austin_dern

My mathematics blog. I feel like it doesn't get so much love. Here's some pieces you might love, if you give them a try.

• My All 2020 Mathematics A to Z: Jacobi Polynomials, my big piece from a week and a half ago, but you know? I put a lot of work into those big pieces so let me show them off.
• Using my A to Z Archives: Julia Set where you can really show off iterative functions of complex variables to be pretty.
• Using my A to Z Archives: Jump (discontinuity) one of those utility concepts that lets you deal with functions that aren't continuous by the clever technique of saying ``OK, but pay attention to where they are continuous, how about that?''
• My All 2020 Mathematics A to Z: K-Theory which, wow, was more complicated than I knew how to write, really.
• Meanwhile, in sandwich news a quick piece about peanut butter and banana sandwiches.
• Using my A to Z Archives: Kernel in case you're looking for that pre-image of zero again.
• Using my A to Z Archives: Kelvin (the scientist), and hey, a biography piece? How strange!

Turning now to cartoons. Looking at 60s Popeye: Paper Pasting Pandemonium, but a polite pandemonium and a cartoon that is extremely okay.

How was Darien Lake looking, back in June 2019? Was it offering us anything special? Sure it was, and it kept giving, too. Take a look.

Darien Lake has a little something for fans of Barney Google and Snuffy Smith! (It's a roller coaster, their oldest, a family coaster that we weren't allowed to ride because we didn't have kids with us.)

And finally, some raccoon action! Not a roller coaster, though; a kiddie bumper cars that we were too tall to ride.

Still, nice if generic raccoon faces on the cars. I would spend a lot of time looking for more raccoon stuff at the park and, alas, it didn't happen.

A sign for the Rowdy's Ridge area, featuring the Moose on the Loose moose, a bear, and --- as you see on the flying scooters ride at the far right --- hornets. Apparently they get quite numerous some times of the year and have decided to own it.

Sleigh Ride, one of the park's original rides from when it became a real amusement park in 1981. Made by Mack Rides, which makes a lot of amusement park rides but traces its origins back to carriage- and stagecoach-building in 1780.

Tantrum is a vertical-lift-hill coaster, very like Untamed at Canobie Lake Park and Hydrus at Casino Pier.

It's pretty compact but does offer a nice ride. Very little capacity, though; a full load is only eight people.

And, oh yeah, it was bunnyhugger's 275th recorded roller coaster!

And oh, what kind of roller coaster could something at a Six Flags park and called The Mind Eraser be? Could it be like the Mind Eraser at Elitch Gardens? Or the Mind Eraser at Six Flags America?

Oh wait, never mind, there's fish here! You can see the roller coaster in the reflections, too.

And ... oh. Yes, it is the same model roller coaster as those other Mind Erasers. Also Thunderhawk, at Michigan's Adventure. And Flight Deck, at Canada's Wonderland, which we'd ridden three days before. And Batman The Ride, at Six Flags Mexico. And Infusion, at Blackpool Pleasure Beach. It's a fine roller coaster, just a bit head-bangy.

I like the brick facade of at least parts of the station, though. It looks nice and cozy.

View of the launch station for The Mind Eraser, while the train is out on the ride. The station's basically the same plan as that at Michigan's Adventure, but the bricks do give it a nice extra something, to my eyes.

Trivia: King Charles II's 1680 charter for the province of New Hampshire did not specify the boundaries of the colony. They would be disputed until 1741. Source: How The States Got Their Shapes, Mark Stein.

Currently Reading: The Plastic-Man Archives, Volume 6, Jack Cole. Editor Dale Crain.

Switch Repair, Round Three: I called that next level of Nintendo Support, +1(877)803-3676 and actually finally had an experience like I wanted. The guy believed me about the problem and did not try to troubleshoot me through ``taking the joycons off to see if they pair''. I wasn't put on ten minutes of hold, I wasn't hung up on, and in short, everything went like it ought.

And he offered: do we want it repaired or just replace it with a working unit? And I had to say, replace it. I just have not any reason to believe in the one we have getting fixed. We have the UPS label and they are supposed to try to transfer the memory from the current Switch to the new one, but goodness knows if that will happen.

Or if it's needed. bunnyhugger bought the kind of ethernet adaptor that is supposed to let a Switch connect, wired, to the Internet. This would in principle let her back up her Animal Crossing village --- the one thing that really has to transfer --- to the Internet. If we can get that to work, we can send this Switch in with ... well, confidence is the wrong word, since nothing that's happened so far has gone as it should. But at least some reason to think we might reach an end to this fiasco.

Little something on my mathematics blog today again. Using my A to Z Archives: Kernel I explain the preimage of zero and why we like such a thing.

