The Moon is a madness, a madness of mine

[austin_dern]

And happy Sputnik day (hi, mahto), and Pogo's birthday, and with any luck the X-Prize will be won today.

So why don't I believe in targeted marketing? Discrete mathematics forms customer profiles by drawing graphs in which, say, the x-axis is the number of DVDs bought in the past year while the y-axis is the amount spent on plane tickets per year. Each person profiled gets a spot; and they try to draw dividing lines around populated ``islands,'' so that if a new customer buys eight DVDs, the travel agency guesses whether it's worth selling to him or her.

This is yesterday's purchases at Borders: Charles R. Pellegrino and Joshua Stoff's Chariots for Apollo (about the making of the Lunar Module); Giles Morton's The Riddle and the Knight: In Search of Sir John Mandeville; Charles Schulz's Peanuts: Snoopy features as The Sportsman; and R.W.R. Darlin's Differential Forms and Connections (I want to get better at sympletic algebra). Based on that, what would you guess might be my next book purchase?

Not that it matters; the ads I see most often are online, where every server in the world thinks I want a U.S. Green Card.

Trivia: The Li'l Pup Dog's first words, besides ``Bow-Wow'' and ``Bow'' were ``Poltergeists are the principal type of spontaneous material manifestation.'' Source: Pogo daily strip of 30 August 1950, reprinted (among other places) in Pogo Even Better, Walt Kelly.

Currently Reading: The Black Cloud, Fred Hoyle. A black dust cloud moves into the solar system, threatening Earth with an intolerable rise in temperature; as one might expect given the author, the process of the cloud's discovery and study rings absolutely true. The characters aren't even ciphers, but it feels like it might have happened.

Comments

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

I recall that Pogo strip. Churchy and Howland were who Li'l Pupdog was talking to, correct?

Offhand, given thoose books and the Intellectual/Nerd/mide-century vibe they give off.. I think the marketers could peg your next book as a 50's or 60's Sci-fi one. Of course, I'm biased in choosing that, but it does seem to fit. Of course, If I were a marketer, I'd be sending you Sharper Image nand Levenger catalogs to little avail...

--Chiaroscuro

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

The Li'l Pup-Dog said it to Howland Owl -- who was his self-appointed psycho-analyst; Beauregard Bugleboy -- who was Pup's interpreter; and Pogo, who just wanted to take the Pup-Dog fishing. They went fishing.

He repeated it a few times in several contexts (in one strip, as Howland and Beauregard tried to make it into a vaudeville act accidentally dropping ``spontaneous'' from it), though not as often as I'd thought, it turns out.

As for books, well, I'll let you know what my next book purchase is, although I think concluding 50/60s science fiction from that data seems like too much to me. The best pile I can make from it is ``something that might get filed under science or history'' and that possible just by disregarding a quarter of the data set.

Sputnik day!

[mahto.livejournal.com]

Hm. What a both fortuitous and appropriate day for Mojave Aerospace/Scaled Composites to schedule their launch.

Re: Sputnik day!

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I was just surprised how long it took the gang at CNN International to notice the ``coincidence'' ... the gang in London is usually quicker on the uptake on things like that than their American cousins are.