ARTIST: Clarence E. Quick
TITLE: Come Go with Me
Lyrics and Chords

Ma href="http://www.guntheranderson.com/v/data/comegowi.htm">Come Go with Me

Dom dom dom dom dom, dom be dooby
Dom dom dom dom dom, dom be dooby
Dom dom dom dom dom, dom be dooby dom
Whoa whoa whoa whoa

/ G Em7 Am7 D7 / : / C7 G /

Love, love me darling, come and go with me
Please don't send me way beyond the sea
I need you darling so come go with me

Come come come come, come into my heart
Tell me darling we will never part
I need you darling so come go with me
Whoa whoa whoa whoa

... / C7 GG7 /

{Refrain}
Yes I need you, yes I really need you
Please say you'll never leave me
Well, say you never, yes, you really never
You never give me a chance

/ C7 - - - / G - G7 - / 1st / D7 - - - /

Come come come come, come into my heart...

{Refrain}

Love, love me darling, come and go with me...

Come on go with me
{Repeat to fade}

Wait, wrong song. Sorry.

I was somewhat surprised that Wired magizine profiled Alton Brown in the June issue. I'm a self-confessed food geek, and Mr. Brown is the food geek's food geek. I particularly enjoy his use of everyday objects to model the chemical reactions going on on our cooktops and in our ovens.

Given the Sharp Sauce thread, I figured that there may be some food geeks lurking around here who aren't already aware of the genius of Alton Brown and Good Eats. (No affiliation, etc, just a fan.)

Play "The Innsmouth Look," it's a wonderful love song.

Alex

Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That hill and valley, dale and field,
And all the craggy mountains yield ...

But that's "live", not "go" - more settling down rather than continuing on life's journey together. Perhaps they'll share their shoyu

I, and all my friends who have tried it so far, are Alton Brown. I have good friends.

On Jordan's stormy banks I stand
And cast a wishful eye
To Canaan's fair and happy land,
Where my possesions lie.

Chorus
I am bound for the promised land,
I am bound for the promised land
O who will come and go with me
I am bound for the promised land.

O the transporting rapt'rous scene
That rises to my sight;
Sweet fields arrayed in living green
And rivers of Delight.

Chorus
I am bound for the promised land,
I am bound for the promised land
O who will come and go with me
I am bound for the promised land.

There generous fruits that never fail
On trees immortal grow;
There rocks and hills and brooks and vales
With milk and honey flow.

Chorus
I am bound for the promised land,
I am bound for the promised land
O who will come and go with me
I am bound for the promised land.

Soon will the Lord my soul prepare
For joys beyond the skies,
Where never-ceasing pleasures roll,
And praises never die.

Chorus
I am bound for the promised land,
I am bound for the promised land
O who will come and go with me
I am bound for the promised land.

(the cats are ignoring my singing)

(an allusive way of saying if I get to go along with all you folks, it doesn't really matter which direction we're going, as Mr. Bloch pointed out...)

I, and all my friends who have tried it so far, are Alton Brown. I have good friends.

I am Morimoto. Yay.

(The only problem with the test is that it didn't mention curry.)

Alex

What happens: You see a post that reads "This is interesting" and a URL on someone's LiveJournal. You click on the URL.

This causes two things to happen: First, it posts a message that says "This is interesting" and a URL in your LiveJournal, and second, it installs a password-stealing trojan on your machine.

And aside from Devilled Eggs, Lobster fra Diavolo and Devil's Food Cake, what's on the menu? That's what I'd like to know...

Recently I bought a few items of what I think of as Low Food: Things that are damn odd, with strange, crude labels.

I'm not sure how I'm going to use this can of . . .

"SMOKED SAUSAGE"

http://home.comcast.net/~stefan_jones/prairie_belt_lo.JPG

Yes, the can says "smoked sausage," but these are vienna sausages, the squishy meat cylinders that are the cheapest canned meat product you can buy that doesn't have a picture of a cat on it, or a dog in it.

(Poor Vienna! How did its name get attached to these extruded cylinders of floor sweepings from the Utility Grade Animal Protein Works? A more honest name would be Bum Chow.)

The ingredients include Beef Tripe, Pork Skins, Pork Spleens, Pork Stomachs and Smoke Flavoring. This is the kind of stuff that went into pet food before pet food became a boutique item.

And that kid . . . what kind of hellish poverty has he grown up in, to be so excited about that Service Suggestion of pan-species sausage? (I picture family dinners consisting of ramen noodles and dandelion leaves, and perhaps the occasional small egg when a twister scours the trailer park's trees of bird nests.)

I think this can will go into the rear of the pantry, or in the trunk of my car, for consumption in case of dire emergency. (Say, if Mount Hood blows its top, burying the area in caustic ash that takes weeks to dig out of.)

I *do* know what I'm going to do with this can of . . .

MARVELOUS BROKEN SHRIMP!

http://home.comcast.net/~stefan_jones/marvelous_broken_lo.JPG

I toss these things, and a can of crab meat or minced clams, in clam chowder, turning it into a kind of seafood stew.

"Marvelous Broken Shrimp" kind of sounds like a string of words that might appear in a piece of spam to throw off mail filters.

Hmmm. Spam. Next time I should pick up a variety of Spam Luncheon Meat knock-offs.

But my immediate reaction is:

I'm a man without conviction, I'm a man who doesn't know
How to sell a contradiction, you come and go, you come and go...

The exploit (according to a friend of mine who volunteers in LJ support) is a fairly simple matter of a Javascript redirect that then does a form-submit that mimics what happens when you click submit on the LJ "post new message" page, using the LJ cookie in your browser -- which can, of course, be sent to LJ's servers without raising any security flags. My friend further notes that the official word is that there were no actual security breaches involved in the matter, but in any case things have been corrected in the LJ posting process so as to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future.

Speaking of which, this week's blockbust came about largely because the person so entranced with the Riddick character from Pitch Black that he wrote fanfiction about him also happened to be the rising action star who played Riddick....

The rather cryptic title of a print which hung in the house when I was a child. I always wondered whether it was a quotation but have never managed to trace it.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of someone who mght be tall and share their enthusiasm for theater.

It connects to a wonderfully decorated map of England that features only genuine weird place names (of which there are many, present and past), produced in the Gloucestershire town of Birdslip.

I love your occasional verse!

For the N'York-challenged, L.I.E. = Long Island Expressway. This is a useful acronym. A useless one is painfully heard on traffic reports that say "slow across the G.W. Bridge," because "G.W." has the same number of syllables as "George Washington," and because it leads us to imagine the state funeral for G.W. Bush in contrast to that of Ronald Reagan, who had Wormtongue's way with words...

I'd say that the G.W." versus "George Washington" issue is, not just syllable count (so important to us poets), but an issue of noncompressibility, which is key to Gregory Chaitin's algorithmic approach to randomness. But that makes little sense to the math-challenged. Although Chaitin has a new book, nicely reviewed on yersterday's slashdot. And tomorrow I give my second college-credit highly-illustrated lecture of Math Through Painting and Sculpture, with special emphasis on da Vinci (no code, please), Escher, and Islamic and Asian wallpaper patterns.

Last night I finally saw "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban." By FAR the best of the 3 movies; scarier, more magical, better child-acting, better paced, finally giving the film franchise a fight for 3rd best Fantasy Film of all time, behind "Lord of the Rings" and "King Kong," and closing in on "Wizard of Oz." Your opinion?

JvP: Your night was spent better than mine. I went and saw the Chronicles of Riddick. The Necromongers looked like Donald Trump doing Goth. And sadly, we can't go see the next movie until my boyfriend gets off his arse and reads the third book.

Come go with me to yonder valley
Where we once stood beneath the tree
Where we once planned our life together
I can't forget come go with me

Come let us live some moments over
Then maybe you won't want to leave
I love you then and will forever
I can't forget come go with me

I can't forget the flowers blooming
The rose that I pick for you
Time changed you but I'm not changing
I loved you then and I still do

Come go with me to yonder valley
Where on the largest of the trees
I'll carve your name to prove I love you
I can't forget come go with me

I love you then and I still do

In other news, I started training for a half-marathon today by running for fifty minutes straight. I rule!

So the trick is to find a compatible color of sauce: white clam sauce is an obvious choice, or a really vivid red for the Goth look. And plate color is crucial.

Uh . . . well . . . yeah, of course I was Alton. Though I was kind of surprised, as my answers seemed to be all over the map, and as a cook, rather than a geek, I think I'm more like Vulfgang. And, er, I went out pricing commercial-style home deep fryers the other day, though I didn't actually buy one, and there are other Things With Plugs ahead of it in the queue.

Not far from where I live there is Kitchen Window, a cook's hardware store with a selection that blows Williams-Sonoma out of the saucier pan. Across the street there's a Penzey's Spices, and around the corner is Lund's gourmet supermarket. Many go there . . . few return unchanged.

Better, I found a shapenote picture!

http://www.ccel.org/s/southern_harmony/sharm/sharm/hymn/t=The+Promised+Land.html

JVP: Last night I watched the DVD of Magnolias. Netflix has it as a rising star but I thought it was amazingly boring. Then again, I got 7 inches done on the baby afghan I'm working on.

Oh, and did no one else's brain see that lyric and immediately think:

"O, who will come and go with me,
To live in a pineapple under the sea!"

Just me then? I was afraid of that.

A state employee and longtime confidante of Gov. John G. Rowland [of Connecticut] solicited a $32,000 loan from the nonprofit foundation that supports the governor's residence so the governor's wife could publish a children's book, "Marvelous Max, the Mansion Mouse," according to documents released on Thursday by the House committee investigating whether to recommend impeaching Mr. Rowland.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/11/nyregion/11impeach.html

The pitch to use funds from the conservancy was made on Aug. 28, 2002, in a letter from Jo McKenzie, a confidante of the Rowlands who runs the governor's residence, to Mr. Wilde. "Patty Rowland has written a wonderful manuscript,'' she wrote. But, she explained, "in order for us to continue to move forward with this project, we need to ask you and the conservancy a huge favor. We would like to borrow approximately $32,000 from the conservancy's account.''

