By RUDY!

September 21st (Romulus, NY) — Ithaca is…

Later, in Ithaca, I came across a girl wearing a bright green t-shirt which hugged her large boobs, and I was staring in their direction — not because I like big boobs, which I will make no official comment on — I was staring because across that t-shirt was a phrase that was 93% familiar, it was the difference that captivated me and caused me to double-take, triple-take, and ultimately, stare in the direction of her boobs. I broke my own trance by stopping her as we passed and asking where she got that shirt. To which she replied, “Are you a fan of Borges?” And in a stupefied manner, I struggled to find the words, “Of course, does man not live only to hope for to experience a sliver of the fantasy of his imagination.”, but all that came out was a pedestrian, “Yes.” She went on to tell me how she came up with the idea and that I could get it done myself if I give her credit. She told me there was a store around the corner that will put “Ithaca is “-anything.

By RUDY!

September 20th (Rochester, NY) — House on the Hill

While studying the Theory of Signal Detection, particularly, determination of optimum criterion, we come to this equation:

where p(N) and p(Y) are the probabilities that a signal is not present (N) and that a signal is present (Y), the rest of the formula involves the value and cost added and subtracted given a decision. For instance, value{n|N} gives the value of saying ‘no’ when there is no signal present, while cost{n|Y} gives the cost of saying ‘no’ when there is a signal present. Cost values are negative, so you only get zero when cost and value are zero. Got it? Good.

Pascal’s gambit (Wikipedia entry) posits that ‘God is present’ (Y) or ‘God is not present’ (N). He goes on to say that proving the existence of God is near impossible therefore we should take the probability that God is present to be ridiculously low, i.e. p(Y) approaches zero, which, ignoring the rest of the formula for now, makes the optimum criterion, B_opt, approach infinity, which, in turn, suggests you should not say ‘yes’ when asked if God is present.

Now when you consider the rest of the formula, B_opt tips back towards zero. Pascal suggests that the value gained by saying God is present, value{y|Y}, is infinite, i.e. the heavenly life, while the cost of saying God is not present when God is present, cost{n|Y}, is an infinite loss - condemned to hell. Since both of these are in the denominator, one over infinity is zero, so the B_opt goes to zero. Pascal goes on to suggest that no value or cost is associated with saying God is present when God is not present, i.e. value{n|N} and cost{y|N} are both zero, he concludes that the safest best is to say yes God is present.

Aside from the problems cited on that Wiki entry, my own problem is this, how does one interpret an indeterminate form like zero divided by infinity? I’ve thought about recasting the problem into an indeterminate form that will allow repeated application of L’Hopital’s rule, but then what is changing, what do I take the derivative with respect to? My conclusion is this: the problem is poorly posed, because the value and cost functions are actually Heaviside functions and their parity is not determined by the question of whether God is present but whether there is an afterlife. Interestingly enough, the derivative of a Heaviside is a delta function at the time of death! So, for optimal gain, live like a heathen at convert or recant at your deathbed!

By RUDY!

September 8th - 19th — Catching Up, Catching My Breath

1. Sept. 8th — Epitaph of a Small Winner by Machado De Assis, a book I’ve had for many weeks and have been reading on and off for just as long. Not my favorite, but worthy of a read for its comical nuggets of false wisdom and abundance of failure. A book where nothing really happens but we continue to read out of the expectation that something will happen. It never does; maybe that’s the catch. It is more like a rub. A raw rub. It is like an extremely droll Felix Krull.
2. Sept. 9th — Bugatti race cars at the Watkins Glen Speedway. My sister was visiting and wanted to see the race track. Unfortunately, it rained throughout. Fortunately, the diehards still raced; we watched with exhilaration.
3. Sept. 10th — Looking towards the District of Columbia from the Alexandria hotel. Work on my mind, illness in my veins.
4. Sept. 11th — Memorial Parking Lot A. My attempt at the anti-tourist picture.
5. Sept. 12th — Chimney Bluffs with the sis’. Earlier in the day we were looking at the polymer preserved interior of the human body. The most interesting sight was the brain, it seemed too small. Maybe I am just egotistical.
6. Sept. 13th — School’s Cool
7. Sept. 14th — Still life. Death by dehydration. The leaves tell me that summer is ending and that their death will not be spectacular.
8. Sept. 15th — I used to be a pyromaniac.
9. Sept. 16th — Perelandra
10. Sept. 17th — Evening walk with H. Working at opposite ends of the dining room table just like old times.
11. Sept. 18th — Silicon Cleavage. Two wafers with different detectors passed around during class. The loupe reveals more. The electron-hole scheme reveals all.
12. Sept. 19th — In class, learning about the eye, again. Bad jokes abound. Horrible obfuscation reigns in this class.

By RUDY!

September 7th (Downtown, Rochester, NY) — Not Part of the Driving Test

Two parts deduction and one part elimination later and I found the driver that pinned in my car. The exchange was brief: I showed him a picture on my camera of his license plate, asked if this was his car, he said yes and went on about technology when I interrupted him and asked if he wanted to move it and walked away in a truly passive aggressive fashion.

By RUDY!

September 6th (Guelph, Ontario, Canada) — Church Bingo Parlor featuring Do Make Say Think

Yes. How do I spell relief? DMST.

Today Do Make Say Think performed in Guelph during the Guelph Jazz Festival. I drove out to see them expecting a crowded house, it was a moderate crowd, but that didn’t detract from the event. They are kicking off a 40 day tour schedule to support their new album, You, You’re a History in Rust. They played lots of songs from that album, but also some songs from other albums, including an encore performance of Hooray, Hooray, Hooray! from the Winter Hymn, Country Hymn, Secret Hymn. Overall, I was thrilled with the performance, but some times the guitars sounded out of tune with one another. They perform with so much energy and their songs are so long (6+ minutes) that the guitars seemed to go out of tune almost every song.

They played The Universe!, which is a jarring punch in the face in an otherwise solemn album. Every time I heard the song on the CD I wondered how it could possibly be performed live. It was the most disconcerted of all the songs played tonight. Towards the end of the song it came together and became very tight, but in the first minute or so, it was chaos — which, come to think of it, is exactly what you should expect from a song entitled The Universe! How apropos.

You’ll wanna see all the images from this day, well, not all of them, but for sure these: