Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.  ‑ Oscar Wilde Readers are invited to guess who's modeling those clothes in the pic. Hints: he's famous for something else he was mentioned in Tommyjournal earlier this year he's 19

Because another pic reminded me that I like the look of bookshelves.

No one knows what time is; certainly no one knows how to define and explain it to the general satisfaction. But we sure know how to measure it.   - David S. Landes

When I was a kid, the four-color map theorem was famously unproven; for planar maps, there was a gap between the number of colors known to be necessary (four) and the number known to be sufficient (five). When a proof--that four colors sufficed--finally arrived, it was huge and relied on extensive computer analysis--a victory, but not a satisfying one.

More recently, there was an ever-narrowing gap between how many moves were known to be needed to solve configurations of Rubik's cube and how many were known to be sufficent in all cases. When that gap was closed (just recently), the solution came by extensive computer analysis. (20 moves are necessary and sufficient.)

The team that solved the problem has posted a description of their method, along with a table showing how many configurations can be solved in a minimum of n moves for 0 <= n <= 20. A plot of the configuration counts (some are approximate) appears below. I fitted a curve to the points not to suggest that the function is meaningful for non-integer values of n, but rather to show how close to exponential (visually linear with a log scale in y) the function is until around n = 18. It's reminiscent of the growth of a population until it runs out of resources.

This guy assumes curious poses when he's getting ready to shed.

I just got back from a short but very pleasant trip to Lone Pine. I was curious to see how I'd feel upon returning to Colorado; would I be bummed that I had left the desert again, I wondered.

I wasn't bummed. On the contrary--it felt good to be back here, and especially good to get back to work. Of all the things I am grateful for, having work that I enjoy is high on the list.

Having said all that, I must also say that I was loving being in Lone Pine. There was a rabbit in front of my house to greet me when I drove up, the Caesalpinia was in bloom, and a (live) scorpion was in my bathtub. Does the desert rock, or what. I will really miss journalist extraordinaire Daniel Schorr, who died this morning in Washington.

In 1988, Mr. Schorr accepted an invitation from Frank Zappa to appear on stage and encourage audience members to vote. He then accepted an offer to sing, and chose a few numbers from Porgy and Bess.



(source here.     July 23 is evidently my day for posting NPR excerpts) Screenshot of a WaPo page from this afternoon. (the same stuff probably won't all be there if you follow the link now, though)

Note the text in the BofA ad. (Yes, I am easily amused.) California is the most populous state of the union, which has translated into (among other things) a propensity for making laws. There are more things you must or must not do in California than in, say, Colorado.

A business in California is obliged to post a sign in the event that the premises contain materials known to the state to cause cancer. The signs are ubiquitous and thus have little to no effect. That is to say, the essential result of that law is that lots of signs get posted.

California is on the brink of declaring serpentine to no longer be its state rock because, well, you can guess why.

The proliferation of state symbols reflects the general bizarreness of the USA. Other countries seem to divide themselves into states or provinces or what-have-you without having to declare an ever-growing array of state symbols: state bird, state tree, state rock, state reptile, state soil, state question, ... . (Not that every US state has all of those.)

The US Constitution calls for a census every ten years. I was moving at just the right moment to not be counted in the 2010 census, neither in California nor in Colorado. That felt consistent with the feeling I had of not quite knowing where I lived.

After almost four months here, I still feel like I only kind of live in Colorado. I don't know whether I'll be here for another month or another few years (depends on whether financing materializes for the project I'm working on). But before too long, there will be resolution. I'll know whether my work here has a future, I'll know where I'm living, and I'll know whether my state fossil is a stegosaurus or a saber-toothed cat.