Torn ACL Uncovers a New Hobby

On February 20th I was psyched to be out on the basketball court.  I had missed a few sessions because of work and the local schools having snow days and vacation.  It was the first game of our normal Friday Faculty & Staff Basketball League (FSBL).  I was on a fast break with only one person to beat, I crossed over from right to left, when I planted my left foot – CRACKLE & POP.  I just fell to the ground and could not walk.  After a week of my knee seeing no improvement, I was sent for an MRI.  The results were not good: torn ACL and ruptured lateral meniscus.  So I scheduled surgery as soon as I could.  I wanted to be on the road to recovery as soon as possible.

On March 30 I had my ACL reconstructed.  Since my patellar tendon was “worn”, the doctor decided to reconstruct the ACL with a hamstring graft.  He also had to remove some meniscus, but said it was only a small portion deep and most of the meniscus was left intact.  The doctor and I consider the surgery a success.  I am one week removed from surgery and have decent movement, but a lot of bruising which is expected.  I have been to physical therapy and am on the road to recovery.

The downfall to this injury is a long recovery.  It takes about 18 months to get back to 100%.  I will not be able to do any moderate activity for about 6 months and probably closer to a year until I can play basketball.  Maybe I will get a round or two of golf in in the Fall.

This injury gave me the opportunity to investigate new hobbies.  I have never really had a hobby, most of my downtime is spent playing a sport; basketball, bowling or golf.  Time for something new.  If you have been following my blog, you know that

my house has many critters.  We have a Boxer, Bearded Dragon, Veiled Chameleon, Hermit Crabs, Tropical Fish and a recent addition of a Tiger Oscar.  I love all of these critters.  We have been to some pet stores and love the salt water reef aquariums.

So knowing that I was “going under the knife” and could not play sports for awhile, I began researching marine aquarium and reef keeping.  It is very involved and very interesting.  It involves understanding biology, chemistry, fluid dynamics and even plumbing.  So I am going to give it a try.  I am going to chronicle my knee and reef progress both on this blog and Facebook. Nemo Fish!

KenKen: Sudoku Using Arithmetic

I am hooked!  I never really like Sudoku. Sudoku uses numbers, but really is not a mathematical puzzle.  NY Times recently released a new puzzle called KenKen. 

KenKen shares some properties with sudoku. Each is a pure logic challenge in which numbers are filled in the squares of a grid. Unlike sudoku, though, in which the numbers act solely as symbols (letters or pictures would work as well), KenKen requires arithmetic. Source.

Secret Science: Floating Toilet Paper

I recently received Secret Science by Steve Spangler.  I finally got some time to try out the Floating Ping-Pong Balls and Flying Toilet Paper experiment with Jackson and Charlie.  They can barely say Bernoulli, but really got a kick out of floating balls and various toys with a leaf blower.  We even go a Mr. Potato Head to float! They do not fully understand the principles, but it sure gets them excited about science and experiments.

I can’t wait for our next experiment.

Party like it is 1234567890

“At 11:31:30pm UTC on Feb 13, 2009, Unix time will reach 1,234,567,890.
Where will you be at this momentous second?” – from Bell Labs

This will be Friday, February 13th at 1831 and 30 seconds EST. If you want to find out what time it will be in your local time, try this Perl script courtesy of Matias Palomec:

perl -e ‘print scalar localtime(1234567890),”\n”;’

Source: One of those magic times: On Friday the 13th!

SMS is highway robbery

I was talking to a president and vice president of a SUNY school I visited recently about math, slide rules, first generation HP calculators, etc.  The conversation trickled into interesting calculations.  I brought up this one I previously blogged about:

Your company is planning to move its data center from the west coast to the east coast of the U.S. (3000 miles) and you are assigned the project to determine the cheapest and quickest method of transport (electric or otherwise). The first method being considered is using a Boeing 747 with a cargo capacity of 20 tons. Determine the amount of data that can be moved using CD’s weighing 1 oz each that can store 500Mbytes each. Note the maximum transport speed of a fully loaded 747 is 500mph. The second method of transport is to determine the number of T1 circuits (use 1.0 M bit per second throughput) that are needed to equal the carrying capacity of the 747 within the same time period (flight time only). Full post.

I left the conversation hanging with the per gigabyte cost of an SMS message.  

TechCrunch had this calculation based on AT&T’s rates:

Today is basic math day at CrunchGear where we discovered that if 160 bytes of SMS data costs twenty cents then 1MB (1,048,576 bytes) of data would cost 131,072 cents, or $1,310.72.

The calculation is (1,048,576 /160)*.20.  This is assuming that you fill all 160 bytes on every message.  It also assumes a $ 0.20 cost.  Most carriers charge $ 0.10 per SMS (global average is $ 0.11), and I would expect the average text message is less than 160 bytes, lets say 120 bytes after your average out the “thx”, “rofl” and “lol”.  The new calculation is (1,048,576 /120)*.10 = $873.81 per megabyte.  (1,073,741,824/120)*.10 =  $894,784.85 per gigabyte.  Highway robbery!

Are You Hungry Tonight?

My wife’s Grandma handed me Are You Hungry Tonight?: Elvis’ Favorite Recipes the other day.  I thought it was a joke at first, but apparently her sister received it as a Christmas gift this year.  I paged through the book, and indeed it had Elvis’ favorite recipes.  They are mostly southern classics or high fat, high cholesterol heart attack specials.  If Elvis ate like that, he was probably lucky he died of a drug overdose!

Griffin AirCurve: Fibonacci Spiral?

MacBreak Video 174 reviewed the Griffin AirCurve at Macworld.  The AirCurve is a non-powered acoustic amplifier.

AirCurve looks like a simple, elegantly minimal stand for your iPhone. But inside is a coiled waveguide “horn’ that collects the sound from the built-in speaker of your iPhone, amplifies it (by about 10 decibels), and projects it into the room.

At first glance, it appears to be using the Fibonacci Spiral.  I can see how it uses the same principles as the cochlea of the human ear.  It is hard to tell for sure, but a pretty neat device for your ipod.

Evolution of Dance 2

I got a fever…

Microsoft Songsmith: Sing a Little Song for Me

Microsoft Research is has an neat application out called Songsmith.  Looks really cool to play with, not sure it is much more than a toy.  It might be one of those application like Photo Booth for the Mac that makes people excited about Windows.

 

What is Songsmith?

 

Songsmith generates musical accompaniment to match a singer’s voice. Just choose a musical style, sing into your PC’s microphone, and Songsmith will create backing music for you. Then share your songs with your friends and family, post your songs online, or create your own music videos.

Although it is not Tony Bennett or John Mayer demoing Songsmith, the demo video is amusing.

Critters Everywhere

Boxers, Bearded Dragons, Hermit Crabs, Fish and Chameleons, Oh My!

I had an outstanding Christmas this year, but my household got a bit more crowded.  As you have probably seen on previous posts, I have a 7yr old Boxer named Mesi and then added a juvenile Bearded Dragon named Leo (really Leonardo de Pisa a.k.a. Fibonacci).  This year Santa brought my younger son Charlie 7 fish.  He also brought my older son, Jackson two hermit crabs.  The holiday was topped off with us bringing home my wife’s birthday gift, a veiled chameleon named Darwin (Charles Darwin).

Our home is now a desert, rainforest, beach and tropical sea.  We are learning so much about habitats, reptiles and pets in general.  Our house was hectic with a 3yr old, 4yr old and a boxer, now it is a zoo.  Awesome!