Thane Plambeck

via chippyd @ flickr

This past weekend we went to the Omsi's Brainteaser exhibit. It was pretty fun, and it made me think of the hours of slave labor that Ben put us through to make this year's puzzle for his G4G8 conference entry.

He designed a 2x2 cube (8 cubes!) that have 2 solutions (where each side shows a single color): one easy, one difficult.

The return to Nelder Grove

Return to Nelder Grove, originally uploaded by thane.

Google checks

Dodging questions about the nature of scientific knowledge in Paradise Lost

Question 1 is from Satan. 

Satan, you have the floor.

One fatal Tree there stands of Knowledge call'd,
Forbidden them to taste: Knowledge forbidd'n?
Suspicious, reasonless. Why should their Lord
Envy them that?  Can it be sin to know?

Book IV, somewhere.   (here, in fact).  As usual, I don't see anyone giving particularly impressive answers to the questions posed by the Dark One. 

Shortly thereafter, Gabriel, a good guy, appears.  After some back and forth, Satan's got another puzzler:

* * * *
Question 2 (posed to Gabriel):

Gabriel, thou hadst in Heav'n th' esteem of wise,
And such I held thee; but this question askt
Puts me in doubt. Lives ther who loves his pain?
Who would not, finding way, break loose from Hell,
Though thither doomd?

Another good puzzler from Satan, but there's not much of an answer from Gabriel, that I can see, but at least he gives Satan good ole 'fuck you, and the horse you rode in on:'

Satan, I know thy strength, and thou knowst mine,
Neither our own but giv'n; what follie then
To boast what Arms can doe, since thine no more
Then Heav'n permits, nor mine, though doubld now
To trample thee as mire: for proof look up,
And read thy Lot in yon celestial Sign
Where thou art weigh'd, & shown how light, how weak,
If thou resist.

Satan doesn't answer, but just moves on:

The Fiend lookt up and knew
His mounted scale aloft: nor more; but fled
Murmuring, and with him fled the shades of night.

* * *

Jump ahead to Book seven for Question 3, posed by Adam.  He seems bent on figuring out a little bit about this odd universe he's been plunked into:  why such a big universe -- what's the point, he seems to be asking (and sorry for the length---Paradise Lost has a remarkable lack of periods in it.  Milton doesn't quite get how to end one thought and start the next).

What thanks sufficient, or what recompence
Equal have I to render thee, Divine
Hystorian, who thus largely hast allayd
The thirst I had of knowledge, and voutsaf't
This friendly condescention to relate
Things else by me unsearchable, now heard
VVith wonder, but delight, and, as is due,
With glorie attributed to the high
Creator; some thing yet of doubt remaines,
VVhich onely thy solution can resolve.

Yes, yes, yes---and your question is?

VVhen I behold this goodly Frame, this VVorld
Of Heav'n and Earth consisting, and compute,
Thir magnitudes, this Earth a spot, a graine,
An Atom, with the Firmament compar'd
And all her numberd Starrs, that seem to rowle
Spaces incomprehensible (for such
Thir distance argues and thir swift return
Diurnal) meerly to officiate light
Round this opacous Earth, this punctual spot,
One day and night; in all thir vast survey
Useless besides, reasoning I oft admire,
How Nature wise and frugal could commit
Such disproportions, with superfluous hand
So many nobler Bodies to create,
Greater so manifold to this one use,
For aught appeers, and on thir Orbs impose
Such restless revolution day by day
Repeated, while the sedentarie Earth,
That better might with farr less compass move,
Serv'd by more noble then her self, attaines
Her end without least motion, and receaves,
As Tribute such a sumless journey brought
Of incorporeal speed, her warmth and light;
Speed, to describe whose swiftness Number failes.

The angel responds:

To ask or search I blame thee not, for Heav'n
Is as the Book of God before thee set,
Wherein to read his wondrous Works, and learne
His Seasons, Hours, or Days, or Months, or Yeares:
This to attain, whether Heav'n move or Earth,
Imports not, if thou reck'n right, the rest
From Man or Angel the great Architect
Did wisely to conceal, and not divulge 710
His secrets to be scann'd by them who ought
Rather admire.

