Companion Blog

I have started a new, companion blog, "Brian Wetton's Short, Daily RL", where (not surprisingly) I hope to make daily, short posts. For various reasons I am in my own head a little too much these days and I am hoping it will be useful to help me get some things out of it. I also imagine that one day I will be a novel writer, following in my father's footsteps. My daughter, who has actually some talent and training in creative writing, says that the best way to improve your writing is just to work at it every day. So, expect the same quality (or lack thereof) in my new blog, just shorter... and daily.

Donations

Our family makes some ongoing donations to some serious causes: Doctors without Borders (MSF), World Vision (sponsoring a child in the third world), and Women Against Violence Against Women (local Vancouver). From what we hear, these are organizations that deserve to be supported. Our family has a comfortable life, it is great that we are able to contribute to others, locally and globally.

This evening, I made a number of small donations to support freeware and free podcasts. The amount of excellent entertainment developed and put online "for free" these days is amazing. The products are freely available but you can voluntarily support them if you choose to, with whatever amount you wish. What amazes me is that people really do pay money, even when they don't have to. Somehow this is a movement and an attitude fundamentally different to standard capitalism. It makes me happy that people will voluntarily step up and pay for something that others can enjoy for free. The world will be filled with things that appeal to selfless people.

So most of the things fall in the geek category, as you can see:

• Wikipedia: Everyone knows this. I find all kinds of useful things here: from Gaussian Quadrature to X-men crossover story details. The science information I find has always been quite accurate. Pop culture information is very detailed. I am amazed at the quality of a resource which anyone can contribute to. Presumably the information on politics and religion can be more biased, although I have never seen anything egregious. I wonder how they manage competing views on a topic. 
• Rachel and Miles X-plain the X-men podcast: The X-men is a long running comic series (well, several series with common characters) that began in 1963. It is a Marvel product, which means that it has a single continuity (well, except for changes due to time travel) for the fifty years of its run (well, there were a few early years when it was on hiatus). Rachel and Miles have a weekly podcast that is slowly working its way through the long history of the series, "X-plaining" some of the weirder plot twists and continuity revisions. Very entertaining. 
• Welcome to Night Vale podcast: It is hard to describe this bi-weekly podcast in a way that will show why it is so entertaining. It is a radio show from a fictitious desert town full of "strange happenings". Imagine H.P. Lovecraft stories been told as news by a mellow radio show host. 
• Simple Comic: This is a freeware comic reader for mac. Displays scanned on e-comics in .cbr and .cbz. There is a version for iPhone, so I can read comics on the bus...
• Thermal Expansion and Minefactory Reloaded: These are two excellent minecraft (a sandbox adventure and building game) mods (programs that modify the original game). Thermal Expansion adds engines, processing machines and automated item and energy transport. There are several other mods that aim to add similar content, but Thermal Expansion is very elegant and gives such great control over functionality. The blocks from this mod are just so nice to work with. Minefactory Reloaded provides a whole array of machines to automate repetitive tasks in the game (planting and harvesting, monster creation and killing for items, animal breeding, enchanting and disenchanting...). Again, there are mods that have some of these functions, but Minefactory just does it more elegantly. Both mods are now grouped together in a common site. I expect great things from the synergy.
• Twilight Forest: This is another minecraft mod. This one adds a whole new world to the game (well, the Twilight Forest). You make a 2 by 2 pool of water, surround it with flowers and throw in a diamond to make the portal. The world is filled with new creatures, structures, treasures and bosses. It is a very fun, fantasy themed addition. 
• Chisel: Another minecraft mod. This is a very simple one, that allows you to "chisel" blocks into new, decorative patterns. It is useable early game on basic blocks and adds a lot of visual interest. 

Pottery Fall 2013

I was back at Britannia community centre this Fall with Helen Spaxman as instructor. I made a bunch of things this time that I liked the direction of but that were not quite right. Some of the ones I was happier with are shown below. The only one I really liked was the two-colour, two-circle pinch bowl. Some good things to follow up on and try to improve.

Israel Trip August, 2013

I was invited to the Technion in Israel to give lectures in a week long Summer school entitled "Microstructure Evolution and Dynamics". You can look on my work page for my lecture notes if you are interested in the technical details. The Technion is the top Science and Engineering university in Israel. It is quite an impressive place. A few times in my career I have had the type of invitation at the level where they pay my way to go and my local expenses. This was one of them. Usually I attend conferences using my own funding from a government research grant. Israel was not high on my list of places to go but since I was going there anyway I figured I should spend a few days as a tourist, so I spent three days before the meeting in Jerusalem.

I stayed in the Hotel Hashimi in the Arab quarter of the old city. The hotel was a short walk in from Damascus Gate, shown below and had a great view from their rooftop garden.

