Gravity’s Probably Not Causing the Pioneer Anomaly

Posted by Stephen on February 9, 2010 – 7:35 pm

A quick follow-up to one of the talks I gave at Dragon*Con last year. The Pioneer Anomaly refers to how the Pioneer 10 and 11 space probes were pulled more strongly towards the sun than they should have been, making them slow down more than expected. Scientists have been trying to explain what’s going on for about fifteen years. Wikipedia has a pretty good rundown on possible explanations. But to date we still don’t know what’s really causing the Pioneer acceleration.

One theory was that our knowledge of gravity is wrong. There might be higher-order effects that only happen at very long distances, so that we don’t normally see the effect. However, any gravity weirdness like that would affect not only Pioneer 10 and 11 but also the outermost planets in the solar system. A recent paper looked at the orbits of some of Neptune’s moons. They didn’t find any evidence of the Pioneer Anomaly, which means some of the tweaks to gravity like MOND can’t explain the anomaly.

Caution: you may want to skip the comments at the bottom of the linked article, as there’s some crankpotulous discussions going on.

Comments (4)

At my house right now: snOMG!

Posted by Misty on February 8, 2010 – 3:49 pm

Comments (1)

Where I’ve Been the Last Month

Posted by Stephen on February 3, 2010 – 4:26 pm

Fragile Shells, new interactive fiction by Stephen GranadeI’ve been writing a text adventure!

Fragile Shells is a short, puzzle-centered game. I wrote it for the Jay Is Games 7th Casual Game Design Competition. This 7th CGDC is an all-interactive fiction competition, so how could I resist?

You don’t know how long you’ve been hammering against the station’s wall, but you stop as soon as you realize what you’ve been doing.

If you head to the competition’s page you can play my game through the power of Flash or Javascript and rate it. There are also twenty-nine other games you can play. Why not give them a try and rate them as well?

Comments (0)

How to Put Non-Amazon Ebooks On Your Kindle

Posted by Stephen on February 2, 2010 – 6:30 pm

Amazon and Macmillan have been in a pissing match recently over ebook pricing. On Friday, as part of their continuing battle, Amazon removed the “Buy It Now” button from all Macmillan titles in their catalog, even the print ones. The only way you could buy a Macmillan title through Amazon was through one of the Amazon Marketplace sellers.

As you can imagine, authors weren’t happy.

By Monday Amazon had given in and started re-instating the “Buy It Now” button on Macmillan titles, though they’re taking their time doing so. Meanwhile, lots of people on the internet are happily choosing to be on Team Amazon or Team Macmillan, since you want to choose which giant company will crush your dreams instead of having one forced on you. They’re also parsing the meaning of words like monopoly, monopsony, and collusion. It’s very exciting!

In the wake of what was a pretty stupid attempt by Amazon to muscle Macmillan, some have said that they don’t want to buy books from Amazon, but they bought a Kindle. What are they to do?

Since I’m a physicist and thus have a technical answer to any question, even “Who should I date?” (answer: the robot, for he is programmed to love you always), let me explain how you too can put non-Amazon ebooks on your Kindle.

The big thing you’ll need is a copy of Calibre. Calibre is free software that runs on Windows, Macs, and Linux. It’s the Swiss Army knife of ebook software. It’ll manage your entire library if you want, but the most important feature in this case is that it can convert ebooks from one format to another. The Kindle uses a modified version of the Mobipocket format (files that end in .mobi or .prc), so that’s the format you’ll convert to. (Calibre’s frequently-asked questions has an entire section on converting an ebook to different formats.

The big question when buying an ebook is: Does it have DRM? DRM, or Digital Rights Management, is a scheme where the ebooks are locked so that they can only be opened by a specific ebook reader or piece of software.

No DRM: you can buy the book in nearly any format you want, though Mobipocket is best. If you buy the book in a different format (such as ePub or HTML), use Calibre to convert it to Mobipocket format. Once you’ve done that, you can plug your Kindle up to your computer and drag the files onto your Kindle.

