A quote I happened across, from the introduction to a 1975 textbook called States of Matter by David L. Goodstein:
Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.
A fun sign near my house:
For our summer vacation this year we didn’t go to the seashore, though; Ellie wanted to go to a lake in the Sierras, since she had seen some pictures of various such lakes and wanted to see one for herself. That seemed like a good idea to me—after all, this might be the last summer that California even has lakes!—but most of the ones she’d been looking at were at the end of mountain trails ten miles long, and that ain’t for me. I’m not very outdoorsy. I figure that if previous generations had meant for me to spend my time outdoors, they wouldn’t have invented doors. So I looked into lakes we could drive to, and put together an itinerary consisting of three clusters of lakes.
The first were the Echo Lakes, but these proved too inaccessible. The drive to the parking area was not for the faint of heart, and once we got there, it was unclear how to actually get down to the lakes, so we make an impromptu change of plans and went to Lake Tahoe instead. However, while I know there are ways to get to the lakeshore for free (because I have), the spot where we landed was fenced off, and to be allowed through the gate we would have needed to have paid $25 and booked in advance. And Tahoe wasn’t even on our list, so rather than find our way to a spot with free access we went to our hotel and thence to our second destination…
…the Mammoth Lakes; once we got there, a helpful guide directed us to Horseshoe Lake in particular. (Ellie wanted to swim, and the guide said that Horseshoe Lake would be best for that since it was so full of carbon dioxide that all the fish had died and we therefore wouldn’t have to compete for space with people fishing.) Horseshoe Lake turned out to be very cold, though, as you might expect from what is essentially a bowl full of recent snowmelt, and we soon moved on.
Our last stop, then, was the June Lake Loop. June Lake was surrounded by a gravel beach that hurt to walk on and was crowded, but at least the water was warmer. It wasn’t pleasant, but it was tolerable. What was pleasant was floating in the inflatable ring (heart-shaped and full of glitter) that Ellie had brought—that was actually delightful and I could do that every day. The amusing thing about that was that, if you look at the map linked above, you’ll see that the lobe of the lake near the beach is extremely shallow. We got quite a ways out and were floating around in the currents feeling as though we were out to sea, but we actually remained at wading pool depth the entire time. Not only could we get out and stand up whenever we wanted, but the floatie was actually below waist level. Anyway, 10/10 would float again, as the kids say.
The last few times I went outside on one of these summer trips I wound up with a sunburn, particularly on my nose, as I worked my way up from SPF 15 to SPF 30 and 50. This summer I went all the way up to 70. And it finally worked! How do I know? Because I still had my shoes on when I put the sunscreen on, and after I took them off, the tops of my feet ended up getting sizzled to a crisp like a steak Donald Trump would order. The rest of me was fine.
On the eastbound leg of our journey we passed through a tiny settlement called Strawberry. This made me think I had somehow made a navigational error when, on the return trip via what was supposed to be a different route, we again passed through a tiny settlement called Strawberry. It didn’t look the same, but, like, is that even allowed? Two places with the same name in the same state? I know there’s a Brentwood in both Northern and Southern California, but the former is a city and the latter is just a neighborhood, right? Anyway, I looked it up later, and sure enough, there is a Strawberry in El Dorado County and a different one in Tuolumne County. But here’s the kicker. The zip code for the former is 95735. The zip code for the latter is… 95375. So, uh, that wasn’t very well thought out, now was it?
Our unplanned detour to look at Lake Tahoe through a fence led to an even more unplanned detour through the state of Nevada. Speaking of which: apparently the Vegas Golden Knights won the Stanley Cup this year. But why are they the Golden Knights? California is the Golden State. Nevada is the Silver State. They should be the Silver Knights, right?
Here’s an image I happened across:
I have one of those. It’s even blue like the one in the picture. Mine lasted a month. I tried making macaroni and cheese in it, and bits of it stuck to the inside and won’t come off. Boo hiss to the Dutch oven, sez I.
Back in 2005 I had a weird experience on an airplane in which most of my vision remained normal, but text suddenly turned into a cloud of dots. It lasted about half an hour. Later I was told that it sounded like I’d had an “visual migraine without headache”, but my symptoms didn’t match what I read about that phenomenon. However, this month I had an episode that was a perfect match! You know how you have a blind spot where your optic nerve attaches to the retina—but that instead of having an actual black spot in your visual field, your brain just fills in the gap so that you feel like you have a complete picture, but any detail that happens to fall onto that spot disappears? Yeah, suddenly my field of view was full of blind spots. It didn’t look like Swiss cheese, but suddenly there were just dozens of spots I couldn’t focus on. And then the zigzag arrived. Here’s a picture I found of what a visual migraine is supposed to look like:
And, yep, that’s pretty much what it looked like! And then after about half an hour things had gradually returned to normal.
