Tanka, February 25, 2023

Almond trees in bloom --

Like mine their heads have turned white.

Snow on the mountain --

An old man in a white shawl.

And yet -- and yet! -- new Spring grass!

A. K. Chesterton

 Gilbert Keith Chesterson's alter ego? 

Saw this: 

Thought this: 

 

When I was little, I thought the Christmas song said, "Deck the halls with BALLS of holly."

Well, the berries ARE like little balls, you know.

There's been a bug going around

 

When I was little, I'd hear my parents talk during flu season about the bug that was currently going around, and I thought they meant, you know, a BUG. 

Treat it with kid gloves

 

When I was little, when grownups talked about "kid gloves" I thought they meant the gloves kids like me wore to play cowboys. 

Taking things for granite

 

When I was little, when the grownups said "taking things for granted" I thought they were saying "taking things for granite."

Windows is now that rude clerk at Home Depot

Saturday morning is time to finish up my grocery shopping list.  To ensure the very best prices I need to check with Safeway.com's Just-for-U, which gives me the warm cozy feeling that I am saving money and doing something right for a change. 

So. Pull down the laptop and fire that sucker up. 

Spinning ball bearings.  Spinning ball bearings that occasionally stop and start spinning again. 

What's taking this thing so long?  Let's find out.  Ctrl-Alt-Delete.  No immediate response.  Eventually the little menu comes up and I click on Task Manager.  No immediate response. 

Finally a pale small empty window labeled Task Manager comes up.  Overlaid on it is a message that Task Manager Is Not Responding.  In fact, Windows, NOTHING is responding. 

Yes at last Task Manager does respond, and I close things like HP Support Services and Chrome update and such.  Great.  All settled down.  Now I can browse Safeway.com.

And I think: "If I worked for a company that had Windows as an employee, I would agitate to get Windows fired ASAP."

It is true:  Windows is that rude clerk.  You know the kind.  You go into Home Depot to get the kind of exterior caulk that you can paint over.  Like everything else these days, the labels have all changed from what they looked like when you bought it last year, because New! and IMPROVED! or something. 

So you see a clerk. Two clerks in fact, yucking it up about something.  I walk up to within striking distance and announce that I have a question. 

He turns slightly.  The mouth opens slightly.  The eyelids close slightly.  Then he turns back to his co-worker and finishes what he was saying.  They both laugh.  I get the impression that he had finished with, "See?  This guy? He's just what I was talkin' 'bout. Heh."

Then oh so slowly he three-quarters faces me and puts on a sarcastic version of his work face. 

That's Windows.  Windows is that guy.  Like I'm interrupting Windows' precious time by wanting to actually use my computer for a non-Windows-sanctioned function.

Some day, Windows.  Some day I'm about decided I'm gonna hafta just Linux this thing.  Then you'll be sorry.  But then, given the limitations and learning curve, I know I'm gonna be sorry too. 

But it will be a satisfying kind of sorry. 

The faces of my dead

The book in hand is Traffics and Discoveries by Rudyard Kipling.  The story I have open is "They" in which the narrator has met a blind woman at her country estate, where "they" live -- magical (?) almost hallucinatory (surely not!) almost faerie (?!) children.  The narrator almost asks whether his host had ever had sight. He stops himself, but she understands.  An excerpt:

     "Not since I can remember. It happened when I was only a few months old, they told me.  And yet I must remember something, else how could I dream about colours.  I see light in my dreams, and colours, but I never see them.  I only hear them just as I do when I am awake."

     "It's difficult to see faces in dreams.  Some people can, but most of us haven't the gift," I went on, looking up at the window where the child stood all but hidden.

     "I've heard that too," she said.  "And they tell me that one never sees a dead person's face in a dream.  Is that true?"

     "I believe it is -- now I come to think of it."

     "But how is it with yourself -- yourself?"  The blind eyes turned towards me.

     "I have never seen the faces of my dead in any dream," I answered. 

     "Then it must be as bad as being blind." 

