Coati mundane

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Taxi light shines so bright

Our plan for our first full day was that we might go to the supermarket for victualing, then to eat at a sushi restaurant, and then to a movie.

( So let me discuss just what did happen instead of the exact plan. )

Probably it's worth pointing out that, happily, we're both night people.

Trivia: On 12 July 1776, the British ships Phoenix and Rose, with three tenders, sailed from Staten Island up the Hudson River toward Tarrytown. American artillery all along the Hudson River (at Red Hook, Governor's Island, Fort George, Fort Washington, and others) fired something like 200 shots, 150 from New York City alone, without any great effect other than killing six Americans when their cannon exploded. Source: 1776, David McCullough.

Currently Reading: Amelia Earhart: A Biography, Doris L Rich. It's an abnormal biography, for me, because I'm coming out of this with a worsened impression of Earhart's abilities. I'm used to being more impressed by whoever I've been reading about. But what I can't avoid taking away is Earhart as a more reckless flyer than I imagined, more eager than I'd thought to leap into the air without doing the tedious slog of full preparation --- for example, not learning Morse Code at ... maybe not at all, certainly not at the speeds useful for communicating in-flight. That's forgivable for 1922 when radio was still in many ways a charming theory especially on vehicles, but by 1937? For that matter, deciding to just do without the antenna that would allow access to half the radio channels that were available to her? Her disappearance is treated with the briefness of dull but probable reality, which is also a refreshing change; oddly missing is the epilogue giving ``living ever after'' for the key people in her life, or her cultural influence outside the luggage industry since then.

People so busy, makes me feel dizzy

Since the urgent business of the car and my final disenchantment with my current employer are out of the way let me return to my trip report about a wonderful nine days spent with bunny_hugger.

( This isn't nearly as serious as the work problems, but it is a touch longer than usual. )

It did not rain.

Trivia: Michigan's southern border as defined in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 was the line running from the southernmost point of Lake Michigan due east to Lake Erie. Source: How The States Got Their Shapes, Mark Stein.

Currently Reading: Amelia Earhart: A Biography, Doris L Rich.

But I thought you might like to know

Now researchers have done it again. By ``it'' I mean ``research'', so there shouldn't be any stigma attached to that particular it done again. We'd be suspicious if they weren't doing it again, unless they were just starting the job. Here the researchers are Jack Houston and others at Sandia National Laboratories and the University of Pittsburgh, and they were doing research. More specifically: they were researching salt, a common mineral found in cylindrical boxes in the corner lazy susan of the kitchen even though you don't remember ever buying any. How it gets there is a mystery. Most authorities suspect it's what Santa does the rest of the year.

The research was about what happens when things get very small, or when you look at just small parts of them at the same size. When small things get weird: water, for example, gets quite viscous, starting rumors about other materials, editing plausible yet false statements into Wikipedia entries just after [citation needed] notes, or messing with the heads of Soviet surface-physics scientists. And werewolves are almost unrecognizable at a scale of a hundredth the width of their own fur; you have to tell what you're looking at by the biting, and at that size it takes them months to even slightly maul you.

At the ``macroscopic'' or just plain ``scopic'' scales salt has familiar properties. For example it sticks to French fries exactly long enough to pick up the fries, and then falls off messing up the table or sticks to your hands. This forces you to rapidly yet awkwardly choose to lick your fingers or try wiping them on the napkin. And the result is greasy salt all over your pants. Yet on the microscopic scale nothing of the sort happens, because the werewolves have already eaten the mini-fries.

The discovery is if you put some salt on the tip of an atomic microscope while nobody is around so you other people don't complain this is why we can't have nice atomic microscopes, and then pull on the salt, it stretches out. ``It's kind of like Silly Putty'', said Dr Houston. This finally explains why microscopic quantities of salt have been used to make hilarious copies of the funny pages in microscopic newspapers from the Fifties, before they changed the ink to that new kind that doesn't quite look inky enough. That mystery had been nagging people for years and it's good to have progress again.

The researchers said they didn't know of any immediate practical uses for ``nanostretchy salt'', a clear failure of imagination. After al, nanostretchy salt gives all kinds of applications in nanostretching. The applications to salt would be gravy, if you take salt in your gravy. Nanostretching must surely be important considering how fun it is to say; for example, it provides a practical way to manufacture teeny tiny little resistance bands. In this way amoebas and werewolves can have decent exercise equipment. Obesity is on the rise these days, after all, and if people are getting fatter it follows the microorganisms in them are getting fatter to, and therefore if they get in shape then we all might get in shape too, though perhaps not the same one.

And nanostretching gives the chance for microorganisms to augment their own stretching abilities. Amoebas don't have toes worth talking about so they can't stretch up on tippy-toes to reach over the top of nanorefrigerators or the top shelf of their microclosets; with the right stretchy molecules hanging around they can pick up whatever they were looking for. But since lots of microorganisms can change shape already maybe there's a stigma attached to using outside stretchy molecules. I wouldn't want to encourage a steroid scandal-like set of revelations at the tip of your atomic microscope. I know kinds of trouble I don't need anymore.

I don't know if anyone's figured out what Silly Putty is like at that size. It'd be nicely balanced of the universe if it acted like salt and appeared without explanation in cylindrical cartons in the lazy susans of miniature werewolves, but the universe doesn't always work like that. Maybe they get it in rectangular boxes.

