Origami amazingness

Like so many other videos, I happened upon this via another video.

In Japan, the art of origami (which literally means "fold paper") is something that all Japanese children are introduced to from an early age. It's an integral part of the culture. Although it's purportedly quite old, the mathematical theory of origami is only a few decades old. Before the discovery of its mathematical theory, it wasn't very easy (or possible in many cases) for people to derive new forms from the paper. (There may also have been some level of social conservativeness that slowed adoption of novel forms, but that's another topic.) However, certain forms became iconic (and still remain so), the crane being perhaps the most famous.

I like making cranes for the kids of my friends, using bits of paper I find around the place. Most are sufficiently surprised and  tickled with my quite limited ability of making this form. My brother -- a far greater origami worker -- achieved official ranking in Japan while he was still in high school, and can make far more interesting and intricate forms than me. However, the traditional crane has been (and still remains) the icon of origami (even though more realistic ones are possible).

However, with the discovery of the mathematical theory of origami, completely new shapes are able to be produced, sometimes with exquisite intricateness. These forms have exploded onto the scene in a Japan that is now far more obsessed with the novel (and new uses for traditional things) than with the conservation of tradition for traditions sake alone. Thus, we can get things like this:



The following video describes the secret of the mathematics behind origami:

At SFO testing out a Chromebook

Standing at SFO, trying out a Samsung Chromebook at a Google Chromebook kiosk. Pretty fast, pretty cool... so long as you have an Internet connection.

(Also, it says that it's a "series 5"... where did the first four go?)

What might this mean about voting for a half-Black, half-White presidential candidate (or incumbent)?

Andrew Sullivan links to a Gallup post discussing the changing trend in the acceptability amongst Black and White respondents to the question of marriage to a member of the other race. With only slight word changes (that went from "colored people" in 1958 to "non-whites" from 1968-1978 to -- presumably -- "blacks" in subsequent surveys), there has been an ever-upward trend in both populations. Americans in 1958 had only 4% approval, but this had climbed to 86% in the most recent poll. Presumably, though, Whites were a vast majority of the early surveys, due to the demographics of telephone owners.

Indeed, looking at when Gallup started to ask about race (1968), White Americans showed a 17% approval (compared to the 20% national number). However, in the latest survey, White Americans showed an 84% approval of Whites marrying Blacks.

Why might I find this terribly interesting? Well, partially because I'm mixed race (although it's Japanese/White, and not Black/White), but mostly because I see a confluence of some different things: marriage, morality, and voting.

What's troubling for me has been listening to the "debate" about the validity of same-sex marriage. The religious right has been -- for a long, long time -- chipping away at the notion that marriage holds a legal meaning that is separate from religious meanings. Therefore, it's possible for two atheists to get married to each other and have the same governmental recognitions that a married Christian couple has (or a married Jewish couple, or even -- *gasp* -- a married mixed-religion couple). The marriage between a Jewish friend of mine and his Christian wife is just as valid to the state as the marriage between two Christian friends of mine. The churches and temples to which these friends belong may (or may not) approve of their choice of spouse, but have no secular legal recourse. The most that they can do, if they so choose, is to react within the confines of their ecclesiastical bounds.

However, if you listened to the talking points of the religious right, and if you believe their position, then marriage isn't primarily a governmental institution, but a religious one (and for many, it seems to be that their point of view is that the only valid religion is Christianity, and the only valid version of Christianity is their own). This turns the idea of government recognition on its head (unless you prescribe to the notion that this is actually a religious country founded upon religious ideals that -- for some reason -- aren't to be found anywhere in the founding documents of the country, nor can any analogues of the founding documents be seen in the Bible). However, there are many people who do believe that marriage is a sanctified bond that is between only one man and one women (regardless of what the Bible actually says about different acceptable forms of marriage and regardless of what prior Christian custom may have been, either).

In short: there are a vocal group of people who viscerally believe, with unshakable resolve, that marriage is a matter of, for, and from religion, and that viewpoint brings us to the point of morality.