Well now!  I know it is methodological madness to mix the author up with the narrator. Nevertheless, here is a conjecture:  Mr. Kipling was someone who could see and remember any number of faces while awake.  Part of his creative gift was that he could emphatically see and pay attention to anyone he met. Yet here he has the narrator saying, "I have never seen the faces of my dead in any dream."

How different I must be than Mr. Kipling!  (And yet I love him like a friend I never had, or like one of the friends of mine who have passed beyond the veil of this life.)  Yes, how different he and I are.

In my waking life masquerading as a grown-up, I have a hard time remembering names and faces.  I'm afraid I have to know you quite a while before I can see you.  Sometimes I wonder whether I ever see the faces of those around me.  But in my dreams -- ah, unexpected mercy! -- the faces of my beloved dead are frequent and comforting visitors.

Oh, Wikipedia, when you talk like that!

"An alternative to the synchrocyclotron is the isochronous cyclotron, which has a magnetic field that increases with radius, rather than with time." 

Thank you, wikipedia. Also, well, duh.  Of course!  But they fall short of telling me how to build one in my secret laboratory. 

A good wiki-wander, like the dinner table conversation around casa Crowndot, is topologically indistinguishable from a Rube Goldberg mouse trap, only without all that distracting utility. 

...the electronvolt was devised as a standard unit of measure through its usefulness in electrostatic particle accelerator sciences, because a particle with electric charge q has an energy E = qV after passing through the potential V; if q is quoted in integer units of the elementary charge and the potential in volts, one gets an energy in eV.

Hmm.  You don't say!

But it doesn't get me any closer to finding out whether an old computer CRT repurposed into a particle pointer of whatever energy value (for purely aesthetic purposes I am partial to "in the two to four MeV range" just because I learned how to say that on Wikipedia) can be used to knock out the electronics in those head-banger cars that pass the house in the middle of the night blasting their tooth loosening low frequency audio. 

After all, Earnest Orlando Lawrence (the Lawrence Hall of Science Lawrence) and Niels Edlefsen built their first cyclotron out of basic household materials (if your house includes things like brass sheet-metal, baling wire, and sealing wax?) and it was small enough to hold in one hand.  I learned that on Wikipedia! 

Forgive myself for all of my mistakes

[I originally wrote this June 9, 2006, not quite six years after my mother died suddenly, and not quite a year after my father died of cancer.  I'm offering this today very slightly edited.] 

Every Halloween we are treated to images of ghosts with rattling
chains.  In Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," Mr. Scrooge is
confronted by the shade of his old business partner.  Marley's Ghost
is chained and burdened by cashboxes, coin purses, locks.  The things
that occupied Marley's thoughts are supposed to bind him to earth
after death.   

Bah, humbug!  The image may function for the plot of Dickens' ghost
story, but it hardly jives with my world-view, let alone my
"other-world"-view!   

In my dreams my mother walks without a limp.  In my dreams my father
is healthy, unworried, well-rested. 

No, I don't think it's the shades of those whom we have lost who bear
the chains.   

The chains are the ones I carry.  The chains are the burdens of
accumulated grieving, loss after loss.  The chains are the regrets and
second thoughts and wish-I-hads.  The chains are the freedom I dare
not grant myself -- perhaps the freedom to be angry at Dad.  Or
perhaps the freedom to create my own standard for being ME, a
standard that would not be always a comparison, a relative judgment
about me *as* son, or me *as* friend (or me *as* blogger).   

Are my chains, my burdens, ones I *choose* to carry?  Why should there
be something inescapable, something inevitable, about the burdens
*others* put upon us?  Oh, how I wish I knew the ins and outs of the
countless little habits I have developed over the years, habits for
making my chains seem normal, necessary, even *deserved*.
Many of the links in my chains are negative memories.  Some of the
locks are believing that I failed to meet expectations.  Here is a
coffer full of guilt.  Here is a cashbox filled with the coin of
resentments. 