The outfit that did the publishing is called Norfleet Press. I can find nothing about them other than a couple different addresses and phone nos. It would appear, though, that it's some sort of vanity press--and an expensive one. I think Vantage would have done it for a lot less. Anyone know anything more about them?

fasola.org

A misreading of the opening line started Chan "Cat Power" Marshall's version of "Sea of Love" ricocheting through my head, but that was a problem more easily remedied.

A friend of mine has been trying repeatedly. His last attempt had two
tablespoons of dried aleppo flake, two eggs, and... however much flour
that takes... and the resulting pasta was not hot. Not when it was
cooked. (The raw pasta was pretty zingy.)

We were half-seriously considering throwing away the flour and making
pasta out of egg and cayenne. Only I don't think that works,
structurally.

Not too sure if I'd go for pure cap. Part of the joy of hot foods is the flavor of the peppers, not just the burn.

I'd also let the oil cool off before proceeding, and consider ditching all or part of an egg yolk to manage the fat level. (The egg yolk part is just a WAG. YMMV)

The capsaicin comment was about how to make the pasta hotter. If the flavor's good, added capsaicin seems a good method to increase the heat. I absolutely agree that flavor is the most important criterion for me, but some just want to see the beads on the brow.

Sarah, it's nice to know there's someone else like me out there. I was starting to feel like I was the only one, a Sushi wizard awash in a sea of James Altons...

And yes, I agree, Kenichi is very sexy.

Alex

"Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;"

Not the best fit, but that's what it reminded me of.

(No, I just like to quote it.)

That the books made her think to that level somewhat redeem them to me.

Today Roscommon County Council, tomorrow the Universe!

Used to have a pair of octagonal oxblood plates it went rather well on, but the last one was broken in a move. It would go rather well with a red vegetable like capsicum or tomato in a white bowl. Haven't yet found anyone else interested in squid-ink dishes, so it's just for my own amusement.

Warning re capsaicin: Hope y'all know enough to be quite cautious with it - a strong irritant used in what you call "pepper spray" & we call capsicum spray. Don't touch it & then touch anything else, particularly your eyes, before wiping your fingers.

Elijah Bailey & his world is one sfnal creation that's stayed with me despite the many years since I read those books. Has anyone heard about or seen the movie?

There's a story that when the late Isaac Asimov saw the film of _2001_, he said "HAL's breaking First Law!" and his companion said "So smite him, Isaac." The preview made me wish for Isaac to smite them quite comprehensively.

I do not understand the urge to take the name of a classic work and paste it onto a completely different story.

hark! there beneath a cover that molts,
if indeed covers do molt,
awaits a vision of dissimilatory
arsenate reducing prokaryotes

so please forgive my metre and rhyme
I did not intend this poetic crime
it is only arsenophiles I seek
and will search in the library for at least two weeks

And good morning to all.

Or if you feel really adventurous and don't want to put effort into cooking something try this - make some teriyaki chicken, put that with some nachos (pepper jack cheese, serranos, pineapple salsa - guacamole and sour cream at your own risk but I don't think they'd work with this), now add mandarin oranges, heat, take out of oven, and splash a little soy sauce and some lime on there.
Finish off with some dark coffee and dark chocolate afterwards.

I know it sounds nuts, and it is lazy food, but it is really good to me at least, but then again, I am a student (see ramen haiku).

six for a dollar
malnutrition is on sale
my ramen noodles

Songs to Wear Pants To plays the Exquisite Corpse game with books and CDs. Here's the MP3: False Impersonation.

Grab a half dozen books at random and write down the fifth sentence on page 23 from each. Now (with eyes closed), grab six CDs at random from your collection. Now compose a song using only these six sentences, where the music for each sentence is in the style of one of the CDs. (If the CD is a compilation or something, use track one.) Also, if you make this song, please list the books and corresponding CDs!

[BOOKS
1. BENRIK: THIS DIARY WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE
2. CHRISTIAN BÖK: EUNOIA
3. CONSTANCE HALE: SIN AND SYNTAX
4. EDGAR ALLAN POE: COMPLETE TALES & POEMS
5. JOHN SCARNE: SCARNE ON CARD TRICKS
6. E. E. CUMMINGS: ETCETERA

COMPACT DISCS
1. THEE MICHELLE GUN ELEPHANT: GEAR BLUES
2. DÄLEK: FROM FILTHY TONGUE OF GODS AND GRIOTS
3. THE BOOKS: THOUGHT FOR FOOD
4. HOOD: COLD HOUSE
5. RÖYKSOPP: MELODY A.M.
6. BRAINIAC: BONSAI SUPERSTAR]

It not only has nothing to do with Asimov's stories (it uses several of the character names, that's about it - imagine a pretty, young Susan Calvin!) it is exactly the sort of tale the Good Doctor was crusading against. The robots go berserk and start killing everyone. Too bad they didn't kill the script doctors...

Don't give this your money. Let's hope it's a total flop (but of course that won't make them think presenting travesties of good books is a bad idea, just that "science fiction doesn't sell" - no one is better at ignoring reality than Hollywood).

Only 19 cents at Crazy Hy's Video Warehouse, 4653 Landsdown, in Melonville.

---L.

On the other hand, I suppose there's some benefit to a combined condiment and personal protection device. Alton actually suggests non-powdered surgical gloves to handle hot peppers. Rub your eyes accidentally after cutting a habanero and you'll agree.

If you want a more unusual heat, seek out Sichuan peppercorn oil from your Friendly Neighborhood Chinese grocery store. As far as I know, it's legal in the U.S. (vs. the actual peppercorns) and provides mostly the same odd, numbing heat of good Sichuan food. Eating enough of the stuff triggers a pretty serious endorphin rush. I don't think it breaks down as quickly under heat as some of the other hot pepper flavorings, making it more likely to outlast the cooking process.

-- Ed

Channel 9 in New York used to show those at 11:00 pm Saturdays, right before Saturday Night Live. You just knew that the SNL writers watched, too, because sometimes they stole SCTV's gags. (Like the ad for a mysterious feminine hygiene product that came wrapped in brown paper and was required once each spring.)

In any case, I'm glad the DVDs are out. Remember the episode where a Soviet satellite hijacked the signal, or when cabbage aliens started borging people?

I thought everyone knew that handling capsaicin with care was important....

I'm not sure why they didn't start with the syndicated ones. Perhaps it's because the NBC shows have the bigger fan base? (Although the half-hour shows have the more dedicated fan base. I could tell stories about staying up 'til 2:00 AM, disconnecting the cable, and wrapping tinfoil around the aerial just to get a snowy picture of SCTV.) A couple of the fansites hinted that releasing future volumes is dependent on the sales for this one, so I'm encouraging everyone to buy. I want them all.

I've watched the first two episodes so far. I've heard some people opine that the show doesn't always age well. I find that things I found hilarious when I was 18 are mildly amusing to me now, but, for example, the Gerry Todd Show had me in convulsions yesterday, and I never much cared for it the first time.

If I had kids, I'd insist that they watch SCTV, the way my dad forced me to watch Ernie Kovacs when PBS re-ran his old kinescopes.

I remember when CCCP-TV stole their satellite signal. I also remember when SCTV was late with its licensing fees, and they had to temporarily replace the feed with the CBC. That was the one with the live curling broadcast, with three color commentators, each of whom was named Gordon.

[Obligatory Simpsons ref:]"Homer, stop remembering TV and get back to work!"

Also, what are the sources on pepper spray being better than real teargas? That contradicts what I know; pepper spray was invented to get around legal restrictions on the good stuff.

When did that happen? Verr-eh nice-uh.

Anyone who knows how to make/insert one care to let me in on the trick? I've wanted one for my site for a while...

As for "I, Robot".... *shudder.* It reminds me of something I read on Neil Gaiman's site about a script for Sandman that turned the Corinthian into Morpheus' twin brother, the Prince of Nightmares, while relegating Morpheus to the role of Prince of Good Dreams. The two spend the film battling it out superhero-style over the love of a woman.

No, really. That was the script. This sort of thing really makes me wish there were more Peter Jacksons around.

I suspect the real answer is "make pasta, cook it, and then toss it
with the oil-and-pepper mixture". But the idea of red, deadly noodles
is aesthetically tempting.

"I, Robot" has all the potential to be this decade's "Starship Troopers." Yet another instance of some producer somewhere going "Hey...this script reminds me a lot of that Asimov stuff we bought the rights to a while back...let's change some character names on it and we'll be set!"

...Except that it's got the same plot, setting, and characters as so
many damn SF movies from the past ten years. Nearly twenty, I should
say. According to the trailer, it's ripping off everything from
_Robocop_ to _Aliens_.

Why bother.

"I, Robot" strikes me as the kind of movie that {name of author who knocks off lots of novelizations} would knock off a quicky novelization for, rather than the original book being reissued with a snazzy cover. So I don't think it would help the Asimov estate much.

I wound up researching Szechuan peppercorns (Zanthoxylum piperitum) recently. They can no longer be imported into the U.S. because they're a host for a citrus canker. Bums me the heck out. My husband is hoarding our existing stock. See here for details.

There -is- a practical reason for not letting an original creator have any say in the project, and as usual it involves money. The costs of preproduction and a script are so large (last time I looked, the WGA -minimum- for a feature script was about $50K) that even a "big" film sale is modest by comparison. If you give the artist a veto, you can't tell how much it will cost you to implement any changes. And (stop me if you've heard this one) many prose writers really don't know how film adaptation works; they want total literality, which is hardly ever practical, or fixate on particular dear-to-the-heart scenes that may be dysfunctional off the page, or, well, there are a lot of ways not to film a book.

Probably sounds like I'm arguing against creative ownership, and of course I'm not. But it's a devil's bargain at best. If you're insanely lucky, like Mike Mignola, you find a movie guy who loves the work for itself, makes you a full participant in the project, and does whatever he can to get it made right. If not, we all know what happens.

