1.1 2025 January
1.1.1 2025 January 1 - Happy New Year
A Happy New Year to all my web-page readers.
I'm told the fitness gyms are packed wall to wall
for the first two weeks in January with people
who swear that this year they're going
to stay in shape.
My New Year Resolution is going to be keeping up this weblog
and my
issues weblog pages.
Time will tell how well I do with it.
Here is a link directly to the
most-recent
entry.
1.1.2 2025 January 1 - From "Law and Order"
I love the television show "Law and Order,"
especially the inter-generational, inter-cultural banter,
usually around Detective Lenny Briscoe and his younger colleages.
1.1.3 2025 January 3 - Moab Pictures and Videos
Okay, the trip was last year,
2024 December 20-22,
but I finally got Tyler's drone videos and put them all together
http://the-adam.com/stuff/htm/moab2024.html
on a web page with links to the daily pictures,
my hand-held flying videos,
and, now, Tyler's drone videos.
The drone videos are fantastic and, alas,
they are also quite large,
large enough to tax some people's download speeds.
So I have the link to a smaller version and then a
"(large)" link to the full-size video.
There are also drone videos from an early trip,
2024 October 26-27,
to Bryce Canyon.
1.1.4 2025 January 4 - Aviation Day of Joy
Flying friend Shanley invited me and
other flying friend Tyler to a brunch gathering of
her local Phoenix chapter of the
Ninety-Nines
in beautiful-red-rocks Sedona (SEZ).
We flew up together in my Piper Cherokee N8377W
and had a delightful breakfast with good company
where we were welcome guests at their table.
There was talk of airplanes and airports
and flying and careers and other aviation subjects.
It was great.
As we were leaving Sedona
we bumped into the Sedona chapter of the Ninety-Nines
who also were having a meeting at Sedona Airport (SEZ)
and I got to see both groups taking a big group photo.
On the way back to Falcon Field Airport (FFZ)
we passed a local back-country airstrip called Red Creek,
the shortest runway in Arizona where I land my Cherokee.
"I'm not saying it's where angels fear to tread,
but they step lightly in these scary places."
Looking down on this seldom-inhabited aviation landmark
we saw an airplane on the side of the runway,
so we decided they might want company.
Radio calls unanswered,
we flew over the airstrip
to let them know we were landing, they waved at us,
we waggled our wings, I did a nice
landing
there, and our now new friends taxied over to greet us.
Matt is into aviation fire fighting and agriculture,
aviation careers outside the airlines
or the flight schools,
and interesting topics for young pilots
like Shanley and Tyler,
who are curious about careers in aviation.
It was a delightful conversation and
we admired his cool Piper SuperCub.
When we were coming back to Falcon
the radio sounded like a rapid-fire square-dance caller
and I was anticipating having to find five free seconds
to call my position and intentions,
"Falcon Tower, Cherokee
November Eight Three Seven Seven Whiskey,
inbound with [radio information] Echo,
south parking."
The last is squeezed in there
in the hope that the guys in the tower
will be kind enough to let us land on the south runway
further from where we are but closer to where we park
so we don't have to cross the south runway on the ground.
Air traffic controllers are usually pretty amazing
and they handle a lot of airplanes.
At so-called general-aviation airports like Falcon
they're handling lots of less-experienced pilots
which is a lot more stressful than sequencing airline pilots
who have thousands of hours and recent training
and who fly all the time with their excellent radio skills.
It's an interesting relationship between
pilots and controllers and usually it works very well.
We cede control of our immediate destiny to controllers
after telling them what we want
and their job is to get everybody where they want to be
safely and quickly.
It's like police where we give them control
so they can keep us safe and happy.
Whatever you may think of how good or bad
police-civilian relationships are in your town,
I have found air traffic controllers are my friends in the air.
Well, this time was above and beyond.
Just as I was anticipating introducing myself on the radio,
the point where we pilots tells controllers
who we are, where we are, and what we want to do,
I heard on the radio,
"November Eight Three Seven Seven Whiskey,
do you still park on the south side?"
I sat up with a start.
Not only had I not introduced myself
to this frantically-busy tower controller,
so he must have been looking at the tracks
on the traffic display
(where on earth did he find the time
to look for me?),
but he also remembered I parked on the south side
and I might want to use the south runway,
not the north runway nearer my current position.
So I answered, "Seven Seven Whiskey, yes, please."
"Seven Seven Whiskey,
fly to the confluence
(a known reporting point for Falcon pilots)
for extended base leg to Runway Two Two Left."
Wow, yes sir,
"Seven Seven Whiskey, fly to the confluence, thank you."
After being cleared to land and landing,
I was able to get off the runway quickly
(to help him with traffic behind me) and,
as an encore,
he gave me taxi instructions to get to my parking space
so I didn't have to call the equally-busy ground controller.
We did find a gap in the radio chatter to thank
the controllers for doing a kick-ass job for us.
The whole day was pleasant, wonderful, and surreal.
1.1.5 2025 January 7 - The Gloomiest Week of the Year
The solstices are the longest and shortest days of the year,
summer being the most daylight hours and winter being the fewest.
However, the earth's orbit is not a circle but an ellipse,
the earth is tilted on its axis, and the result is an effect
called "The Equation of Time" in some books.
The result is the winter solstice is neither
the earliest sunset, usually around December 7,
nor the latest sunrise, usually around January 7,
check out the
analemma
for more details.
So, for morning people like me,
especially morning people that like to ride a bicycle
and don't like doing it at night at my more-advanced age,
that makes this week the gloomiest week of the year.
At least there's nowhere to go but brighter mornings
until sometime around June 7.
1.1.6 2025 January 11 - Making Cool Friends
This one isn't really my story,
but I got to enjoy the moment today.
My buddy Tyler was playing some video game online,
I'm older and I don't play these games
(although I did go through a bunch of first-person
virtual-reality games like "Castle Wolfenstein"
and "Doom" and "Heretic" a few decades ago),
and he met a fellow Hayden.
This fellow was Out There in Cyberspace,
who knows where, some user handle in an Internet universe.
The same gregarity that got Tyler and me to become friends
from a chance meeting from a flat tire he got at another airport
got Tyler and Hayden to ask the next questions.
These are questions like "Where do you live?"
and "Can we meet in real life?"
Well, the short version is they did meet,
they have other interests in common,
and I got to meet Hayden today on a flight to meet
another friend for breakfast
out in the Middle of Nowhere,
the Wayside Oasis restaurant at Alamo Lake
in western Arizona.
He is truly a delightful and interesting person.
Not all my friends of friends interest me,
but this one does and I look forward to future meetings.
1.1.7 2025 January 14 - Retired from Clear Demand
It looks like my time has come,
at least so far as Clear Demand is concerned.
Jim and I started Clear Demand in 2011 October
and incorporated in 2012 April, thirteen years ago.
With a combination of our very-different knowledge and insights
we became a serious force in retail science
and we made eight or ten clients a lot of money.
With my usual lack of aw-shucks modesty,
my phenomenal ability to turn good ideas
(my own ideas and those of other people)
into working, practical, production-quality software
made our success happen.
We sold the company to M3 in 2024 June,
M3 bought a retail-competitor-data company BungeeTech soon after,
and the combination should be
a stronger, more-complete company,
still called Clear Demand.
Where the company is going is different enough
that my role as an employee is coming to an end.
My last day is today and, going forward,
my connection with Clear Demand will be less and different.
There is opportunity for me to give advice
and to answer questions and maybe to do work with Jim Sills.
