In a funk all day yesterday. Didn't sleep well Saturday night. Surprised at how the death of a fictional character seemed to affect me.

Played with the HP-48SX, working my way through the manual. Didn't require much real thought, other than puzzling out the locations of the various shifted keys. My SX has one column of dead pixels. I've seen worse. Some dumb part of my brain wants to look for a "perfect" one. So far I've managed to squelch that. I can run a "perfect" emulator if I really need to, which I don't.

Wanted something light last night. It seems harder and harder to find anything worth watching as a "new release." John Wick 4? Please. I own 1-3. (Well, kind of "own" them. I guess I have them on sort of "permanent loan" until I die or something, because I'm not passing them along to my heirs, so I guess they're not really "mine" are they?) Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, I thought they went one too far with 3. Love Keanu, but really.

So I turned to my library of "permanently loaned" movies. Watched The World's End, figured that'd cheer me up. And it did. I'd actually forgotten how it ended, or at least a key element of it. I guess there are some welcome aspects to having less facility with memory as one ages.

Caitie texted me yesterday about the earthquake, she didn't feel it but apparently a lot of her friends in LA did.

Stepped outside this morning and my sunglasses fogged up. The house is at 77°F, so the dew point was above that, and there was no dew on the grass, so the ground never cooled below 78-79°. Felt like a sauna. Yellow flies were numerous and aggressive. Notched another five "kills" on the walk, at the cost of at least two bites. They don't itch very long, but intensely for the brief time that they do. One was so aggressive I assumed I must have killed its sibling and it was seeking revenge.

Was lucky on some bluebird pics, as previously posted. Flickr Uploader seems stuck at the moment. Le sigh.

Got back soggy from the walk. Turned on the ceiling fan in my office to dry me out as I processed the pics. Now I need to shower, as I no longer feel funky, I am funky.

Have a wonderful Monday.

This morning's bird. I took some shots from farther away, unsure if it'd let me get closer. This is straight from the camera.

While Donna Deegan's new mayoral administration holds the potential for rousing Jacksonville city government from its malignant torpor, the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office is in the hands of a Duval County Republican, the party responsible for decades of mediocrity.

It remains to be seen what Sheriff T.K. Waters' legacy will be, but early indications are uninspiring.

We are going to have to reinvent the notion of insurance. The current model is unsustainable.

Spotted the crescent moon last night and had to take this. Used the E-P7 with the 25mm/f1.8. Already posted it on mastodon, but I'd posted an earlier crescent moon this month, so I figured I'd post this one as well.

Wasn't my night, last night I guess.

We'd finished watching season 4 of Unforgotten, not season 3.

So, spoilers I guess. You know the drill.

I wonder if Chris Lang had the arc of the whole thing worked out before it began, or if it came to him as the series progressed, or if the dénouement was something of a practical requirement because of Nikola Walker?

One of the great things about the show is watching the suspects react as more and more of their past is revealed. How they fray as each piece of the puzzle is slowly fitted into place.

Binging the show as we did, it seemed to me that by season 3, Lang wanted to show another side. There's a scene in season 3 where the victim's ex-boyfriend, who had been a suspect decades ago, delivers a lengthy, bitter, stinging rebuke to one of the detectives. It's pretty much the only reason he was written into the season, I suspect. In the first two seasons, the police are all depicted as competent, professional, empathetic "good guys," albeit with complicated personal lives, at least in the case of DCI Stuart and DI Sunny Khan who are the only police regulars with three-dimensional characters. I suspect Lang perhaps received criticism for that depiction of the police.

A love interest is introduced for both Khan and Stuart. In Cassie's case, he's an ex-career "copper" off the force for budget cuts, who was a junior detective on the original case, now "an historical murder." It seems his role was also to, at least at first, depict the police in a less-flattering light.

Season 3 also focuses on how DCI Stuart begins to fray, as a decades-long career as an empathetic police officer, interacting with people at the worst moments of their lives, finally exhausts her emotional resources.

