Thane Plambeck

Cole and Owen in the "Jews on Vinyl" exhibition

Cole and Owen in the "Jews on Vinyl" exhibition, originally uploaded by thane.

http://www.thecjm.org/index.php?option=com_ccevents&scope=exbt&task=detail&oid=40

The obituary of Charles Leonard Bouton

There's an interesting article in the September 2009 issue of the AMS Notices with title "Bocher, Osgood, and Ascendance of American Mathematics at Harvard" by Steve Batterson.

Batterson's article briefly mentions Charles L. Bouton, the author of  Nim, A Game with a Complete Mathematical Theory, Ann. Math. Princeton 3, 35-39, 1901-1902.   This is a seminal paper in combinatorial game theory.  I've long wanted to know some details of Bouton's life, but hadn't managed to turn up much in sporadic attempts to locate information about him.

So, today I sent a message to Batterson and he pointed out Bouton's two page obituary notice, which appeared in the March, 1922 Bulletin of the AMS pp. 123-124, and was apparently put together by William F Osgood, Julian L. Coolidge, and George H. Chase.

So, I Googled that, and discovered that projecteuclid has the obituary online as a PDF.

It's a fascinating document, particularly its last paragraph, which I interpret as a veiled description of Bouton's suffering from a mental illness.

[ Michael Albert comments (at Facebook):    Yes, particularly given the two earlier references to "sanity" ]

430 East 4th Street, Ainsworth, Nebraska

430 East 4th Street, Ainsworth, Nebraska, originally uploaded by thane.

228 South Main Street, Valentine, Nebraska

228 South Main Street, Valentine, Nebraska, originally uploaded by thane.

OutsideBassett

Scaling the Google Streetviewer out to the point where most of Nebraska appears to be covered as thick blue lines of available "views", I like to plunk the Streetviewer man down at random. The Google user interface compels the man to lands on the nearest blue line. In this way I found it pretty easy to target random remote highways, somewhere in central or western Nebraska.

It's possible to go hunting for grain elevators this way, and with a little photoshopping, build up a library of images of them.

OutsideBassett, originally uploaded by thane.

Here's the original viewpoint I used, before Photoshopping:

View Larger Map

OutsideSpencer

OutsideSpencer, originally uploaded by thane.

The Google Streetviewer vans are sure getting around---I screen-grabbed this image of US highway 281 a couple miles north of Spencer, Nebraska.

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=spencer+nebraska&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&split=0&gl=us&ei=sW-USveHO5DqsQOOk8HyBg&sa=X&oi=geocode_result&ct=image&resnum=1

schneider-drawing

schneider-drawing, originally uploaded by thane.

http://happydays.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/the-self-thinking-thought/

Blue front door concept, reprise

THANE: Fernando is going to paint the front door blue.

GLORIA: What shade of blue?

THANE: I looked through the Benjamin Moore thingy you gave me, and picked "Daisy Blue."

GLORIA: Daisies aren't blue.

THANE: Some daisies are blue. Blue daisies, for example.

GLORIA: There are no blue daisies.

THANE: So I thought, too, until I saw one. Try Googling it, miss ex-flower-lady.

GLORIA: I'm not going to do that.

THANE: Ha: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felicia_amelloides

Mystery car

Mystery car, originally uploaded by thane.

THANE: What kind of car is that?

OWEN: It looks like a Mini Cooper that ate too much.

GLORIA: Maybe it's a Maxi Cooper.

THANE: I'll take a photo.

Sock fishing & STAR testing

THANE:  Your dog nosed through my carefully arranged basketball clothes, found both of my freshly-washed---and dried---socks that I'd hidden under both my T-shirts and my shoes, and now is clamping her mouth on them like they're dead rats---she'll never let them go.

GLORIA:  Not my problem.

THANE:  Your dog has a sock-fishing problem.  She needs counseling or something.  Oh, and Cole and Owen: your STAR testing results came today.

COLE:  Where?

THANE:  I'll get them from the office [...]  I'm pleased to say that Cole's testing results are quite clear, the boy scored well all-around and 100% on a particular section, the section for which he has professed the *least* enthusiasm, but perhaps only to spite me.  You perhaps know the section to which I refer, but let's just be clear:  Cole got 100% on the ALGEBRA ONE section.

COLE:  Ha, ha.  Ha.

THANE: And Owen, too:  Practically perfect.  He missed only one problem, characterized only by the category OPERATIONS WITH FRACTIONS AND DECIMALS.  So:  good job.

GLORIA:  Cole's reading level is marked as 12.  I think it only goes to 13.

THANE:   What is on the level 12 reading list?

COLE:  Moby Dick, books like that.  Old books.  Boring books.  Long books.  Not interesting books.

THANE: Is there a possibility we can move this child on a little early, send him off to some other distant location to continue his education?   An education not troubled by reading the Great Masters?  Just a thought.

GLORIA:  He does have a new bike.

THANE:   They've changed the nomenclature on these STAR tests.

OWEN:  The middle band---it should be AVERAGE, I think.   Maybe it was.  Now it's BASIC.

THANE:  Well done, anyway.  Each boy is ADVANCED.  I say let them move on.

Ter with Boo-boo

Pearl

Pearl, originally uploaded by grwster.

Greg took a nice photo of the pup

Today's weather in Moultrie, GA

thunderstorm, originally uploaded by thane.

90 degrees today (Sunday), and 92 degrees tomorrow.

With thunderstorms.

Cole and Gloria and the many other divers assembled for the Summer Junior National Diving Championships are hiding out inside.

"It's a sports facility," Gloria said. "We have a nice view outside, and that might be cotton field across the street—did you hear that?"

"No."

"That's the weather siren."

SUV rollover

SUV rollover, originally uploaded by thane.

I took this photo a couple of years ago in Lincoln, Nebraska, after coming upon a pickup truck that had just hit an SUV. I don't remember messing with it in Photoshop, but I guess I did.

I just ran into it again---It's kind of interesting to me.