Sunday

Sunday, December 31, 2006
14:21

Friday: poker game at TB's. Six players, with a seventh showing up later. Had a good time, helped no doubt by the fact that I came out ahead. When I got home around 1:30, the power was out. The first thing I noticed was the little sandwich-board "Stop" sign in the middle of the main intersection. "Hey, that's what they did when the power was. . . .ah crap". Looked like the little substation went out again, power was out in a few-blocks radius. I parked my car, walked over to the street to survey things and mutter "son of a bitch" a few more times, then as I turned to walk up the stairs, the power came on. From news reports I think it went out sometime around 8 PM?

Saturday: manged to get out of bed in time to make it to the last calisthenics meeting of the year. Followed by the sitting, then a coffee run to Java Bean. We got the space mostly "reset" and cleaned up by 12:45, then mopped the floor on the way out. It will definitely need paint next year. The caulking holding all the little red rocks on the wall took paint off as it came up. The floor needs it too. Stopped by Than Brothers on the way home for lunch. Napped through the afternoon. Watched TV and played bass some.

Tonight, NYE party at Chez Tragor. Forgot the liquor stores would be closed today, dang, wanted to get some of that super-Kahlua.

Map Geekage

Follow-up:

Been wasting some time using Google Maps's satellite view to follow power lines (as in the big kind). In wooded areas, it's not too hard to spot the right-of-ways, as they are straight, bare areas with no road. Zooming in, if the maps for that area are hi-res, you can spot the towers (a gray smudge, sometimes with a nice shadow) and sometimes the lines.

So far, found what looks like the main route over the Cascades to the Seattle area: It's visible from quite a ways back – put the map on hybrid, and zoom so that Seattle is in the upper left corner and Ellensburg is in the lower right corner. Look for the little line that goes over the mountains (I think through Stampede Pass?) about halfway between I-90 and 410, then meeting up with I-90 between Keechelus and Kachess lakes. It ends up in a huge switching yard just north of Ellensburg. Also, a pretty serious set going from Oregon to California. So far though, no luck finding the lines heading south from Grand Coulee that cross I-90 around Moses Lake. I've stood under those lines, and you can hear the buzz from corona discharge.

Thoisday

Thursday, December 28, 2006
23:20

Another fairly quiet day. Caught an interesting show on PBS about The Rite of Spring, narrated by a conductor, following the musical details and other stuff along with excerpts from the performance. I didn't know anything about the actual ballet, and how un-ballet-like it was.

Was really foggy on the way in to work. A little spooky out.

Sushi for lunch. Sushi for me is still a lot of, "Hey, what is this?" and "Oh that one's not bad, it doesn't taste very fishy." The maguro was so-so, the salmon surprisingly good.

Random thought from today: Sonic Youth's "Kool Thing" is one of the greatest rock songs ever.

In other news, my car has become very reluctant to start lately. It began Sunday morning. It'll turn over for a few seconds with nothing happening. If I try again it (so far) will start up fairly quickly, but roughly. The idle is rough too. After that it's just fine.

listening:

Swans - Various Failures
Opeth - Ghost Reveries

kindofblue

kindofblue
Originally uploaded by taylorsherman.

I've actually been feeling pretty good lately.

Wednesday, December 27, 2006
23:48

Pretty quiet day at work today, lots of people out for the week. Higher points on the Eastside got some snow last night, I noticed on the way in.

Ah I'm happy that they're showing Scrubs on Comedy Central now. Such a great show. Though at the 7-9 time slot I probably won't catch any more for a while.

There's been a fortune-cookie fortune on my desk for the past two months or so that says, "That long-sought opportunity will soon arise." My reaction when seeing it today was that they didn't have room to print, "At which point you'll stand around like a dumbass and watch it fly by."

today's listening:

Dead Can Dance - A Passage In Time
KMFDM - WWIII. Been a while since I listened to that. I like it more than I remember. More than ATTAK anyway. The copyright says 2003 – has it really been that long? If I had to guess I'd have said that I saw the ATTAK tour show in 2004, but that must mean it was 2002 or 2003.
Kitchens of Distinction - Strange Free World. So good, but so depressing. Partly just because it is, but mostly because it just takes me back to high school.

Christmas

Sunday, December 24th 2006
24:53


The past couple weeks have been long, for a few different reasons. Partly that's been getting ready for Christmas. I didn't have too much trouble w/ gifts this year. One shipping surprise, but I was able to find it locally. Just one thing I put off until too late and wasn't able to find locally, so it will be belated. Spent a good day w/ family today.

All the excitement with the weather has been another factor. Thursday the 14th and the following Friday take up about a week's worth of space in my memory.

