… or almost autumn. But at 7,000 feet, leaves turn a lot faster than they do down in the lowlands.
The place was absolutely crawling with deer. We lost track of how many we saw.
As pretty as these colors are, they are already fading – I should have done this three weeks ago for maximum effect.
The hazy sky behind the trees was the result of a cold front coming down from Idaho where a number of fires are still burning. It was 57 degrees up here last evening.
A patch of deciduous color amidst the scrub and pines.
We stopped at Box Lake (more of a puddle, really – the Goodwoman of the House is from Maine, and she knows what real lakes look like). Had dinner on some rocks while enjoying the view. You can see how low the water level is, the drought is affecting all of our reservoirs.
Someone had built a home worthy of Scuppers the Sailor Dog.
(One of my favorite books as a child, I was tickled to find a copy again later.)
On the way down, a final burst of color in a parking area.
Many small groups of deer, in twos (mothers with children), threes, and fives – but no greater clusters than that. It was getting dark and we had to drive slowly because they were crossing the road frequently.
I was born in 1951. This book came out in 1952. I may have been given Dick and Jane in school, but this is the book I remember learning to read from. I have never lost my love of it, and all the ones that followed. The complete Peanuts series has been coming out from Fantagraphic Books since 2004, and the series of 25 volumes should be complete by 2016. By that time I may just be able to afford them. They’re not cheap, but they are lovely. I’ve already collected the complete Calvin and Hobbes and the complete Far Side, and having a complete Peanuts collection has long been one of my dreams. Schulz was a master.
This put me in mind of the Charles Addams cartoon which shows a bunch of people clustered around a giant octopus emerging from a manhole and grabbing a passer-by. Two guys walking behind the crowd who can’t see what’s going on say “It doesn’t take much to collect a crowd in New York.”
It’s true, too. Times Square was the scene of a dramatic self-immolation at 2 P.M. on Saturday, July 18, 1970, when Hin Chi Yeung poured two cans of gasoline on himself and struck a match. I sadly happened across this event just after he had been extinguished; apparently he was getting poor grades and was distraught at the prospect of shaming his family who had sacrificed much to get him here to study. The crowds were insane. It was surreal – I thought someone had set fire to a department store mannequin at first, never thinking it might have been a real person.
On another note: See those “Cooled by Refrigeration” signs on the marquee back there? That was a huge draw in New York. “All around, people looking half dead, Walking on the sidewalk, hotter than a match head” is an accurate description of summer in New York, and for 50¢ you could pop into a theatre, sit down, watch the newsreel, the short, the cartoon, and the feature presentation… and then do it again and again for as long as you pleased. It was a cheap way to get out of the heat. Back then it was no big deal if you were late to a show… you just waited for the next round to start and caught what you had missed. Those were the days.
A post on George Takei’s Facebook feed displayed this photo of Earth and two other planets seen from the surface of Mars, purportedly taken from one of the rovers up there.
The one on Takei’s feed had an arrow pointing to the lower dot which said, “You are here.”
It’s a pretty picture, but my BS bells went off because there’s just something “off” about the photo, specifically those clouds and the fact that the three dots are the only things visible in the sky.
By the time I saw this, the post had gathered over 2,000 comments, and a brief perusal led me to this post over at Discover, which explains that the image is a computer-generated “planetarium” scene, as witnessed by the little “NE” in the lower left hand corner of the screen.
Sweetly enough, the article also posted this picture…
… which is a real picture, “the first image ever taken of Earth from the surface of a planet beyond the Moon. It was taken by the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit one hour before sunrise on the 63rd Martian day, or sol, of its mission. (March 8, 2004).” Found at NASA’s Flickr Feed, where you can read more information about the shot.
The tiny speck put me immediately in mind of the now-iconic photo of Earth taken by Voyager 1 as it was leaving the earth.
Astronomer Carl Sagan had requested NASA to point Voyager’s cameras back toward home, and this was the resulting image.
In his book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, astronomer Carl Sagan related his thoughts on a deeper meaning of the photograph:
From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
—Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, 1997 reprint, pp. xv–xvi
This quote, and much additional information about the photo and how it was taken, was found at Wikipedia. I had seen the picture and read the quote before, but it never ceases to move me.
Confession: I can’t do higher math.[1] I always wanted to be a doctor, but calculus put a rapid end to that dream, because you need calculus for the pre-med Chemistry degree and screw whole bunches of that, with apologies and honor and homage to my freshman chem teacher, Dr. Alex T. Rowland of Gettysburg College, a good man and a fine professor. But I’ve always loved science, and have stood in awe of the glory and majesty and miracle of the universe from its largest expanses to its smallest bits and pieces. I think I owe that love of science to the hours and hours my mother spent allowing me to roam the halls of the Hayden[2] Planetarium and the Museum of Natural History.