Our next big thing on the Niagara Full visit, and the last amusement park we got to, was Darien Lake. Once an independent park, then a Six Flags park, then an independent park, and now a Six Flags park again. I know it sounds like I'm skipping but this is what really happened. And we had nice weather, for once! Beautiful clear skies for the whole day, which ended at 5 pm, because it was still not quite late June of 2019.

The entrance to Darien Lake, which had just become a Six Flags park for the second time that season.

We were entitled to free trickets thanks to our American Coaster Enthusiasts membership! Unfortunately the tickets were these boring little things printed out at the customer service desk. I like a fun ticket, you know?

Every high school student in Western New York was going to Darien Lake that day, and they were in line in front of us. You can see they had real actual tickets.

And a nice entry archway. They had switched over to the abstracted flags of uniform colors, rather than, you know, the flags that represent two different secessions in support of slavery.

The main midway for Darien lake and you can see water left over from, probably, cleaning the park.

We liked the abundance and diversity of birdhouses until bunnyhugger noticed they were all fakes. The holes are just quarter-inch divots painted black.

Our first coaster! We paid attention to where the many, many students were going and went around the park the opposite direction. Also, that's a hecking weird logo, which is appealing.

The twisty paths of Moto Coaster, a small steel coaster with a nice flywheel launch so it starts real real fast.

The rides have a motorcycle/motocross theme so you sit in something like a motorbike configuration, an arrangement that's unusual but a lot of fun.

Our next coaster, and Darien Lake's oldest adult coaster.

Viper's queue is some of the most lushly green parts of the park.

And there's a lot of it; you really see how this was their first Big Ride by how much and how much decorative space they give for it.

Trivia: The Charles Stark Draper prize, intended to honor engineering achievements (not generally considered fit for Nobel Prize consideration) has been awarded to people for pioneering jet engines, communicates satellite technology, and the Fortran programming language. Source: Remaking the World: Adventures in Engineering, Henry Petroski.

Currently Reading: Computers In Spaceflight: The NASA Experience, James E Tomayko. NASA Contractor Report 182505.

bunnyhugger's university has extended her --- and everyone else's --- accommodations for Covid-19 through the end of the spring semester. Which is great: if things start going well, she can teach as normal again. But she does have the option to go a whole academic year without the need for regular two- and three-time-a-week commutes, often in lousy weather or at night.

They have not said why they granted this accommodation, or why so early. Perhaps the explanation comes from an outside source. For example, the county that her school is in declaring a public health emergency. In the first week that students returned to campus, the county went from an average of between one and two new cases per day to eighteen per day. That's the seven-day running average, so the actual daily count is higher right now. Per capita (the county has about 70 thousand people) that's 25.8 new cases per hundred thousand people. The infection rate jumped from its July low of 0.77 to its current 1.62.

There are two counties doing even worse. Muskegon County, with 170,000 people, has a per capita new case average of 37.2 per day, and infection rate of 1.63. Luce County, in the upper peninsula, has an appalling 156.0 new cases per day per 100,000 people, but Luce County has a population of about 6,200, which is about the same number as are on my block. In reality, this is ten cases a day, which is a lot --- Ingham County, where we live, has about the same count but out of 290,000 people --- but that could just be, like, one block party.

If there is any good coming out of the plague factory it is that absolutely nobody can complain that ``students are responsible, they can handle the necessary in-person restrictions even without supervision''. In this, bunnyhugger's school is giving cover for, like, Michigan State and its decision to go entirely virtual. I still expect them to yield to the inevitable closure by Labor Day, an annoyingly late 7th of September this year.

Still, while it is simple reasonable caution to extend Covid-19 accommodations for the spring term, and while it's hard to imagine things being back to tolerably normal by January ... jeez.

(Ingham County's infection rate has been below 1.0 since the 2nd of July as I write this. Not as much lower as I'd like. But a hopeful trend. I don't know when I'll feel safe going to go somewhere to play pinball again, but ... like, for a while in June, we were down to under 1.0 new cases per day per 100,000 people and that seems like a safe threshold.)

On my mathematics blog today: My All 2020 Mathematics A to Z: K-Theory, a concept so big I doubt I did it justice but, what the heck, I have to publish something sometime.

Let's go back to the relative normality of June 2019 and our time at Seabreeze Amusement Park, which was a great place and I assume would be great even if you didn't go on a slow, chilly, and rain-threatening day.

A sign at the edge of the water park warns that past here, shirt and shoes are required. Why does the sign have a hinge? It turns out it can be changed to demand just shoes be required. What are the circumstances in which a shirt is not required in the main body of the park? That, my friends, is a question.

