As usual, I'm late coming to this -- fashionably so, I hope. Jeff sent me a link to the Discovery Channel's 100 Greatest Americans, along with a number of comments, one of which I quote here.
"%$&!!"
If you knew Jeff, you would know that he can accurately call balls and strikes from an obstructed view seat out near the foul pole at Fenway, while waxing philosophically about baseball's dim past, and carrying only one thing in his pocket which was thank God the confirmation number for our tickets. You would also know that the quote indicates that he expresses strong reservations with the list. And rightly so.
Tom Cruise? Laura Bush? Ellen Degeneres? Brett Favre? Michael Moore? Rush Limbaugh? John Edwards? Dr. Phil? Dr. Phil???? The absence of John Adams, Thomas Paine, and Andrew Jackson? Every president but one since FDR made the list, but only four before him. And their choice for number one just makes me want to cry. I don't care whether you like the man or not, approve of him or not, he's just not the Greatest American.
Every single person I discussed this with expressed similar feelings about the list. Everyone had a long list of people to strike from the list. But once the ranting ended, the women stopped weeping, and the apoplectic stroke victims were made comfortable, rationality raised its ugly head. It is, after all, a list of 100, so it seems to me that if you are going to pull someone off the list, you ought to replace them with someone else. This turns out to be much harder than it looks. Nobody was able (or willing) to do it.
I think a list like this should stand up over time. Fifty years from now, anyone should look at this list and nod their head in agreement, or at least recognize every name. I can't believe that the current list qualifies in this regard.
Well, here's my shot, with additions in blue and deletions in magenta. Maybe it's a bit writer-heavy, but that's better than being pop-heavy. There's still a few who ought to go, and I'm embarassed that I can't think of any decent replacements. When I do, I reserve the right to edit the list.
Ali, Muhammad
Angelou, Maya
Anthony, Susan B.
Armstrong, Lance
Armstrong, Neil
Ball, Lucille
Barton, Clara
Bell, Alexander Graham
Boone, Daniel
Bryan, William Jennings
Bush, Barbara
Bush, George H. W.
Bush, George W.
Bush, Laura
Calhoun, John C
Carnegie, Andrew
Carson, Johnny
Carter, Jimmy
Carver, George Washington
Charles, Ray
Chavez, Cesar
Clay, Henry
Clinton, Bill
Clinton, Hillary
Cooper, James Fennimore
Cosby, Bill
Crazy Horse
Crockett, Davy
Cruise, Tom
DeGeneres, Ellen
Dickenson, Emily
Disney, Walt
Douglass, Frederick
Earhart, Amelia
Eastwood, Clint
Edison, Thomas Alva
Edwards, John
Einstein, Albert
Eisenhower, Dwight
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Faulkner, William
Favre, Brett
Fitzgerald, F Scott
Ford, Henry
Franklin, Benjamin
Frost, Robert
Fulton, Robert
Gates, Bill
Geronimo
Gibson, Mel
Giuliani, Rudolph
Glenn, John
Goddard, Robert
Graham, Billy
Grant, Ulysses S
Hamilton, Alexander
Hanks, Tom
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
Hefner, Hugh
Hemingway, Ernest
Henry, Patrick
Hepburn, Katharine
Hope, Bob
Hughes, Howard
Irving, Washington
Jackson, Andrew
Jackson, Michael
Jay, John
Jefferson, Thomas
Jobs, Steve
Johnson, Lyndon B.
Jones, John Paul
Jordan, Michael
Keller, Helen
Kennedy, John F.
Kennedy, Robert F.
Kennedy Onassis, Jacqueline
King Jr., Dr. Martin Luther
Lee, Robert E.