When I started playing Wordle, it seemed to me that a good strategy would be to play the most common letters first. The twelve most common letters in the English language are, famously, ETAOIN SHRDLU. I looked at the top ten and discovered that ETAOINSHRD anagrams out to THOSE and DRAIN. So I started using those as my first two words. On 2022.0201, THOSE was the answer, so in hopes of getting another hole-in-one in the future, I switched the order so I play DRAIN first and THOSE second.
Ellie has a similar strategy, except she plays HEART first and DISCO second. This does leave the letter N unused, but still, she has 90% of the ten most common letters covered and gets to use two words she likes. And hey! On July 26, the answer was HEART! Hole in one!
That didn’t surprise me much. I mean, it’s a common word. It was going to be the answer one of these days. What surprised me—and freaked me the fuck out, quite frankly—was that on July 27 the answer was DISCO. Back to back days! Wtf! <insert “running around screaming” emoji here>
Hey, have you checked out my new name-tracking page? One of the things I have learned in playing around with it is that there are a number of names that seem like homages to icons of 1960s culture that skyrocketed in popularity in the 2010s. Take “Holden”, which was a very uncommon name from the beginning of American name records right up to 1985—when suddenly its popularity shot upward, to the point that it was over a hundred times more popular in 2017 than in 1985. The most famous Holden is of course Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye, a character with a Silent birth year, written by a G.I. author, whose book was beloved by countless Boomers… and reviled by most of my Gen-X classmates. From what I’ve seen in teaching literature for nearly thirty years now, J.D. Salinger has virtually no cachet among Millennials and Zoomers, and it seems safe to say that the popularity of Catcher does not mirror the popularity of the name Holden. The name “Lennon” was 27 times as popular in 2016 as in 1998, and this does not reflect a growth in the popularity of the Beatles. As for the name “Hendrix”—that went from virtually unknown in the twentieth century to one that is now given to over a thousand American babies every year. And yet Rick Beato felt compelled to make a video discussing “Why Jimi Hendrix Is Disappearing”, suggesting that the popularity of his surname as a given name does not parallel the trend of his own popularity.
In recent years, the median age of an American woman giving birth has been thirty. That means that the parents giving their children names like Holden, Lennon, and Hendrix are not the Boomers to whom these people were icons, nor even the Gen-Xers exposed to these people by our Boomer parents and teachers. They’re Millennials, born in the 1980s and ’90s. And I think I have a hypothesis to explain the popularity of these names. I don’t have kids, but since my teens I have had a list of names for any kids I might eventually have, names that are deeply meaningful to me. In watching my friends name their kids, though, I have discovered that this is pretty rare. Back in the late ’00s and early ’10s I was dumbstruck to find the expecting parents among my acquaintances asking for suggestions on Facebook, or going through lists of trendy names and picking out a couple they liked the sound of. So my guess is this. Every year since 1951, a tiny handful of Catcher superfans have named their children Holden. Every year since 1963, a tiny handful of Beatles superfans have named their children Lennon. Every year since 1967, a tiny handful of Jimi Hendrix superfans have named their children Hendrix. And every year, parents have enrolled their kids in preschool and have heard the names of their classmates. Ooh! “Ashley”! That’s beautiful! I think I’ll name my next daughter Ashley! Or their friends have had kids and batted around some trendy names, and they’ve heard a couple they’ve wanted to poach. “We were deciding between Olivia and Sophie, and eventually settled on Olivia.” Ooh, “Sophie”! Well, now I know what my daughter’s name is going to be! So in 1970, some Jimi Hendrix superfans name their son “Hendrix” after the recently deceased guitar legend, and the other parents think, oof, not for me! I’m not that big a fan of “Purple Haze”! But then a couple of generations pass. It’s 2006. Some Jimi Hendrix superfans name their son “Hendrix” after the long-deceased guitar legend. And the other parents think, ooh, I like the sound of that! “Henry” is making a bit of a comeback, and names that end in the letter X are trendy, so maybe I’ll name my next kid Hendrix! And they don’t worry about being pigeonholed as Jimi Hendrix superfans, because enough time has passed that they don’t know who he is. That is, my guess is that nowadays, names like these become popular when the source of the name has become obscure enough for the name to be taken by prospective parents as a free-floating string of sounds and letters and not a reference to a character or a celebrity.
After Elon Musk re-branded Twitter as “X” (trendy!) I saw a bunch of people joke, “Ha ha! Not only did he pick a name whose trademark for social media belongs to Mark Zuckerberg, and a logo he can’t trademark because it’s just a character from a font he doesn’t own, but everyone knows that ‘X’ is how you close an app! How appropriate!” And, yeah, I thought, it’s true enough that you do close a window by clicking on an X. Like, here’s a screenshot of the top right corner of a window on my screen:
But that’s not really the same thing. It’s on the right instead of the left, it’s in a big red box… it doesn’t actually have that much in common with the new Twitter logo. And then I actually went to Twitter, and:
