Sunday Nite

Who remembers this radio program?

One night while we were listening to it we started picking up interference from a trucker's CB radio. That CB must have been very badly tuned.

Books in wartime

The US tried to supply troops with books. They printed special editions from Sept 1943 until June 1947.

During long transits across the Pacific and quiet lulls in combat zones, these servicemembers had little in the way of distraction, but they did have a book in their pocket. Eventually they opened them. Soon they would devour them, trade them like currency, and report them to be “as popular as pinup girls” — just about the highest form of praise possible from a young soldier.

They'd tried to supply books in WW-I, but that proved difficult. Standard editions weren't very portable, and the books were volunteer donations.(*)

I remember seeing one or two of them, umpteen years ago. There's quite a list, and it doesn't look like anybody brought a single vision to the collection--or a censor. I assume most disintegrated long since.

An anecdote or two suggests that books are still quite popular in informal libraries (X brings a few books, reads them, leaves them for whoever), though I gather video games are also common.

(*) Donations... Back in '63 a number of churches donated books for the library of a Baptist boarding school in Liberia. I remember the attitude of resignation of the missionaries who sorted through the pile that arrived. Quite a few books were water-damaged, many were obsolete, falling apart, irrelevant (random latin textbooks?) -- one book (sent for an African school, recall) was a glamorized history of the KKK.

Fall

Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes describes the season just right. "Gee, I like this season best of all! The trees are like nature's own fireworks display!"

And they are, in both their shape and transience, and their colorful changes.

It's odd, though, how the dramatic reds and yellows and even browns turn less spectacular when their leaves are lying on the ground. Perhaps part of their glory was the light shining through them. I've no pictures that adequately show this, but if you've seen it in person you know.

I wish that images could show the dynamics of the light. Perhaps you could with a projection table under the photo that let you vary the intensity place to place with greater range than a mere computer monitor can (or than a print, where the illumination is the same over it all).

Adding machines

My father was an accountant (who became a missionary accountant/business manager), and on his desk sat an electric mechanical adding machine. It only let you enter about 9 digits (may have been 8), but of course if you added 9,999,999.99 and .01 you'd get the proper 10,000,000.00. It did 1 digit overflows fine. Did it do 2-digit overflow? I added 9,999,999.99 eleven times, and yes -- it did account for 2-digit overflows.

How about 3-digit overflows, for 12 digits total? I bobbled that test the first time -- I lost count and didn't type enough entries -- but the second time I typed in all 101 entries and hit the "enter."

It only gave the 11 digits. Phooey.

Worse, I must have bent something, because ever after, if you rested your finger on the "enter" key too long, it would not just print the current answer, but would follow it with one or more irrelevant lines of 9,999,999.99

Since he included the adding machine tape in the records, this may have confused whoever looked at the records later.

Data centers and finance

Whether to allow data centers to be built is a huge issue locally, with lots of talk about water use and competition for electric power. My gut feeling was that the AI frenzy felt like a bubble, and that a lot of the centers were going to wind up as white elephants (or worse, taken over by the government for China-style social score management).

This article, which assumes a fair bit of knowledge about market instruments which I don't have, proposes that the whole system is already starting to fall apart. He looks not at the growth (first derivative) but the rate of growth (second derivative) and explains why this matters.

Three errors, stacked, recreate 2008. The market is pricing AI as a technology cycle when its financing is the machinery of a credit-and-real-estate cycle. It is watching the level and the velocity while the structure breaks on the acceleration. And it is treating a concentrated, single-borrower loan book as though it were diversified forward demand. Each error alone might be survivable. Together they reconstruct, feature for feature, the conditions of the last great credit event - the same negatively convex structures, the same originate-to-distribute plumbing, the same correlation-of-one hiding inside the appearance of diversification, the same blindness to the one derivative that matters.

Maybe somebody with more finance experience than I has thoughts about it.

Interpreting

In 1 Corinthians 14:27-30 Paul says that in church no more than 3 people are to speak in tongues, and only if an interpreter assists. Also, no more than 3 prophets are to speak, and others are to pass judgment: a kind of interpretation.

He previously praised prophecy and teaching far above tongues--so it's interesting that he says that in church both "tongues" and "prophecy" must be limited. I guess they aren't what the worship service is about.

Paul wrote that he'd rather speak five words to instruct others than ten thousand in a "tongue." Interestingly, Jerome wrote about John the apostle:

The blessed John the Evangelist lived in Ephesus until extreme old age. His disciples could barely carry him to church and he could not muster the voice to speak many words. During individual gatherings he usually said nothing but, “Little children, love one another.” The disciples and brothers in attendance, annoyed because they always heard the same words, finally said, “Teacher, why do you always say this?” He replied with a line worthy of John: “Because it is the Lord’s commandment and if it alone is kept, it is sufficient.”

5 words to instruct others. At least in English; I think it's 3 in Greek.

Fall chores

Painters make it look easy.

In theory, it is. But how much of this thickness of paint is just enough, how far is far enough, and when the sun is glaring in your eyes, where'd you leave off?

1942: Crux of War by Jonathan Parshall

A few years ago when Drachinifel visited U505, Jonathan Parshall also dropped by to visit him, and we wound up talking with him more than Drach – mostly about kids. We'd already read his Shattered Sword (about Midway), and told him we were looking forward to his next book.

1942: Crux of War was worth reading. He broke the year down by month, and in each month went over what was happening in each theater (including the economic). He gives the big picture of the war during that pivotal year.

Turns out there was a lot I didn't know, and I'd not seen how it all laid out together before, and how the parts tied together.

Some alternate history buffs have suggested "What if the Germans chose X instead of Y" -- it's a popular pastime. Parshall points out several such instances, and fills in the parts that show "oh, that wouldn't really have worked either." By the time Manstein was in position to almost relieve Paulus at Stalingrad, the 6th army wasn't capable of breaking out to meet him anyway. Some seemingly crazy decisions were born of necessities you don't see unless you look at the big picture. And some were just crazy – almost anything Hitler had a hand in, for instance.

If you have any interest in WW-II, read it.

---

China doesn't make many appearances, but Parshall says their contribution in tying down Japanese armies was significant, even if they had little or nothing in the way of victories of their own. The British in southern Asia were unbelievably incompetent. And somehow I'd never realized that the Germans were reading American naval codes.

Alternate history

I've got a premise for a story I won't have time to research. Suppose the Viking settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows had included a youngster with measles.

The settlement was probably going to be abandoned no matter what -- the Vikings didn't have firearm advantages. But if measles had spread over the trade routes in North America 500 years before Columbus, the great die-off would have happened earlier, and by the time France and England got involved the populations would have built back up. This time, there wouldn't have been such a big die-off, and the settlers who followed the explorers would have found a much more crowded coastline. No room, no room.

What then?

If you have the budget, why not

Epic System is famous for several things, most happily the way they decorate their buildings. They're completing two more: "Azland, loosely inspired by “The Chronicles of Narnia,” and Elvendell, inspired by “The Lord of the Rings.”" ... "Two more buildings, Rogue Planet, based on “Star Wars,” and Dragonfell, reminiscent of Game of Thrones, are scheduled to open in spring 2028." (I'm not sure the latter theme is auspicious.)

Buildings across Epic’s campus share a similar footprint, with distinctive staircases, conference rooms and office space for about 300 to 400 employees, often working on the same team. But their interiors, from digitally printed carpets to walls covered in fantastical vinyl designs, give each building — and sometimes each floor — its own identity.

...

Much of the variation between buildings comes from the decorations, with most having the same general layout of offices and conference rooms. Recent advances in digital printing have made it easier to produce customized carpet patterns and vinyl wall coverings, including carpet designs featuring pictures of ponds and lion faces.

“The price is the same, so why not get the fun one if you have the choice?” Schumacher said.

Ambassadors

Back in the day the Womens Missionary Union organized a group for boys called "Royal Ambassadors", recalling 2 Corinthians 5:19-20 "ambassadors for Christ".(*)

"Royal" is nice and encouraging for the youth, but I wonder if "Loyal Ambassadors" for Christ are what the world needs more of. I know I haven't always reflected Christ well and fear I have sometimes passed along my own attitudes instead of the "word of reconcilliation".