Publicity shots for “Pepper Young’s Wife”, TV-Radio Mirror, March 1957
I loved that rocket – it was in a darkened room, and each section was illuminated by a different color. The fuel chamber had a deep, red glow and I could stare at it for hours. This was one of my favorite books. Alas, my inability to comprehend the fine points of differentiation meant that I had to spend my life as a linguist and not as a scientist, but the love of understanding our world, from the quantum to the cosmic scale, never left me. All I can do is peep through the keyhole to where the big boys and girls are playing, and hope to understand as much as I can from there.
Years ago I happened across a copy of Powers of Ten, a companion volume to two films of the same name which were based on the book Cosmic View (1957) by Dutch educator Kees Boeke.
Later, this map of the known universe from National Geographic served to pretty much bork my mind out completely.
Trouble is, it doesn’t stop there.
I posted the above map earlier, along with a photo of Hubbles ultra-deep field image, and just recently came across this mind-bending video done by the folks at NASA/ESA:
The animations were based on the red-shift values of the various galaxies captured in the image. The thing is, that is by no means all of it – it’s only the part we were able to capture with our rather primitive (albeit wonderful) instruments.
So what is our place in the universe? Scientists will be grappling with that question for as long as man continues to be relevant. The president of my church, Thomas S. Monson, said in 2001, ” I acknowledge that I do not understand the processes of creation, but I accept the fact of it.” Taken in the context of the rest of his quotation, this has been interpreted by some to mean that we should reject science in favor of faith. I do not see it that way. The miracle of creation, in all its massive and miniscule glory, is before me, and I must accept the fact of it. But another fact remains: for all we know, we know virtually nothing. As tiny as the pale blue dot is in the immeasurably vast universe, so is all our scientific knowledge in the face of all there is to be known. I believe firmly that we do have a purpose and a place in all the vastness, and that purpose is to raise the human condition, to make life better in all possible ways for ourselves and for all whom we encounter. This is sufficient for me. In the words of Hillel, “the rest is commentary.”
And all this because of a single “fake” picture posted on George Takei’s Facebook feed. Thanks, George.
The Old Wolf has spoken.
1Just because I can’t do math doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate it.
A mathematical friend of mine assures me that this equation evaluates to ⅓. I couldn’t say for the two crore question, but I’ll never forget how to write it. See, it’s a limerick, and limericks I can remember. All of them. Darnit.
“Integral zee squared dee zee
From one to the cube root of three
Times the cosine
Of three π over nine
Equals log of the cube root of e.”
[2]With thanks for the correction to Haydn Rawlinson, who apparently knows not only how his own name is spelled but also the Planetarium’s.
Times Square theaters by day, in New York City. The Times Building, Loew’s Theatre, Hotel Astor, Gaiety Theatre and other landmarks are featured in this January, 1938 photo. (Bofinger, E.M./Courtesy NYC Municipal Archives) via Urbanobservatory
Times Square, 1943, found at Shorpy
Times Square, between November 1944 and January 1945 based on the “Tomorrow the World” and “3 is a family” marquees.
Times Square in a blizzard, 1947
Times Square, 1949
Times Square at night, circa 1950
Times Square, circa 1951
Times Square, 1953
Times Square, 1954
Times Square, 1955
Times Square, 1955 – wide view.
Times Square at night, raining – 1957
Times Square at night – 1957
Times Square, 1961. Note the Horn and Hardart Automat.
Times Square, 1964. Found at Frog Blog (Now inactive)
Times Square, 1966
Times Square, 1966, by night
Times Square, 1967
By the 1970’s, Times Square had become a cesspool of smut, as shown in the following images:
Times Square, 1973
I remember this Playland well – You could play Fascination there if you were over 18. There was one transient dude who would park himself right by the entrance and give passers-by the razzberry.
Time Square at night
Filthiest!
I remember one theatre on a side street that advertised “3 Hours of Solid Beavers!”
In the mid 1990’s, Mayor Rudy Giuliani led a campaign to close the smut houses and restore the Times Square area to something more tourist-friendly. Supporters claim it’s an improvement, detractors point to the “Disneyfication” of the area. Having grown up there, I’m in the first camp. The 1970’s were depressing, and I’m glad that era is gone.
I won’t be around to see what Times Square looks like when my grandchildren take their grandchildren there, but I’ll bet it will still be something amazing to look at.