DRM: Ooh, now it’s going to get tricky. You need to buy your ebook in Mobipocket format, and you have to jump through some hoops to make it readable on your Kindle.

Mobipocket DRM uses something called a PID key. The PID is a unique string that identifies a specific reader. Your Kindle has one that’s based on its serial number. You can find out your serial number by looking on the back of your Kindle (for some models), checking the box it came in (it should have a sticker on it with your serial number), or going to your Kindle’s “Settings” screen and typing “411″ (without quote marks). To turn that serial number into a PID, you can use this online tool. (Alternatively, you can download a python script called Kindlepid.py to find out what your PID is, if you’re a Python kind of person.)

When you buy a DRM-protected Mobibook, you’ll be asked for your PID. Enter your Kindle’s PID and download the file. What happens next depends on your operating system and whether you want to get rid of the DRM entirely.

Are you on a Mac? If so, you can use Mobi2Kindle to convert your ebook to a protected format that your Kindle will read. This won’t get rid of the DRM, but it will make the book readable on your Kindle.

Are you running Windows? If so, you can use the unswindle package (as described here) to remove the DRM and create an unprotected Mobipocket book that your Kindle will read with no problem.

Are you on Linux, or on a Mac and want to get rid of the DRM altogether? If so, you’re going to have to do some Python hacking! You’ll need a copy of mobidedrm.py to remove the DRM so that you can read the book on your Kindle. The process is a bit complicated; fortunately, there’s a guide to help you out.

How can I tell if it has DRM or not? The best way is to try to purchase a Mobipocket format book. If you need to enter a PID to do so, you’re buying a DRM-protected book. Chances are, you’re going to be buying a book with DRM on it.

There you go. You now can read non-Amazon ebooks on your Kindle.

Comments (6)

The Dollhouse Finale Wasn’t Very Good At All

Posted by Stephen on February 1, 2010 – 5:55 pm

Huh. So that’s how Dollhouse ended: with a jumbled, unfocused episode that epitomized many of the show’s shortcomings.

It didn’t help that Misty and I watched Epitaph One right before the finale. Epitaph One was the first season episode that only showed up on the DVD release, at least in the US. It was set ten years after Dollhouse’s main timeline, at a point where the mindwipe and imprinting technology had become widespread and readily abused. People could be erased remotely and have new personalities imprinted on them. Everyone was paranoid, and with good reason. How did you know that you were still you? What was to keep someone from wiping you and hijacking your body? How do you live in a world where one nation can phone the citizens of another, wipe them, and turn them into an instant fifth column? Epitaph One reminded me of Philip K. Dick’s stories where people’s identities were fluid and no one was sure who they were any more. It was smart, it was engaging, and it hinted at a show that I very much would have enjoyed watching.

Epitaph Two, the series finale, failed to live up to Epitaph One’s promise. A lot of that is probably due to how rushed the show was. Credit Whedon and his writing team for wrapping everything up, but the lack of time meant that there was no time to build the sense of dread that the show really needed. Here’s this world-changing technology that in the end brings down civilization, and instead of seeing it happen, we get a “meanwhile, ten years later”. It was a classic case of story events being far too exciting to be shown.

Character beats were rushed, making the finale feel like someone’s fanfic, as if someone said, “Hey, what if it were ten years later?” and immediately fired up their copy of Wordpad. Alpha reappears, only now he’s a good guy and is about as dangerous as Bertie Wooster! Anthony loves that the technology lets him pick up new skills instantly, while Priya hates the technology! They’ve split; I wonder if they’ll get back together! Will Paul and Caroline get back together? Only time and cliché tropes will tell!

