Spoonflower

The actual fabric! (rotated)

The design

Spoonflower inspired me to start designing fabrics that I could use to make Arm Pillozzz. Spoonflower is a neat site that allows you to upload images and tile them to create patterns. Then you can order them or just post them online so that other people can order them. You get 10% of any sales and you get a 10% discount on your own fabrics. Ordering a pattern on the basic cotton fabric is $17.50 per yard length (the rolls are 42" wide), so it's expensive compared to commercial fabrics. But you can make pretty much anything you want. It's like a zazzle/cafepress type site for fabric.  Most of my patterns are rigidly geometric, but I think I'm a pretty creative geometrist (Geometrician? Geometer? Whatever, I like geometry.) I think pattern design is math intensive considering that to effectively repeat a unit block, the boundaries of the block have to be consistent when repeated. Also, there are a lot of colors, and the way they interact and compliment each other is very interesting. Here's my first pattern!

LiteCoin Mining

I started looking into mining LiteCoin. I'm not too sure that it will be profitable, but I thought I'd give a shot with an old computer that goes completely unused. I installed Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (long term support) because Windows XP is not going to be supported by Microsoft after April 8, 2014. I downloaded the LiteCoin wallet and the bootlogger quick sync file. The syncing was only supposed to take an hour, but it took about four. Good start. Guess that's what I get for using a 10 year old computer. Anyschmows, I still have to download a mining program (pooler's cpuminer) and join a mining pool. I could go it alone, but it's practically impossible to get any coins by yourself. An analogy to the way LiteCoin (and BitCoin and all other altcoins) are mined is everyone is throwing darts trying to hit the LiteCoin and whoever hits it, wins. So my slow computer is a tiny dart and fast computers are machine guns. So, to distribute the effort and end up with a partial coin instead of nothing, pools were formed and the more computing power you contribute to the pool, the larger of a percentage of the LiteCoin you'll get when your pool wins. Kind of like a lottery pool.

Interestingly, mining is what keeps the network safe, as the math that your computer is doing is checking the validity chain of other people's transactions. Neat stuff.

BarSign

I made an app! It's brilliant. Well, kind of. If you hate ordering at loud bars, but you still go to loud bars. I call it BarSign and it's available on Google Play here. It's a list of drinks that you can select from and the your selection is displayed in large text for you to show to the bartender. Pretty nifty, I think. I made it with the MIT app inventor which is pretty simple to use, and I really like it, but it is somewhat limited.

Categories

Drinks

Please!

Hop Farm and Fechtmann Number

So, like most other people (especially males), I like to drink beer. Good beer. What's good beer? Essentially, any beer that I haven't had before or a very alcoholic/bitter IPA. While I was studying fluid mechanics in college I noticed that all the dimensionless numbers (i.e. Reynolds Number, Capillary Number, Mach Number, etc.) gave a quantitative number, but were qualitative in that the number would fall into a certain range that corresponded to a certain flow regime. Blah blah blah, engineering. SO, I devised the Fechtmann number, which is given by the formula:

Where V is the volume of the drink, A is the alcohol percentage, P is the price and v (a.k.a. nu) is Hershel's Coefficient. If you've had the drink before and liked it, Hershel's coefficient is 1.1, if you haven't had it before it's 1.2, if you  had it before and thought it was okay, then the coefficient is 1 and if you had it before but didn't like it the coefficient is 0.9. So, basically the higher the Fechtmann number, the happier you'll be. It also says that you need to try new things and if something is very alcoholic and cheap, just order it.

Since I like IPAs so much, my brother and I decided to grow hops. Our dad didn't realize what he was getting himself into when he allowed us to build a trellis :) But now he thinks it's pretty cool.

My dad next to our trellis posts

Hops about midway through the growing season

pssssyyyyunnnggg

Hands in the air

ヘ(^_^ヘ)(ノ^_^)ノ

Gotye Is On Another Level

"Somebody I Used to Know" was an unbelievably huge hit for Gotye, and an ungodly number of people covered it on youtube.  But being the artist that he is, Gotye decided that all these cover presented an opportunity rather an encroachment on his work. This man is on another level of artistry that most will never achieve. Remix the covers of my own song? Brilliant.

The Cuddle Sutra

The Cuddle Sutra is exactly what you think it is: a collection of cuddling positions. I, for one, am glad to see that someone has put in the effort to create this book (the author Rob Garder, and the slew of other people that it probably took to make it happen). It's a bit of de-sexing in an oversexed society. Now for my shameless plug, the Arm Pillo, as it's name implies, is a pillow that wraps around your arm and is great addition to many cuddling positions. In addition to cuddling positions that are enhanced by the Arm Pillo, the Arma Sutra (get it?) contains positions that you can comfortably sleep in by yourself in random places (like at a desk, in a car, etc).