One year ago today: June 24, 2013, JZ tunes the truck, hmmmm...
Five years ago today: June 24, 2009, on working.
Ten years ago today: June 24, 2004, in infamous CPOD
MORNING
It is 7:00AM and 80°. And I’m not on the road with my sidecar. The cause is the unexpected increase in housing prices and the lack of anything suitable on the market. I’m right in the midst of the “second wave” demographics of the boomer generation. To remind you, the first wave get the goods, the second wave find the laws have changed to put a stop to it, the third wave will get nothing. Essentially, every penny I don’t get to spend traveling is going toward a down payment when something comes along. Prices are a big concern, but since banks aren’t lending, well, let’s see what happens.
For those who don’t keep up with robots, look for these on the robot and you can be sure you are looking at among the latest technology, at least for anyone with a budget. Watch for inventions that use them, but I said I’d tell you how to trick them. Say they are used in an alarm. Here’s what the package doesn’t tell you. The device works on three pins. Common sense. One must be power, the other the ground, leaving one pin to do the work. When commanded, one of the microphones begins to emit a tone (42kHz) and the pin “goes high”, meaning if you measure it with your voltmeter, you see 5 volts.
When the other microphone picks up the reflected signal, the pin goes low, or 0 volts. There is a timing difference which can be programmed to calculate the range. (For you buffs, sound travels around 147µS per inch). See the built in default? The sensor has no clue where the echo is coming from. That’s why the picture shows two devices. We will soon be aiming them at each other find out how to “kill” the emitter. For continuous operation, the robot has to keep issuing the send command, but the second sensor need only use clever timing to shut it down again—or give it a misleading distance.
I didn’t go out last evening. Could not be bothered. Instead, I found a box of home-made pickled onions and cukes labeled, in my own handwriting, 2005. Mmmm, good. Some were salted, some plain, and some spiced with curry. I’d invite you over, but it’s all gone. Then I finally, after months of not acting on it, re-wrote the bass lines to the surf tunes “Pipeline” and “Walk Don’t Run”. They are still the original, but with a few added thirds and flatted thirds to give the refrains that walking bass that crowds from the 60s love to death. And so the guitar players don’t have it all their own way. Oh, they’ll do the usual fine job, but it will be a job everybody has heard five hundred times before.
Then I found a spread of documentaries on map-making, which I’m proud to say made perfect sense this time around. Then I watched a history of the Royal Navy during the Armada days. Why do people find it so surprising Britain had a tough navy? The place is an island and you can’t let the bad guys get ashore. Bill the Conqueror taught them that lesson. I’m no admirer of the English, my interest was the changes in ship design. Things have not really changed that much since then, you know. Except for metal and the way turrets are made, the hulls and systems are fairly static over time.
So you want to retire, do you? Today my electric bill for June and a new ink cartridge for my printer set me back $110.00. And that should double in the next five years as the freshly-printed war money reaches to the corners of the empire and inflation goes insane. We’ll find the hardest hit will be the middle-class, which in this country means the working class with access to insane amounts of credit. Let’s see how they fare when the credit evaporates and they have to spend their meager savings.
Also, I’m pretty surprised there haven’t been more pension defaults, such as the teachers and post office. Chances are they’ve changed the rules to keep on pretending they can ever meet their commitments. As things are, it is, in fact, practically impossible for the entire middle-class to have saved enough money to last their retirements. If it wasn’t so comfortable here, I’d be worried. Next!
NOON
You know, I just got to thinking. Might there be a germ of an idea happening? Right now, robots combat each other physically. But if my robot could remotely disable your robot without contact, that’s a win. I don’t mean the military, who do all this so secretly I can’t even say, but in say, robot games. A new era of robot games. Just an idea.
