I did a double-take with the ad on the back.
"Dedicated to helping you reach your financial goals through results based redacted" OK, fine. But that chess layout is impossible to achieve without cheating. The picture presumably has something to do with how the company gets results. So is the picture supposed to illustrate the impossibility or the cheating?
According to Greenberg the core of honor is the South was how you were perceived. To insinuate that someone was a liar was an invitation to a duel—if you were a peer, or a horsewhipping if you weren’t. The concept of "to give the lie to" was critical: a lie didn’t matter unless someone accused you of it. He cites one Southern gentleman who forgot about an invitation and met the unwanted guest with the statement "I am not at home."
The "language of honor" included many symbols: you demonstrated superiority by giving gifts, demonstrated your indifference to petty things like death or loss by willingness to duel or gamble, and your courage by standing up in battle (or in the hunt) in the face of attack and not running or dodging. (Which seems to have made baseball unpopular: run from a ball???)
To wear a mask was no shame for a man of honor; the horror was to be unmasked... A Southern gentleman could wear anything—even a dress or a lie—as long as he could prevent it from being removed.
A gentleman’s word was expected to be honored; a slave’s to be disbelieved. A gentleman was expected to be courageous and a slave a coward. A stranger didn’t fit in, and despite celebration of "Southern hospitality" was apt to find himself houseless. I wish Greenberg had gone farther describing the stranger’s role, and addressing the middle class and honor. Probably they shared the same values as the aristocracy, but it would be nice to have that explicit.
Gift-giving was very important, especially if you didn't limit the concept of gift to money or things. They regarded the food and clothing they gave the slaves as benevolent care: gifts.
You don’t have to admire the Southern aristocracy, but if you want to understand the past at all, you should understand them. Read the book.
Not only will they have to comply with the rules of federal bodies such as the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, there are also state bodies, such as The New York State Department of Financial Services, which is the regulator that accused Standard Chartered.
It is 10 months old and supervises some 4,500 institutions with assets of about $6.2 trillion.
Yet many had not even heard of it until this week.
I should probably give people the benefit of the doubt and assume they mean well, though I'm extremely skeptical of that titular pair. Still, it takes a certain deliberate blindness to forget the "sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander" rule, especially given how many Americans have wound up in hot water for exercising free speech in lands that don't allow it.
And to be fair, Berlin and Brussels are no slouches at "These are our rules so they're your rules too."
But there's a bit of difference between requiring transparency in accounting and demanding boycotts of Iran. If money is flowing through the US it should flow honestly, and if goods are sold here they shouldn't be unexpectedly poisonous; but dealings outside the US aren't under our authority.
Some things companies/countries do are utterly vile: Chinese organ harvesting, for example. Boycotts there sound like an excellent idea: but not enforced by the state. Others are a lot more ambiguous: child labor, for instance. No question that it can be terribly abusive, but it can also be life-saving. So how do we get the right to regulate them?
But they're our laws (written by staffers) passed by our representatives (who don't pay us any mind, but never mind that--they don't generally read the laws anymore either) and interpreted and enforced by our bureaucrats (who might as well be on the moon for all the input they ask from us): they must be good for us and for all the world as well.
male pectoral sandpipers ... are able to maintain high neurobehavioral performance despite greatly reducing their time spent sleeping during a 3-week period of intense male-male competition for access to fertile females. Males that slept the least sired the most offspring. Our results challenge the view that decreased performance is an inescapable outcome of sleep loss.
Or to put it another way, males that slept as little as possible sired more chicks and didn't seem more unhealthy than the others. Which you'd think would tend to breed populations where the males didn't sleep much during the three week breeding season, but apparently some do anyway.
From the report I learn that the males do display flights and ground displays to impress reluctant females, sometimes chasing them in flight in competition with other males, and try to maintain territory in the breeding grounds. And they squabble and fight. Sounds pretty energetic. My first thought on reading the BBC story was: their courtship displays must be low-energy, but apparently it isn't so.
The team wired up bird so they could monitor them 24/7 in their breeding area in Alaska. The study lasted 6 years, and they found only 13 out of 640 males returned to the breeding site, but the more-successful low-sleep males weren't less likely to return (they said 10% more likely, but with numbers that low...). The number of female encounters (monitored by telemetry) was proportional to the time spent awake (moving): which doesn't seem unlikely. And they sired more chicks.
Yep, they thought of the sleep quality issue:
"Short-sleeping males should show greater SWE than long-sleeping males if they compensated completely for sleep loss by sleeping deeper; however, we did not find an inverse correlation between sleep duration and SWE (r=0.22, t9=0.70, P=0.50). Consequently, short-sleeping males still experienced a deficit in sleep."
So the birds don't sleep better, they sleep less, chase more females, sire more chicks and still seem healthy enough to return next year at the same rate as sleepy-heads.
Moreover, the increase in sleep intensity in shortsleeping
males suggests that sleep serves a restorative function. In this case, long-sleeping males may lack genetic traits that enable shortsleeping males to maintain high performance on little sleep. Indeed, inter-individual variation in neurobehavioral vulnerability to sleep loss was recently linked to genetic polymorphisms in humans V. Bachmann et al., Functional ADA polymorphism increases sleep depth and reduces vigilant attention in humans. Cereb. Cortex 22, 962 (2012).
Or in summary:
"Late to bed and late to rise and you rub your bloodshot eyes. Early to bed and early to rise and your girl goes out with other guys."
Although I wonder: Pooh's favorite food was honey, and Paddington's was marmalade. Perhaps British bears are trained differently? Phil Frank's bears preferred salmon and ball-park hotdogs.
Of course that leads to: manufacturers have to test their cars to see how they hold up against that kind of abuse. Which means somebody has to do it, and it is a skilled task to do it quickly, so there must be a car torture engineer.
Which sounds like a cool job: you get to try to trash cars for a living.
Firms do have testing labs and are happy to boast about them. GM has a facility for generating dust and rain, and some sites for winter testing. Volkswagen has some video of how you know your teenager drives when you're not looking.
"Reliability engineer": most of the time they'll be measuring tolerances on parts and making notes and trying to find out what broke, but some of them get to use fun gadgets like an electrostatic gun at HP.
That must make for some interesting party conversations.
The spelling is egregiously bad, of course, with U and V scrambled and apparently some randomness in the rest. The effusive dedication to Queen Elizabeth was pretty off-putting too. And I’m not about to try to address the symbolism on the first go-through: just getting the language straight is enough for now.
Once you get into the rhythm it flows very well, except for dramatic scenes. The suspension in that 9’th line trips up battle descriptions. The scene with Despair persuading the knight is powerful, and the overall tone--almost nobody is trusty--is striking. Many of the descriptions show good attention to detail while remaining clear and flowing. I prefer Bunyan’s "Palace Beautiful" to the "House of Holinesse" and its rather extreme ascetic drills in purification: the forthright allegory in that section begs for the comparison, and Bunyan wins. Though having "Charity" be married with many children is a good touch. Spenser isn't shy about what the usual benefits of the conquering knight are with his late opponent's lady.
Spoiler alert: The Red Crosse Knight is told he is going to be St. George, which jars rather amusingly with the history of the real one.
The Kindle version I have is defective: the original and annotated versions are intermingled, which in the original format were fine but makes this one rough sledding--and there are enough obscurities that I need the annotation. I'm not quite in the swing of language yet either, though no doubt it gets easier as you go along. So, bottom line: I'm glad I read this, but I'm not sure I've got the time to address the other 5 books.
Your mileage may vary.
To illustrate: The Red Crosse knight defeated the Saracen Sans-foy and acquired Duessa (a dubious reward), and on reaching Duessa's beautiful but malignant castle finds himself challenged by Sans-foy's brother. The Queen here is not the titular queen but Pluto's daughter.
At last forth comes that far renowmed Queene,
With royall pomp and Princely maiestie;
She is ybrought vnto a paled greene,
And placed vnder stately canapee,
The warlike feates of both those knights to see.
On th'other side in all mens open vew
Duessa placed is, and on a tree
Sans-foy his shield is hangd with bloudy hew:
Both those the lawrell girlonds to the victor dew.
I haven't reviewed the report, but it sounds plausible that tissues in the body respond to injury by trying to help the damaged area grow back, even if the damaged area is cancerous--figuring that trickery out is beyond the pay grade of your average fibroblast.
"Replacement convicts" are not new. For centuries, the use of criminal substitutes was among the first things Westerners would mention when discussing China’s legal system. Missionary and traveler Karl Gützlaff in 1834, French legal scholar Édouard Louis Joseph Bonnier in 1862, and American scholar Owen Lattimore in the 1930s wrote about the practice. In 1895, Taiwan missionary George Mackay described witnessing these replacement convicts: "It was an open secret that these men had nothing to do with the case, but were bribed to wear the cangue for six weeks." In 1899, Ernest Alabaster, a scholar of Chinese criminal law, wrote that courts "permitted" the real offenders to hire substitutes, and that such things "frequently happen, have for long happened, and—notwithstanding Imperial decrees to the contrary—will, under the system, always happen." Supposedly, the going rate in 1848 for a replacement convict was 17 pounds, which would come to roughly $2,000 in present-day dollars."
Slate has an article about some Chinese rich and powerful who, in the unlikely event that they wind up being prosecuted, hire stand-ins to appear in court and if necessary serve the sentence. Even at less elevated levels of society, sober passengers may confess to reckless driving to save their drunk relative from severe penalties.
Apparently the practice has a long history, though how long would take a little skilled research to discover (I can't read Chinese). It was condoned because the culprit had to pay (literally) for his crime and the fact of punishing somebody served as a warning to others. (You thought the weregild was bad?)
I've groused before about "Do you know who I am" and our legal system, but I'm aware that other places are much worse, and this is a reminder that things can get worse still.
Hat tip to Maggie's Farm
Being lowered at 2mph by cables from a rocket-levitating platform: I understand the importance of that to preserve the delicate drives (otherwise they have to be much more rugged and heavy), but I can't help feeling that somebody thought it would be really cool to try. First pix
I was glad to find some good news after the evil from Milwaukee last night.
There's no automatic way to turn daily entries into a coherent whole. That is going to take effort by the author, and possibly quite a lot of effort; including rewriting to join essays together.
Using a "Best-of" tag is too coarse a division, unless the blog is laser-focused on only one topic.
I broach the subject with fear and trembling, because "new feature" is equivalent to "lots of new bugs and instability."
But... There are some things that would make connecting essays easier.
For example, suppose there was an option to order the presentation of essay in a category by rank. The most useful ranking is the author's (unless readership is static a Facebook-like "like" won't reflect real reader approval). The author then can put essays in some category in a "read this before that" order, deprecate things he changed his mind on, and so forth. Ranking in one category doesn't reflect ranking in other categories. This changes the "tag" structure associated with posts, but shouldn't be too hard to implement.
Simplicio: "But can't we do the same thing with meta-posts that consist of links to the others?"
Salviati: "Yes, but it is taxing for the reader to be perpetually jumping back and forth rather than reading longer blocks of related prose. In addition, it compels the author to edit old posts. Granted, there can be more connective detail between the links with the special-post format, but I think the user-interface argument is compelling.
Another thing that could make the user's experience easier is a way to use multiple tags in a single search: "Tribes" and "Geeks" for example. That requires a change in the generic user interface.
And one more thing: you create a structure consisting of different posts without bothering with tags, and tag the whole structure as a "book." A "book" might even include posts from other blogs, provided the authors of that blog all agreed to the inclusion (revocable at any time) and the outside posts were clearly formatted.
And if posts had version control available to the author and the reader--a "book"s version of a post could leave out duplicate introductory material (but still available for other views of the post).
Organizing the material is still going to be hard work.
To get an idea of the scale, the chains of sensors are 1 km high and spread
across 800m, so the light went quite a long way. The size of the blobs tell how much energy that sensor saw, and the color tells about the time the light arrived. (The size of the blob has nothing to do with distance.) The other pictures show different projections, with histograms of how much energy was dumped. The center pictures are of a monte carlo simulation of an electron neutrino interaction and a cartoon of what happens at the center. You'll probably have to click on the image to get a decent view.
The lower corner pictures look a little like the old nuclear tests, though of course the energy dumped in the ice is far less; only like converting a million protons into energy. I know that would violate all kinds of conservation rules: humor me. But whatever made those particles would make our biggest nukes look like damp splashes by comparison.
This is from Aya Ishihara's talk at Neutrino 2012. I wasn't there, and I didn't help with the analysis--but the pictures are too cool not to show.
“For the first time in history, any form of censorship's become utterly impossible. There's simply no way of enforcing it; the customer can get what he wants, right in his own home. Lock the door, switch on the TV set--friends and family will never know."
"Very clever," I said, "but don't you think such a diet will soon pall?"
"Of course; variety is the spice of life. We'll have plenty of conventional entertainment; let me worry about that. And every so often we'll have information programs--I hate that word 'propaganda'--to tell the cloistered American public what's really happening in the world. Our special features will just be the bait."
..
He saw that I was beginning to get bored; there are some kinds of single-mindedness that I find depressing. But I had done Hartford an injustice, as he hastened to prove.
"Please don't think," he said anxiously, "that sex is our only weapon. Sensation is almost as good. Ever see the job Ed Murrow did on the late sainted Joe McCarthy? That was milk and water compared with the profiles we're planning in 'Washington Confidential.'
"And there's our 'Can You Take It?' series, designed to separate the men from the milksops. We'll issue so many advance warnings that every red-blooded American will feel he has to watch the show. It will start innocently enough, on ground nicely prepared by Hemingway. You'll see some bullfighting sequences that will really lift you out of your seat--or send you running to the bathroom--because they show all the little details you never get in those cleaned-up Hollywood movies."
We'll follow that with some really unique material that cost us exactly nothing. Do you remember the photographic evidence the Nuremburg war trials turned up? You've never seen it, because it wasn't publishable. There were quite a few amateur photographers in the concentration camps, who made the most of opportunities they'd never get again. Some of them were hanged on the testimony of their own cameras, but their work wasn't wasted. It will lead nicely into our series 'Torture Through the Ages'--very scholarly and thorough, yet with a remarkably wide appeal."
