What I Learned Today

Yesterday I took my first acroyoga class, which was held at the Laughing Frog Yoga studio.

We started with headstands, which I’ve been learning to do with the assistance of a wall. This time we did it without a wall but with a partner to spot. We were instructed to start in crow pose (picture from the web, not of me):

Next, you place your head to the mat and rotate your hips up to go into a headstand.

This is hard.

It was the first time I’d done crow pose, which is a nontrivial exercise in balance. Then I got my head down to the mat, but I couldn’t rotate my hips all the way up. So I started over and did it the way I’ve been practicing: bend at the waist, put your head on the ground, and rotate your legs up from that point. This is much easier, mainly because your waist starts higher.

In the handstand, we adopted a straddle pike position, which means legs apart in a V and hips bent so your legs are in front of you (not straight overhead). We then practiced flexing the sacrum to learn how to rotate the legs forward and back without tipping your weight forward and back. Why? Because “once you’re doing this on top of someone’s feet, you don’t want to tip off onto the floor.”

Of course.

Next we did a “back flying” sequence, which means the flyer (person on top) is on their back above the base (person on bottom). In theory this is scarier, since as the flyer you can’t see the floor. In practice, to me it feels the same as any other pose where you’re dangling in the air on top of someone else’s feet. Here is an example somewhat like what we did:

Then we did a “chi machine” in which the base supports the flyer’s shoulders with his/her hands and shifts his/her feet to inside of the flyer’s knees; the flyer then folds at the waist into a very relaxed pose. Surprisingly comfortable.

Then the flyer rotated slowly into a “straddle bat” position as the base worked his/her feet around the flyer’s hips. It looks like this:

We then practiced going back and forth between back flying (base’s feet under flyer’s sacrum) and straddle bat (base’s feet at flyer’s hip fold).

Next we went higher, into star position:

As the flyer, you get here by grasping the base’s hands, ducking your head down to place your shoulders on the base’s feet, and leaping up into a shoulder stand. The base brings his/her feet together behind your head, and you press your head back into his/her shins to lock yourself into place. You also still have the hands to help balancing. :)

I got to serve as the base and flyer for all of the moves! Being the base is harder for me, because I get scared that I will drop/hurt the flyer due to my beginner status. My side-to-side control is weak. But when it works, it feels awesome :)

The thesis of this book (“Reading like a Writer,” by Francine Prose) is simple, yet powerful: an excellent way to improve your writing is simply to read. Read those who’ve perfected particular skills and learn to emulate them.

The book tours through various aspects of writing (fiction), such as narration, voice, character, dialogue, etc. Each topic is covered like a mini-instructional lecture, and all of the points are illustrated with excerpts from great writers: Austen, Fitzgerald, Woolf, Chandler, and many others I did not recognize. In fact, reading this book is like being treated to an elite buffet: small samplings of absolutely stand-out writing, enough to make you hungry for more in a delightful way.

The down side of reading this book is that any other work you read concurrently suffers greatly by comparison. My apologies to Tad Williams, who is the unlucky author of the moment. :)

So far, here are some of the lessons I’ve gleaned:

• Put every word on trial. Cut away everything that you can, and leave the bones to gleam in solo eloquence.
• Employ “close reading”: consider each word that exists in the final version you’re reading. Why might the author have made those particular choices? Observe how, for masterful writers, each word conveys just the right information, and a slightly different word would have a different effect.
• Some people avoid “classics” because they fear such books will make them feel stupid. Prose says, “But I’ve always found that the better the book I’m reading, the smarter I feel.”
• With regard to the common advice to “show, don’t tell”: “This causes novice writers to think that everything should be acted out . . . when in fact the responsibility of showing should be assumed by the energetic and specific use of language.” That is, “telling” is okay if you do it in vibrant, precise ways.
• Grammar is like etiquette. The writer is the host, the reader is the guest, and the writer should make the reader feel at home.
• Keep a stack of books that contain, in your view, truly great sentences. Flip through them occasionally for inspiration.
• To shape a paragraph, and decide where breaks should occur, think of each one as inhaling at the beginning and exhaling at the end.
• When deciding on the point of view from which your story will be told, ask yourself not only who is speaking, but who is listening? Why is the story being told? (I found this quite intriguing and realized that for a lot of books, even ones I like, I couldn’t answer these questions.)
• Establish a personality for the narrator through voice, diction, opinions.
• Good dialogue always has a subtext. Those speaking may have multiple motivations, and these may not manifest directly in what they say.
• Conversation can advance the plot.
• In reality, conversation is plagued with inattention and miscommunication. Don’t let fictional conversation be too perfect.

