Game night

Elias and I spent less than 10 minutes in our assigned seats -- too loud. Very exciting though! We had all-inclusive tickets to the special balcony area, where there's lots of TV's and free food. Elias followed some apple juice with a large pretzel, though he didn't eat it, he just held it and rubbed it on things (like his head) for an hour. I think he didn't want to ruin it -- boy, did it get hard in our fridge overnight.

Elias was fascinated by a break-time event in which a random person from the audience took a full-court shot to win a car. It was a great shot, actually, just bounced off the front of the rim. The rest of the night, whenever I said that a player had just made a long shot, Elias asked if he won a car.

"No."

"Why?"

"Players don't win cars."

"Why?"

When we were leaving, during the third quarter, we picked up a Steve Blake bobble-head. I don't do sports, but had decided mid-game that Mr. Blake is my favorite Blazer. The first thing Elias told Amy when we got home: "I got a bobble-head of my daddy's favorite player!!"

The next night, he wanted to go again. Aw.

Thanks for the tickets, Andy!

Logarithms

The other day, when I was wanting to code some financial formulae in F#, I got side-tracked and derived something that's not intuitive to me:



Can that really be? I didn't see an obvious mention of this in the Logarithms article on Wikipedia, nor in the pre-calc book we have at home. So maybe I screwed up the math? I tried some test cases with F#, by defining a function that, given a b and an x, evaluates both sides of that last equation, resulting in a tuple of two floats:

> let logcheck b x = (Math.Log(x, b), (1.0 / Math.Log(b, x)));;
val logcheck : float -> float -> float * float

> logcheck 2.0 3.0;;
val it : float * float = (1.584962501, 1.584962501)

> logcheck 5.0 11.2;;
val it : float * float = (1.501091629, 1.501091629)

> logcheck 7.382 123.123;;
val it : float * float = (2.407742101, 2.407742101)

The equivalence seems to be checking out, so maybe I did the math right. As it turns out, this equivalence is noted in the middle of a Wikipedia page. But what the heck does it mean?

Book ordered:

Political economy

Yaron Brook makes it plain for Forbes readers how crashes and recessions are not a necessary part of society, but are the result of the most popular political opinions.

So what's someone of unpopular political opinions to do in the age of McCain versus Obama? Despite the looming recession, I sent $4 to CafePress -- now I'm participating:

Rocky Butte

The kids scrutinizing small flowers on top of Rocky Butte:

More Raveonettes

The Raveonettes must be getting more popular, because they actually sold out Portland's Doug Fir Lounge last week. I hung back from the stage a bit this time, taking a few cruddy pictures with my cell phone while enjoying the wall of sound immensely.

My third music video

I wrote and recorded this song, "Drive", in about 1993. My friend had offered to "drive till the cows fall down" when we were driving from Portland to La Grande for a hiking trip, and I proceeded to write the whole song in my head on a trail in the Wallowas. The video itself is nearly pointless -- recent scenes of a trip I made to central Oregon -- but since Elias and Dahlia starred in my first two music videos, I've run out of kids.