Trivia: Indian resentment of the British-imposed salt taxes were mentioned as a major grievance of the subcontinent in Mary Eaton's The Cook And Housekeepers Complete And Universal Dictionary, an 1822 cookbook. Source: Salt: A World History, Mark Kurlansky.

Currently Reading: Amelia Earhart: A Biography, Doris L Rich.

I told myself that it was all a bad dream

So there we have it: a frustrating day, a horrible day, and then an awkward week.

( So have I learned anything from it? )

Trivia: The British East India Company promised the crown £400,000 per year in return for freedom from parlimentary inquiries to what it was doing in Bengal, in 1767. In 1772, the company needed to beg for a £1,000,000 loan to avert bankruptcy. Source: The Company: A Short History Of A Revoultionary Idea, John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge.

Currently Reading: A History of The Middle Ages, 284 - 1500, Sidney Painter. It's an interesting book, but it's also about a half-century old so I'm not sure how much of it is still believed accurate by historians and how much of it is now that hilarious stuff we used to think back when we were sooooooo dumb.

I even tried that nine to five scene

The next workday --- Monday --- when it came was anticlimactic.

( This would cover actually meeting the client and showing off what my work had produced. )

Trivia: Among the management problems of the merged Penn Central railroad were computer system incompatibilities: while both the Pennsylvania Rail Road and the New York Central had used IBM computers to record freight movements, the Pennsylvania fed printouts and punched tapes to computers and used a Teletype inquiry system; the Central used punch card input and a cathode-ray TV setup. The Central also had a random-access disc for reading data, updated quickly, while the Pennsylvania's disc system was not and was only periodically updated. Source: The Wreck Of The Penn Central: The Real Story Behind The Largest Bankruptcy In American History, Joseph R Daughen, Peter Binzen. (They don't specify the computer systems more exactly; they probably couldn't have in a 1971 book for popular consumption.)

Currently Reading: A History of The Middle Ages, 284 - 1500 Sidney Painter.

They said my friends were just an unruly mob

Now for the specifics of the worst day I've had at work.

( I don't wish to inflict the uncomfortableness on anyone not fully warned of it. )

Trivia: In attempting to salvage the production quality of the Edsel car line --- which was done by Ford and Mercury divisions of the company rather than the Edsel division and suffered accordingly --- Robert McNamara instituted a tally system in which defects were numerically analyzed: a chip in the paintwork would be 0.1 points; a missing part would be 20 points, and so on. If a sampling of a half-dozen cars in a batch averaged more than 35 points per car the entire batch would be withheld from delivery until repaired. Source: Ford: The Men And The Machine, Robert Lacey. (I am curious whether all parts were weighted equally; a bad dashboard clock seems like it should be fewer points than a missing transmission, for example. So, yes, I'd actually like more detail of a failed scheme to save the Edsel by not allowing an average of two important car parts be left off every vehicle.)

Currently Reading: A History of The Middle Ages, 284 - 1500, Sidney Painter.

With big ambitions of where I could play

Continuing on thoughts about my current employment condition:

( In short: This is what we did to build up to the second presentation; it's still background to the particular incident. )

Trivia: The official corporate name of the American Broadcasting Company was American Broadcasting-Paramount Theaters, Inc, from the merger of ABC and United Paramount Theaters in 1952 through to 1965. Source: Inside ABC: American Broadcasting Company's Rise To Power, Sterling Quinlan.

Currently Reading: Frek and the Elixir, Rudy Rucker. For a change of pace in a Rudy Rucker novel, a not particularly exceptional protagonist gets his life disrupted by hyperdimensional aliens who endow him with powers beyond those of ordinary four-dimensional spacetime and it tangles up his entire world-history with a lot of silly-sounding words. I still like the stuff, though.

I'd sit and listen to my records all day

On to serious talk about work, I suppose. Originally, I was hired over two years ago to create a publicly searchable database of various records, which would in different modes turn up transactions, detailed records of transactions, or scanned copies of the original documents. The idea was to replace an ancient MS-DOS program which I saw demonstrated once with something that didn't require 1983-style ``select what you want to do from this number menu'' interfaces. Because the boss was injured in a motorcycle accident the week before I started work, I went four months without anything at all to do, and then another four months struggling to get the databases I needed and explanations of just what people wanted, and then the project was temporarily cancelled for eight months and I was laid off; and, finally, I got rehired and since the other project I was hired for got to doing nothing I rewrote this one from scratch in a better fashion. That's all backstory. Now ...

( There's a fair amount of backstory, and this gets everything prior to the start of the incident. )

Trivia: The written guidelines for the command module, service module, and lunar landing module developed at the NASA-Industry Apollo Technical Conference in Washington, DC, in July 1961 weighed in total more than 250 pounds. Source: The New Ocean: The Story Of The First Space Age, William E Burrows.

Currently Reading: Frek and the Elixir, Rudy Rucker.

She has a competition in a composition known

I think I want to talk a little more about the strap to my messenger bag and its continuing absence. As was wisely suggested, I thought about music stores, but the nearest music store that I knew about was in Plaza Singapura, off the Dhoby Ghaut interchange, which is a bit of a hike for repairing a used bag. So when I drove to the Freehold Raceway Mall it was with the intent of vague shopping. But I walked the upper level first instead of my usual crossways pattern starting on the lower level. At some point a music store moved in to the part of the mall that I never see anymore because the Suncoast Video closed about ten years ago in favor of Spencer's Horrible And Tacky Gifts. It's probably too much to suppose they opened the store just to answer my particular need.

