Twilight Zone

Today I heard on NPR a description of how Rod Serling developed his Twilight Zone show, despite frequent objections from the Television Establishment. They mentioned several of my favorite episodes, including "Beauty and the Beholder", in which an injured woman had her face remade to be "ugly" but she looked perfectly normal to us, and the doctors and others were the ones with pig faces, as well as another episode in which a man wandered by himself all alone in a town. Some of my other favorites include those where: gremlins kept occurring outside the window of an airliner in a storm; aliens land with a book entitled "How to Serve Man" only at the last minute people discover it was a cookbook; a man describes people into his tape recorder and makes them suddenly materialize; astronauts are lost and land on a foreign looking planet only to discover it was Nevada; a man dies and winds up in a place of eternal happiness where he had all the pleasure and women he wanted so he asks for Hell instead and is told he already is in Hell; one in a war where a soldier sees halos on the heads of soldiers that subsequently die, and then sees it on his own mirror reflection, and one in which a man gives a recalcitrant woman a love potion and then she keeps going after him and he can't get rid of her. I saw these episodes when I was a teenager, and the memory of them sticks in my mind. I would like to see it again; I hear they are playing it again but wonder if it will measure up to the original.

Down and South

I have found objectionable the use of "south" to mean "down", as in "the Dow is headed south". I feel it is wrong; the Dow is going down instead, and furthermore, I feel it disparages southerners of all types - southern US, Third World, and Australians, for example. But I now see by a notable example that one should also not do the reverse; namely use "down" to mean "south". I had not thought of that one. But when the three Arab-Americans were detained in southern Florida because the authorities thought they were a terrorist threat, one of the things that they allegedly said at a Shoney's was "Do we have enough to bring it down?". According to news reports, a lady at the restaurant thought it meant a building, in these post-Planeattack days. But they said they meant a car instead. They used "down" to mean "south" to Miami. They should have said "Do we have enough to bring it south?" or "do we have enough to bring it to Miami?" Then there would have been no misunderstanding. But one thing this whole episode brings up is that one should use "down" to mean "down and "south" to mean "south" and not confuse the directions.

Orisinal

I have to admit some of the stuff I have been commenting on lately has been rather heavy. I will choose something more light-hearted tonight. If you are searching for some good video games that are not violent, no Dooms or Dragons or anything of that sort, try Orisinal at www.orisinal.org. Earlier I had commented on the Bubble Bees game. This is the game where you blow bubbles and try to catch bees and once in a while a clock, in them, hopefully two or three at a time. I play this when I want a break from what I am doing. Yes, you catch bees with bubbles. And you catch clocks. That is what makes these games so neat. They are nonsensical and silly, and are generally, but not always, nonviolent.

I found out tonight that there are about a score of other Orisinal games you can play. I tried a few. Some of them I could not get, like the one on stars. How are you supposed to catch them? In one you are a kid on a bicycle trailing a kite, and you are supposed to speed up or slow down to make the kite go up or down so it can catch little starlets that are flying around, but NO BIRDS! If you hit a bird, you are penalized and too many hits and you are out of the game. This whole idea is silly, and the idea of avoiding hitting birds promotes the idea of protecting the environment. Some are romantic. A video game about falling in love? The attempt here is a cruising Freddy Eynesford Hill at a building serenading his paramour with a guitar. She responds by throwing roses at him but the other neighbors don't take kindly to the noise and they throw teapots and coke bottles at him. The object is to collect as many roses as possible without getting hit. Cute.

Some of them have some violence. In "Snowboarding", you see skaters skating peacefully on a frozen pond until you hurtle huge snowballs at them to wipe them out. Some really get crazy. The ozone hole is damaging the environment of penguins so you are supposed to shoot them and thereby encase them in a big ice cube. That saves them. That's right. You hear it right. That saves them. Ok…

My favorite is still the Bubble Bees. The best of the others I saw tonight is "It takes Two". In this ludicrously cute game, a puppy and a kitten bounce up and down on a see-saw at your command. Fruit, pies and other food fly in the air and you are supposed to hop the kitten and puppy up and down on the see-saw to have them hit the food for points. You can either hop the kitty from above onto food or you can plop him on the see-saw causing the doggie to pop up in the air and hit a pizza and a hot dog.