I hope to get more exercise with longer bike rides
and to continue
my aggressive
(I consider eighty concerts a year "aggressive")
concert season,
enjoying my vinyl and tape collection on my
hifi.
flying my airplane with friends to wonderful places,
seeing total solar eclipses
with Barcelona
(2026)
and Luxor
(2027)
on my planning horizon,
and enjoying my family and friends.
1.1.8 2025 January 17 - Car Crash - Ouch!
A delightful, and delightfully redheaded, paramedic
named Monica chatted with me for a while
and reported to me, and to others I presume,
that I showed no symptoms of anything other than
impending soreness.
I asked specifically about apparent vocabulary or memory issues,
slurred speech, anything like that, and she said I seemed fine.
Monica assured me I could still go to a hospital then,
or tomorrow if I felt bad then.
After a bunch of forms professionally and politely
offered by police, who also were nice enough to get my
stuff from my car for me,
I walked to a nearby petrol station and took a Lyft ride home.
My neck and lower-right ribs are uncomfortable.
We'll see how sore I am tomorrow.
1.1.9 2025 January 19 - Smart People Conversation
I have some smart people in my
professional and social life and
I never stop enjoying dialogue with them.
It's a myth that
reasoned conversation reliably reaches consensus.
You know the message
that if we keep cool heads and discuss something reasonably
that we will reach a common-good conclusion.
Even if every party is reasonably intelligent
the result can still be back-and-forth babble
not getting anywhere useful or interesting.
It's especially difficult when the two people involved
have different cadences.
I'm smart, Charles is smart, but I'm quick and Charlies isn't.
When we have conversations I have to remember that Charles
will get it, but it will take him fifteen seconds to one minute
to get what I get in two or three seconds.
That doesn't make me smarter, only faster,
and I have to remember to wait the extra time
for his equally-valid, equally-insightful ideas to emerge.
Charles and I have been having conversations
for forty-seven years and we have worked it out.
There are media like email that allow for each step
to be reasoned carefully where an extra five minutes doesn't
impede communication.
A conversation shouldn't feel like a chess game
with a ticking clock.
I was having one of those
politically-relevant math converations with Baxter.
It was about voting schemes.
We are both frustrated that the current election process,
with or without the Electoral College,
pretty-much guarantees victory for
one of the two big parties
even when a third party actually has more popular support.
It's not a new issue nor is this a new discussion for us,
but the subject is especially topical
right after a major U.S.-Presidential election.
My scheme is algorithmically consise,
people submit a list of preferred candidates,
initially any U.S. native-born citizen over thirty-five years of age.
We take everybody's first choice on the list of candidates,
rank order the candidates by that count,
and keep enough candidates for half the vote.
Usually we expect one candidate to get half the vote and it's over.
Otherwise we keep just the candidates that total half the vote
and repeat the process with people's first choices on
the new, much-shorter list.
We repeat until only one candidate is left.
In the case where most people prefer D or R
it comes out the same as now,
but supposing there is strong support for some third party,
we would see that support in official ballot counts
because people could vote their Libertarian or Green or other choice
first knowing their D-vs.-R choice would still
affect the outcome.
His scheme is to have people vote just YES or NO
for each of those same initial list.
In practice they could list up to, say, five names.
We're interested in the case where there are two, three, or four
candidates a voter prefers rather than having
vote lists like every U.S. citizen except one person.
There were points in our recent discussion
where we debated the notion of numerical-score voting
where my hope-he-wins candidate gets a score of one,
my hope-he-loses candidate gets a score of minus one,
and some third party candidate gets some numerical score reflecting
the voter's confort with that candidate.
I rebelled strenuously on that one claiming
I might trust people to state a preference
but not to say they liked one candidate some numerical amount
more than another.
Baxter's scheme was that people would list their acceptable
candidates for office and whoever got the highest number,
regardless of rank among a voter's choices, wins the election.
At the end, I said,
"Look, in the current scheme of things,
we would both be mostly satisfied if we could name
one or two candidates for President of the United States
and in my scheme the two-choices voter expresses a preference
and in your scheme the voter just lists both names."
What made it cool with a converation between
two smart people is there was clear recognition
that this captured the essence of our difference.
I find myself in conversation with less-smart people
we get enmired in details and
I find myself unable to communicate essential differences
amid a flurry of minor issues.
I'm a smart person, no mystery there,
and I use other people's ideas well which makes me smarter.
Maybe another part of smartness
is being able to codify the essential difference in a discussion.
Of course that requires both parties in the discussion be listening.
Thank you, Baxter, for being a friend who gets it.
1.1.10 2025 January 21 - Recovering and Relaxing
My neck is a lot less sore from my
accident
on Friday night,
my lower-right rib is still tender,
so I'm not doing my twice-daily plank exercises
or riding my bicycle yet.
I plan to see my doctor soon to check things out,
but I figure I'll wait a couple more days,
once because I want to see how I'm doing after about a week
and again because I tend to procrastinate.
(I keep meaning to look up "procrastinate"
and I keep putting it off.)
Meanwhile I'm enjoying my life of leisure
to catch up on home-computer-system issues,
tools I use that don't work quite the way I want.
There are some new projects I'm going to start soon.
(There's that procrastination bit again.)
One project I'm starting is transcribing my old "master" tapes
to high-bit-rate digital.
During my graduate-school days in 1980 and 1981
I recorded about forty big-reel tapes
(Ten inch reels of 1-mil tape,
48 minutes at 15 inches/second (38 cm/sec))
of local jazz in and around Stanford,
really sweet recordings with the life and energy of live music
and the musical resolution and spatial imaging of
only-two-microphone stereo recording.
There were Maxell-brand reels which are pristine and wonderful,
no problems there,
and I'm starting with those.
There are also Ampex Grandmaster-456 reels that have succumbed
to Sticky Tape Syndrome where they get all gooey
and can't be played the way they are.
It turns out they can be baked in an oven
at 60° C (140° F) for twelve hours,
left for a day,
and then played for the next two or three days.
That window is wide enough not only to make digital copies
at high resolution
(24 bit depth at 96K samples/second resolution, "24/96" in geek-speak,
I made compact-disk (CD) 16/44 copies of these tapes twenty years ago
and they're pretty good)
but also to copy them onto Maxell reels I bought
from The Tape Warehouse in Atlanta twenty years ago.
That means I get to listen to these wonderful moments from my past,
more than forty years ago.
1.1.11 2025 January 23 - Itzhak Perlman
We normally think of violinist Itzhak Perlman
as being a classical musician with exquisite interpretations
of the great composers.
On the Mendelssohn-piano-trios compact disk (CD)
his name gets more than half the album cover,
mostly because "Ax" and "Ma" are such shorter names
than "Perlman."
This concert was different.
He was in a band called "Fiddler's House"
where they played Jewish music from eastern Europe
centered around 1875,
a decade before seven of my eight great-grandparents left that area.
It was fun to hear the music and the banter and the stories.
In a world ripe with strife
it was wonderful to have a concert
celebrating Jewish tradition without
politics.
The joy of the music and the culture and, of course, the food
was the message and the audience had fun with it as well.
One of the fun moments was a brief discussion
of the piano part of the group.
These people were nomadic enough that they tended
to play instruments they could carry with them
and the piano doesn't quite fit that bill.
One voice mentioned electric keyboards and it was pointed out
there weren't a lot of electric keyboards
one hundred and fifty years go.
There was talk of good times and good matzo-ball soup
and wonderful weddings.
It was a good evening all around.
1.1.12 2025 January 25 - The Texas Tenors
The Texas Tenors is three men singing with a band,
a little religous and a lot American patriotic
with a variety of other sorts of music, a lot of fun for me.
