AdamSmith

PS I had a boss who was originally an electrical engineer and used that expression "orthogonal" all the time in any kind of situation, not just technical, so Pardonnez-Moi for not thinnin' to splain it.

MUCH better.

Computing by Brain - Los AlamosWalking around the hastily built wooden barracks that housed the soul of the atomic bomb project in 1943 and 1944, a scientist would see dozens of men laboring over computation. Everyone calculated. The theoretical department was home to some of the world's masters of mental arithmetic, a martial art shortly to go the way of jiujitsu. Any morning might find men such as Bethe, Fermi, and John von Neumann together in a single small room where they would spit out numbers in a rapid-fire calculation of pressure waves. Bethe's deputy, Weisskopf, specialized in a particularly oracular sort of guesswork; his office became known as the Cave of the Hot Winds, producing, on demand, unjustifiably accurate cross sections (shorthand for the characteristic probabilities of particle collisions in various substances and circumstances). The scientists computed everything from the shapes of explosions to the potency of Oppenheimer's cocktails, first' with rough guesses and then, when necessary, with a precision that might take weeks. ... When he (Feynman) started managing groups of people who handled laborious computation. he developed a reputation for glancing over people's shoulders and stabbing his finger at each error: "That's wrong." His staff would ask why he was putting them to such labor if he already knew the answers. He told them he could spot wrong results even when he had no idea what was right something about the smoothness of the numbers or the relationships between them. Yet unconscious estimating was not really his style. He liked to know what he was doing. He would rummage through his toolbox for an analytical gimmick, the right key or lock pick to slip open a complicated integral. Or he would try various simplifying assumptions: Suppose we treat some quantity as infinitesimal. He would allow an error and then measure the bounds of the error precisely. ... When Bethe and Feynman went up against each other in games of calculating, they competed with special pleasure. Onlookers were often surprised, and not because the upstart Feynman bested his famous elder. On the contrary, more often the slow-speaking Bethe tended to outcompute Feynman. Early in the project they were working together on a formula that required the square of 48. Feymnan reached across his desk for the Marchant mechanical calculator Bethe said, "It's twenty-three hundred." Feynman started to punch the keys anyway. "You want to know exactly?" Bethe said. "It's twenty-three hundred and four. Don't you know how to take squares of numbers near fifty?" He explained the trick. Fifty squared is 2,500 (no thinking needed). For numbers a few more or less than 50, the approximate square is that many hundreds more or less than 2,500. Because 48 is 2 less than 50, 48 squared is 200 less than 2,500-thus 2,300. To make a final tiny correction to the precise answer, just take that difference again-2-and square it. Thus 2,304. Feymnan had internalized an apparatus for handling far more difficult calculations. But Bethe impressed him with a mastery of mental arithmetic that showed he had built up a huge repertoire of these easy tricks, enough to cover the whole landscape of small numbers. An intricate web of knowledge underlay the techniques. Bethe knew instinctively, as did Feynman, that the difference between two successive squares is always an odd number, the sum of the numbers being squared. That fact, and the fact that 50 is half of 100, gave rise to the squares-near-fifty trick. A few minutes later they needed the cube root of 2 1/2. The mechanical calculators could not handle cube roots directly, but there was a look-up chart to help. Feynman barely had time to open the drawer and reach for the chart before he heard Bethe say, "Thats 1.35. " Like an alcoholic who plants bottles within arm's reach of every chair in the house, Bethe had stored away. a device for anywhere he landed in the realm of numbers. He knew tables of logarithms and he could interpolate with unerring accuracy. Feynman's own mastery of calculating had taken a different path. He knew how to compute series and derive trigonometric functions, and how to visualize the relationships between them. He had mastered mental tricks covering the deeper landscape of algebraic analysis-differentiating and integrating equations of the kind that lurk dragonlike in the last chapters of calculus texts. He was continually put to the test. The theoretical division sometimes seemed like the information desk at a slightly exotic library. The phone would ring and a voice would ask, "What is the sum of the series 1 + (1/2)4 + (1/3)4 + (1/4)4 + . . . ?" "How accurate do you want it?" Feymnan replied. "One percent will be fine." "Okay," Feymnan said. "One point oh eight." He had simply added the first four terms in his head-that was enough for two decimal places. Now the voice asked for an exact answer. "You don't need the exact answer," Feynman said. "Yeah, but I know it can be done." So Feynman told him. "All right. It's pi to the fourth over ninety." He and Bethe both saw their talents as labor-saving devices. It was also a form of jousting. At lunch one day, feeling even more ebullient than usual, he challenged the table to a competition. He bet that he could solve any problem within sixty seconds, to within ten percent accuracy, that could be stated in ten seconds. Ten percent was a broad margin, and choosing a suitable problem was hard. Under pressure, his friends found themselves unable to stump him. The most challenging problem anyone could produce was: Find the tenth binomial coefficient in the expansion of (1 + X)20. Feynman solved that just before the clock ran out. Then Paul Olum spoke up. He had jousted with Feynman before, and this time he was ready. He demanded the tangent of ten to the hundredth. The competition was over. Feynman would essentially have had to divide one by pi and throw out the first one hundred digits of the result-which would mean knowing the one-hundredth decimal digit of pi. Even Feymnan could not produce that on short notice. Reproduced (scanned) from: GENIUS. Richard Feynman and modern physics. J Gleik. First Published in Great Britain in 1992 by Little Brown and Company (1992). Chapter 4 (Los Alamos). http://www.precisioninfo.com/index.php?doc_id=64

