The cat itself

Saturday: I’m in post-deadline-stress disorder due to the CDC deadline that was on Friday. I’m semi-conscious for most of the day. While I clean the house, I find lying around 13 drafts of the paper. I resist the temptation to read the last one again because I know I will find typos.

andrea caltech, life

There is more than one person complaining that they have news about me only through this blog, which is never updated. What they mean is that I need to talk to them more often, but instead I’ll take the complaint literally and update the blog more often, which to me seems more efficient. I’ll write a little bit about daily life in Caltech, which in the end is really not that glamorous (and not as interesting as Japan was).

andrea caltech, life

So in September I had my Roman Holiday. Brief photo essay follows.

Thanks to the jet-lag, for the first time, I saw the dawn in Rome:

I spent my few days (re)reading my Dylan Dog and Rat Man collections:

and playing my piano:

and generally messing up my room, that, having been cleaned daily for months without being used, had reached negative levels of entropy:

By the way, with a strange twists of events, I discovered that while I was busy converting the department to espresso, my parents had converted to American coffee (note on the left):

Roma! the perfect occasion to test my new camera (Sony A300). I found out that I need a larger macro lens:

and I need a longer zoom:

Then I headed to Nice, France for IROS. The conference was okay, with a good program, but the rooms were too small, especially for the bigger sessions.

During 5 days of conference, there’s plenty of time to go around the city. So I saw the sea,

I breathed the old-Europe air,

and visited the museums:

The most inspiring moment I had was in front of this citation of John Cage:

“the situation being desperate, everything is now possible” which will be added to my list of inspirational mantra.

And then, 26 hours of travel later, I was suddenly back in sunny California, wondering where my baggage was instead.

andrea caltech, life

After the end of a productive summer, for which I offer the following evidence:

and exactly after one year that I’m here, I’m going back home for a week.

The week after that, I’ll be at IROS.

And then I’ll get back and be ready to start the new academic year, with strange ideas about courses to take.

andrea caltech, life

On Tuesday I experienced my first California earthquake. After the first wave I thought: Oh, a cute little earthquake! Then I realized that a bigger wave would be coming. And it did: it was like being in the wooden house of the second pig, while the wolf huffed and puffed from outside.

The magnitude was 5.4 and the epicenter was very close to here:

I also discovered that Richter was a Caltech professor, and Caltech monitors earthquakes for all California (altough they don’t use the Richter magnitude scale anymore, but something called the moment magnitude scale). In the hours after the quake, there were lots of media trucks around:

The Caltech monitoring system sent me an email containing a wave file (?). Maybe they thought that a female voice helps in tranquilizing people.

I also received this email from the administration:

Caltech had no injuries. We had some chemical spills that required temporary evacuation in at least one building. We had minor damage, including broken water pipes in Noyes and in the Cogen plant. Four elevators went temporarily off line. The campus responded as you would have hoped. Everyone did their part – from the daycare center to the environmental health and safety group, facilities, computing and telecommunications, to individuals in all the buildings and labs, and to HR for the notice to be thoughtful of those employees whose homes were closer to the epicenter.

I assume that it was by coincidence that, at the time of the earthquake, the Caltech Trustees were being given a tour of the Seismological Lab. I am told that they were impressed. Public Relations and the Seismo Lab must have been busy. I counted 10 media trucks parked outside as I left campus last night.

Best demo ever!

andrea caltech, life

My 4-year-old iPod mini died yesterday in a tragic incident involving a moth and a cupful of coffee. It survived a couple of traumatic crashes on the floor, and two surgical procedures: I opened it once for replacing the battery, and again to fix a loose headphone connector.

This last problem was difficult (i.e., fun) to diagnose. One day I realized that all the songs on my iPod had become instrumental pieces: I couldn’t hear the singers voice anymore! A little experimentation suggested that, somehow, a certain band of frequencies were absent from the output: the same band that contains the human voice singing range (say 440-1000 Hz). For some songs, like Still Alive the effect was particularly clean as the spectrogram of voice and harmony is clearly separated.

Now this looked like a typical software problem: somehow the equalizer’s settings had been messed up. I tried resetting the firmware, but the problem persisted. So I resolved to open it. From what I could guess, the mp3 decoder in the iPod is constituted by several different ones, and each of them takes care of a certain range of frequencies. These decoders output their signal to a common digital-to-analog converter, from which the headphones line starts. The decoders and the DAC are not on the same chip, rather the DAC is a separate component just behind the headphones jack. Part of the wires were loose, and so part of the frequencies couldn’t be heard.

