Not only is this the most beautiful XKCD post of all time, ...

... it is the most beautiful webcomic ever posted anywhere on the web by anyone.

The ouroboros is preparing to close the loop.

My blogging software suggested that it would be glad to allow the AI to write my blog from now on.

NTSB video explaining why the Dali lost control

18 months ago, in March 2024, the MV Dali crashed into the Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore Harbor.

The National Transportation Safety Board has released the summary section of its report on the incident.

There are many findings in the report, and lots to think about, but a particularly interesting part is the loose wire that crippled the ship at a critical moment. The NTSB made a very good 2 minute video explaining exactly what went wrong.

Another very interesting observation is this:

Contributing to the collapse of the Key Bridge and the loss of life was the lack of countermeasures to reduce the bridge’s vulnerability to collapse due to impact by ocean-going vessels, which have only grown larger since the Key Bridge’s opening in 1977. When the Japan-flagged containership Blue Nagoya contacted the Key Bridge after losing propulsion in 1980, the 390-foot-long vessel caused only minor damage. The Dali, however, is 10 times the size of the Blue Nagoya.

This seems like a sensible recommendation in response to that observation:

To the US Coast Guard:

1. Conduct and publish the results of a study that examines the availability, feasibility, and safety benefits of redundant means to ensure that large singlepropulsion-engine cargo vessels maintain propulsion and steering when maneuvering in restricted waters.

Quite a lot has changed in 50 years. There's lots to learn, and lots to do.

The Road from the Past: a very short review

Ina Caro's The Road from the Past is hard to describe. It's not a travel guide, it's not a history, it's not an autobiography. And yet, in various ways, it is all three.

Caro found herself traveling extensively in France, and decided to try her own approach:

Most people return from Europe with a memory of the places they have visited that is very much like a salad after it has been put through a Cuisinart. They have been to so many countries and heard so many dates and names of kings that when they return, the trip is all a blur. When I see the typical American tourist, I feel like yelling out, "Don't do it that way, it's no fun. Do it my way."

If you do it my way, you will rent a time machine -- available at any rent-a-car agency -- and drive through history. Our time machine can't take us into the future any faster than a minute at a time, but we can, if we properly plan our route, actually simulate the sensation of traveling through several centries of the past on a magical vacation in France. If you follow the route I describe from Provence to Paris, traveling to some of the most magnificent and beautiful monasteries, churches, chateaux, and towns built in France over a period of nearly two thousand years, and visit these sites in the order they were built, you will feel almost as if you are traveling through the past, through the history of France.

Indeed, her book describes exactly that: a journey she and her husband took through France, from Provence to Paris, visiting locations in a way designed to move from the very early Roman times, though the middle ages, into the Renaissance, through the Grand Siecle, and ending at last in modern-day France.

I read portions of Caro's book before a recent trip to Bordeaux, bouncing around from chapter to chapter and "visiting" some of my planned destinations ahead of time, through Caro's eyes.

It was a lovely way to whet my appetite for my journey, but in a way I broke Caro's cardinal rule, because I didn't read her entire book, start to finish, but rather sampled different portions that matched my existing plans.

That is, I read her book as a guidebook, rather than as autobiography.

But really, it doesn't matter: if you're interested in France, and have the time, Caro's book is a lovely way to start learning the extraordinarily long and complex history of this fascinating country. Read it however you want to.

Pathfinder-1 flew quite close to my house today!

This morning, I was driving home (from a doctor's appointment, ugh), and while stopped at a traffic light I was distracted by the biggest blimp I'd ever seen.

It turns out this was Pathfinder-1, the LTA Research experimental vehicle.

Technically, the airship carries helium in a rigid internal frame rather than relying on the soft envelope design of traditional blimps; the design aims to improve resilience and control while lowering the carbon footprint compared to jets, as reported by Design News.

I guess I'm not supposed to call it a blimp.

Reading my way to Bordeaux: Allan Massie

I visited Bordeaux, France, recently. This is a very old city and has a quite complex history. About all I can personally attest to from my experience is that, nowadays, Bordeaux seems to be a lovely place:

• There are many interesting places to see and visit
• There is quite good public transit to get around
• All the local people I met were extremely friendly
• The food is great (try the Caneles)
• There's a lot going on: throughout the city I saw construction cranes and crews at work and lots of activity everywhere

As I often do, when looking forward to visiting a place, I sought out some books to read ahead of time. For this approach to work, of course, it is necessary not just to pick some books, but to actually read them!

Based on that criteria, I feel that Allan Massie's books were a resounding success. Massie wrote a four-book series of novels set in and around Bordeaux:

1. Death in Bordeaux
2. Dark Summer in Bordeaux
3. Cold Winter in Bordeaux
4. End Games in Bordeaux

The books are often referred to as the "Superintendent Lannes Mysteries", a very fair phrase, as they follow our hero Superintendent Lannes of the Bordeaux Judicial Police as he wrestles with a series of brutal crimes.

But the books could be just as easily categorized as historical fiction, since:

• They're set during World War II
• They're arranged chronologically
• They follow an entire collection of characters, not just Lannes
• The historical events and major themes of the World War II experience play an extremely large role in the books.

The last point is particularly important, I think. The books cover a period of time during which Bordeaux, and France as a whole, underwent many social changes. In the first book Bordeaux is a thriving city in the French Republic, but during the series of books France is: attacked by Germany; divided into various zones; occupied by German troops; administered by Petain's Vichy government; home to a Resistance movement; delivered from occupation by Allied troups; and re-formed under the De Gaulle administration. In addition to Petain and De Gaulle, Mitterand and other famous historical figures feature prominently throughout the books.

Massie also explores many important social themes. The experiences of Jews in Bordeaux is examined in many ways. There is also a lot of discussion of homosexuality and how it surfaced during the wartime years. Another major theme is the way that people in Bordeaux experienced contemporary events such as Fascism in Spain and Communism in Russia. Different characters react to these pressures in different ways: some join groups such as the Resistance, or the Vichy government, the French Foreign Legion, etc.; some become collaborators; some escape France for Africa or England; some become smugglers and black-market operators; many simply just try to survive.

And, of course, there are mysteries to solve! Superintendent Lannes and his team must find and interview witnesses, collect evidence, develop theories, and attempt to ensure justice is upheld. As much as they can.

Massie's plotting is tremendous, and his characters are vivid and believable. The action is nearly non-stop. Many of the events are tragic, but Massie does well to remind us that life during wartime in an occupied country is, still, life. So there are the occasional lighter events, even a touch of humor at times. And, of course, this is Bordeaux, France, so there's wonderful food and even greater wine ("Bring us a bottle of St. Emilion, please"), and lots of vivid depictions of buildings, plazas, streets, and other bits of the Bordeaux landscape.

Massie is not without flaws. For one thing, at least in the printings I read, he sorely needed a good editor, or at least a reliable proof-reader; there are far too many typos and missing or duplicate words and inaccurate punctuation dotting the pages of all four volumes. But that's a quibble, and was rarely more than a momentary distraction.

Significantlly more distracting, unfortunately, is that Massie's dialogue, though nicely colloquial, is English colloquial. "Jolly good, old chap" says one French policeman to another, a line that Just Seems Wrong.

A thousand pages is quite a bit to read, and it took me a significant amount of time to make it through all four books. I read the first two before I took my trip, was reading the third book while in Bordeaux, and didn't even start the fourth until I got back home.

But I don't regret any of that time, not even a moment. When I think back about Bordeaux in years to come, I'll certainly remember what a lovely trip I had, but I'll also always see Bordeaux at least partly through the eyes of Superintendent Lannes of the Bordeaux Judicial Police.

The eagle visited the bay

I happened to see a notice that the USCG Eagle was visiting the bay: Media Advisory: U.S. Coast Guard Barque Eagle ride-in opportunity into San Francisco Bay, Friday, July 25.

Of course, with my puny blog, I'm not a qualified media representative. Still! It would have been so cool!

