Joe Auricchio

Ben and I both know how much cash you get from the “Bank Error In Your Favor” card in Monopoly. We don’t know how we can possibly actually know that.

Potassium, sodium, chlorine, and calcium ions in nerve cells have osmotic and electrostatic forces acting on them. Normally they can’t cross the cell membrane, but when ion channels open they rush into/out of the cell trying to reach osmotic equilibrium, and carrying their charge with them. This changes the cell’s voltage with respect to the environment; this is how the neuron fires.

The tendency of these ions to flow is actually a chemical effect, not an electrical one: osmosis is the primary driver. But the tendency to flow in this way can be quantified and calculated exactly like a voltage difference across very high resistance. Even though the ions want to flow to equalize this so-called voltage differential, ordinarily they can’t.

It’s potential potential, in the fullest physics sense of both words.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! I love cognitive science.

upd 8 nov: revised first para, sorry for bumping everyone’s rss feeds

In the general case, percent of work completed is a logarithmic function of time spent.

When you start work, you get things done at a pretty good pace. Over time, you start to slow down. As the task approaches completion, you really slow down to accomplishing almost nothing.

This is a good approximation for time significantly less than the deadline. However, as the deadline approaches, the derivative increases rapidly, following the gamma function. Immediately before the deadline, work is accomplished at a nearly infinite rate.

As the deadline approaches, you work faster and faster to get it done; the last hour before the deadline is the most productive time known to man.

I have seen this pattern in almost everything I do, and I’ve been refining this theory over the past few months. I have further noticed that the pattern applies to most of the engineers I know. There are notable exceptions: some people cannot bear to leave things to the last minute, and get as much as possible done ahead of time.
These people are silly.

The next step would be harnessing my own pattern of productivity. False deadlines, drastically inflated requirements (to keep the early logarithmic rise going for a long time), and making that gamma function kick in earlier: all these will let me get more done.

If you were a scientist or engineer working on a technology capable of launching a Singularity, or alternately destroying most life on earth, what kind of warning sign would you put on the wall behind the lab bench?

Warning Signs for Tomorrow.

TritonLink now has a Class Planner (beta). I’d link to it, but you need to be a UCSD student to see it (which is silly).

Messrs. Dye and Pajak have done a very good job. It feels a lot like TritonSchedule (which makes me feel really validated, because a pair of professional UI designers made the same decisions I did), with some nice improvements. They did a very good job on the lecture-discussion selection flow, and the department selection is just glorious. They fixed the grid width in pixels, which makes the positioning a lot easier. It’s all ajax, with almost no latency (on campus wireless); it’s very smooth and fluid. I don’t like that the lecture doesn’t immediately appear when you click it, but so far that’s my only complaint.

When I don’t have a CSE141 lab and an EAP application that need to be done urgently, I’m going to go under the hood and look at their JS code and ajax transfers.

On the whole, this is a Good Thing. My hat is off to ACT today.

A twist on Chief Joseph:
From where the sun now stands, I will take no more shit forever

To be said at the beginning of a war, rather than the end.

It’s a very Penny Arcade style of humor. It may have been partly inspired by a Family Guy segment involving Jesus and Chris Tucker in a buddy-cop movie: “Let he who is without sin kick the first ass.”

You heard it here first.

Teresa has a loft bed. The frame is above my eye level but below head level. I’ve hit my head on it about a dozen times. I’ve been lucky so far: each time I was already ducking, but not far enough, so I’ve only grazed it. One of these days I’m bound to hit it squarely and get a good concussion.

Last time I hit my head, she suggested I put a post-it note on the edge, so I’d be reminded to duck. Since I always carry a pack of post-its and a pen, I whipped them out and made a warning sign for myself:

           watch

          out

          joe
                      

Reflecting upon its asymmetry, I said, “Hmm, it doesn’t seem to be very centered.”

Teresa took the post-it and added to the top and bottom:

  <center>

  </center>

Isn’t she wonderful?

