Six weeks De-stressing

Four weeks de-stressing

Some people knit. Some meditate. Some gafiate. Some crochet.

I take 3D printed nylon models of WWI aircraft in 1/144 scale, white and somewhat rough textured blanks, and transform them into fairly accurate representations of the originals. I say "fairly accurate" because some compromises have to be made regarding thickness of struts and so on to allow these to be printed. 0.1mm instead of 0.05mm etc.

Similarly, the paint schemes are often informed guesswork. We have, if we're lucky, one or perhaps two photos in black and white of the originals, taken from one or two angles. We also have descriptions in letters and diaries of those that flew them, perhaps some swatches of the fabric, formal specifications from military authorities of colours and patterns to be used  - often these were ignored - and in general much ambiguous and contradictory data. We know the dope they were covered with discoloured over time too, the same aircraft in June 1915 could look quite different in November, even it it hadn't been repainted or reconstructed after a heavy landing. As almost all were, at least once.

There are many published profiles, colour paintings and drawings, of many of these aircraft. All guesses based upon different subsets of data, some more accurate than others.

Anyway, here is the result of 4 weeks destressing. Surface preparation, sanding, smoothing, undercoating, then putting on layer after layer of colour, designing and printing decals, then coating with a protective finish.

It was 40 years ago today....

Updating a previous post.

Did I always have that haunted expression? So obvious in hindsight, but so difficult to recognise at the time?

Life hasn't been easy since transition. There have been issues, medical, legal and social. But none insurmountable, and I think my expression on the latest photo says it all.

Photo from the "Class of 75" 40 year reunion, which I attended on the 21st

At one stage, I had time for hobbies..

Contemporaries - built late 1915, in service January 1916.The Zeppelin-Stacken R.IV serial R.12/15, and the Nieuport...

Posted by Zoe Ellen Brain on Monday, 18 May 2015

Z Gauge

One day, when the continuing crises have passed, we'll be able to indulge in our shared hobby - Z gauge model railways.

Yes, this is Z.

Posted by NMRA on Friday, 28 August 2015

Twelve Years Ago

It's worth memorialising some of the trials and tribulations the FedSat team underwent when it came to building that bird.

Originally, the task was contracted to SIL - Space Innovations Limited

SIL is a space engineering company that specializes in the design and manufacture of satellite products, subsystems and complete small satellites, which generally weigh between 50 and 500 kilograms. This type of Earth orbiting satellite is often used for scientific and remote sensing applications. They could also form the basis of satellites for constellations similar to Teledesic, Globelstar and Iridium.
SIL recorded sales of approximately 745,000 U.K. pounds and profits of 20,800 U.K. pounds according to unaudited company records for the six-month period ended June 30, 1998. Based on current exchange rates, this is approximately $1.25 million in sales and approximately $35,000 in profits.

The wheels fell off though

Jan. 14, 2000 -- SpaceDev Inc. the world's first commercial space exploration and development company, and Space Innovations Limited (SIL), a wholly owned SpaceDev subsidiary in Newbury, England, today announced that SIL management has reacquired the company from SpaceDev. Commenting on the decision, SpaceDev Chairman Jim Benson stated: ``During the past year it became clear to the boards of SPDV and SIL that continued joint operations was not of sufficient long-term benefit to either firm, due primarily to the stringent U.S. State Department restrictions on the transfer of technology-related information implemented about a year ago. At times we found it difficult to discuss basic marketing strategies or product enhancement plans with our own employees.''
Professor Leonard Culhane, chairman of SIL, said: ``We all thought at the time that this acquisition would be synergistic and would benefit both firms, but the environment changed unexpectedly. We look forward now to assisting SpaceDev as a customer rather than one of its subsidiaries.''
In October 1998, SpaceDev acquired 100 percent of SIL via a stock-exchange agreement. The SIL acquisition was one of several strategic moves made by SpaceDev during the past 18 months to position it as a worldwide, integrated provider of affordable, reliable space missions involving small satellites. The decision to rescind the merger agreement was made final on Dec. 17, 1999. Terms of the amicable separation agreement include a re-exchange of common stock and Culhane relinquishing his seat on SpaceDev's board.

SIL found itself in very deep financial trouble. There were severe cash flow problems - they didn't have the money to complete the work they'd contracted to do. It was necessary that they get stuff out of the door, regardless of quality, just to get progress payments to keep the doors open. They could always remediate it later, after the immediate crisis had passed.

