Here's a look at the scrapy machine shooting grated asphalt into a dump truck.
And here's a shot of the road after they've scraped off the top layer.
They only put up signs that they'd be doing this around 3:00 yesterday afternoon. Thankfully, I noticed the signs when I got home and parked somewhere else. A bunch of people got towed. (In cases like this, they 'relocate' your car to the nearest legal parking and you can call the precinct to find out where your car is. Unfortunately, sometimes, what's legal when they tow the car at 8:00am isn't legal at 11:00am when street cleaning kicks in.)
What else can you tell from these photos? First, you'll see that I'm the only one on my block who checked the Dept. of Sanitation web site and therefore knew that recycling pickup was canceled last week for people with Friday pickups. Nothing like having the recycling sit on the curb for an entire week. Also, the school across the street is getting all new windows, so that lovely scaffolding bridge went up last week over the sidewalk. I won't be at all surprised if I'm still looking at it a year from now.
(It occurs to me that my usual pictures don't have much in common with Scalzi's periodic sunset shots. Oh well.)
24 comments:
Good Moooooorning, Nathan!
Off and on I toy with the idea that the fact that the vectors in Hilbert Space have commutativity and distributivity becuase that's a fundamental requirement of the particulate nature of matter.
Perhaps the math that governs the universe is digital becuase the blocks that make it up are quantized, not continuous. I wonder if Tegmark can create a gedankexperiment where matter is particulate, but it's interactions do not have the properties of commutativity and distributivity ?
In our world, for example, I think that the the concept of an exponential function naturally arises from a 3D box of particles bumping into each other. Our brains can re-create this in Math because our neurotransmitters are also discrete.
But if this is so, then why do humans tend to think that elegant math includes continuous functions and absolute solutions? Is it analagous to the fact that statistical mechanics begins to approach the simplified math of equations like the Gas Laws? If you average a lot of small interactions together, you get something that appears continuous - and our macroscopic monkey brains might latch on to that as well.
John,
I'd supply the true answers to your musings here...but then I'd have to kill you.
(I may have to anyway.)
(And if I'd actually read that whole thing instead of just scanning it, I'd be squeegeeing my brains off my screen right now.)
Wait 'til Vince gets here!
Dammit, John, my brain hurts bad enough already this morning - Hilbert Space? You just made that up. You dammed scientists.
Nathan, I had a moose in the yard yesterday, and bears down the hill behind the house. I didn't get any pictures though, because it's hard to hold the shotgun and the camera at the same time when you've only got one functional arm. However, I'd rather have dangerous wildlife than what you see out your window. Can't say I'd be thrilled with finding that huge ugly machine outside my house in the morning - or finding out that somebody moved my fucking car in the middle of the night. Seriously, dude, I like visiting New York, but I can't understand how you can live there.
Jim - it's even worse than nathan paints it, believe me.
And no, I did not make it up.
Yeah, yeah, I was kidding. I know what Hilbert space is. I'm fairly familiar with advanced math/physics concepts, I just can't do it.
C'mon Vince! I want another FOOM outta Nathan!
I just noticed that your second picture has a cat in it. Upholding the letter of the law (literally, in this case), if not the spirit. But where are Vince's cat pictures?
My first thought is that he has none, but on second thought I realize that there's possibly another universe in which Vince's blog is a cat, because the mathematical laws of that place describe blogs in such a way. I imagine that even now, as I type this comment in this place, in the other place (one of many), Vince's blog is waiting underneath Michelle's bed (or possibly under her stairs), waiting to swat at her feet while she goes to find a stamp to mail something to Janiece in South Dakota (she is perhaps mailing a box of white chocolate to Janeice, because that Michelle is obsessed with white chocolate and her perfectly-justified fear of being tripped by the blogs that congregate beneath her furniture for reasons unknown).
An amendment--I now see that both pictures are of cats, or rather the same cat. My mistake--I didn't look closely enough at the first picture.
Hey, at least you all still have money to pave. Have you seen what asphalt goes for these days? Seriously, it's cheaper to pour concrete (although, if they're just resurfacing, it may be a wash, as concrete would require a whole lot more removed, and more base underneath).
And it sounds like someone is writing their PhD thesis.
at least you all still have money to pave
Pave? What hell is that?
Oh, right, that's that funny thing you do to roads in the lower 48. Right. Got it. Nevermind.
Steve - one Ph.D. is quite enough, thank you.
And Jim - although I share your fondness for the rual lifestyle, I like my roads ice free most of the year. In fact all of the year, if I can get it.
Of course, with my state's solar-powered snow removal program, paving doens not make a whole hell of a lotta difference when it snows.
Pave? What hell is that?
Oh, right, that's that funny thing you do to roads in the lower 48.
Yes, because shoveling a gravel driveway completely SUCKS.
Eric,
The cat is a lie.
And John,
You're really cruising for a whoopin'.
That stuff doesn't hurt my head any less no matter how long I give it to ferment.
Nathan:
"Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house." -- RAH
:p
Where the heck is Vince?
At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house.
Guess I fail there too...on the messes in the house part.
Hey that one hits home right now. Potty training for the 3 year old.
Words you don't want to hear from your spouse: "I'm sure he peed around here somewhere".
Closely followed by the older sister's "what are you, a dog?".
John,
Thank you for reminding me why I don't have children.
The cat is a lie.
Therefore, the paving is a lie, since the cat is paving. And since we know that there is no paving in Alaska, it logically follows that Nathan lives in Alaska. QED. Say "hi" to Jim and Tania.
See, I'm good at this mathy stuff after all!
Eric,
I know how you can lighten your workload. Just let your clients read this thread and they'll volunteer to represent themselves. :D
A lot of times they do that anyway.
:-)
Where the heck is Vince?
Vince has been in training. No, not potty training. I've finally mastered that.
Nathan, as you're aware, I'm sure, Hilbert space is a multi-dimensional complex projective ray space. It was developed by David Hilbert in the early part of the twentieth century for purely mathematical reasons. But what is absolutely cool is that Hilbert space can be multi-dimensional and therefore can handle all the possibilities of a quantum system in one convenient package.
Hilbert space doesn't represent a void as in Newtonian mechanics - it's not merely adding dimensions to three-dimensional space. Nope, Hilbert space is a mathematical device for arranging pieces of information, with each complex coordinate representing a possibility, or probability amplitude, for a given quantum state that might correspond to a definite eigenvalue for energy, or position, or momentum, or spin, etc.
Please understand that not all of these observable properties can be definite simultaneously, as noted by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. But each dimension in Hilbert space represents a possible state for a quantum system, so an unmeasured electron exists as a very complicated pattern.
The preceding was brought to you by the campaign to Save the Humans.
Vince,
I've got a banninator and I'm not afraid to use it.
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