Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in austin_dern's LiveJournal:

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Saturday, May 26th, 2012
12:10 pm	Free of any made-to-order liabilities One little thing at the Popcorn Park Zoo. They've had a coati there, Cocoa. I came to know of him when skylerbunny bought me a sponsorship of him as a really creative, imaginative birthday present. I've stopped in several times --- not enough, really, but it's a small zoo and out of the way from anything else --- but, hey, a real live coati and just one zip code over. I'd have to stop in and see if I could get any decent pictures of him --- it's very hard because coatis are pretty much always moving, and all their enclosures are wire-fenced in --- while I had the chance. So I did walk down to the area where Cocoa's cage had been, and found ... nothing. Well, not nothing, since the enclosure had been turned into a chicken coop with a fair number of birds in it, but, no coatis of interest there. I wondered if I'd just misremembered where he was, but while I could get the exact spot wrong, I couldn't have confused the aisle his cage was on, and there wasn't anything there. It went from goats to deer without the coati interlude. I worried about the possibilities, naturally. Some were innocent: they had a new enclosure. Some were maybe positive: they'd placed him in a better facility, maybe with the zoo (which has several locations), maybe with another agency. Some were depressing: what if he'd died? Or was too sick to be on display? The happiest of explanations was the right one: he had a new enclosure, one of a triptych of larger enclosures which failed to register with me when I walked past them. Unfortunately this means in afternoon visits he'll have sunlight streaming in from behind, making photographs all the harder, but it is a larger enclosure with more stuff to play with. Although, most of this visit, what Cocoa was really interested in was the barrier leading to the adjacent cage, which held a rabbit. (Also a pair of discarded Christmas trees, the branches of which I suspect Cocoa was nibbling on.) I could hardly be expected to resist the thematic appeal of a coati and a bunny being in adjacent cages and the coati acting as if the most interesting thing in the world was getting into the bunny's cage. (Actually there were at least three bunnies in the cage.) Unfortunately given the angles and Cocoa's determination I couldn't get any really good pictures of him. I did have hopes when feeding time came around --- I knew it was about 4:00, and Cocoa knew too, since he hopped over to the door in anticipation --- but they fed him with a dish that was put into one of the shelters, so he had a meal beyond the reach of photography. Trivia: In 1863, under the direction of John C Frémont, the moribund Leavenworth, Pawnee & Western railroad renamed itself the Union Pacific Railway, Eastern Division, providing confusion for investors looking for Union Pacific stock. Strangely, no infringement lawsuit was ever filed. Source: Empire Express: Building The First Transcontinental Railroad, David Haward Bain. Currently Reading: Chrysalis 9, Editor Roy Torgeson. PS: Where Interpolations Go Wrong ... and where they're pretty good still, actually. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, May 25th, 2012
1:24 pm	Should have been somebody else ``Anything good in the newspaper?'' - [ Grunts. ] ``Growls and exclamations are not an answer. Try in a more civilized manner. Anything good in the newspaper?'' - ``A growl is a perfectly good answer when it's the most fitting response to the question.'' ``And what state does the newspaper have to be in for a grunt to answer my question?'' - ``I did not grunt; I growled.'' ``It's to the same effect.'' - ``It does not. A growl indicates a general dissatisfaction with the material being discussed. A grunt indicates that one cannot even work up the enthusiasm to be dissatisfied.'' ``I heard a grunt.'' - ``I'm not accountable for what you hear.'' ( Sorry to be late. I was in the mood to write a Vic-and-Sade piece, too.  ) ``Unbelievable. That's worth cancelling the paper for.'' - ``Thank you.'' Trivia: The parasol and shades for the Skylab repair mission were not loaded into the Skylab 2/1 command module until about 2 am the day of scheduled launch, 25 May 1973. Source: Deke!, Donald K Slayton, Michael Cassutt. Currently Reading: A Geography Of New Jersey: The City In The Garden, Charles A Stansfield Jr. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, May 24th, 2012
12:10 pm	Gonna spread our wings and reach right up to the stars Since I had some time after the dentist's appointment I thought of things I might do, and realized, this might be a good chance to visit the Popcorn Park Zoo. It would be, too, since I wasn't too far away and my supply of free afternoons in New Jersey are pretty sharly limited. It had been an overcast morning, threatening to rain and never managing more than a drizzle, but over lunch the skies cleared up, which is about the best way for this sort of thing to work out. Something I had forgotten about the zoo was that, like many zoos, they've got peacocks. Lots of peacocks, roaming free, more or less, and prowling around. Also, apparently, it's the big season for peacocks since not just one had his tail spread out to its full extent --- and kept it out --- but most of the peacocks did. They were even doing that drumming-the-tailfeathers thing so they rattled. Some of the peacocks were apparently just working the crowd; almost the first thing through the gate was a man and woman admiring and photographing them and talking about how extraordinary it was that he was keeping his feathers spread wide out. Some were clearly working to specific productive purposes: there were peahens around, looking skeptically at the peacocks and generally acting like, ``oh, please, must you really?'' None of the hens seemed all that interested, but I imagine a certain amount of this showboating goes a long way. (Also, you know, bunny_hugger is right; peahens would be regarded as quite attractive birds with startling colors if peacocks weren't there grabbing all the attention.) Other peacocks were busy showing off and closing in on any kind of bird without much respect for species. The zoo keeps a fair number of free-ranging chickens and roosters, and it gets a larger number of geese and ducks that hang around becuase, I suppose, it's a pretty safe and secluded area. The peacocks prowled around going full-Argus on any kinds of birds they could find, to the point that I had to suspect they were just in it to show off, and not for any specific productive purpose. I should mention that once again on my way out of the zoo --- at the closing hour, which means I missed the gift shop's operating hours yet again --- I saw the flyer where they mention having wallabies. I've never seen a wallaby at it, and I can't figure out if I'm just overlooking it (which is possible; the zoo has a number of odd little maze-like paths, and since it is in part a rescued animals shelter the exact species collection varies and they don't bother putting up signs to anything), or if the wallabies are at a different campus, or if they did have a wallaby ages ago and haven't anymore and never got around to updating the publicity materials. Trivia: When the American Pencil Company rented space in the under-construction RCA Building, Webster Todd, of contractors Todd, Robertson, & Todd, requested that all Rockefeller Center departments ``give preference to their products when buying pencils''. Source: Great Fortune: The Epic Of Rockefeller Center, Daniel Okrent. Currently Reading: A Geography Of New Jersey: The City In The Garden, Charles A Stansfield Jr. By the way, I'd like to recommend the video of NBC's 1979-80 ``Proud As A Peacock'' jingle since it is so wonderfully 1979-80 considering it's not actually produced by the Buggles. And in other news don't think I missed the info graphic on ``New Life in The Amazon'' with this Onion article. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 23rd, 2012
