Dano’s Advice

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Climate buddy and cycling enthusiast Dano offered this advice for the off-season: “Never go into your big ring.”

Easier said than done this morning down the hill into the valley with a howling tailwind, but I kept it on the small chain ring all day. The psychological trick was to set my bike computer on “cadence” rather than using it as a speedometer, so I didn’t suffer the angst of riding slow. The trick worked. I’m so dumb.

I took most of the week off, but resting didn’t set well with my newly remodelled metabolism, and by the end of the week I felt all edgy, so a decent ride was in order for this morning. I rode down Candelaria into the valley. (Albuquerque readers will ask why he rode down a light industrial corridor, along a major arterial with poor shoulders and bike lanes most of the way. What can I say? I was on a wander.)

I picked up the river trail at the Rio Grande Nature Center, and followed it south through the new pipeline construction project. (Albuquerque readers will ask why he rode on a lousy temporary bike trail through a construction project. What can I say? I was on a wander.)

Down along the river trail, the asters are in bloom, a delicate spray of purple from each plant that belies their remarkable desert durability.

The howllng tailwind headed out of the heights was, of course, equivalent to a howling headwind climbing back up the hill, but I didn’t mind. I was in my small chain ring, and I had no idea how slow I was going. I was on a wander. I think my training next season should include one wander per week.

More on the History of the Calculus

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When I wrote earlier this week about Archimedes, I didn’t get into why I found the Nova piece so remarkable. I loved it in part because I remember the “aha” I had as a youngster when I got the notion of integration – of summing across a series of infinite slices.

Malcolm Tredinnick wrote to point out that this is in fact something that’s been invented multiple times – Egyptian and Chinese methematicians had at least part of the insight as well:

…. Some of the ancient Egyptian scrolls (two
famous ones are the Rhind — or Ames — papyrus and the Moscow papyrus) included various mathematical algorithms and puzzles. These included things like computing the volume of a pyramid. My recollection is that historians are not completely sure *how* the Egyptians discovered some of their algorithsm; just that they did write them down.

The Chinese, on the other hand, wrote down their working as well as the conclusions. They also knew how to compute things like the volume of a pyramid, which they did by repeated dissections and then taking the leap that the infinite series of dissections converged to something sensible (that was really Newton and Liebnizs’ breakthrough: they realised both that there was a question to be settled about the convergence of such series and they provided reasonably rigorous answers). The Chinese also appear to have come up with an early version of approximating a circle with succesively more sided polygons and computing the area that way. Archimedes did it better than they did, though.

Malcolm’s right when he points out that we should be careful not to “look through rose-colored historical glasses” and infer more about their early insight than is warranted. But it’s still cool.

(More here.)

Archimedes Palimpsest

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Saw a cool Nova episode this evening on the Archimedes Palimpsest, which had some fine storytelling leading us into the tale of how Archimedes, at something like 200 BC, prefigured the calculus.

He was using sums of infinite numbers of slices of non-trivial three-dimensional geometrical objects to calculate their volume. Smart guy. But the intriguing storyline of the Nova piece was how Archimedes’ work was lost, wiith what appears to be the surviving copy of his “Methods” torn apart and copied over by some dumbass monk around 1200 AD who needed paper to write his prayers on. Imagine, the Nova people suggested, how Renaissance science would have been accelerated if they’d had Archimedes to draw on.

update: Reader Ryan points out the delicious accidental pun – “to draw on”. I can’t claim credit. I’m a terrible punster.

Yet More Hurricanes and Climate

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Ross Gelbspan is speaking in Albuquerque next week, so I picked up a copy of Boiling Point, and this morning I chased down the references associated with the little discussion of a couple of weeks ago over on Chris Mooney’s blog about hurricanes and climate change.

Gelbspan’s key reference for his assertions about a growth in extreme weather under greenhouse climate change is Trends in U.S. Climate during the Twentieth Century, by Tom Karl. The paper’s relatively noncommittal on hurricanes (“Recent studies indicate that even if significant greenhouse induced warming were to occur, it is doubtful whether increases in tropical storms would be detectable due to the large natural variability in these storms.”) but gives a good account of other issues related to variability, which is to me the really interesting climate change issue.

It’s a bit dated – a lot’s gone on since 1995 – but still an interesting read.

Hitchcock

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When we first moved to Albuquerque, the video store within walking distance of our apartment had a Hitchcock section. This was a perfect solution, because otherwise where do you file the Hitchcock movies? Horror? Mystery? Comedy? Romance? Over time, we trekked through most of what they had, but Hitchcock made a lot of films, so we’ve still not even come close to seeing them all.

When in doubt at the video store (there are so many bad movies, choices always pose such risk) one can always pick up a Hitchcock and rarely be disappointed. Saturday night: Stage Fright. Marlene Dietrich was delicious.