Chapbook

[sasha]

Carlin was BRILLIANT - and he always told the truth.

[sasha]

Hail, Stone Numbers!

Pick any whole number. (For now, keep it small - say, between 5 and 15.) If it's even, divide it by 2; otherwise, multiply it by 3 and add 1. Whatever number you get, do the same - and again. And again. Lather, rinse, repeat.

For example, let's do this starting with 6. Six is even, so divide it by 2: 6/2 = 3. Three is odd, so triple it & add 1: 3*3 + 1 = 10. Ten is even, so divide by 2, to get 5. Five is odd, taking you up to 16; thence to 8, to 4, to 2, to 1. You might as well stop here, because 1 will just take you back to 4, 2, 1 for the rest of Eternity.

Seven takes you on an even longer journey: to 22, 11, 34, 17, 52, 26, 13, 40, 20, 10, 5, 16, 8, 4, 2, 1 - 16 steps; eight collapses to 1 in only three, but nine takes you back up to 52 before collapsing after 19 steps. Twelve & thirteen each collapse after 9 steps, but eighteen & nineteen take 20.

They're called "hailstone numbers", because there's no apparent rhyme nor reason to their journeys up and down - like hailstones bouncing around within a thunderhead. Powers of 2 (4, 8, 16, 32, etc.) collapse immediately, without ever climbing up; but 31, just 1 less than such a power, takes an astonishing 106 steps peaking at 9232 before landing on 16, ending its roller-coaster ride.

A couple of questions come to mind: Does every number's journey eventually end at 1? And if so, how many steps will it'll take to get there?

Remarkably, the answer is: NOBODY KNOWS. This simple game that any school child can play is at the heart of one of the most notorious unsolved problems in mathematics: the Collatz Conjecture. My guess is that all numbers do eventually collapse - after all, there's a 50/50 chance that a step will land on an even number, and while the powers of 2 get further & further apart, it "seems" [sic] unlikely that the probabllity of hitting such a power is ever ZERO. But this argument doesn't pass muster any more than it would in a court of law. The conjecture remains unproven.

It's not the only such. There are unsolved problems involving infinite series of imaginary numbers, unanswered questions about nine-dimensional surfaces, unresolved inconsistencies seen in alien algebras and formal logic. But anyone with Excel and a little spare time can play around at the edge of the frontier exploring the Collatz conjecture and scratch their heads in bewilderment along with the rest of the academic community. And I think that's kinda cool.

[winddance]

yeah I credit that George Carlin bit with my aversion to clutter and love of simple spaces in my home.

[saw]

A bit off the subject but I was reading about The Basin at Franconia Notch and wondering if you have evr been there

[sasha]

I was there once long ago with my family - when I was 10 or 11, maybe. There was a small pool (maybe <50 ft across) near the parking lot, filled with crystal-clear water - it looked to be maybe 2-3 ft deep - and I recall how astonished I was when the guide told us it was at least 12 ft deep.

We must have visited the Flume at the same time, the (late) Old Man of the Mountain, & maybe Polar Caves, because I remember them too - but I'm only assuming it was the same day. The dust lies thick on those memories....

[saw]

https://video.search.yahoo.com/search/v ... tion=click

this looks wild....apparently here are places to swim downstream, but the basin is too dangerous and forbidden

[sasha]

 

Theme Songs

Because our sense of smell is one of the most primitive - it was probably the first to arise, answering the need to distinguish Food from Not Food - it's often tightly linked with early memories. The smells of cattle, homemade chicken stock, & sun-baked pine needles never fail to evoke childhood memories of mine. But so do certain musical selections.

I was driving home from an adjacent town yesterday when Larry Coryell's "Level One" LP cued up on my mix "tape".
(I still use the word "tape" even though the music resides on a flash drive; and I enclose it in quotes because I don't know what else to call it). When the title track started, it was suddenly 50 years ago - I was 25 again, driving to Exeter NH to meet up with friends for a weekend of scuba diving off the coast, listening to the LP I'd just committed to cassette for the trip.

Funny how some music can do that. Dixieland always makes me think of my dad. The theme from the old TV show "Maverick" takes me back to when I was 10, watching with my family while noshing on open-faced cheese sandwiches - the only time we were allowed to eat in the living room. And who of my generation can hear "Puffing Willie" without thinking of Captain Kangaroo jingling the keys to the Treasure House?

The first time I heard Miles Davis - really heard him - is also burned into my memory. In my first year of college, my roommate & I had decided to culturify ourselves by checking out jazz, & we'd heard that Miles was considered one of its leading exponents. So we went 50/50 on a copy of "Filles des Kilimanjaro" - which sailed utterly uncomprehended over our heads. We just couldn't hear the music. We simply were not ready for it.

But a few years later, after I'd graduated & was working a full time job giving me a bit of disposable income, I tried again. By now I'd been exploring not just jazz, but many other genres of music - classical, avant-garde, musique concrete, electronic... If it didn't get airplay, I'd give it a listen. I was also reading some of the trade mags, which were describing Miles' "Bitches Brew" with words like "pioneering", "groundbreaking", and "seminal". So I thought it was time to try again. Maybe now I was ready. So I picked up a copy and dropped it onto the turntable. And this time, I heard the music.

Boy, did I.

It fucking blew me away.

From the moment the needle hit the vinyl I could feel doors in my mind opening that I hadn't even known were there. It was at once familiar and like nothing I'd heard before. Other worldly - hypnotic, rhythmically pulsing, free yet restrained. Pioneering. Groundbreaking. Seminal.

"Pharaoh's Dance", was the opening track. I've never forgotten that chill of revelation, the moment that Downbeat magazine described as "losing one's musical virginity".

And following up on that metaphor - there are musical selections that always evoke certain of the women in my life. Bread's "If", B-52's "Love Shack", Bob Seger's "Turn the Page", Focus's "Birth", Miles' "Blue in Green"... the soundtrack of my memories. Only two of them are still in my life - two others have passed on, the rest have simply vanished into the past. But whenever their anthems come up on a playlist, they're the first visuals that come to mind. May it always be so.

[winddance]

heading north to change my life, "going up the country" canned heat. my first kiss, "true loves ways" peter and gordon.

[sasha]

first kiss, yeah... the Lettermen's "Goin' Out of My Head"... & the smell of fresh laundry...

[saw]

One song that always stops me dead in my tracks to give a proper listen is Van Morrison's " Into the Mystic "...perhaps because in was my first time away from home.....an 18 year old sailor that learned upon arriving in Key West of this extension of many Victorian homes there called a Widow's Walk.....a larger crow's nest if you will where women could lookout to the sea to try and spot the ship their man was on.....often in vain....there were many of these widow's walks to admire in Key West at the time his song hit the airwaves

https://video.search.yahoo.com/search/v ... tion=click

[sasha]

Inauguration Day

My brother, sister, & I are in agreement - dark days are upon us. We also agree there's not much that we can do about it. The crazies are in charge now (though it could be argued they've always been - just those from a different wing of the asylum, suffering different delusions). For now, all we can do is keep our heads down & hope we're too small for the Big Predators to bother with. We're the small mammals scurrying about underfoot, eking out a living in the leaf litter while the great reptilian raptors roam about overhead, tearing out each other's throats.

Actually had a good day yesterday. It got cold enough overnight that the storm's payload was powder, so the lights stayed on. Maybe about 6" total. The moon was still overhead when I got up ~5:30. A few hours later the sun peeked through the trees off to the southeast, bathing the fresh snow in its salmon-colored light. Gorgeous...

Cleanup went quickly, and was actually fun. Shoveled a path to the oil fill-pipe, dug out the car & mailbox, and cleared the windrow the plows had left at the end of my driveway, in case I needed to escape before my own plowman could get here & finish the job. Then I took the camera out for a bit of a walk. Awfully cold, though, made the ice so hard my cleats couldn't dig into it, and I slipped more than once despite them. Left the road to follow an old logging trail, thinking I might bushwhack home through the woods...

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...but I didn't trust my balance enough to deal with the uncertain footing hidden beneath the snow. Too cold anyway, so I doubled back and came home by the road...

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Spent the afternoon codifying the dimensional analysis of my latest physics project, successfully demonstrating that the integrated expression is, indeed, measured in meters. Only then, as daylight faded away & darkness began creeping in, did I turn on the news, as I always do during supper prep. The usual horseshit, but when NPR started broadcasting that odious, fraudulent creature's pompous inauguration speech (if you can call the grunting of a swine "speech"), I put on an audiobook instead. Can't go wrong with Algernon Blackwood.

Supper was fine - the usual stovetop, one-skillet concoction, this time involving chicken, bok choy, parsnips, & millet - taken while binging on YouTube. (Lately it's been that old tv series "The Paper Chase".) Dishes washed, racked to dry, one final pee, off to bed.

Lights out. See you in the morning.
 

[saw]

A very appealing account of a day up north ( at least from Maryland ).......except the kleptocracy part.....but sure enuf real

in 4 years we will not recognize this country we grew up in, and the foundations we came to understand will be shattered


Meanwhile, as you said, keep your head down so you don't step in a hole and break your ankle.....I will try to immerse myself in art and nature, and be useful in some way to the ones I care about...however small that might be

I will take photographs of the land I've loved while it is still stunning for my younger relatives to admire one day and perhaps rue the disappearance

but all the while, i will try to keep my heart and soul light as a feather.....if I were religious I'd pray, so in it's stead I will walk with high hopes and cradle the goodness in most people I encounter.....solidarity will become more imprtant that it ever was before....in this new world.....and above all I will resist the forces of hatred and cruelty and oppression

[sasha]

Thanks for the observations... nice to see that decency hasn't died... One of the perks of living in the boonies is ready access to solitude. It's easy for me to hide from the ugliness our species seems so intent on rolling in, like a dog on a dead squirrel.

I think that meanness of spirit has always been with us - the stubbornly willful ignorance, the perverse celebration of selfishness, the deliberate misconstrual of "freedom" as meaning "I can do whatever the fuck I want"... What's changed is that it's become acceptable. It had been rumbling behind walls for a long time, but DJT unlocked its pen & granted it legitimacy. Now it's here knocking over garbage cans and daring us to make it stop. I don't know where it's going to lead. I've heard pundits say this has happened before (late 19th century), but that was before we had Smartphones to spread information fungal infections - so who knows? I can only hope that someday, somehow, we'll come to our senses, & that I can live out my final years quietly, bothering no one, as that old guy with the camera who dabbles in writing & engineering mathematics....

[saw]

completely agree with your analysis....no more hiding...no more couching the plan in mumbo jumbo...." I'm going to fuck you over, because you are woke "

This is without a doubt, the meanest conglomerate of individuals with the most power to harm whomever they please

I think this plan will backfire....Agent Orange is already hurting the people that voted for him

[sasha]

Word on the street is that the bromance between Trumpty Dumpty & Musk mElon is on the skids. Couldn't happen to a lovelier couple.