12:10 pm	if you want to have great choppers, exercise your teeth I should not have gone so very long without a dentist's visit, and I know it. But after I went to Singapore, I had no idea what kind of dental insurance I had, or with whom, or how to go about getting it, and rather than make the minimal effort needed to solve these problems I just let it drift. And things kind of carried on like that after I got back to the United States. Finally the company I work for put the idea of a dental maintenance organization right there up front in the middle of my employee benefits package, and I signed up for it, and after a year discovered that I didn't actually have any, and we finally got that straightened out. Thus it was that I went to my new and very temporary dentist's this morning. I had a little uncertainty in finding it, since the name of the dentist's according to the company name and web site is nowhere on the building it's in --- actually, the most prominent name on the building is for a chamber of commerce which has moved out and left behind no traces but its signage --- but they seemed to be expecting me. They'd sent me a form of new-patient information to fill out ahead of time. There were a couple points I wasn't sure about, so I left that blank and confessed my ignorance; the secretary said I didn't need to do that because they had that information in the system already, raising the question, what was the form for again, exactly? To fill out, I guess. I was there just for a checkup, which seemed the sensible place to start, so most of my time was spent getting X-rayed. Somehow it had not occurred to me that they wouldn't be X-raying onto a medium as primitive as film anymore, although actually, they did for a 180-degree wraparound scanner thing. Mostly the spot X-rays were a process of me biting down on the thingy as hard as possible and trying to not move, while the armature holding the X-ray generator was itself wobbling. The dentist said my teeth were in very good shape considering I hadn't been for a checkup or cleaning in a decade or so. Based on their appearance she'd have guessed I hadn't been to a dentist for about three years or so. I'm in need of a ``deep'' cleaning, which we're trying to find time to schedule for (I'd rather this be before my wedding, naturally). Unfortunately I have also a number of small cavities, mostly in-between teeth, that will need attention. To celebrate the completion of the dental visit I reached back to my childhood tradition, and went to White Castle. While reading my book, there, a man came up and asked, ``Are you reading about the billions of dollars?'' Yeah, that look on your face now, that's the look I had. ``'Cause I was reading about the billions and billions of dollars.'' I confessed that I wasn't reading about the billions of dollars, and I was torn whether to ask what the heck he was talking about or to accept the incident as the weird thing it had been, but he quieted and I figured I could just move on. Trivia: Max von Laue's experiments detecting the diffraction of X-rays --- proving them to be waves --- were done on exposing the rays to crystals of blue copper sulfate. Source: The Age Of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Was Reborn, Louisa Gilder. Currently Reading: A Geography Of New Jersey: The City In The Garden, Charles A Stansfield Jr. PS: How Big Charlotte Was In 1975: Finally, an answer. Well, the second or third answer, depending on how you want to count it, but, the first answer people would take seriously, which chefmongoose gave weeks ago anyway. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 22nd, 2012
12:10 pm	When I whip out my Diners Card their eyes get so wide After the potluck lunch Wednesday of course there were leftovers. Nearly everybody had brought in stuff. The folks who just bought stuff from the store didn't buy so much that it would have fed the whole staff by itself, but the folks who'd made stuff had made enough for everybody, so the refrigerator was stuffed full of leftovers. It turned the cleanup after lunch into that grand three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle to get the door to close. This was fine by me, since I like food, especially when I don't have to make it or buy it. There'd be plenty to have left over Thursday. And there was. Besides cheese and cookies, good for snacking in the morning, there were the pasta and potato salads and whatnot good for a nice, easy premade lunch Thursday. Especially since the gang on the first floor ordered out lunch on Thursday. I can understand getting tired of leftovers, but I think you have to have the leftovers first before you can get tired of them. There was evidence of going out for pizza on Friday, too, based on talk come Monday about the boss's son. I can't understand it. On Monday there were cookies --- some left over, some brought in on a ``thank you'' tray --- and, remarkably, sheet cake left over. The big question was whether to throw out the cake since it was a half-week plus old (although refrigerated). I kept pointing out, maybe it is time to throw it out, but, not until after lunch. There've been leftovers thrown out before lunch on the grounds of suspected staleness in the past. The cake was a little bit stale, but not bad for that, and of course icing doesn't go bad. Trivia: The Tabard inn on Long Southwark (Borough High Street) may have been the eldest London Bridge tavern, dating back possibly to 1304. It was the start and end point for the pilgrims in Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. Source: Old London Bridge, Patricia Pierce. Currently Reading: The Essential Hal Clement, Hal Clement. PS: Teaching Algebra, or Banging Your Head With a Whiteboard ... another bit of reblogging, but it's of something I want to be sure I remember in future. (Comment on this)
Monday, May 21st, 2012
