Commence!

Tonight the local high school was finally able to hold its commencement for the graduating class of 2020. The young lady who earned the valedictorian honors gave a pretty good speech and the superintendent said some encouraging words to the recent graduates, so it was overall a nice ceremony.

Often I share the opinion that a high school diploma is thought to mean quite a bit more than it does mean and is held in a little higher esteem than it should be. Ideally it's the first achievement in a person's life rather than the high point. But tonight we'll set that idea aside. The young people lost their spring sports, their prom, their awards assemblies and the like. But they got to have their moment, when they moved the tassel and tossed that weird hat in the air and celebrated what, this year more than any, they had slogged their way through.

Good job, grads.

Once Upon a Time...

Much of the time I think Quentin Tarantino is a twerp, and it's tough to forgive him for bringing Eli Roth into contact with people who let him make movies, but every now and again he does something right. QT will not recut his recent Once Upon a Time in Hollywood release to meet Chinese censorship demands that his movie be nicer to Bruce Lee.

This means Hollywood probably won't show in Chinese theaters and Chinese fans will see pirated versions if they see any at all. Let's hope someone emails this story to Steve Kerr.

Good Start

Major League Baseball's new labor agreement removes one of Bud Selig's dumb innovations -- giving the league which wins the All-Star game the home-field advantage in the World Series. But rather than go back to the old alternating American League-National League patterns, home-field will be awarded to the pennant winning team with the best regular season record.

Granted, the frequency of interleague play has removed a lot of the spectacle of the All-Star game. And since players may play for four or five different teams in their careers, the matchups of seeing the best stars of the game take on the other best stars of the game isn't as unprecedented as it has been before.

But tying home-field to the mid-season break winner was a panic-button move brought on by Selig after he ignored a basic law of professional baseball -- no ties, ever -- and allowed the 2002 All-Star game to end just that way. So its demise is no great loss.

Now if they could just close the Hellmouth under Yankee Stadium...

Nobel Prize with Lox and Cream Cheese

When announcing the three men who one the Nobel Physics Prize for 2016, a committe member illustrated an aspect of their work using a cinnamon bun, a bagel and a Swedish pretzel.

I've still got to do some more reading on what the three men -- David Thouless, Duncan Haldane and Michael Kosterlitz -- actually did that won them the prize. It deals with weird states of matter that exist at temperature and pressure extremes and also questions of what physicists and mathematicians call "topology," or the shapes of things and how they relate.

There's no intermediate state between the three snacks that the committee member was talking about, at least in topological terms. The cinnamon bun has no holes, while the bagel has one and the Swedish pretzel has two. There's no "in between" state for the three, where one of them would have 1.5 holes or something like that. That sounds weird, but as a post here at the first of the year noted, topology is kind of a weird discipline.

In any event, it seems like a pretty safe bet that the Nobel Physics committee will win the contest of prize announcements, especially if they brought enough bagels for everybody. On an unrelated note, I am fairly sure I am not the only person who saw Dr. Haldane's picture in the Reuters story and thought he looked like David Crosby.

Redemption Draweth Nigh?

The Major League Baseball Hall of Fame has made a decision that could allow it to once again be worthy of the name, reorganizing its veterans committees and re-opening the door to Negro Leagues players after shutting it in 2006.

The Sporting News article notes that the changes could help ease the logjam for players who have had Hall-eligible carers but who have been sidetracked by the vagaries of voting by the Baseball Writers Association of America. It could also help pave the way for players caught in the Steroid Era who chemically enhanced their performance during years when that was not yet illegal.

As to those possibilities, whatever. The world turns as it always has whether Cooperstown features Alan Trammell's features on a plaque or not. Ballplayers have always sought an edge, and the reality that a needle should feature as prominently as a bat on a Barry Bonds or Mark McGwire display doesn't change that what they did was mostly legal when they did it. BBWAA members can vote them down if they want to, but making sure that the system gives them their chance is a good idea.

But as has been noted before, a special Hall of Fame committee set up in 2006 to take care of remaining Hall-worthy Negro Leagues players exhibited truly adamantine dumbitude by leaving out John Jordan "Buck" O'Neil, about two years before O'Neil's death. The special committees had been necessary because the segregation of baseball by race had left too many great players shining on a less visible stage. Everybody knew how great Babe Ruth was. But not nearly so many knew how great Josh Gibson was, so extra effort was needed to research Gibson and top players like him so they could receive the recognition they deserved.

O'Neil himself didn't consider his stats Hall-of-Fame worthy. As this otherwise kind of corny column in the Kansas City Star notes, he carried his list of Cooperstown-caliber-but-overlooked Negro Leagues players in his wallet. He didn't list himself. But his contributions towards getting the biggest stars some of the attention they deserved and highlighting the untold story of Negro Leagues baseball are without peer. The committee that overlooked him did so to its eternal shame, especially since it was supposed to make the last recommendations from that era and then consider the case closed.