For many people, religion is the source of morality. I could go on about why this is flawed logic, but suffice it to say that I believe that if people can find morality outside of their own religion, then either not only their own religion is moral (and perhaps their religion may not be the only "real" one) or morality is not exclusive (or necessary) to religion. However, regardless of what I feel about morality and its connection with religion, many religious people do believe that religion and morality are connected.

Now, connect the unshakable resolve about marriage and religion together with religion and morality, and you'll be at a point where many anti-gay-marriage religious believers are in this country: proper marriage is an issue of morality. (Which, although inconsistent with the large universe -- let alone world -- of reality, is a central point that seems to be held with fanatical fervor for many in the religious right, or at least those that I read about, hear on the radio, and see politicians pandering to.)

Well, let's pivot slightly from gay marriage to miscegenation. The Bible was historically used as a justification for slavery and the Jim Crow laws following the Civil War. It was also used to defend laws against miscegenation that were finally struck down by the Supreme Court in Loving vs. Virginia. However, just because the Supreme Court struck down miscegenation laws doesn't mean that it struck at the religiously motivated moral reasoning that institutionalized those laws in the first place. (Indeed, such religiously motivated moral reasoning was likely presented as reasons why Whites shouldn't marry Blacks before and after the Loving decision).

Let's now look back at the graph of White and Black approval of marrying a member of the other race. While it is positive to say that 84% of Whites approve, it is also appropriate to say that 16% of Whites do not approve. Let me say that again: 16% of Whites do not approve of Whites marrying Blacks. When surveyed on August 4-7, 2001. During the presidency of the first mixed-Black/White president. (The facts that the marriage was brief and that his father may have been married to two women at the same time may well only diminish the moral legitimacy of Obama's heritage.)

Does this mean that 16% of White America (and 4% of Black America) will be casting a vote in 2012 with this on their mind as part of a moral choice? Might it have affected how they view the validity of Obama's very claim to the presidency?

Looking at the tabular data, perhaps these people wouldn't vote for him, anyway:

Conservatives and Republicans only approved of Black-White marriages at 78% and 77% levels, and in 2008 these groups voted for Obama at 20% and 9%, respectively.  (People with only a high school education did vote slightly more for Obama than McCain, though, so maybe this issue did weigh in their decisions.)

Interestingly, about 4% of Blacks did vote for McCain, which is the same percentage that don't approve of Black-White marriages.

Shinto Shrine Code?

Over at AltJapan, there's a story about a video that shows that Shinto Shrines act as a visual code to show the break line of tsunamis along the coast! WOAH! A tsunami hit Fukushima... and none of the shrines got destroyed?! That's got to be some major divine mojo working there!


20110820　原発建設　警告は無視された？ by PMG5

... or it's just Shinto shrines being built at the location where historical tsunami broke against the shore. As explained over at AltJapan:

It is not for nothing that Shinto shrines are generally built on high ground. One resident interviewed in the piece relates how local lore, handed down from parent to child, said to take refuge at the local shrine in the event of a tsunami. It proved true during the disaster, saving many lives.

Like the "tsunami stones" and folktales found throughout the region, these shrines represent an attempt from those who lived long ago to communicate the dangers of tsunami to future generations. It seems likely that's precisely why they were built in these specific locations.

Woah... a set of religious structures built based on observations of natural phenomenon, acting as a predictive guide to the impact of occasional catastrophic seismic events? Now that's religious encoding that works! It's almost like evidence-based predictions of flood-zones, but done before such user-friendly tools like Google existed. It's almost...... scientific! (If only they had relied on a better form of knowledge dissemination, other than oral tradition...)

It would be interesting for someone to look at sea-side Shinto shrines and correlate their location (elevation and location) based on historical records as well as predicted tsunami impacts.

Relearning Math

I often forget that I don't really do hands-on mathematics anymore. By "hands-on," I mean doing it step-by-step; possibly by hand! A few years ago, I had a go at long division, but after several tries, gave up for a bit in frustration, had a coffee, mulled over it some, and then finished what should have been the operation of just a few minutes (if that).