To me these games will appeal to children up to about age 12 and to adults from 35 on up. Doom people between 12 and 35 years old seem to be too tied up in reality to appreciate a game of this sort but I invite them to try it too.

Hypermedia Day

I was going to go to a memorial service but I didn't. All the books in my attic crashed onto the floor, so I needed to straighten that out. But I didn't go mainly because I got overdosed on Planeattack. I have been dwelling on it too much and thinking about towers falling and people running for their lives. But although this is something I could have done something about, the media did not help much. They overdosed us all today on Planeattack, devoting entire news segments to the anniversary and wiping out all other programming. I did not get much local news at all because the local news program was devoted to national ceremonies.

Although I think there should be memorial services throughout the nation today to help those still suffering from depression and grief to assuage their sorrow, the media does not need to broadcast it all. There were plenty of other news today. How about the primaries in Florida? Once again their electoral process has failed them. What about the threat of war with Iraq and the resulting rise in oil prices? That will hit your pocketbook eventually. Johnny Unitas, the American football star, died today. I did not hear a bit about any of this on the national news tonight. I heard mostly about Planeattack, an event that has already happened.

Besides, why all this focus on a tragedy that killed 3,000 people? Auto accidents kill 44,000 a year; we don't hear about them. About a decade ago, a conflict between rival tribes in Rwanda, Africa killed 200,000 people. This surely was a vaster tragedy. If Planeattack had called for wiping out all other programming for a week, surely we should have heard nothing but what happened in Rwanda for a whole year. But we only got two weeks of occasional headlines about one of the greatest tragedies of our time, and I did not hear of much people feeling sorrow for those who lost loved ones there.

Because of this media overattention on the terrorist attacks of last year, I propose we call this day Hypermedia Day. It is also Remembrance Day, but it is also the day that mediahypism went to its extreme. I think Laura Bush was right. We would have been better off today turning off the TV set.

Planeattack: One Year Later

On September 11 last year nineteen young men saw fit to hijack airplanes and fly them into three of our national landmarks, killing about 3,000 people. It was the worst event to have hit our country since the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941. Like most people, I found some of the events unbelievable and somewhat apocalyptic. I first found out about it when I saw the headline on the CNN web page: "Breaking News: Plane crashes into World Trade Center". My first thought is that this is like the crash of a plane into the Empire State Building in 1945. But I soon found that the towers had serious wounds on them and were smoking into the sky. Shortly after this I saw the towers fall and I heard of the attack on the Pentagon and the plane crash in Pennsylvania. It traumatized me, just like it did most everyone else in the country; of the worst events in my life, this one ranks third. I found it hard to imagine 650 employees of the same company and same office suddenly killed, or 343 firefighters killed. Many acts of heroism occurred that day, but it was still a day of great tragedy. It leads me to wonder: why did it happen, and how can we minimize the chance that anything like this will occur again?

First of all, why did it happen? With most disasters, there are usually several causes. We may not have been watching people at the airports closely enough. Most hijackings up to now have resulted in people going somewhere else other than intended, rather than crashing into a building, so this caught people by surprise. Perhaps security was lax on the airlines. Maybe the FBI did not see the signs of it coming. Then there are the hijackers themselves. What made them do this?

First of all crashing a plane into a building and killing yourself is not something that we would normally do. These people were driven by some other force. It is my belief that this force is a fanatical belief in God coupled with an intense hatred for Israel, Jews, and anything Western. These people believed that they were truly fighting the forces of evil; they were sacrificing themselves to their cause. They were so caught up in their belief that they were willing to do anything for it. What is needed in this world is a healthy belief in self, and a desire to live life to the fullest. If these fanatics had been furthering their own future and causes instead of following the hateful beliefs of those who told them that this was a one-way ticket to heaven, Planeattack would never have happened.

