Owl Chatter’s trip to Vermont went very well: Good food, good friends, good weather, and a good, fun production of The Mikado at the Unadilla Theater in Marshfield VT (or maybe Calais (pronounced callous, I think), because that’s its mailing address. It’s about 30 minutes from Montpelier, where the pizza at Positive Pie is very good (and the beet and arugula salad). I’m sure you’ve seen The Mikado. Why, if you haven’t, it’s like not knowing what a logarithm is.
When we first saw The Mikado at the Unadilla, the kids were pretty little. It was about 30 years ago, and it was magical. Very funny, wonderful silliness — the script and the songs — utter nonsense, just like we love it. And then, for just a few minutes, the most beautiful young woman took the stage alone and sang an exquisite song with the sweetest voice. Here’s a version of it that I found online.
We stopped in Middlebury for lunch on the way up. The Otter Creek Bakery has excellent baked goods and sandwiches. Here’s a view from the banks of Otter Creek.
Today’s puzzle was a celebration of bad puns. It had twelve theme answers, each of which was a state noted via a bad pun. Here are the simplest: “Jaded miner’s remark?” ORE AGAIN!!?? (Get it? Oregon) “Parent’s encouragement to a budding chef?” WHISK ON, SON “Captain and nine crew members?” TEN ASEA.
The worst was VERGE IN, YEAH?, clued with “Mm-hmm, get a little nearer?” Quite a stretch IMO. Rex thought a better effort would have been a clue for VERGE, ENYA? (the singer). Then he shared this song by her. You know, I must have filled her name in in puzzles a dozen times, but I had no idea what she looked like or sounded like, or even if she was a she. Enya? Now I know.
The second song Rex shared today was based on 101D: “What’s left of the Colosseum.” RUINS. My heart was diving and soaring, with the seabirds flashing by. . .
One thing about taking short trips is you lose touch with the world a bit. For example, we missed the debate. How’d it go?
Phil refused to cover the debate, instead slipping us this old photo of a pretty Jill Biden looking eerily a little like a blonde Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Maybe it’s the bed head.
From today’s poem in The Writer’s Almanac by Ciaran Carson called “The Fetch” I learned what the fetch of a wave is. Carson was born and died in Belfast, the latter on October 6, 2019, three days before his 71st birthday.
I woke. You were lying beside me in the double bed,
prone, your long dark hair fanned out over the downy pillow.
I’d been dreaming we stood on a beach an ocean away
watching the waves purl into their troughs and tumble over.
Knit one, purl two, you said. Something in your voice made me think
of women knitting by the guillotine. Your eyes met mine.
The fetch of a wave is the distance it travels, you said,
from where it is born at sea to where it founders to shore.
I must go back to where it all began. You waded in
thigh-deep, waist-deep, breast-deep, head-deep, until you disappeared.
I lay there and thought how glad I was to find you again.
You stirred in the bed and moaned something. I heard a footfall
on the landing, the rasp of a man’s cough. He put his head
around the door. He had my face. I woke. You were not there.
Let’s dip into the Owl Chatter mailbox and see what you readers are saying. Meg Bordle writes: “Your math department has been quiet for a long time. I like math. What gives?”
Well, you got us there, Bordle. It has been a while. Happily, in today’s puzzle the clue way up at 7D is “Paul ___, Hungarian mathematician with over 1,500 published papers,” and the answer is ERDOS. New to me, duh. I’m used to Euler in the puzzles when it’s math. Anyway, yeah, no mathematician published more papers than Erdős, although the aforementioned Euler published more pages in his roughly 800 papers.
He was Jewish and fled Hungary for the U.S. in 1938. He mostly worked with others — colleagues — more than 500 of them. In fact, Erdős spent most of his career with no permanent home or job. He traveled with everything he owned in two suitcases, and would visit mathematicians he wanted to collaborate with, often unexpectedly, and expect to stay with them, have them feed him, do his laundry, etc. A schnorrer!
[Groucho:
Hooray for Captain Spaulding
The African Explorer!
Did someone call me schnorrer?
Hooray hooray hooray!]
Erdős’s friends developed the concept of an “Erdős number” which measures the closeness of any mathematician to collaboration with Erdős. [Judy, you hear of this?] Say Tom has written an article with Erdős. Tom has an Erdős number of 1 as a direct collaborator. (Erdős himself is zero.) If Sally has not collaborated with Erdős, but has written an article with Tom, she gets an Erdős number of 2 (one greater than Tom’s). Every mathematician thus has an Erdős number equal to 1 greater than the smallest Erdős number of the people the mathematician has collaborated with. Since collaboration with Erdős is a feather in one’s cap, you want an Erdős number as low as possible. Someone who has not collaborated with anyone who has worked with Erdős (i.e., a total loser), is said to have an Erdős number of infinity, or an undefined one.
Of course, your Erdős number only tells part of the story. You can earn an Erdős number of one with only one collaborated article. So we also want to look at how many collaborations there are within the “Erdős One” group. Since you asked, Andras Sarkozy leads that group with 62 collaborations. Outside the field of math, Albert Einstein has an Erdős number of 2. Enrico Fermi, Richard P. Feynman, and Hans A. Bethe are 3s. Milton Friedman is a 3. Amazingly, Hall of Famer Roberto Clemente somehow has an Erdős number of 4. (No he doesn’t.)
Erdős taught himself to read through mathematics texts that his parents left around in their home. By the age of five, given a person’s age, he could calculate in his head how many seconds they had lived. Due to his sisters’ deaths, he had a close relationship with his mother, with the two of them reportedly sharing the same bed until he left for college. I’m guessing he was a blanket hog, like most schnorrers.
Here’s Erdős himself — our big fat zero (Erdős number, that is).
Anybody can find dozens of stories by now of pregnant women denied life-or-death health care by doctors reasonably fearful of prison, or loss of licensure, for violating cruel or sadistically ambiguous anti-abortion laws. So Nicole Miller’s story in the NYT today about her experience in Idaho is really nothing special. But one small piece of it caught our eye.
Nicole was in her 20th week of pregnancy when she started bleeding heavily. Her doctor told her to leave the state for treatment. Incredulous, she said, “You’re not going to help me?” He told her he wasn’t willing to risk his 20-year career. She was rushed to the airport where a small plane was to fly her to Utah. By then, she had lost a liter of blood. In Salt Lake City her treatment went well — a dilation and evacuation, and she’s fine. All of that is par for the course in many states these days — hardly worth noting.
But here’s the part that caught my eye. Doctors at Idaho’s largest hospital system said that six pregnant women had to be airlifted out of state for care in the first four months of the year, compared with only one the previous year. The response of the state’s Republican attorney general, Raul Labrador, was to note that the doctors were not under oath when they provided those numbers. He said “I would hate to think that any hospital is trying to do something like this just to make a political statement.”
So don’t think it, you worthless moron. Do something to help the citizens of your state who voted you into office and are now deprived of basic medical care. Jeez Louise, you have to wonder about anything that makes New Jersey look good.
We’ll give Nicole the last word. She reserved special praise for the (male) nurse who accompanied her in the ambulance to the airport. “He was the first person that day who showed me any kind of compassion.” Yup. It’s always the nurse. (Hi Caity!)
Baseball great Orlando Cepeda passed away at the age of 86 last Friday. He had a tough life in some respects. We’ll take a look at the “Baby Bull” in our next post.
It’s nice to be back! See you tomorrow.
The Wellington Files 