Today, it was trigonometry. Specifically, it was trying to remember how to convert field measurements of elevations and point-to-point distances into point-to-point slopes. It wasn't too difficult to start off: get the difference of two consecutive elevations to obtain the change in height, and use the length between the two points as the -- you guessed it -- length. Okay, easy part done. Now... how does one apply "SOH, CAH, TOA" again?

Oh, right: SOH refers to the relationship in which the sine of the angle is equal to the length of the side of the triangle opposite the angle in question divided by the length of the hypotenuse of the triangle, or:

sine ϴ = opposite/hypotenuse

However, since I didn't have the value for ϴ, I needed to take the arcsine (or inverse sine) of the quotient, or:

ϴ = arcsine (opposite/hypotenuse)

Yeah, not too difficult. However, when I tried this out using Excel for my 30-60-90 triangle with lengths of 3-5.2-6, I divided 3 by 6, took the arcsine and got "0.523599" instead of the 30 that I was expecting. Ah, crap. What did I do wrong? Check it again by dividing the 5.2 by 6, take the arcsine and get "1.047198". Shoot. Well, at least the first was 1/2 that of the second, so the ratio is correct. However, the first is not 30 and the second isn't 60 degrees.

I knew that it was coming to this: hit F1 and subject myself to the Microsoft Office Help functions. ... where I was dutifully reminded that Excel does these calculations in radians and not degrees. Suddenly vague memories of trying to change my Casio graphing calculator from radians to degrees swam through my head. How does one do that transformation again? Go to Google.

Search "radians to degrees formula", and bypass all the calculators that don't actually have the formula (and yet somehow get placed in the search results). Ah, right:

degrees = radians * 180/pi

Okay, so now, I go back to Excel, and multiply my two initial results by 180/pi, and get 30 and 60! Woot! Progress!

However, that's just the slope-angle. I need the actual slope (you know, the m in y=mx+b). So, I turn now to TOA, and since I have the slope-angle in question, this should be easier (since Excel wants everything in radians, I first have to convert my 30 degrees into radians (0.523599), and then take the tangent (0.577351) to get the slope of the hypotenuse (assuming that the adjacent angle is horizontal).

Then, I noticed that I could have simplified the whole thing by not transforming from radians into degrees and back again as well as combing the two processes into a single Excel command:

slope = tangent (arcsine (opposite/hypotenuse))

Of course, this only works when the "adjacent" side is assumed to be horizontal, which -- if one is doing surveying properly -- we can take the assumption as being true.

I'm sure that I will likely have to remember how to do differentiation and integration at some point in the future. And I did learn how to do it, and I was actually decent at doing it by hand at one point. However, that was approaching 10 years ago...

... after all, isn't that the purpose behind computers and mathematical software?

UPDATE: It's true that I could have just as easily gone for the a^2 + b^2 = c^2 right-angle association, knowing what a and c were, and using these to find b, and then taking the slope by using a/b... But that would be too simple! LOL.

News ticker stories about smoking and women

Occasionally, my news ticker happens to serendipitously have stories aboutrelated topics (or topics that seem related in my head). This time, as I was scrolling through the day's updates, I saw one story about how smoking bans encourage female smokers to quit:

The new study uses data from a national survey of 7,610 women who work outside the home, 81 percent of whom said they smoked daily.

Twenty percent of women with home and work smoking bans said they intended to quit smoking, compared with 14 percent of those with work bans only, 20 percent with home bans only and 14 percent with smoking bans in neither place.

Yet, even women who said they had no intentions of quitting still made spontaneous attempts to quit, the study found, and a home ban appeared to have a slightly larger effect than a work ban. Thirty-four percent of women who had no prior intention of quitting but who had a ban only at home said they had attempted to quit, compared with 33 percent with bans at home and work and 25 percent with no bans.

More information: Rose A, et al. The role of worksite and home smoking bans in smoking cessation among U.S. employed adult female smokers. Am J Health Promo 26(1), 2011.