Seeing that article instantly took me back to 2008, when the Festival of Sail occurred. That was a long time ago, I didn't even have my blog back then!

The Festival of Sail had a Parade of Tall Ships, which assembled just outside the Golden Gate and sailed through the gate in a grand procession. You can read a little bit about it here.

The Festival’s opening Parade of Sail, at noon on July 23, is a unique opportunity for Bay Area residents to view the stately procession of the visiting Tall Ships as they enter the Golden Gate, led proudly by the sleek, elegant United States Coast Guard Cutter Eagle. The historic fleet will be met and escorted by dozens of local sailing vessels as it proceeds past Marina Green, Fort Mason, Aquatic Park, Fisherman’s Wharf, the Embarcadero and the Ferry Building. At the Bay Bridge, the Tall Ships will tack around to be welcomed at their individually assigned berths along the San Francisco waterfront.

I certainly wouldn't call the Eagle sleek, nor elegant, but it was definitely impressive.

A colleague of mine had a 36 foot Hunter, and loved to sail, and in those days I would often act as crewmember (more fondly known as "meat on the high rail"), assisting with the boat, trimming the sails, helping with tacking, raising and lowering the spinnaer, taking turns at the wheel, keeping my friend company, and generally enjoying a day on the bay.

We arranged to be out on the water during the parade, and it was certainly something! Unfortunately it seems like it mostly pre-dated the Internet, and it's hard to find much information online about it anymore, though I did locate this fun short video. In the video you can get a great feel for what it was like to be out on the water, and there are a few beautiful shots of the Eagle. As I recall, the wind was high and the conditions were challenging, and we were almost too busy with our own sailing to be able to admire the big boys. Watch the video all the way through for some stunning footage of the Eagle coming under the Bay Bridge near the end of the parade.

2008 was a bit of a peak time for sailing in the Bay Area. All of the marinas were full, there were sailing clubs everywhere, there were major regattas every weekend, oh what a time it was.

If the timing for this year's visit by the Eagle had been just a little different, I would have tried to get my dad out to see the Eagle, somehow. I often spoke about the Eagle with my dad, who of course was a 30-year veteran of the United States Coast Guard Reserve, retiring as a full Captain. My dad never had a chance to ride the Eagle himself, but we made several other lovely trips on the bay, including one on the Jeremiah O'Brien during Fleet Week, and another for a special Navy League event.

If you ever get a chance to see the Eagle, by all means do so; it's very interesting!

Apple's memory safety work

I was fascinated by this survey article from Apple describing their work on memory safety: Memory Integrity Enforcement: A complete vision for memory safety in Apple devices.

I spent pretty much my entire 45-year software engineering career working in systems programming areas where memory safety is a constant challenge. We have many many tools (lint, valgrind, Rust, etc) for finding such problems, yet still they seem ever-present.

So it's wonderful to see Apple taking a new approach to the problem, working across multiple layers. Programming languages, operating systems, function libraries, and custom hardware all have a role to play in their work.

This is an approach that is currently possible for Apple, because they deliver integrated systems where such complete stack control is possible. You wouldn't, for example, be able to do this on your Windows PC or on your Linux workstation because in those environments you tend to get the operating system, programming language, and hardware from three different vendors.

So good on Apple for realizing they had an opportunity to do something new and powerful, and for seizing that opportunity and delivering on it.

They're calling it the Turkish Immortal

Have a look at this recent chess game. Just play through the moves.

It's from a recent chess tournament in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. This is one of the qualifying tournaments for next year's World Championship, and there are some very fine players competing.

Chess is very popular around the world these days, and many new young stars from unfamiliar regions are making the modern game quite exciting to watch.

In this game, the white pieces are played by Aditya Mittal, who will have his 19th birthday this Friday, while the black pieces are played by Yağız Kaan Erdoğmuş , currently the youngest grandmaster in the world, having just turned 14 in June.

Pointer Provenance in C and C++

I happened to stumble across some interesting work from some people who are trying to take some of the Rust ideas about tracking memory lifetimes down into C and C++:

• A Provenance-aware Memory Object Model for C

  In a committee discussion from 2004 concerning DR260, WG14 confirmed the concept of provenance of pointers, introduced as means to track and distinguish pointer values that represent storage instances with same address but non-overlapping lifetimes. Implementations started to use that concept, in optimisations relying on provenance-based alias analysis, without it ever being clearly or formally defined, and without it being integrated consistently with the rest of the C standard.

• P2434R4: Nondeterministic pointer provenance

  The main alternative that was considered and rejected is the PVI model, which avoids the notion of storage exposure but imposes further restrictions on integer conversions. These restrictions provide further opportunities for optimization but also complicate the execution model in subtle ways that make it difficult for the programmer to determine whether a manipulation preserves the validity of a pointer (yet to be reconstructed). They also interact badly with serialization of pointers where operations on the converted pointer value are entirely invisible; additional annotations might be required to support this use case.

• What on Earth Does Pointer Provenance Have to do With RCU?

  The results of operations on invalid pointers are not guaranteed, which provides additional opportunities for optimization. This example perhaps seems a bit silly, but modern compilers can use pointer provenance and invalidity to carry out serious points-to and aliasing analysis.

Not very easy reading. And a bunch of it is nearly 20 years old!

Change comes very slowly to the world of system programming in C. But at least C is still, slowly, evolving.

A strange cell phone day.

Mid-morning yesterday (8/30/2025), my wife's phone just stopped connecting to the cellular network (Verizon, in our case).

The phone said SOS at the top instead of its normal display of a signal strength bar graph.

We tried powering the phone down and back up, several times. Didn't fix the problem.

Everything else about the phone seemed to be fine. It was able to get on WiFi with no problems. Its GPS seemed to be working fine, etc. But she couldn't make or receive a call, couldn't get on the internet without wifi, couldn't send or receive text messages. All those Verizon things were just not working.

My phone is on the same plan as hers, and my number is only one digit removed from hers. My phone was just fine.

We happened to be out on the road at the time, and so we went to the local Apple Store and a friendly tech ran a diagnostics program on the phone and it all came back green.

He said there was some chatter among the other staff in the store that there might be a widespread Verizon problem, and maybe we could go over to the Verizon store a little ways down the road.

We called Verizon and the AI that answered told us that there were no outages in our area, and then told us it would be 37 minutes before a human would talk to us, and then said "System Error" and hung up.

I looked on DownDetector and it had a chart saying that there might be a Verizon problem. But there were only 21,000 reports across the entire country, didn't seem likely. I looked on Reddit and some people in Florida were complaining about some problem that might have been similar. Or maybe not. The Verizon status pages continued to report no problems anywhere.

We went on with our day.

Her phone stayed on SOS; my phone remained fine. It was a pleasant summer day and we didn't do much more about it.

Late in the afternoon, after we got home, my wife decided to plug her phone into the charger, as the phone was down to 35% charge.

The instant she plugged it in, it instantly went online and has been fine ever since.

I don't have a good mental model for why that worked.

My best theory is that there is some software in the phone that says: when you are plugged in, check for updates. And something about that update check managed to get the phone back online in a way that simply rebooting it didn't.

Everything is so complicated and mysterious these days; my ability to diagnose even simple problems seems faulty.

But the phone is working again.

Hey Bruce Lacey! You happen to have an email address?

Got your note! Been having a bit of trouble finding a good time for a phone call. LMK

Puzzles vs puzzle analysis

I like solving puzzles. If a crossword puzzle or a Sudoku or a KenKen or a Wordle drifts by, I'll often freeze in my tracks and not leave until I've finished solving it.

My wife and I play "collaborative hard Wordle": we solve the puzzle together, discussing our potential guesses and agreeing on the next one to try, and we play in "hard mode", meaning that each subsequent guess must also obey all of the results of the previous guesses. If a previous guess had a green K in position 2, then all our subsequent guesses must also have a K in position 2; and if a previous guess had a yellow K in position 2, then all our subsequent guesses must have a K, but in some other position.