John Kerry's high school band actually cut a record.

Personally, from the samples I've heard, I'd recommend he not quit his day job...

I will not be going to see it. Thanks for the warning. :)

David Dyer-Bennet asks: "Also, what are the sources on pepper spray being better than real teargas? That contradicts what I know; pepper spray was invented to get around legal restrictions on the good stuff."

I remembered hearing this a few times during self-defense classes and on a karate mailing list I was subscribed to a few years ago. The first references I can find are in this article here and this one here. Mostly, they center on the fact that mace belongs to an older family of tear gas products which have fallen out of favor amongst law-enforcement types because they're ineffective against attackers under the influence of alcohol or drugs, and can take too long to affect an attacker.

Along the way:

This article on capsaicin, found while verifying whether I spelled it right. Apparently, pure cap crystals require full body suits to handle safely.

This list of Scoville Heat Units, the measure of how hot something is. A habanero pepper has a 100K - 350K Scoville rating, while police-grade pepper spray is rated at 5.3 million Scoville units. Frighteningly enough, there's one food product listed with a Scoville rating higher than that!

-- Ed

It might make the dough a little too pasty, but you could always add a quarter teaspoon of gluten.

I have a designer friend who is working on it. If only I had professional help from the beginning (in more ways than one)!

It surely beats the hell out of John Ashcroft's recorded works...

Oh yeah, that I, Robot movie appears to have about as much to do with Dr. A. as the execrable Red Planet (classic bad line: Val Kilmer: "Fuck this planet!") did with Heinlein.

Marilee -- is that the version you learned at camp? It's the first Sacred Harp I ever heard, but I keep tripping over a 6/4 version when I go hunting (unless I use the index of first lines, which tells me there are seven settings of that text).

This one matches both verse and chorus: The Promised Land, page 128 of the Sacred Harp. It's in 4/4, F# minor.

Drop me a line at walters at doubtfulpalace.com and I'll be happy to mail you a Xerox (hooray for the public domain!).

Or wait, here's a barely legible web image.

When I was little, I knew that rubber came (somehow) from rubber trees. So I figured that artificial rubber came from artificial rubber trees.

I was in, what, 4th grade? Yeah, so I was dumb.

That's one of the versions I have in Southern Harmony, which is a shape note book.

The trouble isn't that everyone in Hollywood is a moron with no respect for literature. It's that any project passes through many different hands, and when the music stops, the morons are often the last one holding it.

Did anyone out there get exposed to Hilaire Belloc's Cautionary Tales for Children? Belloc was the Lemony Snicket and Edward Gorey of my mother's generation. I ask you, how many poets offer young readers spectacle of an exploding pony?

http://www.rejoycedublin2004.com/

Coming to Fox this fall..

"My name is Leo Bloom - and the next 24 hours are going to be the most well documented of my life..."

Perfectly logical, but the truth is that artificial rubber comes from the genocide of baby neoprenes.

---L.

The book was apparently a great favorite among children's works in England until a generation or two ago. To me, this explains a lot. Here's a wee history of the book (from the people who turned it into a musical [!]).

I have recently acquired an archive of writings of the brilliant and controversial Eric Temple Bell, dating back to 1932. Based on Constance Reid's book (see blog), he seems to have led a triple life: Math Professor at Caltech, Science Fiction author, and perhaps compulsive liar. You can find out about his most famous discovery (Bell Numbers) at any major Math site, such as mathworld.com. I shall be entering the debate on exactly what he did, when, as revised by my archives. It seems that he had his wife calculating recursive functions on some 1930-era mechanical computer. And it seems that he condemned String Theory decades before it was born!

Further investigation, BTW, reveals that the Playmate was not directly involved in the killings, or even particularly the cult. She dated the guy, and dumped him as a loon, thus her use as a witness.

Little Johnny Head-in-Air sticks in my mind, and someone else who was burned to ashes (much to the distress of her cat) but nothing beats the image of the Great Long-Legged Scissor Man bursting in the door to amputate naughty little suck-a-thumb's offending digits.

I have the Folio Society edition. :)

Despite the tongue-in-cheek presentation, I'm sure that the copywriter knew exactly which nerves he was hitting.

you're probably right. I had an expert clean out my PC less than 2 months ago, and I've been very careful to ensure frequent scourings with the automatically latest updated virus checking, AND there's a firewall.

Today is my first day with the 2 Gigabyte Yahoo email (take that, Google Gmail!), and Yahoo is not utterly virus-free, but probably better than my old Earthlink account, or surely than the old Hotmail account.

So I agree. It look's snarfulent, snarfistic, snarfoidal, whatever...

"I do not understand the urge to take the name of a classic work and paste it onto a completely different story."

Alas, there's an irony here that may not have been appreciated. For taking the name of a classic work and pasting it onto a completely different story is exactly what Asimov did when he published a book titled I, Robot. This had been the title of a then well-known, today forgotten, story by Eando Binder.

http://www.lycettebros.com/notmytype/nmt04.htm

There are "Not my type"s I through III as well.

btw - Teresa - when you reply to 'Mike' and
there's nobody signing themselves as Mike in the
thread, is that John M Ford, or is it an imaginary friend thing?

And who would not be proud of that?

Did I not credit the Amazon housewares thing? I must fix that. Patrick told me about it.

Ways I find things: 1. Distraction. Diffuse concentration. Good peripheral vision. I sort of trip over things while researching other things. Google is good for that. You type in [herrings "school of'], and it gives you nineteen herrings and a coelacanth. If you're as distractable as I am, you wander off to have a look at the coelacanth. 2. I'll be researching something else, and one of the sources I find will remind me of something else I've always wanted to know more about. This is sort of like the preceding item, but you supply your own coelacanth. 3. Somebody tells me about it. 4. Somebody tells me about something, but when I get there I find myself wandering into another part of the site where I find something else I like better. 5. A day or two after I put up a new post, I go to Technorati to see who's said what about it. I follow the links, and when I get to that weblog there's usually some other interesting stuff. 6. Sometimes I'll take some common turn of phrase and google on it to see what turns up. 7. Some sites, like Ray Girvan's Apothecary's Drawer, have links that are like falling down the rabbit's hole. 8. Miscellaneous other. 9. I'm not sure the foregoing isn't just seven different ways to say one thing, and one way to say another.

Ah, Mob Art. Who was it who said that the intelligence of a mob is the intelligence of its stupidest member, divided by the headcount of the mob?

Sometimes I think all my friends are imaginary.

Sometimes (and this is incomparably worse) I think I'm someone else's imaginary friend. And that that person will grow up, or get therapy, or something, and I'll cease to exist.

Brr.

"The Stepford Wives," which is the movie I actually saw, was actually fairly bad, too, though it did have its amusing moments. Someone should make it mandatory that anyone who makes an SF film understand How Things Work...

---L.

Truck hauling bees crashes in Montana: Dumps honey, sending bees on rampage

BOZEMAN, Montana (AP) -- A tractor-trailer overturned on a curve on a highway, spilling its load of hundreds of bee hives and unleashing some nine million angry honey bees.

How bad would it be to dump someone, if it had that result?

(Also posted on P.'s open thread)

http://www.pilgrimproduction.org/sacredharp/fortworth/music/24.mp3

---L.

Doesn't seem to affect posting, but it may have other effects I'm not aware of.

---L.

Bowl of cream? Why yess, I'd love one.

Longfellow, Ultima Thule:

With favoring winds, o'er sunlit seas,
We sailed for the Hesperides,
The land where golden apples grow;
But that, ah! that was long ago.

How far, since then, the ocean streams
Have swept us from that land of dreams,
That land of fiction and of truth,
The lost Atlantis of our youth!

Whither, ah, whither? Are not these
The tempest-haunted Orcades,
Where sea-gulls scream, and breakers roar,
And wreck and sea-weed line the shore?

Ultima Thule! Utmost Isle!
Here in thy harbors for a while
We lower our sails; a while we rest
From the unending, endless quest.

If I used it, I'd have even more adjectives and adverbs to pare out of my writing than I already do. (Jim MacDonald's advice elsewhere already has me hacking at adjectives right and left--I axed about twenty from a few pages of story last night. Dangerously, obviously, curiously, cheerfully, flatly went the way of all the earth.)

I almost fell out of my chair! That's the funniest thing I've read in...I don't know how long!

Damn!
*wipes away tears*

WhiteSmoke understands the different meaning inferred by different prepositions (e.g.” I ran out of doors” and “I ran out of the door”).

The site looks fishy to me - I mean, aside from the fact that the product would require a huge advance in NLP technology in order to work as described.

WhiteSmoke seems to have been available for some time as shareware - all the awards he lists appear to be "best shareware" sorts of things, which aren't exactly reliable. At least some of his "review" quotes are from press releases he sent out (e.g. the one in Crain's). Naughty, naughty.

Since they still can't make a useful grammar checker, I may be waiting a while.

I watched "Cube" last night (rating: "meh") and it reminded me of a story I read as a child, a juvenile/YA SF novella I probably ordered through Scholastic sometime in the mid-70s.

Premise: A small group of teens awaken to find themselves in some kind of endless indoor space that consists of nothing but interconnected stairways. That's all I can remember, except that I think I found the ending extremely disappointing, because I never read it again.

Basically, "Cube," but with stairs instead of cubes, teens/preteens, and no gore.

Any ideas?

I wonder, especially with voracious or precocious readers, if there isn't a significant timing factor at play in how we respond to books. Especially during adolescence, when your world is changing so rapidly, you really have to catch any given book at the moment you're most receptive to it, or it barely registers.

FWIW, the whole thing looks like an elaborate joke to me. (I didn't go past the top page.)

"...capable...to..."? Ha, if they can't spot such errors I'm not sure I'd trust their programming with my precious purple prose, thank you very much.

thank you, that almost caused water to come flying out my nose :)

It's a series of screen shots that illustrates how to "upgrade" (their word) the following sentence: I admire your work.