But by including Negro Leagues players in its new "Early Committee," the Hall now allows for the possibility that the face of Buck O'Neil could smile out at Cooperstown visitors sometime after 2020, when that committee first meets. And that's the kind of fame that can cross out a whole lot of chemically-enhanced infamy.

More Different Follow-Up

Secret Service Director Joe Clancy seems to have some awareness of the optics of the idea of using armed uniformed police officers to move kids with cancer out of a park where they're holding a candlelight vigil to raise money to stay alive.

Rather than the bloodless e-mail "regrets the miscommunication" response available to reporters last night, Clancy called one of the directors of the vigil's sponsoring organization and apologized for the treatment. He offered to come to a meeting and apologize in person and to give tours of the training facility to the kids the organization helps if they would like them. Another spokesperson confirmed the service would review its closing and notification procedures.

Someone somewhere deep within the bowels of the White House bureaucracy still deserves a stern talking-to, but at least we have learned that the Secret Service is led by an actual human being.

Extra Research Necessary?

Dr. Caleb M. Brown, a researcher at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Alberta, Canada, had two goals in one of his most recent papers.

One was to detail the discovery of Regaliceratops peterhewsi, a new species of dinosaur that resembles the well-known Triceratops but has smaller horns over its eyes, a larger one at its nose and a much more elaborate bony plate behind its head.

The other was to propose. The closing sentence of the acknowledgements section, in which writers usually offer their thanks to people who aided in research and preparing a paper, was a personal thanks to Lorna O'Brian, Brown's girlfriend, and a proposal. The publisher knew about the note and had no problem with it, and the entire event seems to have come to a happy conclusion as Ms. O'Brian said yes upon viewing a preprint of the article.

Scientific papers are usually subjected to a process called peer review, in which other scientists in the same field check the work of those who write the paper. They may or may not agree with conclusions reached by the authors, but their goal is just making sure that experimental data weren't fudged or someone did something silly like say 2+2=5 or something. There is no word on whether or not Dr. Brown's proposal was so reviewed, but with her agreement Ms. O'Brian offered the opinion of the one peer who mattered the most and it seems a retraction will not be necessary.

Test of Time

What I like best about this story of a 102-year-old woman earning the Ph. D. originally denied her by the Nazis in 1938 is not that she was simply awarded the degree she should have been in 1938. It's that she defended her original thesis successfully and earned the degree.

Ingeborg Syllm-Rapoport produced a thesis on diptheria when she was a medical student at the University of Hamburg. But since her mother was Jewish, the Nazis denied her entrance to the oral defense portion of the degree requirements and the university did not award the degree. Dr. Syllm-Rapaport emigrated to the United States and began practicing medicine but returned to Germany with her husband following the war. She retired as a full professor of pediatrics and director of the Neonatology Department at a top Berlin hospital.

I imagine no one would have been scandalized if the University of Hamburg had simply awarded her the degree that the Nazis had denied her the chance to earn. But the good doctor did not settle for that and sat for the thesis exam just as she would have 77 years ago, and she passed.

In a way, this is a much more powerful statement to the ideas Nazism espoused about racial inferiorities and the like than it would have been if the university had just decided she should get the degree. The Nazis claimed that having a Jewish mother disqualified Dr. Syllm-Rapaport from earning a Ph. D, but she demonstrated that she was not only qualified then, she still is. The only way the Nazi ideal could win against her was to cheat, which it did. But the victory was only temporary, and the Nazis were wrong.

Of course, they should be used to that by now.

You Go, Girl!

I don't always like what President Obama does or what he and his wife say, even though I applaud them for their work in shielding their girls from media stuff.

But this? Awesome. The only thing better would have been if she'd gotten in the front seat of the limo and said, "I'll drive."

Not Boring

I get bored, and I maybe go work out, or I find a book, or I hunt up random websites, or if desperate, I will do laundry.

You get bored, and it's probably similar, although you may trade out other activities for mine.

Evan Kuester gets bored, and he 3-D prints a hand.

As the story at the link notes, Kuester says ideally the hand would work like a regular one, responding to commands from the brain and grasping things and such, but his version doesn't. It's limited, he says, by technology. Not for long, I bet, if he's got any counterparts in the science and engineering fields.

Abstract Fields

Maryam Mirzakhani of Stanford University has become the first woman and the first person of Iranian birth to win the prestigious Fields Medal in mathematics. The prize is awarded annually to mathematicians under 40 for outstanding and groundbreaking work.

Dr. Mirzakhani focuses on what are called "hyperbolic surfaces," a branch of geometry that would be described in layman's terms as "really really weird."

The normal space we live in features what we call "Euclidean geometry," named after good ol' Euclid, the fellow who codified some of the basic features of the way spaces, lines and points relate to each other. One of his postulates is that if you have a line, and a point not on that line, you can only draw one line through that point that is parallel to your first line. That means the two lines stay the same distance apart forever in either direction.

If you tweak the parallel postulate, you can suppose different things, such as parallel lines that eventually intersect. Or, as in the case of the area in which Dr. Mirzakhani works, you suppose there is more than one line through the point that parallels your first line. Usually when you take a basic postulate and assume some different condition for it, eventually you run into a contradiction that proves your altered postulate is false.