My dad liked puzzles too, particularly word puzzles such as English-style cryptic crosswords, and he, too, would often become mesmerized by a particular puzzle and not raise his head til he'd solved it.

But he didn't seem so interested in solving a particular Sudoku or KenKen; instead, he was drawn to understanding the underlying combinatorics. His notebooks contained pages and pages of thoughts about notations to describe and analyze a Sudoku.

Of course, there are lots of people who feel this way: Wikipedia's page on Mathematics of Sudoku gives you a great introduction.

And when I play Sudoku, I love to try to improve my play by using multi-step deductive logic techniques such as the strategies covered on SudokuWiki.

Instinctively, I feel like there is a qualitative difference between word puzzles and numeric puzzles. Wordle and cryptics are somehow fundamentally different than Sudoku. And I wonder if my dad felt that way too. At least, he never seemed to show an enormous interest in the mathematics of Wordle. I couldn't even get him interested in the "ask the bot" tool that does some basic probabilistic analysis on the guesses that you made.

He just liked finding the word.

But there are definitely ways to abstractly study the combinatorics of Wordle; for example, here's Playing every game of Wordle simultaneously .

One very important aspect of word puzzles is that they can contain humor and subtlety that are totally missing from, say, Sudoku. For example, many crossword-type puzzles include double entendres and homophones and hidden words and other sorts of word play.

Or consider vowelless crosswords . These plug into your solver's brain along some other sort of dimensional axis, letting you enjoy how it is that you actually recognize a word in the face of things like typos.

I applaud the people who are thinking abstractly about word puzzles, but their analyses don't really seem so interesting to me, and I suspect my dad would have thought so, too.

For now, I'll stick to simply solving a single Wordle, and leave the strategy theory to others.

Two articles about the U of C.

In recent weeks, I happened to stumble across two totally unrelated, but interesting, articles about the University of Chicago.

Here's a nice page with some historical information about the nuclear missile base that was once in place just across the street from my dormitory at the UofC. I lived in Shoreland Hall from 1980-1981, during my first undergraduate year.

The missiles were gone by the time I arrived at the UofC. As the story was told to me back then, during the later years of the Vietnam War there were intense protests against the military-industrial complex, as well as more directly against the presence of the base, and it was removed around 1970 (?).

We knew that space as "the Point"; it was a public park and we used to walk out there regularly for fresh air and frisbee and to enjoy the views and the fresh air off the lake. Even in the hottest summers, you could almost always find relief from the heat down at the Point. In the winters, however, the storms blew lots of water up onto the big blocks of conrete that reinforced the shoreline, and the icy paths were treacherous.

I don't recall anyone referring to it as Promontory Point. That seems wrong to me, it seems like something that the Departmant of Redundancy Department (also known as the Squad Squad) would have shot down straightawy.

Moving on...

I found myself fascinated by a recent article by Professor Clifford Ando of the U of C: The Crisis of the University Started Long Before Trump.

When I talk to friends and colleagues about my times at the U of C, they are uniformly amazed at my experiences. I don't believe I ever had any classes with more than 40 other students in them; many of my classes had barely a dozen other students enrolled. Nearly all my classes were taught directly by professors; I never had classes where some grad student was the teaching assistant who led the class, nor do I recall cases where my work was graded by anyone other than the professor themself.

During my time at the U of C, one of the few policy debates that I remember affecting me was the question of adding Computer Science classes to the curriculum. That happened soon after I left, and was even underway during my final years; I remember in particular taking a Complexity Theory class in the Mathematics Department that was truly better classified as a Computer Science course. The resistance to adding Computer Science classes was based in a feeling that the university needed to avoid topics that were industrial or vocational in nature, and instead prefer only those subjects that were rooted in the pure pursuit of knowledge. Although it was already decades old, the Great Books program at the U of C was still strongly held during my time there.

But according to Ando, substantial change was already underway during my time at the U of C; he cites several examples:

The Bayh-Dole act [of 1980] provided for the private licensing of discoveries made during federally funded research. It was motivated by a concern that discoveries made in the preceding decades had not been fully exploited because the lack of opportunity for private gain deprived the system of incentive for development. In short, it granted intellectual property in discoveries made during federally funded research to the universities that hosted the projects and the people who did the research—not, as before, to the people of the United States, who funded that research.

...

The Bayh-Dole act has also fundamentally corroded policymaking at universities. Within perhaps a decade of the act, universities had begun all to pursue each latest fashion in applied science, hoping to score a windfall via licensing that would pay for all: from biomedicine, to imaging, to molecular engineering, to quantum computing, to AI.

Ando also weighs in on the question of whether universities should see themselves as having a duty to provide their students with a direct path to financial success, connecting it back to the same debates that I remember from my years in Hyde Park about whether vocational programs should be a goal of the university.

And of course, just as universities themselves have nearly always failed to make money as they flit from fashion to fashion, so students who were deceived into thinking of higher education as a kind of pre-job are now discovering that the path from coursework to salary is fraught: economics PhDs are going unemployed; finance and computer science BAs have higher unemployment rates than do Art History graduates; coding is a path to Chipotle.

The present landscape, in which AI is coming first for the supposedly high-paying jobs that involve rote forms of data analysis or ground-floor coding, recalls an earlier moment in the history of the University of Chicago. In 1982, a committee at the university published a report on the history and future of doctoral education. It is a remarkable piece of analysis and offers a stunning affirmation of the ideals of the university. It allows that interest in doctoral degrees in STEM fields had plummeted so far that one could fairly pose the question of whether these should be sustained as fields of advanced education at all. The answer, according to the report, was emphatically yes, because that was the duty of the university—to sustain inquiry and training into all things that touch on human existence, both for them in themselves and because we as leaders of universities cannot possibly know the fashions and needs of the future.

I was extraordinarily lucky to receive the education that I got at the U of C. I hope the institution can find a way to continue helping others the way it helped me.

Backpacking 2025: Cliff Lake, Dinkey Lakes Wilderness

California has many, many Wilderness Areas. Some are named after famous people (John Muir, Ansel Adams, Herbert Hoover), some after not-so-famous people (Dick Smith). Some are named after people who lived here before there was a California (Mokelumne, Chumash), some are named for reasons that nobody can remember (Siskiyou).

Often, California Wilderness Areas are named after major geographic features, which, in turn, often have dramatic and impressive names (Granite Chief, Trinity Alps, Desolation, Sawtooth Mountains, White Mountains, King Range).

Sometimes, however, Wilderness Areas have names that are, well, a bit less intimidating.

This summer, when it was time to pack our packs and get out on the trail, we found ourselves heading to the Dinkey Lakes Wilderness.

The very similar word "dinky" generally means insignificant or tiny, and apparently comes from a Scottish word describing the amount of whiskey you might consume in a single sip.

However!

This is not quite the same word, for Dinkey is not dinky. And this Dinkey is said to have been a brave little dog who traveled these parts back in the 1860's:

Due east of the Rancheria, near the center of the Holkoma Mono people’s half-million-acre ancestral homeland in the Sierra, lies a creek that outsiders named after a little dog in August 1863. One day that month, a group of non-Indian hunters was surprised by a large, angry grizzly bear. The hunters’ pet pug, Dinkey, barked and rushed up to challenge the bear. The grizzly swatted the little dog away, but Dinkey’s attack distracted it long enough to allow one of the hunters to grab his gun and shoot the bear. Dinkey died of his wounds from his brief fight, and the hunters named the nearby creek after the little dog to honor its bravery.

I think it's true that there were grizzly bears in California in the 1860's, though there are certainly none now. And I suppose the story is not inconceivable, though we all found it rather far-fetched. But it's entertaining, anyway, and really more more interesting of a name than simply naming your Wilderness Area after a president (ho hum).

