Life of Wry

I’ve heard Kim Stanley Robinson speak numerous times… about the climate, about the Sierra, about the future. He is a novelist, a Sci Fi legend, an avid backpacker, a futurist (though, I think tonight he rebuffed that label) and many other things. I did NOT know he was also a poet. Further, I didn’t know that he started writing poetry at UC San Diego when a literature student there… at the same time I was there (not a literature student)!

He was the featured poet tonight at Dr. Andy’s twice-monthly Poetry Night at the Natsoulas Gallery (cat sculpture in front of the gallery pictured above).

Here’s Stan reading one of about 20-25 poems he read tonight:

Interestingly, there are a few notable overlaps in our life experiences: 1) as I said, we both attended UCSD at about the same time (and Muir College to boot, and both wrote poetry — in my case bad poetry — on the cliffs below our dorms and high above Black’s Beach); 2) we both share a love of the California Sierra Nevada Mountains (well, who doesn’t? … but when asked tonight what hike he’d recommend to a Sierra first-timer, he described the Twin Lake-Island Lake hike out of Wright’s Lake, a hike in Desolation I know exceptionally well, and love); 3) we’ve both trekked to Everest Base Camp in Nepal (about which he read a poem which included references to about a dozen places, all of which I knew well); 4) we both live in Davis (lol). I have to admit that I’ve not read any of his [twenty-some] books (not a Sci Fi fan, but have wanted to read both Ministry for the Future and Sierra: A Love Story), so can’t claim to be a fan, but I have sure enjoyed hearing about all of our mutual life experiences in numerous of the talks I’ve heard him give over the years (including a fascinating conversation with Ezra Klein on his podcast).

Well… it was fun. Especially fun was the break… as Andy made a point to introduce me and I got to talk to Stan for about 10-15 minutes. I really enjoyed that!

After the break came the open mic portion of the evening where about 20 folks read their latest (or greatest) poems. It was a classic poetry reading… poets of all stripes, one after the other, a real mix of styles and intensity. Apparently, Andy always saves Allegra Silberstein — Davis’ current poet laureate (I believe) — for last, whom he introduced with quite a thunder. She was wonderful.

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I composed a poem on the way home.. all about A Street. I’ve already forgotten it!

Spring sprung yesterday. Happy that.

This was our first daff, photo taken on March 5.

Thinking about mom. She died seven years ago today. In some ways, it seems much longer. It seems like forever ago that I could call her up and talk, or just visit for a week and play a lot of gin rummy.

I had lunch today with John who reminded me that we had so many tussles. We sure did! She could make me so mad, so defensive, so annoyed. She could trigger me and set me off like nobody else. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why now. Somehow, thankfully, I rarely think about those times. Glad about that.

I quite honestly reflect mostly on the funny things. I really really wish she were around still and I could draw on her wisdom (she had plenty), memories, observations, opinions. I promise I’d get over all the annoying things.

Don’t get to do that.

But here are some pics that make me smile.

As I write this, the smell of slow cooking corned beef (happy St. Patrick’s day to those who celebrate) is making me a bit dizzy. Smells heavenly, but it’s almost overwhelming. So, I took myself for a walk in the Old North neighborhood (to which we almost belong, missing by just a block, really) on this incredibly beautiful 76 degree spring day!

And these guys over on E Street … who are still celebrating Christmas as the bees are busy and buzzily pollinating.

It’s not like Jim and I are not in good shape. Both of us work out daily. That said… speaking for myself, my little daily workout, while laudable for a near-70-something, isn’t nearly sufficient to prepare me for the kind of hike we’re going on in August. It’s not like we don’t hike. We do. We go on some pretty impressive hikes in Yosemite every year, for example. But this upcoming Dolomites hike, the Alta Via 1, is an 8-day hike, with a group and leader, that is quite challenging. But more than that, there are no outs. You have to keep up, you have to hike every day, you have to get to the end of the day’s hike in time for dinner. Once you start, you pretty much have to finish and you ought to do so without ruining the experience for your husband, son, son’s girlfriend, and anyone else who might be on the hike.

So… Jim and I will need to make sure that we are in THAT kind of shape… not just Yosemite hiking shape (for which we do nothing extraordinary in preparation), but Dolomites hiking shape. I looked at the hiking profiles today with a keener eye than I had before…

Over eight days, we’ll average about 10 miles a day, and average 3000 feet of elevation gain. Some days are longer (11 miles is our longest day) and there is one day when we’ll climb 5500 feet (that is a lot.. and it comes on the 11-mile day… which is actually a good thing.. spreads that elevation gain out).

Anyway, we flat-landers will have to get creative in finding hills (big ones) to train on. I searched last night and found a few in Fairfield, some in Vacaville and bunches in Napa, not to mention a few around Lake Berryessa. Berryessa’s closest but loaded with poison oak which is a deal breaker for Jim.

Today we hiked in Lynch Canyon. This was a pretty perfect day for that area.. it was 75 degrees which is relatively cool (summer will be unbearable for hiking in the Central Valley), and just gorgeous emerald green as far as the eye could see. The ground was soft, but not too, too muddy. And all the cows were busy eating so paid us no nevermind.

