Thursday, September 20, 2018

Evicted from the dock on the bay (or in this case river)

This banner appeared above our bridge (the best bridge) today. It says "Seis Siglos de Esperanza" or "Six Centuries of Hope" on one side and "1418 Esperanza 2018" on the other side. It's clearly the 600th anniversary of something, but I haven't quite figured out what. Maybe Laura can figure it out. It's definitely religious and involves a "procesion" based on my random googling, but I'm pretty hazy on the details. That said, it's rare to be around for the 600th anniversary of anything so that's interesting. Unfortunately, the procession is next week while I'm at a conference. Laura will have to fill me in.

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In keeping with my new tradition of going to a park or somewhere outside to read, I found a bench down by the river. As I went down there, I noticed a bunch of high school aged kids on one of the many private docks along the river. I also noticed that the gated access to the dock was locked. I wondered how they managed to get in there, but not for too long, and found my bench and started to read. Not long after that, an elderly woman went up to the gate and started yelling at the kids. It was clear that they were trespassing. They sheepishly vacated the premises:


It's tough to find a good place to hang out if you're a kid.

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I got back into my hobby of making short mathy/artistic animations recently. In particular, I've been playing with a random number generator based on Perlin noise. Instead of random jumpy numbers, it provides a smooth, but randomly varying set of numbers. You can use this stream of numbers to create more organic looking animations. Here's one:


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Emily made it to Brookhaven today and is preparing/training for her all nighter tonight. With the training and the experiment, she's looking at not sleeping for about 24 hours.