Season 4 turns the spotlight fully on the police, as all the suspects are, or were, police officers. DCI Stuart has applied for early retirement for mental health reasons. Things aren't great at home, despite now being in a loving relationship with former DCI John Bentley. Her father has been diagnosed with dementia, and is in a relationship with a woman Stuart suspects may be taking advantage of him. A change of will is a plot point. One of her sons is living at home and seemingly slow to find work.

Her request for early retirement is denied, and DCI Stuart is forced to return to work for about three months to complete 30 years service to be eligible for full retirement, or forego over 100,000 pounds in retirement income. Suffice to say, she reluctantly goes back to work and cracks the case.

Not before being doubted, criticized, rejected.

And then her car is hit by a stolen Range Rover in a moment of distracted driving brought on by fatigue and emotional distress, ultimately leading to her death.

The best thing about Unforgotten was Nikola Walker's portrayal of DCI Cassie Stuart. I was fully invested in her character, and her death felt needlessly cruel and unfair. Mitzi said they lifted it right out of a Law & Order season, but I don't know.

So much of the series plays out on the faces of Walker and Sanjeev Baskhar as DI Sunil "Sunny" Khan, as they interview witnesses or interact with victims. What you see there, in Law & Order would be verbalized and far less effectively. I think that's what was remarkable and different as a police procedural. It's high-stakes played low key. The tension, the reactions, conveyed in subtle facial expressions, brief acknowledging utterances. No histrionics. No bravado. To be clear, there are hard, direct questions. But no bullshit table-slamming, or chair throwing.

I loved DCI Cassie Stuart. I loved the series. I loved Chris Lang's writing. In season 3, one of the suspects talks about how life can be turned upside down in a moment, in an arbitrary, unfair event that changes everything. And in another moment, it can bring joy and happiness, seemingly equally out of nowhere. I don't know if Lang was telegraphing Cassie's death, but it seems significant now.

Before she died, Lang lets us know she may be in a new place, a better one. That at least some of the anger was gone.

To borrow from Willie, "Out of kindness, I suppose."

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 05:47 Sunday, 20 August 2023

Sitting here doing nothing else, I figured I might mention that I used the term "identity" this morning in the context of a fraction's conjugate. It occurs to me that I likely used that word improperly. While I find math fascinating, I mostly noodle around with it and so I'm inclined to often make mistakes.

Basically, we're multiplying by 1, which doesn't change the value of the expression. So it remains an "identity." It does alter the terms in a way that is helpful.

But yeah, I probably used the word wrong. As always, like ChatGPT, I'm an authority on nothing. I make all this shit up. You're encouraged to do your own thinking.

Finished watching Unforgotten Season 3 this evening. Real punch in the stomach. Great series. DCI Cassie Stuart is an unforgettable character.

We haven't had any rain in over a week. Seems to keep falling all around us!

The other day, I mentioned something that I've long believed. That technology isn't the solution to anything. At best, it's a tool. Tools don't solve problems, they help people solve problems. And most of our problems have to do with us. Our human nature.

We've grown enamored with our tools and our facility with making them. We have more faith in technology than we do in ourselves.

In the early days of blogging, the blogosphere was filled with internet triumphalists. "This changes everything!" Markets were conversations, everything was miscellaneous, gatekeepers were being overthrown, marginal costs were going to be zero for digital goods, yada, yada, yada...

It was all bullshit.

Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit.

I understand the euphoria, the enthusiasm. I understand the endocrine rewards of novelty and attention. I understand how the intoxication skews thought and reasoning.

And in a competitive, capitalist, attention-based economy, I understand how bullshit came to be dogma.

You don't find many of the triumphalists recanting these days. I don't expect many will.

So this was something of a refreshing read.

Buying the HP-75 has turned into a new, and likely passing, obsession. While it's burning, I've spent a lot of time browsing the HP Museum Forum. There are a lot of math posts, as one might expect. So I've been pulling some books out of my library and looking at "recreational" math on programmable and scientific calendars.

Of course, I'm still keeping up with my RSS feeds, and a couple of recent entries from Dr. Drang seemed timely, almost to the point of synchronicity.