But why did they have this fanatical belief? The reason for that lies in the widespread hatred of Middle Easterners for the United States and Israel. Hatred for Israel is easy to explain. Israel took over land which had been held by Arabs for centuries and is looked upon as an intruder. They are also envious of the United States and its prosperity and feel Americans get too big a slice of life's pie. We consume a lot more oil, food and other resources than they do and live a better life. They also don't like the invasion of Western culture, especially celebrityitis and media hype, into their lands. So it is not enough to heighten security, declare Delta and red alerts, arrest guilty and innocent people of Middle Eastern origin, and declare a "war" on terrorism. We need to address in addition the inequity between the rich and developing nations of this planet and this is not going to be easy. We need to work the processes of peace and develop ways of sharing the world's resources so that liberty, freedom, and just will be the province of all. To me this is the best way of ensuring that a tragedy of this magnitude never happens again.

Front Street Syndrome

Last year on this date, the worst terrorist attack ever occurred on American soil. America responded to this by invading Afghanistan and helping the opposition overthrow the tyrannical Taliban and replace it with a more moderate regime, and American troops also helped the Northern Alliance kill, capture or chase out as many Al Qaeda forces as possible. So does this cure the problem of terrorism from Al Qaeda? Maybe not. We may have created Front Street Syndrome.

When I was growing up a notorious street in the city I grew up near (Rochester, New York) named Front Street was well known to be the hangout for all the bums in the city; those that did not have a home and were possibly addicted to alcohol as well. The city tried to chase them out by rebuilding the area and making it look nice, but this merely scattered the homeless people, with some showing up rather surprisingly in better areas of the city. So just like the bums in this city that were scattered all over the place, so too are the Taliban and Al Qaeda now, possibly making the job of going after them more difficult.

Media Hype again

This time the headline read "September 11 weighs on the market", explaining why the stock market averages are down again. How can a date weigh? This does not obviously mean a person of the opposite sex for which you have an amorous appointment, who happens to be overweight. There are better names for the tragedy of last year, such as Planeattack. But still, how can an event weigh? It's just another way of creating drama in a situation which does not call for it. My belief is that most stock market movements are random, and those that aren't are caused more of the time than not by the media.

Simplicity is not simple

The theme for SUUSI 2003 is "Simple Gifts", i.e., the idea of simplifying your life as much as possible. Yesterday the lead article title of a magazine "Math Horizons" startled me. It's title: "Simplicity is not Simple: Tessellations and Modular Architecture". The article was about dividing up two-dimensional space (e.g., office space) into identical regions or cubicles. The square grid is one way of doing it, but hexagons save on partitions (but I have yet to see a workplace that resembled a beehive). Their point was that the problem of making things simple is not simple. In this case the obvious answer was not the optimal one. A quote from a mathematician in the article named Gregg Fleishman: "Making a good system from only a few pieces which are not too hard to machine or build is quite difficult".

Another example I can think of is, say, a UU District Executive who wants to visit all the congregations in his District. To make the job as simple as possible, she would want to minimize the total mileage she has to drive or fly. The very problem of determining the order of congregations she should visit (which one first, which one second, and so forth) is itself one of the most difficult problems in mathematics. You could check all the possible routes but with 15 congregations that would take millions of years. However, no one has come up with a solution that is that much better, and many think there isn't one. However, even that problem, that of proving for certain there isn't one, is itself an even harder mathematical problem (the P = NP conjecture).

Seeking simplicity leads to contradictions. We get contradictions when we look at the Ultimate. An omnipotent God that can lift a stone that is so big that even God can't lift it; an omnipotent, omniscient, good God in a world with evil, the smallest number that cannot be expressed in less than twenty words (that phrase has less than twenty words), the SET of EVERYTHING (just add that very idea of such a SET to that SET), and the set of all sets that are not members of themselves (is the set in itself?) are all examples of such contradictions. And simplicity joins this list.

So simplicity is not all that simple. Seeking simplicity is a complex journey, and one of the things I hope we learn next year is how to pursue simplicity in a world of antinomous complexity.

Planeattack

Earlier I said I had suggested to columnist Kathleen Parker, who wanted a better name for last year's terror than September 11, a better name. Since I have not heard from her, I will mention it now, just before the anniversary. I suggested "Planeattack". It describes what happened: planes made an attack. It was the airplanes themselves that attacked, not objects from the airplanes, as was the case with the Pearl Harbor attack of 1941. It applies to all four incidents on 2001 September 11. I had thought of "Towerfall" earlier, but that applies only to the two attacks on the World Trade Center. So I turned to "Planeattack", and I will be calling it that from now on. If anyone can think of a better name, let me know.

