Cop Car's Beat

The Dzhanibekov Effect

Please credit Chuck Pergiel for having posted the following video on Pergelator. Be forewarned that the video includes a reasonable amount of advertising (for its sponsor) at the beginning and at the end. (The video is 14:48 minutes long.)

The YouTube posting of the video includes a comment from which the following is exerpted.

 

Published on Sep 19, 2019

Spinning objects have strange instabilities known as The Dzhanibekov Effect or Tennis Racket Theorem - this video offers an intuitive explanation."

 

Balsams and other stuff for the week - 9/20/2019

Some weeks ago, I was going through packets of seeds that had accumulated in the garage when I happened upon a packet of Bachelor's Button (AKA Cornflower or Centaurea cyanus) seeds. I flung them out in a vacant space in the planting area to the far side (away from the house) of the driveway. A bunch of little seedlings sprang up! Most of the seedlings did, indeed, look like Bachelor's Button plants - a bit short, but what the hey, it is late in the season. However, there were two strangers in the pack: 1) one plant of leaf lettuce and 2) one plant of Touch-Me-Nots (AKA Balsams, Jumping Betty, Lady's Slipper, or Impatiens balsamina.) In the photo, below, the Touch-Me-Not is the plant with the pink blossoms. The Bachelor's Buttons are the little plants between it and the lettuce plant.

A couple of days ago, while watering the potted tree seedlings in the window well outside my sewing room, I noted the little critter previously shown in Amphibian Day 2019 was sitting within a drainage hole of one of the pots, facing outward. This morning, I checked to see if it was still there. Nope! However, there were two tiny frogs sitting atop the mulch around an oak seedling that I had added to the collection, yesterday. The oak seedling had come up in the corner of the strawberry bed/rose bed.

Bogie's quilt is back from the quilter's!

There are still three steps needed for quilt completion: 1) binding the edges; 2) embroidering the name of the quilter, my initials, and 2019 in a corner on the back of the quilt; and 3) washing and ironing the quilt. The quilting doesn't really show on the front and I've shown enough photos of the front (for instance in The past week or so at Casa CC - 7/27/2019); so, I shall post only a photo of the back, below.

Well, I lied. Having just realized that the last posted photo of the quilt top was from before the borders were added, I'll include a photo of the front of the quilt, below.

One of those weeks

This past week has been one in which, to an extent, my time was not my own. What time was my own, I mostly spent running errands - two trips to the quilting store, a trip to the credit union (checking our locked box - trying to find a couple of Hunky Husband's rings that he has misplaced), a trip to the gardening shop (for bags of top soil with which to fill holes left when I transplanted some daylilies), buying groceries, taking Bogie's quilt top and backing (Paint image, above) to the quilter, having my car serviced and the GPS database updated. Well, I did get one book read and about half of another.

Wednesday, I did my usual thing by picking up Elegant Friend, taking her to lunch, stopping by the Kansas Vacuum Center that is near her apartment to see if the Miele cannister vacuum that I had ordered had come in (it had not), then stopping by the Kansas State University Sedgwick County Research & Extension Office to walk about amongst their plantings to enjoy the roses (not seen anywhere else as they are experimental breeds) and other flowers and vegetables that they have on display.

Thursday, I took HH in to Team Vision Surgery Center for cataract surgery on his left eye. Oh, my, it hadn't occurred to either of us what an ordeal it would prove to be. He was downright giddy from the way all of the women of the surgical team, including his surgeon (photo, above), treated him. According to HH, they must have gone out of their way to put together a team of personable and good-looking professionals! Of course, as his "care taker", one of the team went over his post-operative instructions with me (the patients are not legally competent due to the anesthesia to which they have been exposed.) Trust me: For HH, the lingering effects of the anesthesia have not been trivial. He was really knocked for a loop, cognitively. He could not, as the saying goes, have thought his way out of a paper bag for the first 30-40 hours following surgery. Toward bed time that evening, HH was so disturbed that he told me not to worry about it - that he would worry enough for the both of us. Not on my watch! We are in this together.

