pjthompson | Entries tagged with math

Random quote of the day:

“Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.

—Gustav Flaubert, letter to Madame Louise Colet, August 14, 1853

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Bert and Ernie, Celine Dion, or the Band of the Coldstream Guards. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:

“The prestige accorded to mathematics in economics has given it rigor, but, alas, also mortis.”

—Robert L. Heilbroner, Modern Economics As a Chapter in the History of Economic Thought

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Desus and Mero, Beyoncé, or the Marine Corps Marching Band. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

7 Sep
Feeling as stupid as Hoda Kotb this morning. Sat in the driveway listening to a This American Life story and ran my car battery down. The AAA guy is changing it out for a new one now. It was old and on its last legs, he said. Glad I didn’t have to have the car towed. The other irony? I never did hear the end of that story.

Not much energy today, even less after The Battery Incident. Desperately want a nap.

7 Sep
My 92 year old mother just declared that she wants to cook Thanksgiving dinner rather than have it catered as we’d planned. “It will taste so much better.” It will, but neither one of us is up to it anymore. At least I’ll have three days to recover. I may just be able to walk again by Monday. Mom doesn’t like having Tgiving at other peoples’ houses, either.

Mom has a huge spirit and can’t accept her frail body. Who’s to say she’s wrong?

But I need knee surgery on both knees and that much cooking will involve a lot of time on my feet which will require a lot of recovery.

9 Sep
First sign of autumn at my house.

12 Sep
Called DPSS to find out exactly where to take the form they insist on getting in person (no email) before actually taking the day off tomorrow to bring it to them.   ”That’s not a walk in office,” the person on the phone said. “You can’t bring things there until we transfer your mother’s case to a new office.” Which won’t happen until October 1 when her case worker comes back from vacation. Apparently, no one else can help me.

On the one hand, I should be irate for the sodding great waste of time. OTOH, yippeee! I don’t have to go to DPSS tomorrow!!

12 Sep
So I walked outside last night to put scraps out for the wild critters and came face to face with one—fortunately. I’d hate to be face to tail with a skunk. A skunk! In the middle of the city near LAX. I beat a hasty retreat back inside.

13 Sep
WUUUUUFFFFFFF! That’s the sound of a giant gust of wind going out of my lungs in relief. Doing a little caregiver dance! Dancey dancey dancey! Take that Amy F. Grant and Katie F. Couric! I got someone to take my mother to dialysis on Mondays and Wednesdays so I don’t have to leave work in the middle of the day and make a 50 mile round trip! And I don’t have to wait on DPSS to pay for it!

18 Sep
Remember when newsreaders actually understood the news they read?

19 Sep
She actually simpers. I didn’t think anyone did that anymore once past the age of 16. Or who weren’t employed in a cat house.

23 Sep
Mom was not in a good way after dialysis tonight. Had to call the paramedics to assist in getting her out of the car and into the house. She’s okay. It just takes it out of her sometimes, makes her weak and very disoriented. She’s usually fine by morning.

24 Sep
Procrastination is not a good thing. Then again, neither is exhaustion.

25 Sep
Note to Pam: you can’t rely on the 92 year old to say when she’s running out of things. It sucks but you have to monitor Every. Blessed. Thing.=

27 Sep
Mom came through her outpatient procedure very well. Unclogged the fistula in two places which may explain the excessive bleeding Saturday.

27 Sep
Got an absolutely brilliant idea for a story this morning. Unfortunately it was while laying in bed. I fell asleep and now can’t remember it.

28 Sep
So relieved that necklace I’ve been ogling on Etsy sold. Close enough to my price range to be so tempting, but not money I needed to spend.

28 Sep
The nights when Mom is hallucinating from a combo of dialysis and pain medication are not at all stressful. Not at all.

It is what it is. She’ll be fine in the morning once she’s had a night’s sleep, once I can get her to bed. It’s been an occasional ongoing situation for awhile, just been a stressful week and harder to deal with today. Hoping things settle soon.