First, you choose the text to torment by "Stand[ing] with your mouse cursor on the desired text." (OK, when can I sit back down?)

The word admire is highlighted, and scrollable lists of modifiers and replacements are provided. The visible modifiers include "greatly", "incidentally", "naturally", and "scarcely". The replacement list includes "respect", "appreciate", "commend", and "applaud".

There's also a handy Accept All button which, presumably, yields I greatly, incidentally, naturally, and scarcely respect, appreciate, commend, and applaud your work. Definitely an upgrade! (And if all the choices in the scrollable lists are used, all the better.)

But further down, the lists change. At first, I thought it was the result of a scroll-down when the screen shot was taken. The modifiers now include "legal", "learned", "mysterious", and "papal"; the replacements include "account", "case history", "data", and "documentation."

I mysterious documentation your work. That can't possibly be what they mean! So I looked again, thinking that maybe now we were upgrading the word work. But no, the highlighted word is still admire, so I papal case history your work is apparently considered a reasonable "enrichment" (again, their word).

The instructions definitely sound like the work of a non-native speaker. To select my choice from a list, I must arise again, as I'm instructed to "stand inside the box with my mouse cursor and click on it". Or perhaps they have used the product to upgrade the original instructions.

The irony is that the odd words they frequently choose serve to draw attention to their plagiarism.

He is to my mind one of the really great second-rank kid's SF/Fantasy writers. Nothing he's done is a complete wowzer. Everything he's done has flaws. And everything he's done has one or two moments, or concepts, that are so completely different from what I expected. Even when I'm most frustrated with him, I'll find something that keeps me going on. Not because I don't see the problem: because despite the problem he's got a good enough chance of surprising me without cheating that I'm willing to extend him the benefit of the doubt.

Robert Westall's another in the same camp. Neither one is always even competent IMO; but each hits a moment of "Wow, I didn't expect _that_" often enough (average once per book, I'd guess) to keep me reading. YMMV.

I suspect the native language is Chinese, largely because of the oddities with tense and propositions.

For what it's worth, the guy's name is Lilan Brener (or possibly Brenner), according to, whois, various shareware sites, and the press release he sent to Crain's.

At the end, a huntsman comes to the rescue, apparently slicing the cat in two to free all the villagers. The last illustration was of the villagers holding hands and dancing joyously around the cat, none the worse for wear despite his new scar.

I could never figure out if the original tale was darker, and they decided to tack on a "happy ending", and if so, why the cat had still had a gruesome scar. All in all, a fascinatingly surreal little book involving bright colors, a cat, and no edificational "moral" of the story. Just my kind of book.

I just wish I remembered the title or the author - the only thing I remember about the author is that his/her name involved either an "O" with-a-slash-through-it, or an "a" with-a-little-circle- on-top, like unto a Nordic name. If I ever come across it at a used bookstore, I will pay whatever I have to, just so I can put next to my Nauga on the honored shelf of my childhood.

Yeah, but what if my text doesn't use "artificial intelligence properties"? That is to say, this is a sentence with a badly dangling participle. So why should I entrust my immortal, priceless babblings to Whitesmoke™'s tender care?

Also, i would put a comma between "sophisticated" and "patented."

Anybody know where to start looking?

Don't know that story, nerdycellist -- sorry!

I will be quoted in tomorrow's Seattle _Post Intelligencer_ as a "science fiction expert"; the author was one of the people who started out working out at Comic Relief, good people and (from this example) the kind of reporter that we want looking at SF events. I'll try to add the link, but if I fail look at the Seattle PI page for Friday.... She gave me the last word, so I may be biased.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/specials/sfmuseum/178353_museum18.asp

What’s more, the decades-old procedure for a quick response by the nation’s air defense had been changed in June of 2001. Now, instead of NORAD’s military commanders being able to issue the command to launch fighter jets, approval had to be sought from the civilian Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. This change is extremely significant, because Mr. Rumsfeld claims to have been "out of the loop" nearly the entire morning of 9/11. He isn’t on the record as having given any orders that morning. In fact, he didn’t even go to the White House situation room; he had to walk to the window of his office in the Pentagon to see that the country’s military headquarters was in flames.

Mr. Rumsfeld claimed at a previous commission hearing that protection against attack inside the homeland was not his responsibility. It was, he said, "a law-enforcement issue."

http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mzombiepower.html

I read a book while in middle school that I have been unable to find since (or, more accurately, been unable to identify sufficiently to start looking). It was in hardcover/library hardcover, and would have been published sometime before 1990, and probably sometime before 1988.

The protagonist was an early-teenage human girl who went on a summer vacation/student exchange with an alien race. They were fairly warlike (I don't remember if it was "they're more warlike than we are" or "we're allies and there's a war on"), and the summer excursion was almost like a JRTOC training camp. The aliens were larger and longer-armed than humans and had two, opposing, thumbs on each hand.

I remember certain scenes/scenarios that pointed these differences up. Longer armspan: They were using a rope with knotted handholds to go down a slope of loose dust/sand; the handholds were too widely spaced for Our Hero to use, so she 'surfed' down the surface of the hill instead [and got in mild trouble over it]. Two Thumbs: Their guns were designed so that the trigger and/or the safety involved buttons on opposite sides of the gun that had to be pressed simultaneously, one with each thumb. At some point, some emergency happened and Our Hero needed to fire one. I think she used two hands on a one-hand weapon to get all the buttons pressed, but I'm fuzzy on this. I do remember a certain amount of gentle ribbing from her cohorts about her being too small and insufficiently thumbed to use a gun like a "normal" person.

Please tell me this rings a bell for *someone*! I've been checking library indices of YA SF and confusing children's and YA librarians for *years* looking for this book.

Thanks for that reassurance, Teresa...I assume you also aren't going for intensive therapy to cure your hallucinations of my existence?

John Houghton, thanks from me too...why, I was almost prostrate upon my feet with laughter.

"A Little Iliad"
By Daniel Mendelsohn

Having seen, in one mock-epic day, "The Day After Tomorrow", "Shrek 2", and "Troy," I feel that Daniel Mendelsohn nailed it.

Now, if only Shrek 3 was set in the world of the Homeric epics. Or even if Homer Simpson replaced the cute but floundering Brad Pitt (whom I liked in "12 Monkeys"...

-Catie

It may be to their advantage to drive off any potential customer who would recognize what a lousy job their software does. But they are probably more stupid than crafty.

Oh. Right. "Hugged it like a brother." It's from a novel called Red Sky at Morning, in the episode about the dead horse.

Now someone who has a copy to hand is going to tell me I've misremembered it.

Thanks, Teresa. I owe you for pointing me at this good read. And you're not misremembering. From the Perennial Classics edition, pp. 52-53:

...When my chest hit the horse about midships it made a noise like an orange being squeezed, and the horse's ribs began a slow caving-in movement. I pushed myself away and my hand went through his skin, surprising me so I took a deep breath without meaning to.

Later, still pale and weak-kneed, I told Marcia and Steenie that they didn't need to help me walk and they let go of my arms and stood back.

"A real sport," Steenie said. "Just threw himself on that horse and hugged him like a brother."

"I didn't realize until now that we've been playing the game wrong all this time," Marcia said. "It doesn't mean a thing until you crawl right into the horse."

My only quibble with the relevance to Bush/Rumsfeld is that the latter's correspondence to a decomposing horse is not admidships.

Need more be said?

An Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie (AFDB) is a type of headwear that can shield your brain from most electromagnetic psychotronic mind control carriers. AFDBs are inexpensive (even free if you don't mind scrounging for thrown-out aluminium foil) and can be constructed by anyone with at least the dexterity of a chimp (maybe bonobo). This cheap and unobtrusive form of mind control protection offers real security to the masses. Not only do they protect against incoming signals, but they also block most forms of brain scanning and mind reading, keeping the secrets in your head truly secret. AFDBs are safe and operate automatically. All you do is make it and wear it and you're good to go! Plus, AFDBs are stylish and comfortable.

It was a YA book, published not later than the mid-60's (I read it in grade school), with a young teenage boy as the main protagonist.

The boy is on a cross-country train ride, and wakes up in his sleeper car the next morning to find the train sitting still in the middle of... somewhere.

It appears to be somewhere in the Prairies, but this prairie has... magic. The main plot has the boy meeting a old, decrepit broken-down cowboy on an old, decrepit broken-down horse. The cowboy's Magic Belt Buckle has been stolen by the Evil Witch character, and the boy has to help the cowboy recover the belt buckle. (Once done, the cowboy's -- and the horse's -- youth and vigor are restored.)

But what's kept this book popping up in my mind occasionally over the years was that it also had a Mentor Wizard character. And the Wizard was actually the porter from the train, and (as they were called in those days) a Negro.

I think it was the first book I ever read that not only had a sympathetic black character, but a MAJOR sympathetic black character.

Anyone recognize this? I'd love to find a copy.

It would always cause the rest of us, the hoi polloi in the cars of his train, to make eye contact with one another and laugh. We loved him.

Onan is a registered trademark of Cummins Inc.

:-D

I think I know the book you are talking about and will try to remember to check my daughter's bookcase tonight and see if we have a copy. The cat eats a bunch of people from the village and eventually eats its owner, who luckily has her sewing basket with her . . . I also seem to remember that they all drink tea while inside the cat . . . .

I know I've read this, I just don't know if we still have it. My kid is 8 and has been giving away a lot of picture books.

(And JvP, before we even get into the matter, read this if you haven't already. 'twernt brought down by resonance— negative damping, more like.)

Ahem.

Andy, I had heard the resonance theory had been demolished, but I hadn't seen the actual article. Thanks.

Sorry I missed the name.

Ah, "Karen."

Yes it is an unfortunate name, and as you might expect, it is the name of the company's founder, David Onan.

By now, I am sure they know all the jokes, so asking if they have a hand crank option for one of their diesel generators (rimshot) is definitely out.