Friday, I took HH in for post-operative exam and consultation with his surgeon. Unfortunately, he declined my presence during the post-operative consultation, so I'm not quite sure what went on. There is a time/date on the paper they gave him that implies to me that he was given an "extra" post-op appointment for Monday. HH has no memory of his discussion with the surgeon and I didn't see the paper until after closing time for the facility, so I shall need to call to confirm whether he does or does not have an appointment at 9:45am, tomorrow. I stopped by the vacuum cleaner place, on our way home, to pick up the vacuum (photo, above) that had come into the store while HH was in surgery on Thursday. The next post-op exam about which I had been informed on the day of surgery is next Friday. Perhaps HH's cognitive condition indicated the need for an extra exam. We shall see.

[ADDITION of 9/16/2019 7:52am - Sitting here killing time until the surgeon's office opens at 8:00am to confirm/deny HH's "extra" appointment, I've just been told by HH that he's received a text from that office telling him not to forget to come in for his 9:45am appointment, today. That settles that question!]

[ADDITION of 9/16/2019 11:52am - It turned out that the reason HH was given an "extra" appointment was that his intraocular pressure had been too high on Friday. That was also the reason for the extra prescription that he was given – another eye drop to lower the pressure. The pressure is better, but not great. He was told to continue the new eye drops until he sees his surgeon for his normally scheduled post-op exam on this coming Friday. His mother had glaucoma, so we watch those pressures, closely!]

For the rest of the day, Friday, it was evident that HH was struggling, cognitively, still. And it was worrying him. I had to continue assisting each time he had to use the eyedrop medications per the schedule he had been given (four different medications) - mostly by continuing to assure that he used all of the drops and that he did not use the same drops twice at a scheduled time (as he had attempted to do on Thursday), and by timing the intervals between drop applications (3-5 minutes between each of the four medications). Again, HH became concerned about his lack of mental acuity; so, I did some online research about the effects of anesthesia given old people having cataract surgery. I printed out the latest relevant paper that I found, marked the passages that I found most important, and gave it to HH to read while telling him that, according to my reading of the information, cognitive effects were often observable for as long as one week.

Addition of 9/16/2019 11:53am -

Referenced paper: Prevention of Cognitive Dysfunction after Cataract Surgery with Intravenous Administration of Midazolam and Dexmedetomidine in Elderly Patients Undergoing Cataract Surgery

Another paper addressing possible effects of cataract surgery on cognition, but not addressing anesthesia, is one that I found interesting: Cataract surgery and age-related cognitive decline: A 13-year follow-up of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing

Yesterday, HH arose and removed his night-guard eye patch (photo, above) before I even saw him. It was obvious that his mind was in much better cognitive condition. However, late in the day, when I mentioned the paper that he had read, he had no idea what I was talking about. Oh, me. We are getting there. It is just very frustrating - particularly for HH. Last evening, it took 10-15 minutes for him to find where he had put the eye patch that he was to wear, again, last night and tonight.

Today, HH went out to walk (no running until cleared by his surgeon). He is more himself, today. It will be interesting to see how his memory is working. I'm thankful that I was 11-12 years younger, than now is HH, when I had my cataracts removed. I'm certain that my mind was not impaired by the anesthesia and that I was the perfect patient. (Oh, yes, we all believe that.) Truly...neither of us remembers my mind being impaired; but, who knows?

There's more than one way ....

Bogie's quilt top is ready for quilting and Wonderful GrandDaughter hasn't the time to worry about designing/choosing her quilt as she has just assumed a new position (Director of Nursing) that will keep her occupied for a while; so, I cast about for another quilting project to pursue - Project X.

There is more than one way of designing a quilt. I can come up with three basic ways to start designing a quilt: 1) Duplicating someone else's quilt that one has seen, 2) finding fabrics that one likes then finding/designing a pattern to go with the fabrics, or 3) finding a pattern that one likes then finding fabrics from which to make it. Well...one may always combine two or more of those basic ways, which is what I'm doing for Project X.

Starting Fabric

Years ago, I bought a bunch of Batik fabrics - because I liked them. In fact, in the back of my mind, I thought some of them might appeal to Bogie. I either proved that I'm not always right or I failed to show the fabrics to Bogie. She did beautifully in designing her quilt and I don't care a fig if the Batiks didn't sing to her At any rate, having goodly amounts of those fabrics on hand, I thought that Project X could include one of the following three fabrics.

Being a birdwatcher, I chose the second fabric - the one with only birds in its pattern.

