J Ben Deaton

Ready to learn

Jason Fried paraphrasing Clayton Christensen on why someone can’t be taught until they’re ready to learn:

“Questions are places in your mind where answers fit. If you haven’t asked the question, the answer has nowhere to go. It hits your mind and bounces right off. You have to ask the question – you have to want to know – in order to open up the space for the answer to fit.”

Also, check out Clayton Christensen’s site here.

Day One Journaling App

Writing constitutes a big part of my day, whether it’s academic writing, email, or the occasional blog post. But some of the most valuable writing, no one but me—and perhaps my family—will ever read. Processing thoughts in a journal consistently brings clarity and perspective into life’s matters.

I have been using Day One as a journaling app for several months now. I love the idea of handwriting journal entries in a moleskine notebook, but since I am a painfully slow at writing by hand, most of my attempts at a handwritten journal have ended in frustration because my pen can’t keep up with my thoughts. Add to this the fact that a physical journal can be lost or stolen—as well as that it is unsearchable—and the case for digital becomes stronger. Thus Day One became the chief repository for issues I’m processing, things my daughter says that I want to never forget, and archiving my descriptions of significant events in my life.

I have been very, very impressed with Day One. The iPad version (paired with a bluetooth keyboard) is my favorite flavor and lives on my home row right beside Mail and OmniFocus. It sports a crisp design, Markdown support, syncing between my iPhone/iPad/Mac, passcode lock, and plain text export (my data is future-proof). But today, this already great app gets an overhaul which adds support for photos, location and weather data logging, better typography, and more. This means my daughter’s antics can now be documented with text and photos, I can capture that I was thinking through such-and-such decision while I sitting in a coffee shop on a brisk morning in Chicago, and in general, the documented narrative of my life now has words and images in a beautiful, easy to read format.

For more, check out Shawn Blanc’s detailed review of Day One.

Numerical analysis on a solid state drive

About six months ago I reached a point in my research where my major models were taking over 24 hours to run. Convergence toward a working prototype was much too slow when iterating at this rate. I began digging under the hood and realized that my particular numerical code (a nonlinear finite element simulation) was writing massive amounts of data out to disk throughout the analysis.

Naturally I decided I should get a solid state hard drive (SSD).

This resulted in a ~4x speedup.

Will you get the same improvement? It depends, and there are many people who can answer that question better than I can. The basic line of thought goes like this: If your numerical algorithm is running primarily in RAM (or if you can increase the amount of RAM on your machine to encompass your simulation), then the SSD isn’t going to help you much. But if you see a lot of activity with your page file while running your model, you probably stand to gain a lot from moving it to an SSD.

For those using DIANA for finite element analysis like I am, the software developer provides a helpful discussion/example: Should I install a Solid State Drive (SSD) in my system to improve DIANA performance? — for the scenario they profile, the simulation sped up from 21313 to 7849 seconds (2.7x improvement).

An SSD is worth considering anyway for your primary OS because of how fast everything else will run. I had never used one before and was blown away. Firing up a huge FEA pre/post-processor on the old drive took about 15-20 seconds; on the SSD it’s live in 2-3 seconds. That makes for happy computing.

For those interested in my setup, I run Windows 7 (64-bit) on a 256GB SSD and have a second 2TB, 7200RPM storage/archive drive. I keep the SSD really lean—only hosting the OS and a working directory for active projects. Whenever I finish a project, I move it back onto the archive drive.

In summary: if you can afford an SSD for finite element analysis, you have very little to lose. It will definitely make your computer more enjoyable to use, and you may get some serious improvements in overall simulation time.

Thesis typography: Bembo + Gill Sans

Being a person that has read (a decent bit of) Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style, I have wanted to make sure that my dissertation is—minimally—not a typographical embarrassment. I have spent actual, US dollars on various typefaces and tried this with that, but today, I feel like I finally arrived: Bembo as the primary typeface with Gill Sans for titling.