This morning’s paper reports a firetruck in “southwestern Germany” had to be called to free an American tourist who got stuck in a giant vagina sculpture. Relax, I already called to see if JZ was okay. The same paper reports a California lawyer is trying to crack down on Monkey Parking. That’s where you auction off your parking spot to circling drivers. This is consistent with a rash of applications that take dead aim on the government’s use of public areas to extract tax revenue. Of course, a lawyer would not necessarily spot that as a form of corruption, nor the reaction as a form of protest.
Of course, somebody will turn it into a safety issue, just you watch. I automatically side with the underdogs on this one. The only way the system can patrol the activity is to dictate what apps are allowed on your smart phone, and such intrusion is unacceptable. I predict the entrenched bureaucracy will face increased pressure from these type of apps, such as the luxury Google bus that uses city bus stops. The problem is not the upstarts. The problem is perverted, dishonest, unethical taxation. Of course the powers that be don’t want to allow change, but they will just force it underground.
The robot club is looking at several new technologies and we spent an hour in Best Buy.
We took another hour and tested the acoustics of a guitar-bass duo in the empty church. It is a winning sound. Even if we are below average, we can still play out more than my current group. We’d certainly have better management. The big band is very shy in the management department, the more so because they have the mistaken concept that the band’s majority taste in music is everything. No work in a year and how I make more money at bingo, well, these are not factors, you see. It’s scary, because they don’t even know the proper terms used in band management. Like “volume creep”, “galloping”, and “”stealing thunder”.
Nor do they seem to be aware that certain points of view are excluded from the management function such as whether or not a particular tune is good or bad. That is a discussion for teenagers. The tune either grabs the audience or not, end of the jabbering. There is also a tendency for this band toward the seen-it-all attitude which prevents them from recognizing new or unique problems that arise. Prime example, the guitar play is full of ideas on little things that can be changed or added—until you spot the pattern even he doesn’t see. Every one of his “improvements” is always an added guitar part overtop of the natural spots where other instruments have a few solo notes.
And while I’m lecturing, let me inform the guitar players of the world that Buddy Holly, Linda Ronstadt, and anybody like them is country music. Playing a super-loud rock guitar riff over top of the whole thing does not change that fact.
AFTERNOON
Tuesday is the writer’s club and I got my arse chewed off—but that is why one goes there. So as to willingly expose one's writing to a group of fiction writers. Who remembers I said that? My writing was so bad in some areas. But I’m there to learn and I did. The addendum is a rough copy of my submission and rough copies contain errors. My goal is to find out where I’m not communicating.
I learned. I learned that you really have to spell things out for some people. Maybe it is also up to the reader to not choose they lack the foundation to follow. And fiction readers obviously love dialogue. Here is where my writing can shift gears. Often, I read 900 page manuals when I must, and there can regularly be zero dialogue in such books. So I can be aghast when encountering readers who attach extra importance to a sentence merely because it is between quotation marks.. This isn’t new. We’ve seen this before and I’m learning.
Now I don’t want to come across as a grouch just because it is not the criticism I was expecting. I do want improve my form, my style, but not by changing facts so that it reads "nicer". I am fully aware that it boils down to people who know nothing about my topic telling me how to improve it. Yes, they focus on the topic, not the presentation. But if that is what I must do, so be it. First order of business is to bring my pronouns much closer together. In long sentences—and my sentences here are 30% longer than those used by the fictioneers—tend to lose the reader over who “he” and “him” were just a second ago. I can fix that.
NIGHT
Here is a list of the topics from tonight’s writer’s club meeting. I did not stay to the very end, so these are ten (or so) of the fifteen submissions.
“Treasures”, a personal account of lost faith in a church. Based on the idea that if you seek help at a church, you get a very narrow window of advice.
“The Lifeboat”, a man’s wife becomes ill on a once-in-a-lifetime outing discovers the price of returning home by without completing the tour is three times what they paid for the trip.
“Mixel”, a grandmother believes she is a combination of two animals, a she-wolf and a she-eagle after watching her grandson play a computer game with the same premise.
“Keene Painting”, Ramona dreams and floats across continents while having to choose any two from a medicine man’s list: Sex, Love, or Greed.