Some pics:

There were cows…..

A horse…(and a caballero!)

Trees.. lots of stands of them all over the place (note for future summer hiking)..

The trails were not always clear. There was some signage and some orange-post trail markers, but it was very good Jim had loaded maps before we went and we had GPS. We used it a lot.

All told, we hiked six miles. We think we climbed about 1000 feet. A good start to our training.

Our nephew Matthew sang tonight in a UCD Department of Music concert in the new Pitzer Center. He sings with the chamber singers, a smaller subset of the choruses who performed tonight, closing out the program with five lovely pieces. He was great!

In addition to the chamber singers, there were two concert choirs. One comprised sopranos and altos and the other tenors, bases and baritones… something he clarified for us afterward.

The final piece tonight wasn’t even on the program and was the most exciting. As the choir director announced the song, both choirs and the chamber singers emerged from backstage to surround the audience. Then they performed a rousing rendition of This Little Light of Mine. Very fun!

This may have been the first choral concert either Jim or I had ever been to. The next one will undoubtedly be Matthew’s next performance.. whenever that is.

Between the Pitzer Center and our house (about half a mile along A St), we passed lots of night life: parties, packs of minimally-clad students, a police presence at the Hillel House (just heightened security for an event, it looked like), music emanating from frat houses.. typical Friday on a warm near-spring evening.

Matthew is in the back row, second from left. (Reading the program now, I see photos and audio recordings were prohibited.. oops.)

Peter’s not around to make Pi Day feel like a real holiday, but in his honor, we ate pie for dinner… Chicken Pot for the main course (no pic) and Marionberry for dessert — both courtesy of Ikedas, both pretty darn good! Not much of a shot, but there it is.

And for the fun of it, I memorized Pi to 15 digits this afternoon: 3.14159265357989…

The good news: I did my memorizing about eight hours ago! Take THAT cognitive decline worries! The bad news: the last four numbers are actually 8979… (damn!)

For reasons too numerous to list, I haven’t been [fully] around the Arb in weeks. Missed a lotta spring blooms. But today, Janet and I made the rounds. Some pics:

Poor iPhone… had no idea what to focus on… but I like all the yellow anyway.

And then there was blue…

So, this happened today…

The Cambridge University Press’s prestigious Journal of Fluid Mechanics published eight articles today in its online publication for its Volume 983 – 25 March 2024 issue… and Peter’s was one of them.

I sure don’t know my way around academic journals. For example, of the eight works published today, six are “articles,” one is a “rapid,” and another is a “focus.” Not sure what those distinctions are. If you click on articles, you get 119 pages — approx 20 articles per page (inclusive of rapids and focuses). That’s well over 2000 articles going back to 2011 (not sure how long this journal’s been around). You can search on most cited, and all kinds of other interesting things. They seem to publish every two weeks, but there also look to be several article drops per each issue. Best I can figure.

Well.. all I know is it’s a huge accomplishment to get into this journal and it took the better part of a year of writing, rewriting, review by a 3-judge panel, a rejection, an appeal of that rejection, more rewrites and finally an acceptance. Not to mention the research that produced the findings that became the subject of the article.

This isn’t Peter’s first published article, but it’s his most notable. Suffice to say, he’s over the moon and we’re proud.

The title of his article is Beyond optimal disturbances: a statistical framework for transient growth (by Peter Frame and Aaron Towne, in that order). It’s an understatement to say we hardly understand a word of it, in spite of numerous attempts on Peter’s part to explain the research. Additionally, both Jim and I have read numerous versions of the article — have even proofread for grammar and spelling — but would still be hard pressed to offer a cogent summary. (Again, understatement.)

To wit, here is the abstract:

The theory of transient growth describes how linear mechanisms can cause temporary amplification of disturbances even when the linearized system is asymptotically stable as defined by its eigenvalues. This growth is traditionally quantified by finding the initial disturbance that generates the maximum response at the peak time of its evolution. However, this can vastly overstate the growth of a real disturbance. In this paper, we introduce a statistical perspective on transient growth that models statistics of the energy amplification of the disturbances. We derive a formula for the mean energy amplification and spatial correlation of the growing disturbance in terms of the spatial correlation of the initial disturbance. The eigendecomposition of the correlation provides the most prevalent structures, which are the statistical analogue of the standard left singular vectors of the evolution operator. We also derive accurate confidence bounds on the growth by approximating the probability density function of the energy. Applying our analysis to Poiseuille flow yields a number of observations. First, the mean energy amplification is often drastically smaller than the maximum. In these cases, it is exceedingly unlikely to achieve near-optimal growth due to the exponential behaviour observed in the probability density function. Second, the characteristic length scale of the initial disturbances has a significant impact on the expected growth, with large-scale initial disturbances growing orders of magnitude more than small-scale ones. Finally, while the optimal growth scales quadratically with Reynolds number, the mean energy amplification scales only linearly for certain reasonable choices of the initial correlation.

Here’re two screen shots of what it looks like on the online site:

I just can’t tell you. We’re proud because he’s pleased and it was a lot of work and he learned a ton. It’s a great accomplishment. Eager to see what his next thing is.