This blog is nearly four years old (I started on July 4th, 2011). This post makes it exactly 500 posts here on Logos Con Carne. To commemorate it, I’m giving myself the 500 Odometer Award (which I built myself from various electrons I had laying around).
As part of the party, this post consists of miscellaneous odds and ends that have intrigued me lately. I’ll leave it to you to decide which are the odds and which are the ends.
Twins totally fell on their asses today, but they’re still four games above the .500 mark.
The Minnesota Twins are still keeping the dream (not of winning so much as just not sucking), but as I write this they are getting their asses kicked by the Tampa Bay Rays. We’re just about to start the bottom of the ninth with a score of (gulp) 1-11.
I used to joke that the bus carrying the Twins to (or maybe it was from) the airport suffered an unfortunate accident that put the whole team on the Disabled List for a while.
So they brought out the Twins clones. Who, as it turns out, play better baseball than those Twins clowns. So we fans sometimes got the clones (yea!) and sometimes got the clowns (ugh!).
Today was a clown game. [angry-miserable-face]
It’s also been cloudy and rainy here, so let’s have some beautiful sunshine, NASA SDO style:
That stuff never gets old! If you’re wondering about that black disc that travels from left to right across the Sun, that was the planet Mercury in transit.
The Sun, obviously, is a big part of what sustains life on Earth. It provides light and warmth (and sunburn). We’ve even worshiped it (one way or another) at times. A fitting entry for the International Year of Light!
Speaking of light, did you know that technology has advanced to the point of actually capturing light in motion? This one is a little geeky, but what it’s showing is awesome (a word I don’t use frequently):
That was some serious science there, so let’s get back outside for some extreme sports. This video makes me wish I was young again! The parachuting stuff, especially, reminds me how much fun it was jumping out of “perfectly good” airplanes!
Skydiving was one of the most fun things I’ve ever done (see posts here, here, here, here, and here), so here’s a bonus video (it’s either interesting for showing the entire jump or a bit long for showing the entire jump — you might want to set the speed to 2x):
One thing you might notice is that it’s really hard to tell exactly when you’re about to land on water. The fractal nature of water (which allows movie miniatures to look fairly realistic) makes it difficult to determine how far you are away from it.
For a change of pace, here’s a fascinating video essay about a single wyrd (some of you may remember I recently mentioned how nice used to mean precise):
Here’s a bonus essay (and a lesson in ironic unintended results) from the same folks:
Lots of people hate (or at least pretend to hate) the Comic Sans font (and it is true it is frequently used inappropriately). Here’s a great video essay about that hated font (I especially like his opening comments about typefaces in general as well as the punchline about the problem not being the thing so much as the users and the punchline about design literacy):
Since we’re in the comic zone, here’s a funny video that reminds me of a post of mine from quite a while back:
Finally, to play you out, here’s some music:
That one is, to me, laugh out loud funny even after seeing it several times. It’s as good and as much fun as Monty Python’s famous Galaxy Song.
And now for something completely different (and pretty awesome):
It’s my new favorite piano piece! Every time I listen to it I have to play it more than once. It’s knocked the previous favorite down to number two. For decades it was this one:
George Winston is still my favorite piano player!
And on that note, I’m out. (Twins ended up losing 3-11.)
Logos con carne 
May 17th, 2015 at 6:53 pm
I love that Ted talk guy with the camera the captures light travelling Smitty – that’s super cool! ❤
Diana xo
p.s. Happy 500th post!!!
May 17th, 2015 at 8:11 pm
Isn’t it, though? Especially in the Coke bottle where you can actually see the little bundle of photons (well, hardly little in the sense there are zillions of photons).
Thank you, Lady Di! There’s cookies and cake here, and beer in the fridge.
May 17th, 2015 at 10:48 pm
sounds nutritious!
May 18th, 2015 at 10:07 am
Well, I’m not entirely sure about the cake, but there are oatmeal-raisin cookies made with brown sugar, and the beer is liquid bread, of course. (Remember, food has no beer value, but beer has food value, so beer is clearly superior.)
May 18th, 2015 at 10:25 am
yes and I read on a sandwich board that beer’s nutritional value is minimal, so one needs to drink a lot of it ahaha!
May 18th, 2015 at 10:28 am
Ha! I like that!
May 17th, 2015 at 7:44 pm
Congrats!
May 17th, 2015 at 8:12 pm
Thank you!
May 18th, 2015 at 6:26 pm
Congratulations! You’re quite prolific.
May 18th, 2015 at 6:54 pm
Thank you! I’ve been writing, in one form or another, since I was in high school, so if nothing else I’ve had a lot of practice. 🙂
May 20th, 2015 at 9:10 am
Here’s to 500 more! Congratulations.
