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After Monday’s debacle concerning the “untimely consumption of an insect”:http://www.flexistentialist.org/archives/2003/11/17/dietary_transgre.shtml and Tuesday’s unceasing rain, I spent most of Tuesday playing Playstation games on my PC. The emulator project “ePSXe”:http://www.epsxe.com has come along very well, and now plays most games very well. I’ve been enjoying Legend of Mana, which is a continuation of a game called Secret of Mana that I have fond memories playing with Dustin back when we were rotten little youths. I’m not usually into games much, but sometimes, when the weather is bad, I like to just kick back and do something unproductive for a little while.

However, the real reason I’m making this post is to bring forth more information about the amount of insect parts found in common foods. Through Madalene, I got some good links, and some good information.

First, the amount of insect material in food products is governed by the “Food and Drug Administration”:http://www.fda.gov (FDA) and the “Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition”:http://www.cfsan.fda.gov/ (CFSAN). They regulate all sorts of things related to food safety, but the documents we are interested in concern the Food Defect Action Levels program. This regulates the amount of insect parts, foreign plant matter, rodent filth and rotten parts that food can contain.

If you want to read a nice little article about the process, check out this Salon article called “Bug heads, rat hairs — bon appetit”:http://archive.salon.com/health/col/roac/2000/01/14/filth_lab/print.html. It is a pretty funny little read.

If you want some more detailed information, the main document, for your reading pleasure, is called the “FDA/CFSAN Defect Action Level Handbook”:http://vm.cfsan.fda.gov/~dms/dalbook.html and it is quite an interesting read. For instance, here are the tolerances for peanut butter:

* Insect filth: No more than 30 insect fragments per 100 grams.
* Rodent filth: No more than 1 rodent hair per 100 grams.
* Grit: Gritty taste and water insoluble inorganic residue may not exceed 25mg per 100 grams.

However, this last line is what I find most interesting (emphasis mine):

bq. DEFECT SOURCE: Insect fragments – preharvest and/or post harvest and/or processing insect infestation, Rodent hair – post harvest and/or processing contamination with animal hair or excreta, Grit – harvest contamination
SIGNIFICANCE: Aesthetic

Aesthetic? Well, I suppose its true, despite what some may choose to believe, a few rat hairs and insect legs isn’t going to hurt anybody! You might find it a bit bizarre to be eating insect crap, but really, its a small thing to our bodies. In fact, I’m willing to bet that decreased usage of pesticides and an increase in ‘organic’ farming techniques will only mean skyrocketing insect part levels in food. I’m not bothered by that prospect overly much. I don’t fancy eating bugs, seeing as how I am a vegetarian, but at the same time, a realization has to be made that bugs are everywhere, and invariably will end up in whatever you are eating. It isn’t cruel, its just the nature of being an insect who can crawl into anything, has 300 babies at a time and lives for two weeks. Plus, caterpillars have as much protein by weight as beef, but with much less fat, 10 times as much iron, and many other vitamins as well. I suppose accidentally eating a few isn’t really that bad of an idea.

However, this still doesn’t address the question of how the insect parts are counted. For that, we need to look to another document, called the “Macroanalytical Procedures Manual”:http://vm.cfsan.fda.gov/~dms/mpm-toc.html. This document contains procedures for doing all sorts of filth-tests. For the most part, it seems simple filtration serves to identify insect matter and excrement in the food products. Also, various methods of digesting the food product in acids, and then separating any undigested material (such as the insect heads). Happy reading.

I’ve made it a fair way into the construction and design of a headlight modulator for my scooter. What is a headlight modulator you ask? It is a device that causes the headlight of the scooter to pulse on and off at about 240 beats per minute. It contributes to motorcycle safety by making the vehicle far more visible.

Some design aspects, mandated by federal law, are that the light not flash between full brightness and being completely off. Instead, it must go between full brightness, and no less than about half brightness. That is the difference between ‘flashing’ and ‘modulating’. The rate that the light modulates is also mandated by law, to be between 200 and 280 beats per minute. This keeps it from causing ‘target fixation’ that some strobes cause in drivers, as well as distinguishing it from emergency vehicle strobes.

