Chinese dumpling wrapper

 According to SoupedUp "Mandy":

400 g of (high protein) flour

210 g of water

1/2 tsp salt

-----------------

I convert this to 

3.2 cups flour

.89 cups water

1/2 tsp salt

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That's a pretty dry dough. Did I convert it wrong? I am thinking to try:

3 cups flour

1 cup water

1/2 tsp salt.

Mandy points out that after the mixture has rested for a half hour or so, it should be kneaded carefully for 5-8 minutes. She says "do your best" - meaning this is important.

Reading Old Writings

Due to some basement flooding, I have been airing out the paper contents of a box containing my old writings. These consist primarily of a set of notebooks, starting from when I was an adolescent traveling in Europe, through to when I was in graduate school. I stopped routine writing when I had to concentrate on the final PhD exams. There are a few entries from the years when I was first married and later. There are also various sketches and pictures as well as some old letters. 

The vast majority of what I wrote concerned my attempts to find my own way through some kind of constructivist/idealist logic. Looking back at it, it looks like mostly gobbledygook. A great deal of clarity is provided by today's theory of the Moving Topic. I also wrote about loneliness, looking for sex and love, and about the first years of marriage when I wasn't happy. My early years in Minneapolis in graduate school were particularly painful but also fun in their own way. Luckily things began to warm up when I left academics and there are traces of a happier person emerging. 

There are also some old math papers published and un-published. I am pretty sure I was on the edge of some good math but was not a strong enough thinker to pull it off. For example the theory of bi-measures holds hints about solving the Blaschke inversion transform [finding a domain shape from its distribution of chord lengths] using the Bmn(). And the theory of derivatives of the associate function being Tauberian and all my struggles to define asymptotic behavior of a curve in terms of "basis" curves with simple derivative behavior. I did not pull these things over the finish line and I blame my weakness.

There are plenty of surreal pictures and surreal poems and stream of conscious bull. There is a naturalism that I can be proud of and a flawed character that -what can you say- I had to live with.

Haptics and Pornography

They are starting to study bi-directional digital "skin" that transmits or receives touch information. Since it is a no brainer I have been discussing for some time, let me state the obvious pornographic uses:

You wrap the "skin" around one thing and stroke it or insert it for a person wearing it to receive at the other end of the signal.

I claim this idea. As soon as they reduce the lag time to something immediate.

The skies in her eyes...

 The skies in her eyes were usually gray

It made me realize she had nothing to say

But her ass was on fire and did inspire

So I'd listen intently anyway

Chipping away at the concept of transitivity

Let's start with: 

- A penny is in my pocket and my pocket in in my pants, so the penny is in my pants.

- The present is in a box and the box is in the garage, so the present is in the garage.

I think we regard these as examples of the transitivity of "in" only by ignoring differences. To be "in a box" is not really the same relation as "in the garage". Here, to be "in" implies certain steps one can take to locate something. Clearly, opening the box is an additional step. All of which gets suppressed. Similarly, and more easily justified: to be "in the pocket" is not the same as to be "in the pants".

First Osprey 2024

Just saw one. Note the date: March 30. Last year it was March 29. As I have said, the New Yorkers are not far behind.

I know I saw cormorants a week or so ago. I am under the impression they stayed all winter. 

More jokes

World worst screen savers: dead rat..... colonoscopy record....skin tag...

Answering "What are your pronouns?" without understanding the word "pronouns". Eg: "My pronouns are: or, not, and if...then". "My pronouns are: a, the, and another". Or like "me, my, mine". Or "I kind of like Mike Tyson". 

Non-informative information

There should be a word, other than "enshittification", for the providing of additional information that is of no value. Some great examples: showing RPM on a car dashboard with automatic gearing; showing all the most recent durations that have been used for a digital timer. These examples, require an act of 'ignoring': You consume the information and then discard it. This type of energy draining is going on all around me. 

A joke

 Yeah...I used to smoke for a living.

A pretty little bighorn sheep kill zone

This is right above my little hill in Nevada:

It's a 608 ft climb from the valley floor at 3000 ft. 

I am so intrigued by the pink color of the lithic debris, completely different from what is in use at the foot of the hill.

Competitive Artifact Hunting

Here, effectively in private, I can admit that I find arrowhead hunting with your buddies to be a YouTube genre that pisses me off. These guys are down in the Carolinas in places where there are so many arrowheads, all you have to do to find them is look down. They go out in a team and bring home dozens of arrowheads. Each find is accompanied by loud shouts of "Wow its a screamer"..."its a SMOKER"...etc. Or "Aww buddy you got skunked".

