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
It has been well over a year since the last explicitly named TV Tuesday post. There were only two posts after it in 2024 — Good to the Last Drop, about great shows, and Change Winds Blowing, which was more about blogging but did mention Mr. Robot at the end.
This year the only post so far was about the Amazon Prime adaptation of the William Gibson 2014 novel, The Peripheral. I hadn’t seen the whole thing when I wrote about it but was so disappointed by it that I had to vent. I can say now that it never got better — quite the opposite, in fact.
In any event, high time for a rundown on what I’ve been watching.
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13 Comments | tags: anime, Danger Man (TV series), Dead Like Me (TV series), Devs (TV series), Putney Swope, Scavengers Reign, The Expanse (TV series) | posted in TV Tuesday
I’ve been dog-sitting Ms. Bentley Beans since last Saturday. She’ll be hanging out with me until at least the first of October. We’ve been enjoying the fall weather, though it has actually been slightly muggy for late September. Not like the swamp of late summer, but enough to soak my tee-shirt and make Bentley pant a little during our walks.
As usual, I take Bentley’s visits as my own vacation and spend most of the time hanging out with her and catching up on reading and TV.
Sadly, Friday Notes won’t write themselves, so while Bentley snoozes, I blog.
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12 Comments | tags: Ai Safety, autumnal equinox, Bentley, Digi-Comp I, hail, Mandelbrot, Microsoft Windows, Timex Sinclair 1000, Ultra Fractal, weather | posted in Friday Notes
Just for fun, here are a bunch of meme images I’ve made recently. Most of them were for the Notes section of Substack (its version of tweets). They’re all just my version of interesting memes I’ve seen or good lines that I thought deserved a nice image. Enjoy…
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Leave a comment | tags: Albert Einstein, DHMO, Heisenberg Uncertainty, memes, pi, speed of light | posted in Society, Writing
Every once in a while, it’s time to update my 960 Months image:
See Only 960 for an explanation.
Stay ticking, my friends! Go forth and spread beauty and light.
∇
Leave a comment | tags: sun sign | posted in Life
As we slide into leafy glory of Midwestern fall — the Autumnal Equinox, my least favorite day of the year lurking dead ahead — thoughts turn nostalgic for the dying summer and by extension all those long-dead summers that tail behind.
The older we get, the longer our 4D tail back through the years to our first. As different as we become over time, there is a continuity that defines us.
This post, as did the last one, has notes from 40+ years ago — still a goodly fraction more than half my span (thus far), so these are definitely from my callow youth.
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Leave a comment | tags: old notes | posted in Life
It’s hard for me to believe 2025 is already sliding into fall. The leaves are starting to turn — the trees are ending their annual breath. Some geese are heading south — unmistakable signs that winter is coming. There’s been a chill in the air.
Another orbit around our star, another year torn from the calendar. For an old farts like me, it pulls my thoughts backwards through all those discarded calendar pages.
The usual stream of the new pushed aside a pair of ancient note piles (mid-sized spiral-bound notebooks, actually) that date back to college and high school. It’s time to let the new abide a bit and dig up these time capsules (so I can at long last throw away those agèd notebooks).
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1 Comment | tags: old notes | posted in Life
Logos con carne 