Parking lots, perspective, perception and pain

In A Serious Man, Rabbi Scott, the junior rabbi, tells Larry that what he needs is a fresh perspective, such as "a person who isn't familiar with these autos and such" would have if that person looked at the parking lot outside.  This scene ends with Rabbi Scott turning around to look again at the parking lot outside his window, saying with great admiration and wonder, "Things aren't so bad, just look at that parking lot!"

I have looked at parking lots with a fresh perspective myself, long ago.  I was at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, which like most universities, has vast spaces covered with asphalt for the purpose of parking cars.  My fresh perspective was to think about what would happen if the force of gravity were to stop attracting those cars just on that parking lot, which was one of the faculty lots close to the classroom buildings.  I imagined the cars just floating off, rising slowly from their marked-off rectangular spaces, bumping into one another softly as they rose.  It was just one of those physics-related thoughts.  I still have them, but not as often.  Here's one, also about gravity:  Pick up something near you, preferably something heavy, and move it up and down a little bit.  What's really happening? 

What's really happening is a matter of perception, and this is the word Larry uses in his stoned conversation with Mrs. Samsky about what Rabbi Scott had told him.  The rabbi said perspective, Larry says perception.  As in Aldous Huxley's book The Doors of Perception, about his experience with hallucinatory drugs (well, just mescalin as far as I recall).  Two different things, perspective and perception.

The ideas behind the words "relative" and "subjective" are also different.  I consider some things that people often refer to as relative to be more properly classified as subjective.  The experience of pain, for instance.  It is certainly subjective, but can it also be called relative?  That "One to Ten" scale that a nurse might ask you to use to quantify the pain you're feeling for instance--that's a subjective sort of measurement, although bringing in the "scale" attempts to quantify it and make it relative.

I thought about the experience of pain after my snakebite on September 8.  The bite didn't hurt.  It felt like nothing I've ever felt, but it was more like a slight poke with a stick--that was one of the instantaneous thoughts I had when it happened. So, because the bite didn't hurt, I wasn't angry at the snake, and I probably hurt it worse than it hurt me, since the reason it bit me was that I stepped on it.  When I looked down it was kind of writhing in the leaves that had kept me from seeing it on the trail.  After seeing it was a small copperhead, I left the snake alone, and left.

When people asked me why I didn't kill the snake, one of the things I said was that its bite hadn't hurt.  If it had hurt a lot, for instance, I would have been angry--hurt is surely a prime cause of anger--and might have wanted to beat the innocent snake to death with a stick (innocent, because it was my fault that I stepped on it).  And this is the thing about pain and anger I was thinking about:  how I don't understand other people's anger because I don't understand where their pain is coming from.  Something I might do that wouldn't cause me pain if it was done to me might cause another person pain, and it would be a mystery to me where that person's anger had come from.

Scene titles in A Serious Man; Hotel Trulock

On the DVD, A Serious Man is divided into 20 segments for the purpose of choosing particular scenes.  They are numbered of course, but I'm just going to write the titles of the scenes, separated by commas.  Yep, back to the subject matter, at least the Serious Man part.  I do hope to get back to the Schroedinger's Cat part soon also. 

Scenes from A Serious Man:  Cursed, In Good Health, Family Life, Let's Talk Divorce, Consequences, Fuzzy Reception, Practicalities, Have Faith, The First Rabbi, Death Around the Corner, The Second Rabbi, Simply Disappear, Nothing Adds Up, New Freedoms, Some Good News, Marshak, Can't Escape, Be A Good Boy, It's Darkest Before the Storm, End Titles.

And a bit of Coen Bros movie trivia:  Pine Bluff is mentioned in their movie version of True Grit, along with Monroe, Louisiana.  This is also true in the book, but the order of mention of the two towns is reversed (by Mattie).

MOVIE:  LaBoeuf: ... He dallied in Monroe, Louisiana, and Pine Bluff, Arkansas before turnin' up at your father’s place.
Mattie Ross: And why did you not catch him in Pine Bluff, Arkansas or Monroe, Louisiana?
LeBoeuf: He is a crafty one.
Mattie Ross: I thought him slow-witted myself.
LeBoeuf: That was his act.
Mattie Ross: It was a good one.


BOOK: "'... He dallied in Monroe, Louisiana, and Pine Bluff, Arkansas before turnin' up at your father's place.'

"I said, 'Why did you not catch him in Monroe, Louisiana, or Pine Bluff, Arkansas?''

(end of quote)  Yes, total trivia!  But, on the other hand, you watch or listen for things like that if you are investigating the mysteries of the universe.  You wonder, "Why is this different?" 

P.S.  If Tom Chaney in True Grit had been a real person, he could have stayed at the Hotel Trulock when he was in Pine Bluff.  A letter and envelope from 1894 written at the Hotel Trulock were sent to Jefferson County Historical Society recently from Walnut Creek, California, along with historical info on the man who wrote the letter and his son, to whom he sent the letter:

My father's books, and birthday

My father would be 90 years old today, if he had lived this long.  He was born in Davis Hospital in Pine Bluff, which was built in 1908 and torn down a couple of years ago.  My brother Steven was also born in that hospital in 1956.  Brothers Greg and Arch were born in the newer Jefferson Regional Medical Center (just called Jefferson Hospital when it opened in 1960). My older brother Jeff and I were born in the George Washington University Medical Center.

The former site of Davis hospital, on the west side of Cherry Street between 11th and 12th avenues, is only three blocks from where I live now.  It's a grass-covered vacant lot, belonging to the city of Pine Bluff.  Eventually the lot will be put to good use I expect.  Anyway, it's significant to me somehow that I currently live three blocks from where my father was born.

Among the books I kept from my parents' small library when the house was finally sold in 2007 (the house is also on Cherry Street, between 40th and 41st) was a small group of books that sat by itself on the highest shelf of one of the two built-in bookshelves.  I don't recall taking a good look at these books until the house was being sold.  They are a mixture of old textbooks that Daddy used at Columbia University (he was in graduate school there in 1949-51 studying international relations, then went to work for the U.S. State Department for four years),  and maybe also the economics text he used at Hendrix College, plus some others from the 1950's and early sixties, a couple of which were gifts from my mother.