And when I wasn't browsing the forums, or noodling around with my HP-41CX, I pulled one of my "popular literature" mathematics books, Mathematical Sorcery, by Calvin C. Clawson, off the shelf and thumbed through it looking for something to read while sitting in the recliner. In Chapter 8, Extending the Form, I spotted some continued fractions, which was one of the topics Dr. Drang explored, so I decided to read that.

Clawson goes some way to "show his work" in explaining how continued fractions can be used to find a square root. I like to think I'm an educated person, but he used a term I was unfamiliar with as it appeared in this context: "Our next step is to write the term within the parenthesis as a fraction and multiply its numerator and denominator by its conjugate."

I couldn't follow what he was doing, so I went back to my library and pulled the Penguin Dictionary of Mathematics, off the shelf and looked up conjugate. There are many entries beginning with "conjugate," but none in the context of a fraction. I was no further enlightened.

So before turning out the lights last night, I figured I'd ask ChatGPT, "What is a fraction's conjugate in mathematics?" I received this helpful reply:

In mathematics, the conjugate of a fraction refers to a way of changing the sign between the terms in the fraction. The conjugate of a binomial fraction is obtained by changing the sign of the second term. For example, if we have a fraction (a + b)/(c - d), its conjugate would be (a + b)/(c + d).

The conjugate of a fraction is commonly used when simplifying or rationalizing expressions involving square roots or complex numbers. By multiplying the numerator and denominator of a fraction by the conjugate of the denominator, we can eliminate square roots from the denominator or simplify complex numbers in the denominator. This technique is helpful in various mathematical operations, such as simplifying expressions or solving equations.

Knowing that ChatGPT gives clear, confident answers that are often wrong, this morning I pulled the tome Mathematics, From the Birth of Numbers, by Jan Gullberg, from the library and looked up "conjugate" in the index. There were no entries with respect to "fractions," but one of the two entries was binomial surds, which I knew referred to irrational numbers, like some square roots. So I went to that page, and it was largely a discussion of rationalizing and simplifying expressions containing surds. So I knew ChatGPT wasn't blowing digital smoke up my butt.

It all became clear. You multiply by the conjugate identity to eliminate the square root in the denominator. I could follow along after that.

Out of curiosity, I checked the entry for rationalize in the Penguin dictionary, and while it mentions multiplying by an identity with an opposite sign, it never specifically mentions "conjugate."

Anyway, ChatGPT can be helpful, at least pointing you in the right direction.

No birds this morning. Well, a couple of vultures. Gator though.

This morning's bird, a green heron. Cloud cover made conditions somewhat dim. I heard one across the road, where I'd seen one yesterday. I looked for it in the trees, but didn't see it. Spotted this one next to the pond shortly after. Unremarkable image, but we do what we can.

I like to keep up with Dave Winer's Scripting.com blog, because he's been around for a long time and brings an important perspective to a lot of the conversation.

That said, something he posted this morning prompts me to comment. Dave wrote, "The answers to our problems can be found in the new tech."

To be fair, I'm taking Dave's comment somewhat out of context. I understand what Dave's saying here, that there are ways to develop technologies that help foster behaviors that are less "problematic," and I think I'd agree with that.

But, in general, I think it's incorrect to say that the answers to our problems are found in new technology.

I've said this for a long time now, technology changes how we do things, it doesn't change what we do. Our problems are in the latter.

Because of our facility as "makers," we are biased toward invention when seeking solutions. That is, we look for external solutions to our problems, when the source of our problems is mainly, internal, and related to desire. And there's no technology that can fix that.

There are few external rewards for introspection. No increase in social status. It's not especially difficult, but we don't introduce it in our educational systems, because we don't value it, and so we don't learn how. And when we do look inside, it's often responding to an inner voice that is a notoriously unreliable narrator, which can become problematic in itself.

But we do love our technology.

Didn't see much this morning. A green heron, but it was a little too far away. Shot it anyway. But the bluebirds are always nice to see.

While the writers and actors are striking, and I hope they get everything they want, Mitzi and I have been watching "new to us" past series, especially British programs.

We've just finished season 2 of Unforgotten on Prime and it's outstanding.