I bet you could power a little factory with their stuff.

http://www.npr.org/rundowns/rundown.php?prgDate=21-Jun-2004&prgId=5

That's "Karen from Arizona" and her comment starts at 6:40 in the clip (and then the panelist goes on to make light of her comment -- he's earlier said that blogs are narrowly focused and Karen has covered a lot of T's topics in refutation).

Apparently Dr. David Huffman, the guy who invented Huffman codes, hacked origami in his spare time. According to the article, he worked out nifty theorems on things like what the angles have to be to keep the paper from tearing when multiple folds meet at a point.

Wow! Honestly, first SpaceShipOne, and now curvilinear origami. What a day!

Okay, let's see if I have this right: J. Michael is "Joe" and John M. is "Mike." [Straczynski and Ford, of course.]

I have no idea how this happened.

That "Little Factory" stuff cracks me up. My Mormon mom gets kind of huffy everytime someone brings it up. She claims it's not really a church thing, but since she claimed too that SWKimball never said it was better to be dead than raped (and then I pointed it out in one of her own books) she's not a reliable witness. I say the tone of it sure sounds like the Smug brand of Mormonism I grew up with.

Exactly what was the silver supposed to do? Or did he just want to put it in his body so nobody could take it from him? There are times when people do things that are so colossally stupid that it's hard to have much sympathy.

Argyria. Land of Silver. Where the natives argyre and argimble in the wabe.

The only silver-based med I’ve ever used is silvadine (sp) cream, used for topically for burns and dispensed with many warnings from both doc and pharmacist. Great stuff, if your kidneys and liver are in top shape and you don’t mind turning black in the light. And when you've got a second-degree sunburn (don't ask) you don't mind, believe me.

(Then again, recently Charlie Stross was astounded to learn I'm taking colchicine every other day without damage.)

The cream (not me, just the cream) did turn black in the light, though. It was pretty amusing for all concerned, except me. I guess I embarrassed more easily as a teenager. Then again, a little embarrasment was nothing if it helped me sleep.

My daughter remembers the book too, and thinks we gave it to the used book sale at school this year.

Sorry.

We've never had to sew up our cats, though veterinarians have. At a younger age, when she was the right height, my daughter used to hold the end of the cat's tail and let the animal lead her around the house. A furry leash, except the cat was the one doing all the steering (thanks to my oft-repeated mantra, "the tail is not a handle").

A med student on the other site made an argument much more effective than anything I could have said: he cited a journal article about a man who took colloidal silver for about 4 weeks (I think) and then went into myoclonal status epilepticus. The ER stopped the seizure, but he remained in a persistent vegetative state until he died a few months later. (And yes, the colloidal silver was the cause of the seizure, the coma, and the death.)

Xopher, I've been using it for 13 years now, topically, and the doctors know I use it (they refill it about once a month). We don't have any other alternatives that work as well for preventing pressure sores.

The one case of argyria with the topical SSD that I know of was someone who used 50gr a day.

The second renal failure went undiagnosed for nine months (long story) and we think I had about 300 pounds of water weight on by the time it was diagnosed. I had massive pitting edema -- the nurses would tuck me in with pillows so I wouldn't dent on the side rails -- and my fingers were like sausages and wouldn't bend.

When the doctor found a med to use experimentally, all the water rushed off, leaving a lot of stria (stretch marks) everywhere except my hands, feet, and face, and my hands and feet are permanently wrinkled as if they'd just been in water. I also have skin flaps -- think of love handles but just empty skin hanging over -- and they tend to get pressure sores. If I use a small amount of SSD every day, I only get one or two sores a week, and only have one get bad enough I have to see the doctor for debridement a couple times a year.

My TMI for today!

Thanks so much!

(I'm not usually so exclamation-point-happy, but I've been looking for this book for over a decade, and now I'm holding a copy! Glee! Joy!)

True. Of course, the J. doesn't stand for "John" and the "M" doesn't stand for "Michael".

Well...the Bush campaign has just released this incredibly-poor-production-value "web video" spot. This commercial consists mostly of clips from one of the ads submitted to MoveOn.org which compared Bush to Hitler; one which I recall people deriding as being way over the top, but it still makes this ad seem like an Anti-Bush ad for 3/4 of its length, capped off by a weak and insulting Pro-Voters-Wearing-Blinders conclusion.

That's certainly my Moment of Zen for the day...

My husband showed it to me yesterday. I stared at him and said, "That was an ad for Bush? Really?"

"Now is not the time for . . ." Oh, what'd they call it? I know the word I want to use is dissension.

Tom -- AFAIK, Evangeline Walton is no relation of my ex-husband Ken. None of his family have ever emigrated to the US, or indeed, gone anywhere. They all still live within twenty miles of Walton Green.

P & T -- Technical query. I have upgraded to Netscape 7, for Linux, which crashes when I load long Making Light threads, meaning that I am now reverting to Netscape 4 to read them. This is almost certainly my fault... Netscape 4 also takes me to the end of the comment thread rather than the beginning, which may be a bug but which I had taken for useful functionality. However, Netscape 7 lets me see all the sidebars and ads.

And not-really a haiku:

I have washed one bowl
Six times today, mixing food.
Maybe I need two.

Supreme Court Affirms Detainees' Right to Use Courts

WASHINGTON, June 28 — The Supreme Court ruled today that people being held by the United States as enemy combatants can challenge their detention in American courts — the court's most important statement in decades on the balance between personal liberties and national security.
----
Link to article

I note that the Times didn't put the headline in all caps on the front page, like they ought to have IMHO. Instead, they are highlighting the transfer of sovereignty.

Note that Justice O'Connor is one of (two? three?) Justices who were rumored to have commented before the 2000 election that they were hoping for a Republican win, so they could retire.

(From Dave Barry's blog.)

"Come and trip it, as ye go
On the light fantastic toe."
--Milton

Yes, they have. I don't recall much about them, but I do know that I've read someone's (Martin Gardner's, probably) discussion of "Lucas numbers" somewhere, which I believe use (1,3) as a base (that being the next simplest distinct one).

---L.

---L.

Whew, it's been a long time since I even thought about this stuff - twelfth grade, in fact. I don't remember what neat stuff Lucas numbers model, but I'm sure a quick google search would turn up a ton of material.

http://strindbergandhelium.com/

I heard about it from a colleague who claimed it reminded him of me. I'm not at all sure what that's supposed to mean, or which character I am.

f[n+2] - f[n+1] - f[n] = 0

Since it's a linear difference equation, you can assume the answer is in the form a^n, where "^" means "to the power of."

a^(n+2) - a^(n+1) - a^n = 0
Divide by a^n and get:
a^2 - a - 1 = 0,
which gives a = phi or (1-phi) by quadratic formula.

So all possible solutions to the difference equation are:
f[n] = c1*(phi^n) + c2*(1-phi)^n
where c1, c2 are constants that depend on how you start the sequence off.

Since (1-phi) = 0.618... is smaller than 1, the second term goes to 0 for large n, and you get:

f[n] = c1*phi^n = phi*(c1*phi^(n-1)) = phi*f[n-1]

This reminds me of another forgery. Suppose you select n points on a circle and draw all segments between pairs of points. Be sure you select the points so that no three segments cross in a point. Then count the number of regions that the disc is divided into. This is a suprisingly good forgery for 2^n, but there's a good reason for that. I'll explain later if there's interest.

This has been investigated in some depth by Clark Kimberling. Take all such sequences that don't have a common divisor--each pair of relatively prime integers appears as adjacent terms in just one of the sequences. The Wythoff Array is one way of organizing them. I think there's another way involving a less vanilla geometry, but I can't get to those files at the moment.

Methinks that child should be sicced on the Tor slushpile. Throw to the right: reject. Throw to the left: one of the grownups will actually take a look at the manuscript.

And, on another subject, like Xopher I have started my own blog, a revival of my old paper-and-ink perzine Undulant Fever

If it did not, it would assuredly not be necessary to bring in relief pitchers.

Good work on answering the Lucas Numbers questions (more on which, below), while I was presenting or co-presenting 4 papers at an international conference at Carnegie Mellon University. We (my cousin and I) brought the controversial Peter Lynds from New Zealand and showcased his work in his first formal conference presentation ever. Lynds is the student who finally solved the 3 Zeno Paradoxes, and also proved Stephen Hawking wrong on some points such as Imaginary Time. John Wheeler, protege of Einstein and he who coined the term "Black Hole" says that Lynds has discovered something as brilliantly as Einstein. Honest: I do toot my own horn pretty loudly at times, but at this conference, I was tooting someone else's. Now, if only kiwis Peter Jackson and Peter Lynds collaborated...

Indeed, back to Lucas Numbers, as usually defined:

L(n) = L(n-1) + L(n-2)

where L(1)=1, L(2)=3

The sequence thus begins:

1,3,4,7,11,18,29,47,76,123,199,322,521,843,1364,
2207,3571,5778,9349,15127,24476,39603,64079,
103682,167761,271443,439204,710647,1149851,
1860498,3010349,4870847,7881196,12752043...

For a longer list, see:

The First 70 Lucas Numbers

His list stops at:
L(70) = 425730551631123

The only square numbers in the Lucas sequence are 1 and 4, as proved by John H. E. Cohn (Alfred 1964). The only triangular Lucas numbers are 1, 3, and 5778 (Ming 1991). The only Lucas cubic number is 1. The first few Lucas primes are L(n) = 3, 7, 11, 29, 47, 199, 521, 2207, 3571, ... (Sloane's A005479), corresponding to indices n = 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 11, 13, 16, 17, 19, 31, 37, 41, 47, 53, 61, 71, 79, 113, 313, 353, ... (Dubner and Keller 1999, Sloane's A001606).

You can find out much more at:

Lucas Numbers at MathWorld
which has a nice bibliography and mucho formulae

and amazingly more in the Fibonacci Quarterly, available at any big university library, which covers Fibonacci and Lucas Numbers and their generalizations, and some other cute polynomial integer sequences.

