Cop Car's Beat

Pretty Trees

REDBUD

About an hour ago, Josh and his crew showed up to plant the Oklahoma Redbud tree that I bought last November. It is to replace the redbud that was taken out, last fall, for being too close to the neighbor's fence. Below, the photo shows Josh bringing the tree from the trailer to the hole that his crew had dug.

 

The photo, below, shows the new tree in all its glory! Note the small patch of bare dirt next to the neighbor's fence, toward the left side of the photo. That is where the old redbud had been removed last fall.

DOGWOOD

While checking out my new/old camera, I snapped a couple of photos - closeups of blossoms on the two Prairie Pink Dogwood trees that are abloom. I've decided that the third tree is, alas, dead. Note the difference in color and shape between the blossoms on the two trees.

Another week gone

DENTAL PROGRESS - 4/15/2021

...of which there is little. One of the sutures had fallen out on 4/11/2021. As there was no bleeding, it was at one end of the surgical site, and I could see nothing alarming, I didn't bother calling the dental people about it. No need to bother them.

Today, Dr Omar looked over the new x-rays, looked over the surgical site, removed two of the remaining four sutures, and said that (barring the unforeseen), he would start work on the bridge on the 29th.

BTW: I had the dental assistant look at my records to see if I had updated my medications when my statin had been changed, a bit over one year ago. I had. Dr Omar allowed as how he had not been aware of the known interaction between my statin and the antibiotic that he had prescribed. In addition, he had learned that the titanium implant did, indeed, contain nickel. We are always learning. Dr O took it in stride and was in good humor. He did give me a good idea: Henceforth, when I go to a dentist I shall present him/her with a listing of my current medications - just as I do for a medical practitioner. I shall, also, note my sensitivity to nickel on it.

CAMERAS - 4/17/2021

Fifteen years ago, while shopping at Sam's Club, I spotted a palm-sized point-and-shoot HP R817 camera on sale for a reasonable price - a price that I was willing to pay. Please note that, unlike Bogie whom I would expect to put a lot of research into such a purchase, I knew nothing about the camera. Until then, our household's only foray into digital photographer was via Hunky Husband's Sony MVC-FD71 that uses a 3 1/2-inch floppy disk as its digital storage medium.

 

 

Having served yeoman's duty for 15 years, the R817 quit working. I had noted, for a few weeks, that I often had to repeatedly press the shutter button to get a response. Now, the shutter button is dormant or dead. Since I shake too much with my essential tremors to attempt fine repairs, these days, and since I am unwilling to pay $100 or more to let someone else fix a 15-year-old camera that probably cost about $100, originally, I went online to find a replacement.

HP hasn't put out a camera for several years, now, and since I wanted to stick with a camera that functions closely to the HP R817 that it would replace, I looked at used HP cameras. Fortunately, I found an HP R927 camera - the follow-on to the R817 - for $40, including shipping. It arrived, yesterday.

An aside: Call me crazy, but were I shipping electronics via any means, I would wrap that sucker in bubble-wrap or pack it in peanuts inside a sturdy box. Only twice have I purchased used electronics, online, and in either case the person who shipped the item to me just tossed it into a medium-weight, closely fitting box. Fortunately, "they" must be smarter than am I. In neither case was the item damaged. In both cases, the United States Postal Service came through.

Upon opening the small box (it fit within our standard, cluster-box mailbox) I gave myself a dope-slap. I had failed to check with the seller that a battery, charger (or cords to charge through a PC) and SD digital storage medium were included. There had been no description of the item, online, other than it was in "used" condition.

Well...there was a completely depleted battery, a charger (which I've yet to get to work), and no SD. Not to worry. The battery and SD from the R817 fit perfectly well into the R927. Also, fortunately, the R817 will recharge the battery through its charger - which charger is incompatible with the R927 charger. I am one whose phone is so old/broken that I must use a different phone through which to charge the battery. If I can put up with such an arrangement for my phone, I can probably put up with that arrangement for my camera. OTOH: It is possible that I will, eventually, coax the R927 charger into working.

