Rock Sighting (It Has Been 13 Years)

A movie I like very much is I 💙 Huckabees, and there was a line from a poem composed by Jason Schwartzman's character, about nature conservancy, that goes: "Nobody sits like this rock sits." 

I used it as the title for a post about a huge rock being toured---very slowly---around the LA area. I came out to take a picture of it. Judging by the pictures on the linked post, I can say I took a few pictures, and none of them really showed wha it looked like.

But I felt like I had the image in my memory banks. It made the rounds down our Atlantic Ave at, like, 2 am, but I went out and down the street to check it out.

But, I think I saw it again, a baker's-dozen years later:

On the grounds of the LACMA, in the Miracle Mile zone near Wilshire and La Brea, on the way back to the Tar Pits with our lunch, we walked. The area is covered by a fine white gravel, but there exists a sloping paved path. It slopes down and passes under an enormous rock---the same rock from my memories, the one trucked around LA all those years ago on its way to its final resting place. 

Which...may be on the back side of the LACMA?

It was so big...your nerves start buzzing as you get underneath it...your inner Wiley E. Coyote coming out...

Spring Break Shenanigans

When Spring Breaks Align!

La Brea Tar Pits

The first adventure of our week was to the tar pits, the natural asphalt fissures in, like, the middle of the US's second largest city. Corrie and I went back in 2012 and I took the boys during a Daddy Daycare trip back in 2022, but now Camille was with us, and Corrie was venturing inside for the first time.

It's so cool:

The iconic building hosting the museum and scientific center for archeological dig in the heart of a global city, remains the same basic structure that appeared in Springfield:

Anywho, the museum is great, the Columbia Mammoth was enormous:

The grounds remain an oasis in the middle of LA:

The working lab is still busy:

If you're able to see closeup on the picture above, the microscope on the right is showing on the monitor on the left, and the penny can be seen when I zoom in on my phone...anyway, the work at the lab is ongoing, which is super cool.

The day was beautiful.

Aborted Getty Trip---Point Fermin Park

Next, we tried to go to the Getty. The Getty Center museum, up on the hill above Santa Monica, is a bit of a trek to get to, but it's free and filled to the brim with JP Getty's oil-tycoon-art-collection---the volume of Renaissance, Dutch-masters, and late 19th century European among others rivals any similar collection this side of the Louvre.

Parking isn't free, but there's a cool tram that comes every few minutes. Plus, and this is a note/word to the wise: while entering the museum grounds is free, they do require you to "get" tickets online at specific times. I remembered this, mostly, for Tuesday, but never completed the transaction (of securing free tickets online), and was turned away at the parking garage. "Come back at 3," the attendant said. Pfff. Sure. Shall we hang out for hours up here or drive back in worse traffic. I vowed to myself I would work this out for another day this week (turned out to be the next day) and we split for fun closer to us in Long Beach.

After getting my bulk fancy Kosher salt, we went all the way down to San Pedro and hung out Point Fermin Park.

We picnicked and painted with some watercolors.

A guy came over and gave the kids peanuts and showed them how to feed the squirrels by hand. While it may not be the best thing to teach the squirrels this trick, it was fun to see them come and take the peanuts right out of their hands.

Afterwards, we stopped at the comic shop before heading home.

Actual Getty Trip

We finally made it up to the Getty, and it was as spectacular as I remember it. Now, Camille was feeling a little under the weather, so I knew our time would be limited, and since both kids were asking about snack as we waited for the elevator to take us to my car, I became thankful I wasn't paying for tickets.

At a certain time of day, I imagine all that white marble is pretty blinding. We walked around and saw some stuff, then stopped for (what was left of the) snacks. Maybe visible to the keen-eyed, on the red signage on the top of the building below is the special exhibit: a Gustave Caillebotte.

This I found very exciting, as I really like Caillebotte's work.

One theme that was all over the works we saw early on was Venus and Mars, either Venus distracting Mars once he returned from battle, or Mars trying to play Venus. Here's an interpretation:

You can guess what that guy's take on it was...

Below is a weird one, with some (likely Biblical) dude holding a jaw bone of some ungulate (it looks like):

Of course, here's Van Gogh's Irises, Getty's only iconic Van Gogh piece:

It's so much bigger than it looks here, but by no means is it huge. I got very close to it and looked at the left edge, mainly to see where the paint lacks on the surface, to see the canvas or linen underneath. I find it fascinating how painters applied their paint to their surfaces. The strokes they make that create the foundations for the shapes they're evoking.

That's another reason why abstract art can be so interesting: the shapes evoked may not be based in reality.