OK, nevermind, Adam says:

To whom thus Adam cleerd of doubt, repli'd.
How fully hast thou satisfi'd mee, pure
Intelligence of Heav'n, Angel serene,
And freed from intricacies, taught to live,
The easiest way, nor with perplexing thoughts
To interrupt the sweet of Life.

Ozzie weaseled his way into a warm all stars jacket for a nap

Ozzie weaseled his way into a warm all stars jacket for a nap, originally uploaded by thane.

for the ill, the pills

special medical announcement:

the antidote to joan didion has long been available.  keep this in mind if you encounter this (all too typical) report of the old lady's recent activities in today's nyt:

The week after the election, in a talk at the New York Public Library, Ms. Didion lamented that the United States in the era of Barack Obama had become an “irony-free zone,” a vast Kool-Aid tank where “naïveté, translated into ‘hope,’ was now in” and where “innocence, even when it looked like ignorance, was now prized.”

barbara grizzutti harrison's original antidote dates to 1979.  but medical science is always advancing: in 2007, bruce bawer offered another curative breakthrough.

Peeve

Your contribution is tax-deductible to the full extent allowed by the law.

Um, isn't everything allowed "to the full extent allowed by the law"?  Is my contribution tax deductible, or not?   I guess I need to read the law to find out.   Let's see, where's my copy of the tax code...

Portents

#1) Welcome to the new TypePad! Your account is now on our new next-generation platform!

Blech...I'd just gotten used to the old "platform."  I'm not seeing much that's different, or better.  Calling a web application a "platform" is a bad sign. In fact, calling anything but a flat, simple wooden object that you stand on a "platform" is not good.

#2) [ Via Joshua, who writes: ] A Capesize vessel, which is the largest available for dry goods shipping, cost $233,968 per day to hire in June.  Yesterday the quoted rate was $3,691 per day.  I guess the Capesize has capsized. [Joshua's source:  FT (somewhere);  Wikipedia entry for capesize ]

This can't be good either.  The whole world seems to be grinding to a halt.

#3) Cal 9 point favorite over Stanford in tomorrow's football game.  

Not good for the 1941 Rose Bowl rematch.

In media res

THANE: What, there are more problems?

COLE: You didn't flip the sheet over.

THANE:  OK.  "A riverboat on the Mississippi River travels 30 miles upstream in 2 hours and 30 minutes.  The return trip downstream takes only 2 hours.  Part a:  find the rate of the current.  b: Find the rate of the riverboat in still water."   OK --- you've just written down the answer.  I have no idea if it's correct.  It's got to be wrong.  So, erase that and start of by letting c equal the rate of the current, and s = the rate of the riverboat.  Then you'll have two equations, one upstream, and one downstream...

COLE:  I don't need the variables.  It's 30/2.5 or 12  miles per hour one way, and 30/2 = 15 the other.  So take 3 and divide by two, that's the current, 1.5.

THANE: What?  You could be right.  Hold on.  Oh, you're saying 3 because 15-12 is three?

COLE: Right.

THANE: OK, I guess that is right.  But, such insights are not helping you in this wretched subject, 8th grade algebra.  You messed up the Anita and Tionna problem because you didn't define the variables, you had an equation wrong when you did it in your head.  What I'm saying is that 8th grade Algebra is a pernicious, boring subject and you'll keep making mistakes unless you plod through the problems in the formulaic way I recommend. Even on the riverboat problem, look, you wrote the speed of the current, but you didn't answer the other part, the speed of the riverboat.

COLE:  13.5. I got the right answer.

THANE: But you didn't write it down.  So, think about the grader:  you'll get 1/2 credit, even though you know how to do it, and in fact have even dodged the whole point of posing the problem.  So, on this problem, yes, nice insight OK, but on the ratio of girls to boys problem...

COLE: I got it right, check it.

THANE: [pause] OK, you got it right.  But, you missed the trains travelling problem, again because you scrawled stuff and got messed up.  You didn't check.  I'm supposed to be good at math, right?  Everyone says that.  But I know I make many many, many, mistakes;  I expect to make mistakes, and I find them.  Then I kill them.  But I check to make sure the mistake is dead.  Math is a subject like that --- you have to check and recheck that the vampire is dead.  Then you stick another stake in him, just to be sure.  You are not an algebra God, and you are making mistakes.  That's why you're a borderline A student, rather than coasting.  You seem to think Algebra is a subject that can be treated via a few messy scribbles, some reasonable, or even inspired, guesses and an answer that you don't even bother to check:  I'm saying you're wrong.

