Thane Plambeck

Typewriter

IMG_7334
Originally uploaded by thane.

World's first roller coaster, under construction

World's first roller coaster, under construction
Originally uploaded by thane.

Nudibranch ID card

link

Know one when you see one.

Got Silk?

Lawrence Osborne, New York Times
June 2002

link

Excerpts:

Nexia uses two common spider specimens, Araneus diadematus (the common garden spider) and Nephila clavipes (the golden orb weaver, native to many tropical forests). The spiders are frozen in liquid nitrogen, then ground into a brown powder. Since every cell of a spider contains the precious silk-producing genes, it’s easy to extract them. These genes are then tested in the "Charlotte machine," what Turner calls a "synthetic goat" that tests whether or not the gene will function inside an actual goat. Next, the gene is altered. A "genetic switch" is added, which programs the gene to "turn on" only inside the mammary gland of its new female host during lactation. The altered gene is then pushed on a fine glass pipette into a goat egg. The baby goat will have a spider gene present in each of its cells (its eyes, ears and hooves will all be part spider), but only in the mammary glands of female goats will the silk gene actually spring to life. The goat will eventually start lactating a kind of silk-milk mixture, which looks and tastes just like normal milk.

[...]

What's special about spider silk, as opposed to silk from worms, is that it is a unique liquid crystal. And that's what's magical, says Turner. "Liquid crystals are the Holy Grail of material sciences. They make for incredibly tough, light, strong materials with phenomenal properties. It's way beyond anything we humans can make. Milled steel pales next to it.

"But the complexity of arachnid silk is also what is problematic about it, from the point of view of biomimicry. Spider-silk proteins consist of very long strings of amino acids that are difficult to decode, and little is known of how spiders actually unravel them and spin them into threads. A spider, moreover, constructs its web methodically out of different kinds of silk. It builds diagonal support lines called "dragline silk" (which it also uses to hoist itself around its web) and then inner wheels called "the capture spiral" made from a more viscid, sticky silk. Dragline silk, says Turner, is the "best stopping material you've ever seen," but how it's actually made inside a small orb weaver's abdomen remains mysterious. And whereas spiders produce up to seven kinds of silk proteins, BioSteel, as yet, contains only one.

* * *

BioSteel (google search)

But now it's over three years since that NYT article, so how did BioSteel do in the meantime?

Nexia has decided to refocus fibre development towards biopolymer sales and specialized nano-scale fibre applications for spider silk and away from traditional fibres and yarns. This decision was prompted by the emerging interest in nanofibres and by the ongoing technical challenges of producing bulk, cost competitive spider silk fibres with superior mechanical properties, especially strength...

Music @ Menlo

Tonight, four Beethoven Op 18 string quartets performed by the excellent Miro quartet at the St. Marks Episcopal church in Palo Alto. The Music at Menlo festival is starting again, and one of several excellent string quartets will be playing every single Beethoven string quartet in the next couple of weeks, just a few hundred yards from our house.

Somebody pinch me.

For an encore they played part of a string quartet by Juan Crisstomo Jacobo Antonio Arriaga y Balzola, who heard Beethoven's Op 18 quartets about ten years after they were first performed, and was inspired to write his own. I enjoyed the Arriaga encore quite a bit.

Arriaga died at age nineteen. On the web, people seem to call him the Spanish Mozart. He was born exactly 50 years to the day after Mozart.

Wu Han: "As you listen to the first notes of this string quartet (opus 18, #3), think that these are the first two notes that Beethoven chose for his quartets. It gives me goosebumps."

One web site on Juan Crisstomo Jacobo Antonio Arriaga y Balzola

(born: Bilbao, 27 Jan 1806; died: Paris, 17 Jan 1826). Spanish composer. He studied under Baillot (violin) and Ftis (harmony) at the Paris Conservatoire; his music, which includes an opera (Los esclavos felices, 1820), a symphony and three fine string quartets, is elegant and accomplished and notable for its harmonic warmth. His death before he was 20 was a sad loss to Spanish music.

David Somers writes

Dear friends,

I'm having a bit of a Willy Wonka moment and feeling quite like Charlie Bucket. Late Sunday night I solved a sort of visual riddle in a book called a Treasure's Trove," a book for kids and adults that has a real treasure hunt for 12 Jewels worth a total of $1 million dollars. You may have seen this on the Today show. Anyway, we just found the 12th token! It can be redeemed for a jewel encrusted beetle valued at over $50K or a lesser amount of cash.

