I'm a lasagna boy!

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Adventures in larceny

An early morning: as Anna and I were walking down to Kate's to meet Aram and MD MD, they rang up: "The Kate's doesn't open until 830." So we agreed to detour to Cooper's, where we sat outside an enjoyed the first cup of coffee.

Over a plate of the Fruit Orgy, I wondered what would remind me of my love for this country. Aram promptly said, "The Minutemen." They wrote songs that expressed quiet optimism, while acknowledging the frustration of the Reagan era.

Anna had a soccer game: we walked over to her apartment to pick up her gear on the way to the Polo Fields. Her apartment building has a locked iron grate, and a locked inner door: we passed through these and traipsed up the stairs. On the landing of the third floor, I saw a new-looking pair of Camper trainers. How odd, I remarked. As we approached the door of her apartment she stopped short. Her smelly turf shoes were gone. The shinguards remained, but someone had just absconded with her Adidas (and left their Campers in exchange, apparently).
Perhaps this was a blessing in disguise: after Anna put up a very polite sign asking if someone had taken (she didn't write 'stolen') the shoes, she grabbed her cleats -- fortunately, Saturday was a nice day and the game was out-of-doors, so the loss of the turf shoes was a big irritation but not catastrophic to enjoying the day's game -- and scooted over to the playing field. I rode over to meet her. While the team were playing (and they won, 1-0), I chatted with another cyclist. Upon hearing the story of the purloined sneaks, he said, "You should go over to the Sports Basement, where my best friend works. You can't miss him: he's got a beard out to here."
And indeed, we went down to the shop looking out on Crissy Field, and Anna got a very comfortable ("better than the Adidas!") pair of turf shoes. And then we got ice cream, dipped in chocolate.

Shakes alive!

While sitting at home this evening, I felt a minor quake centered near San Simeon.

Respect to Studio One!

Legendary Jamaican record producer Coxsone Dodd died this week.

A few weeks ago, Brentford Road in Kingston was renamed in his honour.

May 6, 2004

Coxsone Dodd, 72, Pioneer of the Jamaican Pop Music Scene, Dies
By KELEFA SANNEH

Coxsone Dodd, the record producer and entrepreneur who helped invent the Jamaican music industry, died on Tuesday night at his studio in Kingston. He was 72.

The cause was a heart attack, said his daughter Carol Dodd.

Mr. Dodd was best known as the force behind Studio One, a record label he started in 1963; in the years that followed, Studio One released some of the most influential and enduring Jamaican records of all time. His popular tracks were endlessly recycled and rerecorded, often without his knowledge or permission, in a musical tradition built on borrowing and collaborating.

Mr. Dodd ran a record shop on Fulton Street in Brooklyn, Coxsone's Music City. But he maintained his studio in Kingston, on a street known until recently as Brentford Road. During a ceremony held last Friday, Brentford Road was renamed Studio One Boulevard.

Two days before the ceremony, Mr. Dodd told The Jamaica Observer, "It is a wonderful tribute to my contribution to the industry and my years in the business and it shows that my work is highly appreciated."

Clement Dodd was born in Kingston and he began his career in the mid-1950's when he set up his own sound system. Sir Coxsone's Downbeat, as it was called, was his entry in the competition among other Jamaican sound systems to see who had the loudest speakers, who could get the best records and who could attract the most revelers.

He was among the first to realize that instead of importing American R & B records, it might be more profitable to produce some Jamaican originals; soon, Jamaican records were outselling American imports.

At one point, Mr. Dodd was running no fewer than five record labels, including Studio One, and he assembled a remarkable roster of talent that included the Wailers, Bob Marley's first group, who released their hit "Simmer Down" on Studio One in 1963.

Soon ska, the sweet and up-tempo Jamaican style that dominated the early 1960's, gave way to the styles called rocksteady and then reggae, each slower and tougher than its predecessor.

Mr. Dodd kept pace, thanks in large part to session musicians like the keyboardist Jackie Mittoo and the bassist Leroy Sibbles.