Every relationship -- even the very best --  has challenges and
difficulties.  I keep saying that one of the principal tasks of grief
is to find a way to keep our love alive in spite of the fact that the
one we love is gone.  I am barely beginning to learn how to deal with
the fact  that the challenges and difficulties, the bumps and
barriers, have not gone away.   

But now the relationship is a bit single-sided, no?  If the bumps are
going to be smoothed, it is I who will have to do the smoothing.  

I know:  how 'bout if I work on forgiving ME for the failures and the messes?   

Mom would if Mom were here.  Dad would if Dad were here.   

There is a song by Aeone that says in part:

From a point of faith within my head 

I believe in all the choices I have made;

From a point of love within my heart

I forgive myself for all of my mistakes.

That would be nice, wouldn't it...  

Peace and happy dreams, 

--
Crowndot

Maximum Randomness Meets Its Match

Years ago when Ernő Rubik's Cube was a hot gift idea, the brother-in-law introduced me to the mathematical concept of maximum randomness.  Apparently there is a position of the colored pieces of Rubik's Cube from which ANY move takes you closer, not farther away from, the solution: the maximum order of a single color on each face of the cube.

Maximum chaos, or maximum randomness.

Like the sign in the hands of the panhandler says: "Anything would help."

An interesting math concept.  When brother-in-law handed me his mixed-up Rubik's Cube and announced that, for once, anything I did would help, I of course had to take it on faith.  He's a bright guy and takes his mathematics quite seriously, after all.

"Maximum chaos" has bounced around in my mind [I know: "Is he talking about the concept or the usual background noise in his brain now?" And how could I tell?] since the early 1980s.  But I'm not sure I ever really believed in the idea until last week.

I have met maximum randomness in the real world!  It's not pretty.

Opening a new box of blue nitrile gloves from my usual supplier, I beheld not 100 blue nitrile powdered gloves, size medium, lying flat and docile in a stack like Kleenex; I beheld a box packed with the shriveled carcasses of withered blue cocoons, a mass grave of blue nitrile prunes preserved clutching each other in their final agony, an expended and dessicated worm-orgy of rubber gloves packed, pressed, sealed at the factory in Thailand so I could save my delicate digits from the ravages of the industrial workplace.

The picture is a handful of gloves.  Six? Eight? Hard to tell.

How do you even put these on your hand?  There's no opening.

Somebody once said, "You must find the way."  Maybe it was Lao Tzu.  Maybe it was somebody who merely looked like Lao Tzu (which come to think of it is probably most of everybody, ever, on on the planet).

At this point maximum randomness is your friend.  Reach out and pinch a little piece of blue glove anywhere.  It doesn't matter where.  with your other hand pull the wad of wrinkly glove away from the pinch.  There.  You have introduced ORDER to the system.  You will now be able to see the glove shape, to find the opening, and to introduce your hand to the inner sanctum of industrial safety.

Why did I write this?  I figured, "Anything would help!"

When I was born... and so on

For perspective:

When I was born the President of the United States was Dwight David Eisenhower; the Vice President was Richard M. Nixon. 

When I was born the United States flag had 48 stars.

When I was born Fulgencio Batista was president of Cuba.

I watched the Moon Landing LIVE on TV. 

My first “word processor” was a manual Smith Corona typewriter. 

My first computer was an Osborne.

My first “real” job included producing custom reports by hacking COBOL code. On a Burroughs B20 and a keyboard that had the function buttons on the left.

I have made archival copies of computer files on 5-1/4″ floppies, 3-1/2″ floppies, 1/4″ tape drives, CDs, DVDs, thumb drives from 256Kb on up, SSDs, and “cloud.”

The “don’t be evil” might have ended when Google bought  Deja News.

Machine Shop Drama

Scene: My office.

Employee: The flap wheel on the big pedestal grinder is no good.

Me: Ooh. Did it disintegrate on you?

Employee: No. There's no grit on it.

Me: No grit on it?

Employee: Just cloth. No Grit.

Me:  Let's go look.

Scene: At the pedestal grinder.

Me: Okay, here's what I need you to do.  Take the flap wheel off and bring it to me in my office.

