Thane Plambeck

Alexander Cockburn in Beat the Devil

It's always a pleasure to read Cockburn in The Nation (and in Counterpunch, which I highly recommend), but this time he has outdone himself in amusing first paragraphs. This is from a column titled "The Triumph of Crackpot Realism" (August 14/21 issue, pg 10):

The frayed threads anchoring the American government to reality have finally snapped, just at the moment radiologists are reporting that Americans are getting too fat to be X-rayed or shoved into any existing MRI tube. The gamma rays can't get through the blubber, same way actual conditions in the outside world bounce off the impenetrable dome of imbecility sheltering America's political leadership. Twenty-three years after one of America's stupidest Presidents announced Star Wars, Reagan's dream has come true. Behind ramparts guarded by a coalition of liars extending from Rupert Murdoch to the New York Times, from Bill O'Reilly to PBS, America is totally shielded from truth.

Nontransitivity in partisan misere games

In continuing to mess around with misere partisan games, I just found that the three birthday-two-or-less games 0, {1|*}, and { | 0,-1} stand in the relations

0 > {1|*} > { | 0,-1} > 0.

Of course, one doesn't want an relation like "greater than" to be nontransitive. I'm actually glad to find pathology like this because it means that there's probably some interesting theory to be worked out for misere partisan games that doesn't just follow the path taken in Conway's On Numbers and Games.

In normal play, the recursive definition of a game's negative is

-G = { -G^R | -G^L }

In introducing this notation, one expects that

G + (-G) = 0

will be true, and it is true, for arbitrary G, in normal play. The G+(-G)= equation already fails for *2 in misere play, since *2 would be its own "negative," yet *2+*2 is not indistinguishable from zero.

Nevertheless, I still held out some hope that order relations might be a useful concept in misere play, in particular for reduction to some (as yet, undetermined) notion of a misere canonical form via dominated options (and they still might be, somehow), even with this somewhat flawed version of the "negative" operator.

In normal play, one can say that G > H if G + (-H) is a win for Left, no matter who moves first. I wondered how this would behave in misere play, assuming that the definition of "minus" is as it is in normal play, and the definition of > is as it is normal play, and that's how I (more precisely: Mathematica and I) found the example.

On Sirius radio

Coming back from the loft, on Sirius satellite radio, I heard Keb' Mo' improvise a blues version of "America, the Beautiful."

I thought it was absolutely fantastic, but Cole kept saying—ack—turn that down.

THANE: "You are so, so, so, wrong about the blues. This is just too cool—he's singing that song just the way it should be sung. I played that song from a 1951 church hymnal and wondered—what's the right way to jazz this thing up, make it interesting—and here it is, this guy Keb' Mo' is doing it perfectly!"

COLE: Turn it off!

He only seems to like classical music and disco—who can respect that?

Partisan misere games

Since I'm going to this math event in Halifax in less than a month, I thought I should spend some time thinking about the topic of misere partisan games, since that's the only thing mentioned as a definite topic. I worked on it today at the loft, as the kids played Katamari Damacy on the PS/2.

As usual, I can't be bothered to do any heavy lifting and I don't have any particularly good ideas except a healthy suspicion that the whatever I first think about the subject will turn out to be wrong, as well as the second, third and fourth thing I think about it. But I'm always willing to do some computer programming, or fiddle around with other calculations.

Here are the results of a Mathematica search I did today for pairwise mutually distinguishable partisan misere games at birthday two. At birthday 0 and 1, there are 1 and 4 mutually distinguishable normal and misere games (ie, 0, 1, -1 and star, ie *1). But at birthday two, there are only 22 normal play games (I think), but at least 123 misere ones, if this program is correct. There are probably more distinguishable types. There are at most 256.

I'm getting a headache trying to figure out the correct canonical form reduction rule in the monoid of all partisan misere games, so I think I'll forget about that for now. Also, even thinking about order relations is giving me pain.

It's a start at least.

Opal Nicholas

Twenty years ago (30 July 1986) in Kearney, Nebraska, my father was about to cut up an onion for a salad in the kitchen when the doorbell rang. He came to the door carrying the onion, and saw Bob Anderson, a neighborhood kid grown up to be a police officer.

He told my father that my grandmother (Beatrice) Opal Nicholas had driven her car off Highway 30 and crashed into a tree near Wood River, only a few miles from Kearney. She was wearing a seat belt, but it was a bad enough accident to kill her, anyway. She had just started on a drive back to her home in Crofton, Nebraska.

It wasn't hard for my father to explain to me where the accident took place—there was one big tree fairly close to the road just outside Wood River. I remembered it easily, having ridden by it many times growing up. I don't think the tree is there anymore, though.

Here's the obituary that was published in the Kearney Daily Hub

***
KEARNEY — Services for Opal Nicholas, 77, of Crofton, who died as a result of a one-car accident two miles west of Wood River on Highway 30, will be at 9:30am Saturday. The Rev. Helen Handley will officiate at First Presbyterian Church in Kearney. Burial will be in the Kearney Cemetary.

The family plans memorials to First Presbyterian Church or the Congregational Church in Crofton. Horner-Lieske-Horner Mortuary is handling arrangements.

She was born April 26, 1909, in Wisner to Frank and Matilda Laase. She had lived in Crofton for 15 years, moving there from Valentine. She was a clerk for the Selective Service office in Cherry county for many years before retirement. She was a member of the Congregational Church in Crofton, Eastern Star, Daughters of the Nile and Shrine Auxiliary.

Survivors are daughter, Marlene Plambeck of Kearney, and two grandchildren. She was preceded in death by her husband Earl, who died in 1981, and a brother.

