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life, the universe, and everything
Hank Dolben
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_________________
Tue, 2003 Dec 23
Heaven Explicated
My readers, at least one of them anyway, representing a large proportion of the total number, have been clamoring for an explication of my poem A Little Piece of Heaven. If you'd rather work out your own thoughts on it, you might want to avoid my laborious notes.
Lone climber,
she toils up
rock strewn path,
heart pounding,
brow sweating.
Ne'er alone,
here, in her,
Father's soul,
strong, loving,
stern, giving.
All his friends
carry on
there, with him
filling life,
death - defused.
Heav'nly hosts
sing with joy,
every voice
living now,
feeling love.
Merry Christmas
Fri, 2003 Dec 12
Version 1.3.5 of BlueJ Was Released Yesterday
BlueJ is an integrated development environment designed for learning Object Oriented Programming with Java at the introductory level.
Dead Duck Has Become Internet Chestnut
The following has reached the status of Internet chestnut.
A woman brought a very limp duck into a veterinarian. As she lay her pet on the table, the vet pulled out his stethoscope and listened to the bird's chest.
After a moment or two, the vet shook his head sadly and said, "I'm so sorry, Cuddles has passed away."
The distressed owner wailed, "Are you sure?
"Yes, I am sure. The duck is dead," he replied.
"How can you be so sure," she protested. "I mean, you haven't done any testing on him or anything. He might just be in a coma or something."
The vet rolled his eyes, turned around and left the room, and returned a few moments later with a Labrador Retriever. As the duck's owner looked on in amazement, the dog stood on his hind legs, put his front paws on the examination table and sniffed the duck from top to bottom. He then looked at the vet with sad eyes and shook his head.
The vet patted the dog and took it out, and returned a few moments later with a beautiful cat. The cat jumped up on the table and also sniffed delicately at the bird. The cat sat back on its haunches, shook its head, meowed softly and strolled out of the room.
The vet looked at the woman and said, "I'm sorry, but as I said, this is most definitely, 100% certifiably, a dead duck."
Then the vet turned to his computer terminal, hit a few keys and produced a bill which he handed to the woman.
The duck's owner, still in shock, took the bill. "$150!", she cried, "$150 just to tell me my duck is dead?!!"
The vet shrugged. "I'm sorry. If you'd taken my word for it, the bill would have been $20, but what with the Lab Report and the Cat Scan..."
Posted here since I happened to have a picture of the consulting medical team.
A Beautiful Day in Rye after the Weekend Snowstorm
The day after the weekend snowstorm is a beautiful day in the neighborhood; blue sky over white snow.
Sun, 2003 Dec 07
Jack Frost Caught on Radar Fleeing New England
All that's left of this weekend's snowstorm is in Maine. Is that Jack Frost in the gulf, fleeing the wrath of New Englanders buried under his early winter's work?
Thu, 2003 Dec 04
Share The Road
I added the "SHARE THE ROAD" picture, taken today in New Castle, New Hampshire, to the blog's sidebar.
Bush's Policy Methodology Is Archetype Of Hidden Agenda
In September's Washington Monthly, Joshua Micah Marshall, does a nice job of summarizing the Bush administration's maneuvers to advance a radical conservative agenda while publicly claiming that its policies are designed to solve pressing problems. Most of the same points were made over the past few years in Paul Krugman's Times columns, which are collected in The Great Unraveling.
Thanks to a certain Rollins College economics professor for pointing out Marshall's essay to me.
Tue, 2003 Dec 02
Heal Health Care System? Start Anew
In yet another article on the the health care system, The New York Times reports on the proposal by Steffie Woolhandler and others to do away with private insurance. Woolhandler answers the reporter's question of what is driving up health care costs with:
Administrative costs. As of 1999, these accounted for 31 percent of U.S. health care expenditures, compared to 16.7 percent in Canada. In fact, we spent $1,059 per person on administrative costs, compared to $307 in Canada. With a single-payer system, we could save $209 billion a year by eliminating the high overhead and profits of the private insurance industry. Administrative costs may even be higher with the new Medicare bill.While those costs are certainly significant, I'm not convinced that they are most of the increase over say the last decade. Also, I'm always suspicious of claims that changing administration will save much, especially if the administration is regulated by federal law. And couldn't a single-payer system enforce other cost controls, such as lower drug prices which she mentions?
