Every once in a while, someone makes an impression on you that lasts for a lifetime. It sticks with you every single time. This is one of those, although a bit on the nerdy side, it is one that can change the way you present information in a very meaningful way.

I was once sitting at the NIST annual fire conference, going about my business, and someone working on a project regarding the structural response aspect of buildings on fire showed a video in their presentation. No big deal, right? Normally, we get cool fire videos, then some plots, and so on. Sometimes the plots are interesting, sometimes they are default from Excel with the ugly legend and all – with no story to tell.

But not this guy. He showed a video with real-time plots superimposed over the video showing the exact real-time structural response of the structure overlaid on the video in a plot. “AMAZING!” I thought. And it stuck with me. A useful way to convey synchronous information. People love videos, why not tell the qualitative AND quantitative story at the same time?

So I started working in grad. school on fire problems, and naturally, soon thereafter, I was scheduled to give a presentation. As most of my real creative coding and writing work happens of hours between the hours of 1 AM and 6 AM, I wanted to make this happen. I REALLY wanted some real-time plotting action in my presentation. No Excel templates for me! So I stayed up for a couple nights and worked on a way to use MATLAB to make this plotting dream a reality: I worked on importing videos, messing with frame rates, tons of images, and so forth. And soon thereafter, it happened. I had a working script.

I used it to show plots of large-scale fire tests with actual and predicted flame heights vs. time as seen here:

And I used the script to show the predicted flame heights on a small-scale test in an amazing way that just about anyone can relate to, fire-crazed scientist or not:

From anyone who has seen the videos firsthand, the response has been amazing. This is a great teaching and communication tool, and surprisingly enough, I haven’t found any existing program or tool that does this. And so I am sharing the videos and script here for anyone to use to better convey information.

My next steps are: 1) to convert the script to Python (since I am now almost exclusively using Python+numpy+scipy for my graduate research and daily work instead of MATLAB, and 2) to make the script into a cross-platform and easy to use tool.

I’m providing the code in its raw and uncommented and unedited form. It generates a number of images with plots superimposed on them, and then it is trivial to use a program to stitch them together into a video. I used Quicktime’s built in method. Sorry, too much current work going on finishing my MS thesis and Master’s degree to clean up the code, but it’s a brutal use of the “release early, release often” ideal! Hopefully someone can make some use of it.

So, here are the linked .m files:

http://www.koverholt.com/scripts/ssPlotVideo.m
http://www.koverholt.com/scripts/fireplotVideo.m

Enjoy! And please leave your comments or ideas!

Related posts:

1. Passionate and Artful Communication in Science
2. The Arrival of Collaboration in Fire Protection Engineering
3. Apartment fires burn and homes are lost due to outdated modes of thought

They were all events linked to arson and serve to show us the complicated relationship man has with fire, even with the modern day engineering tools and cutting edge analysis methods available to us.

Let me explore these three events in more detail:

Jesusita Fire; May 2009; Santa Barbara, CA

In May of 2009, a 300 foot high wall of fire burning through Santa Barbara, CA had 30,000 people running out of their city and wondering what they would return to, if anything more than an ashtray of their home’s contents. 3,700 acres were burned and it was marked as the most threatening natural disaster in the history of Santa Barbara. The cause? A campfire that got out of control from nearby marijuana growers.

40 MPH winds served to spread the fire as fast as it could towards the city. At the end of it all, 78 homes were destroyed, 29 firefighters were injured, and 15.5 million dollars were used. All from a campfire. From pot growers. This event reeks seriously of the complicated relationship between humans and fire – a relationship of utility, usefulness, crime, chaos, and control. A relationship that cannot be engineered out by even the best computational fluid dynamics code in the world.

Gallery Furniture Fire; May 2009; Houston, TX

Moving from wildland fires to warehouse fires: in May of 2009, an iconic Houston furniture warehouse burned to the ground as freeway traffic crawled by with worried onlookers in the late evening hours. After a long night of fighting the fire, the 100,000 square foot Gallery Furniture warehouse was no more and fell victim to to the 4-alarm fire. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms stepped in and ruled the fire as arson, leading to the arrest of an employee who worked at the furniture store.

This fire hits me close to home since my Master’s thesis research involves warehouse storage and commodity fire protection and how it can be improved. I can formulate the best mathematical fire spread model for predicting fire spread along cardboard stacked to the ceiling, but will my math model account for a crazed man dumping gallons of gasoline in the warehouse and firing up a match? Absolutely not.