But not only did they cut corners, they tried to make the circles rounder. Components that would never have passed even the most basic Quality Assurance checks at the first stage of production went through to the end. What they produced and delivered wasn't just shoddy - it was junk.

What was delivered wasn't usually repairable. It was industrial waste. So we had to build the components ourselves, to SIL's design. You see, before they got into financial difficulties, they produced really good product, both in design and manufacture.

What you see there was made after they fired their highly talented team of competent staff, and got pretty much anyone present on site to attempt Rocket Science. Cleaners, Managers, Apprentices, Trained Monkeys for all I know. But not the SIL scientists who made the company what it had been - a by-word for excellent space engineering.

Evolution IS a Blind Watchmaker

This is a good illustration of the principles involved in my PhD work.

Only I'm attempting to evolve more efficient settings for mutation rate and population size, so it's about not just genetic algorithms, but meta-genetic algorithms. Evolving more efficient evolution.

Why blogging has been light recently

Woman burnt in Downer house fire June 2, 2014

A 56-year-old woman has suffered serious burns following a kitchen fire on Burn Street in Downer.
...
The woman was treated by intensive care paramedics at the scene of the fire and then transported to the Canberra Hospital.
The ESA spokeswoman said she was in a stable condition.

My face was never my fortune, and a few minor scars on the forehead won't make any difference to that. I lost all the skin on my face, but it grew back, and I still have lips, eyelids, nose etc, and looking not very different from before. A few patches on my arms were 3rd degree, but so small no skin grafts were needed.

I just get a bit cold now, much of my dermis on face and arms was destroyed, so there's less subcutaneous fat now, and this will take a year or two to get better.

No damage to lungs or airways. So no real long-term or life-changing effects.

It's taken me a few months to feel OK with blogging it though. I always was terrified of fire, and to be put in a position of having to stay and fight rather than being able to flee was traumatic. Then being warned by the nurses in the resuscitation unit of Canberra Hospital not to look in the mirror was, well, I thought that only happened in the movies.

But it was only for a short while that I looked like a Hiroshima survivor. Now back to normal, or near enough.

Thought For Today

Heinlein – Specialization is for Insects | Not Always On

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
-Robert A. Heinlein

I prefer to live rather than die gallantly though. That's a last resort. Instead, I try to fight so efficiently that it's the other side that has to contemplate that. No matter, I intend winning. Consequences to myself are secondary. If a battle is worth fighting, win it, regardless of personal cost. If not, avoid it.

You see, RAH said something else too.

It may be better to be a live jackal than a dead lion, but it is better still to be a live lion. And usually easier.

 I'm lazy, I guess.

Past History

When I was young, I was one of the few kids who would talk to a boy called Stephen Bristow. Son of "Timmy" Bristow. A walking mountain. Or, as one Judge described him in court, a "Walking Nightmare".

Oddly enough, he had a personal code of conduct that amounted to "Do unto others as they've done unto others, with interest.". The honest had nothing to fear. Others....

My mother disturbed an intruder in our house when coming home from shopping once. He fled, taking some items of considerable sentimental, though not monetary, value.

Tim Bristow got word of it.... We received them back in our postbox in a few days, with a misspelt crudely hand-written letter of apology that can only be described as "grovelling".

I saw Tim greet State Premiers (equivalent of Governors), Chief Stipendiary Magistrates (equivalent of Chief Justices) and other crooks. Only some of whom ended up in jail. He was on a first-name basis with them, as I can personally attest to.

He told us where not to go fishing - a spot off Bungan Beach he called the "See you later club". Miles to the south of where it was reputed to be, possibly a little misdirection on his part to avoid legal, er, complications. Not far from where a Japanese WWII minisub that had been missing since 1942 was found recently.

Our family, very straight-laced, humdrum, ordinary, and ridiculously law-abiding, lived in a very different world from his. Yet somehow there was contact, even friendship. Tim Bristow phoned to give his condolences on my father's death in 1993, the last time I spoke to him.

There have been ex-cops turned "debt collector" since. None of them resemble Tim Bristow though.

Calling Google Scholar...

Google's good, but not perfect. The number of people linking to sites with egregious nonsense about my personal details written by agenda-driven Kooks has boosted their credibility.

No matter.

A bigger problem is that Google Scholar isn't tracking my work very well. Only 60% of my papers are listed. So here's a definitive list that their webcrawlers should understand. With luck.

