Packing this evening, going through my traditional list-making before a trip (toothbrush? deodorant?). We're leaving Saturday morning for St. Louis, to visit Lissa's uncle, Bill.
It'll be the second time we've made the drive out there, and I'm really looking forward to the trip. Last time was 10 years ago, during the early stages of the great flood of '93. It'll be great to see Bill. He's Lissa's best connection to her family past. He reminds her so much of her mother.
It'll also be good to have a week together with Nora and Lissa, without the usual distractions. No IM. No GNOME. No work. No blogs.
And now we have a digital camera. Travelogue on our return!
So in Emacs, the text editor I use for most of my routine writing at home, I have a menu item that gives me a random Zippy the Pinhead quote:
Dehydrated EGGS are STREWN across ROULETTE TABLES..
Microsoft Word can't do that.
I did not know before today that New Mexico's eastern plains are home to the Lesser Prairie-chicken (Tympanuchus pallidicinctus), a rare and troubled bird. Historically, it lived across a great swath of what is now Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado and Nebraska as well as my home state. No more. As you can see here, its range is now limited to a few much smaller patches.
I know all this because I received in the mail a survey from the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish regarding my views on the Lesser Prairie-chicken and the efforts underway to save its sorry ass. The survey assured me I was scientifically selected, and that my views were important. I take my survey-responding responsibilities seriously. I filled it out.
I spent a good number of hours this weekend in Windows upgrade hell.
Nora's computer, running Windows 98, was having difficulties, and I figured a first reasonable step before spending money on it was a clean operating system install. I picked up a Windows XP upgrade disc at CompUSA and set to work Sunday afternoon.
I'm not geek enough to know whether the difficulty lay in the CD drive, or the hard disk, but when the install aborted partway through, I was screwed. I kept getting errors as the install routine copied files from the CD to the install directory. In other words, it had removed the old OS, but hadn't yet installed the new OS. Luckily I was geek enough to have the BIOS boot off the CD, giving me something marginally more useful than a large beige paperweight. The errors were mystifying - it would, in seemingly random fashion, be unable to copy some small number of files from the install directory to the CD. But since the install was failing, there was no way I could figure out to manually get in, find the necessary files and put them in the right spot to fix it.
After hours of trying, I finally succeeded seemingly by chance - the only file it failed on was apparently unimportant enough that it was able to complete the install, and I was then able to track down a copy of the file, put it in the right place, and the thing seems to work now.
Windows XP, despite my GNU/GNOME/Linux preferences, is a very nice operating system. But I wonder how people without a geek in the house survive the ordeal I went through trying to get it installed.
I've had a longstanding goal - a 20 mph (32+ kph) time trial on the bike. To a serious racer, this would be laughably slow (breaking one hour for the 40 km time trial is a common dividing line between the weekender and the race boys), but for me, riding my own little time trials along the riverside trail, it's been an elusive summit, ever just out of reach.
It's a flat trail, with four little turns to break your rhythm and many pedestrians, kids on their bikes with Mom and Dad, but beyond that it allows as much flat-out riding as my legs, lungs and heart can bear. I can get over 18 reliably, and I've pushed up over 19 once, but the magic 20 always escaped me.
Lately, my approach to the challenge has been to ride gently out to the trail's north end, a 45-50 minute warmup, then blast the down-and-back 20 miles, then ride home to warm down. It's a great 40 mile workout, and I figured some day things would click. Saturday they did.
You can see my heart rate profile here. The key is the middle section. The graph pops up about minute 52, at the start of the blast, and I held my speed up, keeping my heart rate in the high 150s for the first half hour. That's high aerobic - unpleasant but sustainable. Once I turned around at the south end of my little track (out-and-back is mandatory, to balance any wind advantage), I started kicking it up, until the last 15 minutes, which you can see is in the red zone - anaerobic.
A couple of factors at play here. I'd ridden three times during the previous week, so my legs weren't flat, but none of the rides were particularly long or hard, so I was well rested. Also, I was experimenting with a carb drink, which seemed to keep my usual two-hour bog at bay. When I finished the time trial, I still felt like I had some spring left in the legs, like I could have continued. And mentally, I felt great, not a stress or worry in the world. My life's good, and that makes everything easier.
Tom Mulhern: Maybe they mistook you for Duane Allman.
Frank Zappa: Oh sure they did. People do all the time.
Ferrying Nora to the record store this afternoon I scored myself. There were times when Frank Zappa had to just torch the place, to show that he could do the straight up guitar thing. One of my favorites is the Illinois Enema Bandit, another is Muffin Man ("Good night, Austin, Texas, wherever you are."). Today, I picked up Them or Us for cheap, which includes what the Rykodisc catalog rightly characterizes as "a straight-faced cover of the Allman Brothers' `Whippin' Post.'" The story goes that Zappa was playing in Helsinki when some guy in the audience yelled out, in ragged English, "Whipping Post". Frank was disappointed at the time that the bad couldn't just rip it out, so they made a point of adding it to their repertoire. The later were, in fact, able to rip it out. Plenty of other great guitar playing on the album, and do-whop.
Today, the 20th May, we celebrate Bernardino of Siena, the patron saint of public relations.
On a recent visit to the library, Lissa picked up The Millennium Problems, by Keith Devlin, thinking I might find it amusing. I do. It is the story of a set of seven mathematical problems for which the Clay Foundation has offered million dollar prizes.
Devlin offers up for himself what he acknowledges at the outset is an impossible task - to explain to us, dear readers, that which is not reasonbly explainable:
For the most part, I do not aim at a detailed description of the problems. It is just not possible to describe most of them accurately in lay terms - or even in terms familiar to someone with a university degree in mathematics.
This does not make the book, at least so far, any less enjoyable for the knowledge that when I'm done I won't understand the problems. I've become comfortable with black boxes, with knowing that there are thinks I won't understand, and don't need to. As long as one carefully circumscribes the box and understand its place in the system, one can get by quite nicely as long as one can place trust in the box builder. A lot of my science writing falls into this realm. In some cases I understand the box's inner workings, but leave it as a box for readers. In some cases it's a box in my own mind.
Think of the boxes as functions, a concept I take for granted in writing computer code but that was a thoughtful innovation a century-and-a-half ago. Quoting Devlin here, if I may be tricky and self-referential:
A function can be any rule that takes objects of one kind and produces new objects from them. According to this new conception, the rule that associates with each country in the world its capital city is a bona fide function (albeit a non-mathematical one.)Mathematicians began to study the properties of abstract functions, specified not by some formula by their behavior.
So my black boxes are functions:
capital = f(country);
If I want, I can look at the way the author of my library (I slip into softwarespeak here) has written the function to return national capitals. Or I can trust the library, and treat it as a black box, thinking instead about the context rather than the ugly details.
Years ago, I was visiting my friend John in Olympia, Wash., and he took me for a late-night hike down through the woods to the water's edge. It was pitch black, and for the first mile or so I was incredibly frustrated and on edge as I tried to peer down through the blackness to see my footfalls. After a while, though, I realized I could just unfocus my eyes and fix my gaze on John's white T-shirt ahead of me and just follow it. And then I was fine.
Sometimes you have to just let go of the details.
I'm adding an xpath example to my libxml tutorial. Draft posted here.
One man's flower is another man's weed, apparently.
Our neighborhood is alive right now with the fragrance of the lovely yellow-flowering Spanish broom - Spartium junceum L.. Here in Albuquerque, it's lovingly cultivated for its lovely open green stems and wild yellow blooms. We've had one for several years on the mound in our front yard, next to the cactus. It's always muddled along, but never really bloomed until this year, when we gave it its own dedicated drip water supply. Now it's on fire.
It grows well here in gardens, but doesn't spread much on its own. Not so elsewhere. Apparently in some wetter climates, Spanish broom is considered a Class A Weed.
It is over between Pablo and me.
It has been a long time coming, such a passionate thing cannot be without unpleasantness. His talent is so magnificent, all stark erotic power. I will never forget the moment I turned a corner in the National Museum to see a sketch from Les Demoiselles, and I was moved beyond all measure. But Picasso he was such a boy, always. "Look at me!" every brush stroke seemed to cry out. I am older now.
The screen does do not justice to this, but when I saw it today I was again moved. There were three side by side (this was to its left) and they seemed to me to carry the weight of the modern on their shoulders, the heavy lifting already done, only Pablo's shouting left to announce it to the world.
