Wednesday, 25 January 2023
Yesterday morning I went down to the kitchen, and in the process of making breakfast discovered that during the previous night’s kitchen cleanup, I’d neglected a single item: the lid to the steamer. It was face down, one edge on the stove top and the other on the counter, thus giving it a slight tilt. When I picked it up, I noticed a lovely patten of water droplets on the inside of the lid.
Continue reading Droplet Condensation14 January 2023
A while ago I reviewed last year, and set out some general goals for this year. Here I will lay out operational details on my plans
Thursday, 5 January 2023
Some days I spent a lot of time doing associative reading, where one text leads me to hop laterally to another text, and so on. I find this pleasurable, but often, after a few hours, have little sense of what I have learned.
Today I am going to try to track, at least partially, the path of my attention.
I did not begin here, but a good starting point is Taleb.
Continue reading Meta thoughts on meandering on the net: Taleb, Perthitic Textures and ChocolateSunday, 1 January 2023
Bright and early, well, somewhat early, we visited the Minneapolis Institute of Art to see Botticelli and Renaissance Florence: Masterworks from the Uffizi. I was struck by three things.
Continue reading The Botticelli ShowSaturday, 31 December 2022
Though I usually will casually reflect back on what happened over the year, and will also usually write out some goals for the coming year, this year I’ve tried being more structured.
Continue reading EoY 2022 Reflections & Looking AheadTuesday, 27 December 2022
Today I was interviewed by Colin Ware of “This Does Not Compute.” CW does retro-computing, which involves resurrecting ancient digital technology. He wanted to talk to me about the Scribe project, which is the subject of a forthcoming video on his YouTube channel.
I was involved in Scribe in the early 1990’s while I worked at Apple. Scribe was, initially at least, an attempt to develop a design for a specialized notebook computer — I think of it now as sort of the great uncle of the iPad. It lacked a keyboard and mouse, and used touch and a stylus as input, and was built on the Mac duo platform (an early mac laptop line). It looked a little like an iPad, except that it was a couple inches thick, five pounds in weight, and ugly.
Continue reading Scribe, and Stamps: A Look BackFriday, 23 December 2022
During the most recent ‘essay chat’ with CT, the question came up of how many essays we’ve read.
Continue reading Essay Project Status: 250Saturday, 17 December 2022
I observed a curious phenomenon on my run today. I have been unable to find an authoritative account or name for it, so I will call them snow crenellations.
Tuesday, 6 December 2022
“Tom, you’re on a roll with your career!” Thus reads the subject line of the latest email of the day.
This is fantastic news! Not “fantastic” in its most common sense, but rather in its alternative sense of “fanciful; remote from reality.” After all, I am well into my fourth year of retirement, and it is at least two years since my last paper was published, my last patents granted, and my last appearance at a professional conference. While it would be fun to believe that the cumulative mass of my accomplishments has somehow reached a critical point, tipped, and is now barreling along on its own like an ever-growing cartoon snowball, it is not so.
Continue reading Algorithmic UntruthsThis note is under construction…
Haecity has to do with the distinct and specific identity of a particular time-place. I encountered the term in Stan Robinson’s Mars triology, and was intrigued by the way it was used to fuse a sort of mystical view of the world as a deeply interconnected whole with the quest for rigorous and systematic understanding that drives scientific inquiry.
Continue reading Haecity: The Architecture of ‘Thisness’Monday, 28 November 2022
I awoke early, called not only by the glacier, which had been on my mind all night, but by a grand flood-storm. The wind was blowing a gale from the north and the rain was flying with the clouds in a wide passionate horizontal flood, as if it were all passing over the country instead of falling on it. The main perennial streams were booming high above their banks, and hundreds of new ones, roaring like the sea, almost covered the lofty gray walls of the inlet with white cascades and falls. I had intended making a cup of coffee and getting something like a breakfast before starting, but when I heard the storm and looked out I made haste to join it; for many of Nature’s finest lessons are to be found in her storms….
—John Muir, Stickeen,1909
I am not tough. Nor I do not aspire to be. That’s not to say I’m weak. Rather, I’d characterize myself as cautious, intelligently so. I am open to challenge, but I wish to be prepared, and would like to see myself as resilient.
