Give someone a boiled peanut and tell them it's a boiled peanut, they'll be like, "This is disgusting". Give that same person a boiled peanut and tell them it's a bean that tastes peanuty, they'll be like, "This is pretty good." It's sad that people are so mentally jailed by their own expectations.

Fish tacos are good unless:

1. you don't like fish
2. you don't like tacos
3. you have mental impediment

We might also note that fish tacos are not the same kind of tacos you eat in a crispy corn shell with ground beef, lettuce, and shredded cheese, in case anyone doesn't know. (I could see that being a little weird.) Fish tacos are actual Mexican tacos, which means fish, shredded veggies, a squeeze of lemon or lime, and a bit of salsa or avocado maybe, on soft corn tortillas. Lots of people who claim to hate fish tacos would love it if you threw the same ingredients on a bun and called it a fish sandwich, or if you serve it without the tortilla and call it fish slaw. Hell, if you serve you serve it with a tortilla, i.e., the exact same dish, and called it fish slaw.

These are some academic papers I've written for school, all for Aerospace Engineering courses. Although none of these are genuine research, nor were any published in journals, I have encountered an occasional proceedings or business publication that cites the web version of these papers.

Searching for Lyapunov Functions using Genetic Progamming (PDF Version §)

Here, I present genetic programming as a possible general method for finding Lyapunov functions. (Lyapunov functions are functions by which one can prove the stability of a nonlinear dynamic system.) This paper describes genetic programming, and how it can be used to find Lyapunov functions. This paper demonstrates that genetic programming is at least worth a better look. I now realize that there is a grave oversight in this method as I've implemented it, although the fix is obvious. [AOE 5984, Nonlinear Control, Virginia Tech]

Self-Tuning Control with Control Allocation (PDF Version †)

This investigates adaptive control: namely self-tuning control which uses parameter identification to determine control effectiveness for use in control allocation. This project is one of the main reasons I decided to abandon my research on on-line parameter identification. After doing this work, I no longer think on-line parameter identification is that important. [ECE 6414, Adaptive Control, Virginia Tech]

A Discussion of Methods of Real-Time Airplane Flight Simulation (PDF Version ‡, slightly modified from what I turned in)

This what the scholarly paper which was a part of my Master's Degree requirements. There are some annoying errors in it, but it's mostly quite detailed and accurate. It describes mathematics and computer implementation of flight simulation.

Composite V-22 Blade Design

Documents my unsuccessful attempt to design a V-22 rotor blade whose shape adapts to the flight condition (hover or propeller) using anisotropic effects of fiber-reinforced composites. Because rotor speed, and thus the centrifugal force, is much higher in hover mode, I wanted to use the extra force to twist the blade into an optimal shape. [Aerospace 597I: Behavior of Advanced Structures, Penn State]

Helicopter Dynamic Stability

In this paper, I do an analysis of helicopter dynamic modes. I am a little amazed that I managed this one, and I think my professor was, too. There's some really advanced stuff in there. As for the results, I doubt their accuracy. They look quasi-reasonable, but I suspect there was a mistake lurking in my code. (Incidentally, although I had to have put at least 30 hours into this project, I whistled through the whole thing. Dynamics just interests me.) [Aerospace 504: V/STOL Aerodynamics, Penn State]

Boundaray Layers

A brief explanation of how boundary layers can really simplify the complicated incompressible Navier-Stokes equations of fluid dynamics. [Aerospace 508: Fundamentals of Fluid Dynamics, Penn State]

The Hodograph Transformation

I describe the hodograph transformation, which is an interesting analytical technique whereby certain nonlinear equations in aerodynamics can be transformed into linear equations. [Aerospace 597D: Topics in Applied Aerodynamics, Penn State]

Project Asterius: Mission to Europa

Here is a report I wrote with my spacecraft design team: Amy Briggs, Becky Carver, Patrick Morinelli, Brian Sarsfield, and Mark Newey. It descibes our design for a Europa Lander. We all learned a lot, and had a lot fun, but our design methodology was utterly terrible. I can't bring myself to read the report any more. [Aerospace 402B: Spacecraft Design, Penn State]

It can be done.

