An Engineer's Literary Notebook

A Transformation In Green

xbanguyen — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 03:21:22 +0000

Is it possible to reinvent yourself from the same past? Is there a certain sheath of light you can put on to fashion the rearranging of the molecules within to emerge anew, sporting a re-engineered memory filled with assured joy? Would you rather be a sojourner, a guest in many cities or to put down roots in a familiar place? Can you be both? Looking at the other face of the same coin, can desire alone forge the necessary transformation? Most likely not — you may have to make do with knowing that a certain kind of transformation is possible, mathematical transformation, that is. So tonight I will attempt to assuage the ghost of Jay Gatsby by considering the Laplace transform that provides a means to traverse between time domain and frequency domain.

Ordinary engineering phenomena such as the switching transient in a RLC circuit and the harmonic vibration of a beam can be described using linear ordinary differential equations where inputs and outputs are functions of time. Converting these functions into frequency domain where inputs and outputs are functions of angular frequency using the Laplace transform make them easier to solve. Instead of calculus,they can be solved by algebra. Such transformation is possible as long as the function satisfies certain Dirichlet conditions. ^[1]

The precision found in mathematics possesses a certain beauty. Equally appealing is the certainty conveyed in those equations. If a set of conditions are met, at least one solution for the equations exists. If I planted red tulip bulbs this past November, the borders will be ablaze with colors comes spring. An adverb describing the motion of the pomegranate flower at the entrance to a walkway in a poem read many years ago in Vietnamese never fails to make me fall hard all over again for all the poems ever written in any languages. One should be thankful for such constancy because it escapes being transformed by time, for not all transformations are to be desired, and we are not in control as this poem ruefully points out.

The opposing force twisting down the upward course of a wayward vine reminds me of Dylan Thomas’s poem of the green fuse that drives the flower. The extreme adjectives describing the hope coursing within the vine carry an optimism that belies the bleak soundings. That vine some day will transform again back into a root from which a new plant will emerge , the resilient seeds sown in soil once wanted will form another Eden. All you have to do is to sow a seed or two, and to be indulgent of yourself. Would you give up being in control for the pleasure of being enthralled by a resolute Eden?

Thank you for listening, dear muse.

Acknowledgement

[1] http://sces.phys.utk.edu/~moreo/mm08/sarina.pdf.

[2] The globe is from Google Earth.

[3] The village picture is from www.overseasattraction.com .

[4] The RLC circuitry and equations are from http://www.ee.ic.ac.uk/pcheung/teaching/ee2_signals/Lecture%206%20-%20Laplace%20Transform.pdf and http://www.mathworks.com/help/toolbox/symbolic/f1-122819.html www.heritage-key.com.

[5] The tulip painting is from www.etsy.com.

Romancing the Light

xbanguyen — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 04:55:47 +0000

Would you rather know that there is less than one ounce of astatine in the earth crust at anytime, and that the speed of light is 299,792,458 meters per second, or would you rather know that the chemist Archie Randolph Ammon wrote poetry, as did James Clerk Maxwell the physicist?^[1]In this late summer evening I would rather watch the gradual departure of daylight softens

the demarcation between the mountains and sky beyond. Of course the lingering light does not go from the Olympic Peninsula to my retina instantaneously. Many years ago, Galileo attempted to measure the speed of light using two lanterns on a windy night atop those Florentine hills – I imagine the windy bit as you already guessed. Even though the experiment failed to yield a measurement, some years later it spurred the Danish astronomer Ole Roemer to note the time it took for the moon Io to revolve around Jupiter to come up with a measurement for the speed of light that was not too far off.^[2]Preoccupied with nostalgia, tonight I have succumbed again to the longing for permanence and felt comforted in knowing that there is such a cosmic limit as the speed of light that is constant for all frames of reference. That equation E= mc²/sqrt(1-v²/c²) describing the energy of a particle with rest mass m moving with speed v can be used to show that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light because infinite energy would be needed to accelerate v to approach c.^[3]This limit makes it impossible for us to travel back into the past nor to see into the future. Would you want to see the future, or just be content observing the light of September and be reconciled to the changing of seasons?

