on wintering

I've spent a lot of time the past 6 weeks or so, scratching my head and trying to remember why, 6 years ago, I swapped warmth and culture for digging the snow and ice out of the path of my car.  To be fair, we've not had that much snow and ice, but where I live now, any snow and ice equates to a few blocks walk to parking I can exit without a shovel.  I remember convincing myself that seasons, with their corresponding changes of lifestyle, appealed because of their perceived diversity.

Winter has benefits.  Once the temperature drops below 20 or so, I have no plans except reading a book under layered comforters.  So I've accelerated my reading.  I've been on a fiction binge, so lately I swung back into non-fiction.  I'm reading "State by state", an excellent set of essays by contemporary authors, one per state.  I also picked up a well-written, accelerated review of statistical methods, well suited to get me ready to fall asleep in about 10-20 minutes.  And I do sleep more in the winter.  If you're not going to go out, and if watching TV is not your drug, then crawling into bed with a book at 9pm starts to look nicer and nicer.

Travel has eluded me this winter.  I'm likely off to Seattle for a few days in late February, on business but also able to visit my son.  And I've been invited to a wedding in June, in Huesca, Spain, in the foothills of the Pyrenees mountains.  The invitation is from a friend from a different era, and while a great excuse for a trip to Spain, I've not gone to visit her in the 6 years since I moved from Miami, so why go now?  She is a drop-dead, gorgeous woman and I've no doubt she's re-married very well.  But travel seems the perfect solution when you're sitting in an under-insulated, under-heated house with nowhere compelling to go, and if the wedding were next week, I'm pretty sure I'd be on a plane.

Wintering is a time of hibernation.  I do not go out as much.  I would like to, I very much love to socialize, but freezing enroute saps most of my libido.  Winter is a time for video, games, and so on.  Winter is a time of very little music.  I've only played [out] 3 times since summer, freelance stuff.  I am playing this afternoon, rock of all things.  I hate playing rock, and everyone knows I hate playing rock, so I have no qualms about turning the music into New Orleans Funk or Latin Rock.  I just hope the guitarist knows more than major, minor and 7th chords.  I don't like to play out in winter because the only thing more miserable than hauling 70 lbs. of bass speaker cabinets is doing so on ice or snow.  But the drummer today is a friend of mine, so here I go.  I'm set up well at home for rehearsing and so from December through March, I pretty much play with myself, entendre intended.

So here's the problem with playing with yourself, or at least, with me playing by myself.  I tend to work on technical aspects, generally overplaying relative to what's expected of a bassist.  I do it to work out my hands, more of an endurance building exercise than what I actually play in gigs.  I do not have high expectations for this afternoon's guitar-rock session.  In fact, I've been warned that the guitarist is basically a blues-God, with fast hands.  This means several hours of 3 or 4 chord patterns, pedestrian rhythms and constant pleas to lower the volume.  I'm not a prude, but high-volumes ought to be reserved for large halls and outdoor performances, not indoor sessions.  One thing rock players seem slow to learn is that volume masks subtleties and mistakes.  Turn the volume down to where you can listen closely to the different parts and the majority of rockers are exposed as lacking timing, mis-fingering out of key, and void of dynamics.

I do need to start playing more, and I've received inquiries about booking my Latin jazz group in the spring.  Work has just been such a bitch lately that I've truly enjoyed a clear agenda on the weekends.  But I need to play live more often, otherwise music becomes strictly therapy.  So I did a session a couple of weeks ago with some straight jazz players, and I need to do a few more to exercise those skills.  I'm also not a big straight-jazz fan, as I find the vast majority of those rhythms to also be pretty limited.  But what straight-jazz does give you is complexity of form, chords and melody.  Fusion, be it Latin jazz, funk jazz, etc. is what does it for me and where my skills are best displayed.

By my calculations, we have 6 more weeks of misery, then the re-birth of spring will begin to be felt.  And I'm really, really anxious to be re-born, to get back out of the house, back into regular performing, and back to a life that's more than work all day, eat, read a little and re-charge.  But with 6 of these season cycles now under my belt, I guess if I'm honest with myself, seasons are overrated.  A perpetual lifestyle of warm to hot lacks some diversity, but the continuity of activities is a better fit for mammals that don't want to sleep through the cold.

on an old puzzle

One of the things I do for a living is applied mathematics.  I've been thinking about the first project I worked on, some 25 years ago, a sort of model of popularity.  At the time, I worked for a freight forwarding company.  These companies operate offices all over the U.S. and/or the world.  They gather shipments up from companies and individuals, and charge a progressive rate based on the size of the shipment.  So a 1 lb. shipment might be charged a $12.00 minimum, then at say 13 pounds, shipments move into a $1.00/lb. price structure, then at 100 pounds, they are rated at $0.80/lb. and so on.  The freight forwarder, or "forwarder", consolidates all of the shipments going to a specific destination and then pays an airline or trucking company to transport the shipments to their sister office in the destination city.

So say for example that a forwarder has received 3 shipments to Los Angeles, a 1 lb. shipment for which they'll receive $12.00, a 2 lb. shipment for which they'll receive $12, and another 3 lb. shipment also worth $12.00.  The forward then has a total of $36 in revenue.  They hand over a consolidated shipment to an airline that is 3 pieces weighing 6 lbs.  The airlines have a different price structure.  Let's say their minimum price is $25.00, and they charge $0.50 per pound above that amount.  So in this example, the forwarder takes in $36 and pays out $25, making a profit of $11.

Forwarders ship to about 300 U.S. airports.  They have hundreds of local customers.  The problem I was tackling was to find out how many shipments a local forwarder office needed on an average daily basis to become profitable.  The customers a forwarder services don't all ship to the same places.  So if you were a forwarder and received say, 10 shipments in a day, probably 2 would be for New York, 2 for Los Angeles, 1 for Atlanta, 1 for Chicago, and so on.  And there'd probably be 1 for Des Moines, Iowa too.  So this is a popularity model of sorts, in that big cities with lots of commerce will "attract" more shipments than will small cities like Harrisburg.  Basic probability theory.

The result then, is that as your daily shipment count increases, your likelihood of getting 2 (basically break-even) or 3 shipments (and therefore profitability) going to a single destination increases.  And that is what I found, and determined the point (I don't remember what it was, but somewhere around 45 shipments a day) at which a forwarder was likely to have enough profitable consolidations to offset the losses associated with the "orphans", such as the single shipment to Des Moines, Iowa.  It is the popularity of Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Atlanta, and so on, that allow profit.  If all cities were equally popular, then the break-even point would be many shipments per day higher.

So that's both obvious and boring, but here was the surprise.  Except at the lowest levels of shipments, there was an almost constant 7 orphan shipments, no matter how high I modeled daily shipment count.  So say at 150 shipments you were pretty likely to pick up a second shipment to Des Moines, Iowa, but you were also likely to pick up a new orphan to Harrisburg. And when shipments increased to 250, Harrisburg paired up, but a new shipment was received for Sioux Falls, South Dakota.  And on and on, always with an average of 7 orphans.  I took the model up to somewhere around 1500 shipments a day, and the 7 orphans rule continued to that point.  Obviously, there is a large number at which point all 300 unevenly popular destinations would attract enough shipments to eliminate all orphans, but I didn't have the time to explore that.

This is probably true across all types of data where there exists uneven popularity.  The number of points a given node will receive at different volume levels is addressed in probability theory, but the steady state of orphans I've not seen addressed.  So, help if you can!