COLE: I don't need the variables.

THANE: Argh, you need the variables!

1941 Rose Bowl

P writes:

I have heard Stanford mentioned as a possible foe for the Huskers if Stanford gets a sixth win.  It would be in the Sun Bowl.

The "sixth win" will have to come against Cal in the Big Game, this Saturday, if it comes at all. Not long ago, Gloria told me about a passage in a book she was reading where the author described a college football game between Stanford and Nebraska, and I said, "well, they haven't played since the 1941 Rose Bowl, and Stanford won."  She thought I must be wrong; the book seemed to be describing a real event.

"If it was real, it was 1941," I said. 

When I was growing up in Kearney, Nebraska, Al Zikmund was the Athletic Director of Kearney State College [now the University of Nebraska at Kearney].  Zikmund seemed like a god---he had played in the 1941 Rose Bowl, against Stanford.

But they lost. 

Bob Devaney, Bill Walsh, and many others are gone.

But I'm still here (albeit born 20 years after that Rose Bowl), and I'm ready for the rematch.

Some drones that kick ass

1) Kaiser Quartet (Haydn Op 76, No 3, Allegro (movement 1)).  Doesn't last long, but worth it.  Kind of bagpipy.  Is it "Hungarian" or "Scottish"?   Even the Poco Adagio ("Deutschland, Deutschland...") has the got the drone on, particularly at the end.

2) Shostakovitch, Prelude and Fugue in G minor ("beautifully lyrical piece of free-ranging plasticity"). Previously blogged and flickred, but who's keeping track, anyway.   S turns off the drone midway, and blows it.  S tends to run out of ideas, and mess things up.  IMHO.

3) Mozart String Quartet in C K465 Dissonance, finale.  Hmmm...must listen to that again.  I can only remember the opening of the K465 off the top of my head.

4) Beethoven, Razumovsky SQs, somewhere (where?).

So, find the Mozart Dissonance.

Google Mobile voice search results for "Thane Plambeck"

1) Pain clinic (Joshua)
2) Spain (Thane---just installed the app)
3) Game plan beck (Thane, 2nd try)
4) Teen planet (Thane, 3rd try)
5) Game plan bank (4th try)
6) St Elizabeth (5th try)
7) Spain

We don't seem to be converging here.

St.Mary's vs Lawrence, Nebraska High School football, ca 1957

St.Mary's vs Lawrence, Nebraska High School football, ca 1957, originally uploaded by thane.

My father is the hatless referee (center).

GIANT SEQUOIA

GIANT SEQUOIA, originally uploaded by thane.

Bull Buck, Nelder Grove

Bull Buck, Nelder Grove, originally uploaded by thane.

Obama in Emerson

We are natural believers. Truth, or the connection between cause and effect, alone interests us. We are persuaded that a thread runs through all things; all worlds are strung on it, as beads; and men, and events, and life, come to us, only because of that thread; they pass and repass, only that we may know the direction and continuity of that line. A book or statement which goes to show that there is no line, but random and chaos, a calamity out of nothing, a prosperity and no account of it, a hero born from a fool, a fool from a hero, --dispirits us. Seen or unseen, we believe the tie exists. Talent makes counterfeit ties; genius finds the real ones.

[Montaigne, or the Skeptic]

* * *

Under this head too falls that homage, very pure as I think, which all ranks pay to the hero of the day, from Coriolanus and Gracchus down to Pitt, Lafayette, Wellington, Webster, Lamartine. Hear the shouts in the street! The people cannot see him enough. They delight in a man. Here is a head and a trunk! What a front! what eyes! Atlantean shoulders, and the whole carriage heroic, with equal inward force to guide the great machine! This pleasure of full expression to that which, in their private experience, is usually cramped and obstructed, runs also much higher, and is the secret of the reader's joy in literary genius. Nothing is kept back. There is fire enough to fuse the mountain of ore. 