4 Oct
“[Those]…otherwise very good at math may totally flunk a problem that…goes against their political beliefs.” http://fb.me/2xzM2CDAw

4 Oct
Plumbing. Plumbing, plumbing, plumbing, plumbing.

5 Oct
My new dishwasher has been down since Sunday. Turns out rat(s) gnawed a hole in the drain hose. Min’s a good mouser but can’t get under the kitchen sink/counter where the bastards are coming up.

5 Oct
Emergency Kittens: pic.twitter.com/7I3Yb87rKi

7 Oct
Sears customer service sucks. My dishwasher purchased in April has a hole in the drain hose and even though I told two people at Customer Service what the problem was, they sent an installer crew not a repair crew and they didn’t have the part needed to fix the washer.   When I called Customer Service/Repair back I did get an intelligent, responsive person on the line who is sending the correct part to me, but even if they had sent a repair crew, I was informed, they wouldn’t have had the part on their truck and I still would have had to wait to get the washer fixed. This is illogical, inefficient, and non-responsive and I am DONE WITH SEARS.

8 Oct
Apparently no one on service desks listen anymore.

8 Oct
So sorry people are leaving Goodreads over the review pulling. Sorrier still about pulling reviews because of some whiny authors.

9 Oct
Not surprisingly, the part needed to repair the dishwasher, which Sears promised would be here on Tuesday, has not arrived.

9 Oct
One of the worst aspects of being home sick is having to watch tea party wipes talking out of their ass. Oh right, I can turn the channel. Senator Buck McKeon claimed that less than 10 people in the whole country had signed up for the Affordable Care Act. Wolf Blitzer corrected that: over 16,000 in the 3 states reporting.

10 Oct
Tipping the potato chip bag up to get the last crumbs in your mouth: ladylike or beyond mortal definitions of assigned gender roles? Asking for a friend.

11 Oct
Guess what? Wonderful Sears ordered the wrong part for the dishwasher. The repairman won’t be back for yet another week. That will be three weeks without a dishwasher plus taking care of a sick 92 year old and working full time. I’m so happy.

(Insert primal scream here.)

This morning as I was reminding Ma about the repairman coming I had a premonition about the wrong part. I’m furious but not really surprised.

13 Oct
Friday Sears said someone would call me within 24 hours. Do I even have to type the rest at this point? Sick as a dog since Friday. Probably just as well they didn’t come.

14 Oct
My mother doesn’t understand the concept of laryngitis even though she had it in the early days of this cold. What? What you say? What?

“The disease is nothing, the terrain everything”—Louis Pasteur on his deathbed.

Well, at least there’s a UFO Files marathon on.

Fun: trying to get VRS to understand you when you have laryngitis.

18 Oct
Sears has gone beyond incompetence into criminal neglect. The part to fix the dishwasher is on backorder until November. At the crucial moment when I thought I was getting some resolution, we were disconnected. I called back to try to get to who I was talking to and the clueless helpdesk folks had no idea and connected me to someone who decided to stonewall and say “I see no record of you talking to anyone who made you such an offer. We can’t do anything more for you. You’ll have to wait until November.” At one point the Sears stonewaller said, “I’m sorry you’re unhappy with your dishwasher. Contact the manufacturer.” “It’s a Kenmore,” I told him. “You are the manufacturer.” He sputtered some but didn’t have much else to say.

18 Oct
In other corporate news, Alka Seltzer Plus Nighttime is most excellent. First good night’s sleep in days.

20 Oct
Hilarity of the morning: the bird and Mom coughing at one another. Or the bird saying “Ouch!” when I cough.

20 Oct
Birdie between coughing fits.

20 Oct
I suppose it’s not possible to hope both teams lose the World Series. No hard feelings.

21 Oct
Every time I look up there’s another Sears commercial on TV. The Universe is mocking me.

21 Oct
The ironies pile up. “18 Depressing Photos That Show Why Nobody Wants To Shop At Sears” http://yhoo.it/1a0jUyq

22 Oct
I gave up on Sears and called plumber. He fixed the dishwasher in about 20 minutes with the parts the Sears tech said were wrong. The only reason I stuck with Sears this long was because the dishwasher was still under warranty.

