VAST Contest 08

One of the things that sucked up a week of my evenings this summer was the VAST contest. VAST is a visualization conference, and I had decided to submit to a contest they were hosting. The premise of the contest is to use or develop tools to analyze a dataset and discover the threat. They provided sample datasets, and our job was to look at them and find out what was going on, who were the suspects, and how the social network was organized.

It happens that two of the major pieces of software that I’ve been developing at the lab do exactly that, and I figured it would be a great opportunity to show off the tool and see how well it works. So I downloaded the dataset and promptly forgot about it until one week before the entries were due. Then I worked like mad and submitted at the last possible minute. I was at the lab till 1 or 2am each day that week working on the datasets and my software and tweaking and exploring and writing up my results and putting together video explanations.

The contest was divided into four completely separate challenges. The first had to do with edits to a wiki page. We were given a fake wiki page and all the edits to it and were told to look at the edits and determine who was on what team, and if any of the teams had any malicious intent. I used one of my programs first to filter out a lot of the junk edits and grammar fixes and spam, then filtered by number of contributions to find out who were the key players. Then I read through the conversations and split the teams up by who was arguing with each other, eventually coming up with a pair of teams. It was a lot more complex than that, but that was the gist.

The second challenge was migrant boats. We were given an XML file that contained fake coast guard interdictions, where boats bound for the Florida coast were stopped by the Coast Guard. There was a lot of metadata associated with the interdictions. For this one, I used a custom Google Map to plot the interdictions, then had a slider bar that showed me where they were taking place over time. I also used color coded markers to show me the kinds of boats used, the number of deaths, where they landed, and other interesting statistics.

The third challenge was cell phone calls. For this one we were given a list of cell phone records that included from, to, tower, date, and duration. We had to figure out who was who by the calls they made, and determine the whole network and who was doing what just from that data. I came up with some interesting results using color-coded tables and my network graphing tool. I also was able to plot the calls on a timeline and showed how some people appeared to be on conference calls because they overlapped their calls a lot.

The final challenge was my favorite, and the one on which I spent the most time. I had to write a lot more software for this one, too. We were given a fake building and fake locations of the occupants of the building over time. We had to look at the data to determine what happened when, who was a suspect, who was a witness, who was a casualty, and anything else interesting. I wrote software that let the user choose which people to watch and over what time period, so you could scroll around and see interesting things. Here’s a picture of it:

If you want to see my whole entry for the contest, you can go here: http://www.bobbaddeley.com/vast08/. Each of the sections has my evaluation as well as a video of me describing how I approached the problem. In the end I didn’t win any awards, but I was the only applicant from PNNL, and I think I was the only team that was a single person. I think I’ll be a lot more prepared for next year, and I fully intend to win some awards.

Mountain Cake

Nick’s birthday was in July, and Carolyn called me to ask if I could pick up the cake for the birthday party. She hadn’t ordered one yet, so I offered to make one instead. I knew Nick loves to go camping and hiking, so I thought I’d make the cake themed around that. I wanted to make an actual mountain cake, and it took me a while to think about how I would do it using regular cake sheets. I had 2 9″ rounds and 1 8×12, so I decided to go with that. I would have the 8×12 as a base, then somehow cut the 9″ rounds to make a mountain out of them. They came out of the oven just in time for me to go to a dinner at someone’s house.

On my way home, I stopped by Winco for some ingredients. I picked up some chocolate ‘rocks’, dried papaya, and gumdrops. Then I started the process. I decided to do two mountains of different sizes, and cut them so that I could maximize use of the cake and have decent looking mountains. The result is the stepped kind of thing, and if I had to do it again I think I’d trim it so that it was more sloped and uneven like a real mountain. I struggled with the frosting. I had made a bunch from scratch, and tried to use food coloring to get a mountain color, but ended up with a brownish green that didn’t please me. Further, there wasn’t nearly enough of it. Fortunately, I had some brown frosting in my cupboard, so I used that for the base and first layer. Then I used the green, then I covered the peaks with my homemade white frosting. Now frosted, I started to add the decorations. I used the chocolate rocks like little boulder fields and large rocks sticking out of the mountain. Some people actually thought they were real rocks. I sliced the green gumdrops into a forest of little trees sticking up. And I carved the dried papaya roughly into a person shaped thing, though it was way out of scale. Finally, I used a tube of blue frosting to show a waterfall down the mountain into a stream that spelled out Happy Birthday.