12:10 pm	Shaping me up for the big time, baby The Joseph A Bank's called, saying my suit was in, and they were ready for the fitting. Unfortunately, this was last week, when I was in short order sick and then giving the final exam. I couldn't make it in for tailoring the hours their tailor would have available. This week, though, I had ... well, work to 7 pm Wednesday and Thursday, but I had Friday free. And they had the tailor free, too. Good timing. At my mother's insistence I went wearing a pair of dress shoes, on the grounds they wouldn't know how to set up the cuff of my pants if I weren't wearing real actual shoes. I was skeptical of this but went along with it because it was easier than not. When I got there and explained what I was doing there to the clerks they told me to put on their dress shoes instead. Their shoes were better-looking than mine, admittedly, although it was a fashion that I've had in the past. But it was also about half a size too small for me. They offered to get a shoehorn, and when's the last time you saw a shoehorn being used for anything? But I managed on my own. I can't be accused of being comfortable in it, but now I know what I look like in subcutaneous shoes. The jacket, though was a perfect fit as-is. The cuffs didn't need adjustment, nor the shoulders, nor, anything, really. The pants were also just about perfect in waistline. I'm a little disoriented whenever I see me in clothes that make me look good. All that was really needed was for figuring out the pants length, which I'm sure nobody saw coming. The tailor marked the spots off for that so fast I didn't see it, so, was left confused by the promise that I was done now and could go. I didn't until I actually saw the chalk marks made. I thought I'd lost the jacket somewhere in changing, but they'd just helped it off me and then put it across a table slickly enough that I didn't realize they'd done it. I don't know how they do it. While I puttered around another customer came in, complaining about the wear on a tie he'd bought only a few months ago. The tailor agreed, sincerely and passionately, about the quality of the material. It was the most passionate I'd heard anyone be about ties ever. Trivia: In landing at Le Bourget in 1927 Charles Lindbergh mistook the headlights of lined-up cars for factory windows. Source: Naked Airport: A Cultural History Of The World's Most Revolutionary Structure, Alastair Gordon. Currently Reading: The Essential Hal Clement, Hal Clement. PS: Reading The Comics, May 20, 2012 ... the subject matter everyone likes seeing. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, May 20th, 2012
12:11 pm	You can bring the moon and the sun on a midnight raid While everybody in the office was gathered for the shower and luncheon one of the customer-service people from the first floor mentioned, wow, a child, and asked idly, ``who'll be the next of us to get married and have a child?'' I haven't got any intentions of having a child, but married seemed to fit the bill so I volunteered that, just before someone else mentioned I was. I haven't talked up much my plans, since I don't much like talking about myself for a person who puts in 350 words a day every day about himself, and I don't interact much with her since she doesn't come up to the break room and I only need to go to the first floor to talk with the tech people, so, the news got to surprise her (``Really? Seriously?'') as well as a couple of other people who hadn't heard the gossip yet. But since everyone was gathered around I got asked what my plans are, and I admitted, I expected to leave sometime next month, probably not to carry on working. I had the sense that I was envied, but I might just be reading that into their reactions. Most of the staff is people who've been with the company for decades, and are sticking around despite their frustrations since where are they going to get a replacement job before they retire? The admission that I expect to be leaving also set off a flurry of questions from the boss's secretary, about whether the boss knows I'm leaving (he does), whether I have an exit date in mind (I haven't), and what plans the boss has for replacing whatever the heck it is I do (the boss told me, we'll talk later, and he hasn't been back in the office since, as best I can determine). I'm not surprised that she's being this organized and thoughtful about it, since she's an organized and thoughtful person. But considering I expect the boss and I will be winging it as I move out west, the pinning down of plans like that feels weird. Trivia: In 1845 United States law dropped postage rates to 5 cents to send a letter up to 300 miles, 10 cents to anywhere in the Union except the Pacific Coast states, with a ``letter'' now an envelope weighing up to one ounce, rather than being specifically one sheet of paper. Source: The Story Of American Railroads, Stewart H Holbrook. Currently Reading: The Essential Hal Clement, Hal Clement. PS: Where Rap Music and Discrete Mathematics meet. ... What the heck, another little reblogging of some math humor. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, May 19th, 2012
12:10 pm	You earn your living like the other rats This I didn't see coming: they played ``Pay The Rent'' again on The Price Is Right, for the May 16th edition. That's barely two weeks from the last time around. I'm a little curious whether there is a pattern to this --- it seems to be there was a previous pair of playing two weeks apart --- but I've got enough statistics threads on the show going already and nobody's interested in those either. (Oh, I know, you read them and appreciate them but just can't think what to write in response, and I understand that.) This time around the prizes were mouthwash ($6.99), laundry detergent ($7.69), Allegra ($6.82), rust guard ($9.99), Capzasin ($13.99), and a bag of Doritos ($4.29). The contestant put the Doritos in the first level ($4.29), then the detergent and mouthwash in the second ($14.68), and, spooked at that point walked away with a $5,000 prize. I would have too, after that layout. However, for the third level, she'd set the rust guard and Capzasin ($23.98) so she could have had $10,000. The grand prize was out of the question, since the Allegra was a mere $6.82 for the fourth level. Again I see only one lay which would have won: the rust guard for the first level ($9.99), then the detergent and Doritos for the second ($11.98), then the mouthwash and Allegra for the third ($13.81), and finally the Capzasin ($13.99). This is the second-most-generous I've got on record for this season for item price ranges, $9.70, joining the earlier $10.00, $3.70, $3.90, $3.90, $6.14, $4.30, $4.30, $2.54, and $2.73. It also ties for generosity the range of level prices, $4.00, which joins the earlier $4.00, $1.50, $1.30, $0.99, $2.00, $1.70, $1.70, $1.00, and $1.23. Trivia: Pierre-Simon de Laplace dedicated his 1812 Théorie Analytique des Probabilitiés to the Emperor Napoleon ``the Great''. In the 1814 edition Laplace noted that ``the fall of empires which aspired to universal dominion could be predicted with very high probability by one versed in the calculus of chance.'' Source: The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, Leonard Mlodinow. Currently Reading: Chance Of A Lifetime: Nucky Johnson, Skinny D'Amato and how Atlantic City because the Naughty Queen of Resorts, Grace Anselmo D'Amato. PS: Why The Slope Is Too Interesting, and the really interesting thing, why is it written down as m? (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, May 18th, 2012