The water park, without most of its water. Wasn't needed then; it was a cold June when we visited all these areas.

Chair swing ride, which looks great and is at the edge of the water park.

Historical marker talking about when the park ran all the way to Irondequoit Bay (and, thus, Lake Ontario).

And back to the carousel. Note this horse has a nice painting of a rabbit on its gear there.

Getting a view of some inner-row horses here.

This horse had a great motif of a crescent moon with a cloud blanket. And that's an inner-row horse; go figure.

At the Sea Dragon swinging-ship ride we got a nice dragon figure, sure. We also talked with the ride operator who had chatted us up at the start of the day, when he was working the front gate.

Historical marker explaining the location of the old Circle Swing, which looks like a Hiram Maxim ride, a century ago. It's located near Whirlwind and I learn from examination that actually this is the north end of the park, with Jack Rabbit the south. I apologize for the errors.

View of some of the Bobsleds ride and a sign explaining the reserved picnic groves. I have no explanation for why they skip grove I and don't have a name for the former grove 10.

Bobsled coming back in on the highest level of the track.

A picture of the station taken from an angle which makes it look like two photographs got merged together by accident.

Trivia: In 1948 the New York Times spent nearly two million dollars to air-condition its new offices, as well as adding an employee lounge, game room, and circulating library. At the same time it added about 40,000 square feet --- nearly an acre --- to its compositing rooms. Source: The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune, Richard Kluger.

Currently Reading: Computers In Spaceflight: The NASA Experience, James E Tomayko. NASA Contractor Report 182505.

We have a working pinball machine!

Our Tri-Zone, a 1979 Williams early-solid-state, hasn't been working in ... nearly a year. Turn it on and the game would spew a set of numbers on the score displays and not start up. The most likely cause, according to our research, is that acid leaked from the AA batteries we failed to ever change, and this fried one or more boards. And we'd left that as ``something to get looked at'' later on when the pandemic hit and getting house calls became ... something for higher-priority stuff than a pinball machine.

So I mentioned our Tri-Zone wasn't working, on Mastodon. Dan (whom we'd met in person, and was one of the pinball techs working Pinburgh previous years, including the Women's Invitational Pinball Tournament last year) said oh, his Tri-Zone too! Was it the drop targets? (Which are always breaking down, on Tri-Zones.) No, and I described the problem and he gave me a fresh diagnostic: when a System 6 fails startup, the display is the game's model number indicating blank or corrupted memory. He advised ``turn it on ... give it a few seconds, then flip the power switch rapidly off/on once and it should boot up''. This wasn't quite enough, but a couple rounds of this, plus new AA batteries, and going through all the operator setup options --- not changing, just seeing them --- did the trick!

The sound did't come back, but our sound was always going out anyway. We suspect a loose connection somewhere, and it's possible that in fiddling with the sound dial I left it on 'too soft to hear' anyway. And actually playing the game sometimes brings the sound back too, so, we'll see!

Prowl around the Seabreeze some more with me, please.

The carousel, as seen looking out onto the park (look at the left).

bunnyhugger getting a picture for her own carousel calendar, perhaps.

Picture of the chariot taken while the carousel's at speed. Came out not bad for only trying this on one cycle.

Seabreeze takes pride in its collection of band organ music scrolls and here (some?) are on display.

Kiddie City, the kids themed area, where none of the rides were anything close to rideable for us. You can see how it was not a hot day from how the ride operators are dressed and how nobody has anything to do.

Star Rockets, one of the Kiddie City rides. I'm ... not sure why this picture seemed important.

Lunch! The Seabreeze Grill had vegetarian burgers. Garden burgers, if I remember right, which is not our favorite. But it's great to have something vegetarian at an amusement park that isn't pizza-or-cheese-fries.

Fresh historical marker: the park office used to be at the end of the trolley line and got relocated to be part of the main refreshment stand. Neat.

Golden horse at the top of the carousel building.

And here's the park office, formerly that pavilion at the end of the trolley line. Also the other exit to the park, not at all needed that day.

After lunch we returned to the Bobsleds; we rode that at least four times over the day.

Ride operator dispatching a Bobsleds car. And about the best view you can hope for of the path of the small but very fun roller coaster.

Trivia: The first ``artificial silk'' polymers developed by Wallace Carothers and his team researching for DuPont melted in hot water, dissolved in common cleaning solvents, and disintegrated after a few weeks anyway. This would, with four years' work, become nylon. Source: Napoleon's Buttons: 17 Molecules that Changed History, Penny le Couteur, Jay Burreson.

Currently Reading: Computers In Spaceflight: The NASA Experience, James E Tomayko. NASA Contractor Report 182505. Which I think I've maybe read before, but it's been ages if I had so let's just roll with this.

