Those of you with a thorough working knowledge of international, American, United Nations and relational flag etiquette and codes may skip straight to the pictures. The struggling laggards picking their noses (and eachothers’) at the back of the class, however, should pay attention. If you get this stuff wrong, you might find yourself declaring war on a global superpower and that rarely ends well.

Much like every immigrant over the past couple of hundred years, I had two simple dreams when I came to America tired, poor, and yearning to breathe free (seriously, JFK was really crowded.) All I wanted was to have a giant American flag on my bedroom wall, and to spend the 4^th of July clad only in said flag whilst eating copious amounts of dubiously-cooked meat products. Basic, modest hopes, I’m sure you’ll agree — but these were dashed once I began looking into flag etiquette.

To the first point, my bedroom already contains a large Welsh flag: it’s how I simultaneously proclaim my nationality to stalkers with binoculars, and inform visitors of my love of badass dragons. Placing the American flag above or below this flag would, as far as I can ascertain, be a declaration of war. The international guidelines are, I admit, more focused towards influencing national and military policy, but the wording really does seem to suggest that I could start a major international incident.

An hour or two of exacting measurement with a spirit level, regularly checked and maintained, could probably prevent the recolonisation of America by the Welsh army, but the problem is not yet solved. It is a violation of U.S. Federal Law to fly any flag to the right of the U.S. flag. It is a much more historic and equally important convention (known as Precedence) that one’s national flag must be flown at the left of any display. Having no wish to be deported, but not yet being ready to renounce my nationality, I eventually gave up on my first dream.

Surely though, I thought, there could be no problem with wrapping myself in the Stars & Stripes in a fit of adopted patriotic fervour to celebrate America’s birthday. Even there, I was to be disappointed. Going above and beyond international etiquette, the United States has a flag code unto itself. Section 8d states:

The flag should never be used as wearing apparel, bedding, or drapery. It should never be festooned, drawn back, nor up, in folds, but always allowed to fall free. Bunting of blue, white, and red, always arranged with the blue above, the white in the middle, and the red below, should be used for covering a speaker’s desk, draping the front of the platform, and for decoration in general.

There are a couple of other choice sections in the Flag Code too, including the particularly interesting point that it is legal, and in fact, encouraged, that a flag past its prime should be disposed of in a dignified manner, ‘preferably by burning.’ Those who feel uncomfortable burning an American flag, however, are often afforded other options, such as this box in Oyster Bay (via Jen.)

Finally, note that the United Nations also has a flag code of its own, and that concurrent to this, has a unique rule regarding the display of flags: namely that the flags of the member nations are displayed in alphabetical ordering. Whilst this may seem to breach Federal Law, by suborning the U.S. flag at the U.N.’s headquarters in New York, this is not actually the case as the U.N. headquarters have extraterritorial status and the location is therefore not subject to this law.

Is anyone still reading?

Xx

I love Walter Lewin.

But I’ll come back to that.

Something I’ve been considering – partly because it would be very useful for my job, partly because everyone I work with or interview has one, and partly because it would just be fun – is getting a Masters from Columbia University. Whilst I’d most enjoy one in mathematics or theoretical physics, they would be slightly harder to justify to my employer, who would pay a part of the costs, so it’d likely be a degree in Computer Science specialising in Machine Learning.

My free time aside, the most scary factor here is the costs themselves. Whilst students of the UK were rioting in London over potential maximum fees of £9,000 (~$14,000,) a graduate degree at Columbia is somewhere between $35,000-$40,000.

Having looked into it, I could probably learn a lot of the material in that degree in my own time, largely for free, which would result in a net opportunity profit to myself of $40,000. However, since I already know, or am learning at work, a good portion of the course, my net profit is really somewhere less than that. Clearly, using my spare time to study say, physics, would be a much more profitable choice.

However, why limit myself to the opportunity profit I could get from a single year at Columbia? MIT, one of the premier institutes in the world, would charge me approximately $170,000 to get an undergraduate degree in physics. If I spend my free time learning this for free, that’s a massive profit I’m making.

But how can I do so?

In a wonderfully generous spirit of public service, MIT has published videos, lecture notes, assignments, exams and everything else to do with their undergraduate physics degree online as part of their OpenCourseWare project. My subway journeys, weekends and evenings are therefore currently sprinkled with lectures from Walter Lewin, who is the most enthusiastic and fun lecturer I’ve ever had the pleasure of seeing.

In addition to his antics above, he’s also comes out with some fantastic quotes, and ends most lectures with a very successful demonstration, following which he shouts ‘physics works!’ — it’s wonderful. There’s a video collection of his best lines below.

