Before you break my heart

Back in January, after her Flightmare experience, bunny_hugger drove my car home, and besides the general upset of everything that horrible day, and that she was driving home in a severe snowstorm, was bothered that the brake warning light kept popping on the dashboard. I attributed it to the car's braking system being stressed out by the slick and icy roads. But the brake light did start popping on more in the months after that. It was an intermittent thing, most often happening when I was accelerating, but still, it was one of those signs that my car was aware it was soon to be paid off and would demand an equal monthly payment in repairs soon.

And then the brake light popped on and wouldn't go off, except for brief intervals, and that was different enough to alarm me. The verdict was that the brake calipers for the front wheels had gotten mostly stuck, and the rotors on all four wheels were getting rusty. The front ones could have the rust sanded off; the rear ones needed replacement. (I should've been ready for the brake calipers, as I have a somewhat famous in personal lore story of a car with many, many rusted-out calipers.) So, the car didn't quite need as much as the last two monthly payments would have been, but, close enough. But if this repair lasts me another 65,000 miles I'll be reasonably content.

Meanwhile, if you know someone who needs like a thousand dollars of math or humor or I guess web stuff done I'd appreciate the heads-up, you know?

And I've had a bunch of mathematics posts on that blog, so let me give you a neat organized summary of them so they're a little harder to overlook entirely. Recent posts have included:

• Reading the Comics, August 29, 2014: Recurring Jokes Edition, the first group of mathematically themed comic strips since that last roundup post.
  


• My Math Blog Statistics, August 2014, answering the question of whether it was a good month for this stuff.
  


• Machines That Do Something About Logarithms, laying out the tools needed for a particular computationally efficient way to evaluate logarithms.
  


• Machines That Give You Logarithms, putting those tools together into a procedure you can follow, or better, have a machine follow.
  


• Reading the Comics, September 8, 2014: What Is The Problem Edition, for a bunch of mathematics comics that get into some bigger issues, like, what exactly are you trying to do?
  


• Splitting a Cake with a Missing Piece, a reblog of an interesting little food-related puzzle with an appealing solution.
  


• Without Machines That Think About Logarithms, about how to do the work ahead of time that you need for the logarithm-computing process so talked about.
  


• Reading the Comics, September 15, 2014: Are You Trying To Overload Me Edition, so named because boy did they send a bunch of mathematics comics in short order at me.
  

Trivia: Thomas Edison sold out his stock in the Edison Electric Illuminating Company of New York in August of 1897, from the need for money to support his electric ore extraction process.
Source: Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World, Jill Jonnes.

Currently Reading: Where No Man Has Gone Before: A History of Apollo Lunar Exploration Missions, William David Compton. NASA SP-4214. Would you believe it only just today struck me that fanciful plans for a Lunar Flying Unit meant that NASA spent at least some time trying to figure out if they could make a flying jetpack for astronauts on the Moon? You know, all the dynamical stability problems of a jetpack on Earth, with the added bonus that the pilot would have all the flexibility of a person wearing three inches of butyl rubber as a bodysuit, a 70-degree field of view, and a deathly fear of even the slightest rip or tear of the thing they're wearing. (Well, OK, lower gravity means stability is probably a lesser challenge, but still, they haven't even tested the zero-gee version of the thing yet.) No wonder they decided to make a moon car instead.