In July of this year I wrote down the titles of the books, year of publication, and inscription if there was one.  Here's the list, photocopied from my current journal:

And here are two photos from what I think is Christmas 1959 (could be '58).  Steven is in the Indian suit (back to camera in both photos), I'm in the cowboy vest and chaps, and Jeff (back to camera in second photo) is also in cowboy clothes. 

'tis the season to dance

4 Trulocks, 3 generations

Thanks to my brother Greg for copying this photo and giving it as a Christmas present last year to the four of us other brothers:

The date scrawled at the bottom is December 18, 1943, one day after my father's 22nd birthday. The men are, from left, my uncle Leo Andrews Trulock, my father Walter Nichols Trulock III, grandfather Walter Jr, and great-grandfather Walter Sr.  Daddy was serving in the Navy at this time, so he must have been home on leave.  In his short and very incomplete memoir (a total of nine single-spaced pages), he describes coming home on leave in 1943 after his first combat mission on the destroyer called the Laub, but that would have been a month or two earlier than this trip.  The photo was taken at Drake's Landing, a duck hunting club near Dewitt, Arkansas.  The clubhouse, with kitchen and living room (with a fireplace of course) and sleeping rooms wasn't built until 1953.  They used tents up until then.  The club was formed in the 1920s, with my great-grandfather as one of the nine original members.  There are still just nine members, my brother Greg among them. 

Cut-out from the Pine Bluff High 1914 Annual

Walter Trulock, Jr, actually.  Seated in the middle.  And on the opposite side of the page:

Woman or Man?

The latest twist in the continuing saga of the dead man in the casket is that it might be a woman.  This is something I  considered a possibility from the beginning, but a co-worker of mine, a retired gentleman I hired to work when I'm off work, said the body in the photo resembles an aunt of his. 

An embalmer's photo perhaps?

Someone said today, visiting my office, that the photo of the dead man in his casket was probably taken by a person who worked at the funeral home where the man was embalmed. 

This person who was in my office, Ray, also said if that was the case they should be more careful with the photo(s) and not let them get out in public.  (I found it on the Recycling Center parking lot, where there are two 30-cubic-yard roll-off dumpsters, or 30-yd open tops, as we in the solid waste biz call 'em).  Ray also said (he says a lot) that his sisters in fact took photos of their deceased mother in her casket but he didn't want one since he wanted to remember her the way she was when she was alive.  Surely I could not agree more.  The strangeness of open caskets and viewing of the body.  Is it a way to reassure people that the person is really dead? 

My own body I plan to give to the nearest medical school, the Univeristy of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, in Little Rock.  Then I'd have a memorial marker out at the family plot in Pine Bluff.  I might even adopt the epitaph of a neaby marker of someone whose last name was Garner: "Lord, I tried."

Binary, Jobs, Lovins

See my previous post on binary numbers for more info and also for the correction I just made for the decimal expressions for the binary numbers 111011 and 111111.  


Also see this web page for "live" conversion of binary, decimal and hexadecimal numbers.


The binary equivalent of the decimal number 111,011 is 11011000110100011.  For decimal number 111,111 the binary expression is 11011001000000111.


I know!  Who cares?  

Well, I can take this opportunity to say I do without all the things Steve Jobs and crew have created.  I thought the original Apple II computer ad in Byte magazine in 1978 (I had a subscription) was pretty stupid, including the name (Apple).  Then in 1985 when I first used the Macintosh, I did not like it a bit.  I liked entering commands and programming, and didn't like the mouse experience, since as far as I could tell I was controlled by the computer rather than being able to control the computer.  I knew the machine language or "op codes" of the Motorola 68000 CPU in the Mac, but couldn't figure out how to get past the mickey mouse point-and-click environment and enter commands. 


Never had a ipod nor none of the other istuff, and don't care to. How have they improved the world?  The man close to Steve Jobs age (also my age) who would get my vote for working to change the world in a positive way is Amory Lovins, of the Rocky Mountain Institute.

To Sea Again in November

This article is scheduled for publication in December in the Jefferson County Historical Quarterly:

A Brief Reminiscence of World War II

by Walter N. Trulock III

Note from David Trulock: This is the second and final part of an autobiographical sketch my father wrote in 1981, eight years before he died. In the first part, published in the Quarterly six years ago (Vol. 33, No. 4), he wrote about his life up to his sophomore year at Hendrix College, 1940-41. The account picks up here during his junior year.

                On December 6, 1941, we had a big formal dance at Hendrix, and my closest friend, Ed Lester, had the bright idea that a group of us would stay up all night and go to breakfast in the dining hall in our tuxedos.  After breakfast we all went to bed and were sleeping soundly when someone came in after lunch and told us the unbelievable news—that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor.

                Shortly after that, the Navy sent an officer to talk to a group of us about enlisting as apprentice seamen and being allowed to stay in school to get our degrees before going to midshipmen’s school for officer training.  Several of us in our junior year were sworn in to that program on January 28, 1942.  In the early spring of 1943, Hendrix announced it would award degrees to students who were called into service in their final nine weeks prior to graduation. The Navy had said it would call us when we got our degrees, not before.  So it took a little persuasion to get the Navy to call us early, but they did this and Ed Lester, Guy Moseley and I were ordered to report to Columbia University in New York on April 5, 1943. This began my longtime love affair with New York.

For the next 15 weeks we marched around Morningside Heights and went to classes eight hours a day in navigation, seamanship, gunnery, etc.  We studied every night until lights out at 10:30 p.m.  Our free time was from Saturday noon until 5:00 p.m. on Sunday, three out of every four weekends.  Ed, Guy, and I spent most of those Saturday nights in one room at the Roosevelt Hotel, going to see the Hit Parade Live with Frank Sinatra (it was free to those in uniform) and to see the shows at the Paramount, Roxy and Radio City, plus the big bands playing the Cafe Rouge at the Hotel Pennsylvania and the Bowman Room at the Biltmore.

My mother had a friend from her Hollins College days who had married a young lawyer from Atlanta who had risen rapidly in one of the great Wall Street law firms (he had the RCA account). They lived in Riverdale in the old Colgate mansion overlooking the Hudson River just north of Manhattan. I spent a few weekends with them (they had two daughters, one my age and one younger) during my stay at Columbia. This was my first glimpse of how the real rich lived. The stone house was huge and elegant with large rooms, high ceilings and beautiful grounds. They had a Scottish couple who lived on the property and acted as cook-maid and butler-chauffeur. Their home was to become my home away from home throughout my navy career.

