I’m starting to feel a bit repetitious with the several TV Tuesday posts lately, not to mention the monthly Friday Notes. It’s starting to feel a little obligatory. They both serve a useful purpose for me, which is why I write them, but sometimes I chaff under the regularity.
Perhaps what feels especially repetitious is ranting about so many modern TV shows and films. That gets as old for me as I’m sure it does for readers. But venting also serves a purpose according to some studies.
Consider that a forewarning, for this one too has a bit of ranting…
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6 Comments | tags: adaptations, Antimatter Blues, Claudia Black, Cowboys & Aliens, Deus (2022), Edward Ashton, Keanu Reeves, Mikey7, Replicas (2018), Rick and Morty, Sisu (2002), Solar Opposites, Star Trek, Upload (TV series) | posted in Movies, TV Tuesday
A few posts ago I wrote that for “two weeks I’ve indulged in intense 12+ hour days on a self-education project in Python and its Tk module.” The end result of the binge is seven new apps (so far; more to come) and a good starting grasp of how to make some fairly decent windowing apps in Microsoft Windows using out-of-the-box Python.
More concretely, my “tk” project folder has 14 Python files with over 9,000 lines of code (367,000+ characters). That’s what remains. I didn’t save the many false starts, tests, and trials. Suffice to say I probably wrote close to twice as much code.
This post is “Dear Diary” entry for documenting the progress, the fun, and the frustration. It may not be terribly interesting for anyone else, but I learned a lot and (ultimately) really enjoyed the experience. And it’s nice to find out that this ancient dog can still learn new tricks.
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15 Comments | tags: grep, hex dump, POV-Ray, Python, Thanksgiving, tkinter | posted in Computers, Life, Writing
Winter, that is.
Last evening, we had rain that turned to snow after midnight. The result, of course, it a bit of an icy mess.
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1 Comment | tags: shoveling snow, snow, winter, winter storm | posted in Life
This post begins with a bit of what I see as good news. We’re exactly one month away from Winter Solstice — December 21st at 15:03 UTC. That’s 9:03 AM USA Central Time, and I set posts to publish at 9:14 AM, so by the time you read this, it’s just under a month away.
Cue regular Solstice-Equinox reminder that the day-length changes very slowly at the Solstices and very rapidly at the Equinoxes [cue regular link: Solar Derivative].
Until then, here’s another edition of Friday Notes.
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5 Comments | tags: AI, Bentley, eagle, equinox, Python, snow, Solstice, squirrel, weather | posted in Computers, Friday Notes, Math
For two weeks I’ve indulged in intense 12+ hour days on a self-education project in Python and its Tk module. I plan to write more about that later this week (that’s the plan, anyway).
Intense coding and learning take me deep into a Zen-like mindset that’s hard to emerge from. I have a minor self-commitment to publish at least five posts a month but have yet to publish anything this month.
As I struggle to regain the English language, I thought sharing another set of Mandelbrot images offered an easy reentry. The previous post had images from 2019 and 2020. Here are the last of those (and some from 2025).
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7 Comments | tags: Mandelbrot fractal, Mandelbrot Monday, Ultra Fractal | posted in Math
In the Friday Notes from last August, I wrote about needing to buy a new laptop. In the September edition of same, I wrote about installing Ultra Fractal 6 on that laptop and shared a few Mandelbrot images I’d made.
I’ve been sharing two or three in Substack Notes every week for “Fractal Friday”, but Notes is a fast-running river in which things vanish downstream almost instantly.
So, I thought I’d start sharing some here on Mandelbrot Mondays, though I don’t plan to make it a regular thing. I am thinking about a series of posts exploring the Mandelbrot, though.
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6 Comments | tags: Mandelbrot fractal, Mandelbrot Monday, Ultra Fractal | posted in Math
Fall — my favorite season ‘cept for the fading of the light — has fallen here in Minnesota, and our thoughts are turning towards the question of what kind of winter it will be: easy or miserable.
My winter is coming triple mile markers loom, the first dead ahead: Will it snow by Halloween? Will it snow by Thanksgiving? Will it snow by Christmas? Answers to all three vary depending on the whims of Mother Nature and her unexpected offspring, Climate Change.
In the meantime, here we are again for another edition of Friday Notes.
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17 Comments | tags: brown sugar, charts, Future Shock, math fun, Quadratic Equation, smoke alarm, stillness, weather | posted in Friday Notes, Math
The Minnesota Twins did not have a good 2025 season. They finished their summer with a 70-92 (.432) record — putting them fourth in the AL Central. A record like that normally means last place in the Division, but the White Sox lost 102 games this year.
Losing 92 games puts this season in a four-way tie with three seasons in recent history: 1983, 1998, and 2014. And now 2025. The tie is for the ninth worst season in franchise history.
Which is weird because the team looked pretty good on paper.
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Leave a comment | tags: Byron Buxton, charts, Minnesota Twins, Rocco Baldelli, stats, Twins 2025 | posted in Baseball
This Science Notes series (a subset of the Friday Notes series) gives me a chance to record bits of science articles that catch my eye and seem worth sharing. I’ve been doing this since my library app provided access to a huge number of online magazines.
Nearly all of which don’t interest me — in some cases, seriously don’t interest me. Bridal and Fan magazines are an obvious example, but there are myriad magazines devoted to interests that don’t interest me at all.
But I do like the ones devoted to science, and some articles fit some receptor in my mind enough to generate a note.
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4 Comments | tags: gravity, human consciousness, infinity, lucid dreaming, real numbers, Science Notes | posted in Friday Notes, Science
This is a continuation of last week’s post. The list of shows I have is too long for one post, so this picks up where it left off (even so, that one ran long, and so may this one). As mentioned last time, I hadn’t written a TV Tuesday post in a while, so there’s a bit of a backlog.
Watching baseball takes up a lot of the TV viewing time during the summer, and I can only watch a few hours of TV in any given day (and not too many days in a row). Many of the shows in my watch lists are old shows that I nibble on for the memories.
The nostalgia is strong but often so is the cringe factor.
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5 Comments | tags: Bewitched, Elizabeth Montgomery, Futurama, Keanu Reeves, Rick and Morty, Solar Opposites, time travel, Upload (TV series) | posted in Movies, TV Tuesday
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