I didn’t know sexagesimal was a word until today. Indeed, I think that most spell checkers will flag it as a misspelling. Yet it is real. And you can probably guess what it means: base-60 numeric.
It didn’t occur to me that anyone would formalize it as a number system, but apparently it did to the Babylonians and Sumerians.
Apparently it’s common in astronomy.
Infinite Summer is now underway, and I’m pleased to see that a book I’m reading has spawned its own internet book club for the duration of this summer.
Infinite Jest is a book about a many things. It’s an epic saga. It’s really, really long. It’s by the late David Foster Wallace whose Consider the Lobster essay (commissioned by Gourmet magazine, hailed by PETA in their fight against lobster consumption) I found enlightening, well-written, and plain fun. His writing is clever and engaging, and his mixing of SAT words with colloquialisms should feel gratifying to all who ever had vocabulary flash cards.
I’m told that Infinite Jest has been read by everyone in UCI‘s English department.
In my case, I’ve not finished the book, though I’m around page 850 or so. That’s about September in the Infinite Summer syllabus, which allows about 75 pages per week, not including footnotes. You should know that some of the footnotes are short-story length. Some footnotes have their own footnotes.
Many of the book’s ideas are literally ridiculous. Yet it treats a number of serious themes on life and humanity, so I usually end up feeling more human after reading its pages.
So, in summary, I think the book is great, and the whole Infinite Summer idea is great too (you will be part of a big effort with a bunch of other people, happening right now). If you’re interested, check out his lobster essay first, because that’s article-length, rather than Bible-length.
It’s easy to bash the American healthcare system and point out instances where it’s lacking. To me, it seems to be more about billing systems than medicine. A friend told me about his experience in France, where he, as a foreigner, was seen and treated by a doctor at his hotel, and upon trying to pay was dismissed: “You Americans, always wanting to pay for things.” Yeah, they pay high taxes and don’t typically have single family homes, cars or enormous flatscreen TVs. They also seem to generally believe in their government. Whereas Americans like to euphemise imperfection as “good enough for government purposes.”
Anyway, if you care about the balance of costs versus quality of care, you should check out this article in the New Yorker about how a small town in Texas has one of the highest healthcare costs per person. I found it a well-written article that’s chock-full of helpful tidbits for your next healthcare debate at a bar, cocktail party, cafe, or late-night dorm room philosophizing session.
Here’s one tidbit from the article: “In 2006, Medicare spent fifteen thousand dollars per enrollee here, almost twice the national average. The income per capita is twelve thousand dollars.”
Another: ” Two economists working at Dartmouth, Katherine Baicker and Amitabh Chandra, found that the more money Medicare spent per person in a given state the lower that state’s quality ranking tended to be.”
A little more than two years ago, I started running regularly for general fitness. What I didn’t expect was the enormous feeling of achievement as I got tangibly better, running distances that I never thought I’d be able to (and actually getting to the point where they weren’t a big deal). Speed was never really a goal of mine, but lately I’ve been happy with my weekly distances, so maybe it’s time to build some speed.
But first, here’s something I didn’t expect. Running actually costs money. I run in public places, so there’s no real admission fee or stuff like that, but I do need shoes if I want to stay uninjured. Running shoes are pretty pricey, usually costing between $70-110. Add the fact that runners need a particular type of running shoe (just being a generic running shoe is not enough!), and that differences between brands and models within brands are as significant as fit (which is more important for running than for casual or dress shoes). In business, they call this an extremely high cost of switching. And running shoes almost never go on sale, and their prices seem only a little less fixed than game consoles.
So why does this matter? Shoes wear out. I’m running roughly 20 miles a week and shoes should be replaced every 300-400 miles. Do the math. This works out to more than a thousand miles a year, and therefore 2-3 pairs of shoes a year, so between $140-330 a year. I guess that might be cheap compared to some sports, but it’s more than what I expected for a sport where “all you need are shoes.”
I wouldn’t give it up though. I feel more alert and energetic than I did in my 20s. It’s a great stress reliever. I’m a little dependent on it, though. If I stop for more than a week, my joints are achy and I get stressed out more easily. I worry more.
Oh, and I should point out that registration for races is not cheap either. A 5K or 10K might cost $30-40, but the longer ones cost! The Disneyland Half Marathon was $100. I couldn’t justify it.
| 7773 • Daniel • Irvine CA • M-30 • Half Marathon • |
| Gun: 7:59:36 AM | 5k | 10K | 10Mile | Finish |
| Chip: 8:02:07 AM | 28:06 | 59:22 | 1:37:55 | 2:19:09 |
| Race Pace: | 9:03 | 9:34 | 9:48 | 10:37 |
Perhaps I’ll tell more later.
