Monday  31 Mar 2014           comment?

California is the best state in the USA for rock climbing, and not just because I am biased. A guidebook for Joshua Tree National Park alone lists 3854 routes.

The first climbing guidebook for the Owens Valley—published in 1988 and long since out of print—listed just ten routes in my neighborhood, dissed the area for having largely crummy rock, and called it a sort of "poor man's Joshua Tree". Well.

There are a lot more than ten routes in my neighborhood now. Fittingly, a few of them have names making reference to J-Tree route names. E.g., Last (and least) is Imaginary Hidden Valley, my silly answer to J-Tree's Real Hidden Valley. I say least because although IHV is in the latest guidebook, it's not popular and it doesn't turn up in a web search. Googling for the phrase returned only four results when I tried this evening, none of them referring to the climbing area. Google's helpful true‑enough count: "About 3 results".

Isaac Asimov told a story of having sat in on a sociology class where the professor classified mathematicians as mystics for believing in imaginary numbers. Asimov spoke up to defend them, and the prof said okay, hand me the square root of minus one pieces of chalk. The rest of the story can be found here.

Imaginary numbers don't come up in conversation often enough. It's been 31 years since the last time someone asked me what complex numbers are good for.

Monday  24 Mar 2014           1 comment

Language stuff.

Yesterday, Mike Rogers (R-Alabama) stood by his claims that Edward Snowden is somehow in cahoots with Russian intelligence services. But from sentence to sentence, what Rogers claimed various unnamed officials think wobbled from "can't rule out" to "believe" to a thicket of overnegation:

We know today no counterintelligence official in the United States does not believe that Mr. Snowden, the NSA contractor, is not under the influence of Russian intelligence services.

A recent NY Times article discusses objections to the term "homosexual": it's outmoded, it's loaded, it can have a pejorative tone. It's a decent article as far as it goes, but it never mentions my favorite curious fact about homosexual, to wit: it's a hybrid word (homo from Greek, sexual from Latin).

I like how modern Greek has no truck with various hybrid words common in other European languages, preferring homegrown compounds instead. In Greece, a homosexual is an ομοφυλόφιλος (omofylófilos), an automobile is an αυτοκινήτων (af̱tokiní̱to̱n), and a television is a τηλεόραση (ti̱leórasi̱).

And for those who find typos in subheadlines amusing, I've saved one from the Times article in case they fix it.

Sunday  23 Mar 2014           1 comment

Goodyear has a new blimp1 and a name the blimp contest. The grand prize winner and up to five friends get to ride the blimp.

Contest rules include (italics mine):

Your Entry MUST2 meet the following qualifications, in the Sponsor's sole discretion:

[...]

(d) MUST NOT contain material that is (or promotes activities that are), in Sponsor's sole discretion, hateful, slanderous, libelous, tortuous, sexually explicit, obscene, inappropriate, vulgar, offensive, sexually explicit, profane, pornographic, discriminatory (e.g., based on age, sex, religion, natural origin, physical disability, sexual orientation or age);

Okay then, I guess they mean it.

---

1	technically not a blimp but rather a semi‑rigid dirigible
2	MUST and MUST NOT are in all caps, thus presumably to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119

Friday  21 Mar 2014           comment?

Justin Casquejo, a teenager from New Jersey, has been in the news for sneaking into the not-quite-finished One World Trade Center.

News reports include pics of Justin from social media websites, but they're all rather tame pics and you'd never know that he and a friend had been posting a few somewhat NSFW pics as well. They've since vanished off twitter—but I saved them. The pics (see also) are composed to be just shy of indecent, but I can see why they've been yanked now that Justin has a measure of fame. It is entertaining that security was deficient enough to allow a kid to get to the top of the building. (Word is, a guard was asleep.) And there's amusement value in the mentality that drives adolescents to climb through barriers (or post pics about how real men do things). And as readers know, even modest entertainment value is enough to make me post stuff. BUT, the reason I'm bringing all this up is because the episode brings back memories and highlights how much has changed since I was a teenager. Circa 1977, two friends of mine got caught trespassing on the construction site of the original World Trade Center. They didn't make the news. They didn't end up being prosecuted.

We weren't taking pics of ourselves naked, and we didn't post the naked pics that we didn't take on social media sites that didn't exist. But I did get this shot of one of my friends who got caught at the WTC. The computer paper on the wall in the upper right had the 6002 digits of the then-largest-known prime number, 219937‑1. The IBM 1130 at my high school had 8192 words of core memory, enough to hold the decimal digits and the (assembler language) program to generate and print them, but not a lot more. I still have the LP whose album cover is partly visible (leaning) next to my friend's foot. I still have the chessboard that's on the floor. I don't have a reel-to-reel tape recorder anymore although I still have some tapes that maybe I'll arrange to digitize some day. My friend is playing with a razor blade standing on a speaker magnet. I've generally gotten better results taking pics of people when they're occupied with something else than when they're looking at the camera.

Tuesday  18 Mar 2014           comment?

As y'all know, the number 19 has figured in fun coïncidences in my life. As a teenager I thought perhaps they were more than dumb luck but nowadays my best guess is that they are just that. Consider, though, that 19 cropped up more often when I was a teenager. Well, except for a run of nineteens again when I was 38. In a few years I'll be 57, perhaps.

Most of my friends have deemed my nineteens to be insignificant and saw my interest in them as another of my quirks, if a fairly benign one. The only friend who understood had a recurring number of his own—1020—which impressed me because a number that large comes around less frequently than a small number like 19. When I did an experiment to test whether 19 came up more than other numbers, I chose a similarly sized number (17) as a control.