There was no time to establish how the characters moved from point A to point Ten Years Later, so their choices in Epitaph Two had very little emotional impact. Topher’s crazy, see, because he’s destroyed the world, but it’s okay, because he’ll get redemption. He’s going to push a giant reset button that would make the Simpsons proud, and it’ll kill him in the process. Meanwhile Adelle gets to wring her hands in the background because she now loves Topher. Underlying it all is a weird cavalier attitude to killing off people’s copies, even by the copies themselves. Caroline’s personality ends up in a young girl, and that splinter of Caroline is quite happy to be erased at the end? Really? Even though that’s effectively the death of an individual? Would you be willing to die if you knew a copy made of you several years ago was going to go on living? We’re who we are in part because of our continuous memories. Cut that thread, and the person made up of those memories is gone. They’ve bobbled something that even a forty-year-old Star Trek novel got right.

The finale also relied heavily on Whedon’s established narrative kinks. You’d think Whedon would develop new ones, or at least outgrow his old tricks, but no. It’s like seeing a forty-year-old man dressed in his childhood sailor suit. Paul is killed surprisingly and unexpectedly because that’s how Whedon likes to generate pathos. Much of the population is insane after being mind-wiped and imprinted and are called Butchers because Reavers had already been taken.

In the end, the series really was Rapehouse. Caroline, the strong woman who was the series’ center, realizes she loves Paul the stalker only after he’s dead, so she puts his personality in her brain. I cannot summon enough words to explain how creepy that is.

Once upon a time, Joss Whedon did some truly amazing, ground-breaking work. Maybe he’ll go back to doing that again now that Dollhouse has been put out of its misery.

Comments (7)

Kage Baker Died This Morning

Posted by Stephen on January 31, 2010 – 9:42 pm

Kage Baker, author of the fabulous Company time travel books, died this morning. My thoughts and prayers are with her family and friends.

Comments (0)

Thoughts on the State of the Union Address

Posted by Stephen on January 28, 2010 – 4:41 pm

There’s a lot I don’t understand about the economy depicted in Fallout 3. The game is set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland near Washington, DC some 200 years after a nuclear war between the US and China. There’s no central government, so you have a bunch of individual settlements and scavengers who wander between them. It’s a perfect example of Adam Smith’s Invisible Mutated Hand.

Except the law of supply and demand doesn’t appear to work. I’ve accumulated tremendous amounts of junk over ten hours of play (approximately 0.001% of the game). I’ve flooded the market with scrap metal and lunchboxes and toy cars, yet the price hasn’t collapsed. At this point I should be paying people to take them off of my hands.

Worse, every vendor and shopkeeper offers me the same prices for my scavenged loot. There’s no arbitrage possible, and no recognition that some communities might find water scarce while others need food. I can only assume that the world of Fallout 3 isn’t really a libertarian’s wet dream. Either there’s a secret monopolistic group setting world prices or in reality there’s a cabal that’s organized everyone into a command economy.

Speaking of food, no one seems to be growing any. There’s never any rain, either. I assume everyone’s living off of 200-year-old boxes of irradiated Dandy Boy Apples and Salisbury Steak.

Oh, right, Obama’s State of the Union address. Most everything of interest had already been leaked, and the speech covered the expected themes: economy, energy, and bipartisanship. I wasn’t expecting his comments on Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell; I thought he’d all but abandoned his drive to repeal it. Other than that, though, it all comes down to follow-through. It was a fine speech delivered well, but I’m more interested in what the government does than what it says.

Comments (5)

Your New Word for the Day

Posted by Stephen on January 27, 2010 – 2:24 pm

It is: backpfeifengesicht.

It is pronounced: back-FIFE-en-guh-zeekst.

It means: a face badly in need of a punching (roughly).

Usage: Did you hear what Pat Robertson said about Haiti? Man, has he got a backpfeifengesicht.

Trust the Germans to come up with a single word that perfectly sums up a more complex concept.

(And thanks to Mike G. for teaching me the word.)