These guys understand nothing and teach nothing to the viewer. They do not tell you the materials, the arrowhead styles, any info about the topography. When arrowhead hunting is about picking up the next trinket, then the arrowheads become correspondingly low valued. You do not need to think about or understand prehistory. When I spend months without finding anything, then a single arrowhead becomes very precious - whether or not I communicate that on YouTube. It is not about shouting and competing with your buddies. I have enough pain of loss during those empty months. For me, there is intellectual effort behind the finds - not that I necessarily succeed. The effort makes me aware of things that may help me understand what I am finding.

A day of arrowhead hunting

Sometimes on a good day you find more than one arrowhead. The ensemble takes on a particular life of its own: the life of that day in the field. Each time you go out you have the focus that you bring to the moment and you have the conditions that are there anyway. Out of this and mother luck come a find or two, a deep sense of accomplishment and a frame captured by the arrowheads. I love the stems on these arrowheads:

Or

Woo hoo! Thank you Rhode Island.

First crocus 2024

Note the date. It was Feb 11the last year. So 2 days earlier.

Ridgelines in Nevada

As you walk along a ridgeline in Nevada you had well look down and keep an eye out for arrowheads. Wherever sheep crossed or followed the ridge, hunters have waited - one time or another.

Some kind of Hebbian Principle

Suppose you have a category of things, that all fall under a name - say - "A". If there is an observable of these things that allows the As to be divided into two groups; then the observable becomes an attribute of As. Two sub-categories are created. 

If we lived in a binary world, every type of thing would correspond to one such observable.

Why is a bighorn sheep like a computer program?

The sheep go through a number of XOR gates and wires, as they wander around browsing. There main activity is eating. Not escaping predators. 

But clever people can arrange the wires and XOR gates in anticipation. Then, through quirk of wind or deliberate broadcasting of smell and noise, or through use of well-trained dogs, the sheep can be made more and more uncomfortable. In a panic they worry about what is behind, as they rush into a shallow bowl with hunters hiding on the downwind side.

It is simple: add sheep and stir.

Is that a petroglyph of a hunting site "bullseye"?

I have been collecting pictures of what I call "funnels". The vocabulary hasn't stabilized yet but I am talking about a "bullseye" pattern of: bald spot, surrounded by light ring of lithic debris, surrounded by a heavier ring of lithic debris, surrounded by a one or more concentric rings of fence post holes. Like this:

And like this:

You see this bullseye pattern over and over in the hills around Las Vegas and I dare say: the inner ring of lithic debris might be a good place to go look carefully at the ground ;)

Imagine my surprise to see this petroglyph, which is not a bad match to these bullseyes:

A few sites have some structure or extra debris at the center but mostly not. Here it is again:

Not unreasonable to suspect a connection to sheep:

A funny thing happened when I tried to draw a map of a Nevada prehistoric hunting site

After multiple days of staring at the Nevada desert using Google Earth, I have begun to get a sense of how complicated the ancient's hunting was. So I was trying to sketch the simplest hunting-site configuration. I decided to get cute and add a little figure of a bighorn sheep to represent sheep entering the "trap". And I put a little hunter with a bow at the center of the trap. It was somewhere along in here that I realized I was recreating some of the petroglyphs I have been seeing around Nevada and Utah.

Now it is pretty obvious that petroglyphs depicting bighorn sheep and people with bows and arrows, have something to do with hunting. Why would you need this? Well, one thing is to brag about the hunt but, probably, there were some pretty memorable hunts and it is natural to want to tell the story in a permanent form (like a petroglyph). 

But after I have stared at drive lines leading up to funnels on Google Earth, it occurs to me that some of the abstract "geometric" petroglyphs could be maps of the whole hunting trap - which could be 10 miles across.

I can see how a map of the whole hunting "trap" would be helpful when laying out plans for a particular hunt. The 'leader' probably wants to be very clear about different roles for different members of the hunt - where the leader will be, where the adolescent, the women (?), and the hunters (men?).

The leader has to judge the qualities of the wind and air, perhaps predicting several days of weather, and the sheep need to be spotted or anticipated in the distance. The hunters have had years to learn the traps and update them and I get a vague sense of the possibility that a map can be updated at the same time as its subject matter is updated - and that the above shows glyphs of different ages.

I know, from looking at the pictures of Google Earth that drive lines and separate "Kill Zones" can be too complicated to understand. The landscape was just as complicated in the past. Did they use smoke signals?

So here is my real proposition: it will be found that some of these hunting site petroglyphs match nearby topography and the layout (topological not metric) of a miles-wide hunting trap. [Ths is probably not an original statement.]