Conference in Madison

PSERC had there spring meeting this year at University of Wisconsin-Madison and I just got back from  my trip up there.  I'll spare you all the technical details of the conference and instead talk about the general aspects of my time in Madison.

First of all, the campus.  This is a very large campus that is thoroughly integrated into the city.


(All photos you'll be seeing today were taken with my poor quality cell-phone camera.  No justification is provided for such a choice on my part.)

All the buildings you see in this picture are a part of the university.  Almost all of the buildings I saw on campus were at least five stories tall.  I was told the campus had 40,000 students and it stretched literally for miles.  Despite Madison being a relatively small city, walking through campus felt just like walking through downtown in a many times its size.  You might guess that parking was not easily found and you would be right.  This is true not only for cars but also for scooters (called "mopeds") and bicycles.

Many buildings had the moped lots and all had many bike racks.  Madison took bicycles very seriously.  Bike lanes everywhere (some with curbs in the middle of the street physically separating them from auto traffic), demarcation between bicycle and pedestrian lanes on paths, and automated bicycle rental racks strewn throughout campus.

After riding my bicycle as my primary form of transportation for a better part of a decade, I have to say that Madison fully understands and enables bicycle commuting.  Autos, bicycles, and pedestrians; these three all move at distinctly different speeds and to facilite each, they each need their own lanes.  Seeing these three lanes makes me want to move there.

There's always the weather, though.  Humidity was high (> 90%) so even at 75'F I was sweating.  I don't think it would be any more bearable than Wichita's summers even if the highs are ten or fifteen degrees cooler. Winters I would expect to be much colder and snowier than anything I've ever experienced; maybe I don't actually want to live there.

Anyway, back to the campus.  At a big school there is a lot of money very modest percentages of the university budget can produce very impressive results.  We got to tour the newest building on campus and it is was nicer and more impressive than the building where I have my office at Wichita State, also the newest on its campus.

Five or six stories, glass and metal, very fancy looking labs with many millions of dollars of equipment.  It is hard not to feel inferior when surrounded by such impressive equipment.  The advantages of doing research at such a large and well-funded school were clear and made me jealous; I've always had a problem with gadget envy.  It is in times like these that it is good to remind myself that I'm actually very happy with the education and research opportunities I have been granted, both undergrad and graduate.  Expensive toys are nice and they enable some incredible work but there is a lot that can be learned and studies with much more modest means.  I am thankful for the opportunities I've been given.

Lastly, a bit of a rant on the controls in my shower at the hotel.

Two levers one controls the amount of water and the other controls the temperature. The large one rotates about 540 degrees (1.5 revolutions), the other, smaller lever only 45 degrees. To turn the shower on you must rotate the larger one until water begins to flow.  To adjust temperature you then turn the smaller one appropriately.  No wait, that's completely wrong.  To adjust the temperature, you continue to turn the larger handle an arbitrary amount in an arbitrary direction.

After using this fixture for three days I had memorized where the handle should go; the location never made any sense.  And the smaller handle?  It did adjust the amount of water AFTER you had turned on the water with the larger handle.  This is the worst design I have every personally encountered.  (If design decisions like this equally ruffle your feathers, do I have the book for you: The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman.  Amazing, fantastic book.)

Ok Go Again

You know this band, the treadmill guys:



And the warehouse-sized Rube-Goldberg machine:



What else is there to say but that  they've done it again, a creative new way realize their music. Here's the original song:



And here's how Ok Go turned it into another amazing experience:

Lorenz in Living Color - Part 1: The Lorenz System

I've been working on a technology art project (not as cool as this one) for over a decade now and by "working" I mean "mostly not working".

The project got a started during the jolting transition from no-free-time college days to evenings-and-weekends-free life as a working engineer.  In the meager discretionary time during my college years I had read "Chaos: Making a New Science" by James Gleick and was captivated by chaotic systems.  The seed had been planted in middle school by the book and movie "Jurassic Park" and was nurtured by my physics professor into something that I could begin to understand.

And the quintessential chaos-exhibiting system was the Lorenz system, boring when expressed as a system of seemingly simple differential equations...

but compelling when plotted in space...

Each one of those green dots is a unique value of x, y, and z that satisfies those three equations.  And given any set of x, y, and z coordinates, those equations will determine where the next dot will be in a second or minute or year.  All these dots, this collection that defines the solution that appears over time, the math people decided to call the shape of these types of solutions "attractors".  The solutions to these equations swirl and combine yet never settle down into regular, predictable patterns.  Looking at the attractor from another angle makes this clearer..

