Some Fun with Numbers and Histories

I had to go back and look up my other posts from Central America, South-East Asia, and Rome (Syracuse, actually) to be reminded about this section of these things---long travelogue post collections. So...here we go.

Where are we?

Germany

Area: 357k sq. km

Population: 83.5 million

Think about it like: Slightly smaller than Montana with the combined populations of California, Texas, and Pennsylvania

Belgium

Area: 30.7k sq. km

Population: 11.9 million

Think about it like: Slightly bigger than Maryland with the population of Ohio

Netherlands

Area: 41.9k sq. km

Population: 18 million

Think about it like: Larger than Maryland, but smaller than West Virginia with the population of nearly New York

Germany is not identified as one of the Low Countries, but it's influence over the region is rich. I don't really want to go into a deep dive on the histories, only to describe a few of the details I learned on this trip.

When Caesar took Gaul, he divvied the northern regions up into a separate partition called Gaulish Belgica. The region became known as the "Low Countries" because much of the northern lands remain under sea level, having been reclaimed from the sea through years of pumping out sea water and building elaborate dykes.

Later, Napoleon recognized the differences between the Dutch people in his Belgica region and split them up, the impetus for what we have today as the Kingdom of the Netherlands and the Kingdom of Belgium. Some of the basis for the split was religious: the northern Dutch were Protestant, while the southern Dutch were Catholic.

Belgium today is the amalgam of weirdo French (Walloons) and conservative, Catholic Dutch. It's an uneasy alliance, that is routinely ready to split the country, with the Flemish part desiring to possibly return to the Netherlands, while the French looking side-eyed at the Wallonia region.

An oversimplification, but here we are...

Pynchon and the Low Countries

After venturing to Rome in 2019, and after the early days of the pandemic hit Italy pretty hard, the 2021 IPW was a Zoom get together like so many other get-togethers at the time. By 2022, the energy for an in-person gathering was back, and this time it would be closer to home for us---up in Vancouver. It's also on the Pacific coast of North America, and my cousin lives there, but it started---and ended---before the summer break actually happened for Los Angeles proper. That put the kibosh on the trip.

In 2024, the International Pynchon Week was in Belgrade. While taking a trip to Serbia would be exciting, taking a trip to Belgrade with a 4 year old proved too much for us to wrap our heads around.

When we saw that in 2026, this year's IPW was to be in western Germany, we decided to pull the trigger and make the journey. Camille is two years older, at 6, and Cass is big and tall and an adventurous eater, and the language barrier is less than in Serbia.

In Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands, English is both much closer to their own languages that it is to the Slavic languages in the Balkans, and taught from an early stage in their schooling. English adjacency and Camille being able to maybe remember things made this the trip for us.

When my half-thought-out project was rejected, I realized I could make the journey and not be stressed.

We ventured through the outskirts of Amsterdam to Dortmund, and then off to Brussels and Antwerp, finishing off with a return to the heart of Amsterdam. It was a whirlwind, and hot, and stressful at times (as anything this complicated can be), and as it recedes into the memories like a dream, the full effect may be borne out with the kids for, er, ever, maybe? 

Regaining Sleep Patterns

We arrived to our Long Beach apartment yesterday in the early afternoon, after two days of flying west, first from Amsterdam, into the sunlight for eight hours to Toronto (trying to get the kids dinner at 9 pm local time but 3 am body time was fun), and then the next morning, from Toronto through the sunlight all the way back to SoCal.

That was flight was funny, as it's jts under five hours, but we get three of them back with the time changes, so it was like we left at 11 and arrived at 1.

Anyway, I'll be dumping stuff up here for the next few days. Before going to bed last night I shaved off my beard and had Corrie start the chopping of my hair. I needed a new summer feel.

I felt like sharing the least Western Europe picture I had from the trip, the north fork side of the Grand Canyon from the flight home.

Happy Birthday Cass!

We made it to double-digits!

We made it to double-digits? Oh. My. Goodness.

Ten!

I love you, buddy, and we've done some cool stuff over the last decade. I even wrote about some of them:

• The Beginning
  
•  First Mexico Run
• Birthday in Rome
  
• Talking about the Pandemic
  
• A nice repository of posts when Cass turned 7
  
• "Home Alone" at the LB Performing Arts Center
  

Minnesota Changed its Flag

I still have (but haven't posted to) a Flag and Logo blog, mainly because I was fascinated/obsessed with, eh, flags and logos.

I once planned out a five-part comic miniseries about the politics of a specific land, breaking up the land into four provinces, each had their own flag, and I had designed all four flags. You may not have known it, but I was able to do it without the Good Flag, Bad Flag book, and I would argue they were each pretty good. 

Anyway, the other day I came across the following flag, labeled as Minnesota's state flag:

What? I've never seen that flag before, but I definitely like it. I thought...I thought the flag of Minnesota was...different.

So, one issue that the GF/BF text discusses is the proliferation of banal sameness in the state flag game, a whole slew of impossible to read official seals on navy-blue fields. I made a graphic below using small versions just to fit them all in and show off the boring similarity:

The bottom row are the seals on different color fields, as well as the seal on the bison with the red frame. Also, in the sea of blue-and-state-seals, you get the obverse of a flag (do you know which one?) as well as Minnesota's old state flag. Can you even tell? Can anybody? Some of the flags have the names of the states themselves on them---twice in the case of South Dakota---which breaks one of the GF/BF rules.

Back in 2024, the new flag for Minnesota was adopted and put into place. There are initiatives to change the flags of Illinois and Massachusetts on the docket, and possibly one other. But...Minnesota.

