"Bucky is not like other dogs. But he is like ..." Part III. ("Visually similar images" from Google's "search by image")

(click on an image for full-screen)

Bucky is not like other dogs. But he is like a motorcycle, or Gerald Ford, or Harry Potter... ("Visually similar images" from Google's "search by image")

(click on an image for full-screen)

Headline of the Week!

The article "Dairy Finds a Way to Let Cows Power Trucks" appears in today's New York Times.

Headline of the Day!

An article entitled "Swiss Cows Send Texts to Announce They’re in Heat" appears in today's New York Times.

Board of Education member: Rock Creek Hills Park not "adequate size," so Montgomery Hills site would be needed, too.

Françoise Carrier, Chair of the Montgomery County (Maryland) Planning Board, attended the April 17th meeting of the Montgomery County Board of Education. There, Board of Education member Laura Berthiaume told Ms. Carrier that, due to the small size of Rock Creek Hills Park, if Montgomery County Public Schools were to take the park to build Bethesda-Chevy Chase (B-CC) middle school #2, then it would soon become necessary to build a third B-CC middle school, on the site of the former Montgomery Hills Junior High (currently the Yeshiva and Torah School of Greater Washington).

You can read their exchange on Kensington Patch.

To help spread the word, after you click through to the blog post on Patch, click on the Facebook "recommend" button on that page!

On average, each bike has a fork.

A mysterious video of what appears to be a pushmi/pullyu tandem bicycle has appeared on the Facebook page of Paul Component Engineering (There's no way to embed, or even to link to, the video here; you need to click through to their Facebook page, and then find and click on the video, which is entitled "Trust us. We're professionaaaaaaaahhhhhhls.").

On the other hand (h/t: cycleexif.com), Olli Erkkilä's beautiful and poetic Graduation Project at the Institute of Design in Lahti, Finland was a "forkless" cruiser:

"It is our duty to take note."

My testimony at tonight's meeting of the Montgomery County Board of Education is available.

A Gazette "Double Feature"!

Supporters of Rock Creek Hills Park may be interested in four media reports on the latest site selection advisory committee meeting, including two articles in yesterday's Gazette newspaper.

"Residents, officials debate parks in Kensington, Silver Spring: Neighborhood groups say use of federal funds prohibits building school."

"Dear Dr. Starr,"

A letter (in six bullet points) to the Montgomery County (Maryland) Public Schools Superintendent is available.

"A Shocking Omission."

This.

Board Rescinds Park Choice; Restarts Site Search.

Today, at the recommendation of Montgomery County (Maryland) Public Schools Superintendent Dr. Joshua P. Starr, who began in that position on July 1st, the Montgomery County Board of Education voted to begin a new site selection process for the second Bethesda - Chevy Chase Middle School, rescinding their April 28th resolution that had selected the site of Rock Creek Hills Park.

However, Rock Creek Hills Park remains at risk (even though it fails to meet the overwhelming majority of the specified site evaluation criteria).

If you want to preserve this important community asset and support high-quality cost-effective education, please join us now in spreading the word to others who care about good parks and strong schools. Join us on Facebook!

A Rock Creek Hills Park update.

Supporters of Rock Creek Hills Park got some very good news ten days ago, and more very good news last week. 

(A November 2nd tweet from Dr. Joshua Starr, Montgomery County Public Schools Superintendent.)

"AF Nikkor 35mm f/2D"

Nikon doesn't want to sell you our favorite lens.

Photo: Nikon.

The lens that's on our camera most of the time, the one with which we take most of our photos, is the little AF Nikkor 35mm f/2D. Why, just this July, for our Four Cities Tour of the Upper Midwest (T.U.M.), the 35mm f/2 was the only lens we took.

Here are four snaps, one from each of the Four Cities of the T.U.M.:

MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN

Frogwater onstage at Milwaukee Brewing.

STEVENS POINT, WISCONSIN

On our favorite feedlot.

DULUTH, MINNESOTA

Sharing dessert with Mark Mitton at the Duluth Grill.

MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA

Atop the Foshay Tower.