I ambled around the organs and sheet music and drum sets and found a spinning rack, the kind used in other stores for ties and belts, full of straps of varying lengths and indescribably ugliness. Granted I tend to buy boring-looking things, like clothes which have at maximum one color, and leave my appreciation for (say) tie-dye to things other people buy, but wouldn't you expect some of them to be neutral or at least not blazingly ugly?

Still, I was looking over the ends to see if they had snaps compatible with my bag, when one of the music store employees came over and said, simply, ``Banjo straps.'' There was little I could say in response unless I wanted to just be contradictory.

I've always had a hyperactive sense of humor, and usually it serves me well, but it does mean sometimes an unentertaining thing becomes briefly the funniest thing in the world. As the employee went about his business the notion of someone wandering the store simply saying ``banjo straps'' to anyone who might not have been thinking of banjo straps began to amuse me, and it grew until I was barely holding in my laughter. And then I got the idea that perhaps it wasn't just something to say to everyone; perhaps in this store the generic expletive for releasing all the frustrations of a business where one works with the public have been reduced to crying out ``banjo straps''. This was ridiculous, and I quickly left, hoping that distance from the store would reduce my laughing to a general good air, and that's how I ended in the Kitchen Thingies No One Will Never Need But Which Are Shiny Or Cute store on the opposite end of the mall.

Trivia: Thomas Jefferson recorded the temperature at 6 am on 4 July 1776 as 68 Fahrenheit, and 76 degrees later in the day. Source: A History of the United States Weather Bureau, Donald R Whitnah.

Currently Reading: Vienna 1814: How the Conquerers of Napoleon Made Love, War, and Peace at the Congress of Vienna, David King.

Tinkerbell's mind is a crazy machine at the best

While we daily make use of the ground, the surprising fact is until recently it was just a charming theory. Its existence, subject to philosophical discussions that can get people riled up even when not inflicted by a surprise disquisition raiding party, was only fully validated with experiments conducted in 1998 by people known mysteriously as ``Bertram Brockhouse'' and ``Clifford Shull''. For this work Brockhouse and Shull were awarded the 1994 Nobel Prize in Plummeting, based on the committee having a ``very good feeling'' about them.

The idea that a ``ground'' should exist was formed barely ninety years and nine months before the prize announcement, as a pair of Ohio brothers found themselves pushed by winds to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The pair were lanky, befitting the late-19th century origins of anyone fortunate enough not to appear in a Thomas Nast cartoon, but they tried not to let their lanking get in the way of their work. A long series of experiments with kites gave way to a seething resentment of the Wright Brothers, who kept flying right through their kite strings. ``Fine,'' said the angered E and O Wollan, ``We'll just come up with somewhere for you to crash!''

Within nine days they were publishing the first modern theory of the ``ground''. Their stirring prose still shows the ingenious simplicity of a great idea being born: ``to locate the ground begin first by plummeting. Take careful note of all things which stop you. The final thing that stops you will be ground, unless it is water, which is a sort of ground covered by ocean, lake, or swimming pool. In case you reach water, attempt plummeting from several hundred feet to the side. If you never stop, then start over, in particular over ground this time.'' While it would take decades to prove ``ground'' was more than just a useful explanation it would be taken for granted from 1926 that proof was coming right up. We can hope nobody was waiting anxiously all that time.

But the ``ground'' theory might not have captured the public imagination had it not gotten mixed up with radio industry in the 1920s. Suddenly people across North America were stringing up comical antennas, and there wasn't anything to keep them from catching a stiff breeze and flying away, tearing the radio set out of the owner's hands and smashing it against the wall, making reception nearly two and a quarter percent worse. The solution was to take a bucket full of ``ground'' and put it on top of the antenna.

Since windproof radios were invented in 1964 the biggest application of the ground these days is cables. As first observed by Aristotle but not understood for thousands of years if yet, any time two electrical cables get near one another both want to be above, and below, the other. The rate of tangling up increases with the number of cables as one of those really fast-growing functions. However, what happens when a wire is left alone? Some advanced cables with mitochondria and rudimentary cellular structures are able to self-tangle, but others have to simply spread across the floor hoping to trap what prey walks past them.

But the pheromones emitted by the ground produce in cables an effect much like mutual tangling, so cables begin burying themselves. The discovery of this affinity in 2004, by tying knots in the ends of cables so that the whole thing couldn't disappear underground, finally answered just what happened to the many telegraph, telephone, electric, and peanut butter cables that vanished into the ground when nobody was looking.

Today enough cables run underground that new-born cables are naturally drawn to them, which is where all those odd little wires you need to make your digital camera talk to your computer have gone. As it is these accreting piles of cables are growing extremely rapidly on the geologic timescale. It's estimated that by 2018 Greenland alone will be elevated enough by underground cables that its presence will interfere with communication satellites, making them plummet. So get your worrying in early and maybe see about getting a strong umbrella, before the prices rise.

Trivia: The design of the first screw-threads light bulbs was adapted from the screw stoppers of kerosene cans. Source: Electric Universe: How Electricity Switched On The Modern World, David Bodanis.