I studied the unfamiliar subjects as though my life depended on learning the material and was rewarded by being among the top 25 graduates (out of 1280 graduates—1600 had started) who were honored at a sword dinner at the New York Yacht Club (only the top graduate got a sword).  My parents came up for our graduation and got to see the musical Oklahoma! which had just opened to rave reviews. Every graduate wanted sea duty—or said he did—and we three Arkansans got our wish. Ed was assigned to a destroyer escort, Guy to the Battleship Wyoming (a gunnery training ship in Norfolk, Virginia), and I was ordered to the USS Laub (DD613), a relatively new destroyer.  I was to report for duty on August 7 in Norfolk, but the Laub turned out to be in the Brooklyn Navy Yard instead, having just gotten back from the invasion of Sicily.

On August 10, 1943, I reported aboard the Laub, the ship that was to be my home for the next two years and two months. I arrived as an unbelievably green ensign and left as Gunnery Officer and Senior Watch Officer.  It took me only a few days to realize that much of my training had been useless. We were taught nothing about radar, sonar and the mechanical computer that solved the gunnery problem.  I also learned that I had to rely heavily—entirely, at first—on the senior petty officers who served under me to see that all of our gunnery, torpedo and fire control equipment was maintained and utilized properly.

Our first mission after I came aboard was to escort a convoy of troops and supplies to Oran, Algeria, where preparations were almost complete for the landing operation on the European mainland at Salerno, Italy. This first voyage was uneventful; the Germans and the weather cooperated to give us a smooth crossing and return. Much to my surprise we were back in the Brooklyn Navy Yard in only 30 days. I flew home for a quick leave and almost ruined my ears on my first commercial flight. The old DC-3's then in use by most airlines were not pressurized and my éustachian tubes were blocked and the pain on descent was intense. A doctor at Grider Field told me I should never fly again, but I have logged hundreds of thousands of miles in the air since then—thanks to pressurized cabins.

Our next trip was to England, stopping first at Swansea in Wales.  A few of us took a train to London where I watched an air raid from my hotel window near Piccadilly. Next we moved up to Glasgow, Scotland, then to Belfast, Northern Ireland, thus giving me a quick look at all four parts of the United Kingdom. We then escorted troops and supplies to the Mediterranean, stopping at Oran again. Our convoy was hit by German torpedo bombers off the coast of Tunisia. They sunk two large troopships and a destroyer just like ours. I'll never forget the sight of our sister ship slipping vertically, stern first, below the sea. We continued to Palermo, Sicily, and brought troops back to England, then we returned to New York.

We began 1944 with a quick convoy to Londonderry, Northern Ireland, and back. Our next mission was to escort some ammunition ships from Norfolk to the Mediterranean, but one of them became disabled in a severe storm.  We were assigned to stay with her, and in maintaining position near the stricken ship we necessarily had to get in the trough between mountainous waves during our turn.  We got caught in between and could not get out, rolled 72°, and lost one man and a lot of equipment overboard. I was asleep between watches on the wardroom couch and was buried under metal chairs and a movie projector. We limped back to our home navy yard in Brooklyn for repairs.

After three or four weeks in the yard, we left to join our squadron in the Mediterranean. We arrived in Naples in early May. What a beautiful harbor! What a dirty port city! There was an allied officers club high on a hill overlooking the bay with Mount Vesuvius in the background. It was an outdoor facility with tables set among orange trees. The Allied Armies in Italy had troops from many countries and it was a sight to see the different uniforms and faces of their officers:  Poles, French, Moroccan, Gurkhas, Sikhs, Australians, and South Africans, to name a few.

Every other night we would escort one or two American cruisers up the Italian coast to shell the German positions around the stalled beachhead at Anzio.  After being stalled for over six months after the initial landings, the Allies were about to mount a major offensive to break through to Rome.  On the night of May 22, the night before breakout attempt was to be launched, our officer of the deck zigged the wrong way on our zig-zag plan and we were rammed and almost cut in two by the Cruiser Philadelphia. By some miracle we only lost two men, but had to be towed back to Naples. We spent six weeks in dry dock there, were then towed all the way back to Boston and finally went to sea again in November.

                The story ends here because my dad wrote this for a genealogy project that my youngest brother Arch was working on at Pine Bluff High School. When it was time for Arch to turn in his project, Daddy stopped writing. Despite some prodding from my brothers and me, he didn’t pick it up again. 

But there is one final story he once told me:  His journey home after the war in October 1945 was on a Greyhound bus, which was scheduled to stop at the bus station in downtown Pine Bluff at about 3 a.m.  Since the bus was coming in on Highway 79 North, young Lt. (junior grade) Trulock asked the bus driver if he’d mind letting him off at the Free Bridge Store instead of the bus station.  The driver didn’t mind (Dad had a large wooden footlocker that traveled on into town and had to be picked up later), so my father’s return from the war was on foot.  He told me there was a full or nearly full moon that night as he walked the last mile home from the war.  I asked if he had a key to get in. From my own experience as a child on that same farm, I should have realized what the answer would be: “Oh, we never locked the door.” –DT

Veteran's Day (formerly Armistice Day)

Binary numbers and today and tomorrow's date

You know of course about the binary number system.  With computers being as common as pig tracks these days, everybody has heard that digital computers use binary numbers.  Not many people know that there are also analog computers, which perform mathematical operations such as differentiation and integration using "op amps" or operational amplifiers.  The first integrated circuits (chips) were op amps that combined many transistors in one package.  Who can forget the famous 741 op amp? 

Anyway, binary numbers were and are interesting in their own right, never mind computers.  Except I do remember when the first home computer was announced, in January 1975 in Popular Electronics (I had a subscription), and I was quite perplexed by what it was supposed to do.  It was a rectangular box that had several rows of single LEDs that displayed binary numbers in a simple on/off fashion.  Commands were entered as binary numbers using a row of switches.  That was it.  With external relays and such, you could turn on and off your house lights, for example.  Whoowee!  But it had an off-the-shelf microprocessor, the Intel 8008, so it was a microcomputer.  Popular Electronics gave the list of parts and instructions on how to build it.

It was useless as a calculator, but if you knew enough and could find the parts you could make it into  a bulky boxy desktop calculator.  Only high-dollar buyers of computers--university computer centers and large companies-- had CRT computer screens and the requisite equipment to make them usable. If you were taking a computer programming class, Fortran or Cobol or assembly language, you used punched cards to run your program, and you got the results on a large green-and-white paper printout.