Lewis & Clark
Limbaugh, Rush
Lincoln, Abraham
Lindbergh, Charles
Lucas, George
Madison, James
Madonna
Malcolm X
Marshall, John
McGraw, Dr. Phil
Melville, Herman
Monroe, Marilyn
Moore, Michael
Morse, Samuel
Murphy, Audie
Murrow, Edward R
Nixon, Richard
Obama, Barack
Owens, Jesse
Paine, Thomas
Parks, Rosa
Patton, George
Pocahontas
Poe, Edgar Allan
Powell, Colin
Presley, Elvis
Reagan, Ronald
Reeve, Christopher
Rice, Condoleezza
Robinson, Jackie
Rockefeller, John D
Rogers, Will
Roosevelt, Eleanor
Roosevelt, Franklin D
Roosevelt, Theodore
Ruth, Babe
Sagan, Carl
Salk, Jonas
Schwarzenegger, Arnold
Sinatra, Frank
Sinclair, Upton
Sitting Bull
Smith, Joseph
Spielberg, Steven
Steinbeck, John
Stewart, Jimmy
Stewart, Martha
Stowe, Harriett Beecher
Tesla, Nikola
Thoreau, Henry David
Tillman, Pat
Truman, Harry
Trump, Donald
Tubman, Harriet
Twain, Mark
Vanderbilt, Cornelius
Walton, Sam
Washington, George
Wayne, John
Whitman, Walt
Whitney, Eli
Winfrey, Oprah
Woods, Tiger
Wright, Orville & Wilbur
Yeager, Chuck
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Behind the curtain
I like Wikipedia. I enjoy browsing random pages like an vitamin-deficient Ethiopian ruminant in Greener Than You Think. And unlike the GB, I trust what they say. Pretty much. Usually.
But the real fun is behind the curtain. Every single Wiki page also has a Discussion page where the editors talk about ... well ... darn near anything, although they are supposed to confine themselves to changes to the page content. I've seen it all: Respectful requests. Shrill complaints. Arcane discussions. Uncalled-for epithets. Misplaced criticism. Life stories. Lugubrious toadyism. Prim reproach. Righteous indignation. Shameless self-promotion. Wanton vandalism. Abject apologies. Disgusting profanity. Edit wars. Monotonic pedantry. Duologic sentences.
The main page is what most people see. It's the facade of the grand hotel. It's the parlour where you entertain your guests. It's the debutante at her Quinceañera. It's the web page of the semi-private government agency that makes no mention of the fact that they lost their only customer and therefore their reason for existence (I mention no names, but if a random link falls into this posting, I can't help it).
But the discussion page is the interesting place to be. It's the alley out behind the hotel with stinking dumpsters, tired working girls sneaking a ciggie, steam rising from the manhole cover, and don't look in that doorway cause you might not like what you see. It's the kitchen of a fourth-floor walkup where a stubble-faced dock worker in a wifebeater backhands his kid for talking back. It's the same debutante forty years later, sixty pounds heavier, centuries wiser. It's the agency that lost its funding in a strapped economy because it hid too many of its problems -- I can dream, eh?
In short, it's the classic Heinleinesque bar scene consisting of the worst refuse of humanity, but the more you read it, the more you find the tortured Unmarried Mother, the fun-loving-in-a-grizzly-bear-wrestling-way Korax, and the free-living but ultimately self-sacrificing Sam Anderson -- the people who make life exciting and worth living, the ones who ultimately improve mankind through their mistakes instead of just settling for what they have.
Go read a discussion page, particularly for a controversial subject. As Friday said, you'll find "it's the liveliest, most exciting and dangerous place you can visit, and be sure to get a blood test afterwards!"
But the real fun is behind the curtain. Every single Wiki page also has a Discussion page where the editors talk about ... well ... darn near anything, although they are supposed to confine themselves to changes to the page content. I've seen it all: Respectful requests. Shrill complaints. Arcane discussions. Uncalled-for epithets. Misplaced criticism. Life stories. Lugubrious toadyism. Prim reproach. Righteous indignation. Shameless self-promotion. Wanton vandalism. Abject apologies. Disgusting profanity. Edit wars. Monotonic pedantry. Duologic sentences.
The main page is what most people see. It's the facade of the grand hotel. It's the parlour where you entertain your guests. It's the debutante at her Quinceañera. It's the web page of the semi-private government agency that makes no mention of the fact that they lost their only customer and therefore their reason for existence (I mention no names, but if a random link falls into this posting, I can't help it).
But the discussion page is the interesting place to be. It's the alley out behind the hotel with stinking dumpsters, tired working girls sneaking a ciggie, steam rising from the manhole cover, and don't look in that doorway cause you might not like what you see. It's the kitchen of a fourth-floor walkup where a stubble-faced dock worker in a wifebeater backhands his kid for talking back. It's the same debutante forty years later, sixty pounds heavier, centuries wiser. It's the agency that lost its funding in a strapped economy because it hid too many of its problems -- I can dream, eh?