Currently Reading: Vienna 1814: How the Conquerers of Napoleon Made Love, War, and Peace at the Congress of Vienna, David King.

Have you seen the stars tonight?

Now it's convenient for my final report on the Showcase and the Showcase Showdown on The Price is Right for a couple months. They finished off the season Friday and are in reruns until, I guess, September or October (and this after just introducing one new pricing game in the past two years, too).

For the episodes from the 1st through 26th of June, the first person to spin in the Showcase Showdown won 13 times; the second person to spin won 16 times; and the final spinner won 11 times, which seems to endorse my original hypothesis about the second spinner being in the best spot, if I hadn't been forced earlier to conclude the third spot looks best after all. The lowest spin to win the Showdown was 60 cents, which isn't quite the all-time low I've seen (55 cents) but is close. Oddly, only two people spun a dollar in June. One week saw not just no dollar spins but also no tie results producing a spin-off.

Historically, starting from the episode airing the 10th of November and going to the season finale, the first spinner won the Showdown 84 times. The second spinner won 106 times, and the third won 124 times. With 314 total winners (and I'm embarrassed to say I spent a while going over my tables trying to figure out why that wasn't a number divisible by three, showing how sloppily I can get to thinking about this), it suggests the first spinner wins about one time out of four; the second wins one time out of three; and the third two times out of five.

mongologue constructed last time around a simplified version of the game and I've fiddled with that some. If I'm not missing an obvious trick his hunch is exactly right, and that the second player has a reduced need to make any strategy decisions, and that the third one almost never has a choice to make, does seem to be what gives them the edge here. I'm delighted by the oddness of a game in which you do better the less your participation is actually needed and I'm trying to explore variations that get closer to the Showdown proper. (I should mention that games in which starting order gives benefits are not at all rare, and make an important side of game theory, which I've always wanted to know better than I do.)

My more useless statistic, tracking whether the first or second Showcase revealed won, turned up in June some 15 times that the first-revealed Showcase won, four times that the second-revealed won, and one double overbid. However, if you take out cases where the order was forced by the other person overbidding or bidding a dollar, then there were five times the first-revealed won, and two times the second-revealed won. Curiously, going back to January (I started following this late) found 29 times that with no forcing the first-revealed Showcase won, and 29 times that the second-revealed Showcase won. Nobody won a Double Showcase for June; and there was just the one double overbid. There were fourteen overbids (out of forty) altogether.

If I didn't miss recording any, then from January there were seven Double Showcase winners, and only five Double Overbids. Out of 244 Showcases shown off that's a chance just under three percent of a Double Showcase win and just over two percent of a Double Overbid. Given that there were 69 overbids out of 244 bids (a bit over 28 percent), this suggests that Double Overbids are less common than would be expected if overbidding were a random phenomenon, which would be at something like six percent. So it seems likely that contestants pay attention to whether the other one has overbid, which shouldn't prove too surprising. It's still nice to be able to say this with numbers.

Trivia: Boyle's 30 Acres, the plot of land in Jersey City leased by fight promoter Tex Rickard for the Dempsey-Carpentier world's heavyweight championship contest of 2 July 1921, was owned by John P Boyle (a paper-box manufacturer) and the Public Service Company, and was closer to 34 acres, and was generally known as Montgomery Circle, formerly home of Jersey City's Eastern League baseball team. Source: Whose What? Aaron's Beard to Zorn's Lemma, Dorothy Rose Blumberg.

Currently Reading: Vienna 1814: How the Conquerers of Napoleon Made Love, War, and peace at the Congress of Vienna, David King.

I'm just a wandering on the face of this Earth

Putting off work talk a little more: Thursday morning my father asked if I had any plans for after work. Well, I had vague plans of editing my humor piece for the week, but I don't talk about that because that would be revealing information about something important to me to my family. So I warily said no, and he said good, because he needed to get up to Ikea to buy a bookshelf for my sister-in-law and her husband. Apparently it's too wide for some purpose or other and yet it should fit in my car but for some reason going up by himself in his Jeep was unsuitable and oh, fine, then.

The nearest Ikea is by Newark Airport, so I was committing after the drive home to an hour-plus drive up and back again over the bookshelf. In fact, it would be more, since --- this is going to take more than a full sentence to explain. My aunt from Rhode Island was visiting for the weekend, on Sunday to pick up her son coming back from college. He was to be dropped off at a convenient midway point before his trip-mates went off a different direction, so they would meet up at one of the Turnpike's lovely service plazas. My uncle had doubts of the Google Maps estimates of plaza distances and asked that we verify them since we were nearby. So we got to drive an extra forty minutes out of the way to verify the location of several plazas on the Turnpike northbound before getting to Ikea.

At Ikea we went merrily around trying to prove the actual existence of the bookshelf, although since they're renovating nothing was where any documentation claimed it was. We stopped for dinner at the in-store restaurant, with meatballs and some Scandinavian fruit drink, and went searching again for any clerk who was not dealing with a customer involved in the most complicated Allen wrench-connected purchase in recorded history. Eventually we did find one, who guided us to the bookshelf. My father took measurements of the shelf and determined that it was too wide for my brother's needs, and it could not be cut down to size, but he could build one like it in appropriate dimensions. So we came home, with over one of every eight miles on my car now dedicated to this expedition and nothing to show for it but measurements on a bookshelf and verified mile markers for the Joyce Kilmer and Grover Cleveland rest areas.

