Russell Atkinson's Blog, page 125

Egrets

I’m no Ogden Nash, but it’s still fun to try…

EGRETS

An egret’s like a heron,

But not so overbearin’.

Proud birds are the egrets,

Living free without regrets.

The male’s white plumage

Gives him the groom edge.

His bride’s just as white,

Which doesn’t seem right.

With spindly legs

And clutches of eggs

She isn’t curvaceous,

But, oh my, how gracious!

Review of The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert


My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book’s central premise is that global warming, ocean acidification, and other man-made phenomena are causing the sixth mass extinction in the history of the world. Like any controversial assertion, this premise will be readily accepted by those already inclined that way (the environmentally aware or the tree-huggers, depending on one’s point of view) and rejected by those already inclined against it (skeptics, individualists, or ignorant flat-earthers, depending on one’s point of view).

The prose is well-written but highly repetitive, almost to the point of an academic paper trying to amass enough evidence to convince the publishers of a major journal on a radical new theory. It is well-documented. The author needn’t have bothered, since adding more and more evidence is unlikely to have any effect on a reader for the reasons stated above. You either believe it or you don’t.

I learned a lot of biology from this book. I like learning new things and that’s why I liked the book. I also found the numerous descriptions of various scientists or other interviewees and their back stories to be a needless digression. This is not a novel. I really don’t care where so-and-so the toad expert grew up. It seems endemic to the genre now that mass market non-fiction works, at least those on technical or scientific subjects, be filled to novel length with such padding when the basic facts and point of view could be stated in a long newspaper article, so this author is not alone, but my patience wore thin by the end.





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Review of The Wrong Girl by Hank Phillippi Ryan

The Wrong Girl by Hank Phillippi Ryan

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

At first I assumed the author, named Hank, was a man. When I came to descriptions of the women’s “outfits” and eyelet lace curtains I realized my mistake. What is it with women authors and women’s clothing? Are women readers really that shallow? A male mystery writer wouldn’t describe the outfit of an attractive young female character; he’d describe her body, especially her breasts, because, yes, male readers really are that shallow.

But that’s not what bothered me about the book. It was just ungodly slow-paced. All the blurbs on the back cover about non-stop action must have been written by fellow authors who were paid to write them and never read the book. Nothing ever gets accomplished for the first 300 pages or so because everyone keeps getting interrupted. As soon as character A starts to tell character B that really important thing she just noticed, character B gets interrupted by character C or a cell phone, or something else and we never find out what it was. If a character gets to an important location and is about to enter, the scene shifts elsewhere. If a key message is left on someone’s voice mail, that person never checks it. It’s exasperating as all getout. I assume an editor told the author to keep the reader in suspense by never resolving anything until the very end. It’s more like suspended animation than suspense. The heroine – or protagonist at least – of the story is a total dingbat. The author’s abysmal ignorance of police procedure and law are a serious drag on the plot, too. It really deserves a 1 rating on the Goodreads scale, but that sounds just a bit too harsh; it’s readable, barely, if not actually good.

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GC11YN4 Great Recreation

One of my hobbies is geocaching. Here is my post for the geocache I found today, titled Great Recreation. Even if you’re not into geocaching, it may be somewhat amusing.

This 2-stage multicache is simple and easy. The first stage is the parking coordinates and the second is the cache location. The offsets from the posted coordinates are given right on the cache page so simple arithmetic or a handheld calculator is all you need to get the final coordinates, which are close to a trailhead. The hide is a nice-size cache in a traditional hide style and the coordinates are right on. It should be a straightforward find. But I managed to turn it into a misadventure of sorts.

I wanted to combine this with my usual Friday run, so I started not at the nearby Mora trailhead, but at the main parking lot off Cristo Rey. It should be about 1.25 mi. each way. I probably looked funny running with a GPSr and a pen, but I look funny anyway, so what the hey. I knew there was a trail connecting the Mora entrance with the Farm, so I ran to the farm and turned on my Garmin. I thought the connector trail was just past the final gate to the farm, but there was no trail there so I kept running up the Rogue Valley trail, certain that there was another trail over to Mora from there. But my Garmin kept telling me the cache was 180 degrees the other way – directly behind me and getting more distant. So after a quarter mile or so I turned around  and headed back to the main parking lot. I kept running through the farm looking for the trail, but my GPSr soon told me the cache was 180 degrees back the way I had just come. Frustrating!