They are regulars at Chandler Center for the Arts and at Musicfest.
Two years ago, 2023 January 21, they did a concert at Chandler.
One of them, Marcus, often goes out into the auditorium
and interacts with members of the audience and, this time,
he stopped by my aisle seat and started doing something
atop my head.
I figured if he was going to do something terrible
there would be close to two thousand witnesses,
so I kept still.
After about a minute he asked for my cell phone and took a selfie
of him and me after he had done my hair into a ridge line.
There isn't much to work with up there, but he did the job and,
in the lobby after the show, several people came up to me and said,
"you're the hair-do guy!"
Fast forward two years to 2025 January 25
and a woman named Luanne comes up to me,
my gray hair looking its normal sparse way,
and said, "you're the hair-do guy from two years ago!"
She even had pictures from back then on her cell phone.
She's from Dallas
and her son and his wife both work in the arts in
the Phoenix Valley of the Sun,
I saw the daughter-in-law at the Phoenix Symphony a few days later,
and it was fun all around.
When I said "hi" to him two years later
I don't think Marcus knew me from, well, you know,
but it will still fun all around.
1.2 2025 February
1.2.1 2025 February 9 - My Tape Project
There was an
outfit
called The Tape Project
where they found master tapes of deserving record albums
and sold high-quality "master-dub" copies for about $300.
I believe they ultimately failed because they put about $100
in packaging around each box they sold and didn't make money,
but I have no way of knowing what actually happened.
My own tape project is a little different.
I have forty tapes I made in 1981 and 1982,
15-inch-per-second, half-track, quarter-inch reels,
that deserve preservation.
The later reels on Maxell tape are fine,
but the old Ampex reels have succumbed to Sticky Tape Syndrome
where the tape gets gooey and sticky and yukky.
There is a process of baking them for twelve hours at 60° C
where they get dry and playable for two or three days
so I can copy them onto Maxell reels I bought
just over twenty years ago that are still good.
(I discuss this in Section 1.1.10.)
I'm copying them all onto digital files
at 24 bits and 96000 samples per second,
high-enough quality to be almost as good
as the original tapes.
(I have copies I made at compact-disk (CD) quality,
16 bits and 44000 samples per second
and they're not too bad.)
For now I'm just copying the newer Maxell reels to digital files,
I bought a big beef-jerky oven to bake the Ampex tapes later on.
So, this morning, I'm back in time, 1981 April 2 9:30pm
in Palo Alto at Chuck's Celler listening to Solar Plexus.
It's very nice, the sound is terrific, and the memories are terrific.
1.2.2 2025 February 21 - Car Accident and Back Pain
Good news is my car-accident injuries are abating.
You know the drill:
"My doctor says I'll get better and my lawyer says I won't."
My car crash on 2025 January 17 left me with sore lower-right ribs
and difficulty turning my head up-down and left-right.
The rib injury is pretty-much gone and
the neck injury is abating, still some trouble,
and still some concern riding a bicycle where turning my head
is a useful thing to avoid getting hit.
That part of my medical life is getting better.
I'm having some sciatic-style pain that concerns me.
When I stand up for more than ten or fifteen minutes
I get pain in my left leg, not localized,
just everywhere in my left leg.
It's a little and then a little more and then more and then a lot.
I suspect it's some kind of sciatic pain
and I have an appointment with my doctor next Monday.
In 1985 I herniated my L5 disk, the lowest lower-back vertebra,
and on 1986 February 14 I sneezed in the middle of the night
and had twenty-one hours of severe sciatic pain
I don't every want to relive. Whee!
That pain has only returned in faint shadows
of its original intensity and I've had periods of about a month
walking with a cane, but never have I had a recurrance.
My latest cane usage is completely different
with my left knee "worn out" from forty years of running,
not the same thing at all.
I've known in the back of my mind
there might be a time when that disk would squeeze down
and my sciatic nerve would be pinched so I would be
in agony for the rest of my life.
I just hoped that day would be the day after I die.
This isn't that, at least not yet,
but social, casual conversations with a medical doctor or two
tell me it might be something surgically fixable.
I expect Monday's doctor visit to result in me getting
a scan (MRI) to find out what's going on in there and then
to figure our what I'm going to do.
It might get better, good, or it might get worse.
Right now I have no pain at all while sitting or lying down,
only when standing for a while.
While not being able to stand around would be a life change
as I have several stand-up social settings in my life,
at least now I have the relief of being able to sit down.
I'll keep you all posted.
1.3 2025 March
1.3.1 2025 March 12 - Hifi
Hi Jim,
I hope you enjoyed joining my hifi journey yesterday.
and I hope you enjoyed finding out how wonderful
hearing-aid technology is in 2025,
especially for music.
Turning the hearing aids off and on made clear
how much they do.
That proves how wonderful hearing aids can be for music.
We know they help us
(say it out loud)
wreck a nice beach,
and now it's clear they help us perceive and resolve
musical information as well.
On Steely Dan's record "Aja"
we heard a lot of musical detail.
Apparently your high-frequency loss isn't as severe as mine
because you were able to hear the little bell in the right rear
on the chorus of the title track "Aja" and I wasn't.
I'll point out that one of my hifi revelations was hearing
that bell on that track on a really-good hifi amplifier where,
instead of just being a high-frequency "ting" in the background,
it had shape and form as part of the music.
We walked through three digital recordings
from a reel-to-reel tape of Ravi Shanker,
16-48, 16-96, and 24-96.
The first is sixteen-bit depth with
forty-eight thousand samples per second,
the second is still sixteen-bit depth with
ninety-six thousand samples per second, and
the third is twenty-four-bit depth still with
ninety-six thousand samples per second.
With your hearing aids you clearly heard the differences
to the point where the first was limp and uninspiring,
the second better, and the third was quite engaging.
Since I prefer to play tapes all the way through,
I was lazy and didn't produce the final step
to the tape itself,
but my point was well made
that your old ears with the new hearing aids
were able easily to hear the differences.
When I put on the digital copy of my tape
from 1980 February 13 at The Bucket bar in Palo Alto,
a wonderful evening of wonderful jazz from forty-five years ago,
the stereophonic presentation of the stage
and the placement of the instruments,
something we hifi weenies call "image,"
gave the reproduction a strong sense of authenticity and fidelity.
The recording was made with a portable compact-cassette deck,
a Sony TCD5, on Maxell UD tape, no chrome, no metal in those days,
and no noise reduction,
just a plain-jane compact cassette,
and the recording was joy.
On a similarly spatious stereophonic recording
of a Swedish choir on the Proprius label,
it was clearly better when I changed the vertical tracking angle
of my phonograph cartridge from the angle best for "Aja"
to the angle best for Proprius records.
On a Mercury Living Presence record of Spanish music
an even-smaller adjustment,
even on an outer groove where it makes less difference,
was still audible improvement.
I played some of your own recordings,
only MP3 quality alas,
of your own guitar-and-vocal performance.
You were pleased that you didn't make any
(or many)
mistakes
on the recording and I hope,
when an appropriate venue presents itself,
you decide to let me make a proper, analogue recording.
I also shared with you a fun merger
of 1955 and 2025 technologies where an old "staggered" tape
with left and right channels time spaced for tape-head isolation
was able to be heard from a post-1955, new "stacked" deck
using FFMPEG computer software.
The recording was a Haydn symphony and the corrected playback
had a clear orchestral sound with a glorious stereo image.
My hifi insight is considerable
over five decades of being an audio weenie.