In the late 1960's, Studio One created a series of rhythm tracks, or "riddims," that would serve as the foundations of songs for decades to come. A 1967 instrumental track called "Real Rock," for example, quickly came to seem like part of reggae's DNA, as successive generations of singers and producers reworked the track.

Mr. Dodd's daughter Carol remembers that the ubiquity of Studio One tracks like "Real Rock" was a mixed blessing for her father, who wasn't always compensated, or even acknowledged.

Even as it made him proud, she said, he was concerned that he wasn't given credit.

In addition to his daughter, Mr. Dodd is survived by six other children and by his wife, Norma Dodd.

The reggae historian Rob Kenner, editor at large for Vibe magazine, compared Studio One to pioneering American labels like Stax Records. "The Studio One sound is kind of like Stax," he said. "It never gets exhausted."

Mr. Dodd never fully embraced dance-hall reggae, the computerized, heavily percussive, sometimes-foul-mouthed style that has ruled reggae since the early 1980's.

But he kept working, dividing his time between Kingston and Brooklyn while working on the Sisyphean task of figuring out exactly who owned the rights to which records. Just as Mr. Dodd claimed that lots of latter-day producers used his music without permission, some of the musicians who worked for him claimed that they had not been fairly compensated.

But Chris Wilson of Heartbeat Records, who collaborated with Mr. Dodd on a series of releases and reissues, notes that Mr. Dodd was, above all, pleased to see that his music had stayed so fresh.

Mr. Wilson said, "He was kind of amused by the fact that some of his songs are 25 or 30 years old and people were still, for the umpteenth time, rerecording them."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Lime in the cocoa-nut?

I am re-reading Robert Kanigel's evocative biography of Srinivas Ramanujan The Man Who Knew Infinity.

Amongst the thrilling problems presented in the text is the case of the guavas and the monkey:

"Two monkeys having robbed an orchard of 3 times as many plantains as guavas, are about to begin their feast when they espy the injured owner of the fruits stealthily approaching with a stick. They calculate that it will take him 2 ¹/₄ minutes to reach them. One monkey who can eat 10 guavas per minute finishes them in ²/₃ of the time, and then helps the other to eat the plantains. They finish just in time. If the first monkey eats plantains twice as fast as guavas, how fast can the second monkey eat plantains?"

Meanwhile, in the practical aspects of mathematics: I attended a talk by Raissa D'Souza, a statistical physicist who studies organic networks:

locality = decentralized control self-organization: scalable growth, grow indefinitely without need for additional controls

fluctuation: distribution of tasks and load; of data and processing;

Preferential attachment:
Zipf's law, power -law distribution
Zipf 1949

Polya 1923 "Attractiveness is proportional to size"
dP(s)/dt [alpha] s

One of the slides she presented was based on statistical collection of sexual contact in Co Springs!

fertile vertices
Nash eqm (network game theory)
sortative vs assortative mixing (M E J Newman Phys. Rev. Lett, 2002 UMich)

immunization models vs network topology

Small World Networks:

model power graphs on a taurus / tauroid, not a square / cube

Catalans and bears, oh my!

Perhaps not as graphically compelling as one of my all-time favourite links, the On-Line Encyclopedia
of Integer Sequences sports a spiffy "webcam" for examining sequences in the database.
Spiffy sequence of the day, although with a misnomer:

The Catalan sequence was first described in the 18th century by Leonhard Euler, who was interested in the number of different ways of dividing a polygon into triangles. The sequence is named after Eugène Charles Catalan, who discovered the connection to parenthesized expressions.

A modern-day Robin Hood

A MUNI repairman has been charged with stealing from the fare-box to the tune of at least $80,000. He also has "a bank account in his native country of Malta."
Matier and Ross also report:

Speaking of Muni: Muni riders have been catching an odd sight these days -- Willie Brown riding the bus.
The 1-California bus, from his Nob Hill apartment down to his new Embarcadero office.
Reason: "Have you seen how much parking costs in this town?" the former mayor asked. "They want $40 a day -- $53 with in-and-out privileges.''

What a day to be eating a lasagne!

Plaque honors the man.

Name an airport after me!