Clarke was a great one for seeing the possibilities in the technological side of things. It is too much to expect him to foresee the spectrum of social consequences of this sort of media onslaught, or to suspect who would benefit most.
They have a model of SpaceShipOne in the museum now. I think it would be fun for them to put in the loop for HotRod, aka Putt-Putt, aka a prototype for Project Orion, though I suppose it wouldn't strictly have been an aircraft since nobody ever figured out how the thing could land.
A Hornet was a noisy part of the show, and a B17 and B29 (with a photography plane shadowing them) a much more sedate interlude as they carried Dolittle’s co-pilot and the Enola Gay navigator and a surprised team of Young Eagles (the winner of the bid didn’t fly himself and his friends but gave the flight to the Young Eagles) around Oshkosh. A Redtail Mustang was taxiing out to be ready after the acrobatics when we left.
The timing of the skydivers worked well, except that the jumper with the US flag came down faster than the singer sang, so the "Oh say does that star spangled banner yet wave" coincided with the landing and the end of the waving.
The kits for sale were interesting, but with my eyebones not quite as young as they used to be, and less than no space to store anything, I was able to consider and restrain myself. (I wanted to be an astronaut, not a pilot.)
We got to look around inside a C-46, of the sort my wife’s uncle had flown over the Hump in China. And a tour through the new Orbis flying eye surgery unit. And others. And a drone. And fields full of planes.
I’m interested in aviation, but you meet the real enthusiasts there. Eldest Son, as we entered the gate, opined that it looked like a fair because of all the sales tents. But when 90% of the tents display aviation-related equipment, the resemblance to the Dane County Fair begins to subside. Even Bose and Sennheiser had booths: hearing protection, of course; obvious in retrospect. (I have trouble with names and couldn’t name most of the aircraft I saw if my life depended on it.)
The scattered drips and brisk wind kept it all cool, though I now sport a jolly red nose that seems to have projected beyond my floppy hat.
In a "yet-to-be-published" article (not on archiv, dang it), they find that the ratio of left to right handed amino acids isn't the same as on Earth either for the Tagish Lake meteorite. In fact the ratios for aspartic acid were 4:1 left:right, but were only 52:48 for alanine, compared to 1:O(0) for Earthly proteins and enzymes. Random synthesis should result in 1:1. Right-handed amino acids just don't fit in proteins. You can imagine proteins made of nothing but right-handed amino acids, but they just don't exist. Here. Though right-handed acids do rarely show up.
The carbon 13 enrichment, combined with the large left-hand excess in aspartic acid but not in alanine, provides very strong evidence that some left-handed proteinogenic amino acids — ones used by life to make proteins — can be produced in excess in asteroids, according to the team.
They point out that some amino acid crystals will be of one handedness only, and that's one way of getting a pure sample. That's nice, but amino acids aren't usually found in crystal form. I suppose one model might be that there is a pool of mixed amino acids, and a crystal of right-handed cytosine forms, leaving the left-handed in the pool to react and get turned into the first proto-proteins. Or something. Alternatively, an crystal of left-handed survives some chemical insult better than the loose pool of right-handed, and is still around to form proto-proteins. Eh.
This process only amplifies a small excess that already exists. Perhaps a tiny initial left-hand excess was created by conditions in the solar nebula. For example, polarized ultraviolet light or other types of radiation from nearby stars might favor the creation of left-handed amino acids or the destruction of right-handed ones, according to the team. This initial left-hand excess could then get amplified in asteroids by processes like crystallization.
Um. Let's suppose we have something like 100% left-handed in a sample that splashes away from Earth. Over time despite the small rate we can get C13 from p+C12->N13->C13+γ, with the solar wind or low energy cosmic rays as a source for the protons. There should be C14 as well, though I'm not sure of the ratio, and some of the transmutations might disrupt the molecule. So chemicals of terrestrial origin can start to look cosmic. If they were in solution I'd expect nuclear recoil to break the molecule, but in a rock matrix there's not much place for the loose carbon to go, and it might as well recombine after a while.
At what rate will ionized amino acids in a rock matrix spontaneously shift handedness configuration? Is it different for different acids?
That sounds like a research project for somebody...
Of course there still are college calendars...
Harrison Schmitt is an adjunct professor at the UW-Madison. (I heard him lecture once on lunar geological history.) Deke Slayton and five other astronauts are from Wisconsin.
But for sheer excitement can you beat a Sputnik crashing into the street? True, the actual event wasn't very alarming--nobody noticed for an hour and when they did they thought the hot object was some slag from a local foundry. I'm trying to imagine the reactions: "Hard hat area: falling spacecraft" or "Reinforced umbrellas for sale."
Odd that I should only learn about this from a BBC article about a claim that one crashed in Scotland too. Next time we go through Manitowoc we'll have to go look.
I love her response to the complaint by the guild of psychologists:
Dr. Guiseppe Luigi Palma said the use of a consulting philosopher was "not only misleading and confusing, but utterly perilous". He said his organisation was ready to take "all the most appropriate actions to combat any offence that may be identified".
to which the reply was
But "the work is not on the emotions, but about ideas," said Lupo. "I don't think the college of psychologists knows what a philosophical consultant is." And being a philosophical consultant, she added: "Their criticism is in any case devoid of epistemological content."
I can think of plenty of people who could profitably spend a little time in such discussions, but not that many who'd actually do it.
Novelty would bring a few people by, but I can't imagine very many people making the pilgrimage to the office, even if it was at a restaurant. I could be wrong: I gather pastors do a lot of counseling and some of that is bound to be big-picture stuff.
What sort of town atmosphere lends itself to philosophical discussion? A lot of what I eavesdrop on at the sidewalk tables turns out to be business or politics. Perhaps asking the important "why" questions makes people feel too vulnerable, and the rigor of logic doesn't seem very popular (especially in politics).
Now an on-call philosopher who you could ring up from a 1am college dorm bull session about the meaning of the universe--he might get some business.
It would therefore be beneficial to have a framework to automatically test and validate the software and data of an experiment against changes and upgrades to the environment, as well as changes to the experimental software. As such a framework would examine many facets common to several current HEP experiments interested in a more complete data preservation model, the development of a generic validation suite is favourable.
My credentials: I spent several years working with code management and validation on CDF, and the last project I worked on had, at my insistence, a focus on making the release as portable as possible so that colleagues could continue to analyze data for years to come, without worrying about changes in operating system.
It took months to validate an ordinary release--there were always little gotchas, and code that used to work, and things that changed when the underlying system libraries changed. The last project is still in progress :-( after a year.
It would be wonderful to have an automatic testing framework, but it would be hugely complex and there's no way it could be generic. And software upgrades (bug fixes) are anathema to people want a stable framework for analysis and comparison. (If both the simulation you did two years ago and this year's data processing share the same bugs you can still compare the results.) The releases also have to be vetted to make sure the physics results make sense. The last time I heard CMS and Atlas still hadn't validated their code on the SL6 operating system either.