12:10 pm	We'd Like To Know A Little Bit About You For Our Files Host: Welcome back. Glad to have you listening to us this half-hour. Cohost: They don't have to be listening. Host: They don't? Cohost: They might be talking. We wouldn't hear. Host: It seems rude of our audience to keep talking while we're trying to say something. Cohost: From their perspective, we're talking over their conversation. Host: That's fair. Well, if any of you out there are listening we've got something special for you. Author: Hello. Host: Not yet. ( I'm liking the voices which I hear in my strip as I read this transcription. So, all of you out there reading it, read it exactly like I imagine it, or you won't have any idea what's supposed to be happening.  ) Cohost: Gives you something to write for the second edition, doesn't it? Author: You're right. Thank you. Host: Thank you, and thanks to our listeners, if they've finished their conversations too. Trivia: Frank Woolworth's first``Great 5 Cent Store'', opened in Utica, New York, on Washington's Birthday, 1879, was a failure from the start, and sometimes took in as little as $2.50 per day. Source: The Grand Emporiums: The Illustrated History Of America's Great Department Stores, Robert Hendrickson. Currently Reading: Chance Of A Lifetime: Nucky Johnson, Skinny D'Amato and how Atlantic City because the Naughty Queen of Resorts, Grace Anselmo D'Amato. (Comment on this)
Thursday, May 17th, 2012
12:10 pm	When I'm old and grey dear One of the guys on the first floor, at work, is going to be a father soon. Like, real soon. As in his wife has gone into the hospital a couple of times over the last few days, although they've been false alarms so far. It was a couple weeks ago, when just how urgently the anticipated son would be arriving wasn't known, that the word went out to put together a potluck surprise lunch/baby shower for the guy. There's a mildly curious little assumption built into the plannings of these office luncheons, namely, that none of the guys are going to actually cook things. The organizer just asked women what they planned to prepare, and the men what they planned to buy, like sodas or stuff. I volunteered for the cheese tray, which was accepted and which I topped by actually bringing in two cheese trays. (They were small ones.) Come Tuesday, when it looked like the baby was going to arrive more than a week ahead of schedule, the guy was out to be in the hospital with his wife and there was a movement to cancel or postpone the lunch. The verdict came down: nah, we'll just all get together Wednesday and if he's not there, we'll just hold another one later. Seemed sensible enough to me. BUt it was a false alarm, it turned out, and he was in Wednesday, and was also taken completely by surprise with the lunch/shower. What caught me by surprise was that the women in the office took the ``baby shower'' part literally, and brought in clothes and soft things to throw and/or snuggle up in, in bags wrapped up in soothing pastel colors. If I'd known there'd be gifts I'd have expanded on the cheese trays with something that rattles or rings bells. Trivia: In 1932 Otis Elevators saw about 1500 maintenance contracts cancelled, but it gained about a thousand new contracts, and total billing dropped off only about two percent. Source: Otis: Giving Rise To The Modern City, Jason Goodwin. Currently Reading: Tama Of The Light Country, Ray Cummings. I must call foul on this Ace Science Fiction Classic's slug line, ``Kidnapped by a spaceship!'', as what's really happening is girls in a Maine private academy are being kidnapped by people in a spaceship, not the spaceship itself. The credit page also gives the suggestion this was printed in Argosy in 1965, which, yeah, what? Anyway, evil men from Mercury are kidnapping human women because they need women (yes, a story actually did that plot!) and --- here's where lighthearted goofiness takes on a sinister air --- Mercury's women, naturally having wings, are actually rebelling against the wing-clipping mutilation that keeps them from escaping their captor-slaver males. Add in a solar system about as large as a Brooklyn convenience store so all the relevant characters can spend as much time together in the 124 pages they have and we're off to jolly good fun and never mind our heroes kind of accidentally murder an innocent Mercurian woman right up front. PS: Why Call The Intercept b, a darned good question which certainly deserves some kind of answer. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 16th, 2012
12:10 pm	I can only receive My parents finally had the chance to get the car repaired, after the unfortunate trunk smashing a couple of months ago. I can't say precisely why it took so long to get started on the repairing business, except that maybe it's been a relatively low priority for them as it isn't like the car was undrivable with the damage. It didn't even have an annoying rattle. What did stand out about the process was my parents getting a lot of mails from the insurance company, addressed to my father, which my mother would separate out and hand to me because she expects her name to be on letters from the insurers, and then I'd open them and track my parents down. It's not for mysterious reasons that my parents found a repair shop about an hour north of home. They --- my father, particularly --- really don't believe they don't live in Middlesex County, so, that adds to the start and end of all the stuff like this they have to deal with. The garage said they'd need four, possibly five, working days for it too, which don't ask me why. I'd have expected the amount of time needed, once parts were on-hand, to be pretty predictable, and they had seen the damage while preparing estimates. Insurance provided for a rental car, nicely enough. It came from Enterprise and I wonder but never got clear just which Enterprise agency they got it from. There is, and I say this with neither exaggeration nor absurdity, an Enterprise agency barely one and a half miles from the house, just past the nearest Wawa. I know this because I rented a car from there once, before I bought my Scion, and I could not convince my father of the existence of this agency. He could identify almost all the landmarks on that stretch of road before and after it, but not the precise spot, and even after I told him about it he drove past and didn't see it. So I'm going to go ahead and suppose they didn't use that agency, because there's probably some in Middlesex County they could use instead. The rental car was a Fiat something or other, one of those little ones that looks like a game board piece. I thought it was ugly, but in that way that could maybe grow on you given time. We didn't have time, though: after two days the auto shop called to report it was done, and the Toyota Something was back the next day. The new-repaired car drives quite well; you wouldn't know from it that the trunk had been smashed in. Of course, you wouldn't know that from before either. Trivia: The container cargo shipping route between Japan and the United States Atlantic Coast opened only in 1970. It was served by thirty ships in 1973. Source: The Box: How The Shipping Container Made The World Smaller And The World Economy Bigger, Marc Levinson. Currently Reading: Changing Channels: America In TV Guide, Glenn C Altschuler, David I Grossvogel. PS: Fibonacci multiples --- this is a reblog of a fascinating point about Fibonacci numbers that I didn't know before. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 15th, 2012