There are two foci to the attractor, two black holes that the solutions swirl around but this view of the attractor shows the solutions move back and forth between the two lobes. Sometimes the solutions loop repeatedly on one side and sometimes they will switch and start swirling around the other.  We never know when a switch is going to happen and the paths never cross or intersect.  Looking at an animation of the solutions over time shows this best...


I found this all very intriguing in many ways.  Here was a simple system that acted infinitely, a set of equations that produced values that never repeated themselves yet clearly had structure and was much more than just random noise. The regular-but-not-repeatable pulled me in and I began to think of ways that I could try to express this, to show others just how interesting I found it.

x, y, z.

red, green, blue.

Each point in space on the Lorenz attractor could be represented by a unique color, a combination of varying amounts of red, green, and blue.

This was the kernel of the idea that started the project all those years ago.

Catan: Explorers and Pirates

There's a new expansion for Catan: Explorers and Pirates.  Rather than a fundamental extension of the game like Cities and Knights or Seafarers (in a small way),  it appears to be more like Barabarians and Traders: mini-expansions and scenarios.  I am enough of a completist that I feel a pull to add this to the collection but for now I'm holding back because:

1. I haven't even played through all the Barbarian and Traders variants yet.
2. I haven't been overwhelmed with the added depth of play in said expansion.
3. I don't think I have room in my box for another Catan expansion.

(It may or may not surprise you to know the last reason is the most compelling to me.)

Extended Family Invasion

Sights from the recent trip my brother and his family made to Wichita to (ostensibly) see my wife and I.



My brother demonstrates an important technique when his kids take the picture: get in front of the camera.

Favorite activities for the boys:

- Playing on the motorcycle, helmet and keys included.

- Shredding paper

- Playing with the dogs.

The youngest of the three kids, the only girl, doing her little-girl-cute thing.

 




We made multiple trips to the premier kid's museum in Wichita, Exploration Place.  Much fun was had.

One of the halls of the museum focussed on flight and had numerous full-motion flight simulators.  At least they used to be full motion; none of them moved or even had full yoke and throttle control.  Makes me want to volunteer to try to get them all working again.

There was an agriculture/livestock display that both boys enjoyed.

The highlight for both boys was a multi-level castle that provided numerous "educational" activities such as dressing up as knights, harvest stuffed vegetables, and firing a catapult.

The most intriguing hall was the simplest: bins of building blocks (Keva Planks, to be specific) with tables to build on and demonstration pieces on display.  For such a simple item, the Planks were inspiring and I suspect will be a part of our toy collection soon.

Two story pendulum that swings its way around a circle as the day progresses, knocking over pegs as it precesses.

The other big museum we visited is the famous Cosmosphere in Hutchinson, KS.  Shortly after taking this picture, there was a trip and fall down a flight short of stairs, twenty seconds of crying, followed by the question, "Was that funny?"

I wasn't laughing until he asked the question.

Proposed

To complete the PhD program in the engineering department at Wichita State, the following steps must be completed:

1. Complete 60 hours of graduate course work.
2. Pass a qualifying exam.
3. Do large amounts of background research and preliminary testing.
4. Write a dissertation proposal.
5. Successfully present said proposal.
6. Actually do all the work outlined in said proposal.
7. Write the dissertation proper.
8. Successfully defend said document.

After five academic years here's how things stand for me today:

1. Complete 60 hours of graduate course work.
2. Pass a qualifying exam.
3. Do large amounts of background research and preliminary testing.
4. Write a dissertation proposal.
5. Successfully present said proposal.
6. Actually do all the work outlined in said proposal.
7. Write the dissertation proper.
8. Successfully defend said document.

We're getting there.

(And in case you're wondering, here's a not-quite-finished copy of the proposal.)

Apple Customer Service

Two weeks ago I was hours away from taking my iMac in for repair for the fifth time.  One failed hard drive, two failed optical drives, and the second screen failure which was about to be repaired.  This is not the reputation for quality and reliability that Apple has built its reputation on and I decided to give them a call to see what could be done.

Their response was to replace the computer outright; I mailed the old one in and they sent me the latest comparable model, all at no cost to me.  They even allowed me to pay for an upgrade when making the switch, allowing me to end up with the computer I would have purchased if I had been buying a new one. And this has been just like buying a new one: new computer, new warranty, new operating system, new experience.  The machine even has that new computer smell; the smell of the scratch-prevention clear plastic sheets covering every surface: screen, mouse, and keyboard. (I would bet that long-term persistent exposure to these fumes would not be good for your health but  I inhale deeply, knowing they will disperse quickly and the magic feeling will be gone.)

