Thane Plambeck

Save me a seat

From an article by Lakshmi Chaudry in the 29 January 2007 issue of The Nation:

In the 1950s, only 12 percent of teenagers between 12 and 14 agreed with the statement, "I am an important person." By the late 1980s, the number had reached an astounding 80 percent, an upward trajectory that shows no signs of reversing. Preliminary findings from a joint study conducted by Jean Twenge, Keith Campbell and three other researchers revealed that an average college student in 2006 scored higher than 65 percent of the students in 1987 on the standard Narcissism Personality Inventory test, which includes such statements as "I am a special person," "I find it easy to manipulate people," and "If I were on the Titantic, I would deserve to be on the first lifeboat."

Paradox, NY

map

The south pole of Saturn

The south pole of Saturn
Originally uploaded by thane.

One randomly-generated person Google hasn't heard of, even though shortly after I post this blog entry, it will have

Nella Vahle [zero hits returned for me on 28 January 2007]

It's getting harder and harder to find truly unknown people such as Ms Vahle. For example, I'm amazed that Google knows a

Xavier Smiley, which to my eye looks like an impossibly-unlikely, spambot-generated name. On the contrary—he's a little boy who was born in March 2005.

[As before, these were obtained using my random person generator.]

Three suggestions for beating the rush hour traffic in Baghdad

#1) Drive an armored Humvee.

#2) Tap horn.

#3) Don't be overly concerned about fender-benders.

The place to start is horizontal gene transfer (HGT)

Nature magazine:

The emerging picture of microbes as gene-swapping collectives demands a revision of such concepts as organism, species and evolution itself.

Tracking the remains of Gondwanaland

Devil Mountain (Tepuis)
Originally uploaded by Tamsin Lyle.

Via BLDGBLOG, a recounting of an article I missed in the NYT about a month ago:

* * *

Throughout Venezuela, we read, there are dozens of sandstone mesas, or tepuis. These tepuis are "remnants of what geologists believe were the mountains of the ancient supercontinent known as Gondwana."

Added later: Recent flickr photos tagged "tepuis."

Newman

Here I am led at once to expatiate on the grandeur of an Institution which is comprehensive enough to admit the discussion of a subject such as this. Among the objects of human enterprise—I may say it surely without extravagance, Gentlemen,—none higher or nobler can be named than that which is contemplated in the erection of a University.

John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University, 1889 (I guess, or maybe sooner?)

U.S.A.

Over the years I've found myself brooding over this excellent trilogy by John Dos Passos:

amazon link

From the Wikipedia:

Dos Passos used experimental techniques in these novels, incorporating newspaper clippings, autobiography, biography and fictional realism to paint a vast landscape of American culture during the first decades of the twentieth century. Though each novel stands on its own, the trilogy is designed to be read as a whole. Dos Passos' political and social reflections in the novel are deeply pessimistic about the political and economic direction of the United States, and few of the characters manage to hold onto their ideals through the First World War.

Strangely, when I brood over Emerson, I always pull it off the shelf to reread it.

Dos Passos stays on the shelf like an unsolved puzzle.

Maybe I'll reread it.

via grw

A former bakery owner and professional bicyclist, he was choking down PowerBars for energy in the middle of a daylong 175-mile ride. "I couldn't make the last one go down, and that's when I had an epiphany -- make a product that actually tasted good."

-- Gary Erickson, founder and CEO of Clif Bar. Quoted in Fortune Small Business, October 2003.

Notice in it the three key elements of a founding story:

* A quest which is romantically appealing to the target market,
* An epiphany,
* A trivial and obvious idea claimed as original.

Not my job

via Ivor

Tom's puzzle

Tom Rodgers #1 #2 snail-mailed me a rebus-like cryptogram involving 5 digit numbers, plus and minus signs, and short sequences of letters.

I solved it and snail-mailed it back to him with the answer, but forgot to take a photo of the puzzle, first.

Anyway, I did just send him a one line email

95501 !

which is enough for you to guess the puzzle encoding I'll bet.

Added later: In checking whether Tom's forwarded puzzle might not be on the web, I found this G4G7 article that I hadn't seen before. In particular, it has the following:

By day four, even Princeton's John Conway—typically the earliest to rise and last to bed—was lamenting the overload. "There's infinitely much to know," he said. "You simply can't know it all, despite the fact that that is my aim."

NB

Seussism source?

"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." (Dr. Seuss)

Is that in a Seuss book, or is it something he just said, sometime?

Maybe it's in "Oh, the places you'll go" ? (probably not)

things I'm thinking of doing

1) Learn to write thoroughbass

The Baroque has been called the era of the thoroughbass. It served as the textual/harmonic foundation for most choral pieces, ensembles, arias, and instrumental sonatas of the period. Other equivalent terms are basso continuo, basse continue (French), and Generalbass (German).