12:10 pm	With a tin hat for overseas One little chore to be finished before I move out west has been to get a decent suit, something I could wear to a job interview or to get married. I had a pretty nice one, got for my sister's wedding, but that was also one I got several months before starting my massive weight-loss program. I imagine it's possible to tailor something down for the dropping of a hundred pounds, but, there's no way that makes any sense. So I went to the Freehold Raceway Mall, to see if there was a suitable shop around --- there would be; I'd got that suit at Nordstrom's, and a blazer I used for an interview at Macy's --- and whether we could find something I looked decent in. My mother was there, of course, so that I'd have someone who understands how clothes work there to tell me when I was doing something wrong. Lord & Taylor didn't have any suits we saw that looked particularly appealing (although some looked like they'd be all right), so we started working up the mall and oh, there's the Joseph A Bank shop right next to it. Why not stop in and see if there's anything? I told the clerk that I was looking for a suit presentable for job interviews, which really is the design goal here: I may be wearing it to marry in, but odds are the majority of its uses are going to be for this more general purpose. However, it did produce some confusion later when the clerk asked about how something looked and my mother mentioned the color that the bride will be wearing. Maybe it would've been less confusing the explain the whole thing right away, but it seemed like ``I'm looking for something for a job interview'' is the expected sort of answer to what kind I'm looking for; ``I'm looking for a suit for an informal wedding, that I can also use for normal wear'' would have started us off confused. There wasn't anything in a single suit that would fit me, of course, but I'm comfortable with mixed pieces. We also quickly determined that pleated pants are not a good look on me, as they make me look like one of those silent movie stars trying to rip off the Little Tramp. But we found a couple pieces that fit together in remarkably short order. All the better, the store was holding a buy-one-get-two-free suits sale. This would enormously over-supply me on suits, but, they could process it as though an online order (which they had to to get pants in the correct size for me anyway) and so just take two-thirds off the price. The suit still costs more than the rest of my wardrobe, but it's not as enormously more expensive than it could have been. Remarkably, all this took under an hour to buy. I'm not noted for making fast decisions, but I suppose at some point I figured that I don't actually need to have the absolutely perfect suit, just, one in which I look good enough. Meeting a threshold is a much simpler problem than optimizing, after all. And so now I just need to get it fitted. Trivia: The ``Wolf Trap'', designed originally around 1958-60 by Wolf Vishniac, was a device for remotely detecting microorganisms, based a growth chamber, an acidity detector, and a light sensor detecting differences in the culture medium. While it was omitted from the Viking Program, Vishniac used it to find life in remote, believed-sterile Antarctic valleys before he slipped and fell to his death in Antarctica's Asgard Mountains. Source: On Mars: Exploration Of The Red Planet 1958 - 1978, Edward Clinton Ezell, Linda Neuman Ezell. NASA SP-4212. Currently Reading: Changing Channels: America In TV Guide, Glenn C Altschuler, David I Grossvogel. PS: Why A Line Doesn't Have An Equation ... it's for the sort of reasons you'd expect to as the carefully-worded alibi Slylock Fox debunks, actually, although I remember it turning up for real as one of the resolutions to a disappointing Asimov Black Widowers story. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, May 14th, 2012
12:10 pm	I don't hold you down Some other stray bits from the close of classes. One was that during the statistics exam the head of the department --- and, come to that, the dean of the school --- stopped in and wanted to chat briefly with me. Specifically he wanted to know if I'd gotten the revised plan for the course for next year. He knows that (barring the unthinkable) I won't be back in the fall, he just wants the input of everyone who could say something meaningful. He also --- besides patting my shoulder --- talked about the homework assignments I'd made up; I'd handed in some of them for my department reviews. I made the statistics homework assignments up entirely, since I didn't find the book's interesting (and I assume that any reused textbook's solutions have been worked out and are available for download for any student who tries). But he was quite enthusiastic about them, and really liked that they were plausibly real-world problems and also that ``they built on each other''. I believe he was talking about how I had one question set up so that half the calculation in problem 2c was already done in 2b, for students who pay attention to the calculations they're doing, and that problem 3 used the same setup information as problem 2 but asking different questions. I did write the assignment that way on purpose, but it's not like it was some subtle pedagogic point at work there. I do feel flattered, particularly that he sought me out when it would take literally no effort to worry about the input --- or feelings --- of an adjunct who's on his way out. But I also have to admit that from our meetings he's such a relentlessly positive, enthusiastic person that I don't know whether he's actually impressed with the homeworks I wrote or whether he's impressed with the homeworks everyone writes for their classes. Not for the first time, I can take what any sane person should receive as a compliment and turn it into a problem. Trivia: Near the end of the 18th century the British found that the county of Hampshire alone had three different units of area called ``acre'', and that each market town had its own unit called the ``bushel''. Source: The Measure Of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey That Transformed The World, Ken Alder. Currently Reading: Tomorrow's Crimes, Donald E Westlake. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, May 13th, 2012