Finding a pattern that will showcase the fabric

Fortunately, in a quilting magazine that was in the "Magazine Sharing" bin at the library, I found a pattern that features large enough pieces of fabric to showcase a large print - such as my bird fabric. Right off the bat, I note that I find the border really lacking in appeal; but, that's a small nit. A larger nit is the basic layout/sewing of the blocks.

A closer look at the image in the magazine proved that the "large print" fabric featured is very similar to the three Batik fabrics shown above.

Filling in with other fabrics

Looking for fabrics to complete the quilt design, I had some Batiks on hand and filled in with two Batiks from my nearest quilting supply store. This (below photo) is the array of fabrics with which I will be working.

The two fabrics of which I've shown larger areas are definitely in my design. How the other fabrics are used is TBD. The blue fabric and the rust-colored one at the upper right corner are the two fabrics that I recently purchased.

Block Design

How slavishly do I wish to pursue the basic block's design? Not very. Whoever designed the quilt is much more apt to deal well with (Liz's) fiddly details than am I. He/she has four pieces of fabric, sewn individually, to make the block. (In my rough version of the block, I intentionally left a bit of space between the two red pieces of fabric to show that it is not cut as a singe piece.)

Trust me when I tell you that I am not going to fiddle with sewing a bitty 1 5/8" right triangle to anything! The design will be modified to allow me to do less fiddly work - or - I will find a different pattern. Who knows? I may use a simple pattern and fussy cut the bird fabric to produce blocks that feature the individual birds. It will take some cogitation.

ADDITION OF 9/6/2019 8:23AM - Who said we need blocks?

Strips of fabric will feature large prints even better than will blocks. Now I'm entertaining the thought of strip piecing - at least part of the quilt top.

ADDITION OF 9/7/2019 4:26pm - And the winner is....

By consensus of the people (all two) living at the CC domicile:

Not that anyone really cares, other than HH and me, there will probably be no yellow in the finished product. That yellow block just happened to be handy for use and I was tired of fiddling around with Paint. Monday, I plan to hit the quilting supply store, again, to buy the fabrics to make the central blocks. Since those blocks were lifted from the first quilt that I made HH, it is obvious that I have those fabrics on hand. However, they are not Batiks. It works better to have the fabrics match in kind, so I must obtain Batiks of appropriate colors to make those blocks for Project X.

FYI to Bogie: Your dad found the original design (from the magazine) and my first cut at strip piecing (not shown in this posting) too "Blah", too "dark". Of course, he understands that he's not seeing true colors. (His first cataract surgery is scheduled for next Thursday.) The final quilt top design, as shown, is about the 8th iteration.

Today's Gems on Aging

Although today's The Born Loser strip addresses the thinking of the young (ages 0-30) and the old (ages 60-90), I guess we have to draw our own conclusions about those who are middle-aged (ages 30-60) or ancient (ages 90 and upward). Or...the Sansoms don't really tell us how old is Uncle Ted, do they?

I think that all of us old/ancient (over age 60) people can agree on the philosophy expressed in today's Pickles, below.

City of Derby, Kansas, USA - 150th Anniversary

This is where Hunky Husband and I live. From the City of Derby website comes a video that was made by the Wichita/Hutchinson Ks Public Television station KPTS in cooperation with the City of Derby.

 

ADDITION OF 8/28/2019 9:12am - We celebrated Derby's Centennial, too!

 

In response to Liz's comment, I had started to add the following: "BTW: If you look at the photo in the left-hand sidebar (down at the Year 2018 photo album), you'll see that we helped celebrate Derby's 100th Anniversary. We were much more active in the community in those days." However, it takes too many steps to get to the photo at a size that is informative. The photo is re-posted, below.

 

Cop Car and her VW Beetle

Photo courtesy of the defunct Derby Daily Reporter

 

You can tell that I look just like this photo, today, by seeing my new passport photo at the TOP of the left sidebar. I haven't changed a bit in the past 50 years. (Or course, not!) BTW: "They" no longer allow glasses or smiles in passport photos.

PSA (Public Service Announcement)

Although I cannot find it, I recall that sometime within the past two years I have grumbled about being unable to decipher what is meant by various pictograms. At the time, I was struggling with a "care tag" on a new piece of clothing. Today, in a magazine sent out by the grocery store chain that we frequent was included the following legend. Aren't you glad to know?

Amphibian Day 2019

Continuing a tradition, I'll post a photo of our first sighting of the year of our amphibian friend. Obviously, the same amphibian friend doesn't show up each year. Having shown up, today, this year's amphibian beat out last year's by about one week. Last year's was shown in Amphibians - order Anura.