In short, it's the classic Heinleinesque bar scene consisting of the worst refuse of humanity, but the more you read it, the more you find the tortured Unmarried Mother, the fun-loving-in-a-grizzly-bear-wrestling-way Korax, and the free-living but ultimately self-sacrificing Sam Anderson -- the people who make life exciting and worth living, the ones who ultimately improve mankind through their mistakes instead of just settling for what they have.
Go read a discussion page, particularly for a controversial subject. As Friday said, you'll find "it's the liveliest, most exciting and dangerous place you can visit, and be sure to get a blood test afterwards!"
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
The Bits
With apologies to Edgar Alan Pogle.
Learn some math by using bits,
Abstract bits!
Look how well into my brain the one and zero fits,
How they toggle, toggle, toggle in the bright fluorescent light
Of the classroom where profs thunder,
"It's not error, it's a wonder:
One plus one is ten, all right!"
Counting twos, twos, twos,
It's the radix used by Zuse,
Til the number overflows and makes twos-complement'ry fits,
Of the bits, bits, bits, bits, bits, bits, bits,
Of the adding and the padding of the bits.
Now define some useful bits,
Carry bits!
Just build a J-K flip-flop and you'll find a bool var fits.
In an adder (full, not half; don't repeat that newbie gaffe)
It announces its result with great panache.
What a stream of data pours from dynamic RAM, and cores,
And SanDisk flash,
Oh, unless it's on the fritz,
What a gush of open/closed, true/false, and dahs and dits,
How it thrills! How it fills all your memory! How it kills
Bandwidth til you're taking pills
For the shifting and the drifting of the bits, bits, bits,
Of the bits, bits, bits, bits, bits, bits, bits,
Of the twiddling and the fiddling of the bits.
Feel the terror of the bits,
Quantum bits!
What a world of strangeness as the light traverses slits,
Among dice not rolled by God, we've lost parity, how odd!
Now I cannot seem to get a dial tone,
And we're never certain that
The life of Schrodinger's cat
Is quite known,
And the boffin, ah, the boffin
Who comes up with this stuff off in
Goedel space,
And who, droning, droning, droning
To make good his clever case
Caused the space-time that old Einstein lived for
To become erased.
I can't call a man a hero
Who says "It's not one or zero,
It is both."
And the universe, it roars,
As it pours, pours, pours
Cosmic rays upon the bits
And their value strangely flits
From reacting to the blitz,
Til their p-n junction quits
Over time, time, time
As their MTBF's climb,
Til you're picking at your zits.
Damn those bits!
Over time, time, time
As their MTBF's climb
To the jangling of the bits,
Of the bits, bits, bits,
To the mangling of the bits,
Over time, time, time
Til your furrowed browline knits
From computing every prime,
To the shaking of the bits,
Of the bits, bits, bits,
To the breaking of the bits,
Of the bits, bits, bits, bits, bits, bits, bits,
To the thrashing and the smashing of the bits.
Learn some math by using bits,
Abstract bits!
Look how well into my brain the one and zero fits,
How they toggle, toggle, toggle in the bright fluorescent light
Of the classroom where profs thunder,
"It's not error, it's a wonder:
One plus one is ten, all right!"
Counting twos, twos, twos,
It's the radix used by Zuse,
Til the number overflows and makes twos-complement'ry fits,
Of the bits, bits, bits, bits, bits, bits, bits,
Of the adding and the padding of the bits.
Now define some useful bits,
Carry bits!
Just build a J-K flip-flop and you'll find a bool var fits.
In an adder (full, not half; don't repeat that newbie gaffe)
It announces its result with great panache.
What a stream of data pours from dynamic RAM, and cores,
And SanDisk flash,
Oh, unless it's on the fritz,
What a gush of open/closed, true/false, and dahs and dits,
How it thrills! How it fills all your memory! How it kills
Bandwidth til you're taking pills
For the shifting and the drifting of the bits, bits, bits,
Of the bits, bits, bits, bits, bits, bits, bits,
Of the twiddling and the fiddling of the bits.
Feel the terror of the bits,
Quantum bits!
