New Bus Route, Who Dis?

Anyone know the schedule for this bus route? How often it runs, the route map, etc.?

[Pictured is the bus shelter at the Central Campus Transit Center, the hub for the university’s campus-focused (vs. Michigan medicine-focused) buses. During normal operation, the electronic signs display the arrival times for incoming routes (e.g. “Bursley-Baits 4 min,” “Commuter North 9 min,” and so on). However, on weekends when few routes are running, they sometimes display a message along the lines of “No route information available. Sorry for the inconvenience.” For whatever reason, they dispatch this information split up as “No route information available/Sorry for the/inconvenience.” There’s room on the sign to display the whole message at once – look at the sign behind it with hiring information – but no, they wish to broadcast INCONVENIENCE 1/3 of the time.

Photo taken last spring, but I think it would be a pretty good route to represent 2020. Instead of showing up when you need it, like the Knight Bus in Harry Potter, the Inconvenience Bus is always running extremely late or pulls away from the stop early as you’re running to catch it, takes scenic detours at least 50% of the time, breaks down if you’re on your way to important meetings, and keeps disappearing from tracking apps, then reappearing either at the stop past yours or in Siberia. Wait, this sounds like public transportation as it already is under normal circumstances . . . just kidding. Mostly.

For real though, both the university and the Ann Arbor Area Transportation Authority (AAATA) are planning to reconfigure their routes this fall to prioritize common destinations and reduce the number of people on buses/time spent on the bus. This does mean that instead of one 25-minute bus ride you might have two 10-minute bus rides, plus time spent waiting to transfer, but depending on how the probability of virus transmission varies with time, it might actually be better to be in contact with more people (two separate bus rides) for less time. For example, assume the probability you get infected is directly proportional to time spent on the bus with an infected person (say 1% for every five minutes) and there’s a 1% chance someone on the bus is infected. If we compare one 30-minute ride to two 15-minute rides, the chance you get infected on the 30-minute ride is 0.01*(6*0.01) = 0.06%. Conversely, the chance you don’t get infected is 99.94%. For one 15-minute ride, you get infected with a probability of 0.03% and stay healthy 99.97% of the time, so for two 15-minute rides, the chance you don’t get infected is (0.9997)² = 0.99940009 or 99.940009%, a (very) slightly higher chance of not being infected by taking two shorter bus rides vs. one longer ride.¹ I have no idea if infection is directly proportional to time, and this also assumes random distribution of infectious people and that total time on the bus is the same, but it’s at least possible that the university isn’t doing some sort of smoke and mirrors/song and dance thing to make people think they’re making these plans to keep people safer.

Of course, this could all still be a CYA move by the university since the route reconfiguration is to make all the routes 15 minutes or less, and part of the CDC’s definition of “close contact” for contact tracing is spending more than 15 minutes near to an infected person, so now U-M technically never has to contact trace anyone from the buses. File this one as more probable than 5G causing coronavirus but less likely than the Earth is round.

¹The funny part about this analysis is that the “safest” thing to do is split the bus ride up into an infinite number of infinitely short rides. Which isn’t the most physically possible solution, so maybe now we need some optimization of “coronavirus risk” vs. “# of times students will willingly transfer buses before mutinying.” My guess is two buses before revolt, because bus transfers are a pain in the neck.]

Top Ten _____ [Musicals]

I’ve documented my musical viewings, but what you really want to know is what’s worth watching out of all those overtures, choreography, love songs, and . . . ABBA?

10) Mamma Mia! – That’s right, we’re starting things off with a jukebox musical romantic comedy set on a Greek island featuring a Swedish pop group. It’s light and fun, and doesn’t try to be anything it’s not. Watch at your own risk of getting the songs stuck in your head for weeks.

9) The Phantom of the Opera – One of two musicals I’ve seen on Broadway. Some people can’t stand Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals, but I don’t think he’s too bad. Phantom has a coherent enough plot, good songs, a dance number, and generally ticks all the boxes of what you want in a musical, which may be why it’s Broadway’s longest running show.

8) The Music Man – Too classic to leave off the list. It’s got a lot of recognizable songs. The competing conman/falling in love plots are similar to A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, but it’s more well known, maybe because its title doesn’t take three years to type.

7) Rent – Yes, the characters are kind of lazy jerks, but you don’t always need fully lovable protagonists. The score is rock solid, and I can’t speak to how much or little it parallels Puccini’s La Boheme because I’ve never seen or read about it.

