Monthly Archives: June 2024
Be a Tauist!
I’ve found it extremely difficult to focus this past week. Most of the blame is on Substack Notes, a part of Substack that’s very similar to Twitter or a Facebook feed. I never had Twitter, dumped Facebook ages ago, and barely know what Instagram, Snapchat, et cetera are.
I have no immunity to a doomscrolling feed of interesting micro-posts. Reading them is bad enough. The urge to jump in join the fun is all but irresistible. But days are passing with little to show for them: no books read, no posts worked on, no software projects advanced.
Now it’s Tau Day, and I can’t let that pass postless.
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16 Comments | tags: 360 degrees, 60 minutes, circle, Invincible, orbital mechanics, pi, tau, tau day | posted in Baseball, Science, TV
Some years ago, I posted Perfect Albums, which listed some music albums where I loved (not just liked) every song on the album. In my experience, that’s an exception to rule. Typically, I find an album has a few songs I love, a few I wouldn’t put on a playlist, and the rest are various shades of likeable.
Much longer ago, Folger’s Maxwell House coffee had the slogan, “Good to the last drop!” Caroming off the idea of Perfect Albums being rare and special, it occurred to me that TV shows that were “good to the last drop” — good throughout their run — are also rare and kinda special.
So, I made a list of some winners. And notable losers.
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8 Comments | tags: Black-ish, coffee, Elementary (TV series), Lucifer (TV series), MASH, The West Wing | posted in TV Tuesday
We’ve just now reached that point in Earth’s orbit known as Summer Solstice (June 20, 2024, 20:51 UTC, 3:51 PM local time). Welcome to summer!
I’m dog-sitting my pal Bentley until Saturday, so my attention is elsewhere than blogging right now. Hope you’re all having a good summer!
Leave a comment | tags: Solstice, summer, Summer Solstice | posted in Life
I was raised by a book-loving dad who passed on to me both the love of reading and the love of books. (He also passed on a love of maps, but that’s a story for another post.)
One of my dad’s lifelong goals was to publish books, and by a round-about path he ultimately accomplished that goal. As an old TV commercial has it, “And I got to help!” He began with a printshop that eventually grew to a (very, very) small boutique book publishing shop. We did maybe half-a-dozen books.
So, a love and respect for books has long been with me.
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5 Comments | tags: Agatha Christie, ebooks, Lawrence Block, Libby, library, reading | posted in Books, Life
I’ll be dog-sitting my little pal Bentley for a couple of weeks starting Tuesday, so I thought I should get this month’s edition of Friday Notes done early. By the time Bentley leaves, I’ll have only one Friday left in June.
Of course, big news at the end of last month. Guilty on all 34 felony counts. A whole new level of strangeness in politics. Even bigger news comes next month with sentencing. Will a President serve while serving time?
That it’s even a question we need to ask is astonishing.
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16 Comments | tags: deism, infinite temperature, John Baez, moon, morals and ethics, prayer, project management, realism, Substack, theism | posted in Friday Notes
It’s happy hour and you and a friend go out for drinks. The bar is serving a new drink that catches your eye, and you both order one. They’re served in martini glasses (which are upside down hollow cones) and look quite tasty (see picture).
More to the point here, the glasses look acceptably full. Not a lot of “headroom” between the top of the drink and the top of the glass. Your friend, a mathematician, bets you they can pour all of your drink into their glass without spilling a drop.
Should you take that bet?
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6 Comments | tags: cones, fun with numbers | posted in Math, Wednesday Wow
One of the more interesting sermons I heard during my last bout of churchgoing involved the notion that prayer wasn’t necessary because God knows what’s really in our hearts. Per the dogma of Christianity, that’s actually a true point. (Albeit perhaps a surprising one for a pastor to preach.)
It points out a key distinction between theism and deism. In the former, most religions, God is personally involved with us and hears our prayers (God’s responses have always been a different matter.) In the latter, God is not personally involved and doesn’t.
On the other hand, some see prayer as merely a form of meditation.
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12 Comments | tags: Albert Einstein, belief, deism, Dualism, faith, prayer, Spinoza, theism | posted in Religion, Sunday Sermons
Logos con carne 