7 October 09
Fibered Up...
We visited Dixon Lambtown on Saturday, a wonderful festival a mere eight miles from home. We met and petted alpacas and chinchillas. I learned how to spin worsted, Navajo, and long draw, and how to prepare fibers for all of these things. We saw the sheep to shawl competition. I overdosed, I think, on fuzzy yumminess.
But not quite, because this Spinners Giveaway definitely caught my attention. All you have to do to enter is say a bad thing and a good thing about moving. (Hard pressed to find a good thing to say about it, but I did come up with something.)
28 September 09
I Iz Not Impressd By Ur Clozur
Charlie refuses to show any excitement during the final pitches of today’s Giants game, which they won over the Chicago Cubs 5-1. We wonder if he’s a Tigers fan.
25 September 09
We Get Slow Food. Now, Slow Messages?
Night before last, we went to a training offered at the Emergency Operations Center on campus for radio messaging. The idea is to make sure that everyone follows the same protocol when sending messages via radio for third parties in emergencies (think Katrina or 9/11 when cellphones and phone lines were overloaded and down).
Back in the day, I got up to about 110 wpm in shorthand. I used to be able to type 80 wpm easily. Not sure if I still can, though I’m still a fast typist. We use email, phone, cellphone, and some geniuses use text messages. We take almost instant communication for granted.
The average speed of radio voice message transmission is between 5-10 wpm.
Five. To. Ten. Words. Per. Minute. It sounds crazy, until:
Every single word for which there might be any confusion at all needs to be spelled out phonetically (radiophonetically, not IPA phonetically) so “Alison” is transmitted “Alison, I spell: Alpha Lima India Sierra Oscar November.” It doesn’t matter that I don’t mind that people spell my name with two ells or a wye or a cee or something equally outlandish. You have to send the message, you have to tell the receiving operator exactly how many words you’re sending, they have to copy down the words exactly as you received them from the third party, checking they have the same number of words. (You even have to send the message, and I have to beat down my inner editor here, if the content is misspelled or even incorrect, though you’re allowed as an operator to add an “Op Note” at the end to say you believe the GPS coordinates given will place you in the middle of the Indian Ocean and not in Davis.)
It could, however, make a big difference in someone’s life to get this information correct. When you are transmitting a message whose contents are completely opaque to you, but not to the sender or the person to whom the message is being sent via radio, you just send it as you get it.
I just have no idea how you practice saying “Please send 500 rolls toilet paper” at a rate of five words a minute. This is something I’m going to have to work on…
24 September 09
Winning Season
The SF Giants beat the Arizona Diamondbacks 5-2 this evening, thus winning their 82nd game this season. This guarantees that they will have a winning season, as the season is 162 games long. With 10 games left to play, they’ll win a few more before the season is out (the most likely number is 5 games).
Barring a collapse by the Colorado Rockies, the Giants won’t be in the playoffs this time around, but given that a) the Giants haven’t had a winning season since 2004 and b) the Giants were widely predicted to be pretty lousy this year, I’m quite pleased. This year has been fun to follow.
19 September 09
Apostasy
Before I visited the new Getty Museum in Los Angeles I happened across a New Yorker article on the landscape design for the museum, the famous altercations between architect Richard Meier and the landscape architect Robert Irwin. (Architects can have really big egos, exacerbated to infinity by open purses.) It described cascading gardens that filled hillsides, that echoed and mimicked the chaparral landscape on top of which this great white city (“Oh, it’s just like Jerusalem”) had been plonked, glowering above the 405.
When I got there, eager to see this vast transformation (desecration) of the landscape, I asked a guard how to get to the rest of it. Oh, this is it, he said. It? It seemed tiny compared with what I’d been expecting. No expense had been spared for sure, but it seemed way overwritten. It also seemed way out of scale with the rest of the structures. (To be fair to Irwin, it seems that the number of edifices multiplied over time, while he’d been given an initial set of plans to work from, so it was never going to be to scale.)
Disappointment. Arrgh.*
Most of my friends in Davis rave, rave, rave about the Davis Farmers Market. It was sold to me repeatedly when we were planning to move here. Best in the country, best in the state, biggest, best, best, best. I remember thinking when I first got here well, this is nice, but where’s the rest of it?
It’s probably unfair to compare any farmers market in the U.S. with what I grew up around in Spain and France. The “smelly markets” that made us wrinkle our noses (brats from JFK-era sanitized California supermarkets) filled large warehouses, overflowed from them. Fish, driven in that morning from the coast. Meats. Stalls numbering in the dozens all selling fresh vegetables and fruit, artfully stacked and arranged. They were vast, overwhelming, gorgeous. We took them for granted.
Farmers markets here are a 70s resurgence, a protest, the anti-supermarket. If the Davis one is the biggest and best, I’m not well encouraged to visit others. (Numenius tells me the one in Bloomington he visited in in September was excellent, but that was probably because many of the sellers were Amish, and they never were shopping in supermarkets in the first place.)
So, a typical experience of shopping at the DFM: I look around. I try and fit what I see into an ensemble that will work for lunch or dinner. (We only eat organic veggies and my choices here are limited to about 3 or 4 stalls, so the comparison is even more unfair, but still.) I can never quite find what I’d envisaged. I buy things anyway. They go into my bike basket and I have just spent $30 on stuff I didn’t plan on buying, without finding what I needed, so I bike over to the Coop to get the rest. Invariably. Every time.