Yesterday I posted about the rice on the chessboard problem, and after I finished, my mind got… squirrel!
Well, yeah, that’s about how it works. I started wondering how long that much rice would last if you were feeding the entire population on a daily diet of 2027 calories. All of this is hypothetical, because living on nothing but rice is not great nutrition, but it would keep you alive – sort of – and a good percentage of the world’s population would kiss your feet if you provided them with that much rice (19.7 ounces) daily on a regular basis.
Since that squirrel just trotted through my mind, I’d like to pause here and put in a plug for an awesome book, Earthsearch by John Cassidy. This little wonder is a geography museum for kids that you can hold in your lap, full of games and facts and hands-on stuff. I was reminded of this by the fact that one section actually contains 4.8 ounces of rice, less than half of what the average kid (8-14 years old) needs per day. This is divided again into two bags, 2.8 ounces and 2.0 ounces respectively – and a spinner that shows your odds (1:20) of being born in the Western world. If your spin is lucky, you get to eat almost 500 calories. Spin poorly, and all you get is about 280 calories, enough to keep a kid hungry for a while and drive the point of world malnutrition home.
Back to our regularly scheduled programming: I’m also assuming that everyone is an adult male, 5’11” tall and about 150 lbs, which is where the 2027 calories come from. Of course that’s going to fluctuate wildly when you factor in the dietary needs of women, children, and people of different sizes and metabolisms. Still, it’s good enough for government work – all I’m doing here is coming up with a nice round number that my mind can wrap itself around.
Thanks to a handy dandy spreadsheet, I didn’t need to do much math.
461,168,602,000 metric tons of rice (bigger than Mount Everest, remember), at 35,273.962 ounces per ton is equivalent to 16,267,243,742,541,100 (16.2 quadrillion) ounces.
Today, the world’s population, according to Worldometers is estimated at 7,066,853,164.
If it takes 19.7 ounces of rice to feed our average citizen, then we’re going to require 139,266,082,699.99 (139.2 billion) ounces of rice to feed the world for a day.
Which means that with his reward from King Shihram, Sissa ibn Dahir could feed today’s world for 116,807 days, or the equivalent of 320 years. That is a lot of sushi.
Sunday’s Retail by Norm Feuti – a strip I read with great relish – brings up an interesting point, and the commentary, written by what seems to be a preponderance of retail employees, got me thinking.
(Click the thumbnail for the full-size strip)
The question revolves around the practice of using brick-and-mortar stores as a showroom, leading to an ultimate purchase online or from a competitor.
This is an intriguing discussion and can see both sides of the equation. Reading “Not Always Right” on a regular basis, I am astonished beyond measure at the rudeness, arrogance, stupidity, and sense of entitlement people bring into a store, and always do my best to brighten the day of any retail worker I happen to encounter. And to keep the communication honest and open, some days I do better than others. As a customer, however, my main difficulty with retail help is a sense of overinvestment – far too many retail workers (admittedly, perhaps, because they have to work with so many asshats on a daily basis and have reached the end of their rope) begin acting as though a return or a complaint were going to affect their bottom line, and they go out of their way to be like Mordac the Preventer. The knife can cut both ways.
The whole concept of using a brick-and-mortar store as a showroom is an unavoidable part of the e-commerce landscape. Customers *will* do it – I confess that I’ve done it myself. But when one is living on a fixed and limited income, pennies count. Unlike the use of smartphones in a movie theater, there has been not been time for society to develop any sort of “retail etiquette” by which it is generally accepted that this practice is “not done in polite society,” but in this economy I can forgive the practice because I know what it’s like to go without those eyeglasses or that dentist appointment in favor of food on the table.
We need things. We shop for them. The nature of retail, combined with the advertising industry, is ultimately to convince the consumer that he or she has a burning need for something which they had never thought of before. As a result, if we’re out shopping for Widget A, and we happen to see Widget B on a shelf which really calls to me, I see no reason to feel obligated to buy either one from the store I’m in if I can get it for less online (including shipping) or at another store (factoring in the cost of gas, and my time to get there).
This is not new. Watch “A Miracle on 34th Street” (the old version) and you’ll see that the concept of store loyalty is tenuous at best. As annoying as this is for store owners, and by metonymy, for store employees, it will only continue to get worse as bandwidth increases and smartphones get smarter. If brick and mortar outlets are to survive, they will need to adapt, and I’d be willing to bet that in 10 years we will have seen some very innovative solutions that have not been thought of at present.
Ultimately, it comes down to choosing our battles. I’d much rather deal head-on with the day-to-day issue of customer rudeness by creating (were I to own and operate a public business) an atmosphere where I could feel comfortable hanging this sign on my door:
This might cost me some business, but it’s the kind of business I don’t want anyway. I suspect (as long as I was running a business that was built on a sound model to begin with) that I’d attract more clientele that appreciated the opportunity to shop where they wouldn’t have to bump into the asshats themselves. I think I’d end up with more business that way, even accounting for the folks that were just window shopping or store hopping.
On September 10th, I posted An Open Letter to Jihadistan. This was addressed to the violent Islamic extremists of the world, rather than to the approximately 1.7 billion Muslims in the world today. Today I share my thoughts with the rest of you.
America is not waging a war against Islam. If you believe that, you are being lied to by people who are perverting your religion for their political purposes.
America is not responsible for, nor does it support the maker of “The Innocence of Muslims.” This repugnant movie was made by a bigoted sub-human who does not represent the feelings of the vast majority of Americans.
Sheik Hassan Nasrallah of Lebanon today urged the Lebanse to increase their protests, saying “The ones who should be held accountable and boycotted are those who support and protect the producers, namely the US administration.” The US administration does not support the producers of this film, nor does it agree with its message. Nasrallah and other sheikhs and imams around the world calling for protests and violence against the US and the west, are speaking out of ignorance, and in so doing they are twisting the religion of peace into something that is not found anywhere in the Qur’an.
Despite the memories of the terrible events of 9/11 being still fresh in the minds of Americans, our land continues to be a haven for people of the Muslim faith, with over 2,000 mosques and countless masjids. Like you, we have our bigots and our sociopaths – but these do not now, nor have they ever represented us.
We believe that freedom trumps tyranny. If you wish to live in an Islamic republic, then live in an Islamic republic. If you wish to abide by shari’a, abide by shari’a. But let these be a republic and a law where the people are allowed to determine what that means, rather than living in fear that a different opinion or a different lifestyle will bring injury or death to them and their families.
I exhort you to stand down from these protests, this outrage, this violence which has nothing to do with America but rather the political aspirations of a few deluded men. Put your energy into building up your societies and improving the lives of your fellow citizens, and I pledge to you that I will do the same. The vast majority of my countrymen desire only the same things you do – the freedom to establish your lives and provide for your families in safety, and without fear. Things will not be perfect, and mistakes will be made, but none of us should allow the frailties of men to stand in the way of peace and progress.
I leave you with a quote that has been attributed to Marcus Aurelius, but whose origin is unsure. Nevertheless it speaks to me, and speaks the words of my heart.
“Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.”
May we desire peace, and pursue it; may we sow kindness, and reap prosperity.
When I was young, I heard the story of the rice and the chessboard.
King Shihram of India was an oppressive tyrant. One of his subjects, Sissa ibn Dahir, invented the game of chess as a strategic (and social) training tool, and the king was so pleased that he asked Sissa what reward he wanted. Sissa’s answer was that the king should put one grain of rice (or wheat, in some versions) on the first square of a chessboard, two grains on the second square, four grains on the third square, eight grains on the fourth square, and so on, doubling the number of grains of rice with each square.
The King thought he had gotten off easy, but the simple math of exponential increase demonstrated that Sissa was no fool: the total weight of rice would exceed the weight of all living things on earth and make a heap larger than Mount Everest.
I always wondered just how much rice that was, but back then we didn’t have Wikipedia, and I don’t think such an “inconsequential” article would have made it into the Brittanica. Now, however, all is different.
An illustration of the operating principle is below:
The abbreviations refer to Mega (million), Giga (billion), Tera (trillion), Peta (quadrillion), and Exa (quintillion).
This principle was used by Ray Kurzweil who coined the term “The Second Half of the Chessboard,” referring to the point at which an exponentially growing factor begins to have a significant economic impact on an organization’s overall business strategy. The example above shows that the first square of the second half contains more rice than the entire first half combined.
Mathematically, the total number of grains of rice can be expressed as
(or so I’m told), which resolves to 264 – 1 (or so I’m told.) Dammit Jim, I’m a linguist, not a mathematician.
On the entire chessboard there would be 264 − 1 = 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 grains of rice (that’s 18.4 quintillion), weighing 461,168,602,000 metric tons, which would be a mountain of rice larger than Mount Everest. This is around 1,000 times the global production of rice in 2010 (464,000,000 metric tons).
Looking at the amazing Humphrys map comparing the heights of various mountains, look at how tiny St. Peter’s cathedral is in comparison (click the map for full size).
Even had King Shihram been able to pay, Sissa would have had difficulty finding a place to put his reward. And that’s a whole lot of sushi.
Playing in the World Game 