Almost every aspect of the transaction has been exactly what we all want customer service to be.  When I called and was passed between customer service agents there was always a hot-hand-off (no being put on hold and transferred).  The customer support people all had access to my information, used it, and I never had to repeat myself or re-tell my story.  The incident was not settled during the first call but follow-up calls and emails were quick, clear, and effective.  I've dealt with technical support for other products and none have offered an experience this great.

Furthermore, last night I was having trouble with the new version of the address book program and with no obvious solutions on the internet, I decided to give Apple another call.  Actually, I had them call me when a customer support person was ready; Apple's website starts the process by putting you in the call queue before a phone call is even made.  In less than five minutes the problem was solved. My mistake was embarrassingly simple and it was clear the guy on the other end was not reading a script, making me jump through silly hoops before actually trying to understand the problem and work on a solution. Best of all, he never spouted company propaganda in response to my statements. There is no better way to make me, the customer, feel like a demoralized cog in a technical support machine than to respond to my words with virtually automated replies.

This I firmly believe; you generally get what you pay for and when you buy an (arguably) overpriced computer one of the things you get is incredible technical support.

iOS Board Games

Truth be told, the most common type of board game I play are translations of traditional cardboard-and-dice games to the iOS platform.  (Some would say this doesn't make them board games any more but for the purposes of this discussion, I'm not going to worry about it.)  The reasons these get played more often are simple:

1. Often there is a computer controlled player I can play against when my wife doesn't feel up to it.
2. No time spent setting up before-hand and cleaning up afterward.
3. Can play where-ever and whenever the situation dictates; we can start a game in one location and finish it days later somewhere else.
4. iOS games are cheaper than their physical counter-parts.
5. Its easy to carry many, many games on an iOS device.
6. The computer takes care of the rules, making it easier to learn games you haven't played before.
7. The games almost always play much faster, sometimes over twice as fast.

Most of the time, we play the cardboard version of the game first and then go hunting for an implementation in the iOS App store with a few notable exceptions.  Here are the board games I tend to play on our iPad, in no particular order

• Carcassonne - Perhaps the first iOS game I tried and I must say, it is fantastic. This is a wonderful implementation and sets the standard for how board games should work on iOS devices.  The art is great, the sound design is wonderful, the game supports local and internet play.  $10 and worth it if you enjoy the game.
• Scrabble - Another early entrant onto our iPad and also a great implementation. I'm not a big Scrabble person but my wife is and she has put in some serious time with this app.
• Dominion - There's a reason there's no link for this one; it's not available on the app store any more. Unofficial implementation, something about stealing the art work from the original game without permission. They say there's a real, official version coming soon.  It needs to be sooner.
• LeHavre - I had never played this game before I purchased it on the advice of the board gamers throughout the internet.  I'm glad I did.  The game is complicated and takes some getting used to but once you get your head around the iconography and understanding the flow of the game, it is a treat.  My wife and I played in bed before going to sleep every night for about a week.  The game does an excellent job of keeping the mountain of pieces and markers understandable without making the screen too busy.  Our experience  
• Blokus - I love this board game but I have to say, the controls on the iOS version I find fiddley.  It doesn't ruin the game for me but it does frustrate me at times and make the game less enjoyable.  It's cheap, though.  I gues you get what you pay for.
• Phase 10 - This is a fun, simple little card game done almost perfect.  The only mark against it is the artwork: I don't care for it much.  It could be worse, but it could be better.
• Risk - This is a board game that I don't usually play because it often takes forever.  The iOS version solves this problem with a two player game often being completed in under twenty minutes.  The artwork is great and if it had internet play, it would get full marks from me.
• Monopoly - It looks like the version of Monopoly we have is no longer sold in the store but there are several other official versions that should be comparable.  Like Risk, the often slower pacing of the game is solved when the computer handles the money and moves the pieces. We've played this with four players, passing the iPad around and it worked just fine, mostly; the auctions were a bit scrunched. The artwork and animation are wonderful and provide a great experience.

There are other board games I've been looking at for iOS like Tigris and Euphrates, Caylus, and Small World and others.  We'll see if I get around to any of them.

Signs of Spring in Wichita

1. The weather radio starts going off on a regular basis, warning of the frequent severe thunderstorms.
2. I ride to school in the morning in long-sleeves but need shorts and a t-shirt for the ride home in the afternoon.
3. I can't decide if a hot or cold shower would feel better after said bicycle rides.
4. It can be 75'F at 3pm and below freezing eight hours later.
5. Some days we get rain, some days a thunderstorm, and some days an ice storm.
6. My wife starts watching the weather on the TV much more regularly.

