Topsy-turvy

On September 24, Apple announced that it had sold 5 million iPhone 5s in the three days since the phone's introduction. This represents a profit of one to two billion American dollars. In three days! One might have expected AAPL to do better than drop $10, that day, from its $700 previous close — and another $17 the day after.

On September 27, Research in Motion announced that it had lost $235 million in its second quarter. How did NASDAQ react to this news? RIMM went from $7.14 per share to $7.50. I guess the fundamentals were sound, in the fundamentally flawed illogic of what constitutes the American stock market system.

Disclosure: I do not use a mobile phone nor have I ever put money into the stock market.

56 by 2's

two nonillion
nine trillion thirteen
one hundred thousand three hundred
thirteen billion forty-three million forty-three
?
one hundred twenty-one million two hundred thirty-six thousand six hundred thirty-six

One, two, three, four

What is the smallest English number expression that has one letter occurring once, two letters occurring twice, three letters occurring three times, and four letters occurring four times?

wordthreepeating

1, 21, 1000013, 4000414, 131256, 21445566, ________________.

Coverage

BBC news anchor this morning: "Give us the background to it. What's at the centre of it?"

Flagpole

oneseventhreesixfiveeleveneightninetwothirteenfourtentwelvesixteenfifteentwentysixfourteeneighteenseventeennineteentwentyonehundredeleventwentyonetwentyfivetwentytwotwentythreetwentyfourtwentyeightthirtyeightthirtytwentyseventwentyninethirtyonethirtyseventhirtythreethirtytwofortytwothirtyfourthirtyfivethirtysixthirtyninefortyfortyonefortythreefortyfivefortysevenfortyfourfortysixfiftyfourfortyeightfortyninefiftyonefiftysevenfiftyfiftytwofiftythreeonehundredtwelvefiftyfivefiftyeightfiftysixfiftyninesixtysixtyonesixtythreesixtyfivesixtysevensixtyfoursixtytwoseventyfoursixtysixsixtyeightsixtynineseventyseventyoneseventytwoseventythreeseventyfiveseventysixseventysevenseventyeightseventynineeightysixeightyfoureightyoneninetyfoureightythreeeightyeightytwoeightyfiveeightyseveneightyeighteightynineninetyeightninetythreeninetyninetyoneninetytwoninetyfiveninetysixninetysevenonehundredfiveninetynineonehundredonehundredtwoonehundredoneonehundredthreeonehundredfouronehundredsixonehundredeightonehundredsevenonehundrednineonehundredtenonehundredthirteen...

This is the top of the flagpole of Eric Angelini's English flagpole sequence. If we subtract the indices from the sequence, we get: 0, 5, 0, 2, 0, 5, 1, 1, -7, 3, -7, -2, -1, 2, 0, 10, -3, 0, -2, -1, -1, 89, -2, 1, -3, -3, -3, 0, 9, 0, -4, -3, -2, 3, -2, -4, 5, -4, -4, -4, -2, -2, -2, -1, 0, 1, -3, -2, 5, -2, -2, -1, 4, -4, -3, -3, 55, -3, -1, -4, -2, -2, -2, -1, 0, 1, -3, -6, 5, -4, -3, -3, -3, -3, -3, -3, -2, -2, -2, -2, -2, 4, 1, -3, 9, -3, -7, -6, -4, -3, -3, -3, 5, -1, -5, -5, -5, -3, -3, -3, 4, -3, -3, -2, -4, -3, -3, -2, -1, -3, -2, -2, 0, ... Herein, the positions of the zeros are: 1, 3, 5, 15, 18, 28, 30, 45, 65, 113, ... In effect, these are the indices of the flagpole sequence where a(n) = n. It turns out that the majority of flagpole sequence numbers lie on that line — of the first 1000000 terms, 688153. Within this region, the largest spacing between consecutive on-the-line terms is between term #321947 (=321947) and term #411273 (=411273). This large gap is due to the demand for the letter L exceeding the local supply. A much larger gap will begin ~10^9 when demand for the letter M exceeds its local supply.

