Technically, most of the plays ran a few minutes more than ten minutes, but no one was complaining as the quality was good throughout. The entire show of ten plays and intermission took 150 minutes. The set changes between plays was very fast, often less than a minute when they just had to move a couple of chairs. The minimal sets did forgo the extra dimension of set design in the presentation.

Speed Mating was probably my favorite. Written by a mathematician, it featured four cicadas in their brief emergence to mate after 17 years underground. The actors made the most of their wings and bug eyes to capture the stages of cicada activity.

Dead Cat was also notable just because it seemed like an exercise in how much can we put into a ten minute play. Narration was mixed with “live” scenes and flashbacks. It all went together seamlessly, but I don’t remember the message.

At least someone else got a shot of me riding a wave in. The weather was perfect all week, and early June fell nicely between biker week and high school graduation season.

Every band member excelled with their playing skills and vocals, but I thought fiddler Kevin Wimmer really stood out with some very smooth sounds coming from his fiddle. Guitarist Chas Justus was interesting to watch because of his perpetual friendly grimace. It was a treat to see a fiddlesticks [video] performance, which was new to me.

Last fall, the powers that be at Duke Forest (presumably the Forestry department at Duke) re-positioned the rocks on the downstream side of the concrete bridge as shown in the first image. While New Hope Creek is usually gentle, I couldn’t imagine the piles holding up long during the heavy flow periods. The images below show the same view over the winter.

December:

January:

February:

Though the piles are lost, it’s interesting that the few big rocks held their approximate locations.

Here is a current image. It looks like a new arrangement is being tried.

The only app I use that’s really built for that kind of thing is Xcode, which will spawn off separate compiler threads in parallel. However, I wasn’t seeing more the two cores busy when compiling a large project, though Xcode claimed to be working on 8 files at a time. I was thinking that disk or memory constraints were the problem, but it turned out to be a configuration issue.

At some point in the past, I had innocently turned on the Distributed Builds option, which is meant for distributing tasks to other machines on a local network. However, a side effect is that the compiling is throttled, presumably with thread priorities, so the build is more of a background activity. Turning off Distributed Builds gets all 8 local cores working in parallel.

Now I just need to get my own programs to use those cores…

I was interested to find out why this pilot feels she’s got to fight. Turns out she never says she’s got to fight. The full quote in the story is, “If I’ve got to fight, I’ll fight.” Quite a different sentiment. I know headline writing is a different job than journalist, but it seems like somebody in the review process would have taken Journalism 101.

Was it just a gaffe or intentionally misleading?

Is there any system of rating heads of state? I see Denmark is atop one happiness index, and Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen is in his third term, so he must be doing something right. I bet he’d like to move to a bigger stage.

There is the minor issue of the constitutional requirement of natural citizenship. First of all, the constitution can be amended, and I know Arnold Schwarzenegger would be for it and probably Panama Canal Zone native John McCain. Second, the wording in the constitution is not completely clear. Section 1 of Article II states:

No person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President; …

It’s hard to parse that in a way that makes all the commas meaningful. The common interpretation is what you get if you omit the second comma, but what makes that comma ignorable? And even without that comma, the first “citizen” is not qualified like the second one, so technically one just has to be a natural born citizen of some country.