The little amphibian is so small that it is dwarfed in the basement escape window well.

 

 

 

Deliverance

The poster is from All Hat No Cattle. Not a fan of C&W or bluegrass music, I giggled at the poster.

The video from the movie is a bit over four minutes long. The music pics up a bit after the two minute mark.

The following video features Carl Jackson on banjo and Glen Campbell on guitar .

More from Slashdot.org - Grading Tests, Nuking Mars, Using Old Tech

The following item from Slashdot.org is an excellent rehashing of the reason we were always told "show your work" on tests!

How Should Schools Grade Unexpected-But-Correct Answers On Coding Tests? 76

Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday August 18, 2019 @07:34AM from the does-not-compute dept.

 

There can be more than one correct answer for academic tests of programming ability, writes long-time Slashdot reader theodp:

 

Take the first of the Free-Response Questions in this year's AP CS A exam, which asked 70,000 college-bound students to "Write the static method numberOfLeapYears, which returns the number of leap years between year1 and year2." The correct answer, according to the CollegeBoard's 2019 Scoring Guidelines, entails iterating over the range of years and invoking a provided helper method called isLeapYear for each year.

Which does work, of course, but what if a student instead took an Excel-like approach to the same problem that consists of a (hopefully correct!) single formula with no iteration or isLeapYear helper function? Would that be a worse — or better -- example of computational thinking than the endorsed AP CS A Java-based solution? (Here's a 7-minute AP Conference discussion of how to correctly grade this problem)?

So, how have you seen schools and companies deal with unexpected-but-correct approaches to coding test questions?

 

I'm not sure how I should feel about the following item.

Elon Musk Begins Selling $25 'Nuke Mars' T-Shirts (bgr.com) 83

Posted by EditorDavid on Saturday August 17, 2019 @06:34PM from the making-a-statement dept.

 

"Elon Musk tweeted on Thursday evening 'Nuke Mars.' A few hours later he followed it up with 'T-shirt soon'," writes Business Insider.

BGR reports: Musk's tweet is a reference to the theory that by dropping one or more large bombs on Mars' poles, the CO2 locked away in the ice there would be released, giving the Martian atmosphere a much-needed boost... Making the planet's atmosphere denser could help it retain heat and bring it a small step closer to being habitable by human settlers. However, past research has suggested that bombing the planet's poles wouldn't release nearly enough CO2 to be worth the trouble. Elon Musk has publicly disagreed.

It's unclear why the SpaceX boss decided to bring this all up again, but he does have a habit of saying whatever he thinks will get a big reaction on Twitter. Oh, and apparently he's hoping to sell some shirts as well.

In any case, no space agency is ready to even begin preliminary planning for a crewed Mars mission, much less any long-term efforts to change the climate of the Red Planet. If that ever does happen, bombs may or may not play a role.
The article adds that scientists "aren't fully on board" with Musk's line of thinking, but the t-shirts really are available in the online SpaceX store. Late Friday Musk began promoting them with an optimistic tweet.

"Nuking Mars one T-shirt at a time."

 

The following item makes this oldster chortle.

US Navy Tests WWII-ERA Messaging Tech: Dropping Bean Bags Onto Ships (popularmechanics.com) 70

Posted by EditorDavid on Saturday August 17, 2019 @05:34PM from the cornhole-code dept.

Long-time Slashdot reader davidwr writes: In World War II, pilots would air-drop messages onto ships using bean-bags. Just as with sextants a few years ago, the Navy is bringing back old tech, because it works.

Just as during the Doolittle Raid of Tokyo, the purpose is to prevent eavesdropping. You can read more about the modern bean-bag-drop on Military.com or Popular Mechanics. There's a video about the Doolittle Raid hosted at archive.org with bean-bag-drops at 2:39 and 5:19 into the video. I wonder how many high-density SSD drives fit in a standard Navy bean-bag?
"In a future conflict with a tech-savvy opponent, the U.S. military could discover even its most advanced, secure communications penetrated by the enemy," notes Popular Mechanics. "Secure digital messaging, voice communications, video conferencing, and even chats could be intercepted and decrypted for its intelligence value.

"This could give enemy forces an unimaginable advantage, seemingly predicting the moves and actions of the fleets at sea with uncanny accuracy."