What a world of strangeness as the light traverses slits,
Among dice not rolled by God, we've lost parity, how odd!
Now I cannot seem to get a dial tone,
And we're never certain that
The life of Schrodinger's cat
Is quite known,
And the boffin, ah, the boffin
Who comes up with this stuff off in
Goedel space,
And who, droning, droning, droning
To make good his clever case
Caused the space-time that old Einstein lived for
To become erased.
I can't call a man a hero
Who says "It's not one or zero,
It is both."
And the universe, it roars,
As it pours, pours, pours
Cosmic rays upon the bits
And their value strangely flits
From reacting to the blitz,
Til their p-n junction quits
Over time, time, time
As their MTBF's climb,
Til you're picking at your zits.
Damn those bits!
Over time, time, time
As their MTBF's climb
To the jangling of the bits,
Of the bits, bits, bits,
To the mangling of the bits,
Over time, time, time
Til your furrowed browline knits
From computing every prime,
To the shaking of the bits,
Of the bits, bits, bits,
To the breaking of the bits,
Of the bits, bits, bits, bits, bits, bits, bits,
To the thrashing and the smashing of the bits.
Monday, July 13, 2009
Savage Kingdom
I've finished listening to Savage Kingdom by Benjamin Woolley. I don't know if you'd like it or not, but if you're a mixed bag, it will suit you to a T. It covers the first few years of the Jamestown colony and is written in a style sometimes academic and sometimes folksy.
The former style comes out in the droning telling of the mundane operations of the Virginia Company in its attempts to raise enough money to send the next supply ship. Yes, I was restless here.
The latter style is used to relate the mundane day-to-day life in the colony. It's amazing to me that a colony that struggled so hard just to keep from starving should have spent so much of its time executing its dissidents. It's not so surprising that so many of its colonists should have run away to live with the Indians, although their new diet was usually only marginally better than before. I've dug gardens in Virginia soil before, and I can tell you that it's not good for much.
Perhaps what kept my interest was that Jamestown is just a few (score) miles away, so it has local interest. "The Chickahominy River...say, shouldn't that have 'confounded' in the phrase?" "Hog Island? That's where the nuke plant is". "Morgart's Beach! He's talking about the rivah house!" Toss in the fact that the GB has traced all but one of her immigrant ancestors and they all came ashore not more than 50 miles from J-town. The book gets a another free point because it mentions Stephen Hopkins, my gggggggggggg-grandfather, who was both an early immigrant to Virginia and a Mayflower passenger, thereby giving him the unique distinction of being a member of the First Families of both Virginia and Massachusetts. I try not to let it go to my head, but I do have 0.012% of his genes, along with the rest of his 20,000 or so descendants.
Breaking with long tradition, I've re-read this post before publishing it, and realize that I haven't been too positive about this book. I guess it meant more to me than it would to most. Come to think of it, even a glowing review wouldn't sell more than half a copy, given my readership. And maybe that's just as well.
A great middlegame book
I have a shelf full of chess books, but How to Reassess Your Chess by Jeremy Silman is the last one I would get rid of. There are lots of good books on the openings, and some good ones on the endgame (Pandofini's Endgame Course for beginners who can tolerate typos, or Averbakh's out-of-print multi-volume series for the truly masochistic), but there's a cricket-chirping dearth of decent middlegame books.
Time after time after time in my mumbledy-seven years of chess I've worked my way through the opening, either by rote or by the time honored trio (develop your pieces, attack the center, protect your king), only to find myself stumped regarding what to do next. The pros are no help; they say "develop a plan", but none of them tell you how. Nimzovich's My System is opaque. Pachman's Modern Chess Strategy gives you a few ideas, but it's not easy to read a condensation of an English translation of a German translation of the Czech original and key-ripes! it uses descriptive notation. Well, stand back fellas, because Silman tells you how.
To grossly oversimplify, Silman suggests you analyze the position for seven key imbalances and develop a plan based on those imbalances. He devotes a chapter to each imbalance, showing you what it is, how it is good or bad, and most importantly, WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT. Maybe because he is not a grandmaster, he is able to talk down to my level so I can understand the concepts. At the end of each chapter are some problems that involve the imbalance in question, and whaddya know, I can occasionally answer them correctly.