There are two nightmares: when something triggers a bug in the compiler and when "the physics results diverge." The first eats a lot of expensive talent's time and wastes a lot of everybody else's as you converge on an agreement that the compiler is at fault. The second involves getting some very busy scientists to step through a lot of tedious debugging and then argue about whether the result is an improvement and if it is, is it a big enough improvement to disturb the status quo.
Yes, most of the analysis software was written by scientists. They have the domain knowledge, but it doesn't always translate into clean code. (And C++ evolved, and some people learned to do it one way and others another. And some people tried to get cute. And so on.)
To be fair, the paper goes on to say that HERA has a test version of a test suite, and if it is built in from the get-go it is probably easier to do.
There was one more bit of low-hanging fruit: Consider the distribution of scores for the highest inning (and what the heck, the second-highest too, since if I remove that the distribution for the rest of the game looks very simple). Is this different if it happens in the problematic first inning than if it happens in the others? I guessed that it would be.
And as the plots below show, it is: and so is the second inning's distribution. The first inning is twice as likely as most of the rest to be the highest-scoring inning, but the average score is less.
The average for the highest score if it happens in the first inning is 1.5, while for innings 3-8 it slowly climbs from 2.5 to 2.8. Given that starting pitchers typically get relieved somewhere between 4 and 6, I don't see any smoking gun for pitchers being exhausted, which was the guess of mine that started this study.
The first inning looks like a combination of two distributions: that common to the rest of the innings and something else. If I subtract off the "common distribution": well, see the bottom plot below where I did a rough-and-ready subtraction. The low score end of the leftover distribution looks like a simple Poisonnian random sampling. The high end you shouldn't pay any mind to; the statistics are low and the subtraction was crude.
The second-highest score looks pretty similar, though smaller.
So from last post we see that when we take out the two highest-scoring innings the score distribution per inning seems to suggest that the runs are relatively independent (which is pretty odd. Home runs yes, but small ball no). At any rate, it looks pretty clean.
But we seem to have two failure modes: one of which can happen in any inning and gives the other team an average of at least a couple of runs, and an additional problem in the first-inning, which follows same sort of Poisson distribution as an ordinary inning, with about the same relative probability.
So a team fouls up with some random probability (grounders take bad hops, etc) all through the game (except the last inning), though in the first inning they seem about half again as likely to foul up. On top of this there's some correlated foul-up that happens in just about any inning.
And one more thing: the second-highest scoring inning is more than twice as likely to come immediately after the first-highest than at any other time. So whatever the effect is, it can last more than an inning.
I think I've taken this about as far as I can without delving into pitching changes. It might be amusing to compare different years with different rules/equipment ("Jackrabbit balls"), but I'll leave those as exercises for the readers.
First the falling flat:
As you can see from the top two plots, the highest and second highest scores tended to come in the first inning, not later in the game. In fact, there's a strong drop at the end, suggesting that relief pitchers do help keep the score down.
I conclude that the high score doesn't come when the pitcher gets tired. I was wrong. In fact, it looks more like the pitcher isn't quite in the game yet, or the team hasn't gotten synchronized for play yet.
Now let's look at the second-highest score distributions, to see what we can see.
The distributions of highest and second-highest are roughly similar, except that the second-highest inning's score is less than half that of the highest inning's score, on the average. And the reduced score distribution for 7 innings (the extra inning games are a small effect here and I ignore the correction) looks much more Poisonnian, dropping by about a factor of 2 each time. That's on the lower right: compare with the 8-inning reduced score on the lower left.
I used the 7-inning reduced score distribution to predict the highest and second-highest innings' scores, and those are in the bottom row of the figure below. Recall that when you are looking at the highest score of a list, 0 is not as likely as higher values. And they have the same general shape as the real distributions above, but with much smaller averages. The average real highest inning's score is 2.3 but the estimate's is 0.7, and the average real second highest inning's score is 1.1 but the estimate's is 0.5.
What can I conclude from this?
The highest inning's score is in substantial disagreement with the estimate. So is the second-highest inning's score, though the real distribution could be a combination of the background estimate and something else.
Unfortunately it filled the window well and started to overflow into the basement, so I bailed about a third of a yard of water(*) while standing in the window well and hoped the lightning wouldn't notice somebody mostly below ground. Deferred maintenance; don't ask. But at least the landscaping I improvised in the back seems to have worked this year, and the sump pump had nothing to do for a change.
But we got a good soaking so I can't complain too much.
(*) The window well was modified to serve as an emergency exit for the basement, so it is all nice and legal for somebody to live down there and there won't be problems if we have to sell and move. So it is a bit wide. The rain filled up 10" of pea gravel and went on to fill in another 7" to lap at the window.
The probability of scoring a run in baseball is a complicated mix of the probabilities of walks and hits and steals (and hit batsmen and home runs and so forth). So a nice simple Poisonnian model isn't really appropriate for estimating what the expectation for the maximum inning's score should be. It is possible that these combinations conspire to make higher scores more likely. If that is the case, then the "second-highest" inning should have a distribution more like that of the "highest" than a run-of-the-mill inning.
Also, I was hinting that this might be due to pitcher failure. That should be more likely in later innings, so I should check that also.
So, I want to look at highest and second-highest distributions, and the monte-carlo estimates of what those distribution should look like based on the reduced-reduced score. I also want to see what the distribution of high score inning numbers, and second-highest score inning numbers, look like. The former should be more skewed to higher inning numbers than the latter if this is due to pitcher issues. And the second-highest score should look more like the prediction from the average than like the highest score, if the high-score inning is pitcher failure.
So let's see if my predictions agree with the data. (No, I haven't done these yet.)
Does this effect, in the end, make a huge difference? How much of the game revolves around the performance of the team as a whole, and how much around how fast the manager spots problems with his pitchers?
The right way to study this is to review all the games and look for the innings with pitching changes, and then drop those, and see if the overall won/loss ratios between the teams change with the new scores.
That gets messy when there’s more than one pitching change. I could try to program that, but instead I used the inning with the most runs scored as a proxy for when the opposing pitcher pooped out. Yes, there are problems with this kind of proxy. The sun getting in the outfielders' eyes can undermine the defense, and contribute to extra runs, for example.
But first, here’s where I got the data for regular season games in 2010 and 2011:
The information used here was obtained free of charge from and is copyrighted by Retrosheet. Interested parties may contact Retrosheet at "www.retrosheet.org".
There may be errors in the site’s data, but I’ll assume it is accurate enough to serve the purpose: the uncertainty of my proxy is undoubtedly larger than their typographical error rate.
What I did was read the text file into OpenOffice and remove almost all the columns, so that I was left with the date, team names and leagues, number of outs in the game, whether there were forfeits or protests, and the line scores. The rest was just simple awk scripts and using root for the graphics.
The procedure is simple. Look at the line scores, and for each team find the inning with the most runs. Remove it from their total. Now look at which team won the game. Ties are .5 of a win for both sides. For a season, add up the wins for each team and rank them using the normal method, and rank them using the reduced scores, and see whether the standings change.