Here are an overview of the single-payer system proposed by The Physician's Working Group for Single-Payer National Health Insurance of the PNHP, and the whole article.
Sun, 2003 Nov 16
Drew and I at the Tour of Hope in Washington, DC
Here's a picture that Mary took of Drew and me on the Ellipse in Washington, after our ride with Lance Armstrong through DC in the Tour of Hope, October 18th. Click on the picture to see an expanded view that includes Lance.
It was a beautiful day and fantastic to ride on closed roads in our nation's capital.
Later, the national team arrived, completing a 3,200 mile relay ride in seven days.
Wheaton Beats Amherst Winning New England Championship
In NCAA Division III women's soccer, Wheaton College prevailed 3-2 over Amherst College in a seesaw battle. Wheaton's All-America forward Tracy Prihoda was a force, scoring the first and winning goals.
Devil Dog
Without explanation good old Dave had this picture in his blog today. We sometimes refer to our chocolate lab, Mousse, a 9 month old puppy, as "Devil Dog". We're hoping he grows out of it.
Fritz Wins After Kasparov Blunders
It now looks like chess playing software will have to be designed to blunder occasionally in order to pass the Turing test - since that is what even the strongest human players do - in spite of what Ian Rogers said in commenting on game two yesterday between Kasparov and Fritz:
Fritz surprised the pundits by making good move after good move, the same moves suggested by the many top-level human players in attendance. Australian #1 Ian Rogers proposed that X3D Fritz had passed the chess Turing test, the point at which a computer becomes indistinguishable from a human!Tue, 2003 Nov 11
Plato Asserted That Universe Is Dodecahedron
When I previously commented on the confusion between a dodecahedron and a buckyball in reporting on recent interpretations of observations made by NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, I hadn't remembered (or hadn't ever known) that Plato said that the dodecahedron was the shape "... which the god used for arranging the constellations on the whole heaven"; this in conjunction with his assigning the other four regular polyhedra to fire, earth, air, and water.
The Pan-Mass Challenge Donates $16.2 Million to the Jimmy Fund
Yesterday, at Fenway Park, the Pan-Mass Challenge presented a check for $16.2 million, 95% of the funds raised this year, to the Jimmy Fund in support of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, bringing the PMC's 24-year total contribution to $102 million.
Version 1.0.6 of NetNewsWire Lite Released
NetNewsWire Lite version 1.0.6 was released today "to fix one particular performance bug, where during a refresh sometimes HTML descriptions would be slow to appear."
Version 1.0.5 of NetNewsWire Lite Released
Here are the changes to NetNewsWire Lite in version 1.0.5, announced Wednesday. NetNewsWire Lite is the freeware version of NetNewsWire, "an easy-to-use RSS Web news reader for Mac OS X."
New York Times Blunder: Soccer Ball Is Dodecahedron
In the science section of The New York Times the article "Cosmic Soccer Ball? Theory Already Takes Sharp Kicks" presumes that the basic geometry of a soccer ball is the dodecahedron, while in fact it is the truncated icosahedron, otherwise affectionately known as the buckyball. Of course, the two polyhedra are closely related forms in everyday three dimensional space, and the article is concerned with a subject where the geometry is non-euclidean. To be fair to the Times, it could be that the mathematician Jeffrey Weeks is a bit fuzzy about footballs. From an article on the same subject in New Scientist:
According to Weeks, the WMAP results point to a very specific illusion - that our Universe seems like an endlessly repeating set of dodecahedrons, football-like shapes with a surface of 12 identical pentagons. If you exit the football through one pentagon, you re-enter the same region through the opposite face and you keep meeting the same galaxies over and over again.Wed, 2003 Oct 08
Java on LEGO Mindstorms Robots
One of the coolest hacks of all time is leJOS, a Java&trade virtual machine, API, and tools for the LEGO® MINDSTORMS&trade robotics computer (RCX). Like Sun's Java products for small devices, the leJOS JVM does not support a complete Java environment, but at an amazingly miniscule size of about 16KB is more powerful than most other systems for controlling the RCX.
The Yellow Jersey Brought $36,000 to the PMC - Jimmy Fund
It wasn't much of an auction: the opening bid $35k and the second, last, and winning bid $36k, but the 2003 Tour de France Yellow Jersey, autographed by Lance Armstrong, auctioned by the Pan-Mass Challenge brought a windfall for the Jimmy Fund. The auction continues on Monday and through the end of October with many other items.