              _______
|f1|-------> |       |
|f2|-------> |       |
|f3|-------> |  DAC  | ----> headphones
|f4|--x----> |       |
|f5|--x----> |       |
      |       -------
       \
         loose wires

So the diagnosis was that the wires got loose when I last dropped the iPod on the asphalt while I was running, and the fix was to insert a little piece of plastic in the connector.

I’m shopping around for a new iPod, and in four years there has been a lot of improvement in the form factor and the aesthetics. Unfortunately, the more compact they get, the less “user serviceable” they are, meaning that if it doesn’t work, you just throw it away, without any chance of fixing it yourself.

andrea life

I moved out of my old apartment.

It was probably the worst in the Catalina complex. It was on the ground floor, in the shadow, on the street, near the garbage bins. Every day I woke up at nine because of the noise of the garbage men. (Descartes used to say that good mathematics is possible only if one is allowed to stay in bed as much as he wants, and who am I to disagree?)

This new apartment is a two-bedroom, instead of four.

Accordingly, I went from 3 physicists room-mates to only one, who is a swiss-italian-american nuclear physicist who likes Rubik cubes:

It’s sooo Caltech! (Did you know that probably the most famous cuber — for having partecipated in The beauty and the Geek, no less — was a Caltech student? And did you know that twenty-six moves suffice?)

andrea life

Today is the first day of summer, and it has been 39° Celsius. Summer is supposed to be the most productive period of the year, but I don’t guarantee any productivity over 40°.

Last week commencement took place, the cheerful black-robe ceremony, in which all graduates (Bachelor’s, Master’s and Ph.D.) are called on the stage one by one. It’s a neverending liturgy patiently endured by the families waiting hours for their child’s moment to come.

By the way, after a previous gaffe, I can now distinguish between the Texan and Cuban flag (can you?):

Caltech is quiet now. I presume most undergrads have left for the summer, or maybe they just hide deeper in their caves. Some spend their Californian summer surfing. Except that here “SURF” means Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships. Here is the class of 2008 that will work on Alice, the autonomous car veteran of the Darpa Urban Challenge.

The perspicacious reader might have understood that I bought a new camera, a Sony Alpha 300, which currently is probably better than what I can handle. Coincidently, I discovered that one of next year’s incoming grad students in CDS is a professional photographer. Before starting in the Fall, he’s traveling around the country: I wrote him to enjoy this time, because during the next summers the only animals he will take pictures of are the many squirrels in the campus.

andrea caltech

This is the most interesting paper I read in a while:

“Historical contingency and the evolution of a key innovation in an experimental population of Escherichia coli”

doi:10.1073/pnas.0803151105

The Long Term Evolution Experiment has been growing 12 colonies of E. Coli in controlled conditions since 1988. At one point, after 30000 generations, one of the colonies evolved the ability to synthetize citrate in addition to glucose. Because the researchers had frozen samples from previous generations, they could restart the evolution process from an earlier point and see it happen again.

And no, I’m not doing biology here at Caltech. I would never wait 20 years for my experiments to finish!

andrea research

RoboCup is an international robotic competitions. There are various specialties: wheeled soccer, canine soccer (this is the robot’s perspective), humanoid soccer, rescue robots.

During the even-numbered years, RoboCup is often held in the same country hosting the World Soccer Championship (year = 2 (mod 4)) or the Olympic games (year = 0 (mod 4)). This year it was organized in China.

But a couple of weeks ago, Minoru Asada, the president of RoboCup Federation, announced on the website that “some change might have to occur with respect to RoboCup” (notice the typical Japanese understatement).

Days later it was announced that

Due to the Olympic related issues, the Government in Suzhou, China will not be able to hold RoboCup 2008 IN JULY. Please stop making any reservation of the flights or accommodations to China. Please do not buy any tickets for China. Now, the RoboCup Federation is working for any alternative and let you know the final decision soon. Thanks.

The back story is that, in the aftermath of the Tibetan revolts, the Chinese government had been cancelling “for security reasons” every international event except the games.

Panic and distress spread through the teams, which would have seen a year of preparation wasted.

But yesterday it was announced that “Chinese Organization Chair and RoboCup Trustees managed to stabilize the situation and have RoboCup at the same place and time as planned.”.

I guess that all’s well that ends well, but I would like to know more about what happened behind the scenes.

andrea misc