6) West Side Story – The other musical I’ve seen on Broadway, and I recently watched the 1961 movie on Netflix. It’s based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, so if you think about the plot too much it makes no sense. However, it’s a Leonard Bernstein score, Stephen Sondheim wrote the lyrics, and Jerome Robbins did the choreography, so that more than makes up for all the characters’ questionable decisions.

5) Mary Poppins – There’s something about the 1964 movie that just feels magical. Well, besides the fact that Mary Poppins magically descends from the clouds, transports children into paintings, and hosts a floating tea party.

4) Into the Woods – Scored by Sondheim, book by James Lapine. It’s a clever musical adaptation and intertwining of fairy tales. I’ve seen the Jr. version staged live and the movie, but not the full live musical.

3) Les Miserables – Probably the only musical on this list that could possibly be described as epic, in terms of both the music and the plot. It’s a sung-through adaptation of Victor Hugo’s 3000-page novel, which I have not read. (Rent and Phantom are both almost sung-through, but do have some spoken lines.)

2) Guys and Dolls – Based on Damon Runyon’s short stories of the New York underworld. Reasonable plot, interesting characters, strong songs, and interspersed funny moments make this a very solid musical, and one of my favorites.

1) The Sound of Music – Couldn’t not have a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical on the list. Based on the number of times I’ve seen this movie, I’ll call it my favorite. Besides the classic Julie Andrews 1965 version, I’ve also seen the recording of NBC’s 2013 live production starring not-Julie Andrews as Maria. Doesn’t compare to the original movie.

I've compiled a list of musicals the library has that 1) I haven’t watched and 2) aren’t random obscure productions like The Utter Glory of Morrissey Hall (run of a single show on Broadway). There’s nothing huge on the list that I think would unseat anything in my top ten musicals, but you never know. I also haven’t seen Wicked, Hamilton, Dear Evan Hansen, etc., or any of the Disney spectacles, so this ranking is subject to change. But this is the list for now, and here’s where I try and convince you all that Shrek The Musical is not terrible, and also surprisingly, the songs for School of Rock (scored by Andrew Lloyd Webber) are pretty good.

Socially Distanced Summer

We are well into summer around these parts. Temperatures in the 80s, humidity anywhere from 40-90%, depending on the time of day and weather. The backs of my hands are happy, my palms not so much. This will reverse in about six months. Michigan kicked off the month by reclosing indoor bars after a coronavirus outbreak was traced to an East Lansing bar known for its college-age clientele. Nationally, the number of cases continued its steady climb upwards, taxing medical staff and facilities in multiple states. But let’s all go to Disney World and get ready to send the kids back to school, why don’t we?

I started the month of July by finishing a fairly typical work week with research, Netflix, and lying around dehydrating from the palms and soles. On Friday, July 3, I snuck out early to bike the Border to Border trail for the first time this year. I’d been avoiding it for coronavirus crowding reasons, but I was hopeful that early on a Friday morning of a holiday weekend would not be a popular time to be physically exerting oneself. I was right, and the people who were out were the people who tend to be more intentional about walking/running/biking and generally have better trail etiquette, as opposed to the family of six who spreads out across the whole path and lets little Timmy zigzag along the trail as he likes or shirtless jogger guy with headphones blasting who wouldn’t hear you if you were dragging a string of cowbells behind you.

Saturday, July 4 was grocery day. I hid out in my apartment for the rest of the day and finished Community, which I would recommend, though the first three seasons are better than the last three. To replace it in my Netflix rotation, I started Parks and Recreation since people say if you like The Office you’ll like Parks and Rec. Full judgement forthcoming. I headed back out on my bike on Sunday, July 5 to check off the parks in northwest Ann Arbor. I might have gotten back a little late for the start of church, but I did not miss the Facebook sermon.

Monday, July 6 began another week. I started editing changes in my code into the official version and running test simulations. Long live Fortran. While the apartment was still a nice cool 79 F at 7:30 in the morning, I baked a batch of orange cranberry muffins on Tuesday, July 7, except I didn’t want to eat an orange so I didn’t get an orange for orange zest when I went grocery shopping so the muffins didn’t taste very much like orange. On Wednesday, July 8, I finally returned the library books and DVDs I’d had since March so someone else could enjoy Spider-Man: Far From Home.

The big news for Thursday, July 9 was that the Revolution played their first soccer game in four months at the MLS Returnament and won. I finished off the research week and ventured (on bike) to the downtown area for the first time since March on Saturday, July 11. I was lured in not by the prospects of specialty boutiques or exotic bistros but library summer game points¹ and my self-inflicted checklist of parks, which overlap in a major way thanks to a series of badges featuring the Ann Arbor parks. The main streets downtown were more crowded than I expected, but I mostly avoided them on my journey to visit no less than 18 summer game sites in one trip.