Another design parameter is that it must turn itself off at night, returning the light to normal operation.

The one I’m working on now uses a pair of 555 timers to modulate. One creates a 300Hz flicker at about 50% duty cycle, producing an output that looks half as bright as normal (you don’t notice the flicker, because 300Hz is fast enough to cause persistence of vision to make it look like a continuous brightness). The other timer flickers at the 240 beats per minute, also at a 50% duty cycle, switching between the dimmed output, and normal output.

A relay connected to a small circuit with a phototransistor checks ambient light level. When it moves above a preset level, the phototransistor activates the relay, which switches the headlight to modulated mode. When it goes dark, the relay snaps back to its closed position, which allows the headlight to work as normal. This is designed to cause the ‘default’ status, in case of malfunction, to be normal operation, another aspect required by law. If the circuit fails, the light must return to normal operation.

Currently the entire mess is sitting on the dining room table, a nest of wires attached to a prototype board. I’m using an old AT computer power supply to provide the 12V to the board. I purchased a set of organizer trays to hold my electronics stuff, and that has helped organization a lot, but it is still a bit of a mess. I don’t think it is possible to work on electronics without making a mess.

Anyway, I’ve got this, as well as a few other interesting projects, moving forward to increase the safety of my scooter. Recent studies have confirmed what many suspected, that motorists simply don’t see motorcycles. A combination of smaller form factor, as well as a level of ‘unexpectedness’ prevents people from noticing motorcycles. Most motorcycle accidents are caused by a cage driver (thats what we call you car-bound people) not seeing a motorcyclist, and running into them, usually by making a left turn into them. All the studies have recommended that motorcyclists do anything in their power to make themselves more visible.

In the 70′s, federal law mandated that motorcycles leave their lights on all the time. Since then, all motorcycles have been made without the ability to turn the lights off. My scooter has a light switch, but it only lets you choose between high beam and low beam. That helped visibility, but with the advent of daytime running lights on cars, motorcycles are losing their edge again. Headlight modulators are one thing that makes the motorcycle much more visible.

Some people find them annoying, but because mine will still be controlled by a manual switch, there are things that can be done to make them less annoying. For instance, it can be turned off while at a red light, so the driver ahead of you isn’t forced to stare at it in the rear view mirror. However, one thing must be made clear. Headlight modulators are despised by some, misunderstood by many, but *seen by all*. And that is the important thing.

Stay tuned for more info on the circuit, including diagrams, once I have it tuned up the way I want it. Also, I’ve got a neat circuit in the works for the brake lights too, I’ll post more about that once I get started on it. There are also plans in motion to add auxiliary brake and turn signal lights (all LED of course), add strategic and attractive 3M reflective material and increase horn volume. My hope is that once I’m done, no one will be able to ignore the flashing, brightly colored streak of light and sound that my scooter will become.

On the way into work this morning I passed a garage sale, and my eagle eye spotted an Apple monitor amongst the merchandise. I almost stopped, but then realized that I would be late to work, so I sighed and drove on. On my way home from work, I remembered the sale, and saw it was still running. I pulled over, jumped off my scooter, and ran over to find that my suspicions were correct, and that there was indeed an Apple monitor for sale, and it still hadn’t been sold! $15 dollars later, I was the proud owner of an Apple Multiple Scan 20 monitor. Its 20″, and supports 1280×1024 at 75Hz. Score!

I also bought a nice Swiss Army laptop bag, which was also $15 and brand new (it still had its original product tag on it). Its a very durable and cool bag, and I’m sure I’ll find something good to do with it. I even picked up a pair of shoes I thought would fit Madalene, because they are pretty sweet shoes. However, they were a bit too small. No big deal, I’m sure we can find someone that they will fit, they are a women’s 6 1/2.