Sears corporate types have been reading my Twitterfeed complaints and calling me, but the situation never got resolved. The weird thing, when corporate Sears calls me they go direct to voicemail. Those are the only calls that do. And when I call them back it goes direct to voicemail. This only increases my frustration and adds paranoia.

23 Oct
I’m not so much hoping the Sox win as I’m hoping the Cards lose. The Cards are a team of prigs. No hard feelings.

25 Oct
#1. Act 3 is broken and I don’t know how to fix it and haven’t got the time. #2. It’s been out there so many times. #3. I never did find the time for that final read through. I don’t know what I’ve got there. Could be brilliant, could be crap. #4. There are holes in this that still haven’t been plugged. Plus #1 and #4 are part of trilogies. Oh the humanity! If I haven’t got time for a one-off, how can I find time for 3???

I’m thinking of changing my name to Oh!TheHumanity! Thompson.

29 Oct
Sometimes I seem nearly psychotically cautious, other times the feckless, trusting fool.

29 Oct
Sears, to be perfectly fair, has promised to pay my plumbing bills for the dishwasher. I have not yet seen cash. I will keep you posted.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Random quote of the day:

“Two and two is four and five will get you ten if you know how to work it.”

—Mae West, My Little Chickadee

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Random quote of the day:

“Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into the nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas.”

—Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

I haven't kept notebooks all my life, just most of my life. I think I must have gotten the first when I was ten or eleven. Although it was dubbed on the outside "My Diary," I rarely went more than a week with any prototypical diary entries. In fact, it was neatly divided into three or four modest “day” entries per page and I routinely wrote over several days’ worth for each entry. These little books always tended to be more like journals, sometimes filled with activities, but mostly filled with emotional screeds, commentaries on the world, philosophical ramblings. Later, they tended to fill up with bits and pieces of my writing: character sketches, poems, dialog runs, etc., etc.—mixed in with the emotional screeds, commentaries, philosophy. They have mostly been cheap paper-cover books, but once or twice I've bought something really fancy, like this one:

This one cost far more money than rational me wanted to spend, but the excitable part of me had to have it. Or, actually, it had to have the one made of brown leather. Black leather has always had less appeal to me. I kept circling back to the store and fondling that book for weeks, but fortunately, the rational me got the excitable one to wait until the notebook had been marked down and I had a gift certificate. By that time, sadly, all the brown leather ones had sold out—but that did not deter me. I’d obsessed about the damned thing and so I was going to have it. Let's not speak of acquisitiveness gone mad, shall we?

That was a few years ago now and I have never written a word in it. I just can't bring myself to violate those pages with the usual screeds, ramblings, and commentaries. What am I saving it for? I have no idea, but there is sits, beautifully occupying a shelf. Seems a waste, but we're not talking rational processes here. The rational me and the excitable one walk hand-in-hand, but it’s often an uneasy partnership, each pulling hard in the opposite direction.

When I was about thirteen and walking around the back yard of our old house in Venice in a moony state (not at all uncommon in those days), something kept nudging me to go to the little walk space behind the "garage." Garage is a euphemistic term for the structure on the back end of our property. Basically it was a couple of strung together rattletrap sheds which hadn't seen paint since the Trojan War and had a distinct lean to the south. My biodad stored his tools and an inordinate amount of Important Guy Stuff in the larger shed. The smaller shed sometimes held fertilizer and the like for his prodigious garden. Behind this structure was a pathway about five feet wide at the very back end of the property. An enormous wire fence kept the riff raff of the neighborhood (my family) from entering the property on the other side, the Edgemar Dairy.