Some pretty connections between Lucas Numbers
L(n) and Fibonacci Numbers F(n) include:

L(n) = F(n-1) + F(n+1)

L(m+n) = (1/2)[5F(n)F(m)+ L(n)L(n)]

[L(n)]^2 = 5[F(n)]^2 + 4(-1)^n

See also:

Lucas factorizations from 2 to 10,000

Lucas himself was interesting. He was the same French astronomer and mathematician Edouard Anatole Lucas (1842-1891) who invented the Towers of Hanoi puzzle in 1883. He also asked the famous mathematical puzzle: A SQUARE PYRAMID OF CANNONBALLS can be rearranged flatly on the ground into a perfect square of cannonballs. How many balls do you have?

But that's probably enough Math for now [he said, preparing the Final Exam he'll give next Wednesday].

A cat is trying to adopt me. It appears to be a stray. (Not wearing a collar, and I've asked most of the neighbors.) The cat is either full grown but small, or a teenager. It is light gray with white feet. The fur is very short, like felt. Every time I see it, it comes up to me and purrs at my ankles. I feel very uncomfortable when this happens, like I ought to be doing something. My building has a no-pets policy, which I'm thinking about defying. Any suggestions or advice?

Depending on how accessible your landlord is, you might want to discuss, in a very theoretical way, whether you might possibly be able to get special permission to keep a cat if you gave him or her a big fat security deposit. If your building's run by a company, this may or may not be possible.

It sounds like a really pretty cat. I hope everything works out for you two.

I did deliberately phrase the puzzle that way to be your (or someone's) straight man.

Andy Perrin:

I suggest that you ask your friends, and/or the friends of the person in whose home the cats is temporarily relocated (with its boxes of books and strange fruit and crack) if any of them have a severe cat allergy. Many do, and they suffer excruciatingly in anyplace a cat has resided even 2 years ago, as few people wash their cats once a month or spray 1% tannic acid on walls and rug and furniture and floor, which are the two main ways to denature the dander and/or bacteria and/or catspit protein that people are allergic to.

Similarly, if considering adoption or relocation of a stray dragon, determine what furnishings are flammable, and who is sworn to fight dragons, and who is a virgin.

I'm not sure where you live, and the laws regarding "good samaritans" and the finding of stray pets do vary some from place to place, but in some states at least, you're required to make "reasonable effort" to find his owners. Personally I find the laws a bit silly, but there you go.

Outdoor cats can wander pretty extensively, and very few people collar their cats. So the lack of a collar and non-recognition from your neighbors doesn't indicate much. A visit to the vet (or the humane society) can tell you if he's been microchipped; usually chipped pets also have collars, but there's at least some possibility that yours is an exception.

In this case, if he's adopted you, and you want him, good on you both. If not, I'd try looking a little more widely to see if you can find his owners; the humane society, an ad in the paper, flyers in your neighborhood are all good ways to publicize. In my city there are several organizations that keep detailed and up-to-date databases of lost & found pets; there may be one in yours.

Vets will generally not euthanize a healthy animal. Shelters will say upfront whether they are "no-kill" or not. As far as living on its own terms--well, I have two cats, and they're strictly indoors, because the outdoor living on their own terms causes the death of scads of wild animals, many of which can't or won't be eaten by anything, and because I work in an emergency veterinary clinic and I see exactly what happens to outdoor animals. Indoor cats can be quite happy, I promise :). It's certainly your own decision, though.

No-kill shelters generally have a waiting list for adoption, but they should be able to tell you how long the wait is likely to be. Unfortunately, we're in the peak of kitten season, and all the irresponsible twerps who don't bother to desex their cats have loaded cities with thousands of unwanted kittens. This makes finding a home for your new friend more difficult, but it's not impossible.

good luck!

The other table I was thinking of is the inverse Wythoff array, which for each (x,y) gives the row of the Wythoff array that contains the sequence ... 2x-y, y-x, x, y, x+y, x+2y, .... The inverse Wythoff array has some fairly interesting geometrical structure that I don't think I can post here. Send e-mail if you want to know about it.

That's very cool. I have actually been studying the Wythoff Array, while trying to understand when numbers in those sequences are also other things, specifically certain Figurate Numbers. The inverse Wythoff array is new to me. I'd love to know more.

The following has nothing to do with Fibonacci, Wythoff, or the conference from which I've returned after presenting 3 papers and spending 48 hours in airports and planes as Dallas-Ft.Worth thundered and flooded.

In one of my background activities, I have been researching Pyramidal Numbers, and found several publishable things. For instance, when a pyramidal number with one base is equal to a pyramidal number of another base.

Today I uncovered 3 nice previously unknown facts:

For 32-Gonal Pyramidal Numbers
32Pyr(n)=n(n+1)(30n-27)/6

32Pyr(13) = 9Pyr(21) = 11011 (palindrome, same upside down base 10)

32Pyr(18) = Square(171) = Square(Triangular(18)) = 29241

For 33-Gonal Pyramidal Numbers
32Pyr(n)=n(n+1)(31n-28)/6

and the 8-dimensional Simplex Numbers as defined by Kim,

33Pyr(34) = 33Pyr(33Pyr(2)) = 8Simplex(14) = 203490

33Pyr(38) = 6Pyr(75) = 284050

I am still, 6 months into 2004, generating math results faster than I can submit them for publication. I'm at about 29 papers this half-year, several still being polished, many submitted, some being resubmitted, some not yet sent out the first time. I dare not violate Heinlein's Laws of writing success, of course.

But I did just submit a new Mathematical Fantasy short story: "War Between the Numbers" to F&SF.

What else are you up to?

I'm thinking of writing a novel called My Vegetable Love; it can't miss.

Hearing the Declaration of Independence read on the radio Friday morning, I noticed that several of the denunciations of George III (UK) can equally (or similarly) be applied to George II (US). You can attack, debate, or cheer (heh) my list here.

(Yes, I realize that Bush 43 isn't really the second George to hold the Presidency.)

> Happy July 4, fellow Americans! (Hi there, everybody else.)

Also my baby daughter's birthday. Our secret plan is to take her to America when she's around six years old, and not tell her that the party's not really for her.

Those of us who can quote the Three Laws of Robotics from memory won't be happy with this one, oh indeed no. The three laws are necessary components of the positronic brains -- the laws can't be removed or shut off.

(For those who can't remember 'em:

1 A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2 A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3 A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.)

This also reminds me of a limerick:

The robot detective, Daneel,
Has oft been mistaken for real.
A lass from Aurora
Who offered her flora
Learned all about case-hardened steel.

" Sci-fi Web sites reveal that some Asimov fans are worried about the Alex Proyas movie "I, Robot." It is actually based on "Hardwired," a 1995 script by Jeff Vintar, which was then polished by Oscar winner Akiva Goldsman ("A Beautiful Mind") to incorporate elements of the nine Asimov short stories later acquired by 20th Century Fox.

"It was good executive thinking," says producer Laurence Mark. "Here was a script well on its way, and here was 'I, Robot' with literary cachet. Why not marry the two? Every screenplay with a robot in it since 1954 relies to some degree on Isaac Asimov and 'I, Robot.' " "

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23550-2004Jul2.html

It's after midnight, and thus no longer the 4th of July. There was a heck of a nice fireworks display at the park across the road from this resort. White magnesium, green copper, red strontium. I watched it from the balcony of the Heinlein Society's suite. We watched the CD-ROM of the only available copy, once Ginny Heinlein's, of Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke being interviewed by Walter Cronkite just after the Apollo 11 moon walk. Inspiring!

Saturday we'd arrived, I'd phoned home, as my wife had gotten the flu or cold and could not come and go with me, and I'd given my first panel, on Space Ship 1 and the X-Prize.

Andrew, my 15-year-old, was deeply into the Gaming, after all the parties were over. I got us out of here perhaps 2:30 a.m., and followed the mapquest to the far side of Phoenix. The Motel 6 we found was NOT our Motel 6. $40 per night is MUCH cheaper than this Wig Wam Resort.

Seems they have one Motel 6 at 51st Street and one at 52nd Avenue, or vice versa, and there is also a 51st Road or whatever. We backtracked half an hour and checked into the right place somewhere in the 3 to 4 a.m. era,
rather sleepy.

A maid pounded on the door at 9:00, and didn't speak English. Night manager had neglected to report my desire to sleep until afternoon.

I got back to sleep, up before 2 p.m., showered,
signed paperwork at motel office, took long time
getting Andrew up.

Back to the Con -- it was 108 Farenheit in the shade.

Recorded a short syndicated radio broadcast, for later transmission, gave the 2nd panel (on future Mars projects, with a star-studded scientific cast, as there are 2 major planetary science entities in AZ), and got free breakfast/ lunch/ dinner at the Staff suite, which
gave food to ribbonned program participants.

Paid for our membership in Westercon 59, 2 years from now, as San Diego won the bid. Verified that we are on the registry for Westercon 58 (San Jose) and Worldcon in Glasgow 2005.

Nothing much to summarize. GOH C. J. Cherry had to cancel -- maybe flu also. Talked to people, drank Port and beer, listened, Andrew had fun. Con smaller than I expected, but run well. Nice resort, but I keep getting lost, as numbering system reflects history but is not any kind of logic in layout. Panels in convention building, but parties, gaming, anime and green room and so forth in little randomly scattered bungalow/suites.

Will take Andrew back to motel soon, sleep, get up, check out, back to con, give 3rd panel, tell 'em I can't do 4th, then drive 360 miles home.

Not a satisfactory con report -- I missed the masquerade, and can't comment on many other panels. Cowboy and Native American motif in resort, painting, sculpture, baskets, pottery. Right next to Indian School Road.

There was a lot of discussion on "I, Robot" and Asimov here. Purists griped that film of Bicentennial Man violated Laws twice in final scene. Mentions that Asimov liked to keep violence off-screen, keep conflict on ther plane of ideas, and preach that conflict can often be resolved rationally. But Hollywood thinks otherwise.