I took my daily walk in the evening yesterday, as it's been hot. This put me in the right place and time to see a raccoon waddle out into the street, yoink some discarded junk food, and run back into the shrubs, which was great. Things went wrong when I got back.

First is the Nintendo Switch which, as yesterday's update mentioned, was not fixed. Not either problem. In my last series of go-rounds with Nintendo Customer Support hanging up on me I got a new number to call (1-855-349-9517) that's supposed to be a different zone of Customer Support and maybe able to explain why the Switch had been delivered by UPS, but not checked in by United Radio of East Syracuse, New York, for more than two weeks. I figured to call them again except that they're not open weekends.

Still. United Radio has a web site and lists a Consumer Electronics division and I e-mailed the General Manager, the Manager of Business Development, and the Operations Manager asking: do you fix Switches? If so, why not ours? And the General Manager answered me, first thing in the morning, asking for the repair numbers so he could investigate. I don't know that anything will come of it --- really at this point, what could they say or do that I would trust? --- but I am willing to make this a problem for more people.

And last came after bunnyhugger had tried to go to bed. There was a bat in the room. So, sub-first, great job by the company we hired to exclude bats from the attic, although they would say the problem is that we re-roofed the house after their work. Sub-second, now I had to sit up and find the stupid bat who had gone into hiding in the curtains and disappeared. And after something like an hour waiting he finally emerged.

And was not a bat.

No, this was a katydid, which looks like a grasshopper and is the size of a VW Microbus, which is why in the dark I thought it was a bat. It makes clicking noises like a bat will do, too, which is why bunnyhugger was frightened of the thing. And we ended up sinking all that time into it, I couldn't even get a picture, as the blasted thing was faster than my camera.

So, yeah, not been the best start to a weekend.

Well, let's spend some more time at Seabreeze Amusement Park, back in June 2019.

The Leopold Lion, named for Charles Leopold, a carver for the Muller brothers and Gustav Dentzel, 1900-era carousel makers. This one was carved in 1903 for the last of eight carousels that Edward F Long built. Long's family eventually took over Seabreeze, and still owns it, so carousels are a big part of the park's heritage.

Here's the lion beside some other antique carousel pieces on display by the band organ.

A sign from when the park operated a Fairyland Petting Zoo, here showing off the kinds of birds they had. And, oh, yeah, the zoo had animals you might expect to see like ducks and geese and rabbits and ... a tapir and ... a coati ... and a llama ... and boy am I not enthusiastic about the lives lived by exotic animals in a small, family-owned park in Rochester, New York, in the 1950s. They also had at least one raccoon, though I can't say when. The sign was of the same style as that one listing the many birds.

Better look at the carousel exhibits, though, including racehorses from a midway game that George Long carved, and an elephant figure which had been on the ``Yogi Bear kiddie ride'' and is dated to circa 1950.

What first made Seabreeze was the ``largest saltwater swimming pool in the world'' and while I would think fresh water the more appealing, hey, they're on a Great Lake, you have to give something novel if you want to charge for it.

Here's a sign explaining more about George Long's carving and also about carousel horses in general. George W Long, you'll see if your eyesight is good, was the third generation of carousel makers-and-operators and he came to Seabreeze in 1904. Bought the place in 1946. The park's now in its sixth generation which is awesome considering these things usually fall apart by the third or fourth generation at latest.

Hit-A-Homer, a once-operating arcade game. I assume it's a flipper game with the challenge of swatting the lever at just the right moment.

Some old Seabreeze souvenirs. For several decades the place was known as Dreamland. The Seabreeze name, it turns out, comes from an area hotel. s

Vintage plates and glasses, plus the weight for a winner-every-time midway game.

1926 newspaper advertising the opening of the Natatorium. Among the attractions, a free ``gaily colored bathing cap for every woman bathing in the pool''. Also, they had a Tumble Bug! Those rides are now all but extinct; the only two instances I know of are at Kennywood and Conneaut Lake Park.

More of that newspaper page. Three roller coasters get featured here: the Dips (``the Most Thrilling Ride in the Park'', which Kiddie Park is next to) the Virginia Reel (``Join the Crowd of Merry-makers Opening Day and Tell Your Friends to Meet You''), and The Wild Cat, ``A Roller Coaster'' (``You'll Ride It Once and then Come Back for More'', which is some stronger ballyhoo for 1926).

And an opening day newspaper for the 1927 season. Curious about that ``Hey Dey'' thrill? Watch this space, unless I forget.

Trivia: King George III"s doctors were paid £30 for each visit to Windsor Castle and £10 for each visit to Kew while treating his 1789 illness. Source: George III, Christopher Hibbert. (He did come through quite well.)