Today I got my car back after two months in the shop after a month sitting in my garage unused (when I was too busy to attend to it). [1]

But I want to make it clear that good public transit was a big part of my decision where to move to where I live now (Santa Monica), and that my job is fortuitously right across from a bus terminal on the other end of the line. [2] In fact, I had been taking the bus to work for about a month before my car's transmission started to go. Around the same time I had a big project at work that was nearing a deadline, and so I never got around to taking the car in for service till a month later.

So for that month and the next two, I took buses (and, in a couple cases, a train) everywhere. Granted, I don't exactly have a vibrant social life, and I have a lot of the stores I need within a few blocks of my apartment. Also, I found that at no point did I have a need to hit anything like a Target [3], which would have been a pain. But the bus was able to get me where I needed to go: doctor's appointments, destinations here and there, and downtown L.A.

So, the next time someone tells you it's impossible to live in L.A. without a car, I am proof that it's definitely possible.

Still, I'm really happy to finally have the car back. In fact, I was so happy I went to the supermarket and filled up a whole cart.

Footnotes:

One of the main complaints consumers have is about companies who "nickle and dime" them all the time, meaning that they charge small fees for a bunch of things that aren't part of the up-front, advertised cost. Airlines charge fees for baggage, food, and earphones that aren't part of the ticket prices. Banks and credit cards charge all sorts of financing and usage feeds. Hotels charge for extra blankets. And so on.

Personally, I say bring it on.

First of all, we have to address a common myth. People think that companies resort to nickling and diming in order to squeeze out every little bit of profit they can, no matter how petty. Although it's true that the goal of nickling and diming is to increase profits, the idea isn't to profit directly off of petty things.

The fact is, these companies already know how much money to charge so as to maximize their profit margin (or, for airlines, to minimize their losses). Nickling and diming customers will acutally reduce their margins, unless the price increase is offset by a lower base price. And that is exactly what the real purpose of nickling and diming is: to allow those companies to charge less money for their basic service while maintaining their margins.

"But isn't that false marketing?" you ask.

Well, yes, sometimes it is, when the fee is unavoidable. But here's the thing: most nickle and dime fees aren't unavoidable. They're mostly for add-ons: optional amenities on top of the basic service.

Personally, I hardly ever use these optional amenities, and I'm rather happy to know I'm not subsidizing other customers' usage. In fact, I sometime rue how many amenities the basic service includes, thinking how many dollars I could have saved if I didn't have to subsidize those amenities for other customers (especially in hotels). And, when I do use optional services, I'm happy to pay for my own consumption, rather than burden other customers with it. The sword cuts both ways for me.

I don't deny that the actual economics is more complicated than I've presented here, nor that there are many shady uses for the "hidden fee". But the bottom line is, most of the time, nickling and diming customers reduces my price. So I say, more nickling and diming.

Nonfiction is one of the most popular genres of books sold today. It's also the genre with the absolute least amount of imagination when it comes to book titles. In fact, all nonfiction titles follow five basic rules.

Rule 1: All nonfiction books must have both a title and subtitle.

There are no exceptions to this rule. All nonfiction, every single book ever published, adheres to this rule.

Rule 2: The title will be in one of these three forms:

1. <single_proper_noun_or_name>

2. <optional_definite_article> <option_proper_noun> <noun> <preposition> the <noun_phrase>

3. <adjective> <plural_or_collective_noun>

   
   

Rule 3: The subtitle will be in one of these five forms:

1. A <adjective> Look at the World of <noun> in <optional location>

2. The Story/Untold Story/Tragedy/Triumph/Defeat/Victory/Lessons of the <optional_proper_noun> <noun> in <optional_location>

3. How the <proper_noun> Expedition/Voyage/Incident/Experiment/War <optional_prepositional_phrase> Changed the World/Ended Slavery/Is Destroying America

4. A Journey into <abstract_place>

5. The Day/Night/Hour <something_bad_happened>

   
   

Rule 4: Only the subtitle is allowed to identify the book's contents.