All of these have happened to me in the past week.

International Graduate Students at WSU

US News and World Report confirms the reality I experience every day: there are a lot of international graduate students here at Wichita State.  As I've said before, being a white guy in my world makes me the vast minority.  According the the report, 84.4% of the graduate students in the engineering program here are international students.

That sounds about right to me.

UPDATE: Nationwide most/many engineering graduate students are international according to this New York Times "article" (its one paragraph long).

Wichita State Basketball Fame

You may have heard that the men's basketball team at Wichita State made the NCAA tournament Final Four this year, a feat they have not accomplished for decades.  I off-handedly committed to buying a Wichita State t-shirt, my first, if they made it this far in the tournament and so today I was at the bookstore, hunting through all the black and amber apparel looking for something I liked.

On my way out of the building back to my office I was blessed with a sign, though: Carl Hall, number 22 on the team was leaving the student union the same time I was.  This is the first time I have knowingly laid eyes on a member of the team, largely aided by the fact that I've actually been watching the games and know what a few of the players look like.

Carl didn't seem interested in talking so I left him in peace.  I assume he was headed back to the gym to continue practice; he had Chick-Fil-A in his hands, though so maybe he was on lunch break.

Tomorrow, back to the bookstore to see if they have any new stock in.

Update: A new design came in and it meets all my WSU t-shirt criteria: amber-colored, has the WSU mascot on it, says "Final Four".  Mission accomplished.

Anniversary Cake

Our anniversary is coming up and its near coincidence with Easter and the Easter dinner with friends inspired my wife with a great idea: buying an anniversary cake to bring to the dinner.  So we did.  The cake was delicious and it was wonderful to be able to get to share the occasion with others.

This is why I don't care to watch football

The whole article is interesting but the graphic (which should be larger) says it all...

Board Game Storage: Domion - New Dividers

As I've recently written, my Dominion case is too small to hold all the cards in the games and I'm preparing for the day when I'll need to move to a larger box.  One of the changes I'm making is to use cardstock dividers rather than oversized plastic sleeves to keep the sets of cards sorted.  I'm doing this because:

1. Getting all ten kingdom cards back into an over-sized sleeve can be a bit of a pain.  I've been able to get up to twelve cards into those big sleeves but past the first few cards in it takes some effort.  
2. With no dividers it takes some flipping and hunting to find a specific pack of cards to pull out.  The packs are all alphabetized but I can only see the names of the pack I'm looking at and some flipping around is required.
3. The dividers I've chosen to use have common rule clarifications for the cards printed on the divider which I hope will save time if questions come up during play.

To get the most storage space out of the new box, I'm choosing to store my cards vertically and have found some excellent vertical dividers to use.  Here's an example:

I decided to print the dividers out in black-and-white on 110lb. card stock at Kinkos FedEx Office as the cost is $8 vs $55 for the color.  Most of the cards are text anyway and my original plan was to use markers and highlights to color the banners a the top of the cards myself.  After I discussed this with a friend, I'm following his suggestion of printing out just the banners on mailing labels and placing them over the black-and-white banners on the cards.  I've purchased some full-sheet mailing labels,  made a few custom pages of the banners (see below) and printed them off.

And then I spent five years cutting. 

Finally, just had to stick banners on the cards and it was done (another 3 years of effort).

If you look closely you can see the labels weren't quite the same size as the area on the card.  I suspected something like this might happen as different printers have different invisible margins for the same size physical page. I probably could have figured out a way around this but this works well enough.  As always, I consider my first attempt at anything my prototype and these dividers fit the bill.

Board Game Storage: Dominion - Small Case

Dominion is similar to Carcassonne in that it seems to be made for expansions.  Both games come with a base set of cards/tiles with a defined set of play options with additional expansions adding new options, modifying existing rules, and adding new mechanisms. In Carcassonne these expansions are mostly tiles with a few new pieces and Dominion is highly similar: cards with a few new pieces.  And when I say "cards" I mean "lots of cards".  The base game of Dominion is 500 cards, standard expansions are 300 cards, mini expansions are 150 cards, and large expansions are another 500; the complete game has almost 3000 cards.

I don't have all the expansions so I was able to use my old Catan box to store what I do have (base set, Intrigue, Alchemy, and Dark Ages):

I've chosen to sleeve all of my cards so that as I add expansions over time the older cards will not look significantly more worn than the newer cards.  (I recently had a chance to play with a Dominion set that had been slowly grown over time and had not been sleeved.  The old cards looked very, very old which, added some charm to them.  These were the old-guard cards that had been there from the beginning. It also meant it that these cards were not anonymous and very easy to identify in the deck.)  

