My Polar Plunge

"This is stupid," I thought. I was standing in my cabin wearing a bathing suit and a thick terry cloth robe with Ocean Nova embroidered on it. Ocean Nova was the cruise ship that had taken me to Port Lockroy (64^o50'S 63^o30'W) in the Antarctic Peninsula. What I thought was stupid was taking the polar plunge into the icy waters just for the right to brag about it later in life.

I walked down to the deck where we usually exit the ship to board the Zodiac boats that had been taking us to the shore for excursions. I found more than a few of my fellow passengers were willing to take the plunge. Plus the staff were prepared to give each plunger a shot of brandy afterwards. "Okay, I'm doing this," I said to myself.

I was the fifth in line. The process consisted of putting on a life vest and tying a pull line to it. The first plunger suited up and then jumped. A cheer went up from the onlookers. Now standing sans bathrobe in approximated 35^o F temperature I start to feel the cold. Plunger No. 2 goes next. A splash followed by a cheer. Same for plunger No. 3. Then while plunger No. 4 was suiting up there was an unexpected "kersplash." The ship's head chef, a real daredevil, had just jumped off the top deck of the ship without life jacket or safety line. "What a jerk," I thought later. "Just think if the guy got injured -- no food for the passengers."



They fished out the chef and it was back to the process. There goes No. 4 and someone points out that the plungers are not looking at the cameraman taking pictures from the Zodiac at water level. "I will not going to disappoint the cameraman," I resolved.




Now it's my turn. The fricking life vest is freezing and my teeth are chattering big-time. I can't wait to get this over with. I look directly at the cameraman and make a silly face. At least that's what I tell people when they see the pictures. I leap.



"Jesus H. Christ it's cold," I tell myself as I sink below the surface. I feel them pulling me right out of the frigid water. I get some water in my mouth and it's salty alright. I'm so eager to get out that I slam my left heel into the gang plank with a force that leaves it hurting for weeks afterwards.


Okay, I survived. I throw down the brandy and it warms me ever so slightly. I'm shivering full throttle now despite the fact that I have the Ocean Nova robe back on. I hurry back to my room feeling warmer the drier I get. I dry off completely, put on clothes, and lie in my bunk knowing that I did it. The battle's over, the war is won.



Facts:
1) 10 minutes in frigid waters is considered life-threatening.
2) Lynne Cox, world champion open-water swimmer, swam 1.2 mi. off the Antarctic Penisula for 25 minutes.

Trip to the End of the World

It's when I travel that I feel most in the hands of God. Today I'm embarking on the longest physical journey of my life. In the next 26 hours I will travel 6,500 miles from Philadelphia, PA to Ushuaia, Argentina on the island of Tierra del Fuego.

I'm on my way to the Antarctic Peninsula. Why Antarctica? It's a place I've always want to visit since I saw the series "The Last Place on Earth" which recounted the race between Amundsen and Scott to be the first humans to the South Pole. Their story was full of hardship and deprivation, victory and the cruelest form of defeat. I appreciated their thirst for adventure and I wanted to see what they saw even it's in the form a comfort-filled expedition on a modern cruise ship.

The trip to Ushuaia consisted of three flights: Philadelphia to Atlanta (2.25 hrs.), Atlanta to Buenos Aires (10 hrs.), Buenos Aires to Ushuaia (3.5 hrs.). When I arrived in Buenos Aires it was morning and I had to wait three hours between flights. I was surprised how warm it was as I walked between terminal buildings. I sunned myself outside the domestic terminal because the terminal lobby was small and noisy.

I had a window seat on the flight to the city that calls itself the southernmost city in the world. As we approached the island I could see distinct waterways that separated the small but rugged mountains that filled the many small islands. These mountains were sporadically covered with snow as if they were decorated by a confectioner. The plane passed directly over the airport which looked like a field strip for small aircraft. But then the plane circled and dropped altitude and I realized that the small strip (Malvinas Argentinas International Airport) was our destination. In a minute we had landed at Ushuaia, my port of call for Antarctica.

At Home and at Work with a Kill-A-Watt

This is a Kill-A-Watt. This is a Kill-A-Watt in action.

It's a specialized device that measures instantaneous energy consumption. I used it at home to measure power consumption from a Verizon set-top box under three conditions: 1) the box "off" 2) the box tuning a channel 3) the box tuning a channel with a 40" LCD TV on. I was surprised that with the box nominally off, it was drawing around 28W of energy. While tuning a channel it fluctuated around 28.5W. Finally with the TV on, the power consumption jumped to around 128W total.