Willingham Residential Fire; Dec. 1991; Corsicana, TX

This last fire I’ll discuss was a residential fire in the city of Corsicana in Texas. In December of 1991, the home of Cameron Willingham was burned and his three children were killed in the fire. He was later arrested and imprisoned on the basis that he had set fire to his house and was responsible for the death of his children. The fire marshal’s investigative report backed this up. 12 years passed, and Cameron was executed in February of 2004 in Texas for murder charges.

Just a few days ago, in August of 2009, a report from Craig Beyler at Hughes Associates (one of many reports to check the validity of the fire investigations on Willingham’s residence) stated that the fire investigation seemed more like the work of psychics and mystics rather than scientific work. There are other human factors here at work – Cameron’s alleged abuse of his children is one example – but I am sticking to the discussion of the relationship between Cameron, the investigators, and fire. In the report, Beyler stated that the investigators had a poor understanding of fire science. And because of their poor understanding, a man was wrongly killed by the state.

Putting it all together: Humans, fire, and education

So the relationship of man vs. fire goes back to the first time someone discovered fire. It is very complicated. Now what? How can we use our understanding of this relationship to save lives?

While churning along my research path, I have learned that I favor fire research, fire dynamics, and fire forensics over alarm design, building construction work, or working with fire codes. The three fires that I discussed above are most interesting to me are all involving arson in some way – and humans in a big way. One fire came from clumsiness, one fire stemmed from passionate and crazed anger, and one fire put to death a wrongly accused person and killed three children. I don’t know about you, but to me, this serves to smack us fire protection engineers in the face with a reminder that the human element can never be ignored, or fully engineered out of the problem of fire. The consideration of the human element should be included in every thought, design, and fire model that is churned out.

And although a recent survey by the Society of Fire Protection Engineers showed that most people think that fire is the greatest likely event to cause harm to them, it also showed that only 18% of the respondents actually worried about the dangers of fire more than once a year. The solutions that fire protection engineering provides stem from years and years of exploring this relationship of people and fire: how crowds react in a building fire, how different residential occupants can be awoken in a fire, and how people respond to building fire alarms.

In my opinion, the best help in the impact of fire protection engineering is effective education of the public. Informing the public (in interesting and engaging ways!) about fire safety and what they can do in their homes and workplaces to stay safe. Informing college students about dorm fire safety. Moving on from stop, drop, and roll, and giving people more of the information and knowledge that they deserve. Informing residents about the benefits of fire sprinklers, and having a huge incentive to have them installed, even retroactively.

And who is responsible for all of these education efforts? Anyone and everyone in the fire protection field. From engineer to firefighter, fire librarian to professor, code official to fire marshal. Everyone can serve to help the big picture of educating the public by taking fire science courses, by working with code committees, by linking together agencies and people who need to be talking, but aren’t. Fire investigators can take fire science courses and fire scientists can run into burning buildings in training exercises. The more we know as professionals about the big picture, the more we can help and educate the public, and save lives in the process.

So again, I say that effective education of the public is the best tool in fire protection engineering. Because without an informed public, we can have the best fire models and investigators in the world, but we would only be putting a band-aid on the complex fire hose of man vs. fire.

Related posts:

1. The Arrival of Collaboration in Fire Protection Engineering
2. Why Do I Chase Fire? (and video)
3. On the Topic of Human Touch

Whenever I listen to it, I am reminded of my grandfather, Jesus Gonzales, born 1908. It paraphrases something that he knew, something deep. It was to clear your mind of any toils or stress from the day that just passed you by. Jesus, or Apa, was married to Margarita Gonzales for many, many years, and he rubbed off on more people than I’ll ever know. He was one of the happiest men that I knew, in one of the happiest marriages I will ever know, ever.

He was a simple man who simply loved life. That feeling and mission I can certainly share with him. He told me to never go to bed angry, at anything. This is before computers, before we began to live in a life surrounded by computers and overwhelming days. He was never too busy for anybody, including you and me.

So I paraphrase him, as Apa wouldn’t mind, and say not to let the sun go down on your grievances. Sleep well, tell the one you love that you love them, and breathe in all the we have. Thanks Apa. I miss the days where I would go “fishing” and hunt for the raisins in my Quaker Oats oatmeal.