I bought the Monotype Bembo Book family a few years ago after learning it was a very close approximation to Edward Tufte’s personally-commissioned version of Bembo (ET Bembo). I started using it off and on for various documents and have developed quite an appreciation for its appearance, both under close-up scrutiny as well as the overall color of the page at a distance. Here is a Bembo specimen:

I was originally also using Bembo for chapter and section headings, but was never really satisfied with how Bembo looks at larger sizes or heavier weights. I started thinking I would go the direction of an old-school, geometric sans for these elements, and certainly would have chosen Futura if I hadn’t already dropped a fair piece on the Bembo Book family (>$100). At the end of the day, the only other geometric sans in the same class as Futura for my taste—and at the right price since it’s standard on Macs and PC’s—was Gill Sans, which incidentally is also a favorite of Tufte’s. (I do understand Gill Sans is overused in the UK, but not so much here in the States.) Here is a Gill Sans type specimen:

So while I didn’t initially intend to rip off the typographic design of every one of Tufte’s books… I have to give credit where credit is due and admit that these are some of the most beautifully typeset books I have ever seen.

Innovate in your own field (engineering in my case), borrow from the best outside of it (graphic/typographic design).

Here is a sample page to illustrate the result:

If you are interested in implementing the same effect in your LaTeX-generated thesis, you will have to use XeLaTeX with the fontspec package. Here is the code I use to invoke Bembo and Gill Sans:

% FONT COMMANDS
usepackage{fontspec}
defaultfontfeatures{Mapping=tex-text}
setmainfont[Ligatures={Common},Numbers={Lining}, Scale=1.1]{Bembo Book MT Std}

% HEADINGS with Gill Sans
newfontfamilyheadingfont{Gill Sans MT}
defchapterfont{Largemdseriescenteringheadingfont}
defsectionfont{noindentheadingfontLargemdseries}
defsubsectionfont{noindentheadingfontlarge}
defsubsubsectionfont{noindentheadingfontnormalsizemdseriesMakeUppercase}

A few final comments:

• Most university thesis style guides are so over-constraining that you don’t have much room to work optimizing characters per line, line height, etc. I tightened the line spacing enough that I don’t think the style reviewer will detect it isn’t doublespaced, but it’s nowhere near the elegance of the Classic Thesis LaTeX theme, which you should absolutely be using if your university’s style guide is lax enough.
• I may still purchase just the medium weight Gill Sans or Futura to make the headings pop a bit more. The bold versions of both are much too heavy for my taste.
• I am open to all suggestions for a moderately priced geometric sans.

Disclaimer: The above code will definitely not work out of the box in your thesis—you will have to edit your university’s thesis template to invoke headingfont for chapter headings, etc. Depending on how cleanly developed your thesis style is, you might can pull off something similar with the secsty package, but the Georgia Tech thesis class was far too hacked together for that to work for me. Also, depending on your system and where you get the fonts, the names may vary from what I have listed above.

Now to finish writing it.

Why Sublime Text is a great text editor for finite element models

Most engineers I observe edit finite element models in MS Notepad. Sadly, many don’t even know that serious text editors or syntax highlighting even exists. Today—in my quest to bring fellow engineers into the 21st century—I want to point out one of my favorite engineer/FEA-friendly features in Sublime Text: the “minimap”.

The minimap is the narrow, vertical band you see toward the right side of the screenshot above—think of it like a 10,000ft view of your file. This allows you to not only view the shape of your code or prose, but by clicking in this area and dragging you can navigate your file from a broader vantage point.

The minimap is extremely helpful this is when editing a finite element model text input file. Although almost every major FEA code lets you interact with your model either using a GUI, serious FEA people prefer working with raw text over a binary database.

The drawback though is that your input file might contain 20,000 lines of nodal coordinates, followed by 10 lines of material definitions, followed by another 20,000 lines of element topologies, etc. If you are looking for that 10-line block, you are scrolling or paging through a 50,000-line file looking for the little blip on the screen to find it, or perhaps using a search function if there is a relevant keyword to help you out. At any rate, most of the time the text editor looks like the open sea:

This is where the minimap kicks in. In the screenshot below, you can see around 50 lines of the actual text on the left, but the shape of around 500 lines of code in the minimap. Look at how much more the 20-line section stands out in the minimap against the 5,000 lines of near-identically shaped text book-ending it. I can track it down in no time.

I think it’s obvious how helpful this is. Although I enjoy the minimap when programming because I tend to remember the shape of certain functions and can jump to them really quickly, for editing FEA models, it’s been a game changer for me.