Each set of ten kingdom cards is placed in a larger sleeve to keep them together and these packs are then stacked into the box.  I've also made packs for the Curse cards and a starting deck for each player, just to help minimize the set-up time for the game.  

The guides/dividers are made from corrugated plastic that I had left over from a photography project. (This is the kind of plastic that is used for yard signs commonly seen during election season.)  The dividers are taped into the box as I was more interested in getting something put together that would work than doing something that looked really nice.  The randomizer cards are stored over on the lower right in their own little area and the extra sleeves I have left over are in the upper right.  Instructions are stored in the lid.

As you can see, the box is pretty full and I there are a number of other expansions that will need a home.  I've already decided if/when I get another expansion I'll be moving over to a larger box, the same one I'm using for Catan right now.  I've been inspired by an online discussion of Dominion players to go this route which will slightly modify what I've done so far.  Rather than using larger sleeves, I'm going to be printing out some cardstock dividers for each deck of kingdom cards.  The lane dividers in the new box will be wood and I'm thinking of putting felt on the interior base of the box to keep the cards from sliding around as much.  Oh, and I plan to store the cards vertically rather than horizontally.

I'll keep you updated as the new Dominion storage box evolves.

One of many things I wish I had thought of (and made)

A few details here.

Board Game Storage: Carcassonne

For a birthday a few years ago my wife purchase me a Carcassonne Big Box: the base game and multiple expansions in one box (and the box was big at 39" x 18.75" x 55.75").  (She claims I had mentioned being interested in it; I think she was reading my mind and gave me one of the best gifts I've ever received because it was a complete surprise.)  But the Big Box was way too big for what boils down to a large stack of cardboard tiles.  My experience in condensing my game of Settlers of Catan gave me confidence that something similar could be done here.

Back to Hobby Lobby with a pile of Carcassonne tiles in tow, searching for boxes that these tiles could fit in neatly.  I'm sure the Hobby Lobby staff were not quite sure to do with the grown man sitting on the floor at the back of the store, trying box after box in various permutations, but my efforts made them (a small amount) of money that day.  The result is the cleanest, densest game storage box to date.

Along the back of the larger wooden box are my self-designed and hand-crafted tuck-boxes for the player game pieces.  Unlike the treasure chests in my Catan box, these comfortably fit all the pieces I have with no special stacking effort.  The manilla one on the end is empty and I leave it in as a spacer to keep all the others snug relatively immobile.

In front of the player piece tuck boxes are three more wooden boxes that contain all the Carcassonne tile sets; more details in the following picture.  The scoring board in front lays on top of the player pieces and the three tile boxes quite easily.  The lid closes cleanly with no hassle.

Looking at the three tile boxes you can see I've made tuck-boxes for each expansion that I own.  Working from left to right you can see Inns and Cathedrals (green), base set (no tuck-box), Tower (black), King and Cult, Count, and River II (all three in the blue box), Traders and Builders (gray), Princess and Dragon (red), Bridges, Castles and Bazaars (manilla), Abbey and Manor (yellow). I made the labels on the flaps for each one and the underside of the flap lists the number of tiles for each expansion; I can't tell you how much of a good idea that has turned out to be when it comes time for clean-up.

And when there are extra pieces for an expansion that don't fit in the tuck-boxes...?

Using some scrap metal I had laying around and some not-very-strong magnetic-tape, I constructed caps that created an enclosed space in the lids of the two appropriate boxes.  I used a little bit of gaffer tape (motto: "We do all the things you think duct tape can do but actually can't.") to create pull tabs to make the caps easily removable.  It takes a little wiggling to get these metal caps into place but the don't come out inadvertently.

Using a similar principle, I created a false bottom for the large box to store the instructions and the tile-holder that comes with Tower.  Unfortunately, the magnetic tape is only marginally strong enough to hold the metal lid in place.  Most of the time its not an issue as the box is either resting on the table bottom side down or being carried with a hand or two helping hold the bottom in place.

Incidentally, deconstructing the tower and folding it flat is probably not a good way to ensure its longevity.  Its a wonderful thematic addition to the game and provides an easy way to pass around the stacks of tile for all players to draw from but the regular assembly and dis-assembly will certainly shorten its life.  It is fun while it lasts, though.

Give how nearly perfectly this set-up stores all that I have of Carcassonne, I'm reticent to acquire any more expansions.  There aren't that many that I'm missing and what I have is more than enough, especially when multiple expansions are used in a single game.  And to be honest, Catapult really doesn't interest me that much.