So I called Verizon technical support to find out if I could turn the set-top box off overnight. They recommended not doing that. Why? During the night they occasionally distribute software updates to the unit. If the unit is off during an update, it may not be able to get it later resulting in a support call. Now that's 28W per hour on a 24 x 7 basis. That amounts to 245 KW per year times two since I have two set-top boxes in my house. That amounts to over 6% of my home's energy consumption last year!

I repeated a similar experiment at work attempting to measure my PC's energy consumption under these conditions: 1) the PC "asleep" in the morning with the monitor powered off 2) the PC "asleep" but displaying the login screen 3) the PC and monitor in use. I came up with these numbers: 108W, 175W, 190W.

I was surprised by the results of these experiments. The Verizon policy and the Vanguard policy concerning not powering-off the device were the same. Vanguard's policy revolves around the need to distribute software to PCs. The TIP Green Team, of which I am a member, has been told that Tech Ops is looking into powering off PCs remotely when there are no software distributions scheduled. If only Verizon would do the same for me!

The Four Greatest Mathematicians

"History of Mathematics" was my final course in the master's program. I took it because I thought it would be fun, informative, and perhaps easy. The textbook we used was not the dreadnought A History of Mathematics by Victor Katz, but the sloop Journey Through Genius by William Dunham. Both books emphasize the development of mathematics from the perspective of Western civilization, but let's quickly thank the Arabian scholars who preserved the works of the ancient Greeks from annihilation. It was those Greeks who got the ball rolling with demonstrative mathematics around the sixth century B.C. It was the Arabs in the twelveth century who translated and expounded on the Greeks, and brought their works back to Europe.

During the course I learned the top four mathematicians of all time:

• Archimedes (287 - 212 B.C.)
• Newton (1642 - 1727)
• Euler (1707 -1783)
• Gauss (1777 - 1855)

I have taken the liberty of writing a short obituary for each of these towering figures.

Archimedes was a true self-starter who liked to apply math to everyday problems. At an early age he invented a water pump called the Archimedes screw which is still in use today. He exploited the techniques of "method of exhaustion" and double "reductio ad absurdum" to prove many theorems regarding familiar two and three dimensional figures. In order to save his city Syracuse from ruination by the Romans he devised innovative war machines to repel the overwhelming army.

Newton was perhaps the greatest self-learner the world has ever known. In his early twenties he spent two years in rustic isolation during which he: discovered the generalized binomial theorem; invented differential and integral calculus; recognized the universal gravitation as the key mechanism of the solar system; and developed insights into the nature of light by refracting it through a piece of glass called a prism. Having little interest in publishing his world-shattering findings, he turned his attention to alchemy for almost 40 years, but was persuaded to publish something by Edmund Haley. The result was a physics text called Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica which is considered the greatest contribution to science ever made by one man.

Euler was the most prolific publisher of pure and applied mathematics in history. His mathematical contributions ranged over number theory, calculus of variations, graph theory, complex analysis, and differential equations. He applied math to acoustics, engineering, mechanics, astronomy, and optics. The publication of his complete works was started in 1911, and the end is not yet in sight. Originally planned for 72 volumes, the discovery of new works pushed the project to an estimated 100 volumes. In order to aid his work in number theory he memorized the first 100 prime numbers, their squares, their cubes, all the way to their sixth powers. As a child he memorized the entire Aeneid and could recite it flawlessly late in life.

Gauss was a child prodigy who at the age of 17 invented a technique for inscribing a regular 17 sided polygon within a circle. This was a ruler and compass construction that stunned the math world since no one since classical times thought such a construction was possible. For his Phd. thesis he proved the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra, but being a perfectionist (more about this later) he improved upon the proof three times in subsequent years. His superlative text on number theory established modular arithmetic as the fundamental tool for its study. He tired of pure mathematics and turned his skills to scientific endeavors. In order to predict the position of the asteroid Ceres, he invented the technique of least squares and error theory in general. He mapped the earth's magnetic field, and along with Weber invented an early form of the telegraph. His perfectionist nature made him reluctant to publish until every detail of proof was beyond criticism. One biographer claimed that his unpublished work would have advanced mathematics by 50 years.

The most shocking thing I learned from this course is that all of the math I learned in high school, college, and graduate school only brought me up to around the year 1900. Seems that the twentieth century and beyond is reserved for Phd. students.