Matt McIrvin's Freaky Alternate Reality

While I'm too averse to physical punishment to be one of these people who can ride roller coasters all day long, I am interested in them. This summer I didn't get to ride any new-to-me coasters; the last amusement park I went to for the first time was Lake Compounce last year.

Over the long weekend, though, we went to Walt Disney World in Florida. It was actually my first time there, and also, I think, Sam's (though she'd been to Disneyland in California). My childhood had been Disney-park-free, so this stuff was new to me.

WDW has four large theme parks, of which we visited three (Animal Kingdom, The Magic Kingdom, and EPCOT; we left off Hollywood Studios, the site of the Aerosmith-themed Rockin' Roller Coaster, which I'd like to ride someday). Disney's parks are not primarily about thrill rides, but Animal Kingdom and The Magic Kingdom have lavishly themed coasters of note, and EPCOT has a difficult-to-classify ride with some coaster aspects. Inevitably, I didn't ride all the ones I wanted to (which was all of them*), but I had a lot of fun.

( Some coasters and a not-coaster )

*Except Primeval Whirl at Animal Kingdom. Spinning coasters are not a thing I have ever regarded as a good idea.

Back in July, my kid and I read Tove Jansson's second Moomin book (and the first really well-known one), Comet in Moominland, as bedtime reading. At the time, I noted that, despite Jansson's reputation as a queer/feminist author, the gender roles in that early book are for the most part quite conventional: there are only two major female characters, and they function as a doting mother and a damsel-in-distress/love interest, though the latter does eventually hold her own and rescue the hero as well. Interestingly, several days ago Jed Hartman made a blog post noting the same thing.

I'd remembered at the time, though, that the number and variety of female roles multiplies later on. Recently we acquired the fourth and fifth books, Moominpapa's Memoirs and Moominsummer Madness, translated by Thomas Warburton. Jorie started in on reading Moominsummer Madness, having been intrigued by the book's central idea of an adventure in a floating theater, so I guess we're reading these very much out of sequence. (It doesn't matter much, though I suspect it's best not to start with the darker, more interior stories of the late books.)


At any rate, Moominsummer Madness, which I remember being one of my favorites of the series as a kid, is a complete delight. By this point the cast of characters has changed a bit: Sniff and the male Snork are absent without explanation, and Moomintroll is missing Snufkin, who is off voyaging somewhere. The family's hangers-on are the Mymble's Daughter and her sister, the minute and uncontrollable Little My, who can hide inside of skeins of yarn, ride in a hatband, and stare down biting insects, and likes to shout biting wisecracks and gleeful predictions of fatal disasters. Little My is one of Jansson's greatest creations, and though she only appears for the first time in the fourth volume, she becomes more and more prominent as the Moomin series goes on. Screen adaptations of the books often insert her into the earlier stories as well.

( Spoilers ensue, though again spoiler protection is not really important for these tales )

For a little while I've been poking around in some basic number theory using the Sage computer mathematics system (and a tiny bit of PARI/GP, which is another package that comes bundled inside of Sage).

I was initially inspired by a blog post of John Cook's about the Perrin numbers, a sequence sort of like the Fibonacci numbers that can be used via a simple further operation to generate what seems to be a list of prime numbers (and it in fact contains all the prime numbers, but eventually starts including some composite ones as well... starting with 271,441.)

( More on sequences and pseudoprimes... )

The main purpose of this post is to provide all of my Sage code. ( So people not interested in that can stop reading here... )

On Google+: Why e^(pi * sqrt(163)) is almost, but not quite, an integer, and how it relates to a pretty function called the Klein j-invariant. With some pictures, and bonus references to Ozma of Oz and an April Fool prank by Martin Gardner.

I am a piker compared to oonh, and there's some handwaving in the math because I don't understand it all, but I had fun playing with this.

We managed to get back through Boston yesterday without significant incident, though the train was a little late and the traffic on I-93 was bad. I was going to bed around the time last night's craziness in Cambridge and Watertown was starting to break, so I missed most of it. I'm still on vacation, and I actually live quite far from Boston up near the NH border, but obviously we won't be going in toward the city today unless the situation resolves.

So on Thursday I had the second dental impression referred to in the previous entry. This was a little more involved than I expected.