Although the name was an amusing side-note, we were interested in the Dinkey Lakes Wilderness for other reasons. We departed from the Cliff Lake Trailhead at Courtwright Reservoir, which at about 8,500 feet is one of the higher trailheads in the western Sierras. It's a five mile walk from the trailhead to Cliff Lake, which sits at 9,400 feet at the base of a dramatic 500 foot high cliff that leads up toward the Three Sisters peaks. The trail to Cliff Lake is clear and well maintained, although the final climb up to the lake is fatiguing when you're carrying a full pack at nine thousand feet of elevation.

Cliff Lake itself is beautiful, and certainly one of the most enjoyable lakes we've visited in our decades of backpacking. Besides just the beautiful scenery of the lake, we had great weather and enjoyed swimming and relaxing on the shores of the lake. Rich and I had brought our "backpacking boats" (glorified inner tubes, cleverly fashioned to be light enough to carry but sturdy enough to allow for paddling around mountain lakes), so we spent most of a day just exploring Cliff Lake from the water.

On this trip, I decided that my ancient Lowa Zephyr GTX boots were finally too worn out to be used (after a mere 25 years!!!), and so I upgraded to a brand new pair of Lowa Renegade EVO GTX boots. They are absolutely wonderful boots, though I am doubtful that I will be able to continue hiking for 25 more years. It's nice to know that if these are the last boots I'll ever buy, at least I found a really great pair.

Although the Dinkey Lakes Wilderness includes 30,000 acres of protected wilderness, the maintained trails are concentrated in an section in the center of the wilderness area which contains some two dozen lovely lakes, from Cliff Lake at the south east to Coyote Lake at the north west. All these lakes are in a large plateau at an elevation range of nine thousand to ten thousand feet of altitude. Normally, the Sierra mountains quickly become bare and exposed once you are at this height, but here the conditions are just right, with plenty of water and fairly protected valleys providing a beautiful region that supported a robust and healthy forest and a large population of birds, fish, and small mammals.

We saw little sign of larger creatures such as deer, lion, or bear, but there were a multitude of squirrels and mice and hawks and woodpeckers to keep us entertained.

One day, we made a side trip to Dogtooth Peak, marked at 10,302 feet on my map. The peak is off-trail but approaching it was straightforward for us and we all managed to reach a large saddle at just over 10,000 feet without any problems. Half of our group chose to wait at the saddle, enjoying spectacular views of many miles to the east and north, while our more intrepid explorers (Chris, Roger, and Dan) made a run at the summit.

Dogtooth Peak is rated Class 3 on the Yosemite Decimal System, meaning that it's just at the threshold from hiking to climbing. As one colorful climbing page puts it, Class 3 means things like:

• requires use of hands for climbing, rope may be used
• I need my hands but might survive a fall
• MUST use your hands for progress but don't need to search for holds nor do you need Real Rock Climbing(TM) techniques

It's actually possible to see Chris and Dan in this picture, though you really have to know where to look!

Our adventurers, upon their return, largely agreed with this assessment. They stopped a mere 25 feet or so below the summit, where the necessary technique was comfortable for Roger (who has some Real Rock Climbing experience) but not for Dan and Chris. They returned with no injuries and with lots of great stories and pictures, which is about the best possible outcome we could have desired.

Sandwiched between the John Muir Wilderness, Kaiser Wilderness, Monarch Wilderness, and Ansel Adams Wilderness, Dinkey Lakes surely often is overlooked. But we're awfully glad we found it, as it was beautiful and remote and wild, and I can't think of a single thing about our trip which could have gone better.

Perhaps someday we will return to this wilderness, for there was much left that we did not explore on our first visit.

A little bit of good news from Mother Nature

Via the SF Chronicle: First salmon in nearly 100 years found in Northern California river.

It came as a surprise when, earlier this month, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife confirmed reports of adult Chinook salmon in the river near Ash Camp. Officials saw one female exhibiting spawning behavior and “guarding her nest,” while multiple smaller males were observed nearby, competing to spawn themselves, the agency wrote of the July 15 sighting.

...

Officials suspect they spent a year or more in Shasta Reservoir before returning to the river. The CDFW attributed the comeback to reintroduction efforts spearheaded in 2022 in collaboration with the Winnemem Wintu Tribe, NOAA Fisheries and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. For the last few years, experts have been incubating winter-run Chinook salmon eggs in the frigid, clean waters of the McCloud River.

Welcome back, fish!

Kyla Scanlon on Alex Tabarrok on Sputnik

I've been following Kyla Scanlon a lot recently. I'm not telling you anything you don't already know, but Kyla Scanlon is amazing. She's an Internet-based author and commentator with an enormous reach. She's written a well-received book. She has an extremely good newsletter (that's how I generally get her writing). And she's only 28 years old!!

Her latest issue of her newsletter talks about the age-old economics topic of zero-sum thinking: Zero-Sum Thinking and the Labor Market.

Her essay starts and ends with the big picture, but for me the most compelling part was the mid-section, where she digs deep into the much-reported observation that "Since 2018, the unemployment rate of recent college graduates has generally been higher than the rest of the labor force."

Dissecting the details, Scanlon notes:

We've turned job hunting into a lottery where you buy as many tickets as possible and pray one hits and it is destroying our belief in meritocracy itself. When getting a job feels like winning the lottery, what happens to the 'hard work pays off' narrative that held American society together? It creates the kind of thinking that feeds zero-sum thinking: “if I can only win by gaming a rigged system, then the system itself must be fundamentally unjust.”

Read the whole thing. Read everything Scanlon writes. You'll be better off for incorporating her perspectives and analyses into your life.

I'm concerned about the Flock

One day, not too long ago, a bunch of Flock Automated License Plate Reader systems suddenly showed up all around my neighborhood.

I asked around and none of my neighbors knew what they were or why they had been installed.

So I did a little reading.

Apparently this was decided about 3.5 years ago, in a quite tight and controversial vote during the pandemic.

Use of ALPRs was approved by City Council by a 3-2 vote on February 1, 2022. Originally, the proposal called for a 90-day retention period for data, but the final version presented by APD and approved unanimously by Council on April 5 called for a shorter, 60-day period. However, APD Chief Nishant Joshi said at the September 20 Council meeting that all data will be automatically deleted after 30 days and will not be recoverable.

The system will consist of 35 cameras monitoring 14 locations, including all ingress and egress points—all bridges and tunnels entering or leaving the island of Alameda and on Ron Cowan Parkway on Bay Farm Island—as well as business district locations such as Harbor Bay Landing, Encinal Shopping Center, South Shore Center, Marina Village Office and Retail Center, Alameda Landing, and Atlantic Plaza.

The city's original RFP said that there would be 14 such locations, and listed them in detail. One thing I can say for certain is that there are many more locations than this. There are at least a dozen cameras within walking distance of my house, including one on my own street. None of those locations are in the 14 location list provided in the official city documents. None of those locations are "ingress and egress points" for the city; the ones I've seen are just on ordinary residential streets in ordinary residential locations. I would guess there are actually hundreds of them around the city.

I found something that appears to be the city's current policy about this system. It says:

All data and images gathered by an ALPR are for the official use of the Alameda Police Department and because such data may contain confidential CLETS information, it is not open to public review. ALPR information gathered and retained by this Department may be used and shared with prosecutors or others only as permitted by law. All ALPR data downloaded to the server will be stored for a period of six months, and thereafter shall be purged unless it has become, or it is reasonable to believe it will become, evidence in a criminal or civil action or is subject to a lawful action to produce records. In those circumstances, the applicable data should be downloaded from the server onto portable media and booked into evidence.

Six months is a long way from 30 days.

Apparently my little town is just part of a wave of such systems, and people are only realizing belatedly what is going on. Here's a report from North Carolina: PRIVATE EYES How a tech company is expanding surveillance in public streets. That article describes an incident in Kansas:

In October 2022, a Kansas woman asked her boyfriend, a Wichita police officer, how a friend could get a domestic protection order. The woman was concerned her estranged husband was tracking her somehow after he made “several comments about her whereabouts,” according to an affidavit from the resulting investigation.

