take the old cypress sides of the previous greenhouse (orignal to the site) and use them as the ends for the new greenhouse.  The sides are kinda like garage door segments.  We wanted to fit these into the U-tube of the end of the green house, which then could also serve to hold down the plastic.  I'm pretty happy how it turned out*.

Example cut and notch

Example of a sung fit

Finished Product

*Mistakes:

• First segment has is cross member cut a little short.  This wasn't a mistake so much as an oversight - originally we thought that they would need to less stable then they ended up.
• Middle segment is somehow lower than the rest.

Hiking & The Dragon!

I rode the Dragon! 318 curves in 11 miles! Twice! Once in the rain!

Evidently this is a big thing, so y'all should be impressed. And we didn't end up on the Tree of Shame.

Tree of Shame (Wiki)

The hiking was pretty long but still a lot of fun.  The premise of this trip was to collect water samples for water quality surveying in the Smokies.  These sites are sampled twice a year, but this time the NPS didn't do it, so the UT part of the collaboration (Timmy) had to. We did about 16 mi the first day, and then hiked up to Hazel Cascades to get the farthest one.  It was starting to drizzle before we reached our campsite the next day, so we slept at Proctor (there is an old house there with a porch) and then finished the hike out in a thunderstorm today.  A lot of cool things were along the trail that were not on the maps, (the town of Proctor, a gold mine) that I think the Park might be ignoring its heritage and just letting nature take it over.

Whoo! Terrible Maps!

The bit up from the old horse camp to Hazel Cascades would be a nice day hike (lots ~25) stream crossings, but the cascades themselves are not worth the hike to them.  I really like the mountains in a thunderstorm, really beautiful with a lot of nice, earthy smells. Causalities from this weekend include:

• My left pinky toe.  Major blister from sandals.
• The DRAGON!