Another peeve

Who decided that 12 pm means noon, and 12 am means midnight? Or is it the other way around? I sure can't tell, unless from the context. I mean for crying out loud:

12 pm = 12 hours post meridiem = 12 hours after noon = midnight!
12 am = 12 hours ante meridiem = 12 hours before noon = midnight!

Pisses me off, I tell you.

Toward a useful definition of Sportboat

For several years Singlehanded Sailing Society has had a Sportboat class in its races. We used the same definition as did the Yacht Racing Association of San Francisco: a Sportboat is a boat with a displacement-to-length ratio or DLR of 105 or less.

Aside: For anyone not familiar with DLR, some explanation is in order. First of all, the phrase displacement-to-length ratio is a misnomer. The cube of the length is used to calculate the ratio, because if a given object is scaled up or down, the weight changes as the cube of the change in length. That is, if you make something twice as long, with the same proportions and materials, it'll be eight times as heavy. By cubing the length, the ratios will be comparable between little boats and big boats. Secondly, the length in the formula is the waterline length or LWL. We don't care too much about what's hanging out over the water. Third, this ratio is obviously not dimensionless, so we need to agree on the dimensions to use in the calculation. By convention, displacement is in long tons (pounds divided by 2240) and waterline length is in hundreds-of-feet -- for example, if the waterline length is 24'6" we use .245. DLRs for sailboats can range from well under 100 for stripped-out racing boats, to around 200 for modern racer/cruisers, to 400 for crab crushers.


Santa Cruz 27
D=3300, LWL=24, DLR=107
Sportboat?


But there's a problem with setting the Sportboat cutoff at 105. The Santa Cruz 27, Bill Lee's classic 1970s design, is generally accepted as a sportboat on San Francisco Bay, but it teeters right on the edge of that definition. The early examples were lighter, but most of them (according to their PHRF certificates) weigh 3300 lb on a 24' waterline, giving a DLR of 106.6! A Mini TransAt that raced occasionally with SSS in 2007, a boat that sure seems like a sportboat to me, also has a DLR of 106 and change. So when I signed on as SSS race chair for 2008, the first change I made was to raise the Sportboat cutoff to 108.




Thompson T650
D=1918, LWL=19.8, DLR=110
Sportboat?



I thought I was so clever. Then I received a race entry for a Thompson T650. Teeny little boat, very cool, certainly a sportboat, right? Its cert read: D=1918, LWL=19.8 ... DLR=110! So should we bump up the Sportboat cutoff a little further still? Or is something else going on here?


Hunter 54
D=20500, LWL=43.5, DLR=111
Sportboat???????


A while back I looked at the specs of a very different boat, a 1982 Hunter 54. An SSS member races one of these successfully. It's a fast boat (PHRF 39), certainly not a sportboat, but look at that DLR, 111! Barely heavier for its length than the little T650. Obviously DLR doesn't tell the whole story. Empirically, we have to say that a small boat can be considered a sportboat with a relatively high DLR, while a big boat may not be a sportboat even if its DLR is pretty darn low. Makes sense: a light boat can get up on a plane more easily than a big boat, even if it is a bit heavier for its size. So ...

Let's invent a new formula and call it the length-weighted displacement-to-length ratio, or LDLR. Instead of using the cube of the waterline length in the denominator, we'll raise LWL only to the 2.5 power. This yields a higher number for big boats and a smaller number for small boats, which is what we want. And since the result isn't going to be directly comparable to DLR numbers anyway, we'll get rid of the long tons and hundreds of feet, and just use pounds and feet ... much simpler to calculate. The formula is:

LDLR = D / LWL^2.5

It remains to calculate the LDLR for a range of boats. We need to choose a cutoff point that classifies average-sized boats (as Sportboats or not) in about the same way as the 108 DLR does. Then we must test the formula on a few outliers - small boats that are fairly light but clearly not sportboats, and large boats that by consensus are sportboats - to see if they get pushed into the wrong category.

LDR & LDLR for selected boats
Sportboat cutoff: 108 for DLR, 1.20 for LDLR
Scroll down for the table; I haven't figured out how to get rid of all that blank space.

