A strange cell phone day.

Mid-morning yesterday (8/30/2025), my wife's phone just stopped connecting to the cellular network (Verizon, in our case).

The phone said SOS at the top instead of its normal display of a signal strength bar graph.

We tried powering the phone down and back up, several times. Didn't fix the problem.

Everything else about the phone seemed to be fine. It was able to get on WiFi with no problems. Its GPS seemed to be working fine, etc. But she couldn't make or receive a call, couldn't get on the internet without wifi, couldn't send or receive text messages. All those Verizon things were just not working.

My phone is on the same plan as hers, and my number is only one digit removed from hers. My phone was just fine.

We happened to be out on the road at the time, and so we went to the local Apple Store and a friendly tech ran a diagnostics program on the phone and it all came back green.

He said there was some chatter among the other staff in the store that there might be a widespread Verizon problem, and maybe we could go over to the Verizon store a little ways down the road.

We called Verizon and the AI that answered told us that there were no outages in our area, and then told us it would be 37 minutes before a human would talk to us, and then said "System Error" and hung up.

I looked on DownDetector and it had a chart saying that there might be a Verizon problem. But there were only 21,000 reports across the entire country, didn't seem likely. I looked on Reddit and some people in Florida were complaining about some problem that might have been similar. Or maybe not. The Verizon status pages continued to report no problems anywhere.

We went on with our day.

Her phone stayed on SOS; my phone remained fine. It was a pleasant summer day and we didn't do much more about it.

Late in the afternoon, after we got home, my wife decided to plug her phone into the charger, as the phone was down to 35% charge.

The instant she plugged it in, it instantly went online and has been fine ever since.

I don't have a good mental model for why that worked.

My best theory is that there is some software in the phone that says: when you are plugged in, check for updates. And something about that update check managed to get the phone back online in a way that simply rebooting it didn't.

Everything is so complicated and mysterious these days; my ability to diagnose even simple problems seems faulty.

But the phone is working again.

Hey Bruce Lacey! You happen to have an email address?

Got your note! Been having a bit of trouble finding a good time for a phone call. LMK

Puzzles vs puzzle analysis

I like solving puzzles. If a crossword puzzle or a Sudoku or a KenKen or a Wordle drifts by, I'll often freeze in my tracks and not leave until I've finished solving it.

My wife and I play "collaborative hard Wordle": we solve the puzzle together, discussing our potential guesses and agreeing on the next one to try, and we play in "hard mode", meaning that each subsequent guess must also obey all of the results of the previous guesses. If a previous guess had a green K in position 2, then all our subsequent guesses must also have a K in position 2; and if a previous guess had a yellow K in position 2, then all our subsequent guesses must have a K, but in some other position.

My dad liked puzzles too, particularly word puzzles such as English-style cryptic crosswords, and he, too, would often become mesmerized by a particular puzzle and not raise his head til he'd solved it.

But he didn't seem so interested in solving a particular Sudoku or KenKen; instead, he was drawn to understanding the underlying combinatorics. His notebooks contained pages and pages of thoughts about notations to describe and analyze a Sudoku.

Of course, there are lots of people who feel this way: Wikipedia's page on Mathematics of Sudoku gives you a great introduction.

And when I play Sudoku, I love to try to improve my play by using multi-step deductive logic techniques such as the strategies covered on SudokuWiki.

Instinctively, I feel like there is a qualitative difference between word puzzles and numeric puzzles. Wordle and cryptics are somehow fundamentally different than Sudoku. And I wonder if my dad felt that way too. At least, he never seemed to show an enormous interest in the mathematics of Wordle. I couldn't even get him interested in the "ask the bot" tool that does some basic probabilistic analysis on the guesses that you made.

He just liked finding the word.

But there are definitely ways to abstractly study the combinatorics of Wordle; for example, here's Playing every game of Wordle simultaneously .

One very important aspect of word puzzles is that they can contain humor and subtlety that are totally missing from, say, Sudoku. For example, many crossword-type puzzles include double entendres and homophones and hidden words and other sorts of word play.

Or consider vowelless crosswords . These plug into your solver's brain along some other sort of dimensional axis, letting you enjoy how it is that you actually recognize a word in the face of things like typos.

I applaud the people who are thinking abstractly about word puzzles, but their analyses don't really seem so interesting to me, and I suspect my dad would have thought so, too.

For now, I'll stick to simply solving a single Wordle, and leave the strategy theory to others.

Two articles about the U of C.

In recent weeks, I happened to stumble across two totally unrelated, but interesting, articles about the University of Chicago.

Here's a nice page with some historical information about the nuclear missile base that was once in place just across the street from my dormitory at the UofC. I lived in Shoreland Hall from 1980-1981, during my first undergraduate year.