It is well that I had the SD. It is all but impossible to find 1 GB SDs these days - the maximum size SD that is usable to the software/firmware of the old cameras - or to that of my old phone. My newer Nikon camera, circa 2012, uses a 16 GB SD.

As proof that the R927 does, indeed, take photos, I present the image, below.

Ingenuity’s rotors will make about 2,500 revolutions per minute because of Mars's thin atmosphere. (NASA/AFP/Getty Images)

Previous posting on the subject is at First flight of Ingenuity expected no earlier than April 11, 2021. The above photo and the excerpt, below, is from The Washington Post.

Ingenuity, which rocketed from Earth inside the belly of the space rover Perseverance on July 30, made it to Mars in February and spent just over a week getting ready for the spotlight. Perseverance, a $3 billion project to check for signs of life on Mars, is the main attraction. The robotic drone worth about $80 million is the follow-up act.

The aircraft went through the multiday process of descending from the rover, unfurling its solar panels and powering itself up to prepare for what was supposed to be its first launch on Sunday. However two days before the big event, its rotors failed.

“During a high-speed spin test of the rotors on Friday, the command sequence controlling the test ended early due to a ‘watchdog’ timer expiration,” according to NASA. The timer was designed to stop the operation if it detects issues.

The glitch occurred when the copter tried switching from preflight mode to flight mode. NASA said a software update is necessary to address the issue. The agency now has to develop, test and upload new software onto flight controllers. Then it has to reboot Ingenuity to move forward with its mission.

The software trouble postponed what is supposed to be only a brief flight. The plan was for Ingenuity to take off, hover for about 30 seconds, then safely land in place. It’s an easy accomplishment for drones on Earth, but a challenging feat on the Red Planet, currently more than 100 million miles away.

Mars’s atmosphere is thinner than Earth’s by a ratio of about 100, making liftoff more difficult. To compensate for this, Ingenuity’s rotors will make about 2,500 revolutions per minute (RPM). That’s far faster than a passenger helicopter on Earth.

 

Also, since Mars is so far away, joystick control isn’t an option. The entire operation has to happen autonomously. The chopper also contends with temperatures that can drop to minus 130-degrees Fahrenheit, pushing the tiny aircraft’s parts to their limits.

Still, NASA hopes the eventual liftoff will serve as the kickoff of five aerial demonstrations, each designed to be more challenging than the previous one, over about 30 days. Step one was to prove the craft can fly. Step five is to test how far it can go. The goal for Ingenuity is to expand how the space agency can investigate other planets.

ADDITION of 4/19/2021

From Space.Com

An image captured by the Ingenuity Mars helicopter shows the vehicle's shadow on the surface of the Red Planet. (Image credit: NASA TV)

BTW: On the morning news, we were told that Ingenuity is about the size of a tissue box. Physics.org further states:

The triumph was hailed as a Wright Brothers moment. The mini 4-pound (1.8-kilogram) copter named Ingenuity, in fact, carried a bit of wing fabric from the 1903 Wright Flyer, which made similar history at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

and

More than six years in the making, Ingenuity is a barebones 1.6 feet (0.5 meters) tall, a spindly four-legged chopper. Its fuselage, containing all the batteries, heaters and sensors, is the size of a tissue box. The carbon-fiber, foam-filled rotors are the biggest pieces: Each pair stretches 4 feet (1.2 meters) tip to tip.

Congratulations to Ms Aung and the team!

From Wikipedia:

MiMi Aung is a Burmese American engineer and project manager at Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She is a lead engineer on the Mars Helicopter Ingenuity, the first extraterrestrial aircraft.

Catching up for the week - 4/9/2021

Photos of the Week

It seems that I take the same photos each spring. It's my way of capturing the beautiful blossoms and the changes that have occurred in our neck of the woods. For comparison, I'll provide links to some of Spring 2020 photos: A little (more) work done; One more time I was faked out; Dogwood Saga; It's Redbud time in south central Kansas.