The title alone should never, ever be sufficient to allow someone to guess what the book is about. Preferrably, the title shouldn't have anything to do with the contents except in the most abstract, metaphorical sense.

Rule 5: The word "secret" may appear anywhere in the title or subtitle even if it violates Rules 2 and 3.

That's it: these five rules are sufficient to cover the title of all nonfiction books ever published. Let's take a look at some examples of valid titles.

• Great Bass: A Comprehensive Look at the World of Fly-Fishing in Steamboat Springs, Colorado
• Dark Valleys: The Untold Story of the Fall of the Amazon Hunter
• Men of the Tundra: How the Chadwick Expedition Changed the World
• The Pendregoth Scandal: A Journey into the Secret Dark Mind of Barry Goodfellow
• Frozen Blankets: The Night the Cold Came to Okruk
• Bronze Rain: Lessons of the Ambush in Chicketaw Valley
• Broken Eggshells: How the War of America's Youth on our Police Force is Destroying America
• Thomas Jefferson: A Journey into the Secret Life of the Slaves at Monticello
• Secret Sailors of the Silent Service: How the Bluefin Voyage Changed the World

Professional Photograph:

High School Yearbook Picture:

A Candid Photograph:

Another Candid Photograph:

Photograph of the MTS Machine and me:

(Interesting note: The photographer of this picture, Regina

Kauffman, was on the crew of the EC9 spyplane that emergency

landed in China.)

Photograph from my Football Days:

Photograph of me in the Virginia Tech Flight Simulation Lab:

My Brother Victor and me in Tempe, Arizona:

My Mom and me in Nogales, Mexico:

Me standing with the SR-71 in Tuscon, Arizona:

South Park caricature:

Professional Photograph with some interesting image processing:

Photograph from my days as a Calvin Klein model:

On a boat on Lake Waconia:

In a restaurant next to Mom:

A more up-to-date South Park caricature:

I've had a web presence since 1995.

In those 15 years, many things about the World Wide Web have changed tremendously, but one thing has remained the same: my web pages have been almost entirely static. Except for a few minor cgi-bin applications (including the Oracle of Notre Dame in a previous form), all my web content was edited on my desktop, uploaded, and served as-is.

Well, I've finally jumped on the dynamic content bandwagon. Welcome to my new blog. Like any respectable web app, it stores content in a database and retrieves it upon request.

So what pushed me over? Well, it's mostly a matter of the right technologies coming together and getting support from inexpensive web hosts. Until recently (last few years), most inexpensive web hosts only supported dynamic content with PHP (which I will never touch) and cgi-bin scripts. CGI is terrible for anything more than trivial apps. But lately web hosts are supporting a wider variety of web frameworks (largely due to the success of Ruby on Rails, I think).

With that development I began considering to implement my own dynamic content in Python. There are now tons of libraries one can leverage to take care of the gory details (and that's all I wanted—which is why I didn't go with a framework like Django). I found CherryPy to be especially helpful to take care of all the HTTP aspects, while not being overly formulaic to use. The major libraries that came together for my blog are:

• CherryPy manages the HTTP aspects
• Mako manages the HTML templating
• Docutils converts user input to HTML
• SQLAlchemy manages the database
• Elixir set up the SQLAlchemy's ORM classes

I threw together a couple small apps with CherryPy and SQLAlchemy, and then decided I was ready to try for a blog, and here it is.

Update

August 6, 2010

Facebook added an application kill switch, which I invoked, so now all applications are blocked. Yay.

Here is a list of Facebook apps I've blocked. With one minor exception, my policy is not to allow any third-party Facebook apps.