Loyola

Loyola
Originally uploaded by thane.

Stamps

st0036
Originally uploaded by thane.

Cole wanted to show me some of the stamps he's inherited (via my Dad) from his great grandfather (Earl Nicholas's) stamp collection.

I went to get my camera when we kept running into interesting ones.

slideshow

The ultimate puzzle

The ultimate puzzle
Originally uploaded by Leonisha.

I've thought about selling a puzzle like this that would only have a solution if (say) there were twin primes with more than 100000 digits.
You'd sell boxes of puzzle pieces asking for the associated tiling, placing no restriction on its size.

I think this is possible, mathematically, at least, or at least I remember reading about it long ago (someone named Berger, or maybe Wang. Or maybe it's in the Gruenbaum and Shephard book).

They'd be welcome to buy more pieces in sets of 100, say. The cognoscenti would know that a solution almost certainly exists, but that it would involve trillions of pieces.

Just keep selling those boxes!

This site describes how to buy this puzzle, and a contest (somewhat vaguely).

Long live the ANV!

On a page I got to from a WSJ article on electric vehicles and miniaturized jets:

The Tomberlin ANVIL is a no-compromise (electric) Aggressive Neighborhood Vehicle available the end of this year.

[ The Aggressive Neighborhood Vehicle—nice! I like its sneering face. This is not your grandfather's golfcart. Oh no—the article says it's street legal. And is that a stormtrooper I discern seated behind the wheel? ]

One piece of the puzzle

one-piece-of-the-puzzle
Originally uploaded by thane.

I found it on the sidewalk near the intersection of Waverley and Hamilton in downtown Palo Alto.

Air des Bouffons

Air des Bouffons
Originally uploaded by thane.

From my Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians (a convenient 1947 edition in only five volumes, unlike the more recent (and bloated) twenty volumes)

MATASSINS Also called—bouffons—a dance of men in armor, popular in France during the 16th and 17th centuries. It was probably derived from the ancient Pyrrhic dance, although the name has been traced to an Arabic root.

[Added later: I can't get this stupid little tune out of my head, and I've never even heard it. Try humming it in your mind from the notes. I picture George Bush walking into a room, and a solitary tuba belting out the Air des Bouffons with the utmost solemnity. I suggest that "Hail to the Chief" be replaced immediately!]

The mathemagician and the pied puzzler

Now online! Go see!

via the Polaroidonizer

via the Polaroidonizer
Originally uploaded by thane.

Puzzle

I saw this bumper sticker on a pickup on Middlefield Road. Most of the last part of the sticker was worn off and unreadable. I've replaced the worn-off part with *'s that exactly count the total number of missing letters and spaces (13 of them)

HUG A LOGGER—YOU'LL NEVER G*************ES

The answer is easily Googled if you get, uh, stumped.

Photoshop Hell

For the record, the two phrases to search on when trying to figure out how to automate Adobe Photoshop tasks are the following:

"Batch processing" and "Actions."

I'm only an occasional user of Photoshop, and I guess I've gotten used to its user interface and menus, but whenever I want to figure out how to do something new, it's like pulling teeth. Is it so unreasonable to expect the word "macro" to employed, somewhere, in describing the process of creating a bunch of commands to be run ensemble on each photo in a given directory? I don't think the word "Macro" appears in the help file for Photoshop at all.

I also think the word "Actions" is incredibly poorly chosen. What is using software at all if not a series of "Actions?" Until I rediscover this word in the help file, I'm helpless.

Helicopter ride

Already as I watched Gloria ascend in the emergency helicopter from this Death Valley parking lot a couple of months ago (visible only in this larger image), the following thought passed through my mind:

Hmmm—wonder if the insurance will cover this one.

Since receiving the bill for $14,631.83, I haven't had the courage or stamina to read our policy. But yesterday we got some good news:

Paid in full!

Upside of jury service

I rediscovered Homma's Brown Rice Sushi, a place that you only find by going down a little alleyway after noticing this sign, and which might possibly be the restaurant closest to our house as the crow flies (or as anything flies, or, more importantly, walks or rides a bicycle from our house).

There's one chef (is he Homma?), and a helper. A few seats indoors, and then plastic chairs outside. The sushi was excellent, and not too much of it, either.

I recommend Combo #1 or Combo #2.

Lee Morgan, Infinity

Somehow I overlooked this CD when I created the HARD BOP JAZZCHIP that I have installed in the Audi— or at least I hadn't noticed it up to the time I got sick of feeding CDs into the laptop and waging hand-to-hand combat with the "featureset" of the iTunes monstrosity.

Recorded November 16, 1965.

I like the second track, Miss Nettie B, although the solos are bit subdued. On the back of the CD I have, it says

Infinity was one of several brilliant Lee Morgan albums that was not issued until the late 1970s. The late trumpeter was a prolific recording artist and, in the quest for follow-ups to The Sidewinder, many of the sessions left in vaults were artistically brilliant dates. This astonishing hard bop gem is issued on CD for the first time...

That seems to overstate it a bit, but having nothing from this on the HARD BOP JAZZCHIP was an overisight I think

Various middlebrow synonyms

Babbitt, boeotian, dabbler, dilettante, illiterati, know-nothing, no scholar, puddinghead, tenderfoot, unintelligentsia

I think "unintelligentsia" is my favorite. I think I'd be proudest to be named one of the unintelligentsia, certainly. On the other hand, "dilettante" is a very comfortable word for me—I use it quite a bit in self-description. And I've certainly got some Babbitt tendencies too.

What a great list.

Prolegomena to a Middlebrow Arithmetic of Curves of Genus 2

link

You've got to love this—prolegomena, middlebrow, and number theory, all at once!