My week under the sea has ended, my first time under way though I have been serving the navy as a hydrodynamicist for the past dozen years. I may share bits of the experience if there is interest, but for now here are two experiences:

I: The last full day at sea was given to surface maneuvering off the California coast. Toward the end of the day, I requested and received permission from the chief of the watch to visit the bridge atop the sail. He assigned a sailor to help me into a harness, and I climbed up top, and spent a half hour standing there with two officers and one crewman, watching the sun lower and set as we cruised past a large island at 10 knots and the waves washed around us. Twenty minutes after going back down, I noticed some feeling within me and examined what it was. “I feel . . . serene.”

II: A couple hours after coming back in, I sat in the crew mess, eating pizza and listening to the World Series with a dozen crewmen. It felt American.

Stopped at an intersection, I heard a noise to my right, and there were four middle-aged women on the corner waving signs for the congressional candidate they favor, four weeks before election day, when it’s appropriate and good for citizens to participate in political campaigning. One of the weaknesses of the internet age is the weakening of local community, including newspapers and politics. Instead the nation obsesses inordinately on the one election choice we all have in common, electing the U.S. president, and does so for two years.

From an interview with Dave Keuning, Killers guitarist:

In 2008, Rolling Stone said you were saving money to book a trip on Virgin’s first commercial space flight. Is that something you’re still wanting to do?

It’s something I’m still interested in, but Virgin has kept pushing that date back. They said it was going to be 2010, and then ’11, and then ’12, and they still haven’t done it. It’s actually made me a bit nervous about being on the first one. Whenever it happens, I’ll probably let other people do it first for a few years because I don’t want to be the one who blows up.

Near the top of a newspaper article about meerkats’ murderous ways: “The team of Spanish biologists and geneticists behind the study did not set out to point a bloody paw at the meerkat, however. They were more interested in plumbing the evolutionary history of lethal violence, comparing murder rates for 1,024 different types of mammals.”

1024 is 100,0000,0000 in binary. With the numbering starting at zero instead of one, so that the ordinal of the last item, the 11,1111,1111th, is a ten-bit identifier.

Monday night Mrs. Clinton brought up Alicia Machado, a former Miss Universe who Trump was mean to, and bragged that she is now a U.S. citizen and will be a Clinton voter. Apparently, Miss Machado has lived a fairly wild and sordid life since her dealings with Trump twenty years ago. Not really the sort of person that candidates of the past would have pointed out by name before a national audience as supporters of theirs. But it’s not the past. It’s now, and as Mr. Trump asked, “Where did you find this?” Part of the answer is that Trump has contributed a lot over the decades, and more each decade than the one before, to creating our Kardashian era in which people like Miss Machado are easy to find. Unpleasantly hard to avoid, really.

So here we are with one candidate who thinks it’s a nifty thing that a woman who posed naked in magazines, served as the getaway driver for her homicidal boyfriend, and threatened to kill a judge has been given citizenship and a vote—because she finds some small advantage in this. The other candidate is married to a woman who posed naked for magazines, thinks that is normal, and has performed an oversized labor toward normalizing public depravity.

Mormons have a very broad and democratic collection of biographies of their 19th Century predecessors. This is due to two causes. The first is our belief that family bonds have eternal significance which leads us to seek familiarity with our dead and to leave records that will allow our descendants to know us. The second is that the first Latter-day Saints felt they were eyewitnesses of something important and wanted to leave a testimony of it. Thanks to these factors, it is easy to find research on hundreds of second-tier associates of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, and tens of thousands of multi-page biographical essays on nobodies written either first-hand by the nobodies themselves or by their children. These are of most interest to direct descendants of these people, so today most of those 19th Century Mormons are each known in detail to a few percent of present-day Mormons, but we like hearing the stories of others’ kin too.

A few of my favorites: (more…)

Last night Elder Cook spoke to the young adults of the LDS Church. My two older sons attended the broadcast in our stake center. (more…)

It’s been my impression that it is the policy of North Korea to scrape together all the loose fissionable material to found around the world, and when they have enough scrounged up for a critical mass, to make it into a bomb and blow it up. This seems like a useful service to the world. The interval between bombs had been three years (2006, 2009, 2012, 2016), but the latest came less than a year after the previous and released a larger yield.

