Supermassive Black Hole A*

Pencils!!! The Mitsubishi Hi-Uni

Fri, 24 May 2013 03:01:40 PDT

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In which I continue the fascinating tale of my journey for the ideal pencil! Yesterday I got to talking about Japanese pencils, and how I found, at a local store, the US market version of one, the Tombow Mono, and it was pretty sweet. I also mentioned the Mono's rival in Japan, the Mistubishi Hi-Uni. Well, shipping from importer JetPens.com is fast enough that I got my hands on a Hi-Uni--well, a dozen, since that's the smallest amount in which they sell them :P--a few days ago, and ran it in a HEAD TO HEAD BATTLE against the US Mono, a pencil almost 1/3rd the Uni's price.

I liked the Mono better. The Hi-Uni, pictured below

(sharpened with my new imported Uni sharpener, which was a bit expensive ;_; but hey, I suck with a pocket knife, wood shavings, and besides, chances are good a standard sharpener won't fit these slightly wider than normal pencils) was significantly scratchier than the Mono, and lighter, almost as if the "H"-grade Hi-Uni is more like a "2H"-grade Mono or something: harder and not as dark. They both seem about equally smeary, though, which would definitely give the Mono the edge. In any case, the Mono H felt more like the H-grade 0.5 mm Pentel leads I've been using in my mechanical pencils--ie, more like what I'm used to. It was smoother than the Hi-Uni, and, well, I just couldn't find any up-side to the Hi-Uni; not that it's a bad pencil, it just isn't quite as good as the Mono, at least according to my peculiar tastes.

So the Mono it was; the handsome box of a dozen imported Hi-Unis was relegated to my bankruptcy-inducing art supply cupboard of shame. However, one nagging thought remained: what if the Japanese Mono 100 *is* better than the plain Mono (or "Mono Professional," strictly speaking) they put out State-side, as some would-be hard-core pencil importers maintain? Why, I'd be using a sub-standard instrument!