So finally, once I got on the other side of the creek separating the farm from the cache, the trail took a bend and the cache was directly to my left. I decided to just bushwhack. I ran up the hill through the foxtails, getting my shoes and socks all stickered up, until I spied some women walking on what must be a trail. I headed their direction and ended up on a beautiful paved road/path that led me directly to the cache. I had no idea where it came from. At the cache site I had to crawl on hands and knees to get the cache, which is not a good idea in running shorts. It’s a nice big cache but has no pen in it, so it was good that I brought one.

I ran back down the road to find that it emerged just before the farm. There was even signage for it, but the problem was the trail at that point led 180 degrees away from the eventual direction of travel and the sign was facing the wrong way! The wrong way for someone coming from the main parking lot, that is. Unless I was running backwards, or looking over my right shoulder every five seconds, there is no way I could have seen it. Even if I had spotted the road/trail, it looked like it was just a driveway up to a ranger’s residence and it was pointed the wrong direction, too.

I probably ran about 50% longer than I had intended, and got chewed up knees and stickers in my shoes, but we all know that pain is pleasure in geocaching. I got my find, and that’s what counts.

New Header Photo

Yes, you’ve come to the right place. I just changed my header photo. The previous one was a shot of the bat bridge in Austin, Texas, where my daughter lives. She took that one. This one I took in Sunnyvale, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley. The water area is the southern part of San Francisco Bay. To the left are various high-tech businesses. You can just see the Moffett Field blimp hangar on the very left. The complex directly ahead is a major sports center. The picture was taken today, a Saturday, and all the cars in the lot suggest there are a lot of games going on there. I don’t know if they have Little League, but I do know they have softball leagues and various company events.

Review of Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Nature

Uncharted: Big Data and an Emerging Science of Human History by Erez Aiden


My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This nonfiction account of the creation of Google’s Ngram Viewer is fascinating. An Ngram is a word or phrase (N words long) and the Viewer measures how often that Ngram appears in books in recorded history up to 2008, at least in those scanned by Google. The authors devised the program’s basic features to view history and social change through a factual scientific lens, to see how our word usage changes over time and what that tells us. It begins with the example of illustrating when the United States changed from a plural to a singular noun. Popular accounts attributing that to the Civil War fully uniting the states into one entity once and for all turn out to be false. The trend toward the singular began before that and didn’t really take off until after 1880. If you don’t want to read the rather dry prose and the authors’ own speculations on social trends you can go directly to the appendix to see some of the charts that tell us how Santa compares to Satan, when data became more important (in books anyway) than God, and so on. They do touch on other forms of big data, but I wish they had spent more time and space on things other than Ngrams. What are the possible benefits and harm of all those photos being massively uploaded onto the Web? What about medical data – can it be used to identify causes or cures of diseases by examining massive trends. Google is now already quicker and better at predicting flu outbreaks than the NIH based on web searches for terms like”flu,” “influenza,” “fever,” etc.





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Google Ngram Mad Libs

Once upon a time there was a little girl who was not a member of the family. She was a very good friend of mine. When she was a child and I was a little girl in a white dress and a white apron and a pair of shoes, we had to do something. So we have to get out of the way of the world.  I thought I was going to be a long night of darkness and silence. Instead it was a matter of life and death of the son of the late King of Prussia. This seemed to be the only one who could have been a lot of talk. Despite this we have to be careful not to let the sun go down on our knees. Incredibly, it was not until the early 1980s that the government was forced to take a job in the city. That meant that the first two of these were in fact the same as the one in the middle. Neither of us had ever seen a man who was a stranger. Of course she did not know what to say to him. After a while I got up and went to the door of the house and the garden. Finally I said to him that he was not a man.

Do you remember that great party game Mad Libs, where you have a template of a story with blanks in strategic places and the host calls out parts of speech? The audience calls back with suggested fillers, usually wacky, suggestive, or ribald, which the host uses to complete story, and which is then read back to great hilarity. I have taken this further. The above story was written by Google. Yes, Google Ngram Viewer now has a feature where it will return to you the 10 most frequent words fitting in a phrase where you have placed a wildcard symbol (an asterisk), as determined by the millions of books and periodicals it has scanned. It can only go up to 5-grams, which means you can feed it the first four words and it will provide you the most frequent fifth word.

