Earlier this evening I was able to share an unexpected and
rather unusual event with my kids: a tornado warning for Davis and southern Weber counties.
Cade came over to report that Shauna & Becca were on their way home from the activity they were
attending at Church (which was ending early because of the National Weather
Services tornado warning). Meghan, who likes to
feel like she is in control, began to panic at the thought that a tornado
might hit our house. I told Meghan that the
safest place to
be in our house would be downstairs in the basement.
Quickly as Meghan began crying hysterically Caleb began to be very
afraid. We had been playing WoW
together and he didn't even want me to take the time to logout properly.
(Wise, but at this point I doubted very much we were in any real danger.
I can only recall one tornado ever touching down along the Wasatch Front
in my lifetime.)
Jacob didn't mind tagging along as we went downstairs, but Andrew
didn't grasp why Meghan was wrenching him away from watching his
favorite Scooby Doo video.
When we got to the basement I tried to get Meghan and Caleb to calm
down enough so we could talk about the situation, and so they could
articulate their fears, which I hoped to be able to calm by teaching
them (at one point Meghan sobbed, "what is a tornado anyway? Is it like
in movies?").
Caleb gained enough composure to be able to blurt out, "Daddy, let's
say a prayer."
That touched me profoundly.
After the three of us had each taken turns offering a prayer (and I
don't think I've ever heard Caleb pray so fervently), I was able to
get them to explain why they were so scared. Meghan said she "didn't
want to die" and Caleb said he was "too young to die." Can't disagree
with that sentiment!
In The Wizard of Oz Dorothy doesn't die. I told them that
in the last hundred years, in Utah, I didn't recall that anyone had ever
been killed by a tornado. We talked about the weather and about
what meteorologists do. They understood temperature, precipitation, and
wind speed, but I had a harder time explaining humidity and barometric pressure.
Next I helped them employ some basic mathematical reasoning to see that
the odds of a tornado hitting our house were quite low. If there are, say,
10 cities & towns in Davis County that might experience a tornado,
if (hypothetically) there was one, what's the chance that Layton would
be the city hit? Quick answer: 1 in 10.
Next, consider the size of Layton. In our immediate neighborhood
(phase I of our subdivision, 2 streets by 3 streets) there are roughly
150 homes. Consider how many other homes there are in Layton. Even
if a tornado did hit Layton, and if it managed to avoid the large swaths of
farm & other undeveloped land, what would the odds of our house
being hit be? I don't know precisely how many homes there are in Layton,
but I figure Meghan was probably in the ball park with "more than 1 in
1,000."
Once Shauna made it home safe from her meeting everyone was a lot
happier. We all stayed in the basement for another hour and a half
reading stories outloud to each other. Eventually we got a phone call
from a neighbor letting us know that the tornado warning had been
lifted, although the severe storm warning was still in effect.
Caleb told me he was sure glad that this had happened when his Dad
(me) was at home. More than anything else they wanted our family to
be together and to be safe. Meghan had left her scooter at a friends
house this afternoon. She said she didn't mind if one of her favorite
toys got blown away, what was important was being with her family.
Teaching moments of faith, natural science, and mathematics. I
never would have guessed how interesting tonight would turn out when I
got home from work today.
— Michael A. Cleverly
Tuesday, August 02,
2005
at 23:23
341 comments
| Printer friendly version
In 1997 I had an idea for a book I wanted to self-publish. I paid $250 for
a block of ten ISBN numbers as part of my preperations for doing so.
While I did learn a lot about Quark
(synopsis: yuck!) and Adobe FrameMaker I never actually got my book printed. (It was to be a
compilation of speeches and I never heard back about—and didn't follow
up on—my request for copyright permission to use a handful of addresses
that weren't in the public domain or otherwise licensable.)
For years the expensive list of ten 10-digit numbers ($25 per number!)
has sat in the bottom of a filing cabinet. I managed to find them this
evening. (I found all sorts of other stuff that I hadn't seen or thought
about in years, but that's possibly the subject of a future post.)
I got to looking because I've been trying to decide whether I should go
ahead and publish, on a larger scale, the book I typeset in
LaTeX to give as
Christmas gifts last year.
(Mormon's Book, a paragraphized version of
The Book of
Mormon. The initial print-run was 25 in December and another 52
in March. Since President Gordon B. Hinckley asked Church members
to re-read
the Book of Mormon again before the end of the year I've had a couple
of inquiries from people who've received Mormon's Book asking
if additional copies are avaiable. At the moment, I'm all out—I gave
away my final copy six weeks ago to a captain in the US Air Force.)
Up till now I've had the book printed locally at Alexanders, a digital printer in Utah County. In the volumes
I've been doing each book has run $8.70/each. If I went with a real
bonda-fide book printer instead, and ordered a larger run (perhaps 500?)
