Monday  31 May 2010           comment?

Boulder, Colorado has good street performers. The left pic shows a card that a magician had me sign and date before he did a trick this afternoon.

Several things were cool about his act. One, he was just really skilled. Two, he stopped what he was doing at one point to ask someone in the audience to stop texting during the performance. Three, he did the card trick--which relied on sleight of hand--several times in a row, giving us all a chance to watch more carefully. Even on repeated attempts, standing close by, I couldn't see how he was doing it. Good stuff.

The pic on the right shows my phone, evidently unprepared for a month that stretches over six rows of a calendar. (I am, as regular readers know, easily amused.)

May 31 is a nice date. 5 is a prime Fermat number, and 31 is a prime Mersenne number.

Wednesday  26 May 2010           5 comments

I emailed John Derbyshire about his phony blurb (see yesterday's entry), and he responded:

I considered it a kindness on his part, and wrote it to be as Gardner-ish as possible.

This is in fact rather common. Another one of my blurbs (not a math book) came the same way.

It's a fallen world. We do our best.

I couldn't imagine presenting my own words as those of "Martin Gardner ... author of more than sixty books on mathematics". I just wouldn't. I respect my readers too much, and I prefer trust over deceit and cynicism.

"This is in fact rather common" and "It's a fallen world" are so beside the point that it was Derbyshire's option whether or not to pull such a stunt.

Deceit is almost always a double standard. I suspect Mr. Derbyshire wouldn't like it if his publisher's promise of royalty payments was as hollow as the quote he put on his book to lure people into buying it.

A couple months ago, I wrote about why I came to work in Colorado this year. Another reason: the guy I'm working for is honest.

Some corners of the world are less fallen than others.

Tuesday  25 May 2010           1 comment

In the 1970s, I spent many enjoyable evenings at my town's library reading installments of Martin Gardner's Mathematical Games column in back issues of Scientific American on microfilm. Gardner was without peer when it came to making math entertaining and inviting.

With how much his readers loved him, Gardner was free to write about topics only tenuously--if at all--related to math. Who else ever got a pun like "All jack and no work makes a dull playboy" into the pages of Scientific American?

Now, after Gardner's death, an author admits--with no hint of regret--to having written a blurb for his own book that he attributed to Martin Gardner. I take blurbs in general with a grain of salt, but ghostwriting a blurb for your own book (or, for that matter, giving permission to do so, as the author says Gardner did) strikes me as brazenly meretricious. Sigh.

----------------------------
20 Sep 2019: the link to a page at sadlyno.com is dead. I've archived their image of the blurb in question at http://tommyjournal.com/derbyshire_obsession.png

Monday  24 May 2010           1 comment

Sunday  23 May 2010           comment?

The City of Los Angeles has denounced Arizona's new immigration law (as have several other US cities). Earlier this month, the L.A. City Council resolved, by a 13-1 vote, to "refrain from conducting business with the state of Arizona" unless the Arizona law is repealed.

Last week, an Arizona official sent a letter to the Mayor of Los Angeles, saying, "If an economic boycott is truly what you desire, I will be happy to encourage Arizona utilites to renegotiate your power agreements so Los Angeles no longer receives any power from Arizona-based generation."

The next day, an LADWP official responded, saying

I want to make clear that we support the City position regarding the recent law enacted in Arizona and the resolution adopted by the Los Angeles City Council.

On any given day, we receive 20 – 25% of our power from two power plants located in Arizona: Navajo, a coal-fired plant, and Palo Verde, a nuclear plant.

We are part owner of both power plants, which are generating assets of the Department. As such, nothing in the City’s resolution is inconsistent with our continuing to receive power from those LADWP-owned assets.

I might add that, as the City’s Job Czar, I certainly would welcome any conventions or meetings that were going to be held in Arizona to come to Los Angeles. We have fantastic facilities and incomparable weather and we’d welcome them to the City of Angels.

In defense of his state's weather, the Arizona official said, "but it's a dry heat." (no, just kidding)

Note:

• your Tommy gets electricity from LADWP
• LADWP was already planning to phase out its use of the Navajo plant, although that will take a while
• the Palo Verde plant is the largest (3.7 gigawatts) nuclear generation facility in the USA

Tuesday  18 May 2010           1 comment

A while back, a co-worker asked, "What should we do with the aquarium?" (An empty 55 gallon aquarium was in our office.)

My response: "Let's get a snake."

And so we have. His eye would be dark if it weren't a flash photo. I tried retouching it but that only looked more artificial.

Sunday  16 May 2010           comment?

Visiting this building yesterday reminded me of how a plain staircase is more ergonomic than one with treads at an other-than-90°-angle to the direction you walk in.

photo by Adam Crain (used by permission)

Wednesday  12 May 2010           2 comments

Miscellaneous stuff--

It kills me when a web site's search code returns
"Results 1-8 of about 1". *

Maybe I'm weird, or maybe it's just that I've lived in the desert for a while--but I think the custom of having a lawn is a strange one. I think it's somewhat insane for a community to use lots of water to sustain expanses of plants ill-adapted to the prevailing climate, where said plants are continually cut with power tools and the cuttings thrown away. (In this part of Colorado, a lawn needs watering multiple times a week in the summer.) On the other hand, lawns do get lads out of the house--so I suppose they aren't all bad.

Not that it feels like summer is imminent. I mean, it snowed here last night.

---

* generated by the Javascript expression

"Results " + (start + 1) + "-" + (start + itemsPerPage) + " of about " + data.responseData.cursor.estimatedResultCount.toString()

  if you must know

Tuesday  11 May 2010           1 comment

I had the window open a couple weeks ago and overheard an instance of a kind of conversation that has played out millions of times in human history: a teenage boy breaking the news to his father that he's damaged the family car (in this case, by driving into a stationary object: the garage).

The father was notably calm. The boy was annoyed with himself and the dad was encouraging him not to get upset: "The thing about life is how you react to things." Indeed.

Monday  10 May 2010           1 comment

Professor Kagan  or:
how I learned to stop worrying
and love the vapid and hollow charade

From an article Elena Kagan wrote in 1995, as reported by the L.A. Times:

The Senate confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court have become "a vapid and hollow charade," a Chicago law professor complained, because the nominees are not forced to say what they think about disputed issues such as abortion, affirmative action and privacy.

It is "an embarrassment," she said, that "senators today do not insist that any nominee reveal what kind of Justice she would make, by disclosing her views on important legal issues." Justice Clarence Thomas won confirmation, she said, even "after his substantive testimony had become a national laughingstock."

Last year, when asked about those views at her confirmation hearing (for the office of Solicitor General), Kagan said

I wrote that when I was in the position of sitting where the staff is now sitting and feeling a little bit frustrated that I really wasn't understanding completely what the judicial nominee in front of me meant and what she thought.

What a difference 14 years makes! Calling the process what it is--a vapid and hollow charade--she later brushed aside as the remarks of an inexperienced professor who was "a little bit frustrated" at the time.

No, I'm not happy with Obama's selection (see here for reasons why). And I expect that Democrats will not have the guts to demand someone else (as Repubs did when Bush nominated Harriet Miers).

Saturday  08 May 2010           comment?

The mont Longmont is named after.