Books

Came across a couple of stories about the history of books, if you are interested in that kind of thing.

New England Primer 1764

WHY PICTURE BOOKS WERE ONCE CONSIDERED DANGEROUS FOR CHILDREN via Indy Tom

The Grapes of Wrath - Armed Services Edition

Why were the books published for American soldiers during World War II printed in landscape format? What was so special about these books? via Quora

Man Carrying Chair

We went over to the neighbors this evening for dinner and conversation. They didn't have enough chairs for everyone, so I brought a couple. When I go home they give me a chair to carry. When I get home I am very careful not to bang into the walls, and then it occurs to me that when I was younger I would have been very satisfied that I had carried the chair home and wouldn't have been too concerned about whether I banged into the walls or not. Huh. Could I be getting old?

Early Phonograph Recording

Lauritz Melchior Prize Song from Wagner's Die Meistersinger
I presume the singer is being restrained to keep him from overpowering the recording media. Via Posthip Scott.

Steampunk Violin

Roundtable Rival - Lindsey Stirling
This lively little tune showed up on YouTube. It's pretty great, it's like an old Western with cowboys and dancing girls, and wait a minute, what the heck is that thing she's carrying around? A violin with a trumpet horn?



Yamaha Performing Artist Lindsey Stirling - "Roundtable Rival" Behind The Scenes
Yes, as she explains here, that is exactly what it is. But it turns out there really was such a thing. John Stroh invented it back in 1899:

The Stroh violin is much louder than a standard wooden violin, and its directional projection of sound made it particularly useful in the early days of phonographic recording. Regular violins recorded weakly with the old acoustic-mechanical recording method, producing a thin, whining tone. The Stroh violin improved this by producing a fuller, louder sound with better tone.
Stroh violins were common in recording studios, but became rarer after record companies switched to the new electric microphone recording technology in the second half of the 1920s. - Wikipedia

Erwin Schulhoff : Susi (1937)
I listened to several recordings of the Stroh Violin on YouTube and this one sounded the best. All the others sounded a bit whiny. Could it be that what made it work well with recording equipment 100 years ago makes it sound worse with today's equipment?

Desmos Graphing Calculator

I've been hanging out at Quora lately. A fair number of math problems show up there. Many of them are inane, like 'What is 2+2?", or "What is 3+3 x 3?".* But some advanced ones show up as well. Some of them are really ugly, I've never seen the like before, don't know what they're good for, or why anyone would care, but they make me curious so I've taken to plotting them on the Desmos Graphing Calculator.  It would be nice if you could simply copy the equation from Quora and then paste in Desmos. You can, but it doesn't translate properly, so you have to go in and fiddle with it enough for Desmos to understand it. Plus sometimes the equation (or expression) you get from Quora is missing something, or didn't get entered properly, so you have to muck with it to get anything graphable.

The equation for the Middle Green Circle on the graph comes from this question on Quora.




Outer Orange circle    x^{2\ }+\ y^2\ =\ 16     
Middle Green circle    e^{\left(y^2\ +\ x^2\ \right)^{.5}}\ =\ 16
Inner Orange circle    e^{.5\left(y^2\ +\ x^2\ \right)}\ =\ 16

The original equation from Quora.

f(x,y) = e^sqrt (x^2+y^2)

Mucking about with above equation and then typing Ctrl-Z causes the graph above to be redrawn. Actually, it doesn't matter what you were doing before, if you have done anything at all in Blogger's Editor, Ctrl-Z (Undo) causes the graph to be redrawn.

Taking the Middle Green Circle and changing it to a function gives us this
f(x,y)=e^{(x^2+y^2)^{.5}}
but Desmos doesn't know how to graph it.

Note that I have replaced the call to sqrt with an exponent. Desmos treats sqrt as four variables (s, q, r & t) being multiplied together.

Also capital X and capital Y mean something special, so don't use them until you figure out they do.

This post started as a test to see if I could copy and paste the equations, but I can see it's expanded a bit.

About the Math
The difference between the 2nd and 3rd equations is that one multiples the exponent of e by .5 and the other raises it the power of .5 which should be equivalent according to math.com's article on exponents (see the Power Rule). I don't quite understand why the graphs of these two equations should be different, but Desmos evidently thinks otherwise.

I set the expression equal to a constant (16) to get it to graph. Properly, it should be set to Z and graphed using a 3D graphing calculator. I found one that looks like it should do the job, but I've been having some trouble with it, so that's going to have to wait for another day.

* What's even weirder is how many answers the inane questions get. I made some sarcastic replies, but it's just endless. Besides, since some people think these questions are worth answering, I am trying to train myself to Pass on these questions, but it's really hard not to click Answer and just let them have it with both barrels. Gee wilkers pops, everyone knows the answer is 42. I mean it's the answer to everything, ain't it?

P.S. I just discovered that Google has a plot function.

The Samaritan

The Samaritan - Trailer
The Samaritan is an okay movie. It's got a bunch of good pieces, like Samuel L. Jackson, but it's not well put together. It's the story of an old confidence man and a young criminal who wants to pull a scam, but the story line is thin. It just doesn't fit together well. Plus they use the word 'grift' way too often.

I would think that to pull off big confidence scam, you would want to be working with people you like and trust, but maybe I'm naive. Maybe people can perform under pressure and work with people they despise. Or maybe someone will be so pissed off they will pull the plug at a crucial moment and the whole thing will collapse and everyone dies. Did I just spoil the story?

I enjoy a good movie about scams The Sting, The Grifters, House of Games and The Spanish Prisoner were all pretty great.

200b

It seems there are invisible characters floating around out there on the internet that cannot be detected by a person using any popular computer programs. Zero-Width Characters by Zach Aysan gives us a hint, but he doesn't tell us the whole story. He gives us two sample lines of text that look the same but he claims are actually different.

Copy one line and then search for it using Ctrl-F and you find both lines. Look at the source using the Chrome browser and the lines look the same. Save the page and look at it using the Linux text editor xed and again, both lines look the same.

Invisible Text

Only when I opened the saved web page with vi (an old school text editor) was I able to see the 'invisible' characters: a less-than-sign (<) followed by 200b followed by a greater-than-sign (>). What's even weirder is that vi highlighted this sequence with blue.

Via Monday Evening