Heart attack, Jack (Q4 2023)

 My brother, your uncle, Jack J. had a heart attack yesterday.  It isn't his first, or his second.  It knocked him down hard.  He was medivac-ed (how do you spell that) to a city 120 miles away.  He had to be resuscitated 3 times during transport.  His sone feels that it is really good that he is alive, and that he is stable and breathing on his own.

His daughter K was saying that if he died she might harm herself, she has no idea how to live on her own. His (amazing) wife was saying that they would be able to pay bills even with the older kids taking up jobs.  They need him alive. 

I wish I could email "Oliver Anthony" and ask him to write a song about how when the old men get put six feet underground their families explode, disintegrate, and half of them are done in half a year.

And I think about life insurance in the presence of printing $6trillion in new bills, and the mega-inflation we are due.  And when folks ask if the treasury can print a trillion dollar bill it answers in the affirmative whether there are million or billion dollar bills.

This decade "buried" my mother and my sister.  I do not think it deserves any more of my siblings lives.

And my beautiful nano, you said "can you please stop talking about dying because it is making my tummy sick".  You are five and articulate and wonderful.  I love you dearly.  

God keep us all.  God keep us all.   

Summer 2022, Covid was a dumpster file or bad politics

 Hey there kiddos.  Girlies. Big girls.  

It has been quite a while since my last letter to you.  Nearly a year.  I think my last post was mid-october in 2021.

I made a video for you.  Unpacking the encoded documents should be hard, but maybe valuable. 

Here it is:  

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npHOBskzoOw
• https://www.slideshare.net/EngrStudent/advocating-effectively-for-women
  

It was part of a larger video.

If I were more experienced then I would have fixed the volume.  Those 2d-id's have encryption checksum instead of urls, some for technology not imagined yet.  Going from encrypted checksum to source document is hard, but should be more tractable when you are adults.  If I am alive and have enough brain left, then I can tell you (maybe) where to find versions of that.  I have had enough of my stuff taken and used without remuneration.  

You can see on slide one that you are meaningful elements of my life, and from slide two that you are my favorite creatures.

A year after the fact, it has only 74 views (maybe a dozen of them from me).  

I joined the navy immediately after high school, but my ptsd and aspergers, as well as the very unusual nature (very new age, very hippie) of my upbringing led me to leave it early.

I struggled through 15 jobs in 5 years in the middle of new mexico.  It was a terrible time.  Arbys, Dennys, Subway, Burger King.  Some brief stint at NMIMT in their auto-shop.  Hertz car rental, Checker Airport Taxis, "National Research Labs" that made pcb boards but only turned on safety equipment during active osha inspections that happened about twice a month.  Movie theater.  Live-in health care.  Then I moved to Phoenix and worked for Bulle.  I solved 5 deal-breaker problems, big things, for not enough money to even pay rent, had to split an apartment with Tod Landis.  He hired "manager team" who fired me.  Didn't help him, but man it hurt me.  Unique Home Designs, I stood up their internal pipeline for custom security doors, good increase in yield.  Faith Church Janitor.  SMCC.  ARC Flashlight.  I did good for Pete.  His wife didn't like me, and his accountant wanted to rob him so they convinced him to fire me.  That was hard.  

I went to college then.  Home Depot during the summer.  Worked as a tutor/grader/assistant through college.  Spent a summer at Magique Golf (Heath and Sean, sons of Bill) setting up their IT and working through the yield in their production process.  

Some of those photos are other entries on this blog. 

Here is "no mans land": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJCgeOAKXyg

My mothers life.  A little slice of that hell.  She got us kids across that no-mans land.  We all lived to 18, something my biological father swore we would not do.  Murderous pedo monster. It is a crime that she died before he did.  

In the movie, Jean was the glue that held X-Men together, that brought in the lost wolverine.  It was an imperfect metaphor, but it was the best I could find.  You girls know about the inattentional video. 

I'm running out of time to finish this letter.  I wish I could tell you that I love, you and how very meaningful you are to me.  I wish I could give you hugs and strength that last a lifetime and make your roads straight and your destinations worth having. 

Feb 2019 again, but better late than never

Youngest mathbaby:
I love you. 
I see your face, and who you makes me smile a smile of joy.
I identify with you.  That means that I see you as a part of me.  Because you are part of me, I'm okay with giving myself to you, to better you, to maximize the good you can get in life.
I want you to live.  There is a chorus of fools, ghosts from my past, that chant they want me dead.  I speak into you the words opposing what they say.  I deeply want you to have real life.  You have my blessing, my permission, my blessing, to be amazing and have a life worth having.
If you let me, I will give good.

Middlest mathbaby:
I love you.
I see your face, and who you are makes me smile when I see you. 
I see the wild curly hair that you identify as yours, and I remember the wild curly hair that I, as a boy, hated as a kid.  It was a bane of my existence, but intrinsically me.  I see your pride, and delight and I am delighted, and comforted that it did someone any good instead of harm, and I delight in your delight.
I see your art, and your jumping and running, and your dancing, and fairy houses: your alien.  I love how alien you are, it is beautiful.  It is the scent of you, and though I couldn't possibly put a ruler to it, I have learned to deeply love it.
You look to me for a road to greatness, and to be as fun as you remember me to be.  It compels excellence, drives me to want to give you such things.  I need to be needed.  My meaningfulness, while limited by my comprehension, is architected in part by your perspective, and your vision. 
I love to sit and play video games with you.  I like your brave, your fun.  I like how deeply you love your friends even when they are deeply flawed people. 

