Your Drunken Buddy, AI

So...I'm not proud of this, but I was by myself playing an online trivia game about baseball and I had to resort to cheating. I opened a second browser and entered some of the clues. It took a while, but I finally got to the answer, which I correctly entered back at the trivia game to keep my streak alive. (Also, this will turn into a word of caution for anyone who still may trust their drunken cousin/buddy/neighbor AI.)

But these clues were hard! This game gives you 5 clues, one at a time so you can guess after each clue, and you get better bragging rights for getting it earlier. Each clue is more and more focused, so that helps.

One time I played the first clue was: "First Baseman." Being the Yankee nut I am, I typed in Don Mattingly. It was wrong, so the next clue was: "Played in Exactly Two All-Star Games." I wasn't remotely sure, so I went with another of my Yanks and typed in Tino Martinez. Correct! Whoa! Only two guesses Yay me!

So, the round where I cheated went like this:

• Outfielder (my guess was wrong)
• Played ONE year with the Mariners (WRONG)
• Won an MVP award (WRONG)
• Won a World Series with the Mets

By now...right? Any baseball fans in the house? Who TF could this be? Maybe you know, but I was perplexed. How many MVPs won a World Series with the Mets and then played just a single year with Seattle? This is when I went to a new tab and tried to cheat. I tried, but wasn't successful, because of shit like this:

Okay...okay...(heavy sigh) There's a lot to unpack here. I'm generally wary of the AI Overview about anything and ignore them on principal. I've read enough about artificial intelligence to know that AI for 1) doesn't always/really understand that lying is considered bad; and 2) isn't as concerned with getting things factually correct in general as we'd probably like; and 3) has about the performance record of a C, maybe C-, student. If I'm curious about gluons and other massless vector bosons, I may Google the topic, but then skip the AI Overview and move right to the white papers.

BUT, baseball is something I know WAY more about than quantum mechanics, and that image up there, that Overview trying to answer my question, just shook me. The only literally correct thing in that box is that Mike Piazza played for the Mets. He NEVER played with Seattle (the randos are San Diego, Florida, and Oakland); he NEVER won an MVP award, although he was close in 1996, but he was still playing for the Dodgers; and in 1992 he got his 'cup of coffee' in LA before his Rookie of the Year season in '93. And the METS winning the World Series in 1992?  Puh-leeeze. The Blue Jays won in '92 (beating the Braves), as the start of their back-to-back victories before the STRIKE wiped out the '94 post season.

With none of the non-AI answers helping either, I guessed incorrectly again and was given, for my last clue, a list of players Seattle traded for this player, this former MVP, former champion-Met. That was the clue that sprung the answer. And I did cheat to find it. I mean, I wasn't paying that kind of attention back in the '90s. 

It was Kevin Mitchell. MVP was with the Giants (I remember him being good for them), and he was rookie who played part-time in '86 with the Mets. The Mariners tried to bring him in but it didn't work out, and they traded him after that one year.

If you know baseball pretty well, you'll look at that AI Overview and temper your trust of the robots. Temper it hard.

Here's a link to the trivia game (it kicks ass!). There's a new game each day, and you can go back and play the past day's game as far back as...well, as far back as they'll let you.

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.