Thane Plambeck

Cafe Borrone, Menlo Park

Cafe Borrone, Menlo Park
Originally uploaded by thane.

Misc

1) My DNA seems to be stalled in the stage of "DNA isolation." When will it move on to "DNA analysis"? Perhaps some kind of toxic material has been identified in the DNA, and they're not going to take any chances with it?

2) What's the best word to describe the expression one detects always in the faces of fellow motorists when driving? It's often a compound of "ennui," "anger," and "frustration," but there's still a certain sameness in all of these that remains to be named.

3) Now I look at my desk, and see that the book lying there is Ogden Nash's The Face is Familiar. So, perhaps the answer to question #2 is in the book? No ( If called by a panther // Don't anther). I need to return that book to the library.

Article on G4G7 by Ivars Peterson

Nice article (and thanks for the link—not that it's my content anyway, it's a NYT article by Ed Rothstein that I shamelessly archived ).

But it should have said

Where else would you find Raymond Smullyan spoiling a card trick by John Conway by palming off the top card from a prearranged deck.

"Ah, I see," Smullyan said. "It's a card you have to blow on, first."

[He blew on it, and it changed into the card Conway expected to see.]

"I should have known better than to let you deal the cards," Conway said.

Joshua indicates the menu for dinner tonight chez Sommer

Joshua indicates the menu for dinner tonight chez Sommer
Originally uploaded by thane.

Travelator out of service

i'm feeling lucky

Stanislaw Lem, 1921-2006

From the deep plambeck.org archives (ca 1990 or so, "Explaining Twin Peaks")

It's risky to introduce the supernatural and UFO-ial because these are essentially proletarian concepts that when explored to any depth are revealed to be very stupid. I once read a book called by Stanislaw Lem called His Master's Voice—which the scifi-heads amongst us may have also read, and let me be perfectly clear, I HATE science fiction—but the point was this: a man, selling recorded extra-T transmissions as random numbers, is confronted by a customer who points out that these bits, put forward as random, in fact repeat themselves after some large number of gigabytes.

A Los Alamos-type effort is struck up to determine what the hell these bits are and the mathematician-narrator and indeed none of the most-qualified scientific personnel described in the book are ever able to figure out what the bits mean, although they are able to interpret some homomorphism of the bits as chemical formulas and they synthesize some sort of slime out of it that has odd properties.

Now one's interest in this story may indicate nerd tendencies but I for one found it at least mildly compelling, particularly because the right note—that of never really figuring out what the bits mean—is struck.

These outerspace phenomena, if explained, lose much of their force so that the narrative motive force eventually causes them to become, as I have already said, very stupid.

* * *
Klarner was a big Lem fan. In fact, he was the person who originally drew my attention to that Lem passage in His Master's Voice, about twenty years ago!

Twenty year college reunion

Two photos that Gloria dug up for the Stanford "Classmates" book (her 20th reunion is coming up):

With Kim Muth:

Pentakis kaleidoscope

IMG_9708
Originally uploaded by thane.

Not Photoshopped.
i'm feeling lucky

Hall of Fame to induct Kearney referee

From today's Kearney (Nebraska) Daily Hub:
* * * *
Hall of Fame to induct Kearney referee
By BUCK MAHONEY, Hub Sports Editor

KEARNEY (25 March 2006)—"Longevity," Vern Plambeck says, "has meant a lot to me."

His longevity has meant a lot to others, as well.

Plambeck, who started wearing the referees' stripes and blowing the whistle in 1954, and is still at it, will be inducted into the Nebraska High School Sports Hall of Fame at its Sept. 24 induction ceremony at the Lied Center in Lincoln.

"This is a big thrill for me," Plambeck said of his induction. "I feel very fortunate just because there have been so very few (referees) in there."

But few have had a career that rivals Plambeck's.

A retired professor at UNK, he started officiating when he was a student at Hastings College, studying to be a sports writer. A couple Hastings businessmen who needed another man on their football crew approached him. His first game was at Doniphan; now, though, he doesn't remember the other team.

"I told myself when I was 20 years old that I had to be involved in athletics. Many times I would go out and work a game and come back and write a bylined story for the Hastings Tribune," he said.

But he learned that he didn't like the hours, working at the paper well into the nights after the games.

He took a teaching job at Fairbury and tried coaching. But that wasn't for him, either.

Except for a call to active duty in the military in 1957, he kept officiating.

"I like to be on the field. I feel on Friday night, that's where I belong," Plambeck said.

He officiated seven state basketball tournaments, including the 1973 Class A boys championship game. He's worked 33 football playoff games since 1976, including Nebraska's first overtime game—Wheatland 38, Hampton 32 in 1976.

He's refereed the Coaches Association All-Star Basketball and Shrine Bowl All-Star Football games.

He's even worked one of the few 9-man games in Nebraska, an experimental game between Ruskin and Dannebrog—an experiment that didn't catch on.

He's reffed games everywhere from Scottsbluff to Humboldt, from Norfolk and Springview to the Kansas border.

"I've had some big games, but not as many as you might think," Plambeck said. "I haven't had that lustrous of a career. But, I've kept going. I have enough friends hiring me to keep me going."

He gave up basketball in 1989, and has since worked as an observer of officials for the Nebraska School Activities Association.

But he's still on the field in football season.

"I wanted to work six decades, and that would have been in 2000," Plambeck said. "Then I wanted to work 50 years, and that was 2004."