 Using Meta-Genetic Algorithms to tune parameters of Genetic Algorithms to fi nd lowest energy Molecular Conformers
ZE Brain, MA Addicoat  
Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems

Simulation Case Study - ^x_tUML in agile development
A Vincent, AE Brain  
Proceedings of the Asia-Pacific Simulation and Training Conference SIMTECT 2004

Optimization of a genetic algorithm for searching molecular conformer space
ZE Brain, MA Addicoat
The Journal of chemical physics 135 (17), 174106-174106-10

Optimization of a Genetic Algorithm for the Functionalization of Fullerenes
MA Addicoat, AJ Page, ZE Brain, L Flack, K Morokuma, S Irle
Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation 8 (5), 1841-1851

Using a Meta-GA for parametric optimization of simple GAs in the computational chemistry domain
MA Addicoat, ZE Brain
Proceedings of the 12th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation

Meta-Genetic Algorithms, Molecules, and Supercomputers
MA Addicoat, ZE Brain
Poster, SC10 Conference on High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis

EFFICIENCY OF AN OPTIMIZED EVOLUTIONARY ALGORITHM FOR LOCATING MINIMUM ENERGY CONFORMERS
MA Addicoat ZE Brain
Proceedings Ninth Triennial Congress of the WORLD ASSOCIATION OF THEORETICAL AND COMPUTATIONAL CHEMISTS WATOC 2011

 Please go fetch, there's a good robot. 

An Ethical Difference

 Senator Brandis is the Shadow Attorney General. One cannot get into that position without having an IQ greater than your shoe size. Though one might well wonder after his rude interruption of a witness before the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee a fortnight ago.

ParlInfo - Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee : 24/01/2013 : Human Rights and Anti-Discrimination Bill 2012

Senator PRATT: So you would like to see, if religious exemptions were to continue, intersex status specifically taken out of those exemptions?

Gina Wilson : Certainly. To allow anybody to discriminate against intersex people and to allow religious organisations to have an exemption from the law is no different to allowing a religious organisation to discriminate on the basis of colour of skin or a disability that you were born with.

Senator BRANDIS: No, it is not, because there is an ethical difference.

Er... pardon me? An ethical difference?

Gina Wilson : We are born differently.

Senator BRANDIS: The church says, rightly or wrongly, that in its view certain behaviours are sins. You might have said to that—

Gina Wilson : Senator Brandis, this is not about our behaviours.
...

Gina Wilson : It is not a matter of our behaviour; it is a matter of how we are born. We are not behaving like anything. It is not a matter of sexual orientation. We have the same range of sexual orientations as the rest of the community. It is not about our gender identity. We have the same range of gender identities as the rest of the community. It is about how we are physically born. That is like if a person is physically born with black skin. If you give a religious organisation the right to discriminate on the basis that they were born with black skin, that is the same as giving them the right to discriminate about people who were born with anatomical differences of sex. Because my genitals are different or because my hormones are different, they have a right to exclude me from service, exclude me from a school or exclude me from employment, and that just seems bizarre—because of the way I was born, because I was born physically different. It is not a choice. It is not an orientation. It is not an identity. I was born physically different.

But of course, a Christian School would never "dis-invite" a 5 year old to attend pre-school just because he was anatomically unusual. Except they did.

A good thing as it turns out : my son attends a far better school now.

Senator Brandis - this is personal. Letter to follow.

Whew!

About 2/3 of the way on the curve... was seriously worried when I read the abstract.

Cost Of Living Comparison Between Two Countries

Cost Of Living Comparison Between Two Countries

Try comparing where you live with where I live - Canberra, Australia.

Ex-Satanist Exposes Illuminati Card Game and the NWO

I have a copy of the complete set, of course. One With Everything. Steve Jackson's INWO page. You can't make this stuff up.

Optimization of a Genetic Algorithm for the Functionalization of Fullerenes - Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation (ACS Publications)

Optimization of a Genetic Algorithm for the Functionalization of Fullerenes - Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation (ACS Publications) My last paper before I submit my thesis.

My Life

In case you're wondering....

Just gave my first lecture of the year today. And got reminded of just how much I enjoy teaching!

The Best Laid Plans

My mother-in-law is gravely ill at the moment. I've been too busy at the hospital to blog - or do much of anything else. More later when things aren't so uncertain.

For Andrew

I was only a little older than he is now, when I was at this concert.