I walked back into the room full of Picassos next door, feeling a bit sullen, then back to the Cezannes, then back to the Picassos again. They have lovely big piece he did in 1906, in that breathless moment before Les Demoiselles, a harem of images of his beloved Fernande. But he never loved Fernande, or me. He loved only himself. I can see now what a fool I was.
Kid a couple of rows in front of me at the Jake: "Dad, we got Ichiro out!"
The Seattle superstar had just grounded to Cleveland shortstop Omar Vizquel to start the game, and the kid's dad had been down getting himself a beer and his son, probably nine or ten years old, some peanuts.
It was the last time the kid could say that all evening. They had left by the eighth inning, but if they were still there they would have seen Ichiro get his fourth hit - he was four for five on the night, with three singles and a double, a perfectly Ichiro-like performance.
It was cold out at the park - in the 50s, but windy, and I had to wear all the clothes I brought with me to Cleveland. But it was lovely nevertheless, another major league ballpark to add to my list.
Saved again by literature on a trip from hell. Well, not hell yet, just some upper circle of purgatory in which severe weather rumbles out through the U.S. air traffic system in search of victims. My purgatorial circle was a runway hold in Albuquerque, followed by the resulting travel carnage at O'Hare. In this case, my rescuer is Vonnegut, a gift from Nora on the occasion of my 44th birthday.
She's given me Vonnegut before, and seems to grasp his significance. On Christmas round about 1973 or so, my sister, Lisa, gave me Breakfast of Champions, which changed my life in unaccountable ways. I holed up with the book all afternoon Christmas and into the next day, and came out the other side convicted to writing.
I gave that book away - to Lisa as a wedding present - so Nora a couple of years ago gave me a new copy of Breakfast of Champions, and I read it fresh with whatever wisdom I've acquired in the decades since. It held up well. I ended up thinking Vonnegut is wrong in fundamental ways, all dark determinism I simply can't embrace. But he is funnier, if anything, than when I read him a quarter century ago, and the funadamental insight I had then endured, richer for the years.
The insight is this: The written word is written by someone. The book has an author. A writer has a voice.
The book is a collection of early Vonnegut short stories, and it is interesting precisely because it does not have that voice I came to know so well. There are sparks of it here and there, but it is mostly just workmanlike prose, solid and often funny, economical and sometimes imperfect - a writer in the process of acquiring the voice that later so change me.
I finally made it to Cleveland. And so it goes.
Assuming the weather cooperatres, I'm off to Cleveland for the week to the International Science and Engineering fair, where high school students show off their best work to the world. Should be fun.
Lissa and I were visited this afternoon by an elegant little lesser goldfinch, first sitting on a sprinkler head, then perched on the iceplant picking out some sort of meal. We had them last year, light enough to perch on the sunflowers and eat their seeds, but we'd both forgotten, and had to pull out the bird books to identify him. I'll have to put out sunflower seeds for him. Hope he hangs around.
Out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field.
This whole naming thing is incredibly important.
I do not write fiction, but if I did, here is what I would write. It's a story about a lonely middle-aged man who lives in a little town in the desert of California. These are pathetic towns, where the marginal go to live, all real estate fantasy and sad tourism. Imagine an old weed-grown miniature golf course that no one's played on in years. I once sat in a McDonalds in Yucca Valley and saw a poor old leathery woman buy a small cup of coffee, drink it half down and then fill the empty space with those little plastic things of half-and-half. Food.
The man befriends a desert rat of a woman, and they sit in her backyard on spring days and she teaches him the names of the birds that frequent the feeder she lovingly stocks with seed. Knowing the names of the birds becomes incredibly important for the man, where knowledge is dominion and the name is the token of the knowledge.
I do not know my Bible well enough to be sure, but that's what I think is going on in that passage of Genesis I quote above. God bids Adam name things, and therein lies the human's dominion over every beast of the field, and the fowl of the air.
I love to learn the names of things.
The Philadelphia Daily News concludes: Johnny Unitas still dead.
OK, this is weird. Some guy just gave me 125 blogshares. I think it's a scheme to get me to link to his blog and thus drive up its value. I think it might have just worked.
I finally overcame the obstacles and inertia and got a working working GNOME 2.3.x built. I had to bail out on the much preferable jhbuild scripts because of some unexplainable auto tools problems, but prayer to the God of CVS and the sacrifice of five sheep seems to have brought some marginal success. I still don't wanna be a hacker, but now at least I can play one a bit to get some work done.