12:10 pm	My hands felt just like two balloons Friday morning, besides feeling dramatically better, I realized I'd had an error in the answer key for one homework problem and hadn't posted a correction, which was a bit awkward as Friday would be the final. (I wrote a correction on the blackboard in class.) I noticed the error while grading the night before and meant to fix it but just got distracted since I was coming out of the stomach virus and not running terribly close to full speed. The final exams were held during the normal class period, as the community college hasn't got a separate exam week. Probably they could have worked one up, but, they haven't found it worth doing for whatever reasons they had. I'm a touch disappointed to lose the extra class hour since I didn't feel I got enough done in either section, and plus a 75-minute exam isn't going to let me cover as much material as a two- or three-hour exam will, but that's beyond my power to change now, anyway. For all that it's not quite done yet. One student was in a car accident and has to take a make-up. I don't have to specifically get there to proctor him, though, as there's a testing center that will provide supervised exams at his convenience provided it's within a reasonable while. (Given the description I'd be willing to write off the exam, provided it's backed up with a doctor's note.) In the morning class, statistics, while I was passing out exams and graded homeworks someone slipped up to my desk and put a flower on it, one using a water bottle wrapped in construction paper as the vase. This leaves me with a very warm, contented feeling. Also another student accidentally left his laptop behind, but the department secretary was able to find his cell phone number in the secret campus records and get him back before real trauma was done. Trivia: Jerry Fairbanks and Television Arts provided the raw film stock and other production costs for Jay Ward's Crusader Rabbit, and was to handle marketing and publicity. Source: The Moose That Roarded: The Story Of Jay Ward, Bill Scott, A Flying Squirrel, And A Talking Moose, Keith Scott. Currently Reading: A House Called Morven: Its Role In American History, Alfred Hoyt Bill, Walter E Edge, Revised by Constance M Greiff, Postscript Bolton F Schwartz. Which for all that heavy author-lining is still a book of barely over 200 pages. (It's a history of what became the New Jersey Governor's Mansion, and then got revised after a couple more decades of existence and the discovery that its earliest history is, as best as can be determined, bunk --- which was also really the most interesting part, because, have you ever come across a New Jersey governor in any history book ever? Other than Woodrow Wilson? No, and correctly not, and Wilson doesn't get mentioned because he was governor.) (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, May 12th, 2012
12:10 pm	When I was a child I had a fever I got up Thursday actually a little ahead of time, after a restless night in which I kept feeling like I was almost ready to go to the bathroom but didn't quite need to. I felt woozy, and my mouth felt rotten, like I was dehydrated. I supposed that to have the simple, obvious cure, and resolved to take care of it after weighing in on the WiiFit. In the midst of the WiiFit Fitness Test --- besides weighing, also a pair of (straightforward) agility and mental exercises --- I got feeling a lot woozy, and barely a second into the Prediction Test I had to run off to the bathroom and throw up. So that really cleared out my schedule for the day. It was some kind of stomach virus, obviously, possibly aggravated by the fact I've been running around doing a lot of stuff normal workdays and class days. I actually harbored thoughts of using the day spent at home to do other little projects I'd not had time for, like further experiments with my drawing tablet (I'm starting to get the hang of it, and starting to learn Manga Studio), or even just catching up on stuff I had on the Tivo, but first, I'd have to go to bed and catch up on my rest. I ended up sleeping through to about 2 pm, getting up for an hour, going back to bed, and so on until a little before 7 pm. At that point I forced myself up because I needed to finish grading for class, and so as not to miss Community et al. Also since I was interrupted mid-weigh-in, I did the weigh-in again, and now have a data point about how much I might vomit at an ordinary stomach virus-induced event. I had never particularly wanted to know this, but somehow, I feel like I better understand the nature of stuff in general now that I have this number. Come Friday morning I was in pretty decent shape, and was certainly better-rested than I've been in ages, even if I still wanted ten more minutes when the alarm went off. Trivia: When the United States joined the first World War, its whole supply of surgical needles was imported from overseas. Setting up a United States factory was a high priority. Source: The Great Influenza: The Story Of The Deadliest Pandemic In History, John M Barry. Currently Reading: A House Called Morven: Its Role In American History, Alfred Hoyt Bill, Walter E Edge, Revised by Constance M Greiff, Postscript Bolton F Schwartz. (Comment on this)
Friday, May 11th, 2012
12:10 pm	Once I was a funky singer playing in a rock-and-roll band Here's some cheering news: they've now cleared varnishes as possible sources for the sound made by Stradivarius violins. I'm not sure who they were exactly, but I'm pretty good on varnish and on Stradivarius violins. I mean knowledge about Stardivarius violins. On actual violins I was good at the parts where you played the notes that didn't need fingers put down on the strings for. Give me sheet music made up of the right E, A, D, and G notes and I could carry on for whole minutes producing music-like sounds before I got bored and went off to watch Silverhawks. It's the notes where you have to have fingers on the strings that were trouble. They always came out sounding like I had only learned how to put fingers on things a few minutes ago and hadn't had time to practice. I remember the first finger was supposed to go about a thumb width down from the top of the thingy, but it would actually come down maybe on the underside of the bridge, maybe on a small and, in context, justifiably protesting fish. Also I could do the bow thing part all right, as long as it was just moving the bow side to side somewhere near the strings, but the part of plucking notes I was bad at, because I was scared of my fingernails snapping the strings, sending them flying loose, snagging my eye and flinging that up into the air, and I just knew it'd happen in a part where you're supposed to repeat a block of music. But there were parts of the Theme From Masterpiece Theater that I was just great at, particularly the D and the A notes. Anyway the thing with Stradivarius violins is they're supposed to sound so very much better than regular violins that it's worth naming them after Antonio Stradivari. But they really had to do that, since it would be a stroke of luck to name them before Stradivari. Still, ever since they got a reputation for sounding so great people have gone out trying to figure why they do. Probably that's so they could duplicate the sound. You never read about people working hard to replicate the taste of a Stradivarius, or the way it cuddles up against someone in the dark of the night. Over the centuries all kind of theories have been tried out. For example there was a great theory going where maybe the wood came from old cathedrals and so the music was enhanced by the centuries of built-up observances of Septuagesima being emitted all at once. But careful study showed the story couldn't be that simple. The wood was clearly tree matter of some kind, while cathedrals are mostly rocks and glass, and