There are no pics this week.

Here’s something that was yucky this week. I took the car out Tuesday to open a new account at our bank. It was cold and snowy. I turned on the defroster. The windshield cracked. It went across the bottom of the windshield, all the way across the car. I can’t complain. I picked up a stone divit years ago. The crack was overdue. I ended up spending a lot of time Thursday getting it fixed. The bike ride to pick up the car was bracing. The temperature was 12 degrees. But the roads were clear and there was little traffic. I couldn’t even declare a snow emergency Tuesday evening, because we had Yoga.

Danita and I went out to dinner Thursday. We tried a new place. The food was good and the prices very reasonable. Unfortunately, parking is a mess and the music was very loud. I don’t think this will become a regular place. Friday, we had a neighborhood party. The food was good and we had a good time. But both of us woke up in the wee hours feeling extremely thirsty and had trouble getting back to sleep. Spoo-oooky.

Danita went down to visit Bud last weekend. They decided Bud needed a larger safe deposit box at the bank. Bud was getting tired and decided to get the new safe deposit box later. When he went to get the box, he learned that Danita had to sign a new signature card. The signature card on the old box could not be used for the new box. That’s why Danita is at Riderwood as I write this, for the sole purpose of signing that stupid card.

I finished Gleick’s “The Information”. He mentioned that the Rand Corporation published a book with 1 million random digits in 1955, and that the book is still on sale at Amazon. I was amazed. In 1955, this book was essential to some geeks, but today it has little if any value. There are many programs that will generate random numbers that are better than Rand’s book. I went to Amazon and found the book is indeed still for sale. The reviews were hilarious. I must have spent half an hour laughing myself out of my chair. One person put the book on his wish list so he could easily go to the page and read a few more reviews. His wife thought he actually wanted the book, and bought him a copy. This is a very expensive book.

When I needed random numbers in school, I used a short table that was in my CRC handbook. This handy tomb had every mathematical thing an engineer or undergraduate math major could want. My copy was well used by the time a graduated, and I bought a new copy as a kind of graduation present to myself. I actually had a job where I needed random numbers. I was building a radiation monitor system for Westhingouse’s nuclear power plants. It was the first system to use a microprocessor to do the measurement. Radiation measurements are very random. The trick was to find a way to accurately estimate the radiation level while also reacting quickly if the level changed. And to make it work with a ridiculously under-powered microprocessor. And make the measurements for 8 detectors. (Microprocessors were so expensive, not even a nuclear power plant could afford a separate one for each detector.) The project was grand fun. Unfortunately, tables of random numbers have a normal distribution. I needed a Poisson distribution. There were no canned ways to generate the numbers I needed. I was concerned that if I had some kind of fundamental misunderstanding, I wouldn’t necessarily detect it if I wrote the program to do the radiation measurement and also wrote the program to generate the random numbers I would use for testing. Just then, a woman majoring in engineering physics at Loyola College applied for a summer job at Westinghouse. Everybody wanted to give her a hand, but nobody had anything for her to do. Finally, in desperation, my boss asked me if I could use her. And that’s how one young lady ended up spending her summer reading radiation measurements and typing them into a computer. It had to be a tedious summer for her, but the pay was a lot better than she could get anywhere else. She never complained.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.