I ignore inter-league games, and toss out any games that were flagged as being forfeits or protested by one side or the other. I also don’t worry about divisions; lump them all together.
The first thing to check is consistency. When I look at the win totals I find that they are close to but smaller than those in baseball-reference.com. I have not yet accounted for the discrepancy.
If I check there is a home-team advantage: about 2 sigma for the ordinary score and a bit over 1 sigma for the reduced score.
So far so good, modulo the discrepancy with the official stats.
The distributions of the scores look a little different! They aren't Poissonian, which isn't too surprising: unless it's a home run, if one man scores he had some help, so there's a chance somebody else is now on base and ready to try to score too. And, if I didn't botch this calculation, over half the average scoring comes from a single inning's success.
Add them up and rank them!
As you might expect, the won numbers cluster tighter together.
As you might expect, the overall shape of rankings is pretty much the same.
But the final rankings do change. In 2011 Arizona undergoes a huge jump in ranking when ranked with the modified score, from 3'rd in the league to 6'th. Can their opponents all have had so many moments of bad pitching?
The astute reader will notice that there are no error estimates on the modified win totals. One contribution comes from the fact that if the high-score innings are left out, the home team would sometimes have come to bat in the 9'th where in the real world they didn't. Real scores average about .47/inning and modified scores about .22/inning
| Rank | Team normal | wins | Team modified | mod wins |
| 1 | "PHI" | 87 | "CIN" | 84.5 |
| 2 | "SFN" | 85 | "PHI" | 84 |
| 3 | "CIN" | 83 | "SFN" | 83 |
| 4 | "ATL" | 82 | "COL" | 78.5 |
| 5 | "SDN" | 81 | "SDN" | 76.5 |
| 6 | "SLN" | 77 | "SLN" | 76 |
| 7 | "LAN" | 76 | "ATL" | 75.5 |
| 8 | "COL" | 74 | "LAN" | 75 |
| 9 | "HOU" | 73 | "NYN" | 73.5 |
| 10 | "FLO" | 73 | "CHN" | 71.5 |
| 11 | "MIL" | 68 | "HOU" | 71 |
| 12 | "CHN" | 67 | "FLO" | 70.5 |
| 13 | "NYN" | 66 | "MIL" | 69.5 |
| 14 | "WAS" | 64 | "WAS" | 67.5 |
| 15 | "ARI" | 59 | "ARI" | 58.5 |
| 16 | "PIT" | 55 | "PIT" | 55 |
| Rank | Team normal | wins | Team modified | mod wins |
| 1 | "TBA" | 88 | "TBA" | 83.5 |
| 2 | "MIN" | 86 | "NYA" | 83 |
| 3 | "NYA" | 83 | "MIN" | 82.5 |
| 4 | "TOR" | 78 | "BOS" | 77 |
| 5 | "TEX" | 76 | "TOR" | 77 |
| 6 | "BOS" | 76 | "TEX" | 75.5 |
| 7 | "OAK" | 73 | "OAK" | 74 |
| 8 | "CHA" | 73 | "CHA" | 74 |
| 9 | "DET" | 70 | "ANA" | 70.5 |
| 10 | "ANA" | 69 | "CLE" | 68.5 |
| 11 | "CLE" | 64 | "DET" | 67 |
| 12 | "BAL" | 59 | "KCA" | 62.5 |
| 13 | "KCA" | 59 | "BAL" | 61 |
| 14 | "SEA" | 52 | "SEA" | 50 |
| Rank | Team normal | wins | Team modified | mod wins |
| 1 | "PHI" | 93 | "MIL" | 90 |
| 2 | "MIL" | 90 | "PHI" | 88 |
| 3 | "ARI" | 84 | "SLN" | 86.5 |
| 4 | "SLN" | 82 | "SFN" | 80.5 |
| 5 | "ATL" | 79 | "ATL" | 78 |
| 6 | "SFN" | 76 | "ARI" | 76.5 |
| 7 | "LAN" | 75 | "CIN" | 74 |
| 8 | "CIN" | 73 | "WAS" | 71 |
| 9 | "WAS" | 72 | "LAN" | 70.5 |
| 10 | "NYN" | 68 | "COL" | 68.5 |
| 11 | "CHN" | 66 | "NYN" | 68.5 |
| 12 | "SDN" | 65 | "SDN" | 67 |
| 13 | "COL" | 65 | "CHN" | 66 |
| 14 | "FLO" | 64 | "PIT" | 64 |
| 15 | "PIT" | 64 | "FLO" | 62 |
| 16 | "HOU" | 52 | "HOU" | 57 |
| Rank | Team normal | wins | Team modified | mod wins |
| 1 | "DET" | 88 | "TEX" | 86 |
| 2 | "TEX" | 87 | "NYA" | 85 |
| 3 | "NYA" | 84 | "DET" | 84 |
| 4 | "BOS" | 80 | "BOS" | 82 |
| 5 | "TBA" | 79 | "TBA" | 75 |
| 6 | "ANA" | 73 | "TOR" | 74.5 |
| 7 | "TOR" | 73 | "CHA" | 71.5 |
| 8 | "CLE" | 69 | "ANA" | 70.5 |
| 9 | "CHA" | 68 | "KCA" | 68.5 |
| 10 | "OAK" | 66 | "OAK" | 67 |
| 11 | "KCA" | 66 | "CLE" | 66.5 |
| 12 | "BAL" | 62 | "BAL" | 61 |
| 13 | "SEA" | 58 | "SEA" | 58.5 |
| 14 | "MIN" | 55 | "MIN" | 58 |
I should check that the score distribution in the real world agrees with other measurements, just to be safe.
UPDATE: But if there's no error, then something is different about those high-scoring innings.
I really need to be more careful. The distribution of the maximum from a set of samples will have a different distribution than the samples will. If you throw a die once you'll get a 6 about 1 time in 6, but if you throw it 3 times and get to pick the highest value you'll wind up with a 6 about 42% of the time. So I have to show that the real-world high-score inning has a different distribution than what you'd get from just picking the best of 9 tries with the reduced distribution.
The following plot includes the average distribution of runs per inning without the high-scoring inning in the upper right. In the lower right is an estimate of the maximum scoring inning in 9 innings if the upper right distribution is correct. The average is about 0.7, which is far less than the 2.3 average for the real-world high-scoring inning (lower right).
There is something different about the high-scoring innings.
There are a few oddities (infield fly rule, how to tell a balk), and I have to admire umpires who can keep all the rules straight.
Later innings tend to last longer than earlier ones. I remember a few 8’th innings that lasted longer than the first three combined.
And saves. Suppose a pitcher (call him Leroy Paige) leads his team in a 20-0 no-hitter until the last out of the 9’th when he tears his rotator cuff and is carried off the field. The relief pitcher (call him Phillip Wrigley) pitches so badly that 19 runs score, and the game only ends when the second base runner trips and falls on a grounder. Wrigley is credited with a save. Umm...
