venus, moon

Speaking of sunglasses (not mine, though)--

In the early 1990s, I had a job with a startup company in Silicon Valley. Everyone there worked hard.

I remember putting in a lot of hours finishing one project and feeling molto stressed: tense, frazzled, edgy. When it was done, I took a few days off to go to climb in the southern California desert.

My destination was a nine hour drive away. I remember getting about 4/5 of the way there and stopping to get out and stretch my legs. This was April, it had been a spring with ample rain, and the area of the desert where I stopped was carpeted in wildflowers. Taking in the quiet, the fragrant dry air, and sunset colors, I felt the stress drain right out of me. I could've turned around right then and been happy.

On that drive, I got a $5 bill in change that had a palindromic serial number. (I save those.) I remember taking it out of my wallet so I wouldn't spend it, but I left it on the counter at the motel and the maid took it.

I was accompanied on that trip by my friend Beowulf, who had a flexible work schedule and was able to leave for climbing trips on short notice. I'd taught him how to climb and he genuinely enjoyed it. He wasn't especially strong and his sense of balance wasn't good (due to a congenital abnormality in his inner ear, he told me) but he tried hard.

On the afternoon of the first day climbing on that trip, he fell off a route. Falling normally isn't a big deal, the rope catches you and you try again. This time, though, one of his legs got wedged in a flaring crack before the rope took his weight, leaving him quite stuck. He stayed calm waiting for me to come down and extricate him. We were both just glad to get off the rock before it got dark. We had dinner in town and hot chocolate afterwards.

I needed a pair of sunglasses on that trip, and stopped at a convenience store to buy a cheap pair. All the glasses they had were ugly, there wasn't one I thought I liked, so I bought what I thought was the ugliest of the lot. The cashier joked with me, saying she'd been wanting that pair for herself.

I ended up liking those sunglasses. They were so hideous that they were cool. I wore them all the time, until once I put them in a backpack along with climbing gear that scratched up the lenses.

Beowulf liked it cooler than I did. On the drive home, we had air conditioning on in the car and I wore warm clothes. There were swarms and swarms of butterflies on route 247 between Lucerne Valley and Barstow.

clouds loitering in the valley this morning

For me, today had a feeling of renewal. I don't mean to overstate the importance of one office, nor get too excited over something as inherently flawed as politics--but today was a day for celebration.

And, because I can't resist commenting on music--
before the inauguration ceremony, the band played (among other things) a piece by Gustav Holst. Lots of people only know Holst for The Planets, but he wrote some fine music for concert band as well.

According to a US Department of Justice report on the disposition of seized property, the following items were "placed into official use" by the FBI in 2008:

Asset Type	Number	Asset Value
Electronic Equipment	25	$33,991
Firearms	5	$2,179
Furniture/Hshld Item	1	$10,738
Gambling Devices	1	$2
Heavy Machinery	1	$300
Jewelry/Precs Item	7	$119,925
Other	5	$87,790
Pornography	1	$134
Vehicles	39	$571,374
Vessels	2	$130,425
Total	87	$956,858

I wonder what official use they had in mind for pornography. Maybe it's for training: "this is what pornography looks like." After all, in an opinion on an obscenity case in 1964, a Supreme Court justice famously said

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.

An exchange at a music store around five years ago:

Tommy:	I'd like to buy a music stand and a metronome.
store dude:	What instrument do you play?
Tommy:	Marimba.
store dude:	You could get a lot of work, not many people play marimba.

Setting aside whether or not I play well enough to make money at it (I don't), I thought to myself, the last thing I want to do is taint the experience of playing music by linking it to making money. I don't have a problem with commerce in general, but--

Although I first got into software because I enjoyed programming, doing it for a living has been a mixed bag--sometimes satisfying and sometimes frustrating. Having already had an experience of getting burnt out on something I like doing, I didn't want the same to happen with music.

And, the music business seems to be plagued with deceit and treachery. I say this based on what friends of mine in the business have gone through, and from what more than a few professional musicians have said. Béla Bartók continually struggled to collect royalties due him from his music publisher. Frank Zappa wrote about how record companies cheated him. Robert Fripp has blogged at length about the music industry, most recently detailing his treatment by a record label that (among other things) sold his music on the web without being licensed to. "Sanctuary UMG’s Second Tier Lawyer has not been replying to my recent e-letters, perhaps because they incline towards frank & direct terminology." Frankness and directness, Fripp-style:

i have no difficulties with mistakes; i have difficulties with those who make mistakes & subsequently brush aside their accountability & responsibility to address the repercussions of those mistakes.

A few of my favorite musicians have inspired me not just with their music, but with their commitment to fairness--I don't just mean protecting their own interests, but fairness in general.

A new version of Linux I recently installed had a bug (now fixed) that caused audio to play at the wrong rate: slightly too fast and correspondingly raised in pitch (a little more than a semitone).

It looks like audio sampled at 44.1 kHz was being played at 48 kHz: a small enough error that a casual test of the software's audio function could fail to notice it.

As many engineers (myself included) have more fun building things than testing them, you can guess which we naturally put more effort into doing.