Paradoxically, the broken shadows illuminate for me the beauty of having four seasons, made possible only because of time. The lyrical uncertainty that light is neither before or after reminds me of the dual nature of light as particles and waves. Akin to D.H. Lawrence’s torch of blue gentians, the cheerful yellow mullein can also be torch-like. Phonetically, the mullein brought to mind the mullioned windows of a certain cathedral in Emily Dickinson’s mind when she felt the weight of that slanted light. The weight she felt is not only metaphorical but also physical because its particulate nature enables scientists to hold light captive in chambers containing a specific mixture of gas. The captured light can be released by flashing a second light through the gas.^[4]I wonder if the newly freed light, when departing from the holding chamber, left something like regrets in its wake.

Thank you for the book filled with light, dear muse

Acknowledgement

[1] http://aestheticimpact.com/the-muse-dances-with-jung/james-clerk-maxwell.html

[2]http://www.is.wayne.edu/mnissani/a&s/light.htm

[3]http://www.is.wayne.edu/mnissani/a&s/light.htm

[4]http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/18/us/scientists-bring-light-to-full-stop-hold-it-then-send-it-on-its-way.html

[5] The Gaileo’s lantern picture is from http://www.worsleyschool.net.

[6] Jupiter and its moons picture is from http://www.is.wayne.edu/mnissani/a&s/light.htm

[8] A swatch of the universe photo is from realitypod.com

[9] http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110922/full/news.2011.554.html

In Praise of Sleep

xbanguyen — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 05:23:28 +0000

Falling asleep under the sun is not an overrated experience as you’d think even if you don’t live in Seattle. Receding, the minutiae in the dreams you had under the sun’s influence left a peculiar disorientation as you surfaced out of the heat back to everyday life. Admittedly, it is not the same as being alive twice. For that, you will have to come back from inhabiting certain images, like Van Gogh’s field of poppies, in a not-quite-still life fanned by the quivering wind, the red flowers indelible once imprinted by the cones of your retina. Burns’s love, Kayyam’s rose and the dress Kim Addonizio desired are red too. Would I be able to create the experience of seeing those shades of red if I have the exact size of their wavelengths, knowing that red has the longest, 780-620 nanometers? To be exact is necessary in engineering. In recreating the field of red flowers as they move gently in the wind in high resolution, the clock of the video circuitry that sends the images to the monitor needs to be at a definite range of frequency. Predictability and precision are virtues in engineering whereas the usefulness of poetry is inexact. Far from repelling, this tension can be inordinately attractive when I work to remove the last pico second in a setup path to close timing in an FPGA. It is a relief to be able to let go of certainty to return later. The sleepwalkers are always able to return.

So by sleeping they can literally “walk through the skin of another life” and return with their hearts intact even after that feat of flying, figuratively though it may be. Such adventures they had in the dark! No poetic license was taken to recreate that well-being feeling upon awaken after such deep sleep. The price of consuming darkness in exchange for that is paltry, especially as that other life comes with it. The resonance in the last line of the poem makes me feel grateful because of the self-sufficiency it induces. All is within our reach. Surely there are mornings when you start anew, brimming with energy so much that if you walk faster it will spill over. Never mind that this well will be depleted, for some by day’s end, for others sooner because some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal (1) . There is always tomorrow. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. Time to stop before the ricochet starts.

Thank you for the seeds, dear muse.

Acknowledgement:

1) Albert Camus

2) The painting of the sun landscape is from adrishta.com

3) The Van Gogh’s Field of Poppies image is from http://www.vangoghgallery.com

4) The color spectrum is from o2mc.net

The Malleability of Time

xbanguyen — Mon, 16 May 2011 01:44:26 +0000

The word elegiac comes to mind today for no discernible reasons because conventionally elegiac is a wintry word and we are well past that season, aren’t we. The primroses have run their course, the disheveled leaves a fair price to pay for the boisterous beauty of the flowers enjoyed earlier. Thankfully, the leaves on the rose bush “Jude the Obscure” are glossy, sturdy foils for the swollen buds from which fat buttery blossoms will surely emerge. June is but a couple of weeks away, but it is easier to be in tune with the passing of time when gardening. So then why elegiac? Could it be because I lack the ability to stay in the present but race forward already to winter while summer is not yet here even while aware that spring will come again? A competent engineer specialized in digital design should be more mindful of the cyclical nature of most matters as she must ensure that the clocks governing the digital FPGAs are precise in their cyclic property. On the one hand, it is desirable for a clock to have a narrow spectrum so that the timing budget for setup and hold is maximized as there is no wasteful uncertainty to be subtracted from the clock period. On the other hand, having all energy concentrated at a single frequency carries some perils, most notably causing interference to other signals in wireless communication. The spectral density of signals in a system influences the electro magnetic interference (EMI) emitted. One method of reducing EMI is spread spectrum clock generating (SSCG) by which the clock signals are distributed across a wider band of frequencies. Here randomness has its use because a noise-like signal from a pseudo-random number generator is applied to spread a clock in one technique.(1) And if you happen to be in need of hiding a signal, this technique is also useful. In the heart of that apparent randomness, a precise signal dwells. Is there an analogy to that of what dwells in the human heart?

