Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   anglehair of my people
Friday, August 21 2015

location: Catoctin Mountain, Frederick County, Maryland

Mornings are busy times when you're with Gretchen's family. Her father likes to make breakfast (and, since he's vegan, that never involves anything I congenitally find disgusting). For me, such times are all about finding a place where I can sit and drink my coffee without blocking traffic. Gretchen gave me a waffle her father had made, which was good until I got to one of the chocolate chips it contains. I do not like chocolate chips, especially in something I've just flavored with sriracha.
I'd brought my barometric windvane pod and Arduino Mega 2560-based weather station client, so I set all of that up on the kitchen table and proceeded to hack away at my code, adding provisions allowing me to, for example, easily change the temperature plot colors via the serial terminal (and save those settings in battery-backed RAM). A few of those present showed interest in my project, but none of them as much as my eight year-old niece. I heard somewhere that lately she's been expressing interest in maybe becoming an engineer, which would be an unexpected gender-bender if true, one that would be fun encourage.

Meanwhile, my eleven year old nephew appears to be obsessed with algebra, which his father (who is a medical doctor but who, according to Gretchen, had always wanted to be a math teacher) is delighted to teach. Today (after a lunch centered around those Blackbird Pizzas we'd brought) they spent a considerable amount of time solving math problems together, which, like microcontroller programming, is an odd thing to be doing while on vacation in the forest. Occasionally this ongoing math education would spill out into the conversation among the rest of us there sitting at the picnic table out on the deck. At some point I made a poorly-considered statement saying that the Quadratic Formula derives from the Pythagorean theorem (after all, they both have a, b and c and either squares or square roots, and I thought I'd remembered reading that somewhere). At that, my brother-in-law went and fetched some paper and showed us all step by step where the Quadratic Formula actually comes from, starting with a generic quadratic equation of the form ax2+bx+c=0. It was an impressive show; the guy would have made a great math teacher. "I hadn't thought about that stuff since eleventh grade," I said afterwards.
Later this afternoon, Gretchen's, her mother, her niece, and I all went for a walk in the nearby forest northeast of the house with the dogs. The trails were poorly marked and many trees had fallen across them, but Gretchen's mother sort of knew the way and even had names for places along the way. She'd put up orange ribbon on the trees to mark the path in some places and had also hung a number of small sculptural artifacts to serve as landmarks. At the beginning of the trail there were a large number of small Sassafras seedlings, and I gathered a few of these so later we could maybe make Sassafras tea. The forest consisted mostly of (in this order) Tuliptree, various hickories, Sugar Maple, American Beech, White Oak, Black Tupelo, White Ash, cherries, Black and/or Yellow Birch, and Northern Red Oak. There were almost no evergreens, and it was surprising to see so few oaks at this elevation (about 1660 feet above sea level). We rambled among huge sandstone (or perhaps crystalline metamorphic igneous) boulders (one of which we climbed), looking for some natural object to use as feet for tiles that Gretchen's parents wanted to make into trivets. My idea was to use short cross-sections of thin dry branches as feet, and eventually we found a number of candidate branches. The best of these seemed to be White Ash, which is perfect for use as found tool-wood, since it often dries without cracking. I noticed, by the way, that Emerald Ash Borer didn't seem to have affected the trees in this forest. (Meanwhile, in the last year or so, it's started killing a lot of White Ashes near our house in Hurley.)
Back at the cabin, Gretchen's father (who has a surprisingly well-stocked shop in the basement) used a power saw to cut segments from one of the dry branches we'd brought back. It's hard to cut them all the same length, so the strategy for making trivet legs was to make a bunch of segments, line them up from shortest to longest, and then select consecutive legs in that series for each trivet. (This approach has something in common with Survival of the Fittest in that it filters chaos to produce order.) Gretchen's brother found something to do with all the leftover segments; arrayed as a grid on a plain white tile, they looked like scaled-down pieces of sushi and formed a pleasant-looking array.
Meanwhile, I'd begun work on shaving all the Sassafras roots I'd gathered (to which the two kids had also enthusiastically contributed, to the extent their root-digging skills had allowed). Initially the parents and grandparents were horrified that the kids would cut themselves if allowed to use potato shavers on the Sassafras roots, but I supervised them and they were actually pretty careful with the sharp edges. Of course my attitude is that if you don't let kids use sharp tools at an early age, you're just post-poning the inevitable day when they accidentally cut themselves.
My niece seemed to jump at the chance for doing or making anything with her hands, and when I casually suggested that the leftover wood pulp from the Sassafras could be used to make paper, she wanted to make some right then. So we made the crappiest piece of paper in the world, using a hammer to pound some grass and sassafras into fibery mass, soaking it in water, and then spreading it out on a screen. I kept doing my best to lower my niece's expectations, but she insisted on making the thing. It ended up being more like a bird's nest than anything else. It was about half the size of a credit card and maybe ten times thicker. When we put it aside to dry, I hoped my niece would quickly forget about it.

Occasionally, when they weren't solving complicated math problems together, my brother-in-law and nephew would be in the living room working on pedagogical musical projects. They were using an electronic keyboard as a piano and it sounded great. Later I went in there to play with it and was delighted by the sensitive velocity-aware keys and the various voices it could be configured to use, particularly strings (which sounded as if I had gained control of an entire orchestra) or chorus (which sounded like I'd employed a full stage of professional singers). I hadn't played with such an ambitious keyboard since the 1980s, back when synthesizers sounded cheesy and terrible (as did, consequently, most of the music of the period). The keyboard made me want to play slow, moody film soundtrack music, which I made increasingly chromatic as I played. My sister-in-law was a little surprised by the sounds I was making, asking Gretchen why I was playing "New Age" music.

This evening we had a quick little shabbat ceremony (because it was Friday) and then dinner was served. It was centered around a purportedly Basque dish that used Mueller's angelhair pasta instead of rice. I liked it so much that when all that was left was the soupy sauce at the bottom, I mopped it up with potato bread (which Gretchen and I had eaten instead of challah; we being the only vegans present quite that strict). Tonight I found several occasions to refer to that pasta as "the angelhair of my people." Every time I did, Gretchen would roll her eyes; she considers Mueller's one of the worst of the mainstream pasta brands. Besides, she is always quick to point out, what would the Germans know about pasta? At this point I'd usually turn the conversation to "the sewer lids of my people" (Mueller being a common brand of industrial plumbing equipment), and Gretchen would concede that my people are much better at making sewer lids than pasta. Meanwhile, everyone was trying the Sassafras tea, which turned out better & stronger than I'd expected. Unfortunately, nobody seemed as into it as I was. For example, Gretchen, who hates fennel, said that it tasted sort of like licorice.

Later, we all went into the living room and watched Microcosmos, a mostly un-narrated visual documentary of the spectacular world of insects and other invertebrates. I'd seen it once before, but for some reason I'd thought it dated to the late 80s or early 90s and that I'd seen it in college. Evidently I'd seen it much more recently, as it came out in 1996. It's great family-friendly entertainment so long as one doesn't consider snail sex unsuitable for children.

I ended up staying up late working on my weather station client program, sipping sassafras tea spiked with gin (delicious!) as I worked. At this point, I was beginning work on the part of the code that would allow multi-trace plots of temperatures to be dynamically resized and paged.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?150821

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