At one point, in the "Impressionists" room (Europe: 1870-1900), Cass got Camille and took her to this painting:

It's by Camille Pisarro. Cass saw the name and wanted to show Camille, knowing that she can recognize her name. We did no have the conversation then about the androgynous nature of the name then, but we have in the past.

We ventured outside and I tried to take a selfie with the kids, but the wind and Camille's generally out-of-it nature made it difficult to get a classic pic:

West LA and DTLA were visible through the haze beyond the 405:

Finally, after many stairs and cruising by schools not on Spring Break and on a field trip, we made it to the Caillebotte special exhibition.

Caillebotte, who's name I'm still not confident I can pronounce correctly, was a contemporary of and friend to Claude Monet and his merry gang of what-we-call Impressionists. Renoir, Manet, Mary Cassat, Pisarro...

Caillebotte, though, had family money, and supported his friends often by purchasing their work.

He was no slouch as a painter either, and some of my favorites of his were at the Getty on this day, like, for one, "Floor Scrapers," from 1875:

I figured if I was going to go with just one...

When we asked the kids later what their favorite part of the Getty trip was, invariably you can guess what rated pretty damn high:

With Time Left, Should We See a Movie?

Maybe the Minecraft movie?

Happy Birthday to Me!

Today is my birthday, and I fielded many texts and emails during the day. One was from my wife and included Norm. Corrie texting me and Norm?

What...what's up? It was a picture of an article she snapped with her phone, with a picture of Pynchon---one of the famous ones when he was young---and her message was "Out October 7th supposedly."

The link was for a new book from Thomas Pynchon, out October 7th. So...at work and down a rabbit hole.

Here's a link about it being real.

After the "Cow Country" shenanigans---when I realized that book had nothing to do with Thomas Pynchon---I found a synopsis about this possibly-real/possibly-fake Pynchon story, and I felt relieved. It sounded like it certainly could be a Pynchon story. The main character is named Hicks McTaggert (snort), and he's a private detective hired to find a Wisconsin cheese heiress (double snort), ends up shanghaied on a boat out of Milwaukee, wakes up in landlocked Hungary, and ends up dealing with Nazis in the years leading up to WWII.

Now that's Pynchonian. 

In all reality, it took the opening paragraph of Cow Country for me to conclude, "Well, this isn't our boy." And, after reading the synopsis on Pynchon's publisher's own website, I mostly concluded, "Well...story checks out."

I was on the socials last night and all the chatter was about the new movie from Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle After Another, loosely based on Pynchon's Vineland. So, on my birthday, the news dropped that a new book from our author is dropping in October. Freaking rad. 

Happy birthday to me!

From the Magazine Department

We still use a checkbook, and keep track of the check numbers and amounts that go out in a piece of paper we call "The Ledger". Just like how people used to balance a checkbook, we still keep track as one should. Anyway, Corrie was looking through it and asked me about an entry I'd filled out.

"Oh," I told her, "That's the Archeological Conservancy." She nodded, "Ahh..."

Over winter break and the Decemberween season, because of the magazine's we do get, we were sent all sorts of crazy offers for other magazines, and by and large Corrie said: "Just do it. Who cares. Cass and Camille love them, and Cass does read them...so..."

Before last December, we got Archeology, The Smithsonian, Mad Magazine, and Highlights and High Five, two of the same type of thing for different age groups ( I think my mom sent those). After last December, we've added Ranger Rick, Ranger Rick Jr, The New Yorker, American Archeology, and Ancient Egypt. If we add all of the checks that went out for those magazines, it would still be, like eighty-bucks. Cass loves Egypt, and all the archeology magazines we tend to think of as travel magazines, so... Also, the Ranger Ricks are made by the National Wildlife Federation, and I guess they could use all the money they can get.

Anywho, so far we've gotten just one of the American Archeology magazines (that's the Archeological Conservancy), and I have to say I've been deeply and pleasantly surprised by the stories.

It focuses solely on the US, and among the stories contained within are things I either didn't know, or gained perspective on. To wit:

• The cover story about rising sea levels focuses on many coastal colonial settlements (many in climate-change-denying areas) having been washed away by new coastlines;
• A story about where the original cows that are here now came from. We mostly know that the Spanish brought them, but did you know they're originally from Western Africa?
• It turns out that native tribes were far more advanced in terms of metallurgical knowledge and ability, and had harnessed copper forging around the same time European counterparts did, about eight thousand years ago. It turns out there are so many metal spear points and arrowheads that American scientists used to think European settlers must have been stateside much earlier, because how could natives do this? [See: racism in academia] Also, they found a copper quarry in present day Michigan...it was more like a gouge that had a vein of cooper ore that had been worked for a number of years, but it was thousands of years old.