Type	D	LWL	DLR	Sportboat?	LDLR	Sportboat?
Santa Cruz 27	3300	24.0	107	yes	1.169	yes
Thompson T650	1918	19.8	110	no	1.099	yes
Catalina 22	2150	19.4	132	no	1.297	no
Hunter 54	20500	43.5	111	no	1.643	no
Santa Cruz 50	15000	46.5	67	yes	1.017	yes
1D 35	6500	31.5	93	yes	1.167	yes

We seem to be on the right track with the LDLR formula and a Sportboat cutoff of 1.200. We've ruled the T650 into the Sportboat class and not changed any others of this sample. I'll collect a few more boat specs when I get a chance and add to this table.

"Miscegenation": the political implications of misplaced stress

Every newscaster or commentator that I've heard recently using the word "miscegenation" on the radio or television has placed the primary stress on the fourth syllable and the secondary stress on the second: "misCEgeNAtion". Even Terry Gross, that goddess of wisdom, truth, good humor and enlightenment says it that way. But this pronunciation implies that there's something wrong with miscegenation: Whatever cegenation is, mis-cegenation must be some sort of bad behavior. If you want to make the case that there's nothing wrong with persons of different races having children together, as most reasonable people would agree, then you're digging yourself a hole right at the beginning of your argument by making the word sound like a negative.

Instead, we need to pronounce the word in such a way that suggests its true meaning. "Miscegenation" just means the mixing of races (genuses if you prefer), and the secondary stress belongs on the first syllable: “MIScegeNAtion”. Rather than the pejorative "mis", this pronunciation naturally brings out the Latin root "misce", from "miscere", to mix, as in miscellaneous or miscible.

By the way, the 1957 dictionary here in my office gives only the "misce-" pronunciation. That anyone would pronounce it the other way is a sorry comment on the state of American education.

If you say "Barack Obama is a product of misCEgeNAtion", you’re setting yourself a hurdle to get over: "Barack Obama is a product of miscegenation, but I’m going to vote for him anyway". Why would you do that? Say instead: “Barack Obama is a product of MIScegeNAtion. Cool! This is the 21^st century. Of course I'm going to vote for him."

The insidious spread of Daylight Saving

I used to be totally opposed to daylight saving. I told people I was boycotting it. I refused to set my clock forward an hour in April and back in October. I always showed up for work or appointments as expected, but I tried to do the conversion from daylight savings to standard time and remind myself what time it really was.

Why? I guess it just seemed right to me that noon should be the time at which the sun reaches its highest altitude and stands due south (in the northern hemisphere, outside the tropics), and that there should be equal amounts of daylight before and after noon. Yes, I knew that solar time only matches up with clock time for one particular longitude in any given time zone. (Now I also know that solar noon can be up to a quarter of an hour earlier or later than noon on the clock, even at that specific longitude.)

You can even figure out compass directions (subject to the aforementioned approximations) if you have a watch (with hands! not digital, duh) and can see the sun. How? Point the hour hand at the sun. Halfway between the hour hand and 12 will be south. How cool is that? It struck me as horribly wrong to throw out such a useful tool, and such a harmonious and symmetrical relationship between earthly conventions and the the motions of celestial bodies, by arbitrarily offsetting our clocks. If we find it pleasant or useful to have more daylight after work and less before we rise in the morning, surely the logical change would be simply to rise and go to work earlier. Far more sensible to do so than to mess with our clocks, right?

So why did I stop boycotting daylight saving? I found that I was doing the conversion the wrong way, from true righteous proper time to debased conventional time. If I looked at my watch and it said 7:15, without hesitation I read it as 8:15. Also, I came to realize that I enjoy the conventions of daylight saving as much as anyone.

However! I still have an enormous problem with the insidious extension of daylight saving time beyond half a year. For most of my life, daylight saving in the United States started the last Sunday in April and ended the last Sunday in October. In other words, it lasted almost exactly six months. Some years ago the start of daylight savings was advanced to the first Sunday in April. Now, as we’ve just experienced, it starts the second Sunday in March, for crying out loud. And it won’t end until the first Sunday in November. In other words, henceforth we will spend 34 weeks of the year on daylight saving time – almost twice as much time as we spend on standard time.

