Notes From All Over, Part 1 -- January 27, 2020

Re-writing "blackface"? Maybe it's just me but the 30-minute TCM short on "blackface" that aired last night (January 26, 2020) seems to be re-writing history, now that more and more politicians have been exposed. One narrator suggested "blackface" was America's first original art form. [I can't make that up.] The segment seemed to note that it was okay as long as it was folks like Bing Crosby ("Holiday Inn") and Fred Astaire ("Bojangles") doing blackface. No mention was made in the TCM segment of recent Virginia leadership in blackface which they have admitted is accurate. I saw the segment for the first time last night and generally I don't miss much on TCM suggesting this is new. The timing of the segment is interesting.

Wavelets: from The WSJ -- mathematics pioneer Ingrid Caubechies has more barriers to break. Best known for her work on "wavelets," she wants to reduce the obstacles to women entering the sciences. Paywall.

Ingrid Daubechies is a woman of formidable firsts: the first tenured female professor of mathematics at Princeton University (1994), the first woman to receive the National Academy of Sciences Award in Mathematics (2000) and the first woman elected president of the International Mathematical Union (2011).

Dr. Daubechies, 65, was born in Houthalen, Belgium. Her mother was a homemaker, her father a mining engineer in the local coal mines.

She earned her Ph.D. in theoretical physics at the Free University of Brussels and continued to conduct research there until 1987, when she joined Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. That year, she also married Robert Calderbank, an American mathematician, with whom she has two children. 

Dr. Daubechies is best known for her work on mathematical structures called wavelets; her discoveries have been so influential, in fact, that these are referred to in the field as Daubechies wavelets. She describes them as “mathematical building blocks” that can be used to extract the essential elements of images or signals without losing their quality—in effect, a new universal language for scientists and researchers. 

Blogging? I may or may not do much blogging on non-Bakken news this week -- until some of the craziness dissipates. I may not even report Apple's earnings tomorrow afternoon.

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The Book Page

John Hands' Cosmo Sapiens:  Human Evolution from the Origin of the Universe, c. 2015, should be read by every high school junior/senior who plans to major in biology, chemistry, or physics. He covers a lot of ground.

As hard as he tries, he simply cannot avoid metaphysics and Intelligent Design, and/or intelligent design (the upper-case letters are very, very important).

Concepts that the author notes (some of which the author brings up several times):

• the most complex molecules found in interstellar space and on asteroids are but 13 atoms in size;
• a single amino acid has 9 atoms plus an "R" group, the latter unique, and containing upwards of another dozen or more atoms, including cyclic side chains;
• the incredibly difficult-to-explain peptide bond (connecting two amino acids) and the crux of life;
• classical thermodynamics is inadequate to explain origin of life; quantum mechanics is being invoked to cross that chasm but so far is also inadequate;
• the unique characteristics of the carbon atom;
• the unique characteristics of H20, and hydrogen bonds;
• the uniqueness of the moon-Earth duality;
• how the Pauli Exclusion Principle explains 118 elements of the periodic table; without that exclusion principle, an inconceivably vast array of possibilities exist;
• the surface temperature of the earth is determined by no less than five physical entities; CO2 accounts for 0.003 percent of the Earth's atmosphere (p. 180);

Eyesore? Firefly.com.  Parked outside social-media chat room near DFW.

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Free Market Capitalism

On the corner near our little hovel are two gas stations, across the street from each other, a Murphy service station and a Shell service station, neither with an EV charging unit.

For the longest time, the Murphy station location was occupied by an ExxonMobil station. Both the XOM station and the Shell station had some of the highest prices for gasoline in the immediate area, often 20 to 30 cents / gallon more expensive for least expensive grade.

Murphy came in, replaced XOM. Murphy is a low-cost, discount outlet. Besides being a most modern, state-of-the art facility, the Murphy station on our corner now has the least expensive gasoline in the area. When it went into service, the price for regular gasoline was twenty cents/gallon less expensive than Shell across the street.

Shell hung in there for several months without bringing down the price of their gasoline but it appears over the weekend, Shell finally threw in the towel. This morning I noted that Murphy was selling their regular gasoline for $1.979/gallon. To my surprise, across the street, BP was selling its regular gasoline for $1.989 -- one penny/gallon higher. Without Murphy across the street, my hunch is that the price of gasoline in our area would have remained twenty cents higher, closer to $2.20, than $1.90. Meanwhile, on another note, google doofus-in-chief milliondollarway.