The commercials have shown an uptick in "insulting my intelligence and/or character" in the past couple of years. But that may be a function of the radio stations.
And it is startling how much the game relies on the pitcher. But more of that in the next.
As everyone learned in high school and promptly forgot, when a gas is at some given temperature the molecules in it have a distribution of speeds, with a long tail on the high speed end. There’s a peak speed, and the peak speed increases with temperature and the distribution widens. It is fairly easy to describe and is given the name Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution, which should tell you how long people have known about it.
The formula works for plasmas and free electrons, which are pretty common around stars. Turns out there’s a hidden assumption in the prediction of the distribution though—equilibrium.
People who study the plasmas around the sun use a class of related distributions called "kappa" distributions, which have a much bigger high energy tail. When your gas or plasma is fed with some energy source (magnetic reconnection, or what have you) and the gas doesn’t have time to come back to equilibrium, you get more high-energy particles in the mix—the high speed tail increases.
I didn’t know that, and I didn’t know that astronomers were scratching their heads about the temperature estimates; but Nicholls did, and he put the two together in one of those "obvious" connections. If you do the calculations for a "kappa" distribution instead of a "M-B" one, you find that processes that sample the high speed part will proceed as though the temperature were higher than it really is, and those sampling the lower speed part will proceed as though it were lower. So the team goes on to estimate "kappa" for several sources, and note that several have good candidate for providing a strong source of high energy electrons.
I like it. A "cool" result, and it sounds plausible.
A subscription is required to view the article itself, though unless you have some professional interest in it you probably shouldn't bother.
The actual study says that women with certain genes known to increase the risk of breast cancer tend to have larger breasts—which is a slightly different statement. They took information from using 16,165 contributors to 23AndMe, used the self-reported information (bra sizes, age, cancer history, pregnancy history, currently nursing or not, etc), and found the correlations mentioned in their conclusions. They used cup size, which they admit is problematic. And they mention a study that supports CBS' headline a little better: "Kusano et al. [7] found that among women with a BMI under 25, those with a cup size of D or larger had a 1.8 times higher risk of breast cancer than those with a cup size of A or smaller."
So I went to the font of all wisdom and looked up cup size to volume and found that it is a complete mess (and apparently manufacturers have vanity sizes). This study used strap size as a proxy for BMI, so I will too. Picking a few sizes with the same strap size one finds: the ratio of estimated volume for a 34D to a 34A is about 1.9, 36D to 36A is about 1.8, 38D to 38A is about 1.8. So maybe my intuition is OK. If size matters most, then how you got the size should have the biggest bearing on what kinds of cancer you’re at risk for and when.
Their Figure 1 is pretty dramatic. But they warn
... the shared relationships between breast size and breast cancer at these three regions are not strong enough to account for the possible epidemiological connection that has been reported elsewhere between breast size and breast cancer
Maybe their volume estimation isn't clean enough. Or maybe the naive intuition isn't enough of the story.
BTW, increased BMI increases cancer risk in parts of the body that don’t necessarily increase in size/cell count proportionately. Cancer stories are complicated.
[7] Kusano et al. Int J Cancer 2006, 118:2031-2034
An engineer, a mathematician, and a physicist went to the races one Saturday and laid their money down. Commiserating in the bar after the race, the engineer said, "I don’t understand why I lost all my money. I measured all the horses and calculated their strength and mechanical advantage and figured out how fast they could run..."
The physicist interrupted him: "...but you didn’t take individual variations into account. I did a statistical analysis of their previous performances and bet on the horses with the highest probability of winning..."
"...so if you’re so hot why are you broke?" asked the engineer. But before the argument can grow, the mathematician takes out his pipe and they get a glimpse of his well-fattened wallet. Obviously here was a man who knows something about horses. They both demanded to know his secret.
"Well," he says, between puffs on the pipe, "first I assumed all the horses were identical and spherical..."
You’ve probably noticed that the world is extremely complicated, even if you leave out people’s love lives. To understand it we try to figure out patterns, and then see if we can isolate the things that go to make up those patterns. For example, things slide downhill. Sometimes they stop on the way; sometimes they keep on going through your garden and the back of the garage. You can conclude that something pulls them down (more strongly the steeper the slope), and that something slows them down (that varies in strength depending on the surface roughness and how fast the object is going).
The obvious thing to do is set up some experiments that limit the number of things that change. For example, pick rocks the same shape and slide them down a straight slope of uniform texture with no bushes in the way, and see what you learn about the force that pulls them down. Then vary the tilt, and so on, until you have a model for the force. Then you study the effect of the surface, and so on until you have a picture of friction. Then maybe you worry about air resistance...
Isolate, simplify, and model—and then introduce the complications. It works pretty well.
But what do you do when the pattern is irreducibly "almost symmetric?" You have electrons and anti-electrons, electron neutrinos and anti-electron neutrinos—but you also have muons and anti muons and similar neutrinos. And there are tau particles as well. The groups are called "generations" and the particles in each generation behave in very similar ways to their counterparts in the others; similar enough to use the patterns to form a model to describe them. But they aren’t the same, and the different masses have consequences.
Noether showed that conservation laws (like conservation of momentum, energy, angular momentum) could be associated with symmetries. For example, conservation of momentum is associated with the symmetry of displacements in empty space. Move from one point to another in empty space, and it looks exactly the same: symmetry. And it turns out that some symmetries have representations (mathematical models that reflect the properties of the symmetry) in which some of the parts can represent fundamental particles like electrons. Offer a scientist a powerful tool like that and watch him apply it everywhere he can--it unifies symmetries, forces, and particles in a single bundle.
Analyzing interactions of matter and energy using the symmetries of the relevant fields is immensely powerful—very accurate calculations prove it (QED). Working backwards, by noting that there exist what appear to be parts of the representation and inferring the symmetries, has also been powerful (QCD) and surprisingly accurate (when we’ve been able to actually do the extremely complicated calculations).
I say "surprisingly" because one of the assumptions that goes into the theory is that the particles are massless. This isn’t even close to true for quarks, and the only reason we put up with such nonsense is because the theory works so well. In the real world, and if you want full accuracy, you have to include the masses so that the heavy particles aren’t quite so interchangeable with the light ones anymore. The wonderful symmetry in which all the particles are massless is "broken".
It is only "broken" because we started with the theory where everything was nice and symmetric, so something has to "add on" to the theory to make the proper bits different. It is easier to understand the interactions when you study the problem in that order, but it leads to weird jargon. Sorry.
So what makes the difference?
Higgs (actually several people before him as well, including a superconductivity physicist named Anderson) discovered that you could give a particle or quasi-particle what was to all intents and purposes a mass by the way it interacted with a field with special properties, in particular that it has a non-zero vacuum expectation value. Massless particles could acquire masses in a natural way. It is really a little more involved, since particles in families can share the effects in different ways (e.g. the Z boson is heavy and the photon is massless), but that’s the general idea. Different particles interact more or less strongly with this field, and the effect is to give them what we call mass.
Of course this doesn’t explain why an electron has one mass and a muon a different one. They couple to the Higgs field with different strengths, but nothing yet explains the different coupling strengths. But hey, at least they don’t have to be massless, right?