Turnings

The service at the Unitarian church I attend had a responsive reading that started with:

"Now is the time for turning."

Turnings are interesting; I had been interested in Strauss and Howe's theory of generational turnings in The Fourth Turning. Their theory is that our present time is about to turn into a Fourth Turning; i.e., a period of crisis similar to the Great Depression and World War II. So I hear them proclaim in church that the turning is about to occur.

The reading goes on to say that we can't get out of our current stagnant pattern of life by doing the same things, as we then get the same results we had been getting. We need something to jolt us out of this reverie. I feel like I may be nearing such a point in my life, and according to Strauss and Howe, so is American society. Dotcomitis, celebrityitis, mediahypism, political correctness and corporate deception have been going on too long. Something needs to happen to jolt us out of this, and this is Strauss and Howe's Fourth Turning. They say the previous or Third Turning is a period of growing disorder; I disagree. It is a period of order, when the same things happen over and over again like a broken record and something needs to hop to get the tune playing again or to play another tune. It is a suboptimal stable equilibrium. We need to get out of this to achieve new heights.

AOL Deception

I see them everywhere now. America Online (AOL) discs free for the taking from numerous places, including stores, bundled software, and offices. They say, "Get 1,025 hours of AOL free with AOL 7.0". That sounds like a lot of hours. But if you look at the smaller print, you find that you have to use these hours up in 45 days. If you get out your calculator and multiply the 24 hours a day that there is only that many of by 45 days, you get 1,080 hours. AOL is deceiving us. It may be true what they say. However, the only way you are going to use up 1,025 hours in 45 days' time is to be continuously online 24/7 except for 55 hours. You need far more than 55 hours of sleep in that time. What they are really saying is that you get 45 days of free time on AOL. It is all too easy to deceive by using numbers out of their range. 1,080 hours sounds like far more time than 45 days, yet they are the same amount of time. Further, "hours" in internet service provider (ISP) language usually means time that you are actually logged into their system, whereas "days" connotes time that you are subscribing to their service, regardless of whether you are logged in. So 1,080 really sounds like a lot, like it may last a year or more. But it lasts only 45 days. So AOL should state this up front, in much larger font than the1,025 hours. Their putting 1,025 (which is the wrong number anyway) in the biggest font instead of 45 to me constitutes misleading advertising. They should terminate this practice immediately.

Dear Abby advice

This morning I saw a case of a 33-year-old reader who wrote to Dear Abby about the difficulty she was having in finding a mate. She lived in a small town and she had already considered all the eligible men in her town. There was a singles club, but that was 30 miles away in the city. She had tried the Internet but she got men in their 50s where she had stated that she did not want anyone over 37. Dear Abby said she should go to the city and hunt for her man there.

I agree with her. To me a small town means one of population 10,000 or so. Therefore the best she can do here is a person who is one in 10,000. In my web page Logarithms Keep Dr. Brown in Perspective, I describe such a person as an L4, where the 4 is the number of zeroes after the 1. If it were me, I would find an L4 unacceptable as a partner, since one can easily find an L6, a person who is one in a million, as I show in that web page.

However, to find an L6, you need to be in a P6 place - a place with a population of 1,000,000, with six zeroes after the one. This means at least a moderate-sized city. So yes, I would say she should go to the city to find her partner. A singles club is not the best place, since people there are random. If there are 100 people there, the best she can hope for is an L2. Instead she should go after men who share common interests with her. She could go to a birding club if she enjoys birding, for instance. The most important common interest by far is religion, so the best place for her to find her mate in the city is a church. She needs to choose a church in the city which corresponds most to her beliefs, not necessarily that of her family or the one she has been going to all of her life.

There is one problem with this advice that needs to be mentioned. If she goes about getting a partner in this manner, she will be using a lot more gasoline. Many experts feel that petroleum will run out soon, around 2010. Alternatives are being developed, but still one should try to minimize the amount of gasoline one uses. The Dear Abby reader could take care of this problem by moving to the city. Also why did she get men in their 50s when she went to the Internet? She is 33 years old so she is a member of Generation X and born in a time when births were de-emphasized; a scarce generation. 50-year-olds are in the Baby Boom generation, which are numerous. Further, these men want women who are younger than them, perhaps because they may want to start a family. These two things outweigh the scarcity of older men due to men dying earlier than women.