I'm sure I could get the unit cost down lower.
One issue I've struggled with is what to price the book at if I do
decide to publish and sell it. The content, originally published in 1830,
has long since entered the public domain. It wasn't divide into verses
until 1879. My reparagraphization doesn't precisely match the original
1830 version because in the early 19th century it was fashionable to
typeset paragraphs that would sometime span multiple pages(!).
Therefore, the amount of "work" I've done has been limited to
typesetting in LaTeX. What sort of markup is that labor worth? As
a practical matter many people seem to find it much easier to read
(as a book) when it isn't chopped up into chapters & verses. I don't
want to take advantage of peoples religious beliefs just to make
money, however. Thoughts?
What I didn't find this evening in a quick review of isbn.org is whether I can change the name of my (nascent heretofore
really non-existant) publishing company. The name I registered the ISBNs under
eight years ago might not be my first choice still today...
— Michael A. Cleverly
Wednesday, August 03,
2005
at 22:06
304 comments
| Printer friendly version
Today driving home from work we turned on the
radio to get a traffic report. It was right at 6pm, so the national
newscast was on.
<boggle>Must be a slow day, but somehow a bunch of
cheerleaders in Michigan who witnessed a hit & run accident and
turned the license
plate into a cheer made the national newscast.</boggle>
(And a slow blog day for me to be mentioning
how un-noteworthy I found that, thereby drawing even more attention to the
story...?)
— Michael A. Cleverly
Monday, August 08,
2005
at 22:29
318 comments
| Printer friendly version
What do you call someone you carpool with?
Obviously, in the carpool you'd simply call them by their name. But
if you are speaking about them, to an audience who might not know any of
the people you carpool with (and suppose they might not—for whatever
reason—want their name immediately Googlable), what's the best term
to use to refer to them?
- My carpooler? My fellow carpooler? The other carpooler?
- My carpooling companion? My carpooling buddy? My carpool buddy?
- My co-worker? [What if we don't work for the same employer?]
- My neighbor? [What if we don't live near each other?]
They all feel awkward to me. Carpooler, especially. To my ear carpooler sounds like a made up word. But it's in at least one respectable
dictionary. If you Google on the term (today) you'll find that roughly
one-third of the top search results are for slipper socks. Strange, that.
— Michael A. Cleverly
Monday, August 08,
2005
at 22:54
663 comments
| Printer friendly version
Our family enjoys watching good wholesome commercial-free broadcasts of
classic TV shows on our local PBS station.
We've purchased several seasons of I Love Lucy for our
children. I went looking for some of the other shows they enjoy, or that
they hadn't seen but that I thought they would like, and was disappointed
to discover that a number of classic shows have never been released on
DVD.
Amazon.com lists these and offers to let you know (via email) if and when
the studios ever wake up and realize they could make some money by dusting off
the originals in their archives. Apparently they also communicate periodically
the number of people who've expressed an interest to the studios—in effect
telling them how many people are voting for these old shows to be released
on DVD.
Several of the shows I "voted" for:
- Leave It
to Beaver (1957)
- Perry Mason (1957)
- My Three Sons (1960)
Feel free to vote, if you're interested.
— Michael A. Cleverly
Wednesday, August 10,
2005
at 19:51
482 comments
| Printer friendly version
I've been spending most of my spare time working on putting the final
spit & polish on the typography of Mormon's Book.
So far I've always typeset it in Palatino (because I already had it and
didn't need to buy it from Adobe). But before I commit myself
to a larger print run, I want to have everything just about perfect, since
it might be a long time before I get another chance to make changes.
So, I'm giving other book fonts another
look. (This is precipitated by my addition of quotation marks, and my
dislike of how the pdflatex+Palatino quotation marks look.)
— Michael A. Cleverly
Tuesday, August 16,
2005
at 23:26
1176 comments
| Printer friendly version
I decided to purchase
Bembo to
use as a book font with
LaTeX.
Now I just have to wrap my head around how to install additional fonts for LaTeX so that my $99 isn't wasted.
At first glance it looks neither easy nor utterly impossible, though it
would be much closer to impossible without Google!
Some links that might provide clues:
— Michael A. Cleverly
Wednesday, August 17,
2005
at 21:21
309 comments
| Printer friendly version
I've hit the wall with trying to get new
fonts working in LaTeX and/or ConTeXt.
I spent the better part of last weekend, and more time tonight, futilely
reading, studying, experimenting, trying, and only ending up frustrated.
Several times I've felt I was close. Tantalizingly close. Then that
feeling of closeness seems to rapidly race away leaving me stuck in some
new fashion.
