It has been an interesting summer. The actual weather has been on the cool and rainy side; the political weather has been … words fail. What I’m seeing — the apparent final death knell of the original American Dream — makes me speechless. A deeper question, did we lose our way or hit our ceiling, tasks me.
Regardless, there is a looming deadline in November that overhangs my thoughts and makes it hard to find much interest in anything else.
Regardless of that, Friday Notes marches on.
Back on Tau Day (which is also my retirement anniversary), I posted about a scene in the superhero comic Invincible that involves a baseball orbiting the Earth at a very close distance (roughly airplane height). Regardless of superhero strengths, I found the scene impossible on multiple counts.
At the time, I could only calculate the velocity of the ball given the circumference of the Earth and some guesses about the length of the presumed orbit. Suffice to say the answers sufficiently demonstrated the impossibility.
Here, I’ll use orbital mechanics for some hard data on putative baseball orbits.
I don’t mean the social kind of integration, which I learned as a child, but the mathematical kind of integration, which I never learned in any of my math classes. I didn’t even take calculus until The Company sponsored some adult education classes for employees.
But those calc classes only got me through basic derivatives (of polynomials, mostly), so integration has been a bit of a mystery to me. Lately, though, I’ve been trying to pick up the basics.
This post just records my first attempts — my math lab book, so to speak.
Someone on another platform used the phrase “social entropy”, and it has been echoing in my head ever since. It strikes me as perfectly encapsulating what feels like the fraying of our social fabric. I almost wonder if the new millennium blew some of our mental fuses.
It’s hard to know what to make of things now. Is this just another pendulum swing along humanity’s path or a genuine sign of decline. Has humanity peaked, been found unworthy, and slid into a dumb and numb acceptance of our lot?
What the hell is even going on anymore?
The Earth has completed yet another orbit from this particular spot, so here we are (or at least here I am) with another Blog Anniversary. Almost hard to believe the Earth has spun ’round the Sun thirteen times since I began this blog. My blog’s a teenager now!
Thirteen years, fourteen hundred posts (this is post #1400), lots of wyrds (1.8 million). Lots of Wyrd, for that matter. This has been a self-documenting project from day one.
Needless to say, I have lists, stats, and charts (oh, my).
My President.
Okay, the debate was disappointing, let’s get that out of the way. There’s a long history of dismal first debate outings. Sometimes they are followed by stellar second debates. I’m ever hopeful, but there is a fundamental problem here with the Democrats that worries me.
I’ll get to that, but I want to stress my other point right away. Biden and the Democrats are far (far!) from perfect, but the alternative right now is unthinkable. What is offered by the Republicans is contrary to long-established conservative American values (let alone progressive ones).
I have no plan here, no notes, just some thoughts.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Posts pertaining to programming!
Logos con carne 