The wind blows

through the doors of my heart.

It scatters my sheet music

that climbs like waves from the piano, free of the keys.

Now the notes stripped, black butterflies,

flattened against the screens.

The wind through my heart

blows all my candles out.

In my heart and its rooms is dark and windy.

From the mantle smashes birds’ nests, teacups

full of stars as the wind winds round,

a mist of sorts that rises and bends and blows

or is blown through the rooms of my heart

that shatters the windows,

rakes the bedsheets as though someone

had just made love. And my dresses

they are lifted like brides come to rest

on the bedstead, crucifixes,

dresses tangled in trees in the rooms

of my heart. To save them

I’ve thrown flowers to fields,

so that someone would pick them up

and know where they came from.

Come the bees now clinging to flowered curtains.

Off with the clothesline pinning anything, my mother’s trousseau.

It is not for me to say what is this wind

or how it came to blow through the rooms of my heart.

Wing after wing, through the rooms of the dead

the wind does not blow. Nor the basement, no wheezing,

no wind choking the cobwebs in our hair.

It is cool here, quiet, a quilt spread on soil.

But we will never lie down again.

Deborah Digges

The imagery within the poem resonates. The teacups full of stars bring back a childhood desire to raise a ladder leaning against the sky to paste more stars there. The wind comes alive in the poem. It could be the same wind painted by Edward Rochester’s Jane depicting her interior landscape. Refraining from analyzing the poem, I find it a pleasure just to quietly acknowledge the electrical signals emitted in those four chambers of mine, gentle like a sign, as I read it one more time. How much of that is physiologically induced – what the eyes read, the mind comprehends, the heart empathizes, I do not know. The number of neurotransmitters involved in the entire process is an esoteric matter. I’ll continue to be grateful for the power that poetry can induce, unquantifiable though it may be.

Thank you for the subject, dear muse.

Acknowledgement:

1.http://www.ipsi.fraunhofer.de/mobile/teaching/LaPlata/2Funk/2Funke.htm
2. The rose photo is from http://www.garden-and-patio-inspiration.co.uk/rose-bushes.html
3. The spread spectrum waveform is from www.lowemi.com
4. The neurotransmitter image is from http://www.buzzle.com/articles/neurotransmitters-and-their-functions.html

Finding Paradoxes

xbanguyen — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 07:56:04 +0000

Did you know that Socrates started learning to play the lyre after he was sentenced to death? That is not surprising as the man believed that all you need to be happy is to be virtuous. And to be virtuous all you have to do is to know enough to describe in words the necessary and sufficient essence of virtues.(1). It was what originally drew me to reading Socrates’s words as told by others, especially the idea that virtue is a kind of knowledge that once known will be carried out by rational beings. There are no weaknesses of will, only lack of knowledge (2). And that in itself is a paradox.

The relentless expectation to be rational can drive one to extremes and to seek out paradoxes in conventional wisdom such as “practice all things in moderation”. Would this extreme adherence to moderation is an immoderation in itself? Paradoxes abound in mathematics. Are there different sizes of infinities? If there is an infinite number of even integers and an infinite number of integers then how can it be proved that there are more integers than even integers? Regarding time, Augustine’s paradox is compelling: the past does not exist because it already happened,the future does not exist because it has not yet happened, and the present has no duration (3), so how can time be measured? The question escapes being rhetorical to become almost poetic for me, preoccupied with time as I type. In the same universe, paradox is also a literary device used most effectively in a tragicomedy manner by Joseph Heller in Catch 22. It has been said that the language of poetry is the language of paradox with its inherent contradiction creating tension to draw in the reader. Sometimes the tension appears to be gently dark.