We love this lens. If you want a fast prime that is at least normal, but you don't want to go any wider than necessary (and if you're not willing to lug around a boat-anchor), this is it. And, as such things go, it's actually inexpensive. However, Nikon doesn't really want you to buy one.

When you go to the Nikon USA website, and select "lenses", you get a lens splashpage asking you to choose between lens categories. It appears that these optical devices now come in categories, called "Travel and Landscape Lenses", "People and Events Lenses", & "Sports and Action Lenses":

But here's the thing – No matter which category you choose, you will not find the 35mm f/2! It's not under any of the categories. You can find it only if you click on the small "Show all lenses" link on the lens splashpage.

To be sure, Nikon makes this lens, and sells this lens. But do they really want to? Or, would they rather that you buy something else – something more expensive?

Seeing without reading. Or, visualization without (local) comprehension.

Last week I received via email a movie file in .avi format that would not play on any of our Macs, until I uploaded it to YouTube; now I can watch it just fine from any device – further proof that "the cloud" has (to some degree) eliminated the old requirement that a file's format be locally readable in order for the data in that file to be visualized.

"A man's got to know his limitations."

As you may have heard, on Wednesday we got some extraordinarily heavy wet snow here in the National Capital Area. Only about half a foot of snow, mind you, but much much heavier than any half-foot snow-fall ought to be, because it was really sopping wet. As a result, our area suffered from extraordinary levels of tree damage and power outages (because so much electricity here runs in overhead power lines).

At home, one of our street trees dropped a big limb, blocking the street in front of our house. So, I went out – wearing lug-soled boots & winter layers – to try to move the limb. I determined that it was far too heavy for me to move.

What about snow plows? Would the next plow to come along just push the limb out of the way? Hard to tell – to me, the limb was neither clearly so small that it could easily be moved by a plow, nor clearly so large that it could not.

What would the plow driver decide? Might different plow drivers make different decisions? Well then, a probability distribution would be required to compute the likelihood of the street remaining blocked over time.

I was wondering how big an error would be made by using a Gaussian, as opposed to a Poisson distribution, when a van drove up, and stopped. Two men wearing sneakers, sweatshirts, and jeans got out, moved the fallen limb aside, and got back in. The van drove through, and away.

I went out with a rake, to clear the many smaller broken branches from the snowy street, and I thought: Some problems are best solved by persons who are not scientists.

___

[Post title refers to this.]

"Pick two."

"Strong. Light. Cheap. Pick two."

-Keith Bontrager

Inversion as a good.

In the 1940's, Jerry Cornfield & Wassily Leontief invented econometrics. In one of their first studies on the "sectors" of the American economy, they used economic data to arrive at a 24 x 24 matrix that they then needed to invert. Inverting that 24 x 24 matrix by hand, would, they calculated, take several centuries.

Harvard University's IBM "Mark I" electro-mechanical computer, developed for the war effort, was in principle available to perform this calculation, but the work would have to be paid for, and Cornfield & Leontif's bosses at the Bureau of Labor Statistics refused to approve such an expenditure, because, according to policy, the government would pay for goods, but not for services – after all, so many experts were on the government payroll that they saw no need to pay for services.

In the end, the bureau issued a purchase order, for "one matrix, inverted" from Harvard.

_____

Source: "The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century" by David Salsburg, 2001 (chapter 17).

A metacognitive approach to problem-solving.

"You're a pretty smart fella."

"Not that smart."

"If you're not that smart, how'd you figure it out?"

"I tried to imagine a fellow smarter than myself. Then I tried to think, 'what would he do?' "

- from Heist (2001) by David Mamet

No, what time is it, really?

In the 19th century, Captains in the British Navy who could not afford their own marine chronometer (used to determine longitude by celestial navigation) were issued one by the Navy, but Captains who provided their own were issued two, so that they would have three chronometers aboard ship – because you need three to know which one has gone wrong.

"A healthy shove ..."

Time-traveling with Mark Trail does create a sense of responsibility: If we can see the future, aren't we obligated to act upon it? Which is why we say, today, regarding tomorrow: "Look out, Mark!"

[If you get a "permission denied" message, then click on this link, and then on the "Look out..!" link above. Cookies, I guess.]