Untamed with the Lester Tang Conjecture Not Pacing Horses

[Photo with scribbles: Blackie's Pasture]

If only we'd had real-time assistance from a spy sattelite, this would have been much easier. (This image is based on data copyright 2004 AirPhoto USA, further tweaked and copyright 2004 by Keyhole, scribbled on by me.)

We were to go to Blackie's Pasture, a field close to Tiburon. I had never been there, though I'd been intrigued when Morgan told me about the place. He said that a swaybacked horse had grazed there, enjoying his retirement. After the horse had died, the pasture remained as a memorial to this beloved beast. I'd thought that was a neat story after I looked up "swaybacked" in the dictionary.

Now we were on our way there. I asked the mapping software that came with the GPS how to get there. The software was very impressive. It displayed a map of the Outer Richmond with a yellow dot marking our location. It didn't think we were in the Pacific Ocean or anything. I asked it how to reach Blackie's Pasture. As it thought about this, I found Blackie's Pasture on a paper map and plotted a backup route. But the software came up with a route soon enough: It told us to stay on Clement to reach Park Presidio. That seemed a little strange--Clement is a slow street. But by the time I thought to doubt the machine, we were already most of the way to Park Presidio. I looked at my laptop with a baleful eye.

I noticed that my badge had fallen off. I put it back on. Was that a vein throbbing on my forehead? I took a deep breath.

Soon Tom had driven the trusty green van to Blackie's Pasture which was overrun with teams and twine. What was going on? Some Game Control folks told us. They had placed five shiny spheres in the pasture. There was one big one and four little ones. All we had to do was write down the colors of the little ones in order of their distance from the big one. The catch: we had a 20' tape measure with us, and the spheres were further apart than that. Apparently, no team had a tape measure long enough--that's why so many people were wandering around with string.

And so we started measuring off distances with string. We were surveyors, like Mason and Dixon, if Mason and Dixon had been in a contest with a lot of other surveyors.

The measuring took a few minutes. We didn't have piece of string long enough to extend the distance between spheres. We needed to measure off the distance in lengths, eyeballing the straightness of our line. Meanwhile, other teams were doing the same thing. And of course, since we were all trying to measure the same line, we all got in each others' way.

When we turned in our first ordering to the officials, they said that we had made a mistake. We would have to try again. We'd have to wait a few minutes before turning in our next guess. Tom and Peter chatted about measuring. They pointed out that measuring with string is not very accurate: If you pull string taut, it stretches; if you don't pull it taut, it droops. I thought back to reading Mason & Dixon. They had used chains to measure. You can pull a chain taut and it won't stretch, I guess. We had no chain.

Tom and Pete paced off the distances. (Actually, I think Tom had started this while the rest of us were still using string to come up with our first guess. Three cheers for parallel solving.) The paced-off distances suggested that we had mis-ordered a couple of distances.

We turned in our second guess and it was right and the universe was full of joy. Who would have thought that Tom's paces would be more accurate than a precisely-measured (but not accurately-measuring) piece of string?

Soon we had a secret word to enter into our WOLF device for our next set of instructions: proceed to Muir Woods National Monument; look for a Game Control person between bridges number 2 and 4. Of course the bridges of Muir Woods National Monument were numbered.

Untamed with the Lester Tang Conjecture: Not Pacing Horses