This kind of field demands a particle to go along with it, and people have been looking for it for years to try to verify the theory. And it looks like it has been found, though there are a few oddities that may just be statistical--we should know by Christmas. (There might be more than one type of Higgs—several theories demand that.)
Perhaps I don’t understand it well enough, but the theory still feels a little ad hoc (*), and several years ago I was predicted that there wasn’t any Higgs. Looks like I was wrong.
(*) Especially that non-zero average value for the Higgs field.
It was quite a feat, and a great milestone--but I wish the reporting were more accurate. First, of course, I wish they'd get rid of all references to the g-d particle. Second, though this fills in a hole in the Standard Model, we already know the Standard Model is incomplete: there are known technical problems with it. Third, astrophysics tells us there's more dark matter than visible, and dark matter isn't in the Standard Model at all.
This isn't the capstone for particle physics: there's still work to be done. I don't know if the LHC will address all of these problems--there are things more easily done with ultra-cold and ultra-pure low energy detectors.
The idea is that a woman could have part of an ovary removed, sliced thin, and frozen for years. The slices could be re-implanted later, and if they take--which they seem to--the woman can stave off menopause.
This has been done with women with cancer who wanted to have children after the cancer drug treatments, which would otherwise render them sterile--and it seems to work: "without the need for IVF" (a problematic procedure, but that's another issue).
Imagine: a woman could remain fertile into her 70's at the simple cost of abdominal surgery every few years. Perhaps a mere man can't appreciate such things, but somehow I don't think doctors will be overwhelmed with requests for the procedure.
As a side note, this is their model:
The controversial notion would allow career women peace of mind with a fertility insurance policy so they can find a partner, settle down and become financially secure before starting a family.
Is it better for the husband and wife to grow their lives together into the marriage, or to try to join already-established lives? I've seen both ways work fine, but I wonder if the first isn't the easier path. There's no question that it is easier to take care of kids when you're young (no, not early teen young!), even though there's not a lot of financial security then. I'm not convinced their model is at all ideal.
I'd have thought the issue was easier than that. The military invests a lot in morale, and you'd think it a no-brainer that morale for people working with the dogs would be higher if they knew their companions would be able to come home too. It seems like a cheap investment; a couple grand for the trip and maybe a little more for the paperwork to connect them with homes. Medical issues are another matter, though.
When the smoke alarm started beeping at 4 in the morning (even the stepladder wouldn't have been enough for me to reach the cabin ceiling), we embraced necessity and got up. Outside Mercury and Venus were rising above the hill and dawn was threatening, so we sat and watched while a small squadron of bats flashed back and forth around us. My better half was glad to see them, saying that they'd eat the mosquitoes.
Since the mosquitoes were eating me instead, I wondered what the bats were up to--clearly not deterrence. And they didn't fly all that close to us, where you'd think there'd be great pickings.
Light dawned. On me, anyway. Full mosquitoes are slower fliers, and are simultaneously easier targets and flavored with a little something extra. Perhaps the bats were waiting to get the full ones leaving us instead of interdicting the hungry ones headed our way.
How would you test this? Release known numbers of empty and full mosquitoes into a bat pen, and count the number that escape? Sounds kind of tedious, but it might be inexpensively do-able, with a large room, a pen, and big fans forcing the insects into a small screened room where you BlackFlag the beasts and count the corpses. You might even be able to get some preliminary separation between full and empty by shaking the tray of dead mosquitoes. You'd need lots of repetitions to get good statistics, since it would be easy to make counting errors, and sometimes the input group would be all empties and sometimes all fulls to let you try to measure the counting biases.
Now where does one find volunteers for the feeding chamber?
I have less experience with Romanian culture than he, but there might be a more universal collection of reasons why people might not trust Oliver Twist.
There's the correlation of bad luck and bad character: the bad things that happened to his parents are because of bad things they did, and the lad is going to inherit the bad luck. Keep him away from me.
You can't know an orphan as well as you can know a child when you know his parents. Knowing the parents gives a strong clue as to which unfledged traits are going to be important in his character. In addition, you can tell from them how he has been/will be trained. Without them he might have been trained by Fagin.
Without parents to tie him into the extended family and tribe, is he going to be part of the tribe? Will he be loyal? (OK, this one is a little circular, since if you are part of their tribe you could take over the office of tying them into the tribe yourself, if it occurred to you.)
Pattison park in Wisconsin is nice too, but we discovered that the tent was shot and the heat was more than we cared to endure so we cut out for home a day early.
There was only a little rain (actually a thunderstorm lively enough to encourage us to put the canoe away for the rest of the day), and the heat didn't get to be a problem until we got well away from the lake. Lots of resting, lots of hiking, lots of visiting Great Lakes shipping history sites (and a taconite plant), scenic trials, and so on.
Not everything was perfect: I should learn braille to figure out what the mosquitoes at Pattison were trying to tell me, and the smoke detector decided to let us know the battery was low at 4 in the morning--and the ceiling was 12 feet high at Tettegouche so I couldn't deal with it. We can't afford to do something like this very often, but I'm glad we went.
No ethernet, only rare cell phone reception, and a hike to the campsite: we won't have to pay attention to what passes for news.
Take care of yourselves while we're gone.
This morning after a fast-paced introduction to supernova neutrino theory (and an admittedly rather optimistic plan for studying neutrino oscillations), a discussion broke out at lunch break about soft drinks. Challenge and response; and a modified "Pepsi challenge" ensued. Greg prepared 8 cups of random beverage (he rejected my suggestion to mix a few) and those who claimed to be able to tell the difference poured samples, and guessed. 4/8, 4/8 and 3/8 correct. Heh.
A rematch at 4:00 attracted more grad students and some secretaries, and we histogrammed the results, which turned out to be surprisingly flat, suggesting that perhaps two distributions were represented: those who could tell the difference but weren't always calibrated correctly, and those who couldn't tell the difference. (A secretary scored 8/8 and a grad student 1/8.) A large group said that you could tell the difference for the first swig, but after that your taste buds were a little shocked by the acid and one was like the other.
Doesn't your office spend free time analyzing experiments?
Several cities are now afflicted with "flash mob" gangs that use electronic media to coordinate maneuvers to converge and attack stores or people in overwhelming numbers and then fade away. It isn't difficult to find out that most of the mobs are young black men.
It does have something of the unexpected character of zombie attacks, doesn't it? Maybe I was naive in 2010, or maybe the zombie fad is morphing a bit, but I now think the racial aspect is larger than I did then.
While time and accident bring these kinds of troubles to us all, we can bring thing on a lot faster with stupidity and abuse. And while teenagers generally feel immortal, they can look around the neighborhood and conclude that a pack-a-day might be uglifying.
College is not a typical neighborhood. You find three groups: the old rulers and maintainers, overworked apprentices, and the bulk of the rest are the undergraduates, who are always young.
They are always young because they’re always being replaced; and they disappear either because they graduated or failed. Never mind those who failed academically (or because they ran out of money)—some fail because they did something stupid.
