99.44 Percent

Posted on March 5, 2011 by Granger Meador

Since 1882 the slogans for Ivory soap have been “It floats” and that it is “99 44/100% pure.” Regarding the latter, Harley Proctor had the soap sent out to college chemistry professors and laboratories for comparison to the popular Castile soaps of the day. One chemist’s analysis was in tabular form with the ingredients listed by percentage and Harley added up the ingredients which fell into the category of pure soap, leading to the slogan which has become so associated with the product it is now registered with the trademark office.

I thought of this the other day when someone asked me that annoying question I’ve heard all too often in my nerdy existence: “How smart are you?” There is of course no reasonable answer to the inquiry, although I’m tempted to snap back with, “Smarter than you.” Thankfully I’m too polite to do that. But I find the question both annoying and embarrassing. Perhaps I should answer, “99 44/100%” since that was my percentile ranking on the Wechsler test I took in college as part of a paid psychology experiment, as well as on the simplistic IQ tests I took in grade school. My IQ score may be higher than 99.44% of the population, but while I approach three standard deviations above the mean IQ score, I’d hardly call myself a genius, and I’m not about to join Mensa!

The question, “How smart are you?” is annoying because it is absurdly simplistic to quantify intelligence as a numerical value. The eminent Stephen Jay Gould despised IQ scores, criticizing in The Mismeasure of Man their development and use, charging they reflect two major fallacies: reification, or, “our tendency to convert abstract concepts into entities” and ranking, our “propensity for ordering complex variation as a gradual ascending scale.” And most school teachers have suffered through trainings about Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, the gist of which is that traditional IQ tests measure mostly logical and linguistic intelligence, overlooking many other types. The specifics bore me, but the theory is popular, although its specifics debatable.

I’m very good at school work and always had top grades, and the correlation between IQ scores and grades is about 0.50. But that leaves a lot of room for other factors. My good grades also reflected my persistence and motivation. Since I teach physics, people naturally assume I’m a math whiz. But while I loved geometry, I hated algebra and had to work hard at it throughout junior high and high school. I was on my high school’s math bowl team, yet I barely earned my A in high school calculus, and while I followed the math sequence in college all of the way through calculus and ordinary and partial differential equations, earning A’s all the way along, it never came naturally to me. But now I use plenty of algebra successfully every working day.

So am I “smart” in math? It depends on what you mean. I’d say I’m much “smarter” at language arts than mathematics, yet I still commit punctuation and grammatical errors. An example of the kind of things which worry me: I ended my opening sentence for this post with “pure.” to follow American English, but greatly prefer “pure”. as per British practice. I’m an Anglophile with regard to British mathematical notation and some spellings and the like. But I digress…

Sometimes people conflate the remembrance and retrieval of trivial knowledge with intelligence. Many are fascinated that IBM’s Watson defeated the human champions on Jeopardy, and students often infer I must be great at that game. But I know so little about so much that it asks about, e.g. sports, opera, and alcoholic drinks…er, potent potables, that I doubt I’d do all that well. And what does it mean to be “book smart” when IQ exerts a causal influence on future academic achievement, whereas academic achievement does not substantially influence future IQ scores?

Finally, I find being asked for my IQ score or ACT or SAT scores to be embarrassing. They were all good enough – good enough to get me into the gifted and talented program in elementary school and good enough to make me a National Merit Scholar and receive other scholarships for college. But if the roughly 1000 people at my school are normally distributed, there are a handful with higher IQs, and I can tell I’ve taught students whose IQ, SAT, and ACT scores beat mine. I’m confident every student in my classroom is better than I am in some important way. Some of them are certainly “better people” than I if you go by empathy, personality, physical attractiveness, athletic ability, or a zillion other things.

So I’d say my 99.44% rank is little more than a marketing slogan. And while I can float, I have to work at it.

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Bushwhacking in Charon’s Garden

Posted on February 27, 2011 by Granger Meador

Elk Mountain & Charon's Garden (click image for slideshow)

The forecast for Saturday, February 26 was irresistible: low 70s and partly cloudy in southwestern Oklahoma. After the heavy snowstorms of January and February, I’d managed to start mapping trail lengths in Osage Hills, but I wanted to go on a sunny hike which would really make me sweat. So I set my sights on two large trails in the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge I had yet to complete: Elk Mountain and the northern half of Charon’s Garden.