there's just not so much rock in violins. That took years to prove, since the surest way to prove something is a rock is to drop it on your foot, and who wants to go dropping violins on feet in case they turn out to be rocks too? But by 1807 some suitable violins were donated to the cause of science, and by 1814 they'd found the first researcher actually had rocks as feet, which had confused the earliest results. With the cathedral idea dashed we could move on to blaming the wood preservatives. There was certainly wood in the violins after all, and why shouldn't they have been preserved? So if you start with a couple violins and carefully remove the preservative, what you get is a small bucket of preservative and a pile of moldy violin ash. That approach handles the problem of excessively many Stradivarius violins, but it does nothing to solve the mystery of the Stradivarius Theramin or the Stradivarius Collection Of Mom's Pots And Pans Scattered On The Floor And Banged On With A Spoon, unless the spoon is also made of wood. Check and find out while Mom's not looking. I wonder if part of my problem wasn't that I was learning on what's called a 3/4-size violin because it was not 3/4ths the size of a regular violin. I'm waiting for research results about that. Trivia: On 11 May 1934 the Douglas DC-2 made its first flight. It seated two more passengers than the prototype DC-1. Source: The Boeing 247: The First Modern Airliner, F Robert van der Linden. Currently Reading: The Fear Planet and other Unusual Destinations, Robert Bloch. (Comment on this)
Thursday, May 10th, 2012
12:10 pm	Whirl me 'round, 'round, 'round, through a waltz or a two-step we'll glide One question my brother-in-law had was whether bunny_hugger and I had ridden Green Lantern. I couldn't remember. My sister said that I hadn't, then, because if we had, I'd remember. They said the ride hurts, a lot. I was skeptical about this since other roller coasters they say hurt don't bother me, but, particularly with the more modern ones where you get strapped into a harness, little changes in how a body's distributed can change the ride experience greatly. But they explained it was a stand-up roller coaster, and I was pretty sure I hadn't been on one of those. Since then I looked it up and yeah, it opened 2011, when bunny_hugger and I didn't get to Great Adventure. We also didn't go on Kingda Ka. I was emotionally prepared for it, but neither of them made any strong moves towards riding it. The day was slightly misty --- at one point the top of the ride vanished in the fog, and my brother-in-law tried taking a photograph, which for some reason got posted eight times over to his Twitter feed --- but the ride was running, and they discussed the possibilities of getting stuck on top or facing a rollback. It was mostly a day of riding roller coasters, though; somewhere near one of the Panda Express my sister asked if we wanted to eat and there wasn't much consensus for that. One of the non-roller-coaster rides was the Super Round Up, which was my favorite as a kid. They call it Swashbuckler now, for some reason (well, there's a Buccaneer nearby its current location). Also in one of the metal spokes was a collection of short branches which looked like a shoddy bird nest. It couldn't be --- could it? --- but none of the other spokes had such a collection either. There's this Dark Knight roller coaster, a wild mouse that's enclosed so it's largely a dark ride, themed to being in the Gotham City mass transit system. It's not a busy ride. The whole day wasn't busy --- our longest wait, for El Toro, was twenty minutes --- but this was really empty. When we got around the first time the attendants asked if we wanted to re-ride, no need to get out, since nobody had come up to the platform anyway. One guy said he just wanted to do anything to get the ride used. One gets the sense it's not long for this world. The Runaway Mine Train ride is a survivor; it was there when the park opened and it's carried on since. A woman ahead of us was trying to tell her kids how it had just been there forever, and I was able to provide confirmation, that it dated to 38 years ago. At the close of the night we went to the carousel. On the ride ahead of us one girl sat side-saddle on her horse, with the seat belt strapped around her. The ride operator noticed this and announced on the speaker that all riders must be facing forward, no side-saddle, but the girl didn't seem to notice. I'm not sure someone who looked about five like that might know what side-saddle means, or realize that the directions were about her or were anything out of the ordinary for the ride. Even if she had, I don't know she could have done anything about it with the ride in motion; I wouldn't want to try maneuvering a leg around the horse, particularly as there aren't foot rests on the right side, where she was facing. So the operator stopped the ride early, mildly disappointing people who knew how long it should last. Even then when the ride stopped he went up to the girl and --- well, I couldn't hear what he was saying to her. But she looked distressed, close to tears. After that demonstration, however pointless I might think it was, I put the canvas strap around my back. Trivia: Around 1350, England exported 35 thousand sacks of raw wool per year. A century later, it exported barely five thousand. Source: Gold and Spices: The Rise Of Commerce In The Middle Ages, Jean Favier. Currently Reading: The Fear Planet and other Unusual Destinations, Robert Bloch. PS: Who Was Karl Pearson? Someone asked me the question, so I'll answer in a completely different venue. (11 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 9th, 2012
12:10 pm	For there's always a breeze in the ``Park with the Trees'' Now, here's a little incident just from riding Rolling Thunder which is just the sort of thing that happens to me, and for which bunny_hugger will need to use her indignant-angry user icon. (She's heard the story already, though.) Rolling Thunder, nominally a racing coaster, was running both tracks, although they weren't racing. They were just running both tracks as trains came around. My sister, her husband, and I make a poor group for roller coaster rides, which are really designed for pairs or quartets. In front of us when we got to the platform was a pair of kids and a man I took to be their father. The father looked at my sister and her husband, and offered to let them go ahead, since there was a single rider in the car in front of his turnstile, and he apparently (reasonably) didn't want to get separated from the kids. My brother-in-law and his wife agreed, and took the empty seats. I tried to get past the father, though, and he either didn't see me or didn't realize that I was connected with the two he'd just let through. So for the second ride in a row we were on separate rides. The train left, and the next one came in, and slowed to a stop not quite quickly enough: the train was about one turnstile width ahead of where it should have stopped. So the kids jumped into their car --- the last one in the train, and just about in front of the turnstile with the father and me. The father sat down in the near seat, blocking me