North_Fork_Trails said...
Hey congratulations on your 100th clog post! I really like your clog.Good that Rich and Chris visited and took you shopping. Good that your tree has a skirt.

All is well here.

Love, Dad.
November 29, 2007 6:24 AM

Janet had discovered that her vitamins contained caffeine.

North_Fork_Trails said...
What kind of pill has caffeine? NoDoz?

Maybe you should try coffee. After all, you are a writer.

Interesting clouds this morning. I am working on a new polar zonohedron algorithm for POV-Ray. I have got two versions of POV, one is UNIX and runs under X11, the other is Mac. I've got the UNIX version rendering 1200 640X480 frames for an animation, each frame takes about 15 or 20 minutes. It will take many days. Two and a half days so far, frame 216 is rendering right now.

But that leaves my Mac version of POV free for other work.

I had a funny programming experience. I decided to make a polar zonohedron as a "solid of translation" in POV. I would take the n vectors v[n], and first translate a sphere along 0*v[1], 1*v[1], ..., 9*v[1]. So, a line of ten spheres.

Then I would translate this line of spheres along 0*v[2], 1*v[2], etc.

Then I would translate this rhomb of 100 spheres along 0*v[3], etc. etc.

And so on.

But I neglected one thing: the number of spheres grows large very quickly.

I got the basic procedure up and running and said, OK, time for n=8.POV crashed almost immediately. I re-opened and examined my code. Tried again. Crash. Again. Crash. Again. Crash.

Then it finally occurred to me: I was asking POV to render 10*10*10*10*10*10*10*10 spheres! Or one hundred million. And that was too much.

However it works fine for n=4. I will send you an animation of a rhombic dodecahedron made from 1000 spheres.

Love,

Dad
November 30, 2007 10:26 AM

North_Fork_Trails said...
Hey Jan, you should know that geometers have senses of humor. My hero Professor Coxeter used the quotation below to introduce one of his chapters, in his book "Geometry Revisited."

"Since you are now studying geometry and trigonometry, I will give you a problem. A ship sails the ocean. It left Boston with a cargo of wool. It grosses 200 tons. It is bound for Le Havre ... . There are 12 passengers aboard. The wind is blowing East-North-East. The clock points to a quarter past three in the afternoon. It is the month of May. How old is the captain?"
--Gustave Flaubert.

I had to share it with you.

Adieu,Dad
December 3, 2007 10:46 AM

Janet had a computer problem

North_Fork_Trails said...
Hey,

I much doubt that it was changing to "Endure" that allowed Google to find your Parkour page. I tried Googling "davis parkour" and only three pages were returned. Your blog post was from October. Before any change to "Endure."

It is possible that you can set your blog to *not* be indexed by Google but I don't know. Some sites are that way. For instance, Google searches do not link to content within certain history sites. It's some kind of agreement Google makes with various web sites. These sites prefer that people can only access site content by passing through the site portal itself as it were ...Beautiful sunny day here. Just finished a new (to me) Terry Pratchett, "Interesting Times." Ah it should be made into a movie.

Luvya,

Dad
December 10, 2007 1:05 PM

Janet wrote re hopes for getting a good grade in Latin

North_Fork_Trails said...
Hey Dude the Latin sounds great!

Parturiunt montes, nascetur ridiculus mus!

See you soon,

Dad
December 11, 2007 10:26 PM

Janet was considering taking a course on spiders

North_Fork_Trails said...
The thing of it is, with spiders, it goes beyond mere cultural importance: they are culturally self-important, too! So there is an added layer of complexity.

We finally have electricity again as of this (Wednesday) morning.

The Tempest by Shakespeare one presumes? One of my favorites.

Hope the cell phone arrives soon,

Love,Dad
January 9, 2008 9:15 AM

North_Fork_Trails said...
Hey Dude is the iPod under warranty? It's not that old. Dreadful it's broken.

Betcha it' foggy there. For once in a long while it is sunny here.