Comments (5)

Friday Night Videos on Friday: Marching Band

Posted by Stephen on January 22, 2010 – 8:54 pm

This one’s for Jeff McClure, and anyone else who’s ever willingly watched a DCI show.

I’m enough of a marching band nerd that my first thought was, “Why aren’t they marching on a football field?” There is an answer, one which will become immediately obvious upon watching the video.

For those of you who prefer words to images, here’s OK Go explaining why you can’t embed their videos on your blog via YouTube.

Comments (7)

An everything update in one post!

Posted by Misty on January 22, 2010 – 4:59 pm

As Stephen posted earlier today: Life! it is busy! We have a wounded hot water heater that we’re dealing with. I have a root canal scheduled for Tuesday. My blood pressure has been crazy high and I’m dealing with that. And in and around all these other things, we’re trying to get Eli’s birthday party plans worked out and still carry on the day to day business of life. I’ve remarked a few times that I have no idea how I’d hold down a full time job what with all the work I do and this is definitely one of the busy times.

But we’ve still had some fun lately. Behold: The nearly six year old spoon boy!

And his crime fighting buddy: Orange Girl!

If that’s not enough to scare the evil pants off of the bad dudes, here is the even scarier formation: Tower of Granades! to get the bad guys attention. Stephen is welding the pickle-pult for full defensive action.

How do I fight crime, you ask? Well, I bore them to death with tales of organizing my office and photos of cross stitch projects. See below!


Here is The Fortunate Traveler as I packed it up this past week. I’m moving on to a new stitching project so I wanted to show off the progress I made over the past four months.


This is the box of thread I worked out of for Traveler. I remember when I organized this box I thought it was the largest project I’d ever undertake. I was so very wrong.

My next project is Starry Night as reproduced by Golden Kite. This is one of my favorite pieces of art and I’ve wanted to work on it for a while. Several companies have done a repro but none of them get it right like Golden Kite. I got the pattern for Christmas.


The box on the left is thread I had to purchase for this project. The box on the right is thread I already had. I also had to purchase another box like the one on the right to hold all the thread.


The second box I purchased holds about 1/3 of the regular colors and then 2/3s of the box is blended colors. What is a blended color? Take two colors, separate the individual six strands of each and them combine one strand out of each two. Makes for a beautiful color set. Starry Night has 88 blended threads. I know, because I’ve numbered the cards for easy reorganization. Getting the thread wound took three separate nights of work.

Previously, I’ve kept track of my blended threads on the symbol card by sticking the needle through the card next to the symbol. It makes for a very messy symbol chart! The needles then fall out and I end up trashing thread because I don’t know what the colors on the needle are. So blending the threads on their own cards before I start stitching is a new method for me. I can already tell it will, at the very least, be neater than my earlier setup.

Fabric! I bought a slightly undersized piece of linen to use. It was 40% off and I decided that if I ever actually got the piece finished it would have to have fabric sewn to it so it could be stretched anyway. I stitched about 30 stitches and realized two things: I needed to stop and pre-blend all the thread AND I desperately needed Aida fabric.

I’ve not used Aida much in the past few years. It’s the fabric you use when you start stitching. It’s heavier, starchier, and even the best quality Aida doesn’t look as good as the lowest quality linen. However, for this project, I realized that it would go much faster if I wasn’t counting holes in the linen to get the stitches right. Also, since the finished piece is solid stitches the fabric wasn’t going to show anyway.


That ruler? Inside the frame in the center of the fabric? It’s seven inches long. That piece of fabric is 36 inches by 31 inches. The finished piece will be 29 1/2 inches wide by 24 inches high.

I got it all stretched on the frame last night and almost, almost got the 30 stitches done I’d made earlier in the week on the linen.

Are you dead yet? A couple of photos of the office since it looks so amazing right now.

The monument to paper! Notice I have labeled all the drawers!


New boxes! New books! New labels! I might be able to actually find things! Crazy talk!

Comments (9)