So I fed it the underlined phrase “Once upon a time” and here’s what I got. With each new word filled in I used the preceding four words to provide the next. In most cases I used the most frequent word that Google provided but I had to make a few exceptions. If the word had gender, and both genders were represented as top frequent words, I took the one that made the most sense. I also picked the correct tense once or twice to make the sentence grammatical, but I did not allow logic, plot, or style drive any exceptions I made. I had to choose the second or third choice a few times to avoid getting into a repeating loop (e.g. “a white dress and a white apron and a white dress and …”). Since the Ngram viewer no longer includes Ngrams that go across sentence endings, I had to choose a stopping point myself, sometimes choosing the third or fourth returned word in place of “and” to avoid one long run-on sentence. Then I had to provide a new seed phrase consistent with what came just before. I tried not to guide the story with these. I have underlined all the seed phrases. At times Google’s page could not find a fifth word to complete a phrase, even though it had found the preceding phrase frequent, so in those cases I would reduce the feed to the last two or three words instead of four.

You can play this game too. To get a bit more life in the story you can try some crazier seed phrases or just choose responses further down the list than I did.

The power of one book

This graph shows the frequency of the use of the words “cryptography,” cryptology,” and “cryptanalysis” in books and magazines for the period shown. The Codebreakers by David Kahn was published in 1967, which explains the peak at that time, but what brought about the steady rise, sharp peak in 2001, and then sharp decline of the word “cryptography”?

What happened in 1963 and 1970?

Cryptic Acrostics

Cryptic acrostics are one of my favorite leisure activities, but there aren’t many around. Yesterday I finished one that I particularly enjoyed in Simon & Schuster’s Super Crostics Book, Series #4. Many people don’t understand them, or at least don’t know how to solve them, so here is a short explanation with some examples from the puzzle I just did (puzzle by Thomas H. Middleton). First, in case you don’t know what an acrostic puzzle is, Wikipedia explains it here: Acrostic (puzzle).

It is the cryptic part I want to explain. The clues for cryptics are just that: cryptic, and at first unintelligible. But every clue actually contains a real definition or synonym along with secondary information which serves both to obfuscate the definition and to provide another way to identify the answer word, usually by describing characteristics of the words or letters in the word. Very often the information makes total sense when proper punctuation is added or changed. The best of them are witty and clever, providing a nice chuckle or smile when you finally “get it.” Here are some typical techniques used:

Anagrams: One or more words in the clue are anagrams of the answer.

All the way, it’s deadly (6 letters) Answer: LETHAL. Deadly is the definition; All the is an anagram of LETHAL. Often anagrams are hinted at by words like strange, crazy, broken, awkward, etc. “Strange times” might mean “EMITS”, for example.
Hidden word: The word appears in the clue, but is buried in another word, or across two or more words.

Fixed part of Carmen dedicated to bullfighters (6 letters) Answer: MENDED. Fixed is the definition. The word mended appears across “CarMEN DEDicated”. Additionally, the phrasing “part of” tells you that what you’re looking for is contained in the word or phrase immediately following.
Double definition: The word is defined in two different ways.

Stuff to count (6 letters) Answer: MATTER. “Stuff” defines matter as a noun; “to count” defines matter as a verb, as in “That doesn’t matter.”
Alternative letter use: The clue uses letters in the answer in a different way, such as a Roman numeral, an acronym, etc.

Stuff of froth; for example, the wig is askew. (2 words, 8 letters). Answer: EGGWHITE. The EG is used as the Latin acronym “e.g.” meaning “for example”, and the GWHITE is an anagram of “the wig”. Egg white, of course, is the frothy stuff of meringue. Be alert for the letter O being used as a zero, especially when words like “nought,” “zip,” or “nil” appear in the clue.
Internal words redefined: A part of the answer is defined as a separate word.

Hindu greeting sat awkwardly in title (7 letters). Answer: NAMASTE. Hindu greeting is the real definition; “Sat awkwardly” means “sat” (anagrammed as “ast”, i.e. awkwardly written) inserted in the word “name” (which is one definition for “title”). Prepositions are often key clues. Back, backward, comeback, etc. will usually mean to spell something backward.
Initials: The initials of words in the clue are used, almost always hinted at by using the word “initial” in some form.

Teams stuck in depressing early slump initially (5 letters). Answer: SIDES. Teams is the definition, then the initials of the next 5 words.

You get the idea. There are no rules, although in my experience, all the published ones are fair. Once you finally get the answer, the clue makes sense, usually in two ways. For this reason, cryptics are sometimes easier to solve than regular acrostics because every answer has a built-in confirmation method. With regular acrostics, you might think of several possible words that could fit a definition, but you have no way to be sure which is the correct one until you’ve solved enough of the grid to provide feedback.