We have talked about this,
that much of my "genius" is that I understand the
insights and vision of other people who often know more than I do,
and much of my hifi vision comes from my
forty-four year relationship,
as a customer and as a friend, with Mel Schilling.
Most of my equipment is related somehow to Mel,
the Quad ESL
(for ElectroStatic Loudspeakers)
in my hifi room were his,
he gave them to me
(for $800, that was a gift)
in 1985,
and I figure he used them for twenty years before that.
He sold me my Linn Sondek LP12 turntable in 1979,
his associate John Iverson made my amplifier in the 1980s,
and my EK-1 phono-pickup system was a partnership
between Mel and John circa 1980.
Actually, in 1980, his "techie" Mike Frasier sold me
the two ReVox tape decks that I still have and use.
Mel's insight into music and sound are a major part
of my own hifi insight and understanding.
1.3.2 2025 March 30 - Increasingly Dense Traffic
I've noticed a disturbing trend in the
Phoenix Valley of the Sun,
the increasing density of road traffic.
Not only are they denser, they're more numerous.
(Get it?)
Having more cars on the road is scary enough,
especially when I'm spending more time on my bicycle.
More cars means more opportunity for one of them to hit me.
It's worse than that because each of those drivers
is looking at more other cars and that means
they have less attention available to look for me.
The last-few years randomization of the traffic light sequences
in Scottsdale is also disturbing.
We used to be famous for the "lagging left"
where our green left-turn arrow came after
the straight-traffic which has several advantages
for both motor traffic and for bicyclists and runners.
Now about half of them come before and half come after,
so there isn't even method to the madness.
Drivers distracted by randomized traffic lights
of course have less attention to devote to avoiding
hitting bicyclists.
My last beef is the change in attitude.
I believe this is a migration from the California coast.
If Los Angeles is the "Mental Desert,"
then Phoenix has become the "New Mental Desert"
where people who can't afford California real-estate prices
or people who don't like the results of California politics
decide to come here.
(Alas, they may dislike the results of California politics
but these people generally do not renounce the political positions
that made things that way, so they're bringing the same problems here.)
When I lived in the Golden State of California
a few decades ago, the driving was a major problem for me.
Drivers weren't just negligent and stupid,
they were perverse.
Bay area drivers tend to hide just behind another driver,
in the other driver's so-called blind spot.
I guess they figured they wouldn't be hurt if they couldn't be seen.
It doesn't work that way and I found myself "pinned" in a lane
by some other driver who rushed from behind to block me in.
Los Angeles drivers tend to drive next to others at their speed,
again changing their speed perversely to be in the way.
As those drivers migrate east to Arizona,
their bad habits come here as well.
I find myself having to do more lane changes this year
than in years past,
more than the increased number of cars would suggest.
I find other drivers also have the perverse habit
of slowing down when I get behind them
and speeding up when I try to pass,
both bad things to do.
Add this to the dramatic increase in no-signal drivers
and the increased tendency to make wide turns into the wrong lanes
and the result is a more-stressful, less-safe road system.
I'm open to suggestions what is the best way to deal with this.
A few years ago I raised the turn-signal, wide-turns, and
randomized traffic lights to the Scottsdale traffic regulators.
I'm a bright, articulate, Stanford-Ph.D. person,
I spoke carefully and calmly from notes with my reasons
for concern,
and I expected some dialogue, but I was completely ignored.
Oh well, maybe it's just going to get more and more awful.
1.4 2025 April
1.4.1 2025 April 10 - Arts Cultural Revolution
I'm having a bit of frustration with
a trend in some of the local performing arts,
local in place and local in time.
Let me get the local-in-place off my chest.
Many so-called "classical" pieces of music are written in movements.
Symphonies usually have four movements,
concerti usually have three movements,
but there are many examples with different numbers.
Some story-style pieces have ten or more movements.
When and where I come from we are silent between movements,
maybe clearing a throat or a cough, but never applause.
(When I took my mother to the Philadelphia Orchestra
we would often smile at each other as if it were our secret
how beautiful this piece of music was,
kind of like we winked at each other watching detective shows
as if we were the only ones who knew who committed the crime.)
Per cliché this between-movement silence is golden,
a romantic, holy chasm in the plateau of sound.
Alas, while this respect is nearly universal back east,
here in Phoenix applause between movements happens
and it frustrates me, especially at the Phoenix Symphony.
I had a short conversation
with then-music-director Tito Muñez
where he defended it by suggesting that
between-movement applause was okay in Mozart's time.
I still maintain it's not a good thing in our time
and I try to encourage people near me to keep quiet
and I raise my arms in the air as a signal to those behind me.
Who knows?
I may yet win this battle as more and more concerts
seem free of between-movement applause.
My other, local-in-time, beef is a kind of cultural revolution
in performing arts.
Some so-called classical concerts have electronic music
or amplified instruments, a little bit of modernism creeping in,
but my greater beef is when my two ballet companies,
Arizona and Philadelphia,
have selections that have no ballet in them.
I'm a huge fan of all kinds of dance,
Martha Graham, Paul Taylor, Dave Parsons, Momix, Pilabolus,
Dorrance, Alvin Ailey, Aspen-Santa Fe, et cetera,
along with international dance including
Flamenco, Irish tap dancing, Indian, and Cambodian styles.
They have their own individual "vocabularies" of dance movement
as different ballet choreographers have their own vocabularies.
George Ballanchine was a major force in ballet
here in the United States during the Twentieth Century.
I have seen ballets that are different,
pressing their metaphorical noses against the glass walls
of the ballet medium,
but only one that felt extended his intensity and energy
with new movements and forms without pressing the limits.
(My reservations about "outside the box"
is I had a cat who thought that way and I had to clean it up
each morning.)
That ballet exploring new frontiers completely inside the box
was "PS" by Juliano Nunes in Philadelphia.
I remember less of what I saw and more of what I felt,
but I had no doubt it was all ballet, it was new and exciting,
and it was not Ballanchine.
So it can be done.
When I see a half-hour ballet where I see no ballet movements,
or very little,
I feel something essential is missing.
I get the response, "Well, it's contemporary."
If I go the opera and a jazz band comes out with no vocals,
then my response is to feel robbed, not to feel it's okay
because "it's contemporary."
Of course the post-modern cultural vibe is our minds
should be open, at both ends sometimes,
a vision I don't share.
Like my opera example, I want some of my ballet shows
to be new and different, but not to abandon their ballet roots.
My response to the notion that these dancers should have
an opportunity to show their abilities in fora other than ballet
is to suggest having a show that specifically says it's not ballet,
that's it's our "Modern Dance Show" or something like that.
I believe the effect of being open minded to extreme
is to create an atmosphere that, all too soon,
will forget the traditions that make the original art
wonderful and special.
We have seen what "cultural revolutions" have done
in China and here in the United States
where past glories are forgotten in the quest for new vision.
I want my orchestra to keep playing
Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, et cetera
and I want my ballet companies to keep doing
"Swan Lake" and "Sleeping Beauty" while they explore new frontiers,
and I want those frontier still to keep traditional roots.
Is that too much to ask?
1.4.2 2025 April 14 - Opera Aida in AI
Just in case my opera-jazz example was too esoteric,
I saw a production of "Aida" yesterday at Phoenix Symphony Hall.
Instead of the usual magnificent sets and theatrical blocking
and creative costumes,
they had the usual orchestra in the pit,
the singers and chorus onstage,
and a big screen with AI (as in "artificial intelligence")
generating a visual image following the music.
The images were creative with computer-generated lip-synching
for some of the arias.