Update! About a minute ago, I was sitting on the floor under Teresa’s bed. I stood up rapidly and hit the frame squarely with the top of my head. It hurt. A lot. Ow.

Chris has a new MacBook for work. He likes Mac OS X, and he especially loves Adium. I agreed, and told him Adium is one of the very few apps that keeps me from switching to Linux. He asked what the others were. Here’s the final list I came up with:

1. Adium: multiprotocol chat client par excellence. The interface is beautiful and logical; it ties in with Apple’s Address Book; and these days it’s actually pretty stable.
   Alternatives: bitlbee. Every graphical client I tried on Linux just left me cold. Bitlbee is at least a novel way to solve the problem of user interface. I used it for a few weeks and didn’t hate it. I’d miss text formatting and the occasional image or file transfer. I’d really miss metacontacts.
2. Safari and Camino: browsers that aren’t ugly and slow. Sorry, Firefox. You were a pure joy to use back in the 0.7 days. Now, somehow, you’re bloated and slow and not very pretty… just like SeaMonkey you tried to replace.
   Alternatives: Firefox sucks, Konqueror does too much that isn’t viewing HTML (just the browser, ma’am), and that’s about it for Linux browsers.
3. Quicksilver: difficult to describe launcher-and-kitchen-sink. It just does stuff. Awesome stuff.
   Alternatives: none I know of.
4. Finder’s Column View. The rest of the app sucks rocks, but I still love Column View.
   Alternatives: Eh, there’s probably something for Linux by now.

These four thin but strong threads keep me on Mac OS X. I could switch to Linux tomorrow—I would have switched a year ago—if not for these few programs I love so much.

My previous post pointed out to me a failing of terminology to describe compatibility. To paraphrase FOLDOC:

• Backward/downward compatibility means playing DVD discs in Blu-Ray players. It is a property of the new system.
• Forward/upward compatibility means DVD players were originally designed to play Blu-Ray discs with some level of degradation. It is a property of the old system. (This is not true, of course. DVD players have no idea what a Blu-Ray disc is and will spit it right out. The physical layer wasn’t designed to be gracefully forward compatible.)

I’m looking for a term that means that Blu-Ray discs were designed to be played in DVD players. It’s a property of the new system; the new system was built to work with the old system, the old system never had a clue about the new system.

Toshiba Creates Three-Layered Disc (Gizmodo via Slashdot).

Backwards-compatibility! Today’s normal DVD players will play these hybrid discs just fine, and when you put the very same disc into an HD-DVD player, you get the next-gen HD content. You pay once for both next-gen HD content and graceful degradation to ubiquitous players. It’s no longer a binary choice between DVD and HD. The very best part: so few next-gen HD players and discs have shipped yet that this tech has a fighting chance of being in the second wave of products making it out to customers.

It’s not clear yet if next-gen HD will have as sharp an adoption curve as DVDs did. DVD’s advantages over VHS were fairly overwhelming: extra features, physical convenience, vastly better video quality, multichannel audio, multiple audio tracks, optional subtitles in multiple languages. Next-gen HD doesn’t bring much, just a little bit more of everything (resolution, channels, tracks, frames). DVD has a formidable installed base without compelling reason to upgrade, so the transition to next-gen HD may be fairly slow. In a slow transition, the most backwards-compatible format will win.

Blu-Ray’s only possible hope of responding is getting players in front of TV sets and burners into the lion’s share of computers, fast. PS3 is trying on the first count, but it may not be fast enough to get out there. At least its competitors, the 360 and Revolution, don’t come with HD-DVD players. As for computers, a brief survey of the two formats’ wikipedia articles seems to indicate Blu-ray has a slight headstart, though HD-DVD has more supporters in the PC industry.

As an aside, HD-DVD uses HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and friends for interactive programming and menus, while Blu-Ray uses Java. To me, that says everything that needs to be said about the two formats’ technical merits and likely trajectory of adoption by programmers.