I wonder who makes these postcards… I bet there’s a hole in the wall shop somewhere just filled with these.

It’s either a big potato or a small model.

Looks like spring…

Mail arrived from the S.F. Peninsula
Again, the sender’s words were nebular
Even though it came
from The City By The Bay
The disguise’s failure was spectacular

There’s nothing like the grim reaper with an M-16 to instill joy and happiness.  Of course, I also got the monthly installment from my good friend out west:

I’m not sure exactly what this is, but it sure is evidence the sender isn’t quite on the same planet as the rest of us.  And on the back:

Yes, I’m still here.  And, you got your wish: it’s on the web.  Apparently, I’m not the only one getting these strange post cards with the 19th century portraits and ancient solar system mobiles.  To finish up:

There was someone from Planet Earth

Who belonged on another world’s turf

He sent mailings bizarre

To many friends afar

He should’ve been named Krazy at birth

Out there, he hoped for the best

But he couldn’t ignore

Where he’d been before

So he sent postcards back home in jest…

Who are you?

Who is this mystery man?  There is no caption on the reverse side, so I hope it’s not someone I’m supposed to know.  My guess is that it’s nobody famous, only a picture designed to torment me into wondering just who it is.

Guilty?

I’m guilty?  What did I do?  Maybe it’s what I’m going to do…

I wonder if a certain someone in Seattle is getting any sleep at night. Since I’m doing a bit of traveling this summer, it wouldn’t be much effort to make another trip…

Using water current and Monte Carlo simulation to predict object positions in water?  This sounds really similar to our Sidewinder paper.  It’s strange enough that the people who did this debris location prediction practically live right down the block.

There are plenty of differences, though.  I would bet that the Coast Guard’s current model is much more advanced than a general group velocity with random deviations for all objects involved.  Instead of predicting debris location, we use Sequential Monte Carlo simulation to predict the location of a sink node in a mobile wireless sensor network.  The prediction is refined over multiple hops to make routing more reliable and efficient in a highly mobile environment, such as floating sensors routing data in a flood tracking application.  A similar density plot to the one provided in the paper is created at each hop for the estimated sink location.  This density plot becomes darker and smaller with each hop as the refinement occurs.  I’m guessing that the Coast Guard doesn’t use such sequential refinement.

So where’s my front page newspaper article on SMC prediction and flood tracking?

It could be that biking is just making things tight and that maybe I should run first.  I also really shortened my stride so I didn’t have to bend my knee as much, which probably helped.  It might be that bending it too much is causing the pain in the damaged area, so I might be constrained to shuffling around everywhere.  If my body permits me to go more, maybe that will work itself out.  Regardless, it was the best four minutes I’ve experienced in quite a long time.

Pain is a weird thing.  When you don’t have it, you don’t think about it, but when you’ve got it, it makes things miserable.  I remember my high school coach giving a speech about pain before a workout.  It was during the first few weeks of my freshman year.  He asked how many of us had older siblings in our families.  A lot of guys raised their hands.  He then went on to say that our minds don’t remember pain and if our mothers had remembered the pain of childbirth that many of us who were second or third children would not exist.  The point was to illustrate that though you’ll be suffering through the workout, an hour later, you’ll be fine and you’ll be willing to do it again a few days later.  The same thing goes for injury pain and illness: it’s hard to concieve what it’s like when you’re healthy, but when you’re down, it really sucks.

An interesting study/article points this out: that the little things like pain are what make or break our lives.  People believe that it’s the big things that really make us happy or sad, but it isn’t.  It’s not the new and exciting job, it’s not the move to sunny California, and it’s not winning the lottery that makes your life better.  People who survive natural disasters and other traumatic incidents and those that even lose their vision or hearing don’t report that they feel any less happy than they were previously.  However, those that develop strong ties with family and friends report being happier, while those that develop chronic pain or discomfort never adjust.  It seems that indeed, pain is something that can never be adjusted for, and it’s probably some kind of evolutionary survival mechanism.  Without pain, I would have run even farther on my knee last year and probably to the point where I would become unable to walk.

For now, I’ll get while the getting’s good and try to run in real small increments all the while being on the lookout for any serious problems.

This is the fourth such postcard and I’ve been getting about one a month. Somebody wants attention and I should give it to him in the form of a return prank…