10 99 Luftballons

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.

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.

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

Wyoming Mountain depicted on Colorado Stamp

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

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

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.

The house has some “interesting” features, like staircases that go to the ceiling, or doors that open to blank walls, or chimneys that rise though four stories just to stop short of the roof.

She was also pretty short (well under five foot tall), so some of the work in the house was obviously scaled for her size.

Other than the oddities in the house, there was beautiful hand carved woodwork, elegant gardens, and stained glass all over the place.

Also interesting was that during the 1906 earthquake, she was trapped in one of the front bedrooms, when the wall shifted and the door was bound in the frame.

The servant staff had to pry the door open, and this is supposedly the marks on that door.

After she was freed, Mrs. Winchester decided that the earthquake and damage were signs from the spirits that she had spent too much time on the front part of the house, so she boarded up the front 30 rooms, and left them as is. Today you can still see the unrepaired damage from the 1906 quake.

For more information there is always the wikipedia article, or a room by room virtual tour on a haunted whatnot site.

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.

One slow afternoon, I made it to the Deutsches Museum, by far the best science and industry museum I have ever been to. I could have spent days there.

After the conference was over, I spent my last afternoon in Munich vistitng the Olympic Park, and seeing where baby BMWs are made.

It was a nice trip, I really enjoyed Munich. Next time I’ll have to bring the family and spend some extra time.

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.

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.

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.