I left Bartlesville Friday night for Oklahoma City for an evening with my parents, spent doing the usual technical support on their computer equipment. The next morning Dad treated me to breakfast at Jim’s on the west end of Bethany along old route 66, and then I headed southwest down the H.E. Bailey turnpike. Turning off at Medicine Park, I drove past Mount Scott, which was still enshrouded in fog. The morning had been overcast, but just after I passed Mount Scott the sun broke through the cloud deck for the first time, promising a better day to come. I drove west across the refuge to the Sunset Area, site of two different CCC camps back in the 1930s.

The parking lots were already filling up with eager hikers and fewer family picnickers. I took a bridge across Sunset Pool along Headquarters Creek to first take the Elk Mountain Trail, which arcs around southeast to climb the northeast side of the mountain with plenty of side “social” trails and stone steps.

Just a short ways up the mountain the view was already quite charming with the skies rapidly clearing. The granite shoulders of the mountain were popping out through its covering of blackjack oaks and cedars. The CCC boys had laid broad granite steps leading up through the brush and winding about its northeast flank, devolving into a jumble of large tilted stones.

The summit was crisscrossed with trails and a broad range of hikers, from teenagers to pensioners, milled about, including a soldier from nearby Ft. Sill. I walked westward along the southern edge of the summit, looking across the chasm of Post Oak Creek far below over to Twin Rocks Mountain to the west. Granite outcroppings rose amongst cedars, including a prominent stone resembling a conning tower. I clambered over atop some long folds of granite for a view back eastward, then returned to the peak of the summit, as designated by a survey marker, for a panoramic view eastward over French Lake towards Mount Scott.

Using my camera’s 12x zoom I could see the dam at French Lake and the first of the fish lakes downstream, beside which I had hiked in late December. I glanced north and then descended the mountain, deviating onto a narrow “social” trail which wound its way down to the western end of the Sunset picnic area, where I inadvertently startled a couple who were chatting in what must have seemed an isolated spot until I emerged from the brush.

Here’s my photo track up and down Elk Mountain at EveryTrail.
Today I would deviate significantly from the main trails, since they are unmarked. When you compare my actual path (in yellow) up and down Elk Mountain to the schematic map at that trailhead, you can see how I managed to turn a 2 mile round trip into a 3.1 mile excursion. Next came Charon’s Garden Wilderness, which Quincy Amen and I hiked partway up from the south back in November. This time I’d make it all of the way, although my deviations (in red) turned the 4 mile round trip through into a 6.2 mile trek.

I soon reached the north trailhead for the Charon’s Garden Wildnerness. The dirt trail shot westward, paralleling Headquarters Creek for quite a ways until it reached sandy Post Oak Creek. I had forgotten to bring along my trail guide from Oklahoma Day Hikes and also failed to read it in advance, so instead of turning south along the creek, I ventured on west down an obvious dirt trail.

The trail eventually turned southwest toward Twin Rocks Mountain, although I shot the landmarks without knowing they were eponymous. I paused to eat a turkey sandwich for a late lunch, surrounded by granite peaks.

Setting off again, my trail began rapidly diminishing into a buffalo track and there were frequent echoing gunshots from Charon’s Garden Mountain to the southwest. When the track turned westward again, I knew I was way off track – later I’d discover I was 0.7 miles west of the proper path.

So I retraced my steps and then headed southeast toward what I presumed, correctly, was the ravine of Post Oak Creek. Eventually I reached a nice overlook of Post Oak Creek, with Elk Mountain and its landmark Apple and Pear stones to the east. Below I spied several young men noisily traversing the main trail, but reaching them was no easy task. I followed animal trails, but the animals who forged them kept shrinking until I was ducking and scrambling through tree limbs and brush – a true bushwhack. I finally emerged onto the main trail with several long scratches along my hands and forearms.

The party I’d spotted turned out to be a major leading an ROTC troop. As they clambered up a hillside, I overheard them remarking about a strong odor. I doubted my tortuous bushwhack had made my that smelly, but years of bloody noses in my youth left it so scarred my sense of smell is quite weak. So I shrugged and march onward. The mystery was solved when I passed this spot on my northward return journey and spotted a rotting carcass in the creek. Downwind the smell was intense enough even I could smell it.

Soon I recognized I was back on the creekside trail Quincy and I had traversed in November. A couple of ladies were also struggling southward along the confusing trails with me. So I stopped at a pool and, when they came along, offered them directions about how to proceed south to Treasure Lake. I passed the markers at the south trailhead and ventured over to the shore of Post Oak Lake for a snack.

