Numerical Explorations

It is my fervent wish that unabated capitalism like the type practiced in the current United States will disappear from the face of our Earth relatively soon (next 20 – 50 years). The excesses of our current economy sicken me with all the waste and proliferation of high carbon footprint automobiles and industries (coal fired power plants, etc.) Our economy is notorious for differentiating us into a majority lower poverty-stricken and disenfranchised class, a fleeting minority middle class, and millionaires and billionaires who have bought our federal government in almost its totality (“lock, stock, and barrel”).

Former and deceased President Dwight D. Eisenhower in one of his final speeches as President warned the United States citizens about the power of the military-industrial complex. We need strong armed forces, but how many times do we need to destroy our planet with our Nuclear (“Deterrent”) Triad. I am happy to read in hopefully the real news that our President Donald J. Trump is ready to negotiate better nuclear arms reduction treaties. I believe we need treaties banning cyberwarfare, computer and network hacking of any kind, creation of genetically modified organisms, and human manipulation of human and other animal genome (recombinant DNA machinations).

You may call the above diatribe sour grapes and perhaps you would be correct but only time will tell.

I know this post will disturb some of my black friends, but this is the way I feel. There were some very decent, good, and noble Confederates fighting in the Civil War, and thus should be honored on Memorial Day, not Veterans Day since that is traditionally a WWI remembrance. Captain and later Rear Admiral and General in the Confederacy Raphael Semmes was a very caring and noble privateer (commerce raider or pirate). He set the crews of the ships he and the CSS Alabama captured free and only destroyed only empty US commerce ships. Also, the CSS Alabama put up a hell of a fight against the USS Kearsarge off Cherbourg Harbor, France on June 19, 1864:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cherbourg_%281864%29

My idea is put a large Confederate flag from the era June 1864 in our Confederate Soldier Park on the corner of Ridley Avenue and Morgan Street next year.

I am going to honor my four misguided blood kin who fought in Confederate States Army by wearing a  gray Confederate cap that I bought along with a Union cap at the Legacy Museum half the time while I out around town walking. The other half I will honor my uncles (WWII and Korea, WWII, respectively) and the Union Army by wearing a Union cap.

According to the article (post) below “Pac-Man” is 35 years old today:

https://twitter.com/i/topics/news/e529780273?cn=ZmxleGlibGVfcmVjcw%3D%3D&refsrc=email

I remember playing “Pong”, the very first video arcade game, in the early to mid-1970s. Not soon thereafter I was playing “Space Invaders” in the same era as “Pong”. I started playing “Galaga” in the early 1980s. I used to know the cheat for “Galaga” and I would amaze my acquaintances and friends by running up a score on “Galaga” of more than a million points. I was not a great fan of “Pac-Man”.

I saw my old friend Wesley (Wes)  Cochran, a world class art collector of African American works on paper, at his Gallery on East La Fayette Square. As usual he was chewing on an unlit cigar. I was circling the inner ring of La Fayette Fountain and Statue Park. I yelled at Wes, “What are you doing old man?”, I could not hear his response. I deeply miss hearing one of my favorite people in this universe yelling at me at “What are you doing in my nurse’s station?” when I was naughty last year, 2019. Here is Wes’ website with pictures of a lot of his and his wife Missy’s art collection.

http://thecochrancollection.com/

I cannot talk Wes into spending more money for an unnecessary SSL certificate, so that the website would be a secure HTTPS web application. Also, I am not data mining IP addresses of the people that log onto his web application. I do not approve of collecting IP addresses without warning the customer or client of a website that his/her privacy is about to be violated.

Where do you find eligible (unmarried, ethically okay to date me) females in the Fortress LaGrange, Georgia area?  My criteria are rigorous:

1. Beautiful by anybody’s aesthetic values.
2. 32 to 52 years old
3. A female who is reasonably intelligent by any standards preferably smarter than me.
4. A female who is possibly a Christian but is tolerant of other belief systems.
5. A female who is not hedonistic and narcissistic.
6. A female who is not on her smartphone all the time.
7. A female who loves jogging, running, and or walking and likes to work out at a gym.
8. Preferably a scientist or at least someone who practices scientific principles.
9. Etc. along similar lines of logic.

