Printed circuit board jargon includes the term annular ring. When I was in the PCB design software business, my co-workers and I made fun of the term's redundancy by saying "ring-like annulus" instead.

Speaking of things annular, there's an eclipse tomorrow.

Caesalpinia gilliesii, a shrub native to South America, is planted around the American Southwest for its attractive flowers. When I saw that a kind of commercially-available lumber that I like was in the same subfamily (Caesalpinioideae), I saved the thickest part of a C. giliesii specimen and dried it out to see what kind of wood it would yield. I got enough material for a small picture frame. The good news is, the wood has nice color. The bad news is, the dust is noxious. Like really noxious. Like worse than any other wood I've used. Like it made my throat sore. This is the first and last frame I am ever making out of this stuff. Not that I thought I had any readers who were wondering whether to try making stuff out of Caesalpinia, but I hereby suggest not doing it.

My digital camera, like most of them, has monochrome pixel sensors behind a color filter array. If a resulting image file has as many pixels as the sensor does and if each of those pixels has combined R, G, and B values, they were interpolated by demosaicing software.

When I do the digital equivalent of taking black-and-white landscape pics with a red filter, the process wastes information and detail. That waste is irrelevant for the sizes of images I post here, but I wouldn't mind having a camera more optimized for black-and-white.

Film is always an option, and I have some nice, slow, black-and-white film from Croatia. But I take pictures more by trial and error than I would if I were a skilled photographer, and digital is good for making lots of exposures.

If digital cameras already have monochrome sensors in them, shouldn't it be easy to make one without the color filter array? Kodak made such a camera for a while, but it's discontinued. The Leica M Monochrom was introduced this month, but it's $7950.

I have no illusions that this trifle of a blog has influence on the powers that be, but yet: could Fuji or Canon or someone please make an affordable black-and-white digital camera? Last year, I wrote about Deep Springs College

Time has caught up with the will of Deep Springs' founder. Last month, the college's trustees voted 10-2 to admit women. It's not a done deal; a court might enforce the Deed of Trust as written. We'll see.

The 2 who voted against the 10 have asked our county's court to block the change to coëducation. Their filing recounts some of the history of the founder's estate planning:

At the time, there was a mortmain statute in place in California (...) that restricted a devise to a charitable organization to no greater than one-third of a decedent's estate unless that devise was executed by a person with no children, parents, or spouse at least six months before that person's death. Therefore, being childless, parentless, and a lifelong bachelor, if Nunn could live at least six months after October 1, 1924 (i.e., until April 1, 1925), he could leave as large an endowment as possible to Deep Springs from his estate.

Nunn was dying a miserable death from tuberculosis and stuck around by force of will. He died on April 2.

After L. L. Nunn's death in 1925, his brother P. N. Nunn and close associates moved quickly to destroy L. L. Nunn's papers (likely consisting of several thousand files). There was a second purging by Frank Noon of L. L. Nunn's remaining papers at the college. Due to these massive culls any available articulation for why Mr. Nunn wanted to educate only "promising young men" was likely destroyed.

The next court date is a status conference on June 22.

great headline.  --->

The article quotes Cheney defending 'enhanced interrogation' techniques: "We didn't pull anybody's fingernails out with a file or something like that."

No, we just tortured some of them to death.

The guy should be in jail.

roadrunner 1, lizard 0

I've always liked Albrecht Dürer's work. His paintings of animals are well known, as are his engravings (e.g., Melencolia I, with the magic square). He wrote the some of the first books on mathematics published in German language. A recent article on Dürer told me a few things I hadn't heard before: that some homoerotically suggestive work of his had for a while been hidden away by researchers, and that a sexually explicit note on the margin of one of his portraits, long presumed to have been added by someone else, has been chemically analyzed and shown to be from Dürer's pen. A huge Dürer exhibition is opening in Nuremberg later this month.

bee on short final to flowers of Robinia pseudoacacia

In 1980 I lived in New York City and I rode my bike all over at any time of day and in any condition (I refer to the condition of the rider; the bike was in good shape). I had a friend who lived on Christopher Street who let me use his apartment as bicycle parking when I went to the west village for nights out. I don't think I fully appreciated at the time how generous that was of him. His work sent him to Dubai and he offered me a job there and I turned it down because I was 21 years old and couldn't see living in a country where gay sex was illegal. He was also the friend who turned me on to one of my favorite bands, The Monochrome Set. For me, their music is entwined with all the other memories I have of being 21 and living in New York City (although I also like a lot of the music they made after I had moved to the West). And I will remember April 2012 as when The Monochrome Set released their first record since 1995. It is not sold by download but rather on CD, which is fine with oldsters like me who still like having physical media and packaging, and seems wholly appropriate for a band whose lead guitarist's style is described, aptly, by Wikipedia as idiosyncratically retrogressive. I have never gotten much traction when I've tried to turn others on to their music, but that will not deter me from saying that Waiting for Alberto—my favorite song on their new CD—is streamable, in full, courtesy of the engineer who recorded it (and thus, I trust, with the band's blessing).

"The producers of this record do not propose that this record will answer all the questions which your child will eventually ask about sex, however, it will give the basic foundation of knowledge which every responsible parent will want their child to acquire."  - from the back cover of the 1990 CD Dante's Casino; quoted here because I found it nowhere on the web and I wanted anyone who searched for it to find this page.

While I was working in Colorado, I had lunch every Monday with a few engineers I knew. We talked more about politics than we did about engineering. I don't have lunch with the group on Mondays anymore but I do get included in some of their email discussions.

After a recent exchange about the sad state of—well, it doesn't really matter what—one of them wrote,

I would move to New Zealand, but I am stuck because of the kids.

I don't think he would do it. Or: if he didn't have kids, he'd find another excuse. I say this as someone who has, on occasion, been fed up enough with US politics to have said I was tempted to leave. Not having kids, I had a different excuse.

It all reminds me of a line from Nietzsche:

The thought of suicide is a powerful solace: by means of it one gets through many a bad night.

Capybaras that look like Rafael Nadal.