Dairy is also a euphemistic term, as no actual cows wandered the premises. It was a processing plant and staging area for Edgemar trucks to fill up with ice and cart their loads of milk, cottage cheese, fruit drinks, etc., to stores. An enormous ice-crushing machine sat on the other side of that wire fence and it would start going at about two or three in the morning. (That, and being in the flight path of Santa Monica airport, helped train me to be the talented sleeper that I am to this very day.) The positioning of the ice-crushing machine against the property line was intentional, one in a long series of harassments the dairy management folks concocted in an effort to get us and our neighbor to sell out cheap to them and move. It didn't work. We were made of sterner (and more spiteful) stuff than they imagined. They never did get our property. But that's another story...

So anyway, something urged thirteen-year-old me to go behind the garage, telling me I'd find something special. I'd been back there countless times and the rational was skeptical—but the Believer was game. When I walked this familiar path, what did I spy? A little notebook lying just beside the fence on the dairy side: a cheapie, maybe 4x7, black leatherette, spiral bound. I could reach quite easily under where the wire of the fence didn't quite meet the concrete and pull it to me. It was full of paper, every page blank, and it must not have been there long because it wasn't damp or dirty. Well! The Believer thought I'd been given a Very Special Gift from the universe. The Skeptic (active even at that tender age) thought some schmuck had dropped it in the wee hours while filling his truck up with ice and disturbing my sleep. But I held onto that notebook for years—and kept it as empty as that expensive model. I just could bring myself to violate the pages.

The Believer always seems to be saving these things for that something special that never quite materializes.

( This post is really about Skepticism and Belief. )

Srsly, I’m not a Luddite, or even a Troglodyte, but here’s my bit of counter-propoganda for the day, taken from Tracy Seeley’s reading blog, “A Grab-Bag of Good Book News:

The second study actually surprised me. It tracked 500,000 kids in grades 5-8, and found that kids with high-speed internet at home are getting lower scores on math and reading tests. That’s a lot of kids logging a lot of hours not reading books.

And this:

Convicted Criminals Get Reading Time Instead of Jail. Judges in eight states now have an alternative to sending offenders to prison. Instead, they put books in their hands and send them to reading groups. I don’t know about you, but this makes my heart leap up. Some participants have never read a book before, and through reading and discussion, their lives really do change. The program more than halves the rate of recidivism, and compared to the cost of throwing people in jail, it’s virtually free. Let’s send a shout of thanks to the program that makes it possible: “Changing Lives Through Literature.”

Go, slow read the rest of the good news…

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

So, I depressed myself last night by sitting down and figuring out the page count for each chapter I've finished thus far, calculating an average page count, estimating how many chapters it will take to finish, and doing the math (SMF). Let us say that it was more than I anticipated. There's not a lot left in the 1968 and 1977 timeframes, but the 6th century has a lot going on.

If you are an organized writer, you might say to yourself, "Pam, shouldn't you have known this before now?"

The answer is no. I couldn't really do an estimate like this before because there is always a certain amount of terra incognito in my novels as I write them. And my plots are always complicated. I'm just now at a point where all the plot elements are coming to fruition, where the lookout has called, "Land ho!" and I can see the entire stretch of water between me and that shore I hope to land upon.

Realistically, I think it probably won't take as many words to get there as my crude estimate suggests, but the thought that it might took the wind out of my sails. Just a bit. The wind has picked up again and I'm still on course. But.

And for those of you kind enough to agree to read this monster in its entirety, I won't be expecting you to read this monster. I plan to do some hacking (maybe quite a lot) before I inflict it on any beta.

And then there's this here post right here by

sartorias featuring Rudyard Kipling talking about writing long and cutting down and the work being the richer for it. That was some consolation.