Now I get to my point. This is totally out of whack! I don’t object to altering the agreed-upon time of day away from a neutral, average value based on the sun’s motion – for up to half the year. But if the benefits (in terms of energy conservation, quality of life, or whatever) are seen to increase even more if the alteration is maintained more than half the year, I argue that our behavior is at fault. Rationally, we should alter our behavior relative to sun time rather than arbitrarily agreeing that the time of day is something other than it really is.

I acknowledge that a more universal change in behavior is accomplished by a mandated change in clock time. But imagine the benefits that would accrue if we changed the timing of our daily activities in open recognition that we are changing them relative to astronomical events.

All we have to do is get up earlier, go to work earlier, leave work earlier, and go to bed earlier. Sure, many persons are required to be at work at a certain hour. But increasingly, many of us can set our own hours. And among employers that need rigid hours, some could change those hours while others might not. This non-uniformity would spread out commute hours, reducing traffic congestion.

The extension of daylight saving has been criticized for reducing the daylight hours available for farmers to get their crops to market, and for forcing children to travel to school in darkness. If we left the clocks on standard time early in spring and late in fall, those groups would be unaffected, and only those who benefit from changing their schedules would do so.

What it boils down to is: let’s acknowledge that we change our schedule every summer, and not pretend that the universe has changed to accommodate us.

Not So Sweet Claude Lorrain

I've always wanted to use that line. Saturday Rebecca and I went to the show of Claude Lorrain drawings at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. The guy was just amazing. He has this absolute bravura in his ink and wash drawings, especially with foliage. He'll finely outline leaves in one part of a tree, then throw down a puddle of brown wash, fearlessly but with control, that perfectly captures the shade. Then a white wash (or was he just leaving the paper exposed? I dunno) on the sunlit side of the tree, where he has made almost no ink marks, will make that side pop out with volume. There was a drawing of a grove of tall, thin pine trees with the branches jutting out in stark dark strokes from the trunk, and fine hatches in a few different weights to establish the volume of the needles. You could practically smell the pines.

His figures aren't very impressive, and he can't accurately draw a boat to save his life. There are a few of his paintings in the show too, and they aren't that great either ... except for the foliage again, which he nails even though the technique is very different from what he's doing in the drawings. But those drawings! Yow.

The show is at the Legion of Honor for a couple more months, http://www.famsf.org/legion/exhibitions

The drawings are on loan from the British Museum. I've been there a few times, but don't recall seeing them there.

A peeve

"Back in the day." Give me a break. One particular day? If some ideal nostalgic conditions prevailed for just one day, why would you bother mentioning it? Besides, where do you get off claiming some sort of primacy for your past experience (as THE day) without any sort of explanation or modifier?

If you say "Back in the days when ... [I had hair; spelling mattered; you could lock your car without honking the horn]", then I'll listen to you.

Thank you.

Palindromes

I love palindromes. Doesn't everyone? I've seen a couple of good books that contain a palindrome on each page illustrated with a cartoon: Madam I'm Adam by William Irvine and So Many Dynamos! by Jon Agee. You can have a pretty silly palindrome that, with the addition of a cartoon, becomes something special.

Example: I think it's So Many Dynamos that has a cartoon of a street scene in Mexico or somewhere, with two mobs of guys in sombreros and serapes throwing fruit at each other. An unsuspecting gringo tourist is sauntering out of his hotel into the street, whereupon a solicitous native breaks away from one of the gangs to divert him, saying "No sir, away! A papaya war is on!"

There's another book of palindromes, From A to Zotamorf by Stephen J. Chism. No cartoons, but it has some extraordinarily long palindromes that (IIRC) were composed with the aid of computers. Impressive, but to my way of thinking that's on the verge of cheating.

I've made up a bunch of palindromes myself. I don't want to give 'em all away without looking into copyright (I might want to publish one of those cartoon books myself someday), but I'll share one.

To set the scene: A military hospital in Argentina, circa 1950. The beloved yet controversial first lady Eva Peron has just been admitted. Because of her ongoing health problems, some of the hospital staff are permanently assigned to her care. Here's a telephone conversation between two army doctors:

"Evita desk."
"Sir, Evita ill! Apt palliative?"
"Risk sedative."

... Yeah, I know it's not that great. You expect me to share all my good ones?