Oldest.  Largest?  Little girls want to be big girls.  Grown girls detest being called big because they equate it with fat or ugly.  Your gender engineers chunks of its vocabulary so that it can't win, doesn't it.

Math old/big girl:
You were the first mathbaby.
I see you and see a thousand images of your face flash by, from the 4d ultrasound months before you were born to the moment of your birth to the grump of last week and your tweenage silliness.


.... to be continued... 

Mid-October 2021 and midbrain graph cognitive structural stochastic resonances...

 Hey there mathgirls,

A genius I know (E) uses cleverly correlated white noise to stimulate traffic in corpus callosum.  I was thinking about this as I was trying to find my old favorite simplynoise.  I used to be able to tune up a color of noise for optimal cognitive stochastic resonance with particular songs.  The music of the 80's shows that music industry already knew then (at some level) that additive noise of the right color can crisp or blur sounds. 

We are almost at the tech-level for me to be able to re-engineer mathematical language into Klingon, so that instead of being comprised of the names of old dead guys, it is what it means.  I think to do so would be to give humanity to own the future of all science.  

I had the idea that one could encode the graph of that mathematics into the nature of the correlations of the white noise, and imprint it on the structure of the infantile brain.  Such a thing could make it easier to be a Boltzmann, or other once in a thousand-year genius.  Humanity needs more of those.

-mathdad

It is 2021, or so they say

It has  been a rough year.  There were good things, but the world got crazy.

I don't know how to post here anymore.  I need to re-read "she calls me daddy" and "letters from dad".  I need to find this "dad" person again.

-dad

End of March, 2020

Hello Math-girlies,

It has been a busy year.  The mind forgets, doesn't it.  If you wrote down all we did, it would be a year of good adventure.  Kelleys Island.  Dad's new Job.  New baby.  Kings Island.  Christmas.

I'm in the basement writing a letter because the world is nearly shutdown. There is a virus, "covid", a coronavirus SARS-2, that has been overwhelming medical resources of 1st world countries like Italy, and Spain.  It came from Wuhan China, a product of their "wet market" where they kill, cook, and eat near where the animals are stored.  Very unsanitary.  Only in the 3rd world can things like that still exist.

I have a new cough.  It's really weak, but its unlike coughs that I have had before: its really dry.  I worked from here all last week, and I don't get out much.  Allergies?  Flue?  or Covid?  Time will tell.  The dry cough has been around since Saturday the 21st of March 2020.  We will see how this goes.

We have started playing through "Storm Kings Thunder".  I want to tell you how to think of goblins with AC15 and your first level characters.  Neither hit so well. How do you stack the numbers so the individual goblins become a non-issue?  You don't know it but the same approach works for the college application process, the job application process, and other game-theoretic situations.

I have to get working.  Cognitive models, and optimal computing beckons, and it also pays our bills.

I love you dearly.  You are all four my favorite girlies.  

-MathDad

End of May, 2019

You both went through cross-over.

Math-mini, you were the first girl to earn "arrow of light" for Pack 365.  We did it together, but you had to do a lot of the legwork.  In one year you earned both your Webelos and your Arrow of Light.  I am very proud of you.

Math-micro, you completed your tiger and you are now a wolf-cub.  You two worked very very hard.  I can't tell you how proud I am of you both.

First they gave the pins (mathmini) or belt-clips (mathmicro) that each scout in the pack had earned.  Some had earned few, you both had earned many.  We do a lot of activities.  Mom doesn't know how very much of a scout she is.

Afterwards, they had each den starting with the youngest (lions) and ending with the oldest (Webelos) cross over the bridge. 

Before you crossed the bridge they painted your faces and said (I think):
- black stripes on the tiger trail mean happiness
- yellow on the chin is sunlight along the wolf trail
- red on the forhead is for bravery

These show you are ready to move along the trail of scouting.

 Mathmini, you were the first girl ever to go through your pack.  You were the first Webelos girl.  You earned your Webelos and Arrow of Light in one year.  Words fail me when I try to say how very proud of you I am.

Mathmicro, you are a brave and friendly wolf-scout.  I am delighted in your character (don't tell folks but I am also delighted in some of your quirks) and I love your kind soul. 

On the saturday afterwards, we went and put flags on the graves of veterans.  When someone has died, giving their life, so you can have a life of peace and freedom, then you have to say thank you, and take a moment.  There are thousands, tens of thousands, of graves of veterans there.  It took hours to put down all those flags, but there were Scouts BSA, Girl Scouts, American Heritage girls, and several other organizations with lots of folks to make the job a lot easier. 

You said it right, mathmicro, when you said just thinking of it is scary and sad.  It is scary and sad.  It is a holy thing.  No person with a soul should disregard the high cost it took to get here.  Fools throw it away as worthless because they haven't taken the time to look at the value. 

I am delighted with and deeply proud of my Scouts.  I love you girlies deeply.

I also love our math-nano.  Too young to be in scouting.  I don't have a picture to put here yet. 

You are why I do so very much of what I do, because it is good for you, because you need it.

-mathdad