Where Lancaster, er, I mean Halifax had several examples of cringe-worthy dialog in every single episode ("I'm still your commanding officer!"), Unforgotten has some of the best dialog I've ever heard in a police procedural.

The title of the series is a double entendre, that snuck up on me about two-thirds of the way through the first season. At first I thought it was about the victim being unforgotten with the discovery of the crime. But it's really about the explosive damage the act of "unforgetting" the past delivers to the present. It made me think of UXB, if you've ever heard of that. It's not an especially novel idea, but it's extremely well done here.

Mitzi and her daughter Sherri love Law and Order, in all its many manifestations. I mean, really love it. I liked the characters in the original series, but I don't care for any of the others. A six-episode season of Unforgotten is like the first half of a single episode of Law and Order, which is a vastly different dynamic. There is no "trial" portion. The case is solved and we're offered some idea of what the future might hold for everyone, but there are no courtroom theatrics.

It's a slow boil as the detectives work hard to identify a victim who's been dead for over 30 years. That's the forensic piece that's always been fascinating to me since I read Thomas Harris' Red Dragon, back in 1984. So far, there's been no "profiler," which is a tired saw as far as I'm concerned. It's just gumshoe detective work, aided by some bits of fairly interesting forensic science. As these cases are so old, there's no "blood spatter" analysis, which is refreshing.

The on-screen violence is largely confined to bits of stylized flashbacks of recalled memories. There's no man-handling of suspects, no car chases, no SWAT teams. But the tension is still palpable as the noose grows inexorably tighter and you try to figure out which of the ensemble of possible killers did it, and why.

There's no snarky banter from the detectives to the suspects. No bravado, no threats. "I know what you did, and you're going down for it!"

Nicola Walker is a marvelous actor. She's in a lot of these British shows, and Mitzi liked her in Last Tango in Halifax (no relation to Lancaster, er, I mean Halifax.), but that was a rather soapy affair with everyone always yelling or in tears all the time. Not my "cuppa." But I think she offers a remarkable performance as DCI Cassi Stuart. All the cast give credible, understated performances.

As much as I've enjoyed Luther, this is like the exact opposite and, really, much better and far more enjoyable.

Kudos to Chris Lang, the writer and creator. This is great TV and deserves a wide audience.

With the slightly cooler temp, I walked later yesterday morning, with enough light to carry a telephoto zoom. Spotted this cattle egret looking a bit uncomfortable standing in front of a neighbor's garage. I don't see them often around here.

If you care to notice, the temperature recording for this post is somewhat less than the previous one, but both are below 80°F. (Speaking of precision...) My local reading is 76 point something. Yesterday was likewise around 77 and so yesterday's walk was far more pleasant.

It's really kind of amazing how much difference a few degrees can make in your perception of discomfort. The humidity is still ridiculous.

Calculators and handheld computers consumed what time I might have spent with the marmot yesterday and Sunday, though I did sit in on the Tinderbox meetup on Sunday.

I need to correct something I mentioned on Saturday. I had the impression that the TI-89 series used a Z-80 processor and that's not the case. It used the Motorola 68000, as did the TI-92. The 89 was basically the 92 without a QWERTY keyboard, which apparently made it acceptable in some classroom settings where the 92 wasn't permitted. I knew they are largely feature identical, (the 92 has a larger screen) but seemed to recall being somewhat surprised to learn the 89 had been supposedly developed using the Z-80. I don't know where I got that impression, but it's false and I wanted to correct my error.

In other news, I also mentioned NTDS on Saturday, and it seems much, if not all, of the text of a book on the history of NTDS, When Computers Went to Sea, is available online as a web site. Even if you're not interested in NTDS, chapter two (link at the bottom of chapter one), has a nice capsule history of computer development. It also offers a more nuanced view, crediting Eckert and Mauchly with the "stored program" design of a general purpose computer, something that has historically been credited exclusively to John Von Neumann.