“Brookland Manor today has 134 four- and five-bedroom apartments. Yet when the new community is built, none of its 1,646 apartments or 114 for-sale townhouses will have more than three bedrooms, and a vast majority will have only one or two.

Brookland’s owner, Mid-City Financial Corp., based in Germantown, Md., told the city’s Zoning Commission that four- and five-bedroom apartments ‘are not consistent with the creation of a vibrant new community.'”
(link)

“Four- and five-bedroom units in the District constitute just 8 percent and 4 percent of available rental housing, respectively, with most of the properties in Wards 7 and 8, the city’s poorest areas, according a report last year.”

A few links:

“6 things to know about independent presidential candidate Evan McMullin,” Washington Post.

“Meet Evan McMullin, The #NeverTrump Movement’s Last Hope,” NPR.

“Here’s why #NeverTrump candidate Evan McMullin is too late to get in the game,” all the missed and upcoming ballot deadlines at Conservative Review.

infogalactic bio.

I’m looking at a recent traffic safety newsletter produced by Cape Fox, a company that does driver training programs for the military. An article on texting while parking (instead of driving) lists the U.S. states and territories where texting while driving is illegal. Six states are not on the list.

Which six states are they? Please restrict yourself to two states per hour in the comments.

Panaca, Nevada goes back to 1864 when it was Panaca, Utah, a couple years before Nevada’s boundary was moved another degree east to the 114th Meridian. It was an agricultural community supplying mining camps. “Tranquil and religious, Panaca never had an easy relationship with its rambunctious neighbors, but it has outlasted nearly all of them.” Today with a population of 900, it is the only dry town in Nevada. There is a Panaca Nevada Stake of the LDS church, a Panaca 1st Ward, and a Panaca 2nd Ward. The last time I was there was two nights before the 2012 eclipse. The next morning I visited graves in Enterprise, 50 miles east of Panaca.

A weird crime occurred there Wednesday evening. (more…)

From “Table 2. Births, by age of mother, live-birth order, and race of mother: United States, 2014” in “Births: Final Data for 2014,” National Vital Statistics Reports, Volume 64, Number 12 are the following number of first-borns, second-borns, etc.:

1st: 1,550,475; 2nd: 1,267,334; 3rd: 667,446; 4th: 283,953; 5th; 110,565; 6th: 46,045; 7th: 20,771; 8th and over: 21,589; not stated: 19,898; total: 3,988,076.

That makes for the following ratios:

1st/2nd: 1.22; 2nd/3rd: 1.90; 3rd/4th: 2.35; 4th/5th: 2.57; 5th/6th: 2.40; 6th/7th: 2.22.

I wonder what my six children would make of this, particularly the youngest. The ratios correspond somewhat with my own experience as a potential parent: The choice to have a second child was never pondered independently—it was part of the choice to marry. After that, conception was a consciously considered matter, and considered one child at a time. The last two were on exception, though. Before conceiving a fifth child, we decided to also have a sixth if we could and then retire from getting and bearing. After the sixth was born, that seemed to be a good decision and we stayed with it.

“As the rain clouds dispersed over Madison High before a recent Saturday afternoon game, a throng of pro scouts in a rainbow of Major League Baseball caps crowded along the backstop, eyes focused on two seniors who may not even be playing baseball in two years.”

In the Washington Post, with quotes from former missionary Jeremy Guthrie and not-former missionary Bryce Harper. (link)

From Music and the Making of Modern Science by Peter Pesic, page 28:

In his earlier Tractatus de commensurabilitate vel incommensurabilitate motuum celi (Treatise on the Commensurability or Incommensurability of the Celestial Motions, written sometime during 1340-1377), Oresme staged this problem in the form of a debate between personified figures of Arithmetic and Geometry, enacted at the command of Apollo himself. The whole dramatic scene is unique among his works, which he generally phrased in the traditional Euclidean style of geometrical propositions.

Appearing as a character in his own drama, Orseme expresses his perplexity whether incommensurability is actually present in astronomy or only a purely theoretical possibility. Then Apollo, accompanied by the Muses, Arts, and Sciences, appears to Oresme “as if in a dream.” Apollo rebukes him for being “ignorant of the ratios relating the things of this world” and hence subject to “affliction of the spirit and an unending labor.” Apollo phrases the problem trenchantly; “an impreceptible excess—even a part smaller than a thousandth—could destroy an equality and alter a ratio from rational to irrational.”