I was there to see some of my friend's 1020 instances firsthand and he told me about others, e.g.:

The lock came with the tag shown here. Strictly speaking, this wasn't an instance of 1020 but rather 10 and 20—but even so. A well-known "feature" of getting high is that trivial things can seem profound. My brother once wrote down what he at the time thought was a cool observation, but it struck him as less remarkable in the cold light of day the next morning. It said, a combination lock is really a permutation lock.

Monday  17 Mar 2014           1 comment

I've been without my marimba for ten days because I sent the bars out for tuning. I miss it. If I had more energy I'd consider making another marimba. Not that the one I have is bad, but I have an idea I'd like to experiment with. The bars for the lowest notes are really thin in the center, which makes them more prone to vibrating in undesirable modes. Making them thicker would require making them longer, ideally mounting them on curved rails (akin to how piano strings don't increase in length in a linear progression). Curved rails would be a pain to fabricate and I suspect that has a lot to do with why no one uses them. Branched rails (a piecewise-linear approximation to curved rails) exist but they are uncommon. Bass notes are special to me. A local band I used to see in Boulder was scrambling to find a bass player for an upcoming tour (summer 1987 or 1988, I'm not sure). I borrowed an electric bass and started learning their songs, but they got someone else (who also learned the instrument from scratch) instead. But the experience made me start paying more attention to bass lines in songs and increased my appreciation for the role of bass in general. I envy string players for the expressive qualities of their instruments. There is no vibrato nor bending notes on the marimba. But what is life if not working within limitations. Among the tone colors electric bass is known for is plucking a string so that it rebounds off the fingerboard. Although known as popping in this context, the general effect has another name associated with the composer who invented the symbol for it that's now standard in music notation. If you know me, your first guess as to which composer it is will be correct.

Thursday  13 Mar 2014           comment?

Asked whether the search for the missing plane had degenerated into confusion, Malaysian transport minister Hishammuddin Hussein said

It's only confusion if you want it to be seen as confusion.

I may start using that phrase when people visit my house before I've had a chance to clean up.

Tuesday  11 Mar 2014           1 comment

The grocery store in town plays strangely varied types of background music. Sometimes it's from a local radio station, sometimes it's from who knows what. Today the 1970 song Lucky Man came on, which brought back memories. I remember it being the only song I could recognize the chords for. I didn't play guitar (still don't) but I knew fingerings for a handful of chords and discovered they were enough to play Lucky Man. I now know why: the guitarist wrote it when he was 12 years old, using the first four chords he had learned.

Lucky Man ends with a synthesizer solo, one of the first such things to appear in a popular song. It was idly improvised by Keith Emerson who thought it was junk but Greg Lake loved it and put it on the record.

The synth part was playing while I was at the checkstand today. The cashier called the manager and asked for the music to be changed, saying it sounded like an LSD trip.

She told me my total: "1968, the year my husband was born."

In 1968, my fifth grade class staged a mock presidential debate. We picked three students to play the candidates for president that year: Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, and George Wallace. The rest of the class split into three camps that did research for their "candidates". I remember all this because I played Richard Nixon. I think I'd now find the debate too painful to hear if there were a recording of it. I remember screwing up my opening statement and starting over.

Monday  10 Mar 2014           2 comments



Living to the leeward side of a mountain range treats you to special clouds. One of my favorites is an altocumulus that creates a smooth fade from white to blue as seen here on the cloud's left edge—although the effect is (as usual) less striking in a pic than when you're just looking at it. Boulder, Colorado was the first area I lived in that had such clouds, and they were part of what endeared the place to me. Lone Pine has them too.

The climbing route my buddy is at the base of is new enough that it's not in the guidebook for the area. Unlike most of the routes in my neighborhood, we have no idea whose work this one is or what it's named. But to whoever developed it: thanks—fun route.

The tent belonged to other climbers visiting the area who we met later on and who had cool-looking dogs.

The upper-rightmost rock looks to me like a masked face in profile. Interesting, how looking at a photo can make me notice stuff I missed while I was taking it. Perception is so selective.

Saturday  08 Mar 2014           comment?

This has been CPAC week, with various conservative specimens on full display. I have an other-than-political angle in posting today, but first a few CPAC moments:

• Mike Huckabee said (quoting Billy Graham's wife): If God does not bring fiery judgment to America, then he will have to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah.
• Michele Bachmann produced a sentence that exhibits overnegation (or doesn't, depending how you read it): When [Hillary Clinton] gave that reset button to Russia, did she not think they weren't going to use it?
• Donald Trump referred to "the late, great Jimmy Carter".
• Oliver North (standing in a wingnut tradition) complained about gays in the military: The members of our armed forces and their families deserve better than to be treated like laboratory rats in some radical social experiment.
• Paul Ryan repeated a story he hadn't checked out (whose inaccuracy he later apologized for): This reminds me of a story I heard from Eloise Anderson. She serves in the cabinet of my buddy, Governor Scott Walker. She once met a young boy from a very poor family, and every day at school, he would get a free lunch from a government program. He told Eloise he didn't want a free lunch. He wanted his own lunch, one in a brown paper bag just like the other kids. He wanted one, he said, because he knew a kid with a brown paper bag had someone who cared for him.

...which leads to the not-so-political angle that patient readers have made it this far to hear. A friend who had pet snakes used to buy their food from a local pet store that gave customers cardboard boxes to take mice or other small live animals away in. Printed on the side of each box: someone loves me enough to take me home.

Saturday  01 Mar 2014           comment?