Then, just a few stories down, I saw this from copyranter, about new cigarette packaging in Russia that is specifically aimed at girls:

"Sweet dreams" indeed. I'm sure, though, that the Sandman won't be the one that will take you though; with ever-accumulating evidence linking smoking with lung cancer (and other cancers), I'll more likely be Charon (and his dreams are less varied and more dismal -- and final -- than Morpheus').

Coincident evolution of dance and sartorial arts

(H/T: The Dish)

Small houses

I don't know if it's because I grew up in East Asia, surrounded by examples of small houses (and small apartments), or if it's because I find the idea of highly efficient space allocation to be intriguing, but I've gone ga-ga over many of the postings about small buildings at various (non-architecture) blog rolls to which I subscribe. While waiting for a student to show up to office hours (and with an interest piqued by another article about a tiny home), I decided to look for some blogs about tiny houses and tiny homes, and found two that look kinda fun:

Tiny House Talk
Tiny Home Builders

There's something that I just love about the aesthetic of a tiny, hand-made home that maximizes the inside space. (Perhaps it's one reason why I wish that I had the ability to have built the little cabin in which I currently reside...) However, these tiny homes are truly tiny and many use multi-purpose furniture and innovative floor design to maximize space, function, privacy, and comfort.

Although I really like them, though, I can't see myself living in one for more than a few weeks at a time...

A ramble about physical sciences, human systems, and governance

Let's first lay down some basic assumptions:

1. The physical environment follows physical laws.
2. Biological systems are affected by the physical environment.
3. Humans are part of the biological systems.
4. Humans can affect the physical environment.
5. Humans create and work within social realities.
6. Human social realities intersect with the physical environment.
7. Humans create social laws that help govern humans' association with the physical environment (i.e., social laws moderate basic assumption #4).
8. Physical laws trump social laws.

If we take each of these statements as true, then we must also take the set of these assumptions to be true as well. Therefore, it follows that:

• Physical laws impact biological systems.
• Physical laws impact human social realities.
• Human social realities impact the physical environment.
• Changes to the physical environment caused by humans will follow physical laws.
• Changes to the physical environment will affect human society.

These deductions -- made by combining different statements from above -- form the basis for a social expectation for ecological and physical sciences. Indeed, just as political scientists, economists, and public policy experts are called upon to determine impacts to governing systems, ecologists and physical scientists need to understand that physical and social systems are interlinked, and not only are they interlinked, but due to increasing technological capability combined with increasing human populations, the degrees of freedom within which to move are becoming evermore diminished.

Understanding that the region-scale physical sciences can provide a lot of insight into the workings of the social world, help anticipate some of the physical impacts of decisions that governments (or other social institutions) make that will affect themselves (or others) in the future is an important step for people to make. There are differences between "advocacy" and "informing" (although the line can often be a thin one), and while advocacy -- through various means -- can be problematic, especially since it often is led by a presumption and not by observation or fact. However, sterile information from a virginal white "honest broker" scientist figure is also problematic when viewed through the light of interconnection between social and physical environment.

Just as we all make decisions based on a lack of perfect information, so, too, we make decisions about governing, and it seems ludicrous to me that there should be a double-standard about moving forward on relatively very good scientific evidence that consistently supports one side -- so long as there is the will and ability to continuously test and determine the principles upon which those decisions were initially made. (You know: do iterative science!)

More rambling on this topic later -- no doubt.

A couple of responses to a(nother) post at SocImages

I really do like reading SocImages, since it often brings up issues that are not relevant to my own area of study. However, many of the topics are germane to everyday life as well as perspectives on it. Furthermore, because of this, it's quite interesting to look at the reactions that people (including myself) have about their interpretation (and -- inevitably -- the interpretations of others). Occasionally, the author of a blog post seems to reach a little too far to make a point -- we are all guilty of that on occasion -- and often get called out on it. Sometimes, though, the reaching seems to go unnoticed (or perhaps I just notice it early on, since it shows up on my RSS feed), and I point it out. This happened in a recent post about how the Rikers Island prison didn't have any hurricane evacuation status and linking this lack of evacuation status to a perceived lack of compassion for prison inmates seen during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. While I didn't have a lot of problem with the many of the points made in the post, it seemed to me to be less objective with the facts than it could have been, and it didn't seem to me that the author considered alternative explanations for the same facts.

