Another memory of Dad

I took a right turn and heard a thumping from the trunk. It was a big roll of paper, "butcher paper" I think, that we used for covering tables for yesterday's lunch reception. The sound reminded me of something Dad told me.

"Did Dad ever tell you that story about the bottle in the trunk?" Neither Mom nor my sister Donna had heard it.

I guess he was still single when this happened, so probably more than 60 years ago. He and a friend were driving, and there was a bottle or something in the trunk. They turned a corner and heard this Bah-dum-bah-dum-bah-dum from the trunk. They found this amusing. "Hey, that's pretty good!" They checked for traffic and swerved left.

Bah-dum-bah-dum-bah-dum. Swerved right. Bah-dum-bah-dum-bah-dum

Pretty soon another sound was heard: a siren, accompanied by flashing lights in the rear-view mirror. They pulled over.

"Lemme smell your breath!" The cop was not pleased.

"The steering seemed a little loose," my dad said.

After checking his license and registration, the cop let them go. "Next time test your steering in a parking lot," he growled.

Is that the kind of thing to tell your son, but not your wife or daughter?

Dad: some notes

Dad's memorial service was today. They asked me to do the bio—but then… well:

---

I was asked to do the biography, but since that's printed in your bulletins, I'll elaborate [on it], and start the remembrances early.

Dad was born August 6, 1923 in Fairview, Oregon. He never knew his mother; she died before his 2nd birthday. As a single father overwhelmed with a farm to run, Grandpa Kyung Soo sent little Arthur away to the "Waverly Baby Home." There, Art unfortunately learned something of racism and the dark side of human nature.

One day, a strange man came to retrieve Art from the institution. Art was so afraid of this stranger that on the train ride home, he couldn't bring himself to ask for the bathroom. You can imagine what happened next. Grandpa asked Art why he didn't say anything; when he heard about Art's fear, he spoke kindly to him.

Art moved to Honolulu in 1941 to live with sister Louvie and her husband Kenneth, now both deceased. He wrote home that he got seasick on the boat ride, and that Kenneth seemed to be "a good egg." Then December 7th came.

Dad worked for the Army as an electronics instructor, first as a draftee and later as a civilian. He had an interesting and varied career before the FAA. He was the engineer at the UH radio station near Date and Kapiolani. He sold insurance, which is how he met our mom. They would have celebrated their 60th anniversary next month.

Dad had quite the sense of humor. One day, back when Mom was, ah, "great with child" (me I think), she had lunch with Dad downtown. They were heading their separate ways -- she was on an escalator -- and he called out, "Don't tell your husband."

The FAA would send Dad to school on the mainland, sometimes for months. Mom would record audio letters to him, and include voices of us kids on them. These were small reels of 1/4" magnetic tape.

On one of these stays on the mainland, Dad had an idea. "Hey fellas," he told his classmates, "Let's move our chairs forward 2 inches." They did this every day for a week or two. One morning, the instructor turned around to walk to the blackboard and bumped into it instead. He told me this story just a couple of months ago, in July.

Dad didn't preach a lot, but he impressed upon me the idea that there are other perspectives than mine. "That's a funny-looking caterpillar," I remarked once. I might have been four or five. "You probably look pretty funny to him too, Son," he replied. Indeed.

Way back, when all of us kids were still living at home, Dad habitually went to the blood bank. He'd call out, "going to give blood" before driving off. I don't know how many gallons he gave. I learned from him that giving blood is something that a man does. Part of why I give blood today is that I wanted to be like him. Still do, in fact.

Dad lived a generous and loving life. My wife often recalls meeting him before our wedding. At first sight, Dad said to her, "Here's the girl that's making my son so happy!"

Back when he was only in his 80s, he taught computer skills at HCC. It wasn't for the money. He was always fixing something for somebody.

He also volunteered a lot at this church. In fact he was about 10 feet above the concrete floor of the Parish Hall here, when the ladder slid out from under him; that's how he broke his back.

After that, I heard him praying more. In one of those prayers he was thankful for that experience because it brought him closer to God. When we say Dad never stopped learning, we don't just mean technology.

Oh, and he didn't stop volunteering at the church after that incident either. I learned that a man doesn't stop giving and helping just because of some inconvenience.