May 20th, 2015 at 12:01 pm
Thanks! I don’t know about 500 more… WP keeps changing in ways I don’t care for, and I just found out that if you have a “large” blog, you can no longer successfully export your blog for backup (and analysis). They’ll supposedly get back to me about the possibility of a fix, but I don’t have high hopes. Social media seems to be more the Facebook-Twitter-Instagram mode these days than the “long form blogging” mode. More and more people have this TL:DR attitude. Plus WP moves more and more towards supporting mobile platforms while doing away with things for us computer users. The new editor, for example.
I have nearly 2000 followers, but only a handful of participants. I dunno… I’m seriously — very seriously — considering just giving it up. It seems my enjoyment and satisfaction levels keep going down while the aggravation and disappoint levels keep going up.
So what’s the point, really?
[Sorry about that response, but I’m having a seriously bad week, and my mood is as black as it gets.]
May 20th, 2015 at 12:10 pm
I post long things too and worry about having places to put long-form writing if WordPress changed/disappeared. I would be devastated.
I hope your mood improves, my friend . Cheers.
May 20th, 2015 at 12:51 pm
There are other blogging platforms, but blogging (as we know it) seems a bit in decline. (I keep meaning to try to research this and come up with some numbers.)
Yeah, me, too. Thanks.
May 21st, 2015 at 9:48 am
I couldn’t help not responding to your last comment above. As one of your long-time followers, I can’t be glad to see you feeling down.
Wyrd, we recognize now the reality of how only a few would be willing to carry on with blogging for a more than an impressive length of time.
Who’d stick with this thankless task where we don’t just not get paid, we get in trouble, too; not to mention how it most often requires a few crucial things from us. I also understand how you feel about lack of participants, or of blogpals that eventually fade away. Yet if friends come and go in our physical world, what more in this virtual world we only inhabit in apparent simulation.
I’ve seen a few of your (new) commenters who could barely express anything other than their genuine appreciation for your blog. It’s, of course, unnecessary to point out you being in a league of your own is the reason for that.
Your question: “what’s the point really?” I believe writing for oneself holds the key to blogging longevity. Validation and proof of wide readership feels exhilarating, yeah, but I believe everything should come second to love of writing.
500 blog posts and practically every one of them worth one’s while. I’d rather reread your wonderful previous pages here than undertake the trial and error of exploring unfamiliar or undiscovered blogs.
You are the last person I would want to find totally gone in our blogsphere, Wyrd. My huge congratulations to you for getting this far.
May 21st, 2015 at 2:53 pm
“I believe everything should come second to love of writing.”
Yeah, agreed… And it’s a love I seem to be losing.
May 21st, 2015 at 8:25 pm
Could be a temporary phase, Wyrd. I hope you do get that necessary time off from blogging. Meanwhile, the 500 posts you left here would suffice.
June 17th, 2015 at 12:41 am
Congrats on 500 posts, Smitty!! Something I aspire to 🙂
I really enjoyed this post and the videos! Oh, yeah, and I love Comic Sans, I admit it 😉
I was reading the comments, and just between you & me – I love to write & have been since I was in like 4th grade. But though I am a writer at heart, and have been a paid journalist, I have never subscribed to the fact that I must love/put writing above all else all the time. I think my writing flows like the tides, or phases like the moon, though in my own time frames – which typically aren’t consistent. I’m pretty undisciplined these days, and I’m okay with that.
Even when I got paid to write, I did it for me because I enjoyed it and what I was writing about. Now, I write for me only since there is no paycheck associated anymore. I used to feel guilty about not being more prolific, but that took the fun out of it. I want it to be fun so I’ll keep on loving it. If it becomes laborious, or I just have no time for it, I back off for a bit & come back when I can ❤
On my down days (and there have been a few the last couple years since the layoff), I listen to this – maybe you'll enjoy it 🙂 I noticed the date on this post was a month ago – so hopefully the weeks have been better lately.
June 17th, 2015 at 2:32 pm
Thanks, I did it with my own two hands. XD How far do you have to go to reach 500 yourself?
I was just “talking” to a long-time blogger yesterday who’s, for the most part, hanging up her blogging shoes. The audience for long, thoughtful, balanced, nuanced posts seems fading. We’re in the TL;DR generation now. (Which is a real bummer for someone who thinks “brevity” is some kind of French underwear.) She said she’ll only post when she really has something to say — “No Obligation Posting” she called it — and I find I quite agree. Sounds like you’re on the same page.
One problem for me is that the less often I post, the more I enjoy the freedom of not posting, so it’s like I have to post semi-regularly to post at all. I have a huge backlog of post topic notes, so I’m certainly not strapped for ideas. I’m more strapped for giving a shit.
The last few weeks have been ugly on the baseball side of things (Twins doing a serious fade), but I do appreciate it being summer. Down, perhaps we are, but not out!