Aida is set in ancient Egypt in a war with Ethiopia
and they managed to have tanks and rocket bombs for the war,
solar panels on the rooftops,
twenty-first-century windmills in the scenic backgrounds,
and an old, rotary-dial telephone for one intimate conversation.
I found myself quite happy with the performance
once I ignored the visual effects.
I'll point out that one of my seat neighbors
thought the visuals were a good thing,
interesting and creative and supporting the plot of Aida.
The fourth act had the computer screen completely dark
and I don't know if it was technical failure
or reflecting the darkness of the buried-alive-in-a-tomb
death sentence for him-and-her characters Radames and Aida.
I have been to concert-opera events before.
Avid opera conducor Riccardo Muti was
the music director at the Philadelphia Orchestra
for a dozen years and he managed to sneak in
some operas performed in a concert setting
without sets or costumes.
These were wonderful musical events,
but nobody pretended these were real opera performances.
Unlike the movie-screen shows of actual, live operas,
the music here was all live and it filled the hall with joy
as only a live-performer presentation does.
They told us up front the visuals would be computer generated,
but, still, I wasn't the only one who felt it fell short
of an actual on-stage opera.
I'm sure "it's contemporary,"
but I missed the opera in the opera
as I missed the ballet in the ballet
a few weeks earlier.
If anybody has any opinions to offer here,
then I'm "all-ears" interested to hear them.
1.4.3 2025 April 21 - My First Seaplane Ride
I fly airplanes single-engine land (ASEL),
as it says on my pilot certificate,
and I got my first ride in a seaplane last Saturday.
I belong to the Experimental Airplane Association (EAA)
even though I don't build or experiment on airplanes,
my chapter got a donation of a seaplane ride from Tod
for its door-prize lottery, and I won it.
We met at Phoenix Deer Valley Airport (DVT),
definitely a land airport,
we flew around and landed on Roosevelt Lake,
definitely a water landing.
Each landing was preceded by three say-it-aloud statements from Tod.
In one case,
"This is a land landing;
the green light is on;
the gear is visibly down,"
and, in the other case,
"This is a water landing,
the blue light is on,
the gear is visibly up."
As depressing as a gear-up landing is at an airport,
a gear-down water landing is far worse
as the airplane usually flips over and often tears apart from impact.
There's an old line about landing-gear mishaps,
there are those who have and those who will,
and we like to stay in the those-who-will category
until death do us part.
We also wore our life jackets.
The last thing I want to have to worry about
after a water-landing accident is
finding a life jacket and trying to put it on.
I recall one time I got my airplane preheated on a chilly day
(−35°C, −30°F) in International Falls (INL),
known as Frostbite Falls to Rocky the Flying Squirrel
and Bullwinkle Moose.
The preheat was fanastic, my engine was warm to my touch
and the cockpit was quite warm (50°C, 120°F).
I was about to throw my jacket in the back seat
and the same thought occurred to me.
If I found myself putting my airplane down in the trees
at minus thirty something degrees,
the last thing I want to worry about
is finding my jacket and trying to put it on.
So we flew with life jackets on quite happily.
Landing on water is really cool
with a gentle touchdown and water splashing on the sides.
Once we're down and stopped on the surface
the airplane "weathervanes" into the wind
unless there is some correction using some engine thrust.
This airplane is a Grumman Widgeon,
two engines mounted high on the wings,
so differential thrust was an option to steer.
The high wing causes a significant aerodynamic change
when flaps are applied so the design folks at Grumman decided
to add a special trim on the elevator linked to the flaps
that gives a nose-down compensation when flaps are put down.
When I flew high-wing trainer airplanes
I learned the mantra, "flaps down nose down"
to remember to trim the airplane down.
I usually use that change as a chance to slow the airplane down,
which is the primary affect of the flaps-generated nose-up effect,
so I didn't have to retrim the airplane
and my low-wing Piper Cherokee lacks this flaps-generated change.
Taxiing an airplane around on a lake was fun.
The birds on the water put their heads down below the surface
when they see us coming their way.
1.5 2025 May
1.5.1 2025 May 16 - Old Computers
I was educated by computer people who used computers
when wire-wrap programs were superceded by punched cards.
I had a lovely conversation with an older cousin
about computers "back in the day"
when programs on punched cards were all the rage
and output came from line printers
in big rooms with refrigerator-sized cabinets
filled with processors and memory and mass storage
and drives with jerky-moving reels of magnetic tape.
These rooms had white-tile floors and loud cooling fans
and we reminisced about the now-long-lost programming skills
we developed in those days that we applied in later, easier life.
I have spent almost all of my career
writing "industrial-mathematics" computer programs
that solve business problems.
I definitely have The Knack for programming,
but I believe my education and computing heritage
have something to do with my success.
I learned BASIC
(Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instructional Code,
talk about an word looking for an acronym)
and then FORTRAN IV
(we spelled computer-language names in all-caps back then,
ALGOL, COBOL, SNOBOL, PL-1, as they were usually acronyms),
and my programming attitudes and style come from those tools.
I remember a conversation circa 1985 where
I was promoting the use of FORTRAN over some newer languages.
When I pointed out my success my colleague explained
that it wasn't the tool but the craftsman,
that I might well get similarly-superior results in
the C programming language that was gaining popularity.
He was ultimately right, but maybe only half right,
as I wrote my code in C from 1991 forward,
but I used a FORTRAN-style subset of the language
that horrified those who promoted the C language.
I felt the so-called advantages of C over FORTRAN
were destructive distractions that produced programs
that were hard to maintain
and that didn't run well so they needed maintenance.
I'm getting used to the idea that the analogy
between Ray Krok and post-modern software methodologies
like Waterfall, Agile, and JIRA is all too apt.
The same way McDonald's is fast and cheap
and hardly a substitute for a real chef making good food,
Waterfall, Agile, and JIRA, while neither fast nor cheap alas,
allow far less capable people to write computer code,
but that code doesn't do the jobs as well as programs
written by really-qualified people.
The way I see it is one in a million can really program computers
and one in a thousand can crank out sausage-like code
with tools like Waterfall, Agile, and JIRA.
So we went from eight thousand capable programmers
to eight million software developers and
maybe doubled what is produced.
We might get another 50% if we put
the rest of the world's population into software
and then we would reach the point where
everybody's writing code and nobody's doing anything else,
the Douglas-Adams-Hitchhiker's-Guide "software event horizon."
I think we're closer to that than most people realize.
I'll point out I know several people
who aren't one-in-a-million who still write good software.
Their organizational skills and planning-process perspective
make them able to solve problems using computers
that have historically been beyond the reach
of large software organizations.
All those platitudes about attitude seem to apply
more than ever to programming digital computers.
So there's my take on old-school computing
versus post-modern, new-age software weenies.
1.5.2 2025 May 31 - Grading my Graduate Course
There is fuss these days about academic standards.
My one-and-only exposure to being an academic professional
is teaching a course OMS8660
"Introduction to Mathematical Programming,"
a Ph.D.-level course at the University of Minnesota.
I was what they called an "adjunct" professor
which meant I kept my day job but I
showed up evenings for lectures,
distributed and marked homework assignments,
gave a final exam,
and assigned final grades for the course.
I had eleven students,
nine from various parts of the Indian subcontinent,
one Chinese fellow, and a blonde from Wisconin.
Every course starts off with a "scare lecture"
where the professor has the opportunity to instill fear
in the students lest they ask for favors or mercy.
There's a classic scare lecture in William Goldman's book
The Marathon Man that starts,
"I hope you all flunk."