Dad was diagnosed with prostate cancer in the summer of 2014, and that was when I finally realized that he might die some day. He had surgeries, and courses of various medicines. He's had a few health crises, and we all knew the end was coming soon. When I last visited, he was very interested in what happens after this life.

The past couple of weeks have been quite frightening, but he'd been improving until Monday; none of us expected we'd be gathered here quite so soon.

But how can we complain? We've all had our lives touched by this wonderful man; I had the distinct pleasure of having him for my dad, of learning from his example and seeing him enjoy his long life.

I can hardly believe he's gone, and sometimes I can barely hold myself together. But then I remember that one of his fondest wishes was that we survive him. So even in our grief, we can rejoice with him that his wish was granted.

---

That's basically what I said. I wish you could have known him.

Update: And now you can, a little

through some short videos made by his super-talented granddaughter Jana (my niece):

• Arthur W. Park Memorial Video

  Through this video, I hoped to allow Grandpa to "speak" at his own Memorial Service. Although tears were shed, there was so much laughter, just the way Grandpa would want it. Hope you all enjoy this! (w/clips from the many commercials/films he's starred in!)

• "Arthur" (Championships Winner: Showdown in Chinatown 2015)

  Published on Nov 9, 2014
  We had less than 3 weeks to make this film, starring 91-year old korean-American senior, Arthur Park, and shot in Honolulu, Hawaii.

I just did something really dumb with my computer

So of course I want to tell you about it.

I learned a new word the other day: presbyopia. It means "old eyes" basically. The optometrist says it's kinda insulting, and it's OK because we're about the same age. Anyway I bought a new monitor: an acer 27" HD one with pixels just about big enough for me to read.

I wanted to connect it to the computer using DVI, so I got (from a colleague) a video card. I thought I needed a new driver for this card (this is silly part #1) so after some web searching, I downloaded the driver package from the manufacturer. I think.

This was a source package, and it needed kernel headers. I didn't have header files for the kernel version I'm actually running, so I downloaded header files for... another version. Of course then I needed to install the kernel sources for that other version. Then I built this newer kernel....

Somewhere in here I realized that I already had a driver for the video card; it was there in usable form in the kernel I was running, the old one.

Now for the silly part. I rebooted the box, not noticing that the default kernel was the new one. I mentioned above that I had built that kernel? Built and installed it in the /boot partition, actually. But I hadn't built the modules. So the video was in an icky mode, I had no network connectivity, etc. etc. etc.

I'm embarrassed to tell you how much time I wasted (don't tell my boss), but I ended up by putting a post-it on the monitor to remind me to use the 3rd option on the boot menu.

I'll fix it tomorrow.

Heard last week, on a boat ride on the Thames

As we approached the Tower of London area, the waterman (who claimed not to be a guide, but he was very good) described some historical events that occurred in the "Bloody Tower."

"People ask, where is the Bloody Tower? Well, it's behind the bloody trees, which is why you can't bloody see anything!" This guy was pretty funny -- every bit as funny as he thought he was :)

Two spaces or one at the end of a sentence?

My buddy Michael asked the question, and pointed out that if you use two spaces at the end of a sentence, and you're writing HTML, then the web browser will treat it as a single space. But really, reformatting goes way beyond that. If you write something like the following:

The skies they were 
ashen 


and sober /          the leaves they 
were crispéd and 


sere. 

it will be rendered in HTML like this:

The skies they were ashen and sober / the leaves they were crispéd and sere.

To verify, select "view source" in your browser and search for "ashen"

Skeuomorphic design??

So I happened to read some rants about Mac OS X Lion™’s user interface—a rant written as it turns out by a current Apple employee. These rants were not particularly charitable but I'm afraid I still found them entertaining, laced as they were with 4-letter Anglo-Saxon words (one verb in particular appeared numerous times) and complaints about stupid *pointless* skeumorphism.

Naturally I had to go look up the word. A few hours later, I was working on an HTML table; when you click on a certain element, the table would expand, and I wanted to show the number of rows you'd be adding by clicking there. It looked kind of like this:

title	KLOC	etc
[⊕5] summary info here	474	...

Got the picture? I asked a few colleagues if they thought the number made the table too busy, etc., and one of them said, yes it's busy but I still love it... and also said the design was skeuomorphic.

My reply: "I've seen this word before but for some reason your email didn't have any profanity in it."

