Paradise Park

Today I made my second visit to Silver Springs, the old tourist attraction now run as part of a Florida state park. It is a fantastic place, about which more soon, but first: something I learned in the visitor center today. There was a nice wall of photos taken at Paradise Park, which the old resort opened in 1949 for "colored people," about a mile downstream from the spring. Blacks and whites swimming together in the crystalline spring-fed waters of the Silver River was not an option in Jim Crow Florida. In fact, Paradise Park would operate until 1969!

The photos make Paradise Park look like a pretty great place, and having seen those waters up close I imagine it was; this nostalgic feature article confirms it. Still, the symbolism of its placement downstream from the white folks was unlikely to be lost on the visitors. Perhaps it is nostalgia for that order of things that lies behind Donald Trump's refusal to repudiate the KKK?

Photo credit

Moonlight

I own an Android phone, but I use it mostly for texts, emails, and reading the Times, so I can't say I would ever think of it in the same way I would think of, say, a Beethoven piano sonata. Regardless, this commercial is very cool. It's not just that they bothered to rebuild a piano with all the strings tuned to middle C, which is nifty. It's also that the rhythmic drive of Beethoven's masterpiece is compelling and exciting even when played in monotone. Of course your mind's ear is filling in the arpeggios...

R lightning talks

More on the recent Bay Area meeting at which I presented (briefly!). I agree that the lightning talk format is quite engaging, even when the topic is something in computer engineering that I can't really make sense of...

Can Music Be Perfect? Vol. 69

Divine.

Interstellar

A more fitting title would have been "Interminable." I guess the problem is that while our fictional interstellar travelers were navigating the wormhole, time was stretching out back here on earth, so what seemed like 2-3 hours to the characters in the movie extended into what seemed like years for the terrestrial audience. Ah, the paradoxes of movie relativity. Having seen "The Martian" recently I was mildly amused when who should corn farmer Matthew McConaughey bump into on a distant planet but potato farmer Matt Damon! "There ain't but room 'nuff for one dude name Matt in this here galaxy."

Tangerine

We watched Tangerine the other night. It's not the best movie ever made, but considering that it was shot on i-phones and stars mostly amateur actors, it is a minor miracle. The story is compelling, and the cinematography is often riveting: Hollywood never looked so beautiful, or alien. Mostly it is a funny, matter-of-fact narrative about the most "other" you could possibly be among American others: black, trans, and a sex worker. In the end, a Valentine: sweet, if sad. I wonder what Justice Scalia would have made of it.

Joanne Brackeen

An under-appreciated master.

Teaching Undergrad Econometrics with R

Slides from my presentation at the February Bay Area R Users Group meetup. Obviously I long ago got over any kind of anxiety about being perceived as a nerd...