[Uses of Great Men]

* * *

All successful men have agreed in one thing, — they were causationists. They believed that things went not by luck, but by law ; that there was not a weak or a cracked link in the chain that joins the first and last of things. A belief in causality, or strict connection between every trifle and the principle of being, and, in consequence, belief in compensation,  or, that nothing is got for nothing, — characterizes all valuable minds, and must control every effort that is made by an industrious one. The most valiant men are the best believers in the tension of the laws. " All the great captains," said Bonaparte, " have performed vast achievements by conforming with the rules of the art, — by adjusting efforts to obstacles."

[Power]

[There's got to be even better ones than these...must keep searching.  In the the third one, the important word from Emerson's point of view is compensation: "nothing is got for nothing." Got to reread that one again (there's a whole essay with title Compensation, but I didn't think of flipping through it for Barackian Tidbits).   Is my obsession with Emerson unhealthy?  It's not a good thing to be always thinking of how events relate to the essays of Ralph Waldo.  Where's Waldo, you know.]

38 Half Domes

Flickr slideshow of webcam images I saved from Oct 2006 to Jan 2007.

Veit Elser's packing puzzle

Bill brought over Veit Elser's 14-disk packing puzzle, and the Cheny dish (thanks!) but I wasn't at home. 

Cole accepted delivery and when I got back, we took some photos of Veit's beautiful puzzle:

1/2 inch aluminum frame

I think Greg's going to have his work cut out for him into so many thick aluminum pieces if he's going solve this one, too.  Unlike Bill's Dozeneggers, which invite you to replace each piece into its appointed cavity when things aren't going well, the only idle thing to do with Veit's puzzle is to stack up the pieces.

Stacking, not packing

Unfortunately, Gloria called while I was snarfing down the Cheny creation, and I made the mistake of mentioning how good it was to her.  So I left what remained for her:

sharing: not fun

Numbering things helps

(1) Bill Gosper writes:

Thane, hie your family over to Jade Palace and order the (finger shaped) roast pork flake pastries.  Also, do you want to try Veit's 14er?

We were there for lunch today, but unfortunately Veit Elser's 14-disk aluminum packing puzzle had moved on. Maybe Bill has it again.  Cheny Xu, the Jade Palace proprietor, made us five disk-shaped beef things as a consolation prize, but before I thought of taking a photo of their careful pentagonal packing on the serving dish, we'd eaten three of them already:

(2) Tom Rodgers mailed me copies of several G4G8 articles, each signed by Martin Gardner (!).  He visited Martin in Norman, Oklahoma a few weeks ago.  Thank you Tom!

(3) Granta in today's mail:  The Rise of the British Jihad.   Opening it at random to page 70, I read

On February 20, MI5 officers secretly recorded Omar Khyam at home talking to another man about obtaining detonators for a bomb.  Coincidentally, on the same day, a member of staff at Access Self Storage telephoned the police to report his suspicions about the contents of the lock-up.  Counterterroist police officers arrived the next morning and, on finding the 600-kilogram bag of fertilizer, took samples for laboratory analysis.  The ammonium nitrate explosive was switched for an identical-looking inert substance and surveillance cameras were installed in the lock-up to catch conspirators when they returned.

Now, I'm generally a War on Terror Skeptic, but I do enjoy a good read.  Highly recommended.

(4) Underneath a pile of now-discarded t-shirts, a long-missed copy of Roger Penrose's The Road to Reality.  I'd wondered what happened to this book.  I actually liked this book a lot after I started flipping through it over a year ago, and much more than I thought I would; it's nice to have it back.  It's written at about just the right level for me, and I think it represents an excellent effort by Penrose not to "dumb it down," but instead to describe how he actually organizes physical concepts in his own brain.  So, again, highly recommended.

Logician needed for semantic cleanup

At CNN, "Obamas, Bushes to meet at White House":

Barack and Michelle Obama will get a tour of their future home Monday as they meet with the Bushes at the White House.

President Bush and the president-elect are expected to hold a meeting in the Oval Office, while first lady Laura Bush is expected to show the incoming first lady around the property.

Bush has pledged to do everything he can to make sure the transition is smooth.

[ ... ]

The courtesy tour is a historic formality.  Monday will mark the first time since 1988 that a Bush has not hosted or been hosted by a Clinton.

Hmmm---it seems to me that Monday will involve a "Bush host," so that can't be quite right.  Yet it's "sort of" clear what the writer is trying to say.

But---how to rewrite to make it correct?  To make it fun, I require that the reformulation begin with the words "Monday will mark the first time since 1988 that..."