About Wyrd Smythe
The canonical fool on the hill watching the sunset and the rotation of the planet and thinking what he imagines are large thoughts.
The next several posts are trips down Memorex Lane. They recall one of the most exciting times of my life. I’d just started an incredible relationship with a girlfriend who later became my first (and so far only) wife.
That the marriage didn’t last but a small handful of years and that we’ve been divorced at least twice as many years doesn’t at all detract from the wonder of joy of those early years.
It was in that setting that I (we) tried skydiving for the first time and fell (pun definitely intended) in love with it. These posts (which were first written back then and have since been slightly revised) are about those experiences.
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10 Comments | tags: drop zone, first jump, memories, parachutes, skydiving, tandem jump | posted in Life
Warning: This is a 100% pure foul-mouthed rant…
You’ve been warned.
It’s been quite some time since I’ve been able to watch any of the cable news networks. I used to watch Fox just to see the other point of view, but their lies and bias were finally more than I could stomach.
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2 Comments | tags: Anderson Cooper, Chris Matthews, CNN, Colbert Nation, Don Lemon, Fox News, Jon Stewart, Keith Olbermann, Lawrence O'Donnell, MSNBC TV, Rachel Maddow, refudiate, Stephen Colbert, The Daily Show, truthiness, Wolf Blitzer | posted in Rant, Sideband
Computer Programming is hard! It’s at least as hard as what commercial architects do, and I will argue that it’s as intellectually difficult as what doctors and lawyers do.
Many people think it’s easy, because they know some nine-year-old who “programs,” but there’s a difference between fooling around with the computer and building good software applications.
Here’s the deal…
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8 Comments | tags: A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess, coding, computer programming, Klingon, programming, software, software design, source code, Star Trek | posted in Computers
It’s Moanday, and there wasn’t enough sleep time during the weekend, so this is a good time for a little poem I picked up along the way.
It sums up my feelings on the matter of morning quite precisely.
I Am Not a Morning Person!
-anonymous
Woke early one morning,
The earth lay cool and still,
When suddenly a tiny bird,
Perched on my window sill.
It sang a song so lovely,
So carefree and so gay,
That slowly all my troubles,
Began to slip away.
It sang of far off places,
Of laughter and of fun,
It seemed his very song,
Brought out the morning sun.
I pulled back the covers,
… crept slowly out of bed,
And gently shut the window,
And crushed his fucking head.
I am not a morning person
Nuf sed!
Leave a comment | tags: birds, dead birds, funny poetry, humor, morning, morning person, poetry | posted in Sideband, Writing
Over on an MLB blog (but it could have been anywhere) someone used the common abbreviation “ppl” for “people,” and it invoked in my head the voice of my high school English teacher ranting about spelling things out.
Mr. Wilson also did not care for the i.e. and e.g. abbreviations of the Latin id est and exempli gratia, respectively. He preferred the less pretentious that is and for example.
And let’s face it, many people misuse i.e. when they actually do mean for example.
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4 Comments | tags: aeiou, eg, et al, et alibi, et alii, et cetera, etc, FLA, humor, ie, lonely, ppl, TLA, vowels | posted in Sideband, Writing
My recent post about how the Big Bang and “Let there be Light” seem equally fantastic to me triggered an interesting comment from a reader. A detailed response requires more elbow room than a comment allows, so here’s a follow-up article instead.
One of the points involved that our scientific ideas, no matter how inaccurate they may turn out to be, are at least based on evidence. And to the credit of science, when we recognize errors in our interpretation of the evidence, science changes to accommodate the new interpretation.
This has been, as I mentioned in that post, hugely successful. One of the failures of our spiritual metaphysics is that it clings to frameworks defined thousands of years ago and often stubbornly refuses to accommodate new information.
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7 Comments | tags: atheism, big bang, brain mind problem, Gandhi, Kurt Gödel, Lee Smolin, Max Planck, quantum physics, Roger Penrose, Sheldon Glashow, spacetime, spirituality, String theory, theism, Theory of Consciousness, Yin and Yang | posted in Philosophy, Physics, Religion, Science
Call me weird, but I have always liked films about assassins. That fascination goes back to Charles Bronson in The Mechanic (1972), Edward Fox in The Day of the Jackal (1973) and Clint Eastwood in The Eiger Sanction (1975).
I’m clearly not the only one fascinated by the topic; there are a surprising number of such films. From the outstanding Léon: The Professional (1994, Jean Reno and Natalie Portman’s film debut) and Grosse Pointe Blank (1997, John Cusack and Minnie Driver) to the sheer goofy and fun Assassins (Sylvester Stallone, Antonio Banderas, Julianne Moore) and Kill Bill (Uma Thurman).
Something about these movies fascinates us (well, some of us anyway).
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Leave a comment | tags: Anton Corbijn, assassins, Ben Affleck, George Clooney, Irina Björklund, movies about assassins, Mr. Butterfly, The American, The Town, Thekla Reuten, Violante Placido | posted in Movies
Here’s another little favorite from my collection.
It’s a satire designed to illustrate the rather large difference between correlation and causation. But unlike the dihydrogen monoxide hoax, you’ll probably have a hard time getting many signatures on a petition to ban bread!
Still, it’s funny and it seems to make sense… because it deals strictly with facts. Again: correlation is not (necessarily) causation. Sometimes it’s not even close.
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5 Comments | tags: bad statistics, bread, correlation vs causation, humor | posted in Sideband
I’d planned to do this later, probably for Sideband #64, but in honor of my parents 64th wedding anniversary (2 parents, 64 years, okay!) this numerical rumination gets queue-bumped to now.
Just recently I wrote about 64-bit numbers and how 64 bits allows you to count to the (small, compared to where we’re going) number:
264 = 18,446,744,073,709,551,616
That’s 18 exabytes (or 18 giga-gigabyes). Just to put it into perspective, if we were counting seconds, it amounts to 584,942,417,355 years; more than 500 billion years! (That’s the American, short-scale billion.)
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Leave a comment | tags: 64-bit, 64K, 8-bit, big numbers, binary, bits, exabyte, powers of two | posted in Computers, Math, Sideband
I want aliens to come to earth.
It’s going to be a very long time (if ever) that we go traipsing around the galaxy visiting others. If we do, of course we’ll be the aliens (which has made for some good SF stories and a recent cute film). Our tech is a long way from a galactic bus, so that’s one thing. Another thing is that we have no idea where to go. So far SETI hasn’t SEEN; for all we know we’re alone in the local universe.
You may have heard of the Drake Equation, which starts with the huge number of stars and calculates that even if a fraction of a fraction of a fraction (and so on, several times) of them have the conditions necessary, there are still many possible worlds with intelligent life.
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8 Comments | tags: alien contact, aliens, Contact (book), Contact (movie), first contact, Planet 51, The Day the Earth Stood Still | posted in Books, Movies, Philosophy
The next several posts are trips down Memorex Lane. They recall one of the most exciting times of my life. I’d just started an incredible relationship with a girlfriend who later became my first (and so far only) wife.
Logos con carne 
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