I wish her luck in finding a partner.

Hype in the news

The news media really exaggerate and twist events in their coverage of them. Stocks took a brief downturn today and then went back up. So how did Yahoo describe the downturn around lunchtime? They said, "Stocks fight hard to keep gains after data." Nonsense. Stocks don't fight. Did you ever go to an arena with a boxing ring in it and see a common stock punching an opponent? Do stocks pull out rifles and start shooting into a rifle-filled ridge? Maybe that's why the market has been down lately. Stocks are confused because they can't figure out how to fight.

Weathermen say lots of silly things in their broadcast. "Here comes this front marching through the area tomorrow…" OK, Cold Front, Hup, two, three, four, column leftttt…. Harch! "Storms will be firing up in the afternoon hours." Storms are made out of water, not fire. "A severe thunderstorm has erupted in central Illinois." Hey are these thunderheads, or are they volcanoes? I've never seen lava come from a thunderstorm.

These may seem funny but I believe that events, especially adverse events, are exacerbated by the continual hyping it up by the media. The media should tell things as they are instead of turning storm clouds into hot lava and putting blue chip stocks in the boxing ring. I will be making more reports of media hype in the future. It's not to hard to find it.

Astronomical year

It looks like astronomy will dominate my activities this autumn. Toastmasters runs into several conflicts. I have written a humorous speech for this year's Humorous Contests, a speech about our unreasonably bogged-down airline system done in the same spirit as the movies Airplane and Airplane 2. However, if I get beyond the Area level, I will have to quit. The Division Contest conflicts with the Virginia Association of Astronomical Societies (VAAS), and I am to give an introductory keynote speech to that. The District Conference has been moved to conflict with a mathematics meeting that I am going to. I am not giving a Speechcraft at my congregation because two of my biggest helpers and I are instead trying to save a weak Toastmasters club that meets the same night that the Speechcraft would have.

Instead, there are a large number of astronomical activities. A newspaper reporter interviewed me for articles in local newspapers today. There are several skywatches coming up in the next couple of months, and there is that VAAS convention that I just talked about. I intend to bring astronomy, and if possible, mathematics to the people in the next few months; to tell what it is about, and how to view the heavens with a telescope. I also hope to get involved with mathematics as well, probably teaching.

September 11 a holiday?

There is a proposal to make September 11 a holiday to remember those that were lost in Planeattack on this day last year. It seems to be too close to the event to make it a holiday. We did not make 1941 December 7 a holiday, even though that cost thousands of lives and led to a horrible war. There is another objection, though. It is too close to Labor Day. We already have two holidays that are too close to each other, namely Christmas and New Year's. The result is an entire WEEK of holidays for many of us. Would the same thing happen to Labor Day and Planeattack Day? That would be most inconvenient when we are trying to get our children back to school. One way of working that out is to move Labor Day to the time that most of the world celebrates it on, on May 1. That would provide a holiday in the holiday dearth between Presidents' Day and Memorial Day. But I think it may be too early to decide on a holiday. It took at least a decade to decide to make a holiday for Rev. Martin Luther King. So for now make September 11 a day of remembrance without a formal holiday, and time will answer whether it should become our 11th national holiday.

Drought makes me wet

Yesterday Governor Mark Warner of Virginia issued an executive order to combat the drought in Virginia. Among other things, he prohibited all watering of lawns and washing of cars in residences. Yes, we have been having a severe rain shortage. Only about once a week or less has there been rain all summer long, and usually it is only a fraction of an inch.

But Governor Warner, have you opened your window recently? Don't you see the drought from outside your window? Don't you hear the pitter patter of drought hitting the windows and the roof? Do you see the drought all over the streets, in places collecting in puddles? Have you gone outside recently? Did the drought make you all wet? A lot of us feel our Labor Day weekend has been ruined by drought. Gray drought clouds hover and threaten in the sky, occasionally dumping drought on us and getting us all wet. The weather bureau keeps predicting the sun will come back, but the grayness and the wetness keeps going on and on. Forecasts of sunny turn to gray as we approach them.