Handheld calculators, however, had just a couple of years earlier become affordable for students. I had one my father bought me for the first physics class I took in the summer of '74.  It cost in the neighborhood of $100, a Texas Instruments scientific type.  I thus got interested in physics about the time slide rules were going out of fashion and were being replaced by calculators.  I never had to use a slide rule, and I don't remember seeing anyone carrying one around on his belt.  I did buy one at Hendrix College in 1978--actually the bookstore manager gave it to me, since no one was buying them by that time--and I learned the basics of how to use it.

But back to binary numbers.  The 17th century scientist-mathematician-philosopher Gottfried Liebniz called binary numbers the language of God.  This is because so many things in nature do take a dual or binary form, such as male-female, positive-negative, yin- yang, dark-light, love-hate, to-be-or-not-to-be.  Binary numbers, or base-2 numbers, are nowadays expressed in the symbols 1 and 0.  This is all you need for a number system: an incremental unit and identity element, and a "zero" as a placeholder and null element. 

When you write a number in normal decimal notation, you write it in descending powers of ten.  So 468 is 4 x 10-to-the-second-power + 6 x 10-to-the-first-power + 8 x 10-to-the zero-power.   And of course there are ten numerals or symbols in the base ten system, 0 thru 9.

So, today's and tomorrow's dates look like binary numbers (ignoring the backslashes or dashes you have to use to actually write the date, and of course with 2011 abbreviated to 11). An interesting (to me) exercise is to compute what decimal number these numbers, 111011 and 111111 (written in the American and not the European order), would represent if they were binary numbers:

111011  =  1x2⁵ + 1x2⁴ + 1x2³ + 0x2² + 1x2 + 1x1  =  32 + 16 + 8 + 0 + 2 + 1  =  59.  Since the 1 in 111111 replaces the zero placeholder at the 2² position of 111011, we just have to add 4 to 59 to get the decimal equivalent of 111111, which is 63.

A harder and even more pointless exercise is to consider the numbers to be decimal (111,011 and 111,111) and to compute their binary equivalents (maybe your calculator can do it).

As a final useless activity, here's the base 16 representation of the binary numbers 111011 and 111111.  Base 16 (hexadecimal) needs 6 more characters than base 10, and A, B, C, D, E, F are the universal choice.  Here's the binary to hex conversion:

0000=0, 0001=1, 0010=2, 0011=3, 0100=4, 0101=5, 0110=6, 0111=7, 1000=8, 1001=9, 1010=10, 1011=A, 1100=B, 1100=C, 1101=D, 1110=E, and 1111=F.

Our binary dates written as hexadecimal numbers are 11 1011 = 3A, and 11 1111 = 3F. (You group the binary digits (bits) into groups of four bits each to express them as hex numbers. I left out the two zeros to the left of the ones in writing 11, see?)

Now when you get some error message like this (I hope you don't) ....

"A fatal exception OE has occurred at 0167:BFF99B3B. The current application will be terminated.

*Press any key to terminate the current application.

*Press Ctrl+Alt+DEL to restart your computer.

You will lose any unsaved information in all applications. Press any key to continue."

....(in other words "press any key and you're still 1111 U 1100 K 1110 1101") you know why there are the Bs and Fs in there--it's a binary number expressed in hexadecimal notation.

Happy Armistice Day, eleven eleven eleven!

Random notes on the passing scene

Well, it's still snake weather around Pine Bluff.  It was about 75 degrees Fahrenheit at sunset today and as I was ending up my walk on the trail, sweating, I stopped for a moment after Jessie stopped (I'd put her back on the leash by then, to avoid her taking off after deer and being gone when I was ready to leave).  We were on a high sloping bank above the bayou, and I saw what at first looked like a stick, about 12 or 13 inches long, near a big cypress tree less than 10 feet away.  I looked closer, and yep, it was a snake.  Copperhead again, but bigger than the one that bit me on Sept 8.  It's skin was dark enough I thought at first it was a mocassin, but I looked closer and could see the copperhead pattern.  It kept it's head down, continuing to look very stick-like, even though I had a few words to say to it (no cussing, just normal conversational talk).   Earlier, in the middle of the trail, I'd seen a stick about the same size that looked like a snake due to its missing some bark in places and being slightly sinuous.   I stopped quickly when I saw it, then kicked it off the trail, relieved but with my heart beating a little faster.

Jessie stopped to sniff the air, not because of the snake, which she apparently didn't see.  She's seen them on the trail several times when she wasn't on the leash, passing right by them sometimes and other times stopping and looking warily at them and then going on her way, helped along by me shouting, "No!  Let's go!" several times.

I've been wearing boots on the trail ever since the snakebite.  This is the second or third snake I've seen since then.

Now let's get off snakes and onto burns.  The best thing you can do for a burn, the usual kitchen burn, is to get it under cold water immediately and keep it there for several minutes.  I did this after taking a hot iron skillet out of a 400 degree oven using a whatchamacallit (hot pad?), then a moment later getting burned when I pushed the skillet to the side on the stovetop with only my bare thumb and two fingers. How quickly one forgets when distracted by other thoughts...

In less than a second, I had my thumb and two fingers under cold running water and I kept them there, impatiently but with determination, for about 4 minutes.  Afterwards, I could still see the burned places (light brown), but they didn't hurt at all, and they disappeared in about 24 hours.  Apparently, the "less than a second" part is crucial.  You're almost superimposing the hot and the cold at a single moment, see?  Almost a superposition of the two.  Well, okay, more like an average, you're right. 

Now for stars and planets.  (Stars exist because they are burning, by the way.)  What's the bright "star" in the east at sunset?  I haven't looked it up, but I looked up at it a few nights ago with binoculars.  I saw what looked like tiny stars lined up (i.e.,.,., in the the same plane) next to the object, which was conclusive proof that it is Jupiter--the tiny "stars" are several of its moons. 

I guess the other, later-rising bright object is Saturn, since it's not reddish (then it would be Mars; don't know where Mars is right now).  And finally, that must be Venus in the west after sunset.  Now I'll go check out an astronomy website to see if I'm right.  Oh yeh, I'd rather be happy than right, but sometimes you, I, we can be both. Right?


