Arlen Ward dot com

In order to celebrate my birthday tomorrow DARPA is offering a $40,000 prize to the first person or group of people that can find 10 red balloons. DARPA, aka the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is not just looking for any ten red balloons, but ten specific red weather balloons they have positioned around the United States. They are calling it the DARPA Network Challenge to hide the real reason for the contest, because the “Arlen is so awesome we want to give away money to celebrate” was too obvious.

10 99 Luftballons

The contest begins at 10 AM Eastern, and ends when a group provides the latitude and longitude of all ten balloons, or December 14th, whichever comes first. You can find the Frequently Asked Questions here.

So there you go, 10 AM tomorrow go win $40,000 for my birthday.

Find the location of these 10. I doubt they will be this close together.

OK, so it isn’t really for my birthday, but to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the internet. More specifically the ARAPANET, the internet’s predecessor.

To mark the 40th Anniversary of the Internet, DARPA is hosting the DARPA Network Challenge, a competition that will explore the role the Internet and social networking plays in the timely communication, wide area team-building and urgent mobilization required to solve broad scope, time-critical problems.

Still, it is a good reason to use lots of things DARPA has helped develop: GPS, the internet, maybe some robot minions, or even a Predator if you have one to help with the search, which would be way cooler than the social networks other groups are using.

9 Amazingly Unique Bridges You May Not Have Seen

Ah, the Dropkick Murphys. Good stuff.

I was out in Massachusetts again for a few days. Actually I was in Mansfield, for a two day meeting at our company headquarters. To get there I had to rent a car in Boston and drive about an hour or so. This was the first time I had to drive in the Boston area, and despite the city being originally plotted out prior to automobiles, I would say the Big Dig really made it a tolerable experience. I really only have one complaint.

Why don’t the interstate exit numbers match the mile markers? They do here in Colorado. They did when I lived in Wyoming. In fact, I think they have in every state I have ever lived in. I even drove the 20 minutes into Rhode Island to see if it was an east coast thing or a Massachusetts thing. Seems to be an east coast thing.

It drove me crazy the whole time I was there (all two and a half days).

I know, I know. Therapy is always an option.

Well, I’ve always said that I thought the Wind River Mountain Range in Wyoming is way more breathtaking than any of those we have here in Colorado, but I’m not sure I would have done this…

Wyoming Mountain depicted on Colorado Stamp

“Hey, can we borrow this? Nobody up here seems to be using it!”

…just ask yourself “Where the Hell is Matt?”

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

I got a chance to give a symposium talk at the conference in San Jose last weekend, and during a bit of free time I found my way over to the Winchester Mystery House. This house was under continuous construction for 38 years, under the daily direction of Sarah Winchester, who supposedly built the additions to the house to appease some spirits that were haunting her. In my opinion, a lot of the odd construction could be the building of additions without any sort of master plan, but thats just me. Not really one that gets excited by ghost stories, I was more interested in the construction of this house, the architecture, and the chance to take some interesting photographs.

The story behind the houses starts on the other side of the country in Connecticut. After her daughter and husband died, Mrs. Winchester consulted a psychic of some sort that told her the family was cursed, and she was haunted but the souls of all the people that had been killed by Winchester firearms. She was ‘drawn west’ so she went to San Jose, bought an six room farm house and started construction in 1884. This construction went on 24 hours a day, 365 days a year for 38 years until her death at the age of 83 in 1922. The day she died the workmen stopped. All told she spend over $5 million on construction, funded by the $20 million in cash and the $1000 per day she earned from half ownership in the Winchester Repeating Arms Company she inherited from her husband at his death.

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As mentioned in the Cliff’s notes version regarding April, I spent a few days in Munich last month. It was part of the 10th International Conference on Hyperthermic Oncology. The trip was quick (yay for direct flights), and unfortunately the family didn’t get to join me. I did get to present a poster of one of the measurement tools we are using in my dissertation research, so that was a plus.

The conference venue was a hospital that was located about six or seven kilometers from the hotel, so I quickly learned the layout of the subway system in order to get back and forth each day. The hotel was close to the center of town, so there was a chance to see the Rathaus and wander around downtown each night.

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Hmmm. It sure has been a while since I have posted! I seem to be missing the whole month of April. Sorry about that!

Things have been crazy, but I am still alive. So here’s the cliff notes version of April:

• School
• Work
• I helped build a train track around the boy’s room.
• School
• Work
• I went to Munich for a Hyperthermia Conference
• School
• Work
• I gave a couple of presentations on protiens including measuring denaturing energy with an atomic force microscope and computational methods for simulating folding.
• School
• Work
• School
• Work

More updates in the near future.

As a professed data presentation nerd, I have always liked the postings over at Strange Maps.

Recently there was a post with a map of the United States, shaded by leading church body in each county.. This one caught my eye, just with the clustered groups of various denominations. No conclusion, I just thought it was interesting.

If I had an observatory at my house, I would be out there all the time. If I had big telescopes at my house, you would have to pry me away with a crowbar. People would be sick of hearing me talk about the stars and planets, and they would run and hide every time I got out the pictures.

But alas, it is not so for everyone.

As reported in the Independent, Pope Benedict XVI is moving the observatory off the grounds of his summer residence.

Science is to make way for diplomacy at the Pope’s summer residence, with the dismantling of the astronomical observatory that has been part of Castel Gandolfo, south of Rome, for more than 75 years. The Pope needs more room to receive diplomats so the telescopes have to go.

Moving it to make more room to receive diplomats? I think the stars would be more interesting, but nobody died and made me Pope.