He shot back: "It looks f*** nice, too"

Workplace humor US-Japan

Back in the previous millennium, during our six-year stint in Japan, Mizuno-san and Kamei-san had accompanied me on a business trip to the US. As we sat in the company cafeteria, my old buddy Paul, who I worked with back in the 1980s, stopped by to say hi.

We shook hands, and I introduced him to my Japanese colleagues. "You work with Collin?" he asked them.

When they replied in the affirmative, he said, "And you're willing to admit it??" The Americans guffawed, but my colleagues were mystified.

Back in Japan some time later, I described this interchange to some other colleagues. Kubo-san, one of the best English speakers in our department, was surprised at this sort of joke. "It is an honor," he said. He meant an honor to work with me. He was completely serious.

Fast forward to the 21st century...

My current boss asked the other day what I was working on, "besides beating on Chris two or three times a day."

I replied in mock exasperation, "You said two or three times a week!"

The reply was immediate: "That was before you moved right across the hall from him! Slacker."

You're smarter than people say you are!

So my buddy "Horace" asked me how to do something in PERL.

OK, well, it's not like he asked how to do something in mi¢ro$oft Offic€. He was calling a database library that returned a hash reference, which he was using like this:

$foo = blahblah::hashref($what,$ever);
print OUTFILE "DATE:", $foo->{DATE}, "TYPE:", $foo->{TYPE} ...; 

The question was, rather than hard-coding the keys, wasn't there an easy way to find all the keys and dump the value corresponding to each key?

It seems like the sort of thing Larry would provide -- and because of the TMTOWTDI principle, probably provide more than one way to do it. I'm not a big fan of the TMTOWTDI principle because if you have to read other people's code, you eventually have to learn all the cockamamie ways people might have coded something.

It's this way in C, too; one can code ++a; or a++; or a+=1; or a=a+1; -- they all do the same thing. Similarly i[x] and x[i] mean the same thing: *(x+i). And strptr->fld is the same as (*strptr).fld

Back to Horace's problem. If we had an actual hash, rather than a hash reference -- e.g., if we had %bar rather than $foo -- then we'd simply code

foreach my $fld (keys %bar) { print "$fld $bar{$fld} "; }

Then I remembered an incantation I saw in a musty old volume...

I suggested trying it: using (keys %$foo) in the statement above. Horace typed it in and gave it a cockeyed look. "I'm not sure that'll even compile," he said. Just being supportive I guess. But much to his surprise...

$ perl -cw thescript.pl
thescript.pl syntax OK
$ 

Then he ran it; out came the keys and their values.

It was gratifying to see that my guess worked. Then came the best part. "You know, you're way smarter than people say you are."

It's nice to feel validated. I guess.

That happens to me a lot with women

I smiled and her eyes lit up. Roger tried to get her attention, but she only had eyes for me.

"She's really interested in you," he said, sotto voce.

"That happens to me a lot with women," I replied, then burst into manic laughter. Roger didn't join me. Was my humor too subtle?

Her mother produced another ¼ teaspoon of strained carrots -- or maybe it was applesauce. When the spoon reached her mouth, she opened up and took it, to Mom's encouraging words.

Until they turn two, I should have said.

Mercenaries?

So I get ready to write a post and blogger has an announcement that I can make money by linking to amazon. It can be easier to look stuff up on amazon.com, link to stuff on amazon.com, and if you my reader buys stuff on amazon.com, there'll be a kickback! Yow! Early retirement here I come!?

Or not.

So maybe you'll think I'm silly, but it seems kinda tacky to say "oh yeah, here's a cool book, and they'll give me money if you click through and buy it." So... no thank you, amazon.

So if you click on a link here, amazon.com will probably know that you came from here, but I don't think it'll give 'em the kind of info that facebook gave when I clicked on one of their links (image at right). And I'm certainly not taking any money from them to refer you there. I do like amazon.com (we spend quite a bit of money there) and it's easy to create a link to any book they have, but I'm not making money off of you when you buy stuff from them.

Just thought you'd like to know.

Mount Pilot College -- does it really exist?

Maybe it doesn't, but according to... waitaminute... "Howard Sprague"?

"I am sorry, Mr. Cash, but we are unable to accept your rap sheet in lieu of a high school transcript."