I used to know a guy named Ed who was a Calvinist. That alone was remarkable to me—I didn't think Calvinists existed anymore, but Ed sure did. As I understand it, Calvinists are pretty strict in their beliefs about sin and morality and right behavior, so much so that one of the tenets of their faith is that when Judgment comes, only the Elect will be admitted to Heaven. And they've even come up with a calculation, derived from numbers they say are encoded in the Bible, to estimate how many human souls out of all the billions who have ever existed are going to make the cut: 144,000.

So I asked Ed if he really believed that only 144,000 souls were going to be saved come the End of Times. He nodded—one of the fast, tight-necked nods that scared people make. His eyes showed a lot of white, too, like a horse seeing a stick on the ground and thinking it's a snake. I asked him if he thought the rest of us were going to be pitched into the lake of fire. Again, that tight, white-eyed nod.

Ed was an engineer so he had a pretty good grasp of math. I can't clearly remember if I was actually impertinent enough to ask him if he thought he'd be one of the Elect—I was pretty young and tended towards impertinence, so it's possible. But looking back, I don't think I really needed to ask that question. Ed's fear was palpable, a daily ritual. Ed knew in his heart of hearts that he wasn't "good enough" by Calvinist lights.

He was the most terrified person I ever knew, if you looked beneath the surface of things. Tightly controlled, afraid of shadows, hyper-cautious about everything, every deed and morsel, extremely safety-minded and risk-averse. He always seemed a bit squirrely, ready to jump at shadows. Not hard to imagine why. If Ed truly believed in the Calvinist creed, then the thought of death had to fill him with terror. His faith, as he interpreted it, was a torture to him because he was convinced that all that awaited him when he died was the lake of fire.

I can't say that I really see the point in a belief system like that, but different strokes to different folks, as Sly Stone said. Perhaps Ed needed the fear. Or perhaps he'd been so indoctrinated at such a young age that he couldn't escape the prison of his thought patterns.

I've thought about Ed now and again over the years. When I was younger it was with shake-my-head amazement and a bit of derision. These days, it's with pity. Faith—it seems to me—needs to be a living thing, not a dying thing, though God knows many a creed has arisen that glorifies punishment. Glorifying punishment, instilling an unnatural fear of living, seems a perversion of Spirit to me. But what do I know? I am clearly not one of Ed's 144,000.

Ever since the final word count on my latest novel hit 144,000, Ed's been on my mind and I've been picturing his tight-lipped face. No, no, I'm not going to reduce and cheapen Ed's terror to a discussion of my novel. It's just on my mind a lot this morning, this afternoon, thinking about the boxes we shut ourselves inside of, the lakes of fire we sometimes create out of our own lives.

Life is about living. For all I know, this is all we've got. Spirit calls to me and I listen, but nobody really knows a thing. Not the Pope, not Billy Graham, George Bush, the Dali Lama, the imams and ayatollahs, not Ed. Not me, not anybody. There is no received wisdom that wasn't first filtered through the skull of some poor mortal, where the lines of communication are prone to misinterpretation, self-interest, cultural biases, rationalization. We're all just living inside our own skulls, making leaps of faith.

I think it's important to believe in something, to make some kind of leap of faith sometime in our life. But when I look back at Ed and folks like him, I realize they aren't making leaps of faith about anything. It seems to me that life is the true test of faith. If what you believe is not enriching your life; if it is not about living but about death and revenge and self-righteousness and judgment, then it is most likely a false faith. Spirit does not want us to "kick ass" on anybody else. Spirit wants us to concentrate on our own hearts, on making our relationship to our own souls as clear and as loving as we possibly can. Anything else is a perversion.

No lake of fire could be worse.

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Echoes in a Hollow Space

I'm here because I'm here because I'm here

Entries tagged with math

Geometry

Economics

Observations

Doing the math

Do the math

Journey around my room: Notebooks

Books make you smarter than the internet

The wind beneath my whinge

The 144,000

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December 2025

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