The rest stop directions would have been marginally useful, I suppose, except as it turned out the cousin claimed to have gotten stuck in traffic coming up and so they turned around, with him going up by train the next morning. So if we got anything out of the trip it was ... uh ... my new car's first ride on toll roads.

Trivia: The Roman Emperor Commodius tried to rename the seventh month of the year `Aurelius', after one of his many names. Source: Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History, EG Richards.

Currently Reading: Vienna 1814: How the Conquerers of Napoleon Made Love, War, and peace at the Congress of Vienna, David King.

We won't have it known, dear, that we own a telephone, dear

I want to talk seriously about my job a moment, but before that I really should talk frivolously about it because I had something silly turn around it and it'd be a shame to let that go to waste. I've been coming to realize that I don't really think like anybody else in the company does, and that's making even little interactions weird in ways I don't think they should be even for me.

In this particular case, there's the lunchroom which unexceptionally has several coffee pots brewing caffeinated and decaffeinated, as well as bags of tea in both caffeinated and non- forms, and the various accessories. A couple months back when in the supermarket I bought a box of green tea, and opened it and left in the lunchroom by the other boxes of tea. I'd figured I'd certainly like drinking a different flavor now and then and other people might too, and supposed it wouldn't hurt to do something to contribute to the office community such as it is.

While I would have a bag of green tea about once or twice a day and go back to black for the other tea breaks, I did notice that the regular tea boxes were used much more quickly. I overheard two people (outside the lunchroom) discussing the strange new tea and wondering who'd brought it in, although it would've been awkward for me to explain things then. The next week one of them asked me if I'd brought it in, and yes, and I tried to explain that it wasn't just for me, it was for anyone who wanted it. If I wanted to keep it for myself I'd have left the box in my office. I'd have thought that ended the matter but she asked again two weeks ago, and I gave the same answer, and it seemed to surprise her.

Last week the box got down to its final tea bags and I was able to track: at least for this interval, I was the only person touching the green tea. Other people had talked about it but, if I'm not grossly misremembering when I got it and how much I've drank of it, I've been basically the only person to use it, even with people who say they like green tea and would like to drink more. And somehow leaving the box in the lunch room open and unclaimed and saying several times that it's free to any who want it doesn't suffice to share it with the world. I don't see where I went awry.

Trivia: The first record in the British East India Company's books of buying tea was in 1664, and that of only two pounds and two ounces of ``good thea'' to present to King Charles II so that he would not feel ``wholly neglected by the Company''. Source: The World of Caffeine: The Science and Culture of the World's Most Popular Drug, Bennett Alan Weinberg, Bonnie K Bealer.

Currently Reading: Salt: Grain Of Life, Pierre Laszlo. Once again a new area of my ignorance is revealed: I had never considered where the phrase ``red herring'' originated and probably wouldn't have thought to look for a plausible explanation in a book about salt.

If you fell on a pin, well, you'd be blind in both eyes

Now, the Radio Shack thing I mentioned a couple days ago with the abnormally low videotape price. All told my videotapes and something else I bought that now I don't remember came to just over ten dollars, the level where I feel comfortable putting it on my credit card. I ran my card through the little scanner thing and the Radio Shack cashier had to for mysterious reasons look at my card to verify the last four digits of the number. And although it was an under-$25 purchase I still had to sign, on the touch-screen thing that insists on using their electronic pen rather than my own. Well, I signed, and tapped 'Done', and the panel came back with the blank line.

I signed again, and tapped 'Done', and nothing happened again. The cashier told me that I had to sign my name, which I had thought I understood. I signed again and tapped 'Done', and the cashier clarified that I had to sign my name, not my initials. Mm-hm. My signature features my initials prominently, but it has all the letters in it, at least roughly, and at least when using my pens instead of fat electronic pens. I signed again, and he told me that it needed to be my full signature. I pointed out it was, and he told me I was just initialling, and they can't take initials. Finally I ended up writing my letters out in pretty near all capitals, which Radio Shack's credit card thing finally accepted as a signature, since it in absolutely no way resembles my actual signature.

What I do want to know is since when is it Radio Shack's business to decide whether I have a signature appropriate to them? The last person with authority over my cursive was my English teacher in fourth grade, and I don't remember Radio Shack being involved in that.

Trivia: Vanillin, the main component of vanilla flavor, can be extracted from pulp and paper waste. Source: Radar, Hula Hoops, and Playful Pigs, Joe Schwarcz.

Currently Reading: Salt: Grain Of Life, Pierre Laszlo.

Thunderbolts caught easily

When I did finally drive my car into work, that Tuesday, I decided to not make a conspicuous deal of it on the superficially sound reasoning that if someone was interested in the new car in the parking lot, they'd say something, whereas if I started talking about it unprovoked I might run into people who didn't care at all what if anything I drove. I probably just think this sort of thing to go along with my natural shyness. Nevertheless about ten minutes into the day I got a call on the office phone, disrupting my watching of The Price Is Right from Monday, from one of the people on the first floor (the one I work with most, as it happens) asking if that was my new car, and since it was, it was a sweet-looking ride.