Much Bush-bashing here, even by formerly hard-line Republicans, eben by ex-military.

Not entirely on-topic, but vaguely 4th of July and Robotic. Bye for now. ZZZZzzzzz...

"We're combining the story of 'Romeo and Juliet' with high-speed car action and a sincere plea for nuclear disarmament." (The movie in question is called "Atomic War Brides," and features Paul Bartel directing Godzilla to "express your true feelings for the heroine, while managing to step on as many people as possible.")

The game of combining two unfortunate companions into one screenplay ("Ill Met by Klieglight"*) could keep us busy for a long time. It's getting very late, so I'll only offer:

VIVA LOS ALAMOS: The best parts of "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman" combined with rock 'n' roll! Elvis as Richard Feynman, and Horst Buchholz as Klaus Fuchs!

(Yes, I've seen "Infinity." More than once.)

Oh, and the script "Hardwired" had to get a different name because . . . well, I'm sure we all know.

*That -is- one word, and a trademark as well, not that it ever gets used that way.

Three songs -- "Season of the Witch", "Hurdy-Gurdy Man", and (of course) "Mellow Yellow".

Even stranger than that the last song of Henry's band set was the Andy Griffith Show theme song preceded by the Firefly theme song....

You hadda be there.

Coming Soon, to a Website Near You:
---
THE LONGEST OPEN THREAD*
A Daryl Zanuck Production

A group of blog readers storms the beaches of Normandy, and overwhelms the shoreline defenses with a frightening arsenal of wit.

---
I'll pass on trying to assign casting decisions here, as I need to dash out to the store, get more charcoal, and RIBS. lots of RIBS.

* No Todd James Pierces were harmed in the making of this thread.

Did you catch Brian Kenney Fresno (the opening opening act)? He plays Warr guitar very well and is completely insane, two traits not often found together.

Here's a good sample, though. The part where he sings the Mexican restaurant menu is particularly fine.

Wish I'd made it to the show--I haven't seen RT with a band in ages.

========

Meanwhile, regarding Gag Order Gorge Bush and his Brigands' Brigade/Gag Order George's Jackals:

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/07/05/translator_in_eye_of_storm_on_retroactive_classification/

Catch it quick, it probably won't be accesible long between the Globe's policy of turning things to pay archive after a couple days, and Ashcroft's retroactively classifying every piece of adverse information indicating possible malfeasance on the part of the FBI etc....

The Beatles, after their box office boffo "Lord of the Ringos" (John Lennon as Gollum), try their eight hands at Shakespeare. With Pope John Paul, Wally George, Freddy Mercury as Mercutio. Yoko Ono memorably played by Courtney Love. Simon & Garfunkle as Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern. Mickey Rooney reprises his role as Puck.

You can find this quote in AHD5 under the listing for 'scumbag'. Spit upon the name of Laurence Mark and all his unholy kindred!

---L.

My magicdragon.com site is not quite in any category, as "The Ultimate Science Fiction Web Page" is so much broader in scope than any site for any particular author, film, publisher, or TV series. I'm glad NOT to be competing against Making Light!

I, Robot, Am a Camera
Serio-comedy remake of the 1955 film, adapted from the John Van Druten/Christopher Isherwood novel, that was the basis for "Cabaret." Stars Julie Harris, Laurence Harvey, and Will Smith as robot singers and writers in 1920s Berlin living a life of pleasure and ignoring the signs of encroaching tyranny. Co-stars Shelley Winters and Patrick McGoohan. 99 min. Director: Henry Cornelius and Jerry Cornelius;
Cast: Anton Diffring, Julie Harris, Laurence Harvey, Patrick McGoohan, Ron Randell, Shelley Winters, Will Smith, Harlan Ellison; uncredited scene with Governor Arnold Swartzenegger;
Rated: NR B&W
The original "I am a Camera" famously received the 2-word review: "No Leica."

As to another topic, Westercon 57 was slightly light on authors, as it did not include the Locus Awards event. Further, there is the upcoming CopperCon in the same greater Phoenix, which is specifically Literary.

JVP, did you know the Beatles DID want to make a film of LotR?? As described in Mike Foster's article "Ringo and Samwise: Paradigms?", the casting would have been John as Gollum, Paul as Frodo, George as Gandalf, and Ringo as Sam. Scary to contemplate...

THE WIZARD OF OZ: Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first woman she meets and then teams up with three complete strangers to kill again.

I'd read brief descriptions of this LOTR scheme in several of the books about The Beatles. Without yet following your link, I recall that the Fab Four did indeed own a film option for a year or so.

I once wrote a never-submitted verse play about the Beatles encountering the Three Stooges, all in pseudo-Shakespearean iambic pentameter. I've rarely spent time on any writing less likely to succeed. And that includes most of 700+ poems (of which at least 212 have been published).

Excerpt from:
The Ultimate Science Fiction Web Guide: Authors: B

The Beatles: Hindu mythology recognizes that a single god can be fractionally
reincarnated in several people simultaneously. In one Vedic tale, a
god appears as 3 brothers, one of whom is 1/2 the god and the other 2
brothers are each 1/4. Well, I suspect that Orpheus was reincarnated
as 1/4 John Lennon [1940-1980], 1/4 George Harrison [1943-], 1/4 Ringo Starr
[1940-] and 1/4 Paul McCartney [1942-]; with maybe a smaller fraction
going to each of several 5th and 6th Beatles. The full complexity of
their lives, loves, and music could not have been invented by any
fantasy author, although Rock & Roll novels have proliferated in the
past 4 decades...

[sad: I need to update this with the death-year of George, Lead Guitarist of the World's #1 Rock Band Ever]

Since this is just the sort of claim people make to get master's degrees, I thought it was pretty funny.

that's the sort of thing wherein the author should be offered a chance to post the article online...

Xopher:

I once visited Chip Delany while he was acting Chair of Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. There's a fine line between making clever jokes and being forced to cleverly chair a department of jokers...

My math trivia of the day (as discovered by Python programming), (with the "^" meaning raise to the power of):

Let Octh(n) = the nth Octahedral Number
= n(2n^2 + 1)/3

there are only two Octahedral Numbers which are squares of integers [original proof omitted here]:

Octh(1) = 1, and Octh(12) = 1156 = 34^2

But the closest Octahedral "near squares" up through Octh(30000) are:

Octh(69) = 219029 = 468^2 + 5

Octh(110) = 887370 = 942^2 + 6

Similarly, there is only one Octahedral Number which is a cube of integer [proof left to reader]:

Octh(1) = 1

However, as to near misses through Octh(20000):

Let Tet(n) = the nth Tetrahedral Number
= n(n+1)(n+2)/6

Then:

Octh(704) = 232609344 = 615^3 - 969
= 615^3 - Tet(17)

and:

Octh(9334) + Octh(28) = 542140850914 + 14644
= 8154^3 - 6

Can anyone with serious number-crunching capacity find closer such near misses?

Okay, now I'll drive to Woodbury University and administer a Final Exam in Intermediate Algebra.

But, that'd take CPU cycles away from my antenna modeling projects!

Won't have spare CPU cycles until I finish building my AMD64 system this weekend.

Since this is just the sort of claim people make to get master's degrees, I thought it was pretty funny.

*** Along the same lines, have I got an article for you! http://www.mark-shea.com/LOTR.html
It's going to be reprinted in my forthcoming anthology _Tolkien on Film_

Stunned, I didn't think to be polite (this is a recurring problem of mine). "No they don't."

She smiled in a condescending way. "Yes, they do."

I fixed a probably not convincing smile on my face for long enough that I could walk away without being too rude.

I don't know for sure, but I'd guess The Einstein Intersection, since the whole novel is, in a way, this sort of in-joke. Maybe I'll have to re-read it. Again.

I'm a bit surprised by that level of invincible ignorance; I've gotten the impression it isn't easy to get a job as a librarian -- but I suppose the qualifications don't always include certain kinds of real-world knowledge.

I just got back from my local library, where I was looking to put a hold on the first episode of Cosmos (which is both better produced and more pessimistic than I remembered it) and was surprised to discover that our real librarian (MLS and all) had never heard of it, or of Carl Sagan. I'd say she's in her mid 40's, and definitely American, so she would have had to have been under a pretty serious rock in about 1980 to not have noticed it. But, she was super-helpful as always...

From Philip K. Dick's point of view, it was a tragedy that EVERY novel of his was a paperback original, by publishers such as my father (at Macfadden-Bartel). He was never, in his lifetime, published first in hardcover. He longed to be reviewed in the New York Times, to have stories in the New Yorker, and so forth. Now Dick (along with Shakespeare and Homer) is the hottest name in Hollywood.

One should also distinguish between Mass Market paperbacks and Trade Paperbacks.

This has been an unpaid and semi-hysterical announcemnt by a former librarian. I approved this message and I'm

MKK

Small editions, mostly from Doubleday, often with SFBC versions available much more cheaply.

I'll defer to you around mathematics, but your knowledge of publishing leaves much to be desired.

Ouch. I assume that you're right again. Perhaps I'm remembering from one of the bios of PKD something he griped about MUCH EARLIER in his career than The Man in the High Castle.

Or maybe I misunderstood the back-story to the PKD Award?

On another matter, are you willing to supply edification on the mechanics of local, regional, national, NASFIC, and Wordcons to the Chair of the series of International Conferences on Complex Systems, who are trying to be proactive in scaling up as their cons continue rapid growth, multitack-width, and cooperation with other international venues? They've asked for such an education, and you plus Ben Yallow leap to my mind as Doctors of Conrunning, Theoretical and Applied.

And it's still new to me, being deferred to around Mathematics. I felt so utterly humbled when I was an undergrad at Caltech taking mostly Grad courses in Math -- where every other person present was on the track towards PhD and professorship, and was highly unclear what track if any that I was on. Not counting the Physics, Astronomy, Philosophy, and English Lit I took.