It was a total of about 3-4 hours of work, and with the exception of the chocolate rocks, the gumdrops, and some of the frosting, was entirely from scratch.

Fudge Fudge Fudge

The last few weeks I’ve been working insane hours. Some very important stuff is happening at work, and there is a lot of potential for some huge things to happen, and I’m right in the middle of it. It’s very exciting. Ten or twelve hour days most days. There was a bit of a party at work today and I promised to bring a dessert. Last night I got back from work at about 11 pm and started the fudge.

There were three batches; one after another. The first batch was regular chocolate with walnuts. After that I did mint and chocolate. The third was white chocolate with walnuts. I put them in the fridge overnight to harden and went to bed.

In the morning I got up early to cut it up and realized I had made a mistake. The fudge was fine; tasty in fact. But fudge is wont to stick to the pan, and I had forgotten to line the pan with wax paper or saran wrap. It didn’t affect the fudge at all, but it did mean I had to spend a lot longer extracting it from the pan, cutting it up first and pulling each piece out of the pan. Oh well. Next time I’ll remember and it’ll go faster.

I got a lot of mileage out of the fudge, too. I had made a lot for a reason. First was the party. Then it ended up in the kitchen for everyone to enjoy. I brought some to one of my weekly meetings. I also made up special plates for some of the admins who have helped me lately. I had to arrange some pretty crazy travel in the next couple weeks (From Pasco to Boston on United Airlines, Boston to Florida on Northwest airlines, then Florida back to Pasco on Delta. The Boston to Florida part was a close call and there was only one flight that would have gotten me from one meeting to the next on time, and I managed to get the flight). Our travel people were great, and they’ve always been great, so I promised them some fudge. Today I delivered, and they loved it. I also brought it around to some of my coworkers and project managers. It’s amazing how much giving people sweets gets you on their good side, and it comes back in great ways when you need a favor. More importantly, though, it’s just nice to see people enjoy the things I make.

Key Lime Pie

This weekend I tried another kind of pie. I’ve been wanting to do a key lime pie for a while, and I promised the admin at work that I’d bring in something nice for her. I was having dinner at a friend’s house, too, so the pie got to pull double duty.

Anyway, I used my typical nilla wafer crust, then followed the recipe for the lemon filling, which was surprisingly easy. The recipe said to use whipping cream when you serve it, but I needed the pie to last a few days and didn’t want to bother carrying separate whipping cream around, so I took the meringue recipe from the lemon meringue pie I had made a couple weeks prior and used that instead. I baked it for a quarter hour, and it came out just right. I was of course worried that the filling hadn’t solidified, but with the meringue on top there was no way of knowing until I cut into it.

Fortunately, at dinner it turned out to be perfect. It was very sweet, but it tasted perfect. The next day my admin and manager got slices, and a couple other people. It went over really well with them, too. It’s definitely a dessert I’ll do again, and it was pretty easy to do, too.

My Latest Mad Scientist Device

My friend Carolyn is getting an advanced degree through W.S.U Tri-Cities. One of the things she’s currently working on is a project that involves the use of an electric field to speed up bone regeneration. In the future, they hope to have biodegradable implants that could be placed at the site of a bone break that would create an electric current and help the bone grow faster. Right now they’re testing whether the current does have an effect on bone growth. Because of my ability with electronics, and my inability to say no to anything that sounds remotely cool, I ended up building the prototype testing device. I worked a lot with Carolyn to figure out what exactly she needed, and she was kind enough to order most of the parts and take care of getting me the materials I asked for. The electronics was up to me, though, and putting it together was my bag.

Essentially, the prototype has 12 ‘wells’ that will contain mouse bone cells immersed in a solution. They will be subjected to different currents for different durations. So I had to build something that would allow us to turn on and off the current to each well, and adjust the amount of electricity flowing through each well. The circuit is actually really simple, and the parts came from a variety of places. We’re even using straightened paper clips to dip into the solution.

It took me a lot of time to put it together. Well, one evening and one full day. But it looks great, and I’ve done a little bit of testing on it to make sure it’ll work. There are a couple extra features that will really help; the LEDs show which wells are turned on, and some pins on the side of the contraption will allow us to measure the voltage across the solution and the resistance of the solution.

