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Da Weekend
Oct. 1st, 2023 07:09 amWhen it stopped raining yesterday, we went outside and planted some bulbs. And I edged the front edge of the yard with decorative bricks. And replaced the low fencing around the front sublawn. There are more bulbs to be planted, and there are still some gaps left behind by the front-walk construction, so I think we need to buy a couple of bags of topsoil, and probably some mulch -- I hope we can find some that aren't water-saturated, after the past few days of rain. And I need to bake bread today.
[UPDATE: we planted most of the bulbs yesterday, and bought mulch, and topsoil, and potting soil, and sand (which I used to fill gaps between the brick edging and the sidewalk). The rest of the sand may be used for annealing ferrous-metal clinch nails, or something like that. Baked a loaf of sourdough bread. Picked raspberries, and turned them into a mixed-berry smoothie with yogurt and tofu.]
I want to attach about a hundred loops to the shoulder of the tent roof, and toggles to the top of the walls, to hang the walls from the loops. Ideally, the toggles and loops would be equally spaced (in the 6"-9" range) around the perimeter, so the walls can be attached equally well wherever you start. I'm not sure that'll work, since the tent is oval rather than circular, but even if it were circular, there's another problem: how do you measure the length of a tent edge, and the distance from one toggle to the next, with sufficient accuracy that the latter divides an integer number of times into the former, with no remainder? I can measure them both in such a way that the quotient is whatever I want, and it'll come out pretty close, but the remainder is much more sensitive to measurement error. On the divisor side, the Law of Large Numbers works in my favor: if each one has an error bar of 5%, their mean has an error bar a factor of sqrt(n) (i.e. about ten times) smaller, or 0.5%, so the quotient is fairly predictable. But if the dividend has even a 1% error bar (which is quite optimistic -- it's almost 50 feet of length, measured on a heavy mound of fabric that can't be laid flat), the remainder can be literally anything from zero to the distance between toggles.
Perhaps the answer is to set up several checkpoints along the way, dividing the perimeter a priori into halves or quarters, and reset at each checkpoint. This way each quotient is only about 25 rather than about 100, so I can have as much as a 4% error bar in the dividend before having no control whatsoever over the remainder. And if one of them comes out horribly off, I can fudge that checkpoint a posteriori and try to correct it gradually between that checkpoint and the next.
About Sept. 14 or 15, I noticed a scratchy throat. On the 16th, I started coughing. It's over two weeks later now, and I'm still coughing. Two different kinds of COVID tests both reported negative, and it doesn't feel like flu (no fever, no general body aches, little or no nausea, no "my hair hurts"), but it's lasting longer than a cold usually does. Yuck. I'm due to see the doctor again on Tuesday.
[UPDATE: we planted most of the bulbs yesterday, and bought mulch, and topsoil, and potting soil, and sand (which I used to fill gaps between the brick edging and the sidewalk). The rest of the sand may be used for annealing ferrous-metal clinch nails, or something like that. Baked a loaf of sourdough bread. Picked raspberries, and turned them into a mixed-berry smoothie with yogurt and tofu.]
I want to attach about a hundred loops to the shoulder of the tent roof, and toggles to the top of the walls, to hang the walls from the loops. Ideally, the toggles and loops would be equally spaced (in the 6"-9" range) around the perimeter, so the walls can be attached equally well wherever you start. I'm not sure that'll work, since the tent is oval rather than circular, but even if it were circular, there's another problem: how do you measure the length of a tent edge, and the distance from one toggle to the next, with sufficient accuracy that the latter divides an integer number of times into the former, with no remainder? I can measure them both in such a way that the quotient is whatever I want, and it'll come out pretty close, but the remainder is much more sensitive to measurement error. On the divisor side, the Law of Large Numbers works in my favor: if each one has an error bar of 5%, their mean has an error bar a factor of sqrt(n) (i.e. about ten times) smaller, or 0.5%, so the quotient is fairly predictable. But if the dividend has even a 1% error bar (which is quite optimistic -- it's almost 50 feet of length, measured on a heavy mound of fabric that can't be laid flat), the remainder can be literally anything from zero to the distance between toggles.
Perhaps the answer is to set up several checkpoints along the way, dividing the perimeter a priori into halves or quarters, and reset at each checkpoint. This way each quotient is only about 25 rather than about 100, so I can have as much as a 4% error bar in the dividend before having no control whatsoever over the remainder. And if one of them comes out horribly off, I can fudge that checkpoint a posteriori and try to correct it gradually between that checkpoint and the next.
About Sept. 14 or 15, I noticed a scratchy throat. On the 16th, I started coughing. It's over two weeks later now, and I'm still coughing. Two different kinds of COVID tests both reported negative, and it doesn't feel like flu (no fever, no general body aches, little or no nausea, no "my hair hurts"), but it's lasting longer than a cold usually does. Yuck. I'm due to see the doctor again on Tuesday.