The first photo shows the growth of the little clump of redbud trees, and the larger whitebud, behind them. Obvious in the foreground are the seed cones from last fall of one of our staghorn sumac plants, while, much less obvious in the background is the redbud tree that was so brutally beaten down when the neighbors trees fell across it.

The second photo shows the beaten down redbud tree. It seems healthy, but it will take several years for it to regrow some branches to take over the places of the branches that had lent height and shape to the tree, but which were split off.

The third photo shows the three dogwoods that have been planted in the past two years. The two are abloom; the third shows no signs of blooming, but seems to be alive.

Next photo: closeup of dogwood blossoms.

The blooms in the next photo are crabapple blossoms. I seem not to have photographed the whole tree.

Tulips are next. The leaves of the iris plants foretell a bountiful year for them.

Lastly, the next photo shows one of the lovely clumps of phlox that we have - transplanted from New Hampshire some years ago at the benevolence of Bogie. (Bogie probably noted that there is a larger clump of her light lilac colored phlox in the midground of the first photo at the start of this posting.) The remaining phlox (not all of the phlox that Bogie sent me survived the first couple of years - probably due to poor placement and/or lack of water) loved our wet March, this year.

 

Disappointment (4/8/2021)

The dental road down which I embarked in late December, 2020, has taken a turn for the worse. I started telling the tale of my adventure at the end of a posting, Week in Review - 10/17/2020. I told of my troubles with keeping a crown on my #9 tooth (upper, front, right-hand tooth). I had decided to try for an implanted fake tooth as it became obvious that any attempt to keep a crown on the little tooth stub that was left would be futile. (I had had four crowns on that tooth since the first one that had been installed in 1967, the first lasting for 30 years, the second for 20+ years, the third for 11 months, and the fourth for a few weeks. That was in addition to the two root canals done on that tooth.)

On January 11, 2021, Dr Omar started the process, pulling the root of my #9 tooth out. It was long, strong, and healthy looking. Dr O installed a titanium insert into the bone and measured the torque. The installation would not resist enough torque for the post to be inserted that day - my bone was not dense enough (imagine that at my age!) One week later, I returned to the dental office for removal of the sutures and evaluation of the healing process. Everything looked good in the x-rays. The x-rays taken at the next (and last) evaluation on February 8 also looked good. Today (4/8/2021) was my day to have the post installed into the implanted receptacle. Oh, joy.

Dr O had never seen me phased by the pain of any of the work he had done up to today. Today was different. He had barely gotten started when I flinched. He applied more Novocain. When he started up again, the pain was worse and I flinched even more. More Novocain. This was repeated twice more. Eventually, Dr O was able to work without causing me great pain. It turned out there was a reason things were so painful. My body had, stealthily, been rejecting the titanium insert. The insert had to be removed, the bone smoothly cupped, a bone grafting mixture inserted, and the gum sutured once more. What a disappointment.

Dr O offered to try implanting, again, once the surgical site had healed (maybe up to six months). As Dr O and Sheri were working on me, I thought, coming up with the working theory that the insert is machined from a titanium alloy that includes nickel - to which I happen to be sensitive. I told Dr O, "No, let's not try that, again." and told him that I saw no reason to expect different results for the same procedure (I'm not insane!) When I explained my working theory, Dr O started to object, "But...it's titanium...." Finally agreeing that the hardware had to have been formed from an alloy (that he could not identify), he agreed that we should move on to the next option - a bridge. In his lexicon, a bridge is when three crowns are made as one structure and installed with the two "good" teeth as the support for the fake tooth that fills in for the missing tooth.

Last night was the pits - today is better (4/9/2021)

I made a rookie error, yesterday. When Dr O prescribed an antibiotic, I picked it up on my way home. As soon as I got home, I took the first dose (2 tablets). I was to take a dose (1 tablet) on each of the succeeding four days. My error was in taking that first dose before finding the information sheet in the pharmacy's bag. I know that the pharmaceutical companies write those sheets to cover their asses; but, in the process they can scare a person to death. There were a couple of "pucker" statements: 1) that those with kidney or liver disfunctions might have a problem and 2) that anyone over age 65 should think again. Yikes! That was in addition to all of the horrible, possible side effects.