The officer knew Wichita used Flock, and asked a supervisor if other agencies had access to the department’s data.

Wichita detectives soon learned that 32-year-old Victor Heiar, a police officer from the small town of Kechi north of the city, used that access to search for his wife’s license plate at least nine times in less than an hour — shortly before texting the woman that she was “spotted” in several locations away from home.

Back at home, the camera company host a "transparency portal" for their activities here. At least it doesn't claim there are only 14 cameras, though I have no reason to believe that any of the information on that web site is legitimate.

And there's definitely reason to believe that the information that the city and the company are providing is not accurate. Here's what happened in Richmond, Virginia this week:

In June, administrators of the Richmond Police Department’s license plate reader program learned an analyst with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives had been granted access to the RPD system and had made queries for immigration enforcement in violation of RPD’s operational standards. The ATF analyst’s access was immediately terminated and, moving forward, no federal agencies will have access to RPD’s license plate reader program.

“ATF is a valued partner in our efforts to combat violent crime in Richmond. But their analyst should not have been granted access to our system — and absolutely should not have used it for immigration enforcement purposes,” said RPD Chief Rick Edwards. “I’ve been clear with the public, with city leadership, and within this department: the Richmond Police Department does not enforce federal immigration law, and we do not investigate a person’s immigration status. If ATF had formally requested access for that purpose, I would have denied it.”

In Virginia, at least, a new state law is trying to prevent such use.

I see that the ACLU has been warning about this for years, apparently to mostly deaf ears.

Many police departments neither understand nor endorse Flock’s nationwide, mass surveillance-driven approach to ALPR use, but are adopting the company’s cameras simply because other police departments in their region are doing so. As such, they may be amenable to compromise. That might even include using another vendor that does not tie its cameras into a mass-surveillance system. In other cases, you may be able to get your police department or local legislators to add addendums to Flock’s standard contract that limit its ALPR system’s mass surveillance capabilities and highly permissive data sharing.

My father was a proud member of the ACLU and a loyal sponsor of their work. But one thing he used to frequently tell me was that the ACLU have good ideas about important issues, but no money and very little audience.

My dad took the long view

My dad had a crazy-broad range of interests, not surprising for a man who had both a PhD and a JD. Some of his interests were recreational: he loved cryptic crosswords; he was fascinated by genealogy; he loved playing board games; he was surprisingly good at golf.

He was also interested in many areas of basic science, particularly those that were involved with what he thought of as existential threats to the human race. He was interested in public health, in education policy, in foreign affairs and diplomacy, in international trade and economics, in military policy, and more.

He read voraciously. Just in the last few months of his life he was reading books on world history, on cosmology, even a biography of Emma Noether, who collaborated with Albert Einstein on the mathematics of the general theory of relativity.

A topic that my dad was particularly passionate about was climate change. He was fascinated by all the different ways that climate change was (or wasn't) affecting our modern society. How would zoning codes change? How would the insurance industry change? How would tax assessors adjust? How would transportation systems adapt? Almost everything he read, he immediately held it up to a climate change lens, thinking about the future.

I thought about this aspect of my dad when I came across this powerful essay by Michael Bloomberg: The Texas Floods Were Made Worse by Climate Denialism. Bloomberg writes:

Not every life can be spared from climate change, unfortunately, but many more could be saved if elected officials stopped pretending that they’re powerless to do anything about it. The fact is: Climate change is a manageable problem with practical solutions. Those solutions will not only save lives, but they will also improve our health, reduce our energy bills and create more jobs. The longer these officials pretend otherwise, the more the public will suffer, and the more people will die. And yet what are those in power in Washington doing? Worse than nothing: They are actively thwarting efforts to address climate change and help communities cope with its harms.

I can see my dad now, sitting in his reading chair, nodding his head, and forwarding the essay along to everyone he knew.

Trust, but verify

So my son bought a bunch of updated gear for our August backpacking trip. New boots, a day pack, some sun-protective clothing, etc.

He says to me: I think I want to take a good day hike, a real hike, somewhere that I can go and break in my gear and see how I feel after a 8-12 mile hike.

I said: great idea, that sounds worth doing.

This being the modern age, Dan goes off to ChatGPT and starts a conversation. He describes the goal of his hike, some parameters about where it needs to be so that he can accomplish it in a single day, etc.

ChatGPT thinks for a while, and gives him back a detailed description of a hike it's found, with lots of details about the trail profile, the distance and elevation, the points of interest along the way, what he needs to bring, etc.

ChatGPT includes a very detailed and precise set of driving directions to get to the trailhead. It starts by driving up to Truckee, then getting onto CA-89 north towards Sierraville, then taking a side road, then a side-side-road, then a Forest Service road, and then he'll find the trailhead. 4.1 miles down this road, 1.7 miles after this turn, etc.

Dan sends me the ChatGPT report and says: This looks great! Just what I was looking for, what do you think?

I look through the notes, really impressed by the detail and presentation. I bring up some maps on my computer and start following the driving directions to see where it's taking him.

About 30 minutes later, completely stumped, I get back to Dan, and tell him: I don't think this place exists! I don't think there's such a trailhead; I don't think there's such a lake; I don't think there's such a waterfall. I can't find them on the map, and the road names don't match up.

Some time passes.

Dan gets back to me: Yeah, I was afraid of that. I challenged ChatGPT on this, and it admitted that the trail didn't exist, and it had invented it. I'm going to go on a different hike that my friend takes regularly.

Thank goodness Dan is sensible (and sensibly cynical about these Machines of Loving Grace).

Trust, but verify.

My father was fascinated by the ideas and the activity around Artificial Intelligence. One of the last things that he and I did together was to sit for hours with my son and listen to Dan describe his adventures in the land of AI.

My father was never afraid of change, and was always eager to hear about what was coming next.

But he was realistic, a trait which arose from being born in the depths of the Great Depression, deepened by his innate wisdom and his decades of experience.

Bring me flying cars and wondrous new medical discoveries; let me bask in the ever-changing miracles they create.

But, still, I will feel compelled to verify.

Model making

A very early memory of mine is a "ship in a bottle" that my dad had acquired somewhere. I was fascinated by it, and couldn't understand how the ship got into the bottle. My parents encouraged me to build model ships and planes and cars, those classic old Revell kits. I spent many hours assembling kits, but I was impatient of course.

A lot of my playtime as a child was model-making of various sorts. One of my favorite toys was simply a bunch of plain wooden blocks of different sizes. I would pile two smaller blocks atop a longer block, call it a "battleship", and drive it around the carpet of our living room, staging battles with other block-ships. I loved other construction toys, like Tonka trucks, which I would deploy in large earth-moving configurations in the sandbox. And of course Lincoln Logs, and Tinkertoys, and Legos.

One of my favorites was our family Erector Set, a ridiculously complicated box full of hundreds and hundreds of little metal pieces which we could put together and take apart any which way.

I don't really have a lot of memories of my dad playing with these various construction kits, but what I do remember is that he had a diecast model car on his desk, like one of these. It was some sort of convertible sportscar, perhaps a Porsche, and it had tires that turned and doors that opened and best of all the steering wheel was a real linkage and if you turned it the front wheels would turn.

I think I spent many an hour just annoying my dad while he was working on whatever, driving his little model sportscar all around his desk.

Dr Demento is retiring

I came across the news that Dr Demento is retiring. It of course made me think of my dad.

I have (blurry) memories of listening to Dr Demento shows in the mid 1970s with my dad. I have no memory of how he found out about that radio show; perhaps he heard about it from one of his students at the college. Or perhaps I somehow heard about it from somewhere and figured out how to play it on our home radio? Certainly dad didn't listen to radio very much. He didn't even listen to music very much, although we had a nifty record player at home with a selection of LPs. But dad only played Bach, if he played anything.

Since I was 12 or 13 years old at the time, I mostly liked the silly novelty stuff that was played by Dr Demento: They're Coming To Take Me Away, or Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah.