I decided to take a high trail to the west to begin my return journey. From up high there was a nice view of Elk Mountain’s south slope and Treasure Lake. Soon I spotted the ROTC troop exiting a cleft to the east, where a small waterfall was visible. I walked back down to and crossed the creek, making my way up into the cleft to the waterfall.

A tree grew beside a pool created by the waterfall’s flow through a rock cleft. Scrambling up a rocky slope, I was able to get a close-up shot, and look back out of the cleft toward Post Oak Creek. I followed a trail along the east side of the creek toward Elk Mountain. The sky was quite beautiful as the afternoon waned, and up ahead giant boulders stood across my path with the Apple and Pear looming overhead, although they did not resemble fruit from this angle.

Soon I reached this field of massive boulders, the south edge marked by an enormous stone looming above me. Scrambling around and then atop the boulders, I paused for a breather and snapped a self-portrait with the Apple and Pear behind me. Leaving those landmarks behind, the rough trail then led across a massive boulder pile and I cautiously slid my way across. A solo hiker fell in between two of these giants and perished in 1992, so I knew I had to proceed cautiously. After crossing, I took a shot of the treacherous path I had followed.

Eventually I reached the sandy headwater of Post Oak Creek, where I’d mistakenly headed westward a few hours earlier. I returned to the Sunset Area down in the bed of Headquarters Creek and soon reached the end of Sunset Pool. I’d completed 9.4 miles and headed back to Oklahoma City for a much-needed shower and some Chinese take-out with the folks.

Here’s my loop about the Charon’s Garden Wilderness at EveryTrail.

Click here for a slideshow of this day hike

Posted in day hike, photos, travel | 1 Comment

Padding About

Posted on February 19, 2011 by Granger Meador

At home with my iPad

I love my iPad, which I purchased in early May. So what lessons have I learned after using the iPad for nine months?

  • Save money on memory. Unsure of how I would use this trend-setting device, I bought the top-of-the line model with 64 GB of storage and both WiFi and 3G connectivity. Looking at my iPad this morning, it shows I have used:
    • 42.2 GB for audio
    • 4.4 GB for applications
    • 4 GB for video
    • 0.47 GB for “other”
    • 0.13 GB for photos
    • 0.02 GB for books

    So at first glance it would appear I chose wisely on memory capacity. However, I almost never listen to audio on my iPad, instead relying upon my Apple TV at home and my iPhone 4 on the road. So I could have saved $200 and done just fine with 16 GB of memory on the iPad. I also rarely watch video on it, although sometimes I’ll have a video podcast running as I wander around the house. Things might be quite different if I did not have an original Apple TV, but I do, and music and video are far better on my big HDTV and surround sound system than on any portable device.

  • 3G is nice to have. I have gone back and forth on using the iPad’s 3G connection. You only have to sign up for 3G service on a monthly basis, although AT&T is greedy and automatically renews the service each month unless you remember to cancel it before the renewal date. I’ve gone without the 3G service a few times since I was just using the iPad around the house, where WiFi is available and faster. But on the road I find WiFi hot spots are too rare to be of much use. Few restaurants in Oklahoma have WiFi and hotels are very unreliable about extending WiFi beyond their lobbies. And it is most frustrating to use the iPad with no active internet connection – you can read a book just fine and view articles you’ve already saved in InstaPaper, but you miss the web right away. And while I can make do with the iPhone’s browser, the iPad is a far more comfortable read for a guy in his 40s. The iPhone 4 now has a HotSpot feature where you can tether it to your iPad or laptop and use the iPhone’s cellular data, so that is an option.
  • A hardware switch for screen orientation is preferred. In one of the iOS updates Steve Jobs decided to change the switch on the side of the iPad from locking the screen orientation (the iPad can switch from landscape to portrait mode by tilting it) into a useless mute switch. I never have to mute my iPad but am often annoyed by the screen rotating unexpectedly as I carry the iPad around the house. So I’m glad to hear that the next iOS update should give the option of making that switch lock the orientation again. Steve is brilliant, abrasive, and fallible.
  • Multi-tasking is a mixed blessing and the battery life is so-so. I’m spoiled by the long battery life of my iPhone 4 and my Kindle 3. I’m often surprised that in a session with the iPad I may use up 20% of its battery life. While I’ve never drained it dry in a single day of intermittent use, it has led me to become somewhat obsessive about shutting down apps that might be running in the background. Apple added multi-tasking in an iOS upgrade, but in the task manager you can’t tell which apps are really running in the background and draining your battery and which are just listed because they were used recently. So I’m going to try to modify my own behavior and pretend there is no multi-tasking manager. I’m going to just let everything run and get in the habit of plugging the iPad in for a recharge each night.
  • Photo editing doesn’t happen. The next iPad will likely get some sort of camera, but I can’t foresee using a bulky tablet to take photos. So I presume it will primarily be used for video chats, something that does not appeal to me in the slightest. I have a slew of photo editing apps on the iPad, but I never use them because it is far too difficult and clumsy to get photos on to the device from my iPhone 4 and I’d rather edit the nice photos from my superzoom camera using Aperture on my Macbook Air or Photoshop Elements and ThumbsPlus on my desktop PC than with the iPad’s apps. So the Camera Connection Kit dongle for the iPad was also a waste of money for me.