I had to scoot home and get the car in order to pick up the monitor, but it was worth it. 20″ of goodness is now gracing my PC. I’ve got a bit of a quandary now, because I have a very nice Hitachi 19″ monitor on my Mac, which supports great resolutions and looks wonderful, but now there is this multiple scan 20″ which doesn’t support as high of resolutions, and doesn’t look quite as good, but is still larger. The higher resolutions of the Hitachi aren’t in use right now, because I don’t have a very good video card in the Mac, though I’m planning on getting one at some point. So which monitor goes on which computer? Well, for now, the 20″ will stay on the PC, because the slightly larger size doesn’t fully account for the slightly lower visual quality. Also, I like to watch movies on the PC, to keep the Mac open for real work, and the larger monitor will look nice for that, despite the fact that it isn’t as well converged.

Either way, I’m happy.

“Andrew”:http://www.andrewsw.com requested more information on Set Theory, a branch of music theory that Forte Night deals with, in a comment to my last post. I was going to email him, but figured I’d post about it instead, so that anyone else who is curious can also partake of the information.

Now, IANAMT(I Am Not A Music Theorist) (I Am Not A Music Theorist, to those of you who aren’t hip to the latest in Internet acronyms), and what I know is mostly from the perspective of having to write a program about it. Hence, I’m quite clear on the mathematics behind Musical Set Theory, but not very clear about the practical applications of it. However, I have a few friends who are very clear on it (they are composers) and I’ll query them for more information which I’ll add to the post later. I’ll also forward specific questions people have about it along to them, just post them in the comments. Read on if you dare, things will get a little complex as we go.
Continue Reading »

Update: My computer has been dragged to its knees by the C program “Roy Williams’ pi to arbitrary precision”:http://www.cacr.caltech.edu/~roy/upi/pi.txt which uses Machin’s formula, π/4 = 4*arctan(1/5) – arctan(1/239). It has spent the last two hours working on calculating π to 1,000,000 digits, and I don’t know how much longer it will take. 10,000 digits took only a few minutes. However, it felt good to know that while we were eating Pizza πs and Key Lime πs, the computer was celebrating in its own special way. Pictures of the π pizza and π pie are forthcoming.

As many of you may know, today is March 14th, or 3/14, or… 3.14 ~= π! Today is the day to celebrate the goodness that is the number π (aka, Pi).

The most common definition of π is the following familiar equation: π = A/r^2 where A is the area of a circle, and r is the radius of said circle.

You may have seen it written like this: A = πr^2 in school, when using it to calculate the area of circles.

The number is very old, and was known in its significance by the Egyptians and the Babylonians, though their calculations weren’t as accurate as ours. The Babylonians considered π equivalent to 3 1/8 = 3.125, and the Egyptians had the more difficult to use, and slightly less accurate approximation of 4*(8/9)^2 ~= 3.160484.

π is an infinite decimal, meaning that as you calculate π, you will never find a repeating string of digits. The number never stops, you can continue to add digits forever. This isn’t just shown by experiment, in 1768 Johann Lambert proved mathematically that a repeating pattern can never exist.

π shows up in some amazing places, like probability, and the “famous five” equation that combines 5 of the most unique and key constants in mathematics: e^(i*π) + 1 = 0

e is the base of the natural log, and another infinite decimal, which is approximately equal to 2.71828, and is found all over, especially when studying growth or decay (including compound interest at the bank), the statistical “bell curve” functions, and the shape of suspended wires, or the shape of arch’s like St. Louis’ own Gateway Arch). E is just about as amazing as π, but we’ll talk more about it later, since today is π’s day.

i is the so called “imaginary number” and is equal to the square root of -1. The astute among you will remember that it is impossible to take the square root of a negative number, because any number multiplied by itself equals a positive number. The explanation for i then is that it isn’t a real number. The “real number set” is defined most generally as all the numbers you are probably familiar with. Negative numbers, zero, positive numbers. Number like π and e are considered real numbers, as are fractions. Basically, imagine an infinitely long number line, with zero in the middle. Any number that can be found on that line is a “real” number. You won’t find i on that line anywhere, because there is another number line, perpendicular to the real numbers, that contains i. It is a difficult concept, but is crucial to mathematics. i is the most clearly defined imaginary number, and is used to build other imaginary numbers, like 3i, or πi.