         

The hotel was great: very friendly staff, clean rooms, great breakfast provided, and very reasonable rates. I would recommend it but come prepared that they only take cash as payment. I spent time walking the city walls and shopping in the street markets (although I didn't buy much because I am not a great bargainer). I spent a day outside the old city in West Jerusalem and found a food market and it was fun to check out what they had. I stocked up on food for the Shabbat (more on that later).

Just the age of Jerusalem impressed me (remember I am from Western Canada where non-native history goes back just a couple of hundred years). The layers of history (and physical layers of building) was really impressive to me. The single most impressive sight was the Mosque, Temple of the Rock.

To get to this mosque in the Temple Mount area, there was a fairly serious security checkpoint. In general, Israel is a place with pretty intense security measures. It began in Toronto airport, where the flight to Tel Aviv had an extra security check at the gate. Apparently that is typical for all flights to Israel. At the Technion, there was also a security gate and cars were stopped and their trunks checked. I don't know if it was my Canadian passport or the way I look but I was sent through all these check points with minimal scrutiny. 

I had to make my way from Jerusalem to Haifa, the city on the Northern coast where the Technion is located, on Saturday (the Shabbat). The Jews there take their religious day off quite seriously: stores close and buses and trains don't run. Arab busses run in Jerusalem but they all went the wrong way. I made my way with Sherut taxis (shared taxis) which have a whole makeshift system in place to cover the lack of official travel options. It turned out to be much easier than I thought. 

The Technion is a pretty impressive place, both the buildings and the level of scientific activity. I thought the computer science building, shown below, was architecturally interesting.

     

The place has benefitted from donations from around the world. There were a number of Canadian contributions, including this one right outside the room where the lectures were held:

The meeting itself was very good for me, I really enjoyed the other lectures. A young faculty member there, Nir Gavish, was the one that invited me. I had met him when he was a postdoctoral fellow at Michigan State working with Keith Promislow, who was another of the speakers. Nir is a bright guy with a good eye for problems to work on. I had brief hopes we might hire him at UBC but there was no suitable opening when he was looking and he and his family seem very happy to be back home. The other organizer was Amy Novick-Cohen who I also knew before the meeting. They put together a great event. 

Haifa had some tourist appeal as well. There are long stretches of beach right in the city which we visited one night. It is the centre of the Baha'i faith and this group has some great gardens in the city.

Of course, I wouldn't have centred a new religion in that area. I would have picked somewhere else, where other faiths were a little thinner to the ground. There was a conference excursion to the nearby city of Akko, which also had a very long history, including its use as a Crusader base in the area. Many of the crusader buildings have survived and are being excavated. 

It was hard not to notice the systematic oppression of the Arabs. They have less access to education, restricted areas where they can live, and barriers to many careers. It was hard to look on and not feel how unfair this is. Of course, better people than I have tried to find a way forward. A way that would allow the Israeli Jews to begin the process of reconciliation without being blown up. I can't see that there are any easy answers.  

Chicago Trip May 2013

I am just back from a work trip to Israel. I lectured at a summer school at the Technion in Haifa but before it started I took a few days to be a tourist in Jerusalem. I was getting ready to post some pictures from that trip, but then I realized I had not posted pictures from the trip I made to Chicago in May. This was a trip I made on the train from East Lansing when I was working at MSU. It's an easy trip and a great city to visit.

One of the real attractions is the architecture of the city. I did a boat tour down the river with a guide to the high rise buildings downtown. They really are impressive and quite varied. Since playing minecraft I have more interest (appreciation?) of architecture. Some pictures I took on that trip are shown below.

Below is an outdoor venue (Millenium Park) where I went to a concert one of the evenings I was there. The warm-up band was called Speck Mountain and I quite enjoyed them and later bought their album, Badwater. 

Since views are my thing, I went up the Sears (now Willis) Tower. 

 

Museums are not usually my thing, but everyone had told me I had to see the Art Institute. Having seen the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the British Museum in London it is hard to be impressed. There were quite a few things here that I thought were interesting, mostly the ceramics.

The most interesting art piece for me was this piece by Lee Bontecou. 

Continuing the architectural theme, I did a walking tour through the suburb (Oak Park) that Frank Lloyd Wright began his career in. There are a number of his houses in that area.

The final stop of the tour was a Unitarian Temple he designed in the area.  

Minecraft RiffRaff server

My latest minecraft venture was a custom server put together by the RiffRaffSyndicate. This has an extensive set of increasingly complex mods. I bred bees (yes, the insects) to get ones that had diamonds in their honeycombs. I used a magic sword that could harvest the souls of mobs that you could put into a device that summoned them continuously. I had a summoner of small spiders from the Twilight Forest mod. These, I killed with a machine that harvested their monster essence that I fed into another machine that created other monsters using a template from a single captured one (which I then killed with another machine to harvest things they dropped on death). I built a tower with decorations of gold blocks made from nuggets harvested from Zombie Pigmen in this way. I do understand that this is the equivalent of dressing up in costumes of Star Trek characters, but furry. But if you are in the scene, furry trekkies are probably a lot of fun.