I walked in, put a paper bag on the table,
introduced myself, and said I was new at this game.
"Anbody who shows me excellence will get an A in this course."
Then I made the rest up.
"I had a student named Michael who was very concerned about grades,
we had a long talk,"
and I pulled a human skull out of the bag and put it on the table,
"and Michael didn't say any more about grades.
Of course you should feel free to discuss the subject with me."
Well, I gave a truly-challenging final exam
with an example of "the cutting-stock problem" which was
new enough not to be in textbooks, so they had
really to understand that material in the course.
All of them got more than 90% on the exam and
I turned in a grade sheet with eleven A grades.
When I called the department head,
concerned about the impression I succumbed to grade-inflation,
he said not to worry.
"I saw your final exam."
He figured anybody getting 90% on that exam knew the stuff.
1.6 2025 June
1.6.1 2025 June 17 - ChatGPT AI Experience
Remember when
World-Wide-Web
search engines first appeared?
It all looked so easy,
just type what you're looking for in the search window
and voila, there it is!
Somehow they work better now, but
it seemed like I typed "bear smokey"
and got linked to bears in the Smoky Mountains.
partly because they work better now and
partly because we learned how to use them.
We learned tricks and shortcuts,
some ours and some theirs.
I remember how cute it was that
"right to bear arms" got a bunch of links
to Michelle Obama in sleeveless outfits
and they eventually sent "dicks" to
Dick's Sporting Goods instead of
where a more-perverted mind would have expected.
The new Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems
seem to claim everything and, up until yesterday,
I haven't seen much.
I've heard horror stories about computer code produced by them
and a friend and I got some very strange results
"ego surfing" on ChatGPT.
("Ego surfing" is looking for oneself on the web.)
A friend says he found it useful looking for specific things
in his study of German like declensions and conjugations
of nouns and verbs.
(I'm told the search engines don't work as well as they used to
as they now go through these AI engines rather than directly
search the web sites like they used to.)
So my friend, not a computer geek,
not knowing anything about "the cloud" or virtual machines,
offered to help me reset my Google-Cloud account.
I had help message from India that told me to click a figure
next to a button that must have been on some other screen.
Really? Yes, really!
So he pulls up ChatGPT on his laptop
and types my question,
"How do I reactivate my Google Cloud account?"
It gave a sequence of operations that we could easily follow
complete with a place to reactivate my account.
My payment plan was already changed,
it's just the Google wouldn't "activate"
me using the service I paid for.
The question "How do I restart my Google-Cloud virtual machine?"
got similarly-useful results, screen by screen, menu by menu.
Granted, here I had some knowledge of my own,
but it got me where I needed to go.
Does that mean AI is "the cat's meow" that will
solve all our problems?
Probably not, but I'm not so quick to dismiss it either.
1.6.2 2025 June 18 - Don't Computers Do That?
When I call my pharmacy to refill my prescription
the recording takes about thirty seconds to explain to me
that I should type just the six-digit number
without any leading zeros and without the two digits
after the hyphen at the end.
Now wait a minute.
Isn't this sequence of digits going to a computer?
How much programming software would it take to have the
computer receiving the digits ignore leading zeros
and stop recording after the first six digits?
The computer could do that in a millisecond
and I wouldn't have to listen to a recording
telling me in detail to ignore leading zeros and trailing digits.
A web page rejects my credit card because
the expiration date from my auto-fill software came out
01/2030 instead of their desired 0130.
Again, isn't that the sort of thing computers are supposed to do?
Another one rejects 85258-3106 as my zip code
with no explanation when it just wants 85258 without
the last four digits.
If it doesn't need those digits,
then why can't it just ignore them?
On the one hand we have search engines
filling in my search after the first two or three characters,
usually correctly, no problems,
and then rejecting my correct data because it isn't in
their preferred format.
Shouldn't our user-friendliness standards
be a little higher than that?
1.6.3 2025 June 28 - Peter Frampton Blues
I went to a big Peter-Frampton concert in Phoenix.
I have a fifty-year-old copy of "Framptom Comes Alive!"
and I hoped the VIP ticket I bought for my front-row seat
would get my record signed.
Well, they told me he wouldn't sign personal items,
I don't blame him,
he's seventy-five and suffering from some medical ailments,
but they sold signed vinyl records at the merchandise table.
I got a new, signed copy of "Frampton Comes Alive!" and
a recent record by the Peter Frampton Band called "All Blues."
I didn't know Peter Frampton did the blues,
but he does, and the record is terrific,
a win all around.
1.7 2025 July
1.7.1 2025 July 2 - Then and Now
I've reached an age where I have history
with events and organizations.
Sometimes there's a clear ending, like a war or an event,
sometimes there's clear continuity between then and now, and
sometimes it's gray.
My Vietnam-veteran friends have no expectation that
going back there today will relive the old days,
not that those old days were good.
The war is over and done.
I last lived in or near Philadelphia
fifty-one years ago in 1974.
That's a pretty-long time ago,
but I go back several times each year.
There are some new buildings in the skyline
and I have new friends,
but the place is still the same place.
The traffic jams on the Schuylkill Expressway are the same,
the Academy of Music concert hall is still
a wonderful, beautiful, uplifting cathedral for music and dance,
my home town of Cheltenham is pretty-much the same
with the old Frank-Lloyd-Wright synagogue Beth Shalom
and my high school and Curtis Arboretum
where we ran cross-country meets.
Sure, the big maple tree in front of my childhood house is gone
along with my elementary and junior-high schools,
but I still feel like home there.
Twenty-five years ago a buddy of mine was enjoying
a web page from his old military base #176 in Germany.
I asked him if it was the same place, he said no,
or the same people, he said no,
so I wondered if the connection was any more than just
the number 176.
I would have felt better for him if there was some
continuity where the people from the old place moved to the new place.
It's kind of like when I see the Doobie Brothers
or Yes or Tower of Power or the Righteous Brothers
where there's just one old fellow from the original band.
I feel better when there's some continuity between Then and Now.
My high school is the same but it's different.
For a while there was a growing population from Korea
with the same crazy-academic emphasis as the Jewish kids
had in my day and the old Yiddish signs on Cheltenham Avenue
changed to Korean.
More recently there are less-desirable changes,
even fights in the hallways,
but many of the strengths are still there.
I still attend the cross-country reunion races each year
and enjoying spending time afterwards on campus.
My old coach is still there in an "emeritus" status
and the new coach and I share a mutual respect I enjoy.
As for where I went to college,
there have been significant political and social changes.
Even with the same name in the same place maybe,
as New Yorkers used to say, "it's not the same."
1.7.2 2025 July 18 - Minnesota Friends
I just had a lovely weekend with my Minnesota friends.
I lived there 1991 April through 1995 October,
almost five years, and made a lot of friends, mostly my age.
I stayed with Mike, Helen, and George and shared meals with
Rick, Linda, Ned, Tommy, Mark, Kevin, and Kim, all meals of joy.
One fellow said it's always nice to see friends,
but sometimes it isn't,
sometimes Mary is a pain or Peter's kids are obnoxious
or Sam nags about not getting a knee replacement or whatever
and you have to see these people out of obligation.
Fortunately,
I don't have any of that, at least not in these circles.
It's a pleasure and a blessing to have friends I truly enjoy.
There were the usual health issues of any gathering
of people in their late sixties, but most of us were doing okay.
Those who weren't doing okay were managing to get along
and didn't let their medical woes dampen our good moods.
One subject that came up is several of these older friends
are older people who used older computers
back in the days of punched cards and line printers.