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leafs a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Rober Frost

In making green gold and flowers leafs, the poet conveys that the earth turns. That in itself may not be so dark after all because spring will follow winter as surely as autumn summer. There are no reasons to pine for permanence because permanence is stasis. Impermanence is permanent. I will learn to make peace with that paradox and turn to these stanzas of Marie Ponsot’s

Burn, or speak your mind. For the oak to untruss
its passion it must explode as fire or leaves.
The delicious tongue we speak with speaks us.
A liquor of sweetness where its root cleaves
ripens fluent, as it runs for the desirous
reason, the touching sense. The infant says, “I”
like earthquake and wavers as place takes voice.
Earth steadies smiling around her, in reply
to her finding of pronoun, her focal choice,
& waits: while sun sucks earth juices up from wry
root-runs tangled under dark, while the girl
no longer vegetal, steps into view
a moving speaker, an “I” the air whirls
toward the green exuberance of “You.”

Only to themselves are the passionate
hot. To the objects of their passion they
are cold. What Yeats knew. They eradicate
what they notice; the thumb hard-crams the clay
impressionable under it, to lie flat,
apt to the shape a cold-steel scribe may
cut or spurn it to. Yet they know passion
must drown to ripen sweet & give fair play
to the whole life hot passion speed us from

Clay, be glass. Cling to the crystals of sand
that tell you, centuries of soil will come.
Not-heart, translate root-ends the planter’s hand
cut & abandoned, to slow chrysanthemum.
Heart of felt life, drop your guard, be still, be slow,
easing all you long for toward all you know.

Marie Ponsot

Tall order that is, to drop one’s guard – only in certain company, perhaps. Challenged to choose between speaking my mind or being burned, I immediately fell for the poem and had difficulty deciding where to stop quoting as the single-syllable words march purposeful forward like drumbeats. Valiantly I tried to grasp hold of a punctuation mark, any punctuation mark will do, to no avail, the words insist on appearing like a compulsive habit. Paradoxically, this poem is from a collection called Easy. Time to stop. I had planned to end this post with a note of optimism but the biblical paradox quoted by Fitzgerald in The Crack Up has the upper hand. “You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt hath lost its savour, wherewith shall it be salted?”

Thank you for the imagery, dear muse.

Acknowledgements:

(1)http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/Socrates.html
(2) http://nibiryukov.narod.ru/nb_pinacoteca/nbe_pinacoteca_philosophers_socrates.htm
(3) http://www.fordham.edu/gsas/phil/klima/augustine/Time%20and%20Eternity%20in%20Augustine.htm
(4) The old books image is from trilibnews.blogs.brynmawr.edu
(5) The green/gold leaves photo is from http://wn.com
(6) The early leaf photo is from http://somewhereindhamma.wordpress.com/2010/04/27/natures-first-green-is-gold-nothing-gold-can-stay
(7) The waterdrop photo is from premarin.tedehu.brasilia.me

Searching For Anodynes

xbanguyen — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 00:07:36 +0000

It’s not quite the cliff-diving sensation of writing a short story, but starting a new post is like setting out for a short walk and ending up in a different city with a collection of souvenirs displayed in ASCII, deceptively tentative. As you probably have observed, we seldom write in long hand as much anymore, not long letters, not sheaves of manuscripts stained with ink and hope. Instead, we use our laptops to register our thoughts that keep on meandering despite our left-brains’ effort to shepherd them toward a destination. These streams of thoughts are continuous, analog-like in nature. However, the incongruity of expressing them using digital technology is no longer jarring. With the advent in display technology and the familiarity of use, we no longer notice the demarcation.

Always wary of time, for me the efficiency of digital technology seems to be indisputable even in the realm of audio, never mind the condescension of some audio aficionados, because the materials used for analog recording will deteriorate with time more so than those ubiquitous CDs, and a sense of permanence is essential to this engineer. Listening to Ravel’s Bolero recorded on an audio CD confirms that those austere ones and zeros could intermingle to reproduce voluptuous sounds to be delivered to the pleasure center in our brains via the membrane that is our eardrum, an organ so delicate that when we listen to the softest of notes, it vibrates less than the diameter of a single molecule.[1] The demarcation between analog and digital blurs because those impulsive ones and zeroes have the same analog root — the sound waves coming from that saxophone are received as analog signals, filtered, sampled, quantized and encoded into digital packets. With the proliferation of wireless technology, there are many such packets zipping purposefully in our world to maintain the analog illusion of continuity. The pixels that are part of the same digital technology enables me to see Keats’s handwriting, as it was, and be drawn into his world all over again. The graceful curves of the words bring to mind Mary Oliver’s endearing habit of leaving pencils in trees so that she can capture her thoughts as they occur during her rambles in the forest surrounding Provincetown. Perhaps this poem came from the notes taken with one of those pencils.