Huron River, Barton Nature Area

It was back to work on Monday, July 13, but by Thursday, July 16, I got fed up enough with the banshee-screeching children outside my window to go for an afternoon bike ride and get some more parks off the list. I tried another morning bike ride to the west side of Ann Arbor on Friday, July 17, but spent most of the first half of it playing leapfrog with the compost truck. The Revolution’s second group game in the Returnament was Saturday, July 18, which they tied thanks to an atrocious back pass gone wrong. They finished group play on Tuesday, July 21 with a scoreless draw, which was enough to get them into the knockout rounds.

I spent the rest of the week mostly doing what I’ve been doing for the past 4 months. In other exciting news for the week, Jeopardy! opened their vault and showed episodes from the first decade of Alex Trebek hosting. We got to see the first game of its current syndicated run, buzzing in before the clue was read, really bad final Jeopardy! betting, his and hers tennis racket prizes, a maximum cash winnings cap, and more. A couple more bike rides over the week leaves me with mostly parks along the southern reaches of Ann Arbor. At the very least I can say that I didn’t get less fit because of coronavirus. Saturday, July 25 was groceries in the morning, my longest bike ride of the year so far (~17 miles) in the afternoon, then I had a video call with friends from Cornell at night and I stayed up to watch the Revolution lose to the Philadelphia Union in a late-night MLS in Florida during a pandemic special 10:30 pm match. Why do I keep doing this to myself? Why did I come to grad school? Why do you always plug the USB in the wrong way the first time?

I finished out July spending until midnight on Tuesday, July 28 making a birthday card, which required taking out my colored pencils for the first time in months. It was just like being back at Cornell working on problem sets at absurd hours. And on Thursday, July 30, my turn to give virtual group meeting came around again, so I talked about my micelles and computational simulations.

Heading into August, the coronavirus numbers aren’t great – cases have been slowly but steadily rising, though hospital usage, at least in Washtenaw County, has remained low. The university is planning for some in-person classes, so students should start coming in next month, but we’ll see how long we make it before something goes wrong. I hope we get to Thanksgiving as planned, because that would mean people are behaving responsibly and thoughtfully, but I wouldn’t be surprised if things go pear-shaped by/in September.

Blue jay feather

¹The library puts on a combination summer reading program/scavenger hunt/events spectacular where you earn points for reading, writing reviews, attending events, searching the catalog, and visiting certain locations. In the catalog and at locations you either get a code to enter directly for points or have to find specific signs/objects to assemble the code (e.g. if you’re at a park the code might be “color of the slide + number of swings” and you’d enter something like “orange5”). Some of the codes are grouped together in badges and completing badges gets you more points. The points can then be traded for a finite number of objects in the summer game store.

Every Puzzle I Own (and one I don’t)

Even before stay at home orders, lockdowns, and quarantines sent people scrambling for non-electronic activities that could be done from the confines of their homes, I was assembling jigsaw puzzles like a technology-shunning hermit. My current collection is curated mostly from the Friends of the Library bookstore at the library, plus a couple from a family at church, and one on loan. The loan has gone on much longer than expected. Thanks corona.

I’ve done enough puzzles that I have opinions about them, both in terms of content and manufacture. If you know me, this should be approximately zero percent surprising. Let’s begin, shall we?

[Click photos to enlarge]

We start with a puzzle of beer brands from White Mountain Puzzles. The 90s and Finger Lakes puzzles below are also manufactured by them. They also make more “traditional” style puzzles of landscapes and bucolic Americana, but I’d say they bring more to the jigsaw puzzle industry with their “collage” puzzles, whether they’re maps + highlights (Finger Lakes) or a mélange of related images (beer, 90s). Because these puzzles don’t have endless stretches of sky or 50 shades of grass, they tend to be easier than their pastoral landscape counterparts, but they’re very fun to do and would probably be good for a group who might be less enthusiastic about puzzles. Out of all my puzzles, White Mountain makes the second tightest fitting pieces, especially when new, to the point where you can pick up the entire puzzle by a corner when it’s complete. Overall an enjoyable and well-made brand of puzzles.

The puzzles on the right in the image above are my two Ravensburger puzzles. This brand is known for making high quality puzzles, which I find to be true. The pieces fit together nicely and are cut well, and you don’t see much, if any, peeling off of the image. The Pixar puzzle, because it’s essentially nine smaller puzzles in one, is a fast assembly, but that’s not a complaint.