From your quote from the NYTimes blog, the problem appears to be as much an administrative one as a physical one (that then results in a combined administrative and logistical problem):

no hypothetical evacuation plan for the roughly 12,000 inmates that the facility may house on a given day even exists. Contingencies do exist for smaller-scale relocations from one facility to another.

This speaks -- to me -- more to the department of corrections being blind-sided by this event; something that hasn't happened since 1938. Yes, pulling together contingency plans for awhat if scenario for evacuating Rikers Island in the event of a hurricane could have been undertaken following the 1938 hurricane, but it would also have to have been periodically updated as conditions in the area (and in the prison) changed, and the investment would likely have been seen as wasteful spending during eras of budget cuts (and likely scrapped, thus needing another administration to re-start investments in the planning process).

Voters don't like what is perceived to be "wasteful government spending", and continuous spending to update evacuation plans for an island prison complex due to a 100-year-event (as the flooding from the hurricane was forecast to be) could well fall inside that perception of "wasteful government spending."

Could not the city have started moving people out to other facilities ahead of time? Well, perhaps, but I don't know (and likely most readers of this blog don't know) the logistic difficulties that are inherent with scaling up the NYTimes blog's statement of, "Contingencies do exist for smaller-scale relocations from one facility to another." How much police effort would have to be shifted from other public-safety operations? What would the political heat on the city be if New Yorkers discovered that the city government was (to put easy spin on it) 'spending money saving criminals instead of the innocent citizens of the city'? 

I noted earlier that it seemed to me that the department of corrections was blind-sided by this event. I previously established that it was popularly quoted as being a potential 100-year flood event (and thus likely was not planned for -- or had updated plans maintained). If you can agree that it was highly unlikely that there was decent planning (and updated plans) available, then let's look at the problem in light of the time line, because (given enough time), perhaps Rikers could have transferred some of the inmates, using their contingency plans. I looked around the NOAA site, but could not find accurate information that confirms what I recall: the hurricane forecasts placing the storm over NYC didn't start to come out until last Monday (August 21), which would mean that Rikers would have had less than six days to move out a significant number of inmates to other facilities based on plans that were only meant for contingencies of moving a smaller number of inmates.

If we were -- in sum -- a people who did care a modicum more about these people who are in our custody (extrapolated from us, since we have an ostensibly representative government), then we would likely have had adequate flooding predictions to include Rikers (instead of having to extrapolate -- sans data -- to say things like "despite the fact that the island is surrounded by areas with the second highest evacuation rating") as well as monies to put toward adequate planning to cover such rare occurrences as this one. (After all, a 100-year flooding event means that each year there is a statistical 1/100 chance that it will happen, not that a flooding event won't happen for another 100 years.) However, we are a society that (more often than not) praise law enforcement officials and politicians who are "tough on crime" (which usually means "no compromising with felons" and often means "don't give prisoners more stuff"), and therefore we get situations like a prison island that has no viable plan to relocate an house its inmates in the face of a hurricane. (And this is exacerbated by the fact that hurricanes don't have a history of hitting NYC -- or come close to hitting it -- very often).

If we are to have the responsibility of governance as a people (think: "We the people" and "government of the people, by the people, for the people"), then we need to learn to think about those whose lives are held by us. However, while I state this point of humanist governance, I would also caution people to (seemingly) jumping directly to conclusions of the one above. The historical condition viz hurricanes is significantly different than New Orleans. Likely, too, Rikers is a very different sort of prison than those in New Orleans, requiring a very different level of logistical and administrative coordination. (And don't forget about the vastly different legal, political, and social differences between New York and Louisiana nor New York City and New Orleans.) Making the direct link -- without making reference to these differences and the ones I outlined above -- is sloppy analysis.

I think that my meta-analysis is right: for various reasons, the explanation given in the post was not a very good analysis of the problem as one that matched the author's apparent thesis: that New York City didn't care about it's inmates leading up to Hurricane Irene, just like New Orleans didn't care about its inmates leading up to Hurricane Katrina.

In doing some online investigation for my response, I noticed something in the author's post that I couldn't square with the Wikipedia entry about the history of Rikers Island. The Wikipedia entry stated that it was purchased by the Dutch in the 17th Century, but the article made it sound that it was potentially all built on reclaimed land. The author provided a link to the source article for that sentence, but when I looked at it, I noticed something a little more problematic (from an academic point of view, that is):

Re: "Solitary Watch reports that Rikers Island was built on landfill, which is especially vulnerable to disasters."

This is an incorrect citation of the fact and a fudging of the implications in two parts.
First, the incorrect citation: Solitary Watch did, indeed, have this information, but it clearly cited its source as the New York City Department of Corrections' website (not themselves). Proper citation should mention this, rather than merely pointing to Solitary Watch. Therefore, something like "Solitary Watch -- reporting figures from New York City's own Department of Corrections -- reports that..." would have been far more accurate. (Sorry, but freshmen would have been marked down for that mistake in my classes.)

The first of what seems to me to be fudging: You state that it "was built on landfill", which -- without greater knowledge of the facts -- makes no distinction between the entirety of the island vs a portion of the island. Looking again at Solitary Watch, we find that their figure (from NYCDoC) is that "more than three-quarters" is built on landfill. Now, while that is a huge percent, it is a fudging of the original cited figure. Since you have a PhD, this being a mere slip-up seems rather dubious, since the number is right there in the citation, and because the island pre-existed the settlement by the Dutch in the 17th Century (i.e., it couldn't have all been "built on landfill"). (Sorry, but more points off for massaging the data.)

The second of what seems to me to be fudging: You state that it "is especially vulnerable to disasters," which is again not what Solitary Watch said, which was that it "is generally thought to be more vulnerable to natural disasters." As a writer, the difference between your "is especially vulnerable" and the original "generally thought to be more vulnerable" are worlds apart. Your use is a declarative statement of fact, while Solitary Watch's is not, so unless you are an engineer qualified in determining the structural integrity of such an island add-on, then you should not make the definitive statement of "is". (Sorry, again, but mangling the difference between "is" and "thought to be" only seems to point to again massaging the data to make it fit your narrative.)

I am not arguing that Rikers Island is now mostly constituted of landfill. Nor am I arguing that reclaimed land is more structurally sound than natural geological landforms. (However, I am arguing that you did a poor job of citing the source of the fact that Rikers was partially built on landfill.) 

I am pointing out, though, that within one sentence, you have committed three distinct academic fouls that would have lowered many a student's grade for what would be countenanced as factual sloppiness at best. Furthermore, recognizing these fouls only diminishes the strength of your argument, since I now have to wonder about the verisimilitude of your entire argument. (And holding a PhD only makes these errors more egregious in my opinion, since I would expect you to know better.)

Yes, I'm no fan when people with PhDs go around and mis-attribute facts and less of a fan of PhDs who go around and bend wording into such phrasing as to lead to a different reading of the points in question. The author should have acted with intellectual honesty and provided the source for the fact of Rikers being partially built on reclaimed land as the New York City Department of Corrections, and not Solitary Watch. One must cite the original source of factual data or -- if the actual original source (say, in this case, a surveyor's report) is not available -- a reputable and/or authoritative source that can attest to the fact. Failing this, one should make it clear that a source (such as Solitary Watch) is secondary. The verb "report" does not imply one way or another whether the source was primary or secondary, but merely that a written account was given of something investigated (primary source) or received (secondary source). To many people, this may seem a nit-pick, but it in academia, this can be a quite important distinction.

Also, for some people, the difference between "is" and "thought to be" as well as the difference between "was built on landfill" and "more than three-quarters is on a landfill" are word-choice differences. However, if you add up enough of these small "word-choice differences" you can get a very different message. For example, while the original source's wording can be generously read as, "almost all of the prison is built on reclaimed land, which many people think can be a problem in natural disasters," the author's wording provides an even greater generous reading of, "the whole prison is built on reclaimed land, which is a problem in natural disasters." This is a set of differences, which (if continued over the course of a lengthy discourse or series of discourses) can lead to final interpretations as distinct as Catholicism and Unitarianism.