Immediately, of course, I started experiencing stomach pains and twitches in the left side of my chest. (Abnormal heart beats - long QT syndrome - were a side effect. A QT interval is the time from the beginning of electrical activation of the heart to the end of electrical relaxation.) In addition, I felt lousy and I developed a semi-severe headache that was still with me this morning. Was I being panicky or was the antibiotic a real problem? This question haunted me all night.

This morning, I was at my primary care physician's office at 8am. She and her staff, as it happened, were not in office, today; but, Hunky Husband's primary care physician, a partner in the same office, was seeing walk-ins. My wait was but five minutes. He listened to my sad tale - that I was concerned because Dr A had told me a couple of months ago that my kidney function was failing, and I don't need any medication contributing to its problems. Not having seen me before, and it's being faster to ask than to look at my chart, Dr N asked if I took other medications. Yes, I take a statin. Well...it turns out that there are bad interactions between the prescribed antibiotic and the particular statin prescribed for me. Dr N wrote me a prescription for a different antibiotic - one that I had taken six times within the past 15 years. I asked the pharmacy to destroy the four unused antibiotic tablets and bought the newly prescribed antibiotic.

At noon, I took my first dose of the new antibiotic and I can tell you: Whether I was panicky or whether there really was a problem, I feel much better. The headache is gone, no further stomach problems, and no twitching in my chest. Of course, part of my improvement must be attributed to the surgery's now being about 30 hours behind me. The swelling in the gum and my upper lip is down enough that I no longer resemble a snapping turtle but a more friendly sort of turtle.

First flight of Ingenuity expected no earlier than April 11, 2021

APRIL 4, 2021

NASA's Ingenuity helicopter dropped on Mars' surface ahead of flight

ADDITION of 4/6/2021 - from NASA website

NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter is seen in a close-up taken by Mastcam-Z, a pair of zoomable cameras aboard the Perseverance rover.

This image was taken on April 5, 2021, the 45th Martian day, or sol, of the mission.

Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

NASA is targeting no earlier than Sunday, April 11, for Ingenuity Mars Helicopter’s first attempt at powered, controlled flight on another planet. To mark a month of Ingenuity flights, the agency will host several events to bring people along for the ride.

A livestream confirming Ingenuity’s first flight is targeted to begin around 3:30 a.m. EDT Monday, April 12, on NASA Television, the NASA app, and the agency’s website, and will livestream on multiple agency social media platforms, including the JPL YouTube and Facebook channels.

Ingenuity arrived at Mars’ Jezero Crater Feb. 18, attached to the belly of NASA’s Perseverance rover. The helicopter is a technology demonstration with a planned test flight duration of up to 31 days (30 Mars days, or sols). The rover will provide support during flight operations, taking images, collecting environmental data, and hosting the base station that enables the helicopter to communicate with mission controllers on Earth.

The flight date may shift as engineers work on the deployments, preflight checks, and vehicle positioning of both Perseverance and Ingenuity. Timing for events will be updated as needed, and the latest schedule will be available on the helicopter’s Watch Online webpage:

https://mars.nasa.gov/technology/helicopter/#Watch-Online

Happy birthday, Bogie!

Asimov & Heinlein would be proud at baby steps in robotics

If you watched today's 60 Minutes, you've seen Boston Dynamics' robots dancing the mashed potato and the twist. (The link to 60 Minutes leads to a page with a further link to tonight's show - a 13.5-minute video.)

For those who didn't catch the program, a 3-minute video is embedded, below. Sheer fun! BTW: The quadruped, Spot, is for sale for about 75K USD per copy. 

 

Next is a video with demos of gymnastics & useful work sequences.

 

 

Just to show that I don't play favorites, below is a 12-minute video that demonstrates capabilities of robots made by various companies.

 

 

Then, there's an update from News for Nerds.

