Friday Notes (Jul 26, 2024)

It has been an interesting summer. The actual weather has been on the cool and rainy side; the political weather has been … words fail. What I’m seeing — the apparent final death knell of the original American Dream — makes me speechless. A deeper question, did we lose our way or hit our ceiling, tasks me.

Regardless, there is a looming deadline in November that overhangs my thoughts and makes it hard to find much interest in anything else.

Regardless of that, Friday Notes marches on.

Just to finish my opening thoughts, there is a version of humanity in our art and literature that reflects what individuals can rise to. Yet humankind rarely does overall. Societies seem defined more by the worst common denominator than the best. Societies tend towards another thing art and literature show us, what individuals can sink to.

One of my earliest posts invokes the example of a barrel of wine. If you add just a teaspoon of sewage, you end up with a barrel of sewage. Which seems to be what we’re sitting in politically these days. But if you start with a barrel of sewage, adding a teaspoon (or even a gallon) of wine does not result in a barrel of wine.

That early post was about entropy. A more recent post discussed social entropy. The barrel of wine example illustrates why the lowest common denominator has such power to bring down the social average. The more antagonistic the additive, the less of it required to significantly change the character of the wine. Only a tiny amount of something with the character of sewage destroys the barrel.

Though, let’s not get carried away comparing society to a barrel of wine — we’re not, nor have ever been, as refined as that. The better comparison is a stew, a mixture of ingredients, some of which aren’t great on their own, but which contribute to the stew when boiled down. Stews can have many ingredients and are harder to ruin. Even so, some additives are inimical. Sewage certainly is.

My deeper question involves what the social arc of the last two-and-a-half decades says about us. Are we inevitably drawn towards attractors in the realm of all possible societies? Or is our overall progress like climbing a sand dune — almost as much backsliding as forward progress? Does the backsliding put a limit on how high we can climb?

What I’m seeing these days makes me wonder. The graceful exit of Biden and the energetic replacement by Harris seems to have changed the dynamic from dismal to guardedly hopeful.

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Here in Minnesota, we’ve been a drought for a while, so all the rain we’ve gotten lately has been nice. In fact, we’re no longer in a drought condition:

[Click image for latest version from U.S. Drought Monitor.¹]

The central USA has generally been getting greater-than-average precipitation. This map shows the deviation in normal rainfall over the last 180 days:

[Click image for latest version from U.S. Drought Monitor.¹]

Shows why we, at least, are no longer in a drought. We’ve been getting more than our fair share of rain.

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As a young programmer, I needed to print my code to debug it. I would spend futile hours staring at the screen searching for an elusive bug. Then, once I finally printed a listing of the code, the bug would often leap off the page as I leafed through the printout walking back to my desk. If it didn’t, it almost always showed up on the first read-through.

As a result, over a twenty-year software career, I filled several boxes with reams of scrap paper. (A box holds ten reams, and a ream holds 500 sheets.) After many years of diagrams and calculations and notes, I’m finally making a dent in my supply. (Most of the notes I make are made on these.)

Over time, I learned to debug effectively on the screen. In part because displays and fonts got so much better. They’re like paper now. (I usually configure my editors to use a white background with black “ink” — I’ve never understood the attraction of “dark mode”. Reminds me of the old days of black CRT screens.)

At some point I stopped adding scrap paper to the heap, and now I’m finally seeing the heap diminish. I just had to open one of the boxes to replenish the six-to-eight-inch stack I keep on a shelf to resupply my clipboards.

There is also that work provided recycle bins for paper at some point, so printouts from then on had a fair chance of landing in one. This was in the late 1980s and early 1990s that the heap grew. It has taken until now to open another box.

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Justice & Fairness versus Love & Compassion. I suppose it might be considered a flaw that I socially lean strongly towards the former pair. On a personal level, I’m more inclined towards a balance, but I know many generally favor the latter over the former.

The real trick seems finding a balance. Still working on it.

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I’ve noticed that many of those arguing for atheism also report essentially “escaping” from faith in some form of Christianity, Catholicism being most common. Recently, I encountered a few who’ve gone the other way, from strongly supported atheism to equally strongly supported belief.

I think it’s those who’ve switched sides in almost any major life issue who seem the least likely to feel agnostic. I remember in my youth, when I briefly gave up red meat and white flour and sugar, I was sometimes vehement about it to the point of evangelism.

To some extent, it’s the need some have to feel gnostic (certain) about reality. I think some have a need to believe in something. For them it’s a matter of flipping a switch, always one position or the other.

Others seem more prone to seeing both sides and are therefore less likely to pick a side. I’m on their side.

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Watched the MLB All-Star Game for the first time in a few years and realized why I haven’t watched it in a few years (and probably won’t watch it again). For one thing, the only place left in life I suffer commercials is YouTube, and those are mercifully short.