My even-older friend Forman programmed computers
with wire-wrap and solder for more-permanent programs,
but all of us are young enough that we only go back
to batch computing using punched cards and line printers.
Besides the obvious nostalgic reminiscing
and the ongoing gratitude that we have newer, easier methods today,
there was a sense that we programmed better back then.
I was the one person in all this who has managed
to program the same way now as forty years ago and,
somehow, I managed to get away with it in a whirlwind world
of new-and-improved computer software systems.
(If it's new, then how can it be improved? Go figure!)
The common thread is that we all wrote software systems
that did things that weren't done before and
we all added significant value to the world in doing so.
I believe there's a connection between the discipline and rigor
of our methods and the positive results we were able to produce.
There were also stories of music and hifi
and I told some of my own where I merged "ancient"
media
with computing technology seventy years newer
to hear some wonderful tapes I got on eBay.
Friends are a true gift to me,
I like to think I did something right and good to deserve
them in my life.
1.8 2025 August
1.8.1 2025 August 1 - 110%
One of the things I remember coaches saying
is the path to success is "giving 110%" which is
coach-speak for making every effort a maximum effort.
Every workout had to be pushed to the limit and any effort
short of that was somehow cheating.
The slogan was, "no pain, no gain," and the message was
if our competition is working harder than we are,
then they will win when we meet.
I remember one athlete saying his dark-morning-rainy-day runs
were satisfying as he pictured the other guy sleeping in
and not training.
Arthur Lydiard found that training his top athetes
at a partial effort most of the time worked very well.
He had his athletes run longer and slower on most days
and saved their maximum effort for specific hard workouts.
When I was training for marathons almost all my
training was "LSD" as in long, slow distance for about
ninety miles (150 Km) per week.
Only occasionally would I do a "tempo run" at a faster pace
where I was breathing hard the whole way.
My usual pace passed Dr. George Sheehan's "talk test"
where I would be running easy enough for conversation.
The hard runs were painful and difficult,
but they were thrilling and exhilarating efforts of joy.
There seems to be some combination of hormones
that makes sustained maximum pleasurable and fun.
As I ran along the facing-traffic left side of narrow roads,
I had to remember that,
no matter how invincible I may have felt,
I would come a distant second place
in a collision with an automobile.
Fortunately, most of the roads I ran were
lightly-enough traveled that cars weren't a problem.
Now, in my dotage, my knee is worn out, no more running,
but I keep a "maximum sustainable effort" in my training.
What I mean by that is that I maintain a level of effort
hard enough to stay fit and easy enough that I still enjoy it
and have no desire to become lazy and to skip workouts.
I do a set of exercises each morning, each with 70% effort,
so I enjoy my fifteen minutes of physical effort.
My twenty-mile (32 Km) bicycle rides are similarly
sub-maximum effort.
I'm tired after a couple of hours out there,
more so when Scottsdale summer temperatures
reach 45°C (115°F),
but I don't finish gasping and puking,
no 110% effort, just a good, pleasurable, enjoyable ride.
I'll point out that consistency still counts.
When I was training for races I would still do my
dark-morning-rainy-day runs with similar satisfaction.
It's just that I might go a little easier so I wouldn't
plant my foot in a too-deep puddle, fall down,
and lose my chance at victory at the next competition.
I'm learning that taking an occasional day off from any activity
is also a part of the 110%-to-70% sustainable effort.
1.8.2 2025 August 9 - Windows 11 Audacity Adventure
I have been transcribing, copying, archiving, and digitizing
my old reel tapes from 1981 using some new technology
from this decade.
These are tapes I made in bars and clubs and small concert halls
when I was a graduate student at Stanford,
fifteen inches per second (15 IPS, 38 cm/sec)
quarter-inch half-track open-reel tape
with a well-placed pair of Nakamichi CM-700 cartioid microphones
and a pair of ReVox A77 tape decks.
In the world of tape hifi, this is decidedly "mid-fi"
rather than "high-end,"
but it's the best sound in my living room.
(A few years ago I heard one of my own tapes played on a friend's
high-end Studer A80 and it was profoundly better than my ReVox.
In my world of high-end audio there's an even higher-end to be heard.)
Anyhow, I've been using a Sound Devices USBPre-2
analogue-to-digital (A2D), a premium device for tapes
that deserve the best treatment
and I used a Windows 10 computer running Audacity.
Here is one case where Windows worked a lot better than Linux
as I couldn't get Audacity to remain free of small dropouts
on my Linux laptops and Windows works fine,
even when the computer is busy doing other things
like Media Monkey and TeamViewer.
At "24/96" digital resolution the tape is still clearly better,
the higher digital resolutions are not, so I use 24/96.
It's a lot better than compact-disk 16/44
and not audibly worse than 32/192.
Here bigger numbers are better, you get the idea.
So it was time for Windows 11 and now the digital recording
was overloading, saturating, clipping, whatever you want to call it
when the emerald-green and amber-yellow display turns bright ruby-red.
Turning the record level down on the Sound Devices USBPre-2
didn't seem to change anything,
it didn't change when I turned the tape-deck-output level
down,
and it didn't even change when I turned the USBPre-2 completely off!
Well, it took some monkeying around to figure out
that there was some missing driver and the laptop was bypassing
all my expensive, elegant, eloquent electronics
and using the little microphone it has for speech communication.
Review of the resulting digital file was as terrible
as one would expect.
The immediate, obvious symptom was no stereo separation.
Here is one minute of the good file
from Windows 10 and
here is one minute of the bad file
I got from Windows 11.
It took some late-night help from my computer-geek friend Noah,
and now I'm back to re-recording my tapes using my highfalutin gear
and not the tiny, tinny microphone.
Well, that wasn't what I really wanted to do with
my Friday night, but I like the results of having the
confluence of old and new technologies,
1981 tape and 2025 computers,
and I guess this is the price.
At least I didn't send any of these files to anybody else
who might actually listen to them!
1.8.3 2025 August 17 - Mystic Bluffs
Weather was perfect and seldom was heard a discouraging word.
I went with my usual flying companian Tyler
and his friend Megan
and we flew home through some canyons along the Salt River
not too far from Phoenix, more breathtaking scenery.
The increasing clouds brought neither
thunderstorms nor turbulance, so the flight home was pleasant.
1.8.4 2025 August 19 - 1981 Was a Very Good Year
To a young friend
who just celebrated his Quarter-Century birthday,
I would point out I was twenty-four once in 1981,
a year before I got my job at Bell Telephone Laboratories,
five years before I first flew in a light airplane.
My hobby at the time was hifi-stereo audio and I expressed that by
finding great-sounding gear that I could afford,
building some of it myself
and buying some of it from my limited funds.
I still have the turntable I bought,
the subwoofer I made,
the tonearm I designed and manufactured,
and the tape-recording gear I got.
In addition to listening critically to audio gear and learning
what makes music music,
I also
recorded
live jazz at various clubs.
Throughout 1981
I would put one of my so-called-portable ReVox reel-to-reel decks
in the trunk of my VW Beetle
along with a mike stand,
a red bag with six ten-inch reels of tape,
and a green bag with my microphones, cables,
and a very-portable Sony TC-D5 compact-cassette deck.
I took the reels home and the band got the cassettes that night.
Jazz happened late at night in those days
and I would get home
at 26:00 (two o'clock the next morning)
and I had to listen to the tape while the music
was still fresh in my mind
and then get up at 5:00 the next day for my
morning run.
Most of these two-mike stereophonic recording are gems,
gorgeous spatial representations of
the tone, timbre, and texture of music.