To me this is a bad time to issue this edict. We are already having to deal with the rain, clouds, and coolness in what is supposed to be the last weekend of summer in the year. Then we hear that we can't water our lawns because of the drought. Makes one feel like going out and watering anyway just to defy the governor. But that doesn't work, because of the Sprinkling Paradox. You see, with all this water we have been getting lately, including flood warnings, we don't need to water our lawns. The time when we need to water is when there has not been rain for some time; watering merely provides what the skies don't. But that's when they restrict you with this odd-even system and then prohibit you from watering altogether. That's the paradox: If you need to water, you can't; If you can water, you don't need to. Sort of like Catch 22.

I do think we should conserve; flush toilets only when there's brown in it; wash full loads and so forth. But I think Governor Warner should have waited until at least five straight days of rainless weather before issuing this executive order. The worst time to issue it is during the midst of a rainy spell.

September Coming

It is now the dawn of Labor Day weekend 2002. The day is supposed to be a celebration for the laboring person, the working man and woman, and is celebrated on May 1 in most other places in the world. In this country, instead it seems to be the beginning of a year. It is in the Jewish calendar. Should New Year's Day be moved to September 1? September is the beginning of school. This includes nursery schools, grammar schools, high schools, colleges, and universities. Many other activities begin in September. Toastmaster contest season begins in September. Unitarian Universalist churches seem to begin a new year in September; attendance dramatically rises and new activities galore fill the scene. It is also the end of summer and the beginning of autumn, so it is somewhat sad in Minnesota, but in Texas it is a welcome relief. It is the year of the final baseball games and the World Series, but that may not happen this year.

This September comes with a number of unusual days. There is September 11, a day that will be etched forever in our memory. Two days later is Friday the 13th, a day of foreboding for the superstitious. And for me on 2002 September 7 I will be 56 years old with 30 years of service, qualifying for retirement at my workplace. I don't intend to do that any time soon, but I have been thinking about it. If you want coincidences, note that 7 x 11 x 13, when doubled, is 2002. By coincidence it is also Rosh Hashanah 5763. That date is now only 9 days away. And after that can anything be possible? Shoot for the heavens?

September, a month to remember.

Blogsnail

All at once since last night Blogger has been slower than a glacier. This of course makes it hard to post blogs. There is no explanation on the Blogger site for the slowness, which does not appear on any other site I try to access. If this keeps up of course I am going to switch to another blogging site. Blogger also had been throwing up Error 530s, but as of late has been publishing the page anyway. Otherwise it seems to work fine, except for my not being able to add an interactive component. I hope this problem clears because any kind of a move is painful.

Drought and Flood

So far this summer we have had a severe drought. Trees were turning their leaves brown even though it is not autumn yet; or at least autumn shouldn't start in August. The reservoirs were really low, many wells were running dry, and all the grass was turning brown. Days were getting really hot since the moisture cools the air. Now all at once it is a flash flood watch. We are getting rain all day long, some of it heavy, up to 3 inches of it. I suppose this might not cause flooding because the water levels are so low, but what this could cause is the official authorities warning about a contradiction. They have already put out a Flash Flood Watch, but they are also meeting in Richmond to decide on what to do about the severe drought. So we could have the oxymoronic situation of the government trying to do something about both drought and floods in the same part of our state.

But that's life. Bang-bang. Feast or famine. All or nothing. Deficit or surplus. We take it when we get it. Too bad we can't save flood water to provide us during droughts.

Baylor and Playboy

Now I hear that a fraternity was suspended at Baylor University in Texas because a bunch of students in it posed for Playboy. Never mind that these were male students and that they had clothes on. Baylor objected to it saying Playboy was salacious. To me this is one of the most ambiguous situations I have seen. Playboy is good since it expresses liberation from the prison-like sexual mores of our society. It is not good because it exploits women (why can't they have male nudes every once in a while?). It is not good because it is gaudily commercial. Baylor is good because it is resisting an ad empire, but Baylor is not good because it says the magazine is "salacious", when actually much good literature has appeared in it, and despite their students having clothes on in the group shot. Fraternities are good because they encourage students to relate to each other. Fraternities are not good because of their hazing, drunken parties, and other crude practices. Football is not good because it is a violent sport and because people make too much of a production of it, but it can be exciting at times. I don't know who to favor here. I would come down on the side of the students (and Playboy) in this case, because they have their clothes on.

