The inflation chart that you need to see

The media are reporting that we have an 8% annual inflation rate. It is true that prices are about 8% higher than a year ago. What they're not reporting, though, is that the increase has more or less leveled off. Here is the chart you never see — in fact I couldn't find it on line, so I downloaded the data and made it myself. If suitably reminded, I'll update it in future months.

Data source: https://inflationdata.com/Inflation/Consumer_Price_Index/HistoricalCPI.aspx

Unlike most people, I don't claim to understand all that caused this inflation or should be done about it. We've had a COVID pandemic and a war (in Ukraine) that caused global shortages. We've also had some government spending, possibly excessive, but on the other hand, maybe this inflation was a deliberate trade-off against some other, worse harm, such as mass unemployment. And we had policymakers confronting an unforeseen situation during a time of unprecedented uncooperativeness between different segments of society and politics.

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Barnard's E (Field of Altair and Tarazed)

Here you see clouds of stars, and clouds of dust in front of them, in the direction of the star Altair (at lower left). One of the dust clouds is shaped like the letter E. This is a stack of 14 1-minute exposures with a Sigma 105-mm lens at f/4 and a Nikon D5500 (H-alpha modified).

I took this picture last night. The occasion was that I've been so preoccupied with iOptron and Losmandy mounts that I need to get out some of my other gear and make sure it still works. My ultra-portable setup, which I'll take to Deerlick if I expect it to be crowded, is an early-model iOptron SkyTracker that runs on four AA batteries. It has enough periodic gear error that, with a 105-mm lens on the camera, only about 2/3 of a series of 1-minute exposures is sufficiently well tracked, but that's enough. (In this case, I used 14 out of 21.) The yield would be higher with 30-second exposures, and/or with a shorter lens, and I plan to do some more testing.

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Jupiter

Last night I also set up the 8-inch (C8 EdgeHD) and got some good images of Jupiter, of which this is the best. Stack of the best 25% of 3,470 video frames (not as many as I intended to take, but I overlooked some settings). The air was steadier at that time than later on when I refined the camera settings and took images that I thought would be better.

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Short notes

Let the record show that today I took a bath in the front bathroom in this house for the first time since my wedding day in 1982. The master bathroom is being remodeled. At last, it will no longer be decorated with gold foil wallpaper!

This was then my mother's house and was where I lived between finishing graduate school and getting married. At that time, my bedroom was in the front. When Melody and I moved here (with daughter Cathy) after my mother died, we took over the master bathroom in the back, and eventually the front bathroom became Cathy and Sharon's.

In other news, I thank Melody for introducing me to the music of Lindsey Stirling, composer and dancing violinist, whom I had previously known only as the name attached to some nice instrumentals in our CD and MP3 collection.

[Revised.] Never mind the dancing and the drama or comedy, which add a lot to her videos — the music is what I enjoy, and I am deeply grateful that hard rock music has declined, and pleasant-sounding (but lively and creative) instrumental music has come into its own.

In the early 1970s, instrumentals (from prominent instrumentalists, e.g., Ferrante & Teicher, Percy Faith) were usually too bland, and rock music was, to me, too wild and noisy and often struck me as unfinished and unpolished. Indeed, hard rockers, just like "Modern" artists, intended to produce something the previous generation would find unpleasant — that was part of Modernism. (I feel some awkwardness in pointing out that "Modern" now means "50 to 120 years ago" in the visual arts, maybe a little more recent in poetry and music.)

There was of course, instrumental music scattered through all genres, especially jazz, but it was hard to find and was not what it is today.

Good musicians followed their instinct and talents and led us out of that era. We went through a period of soft rock with lyrics of highly variable quality, with some bands' instrumental work much better than their lyrics and singing. (I think one economic factor is that in the 1970s, many radio stations wouldn't play instrumentals; everything had to have lyrics; so we got songs with excellent instrumental parts and shallow or unfinished words.) After that, thankfully, genuinely creative instrumental music flourished, combining techniques from jazz, rock, classical music, and everything else, as well as innovating on its own. Some of it had always been there, of course, but hard to find and not distinct from other genres. But I am delighted that there is now so much music of the kind I longed for, but couldn't find much of, back in the day.

Afterthought: A big factor here, seldom mentioned, but obvious, is that the force exerted on music by producers wanting to make popular culture was different from the force exerted by musicians themselves. Producers wanted to put everybody in a genre with a target market base. Musicians wanted to follow where their talent led them. One thing I thank Melody for is that in her younger days, she bought a lot of albums and looked for the tracks in which the musicians were doing what they wanted to — the tracks you never heard on the radio — the tracks that didn't even fit the genre. That's where the good music was to be found.