I’m really excited about it, and pleased with my handiwork. It looks really slick from the top, and looking at it underneath makes a lot of sense and is pretty slick. Pretty much everything just seemed to work how I envisioned it. I did run into a couple snags along the way, but nothing I couldn’t handle.

I hope it will work for Carolyn. It’d be a shame to see it not used. Here are some pics of the device.

The Electrocuter from the top
The Electrocuter from the bottom. There's a lot of soldering and wire routing on there.

Brownie King

My last two pans of brownies have been my best ever. Modesty has no place in describing the awesomeness of these batches of cookie/cake goodness. If I had scaled up production, I could have created world peace.

The first batch was on Easter where we cellebrated the new . I was invited to an early Easter dinner on the morning of, and asked to bring dessert. By the time I got home, I had only an hour to make a dessert, clean myself, and drive 15 minutes over there. Frantically looking through my recipe books, I found that all of the desserts had 20 minutes or more of prep and 40 minutes or more of baking, with another hour or more for cooling. Fortunately, a butterscotch brownie recipe required only 10 minutes of prep and 30 minutes of cooking, which would have it coming out of the oven the minute I was leaving. I hurried through the recipe and poured it into a round cake pan and into the oven. I cleaned myself up and got dressed, then made a nice white vanilla glaze with butter and powdered sugar and vanilla. I already had a chocolate glaze from the cheesecake a few weeks before, but I wanted to have the black and white sauces to play with in the presentation, especially since the brownie was a very light brown (it didn’t have any chocolate in it because it was butterscotch), so the black, white, and light brown would work out well. A quick stop at the grocery store on the way for vanilla ice cream, and I arrived right on time. After dinner I went into the kitchen to plate the brownies. I put a slice of brownie (which was still warm from the oven) onto a plate, then put two round scoops of ice cream on the plate next to it. I heated the sauces in the microwave for a few seconds, then drizzled them over the brownie and ice cream. Here’s a photo:

It went over pretty well.

Last night I made the second pan. I had promised the group admin at work that I would bring in brownies this week for her. I wanted to make something besides regular brownies, so I found a recipe that had cream cheese filling and nuts. I made the brownie part, then I made the cream cheese part, which had cream cheese, sugar, eggs, and vanilla. I poured part of the brownie mix into the pan, then the cream cheese mix on top of it, then finished with the rest of the brownie on top, careful to cover all the cream cheese mix with the brownie. I took it out of the oven at just the right time: when the toothpick doesn’t quite come out clean, so it’s still moist, but it’ll cook for a little bit longer after you’ve taken it out. I brought it in to work and offered it to coworkers, brought it in to meetings, and distributed it to all the admins and other people who might come in handy when I need a favor fast. It’s fun to cook, fun to see other people enjoy your food, and it’s saved my butt a few times when I needed paperwork handled or something done. It’s also good for getting people to remember you. Anyway, this batch of brownies went over really well. I got a few emails from people amazed at how good they were. I’m eating one now and I can say it’s way up there on the list of best things I’ve baked.

I apologize for the bragging, but I was very proud of my latest brownie attempts, and they were completely from scratch and weren’t your standard chocolate brownie. These were GOOD.

April Fools Cake

This year I played a prank on the whole building. It happened in two parts. The first part was more of an anti-prank in that it was actually not a prank at all but everybody thought it was one. Here’s what happened:

The night before, I made a cake. A nice white cake (from scratch) with frosting (also from scratch). I put lettering on top that said “Happy April Fools!” in bright blue.

I brought it in to work the next day and kept it in my office until mid-afternoon, when I figured people had returned from lunch and were in the mood for some cake. I sent an email to the entire building saying there was homemade cake in the kitchen to celebrate April first, then set the cake out there. I had saved a couple pieces for myself so that I could try it and so that the cake would have been started and everybody would continue to cut into it.

Surprisingly, it took all of 30 minutes for the cake to disappear. When I was putting it in the kitchen people were asking me what was in it, telling each other they didn’t trust me, wondering if it had toothpaste or some other unnatural cake ingredient. I didn’t say anything to them other than that they should have a piece. Back in my office people were messaging me asking if there really was cake in there (not wanting to be fooled into thinking there was a cake that didn’t exist), and asking me if there was anything wrong with the cake. There really wasn’t. It was a pretty tasty cake. But watching people’s suspicion was hilarious.