Dr. Howard Sprague Dean of Admissions Mount Pilot College [link]

Here's the thing. When we lived in Japan, I used to read Japan-related newsgroups, where Michael Cash was a frequent contributor. His signature had humorous quotes like the above, or this one:

"There was a time, Mr. Cash, when I believed you must be the most useless thing in the world. But that was before I read a Microsoft help file."

Prof. Ernest T. Bass
Mount Pilot College
[link]

I wondered about "Mount Pilot College" and I think I found the answer today, after googling "Ernest T. Bass" -- and after that quote from "Howard Sprague" I'm sure of it -- Andy Griffith! Well, let me put up a few more quotes. I have to say that Mr. Cash's quotes have brightened many a day for me. Here's another:

"Having your company forced upon me, Mr. Cash, is better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. But not by much, I assure you."

Prof. Ernest T. Bass Mount Pilot College

"You were robbed, Mr. Cash, of your rightful place in American history. Why, with the benefit of hindsight, it is obvious to anyone that yours would have made a much better test case than Roe v. Wade." [link]

And:

"Clowns to the left of me and jokers to the right, Mr. Cash. Clowns and jokers."

Prof. Ernest T. Bass
Mount Pilot College
[link]

And:

"If the enjoyment of life were a Coca-Cola, Mr. Cash, your existence would be the ant poison in mine."

Prof. Ernest T. Bass
Mount Pilot College

These quotes (except the last, which I got from...?) can be found from a search for "Mount Pilot College."

Update: more Michael Cash quotes ...

...appear in google groups.

"Do you work out?"

I don't think a young lady had ever asked me that before, but it happened last week. And no, it wasn't like, "I thought you said you were in shape, Gramps; do you even work out?" How did that happen? How is it that after more than a half-century, I got that question last week?

I'll tell you: John's cycling class at the Sequoia YMCA, 6-7AM Mondays. As I wrote last week, you get a good workout, nobody will hassle you if you're not up to standing up on the pedals when everybody else is, and at least for my fifty-plus knees, ibuprofen wasn't even needed after the 3rd week. Just going once a week was enough to get me into good enough shape to be asked that.

And who was this young lady who asked me that? A cardio tech -- I was undergoing a treadmill test involving an EKG and some ultrasound movies. One young woman was monitoring my EKG, and the other took my blood pressure from time to time as I exercised on the treadmill. They were talking about interval training and remarking on how quickly one can get the heart rate up using this treadmill on an incline.

Of course, if too many of you come to class, we'll run out of stationary bikes and some of us will have to switch to another day or something. By the way, John is reputed to offer brownies to the winner of his Tuesday night quiz on facebook (which I haven't tried). After eating these, you'll feel like you need to come to class on Monday. A beautiful scheme, is it not?

Geek meets girl, and maybe God too, later

A couple of years ago, I saw two twentysomethings talking on the train platform, and started writing the story below. Some notes from that time:

He: Asian, black slacks, shoes, socks, coat; brick-red (a little duller actually) scarf, glasses (20/200?), hair thinning but not that old. Highlights ?? in the hair. Gel/mousse?? Black leather shoulder bag. Heels on the semi-dress shoes somewhat worn but not excessively so.

She: med-blonde collar-length, glasses (20/40? not as thick as his), blue eyes, black coat, brown top, grey/khaki velour or cordless corduroy slacks, tennis shoes

I picked it up and moved the plot ahead a little, which raised some questions for me; I've added those at the bottom.

---

"Hi. Ray, is it? I haven't seen you waiting for this train before."

I looked up from my paperback copy of The Magic Mountain to see... What was her name? I tried to return her smile; not sure whether I succeeded. "Hey," I offered. "Usually I come in later, but I have an 8:00 con-call."

I glanced down the track; no sign of a train. Not that I really wanted one. I looked back at her.

"What are you reading?" she asked after a short pause.

Doreen! -- that was her name, from the 2nd floor. Met her at last Friday's beer bash. From some big-name school; Caltech or MIT? Works on... filesystem maybe? Networking? But she just asked me something....

"Mann," I said. "Trying to become literate, you know." I did not say, "Chicks dig that." They were supposed to dig this all-black outfit, too. Maybe it was finally paying off?

Her laugh was musical. "You should meet my sister -- she says the same thing, even though she was an English major." Doreen was wearing black. Mostly. Well, dark anyway, except for her white socks and once-almost-white tennis shoes.

