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.
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.
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.
I’m beginning to think this Friday Notes series is a Sisyphean Mission. While I’ve managed to reduce the main pile of notes to almost nothing (or at least nothing I feel like writing about), there remain other piles.
Not to mention the way new notes constantly spring up like mushrooms in the shady damp part of the forest.
Fortunately, I enjoy writing these (in all honestly, because they’re easy to write). For a while, largely because of Substack, I thought they might end up being mostly what I posted here.
Hey, how about that, another Friday the 13th. Not that I have ever had superstitions about the number 13 or black cats (or ladders or salt or whatever). Long-time readers may recall that Sister and I were raised without any belief in Santa Claus, let alone other false beliefs. I never had monsters under my bed or a boogeyman in my closet.
But I do sometimes notice things. When I realized I’d publish this Friday Notes posts on the 13th, it caused me to wonder how many other times I might have done that.
Turns out this 50th Notes post is only the second time.
Another (very) late edition and in the same week [see previous post]. In this case, it’s because I hadn’t planned a Friday Notes post for today, but I’ve gotten so indolent lately that I’m falling out of the habit of blogging. (Or, the eternal question, have I perhaps gotten weary of it?)
But, as polite people say, “Stuff happens.” And because it does, I have enough perishable notes that I may have to put out two Notes editions this month.
Assuming I can get back in the blogging habit.
We got our first snowfall of the season today. It melted immediately, but it was really pretty while the big soft flakes were pouring down.
Snow “pouring” was the topic of a small controversy once long ago…
It’s been a while since the last Wednesday Wow. Life got strange the last several months; every day had some sort of real-life wow. (Not that we’re out of these weird woods by any stretch.) It made ephemera like this fall by the wayside.
But we must soldier on, one foot in front of the other. Speaking of which, on this morning’s walk, at 6:30 (AM, of course), it was 59° (Fahrenheit, of course). We had a heat advisory Saturday — temps in the high 90s with equally high dew points.
That’s one beauty (and insanity) of Minnesota: the weather!
Computing…
I’ve written here before about chaos theory and how it prevents us from calculating certain physical models effectively. It’s not that these models don’t accurately reflect the physics involved; it’s that any attempt to use actual numbers introduces tiny errors into the process. These cause the result to drift more and more as the calculation extends into the future.
This is why tomorrow’s weather prediction is fairly accurate but a prediction for a year from now is entirely guesswork. (We could make a rough guess based on past seasons.) Yet the Earth itself is a computer — an analog computer — that tells us exactly what the weather is a year from now.
The thing is: it runs in real-time and takes a year to give us an answer!
Tick-Tock, goes the clock…
Last time, in the Determined Thoughts post, I talked about physical determinism, which is the idea that the universe is a machine — like a clock — that is ticking off the minutes of existence. The famous French mathematician, Pierre-Simon Laplace (the “French Newton”), was the first (in 1814) to articulate the idea of causal determinism.
We now know that quantum mechanics makes it impossible to know both the position and motion of particles, so Laplace’s Demon isn’t possible at the sub-atomic level. (It might be possible at the classical or macro level — that’s an open question.) Sometimes the issue of chaos theory is proposed as a counter-argument to determinism, so I thought I’d cover what chaos theory is and how it might apply.
If you want to skip to the punchline, the answer is it doesn’t apply at all.
Posts pertaining to programming!
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