You knew exactly how to live life, and we all learned from you to pass it on and on.

Don’t let the sun go down own your grievances:

Don’t let the sun go down on your grievances
Respect love of the heart over lust of the flesh
Do yourself a favor: become your own savior
And don’t let the sun go down on your grievances
And when you wake up in the morning
You’ll have a brand new feeling
And you’ll find yourself healing
So don’t let the sun go down on your grievances

Related posts:

1. The Days Felt Like Weeks
2. Updates on welcomed unstability
3. Not Working

Related posts:

1. Passionate and Artful Communication in Science
2. Why Do I Chase Fire? (and video)
3. The cold wind is here

A good day was had talking with the president of a big conglomerate corporation and tons of cheese. Tim Ferriss totally has it down with talking to big CEOs, they are like the hot chicks of the business and job world – i.e. everyone is afraid to talk to them straight and never does, therefore they love to have some informal talk with you and wil remember you always. Also, free beer on campus is cool (hooray private schools without state school regulations)!

Which reminds me, I used to have this statement written in a marker right above my bed when I would wake up in the morning: “Your intention creates your reality.” And I have it on my fridge now. Same idea. It’s true, eh.

Two years ago I quit my job to follow my dream, and each day it gets better and better. It’s amazing what the human mind can do with the help of God. This is exactly what I wanted and there is so much more good to come.

An excellent time was had here as well with my mom visiting Worcester for a week:

And Katie came to visit for a different week as well. We all had a blast here with deliciously cheap happy-hour seafood, bone-chilling temperatures, bland Dominican food in Massachusetts, nuns racing through the park, endless drives along the cliffy coast, and just plain being together. It had been a few months since I saw Katie, and it made it that much better. Many good times were had and many more million to come.

15 days ’til I return to the big Texas. I really miss the people, but not so much the place.

I guess Texas is the home of my heart and Massachusetts is the home of my brain. The two can coexist in harmony you know:

Related posts:

1. On Just Taking the Lift
2. 2,000 Miles Nearby
3. Ideas and the the paralysis of them in slow-motion

Saturday, November 8, 2:04 am: Male on Boynton St. who appears to be intoxicated. (Hmm, checks timestamp, yep, got ‘em!)

Saturday, November 8, 3:17 pm: Officer speaks to young kids skateboarding in the East Hall parking garage, advising them to move along. (Classic, need I say more?)

Sunday, November 8, 12:02 am: Caller reports group of students playing with fire in a can in West St. parking lot. Officer dispatched, individuals advised. (Advised of what? The joys of playing with fire?! It wasn’t me I swear!)

Sunday, November 9, 1:00 am: Pumpkin thrown at SNAP van from balcony on West St. Officers check, find smashed pumpkin, no people on balcony. (Pumpkin taken into custody.)

Sunday, November 9, 1:53 am: Caller reports female playing music and singing out of her window in Founders. Female is very loud and keeping students awake. Officer dispatched, locates student; singer advised to be mindful of other students. (Ahh, I was hoping he would join in! We need more public singing!)

Sunday, November 9, 3:27 pm: Feces found on floor of Morgan Hall restroom. Custodian en route. (It is the only room with a drain.)

Tuesday, November 11, 2:10 am: Caller reports having vomited in Stoddard A. (What a nice guy; classy. Would love to hear the call.)

And there you have a window into my world at WPI. Leaping pumpkins, public singers, and bodily fluids fill the police log. Now laugh along with me, lest you be advised to move along, you damn kids!

Related posts:

1. How to remove yourself and your thoughts from this world
2. Why Do I Chase Fire? (and video)
3. Circles of Passage

- Jamie Raskin, American University law professor, November 2004 on the Democracy Now! radio program

Flickr user sandymichelle

Just this past Sunday I had to kill my television – in the best sense of the word. You know: denounce, unrecognize, and the such. It was really stealing away any free (and productive) time that I had. I mean, the idle brain cells spin out of control and zoning out in front of TV after a long day of work leads to: not caring about what you eat, not thinking critically about other great things in the world, not spending ol’ fashioned time with your family or friends. (Lots of great, original articles about Killing Your TV)

