Trivia that matter
• An explosive announcement concerning Yellowstone National Park
• A re-visioning of Mononoke Hime
• A history of “conceptual writing”
• An audio plugin to blend divine proportion into your music Update: now offline.
• Live tribble cam Update: now offline.
It’s possible that not all of the above news releases are related to today’s date.
Update:
We had a brown Christmas here this past winter. We’re going to make up for that with a white Easter tomorrow, or so the weatherman says, with one to three inches of anthropogenic global warming falling after midnight.
Today was the first time in nearly three weeks that the wind wasn’t furiously howling all day long. I was finally able to get out to the botanical garden to take some pictures.
Here’s a set of variations on a simple traditional tune, “The Bear.” Since this is played entirely on the white keys of the piano, the critter most likely is a polar bear. As usual, it’s my computer playing, not me.
Update: The score is here for the morbidly curious. You can right-click and download the mp3 here.
I’m rather preoccupied at the moment, but I’ll be back eventually. In the meantime, here’s a chess problem to amuse you. There is something wrong with this position. Find the problem, correct it, and then find a mate-in-one for white, no matter how you fix it. You can find solutions in the comments here.
Did you ever get the feeling that, if only you could figure out just what the hell was going on, you’d wish you hadn’t?
Solomon in all his glory couldn’t touch my coffee options!
Hillary Clinton or Cannibal Corpse: Easy Decision
(Via Ubu.)
Here’s a handy schedule of expected cherry blossom bloom times, in case you should be heading to Japan during the next few months. If you can’t go to Japan, you can visit the botanical garden in Wichita, where the Okame cherry, above, has just started flowering.
The Japanese apricot is in full bloom now. Thanks to new construction and landscaping, it is no longer possible to get close to tree, but you don’t need to get close to appreciate its powerful fragrance.
From tonight’s dress rehearsal of The Firebird.
I spent the evening photographing a tech rehearsal for a dance program. Here are three of the pictures. There are about 1600 more to go through. The dress rehearsal is Thursday, and I’ll probably take at least as many more then.
Some aspects of GATE are not well thought-out, e.g., the girls’ armor. What purpose do the pointed projections on the pauldrons serve? If one of the warrior maidens tilts her head to the side, she’s liable to pierce her ear or worse. Also, I don’t recall ever seeing any of the girls with helmets, even in the middle of battles. It may be that on the far side of the gate women’s skulls are so thick and dense that head protection is superfluous, but I am skeptical.
… and pigs are flying. Dennou Coil has finally been licensed for North America. The Mouretsu Pirates movie has also been licensed.
Only one or two of the candidates are as bad as Mussolini. The others are, well, better than Mussolini. I think.
Moore notes also that “Many people have lead perfectly good lives under perfectly awful governments;” which is probably true but not particularly reassuring.
I did some preliminary spring cleaning in the tiny garden out front, and kept one of the plumes from the clump of ornamental grass (Miscanthus sinensis?) to give Helicon Focus a workout. The picture above was composed from 48 slices and has a depth of field of about three inches.
… but there was some color at the botanical garden yesterday.
The calendar says it’s February, but it’s May outside. I took the day off, and in a little while I’m going to go out and enjoy the weather. While I’m out, here’s some miscellaneous nonsense for you. As usual, I forget where I found most of these.
The more Pope Frankie flaps his mouth, the more I miss Bennie and J.P.
Continue reading “What do you get when you cross a joke with a rhetorical question?”
This afternoon in the cathedral.
While I might have felt earthquakes at a greater frequency during the year I lived in San Francisco, during the past few years I have experienced a larger number here in Kansas than in all the years I lived in the allegedly more seismically-active west, most recently earlier this hour.
An unexpected volcanic hazard:
One of the few videos of a phreatic blowout on Iwo Jima turned out to not be phreatic at all. Instead it was heat affecting an old 16 inch shell from Iowa that had fallen into the ocean. As the spot inflated up and became the new beach it dried out and heated and “boom”. Volcanic artillery is something of a novelty. Cryptoshelling with magmatic release…
Years ago, when I was a youngster in Bigamy City, Utah1, I played games stepping on the cracks between sidewalk blocks while walking home from the park. My favorite was as follows:
Step on a crack with the right foot.
Step on a crack with the left foot.
Reverse that: left, then right.
Take the entire sequence so far and reverse it: left, right, right, left.
Now take the entire eight-step sequence, and reverse that: left, right, right, left, right, left, left, right.
And so on.
I could usually keep the sequence straight for 64 cracks or so, but eventually I would either be distracted by something or run out of sidewalk. Later I found that if you arranged black and white boxes in a square grid using the sequence, the sides of which square were a power of two, you’d get a pattern with a high degree of symmetry. You could also use “0” and “1” to represent the elements of the sequence, which led to other sorts of games.
Last night, while browsing around online, I discovered that my game does in fact have a name: the Thue-Morse sequence. I was amused to see that one of the ways of generating it involves the notion of “evil” and “odious” numbers.
Thought for the day, from Francis W. Porretto:
Silo Syndrome is one of the natural consequences of the sense that things are sliding down the slippery slope to Shitville, and there’s nothing one can do about it. The sense might be illusory, of course, but the consequences of it are nevertheless compelling.
The countermeasure is laughter, however administered or evoked. Jokes. Puns. Harmless pranks. General horseplay. Frivolity. Cat videos. The zany impulse indulged in an unguarded moment. Laughter might not be able to cure cancer, but it can make the chemotherapy a bit easier to endure.
Some vile ethnic humor, attributed to John Cleese:
The English are feeling the pinch in relation to recent events in Syria and have therefore raised their security level from “Miffed” to “Peeved.” Soon, though, security levels may be raised yet again to “Irritated” or even “A Bit Cross.”
The English have not been “A Bit Cross” since the blitz in 1940 when tea supplies nearly ran out. Terrorists have been re-categorized from “Tiresome” to “A Bloody Nuisance.” The last time the British issued a “Bloody Nuisance” warning level was in 1588, when threatened by the Spanish Armada.
Years ago I attended a performance of a John Cage piece. The musicians sat on the stage in black turtlenecks while making gurgling noises with conch shells and water to the accompaniment of a recording of pine cones burning. After 20 minutes, one of the performers stood up and blew on his conch for five minutes, at the end of which his face was purple. I’ve also sampled recordings of Cage’s prepared piano music; the sonorities are novel, but the music itself is hard to pay attention to for more than a minute or two. Cage himself was probably aware that his music would not be universally appreciated, which is perhaps why he insisted that auditoriums where his music was performed have easily accessible exits.
Cage’s political philosophy is more interesting than his music, which makes him unique in history of music:
Cage—most famous for his 1952 composition 4’33”, in which musicians sit in perfect silence for four minutes and 33 seconds—was a gut anarchist. Asked about the word ecology, the composer replied that whenever he heard that seductive word he knew he’d soon hear the word planning, and “when I hear that word, I run in the other direction.” He boasted that he never voted.
Continue reading “Miscellaneous nonsense, John Cleese edition”
I came across some startling numbers in an article on politics and dating while skimming though this morning’s Wichita Eagle.
Those in the Clinton camp are more likely to be female (176 percent) and gay (606 percent), and Trump supporters are more likely to be unemployed (82 percent) or retired (96 percent).
I suppose I ought to track down the original Washington Post story to see if the surprising statistics originated there, but I have better things to do with my lunch hour.