A few years ago, I had the opportunity to attend a weekend chess camp run by Gregory Kaidanov. At one point, he went around the room asking for each person's favorite chess book. Each response was met with "uh-huh" until I mentioned How to Reassess Your Chess. His response of "Great book!" gave me some much-needed confidence. And, heck, it's only US$12.
Time after time after time in my mumbledy-seven years of chess I've worked my way through the opening, either by rote or by the time honored trio (develop your pieces, attack the center, protect your king), only to find myself stumped regarding what to do next. The pros are no help; they say "develop a plan", but none of them tell you how. Nimzovich's My System is opaque. Pachman's Modern Chess Strategy gives you a few ideas, but it's not easy to read a condensation of an English translation of a German translation of the Czech original and key-ripes! it uses descriptive notation. Well, stand back fellas, because Silman tells you how.
To grossly oversimplify, Silman suggests you analyze the position for seven key imbalances and develop a plan based on those imbalances. He devotes a chapter to each imbalance, showing you what it is, how it is good or bad, and most importantly, WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT. Maybe because he is not a grandmaster, he is able to talk down to my level so I can understand the concepts. At the end of each chapter are some problems that involve the imbalance in question, and whaddya know, I can occasionally answer them correctly.
A few years ago, I had the opportunity to attend a weekend chess camp run by Gregory Kaidanov. At one point, he went around the room asking for each person's favorite chess book. Each response was met with "uh-huh" until I mentioned How to Reassess Your Chess. His response of "Great book!" gave me some much-needed confidence. And, heck, it's only US$12.
Carcassonne solitaire
When I can't find an opponent, I play solitaire Carcassonne, a version of my own invention. Remove everything but the basic set -- ditch the river, inns & cathedrals, dragon & princess, laurel & hardy, etc. Forget the meeples; you won't need 'em. Start with the starting piece and play tiles one at time. Your goal is to get a complete city, surrounded by a ring-road around the city, surrounded by an unbroken chain of completed cities around the ring-road, surrounded by another ring-road around the chain of cities. Oh yes, it can be done; I did it the first time I tried, although I have never repeated the accomplishment. Sometimes I'm just a tile or two short.
Scoring makes it more interesting. Count your innermost city as usual. If it is surrounded by a ring-road, add in any other complete features (monasteries and cities only), double the total, and add a point for every tile in the ring-road. If the road is surrounded, add in any other features, double the running total, and score the ring-cities as normal. If the ring-cities are surrounded, repeat the process. I've scored over 200 points.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Beatlesfest
I was at Abbey Road on the River in Louisville, which bills itself as the "world's largest Beatles-inspired music festival". Well, maybe it is...68 bands performing over 5 days on four stages. Bands with names like "Eight Days a Week", "Savoy Truffle", and the "Sun Kings" (not bad, the latter), some with cleverer sobriquets like "Backwards", and the rest, of whom "Nervous Melvin and the Mistakes" were a pretty decent local band that Jeff likes.
The low point was the "Beatrips" -- perfect instrumental sound and good costumes, but the Japanese accents were hard to take. Rovely Rita, indeed. The highlight had to be when a band announced they were going to play the second worst Beatles song ever and I knew immediately it was "Mr. Moonlight". No, it was the look on the GB's face when some band started into the day's third rendition of "Hey Bulldog", a song she despises heartily due to Rick and me playing the piano part for 38 consecutive minutes (honestly, no alcohol was harmed during the performance) but thought she was safe from for the weekend because who ever heard of that song anyway?
All in all, I could have done with a little more and the GB could have done with a little less, but at least I ate twice at Steak n Shake (it's a meal).
The low point was the "Beatrips" -- perfect instrumental sound and good costumes, but the Japanese accents were hard to take. Rovely Rita, indeed. The highlight had to be when a band announced they were going to play the second worst Beatles song ever and I knew immediately it was "Mr. Moonlight". No, it was the look on the GB's face when some band started into the day's third rendition of "Hey Bulldog", a song she despises heartily due to Rick and me playing the piano part for 38 consecutive minutes (honestly, no alcohol was harmed during the performance) but thought she was safe from for the weekend because who ever heard of that song anyway?
All in all, I could have done with a little more and the GB could have done with a little less, but at least I ate twice at Steak n Shake (it's a meal).
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