I remember about 4 years ago when I came across a similar “Turn Off Your TV” site online in the form of a podcast. And the 2 people were talking on and on about trans fatty acids. I was so compelled as to what they were saying I remember typing as fast as I could to take notes and replaying parts and looking up health terms and the such. Learning. Critical thinking. Sharing. I went on to write an article in the paper at my school and was excitedly telling everyone about my findings. I continued to look up more and more information – I was addicted to knowledge. Just a few minutes ago, I just finished my meal of baked chicken, couscous, and black bean soup with tomatoes, onions, bell peppers, and garlic. And I know that most of that motivation to eat healthy as I do today came from that little audio finding 4 years back. Now it allows me, 4 years later, a chance for me to just sit and enjoy a meal – in peace and quiet – and experience the flavors of life one by one. Hmm, there was life before TV.

I kept running past the idea that parents talk to their kids about 28 minutes a day while the average adult watches 2.5 hours of television per day. Hmm. What are we doing to ourselves? Now, I’m not being anti-fun here, entertainment is great, and I make it through most of my day with a humorous outlook on life. But I see people ignoring food as they eat, sitting silently among family or friends, just gazing. Paying lots of money – to be advertised to constantly and have this machine suck away brain cells.

Flickr user janz87

I also came across someone who said – if aliens came to visit us and checked out the layout of our homes, they would think the television is some sort of god of ours, as our entire houses are arranged around the careful placement of the television set. And then comes the arguments about using a DVR to save time. Of course, it is better than just mindlessly watching channels and surfing without barriers, but there are other ways to go about getting your fix without paying a crapload (ahem). But I can think of many better things to do anyway! I don’t think you’ll lose sleep at night or have regrets on your deathbed – just wondering and wishing that you you had watched more TV.

Flickr user chrisdonia

On another note, it is awesome to see change and progress going on all around the world, from the recent election all the way down to the small world of fire protection engineering. Every time I watch one of the videos about technology and change in this era – I get all giddy and warm on the inside. It’s true.

There’s a giant conversation going on. And it doesn’t depend on power or money or anything. Just a passion – a want. I think of how one person that I know revamped and forever changed the world of fire modeling by utilizing a couple of free tools to bring together thousands of users who were all previously working in dark corners. I think of how a few scratches I made on a notebook one night turned into a tool that hundreds of fire model users use every week – and I think of the next step, and the next, constantly progressing. I think of those that are “too busy” to participate in this movement and think this is only for nerds and computer people – and how bad I want them to participate.

I came to the conclusion that the two ideas I speak about here are interrelated. Apathy and social sloth. Here’s what I think: no one is any more busy than anyone else. Some of us just want something more strongly than others. And that used to be okay, praised even – when the dark corners were predominant. But now, everything is public – the world pushes upon itself.

Don’t be “too busy” watching TV or sitting out on this big movement – wherever you are or whoever you are. This is big. Join in anytime.

Related posts:

1. The Daily Priority
2. Meddling in life
3. Not Working

[From NASA]

So, let me explain his model simply by example:

The professor said that when he first started this class 2 years ago, the students were working on a different problem with no solution… at the time. The class worked together and in the end the results were so significant that a couple of students took the initiative to publish the results in a scientific journal. The same happened when the class was taught last year – project done, paper published.

So what does this mean and why do you care? Well, all too often in the academic world, people can get caught up in working on projects and sort of work themselves into a dark corner where nobody gets to benefit from the results… and this is done in real life as well, not just academics. This is where the ridiculous amount of collaborative technology available to us comes in to play. Want to gather up notes on the Smagorinsky constant and publish them for anyone to find who is searching for them in the next 1000 years? Easy: 5 minutes. Want to publish your results in the most useful way? Easy: work on an open source project in your area along with your research – or make your own.

…Or you could write a paper, finish your thesis work, wrap up the loose ends in a few years and show a flashy poster of your work 5 years after anybody cares about it anymore or thinks it to be useful.

I digress. I just wanted to stress this new method of collaboration that is among us, and how it’s going to change the way that we work together and grow together in fire protection engineering and fire science.

[From Rowan University College of Engineering]

Why not make use of motivated students and brainpower when they come together? Here is me welcoming this new phase of community and collaboration in a field that directly impacts life safety and makes safer buildings around the world. So when we work on that final project in a few weeks, it’s not really at all about a grade anymore – it’s about a new way of doing science – together.

