the significance of the three circles

In college I took a freshman philosophy class from a professor who was terrifically distractable. One day, he turned to the whiteboard to write down three points, and drew the bullets first:

Then he turned to the class, and apropos of nothing, said, "Have you ever noticed that boring people drive Fords? Whenever you see a Ford, it's being driven by a boring person." He talked for a minute or two about Fords and boring people, turned back to the whiteboard, and said, "I have no idea what these three circles mean. … They must mean that boring people drive Fords. Remember that! It'll be on the final."

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great trees

by Wendell Berry, 1934–2026

Slowly, slowly, they return
To the small woodland let alone:
Great trees, outspreading and upright,
Apostles of the living light.

Patient as stars, they build in air.
Tier after tier a timbered choir.
Stout beams upholding weightless grace
Of song, a blessing on this place.

They stand in waiting all around,
Uprisings of their native ground,
Downcomings of the distant light;
They are the advent they await.

Receiving sun and giving shade,
Their life's a benefaction made,
And is a benediction said
Over the living and the dead.

In fall their brightened leaves, released,
Fly down the wind, and we are pleased
To walk on radiance, amazed.
O light come down to earth, be praised!

the statues remain when the arguments have faded

I was reminded today of this thing I wrote in 2017, early in the first Trump administration, shortly after the violent pro-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

There's an image macro floating around that says we should "never remove memorials," and gives the example of the death camp at Auschwitz, which still stands thanks in part to the efforts of the few who survived there, who wanted the world to remember that such a disaster should never be repeated.

I'm all for keeping Auschwitz up as a reminder of the things that happened there. But now imagine that when you leave Auschwitz (which is kind of out in the country) and go into Myslowice or Katowice or Kraków, you find at the center of town a stone Nazi soldier, saluting from a plinth, over this inscription:

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nary a glance

Image: screenshot of text. Highlighted: "then the Glance overlay appears with headlines about death, war, shopping, or celebrity trivia. Screenshots show only black."

The "Glance" advertising tool for lockscreens on Motorola phones crosses the line from "dark patterns" to "malware." Unacceptable.

I submitted a "policy violation" complaint in addition to this dumb review, but I'm not optimistic.

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a letter!

Me: Wow, a hand-addressed envelope! With a handwritten letter on blue-lined paper inside!

Letter: would you like to be a Jehovah's Witness

an unexpected theory

Paraphrased from this interview:

NPR: Would you say there's a fingerprint, where a Pat Wilson song is different from a Rivers Cuomo song?

WEEZER/CUOMO: Well, Pat loves Mixolydian mode, where I write in major.

dag, gone

Where I grew up people would say "daggone" as a kind of mild swear word — sometimes shortened to one syllable. "You failed the test? Dag." "Yeah, it was really important." "Daaaag, that's terrible."

My partner does not know this word. Also their PNW dialect has a vowel merger where "leg/beg" have the same vowel as "lag/bag."

This person is excited about a restaurant call "Deg Thai," and I cannot figure out why the excitement is so strong that they are using a West Virginia pseudo-cuss about it.

we've languaged successfully

I've decided I mostly disbelieve in "bad grammar," and that people who write things like this grammarian's lament are doing something different from what they claim they're doing (perhaps unknowingly).

Language is a biological phenomenon that happens in meat. It's kind of miraculous that there are rules we can articulate at all. If an idea gets from my head to yours, then you and I have languaged successfully.

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not what i said

Left a voicemail at two-thirty that said "on my way, see you about quarter after." The recipient teased me for having said I would arrive at 1:15, in the past. Turns out they were reading an automated transcription, "upgraded" to use an LLM, which invented a nonsense hour and signed my name to it.

I was recently reading a discussion about how court stenographers generally do not speak African American English (AAE or sometimes AAVE) and frequently mistranscribe the words of speakers who do. What's in the transcript is the legal record, and apparently a consequence is that witnesses can be required to explain or defend remarks they did not make and whose meaning they did not intend.

Now, this mistreatment is also available to speakers of Schoolbook English! You're welcome!

i can see clearly now

Here's a really excellent weather forecast graphic that the NOAA website has been producing for ages. I haven't found anyone else who makes one as useful. To find yours, go to weather.gov (easier to remember than to bookmark), put in your zip code, and search the forecast page for the word "hourly."

Image: A plot of several different species of weather forecast, described in detail in the main text.

I talk frequently about my wise acquaintance who says "I believe weather reports, like 'it rained.'" But if I want to dissect how much to believe a forecast, this is the best one. Let's break it down.

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wisdom from fiction

A couple of months ago I listened to Brandon Sanderson's "Oathbringer" as an audiobook. I found myself wanting to be a snob about it (there's plenty of self-important silliness), but I kept thinking "wow, that's a real banger of a line." Eventually I started scribbling them on scraps of paper, which I then promptly lost. But here's a few.

Failure is the mark of a life well-lived.

Blasphemy! Art is not art if it has a function.

Sometimes a hypocrite is nothing more than a man who is in the process of changing.

the james-stein estimator

I am reminded today by a video by "Mathemaniac" about the James-Stein estimator.