from getting into the other seat. I couldn't get his attention or he wouldn't acknowledge me. The ride operators started walking by to check things. So I jumped backwards as the turnstile started closing. Since the car was ahead of its proper position this put me into the next turnstile over, alongside a pair of girls. I shrugged and grinned goofily, and went back behind them, around to my original lane. (I wasn't cutting anyone; there were very light crowds.) I did not mean to eavesdrop. But one of the girls took out her phone and began composing a Facebook post, with her phone held right where I couldn't not see it. She write that an ``ugly'' man had just ``skipped in front'' of them. Also that this ugly man looked like Jesus. And she misspelled ``Jesus''. I had been ready to protest that I am certainly not ugly, and in no sense of the word had I skipped the line. But that misspelling made this somehow such a perfect beat that I couldn't object. On the ride, the girls were terrified by the roller coaster, and on the slow approach back into the station (waiting for the train ahead to leave the station) they were doing that sharp, shallow, panicked breathing, at least until my normal post-ride cackling laughter broke through and they started laughing too. Trivia: John Quincy Adams received his commission as Minister Plenipotentiary to Russia on the 4th of July, 1809, at a salary of nine thousand dollars plus expenses. Source: Union 1812: The Americans Who Fought The Second War Of Independence, A J Langguth. Currently Reading: Experiment In Independence: New Jersey In The Critical Period 1781 - 1789, Richard P McCormick. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 8th, 2012
12:10 pm	We'll just take a ferry, go up in the aerie Saturday was Free Comic Book Day, which is unrelated to how I got to Great Adventure. This was a more spontaneous thing. My sister had been trying to buy a saddle from someone in my township, and was thinking I could pick it up and pay for it until she had the chance to come down. But negotiations dragged on, and eventually she figured, why not just take a weekend day to come down, buy the saddle, and go to Great Adventure for her and her husband's first roller coaster of the season? They invited me --- catching me on my cell phone, by the way, in-between my two classes --- on Friday and for a rare moment of decision I said yes, let's go. Who knows when I'll be back in the area, after all, and who knows when they'll be around, as they plan to move later this summer. My sister was slower than she expected in getting the saddle purchased, so, I stayed at home even though we figured to meet at the park instead. I realized on driving to the park that as long as I was going myself, I should've gone earlier and taken in rides that my sister and brother-in-law might not be fond of. They're there for the roller coasters, while I'm interested in more nearly everything. I may be slow starting, but I'm good for trying most anything. My camera was going to be a difficulty. Or at least my camera combined with my wearing a normal pair of khakis rather than cargo shorts would be: I didn't have a place to stuff my camera where it could be easily contained. The ride guardian at the first roller coaster we went to --- Bizarro --- insisted I put it in the locker, and a day of putting stuff into and out of lockers would be a real nuisance. I made it through two locker uses, by our getting a bunch of Bizarro-area roller coasters at once. We got separated early, on El Toro, the wooden roller coaster so large that from the top of the secondary hill you can look down on Rolling Thunder, which had so impressed me in my youth as an impossible huge roller coaster. The guy in front of us offered to let us go, so he could ride with friends, but while I went through the turnstile, my sister and her husband didn't, which I didn't realize until the gates were closing again. So I rode alone --- someone's watch flew off, too --- and waited by the ride photo booth, where once again, my face was in a goofy wide-open smile. Trivia: The radio station Prague I, still in German hands in May 1945, denounced the broadcast of Germany's surrender as an Allied propaganda trick and demanded fighting continue. Source: Germany 1945: From War To Peace, Richard Bessel. Currently Reading: Experiment In Independence: New Jersey In The Critical Period 1781 - 1789, Richard P McCormick. PS: Late April, Early May Math Comics, since it's been a while. (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, May 7th, 2012
12:10 pm	Take It Right Off For You, But I Haven't Got A Hat So the whole immediate family, plus one aunt, got together for this event, threatening but not actually overloading my sister-in-law's house. Between the food on hand and the food my parents brought up we were well-stocked, except that the abundant hummus my father had made the night before was left in the fridge back home. Well, I did my part, in taking the bags my mother said were to go up; I just assumed that they contained all the things which were supposed to go up. My elder niece was having a pretty good time, particularly as she was able to direct each of us into what we were supposed to be doing. Also, with the remains of Easter toys laying around she was doing a lot of hanging out plastic eggs for people to hold and not lose this time. She also proclaimed a miniature football to be an egg. I admit not being precisely sure where she was going with this, but, my brother-in-law blew her mind by casually swapping the egg he was given for a little toy chick. My (Massachusetts) brother more baffled her by passing the football off to another person and insisting that he'd given it to me, so that when my niece tried to track down where it went she was certain I was being silly in my claim I hadn't touched it. The high point there was her grabbing a vuvuzela and having each of us blow it in turn. I insisted on holding it as a flute and ``playing'' it, whistling to my very modest ability, and falling silent when she put a (toy) cooking pot lid over the horn. She took it quite seriously when I blew till I got red in the cheeks and couldn't produce a sound until she took the lid off. My younger niece, being about eight months old, was more occupied in activities like sitting up and trying to grasp things which she could put in her mouth and drool on. Everyone, me included, got turns holding her as well, and she seems to be doing pretty well as best I can tell. She also hasn't decided what exactly her policy is about my having a beard, but she's studying it further. At the end of the visit my father took a moment to do something I'd never have thought of, but that I guess comes to the experienced parent. He congratulated my elder niece on how good she was in letting the younger niece have so much attention. She is four years old, and she ought to be thanked for behaving correctly, just as much as she'd be criticized for doing badly. Trivia: Edgar Allen Poe married his cousin when she was thirteen. Source: Know-It-All, A J Jacobs. Currently Reading: Experiment In Independence: New Jersey In The Critical Period 1781 - 1789, Richard P McCormick. (2 Comments |Comment on this)