I’ve just spent the last hour (most of it, anyway), watching a spider weave a web. If you haven’t watched a spider spin a web, I highly recommend it whenever you have the opportunity.
I was walking home this quiet evening, when I happened upon a rather large spider. By ‘large’, I mean a spider with the abdomen about the size of a piece of Skittles or an M&M. Its legs could probably span the width of two quarters side-by-side. Anyway, I was walking by, and it had just put down a few basic support threads spanning a bush and a tree about two feet away. This was the first time, as far as I could remember, that I had seen a spider actually weaving a web. I thought to myself, “Self, you’ve never seen a web woven before, and this big spider is about to weave one right before your eyes. Why don’t you stop and have a look– you’ve got nothing particularly urgent to do tonight.” So I did.
Watching a spider weave a web is one of the more fascinating things you’ll ever see. As you watch this feat of biology, physics, and, well, nature, you will no doubt observe things that are practically hidden from you when you see the finished product. Here’s what I noticed.
Scaffolding: Though I didn’t see the very beginning of the web, I came early enough to see the spider attach most of its main support threads between the tree trunk, its branch, and the nearby shrub. What was interesting was that a lot of structure is put in place before the center of the web was chosen. This support framing consisted solely of long segments, sometimes bolstered by double or triple threading. When it was done, it began the next stage by marking the center.
Centering: The spider marked the center by emitting a few large globs of web-material. I don’t know if it came out of its spinnerets or if it puked them out, but it sure looked like it puked. One instant, it was attaching another support line somewhere in the web, and the next instant, there was a few army-ant-sized globs hanging on the web. I would later discover that this was the new center of the web. Now that the center was chosen, it could now add radial segments.
Radials: The spider deposited its first radials rather sparsely, apparently to lay out some structural support. Only after there was roughly even support all around did it begin filling in. After the first set of radials, it would fill in the gaps with about 12 degree spacing– I counted about 30 radial threads from the center at the end. Once these radials were done, it never laid down any more of them. It proceeded to the spiraling.
First spiral thread set: The spider proceeded to add spiral segments around its center, easily referenced by the army-ant-sized globs. Ring spacing began around 2mm, and would grow gradually, until they were about 3cm apart, about 10 inches or so from the center. Once they got too far apart, the spider stopped, and began filling in the outside.
Support arcs: I suppose there’s a technical term for what it built next, but it laid out arcs at the top and bottom of the outer edge of the web, several inches from the boundaries of the spiral it had just made. The top and bottom each got three or four arcs, spaced about 1cm apart, spanning several radials.
Outside spiral fill: After these supports were put in, the spider began filling in the web in a spiral fashion, beginning with the outside arcs. Spacing was about 7-10mm between rings. This is the final stage (before I began typing this) of the web construction.
Resting: Every now and then, the spider seemed to pause for a several seconds, apparently to rest.
Attaching threads: The spider paused for about half a second to make attachments after each segment. The long, framing threads took a lot longer to attach– perhaps three or four seconds. I now understand why spiders have eight legs. When spinning threads, the spider uses two rear legs from one side to guide and push the thread to the attachment point. Why two? It hands thread from one to the other. And with two legs on a side not supporting weight or providing stability, it assuredly needs another two on that side. It’s attaching a really thin thread coming out of its butt and attaching it to a precise point on another really thin thread, so a lot of stability is required. I never once saw it slip or stumble.
Thread spinning observations: Usually the spider added threads by releasing silk while crawling along an existing thread. It was interesting to watch when it didn’t. In those cases, it would let itself drop slowly, releasing its silk, until it landed on the horizontal segment it somehow knew was there.
Gravity: After finishing, the web’s spiral rings looked really quite evenly spaced. The slightly wider spacing at the top hints at a different story during construction. I was surprised to find that after beginning what I called ‘support arcs’, the additional weight ruined the nice inner spiral, which looked increasingly ruined as more spirals were filled in from the outside-in. Not to worry– the spider re-tightened the innermost spiral rings afterwards.
Final dimensions: The spiral web portion was roughly three feet in diameter. Yes, that means that if you walk into it, it will wrap around your head completely with room to spare. This spider should get some mighty fine eatin’ tonight.