This sentiment would be echoed over the week as other people noticed the car, or noticed I was around at a time they thought of the car, often as we were arriving or leaving. As I was leaving for the night once, in fact, the company's owner put in one of his occasional appearances and he liked the looks of the car too. He asked if it was Saturn and I initially said yes, then caught and corrected myself. He grunted a bit that I should have bought an American car; I pointed out American car companies could certainly have made something like this. I also joked that I was finally confident that he was keeping me on staff a while; he commented that, oh, yeah, he had to talk to me about my project, tomorrow. Gulp. (The talk proved harmless; he was sulking again but briefly about some database issues that once identified I was very well able to fix.)

It would be Saturday before I'd loan my car to someone for the first time. This would be to my mother, who needed to get to her hairdresser's, when my father had gone to the library with the Toyota Something and had promised to be back by noon, when he wasn't. So I gave her one of my other sets of keys (I don't think it was the one with the little code plate for re-creating the keyless remote, but I'm not sure) and went back to bed. Ten minutes later my father arrived, and he would later in the day be a touch hurt that she didn't wait for him to get back with the car even though he was only a little late. Her argument was that a little late was still late. I still wonder if she wasn't looking for the chance to drive it. While she had my car, she did close the moon roof's front side --- leaving the rear seats' window open --- and set the radio to the infinitely annoying 101.5 FM. How utterly normal.

Trivia: By the summer of 1903 the Ford Motor Company was down to its last $223.65 (from an initial capitalization in mid-June of about $28,000) without selling a car. Source: Henry and Edsel: The Creation of the Ford Empire, Ricahrd Bak.

Currently Reading: Salt: Grain Of Life, Pierre Laszlo.

They're shooting the pier

You might well expect the next day, Monday, would be my chance to drive my new car into work and show off to everyone not only that I had selected something but that I had picked a pretty nice-looking car. Or you might know me instead, and trust that I had some much more ridiculous scheme in mind. As always with the dumb things I get myself into I had a superficially credible chain of reasoning, and a minor problem to solve. In this case my problem was: my rental car. I had a Malibu U (or something) on loan from the Enterprise rent-a-car barely a mile from home, and it needed to be returned by Tuesday at 8 am. The rental agency is open from 7:30 am through 6 pm, so that it's not actually possible for me to get there before work and not be late, and driving back I have to not hit any traffic jams. My father --- who still was unsure just where it was even after I explained it in terms of the Wawa and the 7-Eleven which flank it --- suggested I should drive home after work, take the Malibu back, and ride home with him.

My idea: I'd drive the Malibu in to work, then drive home from work right to the rental agency, and then walk home, unless it should be raining. This was no idle threat, as it's rained 45 of the past 30 days. But the suggestion that I could simply walk home took my parents by surprise even though it is, really and truly, just barely over one mile and along a path that may not have sidewalks everywhere along it but that isn't exactly a dangerous path even of suburban central New Jersey. Anyway, I'd save the time of the last bit of drive, rousing a parent, and backtracking again, so that seemed most logical to me. And so it was that my first weekday, my car sat in the driveway instead of being used as a vehicle.

The Enterprise Rent-A-Car guy, when I returned the car, asked if I needed to be dropped off anywhere. I'd forgotten they do that, or volunteer to do that, but I stuck to my resolve to walk home since getting a lift for under a mile felt too fundamentally lazy on my part. Happily, it didn't rain, and I did notice walking all the way back the differences between the terrain on foot and the terrain on car, mostly in the number of houses along that path and just which side of the street was plainly built in the early 60s and which side was obviously built in the 70s. And I got a couple nice pictures of the entrance to the community which my father thinks I should send to the community monthly newspaper as cover art. Perhaps I will. We'll see. But by now, finally, everything I had to do with the business of car purchasing, other than getting the new insurance card and getting my permanent license plates, was now done.

Trivia: Soybeans were introduced to the United States in 1804, as ballast in a clipper ship. Source: Twinkie, Deconstructed, Steve Ettlinger. (I have my doubts about the exactness of this, in particular the characterization of a ``clipper ship'', which I had thought dated to later in the 19th century. I know little enough about New England shipping of the early 19th century that I can't say the book grabbed at a term without verifying it, however.)

Currently Reading: A Random Walk Down Wall Street, Burton G Malkiel.

He knew that it had something to do with lightning

The Electrical Generator: that's what I feel like discussing. The Electrical Generator is known most often for its one-hit wonder, ``One-Wonder Hit'', from the album ``Hit One Wonder'' which was all over the place in fall 1968 and forgotten afterwards except by people who like rock music to have sitars in it non-ironically. But with that Electrical generator tied the record for one-hit wonders by a single band, which they continue to share, at ``one''.

This gets me far off my topic, which is the electrical generator, noncapitalized except to start off a sentence and in other exceptions defined by grammar rules which gradually escape the mind after high school. You're about to lose something important about returning from a hyphenated clause, only to replace it with a sense of shame when other people speak as if knowledgeably about participles.

With the price of electricity set to continue rising, a result of both people's generally looking down at electricity bills causing by a common optical effect the actual cost to appear to be the same length as the longer line with arrows pointing the other direction, not to mention the continuing use of non-leavened fuel sources, people are naturally getting curious about where this electricity stuff comes from anyway and what they could do about not using the mass-produced stuff and maybe getting back to homemade electricity.