Win a Yellow Jersey
On Monday, the PMC is auctioning a Yellow Jersey, from the 2003 Tour de France, autographed by Lance Armstrong. I think that Lance's Yellow Jersey went for around $10,000 in last year's auction.
Wonalancet
One of my favorite areas for hiking is the Sandwich Range; shown in the picture, taken from Ferncroft Rd., are Mt. Wonalancet and Mt. Whiteface in the background.
The many trails maintained by the Wonalancet Out Door Club are among the best in the White Mountain National Forest.
Unit Testing in BlueJ
There's a good paper on the support for unit testing built in to the current version, 1.3.0, of BlueJ.
Make 7 UP Yours
Can you believe that 7 UP's tag-line is "Make 7 UP Yours"? (italics mine)
Taking a Break Behind Deane, in the Orleans Marsh during the 2003 PMC
Digital Evidence Placing Me in Provincetown, Near the Finish of the 2003 PMC
3,582 People Rode in the 2003 Pan-Mass Challenge
More PMC Statistics
| 2-day Riders | 2,820 |
| 1-day Riders | 762 |
| Men | 2,314 |
| Women | 1,268 |
| Sturbridge Starts | 2,208 |
| Wellesley Starts | 1,374 |
| Cancer Survivors | 161 |
| Volunteeers | 1,931 |
| Virtual Riders | 136 |
| States | 37 |
| Countries | 6 |
| Collected as of Aug 7 | $9,400,000 |
Version 1.3.0 of BlueJ Was Released Today
BlueJ is an integrated Java development environment designed for learning at the introductory level. In combination with the textbook Objects First with Java it provides a great way to learn programming with a software engineering perspective.
I've Updated to blosxom 2.0
This is the first post that uses version 2.0 of blosxom for generating the HTML and RSS of this weblog.
I Successfully Completed This Year's Pan-Mass Challenge Ride
I was the first member of Team Dolben across the line, at about 11:10, Sunday morning in Provinceton, with my riding partner, Deane, not far behind - not that my goal was to finish first, rather to finish feeling good, which I did. The weather this year was pretty good; a little rain early Saturday, then just humid, but not very hot. Thanks to all of the people who are sponsoring my ride by donating to the PMC.
See today's coverage by the Boston Globe. Note that 94% of this year's donations are expected to go to Dana-Farber.
Thu, 2003 Jul 24
I'm Riding with Lance Armstrong in the Tour of Hope
I've signed up to ride with Lance, Oct. 18th, in the Washington, D.C. leg of the Tour of Hope which benefits the Lance Armstrong Foundation and cancer research.
YAPTU (Yet Another PMC Training Update)
Yesterday I rode a pretty flat (all east of route 1 in Hampton, North Hampton, and Rye), 26 mile circuit at an average speed of 18.6 miles per hour - not quite Jan Ullrich's 30 mph, but good by my aging standards. With two weeks to go until the Pan-Mass Challenge I've ridden 1,360 miles in the past quarter, 13 weeks, including six 50 milers, three 100ks, and one 80 miler.
Pan-Mass Challenge Training Update with Three Weeks to Go
This morning I rode a 32 mile circuit at an average speed of 18 miles per hour, making 132 miles for the week, and 1,410 miles for the season.
How Computers Work
Charles Petzold (2000), Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software (Redmond: Microsoft Press: 0-7356-1131-9)
Petzold takes a constructive approach to explaining how a computer works, starting with a relay, then showing how logic gates are made from relays, and then higher level devices - such as data latches - from gates. At first I thought that using relays in the construction was silly, but then realized that they are much easier to understand than transistors and so make the whole discussion more accessible. In fact, anyone can easily make a rudimentary relay from some wire and pieces of metal and wood. After building up a programmable machine, Petzold goes on to point out that making a usefully large machine out of relays is impractical, but that transistors can be used in much the same way to construct logic gates.
I think that this way of presenting the mechanics of computation should be quite satisfying to the average reader, though, at the same time, the amount of detail included might discourage someone who was hoping for a quick explanation. For Brad DeLong (certainly not an average reader), Petzold hit the sweet spot.