And as a font of all wonders, the Internet Archive will serve up a Naval Postgraduate School paper on using handheld calculators and computers for Target Motion Analysis. I think this is a variation on existing programs in the tactical program library, as I was on shore duty in September 1983, and I think I had been introduced to the HP-67/97 and Sharp PC-1500 programs while on sea duty. It's not important, and I suppose I could dig out my service record and check the dates of my schools. I know I did not see either the HP-75 or the HP-71 as part of the tactical program library, possibly because I think the handheld programs were subsumed by a larger Navy computer effort called JOTS, the Joint Operational Tactical System (Jerry O. Tuttle System).

Parenthetically, with regard to the paper using target bearings accurate to a tenth of a degree, I'm skeptical. With an acoustic towed array, I suppose it's possible to resolve bearing to that precision, if the array is long enough; but I think the tactical towed arrays weren't that long and were probably capable of 1 degree of bearing resolution at best. I could be wrong. And the baseline for own-ship onboard high frequency radio direction finding is likewise not capable of bearing resolution to a tenth of a degree. Again, I could be wrong. But I was surprised to see the author using inputs of that precision. The idea behind TMA was to get an area of probability that was practical to search with a helo or other asset, or to place a Harpoon or Tomahawk missile with its own onboard sensor within an area that ensured a high enough probability of acquiring the target.

One thing leads to another in these spelunking expeditions and I found a guy who makes an arduino interface for the TI-74 and TI-95 to replace the cassette recorder interface, which is nearly impossible to find. $30 shipped, so...

Finally, as serendipity would have it, there's a book coming out on "the rise and reign of the pocket calculator," Empire of the Sum. I looking forward to reading it.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 04:45 Tuesday, 15 August 2023

With regard to the previous post, I modified the program in each of the machines to eliminate the display of intermediate results. In that instance, the performance changes radically. The HP-75C comes in first, displaying the result in about 1s. The TI-74 is second at about 2s, while the HP-71b comes in a distant third at about 5s, which is still radically quicker.

I was surprised a bit to see the HP-75C overtake the TI-74, given the original performance.

I've been playing around a bit with the HP-75C. I received a replacement battery pack, which takes AAA NiMH batteries. I'm disappointed that it doesn't seem to power the computer. I haven't investigated the matter further, I've been using the wall wart instead. Previously, the wall wart wouldn't power the computer with the original NiCad pack in place. It does work on the wall wart with the AAAs installed, so I'm not sure what's going on. I haven't put a meter on it yet. It hasn't stopped me from playing around with it.

Yesterday I did a little comparison between the HP-75, HP-71 and a TI-74 BASICALC calculator. The TI is roughly contemporaneous with the two HPs, appearing in 1984. I wrote a little BASIC program to sum the digits from 1 to 100, displaying each intermediate result. The HP-75 chugged along at a pace where I could view each result and register what the number was before the next one appeared. The HP-71 was positively glacial, which surprised me. The TI blew through the program so fast I had to add a PAUSE statement at the end to see the total!

That prompted a digression down a processor history rabbit-hole. Apparently it's been well known since the beginning that the HP-75 was faster in many respects than the HP-71. It has a genuine 8-bit cpu designed as a general purpose digital computer. The processor in the HP-71 is the Saturn, a 4-bit calculator chip, which went on to serve in various HP calculators up through the HP-50 (2006), and lives on today in emulated form, vastly faster, in the HP Prime on an ARM Cortex processor. The TI uses a TI cpu, the TMS70C46. I don't know if it went on to any other products. TI used the Motorola 68000 in its later TI-92 calculator, and a Z-80 in the TI-89.

I thought I was pretty much over my calculator obsession, but the HP-75 seems to have re-ignited it. I've since bought some more old crap I'm unlikely to ever need.

So that was the topic of this morning's walking reflection. I haven't really needed a calculator since the Naval Academy. At least, nothing more than a standard 4-function handheld, and seldom not even that, since I do most of those things in my head unless it's a long chain. At Annapolis, I had a TI-56(?), something below the 59, no card reader. It was programmable with a modest number of steps. I recall I only programmed it a few times, mostly for working homework problems quickly where I could check the answers against those in the back of the book. Mostly it replaced log and trig tables.