This is why you're seeing more electricity at thrift stores, farmers' markets, flea markets, flea farmers, or yard sales. Sometimes you even see them at frightening team-ups of all these places to buy homemade things, and unless you duck pretty fast you might get an extra bag of cheese-flavored electricity along with lamps which were ugly thirty years ago but now with the patina of age and the wisdom of maturing taste have become ugly antiques.

Electricity comes from, oh, let's call it the amberberry bush, which grows wild in Schenectady, New York, as you might be if you had to grow wild there, not to mention some parts of Greece, where it gets a name in Greek from instead. Until its distinctive three-leafed pattern with one leaf the slightly wrong size in order to affect polarity or something was noticed these plants could mostly be a great surprise when someone bit into what sure seemed like a grape or a berry and got an electric jolt instead. It's the sort of thing making you glad you weren't also chewing on aluminum foil, which was in some cases only two thousand years away from being invented, which made the relief premature.

Eventually Benjamin Franklin invented some contraption improving them in ways a lot easier to describe as improvements than in saying just what did change, and he included in the descriptions some remarks about King George III that are witty once translated into English. So things started getting organized and people finally understood enough about how electricity worked to get all the rest of it completely wrong, and a century or two after that things started to clear up, although it required the firm dictatorship of a person known only as ``Kirchoff'' and thirty years of secret laws proclaimed by ``Ohm''.

These days the need to wander around looking for electricity in the wild is pretty much ended. Instead you can look through the Burpee catalogue under the ``Fermion'' section and check out the different flavors of electrons available. Plant them at a finger's depth in a decent ground and keep dry once the seeds hatch, which will be accompanied by rumblings of thunder coming underfoot and making the birds trying to steal your seeds very nervous. (Warning: do *not* plant positrons unless you are certain you live in an antimatter universe, as the explosions make the birds more nervous and eager for revenge.) Then there's just the harvesting, extracting, fermenting, distilling, and pasteurizing and you're on your way to rationalizing the electric bill as not really that burdensome. This cycle from dissatisfaction to attempt to do something about it to defeated acceptance completes the electric circuit, without which none of it would work.

Next week: ground, and where to find it.

Trivia: The new generators Thomas Edison sent to the Paris Electrical Exposition of 1881 were capable of lighting five hundred incandescent lamps of 16 candlepower each. Source: Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World, Jill Jonnes.

Currently Reading: A Random Walk Down Wall Street, Burton G Malkiel.

The freeway's concrete way won't show you where to run or how to go

The day after the great car purchase I thought I might take it out to White Castle for my first fast-food purchase (I'm sure the list of first things to do with it will run out eventually), although those plans were interrupted when I finally did wake up and I was notified that my brother and his wife were coming down. I'm not sure whether they'd been planning to come down and swing by anyway --- there are outlet malls nearby they visit occasionally, and it's not that far off to stop in at my parents' when they might be on the way to visit my sister-in-law's parents, and the chance to see the New Car would make that all the more tempting.

Both approved the car's general look and the stylish details like the red fringe on the alloy wheels, and the alloy wheels, and I gave my brother a ride in it as my sister-in-law declined the honor. We took a little ride around the neighborhood and he complimented my various improvements to my personal style, among them in losing weight, getting some clothes that don't dangle excessively loosely from me (he's also very eager that I wear pants with cuffs so low that they don't show my socks; since this seems to leave them low enough to get dirt on the cuffs I don't see the point); and the new car. I think he's trying to improve me without riling up my natural resistance to such things.

Back home I learned that it had been my responsibility to decide on a restaurant for everyone to eat at, which fact had gone uncommunicated to me until that point. I suggested a restaurant near the outlet malls that we've eaten at in the past and found quite satisfactory (it's got kind of the coffee-shop-where-grad-students-hang-out style, but without a campus anywhere around), and that was accepted with the reservation that nobody was confident it was still open since it used to have about seven other locations all of which have closed. My father also noted it was the spot where my mother managed to drive the Toyota Something over the railroad tie serving as a curb and spot of last stopping for people backing into parking lots, giving their tire protection policy its first test.

Well, the restaurant was open, and I didn't test the limits of the railroad ties any. We did feel our patience tested by the unexpectedly large delay between getting menus and having anyone interested in whether we wanted food selections from them, and we got our first ``how is everything?'' when the server had just seconds before left the food off, which if general policy suggests a theory to why the other seven locations have recently closed.

I drove my parents back --- my father had gone in my brother and sister-in-law's truck --- testing the limits of the back seat of the two-door coupe (it was plenty of space as long as my mother was careful about sliding the seat back), and on the way back I reached the 100th mile in my car, remarkably. Wow.

Trivia: The salvage of the passenger ferry General Slocum the week after its fire and sinking was performed by the Merritt Chapman Company, which towed the wreckage to a shipyard at Brooklyn's Erie Basin. Source: Ship Ablaze: The Tragedy of the Steamboat General Slocum, Edward T O'Donnell.

Currently Reading: A Random Walk Down Wall Street, Burton G Malkiel.