Listen, whatever it is you try
to do with your life, nothing will ever dazzle you
like the dreams of your body,
its spirit
longing to fly while the dead-weight bones

toss their dark mane and hurry
back into the fields of glittering fire

where everything,
even the great whale,
throbs with song.

Mary Oliver

The poem exudes a sense of possibility, an optimism of what could be found when turning inward, an optimism that may be stoked to overcome the sense of impossibility that is indisputable due to the physical limitation, no matter how elegantly wrought. I’d like to imagine that such epiphany [2] occurred to the poet as she walked in the woods in early autumn when the trees were still richly clothed and the sun cast dappled shadows on her hat. That she noticed the grasshopper’s pale forearms, the soft eyelids of the little owl, the moths sleeping in the dark halls of honey inside the moccasin flowers, and the painted islands that were the summer lilies make the confinement of my cubicle a temporary burden. And more than once I turn to the gentle understanding, almost a blessing of the following poem for comfort:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on

Mary Oliver

The last line makes the reassurance more real. Like the school girl I was long ago, I copied this stanza into my notebook just for the pleasure of doing so. But at times, the prospect of keeping desolation at bay seems daunting, in spite of the anodynes found in poetry.

Thank you for the inspiration, dear muse.

Acknowledgment:

1) http://www.dspguide.com
2) http://www.ohioana-authors.org/oliver/highlights.php
3) The waveform graphs and the ear diagram are from http://www.dspguide.com
4) Keats’s script is from http://englishhistory.net
5) The grasshopper, the owl and the lilies references are from other poems of Mary Oliver.
6) The blue water lilies image is from a painting by Monet.

Time Again

xbanguyen — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 07:44:43 +0000

I did not eat the grapes that night because they were conjured up by a defense mechanism to distract me from the pain after the fall. Keats’s ode, purple-stained, and Andre Breton’s recurrent first time were adequate analgesic. Poetry came in handy then, as does the precarious stack of fiction hovering over the monitor at work when I need a diversion from the ordered world of digital design. I take an inordinate pleasure in piling more books onto that stack, haphazardly almost, so that it will topple one day, increasing entropy as stated in the second law of thermodynamics, and the chaos in my cubicle. Of course I can reverse this by righting the books to gain an illusion of orderliness, but it would never be the same stack of books it once was. As observed by Brian Greene the physicist, there is an incomprehensible number of possible ways for the pages to land when you throw an unbound volume, 697 pages, of War and Peace into the air.(1) It has been theorized that the universe started out having very low entropy, and the increase in entropy is relentless ever since. The unidirectional property of entropy is bleak, because the past is proven to be irretrievable.

Truly, though our element is time,
We are not suited to the long perspectives
Open at each instant of our lives.
They link us to our losses: worse,
They show us what we have as it once was,
Blindingly undiminished, just as though
By acting differently, we could have kept it so.

Philip Larkin

The knowing resignation in the poem casts a gentle gloom on the reader, but the engineer in me dispassionately points out that the whole thing is theoretical and that there is an inconsistency in this unidirectional, irreversible nature of entropy in comparison with the symmetry described in classical physics, for example Newton’s third law, and both were formed to describe the same universe. In fact, chemical physicists at the University of Australia have proved that in microscopic systems – latex beads of a few micrometers in diameter suspended in water, entropy decreases for a few tenths of a second (1).

So the deduction that bears out the arrow of time deflects on its own. Nevertheless, the water in the experiment brings to mind Nick Caraway’s last reflection as he ended Jay Gatsby’s story, “So we beat on, boat against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past.” Even though I always enjoy rereading that sentence with my mind’s eye, tonight with the coming of the first snowstorm of the season, such melancholy needs to be counterbalanced by some optimism so I will skip the rest of autumn, an entire winter and go directly to spring

Nothing is so beautiful as spring –
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden. — Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud …

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Thank you for the conversation, dear muse.