What puzzles me the most about this one sentence that I pulled out for examination was how unnecessary its interpretation was. The author could just as easily taken a direct quote from the Solitary Watch website, since the sentence is a mere re-wording of a sentence on that page.

Where is...?

Where is that fresh flush of life?
Wherefore stolid complacency stagnant in my gut?
Where went the cold edge pulled from a sheath,
Shining proud in the sun, ready to cut?

How dull it is now, tarnished red with age,
Unoiled and unsharpened, naked to the sky?
How much cold iron is left below the rust?
What mettle is held in that core?

Shall we burnish it and see;
Rasp the edge until it is once again sharp?
Reveal the cold beauty of the sword:
Serene and archaic symbol of ancient times.

Can it slay our modern creature comforts,
Cut through the Gordion knot wound about us?

(Yup, I'm in a funk once again: writing bad poetry in between bouts of practicing martial arts outside.)

August photos

Thanks to a battery cover that is breaking on my camera, I've been rather remiss about uploading photos to Flickr (since I taped up the cover, and peeling off the tape to get to the memory card is annoying). However, this photo group (and the June and July ones) should get people "caught up" to the random photos taken around town.


Repair crane sitting on a pontoon on Barton Pond.


A scrumptious dinner of (clockwise from top-center) chanterelles, chicken burgers & kale, chicken-of-the-woods, and fried rice (cooked in the juice of the chanterelles).


Damnable purple loosestrife!


The migrations are starting.


The bus shelters on North University (new as of January).


Feasting on milkweed.


Misty morning on Third Sister Lake


Cycling up the driveway in Saginaw Forest.


Repair work on Barton Dam (closing off the gangway above to pedestrian traffic).


Railroad repair vehicles. (I suspect that some of these are meant to pull out and replace the railroad ties, since I saw many stacked up haphazardly along other sections of the railroad.)

July photos

Sandhill cranes (shot at maximum digital zoom, thus the pixelation)


Roughly 1 quart (~1 liter) of raspberries, picked near the campfire ring in Saginaw Forest.


Jiffy mixes in Chelsea


A 19XX Ford at the Rolling Art car show in downtown Ann Arbor.


A huge luna moth decided to spend some time hanging out on the gate post to Saginaw Forest


A sampling bucket from the "frog guy".

June Photos

Chopping down one (more) of the elms.


Massive branch from the dogwood tree takes out the electricity line in Saginaw Forest.


A gorgeous peony


Morning dew


Ripening raspberries

Cycling around the U: 13 months

Over the past thirteen months, I've been using a Garmin to track where I've been cycling. No surprise that I'm focused mostly around the university...

Colors range chronologically from red (July 2010) to yellow/orange (August 2011).

1204 Granger

A reader requested this one, and I happened to be cycling by that location a little while ago, so...

What people call streams... or brooks... or runs... or something else

If you've done work in rivers in the US, you will quickly learn that names for those flowing bodies of water smaller than a "river" are given different names in different places in the country. Some EFL individuals may think that there is a hierarchical nature to the relationship between a "stream", a "brook", a "run", a "wash", etc. Often, though, there isn't; all these things are similar to each other in that they all mean "a small river" or something akin to that. Looking at the Flowing Data website today, I saw a link to a map by Derek Watkins that lays out the geographic distribution of the various toponyms that describe "small rivers" around the US.

Just to show how similar the definitions for many of these different words are, I present their (relevant) definitions [and etymologies], taken from dictionary.com.

• Branch: a tributary stream or any stream that is not a large river or a bayou; Chiefly South Midland and Southern U.S. branch water.  [1250–1300; Middle English bra (u) nche < Anglo-French; Old French branche &lt; Late Latin branca paw, of uncertain origin]

• Run: a small stream; brook; rivulet. [before 900; (v.) Middle English rinnen, rennen, partly < Old Norse rinna, renna, partly continuing Old English rinnan; cognate with German rinnen; form run orig. past participle, later extended to present tense; (noun and adj.) derivative of the v.]