I've purchased the Bembo Std, Minion Pro, and
Poetica Std fonts from the Adobe
Store. All the fonts came in .OTF format:
powerbook:/Library/Fonts michael$ ls -lh *.otf | cut -c 30-
43K 17 Aug 20:13 BemboStd-Bold.otf
46K 17 Aug 20:13 BemboStd-BoldItalic.otf
46K 17 Aug 20:13 BemboStd-Italic.otf
61K 17 Aug 20:13 BemboStd.otf
205K 21 Aug 21:07 MinionPro-Bold.otf
244K 21 Aug 21:07 MinionPro-BoldIt.otf
244K 21 Aug 21:07 MinionPro-It.otf
202K 21 Aug 21:07 MinionPro-Medium.otf
243K 21 Aug 21:07 MinionPro-MediumIt.otf
200K 21 Aug 21:07 MinionPro-Regular.otf
204K 21 Aug 21:07 MinionPro-Semibold.otf
244K 21 Aug 21:07 MinionPro-SemiboldIt.otf
418K 21 Aug 23:31 PoeticaStd.otf
I suppose I should enumerate the various methods I've tried and what
seemed to work, and what didn't (version conflicts, dependencies, cryptic
errors, ...) but I'm too frustrated right now. I'd love to have some
utility that I could run that would just execute all the necessary voodoo
& black magic to get a working LaTeX and/or ConTeXt environment with
my new fonts. (Several seem to go part of the distance and then stop with
some hand waving of "and then you just need to do x, y and z" which means
trying to hunt down how to do x, y & z.)
I mean the documents I want to work with have little more than characters
you can find on any keyboard. I'm not trying to do anything fancy or
exotic. No math even!
Sigh. I think I am going to delete my teTeX installation (installed
via fink) and just start fresh.
I'll probably look at building teTeX from source because at times it seems
that the various tools (texhash, updmap, updmap-sys, etc.) don't know,
care, or pay any attention to /sw/etc/texmf.local.)
The twenty-five different .pdf manuals, guides, tutorials I've
downloaded and scoured... I may delete them too. I'm sure I can find
them again with Google. Hopefully this time I can chase down the right
path.
I'm taking tomorrow off. It's the first day of school, and I really
hope by the time the kids get home from school I'll have made some
substantive progress.
— Michael A. Cleverly
Tuesday, August 23,
2005
at 20:44
359 comments
| Printer friendly version
I've finally found success with my font
installation problem, on multiple fronts!
First I was able to get XeTeX
to recognize all the .OTF fonts I'd purchased. XeTeX is a native
OS X variant of TeX that can use (basically) any font that OS X has installed.
To work with LaTeX I needed to install the XeTeX fontspec package.
XeTeX also works with
ConTeXt, which is a very interesting macro system. I haven't yet
attempetd to include pictures in a LaTeX document, but with ConTeXt
it appears to be a snap. I think I'll use it for my Christmas 2005 book.
Back to the project at hand... I played
around with using multiple OTF fonts in the text (various
combinations of Minion Pro, Bembo, and Myriad Pro) but came to the conclusion
(with some prodding from Ben and Matt) that
it would look best set in straight Minion.
So although XeTeX works with LaTeX and it would be easy to use Minion
that way there was one package I had been using previously that doesn't
work when rendered through XeTeX instead of pdfTeX: the microtype package which
doees a very nice job of character protrusion.
So it was back to the drawing board: I needed to get an .otf font
installed so it could be used by LaTeX & pdfTeX. I'd spent all last
weekend fighting this same battle. I decided to go back to the basics.
I reinstalled everything TeX-related fresh. I kept copious notes of what
I had tried. I wrote a shell script to do the work so that I could
have a means to consistantly and reliably revert back or repeat (perhaps
with small tweaks) something I'd done before.
I discovered, in this process of documented experimenting and further
scouring of documentation, mailing list archives, and the
comp.text.tex
newsgroup a likely source of a substantial part of my recent frustration:
Changes made in 2004
to the TeX Directory Structure
standard as to where font .map and .encoding files
go. There's a lot of documentation out on the net that was written
before this change.
In the end I succeeded using a combination of
otftotfm
and the autoinst program from the fontools package.
Here is the otf-to-latex.sh
script I wrote that succesfully converts and installs the fonts for me.
If I had more energy left I'd mark up an annotated HTML-version. I'll
leave that as a possible project for another day...
The devil is in the details and I still have a lot to learn about
fonts under various flavors of TeX, but at least for the time being
I can go back to making some headway on my actual project.
— Michael A. Cleverly
Thursday, August 25,
2005
at 18:16
636 comments
| Printer friendly version
I've long believed in (and had as
sort of a personal motto) the relentless pursuit of proactive laziness
which meshes well with "Why Good Programmers Are Lazy and Dumb" over at
Google Blogoscoped.
— Michael A. Cleverly
Tuesday, August 30,
2005
at 21:59
300 comments
| Printer friendly version
