Champion d'Automne

In France Ligue 2 has reached the mid-winter break with half of the season, 19 games of the 38 scheduled, having been played. In first place at the break and winner of the purely honorary title, Champion d'Automne (Champion of Autumn) stands FC Nantes.

FC Nantes finished the first half with a slightly disappointing away draw against lanterne rouge CS Sedan but stands comfortably on a record which includes no losses since October 5, a run of 11 games including a 6 win three draw performance in league encounters and two victories in fixtures of the season long la Coupe de France tournament, the French Cup.

FC Nantes next appearance is, in fact, a trip to Dieppe for the round of 64 in la Coupe on January 6. Its next Ligue 2 outing is a home appearance against Nîmes Olympique on January 11.

This guy can really kick.

I like the sound track, anyone know the piece or the band?

EDIT: Never mind, I forgot that I have SoundHound on my phone. You let the phone listen to the music and it tells you what it is. The song is The State of Massachusetts by Dropkick Murphys from the album The Meanest of Times.

2nd verse

Once again, right click on the link and open in a new tab to start the music.

And sing along.

Oh Christmas bush,
Oh Christmas bush,
You're now a tree like all the rest.

Special thanks to my collaborator, TOPWLH.

Song of the season

Right click on the link and open in a new tab.

Then sing along.

Oh Christmas bush
Oh Christmas bush
How lovely are thy branches

Significant digits

I am the kind of guy who loves an opportunity to prove that I am NOT innumerate.

So the question has been posed, just exactly how much is a tiny tish, as in a tiny tish less than 7.1 square miles.

The answer is related to the very important numerative concept of significant digits (for which there IS a Wikipedia article). One of the joys of learning to operate a slide rule is that the process forces you to learn about and to actually confront the concept of significant digits.

Yesterday I wanted to take a nice close up of the slide rules but discovered that the battery on my good camera was discharged. I had to use the cheap, put it in your pocket and go for a bicycle ride digital. The picture was fine, but today I have a much better one.

By the way, stone picked up on the beach at Dieppe for scale. The stone is half something brown and half white chalk, a very distinctive piece, now one of my personal favorites.

So, the rule of thumb for performing calculations is that the result you get at the end can only have value and accuracy to the level of the accuracy of the data input at the start of the calculation. The rule for calculations involving a measurement is that the result can only be "significant" to the same level of accuracy as the lowest level of accuracy of measurements input.

In this case the measurement input was a radius of 1.5 miles. That is two significant digits. Therefore, any result with more than two significant digits contains spurious digits introduced by calculation.

The only reliable result is the one produced by the slide rule, about 7.1 square miles. With a radius measured at 1.5 miles an area of 7.1 square miles is the most correct answer.

However, in examining the slide rule, we can see that pi on the B scale lines up with something just a "tiny tish" less than 7.1 on the A scale.

There is no way to know just exactly how much a tiny tish actually is. Everyone gets to make their own definition. I think that in this case .0314 or about pi divided by 100 is an excellent definition.

Further affiant saith not. That's lawyer talk.

Slide rules

I not only have a slide rule, I have two.

And in a miracle worthy of the season I knew exactly where they were despite not having laid eyes on them for at least 20 years.

So there they are, the white one is a Post, sort of a standard school boy slide rule of that time. It is enamel layered bamboo with a reversible slide. It contains all of the standard scales and is actually suitable for use for nearly all calculations. The yellow one is my "nice" slide rule, a more complex model, a Pickett, enamel layered metal, with many scales for complex scientific and mathematical computations. There is a bunch of stuff on there like log scales and some other stuff that I no longer remember how to use. I bet there is a Wikipedia article that would get me quickly back up to speed though.

Notably I did not need any refresher work to set the two slide rules up to solve a problem which was bandied about here recently.

The slide rules are set to figure the area of a circle with a radius of 1.5 miles. You set 1.5 on the D scale, that also gives you 1.5 squared on the A scale. Then you find pi on the B scale and read the answer on the A scale directly across from pi.

Just a tiny tish under 7.1 square miles.

Brought my bicycle down into the basement

See the problem is when I bring the snowblower back inside for storage after completing snow removal the temperature inside the attached garage is always above freezing and the accumulated snow on the blower, the stuff you cannot sweep off like the stuff inside the auger, melts. The floor gets wet and stays wet pretty much all winter. The snowblower's spot is immediately adjacent to the bicycle parking spot. There will be no $2,000 wheelsets standing in water for three months.