The missiles were gone by the time I arrived at the UofC. As the story was told to me back then, during the later years of the Vietnam War there were intense protests against the military-industrial complex, as well as more directly against the presence of the base, and it was removed around 1970 (?).

We knew that space as "the Point"; it was a public park and we used to walk out there regularly for fresh air and frisbee and to enjoy the views and the fresh air off the lake. Even in the hottest summers, you could almost always find relief from the heat down at the Point. In the winters, however, the storms blew lots of water up onto the big blocks of conrete that reinforced the shoreline, and the icy paths were treacherous.

I don't recall anyone referring to it as Promontory Point. That seems wrong to me, it seems like something that the Departmant of Redundancy Department (also known as the Squad Squad) would have shot down straightawy.

Moving on...

I found myself fascinated by a recent article by Professor Clifford Ando of the U of C: The Crisis of the University Started Long Before Trump.

When I talk to friends and colleagues about my times at the U of C, they are uniformly amazed at my experiences. I don't believe I ever had any classes with more than 40 other students in them; many of my classes had barely a dozen other students enrolled. Nearly all my classes were taught directly by professors; I never had classes where some grad student was the teaching assistant who led the class, nor do I recall cases where my work was graded by anyone other than the professor themself.

During my time at the U of C, one of the few policy debates that I remember affecting me was the question of adding Computer Science classes to the curriculum. That happened soon after I left, and was even underway during my final years; I remember in particular taking a Complexity Theory class in the Mathematics Department that was truly better classified as a Computer Science course. The resistance to adding Computer Science classes was based in a feeling that the university needed to avoid topics that were industrial or vocational in nature, and instead prefer only those subjects that were rooted in the pure pursuit of knowledge. Although it was already decades old, the Great Books program at the U of C was still strongly held during my time there.

But according to Ando, substantial change was already underway during my time at the U of C; he cites several examples:

The Bayh-Dole act [of 1980] provided for the private licensing of discoveries made during federally funded research. It was motivated by a concern that discoveries made in the preceding decades had not been fully exploited because the lack of opportunity for private gain deprived the system of incentive for development. In short, it granted intellectual property in discoveries made during federally funded research to the universities that hosted the projects and the people who did the research—not, as before, to the people of the United States, who funded that research.

...

The Bayh-Dole act has also fundamentally corroded policymaking at universities. Within perhaps a decade of the act, universities had begun all to pursue each latest fashion in applied science, hoping to score a windfall via licensing that would pay for all: from biomedicine, to imaging, to molecular engineering, to quantum computing, to AI.

Ando also weighs in on the question of whether universities should see themselves as having a duty to provide their students with a direct path to financial success, connecting it back to the same debates that I remember from my years in Hyde Park about whether vocational programs should be a goal of the university.

And of course, just as universities themselves have nearly always failed to make money as they flit from fashion to fashion, so students who were deceived into thinking of higher education as a kind of pre-job are now discovering that the path from coursework to salary is fraught: economics PhDs are going unemployed; finance and computer science BAs have higher unemployment rates than do Art History graduates; coding is a path to Chipotle.

The present landscape, in which AI is coming first for the supposedly high-paying jobs that involve rote forms of data analysis or ground-floor coding, recalls an earlier moment in the history of the University of Chicago. In 1982, a committee at the university published a report on the history and future of doctoral education. It is a remarkable piece of analysis and offers a stunning affirmation of the ideals of the university. It allows that interest in doctoral degrees in STEM fields had plummeted so far that one could fairly pose the question of whether these should be sustained as fields of advanced education at all. The answer, according to the report, was emphatically yes, because that was the duty of the university—to sustain inquiry and training into all things that touch on human existence, both for them in themselves and because we as leaders of universities cannot possibly know the fashions and needs of the future.

I was extraordinarily lucky to receive the education that I got at the U of C. I hope the institution can find a way to continue helping others the way it helped me.

Backpacking 2025: Cliff Lake, Dinkey Lakes Wilderness

California has many, many Wilderness Areas. Some are named after famous people (John Muir, Ansel Adams, Herbert Hoover), some after not-so-famous people (Dick Smith). Some are named after people who lived here before there was a California (Mokelumne, Chumash), some are named for reasons that nobody can remember (Siskiyou).

Often, California Wilderness Areas are named after major geographic features, which, in turn, often have dramatic and impressive names (Granite Chief, Trinity Alps, Desolation, Sawtooth Mountains, White Mountains, King Range).

Sometimes, however, Wilderness Areas have names that are, well, a bit less intimidating.

This summer, when it was time to pack our packs and get out on the trail, we found ourselves heading to the Dinkey Lakes Wilderness.