Rainbow SUUSI

I started to finish what I couldn't at SUUSI - a song from my songwriting class with Peter Mayer. The idea centered around a dance with a woman where we come together from places where some disaster has struck - a fire or a flood, for instance. I felt that SUUSI was such a dance this year. When I free associated with it, I started talking about rainbows. A rainbow is a place where peace and tumult meet; a storm and sunny weather. As I pointed out before, I feel that a rainbow symbolizes a transition, and I feel like I am going through one right now. This year's SUUSI reinforces this, and I saw a rainbow for real a couple of weeks later. So I am going to call SUUSI 2002, "Blessings" my Rainbow SUUSI. I hope to have the song completed soon. It shall be entitled "Dancing Under the Rainbow" - note under, rather than over, the rainbow.

Rainbows

On the way back from Rochester to Richmond on Aug 24, a thunderstorm passed us and went to the east. It was there in the east when the sun set in the west. This to me means Rainbow Warning. I looked all over the place for rainbows and found it as we were heading down I-95 south of Richmond. It got brighter as time went on, and produced some impressive scenes over the already futuristic appearance of the bridges of Va 895 over the James River. I took some pictures but they did not turn out well. I did get a good picture of the rainbow near a grocery store.

What do rainbows mean, anyway? The traditional Biblical story says that it is God's forgiveness after the 40-day flood that killed the rest of creation. I suspect this story had its origin in a huge flood sometime around 3000-5000 years ago. A collection of people rode out the storm and thanked the powers that be that they had no control over that they were finally safe. Of course with the sun shining and the storm still around, a rainbow would have shone; hence the symbolism. There is also the Wizard of Oz interpretation, that is, that birds could fly over it but I can't. And there is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow; getting a lot of money is just as elusive as chasing down the end of the rainbow - if you try to find it, it moves further on.

The scientific explanation is that the setting sun shines on raindrops of a storm on the the other side of the sky. These raindrops refract the sun's rays much as a glass prism does, and splits the light into individual colors by wavelength. This means in order for a rainbow to form, both sunny skies and stormy weather must prevail. The rainbow separates the yin and yang of the weather; indeed, one side of the rainbow will be brighter than the other side. So to me rainbows represent a transition. It would be a good symbol for weddings, coming-of-age ceremonies, retirement parties, and so forth.

Planeattack coincidences

Earlier I said that I came up with a name for the horrible events of 2001. September 11 is not good; it means foreboding for all September 11s thereafter, and it is not kind to those who have September 11 as a birthday. I had come up with Towerfall as an alternative, but that ignores the attack on the Pentagon. I settled on Planeattack, which says that the planes did the attack rather than things from the planes, and further the name of the lead hijacker, Atta, appears in the name.

Regardless of what we call it, people have pointed out a lot of coincidences with it. For example: It occurred on the 11th of the month; the first attacking plane was American 11; the plane that attacked the Pentagon was American 77, which is 7 x 11, and 7 divides 175, which is the number of the United plane that attacked the South Tower. The number of people on American 11 was 92, and 9+2 = 11. The number of people on American 77 was 65, and 6+5 = 11. The World Trade Center looked like a big 11 on the New York skyline. The number of firefighters that were killed was 343, which is 7 x 7 x 7. The total number of New York firefighters that had ever died in duty up to September 11 was 777. 9/11 is the number to call in case of an emergency. An asteroid strike in 2077 killing hundreds of thousands in Italy in Arthur Clarke's novel "Rendezvous with Rama" is said to occur on September 11. One can continue with this for a while.

Is all this a coincidence? It surely looks like some sort of design. But I believe it was a coincidence. One can form patterns out of all sorts of things. Finding patterns like in my second paragraph above is like finding patterns in clouds or on the planet Mars. Humans have a tendency to make patterns to explain things. This is OK, if it is supported by evidence and is replicable. I did not think that all this 11 business is replicable. To prove my point I totaled the number of people who died in the terrorist attack last September. It was 3,056. I factored the number and found it was 16 x 191. That took me aback. 191 is an anagram of 9/11. Further, two previous major airliner crashes were Flight 191. I am still sure that this is all a coincidence, but my attempt to prove so only propagated the pattern. Then I found out last week that the death toll at the World Trade Center was lowered by 4, making the overall total 3,052.

I am vindicated. This may all look interesting, but it is strictly a coincidence.

Satanic Teams

I heard today that the high school of Devil’s Lake, ND, called its teams the Satans for 80 years. That seemed natural: Satan is the Devil. Some would say it was sacrilegious though. But it survived the prissy times of the 1920s and 1930s without any objection. Now in the age of political correctness, the school felt forced to change the schools’ name. How about the Red Leprechauns? It says something when a name of this sort fails to survive now whereas it did in the 1930s. That says what we are up against, now. Next thing they are going to do probably is change the town’s name. One thing that may have contributed to this is the existence of Satanism, a cult associated with extremist groups. I suppose they have a point, but still an 80-year-old name that did not refer to anything real has become victim to today’s weird happenings.

West Nile Virus

I see now that there is a case of this virus in the area where I live. The person had flu-like symptoms and went to the doctor. So that means go to the doctor if you develop such symptoms to check for West Nile. The person is better now. And again I say it is a non-epidemic. Two out of three people infected develop no symptoms. Those that do develop flu symptoms – a visit to the doctor can settle the question and there are drugs to treat the disease. It is a problem, and to some extent it can be prevented – get rid of standing water. But to wear long clothing in 100 degree weather is self-torture. Bug spray can make you feel yucky. I say get rid of standing water and report any fever or flu to the doctor. Flu is serious enough anyway – if West Nile is that bad, then so is influenza, a disease which killed hundreds of thousands including one of my great aunts in 1918 – an E6 epidemic.

Mixed-up Nursery Rhymes

Not much to blog on today. So I will give some mixed up nursery rhymes that I wrote earlier. They are either combinations of existing rhymes or permuted versions of single rhymes:

Hickory Dickory Dock

Hickory Dickory Dock
The mouse climbed up the clock
The mouse struck one,
The clock fell down,
Hickory Dickory Dock.

Little Miss Mubbard

Little Miss Mubbard
Sat on a cupboard
Eating her dogs and bones
Along came a spider
Who sat bare beside her
And so the poor girl had none.

Hey Diddle Warpdrive
The cat and the C:\ drive
The PC bombed clear to the moon.
The floppy drive cranked when it saw the abort,
And Excel ran away with the OS.

That's enough for today.

Analysis Suggests Three-Way Baseball Swap

One of my specialties is Operations Research (OR). This is a term referring to the application of mathematical techniques to real world problems. An example of a problem that OR could apply to is the assignment of Triple-A minor league baseball teams to their major league affiliates. There has been a trend towards the AAA farm team and its parent being close together; e.g., Boston and Pawtucket Red Sox, Seattle Mariners and Tacoma Rainiers, and Toledo Mud Hens and Detroit Tigers. The reason is simple: it cuts travel costs. So why not pair up minor league teams to major league ones so as to minimize the total mileage? An OR technique called the “assignment method” can apply to this.

I tried this a couple of years ago and got some interesting results. Much of the present assignments, including the above three pairs, came out like it actually is. I would think that the Florida Marlins could come up with some team closer than the Calgary Cannons, but my model actually paired them up with the farther Edmonton Trappers. The reason is that there are no teams close to either of these teams, and that it is more important to pair up closer teams than to attempt to force some team to pair with Florida.

The model did show an interesting six-way deal that would cut travel costs. Right now the Richmond Braves are an affiliate of the Atlanta Braves, the Nashville Sounds are an affiliate of the Pittsburgh Pirates, and the Rochester Red Wings are an affilitate of the Baltimore Orioles. Some of these are far apart, especially Richmond and Atlanta. The deal would switch these around to pair Rochester to Pittsburgh, Nashville to Atlanta, and Richmond to Baltimore. All three distances would be shorter, resulting in considerable travel cost savings.

Right now is a good time to do this. I learned that the Red Wings are now a “free agent”, meaning they can find whatever major team they can get as a parent, and so are the Baltimore Orioles and Pittsburgh Pirates. This means the deal is easier than ever to do right now, so I hope they consider it; that is, if the impending August 30 strike does not interfere.