Some Blog Site

This is your annual reminder that the term “summer solstice” means “the solstice that occurs during summer”, not “the start of summer”.

It is an astronomical term having to do with the position of the sun relative to the earth, and while it does affect the seasons, it is incorrect to assign June 21 as the start of summer.

It has felt like summer for a few weeks already. What is summer? What is any season? A season is a grouping of days with similar weather features. For example, winter: temperatures are low, plants are dormant. And fall: temperatures decrease, plants lose their foliage. And spring: temperatures increase, plants grow their foliage. And summer: temperatures are high, plants are fruiting/seeding.

From the viewpoint of an observer with no calendar, how would he know when spring ends and summer begins? It’s a fairly slow transition with no defined border, so people have tried to assign that border. But the summer solstice is the wrong border.

The summer solstice has historically had a weather-related association. Think back to the time of Shakespeare. I would hope that you, dear reader, would recall the title of one of his plays (no expectation that you’ll know the plot or characters, just the title): A Midsummer Night’s Dream. When, historically, was the day of the year that was called “midsummer”? The day with the most daylight, of course. A lot of European countries still celebrate Midsummer in late June.

Anyway, my preferred time for summer is the 3-month block of June, July, and August. An acceptable alternative answer is Memorial Day to Labor Day, or perhaps from the first 80-degree day to the first 40-degree day after that, or perhaps from when the first rose bloom appears to when the chrysanthemums start blooming.

I have a disagreement with the people who decide on the color for the mute button for online meetings. The particular incident that brought the color problem to my attention happened to be Google Meet, but other programs such as Zoom also have the same issue. Of note is Microsoft Teams, which does not change color for muted versus unmuted, so it does not have this issue.

The problem is that the color was decided by extroverts.

Before getting into that though, a little bit of background: red is the color that has been chosen by society to mean “unsafe”. Whether it’s the color your car door locks change to when unlocked, or the color revealed on your firearm when it can be fired, things like that are considered unsafe and show a red color in that condition.

Now back to Google Meet. It was my first day back from a vacation, and it was my first meeting using Google Meet that day, so I was out of practice and my actions on the laptop were not back in habit yet. I wanted to be on mute, I saw the mute button was red, so I clicked it to make it not red, then I started talking to Some Wife (I think asking her what her sister-in-law called about) because it wasn’t my part of the meeting.

To me, an introvert, the unsafe mode of an online meeting is when my voice is being broadcast to everyone. Since red means unsafe, red to me means unmute. Not red should mean mute, because mute is safe.

But to the designers of that button or user interface, unsafe must mean no one can hear them, or whatever it is that extroverts want. Because when I clicked the mute button to make it safe, I actually unmuted myself and then everyone could hear me. I was glad other people had the option to mute me, which they did before too long.

On a related note, I’m glad for the programs that put a red border around your screen when you are sharing your screen to the meeting. That is unsafe too.

We have reached the end of the track season here, and one of the later meets reminded me of something that I feel like posting today. On certain events – I think this one was the 4×800 relay – the first 1.25 laps will have the runners stay in their lanes, but then on the back straightaway they are allowed to move over to lane 1. And there is usually an official standing at that point to both make sure people don’t cut over too early and also to remind them to cut over.

My experience as someone who understood math was that I did not cut over very quickly. And that frustrated the official, who thought I didn’t hear him yelling “Cut over!”, so he yelled more and louder at me.

Even all these years later, not many high school kids realize how much extra they are running. They just know that lane 1 is the shortest lane and thus they want to get to it as soon as they can.

It looks like this (not to scale, wrong number of lanes, other disclaimers):

The yellow star is where most runners aim to get, and the blue star is where I was aiming to get, and the green line is the start of the back stretch when runners could leave their lanes.

And now I’m going to add some geometry.

As you see, the distance I ran was line segment A, and other runners were choosing B+C.

Now let’s put some numbers in.

It doesn’t look like it, but the yellow dashed line is supposed to be a 45 degree angle. A standard high school track has 8 lanes of 42 inches each, so segment D is 28 feet

D² + D² = 1568, the square root of which is 39.6, so C = 39.6 feet.

Segment B is going to be 100 meters – 28 feet, so we end up with 300 feet.

Now for segment A. The Pythagorean theorem only works with right triangles, so this one is a little trickier. It’s also not enough just to know two length, we need an angle also.

Since I made angle CD to be 45, I know that BC is 135. So now we’re stuck using the Law of Cosines. I was hoping it would be easier, but that’s what I got.

A² = B² + C² – 2BC cos(A)
A = sqrt(90000 + 784 – 2*8400*cos(135))
A = 320 feet

So I would run 320 feet, and the opposition would run 339.6 feet, so I would get an advantage of 19.6 feet.

Your mileage may vary, especially if you’re not always in lane 8. And yes, it should be 7 lanes of width because no one runs on the outside of the lane so the 42 inches of lane 8 should be discounted. I’ll let you run the math on what the more appropriate number is. Just consider the 19.6 as the highest value it could be. Also, the opposition was not also in lane 8 with me, so no their distance would not be from the same point I was, as shown on the diagram (for illustrative purposes only).

I wish I would have started working on cars earlier in life – it would have saved me a bunch of money. Here are some things I’ve learned over the last few years of working on my own cars.