Currently Reading: Origins of NASA Names, Helen T Wells, Susan H Whiteley, Carrie E Karegeannes. NASA SP-4402. ... There was a program of satellites named ``Injun'' (built by the University of Iowa, designed to observe ionosphere phenomena) and this doesn't rate even a sentence about what the, I'm assuming, very funny person who named that was thinking?

And now I take the chance to share my humor blog. It's got a piece that's utter nonsense this week and yet that I think will prove lastingly popular. We'll see.

• The Mystery Of The Call To Customer Service which may foreshadow what I do tomorrow when bunnyhugger's Switch is allegedly returning from its second round of repairs. We'll see if this is the one in which they do a repair.
• In which I am cranky about an honestly impressive thing someone else did because I got preempted in making the obvious joke about it.
• Statistics Saturday: Some Lists which might well foreshadow some Statistics Saturday posts now.
• 60s Popeye: Swee’Pea Soup plus a cartoon I noped out of but still I do like Swee'Pea Soup.
• The last new Mark Trail just ran on Sunday and it’s all reruns for now but I'm sure just as soon as they get a creative team for The Amazing Spider-Man and Mandrake the Magician they'll take care of Mark Trail.
• What’s Going On In Gasoline Alley? Is Gasoline Alley in repeats still? May – August 2020 I really don't know if Gasoline Alley is in repeats right now.
• After the recycling truck has left I noticed myself doing something absurdist.
• What Your Favorite Polygon Says About You, this week's big piece and a thing that could've been a Twitter thread but I made it something for my site statistics instead.

bunnyhugger sitting for a picture at one of the flower arrangements. Also notice she's wearing a jacket in June. It was a bit chilly. Jack Rabbit is not visible here, but it's above the picture frame, to the left.

Some of the midway games.

``Please, call me Robert Sleds. Bob is my son.''

Bobsleds is a bobsled-themed coaster, although it's not a bobsled coaster. It's a small tubular-track roller coaster that's surprisingly fun. Here's a car about to leave the station.

Each of the cars is a different country theme and of course Jamaica gets its entry. The coaster was originally a small junior wooden coaster, and then the park owner went to Disneyland and rode the Matterhorn and wanted some of that. So in 1962 they retracked it and expanded this ride.

Whirlwind is Seabreeze's newest coaster. It's a spinning wild mouse, the same model as Steel Dragon at Waldameer.

We had described Bobsleds to each other as feeling like the park wanted its own Matterhorn and then we came to this historical plaque explaining that's basically what happened.

We did not find any printed park maps, so I took a photograph. I'll send a higher-resolution picture to anyone hoping to make their own replica of Seabreeze for Roller Coaster Tycoon.

The arcade room at Seabreeze. We thought if any park we visited would have pinball this would, and were on this point disappointed.

bunnyhugger playing the Killer T-Rex game. The goal's just shooting balls into the dinosaur's mouth, but it was a fun challenging one.

Skee-Ball and some of the prizes you could win, such as Mexican wrestler carrot.

Seabreeze's antique carousel caught fire and burned in the 90s. Here's the dedication plaque for their replacement; ``Carousel Dedication June 1, 1996. In tribute to George W Long Jr. We dedicate this carousel, and the happiness it represents, to the families of Greater Rochester and the State of New York, in recognition of the community's long-standing tradition of supporting the park. The Seabreeze Family.''

Trivia: The September 1845 rules for baseball, published by the New York Knickerbockers Base Ball Club, specified that home and second base, and first and third bases, would be 42 paces apart. This likely assumed a pace of two and a half feet, for about 75 feet between bases, but is disputed. Source: Baseball Before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game, David Block. (Block points out, reasonably to my ear, that if by ``pace'' they meant something other than the common convention of two-and-a-half-feet, and meant just ``your average athlete's stride'', they would have used 40 or 45 paces rather than the un-rounded 42.)

Currently Reading: The Plastic-Man Archives, Volume 5, Jack Cole. Editor Dale Crain.

So, first, I'm looking for M, N, and O topics for the All 2020 A-to-Z. If you'd like to see me explain mathematics terms, here's a chance!

Second, want to know What's Going On In Gasoline Alley? Is Gasoline Alley in repeats still? May - August 2020 have come and gone and ... I don't really know whether Gasoline Alley is in repeats. It's maybe not?

Third, I walked to a used book store near the Michigan State campus and found a Robert Benchley book I'd never seen before. The owner agreed, he's never seen the title before that he remembers. So that's great.