Wed, 2003 Jul 09
Some Pan-Mass Challenge Fundraising Highlights
Last year 3,394 PMC riders raised $15 million for the Jimmy Fund. The 16 riders of Team Dolben raised $94,375. $4,238 was donated by people supporting my ride.
This year the PMC, with 4,000 registered riders, has a goal of raising $16 million, while Team Dolben's goal is $100,000 in donations.
Thu, 2003 Jul 03
One Month to Go Until this Year's Pan-Mass Challenge
On August 2nd and 3rd, for the fourth year, I'll be biking with Team Dolben in the Pan-Mass Challenge, a Jimmy Fund event benefiting the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, a leading center for research in prevention of cancer and treatment of people with cancer.
You can contribute on-line in support of my ride. Or if you would rather make a donation by check, and don't receive a direct solicitation from me, please contact me by email (just edit the spam impediment, changing "[AT]" to "@").
Mon, 2003 Jun 30
If You're Reading this, Then You Know the 'Blog Moved
As long as the location of my personal web pages was moving because of the change from attbi.com to comcast.net domain, I decided to also change the "user" to "nothingisperfect" to cut down on email address harvesting from this weblog. Obviously, I won't be reading any email addressed to nothingisperfect@comcast.net. Note that there are some internal links (where one post is linked to another) that are now broken since blosxom doesn't interpret a URL base within a posting.
As it turned out, despite my fears, Comcast handled the transition smoothly by automatically redirecting HTTP from home.attbi.com to home.comcast.net.
Mon, 2003 Jun 23
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (or just before Uranus)
On my bike tour of the solar system I had planned to eat in the neighborhood of the Sun, but, having started early, arrived in Presque Isle mid-morning, so decided to have a Gatorade "energy bar" and find lunch on the way back to Houlton. In the town of Bridgewater, about halfway out to Pluto and just sunward of Uranus, I spotted the Country Bakery on the right side of the road. I dropped out of hyperspace and, peering in through the door, saw that they had subs; just what I wanted. I stepped in, ordered a 12" classic, and downed a bottle of PowerAde while the sandwich was being assembled.
Wandering around the little shop, I spotted a brochure, amongst various promotional literature, of The Maine Solar System Model. What luck! I hadn't found one in Houlton since I had left before the Visitor Information Center room had opened. Now I had some reading material to peruse during my meal. The brochure is quite well done and a handy reference to have along for the ride, better than my handwritten notes cribbed from the website.
A 12" sub was more than I could eat right then, but the shopkeeper was kind enough to wrap half of it to go as well as refilling one of my water bottles. I left with the brochure and 6" of grinder added to my back pockets and zoomed (did I mention the tailwind?) past Uranus and Neptune on my way back to Pluto. At the rest area in Houlton, I enjoyed the beautiful weather as I sat at a picnic table in the shade under pine trees, and finished the rest of my sandwich.
Sun, 2003 Jun 22
The Bike Rider's Guide to the Solar System (Model in Maine)
Friday, as promised, I biked the Maine Solar System Model, from Pluto at the Visitor Information Center in Houlton, around the Sun at the Northern Maine Museum of Science at the University of Maine at Presque Isle, and back out to Pluto again; an 80 mile roundtrip. Given that the scaled speed of light is seven miles per hour, I was in hyperspace while on the bike, breaking the comet metaphor.
The gas giants are striking and hard to miss, while the inner planets, being so small, are not easy to see, but not hard to find, since they are all within a mile and a half of the Sun and their locations are well described in the guide (Earth: mostly harmless). Pluto and Charon are inside the Visitor Center, in the corridor between the restrooms and the information area.
I was pleased that this turned out to be a good ride. U.S. Route 1 rolls over the gradual hills of Aroostook County - always going up or down, never severely, though enough that there are climbing lanes on many of the uphill sides - with the crests from about one to three miles apart, and with an insignificant elevation gain from Houlton to Presque Isle. Since this is farm country, open views of the surrounding fields and hills abound. The rode is generally very good with full-lane, well paved shoulders for the southern 25 miles, except where there are climbing lanes, and three foot paved shoulders elsewhere, allowing plenty of clearance between bicyclist and traffic, which while light has a large fraction of trucks roaring by at a good clip in the 55 mph speed limit that prevails for all but the middle of a few towns.