Come to think of it, we could celebrate my birthday today. Nora got me Bagombo Snuff Box. (We have a Vonnegut thing.) Lissa made me sugar-free strawberry pie. (We have a sugar-free thing.)
One time when young I was on the radio on May 5, and I played the Beatles Birthday and dedicated it to Karl Marx:
You say it's your birthday
It's my birthday too - yeah.
Dunno why, but that has always amused me, to this day bringing a grin. I amuse myself, and believe that is a good thing.
You say it's your birthday
Well it's my birthday too - yeah
You say it's your birthday
We're gonna have a good time
I'm glad it's your birthday
Happy birthday to you.
I'm sure beating the French totally rocked at the time, but things in recent decades have gotten out of hand. So let us today celebrate not cerveza, in which a minor Mexican holiday is transmogrified into an opportunity for the sales of beer. Let us instead celebration the liberation of The Netherlands from the Nazis. Could drink beer I guess, if you want to.
Baseball's very mathematical, a game of discreet events. I think that's why it works so well on radio. Just one thing happens at a time. Fastball up. Breaking ball away. Outfield shifted around toward left. Jones delivers, and it's a ground ball to short - Gregorio up with it, fires to first, in time for the out. There is much more to it than that, of course, texture beneath the discreet events, but the steps can all be captured verbally.
I grew up on Vin Scully (go ahead, click on the link, it's worth it, I'll wait). When I was a kid, had a record album, a centennial history of baseball, and on it Scully told the story of a pitcher who had four strikeouts in a single inning. That is possible because of rule 6.05(c) , which spells out in rather complicated detail the consequences should the catcher not catch the third strike while first base is unoccupied. Four strikeouts in an inning is possible if a batter reaches first safely under 6.05(c) and the pitcher strikes out the side.
It's a rare occurence - 24 times in National League history (twice last year!) and 18 times in American League history. Chuck Finley has amazingly done it thrice.
Out at the ballpark this afternoon, I saw it happen. It was Triple-A ball, the local nine (the Isotopes) against the Salt Lake Stingers. Greg Jones, a right-handed throwing relief pitcher whose statistics suggested no great promise, took the hill in the bottom of the sixth to face 'Topes second baseman Jesus Medrano. I wish at this point that I kept a better scorecard, and could give you the pitch count, but you will have to settle for this - Medrano swung at a third strike that was in the dirt, it kicked past Stingers catcher Wil Nieves and went to the backstop, Medrano sprinting down to first ahead of Nieves' throw.
Jones struck out 'Topes left-fielder Chris Wakeland, Medrano stole second, then Jones walked Chad Allen. Allen is our big trouble at the plate, had tripled earlier, so Jones didn't seem to want to give him much. Designated hitter Rob Stratton hitting behind Allen is weak, so the walk seemed a safe bet. And sure enough, Stratton K'd, bringing up 'Topes third bagger Jason Wood. I leaned over to Lissa, as baseball smart know-it-all, and pointed out that Jones had the opportunity for minor baseball history. She gave me a look of confusion, as if she did not fully grasp the elegant possibilities offered by 6.05(c). But Jones did it, and some small piece of Triple-A history is now his.
And the 'Topes won. It was a sloppy game, but they won.
I've not yet seen a triple play in person, nor a no-hitter. But I've seen a pitcher strike out four batters in an inning.
Ran across this treasure today while cleaning:
The saguaro is an icon of the southwest, so it's something of a surprise to many to find that we don't have any of them here in Albuquerque. They pretty much don't grow anywhere in New Mexico naturally, requiring careful nurturing - winters too cold, etc. But in Tucson, where I spent several days last week, they're ubiquitious. And such a stunning plan. Maybe it's because their outstretched arms give them a human form. Whatever. I really got a kick out of driving up the narrow little road to the USGS lab on Tumamoc Hil, seeing the road lined with saguaro and the amazing green-trunked palo verde, still in spring bloom.
Best of all was my good fortune to be in Tucson at the tail end of an ocotillo bloom. I love the desert.
Sitting in an airplane at 30,000 feet, you can still shop. Skymall catalogs sitting in the seatback pocket in front of you. Just in case you need to shop.