Protected: Meanderings on the Cradlerock Candidates Forum
Posted August 31, 2010 by Tom ComeauCategories: Uncategorized
progress chart
Posted August 14, 2010 by Tom ComeauCategories: Home
I found a cool Android app that fits a trend line to weight measurements and predicts meeting a goal.
Getting my weight down is something my doctors have been bugging me about. I’m using the same technique I used before, John Walker’s Hacker diet, but this time I’m tracking it with another Android app linked to the fatsecret.com site. What neither the site nor the app had was an easy graphing/trendline capability. Now I have that, too.
Looks like I’ll get down to my goal just in time to ruin it over the holidays.
Regifting.
Posted November 24, 2009 by Tom ComeauCategories: Home
Angie’s List is running a promotion I found amusing, but not for the reason they suggest.
I like the idea of getting something regifted. It appeals to both my sense of irony and my sense of utility.
My wishlist, if anybody cares, is here.
But, if you have something you’re not using anyway, particularly still in the packaging, that you think I’d find useful or amusing, by all means regift it. Got a strange kitchen tool you don’t use? I’m trying all sorts of new things in my kitchen. Have a set of cool wineglasses, but you quit drinking years ago? I have a nice Pinot that needs a glass. Did you misunderstand a DVD title, and it turned out to be some weird science-fiction soft-core porn? Well.. I’ll give it a look, anway.
It just seems to me that having a gift whose only purpose is to demonstrate that gravity is still working is of zero, perhaps negative, value. If nothing else, I’ll find it amusing.
tc>
How to think about using a smartphone.
Posted October 26, 2009 by Tom ComeauCategories: Uncategorized
This is an issue I’ve struggled to understand. This seems like a good place to start.
(Renny Gleason’s TED Talk – 3 minutes.)
tc>
Silly, but funny.
Posted August 7, 2009 by Tom ComeauCategories: Uncategorized
This was my first attempt.
Then I was surprised by a failure to converge!
But then I got it in one with my next attempt.
Mary found a nice one in an old favorite.
She thought lyrics might give good results, but not Penny Lane.
A base slander led to a three-part loop.
Some things just translate well!
We had a romance novel fail.
And this reminded me it’s time for bed.
tc>
Science vs Consumer Detectors: Thank you, Mary.
Posted August 4, 2009 by Tom ComeauCategories: STScI, Webb Space Telescope, WSS
I have been trying to figure out recently why people don’t understand what IR detector data looks like, given that we have examples and studies and in a few cases specifications of what we’ll get from JWST, and examples and analysis of NICMOS, Spitzer and some Keck data. My wife explained it to me, and then I looked at the numbers. She’s right, and I wanted to publicly thank her.
We have some simulated data, a cutout of which is shown here, that gives you the general idea of what the data will look like if it’s pretty good. Jay Anderson (STScI) did this simulation.
Simulated NIRCam Data with 1% bad pixels
That picture is 1 percent bad pixels, which is pretty good. For the roughly 4 megapixel NIRCam, you’d expect to get 40,000 bad pixels, before you add any cosmic rays. That means one in every hundred pixels is a bad one. It could be one in 50. And still, that’s pretty good.
Another book review: “Better”
Posted April 1, 2008 by Tom ComeauCategories: Metrics, Process Change
I read Atul Gawande’s Better: A Surgeon’s Notes On Performance last night. It’s written from a medical perspective, and talks about many of the things that are wrong with medical delivery today, but it is really about performance. I recommend it for anybody who cares about their own performance.
The book started as a series of essays, some of which I’ve read before. There are three sections, and each has a theme around improved performance.
Diligence is about how to do something well, and it boils down to just that: be diligent. Planning things, making sure the plan is complete, and executing the plan; washing your hands every time; tracking your own performance and being honest about failures.
Doing Right is about understanding what will improve your performance, and then actually doing it. The Right Thing isn’t always obvious, and deciding on right conduct can require serious soul searching. Having decided on the right thing, however, means accepting the obligation to do right.
Ingenuity is about metrics, of all things, and about finding good metrics and applying them to your work, and about finding innovative ways to improve performance.
In an afterword Gawande makes five Suggestions for Becoming a Positive Deviant.
1. “Ask an unscripted question.” Ask about things that matter to the other person, and actually listen to the answer. This may make other people seem more like real people, and less like machines.
2. “Don’t complain. … It’s boring, it doesn’t solve anything, and it will get you down.”
3. “Count something. …be a scientist in the world.” Some metrics are better than others, but some metric is better than no metrics.
4. “Write something.” This is the same advice Cliff Stoll gives everybody. Publish something, somewhere, in the hope of contributing to a larger world.
5. “Change.” This doesn’t mean chasing every fad, it means recognizing that you are not doing everything you might as well as you might, and you need to try new solutions.
Despite being 250+ pages, I found it a very fast read. It is at times inspiring, at times disheartening and occasionally terrifying, but Better is well worth the read.
tc>
The Big Switch
Posted March 17, 2008 by Tom ComeauCategories: Process Change, Software
Nicholas Carr’s The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison To Google is a look at two major changes in how business behaved. It is part success story, and part warning, and it does a great job of both.
The first fifth of the book is about the process of moving from a world powered largely by muscles or water, and lit only by fire, to industry powered and lit by electrical utilities. No single invention — the electric generator, electric motors, electric lights or power transmission lines — was the key to this second industrial revolution. Rather, it was the construction of systems of generating, delivering and using electricity that led to a complete transformation of industrial production, and laid the foundation (with Hollerith and Watson) for the next great change: digital computing.
Macs take over astronomy
Posted March 11, 2008 by Tom ComeauCategories: Hubble, STScI
Okay, maybe not all of astronomy, but I got these numbers yesterday from the people who handle HST proposal submissions:
Platform Proposals Mac OS X 492 Linux 297 Windows 115 Sparc Sun 46 Not Given 11
Five years ago, less than ten percent of proposals were done on Macs. This year it’s more than half.
Of course, the more interesting numbers would be the percentage on each operating system for accepted proposals, but we won’t know who is accepted until the end of May.
(Put another way, what I’d like to know is whether the platform used for submission predicts, even weakly, proposal acceptance, and whether the proportion of platforms for accepted proposals predicts future submission platforms.)
