Girl From the North Country - Musical

Show Clips: GIRL FROM THE NORTH COUNTRY
Broadwaycom

Went to see Girl From the North Country at Keller Auditorium last night. My wife was ready to leave at the intermission so we did. I don't quite understand why. Most of these shows, I'm ready to leave after five minutes, but I stick it out because. There have been a couple of shows that I enjoyed but they are the exception. The sound might be part of the problem. I thought the sound at several shows was downright awful, it sounded like the speakers were being overdriven, somebody was asking them to deliver more volume than they could and they end up sounding like crap. That was not the case with this show, the sound was pretty clear and I could hear the dialog pretty well. I could even make out some of the words in the songs.

Supposedly all the songs were Bob Dylan tunes, though they didn't sound anything like Bob Dylan. The story was kind of a downer. We've got one old white man trying to hold things together for his family but he's not getting a lot of help. We've got a couple of kinds of crazy, one unmarried, pregnant, teenage black girl, and a couple-three flavors of flim-flam men. The show is set in November in Duluth Minnesota in the midst of the Great Depression. I wouldn't be surprised if everyone froze to death in the second half of the show. Maybe my wife saw what was coming and didn't want to be around when it happened.

Giant Snake Geography

When You Think Tectonic Plates are Giant Snakes
SciManDan

I don't care what Science Man Dan says, it looks like a giant dead snake to me. All you perverts who think it looks like something else, just be quiet.

Gap between South America and Antarctica made by Giant Snake

The gap between South America and Antarctica is like 500 miles. Since snakes usually have a circular cross section, and since the ocean is only a couple of miles deep, if this was a snake then we are only seeing the very top of it and the bulk of it would be thoroughly embedded in the crust of the Earth. Actually, I think it looks like a giant mud flow, but that would imply an uphill source for the mud and there just isn't any. So maybe Science Man Dan is right after all.

Pleasure in a toothache

Stolen entire from Essays in Idleness

Pleasure in a toothache by David Warren

As there are people who take pleasure in murder, there are those who will find pleasure in toothache. I did not see this at first, although I should have, for you know, I have read Dostoevsky right through (though only in the fine English translation of Mrs Edward Garnett). But happening myself upon a most exquisite, indeed excruciating, toothache, developing at the back of my lower left jaw, I turned immediately to Dostoevsky’s “Notes from Underground.”

My strategy with toothache has long been more material than contemplative. After having ignored it for as long as possible, I would counter-attack with the salt-water swish, with almond extract, or topical clove oil, or even an aspirin, inserted against the labial frenulum. This had always worked before, letting me do things like sleep. But this time I had a “wisdom toothache,” which would not be confined, for it had invaded not only the mandible but the maxillary sinus, and was enhancing the dizziness from my stroke. After a few days of escalation, I decided that something had to be done; for it is difficult to carry on with other human activities when distracted by such a toothache.

Of course, this is Canada, and as I did not have a “dental plan” with any employer, or the equivalent bureaucratic papers, I had to try my luck with the dentists of the neighbourhood, and find service à la carte. I spent a morning in this useless wander, during which I found each of the dentists had been privately isolated in a “family practice,” and couldn’t just see someone with a toothache, even if he had cash. But everywhere there is an exception, and I found him in the afternoon.

Thanks to modernity, in the form of 500mg amoxicillin capsules and 600mg tablets of ibuprofen — which I could have ordered for myself, but only if I’d first obtained a medical degree — I am now beginning to relax.

The pleasure in a toothache is, of course, the pleasure of moaning, when you can command an audience to endure you. To the nasty person, lacking respect for himself, so that he will make a spectacle of his degradation, it can be a voluptuous pleasure. But whereas the pleasure in a murder does not require an audience, the malignant pleasure of moaning by day and by night is pointless when it is performed solo.

I was thus unlucky, I could get no pleasure from my toothache.

That is why the eco-warriors and Hamasniks (&c) cannot allow themselves to be left alone. Not only have they not the capacity for the contemplative life, but they need someone who can be forced to listen to their despicable moaning.

Spindle

Desmos Spindle Graph

The red arc describes the upper side of the hull, the blue follows the lower side. The straight green, red and black straight lines are radii for the upper arc. The length of the spindle is 70 meters and the diameter at the center is 8 meters.

I was reading about the Nautilus submarine from Jules Verne's 20,000 leagues under the sea. Seems the submarine in the novel was shaped like a spindle, not at all like the one in the movie. My question is: how do you compute the volume of a spindle? There might be a formula out there somewhere, but I have not found it. So I thought I would try calculating it on my own. Last week I made up a spreadsheet to sum the volume of sequential slices.