I know I am asking a lot at my ancient mariner age of 66 years old, but after putting up with the diametric opposite of 1 to 6 from 2010 to May 8, 2019, I feel somewhat entitled to set down the preceding conditions. Ask for what you want desire and want or forever hold your piece (peace?).

I thought I had found a brilliant, genius, female scientist in about 2006. However, she was ethically and morally bound to her place of work and husband. I think she had a fellow genius male scientist to go home to everyday.

Then in 2019 – 2020 I find myself in a self-similar situation with a female biological genius scientist. However, last I heard in October 2019 she was still divorced thus only bound by ridiculously rigid medical ethics not to date me.

No Kylie Minogue contrary to your song, it is not “Better the Devil You Know”!

I received my first guitar as a graduation from high school gift from my father and mother. My dad purchased a 7-year-old 1964 Gibson SG Standard and a Fender Bandmaster amplifier head and dual speaker cabinet for $500 from George G. Daniel. George had paid $300 for the guitar alone in 1964, I guess. My dad paid to have two new Jensen 12-inch speakers installed in the cabinet.

I tried teaching myself about the guitar, but I needed some bootstrapping help in the beginning. A friend of mine showed me the A, A minor, B, C, D,  E, F, and G chords and some bar chords. He also showed some major scales.

Since I was ripped off in Atlanta, Georgia while trying to buy a pound of pot for $400, I knew the dope man would be angry and I would have to pay him back the $400. I promptly took my Fender Bandmaster amp and cabinet to a pawn shop in Columbus, Georgia to recoup some of the money I owed an angry illegal drug dealer. The year was 1972, I seem to recall. Anyway, I tried to get my dad to pay off the pawn ticket on the amp, but he refused. The night of my dad’s refusal I went totally stark raving angry and I was so mad I broke the neck of my beautiful first guitar. I remember there were two police cars each a block from my parents’ and my house at 601 Hill Street, LaGrange, Georgia during my tirade.

My dad much later paid for the Gibson SG to be repaired by a competent luthier in Atlanta, but I wanted the guitar sent back to Gibson for better repair job. I played that guitar sans an amplifier until about 1980 then I put down the guitar for twenty years. In 2000 my mother supplied me the funds to buy an inexpensive Martin D-1 acoustic guitar for roughly $800. Then in 2001 she paid for me to obtain a Fender America Deluxe Stratocaster electric guitar for around $1,020 and a Fender Deluxe Reverb amplifier. I practiced guitar most days from 2000 until 2010.

More information about my guitars to come in later text to be added to this blog entry.

Back in the 1970s I attempted follow in intellectual footsteps of the now largely discredited sociological cultural anthropologist, Carlos Castaneda. I tested on myself several extracts from indigenous plants and mushrooms. These naturally occurring drugs discovered by shamans were as follows:

1. Jimsonweed (Datura stramonium) which I may remember contains the tropane alkaloid: atropine. Atropine has been used in medicine to dilate the pupils of human eyes for study by an ophthalmologist. It is also a hallucinogenic alkaloid. The antagonist of atropine is scopolamine.
2. Amanita muscaria (the fly agaric also known as a mushroom) contains a few hallucinogenic alkaloids including an insecticide that kills flies that feed on the mushroom.
3. Stropharia cubensis a mushroom that contains the hallucinogenic alkaloids psilocybin and psilocin.

In the halcyon days of my youth 17 – 21, I planned on becoming a pharmacognosist that is a scientist that hunts for useful alkaloids to be found in nature.  To follow in footsteps Castaneda and Manske (“The Alkaloids” an encyclopedia of useful drugs from the natural world in 70+ volumes), I would need to be well trained in botany, ecology, pharmacology, plant physiology, etc. Good thing I did not go down that path since I might have accidentally overdosed on a new alkaloid.