Fourth and best of all: Michigan State is shutting down the plague factory. It's going to a virtual campus, not two weeks before they were going to open and be a fresh round of Covid-19 cases. Thank goodness. Have not yet heard of University of Michigan doing the same. But hopefully they, and the other state schools (Eastern Michigan, Western Michigan, Central, North, and of course ... Northwest) will do the same. I don't know how this will affect the planned reopening of the university library, for now set for the 24th, but we'll see. Wouldn't think they could do even a virtual semester without the library open at all, but they did shut down completely in March, which is why I've still got some books I took out in ... maybe February, when I thought maybe someday I might walk all the way to the university library ... hanging out here.

And now for my last bunch of pictures from Fantasy Island. Maybe it will emerge from its death again, maybe even get back some of the rides. It'll be a different place, though. Our day was cut short by rain, although I think by only a half-hour or so. I regret that we didn't buy stuff from the gift shop before we went back to the car for our rain jackets; it was a bad decision and was all mine.

Getting back to the thrill-rides area of the park. That's bunnyhugger in her d'Efteling-obtained rain jacket.

The control panel and emergency stop button for something or other that puts one person in one chair. It wasn't attended and didn't seem to be operating.

We played a little more I Got It and look what happened! bunnyhugger found no redemption prizes worth anything for a single I Got It ticket, and we kept the ticket in the hopes that we'd visit the park again and maybe win some more. So now that's a good souvenir too.

Flags whipping around the Silver Comet's lift hill.

And a look at the Silver Comet's ride sign.

We found a sweater on the ground at the Silver Comet queue, and this gave us the eternal question about what to do. Like, it's obviously bad to just leave it in the puddle, but should we take it away from where whoever lost it? Would they know where the Lost-and-Found even is? So we put it on the fence here, where hopefully it wouldn't get any more damaged, but still be really easy for people to spot.

Silver Comet returning to the station.

Looking from the Silver Comet exit queue down at the Devil's Hole. The original Devil's Hole was a Rotor but that kind of ride is almost extinct. This is a Gravitron, which has a lot of the same appeal but isn't yet the same.

Another look at the Silver Comet, from the unloading side.

And looking up high at the Silver Comet station's sign.

We got another ride in. Here's the gap between return leg and lift hill. I believe there was another rabbit eating the wet grass here, but that it was far too far away to make out.

Silver Comet's station and the sign put up to celebrate its 2019 anniversary year.

The park would close early, because of the rain. Here's a photograph from near the funnel cake stand where we spent way too much time trying to get a funnel cake back towards the Wild West Town; we could hear the 5:00 show going on, in the far distance.

A last look at the Carousel.

And a farewell look to the Fairy Tale Fortress and the Yellow Brick Road and, well, Fantasy Island. Here's hoping you can come back from oblivion.

Trivia: In June 1849 the Russian czar sent 100,000 troops into Hungary and 30,000 into Transylvania, to suppress the rebellions that the Austro-Hungarian government had been unable to quell, following an appeal they requested from the Austrian government. Source: 1848: The Revolutionary Tide in Europe, Peter N Stearns.

Currently Reading: The Plastic-Man Archives, Volume 5, Jack Cole. Editor Dale Crain.

Of course I want attention for my mathematics blog. Not enough to do anything about it more than include cryptic links to it from over here, but still, attention. To that end, here's pieces that I've run over there recently:

• My All 2020 Mathematics A to Z: Hilbert’s Problems, one of my big pieces for the year.
• Using my A to Z Archives: Hamiltonian
• Using my A to Z Archives: Hypersphere
• My All 2020 Mathematics A to Z: Imaginary Numbers, this past week's major piece.
• Sally Brown knows some imaginary numbers too, a footnote
• Using my A to Z Archives: Into

And we have a bit of a special 60s Popeye: Swee'Pea Soup plus a cartoon I noped out of. Swee'pea Soup I liked enough to almost forget the other one.

Now let's get back to Fantasy Island, June of 2019, and the other show we saw there.

The show at the Fairy Tale Forest's stage. The title card says ``If The Shoe Fits'' and that title makes no sense for the contents.

The show we watched had the prince, played by the Sheriff from earlier, being this general screw-up who needs his majordomo, played by the Deputy, to help him through his rash decision to challenge semi-competent pirates at something.

But we get to sword-fighting! Which is pretty exciting to see.

Does our hero get his act together and finally win? ... Well, yeah, how about that?

Show's over and the performers go back to prepare for the 5:00 Wild West Shootout. The Yellow Brick Road leads the way.

Ah yes, the famous item one finds at the end of the Yellow Brick Road: the Fountain of Youth.

Statue of Jack climbing the Beanstalk here.

Ah, it's the Crooked Man and his Crooked House, much as at Idlewild or Story Book Land.

Did not know the Three Pigs built a high-rise.