Acknowledgement

(1) http://www.rps.psu.edu/time/arrow.html
(2) The entropy graph is from http://www.iep.utm.edu/time/
(3) The clock figure is from http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2008/07/future-is-entropy.html
(4) The green leaves photo is from http://www.widescreenwallpapers.org

Fall Flying

xbanguyen — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 06:17:00 +0000

Absorbed in the integration of a new FPGA, I was unaware of autumn until I heard the beating wings of a flock of starlings flying south past my window. It was a sound both gentle and astonishing at the same time because the whispering air holding the tiny bodies in flight was also capable of supporting a plane laden with cargo, mostly humans and their encumbrance. Even though the physics of flying is well understood, the words used in describing this accomplishment are no less satisfying on their own, especially the alliteration: vertical velocity, parasitic power, varying wind vortex, and the visceral viscosity of air. Also satisfying is the paradoxical thought that we can fly because nature strives to be in equilibrium, to be still, as Newton’s third law is integral in lift generation. The reciprocating nature of action and reaction brings to mind the piezoelectric transducers that can both transmit and receive sounds. As you know, a transducer is a device that converts small amounts of energy from one form to another. Left alone, a piezoelectric crystal is still even though its atomic structure is not symmetrically arranged — their electrical charge is in perfect balance. Piezo means press in Greek. When an electrical charge is applied onto this structure, the atoms within the crystal move to rebalance themselves electrically, causing the crystal to deform, generating mechanical vibration that could be in the form of sound. Conversely, when a mechanical force in the form of sound, for instance, is pressed into this crystal structure, the atoms are pushed closer or pulled farther apart, developing the polarization that creates electric current from the sound received.

So you see that one form of energy flows into another – Things are amorphous in many ways. There are no boundaries that can’t be transcended. Looking at it another way as John Donne did a few centuries ago, no man is an island. How then, are we, limited by nature, have enough empathy for all things big and small? I mused over this question reading the following lines

The Seasons Have Unwound

and will not circle back again.
You pad like a cat through the changing
woods, trying to save what’s left before winter
swallows the red leaf, the yellow, the last
finger of the creek that passed
through August. It’s the question
you’ve answered and never answered:
What would you save from a burning house?

…

Once I hoped I’d save only
myself, naked and untraceable.
I wanted to stand in the mob of the curious
gathered at the curb and watch
the uniforms of recognition kindle and smoke,

to be absolved of owning.
The present is burning.
I know myself only
by what I’ve discarded, a vagrant’s
inventory of ashes.

Wendy Battin

I’ve found such pleasure reading the poem, especially the last sentence this rainy October evening. Having lived a number of years and not being able to discard things physical as well as emotional, I imagine that the bonfire that would result if I were a considerate pyromaniac could be spectacular, the heat radiating would be audible. But I feel blessed to have other obsessions, just as incendiary but far less destructive, to refrain, the desire for the illumination within not withstanding.

Happy autumn, dear muse.

Acknowledgement
1) The airplane over the vortex photograph is from http://www.aviationexplorer.com/
2) The piezoelectric diagram is from http://resources.edb.gov.hk/physics/articleIE/smartmaterials/SmartMaterials_e.htm
3) The autumn fire painting is the work of Scott Bennet displayed at http://rsbsmallworks.blogspot.com/

A Derivative of Sunlight

xbanguyen — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 08:13:20 +0000

There was a tremulous quality in the heat of summer this afternoon. Oh it was warm all right, especially for our city of rain, the wavy air above the hood of my car attesting to that. With that intensity, why did the sense of fragility persist? As dusk approached, the piece of sky over the mountains beyond my window transitioned from blue to red with no visible demarcation, the glowing red reminding me of a childhood tale of the light illuminating the kitchen of heaven. Now it is dark. The seagulls are still awake, judging from the raucous noise they are making – If you hear them now, you’ll agree that raucous is an apt adjective, jaded though it may sound. But I know little about the nocturnal habits of seagulls. All I can profess to know is that things change. Change is constant. That sounds like a bumper sticker and I read somewhere that one should not live life as decreed by bumper stickers. Regardless, changes are mathematically expressed as derivatives. Specifically, the derivative of a function is defined as an infinitesimal change in the function with respect to one of its variables. The rate of change in the intensity of light as the summer night deepens can be expressed as a mathematical equation. The thought that the light from the distant stars I see tonight has been in transit for thousands of years brings me a sense of peace — I am not sure why, just as I am not sure why the following poem resonates. It does, and I am thankful for its existence.