Continue reading On Being ToughSunday, 23 November 2022
We are in San Jose del Cabo, in Baja Mexico, with our friend RD. It is a nice respite from winter in Minnesota, even though winter only arrived in earnest about a week ago.
I am taking these next few weeks as a time to relax, not that regular life is very taxing, and more particularly to re-set my daily routine.
Monday, 13 October 2022
Since I last wrote — where I noted that post-Iceland the future seemed a bit unstructured — I’ve done or arranged several things for moving forward.
Continue reading Early Fall 2022 Overview and ReflectionsThursday, 8 September 2022
You’d think that at 67 the thrill of the first day of classes would have faded. But actually, not so much. I find great pleasure in the first classes, where the fields of knowledge, like arcadian fields, stretch out in the distance, green with promise, the inevitable bogs and ravines and precipitous slopes smoothed by distance into an intriguing terrain ripe for exploration. My enthusiasm has not yet been tempered by the practical realities of problem set, or the daunting challenge of resurrecting my very shaky knowledge of tensors after four decades have passed.
Continue reading The First Week of Classes — fragmentWednesday, 24 August 2022
After our time in Iceland, which was very reminiscent of early Minnesota spring, I seem to have returned to fall… not full-on fall, but to the period where there are various intimations… a single red sumac leaf, a certain clarity of the light, a coolness to the morning air. Then I opened the paper, and found that the Minnesota State Fair begins tomorrow, and that, in all its noisy, crowded, junky-foody glory, is the unmistakable harbinger of fall. Summer went by very very quickly; hopefully fall, in its various phases, will move more slowly!
Saturday, 12 August 2022
I’ve just returned from the ILSG Iceland Field Trip. I had a great time. The question is, What’s next?
Continue reading Thoughts on What’s NextSaturday 28 May 2022
One thing I enjoy doing is photographing natural patterns. Something about the patterned chaos of nature is very attractive to me. Here are four images from our most recent trip to the north shore of Lake Superior, taken in May 2022.
Here are two images of foam in a backwater on the shore. I like how the precussion of the waves has built up ridges upon ridges of foam – in the first picture it looks almost woven. I like, too, that the threads of foam are in turn inflected by the flow of the backwash as it interacts with shore and rocks.
Here is another image from the same trip. It is a pattern of lichen on a rock. I presume, but do not know, that there are different colonies of lichen contending for the same patch of rock/sun, and that they have arrayed defenses against encroaching colonies creating a bordered patchwork, like a small continent of countries :
From October 2019, brought to mind by the lichen, are some images of a fungus on Maple leaves in Yosemite Valley. I’m intrigued by the speckled brown centers, which I imagine contain sporangia, surrounded by the halos of green (chlorophyll?). These different fungal colonies seem less hostile to one another than in the case of the lichen, since they appear to sometimes merge.
Enjoy.
Wednesday, 25 May 2022
Two weeks and change have passed, and here I am again.
The notable events for the last couple of weeks include ‘graduating’ from physical therapy, a trip to the north shore, and… well, I think not much else.
Sunday 8 May 2022
I’ve returned from my 3-month post-surgery checkup last Monday. Everything is entirely positive. Even though I went into the appointment with considerable optimism, the relief I feel suggests that there were still some niggling doubts. It is also true that I’ve been looking at this checkup as — at least it was positive — as a sort of milestone. So I am going to stop talking about my “recovery,” and declare myself “recovered.”
Saturday 9 April 2022
The advance of spring has been stalled for the last couple of weeks. Temperatures rise and fall around freezing. We wake to a frosting of snow, which melts by mid-morning, and refreezes after night fall. The days are cold and damp; the nights cold and slippery. But finally the gears seem to have engaged, the snow has melted from even the most shadowed areas, and temperatures reach into the 40’s and 50’s. B’de Maka Ska — our local lake — is melting around the edges. If we have a good windy day the ice will break up and form small ramparts along the shore, to be admired by walkers wearing shorts. Such is spring here.
Continue reading Moving Slowly into Spring: Continued Recovery