So what do I find myself using my iPad for?

  • Morning news. Each day I scan through headline stories from the Tulsa World (although I prefer to use its mobile news web page over its iPad app), the Bartlesville radio station, the New York Times, and the frequently disappointing USA Today. I’ve been trying out The Daily for over a week, but its stories, like those of USA Today, are too short and lack the kind of connectivity to deeper information which I would like. Its interface and layout are also more annoying than useful. I’d still subscribe to The Daily if it would have more in-depth news, but evidently that isn’t their business model. I’ve also tried using Flipboard to scan headlines from other sources, but while the interface is nice, I haven’t found compelling content to link to it.
  • Browsing, WikiPedia, and Facebook. The best thing about the iPad is surfing the net from the couch. I like Wikipanion for WikiPedia access, but Facebook’s own iPad app has odd failings and limitations. For a long time I just had the normal web page link saved as a shortcut on my iPad, but now I’ve discovered the Friendly Facebook for iPad app, and its interface works better for me, and it was well worth paying a buck to upgrade to Friendly Plus to get rids of the ads in the free version.
  • Kindle e-Books. I’d use the Kindle app on the iPad much more, of course, if I didn’t have a Kindle 3 with its easier-on-the-eyes and visible-in-sunlight display. But when I want to surf the web at a hotel or restaurant, the iPad wins hands down over the pitiful browser on the Kindle, so it is great to also be able to read my Kindle books on the iPad.

Given my past experience with the iPhone, I’ll probably skip a generation and do without the iPad 2, which everyone expects to be announced soon. I’d be wiser to just wait another year for the iPad 3. By then the battery in my iPad will be wearing out and I expect I’ll be ready for a more powerful, thinner, and lighter pad. But I do expect to use a pad like this for the rest of my days – the future is here and I like being in it.

UPDATE: I’m well on the way to Apple fanboy status. The iPad 2 was announced on 3/2/2011 as thinner, faster, and with a better cover design. So I promptly sold my 64 GB iPad WiFi+3G to Gazelle.com and will be ordering an iPad 2 on 3/11. But this time I’ll opt for only 16 GB of memory. And I think I may just order the WiFi model and use the new Hotspot feature on my iPhone 4 if I need cellular data for the iPad.

3/14/2011 UPDATE: I stood in line at my local Wal-Mart on the release day and snagged a 16 GB WiFi iPad 2. I love using Home Sharing to access my desktop’s iTunes library from the iPad, iPhone, MacBook Air, and new Apple TV. AirPlay is great for sending video and audio from my iPad to the Apple TV wirelessly. And while I like the new Smart Cover, it was only worthwhile upgrading to the iPad 2 because I could sell my old model for same price as the new one.

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Remix and Mashup

Posted on February 11, 2011 by Granger Meador

Years ago I subscribed on YouTube to anything put out by New York filmmaker Kirby Ferguson. He has posted videos ranging from the Iron Man dance, to how movies overuse Trajan, to punchline piracy.

Now Kirby has embarked on what will become a four-part video series, Everything Is A Remix. Parts 1 and 2 are out and I learned something from each. I’m donating to this project, for when I see really great work on the web and the artist asks for donations or offers up paid extras, I often respond. They should be rewarded for their effort and I have the selfish excuse that I also want this talented person to keep producing. I’ve donated money or purchased items for such efforts as:

Sita Sings the Blues is a perfect segue to Kirby Ferguson’s latest video project on remixes. Nina Paley’s animated movie used old jazz tunes by Annette Hanshaw and a variety of animation styles to retell the Hindu epic the Ramayana, mixing in the story of her own failing marriage. That’s what I call a mashup!

