cement homeless

kein Brandenburg für alte Männer!

As I had to make a day round-trip drive to Luxembourg last week, I grabbed a couple baroque CD boxes, including the one above with the complete Brandenburg concertos, that I had not opened for a long while. In such a long while that the foam protection had started to disintegrate, as I found when I opened the case! Anyway, I managed to clean the stuff away well enough to listen to the CDs (while staying on the mostly deserted road), which reminded me of a concert at the 92Y in New York City, 1988, where the orchestra (I cannot remember which chamber music group was playing) played the entire series. Listening to these pieces was most pleasant, except for the harpsichord parts in the 5th concerto, as I realised I could no longer hear clearly enough the harpsichord against the noise from the car…

cyclic riddle [not in NYC!]

In the riddle of this week on fivethirtyeight, the question is to find the average number of rounds when playing the following game: P=6 players sitting in a circle each have B=3 coins and with probability 3⁻¹ they give one coin to their right or left side neighbour, or dump the coin to the centre. The game ends when all coins are in the centre. Coding this experiment in R is rather easy

situz=rep(B,P)
r=1
while (max(situz)>0){
 unz=runif(P)
 newz=situz-(situz>0)
 for (i in (1:P)[unz<1/3]) 
  newz[i%%P+1]=newz[i%%P+1]+(situz[i]>0)
 for (i in (1:P)[unz>2/3])
  newz[i-1+P*(i==1)]=newz[i-1+P*(i==1)]+(situz[i]>0)
 situz=newz
 r=r+1}

resulting in an average of 15.58, but I cannot figure out (quickly enough) an analytic approach to the problem. (The fit above is to a Gamma(â-1,ĝ) distribution.)

In a completely unrelated aparté (aside), I read earlier this week that New York City had prohibited the use of electric bikes. I was unsure of what this meant (prohibited on sidewalks? expressways? metro carriages?) so rechecked and found that electric bikes are simply not allowed for use anywhere in New York City. Because of the potential for “reckless driving”. The target is apparently the high number of delivery e-bikes, but this ban sounds so absurd that I cannot understand it passed. Especially when De Blasio has committed the city to the Paris climate agreement after Trump moronically dumped it… Banning the cars would sound much more in tune with this commitment! (A further aparté is that I strongly dislike e-bikes, running on nuclear power plants,  especially when they pass me on sharp hills!, but they are clearly a lesser evil when compared with mopeds and cars.)

New York City Marathon snapshot

hold your breath for a few more hours…

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair…, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way…” Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

New York solidaire [guest picture]

Saffron and Brimstone [book review]

I cannot really remember how I came across this book, when selecting Amazon (free) books to collect from Andrew on my last trip to New York… (Thanks to ‘Og readers!) Presumably the name popped out of a list of recommended books. The cover was intriguing enough to stop by and to spot that the author was Elizabeth Hand, whose horror/fantasy trilogy I had liked very much in the late 80’s… So I ordered the book and brought it back from New York. Only to realise that this was an altogether different Elizabeth Hand, whose book Available Dark I had read a little while ago. And did not like so much. However, since the book is a collection of short and less short stories, I gave it a try.

As it happens, this Saffron and Brimstone truly is a great collection of short stories, fantastic in a completely different frame than those of the fantasy books I usually review here. It is a fantastic that borders reality, sometimes hardly fantastic, but with a constant feeling of something being not fully natural, not completely normal. The subtitle of “strange stories” is quite pertinent, as the feeling of strangeness hits the reader (or this reader) almost instantaneously from the beginning of each story. I enjoyed all of the eight stories for different reasons, from a reminiscence of an “Alfred Hitchcock presents” short story called the Cocoon that terrified me [as a pre-teen] when I read it late at night!, to variations around Greek myths that brings them beautifully into the modern era. And always with a central female character who brings another degree of strangeness and surreality to the tale.  I do not think it matters the least that those novels are or are not fantasy or fantastic. They are simply gems of contemporary literature. Superb. (Which makes the rather unexceptional Available Dark the more inexplicable!)