I actually moved the bicycle over to the door into the house before I even began. When I paused to get this photo I had to go inside to get my cheap camera and when I did I moved the bicycle inside. So technically, the bicycle season officially ended DURING the first snowblowing of the season.

It must be apparent from the photo that it is STILL snowing. In fact, the big plow, the one that does the street went by again while I was out there. Digression, we have a big plow and a small plow on our street. The small plow only does the circle. That plow was by about three hours ago. This was the first I have seen of the big plow. The big plow goes fast and blasts up and down the straight bit up to the corner. I am guessing that we are back in contact with civilization should the need arise.

Digression, good luck to family members living in the two big cities just to the south of where we live. When we get a bad one for the first one it seems like the big cities NEVER really get adequately dug out. The snow has arrived late but it could still be a nasty one. The days are still getting shorter.

After getting myself inside and actually getting the bicycle into the basement I took my nice camera and got a view of winter wonderland.

The prediction was 3 to 5 inches. A good look at the ruler will support my version of the story that we have about 7 already and, AND, it is still falling.

There was one day in December when I could have ridden. I didn't. Now I won't.

On the bright side my walking fitness has returned, I mostly feel pretty good out there on my daily rounds.

EDIT: A little past 7pm and it is still coming down. That looks like 9 inches now out there on the picnic table.

We haven't seen the plows again so far, but the street has descended back into deplorable driving conditions. Clearly there will be more plowing before morning and that means this is that most unusual of events, the two snowblowings required snow emergency.

Well, the British burned it during the War of 1812.

So this isn't the worst thing that ever happened at the White House.

There was a poll on Yahoo today about Gangnam style. The options were I love it (23 percent), I'm over it (36 percent) and I have no idea what that is (41 percent). So I have no idea what that is is still winning but over it has clearly taken the lead over love it.

Over it.

We must really be over it if it is true that PSY will be appearing at the White House on December 21.

Obviously anything interesting to the ruling class will fall out of favor with the young people. And it looks to me like that has happened. Gangnam style has used up its 15 minutes of fame. But what a run it was.

Here is another one of the high points, PSY appears at the 2012 American Music Awards on November 18, 2012. He performs with special guest MC Hammer and an audience understanding not a single word of the lyrics other than "sexy lady" and perhaps "Gangnam Style". Of particular interest it seems to me is PSY's choice of costume, MC Hammer pants.

It starts slowly and builds but by the end of the performance the whole audience gets into it and they start to dance, Gangnam style.

It is over NOW.

Teddy bear toss game

It was the most exciting game of the season to date. The game remained scoreless for nearly 50 minutes, but the Gophers got the teddy bear goal at last. We had a very nice crowd of over 2,100, far short of yesterday's sell out but a nice crowd nonetheless. With 2,100 in the building it was not the spectacle of 25,000 bears as seen in the Calgary video but the ice was respectably littered and it was all for a good cause, Toys-for-Tots.

Final, Gophers 2, Badgers 0.

One of my readers noted that even though the riding the invisible horse video is clearly lots of fun, it is a little hard to tell if "Gangnam Style" is a great song or not. Her problem is quite common since PSY is Korean singing in his native tongue. Korean is not a language that a HUGE number of people are fluent in.

But just in case anyone happens to think that PSY is just some new Justin Bieber/YouTube sensation propped up by American teenagers, here is a clip of him performing his signature hit at the Summer Stand - The Drenched Show concert at Jamsil Sports Complex in Seoul on 11 August 2012. These kids speak the language (and sing along) and they seem to like the song.

And THAT's what it looks like when the audience speaks the language and understands the lyrics.

This one only has about 46 million views. According to PSY, "People don't use YouTube in Korea that much, they have their own streaming sites so this is uploaded almost exclusively for international fans". That means that most of those now more than 855 million views of the original video were not by residents of Korea but of the rest of the world.

My street has no outlet

Theme day, my street.

After taking my camera for a bicycle ride 150 or so times I took it for a walk yesterday.

I noticed when the corn field appeared to have been tilled after the harvest was over. It turns out that they did more than cultivate, they have put in a row crop.

I have never seen this before, I have no idea. Erosion control? They have never done that before, why now? Possibly some sort of nitrogen fix or some such agronomy technique of which I have no knowledge?

Winter wheat?

Today in hockey, a new record crowd at Ridder Arena for Gophers 4, Badgers 1.