Freeman Dyson recalls: As soon as I arrived at Cornell, I became aware of Dick as the liveliest personality in our department I had a room in a student dormitory and sometimes around two oclock in the morning I would wake up to the sound of a strange rhythm pulsating over the silent campus. That was Dick playing his bongo drums. Dick was also a profoundly original scientist. He refused to take anybodys word for anything. This meant that he was forced to rediscover or reinvent for himself almost the whole of physics. It took him five years of concentrated work to reinvent quantum mechanics. He said that he couldnt understand the official version of quantum mechanics that was taught in textbooks, and so he had to begin afresh from the beginning. That was a heroic enterprise. He worked harder during those years than anybody else I ever knew. At the end he had a version of quantum mechanics that he could understand. The calculation that I did for Hans [bethe], using the orthodox theory, took me several months of work and several hundred sheets of paper. Dick could get the same answer, calculating on a blackboard, in half an hour. So this was the situation which I found at Cornell. Hans was using the old cookbook quantum mechanics that Dick couldnt understand. Dick was using his own private quantum mechanics that nobody else could understand. They were getting the same answers whenever they calculated the same problems. And Dick could calculate a whole lot of things that Hans couldnt. It was obvious to me that Dicks theory must be fundamentally right. I decided that my main job, after I finished the calculation for Hans, must be to understand Dick and explain his ideas in a language that the rest of the world could understand. https://nige.wordpress.com/2010/08/14/freeman-dyson-on-richard-feynmans-path-integral-quantum-field-theory/

NYTimes : ... The generation coming up behind him, with the advantage of hindsight, still found nothing predictable in the paths of his thinking. If anything he seemed perversely and dangerously bent on disregarding standard methods. "I think if he had not been so quick people would have treated him as a brilliant quasi crank, because he did spend a substantial amount of time going down what later turned out to be dead ends," said Sidney Coleman, a theorist who first knew Feynman at Caltech in the 50's. "There are lots of people who are too original for their own good, and had Feynman not been as smart as he was, I think he would have been too original for his own good," Coleman continued. "There was always an element of showboating in his character. He was like the guy that climbs Mont Blanc barefoot just to show that it can be done." Feynman continued to refuse to read the current literature, and he chided graduate students who would begin their work on a problem in the normal way, by checking what had already been done. That way, he told them, they would give up chances to find something original. "I suspect that Einstein had some of the same character," Coleman said. "I'm sure Dick thought of that as a virtue, as noble. I don't think it's so. I think it's kidding yourself. Those other guys are not all a collection of yo-yos. Sometimes it would be better to take the recent machinery they have built and not try to rebuild it, like reinventing the wheel. Dick could get away with a lot because he was so goddamn smart. He really could climb Mont Blanc barefoot." Coleman chose not to study with Feynman directly. Watching Feynman work, he said, was like going to the Chinese opera. "When he was doing work he was doing it in a way that was just -- absolutely out of the grasp of understanding. You didn't know where it was going, where it had gone so far, where to push it, what was the next step. With Dick the next step would somehow come out of -- divine revelation." The characterization below is one of my favorites. We all stand in awe of the magicians! "There are two kinds of geniuses, the 'ordinary' and the 'magicians,' " wrote the mathematician Mark Kac. "An ordinary genius is a fellow that you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what they have done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians. They are, to use mathematical jargon, in the orthogonal complement of where we are and the working of their minds is for all intents and purposes incomprehensible. Even after we understand what they have done, the process by which they have done it is completely dark. Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest caliber." http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2013/11/feynman-and-secret-of-magic.html