Employee: Okay.  Do we have a good one?

Me: Just bring it to me in my office.

Scene:  Later, my office.

Employee: Um.

Me: You have the bad flap wheel?

Employee: Um, it was installed backwards.

Me: Ya THINK?!

- - - -

If you spin it the wrong way, all that hits the work is the BACK of the sandpaper! Stop Everything! The System Has Encountered An Unexpected Error!

I do this.  Every. Single. Day.

I followed a truck all the way home from work

Some dude in some kind of Chevy or GMC 2005 plus or minus half a decade SUV ended up going my way for several miles.

His truck had wider-than-standard tires that stuck out beyond the fender wells by a couple of inches, which used to be a fix-it ticket offence in California. The front wheels tracked about three inches to the left of the rear wheels, like a one-eyed dog trotting down the sidewalk.  That's how I know it was a Chevy type product.  Never seen a Ford or a Dodge do that.  There was a throaty hole in his exhaust system somewhere, or a cut-out system, and the engine was at a stage that we used to call "Yeah she burns a little oil."

I pretty much merge toward the slow lane after the intersection of the interstates, and then I stay there.  It's not a long commute, so if I take a low key approach and let every merging vehicle in, miss every light, and end up behind every overloaded truck trying to make it to the dump before it closes, it still loses me very little time.  What's a minute and a half, three minutes?  So I don't press and don't stress.

The Chevy SUV took a different tactic.  He would roar up to the slow landfill-bound truck and tailgate for a while, then roar out two or three lanes and try to pass some people.  But every time, he ended up just one space ahead of me.  It was like going for a walk with a hyperactive retriever that doesn't know how to heel, but goes roaming around about and back with his tongue hanging out -- and trotting along with his front paws a bit to the left of his rear ones.

We parted ways just before I turned left on the Crowndot street of residence.  Somebody in front of Mr. Chevy turned up the hill, giving him a clear path ahead, and off he roared in a cloud of partially burned diesel and motor-oil soot.

Bottom line:  I don't want to hear a damned thing about MY carbon footprint.

Words Mean Things - And Opposite Things

In Charles Dickens' The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (Chapter VI), Mr. Tupman is wounded by a small bore "rook rifle" shotgun, when Mr. Winkle demonstrates what happens when you ignore three or four of the rules of gun safety. Pickwick, Snodgrass, and Winkle then depart to enjoy a local cricket match with their host Mr. Wardle, leaving Tupman "in charge of" the ladies of the household. Dickens is not saying that Tupman has been vested with authority to police the ladies' behavior. Quite the opposite. The ladies are to see to the well-being of Tupman.

When did the change in meaning occur? How is it that words can flip meanings?

Then there's Subject and Object. Some time between the 12th and the 21st centuries, Subject and Object passed each other going in opposite directions on the towpath of language, and as they passed they traded meanings. "Subjective" used to mean, "of or pertaining to the subject," where "subject" meant the thing being "subjected" to scrutiny.  Now, of course, the subject of scrutiny is called the "object", and if you object to that, you will be subjected to the ignominy of being misunderstood.  What you study is the "object", unless you're talking about your school schedule -- in which case you still study the "subjects" on the list. The final lens on a microscope or telescope is the "objective" lens.  But how handy to introverts it could be when attending a social function, to be able to pull out a little lorgnette or pince-nez or opera glasses holding high-quality subjective lenses!  Perhaps then the (unspoken) object of the person talking to you would be magnified, their point revealed. All the feels they subjectively hold, all the bias they subjectively project, would be visible in shifting pleochroic auras under an optical-quality subjective lens!

And if I were to look at myself in a mirror through the subjective lenses of my hypothetical binoculars, would I stumble across the threshold of some kind of Burnsian satori?

O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!

On second thought, I will pass on the subjective lenses and go on seeing myself as richer, younger, healthier, and handsomer than I may look to "ithers."