Even though I use Facebook sparingly (it's mostly there just in case people want to find me), I find Facebook apps irritating enough to stomp out and brag about it. Besides being annoying information vomit, they are often also security risks (they can phish information from your Facebook profile if you allow them).

The first 20 or so apps on this list I blocked before even having used them; when I first signed up I browsed through the most popular apps and blocked them all. I take great pride in having blocked SuperPoke without ever having been SuperPoked.

Here's the list:

• Causes
• MyCalendar
• Birthday Calendar
• Abrazos
• IQ Test
• Agenda de cumpleaños
• Pittsburgh Steelers Fans
• Top Friends
• Collect Hearts
• Pieces of Flair
• Birthday Cards
• SuperPoke!
• (lil) Green Patch
• Pass a Drink
• Slide FunSpace
• Texas HoldEm Poker
• Hugged
• Circle of Friends
• RockYou live
• Pink Ribbon
• We're Related
• Music
• Pillow Fight
• Food Fling!
• Which TV Mom are You?
• What is the theme song of ur life???
• Which celebrity should you marry?
• Name Generators
• livingSocial
• Yearbook
• How Well Do You Know Me?
• FARKLE
• Growing up in Oakmont, Pa.
• Send Your Friends Terrible Towels!
• Pittsburgh Steelers Swag
• Send Your Friends hugs!

Dear the five or so job recruiters per day who try to contact me:

First of all, I would like to thank you for your interest. It is comforting to know that I always have options. However, several aspects of you methodology have been a source of irritation to me, so I thought I'd write this letter to make you aware of this.

1. Please do not cold call me. I realize that calling the victim, er, prospective employee is the modus operandi of some of you, and that's perfectly fine. But, there a little problem here. You see, the resume I have up on Monster.com has a contact preference set to "Email." And when that didn't work, I decided to put a line at the very top, right in the objective, that says "ATTN Recruiters: please contact me by email only, not telephone." But that didn't work either. I may have to remove my phone number altogether (which I don't want to do, because I would like someone I've communicated with to be able to refer to it to get my number).

   You see, it's really annoying to get 2 or 3 calls a day while at work, oftentimes when I'm at a meeting. Which brings me to my next annoyance....

2. Ok, you've decided to cold call me. Why in God's Holy Name would you call me during work hours? Isn't that the worst time imaginable? "Hell-lo, Meester Bonks, my nay-yam is Hajib, er, Michael, I-ee om calleeng you on behoff of a large tech-no-loj-ee-cal firm. Do you have twoo meenutes to speek with me?" Um, yeah, sure Hajib, I'm sure my coworkers won't suspect anything if I shout my preferred job locations into a phone for the benefit of a guy in India with a bad connection. Which brings me to my third annoyance....

3. Don't use non-native English speakers to recruit. You've outsourced your call center, your software division, your manufacturing, your accounting department, and so on. Fine, you gotta roll with the times. But if there's one thing you don't want to outsource to non-native speakers, under any circumstances, it's recruiting. Let's take a look at my thought process to figure out why. "Hell-lo, Meester Bonks, my ney-yam is Okmed, er, Matt...." Hmm, some Indian guy is calling me about a job. I'm not too familiar with the firm he's mentioning. I wonder if I should consider working for it? Well, let's see, what do I know about this company so far? Number one: They outsource jobs to Asia. Yeah, great first impression there, what American wouldn't want to work for a company that has a history of shipping jobs overseas?

   To be honest, I don't personally care about this so much; from a purely economic perspective it makes sense to outsource. And I am the sort that wouldn't exactly be crushed by unemployment. In fact, I'd probably volunteer if there were upcoming layoffs. But, a recruiter does have to talk about more varied things than a customer service rep. I don't mind talking to Hajib over a billing issue, but over a potential job is a little much.