The Egypt magazine has a picture of hieroglyph on a wall next to a nicely rendered drawing of the same, next to a literal translation, line by line, of the glyphs. It's so serious and cool. The cover article is about the silver pharaohs and all of the gear cast in silver that normally gets ignored because of all the gold.

I expected Cass to enjoy the articles and Camille to enjoy the pictures, but I didn't see having my own understanding of humanity altered. 

Sometimes brief interludes for the brain break up the monotony of the end of times the news cycle (which I actively avoid, so...).

"Hands Off" Protests

We had planned on taking the train to DTLA and joining the masses of people at City Hall. I've been there and done that before, and while it would have been awesome to bring the kids to such an event, we stayed closer to home.

We, the people, took to the streets in protest to the current state of affairs in Washington DC---the supervillain takeover, the handover of most of the government to a South African Nazi-sympathizing maniac...you know, the usual end-of-the-American-democracy-experiment scenes---in a so called "Hands Off" protest. Hands off our rights; hands off our medicaid; hands off our education; hands off our uteruses...you get the idea.

We drove to Lakewood, which is Long Beach adjacent. For Corrie and Camille--they came from Los Alamitos, where the swim facility is. For Cass and I--we came from Cerritos, from a Surf baseball game (we won!).

It was well attended and loud with the honking:

Even Camille got involved, excitedly:

Cass jumped in as well, not even pausing to change out of his baseball gear:

As we're telling our kids: There's no neutral in this debate, there's no sitting this one out. You either have to find a way to resist, or speak up, or fight back in whatever way you can, or you tacitly accept what these sociopaths are doing.

There's disease and rot in our democracy, and friends of-, sycophants to-, apologists for-, these tyrannical supervillains taking over our country will need to be ferreted out. And, as big of a problem as that will be to handle, the even bigger one are the seventy million folks who are like, "These guys are all right! They sure have MY interests at heart!"

Doesn't the thought just make you want to wretch with fury?

Anyway...Cass and unions, am I right?

2019 and 2025

Limitations of Technology: Up Close with Singularities Once Again

After a few more experiments, I generated the following images:

The chaos seems to be nearly absent, as a regularity in shape has appeared. The equation may have something to do with it, as it has a linear origin:

Then I started to play with it, with the linear systems that had removable discontinuities:

Slightly different form of that same uniformity in shape, and that may make sense due to the formula:

I was trying to figure out what was happening, and even examined resulting quadratics, with slightly higher levels of chaos entering the scene:

From:

Upon doing some research, I found that because Desmos is essentially a web app, the fact that it struggles with highly zoomed in singularities has been well documented. 

Still, it looks pretty cool. I'm trying to tell if it's the breakdown of the program or something else, something that would take more nuanced and powerful tools to explore.

Warner Brother's Studio Visit

How many Warner Brothers were there? That was a question I was unaware that I didn't know the answer to. On a recent trip to the studio grounds---for a tourist-style trip, even---I eventually learned the answer.

Early on, in the waiting zone before getting on the tram for the guided tour, there are plenty of things to look at, plenty of chest-puffing, imagination-hold flexing images, and I snapped a pic of one of the kinkiest, weirdest superhero movie ever made, Batman Returns:

The floor was a Google Map style picture, with the occasional table or water tower were scaled up buildings or, eh, the following sculpture:

The drive around was heavy with, "Remember in (insert television show I never watched) when (some action that I had no connection to)? Thatw as right there!" The people in my tram occasionally 'ooohed', but other times, they were not scared to say, "I never saw that." I smirked.

There were many "Little Midwest" and "Little New York" style streets, which were, eh, quaint. I thought it was cool, or noticeable anyway, that nowhere were doorknobs. The tram driving tour guide explained that the doorknobs get put on once the time era that'll be filmed get's set.

One show that was shot entirely on the grounds was NBC's Friends. We saw the plaque on the wall of the soundstage where the main scenes were filmed, but we also saw the stairs where Ross played his electronic keyboard before going toi get dressed for Rachel for the prom in the VHS flashback video they watch when Ross and Rachel finally get together:

Those building are always so funny. They look normal, but they never have electricity or working water, and once you get above the normal human line of sight, the upper parts of theses "houses" are just a series of catwalks for grips to set lighting and hold boom mikes:

Here's the house from A Christmas Story:

Here's the shop, where they make all the gear they use on the sets where they film:

They filmed plenty of movies in this space also, back in the 1940s.

The large sound stage below with the WB on it is the largest sound stage ion America, nearly 100 feet tall:

They filmed really big set pieces there. Think the final scene in the Goonies with the ship. It turns out, at one point, they realized they just needed more space. So, instead of adding thirty feet to the top---which would be very time consuming and expensive---they grabbed fifty guys and bunch of cranks and hand-cranked the entire structure up thirty feet, adding these buttresses to the bottom of the hastily created walls:

Later on, during a walking tour, I snaped a pic of some cartoon things I liked. Also, some stuff for the kids:

They put two of the best Batmobiles next to each other, 1989 and 2022:

The whole DC comics area was pretty cool, while the Harry Potter zone was lost on me.

We'll end with a Wonder Woman statue:

Four. Originally there were four brothers: Harry, Albert, Sam and Jack.

Camping at Pinnacles

We did another camping trip, the first since 2022. This time we went to Pinnacles National Park. Pinnacles is buried along CA RT 25, a north-south highway between US Hwy 101 and I-5, about the same position as Fresno.

It's a beautiful park, and, while we didn't really get to any of the awesome hikes, we did get the kids lots of unsupervised play time.

We met some friends from San Luis, and they had invited/arranged for many parties to be in our group on this trip. There was Sam and Aurie, our good friends, and Ken and Christine (we go way back), Meg and Paul (we just met them), and the Bulgarians, as Sam and Aurie called them (Stan and Nelly).

And, as it happened, there were many kids. Ken and Christine have two kids, aged 15 and 14; Meg and Paul have two kids, aged 9 and 4; and the Stan and Nelly have two kids, aged 5 and 3. So, Cass had a running mate (Liam), Camille had a couple of pals (Radha and Zephyr) and enjoyed keeping an eye on the youngest boy, Dian.

Watching them traipse all over the campsite was freaking great. They'd disappear for an hour, maybe more, and nobody ever got nervous or bent out of shape.

Cass and Liam would go exploring the creek in the vicinity, and came back with an elaborate story about Danger Creek, as they called it. They sat and wrote down the adventure, complete with a rather extensive map of the area.

Pinnacles is known for their California condors, and we mave spotted them soaring overhead on occasion:

The tiny hike we did go on was easy going and showcased the hills and live oak in the zone:

We did miss the caves, that looked spectacular from the photos of those who went. It was tough, since they'd closed the road and were using a shuttle bus to get there. The wait for the bus was long and crowded, and we decided to let the kids just run rampant instead of waiting and hiking more.

Below is a picture of a stairwell built into the dirt that heads down the Danger Creek. The boys would head left up the creek on their adventures, after exploring all the campsites across the river and up the other side of this tiny gorge:

The trip was very nice, if nearly six hours away, and we'd love to return and see the caves. Really, though, getting the kids some unsupervised play time was amazing enough, and making new friends along the way was equally great.

Singularities Up Close

A singularity, in mostly common parlance, refers to a part of a black hole, the center point of infinite density. But singularities exist in another place in mathematics, and that's where a function is no longer defined at a given point.

Now, sometimes the result of when functions don't exist at given points are asymptotes, dotted vertical lines where the curves shoot off, either up or down, towards infinity and hugging those dotted lines, never to cross.

Other times, mathematical functions will have undefined points, but these will result in holes instead of those pesky asymptotes. These are easy for Algebra students to identify and draw into their sketches, but calculator devices will never show them, because the hole will be too small considering how the calculator's numbering works.

Recently I was examining two functions, trying to estimate what the output of the function would be where the hole would exist. Here're the functions:

Now, I put these here with their colors, red and green, as in a moment I'll display what the graphs look like---the red will be the red graph and the green, the green. So, for a a quick math moment: the problem with the red graph is at the point x=1. For that equation, at x=1, we can finagle the graph to be 0/0, which is a problem, but a problem where we should be able to estimate the output. For the green equation, the problem is at x=0. When x=0 there, again we get 0/0 (big problem), which, again, while problematic, should give us a hole and allow us to estimate the output.

So, stay with me. Here's the graph, with circles around where the holes would be:

So, on the green graph, x=0 is a hole (or would be on an algebra student's graph), and on the red graph, x=1 is a hole. Neither look like holes, because of he graphical nature of our graphing device, here it being Desmos, a wonderful free online graphing calculator.

How far can we zoom in? Well...let's see...let's take a closer look at the green graph, where the hole should be. Let's zoom in...

Not much happening...

Still not much, but...uh oh, there's some jazz happenings here:

Whoa! This is super close up, and this is the chaos arriving as we approach the singularity. This is the singularity, this is the function breaking down the closer and closer we get to the singularity, the point at which the function ceases to exist:

Let's take a look at the red graph:

Not much happening...let's keep zooming in...

Still need some zooming...

Whoa, there's some jazz, and as we keep zooming, we see the singularity again:

This is where the the function breaks down, as it oscillates back and forth uncontrollably.

The difference between how these singularities look within the confines of Desmos is fascinating. 

I've never looked so closely at singularities before. And really, how many of us have?

How many of us have gotten so close to singularities before!