A telescope is needed to see Saturn's rings, or maybe very powerful binoculars.  But it's sure an awe inspiring sight.  I was the astronomer's assistant on public nights at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock's observatory during the 1976-77 academic year when I first saw Saturn's rings, clearly and coldly, through the observatory's 26 inch telescope.  Austerity, serenity, and of course beautiful circular symmetry. Very much unlike just looking at a photo of it.   Also, try looking at the crescent moon with binoculars sometime.  You can see it three-dimensionally, like a giant beach ball with a flashlight shining on it.

Oh, yeh, and how about that asteroid passing nearby?  Makes me wonder when the next big one will hit, and where, and if it will be seen before it hits.  

"The Coyotes Ain't Got Me Yet"

I Am Curious (Black & White).

Happy Halloween

One pirate (a teacher who comes to the recycling center regularly) and one Cleopatra (behind the desk at the PB/JC Library).  Also one set of trick-or-treaters, on Martin Avenue, near where my Trulock grandfather courted my grandmother (I walk my dog over there sometimes, a few blocks from my house).  And several well-done Halloween yard displays, including an extensive one on Martin Ave.  That concludes my Halloween Report.

Well, almost...  I was a bit spooked today when someone saw this photo on my bulletin board,

and suggested that the inscription on the back, which I've included above, might indicate this death was a murder by a serial killer (murder #10 in the series).  That never occurred to me!  I hope it's not true!  I earlier discussed finding this photo on the parking lot at the recycling center.  I have not tried to look up obituaries from the Dumas area close to this date yet, but I certainly plan to now.

On a lighter subject, filming for a movie called "Mud" has been going on in the Dumas area this fall.  The movie is being directed by the Arkansas-based director Jeff Nichols, and stars Reese Witherspoon and Matthew McConaughey.  About the time the filming started, the manager of Pine Bluff's little airport, called Grider Field (a pilot training field during WW2), stopped by the recycling center, and I asked him if he'd seen any movie stars.  He said Reese Witherspoon had flown in that previous weekend, but he hadn't been there to see her.

See Walker Percy's novels The Moviegoer and Lancelot for astute comments on movie people and movie stars, and their effects on us normal people.  Also, the lyrics of Thunderclap Newman's "Hollywood #2,"  from that group's only album, Hollywood Dream, produced by Pete Townshend, describe those effects pretty well:  "They're a plastic-made sensation/so big it makes me sick."  Film is, or was until digital took over, a sort of plastic.  And if you're given a chance to talk to a big movie star, doesn't your stomach feel the effect?

The Φ in eiΦ

Well, sure, of course, the Φ in e^iΦ is some kind of angle, and if Φ = 0, then e^iΦ = 1, and we have the usual state vector for Schrödinger’s Cat.  So in my previous post, I was only wondering what the variable Φ could represent in this particular coherent superposition.  Φ could certainly be time-dependent, resulting in the "delicate phase relation" between the live and dead components being time-dependent.  This could be just a more general expression for the Shroe cat state, for all I know.  I just haven't seen it before and thus am prompted by the movie to check into it.  It could just be another foolin' around on the part of the prone-to-fool-around Coen brothers.  Except they'd have to rely on a knowledgeable physicist to have given them the opportunity.

If Φ = π = 180 degrees, then e^iΦ = -1.  Live and dead components are "out of phase."  Of course, just as an abstract entity, e^iπ = -1 is interesting in its own right.  Right?

 

Back to the Cat and Back of the Cat (photo)

Time to return to the subject of this blog, the main subject, or subjects:  A Serious Man and Schrödinger’s Cat.

In the only non-dream classroom scene in the movie, Larry (our main man Professor Lawrence Gopnick) writes the equation for the quantum state of Schrödinger’s Cat on the board.  When the scene opens, we are viewing Dr. Gopnick’s feet and lower legs as he writes the equation on the board.  We see high-water pants, too short and pulled up above his waist.  Also, he’s writing the equation at the bottom of the chalkboard and his butt is sticking out in a cartoonish manner as he does so.

But the movie is a cartoon, remember?  I mean, according to my amateur* analysis of it, it’s a slapstick cartoon with real actors on the screen instead of animated characters (although everything is animated with digital film).  And what is this Schrödinger’s Cat business but a sophisticated cartoon itself?  The two drawings representing the live cat and the dead cat that Larry puts on the board are elementary forms of animation.  This is generally true of physics teachers:  they draw "sketches" to go with their equations.

Larry’s quantum superposition equation for the state of the cat has a factor in it that is usually not in the live-cat-dead-cat equation.  Larry’s equation is

|cat> = [1/sqrt(2)] (|LC> + e^iΦ|DC>).

where |LC> is the “live cat” component of the state vector |cat>,  and |DC>  is “dead cat” component.

The usual equation has, by necessity, the "one over the square root of 2" factor, but doesn’t have the factor e^iΦ in the second term.  What kinda factor is this?  Well, it’s a phase factor!  Rather cool I think.  Also rather confusing at the moment, though, since the usual equation for the coherent superposition of the live and the dead cat states is

|cat> = [1/sqrt(2)] (|LC> + |DC>),

with no phase factor explicitly shown.  Meaning there’s no possibility of there being a phase difference between the live and dead states.  But what the hail is Φ in e^iΦ?  This requires more study...

A couple of interesting factors from the film, then I’ll quit for today. 

One:  the quantum mechanics textbook visible on Larry’s desk when he is talking to Sy on the phone and finds the money in the envelope is “PAM” Dirac’s classic, Principles of Quantum Mechanics (4^th edition, 1958).  You can see the dust jacket is a bit worn.  Still, for a movie made in 2009, it’s remarkable that such a pristine copy of the book could be found.

Two:  in the final scenes in Larry’s office, it is not when he changes Clive's grade from an F to a C that trouble happens.  It’s only after writing the "C" that Larry shows his negative feelings by making a face  and then decisively putting the negative sign beside the C that the phone immediately rings and the news is bad.  Or potentially bad, if it’s what it sounds like (lung cancer).  Also recall that Larry tells Clive during their second meeting, slamming the money envelope on the desk, that “in this office, actions have consequences, not just in physics but morally.”

Hope you're having a good Ides of October. 

Alex and Anna's Cat

(don't know if he's alive or dead now)

*amateurs are people who do something because they love to do it, not because it makes them any money.