The third element has been some inner turmoil going back to three Fridays ago. It's been a real emotional roller-coaster, augmented by my imagination trying constantly to butt in (often succeeding). Desperation dominated by fear.

other drivers

Tuesday, December 19 2006
24:23

Was almost run off the road on the way home tonight. Someone in a silver Beetle tried to change lanes into me on 405. Good thing I had that carpool lane on my right.

Ugh

This just in: the new condo is delayed another three months.

In other news, I can be such a moron. Sometimes I just need a good swift kick in the butt.

I miss The West Wing.

More numbers

Sunday, December 3, 2006

16:27

More numbers: One twenty-third in base thirty four is a cyclic number, with the following digit sequence:

1, 16, 8, 29, 19, 7, 13, 10, 11, 28, 2, 32, 17, 25, 4, 14, 26, 20, 23, 22, 5, 31

The leftover digits (0,3,6,9,...30) divide the space up into eleven parts.

So far these all fit the pattern of the divisor D being 2N+1 and the base B being 3N+1. However, the cases (D,B) of: (9,13), (13,16), (15,22), (17,25), (19,28) do not create such cyclic numbers. I'd make the guess that the divisor must be prime, and the base cannot be a perfect square, but that doesn't explain (19,28).

Numbers

Friday, December 1 2006
23:42

When writing numbers in base seven, the only valid digits are 0 through 6. Moving digits to the left means multiplying by seven; to the right, dividing. So, writing "125" in base seven means "one times seven squared, plus two times seven, plus 5": the number sixty-three. And, writing 3.4 means "three and four sevenths", or 3.57142857 etc written in normal base 10 (decimal).

In decimal, the ratio "one seventh" has an interesting property. It is written as 0.142857142857... a repeating decimal, meaning that it just keeps repeating 142857 over and over again. That's not so uncommon, but this is: if you multiply the result by 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6, the results look very similar, only shifted a bit:

1/7 = 0.14285714285714...
2/7 = 0.28571428571428...
3/7 = 0.42857142857142...
4/7 = 0.57142857142857...
5/7 = 0.71428571428571...
6/7 = 0.85714285714285...

Oh, and 7 times 1/7 = 0.99999999999999.... which is basically a funny way of saying "one". But an interesting one.

Seven is known as a "cyclic number" because of these properties. In decimal, there are more cyclic numbers, however seven is special: it is the only one where the set of repeated digits, 142857, does not have any duplicates. I'll somewhat arbitrarily call this a "pure" cyclic number. You may also have noticed that there are four decimal digits that do not appear in the set: 0, 3, 6, and 9. If we were to, say, make some repeated decimals out of these digits, we'd get:

0/3 = 0.00000000000000...
1/3 = 0.33333333333333...
2/3 = 0.66666666666666...
3/3 = 0.99999999999999...

And there's that funny way of writing one again. And really, since one can also be 1.0000000000..., there's a certain something shared by 0/3 and 3/3. What we end up with putting all this together is a peculiar repeating sequence using six digits, plus four left over digits that divide the space up between the whole numbers into three parts. If we were to put these digits around a circle (with 0 and 9 on the same spot), connecting each set, we might end up with something known as the Enneagram, a symbol which has taken on various meanings and uses in history, but that's another subject.

Moving on... these interesting properties depend heavily on the fact that we're writing the numbers in decimal. In another base – say, base seven, things change drastically. Because of course, one seventh is just written 0.1 – nothing repeating there. I'm not sure if there are cyclic numbers in all bases, however I know that not all bases have "pure" cyclic numbers. (see the Wikipedia link above, look at "Other numeric bases" – none of the examples there are "pure").

I went looking for some other pure cyclic numbers a while back, and found one pretty quickly: in base seven, the value "one fifth". In base seven, you have to write that as 0.12541254... that's "one seventh plus 2 forty-ninths plus five three-hundred-forty-thirds plus ... " you get the idea. So, we have:

1/5 = 0.1254125412...
2/5 = 0.2541254125...
3/5 = 0.4125412541...
4/5 = 0.5412541254...

Oh, and 5 times 1/5 = 0.6666666666... which is a funny way of saying "one" in base seven. If you're thinking ahead, you may have noticed that the digits 0, 3, and 6 never appear in that cyclic number. Making some repeating decimals out of those digits in base seven, we have:

0/2 = 0.000000000000...
1/2 = 0.333333333333...
2/2 = 0.666666666666...

What we end up with putting all this together is a peculiar repeating sequence using four digits, plus three leftover digits that divide the space up between the whole numbers into two parts. If we were to put these digits around a circle (with 0 and 6 on the same spot), connecting each set, we might come up with something called the . . . I dunno. Technically, it's a hexagram, but I've never seen a hexagram that looked exactly like this. It'd look something like this:



Has this been, or will it be, of any meaning or use to anybody?