Bye bye Birdo

Just a few hours shy of a 492-day stay with us, Harry Vance attempts to put a reluctant Birdo into her carrier. I will miss her anticipation of the microwave beep, half-way (or so) through my one-minute milk heat-ups, and the imitation squeaks as the window blind by her cage came up in the morning. Birdo's vocal repertoire included coughing, sneezing, and a hearty nose-blowing whenever I brought a hankie up to my face. She arrived with a couple of well-worn, two-note whistles but Catherine eventually taught her the theme to The Andy Griffith Show, which fell into disuse after I taught her I Was Kaiser Bill's Batman — phrases of which became our back-and-forth contact calling. She could do a sparrow, robin, or gull, a cat or a dog, and would not hesitate to join in at the first hint of laughter. Birdo's "English" included yeap (guessing correctly, occasionally, the answer to a query being asked of someone else), naow (said with a snarl), c'mere, c'mon, good girl, and of course Har-ree followed by — in a different voice — Birdo. She had a mock people-speak but the monologue was largely unintelligible. Catherine tried once to get her to do a happy wheee but it came out incredibly cranky when she finally succumbed to it. Birdo would greet you with a cluck and thank you with a coo. When she really wanted your attention, she'd let out an ear-piercing smoke-alarm. She had an impossible-to-describe, funny bit that we called the 'dying-parrot'. Watching her grapple with falling-asleep had me conjecture that birds evolved the behaviour to rest on one leg, with the head tucked into the back, so as to make the mathematics/mechanics of balancing that much easier. (I'm aware of the heat-loss theory but I'm not buying it as anything more than a modest advantage in limited circumstances. On the other hand, trying to maintain one's balance with a minimum of thought/correction is, high up — where a bird is likely to find itself at night, a matter of some gravity.) As for having a parrot as a room-mate, I'm now aware of how much dander and feather fluff (such) a bird generates each and every day and this detritus becomes a cleaning-burden far beyond the confines of the cage.

Time warp

I tend to be a little obsessive about the accurate reporting of place and time (as a corollary to my obsession about the accurate reporting of fact). For that reason, twice a year (at the beginning and end of DST), I photograph a display of my presumably-accurate computer clock, before and after I have reset my digital camera's date/time setting to the correct time, so that if ever I might wish to report the actual time that a photograph was taken, I can translate the camera-clock time (in the EXIF data) into real time.

For example, when I did this album of a Toronto Wildlife Centre goose rescue, I had to subtract 2 minutes and 34 seconds from the photos' time stamps because the camera clock had gained that much since I last calibrated it in March.

By coincidence, it was back in March when my iPhoto additions first no longer appeared in the 'photos' section of the application. The pictures were still accessible through the 'events' section and I put the matter down to an application bug resulting from the sheer number of photos (over 44000) it had to display on my aging infrastructure.

This morning, I noticed that the date stamp for a recent picture had the year as 2011. In the four-and-a-half months since I last calibrated the camera clock I had never noticed that the year was incorrect. The photos had in fact all been added to the 'photos' section of iPhoto, but they were back in 2011 where I never once occasioned to look. Fortunately it was easy to correct all of the bad dates in a batch date/time adjustment.

Jump for joy

I came across R.L. Burnside by way of Lightnin' Malcolm (who I caught on a WNED/PBS show last week). This Burnside video from 1978 says it all:

See my jumper, lawd, hangin' out on the line
See my jumper, lawd, hangin' out on the line
Know by that, something on my mind

Would'na been here baby, lawd, if it had'na been for you
Would'na been here baby, lawd, if it had'na been for you
Way down here, way you wanna do

Fix my supper baby, lawd, let me go to bed
Fix my supper baby, lawd, let me go to bed
This white lightnin' done gone to my head

The uninnuendoed meaning of jumper is a smock (on a clothes-line), as evidenced by just such an article of clothing being washed/starched/ironed in a couple of other blues numbers.

Going the distance

The Gar Creek mudslide on the morning of July 12 had me, at the time, trying to accurately place the disaster on Google Earth. Unlike bimmjim, one of the commenters to the Yahoo! retelling of that news, I knew that Johnsons Landing was (obviously) slightly north of where Google Earth spotted the location. David Petley (who writes a landslide blog) had the correct map placement, verifiable by this helpful graphic.

The Fairmont Hot Springs mudslide on July 15 had some in the media trying to relate this event to the Gar Creek one by proximity. The National Post headlined it as 45 km away. I had already measured the distance as ~78 km (as the crow flies) and decided to let the Post know of its error. Incredibly, this evening's CBC - The National suggested that the distance between the locations was only 30 km (at 4:50 into the broadcast), which had me remeasure the damn thing in case I had made some dumb mistake. A little later, I chanced upon Brad Giffen (a CTV news-channel anchor) using the 45 km figure. What is this contagion?

Update: At least one subsequent story got it right.