It is time, at last, to look for a new car. For the first time in a decade, I started looking into what the current interesting automotive options are. I have many friends who own Priuses, and naturally an energy-efficient machine appeals to me. But I’ve discovered that in 2013 there is a much wider range of options beyond Toyota.

Electric cars! No longer a sci-fi fantasy or an option reserved for the super-rich, electric cars are out there on the roads today. A great starting point for learning more about the options, considerations, map of charging stations, etc., is pluginamerica.org. With that under my belt, I decided to go for some test drives.

My first stop was at the Nissan Dealership. The all-electric Leaf is comfortingly familiar (I already drive a Nissan) and really, I must say, quite charming. The visibility out the back feels a little more constrained than in my current Sentra, but this seems (puzzlingly) to be a common design feature of newer car models. Our test drive was in the top-trimline Leaf SL, featuring leather seats, with front AND rear seat heaters (!), a “Photovoltaic Solar-Panel Rear Spoiler” (a roof-mounted solar panel that provides power for your car accessories!), and the CARWINGS® phone app to let you remotely check the battery status, schedule charging, turn on the AC before you go out to the car, and other amazing stuff.

Driving the Leaf was a delight. Electric motors have more torque at lower speeds, and the vehicle’s acceleration from a stoplight was a real pleasure. (Of course, I am comparing it to my manual transmission ’99 Nissan Sentra experience.) I didn’t get to test highway-speed passing (which might not be as powerful since the electric motor has much less torque at high speeds) because the freeway was clogged with Los Angeles weekend traffic.

The dashboard interface was surprisingly simple. Left: engine temperature; right: charge and estimated range; top: are you regenerating power (braking) or consuming it (accelerating)?

The mini-dash at the top shows speed, time, and temperature, plus a cryptic icon meter on the left. This turns out to be your visual feedback about how “eco-friendly” your driving is. When you minimize braking and accelerating, a little “tree” progressively grows there, starting from a little bare trunk and then adding branches. If you finish growing one tree, it is saved on the lower right (1up!) and you start growing the next one. Apparently the number of trees you grow is stored for the lifetime of the vehicle. It is probably accessible with the CARWINGS app and coming to a social media site near you.

I was puzzled by the tree metaphor. When I asked about it, the salesperson said, “Each tree represents a tree that you saved by driving a Leaf.” I asked, “But wouldn’t it make more sense to use barrels of oil or something? Cars don’t run on trees.” Him: “No, it’s because of CO2 emissions, you know?” Because CO2 kills trees? What?

I really enjoyed the driving experience. The only thing I didn’t like was that I couldn’t seem to adjust the rear-view mirror. The salesperson advised me to adjust the height of my *seat* to make the rear-view mirror show the right field. Weird.

Here are the Leaf’s vital statistics:

Next I visited the Chevy dealership to try out a Volt. The Volt is not an electric car. It is a plug-in hybrid, meaning it has a small electric battery that it can run on for a while, plus a gas engine that kicks in when you run out of battery charge or you need extra acceleration or you get over 70 mph. As such, it seems to be a better practical solution than the Leaf: you get increased reliability, increased performance, increased range, but the car still burns (some) gas, and you’ll pay another $10k for it.

The Volt also felt very nice to drive, but I didn’t like it as much as the Leaf. Probably because they needed to fit a gas engine and a battery into a standard car package, they abandoned the center rear seat and instead use that space to store the battery under/in the car. That seemed fine to me. However the dashboard is a confusing barrage display with odd choices about how much real estate is given to different items.

In front of the steering wheel is something that looks like this:

Left is charge/range; middle is speed and a bunch of cluttery icons; right is the mysterious green sphere. This sphere is the equivalent of the Leaf’s growing trees, except you don’t accumulate anything. Instead you are instructed to use it as a feedback device. If the green sphere floats up, you are accelerating. If it goes down, you are braking. Your mission is to keep it in the middle, i.e., do nothing. Since I already know when I’m accelerating or braking, as I’m the one doing it, it was hard to see how this adds anything useful.

Some other green sphere that I never decoded is reproduced in the default view on the big navigation screen in the center console:

Here are the Volt’s vital statistics:

In summary, I liked the Leaf a lot more, but the Volt would be a more practical solution. A 75-mile range, after which you must spend 6-12 hours recharging your car (although apparently with the right charger you can get to 80% capacity in 30 minutes), would be very constraining as the only car in a household (great as a second car, though!). Nissan is offering some other nice incentives to woo the nervous customer, including free roadside assistance and several days of free (regular) car rentals for those times that the Leaf won’t suffice (roadtrips?). I also don’t know enough about how available the charging stations scattered around the city are. (On the up side, charging is free paid for by the government.)

