The Late Dan Head

Dan Head

I only recently realized that I hadn't seen any posts from an old friend, Dan Head, in a while on Facebook, so I went to his profile to see what was up.  There I found out that he'd passed away on August 14th in Eugene, Oregon.

Here's a post I put on his page for any of his online friends to see...

Oh, I'm so sorry to hear of Dan's passing.  I only just saw this now, when I went to look at why I didn't recall seeing any of Dan's posts for a few months.

Dan and I were friends since elementary school in Waldport, when, though he was a year older than me, we played on the same little league baseball team.

In Junior High we had art class together.  One of those classes without the usual lectures and tests and school work, giving us students lots of time to visit and chit chat and goof off together. We were in the same in-class social group there.  The teacher usually let students pick music to play while the class worked and I remember Dan usually picked Ted Nugent's "Intensities in Ten Cities," though I wasn't into that sort of music yet.

I still remember a particular painting he did in class, three silver globes clustered together, floating over some kind of landscape.  

In high school we fell into the same social group again, a bunch of us hanging out every morning before class in either the counselor's office, with its round table and office-style swivel chairs, or if he had a meeting, in the home-ec room.  Talking about inane teenage stuff, but as a group of book loving teens, often working in a lot of puns and wordplay into our discussions.  For a couple of years we had a game where one person would pound the table and say a general subject and we'd spend all day trying to make our puns fit the subject (e.g. "birds" would be an emu-sing day...)

While most of our group likes fantasy, swords & sorcery books, Dan and I were the only ones who enjoyed John Norman's "Gor" series beyond the first book.  Both of us read all twenty plus books available then, and everyone else considered us a bit sick for that.

Being a year apart, we didn't have many classes together, just a few electives, but they were fun for socializing.  Classes like TV Production were like junior high art, not very structured and much of the work was done outside class hours, so in class every day was social hour to visit, discuss books, discuss music and all that...

We were both in the small school Games Club that met a couple of times a month to play war games, either in school or at our teacher's house to play games like Diplomacy, Russian Campaign, Squad Leader and so forth.  Lots of fun, lots of socializing.  Mostly it was the same group of us that met in the mornings, but with a few younger guys as well.

Some of our discussions, especially about a particular H.P. Lovecraft story we both liked have had life-long effects on me.  Talking to Dan back then, at 14 years old convinced me to basically reject religious belief altogether.  Though I'm not sure any of us actually knew much of atheism them, except as something portrayed as evil and communist, which we weren't.  But that's relieved quite a burden off me for decades.

I think the last time I can remember seeing Dan must've been around 1988, when a large group of our social circle were back in Waldport for holidays or summer or something, and we got together with a former teacher to play games.  We stayed up late into the night, playing a board game, chowing down Diane's Nacho Cheese tortilla chips, guzzling soda, talking, visiting and laughing.  

Life was already taking us all in different directions.  But it's a good memory.

Just for reference, here's the profile picture he set on Facebook at some point in the last couple of years...  It's not my photo, of course, so no credit to me.

The Nature and Growth (and Shrinkage) of Modern Mathematics

The Nature and Growth (and Shrinkage) of Modern Mathematics

I've struggled with math since elementary school.  In the 1990's, in my 20's, a late mentor of mine, Dave Mitchell, suggested the book The Nature and Growth of Modern Mathematics by Edna E. Kramer might help me overcome some of that.

It was slow reading for me, and over the course of a few years I made my way through a few chapters.  Until early 2001, when I moved to Pune, India for a year.  Since I was only going for a year, it wasn't among the few books that I packed up to take there with me.

Then I ended up spending a decade in India before I moved back to the United States.  When I did move back to the U.S. I moved to New York City, and didn't have easy access to my large library in storage out in Waldport, Oregon.

With the coronavirus pandemic this year, I figured I'd buy another copy and pick up reading it again.  I found a used one easily enough but there's a problem with it.  In the 20 years since I last read it, the print has shrunk to minuscule, Holy Cow! unreadable size.   (yeah, yeah, I know, it's my aging eyes...)

As for math, I actually did excel at math twice as a boy, in elementary school.  But each time the teachers punished me for it and I learned my lesson, never again excel at math.

The first time was in 2nd grade at the Fellowship Farm School in Piscataway, NJ.  My best friend, Brian, and I worked ahead in our math workbook, enjoying, having fun.  But when our teacher. Mrs. Cooper, found out she punished us.  Back then standard punishment was having to stand against the wall in the hallway during class, and then stand against the wall of the lunchroom during lunch, only eating quickly after everyone not being punished had finished.  We faced this for a week.

I never again worked ahead of the class in math again.

Then the second time was in 4th grade, in a new school, Waldport Grade School, where I was a new student, having moved there in October 1978. Mrs. Elsie Apt gave us the assignment to write all the numbers from 1 to 10,000.  Not all at once, over a few weeks, with some days a set of 100, or 500, or at most 1,000.

Quite an onerous assignment.  However, at some point in it I noticed a weird repetition in the digits of sequences of numbers.  It didn't take me long to figure out how to exploit that to make the writing of all the numbers go quicker.  Especially where the digit 1 (one) repeats in the same position of 10 or more numbers (bearing in mind the maximum repeats is 1,000 but the lined pages only had so many rows...)

Even with other numbers, I could just go down the lines, write 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 over and over till the page was full, then move to the next digit of all the numbers and repeatedly write something like 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, then got to the 3's and so forth and so on...  

Of course, my skill at handwriting and related isn't so great that this wasn't obvious from the way I turned in the page. 

Sample of 210 - 219

Mrs. Apt considered this to be cheating.  And I had to rewrite a number of pages.  

So, despite learning something more valuable about numbers than the teacher probably intended, I got punished for it.  Lesson learned, don't excel in math!

On the plus side, that school year my mother was a volunteer whale counter for the Oregon State University Marine Science Center, so I wrote a lot of those number pages, plus other homework, from the top of the Yaquina Head Lighthouse.  So that's a hell of a good memory.

My Photo of the Yaquina Head Lighthouse from 2016.