Sunday  28 Nov 2010           4 comments

a quiet, restful day today.

Friday  19 Nov 2010           comment?

"Well, it's not really the right word, but freedom is kind of a hobby with me, and I have disposable income that I'll spend to find out how to get people more of it." ‑ Penn Jillette

Thursday  18 Nov 2010           2 comments

Patti Smith:

Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don't abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book.

i.e.,

I think that I shall never see
Anything lovely as a dead tree.

Sunday  14 Nov 2010           2 comments

Internal-gear bicycle hubs have been around forever (i.e., since before I was born), but only recently have hubs been available that have lots of gears and work really well.

Manufacturers of hubs-with-lots-of-gears tend to quote gear ratios as approximations, usually to three decimal places. That's more than enough precision for practical purposes but is deeply unsatisfying for those of us who take an interest in machinery and in number theory. We like knowing the ratios--where "we" includes John S. Allen, who has expended no small amount of effort to inspect and surmise gear tooth counts and to publish his findings on the web.

Shimano has introduced an 11‑speed hub, new enough that no details about its gear stages are available. I tried to deduce what combinations of gears produce the ratios approximated by Shimano's specs, but it's a nontrivial task and I gave up after spending more time on it than I had thought I would. I got far enough along to guess (I could be way off) the ratios of the five lowest gears.

spec guess 0.527    49/93    0.681    77/113   0.770 22834/29667 0.878 13426/15283 0.995  3262/3277

And setting matters of gearing aside--the hub's instruction sheet has this illustration, which may or may not be amusing:

Tuesday  09 Nov 2010           comment?

Sunday  07 Nov 2010           3 comments

I'm recovering from a bizarre episode of infection in and around my wrist.

It was hurting bad enough that I thought something was broken. Not so, said the X-ray.

Redness made the first doctor I saw say he suspected a bacterial etiology. Doctors like words like etiology. He sent me to a hand specialist who said erythema instead of redness and who said it looked bacterial but not quite like the patterns he was used to seeing. He sent me to an infectious disease specialist who said yup, it looks bacterial.

Antibiotics that I got from the first doctor seem to be doing the trick. It's largely better now.

Evidently this can happen to anyone, but it still gives me pause. Full-time work is a strain on me, and I can't help but wonder why this happened now and not some other time. It might be dumb luck, it might not. With the human body, you often don't know for sure--a frustrating state of affairs for those of us who work in software and are accustomed to being able to get to the bottom of problems.

Tuesday  02 Nov 2010           comment?