June 2008

Romeo & Juliet, Wordle Cloud

Apropos nothing, Wordle tagcloud for Romeo & Juliet. Click to view.

This reminds me I really need to play with Processing at some point. Too many tools, not enough time.

Still, right now I’m more concerned with getting my head round Erlang, and the new closure mechanism that’s coming in PHP 5.3 (I really, really wish they’d stop trying to shoehorn the kitchen sink in there).

The Harmonium

The Harmonium

“First, the machine will produce various sine waves for you on paper after you set values for the amplitude and phase angle. Second, in a reversal of this process, you can trace a curve and use Fourier analysis to extract the phase and amplitude of the curve. All of this is done mechanically.”

The design is an interesting amalgam - open-grain wood and Victorian brass that reminds me of the Difference Engine, mid-20th-century faux-bakelite dials that look like they’ve been salvaged from a WWII-era fire-control computer, and late-20th-century perspex.

The Curta

The Curta

Parts of the Curta, a mechanical four-function pocket calculator capable of manipulating 15-digit numbers, were patented by Curt Herzstark in 1938. He completed the engineering plans while imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp.

There are 605 components in that little pepper mill, but that doesn’t quite compare with the mechanical computers that stop the glass of the Hale Telescope from slumping:

First light on a large telescope is the beginning of a process of adjustment that may continue for years. Although glass is brittle, it is actually a supercooled liquid. Glass is physically similar to Jell-O. Glass can flop, tremble, and shudder. As a large mirror moves through varying angles, it buckles and droops. The Hale Telescope’s mirror is rubbery. You could push down firmly on it with your thumb and throw the stars out of focus.
[...]
Bruce Rule then tested the glass for signs of slumpage and found that the glass behaved somewhat in the manner of uncured latex rubber - when the opticians leaned the mirror at an angle, the glass would droop and not return to normal shape for quite a while. [He] extracted the mirror-support machines from their pockets in the glass and rebuilt the machines. Rule’s thirty-six mirror-support machines work passively, by means of levers and lead weights. The levers barely move, yet they exert three-dimensional forces throughout the glass, which, in places, reach stresses of up to twelve hundred pounds.
[...]
Each unit, which resembles a piston inserted in the glass, contains an uncounted number of parts. Rule said, “I think that between six hundred and one thousand parts in each unit is a reasonable number.” Since there are thirty-six mirror support units, that would mean that the Hale mirror is held up by as many as thirty-six thousand pieces of metal, most of which move, if only slightly.
[...]
The support units are, in fact, mechanical computers. They react to forces in the mirror and apply corrective action. Rule said “I never recommended that this type of system be tried again.” Virtually everybody at Caltech understands electronic computers, but nobody at Caltech understands mechanical computers, and consequently nobody dares to monkey with Bruce Rule’s support units. Since 1948, there has been one attempt to oil them. The lead weights on the units are adjustable, but nobody wants to adjust them. [The] feeling around Caltech is that anybody who tries to open Rule’s units to see what is inside will get himself fired.
[...]
Once in a while these days, the stars on the video screen turn into hollow triangles - the support units have become stuck. The astronomer turns to Juan Carrasco and says, “The mirror needs exercise.” Juan then slews the telescope from horizon to horizon, from north to south, from east to west, until the stars turn back into points. The nightmare of the engineers is that one night the stars will turn into triangles, Juan will exercise the mirror, and the triangles will get bigger.

- First Light by Richard Preston

Of course, if the Curta is either too modern for you, or perhaps not modern enough, you could always try to track down one of these hybrid oddities.

Glass Seismograph

Seismic Glass

A working glass seismograph: “This is a functional glass seismograph for measuring earthquakes. It stands about 40″ tall, and is about 48″ wide installed. It measures vibrations along the x and y axes (side to side), as well as the z axis (up and down), on three helicorders. Ideally, it should be bolted into bedrock for accuracy”

(check out the glass spinning wheel, too)

George, British Giant Rabbit

This is George, the smaller (and more photogenic) of our two house rabbits. No, he hasn’t been photoshopped, although he is a bit foreshortened. That’s a normal-sized broom in the background - I’ve seen him pick up a broom by the handle and throw it to one side rather than walk around it. The two rabbits now weigh a shade under 30lbs, combined.

I’m taking some time to tidy things up around here, so I’m coalescing a bunch of one-liners into a single post:

• Smashing Magazine generates linkdump posts faster than I can digest them. This one from April 2008 on creative web form design is one of their best. Lots of inspiration there.
• O’Reilly Radar’s Marc Hedlund on Code Review Software.
• Werner Vogels on Eventual Consistency. If you’re concerned with database scaling and used to thinking in terms of ACID, there’s a lot to mull over here.
• Design Principles and Design Patterns is the clearest description of object composition I’ve ever read. Rather than the standard, 15-year-old “Fido’s a Dog, Dogs are Mammals, Mammals are Animals” object hierarchies you get in Introductory OO texts, it’s a short, readable explanation of how to design objects that are maintainable, extensible and loosely coupled. Really really good stuff.
• A Neat Approach to Narrow Windows. Concept 64’s clever way to deal with varying page widths is firmly grounded in usability. If the page width is >800 pixels, the navigation links style themselves as a left-hand navigation menu. As the page width drops below 800 pixels the navigation links restyle themselves as tabs. Easy to do in Javascript by swapping CSS rules around, but a lot of thought has obviously gone into the design here. [It looks like the site's been taken down (wayback link, no javascript). I'm keeping the link because I hope it comes back at some point.]
• Peterbe’s experiences at the 2006 Google London Automation Test Conference. And… wow, I’m back to 2006 already. I sure don’t post much. Anyway, unit testing is one of those things that I desperately want to use in commercial projects, but when you say to management “I want to spend two weeks writing code that won’t make it into the final application” they get a funny look in their eye. Much the same thing happens when I start talking about user stories. Or the separation of presentation and business logic. Not that I’m bitter, or anything.