KenMankoff

Road Trip

We are going to drive across the U.S.A from New York, New York to Santa Cruz, California. Trip duration is 25 days. We are currently in the planning stages. If you have any suggestions of interesting places to visit, please let us know. Either comment below on this post, or edit our map and add a placemark.

View NYC -> UCSC in a larger map

My Twitter Experiment

Everybody else seems to be discussing and commenting on Twitter so I figured I would too. I don’t know what it is, nor why it is popular, but I do use it from time to time, and will begin a Twitter experiment starting tomorrow morning.

My Twitter usage is limited to following some friends who have chosen to broadcast their activities there rather than on a blog. Most of these people have blogs too, and I follow those also. In addition to following others, I have posted some thoughts there myself, and I’ve set up my parents solar thermal system to tweet when it starts to overheat. I chose this simply because it was the easiest way for them and the technicians to get an SMS on their phone, although there exists an infinite number of non-twitter implementations.

My Twitter Experiment will begin tomorrow, Monday June 14 and continue to Friday, June 19. I am beginning a new project for work, and will tweet my thoughts, progress, trials and tribulations as I go along. The project is officially one week long, although it will continue in other forms for the next few years until I finish my PhD.

The work this coming week will be to write some software to access, visualize, and analyze oceanographic data from the Amundsen and Bellingshausen seas in Antarctica.

Eight New Astronauts

The European Space Agency (ESA) has just announced and introduced their six new astronauts. The biographies testify to an impressive lot. I think even if I had completed my PhD when I was trying out for these slots, it does not look like I had much of a chance. Four of the six are pilots: one fighter, two test, and one commercial.

Canada CSA also recently announced their two new astronauts (one fighter pilot, one doctor + astrophysicist).

Within a few months Japan (JAXA) and the U.S. (NASA) will announce their new astronaut corps too.

Looks like I have some studying to do in order to prepare for the next round in about a decade.

P.S. Tim, keep up the good work so I can just buy me a ticket if it comes down to that. I’d really prefer orbital to suborbital.

An Antarctic Hat (Part II)

Antarctica Knit Hat Pattern Zoom of East African Horn and Southern Saudi Arabia

I recently finished my Antarctic Hat. This post describes how it was made and publishes the pattern. Since I began by posting the finished hat, I’ll continue to work in reverse order.

The final pattern is seen on the right. Click on it for a full size image. The original pattern is shown below. Annotations on the final are either doodles while I was bored, notes about stitch reduction or type (ocean v. land), or markers to remind me where I was when I took a break from knitting.

For each stitch, I simply looked at the pattern, determined what box I was knitting, and decided if it should be ocean or land, and if it was land if it should be green, brown, or white.

In order to make the pattern I began with with the NASA Blue Marble image, and wrote some image processing code to replace the ocean with white (just to save some ink and have extra space to take notes). I knitted a swatch to determine I wanted X stitches, and then placed X gray boxes evenly across the page. A little bit of extra work was done toward the South Pole in order to have the increases mapped onto the pattern.

My X came out to 108. If you wanted to use this pattern with a slightly different stitch count you can probably just add or remove a few columns from the Pacific and Atlantic basins without much effect on the proportions of the planet.

I chose to begin at the Pole and increase because it allows me to take the hat off the needles and try it on my targeted wearer and then continue knitting if necessary. Beginning at the rim and working up leaves less room for adjustments. The first red line is the equator, and the second was my original estimate of where I would stop. As you can see from the finished product I ended up knitting farther north, and even then adding the white-and-black map border.

Antarctica Knit Hat Pattern

I realize I’ve been calling this the Antarctica Knit Hat but it is really the entire southern hemisphere and almost half of the northern hemisphere. It includes Antarctica, all of Australia, New Zealand, Micronesia, and South America (although I forgot a stitch for the Galapagos), almost all of Central America, Africa, and India, parts of the Arabian Peninsula and Asia, and even a pixel / stitch or two of North America.

An Antarctic Hat (Part I)

Spring is not the best season to finish a very warm double knit triple-layer hat. But it is fall in the Southern Hemisphere, and that seems to be a theme with this hat.

I started it a few years ago during my first trip to Antarctica with ANDRILL, and finished it this evening. More posts will come later on the process and the pattern…

Who's The Decider Now?

Rings

Before, during, and after shots (and a whole bunch more) from a day spent making wedding rings.

New York City is Leaking

From the NYT:

New York City is leaking some 20 million gallons a day. To fix it, the city has enlisted six deep-sea divers who are living for more than a month in a sealed 24-foot tubular pressurized tank complete with showers, a television and a Nerf basketball hoop, breathing air that is 97.5 percent helium and 2.5 percent oxygen, so their high-pitched squeals are all but unintelligible.

In the 1820s, New Yorkers used an average of 12 gallons of water a day. Individual water use peaked in the 1980s, at more than 200 gallons. Through conservation, technology like low-flush toilets and repairs to the city’s leaky pipes, consumption is now about 150 gallons a day per person.

Thanks to Apollo18 for linking to the article.

How do I use less water? Take shorter showers. Low flow shower head. Don’t flush urine. Brick or two in the back of the toilet. I haven’t timed it but it takes about 200 to 300 seconds to get hot water up 6 flights. I capture some of the cold water to give the plants. Do dishes soon after showering so that the water is already hot.

See where we have been. Look where we can go.

I was particularly interested in the last few minutes of the Obama acceptance speech last night when he discussed a 106 year old black female voter from South Carolina. He went over all the major events that she had witnessed our country had overcome, setting a stage for what we are capable of doing.

I was interested because it draws significant parallels to another motivational speech many of us have seen, and one I give frequently. As Obama did last night, the last few minutes of An Inconvenient Truth mentions slavery, women’s suffrage, the World Wars, segregation, MLK, cars and planes and the Moon, Berlin, Communism, and a few other environmental-specific events. Obama adds a “Yes We Can” between each event, and he is a better orator than Gore or I. But the examples and reasons for presenting them like that are the same.

I think I will be a bit embarrassed next time I give my version of AIT because it seems silly to try to compete with Obama as a motivational speaker. But I also realize I have a new event to discuss, one that can perhaps motivate people more than all the other historical images combined.

…Now I just need to have a discussion with Obama about this whole “clean coal” thing…

Microscope

I was inspired by a New York Times article and the Nikon Small World Competition to break out my digital microscope and take some pictures.