1 and 0 you are familiar with, but they are still crucial to mathematics, despite being some of the very first numbers you learn as a child. In fact, the reason you learn them early on, is that you find them everywhere, from the simplest calculations to the most complex number theory. 1 and 0, indicating the most basic form of “somethingness” and “nothingness” respectively, are key to mathematics.

People have calculated π out to billions of digits. Here are a bunch of digits of π:

bq. 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944
592307816406286208998628034825342117067982148086513282306647
093844609550582231725359408128481117450284102701938521105559
644622948954930381964428810975665933446128475648233786783165
271201909145648566923460348610454326648213393607260249141273
724587006606315588174881520920962829254091715364367892590360
011330530548820466521384146951941511609433057270365759591953

All in all, π is a pretty cool thing. To celebrate π, Dennis will be bringing over beer, and we’ll make a pizza π, and watch the movie π, and maybe eat a key lime π, and maybe even calculate some digits of π. Cool, huh?

Today I installed a new hard drive in my Mac. Or more appropriately, I installed an old hard drive on top of my Mac. The drive is an old Seagate UltraWide SCSI drive. Its 23GB, and the UltraWide SCSI bus lets it push data nice and fast. Its currently alone on an Atto ExpressPCI PSC dual channel scsi card.

The odd thing about the drive is that it is simply monstrous. I don’t mean capacity, but in physical size. Its a 5 1/4″ form factor, full height drive. For comparison, the average CD-ROM drive is 5 1/4″ form factor, half height. This drive is as big as two CD-ROM drives stacked on top of each other. There is no place to mount it inside of the computer case, so I ran a power cable and a scsi cable out of the case, and now the bare drive just sits on top of the case, roaring like a jet engine. The drive is big and fast, and was only 20$ (brand new) at OW Computing. They don’t seem to have any more (I bought this a few months ago), but this place lists a 4 pack of these drives for only $80. Remember that they are HUGE and require ultrawide scsi, but they are big fast reliable drives. They cost over $2000 when they were released!

I might take a picture and put it up, its pretty ridiculous how big it looks sitting up on the computer case like that. But hey, daddy needs storage.

Seems like a large chunk of the internet is down at the moment.. Rumor says that there is a DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack going on right now targeting MS SQL servers. Apparently some root DNS servers are down, and it is hampering some people’s ability to get around, and making life slow for others. Hopefully it will clear up soon. I’m having a hard time getting info about it, as the few resources I’m trying to get info from are unreachable for me. If you are reading this, and having trouble, just sit tight!

Update: Yup, DDOS it is. Its an MS SQL worm that is spreading through UDP port 1434, it seems. Its done some major damage to DNS root servers, which is causing a lot of the trouble. Check out the 24-hour reachability and packet loss graphs on matrix.net (the last few hours, starting around midnight Central Time, it seems, have been in bad shape, though it looks like things are beginning to clear up), and for more technical details, check out the NANOG Thread Index. This seems to be the specific exploit used, and that file lists a patch at the bottom. Don’t worry about it unless you are running MS SQL Server 2000 (all service packs). Oh, and here is a CNN article about it.

In a totally unrelated comment, I just ate some pasta that contained both Penne Rigate (tubes about 2″ long, and about 1/2″ in diameter, cut at an angle) and Rigatoni (like Penne Rigate, but about twice the diameter). The reason it contained both was simply that I had exhausted a box of the Penne, and started a new box of Rigatoni. The mixture was about 30% Rigatoni, 70% Penne. However, the odd thing was that while eating it, I noticed that every single Rigatoni had a Penne slipped inside of it. The Penne fits easily, and could have worked its way into the Rigatonis during cooking and stirring and whatnot. I’m just surprised that the nesting was complete. No Rigatoni was without a Penne slipped inside. There has to be some sort of chaos theory principles that explain this curious noodle behavior. I’m tempted to try some other multi-pasta experiments, to see if this nesting tendency is widespread, or limited to the Penne/Rigatoni combination. Perhaps Large Shells and Small Shells could be combined to interesting effect… We shall see.