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Jupiter

Another decent picture of Jupiter. Notice how small the Great Red Spot is, compared to pictures from the 1970s or drawings from the 1890s. It has shrunk!

Best 25% of 5,879 video frames, C8 EdgeHD, 2× extender, ASI120MM-C camera, in my driveway. The air was moderately steady. There will be better pictures, but I'm more interested in following the action in Jupiter's atmosphere than in getting one competitively-good picture.

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Short notes

Let the record show that, for the first time since the COVID shutdown, I have a UGA parking permit and to my delight, I was able to get one for the same parking deck I've used all those years. In the spring of 2020, during the COVID shutdown, the University cancelled all parking permits and gave us refunds. Meanwhile, my work routine shifted so that I usually go to the FormFree office, and my trips to campus were so infrequent that it was better to pay by the hour for parking. Now I'm on campus a bit more, and the year-round parking permit is the better deal. Also, it means I won't be turned away when the deck is nearly full.

Boom! The SpaceX Crew-4 spacecraft was predicted to fly right over us at 4:47 p.m. on Friday, so I was out in the yard watching. I didn't see anything, though I did see several jetliners, confirmed with the FlightAware app. Then, at 4:50, I heard a boom. This turned out to be its sonic boom, heard over a wide area. Apparently the spacecraft itself was about 30 miles west of me, obscured by trees, and it took three minutes for the sound to arrive.

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Jupiter

Here's last night's catch, a stack of the best 25% of 5,880 video frames. Celestron 8 EdgeHD, 2× extender, ASI120MM-C camera. This is not the best this telescope can do, but it's a decent picture showing the state of Jupiter's atmosphere at the time.

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Perils of imaging Saturn

Earlier that evening, through very unsteady air, I got a picture of Saturn that shows two curious streaks on the rings (marked with arrows). Note that the streaks seem to be faint copies of nearby parts of Cassini's Division (the gap between the rings). They are very unlikely to be real. What's going on?

I started a discussion on Cloudy Nights Forums, and it was suggested that the telescope might be out of collimation. Image stacking and sharpening methods assume a circular point spread function, and miscollimation can make them produce strange results.

But I got the telescope out again tonight, and it's in perfect collimation. So I'll have to blame the unsteady air. Watching the video, I see that the rings on each side of Saturn seemed to flap up and down like wings, the air was so unsteady, and apparently some of the distortions repeated themselves enough to get aligned as if they were real features in the image.

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I tip people but not companies

Although I don't think tipping is a very fair system to pay waiters, taxi drivers, etc., for their work, I tip generously where it is customary, since people are depending on it for their livelihood.

But I balk at "adding a tip" at a totally self-service business, such as a restaurant we dined at this evening. Maybe the tip is "for the counter staff" but there's no clear indication of who gets it. It looks to me like the company wants us to volunteer to pay a higher price than the advertised one. And that is not fair dealing.

It almost sounds like a declaration that the hourly employees aren't paid adequately. Is that something to be proud of?

[Added:] I have in mind primarily not tip jars, which are purely voluntary, but tip amounts popping up as automatically added on credit card terminals. You can decline them, and if there is no waiter or person providing individual service, that's what I do. I don't think someone earns 15% of the cost of my dinner by simply punching the order into the cash register.

My deeper concern is that our economy gets its efficiency from clear asking prices. Some cultures expect people to negotiate almost every price downward; that is less efficient. Think what chaos it would be it the expectation were to arise that the customer would raise the price. When you buy a car, how much do you tip the salesman?

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Windows 11 and the Start Menu

[REVISED.]

If you are switching from Windows 10 to 11, and you have your Start Menu organized into groups of apps, write down the grouping before you switch. The reason is, you are going to lose it and have to re-create it. As of Windows 11 22H2, there is no longer a registry setting that brings back the old, hierarchical Start Menu. Instead, as on an iPhone, you can put pinned apps into folders (which you can name) by dragging them on top of each other — but the structure you had under Windows 10 isn't preserved.

For more about Start Menu organization in Windows 11, see this: https://beebom.com/how-create-app-folders-windows-11-start-menu/.

Here's how I recommend approaching the conversion:

(1) In Windows 10, write down what your pinned apps are, and what groups you have them in. For instance, here is part of what I had:

All told, I had 54 pinned apps in 8 groups. I know I'm a power user, but I do a lot of things with this computer!