I've discovered that there is a big literature of music theory on this subject, complete with exercises (and solution manuals). I'm sorely tempted to study it closely, at least to the point of being able to do the exercises.

In the sixteenth century the emphasis shifted (from theoretical treatises) to a more didactic approach with "how to write" counterpoint manuals...

Too cool! link

[Aside: I love books of problems that have solutions in the back. Long ago, still in grade school, I got a black-market copy of 8th grade algebra problems used in junior high school classes. The pleasure I took in working out the answers prior to reading the answers has stayed with me to this day. "Give me a boy to age 10, and I will give you the man," said some Roman or Greek personage. Perhaps it is "age 8", instead?]

2) Concoct startup with Greg and Aaron.

3) Book wrastlin'—or more properly, book boxing and transport to distant locations.

4) I finally found a book on quantum field theory that looks understandable, Pierre Ramond's Field Theory: A Modern Primer. At least I was able to get through chapter 1 feeling that I had (a) learned something without getting confused by why it was being suggested that I learn it, and (b) had a desire to learn more.

5) My long obsessional Textoutput project. If you can figure out what it is, please advise.

Wall-to-wall trampolines

Wall-to-wall trampolines
Originally uploaded by thane.

There was no school today in Palo Alto. One of those vague administrative holidays.

After practicing their violin pieces, the normally tireless Cole and Owen quickly wore themselves out vaulting from trampoline to trampoline at Sky High in Santa Clara.

They would exhaust themselves, sit next to me for a few minutes, then return for more jumping. Older kids plopped themselves down on the trampolines somewhere only to have the Staff Guy would have to shout "STAND UP!" Sitting or lying on the trampolines for more than a few seconds isn't allowed.

Cole is pretty good at trampoline jumping, and threw in a lot of front- and back-flips, layouts, back handsprings, etc.

"You're pretty good," the Staff Guy said. "You should come at night, when the girls are here. Bring your little black book."

Killing time on the internet

I just found a neat problem on this page at Stan Wagon's site:

Suppose you are playing poker with a small group of companions and a single deck of cards. If Lady Luck guarantees you a full house, and you can choose which full house you will get, which one should you choose? Hint: The answer is not "three aces and two kings".

Hmmm—

The ranking of poker hands is

Royal Flush
Straight Flush
Four of a Kind
Full House
Flush
Straight
Three of a kind
Two pairs
Pair
High card

Since every full house makes two types of four of a kind impossible, I guess the the trick is that you want to choose a full house that will deny as many straight flushes and royal flushes as possible? With thirteen denominations

A-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-J-Q-K-A,

with A's possible at the "bottom" as well as the "top" on straights, maybe the 5's and 10's full house is better than A's and K's, since it makes more conceivable types of straight flush impossible ?

Uh—"more impossible," that is, if I choose my 5's and 10's so as to exhaust all the four suits.

I'm just making this up here, but I guess I've convinced myself that the A's and K's choice is not the best one, at least.

Maybe I've solved it by picking 5's and 10's?

Um, no, I'm not sure—I've also got to consider the number of possible full houses that beat me, since I'm not picking the best possible full house if I pick 5's and 10's. Yecch—now I've got to actually get out a pencil and paper.

Solution, please?

Added later: If I were a patient man, I'd consult this.

Tarsiers

The first thing you notice about a tarsier are its eyes. Looking at the skull, it is almost the only thing there is to notice: a pair of eyes on legs pretty well sums up a tarsier.

Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale, Ch 7.

Today's news from the lab

From an article in today's (17 Jan 2007) Nature magazine, "Concern as revived 1918 flu virus kills monkeys:"

The 1918 influenza virus, which killed some 50 million people worldwide, has proved fatal to macaques infected in a laboratory. The study follows Nature's controversial publication of the virus's sequence in 2005, alongside a paper in Science that described the recreation of the virus from a corpse and its potency in mice.

Some scientists question the wisdom of reconstructing such a deadly virus. Do the benefits outweigh the risks?

Those who carried out the macaque study say yes, as a better understanding of how it acts in a system similar to humans' will help scientists treat future pandemics. The study was carried out in the biohazard level 4 labs of the Public Health Agency of Canada in Winnipeg. Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his colleagues infected macaques with the 1918 virus or a contemporary flu strain. Whereas the contemporary virus caused mild symptoms in the lungs, the 1918 flu spread quickly throughout the respiratory system and the monkeys died within days. The damage parallels reports of human patients in 1918.

truce vodka logo

Not quite an ambigram, at least to my way of thinking, but still a very nice design I think.

If not an ambigram, what then?