This flag is pretty damn cool. It's unique, simple, clear and easy to read visually from distance, can be drawn by a kid from memory, uses no words, has two colors that are related to the area (rivers/lakes/sky), the single star (for the 'North'), the star reflecting the star in the rotunda in their state capitol building, and which many Minnesotans think looks like four M's glued together. Another key thing in good flag design is how it appears hanging vertically: does it visually hold up? Is it still easy to read?

Yes to all of them. 

Anyway, I'm a nerd. But Minnesota has a cool new flag.

Two Animated Short Films

Back in 2000 (or so) I went to see the Spike and Mike's Animation Festival, and one of the standouts (likely the only piece I do remember) was Don Hertzfeldt's Rejected. The premise of the piece is that Hertzfeldt is recruited to animate some promotional pieces for a television channel and then a manufacturing company, and in the end each of the animated promos were rejected. The animation seems at first crude, being stick figures and on a plain void, but the concept takes off as their world collapses on itself.

Hertzfeldt's work is a mix of hilarious, profound, simple and grotesque. Billy's Balloon was a student film that was entered in the Cannes Film Festival, was a finalist, and Don had to ask permission to miss class at UCSB to attend the ceremony. His professor gave him a B on the piece.

But the piece de resistance in the Hertzfeldt cannon (as of 2016) was World of Tomorrow. I've been meaning on spending some time writing a deep dive on this animated film, but I just haven't gotten to it. It's been called---separately---one of the best animated films ever and one of the best sci-fi films ever. It's combines beautifully the stick-figure design ethos with the profoundness and philosophical weight that considering happiness, cloning, time-travel, and the end of humanity on Earth demands. It also contains an all-timer line of dialogue: "Now is the envy of all of the dead." The character of Emily Prime is voiced by a legitimately un-coached four year old, to a give it a sense of reality that can't be faked. That's her on the poster below:

One reason that I haven't made time to write deeply about it may be that in the last ten years Hertzfeldt made two more, er, episodes. Each subsequent piece, Episode 2: The Burden of Other People's Thoughts, and Episode 3: The Absent Destinations of David Prime, have been equally hailed as masterpieces, and I've yet to purchase the Blu-Ray, as they're not available on YouTube like the first.

The second poster above is for the Portuguese Joao Gonzalez's Ice Merchants. I'm a sucker for hand-drawn animated projects, and this is a classic. It has heart and tension, a cliff-house and a cliff-diving-commute. It shows what you can do with backgrounds.

(I also kinda just wanted to get these links all in one place.)

While I was contemplating this post and other hand-drawn animation, I couldn'y help but think of those ubiquitous 'Red Bull gives you wings' ads. This is the studio that's been making those ads for two-and-a-half decades now, and while they're pretty corny, and it seems like they're universally panned online, I think the hand-drawn and traditionally animated work deserves a nod. And, holy hell, it's SO different that what the Red Bull Studios seem to be involved in.

Methyl Methacrylate Tank Crisis Update

So, crisis averted. Well, explosion averted. It turns out that the endless spray of water kept the temperature down just enough to 1) cause a crack in the tank that relieved pressure, which 2) in turn helped the methyl methacrylate cure and solidify.

Most of the fifty-thousand evacuees have been allowed to return home...well, 34,000 have been allowed to return, while around 16,000 remain on prolly-best-to-stay-away orders.

What got me thinking was when they said they don't know what caused the runaway temperature spike that caused the venting on Thursday that led to this wild crisis in the first place. They don't know, and that makes sense. If watching HBO's Chernobyl as often as I have (what can I say---I like bad-vibe programming) has taught me anything, it's that it takes some time to properly investigate these things once the fallout is finally mitigated.

What caused the crisis in the first place? 

A different conversation I had added to the tapestry within which I view these things nowadays. The other day I took both kids to swim, and I was talking to the mom of one of Cass's buddies and swim-classmates. She was relaying a conversation she had had with her mother. Her mom is a teacher in the nursing program at Cal State Dominguez Hills, and she was lamenting the fact that her students pretty much all relied on ChatGPT, or other large-language-models from other AI programmers, to get their work done. And with an exasperated, distance-staring glare she said with a sigh, "In a couple year's time...you may have to be concerned about your nurse in the ER or operating room." 

Articles are rampant about a growing crisis in higher education, where students have en masse moved away from doing their own work and use LLMs to write their papers, or organize their research at the very least. An AITA entry on Reddit a while back was from a girl who's law-school boyfriend would take every question from every assignment and put them into ChatGPT, then copy and paste the response without even reading it. 

Now...that's pretty bleak. 

While I don't think the crisis was caused by a person who had LLMs do their work for them and then got a job that they were unprepared for and who was actually watching reels on their phone instead of the temperature gauges---and I don't think that---it was a startling reminder that THAT BLEAK REALITY WILL HAPPEN SOMEDAY.

In Pripyat at the Chernobyl plant it was arrogance mixed with hubris and ignorance. But they also had someone at the helm who had 25 years experience in nuclear facilities. That longterm experience may have added to the arrogance, but we're all pretty sure that Anatoly Dyatlov actually did lots of work in nuclear power plants, and didn't have AI do all his work for him.

Just another attack on intellectualism: the propensity to value the completion of the work to get the document over what you may learn from the substance of your studies. Once it becomes more about the document, it's easy to find ways around exerting the needed effort and just get the document at all costs. It becomes very easy to justify just doing the easy stuff and skipping challenges at every turn. Mike Judge's Idiocracy unfolding in real time.

At least in Orange County they still had some hard-working smarties up to the task of round-the-clock working to keep a tank from exploding and obliterating a suburban neighborhood in Garden Grove.

At some point, though?