What should I say next?? "Does she live around here?" Idiot! Why did I ask that??

"Yes, we share an apartment a couple of blocks away," she said. Doreen pointed off-axis from the train track, and I saw the headlight approaching. The singing of the steel wheels was just becoming audible.

The doors slid open, and she boarded first, sliding to the window in a backward-facing row and patting the seat beside her. Obediently, I sat. "So you share an apartment with your sister?"

"Actually I guess it's a condo. She bought a place and had room...."

The doors slid shut, and the train pulled out.

I turned to face Doreen. I'd never been this close to her before, never noticed her chestnut-colored eyes. I commanded myself to breathe. "How's it working out?"

She gave me a big smile. "Really well, actually. We were best friends growing up -- we're from around here. Both of us went to school on the east coast. Our parents hoped we'd move back, and sure enough we did, though she got here first."

MIT then, not Caltech. "So she's older?"

"No, a few years younger. But I did the PhD thing and she got a job teaching right out of college."

"A new teacher bought a condo right out of college? Here?" Several heads turned. Oops!

Doreen suppressed a little grin, and replied almost in a whisper -- "Our parents helped with the down payment. But what's your story?"

"The usual," I replied. "San Jose State, then Berkeley for grad school. Didn't make it past the quals, got my MS and started working. I rent a house with some guys a few blocks over toward 101."

Doreen was looking out at something. When she looked back, I asked her, "So what do you guys do on weekends?"

She giggled. I loved that laugh! "It's not the usual around here, but we volunteer at our church -- we do a skit for the elementary school kids every week."

"You're right," I said. "That's not the usual around here."

"Kinda weird, huh?" she said.

"No no no no no. It's really cool, actually. Umm, what kinds of skits do you guys do?"

"Well, stuff from, you know, the Bible," she started, rather tentatively I thought.

"You mean, like Jael driving a tent peg into Sisera's temple?" Well, that was a bold gambit, but maybe really stupid too. Could she tell I was kidding?

"Uh, I don't think the parents would go for that one," she replied. She cocked her head to one side. "That's a pretty obscure passage. One of your favorites maybe?"

Was she smirking? "Nah," I said. "I used to think the Bible was down on women, and this girl in my dorm told me about that one. Apparently this Debbie person was ruling Israel, which really surprised me."

"Yeah, there are a lot of misconceptions about the Bible -- that women don't count for anything in it, or that the stories are for kids. Even the stories we do tell kids aren't really children's stories: Noah's ark is about the destruction of pretty much the entire human race. Jonah went to tell the city of Nineveh that a nuclear bomb was going to land on them, then he got mad because it didn't happen. Not your best role model."

She was pretty animated. I wanted to say something intelligent, but I'd just given her everything I knew about the Bible; I knew even less about kids. C'mon, Ray, use those neurons! She mentioned... parents! "So what do the parents say?" I asked.

"That's another thing. Most of them are busy with their careers, or taking the kids to sports or pushing them to get straight-As. Not to say they're indifferent about their kids' spiritual education, but it's not as high a priority as it might be." She paused. "Easy for me to say, though; I've don't have kids."

"That's good to know. Uh, I mean..." My face felt hot but she giggled again, and I caught a whiff of her shampoo or whatever. I tried to get a grip on myself. "I bet you get that kind of thing all the time."

Another giggle. Was the train still on the tracks? "Not so much," she said. Is she surrounded by grandfathers or idiots? Or nerds?? I must have looked incredulous, because she added, "No, really. I guess guys see me hanging out with the kids, and...." She looked out the window.

Great -- now I had the initiative. I gave her about five seconds and tried: "Consider me your resource." She turned back to me, and I gave her my "Hollywood smile." "Listen, Doreen, I know how guys think." She raised an eyebrow, and I thought maybe I'd get another laugh. But she seemed intrigued. So I plowed ahead. "How about dinner tonight?"

That got a laugh. "That was fast!" she said.

"Always happy to provide a little comic relief," I said. She continued laughing. Sheesh, it wasn't that funny. "Can't blame me for trying, can you?"

She was leaning forward, managing with some effort not to laugh out loud. She braced herself against the seat in front of us with one hand; the fingertips of the other were just touching the buttons on her jacket. She recovered and turned to me. "Tonight I'm doing Alpha," she said. Her eyes were still smiling.