Today I got quite a bit of homework done, some good solid studying for my C exam this evening, and some serious coffee drinking, because as you all know, caffiene makes your brain work better. Or something like that. Either way, it tastes good.

Also, for an additional 10$ a month, I was able to jack our downstream connection speed up to 1.5 megabits. Rawk! Unfortunately, our upstream is still a puny and despicable 128 kilobits. Its much more expensive to add upstream speed than it is to add downstream speed. Hopefully soon though I’ll be able to push the upstream speed up to around 384kb. That would be acceptable. However, this 1.5 megabit downstream is still very nice. A noticable improvement from our 684kilobit downstream we had before. I had to download updates to the Apple Developer Tools, and zing, it went nice and fast. A speed test at Bandwidthplace.com shows me pulling a realistic 1.3 megabits. Sweet.

However, the values as measured by the Mac are consistently about 100kbs-200kbs lower than the values as measured by Madalene’s PC. Now, the PC is an Athlon XP @ 1.33ghz, and the Mac is a G4 at 466mhz, so the PC does have a bit of an edge when it comes to raw processing power, but is that all that is contributing to the speed difference? Is anyone aware of any settings that I can tweak under OS X.2 to help boost network performance? It is BSD based, so any settings tweaks applicable for BSD might be applicable here. Anyway, I can live with the small speed difference, but if there is anything I can do to speed it up, I’d be very interested to hear about it, and if I discover anything, I’ll be sure to post it.

The other issue concerning network performance I need to look at is the fact that I’m using a hub to connect 4 static-IP computers to each other, and to the internet in general. The collision light flashes almost constantly while the computers are doing stuff. Is this a problem that could be alleviated by replacing the hub with a switch? I’ve also noticed a tendency to have unreliable connections at times. For instance, if Madalene is playing mp3s on her computer over the network from one of the other PCs, and I’m downloading stuff from the internet on the mac with three open SSH connections to the linux machine, then things sometimes get weird, skips in the music, bursts of extreme lag, etc. Hmm. I think I do need a switch. Any features I should look for when I’m shopping for a switch? Recommended brands? Would it be worth it to upgrade my machines to 100BaseT instead of the regular 10BaseT they are on right now? If some were 100BaseT, and some were still 10BaseT, would that drag their total speed down to 10BaseT levels, or could the faster computers still talk over fast connections with each other? I think so, isn’t that one of the features of a switch?

Man, so many questions!! Anyway, have fun people, I’m off to my exam.

Tonight I removed XFree86 and KDE from the 8100, since they were really redundant and taking up lots of disk space. Then I upgraded to the latest security fixes (including some important ones for openssh), and upgraded Apache from version 1.3 to 2.0. Sweet!

In more interesting news, Madalene and I’s photo submission to Human Clock was put onto the Gallery of Best Submissions! Its all PHP, so I can’t give a direct link, but look for us on the bottom of Page 4 of the gallery, under the location “Harris Beach, Oregon.” Thats me standing next to the time written into the sand! Sure there are 5 whole pages of ‘best submissions’, but it makes me feel good that we were deserving of one of those little slots.

As per yesterday’s post on Linux installation, I now have a linux box running. If you’d like, you can check out the boring default Apache page here. You could also try ssh’ing into it, or ftping into it. But that won’t work, because you don’t have an account.

My one problem is that I’m not sure what I want to do with this little server. It has almost no disk space (something I’m working on fixing right now), but apache is running, as is sshd and ftp. Theoretically it is well set up to serve a simple webpage, but I don’t know what I’d serve off of it. Also, I should get a domain name for it, but I don’t know what domain name to get! All this effort, and nothing to do with it.

If anyone has any ideas for domain names, or things to do with the server, let me know!