But that’s not all! There’s more research to be done. I still want to try out the Prius as well as the new plug-in Prius, and may also sample the Honda Fit EV, the Ford Focus EV, and the Honda Civic hybrid.

A desire has been growing in me for some time now to pick up a little Latin. And now with the spring semester at a close, I jumped at the chance to browse some beginning Latin books at the library.

The one I took home with me is “Teach Yourself Beginner’s Latin.” It starts out very basic and has you reading simple Latin from the first chapter. (By “simple” I mean “Dick and Jane” level, but far more interesting, as it discusses the antics of a monk and his mule in the woods.) Despite its simplicity, the feeling of accomplishment is satisfying. Mulus equos non amat. “The mule does not like the horses.” The book jumps right in with declensions (nominative, accusative, and ablative) but, curiously, reserves introducing gender for a few chapters later. So far, it feels comfortingly similar, yet intriguingly different, from my previous studies of French, Spanish, and Italian.

Once I gain some basic reading ability, I will want something to read. That is, something within a beginner’s reach, which probably rules out Tacitus.

My local library contains, to my surprise, two children’s books that have been translated into Latin: Tela Charlottae (Charlotte’s Web) and Winnie Ills Pu (Winnie the Pooh). The former is in juvenile non-fiction, while the latter is in adult non-fiction, due either to inconsistency or some guideline I have not yet grasped. The Library School won’t let me take Cataloguing to find out, until I take some required database class this fall! The non-fiction designation alone puzzled me, until I realized that these books are next to annotated or scholarly versions of various children’s (fiction) literature, so I guess a translation is similar in spirit.

There are also some good pointers to online materials for beginning Latin readers. This list led me to a delightful 1933 text called Cornelia, which is designed with a progressive vocabulary that makes a point of encouraging you to learn words by context as they are encountered. From the Author’s “Foreward to Pupils”:

Salvete, discipuli. This is the story of a little American girl named Cornelia. Her life was different from yours, but not very different. You will readily understand the things that she did. I hope that you will like her and that you will enjoy the adventure of finding out about her in a language that is not your own. Valete, discipuli.

Benigne, magistra!

Cybersecurity is a serious issue not just for computers on Earth, but also for those in space.

Last month, JAXA (Japan’s space agency) announced that hackers had broken in to gain access to information about the Kibo Space Station module. The information consisted of Kibo “operation preparations” and mailing lists. In September, a 16-year-old was sentenced to six months in jail for hacking into NASA (and other) computers. In early 2012, NASA’s Inspector General Paul Martin testified to Congress about the state of NASA’s cybersecurity defenses and woes. “In 2010 and 2011, NASA reported 5,408 computer security incidents that resulted in the installation of malicious software on or unauthorized access to its systems,” he said. This goes beyond hacking into an employee’s PC: “The March 2011 theft of an unencrypted NASA notebook computer resulted in the loss of the algorithms used to command and control the International Space Station.”

Naturally, the same concerns apply for our rovers on Mars.

On Tuesday, I attended a talk titled “MSL Cyber-security implementation status report” by Bryan Johnson and Glen Elliott of JPL. You can view the slides from a similar conference talk. They reported on the long list of actions the team has taken to increase the security of operations and commanding for the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover. These include the implementation of Two-Factor Authentication for access to mission systems and applications, consolidating computers into a single virtual LAN, implementing and testing an “incident response process,” and taking obvious (but time-consuming and easy-to-overlook) steps like pruning the list of people with access to the MSL network.

These steps all aim to improve security here on the ground. I asked whether they would discuss measures being taken to prevent unauthorized access to the rover itself, such as encryption or authentication prior to the rover accepting commands. Unfortunately, they declined to discuss it, but the unofficial word is that there is little or no security on the rover side. Conceivably, anyone with a powerful enough antenna and the right pointing information could send the same kind of signals currently being transmitted by the Deep Space Network to all of our remote assets (rovers, orbiters, and other spacecraft). And as we know, security through obscurity only gets you so far. MSL has had a sufficiently high profile that a rumor began circulating last August that the hacker group Anonymous was trying to gain access to the rover:

MarsCuriosity: “Anyone in Madrid, Spain or Canbarra who can help isolate the huge control signal used for the Mars Odyssey / Curiosity system please? The cypher and hopping is a standard mode, just need base frequency and recordings/feed of the huge signal going out. (yes we can spoof it both directions!)”

A group dedicated to “Space Asset Protection” is looking into this side of the problem. Unfortunately, there is some reluctance to adopt encryption, which carries its own overhead in complexity and bandwidth consumption for the often severely limited data links available for spacecraft communication.

And as for authentication, there’s always the chance that the rover might suddenly say, “I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”