A buffalo painted with kid figures. I assume this is a Buffalo-region thing. That it's buffalo, I mean; I know about having a metro region make a bunch of statues of the same kind and have locals paint it in wild ways.

Another look at the painted buffalo and incidentally a shot down the western midway too.

Goosey Goosey Gander, before 2018 called Blue Goose. We did not know what this was but knew it was something special, and to our regret there weren't any kids coming back to ride the thing so we could see it in motion.

It's a simple enough circular ride, but it sure looked like the legs should move. Our research says yes: as the cars move in cicles the legs should run forward and back. This was a long-beloved ride at Fantasy Island, but was sold off in the 90s.

And in 2011, for the park's 50th Anniversary, the ride was found, bought, and restored to the park. (This is why I find it plausible that that roller coaster was a ride returned to the park, too.)

On to a midway game. Why all these rubber balls, some of them with Canada-flag maple leaves on them, and others with United States-flag stars?

They're for playing I Got It, a sort of low-tech Fascination game. You sit behind the blue counter and toss, one at a time, balls in to the grid there. When you get a bingo you call out ``I got it!'' First caller with a valid bingo wins.

Trivia: The treaty by which the United States bought Spain's claim to Florida, in 1819, also included the establishment of the 42nd Parallel as the northern border between (New Spanish) California and the Oregon country. Source: Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps that Explain Everything About the World, Tim Marshall. (About half a year after the treaty went into effect, in 1821, Spain acknowledged Mexican independence.)

Currently Reading: The Plastic-Man Archives, Volume 4, Jack Cole. Editor Dale Crain. If I'm reading the credits correctly Crain was the project editor, anyway.

PS: bunnyhugger's semester starts tomorrow. She's teaching exclusively online, mercifully. Still, the university has, as of the time this posts, seven hours and 50 minutes to stop the catastrophe. And they won't do it.

bunnyhugger has reached the end of her chronotherapy, getting to bed now finally after midnight again and waking up, we're hoping, reliably in the morning. By a quirk of fate the last week or so I've been sleeping in late, only by an hour or so but still a fair bit considering.

It's comforting to have our schedules back to something like normal. And that I won't be sitting around for long hours wondering if I'll wake her by going to the bathroom. I occasionally think it'd be nice to have a second bathroom, I suppose in the basement; this past month, it's felt like it would be a great idea. That's sure to fade, now.

The drawback, I suppose, is that both of us have had the gift of time in the house by ourselves. I always have that during the semesters, but she gets time alone very rarely. At heart, of course, both of us really like being with each other, more than we even like being with ourselves. But everyone does need their alone time, and it feels like a loss to not have any more of that.

Michigan State plans to open its libraries the 24th, initially to 5 pm, then to 9 pm, then closing them down when the pandemic flares up again. But that might be for a short while a place I can walk to, and just exist a while. I don't believe it's safe to go to our hipster barcade or a restaurant or anything like that. But sitting somewhere around Q8.4.O94, with my mask on? ... That's probably a fairly low risk of infecting or being infected by anyone.

Let's return now to poking around Fantasy Island and the Fairy Tale Forest within it. There's a neat surprise return, too.

The house of the seven dwarves and ... some construction! They were putting in a roller coaster, Dragon's Flight, that would open in August 2019.

It's a Dragon Wagon that they got from the Beauce Carnaval, running out of Ontario. The neat thing is that Fantasy Island sold this ride to the Beauce Carnival, according to Wikipedia, so that this was a return of an old ride to the park. (The Roller Coaster Database does not make a note of this.)

View of more of the Fairy Tale Forest area. Jack and the Beanstalk are over on the right.

Jonah and the Whale? Moby-Dick? Nope, this is the whale that swallowed Pinocchio and his father.

Alice outgrowing her home. Weak walls.

The third and last of the roller coasters we could ride, Max's Doggy Dog Coaster. It's a Wacky Worm model, like at DelGrosso's, in the other theme you can get for it.

Front-on look at the Doggy Dog train.

I suppose it makes more sense for a worm to be going along a path lined with flowers like this. The flowers make good lighting, though.

The reentry hand stamp! We went out to get our raincoats. We should have gotten stuff from the gift shop and brought it out to the car too, but I said we could wait for the end of the day for that, and was wrong.

Oh, but going back in I thought to photograph the rides-not-available sign. The biggest disappointment here was the train not running.

The miniature golf course wasn't open either, probably from being too wet. We'd have played if we could.

That's surely the Bremen Town Musician donkey on the right.

Airplane ride in Kiddieland; Wikipedia says it was moved to make room in the Fairy Tale Forest.

Cute little brontosaurus along the miniature golf course.