Part 1 of Everything Is A Remix focuses on remixing in music, using Led Zeppelin lifts as exemplars. (Sorry, but the embedded Vimeo videos in this post and some of the YouTube links don’t work on an iPad.)

Part 2 looks at the sequelitis afflicting the cinemaplexes, noting how Star Wars was both a pastiche of and homage to earlier films. And don’t be fooled by the early ending in part two…there is an addendum about how Kill Bill is a Hollywood mashup.

So what is the difference between a remix and a mashup? In my parlance remixes are alternate versions of a work, while mashups blend two or more works together. In my late teens I bought a number of remixed songs, which were often created as extended dance tracks for discothèques. I especially liked long remixes of songs from my favorite album of that era, The Lexicon of Love by ABC. More recently I’ve been charmed by remixes of old songs by another band from Sheffield, The Human League. Acoustic versions of pop songs are another type of remix, I suppose. I love Teddy Thompson even when it is just him and his guitar, and closer to home there’s even an acoustic version of Mmmbop, for goodness sake, and frankly it’s pretty good.

There are folks who are best known for remixing, such as FatBoy Slim, aka Norman Cook. I used to just sit and watch music visualizers while playing Praise You, which filmmaker Spike Jonze would turn into memorably funny performance art. Wikipedia reports the song has a vocal sample from Take Yo’ Praise by Camille Yarbrough, a piano sample from an audio test track caused Balance and Rehearsal, a guitar sample from It’s a Small World from a Mickey Mouse Disco album, and the song’s bridge even samples the theme from Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids. Even more impressive to me is how FatBoy Slim transformed the original slow version of Brimful of Asha by Cornershop into a spectacular pop confection. And need I point out that the song itself is a tribute to Asha Bhosle, who looped songs for over 1,000 Bollywood movies? We just keep mixing.

Now there are entire albums being reworked, such as the Whipped Cream & Other Delights Rewhipped covers of the original album by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. In another case we have more talented musicians reworking the songs of a gifted oddball in Discovered Covered for Daniel Johnston. Compare Beck’s take on True Love Will Find You In The End to the rough original, or Daniel’s performance of Go to that by Sparklehorse and The Flaming Lips. Should I point out that Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse and Vic Chesnutt, who both provided covers for Discovered Covered, have since committed suicide? No doubt they treasured the sublime poignancy of Daniel’s songs and empathized all too well with the heartbreaking story of his mental illness and struggles with manic depression.

The first musical mashup that latched on to me was when Soft Cell released a version of Tainted Love which blended seamlessly into a cover of the Supreme’s Where Did Our Love Go – at the 2:24 mark in the video link. Blending the 1964 Supremes hit with this huge 1982 hit makes sense when you realize that Soft Cell was just covering the 1964 original of Tainted Love by Gloria Jones. I force my students to listen to this mashup every year as we use an old phonograph to calculate conversions between angular and linear speed.

A couple of years ago I bought a Beatles mashup, Love, in which Giles Martin intermixed various songs and alternates takes. It is a curious joy to hear Drive My Car blending so effortlessly with What You’re Doing and The Word. That led me to seek out other mashup artists, such as:

  • World Famous Audio Hacker, whose Triple Southern Mash is a delightfully odd and unauthorized mix of the Beastie Boys, Warren Zevon, and Lynyrd Skynyrd, while Rise of the Virals is an 8-bit audio tribute to Tron. The unauthorized nature of his mashups may be why this artist has almost disappeared from the web as of late.
  • The Avalanches, whose Frontier Psychiatrist has hilarious audio inserts from 37 spoken word records and many other samples, some of which are nicely identified here.

I’m looking forward to the next parts of Everything Is A Remix, and the endless remixes, mashups, and homages to come. As you will note, I do insist on the Oxford comma, despite the rude put-down by Vampire Weekend.

Posted in music, video, web link | 1 Comment

Big Snow

Posted on February 2, 2011 by Granger Meador

February opened with a big snowstorm which shut down the city for a bit.  Here’s my video shot during the storm with photos of the aftermath as I spent the next morning shoveling.

Click here for a Flickr slideshow

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