At present, there is road construction, covering about a mile just north of the center of Mars Hill. You might wish that you had your mountain bike for this nasty section as the whole thing is wet, and dirt except for one part that is one lane and covered with fist size crushed rock, where I felt as though I was in the Paris-Roubaix, but with loose, sharp pavé. If not for the fact that this comes between Saturn and Uranus - a long way from Mars, in spite of the town's name - this might be considered the asteroid belt that's missing from the model.
Fri, 2003 Jun 13
The Demystification of Rotation Matrices
Even for people who use them, rotation matrices seem somewhat magical. Direct understanding is largely obscured by the fact that there are a few key steps to the derivation, and that presentation methods are usually hopelessly general. In an effort to counter that trend here's a short explanation that boils it all down to the essential parts in one place. For now, I won't show the math. I think that those with some background will understand all the easier without having to follow the formalisms.
A rotation matrix is most often used to transform a vector in one coordinate system into the vector in another coordinate system, which is rotated from the first. The transformation is accomplished by simply multiplying the vector by the matrix. By definition, the process of multiplication can be broken down into taking the dot product of each row in the matrix with the vector, where each dot product results in a coordinate of the vector in the rotated system.
Each row of a rotation matrix is the unit vector of an axis of the rotated system expressed in the coordinates of the first system. The dot product of a unit vector and a second vector results in the length of the projection of the second vector on the unit vector; exactly the definition of a coordinate for some axis. This correspondence between the dot product and the geometrical relationship of two vectors is the nub of the magic, a theorem equivalent in power and beauty to that of Pythagorus.
The dot product result, in turn, mainly depends on a little trigonometry which can be easily shown: given an angle T, equal to A - B, cosT = cosA cosB + sinA sinB.
Later, I'll write a little longer explanation that includes the math, especially that "easily shown" theorem of trigonometry on which the whole edifice rests.
Thu, 2003 Jun 12
Prentice Hall Advanced Algebra: Tools for a Changing World
by Allan Bellman et al., 1998, ISBN: 0-13-419011-4, is the textbook that I thought was so good when my son Will used it in High School, and from which I got the geometric presentation of completing the square used in my appreciation. Thanks to Will and Mrs. Chadwick, the head of the Mathematics Department at St. Thomas who provided the information. One of these days, I'll copy that paper into another word processor so that I can add the reference.
Change from AT&T to Comcast Will Break these Web Pages on July 1
I expect that the URLs for this web site will change on July 1. Comcast bought AT&T's cable service division and will be making a service transition then. I don't have much faith that it will work smoothly since the information Comcast has provided has been sketchy at best. For example, I haven't seen anywhere what the server name is for personal web pages. I knew this was coming when I started this 'blog and so am treating this month as experimental.
Back-to-Back 50 Milers, Yesterday and Today
OK, the truth is that I cut yesterday's bike ride short, to 49 miles, because of rain, but made up for it today by riding 53.
A Derivation of the Quadratic Formula by Completing the Square
About two and a half years ago (circa Dec. 2000), when my son Will was in high school, my helping him with a little algebra homework led to the writing of an appreciation of completing the square, and its application to a derivation of the quadratic formula. I was very impressed with the clarity of his algebra textbook and now wish that I had done two more things in my document: dated it, and credited the book. I'll see if my son can find a reference for the book. At this point, I can't change the document since I have it only in PDF and don't have an application that can edit that.
My First Dip of the Season
As forecast, a southwest breeze had come up in the early afternoon, producing, along with a temperature in the high 70s, very comfortable conditions for lake sailing, especially for mid-May. From the Point of Pines, the best place to head in that kind of wind is the small bay south of Hay's reef, off the state beach. There I was, catching a pretty good puff and barreling along, hiked out on a close reach when the Laser fell headlong into a hole, leaving me to scramble to leeward trying to keep from going over backwards. I failed to keep the boat from capsizing and so ended up gasping in the very chilly water.
Generally, one proves his or her stalwart constitution by taking a quick dip around Memorial Day. In a year when the winter had been very cold and the ice went out rather late, I was beating that by a good week. Worse, as I was getting my reaction to the cold under control the boat turned completely upside down, allowing the centerboard to fall out. Now I had to haul the boat back on its gunwale by working from the bottom, then swim around to the topside and push the centerboard back in so that, returning to the bottom I could use the protruding centerboard to right the boat - not what you would call a quick dip. But once I was back onboard and sailing again under the bright, thin clouds, I could not have been happier.