There was a period (say 1969-1971) where I seemed to be majoring in Science Fiction, hacking, motorcycle accidents, self-publishing poetry, improvisational theatre, Go, Bridge, Hearts, commune living, romance, and fear of being shipped to Vietnam (as King so precisely nailed it in "Hearts in Atlantis").

You were on the polymath track!

The backstory to the PKD award is that many of his books were paperback originals, at least in the US, and he's probably the best-known author for which that is true (in the SF field -- William Burroughs, Charles Bukowski and others are better known in general).

Don't worry, I won't defer on your math if it sounds wrong to me. If I don't take the time to understand what you're saying, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.

When the incarnated knight Gotz welcomes the guests by fanfare sounds on the terrace with sappy words and drink from the beaker and afterwards leads you into the festivly decorated Gotzensaal (tin gods hall) or when musicians and jugglers become alive during the knight's meal, then the sober everyday-life is far away and you're "guests at Gotz".

Methinks this is an object lesson on the abuse of auto-translation services. (Side note: I wonder if they have Gotz's iron hand?)

Larry, my local librarian friend said they buy paperbacks in things that they think will be read often because hardcovers don't last much longer than paperbacks and paperbacks are cheaper.

Please not to be talking mit der witchen, sie is pure decoratives.

Just follow the breadcrumbs.

(It's particularly suboptimal because something is screwy with the default fonts on Mozilla, so this is typing white on white for me, and I'm having to highlight to read my own words.)

---L.

as a follow-up to my congratulating you (1 July 2004) on your explanation of Lucas Numbers, and that the ratio of consecutive terms approaches Phi, the golden ration, let me add the following.

That the ratio of consecutive terms of the Fibonacci sequence approaches Phi was "first proved by Scottish mathematician Robert Simson in 1753 (Wells 1986, p. 62; Livio 2002, p. 101)."

Livio, M. The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, the World's Most Astonishing Number. New York: Broadway Books, 2002.

Wells, D. The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers. Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1986

These citations taken from the excellent page:

Eric W. Weisstein. "Golden Ratio."
From MathWorld--A Wolfram Web Resource. http://mathworld.wolfram.com/GoldenRatio.html

Also, you punningly suggested that I was once "on the polymath track!"

My favorite herb was not poly-mountain, polyander, or any polydelphia.

My favorite girlfriend was not polyandrous.

If teachers were my rulers, then I was polyarchal.

I did study polyautography with Feynman.

The guitar was my polychord of choice.

It was a polychromatic era, a sort of day-glo Paisley.

I did have to check into the polyclinic now and then.

I could go on far too long, with the OED in my lap, so I'll stop here:

My religion might have been characterized as Polydaemonistic, especially when in Graduate School I was mentored by Oliver Selfridge, the father of Machine Perception, who invented Pandemonium as a computing architecture.

Now I'm thirsty from talking too much. Think I'll pour a glass of polywater...

Damn. What this administration is doing to my image of the US. Not happy. I'd love it if this all turned out to not be true, but I continue to believe the worst of my government.

About 6 months ago, I stayed at a Neapolitan hotel with a similarly colorful website--not so much a result of poor auto-translators as an obviously overenthusiastic student of English. Adjectives everywhere.

Sadly, I was just about to provide a link, but it looks like they've redone the website, with a much tamer English translation. Too bad. It was the thing that made me want to go there.

"The intimate atmosphere of the little sitting room, very friendly, is assured by the wood, greatly privileged in the furniture, from the leather of the sofas and from flowers... "

A fun place, if anyone has the need.

In a store window: Best Jewelry "Value"

On an interstate overhead sign: Road work in 56.4MM

(Since it was near exit/mile 55, I figured they meant at 56.4 mile, rather than millimeters, but there was no road work there.)

I can just picture some big goon in a hard hat lecturing you on the graphemics of case in English orthography... Still funny, though. And they probably should have written MM 56.4.

"Bright, finished in particulars and well cured is the bar, where our guests are served breakfast, that can be offered directly in the room for those who prefer the warm of the sheets..."

The bar does sound like a nice cure. I am, however, rather fond of the warm of the sheets.

This has been an unpaid and semi-hysterical announcemnt by a former librarian.

And seconded by a current, (under)paid reference librarian.

If your library is too underfunded to have a professional librarian staffing the reference desk, talk to the person in charge. Or if possible try a larger library.

From Feedback (where else?), 3 July: The US House (as we all know, the American answer to the Royal Society and the Academie Française) has decided to endow a couple of science fellowships, one for an American and one for a Comm . . . er, Russian, toward the study of nuclear non-proliferation.

The Russian fellowship is named for Igor Kurchatov. The US one honors . . . wait for it . . . Edward Teller.

Somewhere, the Oppenheimer brothers are laughing their baryons off.

That New Scientist snippet is rather grotesque and ironic, parallel to Henry Kissenger and Yasser Arafat winning Nobel Peace Prizes. My biases include being a student of a student of Oppie, although once having my mathematical Physics praised by Teller. Igor Kurchatov was worthy of the element name Kurchatovium. At least there's no Tellerium. Of course, there IS a Telluriumn, but that's another story.

"Elementary, My Dear Watson" -- the screenplay that ("based on a true story") at last explains how Sherlock Holmes helped Mendeleev discover the Periodic Table, and Bell invent the telephone, plus a gold-plated blue-plate special on the mysteries of IBM's leader, Thomas J. Watson.

Here are some results from the Mathematics research that I've been doing yesterday and today. These are "sporadic" solutions. I have a longer paper, several months in progress, that uses the theory of Elliptic Surfaces, to find four infinite sequences of "parametric" solutions to the question of whn an Octahedral Number is a Polygonal Number.

Where Octh(n) in the nth Octahedral Number,
Octh(n) = n (2n^2 + 1) / 3

I have proven (in the main paper):

The only Octahedral Numbers that are also Perfect Squares (i.e. squares of integers) are:

Octh(1) = Square(1) = 1
Octh(12) = Square(34) = 1156

In the work yesterday and today, I've pointed out that,
where P(n) in the nth Pentagonal Number,
P(n) = n (3n-1) / 2

Octh(1) = P(1) = 1

I’ve conjectured that this is the only Octahedral Pentagonal Number.

I've also shown,where H(n) is the nth Hexagonal Number,
H(n) = n (2n-1)

then:

Octh(1) = H(1) = 1

Octh(2) = H(2) = 6

Octh(7) = H(11) = 231

I conjecture that these are the only Octahedral Hexagonal Numbers.

Further, where Hep(n) is the nth Heptagonal Number,
Hep(n) = n (5n-3) / 2

then:

Octh(1) = Hep(1) = 1

Octh(92) = Hep(456) = 519156

I conjecture that these are the only Octahedral Heptagonal Numbers.

When O(n) is the nth Octagonal Number,
O(n) = n (3n-2)

then:

Octh(1) = O(1) = 1

Octh(136) = O(748) = 1677016

I conjecture that these are the only Octahedral Octagonal Numbers.

and, finally, where Non(n) is the nth Nonagonal Number,
Non(n) = n (7n-5) / 2

then:

Octh(1) = Non(1) = 1

Octh(47) = Non(141) = 69231

Octh(124) = Non(603) = 1271124

I conjecture that these three are the only Octahedral Nonagonal Numbers.

Most of the computations I've done, in Python, involve searches for "near misses" where the difference between Octahedral Numbers through about the 30,000th and Polygonal Numbers are as small as possible. Several nice examples, but that's enough for here, now.

I WAS A MALE WAR BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN: Howard Hawks long lost screwball horror classic. French Capt. Henri Rochard's (Cary Grant) attempt to board a troop ship with his American wife (Ann Sheridan) goes awry when he falls into the clutches of Dr. Frankenstein (Colin Clive) seeking material to construct a mate for the Monster (Boris Karloff). (B&W, 110 min.)

I liked this run-in with English idiom on TChem's site:

The calm and discreet atmosphere of a "common house" that distingueshes the Hotel, unique in its genre, is perceived on the entrance...

Rumored to be in preproduction:

Lord of the Flies II: The Natural. A Little League baseball team is shipwrecked on a desert island as World War III breaks out.

JvP: I think people make too much of phi. It isn't nearly as special as people make out.

Example: I give you the Perrin-acci sequence! 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, ...

The Perrin-acci sequence can be generated by the following formula:

P[n] = 3*P[n-1] - 2*P[n-2], with P[1] = 1, P[2] = 2.

The ratio of adjacent terms always converges to the Platinum Ratio, P = 2.00000.... even for different choices of (positive) seeds. The Platinum Ratio has the following geometrical significance. If two perfect squares are placed one above the other, a rectangle will be formed in which the sides have the ratio P : 1.

The Platinum Ratio and the Perrin-acci Sequence play an important role in computer architecture. Memory sizes, hard drive space, and screen bit depths are all generally Perrin-acci numbers.

In pop culture, the Indigo Girls have dedicated a song to the Perrin-acci sequence. Janet Jackson comemorates P in this duet.

The Platinum Ratio is found everywhere in nature. People (usually) have P eyes, P ears, P arms, P legs, and P nostrils. Animals generally have some multiple of P legs.

I'm sure that you can think of many other examples of P, and the Perrin-acci numbers!

THE HAUNTING OF ANIMAL HOUSE
"We see it as 'Carrie' meets 'Mean Girls' with a food fight at the end."

KING ARTHUR
"He's a funny drunk who wears armor."

THE BELL JAR DURHAM
"Hunky baseball player and crazy poet lady. Sequels are gonna be a problem, though."

A LITTLE NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD MUSIC
"Zombies. Sondheim. This is the summer movie to end all summer movies."

WHITEHOUSE
"Stallone's the President, right? And J. Lo is this girl he knew, like, in French Indochina before the war -- did I mention he used to be Rambo? -- and they were, you know. And she comes back, only she's married to Ben Affleck, who's like, this guy, and she needs the football so she can nuke Hanoi and save Ben's worthless butt, right? And Sly's, like, should I nail her or Communism? And Britney's doing the love theme."