"Alpha? What's that, like a double-date -- protons and neutrons?" That got her laughing again, and it was contagious. When I looked up I saw that our stop was next. I reached across her to signal the driver, and she evidently had the same idea at the same time. I drew my hand back, just as she did. Then we both pushed the signal strip. More laughter. To heck with work -- I could ride the train all day with this woman!

"Alpha," she was saying. "It's a group dinner..." We stood up as the train came to a halt. It's always a challenge to keep my feet under me when the train decelerates, but I postponed getting up as long as I could. We lurched toward the doorway, and I was both relieved and disappointed that she didn't stumble into me. The doors opened and we stepped onto the platform.

"A group dinner?" I prompted. We walked toward the office.

"Someone makes dinner, or orders pizza or something, but we all chip in. Then we watch a video -- it's a lecture where this English guy goes over some spiritual issues. Last week it was about the possibility of miracles, and this week... I'm not sure. Maybe something like the reliability of the Scriptures...?"

The reliability of the Scriptures. I'd thought about that before, maybe back in college or something, but never put much effort into considering it. It seemed like an impossibility: the manuscripts were thousands of years old, translated however many times, and didn't that DaVinci Code movie say something about...

"Earth to Ray," I heard.

Oops! "Oh, yeah, I was just thinking that I'd heard of that in college but never spent much time thinking about it."

"Heard of Alpha?" She looked puzzled.

"No. Um, the girl I mentioned? She always referred to the Bible whenever she talked about her purpose, how she made big decisions, that sort of thing. She based her life on that book, which always seemed to me to be like a leap of faith, you know?"

Doreen nodded. "It's huge. If you're going to base your life on a book, you want to know it's reliable." She paused. "Want to come tonight? A friend is giving me a lift after work."

It was still a few minutes before 8:00. She would call me about 5:00 when she got an ETA from her ride, and also tell the host to expect another person. I thought of something else. "Am I dressed OK?" I asked.

She indicated her cords and tennis shoes and laughed again, then turned to climb the stairs to her office. "I'll be counting the minutes," I didn't say.

---

Okay, so I wasn't being 100% silly; here are some of my questions:

1. Let's suppose Doreen isn't aware of what's happening to Ray's pulse. If she found out what was going on, would she feel awkward about it? Should she?
2. If Doreen is aware of what Ray's going through, is she being manipulative?
3. How sincere would you say Ray is -- in his curiosity about the reliability of the Scriptures? -- in his offer to help Doreen understand guys?
4. If Ray seems sincerely engaged after Alpha, should Doreen accept a future dinner invitation from him?

Hugh Gallagher's college essay... and a novel

Going in backwards order, the debut novel of this American humorist was "Teeth"; you can see more about this 1999 book on amazon.com's description. I read an excerpt, which makes me want to read the rest.

But I heard of him because of an essay he wrote, which appeared in Rob Bell's Drops Like Stars (apparently now available in paperback). According to Wikipedia, it was written for a 1989 writing contest and later submitted to colleges. The full version is at http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~susan/joke/essay.htm but here are a few lines from it:

I am a dynamic figure, often seen scaling walls and crushing ice. I have been known to remodel train stations on my lunch breaks, making them more efficient in the area of heat retention.
...

I woo women with my sensuous and godlike trombone playing, I can pilot bicycles up severe inclines with unflagging speed, and I cook Thirty-Minute Brownies in twenty minutes. I am an expert in stucco, a veteran in love, and an outlaw in Peru.
...

There's lots more. The essay also appears on http://saunderslog.com/2005/11/21/hugh-gallagher-man-of-many-talents/ along with 19 (currently) responses.

Success and its pitfalls

We heard a great sermon today about the idol of success.

Two things stood out for me: one was the unconditional favor of our Lord. Now it's a spiritual cliché that "God loves you no matter what" or "God loves you unconditionally," but to think of God saying "My beloved son, in whom I am well pleased" before I did anything (or whether I accomplish anything ever at all) -- that's powerful. Likewise the idea that God God had something wonderful in mind when he thought you up.

The second thing that stood out was our foolish tendency to look to each other, rather than to the Lord, for our sense of success. It's not just wanting to feel successful that drives us; it's wanting somebody else to notice. And so among the (foolish) ways we try to feel good about ourselves is to compare the accomplishments of our kids. A truly over-the-top example can be seen in a video from "Goodness Gracious Me" where a "typical" (South) Asian father compares his son with "Mr. Anderson's son" or "Mr. Sena's son," etc.