Anyway… you should really have a look if you’ve never seen a spider spin a web right in front of you. A book, DVD, wikipedia entry, or youtube video will just not cut it. It’s a different experience when you can walk around it, put your face as close as you dare, squint to see its impossibly thin threads in the light, and watch the web undulate as the occasional breeze (or breath) blows by (you’ll notice that its rigidity increases with support threads and decreases with sticky threads that catch the wind).
Epilogue: Actually, the spider’s completely finished now. It’s resting in the very center of the spiral, and the globs of stuff that marked the center are now completely gone. Overall ring spacing is about 1cm near the top, and 3-4mm at the center and sides, and maybe 3mm at the bottom. Verily, I marvel.
I’ve always felt that mathematics is a useful tool in everyone’s daily life. Here is an example.
Recently, I was prescribed some medicine, and it was to be taken twice daily: once in the morning, and once before bed. However, I made a couple mistakes. The first morning, I took twice the dosage in the morning. And, in the evening I dutifully took another dosage, but made the same error and took a double dosage again. I realized my hapless error just as I downed the requisite glass of water. So what was I to do. Clearly, the drug was now above the prescribed concentration in my bloodstream, so should I continue the normal schedule the next morning?
We can use math to figure this out. Most drugs taken in orally can be considered to have a “half-life” in your bloodstream. Yes, this is the same concept of half-life in radioactivity. Basically, your body gets rid of stuff from your bloodstream at a constant rate, given the current concentration of the ‘stuff’ in your blood. This is modeled in math as an exponential decay function. To illustrate, have a look at these equations.
The simplest form is (1), which illustrates the basic shape of the drug concentration. We add a step function (2), which allows us to make just the part after the dose is administered, along with a t0 time offset parameter to give a more accurate shape in (3). (4) adds a half-life parameter, which is scaled away from the irrational e to become (5). This is the concentration resulting from a single dose, over all time, parameterized by dose administration (6). While you are taking the medicine (t=0 to t=t_finish), we can represent your idealized concentration as (7). The summation variable i gets incremented by 0.5 each time, which flies in the face of normal convention. Sorry about that. The code farther down is correct.
All simple, right? Let’s plot things. I used Mathematica to generate these plots. Equation (6) becomes:
Note that in this function, x is time (in days), and t is the time offset. I threw the equation together before thinking about how best to represent things for others… Sorry…. The 1.3333 factor is the the half-life constant. The half-life for my medicine was roughly 18 hours, which is 0.75 days, which is roughly 1.3333 (close enough for my (government’s) purposes).
And then we can plot our ideal concentration.
This is how the concentration would look like if I took the medicine exactly as directed. We can see that the concentration is roughly periodic after about two days of accumulation. But! I messed up, remember? How can I adjust my next doses to return to the ideal case?
You can see that at t=0, my medicine concentration is twice the ideal(conc = 2), since I took twice the dosage. Accordingly, the second dose, which was also twice too large, boosted my concentration to about 3.25. In this scenario, I skipped the third dosage (second day, morning), to bring my concentration roughly the same as the ideal case at t=1.5 . So there you go.
The bottom line is that I should skip the third dose if I take two double-doses on the first day. Yay! Isn’t math fun? This amount of math is no more than what a high-school graduate should have, and probably less than what an overachieving middle schooler could do.
I’ll be sure to post other examples math in real life when I get the gumption. Have a nice day!
This is my first post in a long, long, time, so you’re probably expecting a long, interesting post…
But, basically, I’m just posting about my new interest in running, and specifically, about my very first 10K ever in my life.
(For your reference, the race webpage. )
It was on a cloudy, rainy (for southern California, anyway) morning that I arose from my bed at 6am to drive to Chinatown to participate in my very first 10K. I had only heard about the race on the previous Monday, stumbling upon it as I missed the Redondo Beach Super Bowl 10K that I had planned after having a ball at my first timed 5K at the OC Marathon a few weeks prior. That night I asked myself, could I do it? It might be a stretch, but I could give it a shot. And so I told myself that if I really thought I could do it, I’d better check by running tomorrow morning. So on Tuesday, I ran 5.6 miles, and it felt pretty good. I had no illusions of speed or such, and so I timed myself at 1:10, which is about a 12 minute mile pace. So I told myself: Self, you’re probably good to go, but you’re gonna take 1:15 to finish and the 2.7 miles of uphill may be challenging. So… there. I made plans to go (but didn’t register online due to the silly 3 dollar surcharge), buying myself an actual running shirt and actual running shorts at Target. I told myself that I could finally start considering myself a runner, though a beginner, and kind of out-of-shape.
