Work is progressing well on the chapter I’m writing on high-energy physics applications for the signal processing handbook, though the Wednesday deadline seems like it’s coming up too fast. I’ll probably have a few 16-hour days coming up over the next week to make sure everything gets done on time.

I’ve written 5/5 of the sections that were originally planned to go into the chapter, though my editors have suggested an additional be written. That will probably take 2 full days of work. The rest is the editing process - responding to comments and criticisms from my editors, polishing prose, etc. A surprisingly large amount of my time is being devoted to formatting and publishing issues. To ensure that I’m producing a document that meets all of the publisher’s specifications, I’m preparing it using LaTeX rather than Word. If you’re not familiar with LaTeX, it is not really an word processor like Word, but rather a markup language, similar to something like XML or HTML. You use tags to denote the division of sections and paragraphs, to insert images, etc. The advantage is that you can load up a pre-made template and have your document be automatically lain out in a professional style. As the author you are able to sort of distance yourself from layout issues, which really aren’t in the expertise of most researcher. The disadvantage is that you have to memorize tags for doing simple things like italicizing text and lose the ‘What You See Is What You Get’ ability to be sure of what your document is going to look like and tweak individual elements.

At the beginning of this project, I wasn’t sure how large my role would be. I thought that I might write part of the chapter, and have other parts written by my advisors. Later, I had the idea that I would write the first draft, and then they would take it from there. It has actually turned out to be more like the typical work-flow that I would have when writing a conference paper - I do the writing, get feedback comments, do rewriting, handle the layout, handle the creation and selection of figures, etc. On the whole, I guess I’m glad, since it will seem like more of an accomplishment this way.

There’s an article making the rounds about a new prototype technology that Nokia is developing to allow for wireless recharging in future cell phones. You can read the (brief) article here:

http://ca.tech.yahoo.com/blogs/the_working_guy/rss/article/3638#

Not unlike AC power, interest in wireless power transmission seems to come in cycles. We are currently in a period of renewed interest in trying to develop the technology. I wrote about the fundamental concepts of wireless power last year, in response to a few such systems being demoed at CES. The Nokia technology is based on the concept of Faraday Induction described in that post. So what makes this different?

A fundamental problem with using Faraday Induction is that the power of the signal from a typical antenna decreases cubically with the distance between the transmitter and receiver. My wireless router, for example, transmits at a power of 42 milliwatts. By the time the signal reaches the antenna on my wireless card 25 feet away, the strength (on a good day) is about -60 dBm, which works out to a meager 1 nanowatt of power, or about 1/40,000,000 of the transmitter power. It would take 60 billion such antennae to power a 60W light bulb. You can probably see what I’m getting at.

Nokia’s system is a bit different. Rather than just capturing one signal from an antenna, which can’t carry power over any significant distance, it tries to capture every RF signal it can find. That includes every AM/FM radio station, over-the-air television, emergency broadcast channels, etc, etc. I’m not really sure how they can capture all of these different frequencies and convert them to usable power, but I’ll defer that point. Using this technique, they claim that they can achieve 5 mW of power.

Even so, it’s not all wine and roses. I popped open my cell phone and determined that it uses a 3.7 V, 1100 mAh battery. At 5 mW, a generous calculation would put the charge time of my battery at 34 days. Nokia believes that in the short term it can increase the power to 20 mW, and that in the long term it would be possible to achieve 50 mW. At 50 mW, we’re talking 3-5 days to recharge, assuming that we are still using the same battery sizes in phones by the time they are able to perfect the technology (which may not be a safe assumption judging by current trends). Still not a replacement for your wall adapter, but it could be useful in rare situations, such as going on vacation and forgetting your battery charger.

I had thought that there were no more DDR venues in Madison after the flooding at Memorial Union wrecked their arcade machines. Fortunately I was wrong. Liz turned me on to two locations with working machines, and we visited the Ten Pin Alley in Fitchburg tonight. Not the most convenient location from my apartment, but beggars can’t be choosers.

This place has, to my delight, a Japanese DDR Extreme cabinet - my favorite version. Despite a bit of jiggle on one side of the platform and some touchiness with my Up arrow during hold steps, the machine was in good shape and seemed to have all the songs unlocked.

It’s been a really long time since I’ve played DDR. I tried a bit of Stepmania with Kyle when he was staying with us last summer, but that only lasted about 10 minutes before we were yelled at by the downstairs neighbor. DDR and apartments just aren’t very compatible. DDR is one of those things that you never really forget how to do, and I was still able to do some complicated step patterns, however my reaction time and leg stamina has diminished a lot since I used to play. I think that DDR really holds more of an appeal as an exercise toy rather than a video game these days. What I mean is that I’ve lost the drive to aim for high scores or beat increasingly harder songs that I used to have. Part of it is that the game lost its novelty long ago and part of it is that I no longer have a large group of friends regularly playing to give me a reason to feel competitive. But in any case, it can still make me sweat like nothing else.