Perhaps you can guess what will happen in the next installment of the pencil saga...which won't be along until a certain package arrives, probably first thing next week.

~~~~~~

Danger with these Monos is overloading on graphite. Kinda did that on page 40 here. Gotta be clearer with decisions when it comes to shading so I don't end up muddling around. Well I suppose that'll come with practice.

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Pencils!! Caran d'Ache 777, Tombow Mono

Thu, 23 May 2013 00:22:03 PDT

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So to continue the pencil saga from yesterday, I was using a 0.5 mm pencil to draw the comic, but kept wondering if maybe I should be trying a more expressive option, more like a regular pencil where you can have more variation of broad and thin strokes and so on. You may remember I got some of those fancy-looking Cretacolor Monolith woodless pencils some time back to try out, where it's just a big pencil-shaped stick of graphite or whatever, which is pretty darn slick, only they don't come in the harder grades of lead; I use H leads with my 0.5 mm pencils, which is on the low end of the hard side of the lead scale, and seems to be about my ideal balance between darkness (leads get lighter as they get harder) and smeariness (leads smear more as they get softer). Well, woodless pencils only seem to go to "HB," which is two grades softer than "H." I tried an HB woodless pencil, but it was just too soft. So I kind of gave up on the idea and just went back to doing the best I could with the 0.5 mm drafting pencil.

Recently though I came across the pencil work of anghorkheng on deviantART, and while his subject matter--big buff dudes with knifes and demons and so on--isn't what I'm into, his pencil work is amazingly expressive--almost brush-like in the way he builds up form with swished parallel pencil lines. And I knew he could do stuff with whatever pencil he uses that is just not possible with a 0.5 mm mechanical--I mean, purely mechanically, aside from him being way better with a pencil than me. And fortunately for me he's one of the nice folks who goes out of their way to thank you when you follow them (you know, I don't do that... I probably should), and so I struck up a small conversation with him via dA comments, and found that he *used* to be a dedicated 0.5 mm user, but eventually broke out of that into more serious pencil hardware.

From that I finally realized I really need to try branching out and not just huddle inside the nice neat protective radius of the mechanical pencils. No, it was time--time to get into wood shavings. I remembered I had an actual wooden pencil somewhere in my art supply cupboard of shame, and dug it out; I had bought it after an extremely enthusiastic clerk at a large local art supply store had snatched it up and regaled me with stories of how great it was as I was looking around the pencil section for the right grade of lead for the 2 mm lead holder I was using for A* layouts oh somewhere over a year ago. I hadn't paid much attention to it at the time, but I found it, and it turned out to be a Caran d'Ache "Technograph" 777, grade F. F is the grade right between "HB" and "H," so a grade softer than I wanted, but I tried the 777 a bit anyhow, and wasn't blown away by it; kinda just felt like a regular old pencil. Nonetheless I looked into Caran d'Ache, and the Swiss manufacturer doesn't seem to make the 777 anymore, at least not for the US, but now they have this "Grafwood" line that comes in fancy cascading painted gray colors and is quite expensive as far as pencils go--but it had good reviews, kinda as the top-of-the-line Western pencil or something.

But the 777 had been underwhelming, so, not convinced, I went looking for something else. Turns out, as no real surprise I suppose, that there are some highly regarded pencil lines from Japan, with most of the English buzz surrounding Mitsubishi's Hi-Uni (what we know as "Uni-Ball" over here is in fact a Mitsubishi brand), and Tombow's revered old Mono 100. Both had about equally great reviews and equally high cost on the JetPens import site. I ran out to my most local art supply store, a tiny thing with high prices close to my favorite grocery store, and of course they didn't have imported Japanese pencils, BUT they did have the Mono pencil brand that Tombow makes for the States, in fact the Tombow MONO "Professional" seems quite easy to find around here. I got an H and an F Mono and trotted home to give them a whirl vs the 777 and my 0.5 mm.

Unlike most other civilized pencil-making countries, Japan seems to have stayed old-school, and their pencils do not come to you pre-sharpened--perhaps this is a samurai thing. I thought I had this covered with a tiny little manual sharpener I had and had never used, but the Mono is actually a millimeter or two thicker than a regular pencil--and marginally thicker than the 777, I think--and did not fit in the sharpener. Um. But then I remembered DocDave's story of how Frank Frazetta offered to draw Dave a self-portrait for Dave's camera, dug up a pencil, and, not having a sharpener, just flicked open his trusty Tarzan pocket knife and whittled the pencil to some sort of point. Thus inspired, I chopped away at the Monos with my childhood Swiss Army knife, wasting a good deal of lead and ending up with a large protrusion of not-very-sharp lead. Still, it would do for simple pencil testing:

How did it go? Well, I had read a person or two on the internet who was of the opinion that the US version of the Mono was inferior to the import-only Mono 100; but domestic though it was, this Mono (the H one--the F was a bit too soft) felt good--darn good. In fact, to my own surprise, even though I was in a hurry and was supposed to be meeting a friend shortly and was in fact already late although I hadn't realized it yet, I just could not stop doodling with the thing, it was so fun to draw with. The hardness/smeariness seemed about identical to the ubiquitous Pentel Super Hi-Polymer 0.5 mm leads I'd been using in the mechanicals, while also being a shade or two darker, which would greatly help some of the difficulty I've had scanning my lighter pencil drawings.

If the cheap American version is this good, I thought, the made-for-Japan stuff must be amazing! So I ordered some--but that'll have to wait until next time. :o

Oh and today's pages were drawn with the US-market Tombow Mono. :) Properly sharpened, though--I got an imported rather fancy Mitsubishi Uni sharpener, the kind that clamps onto the pencil and then pulls it in by springs as you turn the crank to spin the sharpening blade thingy, and stops sharpening automatically once you've got the tip perfectly shaped. Frazetta would probably consider me a sissy, and I'll own up to that, but man this'll save me a lot of pencil lead, finger gashes, and stray shavings in the long run! :"P

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Pencils! Platinum Pro-Use II, Pentel PD345

Tue, 21 May 2013 23:22:04 PDT