Better get ready, gonna see the light

After finishing eating I could have called other friends --- I had phone numbers for several scattered here and there in my notepad of generally disorganized things --- but it just never occurred to me. I suspect I'm still not a natural thinker in terms of having phones. What did occur to me was that I had taken my first drive in my car, but now I had my first drive on my own in my car. And where should that be? Or should I just take some more pictures of my car sitting in its first parking lot space? That seemed like a pretty good idea too, except I would have to go sometime to somewhere.

What I chose to do was drive to The Book Garden, my standby used book store and a place that I go to really more often than the current height of my unread book pile justifies. (Actually, that pile isn't so large, but I have a box which was one of the last things I took out of my Sable full of books from my undergraduate college's library that I'd borrowed on one of my last real jaunts with it. I'd gone up to campus the last full day of exams to take advantage of late closing times for some of the specialty libraries, and haven't got to reading more than skimmings of what I picked up there yet.) This wouldn't be a challenging drive --- it's pretty much just following the route to Great Adventure from where I was, and then continue another five miles in that direction --- and it's one which aggravates me because of the many drivers who figure it's a good spot to drop to ten or so miles per hour below the speed limit and there's no useful passing along most of the route, but it's a good spot for me.

And so that was my first drive on my own in my new car. Oddly, the man who runs the store wasn't in so talkative a mood so I didn't attempt to make small talk about the new and strange and sporty vehicle I was driving, but I did pick up that Extraterrestrial Civilizations book I'd been reading last week, and marvelled at how my car looks in a gravel parking lot. Eventually, yes, I did drive back home, and parked in our driveway rather than the neighbor's for a change. I was excited.

Trivia: In Paris in 1274 there were eight qualified physicians, and 38 men and women identified as practicing medicine without a diploma. Source: Life In A Medieval City, Joseph and Frances Gies. (Admittedly, one may ask how much a medical diploma of the early 1270s was worth as a qualification. Also the book's about forty years old so it may well be that everything in it is today regarded as hilariously outdated, but I do not know that for a fact.)

Currently Reading: A Random Walk Down Wall Street, Burton G Malkiel.

Set the controls for the heart of the sun

My mother thought, reasonably, that a cell phone picture of my new car and me beside it would be a grand picture to send to friends. She took a pretty respectable picture of me by the car, and we attempted to send the picture to bunny_hugger. This would prove more complicated than we thought. While I had her phone number, and had a picture, the rest would prove challenging. The first was that my mother suggested that I send a text message along with the picture so that it would be a trifle less inexplicable, and that seemed a good idea to me.

I've never composed a text message on a hand phone before. The closest I got was when my mother was rushed to hospital back in April, and we started to text-message my sister asking why she was in Manhattan, when she interrupted the message by calling and saying why she was in Manhattan. Getting past a second word would be a new record in text messaging for me. But my mother handed me her phone with surprisingly tiny buttons and encouraged me to write a message. I understand the mechanism whereby you press `4' twice to get the letter `H', as example, and I was able to find space and most importantly delete-last-character, but I was defeated in my attempts to get punctuation marks in this. I understand there are people who text message without punctuation marks; I am not among them. But I asked my mother and she could find no punctuation marks unless you switched the hand phone's orientation from vertical to horizontal, and you can't switch that mid-message.

With a sense of personal shame I made do with multiple spaces where I would want a period and two spaces, and send the message and the picture to bunny_hugger. This set off the little scrolling spinning wheel of waiting as the picture uploaded and in mere moments ... the phone reported that it didn't go through. Something was wrong. I tried re-sending and again it reported that something was invalid somewhere along the line.

My mother re-checked that we had bunny_hugger's phone number entered correctly, and we tried again with the phone in the other orientation so I could use the full keyboard and punctuation marks and I re-entered the message, this time properly punctuated. And that again ... failed. Whatever was going on, it was keeping the picture from being sent to her. As my father suggested, we could try the simpler alternative, and just called her.

We got to talking, and talking, and my parents got tired of waiting for me to finish and eat, so they left in the Something to do some shopping, and told me to just bring the phone home and plug it in when I was ready. Good plan. Before you could imagine we were talking about things such as the P G Wodehouse book-on-disc that I'd borrowed from the library to be among my first reading/listening, Jeeves: Joy In The Morning, and my frustration that I couldn't tell from its plot description whether I'd read/heard it before or not. (The back cover blurb describes it, ``The rural beauty of Steeple Bumpleigh holds no attractions for Bertie, containing (as it does) the appalling Aunt Agatha. But there is man's work to do and, with Jeeves at his side, how can Bertie fail?'' That really doesn't pin things down. Except, in point of fact, Aunt Agatha is not at Steeple Bumpleigh as the proceedings get under way, so it manages to be a uselessly vague description that's still wrong.) In the end, I never figured out the phone's problem and sending of those pictures would be put off indefinitely. I hadn't heard/listened to the book before.

Trivia: The first recorded instance of a flood in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, was in 1808, and that flood destroyed a small dam across the Stony Creek. Source: The Johnstown Flood, David McCullough.

Currently Reading: All On Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery, Henry Mayer. (Boy, one guy gives monomaniacal quasi-religious fanaticism a good name ... and I'm surprised pleasantly to learn he wasn't the sort of abolitionist who figured once the slaves were free they could all go away somewhere that white Americans could stop thinking about; he wanted full equality and nothing less. And he wanted women to have the vote too. Wow. It's a bit jolting to find anyone from that far back whose views on civil rights are still ahead of California's.)