Tuesday  29 Nov 2022           comment?

I've been climbing with C and his dog Sadie (pictured here yesterday) for about ten years now. Each goodbye said to a long‑time friend is with the understanding that it's temporary: there will be another time together, as surely as the sun will rise in the morning. Au revoir, auf Wiedersehen, do svidaniya: on seeing again.

A part of us knows that nothing lasts forever—not even the sun—and yet that doesn't diminish the feeling of continuity that friendship brings.

Monday  28 Nov 2022           comment?

Sunday  27 Nov 2022           comment?

I like communication that's no longer than it needs to be, especially when it features a word with a silent b.

The story I mentioned a while back about really-really-concise communiques between Victor Hugo and his publisher is now deemed apocryphal by Wikipedia for reasons explained here. I originally read about it decades ago in the Guinness Book of World Records, which I trusted for no good reason.

Monday  21 Nov 2022           comment?

When my brother and I were kids we were entertained by how you can fold a dollar bill to make Washington's head look like a mushroom. Below, mosaic artifacts in an excerpt from Google Street View's imagery of a foreign exchange service's storefront.

Monday  14 Nov 2022           1 comment

Friday  11 Nov 2022           2 comments

Wednesday  09 Nov 2022           comment?

I was curious how accurate the gyroscopes in my phone are. The phone is on a turntable in this pic. Converting rad/s to rpm:

   3.490 × 60 / 2π = 33.33

It was really close at 45 rpm as well.

Saturday  05 Nov 2022           1 comment

In 2003, George Bush and his associates tried to run Iraq as they saw fit. They fired the Iraqi army and ran roughshod over existing norms and institutions. They put people loyal to themselves in power.

Elon Musk thinks that similar tactics will work well with Twitter.