I have an anecdote I like to retell about obtaining samples of the mushrooms 3 above. There was a farmer on Whitesville Road next to the old Troup County High School who had cows in a large pasture. I knew that in August there would be psilocybin yielding mushrooms growing out of cow manure. A male partner in crime of mine and I just casually went up to farmhouse door and politely lied to the farmer about being students of mycology from Auburn University and we would like to gather some mushroom samples from his pasture. He said “Sure, just do not disturb my cows”.

The title lyric is from the song “Salisbury” off Uriah Heep’s second album released in the United States in the year I graduated from high school 1971. I probably was unaware of the album until late 1971 or early 1972. The album “Salisbury” along with its title track was my sexual encounter anthem back in the day. The album has other very meaningful tracks, but I will review the album later in this blog entry.

The blog title lyric is applicable to at least four significant females that entered my life then left me high and dry. I do not understand why I was abandoned and sentenced to live in misery and regret. The decades of their meaningfulness to me were the 1970s, 2000, 2010s, and now. I will not blurt out their names and where they worked. Being sentenced to solitary confinement and a singleton life is the very theme and bane of my existence. So much for my depressing facts of life.

Now back to the United States version of Salisbury. It has the following tracks in the order as written:

1. “High Priestess” by Ken Hensley
2. “The Park” by  Ken Hensley
3. “Time to Live” by Mick Box, David Byron, and Ken Hensley (lead guitar, lead vocals, and keyboards, respectively)
4. “Lady in Black” by Ken Hensley
5. “Simon the Bullet Freak” by Ken Hensley
6. “Salisbury” by Mick Box, David Byron, and Ken Hensley

Tracks 1 – 4 comprise side 1 and 5 – 6 are on side 2. Tracks 1, 3,  and 6 are perhaps best considered love songs with track 3 being especially poignant about love lost and never regained. Tracks 2 and 4 are anti-war anthems. It is interesting that there was a lot of protesting about our Vietnam War in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the United Kingdom. Track 5 is an anti-opiate use song.

The lead guitarist Mick Box uses the wah-wah pedal a lot on track 1, 3, and 6. His use of that audio effect is as good as Jimi Hendrix with same effect or perhaps even superior to Jimi on tracks 3 and 6.

“High Priestess” is about eternal love. In track 2 the “speaker” of the song is lamenting the lost of his brother at “hand of needless war”. The setting of “The Park” is a children’s entertainment park. Track 3 is about a prisoner who is doing 20 years for killing a man who was abusing a woman. The prisoner is about to be released and wants the female heroine of the song to smile at him upon his freedom from prison. “Lady in Black” is a Goddess of War and Peace and the singer is asking for implements to kill his enemies and the Lady does not comply with warlike wishes. Track 5 is about a heroin addict who rips people off with a weapon and sometimes kills for money to get high. The album title track is a beautiful full classical orchestral and rock work of high artistry. It is about love gained then utterly lost thus the title of this blog line. Mick Box has at least three guitar solo passages utilizing his wah-wah pedal.

A genetic algorithm is a computer recipe for solving an function optimization problem using natural selection, gene crossover, and random mutations and thus mimics biological genetics.

The Traveling Salesperson Problem (TSP) is a Nondeterministic Polynomial Time Problem and thus is hard to solve in real time on a computer. The TSP starts out with a number of cities to optimally tour once in a complete circuit.

Below are runs for the 29 city Western Sahara TSP which has an optimal solution of 27,603. I get 27,601.

http://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/tsp/world/witour.html

The Djibouti 38 Cities TSP 6656:

http://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/tsp/world/djtour.html

I have a neat hardware “Snarling Dogs Chord and Scale Computer”, but it is a touch device which has a tendency to wear out.