The very similar word "dinky" generally means insignificant or tiny, and apparently comes from a Scottish word describing the amount of whiskey you might consume in a single sip.

However!

This is not quite the same word, for Dinkey is not dinky. And this Dinkey is said to have been a brave little dog who traveled these parts back in the 1860's:

Due east of the Rancheria, near the center of the Holkoma Mono people’s half-million-acre ancestral homeland in the Sierra, lies a creek that outsiders named after a little dog in August 1863. One day that month, a group of non-Indian hunters was surprised by a large, angry grizzly bear. The hunters’ pet pug, Dinkey, barked and rushed up to challenge the bear. The grizzly swatted the little dog away, but Dinkey’s attack distracted it long enough to allow one of the hunters to grab his gun and shoot the bear. Dinkey died of his wounds from his brief fight, and the hunters named the nearby creek after the little dog to honor its bravery.

I think it's true that there were grizzly bears in California in the 1860's, though there are certainly none now. And I suppose the story is not inconceivable, though we all found it rather far-fetched. But it's entertaining, anyway, and really more more interesting of a name than simply naming your Wilderness Area after a president (ho hum).

Although the name was an amusing side-note, we were interested in the Dinkey Lakes Wilderness for other reasons. We departed from the Cliff Lake Trailhead at Courtwright Reservoir, which at about 8,500 feet is one of the higher trailheads in the western Sierras. It's a five mile walk from the trailhead to Cliff Lake, which sits at 9,400 feet at the base of a dramatic 500 foot high cliff that leads up toward the Three Sisters peaks. The trail to Cliff Lake is clear and well maintained, although the final climb up to the lake is fatiguing when you're carrying a full pack at nine thousand feet of elevation.

Cliff Lake itself is beautiful, and certainly one of the most enjoyable lakes we've visited in our decades of backpacking. Besides just the beautiful scenery of the lake, we had great weather and enjoyed swimming and relaxing on the shores of the lake. Rich and I had brought our "backpacking boats" (glorified inner tubes, cleverly fashioned to be light enough to carry but sturdy enough to allow for paddling around mountain lakes), so we spent most of a day just exploring Cliff Lake from the water.

On this trip, I decided that my ancient Lowa Zephyr GTX boots were finally too worn out to be used (after a mere 25 years!!!), and so I upgraded to a brand new pair of Lowa Renegade EVO GTX boots. They are absolutely wonderful boots, though I am doubtful that I will be able to continue hiking for 25 more years. It's nice to know that if these are the last boots I'll ever buy, at least I found a really great pair.

Although the Dinkey Lakes Wilderness includes 30,000 acres of protected wilderness, the maintained trails are concentrated in an section in the center of the wilderness area which contains some two dozen lovely lakes, from Cliff Lake at the south east to Coyote Lake at the north west. All these lakes are in a large plateau at an elevation range of nine thousand to ten thousand feet of altitude. Normally, the Sierra mountains quickly become bare and exposed once you are at this height, but here the conditions are just right, with plenty of water and fairly protected valleys providing a beautiful region that supported a robust and healthy forest and a large population of birds, fish, and small mammals.

We saw little sign of larger creatures such as deer, lion, or bear, but there were a multitude of squirrels and mice and hawks and woodpeckers to keep us entertained.

One day, we made a side trip to Dogtooth Peak, marked at 10,302 feet on my map. The peak is off-trail but approaching it was straightforward for us and we all managed to reach a large saddle at just over 10,000 feet without any problems. Half of our group chose to wait at the saddle, enjoying spectacular views of many miles to the east and north, while our more intrepid explorers (Chris, Roger, and Dan) made a run at the summit.

Dogtooth Peak is rated Class 3 on the Yosemite Decimal System, meaning that it's just at the threshold from hiking to climbing. As one colorful climbing page puts it, Class 3 means things like:

• requires use of hands for climbing, rope may be used
• I need my hands but might survive a fall
• MUST use your hands for progress but don't need to search for holds nor do you need Real Rock Climbing(TM) techniques

It's actually possible to see Chris and Dan in this picture, though you really have to know where to look!

Our adventurers, upon their return, largely agreed with this assessment. They stopped a mere 25 feet or so below the summit, where the necessary technique was comfortable for Roger (who has some Real Rock Climbing experience) but not for Dan and Chris. They returned with no injuries and with lots of great stories and pictures, which is about the best possible outcome we could have desired.

Sandwiched between the John Muir Wilderness, Kaiser Wilderness, Monarch Wilderness, and Ansel Adams Wilderness, Dinkey Lakes surely often is overlooked. But we're awfully glad we found it, as it was beautiful and remote and wild, and I can't think of a single thing about our trip which could have gone better.

Perhaps someday we will return to this wilderness, for there was much left that we did not explore on our first visit.