Your classes sound good. Ah the Tempest. What could be better. And you have the luck to make a presentation.

Luvya,Dad
January 11, 2008 8:43 AM

Janet got a new cell phone

North_Fork_Trails said...
Hey Dude great news, you have one of those new-fangled telephones I've been hearing about! What, there's no cord at all? C'est impossible!

I understand they make great stepping-stones, too, like during a party, if someone needs to cross the room, and people are stretched out on the floor, profligately, in every direction, you just step from cell phone to cell phone.

Hmm, a beautiful sunny morning here. If we were out at Lovers Leap we'd be looking down on a vast ocean of white, to the west. The Sierra and the Coast Range would be seen rising in long islands above that ruffled white sea, rising, I say, sunny, benevolent, even warm. But down within that argent ocean ... it is grey upon grey and cold upon cold and damp upon damp.

Luvya,Dad
January 15, 2008 7:53 AM

North_Fork_Trails said...
Hey Dude, MouseBrute,

I had no idea Clinton was at Davis. Sorry you missed him.

Good news about your apartment! We all love you very much and miss you, thank goodness we have your blog! Glad your iPod is back up and running!

Luvya,Dad
January 16, 2008 8:59 AM

North_Fork_Trails said...
Hey Dude,Cool rugs!

Great you found the elusive iPod!

Hi Crystal!

It's been cloudy and cold and stormy forever up here. We're not buried in snow anyway. Just a few inches, maybe a foot up in the meadow.

So anyway, in Latin, ad deus, in French adieu, in Spanish adiós, in Portuguese adeus,

Dad
January 25, 2008 1:50 PM

Janet wrote about a party her roommates were having that disrupted her sleep.

North_Fork_Trails said...
Hey Dude,

I've got your absentee ballot right here! I should have sent it down to you with Gay the other day but it was in a pile of mail and I didn't even think of it.

Today is breezy, sometimes a little sunny. I made hot water for the first time in a week or whatever.

Fooling around in your dorm room! The teenagers these days! Why, when I was young, we were all well-behaved, endowed with manners rather than mannerisms, and, such pointless hijinks as running around dorm rooms without a shirt--why, we were too busy walking to school in the snow for any of that, let me tell you!

Dad
January 26, 2008 3:16 PM

Janet was looking forward to the new season of "Lost".

North_Fork_Trails said...
Dudeling,I hear tell NBC will air an "enhanced" final-episode-of-last-season Wednesday night. Or whatever the night is before the night of the season premiere.

Be Forewarned,and,Avoid Facebook At All Costs,

Dad
January 29, 2008 11:45 AM

Janet had died her hair.

North_Fork_Trails said...
Hey I hoped it would be a nice light powder blue!

Luvya, Dad

p.s. you can drop off your absentee ballot at any polling place, you don't have to mail it.

February 4, 2008 7:00 AM

Naet wrote about a Lost episode and had posted pictures that showed the results of the strangest hair styles.

North_Fork_Trails said...
Hey Dude,Great hairstyles!

Shall I just tell you what happened in Lost? How WildMouse found, to his surprise, that he was scarcely more than a tool of the Evil Empire, and then the Wicked Witch of the West by Southwest raised her Instrument of Destruction, and she pointed that Instrument directly at the honest mouse, and she ...

But, no, I should not give it away.

Luvya,Dad
February 15, 2008 12:59 PM

North_Fork_Trails said...
Hey Dude,You'd be lost without Lost! Heh heh heh.

Good job on the Chinese! That'll teach'em to go and have civilizations and dynasties and things!

Did you know the gangster tongs of old Dutch Flat were also to some extent patriotic, anti-Manchu organizations? "Down with the Manchu, restore the Ming!" Like the Chee Kong Tong for instance? Which sheltered Sun Yat Sen himself from the Imperial assassins, in San Francisco, in the 1880s? But Dutch Flat had its own branch of the Chee Kong Tong. One of the nicest buildings in Chinatown. Not far form the McClungs', other side of the dirt road going down Squires Canyon and down the hill a few yards.

Maybe if you went for platinum blonde, it would average out to a nice light blue?

We've still got a ton of snow here. Slowly it melts. Not a speck of bare ground by the cabins and the road is a mess.

OK luvya and way to go on the midterm, except, by all means don't neglect your Latin! When Caesar said, "Et tu, Brute," the 'Brute' is in the vocative!

I'm still puzzled by how Portuguese works. You know, in Spanish the masculine for 'the' is 'el." Clearly from Latin illo etc. In Portuguese it's shortened to merely 'o'. What's confusing is to add the article all the time where I think it doesn't belong: "my love" becomes "o meu amor." It seems to me that in Spanish we'd never say "el mio amor" but I may be all wrong.

Dad
February 7, 2008 3:32 PM

Janet had been climbing trees with Eli.

North_Fork_Trails said...
Hey Janet,Sounds like a great weekend! But I'm worried about your tree-climbing. Eli may be a master climber but you are not. Of course practice makes perfect but caution, extreme caution, is called for! Just yesterday Greg was up in a little tree here by the cabins, a little Douglas Fir maybe thirty feet tall. I sent him up there to see if we coudl throw a rope around another tree nearby; it turned out we couldn't; so from a height of fiteen feet he began to descend. He thinks of himself as an expert climber--and maybe that was the problem; for he trusted his weight to the wrong branch, it broke, and in an instasnt he was falling, breaking other branches on his way down, and he landed neatly in the snow, after a fall of ten feet. And if it had not been for that foot or so of soft snow--we don't even want to think about it. That fall was over before either of us really knew it had begun.

So please be very very cautious!

I love you so much and admire you, keep up the great blog and the good work at college!--

Dad
February 11, 2008 7:51 AM

Janet wrote that her Muse had inspired her to do some writing.

North_Fork_Trails said...
Hey Janet,

Your Muse is very amusing, good thing she escaped the Museum, under the influence of Music, har de har har,

bemusedly yours,Dad
February 20, 2008 7:44 AM

Janet wrote about wanting to find yogurt that did not have high fructose corn syrup in it.

North_Fork_Trails said...
Hey how about natural food stores? gotta be a great one in Davis! Or ... buy plain yogurt, add real strawberries, mash it around, voila!

They say, you know, that WildMouse's Muse lived in a museum, and played the cithara very well ... while eating strawberry yogurt! So it's a small universe, I guess.

Hey, fantastic job on the Latin! I am so pleased! As WildMouse's Muse was wont to say, or sing, to tell the absolute truth, "concrescunt subitae currenti in flumine crustae, undaque iam tergo ferratos sustinet orbis," etc. etc.

Sed fugit interea, fugit inreparabile tempus, hinc illae lacrimae,

Dad
February 20, 2008 4:46 PM

Janet wrote about her skill having improved with the game Rockband.

North_Fork_Trails said...
I really liked your description of the bike ride in the rain. And good job, on mastering the guitar and drums! Here we anxiously awaited the Giant Storm and, as they say, parturiunt montes, nascetur ridiculus mus.

February 24, 2008 6:48 AM

Janet was looking forward to two TV shows.

North_Fork_Trails said...
Hey, I can understand "Lost," but "America's Next Top Model"? Unless, of course, it were models of polyhedra, or of tessellations. Yes, that must be it. Now I understand.

What is better, on the other hand, than flowering cherry trees?

Answer: nothing is better. In fact, if I'm not mistaken, some obscure passage of the Bible reveals that God Himself made a mistake; for He intended the flowering cherry tree to be Heavenly, alone; yet, in an odd moment of confusion, He put it here on Earth.

Hence the phrase, "Heaven on Earth."

Just a little scholarship.

Luvya,Dad
March 1, 2008 1:07 PM