And, of course, Weird Al Yankovic; I knew everything by Weird Al by heart back in the 1970s. Though back then I had no idea that Weird Al was barelay a year older than me, and lived almost right next door in Downey. Maybe he didn't want people to know that fact back then; Downey was certainly not a very funny place.

My dad, as I recall, was considerably more highbrow, and favored performers like the Firesign Theater, the Marx Brothers, Victor Borge, etc.

Dad was particularly fond of Tom Lehrer, and knew a lot of his songs. I have no idea how dad came to know about Tom Lehrer; it must have been back in his college days, or soon afterwards, as Dad mostly knew the really early songs (The Elements; New Math; Poisoning Pigeons in the Park; that sort of thing).

Although, looking closely at the Wikipedia page for Lehrer, the timelines match up, as Lehrer was apparently hanging around MIT at the same time my dad was, in the mid 1960s.

In 1960, Lehrer returned to full-time math studies at Harvard. From 1962 he taught mathematics in the political science department at MIT. In 1965 he gave up on his mathematics dissertation on modes in statistics, after working on it intermittently for 15 years.

So perhaps dad met him, even knew him then, though Lehrer was a decade older and I don't remember my dad saying anything specific about meeting him. I feel sure I'd remember if dad had shared any memories of that guy who "taught mathematics in the political science department".

I see Tom Lehrer is still alive! Amazing. I believe he was still actively teaching mathematics at the University of California Santa Cruz when I was accepted there. But I did not attend UCSC. I'm sure I would have enjoyed having a singing professor in my math classes (legend has it that Lehrer indeed had a piano in his classroom and would often open his lecture with a song).

(Side note to these side notes: my brother-in-law Dante Amidei, who teaches physics at the University of Michigan, for several years taught an introductory physics class targetted at liberal arts majors, which he used to refer to as "Atoms for Architects", riffing on Lehrer's lifelong love for teaching mathematics to non-mathematicians, a joy which my father also shared.)

I think I stopped listening to Dr Demento about 45 years ago, but it was fun to talk about him with my dad, who would sometimes think back on those years happily.

Playing Gloomhaven with my dad

My dad loved boardgames. He played all sorts of different boardgames and was always on the lookout for a new one. He favored abstract, strategic games with minimal amounts of luck and lots of possible strategies he could devise and play.

Sometimes he found games such as Twixt, which was perhaps the epitome of abstract strategic games of a certain period in the board gaming world. (It was also the epitome of a game which nobody would ever agree to play more than once.)

At that time, of course, we didn't have the deeply developed worldwide culture of inventing, playing, and sharing board games which arose in the 21st century. There are much more entertaining board games than Twixt nowadays!

During the pandemic years, my dad picked up Gloomhaven, which was possibly the most famous game to come out of the board gaming surge of the last twenty years. Dad was initially interested in Gloomhaven primarily because it was so famous, but he became quite interested in it because it was in the category of cooperative boardgames: in Gloomhaven, all the human players must collaborate to successfully win the game.

My dad particularly liked cooperative boardgames.

Also, dad liked Gloomhaven because I liked Gloomhaven.

I liked Gloomhaven because I had grown up playing computer games like Adventure and Zork and Wizardry and Bard's Tale and Ultima, all those Dungeons and Dragons style games where you build a party and explore the world and have encounters and accomplish quests. Dungeons and Dragons is great but it always succeeds or fails based on the efforts of one person, the Dungeonmaster, who has to do a huge asymmetric amount of work to envision, construct, and facilitate the scenario, while the other players just show up and play. Sometimes you have a great Dungeonmaster, but even then sometimes the Dungeonmaster has an off night. Gloomhaven was like playing Dungeons and Dragons, but you didn't need to have a Dungeonmaster.

But playing Gloomhaven as a true table-top boardgame was a lot of work!

First of all, you have to have a large table. Gloomhaven is an immense game with an enormous amount of physical kit that must be manipulated during the game.

But more importantly, playing the original table-top version of Gloomhaven requires an extensive amount of intricate bookkeeping, in which each play must adjust various tokens and state markers during the playing of their turn in order to keep the game flowing along nicely.

That is, table-top Gloomhaven successfully got rid of the Dungeonmaster, but only by making everyone the Dungeonmaster.

However, it turned out that there was a computerized version of Gloomhaven; even better, it was a very well done adaptation which retained all the fun of playing Gloomhaven while removing all the drudgery.

Conveniently for me, playing the computerized version solved several other problems that I had with Gloomhaven: firstly, we didn't have to leave the physical game set up in the living room, a huge benefit since it took up the whole room and it often took us days to play through a single scenario; secondly, I didn't have to make the 30 minute drive to my parents house just to play some Gloomhaven with my dad, which made it vastly easier for us to fit in some time for game playing and chatting without all the wasted driving time.

The result was that, during the last few years, my dad and I must have played several hundred hours of Gloomhaven together. Amazingly, during that entire time, we never even finished the complete original Gloomhaven campaign, mostly because there were a few scenarios that we just couldn't crack with our party.

We played Gloomhaven faithfully right up until the final few weeks of dad's life, when he was finally just too exhausted to work the computer. At that point I went back to driving over there when I could, and we sat and talked instead.

Over the past few months I've thought a couple times about firing up the game again and finishing off the campaign, playing the entire party by myself. I don't think I'll do that; it's nicer instead to just leave things just as they are in my head.

But I'll remember those years of Gloomhaven for a long, long time.

Happy Father's Day, dad

As my wife observes, this is a year of firsts, and here's one of them.

My parents were never very big on the "Hallmark Holidays", although after I became a father my dad would always remember to send me a Jacquie Lawson greeting card.

My dad wasn't very big on using the phone, either, so often I would call my mom and ask her to hand her phone to dad so I could wish him a happy Father's Day or whatever. He was always polite and returned the favor, though he soon wished to be off the call.

I guess I've become somewhat like that myself; I'm not great on the phone either.

Father's Day often lines up with my birthday, although this year it's a bit off. Either it came early, or I'm running late; probably the latter. A more happier observation is that Father's Day means that we're just coming up on my daughter's wedding anniversary; one of my favorite days!

Well, anyway: happy Father's Day to the fathers in your life, wherever they are.

The Body in the Castle Well: a very short review

I'm reading my way to Bordeaux, trying to get ready for a visit I hope to make to the region sometime soon.

There's a lot to know about Bordeaux, it has centuries, even millenia, of history. Not far from Bordeaux is the Lascaux Cave, where cave paintings believed to be twenty thousand years old have been found.

My dad was a compulsive reader, across a variety of subjects, but mysteries and detective stories were a particular favorite of his. My mom mentioned that, shortly before his death, my dad had been reading his way through Martin Walker's Bruno, Chief of Police series, which are set in the Dordogne region, which runs roughly east from Bordeaux along the Dordogne River.

My dad happened to have just finished The Body in the Castle Well, so I picked up his copy to get a taste for the series.

Walker is primarily a newspaper columnist (he's the US Bureau Chief for The Guardian), and this novel has some of the feel of being written by a journalist. It's well-researched and somewhat encyclopedic, and you get the feeling that Walker seeks to educate you as much as he seeks to entertain you. In this book, we get to learn some art history, and some falconry, and we hear a bit about the ending of French colonialism in Algeria.

With all that history and science tossed in with the detective story, I can see why my dad was very fond of Bruno, Chief of Police.

I'll surely read a few more of Walker's books.

Surfing in Alameda?

An organization called the Neptune Beach Surf Club is proposing to build a Wave Park in Alameda, out in the currently little-used section between Encinal High School and the Alameda Hornet.

Their website features a simple map and some brief descriptions.

The city says that they are exploring the concept.

I've been to that location several times, although not recently. We put in our inflatable kayaks at the boat ramp and in the small protected section of the bay near the boat ramp that's sometimes called Encinal Beach. There's a very-hard-to-find soccer field out there maintained by the Alameda Soccer Club.