So some of my creations from the RiffRaff server are shown below. This server updates every few months. My base on the first world was called Bwandir. Shown below are my enchanting and power rooms. They feature a lot of decorative elements from the Twilight Forest, a magical realm you can enter through portals.

I was reluctant to leave this base and move to the new world on an update, but then I blew most of it up in a GregTech explosion and decided I might as well move on. My new base was called Isengard. It was supposed to be this evil base where trees were cut down by machines, villagers were held captive, and there were fell creatures bred in underground caverns. I did all that, but then I got into bee breeding and they pollinated flowers everywhere. This kind of ruined the evil mood. Below are the main tower of the base and the stairwell into the dungeons (built into a quarry pit).

Since towers seem to be my thing, I built another one for decoration. This is the one with gold blocks for decoration inside. There were arcane levitators from Thaumcraft 3 in various places in this one. Thaumcraft, Forestry and the Twilight Forest were the major new mods to me on this server, all great ones. 

So I am waiting for the server to update. The world will be re-created but we are allowed to take some things with us. I built a small transfer house and filled it with chests - mostly of bees and saplings of special trees since they took a long time to breed. I should say that all these servers are free - run by fans just like the mods are free and made by fans. I have offered to contribute to the servers I have joined but they never take me up on it. This is a great, alternative server. I am surprised it is not more popular. 

Minecraft Tekkit Modpacks

After playing out my interest in "vanilla" Minecraft I discovered that there were a number of fan created modifications (mods) of the original game. These exist with some kind of blessing from the company that makes Minecraft (Mojang), in that you still need an account on the original game and then add in the extra code for these mods. There are a whole range of mods out there, some add new blocks that look interesting, some complex machinery, some more magic items and mobs. On the recommendation of my son, I tried out the Tekkit modpack, which is a collection of compatible mods designed by different people. Some of the mods I tried out in this pack were Equivalent Exchange 2 (EE2), Buildcraft and IndustrialCraft. EE2 was a magic mod, in which you could transform and create matter into any form. It had some fantastic end game equipment that let you fly, grow things instantly, and mine huge areas in one stroke. It takes the name from an anime series, in which there is alchemy that will let you transform matter into new forms, but not let you change one kind of matter into another. EE violated this in that you could change anything into anything else (and later on, from nothing using matter condensers). I appreciated the mod but in the end didn't like the fact that you could make anything out of any old junk lying around (if you had enough of it). It kind of ruins the joy of finding the blocks you were looking for after a long search. Below is my first settlement. Pumpkins had a high EE matter value, which is why I formed them (you could turn a stack of pumpkins into a diamond).

Next I explored the Buildcraft mod, which had engines (and oil which could be refined into fuel), pipes and automatic crafting. This is a fun mod. There are no special tools, but the mechanical items are cool. One of the most fun things is the quarry machine, which will automatically mine a square area down to bedrock when powered by engines. Buildcraft also has some automatic building machines which I used to make the factory buildings below. IndustrialCraft is a sister mod to Buildcraft, very compatible, with electric type machines and tools. The tools are quite interesting - there are electric replacements for axes and pickaxes but also things like electric jetpacks which let you fly (not far and not quickly - but still, flying is pretty useful). There are solar panels and other kinds of generators for electricity and the ultimate machine is the matter fabricator that makes UU-matter, a kind of pink blob that you can transform into most other materials. It comes close to the problems of EE but it is harder to make in quantities and you can only use it once to make other things.

I didn't try out Tekkit long before a new version came out. The old version became "Tekkit Classic" and the new one was "Tekkit Lite" (light in the sense of computational resources). New versions of Minecraft come out, the mods which fans write are not always updated and the community wants to see new things. So, these modpacks are constantly in flux. In the new version, there were quite a few new things to play around with. Thermal Expansion is a very well put together mod of machines for Buildcraft (energy storage, powered furnaces, etc.). This is not a flashy mod, but a real pleasure to work with. ComputerCraft has these cute little robots (turtles) that you can program in Lua. I have one farming in the picture below. These are a bit of a pain because the program stops when you quit the game and you have to restart your system when you start up again. Further below is one of Steve's Carts doing automated mining. Steve's Carts is another well thought out and balanced mod. 

Playing around this time, I also built a nuclear reactor in IC2. This is my totally safe and efficient Mk1 breeder reactor. It only went critical and exploded once :) I think I must have put the components in the wrong way that time, because it should be foolproof. 

All the stuff above was in a single player environment. I also joined a Tekkit Lite server, run by Tmek. This was a very fun group and I built up a tech base there similar to the things above. I built a power suit using the Modular Powersuits mod, which allows for very fast movement and flight. The thing I was happiest with was the set of towers I built just for show. Each tower is supposed to represent a season.