Yesterday, I replaced a zipper in a coat that I've had for about 20 years. It's one of my favorite pieces of clothing: it's wool, it fits, it looks good, and its Made in USA label makes it seem like a relic of another era.

People who get consistent results sewing must have a different temperament than I do. Fabrics want to stretch and bunch up and curl when fed through a through a sewing machine; somehow people deal with this. From the seams I see in store-bought clothes, I conclude there must exist a temperament and technique conducive to making straight, uniform stitching.

My solution: have a wide selection of thread colors on hand and sew with a thread that won't show.

I could have hired someone to put in a new zipper, but I have more time than income nowadays and thus do more things myself. This is where I'd normally add a remark on how satisfying it is to do something yourself, but those bets are off if you don't do a neat job. But at least the new zipper works, even if it's not pro-level work. My favorite coat is back in service.

Give me a woodworking project any day. A table saw has a fence that a sewing machine doesn't. And although wood is anisotropic and often warped, it's better behaved than fabric. What's more, I've poked myself numerous times with pins and needles--but never cut myself with a table saw. Woodworking is clearly safer.

Some nine years ago, a math book got me interested in a certain unproven theorem (the unicity conjecture for the Markoff numbers, if you must know). I thought of an approach that would entail proving it in two pieces, and I made a guess as to which piece would be harder to prove.

I then made a trip to a college library and copied a bunch of articles on the topic. I found that what I'd guessed would be the harder of the two pieces was known to be true; the part I'd thought would be easier was unproven. Getting this news felt pleasantly humbling.

It's not an especially famous problem, nor particularly significant. Solving it won't win you a million dollars. It's hard to explain just what appeals to me about it.

Although I'm way too unskilled to have a chance of proving it, I've used the problem as a kind of carrot to drive me along. Researching it has exposed me to areas of mathematics that I had never encountered before. The journey continues to be satisfying for its own sake.

A couple claimed proofs of the conjecture have appeared over the years, only to be shown to be flawed. I'll have mixed feelings if someone ever proves it. I'll be interested to see the proof--but I'll miss being able to use it as a carrot. It looks so tasty.

I do like to finish things, so I usually try for stuff that's within my reach. But there's something to be said for the occasional unreasonable goal.

From yesterday morning:

Two is a good number of ravens for this image. One raven looking off to the side wouldn't give the same impression that there's something interesting to be looked at. That is, "n raven(s) all looking in one direction" is only an interesting concept if n > 1.

Three ravens would be overkill. Two's company, three's a crowd.

More than three, and it would start feeling like a pic of a flock rather than of individuals.

And if there were zero ravens, it would just be a pic of electrical apparatus--nothing special, just a plain 4800VAC line.

Numbers have character.

In a neon lamp, an electric current is used to excite neon atoms--specifically, electrons in neon atoms are shifted to orbitals with higher energy states. As the atoms return to their original states, they release energy in the form of visible-light photons. The characteristic orange color of neon lamps is associated with the emission spectrum of neon.

An atom can also become excited by absorbing a photon. Cesium atoms, for example, shift between two certain hyperfine ground states when absorbing a microwave RF photon (f=9.19263177 gigahertz). That provides a precise reference; generating microwave radiation that will excite cesium atoms requires tuning an oscillator to that frequency with very little tolerance. This is the basis for cesium clocks, which measure time accurately enough for us to know when we need leap seconds. Accurate timing is also essential for GPS navigation; GPS satellites carry cesium clocks.

Knowing this, you can be as annoyed (or entertained, the choice is yours) as I am by popular articles that try to explain cesium clocks. Cesium atoms are not little pendulums moving to and fro at 9.19263177 GHz, rather they undergo a transition when absorbing RF photons of that frequency. But do journalists (e.g., those writing about the recent leap second) care about the difference? Usually not:

While atomic clocks beat to the oscillations of the cesium atom, Earth's rotation is variable, but is gradually slowing over time. (The Australian)

Take an extra sip of champagne, or kiss that Significant Other a moment longer, or just take 9,192,631,770 oscillations of a cesium-133’s atom to ponder what 2009 will be like... even if the coming year is a wee bit shorter than this one. (Discover Magazine)

Since the 1950s, however, atomic clocks--which are based on the unwavering motions of cesium atoms--have made it possible to measure time far more accurately, to within a billionth of a second a day. (NY Times)

...

I imagine that most people have little rituals they never tell anyone about: phrases they think of at certain moments, inside jokes they recall to themselves, and the like.

For example: when I reset my watch upon traveling from one time zone to another, I recall a short piano piece by Bartók, called Change of Time (the melody is in bars of 2/4, 3/4, 3/8, and 5/8).

I bring this up today because 2008 ended with a change of meter; the last minute of the year (UTC) had 61 seconds.

To me, 2008 felt like it ended off balance in several ways. I won't recount the woes the world is experiencing; I trust you all read the news. Let us all at least create for ourselves whatever islands of peace we can muster within a year that is starting on a less-than-smooth foot.

For 2009, Tommyjournal sports a banner image tailored to your browser window's width, and varied (in font and in the pattern of lines) each time the page is loaded.

I've tested this page on n different browsers (where n >= 4) but there may be bugs. If something looks wrong, please tell me about it (but read the FAQ first).

Happy new year, everyone.