Saturday  30 May 2015           1 comment

Today I got tired of a map I had tacked to a wall in my workshop and took it down. I then saw I'd taken notes on the back of the paper of what my dad said to me in a phone call some 15 years ago, a few months after my mom had died, to wit: I might meet some luscious 80‑year‑old and want to get married again. But she'd have to be pretty good.

Tuesday  26 May 2015           comment?

Monday  25 May 2015           comment?

I went to a talk and book signing yesterday. Later in the day when I started reading the book, I noticed and liked the publisher's colophon (based on an Anasazi pictograph). I looked up the original on the web, and ...

Sunday  24 May 2015           2 comments

Nobel laureate John Nash died yesterday. The NY Times mentions that he invented Hex—as does the Washington Post, although they just call it "a game".

The WaPo tells us a classmate said Nash was "handsome as a god." Well, gods are as handsome as college students.

I named two climbing routes in honor of John Nash in 2002.

Sonja Schwarz—the friend who I saw the movie A Beautiful Mind with— died yesterday as well, at 83. Sonja was a stage actress; see this review for a pic in her last major role.

Tuesday  19 May 2015           1 comment

I wrote

I will announce on May 19 whether I have anything further to announce.

I don't.

Happy nineteenth, everyone.

Thursday  14 May 2015           comment?

John Bolton, US ambassador to the UN under the last President, announced this week that he would announce, which he then did. Bolton loathed the UN and is remembered for having said, "The Secretariat Building in New York has 38 stories. If you lost ten stories today, it wouldn't make a bit of difference."

All this nested announcing makes me wanna get in on the fun; this I now do. Looking forward, I will announce on May 19 whether I have anything further to announce.

Anyhow, the UN Secretariat Building has 39 stories, not 38. And it figures in one of my all‑time favorite lines from Mad magazine. This panel is from their 201 Minutes of a Space Idiocy parody.

Tuesday  12 May 2015           1 comment

Saturday  09 May 2015           1 comment

Friday  08 May 2015           comment?

Car wheels (or helicopter blades, or ...) in films can appear to stop or change direction: the so-called wagon-wheel effect, a consequence of sampling motion with discrete frames.

I saw a similar effect while driving today: a truck's wheel appeared to move slowly. It was like watching the wheel under a strobe light, except that this was in daylight.

I've seen truck wheels appear to stand still before, but only at just the right angle where a wheel presents sampled views of itself (you see portions of the wheel as they appear behind openings in the wheel). Today's illusion struck me as strange, as it didn't seem to be explainable as an auto-sampling effect.

A couple hours later, I read in an article in today's NY Times:

The telling fact, for perceptual scientists, is that this illusion can also occur during normal observation of a rotating wheel, in full daylight. This suggests that the brain itself, even in the absence of a strobe light, is sampling the world in discrete chunks.

To have this experience on the same day I would read about the effect: a fun coïncidence:

The NY Times article is about how consciousness is more of a pulsed rhythm than a continuous stream. That idea ties in with one of my favorite quotes from Bertrand Russell.

Sunday  03 May 2015           comment?

I get how materialism has come to have negative connotations but there's a sense of the word that doesn't deserve them. We would do well to have a term for an appreciation of material itself, an affection deepened by experience. I have in mind the sense in which a sculptor knows stone, a farmer knows soil, a swordsmith knows steel.

A writer knows (among other things) words. A musician knows (among other things) rhythms. We don't think of rhythms as being material like stone is material, but how absolute is that distinction? Is there perhaps some common ground?

I'm not so much suggesting that rhythms are stuff but rather that stuff is like rhythm. Graphite and diamond are both carbon but they're night and day, and the difference is all in the organization. Rhythm is organization in time; diamond is organization in space.

I'm unmoved by schools of thought that denigrate the material world as illusory and base and just not as awesome as the spiritual. It's not that I don't like the psyche; I just think it's no disrespect to recognize cognition as an organized physical process. Never underestimate the power of organization.

The more I work with physical materials, the happier I am to accept that I'm made of them myself. Material isn't a dirty word to me.