The riddle spelled out the name of an Overlook within the Badlands National Park. I immediately called Mark Moeglein, my best friend from Harvey Mudd days. His daughter Katie is my goddaughter and I had given her a copy of the book and we had all been doing the puzzles with the kids. Mark is lives in Oregon and I'm in Boston. We both dropped everything and each raced about 1800 miles from opposite coasts (I drove 560 miles in 7 1/2 hours after my flights). By late Monday night we were both in Wall, S.D. By 1am (MDT) Tuesday morning we were at the White River Overlook in the Badlands and quickly found the specific tree that we were looking for. After 15 minutes of searching from the ground with flashlights and lanterns, Mark finally climbed the tree and spotted the token in a knothole 8 ft off the ground.

It is quite amazing that decoding 15 characters (BADLANDSWROVRLK) out of a children's book set us off on this little adventure. It is even more amazing that we pulled it off without a hitch. We knew exactly which tree to search 1800 miles away. Incredible!

I'm not sure what happens next. The first token was redeemed on the Today show, but the prizes are not scheduled to be awarded until the end of 2007. Oddly enough, the film rights to the story were purchased by Paramount and assigned to Tom Cruise's production company Cruise/Wagner. Film or no film, Mark and I have shared a tremendous adventure together, one that we hope will inspire our kids as well.

We're downright giddy at the moment. Please feel free to sing along. either choose Charlie Bucket "I've got a golden token..." or Bruce Springsteen "these Badlands started treating us good, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa...."

-david

Grave Creek Mound [1833]

From:

AMERICAN ANTIQUITIES

AND

DISCOVERIES IN THE WEST

BEING AN EXHIBITION OF THE EVIDENCE

THAT AN ANCIENT POPULATION OF PARTIALLY CIVILIZED NATIONS DIFFERING ENTIRELY FROM THOSE OF THE PRESENT INDIANS PEOPLED AMERICA MANY CENTURIES BEFORE ITS DISCOVERY BY COLUMBUS, AND INQUIRIES INTO THEIR ORIGIN,

WITH A

COPIOUS DESCRIPTION

OF MANY OF THEIR STUPENDOUS WORKS, NOW IN RUINS, WITH OBJECTIONS CONCERNING WHAT MAY HAVE BECOME OF THEM.

***
By
Josiah Priest (1788-1851)
(1st ed.: Albany, 1833, 2nd ed 1834)

link

Tumuli are very common on the river Ohio, from its utmost sources to its mouth, although on the Monongahela, they are few, and comparatively small, but increase in number and size, as we descend towards the mouth of that stream at Pittsburgh, where the Ohio begins; after this they are still more numerous and of greater dimensions, till we arrive at Grave creek, below Wheeling. At this place, situated between two creeks, which run into the Ohio, a little way from the river, is one of the most extraordinary and august monuments of antiquity, of the mound description. Its circumference at its base, is fifty-six rods, its perpendicular height ninety feet, its top seven rods and eight feet in circumference. The centre at the summit, appears to have sunk several feet, so as to form a kind of amphitheatre. The rim enclosing this concavity is seven or eight feet in thickness; on the south side, in the edge of this rim, stands a large beech tree, the bark of which is marked with the initials of a great number of visitants.L

[I scavenged for contemporaneous images of Grave Creek Mound and put together this slideshow].

Solution to misere play of Guiles

link (Aaron Siegel).

Solutions to wild four digit quaternaries

PDF (Aaron Siegel).

Aaron has also found a solution for the wild octal game 0.144 (its misere indistinguishability quotient semigroup has order 30 and a pretending function of period 9).

More information here (background paper) and here (my original problem statement, presented at the Banff CGT conference problem session last month).

More tidbits from Aaron:

0.01222 has period 8 and quotient order 370
0.10322 has period 8 and quotient order 214

co-bricks1-withminifig

co-bricks1-withminifig
Originally uploaded by thane.

Second experiment

co-bricks1

co-bricks1
Originally uploaded by thane.

Cole, Owen and I downloaded a set of Lego modeling programs called LDraw.

It was surprisingly easy and fun to create our first Lego model (admittedly only two bricks).

Giant chocolate donut discovered on Mars

link

A question

Why haven't I ever been to Big Sur, despite having lived in CA for 20 years? Perhaps because everyone who's told me about it has mentioned nude people in hot tubs?