MS Edge U Doin It Wrong

Here's a funny thing:

Having installed Windows 10 on the laptop many weeks ago, I decided for some unknown reason to try out Microsoft Edge, the new "I'm-Not-Windows-Exploder" web browser.  Meh.  Then I tried to import bookmarks from Chrome.

The good news I guess is that the bookmarks did, technically, move from Chrome to Edge.  The bad news is that all my bookmarks in Edge are upside down.  Inverted.  Sorted precisely backward from where they were in Chrome.

Careful, Microsoft, or somebody might think you suck and you hate us.

Midsummer walk

Elderberries getting ripe

My little buckeye

Sweet Pea blooming on pea vine hill

Huge midsummer sun bow - the black dots are swallows

Had a little midsummer eve walkies and saw some things. 

Tanka for June 13, 2015

Nearly midsummer
Bare stalks with round bead-like seeds

All along the path
Under warm scent of laurel
Pinhole pictures of the sun

Base of Mount Wanda trail

Indian Soap going to seed

Acorn Woodpecker work -- but where are the acorns?

My 2014 Year in Books

War and Peace - - Leo Tolstoy (NOT Recommended!!!)

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone - - J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets - - J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - - J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - - J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - - J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - - J. K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - - J. K. Rowling

The Conquest of Canaan - - Booth Tarkington
Penrod - - Booth Tarkington
Gentleman Takes a Chance - - Sarah Hoyt "Shifter" novel
Witchfinder - - Sarah Hoyt "Magical Empires" novel
Step to the Stars - - Lester del Rey
Dragonhunters - - Sabrina Chase "Guardians Compact" novel
Darkness Ascendant: Book Two of the Catmage Chronicles - - Meryl Yourish
New Treasure Seekers - - Edith Nesbit
The Light Princess - - George MacDonald
Sunk at Sea - - R. M. Ballantyne
Under the Waves: Diving in Deep Waters - - R. M. Ballantyne
Captains Courageous - - Rudyard Kipling
Sea Warfare - - Rudyard Kipling
The Sword of Shannara - - Terry Brooks
Fledgling - - Sharon Lee and Steve Miller
Stardogs - - Dave Freer (NOT recommended!!!)
Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) - - Jerome K. Jerome

Spe Salvi ["Saved in Hope"] - - Pope Benedict XVI
Deus Caritas Est ["God is Love"] - - Pope Benedict XVI

My Guide to RPG Storytelling - - Aron Christensen
On Fairy Stories, and Leaf by Niggle - - J. R. R. Tolkien

Born to Run - - Christopher McDougall
The Cruelest Miles [history of the sled dog teams taking diphtheria antitoxin to Nome] - - Gay Salisbury and Laney Salisbury
The Weight of Poor: a Strategy to End Poverty - - Cloward and Piven
No More Wacos - - David B. Kopel and Paul H. Blackman

- - -
And. . . currently part way through The Theory of Moral Sentiments - - Adam Smith

Some reasons I should have died by now

Unlimited salt intake
Rode bike with no helmet
Slept on the shelf behind the back seat on long trips
No car seats in cars when I was a kid
No booster seats in cars when I was a kid
No seat belts in cars when I was a kid
Walked / bicycled to school
Played in street
Playground without adult supervision
Barbecue food
Kool Aid
Movie popcorn
Fireworks
Played with matches
Played Scientist with old household and garden chemicals
Bacon
Tree climbing
Sibling fights
Playground fights
Baseball
Dodge Ball
Keep-Away
Red Rover
Parade Magazine quiz 1974: "Headed for trouble"
Drove too fast for the rating of the tires
Drove too fast in the fog
Drove so fast stopping distance > headlight beam
Got knocked upside the head by Dad (more than once)
Childhood diseases before all those vaccines
"Hydration" was not a thing -- drinking out of the garden hose was a thing
"Electrolytes" was not a thing -- potato chips was a thing
Ate the green potato chips
Got a "D" in math in third grade
Wouldn't eat Mom's overcooked beef liver
Went trick-or-treating on Halloween without adult supervision
Ate the Halloween candy we got

 . . . And that's just a start!