Boston Dynamics' New Robot Doesn't Dance. It Has a Warehouse Job (wired.com)51

Posted by msmash on Monday March 29, 2021 @04:41PM from the closer-look dept.

It can't do back flips like Atlas the humanoid robot, nor can it dance or open doors for its friends, like Spot the robotic dog can. Instead, Boston Dynamics' new robot, named Stretch, is going straight to work in a warehouse. Wired:Rolling around on a wheeled base, it's basically a large robotic arm that grabs boxes using vacuum power, and it's designed for tasks like unloading trucks or stacking pallets. If Spot and Atlas are the show-offs in the family, Stretch is the straight-up workhorse. But while these machines all look and move in wildly different ways, they actually share a lot of DNA. Stretch may seem familiar to you, because it's a sort of descendant of another machine that debuted a few years back: Handle. That robot had a similar suction arm, but it balanced on two wheels, like a Segway scooter. Handle would grab a box, scoot backward, turn 90 degrees, and roll away to stack the box somewhere else. It looked neat on video, but in practice the robot needed a lot of room to operate. It could manage unloading boxes from a truck, sure. "But it took a long time," says Kevin Blankespoor, lead of warehouse robotics at Boston Dynamics. "The truck is a pretty confined space. And so for Handle, every time it grabbed the box, it would need to roll back into some space where it could rotate freely without collisions."

Which is all to say: If Handle were a human, it'd be let go. So Boston Dynamics pivoted (sorry) to a new form factor for Stretch that slapped a similar robotic vacuum arm on a base with four wheels. Each wheel can move independently, so the robot can shift side to side or forward and backward to orient itself in, say, the back of a truck. This new base granted Stretch two powers. For one thing, resting on four wheels is a whole lot more energy efficient than trying to constantly balance on two. The same is true for animals: A dog or cat is inherently more stable than a human. (Stretch will get 8 hours of battery life, and clients will have the option to upgrade to a double battery that holds 16 hours of charge.) The second advantage is that Stretch's arm can now pivot around its base, while Handle had to pivot its whole body to turn. Stretch can shift up to 800 boxes an hour.

What has happened this week?

Safety Deposit Box Project:

The big thing that happened was that Dudette met Hunky Husband and me at the credit union so that we could get her onto our safety deposit box as a co-owner. Yay! She and Bogie will need to be able to access the stuff in that box, eventually. Unfortunately, despite what I had been told, they would not issue another key for Dudette.

In order to have Dudette put on as a co-owner, she had to provide a photo ID (her driver's license did nicely) and her Social Security card. As happened, Dudette could not find her Social Security card. She, instead, brought her birth certificate and her marriage license (to show her name change), knowing that her original Social Security card is among the papers that we do keep in the safety deposit box. That worked nicely, too. Why we still have Dudette's and Bogie's original Social Security cards is beyond me; but, there they are - and Dudette chose to place hers back into our safety deposit box when the paperwork was all done.

Come to think of it, Dudette also used the opportunity to return the Half-Pint microwave oven that we had loaned the girls. I need to retrieve it from HH's car trunk. [I got it, only to find that Dudette or Wonderful GrandDaughter had slipped a pint container of home made cookies into it. It's a wonder that I opened the door of the microwave. Otherwise, who knows how many years the cookies would have stayed there?]

Similarly, I used the opportunity to take a twig, that is to become an oak tree, that I had potted up a year or two ago - for Dudette & Wichidude or for the girls (Wonderful GrandDaughter and Rachie).

Yard Work:

Slowly, maybe not so surely, I am making progress on yard work. A week ago yesterday, I mowed the good grass. I had actually been checking the status of the mower battery; but, when it proved to be alive and well, I went ahead and used the mower - thinking that Jim's Tire & Auto would be picking it up that day for its 1st annual servicing. As it turned out, Jim's was swamped. They will call us when they have time to do the servicing - in about three or four weeks, they thought.

 

 

Trees:

Our crabapple tree that was planted last May is showing some color. The tiny leaves are unfurled.

