Most of my faithful readers are not college sports fans. Therefore, you are probably not aware that the men's basketball national championship in two days will be between Ohio State and Florida. These are the same two teams that met in the football championship in January of this year.

As a Cal fan, I've learned that the Berkeley football team and men's basketball team cannot both be competitive at the same time. More likely, neither will be all that successful. When I was in school, the football team was awful. I believe they lost somewhere in the neighborhood of 16 in a row over two seasons. They also never beat Stanfurd in the "Big Game" while I was an undergraduate. The basketball team was somewhat more capable. While they would usually lose against top opponents, they at least won more games than they lost by a comfortable margin.

Lately, the rule has stayed true. The football team has been excellent for the last few years, while the basketball team has been less than mediocre. All as is it should be in the Cal athletics world.

The best explanation of this phenomenon is that Cal is a legitimate academic powerhouse. Any school that's worth attending will, and should, stink at high-level popular sports. Sure, Cal is dominant at rugby. The Cal women's basketball team made it to the NCAA tournament this year, unlike the men. Cal is good at water sports like swimming and crew, too. Actually, Cal is all-around good, as their current third place in the Sears Directors Cup shows. All of that doesn't matter to me. Let me know when NCAA lacrosse makes it to prime time and I'll update my rules (a.k.a. chauvinism).

All of this is leading to my main point: Ohio State and Florida graduates should be on high suspicion of their worth for the next few years. They should be looked at with the same eye as Devry or University of Phoenix graduates. It is no secret that athletes are not academic superstars. There's a reason why these schools have attracted the best performers. If you're looking to attract the best athletes, you've got to show them that they can keep their grade point average high enough for NCAA eligibility. Bluntly, they ain't gonna get it done at a place like Cal.

Perhaps, someday in the future, Cal will be proficient at both men's basketball and football at the same time. And I will be forced to eat my words. If you are a true blue like me, you're not too worried about this.

3m 11s playing time, 1917 frames, 7h 39m, ~13s between frames, March 20, 2007

Perhaps it's the nature of pouring concrete, or union jobs, but the middle of this time lapse is pretty boring. Sorry about that. The beginning is fun enough; and the end, with the inch-worm workers and the vacuum-like concrete massager, is cool, too.

Please note the right 1/3 of the image is slightly affected by the reflection of the building façade on the window.

Your challenge is to figure out what the image is as quickly as possible. I'll wait!

Some of you may remember my photo mosaics I played around with a while back. This is exactly that, but this time, I took a screen shot every 20 seconds or so as the program refined the image.

This mosaic is made up of a bunch of "glyphs" which are a colored square with a colored letter/symbol in the middle. The colors and symbol are randomly chosen. The movie above compresses about 8 hours of real time into under two minutes. In that 8 hours the program tried over 330,000 glyphs for the 2500 tiles on the image. The interesting thing is the basic shapes in the image resolved themselves quickly, while the colors took much longer, and never really matched the original image.

Here is a link to a composite photo, showing the original photo and the final mosaiced photo. I don't think the mosiac really captures my tongue accurately.

1000 frames, 3h 40m, ~13s between frames, February 22, 2007

This time lapse was shot before, during, and after the passing of a rain front. See if you can tell when the rain starts. The most interesting thing to follow are, of course, the clouds, which change direction & speed. The clouds really get moving on the backside of the front.

I promised several of my faithful readers multimedia of my new E-Flite Blade CP in action, so here it is. Below is a short movie showing my lack of skills. In my defense, I didn't crash and it was windy today (you can hear the wind on the microphone). When I first started flying the Blade CP, I definitely would have crashed the helicopter in wind like this.

The Blade CP is an electric helicopter with separate main and tail motors. It features Cyclic/Collective Pitch Mixing that uses three servos which move in concert to raise and tilt the swashplate. The swashplate is connected to a flybar, which is then connected to the main rotors. This is called the Hiller control mechanism. The electronic throttle is linked to the collective, so as the throttle increases, the overall pitch of the blades gets steeper. The helicopter also features a gyro that helps keep the helicopter stable and pointing in one direction (yaw). If I get proficient enough with the helicopter, I can upgrade several parts which will enable aerobatic & inverted flying.

Below is a little animation that I made yesterday that shows what I have been doing lately. The green dots correspond to the positions of dark matter particles, while the little yellow squares are the locations of dark matter haloes that I'm interested in. The white lines are the edges of the simulation volume, and you can see the axes triad in the bottom-left corner. To give you an idea of the scale of what's depicted here, each edge of the cube is 50 Mpc, or 163 million light years. Our entire galaxy is only about 20 kpc or 65,000 light years across.

In the first part of the movie, the cube is rotated about its center. Next, while looking along the z-axis, the volume of the cube plotted is reduced until only 1/10th of the cube is shown. Then, this 1/10th thickness is scanned through the entire cube, and then the volume plotted is replenished back to full.

The things to notice are how the dark matter form areas of high density, which are connected by filaments. Between these are areas of relatively few particles, which are called voids. This is how our universe really looks, with huge collections of galaxies clustered together, separated by huge expanses of nearly empty space. I should point out that there are many more galaxy haloes in this box besides the yellow boxes.