4. If you're not going to read my resume, please don't act like you did. All too often I get emails like this: "Greetings Carl, I have personally reviewed your resume and I believe you would be an excellent fit for this job opportunity. If you have an MSEE and 7+ years experience working with PLC, please respond with an updated resume in Word format." Um, dude? You just claimed in the very previous sentence that you reviewed my resume. I shouldn't have to tell you that I don't have an MSEE nor 7 years experience in anything.

   If you're going to send out mass emails based on keywords, fine, but don't be a pretentious fool by claiming you read my resume.

5. Give me details about the job. My rule of thumb is that I don't respond to any recruiter who's failed to supply at least three things: a brief job description, a job location, and a description of the firm. This should be a common sense thing for a recruiter to provide. I get emails like this all the time: "We are looking for an experienced Python developer. Please call me if you are interested." Um, how the hell would I know if I'm interested or not? All I have to go on is Python developer. That's not a brief job decription. What kind of Python developer? What software domain? There's nothing about a job location or firm.

   Even a bit of information might pique my interest; for instance, I'd probably respond to this solicitation: "A medium-size aeronautical firm in Northern California that is looking for an experienced Python developer to write user-friendly interfaces for numerical simulations." Conversely, the tiny bit of information might be enough to rule out the offer, saving everyone's time. When recruiters don't volunteer this information, I assume they have something to hide and ignore it.

6. Emailing me a tenth time isn't going to get me to alter my decision to have ignored you the previous nine times. If I don't respond, it's because I wasn't interested. Sometimes if a person is polite and emails me back for an answer, yes or no, I'll write them back to say no. But mostly these repeated messages are just spam.

7. There's a reason that, although I live in Cincinnati, Cincinnati isn't listed among my preferred locations on my Monster resume. Hint: It's because I don't want to work in Cincinnati.

I think you for reading this, and I would encourage you to pass this on to any of your friends to that all may be enlightened.

Yours truly,

Carl Banks

The Apostrophe Rule is a rule I made up while advising someone on an Internet forum what to do about his wife who would always talk his ear off. I've been told many times how clever the rule is, so I thought I'd share it with the whole world.

The husband in question here didn't want to shut his wife down completely, I guess because he thought gossiping was the highlight of her day, or something. Anyway I gave him this rule which is designed merely to set boundaries about who she can talk about, and it's pretty clever. Here is the rule as the husband would dictate it to his wife:

You may not gossip about anyone you need an apostrophe to name.

If you think about it for a moment, it's clear how and why it works, but I'll give some examples anyway. First of all, people who are on first name basis with both spouses are acceptable, since they can be named with their actual name, no apostrophe needed. Any relative or friend of the wife would be acceptable; she could name them as "my sister", "my mom", "my best friend", "my coworker", "my dentist", etc. However, the rule kicks in once she starts getting to "my sister's friend", "my coworker's niece", "my mom's psychiatrist", "Dawn's hairdresser", etc. Those people need apostrophes to be named, so she is not allowed to talk about them.

This rule has two benefits. It limits the number of people available for the wife to gossip about, ostensibly reducing the overall time she'll be able to spend gossiping. Also it helps limit the gossip to be about people that the husband is less uninterested in.

As far as I know, I am the first person to come up with this rule. I've had a lot of people follow-up with praise for this rule whenever I post it. They will write, "Wow, that's a really good rule." I've even had women say they would respect men who instituted it. It seems that a lot of people like rule.

The Apostrophe Rule is slightly related to an observation I made about urban legends, which I'll call the Apostrophe Theorem even though it isn't a theorem and isn't even always true, for that matter. It's just cool to call things theorems. It goes like this:

Whenever someone claims a dubious, urban-legend type story really happened to someone they need an apostrophe to name, it isn't true.

Point is, stuff you hear from the grapevine, even short grapevines, isn't trustworthy, which is why gossip about your father's brother's nephew's cousin's former roommate is so inane. What's the point of listening to all that when it's probably not even true? Some people have an instinctual filter to that causes untrustworthy information to bore us; others don't. That's why we need the Apostrophe Rule.