“Pauli”, the substitute teacher at a New York reform school run like a mental institution finds one of his former students working in the porno industry and congratulates her for getting a job.
“Mulligan”, an aging parent begins to plan a final big reunion and begins to reminisce as he goes over the invitations.
“Flaming Tree”, a haiku-like poem, hard for me to get into.
“Religious Poem”, a non-religious free verse treatment of the hypocrisy man makes of his “god figure” whenever man goes to war.
“Stiletto”, a clever presentation of what you think is impending doom for mankind to discover it means stiletto heels. Ergo, a different kind of doom?
ADDENDUM
There is a school of thought which says that a non-fiction writer necessarily has to be more familiar with his subject. If the fundamentals are not understood the story comes across as stilted. Any reader even slightly more knowledgeable than the writer will quickly find the book to be inconsistent.
I’ll give an example of complicated material. The topic is celestial navigation, or steering a ship by the stars. Most books on celestial navigation could also double as examples of how to confuse the beginner. If I was to write such a book, I’d baby-talk the reader through each step until a solid foundation is established. That’s because a good non-fiction author never forgets what it was like for himself. And the wise author follows the learning curve.
I would like to present the same concept of “zenith”. But with the minimum definitions and explanations I feel should be included in all beginner’s material. I would begin by telling what the zenith is not. It is not the dictionary definition of the highest point in the sky. That would be directly overhead and that does not happen on most days of the year. Nor is the abbreviation for zenith the letter “Z”. (“Z” stands for something different, called azimuth, which you don’t need.)
A common error is the think of the zenith as being 12:00 o’clock noon. It usually is not for the simple reason called time zones. These are fixed areas of the Earth where people conveniently call it noon, but that is actually true only in the exact center of a time zone. Also, daylight savings time can “push” the apparent zenith forward or backward by a full hour. Thus, a clock is not a good way to know when the sun is highest, that is, at the zenith.
Nor will a compass help in most cases. That’s because true north and magnetic north are not the same everywhere. What about measuring the angle between the sun and the horizon? That’s only possible when you can see the horizon. What if you are downtown, or in a forest? Also, the land horizon can be at different heights. It stays still out on the ocean, but then you have fog.
How do we find the highest spot? What is meant by “highest point”? And how do we measure it?
The answer is observation. Through suitably darkened filters, the sun is easy to track and at precisely noon to the observer, it seems to “stop” or “freeze” or “pause” at the highest spot for nearly a minute. By setting your watch to 12:00 at this time, you have an extremely accurate way to know the correct time—and you also know that in the USA, you are facing southward. Try it.
What’s also nice is if you find the high spot and look directly down to the horizon, that location on horizon is due south. From that you can find all your other directions. It is unfortunate that so many professional explanations give only a dry definition of zenith when it is such a useful thing for travellers. The reality is that there is no absolute agreement on what zenith is or means. It can be an angle, a distance, or an average. There is no standard of measurement upon which there can be general agreement and too many authors seem disinclined to warn the reader of that circumstance.
In conclusion, my objective is to stress that those who write technical material are responsible for maintaining that their output does not contradict the reader’s experience. If the writer of non-fiction is not sure, there exists a requirement to inform others that some guesswork is involved. While my premise here is confined to the one example of the technical term “zenith”, in a wider sense the concept is that writing based on facts carries with it an extra burden of conforming to the basic principles of common sense.
Last, please don’t ever look directly at the sun.
1Citations:
PAULK, Wm. Bruce. “Basic and Intermediate Celestial Navigation.” New York: Hearst Marine Books, 1989. Print. ISBN 0-688-08939-9.
BUDLONG, John P. “Sky and Sextant Practical Celestial Navigation, Second Edition”. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., 1978. Print. ISBN 0-442-21136-8.
TOGHILL, Jeff. “Celestial Navigation.” New York, W.W. Norton & Co, 1986. Print. ISBN 0-393-30294-6.
Return Home
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