Anyway, on the day of the race, it was certainly rainy, just as forecast, and though it wasn’t really cold in an absolute sense, it was cold to be in a short-sleeve shirt and shorts, with a breezy light rain ensuring adequate dampness. I shot the breeze a little with some other mildly-shivering runners, who explained that the course was pretty rough and full of bumps and cracks, and that you wanted to stay in the middle to avoid mud and sand and twisted ankles. Confirming this, the race announcer warned of potholes recently formed from the rain, and cautioned us all to stay safe and have fun.
Luckily, the rain stopped about 5 minutes before the actual start time, and I really couldn’t have asked for better conditions. The air was crisp and cool, and I was treated to beautiful views of downtown Los Angeles and Dodger stadium at the top of the Elysian Hills, about halfway through the course. I settled into a group of people at my pace after about the two mile point. By that time, everyone slower had yielded to walking and everyone faster was, well, faster than my conservative uphill pace. I met a few people… a veteran-sounding runner who briefed me on the views I should expect, a couple who would exchange some friendly trash-talking and rivalry between each other, a couple of boys who couldn’t have been more than 10 years old, a bride-to-be running with a wedding veil, with (I can only guess) her future bridesmaids, and some nice woman who kept my pace nearly the entire run (she was probably faster than me, but probably hampered by an ipod and clothing too-warm…I lost track of her in the last mile). During the last stretch, I happened upon a older woman (age 60, from the results) who sprinted with me towards the finish line.
It felt great to finish, and I seemed to have a ton of leftover energy. I think the clock read 1:04:36 when I passed the line, but the results show me at 1:04:10.
You’ll find me in the race results with my name misspelled as “KANIEL” at a 10:21 mile pace. Honestly, I don’t know how I or the scantron could’ve messed up, but maybe that’s what I get for registering late. If you ran in this race and are looking for people to run with drop me a line (especially if you have a similar pace).
So there you have it. Ever since getting my magic running shoes (a gift, which seem to have nullified my historic knee pain from running), running’s been satisfying and fun. Maybe a marathon isn’t as out of reach as I thought (perhaps next year?).
(By the way, I continue to be inspired every time I think of the elderly lady (at least 70, probably at least 80) who jogged for at least the first two miles of the last 5K I did. The kid who wanted to run 200 miles for charity but ended up running 124 miles? I think he’s on another level.)
Last night, around 9 or 10pm, I went to the grocery store. As with other grocery store trips, I had my Palm PDA with me, ready to remind me what sorts of food and sundries I was needing at the time. Unfortunately for my wallet, I ended up with close to $60 in groceries, despite a careful effort to keep to things on sale. My shopping cart was reasonably burdened, yet not full, and it had the two-cupholders plus a handy tray to place a small purse, a stack of coupons, or various toys for a hypothetical child. I placed my PDA there, in that most convenient of places. It was a rather uneventful shopping trip, whose highlight was probably asking the friendly brown haired female bagger at the checkout if her eyes were naturally that color. I was referring to her nicely aquamarine ( a shade of blue) eyes, of course, and she replied that she got that question a lot, but no, her genes were not *that* good, and if I stopped by next month, they might be grey.
Again, a rather uneventful trip. I rolled the cart out to my car, loaded my trunk and wheeled the cart back to the store front (as any dutiful citizen would, when no cart corral was closer). Little did I know that the next day, today, I would be doing yet more cart wheeling and rolling, but with computing goods and with elevators. But, I digress.
It wasn’t until this morning when I looked at my backpack and, finding an open zipper and no PDA within, I wondered where my PDA was. I think it took about sixty seconds for my morning fatigue to be erased and converted to abject horror and acute anxiety. I searched throughout my apartment, but didn’t find it, which wasn’t surprising since I had no recollection of bringing it in from the car. I went to search the car, but returned empty handed, making sense since I had no recollection of taking it from the cart and placing it in the car. And as Sherlock Holmes would say, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” In my case, the truth was unfortunately that I had left my PDA in the shopping cart at the front of the store for the next lucky customer to utilize.