The weather has provided so much moisture in March (yes, we're supposed to have rain in April) that the nursery has been unable to get their trees out of the ground on their tree farm; thus, the two trees that I bought last fall will not be planted in March - maybe April. The first photo shows, in the foreground, a yellow flag marking the spot in which the new cherry tree is to be planted, eventually replacing the North Star Cherry tree that is enveloped in yellow, in the background. The second photo shows the location at which the new Oklahoma Redbud tree is to be planted, replacing the redbud that had been encroaching on the neighbor's fence.

And then there are narcissi:

 

Spring is nearly here & I'm spring cleaning

First bouquet of the (almost spring) season

Although most of our bouquets are placed where Hunky Husband can enjoy them from "the master's chair", this particular bouquet should be dedicated to Elder Brother (EB) whose 85th birthday is today. Nineteen thirty-six was a banner year. Not only was EB born in 1936, but each of us three siblings (who survived infancy) married a spouse who was born in 1936. I'm remembering, though, that EB's wife succumbed to pancreatic cancer eight years ago. We miss her. She would have turned 85 in mid-February.

My birthday present to EB was foregoing singing "Happy Birthday" to him when we called him. He had two feet of snow on the ground. We had received heavy blobs of snow for several hours, yesterday; but, only a smattering had stuck (to bare ground areas) when we retired last night and nothing was left this morning. We have received about 2.2" of liquid moisture in the past 48 hours.

Spring cleaning our safety deposit box

About a week ago, I removed nearly everything from the safety deposit box that we keep at a local financial institution, bringing it home to sort out and update our inventory listing. Oh, my! We are pretty good about stuffing papers & items into the box; but, we're not good at shredding old papers and keeping the inventory listing updated. The biggest mess was our accordion file labeled "Isurance" (well...Hunky Husband was having a bad day with the labeler, I guess.) That file contained insurance papers dating back to 2007. I culled out more than half of the papers before throwing the rest into a bag to take to our agent's office. Our agent, Ron, wasn't in the office; but, in response to my crying and begging, his right hand assistant Monica replied, "You know we love you!" She would sort through to see if she agreed with me that most of the papers could be shredded.

An hour later, when we stopped by again, Ron showed us the large bunch of papers that were ready to shred and gave me the bag. It now contained four pristine envelopes - each labeled with the insurance policy and date in Monica's handwriting. Monica had also found an envelope containing the title to HH's car which I had noted as missing from the accordion file labeled "Car & Home Papers". Ron & Monica give service well above and beyond duty. Ron even offered to shred the unneeded papers for me.

Now, I need to take a fistful of EE bonds, that I had purchased through paycheck withholding before retirement, to the credit union for cashing in. According to the treasury website, the bonds haven't drawn interest in several years, despite my note that EEs didn't stop drawing interest until they were at least 30 years old and these had not yet reached that limit. Laws/policies must have changed in the meantime.

It's a good thing to get the excess paper out of the box to make room for the new. I am putting into the box the originals of the legal documents that our lawyer drew up for us in May 2020 - general and healthcare durable powers of attorney for each of us, plus a power of attorney for both of us on our house and lots - a total of about 80 sheets of 8.5"x11" paper.

Tidbits for another week - 3/12/2021

Electrical Problems (3/10/2021):

We have overkill in my kitchen: There are four ovens in it. Since I'm not much of a cook (I only cook to keep us from starving), you may not think that logical. However, the number of ovens in my kitchen is not the point of my sad tale. The point is that I had an electrical problem with the small toaster oven (to left of microwave on the counter in the photo, above) which proved to the world that I, who completed a minor in Electrical Engineering back in the late 1950s, am an idiot.

I wanted to toast a sandwich bun for our dinner, last night. I put the bun in the toaster oven, set the controls and started the oven, and left the room. Upon my return, I discovered that the oven was not hot, did not even have glowing digital control numbers showing. I unplugged the unit, re-plugged it. (That's the plug to the toaster oven at the right end of the toaster oven and above it. The other plug to the left of the toaster oven is actually the plug to the microwave.) Nothing. Exasperated, I used a skillet and the range top to toast the bun. As I went downstairs to bed, last night, I took the toaster oven down to our workshop where I intended to check it, later, to see if there is a fuse inside the casing.