It would be good to see continued development and reuse of that part of the city, and something that's water-oriented seems like a natural fit for the city.

My dad embraced science in his healthcare and in his life

In the last 5 years of his life, my dad experienced a lot of complicated health challenges.

In December 2020, my dad contracted COVID-19. This was during the Delta Variant times of the pandemic. The Delta variant was infamous for being just as deadly as the original virus while being much more contagious. That was certainly the case for my father, who had been fanatically careful for the first 11 months of the pandemic and yet somehow fell ill just before New Year's Eve.

Dad was living 450 miles away from me at the time, so we talked about his situation over the phone. (During those days, traveling outside of your county of residence was technically illegal in California, though surely I could have traveled safely.) I managed to order an oximeter online and I taught my dad how he could monitor his blood oxygen levels. On the third day of feeling poorly, he told me that his oxygen level was 82, and I sent him straight to the emergency room. Happily, they were living just down the block from a very fine hospital, and he was immediately admitted and started on a 5 day course of remdesivir. Happily, he tolerated the medicine very well and was soon discharged, still on oxygen, to rebuild his damaged lungs at home.

During this recovery, dad was just as painstaking and detail-oriented as he ever was. He filled page after page in his journals with daily observations of vital information, now augmented with measurements of lung strength taken from a hand-held breathing measurement device that the hospital gave him.

Making notes like this was something he'd been doing for years, as he daily monitored his blood sugar levels to keep an eye out for the diabetes that had killed my aunt at a too-young age.

As the years continued to pass, and my dad battled first Lymphoma, then Brachycardia, then Leukemia, the number of different types of measurements grew and his daily note-taking grew with them. He (and I) became familiar with many new ways that modern medicine can monitor changes in the human body. Some of them were rather tedious, such as getting routine blood draws to look at various measurements of compounds in the blood; others were rather remarkable, such as when he had a small heart monitor taped to his chest for a few weeks while the monitor quietly and painlessly recorded its measurements for later analysis by the cardiologists.

In the end, when the mutated bone marrow cells in his body began to flood his system with damaged blood cells, he knew even before he got the results of the tests; he was just that attuned to his health.

This level of interest in modern medicine was nothing new to my family. When I was very, very young, my parents were at the front of the line to get me vaccinated with brand-new vaccines for polio and smallpox, horrific diseases that had ravaged both of their families in previous generations. They instilled in me a fascination with science and data and rational thinking that has stuck with me though my own lifetime.

I've been thinking a lot about science recently, of course, as it's suddenly forefront on the national agenda. The head of the health division of the national government has said that "vaccinating children is unethical," and the government appears to be moving with breakneck speed to eliminate all science from the federal government.

To be replaced by, ... what? It isn't clear, exactly. I don't know why all these elected leaders fear science and want to abolish it, dumping a hundred years of systematic improvement in the lives of humans around the world into the trash bin for apparently no reason whatsoever.

I know what my father would have thought.

He would have thought they were wrong, and he would have continued taking his measurements and studying his data.

My dad loved to read manuals

My dad loved to read manuals.

As far back as I can remember, whenever we got a new appliance, or a new tool, or a board game, or just about anything that came in a box, my dad would painstakingly start by reading the manual first.

And I do mean reading! The new gizmo would be sitting there in its box, and he would take the manual over to his chair, and sit down, and read the entire thing, cover to cover, before he'd do anything else. Only then would he approach the box again, lift the whatchamacallit out of its box, turn it this way and that way, and try to line it up in his mind with what he had just read in the manual.

In his mind, I think that the manual was the true essence of the thing; the thing itself was just an artifact.

At the holidays, when I ripped off the wrapping paper, I would wonder whether I'd been given something simple enough that I could just start playing with it, or whether my gift was something that came in a box, with a manual, in which case he'd make sure that I found the manual first, and sat down and looked at it, before I could proceed to get to the actual toy itself.

Model ships, Lego kits, even Frisbees or skateboards: "Wait! Read the manual first."

It was a different place and time, I suppose.

People don't read manuals now. If there even is a manual! Usually, at best there is a little slip of paper with a QR code that sends you to a YouTube video.

People don't read the manual; they watch the manual on YouTube.

Or they just take the thing out of the box and plug it in and start pushing buttons.

This change greatly disturbed my dad, and I perhaps noticed it most clearly when he would buy a new videogame for his computer. He loved videogames, and was always looking for a new one to try.

But somewhere along the line, videogames stopped having manuals. Instead, every videogame designer, in some sort of lemming-like mass migration, switched from having a manual to explain how to play their game, to instead having the manual built in to the game itself.

With a modern video game, you just install it and fire it up and start playing. But of course you don't know anything. So the game is carefully designed to start with a series of tutorials, carefully designed so that you think you are playing the game, while in fact you are just progressing through the tutorials.

Think of the start of Skyrim, when you find yourself riding in the back of a wooden cart, being taken down to the town square to be tried in front of the local magistrate. Bit by bit, the game teaches you how to move your character around, to walk and run, to find items and experimentally figure out what they are good for, to engage in dialogue with other characters, to build or buy weapons and armor and equip them, and so forth.

You might spend hours playing the game, when in fact you are still just reading the manual.

This drove my dad crazy! He wanted to read the manual!

Sometimes, he would find that the game included a "help" system, where there was a sort of mini-encyclopedia of short descriptions of the important elements of the game. These help systems were often extensive, with hundreds of individual articles covering all sorts of aspects of the game. They were of course never designed to be a manual, but rather to be a simple in-game reference tool, useful if you'd put the game aside for a few months and were now returning to it, trying to remember the difference between a poleaxe and a halberd, or whatever.

But my dad, if he found such a help system in his new game, would immediately stop playing the initial tutorials. Instead, he would painstakingly go through the entire help system, one article at a time, clicking on each topic. Then he'd copy-and-paste the text (or screenshot it, whatever), and put them all into a Word document, and then he'd print out the entire Word document, often dozens or even hundreds of pages long at this point.

And he'd take the printout, and go sit down in his chair, and read the entire thing, front to back.

How do keelboats sail upwind?

I was pretty sure I understood the basic principles.

Happily, Randall Munroe has clarified them for me!

Construction Physics on shipbuilding

Here's the sort of article that I used to send to my dad. And then we would discuss it when we were together. Improving Naval Ship Acquisition

My dad spent a bunch of his professional career working in the Armed Forces on analytic topics. He worked for several years for the Coast Guard working on logistics and operations problems. And then he worked for close to 20 years for the Navy on operations research problems. He spent a lot of time thinking about the details of why the military does things the way they do.

It's a deep, complex topic, and not easily accessible to outsiders like me.

But still, it was always interesting to get my dad's perspective on issues such as the ones in this essay:

Many of the US Navy’s recent ship designs are large, complex multi-role ships. The Navy expects the same ship to hunt pirates, counter ballistic missiles, track submarines, and more. Also common are high-end features unnecessary for a ship’s mission. These complex ships have many negative consequences on the ability to design ships, increase production throughput, and meet budget and schedule targets.

I really enjoy the Construction Physics newsletter. I have no idea how Brian Potter manages to write so many amazing articles so often, but they're great reading.

My dad and the new pope

I think my dad would have been happy that Leo XIV was a math major.

I think my dad might have liked this puzzle…

... although not because he liked Find-a-Word puzzles

Actually he much preferred cryptic crosswords when it came to puzzles.

He would watch me doing a Sudoku or a KenKen with some interest, but he never really enjoyed those either.

Although he had fun trying to work out the mathematics of Sudoku!

Anyway, i think he would have liked this puzzle because the theme was railroad trains and each word to be found was a type of train car.

One less commenter

My dad was the person who most often commented on my blog posts.

(I mean, besides the automated sparm marketing robots.)

I still have one or two long-time friends who occasionally comment on my posts.

But it's going to be a lot quieter in the comments section now.

Can you inherit interests?