Once the cake had been consumed, I sent out a second email to the building. This was part two of the gag. It said that the first cake had been consumed and that the antidote cake was now in the kitchen, but it was half as big as the first, so they should hurry. I got a few replies back that it was funny, and a few people went to see if there really was a second cake. This time there wasn’t a cake, because there was no need for an antidote (and I was baking the first cake late at night and didn’t have time to do a second).

In all it was a pretty innocuous prank, but in an office environment playing a prank on an entire building without getting in serious trouble is very difficult. The cake was really good, and people appreciated it. I’m pretty happy with the way things went, and a lot of people got a good laugh out of it.

The Mobius Panorama

A few months ago I hit on the idea of the mobius panorama. I can’t remember exactly why I thought about it, but it was an interesting idea, and I spent the next few hours thinking about how it could be done. There are a few things about the panorama that have to be true for it to be mobius-able. There has to be a weird kind of symmetry; the bottom left of the image has to work with the top middle. Not very many images will work for this. The best way to go about it is to start with a reflection panorama, where the top half is real and the bottom half is its reflection in a lake. It doesn’t have to be symmetrical across the length the entire way, you could have a mountain/lake reflection, then a wide open scene for 180 degrees, then another mountain/lake reflection that also is continuous with the first mountain/lake reflection, then another wide open scene for the other 180 degrees. I didn’t have that image readily available. I think it’ll take me a while to find. In the meantime, here’s my start:

There are two things to note about this image. First, it is symmetrical along its horizontal axis thanks to the lake reflection. Second, the panorama is continuous and the edges wrap together. I did this in photoshop by moving the image over by half and wrapping the other half around, then blending the seam with a little bit of photoshop magic.

The next step is to make a copy of this image and turn it into a cylinder with the inside offest by half the image. This way you get a straight panorama with the outside being what you would see if you were looking in, and the inside what you would see if you were looking out. It’s a little hard to explain, but the image does a good job. Here’s an example:

Now we get to take our regular cylinder and cut it at one of the seams (it shouldn’t matter which one you cut, but there are 2 available seams). Flip one of the sides over and reconnect to make your mobius strip. Like this:

The neat thing about the mobius panorama is that at some point the ground turns into the sky, but you can’t tell where. It’s tricky to find an image that will work for this kind of thing, and the image you do choose will very likely need some photoshopping to get it to work just right. Even after you do get it, it’s not like you can show it off or put it in a book easily.

As far as I can tell, nobody has yet thought of this, so nobody has tried to get it to work. I’m probably not the first, but whoever was first did a good job of hiding. It’s not a very valuable piece of knowledge; just a little curious.

Sweet and Sour Pork

Last night I tried a new recipe: sweet and sour pork. The book said it would take 30 minutes, but it was my first time trying the recipe, so it took a little longer. Boy was it worth the effort, though. There are a few separate things that need to happen; preparing the batter, frying the pork, cutting the vegetables, making the sauce, and combining it all. In the end, I took a bite of the pork and thought “THIS is what it should taste like.” It was literally better than any sweet and sour pork I had ever had. It made my night.

The Tomato Rose

There’s a garnish trick I’ve been wanting to try for a while, and I finally got around to doing it today. It worked fantastically well, and gave me a very attractive rose made out of tomato.

They’re actually surprisingly easy to make. Here’s the process, from left to right:

First, start with a tomato. I used cherry tomatoes in this experiment, but I imagine a full sized tomato would work as well. Starting at the top, use a sharp knife to cut around the entire sphere in one continuous peel. You should end up with a single long peel and a very juicy tomato inside. You don’t need the entire outside for it to work, but it should be as thin as possible and not very wide, either. Once you have separated your long skin from the tomato, roll it up. It won’t roll evenly, or even look right at first. Don’t despair. Turn it over. If it still looks odd, turn it over again. You want the outside roll to have the inside facing up like a rose does.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. My first try produced the best rose, but my second was mediocre. The third was good, and the fourth was intercepted by my mouth before it was finished.