De Vegetabilibus

For there are splendors of flowers called DAY’S EYES in every field.For one cannot walk but to walk upon sun.

For the sun has also a stem, on which it turns.
For the tree forms sun into leaves, & its branches & saps

are solid & liquid states of sun.

For the sun has many seasons, & all of them summer.
For the carrot & bee both bless with sun,

the carrot beneath the earth & the bee with its dusts & honies.

For the sun has stippled the pear & polished the apple.

Ronald Johnson

Such luxury it is to have many seasons, all of them summers. But many does not mean infinite. I remember writing, once upon a time in grade school, of the stoic acceptance after being told that the sun was but an immense mass of gas and would decay. The need to affirm infinity is irrational so I will think of the ripe berries found in the summer market this morning and of all the berries in the summers to come, of the earth lying fallow under the autumn leaves, of the fat tulip bulbs that will bloom next year, and be content.

Thank you for your inquiry, dear muse.

1. The derivative illustration is from http://www.vias.org

Of Multiple Dimensions and Dingbats

xbanguyen — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 07:22:59 +0000

Do you write to remember or to forget? Do you write to prolong or to negate an experience? Do you think it is better to tie up loose ends or just go with the flow in this meandering sort of days when this particular summer can not make up its mind whether to dazzle or to play hard to get? I vote for jumping off the pier of uncollected thoughts, unsolved equations and unfolded laundry to plunge headlong … into a book, lest a sense of being too late overwhelms. Why too late? Is the ever increasing amount of logic that my profession of ASIC/FPGA design has been able to implement in an ever reducing area of silicon not enough to gain purchase on time? Let’s not go on yet about the importance of timing analysis in my line of work but just consider how a 3D FPGA enables more processing to be done in less time in the same amount of space. There are 3D FPGAs and there are virtual 3D FPGAs. As you know, a conventional FPGA is a semiconductor device consisting of a 2D array of logic blocks connected via configurable horizontal and vertical routing channels. And in the extravagant visions that sometimes visit this engineer, their metal junctions glisten like teardrops. The size of the transistors that make up a basic logic block keeps getting smaller, 28 nanometers currently, to enable more logic to occupy the same space. In a 3D FPGA there are multiples of such layers – one technique is to put the configuration logic on a separate layer on top of the active logic [1] to provide higher capacity.

In the same universe, the third dimension of a virtually 3D FPGA is time — the same amount of logic is rapidly reconfigured at GHz rate to implement multiple portions of a function [2] expressed in RTL. Similarly, multiple layers of meanings exist in this astonishing poem:

Space Bar

Lined up behind the space bartender
is the meaning of it all, the vessels
marked with letters, numbers,
signs. Beyond the flats

the monitor looms, for all the world
like the world. Images and
motions, weeping women,
men in hats. I have killed

many happy hours here,
with my bare hands,
where TV passes for IV, among
the space cadets and dingbats

Heather McHugh

I’ve found anodyne in this poem as I sit facing the monitors at work, too many hours and not enough, knowing full well that the pleasure of arriving at an elegant RTL implementation is not enough. The repeated appearance of the likenesses of the world in the poem helps me see my surrounding anew while the layered meanings insouciantly conveyed add texture to the way the keyboard feels under my fingers as I type. The act of killing time using such surprisingly elemental devices on the heels of the weeping women and hatted men invokes a thrill almost illicit to make writing an untamed art. And the space cadets bring Dylan Thomas to mind, perhaps because the sloping forwardness of the font has some resemblance to his lilting Fern Hill. Instead of the typological dingbats, my wayward mind’s eye sees bats in the swallow-thronged loft by the shadow of his hand. For a brief moment, Thomas’s swallow, Keats’s nightingale and Hardy’s thrush take flight upward together into the air scented with Khayyam’s roses, a mirage conjured up by poetry to counteract the cold of this summer evening.

Thank you for listening, dear muse.

[1] http://www.tierlogic.com/uploads/press-room-files/Tier-Logic-3D-TierFPGA-and-TierASIC-Technology-Brief.pdf
[2]http://www.tabula.com/technology/technology.php