Some more views of the miniature golf course. It looks normal enough.

And here's the Zamperla balloons ride.

Trivia: The average grocery store in the United States takes in $516,000 per week. Source: Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America, Michael Ruhlman. (Book published 2017 so the data is probably current to about 2014-15.)

Currently Reading: Promise Denied: NASA's X-34 and the Quest for Cheap, Reusable Access to Space, Bruce I Larrimer. You know, the book makes a bit of fuss about the X-34 Project being converted to a Program, but as far as I can tell never explains what difference that makes. And this annoys me because I'm sure it's of administrative significance and I love to know how that sort of shift affects the rules by which something operates.

PS: Sally Brown knows some imaginary numbers too, the littlest possible follow-up post. I bet it's my best-liked thing of the month.

So that fish who was swimming funny? And that we suspected had some disease, possibly flukes, and so were quarantining? Monday he got the last of his PraziPro treatments for flukes. He was looking fairly good, swimming around more albeit still in his weird, working-too-hard manner. Eating regularly. I checked in early afternoon yesterday, examining the wonder of the baby fish. And then six hours later he was dead.

No specific idea what. There was black tissue under his skins, which bunnyhugger judged was internal hemorrhaging from some infection. PraziPro isn't a general-purpose antibiotic so whatever was bothering him we managed to miss, again. We've got a terrible track record at helping fish recover from illness; the only exception we can think of is Gemini, one of our original and biggest fish, who came back from a mild fungus and something that scraped off scales. Magnum, the other of our original set, also survived scale-scraping, but that's injury rather than illness. It's a disheartening end.

The baby fish in the other tank, though? This afternoon I counted five, possibly six. Some are hard to make out and move around in ways making it hard to tell. And given how the biggest seems to be growing it's possible there are quite a few more and they're just not yet visible, or not yet recognizable. To see baby fish you have to look at empty water until something changes and you see them everywhere. (The flashlight helps.)

Yes, it's occurred to me that had the bigger fish not been in quarantine, we would have emptied out that tank long ago, and the baby fish would never have hatched, or been killed when they were specks. It's tempting to think he gave his life for a half-dozen baby fish to live, except that the bigger one made no such choice, and that there was no reason he had to die; he just did.

Still, we're not emptying the quarantine tank, against the possibility that there might be baby fish in there. This seems improbable, since there have only ever been three fish in there (Magnum and Gemini together all winter, and this one this summer). But it's imaginable. And we've taken water and thus possibly fish eggs from the left tank to change out the quarantine tank's water. There's a good chance that our now-dead fish ate baby fish, but, there's also the chance there were more eggs or eggs waiting to hatch than that. Or that some babies got lucky.

And I suppose in future years we're going to be much slower about emptying out the tanks after we move the goldfish back to the pond.

Well. Let me take you back to Fantasy Island, back in the middle of June 2019 and the Wild West Shootout show.

Back to the western midway. Fantasy Island had an Old West Shootout, every two hours, a live show that used to be extremely common and that's almost faded out now. We were eager to see one. And say, what's that shrouded thing on the left?

Huh, that's funny. Why would it be so important that no one be on the mat?

Adult trying to hurry a kid out of the way as the pre-show warmup gets under way.

The shootout's pre-show. The premise is about the sheriff of the town being an incredible screwup, and that's introduced with stuff like this where he tries to talk someone into playing chess with him.

Huh, I wonder if we're meeting a future bad guy here?

And a bit of crowd work before the sketch really gets underway.

The baddies are not up for a game of chess.

In fact, they get to be a bit bullying while the hapless sheriff tries to pick up the pieces.

The Deputy, the competent woman of the scene, tries to get the bandits back in line and things put in order.

It doesn't go well.

Bandit making off with a heap of gold, as they will.

And the bandits go off-stage for a bit, before the climax to the first act.

The Deputy Sheriff tries to shame the Sheriff into doing something about the lawbreakers; he's dressed up as very old man.

Bandits shoot off part of the 'No Guns Allowed In Western Town' sign.

Bandits can not believe they're dealing with a gurl.

And they take to beating up the Sheriff. Will he be able to come back from this humiliation?

Trivia: During the six months of the Columbian Expo the fairground's police issued thirty fines for carrying Kodaks without a permit and 37 for taking unauthorized photographs. Source: The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America, Erik Larson.

Currently Reading: Promise Denied: NASA's X-34 and the Quest for Cheap, Reusable Access to Space, Bruce I Larrimer. Oh, yeah. This has got me wondering now, whatever happened to Burt Rutan and his Scaled Composites stuff? (Looks like he retired and Scaled Composites ... is still telling itself that its spaceship stuff is going to happen, this time for sure?)