Told you so.

Xx

The Scottish economist Adam Smith is often regarded as the founder of modern economic theory, both at a macro political scale and a more micro-oriented personal capitalist level. His conclusions stemmed greatly from social philosophy, and one of my favourite quotes from his opus The Wealth Of Nations is the cynic’s credo:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.

The analogy is followed through its natural progression that businesses and governments will therefore always act in their own self-interest, and that benefits to consumers and citizens are a mere by-product of these institutions’ need to retain popularity. Nowhere is this more evident than in New York, the Mecca of capitalism.

The American novelist Joseph Heller, a born & raised New York native, is most famous for Catch-22, a cry against the bureaucracy and fantastical situations that can be directly derived from Adam Smith’s principles.

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions.

It’s important to have read and fully understood both of these authors’ work before attempting to apply for a credit card in a new country.

A credit company will only provide cards, which cost money to produce and maintain and operate, if they believe it will lead to a profit for them. A basic, no-frills card will probably make money from enough money from vendors to give away nonchalantly — credit companies, of course, double-dip to take profits from those spending and those taking payments. A slightly fancier, card, however, will only be offered to those willing to front some money for it, or who have a history of maintaining a balance and paying interest on that balance.

This profit, however, is dependent on the person using the card not simply walking away and never paying off their balances. As such, it will only be offered to someone who has a credit history of making their basic payments. In order to get such a history, one will need to obtain some credit, and pay it off. In order to obtain this credit, one will need to get this history.

It took seven months, and ringing two banks (Citibank and HSBC) to ask them to post themselves a letter – which they honestly, physically did, to be clear, Citibank USA sent a letter to Citibank USA and HSBC UK sent a letter to HSBC USA) – and now, finally, I have two credit cards, which arrived within a week of eachother.

The new challenge is to overcome to impulse to buy things I don’t need simply to improve my credit rating.

Xx

My new housemates say that they’re not told they’re pretty often enough. I’m unsure what they mean by ‘enough’ — actually, I’m pretty lost by about 50% of what they say, here’s a sample conversation from yesterday:

“They had Bunny Grahams”

“What are they?”

“Bunny Grahams? They’re graham crackers shaped like bunnies”

“But what are they?”

“Graham crackers?”

“Yes”

“…Graham crackers”

“But what are they?”

“Graham crackers”

“Are they crisps?”

“They’re graham crackers”

“Are they a biscuit?”

“When you say biscuit you mean like…”

“…a cookie, yeah”

“Not really”

“Are they more like a biscuit or a crisp?”

“I don’t know, they’re just graham crackers”

“Are they more like a cookie or a chip?”

“They’re…they’re kinda…they’re crackers.”

This went on. A lot. Apparently they’re quite like digestives, a fact which makes me very happy indeed.

Anyway, where was I? Right, my new housemates. They’re pretty. I told them yesterday that some girls might be so pretty that they look like a million dollars, but that these two are even prettier. Then I gave them each one of these.

Who says hyperinflation can’t be romantic?

Xx

When I came to America, it was on the understanding that I would only be here for 6 months. My contracts said as much; there was even an insistence that I book a return flight. Fortunately for me, that means I have a free trip home coming up, and can grab an armful of guitars and teabags with which to populate my new New York, New York home.

I’m a little worried about returning to the UK. It’ll be strange being surrounded by British accents again, and having to remember to actually give a response to ‘How are you?‘ but I’m sure I’ll be able to work around that. The thing I’m really worried about though, is the fact that I’ll be 5,113km from the nearest Chipotle in South Portland, Maine.

You might (but probably won’t) ask, how can I be sure that’s the closest Chipotle? You could (but almost certainly aren’t going to) further inquire, can I give a brief overview of geodesy and cartographic principles whilst I explain? Read on.

The shortest distance between any two points on a sphere is to travel across the minor arc (yellow) of the Riemann Sphere (red) that intersects them. The earth is actually not a sphere, but an oblate spheroid – which, as you may remember, is the shape of an M&M – but whilst the distinction was important when calculating the cost of filling a room, it isn’t particularly important to understand the following.

On a ‘standard’ map that one might come across in any book or atlas, the shortest path between two points will not appear as a straight line, but rather as a curved arc. You may have noticed the phenomenon when staring blankly at the low-fidelity map that shows your flight path on your way to a country where they lack toilet paper.

The reason for this is that various projections are used to represent the earth on a two-dimensional plane, each a trade-off between properly representing area, distance and angles. The common Robinson and Winkel Tripel projections both significantly distort angles.