Must have seen the same damn dumb ads over and over in the space of that game. Makes me wonder if it’s hard to sell commercial airtime for the ASG. In contrast, the Super Bowl is known for the quality of its ads.

Along with democracy, baseball seems to be dying, too. Or at least evolving in ways that are sometimes hard to like. I suspect both decline for similar reasons. Social entropy.

Some random baseball thoughts:

Baseball is a game of pitching, batting and fielding. It’s also a game of inches, luck, and mind. Every pitch a mental and physical contest between pitcher and batter. It’s like the surface of the sea. Not that much happening on the surface — the occasional storm, maybe — but look beneath the surface, and a rich and complex world appears. Baseball is sedate, but not boring; you can have a conversation at a game. To paraphrase George Will, baseball is a game like the Grand Canyon is a hole in the ground.

In honor of being halfway through the season, some Twins humor from back in the days when it was painful to be a fan (see many previous posts). One way to deal with pain is to write about it!

There was this Outer Limits parody:

There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling Twins game. If we wish to make it lousier, we will bring in the bullpen. If we wish to make it sadder, we will fill the disabled list. We will control the home runs. We will control the umpire calls. We can roll the ball, right past the SS. We can change the score from a 5-0 lead to a devastating loss. For the next game, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear. We repeat: There is nothing wrong with your television set. You are about to participate in a great misadventure. You are about to experience the team mystery which reaches from every player to… The Twins Limits.

I tried to change the original text as little as possible.

There were, of course, Haiku (so much fun to write):

They were all based on true events!

Of course, there is the inevitable limerick (also fun to write):

I even had a go at Paul Simon:

50 Ways to Lose the Ballgame

But I’m not sure I hit the target. More an easy a play on that memorable chorus. (My apologies to Mr. Simon.) The important thing here is that I can delete another text file.

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Speaking of baseball hot dogs (one of my favorite foods)! Per Wikipedia:

“According to one story, the use of the complete phrase hot dog (in reference to sausage) was coined by the newspaper cartoonist Thomas Aloysius “Tad” Dorgan around 1900 in a cartoon recording the sale of hot dogs during a New York Giants baseball game at the Polo Grounds. He may have used the term because he did not know how to spell “dachshund”. No copy of the apocryphal cartoon has ever been found.”

The idea of sausages goes way back to Olden Tymes. The idea of putting the sausage in a bread bun seems fairly recent, though. It’s not known for sure who did it first, but one strong candidate is Harry M. Stevens who worked at the aforementioned Polo Grounds in 1901. Supposedly he ran out of the waxed paper usually used and had to substitute small rolls instead.

In any event, a favorite food. Simple and basic. I’m not a fan of ketchup or yellow mustard or relish. I like cheese or chili but am fine with just the meat and the bun. A hot dog for dinner is kind of standard around here.

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I was curious about my posting frequency, especially now that I’m on a second platform (and still trying to decide what to do about both). As far as my posts here, the twice-per-year extract I do gives me the data to figure that out:

I was a bit surprised at the clumping, but I think it actually makes sense. It represents the daily cycle. Obviously, I only post when I’m awake, so there’s a natural circadian rhythm to posting.

Interesting also that the usual time-between-posts is strongest for just one day with strong, but decreasing, signals for two, three, and four days. There are no big spikes in the data after the eight days represented here.

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Lastly, here’s the start of a piece about geometry that, ironically given its content, never went anywhere:

Given the consensus of our experience (over all times and all peoples), we are justified in accepting our apprehension of extent — of 3D space — as axiomatic. We recognize it as a continuum of unique locations.

We specify a location by its coordinates in an arbitrary grid we imagine on the space. (GPS coordinates are one example.) Locations are unique in virtue of unique coordinates. There is an identity: specific coordinates comprise a unique location; a specific location has unique coordinates. A corollary: two locations with the same coordinates are the same location.

Coordinates give us the concept distance. We can compare the coordinates of two locations to see if they are near or far from each other. The natural (mathematical) way of doing this automatically picks out the straight-line distance — the shortest distance — but let’s do it without math.

Given two locations we can imagine a path between them. Define this path as a set of contiguous locations between the path ends (the two given locations). Assume there is a measure over the locations in the path telling us how many locations there are along it. The full measure of locations along any path gives us the distance along that path.

Supposing multiple different paths between two given locations, these paths must have different distance measures. One of them will have the least number of locations along it. This is the shortest path. Which usually turns out to be a straight line.

But not always!

I was leading up to talking about geodesics and shortest distance (and maybe coordinate invariance). Normally, the shortest distance implies the shortest path timewise, but not always. In Minkowski space, for instance, the longer the path between two points, the less time elapses. That’s the foundation of Special Relativity.

But I decided to leave it for another time.

Stay for hot dogs, my friends! Go forth and spread beauty and light.

^[1] The U.S. Drought Monitor is jointly produced by the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the United States Department of Agriculture, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Map(s) courtesy of NDMC.

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