Now, at this point, I was pretty pessimistic about the whole thing. My nice, shiny PDA was surely more attractive than the average find of leftover coupons normally found in used shopping carts. Sure, it had limited memory and functionality compared to those whizzy PocketPCs, but I for one found the applications more usable, despite having a mostly useless Bluetooth implementation, and a built-in 1-megapixel camera whose noisy sensor was only usably good for 640×480. Anyway, no one would’ve been the wiser (except an absent-minded me), so I honestly started thinking about what I could do about it, knowing that my PDA carried a lot of my most personal information, as all PDAs are designed to handle.
I resolved to go about my day and check the grocery store in the evening. It would’ve been better if I had remembered sooner, but quite honestly, if it’s there the next morning, it will still be there in the evening. So I went about my day, mostly with my head hung low, and if I were in an anime episode, my eyeballs would be blank white sockets and there would be a blue/black aura about me, perhaps with bobbing flames dancing mockingly around.
So, my day came and went, with some productivity here and there, taking delivery of more computing power than I really need (another story), and at the end of the day, I went back to the grocery. I went straight to the customer service area and asked the nice young woman there if anyone had turned in a PDA left in a shopping cart last night. She rooted through a particular cabinet for a moment, and then asked her manager, requesting that I wait for just a little longer. I, already accepting defeat, waited without further worry. Her manager came over and checked a “back room”, and a moment later, I had my PDA in my hand. This was a surprise, and a most pleasant of surprises. I’m sure that winning the lottery is also a pleasant surprise, but hey, dodging a bullet like this is also pretty nice indeed. My heart and my profuse gratitude go toward the kind soul(s) who turned it in to the store authorities. In fact, if you have ever turned in items that have appeared lost, and are wondering whether it was worth your trouble, I assure you, it was. The person who turned in my PDA has my lasting gratitude, and I’m sure that other item-losers (perhaps an unfortunately-worded term) are equally relieved and forever grateful to be reunited with their belongings. There’s no reason for random strangers to cover for mistakes by people like me… no reason but the goodness of the heart.
Experiences like this remind me that there really is goodness in the world. I should have faith in humanity. Good people do exist. News and media often remind us of the problems and badness of reality– hopefully, we should want to fix things rather than despair, lose hope, or find fascination in the lurid– but look here. There is good in the world, and here is an example. Maybe it will do good to celebrate goodness rather than to decry badness.
Anyway, thanks for reading this rather long, and perhaps self-indulgent blog entry. Have a nice day. 
I’m all for the indexing of books in print. I want to assure the publishers that I will still buy books(if not even moreso), if/when Google Print gets its way.
But read this first. It’s about an author who wants Google Print to index her book so that more people will find her book. Unfortunately, her publisher against it, and rather decided to sue Google instead.
Link:
Book author to her publishing company: your lawsuit is not helping me or my book (kottke.org)
It’s interesting. Go read it (well, the article, then you can consider the book).
Please allow me to conclude with my own experience with print and digital literature. I like reading. I always have, but I admit that it sometimes falls by the wayside when I feel stressfully busy. Still, I do like to think of myself as an active reader. To make things concrete, I’m in the middle of Merton’s “No Man is an Island,” Dorfman’s “The Empire’s Old Clothes,” Wong’s “Fifth Chinese Daughter,” and Wells’ “The Invisible Man.” The last of these, I read on my PDA. Ooooh. Digital book. I didn’t pay money for a print edition. Uh-oh. But of the others, one is from the library, and I *did* pay for the others. Would I have paid money for them if they were available free? Maybe. I still buy books that I really should borrow from the library– I doubt anyone has space to store all the books one has read. I could if they were digital, but I do like reading from print rather than screen. I have no idea how digital paper would change things, but right now, I find it much more pleasant to read a book and flip pages. I only read on the PDA because it can go *everywhere* with me.
I also fully support the complete digitization of all books or media out of copyright or in the public domain. Indexing of current works seems fine, too. Instead of the hassle of tricking Google into revealing the book, it might be faster to just scan/photocopy a library’s copy. I side with Google in believing that indexing will surely help book sales. I also believe that copyright terms are already longer than they need to be. If the work has so much lasting appeal, let it one day be free to benefit the public. The author has had ample time to receive her reward, so why not?
This also reminds me of how I have this pop CD I bought when it was cool 5 years ago, and I accidentally damaged it recently, and it’s out of print, so I *can’t* get a replacement copy. Since the CD price has nothing to do with media cost, I *should* be able to get another one minimal cost. But I can’t. Hey, I have a license, what gives? Is the distribution the cost? Then I also wonder how those pirates in China can turn a profit if they pay for production and distribution while charging a dollar a piece.
*sigh*
It’s a mad, mad world.