The Davis Food Coop happens to sell produce from the three local organic growers who show up on Wednesdays and Saturdays at the Farmers Market. It also sells produce from about 8 other local organic growers. And about 12 other not-so-local ones. I never leave there unable to find what I went in for. Sure, it’s really a supermarket. But it’s also a community in which I’m invested.
This morning I will go to the Farmers Market, hauling along Sweet Caroline my new spinning wheel for Spin in Public day. (Not on my bike, but when a bag arrives next week for my wheel, this will not be out of the question.) I will run into, probably, 25 people I know (more if they come in more than one at a time). I will joke and laugh and revel in the community that convenes in the Central Park area of Davis every Saturday and Wednesday. I may buy lunch. I may even buy flowers. But I will probably not, apostate that I am, buy produce. They may revoke my citizen of Davis card…
* Happy Talk Like a Pirate Day.15 September 09
Signs of Fall
We had some rain this weekend, the first rain of the season, especially last night when we got about a quarter of an inch, enough to soak into the ground a bit. I had a meeting today up in Sonoma Valley, near the town of Glen Ellen. It smelled wonderful up there along the creek.
Maybe I’ll remember to set up the rain gauge this rainy season.
8 September 09
A Visit to the State Fair
We’ve now lived in Davis for 10 years and have never made it to the State Fair, just across the causeway in Sacramento. Partly this is a horror of crowds and partly it’s a causeway thing — not proud of it, but it’s the truth. We tend to stay this side of the causeway.
But I really wanted to go this year because my spinning teacher was showing her Jacobs sheep, two of which gave birth during the fair (triplets and twins, and little black-and-white beauties they were too). The trip turned out to be a sheep-type pilgrimage. (The Fair is too big to do even a significant portion, so if you limit yourself to one thing you can do it well. I think this is why you go more often than once every ten years.)
We saw the Columbia (an American breed from the 50s) yearling rams being judged; saw Cheviots and Dorsets (meat sheep) and Romneys and Ramboullets. But my favorites were the merinos, incredibly soft, from Mendenhall Wood Ranch up in Marysville. (There were many, many blue ribbons at these pens.) I was able to sketch this lamb, born in January, name of Marissa. (We also saw lots of llamas. What do you do with a llama??)
We ate fair food including the obligatory frozen banana dipped in hot chocolate with almonds. We saw the vertical teetering sculpture of San Francisco made out of 100,000 toothpicks over the course of 35 years. And we saw this giraffe, made from recycled metal, which I sketched and sent into the One Million Giraffes project. Ola now has over 239,157 giraffes, including mine. Do send in a sketch or two if you can.
6 September 09
Did Brian Wilson Just Pitch 101 MPH?
It sure looks like it. The Giants were hanging on to a 3-2 lead against the Brewers in the bottom of the eighth when they called for Brian Wilson their closer to get the final five outs. Earlier in the game our radio broadcasters thought the stadium radar gun was reading a bit high for the starting pitchers; anyway they reported that the radar gun hit 101 during one of Wilson’s pitches.
So I checked out the statistics from Wilson’s performance as reported by PitchFX. This is an independent measurement technique from the radar gun. According to PitchFX, Wilson today threw 18 fastballs, with an average speed of 100.3 MPH, and a high of 102.2 MPH. From looking at his velocity chart here, that was his fastest pitch sequence yet recorded by PitchFX.
Wilson got his five outs, and the Giants won the game 3-2.
4 September 09
Project Rwanda
When I got to work on Monday, this fancy gorgeous cargo bike was leaning against the wall. One of my coworkers, the director of the Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Project in Rwanda, had bought it. She spotted the bike in Rwanda when she was there in August, it rider hauling huge loads of coffee beans. It turns out to be the Project Rwanda Coffee Bike
She plans to do most of her grocery shopping on this bike once she rigs it up with adequate paniers. I love the colors, I love the concept. I love the project. It costs $300 to get a bike like this into the hands of someone for whom it will make an incredible difference. Check out the link, and consider buying a transport bike for your own grocery shopping!
3 September 09
Lure Of PitchFX
We came home this evening and caught the final bit of the Giants game on the radio. They were playing the Phillies, and Brad Penny, who was pitching for the Giants for the very first time, was throwing a gem, shutting the Phillies out through 8 innings, the Giants going on to win 4-0. I was following the early part of the game using MLB Gameday, which has very nice visualizations of the trajectory of each pitch thrown. (“Whoa. Penny’s pitching well”, I thought).
A company called Sportsvision has been capturing this pitch-by-pitch data for a little over two years now; they have a set of high-speed cameras installed at every major league ballpark to track the flight of each pitch and compute the trajectory parameters. This system, which they call PitchFX, generates the data for the Gameday visualizations and for similar graphics shown on TV.
It turns out this PitchFX data is freely available from the MLB Gameday site (in tedious XML format), and at something like 500,000 pitches thrown each season in the major leagues, that is a lot of data. By now there are a number of good websites featuring this data — for instance, here is a set of graphs showing Brad Penny’s performance this evening.
If they gave PhDs for sabermetrics there’s room for hundreds of dissertations using the PitchFX data; it’s fun to think of what analyses one could do with the data. Once they get their image processing algorithms worked out, the folks at Sportsvision are aiming for a complete digital record of every game event, including where the ball gets hit and where the fielders move to on each play. Then we’d have thousands of baseball dissertation possibilities.