Suppose I'm trying to estimate a number $n$ of independent parameters simultaneously, by taking a sample from each one-dimensional normal distribution with unknown means $\mu_n$ and unit standard deviations $\sigma_n=1$. The naïve estimator is to use each sample $x_n$ as an estimate $\hat\mu_n$ of the mean. However, if my number of parameters is large enough, the zero-biased estimator

$$ \left(\begin{array}{c} \hat \mu_1 \\ \vdots \\ \hat \mu_n \end{array}\right) = \left( 1-\frac{n-2}{x_1^2 + \cdots + x_n^2} \right) \left(\begin{array}{c} x_1 \\ \vdots \\ x_n \end{array}\right) $$

actually produces a smaller mean-squared error on the ensemble as a whole.

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a repulsive attraction

sales photo

Found a monthly "board game club" today. Met some strangers and played Gravwell (review, amazon), which is a space-flavored racing game where the mechanic is you play cards which move you towards or away from the other players. Everybody puts down their cards at the same time, so there is a risk that other players' positions will change before it's time for you to move, and you'll move the wrong way.

Pretty fun, honestly.

in with the new

I thought it would be cute to follow last night's post with a dawn … but I slept through it. So, another dusk.

I learned the other day about sunwait, a command-line tool for predicting local sunrise and sunset times.

A sunset.

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the wide wide southern sea

Watch the reflection of the sun move from the center of the field of view to the Indian Ocean and become an ocean sunset thousands of miles across.

Then, because it's solstice season, the twilight zips around Antarctica on its way to becoming the dawn.

(source)

warning

By Jenny Joseph, 1961:

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat that doesn't go, and doesn't suit me,
And I shall spend my pension
on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals,
and say we've no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I am tired,
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells,
And run my stick along the public railings,
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick the flowers in other people's gardens,
And learn to spit.
You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat,
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go,
Or only bread and pickle for a week,
And hoard pens and pencils and beer mats
and things in boxes.
But now we must have clothes that keep us dry,
And pay our rent and not swear in the street,
And set a good example for the children.
We will have friends to dinner and read the papers.
But maybe I ought to practise a little now?
So people who know me
are not too shocked and surprised,
When suddenly I am old
and start to wear purple!

a fireball of a well-crafted sentence

I'm trying to decide which turn of phrase I like better here: the terrifically informative

the boiling temperature of paraffin wax is hotter than its autoignition temperature

or the low-hanging fruit that is

Don't try this at home! Do it at your friend's house first.

a time to repeat

Consider the following decimal expansions:

$$\begin{aligned} \textstyle \frac{1}{ 1 } &= 1.0 & \textstyle \frac{1}{ 11 } &= 0.[09] & % 0.09090909090909091 \\ \textstyle \frac{1}{ 21 } &= 0.[04761\,9] \\ % 0.047619047619047616 \\ % \textstyle \frac{1}{ 2 } &= 0.5 & \textstyle \frac{1}{ 12 } &= 0.08[3] & % 0.08333333333333333 \\ \textstyle \frac{1}{ 22 } &= 0.0[45] \\ % 0.045454545454545456 \\ % \textstyle \frac{1}{ 3 } &= 0.[3] & % 0.3333333333333333 \\ \textstyle \frac{1}{ 13 } &= 0.[07692\,3] & % 0.07692307692307693 \\ \textstyle \frac{1}{ 23 } &= 0.[04347\,82608\,69565\,21739\,13] \\ % 0.043478260869565216 \\ % \textstyle \frac{1}{ 4 } &= 0.25 & \textstyle \frac{1}{ 14 } &= 0.0[71428\,5] & % 0.07142857142857142 \\ \textstyle \frac{1}{ 24 } &= 0.041[6] \\ % 0.041666666666666664 \\ % \textstyle \frac{1}{ 5 } &= 0.2 & \textstyle \frac{1}{ 15 } &= 0.0[6] & % 0.06666666666666667 \\ \textstyle \frac{1}{ 25 } &= 0.04 \\ % \textstyle \frac{1}{ 6 } &= 0.1[6] & % 0.16666666666666666 \\ \textstyle \frac{1}{ 16 } &= 0.0625 & \textstyle \frac{1}{ 26 } &= 0.0[38461\,5] \\ % 0.038461538461538464 \\ % \textstyle \frac{1}{ 7 } &= 0.[14285\,7] & % 0.14285714285714285 \\ \textstyle \frac{1}{ 17 } &= 0.[05882\,35294\,11764\,7] & % 0.058823529411764705 \\ \textstyle \frac{1}{ 27 } &= 0.[037] \\ % 0.037037037037037035 \\ % \textstyle \frac{1}{ 8 } &= 0.125 & \textstyle \frac{1}{ 18 } &= 0.0[5] & % 0.05555555555555555 \\ \textstyle \frac{1}{ 28 } &= 0.035[71428\,5] \\ % 0.03571428571428571 \\ % \textstyle \frac{1}{ 9 } &= 0.[1] & % 0.1111111111111111 \\ \textstyle \frac{1}{ 19 } &= 0.[05263\,15789\,47368\,421] & % 0.05263157894736842 \\ \textstyle \frac{1}{ 29 } &= 0.[03448\,27586\,20689\,65517\,24137\,931] \\ % 0.034482758620689655 \\ % \textstyle \frac{1}{ 10 } &= 0.1 & \textstyle \frac{1}{ 20 } &= 0.05 & \textstyle \frac{1}{ 30 } &= 0.0[3] \\ % 0.03333333333333333 \\ \end{aligned}$$

Each of these either terminates, like $\frac18 = 0.125$, or repeats, like $\frac{1}{27} = 0.[037]$. What determines the length of these repeating sequences?

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