Famous last words

Gauss the famous mathematician is known for his last words:

More light

I used to think this was because he saw a brightness ahead as he began his final exit. But when my grandmother died, the last thing she said was

More water

Which leads to realize that Gauss actually was asking for more light in the room, that had started to go dark for him. I was thinking that I could make a joke at the end:

More or less light

Harvie the Seagull

There was a seagull hanging out at the Woods Hole Waterfront Park. He had really nice lines:

I decided to make him my bestie:

I even named him Harvie Wheeler. He seemed to hang out at the park and I actually changed my morning walk to pass this place and see if "Harvie" was around. One time I brought him some bread but he was not interested after the first nibble. But I thought it was probably not a healthy place for a seagull to hang out and get used to. I saw him begging for scraps at the end of the summer, from people eating their lunches at the park, and imagined him failing to develop good seagull hunting habits. I think he had a parent that was still feeding him mid-summer and them got lazy and stayed in the park.  

Later Harvie appears to be gone and  I saw the remains of a half-eaten seagull down the street. I guess he was not prepared for the fox that hunts along there. 

What is "pain" as a software concept?

I was thinking about how "pain" could be used as a programming concept. Found the answer in

Homeostasis and soft robotics in the design of feeling machines

by Kingson Man and Antonio Damasio

They say that feelings are the response to a system being out of equilibrium.

So then a good answer to my question is to allow every subroutine of a "system" to be passed a pointer to its "environment", as well as pointers to other "neighboring" system subroutine's state, and have an automatic mechanism for comparing the curret subroutine's internal state to this environment and neighbors, to come up with a vector of disturbance from equilibrium. Each subroutine can then take exactly the same form as a 'switch' statement on the values of the disturbance vector. Pain would then be considered to be some of the case statements within this 'switch'. In a simple version, the disturbance is a real valued number and pain is a threshold that affects the subroutine's behavior.

Note in passing that a system would simply move towards death, if all that mattered was equilibrium. There needs to be a larger "equilibrium" driving a system out of local equilibrium, if the system is to do any work. For better or worse, such ideas lead the conversation forward and connect "pain" in a useful way to other programming constructs.

The Levallois Technique

From Wikipedia. Note that the back side may show a "bulb of percussion". The front side has a few flakes removed.

Now consider this from Woods Hole. I think it was in the sand and clay below my yard and I found it in a pile of excavated dirt for the new foundation:

 It has a bulb of percussion and signs or "erraill.

 Additional back-side flakes.

 Side vide of bulb

Darn nice piece of quartz, unlike anything else in the yard.

The smallest of adventures

I took Barb for a row in Rosie. The tide was low at 10:45 so around 11:00 it was still easy to row out the gut, against the current, into the "hole", and around the corner to the right. I wanted to show Barb what it looked like behind Penzance. As we got out towards Buzzard's Bay the waves got bigger - no problem for the boat but Barb wanted to turn back and we did.
On the way back, a motor boat went bye in the hole and left a big enough wake to worry me. Earlier, the same boat had gone bye going fast and left little wake. But it was significantly worse when it went bye slowly. Anyway I watched the wave approach and did something stupid: I tried to race it around the corner of Penzance into the gut. The wave, above the gunnel in height, caught me almost broadside, just as I am passing a big rock. Barb starts voicing worried noises about the rock and the wave crested right next to us. We were thrown sideways but Rosie is no more willing to get her gunnel wet when tilted at 45 degrees than she is at 0 degrees and we were fine. Except the wave was throwing us against the large rock and, as the wave passed beneath me it lifted my left oar out of the water, taking the oarlock with it, out of its socket. So I am distracted by a missing oar on one side and coming down on a large barnacled rock on the other and I row with the one oar that I have on that side, and get us around the corner into the smoother inward flow of the gut. That one stroke of the oar included a bit of sculling, which I do automatically when I am using just one oar. Then I fixed the oarlock, then we were in calmer water.
I want to say that I am right proud of my fine boat. I say it didn't take a single drop of water. Barb thinks it did take a drop but I think that was spray off the cresting wave that came in next to her.

One oarstroke from Ram Island back to the yacht club

I was rowing with Tyler, out to Devil's Foot and Ram Island and we stopped at Ram Island to check for clams. There seem to be fewer than when we went last year. The current was setting into the harbor and the wind was from the southwest. Anyway, from behind Ram, I took one strong stroke of the oars out into the current and we quickly drifted out from behind Ram and into the harbor. The wind was blowing us back towards home.

I thought it would be fun to see how far we could drift back towards Dory Beach where I keep my boat, so I rested on my oars. Aside from fending off one mooring, we drifted all the way back to the beach and only missed it by 20 yards. Amazing! One oar stroke from Ram back to home. The entire way, the boat stayed pointed in the same direction, except it started to turn broadside to the wind one time. So I moved towards the back of the boat - leaving more freeboard in the bow for the wind to blow on and this straightened her out. We missed the beach by a couple of yards and got in behind the last Penzance dock next to Dory Beach, rowed underneath it and over the last few yards to where I store my boat.

Went for a row around Penzance

Launched at A and rowed counter clockwise around Penzance. I got to B about an hour before low tide, with the current flowing out, south, and against me. The wind too. But at B, I rounded the corner without difficulty and followed the eddies and occasional counter currents through the gut and into the harbor side. "Easy peasy". Got my boat Rosie in at C, left her on the beach and went back to A to retrieve the boat dolly. Etc. Saw fish splash near the southern red nun in the hole; and again in the harbor on the final leg. It was a bit scary and a bit awesome to be in more open water. Waves and current were not a problem but one submerged rock that suddenly made an unexpected splash off my bow, took me by surprise.