Some mids had HP calculators with their bizarre "reverse Polish notation." Most of us had TIs though. I think they were more affordable and I know they were available in the Midshipman Store. I don't remember if HPs were carried. The HPs looked as different as they operated, green and tan versus TI's black. The HPs seemed to have better keys though, and that huge ENTER key.

After I was commissioned, I went on to some Navy schools, one for Combat Information Center Officer, and there we were introduced to the HP-67/97 and the Navy's "tactical program library." We got to play around with them a bit and they seemed exotic to me, a little exciting. I don't think we had one aboard GLOVER when I was CICO.

When I went to ASW school, we played around with the HPs again, and a Sharp handheld computer that was intended to replace the HPs. It had a little micro-cassette drive and thermal printer. We used them for "target motion analysis." You'd enter a series of passive bearings from a sonar contact into a program, alter course and enter some more. The handheld would output the data that defined an ellipse, where the target was likely to be. You could then have your helo fly out to search that area. Pretty cool stuff. We did have the Sharp handheld onboard, but we never seemed to use it, not having a towed array.

TMA later became hot again with the introduction of the Harpoon and later Tomahawk over-the-horizon anti-ship missiles. How do you target a weapon beyond active sensor range? By plotting electromagnetic emission intercepts. HF comms, mainly.

We did have an HP 9830 "calculator" aboard GLOVER for deployment. Ships that didn't have Naval Tactical Data System computers could receive a teletype broadcast of link track data that was human-readable, and plot the information on a plexiglass "vertical plot" using grease pencils. It was definitely non-real time, and when there were a lot of tracks the poor Operations Specialist who had to do the plotting was quickly task saturated. The HP 9830 received the teletype signal from radio central and ran a program called ECLIPS, which I think stood for "electronic calculator link processing system," which could parse the Link 14 messages and display them on a miniature vertical plot on a small CRT without getting task saturated. I can't say it was ever terribly useful, but I thought it was cool.

It seems I developed a certain fascination with HP products along the way, although I couldn't afford any back then.

I finally bought an HP-41CV in 1983 or 84 when I was on shore duty and badly managing my money. I still have it, it's in the drawer next to me. I learned enough RPN to use it, and played with a few programs; but it hasn't been of much real use in all the time I've owned it. Still think it's pretty cool though, and it still works too.

Scratching old itches. I guess that's what I'm doing these days. Gets expensive.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 08:06 Saturday, 12 August 2023

It's been about a week now where the morning low is 79°F or higher, with the humidity above 90%. The heat index is only a couple of degrees higher than that, but you can add 10° to that in direct sunlight. So if you want to walk at something approaching a "vigorous" pace, you want to do it before the sun gets very high.

This means it's pretty dark for birds, so I've been carrying the Olympus E-M1 Mk3 with the mZuiko 12-100mm/f4 lens. It's got a little bit of reach for tight cropping, but not enough for closeups. Mostly I use it for landscapes, or flowers.

But I've been playing with handheld high-res lately. I've been making 50MP images, because that's what I'm accustomed to with the moon. I'm a little embarrassed to admit you can make 25MP jpegs from HHHR as well. You may be asking why, given that the sensor's native resolution is 20MP, what's the advantage of a 25MP image?

You gain better noise and dynamic range, by a couple of stops at least. Not that this exposure shows that. I've put some pics up on Flickr that similarly don't really exhibit that, because I'm just playing around right now, getting familiar with the feature in this context.

I concur with Jack Baty and Petapixel. I don't make enough use of all of Flickr's features, but that's slowly increasing. I prefer Flickr for sharing photos to things like Instagram or Pixelfed.

I thought this was worthwhile to read. A brief interview with a social scientist about climate science, denial, the future and Florida.

Got little I'd planned accomplished yesterday. Went looking for my Dad's other pics of Nagasaki, found a couple and uploaded them to Flickr at the end of the LCS(L)-103 album. Decided I should look for other pictures of Nagasaki after the bombing to see if I could identify at least the church. Failed. But then I got sucked into this at the Truman Library, and pretty much the rest of the day was shot.