Columbus Day

The song going thru my mind recently has been Michael Ellwood's "Columbus Day."  Okay, not the whole song, just the only lyrics from it I can recall: "Stay off the reservation/On Columbus Day."

The album it's on is Michael Ellwood and Beth Galiger's "Hemlock Smile: Live at La Casa" from 1993.  Just try finding out anything about it on the Web!  Not easy.  My friend David Cuddeback and I went to see them in Austin, at least once.  There is some info about them at  www.bluebhikku.com/elwoodgaliger.html .

Replicas of two of Columbus's ships--the Nina and the Pinta--are coming up the Arkansas River soon, stopping at Pine Bluff for a week, and later at Fort Smith.  (But not at Little Rock for some reason.) 

Physicists on Wall Street, unpublished review

[This is a book review I wrote for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette three years ago, which the book review editor decided not to use.  Probably a good decision, as it's an obscure book and why write a highly critical review of an obscure book?  Yeh, so nobody will buy it!  Like anybody was gonna anyway, hey?  I edited it some more before posting it. I just love to write and especially, apparently, critiqueing everthang physics-related.  I did have a review, a positive review, of the book Faust in Copenhagen, by Gino Segre, published in the ADG earlier in 2008.  Got a whopping $75 for it!  Then in March 2009, as if to end my attempts to write reviews for them, the higher-ups at the ADG unceremoniously jettisoned the two-page book review section from their Sunday edition in order, one assumes,to stay afloat financially or to just look good (i.e., lean and mean) to Wall Street.  Oh, yeh, speaking of which...]

Physicists on Wall Street and Other Essays on Science and Society, by Jeremy Bernstein, Springer, 182 pages, $34.95.

Some of the tasks performed by physicists and accountants are rather similar, and also rather straightforward.  They both, for instance, work with balance sheets, although physicists’ balance sheets must conform to natural laws called conservation laws, and accountants are only required to follow man-made laws.

            Physicist at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, for instance, are looking at the known masses and energies going into the proton-proton head-on collisions, and balancing or equating those with the masses and energies of particles coming out of the collisions.  The collisions occur at near the speed of light.

In theory it's simple, at least if you know your relativistic physics well enough, but in practice identifying particles and energies after the collisions is a complicated engineering task.  The process requires not only huge particle detectors but also special computer programs that statistically search for the presence of new and already-known elementary particles.

Nowadays, accountants and financial analysts face similarly monumental tasks in figuring out the results of complicated financial transactions.  Some of these analysts also, of course, invented those complicated financial transactions, purposely making them hard for industry regulators and investors to figure out.   By their (man-made) nature, financial instruments that are the hardest to figure out also make the most money—if the people trying to profit from them don’t get fooled themselves.  

Because of the complex, computer-intensive nature of their work, quantitative financial analysts—also called “quants” or financial engineers—are often recruited from the PhD pool of applied mathematicians, engineers, computer scientists, and even elementary particle physicists.

Jeremy Bernstein himself is an elementary particle physicist and a professor emeritus at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey.  He was a staff writer for The New Yorker from 1961 until 1995, and his compact scientific biography of Albert Einstein, simply titled Einstein, was nominated for a National Book Award in 1974. Since then he's written over twenty books on physics, physicists, and other subjects, including mountain climbing. 

With a background like that, Bernstein should be a sure bet. Of late, however, he’s been having a bad run. His two books published last year--Nuclear Weapons: What You Need to Know and Plutonium: A History of the World’s Most Dangerous Element—don’t deliver what their titles promise and often read like extemporaneous lectures directly transcribed into books.  And we’re not talking Feynman-type lectures either.  These books seriously needed a good editor.

It does seem that Bernstein has lost his muse, or maybe just his editor.  He says in the acknowledgements at the beginning of his Plutonium book, “When I first started writing books, now some decades ago, they were made up of things that had first appeared in the New Yorker.” He then gives credit to that magazine’s longtime editor, the late William Shawn, for helping him learn how to write about science for the general public. 

The publication of Physicists on Wall Street, a hodge-podge collection of essays on science, economics, and language, should set Mr. Shawn to spinning in his grave, if he has one. The book could provide nonfiction writing instructors with many examples of how not to write, starting with the first line in the preface:  “Everyone has their own way of learning.” 

(That could easily have been changed by an editor, or by Bernstein himself, to “Different people have different ways of learning.”  Or at least it could be grammatically correct if it read “Everyone has his or her own way of learning.”)

If all the problems with Bernstein’s writing were so slight, things wouldn’t be so bad. But his narrative bounces around like it’s following the random walk or Brownian motion (also called the drunkard’s walk) that was analyzed statistically by Einstein in 1905 and put to use on Wall Street in the 1970s as something called the Black-Scholes formula.

For example, Bernstein writes this about a physics PhD named Emanuel Derman: “He interviewed at Salomon, where eventually he took a job for a very unhappy year, after which he returned to Goldman.  One of the groups at Salomon that he interviewed with was one that had been handpicked by John Meriwether." 

The mention of John Meriwether leads Bernstein off in another direction, into a discussion of Meriwether's ill-fated hedge fund, Long Term Capital Management, which financially imploded in 1998.  That particular debacle, from which regulators of the financial industry seem to have learned nothing, is also described in the book When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long Term Capital Management, by Roger Lowenstein.  Emanuel Derman tells his own story in My Life As a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance, published in 2004.  Either of these would be a better choice for learning about Meriwether and Derman than Bernstein’s rambling anecdotal account.

Bernstein’s writing on science and scientists of various sorts is only slightly better than his discussion of stock market economics. And his writing about language and linguists is too lengthy to maintain the reader’s interest.  Again, the problem seems to be a total lack of much-needed editing.

Bernstein at least does make one astute and timely comment about the financial markets. "The key to everything was the assumption that the market would behave rationally,” he says in a chapter called The Rise and Fall of the Quants. “This continuity of behavior was one of the assumptions, for example, that went into deriving the Black-Scholes formula. If in the Brownian motion, for example, the drunkard suddenly falls down a manhole, all bets are off." 

That’s a pretty good description of what actually happened to the financial world just after Bernstein’s book was published in August 2008. The cover of the September 29th issue of The New Yorker tells that same story pictorially: a businessman walking in front of the New York Stock Exchange, preoccupied with a cell phone call, is about to step into an open manhole. The cover is titled "Downward Mobility."