The end result of the implant process has been that there's a convenient metal adapter in my jaw, with a threaded screw hole in the middle, but also, around that, a shallower hexagonal socket that the final abutment will key into so it doesn't turn. In order to make the abutment and crown align properly with my other teeth, the lab that will make them needs an extremely precise reading of the orientation of that hexagon.

The way they got that is kind of interesting. The rough impression I had a couple of weeks ago was just to make a custom tray for this second impression, which used a much more rigid-setting, extremely vile-tasting purple material. But before taking it, the dentist unscrewed the simple healing cap that's been hand-screwed into my implant and replaced it with something called an "impression coping". This was a piece of metal with a hexagonal base that keyed into the implant, and was held in with a separate screw sort of like the final abutment will be. But instead of the support for a crown, the top of it was a vertical post with two weird bow-tie-shaped projections sticking out to the sides. The central screw holding it in was a long thing that stuck out far enough that I couldn't bite down fully.

They put in the impression coping, took an X-ray to make sure it was securely seated in there, and poked a hole in the custom goop tray so that the screw could stick right out through it. Then my dentist jammed the tray down over that with the impression goop inside, told me to bite down on his fingers holding the tray in place, and stood there for five minutes humming along with the Sixties pop on the satellite radio and pretending not to be uncomfortable with me continuously biting him.

When the impression was almost fully set, he unscrewed the long screw, then lifted the tray of hardened material off my jaw so that the coping came right along with it, with the projections at the top stuck in the impression material. The end result was an inverse image of my lower jaw with the impression coping sticking out of it, its hexagonal base registering the angular position of the hexagonal socket in my jaw.

Anyway, I thought it was interesting. The healing cap's back in now; I think the next step is to CNC-mill the metal abutment, and my next visit is to check the fit of the abutment before the crown on top gets made.

Thanks, everyone, for the kind words about Niobe.

As james_nicoll has observed, sometimes in a multi-cat household you learn surprising things about a cat only after she's gone, and in this case, it's that she was probably eating more than half of the food consumed by all three of our cats. Her thyroid troubles may have been a contributor.

(She was also a shameless thief. Just a few months ago, she managed to pull a raw pork chop entirely out of its plastic-wrapped package, which was in turn inside a grocery bag that I'd carelessly left on the kitchen floor while I was hauling more in from the car. I felt almost sorry to take it away from her; she looked so proud.)

I got They Might Be Giants' new album this morning and have listened through a couple of times. At times it seems almost like a retrospective of TMBG's many familiar styles and gimmicks: the first song, "You're On Fire," is almost a sequel to "You Probably Get That A Lot" from Join Us; later there's a political song from Flans ("Black Ops"), a wistful biographical song about a historical figure ("Tesla"), a cluster of "Fingertips"-like mini-tracks about halfway through (with a few others scattered throughout), even a song about a young nerd with a goofily portentous spoken-word bridge straight out of the Pink Album ("Circular Karate Chop"). It's fair to say they're not going out of their way to shock the fans with this stuff.

That said, John Linnell breaks some new ground here that I personally greatly enjoy: having become a master of children's music, he's starting to sing in his wry fashion about the adult experience of being a parent. "Nanobots" and "Replicant" both frame the experience in pseudo-science-fictional terms; the title track in particular is an utterly joyous piece of work that I want to listen to over and over, whereas the other suggests some of the darker possibilities.

On the flip side of parenthood, "Call You Mom" is a hilarious song about a person with serious, serious relationship issues, which is musically sort of like "Yakety Yak" collided with the Peter Gunn theme.

Flansburgh also gets a little off the beaten path with the spooky, jazzy and baffling "The Darlings of Lumberland" and the melancholy "Sometimes A Lonely Way", which I haven't quite entirely processed yet.

Our cat Niobe died today, aged about 15. She'd been increasingly frail for a while, with a thyroid on overdrive (which we tried to control with drugs) and low energy, and today it became clear that it was time for her to go.


( The life and times of SKEPTICAL CAT )

A week ago, I went back in for the latest phase in my dental implant surgery. This had been originally scheduled for tomorrow, Jan. 17, but they gave me the option to pull it back about a week; I guess a hole opened up in their schedule, and maybe I'd seemed to be recovering well from my October bone graft when they took the sutures out in November.

( Screwing things into my jaw... )