US viewers, note that "A-levels" are similar to AP exams. You really only take one or two in a single day. Millwall is a professional soccer (or "football") team and Liverpool is one of the top pro soccer teams in England.

This father is rather exaggerated, but I the clip makes the very good point that our obsession with other people's kids is utter nonsense.

Ditto other people's careers, other people's houses, other people's cars, and so on.

Railway Engineers and Slime Mold?

Interesting article points out the similarity between Tokyo's suburban rail network layout and a network of tubes that the slime mold generated when presented with food sources in analogous locations.

I wanted to take a look at the rail network layout, and Wikipedia has one in an article on Tokyo-area transportation. I'll put the pictures here for your viewing pleasure.

Tokyo Rail Network (link)	Slime Mold Design (link)

The rail map is at the bottom so it'll be closer to the "F" map on the lower right.

NFS

Heard on NPR: Hook's Cheese of Mineral Point, Wisconsin, has a 15-year-old cheddar currently for sale at about $50 a pound.

By weight that would be on the order of a $75 bottle of wine. Mr. Hook says he has some older cheese -- about seventeen years old -- but it's not for sale. It's only for him and his family. A brilliant PR move -- my covetousness was aroused and I immediately began thinking about this. $12.50 for ¼ pound... that would be an interesting experience. I mean, that's less than movie tickets for two!

Actually, for the price of two movie tickets ($10.50 a pop at the local multiplex) you could rent a couple of movies at Blockbuster and have ¼ pound of the 15-year-old Cheddar. H'm...

"Life has loveliness to sell -- buy it and never count the cost." No idea whether I'd consider the experience lovely, but it did arouse my curiosity.

Quote without comment: Cox on Dawkins

I think of Richard Dawkins as the kind of Jerry Falwell of the atheists. In a way, he’s a kind of fundamentalist.

Harvey Cox

from http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/episodes/january-5-2007/harvey-cox/3735/

You don't... do you???

Dicussing possible meeting venues on the phone with Philip the other day, I pointed out that Togo's across the street serves beer.

"Do you drink beer?" he asked. He was flabbergasted.

In contrast, several weeks ago when I walked into the cafeteria, Dave said to Kong, "Better refill your beer before Collin gets up there."

Yesterday, in a meeting with Philip, he thought I was a vegetarian. So I had to say it. "You think I don't drink beer, you think I don't eat meat... you probably think I'm a virgin, too!"

My wife and teen-ager found this story hilarious.

Surprises in New York

So you're driving along and there's a sign that a toll booth lies ahead. The man hands you a card, which has a big 15 written on it. It has a table showing how much you pay when exiting the toll-road at various exits.

Pretty cool, but I don't think we have those in California. So we drive along and there's a big "Exit 16" sign, and another sign that says "Next exit 17 miles"

"Oh," I say to myself, I guess that must be "Exit 33" -- thinking that, like California and Hawaii, that exit numbers and mileposts have some relationship.

Nope! Seventeen miles later is exit 17. Well, I guess that's another valid way of doing it. I wonder what they do if they add another exit between 17 and 18, say.

Hotel soap

So we checked into the Econo Lodge in Schenectady. In the bathroom were the usual -- some lotion or shampoo or something, and two bars of soap. I unwrapped one: it was in a dozen pieces! Hurmpf, bottom of the stack or something. This is OK for a quick swipe of the hand, but I wouldn't want to shower with it. The other bar was fine though.

By the way that Econo Lodge is a bargain: if you have an AAA card, or you're over fifty, it's like $62/night, plus the usual taxes.

We spent two nights there. The breakfast is nothing to write home about, but you can have a really nice breakfast -- and dinner too -- on the money you save there vs. some of the alternatives.

Anyway, we drove to Saratoga Springs, making just one wrong turn, and checked into the Comfort Inn on Old Gick Road. This is a step up from the Econo Lodge, both in accommodations (pool, fitness center, indoor hallways, etc.) and in price (not quite 50% higher). I went into the bathroom and unwrapped the first bar of soap. You got it -- a dozen pieces. The second one (which we used for showering) was fine.

So what is it with soap in Albany-area hotels?