Funerals and silver hair

Lordy, Lordy, look who's way over 40.  Yeh, me.  How come I don't feel like it?  How come my doctor last week found my cholesterol levels were "extraordinary" meaning very good, not very bad?  My blood pressure and pulse rate were in good ranges also (usually my pulse runs a little high, but not this time, when it was 74, said the nurse).  Coulda been that snake bite on September 8th...

If that's the case, too bad the copperhead venom didn't make me look younger too.  I think I look not too old when I check myself out in the mirror, but then I see a photo of me!  There's gray hair and then there's shockingly gray hair. Mine is shockingly gray--silver is a better way to describe it.  Pre-haps a little darkening lotion would be acceptable?  And wearing contacts instead of glasses?  My older brother Jeff has never worn glasses (started off with contacts, in junior high) and started coloring his hair long ago, before any gray showed up.

On the other hand, his midsection is looking kinda quilt-like, and mine, except for some droopiness of flesh in the chest area that could be cured if I'd do serious exercise, still looks pretty solid.

The older brother of two friends of Jeff's and mine died last week.  The friends are the Owen twins, Joe and John.  Their brother was known as Reece, which we always pronounced Reesy, but which now is pronounced in just one syllable.  He was 62, considerably older than the twins, so I didn't really know him.

But I did go to the funeral, and it was a good one.  Good remembrance or eulogy by a good-looking, black-haired younger woman, and then a good talk by the priest.   And unavoidably, a lot of silver hair, so I fit right in.  Jeff wasn't sure he could trust his car to get to Pine Bluff from North Little Rock, and thus didn't make it.  I briefly saw two of my old friends there--Lee Smart and Mark Townsend.  Mark is also a twin, but his twin brother Lane was killed in a car wreck between Little Rock and Pine Bluff during a rainstorm (a car on the opposite side of the interstate hydroplaned and came across the median) in September of that strange year 2000.

And here is a rather remarkable coincidence.  The Townsend twins and the Owen twins mothers died on the same day, April 7, 2010.  Since they both attended the same church, First United Methodist in downtown Pine Bluff, Nan Owen's funeral was there at 10 in the morning on April 9th, and Wanda Townsend's funeral was held there at 2 that afternoon.

Now back to the present. I was thinking about Lane's death after Reece's funeral, and incorrectly thought the wreck had been on the 15th of September.  A few days later I was at Bellwood cemetery, where I can walk while my dog runs around freely, and I noticed, looking at Lane's grave marker, that Lane and Mark were born on November 15 and that Lane was killed on September 24.  (I sent Mark a card on November 15, 2000, when I was living in Columbia, SC, telling him about the birth that very day of Walter Gregory Trulock, my nephew, son of my brother Greg and his wife Kristin.)

Now on to a very different, currently anonymous, passing, as represented by the photo below, which I found on the parking lot at the Recycling Center a few months ago. Like some other personal items I find there, it was meant to go in one of the thirty cubic yard roll-off dumpsters as trash, but somehow escaped.  I guess this fellow's funeral or maybe just viewing was on September 24th, 1985, and somebody took a photo of him in his casket:

What the photographer wrote across the back is "#10  24 Sept. 1985    Dumas, Ark."  Rather impersonal info for such an apparently  personal photo.   I mean,  from the identification of the photo by "#10" it sounds like this was taken by photographer taking a series of photos, not a bereaved mourner or even friend of a bereaved mourner.

If this dead person's (normal) photo was printed with his obituary, I might be able to find his identity...  It's easy to look up obits and find them on microfilm at the library. Wait--you don't think someone just laid down in a casket like he was dead to have the photo made, do you?  That possibility didn't occur to me until just now, since the man looks convincingly dead.  May he be resting in peace.

Which reminds me of what I think eternity must be: eternal, backwards and forwards in time.  That means we or our souls don't just pop into eternity when we die.  We must always be there, are there now, were there in the infinite past, except "past" is meaningless and so is future, except whilst we are entrained, ignorantly for the most part, in our physical embodiment.

  

First Bayou Bartholomew Trail photo

2005

Clouds of early summer 2011

This cloud formation appeared late one afternoon in June above my humble abode on 12th Ave in old Pine Bluff...



The tree at the bottom is across the street in a neighbor's yard.   In regard to my previous post and Erwin Schroedinger's comment about there being a difference in an out-of-focus photo and a photo of clouds or patches of fog--I guess what he means is the out-of-focus photo is a mistake, and an observer of the photo can tell that, whereas a photo of patches of fog or clouds is not a mistake and the observer can tell that also.  AND the idea of a "fuzzy model" coincides with the cloud/fog photo example.  Still, there's the possibility of an out-of-focus photo of patches of fog or clouds, eh?

Also, an observer can't always tell the orientation of a photo of a cloud if he or she doesn't recall it. This also represents a possible mistake, an interpretational mistake, and how to interpret the Schrodinger cat experiment is very much the problem that has made it so famous and given it such longevity.  As far as my cloud photo is concerned, I had to step outside in my driveway to find the tree branch pattern you can see at the bottom of the photo.  For all I knew, that could have been the side of a tree and not the top.  But the pattern matches the top of a tree across the street, so I could figure out the photo's correct orientation.  For the purpose of art, it doesn't matter, except to the artist.  How much it matters in the case of quantum mechanics is something to ponder.

Schrödinger’s cat-in-the-box description

In a 1986 book called The Shaky Game, the author, Arthur Fine, talks about what he calls "Einstein, Realism and the Quantum Theory."  Chapter Five of the book is "Schrödinger’s Cat and Einstein's: The Genesis of a Paradox."  The chapter includes quotes from correspondence between Einstein and Schrödinger during the summer of 1935, just after the controversial Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paper ("Can quantum mechanical description of physical reality be considered complete?") had been published and just before the Schrödinger cat paper (Die gegenwartige Situation in der Quantenmechanik*) was published.  Professor Fine (of the philosophy department at Northwestern University) included this quote from the Schrödinger's cat paper:

"One can even make up quite ludicrous examples.  A cat is enclosed in a steel  chamber, together with the following infernal machine (which one must secure against the cat’s direct reach):  in a tube of a Geigercounter there is a tiny amount of radioactive material, so small that although one of its atoms might decay in the course of an hour, it is just as probable that none will.  If decay occurs the counter tube fires and, by means of a relay, sets a little hammer into motion that shatters a small bottle prussic acid.  When the entire system has been left alone for an hour one would say that the cat is still alive provided no atom has decayed in the meantime.  The first atomic decay would have poisoned it.  TheΨ-function of the total system would yield an expression for all this in which, in equal measure, the living and the dead cat are (sit venia verbo**) blended or smeared out.