Update: This is exactly the kind of stuff that I’m talking about here, posted today on the SFPE National blog that I set up a year ago – collaboration: Foundation Funded Research underway at WPI

Related posts:

1. The human element in fire protection engineering
2. Why Do I Chase Fire? (and video)
3. On Breathing In Distinct Steps

Well, why do you care about my graph? I certainly do. There are many books about conveying information in statistics and how to present data in a very informationally dense format, sure. But let’s think about this graph that I made for a homework assignment. The purpose of the homework was for me to learn, yes? And that nice orange line bought me some extra credit worth 25 points, but that’s another story. I want to learn it inside out, run it amongst others, and in the end communicate great things to many, many people. Every time. With every action.

So I could have left the default Excel settings for the chart, but my soul cannot allow such a thing.

This graph shows relationships, it runs a conversation with itself and lets the numbers drive by each other and say hello. It’s living, and it talks to me. Check out the dark red diamond line called “Mixture Fraction”. This guy drives all of the others. Then the f’s come in. Then we go back to the real quantities like the mass fraction of oxygen (Yo) and fuel (Yf) and we can also grab temperature (in Kelvin) based off of what those f’s are telling each other.

Yes, yes, Kris. You are talking nonsense, I don’t like it. Well, perhaps I’m not as eloquent and direct as this guy (watch this great motivating video, do I ever let you down?):

But our messages are the same. Do what you love, and work your ass off at it. All the time. Not the old and dead cliched way of “do what you love” – but the minute by minute, day by day, just got home tired from work but I need more, but I don’t have the time, wake up and do it, it keeps you up and night, but I want to watch TV every day, what you REALLY want to do, an exact thing/action/pursuit every day until you die – kind of way.

If I wasn’t here loving my graphs at 2:34 AM in the morning and pondering the million things I just learned from this 4 day exercise, I’d quit. If I doubted for a second (as the guy in the video says), I’d do us all a favor and leave here. But I want this knowledge, and these relationships so very badly. And when the end-result comes along, I have a sick urge to spend so much time and detail on things so that others may benefit. Make your life, thoughts, and business public, and see what happens to it. It skyrockets.

Now do you see why I care about my graph? I’m proud of what it represents. Now go off and care about your own graph. For the rest of us.

Related posts:

1. 18 minutes with an agile mind – video
2. More fire more flames
3. Why Do I Chase Fire? (and video)

Three fire engines and a ladder truck just blared by my house going southbound on the street and stopped about two blocks away. What a beautiful sound of the QO2 siren screaming by on a chilly city night. It takes me back to a few years ago, hearing the fire dispatch alert going out, gearing up in seconds at the station with 45 pounds of firefighter bunker gear, and peeking around each street corner as the truck leaned away from the turn – not knowing if there would be a small car fire or a huge commercial building fire. Terrified people waiting with nobody left to turn to as their family members are endangered by the power of fire. Their life history, photo albums, accomplishments, and material possessions having flames licked at them and could be vaporized into an ashtray within only a minute.

That blaring sound is why I do what I do. And people ask me, why do I like this field so much? Fire is mesmerizing, fire is better understood each day that passes by, but still greatly misunderstood. Fire is extremely useful. Fire is extremely devastating. Fire has context to define its will.

To me, understanding the dynamics of a fire dancing and licking around can be like trying to understand the psychology of billions of different humans. It can be like trying to catch something running away by using differential equations and fluid dynamics. It can be like painting a picture for hours or days and the end product is something that sticks with you every day for the rest of time.

It is like playing on a sports team and working with your family when working in the lab. We work for 3 hours on setting up temperature sensors and calorimeters and even more hours discussing and brainstorming in a room boiling over with a mental flood of science, passion, logic, deduction, and induction. All about fire. Then we burn our creation in 1.73 minutes and forever destroy it, releasing yet another drop in the endless pool of ongoing knowledge.

Here is a video that exhibits a very successful test burn from today. The box is filled with small plastic cups and packed like one that would be shipped. We set up instruments inside to measure the fire size, temperature inside at different places, cameras to record the flame standoff distance, and a ton of other information.

I guess in my version of 1984, things make sense in this way: fire is knowledge, community is power, and intuition is freedom.

This is why I do what I do.

Related posts:

1. 18 minutes with an agile mind – video
2. The Arrival of Collaboration in Fire Protection Engineering
3. The Daily Priority