Top left below is by Kodacolor and is of a standard subject, being one of 1) moored boats, 2) a mountain meadow, or 3) hot air balloons. Well-constructed, and otherwise nothing to write home about. Does Kodak even still make puzzles? [I found some on Amazon under Kodak Premium Puzzles that have mixed to decent reviews. Looks like it’s a different line than Kodacolor though.] Top right – the Las Vegas strip, made by Buffalo Games, who carry a variety of styles of puzzles in various sizes, as well as card and board games (most of which I’ve never heard of). This puzzle has a lot of hotel windows and is also my largest puzzle at 2000 pieces.

Bottom right is the borrowed puzzle from Hinckler’s Mindbogglers series. It has the dubious honor of being the worst-made puzzle in this post. The poor cutting left pieces still attached to each other and caused the bottoms of tabs to peel off. To add insult to injury, the pieces didn’t feel good when being put together. Bottom left comes from Springbok. No complaints about this 1500-piece puzzle.

In the next set of puzzles, we begin with the abstract squares by Talicor, winner of the tightest-fitting, almost overtight, pieces award. It’s a two-sided puzzle that will allegedly “test your best effort,” but at only 81 pieces, it has absolutely nothing (nothing, I’m telling you) on the infamous Dalmatian puzzle. To at least make it a moderate challenge, they do make the horizontal and vertical cuts on opposite sides of the symmetric, oddly-shaped pieces so you can’t immediately tell which side is the top or bottom. It’s still fixable in less than an afternoon. Moving on to a shuttle launch from Eurographics and a Thomas Kinkade mountain cabin from Ceaco. Like Springbok, these two manufacturers offer a variety of puzzles that are decently made – it’s reasonably clear when pieces fit together and small groups of pieces will stay together when moved. Lots of sky in the shuttle launch, interesting textures in the Kinkade.

The penultimate puzzle is Van Gogh’s Starry Night, made by Go! Games. My senior year apartment at Cornell had a copy of a Starry Night puzzle that a previous resident assembled and glued onto cardboard. My roommates put it up on the living room wall as decoration, which already made it about a hundred times better than most of the guys’ apartments. This puzzle wins the loosest-fitting pieces award. Some people may be put off by this; I call it an additional challenge to go along with 800 pieces of blue and yellow swirls and 200 pieces of mostly darkness.

Finally, it’s my only shaped puzzle, winner of the most missing pieces award, a dragon from F.X. Schmid. Turns out F.X. Schmid was acquired by Ravensburger in 1998, so who knows how old this puzzle is? The pieces fit slightly tighter than Starry Night, and the novelty of the shape is fun. So there you have it. Eleven puzzle manufacturers, two of which may not exist anymore, fourteen puzzles, and over 14,000 puzzle pieces.

#MLSisBack (again): The Returnament

Thanks to expansion and an ever-growing number of MLS teams, the start of the season has crept from the beginning of April to early March to Leap Day. Although this means the more northern teams have to concern themselves with freezing temperatures, winter weather travel delays, and snow, besides the actual playing of soccer, this year it also meant that teams got in the first couple games of the season before the country shut down for coronavirus reasons. In Bruce Arena’s first season opener with the Revolution, New England headed north of the border for the #MapleSyrupDerby with Montreal on Leap Day. With last season’s MVP Carles Gil injured, Teal Bunbury scored the Revolution’s first goal of the season, but Montreal answered with two of their own to secure a 2-1 win.

The next week (Saturday, March 7) New England opened their home season at Gillette with a 1-1 draw to Chicago. Adam Buksa, the team’s newest designated player, scored for the Revolution, which was encouraging. Otherwise, they again gave up a lead while looking not terrible, but not great either. And then things got interesting, by which I mean everything was cancelled and the Revolution unknowingly played their last game for four months.

Over the next couple months, the players and staff joined the millions of Americans Staying Home and Social Distancing. They did soccer drills in their backyards, ran outside appropriately distanced, showed off their piano skills, and gave cooking advice, among other activities. As things settled down, they returned to small group, then full team training, and rumors arose about teams returning to play through a tournament, promptly dubbed the Returnament by fans. All the teams would gather in one location and be tested, cutting down on travel and virus spread. The format was finalized and the location chosen – the ESPN Wide World of Sports complex in Orlando, Florida, where they would have accommodations and sports facilities in one place. Great choice, except that in the weeks leading up to the tournament, coronavirus cases and hospitalizations in Florida were in the process of exploding. But MLS decided not to cancel¹, and 24 of 26 teams made it to the Sunshine State without major incident. FC Dallas and Nashville SC, after receiving multiple positive test results, made the decision to drop out, with their group stage games (which count for the regular season standings) hopefully to be played at some future time.