      The characteristic of these examples is that an indefiniteness originally limited to atomic dimensions gets transformed into gross macroscopic indefiniteness, which can then be reduced by direct observation.  This prevents us from continuing naively to give credence to a “fuzzy model” as a picture of reality."

After giving that description, says Fine, "Schrödinger finishes by observing, 'In itself this [fuzzy model] contains nothing unclear or contradictory.'  For, he notes, 'There is a difference between a blurred or out-of-focus picture and a photograph of clouds and patches of fog.'"

For me it's all just patches of fog at the moment, and I couldn't really say if that's because the picture is out of focus or it's a photo of patches of fog, y'know?  I mean, when the great Schrödinger says "This prevents us ..." yada yada, what is meant by "this"?  Then there's the later "this" that Fine parenthetically says is the "[fuzzy model]".  Fuzzy wuzzy was a worm...or a bear?

*"The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics"

**"pardon the expression"

Copperhead Trail

Copperhead snakes are the most colorful of the three common poisonous snakes found in Arkansas. Those three would be the water moccasin ("cottonmouth"), rattlesnake (of various types) and the southern copperhead (as opposed to the northern copperhead). I'm not counting the coral snake, a fourth poisonous snake that can be found in Arkansas. It isn't that common, thank goodness.

Copperheads are pretty because they have python-like markings, coppery instead of greenish.  The intensity of the markings varies with the time of year and how recently they've shed their skins. You can check out copperhead photos of course on Google images. The colorful markings contrast with the rather dull markings of water moccasins and rattlesnakes.

So, when a small copperhead bit me on the foot last Thursday, just after 6 pm, as President Obama was giving his jobs speech (good for him!) and I was about a third of the way into the Bayou Bartholomew trail, I identified it quite easily.  "Small" means I'm guessing it was about 8 inches long, maybe even 10 inches.  I didn't try to look at it all stretched out, and only got a glimpse of it in amongst some leaves on the trail, where it was curled after it bit me, cringing I guess from the pain of me stepping on it.

I was wearing sandals, the number one stupid thing to do, and I had just been running and had slowed down to a walk.  While I was running, I was watching the ground, the trail, closely, and it wasn't covered in leaves. After I stopped running, there were quite a few dead leaves on the trail, but--number 2 stupid thing--I was not watching the trail looking for snakes (the only reason I look down at the trail when I'm walking or running is to look for snakes).  I was casting ahead in my thoughts to something like what I'd have for dinner, or I don't know what.  The snake bite makes it hard to recall what was going on in my mind just before it.

I wasn't sure it was a snake bite, at first.  "What was that?" was my first thought--exactly what I'd read a few years ago in an article a woman wrote about getting bitten by a small rattlesnake she stepped on while wearing sandals.  She had that same first thought.  I also wondered how a stick could have poked me from the side like that, but having read that woman's article (in The Sun magazine), and having thought about it quite a bit since, I almost simultaneously realized, "Snakebite!"  Which was confirmed when I looked down and saw the copperhead kind of writhing down there in the leaves.  I didn't see its head or tail, but from its body width, I saw it was small, but no little bambino.  The bite itself didn't hurt.  It felt like a tiny electric shock more than a piercing of skin.  There was no blood from the bite wounds. They were just two little red marks.


I wasn't angry with the snake, but that has everything to do with not feeling any pain from the bite.  Well, also the snake can't be blamed for what was really my carelessness--my momentary carelessness, which is all it takes, whatever kind of accident it may be. Within just a few seconds after being bitten, I headed for my car in the parking lot, about a half a mile back along the trail.  As is often the case, no other cars were in the parking lot, and Charlie McNew, a friend and also my insurance agent who sometimes bikes on the trail, was not there either. My dog Jessie was with me, but not at the moment I got bit.  I called her a few times and was concerned I'd have to leave her while I drove to the hospital, but she was following me when I  got to the parking lot and looked back.

I called my friend David Matthews on my cell phone while I was walking to my car, asking him to bring a bag of ice and meet me in the parking lot.  But the hospital is about as close to the trail as his house is, only about two miles, and he told me his truck was so low on gas he was afraid he'd run out and his dad was on his way to pick him up to get some gas for his truck.  He said he'd meet me at the emergency room.

My sandal was rubbing the bite as I walked, so I took it off.  I've actually tried walking barefoot on the trail before, but the tiny gravel surface would begin to hurt my feet.  The tiny gravel didn't bother me on my walk back to the car though, a walk that was more of a hobble, with as little weight on my bit right foot as possible. (The bite was on what I would call my instep, midway between toes and heel.) With the bite not even hurting, I briefly considered just going home and putting ice on it myself.

I might as well have done that.  The emergency room nurses put ice on the bite, elevated my foot slightly on the gurney they put me on, and also stuck an IV port in my left arm in case I started having a severe reaction and needed an injection. They also monitored my heart rate and blood pressure.

My foot and lower ankle swelled up, but didn't significantly change color.  The only things that hurt very much were the ice pack itself (only when I took out the towel the male nurse had put between my foot and the ice pack, since at first I couldn't feel the cold of the ice pack; I later put the towel back) and the insertion of the gigantic IV needle.  After about three hours, when a doctor finally showed up (in my case, I had to wait anyway, so that time lag was no problem for me) I was given an injection of pain medication and antibiotics, and prescriptions for both of those.  Matthews drove me to his house in my car (he'd also gotten some water for Jessie and then taken her to his house while I was in the emergency room) where I spent the night in the guest bedroom (my former bedroom when my brother Jeff and I lived there).

I drove myself and Jessie home the next afternoon, and things just gradually got back to normal after I was able to start hobbling around on Saturday, although I wasn't able to get out on my own until Sunday, and then only briefly, with a sock on my right foot.  I took the antibiotic for four days (the doctor had recommended five), but didn't bother to get the pain medication prescription filled.  Now the swelling is almost completely gone, and I'm left with only a story to tell.  Well, the little red bite marks are still there, but are barely noticeable.