• Fork: a principal tributary of a river. [before 1000; Middle English forke, Old English forca &lt; Latin furca fork, gallows, yoke]

• Brook: a small, natural stream of fresh water. [before 900; Middle English; Old English brōc stream; cognate with Dutch broek, German Bruch marsh]

• Kill: (US) a channel, stream, or river (chiefly as part of place names) [C17: from Middle Dutch kille; compare Old Norse kīll small bay, creek]

• Stream: a body of water flowing in a channel or watercourse, as a river, rivulet, or brook. [before 900; (noun) Middle English streem, Old English strēam; cognate with German Strom, Old Norse straumr; akin to Greek rheîn to flow (see rheum); (v.) Middle English streamen, derivative of the noun]

• Bayou: a marshy arm, inlet, or outlet of a lake, river, etc., usually sluggish or stagnant; any of various other often boggy and slow-moving or still bodies of water. [1710–20, Americanism < Louisiana French, said to be &lt; Choctaw bayuk river forming part of a delta]

• Swamp: a tract of wet, spongy land, often having a growth of certain types of trees and other vegetation, but unfit for cultivation. [1615–25; < Dutch zwamp creek, fen; akin to sump and to Middle Low German swamp, Old Norse svǫppr sponge]

• Slough: an area of soft, muddy ground; swamp or swamplike region; Also, slew, slue. Northern U.S. and Canadian. a marshy or reedy pool, pond, inlet, backwater, or the like. [before 900; Middle English; Old English slōh; cognate with Middle Low German slōch, Middle High German sluoche ditch]

• Wash: a tract of land washed by the action of the sea or a river; a marsh, fen, or bog; a small stream or shallow pool; a shallow arm of the sea or a shallow part of a river; a depression or channel formed by flowing water; Also called dry wash. Western U.S. the dry bed of an intermittent stream. [before 900; Middle English washen (v.), Old English wascan (cognate with Dutch wasschen, German waschen, Old Norse vaska) < Germanic *watskan, equivalent to *wat- (root of water) + *-sk- v. suffix + *-an infinitive suffix]

• Cañada: Chiefly Western U.S. a dry riverbed; a small, deep canyon. [1840–50;  < Spanish, equivalent to cañ ( a ) cane + -ada noun suffix]

• Arroyo: Chiefly southwest U.S. a small steep-sided watercourse or gulch with a nearly flat floor: usually dry except after heavy rains. [1800–10, Americanism ; < Spanish; akin to Latin arrūgia mine shaft]

• Rio: a river [Spanish rio, from L. rivus "brook, stream"]

How do most people seem to find this blog?

According to the Sitemeter tracker and the Blogger tracker, most people who come to my site find it by doing a search for "unit conversion" or "conversion table" or something similar. A number of years ago, I had written about a fun site that does unit conversions from standard units into more fun units. So, for example, you could know how far 500 miles was in units of "Great Walls of China" or you could find out how wide 5 feet in terms of CD cases, etc.

For some reason, though, out of the past 100 page views, Sitemeter shows that the page about unit conversions had 53 initial hits, with the next greatest being the archive page that has the entry about unit conversions at 31 initial hits. So, 84 out of the past 100 hits to my site have been related to unit conversions... Furthermore, according to the Blogger stats for the site, out of the 26,429 hits recorded since July 2009, 7177 of them have been to the unit conversions page (and over the past 24 hours, 123 of the ~300 hits have been to that page). This is kind of interesting, because there are definitely better sites that have to do with unit conversion, so why are people coming to this one? What is the logic behind Google putting my blog at a high enough level for people to click through to it so often?

Hmmm...

Brompton Folding bike race 2011

This looks quite fun!

A bit of video humor

A few years ago, I saw a video of a mime of Natalie Imbruglia's Torn:


Later, I saw some other mimes of songs done by Johann Lippowitz (aka David Armand). Recently, I found some more...




And a 14-minute compilation of his interpretive dances done for the Fast and Loose show on the BBC.


Two more. Human


Man in the Mirror