Latest glad tidings on the environment front. After 60 million years of extreme living, seabirds are crashing A new study finds that the world's seabird populations have plummeted by almost 70% in just 60 years. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/radical-conservation/2015/sep/22/after-60-million-years-of-extreme-living-seabirds-are-crashing

The Ig Nobel Prizes are a great tradition!

Which thread am I in?

Corn on the cob! One could fairly easily envision her buck-toothed sister so doing! I read that about her liking McD's in some UK online paper like the Independent or somewhere but can't find it now. When I Google for it, all that comes up is news that she owns or has part ownership in a McDonald's franchise near one of her properties. But that's a different story.

Along similar lines, I read the other day that every couple months Queen Elizabeth gets a hankering for a McDonald's burger and fries. So her driver takes her to one near the palace, they go through the drive-through, then like any of us she eats it while they drive around.

Was just rereading Huckleberry Finn and there is a scene where Huck has gotten into company of two traveling 'circusmen' one of whose acts consists of stripping, sticking a lighted candle up his ass (UNlighted end in the ass), then capering across stage on his hands. Not having read the book since age 11 or so, the likely nature of the two stage gentlemen now becomes clear.

Good. Then I can leave it to others, for I heartily loathe riddles. And I find they happily return the favor.

Last time I followed you down such a rabbit hole, remember where we ended up.

Sounds very Egyptian. Or Hebraic.

Usually a "top's secret" is that he IS a bottom.

And then this thing Clarke said after K had tried but failed to get Clarke to help him in K's ultimately failed effort to make AI: "Well, you know -- Stanley's Stanley."

The upside is the productive public discussion in media like The Guardian and elsewhere about the stupidity of the criminalization of consensual adult sex work: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/07/rentboy-closed-govermnent-saved

Laughing at my sexual practices is not really too polite.

Mention of Princeton reminds (off point but before it flees the memory ) how Hahvahd & Jale enjoy looking down on each other but jointly regard Princetonians as dull white bread concerned with not much beyond their eating clubs. Harvard types are specifically selected for being not 'well rounded' but 'angular' (their own admissions office's word) while the saying I like best about my alma was a WWII phrase: 'If you have something that absolutely must get done, get a Yale man.' (A Bonesman I presume it meant.)

I keep salt on hand only to use the requisite 1/4 or 1/2 teaspoon in cake recipes. It is needful there for the taste note and also the little bit it adds to the leavening.

The Economist, a fairly rock-ribbed center-right editorial point of view, never misses a chance to express their fierce admiration for post-presidential Carter. They deeply admire how he, as they love to say, comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable. For example that he was long one of the only public voices to call Israel out on its brutality toward the Palestinians.

Oddly, possibly, I understand each of those personality attributes, and don't think they undercut my admiration for him. We all live in the real world, and navigate its shoals, external and internal.

"...I met Jimmy Carter twice -- the second time in 2010 when he was 85 and the head of the Carter Center in Atlanta, and the first time in 1976 when he was 51 and running for president, giving a speech to college students in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After the speech, a young African-American woman with a Southern accent standing next to me said to him (half as question and half as prayer), "I hope you'll actually do the things you say you'll do." He looked her in the eyes with an intensity that I'll never forget and said, "I promise you, I will." In my bones I knew he meant it, and that was enough for me then, as it is now..." http://m.deseretnews.com/article/865635957/In-retrospect-Well-done-Jimmy-Carter.html?pg=all&ref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F%3Fref%3Dhttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F