What I was looking for was one of those yellow boxes which is fairly isolated from areas of high density dark matter. I picked one, and now I am doing this same simulation again, but with higher resolution boxes centered on the area of interest. The simulations I'm doing right now are fairly cheap (in computer time currency). I want to be sure that when I run big, time-intensive simulations in the future that I've picked a good area to focus my attention on.

I did this visualization with Visit, a stereo, 4D visualization tool out of the Livermore National Lab. The "stereo" means that it can create two images of the same data that are slightly offset, which create a 3D effect if viewed correctly. The fourth dimension is for time, as it can handle time-ordered data sets. I then used Visit's Python scripting features to output 800 individual PNGs, which I then stitched together (exactly like my time lapse movies) to make this movie.

Taken from the SERF Building on February 1, 2007.

I would have liked this time lapse to cover more time, but the internal camera battery died because I didn't fully charge it. I did have my external battery plugged in, but the camera cannot run off that alone. Also, since these images are very complex, even JPEG compression cannot reduce their size too much, and I nearly filled my 1gb card. For example, my previous time lapse project, Airport Sunset, I took over 600 more photos than this time. The difference is those frames had nearly half devoted to the sky.

Laurel and Union streets facing nearly west January 15, 2007

The external battery pack and "intervalometer" are connected to the camera. I was hoping to capture the Comet McNaught but it has become too close to the sun now. Next time I have a freeway in a time lapse I'll situate it longitudinally so apparent motion is clearer.

The camera is on top of the TV at Dave Sabo's house, January 14, 2007

While I was in college, I took a part-time job working on a small internal library website for the Forest Service. The pay wasn't great, but it was fairly easy and I learned a bunch about website administration.

Since I was an employee of the service, at one point I was required to watch a video on workplace ethics and fill out a questionnaire after watching it. I'm all for workplace ethics. It's just this video was about being fair in granting federal farm loans. I now know that if a woman in a wheelchair comes in to borrow money for her farm I shouldn't reject her based on her sex & disability. The same goes for brown people, stupid people, annoying people, bad actors and lepers (*).

The federal government doesn't do anything unless they have to. So obviously, somewhere, sometime, some bigoted ass-face loan officer rejected a loan to a qualified person because she voted for Clinton. Years of litigation later and this computer jockey in Albany, California, has to waste over an hour of his time learning to not be an ass-face when granting loans.

Fast forward to today: I'm now a highly valued employee of the University of California. The UC system has had a bunch of executive compensation scandals in recent years where ethics rules weren't followed. As a graduate student, I obviously have lots of power when it comes to:

1. Hiring/firing employees;
2. Demanding perks from the administration;
3. Granting these shady deals;
4. Leaking things to the media;
5. Ruining the budget and driving admissions fees up.

This is why I'm going to watch an ethics video soon on how to not do all of the above. This response is totally out of proportion. Of the 230,000 employees of the UC system, only a small fraction are responsible for or capable of these gross ethics violations. Me and my fellow little guys shouldn't have to waste any time on this crap. The big wigs should instead have to attend a week-long course on ethics taught by a former Catholic school nun. Yes, she'd be an excellent wielder of a ruler.

You can look forward to future commentary when I actually see this video. Stay tuned.

(*) I'm making the lepers part up.

(p.s. More on this movie later!)

Now that the full bowl schedule is out, I've done some rough analysis, ranking the bowls by their computer ranking. Since the human rankings don't go as deep as all the various bowl-bound teams, I've used the Sagarin computer rankings to do my mathematics. Simply, I added the Sagarin number for both teams, and also took the difference between the two teams. The first is supposed to roughly gauge the quality of the bowl, and the second the competitiveness of the two teams.

I've lowered the totals (in true USA Today front page style), so the worst bowl, the R&L Carriers New Orleans Bowl between Rice and Troy, has a value of zero. The bowls are arranged in order, with the national championship on Jan 7 on the far right.

In my opinion, the bowls should get better towards and beyond January 1. New Years Day has always been the day for the best bowls -- the Rose Bowl, for example. This graph makes it clear that bowls don't get better in any kind of pattern. In particular, the Pioneer PureVision Las Vegas bowl between BYU and Oregon is way too early for its quality. And the two bowls right before the National Championship (a grand canyon of stink in the graph above), the International and GMAC bowls, are in fact two of the worst bowls of the season.

My team, California, plays in the Holiday bowl on December 28 against Texas A&M. There are 11 bowls after that until there's a bowl of better quality (the Outback bowl between Tennessee and Penn State on the first). By far the best bowl of the season will be the Rose Bowl (between USC and Michigan), which has quality only second to the National Championship, but has a much smaller difference between the teams.

There are all kinds of people out there complaining about the BCS, arguing for a playoff system. I'm on my soapbox asking for the schedule to be changed. Awful bowls don't belong in January, and good bowls don't belong in Mid-December. Especially when my Bears play way too early!