Possibly you’re more familiar with Google Maps which not only perverts the angles we’re interested in but also grossly distorts dimensions as distance from the equator increases. Consider for example, Greenland, which is actually more than 14 times smaller than Africa, but occupies roughly the same area on a Mercator projection (below) that Google uses. This is a terrible, but unfortunately common choice of projection; it’s a 16^th century representation best suited for nautical navigation that is inexplicably still popular.

For the record my favourite projection is the Goode homolosine.

The upshot of all this, is that the shortest distance between two points – in our case, between London Heathrow and any given Chipotle – cannot be calculated by sight on any non-Gnomonic projection, but must instead use the haversine formula. This proffers the Chipotle in South Portland, Maine, as the closest option.

Of course, the entire premise of this post is moot when I point out that this particular Maine branch fell into second place when Chipotle opened its first non-US restaurant a little less than a year ago. On Charing Cross Road.

You’ve just learned all that for nothing.

Xx

This morning, I followed a trail of links stemming from Twitter to discover that for a mere £57 I could purchase 5,000 of those little bouncy balls that, as a child, I loved passionately for the 5 minutes before they were confiscated, broke something, or disappeared into the ether. Following the life imitating art approach to XKCD, I briefly dreamed of filling a room with them, just for kicks.

One of the most popular tourist attractions for people visiting me in NYC so far, has been the triple-tiered M&Ms store near Times Square, the three floors of which offer every conceivable item you could ever want M&M branded, and quite a lot more besides (including a chess set and precious-stone jewellery.) They also sell a lot of M&Ms – as modelled by my friend Stephanie below – probably enough with which to fill a room…

But, how much would it really cost to completely stuff a room with bouncy balls or M&Ms? Let’s find out.

The Room
A fair sized bedroom, nothing fancy, (I’m going off the floor plans of a place I used to live) is 3.2m x 2.64m x 2.5m, which is 21,120,000cm³.

Bouncy Balls
The bouncy balls in question come in a variety of colourings, some with 3D effects and some even embedded with glitter. The important factor that we need to consider though, is the volume of each ball, and this may be deduced from its diameter of 27mm using the simple formula v = 4/3 π r³. Each ball therefore has a volume of 10,306mm³, which we’ll convert over to 10.306cm³ to make things easier to work with.

It would initially appear that we need a whopping 2,049,292 (21,120,000/10.306) of these balls to fill up the room, which seems amazing, but that is before we factor in the particle packing density of spheres to take account of the gaps that will be left between balls and get a more accurate picture.

Back in the 17^th Century, Johannes Kepler proffered a conjecture that that the densest possible arrangement of spheres would fill 74% of a container’s volume (arrangements shown below); a proof for this was offered in 1998 and is near to being accepted. However, the generally accepted estimate for randomly-poured spheres is that they will take up a mere 64% of the available space.

As such, we need to fill only 13,516,800cm³ of space with bouncy balls, which brings us down to a more managable 1,311,547 balls needed, or 656 packages from eBay.

That’s a cost of £37,392.

M&Ms
Various sources on the Internet, such as this one, seem to agree that the average number of M&Ms in a 14oz bag is around 464. From this we can easily see that 1lb of M&Ms contains about 530 individual sweets. Over at the M&Ms store in Times Square, 1lb of candy-coated chocolate will set you back $12.99.

Some fairly exact calculations were done on the volume of M&Ms by someone with a competitive streak playing a ‘guess how many sweets are in the jar’ game. His calculations gave him a spot-on answer of 8,409 sweets in the jar, and let us know that each individual M&M has a volume of .639cm³. 1lb of M&Ms therefore has a volume of 338.67cm³

A quick calculation shows that we’re going to need 62,361lbs of M&Ms to fill our room, assuming M&Ms pack perfectly, that is. Unfortunately, in this case, however, we won’t be using the 64% packing density of spheres to reduce that number, as oblate spheroids have a higher packing density of 68% (Science, February 2004). So, we actually need 42,405lbs of M&Ms.

That’s a cost of $550,840.95, which is £338,583.23 at today’s exchange rate.

Notes
Prices are likely to be lower in reality, assuming a discount is given for buying in such bulk. I’m aware that the XKCD and Last.FM ball-pits are filled with infinitely cheaper plastic ball-pit balls, and don’t completely fill a room.

Conclusion
It’s 900 times more expensive to fill a room with M&Ms than it is to fill it with bouncy balls, and it’s probable that neither of these are actually good ideas. We may also conclude that browsing Twitter is a dangerous activity that may cost you hours of your life.

Xx