Somehow, along the way, I came to find myself sharing certain interests with my father. I'm not exactly sure how this came to be, but it's something that I find I still have, even after he's gone>

The desert. When I was nine years old we moved from Lousiana to California, and came to live in a suburb of Los Angeles. But my dad wasn't really all that thrilled with the suburbs of Los Angeles. Instead, it came to be that he grew to love the desert. When we were young, he would take us on weekend trips into the high desert of inland California, and we would wander around its empty spaces, finding odd things to see and do.

Stamp collecting. I really have no idea how my dad came to be interested in collecting stamps, but I remember that when I was young, he would let me sit in his den with him, as we did things like soaking old envelopes to separate the stamp from the envelope, examining the resulting stamps under magnifying glasses, and looking up each stamp in a specialty catalog to learn more about whether this was a special and interesting stamp, in which case we would happily mount the stamp into its position in the album.

Cryptic crosswords. I came to this rather late, rather than as a child, when at some point I visited my parents and they had a cryptic crossword open on the breakfast table. Cryptics feature a blend of word play and puzzles that is quite hard to explain unless you've tried them. I'm really not very good at them, but I love to try to solve them, and when I got stuck I would just ask my dad and he would explain the answer.

The United States Coast Guard. Most Americans, I'd say, have pretty much no idea what the USCG is, and what it does, but my father was a career coastie, eventually rising to and retiring as a Captain in the Coast Guard Reserve. He helped me understand what the Coast Guard does, and why it is so unusual among all the US armed forces.

Things I already miss about my father

 It’s only been 48 hours so these aren’t particularly deep thoughts. But they are thoughts nonetheless.

• I just finished N K Jemisin's marvelous Broken Earth trilogy, and I really wanted to know what dad thought about it. He had zipped through all three volumes in barely 10 days, while it took me two months to finish them. He was a much faster reader than me. But he was waiting patiently until I finished the last volume before telling me. So now I'll never know.
• I played some golf, which I enjoy but don't do often, and am not very good at. But my dad loved golf and was remarkably good at it , so I wanted to tell him some stories from my golf trip. Don't get to do that and have no one else to tell.
• The golf courses were out in the desert and my dad had a phenomenal knowledge of desert plants; i wanted to tell him about the mesquite and the tamarisk and the locust and the acacia that were lining the course.
• I was learning a bit about prediction markets and they are pretty abstract and so I wanted to talk to my dad about them to see what he thought. I think he would have found them fascinating

Robert Leon Pendleton, 1937-2025

Just 72 hours ago, my father was sitting in the family room debating the virtues and challenges of artificial intelligence with my son.

Time goes by so fast.

I’ll have more to say down the line, for now it’s enough to say: dad, I miss you and I love you and every time I was with you I learned something.

Star Wars Zero Company looks like a game I'd like

It seems that some of the team from XCOM have joined a new effort to build a Star Wars tactical turn-based game.

Star Wars: Zero Company Officially Revealed With 2026 Release Window

Zero Company takes place in the "twilight of the Clone Wars," and stars Hawks, a former Republic officer commanding an elite squad of operatives taking on a growing new threat. It's a single-player game, featuring turn-based tactics gameplay, and is said to incorporate "meaningful outcomes from player choices".

Star Wars: Zero Company to Be Officially Revealed From Respawn and Bit Reactor This Weekend

Developer Bit Reactor is a newly-formed strategy game studio made up of veterans from games like XCOM, Civilization, Gears of War, and Elder Scrolls Online.

Sounds like I've got at least 18 months to wait, but I'll look forward to learning more about what the team is up to.

Happy four month birthday Olive

happy birthday to Olive the puppy, 33 pounds of muscle and energetic love.

CRS

We have a tradition of going on a special trip over Martin Luther King day weekend.We also have a tradition of going on a special trip in mid-August for our anniversary.

But I find that I forget things so fast, and I can't remember where we went when.

And of course everything was a blur during COVID.

• January, 2020: we were in Tucson, AZ. We're pretty sure Donna had COVID on that trip
• January, 2021: we stayed home; COVID was too scary then
• January, 2022: we were in Mendocino, CA. I got COVID on that trip
• January, 2023: we were in Paso Robles, CA
• January, 2024: we were in Petaluma, CA
• January, 2025: we went back to Mendocino, CA. I did not get COVID on that trip

• August, 2020: we went to Half Moon Bay. There were terrible fires in the Santa Cruz mountains.
• August, 2021: we went to Sonoma and stayed at the Sonoma Mission Inn. It was a beautiful trip
• August, 2022: we went to Timber Cove CA. Quiet and peaceful
• August, 2023: we went to Occidental, CA. The redwood grove outside Occidental is glorious
• August, 2024: we stayed home. Recovering from knee surgery
• August, 2025: will be our 40th anniversary!

Sigh, AI

At some point, Google turned their powerful AI systems loose on news.google.com, presumably hoping to improve its results.

Hmm, well.

One of those articles has something to do with Physics.

I guess Google thinks that 1 outta 3 ain't bad.

My relationship with my "office"

It's now been exactly five years since I came home on a Wednesday, and told my wife: "I don't think I'm going back in to my office for a while". The following Tuesday, the company notified me (and everyone else) of the truth of that statement.

I had spent the first 40 years of my professional career, through nine different jobs across three states and both coasts (three coasts if you count Lake Michigan), always in a "white collar" job where I had an assigned desk, with space to set up my computer and other equipment, hang my coat, put up a picture of my wife, have a desk drawer where I could store various necessities.

If anyone needed to find me, I had a phone and I was at my desk, unless I was away at a meeting. And if I needed to find anyone else to discuss things, I knew how to do that, too.

I was totally unprepared for any other way of doing software engineering.

I'd had about 10 years or so of Open Source activities, so I wasn't completely unaware that there were other ways to collaborate on large software projects, but I had no idea how completely unprepared I really was.

I rarely used social media chat programs for informal conversations with co-workers who were 5 feet away.

When I wanted to brainstorm ideas and describe large unfamiliar concepts, I was great at a whiteboard, but horrible at getting my thoughts across in a phone call.

And what was this video conference stuff? How did it work? What was all this unfamiliar software? Skype? Zoom? Google Meet? I knew the names of this stuff, but couldn't find the buttons to click. None of my computers had webcams.

Oh my how much I've learned in five years. Perhaps old dogs can indeed slowly learn some new tricks.

I still struggle mightily to organize and conduct a 25-person technical design review effectively. When I can't "read the room", it's hard for me to tell when I'm moving too slow, or moving too fast, and losing my audience either way. I often spend too much time on small talk when I should move on to the meat of the matter, or jump right into a challenging conversation with someone I've barely met before I've even gotten to know them.

And it's so, so, so hard for me to meet people online. I have colleagues with whom I've collaborated extensively, over hundreds of hours, but whom I've barely met face to face. I couldn't tell you how tall they are, whether they are left- or right-handed, or if they prefer slacks and a dress shirt or blue jeans and a hoodie.

The next generation will grow up completely comfortable with these topics that I only came to late, near the end of my career, and undoubtedly these sorts of things will fade away into the mists of time.

But my goodness what a difference five years has made in my life.

California Wolf Project releases their 2024 report

The California Wolf Project is a relatively new effort operated by the University of California's Berkeley and Davis campuses to do serious study of the state of affairs when it comes to wolves in California.

What?!?? you may say, are there actually wolves in California?

Yes, actually, there are (although I've certainly never seen any). Wolves re-entered California more than a decade ago, after nearly a century of absence from the state, as part of the splintering of a wolf pack that roamed the high desert of Oregon. The wolves in California occupy the parts of the state that are both:

• extremely rural and sparsely populated
• supportive of an ecosystem in which wolves can find both reliable sources of food and minimal human contact.

For now, as illustrated on the project's 2024 annual report, this means mostly the high plateaus of far north-eastern California.

I've followed the recovery of wolf populations in the high country of the far west for most of my lifetime; the California Wolf Project seems like they will be an excellent contributor to our knowledge of how we are co-habiting with these fascinating animals.