Happy Last Day of Hurricane Season!

Actually have a lunchtime party celebrating the first day of Not-Hurricane Season to attend tomorrow.  Though the day is somewhat arbitrary, it's still a big damn deal around here.  Not a bad year, other than Idalia, which was pretty bad if you were in the path.  In any case, Happy Last Day of Hurricane Season!

This Needs Widest Dissemination

From today's xkcd:

As usual, click through to the original for the mouse-over gag.

The Fastest Rubic's Cube Solution

Christmas my college freshman year was The Christmas of the Rubik's Cube, and being a primarily science and engineering school, everyone came back to the dorms in January having received a half-dozen or so of these time-wasters.  Staring down the triple barrels of Phys II, Calc II, and Intro to Programming, there was simply no time to waste, so they languished in piles at the edges of our desks in a multi-colored scramble.

Then one day my roommate walked in, and was surprised to see that all but one in our room had been solved.  I'm sure this has been done many times before, but I'd simply used my pocket knife to pop all the face-blocks off each cube, then re-attached them in the correct order.  It's not a particularly new or clever solution – Alexander the Great did something similar millennia ago – but hey, it works.

As for that one cube I hadn't solved, the attachments for its blocks were barbed and they wouldn't pop off without breaking.  I saved it to challenge budding mathematicians, "Here, let's race.  You solve this one, I'll solve that one.  Go!"  "Wait, you didn't do it right."  "Solution's a solution.  Look, I've got to get back to my E&M homework.  We're doing method of images this week."

Look, life is hard.  Sometimes it's OK to take shortcuts.  Only be careful not to get cut in the short taking.  If it's a triviality to get something working (Rubik's cube, a balky diff pump, etc.) or a matter of safety (flat tire on a lonesome highway at midnight), just get the damn job done already.  For more knotty issues such as the method of images, it's good to understand the uniqueness theorem for Poisson's equation.  Once you understand the required preliminaries, then (and only then) you can go get the damn job done already, and with confidence in the result.

Plant Hardiness Zone Map Shift

The new USDA planting zone map is up, and yeah, the zones are shifting northward.  Article at NPR, and below are screen caps of the maps.  At the article though, it's pretty nice, at the top of the maps there's a flip-between-maps button, and at least the CONUS part perfectly overlays for easy comparison.  

Old, 2012:

New, 2023:

45 years of The Clash's "Give'em Enough Rope"

As of today!  Article over at UCR.  Scroll down for a bonus article ranking of all Clash albums.  Despite its usual low ranking in these sorts of lists, it's always been a personal favorite.  I never quite clicked with Sandinista! or – despite a handful of excellent tracks – Combat Rock.  Give'em Enough Rope always does the trick though, especially with the lyrics about a jailbird physicist.

Cool cover art, even if I don't agree with the sentiment.

Respite

The Season isn't quite over yet – not really until about the time the Christmas decorations go up.  However this is the first time in months when we haven't had at least an ominous thunderstorm tracking around the Atlantic basin, so today's tropical outlook is noteworthy.

My best time: 7 o'clock

People grumble about the time change from daylight savings to standard time (to which I just say "mgph" through a mouthful of coffee), then they wail in agony about the converse change in the spring.  It doesn't affect me at all these days, and it barely affected me when I had to keep some semblance of a schedule.  It all comes down to this: before 10am is too damn early, in which case I decide to – or not to – shoulder the burden and get on with whatever it is, or after 10am, which more or less counts as a civilized  hour.  But when it comes to creativity, I will start at 7 o'clock PM.  Is that daylight or standard time?  Who cares, I'm already up, have had a few meals and after supper coffee, and I'm ready to go.

If you want more on this topic, go read The Tyranny of the Morning People at Tam's place.  There's a bonus link to a mercifully short article at The Atlantic from there.

Musical Interlude

Straight from New Orleans, The Tangiers Combo:

That was a fun evening.  More on the group at their web site.

One More Buffett Album: Equal Strain on All Parts

Article and a sneak preview video at American Songwriter.  Album drops on November 3rd.  Damn straight mine's already on order.

ps: It looks like the Coral Reefer Band is sorting out how to keep the party going.  Article's at Rolling Stone, so take it for what that's worth.  Still, I hope they can figure something out.

pps: More on the new album at American Songwriter.

ppps: CD received, listened, re-listened.  TLDR: A good, consistent album.  Will recommend to friends.