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Like the good ship Aurelia (shouldn't be too hard to figure out where that name came from :), I'm behind schedule too, so just the one page today. Part of the reason I got behind was because I spent some time criss-crossing town the past few days to manage a sale of a couple pieces of the A* original art in my current art show in town (at Spin's Barbershop in Wallingford, through June :). Exciting! The other part was getting a filling at the dentist's yesterday, which was eh exciting in a different way, I guess (always fun when they tell you it's such a small one, they won't need to numb you up--don't worry, it'll be painless! :o And then he keeps going back in with the drilllllllll).

Since I lead such an exciting life, I think I'm going to be sharing some of it with you over the next few days--that's right, it's more posts about pencils! Yes, hold onto your shorts, we're talkin' graphite! :ooo

I know I've excited you before by telling you that I'm doing the pencil work in A* with a Platinum Pro-Use II 05 drafting pencil, a fine machined aluminum Japanese drawing instrument I got over here, but I never thrilled you with a picture of it, so

The long metal pipe for the drawing lead in front is the main way to tell the difference between a drafting pencil like the Pro-Use II--it's so you can draw along rulers better and stuff I guess--and a regular everyday mechanical pencil like that blue beauty in front there, my trusty Pentel PD345. Both use 0.5 mm leads, although there are models in other lead sizes. Wikipedia says the PD345 has been around since the 80's, and...that is probably about how long I've had that one. :) Still going strong! At some point Pentel came out with a new model that has a sorta bigger lead-advance button and other garishness, but fortunately they also still make and sell the original model, although I guess not in this nice blue color, which is too bad. That's the pencil I was doing the layouts with when I first started doing A* traditionally.

The Pro-Use II is definitely nicer to draw with, though--far better balance and weighting, finer tip, beefier feed mechanism, and MAN I swear it must have the best grip in the pencil world, just look at those lovely wavey curves; they snuggle right up against your fingertips for a wonderfully solid grip, without grating or slipping like the spikey grid grips on just about every other drafting pencil. Nice and thick, too! The Pro-Use II is awesome.

And I'm going to be moving to something else. Or trying to. :P Gasp! The carbon-tipped saga continues tomorrow, probably.

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Quantum annealing I almost get

Mon, 20 May 2013 23:40:39 PDT

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An A* reader who actually knows stuff (unlike me who just reads stuff in articles that he thinks sounds cool) wrote me to clear up some of my confusion over that quantum annealing stuff that the new D-Wave computer NASA is getting is going to be doing with its qubits:

...quantum annealing is a variant of a regular computer optimization technique called simulated annealing.

Basically you start with a "landscape" (though it's multi-dimensional) with hills and valleys in it. In this you have the equivalent of a little ball that rolls downhill. The trick is a bit like one of those little puzzles with a ball in it where you shake it around and try to get the ball into a particular hole, except that the holes are different depths and you want to get the ball into the deepest one (which is your solution).

In regular simulated annealing, the algorithm "shakes" the box hard to start with, and less and less as it goes on, which *usually* results in the ball falling into the deepest valley, or at least one of the deeper ones. (In real metal annealing, the "shaking" is done by raising the temperature and slowly decreasing it (causing the atoms to settle into neat regular arrays, so in simulated annealing they refer to this as a temperature as well.)

In the quantum version, they don't make the ball travel *over* the hills in the landscape, it just tunnels through them, and they gradually reduce the area over which it tries to tunnel. But they're still looking to see which valley the ball landed in.

Okay, that's an oversimplification, but is roughly what's happening.

The main thing is that the D-Wave computer isn't a *real* quantum computer, exactly, it's only useful for solving this specific type of optimization problem, as far as I understand it.

And I had seen a chart of that over on Wikipedia. So I said all right but what is this fancy equationing actually doing, and the knowledgeable reader wrote back:

Oh, that's pretty simple. It's common optimization problems, with the X and Y (and other dimensions) representing the values of the parameters (e.g. airspeed and control surface position for a plane) that can be varied in the optimization process, and the Z dimension being the measure of how good the result is for a particular set of parameter values (for a plane design, that might be drag, or lift, or the size of vortices produced by a wing, or some combination of those).

I would guess NASA is interested in using the computer to optimize airflow over vehicles, or rocket engine thrust, or complex-but-efficient "slingshot" orbits, or similar problems. Since it's Ames that's getting the machine, I'd guess it's most likely for aerodynamics stuff, since that's been their specialty. Orbital mechanics would mostly likely be JPL, and engines would be Hunstsville, I think. Maybe they're trying to figure out a better scramjet design�.

I don't really understand how the D-Wave machine works; my (limited) knowledge of quantum computing is of the kind of quantum computer that's a bit more like a general purpose computer, only it works by running all possible values through a computation at once, and then tries to pick out the "right" inputs that give the desired result. In other words, kinda like magic�. "Normal" quantum computers have devices that are sort of recognizably similar to logic gates in normal computers, I don't think the D-Wave machine does. Instead, I think it sets up a quantum physical simulation of the "landscape" somehow, and tries to measure where the "ball" comes to rest in it. Basically it's more like an old-style analog computer, I think.

Huzzah for putting it in layman's terms, I can almost wrap my head around that! I'm fortunate to have super-smart readers. : )

~~~~~~~~

Original version of this page--kinda like the shading of the face but the facial features and body language were off:

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The gray of shame

Sat, 18 May 2013 00:45:44 PDT

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Forgot the lesson I tried to teach myself a week or so ago about not drawing too lightly; drew this one so lightly I can actually barely see it on the page itself in real life (although it looks nice when you look really, really close in good light--honest! :P), so the lighting effect such as it was totally falls apart when trying to scan it and put it into a visible graphic, so finally I've been reduced to salvaging it with an extremely crudely applied digital gray--crudely applied with my finger on my tiny keyboard touchpad, because I don't want to do a nice smooth job with the ol' drawing tablet and get sucked back into working digitally again; what I *want* to do is to be able to produce the "grays" I want with correctly applied linework from the get-go, like maybe I've managed best so far on page 27 and page 28. Oh the digital shame of it all! Blah anyway huzzah it's the weekend.

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