For the rest of the teams, bubble time began, and at 8 pm on Thursday, July 9th, the Revolution restarted their season with a game against their Maple Syrup Derby friends, the Montreal Impact. This time, with Gil playing, and for the first time ever, three designated players (Gil, Buksa, and Gustavo Bou) on the field together, the Revolution looked, dare I say it, good. The finishing was lacking, but the movement and passing looked better than I’ve seen in a while. Ten minutes into the second half, after several missed chances and wayward shots, Bou turned near the edge of the box to pound a shot past the Montreal goalkeeper. And that’s all it took. Well, that, thirty-five minutes of defending, and a last-minute save from Matt Turner. Which the broadcast, streamed on Twitter (seriously, Twitter), cut off. I wish I was kidding. I should have switched to the Spanish stream, but I didn’t want to expend that much energy translating. So I stuck it out on Twitter. Fortunately, because the English announcers were so bad (not maliciously bad, like blatantly insulting one team or players, just bad), I kept the video from Twitter going and borrowed the audio from Brad Feldman and Charlie Davies commentating for the Revolution on the radio, so I heard the final minutes of the game, even if I didn’t see them. The audio was at least ten seconds behind the video, but this was still preferable to “There’s Bruce Arena. He is wearing . . . a shirt. Here is a player. He has . . . kicked the ball.” Like I said, not good. But the Revolution picked up a 1-0 win to start off their Returnament run, so #NERevs Twitter was temporarily happy.

Eight days later, New England took to the field again against D.C. United. Unlike Montreal, who sat back and allowed the Revolution a lot of possession, D.C. pressed more, but the Revolution held up until early in the second half when Buksa headed a deflected shot into the back of the net. Twenty minutes later, New England reminded their fans that they’re still the Revolution by horribly misplaying a back pass to Turner. A D.C. player swooped in to claim the ball and the goal. Final score: 1-1. This broadcast (on ESPN) was better than the previous game. For one thing, they didn’t cut off the final minutes of stoppage time. For another, they used field noise, so we got to hear the players and coaches yelling at each other, instead of fake, generic crowd noise that was inserted twenty minutes into the game and overpowered the commentators (seriously, that happened too).

For their last Group C game, the Revolution played Toronto FC, at nine am on a Tuesday to avoid the worst of the Florida heat and humidity. Arena rotated a good number of his players and was again without Carles Gil, who was out with the same injury as in preseason. But I guess you don’t win five MLS cups and get to coach the US Men’s National Team for eight years without knowing what you’re doing, because the Revolution looked like they were playing some weird sort of Bruce Arena 4D chess. After a lackluster first half with something like no shots on goal and a few saves from Matt Turner, they went into the halftime break tied at zero. One substitution later, New England came out ready to play. Within minutes, they had multiple shots and chances and continued to push for a goal throughout the half. In the end, they had some near misses, and some close calls at the other end, with a couple penalty claims for added excitement, and the game ended in a pretty fair 0-0 draw.

With that, the Revolution got 5 points for the regular season standings and booked their spot in the round of 16. There’s another two and a half weeks of soccer to go before the tournament final, and then who knows? I don’t know if even MLS knows what they’re going to do, based on the resurgent numbers of cases across large portions of the United States. Even though deaths have (so far) seemed to rise only marginally, full ICUs, ambulance rerouting, the threat of crisis care, overworked medical professionals, and cancelled non-emergency procedures are not the signs of a happy and well-functioning health care system. Maybe we’ll have a 5-game 2020 season? Or move the league to Antarctica? Put all the players in inflatable bumper bubble balls to keep them six feet apart? Rebrand the league as Major League Foosball in Real Life where every player is assigned to a spot on the field and can only move a certain distance laterally?

¹There’s some backlash about MLS and other sports leagues getting rapid-result testing to play games while everyday citizens are waiting over a week for test results to return to essential jobs. However, the way I see it is that the reason sports teams haven’t been able to get back to playing games is because everyone else won’t get their act together, so they should just go on ahead and use their resources to get players tested. Also, the number of tests being done is a relatively small percentage of the total, and what I’ve heard is that leagues are contracting with private companies for testing.