(2) Install Windows 11.

(3) Open your Start Menu. Right-click anywhere in it, go to Start Settings, and choose More Pinned (to have more room for pinned apps).

(4) You'll see you already have a lot of pinned apps, more or less in random order. Many are entertainment things you don't need (e.g., I don't use Instagram). Either right-click on each unwanted app and unpin it (which does not remove it from your computer), or make a "Misc" folder of apps you rarely or never use. Recall that a folder is created by dragging an app on top of another app. When you open the folder, you can edit its name.

(5) Go through the "All Apps" menu and right-click and Pin to Start all the apps you are going to want to have in your Start Menu (whether singly or in folders).

(6) Arrange them into folders. Here's what I have right now, though it's subject to adjustment:

There. Windows 11 is livable.

More about Windows 11:

The biggest change is that when you right-click on a file, you don't see such a big menu. Instead, the menu has "Show more options" at the bottom, and that gives you everything else that was on the Windows 10 right-click menu. I have quite a few utilities that can apply to almost any file and are accessed that way. I'm not sure whether I think the two-step process is an improvement.

Another difference is that (without third-party software) you no longer have a registry option to display the time of day in seconds, not just minutes on the taskbar. The reason is surprising, but makes sense. Screen activity more frequent than once per minute keeps the computer "awake" and prevents going into low-power mode. So Microsoft took away that option.

Does Windows 10 software work in Windows 11? Yes, of course; it doesn't even know it's running under 11; the version number of Windows 11 22H2 is 10.0.22621.674.

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The weather on Jupiter

This image of Jupiter was taken in unsteady air and isn't very good, but it shows two big things that are happening on Jupiter: the Great Red Spot is very small (it has been shrinking throughout my lifetime), and the North Temperate Zone is blank.

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Misfeature of the day

Word has reached me of a home weather radio that sounds its alarm, not only for weather alerts, but also for Amber Alerts.

Somebody didn't think that through. Lost or kidnapped children are not going to be wandering through people's houses in the middle of the night. I want you to wake me up for a tornado — not for a kidnapping 150 miles away.

I know they want to show they care, but this is a case of "I want to show my feelings" got ahead of "I want to actually do somebody some good."

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Jupiter and Europa

Here's last night's catch. Jupiter's satellite Europa has just passed across the face of the planet, and its shadow is still on it. The air was unsteady, but by stacking just the best 25% of 6,800 video frames, I got a decent image. Celestron 8 EdgeHD telescope, in my driveway.

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No eyes and no apples: A misconceived riddle

I am blogging about this so that people who Google the answer to the riddle will, perhaps, find this explanation.

All too often, the supposedly correct answer to a riddle or even a mathematical puzzle is somebody pompously telling you something that's unreasonable or even false.

Here's an example. The following riddle is going around the Internet:

A man with no eyes sees apples on a tree.
He takes no apples but leaves no apples. How can this be?

The answer is supposed to be that he has one eye and takes one of two apples (leaving one). We're told that one eye is not "eyes" and one apple is not "apples."

I call foul. In English, "no eyes" means not even one eye, and "no apples" means not even one apple. Everybody who speaks our language knows this. No amount of pompous lecturing will change it.

The riddle has a chance of making sense if you tell it this way:

A man who does not have eyes sees apples on a tree.
He does not take apples but he does not leave apples. How can this be?

"Doesn't have eyes" can indeed mean "has one eye but not more than one." ("I don't own houses; I own one house.") That is not its main interpretation, but it is a possible one. It works better than "no eyes." The same goes for "doesn't take/leave apples."

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Lizard

The style of my astronomical photographs

Sweet Sixteen times four

What's four times as sweet as Sweet Sixteen? Sweet 64, of course! I want to wish Melody a happy birthday. She says she's proud to let me mention her age, because by now, she's proud of having reached it, considering the number of serious health problems that have been taking shots at her for more than twenty years. And I am glad to have her! There is none like the extraordinary Melody Mauldin!

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Short notes

There have been no Notebook entries for several days, and this one is late uploading, because we're all recovering from bronchitis, which nagged at me for two months before finally flaring up. This is the third year in a row I've had a long-lasting cough that went away suddenly when I was finally given azithromycin. Have I really been getting mycoplasma every year, or what?

We have much to be thankful for. Results from Sharon's shoulder surgery continue to be good, and she's getting ready to start physical therapy. My colleagues at FormFree are joining me in making exciting research discoveries. There's never a dull moment!

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