• The speedometer in our 2007 Cadillac stopped working. A bit of internet searching revealed that the motor for the speedometer needle is known to go bad. So I ordered a replacement dash gauge from Ebay, and while I was waiting for it to arrive I noticed the mileage on the odometer wasn’t increasing either. I actually looked around the car then and found some mice had chewed up some wires. I spliced them back together and the speedometer and odometer started working again.
• Also in that Cadillac, the right rear brake caliper was locked up – that brake was always noticeable hotter than the others after a drive. I installed a replacement caliper and it still had the problem. It turns out the cause was a bad brake hose leading to the caliper. A little bit of extra investigation before installing parts can save extra work and part costs.
• The old minivan (2012 Chrysler Town and Country) was a little wobbly, so I went to replace the back shocks. The bolts for those shocks are not very user-friendly, especially the upper bolt and especially after 8 salty winters. I gave up on the shock bolt and ended up unbolting the shock bracket from the frame. That’s 4 bolts instead of one, but they’re more accessible. The problem was that one bolt snapped off rather than move, but I reinstalled it with 3 bolts and figured that was good enough. Then I went to do the other side and only one bolt came out and 3 snapped off. We drove that van with one shock missing for a few months and then ended up junking it due to other problems.
• For that generation of minivan, if the dashboard display “Key in ignition” when the key is not in the ignition, the problem is the TIPM not the WIN module. I bought a WIN (several hundred dollars), installed it, still had the problem, but was able to return the WIN and get my money back (minus a restocking fee).
• A couple years back, I bought a pressure bleeder for the brakes, but I was using it wrong. I finally figured out it’s a lot less messy and quicker too, to not put brake fluid in the bleeder. I think you’re supposed to do that, to keep the master cylinder filled with fluid. But now I just top off the reservoir, then attach the pressure bleeder and just pump it full of air, run the brake bleeds while checking on the reservoir, and if it’s running low on fluid I start over, without spilling brake fluid out of the hose because all it has is air.

Here are some thoughts I jotted down that aren’t quite sufficient for their own individual blog posts. If you’re the type of person who likes Twitter, pretend each of these is a tweet.

• A bird in the hand is no longer worth two in the bush. I checked, and a bird in the hand is now worth 32 birds in the bush. The phrase is a few hundred years old, so it should be adjusted for today’s cost of living.
• It seems to me there is a penny-wise/pound-foolish mentality for people who refuse to eat any GMO food but then go ahead and inject a GMO Covid shot into their body. As far as I can tell, neither one will modify your own genetics.
• What is the correct past tense of the phase “you snooze, you lose” – you snoozed you losed, or you snost you lost?
• I would love to be the receptionist at the doctor’s or dentist’s office (or any other place that still asks Covid-screening questions), because I would throw on at the end “Did you pack your own bags and have they been with you the entire time?”. One, it would check if people are paying attention or if they’re just answering “no, no, no” to the Covid questions (like I usually do), and two, it would highlight the ineffectiveness of that class of questions. I might as well say to the person “If you say ‘no’ then you get to enter here, if you say ‘yes’ then you don’t. What would you like to say?”
• It seems to be a habit of some people to have a list of potential band names. I have no plans to start a band, but my favorite potential band name is “St. Vincent and the Grenadines”.

In the last week or so, we had the announcement of the 2022 NFL schedule. Now that we know who will play whom and when, we can start predicting wins and losses.

I keep my predictions over at Some Fun Site. View results of previous football seasons.

2021 Summary

Last year, I predicted that

• Cleveland Browns = 9-8
• Washington Team = 11-6

How they actually did was

• Cleveland Browns = 8-9
• Washington Team = 7-10

Browns was close, Washington was not. Record prediction is not very reliable

Read the rest of this entry »

Subtitle: in which I improve the government’s records

Allow me to introduce to you the 2021 SFS List of Baby Names that Combine Similar Pronunciations. That baby name list is the place to go in case you are wondering what are the most popular baby names in 2021 regardless of how they are spelled. The Social Security baby name list does not adjust the rankings based on alternate spellings (like Catherine/Katherine), but SFS does.

It was just Mother’s Day, so the SSA released the name rankings for 2021. Last year’s champion, Jackson has finally be de-throned as the most popular boy’s name in the US. After 7 years at the top of the leaderboard, it was surpassed by Liam. Liam had been gaining on Jackson for a few years, but what really happened is that Jackson lost a big chunk, rather than Liam gaining a big chunk.
No controversy for the girls – it’s Sophia again, and by a similar margin as last year.

Some Stats

• In the top 9 names for the boys, 1 and 2 switched spots, 5 and 6 switched spots, and 8 and 9 switched spots.
• The top 8 names for the girls are the same as 2019, and in much the same order. The only difference is that Charlotte moved up 2 spots.
• Again, Liam has the title of the highest-ranked boy’s name that has no spelling variations, at number 1.
• Again, Emma is the highest-ranked girl’s name that has no spelling variations, at number 3.
• Girl names still have more spelling variations than boy names (258/1000 vs. 176/1000 alternates)
• Kayson once again took the prize for the most spelling variations for the boys at 8.
• For the girls, Adaline has the sole lead for the most spelling variations at 6.

2021 Improved Baby Name List

Click on the link above and peruse to your heart’s content!