He saw an article about an official in Kansas who worked for 50 years.

"He was 75 and I'm 70," Plambeck said.

He is contracted to work games this fall and next fall, too.

"And I don't know if I'll quit then. I feel good. I really do. My legs feel better. I do more now, and I'm always walking," Plambeck said.

But his long career has given him respect for many other nameless officials who have worked countless games. He watches officials, like Joe Wells of Grand Island, with admiration for their longevity and activity—referees who work three, four or five nights a week.

"I have to speak for all of them who had better schedules and maintained them better than I have. I have to speak for the group," Plambeck said of his induction ceremony speech. "They've had state tournaments since 1911, and who were those guys who did those tournaments? Who's the Joe Wells of the 1920s? Who's going to nominate them? There are so many out there who never had the chance to get the recognition I'm getting."

Madeleine Olnek

article about the director of hold up

What JHC had

Just after I finished my Advances in losing presentation at the Gathering for Gardner, John Conway gave me a sheet of paper (on the Atlanta Ritz-Carlton stationery) on which he described what he knew about the indistinguishability quotient construction in misere impartial combinatorial games, as early as the 1960s and 1970s.

I thought I'd lost the sheet of paper, but now I just found it again.

"The way this stuff works, you get the credit, since you published it," he said. "But I wanted you to know what I had in case you write one of these history kind of things..."

Stanford Computer Science Dept 40th year anniversary

Bertrand Meyer took this cool photo of me standing amidst Whitfield Diffie (left), Ron Rivest, and Don Knuth (far right).

The Mosquito

The Mosquito ultrasonic teenage deterrent is a solution to the eternal bane of shopkeepers and mall owners around the world who are troubled by small crowds of anti-social teenagers who have nothing better to do than loiter outside their shops and stores deterring older customers who want to go into the shops to purchase goods...

[ link—apparently the noise The Mosquito makes is inaudible to almost everyone over the age of 30. So, if you were born prior to 1976 or so and are looking for a storefront to loiter in front of without anti-social teenagers getting in your way, look for The Mosquito^TM... ]

From The Black Hole at the Center of Our Galaxy, by Fulvio Melia:

The Milky Way and Andromeda, the two dominant spiral galaxies in our Local Group, are falling toward each other at 300,000 miles per hour. Our descendants eons from now will see Andromeda gradually grow in size until, some 3 billion years hence, the two sister galaxies begin to tear at each other's fringes. Eventually, stars from both doomed spirals will plunge past each other, driven by the gravitational force of the two gargantuan galaxies. The Sun itself, together with our planet, will either spin completely out of our galaxy altogether, traveling on a long, desolate path with very few other stars visible in the night sky, or it may plunge toward the center of the newly formed structure where a cacophony of activity will greet it. Since the Sun is expected to burn and sustain life on Earth for another 5 billion years, intelligent life here will see all of this unfold, albeit at a very slow pace. A billion years later, the two beautiful spiral galaxies will have merged into a giant elliptical spheroidal mass of aging stars. Ironically, though, very few stars will actually collide with each other during this encounter, since most of space is filled with wispy gas. Aside from dramatic changes in the appearance of the night sky, our descendants will continue to live on a planet peacefully orbiting around the Sun.

link (feeling lucky)

My DNA has moved on to the next stage

DNA ISOLATION

The cells are broken open by incubation with a protein-cutting enzyme overnight. Chemicals and the samples are transferred into deep well blocks for robotic DNA isolation. The blocks of chemicals and samples are placed on the extraction robot. The robotic DNA isolation uses silica-coated iron beads. In the presence of the appropriate chemicals DNA will bind to silica. The robot then uses magnetic probes to collect the beads (and DNA) and transfer them through several chemical washes and finally into a storage buffer, which allows the beads to release the DNA. At this point the beads are collected and discarded.

Only "DNA analysis" and "Quality Control" to go!

[ National Geographic DNA project ]

Overheard at a violin lesson

Put the dots in—get the bowing also—good job—let's do it one more time—let's go on to the B flat one...good. Again.

Try it now—OK—stop—look at your notes again.

Ready, OK? Better that way. Back to the first A, G, F natural—look at your violin now, not the notes.

Yes, yes those three again. It's wild—sometimes it's a high two, sometimes a low two. That's why I suggest looking at it—high third.

Are they any high twos in here? No? Yes. That's the way I think of it, they're all high twos.

Easy? Let's go on—those two have twos even on the A string. These groups and markings.

Nice! Good. But you have to reach. Higher. You're flat on that!

No, you have to start reaching sooner. Again. No—you're still flat on that.

Are you ready? You could say that in there you got all possible groupings. It's tricky. Not the hardest one in this book, but tricky. Good.

Limerick

Cole (age 10) has been reading a book of Edward Lear limericks. He composed this one

* * *
There once was an old man of Turkey
Who wasn't quite that touristy.
When it came to Thanksgiving
He just started singing
Now why can't we just visit Donkey?
* * *

Don Knuth, Ron Rivest, Oren Patashnik

Don Knuth, Ron Rivest, Oren Patashnik
Originally uploaded by thane.

Stanford Computer Science Dept 40th anniversary

Bruce contemplates the mystery of the sea

Georgia Aquarium, Atlanta, GA

What's the collective noun for rays

[ I suggested a "pencil." Or how about a "Charles." ]