I used the Pythagorean formula to generate a formula to compute the radius of the hull from the distance from the bow. That seemed to work fine. The next day I tried to check my work, but being short on sleep my head was full of cotton and I could not make sense of it. Now I think I understand what it's like for people who have a hard time with math. It was like part of my brain was not working. Anyway, I'm doing better today so I took another look at it.

I decided the spread sheet was too cumbersome, so I wrote a little computer program to compute the volume by cutting the spindle into slices, computing the volume of each slice and then adding them all together. The volume is in cubic meters. Ten slices gets you to the nearest meter and a thousand slices will get you to the nearest cubic centimeter. Beyond that any differences that show up might be due to the limits of double precision arithmetic.

  CPU ticks      Slices        Volume
           4             1  3,518.583,772
           4            10  1,883.743,261
          17           100  1,883.565,830
         133         1,000  1,883.565,812
       1,339        10,000  1,883.565,812
      12,929       100,000  1,883.565,812
     131,847     1,000,000  1,883.565,812
   1,110,081    10,000,000  1,883.565,813

  10,897,789   100,000,000  1,883.565,810

The volume is in cubic meters. At one hundred slices we already have the volume to the nearest liter (one one-thousandth of a cubic meter). At one thousand slices we have the volume to down to one cubic centimeter (one milliliter). At ten million slices the last digit starts changing. I suspect we have reached the limit of what can be done with floating point math without taking a closer look at the equations. I'm not going to do that. The nearest cc is close enough for me.

Comma-fication

Big numbers without commas are hard to read, so I spent most of a day working out how to automatically place commas in the output. It made the program four times as long. In some versions of C you can use an apostrophe to tell printf to insert commas, but it wasn't available with the online compiler I used, so I wrote my own routines. And because I wasn't sure if it was working correctly, I wrote another one to verify the first.

I also added some rudimentary command line parsing so you can change the length, beam and number of slices without having to modify the code.

Blog post: Jules Verne - Nautilus

Desmos Calculator Graph

C program source code on github

OnlineGDB IDE (Interactive Development Environment) C compiler

The length of the Nautilus is given as 70 meters and the beam is 8 meters.

Drone Wars

Vortex Cannon vs Drone
Mark Rober

This video has three parts:

1.  0:00 Survey of current serious antidrone techniques
2.  6:20 Advertisement for Hack Pack, robot kits by mail
3. 11:30 Mark and his friends go out to the field to test their own anti-drone devices.

I think I know what I want for my birthday.

Budos Rising

Budos Band - Budos Rising Live in Austin
naggerbear

Recorded at the Mohawk in Austin, Texas. Usually I will listen to a tune several times before I post it, but this one hit me so hard I said it's going up now.

Mohawk in Austin, Texas

It looks like a dive, which means the music has got to be good. Tickets are cheap, too.

Dragons

Some of the biggest—and most iconic—flying animals in all of history. And non-history. From
How Dragons Fly: When Biology Trumps Physics - Naturalist

House of the Dragon got me wondering about whether you could actually have a dragon. What would it take? I'm going to assume they are carnivorous being as they've got a reputation for eating people and large animals. You also get more energy from eating meat than from eating grass, and if you are going to be flying you are going to need a lot of energy. Like other large predators, they probably spend a lot of time lazing around and sleeping and only go hunting when they are hungry. Given their large size, they probably wouldn't have any difficulty finding something to eat, so they would not need to be airborne for long. Pop up in the air, take a quick look around, spy a fat cow, swoop down and chomp it up, pop back up into the air and head back to the cave for a week long nap.

If you have a tame dragon, as long as you gave it a cow every week or so, it would probably be very happy just hanging out in its cave, dreaming ferocious dragon dreams. You need it to go on a mission, you give it a couple of pounds of amphetamines and a barrel of sugar water or alcohol and he'd probably  be good for an hour. If you can't complete your mission in an hour with a dragon you probably need to rethink your strategy. You can probably only ask them to fly a mission maybe once a week, and for a large, old dragon, maybe only once a month.

As for the fire breathing, digestion produces methane, so dragons might have a special bladder where they can store methane. All you need is to belch out that methane and a little spark and you've got a natural flame thrower. Striking a couple of rocks together should be enough to get you a spark to ignite the methane. Or maybe dragons grow special teeth that spark when struck together.

Dragon bones are going to need to be very light, like bird bones. And that armored skin is going to need to be something light weight, not thick and heavy like a crocodile. I dunno, maybe make the armor out of same thing as space shuttle tiles, but grow it organically. I don't know how you could grow such tiles, but I don't know how we grow teeth either. In any case, dragons are totally possible. Nobody is going to create one any time soon, but maybe in a thousand years we will have learned enough biology that we would be able to. Then we could have the nine zillionth season of Game of Thrones, but for real.

Update - Stu did some math on this.