If the effects of some abuse (alcohol, promiscuity, what have you) don’t manifest right away, they won’t appear. If the effects are severe, they typically won’t linger because the students will fail or be asked to leave. Maybe some are shocked for a few weeks, but they pass on in a few years and nobody remembers—because there’s nobody to remind them. A new class comes, and there is always youth and opportunity and no sign of any consequences.
They get lectures about drug abuse and sex safety (like the "always get consent" mantra; as though consent were the sole criteria of goodness), but the community of the undergrads has no integral adults or living warnings and the lectures’ effects seem to last about as long as those of Algebra I.
They form a kind of standing wave of youth and sunlight with "Do as you please" as their motto, without Rabelais’ assumption of honor or Augustine’s “Love God” prefix.
Luckily some of them please to volunteer and spend part of their life out in the rest of the world, and some please to become deeply involved in the life of the mind and find a new community of all ages in some field of study.
But not for all.
How many other social environments do we have where people are induced to behave badly and when problems arise the problem people are "sanitized" away?
The glue that holds the chunks together is python. I'd never gotten around to doing much more than "Hello world" in it, but the past few days have been fairly intense and I'm starting to see why people like it. It seems to be built to be glue. It is easy to include other language's modules (you can even include a java environment to run java--kludgy but it works) and create new interfaces on the fly. I finally learned what the "lambda" was good for in function definition. And it looks like there's one approach to strings (C is full of traps for the unwary or fumble-fingered).
Nothing is perfect, though. Logical blocks are defined using indentation, and if you cut and paste from somebody else's program you're apt to wind up mixing tabs and spaces--and your program will mysteriously quit working. And I'm finding myself swamped in possibilities: which package do I import to make histograms again? And the expert chatter in the background suggests that programs that work in one release don't work in another...
R. Andrew Hicks (Optics Letters Vol 33 Number 15 page 1672, 1-Oct-2008) wrote up the requirements for calculating the curved surface needed to project a fan of light 45 degrees wide into a driver's eye without a great deal of distortion.
Hicks can customize his creations with exquisite precision. He achieves the desired effect first by characterizing the problem with sophisticated equations. He then programs a computer to spit out the coordinates for tens of thousands of points on the mirror's surface - each one tilted differently to reflect light in just the right way.
The data are then sent to B-Con Engineering, a Canadian firm that uses a milling machine to make the mirrors out of aluminum. The metal is ground and polished with a diamond bit until the smooth, curvy surfaces emerge - a process that takes up to a day for Hicks' unusual free-form designs, company president Brian Creber says.
Like Perline's bike mirror and the mirrors of ancient Turkey, Hicks' new automotive mirror is convex. This provides a wide, 45-degree field of view, instead of the narrow 15 or 20 degrees afforded by a typical flat driver-side mirror.
Objects in the prototype mirror also appear to be farther away; if more things are crammed into the picture, obviously, they have to appear smaller.
US law allows curved mirrors (with a warning) on the passenger's side but not the driver's side, so this will probably wind up being a popular add-on item. If I can figure some way of attaching it I'll invest in one. Or two. Though I don't think I can use his "vampire mirror."
One good reason people haven't worked much with this before is that shaping mirrors isn't trivial. You can get flat, parabolic, or spherical surfaces pretty easily. But other shapes need special grinding, as described above--and that is only really feasible with modern computer-controlled milling machines. Once you have the shape you can make a die or mold and make new ones much more easily, but the prototypes are very difficult. Notice that "up to a day" and imagine how much that costs.
Do I need to tell you he's newlywed?
Pretty much everywhere I've gone, if the church had a minister for youth, that minister was a young recently married man.
Why so young? Imagine a grandfather as youth leader.
Reasons for a young youth leader:
Reasons for a grandpa:
Thought experiment: imagine a one-on-one "Ask the answer man" time for a youth group. Ask the Answer Man anything, get an honest explanation. Who would you, as adults in the church, rather have doing that with the youth? Who do you think the youth would rather ask: a near-peer or somebody who's been through a few fires?
I've heard the claim that youth will only relate to peers or near peers, and so we need to "interface" them to the church using young leaders. It isn't obvious whether we are reacting to this narrowing of relationships or helping feed it, but I strongly suspect the latter.
I'm not getting into debates about women ministers. Similar dynamics would apply there too, and that's what I'm questioning.
UPDATE: My better half pointed out that our current church alternates large and small groups, and the small group leaders can be older.
"And the odd thing in Dad’s voice was the sound truth makes being said. The sound of truth, in a wild roving land of city or plain country lies, will spell any boy." Ray Bradbury (Something Wicked this Way Comes)
Naturally I heard the song as "Michael rode the boat ashore" and figured he must be a passenger since everybody else was working.
Until I was into my late twenties I could count the number of times I’d been on a boat on the fingers of one hand, despite having spent about 15 years within 10 miles of the ocean. (We swamped an overloaded motorboat in a lagoon and spent the next half hour trying to find the tools that went overboard, and some relatives down in Mississippi took us fishing once. That’s about it.) So we moved to Madison where water sports are huge. Odd ducks we were, still not taking to the water.
At Devil’s Lake I was impressed into taking some kids out for a turn in a canoe. I had a theoretical notion of how to use the paddle, and I succeeded in not accidentally beaning any of the kids along the way. Though I dripped a lot of water on them, and we wound up pointed in odd directions.
A generous co-worker loaned the use of his cabin-on-the-lake, and now once you pry me out of the chair it is fun to pilot small boats around a quiet lake (not so sure about places with big waves). Wish I didn’t swim like a brick, though.
In any event, restaurants and gas stations will simply install little refrigerators stocked with 2-liter soda bottles, just like the supermarkets sell. Just for convenience, of course: maybe with quarts of milk and juice alongside for verisimilitude. And give out a free foot-long fun-straw with each purchase.
FWIW, while there've been a few hot afternoons helping somebody move when I went through about a half gallon of soda, I rarely drink more than a quart in three months. A big-gulp seems grotesque.
If I create and fund a black propaganda campaign that purports to be on behalf of one of our senators, the public interest in honest debate demands that I be forced to come clean and admit my contribution. And the public interest in knowing who is buying influence requires that we know who the big contributors are to campaigns—whether as direct contributors or auxiliary supporters.
But in between those scales is a region where vulnerability meets anonymity. If, not my immediate neighbors, but a wider circle are notified of my political contributions there’s no face-to-face anymore, and I am vulnerable to organized intimidators. Yard signs are stolen all the time, and sometimes tires are slashed and windows broken. (typically those of republicans)
It isn’t legal to take my religious or political views into account when hiring me, but there’s no way to prevent searching contribution databases to look for who I might have preferred.
There are going to be tradeoffs in whatever election system we design, but right now we’re looking at a known problem--hidden influence buyers—which we can deal with by open records, and a growing problem with intimidation of small supporters, which open records makes worse.
I know that the link above is about studying how to suppress contributions, not intimidation, but California had plenty of examples of intimidation and vengeance recently after the big referendum.
The above does not accurately reflect either my neighborhood or my finances or my political party.