This morning, as I came upstairs, I brought our standby toaster oven up from the basement. Later, I stuck a bagel into the standby toaster oven and set its simple mechanical controls. I listened to the hum of the spring-loaded timer as I walked away. When I returned, did I find a toasted bagel? Nope. The toaster oven was (electrically) dead as a doornail. Bah! Humbug! The poor thing had served me well in Albuquerque in the 1980s and had served me well for the first 10 years after my return to Derby KS; but, it hadn't been used since about 2000 - at which time it had been replaced by the newer unit.

A bit later, after working in the yard and kicking back thinking to take a short nap, my idle mind realized what was going on with the little ovens: I had been checking the wrong ground fault interrupter (GFI) unit. I had checked the GFI into which the microwave is plugged. That's logical since it is, physically, the nearest GFI unit to the outlet into which the toaster oven is plugged. However, the electrical outlet into which the toaster oven plugs is actually wired into the GFI unit of the outlet that is to the right of the microwave. Duh!

While everyone is looking at the photo of the ovens, please note that the little woodwork one can see is nice and clean. I started on spring cleaning, in the kitchen, the other day. It took me four days to finish scrubbing all of the cabinets in the kitchen, but they are clean!

Terminology Illuminated (3/12/2021):

The other day I asked that anyone who understood "Lie group" and/or "surfaces of ignorance" let me know so that I could share the Zoom login information to yesterday's Wichita State University Physics Seminar. I needed someone to watch and translate for me. The seminar featured Dr. Shannon Ray, National Research Council Fellow, Air Force Research Laboratory, speaking on“The Purification of 3-Level Quantum States and Surfaces of Ignorance”.

No one took me up on the challenge of translating for me, so I watched the presentation, alone. It turned out to be an interesting talk. Although I understood the math (heavy on tensor algebras), there was a lot of what turned out to be jargon - much of it invented by the presenter and his colleagues. One term that he used in a peripheral comment turned out to be less esoteric than I had perceived or considered: it was "The Bottom Turtle".

In exchanging emails with Ole Phat Stu, a few minutes ago, I was inspired to research "The Bottom Turtle". *Face Palm*  The term is from Yertle the Turtle by Dr Seuss.

Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel) has been in the news, much, of late - at least, here in the States. Fortunately, Yertle the Turtle was not implicated in the loud complaints against some of the Seuss books. Who knew it would contain an allegory during a physics talk? Whoo boy.

Personal Tidbits from Hunky Husband and me:

As of Wednesday (3/10/2021), Hunky Husband and I are considered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to be "fully vaccinated". We may now meet with a few other people who are also "fully vaccinated", indoors, without masking and distancing. Unfortunately, in our family, being "fully vaccinated" has skipped the generation of our daughters. We are looking forward to their attaining the designation no later than the end of May.

On Friday (3/12/2021), HH & I met with our tax guy. Yikes! HH had, without my having noticed it, until we gathered our tax papers, chosen to skip the Required Minimum Distribution (RMD) from his Volunteer Investment Plan (VIP) with Boeing, for 2020. The problem that it presented for our 2020 taxes was that by not taking his RMD (not required in 2020 because of COVID-19), he did not contribute the taxes that he would have had withheld from the distribution.

For 2020, we had under-withheld (Fed & State) by an amount equal to my income from retirement benefits plus social security. (Of course, for 2019 we had over-withheld 1.2 times that much.) HH had left home without his checkbook, so the rest of our taxes will be automatically syphoned off of my checking account.  Fortunately, I am in the habit of carrying a blank check in my wallet and Robert was able to get the routing information off of it to give the Feds and the State Revenuers. (The minute we got home I transferred the funds from my savings. In the meantime, HH had received texts from H&R Block informing him that both sets of taxes had been accepted and would be deducted from the indicated account.)