Sun, 2003 Jun 08
The comet ride, biking the solar system
When I was quite young, my mother took my sister and me to the Children's Museum in Boston, which used to be in a big, old house on the Jamaicaway. In one of the cramped rooms, in a glass case, was a model of the solar system, which at first I found exciting, but then disappointing when a guide explained that the model was not to scale, as it would be problematic to show any interesting features and fit the thing in the museum.
For years, as I've noticed while bicycling through Rye, New Hampshire, scaled distances of the planets from the Sun have been marked on Wallis Road starting from in front of the Junior High School and extending towards the beach. The little boy in me who yearned for a better model has silently appreciated Ms. Adams, the teacher behind that nice creation.
Now, some folks in Maine have created a model of the solar system that finally fulfills the dream of that young model aficionado, with a scale of one mile to an Astronomical Unit and stretching from the Northern Maine Museum of Science at the University of Maine at Presque Isle along U.S. Route 1 to Houlton with scale models of the planets and major moons mounted on stands along the way.
I won't be able to attend the unveiling on June 14th, but plan to make a comet-like 80 mile roundtrip bike ride from Houlton around the Sun in Presque Isle and back out past Pluto again, one day in the following week.
I have to thank Slashdot for this one.
Sat, 2003 Jun 07
Mail servers could be responsible for prohibiting spam.
I suggest that one way to stop spam is to make mail services responsible for prohibiting their clients from spamming. The service administration process would insure that the identity of its client is well known. Clearly this is already the case for services where the clients are paying customers or employees, but is problematic for free services such as Yahoo!. Then, through its usage policy the service imposes deterrent costs, including revocation of privileges, for spamming. Finally, the mail server is certified (by a chain of digital certificate authority) to implement sufficient standards. The certification process is completely in the hands of the service providers, who are technically capable of administering it.
Then such a server only accepts email, addressed to one of its clients, from another server that is certified. When clients receive messages that look like spam, they notify their service provider who continues the process by notifying the senders' service provider, who in turn verifies the spam and takes action against the sender.
The existence of a service enhanced in this way would provide a competitive advantage so that all services would be forced to adopt the policies and technology. A transition could be handled by allowing uncertified messages that are flagged so that a client can treat them differently.
Fri, 2003 Jun 06
'Blogging
Every 'blog has to start with something and starting with an explanation of this one seems as irresistible as it is conventional.
I've known about 'blogging for a while and learned to appreciate RSS once I started using an application (e.g., NetNewsWire Lite) that automatically checks for new posts to selected feeds. This is particularly great for feeds where the posting is infrequent (as you can expect this one to be), but even pays off for others such as the New York Times by differentiating the posts that have been seen from those that have not.
To 'blog or not to 'blog? I wouldn't say, "I 'blog, therefore I am." But, what the heck, every now and then I have something to say and I like this method of communicating. Also, there are some web sites, for example, Mount Everest news, that would be well served by an RSS feed, making me wonder how hard it would be.
Since my ISP (AT&T, really Comcast, though not yet in name) doesn't support CGI for personal web sites, I need to be able to generate the HTML and RSS after posting an article, and then ftp the files to the server, instead of having a CGI script generate the stuff on demand. It turns out that blosxom supports that mode, as well as being free and simple to use.
100k Bike Ride
Today I got in a 100 km bike ride, my second of the season, the first being a week ago. That gets me up to 825 miles for the season, with eight weeks to go to the Pan-Mass Challenge. I'm usually motivated to ride on Friday if I haven't gotten much mileage in the early part of the week. The weather was about as good as it's been this spring; sunny, in the upper 70s, dew point 52, though a little on the windy side. It always makes me feel good to be able to ride 100k. It's not so long that it wipes me out, but long enough to be a good day's exercise.
D-Day
June 6th has always meant something special to my family. To begin with, my parents were married on June 6th, two years before D-Day, on the day that my father was commissioned in the Army Air Force. Then there was D-Day, when my father-in-law stormed one of those famous beaches in France. After the war, my father's father died on June 6th. In my mind this always seems more like Memorial Day than the last Monday in May.