So this is my nine-hundred-and-ninety-ninth post here on Logos con Carne (which turns nine tomorrow). I’ll talk more about that when I do the anniversary (or perhaps more accurately, the birthday) post. What I’ve been struggling with for days is what this post should be.
The celebration post, as usual, will look back at the past year (as well as the past nine), which leaves this post wanting a topic. Yesterday I was looking at some old photos and got the idea of looking back at my own (much longer) past.
I figure it’s gotta be an easier post to write than trying to explain a tesseract.
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12 Comments | tags: blog, blogger, blogging, Christopher Walken, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Minnesota, New York City, Southern California, The Bronx, Wonder Bread | posted in Life
Four years ago I started pondering the tesseract and four-dimensional space. I first learned about them back in grade school in a science fiction short story I’d read. (A large fraction of my very early science education came from SF books.)
Greg Egan touched on tesseracts in his novel Diaspora, which got me thinking about them and inspired the post Hunting Tesseracti. That led to a general exploration of multi-dimensional spaces and rotation within those spaces, but I continued to focus on trying to truly understand the tesseract.
Today we’re going to visit the 4D space inside a tesseract.
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5 Comments | tags: 1D, 2D, 3D, 4D, cube, dimensions, square, tesseract | posted in Math, Sideband
Alas (and also alack), with all that’s been going on lately, my Artistic Muse has temporarily fled (she’s almost as prone to suddenly vanishing as her sister, Lady Luck). As such, I’m not feeling much inspiration towards posting right now.
But my Nine Year Blog Anniversary is nearly here, and I’m determined to publish post #1000 to celebrate it. Pulling that off requires three posts between now and then (not to mention figuring out what to write for post #1000).
So today I thought I’d take care of a bunch of random notes.
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13 Comments | tags: D.C. Fontana, Edward R. Murrow, Immanuel Kant, Kurt Gödel, lutefisk | posted in Brain Bubble
Last night I watched — for the second time this week — Jay and Silent Bob Reboot (2019), which is the latest episode of a saga polymath auteur Kevin Smith has been telling since 1994 with his first film, Clerks. The arc of that tale contains one of my very favorite movies, Dogma (1999), wherein we learn that God looks exactly like Alanis Morissette.
If you’ve never heard of Jay and (his “hetero life-mate”) Silent Bob, you’ve missed a minor cultural phenomenon. Clerks is a cinematic landmark on par with Reservoir Dogs and is preserved in the Library of Congress as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” In my book, it’s all three.
I’ve been waiting well over a decade to see these guys again!
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7 Comments | tags: Ben Affleck, Chasing Amy, Clerks (movie), comedy, Dogma (movie), humor, Jason Lee, Jason Mewes, Kevin Smith | posted in Movies
A few weeks ago a friend loaned me The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck (2016), by Mark Manson. I just finished it, and — while I’m not a big fan of self-help books — I give this one an Ah! rating. Manson’s approach, contrary to our modern norm, is not about finding happiness, but about choosing the pain worth seeking (and letting the happiness come through our fulfillment).
The subtle part is that not giving a f*ck doesn’t mean one stops caring. The subtle part is learning to be selective about what matters to us.
The counterintuitive part is that chasing happiness leads to misery.
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31 Comments | tags: Dave Mustaine, happiness, Hiroo Onoda, Joy, Mark Manson, Norio Suzuki, Pete Best, The Beatles, The Buddha | posted in Books, Life
Walleye: It’s what’s for dinner!
Well, that’s a surprise. My Ideas folder has a document I thought was a description of my first Canadian camping trip with my buddy (let’s call him) “Scott”. I’ve been meaning to post it one of these days. Having just told a story about my dog Sam, I thought maybe it was time to post some of the other memories stories.
The surprise is that the document is about a trip in 1996, the 10th (or so) annual pilgrimage we’d made. That first time we didn’t really know what we were doing and both under- and over-prepared. That was of a vacation with a lot of pain, but which engendered fondness in retrospect.
Enough fondness that we did it annually for over 15 years.
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12 Comments | tags: camping, Canada, fishing, Lake Thompson, travel | posted in Life
Father’s Day, 1994
This post rises from deep in my Drafts Folder. I started it back in 2012 as a follow-up to the Sad Day; Perfect Day post. That one recalls a special 1994 memory about Samantha, my dog (who died a little before her time, in 2004). The second post would catalog various memories highlighting how much fun we had and how much she meant to me.
Two years later I did post a version of that eulogy: Dog Tales: Games. That post was actually the second beat to a post the day before, Sam’s Final Walk, which described the disposition of her ashes.
For Father’s Day, I thought it appropriate to post once more…
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17 Comments | tags: Black Lab, Black Labrador Retriever, dog games, dogs, family, kids, love, Marriage, Sam, Samantha | posted in Life
The two Solstices are the only universal holidays I celebrate. There are many personal holidays, almost all anniversaries of whatever happened that day: births, weddings, deaths; the arcs of jobs and love affairs; graduations and engagements; all the milestones of life. (The trick is to avoid Marley’s chains and chests.)
When it comes to the world, I see only two true holidays whose meaning every mind on Earth shares; two that everyone can anticipate and appreciate. These holidays are defined by the star that gives us life. They mark our orbit as precisely as the numbers of a clock mark the hours.
In fact, there are four such star-marked days; two major, two minor.
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13 Comments | tags: astronomy, four, moon, Ophiuchus, Sagittarius, Sagittarius A*, scorpion tail, Scorpius, solar system, Solstice, stars, Summer Solstice, Sun, three, twelve, zodiac | posted in Life
“Go home everyone!”
I seriously can’t believe I’ve never posted about this. It’s one of the few times in life I’ve been “in on the ground floor” of something — been there enjoying it from the beginning.
It’s doubly cool for being an overlooked secret in plain view. Something like a great restaurant hidden behind a plain door down the street from the obvious places. It isn’t some great secret, these taste delights; it’s that most people walked out too soon and never saw them.
I’m talking about movie cookies (they aren’t something one eats, but they are a delight).
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9 Comments | tags: Airplane (film), Being There, Body Heat, end credits, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, filmmaking, Grand Canyon (movie), Lawrence Kasdan, outtakes, Wild Things | posted in Movies
In the nearly nine years of this blog I’ve written many posts about human consciousness in the context of computers. Human consciousness was a key topic from the beginning. So was the idea of conscious computers.
In the years since, there have been myriad posts and comment debates. It’s provided a nice opportunity to explore and test ideas (mine and others), and my views have evolved over time. One idea I’ve found increasing skepticism for is computationalism, but it depends on which of two flavors of it we mean.
I find one flavor fascinating but can see the other as only metaphor.
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10 Comments | tags: algorithm, analog computer, brain, brain mind problem, computationalism, digital computer, human brain, human mind | posted in Computers, Philosophy
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