In terms of audiophile excellence,
these tapes are decidedly more than a small step
better than anything else I have on my shelves.
In the world of tape machinery,
the Swiss ReVox is definitely "mid-fi,"
a cut above most of the Japanese decks
(which were quite good themselves)
and decidedly compromised compared to the
table-size-with-casters Studer decks.
The good news is that tape decks tend to record
better than they play,
so there's more on my tapes than I hear.
A few years ago I got to hear one my ReVox A77 tapes
on a friend's Studer A80 and, wow!, what a difference!
The difference is my friend doesn't have a van,
so the Studer never made it "into the field"
while my ReVox decks have little dings and scuffs
from all the times they were bounced in and out of
my recording venues to make the forty tapes on my wall.
So, forty-four years later, am I so excited about all this?
Well, I've been buying audiophile tapes from one company or another
since that same time, 1981, when it was quickly-defunct Sound Ideas
to The Tape Project
and, more recently, International Phonograph Inc, (IPI)
out of Chicago.
IPI has sold me quite a mix of new recordings and old treasures
going back to 1959 (Ira Sullivan on trumpet) and
I feel my amateur efforts at least let me be at their table,
even if I only get a corner seat.
Well, the new guy at IPI has taken a liking to my stuff
and I'm heading to their new facilities in Fort Lauderdale
next month to share some listening.
I'll get to hear some of their material
and my own tapes on their superior equipment
and I'm sure we'll swap lots of stories.
We'll be baking some of my old Sticky-Tape-Syndrome Ampex tapes
that haven't been played in a few decades,
put them in the oven at 60°C for twelve hours
and we get to play them for a few hours,
a chance to copy them to new tape and to digital file formats.
It should be a lot of fun.
1.8.6 2025 August 21 - Hidden Figures
If you haven't seen the movie "Hidden Figures,"
then I recommend seeing it.
Actually, even if you have seen it,
then it's a good-enough story to be worth watching it again.
There are a couple of Hollywood liberties,
but the basic story is true and important.
It's about the human calculators who did the mathematics
for space flight before there were digital computers doing it.
As a marginal "Bright" myself from Mark Clifton's
"Star Bright" story about two brilliant five-year-old children,
I understand the frustrations and dynamic of really smart people,
both as children and as adults.
There's much to say about Ender's Game
by Orson Scott Card, a story about a brilliant eleven-year-old child
manipulated by adults to do something he didn't really want to do,
but not here.
On top of their astonishing intellectual and mathematical minds,
these human "computors" were black women in 1962,
so the prejudices and discriminations about race and sex
figure prominantly into the story, as they should.
In the movie Katherine Johnson has to spend part of her day
going back and forth to the too-distant colored restroom
while the real Katherine Johnson just used the white restroom
without any fuss made about it.
Still, the justaposition of NASA and that kind of prejudice
not only makes a good plot but also was really there.
There were a few moments, however, where I saw past
the race-sex issues to the general mistreatment of smart people.
Because she was "only" a computing person
she wasn't able to put her name on her own work
and she didn't have timely access to the information she needed.
She often waiting patiently outside the Big-Room meetings
where decisions were being made.
It's a kind of Dunning-Kruger effect
where the not-smart people don't realize they're not smart
and certainly don't recognize how much smarter
the smart people are.
My career is punctuated with job changes,
and now retirement,
based on the inability of pretty-smart people
to realize how much smarter very-smart people are.
(That's why I have more time to write these essays.)
If life were fair, then these smart people
might have no more access or privilege than the rest of us.
If life were just, on the other hand, then these people
would be respected, venerated, and admired.
My extreme example,
historically true and also in movies,
is England.
You may notice the signs in London are in English and not German.
That's because of a group of people led by Alan Turing,
who was not admired, respected, or venerated.
In fact, when the authorities in England found out he was
a homosexual
(the more-official term for what we call "gay" today)
he was forced to take hormones that made him ill and frustrated enough
to take his own life.
When they burned the work
to make sure nobody would find out about it,
I like to think I would have stood up and said,
"No. I want to make sure if any of us walk into
Ten Downing Street twenty-five years from now,
then everybody in the room will get to their feet.
What we did was important and it must not be forgotten."
My own case is a microcosm of that.
I was on the team that made cellular telephony happen
and I'm sure that,
if any of us walked into a cellular telephone company building today,
then nobody there would have a clue who the hell we are.
(They wouldn't know me from, well, you know.)
We did something amazing and I would like some recognition for it.
In one of his less-comedic moments, Alan King said,
"Attention must be paid!"
That's the case here, we have smart people doing smart things
that have changed the world and it's high time to acknowledge them,
not just later in hindsight but at the time,
for Katherine Johnson and Alan Turing and the amazing people
I have had the privilege to work with.
Lenny Briscoe: I always wanted to learn guitar.
Ed Green: Actually it's a bass, a Rickenbacker.
Lenny Briscoe: Is that good?
Ed Green: It was good enough for Elvis.
Lenny Briscoe: Now you're talking my generation.
Ed Green: Actually, that's Elvis Costello.
Lenny Briscoe: Who's on first?
I was driving home
in my new, ten-week-old Volkswagon Golf GTI
from dinner at the home of friends
northbound in the left lane of Hayden Road in Scottsdale.
(I was in the left lane rather then the center lane
because there had been some traffic in the center lane.)
All of a sudden a red car appears to my right
making a left turn "across my bow" not stopping,
just moving directly into my path.
I hit the brakes hard figuring I would stop before impact,
that didn't happen,
I heard a crash,
and, the next thing I knew,
my car was stopped and I was surrounded by white airbags.
I slithered my way out of the car and walked around.
My front end was completely destroyed, "squished in,"
and the other car was on its side with people inside.
Needless to say, the primary effort of the police and fire folks
was getting them out of their car to safety.
Here
are my pictures after the crash.
Yesterday was the annual fly-in breakfast at Mystic Bluffs (NM56),
a dirt airstrip in "the middle of nowhere" in New Mexico.
I especially look forward to this one
as the people are interesting,
the smiles are wonderful and plentiful,
the food is delicious,
everybody who shows up gets a cool corn necklace,
and the scenery is amazing.
This year was no different except some rain made the runway
a little muddy
It was not as bad as a few years ago where
I got in sight of the field and was told on the radio
it was too muddy for an airplane like mine to land there,
just that the airplanes had mud on their tires after landing.
(It was muddy enough that a Cessna `182,
a somewhat larger and heavier airplane than mine,
got enmired in the mud when its pilot decided to turn around
in the middle of the runway and it took a crew of people
to get him out of the mud.)
There were interesting people with interesting flying machines
who loved to talk about them and I learned a few things.
One was a gyroplane, sort of like a helicopter
with a rotating wing on top but those blades on top didn't have power,
only a forward-thrust propeller
while the blades "autorotate" in flight.
There were lots of familier faces,
some from New Mexico and some flying in from Arizona.
I mentioned a humorous story about some guy who borrowed
$5000 with a Rolls Royce as collateral because the interest
on five thousand dollars was trivial compared to paying for
storing his car while he was traveling.
The fellow with me said it was a true story,
his jeweler in Phoenix knew the pawn shop
in Manhattan, it was a lady who would do it every year and
bring back the same bag of money she got six months earlier
for her car.
According to this fellow they became friends to the point
where he just stored the car without any money changing hands
and she let him use the car for his son to take his date
to the prom complete with a chauffer.
It is true?
I don't know, but it was a fun story to hear.
6:28:58 Mountain Standard Time
(MST).
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