Unfortunately for the headache-free existence of non-mathematicians, starting in the 19th century it became clear that there were several geometries that did just fine with an altered parallel postulate. The "hyperbolic geometry" that Dr. Mirzakhani studies is one such vision. This may seem like not such a big deal until you try to make your mind accept the picture of two distinct lines through a single point, both of which are parallel to a third line. There is no real-world situation analogous to this idea, which means people exploring it have to use both sight and imagination to understand what they're doing. In a manner inexplicable to those of us who feel like running an algorithmical victory lap when our checkbooks balance, mathematicians such as Dr. Mirzakhani must combine their math with art in order to understand the fantastic "space" in which they work.

That's worth a medal.

Assigning Value

Kevin Durant of the Oklahoma City Thunder won the National Basketball Association's Most Valuable Player award for 2014. In his acceptance speech, he promptly and sincerely talked about everybody but himself.

That'll do nicely.

Big Little Project

When I putter around in the garage, I may get some old moving boxes or unneeded junk cleaned up.

When Momir Bojic putters around in his garage, he creates an oaken VW Beetle.

I may lack ambition.

No Limits

You can make anything if you have enough Legos, including things that never really existed, like Rivendell of J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-Earth.

Applause

When I worked at the newspaper and we were sent to cover a meeting or perhaps a speech by someone, we had developed a kind of unofficial competition for how many times people used certain clichés. Some that were so overused as to mean almost nothing, like "re-invent the wheel," were worth more points. People who covered Chamber of Commerce-type events usually won; business folk are excellent cliché wielders.

However, designer Duncan Fitzsimmons of London actually did re-invent the wheel, or at least refine it a little bit, to make a detachable wheelchair wheel that also collapses down into a smaller space. This allows wheelchair users to enjoy the greater leverage larger wheels provide but still store the pieces of their chair in a relatively small space, such as an overhead bin in an airplane.

Looks like he was really thinking outside of the box on that one.

Smells Like Team Spirit

Take a trip with me to Bridgewater, Massachusetts, to meet some PeeWee Football players. Do not be fooled by their youth and stature, because they have already been better men in 10 years than many of their elders will ever be in a lifetime:

See the Big Picture

American artist Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada had an idea for a really big portrait. So he got a GPS system, a crew of volunteers, 2,000 tons of dirt, 2,000 tons of sand and some assorted large amounts of grass, stones, and string, and created an 11-acre picture from a photo. It's so big that it has to be seen from the air.

Of course, the developing time was about 18 months, which may make this an impractical sort of thing to do on a regular basis.

A Man Can Fly

Coinciding with the release of their 75th anniversary of Superman video, DC Comics also put together a page that annotates the different versions of the Man of Steel as seen since his debut in 1938, as well as some of the other characters seen in the short.

The neatest things are the rotoscope-looking scenes of Christopher Reeve and Henry Cavil in their respective outings. Man of Steel director Zack Snyder worked with animator Bruce Timm to create the video, and they included different theme songs that came along with the various serials and TV shows that featured the World's Greatest Superhero, woven into John Williams' scores from the 1970s movies and Han Zimmer's from 2013's. That's probably the only less-than-stellar aspect of the video -- my opinion that Zimmer's music is indistinguishable cookie-cutter especially when measured against Williams' instantly recognizable overture, is on record.

It'll Be on the Exam

One of the claims of the wired world is that its natives -- who are considerably younger than me and should reconsider their presence on my lawn -- can "multitask" or pay attention to several things at once. Usually this ends up with them paying actual attention to the thing that interests them and pretending to pay attention to the thing that doesn't.

Such as phone vs. math class.

But on Reddit, someone posted the story of a student who used a phone in class apparently one too many times, whereupon it was confiscated by the teacher. Since this was a math class, the teacher then re-set the phone passcode and gave the student a way to find it.

A math problem.

Have fun, digital boy.

Clearer View

I am reliably informed by most media outlets and many of the movies featuring them that the "millennial generation" born between 1980 and 2000 are spoiled and interested only in themselves, and that members of the different military services are either wild-eyed borderline sociopaths who slake their hunger to dominate, maim and kill by donning their country's uniform or ordinary folks whose exposure to same twists them irreversibly so that they can never fully return to or be at peace with everyday civilian society.

It seems that this picture may not be entirely correct. United States Marine Corps Lance Corporal Myles Kerr was running a race in his hometown on the eastern shores of Lake Michigan when he saw a nine-year-old boy struggling to finish. The boy had lost his group and asked Lance Corporal Kerr if he would run with him to help him finish. The Marine then sent the rest of his unit ahead and stayed behind to encourage the boy to finish the 5K run, and ran so that his own finish time was a full five seconds slower than his new partner.

Lc. Cpl. Kerr, the story notes, was bemused by the attention he has since received, and said, "I was just doing what any man would do."

Leave no one behind, indeed.

(One is advised to overlook the story's frequent references to "army fatigues" and "army friends" as mere errors born of misinformation.)