Not that that is a bad thing.

At least I could go to the Esalen Institute bookstore.

If using Firefox

View->Page Style->No Style

More readable and hype-neutral.

carhenge—now with spawning salmon and dinosaurs

flickr slideshow

I proud to say I was one of only two people in my archaeoastronomy class to know that carhenge is near Alliance, Nebraska.

K.T.E Piano Moving

is there a hidden meaning in this?

Spike the Lizard

Spike the Lizard
Originally uploaded by thane.

Gloria has been taking care of our neighbor's Bearded Dragon. He gets "salad" in the evening, and prefers it to be handed to him.

I've never seen him move much, but Gloria says he can really scoot after a cricket when he wants to.

Review of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John

[Audiobook version—as read by Gregory Peck ("intoned" may be a better term)]

By Thane Plambeck

* * * *
There's nothing like hearing Gregory Peck say

I AM THE LORD THY GOD

in that ever-so-decisive tone that he has—I'm sure you can imagine it.

But someone should have pointed out to God, or to whomever was responsible for this final compilation of the revealed truth of our Saviour, that things in these four books are bit redundant. Perhaps I wasn't paying attention closely enough, but I think I put the audiotapes in one-by-one, without repeating anything. These four books repeat themselves a lot. These four gentlemen Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John might possibly have been copying over one another's shoulders as they wrote these "independent," "synoptic" accounts of the life of Jesus.

I think I need to move on to Romans. Everyone seems to be quoting from it, particularly the evangelicals.

Something I just found at

Something I just found at the web site of Col. G. L. Sicherman:

* * * *

When Herbert Hoover was a small boy in Iowa, his father operated a barbed-wire factory, and, anxious to improve his product, he hit upon the idea of covering the steel strands with tar.

One day young Bertie, standing beside the steaming caldron of tar and wondering whether it would burn, tossed a flaming stick into it. The conflagration which resulted destroyed his father's plant and nearly wiped out the little town and his father's store.

"That night," according to Rose Wilder Lane, one of Hoover's most adulatory biographers, "he heard his father tell how the store, and perhaps the town had been saved. The fire, it was thought, had been caused by the unwatched kettle of tar, which must have boiled over. Bertie said nothing. If he had been asked, he would have told what he had done, but no one asked him.

"He sat unnoticed, eating silently. He was sorry and terrified, yet he was glad. It was such a strange feeling that when he had gone to bed he lay awake for a long time, hearing the katydid in the wild crab-apple tree outside his window. He had done a frightening thing; the shock of it was still in his nerves and the crime of it on his conscience, but he had not meant to do wrong. He had been innocently experimenting, and the result was not entirely disheartening.

"`Anyway, I found out what it would do,' he thought. `I found it out all by myself.' He wondered if he would be punished if he told. He thought not. But he decided that it was best to keep his own counsel in the matter.

"And for forty years he did so."

The story is one of the most revealing incidents in Herbert Hoover's life. It gives the key to many qualities in his character which both his friends and his enemies have been trying to explain.

It explains his vacillation, his indecision, the worry through which he passes before making up his mind. It explains his hesitancy in facing issues, a hesitancy which sometimes borders on outright cowardice. It explains why he privately denounced the oil scandals of the Harding Administration and yet sat unmoved throughout that rgime, never denouncing it publicly. It explains why he hesitated three days before accepting the rle of Belgian Food Administrator which the Allies had offered him. It explains his basic intellectual timidity, his inability to grapple in a straightforward and forthright manner with vital issues, why he is always resorting to such indirect devices as commissions to relieve him of the responsibility of acting on controversial questions.

* * * *

It's long been customary to beat up on Hoover, particularly since circumstances conspired to make his successor FDR America's greatest president (I think—he certainly kicked ass). I've often marvelled at this—no matter who is president, something always kicks that president in the butt. Except for FDR. The guy overcame everything. GBII is going down on Iraq.

David M Kennedy's Apology for Hoover (aka "Freedom from Fear") probably gets Hoover better.

UPS delivery

IMG_7279
Originally uploaded by thane.

UPS guy: "I've got some boxes for you."

Thane: What? Two?

UPS guy: "One hundred fifty-nine."

Note to self: forbid Gloria from being the AYSO kids soccer uniform coordinator next year.