(*) By popular demand they then organized a "Girl's Auxilliary: GA" group, which after a while turned into "Girls in Action: GA".

UPDATE: For those not familiar with the WMU, they were founded almost 140 years ago to educate (esp children) about Christian missions. Their influence has been large--McBride exaggerated a bit, but not all that much.

Patterns and language

When you read "blue" do you think of the sky, or ocean, or copper sulfate, or maybe a little of all at once? The word's just a word, a few letters, a sound, but you use that abstraction to bring to mind all these things, from colored chalk to the spectrum to the rainbow to the refringence in a bubble.

Anecdotal Evidence introduced Nemerov and his Figures of Thought (also see this and I like The Spy ). In that "Figures of Thought" he describes discovery of patterns in disparate things as a "dry delight."

"Dry"? Those spirals he wrote of, like blue hues, inhabit much in the world that we sense. Like "blue", the word "spiral" evokes something from our senses. But it also evokes something from our minds, like "care" or "depth" do.

If you do not know the name, the language, you can still see the commonality when looking at something as obvious as the color blue or a spiral, but you'll miss things less obvious things like the commonality between a pendulum and a wave in the water.

Heinlein exaggerated, but just as you can't fully appreciate Chinese poetry without knowing the Chinese language, or fully understand some paintings without knowing the symbols the artist used, you won't fully appreciate the poems of the world without knowing the language of the world.

Life is short, and I don't have time for all I find to do. I'll never learn Chinese. I'll just have to worry along with translations.

Something doesn't quite add up

When checking for comments for this blog, I noticed that posts were racking up a lot of page views. Curious as to why, I went to Stats, and then to More About This Blog, and then looked at Top Referring URLs. It says I have a large number of links, or at least "the previous site visited" (not sure if those can be distinguished) from the American Osteopathic College of Radiology. Just for completeness I checked, and my intuition was correct -- they have no link.

We wonders.

FWIW, blogger sometimes seems to count page views from spiders, which makes the blog seem more popular than it really is. The above oddity is probably more algorithmic goofiness, unless osteopathic radiologist training provokes a special love for my flavor of eclecticism. Maybe spiders have gotten smart, and pretend to originate from a pool of fake addresses, to get by the anti-spider algorithms.

Crosses

"And He was saying to them all, 'If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross daily and follow Me.'"

He didn't say make a cross for yourself; you'd have one.

It occurred to me a few days ago that Jesus' cross represented suffering for others' sins. So, I suspect, do ours.

It's partly suffering from others' actions, partly pain at seeing others' ruin and pain, and partly the tension between trying to show love and trying to show truth.

Songs and memories

AVI posted a song I haven't heard in ages: Winchester Cathedral. I now see why the guy's voice sounded strange.

I remember where I first heard that – a 6'th grade classroom in Carbondale. For some reason the class had a phonograph, and we (I gather, nobody ever asked me) were allowed to pick a song during some break time or another, selecting from a box by the window. The only two that ever played that I recall were Winchester Cathedral and Georgy Girl. Oddly, Georgy's B-side (Last Thing On My Mind) didn't show up.

The school was directly across the street from where we lived that year. That made it easy to transport the artifacts back and forth for a class demonstration about Liberia. I recall bits and pieces: the teacher tried to encourage reading by having all her students log the number of books and pages they read. Did Lord of the Rings count as one book or three? I found a small sad iron in the rafters of our basement – no idea how it got there. I got malaria partway through junior high, and missed the practical exam for shop class, so I only half finished the shop project. (Drafting came first – you probably would never guess I took the class.)

I tried the experiment of quickly drawing a capital Gamma in all the boxes of a T/F exam and then adding the appropriate final stroke as I figured out the answer. It turns out that doesn't speed things up; the overhead of moving your hand dominates the time.

And a vice principal stalking grimly down to confront a friend and I for playing craps, and then wandering off quietly when he saw we were playing a math dice game. (numbers and symbols – in a minute generate as many unique numbers as you can from the roll).

And one student who looked just like a guy I knew from Liberia.

Bits and pieces… no narrative suitable for a memoir.