dylanstiles.com

I was in the post office yesterday, and I noticed they have these flat-rate shipping boxes, advertised with the slogan “If it fits, it ships.” So you pay $13.95 to ship anything that will fit inside a 12″ x 12″ x 5 1/2″ box, for example. Wouldn’t it be funny to fill up one of these boxes with the densest element on the periodic table, then go to the post office and ship it?

Of course the element I speak of is osmium, which weighs in at a hefty 22.6 g/cm3. If my math is correct here, that 12″x12″x5.5″ box translates into 792 cubic inches, or 12.98 liters. Fill it up with a huge block of osmium and it would weigh 293 kilograms, or 646 pounds.

So you’d probably actually need like 6 people to lift the box. And the fact that osmium costs ~$30/gram, this little prank would cost $8.8 million to pull off. Depleted uranium might be a little more economical. It’s only 19.1g/cm3, so fill up that same box with DU and it would only weigh 546 pounds. Still pretty funny.

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Back in 1886 some relatives of mine (I assume) founded the Stiles Brick Company in Bridgewater, MA. The industrial revolution demanded mountain piles of high-quality bricks, and the SBC cranked them out with maniacal fervor. Take a walk through Lowell, Waltham, etc… these towns are 99 and 44/100% pure Stiles brick. I have often dreamed of having a house built entirely out of Stiles bricks, obviously with the “STILES” side facing out, so as to passionately declare that it is MY HOUSE.



At some point, the SBC underwent a merger of some sort and became the Stiles and Hart Brick Company. This business move created an unstoppable juggernaut of brick production that is in full force to this day. However, it entailed a redesign of the logo on the bricks, and they now feature a more modest “S+H” insignia. These bricks are everywhere, but you might never know it since the plain side is usually facing out.



Well yesterday I was wandering around Central Square in Cambridge, MA, where most of the sidewalks are brick-lined. I happened upon a few bricks that were overturned, and was pleased as punch to see that familiar S+H shining up at me. Yes, this entire sidewalk is constructed out of Stiles + Hart Bricks, so as far as I’m concerned it belongs to me. I can’t say for sure, but I suspect that much of the metro/Boston area is similarly paved with my bricks, and I would be entitled to claim ownership of all the sidewalks if it ever came down to that.

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Glad I’m not in high school any more…

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Normally you might consider an ambulance in the rear view mirror as something that will slow down your transit from A to B. Yesterday I found myself in an unusual driving situation where the presence of an ambulance actually saved me about 30 seconds of driving time.



It was a rare conjunction at a T intersection, where I wanted to make a right on red, but there was a constant stream of cars turning from the opposite direction blocking me. Suddenly I looked in the rear-view mirror and saw an ambulance coming from behind. The ambulance cut off the stream of cars that were preventing me from turning, effectively setting a pick.

This allowed me to execute my right-hand turn before the stream of cars would have otherwise allowed me to do so, saving ~30 seconds. Exploiting the path cleared by an ambulance is normally illegal (ie: stay 500 feet behind), but in this odd set of circumstances, I was actually distancing myself from the emergency vehicle more by turning as I did.

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I found a factual inaccuracy in this wikipedia entry for “pants” (or “trousers” if you prefer). It has since been corrected. Looking at the history of this page reveals an extensive amount of pants-related vandalism.




The desecration is extended to other articles of clothing as well. A quick check at the edit history of “shirt” shows similar activity, although I do have to say that this revision is particularly concise and accurate.

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The Long Now Foundation hosted a seminar by Craig Venter, so of course I had to go. My impression of the man was some combination of Peter Schultz and Al Gore (that is, An Inconvenient Truth Al Gore). Beyond that I won’t even try to summarize. Here is host Steward Brand’s attempt. Hopefully the seminar audio and video will be available soon, here.



What I can say is that 1) during the post-presentation book signing Dr. Venter was kind enough to autograph a printout of his own karyotype that I brought. This came from his recent PLoS publication (open access, thanks internet! You can also download a gigantic pdf of the sequence, for $0.00).

And 2) I was inspired to the point where I felt compelled to throw money at the Long Now Foundation by purchasing this very attractive watch (timepiece? bracelet?). It is the most accurate watch in the world and worth every penny. I am still trying to think of witty things to say when people ask me what time it is - suggestions welcome.

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Today is a landmark day where I fought a pitched battle against my very own visual cortex, and I am proud to say that I emerged triumphant. No doubt you’ve seen those pictures of a bunch of colored dots, where if you stare at them long enough a 3D picture is supposed to “pop out.”




I remember these used to be popular circa 1995 when everyone had huge Magic Eye posters plastering the walls[1]. In the 10 years that I’ve been staring at these speckled dot things (autostereogram, to be precise) I never really got it. The advice people tell you when trying to perceive these images is vague and unhelpful: “you just have to stare at it long enough!” Sometimes it worked, usually not[2]. Until today.

Espousing the wikipedia is passé, I know, but I feel it’s necessary because this page has allowed me to overcome a decade-long frustration and master my own personal visual perception system. The reason why it’s so hard to “see” an autostereogram is because you’re asking your brain to do something totally unnatural. Millennia of evolution have hard wired the actions of focusing and convergence into your eyeballs. Stereograms are basically just a dirty trick on the brain, and for the illusion to work you need to defeat your subconscious reflexes.




It’s helpful to understand how exactly the illusion works, and to practice on simple wallpaper images like this one. Then you can move on to level 2, random dots. It really is just a matter of practice and training. Once you’ve mastered the control of your visual cortex, it’s a cinch.



I’m impressed at how, once locked into the illusion, you can flip between images without having to recalibrate yourself. Take a bunch of images (here’s a zip file of 50) and make them into a screensaver or slideshow. You should be able to switch pictures and stay in 3D the whole time.

Easier, download these quicktime movies I made that cycle through the whole bunch automatically:
1 second per frame or 3 seconds per frame

For best results, open in Quicktime and go to “View” -> “Present movie…” -> “Actual Size.” Stereogram animations are also cool. For the ultimate challenge try this on for size… stereogram tetris! I played for 10 minutes it left me unable to look at still objects, or walk straight.

[1] 1995 was also The Year of the Fractal. Computer-generated images used to be cool.
[2] Turns out I was doing it all wrong. I was crossing my eyes, which made the images inverted. Most stereograms are rendered to be viewed “wall eyed.”

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I just finished reading The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson (amazon). It’s an account of John Snow’s work in solving the riddle of the 1854 cholera outbreak in London, and how that changed the way we build cities. I won’t bore you with a book report, other than to say that the book was “good.” Steven Johnson also gave a very excellent talk about this subject for the Long Now Foundation, which is available as a free download here.

One of the sniglets I picked up from the book is that the International Society for Infectious Diseases has an email list that sends out daily notices about emerging infectious diseases and toxins. It’s called ProMED-mail and anyone can subscribe to the list. This is a way to keep your thumb on the proverbial pulse of the planet, a paranoid hypochondriac’s dream. I am now a proud subscriber. Here is the digest for today, September 21 2007, concerning topics such as ebola hemmorrhagic fever and the measles situation in Kenya. Note the interesting use of Facebook.com to disseminate information about bat rabies in Ontario.

ProMED Digest       Friday, September 21 2007       Volume 2007 : Number 485

News you can use. There you have it.

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